‘You do it well, baby, you do it well.’
Levi tried hard to hold the gaze of this incredible woman but failed, as ever. LaShonda hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that Levi was still only sixteen, living with his parents in the middle-class suburb of Wellington, and therefore not really a viable stand-in father for her three small children.
‘Hey, LaShonda, can I speak to you for a minute?’
‘Sure, baby – I always got time for you, you know that.’
LaShonda came out from behind the counter, and Levi followed her as she made her way to a quiet corner near the Classical Music chart. For a three-time mom, her body was miraculous. The black long-sleeved shirt clung to the muscles in her stocky forearms; the front buttons strained to contain her bust. LaShonda’s big old butt, as it stretched and fought against the nylon of the regulation pants, was, as far as Levi was concerned, the great unspoken perk of this job.
‘LaShonda, can you meet us all out back in five minutes? We having a meeting,’ said Levi, allowing his accent to slip a few rungs down into closer relation with LaShonda’s own. ‘Get Tom and anyone else who can get away for a minute. It’s about this Christmas Day thing.’
‘What’s that, baby? What Christmas Day thing?’
‘You didn’t hear? They making us work Christmas Day.’
‘For real? Time and a half?’
‘Well . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Man, I could do with the extra dollars, I know you know what I’m saying.’ Levi nodded. This was the other thing. LaShonda had made an assumption early on that they were in similar situations, economically. There are so many different ways to need money. Levi didn’t need it like LaShonda needed it. ‘I’ll definitely work. The morning at least. I can’t come to the meeting, but put my name down, a’ight?’
‘OK . . . sure . . . Sure, I’ll do that.’
‘I could do with a little extra, that’s no joke – and this year I gotta get my Christmas shit to-geth-er. I always be sayin’ I’m gonna do it early this year and then I never do – just leave everything last minute just like always. But it’s expensive – oh, my word.’
‘Yeah,’ said Levi pensively. ‘Shit gets tight for everybody this time of year . . .’
‘I hear that,’ said LaShonda, and whistled. ‘And I ain’t got no one to do for me. I gotta do for myself, know what I mean? Baby, you taking your break? You want to come get some with me? I’m heading for Subway right about now.’
There was an alternative universe that Levi occasionally entered in his imagination, one in which he accepted LaShonda’s invitations, and then later they made love standing up in the basement of the store. Soon after, he moved in with her in Roxbury and took on her children as his own. They lived happily ever after – two roses growing out of concrete, as Tupac has it. But the truth was he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like LaShonda. He wished he did know, but he didn’t. Levi’s girls were typically the giggly Hispanic teenagers from the Catholic school next door to his prep, and those girls had simple tastes: happy with a movie and some heavy petting in one of Wellington’s public parks. When he was feeling brave and confident, he sometimes hooked up with one of the exquisite fifteen-year-old LaShondas with the fake IDs that he met in Boston nightclubs, who took him semi-seriously for a week or two until they drifted away, confused by his strange determination not to tell them anything at all about his life or to show them where he lived.
‘No . . . thanks, LaShonda . . . my break’s not till later.’
‘All right, baby. I’ll miss you, though. You looking fine today – buff and all that.’
Levi flexed his bicep obligingly under LaShonda’s manicured touch.
‘Damn. And the rest. Don’t be shy, now.’
He lifted his T-shirt up a little.
‘Baby, that ain’t even a six pack no more. That’s like a thirty-six pack or something! Ladies gotta look out for my boy Levi . . . damn. He ain’t a boy no more.’
‘You know me, LaShonda, I like to take care of myself.’
‘Yeah, but who gonna take care of you?’ said LaShonda and laughed a good long time. She put her hand on his cheek. ‘OK, baby, I’m out. See you next week if I don’t see you later. You take care.’
‘Bye, LaShonda.’
Levi leaned on a rack of Madame Butterfly recordings and watched LaShonda go. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Er . . . Levi – sorry to . . .’ said Tom from Folk Music. ‘I just heard that you were . . . is there . . . like a meeting? I just heard you were trying to organize some kind of . . .’
