What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  He read and watched the street, and depending on his mood that day he might spend the afternoons with Tuyen and Carla, then in the evenings he would sometimes go up to see his boys in the jungle, though less and less these days—get a smoke, tool around, and then go home when the lights were off and his mother and father sleeping.

  It was in the market that he’d met the old Rasta and the musician. Not together, but he’d come to think of them as together. As parts of the same person or the same state.

  The Rasta was in his sixties. He worked the blocks of the city, panhandling. Some days he was at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, some days he was at Spadina and Queen, and some days in the market. On the days that he disappeared, Oku learned later, he was playing the horses at Woodbine. His hair was roughly dreaded. He had a hoary beard, which he tied with green and red rubber bands, his pants were sometimes held up with a piece of twine, and he wore boots, winter or summer. He knew the Scriptures by heart. Oku had met him outside the parking lot, close to the Caribbean food store.

  “Beg you a money, dread,” he said to Oku, surprising him. His face close, the smell of outdoor life reeking on him. Oku stepped back, his senses shocked.

  “Hey, college bwoy, dread, beg you a money. The street them hard, you know, dread. The air is abstraction me tell you. Give a likkle something for the I and I.” He was aggressive and biblical. “Beg you a likkle something to hold I soul together, man. The spirit massive but the body weak.” He followed Oku down the street.

  The poetry of holding the soul together stopped Oku. He turned, fished in his pockets, held out a dollar, waiting for the Rasta to open his hand. He didn’t want to touch him, still scornful of the man’s appearance, but the Rasta grabbed his hand warmly and roughly.

  “Blessings on you, brethren. Is the fate of the world you one decide right there so now. Seen? Jah guide, dread. Is I heartbeat unno save. Selassie I.”

  Oku escaped across the street to the coffee shop, the Rasta continuing to call after him, “Walk good, dready.” He sat at the coffee shop, a little undone. His hands quivered from a mixture of scorn, fear, and elation. He had sensed what he felt was all of the man in that grasp. The man’s scent repulsed him, but the man had drawn him into a kind of embrace. There was something genuine and plain about it, something vigorous. The man had definition. He was living on the street, but he had definition.

  “True brethren, what a merciful morning!”

  The next time the Rasta came up on him as he was daydreaming his way past.

  “How the I and I today, Rasta? His anger endureth only a minute, for his favour is life, dread. Anything today, Rasta? It rough out here, you nuh know?”

  Oku fished in his pocket but could only come up with fifty cents. He gave it apologetically to the Rasta.

  “Ah know, nothing, Rasta. Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning. You nuh see it?”

  The Rasta grabbed hold of him as if to hug him, and Oku shrank with the same feeling of revulsion and allure.

  “Is nothing, man. Is only fifty cents,” he said, brushing aside and trying to recover himself. The Rasta had rejected something, some way of living, some propriety, and with all his derelictness, Oku envied him.

  “Me ah learn, Rasta, me ah grow and me ah learn.” Often the Rasta stood at his post in the market, his arms over his head in a gesture requesting mercy.

  One day he said to Oku, “Me ah give up the business, Rasta. Me ah give it up. What you think? It too rough, the begging.” Oku couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “Me nuh joke, Rasta, it rough. You nuh understand?” he said, as if he and Oku had become such familiars that he expected Oku to dissuade him from leaving the begging business.

  He was a gambler too.

  “Bwoy, the pony business steep! Jah Rastafari. Schoolbwoy, me was one length from millionaire. But Jah know what is not for you, is not for you. Seen! So me ah struggle. Is what you ah read, read so, Rasta? Is only the one book, dread, only one book.”

  Oku wished he could be so single-minded.

  And then there was the musician. Some afternoons the musician sat in the coffee shop muttering, a short pencil in hand, scribbling musical notes onto a tattered fragment of a brown paper bag. He kept a worn leather folder of music under one arm, sometimes shifting it to the inside of his grungy coat, sometimes to the table, then back to his armpit. He was a tall, lean man, his deep dark skin setting contrast to his pink palms. You noticed his palms because his hands were so large, his fingers long and slender.

  On their first meeting Oku made the mistake of looking at him too long and nodding to him in greeting. Thinking the musician was an ordinary black guy, he said to him, “Hey, bro, what’s happening?”

