Drop

by Mat Johnson

  With all the clippings I could muster collected, I made copies of my portfolio and sent them out. I could only afford six books, instead of the nine I wanted, but didn’t it feel good writing London, U.K. on something, knowing that in a few days these pieces of me would be there as well?

  After mailing them off at 30th Street, I was so excited I walked over to the Borders at Rittenhouse Square. It was there, browsing British magazines to prepare my mind for the culture shock of reimmersion, that I saw her on the cover of the latest issue of AdForum. Plaits poking around her head like an asterisk, barefoot and dressed only in a burlap sack. My Fi. Look at her there, that face I used to kiss and put food in – and singing, no less. The headline said ‘Making Yourself Heard.’ Her mouth was open so wide she could have swallowed herself, or anyone else foolish enough to get too close to her.

  The article barely had anything on Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Musical; it was focused on West End and theater advertising in general, but it did have a sidebar that mentioned the show. The smaller article was about the importance of shying away from the use of individual members in promotion, due to the reality of rotating casts. ‘This April, Apricot Advertising learned this rather painful lesson when the visual focus of much of their print advertising, Topsy, portrayed by actress Fionna Otubanjo (see cover), was replaced by Alice Collins, who held the role the previously.’ I was smiling. Big. Not because I was happy for Fionna’s misfortune, but because I didn’t seem to care at all. With that knowledge, my smile grew grander. If the silence of books wasn’t sacred, I might have screamed my joy aloud. Then, when I saw what was across the page, I almost did. What I took at first to be another random ad turned out to be much more. A contest. My sign had been delivered.

  It was Lionskins, the condom company, trying to expand their market to the next generation of fornicators. The challenge was to come up with an innovative campaign of print ads to be aimed at the male 16–34 demographic. The sole qualification necessary was that you were a member of an independent British advertising firm. The award was £4,000 and the celebrated glory of public victory. Finally, something worth contacting Margaret for. I would ask her for the permission to use her address and the name Urgent. It was on.

  Alex said I could borrow her camera equipment; it wasn’t like she was getting any opportunities to take it out. I would still need to pay for film, development, scanning, and the rental time plugging away at a computer to get the job done. If I stayed on the ramen diet, I could make that happen with the next check. Those damn noodles had proved particularly cost effective: not only were they providing a cheap lunch, they were also ruining my appetite for dinner as well. But for anything to happen, I needed my money. My check had to clear.

  Office rumor said: the temp agency didn’t screw up account procedure last pay, they just didn’t have any money. That sounded pretty crazy, since we’d found out from a temp in accounting that the agency was paid $12.57 for every $6.30 hour we made, but we could all sense it was true. The broke can smell the broke. To make it worse, this week the agency not only had to pay our money for this check, they were going to have to cover the back wages for the two-thirds of the temps who’d been stiffed the week before. Reggie started taking bets on the checks not clearing, but then realized that if he won nobody would be able to pay him.

  Pay dispersal time was one o’clock Thursday afternoon, over on 33rd and Arch behind the railroad tracks. If we were going to play musical chairs with the cash, nobody wanted to get caught standing up, so at twelve-thirty the office cleared out. Lynol and me were supposed to stay, but ten minutes after the rest of the temps had left, Mrs Hutton took her purse and walked out to lunch. Lynol followed, telling me he was going to the bathroom. Thirty seconds later, when I snuck out, I could see his lying-ass running a block in front of me.

  Everybody was there; we could barely fit into the office. Every temp from the electric company had turned out. Some people I hadn’t even known were scabs until I saw them there, hungry for their money. Temps from other sites too, maybe from the gas company, crowded in as well, looking just like us but with different faces. Clive, who hadn’t bothered to show up for work that day, had decided to make an appearance here instead. He wore a dress shirt, but only the two buttons at the bottom were done. That skinny chest had more hair than I would have thought it did. For pants he wore pajama bottoms. For shoes, his bare feet sat loosely in black rubber galoshes.

