A Conversation with the Mann (12 page)

Fran, seeing my heart sinking, tossed out some cheer-up bits to keep me from drowning in my own misery. “It's only because
I get that same handful of guys coming in to hear me. They come, they drink, so Ray swings me a little extra.”

We stopped walking for a second under the shine thrown down by a streetlamp.

“He does it 'cause he wants to swing you a little extra in the back of his Chrysler.”

“I'll be careful, Dad.” That came with a smile.

Warm as the smile was, it was no good for making me feel better. Of its own free will my mouth opened and heartache came spilling
out. “Christ, Frances, I'm …”

“You're what?”

What was I? What word was there to describe the hurt of failure forming inside me? “Sick. I'm sick of my life, sick of spending
my days moving furniture and my nights trying to get boozers to listen to jokes, and for what? For pocket change? For goddamn
…”

My hands caught my falling head. I could have cried just then. Except that Fran was a girl, and, friend or not, I wasn't about
to cry in front of a girl, except for that … So I did some dry crying. I wailed without tears. “I just want to make it, Fran.
I want out of this life. I want—”

“What do you want?”

“I want to quit getting beat down.” I corkscrewed against the defeat tearing at me. “I want to quit taking punches. Long as
I can remember I've had people pushing me around, treating me like dirt, treating me like a nothing. All my life I've been
nothing. Worse than that. I've been a black nothing.”

“Don't say that.”

“You ask my pop, he'll tell you. You ask any white person on the street, they'll tell you what I am.”

“Including me, because I don't think that. I don't think of you as black, and I certainly don't think of you as nothing.”

I quit my pity for a tick, looked at Fran. I wanted to read her, wanted to know if she was saying things to say things or
if she meant her words. Even in the streetlamp's bad light she was obvious. She was honesty.

I had to break off my stare; embarrassment juked my head away—her being so strong and me being so weak.

I asked Fran, I looked across the street, but I asked: “Why do you do this, hang out all night just to get in a song in front
of drunks? You're not like me. You have a good home life.”

She laughed a little. “No. Yeah, I've got a real nice life. Nice parents, live in a nice neighborhood. I should meet a nice
Jewish boy, have a nice wedding, move to a nice suburb and just …” Fran laughed again, this time pained. It was like the hurt
I'd been feeling had infected her. “You know something? As much as you don't want your life, I don't want that: a house on
Long Island with a couple of kids and a dog, and a Buick in the drive. I don't want any of that the worst way I know how.

“What I want is to be onstage, in front of people, performing. I want to sing. I … I need to. And if that means it's at the
Fourteenth Street Theater at twenty past two, better that than trying to figure out what flowers to plant in the garden and
what towels go with the bathroom tile. I know that's got to sound … I've got a thousand other choices, but I can't help it;
I can't help the way I feel. I feel—”

“You feel like you were born different.”

Fran shot me a look, slightly hot, as though I'd just announced her secret shame to the world. But after a beat her stare
softened. She said: “Sometimes I feel that way.”

Fran went quiet. The sound of her voice was replaced by the dull hum of life: the few cars that rode the avenues, the sound
of them echoing through the skyscraper canyons. A siren went off somewhere we couldn't see. A guy at a newsstand talking to
another guy who was waiting for the early edition to get thudded down from the cruising
Post, News, Herald Trib
, or
Times
trucks was going on about
them
, and about how he was sick of
them
, and how the president should do this or that about
them
before it's too late.

Fran said: “Let's go down to the Village tomorrow night.”

I shook my head to the idea. “I hate that.”

“Hate what?”

“Going to the clubs down there, seeing people doing better than me.”

“Come on. It'll be fun. We'll catch a couple of acts, get us both jazzed up again. Jackieeeeee”—dragging my name out—“don't
make me go down there by myself.” Fran tossed me more of that smile of hers.

Fran was okeydoke, the kind of girl you thought of as one of the guys. Except when she smiled. When she smiled she was all
woman.

