Something New

In 1968, the Summer Olympics took place in Mexico City.  I loved the Olympics with its human drama, the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, etc.  ABC covered sports in a documentary fashion.  It was not just sports, but NEWS.  And there was much to be covered.  Dick Fosbury, for instance, turned the world around with his near blasphemous new technique of high jumping.  Watching him pass over the bar face up, you felt the revolution in the air.  But this paled to the theater of Tommie Smith and John Carlos who won  gold and bronze in the 200 meters, receiving their medals with bowed heads and clenched, black-gloved fists as the National Anthem played.  It was beyond imagination.  The world WAS theater and sports was news.  Sitting safely on my couch watching the drama, my life seemed small.  

And that year, when I started high school, the first black kids were bussed in.  There were only a few, a single busload, but it had caused an uproar.  There were threats and rumors of trouble, and kids gathered around in a mobbish crowd that first day as those black boys and girls stepped off the bus with tight, unemotional faces.  But that was it.  Nothing happened, and once it was done, it was over.  There was no turning back.  

I had only one black kid in my class.  Well, he was kind of black.  His skin was reddish as was his hair which he wore in a gigantic afro.  His eyes were different colors, one brown and one blue, a thing I could not understand.  He was a pied boy, patchwork, it seemed.  He was smart and funny, too, and everybody liked him.  We were different now, I thought.  We were like the world outside.  Somehow the isolation seemed to lift.  

I was driving around one night with Steve and a friend of Steve's I didn't know.  He wanted to go to the black part of downtown.  There was a club with good music, he said, and we would be able to get in.  

Church Street was mainly black, but in the day it was mixed as there were some hardware and electrical and appliance shops where whites carried on business.  At night, there were no whites to be found and the street transformed.  It seemed there was a party to which we had not been invited, everyone dressed up in what I thought of as costumes having never been exposed to anything like this.  There were people in leopard skin hats and hats with feathers and silk suits in bright colors for which I did not have names.  There were men with shiny hair and hair nets and women with tight gold dresses that sparkled in the night.  Nervous, we lit cigarettes to look older and walked to the entrance of the club.  The fellow at the door was big and looked at us as with great amusement.  

"How old you all?" he chuckled.  

"Twenty-one," we replied in unison.  And to that he gave a great laugh and called a woman over.  She must have been in charge, for once she waved us through the door, nobody bothered us.  

The inside of the club was dark and crowded, the odors overpowering and new.  I'd never been in a bar before and had never smelled the sweet-sourness of spilled liquor and cigarette smoke that could not mask the other smell of sweating bodies and the cloying aroma of perfumes.  Once inside, we quickly made our way to a corner as far from the stares as we could get.  I was scared and had to pee, but that would have to wait, I thought.  I only hoped I could hold it.  There was a band onstage that had guitars and an organ and horns, and man, they were good.  I'd heard some blues before at one of the beer gardens at the fair where a fellow we knew played guitar with a negro band, but I'd never heard this.  The rhythms were all different, instruments coming in at unsuspected times only to disappear again in a way not at all like the predictable melodies of the songs we all listened to.  

We smoked a couple more cigarettes and stayed just long enough to make our coming seem real, but soon we found our way back out into the street.  

"Goddammit, I've got to piss," I said, and the two of them started laughing.  

"What's a matter, you scared?"  

"I don't know, but I got to piss.  Let's get out of here."  

They stayed on me for that, but I could tell that they were happy to have the excuse to go, for at the gas station, everyone got out to pee.  

On Monday, I was back in school.  I thought about telling someone of my weekend's adventure, but I knew nobody would believe me, or if they did, they would view me with suspicion, a strange miscreant who had been raised by primitives.  In English class, Debbie was there with her long dark hair and darker eyes that smiled at everyone.  She wore a pep ribbon for that week's game pinned to her tastefully patterned mini-dress.  And Miss Kurtz called us to order. The lesson began.