  “I’m not your brother.” The musician jumped up, spilling a small table over. He flew at Oku, his face livid.

  Oku reached out his hand in front of him, “No problem, bro, no problem.”

  “I am not your brother, I say.”

  The musician’s sudden looming scared Oku. His outstretched hand touched the musician’s coat, offending him even more. He grabbed hold of Oku, spinning him around. Luckily for Oku, the leather folder fell to the floor and the musician dropped him and scrambled for his music. The small clasp on the folder was broken, and the music sheets slipped onto the floor. The musician became frantic, whimpering as he collected the sheets. Oku moved away from him, disappearing out the door. But he appeared to have forgotten Oku, and tears of relief filled the musician’s eyes when he had put his folder back together. And he appeared to have forgotten the whole incident the next time Oku saw him.

  He was a pianist, classically trained. He held the folder as if it were his life; the leather was blackened and dogeared. All the sanity he ever had, had been poured into a symphony, Sepia Ceremony, which he had created as homage to Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 and Duke Ellington’s sacred music.

  He would walk up to perfect strangers in the street and show them his reams of notations for his symphony. He would launch into explanations about this or that movement to surprised passersby.

  They wanted him back home in London, he said, they wanted him to go to Munich, but he had come to Toronto on the promise that his composition would be played by the Toronto Symphony. But when they realized he was a black man, their promises had dried up, he said. Bewildered people skirted him, thinking he was a panhandler. He rushed out to them to reassure them. They fled or threatened to call police.

  He inundated the Human Rights Commission with complaints against the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Roy Thomson Hall. Leaders of the black community had taken him seriously at first, but his deteriorating mental state would make him launch into outbursts that made his claims confused, if not dubious. He was an artist, a great genius, and they were all fools—his supporters as well as the commission and his persecutors.

  Oku came out of the St. George subway one day, and as he walked toward the university, he saw the musician sitting on a concrete embankment, his leather folder in his lap, his large hands making a gesture of piano playing. Oku slowed his pace, trying to decide whether to take another route and avoid another unpleasant encounter. But he saw that the musician was heedlessly playing his symphony. His face was a beautiful mask of pleasure, his long fingers lustful on some arpeggio.

  Oku walked by close enough to observe these things and far enough away to run if the musician recognized him. The musician looked up and met his eyes, but there was no recognition there except as an artist to his audience, a great pianist to his adoring fan. Oku paid the musician the compliment of listening, then after some minutes, when the musician seemed to have come to the close of his solo, Oku applauded. The musician bowed his head to receive the accolade. From then on when they met at the Market Café there was no trouble. Oku never made the mistake of calling him “brother,” and the musician went about his business, composing his music on brown paper bags and securing his leather satchel full of the contents of his sanity.

  The mu
sician was never as lucid or as friendly as the Rasta, so Oku came by his name through the Rasta, whose own name Oku never found out.

  “See him there?” The Rasta pointed to the musician. “Him a mad, you see! Is talent what have him so. Talent and Babylon take him. Not like the I and I. Babylon don’t down cry me yet.”

  He was patting himself warm in the cold spring day, standing near the parking lot in the market. He waited there often to arrest shoppers as they exited the lot. Oku was on his way to the café.

  “See him? See what me tell you?” The musician was playing his phantom piano outside the café. “Him mad!”

  Oku felt like laughing. Between the Rasta and the musician, who was more mad?

  “Nuh take things to make jokes, dready. Him is a genius. Him name Clifford Hall. Him get scholarship from yard to go a London when me was a big man. Look pon him now! You nuh see it? Follow the white man ways and you doomed. See, them make him mad.”

  Clifford took money out of his mouth, and the Rasta said, “Is how me supposed to compete with a madman? You nuh see me trial! Cha, man. Anyway, ah nah nutten. Make him live. Jah will take care of the I and I. Seen.”

  The Rasta and the musician had become a strange source of friendship for Oku. Though, of course, he had a home, albeit increasingly uncomfortable. A mother, a father. A roof over his head. And the anxieties of a failed career were still in the future for him, if at all. And the elixir of faith, which held the Rasta, was not anything that Oku could say firmly he desired. His was for a sense of sovereignty. How had they started out? he wondered. Like him? He knew he hadn’t experienced the moments, he hadn’t visited the scenes that would lead him where the Rasta and the musician had gone, but he had a presentiment, a moment when he glimpsed all directions of this possible life.

