Baby Brother's Blues

by Pearl Cleage

  Brandi wasn’t down for all that. She was a dancer and she was good at it. By the time she was sixteen, men were throwing five-dollar bills at her and she was able to move up to a classier place that had a tiny, dimly lit private room for anything more serious than a lap dance. At the new club, there was a small stage with a ramp that ran out into the audience and a gleaming silver pole. Brandi had no experience with pole dancing, but one of the other girls showed her the basics and told her to improvise.

  “What you worried about?” she said. “With the body you got, all you gotta do is grin and shake that ass.”

  Brandi liked the pole and she got good at it. She would slither and slide around it, loving the cool feel of the metal between her thighs and the whoops of the men watching as she slowly turned herself upside down, spread her legs wide, and shook that ass for all it was worth. That’s when men started throwing tens, but Brandi still wanted more. Neighborhood clubs were fine, but she wanted access to the places where the celebrities and athletes went to party. Where you might see Ludacris or Usher or Sleepy Brown at a table down front. Where Ray Lewis might pull up in a stretch limo the night before the Super Bowl, or Allen Iverson might stop in when the Sixers came to town.

  Brandi was looking for the big time, and as soon as she turned eighteen, she found it. A club near the airport put out the word that they needed experienced dancers and she went over to check it out. Their setup impressed her. A large main floor had tables for fifty or sixty people, two stages, and a bar that could easily accommodate twenty or thirty more. The DJ booth was a tiny cubicle of light with an amazing array of machines that made sure the music kept bangin’, and the dancers could even change in a clean, well-lit dressing room with mirrors everywhere. Brandi had worked at one place where the dancers had to just go into the bathroom, take off their street clothes, and get to work. That made her feel cheap. This made her feel classy.

  At her interview, the manager, a tall, thin black man who had a nervous habit of looking over his shoulder every few minutes, made it clear that none of the dancers were required to have sex with customers, but that sometimes they had some very special people coming through who took a liking to one dancer or another. In those cases, the manager would discreetly let the girl know what was up and she was free to take the customer to the VIP room and work out an arrangement that was mutually satisfactory. On those occasions, the girls who said yes to these special requests were expected to kick back 25 percent of what they made to the manager and keep the rest.

  “We have standard rates,” he said, showing Brandi the lushly appointed VIP room with its leather couches and deep-pile carpeting. In the corner was a pole like the ones downstairs. “One of the other girls will tell you how much for whatever it is you do extra.”

  “I do that,” Brandi said, pointing at the pole.

  “That’s not extra,” the manager said. “Every other bitch on the block can work a pole.”

  “Can they work it good enough to make you come just by watching?”

  He stopped and looked at her. She didn’t blink.

  “Show me,” he said, flopping down in the chair closest to the pole and hitting a switch that filled the room with the sound of Lil’ John and the East Side Boys. Brandi dropped her purse, kicked off her boots, and slid her jeans down over her hips. She had deliberately worn a bright red G-string for this audition, and under her tight white T-shirt, her breasts were bare.

  The manager watched her with a bored expression. He had seen so many naked women, it took a lot to impress him. She strolled over to the pole slowly, reached out and encircled it with her arm, and then leaned over to lick it like an all-day sucker. The manager was watching her pointy pink tongue just the way she knew he would. This was her shot at getting to the next level and she was ready. More than ready. She hooked her leg around the pole and began her routine. By the time she finished, the manager’s eyes were glazed. She grinned at him and he grinned back.

  “Close enough, baby,” he said, unzipping his fly. “Now come on over here and finish me off.”

  After that, Brandi became a regular in the VIP room. Sometimes she had sex with the guys, sometimes she just danced for them, but she was making plenty of money either way. As required, she kicked back to the manager, and after that first time, he never requested sex from her again. He had a serious lady friend who popped in frequently, unannounced, and she did not play. The rumor was that once she found her man having sex with a dancer who should have known better. Miss Girl pulled a razor, cut the girl’s butt up so bad she couldn’t work anymore, and told her the next time she’d get her face.

  The girl left town, and after that, the manager couldn’t even pay any of the other women to have sex with him. They were more scared of his girlfriend than they were of being broke or fired. Disappointed, but undaunted, he contented himself with the new girls who hadn’t heard the story yet. Brandi didn’t care. She had traded what she had for what she wanted, and from where she stood, this job was well worth a onetime afternoon quickie with the boss. She’d have given up more, but she was glad she didn’t have to. Her future looked nothing but bright.

  After two years at the club, she had started working with the manager selling a little coke to her regulars. She knew he was involved with some shady characters, but all she ever did was sell what he gave her. Who he got it from was none of her business, until he double-crossed a hard-eyed man with no sense of humor who tortured him for two days before putting a bullet in his brain and coming to look for Brandi. She gave him what she was holding and told him everything she knew, which wasn’t much. The hard-eyed man took pity on her, decided on rape instead of murder, and told her to get her fine ass out of what was now his club.

