Fear of the Dark

Chapter 18

Jerry Twist’s was a pool parlor on Slauson, occupying the second floor of a lime-colored two-story building in the center of the block. The bottom floor housed Ha Tsu’s Good News Chinese restaurant.

Good News was unique inasmuch as it was the only Chinese restaurant I’d ever been to that had a bouncer — Harold Crier.

Harold was big and dark. He wore a black eye patch and had hands like catchers’ mitts. Harold was fat, but I’d seen him chase a would-be patron who had slapped him after being refused entrance. The runner was young and sleek, but the forty-something and ponderous Harold ran that boy down after two blocks.

The story goes that Harold met Ha Tsu while trying to rob him late one Monday night. The armed robber made the mistake of getting too close to the restaurateur and before he knew it the smaller man had grabbed Harold’s gun wrist and jabbed him in the eye with a fork from the counter. When Harold woke up, he was in the back room on a cot with a Chinese doctor ministering to him.

Ha Tsu made Loretta’s hatred of white people seem like mild perturbation. Loretta’s anger came from a specific event over a relatively short period of time. But Ha hated whites for the domination of China. He hated white people the way Sitting Bull hated them. He hated them so much that he wouldn’t even turn Harold, an armed robber, over to the cops. He told Harold that he could either die there on that bamboo cot or take a job as the sentry at the front door of Good News.

“You want me to be a guard?” Harold had asked.

“You perfect,” Ha told him. “You know when somebody bad comes to rob me, and when they see your eye they know what they get.”

“Hey, Paris,” the bouncer said in greeting. It was late afternoon, I remember, and there was hot sun on my back. The big bodyguard was sitting on a high stool, leaning against the wall next to Good News’s double green doors.

“Harold. How’s it goin’?”

“Cain’t complain. I’m eatin’ good an’ stayin’ outta jail. How’s Fearless?”

Almost everyone who knew me did so by way of Fearless. I didn’t mind.

“He’s fine. Doin’ a li’l stint wit’ Milo Sweet.”

“Yeah,” Harold said. “I hear that Albert Rive been lookin’ for Milo.”

“Where you hear that?”

“Whisper. He come around lookin’ for Al.”

“What about my cousin — Useless Grant?”

“Useless your cousin, man? Damn. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“What you mean by that?” I asked.

“I guess it could come in handy bein’ related to a snake. I mean, maybe the snake tell ya where all the other snakes be hidin’.”

We both laughed.

“But have you seen ’im?” I asked.

“Not for two, three weeks, I haven’t. No, sir. I don’t work Tuesday, Wednesday, though. Maybe he come by then.”

On the inside Ha Tsu’s looked more like a rundown fishing boat than a dining room. There were ceramic lobsters, shrimp, and other shellfish placed everywhere: on counters, on the walls, hanging in clusters from ropes over and next to each booth. There were dark-colored glass floats hanging by the dozen in fishnets, and the booths were of unfinished wood with peeling sea-green fake-leather cushions for seats.

The counter was nice. Formica and chrome. The cracked green linoleum was clean and without splinters.

“Hi, Paris,” Mum, a young Chinese woman, said. She was related to Ha Tsu somehow and worked as a waitress every day of the week.

Ha was behind the counter. I liked the middle-aged Chinese partly because he was one of the few men I knew who was shorter than I. He liked me because he believed I had a sense of humor.

“Paris,” he hailed. “How you doing?”

“Not bad, Ha. What’s goin’ on around here?”

“Color people study revolution,” he said, cocking an eye at unseen spies.

“They should be studyin’ their ABCs,” I said.

Ha laughed and slapped my forearm.

“You right about that, bruddah,” he agreed. “But you know I hear ’em talkin’. They not happy. Soon the world know.”

“Maybe I better stock up on The Communist Manifesto,” I offered.

“Put your money in gold,” he advised, and I wondered about the treasure he must have buried somewhere.

“What’s good today?” I asked the warlord of Watts.

“Chicken with walnuts, snow peas, and my extra-fancy white rice. Each grain inch long.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You like it.”

Ha went away to let me consider the next part of our talk.

Most people thought that I was harmless at best. I read books and stayed in most of the time. I didn’t have any kind of reputation except in the sex category, and even there I was no Fearless Jones. Women would leave their date to be with Fearless.

As I said, most people didn’t pay me any attention. Not so with Ha Tsu. His eyes were nearly shut all the time, but he saw everything. He heard everything too. When I came nosing around he realized that my questions and actions had purpose. He had heard the stories about people I looked for.

Don’t get me wrong. On the whole I was innocuous. But now and then I did work for Milo and helped Fearless when he got into a jam. And when I did, and Ha Tsu saw me, he knew that I had something going on.

I didn’t want be out in the streets looking for Useless. I didn’t want to find thousands of stolen dollars or moldering bodies. But there I was.

Ha brought my afternoon repast. It was delicious. He poured us both cups of fragrant jasmine tea and sat with me, as there were few other patrons at that hour.

“You look for Al Rive?” Ha Tsu asked.

“No. Why?”

“I hear Milo want him.” Ha hunched his shoulders and opened his mouth. He was missing some teeth.

“No. For my cousin,” I said. “Useless Grant.”

“He your cousin?”

“Uh-huh. And I have never been thankful for that fact.”

Again Ha laughed.

“You should come work for me, Paris,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Then I laugh all times.”

“Have you seen Useless?”

“Five days.”

“Really? How was he?”

“He okay, I guess,” Ha said. “Talking ’bout how he gonna get rich.”

“How?”

“Off of white devils.” Ha smiled a smile that would frighten a child of any age.

“How’s he gonna do that?”

“I don’t know. But he tell me that if you got a man by his dick, even if he white he gonna go where you say. Your cousin funny too.”

At the end of the counter was a doorway covered by a black-and-white-checkered curtain. Behind the curtain was a steel-bound door to some stairs that led up to Jerry Twist’s pool parlor. Only certain people were allowed up into Jerry’s place. If you were Van Cleave or Fearless Jones, or with somebody of that stature, you could go up any time you wanted to. But a schlub like me didn’t have a chance without an invitation.

“You think I could go up that way?” I asked my host.

Ha grimaced at the fabric. His left eye enlarged and he said, “It’s a magic carpet. Only open for men with power.”

“Open sesame,” I said.

Neither the curtain nor the restaurant owner moved.

Abracadabra, Shazam, hail hail. I said all these words, but the fabric did not flutter.

Ha shrugged and walked away from me.

I went into my pocket and came out with a dollar.

“Hey, Mum,” I called to the waitress.

She came over to me with a dazed and innocent look on her face. Mum was dressed in the black-and-white uniform of half the waitresses in America. But she carried it off with more elegance and beauty than Jayne Mansfield could have imagined.

“Yes, Paris?” she asked, but I heard another question.

“You got change for a dollar?”

“For you.”

When I think back on my youth, remembering moments like those, I realize that I have squandered my life.