Or: A Big Black Queer Slice of American Pie

By T. J. Toney

A fresh fable of choice and consequence, or is about a boy-from-the-hood made good whos dancing the corporate tap dance by day and living on the down low by night.

Growing up in the Detroit ghetto, Dante Ellison wanted to be Mayor of Detroit. But at 30, hes disillusioned with politics and career. Worse yet, hes worried that hes losing touch with his blackness. His suspicious girlfriend, his WASPy ex-roommate and a drug dealing politician are all waiting for Dante to find a way to make his life workto their advantage. Luckily, Dante has a talent for picking his way through this not so black and white, not so straight and narrow world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 14, 2004
• ISBN: 9781468513462

T. J. Toney

He / she is a Cosby Kid cum Corporate Tom cum Radical Hip Hop Queer.

Book preview

Harbor and Restoration

If there was a question in Dante’s mind, it has been dispatched by the thought of coming home to Nina and having to rush past her to shower off someone else’s funk. He would feel as if he were washing himself down the drain with the taint. And as a precious few have invested too much and a vicious many would be too smugly vindicated, he cannot allow himself to be squandered.

A few blocks from his place, he dials Nina’s cell from his cell.

I’m almost home, he says when she answers.

I’m already at your apartment with the pizza. And thanks again for getting rid of that nasty couch.

You told me you wouldn’t have it in suburbia.

True, but thanks anyway. For that, I did you a solid and ran a mop by the door again.

If we take Fuad with us to Beaver Cleaver hell, he can pass out on grass.

Amusing, she replies. Now stop smirking and stop in at Cicero’s and pick up some Caesar. Anzio left out the dressing.

It’s no surprise to Dante that two flashing police cruisers are parked along the curb of the three block square park overlooked by his building. One of the cops is standing on the sidewalk talking to Kelad, owner of Cicero’s, the corner grocery a few yards from where they stand. Held up five times in six months and now being undercut by the new Grocery Barn, Kelad has been grumbling about closing up. The store is dark.

For five years, Dante has been chatting with Kelad about the Piston’s lack of steam or the Lion’s bum draft pick. Just now, he’s realizing that it’s likely that this rearview glimpse is the last he’ll ever see of Kelad. The melancholy twinge that he gets when he remembers that Cicero’s and The Park will soon recede into his past proves (yet again) that his ex-roomie Jeremy understood him better than he understood (understands?) himself.

Five years ago, with the lease on their shared flat expiring, Jeremy swayed Dante from the posh downtown lofts to this Palmer Park low-rise. A few months later, when Jeremy chose grad school over this whatever we have going on here, he left Dante with a long lease on a lot of memories that Nina’s feminine touch hasn’t quite erased. As if aware of the ghosts, she’s eager to lead the way to a different paradise and ready to seal the bargain with mortgage, nursery and safe streets.

Now, entering his soon-to-be old home, Dante gives the heavy oak door with its three locks a sentimental pat as he calls out, Hey sweet, Cicero’s was closed. I guess we’ll have to go dry.

Dry, Nina purrs as she emerges from the bedroom, is no longer an option. His Navaho print robe is open and slung loosely about the cinnamon shoulders upon which her dark hair cascades. Cocoa nipples are visibly pert above the tiniest pout of belly. And her legs have a subtle bow that tilts the pelvis slightly forward. Well, come on over here stud man, she rasps in those dusky sex tones that never fail to arouse him.

Her allure is inertial. Discounting Frog and Farm, she is his first adult find. The exquisite contours and delicate heft of her keep him moving sure and forward in order to maintain this coveted object, this centerpiece of his good life.

His lust for her is a mixture of worship and volatile hunger. That first time, after the curry-sweet Moroccan meal eaten with bare hands, they were voracious. But the marks on his shoulders and the bruises on her knees faded as their trysts grew demure and formal, regaining zest only after she’d started to pull sexual stunts like this one. Though he’s not the sort to stray, without surprise delights and steady demands, his mind and eye would wander. Her body and comforts keep him on the narrow path.

Now, she is leading him to a blanket spread amid the boxes. And in an instant, he is inside her. Deeply and invincibly inside her, probing to feel whether she has the barrier in place, whether the warm depth of her might take him fully in, so that in time he would come home to find her big with him, his new self’s heart beating against his belly as he fit himself around her to give even more of himself to her. Coming, she whimpers as if about to sob and bites his shoulder with gentle force, the pain rousing him from his dream.