  Terrified, she hid out with her cousin Madonna for a couple of weeks to regroup. The problem was, her cousin lived in West End, and once you crossed that boundary, you were subject to the absolute rule of Blue Hamilton. That was fine for some people, but if she wanted somebody to tell her what to do, she’d get married. It wasn’t that Brandi didn’t understand the whole godfather thing. She respected Mr. Blue, she really did. It was just that she preferred to take her chances on the outside, where things were a little looser when it came to how you made your money.

  She had to lay low long enough to let that hard-eyed guy forget about her. She knew it wouldn’t be forever, but for now, the high-end clubs were off-limits. That was a real problem. All she knew how to do for money was dance. She couldn’t mooch off Madonna much longer and she sure didn’t want to become a full-time prostitute. She was down to her last ten bucks when she saw a “Dancers Wanted” sign in the window at Montre’s, four whole blocks over the West End line. It wasn’t what she wanted, but she needed the job and they said she could start that night. So she did.

  Eight months later, she was still there. She was counting the days until a year had passed and Hard Eye would have moved on to mess with some other unfortunate soul. She still swabbed down the pole with an antibacterial wipe before she got on it, even though the other dancers bitched about her thinking “her pussy must be made of gold or somethin’.” Most of all, she still couldn’t believe how cheap the patrons of this place were, and how much shakin’ and grinnin’ they expected before they would part with their little sweaty George Washingtons.

  But that was about to change. She could feel it. General Richardson didn’t remember her, but she knew exactly who he was. She had met him when Mr. Blue had helped Madonna handle a problem she was having with that fool King James. They didn’t actually meet, per se. General was just there in the room when Brandi told Mr. Blue what was going on and asked him to help her cousin, who was afraid for her life and hiding out at her mama’s house.

  Blue said he would help and there’d been no more trouble, so there was no reason for Brandi to go back to his place of business. Sometimes when she went to the twenty-four-hour beauty salon in West End, she’d see General driving that big black Lincoln around and think that was the kind of man
she needed. Somebody who could take her places, spend some money on her. She’d never even been to Vegas and she was almost twenty-five years old!

  She wished she had spoken to him that night at Mr. Blue’s after she got through talking about Madonna, but she hadn’t had a chance to make any introductions. She’d told herself back then that if she ever ran into him again, she’d get in his face until he sat up and took notice. Well, she thought to herself with a smile, she sure did that. She didn’t know what it was about that damn mark on her ass that got his attention, but when she asked him if he wanted to kiss it, he looked like he had seen a ghost, handed her another hundred-dollar bill, and left. That was a total of two hundred dollars and he’d never laid a hand on her. She didn’t make that much for having sex. Not that she was hookin’! There were just times when a girl had to do what she had to do to make ends meet. Brandi was tired of that kind of life. She knew she could do better and she knew General could help her do it. All she had to do was grin and shake that ass. Just like always.

  She snubbed out her cigarette, pinched her nipples to life, and headed back out to the pole.

  6

  This was not Blue’s favorite part of the life he had chosen, but this was the essence of it. It was his willingness to do what had to be done that made it possible for him to impose order on one small southwest Atlanta neighborhood. He used to say this life was chosen for him, as if he had no choice in the matter, but that wasn’t exactly true. Nothing happened to Blue Hamilton by accident or coincidence. His lives—this one, and the others he could remember—were ruled by the same vast organizing principle that connected all things to one another and to themselves in one endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.

  His lives were no more or less extraordinary than anyone else’s. The extraordinary thing about Blue was that he remembered them. He carried forward clear memories of where he had been and what he had done. He knew there was still penance to be done and scores to be settled that went back centuries, crossed oceans, survived slavery, and now brought him to West End to try to make some sense of himself and his people.

  In the front seat, General kept his eyes on the two-lane blacktop, looking for landmarks. As they passed an abandoned Shell station, he slowed the car and glanced in the rearview mirror. Blue met his eyes and nodded. General turned the big Lincoln left and eased it down the unpaved stretch that would dead-end at the trailer where the man they were looking for was hiding.

  “Cut the lights,” Blue said.

  General’s immediate obedience to the command plunged the narrow road into sudden darkness. Without being asked, he lowered the windows so they could hear anything out of the ordinary and popped the locks on all four doors while they were still too far away for the dull thump to alert a careful listener. As was his habit, Blue was dressed in a black cashmere overcoat and a dark suit. His one concession to the mission that brought them to this place was replacing his customary white shirt and dark tie with a black turtleneck sweater. His dark clothing and the Africa-dark skin of his high-cheekboned face made him almost invisible against the car’s ebony interior. Only his startlingly unexpected blue eyes were visible as he slowly pulled on a pair of tight black leather gloves.

  At the end of the road, the trailer came into view, a pitiful wreck of a hideout, perched precariously on a foundation of the same crumbling gray cinder blocks that supported the rusty shell of a pickup truck that had been parked there long enough to have kudzu creeping along its front and rear bumpers like a country lake lapping gently at the edges of an abandoned rowboat. There were lights on inside, and in the stillness, they could hear the television blaring Monday Night football. General eased the car to a stop and cut the motor. For a minute, neither man moved. From the trailer’s open windows came the sound of televised cheering as some NFL gladiator broke for daylight.

