I couldn’t do it. I pressed myself against the building across the street. Hey, Grady, remember me? I wish I could get to know you again, have lunch, tapas or sushi, and then take a couple weeks before I tell you Glorette got killed by somebody in an alley, and she still only loved a guy who left her.
I watched him for ten minutes. He washed the tile, wiped down the door, and polished the gold handle with a different rag. Then he stepped back and turned to look at something above my head.
I didn’t move. His eyes crossed over me but didn’t pause. He went inside, and he never came back out.
Other people stepped in now that the door was open. Two actors from The OC. Three young women wearing heels and carrying briefcases. A guy in a suit.
I crossed the street and went inside. This was not a dive. It looked like Liberace had decorated, with chandeliers and black pillars and even little lamps with gopher shades in gold. I squinted. The jukebox played Al Green. My eyes hurt from saltwater and darkness, and I didn’t see Grady Jackson.
The bartender leaned forward and said, “You okay?” He had a two-tone bowling shirt on, and a porkpie and sideburns.
“Does Hattie Jackson work here?” I said. The bar was cool under my fingers.
“Who?”
“She’s about forty. She was a bartender here.”
A young woman—Paris Hilton–blond but with cool black roots, and a satin camisole—came up behind the bar and squinted. “She means Gloria, I’ll bet.”
Gloria was in an alcove to the side. It was like a little liquor store, and she was arranging bottles of Grey Goose and Ketel One. Her nails were red. But her lips were thin and brown. She looked old.
“Hattie?”
“Gloria Jones,” she said to me. I leaned against the wall. My hips hurt, somehow. She knew me. She said, “When I came here, you had Pam Grier and Coffy and all them. My mama named me Hattie after the one in Gone with the Wind. Who the hell want to be a maid? I changed my name long time ago. After you was here with my fool-ass brother.”
“Was that him? Outside?”
She nodded. “Comes to clean, and then he walks again. He got five, six routes a day. You know. He goes all the way along the river till Frogtown. Comes back later.” She pushed the bottles around. “I don’t get much tips over here. People don’t buy this shit till they ready to go to a private party.”
“You’ve been here all this time.”
She shrugged. “Seem like not much longer.” She wore a wig. The hairs were perfect. “After my senior year. I was fine as wine, but even the hookers in LA was something else. Hollywood was crazy. I came downtown to get me an apartment and wait for the right movie. Did the dancing place for a month.”
“The dancing place?”
“Over on Olympic. The men dance with you for ten dollars and they gotta buy you them expensive drinks. But they smelled. Lord, they all smelled different, and some of them, the heat comin off their underarms and neck and you could smell it comin up from their pants. Even if they had cologne, just made it worse. I couldn’t do it. I came here, and I was behind the counter forever serving drinks. The guys would tip me good, all the old drunks, and I went to the movies every night after work. Now the theaters are all Spanish. I just get me a video after work. And I sleep till I come in. I live next door.”
I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were brown and muddy, as if washed in tea. “They were filming your building today.”
She shrugged. “Always doin somethin. Now that Downtown is cool again. Grady can’t even get his food in the alley now. Miss Thang at the bar like a hawk.”
“He comes back for dinner?”
Gloria looked around and nodded. “I used to take my plate out there early, before we got started. Take me two enchiladas and rice. Hold a extra plate under there and gave him half. Used to have Mexican food in here. Not now.” She glanced out over her counter. “Now the little old actors be out in the alley. Think they big time.”
I walked away from her alcove, past the bar, the bowling-shirt watching me with a puzzled look—What is she? Brazilian?—and out to the alley. It must have been just a place to dump trash before—but now huge couches covered with velvet and pillows lay at each end, and the OC boys were already collapsed on one, with two girls. It was cool to be in a dive, in an alley, drinking Grey Goose martinis.
“Where does he eat now?” I whispered to Hattie, to Gloria, as she marked off bottles on a list.
“In the other alley. Next door,” she said softly. “At six. Every night, I take me a smoke break out there. And I take my purse.”
