Blonde Faith

12

Raymond Alexander had always been a fixture in my life. He was a ladies’ man, a philanderer, a fabulous raconteur, a stone-cold killer, and probably the best friend I ever had; not a friend, really, but a comrade. He was the kind of man who stood there beside you through blood and fire, death and torture. No one would ever choose to live in a world where they’d need a friend like Mouse, but you don’t choose the world you live in or the skin you inhabit.

There were times that Mouse had stood up for me when I wasn’t in the room or even the neighborhood. That’s why, sometimes, men like Thunder backed away from me, seeing the ghostly image of Ray at my shoulder.

I lived in a world where many people believed that laws dealt with all citizens equally, but that belief wasn’t held by my people. The law we faced was most often at odds with itself. When the sun went down or the cell door slammed, the law no longer applied to our citizenry.

In that world a man like Raymond “Mouse” Alexander was Achilles, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh all rolled into one.

I STOPPED at a phone booth and dialed a number.

“Library,” a man’s voice answered.

“Gara, please.” I knew she’d told me to wait for a day, but I also knew my hundred-dollar incentive would get her to move quickly.

I waited there, smoking a low-tar cigarette. Usually when I smoked I thought about quitting. I knew that my breath had been shortened and that my life would suffer the same fate if I continued. At the end of most smokes I crushed out the ember planning for it to be my last — but not that day. That day Death held no sway over me. She could come and take me; I didn’t care.

“Hello?” Gara said in a rich tone that I associated only with black women.

“Any headway?”

She laughed at my knowledge and said, “Come on by.”

WHENEVER I SAW Gara she brought to mind deities. She was in that green chair again, fat as Buddha and wise as Ganesh. There was no gender to her divinity, no mortality to her time here on Earth.

“I got somethin’ for you here, Easy,” she said, indicating a buff-colored folder on the table.

There were eight sheets of paper inside. The first listed seven names, neatly typed in the top left-hand corner, single-spaced.

Bruce Richard Morton

William T. Heatherton

Glen Albert Thorn

Xian Lo

Tomas Hight

Charles Maxwell Bob

François Lamieux

After that, each page gave all the information that Gara had been able to find on the various heroes.

I scanned the pages. There were lots of abbreviations and acronyms. I didn’t understand most of them, but that didn’t bother me.

“No photos?” I asked.

Gara frowned and sucked a tooth.

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t think so.”

“Don’t show those papers to anybody, Easy. And burn ’em up when you’re through.”

“Either I’ll burn them or they’ll burn me.”

ON THE WAY HOME I stopped by the Pugg, Harmon, and Dart Insurance building. It was the newest and tallest glass-and-steel skyscraper to grace the downtown LA skyline. On the top floor was Brentan’s, one of LA’s finest restaurants.

As I headed for the red elevator whose sole purpose was to bring fine diners to Brentan’s, a guard in a tan short-sleeved shirt and black pants approached me. The pale-faced, slender-armed guard had a holster on his left hip. The leather pouch contained what looked to be a .25-caliber pistol.

Most white people at that time wouldn’t have given that guard a second thought. I, on the other hand, saw him as potentially life threatening.

“Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”

He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.

“This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.

The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right to be somewhere.”

My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.

“Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”

“You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”

I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.

Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.

I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.

I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.

When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.

The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”

The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.

I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother, we’re not enemies. I just want to go up in an elevator like anybody else. You don’t need to worry about me. It’s the men that own this building that are making you poor and uneducated and angry.”

But I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have heard me. I couldn’t free either one of us from our bonds of hatred.

The young woman returned with another white man behind her. This man was tall, ugly, and impeccably dressed in a dark green suit. He glanced at me and then turned to the guard.

“Yes?”

“This man says that he has an appointment with you, Mr. Green.”

“What is your name?” Green asked the guard.

“Michaels, sir. But this guy —”

“Mr. Michaels, how many times a day do I receive people who have made appointments?”

“I don’t know . . . a few.”

“And how often do you ride up the elevator humiliating those people?”

“Um . . .”

“If a man or woman or child tells you that they have an appointment with me, I’d appreciate it if you would allow them to come here and discharge their business.”

“I just thought —”

“No,” Green said, interrupting the excuse, “you did not think. You saw this man, this Negro man, and decided that you would play the hero, protecting a restaurant where you couldn’t afford even a lunch from a person you don’t know a thing about.”

I felt bad for Michaels, I really did. Green didn’t say another word. Michaels knew enough not to argue. The horsey woman watched her boss with inquisitive eyes. We all stood there for more moments than we should have. I don’t know about them, but I felt that I had somehow lost my way in life, ending up on that high floor embroiled in a conflict that made no sense.

Michaels finally got the message and went back toward the elevator.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Hans Green said, “it’s so nice to see you.”

We shook hands as the young woman watched, trying to understand what was happening.

“Come back to my office,” Green was saying.

As I followed him, I smiled and nodded at the hostess.

How could she know that eighteen months before, Hans Green was being framed for embezzling money from the last restaurant he worked for, Canelli’s. Melvin Suggs, an LAPD detective, was a friend of his and he passed my card along. I took a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant and discovered that the chef and Green’s wife were cooking the books, and each other, at Hans’s expense.

THE BIG WINDOW of the restaurant manager’s office looked all the way from downtown to the Pacific. I liked sitting there. The only thing I would have liked better was Bonnie back in my arms.

Green’s ears and nose were way too big for his face. Red and blue veins had risen to the surface of his cheeks. His teeth were too small, and his thin lips were loose and flaccid. He was a caricature of a man.

“What can I do for you, Easy?” he asked when we were both seated and I had turned down a drink.

“I’m coming tonight with a very special woman. I’d like a good seat and perfect service.”

“What time?”

“Eight.”

“Done. On the house.”

“I can pay for it.”

“If Michaels is any indication, you pay for it every day of your life.”