Underbelly Read online

  “The Aparo Club. Tonight, after ten. A car will be sent for you,” a female voice said. Magrady told her where he was but he had a notion she might have already known that. The call over, he stood for a few moments at the window, arms folded, trying to decipher just what his son was involved in and how deep.

  He chuckled dryly. He recalled several times cajoling his then teenaged son to help him balance the books when he had the distribution business. How the hell would he possibly know what Luke was up to given it involved high finance and who knows what else now? Magrady barely knew his multiplication tables and that was fast eluding him. Luke was now, thirty-one, no, thirty-two. He was a grown man and was, he hoped, capable of falling down the rabbit hole and climbing back out on his own.

  Still, a man’s son is a man’s son. He showered, shaved, and put on the sport coat he’d brought with him, purchased at the Goodwill store in Culver City.

  The car that came for him was a customary black Navigator. Wes Montgomery on the sound system, and eschewing the scotch offered by the female driver, they rode languidly over the bridge. The vehicle arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a development on the waterfront signage informed Magrady. They parked near an unmarked building and the driver opened the rear door for him.

  Dressed in the male fantasy chauffeur’s outfit of tight, short skirt and double-breasted tunic complete with the requisite cap, the copper-hued driver with the dynamite legs escorted him to a metal door.

  “Enjoy,” she said and returned to her vehicle.

  He looked after her and back to the door, which slid open quietly. He entered an elevator car and rode up several stories and was let out on a vestibule furnished in antique wares, all polished wood and plush rococo chairs. There were blue velvet curtained archways on either side of the vestibule.

  A statuesque bronze blonde woman in a tiger skin breech-cloth and little else entered from the right and took his hand. “This way,” she said, and led him through the curtain on the left. Magrady entered an area where he expected all manner of debauchery to be taking place. There were some goings on, but understated. He saw two men dressed in superhero costumes playing chess, several women in business attire or stylish underwear sitting on pillows sharing a hookah, each with violet hair cut in radical hairstyles, and a knot of nude men and women dancing. He didn’t hear any music, but each of the dancers had a single wireless ear bud. He could smell marijuana but didn’t see anybody toking up.

  They went up a short flight of stairs and he was deposited in a small upholstered alcove.

  “How do you wish to partake?” the blonde asked neutrally, cocking her head and smiling.

  “Lemonade or juice is just fine,” he said.

  “That’s all?” She stepped into his space, not breaking eye contact.

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly. The blonde was making him damn uncomfortable. He felt he could have asked for a bj and she would have obliged. Damn Kang Fu and his tests.

  Magrady sat while techno music emanated softly from hidden speakers. His lemonade arrived and he sipped and grooved along with a remix of more Wes Montgomery, this time on his rendition of “Eleanor Rigby.” Soon he was dozing.

  “Hey, Dad,” his son said and he opened his eyes.

  “Luke,” Magrady said getting up and hugging him.

  “Good to see you too,” the younger man said, patting his father’s back as they separated. He was two inches taller than his father, lean as he remembered him, and favoring his mother in his facial features. His hair was cropped bald short as was the modern style, and a small gold hoop earring hung from his left lobe.

  “You’ve lost some weight,” Luke Magrady said, sitting down. He was dressed in dark slacks and a ribbed sweater-shirt that highlighted his athletic frame. “And who you been boxing?” He pointed at his father’s bandaged ear.

  “Long story.”

  “We got time.”

  They sat and Magrady told him about Floyd Chambers, his sister, Nakano, and Talmock’s mummified head. He also told him he’d returned the head though he joked he’d been tempted to keep it as a paperweight.

  “Damn,” his son said appreciatively.

  Magrady sat forward. “Look, I came because me and your sister are worried about you. Also, your mother—”

  “I know about Mom.” He sliced the air with a hand. “That’s covered.”

  “Okay, but what about you? I know it’s been hit or miss with me as your old man, but I can help. I want to help.”

