Doug Cooper Spencer

** It now seemed like the frozen moment that occurs between events, like the moment before the insane steps off the ledge, or the moment before a victim's breath is snatched away. It was a moment that seemed to preclude a horrible act, but just how horrible the act, he couldn't say.

**The sign read 'The Majestic Apartments'. The lettering on the sign had once shone in a brilliant gold color befitting the building's name, but now the gold had become more of a pallid yellow blotched with black stains. The two men walked through one of the arches of the wall that enclosed the courtyard. Otis looked up at the canyon of windows that all appeared as dark eyes, sullen, looking down on him. "Whose place is this?" (From 'This Place of Men')

**Karen had always struggled to hold onto him. Though she had always felt diminished by the knowledge that deep inside he wanted to be somewhere else and to live the life both he and, regrettably, she knew he was meant to live, she held on to the marriage because she loved him, and, besides, it was the only life she had been prepared to live. (From 'This Place of Men')

**He recalled Jerry's demeanor as he recounted the years they had been gathering; his eyes, the way his mouth curled slightly at the corners showed more reminiscence than shame. Then his thoughts drifted to the young man leaning back in the chair, naked, his long torso sloped like a valley; taut and sinewy, smooth, his hairless stomach rippling down to an extravagant bush of curly black hair. He could still see the large black dick, long and thick with a slight curve...(From 'This Place of Men')

**"It's deeper than you think." That was the warning Arthur had given him; and now those very words moved in his head as he sat in church. Terrell sat through as much of the sermon as he could endure then he stepped outside to get some air, leaving behind him the sea of plumed hats and hands waving like hydra. (From 'This Place of Men')

**Terrell stood in the grimy vestibule of the building and dressed himself. He was dizzy from a hangover and his body ached from the beating. The sidewalks were wet from a rain that had moved through that morning and the air was damp as he stepped outside. He looked for his car but it was gone...

**It had bothered her the first time a man caught her husband's eye. The look was quick, but in that inkling of a moment she had seen the fascination in his glance. Suddenly everything in her stopped: her breath, her heart and her mind as she saw the way Terrell looked at the unsuspecting man. It was a passing glance, but it was the kind of look men give women. (From 'People Like Us')

**She looked out the window to the hardness of winter, through the confusion in her mind and wondered about the chances of her family surviving. She was angry at Terrell for the pain she knew would gnaw at their children and it was for those reasons she wanted to see him suffer. (From 'People Like Us')

**The street was silent as it usually was at night. The buildings were old and covered with grime and gave the area a stoic gray appearance that became so sulking at night that most people stayed away except for the lone prostitute or hustler and even they moved in a ghostly quiet. Terrell turned off the car and locked it. He saw the old woman across the street looking out her window... (From 'People Like Us')

**Karen looked at the old instant photo. Thumbing through the pages of the photo album, she watched Terrell, studied him, his images through time, and wondered what had she missed... the way he held her. The photographs didn't lie, so what had she missed? (From 'People Like Us')

**He ended up downtown where he circled Race Street. There the hustlers hung out in their oversized tees and jeans, their Timbs and sneakers startling in color against the night. Some stood talking before moving along the streets or up to waiting cars, while others sat on stoops, all of them making eye contact with passing drivers. One of the men leaned against a mailbox smoking a cigarette. His arms hung across the box and his hand flicked the embers. Terrell watched the orange specks dart from his cigarette before dying to black in the darkness... (From 'People Like Us')

**(Flashback, 1963) It was quick. So quick that light and air shot past his head as he found himself dangling off the floor. Gasping, he fought to catch his breath. He heard his mother and his sister scream, then fade... Suddenly everything came back: the light, the air and the screams as he came crashing down into a chair. Above him his father's face was a twisted mask."I saw him! I saw him!" his father yelled.His mother covered her face and cried as his sister ran between the folds of her dress."Turn off that television! Now!" His father demanded. "I'm tired of the way he looks at those men. Sick and tired of it!" A lamp flew off a table and crashed to the floor. "Tired of it!" His father stormed out the room.Slowly, a longing silence moved over the house. Terrell sat in the chair and pulled air into his chest as he sorted out his crime and the light and the sounds that had whizzed by. His mother walked over to him and cradled his head. Tears streamed down his face as he told her he was sorry.

