Black Chicago Page 12

“Shit, I remember Ramona from Wilson Junior College.”

  “O.K., think back to the way she was then and contrast that with what you saw tonight.”

  The contrast was easy to make. Ramona Spelling in high school was traditional version of Miss Goodie Two Shoes. She didn’t kiss, wouldn’t allow you to slide your hand down on her boody (if you got a chance to slow dance with her, if), would back away from a dirty story and went to church every Sunday.

  “Yeah, man she is different now. What happened?”

  “I can’t righteously say, all I can tell is that I was there when it happened.”

  I exchanged flirtatious looks with a beige colored school teacher three seats away. We reinforced it by checkin’ each other in the bar mirror.

  “I wouldn’t want anybody to take this as gospel but I’d have to say the change happened right after we had sex for the third time.”

  The beige colored lady flickered her eyelashes correctly. She knew how to flirt … hmmmmmmm …

  “The third time?”

  “Thats right, the third time we had a terrible time the first two times, the chick was a semi-virgin. I think the farthest she had ever gone was to let some motherffucker finger fuck her.”

  We locked eyes in the mirror for a pregnant moment. She was telling me all I wanted to know; I’m here for a drink, I’m pretty, intelligent, driving a nice car, got a career and I’m feeling seductive. Who are you?

  There is lots to be said in a bar mirror if you know the language.

  “How was I suppose to know that I had discovered a cum freak?”

  “Cum freak? Ramona Spelling? You gotta be kiddin’.”

  The bartender paused in front of us, took the nod and gave us refills.

  “Don’t ask me how it happened, all I know is that it happened. Like I said, the first two times I almost skinned the head off my dick but after that we were off to the races.

  The first inkling I had that the sister was a sex fiend happened one night after a trip to the lake front. Real hot night, we had gone down to Buckingham Fountain, you know, to cool out.

  On the way back she persuaded me to drive thru Washington Park.

  “Fred, Fred,” she says to me, “lets go out into the middle of the big field ’n do it.”

  I called the bartender over.

  “Scuse me, Fred … uhhh, I see that the lady three seats to my right needs a refill, would you do that with my compliments?”

  I wanted to hear about Fred and Ramona but I didn’t want to lose the beige queen in the process.

  “Go on, man …”

  He checked my possibility out.

  “Yeahhhh, she nice. Anyway, I didn’t need too much persuasion to do what she wanted because, well, if the truth be told, the girl had some sho’ ’nuff good stuff, you know what I mean?”

  Me and the lady held up our snifters to exchange toasts. We were going to be a class act, I could tell, I checked my watch—1:35am—I’d make a slow move in her direction in a few minutes.

  “It got to be real crazy after that, real crazy. Her big kick was outdoor fuckin. It got to the point where I was damned near afraid to take her anywhere.

  And then she started gainin weight ’n stuff because she discovered marijuana. I think one of her girlfriends turned her on. If I saw her on Friday, we wouldn’t do nothin but get high, fuck, eat and do it again all weekend.

  And then she started gettin gross, you know, cussin’ ’n shit …”

  I could tell that the school teacher was becoming impatient. What was more important, the conversation I was having with this bearded hard leg, or the conversation I was going to have with her?

  “So y’all broke up, huh?”

  “I think the best way to put it is to say that I broke away. I had to. You know what this chick proposed?”

  “Naw, What?”

  “She proposed that I get some of my friends together, and she’d get some of her friends together and we’d have a fuck out. Can you imagine somebody proposing some shit like that in 1992?”

  “Hard to imagine,” I replied and checked the time. 1:50 AM. They’d be turning the lights on in ten minutes and calling out, “Last call for alcohol, last call.”

  “Yeahhh, hard to imagine.”

  “Anyway, thats what happened. You better get on over there before the lady decides to ease out.

  “Been checking us out, huh?”

  “It was gonna be you or me.”

  We shook hands as I slid off the barstool and eased into vacant one next to Madame Beige.

