“Your name again?”
“Miles Tillman, sir.”
“Hmm, well. I suppose I’m stuck with you instead of the regular boy, so you’ll have to do. I assume you read the paper from time to time?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say ‘yes’ so quickly, you dunce,” he snapped. “You don’t even know which paper I mean!”
“I assumed you mean do I read the Times,” I replied.
“Of course you did. But there are lots of papers these days. You shouldn’t assume. Only fools assume,” he said emphatically. “Are you a fool?”
“No, sir,” I replied. He fumbled for a scrap of paper on the nightstand and handed it to me.
“Well, if you read the paper occasionally that means you ought to be able to find your way to the newsstand. Now,” he said, “there’s the list of all the papers I want.”
I blinked at the scrap of paper, slowly comprehending I was being sent on an errand for him. The chicken-scratch handwriting revealed a long list of newspapers. It occurred to me it might be easier to bring him the whole newsstand, wooden booth and all, but I didn’t say so.
“And here,” Mister Gus continued, huffing as he reached back to the nightstand to retrieve a glass. In it were a couple of bills and a few nickels and dimes. I realized he had been waiting to assign someone this task and must have counted out the money sometime earlier, perhaps even the night before. I wondered if the previous messenger-boy had been routinely sent on this errand. He dumped the contents into my palm. “And don’t go thinking you can pocket some of this for yourself; I know the cost, and I’ve counted out exact change. When you return, you’ll get your proper tip, but not before then.”
I made no move to go and simply stood there, dumbstruck.
“Well? Go, boy!” Mister Gus shouted. “Hurry up, now.”
“Don’t you”—I hesitated—“have some live-in help?”
“Hmph!” he grunted. “Greta,” he grumbled, grinding teeth that I could only presume were dentures. “Useless! Gone out. Grocery shopping, she says, but she dawdles and takes her time . . . hiding from me, that’s what she’s doing. Do you know, she’s taken to bringing my meals while I’m asleep. Puts the tray on the bed and then rings a little bell after she’s hurried out of the room so I won’t have a chance to complain about her awful cooking. Hmph. Thinks that’s crafty!”
I wasn’t sure what to say to this. As Mister Gus glared at me, I began to sympathize with his housemaid’s strategy.
“Well?” he said with irritation. “Go already!”
I unfroze, went downstairs and around the corner—making sure I took the key with me—and bought the newspapers. The newsstand attendant appeared to be familiar with my laundry list; he took one look at it and stacked the papers in a neat pile without checking twice and confirmed my suspicion that I was not the first messenger-boy Mister Gus had sent on this errand. When I returned, the old man had propped himself up on the pillows and was waiting.
“Set them here, boy,” Mister Gus said, patting the bed beside him, and I did as instructed. He pulled one of the papers into his lap, squinting with milky eyes to make out the headlines. “Your tip is on the nightstand,” he said, not glancing up from his reading. I looked, and in my absence an envelope had appeared—extracted, I assumed, from the nightstand drawer, where it had likely been pre-counted, ready and waiting. I was surprised to see it was an envelope, for that meant paper, not coin.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Felston was the regular boy they sent here,” he said. “I trusted Felston.”
I didn’t know what to say to this idle remark, so I remained silent.
“But I understand he quit recently.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, for this was true. Bill Felston was a very handsome messenger-boy who had recently quit to marry a girl in New Jersey and take over her family’s gas station.
“Hmph. Well, we had an arrangement, Felston and I,” Mister Gus remarked. “Delivery or not, he used to drop by with the papers. You see, I like my papers. And Felston, well, I believe Felston liked his tips.”
“I see,” I said, not knowing where this was leading. Mister Gus paused and lowered his paper, looking me over with scrutiny. His eyes traveled up and down the length of my body twice, then he grunted.
“I suppose you’re not a total barbarian after all,” he said. “You might do.”
“Do what, sir?”
