“I want to see your mother,” she said.
“What for?” I asked. I was already agitated, and I suddenly got very nervous. I just knew that my mother would be upset. She so hates it when things are not going right.
“Your report card was not good,” she said, “and you are falling behind in everything.”
“I do my homework,” I said.
“You have not done a complete homework since the term started, Dennis,” she said, “and do not argue with me. Bring your mother in, fifteen minutes before the start of school on Monday morning, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, please. Good afternoon.”
Good afternoon, I was thinking, bullshit. I was exploding inside. I am so tired of all of it, everyone telling me what I should be doing, nobody doing anything to help me, Father Luke the Capuchin writing me a letter and saying that I should pray for my future vocation for the next few years, Sister Alphonsus saying things have to change, Marilyn Rolleri making out with Raymond Connors, my father walking around in circles in some upstate hospital, I don’t even know where because they keep moving him from place to place, Archie telling me I could be great, but he never says what I could be great at, and my mother crying, sighing, yelling, and pleading with me almost every day to read more, to write more, to spend more time with my homework. It is just too much bullshit to put up with every day.
“Good afternoon, Sister,” I said quietly, holding my head down, being polite.
But something inside me was running, running away from Sister Alphonsus as fast as I could, running into some dark forest where you can’t see two inches in front of you. I felt myself walking slowly away from her, but my feet were going fifty miles an hour, and the next thing I knew I had changed my clothes, and I was in my mother’s room, and I was searching through the drawers of her dresser looking for the welfare money that she kept hidden away. She always keeps the money in her drawer until she pays the rent or pays the bill at Rossi’s. I looked everywhere, in every drawer, in every closet. Even on top and below. I needed some money, but I didn’t know why. I only knew that I had to keep running, that I couldn’t stay and talk to my mother, and tell her that Sister Alphonsus wants to tell her that I am not going to graduate, because I only did some of the grammar questions when I wasn’t thinking about Marilyn kissing Raymond Connors with teeth enough for three people.
I needed a cigarette. I have never smoked a cigarette in my house, but I needed a cigarette, and so I grabbed the carton of Old Golds that my mother had in her bottom drawer, and shook out a pack. I know that she knows how many packs are left, the way mothers just know these things, so I can’t take the whole pack. But I know I can get a cigarette out without her knowing, the way Uncle Tracy would do it, and I carefully opened the bottom end of the cellophane, making sure not to rip it in any way, and then I opened the paper at the bottom of the pack just as carefully. The opened bottom looked like a honeycomb of tobacco, twenty cigarettes all tight together. I pulled out one cigarette from the exact center, knowing that she will open one side of the pack or the other, and she will never see the empty hole in the center of the pack. I ran to the kitchen for the glue bottle, and I glued the paper and then the cellophane back together again, and put the pack back into the carton.
In the living room, I lit the cigarette and leaned far back into the pillow of the couch. I knew that my mother was cleaning some apartment down on Sutton Place, and so I just relaxed. And I sat there feeling for a minute that I owned the building, that I owned my life.
But only for a minute.
What was I going to do? I was thinking. What? I couldn’t tell my mother that I was going to get kicked out of school. I just couldn’t.
Run away, I thought. I had to run away.
Anywhere.
Maybe be a cowboy out west. If I was only older, maybe as old as Billy, I could get a job on a ship and sail the seas like Sinbad. I began to feel so alone there on the couch, smoking that cigarette, but I was thinking about my life. I realized that I didn’t really care about Marilyn Rolleri or Sister Alphonsus or the Regents exam. I just cared about what I was going to do next.
It is not easy to run away when you are only in the eighth grade, because people spot you right away in the train station. But I had to do it, rather than face my mother and watch her become furious with me.
And, worse, I didn’t want to see her cry again just because of me.
If I could run away, everything would turn out okay. Something good might happen somewhere, and I wouldn’t have to explain about why I am not doing what they all expect me to do. I only want to be left alone, and to get a job, and to stay out until eleven, and to earn money so that I can get a pizza at Emiliano’s.