** She would have to die that way. Holding that damn bag in her hand. They said she had been sitting there for almost a week. Just sitting there with her eyes open, holding onto that damn bag.

   They asked him if he wanted it, and he almost said no. But something wouldn’t let him get rid of it. Now it sat somewhere at the bottom of his suitcase, a bag containing his baby hair, nail clippings and three small pebbles that once was his feces, dried in the sun, now just small pebbles.

** The blue sky seemed endless as Otis looked up at it. And it was still. No clouds just the endless blue and a white sun that hadn’t moved in an hour or so.

    Terrell had made the phone calls and had put everything in place. Now he and Otis got out of the car. A wall of hot air rushed to their faces as they left the air conditioned car and began to walk up the driveway. Already there was a van parked there.

     Terrell noticed that Otis slowed a bit as they walked towards the house. “You sure you okay with this?” he asked.

** Later that night, Antonio came into the bedroom from taking a shower. LaVonte watched him walking naked to the bed. He usually found a quiet joy watching a naked Antonio walk towards him, knowing he was coming to bed because he wanted to share it with him. But tonight Antonio appeared to be no more than just another body passing through, just like the others who had come and gone in his life.

“You set the clock?” Antonio asked as he climbed in bed.

"Uh huh.”

  They lay there for a while, Antonio waiting for LaVonte to question him. Finally it came.

 "Was that your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“You fuckin' her?”

** “How’s the boy doin’?” Otis’s father asked. It was the first time he had asked about Antonio since he had found out the young man was his grandson. In response to the news he had crafted a space where he had placed him and had stubbornly ignored him.

 "Fine. Working and holding his own."

“That’s good. He got any friends up there?”

“Yessir.”

“That’s good.”

His father continued to watch Miss Susie’s house. A distant light danced in his eyes then faded.

Otis took out his phone and raised it.

“You going to take a picture?” His mother asked.

“Yeah. I think Antonio needs to see this,” he said as he snapped the shot.

After a while of watching Miss Susie's house, Otis’s mother got up from her chair. “I'm going to go on in and start dinner. Munny will be home soon.” She spoke solemnly, then picked up an empty glass and walked to the house.

“We all Antonio got, ain't we?” his father said.

** There had been men who would have been good for him. Men who he knew loved him, but he couldn’t love them the way they wanted him to. He turned them into friends, or pieces for sex and let them slip away. And once they left he was assured that nothing he loved had permanence.

He had scuttled every intention of love that came his way: every eye that took him in, every hand that sought to hold him, every head that sought to rest on his shoulder.

** They usually came at night, the men and women who watched him; but now they were beginning to come in the day. So it didn’t frighten him when he saw his mother sitting across the room looking at him. He lay on his side in bed and watched her in the waning evening light. This time it was her and not the old woman in the coat.

Neither he nor his mother spoke. They just stared at each other. She had on the same clothes she wore in the photo: a black satin evening gown with a black organza wrap around her shoulders that sparkled in the evening sunlight. She sat with her hands folded in her lap in a chair that was not his nor hers, her eyes looking at him as if she was forming a decision about who he had become.

He heard the T.V. coming from the living room and for a moment in his mind he could see his father sitting on the couch with his feet up watching it, and then his mind was back in the room with her, watching.

His mother moved her hands a bit across her lap and he could hear the soft scuff of her hand as it moved across her dress and he watched her, her eyes watching him, her hand moving across her lap until she was no longer there.

He was no longer alarmed by the people who watched him, only disheartened.

** The rain had frozen on the trees that night. Otis studied the crystals on the branches suspended like silver knives over his head and thought of a place to sleep. It had been a long day, and it seemed each day was becoming longer and longer because each day offered less and less. One street corner to the next, one park to the next, two kinds of faces to encounter: hungry ones or the ones that lacked compassion; and through it all only two thoughts sat in his head, how he got to this place, and how could he leave it behind?

**Maybe Kamon didn’t understand it like he did. That’s what went through Antonio’s mind as he spread his legs and watched the man suck on his balls. Slouched on the couch, he watched the top of the man’s head and the shape of the man’s fist as it gripped Antonio’s dick, squeezing it like it was the last act the man would ever commit, sucking, nuzzling and mumbling incoherently against Antonio’s nuts.

