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Johnny Truffles speaking. Giovanni Garibaldi Tartufo.
DECEMBER 6 - 52ND ST., BIRDLAND STREET
Cold night.
A letter comes in the mail this morning, and Wanda brings it up to me while I'm still in bed. It's from the woman who helped me escape from the Dominican Republic when the Tonton Macoutes were after me. I've thought about her a few times. I was drinking coffee and reading the letter. There were snow flurries outside.
I gave her the beat-up pink Coupe DeVille I'd driven over the border from Haiti, and she's writing to complain about the engine. She wants to know if I work on Cadillac engines. She's had it painted by experts, restored, and she says it's beautiful.
The last time I saw her she was running along the beach at the waterfront in Barahona, waving goodbye. Her friend the blonde was shooting Polaroids of my departure on the rusty freighter, and the freighter was headed north.
At night she put on a red wig and was the featured canary in a show at the place with no name, over on L'Overture Street near the docks. There's one bare bulb outside, and down one flight of concrete stairs and through the steel door you discover a nine-piece band playing hoodoo yambu calypso music. We met because the Conjure Man wanted to see her show and he wanted me to come along. She sat down at our table after the first set, and then we were off. It was a fast-moving thing.
I call her this afternoon and find out she's in trouble. She didn't bring it up, but I could hear it in her voice even though she was sounding breezy on the surface. She wanted to know what my favorite Xmas song was, and I was listing the contenders: "Blue Christmas" by Elvis, "Christmas Mawnin'" by Titus Turner, "White Christmas" by Al Green, "Christmas Mornin' Blues" by Victora Spivey and Her Chicago Four, or "Christmas in Heaven" by James Brown.
I'm here at the bar daydreaming, and Rousseau walks in and calls me Jean Paul because I got the trenchcoat on and the silk scarf around my neck. He walks back to the jukebox, dancing around.
Everything tells me I should stay here. All indicators are don't go. I escaped from there. There's no good reason to fly down there. Fly down there and rent a car. Cruise around in the sunshine on those south-coast roads between Boca Chica and Santo Domingo and Barahona. A fast low convertible with full sound. Check into the Villa Blanca, my hotel on the beach.
This is what I was able to get from her: Her ex-boyfriend was thrown into a prison cell and now some thug cop is trying to shake her down. She's lost it for the ex-boyfriend, but the cop has something on her.
Rousseau finally gets back to the bar, and eventually we exchange some thoughts on this subject. He's got Barrett Strong singing "Money (That's What I Want)" and he's smoking a cigarette and dancing around in his camel topcoat and saying it's an all-time classic.
"Barrett Strong is singing with conviction! Barrett Strong wants money!" he says.
The thug cop's name is Big Bobby Blue, and she says he walks through the streets of Santo Domingo like Idi Amin. He's got juice in Santo Domingo and in all the surrounding regions of the south. They say he's got connections across the Atlantic, in Rwanda and Burundi, where his father is Hutu royalty. That's what they say about Big Bobby Blue.
I'm beginning to get some ideas about what Big Bobby Blue can do with his connections on the Dark Continent. And about what his father the Royal Hutu can do, too.
"The cops of Hispaniola are hardcase oppressors with animal eyes," Rousseau says. "I've been down there. They are ruthless and wicked and they have no honor. You won't be able to make one mistake. You make a mistake and you're history," he says. "We'll be displaying your dead-Johnny body in here for a day or two, on the thin chance we get it back, and then we'll be testifying at your funeral."
"Music and testimony, that's what I want," I tell him.
I squeeze my right arm with my left hand to remind myself that it's damaged forever. I took a hit from Hassan Habib Salah down on South Street six months ago. He came out of nowhere.
It was a .45 slug that mushroomed through some muscle and also shattered bone. And this was a millisecond before I dropped this wildly firing Muhammad with one perfect shot from the Python, left-handed. He was bouncing around shouting some kababba shababba and holding his Glock sideways, but Hassan Habib Salah is now eating lamb in paradise.
"Eat lamb in paradise" were the last words this Abdullah heard on earth.
Then, Bobby Three-Heads and I got the speedboat and hauled his dead-rughead Mustapha body out into the middle of the East River, where it took the slow drop. Hassan Habib Salah got the slow drop.
