When All Hell Breaks Loose (8 page)

“How can I help you?”

“I’m here to view some vests and ties for Alston,” I say.

The man goes to the back and returns with a list. Once he spots my name he goes into the back again. This time he takes a few minutes before he comes out. He’s carrying about ten different vest sets. He takes them over to a nearby table and lays them out.

“When you find what you like, bring it up to the front and fill out the order form.” Portly walks away.

“Who ate his breakfast this morning?” Jamal says smartly. “That cracker needs to relax a little. Take some weight off.”

“Literally.” Tim takes off his shades and helps me sort through the packages. He pulls out a black-and-red-checked silk vest with matching tie.

“This is cool.”

I look at it. “I dig the vest, but a checkered cummerbund and tie are whack.”

We all begin sifting through the vests. We see everything from polka dots, to stripes, to snowflakes. After getting the selection down to three vests, we finally decide on a red silk vest with black diamonds. I really don’t like it, either, but I don’t want to make this an all-day event.

I take my selection back up to the desk and the same store attendant is standing there looking more bitter than ever. I give him the vest, fill out the order form and get the hell out of Gingiss Formal Wear.

We decide to get a bite to eat, so Jamal follows Tim and me across town. We end up at Jo Mama’s Soul Food Kitchen. We get a booth near the front. A small jazz band is playing and I immediately notice the tune. It’s “Lover Man.” I know because Diana Ross sang it in
Lady Sings the Blues
. I also have a Sarah Vaughan CD where she blows the hell out of the same song. I love me some Sarah. In my opinion, she is the hottest jazz singer ever. Forget what you’ve ever heard about Billie, Ella, Abbey, Nancy, Nina, and all the others. I mean, they’re great in their own right, but they can’t touch Sassy.

When I first heard Sarah Vaughan sing, I was about four or five. We were living in New Jersey and my parents took me and my sister cross state to New York to a jazz festival where Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and other legends were performing. I still remember how statuesque she was. Tall, thick, and dark. Lovely! I can still see her holding that cigarette while blasting, “It Never Entered My Mind.”

I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it weren’t true, but I have
proof that I was there. In my father’s house, hanging on the wall, is a picture of me, my sister Shreese, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and my mother. I have on these high-water purple denim pants with a Disney World T-shirt, and Shreese has on a yellow Winnie the Pooh jumper with matching ribbons on her two long ponytails. It was the last time I saw a live performance before we moved to Dallas. My sister and I grew up on straight old-school jazz all our lives.

Anyway, Sarah’s voice was what I heard most of my life after that. I would sit in our study and play her records all the time on my Superfriends record player. The richness in her voice was so warm that it could make you sweat. I was in college when she died in 1990. I got sloppy drunk that night after I found out. Ended up missing classes for two days and my father had to travel down to Commerce, Texas, and beg the school not to throw me out of Hubbell Hall, the all-men’s dorm on campus. Needless to say, there has yet to be another like Sarah.

This band playing at the restaurant isn’t doing too bad a job. The bass player could use some more skills. He’s actually walking a tired dog. No swing in his play at all. Not pulling the strings enough. He’s young-looking, so I let it rest.

We all order and have drinks as we wait on our lunch. Tim is sipping on a rum-and-Coke, Jamal has a ginger beer, and I’m gripping a Heineken. As the waitress walks away, Tim stares hard at her ass. When he turns back around, he sees me shaking my head. He shrugs his shoulders in guilt. “What? She has a nice ass,” he says innocently.

“But did you have to stare at her like that?”

“Man, her ass had me hypnotized.” He laughs slyly.

“What if you walked by a table and a group of women stared at you like that?” Jamal asks.

“I’d fuck ’em all.”

We all laugh. Tim’s good with comebacks.

“No, seriously,” Tim responds. “I think women enjoy being stared at. That’s what God put them here for.”

“To be looked at?” I ask.

“Yeah. They don’t do nothing else but take your money. I haven’t
met a woman yet who didn’t want something materialistic from me. Either my money, my sex, or my car.”

I disagree. “Tim, you’ve been going out with too many gold-diggers and women who are a direct reflection of yourself. Sisters who are caught up in looks, status, and fashion. That’s why you think they’re just to be looked at. I can’t believe you said that.”

