The Last Worthless Evening Read Free

hot-tempered.”
    â€œCarry blades too, I hear. You talk French to the slaves down there?”
    â€œAlways. Called them bête noires .”
    â€œI hear we have a distinct smell. Maybe just to the cracker nose.”
    â€œThey did.”
    â€œDid it smell a little bit like poverty?”
    â€œTheir part of town did. And neglect.”
    â€œThey do seem to go hand in hand. Smell like fear maybe too? Like a dog at the vet’s?”
    â€œI don’t know. Sweat, maybe.”
    â€œAh: a little of both, then. Because they was workin’ theah black asses off fo’ the cuh nel, choppin’ his cotton and wet-nuhsin’ his chillun an’ fetchin’ him mint joo leps own the ve ran dah. White people smell like milk. We get nauseated in a theater full of white people.”
    â€œThey didn’t have that problem at home.”
    â€œOh I reck on not. Smell gun powdah if dey go to a movie wif de white folks.”
    â€œDo I smell like milk?”
    â€œRight now you smell like Asahi. At sea you smell like wet dreams.”
    â€œYou too.”
    â€œBut dreams that stimulate a huge cock.” He held his hands apart, as though showing the length of a fish that fought him for thirty minutes and then threw the hook. “Actually I’m an insult to my people. Louisa thinks I’ve got a cracker in my woodpile.”
    â€œYou can dance, though.”
    â€œSing too. Want to hear something from Porgy and Bess? Or Showboat? ”
    â€œWant to hear a Southern joke?”
    â€œThey have those?”
    â€œIt’s sociological.”
    â€œIt ought to be.”
    â€œMaybe it’s even philosophical. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt started it. Sent a chain letter to Negroes.”
    â€œI didn’t know they could get mail down there. Can’t read enough to vote, how can they get mail?”
    â€œIt’s very complex. There are heroic deliveries.”
    â€œNight riders?”
    â€œOf the New Frontier.”
    So I told him those two jokes. There in the booth, which was small like everything, it seems, in Japan; our feet and legs bumped and drew back and shifted beneath the low table. In that bar lit by softened red lights, much like the passageways aboard ship, to protect the pilots’ night vision. But the lights were softer, and came from behind the bar and perhaps a couple of dim ceiling lights. Faces at nearby tables were shapes with vague features. Cigarettes rose to them, glowed, descended. My eyes burned. At the tables and in booths and sitting at the bar were officers in civilian suits and ties (Willie and I had taken off our coats, unbuttoned our collars, loosened our ties), and sailors and Marines in uniform, some with women, some waiting their chance, a few oblivious. The waitresses carried trays among the tables as if they did not need to see. They were slender shapes in kimonos, wide sleeves moving like shadows with substance, their hair darker than the darkness of the room, their faces in the light a pale glow, with brightly darkened lips and eyes. While men stumbled and bumped their way to the toilet, these women glided, like the figures a child is afraid he will wake to see entering his bedroom and, without a sound of breath or feet, crossing its floor.
    â€œThere’s this boy living on a cotton plantation, and he goes off to college, and after a while he writes to his daddy and says everybody in the fraternity has a monkey and will his daddy buy him one too. So the man buys his son a monkey, and the boy brings him home on vacations, and when he’s finished college he asks his daddy if he can leave the monkey at home, because he’s going out into the world. So his daddy says sure, son, that’ll be fine. So the boy leaves and the monkey stays, and one day the man goes outside and sees the monkey out in the cotton field. He’s carrying a gunny sack and going down the rows, picking cotton and putting it in the sack, and the man