“Hey, you guys want to go over and shoot some baskets?” Angel asked. He couldn’t really play basketball very well but he loved it.
“Come on in, man, we got a meeting going on,” Sam said.
So everybody came in and sat around. BB and Angel were looking real serious and Gloria was looking suspicious.
“This is a little like a speech,” Clyde said, “but it’s something I really feel. I think it’s important to me and I hope it’s important to everybody else. Well, here goes. A lot of us have problems and sometimes it’s hard to get around them. Some things you just can’t do anything about. And when that happens you feel bad and you feel little. Not little, but alone. Because you don’t want anyone knowing how you feel because it’s so hard to tell people how you feel sometimes. When my father died, for example, I really felt bad and so did Kitty. Kitty should be up here.”
“You want me to go get her?” BB asked.
“No, I’ll tell her about it later. Anyway I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I thought that we could form a club of some kind. And the purpose of the club would be to protect each other, not from fighting and that kind of thing but just from being alone when things get messed up. Sam came up when I was feeling real bad, and I could talk to him and he liked me so it helped. See, he liked me before, and I knew that he did, but he came up and talked with me when I needed some talking to. I don’t know if I would have did the same for him. Not that I don’t like Sam but I don’t know if I would have thought about it. That was the cool thing. He thought about it. And when I think about him coming up and saying the things he did, real helpful things, it was good but it wasn’t as good as thinking about the fact that if I need him again he’ll be there, because that’s the kind of guy he is. And, really, that’s the kind of people most of us are. And if we kind of get together and decide that we’re going to like each other—not like each other, but—”
“Care for each other,” BB said.
“Dig it, care for each other, then we’ll always know that we have each other to fall back on. We can do it as just friends, but if we agree to do it before things go wrong, then we’ll know that we have something else.”
“What’s that?” Angel asked.
“Somebody who cares for us all the time. Whether things are right or wrong. So when things go wrong we don’t have to go around looking for someone who’ll like us and understand what we’re all about. We’ll have people we can turn to. We’ll have each other. And we should be able to dig on each other’s problems.”
“Yeah, and we always get the same kind of problems. Somebody is sad because they don’t have any money or something like that or they got family trouble or school trouble,” Angel said. “Everybody in this whole neighborhood gets just about the same kind of problems.”
“Who’s going to be in the club?” Gloria asked.
“Whoever feels they can dig us as we are,” said Clyde. “I don’t think we should put anybody down or keep them out of the club if they can be down-to-earth and be like us. They don’t even have to like everybody in the club. Just know that nobody’s any different.”
“I’m all for it,” Sam said.
“Me too,” I added.
“Okay for me and Maria,” Angel said.
“Okay for me on my own,” Maria said.
“Okay.” Gloria.
BB nodded.
“We gonna give ourselves a name?” Sam asked.
“What do you think?” Clyde asked.
Everybody thought we should have a name.
“How about the Bloody Skulls?” Sam asked.
“Now how would we look with a name like the Bloody Skulls?” Clyde asked.
“Then how about the Golden Imperial Knights?”
“How about the Golden Imperial Margarines?”
“Come on, BB, I’m being serious.” Sam was seriously frowning. “If you got a club you have to have a dynamite name.”
“How about jackets?” Angel asked.
“He’s not talking about that kind of club!” Maria snapped. “I mean, we’re not going to be a bopping club or anything. This is like a social club. Not even that, a community club.”
“We don’t even have to have a name if we don’t want,” Clyde suggested. “Names and jackets are okay—I’m not really against them—but that’s not really what we’re all about.”
“Let’s call ourselves the Good People,” BB suggested.
“That’s corny,” I said.
“I’m corny.” BB gave me a look. “We’re talking about being corny and caring for each other, so let’s be corny all the way. I care for all of you, and I’m not ashamed of it, you know. I don’t mind being called the Good People and I don’t care if anyone else in the world thinks it’s corny. If I get some people in my corner, some people who are going to care for me, I don’t care what anybody else thinks.”
“Then that’s who we are. The Good People,” Maria said.
“At least let’s make it the 116th Street Good People,” Sam said.
“You got it, man,” Angel said.
“Okay.” Clyde.
“Okay.” Gloria.
“And when we have problems, we’ll talk about them?” Clyde asked.
Everybody agreed. I could see that everyone was happy with the club, too.
“You mean like our fathers being dead?” Gloria asked.
Clyde looked up at her and then toward BB. BB looked down real quick.
“I didn’t know your father was dead, Gloria,” Clyde said.
“He’s dead,” Gloria said.
“How did he die?” Clyde asked.
“He got hit by a truck.”
“Oh. When did that happen?”
“About a month ago.”
I looked at Clyde and he looked away from me. I wanted to say something to Gloria, to tell her that Clyde and I would understand and that she didn’t have to lie to us. I thought of our agreement—that we agreed to help each other—and I realized that we had formed a club to help each other and maybe we should have formed one to agree to accept help from each other.
