Idiots First Read Free Page B

liked it better when they had parties at night and everybody had a good time. The musicians played their banjos and saxophones and the houses shook with the music and laughing. The young girls, with their pretty dresses and ribbons in their hair, caught me in my throat when I saw them through the windows.
    But with the parties came drinking and fights. Sundays were bad days after the Saturday night parties. I remember once that Buster’s father, also long and loose, always wearing a dirty gray Homburg hat, chased another black man
in the street with a half-inch chisel. The other one, maybe five feet high, lost his shoe and when they wrestled on the ground he was already bleeding through his suit, a thick red blood smearing the sidewalk. I was frightened by the blood and wanted to pour it back in the man who was bleeding from the chisel. On another time Buster’s father was playing in a crap game with two big bouncy red dice, in the back of an alley between two middle houses. Then about six men started fist-fighting there, and they ran out of the alley and hit each other in the street. The neighbors, including children, came out and watched, everybody afraid but nobody moving to do anything. I saw the same thing near my store in Harlem, years later, a big crowd watching two men in the street, their breaths hanging in the air on a winter night, murdering each other with switch knives, but nobody moved to call a cop. I didn’t either. Anyway, I was just a young kid but I still remember how the cops drove up in a police paddy wagon and broke up the fight by hitting everybody they could hit with big nightsticks. This was in the days before LaGuardia. Most of the fighters were knocked out cold, only one or two got away. Buster’s father started to run back in his house but a cop ran after him and cracked him on his Homburg hat with a club, right on the front porch. Then the Negro men were lifted up by the cops, one at the arms and the other at the feet, and they heaved them in the paddy wagon. Buster’s father hit the back of the wagon and fell, with his nose spouting very red blood, on top of three other men. I personally couldn’t stand it, I was scared of the human race so I ran home, but I remember Buster watching without any expression in his eyes. I stole an extra fifteen
cents from my mother’s pocketbook and I ran back and asked Buster if he wanted to go to the movies. I would pay. He said yes. This was the first time he talked tome.
    So we went more than once to the movies. But we never got to be friends. Maybe because it was a one-way proposition—from me to him. Which includes my invitations to go with me, my (poor mother’s) movie money, Hershey chocolate bars, watermelon slices, even my best Nick Carter and Merriwell books that I spent hours picking up in the junk shops, and that he never gave me back. Once he let me go in his house to get a match so we could smoke some butts we found, but it smelled so heavy, so impossible, I died till I got out of there. What I saw in the way of furniture I won’t mention—the best was falling apart in pieces. Maybe we went to the movies all together five or six matinees that spring and in the summertime, but when the shows were over he usually walked home by himself.
    â€œWhy don’t you wait for me, Buster?” I said. “We’re both going in the same direction.”
    But he was walking ahead and didn’t hear me. Anyway he didn’t answer.
    One day when I wasn’t expecting it he hit me in the teeth. I felt like crying but not because of the pain. I spit blood and said, “What did you hit me for? What did I do to you?”
    â€œBecause you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.”
    And he ran away.
    I thought to myself how was I to know he didn’t
like the movies. When I was a man I thought, you can’t force it.
    Years later, in the prime of my life,