by Bil Wright
Ed MacMillan looked over his shoulder, I guess to see how close the conductor was. I expected him to take his hand away, but he didn’t. It was as if he was playing a game of Dare with himself. I wasn’t playing, but I was in it, sitting there next to him with my leg frozen under his hand.
“All tickets please.” The conductor was right behind us. Ed MacMillan lifted his hand very slowly off my leg. He undid the fastening on his briefcase and felt around in it without looking inside. Pulled out a small card that had about ten holes punched in it. When he did, I saw his wedding ring, a tiny gold thread that looked like it still might be a little big for his finger.
The conductor reached past him and took my ticket. “Next stop is one twenty-fifth.”
“Yes. Thank you,” I said.
Ed MacMillan elbowed me and smiled. He held the card up. The conductor took it and punched another hole in it. He stepped ahead to the next seat. I waited, as though Ed MacMillan had started to say something to me, but hadn’t finished. I counted as the conductor moved one, two, three seats away from us. When he got to the fourth seat ahead of us, Ed MacMillan, without a word or even looking in my direction, put his hand back on my leg, only higher this time, and moved his fingers slowly but firmly, massaging my thigh.
I was embarrassed and ashamed to realize my dick was getting hard. The first thing I thought was that I didn’t want Ed MacMillan to know.
Most of the time, I tried not to think about my dick at all. The guys in the projects talked about their dicks all the time. Even Mom talked about dicks more than I did, except she called them “googies.”
In second grade, two boys’ mothers had been called in by the principal because the boys had been caught in the coat-room before school showing each other their dicks. I’d thought it was a pretty dumb game to begin with and couldn’t understand why it was being given so much attention, but when I told Mom about it, she was even more upset by what had happened than Miss Sanderhuff, the teacher, had been. She stopped ironing in the middle of the story and when I finished, she came over to where I was standing. She grabbed me by the shoulder so hard I winced, thinking I was going to get a beating for repeating it.
“If I ever hear about you and any googie business, you’ll be sorry. You understand?”
What I understood was how embarrassing it was to have my mother talk to me about dicks and call them something that made the conversation even more ridiculous. When I’d wash my hands for dinner in the bathroom and come out to the table, she’d ask, “Did you shake your googie?” Or, once when I’d tried on a pair of shorts at Rudy’s Sporting Goods, she’d giggled in front of the salesman and a couple of other customers, “Those are so short, your googie will be hanging out.”
Our last big “googie” conversation came when I was twelve. I was sent home early one day from school, determined not to admit I had diarrhea from wolfing down six large chocolate bars for lunch instead of the tuna fish sandwich Mom had sent with me. I told her I’d been excused because I just wasn’t feeling well.
“Headache?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Stomachache?”
“Sort of.”
She stared at me for a minute, her eyes like searchlights moving up and down my body. Finally, she asked, “It doesn’t have anything to do with your googie, does it?”
I answered no as quickly and as definite sounding as I could so she wouldn’t pursue it.
“Cause if it is, I can have Ben talk to you about it. Or we can make an appointment with the doctor.”
“Please, Mom. It has nothing to do with that. Please.”
She let it go, but I thought about it for a long time, trying to figure out how she’d come up with the question and why the heck she was still calling it a googie when I was twelve years old. Everybody I knew including girls and other people’s mothers, especially in the projects, called it a dick. So what did Mom think she was doing?
Sitting there on the train with Ed MacMillan’s hand squeezing my thigh, it was definitely my dick and not my googie that was hard. What made me more nervous than him knowing was the idea that back in Stratfield, Mom somehow knew that it was happening. She was sitting at home watching everything, like the witch with the crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz. She’d tell me she’d seen everything as soon as I got home on Sunday.
“I’m awfully glad to meet you, Louis Bowman. Since you’re a commuter too, we’ll have to figure out a way for you to come to Forty-Ninth Street to see my office sometime. It’s on the twenty-third floor. I swear, you can see half the world from my window. We’ll get you behind my desk so you can see what that feels like. Sound interesting to you?”
