Tales of the Out & the Gone (7 page)

The pattern was the weekly mass outings for the collective swelling and growing we were trying to do. Plus, I’d go out a few times a week by myself, because I liked to run. I’d run two and a half for the cross country team in high school and college. Actually, it was a form of meditation, a way for me to get into myself, to let my mind go out and bring back whatever it could. A light wind against my face.

That could be all in passing. I mean, I could relate that running to the later fad or craze and we could speculate as to how that came about. I guess that period of the late ’60s and early ’70s was a period of people pushing themselves, of ideals, of holding oneself up to measure against any number of arbitrary goals or models, convincing oneself, with small difficulty, that the world was the way we wanted it to be. That no matter how horrible it appeared, it was the way we wanted it to be, and we could change it with the assorted words and images we tried to retain inside our otherwise very healthy heads. That itself would be an interesting conversation—limited, but still interesting. But this is not it. This is about something else, perhaps something much simpler.

During this period of running, there was a lot going on. I can’t get into all of that here—it’d scare some people and bore others. But let’s say that while I was running—at the moment of, but also when I went away from Wake-wake, which was most of the time—there was a whole lot going on in Noah. A whole lot going on around the country and throughout the world. You remember the ’60s, don’t you? Well at any rate, you can read about it and whatnot.

Our political action committee was formed to elect black politicians to office. That’s what it really was for. Some of us had more grandiose ideas, either vaguer or more specific, but if there was a consensus, it could be focused on that. We wanted to elect black politicians to office because there weren’t any in Noah. Well, there was one guy, sort of the Jackie Robinson of black politicians. John Walker was his real name. Some of us called him Johnnie Walker Black, after the Scotch. Plus, he’d always have a few glasses of that running around in his system somewhere. He was a good guy—he had been a good guy. When I was a kid, he was a real hero. The first black councilman and whatnot. He knew my parents, and everybody in those days supported him. But he’d stayed around too long. He’d gotten to be too well known for his real self, or the self that had come to be seen by everybody. He’d had a couple of unsuccessful marriages, one to a friend of my mother’s who was a nurse and didn’t want to let go of her job, even back then in the early ’50s. They’d split. He’d started to become a noticeable drinker and an even more noticeable drunk. Sometimes (most times), he’d inhabit a kind of twilight zone between the living and the dead, his eyes rolling open every so often, his dry cracked lips poking open momentarily to suck up some trifling air, and then he’d roll over and go deep off into a primordial ancient pygmy sleep. This would be while sitting in his First Negro Councilman Chair, under a portrait of him as the First Negro Councilman, in front of everybody—white folks too.

Plus, blacks or Negroes or colored were a majority (all of the aforementioned, together) in Noah. The gray industrial countercharm of Noah, which I’d grown up in, had by the ’60s lost most of its hold on anybody who had options, mainly the socially mobile, mostly white middle class, and they’d gotten in the wind. Any other colors of middle class had got in the wind too, mostly, though it must be clear that there were some of us still around pouting that now that we were here almost by ourselves, we still didn’t have any power or control over anything. (I remember shouting at Mr. French, the curator of the museum, that while I like the internationally famous Tibetan collection—I’d grown up on it, snaking around those masks and vases, still in elementary school, trying to sniff out my own essence—that, damn! couldn’t there be something that more resembled myself? The Hudson River School paintings were great—I’d grown up on them too—but damn, what about a picture of Headlight, Bubbles, Roggie, Kenny, and me coming down Belmont Avenue, sharp as African mythology, heading to the Graham Auditorium for the Sunday night “Canteen”? Like where was that, my man?)

The tremors of those years? The rush of trying to be resolved frustrations. The hungers and thirsts. One stretch, I actually thought I was carrying the slave ship around in my head. I kept hearing the drums and screams, the savage slash of the whips. And the ship was nearing the shore, and it was the middle of winter. I kept peering out of a hole in the ship, just about the waterline, I guess, and saw this icy, snowy land draw near. Johnnie Walker Black seemed to be slumped against Plymouth Rock with a red cap on his head, grinning but drunk as a mojo.

But this is not a tale of frustration, per se. This is perception and rationale. We did what we set out to do, our political action committee. Yessiree! We pulled a convention together and selected candidates and actually elected most of them. No shit! We organized and educated and worked our asses off. Our committee got larger and larger as people began to understand clearly what we were about, without being put off by the media.

