Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
‘In other words, brother,’ I told Cooly, ‘I ain’ got no mo’ boys on the block. I’m gittin’ into a thing where yawl don’t fit in. In a year or so, maybe less, yawl gonna all be movin’ on yo way, an’ there ain’ gonna be no big thing. I’m jus’ leavin’ a l’il early. I’m sorry if it looks bad, but . . .’
‘Fuck it,’ Cooly said. I watched him closely.
‘I’m seventeen, man,’ I said.
‘That ain’ no hundred,’ Cooly drawled.
‘Spade an’ John Lee ain’ much older! I got to move!’
Cooly laughed. ‘You still wanna be the man?’
I didn’t comment. The way he said it made it sound like a comic-book hero.
‘Lemme tellya,’ he said. ‘Lee an’ Spade may not be much older than you inna way, but in other ways they ten times yo’ age. Can you dig that?’
‘The only way to learn iz to find out.’
‘The hard way?’
‘If thass the quickest way.’
‘You ain’ comin’ to no mo’ meetin’s an’ tell the gize?’
‘No.’
Cooly started off across the park. He turned back long enough to shake his head.
‘Man, you ain’ never gonna be another Spade,’ he said.
July 9, 1969
‘I got something for you ta do,’ Lee said.
‘Yeah?’
‘If I can trust you . . . This is important.’
‘You know you can.’
John was sweating. It seemed as though he was always sweating. Either because he was fat or because he was nervous.
‘I got some pills for you to deliver,’ he told me.
‘Where?’
‘Brooklyn.’
John reached into a brown paper bag and came out with the familiar cellophane packets. He rewrapped the packs in cloth and stapled the ends together. He did all of this on the kitchen table. His parents had left the day before to see his mother’s sister in Syracuse. I had been practically living there anyway. They weren’t due back for a week.
‘I want you to go to a place called the Ivy Hall.’ He took out a piece of paper and started to jot down directions. ‘You take the A train to Hoyt and Schermerhorn and catch the bus on Hoyt, the QL, four stops. You get off on this corner. The
place you’re looking for has about five entrances. You want the one on the west side in the back. This is a side door that says “Personnel” on it. Ask for a cat named Immies. Tell him you got held up last night and couldn’t make it. Anything. You give him the pills and then he ’spose to give you two-fifty . . . You got that?’
I nodded. I picked up the piece of paper, but he stopped me.
‘Memorize it,’ he said. That was smart. If I got caught, the Man wouldn’t have a map of my plans.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘I may not be here when you get back, so jus’ cool it. I got bizness elsewhere.’
He handed me a jacket with stitched-in pockets under the armpits. I put the pills in these pockets and took off. John saw me to the door. I almost ran down the back stairs in my eagerness to get started, but I figured John might be looking out of the window, so I took the slow way down on the elevator. I didn’t want him to think I was running off to cheat him. He’d make a call, and I wouldn’t make it to the corner. I settled in the elevator and lit a Kool. This might well be my big break. I was finally getting a chance to meet the Big Boss.
6:30
I remembered Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant was the new Harlem. People were stacked on top of each other, and rats and roaches were the most familiar thing about the buildings. I had lived in Brooklyn until I was almost ten. I had watched my old man drink until he could no longer hit my mother with any kind of accuracy as she screamed and yelled about the lack of this and that and the other. There was the solitude of sharing the bathroom with the families down the hall and sitting on the toilet with your ass out while the
Hawk whistled through the cracks in the wall and turned your balls to ice.
There were the radiators that fizzled and hissed and made noises that were supposed to convince you that they were heating while you watched TV after dinner in your overcoat. I watched my father beat knives out of shape signaling the landlord that we were freezing. Into the night he would sit up with his liquor cursing the white man who owned his forefathers and the white man who owned us.
Even in Brooklyn my mother had been into a fate bag. She was always predicting her own downfall through the Lord’s punishment of us for our wicked ways. Our father was being punished because he was a man who wanted his wife to open her legs and close her mouth. Matt and I were doomed because we loved him and he was a wicked man.
When I was almost eight, my father died. He was a stranger to me. He was in the Veterans’ Hospital for four months while the white men did this and did that to him. They did not bring back his smile. He was in pain, and I heard my mom praying that he would die. I hated her more than ever until I understood that she really loved him after all and wanted to see him out of his misery. Then I hated her for what she was without him.
