by Chris Abani
Black watched him for a while, realizing for the first time the difference between him and Bomboy. Black, as a painter, lived in a world of composition—shade, angle of light, perspective—one in which things blurred into one another even as they stood out in sharp relief; Bomboy, on the other hand, lived in a world of statements—often contradictory, but no less rigid and clear each time.
Bomboy was still leaning against the bar, where he’d been since they arrived together a couple of hours before. He was drinking Guinness from a pint glass, and in his shiny black silk shirt, starched linen trousers, mock-croc shoes and black hat he looked out of place. No, Black corrected himself as he approached, Bomboy was out of time. Or as Bomboy would have said: anachronistic. Sitting on an empty bar stool, Black waited for the generously proportioned barmaid stuffed into lingerie several sizes too small to come over to him.
“Hey, Black. What happened? I thought that one is your favorite?” Bomboy asked, gesturing vaguely with his drink toward the stage and Sweet Girl.
“Whatever,” Black mumbled. “Hey!” he said, banging his palm on the bar top to get attention. The barmaid didn’t look up from her cell phone.
Bomboy turned to look at Black and the barmaid.
“Cool your temper,” he said. “Do you want Guinness?”
“Why would I want Guinness, cabrón?”
“Guinness, my friend, is the truffle of alcohol. Truly decadent but packing a velvet punch to floor you.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Hey! Puto!” He banged on the bar top again.
The barmaid looked up and was about to return to her conversation when Bomboy caught her eye. He nodded in her direction and she came over.
“Yes?” She pointedly ignored Black.
“Give this man anything he wants,” Bomboy said, slapping a twenty down on the bar.
“What does he want?” she asked Bomboy.
“Black?”
“Jack Daniels.”
“You heard him. Keep the change.”
She slammed the glass down in front of Black without asking if he wanted water or ice, turned, smiled sweetly at Bomboy and walked back to the corner and her cell phone. Black downed the drink in one gulp.
“That is serious drinking,” Bomboy said. “Be careful when you drive the Blackmobile.”
“You worry about your car.”
“I don’t have to. It’s a Lexus,” Bomboy said, unable to keep the smugness out of his voice.
Black looked at his empty glass and tried to get the barmaid’s attention again. It wasn’t working.
“God, I hate that bitch,” he said.
“Easy.”
“I hate this place.”
“How can you hate this place?” Bomboy asked, with a two-armed gesture that spilt the thick malt Guinness everywhere. “How can you hate Charlie’s?”
Charlie’s was a down-home strip bar on Manchester and Crenshaw. It wasn’t seedy as much as it was run-down: the floor covered in carpet so old and worn that it looked like a pattern in the floor. Walls covered in faded wood paneling. A couple of pool tables listed dangerously by the door, and it was unclear if the table legs were uneven or if the floor just sloped that way.
The semicircular stage, with a mirrored ceiling, jutted six feet out, next to the pool tables, and was bordered by an ornate rusting six-inch-high metal frieze. A row of chairs fringed the stage, leading away from a second row set around small tables. Behind these there were two doors—one led to the men’s toilet and the other to the ladies’ and the dancers’ dressing rooms. Next to the dressing room door, a smoked one-way glass panel looked into the club—Charlie’s office. Beside it, a jukebox hugged the bottom lip of a slope that led up to a bar with twelve stools. On the wall opposite the bar, a few gaming machines lounged, blinking tiredly. To the left of these were the couple of booths reserved for lap dances.
Charlie, an aging ex-dancer in her sixties, loved to hug the patrons tightly, fondling their penises with one hand while the other cupped her mouth as she flicked her tongue in their ears, asking in a husky voice if they liked older women.
Charlie’s was to stripping what the run-down St. Louis Rib Shack on Crenshaw and Adams was to food—they were both a little rough around the edges but, boy, didn’t they serve the best stuff. Deep in the heart of South Central Los Angeles, the clientele were for the most part black, and the occasional white patron got as many curious stares as Juju Bee, who could shoot Ping-Pong balls from her labia across the room to land in a chosen patron’s lap.
