Marijuana Girl (11 page)

"Hold on, man," Joyce said, suddenly smiling. "I don't dig you? What's pot?"

"That good, green Mexican grass," Jerry said. He chuckled--a sound as musical as his trumpet playing it sweet. "Going to have a jam session uptown and we'd like you came along."

"Cool," Joyce said. "The coolest."

"Solid. See you after the next set. We'll all get on a little out back."

11 ~ Transference

Things might have been all right if it hadn't been for Christmas. And they might still have been all right if, just at the beginning of December, Jerry Best's band hadn't gotten the telegram.

Joyce had fallen right in with Ginger and the boys in the band. All day long she would work like a machine tool for the Journal, and at night she would come downtown and have dinner in some Village spot, where it wasn't unusual for seven colored people to be seen together with a white girl, and go over to the Golden Horn, and Joy would hang around until about eleven or twelve o'clock and then go home to bed.

On Mondays, when the club was closed, she would spend the evenings with Jerry and Ginger in an apartment the dark-skinned girl had on West Twelfth Street, and somehow the marijuana would take the edge off the loneliness she felt when she saw how close Jerry and Ginger were.

The part that amazed her about them was that they seemed so glad to have her around, so willing to introduce her to their friends, so anxious to help her in anything she wanted to do.

It was more Jerry than Ginger who showed this concern for her future, because Ginger was, at bottom, an easy-going sort, given to immense indolences and occasional moods; but Jerry was a different cut--a strong, sure individual who knew where he was going, and was going there through the only channels he could find.

One evening, after they had been playing off some phonograph records on Ginger's changer, and while that talkative mood of the weed was still on them, Jerry asked, "Are you going to stick with that machine shop for keeps?"

"I don't know," Joyce said. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Well, you ought to quit," Jerry said. "That right, Gin?"

"Sure, man," Ginger said. "That place is the most uncool for you. You'll wind up so hung you'll flip. My dig is them cats up there got you working so you got no time for just plain grooving yourself."

"She means ..." Jerry started to say.

"I know what she means, Jerry," Joyce said. "But I don't know what to do about it. It's funny with me, I never felt till just about now that I really fit in anywhere. That's something you and Gin did for me. Made me feel--right in there. I never felt it before, I goofed off in school, because I couldn't really feel I was worth anybody paying any attention to because--well, nobody in my own family felt I was worth paying attention to. You know what I mean?"

"Yes, I know," Jerry said. "Maybe I know it better than you think. You kind of get to know these things automatically when you're colored. But you can't just let yourself go, honey. You got to get in there and push. Like, I like music. Music is the greatest with me. Sometimes I dig if they took away music from me I wouldn't be nothing, but when I set off I didn't plan to be a musician. Music was like something I was going to keep for me. That was how I was going to get my kicks. But my real dig was--I was going to be a doctor.

"All the time I was in high school I worked nights as a musician. That's where I got to know Frank, when I was in high school. When we both were. Then we got out and Frank went to college and I was going to take a premedical course, see. I had the loot all saved up. I made enough gold out of music so I could pay my way. But I wanted to do it the right way. No second-rate, all-colored medical schools for me. I was after the best and I had the loot to pay my way--and I couldn't get in. Not medical school, and not even the premeds that I wanted.

"So one day I sat down with me and I figured it out. If you're colored there are ways to get to the top. With the breaks I could make it as a doctor--but I just didn't happen to get the breaks. And the other way was, like, entertainment. You see what colored people make the real money. They're boxers, actors, singers, writers, and musicians. One or two others break out, sometimes. But they're the freaks. Like Ralph Bunche at the U.N., and a couple of scientists and people like that. But what I had to do was--like I don't have any talent for words, and I never was specially handy with my fists--so I like stuck to the thing where I had already got a ways."

It was the first time Joyce had ever heard Jerry talk about himself. "I didn't know that," she said. "I thought you always wanted to be a musician."

"Oh. I did. But the big deal was I was going to be a doctor. Once I made up my mind though. I forgot about the other and got right in there with the blowing."