“Greg, you know it’s true, man. We could do without the secretaries, waitresses, manicurists, and teachers, right? These women ain’t trying to hear about the bills you got to pay if it’s not their bills. All they do is take from you until you can’t give no more, then ride your dick until it goes limp.”

“Women are simply trying to take back what was originally theirs. They just don’t know it,” Jamal interrupts. “Women are the mothers of civilization. Surely you don’t believe that story about the snake in the garden, do you?”

“Jamal, what are you talking about?” I challenge him.

“Adam and Eve.” He takes a drink from his bottle. “That wasn’t a snake in the Garden of Eden. That was another man.”

“Aw, shit, there you go talking that Malcolm shit again.” Tim adjusts the cap on his head. “What’s the truth this time, Brother Bilal?” he asks sarcastically. “Enlighten me, my brother.”

“The truth is that when the Good Book was rewritten, man was called a snake because he whispered in Eve’s ear and it was unlike anything she had heard before. Women had no reason to whisper when they were the only ones walking the face of the earth. Have you ever noticed, when people whisper, it sounds like a snake?”

“So you’re saying that there were two men in the Garden of Eden?” Tim laughs.

“There was more than just two people walking the earth at that time, but before then women were here first and they created man. All existence comes from a womb, not a nutsack,” Jamal proclaims. “Adam and Eve were a civilization of people, not just a man and a woman. What do you think God meant by ‘in
Our
image’?”

I’m listening to Jamal, trying to understand where he gets all this crazy-sounding radical information from. It makes sense to an extent,
as all theories do, but to totally accept it goes against everything I was raised to accept as a Christian. I shake my head at his question. “I don’t get it, Jamal.”

“Have you two ever paid any attention to how women react to a smooth-talking brother when his game is tight?” he asked. “The way the man slides all up on her and leans in, letting the heat of his breath tickle her earlobes? The sister gets like butter and will do damn near anything for that man, that’s the truth. Imagine him asking her to close her third eye and use the two on her face to see his logic and ignore her own innate wisdom. That was the knowledge right there. Wasn’t a tree with apples on it, but rather it was the actual act of the spiritual being overtaken by the physical.”

I sit back against the booth, trying to absorb what Jamal just said. All I can think about is my sister and how she reacts to Reverend Dixon. Like butter. Just like butter.

“Jamal, you can’t be serious, man!” Tim’s voice breaks my thought. “You can’t possibly be insinuating that women were running around here first, when it’s a known fact that men were.”

Tim looks at me.

I have a blank look and offer no support for him.

He continues to try to convince us. “We were!” he argues. “Man was doing fine until the wind blew and his dick got hard.”

“Dang, Tim, do you have to be so graphic?” I ask.

“Greg, you grew up in a Christian home and you know that Adam was the first man on this planet and God took his rib and made woman.”

I shrug my shoulders. “All I know is we here and we gon’ be here and we got to figure this out before the system and AIDS kills us all,” I say emphatically.

Jamal folds his arms on the table and leans, in staring at both of us. “The oldest living human bones in the upright position that have been found to date are those of a woman. A black woman.”

“He has a point, Tim,” I tease.

“But that means that reproduction could never have happened.”

“Tim, women have in their bodies only X and X chromosomes. That means, if you break it down to a simple science, they possess all
natural abilities within themselves to create a female nation, brother,” Jamal says. “There was probably a time they could reproduce without the aid of a penis. They had the egg and one sex determiner.”

“But not the fertilizer,” I interject, making my point.

“That’s bullshit. Crazy! Any man knows that women can’t
run
nothing but their mouths and niggas to their graves. And those two brothers in the Garden of Eden with Eve should have run a train on her and set her straight for listening to that snake and being disobedient.” Tim is practically hollering.

“You and Phil are hopeless,” Jamal says as he takes a sip from his ginger beer. “The only two men in the world who think they know all there is to know about women in less than five sentences.”

“Hey, don’t compare me to Phil,” Tim responds. “I got a degree from a decent school, I’m a businessman, and I personally think that I’m a good man. I don’t do drugs, I’m not gay, and I work every day at a legal job where I make good money. There is no way in the world I’m going to let some woman come in and melt me down to some sniggling boyfriend chump who will do anything for her. My woman will have to carry her fifty percent, while she watches me carry mine.”