I didn’t answer. It sounded ridiculous and exciting at the same time.
“Or maybe since we both live in Stratfield, we’ll run into each other there.”
What happened to the office visit so quickly? I’d never been to anyone’s office in New York before. Half the world from his window? He was exaggerating, but I supposed there had to be some truth in it. Had he changed his mind because I hadn’t said yes right away? Through all of it, he never took his hand off my thigh. Squeezing. Almost letting go. Squeezing harder. Tighter. Not quite letting go.
“I’m hoping I’ll see you again. Are you hoping you’ll see me again?”
When the conductor called 125th Street, Ed MacMillan stood up and pulled my suitcase down from the overhead rack. I looked past him out the window and saw, among a wide cluster of black and brown faces, my grandfather standing on the platform watching for me. It was as if I’d fallen asleep looking through this same window at my mother and woke up with my grandfather in the place where my mother had been. In between was a strange dream I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.
Ed MacMillan took my suitcase and started toward the door of the train with it. I jumped up and followed. As we stood waiting for the train to stop, there were other black people waiting to get off at 125th Street. A few of them stared at Ed MacMillan and me. I wanted him to give me my suitcase and go sit down so I could go back to being who I was. Louis Bowman going to spend the weekend with his grandfather. Not some kid who rode from Stratfield to New York with a white man squeezing his thigh.
When the train stopped, I grabbed my suitcase from him, but not before he put his hand on my shoulder and asked, “You alright?”
“Yes,” I said. The conductor jumped onto the platform before the train came to a full stop. He reached up and took my bag from me. Grandaddy was a few feet behind him. He wasn’t smiling or waving or doing anything that looked like he knew me. Quickly, I looked back over the heads of the other passengers getting off the train. Ed MacMillan was still standing there, grinning down at me. And again, because I couldn’t smile back at him, I stared at his teeth instead.
10
From that Friday afternoon until Sunday when I took the 4:05 express back to Stratfield, Grandaddy and I sat in his apartment in almost total silence. I sat next to the window, looking from my book to the street, listening to the familiar sounds of kids calling to each other in nicknames and curse words.
Grandaddy stayed in his room most of the time. I peeked in when I went past it to the bathroom. He had taken apart a radio and spread its insides out all over the bed. There was another radio playing quietly on his dresser. All news. No music. He didn’t look up when I went by.
Mom told me he’d only gone to the fifth grade down South. His father had died in his twenties while working on a white man’s farm and Grandaddy had to drop out of school to help support his mother and younger sister.
“Your grandfather only talked about it once that I remember,” Mom told me. “He said his father sat down to rest in the middle of the afternoon, leaned back against a wooden post he’d just put into the ground and died right there. Seems like his heart gave out. And he wasn’t thirty years old.” I was curious for more details of this story. I wanted to know, for instance, what kind of work Grandad had done when he was even younger than I was, but I
wasn’t sure I’d ever get comfortable enough with him to ask anything at all.
Friday night, we ate a chicken casserole Mom had sent on the train with me. On Saturday, I volunteered to make spaghetti with a canned sauce, but Grandaddy said there was plenty of casserole left. We sat across from each other in his kitchen. It smelled like gas was leaking from the stove. I stared at a mousetrap in the corner, hoping no mice would come out while we were sitting there. Every few minutes I’d shift my feet under the table just to make some kind of noise.
After dinner I washed the dishes like I would have at home, and went into the other room to sit by the window. I sat by myself in the dark, watching Harlem like it was a movie. There had to have been more black people living on 162nd Street than in all of Stratfield. If you lived in Harlem your whole life and didn’t watch any television like my grandfather, you could probably come to believe that most of the world was black. Maybe half the world was what somebody else saw from a window on 49th Street, but what about all the people in my Harlem movie? If you couldn’t see them from your window, how could you be so sure you were looking at half the world?
Grandaddy started talking to me from his bedroom. He didn’t call my name or come to the door. He said, “I know Jeanette sees you get to church on Sundays.”