  Being with a man was just something to do, an easy nut with no commitment and most of the time the rewards were often his. He had been with a few women in the last few years but they were nothing more than a good fuck. And that was far and in between, because being with a woman risked his freedom, something he enjoyed for the moment. He had tried it with Felicia and all he got were demands that he commit to her. With a man, he figured there would be no commitment and there would be easy money coming his way without the prospect of kids. He definitely wasn’t ready for no babies, so busting a nut with another man was quick and painless. Besides, a hot mouth and a hot hole were all the same. Being with a man was convenient and rewarding, but he knew that being with a woman was something he desired most.

 Nevertheless, it was sex, more than anything, that allowed Antonio to glorify his life and his dick was the center of it. Everyone wanted it. Even his mother sought to protect it by keeping it a secret, but she couldn’t; and it was his sex, his dick that finally broke her stranglehold the day he offered it to Felicia at the back yard fence. It was his dick. He had seen it answer the prayers of the needy and comfort the lonely; and it was his dick, this dark hanging member, that brought him both pleasure and assurance when the world told him he didn’t deserve either. He didn’t see his dick as something to counsel, but as something to offer as counsel, so he had no intention of using it to hurt LaVonte, only to comfort him.

He didn’t know if Kamon understood that, but he did, and the man with his face buried in his nuts did.  Leaning forward, he whispered in the man’s ear. “Twenty more and I can git up in that ass.”

** Tamara laughed and fell back on the couch. “Will you stop looking at me like that?”

"The first time I saw you, I was like, ‘damn’. Then I was like, ‘let it go, bruh’.”

“Funny, because I thought the same thing about you. But I was like, ‘girl you better get to know him.”

Antonio laughed and took a long dreamy look at her. “I just wanna kiss you… right there,” he said, as he pointed at her cinnamon brown stomach. He leaned down and kissed her stomach, right where her navel met the silver ring circled by the tattoo.

** The bloated sky finally broke and the rain rushed to the streets below. Otis ran into the phone booth and slammed the door shut, pushing once more to secure it. It was night and the streets had been emptied by the assault of the rain that came down in large staffs.

He wiped the water from his face and stood under the light of the booth as he thought about what to say. Staring out at the night his mind went over the words that had accumulated in his head over the past three years. Words and phrases culled from the look in his father’s eyes; taken from the mouths of his detractors, from the choking sound that came from his mother’s throat, from the silence of the onlookers as he was led from the courtroom, from the cold cell, from the smell of body odor and urine, words that created the text of his life. He knew the words, but had never rehearsed them, had never heard them, and now it was time.

In the light of the phone booth dead bugs lay in the cover of the lamp. He looked at them for a moment before pulling the coins from his pocket and laying them in front of the phone. For a second an opposing thought came to him that maybe he shouldn’t make the call. Maybe he should just go back to his room at the Y and wait it out just as he had for the last three years- - but it was only a second’s thought; only a flicker of sorrow that he couldn’t afford.

** It was the fragrance of sweet peas that woke him. Antonio opened his eyes and looked across the room and he saw her, sitting between darkness and moonlight. She sat in her chair, the same chair she had when he was growing up, and rocked slowly while watching him.

“Mama?” Antonio gently called to her. He wasn’t sure if the old woman was his mother because she didn’t look like her, yet she did. Her stature and the way she walked that day when she went into the theater reminded him of her, and then there was that unmistakable smell of sweet peas that filled his bedroom.

The apartment was dark and it was quiet. Antonio looked at the old woman and the thought came to him that he was there alone. Alone with her. He called to her again this time out of fear, hoping to calm whatever might be on her mind. 

** He didn’t have to tell Otis where to go. Otis knew. He drove to a clearing and turned off the car. They got out and walked over a recently plowed field, past the skeletons of the buildings that remained where they came to a particular spot. Already tiny blades of grass sprouted through the turned earth keeping alive the memories that were buried beneath it.

Otis and Terrell stood there and looked at the ground.

“It’ll always be here,” Terrell said as he looked at the tiny shoots of green. He moved his foot over the earth, over the space that had been the home he grew up in. He recalled the fear and the confusion. Saw the anger and the ignorance. And he heard the cries. And his eyes, now older and many years removed from the tragedy, filled with tears that rolled down his face.

Otis put his arm around his shoulders as Terrell quietly wept.

They stood in the field, the two men, once boys, once the only ones who understood so many years ago.

