with that nonchalant look on his face, almost undid Clarence, but he quickly composed himself and screamed, “Oh no, you didn’t bring some bitch up in here!” Clarence pushed past him and stormed into the apartment. “Where is she! Where is that skank!”
Awed just snorted, scratched his balls, and calmly followed Clarence inside.
There was a scream. Campbell couldn’t tell if it was the woman or Clarence. A crashing sound followed and then another scream.
“Oh, bitch, you done did it now!” Clarence screeched before a half-dressed female, whom Campbell recognized as the token booth clerk from the Ralph Avenue train station, came running out.
Her jeans were on, but only halfway up her hips, leaving quite a bit of her naked behind exposed.
She took the stairs two at a time, her face a canvas of terror. Clarence was on her heels, his long fingers grasping for the shoulder-length synthetic hair that flared out behind her like a woolen cape.
Campbell was in the hallway by then. The woman made it through the front door, but only because Clarence lost his footing when he slipped on the throw rug that Millie had laid out in the hallway for days when the rain fell and shoe bottoms were damp and muddy.
What followed was horrible: Clarence pacing the hallway, his hands balled into tight fists, screaming and crying, cussing at the top of his lungs.
Awed just watched him, a thin smirk painted across his face. When he’d heard and seen enough, he waved his hand at Clarence, blew some air from between his lips, turned, shot Campbell an even look, and descended the stairs to his apartment—and quietly closed the door.
Clarence let out a wounded sound and crumpled to the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest and began sobbing uncontrollably.
Campbell’s heart was racing. She’d never seen a man cry before, none except for the drunks in the Brookline Projects. But this was different; this was out-and-out sobbing that she’d seen only from women at funerals.
Campbell snatched a napkin from the holder on the kitchen table and carefully approached Clarence, not sure what to do and finally just sort of stuffing it between Clarence’s clenched hands.
“Th-thank you, princess,” he said as he began dabbing the corners of his eyes with it. “I’m so sorry you had to be here for this madness.” He forced a shaky smile. “Awed is just a piece of shit.” A fresh stream of tears poured down his face. “A bastard,” he added, and then wiped at his face again. “Well, I suppose it’s all out in the open now, huh, princess?” he mumbled as he stood up and brushed at the creases in his pant leg.
Campbell didn’t know what he was referring to, the part about Awed being unfaithful or that he was a piece of shit. She looked at Clarence and then down at her feet. “Uhm,” she uttered, and bit her bottom lip.
“Well, it’s not that I’m ashamed of being gay, it’s just that not everybody understands or accepts it, you know what I mean, princess?”
“Oh,” she said, understanding now. “Oh, uh-huh.” She raised her eyes to meet his.
“Well, so now you know.” Clarence shrugged his shoulders before wiping at his eyes again. “Now you know, and I suppose you’ll run and tell everybody you know.”
“No, I won’t,” she said a little too quickly, and felt like maybe she should cross her heart and swear to God, but she just shook her head for emphasis.
Clarence ran his hands over his hair and cleared his throat. “Well, good. It’s nobody’s business but mine and that piece of shit downstairs.”
He smiled at her, but the sadness and the hurt were still swimming in his eyes.
“Men ain’t shit. You’ll find that out soon enough, princess.” Clarence straightened his shoulders. “Don’t ever fall in love; it’ll kick you in your ass every time,” he said, and turned and walked down the stairs.
Campbell watched him move away, defeated.
She remained there in the hallway for some time, chewing on her already chewed-away fingernails, waiting for the second round of anger, but it never came.
Late that night, as Johnny Carson bade his audience good night on Fred and Millie’s nineteen-inch Zenith, Clarence’s breathless “I love you’s” stole through the vents, and Millie hugged herself, wishing Fred was lying beside her, uttering the same.
AGE THIRTEEN
Campbell’s hips protrude, and her behind does much of the same. She’s interested in lip gloss, perfume, fancy hair clips, and fashion magazines now.
Millie notices her daughter’s approaching womanhood like one detects something from the corner of one’s eye when the mind is concentrating on other things. A glint of gold that turns to brass. Campbell should be her main concern, but Fred is all that she can think about.
Campbell is a young lady now, Millie explains to her. She needs to remember to keep her legs closed and crossed at the ankle, not at the thigh.
She spews other decrees, regulations, and requirements that Campbell tries hard to remember and hang on to, but they’re swept away with the April breeze when Trevor Barzey walks up to her one day and says hello.
Trevor Barzey, a brown-skinned, thick-lipped, slanty-eyed brother from Jamaica, lives on the seventh floor of 256 Stanley Avenue.
Rumor has it that he has children from various girls Campbell went to preschool with, those and the twins he fathered on 86th Street with a woman old enough to be his mother. “I’ve seen them,” her friend Pat said. “They have his eyes.”
He’d been with most of the girls in the neighborhood.
The fast-talking ones who wore summer hot pants straight through October. The ones who lined their eyes and glossed their lips.
He’d had some parochial school girls, the nondenominational Sunday-go-to-meeting girls, and the ones that scored high in algebra and history.
He’d had all of them, so when he turned his attention to Campbell, she was flattered.
Trevor talked a lot about the white man, the revolution that wouldn’t be televised, and the fact that his father had been a Black Panther.
Luscious told her that she’d known Trevor’s father, and warned her niece that owning a black beret and dark shades did not a Black Panther make.
In the beginning, it’s just conversation; he confronts her when she returns to Stanley Avenue to visit her friends and Luscious. He asks about her parents first and then school. His eyes move over her high firm breasts that strain against the pink of her sweater and then drop to her hips and shapely thighs.
“You all grown up and stuff now.” Trevor speaks from the side of his mouth as his eyes continue to travel Campbell’s body.
They begin to meet like that every Sunday, and Campbell finds herself looking forward to seeing Trevor, him touching her wrist and sometimes fingering her hair.
By May, they’re spending time in the hallway, him stealing kisses from her before she steps onto the elevator that brings her up to Luscious’s apartment.
By June, they’re up on the top floor, in the stairwell that leads to the roof. Campbell’s pressed up against the wall, the cold cinder blocks against her back, wondering how she will smell after she leaves him because people piss against those walls.
Somewhere below the steady buzzing sound of the overhead fluorescents, she hears the heavy zipper of Trevor’s Lee jeans come undone.
Campbell slides her hands down to his waist and looks over his shoulder at the wall and then at the floor and the puddle of grape soda someone has spilled there, looking everywhere except at his crotch.
He grabs hold of her hand and guides it between them, places it . . . down there. She feels it, and it feels hard. Her breath