by Wesley Brown
“Get a job, I guess.”
“That’s good. I’m glad you’re thinking along those lines, Melvin… You didn’t tell Miz Cotton where you were, did you?”
“She didn’t ask.”
“Well, I think it would be a good idea not to tell people anything, even if they do ask.”
“Then what should I tell people?”
“Just tell them you’ve been away.”
“But that’s not the truth, Moms!”
“It’s not a lie, either.”
“Then what is it? You make it sound like I got something to be ashamed of.”
“Melvin, you wanna finish drying the rest of these dishes?”
“So do you think I have something to be ashamed of?”
“You know, Melvin, sometimes what people know can hurt you and them, too. What’s done is done. You’ve made your point. There’s nothing to be gained by telling people everything. Unless you feel you still have something to prove.”
After listening to Moms, I had the strange feeling that I had been washed, dried, and put where I belonged. But I was too tired to care. So I let her reassert herself into the affairs governing my conduct without any protest.
I TOLD MY FOLKS I was going to see Otis at his job and then go to a disco. Debra gave me a ride to the station and I caught the subway into Manhattan. The train pulled in as I bought my token, and I was able to get inside just as the doors closed. The feeling that I was being locked up again gripped me. I was very uneasy and my face must have betrayed that because I noticed a few people staring at me. When I looked back at them, their eyes darted away like peas not wanting to get involved in a shell game. By the time the train reached my stop, the sound of the wheels against the rails had my ears pretty well dummied up. The train made a jerking stop, almost throwing me to the floor. But not forgetting my inmate training, I didn’t get uptight. Like the hacks in the joint, the Metropolitan Transit Authority was harassing me, trying to get me to react. But I remained cool and got through the doors just before they closed.
I wondered how it was going to be seeing Otis again. Would he be overly self-conscious about his hand and resent my dropping in on him without warning? In a way I hoped this would be his attitude. He had been such a smooth specimen of manhood that I had to see if the loss of a hand had diminished any of his luster.
At Eighth Avenue a man snapped at me like a cat-o’-ninetails hungry for the taste of flesh.
“Muhammad Speaks, brotherman!”
“No, thanks, I speak for myself.”
“You’re wrong, my brother. You can’t speak for yourself until you have submitted to the truth.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t submit to the truth. Only the newspaper.”
“My brother, Muhammad Speaks is the truth!”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t think you do see, my brother. If you did, you would buy a copy of the paper.”
“I’ll get one from you some other time.”
“Why wait, good brother? The hour is drawing late for the black man.”
“I’ve always been late anyway.”
“For a quarter you can find out what it’s like to be on time.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“That’s the story of the black man in America. Always running from the truth.”
“You sure about that?”
“Is pig pork?”
“That’s the rumor.”
“Brotherman, how long have you been asleep?”
“Oh, ever since you started trying to sell me that newspaper.”
“You better wake up, brother. I have a message for you if you’d just open up your dead ears and submit. But you talking like a Negro now. And when you a NeeGrow that means you need to grow!”
“There’s probably still some hope for me, then.”
He shook his head, dropped away from me, and moved on to someone else.
Farther down the block some sounds scissored into me. Suddenly I found myself in the thick of a knotted ring of kids in front of a record store. They were winding to the sounds like a set of drunken propellers and mimicking the words of the records coming from the outside speakers. And they were together, too, pumping up swift on the balls of their feet, then jabbing their knees out and peddling themselves into a flirtation walk. Every slip in a shoulder, backbone, or hip came off with a stroke of finesse.
Watching them made me wonder about the origin of such dances as the Bop, Philly Dog, Boogaloo, Boston Monkey, Shing-a-ling, Skate, Fat Man, Push and Pull, Funky Chicken, and Penguin. Where did they come from? And how did they spread once they arrived? Maybe a dance is like an idea whose time has come. If it is, maybe it comes into town unawares in the brown bag of a churchgoing woman. And after stealing out of there it shops around for the right body to put the wobble on. And then, before something that was nobody’s business becomes everybody’s business, the new dance is good news in some unsuspecting soul’s muscles and joints.
It struck me that a possible strategy for the race lay in the unpredictable way dances whistle-stop from city to city. If those who had an idea wouldn’t tell until it was tapped into their backbones, then it would make more sense to everybody because the idea, like a dance, would be a permanent fixture in their lives. And once someone learned the steps of a new thought, he or she would be a courier for an idea whose time had come.
In keeping with my analysis, watching those kids dance began to trigger movement in me. Having been a child prodigy of Balling the Jack, the Eagle Rock, and the Camel Walk, I was getting the urge to twist out of the everyday run-of-the-mill and flirt with untried orbits.
“Hey, my man,” I said, stepping forward, “can I get in on this?”
“Sure, come on and get yourself a step.”
So, for a moment, I was a mean rudder knifing through the elements and wasn’t to be held in check. But as a quarter-of-a-century-old relic, I didn’t want to blow the hoochie-coochie feeling those kids had cornered. So I made my exit.
