Tragic Magic Read online

  “You in trouble,” Chilly said that afternoon in the chow hall.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Hey, man, come on. You ain’t talkin to your everyday lame. This is Chilly! It’s all over the joint how you let Showboat kiss you.”

  “That’s not how it happened.”

  “It don’t make no difference how it happened. All anybody’s gonna do is look at you and Showboat. Neither one of you is dead or in the hospital. And there ain’t no signs of a struggle on either one of you. That’s all they need to know.”

  It was a long walk to the garbage cans where the trays were emptied. I could feel the heavy wattage being laid on me from the head lamps of dudes in the chow hall. Eyes from everywhere took swipes at me. And I could understand why. I had failed to kick ass and take names. And that’s the calling card for getting over anywhere and the foundation for all credit. It was amazing how my mind was working. Instead of figuring out ways to protect myself from being ripped off by vultures, I was spending time putting their schemes to crush me into a theoretical framework! I kept on walking… but I didn’t drop my head. Instead, I stared right through the gauntlet of eyes.

  “Ellington!” I looked up from my book and saw a black man standing beside my bunk. He was the color of a penny that had been around, and his hair a seasoning of salt and pepper. But his eyes were the reason I listened to him. They were a tired wise, smacked with a quiet strength and a knowledge past surprises. His eyes played no games.

  “I’m Hardknocks,” he said. “I just came by to tell you I know dudes have been trying to move on you, and I liked the way you handled yourself when you walked out the chow hall this afternoon… It was important that you held your head up. Not just for those fools messing with you, but for cats who got other things on their mind. I know what you in here for and I think you for real. And there are dudes in here that need to know there are people like you around. They the ones really checking you out. They figured you’d drop your head but hoped you wouldn’t. You see, I had your jacket pulled out the file and if you about what it says on paper you aint’ got no business dropping your head when push comes to shove. If you didn’t drop it for the judge there’s no reason for you to drop it in here… Be what you are. That’s what it’s all about. If a dude digs men, that’s cool. That ain’t the problem. The problem is when your shuffle don’t jive with your deal. That’s what makes cats wanna rip people off. They hate bullskating in themselves and everybody else.

  “Another thing. In the joint, people identify you by the company you keep. If you run with snakes it’s assumed you down with what they do. That’s why it’s better to travel alone, cause you stand or fall on your own terms… I’m talking about the dude you been hanging with. Chilly. He ain’t no good. He just like his name. What you do is your business, but hanging out with a dude like that is like having walking pneumonia. He’s probably the one who sicked Showboat on you. And that makes him even more dangerous. He doesn’t do his own hunting. He gets others to bring down the prey. Then he comes in for the kill.

  “That’s all I wanted to tell you. I usually don’t talk to people unless I feel it’s worth my time… Later on, youngblood. I think you’ll make it.”

  I lay in bed for quite a while after Hardknocks had gone. Later that evening Chilly asked me if I wanted to go up to the gym. I told him no. The next day I ate all my meals alone and didn’t have any rap for him when he came around. That night while I was making my bed Chilly came over to my bunk with an attitude.

  “Hey, Ellington, you been rounding on me. Why?”

  “I ain’t been rounding on you. I just decided to take your advice.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about carrying my own weight.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “It’s got everything to do with you. You pulled my coat to a lot of things, Chilly. But I just realized I was letting you do things for me you had warned me not to let anyone do. So I’m taking your advice and not letting anyone take my weight, including you.”

  “So you can take care of yourself now, eh?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Ain’t this a bitch. I’m the one kept these muthafuckas from stickin dick in you and now you gonna round on me.”

  Heads looked up from the T.V., letter writing, reading, and card playing to check out what was going on. Seeing it was Chilly who was responsible for the commotion, their faces showed disappointment. Consistency of style is very important in prison, and Chilly wasn’t staying true to form. He was losing his cool, and in the eyes of those watching was no longer worthy of his name. Chilly sensed the attention he was getting and tried to drum up support for his cause.

  “Listen, everybody. I wanna tell you somethin. Brown Sugar here has decided he wants to change up all of a sudden and be a man. In that case, I’m serving notice right now that this punkass muthafucka is wide open. Anybody that wants him can have him cause I ain’t frontin for him no more… What you gonna do now, punk?” he said turning back to me. Unfortunately, Chilly had misread his audience. Their disappointment had now turned to annoyance over the way he was suggesting to them something he wasn’t prepared to do himself. Chilly had forgotten that dudes in the joint are not impressed by words. They are in jail for doing something, not for talking about it. But Chilly kept on talking.

  “If you ain’t stuff now, you will be soon. All you need is a little pressure. You just ain’t streetwise enough to survive in here. All you know is them books. But you don’t know nothing about life. You been babied too much. You was already a punk when you got here, so you might as well come on out and be sho nuff bitch…

  “It’s too late for you to take your own weight. You should a done that the first day when I walked up and touched you. In the penitentiary a man never lets somebody touch him that he don’t know. But you ain’t no man!”

