My mother looks away for a second, and she says, “I do trust you, I trust both of you. What do you want to know, what do you want me to tell you?”
“Is he okay, is he hurt, is he getting beat up?” I ask these questions like they are bouncing off the sides of a pinball machine.
My mother smiles at these questions. “Yes,” she says, “he is not in that awful Greenland hospital anymore but up in Poughkeepsie State and the people there are very nice to him. Believe me, I have seen them being nice many times.”
“All right, good, Mom,” I say, turning. “I’m sorry to wake you up.
“You didn’t wake me up, Dennis,” she says.
“Good, Mom,” I say, “because I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
I go to our room and climb back to the top bunk. I pull the sheet up and adjust my eyes to the dark. Billy doesn’t say anything at all, and I leave him to his own thoughts.
God, I am thinking.
Shit.
God.
Anyway, I’m thinking, at least I’m not alone in all of this anymore.
B
illy is a junior counselor at Kips Bay Summer Camp this year, and so I’m home alone. It is a hot night, and I have a wet rag around my neck, and I’m trying to sleep on the floor. Anything to cool off. My mother is asleep, and probably dreaming about how mad at me she is, because she found a couple of the tiniest pieces of tobacco in my shirt pocket.
She treats me like I’m in the third grade. And she never would have found it if she didn’t have to iron my polo shirts all the time. I’m the only guy on the street who has ironed polo shirts.
Goddammit, I hate that I can’t get out of this being a kid.
She made such a big thing about it, smelling my breath, smelling my shirt, smelling everything around me, searching for the dreaded tobacco stench. I wanted to say that she could be smelling her own cigarettes if she smelled anything at all. But it’s better to keep cool and collected.
“Tom Harris,” I said to her, making up a fast story, “put his wallet in my shirt pocket yesterday when he got up at bat, when we were playing stickball in the street, so it wouldn’t fall out of his pocket, in case he had to run fast if he hit a homer down over two sewers, and so I guess he had some tobacco in his wallet or something.”
It’s not a complete lie. We were playing stickball, and Tom did put his wallet in my shirt pocket, next to my cigarettes.
“Go to bed,” she said, “just go to bed. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I can’t go to bed, Mom.”
“Just go to bed.”
“Mom, it’s only seven o’clock, and it doesn’t even get dark until nine.”
“Okay, then,” she said, her arm gliding like an ice-skater over the ironing board, “just read a book first and wait until it gets dark. Then go to bed. You are making a spectacle of yourself, thirteen years old and smoking like you were a truck driver or a stevedore.”
Sometimes I don’t understand the way my mother develops her thoughts. She is always saying that I am making a spectacle of myself, like I am in the center ring at the circus, and I wonder how I am such a spectacle. And she says it’s because I am being like a truck driver or a stevedore, who are not such spectacles. Nothing goes together. It would be like seeing monkey wrenches instead of knives and forks on the linen napkins at Joe’s Original Restaurant. And so I just picked up
All Quiet on the Western Front,
the book Betty gave me a few days ago, and I read about dirty foxholes and dying soldiers until my eyes hurt.
I wish I was back at camp. At Kips Bay Camp up in Valhalla, New York, everything is bright and green and clear, and there is no mother to be on you about this and that. And even if there was a mother, there would be no time to listen to her complaints because you are always off somewhere hunting frogs or snakes, or playing flag football, or making lanyards for key chains and bracelets and necklaces.
I’ve been going to Kips Bay Camp for two weeks every summer since I was six years old. I think they give it to my mother for free, because I could never stay for a long three-week trip. If I had a three-week trip, I would still be there.
The first time I went to camp I went because I won first place in a “why I want to go to camp” essay contest. I was in the first grade, and I wrote a composition which was about a page long. I remember I wrote that I wanted to get away from the cars, because you can’t play stickball in the street with all the cars coming through 56th Street, and that I had never been out of New York City except when I was four and went to Canada on a train when my Uncle Ronald died there, and my Aunt May paid for my mother to take Billy and me to the funeral so’s all the relatives could see us.
