Just Above My Head Read online

  Peanut had not been christened Peanut, though he had indeed been christened—by his grandmother, whose daughter had died bringing Peanut into the world. Very shortly after this, and, partly because of the grandmother, Peanut’s father disappeared. Peanut was never to meet him. Peanut’s real name was Alexander Theophilus Brown (I never knew his full name until the search began for his body), and he had been born in Albany, New York, where his grandmother was a hairdresser.

  He was about a year older than Arthur—a year, or fifteen months, say; and, since I knew him mainly through Arthur, I cannot say I knew him. My eye followed Arthur’s, which happens when you care about someone. Still, I’m not Arthur, my eyes are not his eyes. I could not imagine how Peanut got his nickname, for example; later on, I realized that I couldn’t imagine it because I wasn’t one of the people who gave it to him. But Arthur was—he had been present at the event. Whatever Peanut had done to earn his nickname must have been beautiful—and hilarious—because his buddies pronounced that name with such love and laughter. I don’t have a nickname, for example, which probably says a lot about me, but, if I did, only the people who gave it to me would know what I had done to deserve it.

  He didn’t look like a peanut at all. He was tall, and thin, and kinky-sandy-haired. I would have called him Strawberry, he had that kind of flush beneath the banana-colored skin. His face was long and thin, high cheekbones, long, narrow, amber eyes. In repose, or in that anger which makes silence a dread presence, the face was as closed as some prehistoric mask. Soon, without realizing it, you waited for the delight and the wonder—to say nothing of the relief—of seeing that face open, as when he laughed, or was talking about something that excited him.

  He was an orphan, really, who lived with his grandmother, a relentlessly respectable old black lady, who hated all black people and who blamed all black people, especially her grandson, and most vehemently her daughter, for the adversity which had driven her from the heights of Albany into the cauldron of the city. The adversity, real enough, was not at all mysterious, being dictated, merely, by real-estate machinations on the part of the people who owned the land. These machinations forced her to sell her shop at a loss. It was not intended that she get past the labyrinth of laws, banks, and insurance rates and find another location: black people, who have many faults (and who have yet more to discover) are not the authors of this particular devastation. Yet, the old lady, Peanut’s grandmother, blamed it all on—us; and matters could not have been helped by the fact that Peanut, standing beside her, was as fair as the morning and she was as black as a shoe. And Peanut had been told that he looked like his mother (or was it his father?). All this must have mightily troubled Peanut’s mind, but he was trying to get it together; and he loved his grandmother, who, in her black, bleak, relentless way, loved him. And Peanut never talked about the adversity which had driven them into the city—for it could not have been entirely an adversity for him, he was asthmatic with boredom in Albany—but it certainly had something to do with both his faces.

  Anyway, let’s say about a year or so after all this, I had a fight on my job with some snot-nosed, red-headed white boy who thought it was fun to call me “Shine.” And I had been real nice about it, let me tell you. I told him once. I told him twice. The third time—but I was still being nice—I warned him of the agonies of dying of constipation because he wouldn’t have no ass by the time I got through with it. And when I say I was being nice, I mean that I could see that this brainless Andy Hardy democratic republican had no idea what he was fucking around with, didn’t know that he could lose his life. He didn’t even mean any harm, he was just having fun the way he’d been taught to have fun. Poor slob, the next time he called me Shine—”Hurry up, Shine, hurry up!”—I didn’t tell him no more. I was on top of the ladder, working loose one of those bolts of cloth which weigh about two tons. You have to be very careful with it. The man on the ladder must lower this bolt of cloth very carefully to the man on the ground. The bolt of cloth is horizontal as you work it loose; it must be lowered vertically into the arms of the man on the ground. The trick is to shift this weight into a vertical position as you work it loose and, since you’ve got your back turned to the man on the ground, he’s got to be ready when you start to slide the cloth down the ladder.

