A Conversation with the Mann (19 page)

If I wasn't hip to it before, Tommy made her thinking real clear to me. “You think money's everything. You think it's everything,
but it's not.”

We were starting to have the conversation with near regularity. Over meals, before lovemaking, after watching other acts—Tommy
would want to know if I thought they were talented, or just popular. One night after she'd finished a set, the audience sending
her offstage with extra-strong claps and whistles, she beelined for me, faking lament, worrying that if people were digging
her, she must not have any depth anymore: “I don't know, Jackie. I don't know. I think I'm selling out.”

The comments were sharp, never subtle. Tommy's remarks never needled, they hacked at you razor-style. But even at that, it
wasn't as if she was trying to be smart-aleck about things. To her, for me, it was a kind of therapy, especially in the months
since those boys from CBS treated me as if I were a one-eyed albino. Day by day I wanted nothing more than to increase my
stature, elevate myself to a place where slicks in suits had no say over me. They could hate me, they could despise me on
their own time, but I wanted only to be so big that to my face they could do nothing but love me. Notions that didn't sit
at all well with Tommy.

“Why are you always on this trip: If I were a star, everything would be great. If I were rich, life would be fine.”

Arguing wasn't how I wanted to spend my last days with my girl before going off on the road. We were walking on Sixth, bundled
mostly in each other and kept warm by our steamed words, after a matinee showing at the Ziegfeld. As if I didn't already have
Tommy hot enough at me, same as every other Charlie in America I'd guaranteed myself a standing reservation in the doghouse
by insisting we take in a film staring European sexpot Lilian Davi.

“You're telling me,” I told Tommy, “folding money's not better than trying to get by on fews and twos? You get some green,
you get some juice, there's nobody who doesn't respect you.”

“Why would you want their respect? Why would you want to minstrel your way into having a bunch of ofays who hate you pretend
they don't?”

Yeah, okay, on a level, maybe, Tommy had a point. Maybe. But it was the point of a girl who grew up in the pretty, pleasant
Germantown section of Philly. The point I was trying to make came hot off the streets of Harlem. I was arriving at a truth,
one I'd been putting the dodge on for the sake of our relationship. Like myself, Tommy was born different. She had something
inside her that made her unlike other people. The problem was, the thing that made Tommy different from others also made her
different from me.

“You don't get it,” I told her. “You come from money.”

“I come from parents who worked hard and gave me and my sister what they could.”

“They gave you a good life, that's all I'm saying. I want to be able to do the same. Get a house somewhere nice, a quiet,
tree-lined neighborhood. We could do the whole scene: picket fence, swing on the por—”

If she'd taken a bullet, Tommy couldn't have stopped any deader. If I'd smacked her, she couldn't have looked at me any more
shocked, her pretty little eyes never so wide.

She asked: “We?”

“What?”

“You said we.
We
could do the whole scene.”

A hundred times I'd mind-riffed on a thousand different combos of the future of me and Thomasina Montgomery. Me and her shacking
up, married up. Married and living in the city, or upstate. Kids got blended into this fantasy or that. But the one thing
every variation had in common was us. The two of us together. Me saying “we”—to her, surprising—was just talking out loud
about what I'd already worked over again and again and again and again.

Still, letting your main know you sit around pipe-dreaming on domestication is strictly a no-no.

Backpedaling: “… I was just supposing. I wasn't saying anything.” Trying not to backpedal too far: “Not that I wasn't saying
anything at all, I was just …”

I quit there. No point going on. I didn't own Tommy's attention anymore. It belonged to something that had caught her eye.
Up the avenue, an appliance store. A crowd, mixed black and white, pressed up to the front window, hypnotized by the chorus
of images projected from a display of televisions.

Me and Tommy walked for the crowd, bobbed around trying to watch what they were watching. No good.

I asked a brother: “What's going on?”

“News film. Little Rock.”

All the more backstory he needed to give. Looking between shoulders, I caught some of the monochrome horror show. Black children
trying to go to school. Blocking their way were bayonet-flashing National Guardsmen—protecting the lilified school from the
young invaders—and a gang of whites lynch-mob crazy. Yelling. Screaming. Some rocks got thrown. And through all that, through
the wailing voices and hurled slurs and the stench of violence, past the Guardsmen who would just as soon let the mob loose
on the “niggers” as muss their uniforms trying to stop them, the children quietly walked up the stairs and into the school
to do some learning.

I said to myself, but out loud: “Why in the hell would anybody let their children go through that?”

The brother I'd questioned didn't care for my comment and let me know with a “Negro, please” twist of his lip. “I expect so
your children won't have to.”

Done with me, the brother moved off.

Tommy, her stare zigzagging past bodies to the TV, said: “It's terrible.”

“Yeah.” On the TV: Some crazed whites chased down a black who just happened to be out walking. They beat him bloody. From
what I could see, they beat him until he was just about dead. “It is.”

Tommy kept standing where she was, kept juking her head around, trying to grab a look at one of the sets. Maybe that was her
way of showing support.

So I let her. For a while.

Pretty soon I gave a tug to Tommy's sleeve and I headed off and she followed. Since I couldn't do much concerning America's
race issue standing around in front of an appliance store, I figured I should bust my conk on problems I could solve. Like
coming up with some new bits for my set.

M
Y FATHER WAS MOSTLY SOBER
, or as close as he got anymore. He was sitting at the kitchen table. Eating. You could call it eating. You could call it
shoveling food in the general vicinity of the hole in his face.