The winning composition was more a letter than a composition, and I guess they sent it to everyone in the neighborhood. A director guy must have read it, and so he sent me a camp package, which, besides having cookies and candy that I had to share, also had a baseball glove and a baseball hat. My Uncle Phil had bought Billy a baseball glove for Christmas, but I just got a sweater.
But this package came as a complete surprise, and I yelled when I opened it. That baseball glove was the best present I ever got, and I used it all the time for years until Uncle Phil bought me a professional one.
But it came with some bad luck, because the man who sent it, this director, decided to stop in the camp one day to pay me a visit. He had another big box of candy and cookies, and he went looking for me.
Archie was the head counselor that year, and he and Archie searched for an hour, but they couldn’t find me, for that was the day my counselor made me make my bed three times before I got the hospital corners right, and I was so mad at him that I decided to run away. I took a flashlight, even though it was before lunch, and went into the woods. I still remember how frightened I was, because I got lost in five minutes, and it seemed like I was in the woods all day before they found me.
Archie was ready to send me home. He showed me the box that the man had left for me, filled with all kinds of stuff, cookies and candies and games, but said that I didn’t deserve it. So he left it out in the dining hall at dinner for the counselors to give as rewards to their best campers.
It did not bother me that Archie gave away the goodie box. That’s the way things are at camp. You’re supposed to be having a great time, and if you’re not, it’s probably your fault. And if it’s your fault, you don’t get the prize, and that’s the way it goes. Archie would never do anything bad to someone, but he will never let you get away with anything bad, either. That’s the lesson at camp.
Now the sweat’s coming out of my neck like Niagara Falls. All I can do is toss and turn on the hard floor, and so I decide to sleep out on the fire escape. It could be cooler there, and it’s cleaner, anyway, than the roof.
The fire escape window is in my mother’s room. I don’t want to bother her, and so I grab a blanket and go out the front door and then down the long, narrow hall to the hall window. The hall back here is never mopped, and I’m walking in my bare feet through an inch of dust. I have to wrestle with the window a little before it opens, which makes me sweat more, but I can feel the live air as I climb out to the fire escape, and I am thinking that at least I’m out of the dead air of the apartment.
I am in my short cotton underpants, barefoot and bare-chested, and I throw the old army blanket across the rusty iron strips of the fire escape. I lie down. There is not much room between the building, the rails, and the fire stairs, and I’m curled up like a puppy in a corner. Still sweating like mad, I say a prayer to Saint Jude, the patron of hopeless causes, to send a breeze my way. I’m maybe as uncomfortable as I have ever felt in my life. I’m not sure of what is bothering me. The spaces between the iron slats of the fire escape, or thinking that I could be up at Kips Camp if we could afford another two-week trip, or maybe just that my mother still hasn’t mentioned anything about our father since we had that talk in her bedroom.
I don’t know why she avoids it. She could tell me what happened to him, how he got that way, why they won’t let me in to see him. There is still this big absence, this big empty hole, in the middle of our lives.
And, then, there is Barbara Cavazzine, who I now like more than Marilyn Rolleri. I asked her to go to the movies with me or to meet me there some Saturday.
She said no.
She didn’t say “No thanks,” or “My mother won’t let me,” or “I like you but I like some other guy more.” She just said “No,” and that was that. I guess I will have to ask her again.
But I saw someone else I also liked, but I don’t think she comes from this neighborhood. All I know is her name is Virginia. Maybe I can get to meet her.
Why is it so hard to get a girlfriend on 56th Street?
I don’t know how long I have been sleeping, but I awake suddenly because I feel the whole fire escape shaking. I smell smoke as I open my eyes, and try to adjust to the night’s dark. There is a giant in front of me, like a character in “Puss in Boots,” with big boots folded over below the knees, and he is picking me up as a group of other firemen are running up the stairs behind him.
“Hey, kid,” the fireman says.
“Let me down,” I say to him, thinking, I’m not a kid, for Chris-sakes.
