I did go to class a few times, but the homeroom teacher kept changing, and each teacher who came in thought he was just there for the day, and no one ever took attendance. There is no point in going to school if no one takes the attendance, because you’ll never be missed, and no one will think that you are in Jimmy’s candy store where you can use the fifteen cents your mother gives you each day to buy singles, Lucky Strikes or Camels. And you only had to stick around the candy store until noon. The school is on a half-day schedule, because there are so many students who want to fix airplanes, and there’s not enough space for everyone to go at the same time.
I never thought much about fixing airplanes, but SAT was a public school, which I wanted, and I could walk there from 56th Street, which by itself is a good enough reason to go there.
My mother thought I was doing great things in my new school, because each day I would tell her about these swell guys I knew, and how smart they were, and I would mix in a few names of books to make everything sound A-OK.
My mother would ask about the teachers, and when did the school have parent-teacher day like they did at St. John’s, and I told her that they did things differently at public school, that they sent reports in the mail at the end of the term.
I was thinking that I could always tell her that the reports got lost in the mail.
Today, most of the guys went over to play pool, but I don’t have the money for even a game of eight ball, so I am sitting in the rear of the candy store, on the back legs of an old wooden chair, leaning against a wall, watching Antone and a guy named Bullboy whose real name I don’t know as they are dancing to the new Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers tune, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” They are not dancing with each other, but they have imaginary partners and they are twirling them out and in and it looks pretty funny.
Antone comes over to me when the music stops. He’s a couple of years older than I am, and I think he lives in Queens or Brooklyn, maybe the Bronx.
“Hey, Smitty,” he says, “give me a butt, huh?”
I have only two cigarettes left, and it isn’t even noon yet. If I give him one, I’ll be stuck for the rest of the day until I get back to 56th Street where I can grub some.
“C’mon, will ya,” he says, holding his hand out.
His black leather jacket is open, and all the zipper chains are swinging back and forth. He has on a white shirt, and the collar is open and standing high in the back. He told us he has his shirts starched and pressed so that the collars stand up like this, like billboards. His hair is in a million curls and falls down into a point just above his nose, and with the collar sticking out like wings it looks like his head could fly away. He’d fly fast, too, I’m thinking, because the sides of his hair are greased down with Vaseline petroleum jelly, and smooth like the sides of an airplane.
He doesn’t like it that I’m taking so long.
“C’mon,” he says again, “give me a fuckin’ bitchin’ bastard cigarette. What are you, some guy who hugs the pillow and takes it in the brown spot, or what?”
The guys I grew up with don’t talk like these guys do. Up here at SAT there is a never-ending contest to see how many curses you can get into a sentence. I look over and see that Bullboy is laughing. I am hoping that he doesn’t ask me for a cigarette, too, as I reach into the pack and take out one cigarette.
Antone doesn’t say thank you, but this doesn’t bother me too much. He’ll never meet my mother, anyway.
Some other guys come in, and Antone and Bullboy leave, and then some more guys come in. The candy store is just a place to smoke, and to waste time, and I am tired of just sitting back on this chair. No one has put any money in the jukebox, either, and so I think about going around to the school yard to see if anyone is playing against-the-wall stickball. I look around to see where I left the three-ring binder I carry around, and I see that some guy is sitting on it, on the floor next to the jukebox.
“Hey,” I say to him, “you’re sitting on my book.”
The guy looks me up and down and gets off the book.
“Here,” he says, shoving it across the floor, “take your fuckin’ book.”
It’s easier most of the time to keep your mouth shut when somebody curses at you up here, because most of the time they don’t mean anything by it.
I am walking down 63rd Street, toward the school building, and I suddenly hear my name called out.
“Dennis,” I hear.
I am stunned to hear my mother’s voice. I know I’ll be in big trouble because I should be in class.
“Hey, Mom,” I say. She is wearing her red coat that ties around the waist, and she has her head wrapped in a red kerchief. She looks good in these clothes, like she coordinates it before she leaves the house.
