THAT DEEP FEELING OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

It’s the next night at the high school, the night after Na-Na has hipped me to both the Hawaiin weed and the incredible voice of Etta James…and now we are ready to make our dream a reality.

Na-Na and I meet at the school again that night, me with my LOOK magazine in tow. We go through our herb ritual, he hips me to Al Green, another master of soul, on the boom box, and we get down to business. The business of transforming our creations into a full-scale reality. Me working off the Raquel picture to unleash my Esperanza, he on his scene.

It’s six in the morning again, and I extract myself from my labor of love, to come down to check out what I’ve done. A deep feeling of satisfaction runs through me. Not too bad. There are definitely flaws, no doubt, but I could see Esperanza up there. I had caught in pencil, in charcoal, a good deal of what I wanted to.

I exhale.

I amble over to Na-Na’s side of the room, where he, too, is taking a well-deserved break.

“Holy shit, Na-Na!”

My body goes cold – then frosty.

That face. I immediately recognize that face. It’s the one that was in my sketchbook the morning after the night at The Savoy. The one I have no recollection of. Except this one is way more vivid. Deadly vivid.

It’s not only that it’s that guy’s face, but his whole body is crumpled to the ground. With a pencil in his neck. Another guy, a pimp, apparently, is standing right over him. Victorious. Like a linebacker. Like Dick Butkus standing over a fallen running back, after he had just made a game saving stuff at the one-yard line. There’s another guy, too. Crouching next to him, who’s jeering at the guy on the ground, or maybe exhorting him to get back up. The thing is, the detail in the fallen guy’s face is freakin’ chilling.

He did it, Na-Na did. He had captured that netherworld look of a dude in the last couple of milliseconds of his life. As it’s ebbing away. Brutal.

Just as intense, is the almost blank, yet satanic smirk on the face of the pimp, who had apparently just offed him. He knew he had won, but it was almost like it didn’t matter, either.

Na-Na’s form was still kind of crude though, I think. Rough. I definitely have technique up on him. But the thing is, I think he might have totally just nailed that expression of the guy. The essence - maybe better than I have done with Esperanza. I feel both a sense of jealousy, and admiration, running through me at the same time. It’s hard to take your eyes off it. This is what happened that night at The Savoy. Whoa.  Spooky.

As I step back to take it all in, I’m struck by the contrast in our styles. His characters are smaller than my full-length portrait, kind of representative type art. Exaggerated features – bodies, muscles. Sort of tribal. African. The same style he had shown me in his sketches before, only even more pronounced now.  But the whole thing works, somehow. We pack up and leave…both feeling, I’m sure, like, we had definitely accomplished something here.  One more night to go.

THE ETTA JAMES VIBE

 Me and Na-Na are in the art room, we just smoked some Hawaiin, and He has put in some amazing music in the cassette player.

I pick up my pencil, no way I’m gonna mess this up with charcoal. Slowly, I take it to the wall, struggling to keep this snapshot, this essence, in my mind and transfer it to this wall before it fades away, like déjà vu.

Hesitantly, I start putting down the preliminary lines, trying to get the proper shapes, the perspective. I was never great at drawing bodies before, not of this magnitude, this size, anyway. No, I am a face man. It’s daunting. I’m shaky. You know when you instinctively know that you have this really phenomenally great idea, but it’s almost kind of too overwhelming? This is it.  Please God, don’t let me fuck this up!    

So, I’m sketching now, tentatively, delicately. So afraid to blow it, yet so much wanting to express it. I’m in and out of the flow, trying in vain to nail that curve of the shoulder, over and over, but no matter what - it’s just not coming. Now frustrated and feeling thwarted, I’ve been vaguely aware of the music in the background. Until this voice - this AMAZING voice - jolts me out of my self-consciousness, forcing me to put down my pencil. I don’t know if it’s being magnified by the Hawaiian, or what, but her voice just freakin’ BLOWS ME AWAY. It is so real. She practically moans through this whole song, no words, but she puts it over with such a sense of heartbreak, of such genuine conviction and realness – that words just could not portray it. Beautiful. Piercing through some hazy level of my unconscious, the recognition of its truth lodges in my throat, and it is choking me up. I don’t want Na-Na to see me getting all emotional, so I try to hide it, while rhythmically swaying back and forth to the music on the ladder.  

Finally, I can’t repress myself any longer; I have to know who this is!

“Na, man, who is this singing?”

“Etta James, my man, Etta James.”

At that moment, it flashes through me.  Another secret door to black culture has just been opened to me, and that in some way it would change me forever. This transcends just black music! It’s deeper than that. Whatever it is - this is what I want my mural to be about! I know it, without even being able to put it into words.

Infiltrated. Seduced. Inspired. Listening. Listening. Listening. Etta James, man. I’d Rather Go Blind, Almost Persuaded, All I Could Do Was Cry. The songs just go on and on.

 All of a sudden, it just clicks! I’m able to go beyond my perceived limitations, elevate my game – my pencil begins gliding over the wall. Smooth, tranquil. Focused. Catching me by surprise, the morning sun peeking in through the classroom window, snaps me out of this trance.  I look up at the clock - 6:35 in the morning! Six hours had passed! We quickly pack up and I scamper home before my parents awaken.

THE TRIBUTE

So there we are, me and Na-Na, sitting in the art room we have just broken into. We have just smoked up that joint of Hawaiin. It’s that quiet moment before the storm.

“Yo, Strong, what we was talking ‘bout? Les’ get to work, man.” With that, we break the tranquility of the moment, and start busily setting up the two small ladders Silverstein’s got in the back of the room.

