by Kate Manning
We got out of there, Darryl shaking his head in pity the entire elevator ride down.
“This is a travesty, Robicheaux!” he said, as soon as we were on the street. “This cannot happen! I will not allow them to bring you down. Because they have tried. Tried to make you a laughingstock.”
“Which would be an accurate description,” said Milo, sunk into himself, not looking at us.
“A buffoon!”
“Also right on point.”
“A turkey! They made you look like a turkey! And that’s one thing you are not!”
“Don’t put any money on that,” Milo said bitterly. “Check at Thanksgiving to see am I still around.” He was furious, walking fast. We passed a parking sign and he whacked it violently with the flat of his palm.
“That’s right,” said Darryl, “that’s right. You got a right to feel that way.”
Milo cursed.
“I’m with you,” Darryl said. “I’m on your side.”
I was keeping quiet. I knew Milo better now than to talk. Darryl was between us. At some point he got me by one arm and Milo by the other, taking up the whole sidewalk, as if we were his pontoons, and told Milo his present agents were charlatans. That the whole talent management establishment was run by those slave traders and those albino demons in stuffed suits; that they never would find a role suitable for a great black talent like Milo; that they wouldn’t think of putting him up for great parts.
“They don’t think about the black man as a leading man!”
“Apparently not.”
“They think of us as dopes and dope fiends. Houseboys and home-boys.”
Milo laughed but it was still a bitter laugh. Darryl talked and preached: They will not aggressively fight for you to be a leading man! No! But I will! Darryl Haynes will fight!
He was right, I thought. I was rooting for him.
Milo was listening, too. He had started out grim and embarrassed, hands deep in his pockets, jaw hard. But as Darryl talked, Milo began to loosen up, murmuring Yeah, I know. I see what you’re saying. We left Columbus Circle far behind us, walked all the way up Broadway till I thought my feet would be pounded up through my legs into the bones of my spine, they hurt so much in their spike heels. I wanted to say Let’s stop somewhere and get a drink. I wanted to sit down. I was on the far side of the conversation now. Darryl had his body turned to Milo in such a way, walking, that I was shut out.
“Unless something drastic happens,” Darryl was saying, “Milo Robicheaux will be doomed to a career full of movies like Slope! and Nope! and Can’t Cope! and Ain’t I a Nobody?”
That got Milo. His real laugh was back. He started swapping bad movie titles with Darryl.
“I Shot the Pope!”
“I Ain’t No Mope!”
“Girls I Have Groped!”
“Dopes on Dope!”
Everybody was laughing now. Milo was half giddy, almost relieved.
“You need somebody who knows the ropes!” Darryl said. “And no fighter alive knows the ropes like Darryl Haynes, the Boxer with Brains.”
“Look, Haynes,” Milo said, “what I don’t understand is—”
“Hey, now you look, Robicheaux,” said Darryl. “Open your eyes: You can stick with White and Company and see what gorilla monkey suit they got for you next—or: You can come home to your black brother.” He opened his arms wide to Milo, and Milo laughed. But then Darryl got that undertaker look on his face again. “I hate to say this, Milo,” he said, “and maybe I shouldn’t: But what, exactly, have you done to uplift the race since you got your fame? And I don’t mean little sports clinic here, little black-tie thing there, I mean payback time. To the community. Buy Black. Hire Black. That’s something we all have to do. It’s a stone responsibility.”
Milo stopped walking. He turned and looked at Darryl. “Why is it more my responsibility than, say, hers?” he said, pointing at me.
“You got a point. You got ten points,” said Darryl. “But I don’t worry about the white male, the white female. With all respect to your wife. I am not about that.” He looked right at me then, smiling.
Milo checked my face. I left it neutral, since this was between him and Darryl, I thought, had nothing to do with me.
“My point is about payback time,” Darryl said. “And you’re the one who’s gonna get paid, in the end, you’ll see.” He got Milo around the neck again, in the brotherly embrace. “Wake up! It’s 1983, and Hollywood has not shot a film by a black man since Shaft. Since 1971! Twelve years! You can change that. I already have a part eyed out for you. Not some Negro part but a real gig. A gig to make you bigger than big. Bigger than Sidney Poitier. Big as Arnold. Big as Sly and Clint. You say the word and it’s yours.”