Once, after, as she played with him in a rough-sexy way that got him hard again so quickly that it surprised him, she admitted that she likes to inflict these small torments to let him know that she is not the sole scathed party. But tonight, it’s Dante who’s left raw, his fears accrued at his nerve endings and being kindled by her warm skin as she warps herself around him, her flat belly pressed to his back, her soft hand stroking him as he talks of work.

I really thought that Carnegie would help. But today, I yielded, posed everything as a query instead of a challenge and still….

Of Carnegie, Dante complained to Nina that there were too many cheaply dressed, clay willed white guys who avoided his gaze and ducked his handshake. Remade in twelve weeks, they learned to mask their stammers with hearty laughs and dry their clammy hands in their pants pockets. For him, technique overwhelmed intimacy, so that the friends made were merely entries in his datebook. And Nina’s gibes about white boy bonding informed him that she wanted no more Brices and Jeremys to ward off.

Now, she is pulling the blanket over them as he confesses that, When I’m easygoing they soft-peddle the refusal. When I opt for the hard line, I get grumbling servitude.

What did you expect El? For a bunch of resentful white boys to put you on their shoulders and parade you through that glass hallway.

No, but I thought that Brice at least…. He stops himself. Forget it.

He can’t help drifting back to Carnegie, wondering whether some softness within him had become evident. Was it the reason that the one young man that he had befriended let so many weeks pass without a call? The young man’s gaze, the restless animation in his moss green eyes, hinted that he and Dante shared a loneliness that couldn’t be eased by technique. (Or was it simply that the eyes were so like Jeremy’s that Dante wanted to find himself in them?) But when months passed with no word, Dante tossed the man’s number into the shredder with the cancelled checks.

Nina tongues his ear, bringing him back into the moment. "Ellison,

you just have to accept that things are how they are. You’re getting on okay. You get your job done. You get paid."

Is that all it’s about?

She begins to stroke his chest. El, it’s like my aunt in Georgia says. She says that the difference between white and black is that when things aren’t fair and good, white folks will look and look for a reason and find one. Where black folks know that most times bad is just the way things go.

In Dante, the stoicism that comes of necessity with brown skin has been overwritten by a thorough steeping in Jefferson, Christ and Camus. He turns to face her. You don’t settle for that.

No. I make my own hours and pick my own clients. That’s why Ieft the D.A. That’s why I left Farm. She is fondling him. Your situation is different. She laughs as she tightens her hand around him. More captive.

For now.

When he does not respond to her touch, she frowns and rolls away. Just don’t make any fool maneuvers before you’ve got the next thing lined up, she warns from above as she steps over him to head to the bathroom.

Later, at bedtime, Dante remembers the Frog package. A small, plain brown mail parcel with a Swiss postmark, it provokes a fatuous thought of the Unabomber. Good take-off on Bling’s is scribbled on the brown paper that he is carefully removing when he sees the beautiful face shining through the glass-lidded box.

Damn! Nina! he calls. Come out here and look at what Frog gave me.

She steps out of the bathroom with green toothpaste foam on her lips and the brush in her hand. She is wearing Dante’s slippers, the old man slippers she calls them. But even though they are three sizes too large for her, they manage to end up on her feet while his toes go cold. Blinking dumbly, he is holding out the $4000 small cousin to Frog’s $10,000 Big Pilot watch as if it actually is a ticking bomb instead of a prize.

She rolls her eyes and pads back into the bathroom shaking her head, leaving Dante to narrate her gesture with the snide profit-bashing comment that Jeremy would have offered.

At the window, he puts on the watch and checks it against the huge, red-rimmed clock of the Durant building. Beyond Palmer Park and the flashing cop lights, the clock is just within range of a young man’s normal sight.

Philosopher King of Detroit

Sauntering into Farm the next morning, Dante has his sleeves rolled up to show off the new watch, which Stoz eyes with knowing envy. At ten, Dante impresses Aruna Lanka with thrifty margins. Half an hour later, he thanks Frog with slavish sincerity. At lunch, Joanne corners him and Brice and makes them agree to put their schlongs away and get over it. At four, a talking e-mail from Dante’s stepfather has Bill Clinton telling a blowjob joke and reminding Dante that family friend and mayoral candidate Don Gillis is to be profiled tonight on News Nine.

