High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  Upstairs was the ragged, dicey atmosphere of an inner-city bus station. People I had never seen before, many elites of one, came out of the plaster to mass in the lounge in front of the television, which was a 26-inch color job, as a result of a Cox Commission recommendation, so the rumor went, that the quality of everyday life be improved to appease some of the discontent that had helped to make all-male Columbia the most unattractive, volatile, and abandoned member of the Ivy League.

  Girls—students at Barnard across the street—descended on armrests. They made O’s with their mouths around bottles of Tab or Miller Lite. Coed floors were also a post-’68 improvement, but my floor, Furnald 6, was not officially one of them. “Holy shit” was the general comment as we watched, with the sound turned off, replays of film that showed people in a melee twelve time zones away. They scrambled over rooftops, clung to helicopters, accomplished gravity-defying feats of locomotion.

  Was it possible, was it so? A young girl, an escapee from small-town New Hampshire, a sort of mascot to the hippies on the floor, started to hum “Kumbaya.” She rocked on her haunches, a beer between her sandals, and fixed her watery, puppy stare on the Jim Morrison cultists, who snickered, and then on the bra-less Barnard women, who declined to acknowledge her. Someone handed her a joint to shut her up. She turned it over, threaded it through her grubby fingers. “Are you going to worship it or smoke it?” her old-man-of-the-week barked. The lounge was thick with the aroma of Acapulco Gold, Thai sticks, patchouli oil, leftover anchovies, squashed Marlboros, Budweiser breath, and slept-in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Through our 26-inch color window on the world we saw a Marine ball his fist. It went up and down on the mob. His brow was knitted but calm, like St. George having his vision.

  Boredom is not out of the question even when worlds collapse. The party broke apart. Each to his quarters, his ardent nonchalance. I had no more connection with my fellow cellmates on Furnald 6 than spectators do after the ambulance has turned the corner. They took me for a black separatist. I knew no one on that floor, an isolation which, at that moment, was no longer as hip as I had thought. All day I had been calling people without success. I worried that my friends were hiding from me. However, loneliness was swept aside by another big emotion, one maybe common to seniors who have not begun their term papers and who have no marketable skills: some awful mix of love and pity for mankind.

  I stood in the dim corridor dumb and, so I believed, invisible in a seizure of oneness. An overweight girl, so important in radical circles that she always wore a shroud-of-Leningrad expression, pounded on the wall near the elevator to affix a leaflet crammed with fine print that announced a demonstration against—she was never not in the vanguard—the Shah. Her faded corduroy trousers dragged on the carpet, drooped so that they revealed to the comprador-bourgeois onlookers the crack of her rear end. I was with her and with the onlookers. I was at one with the floor’s would-be dealer on his water bed, a longhair from Arizona whom no one trusted, whose door stood wide open hour after futile hour, and who seemed forever stuck on the same brown page of an old paperback edition of Kerouac.

  I was also with the congressman’s son in whom philosophy had gotten the upper hand, with the pompous slogans on his door like “Relinquish no part of me to the state” or “Hell is badly done.” I was at one with the stoop-shouldered souls on what was called Grind Row, where no posters or stickers of any kind distinguished their cheders, where there was only the sickening smell of a can of Chef Boyardee heating up on a hot plate. In my mind’s eye I was at one with the stupidities scrawled above the urinals and with the Magic Marker that was made to write yet again “Eat the Rich.” I was there. The lichen on the ledge, Jesse in his dream of Jones Beach, the shadows on the Ho Chi Minh Trail—I was with it all, at every festival, until someone passed by and handed me a look like a traffic violation. “Man, everybody’s stoned out of their gourds today.” Down as a result of contact, as they say in football.

  My room was one of the coveted singles, which meant that I was spared a stranger’s socks and nightmares. The sink, the chest of drawers, the cot with the plastic hospital mattress, and the desk that was unusable because of the number of black candles I had melted on it left a bit of floor space the size of an aisle in tourist class. I heard a blast of music—Suicidio!—from a monster stereo system, the property of my neighbors, two guys who had grown up drinking from the same glass but who had lately come to the fork that led one downstairs to sleep in study hall, the Grub Room, and the other to lavish on the walls of their room his masterpiece in oil, an endeavor encouraged by the speed and peyote he swallowed in lieu of macaroni in the cafeteria. At any hour he shouted to himself of his inspiration: “Well, all right now.” In everyone’s face except your own a map was visible.