I waited for Grady there. I ignored the other homeless men, the drunks from down the street who stumbled past the Golden Gopher, the snide comments of one girl wearing a slinky dress who said, “Uh, the library is on 5th, okay?”
I saw him turn the corner and lope slowly toward me, steady, knees bending, arms moving easily at his sides. He stopped about ten feet from me and said, “Fantine?”
I nodded.
He said, “I been waiting for you. All this time.”
His hands were rimmed with black, like my father’s when he’d been picking oranges all night. His eyes were tiny, somehow, like sunflower seeds in the deep wrinkles around them. All that sun. All those miles.
“You told me you was gon come to LA. And you left for college. I married Glorette. I married her.” His four top teeth were gone, like an open gate to his mouth. “Didn’t nobody know. We went to the courthouse. Me and her.”
I said, “Grady, I came to tell you—”
“I knew you was somewhere in LA. Me and Glorette went to the courthouse after Sere Dakar was gone. He played the flute. But he wasn’t African. I seen his driver license one time. Name Marquis Parker. He was from Chicago. Call hisself Chi-town sometimes. Told me he was goin to LA and play in a band. Glorette was havin a baby.”
“He’d be seventeen now,” I said. “Her son.”
But Grady stepped closer, the ripe sweet smell of urine and liquor and onions rising from his coat. “No. My son. I was gon raise him. Dakar was gon leave every time. So I got him in my truck.”
I tried to remember. Grady had an old Pinto back then. “You didn’t have a truck.”
He trembled, and breathed hard through his mouth. “Fantine. All this time I waited to tell you. Cause I know you won’t tell nobody. You never told nobody about the car. About Pomona.”
I shook my head. My brothers would have beat his ass.
“I waited till Dakar came out that one bar where he played. I told him I had some clothes to sell. Then I busted him in the head and put him in the trash truck. It was almost morning. I took the truck up the hill. To the dump.”
“Grady,” Hattie said from behind me, “shut up.” She dipped a hand in her purse and brought out a foil-wrapped package. “Eat your dinner and shut up. You ain’t done nothin like that.”
“I did.”
“You a lie. You never said nothin to me.”
“Fantine—you was at the barn that night.” He held up his hand, as if to stop me, but he was showing me his finger. “Chicago had a knife. When I got to the dump and went to the back of the truck, he raised up and took a piece of me with him. But I had me a tire iron.”
I looked up at the slice of sky between buildings. Missippi and Cleveland and Louisiana and Chicago—all in California. Men and fathers and fools.
Grady tucked the package against him then, like it was a football. “I was waitin on Fantine. She can tell Glorette he didn’t leave. I disappeared his ass, and then I married her. But she left anyway. She still loved him. I don’t love her now. I’m done.” He brought the package to his lips and breathed in.
“You left him there?” I said. Sere Dakar—his real name something else. A laughing, thin musician with a big natural and green eyes. “At the dump?”
Grady threw his head up to the black sky and dim streetlamps. His throat was scaly with dirt. “The truck was full. I drove it up there and hit the button. Raised it up
and dumped it in the landfill. Every morning, the bulldozer covered the layers. Every morning. It was Tuesday.” He stepped toward me. “He had my finger in there with him. I felt it for a long time. Like when I was layin in the bed at night, with Glorette, my finger was still bleedin in Dakar’s hand.” His eyes were hard to see. “Tell her.”
“She’s dead, Grady. I came to tell you. Somebody killed her back in Rio Seco. In an alley. They don’t know who. I’m going to see her tomorrow morning. Pay my respects.” I pictured Glorette lying on a table, the men who would have to comb and coil her hair. Higher on her head than normal, because she couldn’t lie on her back with all that hair gathered in a bun.
We’d always slept with our hair in braids. My eyes filled with tears, until the streetlamps faded to smears and I let down my eyelids hard. The tears fell on the sidewalk. When I looked down, I saw the wet.
Hattie went back inside without speaking to me, and she closed the black door hard. And Grady started to walk away, that familiar dipping lope that I’d watched for hours and hours while just behind him, that night.