  “There’s nothing to help with, Pop. Everything’s under control.”

  He shook a finger at him. “I used to say that right before I’d go off on a binge.”

  Luke Magrady laughed warmly and touched his father on the shoulder and squeezed. “You’re getting by on that crap disability check? You don’t have to, you know.”

  “Your boy Kang Fu gonna break me off something?”

  He sat back, tenting his fingers. “It’s complicated.”

  “But you could go to jail.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever bullshit you’re mixed up in, Luke.”

  “You see the cops come busting in here? I look like I’m not getting my winks?”

  Magrady shook his head. “I didn’t come to argue.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “What do you think I’m doing, Em?”

  It bugged him when his children called him by his nickname. “Some kind of credit default swap Wall Street Lehman Brothers hocus pocus.”

  “I assure you, what I’m doing is … kosher.”

  “Said the rabbi before he bit into his pork chop sandwich.”

  “You want one? I know you ain’t converted to the crescent and the star.” Luke smiled devilishly.

  One slip was okay. “Sure. Got some potato salad to go with that?”

  “No doubt, and greens too.”

  The two enjoyed their meal of pork chop sandwiches done fancy with the broiled meat having been rubbed in chili powder and some savory herb Magrady couldn’t identify. This between thick slices of toasted sourdough bread with tomatoes and grilled onions. He shouldn’t have been greedy in front of his son, but it took little encouragement for him to have a second one. He did, but ate it slower this time.

  While they ate, their talk revolved on sports, world politics and their never-ending comic book debates on all things comic books.

  “Really, you’re telling me Gil Kane’s run on Green Lantern stands the test of time and Kirby’s ’60s Captain America doesn’t?” the father incredulously asked the son, his sandwich partway to his mouth.

  Luke Magrady spread his arms wide. “Come on, Pop. Kirby and his clunky anatomy have been way overrated. Kane was all about grace and composition.”

  “Pretty poses that’s all,” the elder Magrady said, swallowing, and drinking more lemonade. “Kirby was about the action, just one of his drawings of someone dialing the phone was dynamic.”

  “That’s ’cause he was too damn dramatic,” his son quipped, having some of his beer.

  “Next you’re gonna tell me Mike Esposito was a regular Neal Adams.”

  “He had his strengths.”

  “Sheeet.”

  His son laughed. When Magrady had come home from Vietnam he’d brought back some comic books that had been sent over to the GIs by the various companies, mostly DCs and Marvels and a few like the Jaguar and the Fly from the company that published Archie. For a while he kept collecting them as reading those stories, and digging on the art of Kane, Kirby, Wally Wood, Marie Severin drawing the Sub-Mariner, and the others, was four-color therapy. The stories of flawed good against titanic evil, and what with being able to read what was on people’s minds, via the thought balloons, that was comforting.

  Even their foibles spoke to him. Like Daredevil being torn between the Black Widow and Karen Page in his love life.. Magrady had reasoned then, what man in his right cotton-picking mind wouldn’t be all
over that fine-ass widow? Still, those comics made a kind of sense he couldn’t quite sync up to the real world. Those stories helped him ease back to the world.

  So when Luke was born and began reading, and the older Esther wasn’t much into these boys’ adventures, he’d given his trove to his son. Luke Magrady bought and traded comics until fifteen or so, then switched his energies toward girls and basketball.

  Magrady stretched and sank back into the upholstery. “That was great, Luke. All of it.” His eyes misted up and he coughed to cover his wiping them.

  His son touched him on the knee. “Sorry we can’t hang out more, but some of the sorts I deal with are getting into their offices now.” It was two in the morning. “I’ve got you a suite at the Plaza, not the hovel you’ve been staying in.”

  The father was on his feet. “Thanks, Kang Fu.”

  His son looked up at him, squinting with one eye. “When did you know?”

  “Not right off, though the name did nag at me. And having somebody else be you on the phone threw me of course. But when we were talking about the comics artists it flipped on that Kang Fu was one of the mystic elders who advised Lionhead Mose, your superhero, in that story you wrote and drew.”

