“Oh Jethro, for the last time! That’s not what I meant! If you hadn’t given me such a hairdo, I’d shoot you!” I can see Toni staring at his hair in the reflection of his coffeepot. I look at the nightstand littered with marijuana roaches and condoms. I look at the gray tube of KY Jelly squeezed violently by my own hands. I hate Toni and I want to beat him lifeless.
Toni brings the breakfast tray to bed. The fat pancakes are as smooth and brown as Eartha Pearl. “I can’t wait to go shopping for our tux’s,” he says. “Imagine me buying a tux! Me in pants. Girl, my friends...” I spit a mouthful of pancakes at Toni.
“I told you not to call me that.” I grab Toni’s arm and twists his wrist.
“Oww, baby! I’m sorry. I just forgot.”
“Just don’t forget again.” Toni wipes the pancake from his cheek. He tries to kiss me.
“Let me eat.”
‘‘But you’ve got syrup all over you.
“And you’ve got shit all over you. So beat it!”
Toni burst into tears. “Oh Jethro! Jethro, don’t be so mean to me.
“Shut up acting like a sissy!” I shout at him. Toni stops crying. A tear rolls down his cheek. He sits with his cat in his lap. They both stare at me as I eat--Toni as if I’m a god. The cat looks at me as if I’m a piece of shit. “Sit with your legs apart!” I bark at Toni. “Men sit with their legs apart!” Toni parts his knees as if I’ve tossed hot coals between his legs. The cat falls to the floor, clawing Toni’s thigh as he tries to hang on. It looks up at Toni and hisses before walking away. Toni shivers in the chair with his knees apart. I brush past him on my way to the kitchen. I stand for a moment at the sink and listen to him whimper and sniffle. A wave of sorrow washes over me. I want to hold him. (I’m the same with Eartha Pearl. When I hurt her and make her cry, love and remorse comes up from the pit of my stomach. I get on my knees and beg her to forgive me. I kiss her thighs and hands until she rubs the back of my neck softly.) I walk over to Toni and put my hand on his shoulder. He stiffens his body at my touch I gently soothe him.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” I wipe away the blood from his thigh with my fingers. He leans his head on my shoulder. His tears flow down my arm. I kiss him and coax him back to bed.
****
“Jethro, you’ve got to hurry! Will you come on! It’s four o clock and the stores close at five!” Toni races ahead of me wearing a pair of red platform shoes. His bellbottomed pants hug his ass and dangle like hoops around his ankles. His shirt with red and pink roses squeezes his body like a sausage casing. His steps are short and prissy as if he’s stepping on spit. People raise their eyebrows at us. I try to walk far behind Toni, but he turns around and pulls me next to him. My head swims. All I see are flowers and eyes circling me--frowning eyes, arched judging eyes, eyes burning us like hot coals.
“C’mon, Jethro, c’mon,” Toni sings to me over his shoulder.
Three young men dressed in gold chains and baseball caps pass me and Toni. I hear them snicker like mice. “C’mon Jethro, C’mon,” one mimics Toni’s singsong voice. I look around at them. The darkest one tugs at his crotch. I start toward him. Toni grabs my arm. “No, baby, you’ll get us killed!” Toni pulls me away. “Ignore them, baby. Ignore them.”
I snatch myself from Toni. “Stop walking so womanish and don’t lean on me! Don’t even talk to me.” We walk on. Toni’s shoulders are bowed. I’ve hurt him again. But all of this shame I feel. I’m hurting too. All of these eyes on me. “I’m hurting too, bitch,” I shout at Toni. “Look what you’re doing to me--dragging me through your fucking gutter! I don’t want to go to some punk’s ball. I don’t want to bark my ass off for a bunch of queers. I want to go home, watch the Celtics, and play with my wife. She’s got real knockers. She can’t have a baby, but she’s got real knockers!” I can see Toni shuddering like it’s zero degrees. I feel a sharp pain on my tailbone. I grab my back.
“Hey faggot, that’s how my ten inch dick will feel up your ass!” I look around and a shower of glass and rocks rain toward me and Toni. We turn and run. I feel the needle pricks of glass pierce my legs. I run fast and hard until I feel I’m reaching the edge of the world. It’s not the bottles I’m running from. A voice screeching like a wounded animal chases me. “Pleeease stop, Jethro! Don’t leave me, Baby! Pleease! Pleeease!”
