“This is the library,” the librarian said.
I nodded and gulped.
“Close your mouth, boy.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said finally. “I never seen nuthin’ like it.”
“Of course you haven’t,” she said. “And do you know why?”
“Because I never been in here before?” I asked, not understanding the question.
“No,” she said from some Olympian height. “It is because this is a white library. And no matter how much you know how to read, these books are not meant for you. These books were written by white people for white people. This is literature and art and the way our country is and should be. There will be no library card for you, so you can stop sitting out in front. You have seen as much of this building as you ever will.”
The impact of her words brought tears to my eyes. I was thirteen, but, like I said, I’ve always been small. I looked up at Celestine Dowling, and she seemed pleased to see me cry.
“Go on now,” she said.
I went home in tears. My mother asked me what was wrong, but I was too sad to say. I cried that night and all the next day. Celestine Dowling had broken my heart out of a meanness that I couldn’t understand. Why would she hate me for being able to read well? I wasn’t hurting her. I would have been glad to check out books from the back door or window. I wouldn’t’ve treated those books badly.
All of the happiness flowed out of me then. For months I moped around. I made money reading contracts and warranties for my neighbors, but every time I’d read a line I’d remember the high shelves of that country library.
By the time I was seventeen I was on a train bound for San Francisco, not because I wanted to vote or was afraid of being lynched. I left because a man told me one night that in California black folks could go into any library they wanted. They could get library cards and check out books from here to Sunday.
It was cold in Frisco, but I read a book a day in the first year. Libraries still make my heart race. There is nothing like a book.
“I understand you, sir,” a voice agreed.
I smiled in my doze, thinking that most people thought I was crazy when I told them that story. A door closed and I was jarred awake. Three men stood in the shadows down the street in front of the curtained church.
Some more words were spoken, but I didn’t understand them. This made me think that I had given meaning to the words I heard in my sleep. Through the darkness I could tell that one of the men was white and the other two were black. One black man was well built, wearing a white suit. He laughed and slapped the white man on the shoulder. That was William Grove. I remembered him going into the church with all of the deacons shaking his hand as he went past. The other black man seemed to be older. He also wore a suit, but it was shapeless, fitting the man like the everyday uniform of a night watchman or usher.
The white man was powerfully built too. That’s really all I could tell about him, except that he seemed to have some kind of foreign accent. They talked briefly, and then a dark-colored sedan drove up. The white man got in, and the sedan drove off.
I crouched down as the sedan went past. When I rose partway up again, the black men were still talking.
They talked for a while more, and then Grove walked away down the street. The older man used a key in the front door to the church and went in.
I had brought myself to the edge of that minefield by asking a couple of good questions and by perseverance. But every step from then on was laid out for a better man than I was. So I sat there trying to will myself up the evolutionary ladder from man to superman. But when I got out of that car, there was no cape dragging behind me, only a tail between my legs.
14
I NEEDED TO RELIEVE my bladder, but I was scared. In a car I was an even match for Leon Douglas; on foot gawky Gella Greenspan had about equal odds to kick my ass.
I knocked on the church door, braced by the cold air and the possibility of finding a toilet. I was standing there for quite a while before a baritone voice asked, “William?”
“It’s Tyrell Lockwood,” I said, loud and clear.
“What you want?”
“I came to speak to Reverend Grove.”
“It’s three in the morning,” the opera voice informed me.
“It’s very important,” I said. “About a woman named Elana Love.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the lock snicked and cracked. The door came open and a frosty-headed older gentleman looked at me with a deeply furrowed brow.
“What about Sister Love?” he asked.
“She hired me to find you, said it was somethin’ important she had to say.”
“What?” His features were African Negro with very little other racial influence. Based on his facial structure you would have expected his skin to be dark, very dark, but instead it was fifty-fifty, coffee and cream.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But my business is with Reverend Grove. I spent the whole night driving around trying to find this place and I got to go.”
“I’m Vincent,” the man said warily. “Father Vincent la Trieste. At one time I was the minister of this congregation.”
