Ballard the Perv’s eyes opened wide, and I believed that he’d dream about being the Hulk for the next year.
One afternoon, more than a year after the bio-philosophical talk about the sexual prowess of superheroes, Sherman came up to me and my friends on the lunch court. This was unusual, because my cousin had graduated to high school and didn’t come by very much anymore.
Sherman sat down and greeted me and my friends. He told us about a fight he’d got in with a cop’s son. The kid was named Carl and was in the eleventh grade.
“I got beat down,” Sherman said, with a wry grin, “but I gave him a black eye and chipped his front tooth.”
Mister, Jimmy, and Ball had a hundred questions, but Sherman said, “We can talk about all that later. Right now I need Stew here to help me with somethin’.”
I was due home in less than an hour. My mother and father were very strict, and even though I hadn’t done very well at anything in particular, I always obeyed them and showed up on time. On the other hand, Sherman had never asked for my help before. He made sure to spend time with me a day or two each month. Once in a while I stayed over at the apartment where he and his mother, Titi, lived. At night, after she was asleep, Sherman would take me up to the roof, where he smoked cigarettes and drank sweet wine.
“You see down there in the alley?” he once asked me.
“Yeah, I see.”
“All kinds of things happen down there in the nighttime. People fuckin’ and fightin’, and sometimes they die. Right down there in the open but in the dark.”
I peered into the night, which was broken now and then by fluttering moths or the passing headlights of some car. If I had just looked into that abyss by myself I wouldn’t have seen a thing; but through Sherman’s eyes I could imagine the way the darkness, with the partial architecture of the urban night, was magical, alive. When I inhaled it felt as if that night was coming inside me.
And so, when Sherman came on that lunch court and said that he needed me—I went.
On the A train to Manhattan we sat on a bench for three, and he looked me over.
“Your hair is all right,” he said, after a minute-long inspection, “but you gotta button that shirt to the top and tuck in those tails.”
I did as I was told.
“Did you brush your teeth this morning?” Sherman asked.
“Yeah.”
“How about a shower?”
“I took one after gym class.”
Sherman was still studying me. He seemed more like a teacher or a young father than my cousin and friend.
We were passing underneath the East River when he said, “I met this girl from California goes to a private school on Seventy-Second Street. Her parents are out of town tonight, and she said she wanted me to come by, only she had already planned to have one of her girlfriends come over, and so she asked if I could bring another guy.”
“Girls?” I was pretty sure that half the subway car could hear the fear in my voice.
“Don’t worry, man. Tanya—that’s my girl—Tanya said that Mona is fine. So you don’t have to worry about me puttin’ you with no ugly girl.”
I swallowed hard again and tried to think of some way out of that train, that destination. I had hardly ever kissed a girl, and when I had it hadn’t seemed so great—for her.
“When you kiss,” Sherman said, as if he could read my thoughts, “you got to give her some tongue. Girls like that, and you will too.”
We got out in lower Manhattan south of Canal. From there we walked west. On Washington we came to this modern-looking apartment building that had glass walls and a doorman seated behind a high desk.
Sherman walked right up to the desk, and I followed a few steps behind.
The doorman had bright copper skin and an accent from somewhere in the Spanish-speaking New World.
“Can I help you?” he asked, dubiously.
“Tanya Highsmith,” Sherman said. “Apartment fourteen twenty-seven.”
That was the most impressed I ever was with my cousin, in this life. Tanya Highsmith, apartment fourteen twenty-seven. He spoke clearly, with no hesitation or shame. He wasn’t some young tough from the ’hood but a man coming to see a woman.
The doorman nodded and picked up a phone.
* * *
The next thing I knew I was standing at an off-white door on the fourteenth floor in a wide hallway that had avocado-colored carpeting and muted rose-red walls.
When Sherman pressed the doorbell I got a little dizzy. Standing there I worried that I’d fall on my face. I do believe that the only reason I didn’t faint was so as not to embarrass my cousin and best friend.
The door swung inward, and I was surprised at the young woman who stood there. The beautiful teenager wore a gray silk T-shirt under an emerald cotton vest that had little red eyes stitched into it. Her skirt was a gold color with a blue hem, I remember. She was barefoot and a little breathless. But none of that mattered at first glance. What struck me was that she was a black girl; well, not really black but rather a creamy brown. At any rate—she wasn’t white. I figured that in a building that nice, with a girl from a private school, that Sherman must have found him a white girl to visit.
“Hey, Tanya,” Sherman said.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “You two look exactly alike.”
I’d been told before that Sherman and I bore a strong resemblance. I couldn’t see it; I think that was because he was so powerful and brave and cool, and I was just barely normal.
“They do!” another girl said. This one was also under the category of our race, what people nowadays call African American. But where Tanya was slender of face and body, her friend was a curvaceous girl with skin just a touch darker.
They were Sherman’s age, maybe even a little older.
“Mona,” Tanya said, “this is Sherman and his cousin Stewart.”