Tom was cool. Levi disagreed with him in matters of music in every possible way two young men can disagree, but he could also see that Tom was cool in a lot of other ways. Cool about this crazy war, cool about not letting customers stress him out – plus he was easy to be around.
‘Yo, my man Tom – how’s it hanging,’ said Levi and tried to knock fists with Tom, always a mistake. ‘For real – we’re having a meeting. I’m heading there now. This Christmas Day thing is bullshit.’
‘Good, it’s total bullshit,’ said Tom, pushing his thick blond bangs back off his face. ‘It’s cool that you’re taking . . . you know . . . a stand and everything.’
But sometimes Levi found Tom a little too fretfully deferential, like right now – always anxious to award Levi a prize that Levi didn’t even know he was in the running for.
It was immediately noticeable that only the white kids had showed up for the meeting. Gloria and Gina, the two Hispanic girls, were absent, as was Jamal, the brother who worked in World Music, and Khaled, a Jordanian, who worked in the music DVD section. It was just Tom, Candy and a short, freckly guy Levi didn’t know too well called Mike Cloughessy who worked in Pop on the third floor.
‘Where is everybody?’ asked Levi.
‘Gina said she was coming but . . .’ explained Candy. ‘She has a supervisor up her ass, following her around, so.’
‘But she said she was coming?’
Candy shrugged. Then she looked at him hopefully, as did the others. It was the same weird sense he had in his prep school: that unless he spoke no one else would. He was being gifted with an authority, and it was something complex and unspoken to do with being the black guy – deeper than that he could not penetrate.
‘I’m just like, there’s gotta be a line that we don’t cross – where we don’t go. And working on Christmas Day is that line, man. That’s it, right there,’ he said, employing his hands a little more than was natural to him because they seemed to expect it. ‘My point is we got to protest, with action. ’Cos right now, as it stands, anybody who’s working part time who refuses to work Christmas is looking at losing their job. And that’s bullshit – in my opinion.’
‘But what does that mean . . . protest with action?’ asked Mike. He was jittery, moving a lot when he spoke. Levi wondered what it would be like to be such a small, pink, funny-looking, nervy guy. As he wondered this, he must have been frowning at Mike, for the little guy grew more agitated, putting his hands in and out of his pockets.
‘Like a . . . you know, like a sit-in,’ suggested Tom. He had a packet of German Drum tobacco in one hand and a cigarette paper in the other and was trying to roll. He angled his bear-like torso into a doorway, protecting his nascent project from the wind. Levi – although he passionately disapproved of tobacco – helped him out by standing in front of him, a human shield.
‘Sit-in?’
Tom began describing a sit-in, but Levi, once he saw where he was going with it, cut him off.
‘Yo, I am not sitting on the floor. I don’t do floor.’
‘You don’t have to, you know . . . sitting is not obligatory. We could walk out. Outside the building.’
‘Er . . . if we walk out they’ll just tell us to keep on walking to the welfare office,’ said Candy, digging half a Marlboro from her pocket and lighting it off Tom’s match. ‘Bailey’ll make sure of that.’
‘You ain’t walkin
g your ass out nowhere,’ said Levi, cruelly impersonating Bailey’s clumsy, jerking rooster head and that half-crouched standing position, which made him look like a four-legged animal only just reared upright, ‘Your ass ain’t going out of this store unless it’s whupped out of this store, ’cos it sure as hell ain’t walking out of this store, not now, not no how.’
