The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  It seemed to Max that Wallace started to quit in October; the fire was cooling. Papers like the Century were few and damned far between. The rumors started whipping the man. Who would Wallace be able to trust if he got in? There was all of that and more. It was the black and the white. The sudden equality in 1948 (much too early for America). It was the deep fear of that as well as anything else. Henry A. Wallace went quietly that November Tuesday, quietly and early. Harry Truman retired in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City and everybody felt sorry for him, thinking that when he woke the next morning, he would have two and a half months left in the White House. Max Reddick felt sorry for him, crusty little bastard, haberdasher, symbol of the American dream, little guy gone big. Max preferred Truman to Wallace. Wallace had too much to think about; Truman took a step at a time and took it decisively and later for the rest of you cats. Who really could like Tom Dewey? The polls told the story on Wednesday morning, the same day Truman woke and fired his Secret Service chief who had stayed in New York to guard Tom Dewey, who lost the Election.

  Max had laughed his ass off; it was just like Truman. Then it was all over.

  In Leiden, high on the morphine, Max laughed softly and clutched his paining rectum. How naive he had been then. It had not been over with Wallace, it had just begun, that pulsating, murderous desire to be near or in politics, for that was where power was. Politics was some American game; it had its pauses, but never an end. It was the Ultimate Game, while you lived. It had sent people back to where they came from; it killed others and drove still others to the psychiatric wards or alcoholic clinics. It was where one learned the sorry truth about his countrymen.

  For example, Stevenson’s great losses to Ike brought forth the terrifying realization that unless the people could have a rich President who had had the leisure to study their problems and learn the right phrases and how to utter them (the European heritage—a good King Wenceslaus) like Roosevelt or Kennedy, they’d make do generally with someone pretty much like themselves. A five-star hero, perhaps, who, from the age of eighteen or nineteen had only to answer the call of a bugle to be fed, clothed and provided water for washing for most of his life, with time out for other jobs which were equally unfamiliar, until they made him their President. A man in their image.

  There was no faking that image, as Humphrey could tell anybody; it was no good rambling about the old days as a druggist. Kennedy had put the spurs to that concept of the good old guy next door.

  Max had been an incurious Democrat, but had never thought of himself as a politician, in fact, not even a good, Northeast variety Democrat. But the co-speechwriting, the tremor of Washington, the cold, steely scent of power had touched him. The social crisis that loomed black over the land had attracted him, but now Max wished that it hadn’t turned out the way it had.

  Max’s third novel came out during the end of the Wallace campaign. “… now bests his master, Harry Ames …”

  “The Tribune here [Harry wrote] says you’re better than me. Do you believe it …?”

  Letters from Harry were few after that. When they came they were unexpected, and therefore they threatened. They contained no warmth. It was just as well, for Max, in a manner he never would have admitted, was weary of being compared to Ames, to Bolton Warren, and now, to Marion Dawes, who was in Paris. The critics and reviewers were unrelenting because, Max concluded, they did not know what they were doing; and because they were supposed to be knowledgeable people, they’d never admit to an ignorance of discrimination. The effect was the same. White writers were compared only to other white writers; black writers were compared only to other black writers.

  Max was deep in bitterness when he received a call from Kermit Shea, who was now a senior editor at Pace. Shea had changed, Max noticed. He was no longer a hot roast beef sandwich and two double-bourbon man. Now he ate two-hour lunches at the best French and Italian restaurants in midtown. His suits were pressed, his shoes polished, his hair neatly combed. Now he wore glasses with complexion-tone frames. He was a different kind of newsman.

  “I’m glad you got the break with Century,” he said. “And of course, I’ve read your book. We gave it a good review.”

  Max remembered the lead. It had been about Harry Ames. “Who were you writing about, me or Harry Ames?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I noticed that too,” Shea said. “Well, a review in Pace, good or bad, doesn’t hurt sales, you know.”

  And Max knew it.

  Shea chewed his food slowly; he had expected some bitterness. “You know, we’ve already had some discussion at the magazine about opening up, the way the Century has. Nothing’s come of it yet, but I’d like to be able to throw your name in the hopper when the time comes.”