  Instead of Mary, the receptionist, just handing out the checks from her desk drawer, smiling and waving and not even having to bother to get off the phone, reinforcements had arrived. In the eye of the mob of eighty some people who surrounded him, a big white guy waved a fist of check-filled envelopes over his head where nobody could reach them, his stomach hanging over his waist like a trash bag filled with water. Seeing the money, the room got quiet. The boss man started the discussion by apologizing for the previous week’s mistake, mentioning the possibilities for repayment of insufficient funds fees, how the agency’s greatest asset was its workers, how he would like to give his sincerest apologies—

  ‘Is that all?’ Cindy asked. Cackles and laughs. Aqua-belly blushed.

  ‘No. No, it’s not. That isn’t all. I also brought donuts,’ he said. Mary went into an office and pulled them out. They came in large pink boxes that seemed awkward in her arms, but nobody bothered to help her. When they were placed on a table at the far wall Mary turned around and said, ‘Dig in,’ but the only person who went over there was Clive. His hair was knotted and unpicked, his eyes thick and glazed like the donut he grabbed for, all pretense of hiding his piper status gone. Reaching for another before the first one was completely in his mouth, he ate standing, staring at the blank wall as if it were a goldfish tank. I don’t think he knew where he was.

  Somehow it was decided that alphabetical order was the fairest, then the checks were handed out. Adams. Snatch, run. The sound of feet banging down carpeted floor, doors slamming behind him. Anderson. Snatch, run. The sound of feet banging down carpeted floor, doors slamming behind her. Anthony. Snatch, run. The sound of a man banging his knee into the corner of a desk as he ran for the door.

  ‘People, people, I can assure you on this, there is enough money in the account. The last pay was an anomaly. Everyone will be paid. I can guarantee all of you that everyone’s check will clear. I haven’t even paid myself yet,’ he said, holding his check up to the room. I tried to see the name on it through the cellophane window but the type was too small. ‘Honky needs to get busy before I plant a foot in his ass,’ someone said beside me, followed by hmmphs in the affirmative. But that was lazy. His being white and us being black didn’t have much to do with anything; there were tons of bourgeois negroes in this city, more than most, and broke-ass crackers were everywhere. It was just that he was full, and we were hungry. That was the pain of this place to me: not that I had been full once and had been reduced to hunger, but that hunger is what I always was and no matter what I consumed, this reality would always be a paycheck, a payment, a meal away.

  ‘Chris Jones.’

  Check in hand, damned if I ain’t running. People between me and the bank were casualties to be apologized to later. I didn’t want to be Clive any more. Out in the street, my sprint gained form. Head down, nose to my chest. Aiming north up 33rd Street towards Market, pushing off the balls of my feet, hoping I wasn’t pacing myself too fast but refusing to slow down. Carlton Jones, who got his check right before me, pulled up in a black Jeep, air fresheners hanging like grapes from his rearview window. Slowing briefly at the stop sign beside me, he looked my way and I caught his eyes. Ride? Wheels started spinning, skidmarks writing themselves on the road in front of me. F you, too.

  At Market Street, I turned left and headed downtown. The agency’s bank was the main branch of CaneState, by the Clothespin and City Hall. If you were to shoot an arrow from my face straight seventeen blocks down, it would land on the middle of its front doors. Oh so free, running like God made me to. Busine
ss shoes slapping and tie blowing over my shoulder like a dragon tongue. In my hand the glorious crinkling of paycheck cellophane, the kind that had my name underneath it. People in cars looked at me as if I was doing something important. Move man, move. They could feel it, too, that I had to win this one. White people checked to see if there was a cop behind me. Passing 30th Street Station, I thought of catching a taxi, but cars were slow, cars had laws. And I was keeping all this money, had to: couldn’t be giving away magic beans. Look at me. I was running, finally moving again. Oh shit, am I alive? How long had it been? Knees so high they tagged my nipples, hands chopping the air to punish it for getting in my way. Check in my hand. Best part of the day because there it was, right there, in my hand.

