The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ptolemy took the Central bus up to Twenty-third Street. There he disembarked and looked at the four corners. There was a store-front on the northwest corner of the street that had a display window. Inside the window was a Spanish man jumping rope at a furious pace.

“Can I help you?” another man said to Ptolemy when he walked in the door of the long, sunlit room.

It was a poor gym. A few mats on the concrete floor and a punching bag, a bench for weight lifting, and a bar screwed into a doorway for chin-ups.

The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

“I’m lookin’ for Billy Strong,” Ptolemy said.

“You lookin’ at him.”

The men both smiled and Ptolemy understood why Reggie had called this man friend. He was powerful but there was no anger to him. This was the kind of man that you wanted to know, wanted to work shoulder to shoulder with.

“My name is Ptolemy Grey,” the old man said, continually astonished at his renewed new ability to communicate.

The smile on Billy Strong’s face diminished. It took on a sad aspect but did not disappear.

“You Reggie’s great-granduncle.”

So many children, Ptolemy thought, and children getting children and them doing the same. It seemed to him like some kind of crazy math problem worked out in streets and churches, dance floors and cemeteries. Reggie was his great-grandnephew, now dead. And Ptolemy was his survivor, like the small sum left over at the end of long division, like the few solitary and dumbfounded men who had survived the first wave on D-Day.

“Yes, I am,” he said simply.

“Reggie told me that you was havin’ some problems with your, um, thinkin’.”

“Robyn Small took me to a doctor give me some medicine help me put my words and my thoughts together.”

Strong smiled broadly, saying, “Robyn, huh? That little girl gotta backside on her that’s a crime.”

Ptolemy smiled in response. Even when he was in his confused state he had noted Robyn’s hips.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Grey?”

“Lemme buy you a drink and ask you a couple’a questions is all.”

“You wanna go to a bar?”

“Someplace quiet an’ upscale, so we don’t have to get in no fights.”

“No place around here like that. We have to drive if you want to go to a nice bar.”

“You drive and I’ll buy,” Ptolemy said with a sly grin.

“Julio,” Billy exclaimed.

“Yeah, Bill?”

“I’ma be gone for a hour or so. Look after the place while I’m out.”

“You got it.”

You know my nephew long?” Ptolemy asked Billy Strong at the Aerie Bar, on top of the Fredda Kline Professional Building on Grand Street in downtown L.A. If they had turned away from the bar they would have seen all the way to the ocean through a blue and amber sky.

“’Bout six years, I guess,” Billy said. He had put on a pale-gray sweater and a pair of dark trousers as formal wear for the bar.

Billy ordered a beer. Ptolemy asked for a double shot of sour-mash whiskey. Billy had convinced the older man to leave his steel pipe in the car.

“Somebody kilt him,” Ptolemy said. “They murdered my boy, shot him down like a dog.”

“I know. I was at the funeral. I didn’t see you there, Mr. Grey.”

“Niecie sent Hilly to get me, but I don’t like that boy, he’s a thief.”

“Yeah. He’s not the kinda son I’d be proud of.”

Ptolemy smiled.

“Why somebody wanna shoot a boy sittin’ on a stoop mindin’ his own business?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy took that opportunity to sip his drink.

“I mean,” Ptolemy continued, “I don’t know much about the streets today. When I was movin’ around, there wasn’t gangs or these drive-bys, but Reggie wasn’t a part’a no gang, was he?”

“No, sir. Reggie stayed outta that.”

“So you think that it was just some mistake, somebody thought he was somebody else?”

Billy finished his beer and Ptolemy raised his hand to catch the bartender’s attention. When the slim, mustachioed white man looked their way, Ptolemy pointed at the empty glass. He was astounded by this simple gesture, aware that only weeks before it would have been beyond him.

“Did Reggie talk to you about moving away to San Diego?” Billy asked.

“Uh-uh. At least I don’t think so. You know, the medicine I took cleared up my mind, but a lotta things I heard when I was, I was confused are still jumbled up. You sayin’ Reggie was gonna move outta town?”

“Yeah.”

The bartender brought Billy’s second beer, along with an outrageous tab. Ptolemy put two twenty-dollar bills down on the bar.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

Billy sipped again.

“Why?” Ptolemy asked.

“You know Alfred Gulla?”

The image of the brutal man with the name not his own hanging from his chest sidled into Ptolemy’s mind.

“Reggie’s wife’s boyfriend.”