I took a big hit from this hopping Muhammad. He dropped a bomb on me.
DECEMBER 18, AROUND DAWN
26 degrees and 26 mph winds outside my window. Lights coming on across the city, and other lights fading out. All shades of grey and some blue-black in the sky.
I get my coffee, put on two flannel shirts, a topcoat and a scarf, a pair of driving gloves, and take the freight elevator up to the roof -- where I have a view of the bridge.
JANUARY 13 - BOCA CHICA
Humid and overcast.
I'm here on the south coast at the Villa Blanca, and I'm drinking some rum and crushed fruit in the heat of the Dominican Republic. By night I've been lighting up out here on this terrace, watching the moon and its effects on the water, listening to the waves break. By day I've been cruising into Santo Domingo where Greta and I have been meeting at the Dos Hermanos Cafe. We have a few drinks at the bar and then we take a table in the cool shadows of The Dos Hermanos. We talk and get drinks and smoke a few cigarettes and listen to the music and order lunch around 3:00 or 3:30. Then we take the afternoon siesta cruise in one of the mule carts that are always waiting outside. Slowly she tells me the story.
I've also gotten my first looks at Big Bobby Blue. I've seen him here and there. I pay attention when he's in sight, and so far I've noticed two weaknesses -- one is, he suffers from pride, and two is white women. Big Bobby Blue walking around town with his entourage of voodoo gangsters in sunglasses, wearing their gumbo of uniforms from around the world. Big Bobby Blue with the ribbons and the medals across his chest and down to his knees.
In the Dos Hermanos, people move slowly. They sweat a little under the stainless steel ceiling fans and keep their best energies in reserve. They move around at their own paces, in the daytime and also during the blue nights of Caribe.
JANUARY 19 - SANTO DOMINGO
"Bobby wants me to go to Africa with him," she says finally. "And stay there for three weeks while the Mombassa Long-Congo celebration goes on. Tribes come from high in the mountains and deep in the jungle to do river-jamba all day and all night. He says that if I don't do it, one night he will come and take me to the house on Lago Enriquillo. I was there at a party last year. He's told me what he plans to do after he takes me there, and if I say anything about it, to anyone, he'll have me imprisoned on drug charges."
He gave her a choice.
A flaw of character brings me here, and I waste ten or fifteen seconds thinking about why I'm doing this, about what my motives are.
JANUARY 24 - VILLA BLANCA
Some things have been going on.
Greta and I can't agree on what to do. I told her I'll get her out of the country and bring her up to the City. She can stay with me until she decides what to do. But she wants to go to the Long-Congo Jamba. Whatever she decides to do after she gets there is her business. It'll be her business. Then it'll be finished and Big Bobby Blue won't have anything on her.
She calls it paying the debt, and she wants the debt settled.
For a few moments only, I feel like a supporting character in Greta's developing story of herself.
Also, I met Big Bobby Blue. He came in through the doorway of the Dos Hermanos yesterday afternoon, two of his voodoo-macoute thugs in sunglasses stayed up front around the windows, and he walked straight over to our table.
We talked for awhile. I told him he was an impressive officer of the law and I asked about some of his medals, I invited him to come to New York. On me. I told him I'd take him around town. He made the same offer to me -- a few weeks in Africa. I can travel with Greta and him. He'll show me around Rwanda. He says, "I'll drive or you can drive, take your pick. Or we can use the family driver." He has a deep voice and he projects like a reggae-mon coconut orator.
We can ride around Rwanda with some Hutu at the wheel.
She's resisting my idea, and the question is how much force to exercise and how much energy to summon. I don't have to exercise or summon anything. I can just let her do it.
Or I can work at convincing her she's got diminished capes if she believes he'll honor any deal he makes.
She's sleeping out on the deck in a long chair, under a beach towel.
It's no contest. If she does it, I'm driving up to Puerto Plata and flying out of there on Aero Tropicana Caribe. I'll blast outta Puerto Plata in a jet.
JANUARY 28 - IN THE 59 IMPALA WITH THE WHITEWALLS
I'm doing 35 miles an hour in the sunshine, along the north coast, here beside the strong and blue-green Atlantic, heading west into Puerto Plata. I got the Atlantic to my right, and to my left I see some blue horses. I have some new sunburn, and the ocean breezes are whipping things around. I'm in no hurry so I took the long way up here -- east to Cape Engano and then northwest along the coast and along Bahia Samana.