And the committee was right in the middle of it too. We had a hand in screening candidates, setting up the entire convention, putting out the publicity, mobilizing people to show up, and then the follow-through for the election.

We brought in all kinds of celebrities and leaders from all over the country—Bill Cosby, Dustin Hoffman, James Brown. Raised money for the candidates that came out of the convention, and goddamnit, got them elected too. Not all of them, but out of the seven we ran, four got elected, even a goddamn mayor! Yeh, it was fantastic. You don’t remember that? It was in all the papers, across the country. It was like the first black mayor of a major northeastern city! Yeh, that’s right. Right!

A great night that was too. People came out in the streets and danced up and down, holding hands and laughing. There was a band on top of a bus, sitting in the middle of Broad Street, and black folks and Puerto Ricans and our allies flowed downtown from all parts of the city to have the great moment in Robert Treat Hall (named after the gentleman who’d actually pulled off the Indian deal). That was the height of something. The pinnacle, the goal, whatever. A thousand times heavier than making that last dead man hill and trudging but floating at the same time toward the stadium finish. A thousand-thousand times. Hey, for a minute it seemed like I was brothers with all the people I could see. Like maybe even all the life and color that was inside me, that I carry (and you carry too), could come on out, just like how we all flowed together toward Robert Treat. That what was inside me could flow on out and mingle with all the other insides that could flow out. Because, I don’t know, it was amidst all the screaming and jumping up and down, absolutely safe to reveal your feelings. You know?

I feel like laughing now. No, I
am
laughing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No, it’s nothing. I just thought of something. Not thought of something. The park, the running. We’ve gotten so far away from that, it seems. Wake-wake Park. Gee, I think of old Henry Deel, who just died. He was almost the mayor, but we thought … There was some kind of minor scandal or something. I don’t even remember. And “Sweets” Towne, that old Democratic hustler, was always in it. He even threatened me specifically one night for talking bad about Johnnie Walker Black and trying to rip off his own meal ticket. But he was alright too, actually. Boy, did we talk bad to and about white folks in those days. I saw this one dopey woman recently that we put out of the theatre. She was trying to pass then as a Russian Indian. A sister told her she had to leave the Russian outside. I saw her, that same woman, walking down the street with a guy who actually looked like a Russian Indian, just a couple of days ago.

The park? The running, really. I miss that. Doesn’t time fly? No, I don’t run too much—I switched from Wake-wake awhile ago. Started running from my house, about four long blocks, to get the newspapers, then I even stopped that. I dunno. The guy we elected, Kent Winston. Yeh, you know him? Yeh, now you got it. Well, he never came out to the park too much until after he got elected. Then he’d come out often. One time, I remember seeing him running before the election and I zoomed past him, not maliciously, but he was running much slower than my pace. He said something to me as I passed, like “cross country.” He’d grown up in Noah too, and he knew why I could set such a hot pace. It was funny.

But a couple of months after the election, I’m running around the lake. I’m still not up to the dead man’s hills, but I hear a horn honking like it’s right out on the road. And guess what, there’s Winston, running the opposite way. I mean, he’s running so the hills are reversed, running downhill most of it instead of that killer uphill climb the hills represent if you’re running those three miles the regular way.

Winton’s running the wrong way, but it’s a little different. Just behind him was this big black Lincoln and inside are two cops—two plainclothes Negroes, Winston’s bodyguards. They’re all “jogging”—Winston, the two cops, and the Lincoln. I had to step off the side of the path and run in place while Winston waved and passed. I think I ran in place for a few seconds, think I just stopped. Flat out.

But I don’t think that’s why I stopped going to Wake-wake to run. Maybe, but I don’t think so. What stopped me from running there, early in the morning by myself, was when those two Muslim brothers got killed, supposedly as payback for knocking off this minister of the Muslim temple in Noah. There were always rumors about that temple. It was even said that Malcolm X’s killers had come out of there. And there had also always been rumors about the various “renegade” Muslims who sold drugs and ran the numbers, who’d turn the money in at the Noah temple.