Back home, Dante notices another set of eviction papers posted on Fuad’s door. Under his own door, Dante finds the new issue of Mountaineer, the Playboy of would-be mountain climbers.

His ‘hood buddy Marvin has left a voice mail: Yo D, we balling on Saturday at 11:00. We ain’t seen yo sad got no game ass in a while yo.

Nina has left a note on the fridge: Back late from Ann Arbor. See you tomorrow.

Free to watch the Gillis profile without her liberal commentary chirping in his ear, he settles on the floor in front of his new huge screen. Though Nina may have nixed his ratty couch, she okayed this massive TV on which newscaster Mike Bonaventure stands beneath downtown’s two-story sculpture of Joe Lewis’s fist. With his patented flirtatious yet credible delivery in high gear, Mike opens with:

Until last month, Motown seemed to be shaking off its Kennedy to Clinton funk of riots, gas droughts and white flight. The G8 was coming to town and there was talk of the democratic convention following on its heels. In the downtown bars and streets, folks cheered their hat tricks, bragged their V-8s, and scarfed their chilidogs with a tad more gusto. The pro basketball motto has evolved from bad boys are back to the Pistons are going to work. That was until four weeks ago, when a man refused to put up his hands for cops. At first, it was called an unfortunate overreaction, but in a short time it became an atrocity.

The questionable death and its resulting racial unrest have heated a mayoral election previously thought to be cold leftovers. Shortly after the incident, dark-horse candidate Clayton Samuelson called a press conference at which he praised the uproar as a valid response to the psychic whip that America puts to the blackman. Detractors shouted that his platform was based on dangerous and inflammatory reverse racism.

A black moderate-to-conservative with support from both the black city and the white suburbs, the frontrunner Gillis was cautious. When reporters ambushed him at the ribbon clipping ceremony for the Haag CityCentre, he urged restraint and understanding. City black folks booed his TV image while Haag and the suburban whites who’d trekked down for the gala clapped and hailed.

His dazzling dimples muted by contemplation, Mike Bonaventure goes on with:

Since the fatal incident, the shoe-in has seen his numbers plummet from a solid eighty-eight to a slushy seventy. With more than a year before Vote ’99, the hype in Motown rivals Y2K. Even as the Wall Street Journal eulogizes the Big Three and the census whittles Detroit by half, polls and e-mails show that Detroiters still have faith that one of the other new man will set things right.

Next up is a hip and flattering documentary clip on the current mayor. As the voice-over begins, we see a young version of the mayor shaking hands with a Civil Rights icon while Mike’s commentary eulogizes his reign.

Not that the Grand Old Man now in office hasn’t done his part, but his boldest strokes were applied three decades ago when Detroit was in flames and being abandoned faster than Titanic. Even some of his staunchest supporters feel that it’s time for a change.

Next, the Old Man is shown leaning on a sign that reads: Eight Mile Road - Detroit City Limit. He is aiming a finger at the ‘burbs and challenging alleged local drug mogul Reynaldo Spinoza to hit the road out of Detroit.

Of the Old Man Hizzoner, some will say, Miracle that the city survived him. Others will call him a savior. To racists who sneered that he was King of the Jungle, he proved his jungle necessary for sustaining suburban paradise. But many whites and progressive blacks will say that his separatism caused the world’s auto business to move from the city to the suburban city-states.

But for the most part, the Old Man’s ghostwriter was correct in his prediction that the Old Man will be remembered as a standup Negro with clay feet but a backbone of Dee-troit cold-formed steel.

The News Nine special ends with a promo for next week’s in-depth probe of Grocery Barn Inc. and Haag Technologies, two corporations being credited for Detroit’s renaissance.

Stomach growling, Dante heads out for grub. Past boarded up Cicero’s, he turns onto 8 Mile Road, the moat that fails to stop brown city folk from inching their broken down hooptees north and west to the transplanted factories and glitzy suburban malls.

