Eggplant Man

by Margo De Leaver

  The gentleman had a demeanor of both expectancy and patience reflected in his face. He seemed to sense that the banjo player was deep in thought and respectfully declined to interrupt him.

  Eggplant Man felt the stranger was about to say something to him, but he kept his face expressionless, his eyes straight ahead, saying nothing. He just waited, giving him non-verbal permission to proceed. He thought, “Just drop the money in the banjo case, Mister, and go on with your life.”

  “I bet you don’t know ‘Damn Right I Got the Blues’,” the stranger said finally.

  Just hearing the name of the Buddy Guy piece struck a chord deep in Eggplant Man’s soul, from a time that seemed so long ago.

  Buddy Guy was a Louisiana ‘boy,’ just like him. He played his guitar and beat it with drumsticks at the same time. He had heard Guy play in Baton Rouge and had had the honor of sharing the stage with him at the NO Jazz Club when the famed musician passed through Metairie in 1974. As a young teen, Eggplant Man used to hang out at jazz joints waiting to hear the jazz greats as they passed through his town. One of the great highlights of his life was playing at the 10th Annual New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1978. He got to jam with greats like Eubie Blake, James Booker, Charlie Mingus and Roosevelt Sykes (The Honey Dripper).

  Frequently, these jazz greats would let him sit in on a set and play his guitar or banjo on stage with them. His idol was Buddy Guy, but he never got to Guy’s performances in Chicago as he had promised himself. Serving that jail time had gotten in the way.

  Buddy Guy was a legend. Asking him if he knew Buddy’s work was like asking him if he remembered how Ruby smelled… like cinnamon, coconut and ripe honeydew floating in summer sweat.

  “Sweet Jesus!” he said aloud.

  His hand instinctively felt for the tautness of his banjo strings, directing his mind away from other strained areas. The obedient banjo threads robotically surrendered to their master and, unprompted, the melody flowed. The words began to tumble out of his mouth in a smooth Louisiana drawl.

  You damn right, I’ve got the blues,

  From my head, down to my shoes

  You damn right, I’ve got the blues,

  From my head down to my shoes

  I can’t win, cause I don’t have a thing to lose…

  His fingers continued plucking at the guitar strings even after the words ended. The stranger’s head and feet were tapping to the beat, joining him in a sort of exotic trance created by the music. When Eggplant Man finished the last note of his ‘bluesy’ serenade, the man dropped the bill into the banjo case. It was a twenty. As he walked off, still bopping his head, the stranger muttered, “That was all right man, it was all right.”

  Eggplant Man picked up the crisp bill, unfolded and refolded it, and stuck it in the top part of his torn sock. He decided it was enough for the day, closed his banjo case and headed east on 127th Street. It had been a good day.

  He passed a tall brown-skinned lady dressed in different shades of blue. He had noticed her listening to his Buddy Guy rendition. She said nothing, and dropped nothing into his banjo case. He could feel her eyes on him as he walked by, but he made no effort to return her stare.

  CHAPTER 7

  Primal Loss

  It was just past four in the afternoon and it was still hot and muggy in August Harlem. It reminded Ruby of summer in Louisiana, but the smells and sounds were so different. She had always been one who paid attention to smells. Odors brought back vivid and detailed memories, as if the event connected to that smell was occurring in that very moment. As a child, everything she picked up she brought first to her nose: pencils, blocks, dolls, food, paper clips…it didn’t matter. Her nose was like a clearing house before any further action could take place. Ma’Dear would always say, “Baby, you knows you gets a piece of everythin’ you smell, inside you.” Ruby replied, “Yes, Ma’Dear.” Keeping that in mind, Ruby practiced holding her breath at the first hint of an odor that repulsed her. The odor of burnt anything was particularly difficult for her, bringing back the day of her high school prom.

