It’s not that men don’t want to talk—we just like to choose our time. Lynda Jewell wasn’t a story I was eager to tell.
The banquet hall of Culver City’s Radisson Hotel was decorated in a carnival theme, filled with helium balloons in Tau crimson and white. Instead of the usual chicken breast banquet, they had food stands serving hot dogs, wings, and fresh popcorn. There were also poker tables, roulette wheels, and six celebrity photo booths. The last booth, awaiting the still-absent T.D. Jackson, charged one hundred dollars. Already, a dozen people waited in line.
I was in the second booth, with a twenty-dollar price, right next to dead cheapest, a guy with gold teeth who’d been a Hype man for Shareef back in the day. Since my episodes of Homeland hadn’t even aired yet—and would it have mattered?—most people passed me without bothering to hide a sour pucker that said Who the hell are you?
Higher up the celebrity food chain at fifty bucks apiece were that light-skinned brother from A Different World, a sister from the UCLA women’s basketball team, a Playboy Playmate wearing only a bikini, a Famous Hip-Hop Artist with three initials for a name (D.O.A., maybe? Chela would have known him), and Billy Dee Williams, who was still making young ladies swoon in his seventies.
Billy Dee was Troy back before there was a Troy. If I’d been in the mood for inspiration, I would have found it in Billy Dee. Instead, all I could think about was how unfair it was that Billy Dee was grinning and posing as if time had stood still for him alone, and back at home Dad needed help getting out of bed. A bad mood colors everything.
“Ooh, look at this luscious Hershey’s Kiss over here,” one huge woman said, eyeing me as if I were on a Mississippi auction block. “Honey, you should be charging more than twenty dollars to take a picture with you. Aren’t you that phone guy?”
She grabbed my forearm with meaty fingers, so proprietary that my flesh crawled. My memories of Lynda Jewell were too fresh to tolerate a new woman’s pawing. Gently, I slipped my arm away. She tried to hold on, but a final yank got me free. Her eyebrow arch told me, That’s okay, baby, I like ’em feisty. I think I actually shivered.
The woman lumbered beside me into the booth.
“Stand up, baby,” she said, holding up her red ticket. “Come to Mama.”
She was my first taker in fifteen minutes, so I tried to look happy for the photographer. As the woman cinched her arm tightly around my waist, enfolding me within soft rolls of polyester-and-sequin-wrapped flesh, I cursed myself again for showing up. I could have written the Taus a check for three times what I’d raised and spent my night at home.
The camera went off, and my headache screamed.
Then, air crackled, almost as if lightning had struck in the banquet-hall doorway.
Have you ever stood on a beach with water up to your ankles and felt the tide recede? Even the grains of sand try to flee from between your toes. It’s a dizzying, startling sensation; a reminder of one’s utter insignificance in the face of nature’s full force.
That’s what happened when T.D. Jackson walked into the banquet hall.
“Oh, shit,” said the woman standing beside me, and suddenly she wasn’t.
I’ve spent a career around the chronically charismatic, but T.D. Jackson’s presence was fuller than his six-foot-three frame could contain, stretching from one end of the hall to the other. All eyes and feet gravitated toward him. He floated into the room on a wave of fierce applause, as if he were Nelson Mandela freed after twenty-seven years of hard labor.
T.D. and Billy Dee must have had similar genes, because the man who strode through that door was only a slightly less bulky version of the college sophomore I’d known back at SoCal State almost twenty years before. He had always had an actor’s face—a jutting chin, powerful cheekbones and oddly colored eyes that hypnotized females when they flickered between golden brown and green—so I wasn’t surprised when T.D. transitioned to Hollywood in the middle of his NFL career. Acting ability is secondary when you’re a born star like T.D. Jackson; his face and Super Bowl MVP memories won him forgiveness for his limited range.
Even at a stroll, he moved like a jaguar. It was easy to imagine his famous leaps as he caught balls most players wouldn’t dream of, landing just within bounds with Baryshnikov’s pointy-toed perfection. Some people argue that T.D. Jackson was the best wide receiver ever to play the game. My money’s on Jerry Rice, or maybe Randy Moss, but the argument isn’t dumb.
