Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove-licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance. “Sister Bibb,” he once complained to Sportcoat, “is a grinder, and I don’t mean organ.”

the two best singers in the choir got into a fight over the church’s sole microphone. Church fights are normally hushed, hissy affairs, full of quiet backstabbing, intrigue, and whispered gossip about bad rice and beans. But this spat was public, the best kind.

This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world, cheese so good it inspired a line every first Saturday of the month:

Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team.

“There’s something going around Brooklyn,” she declared. “Some kind of disease.” The Elephant agreed, but not the kind of disease she was worried about. Greed, he thought wryly as he dug into the earth. That’s the disease. I got it myself.

The riots draw all the cop muscle from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct. That’s good for us. We need the cops to stay there till we straighten out our business in the Cause. Tell you what: Call up my Steak N Go shop and tell Calvin and Justin to take the day off. Tell them to get flowers for the family, and cake and hot coffee. Have ’em take that stuff out to wherever the riot and protesters are meeting, wherever their headquarters is. Probably some church. Tell ’em to bring some chicken, too, now that I think on it.” He chuckled bitterly. “No ideas flow through them Martin Luther King Cadillac types till they get some chicken. Call Willard Johnson to help set it up. He’s still over there, ain’t he?”

And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color. And all the while, the ants marched each fall, arriving at Building 17 kicking ass, a roaring tidal wave of tiny death, devouring Jesus’s cheese, moving out of the clock and into the boiler room and into the trash can by the hall door, polishing off whatever leftover sandwiches and bits of cake from the wilted, soggy, uneaten lunches Hot Sausage left behind each afternoon as he and his buddy Sportcoat ignored food in favor of their favorite...

But Sportcoat had something that nobody at Five Ends, nobody in the projects, nobody Deems Clemens had known in his entire nineteen years of growing up in the Cause Houses, had. Happiness. Sport was happy.

“Just be cool,” he said. “I got a plan. We’ll get everything back to normal in no time.” With that, Deems lay sideways, his bandaged ear toward the ceiling, closed his eyes, and slept the sleep of a troubled boy who, over the course of an hour, had suddenly become what he’d always wanted to be: not a boy from one of New York City’s worst housing projects, an unhappy boy who had no dream, no house, no direction, no safety, no aspiration, no house keys, no backyard, no Jesus, no marching-band practice, no mother who listened to him, no father who knew him, no cousin who showed him right or wrong. He was no longer a boy who could throw a baseball seventy-eight miles an hour at the of age thirteen because back then it was the one thing in his sorry life he could control. All that was past. He was a man with a plan now, and he had to make a big play, no matter what. That was the game.

“I didn’t know Thelonius Ellis was your name,” Sister Gee said to Hot Sausage. “I thought you was Ralph, or Ray . . . something or other.” “What difference do it make?” “Makes a big difference,” she said, exasperated. “It makes me out to be a liar to the police.” “You can’t be a liar ’bout what you don’t know,” Hot Sausage said. “The Bible says Jesus had many names.” “Well golly, Sausage, where’s it say in the Bible that you’re Jesus?” “I ain’t said I was Jesus. I said I ain’t stuck with just one name.” “Well, how many names you got?” Sister Gee demanded. “How many do a colored man need in this world?”

The way he drinks, solid food makes a splash in his stomach when he eats it. You keep him out of the house.”

Drugs were a damn stinking fish, the smell of it taking over everything. Gambling, construction, cigarettes, booze were all second-rate now.

“Best bread in the world,” his father used to say. “It’s the cheese.” Elefante tried it once and understood then why Genoans were a miserable lot, because life was nothing compared to the delicious taste of Genoan food; once they got to the food, the business of life, whatever that business was—loving, sleeping, standing at the bus stop, shoving each other at the grocery store, killing each other—had to be done with speed so as to get to the food, and they did it with such silent grit, such determination and speed, that to get in the way of it was like stepping into a hurricane. Christopher Columbus, his mother pointed out, was a Genoan who wasn’t looking for America. He was looking for spices. For food. A real Genoan, she said, would hang themselves before they’d let anyone destroy the one or two things in life that gave them a little relief from the difficulties of the devil’s world.

