So at midnight or thereabouts, here I am, with a list of this guy’s habitats and less sense than your average lemming, prowling bars along Louisiana and Dryades looking for the chicken man.
Just like the good old days. Shut away from the world, the heady smell of piss and beer and barely contained fury all around me. And threading through it all, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, the quiet refrain: This is none of your business, Griffin, none at all.
I remembered a history professor back at LSUNO talking about the Russians’ propensity for throwing themselves beneath tanks just to slow things down; saying that such irrational ferocities made them fearsome fighters.
But I was just going to talk to this guy, of course.
The Ave. Social amp; Pleasure Club was my tenth or twelfth try. I’d started at Henry’s Soul Food and Pie Shop over on Claiborne and worked my way here.
It was a cinderblock affair, the butt half of a grocery whose painted-over windows advertised Big Bo’ Po-Boys and Fresh Seafood, with an unbelievably crude painting of a crab holding a po-boy in its claws and (who would have thought it possible?) leering. The club, alas, didn’t get such star treatment: only its name and a long arrow pointing to the single door.
Several underfed light bulbs hung here and there from the ceiling as though waiting for their mothers to come take them home. Most of the light came from two pool tables in back. I shuffled to the bar against the right wall, which looked to have been cobbled together from scraps of cabinet wood and countertopping, and ordered a beer. Archaeological layers of odor here: raw whiskey, stale beer, urine and sweat; the edgy smell of fish, rotting greens and sour milk from next door; under it all, mildew and mold, a fusty smell that seems to be everywhere in New Orleans.
Most of the activity, like most of the light, was concentrated around the pool tables. A man and woman barely old enough to be in here legally sat nearby at one of a number of battered, unmatched tables. The man drained his malt liquor can, reached for the woman’s and said, “Now baby you know where I stays.” There were a couple more guys at the bar perched on wobbly stilt-like stools.
“Do me a beer, man?” one of them said, turning his whole upper body to look at me. “I’m hurtin’.”
He got his beer.
“Here’s to Truth, Justice and the American Way,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast. “All those wunful things we fought for.” He belched. “ ‘Long with career politics, of course.”
One of the players in back made a tough shot and for a while everybody kept busy walking around the tables doing high fives, slapping palms, exchanging money.
“You in here a lot?” I said.
He thought about it. “I ain’t here, Luther don’t bother opening up.”
“Know a guy named T.C.? Regular, they tell me. Tall dude-”
He grinned. Not a good sign.
“-hair cut short, wears one earring. Light skin.”
“Man, I tell you, these beers be disappearing in a hurry on a day like this one here. You notice that?”
I put another five on the bar in front of him.
“Well, then. He be coming out of the bathroom back there just about any time now, I ‘spect,” he said after ordering and sampling a new beer. “What you want with T.C. anyway? He ain’t much.”
“Friend asked me to talk to him.”
“Ain’t much for talk, either.”
And at that, as if on cue, the man himself stepped into the penumbra of light behind the pool players, six-four or-five and at least two-fifty, all of it muscle except maybe the earring, followed a moment later by two guys in sportcoats and jeans who hurried on out of the bar.
He watched me approach without registering anything at all: alarm, suspicion, caution, interest. Or humanity, for that matter.
“Buy you a drink?” I asked.
“Why th’ hell not?” And after we’d bellied up to the bar over my beer and his double Teacher’s rocks, he said: “So what is it you’re needing, my man? How much and when. And a name, somewhere along the way.”
Faint tatters of an accent drifted to the surface, Cuban maybe.
“I’m throwing a chicken fry for my friends,” I said. “Someone told me you were the man to see.”
He looked at the bridge of my nose for a minute or so. No sign of alarm, suspicion, etc. (See above.)
“I get it,” he said. “You’re crazy, right? Like ol’ Banghead Terence over there. Hey: you been buttin’ down any walls lately, boy?”
“No sir,” Terence said. My informant.
“Nigger got his head scrambled right good back there in Nam, so now every few days we’ll find him in some alley somewhere and he’ll be running headfirst into the wall over and over again till he falls down and can’t get up no more. Wall just sits there.”
He finished his drink, rolled ice around the bottom of the glass.
“Figure something like that must of happened to you. Ain’t no other possible reason you be comin’ here this way, rubbing up against me like this. You got to be crazy too. Now you tell me: am I right?”
I smiled, ordered a couple more drinks for us, and started telling him why I was there. That Sheryl wanted me to talk to him, explain why he had to leave her alone.
“So you just run on out and do whatever any pussy tell you. That it, man?”
I started over. Clare was a friend of Sheryl’s and-
“So you be fucking them both at the same time? Or they do each other while you watch.”
I tried once more. I really did intend, or at least had convinced myself that I intended, just to talk to him. But intentions are slippery things.
When the gun came over the table’s edge, suddenly, at the exact moment he switched his eyes toward the door and lifted his face as though in greeting, I slammed my glass down as hard as possible on that hand. The glass shattered, but I didn’t feel it then. I did feel bones give way under the glass. My other hand was already moving toward him with a heavy ashtray, and that connected just above his left eye.
“Righteous,” Terence said from the bar.
T.C. went back out of the chair, toppling it, but sprang almost at once to his feet and made a grab for my shirtfront. Suckered, I leaned back with the top half of my body-and he swept my feet out from under me.
“Moves,” Terence said. “ ‘Member that shit.”
Things looked quite different from down there. It was absolutely amazing, for instance, how much bigger T.C. had gotten. Or how many cockroaches there were skittering about under chairs and things. At one point when T.C. was sitting on top of me kind of boxing my head from side to side playfully, I saw by a table leg what I’m certain was a severed, dried-up ear.
Then I watched two fingers jam up hard into his nose and heard cartilage give way there. When he lifted his hands to pull mine away, I struck him full force in the throat and he fell off me, gasping. I kicked him in the ribs, then a couple of times in the head before I noticed he was lying still and turning blue. No one made any move toward us; they simply watched.
“Better call the paramedics,” I told the bartender, staggering over to him. It sounded like: Btr. Kawl. Thpur. Medix.
He looked about the room, timing it.
“Man does comedy too,” he said.
There was skittery laughter.
But he also said, to me: “You better get on out of here. We’ll just ‘low Mr. T.C. to sleep it off a while. But come closing I ‘spect I’ll notice him there. Don’t see no way ‘round that. And then the Man’s gonna want to know things.”
I started out.
“That be two-ninety for the last round,” the bartender said.