  The Rasta and the musician would be an embarrassment to men like Oku’s father. They had gone mad, the worst kind of giving into the system that could be imagined among black people in the city. Violence could be understood, but not madness. Violence at least had a traceable etymology—it protected your life, your remaining will, and all your sense of beauty. But madness, madness was weak. Oku’s boys in the jungle felt the same: “You see that crazy motherfucker playing air piano? What the fuck is wrong with him? Shame.” The Rasta got a little more respect, even though they still thought him mad. At least he answered to higher powers, they said. That a steady stream of them lay open-chested on sidewalks and in the parking lots of after-hours clubs was just how the world was.

  Did he want to end up bled out in a parking lot outside a club? Did he want to float out of his body like the Rasta and the musician? Or did he want the hard-headed bitterness of his father, living in the fantasies of if only?

  “If only what?”

  He was sitting at the café, his thumbs on a page of Baraka’s Blues People. A hand was on his shoulder. It was Jackie’s. He hadn’t seen her come in.

  “If only what?” she repeated.

  For a moment it seemed right. He felt as if he was in a room, an accustomed room, alone with her, and had merely drifted off. Her hand was utterly familiar, as if they, the two of them, existed in a particular universe, their particular universe. But, of course, it was the Market Café and they weren’t alone. He smiled at her, shaking himself awake.

  “Nothing, nothing. Hey, what are you doing here?” He didn’t hear her reply. He was suddenly aware that Reiner had also come into the café.

  “Hey, man,” Reiner greeted. “What’s happening?”

  His happiness at seeing Jackie became all awkward. “Yeah, cool, man, cool,” he answered Reiner.

  “Get me a cappuccino, Reiner,” Jackie said, sitting across from Oku.

  “What do you want on it, hon? Cinnamon?”

  Oku flinched at the intimacy between them. He felt like making an excuse to leave. Jackie reached over for his book. “So this is where you are these days.”

  What did she mean “these days”? “You’re the one who disappeared.”

  “I haven’t disappeared. I’m at the store. You know where to find me.”

  Was she saying something to him? He could never quite figure her out. A simple conversation was soaked in double entendre. And if he made the mistake of acknowledging the double meanings, she withdrew.

  “Do I? Do I know where to find you?” He leaned over the table to take his book back.

  “Yeah, you do.” She thumbed the pages, looking at Oku with an appraising sensuousness. Just then Reiner came back with cappuccinos. “Check you later,” Jackie said, rising.

  “Yeah, man, see ya.” Reiner followed Jackie to the door.

  Well, that was confusing, he thought. He watched them cross to the other side of the street. He hated the easy way Reiner put his right hand in the small of Jackie’s back. He hated him seeming to guide Jackie with this very hand across the street. He took comfort in a fantasy—Jackie had seen him in the café and had come in to tell him that she missed him. That was what the conversation meant. She could have passed by, he thought, trying to dismiss the other interpretation, namely that Jackie’s mother and father lived not too far away, a block, really; in fact, Jackie still lived there sometimes, so it had been sheer coincidence and her words meant just what they said, no more.

  But what the fuck did she see in Reiner? That’s what he wanted to know. Well, given the things he’d been thinking about before Jackie came into the café, perhaps it was obvious what she saw in Reiner. Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it, took possession of Jackie’s back, guiding her across the street with one hand, warding off traffic with the other, in which he balanced his coffee. Look at his face, it spoke of someone in control and certainly not threatened. Someone comfortable, easy. Oku hated the familiarity with which Reiner spoke to him too, as if they shared something, a language. He had the sense that for Reiner it was a second language, the “Hey, man, what’s happening?” As if Reiner had switched into the second language to arrive at Oku’s level, so to speak—to talk to him in his own tongue. Those few words were so charged. In any other situation the meanings would be simple. Here, they were the difference between being white and being black, in control or out of control.

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN THE PARAMOUNT CLOSED, Jackie’s mother and father were lost. Everyone in Alexandra Park was lost. Even some up on Bathurst Street and Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue. As far out as Dawes Road and Pape Avenue. All the glamour left their lives.