At Grocery Barn, Dante buys a junk food orgy that he bags in recycled plastic bags. Social conscience and fair prices take the edge off the fact that whale-sized GB has gobbled up Cicero’s and the other mom and pops. During Farm’s failed year-ago attempt to net GB, the sandal-wearing GB president chided Frog for overlooking the chain’s community conscience. Even now, it’s a sore spot with Dante that no one seems to remember that his memo on this very point was dismissed by Stoz as being hippie liberal bullshit.

Headed back, with one hand on the wheel and the other deep in a box of Blitz crackers, Dante sees a flash at the corner of his eye and hears the roar of a V-8 about to blow. He stomps the brake so hard that the anitlocks buck under his cramping foot.

Whoosh!

A silenced cop car leaps the red doing 100. Just as Dante is about to proceed, a second quiet cruiser zooms through, fishtailing, narrowly missing The Swede’s front end.

Fucking morons will end up killing someone…else, he mutters to himself, his heart racing as he tosses a Blitz onto his dry tongue.

As naïve as he finds Nina’s belief in suburban safe haven, he can’t ignore shit like this. Shit that reminds him that city life demands a survival instinct that’s not as keen in him as it used to be when he was broke and single.

Last night in bed, he mentioned to Nina that, before the decision to move, he’d been thinking of vying for city council.

Curling her body against his, she kissed his frown. El, you can’t save Detroit, but you can save yourself…and our child…from it.

Are you? He asked, stunned.

No, but maybe we should start talking about it.

Now, passing darkened Cicero’s, he remembers that, during his and Nina’s first date, he had to run out to Cicero’s for condoms. These last few months, he’s found himself wondering if a slip-up would be such a bad thing.

Next morning at Farm, Dante is making copies when he hears Stoz telling a water cooler huddle of Farm-ers about a drug murder.

Stoz is animate, his beefy face more flushed than usual. Some banger kids got sprayed over on Oakland last night. That’s over near the GB, just three miles down from here. He points in a direction that Dante knows to be incorrect. Then, with a frown of mock empathy, he adds, Glad I don’t have to live down here.

The Farm-ers cluck agreement in the same sincere tones with which they comment on the staleness of the TV series ER or the inferior new syrup in Ishmael’s Mocha Landslide. Stoz’s watch or cell alarms Charge! and the Farm-ers scurry off as if on cue. Cell phone to ear, Stoz whirls to depart, but spies Dante at the copy machine and calls out, Hey Ellison, you live near here don’t you?

Born and raised, Dante replies in a fuck you tone that raises Stoz’s eyebrows.

Either / Or

Ten miles from Dante’s mid-town digs, Nina’s prim suburban apartment village seems a world away from Fuad the Meth Freak and Palmer Park. Her neighbors are low-level Buppies and studious Asians and Indians. At evening, in lighted windows, the Asians and Indians hunch over the computers that provide their rent and green cards. When Dante comes to call, he parks between Hondas and Nissans and navigates halls that smell of Vindaloo and incense. He sometimes chats for a moment with Vinod, if Vinod happens to be savoring his pipe on the shared porch.

After years of sleepovers, curry and communal washers, Nina is due condo or husband. And she feels that a joint pre-nuptial house is a fair compromise. Pitched during the month that Dante’s car lease expired, her proposal caused him to do some calculating. The sobering result was that the string of leases and odometers in his lifetime is easily estimated. Adulthood is sixty years of 24-month terms. It’s time for him to move forward. Drive Ahead, the ad for the new Swede urges.

With Dante, giving up the city was a harder sell than co-habitation, but Nina refused to consider anything below Eight Mile. Coming from someone who’s lived her life in oppressively well kept suburbs, this didn’t surprise him. Away from vacancy and vandalism, folks forget that there is a city and a past. What does she know of the mean sweet rhythm of the city? And don’t new romances have a right to demand the surrender of tokens of the old?

So he threw himself into the humiliating hunt for a suburb that wouldn’t harass or redline, one that would allow him to join the hallowed 1% that crossed over. For months, they circled listings, printed web photos and weathered polite smiles, only to fall back to the one suburb that has .89% of the 1%. The one that had allowed, if not embraced, Nina’s parents.

But wasn’t it worth it, she declared when they finally found their prize. And he agreed because, well, there were others involved. The imminent children had to be considered. And of course, he should have, will have, kids, ultimate proof of his humanity. And according to Nina, kids demand the actual grass and metaphorical security of suburbia. Before the decision to move, they’d seldom talked of children, but as the house search narrowed, all of it started to meld into one plan: house for kids; kids to justify house; house to prove permanence.

