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‘He went to the store.’
‘Did he tell you to say that, too?’ David, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to be nearby, let out a shriek of laughter at something he was watching.
‘Uh huh.’
‘Is he getting stoned?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Let me guess: he’s sitting right there smoking, staring at the wall or something.’
‘Yup.’
‘Oh God. Do try to keep him out of trouble, all right, Chris? From now on, when I’m not around, he’ll be your responsibility. Promise?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m being serious. Please, I mean this. I worry that he’s getting worse. Promise me that when I’m not around you’ll watch out for him.’
‘I promise,’ I told her.
‘At least keep him away from the whores.’
When I hung up David heard the click, turned from his entertainment, and asked me if she sounded mad.
‘A bit. Not too bad, but a bit. She heard you laughing; she knew you were here.’
‘She’ll be all right. You know, it could have been the two of us here, working, but she couldn’t trust it, could she? She had to go back to her law work. Said our marriage would be better if we worked apart.’
‘She just sounded a little worried, that’s all.’
‘Right then, to work with you. I got the management to bring up a typewriter, we’ll put it on the desk in the back, so before it gets here why don’t you go to the bog and put a pair of the Cottonals on your bum. Get a feel for them this time, a real feel, so you can come up with some ideas accordingly.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said, reaching for the bag.
‘Give me your clothes. I’ll send them down to the cleaners so you’ll have some fresh kit to wear out of here.’
‘Cool. But what will I wear till then?’
‘The Cottonals,’ David said. I didn’t ask another question because he was staring into my face, ready to answer it.
It wasn’t that bad, really. I wore two pairs at a time and when I got cold he let me wrap them around my feet like slippers, around both shoulders like slings, even on my head as a skullcap. The Cottonals were so soft, their downy glowing whiteness straight from their plastic womb, silently holding me there, hugging me with gentle, unconditional support as I slammed my fingers into the old manual typewriter I’d been given. David sat behind me, smoking something pungent he occasionally offered and I steadily refused. The method insane but the only way I would have come up with the idea,
If Comfort Came First
: a campaign bearing that slogan depicting men in a variety of life’s duties wearing only Cottonals as the rest of the room, fully clothed, ignored them. A ballroom dancer performing on the floor with evening-dressed partner in hand. A bus driver who opened the door for the camera/passenger while seated in only his Cottonals and his black cap. One Cottonal-clad man on a subway platform amidst a sea of pinstripe, herringbone, and pleats, the method insane but not so crazy when David walked up the office steps a week later, fresh from his Soho meeting, and said, ‘We got the bastards,’ screaming it again as he spiked his suitcase to the carpeted floor.
My London begins as the view from my window, the park behind me and the street through the trees in front. Then, as I learn the way, it is the distance between the lock on my front door to the buzzer at David’s, and everything on that trail. Then, with time, it grows to the distance from those two places to Brixton High Street and the tube there, linking me to all the other places the city becomes.
Soho was tiny streets of cobblestones and heavy buildings that seemed to lean in against one another to create a cave above you. Record shops with only a few records but good ones and they let you vibrate the store with their sounds. Sex shops selling everything but sex (but you could smell it maybe), signs selling amyl nitrate (poppers!) for flaccid love. East London voices trying to bark punters into red neon doors. Sparse hookers at night (are there any actual female hookers anymore?) and pubs that overflow onto the street with smoke, beer, guffaws and too-loud conversations as people carried their pint glasses from one door to the next.
Ladbroke Grove on Saturdays. Get off at Notting Hill Station and walk down till first you get the antiques (so many little white tags with prices so high) and then after a few blocks you get the food (all eatables should be wrapped in off-white paper), then the clothes, the racks of them, dancing to the silent music of the wind. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold, there will still be brothers hanging in front of Ground Floor Pub, funky dressed and afros tight, sculpted sideburns and silver hoops in ears, pints in hand talking junk. By Ladbroke Grove Station there will always be crowds regardless of rain, weaving between stalls as vendors sit on lawn chairs listening to radios held together by electric tape. And wasn’t it a heaven, where Camden was a place of wealth and joy and not just a place in New Jersey for negroes so poor they couldn’t even afford to live in Philly’s ghettos?