The song changed. Smokey. “Ooh, ooh. Baby, baby.” Black turned back to the stage, to Sweet Girl. She looked directly at the audience now, though she wasn’t focused on anything, on anyone, just the room of men; a general sweep. But the look itself was specific, as though what lay before her was water, and she mad with thirst from weeks in the desert. Black moved on the bar stool, the vinyl cushion sticky from sweat. He swallowed hard, throat suddenly dry. Without taking his eyes off Sweet Girl, he reached for the empty glass in front of him, knocking it into a crash. No one turned to the sound. No one spoke. In Sweet Girl’s world, the men only saw what she wanted them to. But she looked straight at Black. Laughed. The sound low in her throat, like breath blown over an open bottle’s neck. Then she turned away.
He followed her gaze. It lingered on parts of her body. First her hands, running palm open down the sides of her torso, from her breasts to her waist, flowed, like water, like a lover’s embrace. Her eyes followed her hands, and her smile was part schoolgirl innocence, part naughty. Down to breasts taut and dimpled from implants, across her hard stomach, to lean, athletic, almost muscular thighs. And then her hands pulled at her skin deliberately yet reluctantly, as though the pleasure was in the wrongness of it. Her head drooped in sweet decline, hair hanging over her face.
And then Sweet Girl was looking directly at him. Her hands were on the move again, traveling to the shadow of where a breast’s curve swept up to her armpit. He followed her eyes down to her crotch and then into the dip, and as she came up, her legs flashed open for just the briefest moment, but long enough for everyone to imagine they saw more than they did. Mouth open, her tongue licked her forefinger again. Black’s tongue licked his dry lips, as he stared at the glistening tip of that finger. Never taking his eyes from it, he followed its plunge, down to her clean-shaven pudenda, and then with the trip beat in the song, Sweet Girl swung round just as the tip of her finger slipped from view under her thong, and then her backside was jiggling like two tambourines in the hands of a revival Baptist minister in the throes of spirit. Then the song ended.
“I like the way that girl makes herself open to love,” Bomboy said, turning back to his bar stool.
“You know she is a man, right?” Black said.
“That girl? Come on, stop playing.”
Black shrugged and turned back to the bar to try to get another whiskey. He could understand Bomboy’s disbelief. Even though he had known Sweet Girl was a transsexual who, though generously endowed in the bosom courtesy of surgery, still had her penis, he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a girl. It was the only way Black could accept his desire for her. Noticing Black trying to get the barmaid’s attention again but not succeeding, Bomboy stepped in.
“Black, you don’t know how to deal with women,” Bomboy said, summoning the barmaid as if by magic. “You are either too soft or too hard. Gently, gently, eh?”
This time, Black paid for six glasses. He lined them up.
“Ah, Black. This is bombastic drinking,” Bomboy said.
Black toyed with asking Bomboy why he never shut up. He thought better of it and began to throw the drinks back with considered deliberation. Thinking about Sweet Girl with each swallow. As she walked among the audience thanking the men for the tips, Black got up and left.
Outside, night held the promise of rain.
five
iggy naked.
Except for underwear and the pair of buffing pads on her feet. She danced across t
he floor of The Ugly Store’s café in wild abandon, the metal loops on her back clanking in time to the music, watched with interest by a stuffed moa, an ugly ostrich-like bird from New Zealand that was now extinct. All along one wall a huge canvas covered in text was stretched. It was Black’s most unusual mural to date and the only one on an indoor wall. A little plaque at the bottom announced: American Gothic: The Remix. Moving back and forth across it, Iggy’s shadow looked like a moth beating against a screen door. Black watched for a while, then retreated to the hallway in the back with the staircase that led to the rooms above where he lived, and lit a cigarette.
