Tragic Magic Read online

  “But how do I ask her to go with me?”

  “You get her by herself. Then you tell her how much you dig her and ask her if she goes with anybody. If she say no, then you say, ‘If I asked you to go with me what would you say?’ But you got to remember to say if cause if she say no, your cool won’t be blown.”

  I made my first move at the movies: the testing ground for copping feels and heavy macking. There were about ten of us in the orchestra section. Everybody was coupled off. I was with a girl named Pearl. I took a few side glances at those around me and saw every dude with at least an arm around the girl he was with. I looked at Pearl. She was slouched in her seat with her left arm propped on the right that straddled her stomach. She was looking directly at the screen, and her left hand muzzled her mouth. I raised my right arm, making like I was scratching my neck, and with a quick jerk brought my elbow down on the back of the seat. I left my arm there for a minute and then slid it down behind my seat and slowly brought it up around the back of hers. I was sweating like a champ! Working my arm off the back of Pearl’s seat, I put it around her shoulder. I gave my hand a little swing and it began to move like a pendulum. On about the twenty-third swing my pooped hand grazed her blouse and nudged what I believed was her fledgling right breast. Good Golly Miss Molly! I’d felt her tit and she didn’t pitch a fit! So, having succeeded in feeling her knob, I was confident she would let me open the door.

  On the following Monday after school I followed Pearl home. Keeping back a safe distance, I waited until all her friends had left her. Then I picked up my pace and when I got to within earshot I called out to her.

  “Pearl!”

  She stopped and turned around.

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “What you wanna talk about?”

  “Well, I, ah, been wantin to talk to you for a long time to tell you I dig you a whole lot and I wanted to know if you go with anybody.”

  “No, I don’t go with anybody.”

  “Well, if you don’t, I wanted to know would you go with me?” The words were out of my mouth before I could retrieve them and insert the safety catch onto the proposition. So I was O.D.—out dere—falling with no ace in the hole I’d landed in.

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause I don’t like you.”

  “But, Pearl, didn’t you feel what I did?”

  “Feel what?

  The needle stuck at the end of the record. I was beginning to feel very musty. What I needed was a shower to wash off the bus ride from Pennsylvania. I let the heat from the water fill the bathroom with a good head of steam before I got in…

  I’m in the shower with about five other dudes and find myself admiring the body of one of them. He is tall, lean, and sickle-shaped. The slouch in his shoulders is an indication that very little has impressed him enough to make him straighten up. His face interests me most of all. His chin, cheekbones, and nose have an arrowhead sharpness. His hair, sideburns, and mustache have been trimmed as evenly as a well-kept lawn. And he is the color of a skillet broken in by cooking.

  I catch myself, almost forgetting where I am. It’s not hip to be looking at a man that long. I don’t think anyone saw me, but I’ve got to be more careful. In this place you become what people advertise about you. At any moment someone may decide you will make a good piece of merchandise. The word from a self-appointed sponsor will go out declaring how mild, how firm, and how fully-packed you are. However, if the product does not live up to its advance billing, something akin to the F.C.C. goes into action. The product will either deliver on its stated purpose or the sponsor will be dealt with by the inmates for defrauding the prison population. One way or the other, somebody will be getting up off of something. When you get right down to it, whether it’s on television or in prison, the regularly scheduled program is not as important as the commercial message.

  I soap myself and wonder what this attraction to the man in the next stall means. I go into some philosophical skydiving in my head about it being a celebration of the human form in an environment fixated on the deterioration of the body and spirit. But that’s bullshit. It’s square business that if the dude spots me looking at him he’ll take it one of two ways: I’m either an asshole bandit or looking to be held up by one.

  I try not to draw attention to myself by averting my eyes whenever they rest on him longer than a glance.

  “Hey, blood,” he says, “why you jerking your head like that for? I know you ain’t no Elgin Baylor.” We both have a good laugh. I shouldn’t have been so uptight about where my eyes wandered. Nobody is paying me any mind. They’re too busy indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson. According to penis mythology, black dudes are supposed to have long banana clip johnsons, while white dudes sport drawed-up pee shooters.

  “It’s them big dicks that get you black guys in trouble,” a white dude says. “I bet when you file your income tax you got to claim it as a dependent.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” a black counters. “Time has just about run out on you whiteys. When Martin Luther King said, ‘How long, not long,’ he wasn’t just talking about your futures!”

  It goes on in that vein and then shifts with black and white screaming on each other for failing to live up to their images. Steam rages in the shower room, and the talk is of the final comedown in the test of manhood between black and white being determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.

  The water turned cold and I shivered out of my reflections. As I dried off I felt dazed in a time lag, trying to play catch-up with my change in status, but unable to extricate myself from being a prison issue.

