Maybe You Never Cry Again Page 14

  Well, they went crazy. They were booing so hard I couldn’t even get a good joke out. It was like being in a fight: I could still hear the echo of the opening bell, but I was already flat on my back.

  People were throwing bread rolls at me. I ain’t lyin’. One woman threw her drink—and the glass with it. I tried to say something else, but they drowned me out with their angry hollering.

  I didn’t know what to do. I looked over at my family and saw how they was dyin’ inside. Jesus.

  Now the audience was getting ugly. They were screaming: You suck! Get off the motherfuckin’ stage, motherfucker. Get your ugly ass out of here.

  So I got off. And that’s when I got my standing ovation: Motherfuckers were so happy to be rid of me they stood up and cheered.

  My family was devastated. On our way out, my mother-in-law said, “There’s always another day, Bernard. We’ll get another day.” But I didn’t believe it. I’d never been so humiliated in my life.

  I remembered what my mama’d said, about failure being life’s way of preparing you for success. And for the first time in my life, I questioned her wisdom. What if she’d been wrong? What if failure was just preparing me for more failure?

  I was scared. I can’t deny it. For the first time in my life, I was scared to death.

  Right after that terrible humiliation onstage, well—worse came. Hell, I don’t even know how to tell this story. Just thinking on it rips my heart out. But I’ll try.

  Like I said, I’d been calling Billy all the time, and I could never get him on the phone. And the once or twice I managed to get through, he wasn’t sounding like himself. I called Big Nigger. “Something’s going on with Billy,” I said. “Billy’s not himself, he sounds scared, and it’s really beginning to worry me.”

  I called Billy umpteen times more and still couldn’t get him on the phone. So I left a message to meet me at Rhonda’s house later. When I got to Rhonda’s parents’ house, he wasn’t there. So I called him again, and nothing. I tried again the next day and the day after that, and still nothing.

  Sunday, I’m watching the football game, still trying Billy, and I had to be at Dock’s at 4:30. And just before I left for work, I got through—to Shawna.

  “Big Mac, how you doin’?” It was her usual game. I told her I didn’t have time to talk, and to please put Billy on. He came to the phone. “Hello,” he said. He sounded groggy.

  “Where you been, man? Don’t you get my messages? What you doing? Sleeping?”

  “It’s the only way I find peace, Beanie.”

  “What the fuck is going on, Billy?” I said. I was steamed. And I guess being worried only made it worse. “I need to talk to you. Tomorrow’s Monday, and there’s Monday Night Football. Bears are playing Miami. Game comes on at eight. Rhonda’s going to make some chili. You’re going to be here, and you’re going to give it to me straight. And if you’re not here, I’m gonna come and get you.”

  I went to work that night and went back again Monday morning to open the store. It was snowing pretty heavy, and while I was watching it come down I called Billy to make sure we were still on. I got through to him. He sounded a little better. He said he’d be there; wasn’t going to miss Rhonda’s chili for nothing. That was my old Billy.

  By the time Rhonda came to pick me up at work, there was a foot of snow on the ground. Morris called to say he wasn’t going to make it: too much snow. Then A.V. called and said the same thing. I called Billy. I said I had the beer on ice and more chips than we could eat, and that the chili smelled good—perfect for this cold night. He said not to worry; he was on his way.

  But he didn’t come. And then the phone rang and it was Billy, with Shawna screaming and hollering at him in the background. “Come and get me!” he said. “Come and get me right the fuck now. I’m sick of this shit!” The phone clicked off. I went to get my boots and the phone rang again. I thought it was Billy, but it was Morris. I told him about Billy’s call, and that I was going to drive over and get him. “You stay inside the house with your family,” he said. “There’s two feet of snow on the ground. You won’t make it in that car.”

  I looked outside. It was for sure a blizzard. Snow was up to near the windows. So I called Billy and Shawna answered. “Big bad Bean,” she said, laughing and sounding crazy. “What’s up?”

  “Let me speak to Billy,” I said.

  “You comin’ to get your boy?”

