Acid Rock

CHAPTER NINE

Abdul Hareem Barenga, alias Tyrone Jackson, didn't give the bellboy a tip because he was a lacky of imperialism, an Uncle Tom and an Oreo. These were the real reasons.

The incidental reason why was that these white mu-fus at the registration desk downstairs had demanded the room fee in advance which had taken the last of the money from St. Louis.

«We outa juice, baby?» asked Philander Jones, looking around the Waldorf Astoria Hotel room, which he figured he could clean out and resell for at least $1,300, if he could get everything past the doorman.

«We not outa juice,» said Barenga. «We beginning to capitalize the revolution.»

«We shoulda waited for the welfare before we begun the revolution 'cause that's two hundred right there.»

«The revolution don't need no welfare. It need capitalization. And we gettin' it.»

«Two hundred is two hundred.»

«You think like a nigger, you always gonna be a nigger, nigger. We listen to you, we do this job for seven, maybe eight hundred. You think capitalization and you know what the man is doing. Gotta think like the man to beat the man.»

Philander Jones had to admit that Barenga was right again. When that Guinea mafioso had been buried in that closed coffin and the money had come out of the wreath and then that candyman Sweet Harold had told them about all that bread on an open contract, Barenga had played it real cool, man. Went right to that white guinea trucking outfit, sitting in the main office like he owned it and had put the man down and down and down.

«I don't need no white mu-fu tell me how to do a mu-fu job,» Barenga had said, sitting with his feet right up there on that guinea's desk and the guinea not saying nothing. Nothing.

«You should see her picture first. To get the right one.»

«Ah ain't here 'cause T love you, honkey. I ain't here 'cause I think you anything but a pale dead meat copy of the original man. Capital. I'm here for capital. My army needs capital. You wanna deal, honkey, you deal capital.»

«How much capital?» asked the vice president of Scatucci Trucking.

«Twenty thousand big ones.» «That would be two thousand dollars, right?»

«Yo ears fulla shit, honkey. I said big one: Twenty thousand dollars.»

«That's a lot of money,» said the vice president of the trucking firm. «You drive a hard bargain. I'll give you four hundred now and the rest when the job is done.»

«You ain't dealing with no jive-ass nigger, honkey. Now break out some of that good scotch you keep around for business deals. And keep your lips off the bottle.»

Barenga and Philander had finished the bottle of Johnny Walker Black in the truck terminal and then they went to the HiLo, where they had scotch and cola, scotch and Seven Up, scotch and Snow White, and scotch and Kool Aid, all from the top of the shelf-Black Label, Chivas Regal, Cutty Sark. The Chivas and the Snow White was the best By morning, the four-hundred dollars up front was exhausted and when they went back to the trucking terminal for more money, the honkey wasn't there, but Sweet Harold pulled up in his hog, a white Eldorado and he said their asses would be in New York City by that afternoon or their asses wouldn't be at all. He showed them the photograph of the white fox with the red hair and said she was the hit and they'd better make a good try or Sweet Harold would cut them up for good.

«We expended the capital,» Barenga tried to explain. «Man, a good hit costs money.»

«You drank it up at the HiLo,» said Sweet Harold.

«We had a taste at the HiLo,» said Barenga.'

«You were buying everyone at the HiLo and then you blew the rest on two foxes, Tyrone. You shouldn't have done that, Tyrone. That is a very nice way to get killed, do you hear me, Nigger Tyrone?»

«We can't get to New York without bread, man. Even if you gonna waste us.»

«You have damaged my reputation, Tyrone. I told the man you were good and you go drinking up your carfare like some field nigger, Tyrone. That is not nice, is it, Tyrone?»

«No. Ain't nice.»

«Is it, Philander?»

«No. Ain't nice.»

«Is it, Piggy?»

«No. Ain't nice.»

«Now it just so happens that the bread you spent was on my foxes and it just so happens that I am going to lend you some money and three tickets to New York City. Now I have been informed that your hit was seen in the Waldorf Astoria so you will check in there. If you are not checked in there before dinner today, I will hunt your ass good. Do you understand, Tyrone?»

«Digit, man.»

«All right, Barenga. Unleash your Black Army of Liberation.»

«That fox is already dead meat, brother,» said Barenga. «You gonna take us to the airport?»

«If I see you touch one of my beautiful leather seats with your scruffy ass, nigger, I will peel the skin from your head.»

It was decided as Barenga went to his sister's home to change into some good threads for New York that after the revolution they would not even try to make Sweet Harold into a new man. He would be wasted along with the honkeys.

Barenga's sister eyed him suspiciously. «I been hearing some weird things about you three. You picking up a contract nobody else gonna touch.»

Barenga told his sister that the Black Army of Liberation of Free Africa did not divulge strategy.