I knew something lucky would happen, and the first person I met on Second Avenue was Henry Castle. I know him from the baseball games under the Queensboro Bridge, a little guy with big ears, and I have hung around with him a few times. He goes to public school, because his father is a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, or something where you would think they were Chinese. But they are Irish and Mexican from the West Side, that’s what Henry told me.
I told him there was a reason God gave him such big ears, so that he could listen better to me, and I told him everything that happened and why I had to run away.
Henry promised that he would stick by me all the way. I think he liked the excitement of somebody running away. Or maybe he wanted to be better friends with me so that he could hang around with me and Scarry and Walsh. It didn’t matter to me why he would stick by me. It was just lucky.
But it was a little unlucky that Henry didn’t have any money left from his allowance. So a bus or a train was out of the question. At least I didn’t have to think of where I could take a bus or a train. I don’t even know what stop to get off at when I visit my cousins in Brooklyn.
We went to the 54th Street Gym, because Henry wanted to work out to get in shape for the Golden Gloves. We hit the bag a little and ran a zillion times the running track that goes around the ceiling of the gym, and then we were hungry.
I sat on a radiator in the hallway while Henry went in to have dinner at his house. He put a fish stick in a paper napkin and brought it out to me, and I was glad Mrs. Castle didn’t make spaghetti. My mother usually makes spaghetti on Friday instead of fish, and I was thinking that spaghetti would be hard to cart around in a napkin.
We then went down 53rd Street and watched the older guys play craps, and I grubbed an English muffin off Fatso Cassidy, who was winning. I did this by volunteering to go to Riker’s to get him six English muffins, and then I ate one on the way back to the crap game. He never missed it.
Barbara Gabelli came around with a girl from 49th Street I didn’t know. Her name is Lillian, and her skin is so dark I thought she had to come from some mountain village in Italy that was close to the sun. Her eyes are jet-black, and her hair is blacker and goes way down below her waist. She is very beautiful in that way you see in the old, dark pictures in the Metropolitan Museum.
We talked for a while, and then the four of us walked downtown. Henry walked us past 49th Street and past the construction barriers where they are building a tunnel underneath First Avenue for the United Nations building.
“Let’s see what’s in the U.N. tunnel,” Henry said, and we followed him deep into the hole. I could tell that Henry was going to try to make time with Barbara, and so I sat with Lillian on the steps of an emergency stairs that went up to the street level.
Lillian was shy and quiet, and so I did all the talking. I told her about Marilyn going out with Raymond, and she told me she could never have a boyfriend, anyway, because her father was strict and he would kill her if she had a boyfriend before she graduated high school, which was four years away.
I told her that her father would never find out if she would let me be her boyfriend for just a half hour, and then I kissed her. I closed my eyes and put my lips on hers, and she opened her mouth suddenly and I felt her steaming tongue slopping away in my mouth like she has been kissing guys for ten years already, and then she got up.
My whole body was shaking.
This was nothing like kissing Marilyn Rolleri.
“I can’t see you again,” Lillian said, “because I can’t have a boyfriend.”
And then she yelled out Barbara’s name and her voice echoed through the tunnel until it was covered by Barbara’s voice as Barbara and Henry ran toward us, thinking someone was coming to catch us in the tunnel construction.
Henry and I left them on the corner of 49th Street, and I shook Lillian’s hand. I watched her walk down the street, her skirt clinging to her legs down to her ankles. I was thinking I will always remember my first real kiss there in the United Nations tunnel, and I was wishing that Lillian was Irish, or at least that she wasn’t Italian, so that she wouldn’t have a father who was so strict, and I could give Lillian another French kiss here in New York on the grounds of the United Nations.
All Henry could talk about as we went uptown was Barbara Gabelli’s stack, and I didn’t pay much attention to him. I just kept trying to keep Lillian’s taste in my mouth.
I think Henry felt that I would just go home at eleven o’clock, but I stuck to him like roof tar. There was no way he could get rid of me. After all, who said he would stick by me? I couldn’t be alone at a time like this, and he knew it. So we went back to his house and crept quietly up the creaking tenement stairs.