Honking horns drown the voice in a noisy sea. I stop running. My legs feel as if they’re wrapped in thorns. Every building is the same--tall, gray, and ugly. I imagine there are spirits flying out the windows and bumping into me on the sidewalk. Where in hell am I? I stop. There is something familiar about this block. In front of me leans a Cadillac with the roof dented in. I look up into a window into the faces of Eartha Pearl and her cousin looking down at me--mouths open like two screaming cats.
****
“And you just walk in from nowhere and don’t say a word about where you’ve been. Just walk in like King Jethro and don’t have to give nobody an explanation. Ha! We owes you an explanation about why we standing there with our mouths open. Lord have mercy,” Eartha Pearl sung at me all the way to the airport in the taxicab. “Legs all bloody. And then insulting my cousin the way you did. Lord have mercy. I know it’ll rain ice cubes in hell before she invites us up here again. ‘Did you screw my wife while I was gone?’ What kind of question was that to ask my cousin?”
“All of y’all know she’s a dyke.” I say smugly.”
“It’s nobody’s business what she is. And how dare an ingrate like you call her names. She was the one on the phone all day and into the night calling hospitals, morgues, city police, transit police in every county in New York.”
“Boroughs. New York has boroughs.”
“Bastard, don’t you dare correct me! Girl crying herself to fits being put on hold, hung up on, and screaming into that damn phone and here a son of a bitch like you call her a dyke and try to correct me! If I had half the guts of Mama’s Aunt Carrie, I’d gut you like a pig. Just like she did that husband of hers. Cut his roots off too! That’s what a nigguh like you needs!”
The Cab driver laughs. I know what he’s laughing at. Some vision of me running down the street without my “Roots”, blood running from a hole beneath my belly. I try to kiss Eartha Pearl. But she’s on fire with anger.
“How can you kiss me after what you’ve done to me and my cousin. When I let you kiss me again you’ll be so old and senile, you’ll think I’m a man,” she says with a sharp jab in my ribs.
****
Back in Houston a few months and the dust has settled, almost. I’ve gone back to work. The pain is gone out of my back and legs. Eartha Pearl has let me make love to her once. I’ve worn out my tongue telling C.C. about the hot chick I met on the subway, how she made me buck like a wild horse, and her fairy brother.
“Yeah man, her brother wanted to give me a blow job--but I drew the line there.
“Shit nigguh, uh huh, I bet you did,” C.C. says back to me. “I’da took him on and I know I ain’t no punk, but turn down a blow job? Shit..
Yeah I’m almost back to normal. If C.C. had said those words about punk and all to me a month ago, I would have have barked at him. But those words don’t trouble me so now. It’s just, it’s just that damn piece of paper that troubles me. I wish C.C. had thrown it in the trash instead of hollering out, “Well looky who’s got them a letter from New York! Mister Jethro Green, Manager, Exxon, Baytown Texas, United States of America--Lord have mercy! Manager? Nigguh, what you tell them folks in New York you a manager of? You manages that shovel all right though!”
I snatched the letter from C.C.. The first word I saw on the envelope was TONY. I jammed it in my back pocket. “It’’s just that chick’s nutty brother,” I said to all the laughing faces around me.
“Ha! I knowed you was lying about that blowjob,” C.C. bellowed.
That damn piece of paper--I crumble and toss in the trash, then sneak into the kitchen late at night and wipe the coffee grinds from it--
I place it next to my heart.
****
Dear Jethro:
Please baby, Jethro, please call me. I love you. Here is some of my hair that you asked me to cut. Remember? I made it into a little bracelet for you. Don’t that prove I love you? I thought you were going to be my life. You mean so much to me. Can you see the red tear stains on the letter? My heart is so broken my tears are red. I thought you were going to be my life. You loved me so and made me love myself. Why did you run away? Please, please call me. 718-622-2169.
Love,
Toni
your love
Some nights after I read that letter, I go out on the back porch and I bark and bark until the far off sky turns red like Toni’s tear filled eyes. And Johnny Scardino’s phone number rumbles through my head--all sevens and a zero.
