Take One Candle Light a Room Read online

  Across the street was the black tile wall, the dimly lit alcove of the Golden Gopher.

  Grady Jackson used to wash that tile every night until it gleamed.

  Grady and his sister Hattie were from Cleveland, Ohio, by way of Grenada, Mississippi. He hated his name. He was in my math class, though I was two years younger, and he wrote Breeze on top of his papers. Mr. Klein gave them back and said, “Write your proper name.”

  Grady said to me, “I want somebody call me Breeze. Say, I’m fittin to hat up, Breeze, you comin? Cause my mama name me for some sorry-ass uncle down in Jackson. Jackson, Missippi, and my name Jackson. Fucked up. And your cousin—she in love with some fool name Detroit.”

  Glorette. We were sophomores, and a senior basketball player who had just moved here was talking to her every day. “Call me Detroit, baby. Where I’m from. Call me anything you want, cause you fine as wine and just my kind.”

  But Detroit had no car. Glorette smiled, her lips lifting only a little at the corners, and turned her head with the heavy pile of hair on top, her neck curved, and Detroit, who had reddish skin and five freckles on top of each cheek, said, “Damn, they grow some hella fine women out here in California.”

  He didn’t even look at me.

  One weekend, I was on my front porch when Grady Jackson pulled up in a car. My brothers Lafayette and Reynaldo had an old Chevy truck, and they jumped down from the cab. “Man, you got a Dodge Dart? Where the hell you get the money? You ain’t had new kicks for a year. Still wearin them same Converse.”

  Grady looked up at me. “Glorette in your house? Her mama said she ain’t home.”

  I saw his heavy brown cheeks, the fro that wouldn’t grow no matter how he combed it out. Should have just called himself Missippi and made fun of it, learned to rap like old blues songs and figured himself out. But Cleveland had already messed him up.

  I said, “She’s home. She’s waiting for Detroit to call her after his game.”

  He spun around and looked at Glorette’s house, across the dirt street from mine, and said, “She think that fool gonna take her to LA? She keep sayin she want to go to LA. I got this ride, and I’m goin. You know what, Fantine? Tell her I come by here and I went to LA without her. Shit.”

  Then Lafayette said to him, “Grady, man, come in the barn and get a swallow.”

  My brothers had hidden a few beers in the barn. When Grady went with them, I didn’t even hesitate. I’d wanted to go to Los Angeles my whole life. I got into the Dart and lay down on the floor in the back.

  When Grady started the car, he turned the radio up real loud, so Glorette could hear it, I figured, and then he spun the wheels and called out to my brothers, “Man, I’ma check out some foxy ladies in LA!” His breath drifted into the back, smelling of pale sour beer. He turned the station to KDAY, and they played the Commodores and Cameo, and then he talked to himself for a long time. I knew the car must be on the freeway, by the long uninterrupted humming.

  “She always talkin bout LA. Detroit don’t know how to get to LA. He know Detroit. She coulda been checkin out a club. Checkin LA.”

  I fell asleep on the warm floor, and when the car jerked to a stop, I woke up. Grady was crying. His breath was ragged in his throat, I could smell the salt on his face, and his fists pounded the steering wheel. “There. I seen it, okay? And you didn’t. You didn’t see shit cause you waitin on some fool-ass brotha who just want to play you.”

  I sat up and saw Los Angeles. The City of Angels. But it was just a freeway exit and some narrow streets with hulking black buildings. I remembered one said Hotel Granada, windows with smoke stains like black scarves flying from the empty sills.

  Grady looked back and said, “Fantine? What the hell you doin in here?”

  I had come to the Golden Gopher five years ago, after Reynaldo called me about Glorette. “We don’t know who gotted her.”

  I hadn’t heard that for a while. She done got gotted. I had said, “What about Grady Jackson?”

  My brother said, “Who?”

  “Grady. The one she married after she got pregnant and the musician left her.”

  “What about Grady? That country-ass brotha been gone.”

  “He lives somewhere in LA. I should tell him.”

  “Only one might know is his sister. Remember? She was gon be on TV. She worked in some place called Rat or Squirrel. Some bar. Said it was just part-time while she was waitin to be in some movie about a jazz singer.”