  This time, when the child called me Shine! I’d just worked the bolt of cloth loose, but he didn’t know it. I lifted it, and dropped it, and turned around on the ladder, just in time to see his face, as it missed him. If it had hit him, it would have broken his neck. I’ll never forget his eyes—he didn’t know what he’d done to make me try to kill him. And, because he didn’t know what he’d done, I came off the ladder, and—tried to kill him.

  It’s a dreadful place to be. I’ve been there a few times since—hope never to have to go there again. There is a blood-red thunder all around you, a blinding light flashes from time to time, voices roar and cease, roar and cease, you are in the grip of an unknowable agony, it is in your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breath, an intolerable labor—and, no, it is not at all like approaching an orgasm, an orgasm implying relief, even, sometimes, however desperately, implying the hope of love. Love and death are connected, but not in the place I was that day.

  Somebody dragged me off him. The boy was a bloody, bewildered mess. I felt an absolutely intolerable grief and shame. The poor child didn’t know. He didn’t know. Two lives had nearly been lost, and on those two lives how many others depended? because he didn’t know.

  I didn’t lose my job, miraculously. Though, looking at it coldly, it probably wasn’t miraculous at all—I was simply a more valuable worker, and cheaper, than the white boy. I apologized to the child, I was even willing to help him wash up, but they gave me the rest of the day off.

  I worked on 39th Street. I walked up Seventh Avenue, intending to go to a movie on 42nd Street, but by the time I got there, I really didn’t have the heart to go to a movie and so I just kept walking. Not for the first time, but, then again, maybe really for the first time, I wondered, I wondered what I was to do. With my life.

  I walked through the city. I just was not able to get into a bus, or a subway. I walked home.

  It was about six in the evening. When I got to Harlem, I realized that it had been a nice spring day. It was April.

  I heard the piano playing as I got to my floor, and I was happy that Paul was home. I walked in through the door which led to the kitchen. There was no one in that part of the house. I walked through the two bedrooms, to the living room. There were Paul, Peanut, and Arthur; and Peanut was at the piano.

  Arthur stood beside Peanut, singing. Paul stood behind them, keeping the beat with one foot; and Peanut was trying to follow the beat.

  That gospel train is coming

  I heard it close at hand

  I hear the engines trembling

  And rumbling through the land,

  Arthur sang, and “Now!” Paul grunted, but Peanut fumbled on the keys.

  Paul leaned over him, and struck a chord. “If you do that, then, you can get here”—he struck another chord—”home free. And then—hit it, Arthur—get—”

  “On board, little children—”

  “Get!” Paul grunted.

  “On board, little children—”

  “Get!”

  “On board, little—”

  “Chi-l-dren!”

  “There’s room—”

  “Come on!”

  “—for many a more!”

  They all laughed, and Paul said, “You almost made it that time, son. But don’t be in a hurry when you play. If you don’t let it take the time it takes, then you ain’t got no time, you see what I mean?”

  Peanut nodded, his forehead vivid with tension, and coated with sweat. He sat, with his hands between his knees, staring at the keyboard. They might have been there all afternoon, or for days; no one had yet noticed that I was in the room.

  “You worry too much about the beat. But the beat comes out of
the time—the space between one note and the next note. And you got to trust the time you hear—that’s how you play your song.”

  Peanut turned on the piano stool, and the two boys stared up at Paul, both drenched in the fading sunlight which poured on them through the window. Heavy, black Paul was in profile to me, in silhouette. The two boys looked up at him, in absolute belief and wonder. Peanut’s forehead was still tormented.

  “Would you give me lessons?” he asked.

  Arthur looked at Peanut, and then up at Paul. There was a fascinating collision in his face of jealousy and pride.

  “I ain’t no teacher,” Paul said.

  Peanut blushed, and dropped his eyes, and his hands fell between his knees again. “I know,” he said, “but—”

  Paul said, “If you want to drop by some evening—early, you know, like now—I’ll run over the keys with you.”

