Chicago Hustle (16 page)

Percy strolled over to him as he walked out of the door, massaging his knuckles.

“She shapin' up, Precious?” Elijah asked, knowing that the eyes of the players inside were checking them out.

“She'll be awright in a couple nights, or else she'll be on a train to Montana, or … somewhere.”

“Tough titty …” Elijah started off, holding out both palms for the five-soul spank.

“But we needs the milk.” Precious finished off the sentence and gave Elijah double fives.

“Oh … if you see Nick 'n Leelah inside, with sweat beads runnin' down the sides of they faces, tell 'em the big E said hello, willya?”

Precious allowed a brief smile to coat his mouth, enjoying the flavor of the lightweight intrigue. “Right on, blood … you gettin' on, huh?”

“Yeahhh,” Elijah winked, “I got some business to take care.”

“I hear ya, man … later.”

“Yeahhh, later on, Precious.”

Elijah popped into his 'chine and started driving, his moods alternating between high and low.

The lights of the Southside purred, flickered to him, made him park his car a few times and wander in and out, under their invitations.

A drink in the Living Room, the last of the cocaine in the men's room of the Matador Club, the powder almost slipping from his thumbnail as two drunks pushed their way into the narrow toilet. A flirtatious conversation with a forty-year-old housewife, out in the family station wagon, trying to get a little bit of what she had been hearing about for ten years of dull, married life. The Singapore for a funny-named drink and some greasy wonton, more flirtation, this time with a couple gays from California … what the hell, if it wasn't for ass, where would pussy be?

Two a.m., the after hours set at Livin' Swell's place.

“I know all you motherfuckers is jealous o' me.”

“Why man?” someone was obligated to ask, a line that always had to be recited at some point, on Saturday night, in Livin' Swell's place.

“Why? 'cause I'm livin' swell, that's why,” the fat man blew on cue and kept tending bar, charging a quarter more per drink because it was after hours, and he needed all the money he could make, to keep on livin' swell.

Listening to the developing roar of the crowd as the horses headed into the stretch, and the old gowster's tall, sad story of what the old days used to be like was exciting, disturbing, interesting. He glanced up at the board and casually ripped his lost bet in half. Another dog.

“Ain't havin' too much luck, huh, junior?” The old gowster pinned him with a shrewd look.

Elijah glared at the old dude postured in front of him, half man, half facade, all hustler, and smiled. Yeahhh, to him, at fifty odd, having played all games, everybody was junior something or other.

“You know how it is, you win some, you lose a few.”

The old timer swallowed his sarcastic reply and looked over both shoulders, as though suspecting a hand would snatch him away. “Uhhh, say, looka here, junior … I wonder if you might be able to slap a slat on me? I got a hot tip on this next one.”

Elijah leaned back on the kidney-shaped sofa, watching Toe divide a medium-sized pyramid of cocaine into six thick lines, fifteen hundred dollars in his pocket. The smile on his face stemmed from and covered the memory of the last five races. What had happened after he had loaned (given, actually) the ol' hustler (what'shisname?) ten dollars?

In a word, everything! he decided; at least it came to one grand and a half. A lot to smile about. Luck? why not call it that?

Toe's lady, a half something and half something else, with eyes like a cat's and stacked stone to the bone wandered through, fluffing up the pillows on the sofa across from them. Toe nodded her out of the room and handed Elijah a strawed-up twenty-dollar bill. “Here you go, blood.”

Elijah bent over the low, Afro-Danish coffee table in front of them and snorted a line up each nostril.

Toe did the same thing and called out, as though he were signalling to a favorite pet. “Hassani, com'mere!”

She reappeared from one of the other rooms, billowing in in a see-through caftan, her reddish-black hair streaming down behind. Was she an Arab? No wonder Toe was sitting up in blood-red polka-dot drawers and undershirt.

She held her hair gracefully off to one side and bent over to snort two lines. Elijah tried to keep his eyes on some neutral spot in the room as she flowed away.

“Go 'head, man … the last two is yours.”

Elijah bent back over the table, feeling as though cold wire brushes were being brushed across the bridge of his nose, a zing feeling.

The last two lines froze the zing feeling, slowed it down. When he held his head back up, he had the sensation that he was sitting up straighter than he had ever sat in his life.

“So, you wanna cut us loose, huh?”

