“Sorry,” he said. “No one goes up without a reservation.”
He was a small white man with eyes of no certain color and bones that would have worked for a hummingbird.
“This is nineteen sixty-seven,” I reminded him.
The guard didn’t understand what I meant; his perplexed expression told me that.
“What I mean,” I said, “is that in this day and age even Negroes can have reservations at nice places. You can’t just look at a man and tell by his suntan whether or not he has a right to be somewhere.”
My tone was light, which made the words even more threatening.
“Um,” he said in a voice that hovered somewhere between scratchy alto and tentative tenor. “I mean, yes, the restaurant is closed.”
“You mean to say that the restaurant is not open for business. It isn’t closed. I have an appointment with Hans Green in seven minutes. That’s because the restaurant employees are working.”
I smiled into the crooked little face that represented every rejection, expulsion, and exclusion I had ever experienced.
Most of my days went like that. Maybe 15 or 20 percent of the white people I met tried to get a leg up over me. It wasn’t the majority of folks — but it sure felt like it.
I pressed the button on the elevator while the guard stood there behind me, trying to figure a way around my reasoning. The bell rang and the doors slid open. I got in and the guard joined me.
I didn’t say a word to him and neither did he speak to me. We rode up those twenty-three floors silently wasting our energies over a feud that should have been done with a hundred years before.
When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.
The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”
The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.
I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother, we’re not enemies. I just want to go up in an elevator like anybody else. You don’t need to worry about me. It’s the men that own this building that are making you poor and uneducated and angry.”
But I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have heard me. I couldn’t free either one of us from our bonds of hatred.
The young woman returned with another white man behind her. This man was tall, ugly, and impeccably dressed in a dark green suit. He glanced at me and then turned to the guard.
“Yes?”
“This man says that he has an appointment with you, Mr. Green.”
“What is your name?” Green asked the guard.
“Michaels, sir. But this guy —”
“Mr. Michaels, how many times a day do I receive people who have made appointments?”
“I don’t know . . . a few.”
“And how often do you ride up the elevator humiliating those people?”
“Um . . .”
“If a man or woman or child tells you that they have an appointment with me, I’d appreciate it if you would allow them to come here and discharge their business.”
“I just thought —”
“No,” Green said, interrupting the excuse, “you did not think. You saw this man, this Negro man, and decided that you would play the hero, protecting a restaurant where you couldn’t afford even a lunch from a person you don’t know a thing about.”
I felt bad for Michaels, I really did. Green didn’t say another word. Michaels knew enough not to argue. The horsey woman watched her boss with inquisitive eyes. We all stood there for more moments than we should have. I don’t know about them, but I felt that I had somehow lost my way in life, ending up on that high floor embroiled in a conflict that made no sense.
Michaels finally got the message and went back toward the elevator.
“Mr. Rawlins,” Hans Green said, “it’s so nice to see you.”
We shook hands as the young woman watched, trying to understand what was happening.
“Come back to my office,” Green was saying.
As I followed him, I smiled and nodded at the hostess.
How could she know that eighteen months before, Hans Green was being framed for embezzling money from the last restaurant he worked for, Canelli’s. Melvin Suggs, an LAPD detective, was a friend of his and he passed my card along. I took a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant and discovered that the chef and Green’s wife were cooking the books, and each other, at Hans’s expense.
THE BIG WINDOW of the restaurant manager’s office looked all the way from downtown to the Pacific. I liked sitting there. The only thing I would have liked better was Bonnie back in my arms.
