Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff

by Walter Dean Myers

  Anyway, we were downtown and were just looking around before we went to the music store to look for a mouthpiece when all of a sudden we heard this screaming and carrying on, and we turned and saw two guys running our way. They were a little older than us and they were really running, bumping into people and everything. Then they passed us by and we heard people yelling something about stopping them. Then Sam figured it all out. They had snatched some lady’s pocketbook.

  “Let’s get ’em,” he says.

  And before you know it, me and Sam and Clyde are chasing these two guys to get this lady’s pocketbook back. Anyway, nobody can run too fast because it’s too crowded in the shopping area. But we’re gaining on these guys. I don’t know why I’m running, but Sam had said, “Let’s get ’em,” and I was running, too. Anyway we hit a little area where there weren’t too many people, and Sam caught the second guy, the guy with the pocketbook in his hand. He twisted and swung at Sam but Sam ducked and hit the guy pretty hard. The other guy had ran across the street. Then the guy that Sam hit kicked him on the knee and then turned and ran again. But he had dropped the pocketbook. Clyde and I caught up with Sam and we saw the second guy dodging cars as he ran across the street and knew that there wasn’t any chance of catching him. We were about a block away from where we first saw what was happening, but we figured the lady who owned the pocketbook would come up eventually, and anyway, Sam’s knee was hurt so we helped him over to the side of the building while he rolled up his pants leg and looked at his knee. Clyde had the pocketbook and Sam was looking at his knee and so was I when all of a sudden this big hand and arm goes around my neck and just about lifts me off the ground. Whoever it was that had me—I think it was the son of King Kong—slammed Clyde into the building. Another guy grabbed Sam and hit him across the face. These were grownups. Then they started talking about how they had us.

  “We got them,” one of them said. Well, I knew that. But what I didn’t know was why they got us. Then this white lady runs up and starts thanking God that they didn’t get away with her pocketbook when all the time she should have been thanking Fast Sam. Then two policemen came up and they grabbed us away from the first guys and put handcuffs on us. I finally realized that we were being arrested.

  “Hey, man, what you putting—” Sam started saying, but the policeman just pushed him right into the wall. I could see that Sam’s face was puffed up. Right over the eye. I was just about set to turn to see Clyde when I got pushed into the wall. In about another second Clyde was against the wall, too.

  “This your pocketbook, ma’am?” a voice said.

  “Yes, it is, officer,” a woman’s voice said.

  Then a police car came up and they took me and Sam and Clyde to the police car and pushed us into the back seat. Sam got a bump on his head from hitting it into the top of the police car when they were pushing him into the back seat. Every time Clyde or Sam tried to say something the policeman would tell them to shut up. They put the lady in another police car and took us all away. When they got us to the police station there were a lot of people around. They took us in and put all of us in a cage after taking the handcuffs off. They left us in the cage for about ten minutes, and then they took us into a room with a lot of desks and started asking us our names and everything. We said that we didn’t take the lady’s pocketbook and they said things like “Yeah, sure,” you know, the way people say things when they don’t really believe you. Then they put us against a wall and they said it was a lineup. Sam looked awful. He really looked awful. His face was swollen in about three places but he seemed more mad than scared. Then the woman came in and a policeman asked her were we the boys that snatched her pocketbook and she said yes.

  “I didn’t snatch your pocketbook, lady!” Clyde yelled out, and one of the policeman went like he was going to hit Clyde and Clyde shut up. I was trembling, really. My knees were really shaking. They asked the lady if anything was missing and she looked in the pocketbook and took everything out and looked at it very carefully and then said no, that as far as she could see everything was there.

  Then they made us turn around and face the wall while they felt us up on our arms and legs and sides, and then we had to empty our pockets. They asked us where we got the money that we had but they didn’t believe us when we told them. One policeman, who wasn’t wearing a jacket, came over and said that there had been another purse-snatching earlier. Then two other policemen came over and each one of them took one of us over to a different place and started asking us questions.

  I didn’t take anything and I started crying. I’m not sure why but I just started crying. The policeman said that everything was all right because I was the youngest and I wouldn’t get into trouble if I just told what the others had taken. And I told him that we were just downtown to get a mouthpiece, and he asked me if I was calling the lady a liar because she had already identified us as the purse-snatchers. I said that I wasn’t calling anybody a liar but we hadn’t stolen anything. I tried to tell him about Sam catching the guys that had taken the pocketbook, but he just gave me a look and said that I would just have to be sent away to a home. Then me and Sam got put into a cage again. Sam and Clyde weren’t crying but I sure was.