“I like to have my papers—all of them—brought to me every day. If you know anything at all about old men, then you know we don’t require much sleep, so bring them as early as you like; I wake with the proverbial cows, as they say, long before dawn. If this is amenable, you may start tomorrow.”
“Oh. I . . . I . . .” I stammered.
“That is all,” Mister Gus said. “If you want the money—and let me tell you, you’d be a fool not to, boy; being a Negro messenger-boy, I hardly expect you’re rich—you’ll come back tomorrow.” He waved a hand as though to shoo me away. I turned and made my way down the stairs, collecting the package I’d originally come to retrieve on my way out.
Once outside, I opened the envelope Mister Gus had handed me, and found two dollars tucked neatly inside. My weekly salary working as a part-time messenger-boy was fifteen dollars. An extra two dollars per day was nothing to scoff at; if I were to perform this service every day for a week, I would make nearly double my pay. I had a funny feeling about this proposed arrangement, though. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but I knew my uneasiness had something to do with Mister Gus. I knew he was what was in those days called “a confirmed bachelor,” and I suspected that, despite his cantankerous manner, he liked receiving visits from messenger-boys every bit as much as he liked receiving his actual stack of newspapers. Even so, if I took on this extra chore, the arrangement promised to bring me one step closer to California and to my father’s journal. As I pedaled away that afternoon, I found myself making plans to stop by Mister Gus’s townhouse first thing the next morning.
12
It had been a little while since I’d gone down to the Village, and I found myself missing the scene. Try as I might, I’d never been able to get Janet to come along. We were inverted images of each other in some ways, Janet and I. I had been elevated in the world through my scholarships, while hers was a tale of reversal of fortune. Her father had run a successful general store in a little town upstate and paid for her to have a private education, until one day the general store burned to the ground and her father, tragically, with it. At sixteen, Janet was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Harlem, where she helped to care for their four children. Like me, she was considered something of a misfit, and mostly kept her nose in a book.
In any case, while she liked to read every bit as much as I did, she had very conservative tastes and claimed the atmosphere in the Village wasn’t to her liking. I attempted to lure her below Fourteenth Street by telling her about the exciting things that went on, the poetry and the jazz and such. She argued that Harlem had plenty of jazz without the indecency and all the people yelling about their dangerous political ideas. I could’ve pointed out Harlem had those latter things, too, if only you knew where to look for them, but I knew it would do no good. It was just as well. I figured I would enjoy the Village while still a bachelor, and give it up once we were married.
So I strolled the Village’s hodgepodge of crooked streets alone. I appreciated the artists and the bohemians, the long-haired hipsters in their undershirts and rolled-up denim jeans, the girls who walked around in painter’s smocks and ballet flats. As a young colored man, I had a certain amount of anonymity. It wasn’t that people in the Village treated you as though you weren’t colored; it was more a question of the fact that, to the kids of the Village, being a writer or artist or politico came first, and all the rest of it came second.
One evening, after finishing a
shift at the messenger service, I took my throbbing calves down to a little café on MacDougal to unwind and read a book. I was reading about the Imagist poets and sipping a glass of cheap red wine, when a band of rowdy young men burst in. It was clear they had been drinking somewhere else before their arrival. They were giddy, whooping it up in booming voices. I recognized one of them and realized it was Bobby.
“Hey! Miles!” he called out in friendly recognition when he saw me. “Hey, fellas, come over here and meet my pal Miles.” I didn’t recognize any of the others. I looked around for Swish, Pal, and Cliff but didn’t see them anywhere. It was clear this was a new band of friends who had probably picked up Bobby only hours earlier. I would venture to guess they’d gotten his attention by sending over drinks. With Bobby, that was often the way he acquired new acquaintances: People sent him drinks or bought him things. He never asked for such generosity, but his handsome face did. Bobby had a perpetually rumpled, appealing air about him that put people in mind of James Dean.