* * *
I had to call a cab to get home. I went to Rio Seco the next morning in my Corsica. I thought I would see Grady Jackson there, or at the funeral, but I didn’t.
My father said to me, “You goin to Brazil? That far?” He shook his head. “You never fall in love with none of them place. Not one, no.”
I smiled and kissed him on the cheek. I sat all that night in my apartment, listening to Al Green, hearing the traffic on Echo Park Avenue, watching out my window as the palm fronds moved in the wind.
No one ever saw Grady Jackson again. I asked Hattie the following week, and the week after that, and then a month later. She was angry with me, and told me not to come back to the Golden Gopher. “You didn’t have to tell him,” she hissed.
“But he would have known someday,” I said.
“You know what?” she said, her fingers hard as a man’s on my wrist. “I loved my brother. I never loved nobody else in the world, but every day I saw my brother. I can’t never go back home, but he came to me. And you done took that away. You don’t know a damn thing about me or him.”
The next time I went to the bar, she was gone too.
I knew him. I figured he just started walking one day and never went back to Skid Row. Maybe he walked to Venice and disappeared under the waves. Maybe he walked all the way to San Francisco, or maybe he had a heart attack or died of dehydration, still moving.
* * *
That night, when we were young, when Grady left the car in Pomona, we walked down Mission Boulevard, leaving behind the auto shops and tire places, moving past vacant lots and tiny motor courts where one narrow walk led past doors behind which we could hear muffled televisions. Junkyard dogs snarled and threw themselves against chain-link. And we moved easy and fast, me just behind Grady. Walking for miles, past strawberry fields where water ran like mercury in the furrows. Walking past a huge pepper tree with a hollow where an owl glided out, pumping wings once and then gone.
That night, we walked like we lived in the Serengeti, I realized all those years later when I watched Grady disappear down 8th into the darkness. Like pilgrims on the Roman roads of France. Like old men in England. Like Indians through rain forests, steady down the trail. Fools craving movement and no words and just the land, all the land, where we left our footprints, if nothing else.
THE BOOK SIGNING
BY PETE HAMILL
Park Slope, Brooklyn
(Originally published in Brooklyn Noir)
Carmody came up from the subway before dusk, and his eyeglasses fogged in the sudden cold. He lifted them off his nose, holding them while they cooled, and saw his own face smiling from a pale green leaflet taped to the wall. There he was, in a six-year-old photograph, and the words Reading and Book Signing and the date and place, and he paused for a moment, shivering in the hard wind. The subway was his idea. The publisher could have sent him to Brooklyn in a limousine, but he wanted to go to the old neighborhood the way he always did, long ago. He might, after all, never come this way again.
The subway stairs seemed steeper than he remembered and he felt twinges in his knees that he never felt in California. Sharp little needles of pain, like rumors of mortality. He didn’t feel these pains after tennis, or even after speed-walking along the Malibu roads. But the pain was there now, and was not eased by the weather. The wind was blowing fiercely from the harbor, which lay off in the darkness to his right, and he donned his glasses again and used both gloved hands to pull his brown fedora more securely to his brow. His watch told him that he had more than a half hour to get to the bookstore. Just as he had hoped. He’d have some time for a visit, but not too much time. He crossed the street with his back to the place where the bookstore awaited him, and passed along the avenue where he once was young.
His own aging face peered at him from the leaflets as he passed, some pasted on walls, others taped inside the windows of shops. In a way, he thought, they looked like Wanted posters. He felt a sudden . . . what was the word? Not fear. Certainly not panic. Unease. That was the word. An uneasiness in the stomach. A flexing and then relaxing of muscles, an unwilled release of liquids or acids, all those secret wordless messages that in California were cured by the beach and the surf or a quick hit of Maalox. He told himself to stop. This was no drama. It was just a trip through a few streets where he had once lived but had not seen for decades. After seventeen novels, this would be his first signing in the borough that had formed him. But the leaflets made clear that here, in this neighborhood, his appearance might be some kind of big deal. It might draw many people. And Carmody felt apprehensive, nervous, wormy with unease.
“How does it feel, going back to Brooklyn?” Charlie Rose had asked him the night before, in a small dark television studio on Park Avenue.
