“I can live through this, because as you know, I am a goddamn Wessindian. But I couldn’t live through it if this was the States and I was a black American. But sometimes I can’t see no fucking difference between Toronto and Harlem! I mean, certain times, a certain time comes in your fucking life when you want to relax and ease-up offa hustling. You want a nice place to live.”
“I was going to mention that they can’t refuse you an apartment because o’ colour no more, or race, creed or nothing. The government passed a law saying so. Only if it is a private house, or they have less than six places in that house or apartment.”
“Man, the government talks a lot o’ shite about six units and apartments! And they write more shite than that, too. If the government wants to find out, let the fucking government walk ’bout with me, one o’ these nights, even tonight, and I will show the fucking government some apartments in this city, man, where no fucking law don’t apply, at all, at all.”
“That’s a hard thing to say about your government, though, Henry.”
“It is true, though.” Henry then looked scrutinizingly at Boysie; and he noticed the way he was dressed: new suit, a pin-striped suit, he was wearing a tie, too; and his shoes, black, were polished; and there were cufflinks in his french cuffs, and he was smelling like a woman, with perfume. “You like turning into a goddamn white man, boy! Or you become a conservative since you hustling that cleaning job!”
“Me? No, man.”
“Well, don’t talk bullshit, then! I am telling you a kind o’ history and sociology that not even the great Doctor Agatha Barbara Sellman-White, hyphen, be-Jesus Christ, could contradict. One night. One night, I spit in a fucking white woman face, just because she was about to close her blasted door before I had time to talk. Another night! Godblummuh! Boysie, as I am sitting down here, I was so mad that I grabbed this bastard by the scruff of his European neck, and be-Jesus Christ, if my wife wasn’t there as a witness, I would have kill that bastard dead dead dead be-Jesus Christ! This thing, man. This thing does some funny things to a man’s mind, Boysie. I am talking about the effects, man, the effects. One night again. I was so mad that I went back to that house on Huron Street where the woman played the arse with me, on Huron Street near the corner of Lowther. And I painted a fucking red swastika sign on her front door. The front door! Fortunately, the door was shite!”
“You do what?” Boysie lost his breath.
“On the fucking door!”
“But was the woman a Jew?”
“No!”
“She didn’t even have a Jewish name?”
“How the hell would I know her name?”
“And why you painted a Nazzi sign on the woman’s door, then?”
“It was the only fucking sign or symbol I could think of to make her feel the way she made me feel, and to scare the shit outta her pants.”
“A Nazzi sign? Ohmygod!”
“Red as shite! Like the communists. It was a goddamn pretty swastika I marked on that door!” And he laughed out. Some neighbours, only in distance but not in attentiveness, nor consciousness, held up their heads, but soon they held them back down, or had them pulled down by the weight in the drinks before them. “The very next day, I saw it in the papers …”
“I remember now. The papers was talking ’bout a Nazzi party and persecuting the Jews, and …”
“I laughed my goddamn head off!” He took a long draught on his beer glass. “And when you sit down sober-like, and face these things, Boysie, you don’t like to know what’s possessing you, or what’s happening to you, you don’t want to know. Living with that woman, Godbless-her! is like standing up in front of a life-sized looking glass that is behaving like an X-ray machine. You see things that make your goddamn heart bleed. I started to think so much these days Boysie, that the moment I sit down, I start thinking. I stand up and I am thinking. I go into the bathroom upstairs to fire a shit and still I am thinking as I am shitting. I am sleeping and I am thinking. I am walking or talking to my wife, and I am thinking. Something inside me, some thing, big and terrible, man; there is some-damn-thing inside here, and I got to get it out. Or else it would kill me. It didn’t come out that night I laughed when that European whore slammed the door in my face. Man, that thing made me walk to-rass to the College Street public library to look up one o’ them election polls, rolls, with the names and streets and the people living in a certain electoral district! … and be-Christ, all the names on that street that slammed doors in my face, or won’t open the fucking doors, all the names were mostly European names. Chuck or Chich or Gowski or Shev, Godblindthemall! Man, they’re lucky I didn’t burn the whole fucking street down! So, as I was telling you, I have to express these feelings …”
He paused to take a sip of his beer. Boysie took one too. They lighted cigarettes. “I don’t want to make you feel that I is this big writer, this big writer like that fellow from Barbados, or the other two writers living in this fucked-up city, the one from Guyana and the