Oxford Street was narrow but endless, padded with cheap synthetic clothes, hung in store windows and off vendor’s stalls snug between behemoth chain stores. The screech of the auction shop man pimping whatever cheap shit someone had shoved into his hand, outdated crap with the fragility total incompetence creates, things without packaging, logo or even proper company name. American fast food joints, both the authentic and replicated ones that look like movie props (the main character would work there). Buses fire engine red and soaked in time. End of the world: cockroaches and London buses, them all driving around, having fun till Armageddon remembers itself and comes back for them. Fun fun buses open in the back so I could jump on or off as they paraded down off into Knights-bridge, or back up Tottenham Court Road, ride one all the way back into Brixton or Clapham if I had the time. Or go to places that didn’t even exist yet for me. Looking out the window wondering if I’m in the same city at all, if some neighborhoods have their own decade they choose to live in, some time they’re so sweet on they never move forth. Riding, knowing that someday, when I had time, I would do that: just get on, just go, just ride, every dirty red bus it had to offer, letting the network of roads provide more grooves for my mind to take hold. I read a book that said that in this old city of Albion, the roads were here before man, cut by animals long extinct, the ground made solid and permanent by hooves and paws guided only by their feel for the energy of this land. Man just came and paved over the trails that were already there, making these roads as sacred as concrete could muster. I was from a people that saw deities at crossroads; I could understand that.
Home was Brixton, this burgeoning outpost of urban negritude. Africans in London since the Romans arrived but never like this: so many native born, a mass to whom their ancestral land was just a second-hand memory. A myriad of melanin born of multiple hemispheres, small islands to big continents, a populace as worldly as their American counterparts were provincial. A negropolis forming, looking at itself, trying to figure out what it was. And here I am, David’s newborn pride: an ambassador from the most successful (hah!) black folks in modernity, the culture to which this new community looked for definition, (mis)guidance. A people, who despite defining the popular culture of the new world, barely knew of this other’s existence, who rarely made it across the Atlantic for a visit and almost never came to stay. And me, the traveler from this mythic land. This was a city that smiled when it saw me coming. And I smiled back. I had a purpose here. There were mistakes they hadn’t made yet, things I could help them with.
When Lennox Lewis (British-born, North American-raised, London-adopted) returned Stateside to fight Alabama holly-roller Evander Holyfield, it was as if Lewis were personally doing me the favor of going back to kick black America’s ignorant ass. I said, This is the sign of the torch passing. I said, Look, my former tormentors, there is a bigger, stronger, more articulate Afro-urban nation on the rise. I said, Behold the warrior of the new tribe. David said, You’re mad, that big wanker’s going down, and proceeded to drop five hundred quid on ‘the American one, whatsit’ at the off-off-track betting club he’d dragged me to. And after Lewis had made his appearance, had patted the American around the ring for twelve rounds like a cat playing with his food, and the judges had tried to deny fate by deeming it a draw, I didn’t even care that I’d lost the two hundred pounds I had riding on the knockout. The message had been sent: that even their champions were in danger. At this club, 100 per cent loss ratio meant chairs flying, male cursing, and female crying. I remained seated, in the tuxedo David had taken me to buy hours before, laughing. Mouth wide, chest bouncing, hands easily behind my head, legs crossed, staring at the frustrated gamblers rioting before me. David, his soft roundness hiding underneath the square table, started pulling on my leg with his blanket hands.
‘Chris, you fucking nutter, get under the table before you get killed.’
But it was just funny, that’s all it was. Beige, black, and brown hands swinging to claim maroon blood. So many sounds, everything moving: chairs across the room, pictures off the wall, projectile napkin dispensers, even my chest jumping as I go ha-ha-ha and laugh at all this around me. Play on. My first public brawl outside the States and I didn’t care because they didn’t have guns, did they? It wasn’t like home, they could beat on one another all they wanted, there would be no random shooting. The
pop-pop
wouldn’t find me here. This was a new, safer world. What were they going to do, kick my teeth in? I could get caps.
