I am proud of this new trick, and I wish someone would have seen me do it. But the street is empty until I turn the corner on York Avenue and walk toward the baseball field at 59th Street. There I see Jimmy Burton, sitting against the rough concrete of the sitting steps that go around the ballpark. The park is empty except for a couple of boys playing catch near home plate. They are waiting for the head of the PAL team to come with the bats and the bases.
“Hey,” I call out to him, “where’s your glove?”
“I don’t need a glove,” he says. “I have a car.”
Burton is fourteen, a big guy with curly hair, and he looks old enough so that he can buy smokes in a store without anyone asking his age.
“Where did you get a car?” I ask, thinking that my Uncle Tracy may be in town again.
“Right here in my shirt pocket,” he answers.
He is wearing a red and black plaid shirt and pulls a chewing-gum wrapper from the pocket. The wrinkles have been smoothed out so that it is a shiny sheet of silver, like silk. I know exactly what he is talking about.
“So where’s this car?” I ask.
“Down by the smokestack,” he says, talking about the big Con Edison smokestack on 59th Street by the river. “I was hitting the windows and the best ‘49 Ford opened up.”
I picture him pressing every side and vent window of every car until he finds one open.
“Did you get it started?” I ask.
“I didn’t try yet,” he says. “You wanna come?”
“No,” I say. “What if you get caught?”
“Don’t be such a chicken ass,” he says. “You don’t even know how to drive. You don’t get caught if you just drive around and obey all the rules like stopping at the lights.”
“I do know how to drive,” I say. “I can drive as good as anyone.”
I don’t like it when people tell me that I can’t do something when I know I can.
“C’mon,” Burton says, getting up and pulling me by the sleeve.”C’mon.”
Burton is one of those guys in the neighborhood that are liked by everybody, mostly because he is a little crazy, but also because he is loyal. Even if you are wrong, like, say, you cursed in front of somebody’s girlfriend, Burton will always back you up if you need him, for he is good with his dukes, or he will give you a quarter for the movies if you don’t have one. He took me to the movies a few times, and I guess this is why I don’t want to disappoint him now.
And so I walk down toward the river with him, knowing that I am getting into something that could end up with me holding the shitty end of the stick. Joyriding in a stolen car is not something any of the guys I know have ever done. Walsh and Scarry and those guys wouldn’t have the balls to put it together that you could act the part in a ‘49 Ford, you could put your arm out the window, and the girls on the corner could give you a look that could work when you passed them by.
This ‘49 Ford is a beauty, gleaming dark blue paint, woven black and white plastic seats, a big black steering wheel. It has a smell of mint in the car, coming from one of those odor things that is hanging from one of the radio knobs. Burton shoves the silver paper up underneath the dashboard behind the ignition key mount. There is a spark, and he flinches backward, dropping the paper.
Maybe this is a sign, I think. Maybe he won’t get it started, and we can get out of this car before somebody comes. But he picks it up and tries again, this time starting the car.
“Go, baby, go,” Burton says, and he rams the car in first gear and pops the clutch. The wheels squeal, and the car lunges forward, just missing a parked car in front. Burton forgets to put the clutch in again as he brakes at the red light, and the car stalls.
“Shit,” he says, shoving the paper underneath again. But the car won’t start. He tries and tries, but the contact with the silver just does not happen.
“The paper must be all scratched up,” he says. “I don’t have any more gum. Do you have any gum?”
Suddenly, a car comes up behind us and beeps his horn.
“Christ,” I say. This could be an off-duty cop, or someone who knows this car and the car’s owner. I can feel my eyes tighten at the corners.
We are sitting at a red light on 59th Street and York Avenue, and I know I don’t have any gum. The car is stolen, and all I can think of is that my mother never lets me chew gum because it is bad for the teeth, and my teeth are bad enough ever since the dental students pulled out the ones with the cavities. And now there is this car behind us beeping his horn like he is an ambulance driver delivering a stretcher.
Burton is looking all around, and I can tell he is wondering what to do.
