I had played about two or three notes—the reed wasn’t even real wet yet—when I heard somebody call my name. I must have jumped near a foot. I was scared almost to death. Like I said, I’m kind of scary anyway. I had goose pimples all over. Then I heard the voice again, coming from the darkness, only this time I knew it was Kitty.
“Kitty?”
“Yes.”
I went over to her on my crutches. She was sitting on an old milk box that someone had fastened a cushion to so they could use it as a chair. She had Clyde’s school jacket around her shoulders.
“Everybody’s looking for you,” I said. “Clyde was even searching around 118th Street.”
“Could you call him for me?”
“Clyde?”
“Yes.”
There wasn’t much light on the roof. But from the light there was, which came from a bulb over the roof door, and the moon which was just shining through the clouds, I could see most of Kitty’s face. She looked older. She still looked like a little girl, but like an old little girl. I went to the side of the roof where there was a narrow alleyway between the two buildings and called down for Clyde. I knew if he was home he’d hear me but if he wasn’t I’d have to go all the way downstairs. I called twice and finally BB answered. I told her to tell Clyde to come up. She said okay and I figured that she would guess that Kitty was on the roof, too.
Clyde came up and BB, Gloria, and Sam. Angel and Maria and Cap had went on home.
“C’mon, let’s go home.” Clyde put his arm around his sister. I knew then that something had went wrong and that Clyde knew what it was. Otherwise he would have asked Kitty what the matter was. But Sam asked, anyway.
“What’s the matter, Kitty?”
She didn’t really answer Sam but said that she didn’t want to go home again, ever. Clyde had his head down and they looked as if they had the same feeling.
“What’s going on, Clyde?” Gloria asked him. Clyde took a deep breath, started to say something, and then stopped.
He looked down for a while and then Sam sat next to him.
“Why don’t you play something, Stuff?” Sam said. At first I didn’t even understand him because I wasn’t expecting him to say that but then I did understand him. I looked at Gloria and she looked at me.
“Go ahead, Stuff,” she said, “play something.”
I couldn’t figure out why they wanted me to play something just then. Anyway I put the practice mute in the sax so it wouldn’t sound too loud and I started in playing the song everybody at school said that I played the best. It was a song that I liked called “Mood Indigo,” and it seemed to fill in the spaces caused by everyone not talking. I wondered if my mother could hear me playing. She loved to hear me play and I loved playing for her. I realized that I loved playing for my friends even more. It was the first time, really, that my friends meant more to me than my mother, and I thought that I would have to figure it all out later if I could. But right then I had to concentrate on the playing.
For some reason the music seemed to be more a part of me than it had ever been before. It was like pushing myself into the horn, what I felt and all, and having it come out still being me but being music at the same time.
I played the whole song, and then the roof was quiet again except for the noises that came from the apartments below. And they all blended together to make one noise that must be the unofficial city noise. I was wondering if I should play something else when Clyde started talking.
“Did you see my mother tonight?” he asked, to no one in particular. Gloria said no, that she hadn’t.
“Well, she went out with this guy she met on her job.” Clyde shrugged.
“What for?” Sam asked.
“’Cause she wanted to, that’s why!” Kitty was sniffling.
“Kitty feels bad because Mama went out with this guy. I don’t really want to talk about it.” Clyde was feeling bad, too. I didn’t know what was going on, but BB and Gloria seemed to know about it.
“It ain’t no big thing, Clyde,” Gloria said. “I know you might not dig it, but she’s not doing anything wrong. Is she?”
“Why she have to go out with him in the first place?” Kitty said.
“Is he mean or something?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go on home, Stuff,” Gloria said.
At first I didn’t answer but then Gloria said it again, about why didn’t I go on home. I didn’t want to go home, that’s why.
“Clyde, do I have to leave?” I asked.
“No, man,” he answered. “You know what’s happening, Stuff, is that my mom went on a date with this guy, see, and I just find it hard to take. And Kitty finds it hard to take, too. Right, baby?”
