!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  Didn’t I see your wife? she says. Such women who do know Allis’ name discard it. She becomes Your Wife, as if somehow nameless. Such women, if they have occasion to call and Allis answers, dispense with the costless little courtesies, brusquely ask for me, hoping to wound my woman. And, for a time, they did. Now she says, This is Mrs. Cato Douglass and may I know who is calling him or take the message?

  If the answer is no, her response is, Fuck you, Selena (or whoever it may be); I suggest you write a letter. Bango!

  Selena is now all concern, turning her head this way and that, as if genuinely looking for Allis. Her concern is fleeting.

  I have to go, she says, but let’s do have lunch or a drink, please Cato. It’s been far too long. Poor, poor Paul. To Mark as she is already moving away, Hello, Mark. Good to see you. She leaves, smiling regally as she threads through the crowd. Mark and I watch.

  Did she have a thing with Paul? I ask.

  Around the time he won the National Book Award, he says.

  We have stepped into a small alcove, out of the crush of people. We are both thinking, I imagine, of that time when we began to question the things Paul had told us.

  14

  That had been on the trip, halfway through the American leg, actually, in San Francisco.

  We had crossed the George Washington Bridge and somewhat nervously entered America. We sat in the VW bus according to our status: Mark, the director and overall location boss in the jump seat. The driver was Ted, a huge guy who would help with the equipment. I sat behind with the cameraman, Dolph, the soundman, Vernon. Like Ted, Vernon was also big, and he was black. Dolph still spoke with a German accent. I was sure that the producer, back at 10 Columbus Circle, and Mark had selected Ted and Vernon as much for their size as for their skills.

  I had been right about the script; changes had been made or suggested, and some froth had replaced substance.

  At our meetings before departure, we had agreed by implication that we were not like those inhabitants west of the Hudson River. We were New Yorkers—several obvious cuts above your average American. We in the Apple told other Americans how they were, recording, or causing to be recorded, the events of their lives that might be of interest to others.

  We had not yet burned churches or bombed the homes of ministers; we had not had to call in the U.S. Army or U.S. marshals to secure the peaceful entrance into school or college for one or two Negro youngsters. Our people spoke out against such atrocities; our people went out from New York to march or bus themselves through hostile territories. Our leaders constantly addressed themselves to the racial inequities distant from New York. Our unions were integrated—why this very team was integrated. (See?) Martin Luther King, Jr., came to our town to relax. The national headquarters of the NAACP, the Urban League, CORE and half a hundred other organizations were in New York. New York supported the Movement. Starting with the activities of one John Kasper, the New York media covered the racial war, if not on the first page or segment, then soon after it. They increased their staffs in the South and hired intrepid stringers. And New Yorkers would be filing into the Village Vanguard to pay Le Roi Jones to excoriate them for being white.

  Etc., etc., etc.

  But the city was our warren, our burrow.

  And now—somewhat nervous? Shit, we were afraid. Out there they bloodied and crippled those who recorded their riotous actions; out there they made cameramen eat their Arriflexes and Bolexes; out there they took the Uher tape recorders and sound blimps and beat the sound men with them. It seemed to us that some parts of the nation were littered with rolls of exposed film and sound tape, ripped cue cards, shattered camera lenses and tripods and hastily abandoned spiral notebooks and broken-headed correspondents.

  Cautiously we worked our way through the cities and towns of Middle America—Newark, Paterson, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Boise, Seattle, Portland. In each there was the scramble to make contact with the local civil rights leader and his counterpart on the other side; in each the days were filled with unloading and hooking up the equipment, making last-minute script changes, writing up the cue cards; in each Mark paced while snapping at Dolph to hurry or to “do this one quick and dirty, baby,” but Dolph, always elegantly casual in dress and manner, was taking his time, checking the blimp with Vernon, fixing a focus, framing the background against which I would stand, running off at the mouth, while I tried to look as if I knew what I was talking about. Strangers, drawn like iron fragments to the magnet of film, of television, put on suits, shirts and ties, best dresses, and best performances, to sit or stand with me before Dolph’s camera.

