Part 70 (2/2)

'Same as me,' he said. 'I don't drink, don't smoke dope, don't do any of that s.h.i.+t. Used to.'

'Why'd you stop?'

'Didn't go with the image.'

'Which image? The pimp image?'

'The connoisseur,' he said. 'The art collector.'

'How'd you learn so much about African art?'

'Self-taught,' he said. 'I read everything I could find, went around to the dealers and talked to them. And I had a feel for it.' He smiled at something. 'Long time ago I went to college.'

'Where was that?'

'Hofstra. I grew up in Hempstead. Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but my folks bought a house when I was two, three years old. I don't even remember Bed-Stuy.' He had returned to the ha.s.sock and he was leaning back, his hands clasped around his knees for balance. 'Middle-cla.s.s house, lawn to mow and leaves to rake and a driveway to shovel. I can slip in and out of the ghetto talk, but it's mostly a shuck. We weren't rich but we lived decent. And there was enough money to send me to Hofstra.'

'What did you study?'

'Majored in art history. And didn't learn s.h.i.+t about African art there, incidentally. Just that dudes like Braque and Pica.s.so got a lot of inspiration from African masks, same as the Impressionists got turned on by j.a.panese prints. But I never took a look at an African carving until I got back from Nam.'

'When were you over there?'

'After my third year of college. My father died, see. I could have finished all the same but, I don't know, I was crazy enough to drop out of school and enlist.' His head was back and his eyes were closed. 'Did a ton of drugs over there. We had everything. Reefer, hash, acid. What I liked, I liked heroin. They did it different there. You used to get it in cigarettes, used to smoke it.'

'I never heard of that.'

'Well, it's wasteful,' he said. 'But it was so cheap over there. They grew the opium in those countries and it was cheap. You get a real muzzy high that way, smoking skag in a cigarette. I was stoned that way when I got the news that my mother died. Her pressure was always high, you know, and she had a stroke and died. I wasn't nodding or anything but I was high from a skag joint and I got the news and I didn't feel anything, you know? And when it wore off and I was straight again I still didn't feel anything. First time I felt it was this afternoon, sitting there listening to some hired preacher reading Ralph Waldo Emerson over a dead wh.o.r.e.' He straightened up and looked at me. 'I sat there and wanted to cry for my mama,' he said, 'but I didn't. I don't guess I'll ever cry for her.'

He broke the mood by getting us both more coffee. When he came back he said, 'I don't know why I pick you to tell things to. Like with a shrink, I suppose. You took my money and now you have to listen.'

'All part of the service. How did you decide to be a pimp?'

'How did a nice boy like me get into a business like this?' He chuckled, then stopped and thought for a moment. 'I had this friend,' he said. 'A white boy from Oak Park, Illinois. That's outside of Chicago.'

'I've heard of it.'

'I had this act for him, that I was from the ghetto, that I'd done it all, you know? Then he got killed. It was stupid, we weren't near the line, he got drunk and a jeep ran over him. But he was dead and I wasn't telling those stories anymore, and my mama was dead and I knew when I got home I wasn't going back to college.'

He walked over to the window. 'And I had this girl over there,' he said, his back to me. 'Little bit of a thing, and I'd go over to her place and smoke skag and lay around. I'd give her money, and, you know, I found out she was taking my money and giving it to her boyfriend, and here I was having fantasies of marrying this woman, bringing her back Stateside. I wouldn't have done it, but I was thinking about it, and then I found out she wasn't but a wh.o.r.e. I don't know why I ever thought she was anything else, but a man'll do that, you know.

'I thought about killing her, but s.h.i.+t, I didn't want to do that. I wasn't even that angry. What I did, I stopped smoking, I stopped drinking, I stopped all kinds of getting high.'

'Just like that?'

'Just like that. And I asked myself, Okay, what do you want to be? And the picture filled in, you know, a few lines here and a few lines there. I was a good little soldier for the rest of my hitch. Then I came back and went into business.'

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