Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
High Cotton (27 page)
My flight to Paris was a flight to Bargetta. I sneaked out of Leiden without leaving a note. I had gone to Holland to find peace in the way I imagined burned-out souls lugged their mad hopes to ashrams. As it turned out, the old university town was anything but soothing. My high-school pen pal had taken to Rudolf Steiner, and his five cats loathed me with the vehemence of stepchildren. Everywhere some kind of construction or renovation was under way and for weeks I had stumbled over the cobblestones in search of soundproof corners.
I made it to the rendezvous on the far side of the outer canal. I saw one of the New Zealand street performers I had met in a pub the night before. He, too, must have had a lot to drink because he didn’t remember me or the promises he had flung like millet. His companions had no recollection of their rowdy offer of a ride to France, but gas was expensive and they found room for one more in the battered Volvo, where I remained hidden until we were well out of Leiden. My parents had drilled into me that to hitch a ride with strangers was to tempt fate and I worried that the New Zealanders weren’t street performers at all. Dikes and low pastures flashed in the sunlight, herons strafed the lakes. I willed the arrival of the lumbering tub that was to ferry us to the border.
Once across it, the New Zealanders frequently pulled over to inspect herbs and mysterious weeds, to buy overpriced fruit from big-boned farmers’ daughters. They complained that my chain-smoking was making them sick, and indeed, two packs lay crumpled between my feet by the time we finished with the stench of Belgian towns of historical interest. Their tales of how they almost got busted at various frontiers hadn’t helped. A quarter-moon monitored our passage across France, through valleys of bundled hay. I was thrilled that I had disproved my parents’
theory of brigands on every highway when the New Zealanders dropped me off in one piece in a confusion of yellow lights.
theory of brigands on every highway when the New Zealanders dropped me off in one piece in a confusion of yellow lights.
Bargetta loved to be “contactable.” Therefore, I had several telephone numbers for her in Paris. After I had played roulette with them, the sound of her deep, smoky voice came to me like rescue. I had to walk outside to see where I was, Les Petits Negres, because I just could not speak again to the bad teeth and lopsided toupee that belonged to the man behind the bar. Bargetta told me to chill out and she’d be right over. I settled at a table outside and prepared for a long wait, but she wasn’t on CPT.
Through my glass I saw Bargetta stride toward me. I could not look at her without thinking of a leopard cruising in a diamond collar or a poster by Zig. We stood cheek to cheek in the silver honky-tonk light several minutes before speaking. Bargetta was, as she liked to say, dressed to the nines: black top, black miniskirt that caught the beams of passing headlights, black fishnet stockings, black flat shoes, a black rayon scarf that wound its way around her head and rediscovered itself at her waist, and the black leather jacket she wore when she stood in need of luck.
“You look serious, preacher man, but kill the shoes,” Bargetta said. “He’s at another party, in another part of the country.” I hadn’t asked about Pierre-Yves. Love me, love my three-legged dog. Her mascara was thicker than it had been Stateside. She said what I smelled was the eucalyptus she put on her temples to cure headaches. Across the street, in front of the dim Hôtel d’Angleterre, perched on little scooters, pink-haired boys and girls with severe buzz cuts passed a bottle and “chased the dragon”—snorted lines of brown heroin. “My mother told me to be careful because she heard there were a lot of drugs and blacks in Paris,” Bargetta said.
All that night I followed Bargetta through the dizzy streets.
Though the weight of the bag on my back made me cry, I had long ago learned to go along with Bargetta’s program without question. Her talent for sussing out the hideaway where, for instance, Keith Richards might be sucking on a Guinness made her a coveted companion. We rolled from café to café, moved whenever a song on the jukebox did not meet with Bargetta’s approval. “I’d rather shoot myself than sit through that shit.”
Though the weight of the bag on my back made me cry, I had long ago learned to go along with Bargetta’s program without question. Her talent for sussing out the hideaway where, for instance, Keith Richards might be sucking on a Guinness made her a coveted companion. We rolled from café to café, moved whenever a song on the jukebox did not meet with Bargetta’s approval. “I’d rather shoot myself than sit through that shit.”
Holland seemed far away, but in between stops, on the streets, Bargetta was pensive and remembered herself as guide with one-liners such as “Quasimodo hung out here.” If I didn’t know that she slept all day I would have thought her stamina miraculous. In Bargetta’s code it was okay to throw up in a club—so long as it wasn’t her—but it was definitely uncool to be seen taking a sudden dip with the sandman in public. She once said that her greatest fear of Manhattan was that she might fall asleep in a taxi and wake up in another girl’s clothes.