“I wish,” he said softly, “somebody would love me.”

child. Everything ever said to you or done to you back then was at the expense of your own dignity. You never complained. I loved that about you.” “Oh, woman, leave my people out of it. They long dead.”

“When you love somebody, their words oughta be important enough for you to listen.”

outside of a child in pain, the worst sound in the world is an old man begging for his life while he’s at work.

“A true Irishman knows the world will one day break your heart.”

“He did trust. He was just careful about the people he trusted.” “Because . . . ?” “Because a man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.”

On the other hand, what was life all about? Family. Love. That woman was concerned about her father. She was loyal to family. He understood that feeling. It said a lot about her.

Try as he might, he couldn’t block it, couldn’t prevent her from seeing the part that most never saw, that while he was firm and tight on the surface, all business, maybe a little too Italian in his manner and speech, beneath it he bore the heavy sense of responsibility for his mother and those he cared about with kindness that was safer to hide. He was the man her father trusted. But why him? Why not a cousin or an uncle? Or at least a fellow Irishman? Why an Italian? In those twenty minutes the war between the races, the Italians versus the Irish, was waged, the two representatives of the black souls of Europe, left in the dust by the English, the French, the Germans, and later in America by the big boys in Manhattan, the Jews who forgot they were Jews, the Irish who forgot they were Irish, the Anglos who forgot they were human, who got together to make money in their big power meetings about the future, paving over the nobodies in the Bronx and Brooklyn by building highways that gutted their neighborhoods, leaving them to suffer at the hands of whoever came along, the big boys who forgot the war and the pogroms and the lives of the people who survived World War I and World War II sacrificing blood and guts for their America, so they could work with the banks and the city and state to slap expressways in the middle of thriving neighborhoods and send the powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a big...

“A man who does not trust cannot be trusted.”

even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men. I knew because Macy talked me out of killing that half-langered Rale Bulgarian priest at Saint Andrew’s who acted the maggot with a lot of kids in the parish. I found out about him when Macy grew up and we started adding up crib notes on him. But Macy said, ‘He’s a sick man. Don’t go to jail for him.’ He was my kid brother and he was smarter than me in a lot of ways. So I listened, and went to jail on my own! Even in prison, Macy’s smarts helped me. If you walk into the slammer not looking for a hop on, knowing that what a man does in his private time is his own damn business so long as he doesn’t make things worse for you, well, you’re all right. So I loved Macy for what he showed me. And he trusted me.”

May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

done told you everything like I said I would. What do I get now?” Bunch shrugged. “You get two hundred dollars. You can get a lot with that. Some soup. A bottle of beer. Some poontang. Even get a job with it in some places. I don’t care what you get, so long as you stay out my business. And if I ever see your face here again, I’ll part it with a hammer.”

“It’s better to pray for the saving of an enemy’s soul than their ruination,”

“Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Y’all don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties. We was just having a celebration for poor old Soup, who went to jail a boy and come out a man. Much of a man, I’d say. Where’s a man like him gonna get a job, big as he is? Soup wouldn’t hurt a fly. Do you know when he was a tiny boy, he was scared to come out the house? Used to stay inside and watch television all day. Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers and them type shows.” “The kiddie shows?” “Been doing it since he was a child. He’s a Muslim now. Can you believe it? All that work we put into him here.” She nodded at the church, then shrugged. “Well . . . as long as he’s got God in his life some kind of way.” She shifted her weight off the weed cutter and absently swiped at a few weeds near her feet on the cracked, dry dirt.

“Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.”

He happily concluded she had too much weight to be a full-blown junkie. She still owned a purse. Her shoes, coat, and clothing were clean. And she had some kind of temp job. She wasn’t a dopehead yet. Just another light-skinned chick on her way to skankdom who maybe got herself skinned by some bad motherfucker in Georgia probably. Come to New York to ease her broken heart and play big. Telling all her friends in Georgia she was dating the Temptations or some shit, no doubt. But Phyllis was fly, and she was new. And he had money. And it was all good.