"Does all right, too," Gin said. "He's right in there with the best." She leaned over from where she sat beside him on the divan and kissed his ear.

"All right. It's cool for me. I dig it. But you got to do what you dig doing. You can't make it doing something you don't like. Way I see it, you ain't awful cool with those machine tool cats. They sound awful square."

"You wouldn't exactly call them hip." Joyce admitted wryly, thinking of Eugene Tip and his colleagues.

"So whyn't you skin an eye. Look around, honey. There's other ways of making the loot. I don't mean another kind of work. Frank said you were great for this kind of stuff; but you ought to get on like a magazine like, say, Look or something; you dig? A real magazine."

Joyce went home that night feeling that things were right. Gin and Jerry were looking out for her. You could feel safe with people like that, people who had your best interests in mind. It was the kind of thing that made you feel wanted. You could go to their house and sit down and turn on the jive, get just a little high and really feel in there. She caught herself thinking in jive, and laughed gaily to herself, making a middle-aged woman facing her in the subway give her a disapproving frown. Then she thought, maybe colored people were the real people, the right people. Maybe that was the way to live ...

It was a hard thing for him to do, and Tony wasn't quite sure he could manage it, even when he was standing in the hallway where Estelle, the Taylor's maid-of-all-work, had left him when she went to find Priscilla Taylor. You can always make some excuse, he thought, and beat it out of here. So then he tried to think up an excuse, such as Mom sent me over to see if I could borrow a cup of sugar.

But when Priscilla Taylor came into the hallway, all Tony could think of to say was, "Miss Taylor, where's Joyce?"

The questions caught the woman completely off guard. Yet it struck her like a blow that she had always known would have to come.

Priscilla said, "Come in the other room, Tony. Leave your coat there on the seat."

He followed her into the living room. The room was immaculate and fussy. Victorian chairs confronted battery-driven electric clocks under glass domes, and annoying antimacassars and tidies cluttered the chair arms and table surfaces.

"Sit down, please," the woman said.

"Thanks, but I can't stay," Tony said. "I just wanted to know where I could reach Joyce?"

"I don't know, Tony." Suddenly she dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief she held crumpled in one hand. "I haven't heard from her since she left."

"Well, where was she going?"

"I don't know, Tony. I don't know what to do." Her voice broke completely. "I don't know anything about that girl. How could she go away like that and not even suggest where she was going?"

"You mean she just went away like that, without even saying where she was going?"

"I've been so distraught, Tony. You can't imagine how this has upset me."

"Let me get this straight, Miss Taylor. Joy just went away and didn't say where she was going. Is that what happened?"

"Yes."

"Well what did you do about it?"

"What could I do?"

"What does Mr. Taylor say?"

"He doesn't know yet."

"You mean you haven't told them that Joy's gone?"

"I couldn't, Tony. I just couldn't. How could I write them over there in Europe that their daughter has run off? Heaven only knows where the girl has gone."

"What about the police? What do they say?"

"I didn't talk to the police."

"Look, Miss Taylor, I don't like to tell you your business, but you'd better call Mr. Taylor, wherever he is, right this minute. Did Joy leave a note or anything?"

"Yes. She left me a note. She just said that she was going away, and wouldn't be coming back. She said I wouldn't hear from her anyway, so that there was no reason for me to worry about her. That's all she said."

"You better start placing that call. It takes a long time to put a call through to Europe. Where are they now?"

"In Rome. My brother's arranging a contract there. But how can I call them? At first I thought she'd be back in a day or so. How can a young girl like that go out on her own? I knew she'd be back. And then time went by, and--and then I just couldn't. I can't."

"This happened in August, Miss Taylor. They have a missing persons bureau, the police, I mean. You call them first and then--No. I have a better idea. Let me see what I can do. I'll be back later." He went into the hallway and snatched his coat from the bench. On the porch he stood for a moment looking at the December rain and planning his movements. Then he ran across the lawn, cutting across backyards until he reached the Thrine garage. He opened the doors and backed his car out into the turnaround. For a moment he stopped there. "What if--?" But he decided there were no what-ifs, and drove on out, swinging into Central Avenue and keeping straight until he reached Randolph Road.