  Max made him work. He listened and nodded or said nothing. He spoke only enough to keep the conversation from dying. He kept thinking: Kermit Shea, white, senior editor, Pace. Western Reserve, class of ’37. Italian campaign, Stars and Stripes. Age, thirty-four. Future, a snap. Why? White. Max Reddick, black, city reporter, the Century. Western Reserve, class of ’37. Italian campaign, infantryman. Age, thirty-four. Future, doubtful. Why? Black.

  “You mentioned Ames. What do you hear from him?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Well, I mean, things are … you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know.” Max lit a cigarette. Seeing Shea again combined with the hurting business of the book brought on all the old pains. “Do you think he should come back? Would you, if you were him?”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I were him,” Shea said. “But he was born here. It’s his country. You care for it—”

  “I care for it? Kermit, this is my day for not giving one good fuck where or how this country goes. I couldn’t care less.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “Am I really permitted to be as conscientious about these things as you? C’mon, Kermit. Since when?”

  Shea waited before answering. “I should think you’d be even more concerned. What if you inherit ignorance and indecision, as I have?”

  “Well then, whose fault is that?” Then Max saw him climbing Harry’s steps once more and remembered Harry telling him about what Shea had said then. “My mood is foul today,” Max said. “Let’s not talk about these things. Tell me about the job. And tell me, does Pace pay more than the Century?” He saw Shea start to relax. At one point he thought, He would be good for Regina. Never seen him with a woman. What’s his bag? Max’s publisher was giving a party for the publication of his book. He would invite Shea and Regina. And Granville. That would take care of that obligation. As the lunch was breaking up, Shea said, “Army-Notre Dame. Saturday at the Stadium. I’ve got two tickets I lifted from the Sports people. What do you say?”

  The man won’t let go, Max thought. What’s the matter with him he won’t let go? But he said, “Sure. Pick you up?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  It had been a different kind of meeting. Max had not been broke, distressed with a girl, or in the pit of a depression still finding its bottom. His bitterness had not, for a time, been muted. He had called a halt to the conversation about “conditions.” Once, he would have allowed Shea to continue talking about them. No more. He knew about the conditions. They had cut him to ribbons, but he had not died. Instead (thanks to Granville) he now stood heavily on his own two feet. The book helped too; a book always did. Well, then. If Shea wanted to unburden his soul, let him find someone else; if he wanted to hang around, goddamnit, he was going to hang around like a man, not a creep!

  At the party for the publication of his book, Shea turned out to be a very shy man, which amused Max. It was Regina who did the wooing, hurtling into this new thing with the force of a bird trying to escape captivity. When last he looked, it seemed to be going okay. He talked for a long time with Zutkin, whom he had not seen in over a year. Granville Bryant was there with a young man who stoo
d silently at his side and listened to his conversation without expression.

  It was Bryant who, midway through the party, said, “Is he your only Negro friend, Max?” Bryant gestured toward Roger Wilkinson, who was indeed the only other Negro beside Max present. Max laughed briefly. “They were invited, Granville, they were invited.”

  “Why didn’t they come?”

  Annoyed, Max shrugged and moved away. How in the hell did he know why they hadn’t come? He had worked hard on the invitation list to bring about a balancing of white and Negro friends. He hated to do that. To secure the right balance he had set down the names of Negroes he didn’t really like. Like Harry, he thought, I’ve become the marginal man. Where were they? Had he alienated every single one of them at precisely the same time? How? Glumly he watched Regina and Shea, then Roger Wilkinson talking with Bryant. That was good. Roger was a young writer; perhaps Bryant could be of use to him. Of course, Roger knew what he was doing. Max had had that feeling ever since his first meeting with Roger, who had thrust himself on Max, asking him to read manuscripts, discussing this writer and that one, eagerly writing down the advice Max half-heartedly gave him. What was wrong with Wilkinson, Max suddenly realized as he took another Scotch from the tray, was that he liked names. He thought they gave medals for reading Stendahl and Giraudoux and Auden and Henry Adams. He was a walking encyclopedia of famous and obscure writers, the good ones. (“Honest, Max, that Andreyev is something else!”)

