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Debra went away to fix the drink, and Belle watched the jukebox as if it were about to come alive. She continued to complain about Tina.
“That girl can’t be no more than nineteen or twenty and been in jail three times. It doan make no sense at all.”
“Belle, leave that girl alone,” Mel said.
She slapped his arm with the wet towel and laughed. “How come you don’t stop by Debra’s and play cards no more?”
Belle stared right into his eyes and her cheeks puffed up as she tried to look seriously concerned instead of just plain nosey. Mel knew that meant she knew all about the trouble between him, Big Boy, and Lillian. Before Mel could think of an answer that would put her in her place, lyrics from the female rap group TLC rollicked out of the jukebox. Belle headed toward Tina, hollering and cursing with every step.
Debra pulled up a stool. She had made a drink for herself, too. Mel took a sip of his and winced. It was a hell of a lot more rum than Coke.
“Listen at what those young girls are saying,” Debra said with disgust.
The bass line was booming, but when Mel listened closely, he could understand that the lyrics were saying that it was okay for a young woman to beg a man for sex if she was feeling hot enough.
Mel grinned at the lyrics and at the way Tina, the dive’s youngest barmaid, began to shimmy as she mixed a Long Island iced tea for her customer. Debra lit a cigarette.
“Tina loves that song,” she snickered.
Mel could hear Debra’s feet doing a tap-tap-tap on the rungs of the stool. “You like it, too.” He laughed.
“Yeah. I don’t like rap, but I can damn sure dig this one.”
Tina started chanting along with the record, Ann joined in, and Belle scowled at both of them before giving up the fight.
Since there were no windows in what was essentially the basement of an apartment building, the place reeked of stale cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and liquor. The walls were bare except for the space right above the liquor bottles. That wall held pictures of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John and Bobby Kennedy.
Mel drank silently while Debra watched him. He glanced at his watch. 7:00. He had finished his route two hours ago.
“You know what today is?”
“Yeah,” Debra answered sadly. “Mama’s birthday.”
“I was thinkin’ about it today while I was driving the bus. I’m one year older than she ever lived to be.”
“I think about that shit every day,” said Debra. “I watch people come in and outa here all the time that I know ain’t takin’ care of themselves but they still alive. Mama never took a drink or a smoke in her life, and God only gave her thirty-nine years on earth.”
Mel nodded. “God is impossible to figure out.”
The abrupt death of his mother had been a cruel blow. At her funeral, he had stood before the open coffin in stunned disbelief, unable to cry. For two years after she died, Mel had been paralyzed inside. Then, one day during his freshman year in high school, he was sitting in English class as the teache
r was reading James Baldwin aloud. It was a passage that had to do with love torn away without warning. At that moment he felt the sorrow, the agony, the dreadful separation. He ran from the classroom, out of the building, and home to Debra. He needed to make sure she was still alive. Without her love, he would have felt completely alone in the world, with no firmly fixed place to head for and no idea how to get there. Their aunt had made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t happy about having them around. She didn’t like young people, which was why she had never married or had children of her own. Debra let him cry on her lap, murmuring softly, “I knew this day would come. You’ll be okay now.” The next day he went back to school and finally noticed the girls who had been trying to get his attention for quite some time. He also made a couple of male friends. All the guys talked about was girls, an old seventies movie that had just been released on videotape called The Mack, and its charismatic star, Max Julien.
Mel saw The Mack three times at his friend’s house that month and started to walk like Max Julien, talk like Max Julien. He became popular, and it made him feel good about himself. Debra was so happy to see him smiling and laughing that she even defied their aunt and worked after school to buy him some clothes that made him look as much like a lady-killer as possible. The girls flocked to him. It wasn’t long before he had sex for the first time, and by the end of freshman year he was tired of looking at tits and asses. Years later he would cringe in embarrassment at photos of the fourteen-year-old boy he had been, all dressed up in flashy clothes in imitation of the famed celluloid pimp.
Debra poked his arm, returning his thoughts to the bar and the drink in front of him. “Look behind you,” she whispered. “I think you got a fan.”
She walked away to wait on some men who had just come in, as Mel turned to see what she was talking about.
The woman advancing toward him with a huge grin on her face was about five feet two, with dyed blond hair that she wore short and slicked to her head. Her lipstick was ruby red, and her eyebrows jet black. Her eyelids were streaked with blue eye shadow. She was wearing tight black leather pants and a yellow turtleneck sweater. Her perfume was cheap and overpowering. Mel shuddered as she slid, grinning, onto the stool beside him.
“Tina say you Debra’s brother.”
“Tina told you right.”
“Debra’s brother got a name?”
“My name is Mel, and I ain’t in the mood for conversation.”
