I hadn’t seen Useless since then and I hadn’t missed him for a second.
“I’m in trouble, Paris,” Ulysses said, looking pathetic.
“So?”
“I need help.”
“I sell books, not help.”
“It’s about that time with the gold chains, right?” he asked me.
I didn’t even answer.
“That wasn’t my fault, Paris. The cops got a hold’a me and like to beat me half to death. I told ’em that I hid ’em in yo’ sto’. I told ’em you didn’t know nuthin’ about it.”
I could have asked him why did they arrest me, then? But that would have opened a conversation, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with Useless Grant.
“I need a place to hide out,” he said.
“Not here.”
“We blood, Paris.”
“That might be, but I ain’t bleedin’ for you.”
I thought Useless was going to break down and cry. But then he looked at my face and saw that I wouldn’t let him in if he was having a heart attack. He wasn’t getting across my threshold even if he fell down dead.
“Well, do me one favor, okay?” he said.
I just stared at him.
“Tell Three Hearts that there’s a man named Hector wrote my name on a black slip’a paper. Tell her that I tried to make it work with Angel, but I guess I was mudfoot just like she said.”
I didn’t say a thing. Nothing. Useless was less than that to me. I heard his words and I would repeat them if I ever saw his mother again, but he wasn’t going to make it into my house.
No sir, not in a thousand years.
Chapter 2
I closed the door on Useless and took a deep breath. I had to send him away, had to. Useless was the kind of trouble that could get a man killed. He had no sense except for the sense of survival. That meant he would deal with thugs or criminals just as if they were upstanding citizens; he’d invite those men into your house and then leave out the back door when trouble started.
The next day he’d call and ask how you were just as if he hadn’t seen his partners come after you with a butcher’s knife. He’d come to visit you in the hospital and hit you up for a loan even after you explained to him that you couldn’t pay the doctor’s bill.
Useless was trouble from the git-go.
But still I felt guilty.
I loved my auntie Three Hearts. She was the finest individual that you could imagine. She never passed judgment on people without cause and she was loyal. I once had a fever of 105 degrees, and she sat there sponging me down for days while my mother was laid up sick with the same flu. She stayed with us another week, cooking and looking after us while her son, Useless, broke every toy I owned.
Three Hearts’s only blind spot was her son. Useless could do nothing wrong in her mind. If he got in trouble it was always somebody else’s fault. If he lied it was for a higher purpose. Her son was a perfect man, and woe be unto those who thought otherwise. She lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was a good thing because that meant I wouldn’t have to face her wrath at my turning her boy away in time of need.
Maybe I would have offered Useless a glass of water but, as I said before, I was already expecting trouble when he came knocking.
Three weeks earlier I had been having dinner at a diner in downtown L.A. It was an Italian-American place at one of the crossroads between the races. There were all kinds of patrons eating there: whites, blacks, Asians, and even one Mexican family.
I liked integrated places. I guess that’s because my time in the Deep South had been defined by segregation. They wouldn’t let me into the library in my hometown. I wasn’t even allowed to urinate where a white man had gone.
I had ordered eggplant parmigiana and was sitting there reading Ulysses by James Joyce. The book was no longer banned in the United States, but there was still a stigma attached to it, and I wanted to see what that was all about.
Between Joyce’s playfulness, the eggplant and Italian bread, and the satisfaction of being able to sit where I was sitting, I was pretty happy.
Also, at the booth across from me there was this skinny young white woman. She had natural, if dirty, blond hair and blue eyes that looked like pale quartz. She used her tongue a lot while eating and I was quite enchanted by her wandering gaze.
The meal and Stephen Dedalus went along just fine, and I was completely satisfied. But then a disturbance occurred.
The plump waitress, who wore a tight red uniform, had delivered a check to the blonde’s table, but then she came back with the cook. The cook was dressed all in whites. He had a sailor’s cap, a stained white T-shirt, bleached white trousers, and an apron that was once buff colored but now had faded to a kind of off-white.
“No, no, miss,” the burly, all-white cook was saying. “This is the dinner menu. The meat loaf is two ninety-nine, not one fifty.”
“It says right here that meat loaf is a dollar fifty cent,” the young woman said, pointing.
“It says lunch from noon to four right here,” the cook, who had a kindly face, insisted.
“You shouldn’t have the lunches on the same menu with the dinners,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t have even eaten here if I thought I had to pay all that.”
“I’m sorry,” the big man said.
The woman took out a small red purse and reached in.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“What now?” the waitress, who was almost as large as the cook, said.
“I must have left my wallet at home.”
“I do not trust you,” the cook said, and I wondered what his native language might have been.
“I’ll just go home and bring it right back,” the woman went on as if she had not heard his words.
“No,” said the man. “You will be staying here and Diane will be calling the police.”
The woman attempted to rise, but the man with the kindly face held up a warning hand.
Diane turned to go toward the counter.
People all over the diner were craning their necks to see what was happening.
“Rita?” I said. I was standing next to the cook with a restraining hand on the waitress’s elbow.
The dirty blonde looked up at me, trying not to seem confused.
“Hey, Rita. It’s me... Paris. Don’t tell me you lost your wallet again. I told you you got to remember to put it in your purse before you leave the house.”
“You know her?” the cook asked.
Instead of answering, I handed him a twenty-dollar bill, the first twenty I’d had a hold of in a few weeks. That’s the reason I had come to the diner, because I was flush and didn’t have to eat pinto beans and rice for once.
“Rita Pigeon,” I said, lying easily. “We work at the Lido Theater. I take tickets in the afternoon, and she’s the nighttime usherette.”
“Bullshit,” Diane, the obese waitress, said.
“Watch you language,” the cook said. “Don’t speak like that around customers.”
“What customers?” Diane spat.
“Come on over and sit with me, Rita,” I said to the blonde. “And could you bring us some coffee with milk?” I asked the waitress.
Diane was going to tell me where I could go, but one gesture from the cook and she was on her way.
“I don’t know what kind funny stuff this is,” the cook said to me, waving the Jackson note. “But I will take your money.”
I remember thinking that there was a great deal more truth to what he said than he meant.
The blonde moved to my booth, and the rest of the patrons returned to eating.
“Jessa,” she said, introducing herself. She held out her hand and I shook it. “Thanks.”