Strivers Row (46 page)

The best nights, though, were the colored nights, just as Freddie had told him they would be. His pockets would bulge with tips by the end of the evening, and threaten to rip out. The bathroom trash baskets overflowing with so many fifths of scotch and bourbon that he had to empty them again and again before the dance was over. On those nights, only black bands were good enough to play, too—with the sole exception of Charlie Barnet's ork, which ratcheted up their renditions of “Cherokee” or “Redskin Rhumba” so fast that they made even the best colored dancers swing. The music growing steadily faster and wilder until midnight, when the dancers would start to shout
“Showtime! Showtime!”
and the band let loose with everything it had left.

On all the other nights, at least half of his customers were white men. They moved about the floor mechanically—doing the same four or five steps, back and forth, as if trying to remember their Arthur Murray dance lessons. They became effusive with bourbon, pumping his hand and pushing a dollar bill into his pocket after he had whisked them with his broom. Others were more secretive, talking furtively among themselves before they approached him. Slim young men with mops of hair and sharp new suits, their faces young yet already wolfish and sardonic in the jaundiced light outside the men's room. Asking him with studied casualness about women, or drugs, while he popped his rag over their shoes.

There was so much, he realized, that he didn't know yet. Only slowly, using his own eyes, had he become hipped to the play— learning who were the hustlers he might be able to score king kong, tea, pills, and powders from, and anything else his customers really wanted. Learning who the plainclothesmen were, and the boys from the narcotics commission, and the play-for-pay girls.

It took up all his time, hanging around the Roseland, even on his nights off, learning what was what. He rarely saw Ella anymore, and he deliberately tried to time his comings and goings so that she wasn't around when he slipped up to his attic room. Lifting her a steak, or some eggs, or cans of soup from time to time, just to ensure that she wouldn't throw him out. He had quit the slave at Townsend's Drugstore as soon as he got his Roseland job, even though it meant that he couldn't see Laura anymore for the time being—and that, to his surprise and embarrassment, the Berlants had nearly wept when he told them he was quitting, and implored him to stay.

He planned to go back, at least to visit. But for now he pressed Jarvis to proceed with his full transformation. He had already taken Malcolm down to the Jew's store to buy him his first zoot. A young man in a yarmulke picking him a robin's egg blue suit off the rack, with Punjab pants thirty inches across at the knee, and twelve at the cuff. The long coat so narrow at his waist that it made him look like something entirely different than what he was—like a comic-book hero, with an immense, iron torso and shoulders—and he had loved it. The Jew had even thrown in a blue-feathered hat, with a brim that was wider than his shoulders, and a gold-plated chain that hung down below his coat hem.

All that remained then was the hair. On the big day he had strutted down to the grocery store with the list of ingredients Jarvis had given him for his homemade congolene. Letting the grocer pull down eggs and potatoes, and a can of Red Devil lye for him. Going next to the drugstore, where he asked for a big jar of Vaseline and a bar of soap, a large-toothed comb and a fine-toothed comb and a hose with a metal spray head, a rubber apron and a pair of rubber gloves. The colored druggist behind the counter smiling at him—

“Going to lay on that first conk?”

—and Malcolm, unable to hide his pride and excitement, had grinned right back at the man:

“Right!”

It did burn like the devil—his new hair, branded right into the scalp. Jarvis had sat him down in a chair in the kitchen of his cousin's apartment, where both of them peeled and thin-sliced the potatoes on the table there, and poured them into a Mason jar. Jarvis had pulled on the rubber gloves, looking for all the world like the mad scientists in the
Frankenstein
movies, and used a wooden spoon to stir in the lye.

“Never use a metal spoon for this. The lye will turn it black,” he told Malcolm while he appraised the white, jellied contents of the Mason jar with a professional air. He cracked in the two eggs last. Stirring the new mixture furiously at the table, until it turned the color of a sick dog's eye, boiling and fuming yellow.

“Feel the jar!” he ordered, and when Malcolm did he had to yank his hand back immediately.

“Damn straight, it's hot!” Jarvis crowed. “That's the lye!”

“That goin' on my
head
?”