  Blue wondered if the man inside was alone. There were no cars around to indicate company, but Blue never made assumptions based on such a cursory review of the possibilities. Such hideouts were often visited by the loser friends of the loser fugitive who was squatting temporarily on his way to oblivion. Sometimes, these men on the run were also able to tap the sympathies of desperate women. Blue had no desire to interrupt a sexual encounter that had nothing to recommend it for a spectator or a participant.

  The sounds of the game were the only thing disturbing the deserted patch of pine trees. They had found the spot on a tip from somebody who had decided this guy’s crimes warranted breaking the street code that held a snitch to be only one small step above a child molester. The fugitive had abused his wife for years, sending her to the emergency room with a variety of broken bones, two concussions, and one near-fatal miscarriage brought about by being kicked in the stomach repeatedly during her seventh month of pregnancy.

  When he attacked their ten-year-old daughter in a drunken frenzy, his wife finally found the courage to move into a safe house in West End with her children. This placed her under Blue’s protection. At that point, General had gone to see the guy to make sure he understood that her safety was no longer simply her personal concern. He communicated Blue’s policy regarding violence against women and children and told the guy not to come anywhere near West End.

  Two weeks later, the guy called to beg his wife’s forgiveness, told her he had found God and was a changed man. He was sorry for the things he had done and only wanted a chance to apologize to her, face-to-face, and beg her forgiveness. Relieved, but worried, she told him to meet her at a busy restaurant around the corner from the West End News. Shamefaced, he told her he was not allowed in West End and suggested they meet at their old apartment, where he was still staying. When she hesitated, he began to cry and beg her to trust him. The sound of his racking sobs touched her heart and she agreed to meet him the next day at noon.

  When she arrived, he attacked her, gagged her, stripped her naked, tied her spread-eagled to the bed they had shared as husband and wife, then raped her with a broom handle and cut off her nipples with a kitchen knife. The cops who found the body the next day told Blue it was the worst thing they had ever seen. She left behind five children, all fathered by the murderer, who fled for his life. Three days later, when he showed up at his buddy’s trailer, with a long story about his bitch wife putting him out over some bullshit, he still had her blood on his clothes. Pretending not to see the stains, the buddy allowed the murderer to crash and the next day headed for West End to give Blue Hamilton the information he was looking for all over the neighborhood. Friendship was one thing, but this guy was just plain wrong.

  General waited patiently for Blue to give him the signal. In this moment, patience was more than a virtue. It was a necessity. A male figure passed in front of the window, turned on the light in the kitchen, grabbed a beer, popped the top, and shuffled back to the television. He was clearly in the trailer alone.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror, General again met Blue’s eyes. In the gloom, they glittered, hard and cold like sapphires. General slid his hand into his overcoat pocket and felt the familiar weight of the gun in his hand.

  “All right.” Blue’s voice had the low rumble of thunder in the far distance. “It’s time.”

  7

  In the beginning, they had ridden in the front seat together, but General felt Blue should sit in the back. “How they gonna know you’re a star if you don’t act like one?” was how he explained it to Blue.

  After that, Blue sat in back and General drove. The arrangement suited them both. It gave Blue a chance to be alone with his thoughts and General an unobstructed view of what was going on around them at any given moment.

  “You need to stop anywhere?” General asked as he headed the big Lincoln back onto the interstate.

  “No,” Blue said quietly. “Let’s just go on to the house.”

  That was fine with General. He trusted Blue to make all the decisions on nights like this. He never questioned or second-guessed his friend’s judgment. He did what he was asked to do
. General was a soldier and they were at war. What he and Blue had done tonight was just part of what it took to win.

  The two men had been friends since elementary school, back when everybody still called General by his given name, James. They had grown up on the same block; learned to ride the same bike; lost their virginity (with different girls on different nights) in the backseat of the same used Chevrolet. Blue had started calling him General in the ninth grade because whenever they got to the playground, James always took charge of whatever game they were playing. Everybody laughed at first, but the name stuck.

  Although General was two years older, they were as close as brothers, and when Blue had his first hit record at sixteen and needed to go on the road to promote it, of course General offered to drive him around to all the little clubs that were clamoring for him to perform. That trip turned into another and another and pretty soon it was a full-time job. General never looked back. The clubs were paying good money and General could always make the owners give up what they owed. As Blue’s road manager, by then he was legally armed. It was a cash business, and the law acknowledged the need for protection of assets. He spent a lot of time at the firing range until he got good at it, but he’d never had to shoot anybody about their money. The killin’ shit came later. But on the road? Plenty pussy, plenty cash, and a friend who was more like a brother to share the adventure. Even at the time, General knew this would be the period they’d look back on as “the good old days,” and he enjoyed every bit of it.

  So did Blue. He was singing better and better and the women in the audience were acting like he was all five of the Temptations in their prime. Women would rush the stage and toss their panties and fall out and Blue would just smile and keep on singing. He wore sunglasses during most of the show. Blue knew the women wanted to see his famous blue eyes, but he didn’t want people to be so busy staring they didn’t hear the music. He’d take the glasses off for the last number and the women would go crazy.