When my mother had her breakdown, we moved to Manhattan. Six months after her husband’s death, God sent her a third son. The city decided to finance our trip to a lower-rent zone. I noticed the changes in our new house. The street was different, too. The boys’ names were Juan and Enrique, and Cuba. The way they talked was funny, and the way they dressed was even more odd. I knew the Beast when I saw him, though. My father always told me on trips to the barber shop, where we saw men leaning almost parallel to the ground, that when the Beast got us we were no longer sons of God or man. The Beast was dope.
The A train was through with the rush-hour millions that piled into each other at nine in the morning and five at night. Those who had run into the Manhattan shopping districts and Wall Street district and business areas had once again escaped to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. They were safe in their other cages.
7:10
I knocked at the door marked ‘Personnel’ at the Ivy Hall.
‘Yeah?’
‘I want to see Immies,’ I said.
‘I’m Immies.’ It was a fat white man who blocked my way. ‘You Lee?’
‘Yeah,’ I lied.
‘Good shit! I thought you’d pull out on me. All goddamn night I’m waitin’ an’ waitin’, ya know? Whut happened?’
‘I got held up.’
Immies had on a baggy suit that just seemed to match his baggy face with the overflowing jowls and rubbery lips. He had an unlit stogie in his mouth, clenched between yellow teeth.
There were two other men in the room. Both of them were white. A squat, fireplug-looking cat with a derby on sat propped against the wall with his feet on a battered desk. The other, a short, red-nosed faggot with a casino man’s dealing hat on, sat at a desk trying to write in a big ledger under the glare of a no-watt bulb.
‘You got dem pills?’ Immies asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Lemme have ’um.’
I pulled the packets from the pockets under the armpits and tossed them at him. Immies had a small pouch in his hand which he handed me. It felt like a roll of bills.
‘Cheg dem dolls,’ Fireplug said.
I leaned against the wall and relaxed opposite the three men who gathered around the desk. Immies pulled the staples from the cloth and opened one of the cellophane packs. He spilled the contents onto the desk.
‘Whatcha say, Nita?’ Immies asked the fag.
Nita picked up a pill daintily and popped it between his index finger and thumb. The white, powdery filling spilled onto his fingers and the desk. He tasted it.
‘It’s salt,’ he purred.
I didn’t think I heard him right. I looked from Nita to Immies to Fireplug. The three of them looked at me accusingly. I moved to the desk and ran my finger through the powder. I placed it to my tongue. It
was
salt!
‘It’s salt!’ I said.
‘Thass right, you schemin’ l’il black motherfuckuh, you. Goddamn salt! All these goddamn capsules iz prob’ly fulla the shit! First I gotta wait, an’ then you play me like a dumb bastard, some dumb fuck in the playground!’
I hadn’t been watching Fireplug. I was still trying to find out what had happened. Plug hit me across the head, and I stumbled face down on the floor, my head spinning and smacking against the wood. Immies kicked me in the ribs. That’s all I know.
1:35
I woke up in a crowd of Juniors. Everything near me was pain. My eyes opened and then quickly closed as the hurt stabbed my head.
‘Who done ya, Junior?’ Cooly asked. ‘The whiteys?’
‘How’d I get here?’
‘We saw them dumpin’ you here. Two men threw you outta car . . . Who wuz it?’
I was getting my mental and physical together. My mind
was in worse shape than my body, because the body can’t hurt unless the mind is registering. There was a taste in my mouth that reminded me of blood. My brain was running here and there, never stopping, always running.
There was an echo chamber that kept repeating John Lee’s name. I was ashamed to look at Cooly. I felt that he knew what happened somehow, even though
I
didn’t really know. John must have known I wanted his job. He set me up to eliminate the competition, just like he might have gotten rid of Isidro. He never cleared himself of that. He had set me up by giving me phony pills and making me think he was trusting me for a big job. Immies thought that
I
was cheating him. John wanted me dead.
I stayed at home the next day. My mother got into a terrible thing when she saw me with my face all kicked in and my ribs crunched, but she was quiet long enough to prod for broken bones and patch me up as well as I would let her. John came to see me about his money. I told him that the pills had been bad and that I had gotten a bad ass kicking and no money. If he wanted anything from Immies, he’d have to go and get it. He said that he didn’t know how those pills happened to be bad, since the rest in the shipment were good. I decided that my showing up alive had brought a great performance from the fat man. He was the picture of concern. When I told him I didn’t have the money, he looked like he would die.