  Maybe Hattie was inside. I had to ask her about the picture at Dimples. And tomorrow night, I’d bring Victor here, and tell him the truth about his father, and how I heard the story.

  “Ma’am?” A goateed young guy in a black shirt that said SECURITY approached me. “I need you to move?”

  I hadn’t seen the film crew—three huge trucks parked on Eighth, a parade of black-shirted guys fanning out onto the street, lights being set up. Someone was taking video of the apartment building next to the bar—gargoyles, sooty cement, fire escapes. The place Hattie Jackson used to live. She’d had a pink curtain that blew out of the fourth-floor window. A young actor dressed in a camouflage jacket looked out from the window now—someplace he would never live. A place probably meant to be New York or Chicago.

  Another security guy noticed me, in the middle of the street. A brother my age, with cheeks scarred as if acid had been thrown at him. His badge glinted in the lights. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, baby—”

  “I know—you’re in the movies,” I said, and crossed the street to go inside.

  ———

  In front of me, blocking the narrow doorway of the Golden Gopher, two young men waited in line for the ID check, laughing and shouting, “It was a Zippo!” A street guy in a filthy bomber jacket looked each of the boys in the face and said, “Got a cigarette, bro?”

  Twenty-four years ago, when Grady had brought me here accidentally, the Golden Gopher was a dive. There was no waiting to get in.

  Hattie was twenty-two then, and Grady was eighteen, and I was still fifteen. He’d pulled me inside the club, past a knot of drunken men. One of the men put his palm on my ass, fit his fingers around my jeans pocket as if testing bread, and said, “How much?”

  Grady jerked me away and up to the bar, and a man said, “You can’t bring that in here. She underage.”

  A line of men sat at the bar, and someone knocked over a beer when he stood up. Then his sister spoke from behind the counter. She said, “Grady? What the hell?”

  Hattie was beautiful. Not like Glorette. Hattie’s face was round and brown-gold, her hair straightened into a shining curve that touched her cheeks. Her lips were full and red. Chinese, I thought back then. Black Chinese. Her dress with the mandarin collar.

  She pushed three glasses of beer across the counter and someone reached past my neck and took them. Smoke and hair touched my cheek. I remembered. The bar was dark and smelled of spilled beer and a man was shouting in the doorway, “I’ll fire you up!” Through an open back door I could hear someone vomiting in the alley.

  “I wanted to come see you,” Grady said. Sweat like burned biscuits at his armpits, staining his T-shirt. “See LA. The big city.”

  “Go home,” Hattie said. “Right now, before somebody kicks your country ass. Take Lousana girl wit you.”

  Hattie’s contempt was heated in her eyes. She thought I was Glorette. I said, “You know what? I was born in California, and I’m coming to live in LA pretty soon. But I’m not gonna work in a bar.”

  But she lifted her hand to dismiss me. “You probably not gonna work at all, babyface. One a them light-bright girls.”

  Grady pulled me back out the door as I was thinking Lite-Brite was a toy at Kmart, and this time the hand fit itself around my breast, and someone said, “Why buy the cow?”

  Driving east, the moon was like a dirty dime in front of us, and we took a beautiful bridge over the Los Angeles River, which raced along the concrete, not like our river. Grady said, “We can’t get on the freew
ay again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Shit, Fantine, cause I stole this car, and you ain’t but fifteen. John Law see me, I’m goin to jail.”

  He drove down side roads along the freeway, past factories and small houses and winding around hills. The Dart ran out of gas in Pomona. We were on Mission Boulevard, and Grady said, “You wanted to come. Now you gotta walk.”

  I stood in the darkened lounge. With the downtown renaissance, investors bought this scary dive and turned it into a hip dive. Two women wearing heels and camisole tops pushed past me impatiently, and two young actors I’d seen on commercials for The OC followed them into the bar.

  It looked like Liberace had decorated—chandeliers and black pillars and little golden gopher statuettes on the tables. The jukebox was playing Johnny Cash. Farther in the long narrow space, the bartender leaned forward and squinted at me. “You okay?” he said. He had a two-tone bowling shirt, a porkpie hat and sideburns.