“… Okay.”

“How did I know you were going to say that? I better run and catch my train. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Wait up.” I held out a couple of bucks. “Here. Grab a cab.”

“Jackie …”

“You can't ride the subway this time of night.”

“And I'm not taking the little bit you hardly make.”

“You don't get home safe, we can't go to the Village.” I tossed back that smile she'd given me.

A little hesitation; then Frances traded the money for a kiss on the cheek.

“I love you, Jackie,” she said.

I watched Frances hop a Checker for Williamsburg.

I spent forty minutes underground waiting for the uptown local.

T
IME.
P
LACE.
D
IDN'T MATTER.
New York. The modern age. Didn't matter. Didn't, but maybe it did. Maybe it mattered more. New York City, 1956; eight million
people. You are one in eight million. So, maybe the instinct to not be alone, the need for tribalism, mattered more even among
the millions, even—especially—in New York. A voice by itself is nothing. A voice timesed and timesed and timesed again is
a shout not to be ignored. The city was a collection of tribes trying to be heard. The Chinese had Chinatown pressing right
against Little Italy for the Italians. The blacks took Harlem. The Puerto Ricans were left the crumbling west side of Hell's
Kitchen. The rich had Park Avenue. The rich had the Upper West Side. They had the Upper Es and Wall Street to work on, and
Fifth Avenue and all of Fifty-seventh to shop along. The establishment had established itself all over the borough.

There wasn't much Manhattan left for the rest looking for their tribe: the headstrong, the independent. The not-like-yous.
Young, disillusioned America that wasn't buying into suburbia and
Father Knows Best
, or tail-finned automobiles and Automats and automa-toning on commuter rails—nameless, faceless, soulless—to do the corporate
job for the corporate pay somewhere waaaaay down the corporate ladder. They didn't go for duck and cover. They positively
didn't think much of Norman Vincent Peale. They
did
believe television rotted the brain, all commies weren't bad, and if they were, they weren't as bad as Pat Boone stealing
from the Negroes. They were the new tribe migrating from all points of Bohemia. They staked their claim south of Fourteenth
Street, north of Houston and between Fourth Ave. and the Hudson River. Greenwich Village. Ground zero for the East Coast cultural
revolution. The Village cribbed every fresh artist, every new musician, and every cat and kitten who desired to be one. Poets,
actors, writers, painters. The Beats. The Beat boys, turtlenecked and goateed. The Beat girls, sporting sloppy Joe sweaters
and drainpipes that ran a few inches short of their flat Capezios. The uniform of non-conformity. All in black. Always in
black. Black was the color of the middle-class rebellion, an uprising waged by finger snapping to free verse in the cellars,
the coffeehouses and jazz joints that choked MacDougal Street. They came to the Village wide-eyed and truly believing that
theirs was the poem, or painting, or performance piece that was going to make the status quo sit down, shut up, and take notice.
And if not, at the very least maybe they could score some good drugs, have some loose sex, and just generally be hep.

In that scene, in that craaazy scene, Fran and I could pal around stare-free.
Down there
a black kid and a white Jewish girl were routine.
Down there
men and men were routine, same with women and women, and men and men who dressed like women, and any other combo you could
dream up.
Down there
everything was cool, so every once in a while
down there
was where Fran and I would hang in the clubs: The Village Vanguard, Upstairs at the Duplex, The Bitter End, Bon Soir. Dark
little dives and slightly upscale cabarets that featured talent both famous and fresh. None featured more of each than The
Blue Angel. The Angel it was called. A night at The Angel was a night of digging Eartha Kitt, or Julie Wilson, or the ever-sultry
Lena Horne. Nichols and May were around doing their comedy bits. Mort Sahl was breaking in his act, toting a newspaper and
V-neck sweater like he was Charlie Harvard. You worked The Angel you had real talent. You worked The Angel you had more than
just a dreamer's chance of hitting it big.

