by Mat Johnson
A white motorhome with the blue company logo stretched along its sides stopped in front of the building. Inside there was a miniature office, and we seated ourselves behind the desks as it drove on. I’d never been in one before, but when I was a kid my favorite show was an adventure about a group of scientists who drove an RV around the ruins of the post-Apocalypse. It was easy to remember as we drove through the post-industrial ruins of Grays Ferry, South Philadelphia. Redbrick tract housing with small, trash-laden yards, streets lined with large American cars in need of paint or death, telephone wires that bore sneakers like strange fruit on poplar trees. Too little space for too many things. White people who didn’t look like any white people on TV or in magazines, broken teeth and hair cut jagged and crude, too-bright clothes made of materials nature never intended. White people as far from what they were supposed to be as fact from story. I’d heard about this place all the time growing up but had never been because there was no reason to go to someone else’s ghetto.
Our driver’s face was red and covered with wrinkles, redundant and overlapping like the lines in an etching. He looked like the people outside. His name was Bill and he offered us donuts from a white bag on the dashboard. They were all powdered and small, and after I ate a couple the sugar clumped around my tongue. Bill stopped driving when we arrived at a parking lot of broken concrete and faded parking lines, pulling up to a small row of shops at the back of the lot.
‘I’m going to call in, tell them we’re here.’ When the door closed behind him Cindy expelled air like Houdini coming out of the water trap.
‘I don’t believe this shit!’
‘What’s your problem?’ I asked.
‘Grays Ferry? I didn’t know they wanted us to come down here. That bitch Hutton, she didn’t say nothing. Nothing.’
‘Where’d you think we were going? Society Hill?’
‘This is where that kid got killed.’
‘What kid?’
‘That kid, last summer. This is where those white people shot him.’
‘Why’d he get shot?’ I started lifting the blinds on the window, looking for bad people.
‘Are you sure you’re black? There was stuff about the fighting down here the whole summer. This is where the mayor came down. This is where Farrakhan was going to hold the rally.’
‘Word?’
‘Where the hell were you?’
‘I was out of the country.’
‘Where?’
‘Out of the country.’
‘You was upstate?’ Cindy asked.
‘No!’ I yelled. Cindy bust out laughing, her eyes growing wide as her head pulled back and her finger pointed me out to no one.
‘Nigger, you was upstate, you was on lock-down, don’t even lie.’
Bill came in and drove us towards the front of the parking lot by the street, next to the McDonald’s. We opened up the main door on the side of the vehicle, sat behind the desks, and waited for people to show up. It wasn’t even nine yet. Cold air came through the screen, carrying the smell of fried pork and melting cheese. Cindy started talking about how hungry she was and got Bill to go get food for her. If ten dirty pennies would have bought anything I would have gotten something, too. My paycheck was two days’ coming. ‘You want some of mine?’ Bill asked, and I said no. I couldn’t play myself, begging from a white dude, but I kept looking at Cindy’s food sitting next to me as it disappeared in a quick numb moment while she read a romance novel.
When she was done, Cindy shoved everything back in her bag, crushed it into a ball, and threw it in the trash on her way to the bathroom. When its door closed, I pulled her rubbish from the bin and took out her sandwich paper. Orange hunks of cheese sticking to the paper like melted plastic that I ripped off with my teeth. Buttered muffin crumbs I collected, balling them together in my fingertips into one caked salty mass.
The first people started coming an hour later. They poked their heads in and when they saw us sitting there they looked to Bill, who motioned back to them that it was okay to go to us. They were polite, though they often didn’t want help, just the application, which they stuck into their coats or pocketbooks or bags as if to say ‘You never saw me take this.’ At eleven a short, skinny, brown-haired woman sat across from me and told me in an educated, out-of-place voice about her brain tumor. She was taking an application in case she lived long enough for them to turn her electricity off. ‘Death brings odd comforts,’ she said. ‘All my life I worried about bills.’ I wanted to give her something, but all I had were blank applications and pencils. When she walked out the door I thought, Like Schroedinger’s cat, she’s dead now. She would see David before I would.
