Iced, page 10
I went to sleep anxiously last night.
I slept fitfully.
I woke up high. I had been dreaming of hits. I often do but these hits were different. These hits were alive. Breathing hits. In the dream I was sitting in this room, as I do, looking out the window. I remember it snowing and snow looking like fluffy chips of goodness all flyin’ around outside. I remember pushing my tongue against the windowpane. . . then I heard these voices—voices screamin’ out my name. It wasn’t just one voice, more like a chorus.
They sounded like a chorus of Alvin and the Chipmunks—or when you speed a record up, a Michael Jackson record—real high and freaky. I remember runnin’ round the apartment, buggin’, tryin’ to figure out where these screechy scary voices were comin’ from. It wasn’t like they were in another room because I heard them everywhere I went . . . I heard them real close like they were in my back pocket, which is where they were, I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out my stash of hits. Inside the plastic bag the rocks were alive . . . they were living heads . . . no bodies . . . just heads, perfect miniature Mount Rushmores of living crack. They were all the same person. Pia. . . . ten hits of Pia . . . some were cryin’ . . . some were laughin’, but they were all screamin’ my name.
It freaked me so bad that I ran to the bathroom to flush the bag down the toilet . . . but I couldn’t . . . yeah they were heads of Pia, but they were still rocks . . . crusty white rocks with Pia faces . . . I put them into my pipe one by one and smoked them . . . I’ll never forget the horror screams as each tiny face blackened, liquefied then curdled into the smoke that bled into my lungs . . . I smoked Pia and it was good . . . the best . . . in my dream the hits were so potent, they set my head spinning off its axis like a world gone hyper. . . . . My head spun around and around my neck like a satellite deployed in space; then spun off my neck and crashed into the ceiling.
Blood and brains spattered everywhere.
That’s what woke me up.
The crash.
And I was high.
Deliciously high. . . .
I drank some water and sat, as I am, in the sunshine.
Sometimes I don’t know if writing this down is such a great idea.
It makes me remember things I would rather not.
Like Pia, and I know why I keep thinking about her so much. It’s because I’m gonna hafta soon tell you what happened between me and her, but I ain’t gonna tell you now.
Everything in its time.
I still haven’t found my rock, but it’s daytime and I’m not supposed to think about it, so I’ll write about Boston instead. . . . .
After I got back to New York City with Quandza, I immediately set about trying to move my life from New York to Boston.
I called the Boston Tourist Guide and got a listing of all the schools in Boston.
I applied to three small colleges in the area. I wasn’t interested in any of the big schools because I wasn’t interested in going to school really, I just wanted to be in Boston. I had enough credits for a couple of schools but they weren’t offering any financial aid so I decided I would just get to Boston, get a job, then get myself in school.
I felt kinda guilty about leaving Lorraine alone, but Lorraine wasn’t bothered.
I think Lorraine was excited about the prospect of having her own apartment and living her life exactly as she pleased without having anyone, including me, looking over her shoulder.
I knew exactly how she felt.
Freedom is positive.
A pungent positive.
Freedom is singular.
Addictive.
Lorraine had tasted freedom briefly, after mama had moved to North Carolina, during my escapades in Manhattan and Boston.
Freedom tasted good to Lorraine.
She wanted a whole bellyful.
Lorraine was glad I was going to Boston.
Mama wasn’t so sure it was the right idea.
She lamented the breaking up of the family. From one solid rock, crushed by death and circumstances into three splintered pieces.
Solo.
Independent.
That us three hadn’t clustered into a smaller but stronger rock-family worried her, but she understood our need for independence because she needed it too.
Freedom.
Cornelius Sr. had ruled us all with such an iron hand, had sealed the loose ends of our individual spirits with the adhesive of his personality, that none of us knew what our own true feelings about anything were.
This was especially true for mama who had for years submerged, even redesigned her entire persona to fit in and complement Cornelius Sr.’s desires and demands.
This is what marriage meant to mama.
BUT
The King was dead.
Long live the Queen.
And the Princess.
And the Prince.
Mama didn’t like my going to Boston but she understood it.
I went.
Trees . . . flowers . . . swans and rowboats growing in the gardens . . . hippies throwing frisbees, sucking on reefer-joints in the Commons . . . students marching and protesting everything . . . music everywhere . . . sunshine just like today’s crashing around this enchanted B-town-place, frame the first memories of my earliest moments in Boston.
