Yes It's Me and I'm Late Again

He would be coming home all hours of the night, kicking over somebody's garbage can and interrupting some dog or cat's breakfast, bending down in the dark to pat the dog or cat on the head and most likely sticking his hand in the garbage instead. He would be thinking about that for a while. People in the project got to know his ways; if you were awake, you could hear him thinking. Then he would wipe his hand on the seat of those beat-up old gray sharkskin drapes with the red pin stripe and start up the West Block stairs, singing, most likely, and doing some kind of little dance, or at least making more noise with his feet than any broken-down 60-year-old bum ought to be able to get out of two Goodwill shoes and three flights of concrete.

The sign on the door of West 403 was hand-lettered by Marvin Lee, a real professional job. He never did pay Marvin for it.

Star Calypsonian

Richard the Lion-Heart

Songs for every occasion

Fix Your Enemies

Delight your friends

It would rattle when he'd knock, bam ba-lam ba-lam, and he would be singing either Doo-doo Open de Window in his mush-mouth Geechee style or Open the Door, Richard! in what you might (continued on page 169) Yes It's Me (continued from page 105) call his natural, or Los Angeles, style. He had these two styles; and if Mary Ann had done an extralong day's work, say down in San Mateo, and didn't wake right up, he might switch back and forth between them for a while:

So tall an' mighty, so cute an' smahtIt's Richahd, Richahd de Lion-HahtDe gyurls cahn't help it, dey breakdey hahtFor Richahd, Richahd de Lion-Haht.

Or some other old calypso jive, like Gin and Coconut Water or Back to Back, Belly to Belly. But he would usually end up with Open the Door, Richard!, maybe rapping out the first bippity-bop on the door like a signal, to let Mary Ann know it was really him, so she could yell, "Is that you?" and he could answer, "Yes it's me and I'm late again!" Then she would let him in.

One of the stories he would tell anybody he could get to hold still was how he was the original Richard from Open the Door, Richard!, which maybe half the people in the project were too young to know was a big hit from right after the War. Jack McVea made it, just a sort of little riff that caught on, and it had those words in it, "Yes it's me and I'm late again," and some other things. He knew them all.

And, of course, even if you weren't even born or thought of in 1947, old Richard would be glad to teach you the whole routine. Like, one little part went, just two guys jiving back and forth:

You hear what the lady said, Jack?Naw, what she say, Rabon?Say "Oh, my, if he was only mine!"

When they saw how good it made him feel, and cost nothing, most people, when he went up to them and said, "You hear what the lady said, Jack?" they would give him the right answer right back, so he could have the punch line. Then he would clap his hands and double over and give them a little skin, old-timy, maybe just one finger, and go on his way. Not too strong in the head, old Richard; and besides, he had been cooking whatever brains he might have had for years, with anything he could lay his hands on to smoke, shoot or swallow. What some people said about him was: He could never concentrate on any one thing long enough to get a real habit. Lucky for him, too, because he never had any money at all; money didn't worry him. What other people said was: Everything was his habit. He sure didn't specialize.

When he would get through telling you about the good old days in L. A. with Jack McVea and Slim Gaillard and Tiny Brown, and about when Diz and Bird came through and played at Billy Berg's on Vine Street, and about how he was the one, the only, the original Richard, he would always end up squinting in your face and singing, "Believe it or not--Bob Ripley!"

Strange things do happen. And you might think: The original Richard must be somewhere. It was just that this particular old beat-up Richard was somebody you naturally wouldn't believe. Not if you didn't want to take a chance on being a bigger fool than he was; and around the project, Richard had the fool championship pretty much to himself.

Then, later on, he went down to Trinidad. So he said. And that much probably was true, because he must have learned to talk that Geechee way someplace, calling you "mahn" or "gyurl" and singing all those songs in that broken-up calypso time, like a dog running on a broken leg. That would be the most likely place, Trinidad, even if nobody believed any of the jive about how Richard the Lion-Heart beat up all the competition in the big calypso wars down there and had everybody in Port of Spain chasing after him. Or, like Mrs. Johnson said, if they were chasing after him, they had some other reason, and she could think of a few.

He stayed down there a long time. Too long, because by the time he got back, the calypso rage had been here and gone. It was stone-cold dead in de market, you might say. Harry Belafonte had moved on to greener pastures and the last thing anybody wanted to hear, let alone pay for, was a nodding, jittering, eye-watering old wreck in a hat like a dead palm tree and a red blazer with all the danger worn out of it and all kinds of stuff strung round his neck--plastic flowers and shrunk-up heads, sea shells and rabbits'-feet, chicken bones and little leather bags and dried-up brown rattly things. You could hear him coming a block away, without him telling you he was mighty Richard the Lion-Heart, Calypso King of the West In-dees; and you better bow down or he would make a calypso on you that would have the whole town laughing for a solid year.