Because their polarity usually leads to spicy bipartisan nookie worthy of Carville and Matalin, Dante and Nina like to talk politics in bed. Tonight, at her place, they are under light cover watching a TV newsmagazine and sharing a carton of Ben ‘n Jack’s Lowfat Smores Frozen Yogurt.

That won’t work, he says of the revitalization plan being touted. As soon as you annex a suburb, all the whites move out, taking the businesses with them.

Since when did the quality of life in a neighborhood become directly correlated to the number of white folks living in it?

He rolls his eyes. Where have you been these past few decades? How much money do you see coming into black neighborhoods? How many cops? Fire stations?

Who’s to change that if not us? The idea is, annex the suburbs that we’re already moving into, and if they run, she shrugs, we just stay and build a financial base of our own. Yawning, she says, El, the key is to stay, build, pass something down. Let black children see that they can own something and have roots and legacies too.

Yeah, right, let’s work together with the b-boys and the crackheads to raise up the ‘hood.

Ellison, you can be such an ass sometimes. You should be less pessimistic about your own people. She props herself up on her elbow to look him in the eye. Not all working class blacks are ghetto nigs you know. My stepfather’s a fine black man.

Yeah, I know. He shakes his head. Stepfather, hardworking barber, standup guy. Father, fancy lawyer, Oreo, punk-ass player.

My father was so proud of being nigga rich, fronting with a leased Cadillac and charge card Armani, that he lost sight of what got him there in the first place.

And that was?

Being poor and hungry…and black. She clutches her pillow to her chest and rolls away from him. Being a father with kids to provide for.

He reaches to rub her back, but she only curls up tighter. A minute or two later, she turns only her face in his direction to say: You know Ellison you really shouldn’t try to use street slang. It makes you sound like a b-boy wannabe. He winces, feeling her insight tattoo O-R-E-O on his balls.

Preparing breakfast, she catches him gazing at her.

What? She says, her tone snippy.

I was just picturing how you’re going to look when you’re fat and pregnant. He pats his leg for her to sit.

She sits on his lap and snuggles into him. I’ll look stunning as always.

Yeah, right, I can see you now. He holds his hand a foot from her stomach. Belly out to here. And unbuttons her blouse to rest his hand on her belly. Its soft gentle curve quivers in his hand as she breathes. For the first time in weeks, they make love in the kitchen.

I didn’t have it in, she whispers afterward.

Good, he says.

They eat with her still sitting on his lap. She scolds him for having his third egg of the week. He is hard again and they make love a second time. She is crying a little when they finish.

What’s wrong? he asks softly.

Nothing.

They hold each other for a long while.

When he returns to Nina’s after his day at Farm, she is just hanging up the kitchen phone. He notices that the planned closing date is now marked in red on the Jacob Lawrence calendar that hangs next to her microwave.

Hey El. That was your partner in crime.

Joanne?

Uhm hmm. I’d left her a message that Elaine is coming back.

Retrieving a beer from the fridge, he asks, How’d she take it?

Okay I guess. But you know, my cuz does possess the family charms. Even after all these years, I think that Joanne still has a thing for her.

He shrugs. She never mentions France to me.

Nina reaches for his beer and takes a sip.

El, you’re not exacty the sort that folks confide love secrets to.

He grabs his chest as if stabbed. Ouch.

She hands him back the beer. Come in here and look this over, she says, pulling him into her little office nook to hand him a sheet of paper.

He reads. Then, frowning, he pauses, sips his beer and finally says, So we’re screwed on the interest rate now huh?

A little, she replies. Only a point and it’s still below market.

Sweet, are you sure that we wannna dive into this load of debt. I mean I could just move in here. You’ve got room and I can pay-

She shakes her head. I should have known you’d use this as an excuse to squirm out of this.

You can’t think that that’s what I’m doing? He downs the rest of the beer.

Three years now. Three years and I can’t even get you to agree to a house. She turns her back to him and starts putting papers in the desk drawer. Those welfare ho’s that I represent can even get their men to move in together to split ADC checks and food stamps and I can’t get shit from you.

That’s totally unfair, he says quietly. He sits on the edge of the desk, blocking her cleanup. I already agreed to a house.

