The Awkward Black Man Read online

  “Alyce blew in like a storm,” Luellen Roundhouse reported to anyone who cared to listen. “She told him that she wasn’t the kind of girl that belonged to anyone or who wanted to settle down. And as much as Al tried to understand what she was telling him, he just sank under all that loving like a leaky rowboat in a summer storm.”

  And it was true, what Luellen said. Sometimes when Albert gazed on Alyce’s brown body in his bed at night, he would howl and pounce on her like an animal from some deep forgotten part of the forest. And Alyce loved his hunger for her. She rolled and growled, clawed and bit with him.

  And then one day she was gone—out of his bed, out of his apartment, out of the city, with Roald Hopkins, a sailor on furlough.

  “He could have been called Jimmy or Johnny,” Luellen Roundhouse said. “He could have been a she for all that Alyce cared. Because she was just hungry for passion from as many lovers as possible. She told Albert that. She warned him.”

  At about that time, September 1979, Albert and Luellen’s father, Thyme Roundhouse, met Betty Pann. He fell for Betty just as his son had fallen for Alyce. But Betty didn’t run away—not at all. It was Thyme who ran out. He left Georgia, his wife, the kids’ mother, and moved with Miss Pann to Seattle, where they lived in a house that looked over the Puget Sound. Thyme became a fisherman and Betty a nurse. “Blood and Fishes,” they had printed on their own personal stationery.

  Georgia Roundhouse changed her surname back to Gordon but still refused to give Thyme a divorce. She didn’t quit her job as senior office manager for the city of Los Angeles, but after seventeen weeks of absence she was fired.

  By then Albert was failing his classes, pining for Alyce. She had sent the lovesick student a postcard telling him that she’d left Roald for another lover, name of Christian Lovell. Her words and tone were so friendly that Albert cried for three days. Luellen convinced her brother to drop out of school and move in with their mother, each to serve as a life preserver for the other.

  For a while it went as well as heartbreak would allow. Albert got a job for Logan Construction and came up with the small monthly mortgage payment. The rest of their money came from Georgia’s private savings and what little Luellen could provide from her various part-time jobs.

  Albert had never done hard labor before. He manned a wheelbarrow most days, moving rock from one pile to another. He lifted and strained and grew callouses. Al was grateful for the exhaustion because it meant he would sleep rather than brood about Alyce at night in his childhood bed.

  Georgia cooked dinner every day and ate with her moping son.

  The mother loved Albert, but for most of his life they’d had little in common and less to say. But with Thyme gone, Georgia would find herself telling Albert about her family history. She told these stories because Albert rarely had anything to say except that he loved Alyce more and more each day.

  Georgia talked about her mother and father and Great-­Grandfather Henry, who had been born a slave but became a spice trader, getting his own ship and working from the port of Havana. Henry’s wife, Lorraine, had been a woman of the streets.

  “Great-Granddaddy Henry married a prostitute?”

  “He had got himself stabbed by a Spaniard that wanted to take over his business, but Lorraine found him bleeding in an alley and took him in. She nursed him back to health, and Henry went out and killed that Spaniard. When he came back he told Lorraine that he would marry her and build her a big house in America, where she would never have to work unless that was what she wanted.”

  “He must have been the most colorful ancestor we got,” Albert said, forgetting for the moment his sorrow.

  “Oh, no,” Georgia said. “Big Jim Gordon, your great-uncle on my father’s side, was the wildest, most exciting relative. Big Jim declared war on the town of Hickton, Mississippi, and fought that war for twelve long years.”

  “War?”

  “Oh, yes,” Georgia said with surety. “Full-fledged war, with guns and traps, dead men and blood. He lived in the woods around that town and took retribution on those that had harmed him and others of our people.”

  “When was this?”

  “Just after World War One and up to the Great Depression.”

  “But the Gordons aren’t from Mississippi.”

  Georgia smiled. It was a look of mild cheer, but Albert thought he could see how deep the pain ran.

  “You only get so much a night, Al,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you how the white men in that town of Hickton hurt Jim and then paid the price.”

  With these words Georgia Gordon got up and went to her bedroom, leaving Albert to wonder about his great-grandfather the spice merchant and his great-uncle Big Jim, the one-man army.

  So taken was the young man with his unknown heritage that he didn’t brood over Alyce that evening.

  In the morning he got up early, before his mother, and went out to work in Oxnard, where he spent the morning rolling chunks of concrete and granite to a pit that had been excavated by the company bulldozer. He swung a sledgehammer for three hours in the early afternoon and then used an oversize shovel in the gravel pit until his shift was through. He worked harder than usual, imagining a one-man black army declaring war on a white southern town. In this reverie he didn’t feel the weight of his labors or the gravity of loss.

  When he got home, the house was quiet and dark. Albert couldn’t remember the last time he’d entered the house when the television wasn’t on.

  “Mama,” the twenty-one-year-old called.

  He expected the “Here” to come from one of the back rooms. But there was no welcome.