Don't ask me what I'm doing here. It was useless. Nothing practical came of it. The Caribbean Queen's not the smartest chick I ever spent a couple of weeks with.
The truth is, I hadn't remembered her in the right proportions.
Barahona Boca Chica Cape Engano Villa Blanca Puerto Plata Bappa-Hutu Bappa-Hoodoo. Bappa-Hutu Bappa-Hoodoo.
FEBRUARY 3 - 52ND ST.
Cold Saturday morning. 25 degrees and 20 mph winds.
I'm at the table by the window with Frankie Panorama and Bobby Three-Heads. We're having some Medaglia D'Oro, which Bobby says should be a controlled substance, and we're having some fresh-squeezed and some hot buttered buckwheats with thick bacon, crisp.
I'm telling them about Greta and about this phone call that came in about 10:30 last night from Byumba, northeast of Kigali.
They're reading the Post and listening and they want to hear the whole story before they say much. Every now and then one of them asks a question. It's what about this and what about that.
"Describe her legs," Bobby says.
It was a bad connection and she was cut off in less than five minutes, but she told me things had gone bad fast; the worst imaginable things had happened. Now she's decided to attempt an escape from Rwanda on a night train and ride all the way across the heart of darkness to Kinshasa.
If she makes it there, her plan is to hide in the city until she finds a way out. She'll check into The Hotel Lumumba Congulu on Avenue Bassa-Gombe as Carol Berry for five days. It can't be more than five days.
"Remember Carol Berry," she says.
Chuck Berry sang "Carol," so it's easy.
I ask for details, but there's all this static and crackling on the line and then she's gone. She says central Africa has descended into intermittent months of full-blown chaos since the assassination of President Laurent-Desire Kabila and the ascention of his son, Joseph. Joseph Kabila, whom she met, strikes her as a pimp and a jungle orchid. She thinks he conspired with the military to have his father killed. Regardless, there's tribal rage and big-eyed cannibal craziness throughout the region.
Kinshasa. Kinshasa. Oochie chang-chang oochie tang-tang. Oochie oochie tang-tang. Chaka Khan Chaka Khan.
Frankie asks me if I'm in love with her and I say no, so he wants me to describe the obligation I feel. I tell him she helped me escape from the Tonton Macoutes and get out of Barahona on the rusty freighter and that she did it with style.
"Maybe she's not as dumb as you think she is," Frankie says. "Maybe she has something going on with Bobby Blue."
"Maybe that's it," I say. I've thought about it. It's been a ruled-in possibility from the start. Half of me believed it as soon as I got to Santo Domingo and saw what was going on.
And maybe it'll be no way out for Greta if I don't fly over there. And maybe she's playing me for a chump.
I'm not sure how to read this, and it's a first.
FEBRUARY 11 - HOTEL LUMUMBA CONGULU, KINSHASA
I've been here for a few days now, here on the Avenue, L'Avenue Bassa-Gombe.
It's Sunday morning. We're at a table on the sidewalk and I'm reading a crisp copy of the Kinshasa Gazette. The air smells like African exhausts, the jungle, coffee, animals, and odd spices. Over here it's the odd spice smells, everywhere you go, indoors and out.
I'm smiling at her, she's smiling at me, and I still only have the three possibilities. One, what she says is true and Bobby Blue is trying to kill her. Two, she and Bobby Blue have a plan for me, and if so I'll have to make a pre-emptive strike. Three, she's making it up as she goes along.
Maybe she makes it up as she goes along.
We're looking at each other's disguises and smiling. She's wearing Kinshasa sunglasses and a black wig, with a gauzy tan scarf over her head and down over part of her face. It's a simple disguise. She's Carol Berry.
And I got a afro-white robe on, and a straw hat. We're in disguise. Big Bobby Blue can go blind looking for us.
After we finish here, maybe we'll take a ride into the jungle and look for Mobutu Shamamakula.
Oochie tang-tang, oochie lang-lang, oochie oochie tang tang lang lang. Oochie chang chang.
FEBRUARY 17 - KATANGA MAU-MAU
Saturday in the jungle. 79 degrees, cloudy, winds calm, 96% humidity.