They had been building up to Christmas for weeks now--all three of them. All four, really, because Don Wilson, the pianist was in on this deal. The tree was purchased and mounted, and stood in the cool of the paved backyard behind the brownstone house on Twelfth Street.

It was a time of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. Out of small sums, quietly conserved, Joyce had bought a tape recording unit for Jerry, a watch for Don, and a fine string of cultured pearls for Ginger.

She knew that Jerry had ordered a car for Ginger, because she had been with him when he had made the down-payment, and she knew that Ginger had laid out a fortune for uniformly bound Bach scores which Jerry had been studying lately.

Don had inquired of her whether she thought it would be all right if he gave Ginger lingerie and, when this scheme was rejected, had settled on a vast vase of costly perfume.

There remained only a week now till Christmas, and Joyce was working on a complex scheme of small presents to be stuffed in stockings by the useless fireplace.

With Ginger she had just returned from an expedition to secure a final miscellany of small gifts, that particular Saturday afternoon, when the doorbell rang long and loud--as though whoever were below could not wait patiently for admission, but intended to deafen them into an immediate response.

Joyce said, "Stick everything under the couch. I'll buzz downstairs." She went to the kitchen and pressed the door release. The ringing stopped, then she ran back to the hallway and, leaving the chain on, swung the door inward. Jerry came up the stairs three at a time.

He said, "Let me in, Joy." His face was hard and angry.

When she released the door-chain he brushed past her. She followed him into the living room. Ginger was still bent over, stuffing things under the couch when Joyce reached the doorway. She saw Jerry stalk across the room, stop behind Ginger, draw back his foot and kick her squarely.

Ginger toppled to the floor, then quickly twisted around to look up at Jerry.

"What's the matter with you, man?" she said.

"Got a present for you, honey. Man left this with me. Man named Roy Mallon. Roy Mallon the pusher." He tossed a small, manila-wrapped package no bigger than a ring box on the couch,

"What you talking about?" Ginger's voice was shrill and whining.

"I told you once, I want no junkies with my band. I got no time for junkies. I want nobody from my band going to any hospital, and I don't want to get hung up on no narcotics rap. Bad enough there's a law against charge. But charge ain't got no hook, and I think it's a good thing, a fine thing. But this--nobody's going to have it around me."

"Jerry!" Ginger got to her feet and came toward him.

"Get away from me. I got a few words to say. I don't know how bad hooked you are. I seen--I saw them little marks on your arms, but I couldn't believe you'd shoot it I thought they were just blackheads or pimples or something. I tried to convince myself and I let it pass. But no more. We got a wire from a Miami place, a big place. We're taking it. But you ain't coming along. I got a replacement for the band and I asked Bob Michell to let us go to Miami. It's only for two weeks, through Christmas and New Year's. He said it would be okay. So then, when I found out about you buying horse from that pusher--then I called Bob and told him you were staying. So that's all right. But when I come back if you're still on that stuff, girl, that's the end." He turned and walked out, without a word to Joyce. It was as though Joyce's whole world had exploded before her very eyes.

The dark girl stood for long seconds, just as Jerry had left her, unmoving until the slamming of the downstairs door came up through the walls. Then she ran into the bedroom and banged the door behind her. For a while Joyce could hear her sobbing. Then, after a time, the sobbing stopped.

Joyce thought, I'll wait a little longer and then I'll give her some coffee. She went to the kitchen and ran water into the pot.

Frank led Tony into the living room, trying to choke down the fear that had caught at him as he saw the boy's face framed in the doorway. When he had opened the door he had started to say, "What's the matter, Tony?" Then, hearing Janice behind him, he had laid his finger on his lips and, turning to Janice, had said, "Could you excuse us a few minutes, Jan?" And she had gone up the stairs, looking pale and terrified.

He said nothing, waiting for Tony to speak.