  “Good evening, my name is James Bennet.”

  “My name is Ellen Barlow, my friends call me Billie, for some strange reason.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Are you a friend?”

  “I hope to be.”

  “Last call for alcohol, last call!”

  The bartender placed two Martells in front of us.

  “Compliments of the brother.”

  Fred was wishing us success. The lady and I smiled and toasted him.

  “Nice friend you have,” she said.

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Well looks like this is going to be the end of a brief friendship, unless you’ll give me your phone number?

  “I’m confused. Is your pumpkin going to turn into a rat or something?”

  “No, nothing like that, I’m riding with my friend.”

  She gave me a shy look. She had marvelous cat eyes and dimples in her cheeks. I was hooked.

  “I can give you a lift, if you’re not afraid to be out with someone you just met.”

  It was my turn for the sly smile. If she hadn’t made the offer I would’ve been a mad ass.

  “You’re someone I just met that I feel I’ve known before.”

  “Thats a nice thing to say.”

  “Scuse me, let me tell my friend that I have a lift.”

  “Hope you’re not anxious to rush right home,” she whispered, “I like to take walks in the park early in the morning.”

  I winked lasciviously.

  The lights were on and we were strolling out of the club.

  “Fred, I got a lift from this lovely lady. Ellen Barlow, Fred Frazier.” Fred gave his look of approval, she smiled neutrally.

  We started across the street into the parking lot. Fred edged up behind me and whispered in my left ear.

  “If you wind up in the park with her, you might have a Ramona Spelling on your hands!”

  I was still smiling when I popped into her black BMW. If she was a Ramona Spelling she had picked on the right man this 2 am.

  Yeahhh, you got to go away from here and come back to really understand what time can do. ’member King Johnson, the brother who looked and behaved like a king?

  King runs a successful funeral home over there on Cottage Grove. Some people say he’s into a little drug dealing, but we haven’t seen any proof.

  Judy Frazier, right here in the album, with the white ruffled collar, the perfect high school girl,” the student body president and all that. Well, she did exactly what everybody thought she was gonna do, the problem is that she’s married to a piece of po’ white trash who flushes her money down the drain.

  How did she wind up with po’ white trash? Who knows what the egg is gonna have in it?

  Fenster MacRoy, class comedian, is playing ’Vegas. Some people think that he’s funnier than Richard Pryor was in his day.

  Carver Tolliver went out to the west coast and is trying to break into the movies. You gotta give it to the girl, she is persistent

  Phillip Harrison, the “egghead,” owns his own computer firm. Oleana Bradshaw, the country girl from Mississippi who made straight A’s for her junior and senior year, went back down to the big foot country and became a politician. I read somewhere that they’re talking about having her run for governor.

  Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

  Bobby Truman, the baddest 100 yard man who ever ran it couldn’t out run the police, he’s doing
fifteen years in Statesville.

  Wonder what ever happened to the white boy and his sister who went to Du Sable when it was all black? What am I saying? It’s always been all Black.

  Grits, the Spiritual Side

  People in Chicago, transplanted southerners whose ancestors were transplanted, can get real serious about their grits.

  “No ma’am, I don’t eat no watery grits.”

  “Uhh, ’scuse me, Miss Lady, but would you please take these back? Too much salt.”

  We have folks who are partial to their grits with too much salt, just to keep the balance here. And people who only want country fresh butter or hot grits with sugar, butter or not with sugar, butter and milk. And others who love steak gravy or cheddar cheese or bacon grease poured on top.

  Why grits? ’cause its fufu in another form. What’s fufu? Its pre-American grits.

  Greasin’… A Guest Review by Be’Helthi

  Years ago in the southside ghetto and on the westside (we say “on the westside” and “on the southside”) you could find the worst food to eat on the planet. And unmercifully, things haven’t changed very much.

  It would take a historian (we say “ourstorian”) to explain how we got into this nutritional insane asylum. That’s not my job. I’m simply going to be taking a hard look at some of the components.