  Georgia Gordon was dead in her bed, her left hand gripping the edge of the blanket near her chin. Her foot, clad in a gaudy, pink cashmere sock, poked out from the sheets. There was an odor hovering in the room, a smell that Albert couldn’t get out of his nose for many weeks.

  “Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” Detective Todd Green asked Albert, for the fourth or fifth time.

  “I, I could tell she was dead,” he said. “Her skin was cold, and she hadn’t been out of bed since I left this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you call the ambulance this morning?”

  “I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

  “You knew that she hadn’t gotten out of bed.”

  “I left the house at five in the morning. When I got home, all the lights were off and the paper was at the front door. I could tell that Mama had never gotten up. I went in her room after she didn’t answer, and there she was.”

  “Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?” the detective asked again.

  “I called my sister.”

  “Your sister? Why?”

  “She’s her mother too. And Mama was cold, and the room smelled bad. Lu said to call the police, and so that’s what I did.”

  Thyme Roundhouse came down for the funeral with Betty Pann on his arm.

  “I’m selling the house, Al,” he said at the reception after the service.

  “But this is Mama’s house.”

  “Your mother’s dead, and I’m still her husband.”

  The full impact of the death hadn’t hit the young man until his father uttered those words. From then on, and through the next few decades, Albert was confused about the sequence of events.

  There were some things he was sure of. He began crying upon hearing his father’s callous pronouncement. Not loud bawling; it was just that the tears wouldn’t stop flowing from his eyes. Luellen and Thyme argued. Men touched him on the shoulder and head. Women kissed him and held him like he was their child.

  At some point everyone was gone from the house, and Albert was alone with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s that someone had brought for the repast . . .

  The first bender lasted for eight or nine weeks. It carried him from the house his father was selling up to Berkeley
and Telegraph Avenue. He crashed in the laundry room of a house on Derby Street.

  One night he had sex with a woman in the back of a van while her husband watched from the driver’s seat.

  He moved out of the house and into an empty lot, using a sleeping bag that a man named Hartwynn had given him. He did day labor when the hangovers were tolerable.

  The Petals of the Sun commune was located in southern Oregon where a redwood forest met the ocean. There he dried out for some months, though he wasn’t sure how many. There was a woman with big hands named Rilette, who had built a one-room cottage and took him in. Rilette had a brother, Marquis. Marquis and Albert went into town one night and bought a bottle of red wine and then another.

  When Albert woke up the next morning, Marquis was gone, and Rilette was blaming Albert for stealing her money to buy wine.

  He hadn’t taken her money, but she sent him away. Albert marked this event as the beginning of his roustabout years.

  Finally, after three months incarceration for vagrancy in northern California, he built up enough strength and sobriety to hitchhike across country with a woman named Bergit. She was half Native American and half Swedish and tall and blue-eyed and completely in love with the world she inhabited. She was leaving her boyfriend in Oregon to visit her husband in Vermont. This husband lived on a commune that raised silkworms and practiced Tibetan Buddhism.

  For a year the master of that sect worked with Albert, trying to get him to “get outside of the inebriation.”

  “You mean you want me to stop drinking, right?” Albert once asked. “I been tryin’ to put the bottle down, but every time I turn around I find it there in my hand.”

  The master had a huge, round, burnt-orange-colored face. He smiled at Albert and shook his great head.

  “It is not what I want that matters,” the master said. “You must seek your own equilibrium. If drinking brings balance then by all means drink. But if it is only a mask, a beard to cover the real face of your desire, then you must find another way.”

  Albert would sit in his straw hut at night, wrapped in a down comforter that Bergit’s husband gave him. Outside it was below zero, but the round hut stayed warm, and Albert wondered what it meant to achieve balance.

  In the spring the master died, and the man who ran the raw-silk production line asked Albert to leave.

  “You’re just a drunk,” Terry Pin said to Albert three days after the cremation rite.

  Theodore Bidwell, Bergit’s husband, apologized for Terry’s rough words.

  “Bergit has relatives that work construction in New York,” Theodore told Albert. He bought the displaced Californian a ticket for the Peter Pan bus in Saint Albans and gave him forty dollars to hold him over till he contacted the Swedish Indian’s cousins.

  Bergit had left some months before to return to her boyfriend and his son in the forests of Oregon. Albert thought it was nice of her husband to buy his ticket and give him a recommendation.

  On the bus Albert sat by the window concentrating on the idea of balance. He thought about Alyce and his father, his mother, and Luellen. He touched the center of his chest with the middle finger of his left hand. At just that place there was a gap, a space that Alyce had stretched out and then vacated. There was something about this emptiness that kept him from the proper equilibrium. It was like trying to stand up straight atop a gas-filled balloon that always seemed to be shifting away.

  Albert rubbed the area that felt hollow, wondering if somehow he could move the emptiness around.

  In the window of the bus he peered into his own dark image, thinking about Alyce and Great-Uncle Big Jim. These unknowable quantities, he felt, were what made him stagger through life. Or maybe it was his mother’s unexpected death or his father’s betrayal.

  “My life hasn’t really been all that bad,” he said to the image of himself.

  “What did you say?” asked the woman in the aisle seat next to him.

  “Nuthin’.”

