Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff Read online

  “Well, if you make something of yourself, and all that kind of thing, you’ll be doing something. That’s what you got to do. Ain’t really nothing else you can do except living like he was still alive and being cool to your mama. All that good doing stuff. What are you planning to take in college?”

  “I don’t know,” Clyde said, finishing his soda. “How about you?”

  “Man, I ain’t going to college.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I’m not taking a college course. I’m taking a commercial course. Everybody ain’t got your smarts, man. Like you knew about getting that cat’s ear back on and things—even if it didn’t work out too cool at least you knew about it. My old man says that he’d like me to go to school and he’d try to get the bread together, but I don’t really think he can.”

  “I’m not taking a college course, either. I just never gave it a lot of thought. You know, college seemed to be for cats that wore them button-up sweaters. Never really was that down. I don’t know.”

  “Hey, baby.” Fast Sam put down his soda, sliding it away from where I could reach it. “You’re my main man, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah?” Clyde looked up and his eyes were red.

  “We been tight since we been about this high, right?” He held his hand, palm down, about a foot above the floor.

  “Yeah, Sam, I guess so.”

  “Then you can’t be letting yourself down, man, because you’ll be letting me down, too. Dig? I don’t have your smarts. You know that and I know that, or maybe I do and just can’t use them the way you do. But I’m proud of you. I can check you out and say, ‘Hey, dig that little black dude doing his thing.’ You know, a lot of cats around here kind of lay their problems on you. Some cat uptight about this, some cat uptight about that. You know, if heavy cats like you be giving up, what am I suppose to do?”

  “Hey, Sam, you can make a guy feel good when you want to.” Clyde looked at Sam and gave him a little rap on his arm. They were so close to each other that I really wished I wasn’t there. “Look, you think I can make a college program?”

  “Yeah, I think so. And even if you can’t, I think you can scare the daylights out of it if you don’t get it.”

  “I guess I’ll have to give it that big try. My mother would dig it, my father would have liked it, too.”

  “You’ll dig it, too,” I added. I was surprised to hear my own voice.

  “Hey, little brother. Hey, Stuff. Maybe I will.”

  Clyde reached over and got Sam’s hand and mine, and we all clasped our right hands together. I got so worked up I started crying and everything, and I would have died, I mean really died, except that I saw Clyde and Sam were crying, too. And then I got a funny feeling that being a man wasn’t everything I thought it was. Because I wasn’t ashamed of crying with these guys.

  “Crying is feeling, baby, ain’t nothing wrong with that.” Sam had seen me trying to hold back the tears. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that at all. Are you hip?”

  “I’m hip,” I sniffled, and we all slapped hands.

  3

  the dance

  People are funny. Here I am digging Sam from today, back on into yesterday and on into tomorrow. Why? Because he was such a heavy dude in a light way. He came on so heavy when he was talking to Clyde about going on to college and everything. And he came on in a way you could understand. And then the next thing he did was to come rapping on my door with a big idea about how he and I should get Clyde to go to this dance and enter the contest with Gloria. He said that if Clyde won the contest he’d really feel good, and even if he lost it would take his mind off his father. I wasn’t too sure about that. If a guy’s father dies you don’t go running up to him and talk about how he’d like to go dancing. We called Cap and asked him what he thought and he came over to the house. It didn’t take him long because he just lived next door.

  “You got to be kidding, man. I mean really! The cat just lost his father a couple of weeks ago. He ain’t supposed to be out dancing. You guys got no heart, no smart, and the part you playing is wrong.” Cap stood up and started scratching his nose the way he always did when he was excited. “You must thrive on jive. Man’s heart’s broken and he wrapped up in misery and you talking about going to a dance. The man’s trying to get himself together in his hour of need, and you trying to make him bleed. He ain’t got no chance in the world of winning the fifty dollars so he’s going to throw away his two dollars and fifty cents plus the two dollars and fifty cents for his woman. Let alone showing disrespect for his poor departed father. The only father the cat ever had in his whole life.” He was really working on his nose now. “I mean, can’t you dudes think at all? I know what’s wrong. You see, it ain’t your father that’s passed on to his reward so you don’t care. Come on, man, admit it! You don’t care! Do you? Do you?”