“They hurt us,” Otis whispered. “But we’re okay now.”

** He was still into you. And after you left, he just kinda chilled out and then slowly I found out he had started bringing in men from out of town again to stay with him. Well. It got ugly. The last man he brought in didn't want to go when it was his time to leave. He said he was under the impression he was there for good.”

 ... Shirley continued. “This guy said he wasn't going to leave, and so he stayed. B-a-a-by, they would fight. Tear shit up in the house. But Charles couldn't get him to leave, not without outing himself. So I had to come on the scene. I had to do some background on boyfriend and found out he had warrants out the ass back in Maryland. I told him I would simply turn his ass in. Well he left then. Went back to wherever the hell he came from.”

**Miss Susie stumbled a bit but caught herself. She looked down at the trail of water she had left, then back to her son. Suddenly she grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against a wall. “You been fuckin’ some girl!” She held him there and searched his face.

 “No!”

She continued eyeing him. “Some damn whore,” she muttered almost incoherently. “A muthafuckin’ whore.” She pressed him harder against the wall with one hand and with the other began undoing his pants.

Antonio struggled. “Momma! No!

She pulled until she had his pants and underwear down mid-thigh. “You been fuckin’, ain’t you. Ain’t you!” She lifted his dick and lowered her head to his crotch and began sniffing.”

“Momma, please,” Antonio begged.

“She want some of this, don’t she?” She said, squeezing his dick in her hand. “Don’t she!”

“Stop it!” Antonio yelled as he pushed her hand away.

She backed off a distance to the center of the living room and began walking in circles, “It’s just like your father’s. She want some of it. I know she do.”

Antonio pulled up his pants and stormed off to his bedroom, leaving the old woman walking and talking in circles.

After that evening he felt unsafe in the house. His mother had stopped talking to him. Humming had replaced her words. All she did was hum whenever she was around him. He became afraid to eat her cooking, so he started fixing his own food, and at night he stayed awake as he watched her shadow pass under his bedroom door. Every night she paced back and forth, stopping to say something to his room and sprinkling dust, and then walking more. It was all he could take, so he left.

**  The year was 1988 when Randolph came home and took Otis by the hand.

     “I'm sick,” he said. Then he laid his head in Otis's lap and cried. Otis held him throughout the night and well into the next morning.

    “How long do you have?” Otis asked as they sat in bed. The noonday sun washed Randolph’s bedroom in white light.

    “I don't know,” Randolph said. He took Otis's hand in his. “I think you need to find out if you're okay.”

     “Maybe you're right.”

     “There's no maybe about it. You should.”

       Otis came back negative.

      Over the course of the next three years Otis watched over his friend until Randolph left him one Tuesday night in a bright white bed in a bedroom filled with flowers.

** No one ever loved him, so how could he love someone else? Felicia had told Antonio that once, and he knew it was true. Growing up in the shuttered rooms of his mother's house he knew what people said about him: 'Susie's little black nigga', or 'Susie's little ‘haint' because they said he just came out of nowhere like a ghost.

In fact, his arrival had been a mystery because no one remembered her being pregnant; besides, they just knew she couldn't have had anybody between those old legs.

Even his mother's obsession with him went beyond love to holding on to something she felt she deserved, a score to settle with the people who doubted her, another oddity added to her broken life. And as far as his father was concerned, only time would tell.

For as far back as he could remember all he had been used for was to settle scores or to close deals. No one ever loved him. He completed other people's lives and that was that, so how could he love anyone? Why should he love anyone? But as much as he denied it, he saw no end to who he had always been, he had no place to settle into, all of which kept him wandering, his feet just above ground.

** The large old house was quiet. Somberness lay among the shaded rooms that led the three men to where the women waited for them.

    Otis could hear a woman’s voice speaking in a comforting whisper. The air slowly changed as they approached the room, becoming a mixture of soap and rose water and the slight odor of feces.

** “Mama needed you,” Antonio said quietly. “She coulda used you. Me too. Maybe if you had been around she wouldn't have gone crazy.”

"Maybe.”

“Would you have come back if you knew about me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I would've.”

 “I think she comes here too.” Antonio looked at his hands folded in his lap.

“Your mother?”

He nodded.

“What makes you think that?”

“There's a lady be sittin' right over there.” He pointed to the bench to the right of them. “She just be sittin' there all quiet and stuff. But I think she be watchin' me.”

