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"You're Lookin' Good" "You're lookin' good," Max says to me, and sticks two C-notes into my pocket. And I know I ain't lookin' good at all standin' there all raggedy-assed, on the nod. And Max grinnin', cleaner than a motherfucker It got to me, the way he knew it would, so I didn't run off to buy more crank; I sank down into myself and phoned home. I told my old man I was coming back to try to kick again. This'd be 1953. And I did. Left my perch at Birdland and caught the next bus back to St. Louis. Only I got to runnin' with my girlfriend, Alice, so pretty soon I was bored out of my brain and back on the stuff again. Not a lot, but enough to make me worry, think shit. Then Max phones and says he and Mingus are headin' to Los Angeles. So they come out. I've got 'em in silk pajamas out on the farm and they're wowed by the old man's spread. He's got cooks, 'n maids, 'n prize pigs and cows, 'n horses, 'n shit and they're city slickers who ain't seen a nigger live like this. And we talk music all night. When Max 'n Mingus are ready to leave, I decide to go with 'em. That's when Mingus started layin' his WASPs is animals rap on us, sayin' some white folks'd run over a cat like that. The analogy is between a cat in traffic and we shit-hot niggers, see. How a white man would as soon squash a cat as get a flat or wreck his car trying to avoid the cat. Then when we're in the City of Angels what does Mingus do but wreck a wheel headin' for a hydrant to avoid a cat a real black cat no less. And we laughed. See, it ain't all white folks. But a lot of 'em treated us like animals in those days, and they wouldn't even give Mingus sandwiches for us at one restaurant and he's pale too. So that had set him off. We had to slap 'im down or he'd have landed us in some hoosegow with his big mouth. He's a talkative nigger and uppity, see. Some of the shit Mingus said was heavy; some was lighter than a mosquito's peter. Still, when I threatened to bust him upside the head with a bottle, he stopped. A good thing too, cos Mingus could break my ass like I was a match stick, if he took a notion. Thing is Max was pissed. It was his Cadillac Mingus racked up on the hydrant. Just drove that friggin' analogy off the road. The cat got off without a scratch. Not me though. I had to run my own car off the righteous road crankin' more smack. It happened at the Lighthouse after I'd sat in with Chet Baker, a cool white cat who'd gleaned the top trumpet spot for '53. It was Max's birthday and I was raggin' him. Said I wouldn't pick up the bar tab. It was his toot and he could pay, only the bartender wasn't about to wait for Max to come off his set to get paid. So we had words and the motherfucker says he's gonna lay a beatin' on me after, and I said he didn't have to wait and we got to bustin' up the furniture. The heat comes down and Max and I are the only two niggers in the place. Blacks couldn't even come to the Lighthouse then, so the police take me down to the station. I had a knife in my pocket at the time. Figured if they frisked me I was fucked, so I started screamin' about my uncle in the NAACP and how this cat had called me a motherfuckin' nigger and thrown the first punch. Max had come down to pick me up and was laughin' his head off. That was the start of it and it got worse out there in the city of no black hip angels. I called home again, after some more shit. Said I was ready to stare down my demons. And this time I went back to Millstadt to the pigs and cows and my big stallion H. My father and sister, down from Chicago, walked me around the grounds and the rage inside me kind of quieted down. Enough that I could stop lyin' to myself. And my father says, "Miles, if it was a woman that was torturing you, I could tell you to get another woman or leave that one alone. But this drug thing I can't do nothin' for you, son, but give you my love and support. The rest of it you got to do for yourself. Well, I thought about Mingus's cat. I thought about runnin' my demons to ground, findin' that hydrant where I could bust off a wheel and I locked myself into the guest house, stayed until I kicked the habit cold turkey. Man, I puked my guts out and writhed and moaned and I had more bones that ached I couldn't touch than I knew existed. Didn't eat for eight days, and when Alice came to fuck my brains out, that hurt too. I had blue balls from all I'd kept locked up in me and I wanted to scream but didn't dare with my father prowlin' around and listenin' in. And then one day it was over, just like that. I walked out into the clean sweet country air and met my father's stare and smiled. We fell into each other's arms and wept. He knew and I knew I'd finally beat my jones. And I was home and sat down to a fine spread and ate like a motherfucker that night. I don't believe I've eaten as heartily since and a black cat crossed my path prim as a ballerina. |