  His son was also standing, smiling broadly. “Good to see that booze and dope didn’t destroy all your damn grey matter.”

  The two walked out to the front of the club, the navigator waiting for Magrady. The elbow Wakefield Nakano had smashed with his mallet ached in the cold.

  “Call your sister, will you?” Magrady said as he gingerly massaged his tender elbow.

  “Okay, Pop.”

  They hugged each other tight. Magrady stayed for three days and nights at the Plaza, enjoyed room service, saw the city, and talked to Luke over the phone, though didn’t see him in person again. He flew back home in first class for his first time thanks to his generous son—a son he hoped wasn’t heading to the hoosegow.

  Back in L.A., he started work as a community organizer for Urban Advocacy.

  “BUT I’M GONNA PUT A CAT ON YOU”

  GARY PHILLIPS INTERVIEWED BY DENISE HAMILTON

  How’d The Underbelly come about?

  The Underbelly was initially written as an online serial a couple of years ago for the fourstory.org site because Nathan Walpow, a fellow mystery writer, asked me if I wanted to contribute to the site. Because Nathan had a background in fiction, he was also looking to add to the site, to augment the nonfiction with fiction, to broaden the site. Not just dry pieces about housing and homelessness. In fact nowadays the site runs stories about issues like housing, sustainable living and transportation, riffs on pop culture, to other fiction and even pieces on Cuba based on a trip the FourStory staff took to the island nation not too long ago. So, really, honestly, they’re not dry pieces.

  Anyway, Nathan knew I had a background as a community organizer and that my wife was an urban planner and ran a nonprofit. I drew on those experiences to write the novella. Essentially, the plot centers on a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady who’s now been sober for eight months. He was on and off booze and drugs for years and suffers from flashbacks. A disabled friend of his, a man in a wheelchair, who’s not a vet, but lives on Skid Row, disappears, and Magrady has to find him. This sets the plot in motion.

  The story takes place in Los Angeles, and that was the point of locating it in the sphere of FourStory, which is to say it takes place in a gentrifying downtown Los Angeles. And à la L.A. Live, this complex of venues recently built there that includes the Staples Center where the pro-basketball Lakers play and nightclubs, restaurants, and a large hotel, there’s a mega development project in the book called the Emerald Shoals. This project like in real life has displaced working poor folks and impacted the homeless as the so-called urban pioneers move into converted lofts and the like. To reflect this one of the characters in the book is a community organizer named Janis Bonilla who is a friend of Magrady’s and also an organizer for a community empowerment organization.

  Hopefully Underbelly walks the line between having substantive issues as context, helping to ground a story, and being on a soapbox with just having the story as an excuse for a polemic.

  Is it bad literature to write polemic stories?

  If I want a polemic I’ll read nonfiction. As storytellers, it’s our job not to be the opiate of the masses but if you’re going to tell a story, it should have characters that resonate with the reader and have a plot and structure and is just not an excuse to go on forever.

  Take for example John D. MacDonald, a mystery writer who created the Travis McGee character and series. It seems to me he got consumed at the end of his writing career with his own conservative politics, and there would be long passages in his books having his characters ranting on about environmentalists, treehuggers, and lefties, but the job of the writer or storyteller is to tell a story. Obviously you want to have these realities in your work but you have to be clever about weaving that stuff in your story.

  I think peoples’ points of view certainly come into play, so that’s fine, but I’m also interested in having characters having different points of view. It makes for better drama, right? Characters always want something, and invariably these interests collide.

  Another example is a book of mine called Freedom’s Fight. The novel is about African American soldiers and civilians during World War II. In the book we see the racism and conflicts the all-black units encounter with white soldiers. Because of Jim Crow policies, black troops weren’t sent into combat until end of 1943, beginning of 1944. The story also unfolds through the eyes of a black woman reporter, Alma Yates, for the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black weekly newspaper at the time.

