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Life Arts    H4'ed 10/3/22

Encounters in Black: Three Flash Fictions

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John Hawkins
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Planet Waves
Planet Waves
(Image by Brett Jordan from flickr)
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I. Planet Waves

My thighs were cold because the coins bulging in my pants pockets had frozen over. Wind blew through my Army surplus coat, which lacked the lining GIs would have had when they were first issued for service in farmland France in the second war's last winter. I was shivering beneath my wool cap, lost -- only vaguely aware of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter location. I wasn't sure whether it was left or right, coming out of Symphony Station on the Red Line. The snow swirled and wind blew it in my eyes; the street was lit by old, weak street lamps. As I paused, two Black teens came out of nowhere, rough and ready; one of them held a long knife across my throat, while the other demanded money. I could feel the edge of the blade's slight pressure on my throat.

"Well, you're gonna have to hold out your hands," I said to the slim jim nonchalantly, as if I got caught up in knifethroat all the time in my travels. I was really f*cking cold and didn't really care if he stabbed me.

"Why I got to hold out my hands," he said with suspicion. His skinny pal angled his head.

"My pockets are full of coins."

"Say what?" He looked at my bulging pockets. "You gotta hold out your hands." I began putting my hands in my pockets. Knife added some pressure. I pulled out scoops of silver coins -- nickels, dimes, quarters -- and offered them up, some spilling over from my palms.

Slim jim said, "What the f*ck?" Knife loosened up with a snigger and gave his pal a look.

As I poured the coins into the hands of the thief, them looking like they didn't know what to do with themselves in this situation, Slim looked down, eyes like Say What? Knife cracked up. He saw that I was carrying an LP record. "Man, what's that record you're holding?"

I held up Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, a Christmas present a friend had given me. Knife and Slim just cracked right up, laughter coming out in gurgles and noises from their noses. While they laughed, I checked them out. They were both dressed better than I was. F*ck, Knife had the slim hands of a pianist. Keith Jarrett. I poured more change into Slim's hands. "Bob Dylan," Slim guffawed over at Knife, who'd taken the blade away from my throat.

"Man," said Slim, "Where'd you get all these coins." Some kept falling to the ground; they didn't bother picking them up. Slim dropped them down into his own pants pockets, but you could tell he didn't like the feel of so many coins on his thigh any more than I did. It wasn't natural. You wanted bills there. There was something not right about it, and I could see in his eyes the look I must have worn knowing I had hard cash practically living off my thighs like fuckin tumors, and they were cold.

I said, "It's a Christmas present from my folks." They laughed.

Then I added, without prompting, "Yeah, we just sat there all day drinking 'Gansett."

"'Gansett," said Knife, and he looked for a sec like he was going to reimpose the steel regime.

"Yeah, it's all they can afford. It's cheap."

"Damn," said Slim. I slid some more coins into his cupped hands. He kept looking at them in surprise. Something didn't add up.

"Yeah. The three of us. Listening to the police scanner. How the neighborhood's changed. Telling stories. Korean War. Pusan Push Back. My mother talking about my childhood in Missouri. How beautiful I was. Bill played some old sh*t-kicking guitar songs. Ma sang sh*t-faced down by the seashore. I kept drinking. Staring out at the snow." My interlocutors started again with the throttled laughter. Slim nodded at Planet Waves again, an expression not quite derision. I kind of knew what he meant and felt absurd.

I continued, "Then the old man went to sleep. Then she wanted to join him. And I assumed I'd be crashing on the couch. And then she came back in and said Bill said I couldn't stay the night. And I said, but Ma, I'm shitfaced, it's snowing. I don't have anywhere to go."

Slim and Knife were laughing their asses off.

I said, "Can't I just stay the night? It's Christmas. She goes, I'll ask again, and she comes back, and says, He says, No. I was gonna tell them to stick the coins they let me take from the jug earlier that day."

They were sh*tting themselves. Slim goes, "These?" We all looked at each other. I had a kind of smile.