  Goddamn it, why hadn’t they come? Now he knew. He had been lucky. He had made it, they thought, and that made him less Negro; that made him no longer one of them. Dick Ricketts, the policy man in Harlem, greeted him in the uptown bars with, “Hey, Money!” Dick had sense and Max had told him more than once that writers made money if they were lucky, or said what other people wanted them to say. Ricketts, sharp yellow face taut, lidless reptile eyes cold so that you couldn’t tell if they were comprehending or not, listened carefully, then said, “Okay, baby, you tell it your way. I know them white folks don’t publish your books because they like you!” Max had told him he had it all wrong. “But dig, man,” Ricketts had gone on, his handmade suit falling about him like gray velvet, his shirt open at the neck, a little gesture to establish and maintain rapport with the nickel-and-dimers, his Aston-Martin double-parked outside, unticketed on 125th Street, for every cop knew it. “And you writin’ for Mister Charlie’s paper too. Don’t I see your name in the paper? How you sound? C’mon here and let me buy you a taste even though I know you can’t get into your house for all the hundred-dollar bills you got jammed up in it.”

  Damn them, Max thought. When you’re down, scraping through on ham hocks and beans, they don’t want to be bothered with you. But when they think you’ve made it, they’re either afraid of you or put you down for being a Tom. What’s worse than being black? Being black and lucky. Max took a final look around at his party, then slipped out. Harlem wouldn’t come to him; he would go to it.

  “Every time I see you up here, you’re runnin’ through. Them white folks run you out from downtown?” Sergeant Jenkins. He seemed bigger, blacker, badder. Drugs were starting their poisonous flow through Harlem and, rumor had it, Jenkins was hell on pushers and junkies. Max nodded briefly. Black sonofabitch, he thought. Like I don’t have any business up here. Like they were all waiting for me to leave Harlem for good.

  “I spend a lot of time around here, Jenks,” Max finally said, wearily. “Right now,” he lied, “I’m doing a story on police brutality. Can you help?”

  Jenkins grinned his big bad grin. “Police brutality, eh. What’s that, son? I don’t know nothin’ about that. Sounds like Communist talk to me. You know the friendly, neighborhood cop is a public servant. That’s right, son.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What happened to your ace-boon-coon, that other writer fella?”

  “He’s in France.”

  “France, huh? Hell, he married a white girl, didn’t he? What the hell’s he in France for? Did he divorce her or something, or just can’t get enough of that white nooky? Is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jenkins laughed. “You got your back up, son. Don’t shit me. I know your type. Police brutality, huh, you goddamn nigger intellectuals and them nigger leaders, soon’s you get two quarters to rub together you got your ass on a ship for Europe. You don’t even know what’s going on here.”

  “We try, Jenks, we try.”

  “That Boatwright boy, he was an intellectual too, wasn’t he, son? Look what happened to him. Look what he did. You cats is as queer as three dollar bills. If it ain’t sex, it’s in the fuckin’ head. I seen all kinds, son, and all the noise you make don’t help a junkie or a cat done messed over his wife good, one bit. Cats say I’m hard. Sure, and I like to beat a bad nigger’s head. Know why? Because when he sees me coming the next time he’s gonna get the hell outa my way. I’m hard because I got to be. These niggers up here are harder on my ass than a hundred paddy cats. And I got to live, son. I got a family. Wife and kids. And I mean to come home in one piece when my day’s hitch is done. And every single day, every day, there’s some motherfucker up here sayin’ I ain’t gonna make it. What you damned intellectuals still got to learn is that this ain’t no classroom, son, it’s a jungle.” Jenkins hitched up his pants, those heavy dark blue pants with the flashlight in one pocket, .38 revolver low over one cheek of the ass, the row of cartridges, the blackjack and nightstick, the notebook, all attached. The paraphernalia made a jangling noise. “Cool it, son. I got to go. Keep your nose clean.”

  Sweet Cheeks, the bartender at the Nearly All Inn greeted him as soon as he entered. “Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the prodigal. The black Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Honoré de Balzac all rolled into one. Furthermore, he is the black Richard Harding Davis, Edward R. Murrow and Walter Winchell also all rolled into one. Hey, baby! Where you been? Have you come over to our side yet? Gay is best, baby, I shit thee not. Have a taste!”

  He fled as soon as he could to Big Ola Mae’s. He should have known what to expect from Sweet Cheeks; his was the most vicious tongue in Harlem. He loud-talked you, if he didn’t think his tip was large enough. Now, Max sat down and Ola Mae waddled over. “Maxwell? It is you. Child, where you been? Is you hungry? You lookin’ a little bit peaked, there. I know, you done got married and your wife’s a little too fast for you. Right? No. Well you eat somethin’ anyhow. Did you know your boss at the Democrat—” she bent close to Max, “that raggedy-assed nigger paper—married your girlfriend, that cute little thing, Mary. Sure enough did.”

