I know it. And I wonder why I should keep talking to you when you could never see what I see or understand what I understand or know the real difference between my school and yours. I wonder why I have kept talking this long when all the time I have seen that you can hardly wait to hit the city to get off this thing and spend your money. You have a good story. But you will never remember it. Because all this time you have had pussy in your mind, and your fingers in the pages of that black bible.

Gold Coast

THAT SPRING, when I had a great deal of potential and no money at all, I took a job as a janitor. That was when I was still very young and spent money very freely, and when, almost every night, I drifted off to sleep lulled by sweet anticipation of that time when my potential would suddenly be realized and there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: “. . . He knew life on many levels. From shoeshine boy, freelance waiter, 3rd cook, janitor, he rose to . . .” I had never been a janitor before and I did not really have to be one and that is why I did it. But now, much later, I think it might have been because it is possible to be a janitor without really becoming one, and at parties or at mixers when asked what it was I did for a living, it was pretty good to hook my thumbs in my vest pockets and say comfortably: “Why, I am an apprentice janitor.” The hippies would think it degenerate and really dig me and it made me feel good that people in Philosophy and Law and Business would feel uncomfortable trying to make me feel better about my station while wondering how the hell I had managed to crash the party.

“What’s an apprentice janitor?” they would ask.

“I haven’t got my card yet,” I would reply. “Right now I’m just taking lessons. There’s lots of complicated stuff you have to learn before you get your card and your own building.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Human nature, for one thing. Race nature, for another.”

“Why race?”

“Because,” I would say in a low voice looking around lest someone else should overhear, “you have to be able to spot Jews and Negroes who are passing.”

“That’s terrible,” would surely be said then with a hint of indignation.

“It’s an art,” I would add masterfully.

After a good pause I would invariably be asked: “But you’re a Negro yourself, how can you keep your own people out?”

At which point I would look terribly disappointed and say: “I don’t keep them out. But if they get in, it’s my job to make their stay just as miserable as possible. Things are changing.”