  “I sure would appreciate that,” said Peanut, “I would sure appreciate that, sir,” and he wanted to say more, but didn’t know how, and Paul, embarrassed, turned, and saw me. I looked into his eyes, and we smiled. I was so glad to see him, my father, my old man. I thought of the boy who had called me Shine: but my father knew about him already, had known him from a long ways off.

  “You’re home early,” my father said.

  Arthur and Peanut stared at me, but said nothing.

  “It was a rough day,” I said, “down yonder in the dungeon. But everything will be all right if you’ll just sit down at that piano and play us a little something.”

  Paul gave me a look, and Peanut moved from the piano stool. Peanut and Arthur stood at the window, and I sat down in the chair by the door. Paul played Duke’s “Across the Track Blues.” The boys at the window, me in the chair, Paul with his slicked-down hair as the day began to fade, and the Duke, from wherever he was, smiling all over his face.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I was at all grown up then, because I wasn’t, and I’m not sure I’m grown up now. But I’m one of those people who have always had to seem to be grown up: this aspect of her husband has probably contributed to Ruth’s sense of humor. Like Peanut, I was trying to get it together. I was luckier than Peanut because I had my mother and father, and I had Arthur: but Arthur (I did not know this then) was a double-edged sword.

  One’s little brother begins his life (you think) within the sturdy gates of one’s imagination. He is what you think he is; he is everything that you are not; and he is, though you will never tell him this, much better, more beautiful, and more valuable than you. This is because you are here already, and he has just arrived. You have been used already, and he is newborn. You are dirty, and he is clean. You want the moon for your brother; you have forgotten that you must once have wanted it for yourself. Your life can now be written anew on the empty slate of his: what a burden to give your little brother!

  Ah. I saw myself in Arthur. I forgot that we were brothers, and that he could also see himself in me. I might have shriveled and grown old if I could have seen what he was seeing. Well. This is love, just the same, however we warp or weave it. Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.

  What was Arthur seeing? I was a fairly good-looking, skinny kid of twenty. With a little light stealing, here and there, I kept myself in fine clothes—fairly fine clothes. I wasn’t crazy; didn’t, for example, pay down on the car; and then sleep in it. I loved my mother and my father—that helps. I didn’t want to be a bad example to Arthur, and that helps. Drugs were flooding the ghetto, and that scared the shit out of me, for Arthur, and so there were a whole lot of things I didn’t do and a whole lot of people I told to kiss my ass.

  But I was scared. My future dropped before me like a swamp. I clung to night school, I kept my job. I had one girl after another. But if there’s no future for you, if fucking doesn’t become something more than fucking, then you have to forget it. And then you’re worse off than you were before.

  Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life. Everything’s happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That’s because you ain’t got to go through it no more.

  Still, the weather of some days, the odor of a moment, or the moment you turn the corner, say, into a street which you do not remember, and which yet you will never forget, or seeing a figure leap from a bus, or watching a boy and a girl hand in hand, or, sometimes, seeing a small child smiling, face to the sky, or a tree, or the sky, or a stone, can make you ache, as though no time had passed, with the first time you saw love, the first time love saw you. The light that’s in your eyes! reminds me of the skies! that shine above us every day. The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.

  But then—for example, I drank: but young people don’t really drink, they swallow, producing instant piss. It’s only later that the liquid you pour down your throat backs up.

  Ah, then—you walk, you weep, you vomit—you stink; your prick rises up, and you jerk it off (if thine hand offend thee!), demons drag you off to sleep, you shudder awake. You shit and shower and shave. You wonder. You get it together, and you make the scene. You tell little brother how everything’s cool. He says, for true? And he’s watching you.

  Here comes Crunch. He was big, the biggest boy in what was to become The Trumpets of Zion quartet. If thunder could be seen, then, I imagine that thunder would look like Crunch; and so would innocence. He owned several plantations of very thick, tangled black hair, a wide nose, which seemed, somehow, both aggressive and abused; heavy lips, a beautiful grin, lots of white teeth, perfectly straight. He was skinny, but powerful, played basketball, and was the boy who made out best with “the ladies”: his term.

