Alonzo started spending a lot of time with Colleen's friends, who were all into getting high. They introduced him to speed; he tried it, and liked it right away. "Good thing crack wasn't around! I have never tried crack--I never will--but this speed I really liked." For three years, Alonzo continued to shoot amphetamines, which led to numerous acts of immature behavior. He did, however, manage to get a job at the United States Post Office, where he worked for nine months. "Boy, it drove me crazy! It was such a boring job, and wasn't for me. But it was a civil service job, and in the neighborhood it was like, 'Oh, you work the post office? You must be a rock star!" he explains.
Soon thereafter, he became a taxi driver and the money was good, but then both his drivers' and taxis' licenses were taken away for unpaid speeding tickets. As a result, he started stealing cars. Alonzo would go to taxi garages, especially on Saturday nights, and steal a cab from the lot. "I was a nice car crook, because if I stole a car, I would always return it." He drove it all night long, sometimes with Colleen, down to Manhattan or over to Harlem. "It was just so much fun," says Alonzo. Around 5 am, he would park the cab, maybe a half-mile from where he lived, and then call the cab company and say "Yo, a cab was taken and this is where you'll find it!" Click.
Alonzo did this for a year until finally he and Colleen got caught. Colleen's father was a New York City Detective in Manhattan. Quite naturally, with Colleen being brought up on grand theft auto charges, her father finagled a pardon, which indirectly absolved Alonzo, as if it had never happened. Alonzo had met him a month before the arrest and things were good between them. After the arrest, however, Colleens' father made it very clear for Alonzo to stay away from his daughter. He had really screwed up, but they were in love, so they snuck around him.
In October of 1981, Alonzo's older brother, whom he had not seen in thirteen years, and lived in Vancouver, sent him a one-way ticket to Seattle. He decided to go, promising Colleen that he would be back by his birthday in February. As he got off the plane in Seattle, he was greeted by a fine, white blond, who approached him and said, "Lonnie" (that's what his brother called him), "I am Susan". "I was like, 'Oh my God!,' I didn't know this about my brother, he likes Caucasian women too!" Susan directed Alonzo to his brothers' car, a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a diamond on the back. His brother, lighting a joint, proceeded to take him to a tavern in Seattle's Capital Hill. Alonzo was shocked when he walked in and saw there were all of these black men hanging out with all these gorgeous white women. "I was like 'Holy Toledo!' Here I was coming out of the Bronx, thinking I was the only black guy with this Caucasian love. I mean, I thought I was the one who invented this damn interracial dating!," explained Alonzo. But in Seattle, this seemed to be the norm, or so it appeared. It turns out these Caucasian women were really all prostitutes. "This wasn't the drug, alley, crack-smoking, I'll-do-anything-so-I-can-get-me-another-hit-of-drugs kind; these were beautiful women! Women that could very well be in Vogue Magazine; and I am not kidding."
Alonzo's brother, along with some friends from the Air Force, were pimping white Canadian prostitutes in British Columbia. Alonzo was dumfounded that these women wanted to be with these pimps. "I mean they knew that these men had more than one woman!," he says. Looking back he assumes they where attracted to the "pimp character". "I have met some monster pimps, who were making money and doing it right. These women would come up to the pimp and say, "Hey I want to be with you". These more successful pimps had luxurious apartments and lifestyles in Vancouver, with maybe a second house somewhere else. Their girls only worked at night. "It was just like the movies," Alonzo says. "The women would sit around the pimps' house, painting their finger and toenails, getting ready to go out at night to pick up tricks".
