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It was almost midnight.

He sat down and started playing “Night and Day.”

Somebody in the building yelled, “Shaddup, you jackass!”

A fart on thee, Ollie thought, and continued playing.

He had to admit he wasn’t yet a jazz giant, but tomorrow was another day.

WALTER WIGGINS , better known as Wiggy the Lid, liked to frequent a bar on St. Sebastian’s and Boyle because there were very often white hookers in here. Wiggy was in the mood for a white hooker tonight. Not any of your Puerto Rican hookers wholooked white because they were of Spanish and not African descent. What he wanted was a genuine white hooker.

As a black kid growing up in America, Wiggy had played basketball in the schoolyard, had joined a street gang when he was thirteen, had convinced a twelve-year-old deb member of the gang that slobbering the Johnson wasn’t the same thing as having sex, had killed two other black kids from opposing gangs when he was sixteen, had decided when he was eighteen that gang-busting was for the fools of this world, had become fond of cocaine while serving as a mule for a Colombian dope dealer whose business he’d later acquired after he’d shot the man with a Desert Eagle semi-automatic he purchased from a black gun dealer.

As a grown man living in America—Wiggy had just turned twenty-three—he earned more each year than the head of General Motors did, but he still lived in Diamondback, the almost exclusively black section of the city, and he still dated black women, and went to a black barber who knew how to cut his hair, and wore expensive clothes he bought from a shop on Concord Av because the black owner knew what looked best on a black man. He liked eating steak and potatoes, but he also liked collard greens, and fried chicken, and grits. He enjoyed television shows and movies with all-black casts. He didn’t read much, but when he did it was mostly novels about crime—none of them by white writers, who he felt didn’t know shit about black thieves, and shouldn’t even try. In fact, Wiggy distrustedall white people because the men believed he was a criminal—which he happened to be, by the way—and the women believed he was a rapist, which hedidn’t happen to be, and hadnever been, by the way. He especially distrusted cops because he’d suffered too many beatings from them when he was coming along, and he was now paying off too many of them to look the other way when it came to this small matter of dealing controlled substances. Having a few dozen cops in your pocket did not engender faith in the criminal justice system.

Wiggy generally steered away from white neighborhoods altogether because he felt reviled there, observed, suspected, never treated with the respect he earned on his home turf. As a result, his universe was largely defined by theabsence of white people in it. This was why he liked to go to bed with white hookers. Same way lots of white dudes came uptown looking for black hookers, because these girls were something outside of they purlieu, so to speak. The Starlight Bar often had white hookers in it, which is why he was not surprised when along around twelve-fifteen or so on Christmas night, this leggy blonde walked in all alone and took the stool to his right at the bar, and crossed her legs to show enough gartered stocking to qualify her for porn stardom. This little girl seemed most definitely for sale. If she was Puerto Rican, however, he didn’t want her. Because to his mind, that meant she wasn’t white, she was just a spic.

America was a peculiar place.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Merry Christmas,” she said and turned to him, and smiled.

“Merry Christmas, Miss,” the black bartender said. “Something to drink?”

“I’ll have a Tanqueray martini,” she said. “On the rocks. A twist.”

“Another scotch, Mr. Wiggins?” the bartender asked.

“No, John, I think I’ll try what the lady’s drinking,” Wiggy said, and swung his stool around to face her. “What’d you just order there, Miss?”

“A Tanqueray martini.”

“Sounds good to me,” Wiggy said.

“It is,” she said, and smiled.

He had never drunk a martini in his life. He did not know what Tanqueray was, either. He had, however, seen a lot of James Bond movies.

“Stirred or shaken?” he asked.

He did not like Bond making it with black girls. The girl here looked very white indeed. But if so, what was she doing in a black bar at midnight on Christmas Day?

“Shaken is better,” she said, and smiled.

“Shakin it, huh?” he said. “Is better, you think?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Much.”

“Then, John,” he said, “you best shake it for me, too.”

“Two martinis comin right up, Mr. Wiggins,” the bartender said.

“So,” Wiggy said to the blonde, “how was your Christmas?”

“Very nice, thank you,” she said. “And yours?”

“Spent it with my mama,” he said, which was the truth. His mama didn’t know he was dealing drugs. She thought he got lucky as a day trader. Only person in his family knew he was thus involved was his cousin Ashley, who was one of his runners. Kid made more money than Wiggy’s father did, who was a mailman. “How about you?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, but he noticed she hadn’t mentioned who with, or exactly how she’d spent the day.

“Santa treat you nice?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Two martinis on the rocks, a twist,” John said.

“Thank you, m’man,” Wiggy said, and raised his glass to the blonde. “Cheers,” he said, “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” she said again, and clinked her glass against his.

Wiggy tasted the drink.

“Mm,” he said. “Good.”

“Told you, didn’t I?”

“So you did.”

Not a trace of Spanish accent, but lots of these third-generation spics spoke English good as he did. Last thing he needed was a roll with a girl had six diseases she’d picked up in San Juan.

“Walter Wiggins,” he said, and put his glass down, and extended his right hand. She took it in her own hand; it was cold from holding the drink.

“I’m Sheryl,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Sheryl.”

Didn’t sound like any Spanish name he knew, maybe she was white, after all. Or Jewish maybe, which was even better. You got some of these Jewgirls in bed, they screamed down the whole fuckin hood.

“You live up here in Diamondback?” he asked.

Smattering of spics lived up here, maybe she was one of them, after all. He was tempted to take John aside, ask him who the blonde with the long legs and the big tits was. A Spanish working girl or an import?

“No, I spent the day here with a girlfriend,” she said.

“She live up here?”

“Her mother does.”

“She a black girl?”

“No.”

“Spanish?”

He looked her dead in the eye.

“White,” she said. “Same as me.”