He grinned saucily as the hippies groaned, having perhaps heard this one before. The brothers, younger than the general run of freaks in the room, voiced their annoyance at such frivolous smoke. One of them, a razor part in his bushy ’fro, muttered, “Niggah, that’s fucked up,” while another, wearing a baseball cap with the bill turned sideways, said, “Yo, Elder, you down with us or what?”
Elder cocked his head in puzzlement, feigned or otherwise.
Then the third Invader, who commanded a certain air of authority (by virtue of his aboriginal brow?), said, “Bro, you gon’ be our podnah in crime?” It had the ring of a rehearsed request.
“Ezackly what’s on y’all’s mind?”
The beetle brow shifted his sallow eyes to and fro. “It ain’t for the ears of all these zebras.”
“These zebras are my friends, Sweet Weeyum,” submitted Elder.
Sweet Weeyum jutted his lower lip till it matched in protrusion his overarching brow. Still clearly suspicious, he nevertheless relaxed his guard enough to get down to cases. He spoke frankly, even boastfully, about sabotage, offhandedly alluding to items such as peashooters and Molotov cocktails.
The tension that permeated the room brought Ira Kisco to his feet. “Elder,” he asked, “what you doing listening to these punks?” His voice wavered between accusatory and apologetic.
Elder frowned. “These punks are my brethren.”
Ira hung his head in momentary surrender, then raised it. “What about the movement, man?” One of the Invaders wondered aloud what did a mothafuckin’ Viking know of “the movement”? He spoke the words with a biting sarcasm, but while perhaps a touch embarrassed by his Nordic features, Ira persisted all the same. “Remember nonviolent civil disobedience? Gandhi and King and all that?”
At the latter name Sweet Weeyum remarked truculently, “Doctah Kang ain’t nothin’ but the president’s house niggah. The man done had his day.”
Ira forced a laugh and rested his case, but in the absence of a similarly dismissive response from Elder he left the room. He was followed soon after by a broad-toothed Cholly Jolly in his six-gallon hat, pumping his fist and shouting an ironic “Black power!” The remaining hippies, their spans of attention spent, fell to gazing at the roiling bubbles inside a glass bong.
Elder continued rocking thoughtfully as he gave ear to the Invaders stating their insurrectionary objectives. Their spokesman, Sweet Weeyum, had begun to list specific targets, businesses run by councilmen who’d been especially vocal in their opposition to the strike; perhaps even the councilmen themselves. At one point Elder noticed that I was still lingering at the edge of their conversation. Actually, I was fascinated, not so much by the substance of their parley as by Elder’s indulgence of it. A gifted young black man who moved with relative impunity between both sides of the color line, Elder Lincoln was much admired by those who didn’t deem him a traitor to his race. (“Oreo” was the word sometimes bruited about.) As a consequence, he was torn between two cultures, and being more or less in the same boat myself, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the guy.
“Yo, monkey man,” Elder was suddenly addressing me, less hospitably than I was used to. “Can we hep you?”
Trying to hide my hurt feelings, I replied, “I ain’t no ear hustler, know what I’m sayin’, but y’all do be talkin’ some off-da-hinges drama. Copacetee, my brothas,” I assured them, rising from the ash-strewn carpet. “Holla back atcha boy Lenny now and then.” And having exhausted all the street jargon I knew, I straggled out of the parlor to the tune of nasal sniggering behind me.
In the kitchen assorted Psychopimps and their camp followers were seated round a square table solemnly passing slab bottles and spliffs. “The cops raided the 348,” I announced in my capacity as messenger from the world at large — though it came to me my more compelling message was from another world altogether. “They arrested Lamar Fontaine,” I added, mentioning also that I was on the lam, but that wasn’t heard due to the rumblings of general solicitude. Their concern, however, seemed not so much for the bar or its proprietor as for the ruptured chemical pipeline between North Main Street and the manor.
I thought their reaction unworthy of them. Where was the sympathy for their benefactor? Certainly Lamar had his idiosyncrasies, not the least of which was his sartorial pride in his antebellum heritage and penchant for adolescent flesh, but his largess toward the band and their outlandish projects had been princely. How could they be so unmoved? Of course, if I were honest I’d have had to admit to being almost as heartless: I was more worried about the threat to my livelihood and tenancy than I was about my landlord’s incarceration. What did I really care about drug traffickers or maverick musicians, or for that matter garbagemen and foreign wars — when what I wanted most at that moment (peace, Rachel) was to get back to the book I’d left in my apartment, which I figured was still too risky to return to that night?
Knackered from the long evening, I went nosing about that funhouse looking for a place to crash. In most rooms, including the hallways, the sleeping bags wriggled from the bodies twining inside them like chrysalises about to hatch. Stepping over them, I eventually discovered at the dark end of the house a small conservatory, its walls and ceiling composed of weather-scored quartz glass panes. On one of the panes was a large orange thumbprint that I assumed was the moon. I settled into a canvas deck chair amid a jungle of unlawful plants and luxuriant ferns, squinting through them toward the vanished civilization I was homesick for.
In the morning I took a bus back downtown. The shop reeked of geriatric must, Avrom breathing like an accordion, hacking up unsightly matter into his Luzianne coffee tin. His color was the yellow of the skim on hollandaise. When I suggested he call Doc Fruchter, a Pinch alumnus who still made house calls, he told me, “A calamity in your navel.” His curses often more riddle than sting. Still he ran me ragged with fetching the nostrums that the old quack had prescribed him and shelving the termite-bored library of a recently deceased entomologist. So it wasn’t until my lunch break that I managed to get to a phone booth. I called the office of Lamar’s attorney, Bernie “the Mouthpiece” Rappaport, and asked how things stood with my landlord. I braced myself to hear I didn’t know what: he’d been tortured, electrodes applied to his genitals until he named names. For all I knew I was a marked man.
“He won’t let me put up his bail,” said Bernie, sounding insulted. I’d met the lawyer once at the 348, a baggy little man with a threadbare comb-over dressed in discordant plaids. His only concession to the unconventional lifestyle of the clients he tended to represent was a pair of rufous muttonchops.
“What’s that?”
“He advised me against posting his bond.” I thought I could smell his cheap aftershave through the phone. “He wants to stay in stir.”
“Why, forgodsakes?”
“Let’s just say there are people on the outside who pose more of a threat to him than the courts.”
I knew that Lamar’s finances were in disarray, that he purchased his stuff from nefarious sources, but he’d made such a haven of 348 North Main Street, to say nothing of his lavish suite at the Peabody, that I thought of him as untouchable. Besides, there was his thoroughbred family who for all I knew still held slaves. Couldn’t their influence be brought to bear?