Doesn’t seem like it. She pushes his shoulder. Move. She pushes him again. Why is it so hard with you? I push and I push and-

You push, he says, rising to go to the kitchen. I’ll review the rates tomorrow. I’m too tired to do anymore of this tonight.

In bed, she initiates sex as if nothing has happened. Afterward, she makes a point of saying that she’d had her diaphragm in. But given yesterday, it might already be too late, she adds, getting up to go to the bathroom. I swear, I don’t even know why I even think about having your baby.

Stepfather, hardworking barber, standup guy. Father, fancy lawyer, Oreo, punk-ass player, he says as he rolls over.

The next day Dante calls their banker from his office to question the rate. He picks a polite little fight and all but hangs up on the guy. When he calls back at 4:30, the banker has already gone home.

He spends the night at his place. When he calls Nina at 10 to say goodnight, her voice is thick with sleep, a bad sign since she sleeps when she is angry or anxious. Yawning, she says, If you’re not serious about us, then we have to stop this roulette with the baby.

If I weren’t serious I wouldn’t want you to have my baby.

Sometimes I think that that’s all you want.

I need you, he says.

I’m four days late. She hangs up.

The Frog & The Toad

Dropping by The Farm at 6 AM to fetch some papers for a meeting at Haag headquarters, Dante overhears a snippet of a open-door tiff going on between Frog and Evan Toad Young. Unseen, Dante slips into the coffee canteen next to Frog’s office for a cup of Earl Grey and a box seat to Toad’s ass-chewing. Through the canteen’s glass brick wall, Dante can see a blurry Frog scowling across his desk at a fuzzy Toad, who’s standing near the door, looking like he might gnaw off a leg to escape.

Fuckit Evan, continues Frog, I told you to make sure that that dipshit didn’t stir everyone up about those billboards. I mean who the fuck is this Samuelson prick anyway. Some ‘hood activist who wants to tell me how to run my show.

Fingering his suspenders with the hand that’s graced with his signet pinky ring, Toad draws in a long weary breath and replies evenly, George, he is a mayoral candidate.

So let this gansta-ass darkhourse get elected and decide which crack houses to raze, but my billboards are none of his fucking business.

Toad shows his palms and chews his lip for a moment before saying, You must understand that the only thing that I can do is arrange a meeting with the man. Abandoning his faux New England brogue, he adds, You don’t actually think that he’s going to admit that he put those kids up to defacing the signs.

He’s not going to admit- In mid-bellow, Frog’s hand goes to his gut as his face blanches.

You okay? Toad moves to assist.

Waving him off, Frog grabs a bottle of water from his mini-fridge and jerks it open. Just get that fucker out of my business however you need to. Surely there’s some common ground between you.

Toad flinches, but then squares his gaze with Frog’s. Surely.

Fuckit Evan. You know what I mean.

Outside, Farm-ers have begun to trickle in.

And if you can’t reason with him, then dig up some shit behind these rumors I keep hearing. Frog takes a slug from the water bottle. Fuuuck his gang-sta-ass up.

As if sensing something, Toad does an about face to close the door. And before Dante can duck back into the canteen, their gazes clash, at which Toad winces and Dante nods, cursing himself for being spied spying.

Dante’s essential Toms are Petty, Cochrane and Waits. Uncle isn’t on the list. But, in Dante’s book, Toad doesn’t even rate the title Tom because it implies that the soul in question has some awareness of its mortgaged state. With Toad it seems only dumb reflex that, for a white face, he always has ready an equivocation or appeasement, where for a black one, a correction is ever at the tip of his affected tongue.

But wonder of wonders, this morning, Dante is feeling a pang of empathy for Tom Toad. Perhaps Haag stress has scrambled his moral compass. WWDD, he thinks with a smirk. While Dante’s belief in free will prevents him from blaming billboards for ghetto drunks, he’s seen ‘hood kids looking up to black men in fine suits swilling Mardel. Those kids don’t see a lot of blackmen in suits. Those kids don’t get much schooling in Aquinas and Kant.

And it’s not like Frog’s ads are for sipping liquor. Second and third label swill is Frog’s staple. While other firms hawk red label scotch and highbrow lite, Frog courts the ghetto, hatching gluts of shapely story-tall brown bodies that proselytize Motown streets with juicy driblets of Frogbabble.