“May I use your facilities, Father Vincent?”
There was a moment when he might have refused me, but then he stepped back, allowing me in.
I had only seen the Messenger of the Divine church once, about a half year before. The landlord brought me around because I was making noises about renting a place and the Messenger was behind on the rent for the second month in a row. Mr. Anderson, the landlord, brought me in on a Tuesday afternoon when there was no one in the place. The room I entered with Father Vincent was exactly the same as I remembered. Plush red drapes on all four walls. Folding walnut chairs set in rows before an oak podium that was edged in gold and jet. There were hymn books with cardboard covers lined with royal blue felt on each seat and a huge, rough-hewn cross propped on its side and leaning against the draperies behind the podium. It was almost an exact replica of the room I had seen on Central. I would have taken the place after Anderson showed it to me, but the church came up with the rent, and I ended up taking the storefront down the street.
In the corner there were three chairs set at a wobbly pine table with three glasses, each one almost empty of red wine, and a tin ashtray full of butts set in the center.
“Through there,” Vincent said, gesturing at the wall.
“What?” I asked.
“Through that door,” he said in an exasperated tone. “The toilet.”
There was a short hallway that led to an old-fashioned toilet that had a pull handle connected to a tank on the wall above. As nervous as I was, urinating afforded me great relief and pleasure. I leaned a hand against the wall while I did my business, exhausted from the past few days of pressure.
I poked my head out of the john, noticing a half-open door a little farther on in the back. In that room I spied a table strewn with watches, jewelry, and 35-millimeter cameras. There were two console televisions with round screens against the far wall and a fur coat of some kind hanging on a nail in the back door.
I snaked my way back to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and then returned to my host.
“You look familiar,” he said when I returned.
“I used to work part-time for the bookstore near to your church when it was on Central.”
“Where is she?” Vincent asked me.
I pulled out a chair from the rickety table and sat.
“Kidnapped.”
“What?”
“She came to me looking for Grove. Like I said, I worked near to where you used to be. She come in there askin’ ’bout where she could find the reverend.”
“You said she was kidnapped?”
“She told me that if I could find Grove, she’d give me five hundred dollars. So I said I’d help out. Only when I started drivin’ her, a man attacked us and took her away. He chased us. Big motherfucker. You know, I fought him, but he laid me out. Before he did though, she screamed at him, called him Leon.”
“Leon Douglas?” he whispered.
“She didn’t yell his full name.”
Vincent took a chair for himself. He was staring hard at me. I wasn’t scared though. He was an old guy, sixty or more, and I always felt comfortable if given the time to roll out a lie. I’m good at lying. My mother always said that it was because of all those lying books I read.
“You lyin’,” Vincent said.
“Why you say that?”
“Why would she trust you? Why she gonna offer you good money like that to find William?”
“She didn’t trust me completely, that’s why I don’t know why she wanted you guys. You know, I’ve done some findin’-people work for Milo Sweet, the bail bondsman.”
“Why you believe her? Did she pay you anything?”
“Man, the curves on that woman and the way she moved ’em, damn, five hundred dollars was the least she had to offer.”
“You go to the law?”
“No.” I made eye contact with the holy man as I said so.
“Why not?”
I shrugged, looked at him again, and then said, “If she offered me five, there had to be more, and if I went to the cops, there was no chance of being paid a dime. What I figured was that I’d find the reverend and see what was what.”
Vincent held out his hands in a show of helplessness. “I haven’t heard from Sister Love in more than two months, and I don’t know anything about any money. All I do is God’s work. I spread His word.”
Like a boxer getting on his bicycle and putting out the jab, that was Vincent. I had staggered him with my information, and all he could fall back on was his everyday con.
“Well, if you can’t help me…” I stood up.
“But I could ask Brother Grove,” Vincent offered.
“Maybe I should ask him.”
“Maybe,” the canny man of God replied. “If you got here five minutes earlier, you would’a seen him. But he’s gone now, won’t be back for a few weeks.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Church business, in Tulsa.”
