Maybe You Never Cry Again Read Online Free PDF

to the Apollo, and it was as fine a club as I’d ever seen. ’Course, it was the only club I’d ever seen.
    â€œYou gonna hear me croon,” Darryl said, and it was all he said.
    He had me help him carry some stuff inside, then found a place for me to sit, way in back. I had a pretty good view of the stage, and when Darryl came out with his band I grinned and clapped along with everyone else. He had a nice voice, my brother, and I enjoyed listening to him, but he was just the opening act. It’s the main event that has stayed with me to this day—and the mainevent was none other than Moms Mabley, the legendary comedienne, in what might have been one of her last performances ever. She hobbled onto the stage, popped out her teeth, slapped a hair net on her head—and damn if she didn’t turn into another person. It was magic. She had the whole place roaring with laughter, and I was roaring louder than them all.
    â€œHave a good time?” Darryl asked me on the way home.
    â€œGreat,” I said.
    He never told me why he’d come by the house to take me to the Regal. Never talked about the neighborhood gangs or the fight in the park. Never asked me whether anyone had bothered me since, which they hadn’t. Maybe it was a family thing. We were taught not to crank and moan. We were taught to let things sit deep inside us and figure them out for ourselves. Fact is, nobody really cares about your little problems. And you know for damn sure that nobody wants to hear you whine.
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    After that, I started going to the Regal by myself. They got to know me there. I ran little jobs for them. Helped move stuff around. Went to the store for cigarettes if someone ran out, or coffee, or ice cream when it was hot. And in between I watched the shows.
    The music and dancing were pretty good, but for me the main attraction was the comedians. Whenever they brought one out, I held my breath during the entire set. That’s the way it felt, anyway. I’d watch the way they moved. The way they timed things. The little pauses here and there. The way this one cocked his head to the left just before he told the punch line.
    One night, Pigmeat Markham was on. He was an old-timer, like Moms Mabley, and he’d come up through the Chitlin Circuit, same as her. But you could see the big, raucous man he used to be, the power he held when he did the bit that made him famous: Here Come Da Judge.
    For me, a kid, to see that, not breathing the whole time he was on—it was something special. This was comedy, this was living history, and it was powerful.
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    Sometimes Darryl would come for Sunday dinner with his best friend, Uncle Mitch, but mostly he wouldn’t talk to me, and he hardly ever even looked at me. He and Mitch were inseparable, and they were two of a kind: men who quit their dreams. Darryl was gifted. Like I said, that boy could sing. For a time, after that first band broke up, he was hooked up with the Chi-Lites, but he couldn’t get along. Then he tried to start another group, and the same thing happened all over again: Seemed like Darryl fought with everyone.
    After dinner, when he and Uncle Mitch was gone, the adults would talk about them. That Darryl—boy is headstrong. He don’t know how to listen, don’t know how to get along.
    Uncle Mitch had his own gifts, and his own troubles, too. He was maybe one of the best natural-born ballplayers in the whole South Side, but he let it slip away. That boy don’t focus, they’d be saying in the kitchen. He let the bad element deteriorate his goals. All that God-given talent, and he don’t have the guts or the heart to make use of it.
    Thinking back on it now, I know they were saying this for my benefit. And it worked. Eventually.
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    â€œDarryl has a lot of his father in him,” my aunt Evelyn told me. “You’re more like your mama.”
    Maybe she was right, but I wouldn’t have known—I