Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (25 page)

49

T
HERE IS NOTHING EXTRAORDINARY
about the video that Madonna wanted Beth to see. It is a little out of focus sometimes, like all amateur videos. The framing of the shots could be better, and the audio is often nearly unintelligible. There is a lot of laughing and even a loud, undeniably off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Of course, there is cake and ice cream. Of course, there are parents and games and several tiny, bewildered, notquite-toddlers trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Of course, there are friends around to share the moment.

And, of course, the proud parents stand on either side of their tiny son, encouraging him to blow out that one brave candle and getting instead only a delighted grin until they blow it out themselves, laughing, and everybody applauds, and Son scoops up the birthday boy and kisses him and grabs Madonna and kisses her, too, and they all laugh again and cut the cake.

I watched it twice, then picked up the phone. Precious answered on the second ring.

“This is Senator Hargrove. How can I help?”

“Regina Burns. How are you, Senator?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“You remember when you promised to tell me the story of how Beth Davis got you into politics one day?”

“I remember.”

“How about we make this the day?”

50

A
FTER I TALKED TO PRECIOUS, THE
next person I needed to see was Freeney. He was the one who would be in the video booth working with the technician. If I was going to make this work, I had to have Freeney's help. Precious had agreed immediately, but her job wouldn't be on the line. His would.

Freeney was on the phone when I stuck my head in his office door. He waved me in.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he was saying. “Certainly. Absolutely.”

Sometimes I think half of Freeney's job is agreeing enthusiastically. He's good at it.

“Oh, yes. That sounds perfect. Just perfect. Yes. I will. Let me know what she says. Bye, now.”

He turned to me with a wide smile. Miss Ross, his perpetually napping calico cat, was curled up in her usual sunny corner of the oriental rug. She opened one eye when I first came in, but hadn't moved since.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked, borrowing a line from Blue.

“Don't be silly! Sit down.”

I took my favorite chair, the rocker. We had done a lot of work together over the last six weeks, and he was as happy as I was to be in the home stretch.

“Everything okay?”

“Couldn't be better,” he said. “The mayor has confirmed and Channel Two is definitely sending a crew.”

It suddenly dawned on me that what I was getting ready to do had the potential to backfire big time. Was I prepared to take responsibility for asking somebody to risk his job? It was my destiny that required the fighting of the dragon, not his.

Freeney saw my face change. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong,” I said, “but I want to tell you something that has to stay just between us for now.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, getting up immediately to close the door into the hallway, although there is no random foot traffic in the archives. If you're not coming to see Freeney, you're not coming at all. “What is it?”

“Son Davis has a child,” I said. “A boy about a year and a half old.”

A strange expression flickered across his face. “How do you know?”

“Someone sent Precious Hargrove a photograph and …,” I hesitated. How much did he need to know? “I met the baby's mother.”

His eyes widened. “Oh, my! What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to introduce him to his grandmother.”

He jumped up suddenly, came over, and hugged me like I had just told him he was getting a big raise and twice as much staff as he used to have. “Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!”

He just kept saying it over and over and hugging me. Miss Ross raised her head and gave us a baleful look for interrupting her nap, but Freeney paid her no mind.

“Bless you! Bless you!”

Finally, he calmed down and pulled himself together.

“I take that to mean you think it's a good idea?”

He sat down, but he was still practically bouncing off the seat. “I think it's a fabulous idea!”

“But I haven't even told you how I'm going to do it yet.”

“You're going to do it. That's what counts. This is just what I hoped would happen, and now it has!”

What was he talking about? “What you hoped would happen when?”

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, then grinned at me, a little sheepishly, but no less delighted for that. “When I sent that picture to Senator Hargrove.”

I almost fell out of my chair. “You sent it?”

He nodded, folded his handkerchief neatly, and put it back in his pocket. His face was serious now. “I had no choice. I've kept too many secrets of my own.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since before you came,” he said. “I had just started going through the papers from his office, and I found that picture, of the three of them.”

