By the time I got home I was ready to talk to my son.
He was in the backyard setting up three sawhorses, each one spaced about four feet from the next. He also had out a few planks of wood about ten feet long and four feet wide. They were between one and a half and two inches thick.
“What you doin’?” I asked him.
“I’m gonna build a boat,” he said.
“Where’d you get the wood?”
“Bought it from Mr. Galway at the lumberyard.”
“He deliver it?”
Jesus nodded.
This was a new phase in his life. Jesus had never before spent money on himself. Ever since he was quite young he saved his money, for fear that I’d lose my job or be put in jail. He worked four afternoons a week at a local market, bagging groceries and making deliveries for old women. Every cent went into a coffee can in his closet. In his mind everything would always be fine because if I fell down, he would be there to take up the slack.
I tried to convince him that he didn’t have to worry, that he could buy himself toys or clothes or anything he wanted. But Jesus had spent his younger years with my friend Primo. In Primo’s world a boy was just a smaller version of a man; he might not have been able to do as much as his larger counterpart but he was expected to do all that he could manage.
“What kinda boat?” I asked.
“Sail,” Jesus said.
“You know how to build a sailboat?”
“There’s a book.” Jesus pointed at a large paperback that he’d gotten from the library. It was lying on the back porch, open to a page that showed three sawhorses spaced four feet apart. “It says that there’s one hundred and sixty-one steps to build a sailboat.”
“Come here and sit down with me,” I said.
We sat together on the concrete porch. I was looking at Jesus as he stared at the grass beneath his bare feet.
“What’s this about droppin’ out of school?”
“I don’t like it there,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like the kids or the teachers,” he said.
“You got to say more if you want me to understand you, Juice. I mean, did somebody do something to make you mad?”
“Uh-uh. They’re just stupid.”
“Stupid how?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some kind of example. Did somebody do something stupid last week?”
Jesus nodded. “Mr. Andrews.”
“What did he do?” I was used to asking Jesus questions. Though he had been speaking since he was twelve, words were still a rare commodity for him.
“Felicity Dorn was crying. She was sad because her cat died. Mr. Andrews told her that she had to be quiet or he was going to send her to the vice principal’s office and she would miss a big test. And if she didn’t take the test, she’d probably fail out.”
“He was just trying to keep her from distracting the class.”
“But her mother died just last year,” Jesus said, looking up at me. “She couldn’t help how bad she felt.”
“I’m sure he didn’t know that.”
“But he should know. He’s the teacher. All he knows is the states and their capitals and what year the presidents died.”
“Are you gonna let somebody like that keep you from going to college and bein’ something?”
“He went to college,” Jesus said, “and it didn’t help him.”
I managed to keep the smile off my face. Inside I was proud of the man my son was becoming.
“You can’t decide to leave school because one teacher’s a fool,” I said.
“That’s not all. They think I’m stupid.”
“No.”
“Yes, they do. They don’t wanna teach me. They give me homework but they don’t care if I turn it in. They like it that I run fast but they don’t care.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
Jesus got up and moved toward his sawhorses. I touched his elbow and he stopped.
“We need to talk about this more, Juice. We need to talk about it until we can both decide. You hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Go work on your boat.”
— 12 —
I pulled up in front of the restaurant at about nine.
Hambones didn’t have an exit to speak of. They had a back door leading into a crevice that Sam called the alley. But that was just for the fire code, nobody could really get out that way. So I sat in my green Pontiac, which rattled whenever I pushed it over fifty miles per hour, and waited.
Hambones was a dive by 1964, but in the old days only the flashiest men and women went in there at night. That was the way it was for blacks. We couldn’t frequent the fancy clubs in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. And we didn’t have that class of joint in our working-class neighborhoods. So men would put on their glad rags and women would don their costume jewelry and furs and go down to some local hangout where there was a jukebox and the pretense of luxury. After a few months of notoriety musicians would begin to frequent the place. Sam Houston had Jelly Roll Morton and Lips McGee as regulars in his joint in the fifties. Louis Armstrong even made an appearance once.
Of course, musicians bring their own crowd: men who want to play like them and women who want to be played. These men and women come in all colors. And once you have a few whites down there, they start coming down in droves. Because as fancy as the Brown Derby might have been, it wasn’t going to give you the kind of freedom that a black club offered. Black people know how to be free. People who had been denied for as many centuries as we had knew how to let their hair down and dance like there was no tomorrow.
Mouse was the first person to take me to Hambones. He hadn’t been in L.A. three months when he nosed it out.
“Yeah, Ease,” he said to me. “The women down there make you cry, they so fine. They don’t have no liquor but you know it’s cheaper in a paper bag anyways.”
It was the early fifties and I was unattached. One thing good about Mouse being so dangerous was that women just loved being around him. You knew that if you were around Raymond, something unexpected was bound to happen.
We went down there looking for a woman named Millie. Millie Perette from East St. Louis. She always wore a string of real pink pearls and carried a nacre-handled pistol in a handbag hardly big enough for a cigarette case.
“Millie do you so bad that you wanna cry when you wake up in the mornin’,” Mouse told me. “Because the next night is so far away.”
We got there at about midnight. When all the white clubs were winding down, Sam’s place was just getting a second wind. I remember a trumpet player blowing at his table, surrounded by women. People were dancing to the music, drinking and kissing to it, too. When we walked in everybody greeted Mouse as if he were the mayor of Watts rather than a recent transplant from the Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.
He had a fifth of rye whiskey in his left hand and a terrible 41-caliber pistol under his zoot suit jacket. Mouse loved that pistol more than any woman. He once told me that the barrel could be un-screwed from the chamber and that he had twelve barrels so that if he killed somebody, he could switch. That way they couldn’t ever prove that it was his gun used in the crime.
Millie was at the bar with a big bruiser, a dusky bronze-colored man with gold-capped teeth, a diamond ring, and a pistol tucked in the belt of his woolen suit pants. His hand was half the way down Millie’s blouse and she was laughing happily, drinking from a hammered silver shot glass.
When Raymond and I walked up to the pair, I was less than pleased. The most you could hope for in Mouse’s company was a bloodless evening — and you could never bank on that if there was love or money involved. The people sitting near the couple moved away as we approached. The conversation died down but the bruiser might not have noticed, because the horn still blew.