  Negroes, scattered like a broken string of beads in the mountain states, voiced precisely the sentiments of those to the east who were huddled into their assigned enclosures.

  Whites were uneasy, but agreed that what was right, was right, though they were not always sure that the method for achieving it was the correct one at this time. On the whole, America then, on that leg of our trip, was an amiable enough place. But there was an endless void between the white people I talked to and history. This was all right with Mark, was what he wanted, the surface of things—slick, but sounding solid, appearing like the real thing.

  Dolph and I, I came to learn, worked for something else: the nuances, the uncertainties, the sprays, like spittle, of anger, bigotry and unconcern. His close-ups (I was to see later, back in New York, when the dailies were run for us) revealed shallowness, false anger, plain bullshit on the faces of some of the people I was interviewing. Dolph had a way of curling his lip at many of Mark’s directions, like a small boy who, face averted, silently snorts at advice. Mark did not know what Dolph knew, nor did I until later. Dolph was remembering a Germany of shattered glass and night visitors, of populations that later claimed not to know what went on in those camps outside their towns; of train searches to snare those slipping back into the country after fighting with the Thälmann Brigade of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Dolph had been one of those survivors. He went to France and, trapped there during the debacle and fall of the country in the summer of 1940, he joined the French Foreign Legion. Dolph never went further than that. He viewed our work as something he had seen before, unfolding before, but this time, perhaps, he could do something about it.

  We shipped the Northwestern dailies to New York from Portland and took the Pacific Coast Highway down. We wanted to give ourselves a chance to rest, to think and mold the script to fit new angles. We’d do San Francisco and Los Angeles, then head southwest and, of course, south—with a set of California plates instead of the New York ones.

  By the time we’d reached Eureka we’d rid ourselves of the little angers and exhaustions that had been compounding along the way. As we curled through the redwoods, I suggested that we look up Paul’s father, Joe Cummings, at the headquarters of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union headquarters; the second in command to Harry Bridges would not be hard to find. And a man close to Bridges who had outlasted Martin Dies, Edward Holt, John Wood, J. Parnell Thomas, Harold Velde, Francis Walters, Edwin Willis and their committees, along with J. Edgar Hoover, surely would have something to add to our story. (The Black Panthers hadn’t come along yet and Berkeley students did not yet know what they were discontented about.)

  Mark thought Paul’s father would make a great insert.

  Driving in the shadows of the great trees, I said, “The co-ops seems to have been a very special place, Mark. Paul says it was what made him.”

  “It was a special place then,” Mark said. He seemed to be looking at something on my nose. “But I don’t think Paul ever lived there.”

  I laughed. “Sure he did.”

  Mark shrugged. “We’re the same age. Maybe I’m a couple of years younger than Paul, but I knew everybody five, ten years older than I was, and maybe five years younger. Man, I would’ve known Paul; everybody knew everybody else, or heard of ever
ybody else, and I’m telling you, Paul Cummings did not live there.”

  “How come you never said that when you talked about the place with him; you remember those times when we met in the Village and got drunk, when you worked at that Gash magazine—”

  “Shit, he said he lived there, which meant that he wanted to have lived there, and it was a special place, so if he wanted to say he lived there, okay by me. I didn’t give a fuck.”

  Weakly, wondering, I said, “He wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t lived there.”

  But Mark was bending to his clipboard, checking schedules and expenses.

  “Joe who?”

  “Cummings, Cummings,” I said. He was the seventh person I’d asked. I was beginning to wonder if the union people were all dummies. But something nagged at me. Something didn’t feel right.

  “Joe Cummings works with Harry Bridges, the president. He’s Bridges’ right-hand man.”