  Ruby had rushed home to tell Ma’Dear that she had finished decorating the dance hall. She decided she was going to wear her hair up after all. More importantly, Jerome, her date and the object of her fantasized romance, had winked at her and said, “See you later, Ruby.” Her already weak knees gave way when she arrived home. Her house was burnt to the ground, a pile of steaming ash, with only two blackened appliances, the stove and refrigerator, still standing upright, as if in defiance to the fates. Her mother and brother were somewhere in the smoking rubble.

  The smell was overwhelming. It was a haunting combination of burnt rubber, wood, fabric, food, flesh and burnt hair. The smell of the hair was the thing that remained indelible, almost alive in her brain. Ruby remembered inhaling deeply. She wanted it to become a part of her.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Abode

  There were still a few more hours of daylight. She was heading downtown to 119th Street. Getting settled in for the night early was routine for Ruby. There was a block between Amsterdam and Broadway that had several abandoned buildings. Even these well boarded-up structures were unable to escape infiltration by those who had nowhere else to go. The poor, the homeless, those floating in nebulous clouds of addiction and those maneuvering through the mental world of dysfunctions and disconnection mingled together in this implausible community. All of them were trying to hold onto or escape their individual nightmare paradigms.

  Ruby stayed in the last building on the block. Several years before, she had managed to pry open a metal sheet from a window in the back alley of the apartment building. Since you had to have an address to qualify for state financial assistance, Ruby had for the past 12 years used this address at the welfare office to receive her Medicaid checks. She would wait for the mailman out front, on the first and the 15th of each month. For his own safety, the postman would arrive in the early morning, before the addicts and hoodlums arose. Ruby had an unspoken agreement with him. He delivered her illicit remunerations each month. Although he was aware of Ruby’s homelessness, his compassion overruled him. He continued the delivery over the years. Each time he would warn Ruby of the dangers of street living. This is how she survived. Ruby cashed her paltry checks at the liquor store on the corner of 125th and Amsterdam.

  The back-alley window was the entrance to a sub-ground level space that had probably been used as an office/apartment for the former apartment manager. Ruby sometimes would imagine that she was the manager of the building and this was her office. Her small frame slid easily under the metal sheet and her feet landed on top of an old splintered wood desk, directly under the window. The metal sheet closed shut behind her.

  It was dark in there, with only a sliver of light shining over the top of another window boarded with wood from the inside. This window was the only other one in the apartment. Ruby had a collection of candles of all sizes, shapes and aromas. She lit three this afternoon. A lot was on her mind. She did not light any of the scented candles. The aromas would distract her and she wanted to vividly recall the events of the day.

  Inside the space was a cot with several old blankets neatly folded on top, a broken wood swivel chair, a refrigerator and small stove, neither of which worked due to lack of electricity in the building. There was a small dilapidated bathroom whose rusty shower faucet continuously trickled a thin stream of cold water. It had broken tiled floors and walls, and a sometimes-flushing toilet, with the help of added water to both the bowl and the tank behind it. The sink did not work at all. Ruby kept bottles of water which she collected from a faucet in the alley behind Wong’s Chinese Take-out, two blocks away.

  She also had a huge collection of newspapers stored in the non-working kitchen. These served a double purpose. Paper proved to be great for keeping warm. On exceptionally cold nights, Ruby would pile a combination of five Daily News and five Amsterdam News papers on
top of her, two blankets underneath her, and then two blankets on top of the newspapers. This worked. She also read the headlines on all of the newspapers… only the headlines. Ma’Dear would say, “The whole story is in the headlines, Baby.”

  Ruby sat on the cot and brought her left hand to her nose. This caused her fingers to tremble slightly. The lingering scent of the eggplant skin rested there. She recalled the color and texture of the skin gleaming in the hot Harlem sun. The taste of her mother’s special eggplant, peppers, and tomato dish flooded her mouth, which had already begun to water.

  Another scent impatiently waited to burst forth. She knew what it was. It refused to be ignored. Her index finger instinctively touched her left cheek and traced the path the calloused finger had coursed earlier that day. Her hand then returned faithfully to her nose, obeying some unspoken order. The smell of cloves, tobacco and Belgium chocolate mingled with summer sweat aroused Ruby’s olfactory. The manliness of this mélange of scents was captivating.