Clyde didn’t believe Gloria, I knew. I knew that Gloria’s father was alive just a few days ago. Gloria’s eyes glistened over. Clyde didn’t say anything. We just sat around for a while longer, and then Angel said he was going out to the stoop. Maria went with him and Sam and BB and me. I thought that Clyde was going to stay and talk with Gloria, but we weren’t on the steps more than a minute when he came and sat with us. He started talking about this and that and asked me how I was doing on the sax. I said okay. I never did understand how people could talk about things they weren’t thinking about.
Gloria came out just as her mother came up. Her mother had bought a six pack of sodas and she passed them out. Then she went on inside.
“He lost his job,” Gloria said to us.
“Who?”
“My father. He come home one day and said he didn’t want any supper and then he sat in the living room and talked about how his company had moved down South and how he had to look for another job and he was wondering what kinds of things he wanted to get into and everything. Then he started looking around for a job and he couldn’t find nothing. And when he came home you couldn’t talk to him or anything. Then one day Mama and I came home and we were jiving around and everything and started fixing dinner—I love it when she lets me do the dinner—well, then we hear this crying from the living room. At first we were real scared because the living room was dark. Then we got up enough nerve to turn on the lamp, and it was my father. He had been drinking and then he was crying. He hadn’t found a job and it was really getting to him, you know. After that he kept arguing with Mama until he started talking about leaving.
“He doesn’t read too well, so it’s really hard for him to get a good job. He’s smart enough in a street kind of way but he’s not really into books and that kind of thing. Then they had this big fight and everything. They were yelling at each other and cursing and going on. I real
ly hate him for hitting her. You know, I just hate him for that.” Gloria was quiet for a long minute. “Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I just hate that he had to do it that way. I hope he’s all right. He didn’t take his winter coat. Mama says she doesn’t know how he’s going to get along without his winter coat.”
“You think he’s going to come back?” Angel asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Gloria said, smiling through her tears. “That’s what makes it not so bad. He’s okay for a cat that’s not too heavy.”
“I think he’ll be back,” BB said.
“BB, you’ll always think the right thing as long as you live, girl,” Gloria said, sniffling a little. “You got a big heart for a young girl. I really mean that, too.”
“Hey, Gloria!” Sam.
“What you want, main man?”
“How come you decided to come out to the stoop with us?”
“Heard there was a jive club down here called the 116th Street Good People. Figured I’d check them out.”
Then we started in to laughing and playing around. If somebody came around and looked at us they’d probably think we were just being stupid, but the real thing was that we felt good. We had something real close and we were glad about it. It filled me up with so much gladness that laughing and crying were almost the same thing. It was a good night, maybe one of my best nights ever.
5
trombones and colleges
It was a dark day when we got our report cards. The sky was full of gray clouds and it was sprinkling rain. I was over to Clyde’s house and Gloria and Kitty were there. Sam probably would have been there too, only he had got a two-week job in the afternoons helping out at Freddie’s. Actually he only did it so that his mother would let him be on the track team again. Sam and his mother had this little system going. He would do something good-doing and she’d let him do something that he wanted to.
Clyde’s report card was on the kitchen table and we all sat around it like it was some kind of a big important document. I had got a pretty good report card and had wanted to show it off but I knew it wasn’t the time. Clyde pushed the card toward me and I read it. He had all satisfactory remarks on the side labeled Personal Traits and Behavior. He had also received B’s in music and art appreciation. But everything else was either a C or a D except mathematics. His mathematics mark was a big red F that had been circled. I don’t know why they had to circle the F when it was the only red mark on the card. In the Teacher’s Comments section someone had written that Clyde had “little ability to handle an academic program.”
“A little ability is better than none,” I said. No one said anything so I figured it probably wasn’t the right time to try to cheer Clyde up.
I knew all about his switching from a commercial program to an academic program, but I really hadn’t thought he’d have any trouble.
“I saw the grade adviser today. He said I should switch back to the commercial program.” Clyde looked like he’d start crying any minute. His eyes were red and his voice was shaky. “He said that I had to take mathematics over and if I failed again or failed another required subject I couldn’t graduate. The way it is now I’m going to have to finish up in the summer because I switched over.”
“I think you can pass it if you really want to,” Kitty said. Clyde’s sister was so pretty I couldn’t even look at her. If I did I started feeling funny and couldn’t talk right. Sometimes I daydreamed about marrying her.
Just then Clyde’s mother came in and he gave a quick look at Kitty.
“Hi, young ladies and young gentlemen.” Mrs. Jones was a kind of heavy woman but she was pretty, too. You could tell she was Kitty’s mother if you looked close. She put her package down and started taking things out. “I heard you people talking when I first came in. By the way you hushed up I guess you don’t want me to hear what you were talking about. I’ll be out of your way in a minute, soon as I put the frozen foods in the refrigerator.”
“I got my report card today,” Clyde said. His mother stopped taking the food out and turned toward us. Clyde pushed the report card about two inches toward her. She really didn’t even have to look at the card to know that it was bad. She could have told that just by looking at Clyde. But she picked it up and looked at it a long time. First she looked at one side and then the other and then back at the first side again.