  “Hey, we care,” Sam said. “Maybe we just made a mistake.”

  “A mis-stake. You got to be jiving. Look, are you going out to some dance when your father die?” Cap got right up in Sam’s face and gave him a look that would turn chocolate milk into sour cream. “Well, would you?”

  “You don’t have to get personal, dude.” Sam gave Cap a look right back. “I don’t want to have to knock you out.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Later.” Cap just walked out of my room backwards and very slowly, looking at me and Sam like we really weren’t very much. Then he closed the door and split.

  I didn’t say very much and Sam didn’t say very much. In fact, we didn’t say anything. Then, finally, Sam said something.

  “Damn!” he said.

  “Yeah.” I almost said damn, too.

  “Let’s just forget the whole thing, man,” Sam said. “I sure wouldn’t be out dancing if my pops kicked.”

  “Yeah. It sounds terrible to even think about winning fifty dollars. You know. Fifty pieces of silver.”

  “Twenty-five. I got the application already.” He reached into his shirt pocket and unfolded the application which announced the dance and the contest. The prize was either twenty-five dollars in cash or a portable tape recorder that played eight track tapes.

  “Well, why don’t you enter the contest?” I asked. “You can take Gloria and maybe you and her can win.”

  Sam’s face broke into a big grin. I could see why his head had to be so long. If I had a grin that big it would meet in the back of my head. “And we got two days to practice, too. We could do one of these numbers.”

  He got up, turned up the radio, and started dancing. First he spun to the left, then he spun to the right, did a little bit of the Cosmic Slop, threw out a few moves from the Soul Robot, and then fell to the floor in a bad split and came up so fast and smooth I almost forgot he went down. No doubt about it, Sam was the best dancer on the block and probably in the neighborhood.

  “Ain’t that together, baby! Come on, tell me how good it was because you know you want to. I know it was good.” Sam put out his hand and I gave him five.

  “Now if you can get Gloria to go with you, you got it made,” I said.

  “If? What you mean if? She be a fool not to want to go to a dance with Fast Sam. Because the way I spin she got to win.” Sam spun around and did a little dip. “The way I move she got to groove.”

  He wiggled his hips and shoulders and snapped his fingers and I could almost hear the music.

  “If ain’t even in my dictionary. I better break the good news to her gently because I wouldn’t want to give her no heart attack. She’s liable to pass out as it is. I wish I was one of them schizophrenics and had me a split personality. Then I’d say ‘later’ for Gloria and go to the dance with myself. Now wouldn’t that be bad? Whew! Outa sight. Gloria, baby, here comes Fast Sam to spread the word of joy to you. And, Stuff, you be ready to catch her if she pass out.”

  We met Gloria on the stoop and Sam broke the glad tidings to her.

  “You pimply-faced, big-nosed, wide-mouthed, bug-eyed, bad-smelling, pigeon-chested fool! If I got hit by a car
you couldn’t take me to a hospital.”

  “Wha?” Sam’s mouth fell open. “Who you going with? Whoever they are they can’t dance like the Sam. You know that.”

  “Will you get out of my face with your stupid self?” Gloria just about spit out the words. “I’m not going to that stupid dance at all. Especially with no…” Suddenly she started crying and pushed past Sam and went into the house. Sam looked at me and I looked at Sam.

  “What got into her, man?” Sam asked, looking at the empty doorway where Gloria had disappeared.

  I just shrugged. Gloria had a way of putting people down but she never seemed to mean it. She used to signify a lot. And she was so good at it that you didn’t mind being put down, really. And she never picked on one person all the time. Not only that, Gloria would always ask about your parents or how you were doing in a way that really made you feel like she meant it. I looked over at Sam and he just stood there. I told him to close his mouth before all the flies in the neighborhood dropped in.

  “Look at me, man.” Sam stuck his face right up close to mine. “Is my nose on wrong, or something? Maybe my eyes are lop-sided. How I look?”

  “You look the same to me,” I said.

  “Well you hear me say anything that I didn’t hear me say?”

