I had three friends through all the years of public school. Bespectacled Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy Ellis, and Ballard “the Perv” Ingram. We would hang out on the lunch court before and after school, trading comic books and gossiping about the sex exploits of everyone else.
Every now and then Sherman would join us, usually waiting to hook up with some girl. We liked him because he was the best of us, all of us. He ran faster, stood his ground no matter the odds, and he could recite every school assignment by heart. At church he sang with the gospel choir, and afterward he’d make out with one of the church daughters in the storeroom behind the dais upon which the choir performed.
But even though he was a blazing star among assorted lumps of clay, Sherman would join me and my friends on the lunch court just as if he was one of us, talking about the X-Men and teachers he couldn’t stand.
I remember one day he asked short, squinty-eyed Ballard the Perv what comic book character he wanted to be.
“Not,” Sherman stipulated, “the one you like the most but the one you would be if you could be.”
Ball, which is what we called Ballard sometimes, scrunched up his eyes and stared at my first cousin like he might be a cop who needed the right answer or else he would kick some ass.
“The Thing,” Ball said at last. “The Thing from the Fantastic Four.”
Sherman smiled and winked at me.
“He’s ugly,” Fat Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Ball replied, “but he’s got a secret power.”
“What power?” Mister asked. Mister Pardon was dark-skinned, like the rest of us, and named Mister, in the Southern black tradition, so that no white man could disrespect him. He was an exceptional student, though he stuttered when talking to anyone but us three and sometimes Sherman.
“His dick,” the Perv said. “It’s rough the way my uncle Billy says that girls like it, and it’s really big ’cause of those cosmic rays.”
Ball’s voice was so filled with wonder and desire that I was afraid Sherman might turn mean and make fun of him. I and my friends were all around thirteen, while my cousin was fourteen going on forty. Sherman could be cutting, and I had the urge, but not the nerve, to stand between him and Ball.
Sherman bit his lower lip and cut his eyes at the Perv.
“Yeah, right?” he said with a smile. “That’s what I always thought about the Hulk. You know like if the madder he get the stronger he is, then maybe the hornier he get the bigger his dick is.”
Ballard the Perv’s eyes opened wide, and I believed that he’d dream about being the Hulk for the next year.
One afternoon, more than a year after the bio-philosophical talk about the sexual prowess of superheroes, Sherman came up to me and my friends on the lunch court. This was unusual, because my cousin had graduated to high school and didn’t come by very much anymore.
Sherman sat down and greeted me and my friends. He told us about a fight he’d got in with a cop’s son. The kid was named Carl and was in the eleventh grade.
“I got beat down,” Sherman said, with a wry grin, “but I gave him a black eye and chipped his front tooth.”
Mister, Jimmy, and Ball had a hundred questions, but Sherman said, “We can talk about all that later. Right now I need Stew here to help me with somethin’.”
I was due home in less than an hour. My mother and father were very strict, and even though I hadn’t done very well at anything in particular, I always obeyed them and showed up on time. On the other hand, Sherman had never asked for my help before. He made sure to spend time with me a day or two each month. Once in a while I stayed over at the apartment where he and his mother, Titi, lived. At night, after she was asleep, Sherman would take me up to the roof, where he smoked cigarettes and drank sweet wine.
“You see down there in the alley?” he once asked me.
“Yeah, I see.”
“All kinds of things happen down there in the nighttime. People fuckin’ and fightin’, and sometimes they die. Right down there in the open but in the dark.”
I peered into the night, which was broken now and then by fluttering moths or the passing headlights of some car. If I had just looked into that abyss by myself I wouldn’t have seen a thing; but through Sherman’s eyes I could imagine the way the darkness, with the partial architecture of the urban night, was magical, alive. When I inhaled it felt as if that night was coming inside me.
And so, when Sherman came on that lunch court and said that he needed me — I went.
On the A train to Manhattan we sat on a bench for three, and he looked me over.
“Your hair is all right,” he said, after a minute-long inspection, “but you gotta button that shirt to the top and tuck in those tails.”
I did as I was told.
“Did you brush your teeth this morning?” Sherman asked.
“Yeah.”
“How about a shower?”
“I took one after gym class.”
Sherman was still studying me. He seemed more like a teacher or a young father than my cousin and friend.
We were passing underneath the East River when he said, “I met this girl from California goes to a private school on Seventy-Second Street. Her parents are out of town tonight, and she said she wanted me to come by, only she had already planned to have one of her girlfriends come over, and so she asked if I could bring another guy.”
“Girls?” I was pretty sure that half the subway car could hear the fear in my voice.
“Don’t worry, man. Tanya — that’s my girl — Tanya said that Mona is fine. So you don’t have to worry about me puttin’ you with no ugly girl.”
I swallowed hard again and tried to think of some way out of that train, that destination. I had hardly ever kissed a girl, and when I had it hadn’t seemed so great — for her.
“When you kiss,” Sherman said, as if he could read my thoughts, “you got to give her some tongue. Girls like that, and you will too.”
We got out in lower Manhattan south of Canal. From there we walked west. On Washington we came to this modern-looking apartment building that had glass walls and a doorman seated behind a high desk.
Sherman walked right up to the desk, and I followed a few steps behind.
The doorman had bright copper skin and an accent from somewhere in the Spanish-speaking New World.
“Can I help you?” he asked, dubiously.
“Tanya Highsmith,” Sherman said. “Apartment fourteen twenty-seven.”
That was the most impressed I ever was with my cousin, in this life. Tanya Highsmith, apartment fourteen twenty-seven. He spoke clearly, with no hesitation or shame. He wasn’t some young tough from the ’hood but a man coming to see a woman.
The doorman nodded and picked up a phone.
The next thing I knew I was standing at an off-white door on the fourteenth floor in a wide hallway that had avocado-colored carpeting and muted rose-red walls.
When Sherman pressed the doorbell I got a little dizzy. Standing there I worried that I’d fall on my face. I do believe that the only reason I didn’t faint was so as not to embarrass my cousin and best friend.
The door swung inward, and I was surprised at the young woman who stood there. The beautiful teenager wore a gray silk T-shirt under an emerald cotton vest that had little red eyes stitched into it. Her skirt was a gold color with a blue hem, I remember. She was barefoot and a little breathless. But none of that mattered at first glance. What struck me was that she was a black girl; well, not really black but rather a creamy brown. At any rate — she wasn’t white. I figured that in a building that nice, with a girl from a private school, that Sherman must have found him a white girl to visit.