“You don’t have any such thing,” said Milo.
“Right here in this pocket,” said Darryl, patting his back flank. “And in my other pocket, I have backers already.” He named a big boxing promoter and a soul singer, household words, both of them.
“You got those guys?” asked Milo.
“In the palm of my hand. Like a moth to flame,” Darryl said solemnly. “On the end of the hook.”
“Long as I’m not the worm,” Milo said.
“You are the worm! You’re the worm and you’re the flame! You’re it! You’re whatever you want to be! Can’t you see that?” Darryl pulled Milo onto a bench right in the center divider of Broadway. We sat there with cars roaring around us and I have to say I was rooting for Darryl. I thought he was right. “They have put you in the jock box!” Darryl said. “You have two choices with the man: the jock box or the lock box. Now, what you may not realize is: Half the time, the jock box is a lock box.”
“But I’m an athlete,” Milo said.
“You were an athlete,” Darryl said. “But that’s just a trampoline to spring you to something else, to Mr. Movie Star. If they haven’t gotten that across to you, then you need me to do their job.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Milo.
“Look, Robicheaux, you have a white wife, the least you can do is get yourself a black handler. Right, Charlotte?” Darryl winked at me.
Milo laughed, but he did not know what to think about what Darryl said. The jock box. The lock box. The black man as the leading man. At home, later, he said, “Maybe I’m not an actor.”
“Believe me,” I told him, “you are.”
“Jed and Mark have always seemed fine to me.”
“Since when was just fine good enough for you, Milo?”
He thought about that. Milo did not like to say anything bad about people he knew. Not Jed and Mark. Not Darryl now, either. He was sweet as pie to everybody, which is the way he was raised.
Bobbie Robicheaux, raised the same way, had no such qualms. She thought Jed and Mark were fools. That was her word. “Any agent that can’t find classier work for you than a chewing gum ad is a first-class fool,” she said. “You’re better than that junk, Milo.” She had come to visit us, and this time, she brought Marcus. I’d never met him; he hadn’t come to the wedding. “I dumped him, for a while,” Bobbie said. “We weren’t getting along.” They were back together now and seemed to be getting along just fine, the weekend they stayed with us, holding hands at dinner, at the café where we had breakfast.
Marcus was a slight dark man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thin beard trimmed close to his face. He looked owly and didn’t say much, but when Bobbie spoke he smiled and nodded, watching her intently.
They were talking about Darryl, how he wanted Milo for a client.
“So why wouldn’t you give a guy like that a chance?” Bobbie said to Milo.
“Because he’s got no track record,” he said.
“Someone gave you a chance once upon a time,” Bobbie said.
“That’s sports. There’s a hard cold time trial you can’t argue with,” Milo said. “And anyway, why should I cast my lot with this guy because he’s black and I’m black—”
“That’s not our point,” Bobbie s
aid.
“It’s Haynes’s point, then,” Milo said. “Why is that a reason?”
“Why don’t you find out for yourself?” Marcus said quietly.
The three of us looked at him. He was smoking, leaning back with his elbows up against the back of the booth where we sat. “It’s not like you have to bail out of your gig with these other guys, the establishment guys,” he said. “Stick with them, moonlight with this Darryl fellow.”
“Agents don’t like a two-timer,” I said. “I know someone who tried it.”
“You’d better not try it. Not on me,” Milo said, joking around. “Better not.”
“What I’m trying to say,” said Marcus, in his slow voice, “is Milo here needs one agent to represent his interests in one world and another agent for his interests in another. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Two worlds is what’s wrong,” I piped up, Miss Righteous.
“I hear that,” Marcus said, as if he’d heard it one time too many. Bobbie smiled at me, though, and I felt complimented, like an A student.
“Marcus is right,” Bobbie said. “Darryl is your man.”