  Temps I was passing. First some of the old ladies, some of the Browns and the Davises, I recognized them from the office. Cindy was in there with them. Seeing me coming, she tried to speed up her walking, but it was useless. Her legs had forgotten swift movement and she had on high heels anyway. One of the women, last-named Baumen from accounts receivable, tried waving me over, like she had to tell me something. Chris, wait, you forgot … She wasn’t playing me for a sucker. I waved back happy and kept going going gone, running through a red light and dodging a SEPTA bus, the number 64. It honked, I kept moving. We were both happy.

  At 22nd and Market, I passed a bunch of young guys, Douglasses, Jeffersons, and Hamiltons. Look at how content they were, smoking and laughing as if their checks had already cleared. Weren’t the Washingtons screwed? Crossing to the other side of the street, I tried to run silent, keeping behind a UPS truck that was going about my speed. Hugging its side, making sure not to get squished between it and a parked car. I had just made it past them when the truck stopped. Flying out beyond it, I was revealed. When I looked over my shoulder they had seen me.

  ‘Yo black, wait up! Wait up!’ Giving the nationalist fist, I kept running, leaping over a pothole the size of a sauna before it could take me down. A couple of them started to run after me. There was a guy getting out of a car ahead, his door cutting off my path. The sidewalk was crowded, the gaps between the parked cars too narrow to reach it at this speed. Moving my legs faster, I cut in front of the moving car to my left and made a racetrack out of the meridian, one foot for each white line. Taxis swerved at me, cars honked, people cursed, but it was all worth it because at 16th Street I looked over my shoulder and the brothers were gone, lost in the crowd. On the street, Carlton Jones’s black Jeep circled the cop-infested block, searching for a place to park. I pushed through the bank doors, my chest was thumping like it held something living inside.

  Under the Bridge

  I got bit. Lord have mercy, got bit two times. Got all excited about the first one, planning my office and running off to the travel store on 22nd Street to search for Lemonlight’s address in an A-Z (I could take the Circle Line to the Victoria Line from Durban Road, Back to Brixton, Back to Brixton). When, boom, I come home two days later and there’s another letter in the box asking for Christopher. This time, a major player. Sublime Advertising. Ain’t that something? Both letters with the same message for me: interested, possibility, make an appointment when I cross the Atlantic, soon. Look at that. Two pieces of paper from fairyland, one for each back pocket. All I had to do was win the Lionskins contest, collect the prize money, get my ticket, and the world was mine again. As tight as she probably was, Margaret would probably buy me a ticket if she knew that prize money was coming to pay her back. So, again, all that was left was doing this. All that was left was to win.

  Selling men condoms was too easy. There was so much shit out there you could catch, it was a wonder boys didn’t have them grafted to their foreskins. A book in the library, amid the section on infectious diseases, featured a whole centerfold of clinical shots of inflicted genitalia. Thick multicolored secretions, pus-filled blisters, painful bloated distortions as virus-mutilated flesh. There was one disease that bore canals from your urethra through your dick’s head. They showed a picture of the afflicted taking a piss. The top of his cock shot liquid from twenty different holes like a sprinkler. Forget death, that shit was scary. If I could have, I would have had that photo scanned and laid out. Even the British ad council wasn’t that lenient. What I needed was an image that invoked the same unmentionable dangers of unprotected sex without resorting to shameless scare tactics and putting people off their tea. More than that, what was needed was an image that could put forth the unquestionable ‘reality’ that Lionskins was the only condom to get the job done. An image that immediately represented sex, illicitness, and expertise of the intimate. It was hooker-hunting time.

  Clive was a big help: he was the only one in the office not pissed at me since they found out my check was the sole one that cleared. Lack of funds had forced him into detox; broke never looked so good on a man. Reggie, on the other hand, was coming back from lunch with nothing to eat but a bag of barbecue potato chips and a peach soda. He wouldn’t even look at me. Loose, well-worn Help Wanted sections from the Daily News and Inquirer were strewn carelessly around the office, but nobody had quit so far. A job you might get paid at was better than no job at all.