By one o’clock a line had formed outside. We had built up a rhythm and the day was going faster than when we were hooked up to the phone lines. I liked working with Cindy because she was rude and it made whoever I sat with nicer because they were happy they’d avoided her. She was also fast since she never explained anything twice or entertained rambling questions, so while I took my time talking with people, Cindy whittled down the line.
During a break between customers, Cindy complained that she needed a smoke. She wouldn’t go outside because she was afraid the white people would come out of their houses and hang her from the telephone lines like a pair of used Pumas. To torture her, I borrowed cigarettes from the carton Bill kept in the glove compartment. I stood by Cindy’s window, puffing up a fog and smiling within it as she gave me the finger. Sucking poison never felt so good. That kept me going until I saw some tattooed pink men in jeans and white undershirts coming down the road. Throwing my half-smoked cigarette down, I ran back on the bus and locked the door behind me as Cindy laughed at me.
The next day we went into West Philly. I tried to do the job right since it was my home, filled with my people. I walked to the meeting spot from my house, happy to get inside the bus before the dark clouds above could fulfill their promise. Out the window was: trash like nobody had invented cans; kids running and screaming while their book bags bounced on behind them; men without hope even at dawn waiting at day-labor lines trying to be asleep while standing in the cold; the smell of grease (food, hair, body); stores that had opened and closed and opened and closed until the titles on the marquees said nothing about the contents. Trolley tracks where there were no more trolleys, just broken and twisted metal embedded into the road. Occasional cobblestones appearing amid the asphalt as stone zits, sidewalks that buckled and cracked underneath the roots of dead trees, maroon broken-brick sand and the sharded glass of alcohol-escape sprinkled on the ground. Every surface covered in the fading graffiti of written screams. Wee-ha, my fucking home, my fucking people. Wee-ha, my fucking source, my own fucking kind. Everything I was, loved, and wanted to run away from.
I was polite but fast so we could help as many folks as possible, because by eight-thirty there was already a line. I wore a tie, hung from a shirt with a collar, so I let my accent shape my words so they would know I was one of them and not a part of the machine, so they would stop being so damn humble and polite to me, like I was an ofay. ‘Excuse me Mr Sir. Excuse me?’ No, fuck that, I’m here to help you. I am you. Spit on me as if I was yourself.
At ten I had my first voice-box in person. She had no teeth and she held the device to her neck like it was an electric razor and she was shaving her throat. I wanted to lift her onto my back and carry her somewhere. Her face was unwashed, and I could see the flaky white lines of tears and saliva on the midnight softness of her skin. So skinny, so small, and she listened, staring, to every word I said. Her face nodding between her wool hat and the faded scarves cloaking her neck and chin from the cold. Eyes that kept looking until they hurt, until it was, Mama, please turn away, Mama, please walk away and heal or die because whatever void is there I can’t hope to fill, whatever pain I am useless to erase.
There were three wheelchair customers that day. They knocked on the door and I went out to the street with the applications to explain it to the
m. The last one came when the rain had started and I hovered over her to cover her from the drops while she finished the forms. Done, I stood inside the shelter of the doorway as she wheeled herself back out. It was a long open parking lot filled with unpaved stretches that she maneuvered. I should have followed her, held something above her as she went. I should have gone home and cooked something for her to devour, a soup thick, salty, and green that made her fall asleep every time she ate it. Cindy yelled for me to come inside and close that damn door.
With the rain going, nobody else arrived. Listening to it hit the roof, I sat in the passenger seat next to Bill. He smoked with the window down and his hand hanging outside, his knuckle hooding his cigarette. When he pulled it in for a drag, the water dripped from his fist onto his shirt.
‘This is my old neighborhood,’ Bill told me.
‘Yeah? You used to live in West Philly?’
‘I used to live right there,’ Bill said, pointing. ‘You can’t really see it from here, it’s behind St Mark’s. I used to go to school’ the hand shifted, ‘there. I used to buy my groceries from … there. I used to jump on the back of the trolley into Center City … there.’
‘I live here now.’
