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Reckless Life Blues

Joshua Stubbs was sick.

Sick of panhandling A Street and sick of the patronizing looks of whites and just as ashamed of usually getting something from the black college girls on their way to classes.

So after three weeks of walking halfway uptown and turning back, of hiding in the shadows outside Mo'Better Records, of casing the building, seeing Maurice "Big Mo" Colford show up daily (always between nine-thirty and nine forty-five), one morning he found himself so lonely and sick of his life he decided to act. When Mo's limo pulled up, Joshua was on the south side of the street, two doors down, and as the first of the bodyguards, a man called Bubba Niles, emerged from the car - slow, like a turtle coming out of his shell - Joshua rushed forward.

"Back off, man," shouted the giant. His voice was throaty and dumb.

Joshua took two steps back. He didn't want to blow this. He waited for Maurice to get out of the car.

"Mr. Colford? Can you help a hungry man get something to eat?"

Mo's man closed on him. He stuck out his fat arms and showed him big pink hands ready to squash him.

"It's okay, Bubba. Leave him alone. You want a little something, mister, come here."

Joshua stepped around the guard, felt the man follow him as he approached Mo. It was like setting foot in a church. Like going to confession. This was the nearest he'd ever been.

"What do you want?" Maurice said it coldly. He had his wallet out and was tapping it against the palm of his left hand, spicing the morning air with the snap of crisp shiny leather.

"Help getting breakfast. If you can."

Mo looked him over, took his time getting the money out, made Joshua sweat it, and into the uncomfortable silence Joshua tossed out words he hoped might improve his status amidst these important men.

"I used to be in music, too."

"Yeah?"

Instinctively, Joshua felt for the object he kept stored in the right-hand pocket of his army jacket.

"You ever heard of Jaycee Morton?"

"No."

By now Mo had decided ten dollars was the proper amount. He held the bill out and made Joshua reach for it.

"I cut a record with him in 1958."

"Before my time."

"Look."

Joshua removed the seven-inch treasure from his pocket. "Reckless Life Blues." A 45 he'd recorded in Detroit for Jaycee Morton's band. They'd pressed five-hundred of them.

"Uh-huh." Big Mo screwed his face at the weird, pieced-together relic in Joshua's hand. It was held together with strips of adhesive tape across the B-side - Joshua had snapped it in half under him one night in his sleep. But it still played. And clear, too. Clear enough for Josh to pick up what he was doing on guitar that day, and clear enough for him to see himself as that boy of eighteen, looking up to Mr. Morton as a god, admiring his suits and the beautiful painted ladies he had hanging on him. A stepping stone to stardom. That's what the record was. The big time. Soon Josh'd be dressing just as fine as Jaycee and getting the kind of woman he could only dream about.

"Thank you. You're a good man."

So much money all at once - that hadn't happened for a long time. He took it into Sammy's Diner for mashed potatoes and gravy and had seven singles left over after the tip. Proud that Maurice had given him something, he vowed to respect the money. To ration it. It could last him the rest of the week if he was careful. Then he could think about seeing Maurice again.

A day later he was kicking himself. Wondering how any fool could manage to lose seven dollars in one day. Okay: "losing" the money was a euphemism for what he'd done with it. It had got him a good drunk, had got his eyes all watery with the wonder of life and the grandeur of the streets and the immeasurable love he saw in the soul of every passing stranger. He'd spoken to good men, smiled at pretty ladies and had slept a much better sleep than normal. But shit. Now was what mattered. Now it was morning, and there wasn't any going back to Maurice. Not for another few days.

A Street, right? The greedy whites and guilty undergraduates. He'd waited in the park until his pants were dry, had shaken off as much of his body funk as he could manage, was tramping there now. Downtown. A Street.

Big Mo's office at the top of the world was on J Street, in a six square block patch of the city known as The Doghouse. The nickname dated back a hundred years, to the construction of the city's first ASPCA kennel at M and Lincoln. That was forgotten now, and even long-time residents believed it was God who'd decreed theirs must remain the ugliest and poorest quarter far and wide.

Big Mo had other ideas. He liked being a symbol of a better life. His Mo'Better Records was outselling the major labels, and for close to a year now Mo had been spreading his expendable wealth around The Doghouse. People were scratching their heads at all the new storefronts and seriously thinking about giving up the nickname for good.