«Ain't nobody touching that contract,» yelled his sister. «You think if it was any good Sweet Harold wouldn't do it hisself? Do you think the guineas would give it to Sweet Harold if they thought they could deliver themselves? Do you know you getting nothing and Sweet Harold and the guineas are getting the bread? Everybody know that but you, Tyrone. Sweet Harold get five thousand dollars just for delivering your ass to the man. He gonna get a quarter of a million dollars if you make the hit, and what're you gonna get? Everyone laughing at you three.»

Abdul Hareem Barenga smacked his sister into the door. On the plane he explained to Philander and Piggy that nothing his sister said was true. It was just the black woman's fear of the black man assuming his role as king that had gotten to her. He had hit her to teach her her place.

«That's right. She gettin' uppity,» said Piggy. And Philander agreed because Barenga sure did a putdown on that guinea honkey at the truck terminal. They all laughed at that and decided that after the revolution they might let some honkeys live, like the stewardess with the nice ass.

When they got to the Waldorf and that foreign guy with the real white-yellow hair had tried to get in front of them, didn't even know how to make a line, why Barenga had put this whole jive hotel in its place. And it had worked. He got served first, while that foreign honkey just stepped back and took it, smiling.

«This the new field headquarters of the Black Army of Liberation,» announced Barenga. «We gonna plan our strategy and tactics.»

«As field marshal,» said Philander, «I suggest we provision the troops.»

«As Major general, I agree,» said Piggy.

«As your supreme commander in chief, I will follow the will of my army,» said Abdul Hareem Barenga and he phoned room service and ordered three of them big steaks and three bottles of Chivas Regal, and what did the Waldorf mean it didn't have any Snow White soda pop? Well, how about Kool-Aid? Okay, any fruit drink? Did he want filet mignon? No, he did not. He wanted steaks. Big ones. And it better be choice meat. He didn't want to feed his army gristle.

Shortly after he ordered, a knock sounded at the door.

«When the man see the Black Army, he move,» said Philander.

Barenga chuckled as Piggy opened the door. The foreign honkey with the white-yellow hair stood in the door, smiling. He wore a purple lounging jacket, soft gray slacks, and slippers.

«I hope I'm not intruding,» he said in that funny voice.

«I don't give a shit what you hope. Don't bother with us,» said Barenga.

«I couldn't help overhearing you talk to the clerk,» he said.

«Well, then, you just stop up your ears iffen you can't help none,» said Barenga; Piggy and Philander laughed.

«When you asked which room Vickie Stoner was in, I thought that was rather gross. As a matter of fact, I found it incredible that anyone would be stupid enough to publicly ask where to reach his victim. Incredibly stupid.»

«You want to get your ass busted, honkey?» said Barenga.

«I don't know if your little monkey brain can absorb this, but when you publicly announce you are on a hunt, then you become the hunted.»

«What you jivin', man? Get outta here.»

Lhasa Nilsson sighed. He looked down the hallway right, he looked down the hallway left, and having made sure no one could see him, took a little automatic pistol from the pocket of his lounging jacket and put a copper-tipped .25 caliber bullet between the left and right eyes of a black man whose nickname he never bothered to find out was Piggy. The shot made a soft, hardly noticeable crack, like a dish breaking over a sofa. Piggy's head jerked slightly and he collapsed right where he had been standing.

Nilsson stepped into the room and kicked the door closed.

«Get him under the bed,» ordered Nilsson.

Philander and Barenga couldn't grasp what had happened. They stared dumbly at Piggy, who looked as if he were sleeping on the floor except for a little fountain of blood bubbling from the bridge of his nose.

«Move him under the bed,» said Nilsson again, and Barenga and Philander suddenly understood what had happened. They stuffed Piggy under the bed, avoiding each other's eyes.

«There's a bloodstain there,» said Nilsson, nodding toward the spot where Piggy had fallen. «Clean it up.»

Philander rose to get a cloth, but Nilsson nodded to the supreme commander of the Black Liberation Army of Free Africa. «No. You. What's your name?»

«Abdul Kareem Barenga.»

«What kind of name is that?»

«Afro-Arab,» Barenga said.

«It is neither African nor Arab. Put some water on the cloth. Now this is what you're going to do. While I was waiting in the hall I heard you order food. You are going to tip the waiter very well. You are going to tip him ten dollars and then you will hold another hundred in your hand while you say you are looking for a white girl whom you will describe. You will not say Vickie Stoner, but you will describe the red hair and the freckles, and will say that she is someone you fancy and came to New York to find. You will not let the waiter in the room, but you … what's your name?»

«Philander.»

«You, Philander, will take the tray and hold the door. Take the tray with your left hand and hold the door open with your right. You will allow the waiter to partially enter, but not beyond the open door. I will stand behind it with this little weapon here, which is more than suficient for both of you and the waiter should that be necessary. Do you understand?»