  Mary. In restrospect, nice, they all were then, softened by time and other women still. They spoiled a guy though, the women. Maybe it had to do with the male–female ratio he had heard about so much. He never thought about it the way he had thought of some European villages where whole male populations had gone off to war and been killed. What happened to the women? They must have become ravenous. New York women were a very special breed. Just as most knowledgeable American women hesitate to compete with European women, so most American women pause before climbing into the same arena with New York women. Special. Tough, lovely, knowing, playing the cards the way they were dealt, most of the time. Maybe the war had done that, set women free. But Big Ola Mae was still leaning on the table, her fat, deep chocolate brown face benignly creased, motherly behind the out-of-place gold-rimmed glasses, talking. “I bet you got one of them little white girls now, ain’t you, Maxwell? You’re a big man now, and every big nigger gets him a white girl.” She leaned back, brown flab encased in whalebone and elastic, laughed and slapped Max on the shoulder with a heavy hand. “I sure am sick of you colored men. Runnin’ just as fast as you can after them. Whoo! Why don’t you menfolks wake up? It ain’t nuthin’, now, is it?”

  She had killed his appetite. But he ordered coffee and sweet potato pie. When he finished, he left, walking home. At some point, going south on Broadway, past Juilliard, Barnard and Columbia, his pac
e slow with heavy thought, November’s cold slashing softly through the Heights, he decided that, with the first break, he’d get out of it for a while. His piles were kicking up more. The Army operation seemed to have done no good. Nerves, one doctor told him; too much sedentary work, another had said. He found himself bored with people, tired of them, and that seemed to gather in his rectum. There was pain, but that seemed easy, compared to the rest.

  16

  NEW YORK

  To hell with the rest.

  In successive days, Zutkin asked him to do some articles. (All right, going-away money.)

  Berg was getting him set to do a series on Jackie Robinson, how he spent his time off-season.

  Shea was giving him almost daily unsolicited reports on his burgeoning romance with Regina.

  Still there was no mail from Harry. (Well, if that’s the way he feels, later.)

  Both doctors were agreed that what Max needed was another hemorrhoidectomy.

  What I need, Max told himself, is a little orgy. For Thanksgiving maybe. Mildred.

  After the long depression following Lillian’s death, there had come the women. He met them at parties, conferences, through intermediaries—in all the ways there are to meet women. He overdid his first affair, put too much into it, made it meaningful when he really hadn’t wanted to. He had to back out of it, and in order to do that well, he had simply begun another, then another. One of his early girls (Betsy!) had been very young, in her twenties, a graduate student at New York University. She wore T-shirts under her blouse (“I sweat a lot.”). The way she liked to make love, it could be done with all her clothes on. She went for nothing else. That had been a mistake. A man likes to grab hold of more than just a head of hair. Most times. The ingenue he had met while writing theater copy liked to drink sherry. She had to have at least one entire bottle before she even thought about making love. During which time she whined about her career. Irene. The Swedish stringer at the UN, Frederika, was all right, except she never came. She liked jazz, but couldn’t shake her head to the music to save her life. There were a few tough hairs on her breasts that made lovemaking somewhat uneasy. And that thing, that ugly, dangling, crippled labia; it felt like taking hold of a piece of warm chitlin. And she was forever shoving it up out of the way. Regina was another who never came except when she masturbated. She guessed that was why she couldn’t have an orgasm when lovemaking. Sometimes she had seemed quite close. Her eyes would narrow, her movements grow short and choppy, as if she were nearing the crest of a hill, running. Then with a long, sorrowful gasp of resignation, she would quit. There was the model, Hélène, who made love with quicksilver passion because she didn’t have to, the way she had to with photographers, agents and others who made it possible for models to get to the top. A telephone call to a woman, or receiving one from a woman late at night, the work lying limp on the desk, meant one thing: the business of pursuing pleasure. Sometimes when one left his apartment and he was still keening his condition which was the murder of loneliness, he would call another and go to her, or she would come to him, giving him just time enough to change the sheets. Once when he had carried five changes of sheets to the laundry several times in a row, the laundryman asked, “Are you from the hotel down the street? Tell me, because we can give you a discount.” Max left hastily, mumbling, No.