I nodded.

“Well, I knew immediately. I realized that he had secrets, and I can't keep secrets anymore. I pretended to be somebody else for years. Scared my family would find out I was gay. Scared I'd lose my job if my boss knew. Scared somebody would kick my ass. Scared somebody would call me a ‘faggot.’ And then I met Brady at an archivists conference in San Francisco, and it was love at first sight for both of us.”

He blushed a little, but he wanted me to understand why he had done what he'd done. “He had never been in anybody's closet, and he showed me how good it felt to be free. He begged me to come out there and live, but I was still too scared, so I came back to Atlanta. Two years, he begged me to move, but I'd only visit, so finally he said, ‘If I have to move my black ass to Georgia to be with you, then that's what I'll do.' And he did. And he taught me to be myself and love myself and not give a damn what other people said.”

Freeney's voice was fierce with determination. He took a minute to calm down, and then he looked at me. “One thing that made me respect Son Davis was that he wasn't scared to talk about homophobia. I respected him for speaking out. … So when I saw that picture and realized he had a secret life, too, I decided to honor the life he'd been hiding, for whatever reason he was hiding it. There's no good reason to pretend to be somebody you're not, but what could I do?”

Miss Ross jumped into his lap, demanding attention, and he rubbed her throat gently. “So I sent the picture to Precious and hoped
she'd
know what to do with it so that child could claim his daddy, and she gave it to you!”

Now it was my turn to grin. I hugged Freeney, being careful not to disturb Miss Ross. “Thank you for that,” I said, “Thank you for Son.”

“He was a good man,” Freeney said. “He just didn't have time to make it right.”

“Which is why we're going to help him,” I said, taking out the birthday video Madonna had given me. “Now here's what we're going to do. …”

51

P
RECIOUS AND I HAD BEEN WORKING
on her speech all afternoon. The story she told me about her initial encounter with Beth was a moving, first-person narrative, and I intended to open her statement with it and then segue into the rest of her remarks. It was almost seven o'clock by the time I left her house and started home. I hadn't heard from Blue for two days, but I wasn't worried. I knew he had work to do just like I did.

I stopped in at the West End News to pick up a paper, and, when I came out, I bumped smack into Brandi, who was having her hair done next door. She stepped back, apologizing immediately.

“Oh, I'm sorry!
My bad!
I just got so excited when I saw you!” She laughed and touched the side ofher hair. “I hope that fool didn't cut a plug out the way I jumped up so fast. She probably thought I had lost my mind.” Brandi stepped back, waved at her stylist through the window, and held up one finger to indicate she'd be right back.

“Were you looking for me?” I asked, surprised at how much younger she looked without all the makeup.

“I just wanted to say thanks, you know? For helping me and my cousin. Mr. Blue sent somebody to pick her and Junior up yesterday, and they are totally psyched about you inviting them to the big doin's this Sunday.”

“Aren't you coming, too?”

She looked embarrassed. “I can't go up there. Halfthem young niggas done seen my titties at one club or another. If they see me out and about, it might shake 'em up a little.”

What she was saying reminded me of the scene in
Gone With the Wind
, where the town's most successful madam is trying to make a contribution to the war effort, and the proper slave-owning Confederate ladies refuse it on the grounds that her money is tainted. That always cracks me up. She earns her money with sex, and they earn their money breeding people, and
her
money's no good.

“They need shaking up,” I said. “Please come. Madonna's probably going to need some moral support.”

“You're right about that,” Brandi said. “She's already nervous as a cat!”

All Brandi knew was that Madonna and her son had been invited. She didn't know they had agreed to play a major role in the proceedings.

“Come as my guest,” I said, looking through the window at her stylist, who was watching our conversation with increasing exasperation. Time is money to a beautician. On Friday night, too? Brandi was playing a dangerous game keeping the woman waiting. If she wasn't careful, she was going to find herself facing the weekend with a half-done head.

“Okay,” she said excitedly. “I'll be there. And can you do one thing for me?”