«What if the waiter don't know where she is?»

«Waiters, cooks, liverymen, butlers, gardeners, keepers of the chamber, keepers of the gate, know these things. They are traditionally the breach in the walls of every castle. It is an old family saying of ours … breach in the wall of a castle? I see you don't know what that is. Well, a long time ago people defended themselves by living in stone houses that were actually forts. A fort is a place designed to be safe from attack, hard to get into.»

«Like a bank, or them new liquor stores,» said Philander.

«Right,» said Nilsson. «And we discovered a long time ago that servants were a breach in this wall, meaning an opening. As if someone left the door to the liquor store open at night.»

«Dig, baby,» said Barenga. «That's strategy. Like the great black Hannibal.»

«The what Hannibal?»

«Hannibal, black. He African. Greatest general what ever generalled.»

«I don't know why I'm bothering,» said Nilsson. «But we apparently have some time. First, Hannibal was a great general but not the greatest. He lost to Scipio Africanus.»

«Another African,» said Barenga, smiling.

«No, he got the name Africanus after defeating Hannibal at the battle of Zama in North Africa. Scipio was Roman.»

«The guineas got him?» asked Barenga in astonishment.

«Yes. In a way.»

«They done in black Hannibal?»

«He wasn't black,» said Nilsson. «He was Carthaginian. That's now North Africa. But the Carthaginians were Phoenicians. They came from Phoenicia … what would now be Lebanon. He was white. A semite.»

«Them Semites ain't black?»

«No. Never were. Still aren't, except those who have bred with blacks.»

«But Hannibal black, real black. I seen it on TV. The Afro-Sheen hair commercial. Hannibal even got corn rows. Now, no white man got corn row hair.»

«Just because it's on television doesn't make it so.»

«I seen it. I seen it with my own eyes. He got this boss gold helmet with feathers and corn row hair.»

«I give up,» said Nilsson. «Do you have money for the waiter?»

«I don't tip no …» Barenga saw the nasty little barrel level at his head. «Got no bread, man.»

Nilsson's left hand skillfully went to a pocket without disturbing his concentration on his gun. He threw some new American money on the bed. «Remember now. Ten dollars tip. Keep him just the other side of the door. You fancy this redheaded girl with freckles. You hold the hundred dollars up. And take off that stupid little beanie. No one is going to believe you'd throw away a hundred to find a woman, not with that silly little thing on your head.»

«Them my Afro colors,» said Barenga.

«Put it away.»

There were three raps at the door. «Room service.»

The beanie disappeared behind Barenga on the bed.

«Come in,» said Barenga. He smiled nervously at the little gun.

Philander opened the door with his right hand and with his left wheeled a two-layered stainless steel cart, draped with white cloth, into the room. Barenga rose from the bed and went to the door.

The waiter was a round jello-soft little man with a cherub's pink face. He opted for liberalism and racial consciousness the instant he saw the ten-dollar bill in Barenga's hand. As he pocketed it, he said «Thank you, sir,» although only three minutes before he had told the room service captain that he would probably wrap the food trays around those niggers' heads.

Barenga pushed the tray into the room behind him but still stood in the open door. Before the waiter could turn to go, Barenga held the hundred-dollar bill in his right hand, waving it slowly like someone teasing a house cat with an old slipper.

The waiter saw the bill and stopped. He could see the light green and the dark green ink on the creamy colored paper. He saw the extra zeroes in the corner of the bill. He decided that liberalism was too weak a posture to adopt in the latter third of the twentieth century. He would become an advocate of radical power.

«Yes, sir,» he said, his watery blue eyes meeting Barenga's. «Will there be anything else, sir?» He looked again at the bill in Barenga's hand.

Barenga was wondering how he and Philander could keep the hundred. It would be a good start on capitalizing the revolution. He saw the movement of Nilsson's sleeve behind the door and decided the revolution would have to wait.

«Yeah, man,» Barenga said. «You know the people in this hotel?»

«Yes, sir. I think so.»

«Well, I'm looking for a special one. This one is a little red-haired honkey with freckles.»

«A girl, sir?» the waiter said, telling himself that distaste and revulsion were unworthy emotions for a radical to feel, just because a black man asked about a white woman.

«Well, of all the sheeit,» said Barenga. «Yeah, a girl. I look like I like boys?» He waggled the hundred-dollar bill at the waiter.

«There is such a young lady,» the waiter said.

«Ummm?»

The waiter said nothing else, so Barenga said, «Well, where is she?»

The waiter looked at the hundred-dollar bill again and without taking his eyes off it, said, «She is in Room 1821. That's on the eighteenth floor. She is with an elderly gentleman of the Oriental persuasion and another young man.»

«He a dink too?»

«A dink?»

«Yeah. A gook. A Jap.»

«No, sir. He is an American.»