I didn’t fly.
I took the Greyhound so I could get a good close look at this New England.
I arrived in Boston the last weekend in August 1969.
I got a room at the YMCA not too far from the South End.
I spent the first few weeks just walking around.
I hitched and walked everywhere.
I was ready for everything and anything.
Mainly.
I was ready to heal.
I forgot about going to school and just dove into the transient gypsy life of the young people that flowered everywhere in Boston like fragrant poppies.
I hung out in Harvard Square. I visited jazz clubs on Boylston St., Palls Mall and the Jazz Workshop. I attended free dance and drama classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts; Elma Lewis was this eccentric Black dance-diva from the 50s who felt that art was every Black person’s given heritage.
It was a rich, thick, herby cake I was eating.
I was full.
I was happy; perhaps for the first time in my life.
Happy just to be.
The thing I loved most about Boston . . . the place crammed full . . . Black folk from every state you could name. These Black folks weren’t looting, rioting, killing or generally makin’ fools of themselves like a lot of Black people are prone to do.
No.
These young Black people were all students.
Attending colleges and universities like it was their right.
Like they were supposed to be there.
I learnt how to be Black in Boston.
I had enough teachers.
There in blue-skied-college-towned-Boston were Black people from every state in the Union.
Geeky-looking Blacks from Ohio, shrunken-malnutritioned-looking-Blacks from Arkansas, snappy-big-boned-beat-your-assers from Mississippi, stuck-up-bourgeois-White-ti-fied-Blacks from Washington DC, gorgeous-exotic-spicy-Creoles from New Orleans, cerebral-sexy-mellow-Blacks from Georgia, pouting-pretty-ambitious-Blacks from Texas, stylishly-cool-crayola-colored-Blacks from Connecticut, beach-crazed-baring-chestied-Blacks from Rhode Island, the coolest, the sexiest, the even-more-down-than-NYC-Blacks from Philadelphia.
Can’t name them all. They came from everywhere . . . Bean-towned-Boston played hostess to all of them.
Blacks from Boston were a law unto themselves.
Honest-down . . . some of the prettiest people I have ever seen anywhere.
Even the men were pretty.
A touch too country about a few things but you couldn’t read Black Boston.
White Boston was another thing entirely, but I ain’t writing about them. Whoever had it going on in their own personal hamlets across the country, when they moved to Boston they brought it with them. Boston benefited or suffered depending on what was brought.
I loved the South End where the YMCA I lived in was.
It reminded me of the Village. It was full of artsy shops, a plethora.
Psychedelic bars. Full of professional alcoholics hosted by music. I would walk down the steps of the gray-stoned building, turn to the right or left and within a half hour would be in the middle of a cinematographic adventure. People would just come up to me and talk to me. I guess it was because I was new.
Guys that lived in the YMCA were either students or transient working men on a schedule.
I didn’t get to meet many of them.
I did meet Mercedes.
Mercedes was a relic.
He was about forty when I met him.
Mercedes had been living at the YMCA before I moved in. I had never seen him. By this time my mama-money had run out. I had taken various jobs to pay my rent. When I met Mercedes I was working at Carvels, an ice cream parlor on Boylston St.
In fact I met Mercedes at Carvels.
Mercedes.
This thinnish, bearded, Amira-Baraka-looking poet-philosopher . . . shoulda wrote his beliefs down in a book. It woulda sold millions. Mercedes truly had the answer to the world’s problems, it seemed to me he did, while sucking joints in his room at the YMCA. Mercedes’ room.
A revelation in itself.
Mercedes was a media freak.
He had up-to-the-second state-of-the-art stereo, radio, four televisions, a film projector, a slide projector, maps, graphs, an arsenal of books and information crammed inside this tiny-boxy room that he had lived in for seven years.
It was smaller than my room at the Hotel Operatic.
Mercedes had some wild ideas.
He proclaimed one warmish day that people talked too much.
He had just passed me the joint.
I pulled on it.
He said, “The whole world should shut up for five years . . . talking and things that talk, plays, movies, radio, records and especially TVs should be banned, people should be forced by law to read . . .”
I choked, spluttering the reefer.
Mercedes had all kinds of ill ideas.