He had to pinch his nostrils together a few times, to somehow control the zing feeling that had now turned into a dry ice cube oozing down the back of his throat. Goddamn! talk about coke! This shit must be almost pure girl.

“Well, like I told you before, man … I wanted a stake, you know, to get the front I needed. You gave me that and I'm grateful … but now it's time for me to get down with my very own thang.”

“Yeah, I hear ya, bruh … I hear ya, whatchu got in mind?”

Elijah looked around the room, collecting himself. “Oh, I got a couple or three ideas.”

Toe responded with a sly look on his face, his eyes widened by the coke. “That's cool. You don't have to run it down to me. I know it must be somethin' really groovy if you wanna cut the pots 'n pans thang loose.”

“Well, you know how it is … if you used to doin' your own thang … besides, the pots 'n pans scene is too much like work.”

Toe burst into hysterical laughter for a full minute, leaving Elijah to wonder whether or not he was laughing at what he had just said, or whether he was just laughing period.

“Yeah, I can dig it! I can dig it! run it down to me? Hassani, come get somethin' on the TV!” Toe ran things together, forgetting that he had just absolved Elijah from explaining what his new deal might be.

The coke in Elijah's head made him stare boldly at the full moon split of Hassani's behind as she bent over to adjust the huge color television set a few feet across from them.

“You don't want the sound, do you?” she asked without looking around.

“Nawww, just the picture. Ain't she got a helluva ass on 'er?”

Toe's question jarred Elijah slightly. “Uhhh … right on!”

As she eased away from in front of the screen, the colored images flickering in front of their faces pulled them both into the tube. Elijah blinked his eyes with the clarity of what he was seeing. Who was the black dude on the screen raising hell in front of all those people? Who was he?

“Motherfucker sho' got a big mouth, ain't he?”

Toe broke the spell.

The militant young dude in front of the store … the day he and Nick had been out doing the short change game? Yeahhh, the same one. He must really be serious.

“I been checkin' into the black, black thing,” Elijah started off slowly, his eyes glued to the figure on the screen.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, you know, Afro pride 'n shit. There's a lot o' dough to be made in all that. 'Member Wimpy?”

“Wimpy the junkie?”

“Uh huh, Wimpy the junkie. I got word in the joint that Wimpy had gotten hisself together, got somebody to write him up a proposal, sent it to some government office and would up with twenty-five grand to set up an anti-drug rehab program … twenty-five grand!”

“Yeahhh, yeahhh, that's happenin' these days. When they ain't throwin' niggers in concentration camps, they givin' money to set up en-counter groups 'n shit … to try to keep everybody cooled out.”

“Well, you know how it is. A game is a game,” Elijah added, and watched Hassani cross the room to bring Toe a drink. Damn! that bitch is fine.

“You wanna taste?” Toe asked in a sly voice, judging Elijah's thoughts from the look in his eyes.

Elijah slid his eyes away from Hassani's body. That's the kind of woman I needs … a real together, stomp down, nitty gritty lady.

“Uhh, nawwww, bruh Toe … I got to be gettin' on. We got all our shit squared away?”

Toe shrugged, a hip, philosophical curl at the edges of his mouth. “Everything's cool,” Toe responded. Elijah stood up … 'way, 'way up …

“It's been real, man,” he said and solemnly shook hands with Toe, noticing that he had a semi-erection.

“Right on, blood,” Toe replied, winked and juggled his nuts with his free hand.

Elijah let loose a low, meant-to-be-dirty laugh, in tune with the moment, and glided out of Toe's apartment the sexy vibes making him anxious to get off onto his set. Ramona, look out bayyy-bee, here I commme.

Elijah followed Ramona, pinkie fingers linked, through six stiff, cold, correct introductions in a row before he begged off, whispering into her ear that he had to go take a piss. She reluctantly excused him, her bottom lip pouted.

Bitches! he muttered viciously in the back of his mind … you long stroke 'em a few times and they think they own you. He groped his way through the black cocktail-whiskey 'n soda everything-now crowd and fumbled into one of the four toilets in the house.

Standing above the seat, taking a few dribbling shots at the blue-tinted water in the stool, listening to Aretha outside, his dick firmly clenched between thumb and forefinger, he found himself watching a quiet, cold-blooded erection develop and collapse. Ain't really nobody here to fuck, he reflected, and composed himself to re-enter a world filled with Ramona Browns … blacks who had pulled off the supreme contradiction.