  I gave him my impersonal traveling smile. He gave me that look—what is she, Brazilian?—and I went into the back part of the club, where small tables were set against the wall, and toward the alley.

  I remembered the alley. Big couches covered with velvet and pillows lay at each end, and the OC boys were already collapsed on the cushions with two girls. It was cool to be in an alley, drinking Grey Goose martinis while the shouts of insane men circled above the walls. “Oh my God, did you see that one guy?” a girl said. “With the big fucking hole in his forehead?”

  Grady used to get his dinner in the alley, back when there was a Mexican food place two doors down. Hattie had brought it to him here, every night at exactly six p.m., his only stop on the round of endless walking.

  A little baroque gold table held an ashtray between the couches.

  I looked straight up at the sky for a moment. Hazy as if sand flew through the air. “What is she doing?” one of the girls whispered. I knew better than to come to a place like the Golden Gopher alone. Places like these made anyone feel lonely.

  My phone rang to redeem me. The girl rolled her eyes and looked away. Tony said, “FX? Where are you?”

  “The Golden Gopher,” I said.

  “What? You okay?” His Jersey accent came back quickly when he wasn’t joking.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where the hell is the Golden Gopher?”

  “Downtown. You’ll have to come here sometime. Great pics.”

  “Come over.”

  In the bathroom, a gold vase held a single hibiscus. White, with a red throat. Where was Hattie? My hair had sprung loose like an aura around my forehead, from the heat and the walking.

  How you get sprung like that over one woman? my brothers always said to Grady.

  He came to the barn another night, and my brothers were working on a car. I had just taken them some coffee. Grady held his right hand wrapped in a rag, and he asked Lafayette, “She over there at her mama’s?”

  Lafayette said, “Man, she told me she was movin in with that flute player. Sere Dakar or whatever he call hisself. He playin them congas now, and he suppose to get a record deal. She’s havin a baby, fool. Said they was gettin married.”

  Grady said, “He ain’t fittin to marry her. I heard him say it. He was playin congos in a club, and I heard him tell somebody, ‘I gotta book, man, I gotta get to LA or New York so I can get me a deal. Tired a this country-ass place.’ So I hatted him up.”

  My brother said, “Damn, fool, your finger bleedin! He done bit off your finger?”

  The red stain on the dirty rag. Grady said, “He pulled a knife on me. Man, I kicked his ass and told him to go. He was gon leave Glorette over and over—come back and then book again. I just—I told him to stay away.” He was panting now, his upper lip silver with sweat. “Forever.”

  He pushed past me. I had already been accepted to college, and Glorette was pregnant with Sere Dakar’s child—the swell was high up under her breasts, awkward on her body as when we used to put pillows inside our shirts inside that refrigerator house.

  We never saw Dakar again. Grady had already been working for the city for a year—driving a trash truck—and he rented a little house and asked Glorette to marry him. He said he would love Victor as his own. But Glorette couldn’t love him. After another year of still loving the man who got ghost on her, she left Grady to get sprung herself—on rock cocaine—and she refused to ever love anyone again.

  Near the bar, a young woman—Paris Hilton–thin, blond over black hair, and a satin tank top—came out with a tray and squinted at me. “What do you want to drink?” she asked.

  “Hattie Jackson?” I said, and then remembered. “I mean, Gloria Jones. Does she still work here?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe she’s that black lady in the go-bar.”

  The alcove. I went back to the counter, where Hattie was arranging bottles of Grey Goose and Ketel One. Her nails were not red now, but fuchsia pink. Her lips were pink, too, but thinner and ruffled at the edges. She looked so old.

  “Don’t call me by that name,” she said, and sighed.

  “I remember,” I said. “Gloria.”

  She moved more bottles onto the counter. When I’d come, five years ago, she’d said, I got myself to Hollywood, and they had been doin Pam Grier and Coffy and Cleo. My mama named me Hattie after the one in Gone with the Wind. Who the hell want to be called after a maid?

  A slave, I had told her.

  Shit. Still a maid. I changed my name long time ago. After you was here the first time with my fool-ass brother.

