Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [40]
Except Tyrone wasn’t looking for heat. Nor trash-talking, nor liquid gold, dime bags, or pretty young things. Even though he’d sampled all the Strip’s offerings during the year he’d been here—small samplings because he still loved the Lord. But his real reason for being on this corner of Fifty-second and Walnut, his cotton shirt collar on the outside of his windbreaker jacket, struggling against the bristle in the March air to light a Pall Mall cigarette, leaning, as if he’d been leaning on corners on the Strip all his life, was for a confirmation of his manhood.
His mother had moved him from Philadelphia when he was three back to the uppity section of Virginia where she was from, a furious move precipitated by Perry’s infidelities. He’d acquired the nickname Mama’s boy, growing up. Even when Perry would go down to Virginia to try to see him, try to take him out for a pop or an ice-cream cone, Tyrone would cry that he wanted his mother to come too. And Perry got so frustrated after a couple of years of three, four times a year trying to spend some time with his son and being met with Tyrone’s cries for his mother and his ex-wife’s satisfied, smug expression that he stopped trying to see him altogether. His father should have kept coming, Tyrone reasoned. One or two more years and he would have passed through that mommie-attachment stage. But a year ago Tyrone left Virginia for Philadelphia. Closed his eyes and took a hatchet to the too thick cord binding him to his overly protective mother, who, even though he was in his twenties, had tried to keep him from finally establishing a relationship with Perry (he was a teenager before he realized that his father’s name wasn’t “two-timing no-good louse”).
So as he finished his cigarette and smashed the butt on the ground outside Brick’s after-hours spot and stepped inside the blue air that rippled with perfumed sweat and laughter, adjusting his eyes to the smoky dimness, the rest of him to the cloud of heat that fell heavily once he was all the way inside, he knew that he wasn’t here entirely to satisfy a thrill for the nightlife on the Strip. He was here mostly for his father.
“You got to pay to play, daddy.” An oversized outstretched palm rose to his eye level even before the door closed behind him.
“No problem, bud,” he said, trying to thin his accent. He reached into his pocket and pulled up a five-dollar bill. “Does this cover it?”
“Covers it.” The palm closed over the money and then extended itself, ushering Tyrone deeper into the club’s dimness.
Tyrone had not been here before, but he had heard his father mention it to his patrons who frequented the Strip. “My lady, Hettie, don’t like me in there,” he remembered his father saying. “Those foxes in there hungry.”
Tyrone would try to get in on the conversations when he’d hear his father talking like that. He’d say something like “Yeah, Pops, they hungry, hunh?” But instead of a sly smile shared between men, he’d see a smirk on his father’s face that seemed to say that he was just a vulnerable country bumpkin only a knot away from his mother’s apron strings. And then the smirk would darken on his father’s face, turn to a look of parental worry when Tyrone would drop the names of his favorite spots on Fifty-second Street. “You outta your league down there, Ty,” Perry would say. “Even I watch my back on the Strip, and I cut my eyeteeth in places like that.”
This place was packed. Tyrone had to angle himself sideways to get to the bar, where