Four large illuminated letters spelling WHIP hung vertically alongside the building. From the looks of it, they also seemed to spell out what was responsible for the shape it was in. On the third floor of the walk-up a woman sat at a switchboard behind a glass enclosure.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Otis Edwards.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No, but I’m a friend of his.”
“What’s your name?”
“Melvin Ellington.”
“He’s still in the studio. Why don’t you have a seat while I call in and tell him you’re here.”
“Thank you.” A security guard was slouched in a chair reading a newspaper. He gave me the benefit of a brief surveillance and went back to his reading.
“Ain’t this a blip!” It was Otis. A shaved head dotted with pores and blending into a ripe plum face stuck out of a red turtleneck shirt. The end of the right sleeve was buttoned neatly across, concealing his nub. He had gotten thicker through the chest and shoulders, but was still tapered off lean from the waist on down.
I got up to greet him, extending my right hand. Realizing he couldn’t shake my hand, I clumsily gripped his arm with both hands and smiled weakly.
“How you been, Otis?”
“Ain’t no need a kickin, Mouth,” he said, obviously enjoying my feeble attempt to appear as though I noticed nothing different about him. “You knew that I lost my hand in the Nam, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s just that seeing it for the first time is sort of…”
“Well, don’t worry about it. You’ll get used to it. I have.” He probably dug the hell out of acting this scene out with anyone who tried to be natural around him and ended up coming off exactly the opposite. It was small compensation for what he’d lost, but he probably took payback in whatever form it came. “How’d you know where to find me?” he asked.
“I ran into Pauline and Alice at Rocky’s and they told me…
I hope you don’t mind me coming.”
“No, I don’t mind. I’m glad you came. It’s been a long time. Almost six years, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, just about.”
“What’s this I hear about you going to jail for not going in the service?”
“You heard right.”
“When you get out?”
“Today.”
“Shit! We got to hang out then. It’s almost time for me to get off, so lay here a minute while I take care of a few things.”
When we got out into the street, there was a group of people at the corner bunched like a skyline near an ashcan. Flames spiraled out of the can before breaking off into smoke. A few feet away a short, chunky man holding a guitar was sitting on a milk crate against the side of a building. He began to play, and his fingers moved over the strings with the delicacy of a daddy-longlegs spider.
“Hey, let’s check this out,” Otis said. “This cat is always out here playing. He’s bad!” Then the man began to sing.
“I’m a man
M, man
A, a child
N, non-spoiled
I’m a man.”
The authority with which he sang those lyrics made my skin shiver. When he finished, someone from the huddled group of people took a bag from underneath his coat, pulled out a greasy piece of chicken, and passed the bag around. Barbecue sauce slipped from lips and dripped down chins.
“Excuse my hands,” someone said, passing a greasy chicken wing.
“Your hands don’t make me no nevermind as long as I get me a piece of this gospel bird.”
“Hey, who’s got the part that goes over the fence?” The way they ate that chicken told me that they not only shared food but the same abuses and jokes.
“Let’s split,” Otis said.
“Wait a minute. I want to ask him something.” The eyes of those crowded around the ashcan turned to fishhooks as I crashed their private dinner party. He was so engrossed with a piece of chicken that he didn’t even notice me. “Excuse me. I want to ask you something about that song you were singing.”
“I just sing the song. I don’t explain it,” he said, and went back to tearing at his piece of chicken.
I was reminded of the comeback for all forms of explaining in prison: Stop crying and do your time. How you did your time was much more important than why you were doing it. As I heard from men who had more than enough time to think about how they would do it—a man has to have something to do. And when he reaches the point where he feels he has nothing to do, he either dies or he kills.
“What was that all about?” Otis asked when I caught up with him.
“I wanted to ask him about the words to that song but he didn’t want to rap.”
“Yeah, he don’t rap to nobody that ain’t in his set… Hey, I know this bar we can go to that’s right near here. It’s called ‘Vietnam’ and it’s owned by some Vietnam vets.”
I expected a bar with a name like that to have a particular look or atmosphere. But it didn’t. The only thing that struck me about the place was the total absence of women. And the conversation between men seemed to lack the arm-wrestling quality associated with most bar talk.
“So tell me somethin, Mouth.”
“There’s not much to tell.”
“How long were you in the joint?”
“Two years.”
“You look like you came out of it all right.”
“More or less.”
“You know, it’s funny the way shit works out. I go in the service. You refuse. I lose a hand and you go to prison. I would a never figured you for something like that. Why’d you do it? Not go in the service, I mean.”
“I didn’t feel like I had a stake in what the army was doing.”
“How did you know if you didn’t go?”
“I didn’t have to go to know.”
“Oh, so I guess that makes me either blind or stupid… Is that why you wanted to see me, to tell me that?”
“Look, Otis, I didn’t come over here to throw any shit in your face about the Nam. We go back a long way. And I wanted to see you. It’s as simple as that. But you did ask me a question. And I answered it.”
“You think I was a fool for going into the Marines, don’t you?”