"Mother f*cker," goes Knife, ch-ch-chiggering. He said it like that O'Jays hit from the 70s, "Back Stabber," all Caesar Et Tu?

"But I knew I needed the money for a bus, so I took it."

"Where you goin'on a bus?"

"Northampton."

"Where the f*ck is that?"

"Western Mass, out near UMass."

"Oh yeah" says Knife. "I got a cousin there."

It got silent. The denouement was at hand. I stared at the swirl of flakes.

"What you lookin at?" goes Knife.

"Just wondering if it's true what they say."

"What who say about what?"

"Even though they all look alike, they're all different. Each one is unique," I said.

Slim says, "Say what?" Some tension.

"The snowflakes." They looked at each and started down the street, running and laughing.

I yelled after them, "Hey!" Slim turned. "Which way is the Harbor Lights shelter?" Slim just cracked up and gestured in the direction to my right, and they kept running. You could hear Slim's coins jangling, like his pockets were giggling.

I stayed the night at the shelter. In the morning, I had to attend Mass if I wanted to have breakfast. I didn't want to attend Mass. So I left. I would've taken a bus, but I'd been robbed. So I hitchhiked in the snow.

II. Blanche

Mom dropped us off. Me and Mike. Blanche smiled and told us to sit down on the sofa and watch TV with her kids. Mom was going to the hairdresser, she said. She'd be back in a while. She gave Blanche five bucks, they exchanged pleasantries, and Mom left for her perm. On the sofa, I sat in the middle next to Jimmy, Mike sat on my left. Neither Robert nor Jimmy looked up as we sat, but were absorbed in the movie on TV. Jimmy kept jostling though, pushing an elbow, letting me know we were barely tolerated. Blanche was dressed in a simple, flowery smock, and neither smiled nor cared that we were there. It was fine. But after a while she brought out some milk and an assortment of cookies -- fig newtons, oreos, vanilla snaps -- for us all, and we settled in to watch the movie. Blanche went into the bedroom and got on the princess phone and began talking at someone in such a way that seemed to go up and down in scale, like an amusement park ride; there was glee and there was threat. I tuned into the movie.

I said to Jimmy, "What's this?"

"Shhh," he said. But as I kept looking at him, he made a face and then said, "Man, it's The Blob. Now shut up." Another elbow to let me know further talk was not welcome.

The film featured a strange red mass that somehow creeped all over a small town and, one by one, absorbed people into its mass that kept growing as it added people. It had come like a meteor from outer space. Whistling down like a WWII bomb. It had Steve McQueen in it and a girl had just rebuffed his efforts at affection while they were watching the starry sky at the hillside Lover's Lane overlooking the city. "I know what you want, Steve," she said. "No," he replied. "It's not like that." I drifted.

Blanche was rather loud in the room. "Fuckin' whitey," she said into the phone. "Can't even buy groceries without some Southie cracker sneering sumpin'." Pause.

The blob had taken in the auto mechanic and he kind of floated in there next to the waitress from the diner who looked like she was in the middle of asking if someone wanted more coffee. The whole world was in danger of being absorbed by the growing blob. If we weren't careful, it might be as big as the world itself one day. Tanks and soldiers were called in.

Mom came for us. She had no perm. Her lipstick was mussed. Robert and Jimmy never said goodbye. Blanche smiled down with a face alive with mystery.

III. Hollywood Jazz Trio

We lived around the corner from a Shakey's pizza joint off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I'd just got discharged from the VA after a short stint in the Air Force, where I crazed out the first night at Lackland AFB boot camp, and was sent to the base hospital dissociating and ending up answering the psychiatrist's questions with what he later termed "bizarre metaphysical overtones," which got me honorably discharged a few months later, sans any GI Bill. Mark, a friend of mine from back East, who'd just flown West and moved in with his brother, who was then living in Hollywood, told me to join out there. Fresh start. So, out I went to La-La Land. And here I was standing at the counter to pick up our pepperoni pizzas. I came in twice a week for happy hour specials that featured ridiculous amounts of pizza and pitchers of beer. A Dixieland band played widely as I paid the tab, grabbed my pies, and left.