Or you could smell him, because he brought back a lifetime supply of lemon-grass oil that he would massage into that skimpy conk of his, like a worn-out floor mat; and on a warm day, even under that hat, he would radiate almost as far as you could hear him. "Lion-Haht is de spicy mahn," he would say and crinkle up one eye. "An' it drive away de mahlice from de mind." So when Jackie Shaw, that poor little junkie, he's dead now, called him a human garbage can, he wasn't talking about how he smelled but about his everything habit, meaning he would put anything into himself to feel good. Richard made a calypso on Jackie and it went like this:

De ugliest mahn I evah sawIs de ugly mahn call' Jahckie Shaw.

But Jackie being already so wasted down, it didn't seem to do him much harm. And if that was a sample, everybody in the project could see that any six-year-old child could jive old Richard down to the bricks in two minutes, and most of them did. They had already crossed out the first two letters of Heart on his sign and printed a big F instead, the very first day. But to give old Richard his due, he knew better than to fire on the kids. They would have just eaten him alive.

Of course, it was no good telling him the calypso wave was two, maybe three years past. And if you mentioned Harry Belafonte, he would carry on for five minutes solid, calling him every different kind of a fake and a bum, including ugly, and finishing up on Miriam Make-ba, who stole all her stuff from calypso in general and from him in particular: "Mahn, I make up all dem so-called Ahfricahn song in Trinidahd years ago."

And he set right off making the rounds, every bar and beer joint, any kind of place at all that looked to him like it might want to hire mighty Richard the Lion-Heart and make a fast million or two.

He gave up on Fillmore Street in a hurry, but not quite as fast as Fillmore Street gave up on him. None of those bars over there ever had gone for calypso, not even at the peak, which wasn't so much itself. The most they could ever afford was maybe an organ player and a drummer on Saturday night, and they better lay it down a whole lot harder than any mush-mouth clowns in tropical hats could ever do. The people that run those places, one look at old Richard must have told them how right they were; and besides, old bums hustling drinks are their meat. A dead loss that wouldn't lie down like Richard, inside a week he was lucky to find a barbershop they'd let him hang around.

So he eased back a little closer to home and laid out a route along Broadway, where most all the action clubs and clip joints in town are strung out along four or five blocks. The one part of town where a so-called colorful character might get by, there being so many tourists and other suckers around. And by spreading himself out pretty thin between Broadway and the Tenderloin, he had himself a pretty fair year of looking for his big break, never quite hard enough to get thrown out of more than one or two places a night on the average, and some nights none at all.

Even if you don't count the janitors and dishwashers and so forth, there are plenty of people in the project coming and going between midnight and sunrise, so everybody got used to old Richard's late habits right away. They got used to his everything habit, too, and pretty soon there was nobody in the whole project he could hit on for a taste of anything, not even wine, because it was known that he was all get and no give.

If you asked him, straight-faced, what kind of gig he went off on every night, he would clap his hands and bust in two, laughing, and say, "Mahn, it dawn't pay much, but it's, I mean, regulah!" So you might say he was a man of regular habits, and Mrs. Johnson did say that he must be Mary Ann's habit, or else there was no explaining why she put up with him. Mary Ann generally kept her mouth shut on the subject. Anybody who tried swapping miseries with her was asking to get buried at least two to one; but the most she would say was, "Well, he don't gamble and he don't chase women." The first part must have been true, because even if old Richard had no money, it is a known fact that a gambler will always find something to lose. And because Mary Ann seemed like a decent woman and much too hard-working, nobody asked what woman would look at him twice, if he could catch her on those rickety old legs of his.

Some nights, of course, he didn't make it home at all, but wound up in the drunk tank at the Hall of Justice, courtesy S. F. P. D. People figured that either he had a troublesome streak hidden away someplace that it took the police to bring it out or that maybe they just couldn't understand him talking Gee-chee. But after a while, they gave up whipping his head. Somebody had beat them to it, anyway; it was as soft as a mushmelon. So they tried 5 days on him, and then 15 days, and finally 30 days, the best they could do. Then they must have just decided not to let him get fat anymore on that county-jail oatmeal soup, and his habits got more regular than ever: He would come home every night, unless he got lucky and ran into some strangers who got him too high to move. After all, there's three quarters of a million people in San Francisco, and they can't all be good judges of character.

When that happened, he would always stay out all the next day and night, so he could come rattling home about three A.M. and go bam ba-lam ba-lam on the door and holler, "Yes it's me and I'm late again!"

Because it was just about that time, after the S. F. P. D. figured he wasn't worth any more of the taxpayers' money, that he began singing Open the Door, Richard!, and mixing up his two styles. Lots of people in the project remember how that started, too.

