Downtown (36 page)

“You look good,” Luke said to me. “Look like you’re ready to swing all night.”

“I am,” I said, and did a little bump-and-grind in the empty parking lot. I wore skin-tight, low-riding blue jeans with belled bottoms over a pair of Teddy’s see-through vinyl boots and a turtleneck poor-boy sweater, sleeveless and cut high so that a wedge of midriff showed. The sweater was tight enough, Teddy said, to be trashy, and I agreed, but did not change it. I had glued on, ineptly, a pair of dime-store false eyelashes, and had a thick frosting of Carnaby Coral on my mouth, and wooden dangle earrings that almost brushed my shoulders. Lavender granny sunglasses completed the ensemble. I looked, Teddy had said when I left the apartment to meet Luke and John Howard, as tacky as gully dirt.

“But great,” she added. “Slutty and go-to-hell and absolutely great. I wish Brad could see you.”

“Yeah, that would just about do it,” I said dryly. I was still angry at him for calling Matt about the story, and determined to tell him so when he called me on Sunday, as he had promised.

“Do that again,” Luke said now, and I repeated the bump-and-grind and held my hand out to John Howard, and he took it, and we did a few exaggerated, hip-swinging, ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 288

frug-like steps on the gritty pavement. Luke swung the Leica up and shot.

“Y’ll are sure enough by-God goners now,” he said, letting the camera bounce off his chest and ambling toward the motel office. “Cross me and I’ll circulate that in Corkie and the SCLC.”

“Corkie wouldn’t know what it was,” I said.

“You can see worse than that any night at Paschal’s,” John said. “And you have.”

“Not from you, bro,” Luke grinned, and we went into the motel to find the convention.

We found, instead, an empty lobby with burn-scarred Naugahyde furniture and overflowing pedestal ashtrays and a long plastic rubber plant that someone had decorated with round gold foil-wrapped condoms. Behind the desk an enormously fat white man sat, licking his index finger and paging through a cheap Bible. Over his knees was a broken shotgun. On the desk was a small American flag stuck upright in a coffee cup. At our approach the fat man looked up.

His look of weary inquiry changed to hostility when he saw me. He looked slowly from me to John Howard and then to Lucas Geary. He had small, slitted light eyes and white brows and lashes, and the heavy smell of stale sweat reached out from him to where we stood.

“Got no vacancies,” he said, staring narrowly at my chest.

“We don’t want a room,” Luke said in an ineffably gentle drawl. “We’re looking for the convention. The black disc jockeys?”

“You a disc jockey?” the man said to John Howard. He pronounced it dee-isk jawkey, drawing out the syllables insultingly.

“No,” John Howard said.

“Look like one, got up like that,” the man said.

289 / DOWNTOWN

“We’re here to do a story on the convention for
Downtown
magazine,” I said in what I supposed to be an authoritative voice. I saw Luke swallow a smile, and knew I was once again sounding like a Junior Leaguer.

“We have press passes,” I added idiotically.

“Do you now,” he said, leering and looking pointedly at my breasts and midriff. “You want to show me your…press pass, sweetie?”

“Are you the manager?” John Howard said pleasantly. His face was still.

“Night clerk. Manager ain’t here. I’m runnin’ ’er tonight,”

the man said. “Somethin’ you wanted…sir?”

His tone said, “boy.”

“We’ve got a legitimate appointment to do this story, and I’d appreciate it if you’d tell us where the delegates are,” I said, my face hot. “I’d hate to have to tell my editor we got no cooperation from you.”

He got up and started around the desk, waddling cum-brously.

“There’s some of ’em down on the end, to the back,” he said into my face. “And a few more upstairs in the rooms by the ice machines. Them’s passed out, I think. Ain’t heard that goddamned caterwaulin’ in a while. The live ones are likely around back. Think I heard ’em throwin’ coconuts at each other whallago. But I tell you one thing, girlie, you ain’t goin’ back there. White girls ain’t gon’ drink and party and I don’t know what all with coloreds while I’m on duty. Two of ’em already gone back there early this afternoon and they ain’t come out, and I ain’t going back there lookin’ for ’em, either. I told the manager wasn’t no good going to come from letting coloreds carry on in this motel—”

Luke laid down his cameras and ambled up to the desk clerk. He reached out and took the man’s fleshy cheek gently in his hand and twisted it. The man took a deep ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 290

breath and reached back for the shotgun. John Howard went around the desk as quickly and lightly as a cat, and picked the gun up and held it behind him. I stared.