Barenga had decided. That hundred dollars was just too much to pay for such horseshit information. He curled it back into his hand and stuffed it into the slit pocket of his dashiki.

«Thanks, man,» he said, backed up and quickly closed the door on the startled waiter.

He turned to Nilsson with a small happy smile.

«How'dldo?»

«Fine, until you stole that hundred dollars from the waiter,» Lhasa said.

In the hallway, the waiter was staring at the closed door and reaching the same conclusion. One hundred dollars was a lot of money. It could buy 50 sheets or maybe enough wood for 10 crosses to burn on someone's lawn, or hundreds of feet of heavy rope for lynchings.

Barenga moved back warily as Lhasa came from behind the door. «Give me back the hundred,» Nilsson said. The gun was still aimed at Barenga, its evil black hole seeming to stare at him in black dark hatred.

Lhasa smiled.

The door swung open behind him. «Listen here, you fucking blootch,» the waiter shouted as he barged into the room. «You owe me.»

The swinging door hit Lhasa Nilsson in the middle of the back and he was propelled forward a few steps toward the bed on which Philander sat. He pulled himself up short, turned to the waiter, who had stopped, speechless, inside the doorway, and squeezed the trigger of the small .25 caliber revolver. A hole opened in the waiter's throat like a red flower opening to greet the sunshine. The waiter's eyes widened. His mouth worked as if he were going to talk, to impart one last piece of wisdom. Then he fell forward onto the rug.

Nilsson moved forward quickly and kicked the door shut. «Get him under the bed,» he snarled. Barenga moved quickly, hoisting the pudgy waiter by the armpits. «Philander, you help me,» he said, his voice dripping hurt.

Philander hopped up from the bed and grabbed the dead waiter's feet.

«Man, you didn't have to do that,» Philander complained to Lhasa Nilsson.

«Shut up,» Nilsson said. «We're going to have to hurry now. The waiter will be missed. Take off his jacket before you put him away.»

Barenga began to open the buttons.

«Tell me,» said Nilsson, «do you wear any trousers under that ridiculous sheet you parade around in?»

Barenga shook his head.

«All right, then, take off his pants too.»

Barenga and Philander stripped the waiter and finally Barenga stood up with jacket and trousers over his arm. Philander rolled the waiter's body under the bed and straightened out the bedspread so it was neat again and would discourage anyone from a random look under the bed.

«Which of you wants to play waiter?» asked Nilsson.

Barenga looked at Philander. Philander looked at him. No one spoke. Being asked to be a waiter was as bad as being asked to tap dance on a watermelon rind.

«One of you has to wheel this cart of food up to Room 1821. Now which one'll do it?»

Barenga looked at Philander. Philander looked at him.

As Barenga looked at Philander, he heard that frightful click again and it froze him in his position. And then the hissing thwap of a shot, and then the first spurt of blood out of Philander's left temple, before Philander dropped to the floor.

«I think he was too stupid to pass for a waiter,» Nilsson said as Barenga turned toward him. «Now you put on the uniform and do it fast. We don't have much time.»

Barenga decided he would take no more time than was absolutely necessary, thus proving to Nilsson his loyalty and absolute trustworthiness. In twenty-two seconds he had peeled off the dashiki and put on the uniform jacket and pants.

Nilsson finished rolling Philander under the overcrowded bed and turned to inspect Barenga.

«I believe most waiters wear shirts,» he said. «I've never seen one before wearing a jacket over his bare skin.»

«I ain't got no shirt,» Barenga said. «But if you want, I'll look for one,» he added hurriedly.

Nilsson shook his head. «Never mind,» he said. «The sight of the jacket should do all right. Let's go.»

They rode up in an empty service elevator. At the eighteenth floor, Nilsson stepped out and looked both ways before motioning Barenga to follow him.

Barenga moved out slowly onto the carpeted floor and began to wheel the car along the hallway, a respectful three paces behind Nilsson. He was a cold mu-fu, this blond, kinky honkey. Barenga was going to keep an eye on him. He didn't act right. He was too quick to pull that trigger. Man, like he was dedicated. He had that look in his eyes like one of those social workers, man, that was always going to do everything and fix everything and make everything right, man, 'cause they had all that love, you know, love. They were so goddamn sure of themselves, man, they was like dedicated, like the minister of the Abyssinian Church, and then at knifepoint, you asked one of them for a penny, and suddenly, they realized everything wasn't going to be as easy as they thought. At least the smart ones learned that. The stupid ones, who were more numerous, never learned nothing. But this cat was funny like, because he knew plenty, but he still had that dedicated look.

Barenga stopped pushing the cart and stepped forward to Nilsson, who had beckoned him with a crooked finger. «Now you knock on the door and when you get an answer, tell them Room Service. When the door opens, I'll handle everything else. You got that?» Barenga nodded.