‘Yeah? Nobody I know does anymore. No more jobs.’ The man could take half a fag down with one puff. ‘Y’know, it hurts, really, seeing it like this. I’m not the crying type or nothing, but it hurts. It’s hard to deal with.’ Of course it hurts. It’s pain. Nobody’s feeling happy. Maybe you never should have left. Maybe we never should have come here. Maybe everybody should run so far away they don’t have to see any of it any more. Leave it vacant like half the homes that line the street already are.
I walked back to the main cabin and sat next to Cindy, and she rolled her eyes at me. ‘Why you talking to that honky?’ she asked as she got up for the bathroom. When its door locked, I walked to the trash. There were a few cold fries at the bottom of her lunch bag. Nice and chewy in my mouth.
Dancing
The women’s checks bounced. The temp place messed up, didn’t switch enough to the proper account. The brothers were protected from the error because we always went to the agency to pick up our pay in person instead of waiting for them to mail it out (we were usually broke first). We felt bad for them, but excited and lucky, too. It was decided we should honor the good fortune by getting drunk.
‘I know this jawn, it’ll be perfect. They sell forties for four dollars. They got a little show going on, you ain’t seen nothing like this shit. It ain’t the type of place you tell Lynol about. And the cover’s hardly nothing,’ Clive told us. Reggie said he wasn’t going up in no North Philly gangsta bar. ‘Don’t worry about it, this jawn is cool. I’m telling you,’ Clive insisted. I sided with Clive until Reggie relented, then we were off to Sodom with a tour guide. I was going to get wrecked tonight.
It was dark, it was humid, we were at the front steps of an abandoned row house. Clive knocked on the front door four times and a small wooden window opened up at eye-level.
‘I got three coming in,’ Clive said into it. The window stayed open silently for a moment, then there were sounds of the door unlocking. I was suddenly tired. I wanted to go home to my hovel where the only danger was myself. There were too many locks for anyone to have on one door, endless clicking and absurd disengaging until it finally opened to let us in one at a time.
There had to be three of them on the other side, grabbing us with their thick hands and feeling us down. The smell was as strong as the musk in the lion’s den at the zoo, just not as nice: sweat, the overriding heat of too many bodies in an enclosed space, sperm cold and liquid and going bad on the floor like sour cream, perfume that lays cheap over stank like sugar on shit. No windows, no light but the sparse colored illumination coming from the top of the stairs. A gutted row house, no furniture or separating walls. Space without obstruction except for the black outlines of folding chairs, some with people sitting in them. Shapes that seemed old and accepting of the situation. A few alone but others with female bodies on them, slight liquid movement in the dull darkness. Once we had been searched the guard said, ‘Stay here’ and walked over to the stairwell, shining a flashlight beam along the angle of the steps three times. Another three light flashes down and we were given the clearance to go up.
‘Give ten dollars to the man at the top,’ the guard with the flashlight told us. It was too dark to see his face.
On the second floor we were searched again by a tall, overweight bald brother who rose from a lawn chair to do so. ‘Gimme twenty dollars,’ he said. Even in that light I could see Clive flinch, but he pulled the money out, so me and Reggie followed.
There were women in the room. The round brownness of their bodies blended into the shadow, their shapes revealed only by their movements and the reflection of the few muted lights upon the sides of their wet flesh. There were men. Seated with the expressionless silence of subway riders. The smell was strongest on this floor, its source. Clive started walking to the back of the room and we closely followed. The floorboards hummed with the music, plaster dust fell from the walls to its rhythm. I almost tripped over a patch of plastic lawn grass raised on a platform four inches off the ground; a lady was dancing on it. Leaning away from the mini-stage, I brushed the knee of a woman sitting on a man’s lap. She was leaning forward, her back to him, her hands on her thighs as if she was peeing. I excused myself but she didn’t look up, concentrating instead on the small round circles she was carving into his lap.
We stopped and seated ourselves at a loose cluster of chairs. It began to register that the women in the room were topless, some apparently naked. The surrealism of the nudity of strangers, of their panted breaths.
‘What do we do now?’ Whatever it was I was getting it done and getting out of here.
‘Five dollars, y’all. Five dollars and they grind on your lap for a whole song. Five dollars more for anything extra. Try to get them just when the music starts so you can get your booty worth.’