I climb up and perch myself on the top. Just me and that wall now. The wall is more wide than high; more so than I had figured it to be. Maybe Silverstein was right all along – maybe I don’t have a clear sense of perspective. No way can I do the portrait of Esperanza standing up, like I had imagined it.  I close my eyes now; just letting go, thoughts and various images drifting in and out of my consciousness. No concrete focus yet though, it’s all fluid. I feel the weight of the pencils and charcoal in my hands, as the minutes clock by. The strike of a match redirects my thoughts. I hear Na-Na climb off down his ladder, the click of a cassette tape being inserted into the boom box’s tape player follows. The whir of the mechanism as it starts up, and the smoke from a Kool wafts through the air, circling my nostrils.

Igniting a new set of images, circulating through the screen of my memory. It transports me back to the smoke of Esperanza’s Virginia Slim, when we were standing outside in front of Tijeras de Oro. The day I finally had dragged up the courage to ask her out.  She gave me her number. That was the last time I saw her. The Dentyne gum she was chewing, the roar of the motors and black smoke, exploding from the tailpipes of the buses as they sped by.

That carries me back to the first day I ever saw her - a nasty, sopping boiler of a day, in late August.  Had to be at least 100 degrees. Relentless sun driving through the polluted haze. Even the flies buzzing you from the nearby dog-shit on the curb are dragging ass.  I see this insanely breath-taking girl in this Puerto Rican beauty salon. I halt mid-step, staring in incredulousness.

Daaaamn!

Their air conditioner must be broken, because all the beautician ladies are plopped down on the chairs, the ones who don’t have customers. Flushed, fanning themselves furiously with takeout menus from the Kim Wah, the Chinese restaurant across the street.

There she is. Esperanza. Stretched out on one of the small sofa-like waiting chairs. Legs curled up a bit behind her, right arm propping up her head in a way that totally accentuates every curve. Effortlessly exhaling that Virginia Slim, watching the rings of smoke dissipate into the heavy mugginess. The thing is, the girl is not even sweating! She is so ice. How could anyone look so hot on such a miserable day? 

A shiver, like downing a frozen Slurpee shakes me into another memory. A centrefold of Raquel Welch, in LOOK magazine last year. Lying in exactly the same position - except she’s wearing a full-length, white mink coat. Shit, I don’t know how many times I fawned devotedly over that picture. I still have it in my room, as a matter of fact.

BAM!

That’s what I would do! I would draw Esperanza in that same reclining position. Like a double tribute!

IT'S REALLY GOING DOWN!!

So here I am - it’s really gonna go down…we’re actually gonna break into the art room…holy shit!

Na-Na is there as advertised, standing in front of Roselle High, toothpick in mouth. He’s twirling his umbrella, and thrusting it forward in the night air, as if stabbing imaginary people, I presume.

“Yo, champ.”

“Hey, whassup, Na-Na?”

“Damn, my man be fierce, an’ shit, last night.”

I smile, trying to play cool, but now my curiosity is really aroused.

“What the fuck happened last night, man?”  

He studies me for a few seconds, I guess trying to figure out if I’m kidding, or not. He shakes his head, chuckles, and clucks his tongue, then picks up this huge boom box and knapsack.

We head towards the parking lot, to the green fire exit door on the side. I look at Na-Na, wondering what his plans are, as he pulls out this tremendous set of keys from his coat pocket. Where he got them? Who knows? Feeling our way into the darkness of the hall, he flicks on his gold plated lighter. We bound stealthily up the stairwell, our footsteps echoing like Goliath into the empty midnight hour.  

The spooky glow of the shadows cast by Na-Na’s flame, infuse me with a strange type of giddiness. I’m imagining I’m in one of those Adventures of Johnny Quest cartoons I used to watch on Saturday mornings. Exploring some ancient, forbidden underground temple in Egypt, or some crazy place like that. Suddenly, I get this uncontrollable impulse to yell out in that Indian kid, Hajji’s, accent.

“Johnny, Johnny! Race! Dr. Quest - look - it is the sacred jewel of the mythical Monkey God, Babaganush!”  One glance at Na-Na, though, and I resist that urge. Who was that kid Hajji anyway? And why was he always following around Dr. Quest, Johnny, and Race Banyon?

We march our way through the second floor corridor, till we finally reach the object of our illicit journey. Mr. Silverstein’s art classroom. Na-Na opens that door with another one from his magic set of keys, we switch on the lights - and it’s all right there in front of us, now. Gazing up at that wall above the closet in the back, the wonder of it all just stone hits me. This is to be the canvas that will fuel our revolutionary hunger. Whoa.

 Inexplicably, in the next second, pangs of fear and anxiety with all the force of a typhoon crash through me. Obliterating the exhilaration that had filled me on the way up here. Now, the wall seems to me a towering monolith of epic impossibility.  

This is gonna take, like, Michelangelo type of talent!  Who am I to even attempt to immortalize Esperanza like this? She is so beautiful. I don’t know if Na-Na reads the panic expressing itself in the sudden paleness of my face.  Maybe he does.  Maybe he doesn’t. He sets up his boom box on one of the tables.  

“Yo, Strong, check it out, man.  This be Hawaiian, man - this be the shit for creatin’.” 

He torches up the monster spliff he’s got in his hand, takes in a couple of major hits, and passes it off to me. I grab it warily, remembering last night when I nearly hacked to death. Man, I’m already feeling super uncool right now, I don’t need to sink even further in esteem. I close my eyes and pull in a toke. Fuck it.  

“My special blend a’ herbs and spices.” Na-Na says, the smoke still cascading out of his mouth. 

To my great surprise, this stuff goes down easy. Nothing like last night. No burning my throat or chest this time.  No, this is a distinct and different flavor and feeling. We just sit there in the night silence, me and Na-Na. Handing off to each other, puffing totally mellow. No laughing. No coughing.