Bronx Noir

Zack Abel, Jr. cut hair at the Big Three Barbershop with his father Big Zack from the time he and Kingston attended Evander together. Big Zack and his wife were staunchly religious; the Big Three of the shop’s namesake were naturally the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, though the secular folks coming in for their fades had no clue. Muhammad Ali had his Afro trimmed there once sometime after the Thrilla in Manila, and a yellowed photo of Ali sitting in Big Zack’s highchair stayed taped to a mirror till the shop closed. Kingston and Zack’s fathers both died in 2000. Big Zack’s death seemed to mature his son. He summarily sold his father’s shop, moved to North Carolina for a Cablevision job, fell in love, and had a son two years ago. Kingston missed Zack, the only friend he felt he really had outside of Gussy. Zack’s move left Kingston a bit ill at ease ever since, as if his life was a jumped-the-shark TV show the network refused to cancel.

Kingston reached the address where his father’s operation first started, now an insurance office. He stood there and removed his Kangol as if out of respect, wiping sweat from his brow with the white cap. He recollected his aunts, uncles, and his own mother dreaming up the number when he was a child, searching through slim stapled pamphlets by Madame Zora and Rajah Rabo listing corresponding numbers for different dream themes: love, sex, death. He got spanked for losing his great-grandmother’s tattered Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book once. His parents let him play occasionally; he recalled hitting for the first time at nine: a whole twenty dollars, all spent at the Good Humor ice cream truck that crept down Bruner playing Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The Candy Man.” His neighbor Miss Lois once scored a combination hit on the very day she needed to pay her back rent to avoid eviction; she threw a lavish block party and bought herself Jordache jeans for every day of the week. And how many misadventures had young Kingston heard about Chink Low, one of his dad’s first runners, the brother with folded eyelids who never wrote down a number that police could confiscate, memorizing them all without fault? Or Chink’s running partner Clarence, who ended up as a regular on The Mod Squad?

The memories were cathartic. Just one month away, September 2005, Kingston would turn forty-three—with not much more to show for his life than what was left him by his father. He tried to pinpoint the source of his recent melancholy attitude; he knew it had started before the Hernándezes. Was it the birthday of little Zack the third, Gussy pressuring him for a baby? Kingston refused to believe his near depression had anything to do with a midlife crisis; he had a curvaceous kept woman on the side and hundreds of thousands of out-of-circulation Ben Franklins hidden in a safe at the spot on Amsterdam. He tried to envision what he wanted that he didn’t yet have, and it came down to this: He wanted to be his own man.

All his life, Kingston had been following his father’s path to uphold a perceived legacy, yet he couldn’t feel the same obligation on his shoulders anymore. Time and circumstance had moved on, and now, so would Kingston. His father had migrated from Georgia to lay his own path to personal freedom on the streets of the Bronx. Now Kingston would reversemigrate back, attempting to find his very own life purpose in Louisiana. This one-sided turf war was the perfect excuse. Let ’em play Lotto, he thought, liberated.

The phone in his pants vibrated.

It was a message. His battery must have been low, he imagined, having missed the call. Lacey’s voice. They hadn’t spoken since she rang in her number a week ago. She’d reconciled things with Tré-Sean. She wished him well in New Orleans. She asked him to not drop by Golden Lady or the Secor projects before leaving. She hung up the phone.

How intriguing, Lacey thought, that she found herself magnetized by two of the older black community’s archetypes, the numbers man and the pimp.

Tré-Sean Niles ostensibly sold crack from his apartment on Webster Avenue, but persuasive game was his true métier, and Lacey knew it. Never mind how he convinced her to try their relationship again after scary antics like sitting in his beat-up Benz near Boston Secor obsessively monitoring her subsequent men and one-night stands or surreptitiously checking her answering machine until getting caught. Forget how he convinced Lacey to work out her exhibitionist tendencies by posing naked and selling the images to the likes of PlumpRumps.com (splitting the profits) or sharing her shakedancing take. Days ago, Lacey dog-eared Confessions of a Video Vixen on a night of weakness brought on by Kingston’s leaving, called Tré-Sean, and navigated the following conversation.