Now he came over and began to make introductions. I don’t recall the names of all the guys, but I remember there was a pair of young men named Andrew and John who had been all-Ivy gridiron champions at Yale, and these two seemed to be the group’s leaders. They were friendly enough but not the sort of fellows I liked: They were a privileged, pampered lot, making the rounds of New York’s most notorious neighborhoods as though Manhattan were some kind of personal playground intended to be enjoyed by them alone. To a native New Yorker, this attitude of novelty can be particularly irksome, but I pushed it aside and smiled and shook hands with each of them in turn.
“You boys look like you’re ready to get up to some trouble tonight,” I said in an attempt to make polite conversation.
“We’re going to go get some kicks at the Hamilton Lodge Ball,” Andrew said. “You oughta come with us! You can show us the way around Harlem.”
This was an assumption. I had not volunteered the information that I was from Harlem, much less that I knew my way around.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” I said, but Bobby cut me off.
“C’mon, Miles! It’ll be fun.”
“C’mon, Miles,” the group chorused in varying degrees of sincerity. I very badly wanted to say no, but I couldn’t see much of a way to flat-out decline at that point.
“C’mon, Miles,” Bobby repeated. “You do know Harlem better than all the rest of us, and besides, have you ever been to the Hamilton Lodge Ball? It’s supposed to be some scene. We’ll get a story or two out of it. Don’t you want to do something adventurous?”
“I have a fiancée,” I said.
“So do most of these fellas,” Bobby said, thumbing over his shoulder. “Like I said, we’re just going to get a load of the scene. It’s harmless.”
I looked at him. Bobby had that somewhat sheepish, slightly guilty look that all young scoundrels have about them; there was a devilish twinkle in his eye that appeared to be forever paired with his humble smile, which said, Don’t blame me! I didn’t do anything! He smiled now and I sighed, realizing he wasn’t going to give up.
“All right,” I relented, in spite of myself. “Why not?”
After a few more beers, the group staggered outside, splitting up as we piled into a series of taxicabs. I rode with Bobby, wondering the whole time what it was I’d let myself be talked into.
The Rockland Palace in Harlem hosted the Hamilton Lodge Ball every year. The dance was infamous for over-the-top revelry and for the large number of attendees dressed in drag. Astors and Vanderbilts had famously attended in years past. I had never been to a single one, and as we rode along in the taxicab I worried about the consequences of turning up at such a party. If I were to be sighted at the ball, it would embarrass my proudly middle-class Harlem family and make me more of an outsider in my neighborhood than I already was. But at the same time, I reasoned, whoever reported seeing me there would have to admit he’d been there, too. There was, at least, a kind of mutual safety in that fact.
• • •
We stepped out of the cab onto 155th Street, under a black awning that led into a tall brownstone building flanked with three sets of double doors and a giant arched stained-glass window. Frantic band music shrieked and roiled from deep within, and we each paid our entry fee to a six-foot-tall Miss America look-alike who stood holding a cashbox at the door. I could instantly see why she had been picked for the job: Her facsimile was meticulous, and she was an impressive sight no matter what the truth was beneath her evening gown.
I followed Bobby inside. It was difficult to ignore the multitude of appreciative smiles he received as we moved deeper into the crowd. He smiled back in a careless, come-what-may manner. The space itself was a mixture of a dance hall and a theater, with a small balcony of loge boxes along two walls. I was immediately gripped with the sensation of being in a fishbowl.
“You know, Bobby, I might beg off early; I’m feeling tired,” I said as we stepped further into the darkness. I was hardly dressed for this, and not in the mood for loud people. There was just enough light for me to see the whites of his eyes as he rolled them at me.
“Stop being a square. Take it easy!” he said. “Let me buy you a drink and then if you want to go, go.” I was taken off guard. I’d never in my life witnessed Bobby buy anyone a drink. He’d never needed to. The fact he had money in his wallet that he might actually spend fascinated me. As far as I knew, he’d never had a steady job.
