Elevation Night

I was mistaken for waitstaff twice that night—odd given my costume—but managed to avoid additional embarrassments by wallflowering in the shadow of the grand staircase. Their cheeks pink from Southern Comfort, the partners, or shareholders as the firm called them, stood chatting in clusters around the dining room. Octavia Whitword’s mansion on the avenue of streetcars seemed as likely a place as any for Elevation Night. If you’re going to haze desperate associates, you do it in a part of town patrolled by heavily-armed military contractors. I couldn’t chicken out as some sentry might shoot me from a moving Humvee. This was the dream.

Playful notes of sandalwood and jasmine lingered in the foyer. Beyond that entryway, Franklin, who got white-girl drunk at every firm function, karaoked “I Feel Pretty” into a microphone that some comedian had covered with an almond-brown stocking, the kind you tried on cheap shoes with. I wasn’t sure what must have been more mortifying for Franklin: singing so poorly into what looked like a dildo made of his own skin or the fact that no one paid him any mind. It couldn’t have helped that he wasn’t pretty.

I’d always thought he looked like Yaphet Kotto, the bad guy from that ancient James Bond movie where Bond jets around the world killing every blackie he sees. Kotto himself always reminded me of the villainous gorilla from the comics I read as a boy. I supposed it was racist to compare a black man to a savage primate, but since I was black myself I figured I got a pass. In any event, neither Yaphet Kotto nor a Machiavellian ape was a good look for any brother trying to climb the social step stool in modern America.

Rollo, on the other hand, was bent over a table and really putting his back into it. Under a twelve-branched candelabra, he gave shoulder rubs to all takers, which didn’t seem so bad. But now, the Managing Shareholder, Jack Armbruster, who was enough of a relic to tell you what color robe Jesus had on when Pontius Pilate gave him the finger, was on deck, his loafers and socks pulled off. Rollo was working the old fart’s feet, feet so gnarly they seemed like roots ripped from the field behind the mansion. Was a promotion and bonus worth that kind of humiliation? You betcha.

My son Nigel’s procedure would be expensive. After feeding the three-headed beast of mortgage, utilities, and private school tuition, I only managed to pocket a few copper coins each month, but if I beat the others for promotion, I would earn a fat bonus and Nigel would finally get a normal face, over his mother’s objections.

Yet, while Franklin and Rollo tap danced for their shot at shareholder, I idled on the sideline, nursing a rum and Coke. Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux hired us years earlier, a trio of black law school graduates hired and retained for diversity purposes. Of course, Seasons hired non-blacks from our class too, but most of them had already earned their wings or fallen to earth. Our arms were tied together by like-minded ambition, but in our free hands we clutched knives. This was a war of attrition and only one of us three would survive. The losing pair would be left to lesser fates in the wilds of the City. Up or out, son, as Franklin sometimes said.

I only drank when at the end of my choke chain. Unfortunately, I was at the end of that chain, and had lost count of how many rum and Cokes I’d had over the last few hours, which meant by now my blood was probably 75% alcohol by volume. And that was on top of the dissipating effects of the Plum my boy Jo Jo Baker gave me that morning. I told myself on each awakening that I didn’t need Plums anymore and that I could quit any time I chose, but in truth those little purple pills, which turned my...