I hated the very sight of him. Cooly’s words kept coming back to me. He had said that I would never be as smart as Spade or Lee. He had said that I would never be the man. John Lee reminded me of those words, and Debbie Clark reminded me of them. I supposed that Spade would make me think when I saw him, too. I didn’t want to see him, though. I didn’t want to tell anybody what happened. The only reason I told John was because it seemed to be one of the games we were playing.
John Lee is dead.
Phase Three
John Lee died last night
July 13, 1969
‘Mrs González,’ the captain said, ‘I know this hasn’t been a very easy thing for you, but your help could be vital. . . . I assume from your call that you are willing to help us.’
‘My wife will help all that she can, sir, but she is not a well woman. She is to have another child,’ the middle-aged Puerto Rican man said.
Captain O’Malley and Lieutenant Thomas sat in a cramped apartment on West 16th Street. They had refused Mr González’ offer of beer or lemonade and now waited patiently for his wife to tell them what had prompted her call about the previous evening.
‘Now, last night, what did you see that made you call us?’ the captain asked.
‘I went for the paper to the corner, and as I am coming home, I walk through this . . .’ She asked her husband for the word. ‘
Como se dice este?
. . . parking lot? Yes. When I come through this parking lot, I see a man bending over this one, and I scream at him . . . He looked back to me and ran away.’
Mrs González was a Puerto Rican woman of about forty. She was plump and short, with long, black hair pulled into a bun. Her husband was older than she by about ten years. He stood at the back of her chair with his hands resting on her shoulders.
The two white policemen sat facing the couple, their lightweight jackets barely concealing the weapons under their left armpits. There was a small fan directly behind them spinning furiously in an effort to battle the ninety-degree New York day.
‘About what time was this?’
‘About eleven-thirty,’ she replied.
‘Could you give us a description of the man you saw?’ the captain asked.
‘Well, it’s so fast I canno’ really see. An’ dark, you see?’
‘Was he white, Puerto Rican . . .’
‘Not a white man,’ she says.
‘Well, can you give us anything? Height, weight, dress, that sort of thing?’
Mrs González turned to her husband, who interpreted the question in rapid Spanish.
‘Sí. He was about six feet, and very quick for running.’ The two policemen smiled vaguely. ‘He was wearing a white raincoat with a paper bag.’
‘Beg pardon.
Como
?’ the captain asks.
‘While he runs, he dropped a package, an’ she looked, uh, it looked like a pa-per bag. He stopped all his running to get it.’ The woman paused. ‘But where he was running, there was no light.’
Lieutenant Thomas was jotting down everything in a black note pad. He asked the next question.
‘How about a hat? Glasses?
Anteojos?
’
‘No. None of this. I wish I could help more for you, but then maybe he could see me too.’ Mrs González looks at her husband.
‘We were afraid to tell. About the movies, you see? In the movies the ones who see are killed. This is a bad neighborhood for killing, because of the young ones. They kill . . . We went to Mass this morning and asked the father. He told us we should call to talk to you.’
The policemen nodded.
‘Well,’ the captain said, ‘unless you can think of something more, I suppose that will be all.’
‘Nothing more,’ Mrs González said.
‘If you think of anything else, no matter how small, please call us.’
‘And thank you,’ the lieutenant added.
Mr González showed the two men to the door. Down the hall away from the apartment, they conferred on their information.
‘What do you think?’
‘Don’ know,’ the captain said.
‘Think some mug shots would help?’
‘I doubt it. All she could say was that the man wasn’t white. There would be no reason for the mug file.’
The two officers reached ground level on 16th Street and moved to their car, parked near the corner.
‘This is fourteen-six to base. Fourteen-six to base. Over.’
‘We read you, fourteen-six.’
‘This is O’Malley. I want to see Mitchell in Narco when I get back. That should be about four. Tell him that I’d like complete files on our district for a man named Isidro Valsuena. Over.’
‘Ten-four.’
The unmarked black sedan pulled away from the curb and swung out into traffic. The kids on the corner had loosened the nozzle on a fireplug, and water banged against scrawny legs and chests and ricocheted to form a small river in the gutter, flowing to the sewer. The policemen drove by, ignoring it.
‘Check this address,’ the captain said, using his note pad: ‘357 West 17th Street. I’d like to see where Paco Valsuena was last night.’