  “No.”

  “Well what’s the matter with that girl, then? What she so huffed up about?”

  I thought that perhaps something had happened between Gloria and Sam that I didn’t know about. Maybe they’d had an argument or something. If they had, I decided, it wasn’t any of my business.

  “Hey, Sam, you and Gloria have an argument or something?” I asked anyway.

  “No, so I don’t see why she had to jump so nasty.” Sam walked over toward the doorway and I thought he was going to follow Gloria, but he just sat on the stoop and began to pound his fist into his hand. “I oughta go tell her off.”

  “Why?” I asked, not really knowing if I should be pushing my luck. “Are you mad?”

  “’Cause I dig Gloria. Me and her’s been tight for a long time, you know. I mean, we don’t go around kissing or anything. I don’t believe in a lot of kissing and stuff like that, but we been to the movies twice this year already. We saw the Kung Fu movies with that Chinese cat that died, and then we saw Shaft Goes to Disneyland or something like that. I even paid her way for the Kung Fu movie.”

  “She know you like her?” I asked.

  “What I look like, a fool?” Sam gave me his sideways look. “You go around and tell some chick you like them and right away they start acting uppity. The heck with her now, though. She done lost me. Here she come now.” Sam tucked his shirt in and stood up real straight.

  Sure enough, Gloria was coming out of the house. Sam gave her a semi-hard look but she turned away from him. She was drinking one of those pineapple sodas she always seemed to be drinking and walked right past us.

  “You done lost me, woman!” Sam called out after her. Gloria turned sharply and looked at him. “That’s right, you done lost old Sam.”

  “Later for you, baby,” she said. She said it so nasty, too. Then she turned and walked on down the street.

  “She probably going some place to cry her eyes out,” Sam suggested. “I’m going to buy her a present when I go downtown later, just to show her I really don’t care. She can’t hurt me, just herself.”

  “Yeah,” I offered, “she’s hitting the bottle already.”

  I told Cap what had happened and he told Binky who told Angel’s sister, Maria, who met Clyde in the A & P and told him. So when Clyde came down the street and Sam started in his rap about Gloria, Clyde already knew. Cap had even big-mouthed about how Sam and me were going to ask Clyde to go to the dance. We told him we were sorry about that, and he said it was okay. He said that he was with his mother in the A & P when Maria told him, and later, when they got home, his mother told him he should go on to the dance.

  “Years ago,” she had told him, “down around New Orleans and Shreveport and places like that, people would march to a funeral and then come back and party. Oh, they’d march out to the burying ground—we didn’t call them cemeteries—just as proper as you want. But, Lord, after we laid the body to rest they’d play up a storm on the way home, brass bands, mostly, and then they’d have a party. Somebody would always stay behind and cook up a mess of chicken or gumbo and we’d have a party. It wasn’t no disrespect to the dead—just realizing that life was going to keep on going on. If crying was going to bring anybody back to life, then there wouldn’t be any dead people. Your father worked too hard for you to throw away your life mourning for him. If he was here he’d tell you that. It’s hard not thinking about somebody who passed on that you loved—it’s hard, but life keeps going on.”

  “You want to go to the dance, Clyde?” I asked. He just shrugged.

  “Let’s go across the street,” Sam said. It was almost November and the shady side of the street was usually pretty cool.

  “I guess I do,” Clyde said as we parked ourselves on a stoop across from my building.

  I saw my sister Sharon come out, look up and down the street until she spotted her girl friends, and then go tearing toward them. She’d made a lot of new friends in this neighborhood.

  “Well, let’s go.” Sam was, as usual when he wasn’t eating, retying his sneaker laces. “We can’t win the twenty-five dollars unless we pick up some loose fox that can dance, but we might as well go.”

  “They upped the prize to fifty dollars,” Clyde said.

  “That’s what Cap said,” I told him.

  “When they do that?” Sam asked, again pulling out his folded application. It was only twenty-five.

  “Yesterday afternoon. Me, Cap, and Angel were over there shooting pool when they upped the prize. That’s because so many people entered the contest. Cap and Angel entered. Angel’s going to take his sister.”