“You sure?”

 “Yeah. And don't think I'm goin' crazy like her, because I ain't. I know it's her.”

“How often do you see her?”

“What are you tryin' to do? Check me out to see if I'm like her?”

** It was 1978 when the cell doors closed, and that was the year Otis’s world fell into darkness. Ever since then he hadn't been able to recover. Even when there were people around him they would fade to gray in the area of desolation that surrounded him.

For years he walked through light and sound, numb and with very little sense of reckoning. But it was the loneliness he wrestled with the most. It was beside him every move he made and it sometimes led him to places he didn’t want to go.

** Antonio didn't tell Tamara the whole truth. He was sitting in City Hall Park hoping to make some money. It was after five and people were beginning to get off from work from City Hall. City workers usually had money.

** “You know how dark she was. She would stand in the mirror and say ‘Gloria Jean, I think I look prettier than Cora Lee and them, don’t you think so? Cora Lee Brooks was high yellow and had good hair. She only ran with people who looked like her. Thought she and her friends were God’s gift to everybody! And Susie would say, ‘Don’t I look prettier than Cora Lee?’ and I would tell her she was, because she was. Cora Lee just had light skin and pretty hair, but that’s all... By the time she was a full grown woman Susie had had most of the men in Lincoln Heights and beyond.”

  ...“Anyway, Susie mostly went after married men. Especially the ones who married snooty women. I think it was revenge. She had so many women riled up at her that she couldn’t even walk down the street without somebody threatening her or just talkin’ nasty about her. Eventually she disappeared. Didn’t say nothing to nobody, not even me; just up and left one day... I figured she musta been chased out of Cincinnati by so many hatin’ women. But that wasn’t it. A few months later I got a phone call from her. I asked her why did she move? She just laughed and said she had got all the men she wanted in Cincinnati. Said she wanted to see who else was out there. I felt sorry for her because I knew she was just trying to love herself through other people … She was changing.” His mother stopped to assemble an extra thought. “But you know what I remember most of all about that phone call? It was silent. I asked her where she was and she said ‘nowhere,’ and it sounded like it. Just silent. No sound of people. No sound of cars passing by ... not even that airy sound you heard sometimes over the phone. Nothing. It ‘bout scared me half to death."

** To him it was nothing more than another slice of irony. He and his father both fucked men and that’s all there was to it. He was used to having unusual things in his life.

** The night was warm and clear. All the lights along the streets cut like crystal as he headed to the theater. Things were beginning to look up for him. Working for someone like Marcus Bond could open doors to bigger things, and God only knew he needed bigger things to happen in his life. He couldn’t wait to give his father the news.

As he came upon the cinema he saw his father standing out front. People passed behind him into the theater. His father motioned for him to hurry. He waved back and broke into a sprint, grinning at the news he was about to tell him. Then he stopped.

 That’s when he saw her. An old woman in a gray coat with a scarf on her head. It was the same woman he had seen that night on the bench. She moved slowly and silently behind his father and disappeared into the theater. 

** Antonio and LaVonte turned to see Tamara sitting at a table outside.

 “Got a minute?” Tamara asked.

Antonio looked at her then turned to LaVonte. “Hold up.”

“Hurry up.”

Antonio walked over to the table.

“How are you?” Tamara asked.

He put his hands in his pockets. “What’s up?”

“We need to talk,” Tamara said.

** The rain came down like a rush of arrows from the sky creating a roar against the awning Antonio and Kamon stood under.  They watched the rain as it cut through the air and shattered against the ground and the roofs of passing cars. A sea of umbrellas moved along the streets.

“Nigga, where we goin?” Antonio called out over the roar.

“We gonna getchou’ that camera. You want it don’t you?” Kamon called back.

“Man I don’t feel like…”

“Like what?” Kamon turned to him. “Like what? You think ‘cause you got that gig you got it made, nigga? Man, Marcus Bond ain’t takin’ you nowhere. You’ll be workin’ his parties day in and day out and ain’t nothin’ more’s gonna happen.” He studied, Antonio who became silent. “You know that, don’t you?”

Antonio remained quiet.

 “Come on. The rain’s lettin’ up.”

They sprinted across the street and down the avenue until they came to the address. Kamon rang the doorbell and announced them to the voice over the intercom. The door buzzed open and they went in.