A Conversation with the Mann (37 page)

Kept company by the science Sammy had lectured to me, I walked back to the Copa Room by way of the casino. A lot of looks
got sent my way, but no one said a thing.

K
ANSAS
C
ITY
. Kansas City, Missouri. I was having an afternoon rest. I'd been up late, a jazz club after my show. I'd just eaten. Barbecue.
If you dig that sort of thing, meats slathered with tangy sauces, K.C. has some of the best bbq to be had. I lay on my bed
in my hotel thinking of nothing in particular. My life had reached such a point of steady ease that very little deep thought
was required in being me. Sid booked my shows, I did my shows. I did them well and was paid accordingly. I worked New York.
I worked Los Angeles. I worked Las Vegas. I worked the best clubs in each city. The only blip on my mental radar was television.
As comfortable as I was, I knew I needed some national exposure if I was going to ever be
more
comfortable.

Sid kept telling me not to worry, television would come.

Alone in my room in the quiet, I had to be honest with myself: I was getting a little tired of hearing that.

The phone rang. I flopped a lazy hand to the nightstand, picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Jackie Mann?” The voice was tentative. It had an accent. Southernish. Missouri was a border state. There were a lot of accents
walking around.

“Yes.”

“Jackie, Ah'm, uh … well, Ah caught yer act last night, and that was some funny shit yew were talkin'. Ah jus' … muh wife
an Ah both—”

“Thank you, I appreciate that. And thank you for calling.” I said that last bit in a you-may-hang-up-now manner. The party
on the other end missed my meaning.

“Ah was hopin' that, well, that… tha missuhs would surely luv tah tell yew how much she enjoyed tha show.”

I didn't mind having fans. I could even deal with fans calling up to the room. But why did the ones who called have to be
the lowest common denominator of fan?

I told him: “Now's not a really—”

“Wouldn't take up but uh minute. Tha missuhs, like Ah said, it would jus', yew know, mean uh lot. She surely does thank yer
uh hoot.”

Ego. My ego was working me. Tired as I was: “Just for a minute.”

“Thata boy, Jackie. We'll see yew down in tha bar.”

F
IVE MINUTES LATER
. The bar was barely populated. A few people. One couple. A guy at a table in the back waved me over with his glass. He was
alone, no wife. Maybe he was the guy who'd called up. Maybe it was a convention of Jackie Mann fans. I went to him.

“Welllll, Jackie Mann,” he drawled. “Hava seat, Jackie Mann.”

I took a look around. “Where's your wife?”

“Oh, Ah expec' she'll be along in uh minute. Go on theyah, take uh chair.”

Something about him … Something about him edged me a little. Maybe it was his way of talking. I never much cared for the sounds
of the South. Maybe it was his breath that stank of liquor and his clothes of cigarettes. His clothes. The suit he wore was
rumpled and out of style by a few years—the wide lapels telling as tree rings—but he sported it in ignorant pride, unaware
it made him look clownish in the hotel bar with the Lacoste-wearing tourists and business travelers decked in miracle fabrics.

So he was a poor Southern white guy. So what? He was a fan. That's how strong my act was: Even poor Southern crackers dug
it. I sat.

He said: “Ah wasn't sure if yew was actually gonna come on down. Some show folk, they're … well, yew read how they ahr in
them gossip magazines. They jus' too good. They wouldn't take uh long elevator ride jus tah meet uh fan. But not yew, Jackie.
Not—”

“I'm sorry, I don't think I got your—”

“Missuhs an me, we're not from heyah, yew know? Takin' uh little vacation. Had tah save up uh lot. Everythang cost these days.
Everythang. Ain't like we got much.”

I didn't say anything to that, not wanting to make the guy feel bad by agreeing with what was obvious about him.

“Then we get heyah, an tha missuhs wants tah see a show. Now, Ah ain't hardly got money for that, but when uh woman wants
somethin', well, yew know how that is, Jackie. Talkin' about wantin' thangs, yew want uh drink?”

“It's a little early for that”

As if to prove how wrong I was, the guy gulped some of whatever was in his glass.