  “Let me speak to him, Shawna.”

  She started singing that Michael Jackson song—“You bad, you bad”—and Billy got on the phone.

  “You comin’ to get me?” he asked.

  “I can’t even get the car out,” I said. “But I see the buses are still running. They the only ones on the road.”

  I could hear Shawna singing away in the background at the top of her voice. Something wasn’t right with that girl. Billy turned and screamed at her to shut up.

  “Billy?” I said. “Billy, come on. I got chips and popcorn and beer and chili and Miami is killing the Bears. They’re kicking ass. They broke their streak.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  I sat down to watch the game and wait, and the phone kept ringing. It was Morris or A.V. or Big Nigger, everyone following the game from their home, not together at my place, like we’d planned—all on account of the damn snow. And everyone was excited and worked up. “Look at these motherfuckers!” “They gettin’ their asses whupped!”

  An hour went by. Still no sign of Billy. I went to call him again when the phone rang, and I thought for sure it was him. “Billy?”

  “Hi, Bean.” It was Shawna. She was slurring a little, sounding strange.

  “Where’s Billy?” I said. “He on his way?”

  “Your main man? Your main man Billy went for a walk.”

  “What do you mean a walk? In this weather? He was supposed to get on the bus and come over here.”

  “Bean, you know I love Billy, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No matter what happens, you’ll still love me right?”

  “Shawna, what’s going on over there? You’re not making any sense. Put Billy on.”

  She hung up on me. I was really worried now. I went out in the blowing snow to see if maybe I could dig the car out, but Rhonda was rapping on the window that I was wanted on the phone. I went back inside and picked up the phone. It was Shawna again, and she was crying.

  “You’ll love me no matter what, right, Bean?”

  “What the hell’s going on, Shawna? Put Billy on.”

  But she hung up on me again. I called A.V. Told him something was wrong and I was going over. He said I’d need a tank to get through that snow, and for me to forget it. “We’ll go over first thing in the morning,” he said. “Take care of this once and for all.”

  I called over to Shawna’s again, but the answering machine was on. And when I tried again after the game, it was still on. So Rhonda and I looked in on Boops and went to bed.

  At ten the next morning my phone rang. It was this woman from work who knew Billy and me was tight. Everybody liked Billy down at Dock’s. “What’s up?” I said.

  “You heard about Billy?” she asked me.

  “What about him?”

  “Billy’s brother Eric just called here, looking for you.”

  “Something happened to Billy?”

  She didn’t want to tell me, but she had to tell me. “I’m sorry, Beanie. Billy’s dead.”

  Then the phone clicked and it was Eric, to tell me what I’d just heard. And Billy’s mother takes the phone from him and she was in terrible pain. “Oh, Bernie,” she said, crying. “She killed my boy. She shot him. She killed my little Billy.”

  I was crushed. Tears were pouring down my cheeks. My main man. I could have gone to get him, snow or no snow, but I didn’t go. I felt awful. Boops came into the room. Nine years old, and she sees me crying and knows something is very wrong.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?�
� she asked me.

  “It’s your uncle Billy, honey,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  She started sobbing, like her heart was breaking. I held her in my arms. My heart was breaking right along with hers. I couldn’t accept it. I kept wondering what he must have felt like. Was he in pain? What were his last thoughts? Was he maybe thinking how I didn’t come to get him? That I’d failed him? Was he already dead that second time Shawna called? Was he lying there bleeding?

  The phone rang again. It was Billy’s mother, still crying a river. “Beanie,” she said. “When the trial comes, please don’t forsake us.” And then I remembered what Billy had told me. “Bean,” he had said. “If anything happens to me, I want you to get Shawna.”

  But I didn’t get Shawna. They charged her with second-degree murder and she got up there and said Billy used to beat her all the time. She was only defending herself against a violent, no-good man. They showed the jury pictures of her body, marked up with ugly bruises, and they said Billy’s fists and feet had made those bruises.