I didn't work The Angel.

I felt queer about that joint, felt about it the same as you'd feel about a woman you dug but knew in your heart you could
never have. Catching a show there was a harsh reminder of how far away success was, the distance from my seat in the audience
to the stage.Nothing in my life ever seemed any farther. And the irony of the agony: As much as I hoped one day The Angel
would figure into my future, I never figured doing nothing more than watching a show would kick my life in a whole new direction.
But it's when you're not expecting things that you step off a curb and get yourself side-swiped. I got hit hard.

Frances and I were at The Angel catching acts—a few singers, a few comics—me having a good time despite washing each performance
down with a straight shot of jealous envy. It was a good way through the show when the emcee stepped to the mike, did a preamble,
and brought out the next performer.

She took the stage.

I can say this: I can say at no time in my life previously had I ever seen anyone—anything—so beautiful that they actually
caused me pain. Pain from the fear that the desire I instantly felt would never be fulfilled.

She was easily, in my mind, the loveliest woman I'd ever seen: black but light in tone, coffee with cream. An unbroken mile
of perfect flesh. Her face and features were smooth and rounded, small and delicate—childlike, which made her wide eyes look
all the wider. Just above her lip on the left side was a tiny mole. A beauty mark. It was the only thing about her that even
came close to being a blemish.

I can't say what I was feeling when I saw her was love. Still more kid than man, I didn't really know what love was. My mother
had showed me some. Grandma Mae. Pop had taught me everything it wasn't. But what this woman made me feel was all brand-new.
She was everything my heart had ever dreamed of.

I didn't know her name, hadn't been paying any attention when the emcee'd brought her up. I sat and listened to her set and
longed in ignorance. Her voice was high in pitch but rich, stopping way shy of being shrill. In range it was full and captivating,
the last sound sailors heard before a Siren lulled them to eternity.

Fran's elbow poking at my ribs got me down off my cloud.

“ Pick up your tongue, buddy.”

I shut my gaping mouth and went back to staring at the woman onstage.

The second she finished her set, I was first up out of my seat clapping like I was trying to slap my hands off my wrists.

As she left the stage she gave a thankful smile to no one in particular, to the audience in general, but I claimed it for
my own.

Fran tugged me down into my seat. The emcee took back the mike.

He said, and I listened real careful: “The kitten's a canary. She something, isn't she? Clap the hands, snap the fingers.
Thomasina Montgomery!”

I was back up on my feet, back to beating my hands. Yeah. She was something.

O
UTSIDE THE
B
LUE
A
NGEL,
outside the entrance. I was waiting. It was getting late. I was getting tired. I didn't care. I was waiting for Thomasina,
and I would keep on waiting even if the end of time rolled around before she came out of the club. Fran, trouper that she
was, kept watch with me though we'd been standing out in the getting-cooler-by-the-minute air for a good long while. I would've
thought that we'd missed her, that Thomasina might've already left and headed home, but the instant she quit the stage I paid
up and dragged Fran outside just so there was no chance of her getting by me.

Unless … was there a back way out of The Blue Angel?

“What are you going to say to her?” Frances yelled over to me. She stood a little ways away, giving me all the space I'd need
to try whatever I was going to try with Thomasina … Miss Montgomery….

“I'm going to … I'll tell her … I've got a line for her.”

“A line?” Fran found that funny. “Okay, Mr. Poitier, you give her a line.”

Truth is I didn't know what to say. I wanted to sound cool, not cuckoo. Complimentary, not off the cob. But what do you say
to a woman who's probably been tossed lines by every Charlie who'd ever caught her act, every guy who's seen her walking down
the street? In my head I tested all my best bits: Excuse me, miss. I'm a little offended, were you going to pass right by
me without even flirting a little? Are your feet tired, darlin', 'cause you've been running through my mind. Your mama must've
been a bee, 'cause you've got a voice like honey.