Mo was in a generous mood when the old man came back. He was oozing success. Seeing him attired for business, dressed in the finest suits, you still couldn't help imagining him at leisure, kicked back in some armchair throne, sipping red wine, grooving to sweet soul on a system worth more than most peoples' houses. He waved his guards off when he saw Joshua, offered him money directly, his fingers all aflash. The ease with which he conducted the transaction gave the old man courage enough to share a little part of his secret.

"You know I knew your mother?"

"That so?"

Mo stopped fiddling with his wallet and crinkled his nose, a habit of his Joshua had noticed at their first meeting.

"I knew her alright. I lived in your neighborhood. Three houses down. A fine woman, she was. Used to wear the prettiest dresses of anybody. You don't remember that, do you?"

Mo shook his head.

"I even remember the day you were born. You believe that? May 15th, 1969."

"That's right. How'd you -"

"It was a close-knit neighborhood then. Everybody knew everybody. I was there for your first couple birthdays, too. Then I kinda lost track. I was moving around a number of years."

"Playing?"

"Huh?"

"With a band?"

"Nah. The paint factory closed down and I had to go where there was work."

"Listen Mister ..."

Joshua had thought this part through weeks before. If asked, he would call himself Johnson.

Mo opened his wallet. Something crisp and promising emerged.

"Take this. Get yourself a proper meal. Put some meat on the bones."

After their hands met and Joshua had closed his fingers around the smooth bill, Mo backed off and did that thing with his nose again. He asked if Joshua had a place to stay, and when Josh mentioned his friend Charlie's place, Mo asked him if Charlie had ever heard of soap.

"It's not for me to say but ... get yourself washed and shaved and you'll feel better about yourself. Put on a fresh shirt. Carry yourself with pride."

The bodyguards were pressing. They had no patience for little men. Joshua was thieving, tricking their boss.

"I got to go. Anytime you need help, you know where to find me."

"You're a good man, Maurice."

Joshua was three blocks away and hadn't looked at the bill yet. Whooeee! A fifty. He ran straight back to the diner and this time he ordered a hot open turkey with the gravy and mashed, and coffee and pie for dessert. He went home - to Charlie's - paid back part of what he owed him and, once alone, did what Big Mo had suggested. He stripped out of his grimy clothes, took a bath and a shave in the floor bathroom, found a clean shirt and tie he'd tucked away, put them on - tying that tie just right was a youth relived, was dancing and carousing till all hours - and in his best sweater he sat down and felt human again. Not a day older than his fifty-seven years.

"I'm gonna buy myself a pistol and hang it on my side,

I'm gonna join the gangsters and live myself a reckless life."

Charlie had a good record player. The song sounded especially fine on it this afternoon. Joshua listened over and over and couldn't figure out why it had begun and ended so quickly, his music career. Except that Jaycee Morton had made that song his own and wound up in a white man's prison.

But Josh was good. He wasn't the best, but he could play. Could he still? He didn't know and damn if he wasn't afraid to find out. The last guitar he'd wrapped his arms around was as far back as the last woman. When was that again?

One hour of bliss and heartbreak, of talented young cats shining and doing their thing. Then Charlie came home, made a stupid remark about the music, Josh put the record away and left.

"Wake up, man. Hey. You. Get up and get your drunken dirty ass off our sidewalk. Remember me? Right. Know where you are? Show your face around here one more time, I'll - hey - don't be messin' up my shoes now, pops. You're gonna lose it go someplace else."

Somewhere real birds were singing. Here where it counted the two-hundred pounds concentrated into the tip of Bubba Niles's shoe were pecking at a man's ribcage. In Joshua's dream, before the shoe became a bird, it had been the head of a hammer, and he guy presumed dead who doctors had decided to practice on. Along with the voice of the hammerbird shoe he now heard morning ripping his eyes open, and squinting up he saw the sharp creases in Bubba's dark blue trousers, a gold chunky belt buckle, a green necktie draped over a paunch and way up top the man's mean mouth whapping those words at him. The situation came home. He tried getting to his feet. Uh-uh. But the bird stopped pecking at him. Give me an arm, Bubba. Do your job. Move me away from your boss quick. Why do I expect this man to help me? The man's worried about dirtying his shoes.

When Joshua became upright he made the mistake of looking for Maurice. Their eyes met. Maurice ran from it, and so did Josh, but they looked long enough for the old man's pores to explode. All the pollution in his body announced itself in a warm, shameful sweat. Inside he felt weightless, like a balloon blown up full and a prick would pop him.