  “It was something,” the youngish, round white woman said. “I heard it. I just didn’t understand the words.”

  Her smile was gentle and reminded Al of a time when he wasn’t sad.

  “I was sayin’ that my life hasn’t really been all that bad. I mean, I’ve had some hard times, but every trouble I’ve had has been at least partly my fault.”

  “We all make our own beds,” she agreed, “but it’s God that gives us bedbugs.”

  Albert laughed deeply. While laughing he tried to remember the last time he felt mirth when sober.

  Mary Denise Fulmer was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. She taught middle school there and lived by herself in a small red house near the train tracks. She was unmarried and had never lived anywhere but Springfield.

  “Where are you coming from now?” Albert asked.

  “My grandmother lived in Montreal,” Mary Denise said. “She died last week, and I took a few days off to wrap up her affairs.”

  Albert told Mary Denise about his mother’s death and his on-again, off-again ten-year bender.

  “I just can’t seem to get straight,” he said more than once.

  Somewhere outside of Amherst she asked, “Would you like to come stay with me for a while? You could sleep on the couch . . . or in my bed if you want.”

  Albert hadn’t had a drink in thirty-four hours. He felt queasy but clearheaded.

  “I really, really want to, Mary D,” he said, surprising himself with the clarity. “But I’m on a tight schedule here. I got to get to a place that’s mine. Mine.”

  The plump schoolteacher smiled sadly and put a hand on his forearm. She leaned over and kissed his bristly cheek.

  2.

  The next twenty-two years passed like overlapping spirals drawn by a tired child on a rainy afternoon. Albert would work for weeks, sometimes for months at a time, and then he’d fall off the wagon.

  But even when on a bender, Albert would always find time to beg. This practice he’d learned from his Tibetan master.

  “A man with a tin cup allows the more prosperous to pay penance. Without this opportunity, their souls would surely be lost.”

  Albert could imbibe prodigiously in his younger years, but after he crossed the half-century border his capacity diminished. Where at one time he could drink a fifth and a half of sour-mash whiskey, now half a bottle of cheap red wine was all he could manage before the gut rot set in.

  He’d been hospitalized twice by the city and had done three stints in jail, for public lewdness, resisting arrest, and simple assault. The Eagle Heart Construction Company of Queens always took Albert back if he was sober. He’d been working for them as long as most could remember.

  Between work and inebriation, jail and hospitalization, Albert lived in a cavity under an abandoned subway tunnel on the Upper East Side. This space was an underground chamber he inherited from a German survivalist named Dieter Krownen, who had returned to Munich when his mother got sick.

  Chained together under metal netting in the abandoned tunnel above his subterranean lair, Albert had a collection of shopping carts in which he kept those belongings that didn’t fit in his 137-square-foot underground bunker.

  Albert hadn’t realized he’d passed the half-century mark until he was fifty-three. One day he’d come across his birth certificate in an old alligator wallet in the bottom of one of the carts. The date of his birth was January 12, 1958, the time 4:56 a.m. His race was Negro, sex male, and he came into the world weighing six and three-quarter pounds.

  After calculating his age, Albert stopped working for Eagle Heart Construction. Fifty, he thought, should be the mandatory retirement age in order to make space for younger workers. One of his professors at state college had told him that.

  So for six months he’d been strolling around Manhattan with his travel cart. He pushed the rickety shopping cart all over the city, whi
spering words about his father and mother, Luellen, and always, always Alyce. He begged for a few hours each day, thinking about his deceased master and believing that he was doing penance by begging and saving souls.

  One sunny afternoon he found himself on Sixth Avenue, two blocks south of Houston Street. There he stood on the corner next to a restaurant with half of its tables out on the sidewalk. He leaned against a lamppost remembering the half-told story about his great-uncle Big Jim who, Albert imagined, had killed a dozen white men in a just war.

  Over the years, Albert had fleshed out the tale that his mother had tantalized him with before she died. Albert’s Jim was six foot six, with fists like hams, and very proficient with every kind of weapon. He’d fought beside Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and had been wounded more than once . . .

  While reconstituting the story he’d contrived over the years, Albert became aware of a woman crossing the street.

  It was Alyce or, at least, almost Alyce. The woman walking toward him was the same age Alyce had been when Albert knew her; she was taller, with different-color eyes, blond not brunette, white not black. But in spite of all that she had the same style and poise and grace. She had the same wildness in her blue, not brown, eyes. Her gait was brash like Alyce’s, and her expression was one of mirth in the face of disaster.

  This woman, who every man and woman around was looking at, walked right up to Albert and said, “Hi, I’m Frankie. What’s your name?”

  “Albert.”

  “You want to make some money, Albert?”

  “OK.”

  “Well, then,” she said, with a wry grin, “let’s go.”

  Stillman’s Gourmet Grocer was a chain that had a store in SoHo. Frankie had Albert leave his cart down the block from the entrance and told him to go into the fancy supermarket before she did.

  “First, go back to the meat section,” she told him, “and then to the fruits and vegetables. Whenever you see me, count to twelve and then go to the next section. Don’t act like you know me. Just count to twelve and move on.”