“Hey, come on, Otis, don’t play on me like that. It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what you think.”
“Yeah, well, I sure believed all that war crap we used to see in the movies… You remember the Marine Prayer we used to say all the time?”
“Yeah, I remember it… ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil cause I’m the biggest, baddest muthafucka in the valley!’”
“That Marine Prayer shit didn’t work in the Nam though. The Vietnamese are slick. They don’t go for all that come-out-and-fight-like-a-man shit. They do their thing on the q.t. A couple of times, the VC snuck into the barracks and shanked some dudes in their sleep, just to show us they could do it. Nobody didn’t even know it happened till the next morning. After that shit went down a few times, I said later for all them Halls of Montezuma muthafuckas nuttin up behind bein in the Nam. I still knew I was bad, but the VC wasn’t gonna give me no chance to prove it. So me and some other bloods started holding up our arms during mortar attacks. Three hits and you got a purple heart and a one-way ticket home. I figured it was better to bleed for a little while than be dead for good.”
“Is that how you lost your hand?”
“Damn, Mouth, what I got to do, piss in your face to let you know it’s raining? What do you think?” I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself but I didn’t. “So what you got on for tonight?” he asked.
“Alice and Pauline told me about this disco called La Magnifique! I figured I’d check it out.”
“So you saw the Queen Bee and the Goodyear Blimp? La Magnifique is a pretty swingin joint. I’ll cut you in to some stone freaks. And you won’t have no problem gettin over on a sympathy tip once broads find out you ain’t had no leg in two years.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah! When I first got back from the war I figured that fuckwise I’d had it. But you’d be surprised how many sympathy fucks I got cause I didn’t have no hand. Some broads even got turned on by it. I don’t wanna brag, but I think I can do more with my nub than a whole lotta cats do with their dicks. No lie! Here, let me show you.” Otis unfastened the buttons on his sleeve, rolled it up, and moved his arm in front of my face. Looking at his thick forearm down to the nub made me think of a huge turkey drumstick.
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” I said, uptight by the sight of it.
“You know, ever since I lost my hand I’ve been having this dream about John Wayne.”
“What about him?”
“Well, it starts off with John Wayne riding across the prairie looking for some more of the West to win. He’s been going through a lot of changes since he was declared unfit for military service during World War II because of bad knees. So the Duke fulfilled his military obligation in the movies with a cat named Yakima Canutt as his stunt man.
“Now after years of taking the Duke’s falls, Yakima gives up stunt riding and starts hanging out at the Department of Interior conferences with the Indians. He whoops and hollers for a fair shake for the Indians so he can get a chance to suck on the peace pipe when it’s passed around. The Duke tries to talk Yakima into coming back as his stunt man, but all he gets for his trouble is a contact high.
“So, for the first time, John Wayne has to roam the world without a stunt man while he looks for a place to rest the heels of his boots. He’s finally busted trying to storm Alcatraz during the Indian occupation. The presiding judge at the Duke’s trial is Iron Eyes Cody, the Indian that cries on those pollution commercials. The Duke is sentenced to the Pacific Ocean and tries to Bogart a ride on the sea. While he’s treading water, Woody Strode, the black cat in Sergeant Rutledge, paddles by in a canoe singing a blues: ‘Everybody wants to go to heaven/but nobody
wants to die/Everybody wants to know the reason/but never get past why.’”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah, what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s all in that blues line. Once you know the reason why shit happens, you shouldn’t have to ask the question anymore. It’s those John Wayne flicks that fucked me around. And now that I know, it’s not about why anymore. It’s about how.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is—fair trade ain’t no robbery. And until I do something about those flicks I won’t feel I’ve been compensated for what I lost in the Nam.”
“But what can you do?”
“Oh, there’s something I can do all right. And I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Since I’ve been working at WHIP, I’ve gained access to a lot of radio and T.V. stations. There’s one T.V. station in particular I can get into whenever I want. It’s the one that shows all those old late night movies. And when I found out they had prints of just about all of John Wayne’s movies, I decided I was going to destroy them.”
“What would be the point of doing that?”
“Isn’t this reason enough?” he said, holding up his right arm. “You know, Mouth, you’ve always asked more questions than me. But that’s all you’ve ever done. You’ve never learned the how of things. Even going to jail wasn’t for doing something but for not doing it. In more ways than fucking, you still ain’t lost your cherry yet. And I think tonight is as good a time as any to do something about it. Why don’t after we do some partying we go down to that station and fire up the image of John Wayne? That ought to make up some for the two years you lost. How bout it? You been grittin too long, Mouth. It’s time you started shittin.”
WHILE I LISTENED TO OTIS detail how we would carry out his celluloid caper, I thought about how much I’ve always been drawn to cats who were sure of how to do something and didn’t spend too much time on why. They are always exciting to watch, especially when they deliver the goods. Unable to make it as a practitioner of how, I became one of why by default. Why type of dudes like myself are not very interesting to watch because, with all our deliberation, we don’t appear to be doing very much.