Alonzo witnessed this all firsthand but had no aspirations for becoming a pimp himself. Instead, his role was official "baby-sitter". Susan, his brother's girlfriend, had two small children. "I loved those little kids and they called me Uncle Lonnie.... I miss them even today," he says. On Monday nights Alonzo's brother would have his buddies over to play Penuckle, as they snorted cocaine, smoked weed and drank Johnny Walker Black. "Once they got a little intoxicated, they would start talking a lot of shit about their women. I felt really dumb, listening to these guys -- I mean, I didn't even know how to spell 'fuck'!" Alonzo and his brother, who wanted him to stay home and baby-sit on the weekends, began to argue and disagree on issues related to his role as sitter. "I was like, 'Yo! I have been here all week baby-sitting, and I am getting out of here, because I got to go dance; get women!" Sometimes, his brother would bring him along to go "catching", which means 'to pick up'. On Friday and Saturday nights, Alonzo would get all dressed up—his brother never let him leave the house unless he looked sharp--and he would learn how to pick up women. "I was clean, from New York City, and you couldn't tell me anything! Because I could dance and dance well -- always have. I was raised on James Brown...!"
Alonzo began dating various white women in the scene, if you will, but he still loved Colleen, even though they had only spoken on the phone from time to time. He had suggested she come out west, but it never did materialize. It was not until 1989, though, when Alonzo came back to visit New York, that he saw Colleen again. She was with a white guy at the time, who was a 'joke,' apparently. "This guy would go all the way to Harlem to get his dope and then come back the Bronx. I was like, Oh my God, Alonzo, what did you expect, you have been away for years, and she wasn't going to wait for you, but anybody but this guy!," he lamented.
One of the last times Alonzo saw Colleen, she had been supposedly going 'down hill'. Her boyfriend had been beating her, and Alonzo tried calming her by saying, "Colleen, sweetheart, baby, I got to go back to Seattle, and then I will come back for you. You're my baby." Unfortunately, at that moment her boyfriend, who had been buying cigarettes, came out of the corner store. Alonzo felt completely powerless to do anything. A year or so later Colleen died. Alonzo heard a couple stories; that she had caught the "monster'--what they called 'AIDS' back then--or that her liver went out due to excessive drinking. "I don't know if I kind of messed her up or not? I don't know if the interracial dating got to be too much for her, especially since I left? I kind of will never know until I die. She came to me and I went to her and I thank God right now for the experience."
Eventually, Alonzo left British Columbia. Susan, suddenly finding herself unhappy with the idea of being involved in the sex business, packed up the kids and left. Alonzo and his brother made haste back to the border for Seattle just before the whole prostitution ring was uncovered. Alonzo himself, feeling lost, decided to stay in Seattle. While there, he earned his high school diploma and started working in the telemarketing department at Sears and Roebuck, while simultaneously getting involved with one woman to another. Not going anywhere, he eventually moved back home to New York.
Today, Alonzo, who has never been married, lives in Manhattan above the Futon Warehouse, where he also works and manages. Alonzo says that white women have been his biggest motivation in life and the reason he desires success. He recently started a Judgment Recovery business that he hopes will finally bring him the money and the connections he needs. "I went around the back way instead of going the front way, but I am qualified and it's on", he says. He is very proud of the fact that he has been dating interracially for years, long before it was socially accepted. "I learned this interracial dating thing on my own and no one is more qualified to talk about it, well maybe Richard Pryor, than me," he believes. When he was five years old his mother would sit him in front of the TV, while she cooked dinner for his father, and everyday around five-thirty, the cartoon 'Popeye, The Sailor Man' would come on. He loved Popeye, his muscles and how he was always protecting his girlfriend, Olive Oyl, from Pluto. It has only been the last eight years that he finally put it all together. He thought to himself, "How come you are so fascinated with these long-legged Caucasian women? Where is this coming from?" And then it dawned on him. "'You fool, you got programmed at five years old!' I swear to God, I really know that to be the truth," he reasons.
Alonzo often refers to himself as Alonzoman, which comes from a combination of Superman, Zorro, the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger and especially Popeye. His motto is, "I'm Alonzoman and I am always doing the best I can, sometimes I do better, because I have always wanted to make the impossible, possible." With Alonzo, anything is possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment