Chicago Hustle (12 page)

“Hahhhhahhh … uhhh … what's so funny?” he asked, trying to slide back into the mellow groove they had.

“You are,” she answered in a heavy, whiskey-scarred voice.

“Oh yeahhh, why is that?” he probed, sustaining his moves and praying that he hadn't grabbed a neurotic off the bar stool.

“Men never seem to be satisfied 'til they find out the lady's name, they even ask whores, what's your name?”

He responded to her observation with a slow nod and stopped his dance.

“You're right! you know that?”

“I know I am,” she answered, and looked at him with a challenge in her eyes.

The dim blue light, the grime of the drab hotel furniture arranged around the bed quietly faded out of his consciousness as he felt her vagina grip his penis and milk the sap from it.

After a few seconds, the intensity of it taking him on a quick, magic ride, he kissed her mouth very gently and whispered into her ear.

“I love you, woman … whatever your name is.”

She squeezed his face into her breasts and mumbled, “You guessed it, that's exactly what my name is, Woman.”

He rolled slowly off of her body, spent … and stretched out to stare up at the bulb.

What's next? After a woman, it would be nice to have some girl, but first, in order to do that he would have to get in touch with Browney the Fence.

The woman curled up into the crook of his shoulder.

“Tell me what your name is, you didn't, you know?”

“My name is Man, baby … my name is Man,” he said softly and faded off into a deep sexual catnap.

Elijah found himself breathing a little harder with excitement as he stepped into the telephone booth to call Browney. Automatically he dialed into their code … three rings, hang up … two rings, hang up, and then let it ring.

If there was anybody who would help him get his shit back together again, it would be old cold-blooded ass Browney. Hmmf! for all the good it did me, I may as well have had a public defender and not blew all that dough … at least I would've had something left for a stake when I got back out here.

“Yeah!” the gruff voice suddenly replaced the dial tone. Same old Browney …

“What's to it, Browney? This is Elijah.”

“Eli … Elijah, well, I'll be! is it really you? I figured you for next month.”

Elijah curled his lips down with a frown. Chickenshit motherfucker, probably got a calendar with every nigger's jail term marked off that he be dealing with.

“You can X me for this month. I'm back on the scene. Can you do me any good?”

Elijah's mind flickered to the patented picture of Browney, leaning back in his stuffed leather chair, waving his secretary out of the room, telling her to accept no more calls from anyone for the next three minutes.

Browney the Fence, used cars, a piece of a record company, a vehement supporter of capitalism in every form, a wheeler dealer.

“Whatcha got, buddy-o?” Browney asked cautiously.

“I ain't got a goddamned thing, man … that's why I'm callin' you.”

Browney's caution skipped from there to outright coldness, now that the reading had been made.

“Uhh, what can I do for you?”

Elijah, mistaking the chill for someone requesting a price list, shot back, “I need a whole gang o' thangs … but they all add up to one thing. Money, honey. I need some clothes and a decent ride.”

Browney shifted his bulk around in his chair and swung his heels up onto his desk, searching in his desk drawer for a pack of cigarettes.

“Damn it!”

“Huh?!”

“Awwww hahh hah, I wasn't talkin' to you, buddy-o, I just discovered I was out of cigarettes. 'Scuse me a sec. Uhhh, Norene! come in here a minute, willya doll?”

Browney's secretary, a Chicana and an ex-wise lady of the barrio, stood in the doorway with an inscrutable expression on her face. The fat greasy bastard!

“How 'bout runnin' out for a pack o' cigarettes, doll? Take it out of petty cash. How much do you figure, buddy-o?” He slid from the lady in the door back to Elijah without a pause.

“I could really get down on two grand or thereabouts, yeahhh, two grand would do it. I still owe my lawyer a few …”

“Two grand? that's a lotta dough, buddy-o?”

“How much do you want on it?” Elijah snapped. “I need it for a month, maybe less.”

“Awww Elijah, EEElijahhh,” Browney responded with a large dose of contrived sympathy in his voice, “you wouldn't hafta gimme anything on it, nothin'! if I had it you could get it, like that!”

The telephone booth suddenly seemed much smaller.

“Sounds like you tryin' to tell me somethin'.”

Browney paused for a few seconds to allow what he had said to Elijah to sink in.

“Well, two grand is a lotta dough, Elijah.”

“Awww c'mon on, man! don't gimme that shit! When I was out in the streets I was layin' at least two grand worth o' stuff on you every week, and what was I gettin' for it? peanuts! and now you gon' try to tell me you can't stake me for …?”

“Now just a minute!” Browney interrupted abruptly, “hold on there a minute! then was then and now is now. Deals made yesterday are old deals. What we wanna talk about are new deals, right? right! Tell ya what, gimme a ring tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I can hit you with a couple C-notes.”

Elijah held the phone away from his ear as though he hadn't heard right.

“A couple bills, huh? Lissen to me close, you motherless white motherfucker! I tell you what you can do. You can stuff those measly two bills up your fat ass!”

He slammed the telephone back onto the hook and leaned back against the panes of the telephone booth, perspiration streaming down his face.

Two of the neighborhood winos slowly made their way past the booth, eyes bleary, looking for another short dog.

Elijah kicked his heel against the back of the booth with frustration. Who in the hell else could he call on? Damn!

The booth seemed to get tighter, to almost the suffocation point, as he slowly dialed Browney's code again.

“Yeah!” The same abrupt snarl, not caring whether it was Elijah calling back or not, but knowing that it was. Or someone else, no matter.

“Heyyyy Browney, look, this is Elijah again.” Elijah spoke in deliberately even tones. “Forget about what I just said. How much did you say you'd let me have?”

“Two bills, tops.”

“Make it three, okay?” Elijah said, trying not to sound as though he were begging.

“Why not? we're ol' friends. Three bills it is.”

“Cool. When can I get it?”

“That'll be a quarter on the dollar, buddy-o.”

Elijah's lips parted for a moment to release some vile language, but reconsidered his position. “Yeahhh, yeah, okay, whatever you say.”

“My man will get it to you tomorrow afternoon. You still hanging out at that Tiger joint?”

“I'll be there tomorrow afternoon,” he spoke softly, resigned to dealing with the Dealer. “Thanks, thanks for everything,” he signed off sarcastically.

“Don't mention it. Just make sure you don't miss any payments, I got a couple guys over here who don't do anything but leg work for me.”

Elijah hung up the telephone coolly, cursing the voice, the man and everything he represented.

The thought buzzed through his skull as he left the humidity of the telephone booth, to hit the heat of the streets. “I got a couple guys over here who don't do anything but leg work for me.” Best be careful with that bastard, I don't know what I'd do with both of my legs broke.

He stopped for a newspaper and strolled slowly down 51st Street, heading for Malcolm X Park and a thorough study of the want ads. One of the good pieces of advice given him by one of the slickest dudes in jail had been: “Get a job, man … work on it for a bit. You know they gon' be watchin' you for a while. Throw 'em off a li'l bit, confuse 'em, that way you can get away with a whole bunch o' shit.” Yeah, a gig. Wowwww! it's been ten years since I hit a lick at a snake. Let's see what we got here …

Elijah carefully wove a sparkling figure-eight pattern onto the length of the long hallway, enjoying the rhythm of the buffer. He suavely flicked the swirling brush around at the end of the hallway, paused to look out at the downtown lights surrounding him, and started back, repolishing the gleaming surface, his mind a little vacant from the monotony of his actions.

The lady at the County Concentrated Employment office had been diplomatic and helpful.

“Please, Mr. Brookes, don't feel for a second that the … uhhh … that your recent incarceration will act against you in any way. We have a large number of brothers coming through our agency who've just been released, or who have served time. We try to deal with the needs of the people and not whether or not they've been … uhhh … in jail or not.”

He pressed the
off
button on the buffer at the opposite end of the hallway, gently laid the handle of the buffer down and dug into his shirt pocket for the last joint in his stash.

Walking quickly past the empty offices to make certain that no one was working at eleven p.m., he stood at the half-opened window at the end of the hallway and lit up.

