They listen, other visitors had told me, but only until they can talk; it’s important that they talk.
We all began to talk in that castle, the castle of our skins, of Wright, Huysmans, Ellison, Baldwin, Whittington, Hughes, Himes, Killens (they were not interested in the works by black women, though I told them they should be), but mostly we talked of the Man and his System, of those who’d “sold out,” and, the politeness long since gone, we argued; they postured and played on my guilt, and they, perceiving that, insinuated about my being free while they were in jail, and cited Thoreau’s statement to Emerson, and I, warming to the free-for-all, suggested that since they knew so much about the System, they should’ve tried harder to keep their asses out of its way.
Like I did? someone asked.
There were chuckles and banks of laughter. Yes, like I did.
Of course they had to resent me. I hadn’t thought about it before.
But a man had to stand up, had to, ’cause a man couldn’t take but so much.
I agreed, but wondered why it was that we could never stand together, even though a basic function of the System was to keep us from doing so.
Someone drawled, “Nigguhs can’t do nuthin’ together. We’re too individualistic. That’s how come the Seventy-Sixers can’t win no championship and keep it.”
Keeyaw, keeyaw, keeyaw.
For over two hours, while Miss Dobbs sat enraptured by the exchange and Purcell dozed and yawned, I served as the safety valve through which they rammed their bitterness, into which they fanged their venom. Yes, that’s what it was all about. Pissed on again. In this small, poorly lighted room, once a month, the System allowed the inmates to destroy it verbally, rip it to tatters, utterly to demolish it; the men became Joe Hills, Nat Turners, Bolivars, Sam Melvilles. Goddamn it! My function was to save Purcell’s ass, the warden’s, society’s. Drain off the anger; bottle it up in libraries, saltpeter it to death with a stream of literary types.
I was tired now. Yes, I agreed, the situation was rotten, but then it had always been. No, I didn’t know how a change could be effected without force, the judicious use of force. Why? Why not? Has the vote worked? Patience? Good will? World opinion? Prayers? Deals? I asked what had got them here.
Force.
How were they kept here?
Force.
How were they to get out?
In a box.
Parole.
Finish the sentence.
Breakout—force.
He hadn’t said anything before. There was always a guy like him, anywhere in the world, all laid back, listening, marking every nuance, sifting the shit from the sugar, who would speak up when the curtain’s about to ring down.
Purcell stirred in his chair; he was no longer yawning. Miss Dobbs’s eyes gleamed.
I took a deep breath. It was all but over.
He said, this man in the back, muscled arms folded over a massive chest, “How does it feel to be able to walk into a place like this and walk out whenever you want to?”
“Great.”
“Do you go to a lot of prisons?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I? Would you?”
Purcell was not the only one not yawning now; this scene had been played before, with other outside straight men.
“You’re as much a prisoner as we are,” the man said, his voice punching out of his body. “Aren’t you, turkey, aren’t you?”
“Yes, yes I am.”
“So that don’t make you much different from us, does it?” He looked around in triumph. “You can go home, sleep in a nice bed, eat good food, go out, travel, you and your wife—I read she’s white—”
I said, “Yeah. And she’s got kinda blond hair and kinda green eyes—was that some kind of point you were tryin’ to make? I thought it was that I was a prisoner, too.”
Miss Dobbs was flashing angry glances at the inmate. Others grumbled and cut their eyes at him.
“There’s a difference, though,” I said.
He was belligerent now; his remark had been considered foul. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“I didn’t have to go to jail to find out how much of a prisoner I was.”
Hoot! Hoot!
Keeyaw! Keeyaw!
The inmates laughed at their man and slapped palms all around.
Miss Dobbs saw that I’d had it, and got to her feet and thanked me. I shook hands with the inmates, including the laid-back one. “Jus’ jailhouse rap, bro,” he said.