  I looked unwaveringly at Chilly and he sent back a look of shock and surprise scrambling for some face-saving action. There was more to me than he thought, which he took as meaning there was less of him. I could tell he wanted me to say something that would give him an excuse to hit me. But I didn’t make it easy for him. Whatever Chilly had in mind would have to begin with him. And then, as if he were raising his hand to wave to someone, he smashed me hard across the face. I was knocked back against the wall. Out on my feet, I was a stricken sail using its mast for crutches. Chilly stood like a predator, ready to spring for the kill. He really wanted a piece of me. But I wanted no part of him. And then, for some reason, I started laughing. At first there were short breaths from the back of my throat; they built to a big production chuckle and ended with my wheezing and falling exhausted on the bed.

  “Hey, Chilly, you better leave that dude alone,” someone said. “Anybody that laughs behind gettin the shit slapped out of em definitely ain’t dealin with a full deck.”

  Oddly enough, Chilly must have taken my antics to heart because he didn’t mess with me anymore. It’s possible that laughing did save my ass, since there is a policy in the joint against fucking with people who act crazy.

  ONCE I WAS OUT in the general population, my laughing strategy turned to silence. I was given a job assignment in the laundry room and spent most of my non-working hours in the library reading or in the dorm writing letters. When I wrote to family and friends I tried to maintain the fiction that everything was copacetic. But my handwriting told a different story as the words shivered uncontrollably across the page like the last dash of a chicken whose neck has been wrung.

  I avoided any recreation that pitted me against anyone other than myself. I had witnessed too many situations where a physical contest became a matter of life and death. So I chose jogging: an exercise where I could use my breath without the fear that I might lose it on a jive tip…

  And from the get go I had no wind at all: my legs blown out after just one lap. But a stack of laps buffered my early fatigue. Soon jogging and doing time shack
ed up in my sweat. And there was just enough salt in my perspiration for me to get a taste of being down as my body wagged toward a raise from a fall.

  Except for Hardknocks, I had very little to say to anyone. I tried to carry myself in such a way that if anyone fucked with me, they had to be wrong. However, my high-flown moral stance wasn’t necessarily a deterrent if someone decided to get down mean and wrong with me for lack of anything better to do.

  “Hey, Ellington, come on down to the gym and run a few games. We need a third man,” a dude said.

  “No, I don’t feel like it.”

  “Come on, man, you ain’t doin nuthin.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m reading.”

  “You can do that later.”

  “But I’m doing it now.”

  His jaws loaded up with rocks until his face was only a stone’s throw away from Mount Rushmore.

  “Don’t ever need anything around me, Ellington,” he said.

  “Hey, man, I just don’t want to play.”

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to. And the longer you wait, the more you’ll have to pay. And I ain’t talkin about basketball.”

  It was like I was back at day one, trying to figure out the basic prescription for survival. Before I wasn’t enough. Now I was too much.

  “You getting too jailwise,” Hardknocks warned me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You too self-reliant. You should a played ball with those cats.”

  “I thought you said it’s better to stand alone.”

  “Not all the time. They were just trying to let you know that you all right with them. Dudes don’t extend themselves too often. But when they do, they don’t dig feeling they been chumped off.”

  “How come I’m the only one that’s got to be careful about hurting people’s feelings? What about my feelings?”

  “What you feel don’t fit into the scheme of this place. And if anybody’s gotta make an adjustment, it’ll have to be you.”

  I started hanging out a little bit more. Playing a game of Ping-Pong now and then or watching television. I still kept pretty much to myself, except when I talked to Hardknocks and two other dudes named Cadillac and Shoobbee Doobbee.

  Cadillac probably got his name because everything was a big thing with him, especially when he was involved. He had a well-stocked torso with arms and legs for days. When he walked he was a V.I.P. brougham limousine Bogarting its way into two lanes. When negotiating a corner he would slink into a Cleveland lowride going into a wide-ass turn while grinning like the grill on a Fleetwood.

  “What you reading?” he asked one day while doubleparked next to my bunk.

  “War and Peace.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Just about everything.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Tolstoy.”

  “He got anything on the ball?”

  “A whole lot.”

  “What did he do with it?”

  “He wrote more books.”

  “He was one sad muthafucka then. What about you? Is that what you wanna do, too?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Then you just as sad as he was… You know what happens to cats like that who don’t want no more out a life than understanding? They get an ass-whipping every day of their lives cause that’s where their smarts is at… That’s the sad part cause most people don’t have no understanding at all…

  “You know what the trouble with most niggers is? They wanna own a Cadillac instead a bein one! But I want what the Caddy stands for. That’s why I’m in the joint now… I bet with all your understanding, you don’t even know what you want.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But I’d like to find out without being forced into something I don’t want.”

  “What’s there to find out? There’s only two kinds of people in the world. Those who do the telling. And those who get told. All you got to do is decide which one you wanna be. And with what you in here for, I figure you should a made up your mind by now. If you don’t speed on people, you the one gonna end up getting peed on.”

  “Don’t pay him no mind,” Hardknocks said.

  “He’d do better payin me some mind than you with your fair-play bullshit.”

  “You run a Coupe de Ville game, Cadillac, but your mind is strictly Pinto material.”

