Pieces Of Us
By Liz Thorne
Copyright 2012 Liz Thorne
Cover Art Copyright 2012 Dan Arrojado
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Better never to have met you in my dream than to wake and reach for hands that are not there.
Otomo No Yakamochi
Work was hard to
find in those days. Any man who had a job was a lucky sonofabitch,
and he knew it. A man who could pay his mortgage and buy his wife a
new dress and buy his son a catcher’s mitt was considered to be of
equal status to God Himself. I wasn’t one of them. I had lost my
job at the office back in ‘30, and I was forced to shuffle through
the city like a wraith with the rest of the unfortunate souls.
When the hammer fell, and the poison really started to flow through Lady Liberty’s veins, it was impossible to do anything. There was nothing for a fella to do back then. When you weren’t pounding the pavement, almost begging someone to give you a chance, most guys’ my age were hitting the bottle pretty hard. You may be asking how we managed to do that, when the times were so tough and the money wasn’t flowing like it used to. It’s simple: Give a man a choice of dimming the lights on reality for a few hours, and he’ll pay pretty much anything.
There was this place down on the corner from my apartment; Bailey’s. Some kind of Mick place, but the beer was cheap and the music was good. I used to go there when the walls of my apartment started to crowd in on me.
I was told what I needed was a dame, but they seemed more trouble than they were worth. They were always fussing about not having any nice things, always turning off the radio when the Yankees were on base and there were two outs. A woman couldn’t understand, you know. She would tell you to find a job, like it was the easiest thing in the world, then she’d go down to the department store and spend your bill money on fancy hats and fur coats.
Bailey’s was always full, usually of sorry louses like myself. Men who would hide their faces under the rims of their fedoras, and nurse their beers like babes on a tit. They had the same hunched shoulders, the same ratty coats, the same holey shoes. A few years earlier, those shoes had been leather and spotless, proudly stomping through foyers and lobbies; but like the seams on those shoes, everything had started to tear.
I’m digressing. I guess even all these years later, I’m ashamed of what happened. I’m ashamed of who I am. And there’s no reason to be, I’ve been told. But back then, a man like me was chased through the streets with golf clubs while the cops laughed and passed a flask around. Look at that, they’d say to each other, Showing that little faggot what’s for.
All these years later, it’s still hard for me to talk about. And maybe it doesn’t have much to do with my shame. Maybe it has everything to do with him. Maybe what I really want to write about is how he loved me, and maybe I just don’t think I have what it takes to put that down. A man is damn good at writing about his interests; you can go down to the bookstore and see a million different books about sports and cars and puttering around the house on Sundays with a tool belt strapped around your hips. But how many of us are good at writing about what’s in our hearts? Not just the new fires that ravage and scorch, but the old fires. The one’s that have turned to embers, burning low and slow and hot.
Those old fires, I think, are the hardest to write about. They’re still far too hot to touch, putting out an awful lot of smoke. It’s choking me in there, you see. I can’t breathe, and I have to get it out.
I have to write about him, as little as I want to. I’m an old man now, the arthritic fingers that grip this pen aren’t the same fingers that once ran over his skin in the middle of the night. But I’ll try. If not for myself, then for him.
****
Brooklyn, New York, 1934
I saw him sitting outside of Bailey’s. It was mid-September, and there was a bite to the air, but he had no hat or coat. I wasn’t surprised by his lack of proper attire, nor that he was sitting against the brick wall. If Mr. O’Connell - the man who owned the pub - found him there, he would probably run him off like a diseased alley cat. It seemed almost tragically fitting that above the man’s head, the sign on the wall proclaimed: NO COLOREDS.
You might be thinking that segregation and racism was a purely Southern problem. But around those times, a Colored man in New York State had about the same rights as a mule. Not many of us were proud of it, but the Coloreds had their own bars and taverns. Why this one was leaning against the wall with his big hands dangling between his knees was beyond me. I approached him - I’m ashamed to admit, I approached him the way a man might a dog he’s not sure will lick his hand or bite it off - and cleared my throat.
He looked up, half his face swollen up and his bottom lip busted. That Mick had already been at him, and I grimaced. He didn’t look like he was too upset about it though, he offered me a smile, and I returned it uncertainly. “David Hardy.”
