Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(39)
Pepper had first met Rusty twelve years before, when he started using the store as an answering service. He walked in and there was Rusty, slender-armed and potbellied, hair conked in frozen waves, chasing a fat fly with a swatter. Time and the city had elevated the hayseed into an upstanding member of the Harlem community. Fatherhood played its part—no encounter was complete without an inspection of his wallet photos of wife, Beatrice, and their three boys. Plus he was churchy, which conferred an air of legitimacy on all comers. Deacon, serving the congregation and such. One time he invited Pepper to check out their services, Church of the Holy Whatnot over on Convent. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been outside,” Rusty said. “There are no locks on His door, no buzzer, and you’re always welcome.” Pepper’s expression ensured that it was a onetime invitation.
As promised, Rusty took care of the store. The salesman directed the young white men to keep the Sterlings with the Sterlings and the DeMarcos with the DeMarcos and herded the floor lamps into a flock of silver and bronze. It wouldn’t be difficult to restore everything to Carney’s liking. He seized on the boom operator’s accent—they hailed from different parts of Georgia but had tuned in to the same radio preacher every Sunday. Now the two of them were up in New York City working on a movie about a black lady secret agent in the cracker-killing business. Secret agent or kung fu lady—Pepper hadn’t read the script. Did black movies get into theaters down there? The KKK probably kept a roadblock to keep them out of the county.
Rusty’s competence and amiability made him a de facto production assistant; Larry’s easy charisma got him a cameo and a line of dialogue. Most days Larry was too slick for Pepper’s taste, but he was less annoying compared to the rest of his generation, with their eye-melting clothing and tiresome, uplifting slogans. When Pepper showed up that morning, Larry was pacing figure eights on the sidewalk and mumbling to himself. Rehearsing, he said.
He told Pepper how it went down. The day after Carney agreed to let them use his store, Zippo made a special trip to see Larry. He slid his dark sunglasses down his nose. “Do you act?”
“No more than the next guy,” Larry said.
“You have a quality,” Zippo announced.
Larry’s character worked for Charles & Co. Furniture, the name of the store in the movie. He holds the door for Nefertiti and makes a flirtatious remark when she comes to see Mr. Dudley, the owner. “I’ve been working on the line for days,” Larry said. “It’s stressing me.” No matter what he did, it always sounded the same as the first time he said it.
Pepper asked him what it was.
“Look at you, foxy.”
The problem was obvious. There was no way to improve the delivery. Larry said it like that when the cameras rolled hours later: One take.
* * *
***
Frankly the racial-harmony shit put Pepper on edge. The majority of the film crew were hippie freaks, but Zippo and the director of photography and Angela, the lady who did wardrobe and makeup, were black. The white people did what they were told.
This was America, melting pot and powder keg. Surely something was about to pop off. It kept not happening.
Pepper had never worked jobs with white people before. Pulling shit in Newark, then uptown in those days, that was the reality. It was not done. Occasionally he’d get asked to join a crew with a white wheelman or a bankroll and that was a sign to wait for the next gig. His current refusals were simple common sense. Pepper barely trusted Negro crooks—why extend the courtesy to some cracker motherfucker who’d fuck you over first chance? Sometimes black people fell over themselves trying to vouch for a white man who hadn’t wronged them yet. Yet.
His work on Nefertiti didn’t break his rule, he decided—as freelance muscle, he was on the outside. No reason not to take the opportunity to learn a thing or two. His second day with Secret Agent: Nefertiti, they were shooting a dice-game scene behind a bodega. The bodega was real—Tiny’s Extra on 132nd, where Skitter Lou had severed Bull Moreland’s windpipe by the ice-cream freezer back in ’67—but the craps were pure Hollywood, from the too-nice threads on the players to the soft faces of the players. A proper dice game featured at least six kinds of plaid—slacks, shirt, jacket—and one dude with a buck-fifty scar. Pepper had read in one of the militant papers that twenty-five percent of cowboys in the Old West were black, and whenever Secret Agent: Nefertiti strayed too far from True Harlem, he liked to share that fact as commentary. Meaning, Hollywood always got it wrong. The movie guys nodded, changed nothing.
Between bodega takes, Pepper summoned Pete the Grip. “Let me see that,” he said.
“Here you go, Mr. Pepper,” Pete the Grip said. Pepper’s voice never failed to startle the young white boy and he almost dropped the walkie-talkie on the pavement. Pete had yet to find his Harlem sea legs, heading uptown when he wanted to go south and losing track of subway entrances as if they shifted moment to moment, three-card monte style. It didn’t help that Pepper gave incorrect directions when asked.
Pete’s Windsor walkie-talkie was a new model, sturdy. Pepper tested its weight, how it hung in the pocket of his windbreaker. Volume knob wide enough for purchase if you wore gloves. The old Windsors cracked like eggs when they slipped out of your hand onto concrete. He returned the device to the kid. It was entirely possible that Pepper hadn’t kept abreast of advances in portable short-range communication. Next free day, he’d check out the hobby magazines for the latest.