He thought that the world’s governments should admit that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, give all the inhabitants of the world each $250,000, declare a world holiday for the next seven years while the nations’ leaders stopped warring and planned for the world’s future for the next fourteen years.
“People work too much and too hard for nothing . . . that’s why everybody’s crazy . . . they work too hard, even if it’s nothin’ but thievin’, killin’, or nothin’ at all . . . they do it too hard an’ ain’t got shit to show for it!”
Mercedes would then take off the cool green half-shades he always wore, even at night in the darkness, stare ahead as if tuning his subject in clearer.
“If the whole world worked hard together for seven years then took seven years off planning what to do for the next fourteen years. . . we’d all be saner. . . ”
It sounded like stew to me but when Mercedes explained it . . . it kinda made sense.
Mercedes was into jazz.
He’d take me with him to see Thelonious Monk or Sun Ra at the Jazz Workshop or Palls Mall.
Mercedes was a daddy to me in my first years in Boston.
He schooled me mucho.
Mercedes was into Malcolm X. He admired Martin Luther King.
He thought Martin was more the soldier-king, even though Mercedes thought he was fighting a useless battle.
“Things were better before integration . . . at least we had our own shit! . . . we had Black-owned funeral parlors an’ shit . . . and then we marched an’ shit, an’ tore up an’ shit, so the White folks finally say . . . OK niggers, we goin’ to let you in, and bang . . . niggers rush into the White. . . . fast. . . . an’ our shit . . . our ’hood shit dies . . . the Orientals own us now . . .”
Mercedes was a separatist.
He believed that Black youth needed to know more about their own culture before tainting themselves with too much up-close-exposure with White culture.
“Black folks don’t know shit about themselves . . . all they know is what they see on TV and they ain’t no real Black folks on TV at least nobody I know . . . I don’t know no Julias . . .”
“Julia” was a TV nurse, played by Ms. Gorgeous Diahann Carroll. It was the middle-class forerunner of the Cosby Show.
Mercedes felt that young Blacks who mixed with young Whites were in danger of cultural poisoning, that without guidance they would end up politically White-washed.
I tried to assure Mercedes that the Black students I mixed with were actually learning something about themselves by being away from home.
These students were getting primed and quality guidance from the Black instructors, professors, older Black students and Black activists of the day. Blacks like Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton as well as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King.
I argued that by living among the Whites perhaps now we could understand them and not fear them, and perhaps they in turn could learn about us and maybe together we could discover some common ground.
Mercedes would listen to me calmly, light another joint, sigh, then laugh.
Mercedes was good for my political head.
The summer flew past dissolving into fall.
Technicolor Boston fall.
The students came back chastened after Nixon’s firing squad dealt death to the children of Kent State—sending a message to Black activists everywhere.
“We’ve killed our own and we’ll kill you too, so cool down. Now!”
They did.
Politics, real political activity went underground and stayed there; like a ground-hog waiting for the sun of dissatisfaction to show its face and cast its simmering shadow against society’s sidewalk. That sun is on the rise. The streets will awaken soon.
Quandza, the girl who introduced me to Boston, would travel down from New York from time to time. Through her I met lots of different females, friends of hers or friends of her friends. I was always happy to see Quandza. I think she was puzzled and frustrated that I didn’t push the boundaries of our relationship further. I really liked her and we spent some wondrous times together, but Boston was mine and I didn’t want to tie myself down to anything that would intrude upon the freedom that my new world had bequeathed me. For that reason I didn’t cultivate lasting relationships with anyone for a while.
By the summer of ’71 I was beginning to run out of money again, so I started looking for another job.
The Boston Phoenix, a hippy-dippie-newspaper-cum-art-music-politico-guide, was my bible.
I scoured their want-ads looking for work.
New England Merchants Bank was hiring night clerks.
I didn’t really like the idea of working nights but I thought it might be a good idea because if I did finally get into school I’d have my days free.
I filled in the application, went to the interview and was hired.
I immediately hated the job.
It was boringly banal.
I had to sit at a desk from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and categorize checks.
American Express checks, Bank-America-Card checks, that kind of bullshit.
It was weird working at night.
There was only two Black people working the night shift; myself and a plumpish but cute-ish woman of thirty-nine named Maggie Ames.
Maggie was one of my Boston casualties.