“We are from the
New York Times
,” Luke said softly and merrily into the man’s gobbling, outraged face. “All three of us have identification if you require it, and you should know that there are four or five more of us on the way. If you’d like to change your mind about directing us to the convention delegates, we’ll go on back. Otherwise, I’m going to make one quick phone call and every newspaper and wire service in this country will have a stringer out here before you can change your britches. Your decision, friend.”

The man wrenched his cheek out of Luke’s grasp and retreated into an inner office and slammed the door. We heard the lock click into place.

“After you, Harrison Salisbury,” John Howard said, bowing slightly to Luke, and we got halfway down the sour-smelling, smoky hall before we collapsed against the wall in silent, helpless laughter.

The back wing of the motel, where the fat man had said the convention delegates would be, was hot and dark and smelled powerfully of marijuana and liquor, and seemed to me as abandoned as a newly discovered Egyptian tomb.

Walking down the shabby corridor was eerie; I felt the back of my neck prickle, and thought of every bad horror movie I had ever seen. We looked into one filthy, disheveled room after another: tangled bedclothes and strewn underclothing and empty plates and glasses said that life had been here, but the silence and the buzzing of flies said that it had gone.

I waited, teeth clenched, to come to the room where the bodies were piled.

“It ain’t exactly the Hyatt Regency, is it?” John Howard said grimly.

291 / DOWNTOWN

“For God’s sake, don’t pull back any shower curtains,”

Luke muttered. He had the Leica to his face, shooting one empty, terrible room after another. I knew that we could make something of the accommodations these visitors were forced to occupy in our article, if we could find faces to go with them.

We turned a corner into another long, stifling, shadowy corridor and heard music, faraway and insistent, the percussion first. It sounded as if, in the farthest rooms, someone was playing jungle drums.

“Man is in the forest,” Luke said.

About halfway down the hall we pushed in a half-opened door and looked into the room. Grunts and squeals were coming from it, and a pounding, squeaking rhythm that I could not identify. Then I saw that a man and a woman were having sex half-on, half-off the sagging mattress, and that the sounds were coming from them and the mattress. Both were black and naked; she sat astraddle him, and at that moment they jackknifed off the bed and the woman shrieked and the man howled like a wolf.

I jerked my head out of the room and whirled away, face flaming.

“Whoa, ’scuse me, brother,” Luke said under his breath.

He did not lift the camera; I would have slapped it out of his hand if he had.

“People will do it,” John Howard said. His face was calm and even a bit amused, but there was an involuntary lift to his upper lip, and a slight flaring of his nostrils, as if he could not disguise his disgust. I walked stiffly ahead of them both down the hall, the images of the sweat-slick black bodies contorting on the bed and John Howard’s rictus of fastidiousness burning behind my eyes. Both were disturbing.

Neither should have been, really.

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 292

At the end of the hall two doors were flung wide open and a powerful barrage of sound boiled out into the hall. It was Motown, a big, prowling wail of sound from an obviously good sound system. I recognized Aretha Franklin hammering out the ending of “Respect,” and then, with no pause at all, the beginning of Otis Redding doing Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa. John Howard went into the nearest of the rooms, and Luke and I followed him.

It was completely dark; no lamps were lit, and the drapes were drawn tightly, but I don’t think we could have made out anything of substance if the room had been floodlit. The sweet, acrid smoke of marijuana cigarettes was too thick. I choked on it, and coughed until I had to back out of the room. When my eyes stopped tearing and I went back in, someone had switched on a dim lamp, and I saw that John and Luke were standing just inside the door talking to an impossibly thin, yellowish man in a gigantic Afro and a silver lame jumpsuit, who was lying on one of the beds smoking.

Next to the man, in the crook of his arm, a heavyset black woman in only a loosely draped towel lay, smoking and drinking from a bottle of sweet wine. As my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, I saw that the other bed and the floor were occupied by couples in various stages of undress, all smoking and drinking, and that they had probably been at it for some time. Everyone had the stunned, loose-limbed beatific demeanor that I had come to associate with pot.