There was a little place on Grant Avenue up off Broadway specializing in folk singers. Didn't even serve beer, just coffee, tea, apple juice and so on, which must have been why it took old Richard so long to get around to it. Every night they would have about a dozen of these folk singers there, maybe each one would just sing two or three songs, and for a lot of them, no doubt that was all they knew. Someway Richard got a one-night tryout at this place, and he even had a piece of paper, a list of all the big folk-singing attractions for the next two weeks, with his name on it: "Mighty Richard the Lion-Heart, Trinidad Calypso Champion."

Friday was the night, and all week long he was broadcasting all over the project. You would have thought he was Nat "King" Cole opening at the Fairmont Hotel, the way he carried on. He said they would be renaming the place Richard the Lion-Heart after Friday night, and he even talked Marvin Lee into taking a picture of him with his camera to give to the newspapers, but he never did pay Marvin for the print, and the picture never did run, not even in the Shopping News.

But he talked so long, and so loud, that on Friday night quite a few people from the project actually did go to this place, and paid a dollar a head to get in the door, and another quarter for a little tiny cup of coffee so bitter you couldn't drink it, and sat on little baby-size chairs that you would be better off standing up, and waited for the Calypso Champion of Trinidad.

He never showed up. And he didn't come home, either. And none of those suckers could get much sympathy the next day, because anybody in his right mind should have known that old Richard would never have ruined his perfect-fool record by doing any one thing right, or maybe even doing it wrong, on time, in front of that many witnesses. But about a quarter to four Sunday morning, he came home, bipping and bopping and knocking over garbage cans; and when he rattle-de-banged all the way up to West 403, he hollered out: "Yes it's me and I'm late again!"

After that, when anybody tried to sound him too hard about Trinidad, he would give them L. A. and how he was the original Richard. "Mahn, I bet you don't even know Slim Gaillard's real name," he would say to some teenager who didn't even know who Slim Gaillard was. "Bu-leeee!" old Richard would yell. "Bulee Slim Gaillard! I know all them cats!"

And if anybody tried to pin him down about L. A., he would just switch back and come on heavy about the girls in Port of Spain and the time he beat Lord Melody and Mighty Sparrow in the finals of some big calypso war: "Mahn, I just ee-rahdicate 'em. I vahnquish 'em! All de way to Sahn Fernahndo, all de way to Ah-reemah, everybawdy talkin' boat Richahd de Lion-Haht!" So, in a way, he was unbeatable.

But he wasn't exactly what you would call a hero. Just somebody with his habits, which you got used to and put up with, and be glad you weren't Mary Ann, who went to work every day cleaning people's houses, and gave old Richard a few nickels walk-around money every night, so he could go off on his rounds. And when Mrs. Johnson finally got feeling so sorry for her she told her to haul old Richard down to the post office and at least take the test, Mary Ann said it wouldn't be worth missing a day's work, Richard wasn't too strong on reading.

To tell the whole truth, there wasn't much going in the hero line around the project those days, except for Willie Bolden, who won the All-City high jump, and then Willie Bolden had to drop out of school and go to work, his mother being sickly.

If mouth made heroes, old Richard would have been a hero, probably, although there was some stiff competition around. Say, from John S. Tree. His middle name was Standing. John Standing Tree, and he liked people to call him Chief, claiming that he was a pure-blooded Indian from Oklahoma and an oil millionaire to boot, if and when the Government ever got around to settling his claim. Or from Mrs. Rose Fernandez, a real West Indian, who looked down on old Richard and most everybody else, because her daughter was a world-famous opera star under a different name that she was sworn never to tell, who would be coming someday in a Cadillac limousine, or a Rolls-Royce, to carry Mrs. Fernandez off to a mansion on Pacific Heights or Nob Hill, or all the way to the French Riviera, if she felt like it. Or from Professor Simpson, who actually did have a master of arts in English history from the University of California but worked all day in a car wash to buy the wine he drank all night and talked to himself all mixed up about kings and queens and empires and colonies, because even if he did know more than the rest of the project put together, he couldn't sleep. They were all mouth heroes, almost up there with the politicians.

But people in the project are mostly busy going to work, paying the rent and the Chinaman and the P. G.&E.--too busy with all that to worry about being a hero. And a mouth hero needs a pretty special line of jive to hold their attention. They've seen so many.

So when L. J. White came back from Vietnam and moved in with his cousin, Prince Tate the cabdriver, people could tell right away that whatever kind of hero he might have been, it wasn't the mouth kind, because he didn't say a word to anybody at first.

Either he looked hard at you, or else he looked clear through you. He didn't say Hi or Good morning or even nod to anybody, like he had his mind on something else. And if people just naturally wondered about his little limp, or what it was like over in Vietnam, they were out of luck. Somebody found out from Prince that L. J. had a leg wound, and word got round that his body was full of holes from grenade fragments, but nobody saw them.

