Every Man a King

2

Roger and I spent the next three-quarters of an hour going over the details of what he’d been told and what he’d found out on his own, how much I’d charge, and, finally, what resources he could make available to me.

“Let’s wait till I ask around,” I said, “before you call out the cavalry.” I stood up from the folding chair and added, “After all, this is intelligence gathering, not war.”

He nodded, but my estimation of the job caused a sour twist in the rich man’s lips. He was used to bullying his way through the world.

I was used to clapping bullies into cuffs.

“I have something for you,” he said, reaching into a pocket.

“Hi, Daddy,” Aja, my daughter, hailed as I stepped out of the cube room into the wide, blue-carpeted hallway.

“What are you doing here, honey?”

“Grandma B invited me to brunch.”

Aja was a couple of inches shorter than I with dark brown skin and bright eyes. Valedictorian of her high school class, she swam competitively and loved playing in basketball pickup games around Manhattan. There were very few women allowed in those games, but the city basketeers knew that she left it all on the court.

“I thought you were going to write that paper today.”

“And that I wouldn’t even eat?”

I smiled and she kissed my cheek, the scarred side. She was the closest person in my life and I thanked the God I didn’t believe in every day for her.

“Aja-Denise,” Roger greeted, coming out after me.

“Hello, Mr. Ferris,” she said. “How are you?”

“Even if I fall dead after our meal, this would have still been a pretty good day.”

My daughter giggled at his over-the-top words and the three of us made our way toward the afternoon dining room.

Everywhere was a trek at Silbrig Haus, Roger’s name for his humble abode. We walked down the long hall, through a painting gallery, across a sitting room, and finally into a room that sported a twenty-foot-long hickory table set next to a bulletproof wall of a window that looked across the Hudson into New Jersey.

Everything Roger had or did, lived in or thought, was immoderate and excessive.

Seated at the north end of the dining table were my grandmother and her grandnephew, my watered-down cousin, Richard “Rags” Naples.

“Rags,” I said, holding out a hand as he rose to his feet.

“King,” he rejoined.

I felt the strength in that grip. Rags was a rough-and-tumble ex-soldier, ex-mercenary, ex-bodyguard who now worked as a specialist in delicate extractions. Ten years my junior, he didn’t look dangerous but that’s what made him so good at his job. His hands were not only powerful but roughened from extreme exertions. His face was... wizened; not wrinkled, but rather etched with extremely fine lines. He was acorn brown and the same height as my daughter.

“How’s extractions?” I asked.

“Keepin’ me on my toes, all eight of ’em.”

Everyone got to their feet to exchange kisses, hugs, and handclasps. My grandmother’s place was at the head of the table for all daylight meals. Roger took that position for dinner.

After Forthright came to join the get-together, we all sat.

The meal consisted of buckwheat waffles, wild rice and citrus salad, smoked salmon for my daughter, who’d given up mammal-red meat, and thick bacon for the rest of us. The serving staff brought out the trays containing the meal and then left us on our own to divvy up the largesse.

“So,” Roger said a while after we’d started eating, “Aja-Denise, how’s school going?”

“Okay. They have us studying world history from the Industrial Revolution up through the later nineteenth century.”

“That’s an interesting period,” Roger said. “A lot happened then to shape the world — for better and for worse.”

“That’s what they say in almost every lecture,” Aja agreed.

“What college is it?” Rags asked.

“Beckton University.”

“Never heard of it,” our cousin stated.

“It’s in Detroit, been around for nearly fifty years.”

“You moved to Michigan?”

“Beckton is a low-residency school,” Forthright put in. “They offer what one might call a radical arts education.”

“So what do you study there?” Rags asked anyone who wanted to answer.

“They have all kinds of degrees,” Aja responded. “You can study architecture for the twenty-first century, Chinese medicine, footprint ecology, and about fifty other subjects.”

“And what’s your major?” Rags asked.

“I’m getting a degree in knowledge, which is also called a PhD in liberal arts.”

“PhD? Don’t you have to get a BA first?”

“It’s a six- or seven-year course of study,” my patient daughter explained. “You pick up the lower degrees along the way.”

That conversation went on for a while. As it meandered, my mind drifted to the job Roger wanted me to do. There was little involved that I liked or felt drawn to. To begin with, there was the nightmare called Rikers Island.

Most of the literature I’ve read on psychotherapy says that all humans’ true psychological natures were developed before the age of six; what you experienced combined with the structure of your DNA bespoke who you would be from then on. You could make conscious changes to your mind, but you had to work at it all the time because the person you were born to be was always ready to come out and play, and play hard.

I believe in that psychological rule of thumb even though my experience has seemingly been the exception.

While Aja explained the ins and outs of her extremist education, I was remembering the twelve weeks I endured becoming a new man under the pressure of Rikers. When I was incarcerated I was still a New York City cop, a detective working his way up the ladder. Then I was framed, arrested, beaten, doused with piss, and threatened from the time I woke up, through my tedious and dangerous day, until falling back into nightmare, only to wake up in terror again.

I’d been in the hole three weeks when guards took me to the shower room to wash off the crud. I was already permanently scarred by a con named Julee, who wielded a jagged tomato can lid. I’d already been told that I’d spend the rest of my life in stir.

