“Okay,” said Jones.
Jones thinking, After I get my nut, I’ll just tell her I had a change of mind.
KENNETH WILLIS HAD bought his Mercury, a green Monterey, because of its flat rear window. With this feature, the Monterey was like no other model on the street. Women, he believed, would like to sit beside a man who drove a car like that.
Lately, though, Willis was having a little trouble making the payments. He had a custodial position over at this elementary school off Kansas Avenue, but it was a low-pay job. Also, he and Alvin had not pulled off any side thing for a while. He needed money. He was counting on having some soon.
Kenneth Willis and Dennis Strange were driving south on 7th Street in the Monterey. Both were high from the marijuana they’d smoked, fifteen minutes earlier, in Willis’s shit-hole apartment on H. Dennis was dressed in clothes that were fashionable in ’66. His hair was ratty. He held a paperback copy of Dominated Man in his hand.
Willis was under the wheel, filling out the window frame with his big body, nodding along to the brand-new Percy Sledge, “Take Time to Know Her,” coming thin and crackly from the speaker mounted under the dash shelf.
“Percy be singin’ good right here,” said Willis. He had big shoulders and lean, muscular arms. He would have been handsome if not for his buckteeth.
“Any motherfucker sound good when you’re high,” said Dennis Strange.
Dennis preferred the new-sound thing coming up, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, and them. He dug the way those cats looked, like they were gonna step out any way they wanted to and just didn’t give a fuck about what society thought. Percy Sledge? To Dennis he was one of those old-time, lantern-on-the-lawn Negroes, a prisoner to the record company. He dressed in tuxedos. He still wore pomade in his hair. But he wouldn’t mention that to his friend Kenneth. Willis wore pomade in his hair, too.
The street was crowded and alive. Families were out alongside hustlers and children playing ball. Women were gliding on the sidewalks, still in their Sunday dresses.
“Damn, baby,” said Willis, slowing the car and leaning his head out the window to talk to a girl who was making her way down the strip. “Why you gonna walk like that while I’m behind the wheel? You gonna make a man have an accident.”
“Don’t blame me if you can’t drive.” She was smiling some but kept up her pace and would not look his way.
“Wanna go for a ride?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What’s wrong, you got a George?”
“Ain’t none of your concern if I do.”
“Why you wanna be like that, girl?”
“Go ahead, slick,” she said, before turning down the cross street.
“One of them jaspers,” said Willis.
“If they don’t like you, they must be lesbians, huh?”
“Some bitches just don’t like men,” said Willis, shrugging.
“You gonna talk to them all, though. Find out which ones don’t and which ones do.”
“Somethin’ wrong with that?”
It wouldn’t help any for Dennis to tell Kenneth that there was. Kenneth, who he’d known since they were both in the reserves, was as pussy hungry as a man could be. He’d done some time on a statutory rape conviction, but even that lesson hadn’t thrown water on his fire. Dennis didn’t know how a man like him could get a job, not even a janitor’s job, around little kids. He wouldn’t let Kenneth around his own daughter, if he had one. He didn’t even want him near his mother, and she was over fifty years old.
“Sure is some nice scenery out here, though,” said Willis, his sights already set on another girl.
“Sure is,” said Dennis, smiling at the familiar feeling he had, looking at his people, his world.
They rolled slowly past T Street, where the Howard Theater was set just east of 7th. Lately, the Howard had been replacing its stage shows with what they called adult films. Today the marquee read, Miniskirt Love, and underneath the title smaller letters had been put up, saying, “Warped Morals of the Mod World.” Dennis wondered, Why would anyone care about some rich-ass white kids, doing shit ’cause they bored?
“Where the music gone to, man?” said Willis.
“Acts be goin’ places where white folks got money to spend,” said Dennis. “Ray Charles just played Constitution Hall. James Brown, Gladys Knight, shit, they’re out there at Shady Grove next week.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
“In some cornfield out in Maryland. All I know is, I ain’t interested.”
He couldn’t have afforded to go to those kinds of shows if he wanted to. Dennis Strange had no job. He lived with his mother and father. He sold marijuana in small quantities so that he could afford his own stash. He had a pill habit. He drank too much, and what he drank was cheap. In fact, he could smell last night’s fortified wine coming out his pores now. When his head was up, he thought of these things and his shame grew. But that didn’t stop him from getting high.
Being up on reefer, it chilled some of his anger, too. That was good, as it felt to him that he’d been angry for a long time. He’d been fired up on the injustices done to his people way before these Johnny-come-lately motherfuckers came out with their black gloves, naturals, and slogans. He was no longer interested in wearing signs.
Early on, during his stint in the navy, he’d gotten involved with a couple of Muslim boys who were into the same kind of ideology as him. Quietly, they’d hung together and talked about Elijah Muhammad and the new world they knew would have to come. They exchanged books like The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Wretched of the Earth. They talked about institutional oppression, the disease of capitalism, and revolution deep into the night. But Dennis never could get with the personal politics of the Muslim religion. For one, he liked to drink and get high, and he liked his women smart and free. Wasn’t any god worth giving those things up for. Then, when Malcolm was assassinated by his own, Dennis got disillusioned all the way. He stopped hanging with his Muslim friends and retreated inside himself.
One night, drunk on Night Train, out there in Chicago where he was stationed, he tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke his tailbone. He had been coming down out of a tenement where he had gone to cop some weed when he tripped and fell. He blacked out from the pain and the drink. No one got to him until the next morning. When they did he was sober and lying in his pee. His time in the navy was done. He received an honorable discharge and full disability. He walked with a slight limp and always had pain. He was prescribed barbiturates and fell in love with them. He began to receive a monthly check.
Dennis Strange came back to D.C. as a cripple living off the government tit, more bitter and insecure than he had ever been before. He moved in with his parents and did not try to get a job. He got high every day. He went to seminars at Africa House, a couple of SNCC and Black Nationalist rallies, and attended a few meetings organized by the local chapter of the Black Panthers in Shaw. He thought he would be into the Panthers, but he was put off by them, too. True, many in attendance were genuinely committed. But a few of the young brothers were there because they liked the fit of the beret and the cut of the uniform. Others were there for the pussy to be had. Some of them liked to shout; all of them liked to talk. To Dennis, they were dark-skinned versions of those kids with the long hair who hung out at Dupont Circle, on the other side of town. They were playing soldier, but they didn’t really want to go to war. As usual, he did not fit in.