Lit Riffs (34 page)

“I think you are lying,” he says.

She smiles. “Oh, c’mon, it
isn’t
something to be on television? Think about it. I’m not sure how television even works, are you? I mean how it actually works, the science of it. Waves, particles, gamma rays—who knows? But how amazing is it really that you can just flick a switch and see something happening live, right then, around the world. Just thinking of it makes me feel, I don’t know, proud.”

Guiterrez smiles. “Pride only gets people into trouble.”

A waitress approaches. Ellie orders a 7UP. “My name is Greta,” she says. “What’s yours?” she asks. He doesn’t respond. “Is it—”

“My name is Diego,” he says.

“Great name.”

He laughs, then gently closes his eyes and looks up into the sun. It is getting cooler. He rubs his eyes with his fingers.

“Is everything okay?” Ellie asks.

He looks at her. She is a attractive, sexy somehow, but short.

“Yes”—he sips his coffee—“thank you.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I have a secret, something I haven’t told anyone, something maybe I shouldn’t tell anyone. But I want to tell someone, I think it’s important that I do.”

“Are you in the habit of telling strangers secrets?”

“Sometimes they’re the only people you can trust.”

“Are you in the habit of having conversations with most of the strangers you meet in cafés?”

“Only this one.”

“Secrets are often best
kept
secret.”

“Because people are afraid of them.”

“People are afraid of everything.”

She smiles. “Yes.”

“You remind me of my daughter,” Guiterrez says, even though it isn’t true. “She is about your age.”

Ellie looks at him. “Here’s the secret I’m going to tell you,” she begins, but then waits, unconsciously pausing for effect. She is about to start speaking again but suddenly realizes she wants to let the moment build, just for half a second or so more, but then that half second passes and she lets another go by, then another, and another. Now she and Guiterrez are staring at each other in silence. She does this sometimes, lets pauses grow into silence, silences into small awkward moments, small awkward moments into semi-excruciating ones. She finds it delicious, not so much that it tends to unnerve people, though she likes that it does that, too. She likes the suspense. When will she start speaking again? Now? How about now? Will the other person say something first? She once told someone that for her it feels like the moment right before a movie starts, but better, sharper, scarier.

Guiterrez likes Ellie. He can’t help but think to himself, She doesn’t know who I am.

“The other day I was walking though the park,” she says. “The weather was like this, gorgeous. It was the weekend and the park was crowded, with lovers, children, parents. I was walking around just looking, just watching. I think it became too much for me. I’d been watching a small boy play, he was five or six years old and running around a patch of grass near a playground. I couldn’t tell who his parents were, or where they were. There were lots of parents around watching their kids, drinking bottled water, packing things away into various packs and pockets. I was sitting on a bench nearby and this little boy ran over to me. He was very cute and said hello. I asked if he was having fun. He said he was. Then I asked him where his parents were, and he pointed back toward the playground, toward where most of the adults were standing. Then I asked him if he was a fast runner. Oh, yes, he said …”

Ellie stops. The waitress puts down her 7Up. Ellie smiles at her and takes a sip before continuing. “I asked him if he could run far. He said he could. I told him I didn’t believe him. He said he could run as far and as fast as I could imagine. We went back and forth about it for a while, me saying, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and him saying, ‘I can, too.’ Then I told him to prove it to me and pointed in the direction opposite the playground, toward a hill way in the distance. I told him to run as far and fast as he could in that direction, and that I would watch, and if he did it, I would believe him. And he said okay and took off.”

She stops.

“And?” Guiterrez says.

“And then I just got up and walked away.”

“And you think something happened to the boy?”

“I don’t know. But my secret is not that this thing happened, it’s that I do things like this all the time, and even more than that, it’s that it doesn’t bother me. I don’t think about it afterward. Like with the little boy, I just kept sitting there, then got up and walked away. I didn’t even watch to see how far he ran. And right now, telling you, I don’t feel guilty about the little boy, or wonder if he ever found his parents again, or if something awful happened to him. It’s just something that happened, something I made happen. I do things like this and just walk away.”

“Maybe you should see a priest.”

“I don’t know any priests.”

“Maybe you should see a psychiatrist?”