I am trying to be nonchalant. It is always good to be nonchalant because it is cool not to be raveled by things.
“Give us a kiss,” she says. She is carrying a big paper bag, and she swings it as she puts her arms around me.
I know I am not in such trouble now, because she would never want a kiss if I was in trouble. And so I kiss her on the cheek, hoping none of the guys are around to see me.
I know I have to think fast, before she asks me any questions.
“I just came from shop class,” I say. “Now I’m going around to history and social studies.”
I know I am lying.
“Where is shop class?”
Her eyes now are like pinpoints, like she is a detective studying some clue.
“Around on 64th Street.” The school is divided between both streets.
She thinks for a minute and shrugs her shoulders.
“I have a surprise for you,” she says.
She is smiling as she changes from a detective back to my mother. I can tell she is happy for some reason. My mother is not happy so much, and I always feel good if I see her smiling.
“What’s that, Mom?”
“Just take a look at this,” she says, opening the bag.
She pulls out a green wool jacket and holds it up, here in the middle of the street. Across the back, in big white letters, it has the name of the school:
AVIATION.
It is brand-new, and I wonder how much money she had to pay for it.
My mother just began working for the New York Telephone Company. After all those years on welfare, I am finally old enough to leave home alone after school so she could go out to work. I know she doesn’t make much money, especially as an operator in training.
Oh, man, I think. I feel so bad that she went and did this, spending all this money on this jacket.
Maybe I could have gotten a cheap leather jacket with all the zippers, and here she has gotten me this jacket from the school where I never go.
She is looking at me now, waiting for some response.
Now is the time I could tell her about the black leather jackets, but I don’t know if she would like those. There are certain clothes she hates, like pegged pants with pistol pockets, and maybe she would think leather jackets are bad for me.
But she is gleaming at me. She is so proud that she has given me this jacket.
I should smile, I think, and I do as I take my windbreaker off. Even if I don’t like it. I can see in her eyes that she has a little happiness, and I wish I could add to it by loving the damn jacket. But I can’t. The only thing I can do is to not cut down that little bit of happiness that came to her by giving the jacket to me.
And so I put it on. It fits just right, and I put the collar up, so that I feel a little like a brizzer, a king of the hill, a guy who’s cool and with it.
“It looks great,” she says. “It is just the thing, now that you are in high school and everything is going so good for you.”
She stands back a little and folds her hands one into the other the way she does when she is studying something. Her smile goes from one end of her face to the other.
I am feeling worse now, because the first thing I think about is I wonder if the guys around the jukebox will think the jacket is for faggots.
But my mother has taken the windbreaker, and I have no choice but to wear this one.
“Thank you, Mom,” I say, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I have to go or I’ll be late.”
I am walking down Second Avenue when I again hear someone call my name. This time I don’t recognize the voice. I look around, but I don’t see anyone.
“Over here, Dumbo,” the voice cries.
I turn and see a guy I know from 56th Street, an Italian named DooDoo, his head hanging out from a window of the Second Avenue bus. The bus is stopped for a light, and I walk over to it. I can see the bus is packed with people. I look up at him.
DooDoo is a kid who works on a garbage truck that his father owns, and is maybe a year older than me. His little sister could never say Dominic, so he got tagged with DooDoo, because his father could never stop laughing when the sister called him that.
It is a stupid name, but it is the only one that anyone knows to call him, and reminds me of guys who have names like Lipshitz or Fokker or Handman. And then there’s the Dicks of the world. I don’t know a single Dick who doesn’t wish they named him something else.
“Who you calling Dumbo?” I say. “At least my name doesn’t mean crap in a diaper.”
“Oh, yeah?” he says, laughing, and squinting his eyes so that he looks Chinese.
“Yeah,” I say.
DooDoo then fast pulls up a lunger from deep within his throat, and he spits it out at me. I jump away as quick as I can, but part of it lands on my face. More goes on the jacket that I haven’t been wearing more than an hour.