“I ain't lyin' to you, homeboy. You know it's gonna burn
bad
when I comb it in. But the longer you can take it, the straighter the hair.”

“I can take it.”

“Uh-huh. Now you remember where the sink is, behind you? Where I told you it is? And where I got the spray hose?”

“I can take it.”

“All right, then. Just so's you remember.”

He tied the rubber apron tightly around Malcolm's neck—then slathered the Vaseline on thickly over his ears and neck and forehead, anywhere his hair curled naturally over the skin.

“Here it comes!”

The first, thick handful almost pleasant at first, like warm jelly on his scalp. Then it had started to work its way into his head.

“Hang on, homie!”

He had writhed, and clutched the table before him. Jarvis raking the comb through his hair, each pass feeling as if it were scraping the flesh from his skull. His eyes filling with water, his nose running freely down into his mouth.

“Hang on, hang on!”

He had reared up then, stumbling blindly toward the sink. Jarvis's hands on him at once, spraying the cold water over his scalp, rubbing the soap in, over and over again.

“There—there—there, homeboy,” he cooed to him. “Tell me where it burns, now. Tell me every little spot so it don't burn through the skin—”

Rubbing his hair with a big towel now. Malcolm still writhing, crying and moaning under his touch like one of the converted in his Daddy's church.

“Tell me where it hurts—”

That had been the worst of it—then the pain had slowly subsided into blessed relief. After he had gotten the burning spots out, Jarvis had combed more of the Vaseline in. Using the large-toothed comb, then using the fine-toothed comb, until all of Malcolm's hair hung down in straight, flat tendrils, and then he had taken a straight razor and began to work carefully around the back of his neck and his sideburns. Shaping it meticulously, refusing to be hurried, until at last he was satisfied enough to let Malcolm stand up and look at himself in the mirror. Jarvis just behind him, his head level with Malcolm's shoulder, grinning proudly at him in the reflection.

“The first time's always the worst. You took it real good, boy—
real
good.”

But Malcolm had barely heard his praise, staring at himself there in the mirror. Still wiping the tears, and the snot and the sweat, from his face, his chest still heaving—but unable to turn away from his own image now. His hair a bright red color, but Vase-lined straight back against his grinning skull.
Just like a white man's.

He knew he had to capture it right away, to make sure it wasn't a mirage, and so he had changed into his new zoot, and gone down to the penny arcade at Scollay Square. He had stepped into one of the automatic photo booths there, and had a strip of four, full-length photographs taken of himself for a quarter. Profiling for the camera the way he had seen the hustlers do it around the poolroom. Dangling his hat in one hand, knees together, feet apart, both hands in his belt, with his index fingers pointed toward the floor. When the pictures came out, they were everything he had hoped they would be. He stared at them for hours afterward, amazed by how tough he looked, his face pulled up into a hard, leering smile.
Like the devil himself—

“It's me,” he whispered in wonder. “It is me.”

He had cut them apart and autographed each photo. Mailing one home to his brothers and sisters in Lansing. Giving one to Ella, who had only screamed and bellowed that he had become no better than some cheap Town nigger hustler. She had even sneaked into his room at night, and tried to cut a swath out of his new conk— before suddenly shrugging in acquiescence the following day,
Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later,
another of her own unfathomable transformations.

He had given the third picture to Jarvis, who Malcolm was pleased to see looked truly touched by the gesture, averting his eyes and tucking the photo away in his pocket.

“Thanks, homeboy,” he had said. “But who you gonna give the last one?”

He had waited for Laura outside Townsend's. Leaning against a lamppost, twirling the long gold chain of his zoot in one hand. Hardly able to contain himself while he waited to see the look on her face,
wanting
her to see him like this instead of her Harvard-lawyer-to-be. But she hadn't seemed surprised at all, only breaking into her usual warm grin—his first disappointment. She had dropped her books and put her arms around him, right there in the street.

“Malcolm! You're back!”

“Hey, baby.”

Trying to sound as cool as he could—though she was already walking around him, gawking appreciatively.

“Look at you! You're so handsome!”