Henry lives on the third floor of a building next to the Old Brew House Restaurant on 54th Street. It’s an old building, probably as old as the Civil War, over near Third Avenue, and I was again in the hall as he searched the apartment for somewhere to hide me. Henry has a younger sister and two older sisters. I know their house. There are two bedrooms off the kitchen, and so I took my shoes off and tiptoed into the bedroom, where there were two sets of bunk beds, with maybe six inches between them.
Henry’s younger sister, Madelaine, was sleeping on the couch in the living room. She is a year younger than we are, and good-looking, too. It would have been a lot easier to just sleep with her, but Henry made me get on the floor and pull myself under the bed like a grease monkey under a car. His sisters were already sleeping. I asked Henry for a pillow, and he threw me a blanket to put under my head.
I lay there, in the dark and under a bed, and wondered what my life was coming to. I put Lillian out of my mind. I did not know what to think, because everything was all confused. I only knew that I was running away, and if I didn’t, everyone would be sad and angry. No one was going to forgive me, anyway. I was wrong in everybody’s eyes, and I just said to myself that I wasn’t going to think about it anymore.
So I said my night prayers and made all the blessing requests like nothing had ever happened. I blessed my mother and asked that my father gets okay again and that Uncle Tommy forgets about the airplane crash and is happy.
And now I am here. Still under the bed. I am just opening my eyes. It is a new day, and I am hoping it will be better than yesterday. Forget about Lillian’s taste, I say to myself. I raise up a little and bump my head on the bedspring. Shit. It is like being in a tiny sewer or cave. There is nowhere to move.
Now I am hearing voices, and I remember where I am. What are those voices? Is my mother here? Where is my mother? Probably sitting in the police station. Oh, shit, she is going to give me blue murder, and now that I’ve been out all night I can never go home.
I listen for a minute or so. I don’t hear my mother’s voice. The whole Castle family seems to be sitting around the kitchen table. I will just lie quietly here under the bed, waiting for Henry to figure out how I am going to get out without anyone seeing me.
Henry comes in, and he lies on the floor next to me.
He whispers.
“My father,” he says, “will pull my eyes out of my head if he finds out you’re here. It’s like harboring a criminal.”
“You want me to jump out the window?” I ask.
“That would work,” Henry says in a whispering laugh. “But that gives me an idea.”
“Yeah, so?” I ask.
“I got it,” he says, his eyes sparkling like he invented something. “We’ll have seven seconds, maybe less, so you gotta run like hell. You got it?”
“I got it,” I answer. “I think.”
“Run like hell,” he says, “when you hear me making a commotion, but quietly.”
“Got it,” I say. The Irish-Mexican mind is a mystery to me.
I don’t have a clue about what is going on.
I have my shoes in my hands now, lying under the bed, and waiting for something to happen. I hear Henry opening the front window of the apartment.
And then Henry begins to scream.
“Holy God,” he is yelling to his family at the top of his lungs, “look at this!”
I can hear all six of them now running to the front window, and everyone is crying, “What, what, what?”
I am now bolting like a racehorse to the front door, and I can hear Henry in the background, saying, “It’s not even raining today.”
It was just about seven seconds, and I am now out in the hall, and I run down to 54th Street and onto Second Avenue and then to 56th Street.
I stop running in front of Billy’s Bar and Grill, and I am thinking hard about what I can do now. I still have nowhere to go. I can’t go home. Kips Bay doesn’t open for another hour or so. I will have to hang around somewhere, but where? My neighborhood is so big, maybe the biggest neighborhood in the country, and it is changing. There is a lot of construction, and the high buildings that are going up will make the neighborhood even bigger. My mother says that when they tear down the Third Avenue El, the whole neighborhood will get ritzy, and our apartment will finally be worth the thirty-two dollars a month we pay in rent.
The bright light of the sun is gleaming off the copper roof of St. John the Evangelist, and the sunbeam is like a halo over the church. Maybe I should stop in for a while. I could just sit in church until Kips Bay opens. To think about God, to ask Him to get Sister Alphonsus to change her mind. But it is too late for that. I could just go up to the altar and wait for the Virgin statue to smile at me like when I was a kid, and ask her to watch over me specially, to help me get better marks, to make me as smart as Billy, to make my mother happy.