Taste the life.

You deserve it smooth.

Power by the ounce.

Cash by the fistful, since the low margins and high returns keep The Farm flush.

Of late, Frog is also reaping kudos and cash from the tobacco rapprochement. Cooing testimonials and just-say-maybe pics make for easy profit. (Beer and cigarettes, well yes, but new playgrounds and scholarships too.) Frog has even let Toad be the face for this effort.

Dante is unsure why Toad has never been raptured to the big leagues. Farm rumor has it that a tipsy Frog said in unmixed company that, I keep him well fed because the new ones are too much damn trouble. What with their expectations of always more, of ours, really.

A natural symbiont, Toad lives in Frog’s cast-off neighborhood 22 miles from Detroit. Since the influx rumor that provoked Frog’s move proved to have been just a rumor, Toad remains the first and only black on the block. Seizing every public opportunity to lament this fact, Toad has been heard to say, Even blacks who can afford it cling to their outdated separatist notions. My only regret is that my son isn’t exposed to more diversity.

Diversity dropped in for a visit two falls back when Toad invited Dante and Joanne to Wednesday dinner. While Toad assisted his wife with the rolls, Joanne whispered to Dante that the meal smelled decidedly more Ebony than the Town and Country fare that Frog had raved about one Monday morning.

While the sweet potato pie was fragrantly warming, Toad took them into his Wharton-saturated den to show them his UNCF Gold Key.

You’ll do very well, Toad said as he fingered his suspenders, to forget the notion that you are any different from the rest of the firms talented individuals.

They waited for more.

Toad eyed Joanne. Eccentricities too, he said as he twisted his pinkie signet, need to be minimized.

At this, he waved them back into the dining room, where his doting brown wife was waiting with deep rich coffee and potato pie scented with Grand Marnier.

As they were leaving, Toad kept Dante back for a moment. You might make less of the black thing and focus on accessible fallibility.

Dante thanked him heartily while straining to recall the last accessibly fallible and employed black man that he’d met. The only candidate that he could think of was David from accounting. David was fired and replaced by Aruna Lanka because Stoz said that David was competent, but not quite aggressively committed to shepherding the bottom line.

Now, standing in the canteen with his tepid cup of tea, Dante can’t help thinking that, unless he wins big with Haag, he might be the next David.

Strawman & CheckDasher

Spying on Frog and Toad has shaved a few minutes off of Dante’s planned early arrival at Haag. Luckily, the new Northwest expressway gives him a straight shot from Farm to the Haag CityCentre. Cutting a swath through the tree-shaded avenues of this Jewish suburb, the Northwest hampers the residents’ traditional strolls to temple. Only after much protest and delay did the neighborhood win its petition for crosswalks. So now, on Saturdays, there is a high and lugubrious parade of bearded men in black and women with upswept hair and golden Stars of David.

When Dante happens to spy them passing over, he gets twinge of shame colored with envy. He wants Hassidic serenity or 71 virgins in heaven, not grudging quotas and half-million man marches. At the pearly gates, he’s sure that he’ll be found undeserving, as he’s neither Job nor suicide bomber, but merely a check dasher.

Back at his desk, Dante plunges into the 22 e-mails that have cued up during his morning out at Haag. Five minutes later, someone knocks on his cube wall. He looks up to find Brice standing over him. As usual, Scott Brice’s hands are nicked and stained from weekend bricklaying. The casual utility implied by the damage provokes, in Dante, a twinge of envy because the last brick that he handled was the one that he tossed through the window of Lucky 7 Liquors when he was 12.

Lunch in the park? Brice asks.

Brice, I’ve got 16 more e-mails to slog through.

We can talk Haag? Brice pleads, showing a hangdog face.

In spite of Dante’s attempts to self-protect, stubborn and inexplicable fondness for Brice usually disarms his defenses.

In the park, hip-hops are going at it three-on-three on the asphalt courts. Pale office workers are eating falafel on the stroll. Brown and tan children are shrieking and tumbling in a game of kickball. Passing a trashcan, Dante lobs in his hot dog wrapper and pauses to watch Brice perform a hammy jumpshot toss that nearly misses the can.