She picked up the chain where he had let it fall, holding it teas-ingly in one hand until he pulled it away from her.

“Yeah, well. This is how I am, now,” he told her roughly. “I got me a slave at the Roseland. I go beat my hoof riffs there most every night, matter-of-fact.”

“
Really?
You mean lindy-hopping?”

“Uh, yeah, that's what it is—”

“I just
love
to lindy,” she told him. “You do? Where'd you learn that?” he asked, his voice betraying the depth of his surprise.

“Oh, some friends of mine have lindy parties all the time, over their houses,” she laughed, then looked at him daringly. “But I've never been to anyplace like the Roseland. Do you think you could take me sometime?”

“But what about your gramma—”

“That's okay. I can just tell her I'm staying over my cousin's. She'll cover for me, and I'll meet you at your sister's. All right?”

“All right. All right, then,” he had told her, still grinning, but staring back at her over his shoulder as he walked away, wondering if he had the right girl.

The night of the dance she had come running up the steps of Ella's house to him. Her eyes larger than ever when she saw the huge pearl gray Cadillac he had arranged to borrow through Jarvis. Smiling shamelessly as she told him how she had gotten away from her grandmother's:

“That's the first time I ever lied to her!”

She had kept her arms entwined through his the whole way to Roseland, nuzzling her head against his shoulder. And when they arrived she had peeled back her long spring coat, to reveal—not the modest pink sweater and pleated gray school skirt that was practically all he ever saw her in, but a shiny, red silk blouse, and a short, matching lindy skirt. Even holding up a pair of sneakers she had secreted in her overnight bag. Squealing out loud when she saw the golden, waxed dance floor, and all the dancers—all the hustlers and fancy men, the b-girls and painted women, already throwing themselves around it.

“Oh, Malcolm! It's just like I pictured it!” she told him, laughing as happily as a child.

“It is?”

“Come on!”

She was already scampering out on the dance floor, pulling him out with her—and right away he knew he was in trouble. He tried to take control, pushing her around before him. Trying to remember everything he had learned from his lessons, and all the nights watching the dancers after he had run down from his shoeshine post.

But each time he did, she floated effortlessly away from him. Moving much faster than he possibly could have, breaking out one move after another, until he realized with a growing sense of astonishment and panic that he was simply not in her league. He had tried to shrug it off, tried to dig in and keep up then. But she kept moving ahead of him, her face gleaming with sweat. Smiling back fiercely at him, as if she were having the time of her life—as if this were no great effort at all for her. He went after her again, but the faster and harder he tried to move the heavier his feet got, until he knew he was clomping about ridiculously on the floor, his pointy orange zoot shoes feeling like big clown feet. He reached for her waist again—but his hands slipped off, leaving him flailing foolishly. Then she was gone, lost in the crowd for the rest of the number, while Malcolm slunk back off the floor.

Only later, when the final encore had finished, had she come running back to him. Still wiping the sweat and hair off her face, her big eyes shining.

“Where did you go? I'm sorry I lost you! Oh, that was the best time I ever had!” she babbled happily at him, putting her arm through his again, as if it belonged there.

“Thank you, thank you so much for taking me, Malcolm,” she told him, in her soft, gentle, earnest voice, her hand stroking his arm. “It's the best thing anyone's ever done for me. I can't thank you enough—”

“Sure, baby.”

“If there's anything I can do for you. Anything at all—”

He had driven her back up to the Hill in silence, maneuvering Jarvis's car carefully through the streets, his mind a jumble of humiliation and undirected anger. When he reached Waumbeck Street he had driven slowly, right by her house, as if daring her to say something. But she hadn't—she had just looked over at him from the passenger seat, her big eyes glistening in the dark.

He went right on by, then turned the corner, headed over to Dale Street where he knew there was a little cul de sac at the end of the block, a dead end next to a couple of empty buildings and under a streetlight that was always broken. There he had pulled up the car and cut the engine, dousing the lights so they were submerged immediately in the dark. All he could see by the ambient light was the vague silhouette of her body, sitting very still on the seat next to him. The whites of her eyes gradually emerging as she stared at him silently.