books nor newspapers in his youth, he had picked up the reading bug while in prison. The habit had stuck.
One section he skipped was employment. With his history, there wasn’t any good reason to apply for a job that came with a pension, health insurance, or a future. He’d been down that funny road. Going out on interviews, employers sensing immediately that he wasn’t “right” for the job, the box cutter scar on his face not helping him, the stink of his life on him permanent. When it was time to talk about his experience, he mentioned his felony convictions and incarcerations, as he was required to. Also, he liked to make straights squirm.
“It’s only fair to tell you that there are a lot of people applying for this position” (people without rap sheets). “Many of them are highly qualified” (they have been to school past the tenth grade, unlike you). “You seem like a good person” (I’m afraid of you). “We’ll give you a call” (never).
Sometimes Baker just wanted to laugh out loud in their offices, but he did not. He was a good boy. On the outside.
Anyway, he had a job, a part-time thing his PO had hooked him up with. It involved bedpans, soiled diapers, trash bags, and mops, but he was on paper, so he had to get himself employed. He was part of a cleaning crew in a nursing home down in Penn-Branch, off Branch Avenue, in Southeast. He had an arrangement with the dude he worked with, some variety of African, who would cover for him when he didn’t come in, assure the lady parole officer that Baker was regularly showing up for work. The African preferred to have his brother, whom he’d just brought over from the motherland, take the hours instead.
It was at the nursing home that Baker had met La Trice Brown. And through La Trice he’d gotten together with her son, Deon, and his friend Cody. Indirectly, working in that shithole had been good for him.
“What’s the name of the song and who did it? And don’t say Lou Rawls.”
“Gimme a second. I’m thinking.”
At the other end of the bar were two middle-aged white men four rounds deep in vodka. They had been talking loudly about women they claimed to have done, sports they’d never played, and cars they would someday like to own. Now they had begun to argue over the song coming from the juke. It was a popsoul number, heavy with strings. The vocalist had a smooth voice that started calm and grew in drama. At the peak of it, the man sounded like he was about to bust a nut all over the microphone. Baker knew the song but not to name it.
“ ‘Hang On in There, Baby.’ Johnny Bristol.”
“What year?”
“Seventy-four?”
“It was seventy-five.”
“I was off by a C hair.”
“What about the label?”
“It was MGM.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I bought the forty-five up at Variety Records when I was a teenager. I can still see the lion and shit.”
“You know what this song means, don’t ya?”
“It means, like, don’t let the world get you down.”
“No, dumbass. It means, hang your sausage hard inside me and don’t let it go limp.”
“Inside you? ”
“You know what I mean.”
“But it’s a dude singing it.”
“Okay, so he’s telling a broad to hold on. He’s telling her, hang in there. Try not to come too fast.”
“Who cares if she comes?”
“You got a point.”
Baker did not look over at the fools or pay them any mind. He was into the business section now, reading one of those sidebars they had, “Spotlight On,” where they profiled a successful person in the Washington area. Age, college attended, married to, kids, last book read, bullshit like that. It was in this very sidebar that Baker had first been mentally reacquainted with his man, who had made the big time. Not just an attorney, but a partner in a law firm. Bragging about how he was “involved” with kids in the inner city, had started a charitable foundation in the name of his family, through which he made “substantial contributions” to scholarship funds for “African American” students who were bound for college but needed “a helping hand.” Baker wondered if the man was running for office, or if he was just trying to show his friends that he was right in his heart. Everyone was gaming in some way.
The bartender, a heavyset guy with a big nose, asked him if he was ready for another. Baker put his hand over the top of the glass and said that he was good. The bartender went down the stick and asked the jokers if they wanted another round. They said they did and went back to their conversation.
“Hey, you ever been to Wardman Park?”
“When it was the Sheraton Park, I did.”
“I’m going to an affair down there on Saturday night. A wedding reception, in that Cotillion Room they got.”
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t been there in years. But I got, like, a history in that place.”
“What kinda history?”
“It’s of a sexual nature.”
“This again.”
“I’m sayin, I scored my first make-out there when I was fifteen years old.”
“Where, in the men’s room?”
The bartender prepared their drinks.
Baker thought of the photograph of the man he had seen in the newspaper. He remembered the boy at the trial. Blond, soft-spoken, so filled with remorse. The lucky one who ran away. He didn’t look anything like that boy anymore. Gray hair, nicely dressed, distinguished. Wouldn’t he be surprised to meet his old friend Charles?
“Hey, pal, can we buy you a beer?”
Baker turned his head. It was one of the white dudes, short guy with a Jew boy-looking Afro. Baker had been in and out of the world for many years, but he felt certain that whites had given up on that tired look a long time ago.
“I’m about to get up on outta here,” said Baker in a friendly way. “Thank you, though.”
In his previous life, he might have pulled back on his jacket to show the little dude the grip of a pistol coming out the waistband of his slacks. A visual reply to his kind offer with a glimpse at something that said “I ain’t thirsty.” That was the old Charles Baker. Not that he didn’t like to fuck with people now and again. But he wasn’t about to take an automatic fall for carrying a firearm.
Time was, he carried a gun regular and cared less than nothing about the consequences. Used to be, back when he was staying with a woman he knew, over there in the high forties, off Nannie Helen Burroughs in Northeast, he’d get up in the morning, drop a pistol into his pocket, head out the door, and go to work. Walk the streets until he came up on people who looked to be weak, older females and men he could punk, then take them off for what they had. He fancied himself a beautiful, strong animal, like one of those cheetahs walking out on the plain. Going to work natural, doing what hunters did.
That was before his most recent stay in prison. In the federal facility in Pennsylvania, toward the end of that last long stretch, he had crossed over into old. Sure, he had lifted weights and done the usual push-ups in his cell. He continued to look men in the eye and he walked tall. But no doubt, age had come up on him and it had slowed him some. Upon his release, his plan was no plan, as it had been many times before, but now the lack of a road map scared him. He realized that the physicality and fearlessness of his youth would no longer carry him in the world. He had no desire to live straight, but he could read a mirror and see that his strategy had to change. He would become a manager. Use his wiles and charm to make others do what he had grown too old to do himself.
He’d need to find some young ones and put them to work. Wasn’t hard to rope in the pups. Though his rep had died with those who were gone or incarcerated, anyone could look into his hazel eyes, drained of light, and see that he was real. Not in the sentimental way that graying uncles and tired rappers were afforded the OG tag. Real.
Baker’s cell, a disposable, sounded.