“Oh. Well I guess that’s that.”
“But he’s gonna call me. When he gets there he said he’d call. I could ask him then.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just go to the police.”
“Better no,” he said.
“Why?”
“Let me ask William first. Maybe he could shed some light on it. I’ll tell you what, you go home and get some sleep, and when I talk to William sometime tomorrow night, next mornin’ at the latest, I’ll call you.”
I thought about sleeping in that lilac-scented, apricot-colored room. It sounded pretty good. I mused on that for a few seconds, pretending that I was thinking about Vincent’s selfless offer.
“Call you by ten day after tomorrow,” he added.
“All right,” I said, nodding. “All right. But I’ll have to call the cops if you don’t call me by then. You know it’s a crime not to report a crime.”
Vincent was scanning the tabletop until he located a short pencil and a paper matchbook. He took the nub and said, “Tell me your number.”
I gave him the Tannenbaum phone number.
“What’s the address?”
“Why you need my address?”
“Well, uh, we might have to run over there or somethin’.”
“No, uh-uh. You just call me. Call me by ten day after tomorrow.” I stood up.
“We could use the address too,” he said with no apology or excuse.
“I’ll give you what you need after I talk to Grove.”
I had a question in mind, and it must’ve shown on my face.
“Something else?” he asked.
“Why did you pull up your red skirts and run from the old church so fast?”
Father Vincent blinked twice but said nothing.
“I mean,” I continued, “you ran outta there in the middle’a the night. The landlord came around askin’ everybody if they knew where you’d gone.”
“A misunderstanding about the rent,” the elder Holy Roller said. “Anderson made some promises about work that he was gonna do to the buildin’. After a year we told him that we wouldn’t pay, you know, the rent until, uh, he did what he said he would.”
“Hmm.” I pondered his lie. “Only time I ever seen people pull up stakes that fast they were either runnin’ from the law or from a loaded gun.”
“Nuthin’ like that,” Vincent assured me. “Just a misunderstanding is all.”
“All right,” I said, still leery. “You call me when you’ve talked to Grove.”
I turned and walked out of there, feeling in charge for the first time since Elana Love walked in the door. I didn’t look back at Father Vincent. I was sure that he’d be on the phone to Grove as soon as I was gone. But that was okay. I wanted them upset. I wanted them to feel like I felt.
JOHN-JOHN’S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGER STAND on Slauson was the right place for me. Their hamburgers came with beefsteak tomatoes, Bermuda onions, sour pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and homemade chili. You had the choice of cheese. My fries always had chili and cheese on them. A strawberry malted for my milk and I was on cloud nine.
The only two things that I was proud of consistently were that I could eat anything and never gain an ounce and that I’m extremely well endowed in the sexual organ sort of way. My manhood was questionable as far as courage or strength, but once in the bed I could out-joust the best of them.
I once thought that all I had to be was slender and sexually imposing and women would love me for that alone. But I realized as time went on that women, though they were often excited by my size, got used to it pretty quickly and were willing to leave me for what I thought were lesser men.
I guess I was thinking about Fearless. He was with a woman right then, and there I was eating a chili burger at four-thirty in the morning.
Sal Grimaldi, the night manager of John-John’s, liked to play chess. He pulled out his small wooden board and sat across from me in the courtyard space that they covered with canvas on a cold night like that. He said that I looked tired and maybe he could beat me.
He couldn’t. Grimaldi was a white guy from outside of Barre, Vermont. He always loved telling me that he had never even seen a Negro until after his twenty-first birthday.
“I mean,” he said more than once, “I knew you guys existed in theory, but seeing a real black man shocked the shit out of me the first time.”
I believed him. Over the years I had come to realize that people who had no experience with each other rarely hated with the vehemence that I had experienced from some southerners. Sal didn’t have any preconceptions about blacks. Because of that he was critical in ways that other people weren’t. He loved to talk to me about how he didn’t understand why Negroes didn’t make more out of themselves.