I am suddenly scared, and my mouth begins to tremble. If this guy would only stop beeping his horn. Everybody up and down Sutton Place must be turning around to look. I can hardly speak, for if we got caught in a stolen car, it would be Lincoln Hall or some other reform school for sure, and all the boys I know who went to Lincoln Hall were practicing to be murderers. I don’t know if I could ever live in a place like that.
“Christ, Jimmy,” I say, “I don’t Want to cop out on you, but let’s get the hell outta here, huh?”
“Right,” Burton says, “just get out and run like hell.”
And so we leave the car right there at the red light, sticking out like an elephant in the middle aisle of the supermarket, with the beeping-horn guy now stuck and cursing with every beep. All I can think of as we run back to the baseball field is that this guy must think he is in some circus act with these two kids jumping out of the car in front of him and disappearing around the corner.
Burton does not say anything as we enter the park. I try to say something, but I still can’t control my speech, I am so scared. There are a few more boys on the field now, and they are about to choose up sides. At least I’ll get a game, and that will take my mind off of how close I am to going to Lincoln Hall for Delinquents. I can hardly catch my breath. Bobby Walsh is there and sees me. He comes over and puts his arm around my shoulder.
I am still thinking of what would happen if we were caught. Holy shit. I don’t know what would happen. Except for the trouble, and Lincoln Hall. But what would my mother say? God. She would never believe it, that I got in a stolen car. And if she did, she would be so disappointed and sad. And she’d beat me with a hanger or a baseball bat or something.
“Hey,” Walsh says, “s’matter you?” I guess he sees me shaking.
Burton comes over and punches me in the arm.
“Nothin’s s’matter him,” Burton says, laughing. “He’s gonna loand me his baseball glove is all.”
I look at Burton. I am feeling strangely strengthened, like I did something that was different than anyone else can do, that I have won a sort of trophy in my own mind. I want to smile, to laugh it off like Burton, but, still, I know that I have done something stupid and that I have gotten away with it.
This time.
F
inally, I am thirteen, and old enough to go to the teenage canteen at Kips Bay Boys Club, but my mother is acting like I am still twelve or something.
“I’m in the eighth grade now,” I am saying, “and I don’t know why I can’t stay out until midnight, ‘cause everyone else stays out.”
I am sitting at the kitchen table, trying to draw a bird in a back page of my schoolbook. I like to draw birds, because they are easy. You just have to start with a circle, and you will always get to something that looks like a bird.
My mother is at the sink cleaning those little pork chops that she boils with the sauerkraut and potatoes.
“C’mon, Mom,” I say, protesting. “C’mon. Just until eleven-thirty, then.”
“You have a lot of nerve,” my mother says finally, “to expect to go gallivanting around, to ask for any favors with the report card you brought home. When you start getting marks like your brother Billy, I will think about giving you any special privileges, but for now you’ll be home here at ten o’clock if you know what’s good for you. Otherwise you can stay home and brood about it.”
This, I am thinking, is exactly the trouble with trying to make sense with my mother. She’s always saying if I know what’s good for me, as if I don’t know what’s good for me, but when I tell her what’s good for me, she never pays attention. It is only her definition of “good” that we get to talk about in the house.
Billy is up in the Bronx at school, Cardinal Hayes, and he is probably still at basketball practice. Even on a Friday. He made the varsity team there, and he is only in his second year. He is such a good player. Billy is good at everything, and when he graduated from St. John’s, most of the parents got pretty mad at him because he won so many of the medals, and their kids didn’t get very many. He is good at remembering things, like how many errors Ty Cobb made in his career, or who was the king of England or the king of France when America was discovered by the Vikings, or even before when the Irish came.
Just recently, Billy won the Boy of the Year at Kips Bay, and they gave him a scholarship to a place called Exeter up in New Hampshire, a boarding school. Mr. McNiven at Kips Bay said it was a good school, but Mom went up to Cardinal Hayes to talk to the principal there, Monsignor Fleming, and he told her that Exeter was a Protestant place, and it would not be good for Billy’s soul to go there. So he is not going. He’s got a scholarship at Cardinal Hayes, anyway, because of the fact that we are on welfare and Billy plays basketball.