“I don’t know,” Carmody said, and chuckled. “I just hope they don’t throw books at me. Particularly my own books.”
And wanted to add: I’ve never really left. Or to be more exact: Those streets have never left me.
* * *
The buildings themselves were as Carmody remembered them. They were old-law tenements, with fire escapes on the façades, but they seemed oddly comforting to Carmody. This was not one of those New York neighborhoods desolated by time and arson and decay. On the coast of California, he had seen photographs of the enrubbled lots of Brownsville and East New York. There were no lots here in the old neighborhood. If anything, the buildings looked better now, with fresh paint and clear glass on the street-level doors instead of hammered tin painted gray. He knew from reading the New York Times that the neighborhood had been gentrified, that most of the old families had moved away, to be replaced by younger people who paid higher rents. There was some unhappiness to all of that, the paper said, but still, the place looked better. As a boy he had walked these streets many times on nights like this, when most people retreated swiftly from the bitter cold to the uncertain warmth of the flats. Nights of piled snow and stranded streetcars. Now he noticed lights coming on in many of those old apartments, and shadows moving like ghosts behind drawn shades and curtains. He peered down a street toward the harbor, noticed some stubborn scabs of old snow, black between parked cars, and in the distance saw a thin scarlet band where the sun was setting in New Jersey. On this high slope, the harbor wind turned old snow into iron. But the sliver of sun was the same too. The day was dying. It would soon be night.
If the buildings were the same, the shops along the avenue were all different. Fitzgerald’s bar was gone, where his father did most of his drinking, and so was Sussman’s Hardware and Fischetti’s Fruit and Vegetable and the Freedom Meats store and the pharmacy. What was the name of that drugstore? Right there. On that corner. An art supply store now. An art supply store! Moloff’s. The drugstore was called Moloff’s, and next door was a bakery. “Our Own” they called it. And now there was a computer store where a TV repair shop once stood. And a dry clean
er’s where men once stood at the bar of Rattigan’s, singing the old songs. All gone. Even the old clock factory had been converted into a condominium.
None of this surprised Carmody. He knew they’d all be gone. Nothing lasts. Marriages don’t last. Ball clubs don’t last. Why should shops last? Wasn’t that the point of each one of his seventeen books? The critics never saw that point, but he didn’t care. Those novels were not literature, even to Carmody. He would say in interviews that he wrote for readers, not for critics. And said to himself: I’m not Stendhal, or Hemingway, or Faulkner. He knew that from the beginning. Those novels were the work he did after turning forty, when he reached the age limit for screenwriting. He worked at the top of his talent, to be sure, and used his knowledge of movies to create plots that kept readers turning the pages. But he knew they were commercial products, novels about industries and how they worked, his characters woven from gossip and profiles in Fortune or Business Week. He had started with the automobile industry, and then moved to the television industry, and the sugar industry, and the weapons industry. In each of them the old was destroyed by the new, the old ruling families decayed and collapsed and newer, more ruthless men and women took their places. The new one was about the food industry, from the farms of California to the dinner plates of New York and Los Angeles. Like the others, it had no aspirations to be seen as art. That would be pretentious. But they were good examples of craft, as honest as well-made chairs. In each of them, he knew, research served as a substitute for imagination and art and memory. Three different researchers had filed memos on this last one, the new one, the novel he would sign here tonight, in the Barnes & Noble store five blocks behind him. He hoped nobody in the audience would ask why he had never once written about Brooklyn.
To be sure, he had never denied his origins. There was a profile in People magazine in 1984, when his novel about the gambling industry went to number one on the New York Times best seller list and stayed there for seventeen weeks. He was photographed on the terrace of the house in Malibu with the Pacific stretched out beyond him, and they used an old high school newspaper photograph showing him in pegged pants and a T-shirt, looking like an apprentice gangster or some variation on the persona of James Dean. The article mentioned his two ex-wives (there was now a third woman receiving his alimony checks), but the reporter was also from Brooklyn and was more intrigued by the Brooklyn mug who had become a best-selling author.
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