Levi’s audience laughed ruefully – the impersonation was too accurate. Bailey was in his late forties; unavoidably a tragic figure to the teenagers working under him. They considered such employment for a man over the age of twenty-six to be a humiliating symbol of human limitation. They also knew that Bailey had worked in Tower Records for ten years before this – this heaped tragedy upon tragedy. And then Bailey was painfully overburdened with peculiarities, one of which alone would have sufficed to make him a figure of fun. His overactive thyroid made his eyes start from his head. His jowls gathered like turkey wattle. His uneven Afro often had a foreign object in it – pieces of unidentifiable fluff and, once, a matchstick. His heaving, saddlebag backside looked distinctly female from behind. He had a tendency towards malapropism so extreme even a gang of near-illiterate teenagers could notice it, and the skin on his hands peeled and bled, the worst example of the psoriasis that also showed up in milder patches on his neck and forehead. It boggled Levi’s mind that anyone could pull such a short straw from God. Despite these physical difficulties (or maybe because of them) Bailey was a hound-dog. He followed LaShonda around the store and touched her when he didn’t need to. He went too far once, putting his arm round her waist and suffering the humiliation of a LaShonda dressing-down (‘Don’t you dare tell me to lower my voice, I swear to God – I’ll scream this place down, I’ll send the roof tiles flying!’) in front of everybody. But Bailey never learned; two days later he was hound-dogging her again. Impersonations of Bailey were the stock-in-trade of the floor staff. LaShonda did one, Levi did one, Jamal did one – the white employees were more hesitant, not wishing to cross the line from impersonation to possible racial slur. In contrast, Levi and LaShonda were unrestrained, emphasizing every grotesquerie, as if his ugliness were a personal affront to their own beauty.
‘Fuck Bailey,’ insisted Levi. ‘Come on, man, let’s walk out. Come on, Mikey, you’re with me, right?’
Mike chewed the side of his face like the current President. ‘I’m just not really sure what it would achieve. I guess I figure Candy’s right – we’ll just get fired.’
‘What . . . they’re gonna fire all of us?’
‘Probably,’ said Mike.
‘You know, man,’ said Tom, pulling hard on his rollie, ‘I don’t want to work Christmas Day either, but maybe we need to think it through a bit more. Just walking out doesn’t really seem viable . . . like, if we all wrote a letter to management and signed it maybe . . .’
‘Dear Motherfuckers,’ said Levi, holding an imaginary pen and screwing his Bailey face into a look of comic concentration. ‘ Thank you for your letter of the twelfth. I really could not give a fuck. Get your asses back to work. Yours sincerely, Mister Bailey.’
They all laughed, but it was harassed, bullied laughter, as if Levi had reached into their throats and pulled it out. Sometimes Levi wondered if his colleagues were scared of him. ‘When you think of how much money this place makes,’ said Tom, unifyingly, drawing approving noises from the rest, ‘and they can’t close for one lousy day? Who even buys CDs on Christmas morning? It’s really twisted.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Levi, and they were all silent for a minute looking out over the deserted back lot, a non-place where nothing happened except lines of trash cans overflowing with discarded polythene packaging and a basketball hoop that no one was allowed to use. A pink-streaked winter sky, with the clarity of heatless sunlight, gave a sting to the bleak prospect of returning to work in the next thirty seconds. The sound of the fire door’s bar being shunted downwards ended this quiet. Tom went to help pull it open, thinking it was tiny Gina, but it was Bailey pushing against him, sending him back three steps.
‘Sorry – I didn’t realize –’ said Tom, releasing his own hand from the spot where Bailey’s psoriatic fingers were pressing. Bailey came blinking into the sun like a cave animal. He had his mega-store cap on backwards. There was a strong streak of perversity in Bailey, born of his isolation, which pushed him to pursue these feeble eccentricities. It was his way of at least knowing the cause of, and therefore in some way controlling, the contempt directed at him.
‘So here’s where all my staff is at,’ he said, his manner, as ever, vaguely autistic, speaking to a point just over their heads. ‘I was wondering about that. Everybody come out to smoke at the same time?’
‘Yeah . . . yep,’ said Tom, throwing his smoke to the floor and stepping on it.
‘Kill you dead, that will,’ said Bailey sombrely, seeming to predict not warn. ‘And you too, young lady – kill you dead.’
‘It’s a calculated risk,’ said Candy quietly.
‘Excuse me?’
Candy shook her head and put her Marlboro out against the cement wall.
‘So,’ said Bailey, smiling strainedly, ‘I hear you been organizing a coop against me. Grapevine – little bird told me. Organizing a coop. And here you all are.’
Tom looked confusedly at Mike and vice versa.
‘Sorry, Mr Bailey,’ said Tom. ‘Sorry – what did you say?’
‘A coop, you’re organizing one. Plotting against me out here. I just came to see how that’s working out for you.’
‘A coup –’ said Tom, very quietly correcting Bailey for his own comprehension. ‘Like a revolution.’