Downtown Chicago, the four-to-twelve shift. A custodian. City lights … his playground. He found himself unable to repress a smile as he sucked down to the roach.

A working man, an “employee,” a member of the “proletariat,” someone in the joint had once called it.

Thirty-one years old. The smile faded. Emptying waste baskets and buffing floors. In debt to Nasty Browney. Couldn't even borrow a dime from supposed to be “friends.”

Thirty-one years old. In and out of institutions since sixteen or thereabouts. Supposed to be slick. Shit!

He flicked the fingernail stub of the joint out of the window and tried to follow its flight down through the canyon, to the street, sixteen stories below.

Loaded now, feeling mellow, he braced himself on his elbows and leaned the top of his body out of the window, trying to think/dream himself away from the two hallways left to be buffed.

The smell of Lake Michigan backed up in his nose for a few minutes, braced on a strong evening breeze. Chicago in the summertime. The summertime, the spring and the fall.

He shivered involuntarily, thinking about the coming winter. Winter was always coming, and there was nothing in the world you could do about it.

“Sorry to disturb you, Brookes.”

Elijah bumped the back of his head pulling himself out of the window. The foreman of the building's custodians, a large, grim-faced black dude who always seemed to be prowling around, trying to catch someone doing something they shouldn't be doing, glared down into Elijah's face.

“Like I said, Mr. Brookes, sorry to disturb you, but shouldn't you be buffin' the floors?”

The throbbing pain in the back of his head, amplified by the smoke, made Elijah speechless for a few seconds, as he stood glaring back at Samuel S. Simon.

“Mannnnn,” he finally managed to say, as the first flush of pain subsided. “Don't be sneakin' up on me like … like …”

“That's my job, Brookes! to be sneakin' up on people. We got a contract to fill, now how about doin' the rest of these floors?!”

Elijah stared at the man's broad, muscular back as he turned away abruptly and walked back down the hall, to sneak up on some other wrongdoers, if he could.

Just like that. No excess words, no waiting for any explanations or excuses. The son of a bitch! He felt like running up behind him and kicking him in the ass.

“And you don't have but forty-five more minutes to finish up, so you better get a move on!” Simon growled out over his shoulder as he walked under the exit sign, heading for the seventeenth floor.

The throbbing in the back of his head and the rage he felt at being treated like a child clashed inside his brain, made him feel helpless.

“Nigger!” he screamed when he was certain that Simon was halfway to the next floor.

“Niggggerrrr!” He rolled the word off his tongue as he reached for the buffer handle.

“Nigggerrrrr,” he rolled out again, praying inside that Simon hadn't heard him. There was no way he could think of out-thumping him. No way.

His mellow mood returning, he slowly turned Simon out. “Ol' Unca Tom ass motherfucker,” he mumbled viciously to himself, in the process of doing a sloppy job on the next two floors. What could you expect from a chump who didn't want to do, didn't
know
how to do anything but work for a living?

Stupid sonofabitch! they put his head in a vise about forty-five years ago, squeezed all the “sensible” juices out of it and refilled it with whatever they felt was necessary … to get him to obey the commands.

Here Spot! fetch Simon! attaboy Spot! down Simon! eat Spot! sic 'em Simon! here Simon! fetch Spot! chase the car wheels, Spot-Simon! Yeahhhh, that's what made the difference between the squares and the other kind of people. The squares took their programming lightly, it put no problem on their heads at all. None at all, they just did what they were supposed to do.

Elijah fumbled through the keys on his custodian's key chain for the key to the equipment room. Stashing the buffer inside, in its proper place, underneath the shelves of toilet paper, scouring powder and soap, the thought swept through his mind. I bet Li'l Bit, Blue, Sneezy and the rest of the neighborhood dopefiends would pay to have these keys. The thought was still circling around in his head as he made his way down to Simon's fifth floor office.

He dropped the keys on Simon's desk and eased out into the hallway. Five minutes to twelve. This was the part he hated most of all. No matter how soon you finished up, you still had to drop your keys off in Simon's office and wait until he dismissed you, at exactly twelve o'clock.

Elijah nodded to the dudes he felt some cohesion with, ignored all the others, the Simon types.