  Now then, we had a good time at the Play Time, made a date in the Dating Game, swept thru my Place and the Other Place, made lightening creeps into the President’s Lounge (checked Chazz out), The Apartment, Piece of the Rock, Reese’s, The 50 Yard Line, The Dew Drop Inn, The Palm Garden, and a few other spots no one knows about but us.

  Dawn streaks beckon the sky to get hot again (its summer, ain’t it?) as our stomachs rumble.

  “Hey y’all, why don’t we have breakfast?” The Breakfast Place (name changed to protect the guilty) is open to serve us as much cholesterol as we can bear.

  “How do you want your eggs?”

  “I’d like cheddar sprinkled on my grits.”

  “I don’t know about y’all but I want some butter on my grits.”

  Bacon, eggs, hamburgers, steaks, sugar and cream every where. We waddled out after the breakfast (“break-fast”) guts filled with cholesterol, high blood pressure catalysts, diabetes yeast start ups, grease for the future.

  And … ahhh, a smoke after the breakfast, doing whatever is necessary to ensure bad health for the next generation what do we need with crack?

  Years ago, yes, you can say that if you’re older than thirty years ago, I ate the candy corn Spanish peanuts and washed it down with Coca Cola. We sucked on giant peppermint sticks in dill pickles (girls did that a lot) and developed an unbelievable number of cavities.

  One of the things I notice now is that many of our sisters paid for feeding on candy bars and sugar filled chewing gum. But we’re getting off the track, then was then, Now is Now. Now we go to the swanky named restaurants (“Nom de Plume”) where they would kick you out if you ordered grits or chit’lins, but they serve, in crude European imitation style, iced wine.

  “And how is your wine, sir?”

  “Its frozen, how can I tell how it is.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Forget it, put the bottle on the table, maybe we can thaw it out before the night is over.”

  “As you wish, Sir.”

  The customer is always right, you see.

  They say to me, “Be’Helthi, we have this wonderful new restaurant for you, come with us.” And I go because I’m a gopher, o.k.? and what do I find?

  I find a pretentiously attended establishment (my coined slang for a snobbish hang out) where pasta is post dente (“al dente” doesn’t mean shit to the middle echelon types who support these places), the vegetables have been desecrated by overcooking and the meat (gotta have a “meat” cooked, baked broiled, fried to within an inch of … well, what? Its already dead.

  Chicken is reserved for a special brand of crucifixion, a misfried, over battered or barbequed fate that seems perfectly suited for a bird who has been worked to death and flung into the ghetto for consumption.

  Barbecue. Some evening in the summer when the wind is blowing right, I feel that every pig and cow’s ribs in the state of Illinois is being charcoaled. And why? I ask myself; so that the brothers and sisters on the southside and on the westside will have some flesh to accompany their macaroni and potato salad (loaded with mayonnaise).

  The fast food corporation took note of our predilection for monotonous diets a while back (they didn’t believe we’d dig it 30 years ago) and played into it. How else could you explain why a woman or a man would eat those little hamburgers all the time.

  The African people in Chicago will use any excuse to eat the worst food in the world (we’re not talking about the Be’Helthi conscious people). Christmas Day offers a prime example.

  Yeahhh, I know, Be’Helthi is just a dirty rotten snake-dog-motherfucker-bastard-asshole-son of a bitch! “Christmas! He’s talkin’ against Christmas! He must be a communist or a white boy!

  Sorry, just an African-American man with permanent affiliations for what goes into our bellies. Christmas, what do I have to say beyond pies cakes and those little specialties that we’re never able to diet off after Christmas?

  The New Year’s Day Feast in front of “The Game.”

  As the sign on the t-shirt says, “Shit happens.”

  Some folks are starting to talk up a Martin Luther King Festival Feast for his birthday, January 21st.

  We’re already into some green stuff on St. Patrick’s Day, this is for Africans with Irish monikers.