Levi, who heard him, and had not understood the initial mistake or known the word ‘coup’ until this moment, laughed loudly.
‘Coop? Bailey, that’s like some thing for chickens, man. We organizing a coop? How’s that work?’
Candy and Mike sniggered. Tom turned away to gulp his laugh down like an aspirin. Bailey’s hopeful face, hopeful a moment earlier of triumph, broke down into confusion and anger.
‘You know what I mean. Anyway – ain’t nothing can be changed about store policy, so if anybody here don’t like it, they more than welcome to leave this current employment. No point in plotting nothing. Now everybody get back to work.’
But Levi was still laughing. ‘That ain’t even legal – you can’t coop nobody up. Some of us got girls to go home to, man. Fact is, I wanna be cooped up with my girl come Christmas Day – I’m sure you do too, Bailey. So we just want to find some way that we can all come to, like, an arrangement about that. Come on, Bailey – you don’t want to coop us up in this store on Christmas. Come on, brother.’
Bailey looked closely at Levi. All the other kids had stepped back a little into the alcove by the door, signalling an intention to leave. Levi stood firmly where he was.
‘But there ain’t nothing to talk about,’ said Bailey in a low, resolved tone. ‘That’s the instruction – do you get that?’
‘Umm, can I?’ said Tom, taking a step forward. ‘Mister Bailey, we’re not trying to irritate you, but we were just considering whether . . .’
Bailey waved him off. There was nobody else in this back lot. Just Levi.
‘Do you get that? This comes from above my head and it’s done. Can’t be changed. You get that, Levi?’
Levi shrugged and turned from Bailey slightly, just enough to show how little this stand-off meant to him.
‘I get it . . . I just think it’s bullshit, that’s all.’
Candy whistled. Mike pushed the fire-exit door open and held it, waiting for the others.
‘Tom – all of you, get yourselves back to work – now,’ said Bailey, scratching one hand with the other. The welts were pink and raw. ‘Levi, stay where you are.’
‘It’s not just Levi, we all feel –’ tried Tom bravely, but again Bailey held a finger up in the air to stop him.
‘Right now, if it ain’t inconveniating you too much. Somebody’s got to
work round here.’
Tom offered a look of pity to Levi and followed Mike and Candy back to work. The fire door swung shut, very slowly, pushing out a little of the warm store air into this barren cement place. At last the judder of the lock sounded and echoed across the back lot. Bailey took a few steps closer to Levi. Levi kept his arms folded high on his chest, but Bailey’s face this close was a shocking thing and Levi could not help blinking over and over.
‘Don’t – act – like – a – nigger – with – me – Levi,’ said Bailey in a whisper, each word with a momentum of its own, like darts he was throwing at a target. ‘I see you, acting up, trying to make me look stupid – thinking you’re all that, ’cos you’re the only brother any of these kids met in they whole lives. Let me tell you something. I know where you’re from, brother.’
‘What?’ said Levi, his belly still turning over after the shocking plummet invoked by the strange word – like a speed bump in the sentence – never before said to him in anger. Bailey turned his back on Levi and reached out for the fire door, his upper body sadly hunched over.
‘You know what it means.’
‘What are you talking about, man? Bailey, why you talking to me like that?’
‘It’s Mister Bailey,’ said Bailey, turning back. ‘I’m senior to you here. ’Case you ain’t noticed. Why am I talking to you? Like what? How did you just talk to me in front of them kids?’
‘I was just saying that –’
‘I know where you’re from. Those kids don’t know shit, but I know. They nice suburban kids. They think anyone in a pair of baggy jeans is a gangsta. But you can’t fool me. I know where you pretend to be from,’ he said, his anger newly virulent, still holding the door but leaning in towards Levi. ‘Because that’s where I’m from – but you don’t see me acting like a nigger. You better watch yourself, boy.’
‘Excuse me?’ Levi’s fury was backed on either side by forlorn terror. He was a kid and this was a man, speaking to him in a manner, Levi felt sure, he would not use when speaking to the other kids who worked here. This was not the world of the mega-store any more, where everyone was family and ‘Respect’ was one of the five daily ‘personal conduct’ reminders written on the board in the coffee room. They had fallen though a loophole of law and propriety and safety.