  It had been a long time since Ruby had allowed her thoughts to venture into that realm. All of this thinking, combined with the day’s events, was unsettling and made her tired. A sensation was growing inside her chest, warm and thick like syrup and slowly drizzling over her heart. “Painless,” she thought.

  Ruby did not want to worry about this new, pleasurable feeling. She felt a little dizzy, perhaps giddy, and could feel the sandman closing her eyes. Her fatigue overcame her. There had been too much thinking today.

  Ruby removed her khakis and tee shirt, folded them and placed them into her faux dresser, made from two cardboard boxes. She kept her bra on this evening, in an effort to contain that tingly sensation in her chest. It had now spread to her breasts. She did remove her panties. Noticing a whitish discharge in the crotch, she methodically washed them in the one stream of cold water that continuously flowed from the shower. She used a harsh brown bar soap.

  On Friday nights, and on some Saturday mornings, St. Thomas the Apostle Church—on 118th Street just west of St. Nicholas Avenue—distributed to the homeless items like soap, shampoo, toilet paper, candles and other miscellaneous items. Ruby treasured her coarse soap. She used it to clean everything, including her face and body. Today, though, she was careful not to wash her scar. Instead, she ran her right index finger over the length of her lesion.

  She managed to extinguish the candles one by one with her right thumb and index finger, allowing the smell of Eggplant Man to be sealed there by the warm wax. She slid into her makeshift bed, covered up with the newspaper of the day, and let her eyelids softly meet. Her right hand remained at smelling distance from her nose. For the first time in 20 years, Ruby had forgotten to read the headlines before going to sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  No Escape

  mary wont ya come out of yonder tree mary cuz i want you down here with me see i know the place with the good fried chicken with biscuits and gravy and all the mixin’s hey mary, don choo wanna? mary wont you come wit me? mary don ya hide under all them books sweet little girl with them bad good looks see i know the place …

  From Lyrics Mania

  Eggplant Man could not get Ruby out of his head. The intensity of her brief yet compelling, hazel-eyed stare remained with him, flashing back sporadically throughout the day.

  His gastric juices began to flow. Now, he felt hungry. Knowing that he had missed lunch at the soup kitchen on 125th and St. Nicholas, he reversed his direction and began heading west on 127th, telling himself he would go to the Down-home stand on 125th street that boasted ‘Southern-Style’ fast food. Subtly looking north and south on each block, he pretended he wasn’t searching, but secretly hoped to see Ruby walking there. He gazed down at his sock and saw the slight bulge of the 20-dollar bill he had placed there. It was enough to buy two meals for two people. “Dinner and breakfast,” he thought. He smiled to himself at the absurdity of his fantasy. Ruby was nowhere in sight. Little did Eggplant Man know, Ruby was busy elsewhere, having her own thoughts.

  Not fully acknowledging his disappointment, he arrived at the food-stand, ordered two pieces of fried chicken and a biscuit with gravy. Instead of talking, he pointed to the items on the menu taped to the counter. The total cost for all was one dollar and seventy-five cents. None of it tasted like ‘down-home’ anything. Hungry, he wolfed down the impostors.

  Already disappointed at not seeing Ruby, he eyed the two cooks in the kitchen suspiciously. One was Asian and the other Latino. Eggplant Man sent the pair a non-verbal message: “Are you kidding me with this food?” They avoided his gaze, both guiltily looking downward at the bubbling old cooking oil.

  “Ain’t nothing like the chicken at Willie Mae’s Scotch House on St. Ann’s Street in New Orleans,” he thought.

  Willie Mae had the best fried chicken he had ever tasted. She was in that kitchen frying it up all by herself. Ms. Mae used a secret ingredient she wouldn’t share with anyone. “It’s just love, baby,” she would say. People would come from hundreds of miles away just to taste that love.