There’s a bevy of ladies in my life. . . .
Standing in a bunch. . . .
Carrying huge loads of baggage. . . .
Fighting each other to get to the front. . . .
Of the revenge line.
At the front of this line stands Maggie.
I had put all my memories of Maggie outside my experience of Boston because I had well and truly fucked up her life.
Wow!
Another low-life chapter in my book of crimes.
I’d really like to skip the Maggie section but the picture wouldn’t be complete without her frame.
I didn’t even want to get involved with Maggie.
I thought she was too old for me.
She was almost old enough to be a KIND OF MOTHER to me; in fact that’s how our relationship started.
My first week at Merchants started on a Friday which meant that I had no money until the following Friday.
I had waited until I was truly out of money before I looked for a job and when I got the job at Merchants I had only enough money to pay my rent at the YMCA, and a bit left over for food.
I didn’t even have enough for car-fare or lunch. I didn’t mind the car-fare bit because I walked or hitched everywhere, and Merchants Bank wasn’t too far from where I was living; about a forty minute walk.
I always took an hour’s nap during my lunch break which came around 3 a.m., so I wasn’t bothered about eating lunch, however when work was over at seven in the morning I was always starving. I guessed Maggie noticed that I never ate anything so one day near to the end of my first week at the bank, she brought me a fried chicken sandwich and a piece of homemade vanilla cream cake. I didn’t want to take it because I could see already by the way she was always looking at me that Maggie was interested in me and I didn’t want to get involved.
I wasn’t ready for a relationship yet.
BUT
Maggie was very persuasive and very funny.
She had a way of putting things that made me laugh and laugh.
She called our manager Ms. Thing even though he was this fifty-year-old Jewish man.
After that first time, Maggie brought me lunch everyday.
When I asked her why she was being so nice to me she laughed that turbo-charged laugh of hers and said that she had spoken to my mama and promised her that she would keep meat on my bones, then she laughed again.
Soon I wasn’t sleeping during my lunch breaks but would be up laughin’ and shootin’ the shit with Maggie.
Maggie had a laugh that could bang the universe into existence.
It started out as a low bubble then ballooned and ballooned into a high, hard bellow that would float above everything in its wake.
I slept fitfully.
I woke up high. I had been dreaming of hits. I often do but these hits were different. These hits were alive. Breathing hits. In the dream I was sitting in this room, as I do, looking out the window. I remember it snowing and snow looking like fluffy chips of goodness all flyin’ around outside. I remember pushing my tongue against the windowpane. . . then I heard these voices—voices screamin’ out my name. It wasn’t just one voice, more like a chorus.
They sounded like a chorus of Alvin and the Chipmunks—or when you speed a record up, a Michael Jackson record—real high and freaky. I remember runnin’ round the apartment, buggin’, tryin’ to figure out where these screechy scary voices were comin’ from. It wasn’t like they were in another room because I heard them everywhere I went . . . I heard them real close like they were in my back pocket, which is where they were, I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out my stash of hits. Inside the plastic bag the rocks were alive . . . they were living heads . . . no bodies . . . just heads, perfect miniature Mount Rushmores of living crack. They were all the same person. Pia. . . . ten hits of Pia . . . some were cryin’ . . . some were laughin’, but they were all screamin’ my name.
It freaked me so bad that I ran to the bathroom to flush the bag down the toilet . . . but I couldn’t . . . yeah they were heads of Pia, but they were still rocks . . . crusty white rocks with Pia faces . . . I put them into my pipe one by one and smoked them . . . I’ll never forget the horror screams as each tiny face blackened, liquefied then curdled into the smoke that bled into my lungs . . . I smoked Pia and it was good . . . the best . . . in my dream the hits were so potent, they set my head spinning off its axis like a world gone hyper. . . . . My head spun around and around my neck like a satellite deployed in space; then spun off my neck and crashed into the ceiling.
Blood and brains spattered everywhere.
That’s what woke me up.
The crash.
And I was high.
Deliciously high. . . .
I drank some water and sat, as I am, in the sunshine.
Sometimes I don’t know if writing this down is such a great idea.
It makes me remember things I would rather not.
Like Pia, and I know why I keep thinking about her so much. It’s because I’m gonna hafta soon tell you what happened between me and her, but I ain’t gonna tell you now.
Everything in its time.