Of course, the kids couldn't help looking at him like some kind of hero, just for where he'd been and come out alive. And naturally one of the big kids, it was Randy Jefferson, who thinks he's so bad, had to sound him. One evening he said to L. J., "Say, there, General, where you hidin' all your medals, baby?"

L. J. gave Randy one stone-freezing look, and laughed, and walked on by, but Randy didn't say anything after him, and then all his buddies got right on his back, and he had to pound Wellman Rankin a couple of times in the head to shut them up.

He had his mind on something, L. J., and he wasn't talking. But pretty soon he began to move, and really move, and then he did begin to talk a little bit. First thing, he was a Muslim, carrying home all kinds of stuff to read, saying his name was L. J. X, and still nobody knew what the L. J. stood for. Somebody saw him in one of those undertaker suits they wear, selling Muhammad Speaks down on Market Street.

Now by this time, there weren't any more what you might call practicing Muslims in the project. James Brown was for a while, but he quit, and Mrs. Shaw tried to get Jackie to join because Muslims don't shoot dope, but he never did. So L. J. had it all to himself. But he didn't do a whole lot of preaching; no, if somebody asked him, he would say he thought it was a good thing and they ought to drop over to the temple. Or he might give them a leftover Muhammad Speaks and not charge them. But mainly he would just say, "See for yourself." No heavy evangelizing.

Then next thing, after a month, or six weeks at the most, he wasn't a Muslim anymore. Didn't make a big scene out of it, just quit; and if you asked him why, he would say Elijah Muhammad was nothing but an old-time Baptist preacher turned inside out, and there was too much mumbo jumbo. Still, he didn't put the Muslims clear down. He would even say he thought they were going the right way, but he wasn't in that bag anymore. "It's just personal," he would say.

He was in the Malcolm X Brotherhood next, and it seemed he was gone a lot more of the time, although you couldn't be sure, because he never raised any racket coming and going. But it was during that period, you might call it, that he first tangled with old Richard the Lion-Heart.

Richard didn't have any more sense than to start it. Seemed like he thought his travels to Trinidad and L. J.'s to Vietnam gave them something in common. Like, they were both men of the world, so to speak. But he didn't halfway get going about the girls in Port of Spain before L. J. cut him off.

"Just look at you, man," L. J. said. "You are the worst goddamn disgrace to the black race I've seen since I got back. Funky, broke-down, lazy, good-for-nothin' old junkie wino. Look at yourself! You everythin' they say about niggers come true and walkin' the streets like you had a sign on your back. Let your poor old lady work herself to death so you can go out moochin' drinks and shit enough to get yourself stoned. Don't you have one tiny little scrap of black pride? Not in your whole body? Hell no, you don't! Man, you don't even have enough sense to jump off the bridge and do the whole race a favor!"

He had old Richard's number all right, even if he did rap it out pretty hard, right in the middle of the court by the concrete water fountain with no water in it, and half the project listening in.

But old Richard has got a pretty thick skin, which on his face looks like a lot of sewed-together little pieces of old cardboard, so you can't tell the scars from the wrinkles. And he just took a breath and started in on the good old days in L. A. with Jack McVea and Slim, and L. J. shook his head and spit in the fountain and walked away and left him standing.

Next day, or the day after, Richard was walking out, over to the Chinaman to see could he get a pint of sherry and Mary Ann would pay for it later, and L. J. was in the same place by the fountain, talking to Randy Jefferson and Wellman Rankin and Raymond Walker and a couple of other big kids. L. J. pointed straight at old Richard, like he was about to say "That's the man" in the line-up. "Take a good look at that, you guys," he said. "You want to see a perfect example, there he goes. That's some proud black man, old Richard. You guys work real hard you can wind up like that."

Richard couldn't help but hear, and what did he do? Clapped his hands, doubled up, laughing, and pointed right back at L. J. Then he called out a little calypso across the court:

Listen him talkin', de ugly mahnSoldier hero from VietnahmWhy dey send him home is plain tosee He gawt too much plenty ug-lee....

That was already about twice as much calypso as he ever made before on anybody but himself. He just threw back, his head and let out a screech, Hiyee-hi!, and went shuffling on over to the Chinaman's. Yes, either L. J. had inspired him or the thought of that pint in his blazer pocket had, because five minutes later, when he got back, he turned around halfway up the West Block stairs and sang out some more:

De general hate to let him goCome bahck to Sahn Frahn-cis-coAn' what de reason, cahn't you guessHe gawt secret weapon, ugliness....

L. J. looked up at him, and this time he nodded slow. Maybe he was just accepting the fact that it was way too late to make old Richard change his habits. Or maybe he wasn't. Either way, they kept on seeing each other around, passing in the court or on the stairs, because Prince's place was West 402, right next door to Richard's.