“I don’t know,” Milo said. I could see he wanted badly to please his sister, but he thought she was motivated by politics. “They operate in a different world,” he said, when she and Marcus left. “Prisons, teenage mothers. All that. They don’t get what it’s like.” He thought that was Darryl’s problem, too. Milo really didn’t know what to do about Darryl, about Jed and Mark, his future. Bobbie and Marcus had powers to influence him, I saw. What he said was: “If my sister thinks me in a gum ad is bad, wait till she sees Slope!”
She did see the picture, that first week. “Lucky nobody reads reviews,” she said. But Milo read them. This embarrassing film. It was those words on top of his sister’s that carried him into the arms of Darryl Haynes. Sometimes in my more paranoid moments I have even wondered whether Darryl didn’t write the reviews himself, for that reason. Still, the critics were right. Slope! was a dog.
Cade: Rebel Fury, on the other hand, was a sci-fi thriller blockbuster. Rebel Fury was Milo’s next movie. He played Cade, the alien fighter, and has played that character in sequels ever since. You will remember Cade, the defiant captive held on the planet Cryos, working at hard labor, mining the Ore. The Ore was the source of power for the alien Cryotrons; it gave them strength and brilliance. They drank it in liquid form, dissolved in a glowing blue solution. The Ore could only be melted at the human body temperature of 98.6. Since the Cryotrons had no heat source of their own, being bloodless, they depended on slaves—human beings captured from Earth—to mine it.
People often tell us, with total recall, of the first time they saw Milo as Cade, his noble face ashed and sweating, melting the blue Ore with the sheer warmth of his hands. The most famous scene, of course, is the one where Milo as Cade picks up a stolen goblet of liquid cryonite and drinks it, only to discover that the Ore does nothing. It has no intrinsic power at all but is addictive and narcotic for the Cryotrons. With this discovery, Cade becomes a rebel and leads the captive miners to escape and, ultimately, to victory.
Cade: Rebel Fury was born from that deal in Darryl’s pocket, the one that spent time in our wastebasket. It was a treatment for a script supposedly written by one of Darryl’s clients, a kid Darryl had met years before at City College, who was, unfortunately (allegedly), now dead from a drug problem. I always wondered if the kid was actually Darryl. But Darryl said no, it was a kid with a wish to see Cade live on film. He got his wish, but not a credit, I noticed.
How Darryl ever put the whole thing together I don’t know. He wasn’t just brokering between parties. He was the whole party. He got writers, he got the script, he got Milo for the lead, and he got the money. The story is that he was telling the Soul Singer that he had money from the Boxing Promoter, and vice versa. Telling them he had Milo, and telling Milo he had them, when, in fact, he had neither. The minute the Business Suits showed any reluctance, Darryl would say: What’s the matter, don’t you deal with black people?
Milo fired his agents and hired Darryl, who got to work right away. He got Milo a freelance contract with the Network, so Milo could do a story a month, and keep an office. We could easily afford it, what with our savings, and my paychecks. I don’t know what Darryl lived off, that year, unless it was Milo. The two of them lived and breathed that movie. Milo was helping with the script, with raising money, with choosing locations. He took acting classes. Jesus. I had to listen to him practice. Milo as Hamlet. Milo as Stanley Kowalski. He went around saying Get thee to a nunnery. It was funny. Milo in the kitchen with his hand on his heart. But he was good; he really had something. It was unsettling, how completely he could change himself, menacing and bellowing Stella! or saying his lines from Cade: I will spare your life, Cold King, but not your power. He would rearrange his face. “Look,” he said, “my mask of fury,” and he’d harden his mouth and narrow his eyes, so you got chills. And then he’d be right back to Milo in the kitchen, smiling at me. You could see him learning, working at it, making himself up as he went along. What bothers me now is this: If he was born to it, as the critics said, how do I know what was Milo acting and what was just Milo, all these years? They said he had a natural gift.
23.
