Night Work

by Nelson George Narrated by Marc Damon Johnson

Overview

Nelson George is a best-selling author and two-time National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. A work of nightlife noir, Night Work uncovers the scandalous sexual exploits of a gigolo in New York City. Ebony-skinned and sexy smooth, Night gets by in the big city by servicing the deepest, darkest needs of rich white women. But he's getting tired of that life. If only he could find someone to buy into his dream of becoming an RB singer. But just when it seems like that might actually happen, Night gets caught up in a risky drug dealing operation.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Best known for his nonfiction (Hip Hop America and The Death of Rhythm and Blues were both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award), George is also a talented novelist (One Woman Short, etc.). In his fifth novel, he chronicles the tenuous dreams of Night, a male gigolo who is rapidly tiring of his sordid life. Night's clients are an intriguing mix of wanton playmates, including the white widow of a dead civil rights leader, a sexually frustrated society matron (she's sure her husband is "doing a Congressman Condit with someone in the nation's capital") who likes her action rough, a guy with a penchant for threesomes and a couple who like to romp while wearing masks depicting the faces of noted jazz figures. The money's good, but Night no longer wants to be "a walking, dick-swinging stereotype, the kind of black image the civil rights movement had to overcome." He's pursuing his dream of an R&B singing career in his off-hours, but his ambitions are restricted by haunting memories of what may have been sexual abuse, an ailing younger sister and above all his friend Beth Ann, a needy supermodel with ties to a violent Israeli ecstasy-peddling ring. When one of Night's clients is murdered, police peg him for the killing, further diminishing his chances of going straight. Billed as a noir thriller in the tradition of Chester Himes and Donald Goines, George's novel falls short of the raw power of their work, but it does offer biting wit and intelligent commentary on youth culture, the sexual underground and the entertainment world. Despite substantial weaknesses in the contrived, pulpy plot, George has a flair for keeping readers amused and entertained. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172792878
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	04/27/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Night Work

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By Nelson George

Touchstone Books

Copyright © 2003 Nelson George
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0743235517

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Chapter One

Three Times as Many Doors

In New York City there are at least three times as many doors as people. Front doors to homes and apartments. Back doors to alleys and driveways. Doors to restaurants. Doors to clubs and bars. Doors to brownstones and tenements, to sitting rooms and dayrooms and night rooms (also known as bedrooms). And there are doors inside doors -- doors to other doors and other realities, doors to the rooms where you expose yourself, where you embrace the things you love so dearly you share them with only a well-chosen few. I work behind those closed doors, places where what happens is just between the people there and no one else has to know. I work in darkness even when the light is on. You see, my name is Night and I do night work.

Like Curtis Mayfield sang, "Dark as the night with the moon shining bright." I'm as dark as Michael Jordan or Tyson Beckford. Smooth and black and glowing. Sometimes I look at myself naked in the mirror above my bed and watch how the light bounces off my skin, how it reflects the curves and muscles God gave me, and I smile at my ebony beauty.

I didn't always appreciate the chocolate. For much of my life my color was a curse, a burden, a target. It was all people saw. Nobody paid attention to my eyes, my mouth, or my troubled soul. I was a dot. I was midnight. I was doo-doo. I was black magic. I was blackmail. I was the black that existed to define white, yellow, and red. I was the punch line that made a sentence a joke. I was the exclamation point that made a sentence an insult. I was the nightmare that ruined dreams.

Black mothers laughed at me and kept their children at bay. White teachers joked about me over coffee and cigarettes. Schoolmates held up black crayons next to my face and told me I was darker. And my father -- that evil fool -- used to tell me I looked my best with the lights out.

Now my sister, she's yellow. "Yellow as a Chinaman's piss." That's what our father often said. But skin color never mattered between Nikki and me. When I'd be called "African looking" by a black person who hated himself or Sambo by someone who didn't care about history, it was Nikki who held my head and said, "One day they'll all love you like I do." I wanted to believe her but didn't. My sick little sis thought she could hear the sound of stars and the heavy breathing of fish in the aquarium, which didn't really make her the most reliable source for life-affirming information.

When I was a boy in Brooklyn I'd look into our bathroom mirror, not in admiration but pain. I used to stand over the sink and rub my skin, expecting that it would all appear like dirt in streaks on the pinkish yellow palms of my hands. But it wouldn't peel off. I'd think of Michael Jackson, the boy-man who was so large during my childhood. He'd made himself into science fiction by shedding layers of skin as I so wanted to. This should have been the perfect solution -- to shred it all and escape my burden, to quiet all the talk and the nasty laughter and, maybe, make my father love me.

The problem was what lay beneath. For Michael there was a ghost face unlike anything I, or anyone else, had ever seen. His black skin had withered and no amount of soul singing could bring it back. And the light from cracks under Michael's closed doors caught my attention. Stripped of his skin and his secrets, Michael was too naked, too damaged and damaging, for me to follow his path any longer. This I could not envy. It was too much. Too ugly. In fact, Michael's face finally put me in check. No way could I allow everyone else's poison in me. I began to understand that my skin had to be loved if I was to love myself.

So the day I turned sixteen I became Night and I reclaimed my face.

And just in time, help arrived. Big Daddy Kane, who was "big just like your Daddy," dropped "Raw." And Michael Jordan, who folk in North Cacalacki used to call "the man in the dark suit," before he sliced the Celtics for sixty-something one Sunday afternoon. And Wesley Snipes, who said, "Always bet on black," and so I did. These brothers, and others, helped reinvent the world around me. They made everyone look at dark skin. I'm talking about hi-top fade. I'm talking about Jordan in Nike ads. I'm talking about Wes boning in Mo' Better and Wes killing in New Jack City. I'm talking bald brown domes sweating under the sun. Dark skin in white tank tops. Even Grace motherfucking Jones and her freaky ass self. Black was back, all in, we're gonna win. Night had been intended to be my shield. Then things changed and it became a sword.

Copyright © 2003 by Nelson George

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Night Work by Nelson George Copyright © 2003 by Nelson George. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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