  On the dresser in my sister’s room was a photograph of her taken about ten years before when she was eighteen. Debra had left home around that time and in rapid succession was married and divorced. She had been shacking up with a man for the past few years and my folks didn’t dig it. Straightened black hair surrounded her face like a partially drawn curtain. A frown tugged at the left corner of her mouth. She was tilted back on her heels, her left hand cocked on her hip with the elbow out, shotgun style. That defiant stance had gotten the drop on many caught half-stepping with her affections. Compared to Debra’s, the poses struck by the ladies of liberty and justice don’t convince me that they mean what they stand for. But one look at Debra leaves no doubt in my mind that she is definitely about the business of due process.

  I recognized the shape of my father’s body in his unmade bed. I could almost see him sleeping and hear his snores. And you’ve never heard such sounds—sounds resembling the heavy breath grunts of buttermilk bottom preachers. And I was one of the captivated without a church home, drawn to the message coming from his nasal passage. My father’s sleep was so deep and his snoring so commanding that the Lord would have needed an appointment before tipping up on him to negotiate a loan of a rib. But Pops’ quarrel wasn’t with the Lord.

  “Damn whiteys, buildin a kingdom off a my back!” How many times were those words hammered into his talk? He would get so worked up when he said them that I never dared ask what he meant. Listening to him snore was my way of eavesdropping on what was going on inside him without bugging him. This was much better than talking to him directly because while he slept I could create my own conversation between us, asking questions I might never have put to him otherwise and imagining his answers blown through snores. Pops’ body would be a sprawling heap of steady motion as I crawled into bed with him. Under the surveillance of his snoring, I inchwormed up to his double-barreled nostrils. Up close, the full stature of his nose was revealed: an Egyptian pyramid scarred with hieroglyphics. Latching on to its rhythmic pattern I snuggled my nose under his and drew from his breath, letting it mingle with mine. And from the pull and smell of his rest Pops spoke to me, exhaling the whys and wherefores of his life into me. I’d doze for a while, share some sleep with Pops, and tuck
myself inside the labor of his soul.

  “Damn whiteys, buildin a kingdom off a my back!”

  Those catnaps with my father made those words the handle that cranked out my first clear sounds. His snoring was filled with the lingo that a father must pass on to his son if his son is to carry on the family tongue, get a grip on his own voice, and not lose himself in babbling.

  The presence of my mother overtook me as I remembered how some mornings she would sit at the kitchen table staring into a cup of coffee. In between sips I saw expressions settle on her face that had nothing to do with her being my mother and my father’s wife… Maybe after the first sip it was the look of a little girl that sprang into her face, entertaining whatever came into her head. Those creases outlining her cheeks after the second sip could have been the signs of some past ache. And maybe after another taste the acid kickback of coffee caused her face to tremble with what might have been a craving for something she desperately needed but could never find. And when she drained the cup of coffee and all the lines in her face were smoothed out, the smile could have been satisfaction over where she’d traveled between the brim and the dregs of the cup.

  Of course, all of this was my imagination, but it was all I had to go on, since Moms and I never discussed these things.

  THE HOUSE WAS BEGINNING to cramp the need of my senses to stretch a bit more. I decided to go out and see if I could tease the sky. I left a note saying I’d gotten in and would be back around six. I was tempted to stay in and wait, but that would have been too easy. Moms and Pops would act as if nothing had happened. And Debra would probably act as if everything had. I was still looking forward to seeing everybody. I knew a big fuss would be made over me, and after being away for two years I was definitely ready for that.

  School was just letting out, and kids dominated the streets. I passed Otis’ house. I hadn’t seen him in about four years. We had grown up together and had been real tight. I’d always looked up to Otis as a sort of pentathlon champion because of his ability to perform well in all the main events with girls. He could find them, fool them, feel them, fuck them, and forget them with exceptional agility. We were inseparable, and even though I could never match Otis’ exploits I was content to be more a spectator in his life than an actor in mine. After high school we drifted apart. I went to college and Otis went into the Marines. We wrote each other for a while, but then the letters stopped.

  I rang the bell, but no one was home. I decided to walk over to Rocky’s Bar, my old hangout. Someone there might know where he was. A kid almost knocked me over coming through the gate of my old school. I looked at the high iron gate surrounding the building and the grated wire covering the windows. These security measures reminded me of the day I approached another building that had U.S. Penitentiary chiseled into the brick…

  I am among about forty men being led inside the wall. Once inside we strip, give the hacks a peep show up our asses, and change into prison-issue clothing. The hacks take us upstairs. We walk down a long corridor and are sized up by the other inmates. They make catcalls and whistle. But none of this bothers me as much as the howling silence from stares. I have never seen such hard, gritting faces before. And then there are the eyes: eyes that explode in your face, taunt you, crawl over you, make propositions and inquiries, but never ignore you. On this first encounter I try to meet them head-on but I’m forced to look away or drop my head.

  About sixty of us are jammed into a dormitory for new arrivals. Everyone has picked his company or chosen to stay by himself. I’m lying on a top bunk reading a book when someone touches my shoulder.

  “Everything all right, home?”

  I jerk up quickly and see a black dude looking very satisfied with himself. It’s as if I had reacted just as he expected. Everything about him, from the way he leans against my bed to the way he smiles, gives me the impression that the last time he’d been caught off guard was when the doctor slapped him on his ass at birth.