“Another thing is that I steal things, not so much from stores, but from other people, people I know, and people I don’t. In general, the truth is that I can just be … I guess
cruel
is the best word, usually for no real reason. Sometimes I think it’s that I don’t have some kind of gene that most other people have that keeps them from doing certain things. I’ve never hurt someone, like, you know, physically or anything, never hit someone or anything like that. Truthfully, I don’t think I’m a cruel person. It’s just that maybe I think about people in a different way. I mean, I don’t walk away from people. I don’t not want to let them in or whatever. I want to let them in. I want people close to me. You know, I hate even going to sleep.”

“You are quite a young girl,” Guiterrez says.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Another sip. “It’s like … Everything, it all means so much to me. Like a birthday, or …” She stops.

“Or a pretty view,” says Guiterrez.

“Yes, exactly,” she says.

He laughs.

“I’ll tell you a secret of mine,” he says.

“You think I’m a stupid girl.”

“Listen.”

She does.

“I have hurt people, physically. I have killed people, shot them, strangled them, drowned them, tortured them. I don’t know how many, more than ten, less than twenty, with my own hands. But I have been the cause of many more deaths, hundreds more, people whom I ordered killed, and people whose deaths I could have stopped, but didn’t.”

He looks at her, tries to read her face, but can’t. “I don’t believe I’m a cruel person either.”

“I know who you are,” Ellie says to him.

“You are a stupid girl,” Guiterrez says to her.

They stare at one another. She stands up.

“Do you think
I
am lying?” Guiterrez asks.

She smiles at him, and it—the smile—ends up being the most honest thing to have come out of her in a while, perhaps ten days. “I don’t know,” she says. “But I enjoyed our conversation.”

Now he smiles, too. “So did I.”

Before leaving, Ellie stops at the café’s bar and asks the bartender to bring a bottle of Cristal Champagne to the older man sitting in the corner, her boyfriend, for his birthday, that she has forgotten his present in her car, but will be right back with it. When she is outside, she immediately takes out her cell phone and calls a friend with news of how she just slept with Diego Guiterrez, the famous Formula One race car driver. Soon after, Guiterrez walks back to the Waldorf, hungry for dinner.

author inspiration

Upon first hearing about the idea for the
Lit Riffs
collection of stories, my first instinct, other than dismay at the chosen title, was to choose a song that would in some way be surprising and fun, even more so than a song I really loved, or at least liked, or at least knew most of the words to. This notion was further solidified in my head after I saw an initial list of songs other writers were choosing (not sure if that list has any resemblance to what finally made it in the book). Lots of folks were picking what I thought of as smarty-pants, hyperliterate stuff. I kinda just shook my head. I mean, what’s the point of trying to write a short story based on a Dylan song? (I always thought Dylan songs were short stories, only better.) Anyway, for me, “Rio” came up right away. For one, I fucking love the song, it usually makes people smile, even if they’re shaking their head in the process. I sort of think you can divide the world into people who appreciate Duran Duran, and people who don’t, and I’d rather vacation with the people who do. To me, Duran Duran in general, and “Rio” in particular, shimmer with the absolute brain-freeze purity of pop-rock’s transcendent ridiculousness, whatever that means. And I like the drums and guitar. And, good Lord, the lyrics, to “Rio” especially, are an L.A. sunset, a hot breath of everything and nothing all at once. I love shit like that.

nelson george

When I was on the street, there was a kind of style, a kind of cool, even grace, you won’t find anymore. It was in the way we spoke. The way our threads lay, the way we hung and laughed and made things happen. All that style has been replaced by a lack of brotherhood that disgusts me. It’s like the world has no center anymore.

I know I sound nostalgic and old. Maybe even silly. But I know what we tried to do. We tried to impose order on the street without having to hurt people—though we always kept our options open. It’s the difference between a .45 and an Uzi. We never sprayed a street indiscriminately; we aimed precisely, we took out who needed to go and let civilians live in peace. After all, they were our customers. If you weren’t in the game, you couldn’t be hurt by the game. Play at your own risk. You could have lived on 145th and St. Nick your own life and not been hurt by my people.

Well, no. That’s actually a lie.