  “If that’s true, you can bet your shit ain’t been mistaken for meatloaf. You may’ve been named for them hard knocks you’ve taken but that don’t call for no celebration. They ain’t even givin up watches for takin shit no more. But I’m a put in a good word for you, cause with all the time you got in they ought a give you Big Ben.”

  My nerves had gotten raggedy at the root from listening to them run off at the mouth about what was best for me. They didn’t even notice when I left. As usual when the dorm began to get to me, I hightailed it for the music room, where Shoob-bee Doobbee would be playing records. I’d first met Shoobbee Doobbee coming out of the projection room after a movie. The room doubled as the place that beamed music to every dormitory and cellblock in the prison. I’d heard other inmates talk about this cat with a heavy jazz jones who supported his habit by shaking his head, tapping his feet, and tampering with the origins of famous jazz standards. The day I met him he was wearing a sun visor, a string of reed mouthpieces around his neck, and a drumstick strapped to his waist. When he spotted me, he came over and said, “Do you know what Miles once said to Coltrane after a recording session?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He said, ‘Man, how come you play so long?’ And Trane said, ‘It took that long for me to get it all out.’ I used to keep it all in and wound up knockkneed in a jive humble… Thanks to jazz my toes don’t knock no more. I cold-turkeyed to Bird doin ‘Now’s the Time,’ and hucklebucked out a the spell of heroin. So now I’m stone slewfooted, and I plan on keeping my feet turned out at ten to two and never let them turn back in to twenty after eight.”

  When I walked into the projection room, Shoobbee Doobbee was leaning back in a swivel chair, deep in thought. A spotlight from the ceiling made a cone shape against the wall. Hundreds of album jackets checkered the walls. The side on the record player sounded like a Thelonious Monk tune.

  “What’s happening, Shoob?”

  “Monk!”

  “Is that Straight, No Chaser?”

  “All day… Listen to that statement… Bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah… Clear as a glass a water… What’s wrong, Ellington? You look like you got some botheration on you.”

  “I’m all right. I just thought I’d come over here and get a change of pace from all the rap in the dorm.”

  “I hear you! It’s a drag cause most folks never change channels… You ever notice that musicians never do much rappin? Like Miles. He never gets up off too much talk. Everybody and their mama got the ass when Miles started turnin back to audiences durin performances. The lames didn’t understand he was payin em a compliment by turnin his back. Miles was sayin, ‘You cool with me.’ Most a the time Miles never trusted nobody enough to give his back to nuthin but the wall.

  “On the other hand, the dude whose name you got talks more shit than a little bit. But he ain’t never turned state’s evidence on his damnself. Once somebody asked the Duke how he got that scar on his cheek, and he said he got it umpirin a duel between a pink baboon and a three-legged giraffe in the back of a Japanese supermarket in Eastern Turkey.”

  “You play an instrument, Shoobbee?”

  “What the fuck you think I was just doin! Bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah, bwah bwah dee daah…”

  After listening to Shoobbee Doobbee trade licks with records for a couple of hours, I went back to the dorm. On the way I ran into Chilly. We hadn’t spoken to each other since our run-in.

  “You may think it’s over but it ain’t,” he said. “You may not have submitted to the draft but you’ll submit to a skin graft from a shank. One
way or another you gonna spread your cheeks. And I’m hip to your shit, so you can forget that laughing act. You can act crazy all you want. But I am crazy!”

  “Why do you keep fucking with me, Chilly?”

  “Cause you need fuckin with and I need to be the one doin the fuckin. And Hardknocks ain’t no different. He’s a little slower than me but he’s sure as shit on the same case.”

  I walked into the dorm like a staggered boxer, knee-buckling down queer street, and was about to take a mandatory eight-count when someone touched my shoulder. I was stunned. It was the first time anyone had touched me like that since the day Chilly had when I first arrived.

  “What’s wrong?” Hardknocks asked.

  “I just ran into Chilly. The hunt’s still on.”

  “He’s bullshitting. He’s just tryin to see how you’ll react.”

  “Oh, he is, hunh? Well, does that mean no matter what anybody says in this place the opposite is true?”

  “It depends on who it is.”

  “Well, how the fuck am I supposed to tell who’s who? You can’t be around all the time to pull my coat. That’s unless you’ve decided to take Chilly’s old job.”

  “Look, Ellington, I know what you going through but don’t get an attitude with me. Chilly’s the one who threatened you, not me.”

  “That’s right, he did. But like you told me, some people are the opposite from the way they appear.”

  “Oh, so that’s it. Sounds like Chilly put more than one buzz in your ear. I’m sorry you feel that way, Ellington, but if after all this time you believe I ain’t no different from Chilly, there ain’t nuthin I can do about it.”

  “Yes, there is. If you can take time hipping me to Chilly, you can hip me to you.”

  “You remember when I first talked to you, I said I usually don’t say anything to anyone unless I feel it’s worth my while. Well, I figured you knew without my having to tell you where I was at. I guess we both misjudged you.”

  “Maybe, but right now the only thing I’m sure of is that there ain’t nothing I can be sure of.”