Love and Other Consolation Prizes(29)
The Black and Tan had been around since the days of Prohibition, neatly tucked away in the basement of the Chikata drugstore and almost invisible on the corner of Twelfth and South Jackson. Ernest and Gracie had once seen headliners like Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway there, but the lounge had faded since its glory days. Now it was just a cover band who played, more black than tan. They did their best to re-create the bebop of yesteryear amid the footlights and velvet swirls of cigarette smoke.
For hours Ernest sat in a tiny, faux-leather banquette, nursing a champagne cocktail, while Pascual had loosened his tie and danced the watusi with a cadre of inebriated Caucasian women half his age. Ernest watched the happy sway of their cotton print Woolworth dresses, their bouffant hair, which towered over his friend.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to dance?” The kind woman Ernest recognized as Dolores appeared, smiling. “Your friend tells me you’re a great dancer.”
“I would love to,” Ernest said. “But I’m saving the last dance for someone else.”
“Oh, is she here?” Dolores asked as she looked around.
“Not yet.” He shook his head. “But I keep hoping she’ll come back someday.”
Dolores regarded him with sad, puppy-dog eyes. Then she leaned down and gave him a warm hug and kissed his cheek before returning to the dance floor.
Ernest smiled as he wiped the lipstick off with a napkin. He watched Pascual and occasionally chatted with the barmaids who vaguely knew him, until he ran out of cigarettes and grew restless. He waved goodbye to his friend, who didn’t seem to notice.
Ernest walked home in a light rain, past all-night liquor stores and flower carts, around sailors in blue, and high-heeled streetwalkers with umbrellas who were arguing with the shore patrol, uniformed men who wandered the neighborhood in white helmets, twirling their chipped black billy clubs. Ernest drifted silently past the benign fa?ades of mom-and-pop businesses he knew to be fronts for Chinatown’s many backroom casinos. He pulled his collar up to ward off the damp April chill, grateful it was only drizzling as he strolled beneath pools of streetlight, steering around mud puddles that reflected forgotten constellations and lonely stars of the northern sky. He wasn’t disappointed to have played Dean Martin to Pascual’s Jerry Lewis, because Ernest had needed a night out. He’d been burdened by memories all week, and now the past seemed more resplendent than the present. But the past was no-man’s-land. He gave five dollars to panhandlers in front of the Publix, then climbed the creaking stairs to his apartment, thinking again about how to tell Juju the rest of his story.
He was still worrying when he saw two people standing beneath the glow of a single forty-watt bulb that dangled from the hallway ceiling. Amid the riot of blistered paint, there was a couple arguing.
“I don’t know why you had to drag me all the way down to this dump,” the man said. “Couldn’t we just meet him at a goddamn restaurant or something?”
Ernest understood. The Publix was an acquired taste. The address alone might have deterred some people, because the neighborhood wasn’t what it used to be. Most of the fancy supper clubs were gone, replaced by all-night diners like the Bamboo Café. And the neon had faded or burned out. Now the streets from First Avenue to Pioneer Square and on up to Chinatown were illuminated with signs for pawnshops and taverns. Empty, rusting cans of Olympia beer and Brew 66 littered the once glorious cobblestone streets. The avenues, which had been crafted by hand, brick by brick, sculpted around polished streetcar rails, had been buried—slathered beneath a layer of burning asphalt, then strewn with twenty years’ worth of losing pull tabs and cigarette butts. Now the stench of despair was so strong even the rain was unable to wash it away.
Then Ernest heard a familiar voice.
“Jeezuz, you were the one who said you wanted to meet my family. Well, this is where my family lives—part of my family, anyway. So deal with it. If you’d rather run off and shoot dice until dawn like you always do, that’s fine with me, but the least you can do is take five minutes and meet him like you promised you would. It’s a surprise.”
“That’s just you being childish.”
“Me?” the woman snapped.
“Yes, you. Eight-year-old girls like surprises,” the man scolded her. “Grown men hate surprises.”
Ernest cleared his throat. “Not all grown men.” He stepped into the light and waited for their reaction. The man looked annoyed, the woman confused for a brief moment and then…
“Dad!”
“Is there a chorus line somewhere in Las Vegas that’s missing its lead dancer right now?” Ernest asked as he removed his hat. “Hanny, this is a wonderful surprise—the best kind. I don’t care what anyone says.” He winked at the strange man, who smiled back, barely concealing his embarrassment.
Hanny squealed as she dropped her purse and threw her arms around him. “Daddy! I missed you so much—Mom too. Juju called and said that Ma’s been coming back around. So I dropped everything and booked the first flight I could find. We just landed an hour ago. Oh, and I have another surprise.”
Hanny put her arm around the tall fellow with perfect auburn hair, flawless teeth, and a cleft in his chin like that of the actor Cary Grant.
Ernest smiled. “I can only imagine.”
“I’m Rich,” the man interjected as he thrust a hand in Ernest’s direction. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet, I’ve heard a lot about you. Oh, and if you ever need an entertainment attorney, I might know a few—starting with yours truly.”