  Clive provided me with a thirty-minute lecture on the history of prostitution in the Delaware Valley, not stopping till Natalie sat down next to us and he got embarrassed. There were five-hundred-buck-an-hour hookers doing private visits on the Main Line, there were two-hundred-dollar-hookers in brothels on Race and Vine that you could look up in the phone book, there were fifty-dollar-an-act hookers on Spruce Street after ten o’clock, and there were five-bucks-a-tag crackheads under the El in Kensington. When I told Clive what I was planning, and my price range, he suggested buying a token, head over to Kensington tonight. Monday was usually slow, they might even lower their price to three bucks a pop.

  Alex hooked me up with equipment, making me promise on the grave of my moms that I would get it back intact. From her crib, I walked down to the El on 46th Street past homes that begged to collapse, shedding paint and splinters and concrete chunks the size of cupcakes. On their porches sat clothes, newspapers faded by light and rain, and poor people. Hair sticking out over their heads like black cotton candy (if you took it into your mouth, it would taste like the popcorn on the floors of movie theaters). Looking back at me walking down the street, too broken even to pace their cells, knowing nothing I can do (dance, sing, give out free cigarettes) is going to change that.

  On the El, I sat alone, pretending to be too bored to be mugged, arms folded across my lap and my head down. By my feet, liquid ran along the black grooves of the flooring, ebbing to and fro with the momentum of the car. I kept touching the camera to tell myself that it was still there, rubbing my finger over its smooth sides until the plastic was warm and I felt like I could bend it like a tin spoon.

  We were aboveground, then we were underground in Center City and screaming through the hollow, then we were back aboveground again, in the white ghetto now, among the white hungry folk. Ghetto to ghetto, negro to trash, and all for a dollar fifty. Forget the Chunnel.

  Kensington? This isn’t Kensington. The real Kensington was down Notting Hill, over from the Royal Albert. Kensington was travel agents taking you anywhere in the world, the backyard of the queen, cute little shops and American tourists young and loud and buying things. Philly-Kensington was all wrong. It was people with bad skin and brown cooked teeth and thin gold chains, hair forced to attention high over female heads and violent boys with harsh mouths. Hooded sweatshirts covered with flannel shirts, jeans too tight and sneakers too dirty (but still brand-name, baby). Mouths spitting out ‘you’se’ and ‘we’se,’ a community subject to its own internal grammar. This is a place where niggers die, where field reporters come on TV talking about tragedy and then interview neighbors who stand in the cold and say ‘It’s a shame’ in steamed vocals into the camera, then rush home to see themselves on television for the first time. Front Street, under the blackened frame of the El tracks. I walked for ne
ar an hour, determined to either get the picture or get mugged. Streetlights extinguished by gunfire or shame provide bubbles of darkness, sections between functioning poles where reality was soft and crack ghosts haunted. Cars came down the road and crack hos emerged from the shadows like cats to can openers. Clusters of them, hiding in the vacant lots and buildings that lined the road, waiting in shadows, whispering to their habits that the next headlight was going to be the one. Dreaming about a bit of cash, a taste of food, another pebble in the pipe to remind them why it was all worthwhile. Me walking down the street was nothing to them because tricks came in cars and I was too big to rob, weak as they were. If they had ever had a gun or knife they would have smoked it by now. Buy now. More love. Suck it down with a Bic lighter.

  I needed one alone but couldn’t get them to come out, and I was scared to get close to a group for fear of being pulled into the darkness by a collective of bony hands. Getting desperate, when the next car pulled up and one of the creatures climbed inside, I followed it around the block to the alley between 2nd and 3rd. A close distance behind, listening for the footsteps I expected to come after me, I waited in the doorway of an abandoned deli for the car door to open, for the crackhead to emerge. The vehicle actually bounced. As soon as it was still, the white Buick opened its big-ass wing and she got out. Drinking water out a Pepsi bottle as she walked my way. I stepped towards her.

  ‘Excuse me, miss?’ My voice weak from hours of neglect and fear. I cleared my throat. She jumped. Aqua blue velour V-neck with grease stains on stomach and black denim cut-offs (its gray strings bouncing when she did). She was a man, I could see from her neck, and from her feminine walk. The real women out here moved like stiff-kneed infants on their first strut.

  ‘Watchu want? I didn’t do nothing,’ she whined, stomping her foot down.