HAMBURGER STAND on Slauson was the right place for me. Their hamburgers came with beefsteak tomatoes, Bermuda onions, sour pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and homemade chili. You had the choice of cheese. My fries always had chili and cheese on them. A strawberry malted for my milk and I was on cloud nine.
The only two things that I was proud of consistently were that I could eat anything and never gain an ounce and that I’m extremely well endowed in the sexual organ sort of way. My manhood was questionable as far as courage or strength, but once in the bed I could out-joust the best of them.
I once thought that all I had to be was slender and sexually imposing and women would love me for that alone. But I realized as time went on that women, though they were often excited by my size, got used to it pretty quickly and were willing to leave me for what I thought were lesser men.
I guess I was thinking about Fearless. He was with a woman right then, and there I was eating a chili burger at four-thirty in the morning.
Sal Grimaldi, the night manager of John-John’s, liked to play chess. He pulled out his small wooden board and sat across from me in the courtyard space that they covered with canvas on a cold night like that. He said that I looked tired and maybe he could beat me.
He couldn’t. Grimaldi was a white guy from outside of Barre, Vermont. He always loved telling me that he had never even seen a Negro until after his twenty-first birthday.
“I mean,” he said more than once, “I knew you guys existed in theory, but seeing a real black man shocked the shit out of me the first time.”
I believed him. Over the years I had come to realize that people who had no experience with each other rarely hated with the vehemence that I had experienced from some southerners. Sal didn’t have any preconceptions about blacks. Because of that he was critical in ways that other people weren’t. He loved to talk to me about how he didn’t understand why Negroes didn’t make more out of themselves.
“I mean, why don’t you guys just go to school and buy the businesses and take over your own communities like the Catholics and the Jews?” he’d ask.
He didn’t believe that racism existed except in the southern fraternities. He was a nice guy, but just like the libraries of the North and South, he had very little information about me.
I BEAT SAL seven games straight. It took until just after nine. He stayed to play out the last game when the breakfast man came in. He wasn’t perturbed at losing to a Negro, and so I felt friendly toward him. Sometimes it’s just a little something that makes a man feel good.
I was exhausted, but I never liked to sleep in the daytime. And even if I’d wanted to take a nap, the only options for a bed I had were the backseat of Layla’s car or the upstairs bedroom at Fanny Tannenbaum’s house. Both of those choices had serious disadvantages. If the police found me curled up in the backseat of a car I didn’t own, they could take me to jail for vagrancy or worse. Fanny’s was no safer; Leon Douglas or at least one of his friends had already been there once.
I went over to a small shoeshine-and-magazine stand on Florence. I hung around there a couple of hours reading
15
WHEN I PULLED UP in front of the Greenspan house it was almost eleven o’clock. My intention was to take Fanny back home and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. I was so tired that I wasn’t even afraid of running into Leon Douglas.
Gella came to the door all awkward and timid, ready to run.
“Mr. Minton?” she said.
“I came by for Fanny,” I told the girl. She wore a medium gray dress cut from coarse material with dark gray buttons up the middle. The sagging hem came down to her shins. It was a dowdy dress without style or promise. I couldn’t understand who would make such an ugly piece of clothing, who would sell it, much less walk into some store and decide that this was the rag they wanted to hang on their shoulders.
“She went home early this morning,” Gella said, half grinning, half looking away.
