“No.”
“Well, it’s really something, man. Some of them girls are pretty nice—some are pretty strange, too. And the guys that come around there…well, some of those girls go for some pretty freaky guys. I guess some of them, the girls, even liked me. But only the freaky ones that I just wasn’t interested in. I wanted to get me one, sort of little—they got some big women over there!—and pretty. And soft. And smart. Now to me being smart in a girl is very important. If I could get me a girl who could talk about things and understand things half as good as Frank could, I’d be happy. And they got some smart girls over there too. In fact, I don’t think none of ’em is stupid. Just a lot of them is pretty freaky, though. There was some there just like I wanted. And I could of used a girlfriend! I mean I talked to them. And they talked to me. But I couldn’t get anywhere. Frank could. He could get laid from Wednesday to next Thursday and start all over tomorrow. I wanted to get laid, but I wanted more than that, too. Now I know people around here is different from me; but that means I’m different from them, too. Only I guess if you’re too different, nobody wants anything to do with you. I mean they don’t care shit.” His hands jerked in the puddle, to the bottle’s base. He frowned for a while, and I thought he was finished. But he said: “You hear about the nigger—this black guy who used to come in here: the one who got shot off top of the Second City Bank building?”
I nodded.
“Do you know what they think—” Jack turned on his stool, one hand going to spread across the chest of his shirt—“John, Mildred, all them people over in the commune in the park—that I was the one who done it! And they tellin’ all sorts of other people, too! They tellin’ that to all them girls who live in that House together! ’Cause I’m white, and I’m from the south, and I don’t know how to argue good and explain that they are fuckin’ crazy—they are fuckin’ crazy if they think I done something like that!” He looked as surprised in the telling as I was in the hearing. “I…I had a gun, you know?” His hand closed to a loose fist that slid, stopping and starting, down his shirt, leaving a wet stain.
I nodded.
“I always had a gun at home. They should have guns out there in the park with all the nuts wandering around in this city. And all they got to do is walk into a store and take one—like I did. They got people comin’ around to the park all the God-damn time, to take food away from ’em? And some of the people who come got guns. Get up on a damn building and shoot a damn nigger?” His hand, loose in his lap, twitched. “Jesus Christ, I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that! But I go around the park, man, and I hear them talking. I mean I heard people talkin’; then they’d turn around, and they seen me and shut up! Frank won’t have nothin’ to do with me no more. I mean he’d say hello or somethin’ when I’d speak first and then walk away to do something else. But five times—five times I’d start over to find out just what’n hell was goin’ on and he walks away soon as he sees me comin’. I mean it’s like they’re afraid of me; only they got me so scared, I’m afraid to go back. Shit, I don’t even believe Frank thinks I done it. Frank’s a nice guy. He just don’t want the others to think he’s havin’ anything to do with me. And I don’t know what to do with that. I just don’t know. I thought for a while, right after I first met him, Frank was like Tak. I know he goes after girls. But he writes that poetry and stuff and, sort of, well…if he liked me, I guessed maybe that was part of it. ’Cause I damn well couldn’t see no other reason: he’s smarter’n me, older’n me, and he’s got about everything he wants. When all this stuff started, I thought maybe because I’d never done anything with him, like with Tak, that was…well, was why he was bein’ so damn mean. That pretty stupid, huh? But this place puts ideas like that into your head. I told him, right out; I said, ‘Anything you wanna do—Anything at all…!’ I wished he’d been gay, man. I wished he’d liked me like that. Because then, after bein’ with Tak and all, even though I ain’t, I’d kind of known what to do. You know?” He looked at me, shook his head, looked at the bottle. “You know what I mean?” He took his hand out of his lap and put it back in the puddle.
“Go on,” I said. “You’ve got it too simple. But go on.”
His jaw moved a few times, but he didn’t speak.
“How come you don’t come down to see us?” I asked. “You get hungry, come on down to the nest. Tak’ll bring you there if you ask him. Left over flower-power, in all this pollution, was never my thing either.” I was wondering about him and the department store people but I didn’t say anything.
“Well, you guys…” Jack turned a little from side to side. (Thinking: His palms are now glued to the wood, but he doesn’t want to be noticed trying to tug them loose.) “You guys…I just don’t know. All you got down there is niggers anyway, don’t you? After what I done—what they said I done, what’s a bunch of bad niggers gonna do when I come walkin’ in? You guys play a little too rough…robbin’ people in the street. And killin’ people.” He blinked inflamed lids. “I don’t mean you, personal. You’re a nice guy. And you’re their chief, huh…? But that’s what I heard, you know? And I don’t wanna get into shit like that. I don’t got nothin’ against it, but…” He frowned, shaking his head. “People talk. And people talk. People talk, tryin’ to make you into something you ain’t. And after a while, you almost don’t know what you done and what you didn’t do your own self.
I don’t remember ever getting corrected in high school or college for writing who instead of whom. But except to be funny, I’ve never said whom in my life. Which makes me think there are two other words: who and who’—the apostrophe standing for the syncopated m. I’ve been using who’ in this notebook for maybe a week, but it still looks funny. So I’ll cut it out.
People talkin’ about me, about what I done, that day when the sky was it across with that funny kind of light, and the nigger they got in the pictures was after that white girl and the colored people had a riot and tore the hands off the church clock down in Jackson; they say cause I climbed up on the roof and shot the nigger, I’m responsible for the riot, for the whole thing, for everything that happened here. Just for shootin’ a damn nigger…” His lips, lined with brown, touched, parted, touched: “I had a gun. I didn’t shoot…” He spoke slowly. “I didn’t shoot that black man. I mean, I met him three or four times. Right in this bar. With Tak. He was a nice man. I shot him…? I didn’t shoot…” Suddenly he knuckled at his lips’ scabbed corner. “I went down there. I did that. To check the place out. And with my gun! You climb up the steps behind the Second City Bank building and get up the rest of the way by the fireladder. You can hunker down behind the cornice and aim out over the whole damn street. Man, if you could shoot at all, you could pick off anyone! An’ I shoot pretty good…” He looked at me, narrowing his thickened lids. “You think I done it?”
“That depends,” I said. “Did you check it out before or after he got shot?”
Something happened on Jack’s unshaven face: the skin between his eyebrows wrinkled, the skin below his jaw slackened. Something happened behind it too. “Oh God,” he said as flatly as, once, I heard a man say “elevator.” “Oh God…” He turned back to the bar. “They all want it to be so bad, they gonna make it be no matter what I done or not. They gonna make it be. Just by wantin’ it.”
“I know,” I told him.
“What can I do? I don’t know what to do.”
“You have to know who you are,” I said. “No matter what they say.”