Several boxes were piled high against one wall, their tense line broken by the lazy lean of a ladder. Next to them a mop listed in its bucket, waiting out the day. Everything was wrapped in the smell of incense and food. It was like coming home: everything in its place, everything familiar. Black walked through a door marked Shiva and pissed. He glanced up as he washed his hands. The faint light from the hall reflected in the mirror above the sink carved his face unevenly into the background. Black was dark enough to be black, yet light enough to be something else. His hair was long, limp and unkempt, and shadowed his forehead, deflecting light onto his spreading nose and the one-inch scar on his right cheek. He put his finger to the scar, traced its uneven keloid-lividness.
He had done it to himself, cut deep with a pocketknife to keep from going off the 4th Street Bridge that night, carving himself into visibility, he said. To fill the emptiness inside: a deep well, he said. That night had been the lowest point in his life, as he freely admitted to anyone who would listen, though he never gave details about why.
Long ago Iggy had asked him:
“Was it the cut that kept you from going over?” Her tone as gentle as the fingertip she ran over the scar, until bumps goosed his skin.
“No. It was the dog,” he replied, reaching down to fondle the ear of the smelly black-and-white mutt that had followed him everywhere until it died.
When he got out, he walked through the door that led into the shop, and ran straight into an eight-foot-tall evil-looking statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, carved in a solid dark wood that could be ebony. Its oversized overbite, embedded in a head that was several sizes too big for the body, overshadowed everything around it. He moved past it quickly.
“Black?”
He kept quiet. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t exactly looking at her. He was still smoking, standing in the shadows of the three floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with bric-a-brac.
“You can’t hide. Might as well come out,” she said.
“I’m not hiding,” he said, emerging from behind the shelves heavy with broken toys, voodoo dolls, fetishes from Java, Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Papua New Guinea, sour-faced-Annies (dolls with heads made from desiccated apples, that looked like the shrunken heads of cannibal cultures), and flowerpots that could only look at home on a balcony in the lower sixth circle of hell. “I just didn’t want to interrupt you. Especially since you seem so naked.”
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
He shook his head, suppressing whatever sarcastic comment he was thinking, and walked over to her. He always had to fight the urge to rub his hand over her shaved head. Reaching out he touched one of the metal rings hanging from her back instead. No matter how often he saw them, they looked painful. As a fakir-psychic, she suspended her body in midair from meat hooks in order to induce a trance. Black still thought it was a strange practice for a lapsed white Jew from East LA, but she’d had a lot of success with it as she now had a celebrity client list. The Ugly Store had one rule and that was that to gain entry, clients had to be scarred. Psychic scars, mental scars, and general eccentricities were welcomed, but as it took some time and observation to determine these, visible scars were like gold and guaranteed an appointment. He’d seen Jennifer Garner and Uma Thurman in line scratching desperately but discreetly at their faces to ensure entry.
At first Iggy had just driven the meat hooks under her skin, believing her first teacher, who told her that the skin would callus and form strong straps, like leather. But the promised calluses never formed. Instead her skin began to tear. So on the advice of another teacher, she had the special stainless steel loops made and threaded under her skin. Three on each side of her spine, all along the back. When she had a client, she connected the metal loops to hooks hanging by chains from the ceiling, directly over her tattooing chair. By using a remote control device, she was able to hoist herself up to the desired height.
Black could only imagine what she must look like to the client who was lying back in the chair looking up at her eyes: one green, one purple. Did she look like a bald, white, demented broken-wing bat? And what of her skin, stretched into big pimples like a fetish cushion pulled by the hooks attached to the loops on her back? A witch from the Middle Ages about to be flayed?