“If we look just alike,” Sherman said, “then how you know I ain’t Stew?”
The skinny girl grinned, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Because I know what I like. Come on in. I got it all ready.”
Tanya took us through the living room into a yellow-and-red-tiled kitchen. Past the stove there was a little nook of a room with no door, in which sat a small, square, orange table-booth. There she had set out a crystal decanter filled with amber liquor and four bulbous drinking glasses.
“Cognac,” Tanya said. “Like I told you.”
Sherman and Tanya sat on one side of the table, her in and him out. I climbed into our side, and Mona pulled in close beside me.
Tanya explained to her friend and me that she met Sherman on the F train and that the first thing he said to her was to ask if she had ever had champagne.
“I asked him why,” she said. “And he told me that I looked like I was rich and so I must have had some.”
“What did you say?” Mona asked. At the same time she laid her left hand on my right.
“She said that there was something better than champagne,” Sherman answered.
“Cognac,” Tanya finished, gesturing at the contents of the tabletop.
She poured us each a generous dram and warned us to sip it because the cognac was strong.
When Mona let go of my hand to reach for her glass, I felt both bereft and relieved. She got my glass too, turned toward me on the small bench, and clinked hers to mine. She smiled at me with lips that I will always think a woman’s lips and smile should be.
“Cheers,” she whispered, and we all sipped.
“Damn!” Sherman said. “This feels warm all down in my chest.”
“That’s what it does,” Tanya said, a note of triumph in her voice.
“This how rich people feel all the time?” my cousin asked.
Tanya’s reply was to lean forward and kiss him.
Sherman already
knew how to kiss. After a moment with her mouth, he moved to the side of her neck. This caress brought out a smile, and the next thing I knew Mona gave me a peck on the mouth. My tongue was ready, but her lips moved quickly to my ear.
“We should go in the other room and leave them alone,” she whispered.
Mona poured some more brandy into our glasses and then led me by the hand into the living room. There we drank and whispered and kissed—a lot. Toward the bottom of the snifters my trepidations evaporated. Mona showed me how and where to kiss and when to linger. In hushed tones she told me about her white boyfriend and how he would never let her guide him to her desire.
I was overexcited and so suffered two premature ejaculations, but Mona was more experienced and explained, between kisses, what was going on with me and how we could get back to where we wanted to be.
Somewhere in the night I looked up from the sofa and saw Sherman and Tanya, mostly naked, tiptoeing toward another part of the house.
“Kiss me, Stew,” Mona said, to bring my attention back to her.
The couch Mona and I staked out was long and deep, like the sleep we tumbled down into. It was slumber in an upholstered hole at the side of a road in some fairy tale my mother might have read aloud before my siblings and I fell to sleep . . .
My mother. I came awake suddenly, so deeply afraid that even the loss of my virginity failed to buoy me. I sat up quickly and felt a wave of pain go through my head. I gasped, looked around, and saw Sherman sitting in a stuffed chair set perpendicular to the foot of our sofa.
Mona groaned and shifted under a blanket I didn’t remember.
“I been waitin’ for you to wake up, cousin.”
“Does your head hurt this bad?” I asked.
“It’ll go away in the air outside,” Sherman explained.
“My parents are gonna kill me,” I predicted, through pain and some nausea.
“Uh-uh, man. I got that covered,” my cousin promised.
It was late May, and the sun was rising at around five that morning as Sherman and I made our way to the subway.
“What you mean you got it covered?” I asked Sherman for the sixth time as he handed me a subway token.
“While you was playin’ makin’ Mona moan I called Titi an’ asked her to call your parents and say you was sleepin’ ovah.”
No magician ever impressed me as much as Sherman did.
“And she did it?” I asked.
“Sure she did. I told her that you and me were on a double date. She understands what men need to do.”
For a week or so after the visit with Tanya and Mona, I avoided my cousin. I wanted to forget about cognac and sex and Manhattan too. I felt so guilty that I was even trying to do some homework one Wednesday evening in the bedroom I shared with my brother Floyd.
“Stew?” my mother, Mint Cardwell-Brownley, called from the hall.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Phone. It’s your cousin Sherman. If he wants you to come over, tell him you have to come back here to bed.”
“Hey, cousin,” he said, when I answered.
“Hi.” I didn’t want to be rude.
“Where you been, man?” he asked.
“Nowhere. Studyin’ for finals is all.”
“Well, come on ovah an’ I’ll help.”
There was no way that I was going to see Sherman and Nefertiti. My soul was on the line; that’s how it felt. I tried to think of some kind of reason that I had to stay and do my homework alone. Maybe it was some kind of spelling that I had to commit to memory, and Floyd was already testing me. That was a good excuse.
“What you thinkin’, Stew?” my cousin asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“So you comin’ or what?”
“OK.” And that was it. My soul was sold, and Sherman owned it.
That early evening we went down an alley past the back of a bodega. We stopped for a minute while Sherman looked around.