  “Cap entered?” Sam jumped up.

  Clyde nodded.

  “That’s why that dude didn’t want you and Gloria entering! ’Cause he’s the third best dancer after me and you, right?”

  Clyde thought for a moment and then agreed. I wondered where I fit in. I mean, I was pretty smooth too, you know.

  “That’s why he didn’t want you to enter. Go on and enter,” Sam said to Clyde.

  “Who am I going to take?”

  “Borrow Angel’s sister.”

  “Angel entered.”

  “How about Joan what’s-her-name? You know, who lives over in the projects?”

  “She dances too wild.”

  “How about Blondell? Hey, man, that’s a bet. Blondell’s outa sight!” Sam jumped up.

  “Her mama got saved again.”

  “Which mean she can’t go to dances for another six months. I swear I don’t see how she keeps her dancing up, what with being saved half the time.” Sam sat back down.

  “You think Gloria will change her mind?”

  “I don’t know, man. Why don’t you give her a call?”

  “Hey, Stuff, go upstairs and give Gloria a call,” Clyde said.

  Call Gloria? Me?

  In the first place, Gloria was older than me. In the second place, she could put other people down, and it was cool, and I even liked it, but when she put me down it hurt. So I didn’t want to call her. But, on the other hand, I dug Clyde asking me to do it so I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say I was afraid of Gloria, which I was a little bit, and I didn’t want to say I didn’t know what to say, which I didn’t, but I didn’t want to say no, either.

  So I went upstairs and called Gloria, and her mother answered the phone. She said Gloria didn’t feel well, but I could tell her mother was crying, too, and something was wrong. I came down and told Clyde and Sam that Gloria didn’t feel well and didn’t come to the phone.

  “Too bad one of us ain’t a girl,” Sam said. “We could go with each other.”

  “Well, 116th Street never wins anything anyway. We lost the cleanest block award
last year…” Clyde started.

  “…Yeah, and we lost the Catholic relays because Cap slipped in some dog mess…” Sam continued.

  “…And we lost the stoop ball contest when we had it in the bag because we showed up an hour late.”

  “I sure wish we could win this contest. Angel and Maria are okay but they ain’t dynamite. Cap ain’t bad but I hate to send third best out to do the best man’s job,” Sam concluded.

  Anyway, what went down is that Angel and Maria dropped out because somebody got sick in Puerto Rico and they had to split on the morning of the contest. That left only Cap and his old lady in the contest from our block. Cap wanted the fifty dollars bad enough but he didn’t really feel into a contest thing. What it was, I think, was that he got nervous when he heard that Carnation Charley from Morningside Avenue was entering the contest.

  Now, you have to see Carnation Charley to believe him. He’s about six feet tall or even more and he’s got a real long neck. He’s about my complexion and he wears his hair like he was born in the olden days or something—slicked down and all. Anyway, guess why they called him Carnation Charley? That’s right, he always wore this carnation in his lapel. He had some nice vines, too. But—and this is the weird part—he could be decked out, see, I mean decked out, and he would wear sneakers. No lie. I mean, this guy could fall out in a cashmere suit, a silk shirt, a velvet vest, West Indian bracelets, an East African tiki, and Pro-Keds. I mean, can you dig it? But he’d have his carnation and that big smile and he’d be cool, see? And dance, oh, that cat could dance. He’d come to a dance with a game plan on a piece of paper. He’d take a look at his notes and get into his thing. He was the only guy I ever met that could jump straight up, the sweat popping off his brow, land in a perfect split, and jump up into the Funky Hustle without either missing a beat or changing the expression on his face.

  But he had one fault. The way he danced, which was real good and everything, it seemed like work. He’d be sweating so bad that if he danced in one place for more than a minute there would be a puddle of sweat on the floor under where he stood. Anyway, that’s the way it was. So Cap chickened out. He told Sam that he thought that he (“he” meaning Sam) should enter. Sam said he had already entered but he didn’t have a girl. And then Sam had his big idea. Now, you see, when I think back on it, it seems kind of funny and everything, but I have to confess, at the time it seemed like a boss idea.