“I thought she loved Daddy.” Kitty half talked and half cried. “I don’t want this guy for a father.”
“He can’t be our father,” Clyde said. “He’ll have to be a stepfather. Or maybe a foster father.”
“How can Mommy do something like that? I mean, how can she?”
“Hey, Clyde, Kitty”—Sam knelt down in front of them—“it ain’t the world, man. You know, the guy could be okay, or maybe she won’t even go out with him again.”
“Hey, Sam, why don’t you shut up your mouth, man.” Clyde stood up and pushed Sam. That was the first time I had ever seen Clyde really mad at Sam.
“You don’t have to be pushing on me, Clyde,” Sam came back. “I don’t have to take that, you know. Even from you.”
“Well, why don’t you do something about it.” Clyde pushed Sam again. “You don’t know nothing about what’s going on so why don’t you shut up!”
“It ain’t the world, Clyde.” Gloria stepped in between Sam and Clyde. “I know what’s going on even if you think Sam doesn’t. My mother’s all alone and I’ve been thinking about what’s going to happen with us. And I’ve been thinking about it longer than you have. And even if Sam don’t feel the same thing you do, you don’t have any right hitting on him.”
“I have all the right I want to have!” Clyde said.
“Why?” BB asked. “Because you’re hurt now because things aren’t going too tough for you, right? But how about me? I wanted to join the club because things weren’t too tough for me, either. And now as soon as things look a little bad for you, all the things that were part of the club are just gone, right?”
Clyde looked around at all of us and then he looked at Kitty and sat back down and put his arm around her again.
“You see, I loved my father very much,” Kitty said, “and I feel very bad about my mother going out with some other guy. I don’t want another father and she don’t care about my father’s being dead and all, like me and Clyde do. That’s the whole problem. All she wants is to go out and have a good time and all. How do you think I feel—my father’s spirit could be walking around the house and trying to be at home and here she comes up to the house with another guy. If she loves my father, why she have to go out with that guy for?”
Nobody had anything to say. We just stood around for a while, and then Sam asked me if I thought the Los Angeles Lakers were going to win the Western Division title this year. I didn’t know. I hardly even knew who was on their team this year. We stood around for some more time, talking about this and that, when the door to the roof opened and it was Clyde’s mother.
“What are you people up to?” she said. Her voice always had a little laugh in it. A man came up with her.
“Nothing,” Kitty said.
“Is something wrong?” Mrs. Jones put her hand on Kitty’s shoulder and Kitty pushed it off.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Clyde said.
“How come you had to go out with him?” Kitty asked.
Everyone turned toward the man that was standing with Mrs. Jones. He was tall and wore glasses and looked a little bit like my father except that he was smoking and my father never smoked.
“I don’t think that I have to answer to my children about what I do,” Mrs. Jones said. Her voice was low b
ut still kind of shaky.
“And I don’t have to go and live with you any more, either!” Kitty began to cry again. As soon as she started Mrs. Jones started and Clyde put his arm around Kitty and they started downstairs. The guy that Mrs. Jones had went out with started to say something but she just walked away from him. So Clyde and Kitty and Mrs. Jones left, and me, Sam, BB, and Gloria were left on the roof with the guy.
“Can I say something?” he asked.
“Go ahead, talk is free,” said BB.
“Well, let me tell you something.” The guy leaned against the brick wall that separated our roof from the next. He was smoking a pipe and he took out a match and relit it. When I saw his face in the light from the match he didn’t look so bad. “Sometimes we get very close to another person. Oh, that person may be a friend, or a brother or a sister or even a husband or a wife. And if something happens, if that person that we’re real close to happens to die, then we’ve lost somebody, a friend who we love very much or a relative who we love very much but it doesn’t mean that we should die, too. Mrs. Jones’s children loved their father very much, I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to grow up and get married. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to stop living. Mr. Jones wouldn’t want to see his children unhappy after he’s gone. He wouldn’t want to see his wife unhappy, either. And sometimes it’s hard, you know, if you’ve lost someone that you really care for, that’s lived with you and shared your life with you, it’s hard to lose them. After they’re gone you feel bad because you’ve lost them, but after a while you feel bad because you’re all alone. And after a while you wonder which is worse, losing someone or being alone.”