We've been in here for four days now, in this village among the trees and shadows.
There are monkeys sitting in the trees around us and flying through the canopy doing the monkey chatter. I've been watching them and listening, and I've learned what they're saying to each other. They're easy to understand, but no two are the same.
Leopards are nearby, and there are cheetahs on the savannah 70 miles away.
It took us two days to get here, and it was dirt and mud roads all the way. Storks in the trees and water buffalo along the river banks.
I was thinking that I'd rather go up against any animal in Africa other than a water buffalo. I could handle lions by getting big, by holding a staff over my head and walking toward them slowly, smacking the staff down every 15 seconds to give them something to think about. But I might lose to a water buffalo. They're no-nonsense. Cats have imagination.
Hippos in the water. Leaping gazelles. Crocodiles, herds of wildebeest and zebra, running lions. Apes. All kinds of primates.
During the drive, Greta began telling me about her ride across the heart of darkness two weeks ago. She described segments of it, and she was hinting that she'd killed someone on the train with a weapon of opportunity.
I'm here in this hammock, about five feet from Mobutu Shamamakula's, and he's been telling me about the Spearmen. He's got a melon-green turban on. Blondie is on his boom box.
His tribe once produced the Cheetah Spearmen, a brotherhood of fighters renowned from the lower edge of the Sahara to Zululand for speed and stealth.
They were the most feared and admired warriors on the continent. For sport and training they would stalk cheetahs, alone, and only when the cats were in full sprint would they hurl their long wooden spears. The greatest among them could send a spear on a line through a cheetah's heart with each shining throw.
They wore only cheetah skins and skulls, nothing else. They painted their faces to look like cheetahs, and they carried no shields, opting instead for a sheaf of ten or twelve extra spears across their backs. They approached battle zones stepping lightly, with their heads low and extended like stalking cats.
The enemy usually scattered in terror the moment the Cheetah Spearmen appeared. The few who stayed to fight, out of bravado or because they were deluded, took instant shafts through the chest and dropped so fast they seemed attached at the neck to powerful springs which jerked them backward to the ground.
The world was full of cheetahs then, there were cheetahs galore, the plains to the east were thick with cheetahs. It was another world.
Soon after the Industrial Revolution, when guns began to appear all over Africa, the Cheetah Spearmen disappeared and live now only in legend and deep memory.
The last one died in 1906 at the age of 37, a picture of great warrior form, shot to death at 90 yards by eight hunters from Leopoldville with German rifles. The Last Cheetah Spearman was coming after these hunters, making the traditional approach through golden grass on a bright afternoon in August.
That's what Mobutu Shamamakula says.
LATER
I'm taking my new hat out of the box, the Panama I bought last week in the lobby of the Lumumba Congulu. This model is called The Ecuador Smooth.
After working the brim of the Smooth to get the angle right, to get the rake, I lean left in the hammock to allow Greta the pleasure of this sight. She's stretching by the table, and when she's finished, she comes over and stretches out in one of the hammocks. About the same time, a Congo Howler drops out of a tree and lands in the standing position. This tall monkey walks straight toward her, cool-eyed and full of swagger, sounding like a gorilla and carrying some piece of smashed fruit.
He stops about five feet from her, steps back, cuts into a slide move, and shuffles forward again with his head cocked to the left. He drops the fruit and starts snapping his fingers to get rid of some seeds and pulp. Then this monkey shoots his arms out to the side, spins around once, and begins dancing to Mobutu Shamamakula's music -- first to this, and then to this.
The Howler's got the moves, and Greta is looking this signifying simian over. This monkey sees himself as a dancin' man.
When the show's over and the monkey's back up in the tree, Shamamakula looks over at some ground-vultures and says, "Look. The three of us can take Bobby Blue and anybody he wants to bring with him."
MARCH 2 - KATANGA MAU-MAU
We're pulling outta here. We got the word that Bobby Blue and three heavily armed Macoutes left Kinshasa yesterday morning in a hot-rod V-8 Jeep and are headed this way with murder on their minds. The word on L'Avenue Bassa-Gombe is that they're hauling AK-47s, Thompsons, grenade launchers, and some big-bore handguns.