  Easter takes our children deeply into those egg-sized chocolates and candy things, Lord knows what the connection is between eggs, rabbits and Jesus reborn.

  But then, I’m only a social critic of the African-American food scene, what do I know?

  I know there’s some kind of manic logic happenin’ behind the idea of taking overweight, high blood pressure ridden diabetic mammas to high cholesterol feasts on Mother’s Day.

  “Y’all goin’ barbecue Memorial Day?”

  “Probably, Earl got to have him some ’que on Memorial Day.”

  June 16th, Father’s Day. He doesn’t get the full kaduza, and more often winds up with a new tie or a pair of slippers than a feed bag.

  And just when we had become accustomed to only minor league excursions into gluttonous behavior. July 4th. What is July 4th supposed to mean or do for African people in America?

  I’ve been to barbecues (you have to go where your friends are) on July 4th, where the man of the house was flipping barbequed sauce, wearing a t-shirt that said, “We are not Independent or Free, yet.”

  I could repeat variations on that theme, followed by gigantic fireworks displays and a bunch of other patriotic madness.

  The obesity, the tensions, the malfunctioning of the body that happens as a result of eating poison is evident as the nose on your face.

  The Be’Helthi’s have formed conclaves that are almost cult-elitist.

  “Girl, I know wher you can find fresh bread!”

  “I was talking to Johnny yesterday about bread.”

  Poor Be’Helthis, we have to be careful of our feelings, guard our sources before they are discovered and closed down for lack of the right license.

  A Chinese friend of mine, a restauranteur and a Be’Helthi type told me that he was forced away from the good Cantonese style of cooking when he opened a restaurant on the westside.

  “I tried to do it the way my parents had done it. Fresh vegetables, nothing overcooked, you know, real cuisine. People were bringing orders back saying that the food was not cooked well enough.

  We had to change or else go out of business.”

  It should end there/here, but Fate demands that I mention sugar. Sugar … We even call each other “sugar,” which is the only decent use of the term or the substance.

  What’s going to happen to us? The scenario is quite clear. We’re going to e
at ourselves to death without finding out what authentic food tastes like.

  ’Til taters get sweeter, Be’Helthi.

  Changes

  No place in the world is capable of changing as fast as Chicago. The whole city is a quick change artist.

  It may have something to do with the weather. The Weather, as many people are fond of reminding us, will change at the drop of a hat.

  It can go from cold to warm, from warm to cold (and often does, raining on one side of the street and not on the other side), it can sleet, snow, rain thunder and flash jagged bolts of lightening while the sun is shining.

  The wind can blow you down, stand you back up and carry you to wherever you thought you wanted to go in minutes.

  Neighbors are barometers of change in Chicago. You might have a Jewish neighborhood turn African-American (it has happened) or Mexican, or Czech neighborhood turn Mexican, or German neighborhood become Polish, or Lithuanian or Estonian or Croatian or Sorbian or Hindu Indian.

  Strangely, the most stable neighborhoods seem to be mixed. Mixed with what? Well, who gives a shit! just mixed.

  Tropical Intrigue

  August is Chicago; the asphalt melts, heat waves shimmer on the horizon, people stay indoors with the fans fanning them or the air conditions on and drink beer and have lazy dog conversations about their neighbors, ’specially in the section called Blarney.

  “Michael O’Reilly, you’re as big a liar as I’d ever hope to find anywhere!”

  “But its true, I tell ya! its true! Molly, come in here a moment will ya?”

  “And what is it you’d be wantin’, I’m tryin’ to make soda bread, ya know, and its not the kind of thing that makes itself.”

  “I know darlin’,” I know. But I need your witness.”

  “Well here I am, what is it?”

  “I’m trying to tell the doubtin’ Thomas here the truth about the people across the street.”

  “O Heavens! those ungodly folks! What about’ em?”

  “Remember when they were married to each other?”

  “How could I ever forget?”

  “Now just a minute, you’re tellin’ me that they once were married to each other?”