The shower was an empty room made of concrete and cinder blocks. When we got there the guards made me strip. Then they brought out a hose designed to put out fires. They blasted me for maybe two minutes, but it felt like forever. I could still feel the bruises at that rich man’s table.

When the hose was shut off I was too stunned to get to my feet. Freezing, I could hardly breathe. One of the guards was yelling something, but the words failed to convey meaning — at first.

“He said get your ass up or we gonna clean out your butthole with this here hose!” one of my tormentors shouted.

Biding for time I said, “Why you doin’ this shit to me, man?”

“For knockin’ out Jimbo’s tooth,” another guard replied.

There were four guards in all. That was the usual count for badasses, and by that time I was one of the most dangerous convicts in stir. Jimbo was a huge Black guard who thought he didn’t need any help transferring me to the meeting with my lawyer. Despite hunger, thirst, and fifteen pounds’ worth of chains, I whipped around and hit Jimbo so hard that the blood was gushing from his mouth.

My surprise was that he only lost one tooth.

“...right, Daddy?” Aja said.

“What?”

“Richard says that maybe a degree from a school like Beckton might not be good for getting a job, and I told him that I could, probably.”

I was still in that torture room, looking at the meal through a chink in the cinder block wall.

“What kinda diploma you got for your work, Rags?” I asked my cousin.

At first he riled, no doubt thinking that I was somehow insulting him. But when Rags went over the words in his mind he smiled and then nodded at my challenge.

“Yeah, yeah,” he agreed. “It’s the man you hire, not the diploma.”

The meal went on after that. Outside the cell of my mind people laughed and conversed, ate and shared their ideas. I wanted to join in, but once I’d begun remembering Rikers and the man I no longer am, I couldn’t change tracks. I went into jail a guardian of the peace and came out lawless, or, at least, unbound.

“Baby?” my grandmother cooed.

“Yeah?”

“You wanna come help me with the dishes?”

“We have people who wash dishes for a living,” Roger pointed out to Brenda for probably the hundredth time.

“Every man got to clean up his own mess,” she replied.

“But why does Joseph have to help? Washing dishes is women’s work.” Roger was rich enough not to have to bend to social expectations. He said whatever he felt.

“Women’s work is keepin’ fools like you in line,” Brenda Naples informed the billionaire.

“What’s wrong, Joe?” my grandmother asked while we worked our way through the dishes.

The sink was restaurant-size. There were two dishwashers, one for breakables and the other for pots and pans, and enough staff that if each one cleaned only three dishes the job would be done. But Brenda put liquid soap in hot water, donned her own personal rubber gloves, and washed each piece of tableware by hand. I rinsed and dried, a job I’d done since I was five years old visiting my grandparents’ cold-water shack in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Nothing, Grandma,” I said.

“You know a child is never s’posed to lie while doin’ his chores.”

“So I could lie any other time?”

“Answer my question, King.”

When she called me King in that tone, it meant playtime was over.

“Why you invite Rags to brunch?” I wasn’t going to spill my guts that easily.

“He’s a trustworthy soldier.”

“Doesn’t Roger have enough security with Forthright and all?”

“I called Richard for you.”

“Me?”

“Roger didn’t tell me that he was callin’ on you. That means he’s tryin’ to protect me from some danger he’s puttin’ you in. That’s why I called your cousin, so you’d see him and remember him if you get in too deep.”

“You know I’m forty-four,” I reminded her.

“Ain’t none of us could make it on our own, child.”

I’d been receiving pearls of wisdom like that from my father’s mother for all my years. That was probably the reason I didn’t embark on a life of crime like my dad and his brothers. I knew for a fact that it was from her words that I found strength in the bowels of Rikers.

“I love you, Grandma.”

We were all out on the driveway that went past the front doors of Silbrig Haus. Forthright’s people brought my Bianchina and Rags’ sand-colored CJ-5 Willys Jeep. The militaristic vehicle was a small and sturdy version of its World War II counterpart — and a perfect automobile for Rags.

Before climbing in he handed me a business card. It had been blank but Richard had jotted down his initials, two phone numbers, and an e-mail address.

“Granny B told me that you might be wanting my help with something,” he said as I read the scant markings.

“She worries too much.”

“That is an existential impossibility,” the self-educated mercenary said.

I smiled and clapped his shoulder.

Aja bundled in next to me in the tiny car.

We made it over to Park Avenue and toured down toward Lower Manhattan in no particular rush.

“You gonna work for Mr. Ferris?” she asked when we were crossing Fifty-Seventh.

“That what your great-grandmother said?”

“No. She asked me when I was gonna have a baby.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. Her sister Lottie has two great-great-grandchildren and Grandma B doesn’t want her getting that far ahead.”

“Granny B has six great-grands as it is,” I argued against the woman not there.

“Yeah, but I’m her favorite. She knows that my kids won’t come askin’ her for money.”

At that time Aja lived, with four other girls, in a fourth-floor walk-up on Bowery Street not far from Delancey. I stopped in front of her building and leaned over to hug her good-bye.

“See you in the morning?” I asked. She worked in my office, pretty much ran my life.

“I want to take the morning to finish my essay on Fanon.”

“Wretched of the Earth?”

“Black Skin, White Masks.”

“Never read that one.”

“You mean there’s a book you haven’t read?”

“I love you too, honey.”

She jumped out and ran up the stairs of her overpriced tenement. I sat in the car in front of her door a good five minutes before pulling away from the curb.