Coming into my apartment building a Latino guy named Manuel (pronounced like the artist Buà ±uel's, but without the tilde). He was in his 40s I guessed, quiet, nervous, always smoking. He looked a little like James Dean, from the way he dressed and groomed, but one who'd been beaten half to death a few times. He didn't look you in the eye right away. He sometimes hung around the front steps, stirring.

"Hey, Jimmy," he said to me, as I tried to pass with the pies. "How's it going?"

I just nodded. He saw the boxes. I said to myself, f*ck it. "Wanna slice?" I gave him a couple.

"Muchas gracias," he said. "Jimmy, I believe in fair exchange. You must come up to my mother's place sometime and shoot up some heroin with me." I nodded and moved on. "But if a man should double-cross me," he was yelling after me, "I would have to kill that man." More nodding and moving away.

Inside the apartment, Mark and Jeremiah were preparing their instruments. Jeremiah, a muscular Black guy who Mark and I met at IBM, where we all worked as ManPower temps, mostly preparing legal documents we would send to some firm in White Plains, New York, that was defending IBM from some antitrust violation. Jeremiah was wetting his reed, a procedure that reminded me of lubing a fresh rolled doobie. Mark was busy under the hood of his Steinway with his tuning kit. They paid no attention when I came in with the pies.

Jeremiah had played solo here for us before and was outstanding with his baritone sax. He made the rounds of small clubs. He had a dream. Told us a story about the time he played and got into his vibe and when he opened his eyes to all the white people in the audience seemingly mesmerized, he goes, "Man, I went through some serious changes." We all laughed, the risibility reinforced by a jay we passed around. It felt laced with something.

We all had quick slices. Eager to get to it. Or munchies, more like it. I washed my hands and went over to the couch and took out my cheap Suzuki violin from its case. I'd begun taking lessons and had been doing my Three Blind Mice progressions down in the basement laundry room to avoid annoying, with my scratchy work, Mark and Syd, the third roomer, in the apartment. I knew chords and ventured off into riffs, but I had a long way to go before I'd be receiving an invite to audition for a trio position opening up. Lesley, an attractive brunette, and single mom, sometimes chatted me up while she soaked her dainties (I guessed) and stuffed her children's clothes into the machines. She asked about the violin and after I explained, she said, good-naturedly, "You really suck." And we'd talk sh*t and share a doobie. I'd say, "It's just the Suzuki method -- you have to do these routines." I gave her a sampling of my private riff stash and she seemed more ameliorated, but said, "Sad." But I wasn't gonna give her any more kids, if that's what she was after. And I don't think she was.

Jeremiah and Mark set up. They were ready to jam. I thought about Jerry Goodman, the violinist for Mahavishnu. Channeled "A Lotus on Irish Streams." Right? Good way to kindle the mind. Honks. Pursed lips. Keyboard rolls. Finding chords. And me, trying to avoid Suzuki like plague. I would be spontaneous. I was already high.

Jeremiah led us with a little riff to give our fingers something to think about. Then Mark came in with a complementary spray of notes. Wow. They were already symbiotic. I was afraid. F*ck, I was terrified of interrupting that ride. What if I channeled Suzuki instead of the dirge that came to mind as I listened and grooved on the vibe? I lifted my bow and offered up my hoarse drawn-out carriage to the mix. Jeremiah gave me some lovin with his eyes. Yeah, that was gonna work. We were jammin. We went on for about 20 minutes that way, all touchy feely with the vibe, the promise of a good evening of righteousness ahead. When we felt we had something to build on and briefly discuss before we got really into it, we took a short break, talked some diminished, passed around a doobie. Wow, this one was loaded.

I felt the need to sit down on the couch to play. My mind seemed to expand and the room was the inside of my cranium. I mean, there was no longer a separation between me and my environment. I hung there for a moment, in the balance, as it were. Then I must have fallen asleep. I can't remember my hallucinations, but my dreams were vivid and wild.

I told Lesley about my dream the next day. We had coffee and made love, while her kids watched toons on TV. Suzuki.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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