A Conversation with the Mann Read Online Free PDF Page B

father had a civil-service
     job—good, steady pay, at good government wages. Around my way, that made their family equal to uptown royalty. In her eyes,
     my raggedy clothes and worn shoes must have made me look like the poorest of the poor. And when the other kids would joke
     at me, call me names, what hurt bad only hurt worse if Nadine was around to hear their abuse and witness my crying. Her watching
     me break down cut deeper than anything the kids had to say. She would watch, but Nadine never joined in, never name-called,
     never so much as laughed. Sometimes, even, she looked very sad about what was happening.
    And those times, when Nadine was showing a little sympathy for me, whatever it was a grade school boy feels for a girl, I
     felt for her.

    I WAS COMING HOME after doing chores at Sergeant Kolawole's. Like every night when I came home from working, I was coming home tired with just
     enough energy to eat before sleeping. Inside the apartment my pop was where he always seemed to be: taking up space on the
     couch. Hunched over the coffee table, his body was trembling and he moaned some. Experience told me he was coming down off
     whatever high had given him altitude. I left him to work things out with himself and went for my room, moving quietly, as
     most times Pop was an emotional minefield. Trouble was all a misstep ever got me.
    As I passed him I caught Pop's face in the shine of the lamplight, his cheeks marked up with the slickness of tears. The shakes,
     the moans; Pop wasn't crashing, he was crying—his tears dripping down onto a photo album spread across the table. I went cautiously
     closer, curious the way you're curious at a car wreck, flinching every time my father made a move. But that night he was harmless,
     clean of liquor but high on memories fed to him by the photographs.
    Pop lifted his head, looked up at me, his eyes as weak as the rest of him. “Jackie?” he asked as if not quite recognizing
     his own son. Then, “Jackie,” he cried at me. His hand came up, stretched out. “Come here, boy. Come to your pop.”
    I did as told. Fear, not compassion, driving me to the man.
    Pop took me in his arms, hugged and held me.
    He stank. His clothes, gone days without change, reeking of the Thunderbird he sweated, were a pandemonium of odors. The closest
     I'd been to my father in years. All I could think of were his smells.
    “Look here, Jackie. Look at this.” A shaky hand sort of pointed at a picture of a man barely familiar to me—young, strong,
     handsome, and smiling. Fifteen years earlier? More?—standing on a beach somewhere tropical.
    Pop started to ramble a story to me. He told me how he used to work on a transport, how he used to sail all over the world.
     South America, the Caribbean, and the Orient. As he dragged his fingers over picture after picture, literally trying to touch
     his past, he told me of all the things he'd seen, all the faraway countries he'd traveled to, each more spectacular or mysterious
     than the last. Maybe they'd been that way. Maybe the years, or the drugs, or the oppressiveness of his present life made them
     seem better than they ever really were.
    He told me of the women he'd had. Sparing little detail, my father told me of the exotic beauties he'd sexed at apparently
     every port of call. I did not blush with shame at his stories. I smiled with pride for the man my father used to be.
    He turned the page of the photo book. There was a picture of my mother. No matter that it was black and white, aged and faded,
     as beautiful as I remembered her, I never recalled seeing her
so
beautiful. I had never seen her so young and alive as she was in the photograph.
    My father told me how he met her, and how once he had, all the other women he'd ever known could find no traction in his head
     or in his heart. He told me how much he loved my mother.
    Love.
    Coming from Pop the word sounded as foreign as Chinese.
    He spoke it with no difficulty.
    And then he told