  Before I took the stand, they asked me if I was sure I still wanted to testify. I said yes, more than ever. I would tell how crazy that woman was, how she had my Billy hooked. And they took me into a small room and showed me pictures of Billy. There was a little hole in his right temple, where she’d shot him at close range. He’d fallen forward and hit his head on the edge of the dresser, they told me. They said he died instantly. He didn’t suffer.

  “Oh, he suffered,” I said.

  I went and gave my testimony, but it didn’t do a damn thing. Shawna walked out of there with probation, a free woman. I’d made my main man a promise I couldn’t keep. And I kept thinking about the snow. And how he’d still be alive if I’d only got in the damn car and gone to get him.

  I would never see his handsome face again. I would never hear him laugh again. Never.

  Billy had suffered. And his family had suffered. And I was going to suffer for a long time to come.

  Billy. My nigger. My main man. I miss you, Billy. The world is a lonelier place without you.

  ““STOP LIVING IN THE PAST, BEAN. YOU CAN’T CHANGE WHAT HAPPENED. JUST LIKE YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE FUTURE BY WORRYING ABOUT IT. YOU JUST HAVE TO KEEP MOVING, SON.””

  12

  MUST BE A GOT-DAMN STORM RAGING INSIDE YOU

  Billy had a big funeral, with people getting up to remember him and pray and sing and tell stories. Normally I was the one who cheered the mourners at these events, with my comedy routines and such. But I didn’t find the strength for it that day.

  They sealed the coffin, and we took him to the cemetery and buried him.

  It was a grim day. Raining. With ice everywhere from the big storm. Me and Morris left the cemetery and picked up a case of beer and went and sat in a park. We were the only ones there, two sad fools drinking beer in the cold rain and missing their friend Billy.

  “I should’ve gone to pick him up,” I said. “Blizzard or no blizzard, I should’ve driven over.”

  Morris kept telling me I was crazy to be thinking like that; that it wasn’t my fault; that I had begged Billy umpteen times to open up to me and he never came clean about the serious trouble he was in.

  Still, I couldn’t help blaming myself. That’s the way guilt works. I kept going back to the times I felt I wasn’t there for him, and it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t stop dwelling on it. It was with me during the day, and it kept me up half the night.

  My only solace was in work. I lost myself in my work. They had about twenty Dock’s around town, and at one point or another I must’ve worked in every last one of them. Pat the fish dry, throw it in the flour, flip it over, repeat. Then lay it in the fryer smooth. My fish would always come out flat, not a curl on it. Amazing how a man can disappear into his work. Not think of anything else. Keep it deep inside. Hidden.

  But I was kidding myself. The thoughts of Billy were never far behind.

  “You have to stop thinking about this,” Rhonda told me.

  She could see it was making me crazy, and it worried her. I’d always been hard to read, hard to ruffle; now I was walking around like a zombie. It was showing on my face. In my eyes. In the way I moved.

  “Billy’s the only one who believed in me,” I said. “He’s the only one who thought I was going to make it as a comedian.”

  “That’s not true,” Rhonda said.

  But I wasn’t listening.

  On July 4, I was walking around in my usual daze when I got hit in the forehead by an M-80 firecracker. Woke me the fuck up. Blood was pouring down my face and my ears were ringing so loud I couldn’t hear anything. I felt like I was underwater. My cousin came running over and started hollering at me, but I couldn’t hear a word. I could just see his lips moving, and the worry on his face. He grabbed me by the arm and helped me home, and Rhonda lay me flat on the bed and put an ice pack on my head.

  But my damn head wouldn’t stop bleeding, so Rhonda took me to Jackson Park Hospital. When the nurse finally got around to taking my blood pressure, she looked at the gauge like it had to be wrong. She tried again. This time she looked plain worried, and it worried me.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said, and she hurried off to get a doctor.

  The doctor told me my blood pressure was 190 over 120. I didn’t believe him. I said I felt fine and went home. I lay down and took a couple of aspirin for the headache and went to sleep.

  The next morning I got up and had breakfast with my family, then walked Je’Niece to school and went to see my own doctor, a man I trusted. He took my blood pressure and looked at me funny. “Bernie,” he asked. “Did you run over here?”