  My inner composure depended on the lone window in my room. It looked out on Broadway, on Chock Full o’Nuts, trucks, taxis, delis, abused chestnut trees, panhandlers with fringed cowboy jackets slung over their shoulders, tables of textbooks and SWAPO pamphlets at the college gates. I saw two dedicated teachers, one huge, one thin, both in the throes of tenure battles, scrape gum or shit from their soles. “Don’t they know I’m the greatest poet since Dante?” Mr. Huge once demanded of a seminar. “Trotsky, who was in love with my grandmother,” Mr. Thin had begun a lecture. Furious student petitions were circulated in their behalf. The pair headed toward the West End Cafe, the hangout of the unappreciated, the persecuted, and the fired.

  Broadway was so crowded with vegetable buyers and buildings streaked with weather that I hadn’t noticed the dark. Of all the things to witness in the street—flyers and newspapers that tumbled waist-high above the pavement in warm gusts; blue, lemon, red, and green lights in a diaphanous blur of gases; grit that miraculously retained the day’s heat as it flew to my teeth— nothing was more consoling than the sight of people caught by nightfall in their shorts, their muscular tank tops and bobbing stripes.

  Summer was coming in as fast as what we thought was the liberation of the people of Indochina. Summer, that season of disappointed travel plans and joke reading lists, that slowing down into which your classmates disappeared and from which they returned russet and altered, made the hairs of my Afro stand on end, as if life itself had been invented by my generation the day before yesterday.

  The time had come. Summer had always meant no school, but it had not meant, until then, with the tanks rolling down Tu Do Street, with the Chekhovian solution imminent—either hand in those term papers or shoot yourself—no school ever again. I saw summer whistling in over the water towers of Broadway as a great postponement of the Next Move, a beautiful ellipsis limited only by my cowardice, by insufficient wantonness of mind.

  My parents had never allowed me to spend the summer in New York. Their policy against dancing in the street began the August before my freshman career, when I zoomed back from my first solo moon flight with one dime. I used it to call collect, to wonder how I was going to get from JFK to the Hoosier-bound plane at LaGuardia, and then I plugged the coin into a pay toilet. After that my parents enforced between semesters the uplift principle, which I interpreted as surveillance, wing clipping, Indiana arrest.

  How I’d spent my summer vacations: the uplift principle put me to work as a counselor at a “student leadership” camp where the teenagers believed down to their tan lines in nonsmoking, Our Lord Jesus Christ, “role-playing,” Karen Carpenter, and the war on apathy. The uplift principle also permitted me to haunt my room back home or, sulker that I was, to teach my wounded parents that nine-dollar scoops of chicken salad and debates about busing at NAACP conventions were not fun. But all of that was over. Go ahead, the lights in the wild air said, throw your heart over the fence.

  New York City was going bankrupt that summer, unraveling toward its high noon. I found what back then could be described with sarcasm as a studio near the cathedral alumni called St. John the Unnnished. My belongings smelled funny when they dried, having been transported down Broadway in a stolen
cart during a BB-gun rain. I coated every surface of the room with a glue that sort of killed roaches. The guy who rented me the place—I was the subletee of an illegal subletee—generously showed me how to construct an exploding trap that involved a 12-volt transformer, pieces of magnesium, and peanut butter.

  The walls vibrated with hypnotic anthems like “Negrito Bi-bón” by Ismael Rivera, the Spanish Elvis. Children screamed, bananas fried; something scooted about in the walls themselves. The window faced an airshaft down which came boxes, bottles, plates, arguments, and that was difficult because I needed the nearness of a street to be at rest. I was usually on the stoop among the old men studying dominoes, the young men haggling over stripped cars, the mothers braiding daughters’ hair.

  I discovered that Morningside Heights, when cleared of students, was a black and Hispanic neighborhood. Just when I was learning to act normal in the barrio, trusting that exchanges in the bodega late at night were not about how to mug me, my father decided that I would sail away with myself unless he intervened. He gave me the last thing I wanted as a housewarming present: a job.

