Content warning: This article quotes a racial slur.
Wee-oo! Wee-you-oooh, wee-you… (boom-b)! Boom-ba-boom-ba, boom, doo-do [weeyoo…] The vibrations: exuberantly insisting on breakin’ down that kitchen screendoor. Hot outside in the May noonday sun — hot inside, cause Fleurina Doll was baking a fresh sheet of down-home biscuits! For mother, of course. In the grip of silent, surely painful catatonia; unable to communicate save her impassive grey eyes.
And for Johnny and Doll, additional beneficiaries of the baking tray. On the tweed, plug-in portable radio sitting on the counter, radio station WOOK-1340 AM was wrapping up another nonsensical episode of “Ben Basie, MD” — a send-up of the lily-white hospital series Ben Casey, only here with the jovial and affable Count Basie himself mumbling endless witty asides. (“Here I am, with no flim flam!”)
Following “Dr. Ben,” was the nasal rat-a-tat-tat of a standard strident broadcast of “Dateline Cuba, June 15, 1962; President Kennedy and his defense staff are busy monitoring naval activity of increased volume in Havana Harbor.” Followed by, “Sidney Poitier makes big-time box office this week with ‘Lilies of the Field’…” Click. Doll snaps off the radio and snaps at me, “Let’s walk down to the shopping center bus, see if the natives is restless,” with a sly smile, bigger than all outdoors.
As we pull off from the bus stop on the corner of Overland and Fort Sumner, Billy Badhams and three of his mangy cohorts in matching striped T-shirts and wrinkled shorts try to block the vehicle, shouting epithets like “coon bus!”
Upon hearing the shouted gibberish, Walter the leathery, bespectacled driver (nearly 70), pushes back his peaked cap and vaults onto the less empowered Billy with both bony knees and sharp elbows as he whispers hoarsely, “Whatcha say about this bus, boy?”
“I-it’s-uh-it’s-a-cool bus, s-sir,” Billy drooled.
“Yeah, well get the hell down the road — on foot,” Walter said.
We then traveled uneventfully over to the Spring Valley shopping center across the D.C. line. Doll sprang for an ample bar of Sugar Babies candy for us.
“I know this’ll get you sugar up but knock yourself out,” said Doll. In the barbershop, Bobby Blue Blood drawled, “Take it where you find it — that’s the way love is.” Doll editorialized, “I know Blood gets his nails done — but believe you me, he ain’ vulnerable.”