As they move on, Dante is attempting to pick up the pace. So far, he’s been ignoring Brice’s fits and starts and the thoughtful frowns that might indicate confidence brewing. Dante’s not the sort who gets antsy in the locker room. It’s casual male intimacy like this now being plotted that gets him sweating.

Brice catches up to Dante and offers, Pretty good move today.

Dante puts on a puzzled frown.

Getting the ear of Haag’s VP, explains Brice.

Yeah, I thought it was, Dante says levelly. Shit, the guy was shaking my hand and looking around me to hook up with you.

Brice shrugs. Risky move, but long as it worked-

Dante kneels to tie his shoe. Seemed to.

Sure did. I wish I could have seen Frog’s face, but even with him on squawk box, you could tell he was eating it up.

A kiddie ball with stars has rolled into their path. Brice scoops it up and tosses it back to a tiny brown girl with gap teeth and pigtails. He smiles at her with a tenderness and excitement that Dante thinks to be the precise inverse of nostalgia.

Squinting to watch the up court drive of a six-footer in a do-rag, Dante says casually, Brice, you don’t have to-

Brice stops him with, Nice out today.

Dante waits a beat and begins again. With Haag, I think it’s best-

And Brice again cuts him off, this time with, Sorry. But this isn’t meant for Dante. It’s for the woman whose dropped change purse Brice has made the mistake of retrieving. Snatching it from his outstretched hand, she returns a warning scowl.

A moment later, Brice offers, Did I tell you that Christine is expecting?

Aware that this is an opening, Dante weighs his next move, saying, I hadn’t heard. Uhm...congratulations. He stoops to brush soil from his pant leg. I guess.

Muddy here. Brice says, scuffing his feet. It’s not common knowledge around the office yet. They say not to tell people before three months because….

Dante ups their pace, carving them a shortcut through trotting kids and new shrubs with green shoots like bits of flesh on skeletons. The shouts and cadence of the ballgame fill the silence. Dante is thinking that these times are like basketball for him, ability lagging a hair behind intent. Would a regular guy tell Brice that Nina is late and that he’s neither as happy nor as terrified as he thought he’d be?

Rounding a curve, they are passing a pale young man in a gray tee that makes him seem sculpted of limestone. This boy in gray holds Dante’s gaze just long enough to spark the worry that Brice has noticed the slight widening of Dante’s pupils, the tiniest flare of nostril. In his head, Dante can hear Jeremy laughing, laughing and humming the riff of that Morrissey song, The more you ignore me the closer I get.

Dante takes this moment as a warning that his distance from Brice--his refusal of more than amiable rivalry--is necessary. He senses that Brice could easily become a conduit between allowable intimacy and dangerous infatuation. One concession could lead to others and so on. This terror of the erotic slippery slope holds Dante’s male friendships at the threshold of his life. Marvin and Baldwin are fine for basketball and hangin’. Brice is good for the boardroom. But close confidence would be dicey. For that, there are the women.

With three days left to make the final decision on the house, Dante’s guilt over putting the deal in limbo has made him drive ten miles out of the way to snag one of those gooey Greek honey cinnamon cakes that Nina loves. Sticky box in hand, he’s about to rush her, grab her around the waist and gush an apology sweeter than the cake when he notices that she’s so absorbed in the mail that she hasn’t even heard him enter.

He can smell the clover scent of her shampoo. In the trim sweats, bare feet and ponytail, she looks as fresh and pert as a coed. He lays his jacket and the cake on the small table by the door and moves quietly toward her, but a glimpse of the envelope in her hand stalls him. Its familiar angled script and the rash of postmarks above the re-address label kindle a rush of dread.

She doesn’t seem startled when she looks up to find him watching her. Her mouth softens into that little half-pout of worry that has only recently surfaced to him.

Paper and ink, she says as she hands him the letter, and with foreign postmarks.

A timely and trivial e-mail or postcard could be shrugged off, but intimate linen paper and carved strokes pose a question. There is no return address, but she might have noticed that the script is the same as the poems that she’d found during the move. College girlfriend, he’d said before urging her to toss them. And where girlfriend was a lie, the permission to toss was a sincere, if weak, attempt to commit fully and finally to her, to flush Jeremy the poet from his soul. But it proved to be only a hollow and futile gesture, as he’d later rescued the poems from the dust and coffee grounds and hidden them in his office