“Sir, I need to ask you to move along,” the owner began. “You’re making some of my customers uncomfortable. Do you know where you should be? I can call an Uber for you. Happy to pay for the ride, okay?”
The old man fixed the owner with a quizzical look. “I need to be among them, don’t you see? Left to their own devices, who knows what devilment they’ll be up to? This is for their good too, understand?”
“And where is this place you need to be among them?”
“Ha,” the older man replied, wagging a finger at the owner. He backed away and headed farther down the block.
“I tried.” The owner held his hands aloft and went back inside his establishment.
The wanderer took several more turns and was now nearing a residential area. In this section of the sidewalk, the serpentine roots of a large tree had caused a portion of the concrete to rise and buckle. The old man’s feet got tangled and over he went, landing face-first on the sidewalk. He gashed his head but was still alive. A bystander saw what happened and hurried over to help.
“Hold on, I’m calling an ambulance.”
The old man groaned and rolled onto his back, gazing up at the sky. His breathing was labored but his face was untroubled.
The helpful bystander knelt beside him. “You have any ID? Somebody I can call for you?”
“Yes,” the old man answered, “put in a station-to-station call and find out all their also known as... ases.” He giggled.
“I’m sorry, what?”
The fallen man began to tap out a phrase in Morse code on the concrete with his index finger. Three other people had also gathered around and though they noticed his finger moving, they assumed it was a spasmodic response to his fall. An ambulance soon arrived, and after his head wound was attended to, he was carefully loaded onto a stretcher, a neck brace having been snapped in place as well.
The phrase he’d been tapping out was Reason frees us from fear. He would last three more days, tapping out the phrase all the while, and succumb to complications arising from an unforeseen heart attack in the hospital. On a ventilator, his eyes fluttered open seconds before death as he stared at an image only he could see.
“The angel of death is here. And just my luck, she looks like Angela Davis.” He chuckled, coughed up phlegm and blood in his throat, and expired. The words he’d been tapping out were inscribed on his headstone along with his name and birth and death dates. It was among several sayings the ninety-four-year-old man was known for uttering over the years. In the following days, that and other details of Jonah Montgomery Rikemann’s colorful life were related in print and by newscasters and pundits across the airwaves.
Magrady sat off to one side in the World Stage, bopping his head as the quartet grooved. There was a piano player, an upright bass player, a drummer, and his friend Tyrone “Ty” Banshall on the sax. They’d been improvising but had dropped into a Paul Desmond number, “Feeling Blue.” After that they played several more compositions and finished off the night with a tripped-out, jazzed-up instrumental rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.”
Amid the applause, Magrady came over to his friend. “That was wild, man.” He stuck out his hand and the saxophonist shook it vigorously.
“Glad to see you made it out, brother,” Banshall said. “It’s been a minute, like the kids say.”
“Well, it is past my bedtime. But y’all knocked it out the park.”
“Not to brag but I think we did.”
“This is Horace,” Banshall said, introducing the drummer, a stout man with gray at his temples. “This is Magrady. We were in ’Nam at the same time.”
“No shit.”
“Pleasure,” Magrady said, shaking the drummer’s hand. “Me and Ty weren’t in the same unit but a lot of us bloods hung out together away from the bush.”
Magrady looked like a beer truck driver, the hair bristled close on his head mostly snow these days, clean-shaven and neat in jeans and a buttoned-down shirt. His windbreaker was draped on the back of the folding chair he’d been sitting on.
Banshall, tall and lanky, was taking his sax apart to put in its padded case as the piano player came over. This individual was a medium-built Black man decades younger than both of the other two, who were in their sixties. He wore stylish glasses and trendy sneakers.
“You were in the stratosphere tonight,” the younger man said, grinning at the saxophonist. The drummer had walked off to talk to someone else.
“Just following you, youngster. Lee Sorrells, meet Magrady, he was all Sergeant Fury and shit over there.”
“Mostly shit,” Magrady said, the emotion flat in his voice.
“Good to meet you,” Lee said. He and Magrady also shook hands. “See you Friday, Ty,” he added with a nod to the saxophonist.
“For sure,” Banshall answered. Then to Magrady he said, “Gimme a ride to the crib and I’ll buy you a drink.” He made a face. “Damn, sorry, man. Old habit.”
Magrady was some years sober. “Ain’t no thing. I can have tap water with an ice cube.”
“I think I have a bottle of fruity seltzer,” his friend quipped.
The two left the World Stage, exiting onto the wide expanse of Degnan. Shops such as Hot and Cool Café and Eso Won Bookstore lined the next block of the boulevard. As Magrady and Banshall headed south away from the stores, they saw a man and woman in yoga gear each riding a hybrid unicycle-tricycle. The bikes had one large front tire and the two rear ones were canted outward for balance. They each had a seat and pedals but no handlebar. The two expertly maneuvered about.
Magrady and Banshall neared the recently refurbished Leimert Park Plaza which fronted the main throughfare of Crenshaw. The coming of a metro train signaled an uneasy development of the area. Riding in on those rails was gentrification, which often as not meant displacement. The two also passed several pup tents and lean-tos made from cardboard and scrap, evidence of the city’s ever-present homeless population.
The two arrived at Magrady’s car, a twenty-year-old PT Cruiser with a rebuilt engine and faded fake-wood paneling on its sides and rear hatch.
“Haven’t seen one of these in a month of Sundays,” Banshall remarked.
“Haven’t had a car in that long either,” Magrady replied as he unlocked the passenger-side door for his friend. “Even a goofy one like this.” The bus and occasional biking had been his modes of transportation for years.
“I ain’t complaining.”
Banshall put his case on the backseat as Magrady went around to the driver’s side. Off they went to Budlong near 35th Place, not too far west of USC. Banshall lived in what was called a neoclassical wood-sided fourplex built in another era. Back then it would have been called a rooming house. It was set among several humble abodes with well-tended lawns, some with security bars on doors and windows. Magrady found a parking space at the curb in front.
Banshall yawned, working a kink out of his neck. “Remember when this would have been the time we’d be hitting our stride in Soul Alley?” This had been a section of the then-called Saigon of nightclubs and joints where Black GIs hung out. A fleeting relief from the toils of war and antagonisms with their fellow white soldiers on base.
“Man,” Magrady said, shaking his head, “I once got so high there in the Three Clicks that I saw Ho Chi Minh floating through the ceiling with a deck of cards. Bobby Seale showed up and we played Spades.”
They chuckled and headed inside. Upstairs Banshall unlocked the door and, stepping inside, set his keys on a small table with a vase on it. His rooms were comfortable and tidy. There were photos and framed posters here and there chronicling his years in the music business. While not always a headliner, he’d put out a few albums of his own, and worked steady as a session man and a sideman on various tours, including ones with Herbie Hancock and various rock stars. There was also evidence of his playing gigs for causes ranging from police accountability to when Jesse Jackson ran for president in the ’80s.