The room was small, thin, and long and filled with couplings of seated men and the women who pushed their asses into them. Slow-moving crotch riders grinding slurred versions of the beat of the room. Clive waved a folded five-dollar bill to an incoming shape until he had a woman before him. The bill caught between her teeth, her legs spread over his lap, one hand on the back of the chair and another at his groin.
‘You got any money?’ Reggie asked me.
‘A little. I got like ten ones. Fifteen maybe.’
‘I got ten.’
‘I ain’t trying to spend it,’ I told him.
‘Shit, you here.’
‘Yeah, but I’m trying to eat on that.’
The woman on Clive’s lap thrust her tailbone into him like she was trying to slam her asshole through to the chair. She stared at the top of his head like she was landing blows. A young one, long hair that even in the dark looked like a wig, her thin upperbody flanked by the bulbous weight that exploded past her waist and kept going down. She looked like a cousin I had, from Delaware, the one who went to college for accounting. Song over, she stood up, almost getting away before Clive found the next five in his pockets. Past him a woman was holding an old man’s dick in her right hand, his leg the pivot of the flurried flapping of her arm. He raised a wrinkled hand to her face and she kissed it quickly, then lifted her gaze to the ceiling until he slid his claw back down. Old man, old clothes, wearing a hat as if people still wore them any more. I wanted to save her, then him, somehow, from something, but then they kept going, flapping and moaning.
Reggie had a woman on him. Her calf rubbed against mine with the rhythm of her dance, but she didn’t seem to care. Ladies without partners circled the tight space, weaving slowly between the chairs, waiting for one of the seated men to pull on their arms so they could earn some money. Some wore small black G-strings from which hair climbed out. One woman, older and large, wore thick white underpants that glowed in this darkness. Cottonal Y-fronts, I recognized. M
ust have got them in the West Indies; they didn’t sell them in America. I bet she was comfortable.
Because I was alone, ladies began to orbit. When one came close I would turn my head and look past them. Reggie sat like the Lincoln Memorial while the woman on top of him bounced, her small pancake breasts flapping in front of his eyes. Over to their left, a couple stood, her leaning against the wall, panties pulled down to her thighs. She was looking over her shoulder, telling him to hurry up. His hands were on her waist, his ass vibrating like humming bird wings.
‘Hey baby, let me get on there,’ a voice said as she began to straddle me. Fingernails on my neck, weight bearing down on my thighs.
‘I don’t have any money,’ I told her. It didn’t come out as loud as I wanted.
‘It ain’t all about money, baby,’ she told me, pushing her crotch into mine. I could feel it reaching down into me, searching, looking for something to take hold of. A thick arm brushed by my face on its way to the chair and covered my cheek in cold liquid that stunk of spray deodorant and pointless masturbation. The next song had a fast beat, and she leaned forward trying to shake her breasts across my face, showering me in the dead liquid that coated her body. It slipped between my lips and tasted of nail polish remover.
‘Come on, baby, how you feeling?’ My rider reached down at my lap and was greeted only with the empty loose material of my pants. She pushed her hand deeper, farther, eventually locating the flaccid thing that avoided her. She walked off without looking at me.
‘Wow, she did that shit for free?’ Clive asked.
‘Yeah,’ I told him.
‘You the man,’ Clive said. But I was not a man. I was a thing in a hole. Shivering, wondering why I dug myself down in the first place.
I got up to leave. Nobody said anything, so I didn’t offer an explanation. I just concentrated on not touching anyone. I walked by the bar on the way to the stairs; there was a light beneath it that guided me. When I got to the steps the bouncer stopped me and flashed the light downstairs once to clear my departure. While I stood waiting, I saw the woman who had ridden me crouched beneath the bar. She was still naked, looking older in the light. She kneeled like a squirrel, in her hand a large yellow bag of peanut M&M’s that she dug into, throwing the candy up to her mouth. One after the other, tiny mortars, all caught and crunched with joy. She didn’t look at what she was doing, she didn’t even care what color they were. Just staring down at the floor like there was a book there and she could read it.