Later, there’d been some breakaway movement. I think it was called Brothers of the New Age. Some folks said it all had to do with the pushers and gamblers not wanting to turn the money over anymore, so that a sharp conflict developed inside the temple. One afternoon, somebody’d blown the Imam of the Noah temple to kingdom come. He was shot up close, as he’d come out of his house on the way to the temple.

Of course, the whole Muslim community was in an uproar and there were Muslim brothers supposedly searching Noah furiously for the assassins. Apparently they found them too, or at least some dudes who’d fit the description. Early one morning, the two guys’
heads
were found by the lake, just off the running path. Yeh, the heads of the twin brothers were left there, blood still drying at the severed necks, right down by the lake. I think that’s what killed it for me. I never went jogging there again.

August 15–September 5, 1982
Correction Facility, New York City

MONDONGO

Y
ou never go anywhere, Ray. Believe me, I know where you go. And you don’t go anywhere. Not around here, I mean, where everybody can see.” Irv Laffawiss pushed his “cunt cap” back on his head so he looked like the posters of the sloppy airmen in the slides shown at Character Guidance lessons on Saturdays. He should have had a red
X
painted across him to resemble the classic well-advertised “Sad Sack” of U.S. military tradition. And it was the U.S. military, the Air Force, in which he and his good friend, Ray Johns, were now entrapped. Johns was reading, it looked like. But he had on dark glasses and the lights in the room were low, so how he was accomplishing this reading was vague. But Laffy knew from repeated encounters not to get involved in any conversation with Ray about how it was he could read in the near-dark with dark sunglasses.

To the inquiry about “not going anywhere,” Ray Johns merely peeped up over the book and stared at Laffy, “Hey, man. Why I got to go off the base? I ain’t lost nothin’ out there.”

“You’re too weird, Johns.” Laffawiss sounded mildly annoyed. “Don’t you believe in R&R?”

Ray Johns turned over on the bed where he was half-sprawled. He knew Laffy was going on with the conversation, so he wanted to see how he looked when he said this shit. “R&R? Shit, man. I wanna go home. Naw, I wanna go to fuckin Greenwich Village. R&R?”

“Don’t you believe in girls, then?” Laffy was pressing it. He was leaning now against one of the walls, smoking a bent cigarette and flicking the ashes like Groucho Marx. Groucho was Laffy’s alter ego. He enraged the non-coms and officers by coming into their office or his own room when there might be an inspection or something, bent at the waist, holding his cigarette like Groucho’s cigar and striding in crazy-looking, rolling his eyes like a roulette wheel.

“Yeh, Laffawiss, I believe in girls. Why, you got any?”

Laffy pointed over his shoulder and imitated Groucho: “They went that-a-way!” Pointing in the general direction of the town—in this case, Aguadilla, a nasty little dot at the tip of Puerto Rico’s shore. Laffawiss and Johns, together with 5,000 other airmen, were stationed just outside Aguadilla at the SAC base, Ramey. They, along with the others, commanded by a thirty-eight-year-old nutty general who wanted to clean up venereal disease, were busy with the task of keeping the free world free and intimidating any sons-of-bitches who wanted to maybe make wise remarks, or rape frecklefaced girls, or live too close, or talk in funny languages, or smell or look funny, or communize the country—any of that stuff. They were doing this by means of the B-36 bomber. Laffawiss was a radio operator without a crew, and Johns a weather- gunner in the worst crew on the base.

Every weekend and maybe more, Laffawiss would “roar into town,” as the airmen described, get drunk, pay for some pussy, then stagger back to the base with a head as big as a propeller. Johns and Laffawiss were pretty good friends, Johns from a large town in Jersey close to Manhattan and Laffawiss from the Lower East Side. Not the Lower East Side of boutiques and poetry readings, but the old East Side of Mike Gold’s heroes and heroines of herrings, kosher pickles, pushcarts, and poverty.

Johns was a college boy, a dropout from a black school trying to find himself. Mostly by reading everything that would sit still long enough to be read, including gruesome adventures like reading the whole of the
Times
best-seller list in a month. The complete works of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, &c. Hours and hours of guard duty pulled by Johns had turned reading from an informative pastime to a physical and psychological addiction. He got so he could read anything—no, not could, had to. The sight of words on paper inflamed him, turned him on in a way nothing else could. Sometimes when he slept uneasily under the Puerto Rican moon, he dreamed of reading, pages flowing effortlessly through his sleep.