By that time, L. J. wasn't in the Malcolm X Brotherhood anymore, either. He was into something else; nobody knew exactly what it was. He didn't put down the Malcolm X Brotherhood, not even a little bit, but it was known that he was into something else. You might call it top-secret, except that most everybody had some idea what it was about. And some people knew more than others. Randy Jefferson's mother was worried half to death, as if Randy hadn't been in enough trouble already, and not a year away from going into the Army on top of it.

L. J. was coming and going more than ever now, because this hush-hush thing was tied up with people in Fillmore, and Bayview and Hunter's Point, and most likely Oakland and Richmond, too. Him being the exact opposite of a mouth hero, all the talking he did was private and one at a time, so people were sure it wasn't just some small-time operation. And the less he said, the surer they got.

One thing came out, what you might call a clue. A couple of people overheard L. J. giving Wellman Rankin a whole lot of hell in close for getting high one afternoon and showing some book to the Chinaman. He said: "That's the wrong kind of Chinaman; you ought to know better than to pull any kid stuff like that. You do one more thing like that and you're dead, brother." Or words to that effect.

Now, the Chinaman may be nobody's friend, but he's all right. When Mrs. Hamilton said Chinamen were some kind of Oriental Jew, Mrs. Johnson said that was pure nonsense. She lived in Harlem 25 years, she said, and no Chinaman was any worse than a Jew, not one damn bit, and better, in fact. Anyway, he's there, the Chinaman. People have got to eat and drink, he opens up earlier than Safeway and stays open later, he's known to carry most people up to a week, and longer if he knows you only get paid once or twice a month; and if he does charge a penny or two more for everything, people mostly say, Well, it's a small business, the little man's got to do that to stay alive. Then, besides, his kids play in the project after they get home from the Chinese school they go to after regular school; and little Wayne Jefferson even claimed he played momma and poppa with the Chinaman's oldest girl and she let him. So he's all right, and what got people thinking was: If he was the wrong kind of Chinaman, who did L. J. think was the right kind?

People in the project watch TV and read the papers, like everybody else, so they know all about the Communists and the free world and the rise of black power, things like that. Therefore, you didn't have to be a mental genius to connect up this thing L. J. was into with the Chinese Communists. Like, two and two is four.

And that started a little argument going between Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Walker, who were usually pretty tight, on account of Buddy Hamilton and Charles Walker being in Vietnam, not both together but at the same time.

Mrs. Hamilton said it was treason and a stab in the back to be getting together with the same ones were trying to kill our boys and come over here and turn everybody into slaves. Said they ought to be shot, although she didn't call L. J. by name.

And Mrs. Walker said Mrs. Hamilton ought to be in the insane asylum if she would rather see the black man over there killing the yellow man for the white man, instead of fighting for his own right here. She said Mrs. Hamilton had been brainwashed: and as for her, she would a thousand times rather see little Raymond running with L. J. and refusing to tell her what he was doing than just wait around another year and get shipped over there after Charles, who had written him the very same thing in a letter.

Mrs. Hamilton said she just hoped the FBIs were keeping their eye on some of these secret agents before they got the whole project messed up.

Mrs. Walker said she supposed Mrs. Hamilton might be about to call up the FBIs herself.

Then Mrs. Hamilton broke down and cried, being a nervous woman herself and Buddy her only child. Said, Aw, why didn't they just drop the damn bomb and get it over with; she couldn't stand the waiting.

All that just because somebody heard L. J. say a couple of words to Wellman Rankin. Make no mistake: Even if L. J. didn't let his hair grow Afro and call himself some wild African name, and even if you never saw him on TV demanding and denouncing and giving the honkies hell, he had most everybody's respect, and that's power. He was cool; he had his mind made up. He knew how to fight and come out alive. So those days around the project, when anybody said "Black power," the first person you thought of was L. J. White, who had never been heard to say those words out loud. He was black enough, and he had the power.

Then he was gone, for two whole weeks. Prince swore he didn't know where to. Chicago, people heard. When he got back, not even carrying a satchel, he looked just the same. But one thing had changed. It took a couple of days for word to get round the project, but when it did, it said: Communists are out of it now. It is strictly a black-people's movement, no strings attached.

And that was funny in a way, because up till then, nobody had been actually talking about a movement, even if everybody knew that's what it had to be. But as soon as word got round, even the little kids were talking about how L. J. went to Chicago and got all the Communists told: "Lay off my movement, man." Until somebody shushed them; and even after that, they were playing L. J. vs. the Communists all over the place. The littlest ones had to be the Communists, of course, just like Indians.

Mrs. Walker told Mrs. Hamilton she hoped the word eased her mind about calling the FBIs, and Mrs. Hamilton said it was probably just a trick, because it was a known fact that Orientals were sneaky; what about Pearl Harbor? Besides, she was sick and tired of law-abiding people getting blamed for what a few troublemakers did. She was so sick and tired she could cry, and she did.