  The term conveyed his bewilderment. Some men, and some women, appear to be born for the purpose of igniting desire: it appears to be their function. It is taken for granted that their intention is to fulfill desire—your desire—and that their smile, or their look, is meant to convey this intention.

  It is not their intention at all. They have, very probably, barely noticed you, and are too innocent to be able to imagine what you are imagining.

  These people are treated with an unbelievable brutality, a brutality made all the more hideous by presenting itself as love. And, in my experience, at least, these people, who are the objects of a lust at once abstract and consuming, rarely know how to defend themselves. They do not know, until too late, that they have any reason to defend themselves. This is because of that invincible innocence: and, less innocent, they would be less attractive—to rouse innocence to an utterly brutal, pounding passion is a fantasy rooted in everybody’s nature. It makes the head spin; perhaps it makes the earth spin. What is lacking in every fantasy is that sweat of love which is called respect. “I’m tired,” Crunch was to say to me, much later, “of being treated like something hanging on the other edge of a prick.” For he was King Kong in a jockstrap, poor boy, dribbling the ball down the court, striding the avenue, patting children on the head, helping old ladies and blind men to cross the street. He was a beautiful person, manhandled, smashed.

  He was the oldest of five children, three girls, two boys. Their fathers came, and went; their mother was, in the main, a barmaid. His name was Jason Hogan, and he had been born in New York City.

  Red was his best friend, was, in fact, a distant cousin, and they had grown up together. Crunch called Red his “heart,” and he meant it.

  A Saturday afternoon. Crunch has the guitar. Paul is at the piano. Peanut, Red, and Arthur stand behind him, Crunch stands to the side.

  It is early December. The streets are empty and the air is icy with the threat of Christmas.

  They are to make their debut Christmas morning, in our church, on Edgecombe Avenue. One of the reasons that we attend this church is because of Paul’s following on Sugar Hill. But Paul does not play piano in this church—the church would not ap
prove—except when Arthur sings. He doesn’t always play for Arthur, and almost never plays for Arthur in any other church. He didn’t carry Arthur around the way Brother Joel Miller carried Julia around. He took a very distant attitude toward Arthur’s singing, almost as though it were an adolescent malady his son would have to survive. He was far more available to Peanut, Crunch, and Red than he was to Arthur. This made Arthur jealous, and jealousy made him work—he stayed at that piano, and he listened to everything—so that, if Paul’s intention had been to discourage Arthur, his technique boomeranged.

  Later on, I understood Paul. I think I may have understood him, though dimly, even then. Paul did not know if Arthur knew why he was singing. It was something Arthur had come to all alone, and at the age of thirteen. He had not claimed to be saved. He had not been baptized. (He had been christened at birth, but that is not baptism.) And, yet, he sang—indeed, he sang, and there was something frightening about so deep and unreadable a passion in one so young. Arthur’s phrasing was the key—unanswerable; his delivery of the song made you realize that he knew what the song was about.

  Your reaction to this passion can destroy the singer. Paul knew this, and Arthur didn’t. Paul marshaled the other boys around his menaced son, for he knew why they were singing. (The boys thought they knew, too.) He knew they would not sing long—something would get in the way. But if anything got in Arthur’s way, Paul would be missing a son.

  So, he labored every weekend, my old man with the slicked-down hair, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening. It was out of jealousy and curiosity that Arthur joined them, and that’s how the quartet got started. Arthur wasn’t really anxious to surrender his solo status, he really dug being alone up there. But, on the other hand, it was more of a challenge, and more fun, being up there with the others, and he learned more that way. Paul had painted him into a corner, for he would not work with Arthur without the others: and, teaching the others, he was teaching and guiding his son.