CHAPTER NINE

CAUGHT

Ella couldn't believe how atheist, how uncouth I had become. I believed that a man should do
anything that he was slick enough, or bad and bold enough, to do and that a woman was nothing
but another commodity. Every word I spokewas hip or profane. I would bet that my working
vocabulary wasn't two hundred words.
Even Shorty, whose apartment I now again shared, wasn't prepared for how I lived and thoughtlike
a predatory animal. Sometimes I would catch him watching me.
At first, I slept a lot-even at night. I had slept mostly in the daytime during the preceding two
years. When awake, I smoked reefers. Shorty had originally introduced me to marijuana, and my
consumption of it now astounded him.
I didn't want to talk much, at first. When awake, I'd play records continuously. The reefers gave
me a feeling of contentment. I would enjoy hours of floating, day dreaming, imaginary
conversations with my New York musician friends.
Within two weeks, I'd had more sleep than during any two months when I had been in Harlem
hustling day and night. When I finally went out in the Roxbury streets, it took me only a little while
to locate a peddler of "snow"-cocaine. It was when I got back into that familiar snow feeling that I
began to want to talk.
Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme wellbeing,
and a soaring over-confidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip
the heavyweight champion, and that you are smarter than anybody. There was also that feeling of
timelessness. And there were intervals of ability to recall and review things that had happened
years back with an astonishing clarity.
Shorty's band played at spots around Boston three or four nights a week. After he left for work,
Sophia would come over and I'd talk about my plans. Shewould be gone back to her husband by
the time Shorty returned from work, and I'd bend his ear until daybreak.
Sophia's husband had gotten out of the military, and he was some sort of salesman. He was
supposed to have a big deal going which soon would require his traveling a lot to the West Coast.
I didn't ask questions, but Sophia often indicated they weren't doing too well. I know I had
nothing to do with that. He never dreamed I existed. A white woman might blow up at her
husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious
things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing
she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man. That's one automatic red
murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.
Sophia always had given me money. Even when I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket, when
she came to Harlem I would take everything she had short of her train fare back to Boston. It
seems that some women love to be exploited. When they are not exploited, they exploit the man.
Anyway, it was his money that she gave me, I guess, because she never had worked. But now
my demands on her increased, and she came up with more; again, I don't know where she got it.