When I knew I was pregnant I kept it a secret. Even from Milo. I held the news to myself the way you hold some complicated food in your mouth, deciphering the flavors. I was afraid and full of hope. I was sleepy but couldn’t sleep. It had taken so long, two years; telling would jinx it, I was sure.
The day I finally told him, I was six weeks gone, twenty-nine years old. We were surrounded by packing boxes and the maelstrom of moving. The plan was: go to L.A. for the shooting of Cade, see how we liked it, keep the place in New York. We were sorting through our things, to see what to take from nearly three years of living there and what to leave. Milo was sitting exhausted on the couch with his feet resting on a stack of magazines. I went to sit next to him.
“I’m still not really sure about this move,” I said.
“We’ll see,” he said. “I think you’ll like L.A.”
“I never liked it,” I said.
He twisted my hair around two fingers. “It’ll be a good change,” he said, and lowered his voice, peering over his nose at me, imitating his father: Change is good! Change is progress! You gotta grow and expand and live!
“There are going to be a lot of changes,” I told him. “A lot of growing and expanding.”
“Yeah.” He smiled at me. “In L.A. I’m going to take up surfing. I am going to say ‘dudes’ constantly.”
“I mean, sometimes ten changes a day.”
“What?”
“From what I know,” I said, sitting up, “you have to change them ten, twenty times a day, for like, two years.”
“What!?” He was afraid to jump to conclusions, trying to make me say the words. When I said them—It’s true. I am. Six weeks along—he closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. Then he looked at me through his fingers, smiling. “Really?”
Neither of us could discuss it, not until the top button of my slacks safely refused to close anymore. We were superstitious. Once, walking past a shop with rocking chairs and tiny socks and shoes in the window, Milo put his hands to my eyes like horse-blinders, so I wouldn’t see. “Don’t look,” he said.
I was dying to look. Milo, too. We steeled ourselves and hustled by.
But then we were safe. The doctor said so. We went into a dark room with her and I lay down on yet another table, and she hooked me up to a kind of television to show us: a tiny jumping creature on the black-and-white screen.
“Look,” Milo said, hardly breathing. “Oh, will you look at that.”
There Hallie was, like a fish, like a bungee jumper, like a pearl floating. Her spine was a chain of tiny bone beads. Head bulging, belly bulging. We couldn’t get enough of looking at her, listening through the stethoscope to the wet echo of her heart beating under mine
.
Milo couldn’t get over it. He told everybody he saw, tollbooth attendants and waiters. He couldn’t stop handling me around the belly, polishing the rounding-out part. Hello in there! he said to my middle. It’s your dad! You listen to me now! It was funny. I was constantly breaking down in a mess of giggles. Milo would put his lips to my belly and call: “Hey! Kid! Bend those knees! We’re gonna have you on skis by the time you’re weaned, you hear me?! You just hold that tuck, kid. Don’t forget!” It was so funny and darling. Most of the pregnancy, Milo was working on Cade, but in between takes, he’d go to his trailer and call me on the phone. Charlotte? How’re you doing, babe? Are you feeling okay? Are you resting? Or he’d ask me to come with him to the set. I’d sit there and watch and chat up the crew. I even have a small part in the first Cade film myself. You can see me in the mine scenes, an extra captive heating the Ore, my hair stringy around my face. I accused Darryl of making me look bad on purpose. “You’re a slave,” he said. “It’s not a glamorous job.”
I watched Darryl on the set one day. He was always there for Milo, like a trainer in his fighter’s corner. They were shooting the scene where Cade is thrown in an underground cell—an oubliette, they called it—by the evil Emperor. Guards toss him food and water. Just a few rays of light come down to illuminate Cade’s troubled face. Before the first take Darryl got Milo off away from the set. He had a big white towel around Milo’s neck. He massaged his shoulders, gave him drinks from a water bottle, squatted down on his haunches in front of him, talking to him. I was sitting right there and I heard him.
“Listen to me, listen to me now,” Darryl said to Milo. “Think about Dr. King in the Birmingham jail. You think of that, you hear me? What he said. How he felt. Did you read that? What I gave you? The letter from Birmingham?”