A Conversation with the Mann (52 page)

“I'm telling you what's what. The point is to demonstrate our suffering the way Dr. King demonstrates his suffering by staying
in—”

“The point is to get beat up and tossed around so you can feel like you're super-Negro—”

“Black, Jackie. When you gonna get—”

“So you can look down your nose at anybody who isn't trying to integrate the same way you are.”

“What kind of dumbass … You think I go out looking to take a beating from the pounders? You think catching their billy clubs
makes me feel like the big nigger?”

“The word is black!”

“Then how about we integrate your way, Jackie? Should we shuffle over and get a room at the Plaza, or a suite at the Ritz?
Or how about we just find us some white girls to fuck?”

Well, let me tell you: That was the straw. “Shut up!” I was grabbing Mo's jacket again, not caring about the rips and tears.
“Shut the hell up! I'm sick of you talking me down!” My hand was a fist, my arm was cocked, ready to send it blindly into
whatever part of Mo it could most quickly find: his temple. His jaw. His mouth … His mouth. His mouth was made up into a little
bit of a smile, the corner of his right lip pulled up some, just some, toward his cheek.

Mo said: “How about that? I always knew you had some fire in you, Jackie.”

My eyes took a sheepish trip around the room. With my yelling, with my hand ready to toss Mo a beat down, I figured people
would be staring. They weren't. They had other things on their minds. A husband or father or brother or lover who was still
on the other side of that steel door. I let go of Mo.

Mo moved across the room to one of the chairs and sat, the wood making noises as it took his weight. About half a minute later
I sat in the chair next to him.

I said: “Know what I remember most about us?”

“The old woman.”

I nodded. He knew.

“To this day I still got a picture of that ashy old battle cleaning herself out in the pond. Just about ruined me for women
altogether.”

Independently, we smiled some.

Another half a minute passed.

I said: “We were friends, Mo. How'd we wind up so different?”

“Don't know.”

“Must be a reason. You don't like me, must be a reason why.”

“I like you just fine, Jackie.”

I got a little laugh from that. “Got a queer way of showing it: come around every two years to preach at me, let me know how
I failed the Neg … black race.”

“I preach at you because I'm trying to get through to you.”

“Get what through? I don't have the pride you do?”

“Know what else I remember about us? I remember when people used to pick on you: kids at school, at that logging camp. I remember
how you used to flip the situation, make jokes, make people listen to you. You're good with words, Jackie. You're good with
your lingo. You always knew how to make people pay attention. And all you ever did with it was turn yourself into a comic,
a nightclub Stepin Fetchit. Guess I just expected more from you.”

“You see how wrong that is? You expected more from me, from my life.
My life
, Mo. You ever stop to think that this, what I'm doing, is what I want?”

Morris accepted that. “I didn't mean it as no dig.”

“There's another way I should take
you
don't like
my
choices?”

“You should take it as meaning … to me, you're better than what you ended up doin' with yourself.”

Another thirty seconds of sitting, the wood of the chairs doing the only conversing as we both fished around in them for an
unfindable position of comfort.

Pretty soon I said: “Sorry for getting you out of jail.”

“You were just trying to do right.”

I know Mo was making an effort at being sincere, but even that little bit came off as stooping.

We left the House, left the other people to their waiting.

We did a little walking.

“Let me ask you something, being onstage, being in front of people. It's just you … you and nothing. That must be frightening
as hell'

“Nah, it's not really … ” I started my standard response, then quit it. The question Mo was asking was one I'd gotten a hundred
times before. A hundred times before, I'd given the same answer. But this time, this time because I was talking to a guy I'd
been familiar with all my life, but knew by the measure of distance we'd traveled apart, I was probably talking to for the
last time, I thought about the question. I thought, I said: “There's this moment, this one quick tick that's always waiting
right between when the audience stops clapping and you tell that first joke. When you're there, when you're facing that beat,
it's like … Can you imagine what it's like to stand on the edge of a deep, dark hole, not knowing what's down inside it, but
still you've got to jump in? Yeah. That's frightening as hell. But then you make the jump; you tell your first joke, you get
your first laugh. After that, once you've got the audience, once you know you own them … Morris, can I tell you: It's the
sweetest thing there is.”

Mo nodded to that. Maybe he understood where I was coming from. Maybe he didn't and was just nodding to nod. Then he said:
“I don't think I could make that jump.” What he meant, what he'd never said to me before: He respected me.

We did a little bit of standing around.

I asked Mo where he was headed, if maybe we could head there together. He said he wasn't exactly sure, but that he figured
he should go and try to get arrested again.

Trying not to make a joke of the moment, I wished him luck, then hailed a cab for Midtown.

Mo kept walking.

I
WAS HOOFING BACK
to my apartment after a set at the Copa. Walking, letting the night air clear out my gummed-up head. Doing a stand at the
Copa had gone from being nearly all I could ever dream of to being
just
doing a stand at the Copa—going to work and doing my job. Nothing more. Nothing special.

As I approached my apartment, a voice called: “Jackie.”

It stopped me shotgun dead. The voice, vivid as a bad scar. The accent, Southern.

W
E SAT IN A BAR
drinking. Dighton drank. I just watched as he liquored himself.

“Goddamn whore, Jackie. They all … She wanted tah leave me, she coulda goddamn well left. Ah don't give uh … World's fulla
whores. But she ain't gotta make uh foola me.” He was weepy and pitiful, the cracker version of my father, and every glass
he downed only made him more so. Yelling at a waitress: “Sweetheart, yew see muh glass is empty!” To me: “She knows Ah'm tryin'
tah get uh drink over heyah, an' she don't … Yew see how they all whores, don't yew?”