His level of communication, the sum of hospitality he could extend to his son as I entered the room, amounted to: “Want some?”

I went to the table. I ladled out a bunch of whatever it was Pop was having—maybe rice and chili—onto a plate, sat. We had
a meal together. No eye contact. No words. Our only conversation the dueling of his spoon and my fork against our plates.
Anyway, it was our version of having a meal together.

I said: “I'm going away for a while.”

“When you come back, bring me a—”

“Not coming back. Said: not for a while.”

That paused him for a tick. “Whadaya mean, a while?”

“Might be a couple of months. Might be more.”

“You ain't goin' nowheres.” He said that like it was a simple fact he knew to be true: The sky is blue. Water is wet. I wasn't
going any where. He said it, then shoveled more of the slop toward his mouth.

I ate some more, too, then I corrected my pop. “I am going away. It's going to be a few months. Might be more.”

“Where? Where do you think you goin'”

“To do some clubs on the road.”

“Nightclubs … ?”

“Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago. A few other places. Going to end things up in Miami.”

Pop didn't care for me explaining things to him. Heating himself up: “Work a few times in the city, you think you somethin'
big. Think you somethin' special. Ain't nothing, Jackie.” He just about snarled. “Jackie … Know why I name you Jackie? 'Cause
tha's a girl's name, and tha's all you are.” He just about laughed. “You nothin' but a sissy little—”

“I'm a good comic.”

“Ain't nobody gonna pay to see yo nigger ass! ” Pop's anger flushed his black skin. His chest pumped short, hot breaths.

I stayed quiet, the quiet only making Pop all the madder.

A few more scoops of food. After that I stood from the table, took my plate to the sink, and put it with the others Pop had
left there for me to wash.

To him I said, even in tone: “People will pay to see me. They'll pay this time, and they'll pay more next time. And I'm going
to take their money and get me some nice things, a nice apartment. And when I get that nice apartment, I'm going to leave
you here.”

“You ain't gonna—”

“I'm going to move so far away, all you'll be is some black man I'm going to have to think hard about to remember.”

“Ain't goin' nowheres! Not gonna let you go nowheres! ” Pop clutched at his spoon, ready to use it for something besides eating.

“It's already happening. Sid's booked me into—”

“That Jew? That Jew done this?”

“Don't you talk about him that way.”

“That Jew got all up in yo head an' poison you against me.”

“You don't talk about him like that! ” For the first time since I'd walked through the door, hard as I'd tried to keep cool,
Pop had finally managed to edge me up. I didn't care what he had to say about me. There was nothing else he could add to the
volume he'd written. But I wasn't going to let him talk on Sid. “He's more a man than you are. He's a
man
, a decent man, and that right there is one whole hell of a lot more than you'll—”

“Learn yo nigger ass!” Pop came at me; the spoon, having completed its transformation from utensil to weapon, led the way.
But for all his anger, Pop's move was powerless, the lumbering and incoherent charge of a perpetual addict, his actions as
exaggerated as they were slow. It took little effort to sidestep him, grip him by the shoulder. It took even less to push
him away. So little that the conservative energy I put into my defense sent Pop to the floor.

It wasn't that I'd suddenly gotten tough with myself, gone Charles Atlas and was paying back some sand-kicking bully. It was
just that I wasn't a kid anymore. And same as I no longer believed in imaginary monsters under my bed, I knew my pop wasn't
a demon, just a sad old man who no longer had a hold over me.

From the floor he looked up at me with a hurt that was greater than his little bit of physical pain. His kid—his weakling
kid—had just shoved him down. Whatever manhood Pop had left had just taken a beating.

I said to him, said very clearly in the same manner used to communicate with an animal that doesn't have the capacity to dig
your lingo: “Sid has set up some club dates. I'm going with him on the road. I'll send you some money for rent, food. Use
it for booze. Use it for whatever. I don't care. Not anymore. But I'm going, Pop. I'm going away.”

The last time I'd told my pop I was going off on my own I spent the night on the floor—belt-whipped and bleeding—and slinked
away while he was passed out. This time I would pack a bag and walk out the door when I was good and rested and ready.

T
HE IDEA OF GETTING DRESSED UP
and going out to a club for a meal and a show is laid up in the same burial ground with the notion of
not
buying a car because its tail fins aren't big enough.

But used to be …

Used to be a guy would put on his sharkskin, his lady would get dolled up in a beehive and pearls, then head off for a night
of adult entertainment. Adult meaning steaks, some drinks, and a smoke before settling in to watch a name act from so close,
you had to dodge the sweat that flew from their hardworking showbiz bodies as they gave and gave and gave until you had no
choice but to jump up and put your hands together.

And real suddenly I was part of that. Sid had pulled his strings, and I was part of the High Life opening up for talent I'd
previously been no closer to than my TV screen.

Week one: Club 500 in A.C. opening for Buddy Greco. Good Guy. Nice Guy. A guy who never knew how to do a show that was less
than one hundred percent. Sid figured Jersey to be a good place for me to start things off: out of New York, out of the Village
with its Village clique and coffeehouse scene but still near enough the city to be “my” crowd, the kind of people I'd been
cracking jokes for since I'd first hit a stage and with just enough boardwalk tourists mixed in so as to tell me what would
and wouldn't fly beyond the bridges and tunnels.