Purcell was quiet as he led me out through the halls and past other guards. At the gate he said, “All you folks come in here tryin’ to find another Malcolm X.” He shook his head as he hauled open the door and the cold air swept in, clean and blade-sharp.
“I suppose,” I said. “Maybe we should stop trying?”
“Hey. That’s up to you, man, now ain’t it?”
Allis had beat me to the mail again. She gave me the green-bound galleys of The Pushkin Papers, slapped them into my hand as a baton is slapped in a relay race. I thumbed through them. Crane Duplicating, as usual. Who needed to read the book again? They were designed to make it easier for reviewers to read in advance of the actual book. For me this time out they seemed all gesture, like a coach whose team is behind 80–zip asking for one more for the Gipper.
“And,” Allis said, “this.” She placed the galleys of Jumper gently in my hand. They were bound in red.
“This I’ll read for the changes,” I said.
“But I wanna read it,” Mack said.
I hesitated. How could you not let one son know his brother?
“It won’t take long,” he said. “Maybe about a month?”
Allis was nodding. “You might get an advance copy or bound galley of Paul’s new book,” she said.
There were lots of notices that Paul had a big, Hemingwayesque war novel coming out at the same time Glenn’s and my novels would be out.
“Sure, okay,” I said to Mack. He read while he watched television, that entity that sought to submerge all things in swamp and from which, day after day, we fought to save our son. Or we could of course read Glenn when Mack was out playing, or visiting, or just staring at walls, too exhausted with electronic living, whether watched, played or listened to, to move.
“They’ll be home soon,” I said, handing him Glenn’s galleys.
“I know, I know, you already told me ten times,” he said, bending back to a map I’d laid out for him. They didn’t teach kids where things were anymore.
“Okay, fat mouth, I told you. But I’m telling you again!”
“Mom!” His voice echoed with indignation. “All I said was—”
“I know what you said and how you said it!”
Allis looked at me in that way she looked whenever Mack and I got into one of these stupid, idiotic, just-out-of-the-atmosphere things. For emphasis, I smashed an ash tray against the wall. I didn’t need this shit today. Allis turned away. Mack stared at me with a mixture of disbelief and fear, and my stomach started leaking out my ass. Oh, crap. What was happening here?
We were motionless until Mack, the first to recover, said, “Sorry. Who’s Al-ay-joe?”
“A relative,” I said and then hurried to my corner of the bedroom. We’d not yet told Mack about his older brother. His sense of right and wrong was stronger than most kids’, certainly far stronger than Glenn’s at that age. Mack was for everybody’s rights, black folks’, white folks’, cats’, dogs’ and sparrows’—even snakes’ now. He hated kids who cheated at whatever game they were playing. He would wonder how Alejo had managed, how I could have been so cruel as to leave him, too. That Alejo had not been born when I left, that I had not been able to find him at first, wouldn’t have mattered. In the fairy tales disguised as sitcoms everyone got found or married a prince or princess or at least resolved the problems at hand in only twenty-four minutes; he’d wonder how come I couldn’t have done the same in twenty years. The relentless impingement
of the world had not yet started to make an impact on his soul.
Yet, I thought, resting my head upon the cold metal of the typewriter, a man ought to be able to be some part of what his sons think he should be. Willie Loman believed that; believed it too much. You always had to keep something of yourself for yourself.
Mack, it wasn’t just one of those things; it just turned out to be, for a while.
Ice rattling in a glass. I looked up as Allis set the drink down beside the machine. She leaned on the back of my chair and sighed.
Glenn was now moving through that great valley. For all our talking, he couldn’t know and therefore our talks about book life always ended with me feeling the way I did at the end of some classes: I had not made them understand. In some twistingly subtle fashion he made me feel that I had not become a black Hemingway, say, because it was my own fault, the accumulation of my own blemishes, the root of which might have been my desertion of him.
¿Quien es mi padre?
Alejo no longer had to ask. He now knew. Yet what bitterness he must have felt all those years (I am still assuming), before Monica married into the security of political respectability. Nothing, they say, leaks that away like success, an abscess that has been drained clean.