No need to lie. Not now. We really went out of our way not to shoot civilians. We just destroyed the world around them, block by block, like a damn virus. I mean Harlem was crumbling when I came of age. All the families that could were running out to Long Island or Queens or Jersey. All the cops and the TA workers and the mailmen. Shit, half my lieutenants had houses in Englewood or St. Albans living that comfortable-ass Negro American dream.

Harlem was left with nothing but poor people, sad people, and weak-willed suckers and people like me—pimps, thugs, jackleg preachers, crooked cops, and peddlers of narcotics. These two groups of people, prey and predator, victim and victimizer, working men and people in the life, were what Uptown was all about after the marching and protesting had died down. Those whom civil rights had helped were gone. For those who got left behind, there was me and my crew with cellophane bags of white powder to take your mind where your body couldn’t afford to.

When a junkie shoots up, his blood slides into the needle and is visible as the dope heads into his system. The needle and the vein become one milky, red-tinted substance, a new thing that bonds them together. That’s how my business worked. We commingled with the streets. We took over corners. We bogarted buildings. We owned police precincts. We injected ourselves into everything that linked Harlem to the rest of Manhattan.

We ran Harlem because we could. There was no master plan. At least not at first. Not overtly. Not like we blueprinted it one night at Jagazzy’s. I think there was some racial pride involved. The Irish and the Jews and the Italians had all been sucking brown people’s money out of Uptown since before Duke Ellington opened his jar of pomade. So we were just asserting our ethnic rights.

But I’d be lying a bit again. All that makes me sound like some damn nationalist on a soapbox in front of Micheaux’s on 1-2-5. Like behind all my dealing was some submerged political agenda. Power to the people! Free Huey! We shall overcome with a brick of China White cut with baking soda in the hand that wasn’t giving the black power salute.

Fuck that. We were criminals.

Now I can say that. I don’t have to act righteous anymore or justify myself like I used to. I ruled Harlem because it was there to be taken. I didn’t do it for black people or “the movement.” At the time I would not have admitted that. I would have quoted Malcolm or the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I would have painted my organization in the bronze hues of salvation and empowerment. I would have given donations to Operation Push and even them Tom-ass niggas at the NAACP. And, like half the people from my generation, I would have been full of shit.

Back then, everything we did could be explained by the struggle. You see, I preached discipline and force, and we enforced with cruel brutality. Even selling dope was a way, perhaps, to punish our weak-minded. If they were sad enough to buy my shit, should they survive? Jerry Butler sang, “Only the strong survive,” and that, beloved, meant me and mine.

You know, we never made anyone buy our product. We set up shop but never bought ads. No billboards. No newspaper ads in the
Amsterdam News
. No jingles on ’LIB. We just made it available and the customers—the silly, stupid, and needy—lined up twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and sometimes twice on payday.

IN THE YARD

Every day I saw my tortured children. Man-children with eyes that surveyed the yard as if it were a street corner to capture. Most of them had bulked-up shoulders hunched like rottweilers as they strutted like streetwalkers. I would have liked to have had a hand in raising them. I could have brought them up like all the ones I once loved and schooled. I could have given them some class and some discipline to go along with all that heart. Yeah, these new jack, hip-hop, jiggy young ones got heart for days. If I’d had niggas like these back in the day, things would have ended right. I truly believe that.

In a way I did raise them, I guess. I laid the foundation in the dope game that they’ve been following for twenty-odd years. They followed my path, straight from the concrete heaven of Lenox Avenue to the concrete hell the Feds built out here in Marion, Indiana. Yeah, we all ended up in the same place—might any way—but I know I could have changed the journey for all of us.

About once a month a newbie would stroll by my bench, acting like he didn’t give a fuck. Some even stepped to me, trying to treat me like some crusty, old man not be respected, who had no knowledge of crack, the chronic, or that E shit they fuck with now. But I knew that they knew and they knew I knew what they didn’t. Sometimes it would take time—but then we had plenty of that—before they broke down and asked to hear what only I could relate. They’d finally acknowledge that while there were many a serious motherfucker in that gray steel Midwestern hell, there was only one who’d had the president of the United States drop a dime on them. That’s why they sought me out. I’d been that dangerous—I’d been that large. That’s why I was the only Edgecombe Lenox.