A cloud of smoke sweeps down over us, and I begin to choke uncontrollably. I look up and see the flames coming from the apartment window above us, Mr. Sorenson’s apartment. My eyes are hurting like someone put mud in them.
“Sure thing, kid,” the fireman says, putting me down. “Let’s get you off this fire escape, anyway. You’d be in a lot of trouble when they break the windows upstairs.”
He has me by the hand as we go to the hallway window.
“The firemen,” he says, “have to break the windows, you know.”
He grabs a huge ax which he had put down, climbs in first, and helps me into the hallway. The fire is above, but I can still smell the smoke here in the hall.
“Hey, kid,” the fireman says as we walk into the hallway, him in his huge boots and me in my bare feet, “what do you think of that DiMaggio? Is he a hero, or what?”
Mr. Sorenson’s apartment, and maybe even Mr. Sorenson himself, is burning up, and he’s asking me about Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
“Nobody better,” I say.
I love this fireman. This fireman is like Father Luke, and I wonder what you have to do to be a fireman.
There is a lot of noise in the hallway as the firemen are dragging up the hose. I see that my mother is sticking her head out of the apartment door.
“Just stay in your house,” the fireman says to her, “and you’ll be okay.”
He messes my hair and runs back to the fire escape, and in a second he is gone out the window. My mother has no idea that I was out on the fire escape, and it must seem to her that I came out of thin air. She puts her arm around me and squeezes hard as the door shuts.
“It’s Mr. Sorenson’s apartment upstairs,” I say. “There’s a lot of smoke.”
“Ohh,” my mother says.
I look at her hazel eyes, and they show that she is afraid. Her eyes are like street signs to me, because you always know where she is when you look at them, and now I can see the fear in them.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say to her. “The fireman said so. He said that we’ll be okay and that DiMaggio is a hero.”
I am back on the floor in the living room, the wet rag again around my neck, and in the new quiet of the dark I am thinking about that fireman. It must be something to be a fireman. He was so cool, a real cool cat.
I wonder if he has children, maybe a boy or a couple of boys, that he takes to Yankee Stadium to see DiMaggio.
I
t is now fall. I am fourteen years old, and in public school.
There was a big ruckus about going to a public school. Everybody knows that kids go to Catholic high schools when they graduate St. John’s, and it’s like getting caught at first on a bunt to go to public school, like you’re destined to be out. Even Sister Alphonsus, who was going to fail me in everything, told me that I would be better off going to a minor-league Catholic school like St. Agnes than to go to public school.
And my mother, too. She went on and on about how good Billy is doing up in the Bronx at Cardinal Hayes High School. Billy would do good at Nortre Dame if he was there, but my mother doesn’t realize the difference between us, which is a simple difference. Billy
likes
school.
I begged her.
Another Catholic school would kill me, even if I could get in one of the not-so-good ones, which I thought pretty doubtful because of the bad grades. I just want to be out of it, away from the nuns and the priests. It’s like being a duck-stepping Nazi storm trooper to be in Catholic school. Everything is all precision and discipline, and you can never talk without being first asked a question. And you are reading all the time, breakfast, lunch, and supper, in these big books they give you with stories about history or people who invent things or about soldiers going off to war to fight the Japs and the krauts.
All my friends who go to public school tell me that no teacher ever makes you do things like read, or gives you a bad time, and you can either do your homework or not, no difference to them, no sweat off their back. That was for me, to get away from the standing-up-straight-in-line stuff.
Public school is like heaven, where nobody bothers you.
And so now I’m in a school where I never go.
The School of Aviation Trades is on East 63rd Street. I get up in the morning, and I go to Jimmy’s candy store on 62nd Street where “Sh-boom, Sh-boom” is always playing on the jukebox, and the guys who hang around wear leather jackets and have key rings hanging from their belts.
At least I don’t have to wear a white shirt and blue tie anymore. I have this black windbreaker with my name printed on the front pocket. I know my mother would never be able to afford to buy me a leather jacket, but those leather jackets are so cool. Some of the guys put gloves through the shoulder flaps, like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One,
and nothing looks cooler than that.