I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I must be beet-red, and I look around to see if anyone has seen what DooDoo has done.
DooDoo is laughing, and I feel my face stinging from all the redness. The muscles around my eyes are tightening. I don’t know what to do, being out here on the avenue, all alone, looking up, the whole busload of people looking down at me.
“Dumbo,” he yells again as the bus pulls away.
I can’t just stand here, and I begin to run with the bus. I am pointing my finger at him as I run. I have to let these people on the bus know that I’m not going to just stand there and do nothing.
“I’ll get you later,” I yell in return. “You punk.”
I realize as I am running that I am not just yelling. I am screaming. And everyone on the street is looking at me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I can hear DooDoo say as the bus gains speed down the avenue.
I am sitting on a car fender now, across the street from DooDoo’s house. Walsh and Scarry are with me. Scarry has in his hands a
New York Times,
folded in three parts like a letter, and he is rolling it up. Rolled and tied together with strings, it is the closest thing to a free football that exists. A
New York Times
football sails through the air like a glider when you throw the bomber pass.
“Let’s play touch,” Scarry says as he knots the third and last string.
“Let’s wait a little while longer,” I say, “ ’cause DooDoo’s gotta come out sometime.”
“Why don’t you just forget about it?” Walsh says.
“You can’t let somebody spit on you, Bobby,” I answer.
“He could kick the crap outta you,” Scarry says, “maybe.”
“So,” I say, “as long as he knows he can’t spit on me, I don’t care.”
“C’mon,” Walsh says, “let’s play football.”
I can feel my stomach turning, waiting here for DooDoo. I don’t want to fight anyone, but you have to take a chance on getting hurt once or you’ll get hurt all the time. I learned that with Shalleski.
Finally, I see DooDoo come out of his building, which is next to the Hotel Sutton on the other side of the street from my house. There is only one step on his stoop, and he is just stepping off it when he sees me charging toward him. He knows what to expect, and he puts his hands up fast. But it is too late, and I punch him five times in a row, right, left, right, left, right, and DooDoo is falling to the sidewalk.
He gets up slowly and turns his back to me.
I could hit him again, but you can’t Jap someone like that, hit someone whose back is to you. It would get around the neighborhood that you were a Jap puncher, and people would think you’re a creep and a coward.
DooDoo turns, points his finger at me, and says, “I’ll fight you Saturday, down by the river. I’ll get you.”
DooDoo then turns and walks back onto his one-step stoop and into his building.
It is Saturday morning, and a crowd of us are down by the river, in the 56th Street park. Walsh is holding my Aviation jacket. DooDoo is taking things out of his pockets and putting them on a park bench. Other guys, like Jurgensen and the Harris brothers and Jimmy Burton, are standing around us. They heard there was a fight, and they came around to see.
I got DooDoo good the other day, but I took him by surprise then.
Now he is waiting for me to come toward him, his fists out to either side of him, clenched tightly.
He moves in and throws a punch. The last thing I think of before it hits me is that I have to be fast and quick like my brother Billy. But I am not being fast enough, and it crashes into the side of my face. And before I can recover from this punch, I get a second one, just above my eye on the other side of my face. Shit, I am thinking. It is hurting, stinging like a hard slap.
I know I have to move fast, and so I lunge forward at him, grab him around the neck, and pull him to the ground. He gets out of the headlock easy, and now he is on top of me, and he is fast, fast like Billy, punching like he was hammering nails. He gets me in the eye again, and in the mouth, and I feel the skin smarting, burning.
I grab him around the neck again, and this time I squeeze like a vise, and there is no way he can get out of it. He is punching and flailing, but he isn’t hitting anything but my back. I am holding on like I’m on a branch over a cliff, and now he is pushing his hand just under my arm so that he can breathe a little. He keeps trying to punch with the other hand.
But nothing is happening in the fight. He can’t do anything, and I don’t want to do anything except keep holding onto him. My face is hurting a lot now, and I know that if he gets a chance to belt me a few more times, I’ll get hurt good.