I still haven’t found my rock, but it’s daytime and I’m not supposed to think about it, so I’ll write about Boston instead. . . . .
After I got back to New York City with Quandza, I immediately set about trying to move my life from New York to Boston.
I called the Boston Tourist Guide and got a listing of all the schools in Boston.
I applied to three small colleges in the area. I wasn’t interested in any of the big schools because I wasn’t interested in going to school really, I just wanted to be in Boston. I had enough credits for a couple of schools but they weren’t offering any financial aid so I decided I would just get to Boston, get a job, then get myself in school.
I felt kinda guilty about leaving Lorraine alone, but Lorraine wasn’t bothered.
I think Lorraine was excited about the prospect of having her own apartment and living her life exactly as she pleased without having anyone, including me, looking over her shoulder.
I knew exactly how she felt.
Freedom is positive.
A pungent positive.
Freedom is singular.
Addictive.
Lorraine had tasted freedom briefly, after mama had moved to North Carolina, during my escapades in Manhattan and Boston.
Freedom tasted good to Lorraine.
She wanted a whole bellyful.
Lorraine was glad I was going to Boston.
Mama wasn’t so sure it was the right idea.
She lamented the breaking up of the family. From one solid rock, crushed by death and circumstances into three splintered pieces.
Solo.
Independent.
That us three hadn’t clustered into a smaller but stronger rock-family worried her, but she understood our need for independence because she needed it too.
Freedom.
Cornelius Sr. had ruled us all with such an iron hand, had sealed the loose ends of our individual spirits with the adhesive of his personality, that none of us knew what our own true feelings about anything were.
This was especially true for mama who had for years submerged, even redesigned her entire persona to fit in and complement Cornelius Sr.’s desires and demands.
This is what marriage meant to mama.
BUT
The King was dead.
Long live the Queen.
And the Princess.
And the Prince.
Mama didn’t like my going to Boston but she understood it.
I went.
Trees . . . flowers . . . swans and rowboats growing in the gardens . . . hippies throwing frisbees, sucking on reefer-joints in the Commons . . . students marching and protesting everything . . . music everywhere . . . sunshine just like today’s crashing around this enchanted B-town-place, frame the first memories of my earliest moments in Boston.
I didn’t fly.
I took the Greyhound so I could get a good close look at this New England.
I arrived in Boston the last weekend in August 1969.
I got a room at the YMCA not too far from the South End.
I spent the first few weeks just walking around.
I hitched and walked everywhere.
I was ready for everything and anything.
Mainly.
I was ready to heal.
I forgot about going to school and just dove into the transient gypsy life of the young people that flowered everywhere in Boston like fragrant poppies.
I hung out in Harvard Square. I visited jazz clubs on Boylston St., Palls Mall and the Jazz Workshop. I attended free dance and drama classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts; Elma Lewis was this eccentric Black dance-diva from the 50s who felt that art was every Black person’s given heritage.
It was a rich, thick, herby cake I was eating.
I was full.
I was happy; perhaps for the first time in my life.
Happy just to be.
The thing I loved most about Boston . . . the place crammed full . . . Black folk from every state you could name. These Black folks weren’t looting, rioting, killing or generally makin’ fools of themselves like a lot of Black people are prone to do.
No.
These young Black people were all students.
Attending colleges and universities like it was their right.
Like they were supposed to be there.
I learnt how to be Black in Boston.
I had enough teachers.
There in blue-skied-college-towned-Boston were Black people from every state in the Union.
Geeky-looking Blacks from Ohio, shrunken-malnutritioned-looking-Blacks from Arkansas, snappy-big-boned-beat-your-assers from Mississippi, stuck-up-bourgeois-White-ti-fied-Blacks from Washington DC, gorgeous-exotic-spicy-Creoles from New Orleans, cerebral-sexy-mellow-Blacks from Georgia, pouting-pretty-ambitious-Blacks from Texas, stylishly-cool-crayola-colored-Blacks from Connecticut, beach-crazed-baring-chestied-Blacks from Rhode Island, the coolest, the sexiest, the even-more-down-than-NYC-Blacks from Philadelphia.
Can’t name them all. They came from everywhere . . . Bean-towned-Boston played hostess to all of them.
Blacks from Boston were a law unto themselves.
