What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

“Come and go with me back to my country,” he said. “You will be loved by my whole family, you will have my children. It is not like it is here. You are lost here. No one loves you here. In my country you will be a queen, life will be your plaything, the sky will always be blue when you are there, the rains will only come when you remember a sadness.”

Mrs. Knights closed. And These Eyes, where the marquee was a purple-rimmed eye, that was gone too. Jackie’s father loved the deejay there. His name was Maceo, and he could spin some rhythm and blues like nobody’s business. The Web was gone too—DJ Ghetto Soul used to play there and Grand Master—and the Upstairs Side Door closed last, and anyway it wasn’t such a funky place. All the glamour left, in other words, the chance to show a bit of style and flash. All the people who looked like they were famous, like the pimps and whores, all the athletes and the intellectuals, the jazz aficionados, the newcomers from down home, the just-comes from the Caribbean, all of them had to fly solo, go places where nobody knew them.

Jackie’s mother and father could take hard time, anyone in the Park could. But the thought of hard time without even the relief of the Paramount was unbearable. What’s life without a little fantasy, a little Diana Ross, a little Chilites, some Bobby Womack, some Billy Paul, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes? Well enough if your fridge didn’t work, if your sofa was on credit, had a spring busted, if, Jesus, you were one dime short of a dollar, but what was life if your imagination didn’t work? If you couldn’t see yourself strutting into the Paramount to the appreciation, the love of other dreamers like yourself? If no one else could verify your state of cool existence? Not a single soul who could say that last Saturday you were the flyest, the baddest, the most solid dancer/lover/dresser; the one with the edge like a razor, the slickest, funkiest, the most crisp, the sleekest, the foxiest, the most outta sight, the wickedest in the whole damn place. Well, that’s the end, isn’t it? That’s the bottom, that’s the final. And Jackie’s mother and father weren’t thirty yet when the Paramount closed.

But Jackie couldn’t wait for them to find bottom, she had to save them from the downstroke. The bottom was the Duke of Connaught, and she had no intentions of going in there to find them. The Duke wasn’t dangerous, it was just sad. Full of might-have-beens and should-haves. It was a dive on Queen Street across from the Kentucky Fried Chicken long before that side of Queen Street became trendy. And even now the Duke still maintains that down-and-out feel, as if its ugliness were so congenital that not even the trendy makeovers all around it could change it. All the glamour and daring of the Paramount had come to a colourless rest at the Duke. Some didn’t have the heart for it, so they stayed home. The Duke just wasn’t made up to be glamorous. It smelled of wet carpet and beer spills, the walls were a dishevelled cousin of moss green, the lighting was sickly. No, the Duke depended on lost hopes, it depended on crushed spirits, it was not there to cheer you up, it was there to trawl in all the phlegm of your life; the I-never-got-to-do-this-and-that, the wrong-headed mistakes, the unavoidable ones, the inevitability of ending up at the Duke, which you had always seen in your face when you woke up in the morning but disregarded in your enthusiasm for life, your love for someone, and your lust for fun. The Duke was always lurking in the mirror—the bald-faced bad luck of it, the straight-up knowing of it. There was the Duke, waiting to swallow you. There was the Duke, ready to swaddle you in its seedy arms; there was the worn-out shuffleboard table, the deep bar chairs, the smell of spunky beer on tap. Didn’t make sense putting a good dress on to come here, didn’t make sense trying to hold up any attitude. If you came here, dressed in your fly threads, the Duke showed up that they were really cheap, that they were bought down on Spadina off the back of a truck. Didn’t make sense going to Gabriel Kay’s apartment to see what he had heisted from Holt Renfrew; it would be wasted at the Duke. The Duke stripped you naked in an ugly kind of way. Every person in there looked like they were ashamed to be there, like they had lost respect for themselves and therefore each other. If you strutted into the Paramount, you slid into the Duke.

So when Jackie heard her mother and father talking about going to the Duke—“Well, maybe I’ll just step down to the Duke tonight,” her father said. “Yeah, think anything’s shakin’ there?” Her mother. “Gotta hook up with Gabriel, said he had some business thing.” Her father. “Well, maybe I’ll tag along. Leave Jackie with Liz,” her mother said—she knew it was the end. She had felt their restlessness for weeks, ever since the Paramount closed down. First they had been mournful. “Sheeeet, why’d they have to go and do that, man? For all the money I spent up in there, just that shoulda been enough to keep that place open.” Her father. They’d even sworn they would never go to the Duke. “Never find me in that place. Ain’t got enough room to swing a cat and they play some country shit in there.” Her mother. They held out a good few weeks, Jackie’s father stroking that particular spot in his beard, switching from the television to the stereo. He loved Wilson Pickett. He played “When a Man Loves a Woman” over and over again, saying to Jackie’s mother, “Hear that, girl! Hear that?