For the first time since I’d known her, Bargetta seemed to be stalling, to be waiting for an idea. She hoisted herself up and directed us toward the Champs-Elysées. I thought we were going to a party until Bargetta put a finger to her lips. I crept behind her up several flights of polished stairs. She smuggled me into an apartment, around the proper mixture of squeaks and moans, and into a pantry where there was a mat among mops and boxes.
“Happy birthday,” Bargetta said.
“You remembered.”
It was pitch-dark in the closet when Bargetta shook me awake. She led me by the hand, Harriet Tubman taking a runaway to free territory. I heard snores and the mutter of someone in the throes of a terrible dream. A pale blue rose behind the blur of trees. We walked in a trance up the yellow-and-cream streets. At a café near the river a youth whose shirtsleeves smelled of smoke brought warm red beers.
Bargetta said we had been in the apartment of a Brit from the record company who was letting her stay for a while, but the Brit was on simmer, rising to a boil about the number of people crashing on her floors and the rings left in the swank bath. One more guest, Bargetta feared, would send the poor girl over the top. Bargetta apologized for getting me up, but she wanted to escape before the woman started her body count. We watched the barges on the Seine. “A girl can end up with nothing if she knows how to work it right.”
“If you come from a close family, you tend to feel lost without them,” Bargetta said. “So what’s my excuse?” We were on our way back to the apartment, to pretend I had just dropped by, and then to test the possibilities of taking a nap. Bargetta talked more to the stone dressing over the streets than to me. “I used to feel sorry for him, but he’s just another rich kid in disguise. I think he should paint on velvet, get in touch with his real level.”
I remembered Pierre-Yves from one of his heavy New York visits. He had inherited his mother’s devious looks and one of his father’s apartments. They were pieds-noirs, and had his father been alive Bargetta probably would not have moved in. A woman was only as good as the man she lay under, but what Bargetta liked about Pierre-Yves was that he had gone to a slick school like Saint Martin de Pontoise and forever afterward was unable to get himself together. “The cold thing about it is that I spent all this time building him up, and the next thing I knew he believed me.”
Pierre- Yves got out of taking Bargetta to the country by saying that he hadn’t been able to work, implying that she was the cause. His holiday coincided with the disappearance of a girl who hung around the apartment too much for Bargetta’s taste. “You know, one of those girls in ankle socks who’s into Zen and sleep
therapy and macro diets. I warned her not to work me, but she kept coming over with all that rice.”
therapy and macro diets. I warned her not to work me, but she kept coming over with all that rice.”
A sinner needs a witness or else something is missing. Pierre-Yves flaunted Bargetta in front of his mother. “It killed her to have me to dinner. She watched me like crowds do when somebody’s out on a ledge, just waiting for me to pick up the wrong fork.” His mother, that amanita, decided to surprise him and have his apartment redone while he was away. Bargetta was in the shower when she brought over the crew. To finish off what could not be defended, she refrained from inviting Bargetta to stay with her.
Bargetta said that when a man got analytical it meant trouble. “I should have known after our first night. I’d set him up. Made him think he was one of nature’s rapists. And me thinking the cracks in his ceiling were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I slept with his glasses before that. I stole them. I should have stopped there.”
Bargetta had emptied the contents of a bag on the mat—shades, tortoiseshell combs, Borghese lip gloss, Chloe, Motrin, Efferalgan, valerian root, Aspro effervescent, Xanax downs, Zo-max ups, Halcion sleeping pills, Coedetheline Houde, dagger letter opener, joint, address book, and a quantity of black cotton headgear—when screams and household articles flew by the crack in the pantry door. All explanations end at some point. The Brit had snapped. Her Carr’s biscuits and hearts of palm had vanished, as had the caviar and the tin of cassis stashed behind the floor wax. She found two couples on her futon, one of which she didn’t even know. “The domino theory of eviction,” Bargetta said, and looked wistfully up through the banister. “She has that ten little Indians look in her eyes.”
Along boulevard St. Michel, near Cluny, guys with guitars—in 1980—lined the curbs. I saw some flower children who rivaled
the holdouts of Amsterdam, and Bargetta grabbed me. A fight had broken out in McDonald’s, an old-fashioned rumble complete with everything not bolted to the floor going upside down. People ran out and then ran back to watch. We heard metal twisting loose and scattered as the huge window of the restaurant jumped down from its hinges to challenge the mob. It shattered into a thousand pieces, glimmered for an instant, like a summer swarm of mayflies, and then crashed to the pavement.
the holdouts of Amsterdam, and Bargetta grabbed me. A fight had broken out in McDonald’s, an old-fashioned rumble complete with everything not bolted to the floor going upside down. People ran out and then ran back to watch. We heard metal twisting loose and scattered as the huge window of the restaurant jumped down from its hinges to challenge the mob. It shattered into a thousand pieces, glimmered for an instant, like a summer swarm of mayflies, and then crashed to the pavement.