###
About the Author
Charles W. Harvey is a native Houstonian and a graduate of the University of Houston. He has studied fiction under the guidance of Rosellen Brown and Chitra Divakaruni at U of H. He has studied poetry under Joyce James and Cynthia MacDonald. In 1987, Charles was a 1st place prize recipient of PEN/Discovery for Cheeseburger, which went on to be published in the Ontario Review. In 1989 Charles Harvey was awarded the Cultural Arts Council of Houston Grant for Writers and Artists. Also in 1989 he was a finalist in the MacDonald's Literary Achievement Awards. Charles has been published in Soulfires, Story Magazine SHADE, High Infidelity, The James White Review, and others. He is the author of the novels The Butterfly Killer and Promise Goodday. He is also the author of several story and poetry collections.
****
Excerpts from Bark Too
Drifting
Out of my head, out of my broken body,
I drift. Not like the drifter
Who walks on solid earth
Unlike the space-shuttle man
With his umbilical cord
Linked to an iron heart.
Me, I am the wind, who travels through trees,
Through hair, through cloth.
I touch you and leave you.
End of Summer
The days of blue
summer haze comes to an end.
The little boys brown skinned and shirtless
put on boots and march to the schoolhouse
carrying AK-47s and Big Chief tablets
And Daddy takes sabbaticals in male whorehouses
in my absence dallying with boys my age.
Mama rests in Paradise South.
We took her there in October
When she cut off her breasts
her painful breasts swollen with thorny roses.
I’ve gotten older--always do at the end of Summer.
Fall is my lover. Winter waits patiently
while I foolishly try to recycle
Summer days and sunny memories that were
all blue haze and shirtless boys
and Daddy peeking in the marble bathroom
while holding his blood filled dick.
anonymous men
There is blue joy
in solitude,
sweetness in the lonely soft night
that drapes the bones of black men.
I dance in this solitude.
I carry wrapped in my heart to my home
a willowy young body.
We make love in solitary
Later,
we kiss under the blue morning canopy
and carry off pieces of blue joy
in our deep pockets.
*******
Boy 4 Higher Excerpt
Wagner rolled across my mind. He would be a distraction—something to entertain. But shit I wasn’t going to invite him here to Park 224. He probably wouldn’t be interested in smart, intelligent, button down Antoine Rucker. Kenneth Brown was his thug fantasy—the one to talk trash to him, slap him around, and piss on him. But Wagner would have to wait until later. How was I going to satisfy the monkey on my back now? His ass was getting heavier—taunting me to walk outside. John Rucker had been dead for months, but the monkey hadn’t disappeared. He needed to be punished.
“Get up off that floor, boy,” a voice whispered. I got up and went to the closet. I grabbed the duffle bag I had taken to Valdosta and dumped it on the bed. The suit I had worn to my stepdad’s funeral and that old frayed belt tumbled out. As I stood bare-assed in the jacket a feeling of vulnerability swept over me. I was guilty of some unnamed sin and needed to be punished. I picked up the frayed belt. It had unraveled at the tip.
“Come here, boy and get across my knees,” the voiced cooed.
I lay over the arm of my leather sofa. The smell of the cured leather and the coat brushing my nipples made my dick hard as a rock.
“Why do you tempt me with your evil ways,” the voice asked
“I’m sorry, daddy,” I whispered into the sofa cushions. I imagined him lifting the belt high before bringing it down across my ass.
I bit my bottom lip as the belt cut into my flesh. “I’m sorry, daddy!” I kicked and screamed. I reached under my belly and jacked my dick as I beat my quivering ass. I watched in the floor length mirror my tan legs flailing the air. “Please, Daddy, Please!” I stroked harder toward a climax. My load shot all over the couch. I lay there rubbing my ass and listening to him telling me how sorry he was. I felt his hands on my shoulders as I walked into the shower. This self-spanking is another secret to keep from Dr. Silverman. Or should I tease her with a few tantalizing hints?
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My Manhood is Very Important to Me
Betty’s House
Bark Too
Black Queen
Odd Voices In Love
The Butterfly Killer
Bark 2
Minister Q
Boy 4 Higher
Punk’d Out On Da Downlow
****
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