We took the night bus home from Trafalgar after that. That was when Margaret wouldn’t let David have the car (note: speed bumps are not to be used as ramps, particularly not at four in the morning, in a quiet suburb like Croydon, in a Fiat hatch back when the driver is drunk and the car is too too fast for such roadways). I made us sit on the second level, in the front, my novelty spot. David sat next to me eating the hot dog he bought for two quid right next to the stop and I looked at the road as we wandered south. We were going through hotel-lined streets and I was staring at the buildings, their smooth white facades going on for blocks like an army of cream cakes, occasional small signs hung before them to offer entry to the temporarily homeless and financially secure. No one was on the streets, not even rats. No light was on. No one was awake because no one knew each other. A neighborhood of strangers probably thinking about someplace else, maybe on their way there, maybe not.
‘It’s lonely out here, isn’t it?’ I asked. David’s hot dog was gone and he was brushing mustard off his face.
‘Sure. It’s a lonely world. Why do you think people get married?’
‘Why?’
‘Love shits on lonely.’
‘If we ever have Aphrodite as a client, you got to use that one.’
‘My Margaret, she’s my world. She’s what keeps me weighted.’
‘I feel the same way about my account at Barclays.’ We were crossing over the Lambeth Bridge and I was checking my watch against Big Ben’s yellow face and getting off on that, loving a cliché.
‘Oi, you little yardie, I know what’s in there, I’m the one that puts it. But I’m telling you, you gotta have someone. My Margaret, she’s my roots, man. She’s like, if somebody shook the world, y’know, she’d be the thing that keeps me from flying off. A man has to have that, can you understand?’
Twenty minutes later, we were at the Chinese take-away off Effra Road bleaching our brown under bright fluorescents. ‘Chris, that’s what you need.’
‘Whatever boss.’ I reached for my bag. How did I live before curry and chips? Fuck cheesesteaks. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I added, but I wasn’t thinking about no woman, not in any sense beyond the normal unceasing mindless fantasies that populated straight men’s minds. What I was doing was staring behind the take-away counter at the aluminum trays with their clear plastic tops and thinking, That’s the only thing I miss about America: Chinese food in white cardboard boxes with little tin handles and red dragons on the side. Going on eight months over here and wow, look at that, that’s the only thing missing for me.
Friday, I opened the door for her. This little woman, too proud to even look up at me past the rib she came to. She stood, beneath layers of white skies and before wet sidewalk, a vision. A face so black it was bold, cheeks a duo of sweeping circles beneath the soft rainbow of a head wrap that contained all the colors that could scream or cry for you.
‘Is this the place?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Is this the place that’s supposed to be taking pictures of me?’ she asked. She was so much smaller than I’d been expecting, but she had to be the dancer David hired: she was too pretty not to be getting paid for it.
‘Please, please come in,’ I managed. I shouldn’t even have been answering the door because by this time, besides clients growing and waiting for our attentions, Urgent had a secretary too, a bony, Marlboro Light-smoking Brixton boy named Raz who should have been down here with this woman, saving me from my awkwardness. The shoot was scheduled for a half hour before, but models, David reminded, were always late. Taking in the smell of her: of violet water and hot sauce.
‘Fionna Otubanjo?’ She just walked by me and started heading upstairs; I couldn’t tell if she’d nodded. Tiny, this one. The size of a girl but the shape and proportions of a woman, making the stairwell look cavernous as my eyes struggled to keep perspective.
After I took her coat, introduced her to the photographer, the stylist, and even Margaret, who was taking a rare intermission from her reading to make an appearance on the third floor, I showed Fionna to the bathroom that would be her dressing room for the day. Then I pulled David to a far and relatively secluded section of the floor.
‘Cuz, she’s gorgeous.’ Somebody in the room had to acknowledge this.
‘Really? A bit of a head on a stick, I thought. A short stick at that. She looked bigger on her Z card. If you like, maybe later we’ll go for a curry or something, you could ask her to tag along.’ David reached into the cereal box in his hand and threw a kernel into my mouth.