Bargetta took off when she heard les flics. She was fast in her kid slippers, was, in fact, yards ahead of me. I stopped and watched her race on, her lucky black leather jacket aloft in her fist.
“Am I having a good time?”
“The baddest.”
She said the movements of street sweepers in the Gare du Nord had the beauty of survivors, and Barbès, the African-Arab quarter north of the peep shows, was the headquarters of those determined to hang in there. Migrant widows waited near the equator for paychecks as the sources of their mail, black and brown men, distressed the streets around us.
We entered a couscous den and extinguished conversation. Goat and the music of Nass el Ghiwan cooked behind a moldy partition. Molecules heated up, closed in, and Bargetta breathed through her mock-debutante smile. “One thing about money, if you have it you can tell certain people where to go.” Pierre-Yves had taken Bargetta—at gun point, but he took her—to the Grand Vefour. She phoned ahead to make sure the kitchen knew a vegetarian was on his way. The waiter presented the most beautiful omelette the world had ever seen. “I do not eat eggs,” Pierre-Yves said. She liked losers.
I was no help, dragging our bags around town, riding with
used or no tickets, feeling more freakish and fifth-wheelish than usual while Bargetta fended off gypsy kids and made change for the phone booth. She distributed cigarettes like the Red Cross on the steps of Sacré-Coeur. We missed the Mass for St. Rose of Lima, who, though prudent, had failed to be martyred and was therefore only second-string. Bargetta had no need of intermediaries, being on the direct-dialing system with the Lord. “Now somebody up there slap me. Hard.”
used or no tickets, feeling more freakish and fifth-wheelish than usual while Bargetta fended off gypsy kids and made change for the phone booth. She distributed cigarettes like the Red Cross on the steps of Sacré-Coeur. We missed the Mass for St. Rose of Lima, who, though prudent, had failed to be martyred and was therefore only second-string. Bargetta had no need of intermediaries, being on the direct-dialing system with the Lord. “Now somebody up there slap me. Hard.”
A hotel was our last resort. We ended up on the rue des Trois-Freres, in the rump of an ash-colored dwelling with a rancid charcuterie downstairs. The torn and divided rooms that reeked of sulphur and the carpet of vintage kitty litter belonged to Gilles, a boy Bargetta knew in Memphis when his absenteeism got his mother kicked out of Jack ‘n’ Jill. “Did I say friends, ha, are my aces high?” He visited Bargetta frequently in New York, selecting the longest butts from the hubcap she used as an ashtray, and it annoyed me how everyone said what a handsome couple they made. Not only was he the first black at Harvard to be asked to join the Fly Club, he was the first to turn them down. I offered myself the dubious consolation that Gilles never wanted me around because I could read his mind. I knew that he liked to be the only “shine” in the room and resented the presence of other black men.
When I was in the fourth grade, a new boy in class became the most popular. He had wavy hair, “good hair,” it was called, and wasn’t dumb. He wore black bow ties, white shirts, and red mohair sweaters. The girls sang “Do-wa-do-wa-do-wa-diddy, talk about the boy from New York City,” and ooed when he got up on Savings Bond day, to buy fifty stamps instead of the decent twelve. I bullied my mother until she let me dress like him. Then we moved and I didn’t need him anymore. There were real whites
at my new school. When happiness comes it brings less joy than we expected, Cavafy said.
at my new school. When happiness comes it brings less joy than we expected, Cavafy said.
It was pretentious for someone whose real name was Luther to call himself Gilles. I said that I didn’t believe his stories about Fez and St. Bart’s, about the grams he had consumed in a producer’s town house, about his mother, a sex therapist, being overly married, four or five times. I didn’t even believe he went to a shrink. I couldn’t touch his will to cool. Bargetta said I had nothing to worry about because Gilles went out only with white boys.
We didn’t shake hands. Mine was cramped from the straps of Bargetta’s bags. I was being unfriendly, Bargetta’s glare said. After all, he was giving shelter to strays. “You look as though the world is too much with you,” Gilles said. He was supposed to be away. Bargetta had called him on a hunch. He didn’t say where he’d been or why he’d come back, but a bruise was waking up under his right eye. We’d interrupted him in the middle of a brick of mujahedin hash. He was busy cutting out pictures of young workers with mustaches barricaded inside the Lenin shipyards.
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