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While Jamison was sure the old dust that lined almost every surface in the Rainforest had been responsible for the little rash he’d gotten on his neck just three hours after he’d pledged and been invited to the Rainforest as a rite of passage, he still frequented the hideaway to reminisce about some romp he’d been pressured into there that had proved to him that he was still a boy or else make fun of its dated décor that hadn’t changed one bit since 1976. The old joke was that the only thing that changed at the Rainforest was “the bottles and the brothers—due to those who’d passed on like Renaldo (and may God—who is frat—bless his soul).”
Emmit and Scoot were at the tiki bar in the Rainforest plenty drunk when Jamison walked in. They pointed at him and laughed, hollering something purely nasty that Jamison dared not commit to memory. As always following a chapter meeting, the bar was packed with brothers—well, as packed as a bar could be that was housed in the basement of a three-bedroom bungalow in East Atlanta. There were even a few women peppered here and there between brothers and on laps. No wives or girlfriends or longtime sweethearts or sorority sisters to worry about. Just women who knew what they were there for and abided to such planned and unplanned activities as they came.
One woman met Jamison midway through his entry with a beer in her hand.
“I heard you liked Golden Monkey,” she said, her arm outstretched. She was much shorter than Jamison. Had a petite, hard body and a face that made him wonder how beautiful her mother must be. Soft lips. Colored pink.
Jamison took the beer and kissed the woman on the cheek.
She walked away. She’d come back to say hello later.
“You made it, young buck,” Scoot said, watching Jamison as he took a seat on a stool at the bar beside the one that was no doubt struggling to support Scoot’s jolly girth. “Thought you were going to stand us old ladies up.”
“Never that. You two are my favorite sweethearts.” Jamison clanked his beer against Scoot and Emmit’s glasses of Jack Daniel’s.
As usual, time was easy but ferocious in the dank, harshly decorated basement. There was an endless stream of jokes and laughter. Toasts. Women taking shots off of one another. Old stories. Card games. Brothers being carried out and in. And then the men were all four hours older. And then five. Six.
Jamison was on his third Golden Monkey. He knew better than to move off of his stool. The petite girl had returned and was standing beside him, laughing at Scoot’s old-timer “Shine and the Titanic” jokes and rubbing Jamison’s back like they’d known each other for a long time or not at all.
Emmit had gone outside to talk with another brother he’d been in business with for a while. They were silent owners of a massage parlor on Piedmont in Buckhead. It was crewed by dozens of non-English-speaking Vietnamese women who might be underage but were definitely illegal. The place catered to a stable list of regulars—cops and lawyers, businessmen who claimed to visit the Lotus Health Club because they liked the authentic Vietnamese food and cheap drinks. Emmit, who’d served in the Vietnam War for two weeks before it ended in 1975, had absolutely no visible ties to the parlor. According to business and tax records, the sole proprietor was a Vietnamese woman named Lang. Her daughter, Natalie, had finished at Spelman two years before Jamison. She was half black and had tiny elf-like ears like Emmit’s, but she’d never met him.
“So, what’s going on at de mayor’s office,” Scoot asked after he’d finished telling his jokes.
“Lots of paperwork and baby kissing,” Jamison said.
“Ass kissing, too. I’m sure of it.”
“Now that’s always on the menu.”
“I was playing golf with Governor Cade the other morning and he seemed pretty entertained by your recent headlines.” Scoot chuckled.
“I’m sure he was,” Jamison said, shaking his head disapprovingly. Governor Cade was a white-haired Republican who openly longed for the old South that had been dying since he was a boy. Not that he wanted segregation and for the world to be unkind to those who hadn’t been lucky enough to be born in his world, white, and male, but he dreamed of a place where things could be less complicated, and there were clear lines he understood and he could move as he wished. Simple. Every man was responsible for his family. And how he fed them was his own making. He was one of the suburban business types who avoided “colorful” Atlanta and only mixed crowds when a deal was at stake. Since Jamison had been in office, he’d only seen the governor at press conferences and sometimes at events where they’d been forced to take pictures together. Jamison noticed that Cade hardly spoke to younger black men and mostly sent messages to him through the likes of Emmit and Scoot. “Don’t take it too hard, young man,” Scoot said. “We all get caught with our dicks in the sucker sometimes. You just have to get a better strategy next go round.”
When Emmit walked back into the bar, he was following behind a woman in blue shorts, black fishnet tights, and stylish wire-rimmed glasses. Her hair was long and blond and messy. She kissed the woman beside Jamison on the lips and ordered a drink for Emmit.
Scoot and Emmit and half the other brothers their age in the bar watched the girl’s soft buttocks move around in her shorts as she purposefully leaned over the bar. The woman beside Jamison stopped rubbing his back and started rubbing hers.
Scoot kept on joking like nothing was happening, but Jamison reminded himself that he’d need to leave soon. There was a time in any night like this in a place like that when men like Jamison had to be gone. The men were seven hours older, and the beer and liquor was setting in. Night was outside. Things could go any way from there. And though not one soul had any intention of remembering that Jamison was there, the potential for a snitch in the sacred space grew as he became more powerful.
He looked at the women. They were girls. If men ever thought like that, Jamison might discern that they were a little more than half his age. Just young enough to be Emmit’s granddaughters. They were laughing.
“You okay, baby?” the petite girl named Iesha asked Jamison. “You want some more beer?”
She almost fell into Jamison, but Scoot caught her and all of her attention transferred to him then.
“He don’t want no beer, girl. If you came here thinking you’re just going to be serving up beer all night, you’re mistaken,” Scoot pointed out, but his voice was more playful than commanding.
The girl’s answer wasn’t: “I came here for more than that.”
It seemed everyone in the bar heard this affirmation, and there was this invisible ear turning.
The girl in the fishnets was all the way up on Emmit’s lap in the chair, whispering something in his ear. The way his muscled, gray-haired arms were wrapped around her waist made her look like a child about to be carried upstairs to bed. But then there were hands firmly placed on her butt.
Jamison turned to listen in on Iesha making promises to Scoot. He wondered if his beer had worn off yet. He tried to step down from the stool and realized it hadn’t. It was 2 AM. Too late to drive home with even a little bit of alcohol in his system. No way any cop would miss that chance to get his name in the papers. He thought of calling Val to come and get him. Leaf. He sat up a little more and laughed at something stupid Scoot was saying to Iesha: “You can bounce up and down on my stomach for thirty minutes until this Viagra
sets in.”
Jamison glanced over at Emmit to avoid seeing Scoot pull his infamous bottle of Viagra from his shirt pocket. Awaiting his spectatorship was another vision he’d seen previously but was never quite prepared for—Emmit’s whole tongue was caged in the mouth of the girl on his lap. She was gyrating over him to some song no one else heard, but they all, men and women, watched like they were privy to her tune. The bartender, a younger brother who volunteered at the Rainforest to get to know the older brothers, cleared a mess of empty glasses from behind Emmit as the girl pushed him back into the bar.