  Through the sad Negro imitation of the Indiana contingent of Good Old Boys, the very reason I could not refuse his assistance, this is what my father came up with: his accountant, with the blessing or wink of some minority-business program, maintained an office in Manhattan that audited federally funded community projects. I was to be an auditor’s trainee. One majestic Monday, when odd vapors enveloped my fellow workers as they made for the holes of public transportation, this job, this violation of my personal liberty act, had me sneaking upstairs on a wrong stretch of Broadway in the uninspected vicinity of the Flatiron Building.

  I entertained dreamy feelings about dereliction. Granite that long ago had been stained by fumes of coal, vacant lots, junctions of shattered glass—these pockets, when depopulated, silent, were to me, at night, the height of romance. Run-down, bricked-up blocks were cozy, and when a building was fixed up, which seldom happened back then, I resented it, as if it had been taken from me or a friend had kicked cigarettes and left me puffing. I’d not reckoned with having to be a working part of the landscape of marginal stores and squalid businesses, as if my job would force on me a clarification of social status. But the accounting office didn’t take my presence seriously. I was one of the absentee boss’s whims, a favor he was doing a client.

  It was a skeleton of an office. The Filipino manager and his wife were not around much. In a room of army-green file cabinets the secretary, the third runner-up in the 1969 Miss Afro America Contest, swiveled in her house slippers. I sat in a back room at a blank metal desk with an adding machine and a manual. Whether I read it or not was of no consequence to my supervisor, a corpulent Argentinian who spent much of the day bawling out his rabbi. He was after a religious divorce. He dealt out handsome documents in Hebrew on his desk while his wife obstructed justice from Buenos Aires. He talked to the ceiling fan about her, about the trouble that had started when he confessed that he wanted to become a U.S. citizen. He’d met a woman in New Jersey and the ceiling fan told him not to lose hope.

  Meanwhile, if you can’t have it all, you can get away with something. My lunch hours got longer, I came back reeking of mouthwash. The secretary painted her nails tequila-sunrise orange. I’d ask how she was and invariably came the reply “Trying to be better.” I settled into a boogaloo of come late, leave early; became as adept as my supervisor at inventing errands that required my immediate attention around 3:30. This summer rhythm suited the secretary, whose duty it was to lock up. I departed in a mood of perfect blamelessness, a cog in cream or sky-blue three-piece suits, costumes no pimp would suffer near his skin. Along my noisy block the fire hydrants ran on and on, just like in the movies.

  Then my supervisor announced that I was ready to go into the field. Issued a plastic briefcase, tablets of giant graph paper, and bundles of virgin pencils, I followed his stomach into the subway. He asked the driver-education ads why God had sent his wife to torment him, and somewhere in Brooklyn he beseeched God Himself in different languages. At the door of a day-care center my supervisor pulled out the name tag of his charm, tossed his thick mane, which he must have thought was still fragrant with the morning’s shampoo, cocked his head in boundless sympathy. I thought of the flesh of his handshake, soft like pads of butter in a humid restaurant. The director of the day-care center fluttered and showed us to a corner room where ledgers and cartons of receipts were layered on a table. It was like putting yourself in a jar and screwing on the lid.

  My supervisor fell to, as if it were a meal. I copied whatever he told me to, filled columns with numbers, and in the sweat surrendered to something like a Carthusian’s serenity, though I did not know what FICA stood for or why I had to retrieve this information by such slow means. This was before portable computers, but Xerox machines were not unheard of. The audit consumed several days. We munched lunches that tasted like shredded telephone book. I switched to my supervisor’s brand of cologne. He revived himself with Hostess cupcakes. Outside, the children rioted, and then I laid down my pencil nub and taped together sheets to make a chart the size of a tablecloth.