“Excuse me?”
He grinned, sliding up the wall. He towered over me, easily by three or four inches. I flicked my eyes over him. He looked like any other man around that time, all patches and worn shoes. But there was something about him that was different: his easy smile. Even when half of his face was beat up and bruised, he smiled. “I’m David Hardy,” he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it.
I laughed, I think. What else was there to do when this giant man was pumping my hand and pulling my arm out of its socket? “Joe Sawyer,” I offered. I was very aware of how easily he could crush my hand if he wanted. For some reason, this gave me a little thrill. I couldn’t explain it then, and I still can’t now. Maybe I just liked how dark and strong he was. Maybe, with all that had happened, I wanted someone who was strong enough to carry all of my troubles.
Or maybe I was just really horny.
We got to talking, and he told me that he had come up North from Georgia. I had a feeling he wanted to expound on that, maybe go into just what was going on down there, south of the Mason-Dixon, but he never did. That sunny smile reappeared, and the dark shadows on his brow cleared. I imagined that a man who smiled like that would be an easy man to love, and my stomach got all tangled up in knots.
“The beer here tastes like piss,” I told him, “I have some back at my place.”
What? A little voice asked, but by that point, I was past hearing it.
“Aces,” David said, rubbing at his swollen cheek with apparent discomfort. He didn’t show any evidence of being surprised by an invitation back to a white man’s apartment. No doubt, he was probably freezing out there, and looked forward to a place to warm his fingers and rest his bones. I didn’t know it then, of course, but he had his eye on something more.
Back at my apartment, I tossed David a brewski and he sunk down into my sofa. We talked about the Yanks, about their chances in the Series. I remember laughing with him, and feeling perfectly natural. He had a twang to his words, a slow southern drawl that moved like molasses over my body.
I felt like a real asshole the more we talked. David was telling me about his life back in Macon, about how he used to work for his daddy on their farm before the land was taken from them. David had worked on the railroads since then, hopping from place to place, “like a flea on a dog’s backside.”
David ended up in Brooklyn, and the work had stopped. No more railroads, no more factories, no more prospects. He told me he lived in an abandoned warehouse on the East side. “There’s a bunch of us squattin’ there,” David explained, “Colored, white, don’t make much difference there. Long as you stay quiet and keep your nose clean, the fuzz don’t give you no trouble.”
“You get beat up on much?”
David looked at me solemnly. I remember thinking that his eyes were sharp enough to see through me, and I dropped mine to my lap. “Yeah, they don’t know why, though.” I thought he might have been smiling, a sad, almost wistful smile. “I feel sorry for ‘em.”
“Sorry for ‘em,” I repeated, mockingly. “Sorry for the Mick that beat your face in?”
I looked up at David, just in time to see him nodding slowly. “They don’t know why,” David repeated, and there had been something ineffably patient and gentle in his voice. “I know people, Joe,” he told me, leaning back and taking a swig of beer. He looked at me sideways, and I flushed a bit.
“Oh, yeah? What do you know about me, Dave?”
“You a vamp,” David said, and a little chill went through me. A vamp in those times was a gal or guy who seduced men, and how the hell could he know that about me? I wasn’t a feminine man. There were fellas like that in the city. They ran around with their faces all dolled up and their clothes all silky, and they usually hung around at bars since the end of prohibition. They lit the cigarettes and cigars of rich men and batted their painted eyelashes.
I wasn’t like that. I had been with men of course, but I had never gone out of my way to seduce them, or con them into my bedroom. David must have noticed that I was angry, because he sighed. “Maybe not a vamp,” he amended, “Maybe you just lonely.”
“You can go,” I told him. “I’m not gonna sit here and have some spade insult me.”
“You’re cuter’n a bug’s ear,” David said, giving me a crooked smile. “You know that?”
There was a part of me that was still pissed off. This man had assumed I was queer, and even though I was, it boiled my blood. And maybe what really festered in me was the idea that I couldn’t hide it, that someone else would be able to figure it out. Most people wouldn’t smile at me and call me cute; most people would bash my brains in. And people back then would celebrate them. One less queer boy in the world. The anger I felt wasn’t at the black man seated on my sofa, but in the world around me.