I don’t know how many people I’ve met in my life. I’ve never tried to count them, but they must number in the tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands since I worked 20 years in nightclubs in New York, LA, London, Paris, Nice, and Hamburg and have also circumnavigated the globe over twenty times. Some people I have forgotten. Some names I’ve forgotten. Some people I remember very little, while others exist as a story surrounded by shards of memories and Mojo is one such person.

Mojo had been the doorman at the Berlin in the 1980. The after-hours club was located in a four-floor walk-up at the corner of Broadway and Houston. The stairs were very steep. Mojo was big, black, and mean to women. On several occasions I warned him to calm down and he glared threateningly without making a move. My temper was legendary back then.

I hadn’t seen him years, but I didn’t forget him like other people.

Mojo was one of a kind and two year ago I ran into at a Williamsburg bar.

Mojo greeted me as if I had risen from the grave. He was smiling. All that meanness was gone.

“I’ve been working as a chef.” Mojo was bigger than ever. I gauged his weight at near 300. Heavy people like working in restaurants.

“Where?” I like eating.

“Out in the Hamptons.” Mojo shrugged as if it wasn’t his first choice. “Tough living out there without a car, but I live about a ten minute walk to the restaurant. Even quicker if I cut through a graveyard.”

“Aren’t you scared about a graveyard?” I wouldn’t walk through one at night.

“That’s what I thought too, but a month ago I was drunk and decided to take the short cut. There was no moon, but I could see the lights of my house, so I knew where I was going. Problem was that it was too dark to see the ground and I fell into an open grave. The impact of the drop nocked the wind out of me.”

“How you get out?”

“Get out? A man my size ain’t getting out of no grave. I tried climbing out, but it was a waste of breath, so I sat down and waited for someone to come along. I had cigarettes and it wasn’t a cold night. I might have even fell asleep, except I heard someone coming. He was drunk. I was about to call out for help, when this white frat boy fell into the grave. He gets to his feet right away and starts jumping out of the grave.”

“Not easy.” Six feet is six feet.

“Not at all, but I figured that he could climb on me and get out, then get help to get me out, so I coughed and said, “You can’t get out of here that way.”

“And what he say?” I was laughing hard now.

“Say? The white boy squawked like a chicken with a hot rod up its ass and practically flew out of the grave like I was Satan.” Mojo laughed at the recollection of this moment. “Man, his eyes were bigger than dinner plates and ten minutes later the police come down to the cemetery. Nothing gets those lazy fucks working faster than a black devil in the grave, but one of them knew me and they helped me out of the grave.”

“Soo more short-cuts?”

“None at all.”

After a few drinks Mojo and I bid each other ‘health’ and went our separate ways. Each happier for his tale from the grave, although a year later I heard another black friend tell the same story about his uncle living down South. Guess it’s something that happens a lot to brothers.

ps ‘Mojo’ is a magical bag of charms used in Hoodoo, an ancient Afro magic.