“Thanks,” I said, picking up the drink. It was weak.
“You found him, I guess,” Allis said.
“Yep. I found the sucker.”
She slipped off her shoes. “And?”
“We talked. Over drinks. Lots of drinks—”
“I could smell them—”
“—in a cruddy old bar. He’s really drinking with another crowd now.”
“Bad, huh?”
“Hopeless. I told him about the sales conference and, man, did he laugh his ass off. He fell out on the floor.” I got up, put some muscle in my drink, surveyed the shattered clay I would have to clean up and came back. “Bad? It’s almost hopeless. His head’s together on his terms. Hopeless, if you mean he should be living like other people. And he’s sick. Looks like hell, and I think he wants to ride that all the way out to the end. Hell, why not?”
“Is he doing any writing at all?”
“Naw,” he had told me. “Thought about TV writing for a while. They asked me all the time and I said no. Naw, I won’t even do that, now. That’s lower than this.”
His hair was long, dirty, swept to one side of his gaunt, gray face. His clothes were spotted and stained and he would have smelled worse had it been warmer.
“I don’t believe you’d quit,” I told him. “You’re a chickenshit, lying honky.”
He’d laughed and asked for another drink and after he led me to his room and gave me a box of typescripts. The name on the very top page surprised me. “This says Ike Plunkett. He’s around here, too?”
“He was.” Roye Yearing searched through one of the drawers in the splintered dresser and came up with a half-pint of wine. He knocked it back and exhaled deeply, coughed until phlegm the color of three-day-old death leaked out on his lips. He licked it down. “I heard he got wasted, but they can’t find his body. He gave me this stuff to hold for him last summer when he was doing doorways and had no place to stash it. Poor guy. Hey, if you just happen to sell any of that stuff, my stuff, bring down a case of bourbon, willya? Or even if you sell some of Ike’s stuff. He ain’t drinkin’ no more.”
“Nobody wins any battles,” Allis said, “let alone the wars. Maybe Mack.”
“What?”
“He started taking Oreos to school again.”
He’d stopped taking them because the kids called him Oreo. The meaning of the name had changed since the sixties. Now he could handle their laughter, their taunts. Mack was moving around and around ancient genetic fields. I’d explain it all to him later, when the laughter was a distant memory.
I came away from encounters like the one with Roye with the feeling that danger had passed close by me. Close, man. They used to say that a miss was as good as a mile, but they were using different shit these days; it was radioactive. If a direct hit didn’t get you, radiation would, and God, I didn’t want what was radiating around this town to get me.
11
As the last of the stiff March winds crashed and banged through the city, Glenn and Maija arrived home. They were aghast and disgusted by the dirt, the forever crescendoing noises. Allis and I smiled. It was always so: the place one left was superior for a time to the place arrived at.
They were filled with the cadences and airs of Europe—the frequent Spanish or French and sometimes Arabic or African phrase or word, the simulated belch of the North Europeans that served as punctuation, the feigned exuberance of South Europeans. For moments at a time they were insufferably arrogant with those who had been to the continent only on business or vacation, but not to live.
We smiled again.
Hours passed in our apartment or Maija’s loft, to which Glenn had moved, talking about the old countries, ships’ crews, Arabs, Africans, Europeans. We talked of the “kids,” Alejo and Dolores, and how they seemed to be living their lives to the full, the crowds they drew wherever they went. We could not get over how much they’d done while still so young. We talked of restaurants, of legends and how they were catching up with us, the redemocratization of Spain almost fifty years since the last taste, and the rise of new class and regional antipathies. Blissfully, there was only passing mention of Iris Joplin and her niece who had studied with me, but with it a look in Allis’ eyes, half-smile, half-something else, of scores settled, evened, something so perfectly conveyed that for the rest of that evening my interest, my attention, were forced to peek over the questions when? who? I didn’t have to ask why, and I didn’t need to know where.
