Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Then Rhode Island Freddie waved in the direction of the door, while a waiter set up ice and a bottle and glasses for our table. I turned to look at the door and three black women were moving through the room, men looking up at them with greedy eyes, the three women all round and their hair piled up high and their dresses fitting them like tattoos. One of them was Winnie. In a white dress.

“Yo, yawl,” she said, and Bobby Bolden covered his mouth with a finger and nodded toward Dupree. No talking, the move said, until the man finishes. Winnie sat next to me, and leaned close, her breasts pressing against my arm, and whispered in my ear. “Member me? Ah’m Winnie.” I said I sure did remember her and she reached past me for the ice and the bottle.

Dupree smiled widely as the crowd yelled, stomped, banged on tables. Winnie squealed and then tried to introduce the other two women, Velma and Cissy, and then Rhode Island Freddie was moving on Cissy and I saw Bobby holding Catty’s hand below the table and Bumper had moved beside Velma. Champion Jack Dupree was finishing, the whole room cheering and standing, the little man nodding and smiling and walking off in a hurry.

“Sure do love the way that man sing,” Winnie said. “Whad you think?”

“Great.”

Her eyes were fixed on me as if I was the only man in the place. She looked even darker in the dim light of the Blackhawk, her skin offset by the white dress, and she wore a lot of black makeup around her eyes. Her lips were thick and full, covered with glossy coral lipstick. She asked me again about New York, while Dupree’s musicians left the stand and some burly men in T-shirts began to set up for another act. I tried not to look at her too hard or to stare at her breasts. I didn’t want her to say, Ain’t you never seen no cullid girl before? Recorded music played on the sound system, slower stuff, some of those records I’d heard up in the Kingdom of Darkness. Lowell Fulsom. Roy Brown. The small dance floor was immediately crowded. Rhode Island Freddie led Cissy away by the hand and Bumper took hold of Velma and Tampa went away somewhere and came back with a bony woman with scared eyes and slipped past us into the dancing crowd. Winnie said, “Dance?” I glanced at Bobby, thinking: What is this? Is she some gift? Bobby said, “Why in the fuck not, man? Go ahead …”

Winnie led the way, holding my hand, and I felt strange, wondering if this was the way black men felt when they were in a place where everyone was white. I was sure everybody was looking at me or looking at Winnie, or both. Just waiting to see if I made a grab at one of their women. Just waiting for a sign of arrogance. So I held her hands in a formal way, hoping everybody would think I was polite, that I was a visitor, a friend of the girl and the guys at our table, just a guy passing through. But the floor was packed now, bodies jammed against bodies, and Winnie pulled me close and said, “Relax, man,” and we began truly to dance. I could smell soap in her kinky hair and felt her breasts against my chest and her syrupy belly against my crotch and I thought about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, I thought about Robert Henri and John Foster Dulles, but nothing worked: I got a hard-on. Not a mild run-of-the-mill Saturday afternoon hard-on. Not the hard-on you get from the shaking of a bus or seeing some luscious pearly-skinned Zsa Zsa Gabor in a movie. Not some piddling venial sin of a hard-on. This was a throbbing mortal sin, iron hard, thrusting right out my shorts and pressing for release from my trousers. She felt it. She squeezed my hand. Her voice was a growl.

“Least you aint no queer,” she said. “Least Ah know that.”

“I — uh—”

“Hush, now,” she said, grinding into it, the heat coming off her, while I tried to keep my back to the people at the tables, so nobody could see what had happened to me but feeling that everybody had seen it already, that it was like Pinocchio’s nose, getting bigger and longer by the second.

“We should take a walk,” she said.

“I can’t walk now,” I whispered.

She eased away from me an inch or two. “Nobody can see you. Look aroun. Yawl see any other mens?”

I could barely see the couple next to us in the hot warm darkness.

“Where to?” I said.

“We got us a borried car. Outside.”

And I knew then that she wanted it as much as I did, that maybe I was the first white man she’d ever been that close to, that I was as new and strange and dangerous to her as she was to me. We started to leave. And then the room got brighter, and the dance floor started to clear, and there was someone on the PA system talking in a blurred voice. The hard-on vanished. “Later,” I whispered. She looked annoyed, but said, “Aw right … later.”

I had to piss and said I’d be right back and started walking toward the entrance. Over the microphone, I heard the word “… Upsetters” and turned around and Rhode Island Freddie was right behind me.

“Don’t wantchoo getting lost,” he said, and smiled. He guided me away from the entrance and along the back wall and down a corridor. There were a couple of bare forty-watt bulbs hanging from electric wires strung along the ceiling. I could hear a roar from the main room. Then in front of me I saw Champion Jack Dupree arguing with the large black man with the sunglasses.

“Ah, juss wunt muh fuckin money , man. Tha’s all.”

“You play you second set, you get the green.”

“Shit,” the old man said, turning away. “Shit.”

Freddie and I went into the john. There was a shallow trench along one wall, and we stood there and pissed into it.

“Po fuck cain’t get his bread,” Freddie said. He stuck a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He lit up, finished pissing, took a deep drag, then passed it to me.

“Little reefuh?” he said.

“Nah. Hey, what’s with this Winnie, man? How come none of you guys want her? I feel funny, you know—”

“Doan feel funny, feel her .”

Champion Jack Dupree walked in and went to the trench and pissed in silence.

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

“Her husbin’s on the Midway,” Rhode Island Freddie said with a sigh. “Mos’ of us, we know the dude. Wouldn’t be right, us knowin him and all. But it seem lak such a waste, hear? And you don’t know the man.… Hey, Champion,” he said to Dupree, “want a toke?”

Champion Jack Dupree zipped up his trousers and reached for the reefer. “You hear that fat mothafucka?” he said. He inhaled, held it, let the smoke out slowly. “If he still in the county when I finish the second set, itd be a fuckin miracle.” He looked at me. “What the fuck are you dune in this shithouse?”

“Came to hear you,” I said.

“Don’t bullshit a bullshittuh, white boy,” he said. “I hoid yiz talkin. You here for da fine brown pussy …”

Rhode Island Freddie giggled.

“Know what I’m saying to you?” Champion Jack Dupree said. “But ya better watch it, white boy. Pussy drive men into da valley of fuckin deat’.”

He took another toke, then sang a few lazy bars:

We all laughed, and started back to the hall. The place was going crazy. Women were standing, screaming, shouting, and the men were shaking their heads, and laughing, and tugging at the women. And up on the stage was the craziest looking black man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t very big, but his hair rose high over his head in a pompadour, all greasy and wild, and he had on a long draped baby-blue jacket and red shoes and he was standing up at the piano, banging hard while horns and saxes honked behind him and his eyes rolled around, out of control. I couldn’t hear the words. But words didn’t matter. He came to a crashing windup and whirled, and did a double split, stood up, and bowed. The crowd went wild, calling at him, shouting for him. He had the mike in his hand, gazing in a glassy-eyed way around the room, and then saw me about to sit down again next to Winnie, who was very sweaty now, with deep stains under her arms and down her back.