  Le Coq d’Or—the nightclub on Yonge Street where American acts used to play and where Jackie’s mother and father saw Parliament-Funkadelic and the Ojays, the Barkays, and Rick James, who was put in jail after some freaky behaviour—that had closed down a few years before too. And then the Piccadilly Tube, where they danced till three in the morning, went under. And then Mrs. Knights, where they danced too and sat in the raised section and a man from Ghana had tried to pick Jackie’s mother up right in front of Jackie’s father, and he did it so directly and as if it was such a bargain that even Jackie’s father would have gone off with him to Accra. The guy took Jackie’s mother on the dance floor to “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and Jackie’s mother almost didn’t come back.

  “Come and go with me back to my country,” he said. “You will be loved by my whole family, you will have my children. It is not like it is here. You are lost here. No one loves you here. In my country you will be a queen, life will be your plaything, the sky will always be blue when you are there, the rains will only come when you remember a sadness.”

  Mrs. Knights closed. And These Eyes, where the marquee was a purple-rimmed eye, that was gone too. Jackie’s father loved the deejay there. His name was Maceo, and he could spin some rhythm and blues like nobody’s business. The Web was gone too—DJ Ghetto Soul used to play there and Grand Master—and the Upstairs Side Door closed last, and anyway it wasn’t such a funky pl
ace. All the glamour left, in other words, the chance to show a bit of style and flash. All the people who looked like they were famous, like the pimps and whores, all the athletes and the intellectuals, the jazz aficionados, the newcomers from down home, the just-comes from the Caribbean, all of them had to fly solo, go places where nobody knew them.

  Jackie’s mother and father could take hard time, anyone in the Park could. But the thought of hard time without even the relief of the Paramount was unbearable. What’s life without a little fantasy, a little Diana Ross, a little Chilites, some Bobby Womack, some Billy Paul, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes? Well enough if your fridge didn’t work, if your sofa was on credit, had a spring busted, if, Jesus, you were one dime short of a dollar, but what was life if your imagination didn’t work? If you couldn’t see yourself strutting into the Paramount to the appreciation, the love of other dreamers like yourself? If no one else could verify your state of cool existence? Not a single soul who could say that last Saturday you were the flyest, the baddest, the most solid dancer/lover/dresser; the one with the edge like a razor, the slickest, funkiest, the most crisp, the sleekest, the foxiest, the most outta sight, the wickedest in the whole damn place. Well, that’s the end, isn’t it? That’s the bottom, that’s the final. And Jackie’s mother and father weren’t thirty yet when the Paramount closed.

  But Jackie couldn’t wait for them to find bottom, she had to save them from the downstroke. The bottom was the Duke of Connaught, and she had no intentions of going in there to find them. The Duke wasn’t dangerous, it was just sad. Full of might-have-beens and should-haves. It was a dive on Queen Street across from the Kentucky Fried Chicken long before that side of Queen Street became trendy. And even now the Duke still maintains that down-and-out feel, as if its ugliness were so congenital that not even the trendy makeovers all around it could change it. All the glamour and daring of the Paramount had come to a colourless rest at the Duke. Some didn’t have the heart for it, so they stayed home. The Duke just wasn’t made up to be glamorous. It smelled of wet carpet and beer spills, the walls were a dishevelled cousin of moss green, the lighting was sickly. No, the Duke depended on lost hopes, it depended on crushed spirits, it was not there to cheer you up, it was there to trawl in all the phlegm of your life; the I-never-got-to-do-this-and-that, the wrong-headed mistakes, the unavoidable ones, the inevitability of ending up at the Duke, which you had always seen in your face when you woke up in the morning but disregarded in your enthusiasm for life, your love for someone, and your lust for fun. The Duke was always lurking in the mirror—the bald-faced bad luck of it, the straight-up knowing of it. There was the Duke, waiting to swallow you. There was the Duke, ready to swaddle you in its seedy arms; there was the worn-out shuffleboard table, the deep bar chairs, the smell of spunky beer on tap. Didn’t make sense putting a good dress on to come here, didn’t make sense trying to hold up any attitude. If you came here, dressed in your fly threads, the Duke showed up that they were really cheap, that they were bought down on Spadina off the back of a truck. Didn’t make sense going to Gabriel Kay’s apartment to see what he had heisted from Holt Renfrew; it would be wasted at the Duke. The Duke stripped you naked in an ugly kind of way. Every person in there looked like they were ashamed to be there, like they had lost respect for themselves and therefore each other. If you strutted into the Paramount, you slid into the Duke.