  “No.”

  “This is very bad,” he said. “Your blood pressure is 220 over 140.”

  “That can’t be right!” I said. “That’s worse than yesterday.”

  He put some kind of tablet under my tongue and told me to hold it there until it dissolved, then wrote out a prescription for hypertension.

  “I don’t understand this,” I said. “I’ve always been healthy as a horse.”

  “I know,” my doctor said. “I don’t understand it, either. What’s on your mind, Bernie? Must be a got-damn storm raging inside you.”

  And suddenly I knew what he was talkin’ about; knew just the storm he meant. I’d been thinking about Billy. I’d been thinking about all the times I wasn’t there for him, about how I’d failed him in life and failed him again at the trial. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and my obsession was making me sick.

  By the time I got to the pharmacy, I had decided not to fill the prescription. Instead, I walked home and went into that quiet place inside me. It’s like a church in there. Best church in the whole damn world.

  And I remembered another of my mother’s Mac-isms, something she’d tell me when I’d obsess over things that had already come and gone: Stop living in the past, Bean. You can’t change what happened. Just like you can’t change the future by worrying about it. You just have to keep moving, son. It’s all about forward movement.

  She was right. Again. I couldn’t change the past, but I could sure enough keep moving. I had lost my way. I’d stopped dreaming. Take a man’s dream away from him and he might as well curl up and die.

  “You know something, Bean,” she once said, “it’s very hard to balance a bicycle when you’re standing still. But when you’re moving forward, there’s nothing to it. You can fly.

  “Well, life’s like that, too. If you’re not moving forward, you’re going to struggle just to keep your balance. But if you’re moving forward, if you’ve got direction, nothing can stand in your way.”

  I was still getting strength from my mother. Her words got me out of my rut, back on track. “You can’t control what happens, Beanie. But you can control how you respond to it.”

  Before I knew it, I was back doing comedy. I’d leave Dock’s at five and run home and shower and go find me a stage, any stage.

 
; By 1988 I was somewhere just about every night. Tuesdays at Dating Game. Wednesdays at Chez Coco. Thursdays at The 500. Fridays at A.K.A. On weekends I’d do shows and private parties and be the half-time entertainment at local discos.

  That’s show biz, baby.

  When I had a bad night, I wouldn’t sleep well. I’d toss and turn. I’d be thinking about where I went wrong. About delivery, timing. And that’s fine, because I’d learn from my mistakes.

  On good nights, I’d toss and turn, too. I’d be pumped, high. But I had to let that go, too, else I’d be watching the sun come up.

  Life isn’t about what happened yesterday or about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Life is about right now, and right now I needed my got-damn sleep. I had other fish to fry in the morning. Well, no—it was the same old fish. Them and the shrimp. But I didn’t mind. Those fish paid the bills.

  One day, during a break at work, I was flipping through a greasy newspaper and saw they were having open mike at the Cotton Club. Everybody was welcome: singers, dancers, comedians.

  Last time I’d performed at the Cotton Club, standing in for Bob McDonald, the bastards had stiffed me. But that was water under the bridge. Why hold a grudge? If I didn’t go, I’d only be hurtin’ myself.

  So the big night comes. I’m home, preparing. That’s right, preparing. Don’t think I’d forgotten being booed in front of my own family. Get off the motherfuckin’ stage, motherfucker.

  By this time I was doing the Six P’s—the ones my mama had drummed into my head when I was a little boy: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.

  So I was ready. Took the bus to the Cotton Club and stood in line with all the other hopefuls. And when it was my turn, I got up there and did my five minutes and killed.

  “Been ten years since Roots came out, and black people still be givin’ their kids crazy names. Zaqueeda. Jambalaya. Paradise. What happen to just plain John?

  “Black folks can’t fight. We drink, we smoke, we eat ham hocks. We eat chicken three, four times a day. Two black men fight, last about fifteen seconds. Then they dust themselves off and go to Popeye’s to kiss and make up.”