  Gloria Jones said, “Uh-uh, you ain’t got no news for me. You told my brother about Glorette, and I ain’t never seen him since. Five years. You might as well killed him.”

  A young guy with those unshaven filings clinging to his cheeks came up and said, “Hey, can I get a bottle of Grey Goose? And that—right there. You know.” His voice got all rapperish on the last two words, and he nodded toward a pack of condoms.

  He handed her a hundred-dollar bill. She slid the things into a sleek black bag and gave him change. He said, “Thanks, Gloria. You always hook me up.”

  Her lips moved half an inch and her eyes not at all. And in the way he slapped his palm on the counter, lightly, dismissively, I saw it. She was the cool black madam, sex radiating out of the alcove, the funky agent for the bottle in the motel room.

  Hattie looked straight at me. “Maybe it’s cause there’s no damn food around here anymore—why he doesn’t come around. You know? Maybe after all those years, it was just the free food, and he done forgot who the hell I was.” The blond waitress came by and raked Hattie with that glance. Hattie said, “And Miss Thang there done moved in with the bartender, and I heard her sister wants this job right here. Don’t get much tips, cause people don’t buy this shit till they ready for their private party.”

  Fake nails like pink almonds. “You’ve been here all this time,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Not much longer.” She wore a wig. The hairs were perfect. “You know what? I left home and came up here, and I was fine as wine. But even the hookers in LA was somethin else. Hollywood was crazy, so I came downtown cause it was cheap and I thought I’d wait till I got me a movie. I did the dancing place for a month.”

  “The dancing place?”

  “Over on Olympic. The men dance with you for ten dollars and they gotta buy you them expensive-ass drinks. But they smelled.” She tapped all ten nails on the bar, as if piano keys were marked. “Lord, they all smelled different, and some of them, the heat comin off their underarms and neck and you could smell it comin up from their pants. Even if they had cologne, just made it worse. I couldn’t do it. I came here, and I was tendin bar forever. The guys would tip me good, and that Mexican food place was so cheap. I would take my break, buy a plate, and go out front at six.”

  “After Grady finished washing the tiles.”

  “Two enchiladas and rice. One for him and one for me. I used to go to the movies on Broadway every night before work, and I
lived next door.”

  “They’re filming a movie there tonight.”

  She let a laugh out through her nose. “Yeah. They all down and dirty. Uh-huh.” Her eyes were brown and muddy, as if washed in tea.

  “I came to see you about Glorette,” I said. “Her son went to this club. There was a picture of you and Glorette on the wall.”

  Now she frowned, so hard her eyebrows moved together like toy trains. “What?”

  “Dimples.”

  Then she said, “Shit. Dimples. We went there one day. Yeah.”

  “Glorette was in LA?”

  She laughed dismissively again. “Hell, no. I went home for Christmas to see my mama and them, and Glorette and Grady were livin in some lil house with the baby.”

  I looked at the hairs on her wig. What was underneath now? “Where he wanted to be. He was happy.”

  “Thought he was. Drivin a trash truck. I had this card from a dude came in here one night. He told me get a friend and come audition at Dimples. Make us stars. Grady brought me and Glorette out there the next day. Dude took our picture and then we got up there onstage, but Glorette—”

  “She never sang.”

  “Not that.” Hattie watched two customers pass, and her smile was perfect and curved then, her lashes moving. “We were standin there on the stage and they was movin the camera and all of a sudden her shirt is soakin wet.”

  I couldn’t picture it. “She was crying?”

  “Milk.” She moved two bottles in circles. “Grady was sittin outside in the car with the baby, and somebody opened the door, and she musta heard cryin. Big old circles on her shirt, and you could see her—”

  I knew.

  “All the men in there was pantin. Shit. She run out and musta told Grady to leave, cause I sang my song and when I went out, that car was gone. I had to take a cab home.” More customers went past the go-bar, and two waved at Gloria. She lifted her chin and said, “Hey, baby.”

  Her eyes were hard on mine. “They still got my tape over there, at the club.”

  Up there in a storage space? I thought. Behind the Screening Room?