“You see that little window ovah the door?” he asked me.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s what they call a transom, and Julio’s ain’t got no alarm.”
“So?”
“I’m ’a break into that bastard an’ steal one hundred dollars.”
“Why?” I was so scared that even the spiritual devastation of sex seemed tame.
“’Cause I can. ’Cause I wanna do everything. Don’t worry, Stew. I won’t bring you into it.”
The years passed, and Sherman and I were fast companions. Whenever he broke the law he did it alone, but later he’d tell me all about it—step-by-step. I spent lots of time with him and his mother, my aunt Titi, in their sixth-floor walk-up apartment. Titi was always nice, kissing me hello and goodbye.
My own mother rarely kissed me. I had never much thought about that until I became the beloved chattel of my aunt and cousin.
After high school Sherman was accepted to NYU on full scholarship, and then I, the next year, went to work on an early-morning paper-delivery crew for the New York Times.
Somewhere in that time our cousin Theodora decided to take the NYC civil service exam. She asked Sherman to help, and he did. I hung around because it felt better to be with him than my own parents and siblings.
Theodora and I studied together. I had no desire to take the test, but I liked her. We’d laugh and try to fool each other, and Sherman told me that she’d do better if I was there too. Theodora was slender and tall, and she told us on the third night of study that she liked women more than men.
“I just like the way girls kiss,” she admitted between practice tests. “It’s like I know something with them, when men keep their secrets.”
I didn’t care about who she loved. Theodora was my blood, and I had learned from Sherman and Titi that that was all that mattered.
A few years later, after Theodora had gotten a clerk job at the local police precinct, Sherman got into a fight with the husband of one of his girlfriends.
It isn’t what it sounds like. Isabella Vasquez was a first-grade schoolteacher, who taught many of the kids that our siblings and cousins had produced. Sherman got to know her when taking our nieces and nephews to school on Thursday mornings.
Isabella’s husband, Murphy, one night got drunk and knocked out one of her teeth. So Sherman kicked his ass.
Murphy got mad at that, and with two of his friends he beat my cousin to death. They jumped him in an alley and stomped his face and ribs. Nefertiti and I sat by his body in the mortuary all Saturday morning, while Murphy Halloran and his friends were being arraigned and charged.
Nefertiti held the vigil in her sixth-floor walk-up. All forty-seven of the Cardwells, Brownleys, and Cardwell-Brownleys came. Our grandparents were dead, but Titi had brought out an old photograph of them and tacked it to the wall.
I was there from the beginning to the end, serving sweet wine with butter and salami sandwiches on hard rolls. My mother, Mint, when she first saw me there, sneered in a way that I didn’t understand—at the time. Many others who knew how close I was to Sherman said how sorry they were and how much alike we looked.
I stayed to clean up after the wake. Titi watched me from the kitchen door.
“Sherman loved you,” she said.
Her tone was sweet, but still I took it as an accusation. I castigated myself for failing to be there to fight side by side with him.
“He was my best friend,” I uttered, trying not to cry, again.
“More than that.”
“I know we’re blood, but I always thought of him as something more, I guess.”
“He was,” Nefertiti said. “Your father and his are the same.”
“My father, Skill?”
“No. My husband, Blood.”
I stopped drying plates and turned to look at Titi. She’s a dark-skinned woman with bright ey
es and graying dreads. I could see that she had always loved her husband and son in me. That connection was the source of her kisses and kind words. It was why she protected me when Sherman and I spent the night with those fancy girls.
She took a light-brown snakeskin wallet from the pocket in her apron and handed it to me.
“It was Sherman’s,” she said. “I couldn’t even look inside. They killed my boy. This world killed him. He was too beautiful, too beautiful.”
“I can’t, I can’t take this, Titi.”
“Please,” she implored. “I’ll sleep easier if I know he’s with you.”
The next day was the funeral. Six hundred people and more showed up.
Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy, and Ballard the Perv were there. They told me how sorry they were and dredged up the old stories about Sherman’s adventures at school. I liked my friends, but they seemed very far away. Or maybe it was me; ever since I’d heard that Sherman had died I’d felt that there was a wall between me and everyone else. Everyone except Nefertiti.
I sat through the ceremony thinking that Sherman was my brother, my brother.
My mother’s husband—my uncle Skill—and I took opposite sides at the front of the casket.
The reception after the interment was held in the house that our grandfather Theodore Brownley had built. I hung around the corners, talking to people as little as possible. People talking and laughing and remembering things about Sherman just made me angry. Didn’t they realize that someone who was so much more had been taken? Didn’t they understand what Sherman was in this world?
That morning I’d broken up with my girlfriend of two years, Leora Dumas, because she said that Sherman had been a bad influence on me.
“He was crooked,” Leora said. “And you couldn’t see that he was holding you back.”
I was living with Leora because I didn’t make enough delivering papers to afford my own place. She wanted to get married, but I really didn’t have any interest in that. I guess Sherman dying meant that I had to move on, no matter what Leora said.
The Awkward Black Man Page 14