I figured I should get up and go to his room to answer him. He was sitting on the side of his bed, smoking a cigar.
“Yes, sir.” Mom had said my missing church was the only thing she regretted about me being in New York on the weekend.
“There’s a church around the corner on a Hundred Sixty-first,” Grandaddy told me. “You’re big enough to go on over there in the morning, if you want.”
I wasn’t sure if he was ordering me to go or giving me a choice.
“No thank you, sir,” I said, trying to make it sound like I didn’t want to inconvenience him by going.
“Suit yourself.” He never looked up from the newspaper.
That night I dreamed about Ed MacMillan. He and I were sitting on the stoop outside Grandaddy’s building. I wanted to show him how many more black people there were in Harlem than in Stratfield where we both lived. But he wouldn’t pay attention to what I was saying. He kept making jokes about leaving reports on his desk and how absentminded he was. I thought what I was saying was important, but he wasn’t listening. I was annoyed. How could you be so absentminded, I wanted to ask him, and have an office that overlooks half the world?
Sunday afternoon, when Grandaddy and I were standing on the platform above 125th Street waiting for the 4:05, I wondered if Ed MacMillan might be on the train going back. Maybe sometimes he had to work on Sundays. I reached down and put my hand on my leg, gripped my thigh as tight as I could, but I didn’t have Ed MacMillan’s strength.
“You listen to me.” Grandaddy surprised me. He sounded like I’d suddenly done something wrong.
“You behave yourself. Don’t give Jeanette any trouble. You do what her and Ben tell you to do.” I was stunned. There was a tingling in my jaw. I held it tight to keep it from quivering.
“Jeanette said she got Ben to give you some boxing lessons and you’re acting real sissyish about it. You don’t know anything about how to take care of yourself, do you?”
“No, Grandad.”
“You should be grateful you got somebody to take that kind of interest in you.”
“Yes, Grandad.” Grateful. For getting knocked around at the end of every week.
“You’re sposed to be a man. Act like one.”
We stood in silence until the 4:05 pulled in.
“I’ll call Jeanette, tell her you’re on the train like I said I would.” I turned and waved, wondering what he’d tell her about the weekend. It hadn’t been bad, sitting there, reading homework chapters and staring out the window. It absolutely beat being home with Ben and Mom. Still, I wanted to know many times they’d agreed on for these visits.
“You’re sposed to be a man. Act like one.” I watched Grandaddy leaving the platform before my train pulled off. I thought about the men I knew. The two I thought of immediately were Ben and Ray Anthony. Grandaddy probably wouldn’t consider Ray Anthony a man, but I did. I smiled thinking what Grandad would say if I acted more like Ray Anthony Robinson. You told me to act like a man, Grandad, I thought. You didn’t say which one.
11
Mom and Ben seemed to be getting along better than usual. Sunday night, she was too busy fussing over his dinner to ask me anything about New York. After we ate, she rubbed his back and shoulders, wanting to know if she’d cooked the roast too long. She was working harder than she did when she scrubbed floors on her knees.
I wondered if my being out of the apartment for the weekend had made that much of a difference for them. If the way she was practically ignoring me after I got home was any evidence, I’d be spending a lot more weekends on 162nd Street. For all the attention she was giving him, though, I still didn’t believe Ben could be persuaded to do anything he didn’t want to. Mom would be furious, I thought, if all these back rubs and special recipes didn’t get her a house.
“I had a good time with Grandaddy,” I lied to her.
“Yeah, well, I’ll send you back if my money holds out.” She didn’t bring up Sunday boxing, and I didn’t remind her.
The next weekend she did send me back, but this time Ed MacMillan wasn’t on the train. Nothing felt like it had the week before. I sat on Grandaddy’s couch for hours, bored by the sights and sounds of Harlem that had been so magical to me the week before.
It was worse the week after that. I decided Mom must really be kidding herself into thinking getting me out of the apartment would get her a house. On the train ride home, I wished I could tell her I didn’t want to go back to my grandfather’s again and she should find some other way of making me disappear.