Bobby made good on his word and I soon had a beer in my hand. It was humid in there; the heat and perspiration of bodies pushed up together in a confined space had already begun to dominate the atmosphere. Despite the thick heat, hordes of people were dressed to the nines. It was oddly touching. Well-coifed queens—who, if they couldn’t be called beautiful, could at least be called statuesque—floated about, festooned in mink stoles and mermaid-tail dresses. Women with short hair shuffled about in tuxedos; I glimpsed a pair of women in matching suits kissing at the bar. Scores of people were arrayed in masquerade costumes. Others skulked about the darker corners of the room in plainclothes, some of them genuinely interested in the scene, others just taking in the freak show, as I’m sure the Vanderbilts and Astors must have done. Tourists to the carnival. I found myself inexplicably embarrassed to realize we were among their number.
“Let’s go up to the boxes,” Andrew suggested to the group, and John moved towards the staircases, clearing the way with his tanklike posture. We climbed up and found our way to a loge box, where Andrew seemed to already know people. As I was introduced around for the second time that night, I realized I was meeting a dozen or so men who would soon have jobs selling stocks or bonds or something of that ilk on Wall Street. Some of these boys were simply having a laugh, trying to create the madcap memories they would recall when their lives had gotten boring and gray. Intuition informed me, however, that a small minority among them—a few of the quieter, sober-eyed fellows—were laying the foundation for the split nature of their future adult lives.
“What do you think?” said Bobby as we looked down over the riotously colorful throngs on the dance floor below. “Awfully wild scene, but impressive all the same. Look at all these characters! These cats go all out.” I surveyed the panorama down below. Half-naked bodies intermingled with the formally clad. Headdresses bobbed high over the crowd as people milled about. It was pretty wild. And beautiful. And obscene.
I finished my beer in record time and we hadn’t been there longer than thirty minutes before Andrew got his hands on a purple feather boa and had draped it around his shoulders. He sat perched atop the seat back of a settee in our loge, teetering ever so slightly as he presided drunkenly over the small kingdom of our box. He was making fun of it all, I understood. But the vehemence of his glee made me wonder if there wasn’t a bit too much protest in it. If someone were to press him on this subject, however, he would very likely retaliate with surprising viciousness.
I felt a slight tremor of revulsion.
“Where are you going?” Bobby asked, seeing me turn away.
“I might roam around a bit,” I replied.
“Down in the trenches?” he asked with one eyebrow raised.
I nodded and made my way towards the stairs. I wondered if he intended to follow me, but he stayed put. I was simply relieved to be away from John and Andrew and the band of merry men they led. I was sorry I’d come. I would kill some time by making a few rounds of the scene downstairs, I told myself, then I would go back up to the loge box and bid Bobby good night.
Once downstairs, I wandered the floor aimlessly, awash in a disorienting sea of cologne, body odor, and sickly-sweet perfume. A tall man dancing with an even taller drag queen backed into me and spun around just in time to spill beer down the front of my collared shirt.
“Sorry, fella!” he bellowed.
The drag queen—a brunette with snow-white skin and a drawn-on mole over her lip—tittered nervously, anticipating my aggravation. She was mistaken. I generally avoided fights as a personal rule, and now, at the Hamilton Lodge Ball, the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself by starting a brawl.
I waved my hands and shrugged to signal my lack of desire for a confrontation, then moved away to find something to mop the beer off my shirt before the stain set permanently. A hand appeared holding a clean white handkerchief.
“Here, take this,” a voice said. I looked up, following the hand that held the handkerchief. A young man with strawberry-blond hair and hazel eyes stared back at me. He was about the same age as me, conservatively dressed—his manner of dress made me think he might be a clerk at a law firm or an insurance company—and he appeared every bit as out of sorts with our surroundings as I was. I regarded the handkerchief and smiled politely.
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