I made a broad show of checking my watch. That minute he had promised me this was going to take was stretching into ten.

“I'm not trying to be rude, but I really need to—”

“Dighton.”

“I'm sorry, I don't—”

“Yew asked mah name, didn't yew? Dighton Spooner.”

Taking out a pen, reaching for a cocktail napkin: “Mr. Spooner, why don't I just give you my autograph and then you can—”

“Don't mean nothin' to yew, do it, muh name. Yers didn't mean nothin' tah me neither. Tha wife wants tah go see uh show, an'
Ah see Jackie Mann's at tha club, so Ah take her, an' Ah don't thank nothin' of it.”

I started to get up. “If you could tell your wife that I'm very sorry I couldn't—”

“We're on vacation, like Ah said. Like Ah said, we're not from around heyah. Know where Ah'm from, Jackie? Ah'm from Florida.”

I looked hard at the guy and I knew what it was that made me uneasy about him: his ear—messed up like at some point something
had gnawed away at it. A rat. One of his own kind. I sat back down. The sudden lack of strength in my legs gave me no choice.

“Yeah, now yew startin' tah recall, ain't yew, boy?”

I recalled. The last time I saw that chewed-up ear I was taking a ride with three rednecks in the dark of Florida, heading
for as much of a beating as they felt like handing me.

“Yeah, yer name didn't mean nothin', but soon as yew walked out onstage Ah recalled right off. Ah said: Goddamn, there that
niggrah who squirrled away from us. Now heyah yew ahr entah-tainin' jus' like yew said.” He took a big, long sip of his drink.
I could almost track the booze as it worked through his body, making him dark and sullen.

He said with narrow, spiteful eyes: “Big star and everythang, everybody clappin' for yew, laughin' at yew … A big niggrah
star.”

At night in the dark, when I was alone and he was with two others, this man was as terrifying a thing as existed. In the day,
in the light, when I could see him for what he was—a cheap lush—he did not scare me. My father had cured my fear of drunks.

I started to regain some of my self. “Better step careful. We're not in backwater Florida now.”

“Yew tha one ought tah be careful, niggrah.”

A thought occurred to me. A bad one. I did a quick look around for any more of the white-trash trio who might have come to
finish what they'd never properly started.

The balance of fear shifting back in his favor gave Dighton a smile. “Settle up, boy. Ah ain't got nobody with me. Jus' tha
missuhs, like Ah said, an she's back at the motel.” He gave our surroundings an overdone inspection. “Naw, we cain't afford
no place like this.”

He raised his glass to the waiter, signaling for another round.

Continuing: “Nope. Jus' me an tha missuhs. Don't much pal around with Jess no more. Yew rememba Jess? Redheaded Jess. After
what happened that night he sorta got spooked. Spooked by a spook.” Dighton grinned at his own cleverness. “Don't pal around
at all no more with Earl. Cain't. Earl's dead. Earl's dead, an yew tha one that killed him.”

I said nothing. My face danced with confusion.

“You killed Earl.”

“I—”

“Well, whadayah expec', boy? Take uh steel pipe, put it tah uh man's head; whadayah expec' 'cept that he gonna die?”

In an instant the past was present. The thin/fat redneck was moving for me, hand brass-wrapped and ready to do work. I swung
the pipe and could feel the resonance of metal on bone through its shaft and across my body. But even against a memory so
real I protested.

“I didn't ki—”

The waiter came 'round, set down a fresh drink before Dighton.

As he moved away, I started again, guarded: “I didn't kill him.”

Dighton sipped at his booze, savored it same as he savored the moment. He reached into a pocket and took out a clipping—yellowed
and torn—that seemed to be as old as the jacket he pulled it from. In a grand gesture, a ham actor playing to the cheap seats,
he held it to me.

I did nothing, my show of defiance, but only for a moment. I took the clipping, unfolded it. It was from a newspaper, and
read:

A local man was killed late yesterday night in what witnesses called an attack by a colored drifter.

Earl Colmbs of Kendall was killed near North Miami by what police say was a single blow to the head from a blunt object.