Once in a trance, Iggy divined a shape and began to create an intricate tattoo on the client. While the needle danced over burning flesh, she would sing the prediction in a droning monotone that matched the needle’s buzz. The results varied, ranging from a single black dot, small geometric shapes and flowers, to the one that covered a client’s entire back. It all depended on how long the client had been coming to see her. For squeamish clients, she offered a henna alternative so that they could reverse the designs, but though she never said anything about it, Black could tell from her eyes that she disapproved of the no-pain-wanna-gain clients.
Iggy reached for a robe draped over the back of a chair and wrapped herself in it. Sitting on the chair, she crossed first one leg, then the other, untying the buffing cloths. As she looked she caught sight of the moa and Anubis.
“Gosh,” she said. “Those two are the twin towers of Ugly.”
He had heard it before. Many times.
“They set the tone for the rest of the store,” he said, sitting down and turning off the boom box playing loud merengue. She reached forward, snatched the cigarette out of his hand, took a drag and then stubbed it out.
“Hey!”
“Smoking is bad for you,” she said.
He looked away from her as she fixed her eyes on him; the two different colors disconcerted him. She smiled, stood up and walked over to the bar in the corner. She pulled a bottle of brandy from under it and splashed some into a couple of glasses.
“Why don’t you get the pygmy to clean?”
“Ray-Ray is not a pygmy. He’s a dwarf.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Legs too short, eh?”
“Black!”
“Am I right?”
“Yes,” Iggy said, laughing.
“So are you bringing those drinks over or what?”
She walked back, jingling the whole way, and put a drink down in front of him.
“Mazel Tov.”
He downed the brandy and grimaced, even though he didn’t need to. He set the glass down and pulled his shirt away from his body. He hated when it clung to him. She watched but said nothing.
“So where’ve you been?” she asked instead.
“Out.”
“So not working then?”
He shrugged. His painting was all he really cared about.
“Ah. Strip club or hooker?” she said.
He laughed.
“Some things never change, love.”
“Well, actually they do,” he said, thinking of the recent but persistent appearance of Gabriel.
“What?” Iggy asked. “What has changed?”
“I think I am hallucinating,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
He didn’t want her to think he was going crazy, so he hesitated.
“Black?”
The need to know if he was crazy or having a real visitation overcame his fear.
“Well, I have been seeing Gabriel recently.”
“Gabriel?” she asked.
“The archangel.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.�
��
“Is he beautiful?”
“I don’t know. He scares the shit out of me. Sometimes he’s fifteen feet tall with huge wings, other times he’s a pigeon.”
“A pigeon?” she asked, laughing.
“Look, forget it.”
“No, no. Tell me.”
He finished the brandy but said nothing.
“Is there any reason why you would begin to see Gabriel now?” Iggy asked.
“No. Not that I know of.”
“Well, he’s the angel of annunciation. So maybe you are going to get good news. Or maybe, you just wish really hard that you would.”
“I’m not imagining it,” he said.
“Of course not, darling,” Iggy said. Her tone was soft, like felt rubbing against a freshly shaven chin. He liked it. Liked her.
“There is of course the question of ghosts,” she said.
“Ghosts?”
“Well, yes. Everyone is attended by ghosts,” Iggy said. “What matters is whether we begin to attend to them.”
“How do you mean?”
“With some people, the ghosts are transparencies, barely visible as they hover around, sit at the table next to them and so on. They are particularly hard to see in bright sunlight. Sometimes, when memories are revisited, there is a flickering of light and shadow, image and text across them, and for a moment they flare up and then vanish.”
“So are you saying that ghosts are our memories?”
“Ghosts are the things, the shapes we make with our memories,” she said.
“Ah. So if some are light like . . .”
“Like well-worn lace drapes blowing in the wind.”
Black smiled.
“Yeah, like that. Then what are the other ghosts like? The ones we attend?”
“Like thick black lines drawn in a notebook. They are visible, brooding dark clouds that we drag around with us like reluctant sulky children. We feed them and they grow big and their haunting dominates our lives. We love them and we hate them and we are always measuring them for a coffin, yet we cannot let them die.”