Pope cursed, eyes watering. “How am I supposed to make this movie with my face all swole up, nigger?”
Pope had a couple of days to ice his nose before he hit the cameras. Pepper told him that Angela the makeup girl was pretty good. Last Monday she took ten years off the guy playing the police chief, some magical brown blend of hers.
Pepper had a headache the rest of the day and from then on remembered this morning as his retirement from headbutting. It was a young man’s game.
* * *
***
The Times Square station abounded with escape routes; Pepper kept a hand on his quarry’s arm. People in Times Square these days kept their eyes to themselves—if they hadn’t learned firsthand that the game had changed, surely the daily reports from the nightly news and newspapers and their cowed circle kept them appraised. At any moment your day might lurch into tragedy—Juilliard student shoved onto the tracks, mother of four stabbed for six dollars and a pastrami on rye. Rats hopped on the tracks fighting over discarded pizza crusts and knishes. Teenagers threw food down there to see them fight, Roman emperors overseeing the games.
On the downtown track a 2 train pulled in, its metal skin writhing with bright, multicolored symbols. A few years ago the cars were covered in grime and soot, as if the darkness of the tunnels had rubbed off. Now miscreants descended upon the cars at night in the train yards of the IRT and the Flushing Line, the terminuses of 239th Street and Coney Island, hopping chain-link to attack their canvases, loaded with shoplifted aerosol paint cans. The clack-clack of the metal ball inside that agitated the paint while they contemplated their next avenue of assault. Names, deadbeat slogans, boasts, and invective exploded on the train cars in balloon letters and sharp-angled glyphs, rainbow dispatches for the people on platforms and the bystanders on the street who saw them zipping through the air on the elevated tracks.
People complained of course, but Pepper didn’t care if some kid wrote his name on the side of a subway car, or the wall of a tenement, or a dry-cleaning van when its driver wasn’t looking. The city was covered in names, on plazas and parks and bridges, and most belonged to crooks. Whoever Remsen and Schermerhorn were, they didn’t get their names on street signs for being decent men, that’s for damn sure. The world didn’t work that way. The Transit Authority maintenance crews beat back the graffiti, hosing it off so there’d be room for the next day’s messages and handles, but the names of the crooked city fathers—the slavers, money pimps, and fat cats—would never be washed away. They were indelible.
Pepper had no beef with the graffiti kids. Let them roam.
The uptown 1 pulled in before the 2. The conductor in the lead car said, “Let ’em off, let ’em off.” The hordes shuffled. Make a cross section of Times Square, ant farm–style, and you’d see a collection of mobs—the ones huddled on the platforms below waiting for the train car doors to open, and the ones on the sidewalks above waiting for DONT WALK to become WALK. At their respective signals, both groups surged forward.
There were no seats. Pepper stood between Pope and the door. The comedian nodded, resigned after the escape attempt. Pepper had seen it before in men he’d beaten over the years, the satisfaction with a token attempt to reverse the situation. It didn’t matter if it worked as long as you could tell the fellows or yourself that you tried something.
Pope said, “Talked to Hal Ashby last week at a party. He’s doing a movie about the circus. Writing a part for me—the ringmaster. Black ringmaster of a white circus—ain’t that a gas? And I’m in New York City doing this crummy picture.”
Pepper nodded. Fiftieth Street. He’d been chased into this station once and lost them when he jumped into the tunnel. They only follow half the time if you beat it for the tracks, he’d learned.
“This guy Zippo? I don’t think he’s all there. I think that nigger’s got a screw loose, you hear me?”
“I agree.”
Pope’s expression turned overcast. “This thing with Lucy. You think she’s okay?”
“How would I know?”
“She never missed a day of work, even when she was snorting one day into the next. I thought I was bad, shit—I used to call her the Hoover, the way she vacuumed that shit up! But she always showed up to the set. ‘We don’t get second chances,’ she used to tell me when I was fucking around, sleeping in. You need people like that in your life—tell you to get your ass out of bed, right?”
Pepper thought of Hazel naturally, but was not going to signal inclusion in Pope’s fraternity. But he did miss her. He didn’t mind it when she told him his business, didn’t mind a lot of things about her.
Pope sighed. “Quincy is cool, but he has these guys who handle his business sometimes, I heard some bad things. You think one of them did something to her? She goes up there late at night and—”
“I don’t know.”
“We should have taken a taxi if the movie is paying for it. I’m famous, bitch.” He delivered famous with a quiver, as if unable to hold on to the notion. He met Lucinda Cole three years ago, he said, at the house of a Los Angeles player. Pepper had never heard of the guy, but Pope kept repeating his name, the way low-level hoods invoke neighborhood gangsters and bosses, like everyone is supposed to know who they are and regard them with the same fear and reverence: Don Cornelius, Don Cornelius. Don—was he in the mob? Pepper gathered the man was in the music industry. He’d ask John or May who he was, next time he saw them.
Don Cornelius held a July Fourth cookout and Roscoe Pope saw Lucinda enter the patio from the walkway along the side of the house. “You know how it is, you recognize someone from the movies and then you see them in person and it knocks you out? It was like that but times ten.”
Pepper had seen Martin Balsam coming out of Trader Vic’s once, back in the old Savoy Hilton, so he understood.
“Everybody had a thing for Lucy from Miss Pretty’s Promise—she was fine. Finer in person—but you know, you’re working on this movie. A Black Athena.”
“Nefertiti.”
“Black Athena. I don’t know how I got it up to rap to her. I was all”—he mouthed gibberish—“but that was the start. She’d heard of me—not seen my act but heard stories of my partying, that Vegas stuff. She listened to me. You let me talk, I’m going to get you.”
Pepper tuned him out. The ghost station caught his attention, as it always did, that fleeting apparition beyond the windows. Look at a subway map and downtown all the stops are close together: Rector, Wall, Cortlandt. Only a few blocks apart. White people were lazy back then—lazier—and didn’t want to walk too far. Then they got smart—too many stops slow things down. Back in ’59, they closed the Ninety-first Street station, so the 1 went from Eighty-sixth to Ninety-sixth. It made sense. Pepper didn’t remember activists marching up Broadway with Save Our Ninety-First Street Station! signs and handing out pamphlets like they do these days over every little thing.
But it had been one of his stations. Dolly had lived on Eighty-ninth when they were together, so he’d split from her pad, snag a coffee at Metro Donut, and hop on the 1 at Ninety-first. Ninety-first was a door into Dolly’s law-abiding world—and how he got back into his own crooked one. He liked getting on at Ninety-first because it meant he was returning to where he belonged. Sometimes when he hung out with Carney and Elizabeth and the kids, Pepper thought about how he had chosen to live, and where. He thought about all his passed-over stations.