Another Season
(excerpt)
“To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven...”
Eccles. 3:1
“Oh, yeah? How is she?” Gary said.
“She looked a mess!” Was Billy’s response.
We all yelled and Gary, still laughing said, “I didn’t ask you how she looked, Miss Thing, I said how is she!”
And that’s the way it was: reading sessions and getting high, and talking about tired queens, drag queens and closet queens; and anybody else who came into range.
We were all sitting around Gary’s room smoking weed and dishing dirt. It was part of the daily after school routine. We’d congregate at one of our houses or at Gracie’s luncheonette across from school. Today it was Gary’s house and I was glad. I liked going there. Gary’s grandmother, Miss Rose, was such a treat. Heavy-set and black as coal, with smooth pretty skin, and delicate small fingers on short pudgy hands. She always wore long dresses with an apron tied around her ample waist and a head rag covering her hair. She was right out of “Gone With The Wind,” and Billy had nicknamed her “Miss Hattie,” after Hattie McDaniel. She used to heat up lima beans and rice or navy beans and rice, with pig feet or whatever meat was seasoning the pot in a good sized aluminum sauce pan, and eat it from the same container. Sitting in the kitchen over the heat vent, sucking the meat from her teeth and having a grand time.
She had admonished us as we made our noisy entrance not to “mess-up, up there.” She always had the house in perfect order and Gary’s room would be spotless until after we’d invade it.
“Light one of them incense, chile’,” Gary said handing me a joint.
“Gar-eh!” Miss Rose was yelling from the bottom of the steps. “I can smell that shit; you know I don’t like that!”
“Aw, grandmom, we ain’t doin’ nothin!” Gary called through the closed door; then to me he said, “Hurry up and light that, Miss Thing!”
I lit the incense and waved it around the room.
“I don’t want that woman startin’,” Gary was saying as we heard Miss Rose shuffling back to the kitchen, still fussing.
Claude Skelley was kneeling by the records and thumbing through the pile. He was curiously attractive; tall, medium in build, with a large head that was kept closely cropped and edged with a razor. His hands were also rather large with long tapering fingers that often found themselves gesturing in the air to emphasize some point. His eyebrows were heavy and dark and almost joined in the middle. He was the first in the clique to have a mustache, but then he’d had one since about when he was twelve and over the years, it had simply grown darker and heavier. His lips were full and slightly pouted. He was writing a book. He’d been writing it forever it seemed. Drinking scotch and smoking Vanity Fair cigarettes, and listening to Dinah Washington. Into his sophistication (as he viewed himself) and thinking he was James Baldwin.
Skelley (as we always called him, since he hated his first name), was actually bisexual and exhibited no outward signs of homosexuality. He seldom, if ever, “camped” with the rest of us. He always had a girlfriend, despite whatever guy he might be fancying at the time. It was he who, when we’d be standing around on the steps or some corner and a girl would pass, would lean back in a pose, with one arm folded under the other while his hand cupped his chin and his index finger stroked his mustache and say, “What’s happenin’, mommy?” To which one of us would say to him (usually Billy) “Straighten up girl!” We’d all scream then and Skelley would be furious, as he really did enjoy fucking girls. We called him a dike and told him he needed help. “I don’t believe in mixing the sexes, honey,” Jimmy had said one day, “Girls should be with girls and boys should be with boys. Mixed marriages never work!”
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