“Sure.”

“Tell Mr. Blue thanks for putting that money in for the dancers.”

She had lowered her voice conspiratorially, although there was nobody nearby.

“What money?”

She looked surprised. “He didn't tell you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I don't mean to be talkin' out of school, but I know it had to be him. Who else gonna think to do somethin' like that?”

“Like what?”

“When we got to work last night, there was a new guy there, a big guy, but real cool. Real polite and all, just like Mr. Blue.”

I knew exactly who that was: Blue's combination driver, bodyguard, and special assistant. He never had much to say, but when he did, everybody listened.

“He told us King James and DooDoo had sold their interest in the club and it would be closing for a couple of days. Then he apologized for any inconvenience to us—that's how he said it, too, any
inconvenience
to us— and gave us each an envelope with one thousand dollars in it!”

“One thousand dollars
each
?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Cash money! All twelve of us. You know how much that is altogether?”

She laughed and shook her head in happy disbelief. Her stylist tapped a hairbrush against the glass and frowned.

Brandi turned to me apologetically. “I gotta go before this girl goes off and starts on somebody else's head before she hooks me up. Thank Mr. Blue for me, will you? I don't know what we woulda done without him.” And she ducked back into the beauty shop.

The neighborhood was humming with Friday night energy. Women were hurrying home with bags of groceries and holding hungry children by the hand. Men were stopping at the barbershop or the dry cleaner's. The line at the liquor store was still short enough to be jovial, and through the window of the florist shop, I could see a young man counting out the money for a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses.

I smiled and started home with Brandi's words ringing in my ears.
I don't know what we would have done without him.
I do, I thought, and trust me,
with him
is better. Much better.

52

W
HEN I TURNED DOWN OUR STREET
, there were a few people out puttering in their yards, watering their azaleas, pruning their dogwoods. Some of the vegetable gardens were already showing tiny little tomato plants, the beginnings of blooms on the bell peppers, the fuzzy leaves of summer squash. I was admiring a line of pink dogwood trees in front of a house across the street when I heard the first tentative notes of our neighborhood saxophone player. He was still working on “My Favorite Things,” and he still wasn't giving the real Coltrane any serious competition, but this time, I could actually hear the melody beginning to emerge. He had slowed it down and found the fingering for at least every third or fourth note, and it was close enough so that I actually found myself singing along with him under my breath as I walked.

“When the dog bites,
When the bee stings,
When I'm feeling sad,”

Blue's voice joined me out of nowhere.

“I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad!”

I turned around, and he was standing right beside me, smiling that smile and twinkling those beautiful, incongruous, otherworldly, past-life, ocean eyes. The dogwood trees were shedding their petals in a shower of four-pointed pink blossoms, the sky was lilac in the twilight, and Coltrane was taking a breather. The silence truly was golden.

“Welcome home,” I said, smiling back at him, respecting the position he occupies around here and resisting the impulse to throw myself into his arms. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Blue said, offering his arm.

I took it, and we strolled on toward home as if there wasn't a big Lincoln creeping along a few feet behind us. “Everything okay?”

His smile was genuine. “Everything's fine.”

Coltrane began his second set, but it wasn't a tune either of us recognized, so we couldn't sing along.

“I have a message for you,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows slightly.

“Brandi asked me to tell you
thanks
.”

I didn't have to say for what. We both knew she meant for creating a place where she could go to the twentyfour-hour salon and walk home safely at whatever hour. For creating a few city blocks where I can walk home alone in the twilight and allow myself to fall so deeply into the beauty of the moment that I don't even notice a man coming up behind me, and
it's okay
.

“She said she didn't know what they would have done without you.”

He smiled slowly as we turned up the front walk and his driver pulled the car into its usual spot at the curb. “And what did you say?”

I stepped inside the blue door and turned to face him in the small foyer. “I said, ‘You don't have to worry about that. He's not going anywhere.’”

He grinned and pulled me close. “You got that right,” he said. “You sure got that right.”