But she was a minority: Most people were behind L. J. whatever he was up to, and they respected his tight mouth because it meant business. Of course, somebody like old Richard the Lion-Heart was so nowhere, so far out of it, that he didn't count one way or the other. Once he asked L. J., "You hear what the lady said, Jack?" and L. J. just spit. Then he tried one more bit of calypso:

In de jungle fightin' he gawt it madeWit' a monkey bawdy an' a coconut head....

But that didn't produce much of a laugh, and after that it seemed old Richard just gave up on L. J. Which was turning the tables in a way, because L. J. and everybody else in the project had given up on him a long time ago. Except for Mary Ann, maybe, and maybe her, too.

They would probably just have gone ahead ignoring each other forever if it hadn't been for what happened one night last May, because if any two people were ever on two different tracks it was L. J. White and Richard the Lion-Heart.

There were three or four nice warm days in a row, the beginning of summer, and then the clouds came in with a little rain about sundown, and then the breeze blew them away. That week in Oakland, the police shot a boy and killed him. People don't take that lying down the way they used to. In the project, talk was that now maybe the movement was going to move--L. J.'s movement, which didn't even have a name. Word had been: Coming for sure, but not quite yet. But everybody had been hearing that, it seemed like forever, and there was a new feeling: half scared and half ready and half tired of waiting. Something like Mrs. Hamilton saying, Why didn't they just drop the bomb and get it over with, only not so nervous, and nobody crying.

Round midnight, the stars came out all over the sky; and a while after that somebody with good eyes saw L. J. glide down the West Block stairs, take a few steps toward the street and stop. He must have learned to spot traps in the jungle. They were across the street in two cars. L. J. doubled back into the Center Block entryway and took a look. They were out there, too. Coming back toward the West stairs again, he must have showed up on their radar someway, because two spotlights came shooting into the court together; and one caught him, not sneaking, not running, just walking easy past Mrs. Birdsong's door. He was gone before the bullhorn said: "All right. White. Stand where you are."

He got up the three flights to West 4 in a hurry, and rapped on the first door he hit, right at the head of the stairs, rapping fast and soft but so you couldn't miss it: and by the time they had the court lit up like the Fourth of July and were coming in after him, about eight of them, some uniforms, some plainclothes, L. J. was out of sight and the door locked. Mary Ann took him right on in.

Three of them came up to take him, one in a Dick Tracy hat and a trench coat and two in uniforms. Right to Prince's place they went, and started out knocking soft and polite, like they didn't want to disturb anybody who hadn't noticed the court full of spotlights and police. And Prince being out in his Yellow Cab, they didn't get any kind of answer. "OK, White, come on out now," the Dick Tracy one said, like he was coaxing a child. "We just want to talk to you." Which you would hardly have called a fair match, L. J. not being much of a talker, and there being about a dozen of them by now, upstairs and down.

"Hear me, White?" said Dick Tracy. And if L. J. didn't hear him, he was the only one in the project who didn't. More lights had gone off than on, and it was dead quiet. You could hear the police-car radios going out in the street; and over in East Block, Lucille Williams' baby started crying.

Blam! they kicked the door in, and waited. They had lots of company. Nothing happened, of course. And it didn't take them any time at all to go through Prince's, places in the project being what they are. "Up here somewhere," said Dick Tracy, and he called down into the court, "Tommy?" and another plainclothes came up the West stairs.

They had a little whisper together, and couldn't agree. Dick Tracy said they should get the bullhorn and call all the people in West Block down into the court. The one he called Tommy didn't like that. "Too many to handle," he said. "Get a couple hundred people down there, bound to cause an incident."

So they decided some of them would start down on West 1 and Dick Tracy would start up on West 4, and they would go through the whole block one place at a time until they found L. J. But just when they were about to begin, Claude Du Hamel up on the east end of Center 3 yelled down to the court: "All you motherfuckers gonna die!" Those S. F. P. D. guns came out like for a shootdown in a Western, but Claude had his lights out; and by the time they began sweeping Center 3 with a spotlight, he was out of sight.

Then up in East 4, somebody hollered, "Get out of here, you sonofabitches!" It must have been Lucille Williams, who you might say had paid off enough police in her line of work to know what she was talking about. And by the time the spotlight looked for her and didn't find her, Claude opened up again. Then up on the west end of Center 4, Mrs. Johnson called out that if they wanted a war, they were going to get a war. For about a minute there, both spotlights were going every which way, with more people yelling down from dark windows and nobody getting caught, so the voices seemed to be coming out of nowhere. Except Mrs. Johnson didn't duck back, and a spotlight lit her up like a movie star, leaning out her window in her old green robe, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing with the other like God Almighty on judgment day.

"Comin' in here the middle of the night with your guns and searchlights! People ain't gonna take no more of it!"

And this Tommy, a thick-built little man with white hair butched off short, called up to her: "You better cool it, lady, you don't want to get arrested."