I wonder about Billy’s soul, and if being at this place Exeter would make a Protestant out of him. And then, I wonder, what is a Protestant, and why is it so bad to be one? I have never been inside of a Protestant church, and I don’t think I have ever met a Protestant person except for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who knock on the door every once in a while to give out magazines. I only know that being a Catholic is better. We have to do things, like love God, do good, avoid evil, and provide for the propagation of the faith. I always try to provide for the propagation of the faith, which I think is that you have to be ready to be a martyr, like those guys who had to fight the lions in the movies. But Protestants don’t have to do anything special. They don’t even have to go to church on Sunday if they have something else to do. If we don’t go to church on Sunday, we go right to hell when we die.
We never miss Mass in our house, and even if we did miss once in a while, I don’t think Billy would be available to be a Protestant, no matter how many teachers at Exeter tried to get him to be one. Anyway, Billy’s too tough, and he’s such a good athlete it would take four or five guys to hold him down if they wanted to make a Protestant out of him.
I wish my mother would treat me like a teenager.
“I don’t want to stay home,” I say, trying to draw feathers that look like something other than sticks on the side of the bird. It comes out better if I use the side of my pencil instead of the point.
“Then be home at ten,” she says, now scrubbing out a big pot, the one where there is only one handle, “and do your homework the way your brother always does his homework before he goes to sleep.”
She is always telling me that I should get better grades, and I guess she doesn’t have any choice except to use Billy as an example. Sister Alphonsus always does that, and Archie down at Kips does it, too. Everyone thinks Billy is doing great in everything, and it’s easy for them to say I’m not doing so great.
“Maybc,” my mother says, “if you paid closer attention to your homework, you will begin to apply yourself better to your schooling. You have to build on the stuff God gave you, and I’m not just talking about those blue eyes of yours, either. It’s too bad we can’t put our fingers in our ears to feel our brains, because that might remind us that we had one.”
She smiles, but I don’t think it is funny. I wish I could tell her how much I think school is a waste of time. That I would rather be out working somewhere, and having a quarter in my pocket to go to the movies or get a hamburger at Riker’s if I want one. But she would just argue with me, and tell me that I don’t know what’s good for me, that I will never get near to meeting my abilities without getting high marks at school.
Besides, everyone at school is always yelling at you, making you feel like you did something wrong by getting up in the morning. My mother doesn’t realize that there is so much yelling at St. John’s. The nuns yell at you for running in the playground during recess, the principal yells at you if you’re late to lineup, the priests yell at you for pouring too much wine in the chalice, or not enough wine. And everyone yells about getting better marks.
My mother is very much against yelling. She never lets us yell in the house. “A gentleman never raises his voice” is what she says if we yell.
Sister Alphonsus doesn’t hit anyone, but she doesn’t let the smallest thing pass without yelling at you, either. And almost everyone stays after school every day for something or other. Like yesterday I had to stay because I got out of the line at lunchtime to tie my shoe.
“You stay after school, young man,” Sister Alphonsus said as she pushed me back into the line. I feel like I am in some prison movie when I am in school, where everyone is against you, and you know your only job there is to find a way to escape.
I am sitting on the floor now in the auditorium-size game room of Kips Bay. On the walls are big paintings of dancing teenagers, ten of them, that were done for Kips Bay by students in an art school somewhere. The paintings give the room a feeling of a dance hall or a nightclub, anything but the dull gray-painted game room of Kips. The room is pretty dark, and there are spotlights shining down on the dance floor in the middle of the room.
Marilyn Rolleri is on the other side of the dance floor, sitting on a chair in the middle of a crowd of girls. I am in my powder-blue sports jacket, and I am talking with Walsh and Scarry, drinking the small bottles of Coke they gave us for free. Archie is at the door, checking the club cards, making sure that everyone who wants to get in is at least thirteen.
Some slow music starts, and there is a rush of boys going across the dance floor for the girls.
“I’m going to ask Rolleri to dance,” I say, getting up.