“I’m alone.” My voice even scared me. But it was true. I loved my mother and Sharon and all, even my father, I guess, because he’s really not so bad as I always put on, but I wasn’t in love with anybody. Not the way they meant in love when they did it in the movies.
“Well, that’s because you’re young. And when you’re very young you have a lot of casual friends and you’re more interested in playing ball and running around having fun than anything else. When you get older you don’t have as many friends. The friends you do have are different. When you’re married you stick with your husband or with your wife. Like your parents do. But when one of them goes away or dies, then you’re all alone again. You’re all alone so you go to a movie with a friend. Is that really so bad?”
I didn’t think it was so bad but I decided not to say anything. I kind of knew that everyone there knew a little bit more than I did.
“Later, I got to split.” Sam said that he had to leave and he sort of be-bopped away. Then Gloria and BB left and just me and the guy were there. It kind of bothered me because I didn’t know if the others were mad at him or not, and I didn’t want to be the only one that was friends with him if everyone else was mad. So I gathered up my stuff and I told him that I had to leave.
The next day I saw Clyde and he asked me what the guy had said. The guy’s name was William, by the way. I kind of told him what little I knew. Clyde said that his mother had run a lot of things down to him and he understood them some.
“I got it with my head,” he said. “And that’s funny because in school I keep trying to get things with my head. I’ve got this with my head but I don’t really feel it. My moms ran it all down about how she was lonely and about how she wouldn’t do anything to put down my father and all, but I don’t feel it. Kitty’s still upset. So is Gloria.”
I asked him how come Gloria was upset. The guy wasn’t going out with her mother. But Clyde said that she thought her mother might go out with somebody because her father had split. And just knowing that it was a possibility made her feel closer to it than I did. I didn’t really understand that, either.
But I didn’t mind. I had found out that there was a lot of things that I didn’t understand. And even though it was better if I knew what was going on all the time and understood everything, I found out that if I didn’t know everything it was okay, too. I really felt close to Kitty, and I asked her, after a while, how she felt about it. I told her that I liked her, too. I wanted to tell her that I liked her a whole lot but I got ashamed. She told me that she was real mad at her mother for going out with that guy even though she didn’t feel that her mother was doing wrong or anything like that. I asked her why and she didn’t know. I kind of think it was because she felt her father might not be her father any more if her mother was going out with somebody else. Everybody seemed to feel one way but couldn’t go along with the way they felt because it didn’t seem right. Nobody felt that Clyde’s mother should go out with another man, but they knew it was really okay.
Anyway, I was falling in love with Kitty all over again. She told me that she liked me a lot, too. I was going to ask her to be my girl friend, but I was afraid she might say no and tell everybody so I didn’t ask her.
Mrs. Jones didn’t go on another date for a long time. It was over a year later. But when she did, it was Kitty that got upset again. Clyde took it real cool. He didn’t even mind when she went out with another guy, but Kitty went into a panic kind of thing. By the time Mrs. Jones had went out with another guy me and Kitty were real close. Everybody knew that we were going out together and everything, but even I couldn’t help her. She just got so upset. I really wished I understood, but I didn’t.
9
chalky
You ever see one of those old-time movies when a guy looks at something, then looks away, and then looks back at it real quick? They call that a double take. Well, I saw Sam do a triple take or at least a two-and-a-half take. There was this new guy that used to hang around the center a lot and talk about how bad he was. He used to say things like he was the best basketball player that we had ever seen and that he had had a tryout with the Chicago Bulls but then they found out that he was only fifteen and a half years old. We didn’t believe him but every time we had a game he said that he didn’t want to play because we really weren’t enough competition. Sam challenged him to a one-on-one game and he said okay and everybody thought we were really going to find out how good he was, but just as he was lacing up his sneakers he looks over at Sam and says, “Hey, man, what we playing for? I usually play for five a point.”