  It was starting to cool off a bit, so Eggplant Man considered his sleeping plans for the evening. The mission would already be full by this time, so it would have to be a night in the park or in a doorway. Mr. Lee, owner of Bubba’s Barber shop, did not like it when he spent the night in front of the barber shop. Most of the barbers that worked at the shop were black. There was one Puerto Rican guy, but the owner was Mr. Lee.

  In a thick Chinese accent, Mr. Lee would shout, “Not good for business! You can’t sleep here!”

  But Eggplant Man wanted to stay there and reminisce about the day’s events. He wondered where Ruby was and what she was thinking.

  The shop used to be owned by Old Joe, from Mississippi. Joe had cut hair for most of his life, since he was 10. His father, Joe Brown, Sr., had owned a shop in Tupelo, Mississippi, right across from Oxford, where Elvis Presley was born. Joe would say that his Daddy cut the hair of most of the black boys in Tupelo, and many of the white boys too, who grew up in Tupelo. He was the best barber in town. They called him Poppa Joe.

  With the civil rights movement of the 60’s, things got very tense in Tupelo and Poppa Joe was forced to close his shop. He had slipped and made a racial comment in front of a little white boy whose hair he was cutting. After closing his shop, Poppa Joe fell into a state of depression and suffered a heart attack, dying soon afterwards.

  Joe, whom everyone called Bubba, then came north to seek work as a barber and had been there in Harlem for years. He would give Eggplant Man odd jobs around the shop and let him sleep there whenever he wanted.

  From time to time, Bubba managed to convince him to let him cut off an inch or two of his hair. Eggplant Man liked having his hair at least four inches long in an “afro” crown style. When he was in prison, it was mandatory to keep his hair very short. The prison barber had made it a point to nick his scalp each time he cut his hair. Once free, Bubba decided to let his hair grow.

  When Bubba wasn’t cutting hair, he and Eggplant Man, known to him as LeRoy, would talk for hours about Jazz, the Blues and women. Both were big fans of Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Lady Day and Louis Armstrong. At the end of a good day, Eggplant Man would play “St. Louis Blues” on his banjo and Bubba would sing the lyrics.

  I hate to see that evening sun go down

  I hate to see that evening sun go down

  Cause my lovin’ baby done left this town

  If I feel tomorrow like I feel today

  If I feel tomorrow like I feel today

  I’m gonna pack my trunk and make my getaway

  A Ruby thought flashed across his mind. “What if she don’t come back?” he thought. He felt a slight tightening in his throat and then quickly returned his thoughts to Bubba.

  Six years ago, when Bubba’s mother fell ill, he decided to go back home to Tupelo, to take care of her. When she died, he sold his shop in Harlem and stayed i
n Mississippi to reconnect with his family. He had always talked about going back home.

  Eventually, he did. Eggplant Man missed his only friend and had not spoken with anyone for the six years since his buddy had left.

  He decided to sleep on top of some wood planks in the alley behind the shop. Piled about four feet high, the wood was left over from the renovation of a clothes shop located a few doors down from the barber shop. He removed his jacket and rolled it up, forming a crude pillow, then climbed easily onto the makeshift lumber bed. He laid on his good side, rested his head on his jacket, checked his sock for his money, and closed his eyes. His hand sought his groin as he allowed his thoughts to drift to Ruby.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lured

  Ruby tossed and turned for most of the night. A song Ma’Dear often used to sing kept playing in her head.

  A good man is hard to find, you always get

  the other kind

  Just when you think that he’s your pal

  You look for him and find him foolin’

  around some other gal

  – en you rave, you even crave to see him

  layin in his grave

  So if you man is nice, take my advice…

  A Good Man is Hard to Find, Alberta Hunter- lyrics, Lovie Austin- composer

  When she awoke the next morning, Ruby did not feel rested and was annoyed with herself for waking up so late. It was already 9:30 AM, which meant she had missed the 7 AM garbage rounds. She moved quickly toward the bathroom, almost stepping on a mouse darting across the floor in the opposite direction. Ruby never attempted to interrupt or harm any creature she categorized as a survivor. There seemed to be a mutual respect between them and her. Flies were the only exception. No qualms about putting an early end to their twenty-one day lives.