Honest-down . . . some of the prettiest people I have ever seen anywhere.
Even the men were pretty.
A touch too country about a few things but you couldn’t read Black Boston.
White Boston was another thing entirely, but I ain’t writing about them. Whoever had it going on in their own personal hamlets across the country, when they moved to Boston they brought it with them. Boston benefited or suffered depending on what was brought.
I loved the South End where the YMCA I lived in was.
It reminded me of the Village. It was full of artsy shops, a plethora.
Psychedelic bars. Full of professional alcoholics hosted by music. I would walk down the steps of the gray-stoned building, turn to the right or left and within a half hour would be in the middle of a cinematographic adventure. People would just come up to me and talk to me. I guess it was because I was new.
Guys that lived in the YMCA were either students or transient working men on a schedule.
I didn’t get to meet many of them.
I did meet Mercedes.
Mercedes was a relic.
He was about forty when I met him.
Mercedes had been living at the YMCA before I moved in. I had never seen him. By this time my mama-money had run out. I had taken various jobs to pay my rent. When I met Mercedes I was working at Carvels, an ice cream parlor on Boylston St.
In fact I met Mercedes at Carvels.
Mercedes.
This thinnish, bearded, Amira-Baraka-looking poet-philosopher . . . shoulda wrote his beliefs down in a book. It woulda sold millions. Mercedes truly had the answer to the world’s problems, it seemed to me he did, while sucking joints in his room at the YMCA. Mercedes’ room.
A revelation in itself.
Mercedes was a media freak.
He had up-to-the-second state-of-the-art stereo, radio, four televisions, a film projector, a slide projector, maps, graphs, an arsenal of books and information crammed inside this tiny-boxy room that he had lived in for seven years.
It was smaller than my room at the Hotel Operatic.
Mercedes had some wild ideas.
He proclaimed one warmish day that people talked too much.
He had just passed me the joint.
I pulled on it.
He said, “The whole world should shut up for five years . . . talking and things that talk, plays, movies, radio, records and especially TVs should be banned, people should be forced by law to read . . .”
I choked, spluttering the reefer.
Mercedes had all kinds of ill ideas.
He thought that the world’s governments should admit that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, give all the inhabitants of the world each $250,000, declare a world holiday for the next seven years while the nations’ leaders stopped warring and planned for the world’s future for the next fourteen years.
“People work too much and too hard for nothing . . . that’s why everybody’s crazy . . . they work too hard, even if it’s nothin’ but thievin’, killin’, or nothin’ at all . . . they do it too hard an’ ain’t got shit to show for it!”
Mercedes would then take off the cool green half-shades he always wore, even at night in the darkness, stare ahead as if tuning his subject in clearer.
“If the whole world worked hard together for seven years then took seven years off planning what to do for the next fourteen years. . . we’d all be saner. . . ”
It sounded like stew to me but when Mercedes explained it . . . it kinda made sense.
Mercedes was into jazz.
He’d take me with him to see Thelonious Monk or Sun Ra at the Jazz Workshop or Palls Mall.
Mercedes was a daddy to me in my first years in Boston.
He schooled me mucho.
Mercedes was into Malcolm X. He admired Martin Luther King.
He thought Martin was more the soldier-king, even though Mercedes thought he was fighting a useless battle.
“Things were better before integration . . . at least we had our own shit! . . . we had Black-owned funeral parlors an’ shit . . . and then we marched an’ shit, an’ tore up an’ shit, so the White folks finally say . . . OK niggers, we goin’ to let you in, and bang . . . niggers rush into the White. . . . fast. . . . an’ our shit . . . our ’hood shit dies . . . the Orientals own us now . . .”
Mercedes was a separatist.
He believed that Black youth needed to know more about their own culture before tainting themselves with too much up-close-exposure with White culture.
“Black folks don’t know shit about themselves . . . all they know is what they see on TV and they ain’t no real Black folks on TV at least nobody I know . . . I don’t know no Julias . . .”
“Julia” was a TV nurse, played by Ms. Gorgeous Diahann Carroll. It was the middle-class forerunner of the Cosby Show.
Mercedes felt that young Blacks who mixed with young Whites were in danger of cultural poisoning, that without guidance they would end up politically White-washed.
I tried to assure Mercedes that the Black students I mixed with were actually learning something about themselves by being away from home.