“What you mean, ‘five a point’?” Sam asked.
“You know, if you beat me by four points I owe you twenty dollars. And if I beat you by four points you owe me twenty dollars.”
“I don’t have any twenty dollars,” Sam said.
“I thought you wanted to play some ball, turkey,” Chalky said and took his sneakers off.
Sam sat back down again. Now, later, me and Clyde were talking with Angel and we figured that Chalky knew Sam didn’t have that kind of money to be betting five dollars a point. And we also said that we knew Sam was a good basketball player and if they had been betting a nickel a point Sam would have bet him and played. But five dollars a point was a lot of money! Angel said that maybe he really did almost make the Chicago Bulls. We still didn’t really believe it, but if a guy had the heart to bet five dollars a point he had to be pretty good. And he was just about a little taller than Sam, too. That night after dinner when I should have been doing my homework I daydreamed about Chalky and Sam in a one-on-one basketball match. At least it started with Chalky and Sam, but it ended with Chalky and me. I won, too. I have never, ever lost an imaginary basketball game. When I’m depressed I sometimes miss imaginary shots, though.
One day Clyde said that we should all go up to his house. So we did and we put some records on and sat around and talked about basketball and stuff. All of us were there, Clyde (naturally—it was his house), Sam, me, Chalky, Angel, and Light Billy. Light Billy had actually moved by this time but still used to come around the block sometimes. Then someone started talking about girls. Lately a lot of the guys were talking about girls a lot. This particular conversation got started when Light Billy asked Clyde how his sister Kitty was doing. Clyde said okay and that
she was downtown taking piano lessons. Then Chalky said that he was talking to a girl named Gloria yesterday, and he asked if anybody knew her. We said yes, we all knew Gloria, which was the truth. Then Chalky asked if any of us were going with her and everybody said no. The truth of the matter is, though, that Sam had taken her to the movies a couple of times. But they weren’t officially girl friend or boy friend, I guess. Although I don’t know what makes it official, anyway. Then Chalky did it. He asked Clyde if he could use his telephone. Clyde didn’t know at first because none of us ever asked Clyde if we could use his phone. That was because we never had a reason to call anybody hardly. Anyway, Clyde said he guessed he could as long as it wasn’t long distance. Then Chalky takes out this little piece of paper he had in his wallet and dials a number.
“It’s this chick I spoke to yesterday,” he said. “I got her telephone number.” He winked at us. Sam looked at me, and I looked at Clyde, and Light Billy kind of raised his eyebrows. Chalky put his finger to his lips to tell us to keep quiet and then he winked again. “Hello, Gloria? This is Chalky. Remember you spoke to me yesterday…. Right. Look, I happen to be in the neighborhood and I wondered if I could come up and talk to you about something for a few minutes…. Well, I’ll tell you when I get there…. Yeah. In about ten minutes…. Okay. Later, sweet-heart.”
Then he hung up. Everybody wanted to know what he wanted to talk to Gloria about but nobody wanted to ask. But Chalky told us anyway.
“I’m going to go up there and see if I can get some,” he said, and then he went through his wallet until he found a little red and white thing. He held it up so we could see it, put it back in his wallet, and left.
Now, when he held it up was when Sam did this triple take. Then he looked at me and Clyde and then he looked away. Afterwards, after Chalky had left, we just sat around talking about basketball again but Sam didn’t say much. After a while everybody left except me and Sam and Clyde and we were hardly saying anything. I knew what was on everybody’s mind, though. It was Chalky going up to Gloria’s house. Well, it was more than that. He was talking about “getting some” from Gloria, and I knew he meant sex.
Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff Page 8