By this time, she’d decided she trusted me enough to catch a city bus home from the train station. It was only about a twenty-minute wait, the bus let me off near the projects, and I walked the rest of the way home. The station was run-down and stale smelling. No one seemed to spend very much time inside, except to buy a ticket. I wouldn’t have gone in to wait for the bus that third Sunday if it hadn’t been raining.
There were two women waiting for the bus like I was. They were standing together on one side of the station, I was alone on the other. When I realized the bus was more than a few minutes late, I decided to call Mom from one of the pay phones. I held the greasy-looking receiver away from my ear and dialed. I could hear it ringing when I saw the door of the men’s room open a few feet away from the phone booths. Hurrying my way, although he didn’t seem to see me, was Ed MacMillan. I hung up the phone and stepped out of the booth into his path.
“Hi!”
Ed MacMillan stopped just short of knocking me over. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a navy blue windbreaker and jeans. He looked even younger without his wrinkled gray suit on. He seemed nervous now, too, so unlike the Ed MacMillan from that first Friday on the train.
“Hi.” He remembered me, but he wasn’t as glad to see me as I thought he’d be. “What are you doing here? You by yourself?” He looked around the empty station.
“Yep. I just came back from New York.” I was ready to stand right there for as long as it took to get to know exactly who he was.
“Well, it’s good to see you again.”
He was already past me when I ran backward and blurted, “I go to my grandfather’s every weekend. I always come home on the same train. The 4:05.”
He didn’t respond. But he looked at me, really looked at me and I knew he’d heard what I’d said. Then he hurried through the station without looking back.
Through the station window I watched him get into a dirty, cream-colored station wagon. There was a bright green bumper sticker on the front fender that said “The Whole Family Plays at Playland.” He’s got kids, I thought, as he drove away from the station. He’s going home to his kids.
• • •
I changed my mind again about being sent to New York on weekends. It occurred to me that whether I was on my way or coming back, things were different than when I was in Stratfield. Even when I was being ignored at Grandad’s, it was better than being at home knowing Mom wished I wasn’t there. And boredom definitely beat boxing.
So I did everything I could to make sure I was on that train the next weekend. I cleaned, came when I was called and did everything Mom told me to as quickly and efficiently as I possibly could. I told Mom every chance I got how good it felt to be around Grandaddy and how much I was learning about taking a radio apart.
“Your grandfather says he asks you about church and you tell him you don’t want to go.”
“Oh, I would go,” I said, feeling my way, “I just didn’t think it would be polite to go if he didn’t.”
“Well, I think if he’s willing to walk you over there and pick you up afterward like he says he is, you should get up and go to church like you’ve been raised to.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was going to ask you if I should go whether Grandaddy goes or not. I’ll go this Sunday.”
She didn’t say anything. Good, I thought. That must mean I’m spending the weekend in Harlem.
• • •
This time, it felt almost better than the first. It was easier than it had been the past couple of weeks to be with my grandfather, to sit in the same apartment with him and not say anything for hours. Whenever we did speak, I said whatever I knew he wanted to hear. Yes sir, I was obedient to my mother, and to Ben. Yes sir, I was doing well in school and I was definitely going to college. Yes, yes sir, I was learning to act like a man.
Sunday morning at Greater Faith Harlem Baptist Tabernacle on 161st Street turned out to be the best thing about New York. There was a thumping organ and ladies in hats with rose gardens on them. Harlem Baptist couldn’t have been more different from Stratfield Methodist. There were no dragging hymns with seven verses or long droning prayers that sounded like the vowel exercises from school. It was like walking into the middle of a big, loud musical play and everyone including the audience had their part. I only wished somebody I knew was there with me, to hear the singers, and the organ and the children’s choir clapping double-time. I thought about Ray Anthony and wondered if he’d ever been to New York. But then, even if he had, it was hard to picture him in anybody’s church. The preacher said, “Everybody in this world is entitled to a miracle.” It would be a miracle, I thought, to have Ray Anthony here with me now.