  I was sent out in my drenched paisley tie, shirt, and vest to audit books on my own. I was given Bedford-Stuyvesant, the part of Brooklyn where theft was known as the five-finger discount and sneakers as getaway shoes. I got lost and everyone I asked directions of either ignored me, tried to sell me diamond rings, or ran from me. Even the pigeons were fierce. Day-care centers in converted warehouses, in basements, in mere sheds compressed by too much sun; in streets depleted of cars, empty of shop life; streets overrun with small people skipping rope, playing jacks in the potholes, jumping on tar patches—“God will give you back the days the locusts have eaten,” Grandfather liked to say—and I could not hear those children without the fear that I was heading home, guided by their cries, to my own childhood, my early summers, when I suspected there might be something shameful about my crowd of little baseball players and lagged behind so that white motorists wouldn’t think I was one of them.

  I was treated at some day-care centers as a lackey for the revenue man, and at other places, holding pens for children, the wardens were amused that I fit right in, watched soap operas with them straight through the blazing afternoon. I had no idea what those numbers, forms, and vouchers were supposed to amount to, and proudly faked findings, made up sums, jotted down any combination of integers in order to complete the intricate grid of those green sheets. It never occurred to me that I might slander a scrupulous staff or acquit a dishonest one by tinkering with the figures. I didn’t care if someone skimmed from the milk money so long as my head was free to wander. I thought the deep-eyed Black Muslim women in flawless white that made them look like nurses in photo histories of World War I were sending out the murderous vibe that they had figured me out, when they were, like me, just waiting on the subway platform.

  The best thing about working was not showing up. I called to tell the secretary at which day-care center I’d be—and who was to check that I was not in a stupor in front of my fan? Sunday conversations with my parents I padded with talk-show-level sincerity about how much I was learning about Black America through my job, yarns that had the self-sabotage of the patient in analysis who gets nowhere because he thinks he has to keep the therapist entertained. Then the con man got conned: my paycheck bounced.

  The secretary said the boss had forgotten to put the money in payroll, don’t worry about it until Monday, and continued to file her nails. A week later the yellow rectangle bounced again. The secretary said that was why she had a second job as a salesclerk, the manager and his wife as teachers of English, and my supervisor as an instructor at a business institute near Macy’s, and to come back that afternoon. I saw HELP WANTED notices at Dianetics centers in my sleep. The third time it bounced, the secretary turned down the voice reeling off baseball scores and said that the first lesson of Black Capitalism was faith, faith that the money withdraw
n to dig metaphorical ditches out there in the great somewhere would one day make it back to behave again as payroll.

  My connection with the office trailed off, much like those other relationships you forget because they were made out of having had nothing better to do. Then I called home to play injured. The boss had taken the secretary on a Caribbean cruise. I was never so happy to have been associated with a crook.

  I didn’t have to roam the Village, the meat-packing district, or the Lower East Side. Summer loitered in boxing gloves on Broadway, close to my front door. I met Jesse, the security guard, barrel-chested between shifts. His personality changed with his uniform. “You look ready to Freddy,” he said. To reaffirm our kinship as soul brothers he introduced me to Betty, a redhead of indeterminate age with sharks in her eyes whose name was on the liquor license of a dive called the Melody Coast. “He’s good people,” he told her. Betty smoked cigars.

  To Jesse I was a college boy, and Betty, I learned, did not like students. Absolutely No Pot, a banner in the men’s room read. When students, the few around for the summer session, happened into the Melody Coast, they received a lesson in discrimination: waitresses vanished into the clatter of the kitchen; Betty became hard-of-hearing when sophomores yelled for pitchers of beer. “Their politics stop at the cap and gown,” she said. Black students were not above suspicion. “You’re not one of those brainwashed gray boys, are you?” She didn’t want her place to become an “in” spot, which is what made it so “in” to me. The jukebox offered no rock, just the Philadelphia Sound and some throwback favorites like “Fine Fat Daddy, Please Don’t Reduce.”

  Cats prowled the shelves. Most students looked in and went away. The Melody Coast presented too much of an exclusive scene: concrete floors, red booths that recalled the interiors of gas-guzzling cars with tail fins; mirrors; low yellow lights; an enormous pool table in the back cave; and at the long, dark bar mottled with polished burn marks the murky regulars, the “working people” to whom Betty catered. Some of them were between jobs or waiting for the right thing, but it was against the code of the Melody Coast to ask too many questions. Everyone understood how hard it was out there.