  Then another guy came in and he had this red-haired woman with him and he looked at us in the cage and shook his head and started talking to the police officers, and then they brought the lady over to look at us again and she asked them to take us out of the cages, and they took us out and put us against the wall again, and then they came over and told us that we could go home. Just like that. So we all looked at each other and the lady came over and said that she was sorry, that the guys who took her pocketbook looked just like us. Actually they didn’t even look near to us. And the other guy, who came in with the red-haired woman, said that he had seen the whole thing and that he was sorry that it had taken him so long to get down to the station. I was glad that he got down at all. If he had been busy or something we would have been in a world of trouble. The police asked us where we lived and they gave us carfare for the bus and told us they were sorry that they had to bring us downtown. The lady offered to give Sam five dollars but Sam told her to keep her five dollars. I don’t know why he did that and it seemed stupid, but I was so glad he did it I could have jumped up and down. And that’s how I got into jail again. We went on home and I told my father, and he said that I was learning what the world was all about. I don’t think so, though. Because the people I like most, like Clyde and Sam and Gloria and Kitty, aren’t like that. Neither are my parents but sometimes my father seems a little mean. So the second thing that got me into jail, besides modern science, was helping people. You get into jail for some very funny things.

  7

  about being unfaithful

  Being unfaithful to a woman can get you into a lot of trouble. I finally decided that I was in love with Kitty Jones about a week before I was unfaithful to her. She was the prettiest girl that I had ever met and I really loved her a lot. Of course I didn’t tell her that I loved her because I didn’t want it to go to her head. Sam always said that you should never let a girl know that you love her or she’ll start acting funny. I guess that’s because Sam went up to this girl—not Kitty, who he had just had an argument with, but another girl—and told her that he loved her and she slapped him. Anyway, I was in love with Kitty until I met this girl named Susan. Susan wasn’t as pretty as Kitty but she was okay. She was a friend of Gloria and kind of chubby. But one day in school we had to do some filing together in the old records room. That was part of the honor squad’s duties. We were filing and talking and she asked me if I had ever kissed a girl. I said yes, plenty of times. She said that she had only kissed one boy and I asked her if she had ever soul kissed and she said no. I said that she didn’t know what kissing was unless she had soul kissed. (I had never really soul kissed but at least I knew a lot about it because Sam had told me.)

  “What’s a soul kiss like?” Susan asked.

  “That’
s when you put your tongue in the other person’s mouth when you’re kissing them,” I said. “But you really have to do it before you know what it’s all about.”

  “Would you soul kiss me?” she asked.

  Now that was a problem. Because I wasn’t just a kid any more. I was going on thirteen and really couldn’t be fooling around with girls. You know, when you get older you have to control what you do more. But I thought I might as well give her a soul kiss so I went over to her and took her face in my hands and started to kiss her. First I just kissed her ordinary, which was really nice and I had to sort of move my body away from her, which wasn’t easy because as I said she was kind of chubby, but if I hadn’t she might have felt something and embarrassed me. Anyway, then I was just about to soul kiss her when she started to soul kiss me! I had never felt so funny in my entire life. It was a long kiss, too. And she held me very close, too. I knew that Susan was older than me, nearly fourteen I think, but I didn’t really care. After we had finished kissing she just looked at me for a while, and then she asked me if I would soul kiss her, and I said yes and I kissed her, only my tongue wasn’t nearly as long as hers was and I don’t think it was as good but she seemed to enjoy it. That’s just about when I fell in love with her. She started asking me things like where I lived and did I have a girl friend. I knew I had been in love with Kitty but I had never kissed Kitty or anything. I had kissed Susan.

  After we had kissed a third time she asked me if I played basketball on the school team and if I knew any karate. Well, I had to tell her that I didn’t play ball on the school team but I told her that I did know a little karate. I had seen a trick on television and I thought that I’d try it with Susan. On television one guy would be blindfolded and the other guy would stand there with a handkerchief in his hand. The guy with the handkerchief in his hand would throw it in the air and just as it came down he would holler “NOW!” and the other guy would snatch off his blindfold and then jump up and kick the handkerchief before it fell. I told Susan about this and she blindfolded me and threw up a piece of Kleenex, which was because she didn’t have two handkerchiefs. When she yelled, “NOW!” I snatched off the handkerchief, jumped up and dealt a death kick to the corner of the filing cabinet. The pain was something awful. I fell on the floor and rolled over. I grabbed my foot but it was hurt too much to touch. Susan went out to get the school nurse.

  The school nurse came down about two minutes later and asked me what happened. I told her that I hurt my foot.

  “How?” she said.

  What difference did it make how? What was I going to say? I mean, really, what was I going to say? “Well, I was soul kissing Susan, and I had seen this trick on television, see, and I thought that if Susan saw me do it…”

  The school nurse felt my foot after I got my shoe off and I jumped around and hollered a lot because the pain was, as I said before, something else! She said that I had to go to the hospital right away. The custodian drove me to the hospital in his car. They took me to the emergency ward and I got an X-ray and everything. The doctor said that I had what they called a hairline fracture. Which means it was broken a little. Oh, yes, I forgot to say that BB went to the hospital with me. She was on the safety patrol in school and the nurse had her come to the hospital with me. I wasn’t the least bit nervous or anything like that, even though it hurt a lot, but it was still good having BB come with me to the hospital. And at least I had a broken foot, too. Anything that I can’t stand is somebody going to the hospital and they can’t find anything wrong. But I had a definite hairline fracture, the doctor said. He asked me how I got the break and I told him. He told me that he gets more karate fractures than any other kind, especially since Kung Fu moved to prime time on the television. Anyway, when we finished fixing my foot up, which was mostly the doctor taping it up and giving me this big white sock to wear over the tape, I was told that I could go home. The doctor asked me if I had another friend besides BB that could help me home. And BB said that she would call Clyde. She went to make the call and a moment or two later came back and said that she couldn’t reach Clyde but that Sam was coming over to give me a hand.