She smiled and gave him the look. He’d forgotten Hettie’s “look”: her smile of understanding and acceptance that said, “All intangibles are forgiven, I accept them and more—your faults, your dips and turns, everything, because our love is a hammer forged at the anvil of God and not even your most foolish, irrational act can break it.” That look. Sportcoat found it unsettling.

I could have never thought up such a rotten business myself. I would be ashamed to even think of it. Firing me over eleven dollars. The truth is, he could’ve said I stole one dollar or a thousand dollars. It didn’t matter. He was white, so his word was the gospel. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.

Everything she ever done to you was wrong. The habits you acquired was put on you by the very folks who should have helped you be a better person. That’s why you like Deems so much. He come down that same road. That boy was beat up bad, grinded down from the day he was slapped to life.”

There was a hammering sound in his ears and he glanced around the room but saw nothing move. Could that hammering be his own insides? The sound of his own heart beating? He felt as if part of him were splitting apart, and within his old self, the person he once was, the young man of physical strength with a wide-eyed thirst for wisdom and knowledge, had suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and gazed around the room.

“Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”

“Our cheap death shows make me sick,” she said calmly. “Why don’t folks in church talk about life? They hardly ever talk about the birth of Jesus Christ in church. But they never get tired of singing and reveling in Jesus’s death. Death is just one part of life. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, all day long, the death of Jesus.”

“I holler about Jesus’s cheese because Jesus could baptize shit into sugar! Because if I didn’t have Jesus and his cheese, I’d kill somebody. That’s what Jesus did for me for sixty-seven years. He kept me sane, and on the right side of the law. But he run out of gas, sweetheart. He got tired of me. I don’t blame Him, for the hate in my heart done me in. I couldn’t see the man I loved so much, my Plant Man, stand by the window in our apartment sucking on crab legs and looking at the Statue of Liberty outside our window chatting about nothing, when I knowed all he wanted was for me to go back to bed so he could let a liquor bottle suck his guts out the minute I gone to sleep again. The evil I felt at that moment was enough to kill us both. So instead, I walked into the harbor. And I left myself in God’s hands.”

who got time to make a garden? You can’t grow nothing in New York.” Rufus stood above Sportcoat, still holding the sandwich. “This thing’s gonna grow ears, Sport. You want it or not?” Sportcoat shook his head. The sound of hammers banging in his brain had returned. He wished it would stop. With a sigh, he stared at the jug of King Kong in his lap. Booze, he thought. I chose booze over my Moonflower.

He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.

“Don’t ‘son’ me, you shitface bitch! You fucked around and shot me. The only reason I didn’t smoke your ass was because of my grandfather. That was my first mistake. Now Beanie’s dead because of you—and Sausage, that lazy, stupid chickenshit plumber’s-helper bitch. Two dumbass, old-time, donkey-ass idiots.”

Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.” He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”

“He said, ‘A person who trusts can be trusted.’

The romance was new territory for them both. A couple of lunches and a quick dinner at a Bronx diner had dissolved into long, peaceful dinners at the Peter Luger Steak House in Williamsburg, then lovely walks along the Brooklyn Esplanade as the cocoon of affection and lust blossomed into the kaleidoscope of bursting, passionate, gorgeous love.

Even so, he thought, as he steered the car down the FDR Drive, the Chrysler Building at Forty-Second Street receding in the distance, to love a man by the light of day when the sun is shining and there is a promise of love is one thing. But to rumble into the housing projects of Brooklyn in his Lincoln to pick up the old deacon in the dead of night was quite another.

As the ferry pulled away from the dock and arced into New York Harbor, heading due southwest, it offered her a clear view of the redbrick Cause housing projects on one side, and the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island on the other. One side represented the certainty of the past. The other side the uncertainty of the future.