He took note, as he started away, of the sweater and shirt and tie he had on him and now he remembered the good intentions of a yesterday as irreversible as all the rest of his days. Here I am, Maurice. Look at me! All cleaned up and shaved like you said. That money. Big Mo's fifty. That had done him. There was a snazzy bar in his acid-washed memory of the day before, a clean place with carpeting and cool jazz and a curly-headed barmaid who smiled when she took his order, smiled when she brought it, smiled when she took his money, smiled. He'd got drenched with her help, got to thinking about Ruby, about telling Maurice, figuring cleaned up with a tie on the boy could take it. But it was Ruby he'd got stuck on. Too long and way too heavy. He'd relived the worst of his messing up with her and the sliding away from him of his life ever since. From the barmaid came smiles and drinks, smiles and more drinks.

That he'd later found his way across town to J Street in the middle of the night, this seemed impossible and unreal. And now the boy had seen him at his worst. He'd let Bubba kick him awake like an ordinary street bum and -- this hurt -- had tried to make it inside without Joshua seeing him.

Life in the shadows again. Telling himself he belonged there. His resolve to stay away was strong, but eventually Joshua weakened enough to allow himself to watch from a distance. He thought incessantly about Maurice and what he had to say to him. He went past Mo'Better a dozen times, admired the big blue-and-yellow sign. Then it became a routine: mornings at nine-thirty, watch the limo pull up and Bubba get out, then his partner, then Maurice. Spend the day thinking sad thoughts about him. Until a man emerged from the limousine one morning who wasn't Bubba Niles.

He was as big and as ugly as Bubba. But he wasn't Bubba. Joshua felt his fear slip away with the sight of him - and most of his shame. Could he risk it again? He watched one more morning and then another and there was no sign of Bubba. Just this non-Bubba who'd never seen him or shown him pink hands or made his side ache.

He thought back to the advice Maurice had given him. The fifty dollars was long gone, but he scrounged a couple of days and got himself a brand new shirt. White with blue pinstripes. The days had warmed up, so he didn't need a jacket, and that new shirt together with his old tie would do just fine. Charlie made a crack about rent when he saw this unusual thing - a shirt which came out of cellophane - but the things on Joshua's mind made him bigger than Charlie's smallness. The same smallness, he decided, that prevented the man from hearing the genius in Jaycee Morton's recording of "Reckless Life Blues."

Josh watched his tongue, went about his business, and got things right this time. He woke at seven, before Charlie. He crept down the hall for a bath, shaved and brushed his teeth and splashed on cologne, and then slid his reawakened self into that new shirt and old tie. He even buttoned suspenders onto his worn-out pants. Joshua watched the picture slowly take form in Charlie's bureau mirror and couldn't help liking the man he saw.

"Who are you?"

"Wait, sir -"

"You got business here? Huh? Huh?"

"Hold on, I wanna -"

"Wanna what? Huh? You got something to say, say it."

The new guy was even more of a hardass than Bubba. He came at Joshua from the get-go and instead of moving closer to Mo they were fading down the sidewalk. The clothes didn't count for nothing. You're a stranger, you get shoved away.

"Please, Maurice. I want to tell you something."

Big Mo was out of the car.

"Come here." He got out his wallet. "How much do you need?"

"I don't want your money, son."

"Your loss." He put the wallet away. "What then?"

Joshua moved closer to his boy than ever before. Maurice sniffed and wrinkled his nose, and then sniffed again and grinned at his daddy. Cheap but fresh, that perfume. Joshua stole a look at the boy's smile. Wow. There was Ruby. He couldn't find himself there, maybe a little in the set of the eyes, but Ruby, all the sweetness of her, the goodness and the sadness of her, was alive in the curve of their son's mouth. Maurice Colford. Nicknamed Big Mo.

"Well?"

"Did you know your father, son?"

"Huh?"

"Did you know your daddy?"

"No. He left."

(You gonna say it, say it now. You want him to know? It ain't right. Is it? No. It simply ain't right. Don't do this to the boy.)

Joshua turned.

"Wait." Mo brushed past his bodyguard. "Can I do anything to help you out?"

Joshua kept walking. He discovered an unfathomable hunger inside him, and when he reached the first corner he turned left, toward A Street, toward the white folk and the college girls.

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