Moreover, the bedside tables and floor corners were piled high with takeout food boxes, and half-eaten pizzas and gnawed chicken wings competed with empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays for floor space. Food and sweet smoke: no hard drugs here. I relaxed slightly.

The thin man uncoiled himself from the bed and stood, swaying slightly, to give me an exaggeratedly courtly bow.

Behind him the woman stared levelly and 293 / DOWNTOWN

insolently at us, and let the towel fall away from her great breasts. Luke grinned and raised the camera, and she pulled it up. The insolence gave way to dull anger.

“Allow me to present Lord Byron Playboy, from Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Luke said, and the thin yellow man said, in a perfect Liverpudlian accent, “Chawmed.”

“Likewise,” I said, smiling. Lord Byron smiled back, and I saw with simple disbelief that his front teeth had been filed to sharp points.

“The better to eat you with, my dear,” he said. I said nothing.

“I’ve explained to these folks what we’re about, and Lord Byron here says it’s okay by him if we take some shots,” Luke said. “Seems like the rest of the folks are either…napping or over at La Carrousel. Horace Silver’s in town. He also tells me that there’s a big barbecue tonight over by AU for the delegates, thrown by none other than our little friends the Panthers. So the pickings here are pretty slim as far as the story goes. No offense, my man.”

He nodded to Lord Byron Playboy, who had collapsed back on the bed. Lord Byron nodded back affably.

“’Fraid y’all stuck with jes’ us no-’count, spaced-out niggers,” he beamed. “Gon’ have to go to the bobbycue to git the in crowd. Ought to be worth it, though. Them Panthers look real pretty in them little Panther suits. Make good pitchers, they would.”

He looked over at John Howard, who stood leaning against a wall, studying him with courteous interest.

“You ain’t one of ’em, are you, brother? Seem to me like I know your face from somewhere.”

“I ain’t one of ’em, no, brother,” John said mildly.

“You with this magazine then?”

I knew that Lord Byron Playboy was parodying the rough dialect of the uneducated black man, and guessed ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 294

that he meant it as a taunt to John Howard. But his smile was still brilliant and lazy and startling, with the vulpine pointed teeth.

“No,” John said. “I’m with SCLC when I’m with anything.

These are friends of mine. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Whooee,” Lord Byron said. “SCLC, FBI, NBC—Lord Byron don’t know nothin’ ’bout no initials. You mean you along to ride shotgun, don’t you, brother? Keep this nice white girl and boy from gittin’ set upon by savages?”

“You don’t look too savage to me…brother,” John said lazily. “Despite the Secret Squirrel teeth. What did you have in mind?”

“Why, bro, no mind at all,” Lord Byron said, laughing mightily. “Go on and take your pictures, and then we give you a little somethin’ to puff, or sip, or maybe a snack, if you fancy chawin’ a bone.”

He waved his hand loosely at Luke, who grinned and lifted the camera and shot around the room at the bodies on the beds and floors. No one moved, except to follow the camera with bloodshot, half-lidded eyes. Otis Redding segued into Ben E. King: “Stand by me, ohhhhh stand by me…”

Someone began to giggle, and I looked around for the sound, a smile tugging at my lips. A giggle was better than nothing. The sound went on and on, and then I realized that it was not a giggle at all, but sobbing, that got louder and louder until it was a wail, sick and hopeless, dreadful to hear.

It broke off into vomiting, and then the whining sobbing began again. I thought that it was coming from behind the closed bathroom door. I looked around at the people in the room, but no one was paying any attention. I looked at Luke and John, who were looking at each other. The sobbing began to rise

295 / DOWNTOWN

again, and I went quickly across the littered floor, literally stepping over couples, and opened the door into the bathroom.

A woman lay on the floor, curled in a fetal position around the base of the toilet. The bathroom was indescribable, unspeakable, filthy, hideous smelling. The woman lay with her head buried in her thin arms, and I could not see her face, but I saw that she was white. The desk clerk had said that two white women had come into the motel earlier; this must be one of them. There had to be something terribly wrong with her. The room reeked of vomit, and there was vomit caked in her hair, and on her arms and legs. Why the hell wasn’t someone doing something for her? I took a deep breath and leaned over her.