"You want to arrest me, you better come up here and try it," said Mrs. Johnson. "But you got a lot of stairs to climb first." Yes, she was hot.

Mrs. Birdsong heard Tommy say, "They're just talking; let's get going. Keep those lights down here." And with people all over the project calling them every kind of name, and telling them they were going to die, he started knocking at West 101, Young's place.

Up on West 4, Dick Tracy pounded on old Mrs. Neal's, who is too deaf to wake up for judgment day or the bomb, whichever comes first. When she didn't answer, he told one of the uniforms to write down 401; they would keep a list of the ones that didn't open up. They had already been to West 402, that was Prince's, and the next door was Mary Ann's. Dick Tracy slammed his fist on it like he wanted to make as much noise as the bullhorn he didn't get to use.

Down at West 101, Young didn't answer, nor did Mrs. Jefferson in 102. Young must have been in there, and little Wayne Jefferson should have been in bed, but Alba Jefferson was down on Market Street washing floors at the Flood Building. Mrs. Hamilton didn't answer the door of 103, either, which might have surprised a few people. It looked like they might come up with a list as long as all the numbers in West Block.

Except that after Dick Tracy kicked the door of 403 so hard old Richard's sign fell off, Mary Ann opened it.

"Do you know, uh..." Dick Tracy said, and then he looked at a little piece of paper he took out of his trench coat. "Lord Jeremiah White?" He called it out good and loud, and half the people in West Block found out what L. J. stood for. Lord Jeremiah White, one of those names they just need to see on a job application to tell you, "Sorry, nothing." They don't need any photograph.

"We're looking for a Lord Jeremiah White," Dick Tracy said, before Mary Ann could say whether she knew him or not. And he shined his flashlight on a picture of L. J. so she could see. "We know he's around here; have you seen him?"

"I don't know nobody looks like that," said Mary Ann. "I been sleepin'."

"He lives right next door," Dick Tracy said, like calling her a liar.

"I don't care where he lives, he ain't none of mine." And Mary Ann is standing there in her nightgown like some little old dried-up girl that a stiff breeze would knock her flat. But in the door, with her feet in the hall.

"Mind if we take a look around?" Dick Tracy said. But Mary Ann was already bending over, saying, "Man, you knocked down my sign," so maybe she didn't hear him.

"We'll just have a look around," Dick Tracy said.

"Had that thing nailed on there good," Mary Ann said. "You come up here middle of the night and wake me up, kick my sign down...." One of the uniforms made like to pick up the sign, but Dick Tracy stopped him.

"You gonna let us take a look?" he said. "Save yourself a lot of trouble."

"Man, lemme tell you somethin'. Trouble is one thing I don't never have to save, 'cause I got enough to last me till I die. I cleaned a three-story house today, and I am too tired to stand here arguin' with you." And she stepped back and shut the door in his face; didn't slam it, just closed it and snapped the lock.

Next door in West 404, Mrs. Cleveland and little Jacqueline were holding their breath, and so were a few other people. Dick Tracy was making up his mind. The uniform that wanted to pick up the sign, he said he thought if White were in there, she would never have come to the door. "Write down four-oh-three," Dick Tracy said, and rapped on Mrs. Cleveland's door. She didn't answer.

Neither did anybody else on West 4, nor down on West 1, either; and when they got through, instead of going on to West 2 and 3, Tommy and Dick Tracy got together down in the court and had the same argument all over again. Tommy had a hunch he was either on West 1 somewhere or all the way up on his own floor. Dick Tracy still wanted to call out the whole West Block with the bullhorn, line everybody up in the court. Tommy yelled at one of the uniforms to stay the hell out of the lights, some people had guns up in those windows. He was right about that. Lucille Williams' baby was still screaming bloody murder, and people were calling down from all over East and Center. Even Mrs. Rose Fernandez opened her window and yelled, "Dirty dahgs! Gaw bahck wheah you cawm from!"

"OK, try the horn then," said Tommy, and Dick Tracy must have been mighty pleased, because now he got to use it.

"All right, all you people in West Block, this is the police. Come on down here nice and orderly please. There's a dangerous man in there and we don't want somebody getting hurt."

The whole project shut up. Not a sound from East Block, not even the baby. Not a sound from Center Block. And West Block was really quiet. The police radios were roaring and crackling out in the street, and a uniform told some people out there watching to move along.

"White. Come on out now and save everybody trouble."

"Save your ass, honkie motherfucker." yelled Claude Du Hamel. "You all gonna die!"

"White. You got to come down sometime, tomorrow or the next day. Might as well come on down now." Dick Tracy had what you might call a more friendly style on the bullhorn than face to face.

"All right. Mike," said Tommy. "Hold it a sec." But before he decided what to do next, maybe call the station for some more orders, a uniform came running in from one of the cars and told him something into his ear; and it was like a speeded-up movie how fast they cleared out of the court, and piled into the cars, four of them now, and took off. All anybody heard was "Hunter's Point," but it must have been something big.