These students were getting primed and quality guidance from the Black instructors, professors, older Black students and Black activists of the day. Blacks like Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton as well as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King.
I argued that by living among the Whites perhaps now we could understand them and not fear them, and perhaps they in turn could learn about us and maybe together we could discover some common ground.
Mercedes would listen to me calmly, light another joint, sigh, then laugh.
Mercedes was good for my political head.
The summer flew past dissolving into fall.
Technicolor Boston fall.
The students came back chastened after Nixon’s firing squad dealt death to the children of Kent State—sending a message to Black activists everywhere.
“We’ve killed our own and we’ll kill you too, so cool down. Now!”
They did.
Politics, real political activity went underground and stayed there; like a ground-hog waiting for the sun of dissatisfaction to show its face and cast its simmering shadow against society’s sidewalk. That sun is on the rise. The streets will awaken soon.
Quandza, the girl who introduced me to Boston, would travel down from New York from time to time. Through her I met lots of different females, friends of hers or friends of her friends. I was always happy to see Quandza. I think she was puzzled and frustrated that I didn’t push the boundaries of our relationship further. I really liked her and we spent some wondrous times together, but Boston was mine and I didn’t want to tie myself down to anything that would intrude upon the freedom that my new world had bequeathed me. For that reason I didn’t cultivate lasting relationships with anyone for a while.
By the summer of ’71 I was beginning to run out of money again, so I started looking for another job.
The Boston Phoenix, a hippy-dippie-newspaper-cum-art-music-politico-guide, was my bible.
I scoured their want-ads looking for work.
New England Merchants Bank was hiring night clerks.
I didn’t really like the idea of working nights but I thought it might be a good idea because if I did finally get into school I’d have my days free.
I filled in the application, went to the interview and was hired.
I immediately hated the job.
It was boringly banal.
I had to sit at a desk from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and categorize checks.
American Express checks, Bank-America-Card checks, that kind of bullshit.
It was weird working at night.
There was only two Black people working the night shift; myself and a plumpish but cute-ish woman of thirty-nine named Maggie Ames.
Maggie was one of my Boston casualties.
There’s a bevy of ladies in my life. . . .
Standing in a bunch. . . .
Carrying huge loads of baggage. . . .
Fighting each other to get to the front. . . .
Of the revenge line.
At the front of this line stands Maggie.
I had put all my memories of Maggie outside my experience of Boston because I had well and truly fucked up her life.
Wow!
Another low-life chapter in my book of crimes.
I’d really like to skip the Maggie section but the picture wouldn’t be complete without her frame.
I didn’t even want to get involved with Maggie.
I thought she was too old for me.
She was almost old enough to be a KIND OF MOTHER to me; in fact that’s how our relationship started.
My first week at Merchants started on a Friday which meant that I had no money until the following Friday.
I had waited until I was truly out of money before I looked for a job and when I got the job at Merchants I had only enough money to pay my rent at the YMCA, and a bit left over for food.
I didn’t even have enough for car-fare or lunch. I didn’t mind the car-fare bit because I walked or hitched everywhere, and Merchants Bank wasn’t too far from where I was living; about a forty minute walk.
I always took an hour’s nap during my lunch break which came around 3 a.m., so I wasn’t bothered about eating lunch, however when work was over at seven in the morning I was always starving. I guessed Maggie noticed that I never ate anything so one day near to the end of my first week at the bank, she brought me a fried chicken sandwich and a piece of homemade vanilla cream cake. I didn’t want to take it because I could see already by the way she was always looking at me that Maggie was interested in me and I didn’t want to get involved.
I wasn’t ready for a relationship yet.
BUT
Maggie was very persuasive and very funny.
She had a way of putting things that made me laugh and laugh.
She called our manager Ms. Thing even though he was this fifty-year-old Jewish man.
After that first time, Maggie brought me lunch everyday.
When I asked her why she was being so nice to me she laughed that turbo-charged laugh of hers and said that she had spoken to my mama and promised her that she would keep meat on my bones, then she laughed again.
Soon I wasn’t sleeping during my lunch breaks but would be up laughin’ and shootin’ the shit with Maggie.
Maggie had a laugh that could bang the universe into existence.
It started out as a low bubble then ballooned and ballooned into a high, hard bellow that would float above everything in its wake.
