IV Venus Johnson
‘And her joy was nearly like sorrow.’
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
Los Angeles. 6 September 1965. Sweltering.
There’s a dull stench. I think it’s the garbage. But it’s me.
The sun feels hot. Is it afternoon? No birds sing.
Why can I hear but not see?
The two ambulance men mistake me for dead.
The one popping chewing gum jabs my right nipple. ‘This can’t be the Irene O’Brien,’ he says. ‘Irene’s got bigger titties.’
I try to scream but nothing comes out.
The gum chewer coughs. ‘Wouldn’t no movie star be livin’ here.’
Tell me about it. Thanks to bankruptcy, my puny, one-bedroom apartment was on the wrong side of Sunset.
‘Let’s dump her at the hospital and drop by the Fat Burger.’
‘This here’s a morgue job,’ says the one with the deep voice.
‘Where’s the body bag?’
‘You left it downstairs. Throw a sheet over her. Fuck rules.’
I imagine that I am lying face up. But a newspaper picture I later saw showed me curled on my side on the kitchen floor. Stark naked. Which had never been my style. I always sleep in nightgowns and had put one on the night of 5 September before crawling into bed with a nightcap.
The gum chewer says, ‘Spooky that her hair’s all over the floor.’
I try to scream again but can’t get my lips to move.
‘Irene O’Brien. She was a credit to the race till she started fucking honkies.’
‘Shit … you ain’t had nothing but white pussy since I known you. Grab the stretcher.’
‘Stub out that cigarette,’ says the deep voice. ‘You droppin’ ashes on her head.’
As they lift my body, a siren blares with the sound getting closer until it halts abruptly outside my building.
The gum chewer says, ‘Check the window. Ain’t no coincidence that two ambulances get called out to the same corner at the same time.’
‘Betcha Claudeen at the office double-booked again. See her butt in that tight skirt today? She can call out ten ambulances.’
Suddenly from down in the street there is loud raucous laughter. The gum chewer says, ‘That’s Bobby Lee out there clowning. Don’t nobody else laugh that loud… He’s on duty with tired-ass Charlie Adams.’
‘Yell down and say we’re on the case.’
‘No wait. Let Charlie dump her at the morgue, so Bobby can eat with us.’
My neighbourhood was normally as quiet as a suburb. All white till I moved in. I figured the young professionals were peering from their windows. Blue eyes alarmed.
Then the poodle in 2c started barking.
It’s hard to believe that happened almost thirty-five years ago. Here it is, 1998, and who’d believe I’m still kicking?
Tired-ass Charlie Adams.
What would have happened had he not come along? I can still see him drawing on a joint and saying ‘Now is won spelt backwards. This minute, this second. That’s what matters. The past is memories and bullshit.’
Since he was destined to die young, Charlie should probably have been a musician. He would have made a great Mingus or a Thelonious chasing his angst back and forth through a melody.
On the surface he came across as a draft dodging militant, a college boy with half-baked philosophies. But like Mother used to say, ‘The good Lord comes in many guises.’
* * *
Just yesterday in a Berkeley bookstore, I heard somebody mention Irene O’Brien and the sales assistant quipped, ‘Killed herself back in the sixties.’
It was all I could do not to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘No, I even messed that up.’
Charlie gave me the best advice when he said don’t look back. Yet sometimes when I sit out on this roof like tonight, it’s hard not to remember the things I made myself forget. Memories are so elusive. A bit like the stars when I’m painting them at dawn. Clear as day one minute, then I turn my back and they’re gone.
People refer to ’29 as the start of the Depression, but it’s firm in my memory as the year Mack O’Brien got arrested for killing his wife.
I guess I was Mack’s bit on the side, though I was only six and he was forty-five. Had I been older, I might have realized that his wife suspected he was up to no good, because twice that October I’d stood outside their corner store and heard Mrs O’Brien drill him. Once she’d yelled, ‘I know what you’re up to!’ But she didn’t really raise hell until he slipped two free pork chops to Hortense Alvarez, our neighbour down the hall, whom Mother accused of flaunting her large bosom.
I don’t tell my age, but it’s relevant that I was born 11 November 1922, because that same day four years earlier, World War I had ended. So most neighbourhoods held their annual block parties around my birthday.