  “No, Joe Cummings, no. Look, buddy, there ain’t no such animal. No Joe Cummings ever worked with Harry, and I been with Harry since he stepped off the boat from Australia—”

  “He’s got a son, Paul—”

  “No. Listen, I’m busiern a bedsheet in a whorehouse. Television, ya said? Is there anything I can do for ya? No, well, ya better run along then, bud. Somebody sent you for a left-handed monkey wrench.”

  I walked out of his office and through the hall, thinking of Wobblies, radicalism and Joe Cummings, all shrinking fast into the perspective point of my mind. How could the Third Vice-President (for that’s what the desk plate had read) not know Joe Cummings?

  Where was Joe Cummings?

  He existed, of that I was almost sure, until, walking back to the hotel, I recalled my conversation with Mark about Paul and the co-ops. One. Two. Then I was not so sure, which led me to ponder two obvious questions:

  One. If Paul had not lived in the co-ops, why had he said so?

  Two. If Paul’s father was not Harry Bridges’ right-hand man, why had he said so?

  Before telling Mark, I called every J, Joe and Joseph Cummings in the phone book. Compared to the inches and inches of Browns, Joneses and Williamses in the directory, this was a snap.

  “Hello, Joseph Cummings, Joe Cummings, with Harry Bridges and the IL and WU?

  “Joe? Joe Cummings of the IL and WU?

  “Your son, Paul, Mr. Cummings—

  “Hello?

  “Hello.”

  I called Paul. His telephone had been disconnected. And then I called Allis.

  I would be calling her often, it turned out, but this time I wanted her to go by Paul’s apartment and get the information on his father and call me back.

  Paul had moved. There was no forwarding address.

  “Fuck ’im,” Mark said. “We’ll go without it. You know something about this place, don’t you?”

  (I did remember, in a disjointed way, something about the Fillmore District. I’d been mad about a chorus girl who worked in a two-line chorus when I was at Shoemaker, waiting to be shipped over with the outfit. Catherine was back there, in the East, and I was on the edge of the vast Pacific, immersed in its nightly foggy sweatings over the Bay Area. The chorus girl and I slid back and forth on the A train, making love in every shadow along the streets; we had every drink conceived of by every misanthropic bartender: sky-blue P-38s, B-17s that were bomb-blast red and 50 Calibers that were gold and shot through with cherries.)

  I said, “Why don’t we tie Northern and Southern California together?”

  Mark was going over the California segment of the script. I knew that he was uneasy about the history of bigotry against the Chinese, the Spanish-Americans and the Japanese-Americans; he didn’t have to tell me that he wanted to have as little as possible to do with Tule Lake and Owens Valley, though he certainly saw the relationship between the way those people had been and often were still being treated, and what had happened and was still happening to Negroes.

  Dolph sat a little distance away, checking the charge on a battery, I thought, and occasionally he’d look at me, his eyes blank, as if waiting for something to impinge upon them. I could hear Ted and Vernon talking down the hall.

  I knew what was going on. Mark had invited me to play the game. He needed me and surmised that he could control me. Now I was playing too rough, linking truths that he knew very well, was in fact to some extent closer to them than I. He was puzzling over my inability to dance on that tightrope strung between truth and entertainment—albeit high-class, educational entertainment.

  He said, “Well, okay, Cate, but I really don’t think we ought to back too far into history. The Chinese railroad workers and the Japanese camps—you know, we ought to keep hammering, hammering, on the Negro thing.”

  Dolph cleared his throat, got up and left the room. Even as we were looking at the door through which he left, he returned and, leaning in, said directly to Mark, “The first person to die in a gas chamber was a Chinese man named Gee Jon. Denver Dickinson was the presiding official. In Carson City, Nevada, nineteen twenty-four.” Then he was gone.

  For 119 years the Legion (composed of only two regiments) was where men went to forget their pasts. The old romance clung as Ted wheeled us down the highway past wind-seared cypress trees, endless vistas of the sun-struck Pacific and through dozens of towns. There was something missing from Dolph’s story. Vernon had replaced Ted at the wheel and Ted was now sleeping and dusk was coming on.