“Why don't you go home?”

“Don't yew tell me what tah do!” Me just opening my mouth swung Dighton's pendulum from pathetic to psychotic. It was a unbalancing
made fertile by alcohol: its only growth would be twisted. “Ah don't need some black boy tellin' me …” That quick the pendulum
swung back. “Jesus Christ. Tha principal. Tha grade-school principal she run off with.” He was talking about his wife. I remembered
her. Kind. Pleasant. A bruise to her eye. I wouldn't blame her for anything she did to this man. “Yew see how that makes me
tha talka tha town, tha laughin'stock. That's what Ah'm sayin, Jackie—they're whores. Know sumthin': Ah thank she likely wanted
tah do yew. That time we seen yew in Kansas City. Tha way she looked at yew up onstage, Ah think she …” Dighton gave me a
good looking-at, his eyes x-raying my heart, trying to find truth or lie. The diagnosis: “Nah, yew wouldn'ta done that tah
me, would yew, git all jungle with muh wife? But that no good … Run off with tha principal of tha grade school, an' took muh
every last dime with her. Took muh money, Jackie! It was all Ah had left jus' tah get heyah. Knew you lived in New York. Big
goddamn city. Didn't think Ah could find yew, excep' yew was playin' at tha Copacabana. Shit, yew play uh fancy place like
that, it's all over tha papers.”

My luck.

I knew where things were going, it was obvious, so I just went ahead and got there. “I'll give you some money, then you're
through here. You're on your own.”

For a moment Dighton looked ashamed. It was as if, even though his intentions were nothing but bad, it was still a disgrace
to have arrived at a place in his life where he had to travel half the country to shake down a “nigger” just to get by.

He covered failure with rage. “Ah told yew: Don't yew tell me what ta do!” Dighton went to work on his freshly delivered drink,
giving the waitress a sneer as she walked away. Anyway, the booze seemed to calm him. “Ah … Ah cain't go nowhere. Ah cain't
leave yew, Jackie. Yer all Ah got left. Ah need yew, an' yew need me.”

“How do I—”

“Yew jus' do! Yew jus' …” He took in a little more booze to help him grease his logic. “We tied together. Tha's tha queer
parta it all. One wild night, an' now yew an' me arh like white an' niggrah blood brothers. Spilled blood bruthas.”

I felt very ill and very cold.

“Nah,” Dighton went on, “Ah don't think Ah'll much be movin' on from heyah. Ah ain't gonna be movin' nowheres 'cept tah maybe
uh better hotel. Heyah that Waldorf place is real good. Yeah, Ah'm gonna want tah be real close tah yew. Jus' like Ah said,
white an' niggrah blood bruthas.”

I got his meaning. I'd always feared, in my heart I'd always figured, him putting the touch on me wasn't a one-time thing.
But what he was talking about now was a state of permanence: me making money and handing a cut of it over to him like he was
a Charlie on my payroll, a vig to be paid off, and if I didn't … The article, the incident, the police, the scandal rags.

Maybe.

Maybe there was all that. Maybe there was none of it. Maybe he'd send me to jail or kill my career, or maybe he'd just limp
away a sick drunk too scared to risk doing time himself. Like old dynamite, he could've been harmless or deadly dangerous.

Sweat glued my clothes to my skin. I felt all bunched in, nervous and anxious, claustrophobic in my own body. I felt like
I was being buried alive.

Drunk as he was, Dighton could see me going scared-white under my flesh. “What yew worried 'bout, Jackie?”

I hated the way he called me by my first name. Easy, I'd take “nigger” over him being familiar with me.

“Ah ain't gonna do nuthin' foolish.” Some more of his drink, then Dighton followed that with a smile dimmed by his yellow
and black teeth. “Lessin' yew arh.”

Foolish?

Foolishness was thinking that a black man in the 1950s could walk alone at night from Miami Beach to Miami without encountering
some craziness that would chase him for the rest of his life. Foolishness was thinking that once a guy got a taste of free
money, his appetite for it would ever go away.

I wasn't going to be foolish anymore. From that moment forward, everything else I did were actions marked past due.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT AT THE
C
OPA
. I talked to Jules, told him I needed a favor. Told him I needed to speak with Frank. Frank C.

He asked what about.

I said it was a private matter.

Jules didn't ask anything else, just gave me an “I'll see what I can do.”

The next day. Over the phone I got an earful of a raspy voice I hadn't heard in a good while.

“Jackie, what's doin'?”

“Hello, Mr. Costello.”

“Frank. You know it's Frank with you.”

“You well, Frank?”

“Ah, you know. Got some time on my hands now. Wife likes havin' me around. Drivin' me fuckin' crazy. Heard you got hitched.”

“… We took the cure a while back.”

“Sorry for that. Sad thing when a marriage don't take.”

I wondered how the table full of blondes Frank had when I first met him figured into his philosophy but was sure it did somehow.
Anyway, I wanted to let the comment pass, all remembrances of my bogus wedding, and slide into another conversation.

Frank beat me to it. “Jules said you wanted to talk.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we should have a sit-down.”

“Yes.”

Frank gave me the address of his place in Port Washington. I told him I'd be out in the afternoon. We swapped good-byes, hung
up.