  The school nurse, who was still there, said that she thought that I’d be all right and she would see me in a week. This was because the doctor told me to stay off the foot for about a week. They even gave me some crutches to use. You should have seen how concerned BB was. Anyway, I had to stay off the foot for a week and then come back again for X-rays. The school nurse signed some papers and we all left. Sam had got there and me, him, and BB went home by cab.

  8

  good-bye forever: at least

  When we got to my house we found Maria sitting on the stoop crying. We asked her what the matter was and she said that Kitty had disappeared, and no one knew where she was.

  “Angel and Clyde and Cap are out looking for her now. Here’s the note she left.”

  I looked at the note.

  CLYDE

  I am going away and I will never be back. I can’t stand to live here any more. I might come back when I am grown and married.

  Good-bye forever,

  Ms KITTY JONES

  “That’s just it. Nobody knows why she ran away or anything. Her mother’s not even home and she doesn’t know about it.”

  “Did Clyde call the police?”

  “He didn’t want to call the police because then everything would be upset. We checked the handwriting on the note and it looks like hers so we don’t think she was kidnaped. Anyway, Clyde don’t think she was kidnaped. They’re going around to all her friends’ places. You know Jeannie, that new girl? You know her BB.”

  BB nodded that she did.

  “Well, she’s upstairs in case the phone rings and I’m sitting down here in case she comes around.”

  “Maybe she’s just fooling around,” Sam said.

  “I don’t think so because she don’t be fooling around like that.” Maria wiped at her eyes.

  “Did they check over at that girl’s house where she does her homework sometimes?”

  “Everywhere. They even checked on 118th Street, and you know that Kitty would never go there by herself,” Maria said. “It’s almost eight thirty and she’s usually home about at least seven. At least if it was real winter she might get cold and come home, but it’s warm.”

  You could see that Maria was real sad. I didn’t know what to do. Sam and BB mentioned some more places to look, but Maria said that they had looked in every place Sam and BB mentioned. Then Clyde and Cap came back and said they still couldn’t find Kitty. We just stood around for a while mentioning places where she might have gone but anywhere we mentioned had already been checked out. Angel came by a little later and he said that he hadn’t had any luck either but he had asked his mother to let him and Maria stay out later and help look for Kitty, and their mother said okay.

  It was almost nine o’clock so I had to go home. I asked them to call me if they heard anything and they said they would. Clyde was real quiet, not just worried, and I wondered about that.

  When I got home I told my mother what had happened to Kitty and she said that Kitty had probably just went off to a movie or something and had forgotten to tell Clyde that she was going. She fixed me a hamburger and I had that and some milk for dinner.

  I had to tell my father all over about how I had hurt my foot. He went through this big thing as if he didn’t believe it could really happen the way I said it did.

  “Why on earth did you bang your foot into a file cabinet? That doesn’t make a bit of sense. Not one bit.”

  It was no use telling him that I didn’t mean to hit the cabinet, because once he got wound up you might as well forget it. He was going on with the same thing until he had talked himself out. That’s the way he was. I got out my sax to practice, and he immediately jumped on me again. This time about how if I spent more time on school work and less on the sax maybe I wouldn’t be breaking my foot against file cabinets.

  Mama said that I could go u
p to the roof and practice if I wanted to. She had a way of saying that you could do something when she really meant that you had to do it. I could see that she didn’t want me to get into it with my father and was just being cool and all. So I took my sax, crutches and all, to the roof. Our roof was fenced in all around and sometimes women came up with their children if they didn’t feel like taking them to the park. They didn’t allow dogs up on the roof, either.

  I put my sax together and started to get into one of my cool attitudes. I had about three real cool attitudes that I got into. One was on the way home from a spy movie. That’s when I pretended I was in England or Poland or any of those places where they have cobblestone streets. Then I did my cool spy thing.

  Another cool attitude was when I pretended that I was Clyde. Because—well, Clyde’s cool. I mean, he walked cool and he acted cool and even when he didn’t seem so cool, when you thought about it later, he was cool.

  The last cool attitude, and, maybe, the coolest, was when I play my sax on the roof. That’s really cool. I saw this picture on television once where this guy would go up on his roof and play this song on his guitar. Then he met this girl and they were in love for a while but then they broke up over something. Then one day he was drinking some whiskey and was on the roof thinking about jumping off, and all the while he was playing his guitar, real cool, and she came up and walked real close to him and started humming the same tune and they stared at each other a long time, being in love and whatnot, until the commercial came on.