  “You’re Jewish,” I said.

  Dolph smiled his little smile. “Yes,” he said. “I am a Chew. And I was a Thälmann.” He shrugged. “They really wanted my head. Lousy Cherms.” He closed his eyes. I wondered why Mark had not taken him down to Hollywood to hang out with the movie types. And then, close to dozing myself, I understood that Dolph would have his own bunch and that it would have nothing to do with Mark’s. That made me feel better, for some reason, and I went to sleep.

  Los Angeles then was raw and huge and still growing; its grids of streets formed at the base of mountains north, south and east of it and ran, often, as on rhumb lines, westward straight to the sea. Many corners were sprinkled with black men and women waiting for buses that were always late, crowded and still far from their homes. They had that look on their faces. There is a look that clamps on the faces of black people which is sometimes incompletely described as sullen; it is that and more. The expression is like the one on the face of the La Venta-Tabasco head—imperious, wrathful, calculating and filled with cold suspicion of past, present and future.

  In Los Angeles, if you have to ride the buses, you are nowhere else but at rock bottom; and these people, strung out from Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Encino and Sherman Oaks, San Marino and San Gabriel, were still struggling to acquire that first used car, the one they probably would see on the weekend commercials when the clunker was king, the clunker that could take them from Watts to a job and back without falling apart.

  We shot on Central Avenue, at the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, where, with costly lighting, Dolph panned slowly over the murals done by Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff—The Contribution of the Negro to the Growth of California—which had everything, everybody, in them. Black executives and film people fell under Dolph’s relentless camera, and soon we were all edgy; the real meat of the trip was coming up: Southwest, across the South and back to New York.

  Mark seemed unusually pensive after his nightly call to the producer. “I don’t understand why I feel this way,” he said, when he had assembled us in his room the night before we left. “I mean, we live here in this country, right? We’re Americans, right? Then, why do I feel this way—scared shitless.”

  Vernon laughed.

  “Rick said to be very, very careful,” Mark said, after glancing at Vernon. “If it looks sticky, Dolph, one take; if it looks very sticky—”

  “—no take,” Dolph finished.

  “Right.” He sighed. “Ted, you and Vernon, well, Rick says you guys, when it gets rough, get between the
m and the camera. We can always stick in some voice-over.”

  “Yeah,” Ted said.

  Vernon said nothing. Mark looked at him again. “Vernon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The Nagra’s dispensable, if it ever comes to that.”

  “I know it.”

  “What?” Mark said.

  “I said, I know it’s dispensable and, as far as that goes, so is the camera, Mark.”

  “Depends on the situation. You wanna say something, Cate?”

  “No.”

  “Got the route down, Ted?”

  “Bakersfield to Barstow and Route Sixty-six to Albuquerque, first stop.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Mark said softly. “I’m really worried.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” Dolph said. He inclined his head in Vernon’s direction and then mine. “They do.”

  Mark was thinking of the black and white Freedom Riders, I knew, who had been beaten indiscriminately earlier in the year; he was thinking of the old guilt by association.

  “What,” I said, “me worry?”

  We broke up. I was in my room packing when there came a soft knock on my door. I opened it to Vernon, who slipped in fast, carrying a brown bag. “You nervous?” he said with a grin.

  “Mark made me nervous. Shit, I was all right before.”

  “Aw,” he said, “ain’t nothin’ to it, but just in case there is, here. That’s eighty bucks.”

  He handed me a brand-new leather holster in which rested a .32 revolver; he dipped into the bag again and came up with a box of shells. He grinned again. “Just in case.”

  Reaching for my wallet I asked, “Where did you—”

  Vernon waved away the question. “This is Los Angeles, man, a wide-open country town where you can get anything you need, anything.”

  “What’d you get?”

  “A Derringer for my sock and a thirty-two.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Look, man,” Vernon said, pocketing the money. “I got all I can do to look out for number one, dig? But as long as I was buyin’, I figured I could just as well see you down, too, know what I mean?”