"Motherfuckers tryin' to pull somethin'," said Claude Du Hamel. "Everybody stay cool." But he didn't have to say it. Nobody was flying out any doors in a hurry. After maybe 15 minutes, people started peeking out, and maybe talking it over with their next-door neighbor, but that was all. Nobody knocked on Mary Ann's door, and nobody came out.

It might have been some kind of trick, but when old Richard came rattling on home about an hour later, nobody tried to stop him. And he was flying; must have had a good night. He missed the garbage cans, but he didn't make it upstairs any faster or quieter than usual.

I say I'm gonna staht a generalslaughtahIf I don't get me gin an' coconut watahFor as every doctor cahn tellDaht's de med-i-cine keep me fit an'well....

And when he got to the top, he yelled out, "Heah! Heah! Somebawdy been messin' up me sign!" and bam-bam-bam on the door, which must have been ready to fall off its hinges by that time.

Mary Ann forgot to say "Is that you?" so old Richard didn't get to say "Yes it's me and I'm late again," and when the door opened and he saw L. J. standing there with a pistol in his hand, he jumped back a foot or two, and almost fell down the stairs. "Hah!" he yelled, like maybe he was glad to have a reason to carry on some more. He stomped his foot and slammed his fist into his hand. "Now de Lion-Haht in a rage," he said. "Cahtch a mouse in de lion cage...."

"Man, just shut your goddamn mouth," L. J. said. "And get inside here."

And Mary Ann said, "Richard ..." but he wasn't hearing.

Hurry everybawdy, come oat an' seeDe strangest goin's-on in historeeLike he t'ink he Gary Coopah aw Cary GrahntHe bawtherin' me wife like a stingin' ahnt....

The shape he was in, he couldn't have made up that much on the spot. He must have had it stuck away in his head somewhere, like he'd been saving it for the right occasion.

Daht's how de Romeos like to doWhen you turn your bahck for minute aw twoAn' dey always plottin' some kind subversionLike it was a great military ahctionSo all you husbahnd bettah face de truthKeep your wife away from dese sly mongoose....

L. J. came out in one step and hit old Richard one shot backhand across the face with his pistol hand and down he went.

"You goddamn good-for-nothin' brokedown old nigger," L. J. said. "You nothin'. You don't know nothin' about nothin'! The war's on, man, and look at you! Man! You're no kind of man! Black trash on the street, all you are; they been wipin' their feet on you a hundred years----"

And that was when Mary Ann came alongside and hit L. J. She doesn't weigh a hundred pounds after a square meal, but she must have got them all behind it. You could hear it all the way over on East Block.

"Man," she said in a little dry voice, but it had a wire running through it stretched tight. "Man. You got it all figured out, ain't you? Who's a man and who ain't. You know it all, don't you?"

"I missed it," L. J. said. "I been shut up in there two hours and all that old fool could do was----"

"You got no call to be hittin' him like that," Mary Ann said. "What he ever do to you, and him old enough to be your grandfather. But you a man. Yeah, you a bad man. You know it all, don't you? Well, lemme tell you somethin'. You the one don't know nothin'. He may not look like much now. He may not be no hero. But he taken more in his life than you ever gonna know about. Dope couldn't kill him. Police couldn't kill him. And he still gettin' around havin' his fun. Man. You think a man is a damn pistol, don't you? Just like all them police I didn't see you startin' no war with tonight when you was in there hidin' behind the sofa. You just like them."

"Lady, I missed it tonight," L. J. said. His voice was tight and hard, like he might want to shout or cry, but he wasn't going to do either. "Don't you understand that yet? I missed it."

"Aw, man, you got plenty of time," Mary Ann said. "Now go on and get out of here and fight your damn war."

L. J. went down to Rankin's and made a phone call, and Mary Ann got old Richard on his feet. The right side of his face was busted wide open, but it wasn't bleeding much, like maybe it had been hit so many times, it just wouldn't bother anymore. When she led him inside, he started to mumble, all mixed up, in both his styles. "De Lion-Haht gawt he pride," he said, and in his Los Angeles style he said he was going to get a gun and put L. J. out of business.

But an hour before sunrise, Prince's Yellow Cab stopped in front of the project, and L. J. got in and went off, and never came back, which saved Richard the trouble of buying that gun. The very next night he was back on his route with a whole box of Band-Aids stuck on his face. All hell was breaking loose out in Hunter's Point, but it made no difference to him. The whole city looked like it might go up, but at least he had that much Post Office Department in him: Nothing could stay him from his appointed rounds.

And he's still around, just the same as ever. He still comes home every morning and hollers, "Yes it's me and I'm late again!" In other words, he is still nowhere. And as for L. J., he's somewhere.