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Look, I don’t wanna get in your business but is this your first bit?”

  “My first what?”

  “Is this the first time you’ve been in jail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figured that. I’ve done two bits before and I can always tell if someone’s never done any time. What you in for?”

  “Refusing induction.”

  “Oh, you one a them draft dodgers. How much time you get?”

  “Three years.”

  “Well, that ain’t much time. Why didn’t you wanna go in the army? You a pacifist?”

  “No. I’m just not about what the army stands for, that’s all.”

  “Are you about what this place stands for?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you come here? Why didn’t you refuse to do your time like you refused induction? I mean, if you really believe what you say, you wouldn’t have come here either. Unless you prefer jail to the army.”

  “I didn’t want to come to jail. I just couldn’t see splitting.”

  “So you decided to be a hero, eh?”

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah, I bet… What’s your name?”

  “Melvin Ellington.”

  “Well, Mel, I’m Chilly and I’m gonna pull your coat to a few things. First thing is, forget about the street. You in the penitentiary now! Most cats in here is hard. They don’t know no other way to be. They been hurt a lot, so the first chance they get to hurt back, they take it. All anyone’s got to do is look at you and they can tell you ain’t had it rough. You probably been to college and shit. Right? Dudes are gonna resent you, especially when they find out what you in here for.”

  “Why?”

  “They figure that with what you got going for yourself you should a been able to scheme your way out a coming to jail. And since you didn’t, all that education you got ain’t worth a damn. They figure they got more of a beef with society than you do. They never had the opportunities you had. So you not going along with whitey’s program don’t cut no slack with them. Cats in here been messed over. And here you come, not a mark on you, lookin just as tender as you wanna be, talkin bout you don’t wanna fight in no war. Shheet! To them you no different than a white boy.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? I can’t do anything about the way people think.”

  “You better start doing something about it, cause if you don’t you gonna be punk of the month. Look, I don’t care one way or the other. I’m just trying to tell you something for your own good. Dudes will try to give you things and get you involved in a lot of jive conversation… It’s all a setup to turn you out. Watch yourself when you take a shower. Don’t walk around half nude. And for your own protection, make sure you stay on a top bunk. The main thing is to be a man. If someone comes at you with some silly shit, knock hell out of em. If you get your ass whipped, you get your ass whipped. At least you’ll get some respect and dudes will know where you comin from.”

  From then on, I became very self-conscious and Chilly didn’t help the situation any. He was always on me about some mannerism of mine that betrayed something funny. It didn’t matter if these things seemed natural to me. I had to avoid being labeled a punk. So I watched the way I ate, held my hands, crossed my legs, and walked.

  “Every man got some bitch in him,” Chilly said. “Some just got more than others. In here you either check it or let it all hang out.”

  One afternoon a fight broke out in the laundry room between two blacks. Physically, it was a contest of extremes. One dude was thin to the point of being frail, while the other was taller and very husky. Surprisingly, it was the smaller of the two who was selling the most wolf tickets.

  “Come on, man. You said you wanted some ass. Well, come on and fuck me now!”

  “I’m gonna see how bad you jump when you ain’t got an audience,” the larger dude said, visibly shaken from being louded in front of so many people.

  “Unh, unh, man. You got to cop now!” Th
rowing up his hands, the smaller of the two men began dancing for position and then fired a right-hand punch, catching his man flush on the temple. The hacks moved in quickly to break it up and no other telling blows were landed. Everyone talked about how the youngblood had sucker-punched the big dude and in general made him look bad.

  The next morning on my way to the dorm after breakfast I was surprised by an inmate on the stairway as I turned to go up the next landing. The lapels on his khaki jacket were turned up, making his weightlifter’s shoulders stand out. His Magic-Shave head and dark glasses gave him a cagey look. He looked like the kind of person capable of slipping under doors and through keyholes.

  “What’s happenin?” he said.

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  “That ain’t the wire I got on you. The word is that you sho nuff stuff. Now, I don’t wanna disrespect you so I’m comin to you like a man to find out what’s what, cause if you do mess around you gonna need someone to take your weight when the vultures come around. If you hook up with me you won’t have to worry about nobody fuckin with you.”

  “I’m not what you’re looking for.”

  “Is Chilly takin your weight?”

  “Nobody’s taking my weight.” I moved to walk past him. As I did, he pulled me roughly toward him and kissed me on the side of the face. I twisted free of his grasp.

  “Look, man, I told you I don’t go that way.”

  I backed away from him but he didn’t make another move toward me. He just stood there. I remembered the scene the day before in clothing issue. By the standards of the joint, I hadn’t acted in the desired manner. When my response to being kissed got around, there would no longer be any question about what I was. I wonder what it would have taken for me to have fought that dude. My problem remains what it has always been: the inability to turn my aggression into a methodical instrument of destruction. In other words, my violent thing ain’t coordinated too tough.