Bad Boy Brawly Brown

— 12 —

I pulled up in front of the restaurant at about nine.

Hambones didn’t have an exit to speak of. They had a back door leading into a crevice that Sam called the alley. But that was just for the fire code, nobody could really get out that way. So I sat in my green Pontiac, which rattled whenever I pushed it over fifty miles per hour, and waited.

Hambones was a dive by 1964, but in the old days only the flashiest men and women went in there at night. That was the way it was for blacks. We couldn’t frequent the fancy clubs in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. And we didn’t have that class of joint in our working-class neighborhoods. So men would put on their glad rags and women would don their costume jewelry and furs and go down to some local hangout where there was a jukebox and the pretense of luxury. After a few months of notoriety musicians would begin to frequent the place. Sam Houston had Jelly Roll Morton and Lips McGee as regulars in his joint in the fifties. Louis Armstrong even made an appearance once.

Of course, musicians bring their own crowd: men who want to play like them and women who want to be played. These men and women come in all colors. And once you have a few whites down there, they start coming down in droves. Because as fancy as the Brown Derby might have been, it wasn’t going to give you the kind of freedom that a black club offered. Black people know how to be free. People who had been denied for as many centuries as we had knew how to let their hair down and dance like there was no tomorrow.

Mouse was the first person to take me to Hambones. He hadn’t been in L.A. three months when he nosed it out.

“Yeah, Ease,” he said to me. “The women down there make you cry, they so fine. They don’t have no liquor but you know it’s cheaper in a paper bag anyways.”

It was the early fifties and I was unattached. One thing good about Mouse being so dangerous was that women just loved being around him. You knew that if you were around Raymond, something unexpected was bound to happen.

We went down there looking for a woman named Millie. Millie Perette from East St. Louis. She always wore a string of real pink pearls and carried a nacre-handled pistol in a handbag hardly big enough for a cigarette case.

“Millie do you so bad that you wanna cry when you wake up in the mornin’,” Mouse told me. “Because the next night is so far away.”

We got there at about midnight. When all the white clubs were winding down, Sam’s place was just getting a second wind. I remember a trumpet player blowing at his table, surrounded by women. People were dancing to the music, drinking and kissing to it, too. When we walked in everybody greeted Mouse as if he were the mayor of Watts rather than a recent transplant from the Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas.

He had a fifth of rye whiskey in his left hand and a terrible 41-caliber pistol under his zoot suit jacket. Mouse loved that pistol more than any woman. He once told me that the barrel could be un-screwed from the chamber and that he had twelve barrels so that if he killed somebody, he could switch. That way they couldn’t ever prove that it was his gun used in the crime.

Millie was at the bar with a big bruiser, a dusky bronze-colored man with gold-capped teeth, a diamond ring, and a pistol tucked in the belt of his woolen suit pants. His hand was half the way down Millie’s blouse and she was laughing happily, drinking from a hammered silver shot glass.

When Raymond and I walked up to the pair, I was less than pleased. The most you could hope for in Mouse’s company was a bloodless evening — and you could never bank on that if there was love or money involved. The people sitting near the couple moved away as we approached. The conversation died down but the bruiser might not have noticed, because the horn still blew.

“Millie,” Raymond said.

She opened up her lips in a loose fashion, showing her teeth and smiling but with an edge that said she knew the stakes had just been raised.

“I thought you said that you was gonna be up north, Ray baby,” she said. And even though I was girding for fatal violence, I saw the attraction of a woman so brazen.

“Thought I’d stick around and see if you wanted to dance,” Raymond said pleasantly.

“Delmont Williams,” the bruiser said to Mouse, holding out his hand.

Ray looked at the hand but he didn’t take it.

I fought the urge to back out the way I’d come.

“Where you from, Del?” Mouse asked.

“Chi-town’s my home,” he said proudly. “Three generation outta Mississippi but I still eat hog maws and call my mother ‘ma’am.’”

“How long you been in town?” Mouse asked.

“What’s it to ya, little man?”

“Oh. I just wondered.”

Millie was beginning to understand the seriousness of the conversation. But she was more amused than she was worried. Men fighting over her charms was like a box of chocolate creams to her.

“’Bout a week or two,” Delmont said. “Long enough to meet the most beautiful woman in Los Angeles.”

He let his big hand rub over Millie’s breast. She didn’t even feel it, though, entranced as she was by the spectacle promising to unfold.

“I see,” Raymond said politely. “It’s Delmont — right?”

“Yeah.”

“Delmont, would you step outside with me?”

“What for?”

“’Cause I don’t wanna get no blood on my woman.”

A little sound came out of Millie’s throat then. Whether it was fear or humor, surprise or just a burp, I did not know.

Delmont looked at Millie and asked, “Are you his woman?”

“What do you think?” was her reply.

Delmont turned back to Mouse and said, “Get away from here ’fore I hurt you, boy.”

“Come on outside,” Mouse said. “And we’ll see just what kinda man yo’ ma’am made.”

Delmont was high on liquor and he was intoxicated by the wild and beautiful Millie Perette, but I think at the last minute there he got an inkling of the iron core of my friend. It wasn’t enough to stop him from getting to his feet, though. It wasn’t enough to keep him from going out the door.

Nobody followed them out there, because no one wanted to be witness to Mouse’s rage. Less than a minute after they’d gone outside, a shot was heard. Two minutes after that, Raymond returned to the restaurant. The horn had stopped playing by then.

Mouse walked up to Millie and whispered a few words into her ear. She hopped off her stool and walked out with him. I remember that she kept her thighs close together as she walked, making her posterior sway in the most intoxicating way.

Silence trailed in their wake.

A minute or two later a few of us went out to see what remained of the big man from Chicago. He wasn’t in the street, so we went down two doorways and turned into the alley there. Under a weak lamp I saw Delmont, a small puddle of blood next to his head.

When he moved and moaned I jumped. Then I leaned closer and saw that he’d only been wounded in the ear.

“Naw, man,” Mouse said to me a few days later, when we’d finally caught up with each other. “I didn’t intend to kill ’im. He was from Chi, didn’t know shit. I wouldn’ta even shot ’im but he had to go callin’ me names in there like I was some kinda chile. But you know, baby, Millie really liked that shit. She give it up all night long. I just touch her and she start to call on the Holy Spirit.”

Sitting out there in front of Hambones, I found myself smiling. Ray had a short life but just one day out of it was a year or more to most other men. I could never feel sorry for him — only guilty that in the final moments I had let him down.