Witnesses, Jess Rand and Dighton Spooner, both also from Kendall, said they were driving with the victim, when they came upon
a colored man walking alone who appeared to be in distress. The three men stopped to inquire if the colored needed assistance,
when the drifter swung a metal pipe, striking Colmbs in the head and killing him. The colored then fled the scene. Rand and
Spooner, attempting to give aid to Colmbs, did not pursue the suspect.

It went on from there. The article dryly recounted the eyewitness's details, the police search for the colored suspect, mentioned
Colmbs's survivors. There was no mention of the redneck's brass knuckles or their board with nails. The article had nothing
to say about how the victim, poor, departed Earl Colmbs, and his buddies tried to deliver a lynching that night.

Still …

Still, I had killed a man. By accident, in self-defense, but I had killed a man. I don't know if what I felt was revulsion
or guilt or sorrow despite the circumstances, but when mixed together it was a sickness that thrashed in the pit of my stomach
before seeping through my body. Soon there wasn't a part of me that wasn't infected with the sense of murder.

Whatever the emotion, it was more than what Dighton felt. He seemed not to care about his dead friend but only to take pleasure
from the state he'd reduced me to.

Fighting my own affliction, I tossed down the article. “That's not how it was.”

“Tha's what tha papers say. Tha papers don't lie.”

“It was self-defense. It was you three who—”

“Yew got anyone tah say otherwise?”

The man in the car, the one who saved me … What were the chances of ever finding him?

Dighton put an end to that train of thought with: “An no matter how yew say thangs was, how yew think uh Florida jury's gonna
feel about it? What's tha word of uh niggrah against uh fine, upstandin' white?”

I considered that. Then I considered that if this redneck really thought he had the law on his side, he wouldn't be sitting
across the table from me, boozing. The cops would already be putting iron on my wrists.

“You willing to take that chance?” I bluffed.

“Are yew? 'Cause tha way Ah figure, no matter what uh jury say, it ain't gonna be no good for some celebrity niggrah tah have
this kind uh shit swimmin' around him anyhow. Know what Ah'm sayin'?”

That smile of his again. That goddamn smile.

I knew what he was saying.

The air was getting weak. Breathing was hard and thought would've been impossible except I was beyond thought. Nerves made
my actions bypass my useless brain. As I had back in Florida, I was operating on instinct.

Instinct told me to get down to what was what: “How much?”

“Welllll, Ah ain't a greedy man—”

“How much to make you go away and stay away?”

“Ah was tryin' tah tell yew, boy—”

“Don't call me—”

“Boy, Ah was tryin' tah tell yew, Ah ain't uh greedy man, but that don't mean Ah don't like money. Ah like it jus' fine. How
'bout we call it five thousand dollars?”

The cat was pure hick. To most Charlies off the street, five grand was a fortune. I wasn't a Charlie off the street. I was
raking more than seven hundred in a good week. Five thousand dollars wasn't letting me off cheap, but it was very affordable,
especially when it came standard with the promise of staying out of jail and clean of headlines. Only, I didn't need him to
know that.

Protesting: “Five?”

“Shit, Ah seen all them people at yer show. Ah read them Hollywood magazines. Ah know how show folk live. Five thousand ain't
nothing.”

“It's not the kind of money a man walks around with.”

“Oh, Ah understand that.” Dighton scribbled in the air at the waiter for the check. “Me, tha missuhs, we gonna be around for
uh few more days. Ah'll give yew uh ring before we head on outta heyah.”

The waiter brought 'round the bill.

Dighton started to fish out some money, stopped, looked to me. Again, that smile. “What the hellam'ah doin'?”

He left the bill for me along with the clipping saying: “Gowon an' make a souvenir a' that. Ah got lots others.”

I
CALLED
S
ID
, set him up with a story about having to do a quick purchase of this or that that I'd seen and loved and had to have right
away, then hit him with the punch line of needing five grand. If Sid bought or disbelieved what I was handing him, I couldn't
tell either way. He'd worked with enough talent who had their hidden bents that a sudden need for cash for one reason or another
didn't get a rise out of him anymore. He Western Unioned the money out to me.