Trip Wire Read Free

said.
    Wilt leaned across the table to give him five. “Who ain’t?”
    They all laughed, even Barry. “That’s okay,” he said, “I forgive youse. Here. Here’s some shit I brought you all. ’Cause I’m such a good king. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”
    He threw an overstuffed plastic Baggie at the table. The “shit” was stemless, pristine, and the color of straw. I got a buzz just from looking at it.
    Barry was grinning at us.
    “We’ll kiss your ring some other time,” Wilton said.
    “Fuckin’ A, you will,” said Barry.
    I wasn’t joining in the laughter. And I wasn’t really hungry, either. Suddenly restless, I soon left the table. In my room I threw a few things into my knapsack. Then I pushed into my stained brown boots and peacoat, and headed out.
    2
    Gray snow was flung thigh high against the parked automobiles. The neighborhood porches and front yards were festooned with Christmas tree lights and those dumb plastic Santas. I bet Forest Street, in the haunted neighborhood where I’d lived with Grandma, looked this way, too, even though it was miles away, almost in another world. Ole Chicagotown was the most rigidly segregated city in the nation, but at Christmastime most neighborhoods, black or white, tended to look the same: gaudy and sad. I wondered if it was that way all over the world.
    Well, probably not in London. I bet Christmastime London was a tasteful wonderland of gaslit Victorian froufrou. That particular city was in and out of my thoughts a lot these days. I’d been a front-runner for a fellowship that would have taken me to England to study for a year. But I had pretty much blown that. So much for figgy pudding, whatever that was. For a while now, my studies have been limited to the fine distinctions between Panama Red and Acapulco Gold.
    Feeling the wrath of the wind, I quickened my pace. When I reached North Avenue, I turned into the little cul-de-sac of Vine Street. My guy, Nat Joffrey, wouldn’t be home yet, but I had the key to his place, the ground-floor apartment in a rickety two-flat that had probably been built about 1850, not unlike the pitiful housing thrown up around that time in another part of town to house the stockyard workers.
    Nat was one of the better people in the world. A Negro born and raised on the North Side, he was part troubadour, part philosopher, part oracle. He had a wonderful baritone voice that made him a charismatic speaker at rallies.
    Kindhearted Nat, when he wasn’t bagging granola and hosing down organic celery at the Food Coop, worked tirelessly for the peace movement, edited and published political broadsides, organized folk music festivals, volunteered at skid row soup kitchens. The list went on. He was fifty-one, more than thirty years my senior. He was also beginning to lose his woolly hair, and he had a body as formless as a sack of baking potatoes and a face just this side of homely. In other words, every bit of his beauty was on the inside.
    Naturally, he was madly in love with me.
    When he arrived, he was loaded down with groceries. Trying to help him, I reached for a couple of the earth-friendly Food Coop bags. He wouldn’t let me take them, though. All he wanted to do was kiss me. Grapefruits and lentils and unshelled peanuts went all over the floor while we stood there going at it. Five minutes later, we hit the bedroom.
    Seeing me shiver, he struck a wood match for the gas heater. “You go to school today?”
    Instead of answering, I sighed.
    “Uh-huh. What’d you do all day? Hang around and smoke grass?”
    “More or less.”
    “What are your folks going to say if you flunk out?”
    “I’m not going to flunk out, Nat.”
    “You will if you keep on hanging around with Wilton and them.”
    “Right. We ought to be more productive members of society. And if I moved in here and had you nagging me all the time, I would be.”
    He smiled in his ragged way; tooth broken in a fight during his stint in the segregated WWII