Two banana skin colored, middle-aged women, modishly dressed, swished past him into the toilet as he made his exit. Jiveass booshiee bitches … either gossiping about some dumb chump one of them digs, or slipping a lick to each other's pussy on the sly … who knows?

He scooped a glass of cold duck from a waiter's passing tray and stood off to one side of a long hallway, checking out the action. A bunch of superficial assholes, he decided after a few minutes of careful study. Grating against the sound of soul music, their metallic, nazalized voices irritated him, made him feel that he wanted to jump on top of something and scream, “Awright! three or four of you wall-eyed spooks done got a degree or two or somethin' but it don't mean shit! y'all still just niggers! like me!”

He absent-mindedly dug down into his leather vest pocket for a home-rolled joint, thought about it for a split second and short-circuited himself. Wowwww! these motherfuckers don't even get loaded! They'd probably call the law on me if I fired one up.

He had noticed the absence of smoke in the house, of all kinds, and had come across a hand-lettered sign on a coffee table that said plainly, “No smoking inside the house, thank you.” He smiled at the thought, his head already smoky from the dope he and Ramona had smoked during the course of an afternoon of strong sexing.

“Phil, I don't know what you're making out of me … God! I just feel so horny all the time.”

“Dr. Johnson, this is Phillip Dobson.”

Elijah spilled a little of his duck turning to face Ramona and a bulldog of a brown-skinned man who had eased up to his left side. “Phillip, this is Dr. Mordecai Johnson …”

“I own the establishment,” Dr. Johnson said metallically, dark circles rimming his eyes, shaking hands with Elijah as though he were handling a cold fish, all the while maintaining a constant vigilance over the gathering as he did so.

Motherfucker looks worried shitless, Elijah thought, watching the doctor's eyes shift from one person to another. He's watching people's hands, Elijah noted with surprise … watching people's hands to see that they don't steal something. Ain't that a bitch!

“What do you do, Mr. Dobson?” the doctor asked in a hard, flat voice, his eyes taking in everything.

“I'm an orgasm maker,” Elijah cracked, testing the good doctor for some sign of life.

“Did I hear you correctly?” the doctor asked in the same hard, flat voice.

Elijah placed a hip, conciliatory-type smile between them, like, after all, we
are
soul brothers.

“Awwwww, I was just jokin', mannnn … I … uhh …” The doctor looked, glared into Elijah's face for the first time, contemptuously, and abruptly performed an about-face and waddled away.

Ramona leaned closer, her arms folded across her bosom, a frozen smile on her face, and whispered, “You didn't have to say that!”

“Fuck you talkin' 'bout, woman! didn't have to say what?!” Elijah raised his voice slightly, pissed off by the doctor's treatment, the general atmosphere, and now, by Ramona. Several people nearby turned to check them out.

“Phillip, you don't have to get all excited,” she grated out between her teeth, trying to maintain. “All I said was …”

“Rahhhh mona!” two debutante types trilled in unison from halfway across the room and swayed over, all fashion and facade.

“Girrrrl! where in the world have you been keepin' yourself? I haven't seen you since the Morgan party.”

“I haven't seen her since the Debs had their affair … I hear you're planning to get married? Reeelly!”

Elijah watched the three women stick their heads together right in front of him, looking, for all the world, like three teenagers talking on the telephone at the same time. Dizzy ass young bitches! don't really hardly know their asses from a hole in the ground. Parties, shopping, keeping up appearances for appearances' sake, doing what was supposed to be hip. He had to stop himself from sneering as they practically drug each other away by the armpits. Where were they going? To meet someone? take a triple-deck shit? smoke some opium in a far corner? ooopps, no smoking in the house. “Be right back, Phil … don't get lost,” Ramona sang out super-sweetly as she was being pulled away. Elijah waved her away casually. They had saved her ass from a frightful chewing. The nerve of this young booshiee black bitch trying to tell me how to act! He snatched a fresh glass of something from a nearby buffet and wandered around the house feeling mean 'n evil. Big house. Rich. Shit hanging all over the walls. Phony ass people. He stood off to one side of the huge main room and shot out a host of bad vibes and one low-keyed fart toward an assembly of Ebony Fashion Show types grouped around the circular fireplace in the center of the room. Jiveass black motherfuckers! can't even talk right. Sound like they all got dictionaries in they mouths.