  Via her, the reader gets glimpses of what’s happening in the States. The Courier was part of something called the Double V Campaign, victory at home and victory overseas. During that time there were arguments among civil rights organization and on the left about the role of the black soldier. Why should they fight and die for freedom abroad if they didn’t have freedom here at home, versus the pressure for African Americans to show white America they were good, loyal citizens.

  Freedom’s Fight came about as my way to tell a slice of this bigger story. I think I’m accurate in stating there are less than a handful of novels about black soldiers during this period—though certainly there are several informative nonfiction books such as The Invisible Soldier by Mary Penick Molley, Lasting Valor by Medal of Honor winner Vern Baker and Ken Olsen, and Brothers in Arms about the 761st tank battalion by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton.

  But if you watched the TV miniseries Brothers in Arms or now the recent Pacific on cable, you wouldn’t have any idea that there were all-black units who fought in those theaters of conflict, but there were. My late dad Dikes was in combat at Guadalcanal, his brother, Norman, was at D-Day Plus One, and the youngest brother, Sammy, served in India. My mother, Leonelle, had a brother named Oscar Hutton Jr., who was shot down and killed over Memmingen, Germany, as a Tuskegee fighter pilot.

  Given all that, I tried not to make Freedom’s Fight preachy, but, hopefully, entertaining historical fiction with a socio-political grounding, and even some hardboiled elements—there is a murder mystery subplot, dimensional characters and action on the battlefield.

  Speaking of which, when did noir get a grip on you?

  I stumbled into it at as a kid, I played sports as a kid in school, but because my mom was a librarian, I was literally forced to read. When I came home from grade school I’d have to read Pinocchio and Grimms’ Fairy Tales for an hour before I could go out and play. I initially rebelled against this, but damned if I didn’t come to like reading. And there’s some pretty rugged stuff in those Grimm stories, including cannibalism and murder.

  I still remember at 61st Street Elementary, they taught us the Dewey Decimal System, and I went to the school library and plucked off the shelf 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne and I was eight or nine, I hadn’t even seen the
Disney movie of the book so I don’t know how I knew about it, but somehow I knew who Verne was.

  How does that get us to noir? I started to develop a love of reading. Somewhere in this I was reading a lot of pulp stories because Bantam was reprinting Doc Savage and The Shadow. At this time I’m starting to watch mystery and detective stories on TV and I heard about Dashiell Hammett so I picked up some Hammett and read some of his short stories. It would be awhile before I read his Sam Spade novel the Maltese Falcon. But Hammett got me hooked, I liked the way he wrote, I liked his patter, and I liked that he wrote these tough, and in many ways, unsentimental stories, and from there I branched into Ross Macdonald, though that was a little later.

  Then in 1970 when I’m still in high school, playing at the Temple Theater in my neighborhood in South Central was this movie called Cotton Comes to Harlem. I didn’t know then about Chester Himes—the movie is based on his book of the same title—but the film looked cool what with two black actors dressing ’70s-slick in the lead roles as Harlem cops. The stars were comedian Godfrey Cambridge as Gravedigger Jones and Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson, with Redd Foxx in a supporting role as, yes, a junk man—this before his fame as Fred Sanford on the TV show Sanford and Son. Foxx I knew from his ribald party records—and I’m talking vinyl LPs, long play, here—my dad would play for his friends when they came over for beers. Naturally I was sent off to bed but always managed to hear some of Foxx’s dirty jokes through my slightly cracked door.

  This early ’70s is the beginning of the blaxploitation cycle of movies Hollywood ground out, a lot of them with mystery and crime plots. Seeing Cotton gets me to Himes. At some point I began reading his work, a blend of oddball characters, crazy plots and rumination on race relations in America. What always struck me about noir and hard boiled stories is one I enjoyed them because they were crime stories, walks on the wild side … and two, they always looked at what exists in the shadows, the flip side of human personalities. Plus they’re great morality tales.