Cotton Club 1952

The jazz band had just finished when Marzine strode through the backstage area of the Cotton Club. Tonight's show was sold out, and it was easy to see from where she stood why. The boys in the band seemed to take up the whole room with their chatter. They spoke differently than the rest of the folks in the joint. They shouted out in staccatoed half sentences, and seemed to be broadcasting on an alternate frequency, one that only the most carefree could follow.

To Marzine it was like another language entirely, the way they'd inhale their cigarettes backwards, pausing a moment before exhaling like they had all the time in the world.

The crowd was a wealthy conglomeration of white folks with a few blacks thrown in the mix for good measure. Marzine always felt at home in their speech. She found comfort in the familiarity by which they shared each others' lives. They seemed to exist as a whole, the community a lot more supportive that her own family, save for the tender spirit of her father.

She lit a cigarette and yakked with Spenser Collins, the horn player. Spenser had just kicked the juice, and was filled with a gentle exuberance that shouted out to an unsuspecting beatnick, grabbed hold of you, and passionately kissed you until you fell into his arms.

When she looked up again he was gone. He was always playing hard to get. A slower number came on, and the audience scraped their chairs against the floor in order to reach their dates. As they swayed together to the beat the way a sycamore tree would cling to a swinging wind, hugging close to the jagged coastline, praying it never ends.

Marzine spots the rat bastard at the back of the club, and she hurries out the door. He's been following her again recently, the one with the sequined grin and the tattoo on his shoulder, of sinister barbed wire on bronze skin. His pale face sticks out from the back of the club, a phantasmic presence, and she does not notice he's already in the back seat of the car when she arrives there panting, lighting another cigarette as he reaches around from the back seat and kisses her.

She trembles as he laughs, flashing a grin the way a cobra would spit venom.

"We've heard a lot about your friends, they've got a file on you, Hoover and his cronies. They know your a Communist Marzine, they know everything. I'f youll just hold still I have to check for something."

Marzine's squirming now, struggling to get this guy off of her, as her eyes jump around, staring at the gas pedal that's four inches from the ball of her foot.

"Your looking for the tattoo, right, the one he gave me after the gig? Is that what you want to hear?" She says between gasps, struggling to break free from his clamped grip.

His fingers are going limp, and letting go of her arm now, as she slams her foot onto the gas and the car leaps forward. She manages to squirm out of his repetetive grabs at her waist as the car slams into the dumpster in the alley, and he's pinned in between the two trying to chase her and she rounds the end and calls on Eddie as soon as she's in the club, and four boucers come out and drag him in the alley and in the morning there's a link between the mob, and the fear of Communism is spread over every piece of toast of every law-abiding citizen in the city.

A city wrapped in fear shudders as Marzine boards a train headed for Upstate NY with her bruised arm concealed in her torn black blouse.