Alejo had read my books there in both the English and the Spanish, the latter, Glenn conveyed to me, being extremely poor translations. Nuance had been missing or not understood, Maija said. For a while there Clarissa had been almost as popular as La Choza de Tio Tomás. “I think about a month, Alejo said,” Glenn said, and we exploded with laughter, but I was looking at Allis and her eyes were calm with her yes, and we finished the evening with me barely on this side of sullen.
“Something the matter?” Allis said later at home when we were in bed and had just turned out the lights.
“Yes,” I said.
“What?”
“You know.”
“I don’t. What?”
“Forget it,” I said.
“All right. It’ll pass.” There seemed to be a smile in her voice.
She took my hand and placed it on her hip, where she liked to feel it, and within minutes was snoring softly.
It took several hours before I slept, consoling myself with the thought that Alejo would be in New York this summer.
My ten free copies of The Pushkin Papers arrived the next week. I went through a copy, noticing that the paper was cheap and would not last a year without yellowing or becoming brittle, and that the cover was paper, instead of cloth, over board and that the board was as tough as a wet sponge. The type, I had seen earlier in the galleys, was an ordinary Roman—nothing cute like Bodoni or Electra or Janson or Caledonia—and the jacket paper had the sheen of the high beams of a car bouncing off dense fog.
The package did not indicate great love for me. But it was coming out. It would be like scoring a touchdown in that 80–zip game to make the score 80–6, with seconds left in the last quarter.
Glenn’s copies of Jumper came soon after, and his publisher, somehow, had managed to make them more cheap-looking than mine. I said nothing, watched my son elaborately signing a copy for us with multitudinous thanks for help, comfort, strength, etc., etc. I felt very good about him. Then, as our pub date drew closer, he became like one who, under the stress of impending combat, forgets all the rules of survival. He’d made himself unavailable for assignments from Office Temporaries, to which he had returned. He fretted in our apartment or squatted behind Maija in the loft while she painted. A Kirlian photo, I was sure, would hav
e revealed an extensive aura filled with unimaginable colors.
We got, as did Paul, the evenhanded good advance blurbs in Publishers Weekly. Paul’s book also had a big ad, and the publicity about his new novel was coming like waves in a cycle, each one higher, each promising that this one would be the most masterful novel of the decade. It was called Man on the Point. His war novel. The only war novel written by a black ex-soldier that I could remember was And Then We Heard the Thunder, by John Killens, and there was Last of the Conquerors by Bill Smith, who did his dying in Paris. That book, however, was about occupation, not combat.
I thought more frequently about returning to my classes in the fall as I moved on toward the completion of Graves. Spring drifted in on soft, warming winds, but this time it barely stirred within me the sense of awakening from the winter cold for yet another season.
Maureen Gullian called, and in a hearty voice suggested mounting a book party for the publication of The Pushkin Papers. I had always been opposed to such functions on the part of my publisher, feeling that the money could be better spent on promotion. That TCFP would not be advertising was a foregone conclusion—quite well supported by word from Maxine. In any case, the cost for a page of advertising in any of the tabloid-sized book review sections was fast becoming equal to the purchase of a one-minute spot on prime-time television. (A fact some paperback book publishers were already putting to good use by advertising on the tube.) Jock Champion, Gullian said, was insisting. The party wouldn’t be a bad thing and perhaps might help me in what I had to know was a sticky wicket. Gullian was adamant. Jock was adamant. There would be a book party. Where would I like to have it?
“The Plaza.”
“No,” she said. “Really.”
It was upstairs at Sardi’s and it drew the second- or third-rank reviewers the folk who might write a review, but mostly would not. The top shell didn’t show, but then they never had, so I was not as unhappy as Jock pretended to be. If he’d wanted them there, they would have been there.
The free-loaders seemed to be younger these days. The older ones had learned to save themselves for the big bashes.
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