T.D. was flanked by five men who might have been linebackers, and I knew a couple of their faces from college, too. Classmates, friends, bodyguards. All of them, including T.D., were dressed in silk crimson suits, white shirts, narrow crimson ties, and sunglasses. The crowd in the room surged toward T.D., but no one dared block his direct path. T.D. Jackson was leading a moving train with no signs of slowing.
I forgot about the murders. Everyone did.
T.D. raised his arm over his head, a signal, and the hall’s speakers blared to life. Tinny, inane carnival music was replaced by a deafening recorded shout and heavy percussion. M.C. Hammer’s “Turn This Mutha Out” flooded the room.
T.D. Jackson and his crew fanned into a circle, facing us with wide-legged stances. On the beat, all six men thrust their groins forward in synchronization, their knees so low to the ground that they were bending backward. For several seconds, they froze in place, testing their impossible balance, their heads nearly touching. Onlookers squealed, shrieked and shouted. An excited chant swelled from the crowd, also in rhythm: “Go ’head! Go ’head!”
The step show had begun.
Step shows have been popularized in film recently, but they originated at historically black colleges in the 1960s. Black Greek organizations at mainstream universities like SoCal State have kept up the tradition, and that night T.D. Jackson took us all back to school.
T.D. Jackson was playing for his true home crowd.
Like the gears of a perfect machine, the men flung their sunglasses into the ecstatic crowd. The woman who had just posed for a picture with me nearly stampeded the poor young sister beside her as she snatched T.D.’s shades out of midflight.
Double time, leaping high while they jabbed their arms skyward with perfectly matched motion, the six men stalked to the waiting stage. To climb up, they leapfrogged in twos until all of them stood in a single line, moving like an optical illusion. They raised their knees high in synchronized clapping above and below their massive thighs. Their rhythmic stomping on the wooden stage sounded like thunder. I was sure the floorboards would snap beneath them.
T.D., the war chief, let out a shout. “When I say Tau, you say Heat. Tau!”
“Heat!” the men roared in unison, with perfectly timed stomps emphasizing the word.
“Tau!”
“Heat!”
All of the men dropped to the floor in a line, as if about to do push-ups. Each man except the last hooked his ankles on another man’s shoulders, and they melded into a single unit. One by one, they raised themselves high, then back to the floor, a slowly undulating snake waving back and forth across the stage.
Women screamed. Every entrance to the banquet hall was crammed with hotel waiters, cooks, and housekeepers watching the marvel of giants moving with such uncanny fluidity. April sidled up beside me, in wide-eyed wonderment despite herself.
Another shout from T.D., and the men were on their feet. They danced in formation around each other, alternately thrusting their fists into the air and stomping out a pattern with their feet that sounded like angry drumming straight from the Motherland. The way they moved their torsos, elbows, and fists reminded me of karate katas. These were the warriors of our tribe, performing a mighty war dance. If T.D. Jackson and his crew had done their step show on the field before their bowl games, the other teams might have fled back to the locker room before the starting coin toss.
I’m in good shape—I work out, I can fight when it counts, and I can dance to anything from hip-hop to salsa—but on my best days, I couldn’t will my body
to move like that. T.D.’s crew carried their bulky frames with stupefying ease, capturing an odd combination of beauty and ferocity. Their shouts jittered up my spine. A premonition, maybe.
As the last of M.C. Hammer’s music sounded, the other men heaved T.D. Jackson over their heads, holding him high as he lay in repose. They looked like pallbearers.
Once the show was over, April remembered her indignation. “You’d think he’d have the decency to keep a low profile until after the civil trial,” she muttered to me over the room’s raucous shouting and applause.
I chuckled. The phrase low profile had never been in T.D. Jackson’s vocabulary.
April’s eyes narrowed. “You think it’s funny he got away with murder?” She said it loudly enough to elicit a gaze fit for blasphemers from a nearby older couple. I hoped April wouldn’t be foolish enough to confront T.D. Jackson, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. Women’s mouths have earned their men a beat-down, or worse, since the dawn of so-called civilization.