“What they say around the school?” she asked, still looking at the card.
“They said I should drop the academic course and go back to the other one.” I could hardly hear Clyde, he spoke so low.
“Well, what you going to do, young man?” She looked up at Clyde and Clyde looked up at her and there were tears in his eyes and I almost started crying. I can’t stand to see my friends cry. “What are you going to do, Mr. Jones?”
“I’m—I’m going to keep the academic course,” Clyde said.
“You think it’s going to be any easier this time?” Mrs. Jones asked.
“No.”
“Things ain’t always easy. Lord knows that things ain’t always easy.” For a minute there was a faraway look in her eyes, but then her face turned into a big smile. “You’re just like your father, boy. That man never would give up on anything he really wanted. Did I ever tell you the time he was trying to learn to play the trombone?”
“No.” Clyde still had tears in his eyes but he was smiling, too. Suddenly everybody was happy. It was like seeing a rainbow when it was still raining.
“Well, we were living over across from St. Nicholas Park in this little rooming house. Your father was working on a job down on Varick Street that made transformers or some such nonsense—anyway, he comes home one day with this long package all wrapped up in brown paper. He walks in and sits it in the corner and doesn’t say boo about what’s in the bag. So at first I don’t say anything either, and then I finally asks him what he’s got in the bag, and he says, ‘What bag?’ Now this thing is about four feet long if it’s an inch and he’s asking what bag.” Mrs. Jones wiped the crumbs from Gloria’s end of the table with a quick swipe of the dish cloth, leaving a swirling pattern of tiny bubbles. Gloria tore off a paper towel and wiped the area dry.
“Now I look over at him and he’s trying to be nonchalant. Sitting there, a grown man, and big as he wants to be and looking for all the world like somebody’s misplaced son. So I says, ‘The bag in the corner.’ And he says, ‘Oh, that’s a trombone I’m taking back to the pawn shop tomorrow.’ Well, I naturally ask him what he’s doing with it in the first place, and he says he got carried away and bought it but he realized that we really didn’t have the thirty-five dollars to spend on foolishness and so he’d take it back the next day. And all the time he’s sitting there scratching his chin and rubbing his nose and trying to peek over at me to see how I felt about it. I just told him that I guess he knew what was best. Only the next day he forgot to take it back, and the next day he forgot to take it back, and finally I broke down and told him why didn’t he keep it. He said he would if I thought he should.
“So he unwraps this thing and he was just as happy with it as he could be until he tried to get a tune out of it. He couldn’t get a sound out of it at first, but then he started oomping and woomping with the thing as best he could. He worked at it and worked at it and you could see he was getting disgusted. I think he was just about to give it up when the lady who lived under us came upstairs and started complaining about the noise. It kept her Napoleon awake, she said. Napoleon was a dog. Little ugly thing, too. She said your father couldn’t play, anyway.
“Well, what did she say that for? That man played that thing day and night. He worked so hard at that thing that his lips were too sore for him to talk right sometime. But he got the hang of it.”
“I never remembered Pop playing a trombone,” said Clyde.
“Well, your father had a streak in him that made him stick to a thing,” she said, pouring some rice into a colander to wash it off, “but every year his goals got bigger and bigger and he had to put
some things down so that he could get to others. That old trombone is still around here some place. Probably in one of them boxes under Kitty’s bed. Now, you children, excuse me, young ladies and gentlemen, get on out of here and let me finish supper.”
We all went into Clyde’s living room.
“That was my mom’s good-doing speech,” Clyde said. “She gets into talking about what a great guy my father was and how I was like him and whatnot.”
“You supposed to be like your father,” Sam said. “He was the one that raised you, right?”
“She wants me to be like him, and I want to be like him, too, I guess. She wants me to keep on trying with the academic thing.”
“What you want to do,” Sam asked, “give it up?”
“No. Not really. I guess I want people like my mother to keep on telling me that I ought to do it, really. Especially when somebody tells me I can’t do it.”
“Boy,” Sam said, sticking his thumbs in his belt and leaning back in the big stuffed chair, “you are just like your father.”
Then we all went into Clyde’s room and just sat around and talked for a while. Mostly about school and stuff like that, and I wanted to tell Clyde that I thought I could help him if he wanted me to. I was really getting good grades in school, but I thought that Clyde might get annoyed if I mentioned it. But then Gloria said that we could study together sometime and that was cool, too.
6
there’s people and then there’s people
Me and Clyde and Sam decided to go downtown. We were supposed to go down to buy me a new mouthpiece for my sax but really we were going down because we all had money. I had fourteen dollars, seven that I had saved by working in the A & P in the afternoons after school and seven that my father gave me. He said that if I wanted a new mouthpiece (which I did), then I would have to come up with some money and he would match it. I came up with seven dollars. That was actually from four days of carrying packages for people from the A & P. Clyde had about nine dollars and Sam had about six dollars which was his allowance minus one dollar which he spent on two thirty-nine-cent bags of potato chips with garlic and a large Coke. He loved Coke.
Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff Page 6