“What about being there for her?” I ask. “A woman needs a man’s support. Doesn’t all that go hand in hand?”

“All these strong sisters want nowadays is a virile brother with stamina and bedroom skills, and I got that covered, you know what I’m talking about?” Tim flashes his white smile. “I’ll support her, that’s for sure.”

Jamal lets out a small laugh. “Tim, you’ve made your point.”

The waitress comes back with our food, and this time, Tim never looks her way. He remains quiet as he digs into his Family Reunion Platter, which consists of short ribs, potato salad, red beans, yams, and a side order of peach cobbler. I have a Black Power Special, which is meat loaf, black-eyed peas, cabbage, corn on the cob, and a large square piece of cornbread. Jamal is eating from a Be Light Plate, which is vegetarian meat loaf, elbow pasta, and a whole-wheat roll. We eat in silence for a little while, but it’s cool because the band is now playing “Caravan,” and I’m digging it.

“So Greg, you and Adrian planning on getting a house before the wedding?” Tim asks. He acts as if the previous conversation never happened.

“We’ve talked about it. I would like to.”

“What about your honeymoon?” Jamal asks. “Where you going?”

“Cozumel.”

“Mexico. That sounds cool.”

Jamal wipes his mouth. “So”—he smiles—“Adrian is really the one huh?”

“Yeah, this is it for me. My girl is truly a good catch.”

“What do you like about her?”

“It’s a lot of things. She’s hangs with her girls just as much as I hang with you guys, and that’s liberating for me because I don’t like a woman who clings.”

“Like Cheryl,” Tim says.

I thought about Cheryl Coleman. Crazy Cheryl Coleman. She was an old college classmate I hooked up with before I met Adrian. We dated for three months and in that short period of time, she had my phone tapped and had me followed by one of her stupid girlfriends. She would even ask me to keep the bathroom door open whenever I took a piss. “Yeah, Cheryl, man.” I laugh a little. “Cheryl wouldn’t let a nigga breathe for shit.”

“Straight.” Jamal drinks the last of his ginger beer. “I remember her. She wasn’t secure in herself.”

“Yeah, but Adrian is really into this woman thing. She digs being a woman and she knows how to treat people from that aspect. It’s like she is a supreme version of a strong, feminine woman and I like that,” I say between bites of corn on the cob. “And she doesn’t keep tabs on me, even though she doesn’t have to.”

“Ain’t many out there like her,” Tim adds. “I could marry a woman like Adrian. She’s all right with me. Watch out, Greg, I may take her,” he jokes.

“Tim, I can’t see you getting married. Why do you say that about Adrian? What makes her different?” Jamal asks.

“Adrian has good sense. She just has an air about her that most of these other women don’t have. I don’t know, but it’s attractive, and
my man Greg is damn lucky. I’d kill to be in his shoes.” Tim shrugs and dips into his plate again.

“She’s well traveled too. Been damn near everywhere,” I add.

“Like where?” Tim signals the waitress to bring over a second round of drinks for everybody.

“New York, Atlanta, D.C., and she even spent some time in Europe.”

“That’s cool,” Tim responds. “Adrian doesn’t have that well-
traveled look
.”

“How is a well-traveled sister supposed to look, Tim?” I ask, slightly offended at his remark about Adrian.

He shrugs. “Like Halle Berry. Halle Berry looks like she’s been out of the country a lot. She’s well traveled, I can tell. Or like Jasmine Guy. She has definitely been to the moon and back.”

“Tim, your senses are warped,” Jamal says.

“J, just because you sit in your house all day reading books about the origins of man and I don’t, doesn’t mean I don’t know nothing. I know how to treat women. I buy flowers, expensive dinners, and even a nice blouse or panty set every now and again. I also know how to read women, and most of these sisters don’t even have writing on their pages. They have dollar signs. Women,
especially black women
, are shallow, immature beggars and they expect a brother to bend over backwards just to get a kiss. I ain’t that kind of nigga. I like the best of what Dallas has to offer. I don’t mess with just any old female. The classy, upscale ladies make you work harder, but the rewards are always sweeter. You don’t see me running around here like Phil, calling them bitches, do you?”