“Chill, April,” I said. “You knew he would be here.”
April’s eyes cut at me in a way I wasn’t used to. Maybe there had been something in my voice she wasn’t used to either. That was the way things were with us lately.
While the crowd swarmed T.D. Jackson at the other end of the room, I returned to my lonely booth to wait until April was ready to go. She was a member of the Taus’ sister sorority, so the ladies were there to help keep the popcorn popping.
After the step show, the rest of us might as well have been invisible. The line for T.D. Jackson’s photo booth was so long that organizers set up velvet ropes to keep order. The Bruin and the Bunny traded hair care advice while Billy Dee and the Different World dude exchanged business cards, talking politics.
“Now I have truly seen everything,” a woman’s voice said beside me.
Any number of unusual sights could have fit that description, so I followed her gaze: She was staring toward the flock around T.D. Jackson and his entourage at the other end of the room.
The woman was petite and smooth-skinned, dressed in an efficient gray pantsuit that told me she had come to the event straight from a job she probably didn’t like. I didn’t know her, but when she looked at me, I was sure I knew her eyes.
“Marilyn…Johnson?” I said. Her name came first.
She smiled. “That’s impressive. I look…” Beat. “…different.”
The long, embarrassed pause helped me remember her: She’d been the only other sister in my first college drama class. She’d had unfortunate acne and overprocessed hair, and I remember thinking that she would need to lose about sixty pounds if she wanted acting work. Apparently, she had. The weight was gone, shrunken to a healthy athletic frame that bespoke serious workouts. The acne hadn’t left so much as a scar, and her hair had a raven sheen. Marilyn Johnson had gotten herself together.
I’m not the school-reunion type, but I was happy to see someone looking better instead of worse after twenty years, so I stood up to hug her. My hug surprised her, and I felt her body stiffen, so I pulled back sooner than I would have. I’d been careful to issue my Friendly hug—more upper body than lower—but Marilyn was skittish about contact.
Marilyn never met my eyes for more than a hot second, roiling with shyness that seemed misplaced. Despite her effective dusting of makeup to bring out her cheeks and large, almond-shaped eyes, in her mind’s eye she was hideous.
“Hey, darlin’,” I said. “You look terrific.”
“Right back at ya,” she said. “I’ve marked my calendar for your first episodes on Homeland. Love that show! I’ve been keeping up with you on the internet. I’ll never forget turning on my TV and seeing you on Malibu High back in the day.”
“Way back,” I said, downplaying it. My entrée into television had been a minor part as a basketball coach on a Beverly Hills 90210 knockoff.
Marilyn swatted my hand, just like April might. “Stop. Everyone didn’t get triumphs like that to celebrate, Tennyson. Embrace your achievements.”
It was the nicest thing anyone fully dressed had said to me all day.
The photographer had long since drifted away, but Marilyn waved him over. Then she opened her purse to find her twenty dollar photo fee. “You don’t have to,” I said.
She smiled. “I want to. A picture with you will wash away how the Taus just ruined my night.” Her jaw could have cracked a walnut. Marilyn wasn’t looking at T.D. Jackson anymore, but I realized she could see no one else.
“Not in the fan club?”
“He’s guilty as hell,” she said quietly. “And he knows it.”
As the camera flashed, Marilyn posed by giving me a gentle kiss on the cheek. The kiss lingered, sweet and sad, as if she wanted to absorb some luck, or goodness, from me. I wished I had some to give. I expected the Let’s-have-lunch riff, but none came. I could tell that she had abandoned her acting dreams long ago. Most people do.
“I’m disappointed with the Taus. They should know better,” Marilyn said with the My-people-My-people shake of her head. “But it was good to see you, Ten.”
Her expression was so fragile that I wanted to retrieve a memory to delight her. I tried to remember a single conversation with her from class, a friend or relative to inquire about, but I couldn’t. Back in school, she had been invisible to me, and probably to almost everyone else. Watching her walk away beneath a veil of sadness, I wanted to reach back through time and invite her out for coffee after class. But all that was too little, twenty years too late.
