Free Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life by Walter Mosley Page B

powerful black hands feeding nickels into a slot machine, happily losing, confidently expecting that one day I’d hit the million-dollar nickel pot—it was inevitable.
    The physical me, the man who had just awakened in the hotel room, had hands that were masculine and Caucasian except for the Negroid ring finger on the left hand and a tapered, feminine baby finger on the right. There were micro-thin lines zigzagging across my forearms, legs, and chest. These might have been stitches from surgery except they were too fine for any suture made by needle and thread.
    The full-length mirror in the bathroom revealed a patchwork of pink, pale, and tan flesh and a face that was maybe not quite forty. I had a square jaw, one blue eye and the other brown. My hair was a wiry auburn, closer to chestnut than red. I had black hair on the upper portion of my chest. One nipple was rugged and reddish where the other one was smooth and ocher in hue.
    I was tall but not like a basketball player. And I was strong—very, very strong.
    The penis amazed and surprised me. I lifted it gently, remembering being another sex. It came to me that it wasn’t so different being man or woman. We all slept and woke up, felt heat and cold, got hungry and aged over time. Our senses approximated each other’s, and memory offered up images that had more meaning than anything real, today. But the penis and vagina—they tilted in different directions, blindly headed for summits of very different emotional climes.
    I was a man in a man’s body and a woman, too.
    Upon the bench at the foot of the king-size hotel bed lay my shirt and pants, jacket, and Stetson hat. My driver’s license said that I was Jack Strong, born in 1976, in June, and my eye color was multi . I had $986 in various denominations.
    Handling the money, I thought about my face and greater amounts of cash. There was a place … The Steadman. The Steadman Casino. It was off the Strip but not far off. I remembered the Steadman. It was a place I’d spent a good deal of time. I was a … a manager there … something like that.
    My memory was fuddled, staggery like a man who had drunk too much trying to remember where he’d parked the car.
    I put on the clothes and found shoes and socks in a suitcase in the closet.
    My mind sparked with fragmented memories at everything I saw and touched. The wall was a chance to hang a recently acquired Monet; it also represented a prison and a sounding board that broadcast secrets from the other side. The dying light from the window was the night before an execution, the time to go out and stalk another victim, an invitation to open another bottle and forget the day before.
    Dressing in the sanitized room, I felt like a frail immortal, a god in a world of his creation, a world that remembered but no longer believed in him.
    “Mr. Strong,” a man hailed as I strode toward the glass doors of the hotel lobby.
    It was the desk clerk, a young black man with long processed hair that was combed back artlessly. Seeing his coif, I felt the burning of chemical straighteners on my neck and ears.
    “Yes?”
    “You want me to call Albert to bring your car?”
    “Sure.” Changing direction, I walked up to the desk. I had a slight limp but felt no pain in my joints. It was almost as if I were an infant learning the balance of perambulation. “What’s your name again?”
    “Tony,” the desk clerk said. “You look a lot better.”
    “Oh?” I said. I wanted to grab him and shake the secrets of my history out.
    “Yeah. When your nurse and Mr. Grog brought you in, you was just sittin’ in that wheelchair and mumbling.”
    “Where are they?”
    “What?”
    “Mr. Grog and … and … and the nurse.”
    “They left this morning. He told me that you’d be down later today. Said that you were fine after the operation … something like that.”
    “How much do I owe you?”
    “For what?”
    “The room.”
    “Paid up to the end of the month,” he said.
    I wanted