They've got more firepower, more manpower, and more horsepower, but we got the stealth. Mobutu Shamamakula says he knows the perfect place to spring an ambush, and we're gonna do the job. We've got a plan.
MARCH 3
I'm driving fast down this red-dirt jungle road. Everybody's hair is flying, even Mobutu Shamamakula's. We're pressing deep into the jungle, toward Kisangani, in this WWII Special-Deluxe Model designed by Germans for swamp and jungle war. We're gonna engage them at a mountain crossroads between the river and the Uganda border.
"Baby have you got enough gas?" Greta asks.
"Look. Full tank," I tell her. I ask her what she's talking about.
They got the sound way up.
"It's from the song that just played," she says. "Prince."
Then Shamamakula says, "Funky Cold Medina."
I don't know what they're talking about. I'm thinking about the showdown.
Between us we have my Model 66, which I mailed to myself Fed-Ex from New York, and his M-16. One world-class revolver and one world-class Vietnam-era rifle. That's it.
"It's all we need," he says. And I agree. They got an arsenal, but we got the grace of movement.
Funky Coleman heater. I'm thinking about King Oliver too. Maybe we want to enlist him for that moment when we turn the tables on Big Bobby Blue and his Jeepfull of Macoutes.
"Tear The Roof Off The Sucker (Give Up the Funk. We Want The Funk. Give Up the Funk.)" comes on and Greta climbs up into the front seat and makes Shamamakula get in the back. She turns it down a couple of notches and gets close to my ear and starts telling me more about her train ride west across the Congo from Rwanda on the night train.
It turns out to be a good story and I almost believe it.
She left Byumba just after dark with one bag and a steel briefcase. It was raining and she was soaking wet. She got into her compartment and was drying off with some towels as the train left the station.
Nothing happened until they got into Bombahasu, just before midnight. She was looking out the window as they pulled into the overgrown one-bulb station, and through the steam she saw a man and woman in big hats waiting on the platform. She wasn't sure what to think of them, their western silhouettes were so unusual and unexpected, so about 1:00 she went looking for them in the club car and they were there.
The three of them had drinks and talked, and after about 90 minutes of this the woman in the big hat invited her to smoke contraband with them in their compartment.
It was opium and she had a good time.
This train stops three or four times an hour, and during the next day the coach cars were jammed with all kinds of local traffic including chickens and pigs.
She spent most of this day taking naps in her compartment and looking out at the jungle. When she was awake, she also looked at the villages when they appeared, and at the people and animals near the tracks, and at the streams and rivers. She browsed through a stack of French and Belgian military magazines.
After dark, she freshened up in her private washroom and made her way to the club car. The man and woman weren't there yet, and she ordered a bottle of Fela Kuti Yoruba wine and a sandwich.
The couple arrived about 8:00, and by 10:30 or 11 they were all back in the compartment zoned on opium, or appeared to be. The man was passive, as he'd been the night before, and hardly spoke. The woman, though, was attentive to Greta and also intent on details.
But this time, Greta had only pretended to smoke because she'd glimpsed the handle of a semi-automatic in the woman's bag as they were pressing against each other getting through the tight doorway.
She's lying on the seat across from them, listening to the Kikuyu jazz and watching them in the candlelight. The woman reaches for the .380 as they're rolling into a tunnel, but Greta is ready and gives her a quick two-foot kick to the wrist before she can get a good grip on it. The gun bounces off the window glass and hits the floor.
Sometimes Greta gets swept away by the details of a story and tells it the long way. Sometimes she resists the story she is telling and barely says anything. Sometimes the telling seems more like ritualized sexual behavior than anything else, and she appears to be under remote control and almost hypnotized as she heads toward the ending. Sometimes she slows down as she nears the heart of a story; she becomes cautious and wary, as if she fears it might snap at her.
Some of her stories have no endings and some change with each new telling, so look, here's how this story ended -- the gun went off, the bullet grazed the passive man's calf, and in the scuffle Greta killed the woman with her steel briefcase.
The wounded man tried to make a getaway by limping out of the compartment, but Greta ran him down and pushed him off the full-speed train into the darkness. Then she dragged the woman's body down the empty corridor and did the same thing with it, spinning both hats out into the air behind them.
"Maybe leopards took them up into a tree," she says.
That's her story.
She knows they were sent by Bobby Blue.
MARCH 19 - 52ND ST., BIRDLAND STREET
I'm back in town now. And Big Bobby Blue, he's in another town. He's in Deadmanyika.
Greta's story turned out to be partly true.
The truth is that the three of them had been traveling together all along, with Bobby Blue in Rwanda and on the Kinshasa train. They were coming after me and she was the lure.
Bobby Blue had bought her with moolah from Cousin Doc, who's been after me since I ran off to Cap-Haitien with his wife two years ago -- his wife who died after the encounter on the road to Jacmel, his wife the Conjure Man tried to save by kicking the drums and shaking the rattle. Giselle.
The idea that Cousin Doc would still be after me hadn't entered my mind. I was a 3-D dimwit.
Greta changed her mind on the train, she began thinking about it in an all-new way, and she told them she was out, straight up. She told them that not only was she gonna warn me, but she might get involved.
And they tried to stop her. They were being paid lots of money.
I found out that, yes, she'd been making it up as she went along.
So her story was only partly true. So what. Look at what she did do. She sent the hats flying.
She'd been trying to kill me. So what. She changed her mind. There have been stranger turns of events. Anything can happen.
Look, she has her own story going on. You just have to know this about her.
She's staying here now, upstairs, and for all we know more Macoutes are on the way to New York.
Wanda quit. She didn't like Greta.
MARCH 21 - 10:30 A.M.
Raw day. 41 degrees. Windy. Slick streets and steady rain. Low gray sky. The sounds of horns and sirens.
New York.
Greta's been in the shower for 20 minutes and the steam is floating through my office. I'm half asleep, making coffee.
I hear her coming down the hallway in her flip-flop slippers, and she walks into my office with a white towel wrapped around her hair and a white terrycloth robe on. She's singing some song and sort-of dancing and says she smelled coffee. She goes over to the window and looks down at the street.
I ask her about Bobby Blue, what the time with him was like.
"It was like a job. It felt like I was doing a job. But I'm guessing that you want to know about the sex," she says.
"Maybe not. I have an imagination," I say.
She fakes a slap at my face and a full attack with her shoulders and legs and I flinch. I wasn't ready for it, but only because I was half-asleep.
"Imagine no kisses," she says.
We took care of Bobby Blue up in the mountains. And it turned out to be the three of us with two weapons against the four of them. I drove all the way across the wide Shababba Valley looking for King Oliver, thinking about how we might get a whole tribe to join this attack, but I couldn't find him. We heard the drums three or four times, but we couldn't home in on him. They must have been on the move.
Lines of walking Masai silhouettes. Kikuyu too.
We waited for Blue and the Macoutes in a curve just beyond the crossroads. It was thick with trees and shady, but it was still hot. Shamamakula was behind a mahogany on one side with his M-16, and I was on the other side, down low in some high grass with the Model 66, close to the road for the gravel-level attack. We fired at the 19" tires as these bone-thugs came past doing about 45 and they didn't know what hit them. The jeep crashed, and only two of them were able to open up on us. It was over in 30 seconds and they were a mess.
Greta grabbed a .45 from the crash scene as the Macoutes were trying to get a counter-attack together, and she engaged them on the spot. It was a rout.
She's welcome to stay here as long as she wants. For the moment she's got carte blanche.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 20 - 53 DEGREES AND SOME LIGHT RAIN
Sometimes with Greta things flare up. Sometimes it's just right. You never know what will happen.
By day we've been putting in a garden on the roof, the roof with the view of the bridge. She says I need a garden.
By night I've been taking care of business downstairs, but she's got no interest in anything about my lounge. "Those people are wasting their lives," she says, "and while some of them may have some style, none of them have any character. Sometimes you're just like them." She's dismissive.
"Anything I like about you is apart from your Johnny-life," she says.
The Last Neanderthal
Lee
Johnny Himself
Wanda
Rousseau
Roxanne
Jefferson
The Jukebox
Punch this for Johnny's, Part Eight or this for
Part Nine this for the current Tough
Talk or hit this to Talk Tough Yourself or hit this to listen to some Table Talk or hit this to
Do Some Table Talking or hit this for Part One. And if you don't want to do any of this, then you can eat it.
Sometimes Johnny picks up mail at FNrJohnny@aol.com