I was ready to leave the Taus, too.
I’d lost sight of April, so I went looking. I found her at a Sno-Cone machine with three other women, deep in a huddle. Their fingers fumbled with cups and plastic jugs of rainbow-colored syrup. Even before I was close enough to hear, I could tell that the women were pressuring April about something, and I was paranoid enough to believe that they were talking about me. In a way, I guess they were.
“…for you. You’re the one who has to take control,” one of the women was saying. “If you don’t—” She clammed up when she saw me coming. She was as model-thin and as tall as I was, with hair dyed platinum in an ill-chosen contrast against her skin.
When April met my eyes, I thought I saw guilt tug at her mouth.
“Hey, Ten,” April said absently, hooking her arm through mine. Hey, old buddy.
Four sets of eyes felt heavy on my face. “Is there a problem I can help with?” I said.
“No,” April said quickly, before anyone else could answer. “It’s nothing.”
April didn’t lie often—and maybe not at all since she’d been my girlfriend—but that lie made us even. On our way to the fund-raiser, April had asked me a half dozen times what was bothering me, and I’d relied on the same old line, too. Nothing. One bad lie deserved another.
“I’m ready to go,” I said. “If you need to stay, I’m sure someone can give you a ride.”
Around me, reflexive hands perched on hips. I felt unspoken refrains of Oh-no-he-didn’t. April looked slightly embarrassed, but she gave me a gentle pull that made me think she was almost relieved to get away. “Maybe it’s okay if I go. I’ll ask Percy.”
Whoever Percy was, I wanted to suggest some anatomically challenging acts he could perform on himself. Why was a stranger having a say with my lady? But I set my teeth and followed April toward the throng at the other end of the room.
“One of my sorority sisters found out she has lupus,” April said as we crossed the room.
“Sorry to hear it.”
“They want me to take over her project, but I’m not interested.” April sighed. “A high school journalism class.”
“You’ve always wanted to teach.” April’s father was a college professor, and she’d vowed to leave the newspaper for teaching one day.
She dropped the bomb. “It’s in Soweto. Six months in South Africa. Classes start in three weeks, and I couldn’t land there cold on day one. I’d have to take a leave from the paper, like, now
. And sublet my room.” April was no longer talking to me; she was thinking it through.
One night, after half a glass too much of wine, I had asked April to move in with me. That was probably when my feeling of unease began, if I had to choose a date on a calendar. Three months before. I’d seen surprise flare in her eyes, and I realized that maybe she’d misunderstood me. When I said it, I was mostly thinking what a pain it was that April couldn’t spend the night more often—that was before she’d confessed that Chela made her uncomfortable. The way I saw it, why should she be spending six-fifty a month for a room in a two-bedroom apartment when she could live in my house for free? That was all. Convenience.
April had answered my offer with a laundry list of excuses: not enough notice for her roommate. Respect for her parents. The distance from her job. Her list of reasons, sounding a firm no, made me realize I’d been asking more than I thought. But this time, I already recognized the hungry ring of yes underneath her excuses. The challenges weren’t a wall to hide behind; they were bricks to be torn down. April wanted to go to Soweto. She might not know how badly yet, but she would before long.
April pulled herself closer to me, reassurance. “I’m not interested,” she said again.
“Yet.” If April heard me, she didn’t let on.
The man she was looking for, Tau chapter president Percy Duvall, also dressed in crimson, hovered near T.D. Jackson’s booth to keep order along the velvet ropes. Duvall was below average height, with a Napoleon syndrome that kept his neck at full tilt. In proximity to T.D. and his crew, Duvall looked like a gnome.
T.D. was jocular and grinning as he posed for photos with admirers. Each newcomer, men and women alike, paid one hundred dollars for the privilege of giving T.D. Jackson prayers, hugs, and encouragement in his hour of need.
“Too blessed to be stressed, bro.”
“Stay strong, brotherman.”
“The truth will set you free, man.”
“T.D., you’re an inspiration to humanity.” That quote is verbatim.
In the Night of the Heat Page 4