Today I ask the Immaculate Conception to make my father better, and she says she will and smiles at me. She doesn’t actually talk but gives me a message. I always close my eyes and think that I am swimming in the bottom of a deep well, and looking up I see just a small circle of light in the middle of the blackness, and there in the light is the Blessed Virgin.
Maybe, too, you can make sure that Uncle Tommy is in good shape up there. That he doesn’t need much.
Now it is time for the deal. What am I going to do in return for any favors? Last time I promised to wash the kitchen floor for Mommy, and so now I look up at the Virgin and promise to wear a clean shirt whenever I can remember. She seems to think that is a square deal, and so she smiles at me.
I return to the back of the church, which is really the front, and pass the big plaques with the names of all the St. John’s men who were in the wars. The first one and the Second World War. Uncle Tommy has his own plaque, a small one.
I never knew him, my Uncle Tommy, never even saw a picture of him, but whenever I look at his plaque, I invent his face, and I put words in his mouth, just like I do with my father. Sometimes I put my father and Uncle Tommy together in a room, and they always argue about what ball game they want to take me to, for I think my father likes DiMaggio and the Yankee Stadium and Uncle Tommy likes Pee Wee Reese and Ebbets Field.
And so I stand before the plaque and talk for a few minutes to my dead uncle, kiss my fingers, and touch the cold bronze of his name. Just next to him is the heavy wrought-iron poor box screwed to the wall, and I separate the penny from the nickel. For a second, I hold the penny up like an offering, and then I reluctantly drop it into the poor box and bless myself with the sign of the cross. I do not want to give the penny up, but I picture my mother saying that if you forget the poor of the world, the world will someday forget you. It is what I remember each time I pass the poor box. So there is no choice.
That is two rolls of caps, the poor-box sacrifice, but I still have the nickel for Abbie’s candy store, and a nickel will go a long way.
On the church steps, though, holding tight onto the black-painted handrail, I stop to think about the poor. Where were they? I don’t know any poor except those in Ireland that my grandfather talks about. He lives with my Aunt Kitty in Sunnyside, and he is always talking. I can hardly make out what he is saying, what with his brogue.
“D’poor wuz dare, a always be dare. Dey was ten o’ us ind a room an’ dare was a lot less meat dare den dare wuz some music and a bit a da song.”
He sounds like this, and he is always talking about music and being poor.
“You’re not poor if you don’t miss a meal, Pop,” my mother tells him.
Uncle Tommy would have laughed at that if he heard it. And my father.
There’s a family of coloreds that lives down on 54th Street, the only ones in the neighborhood. The father is the super there, and they don’t look like they’re as poor as colored people are supposed to be. They are all pretty fat. Like Mommy says, they don’t look like they miss many meals. But their clothes are always dirty, and they go to public school.
There are so many things I don’t know, like when people are poor and when they’re not, or what this decimal point is that Sister Maureen keeps talking about, or why my father can’t get better and come home.
And then there are so many other questions, like what is the story about the front of the church? Here I am standing on the steps of the church, and I know that, without an argument, this is the front of the church, but as soon as I walk into the church I am in the back of the church and have to walk all the way down the center aisle if I want to be in the front of the church again. So I guess there are two fronts of the church, but only one back.
C
’mon already,” Abbie is saying, “there are things to do instead of waiting for you to make up your mind. What’s your name?”
“Moniker,” I say, because I might be seven but I know it means a different name. My Uncle Tracy always says that his name is Tracy, but his moniker is Your Lord Worship Tracy.
“Monica is a girl’s name,” Abbie says. “What’s your name?”
Abbie is always rushing you. If you have the nickel for an egg cream, he stands in front of you until you drink it, saying, “C’mon already.” And he always asks your name, so that if he catches you stealing, he can tell the cops if you squirm out of his grip. A lot of the guys in the neighborhood steal every time they go into Abbie’s.
“Just an old Jew,” the guys say, “that gots lots of dough. He’ll never miss a little candy.”
I guess everybody thinks that stealing candy from Abbie is like stealing a pair of leather gloves from Bloomingdale’s or a million dollars from the Rockefellers. There is a lot more where it came from, money and stuff, or Abbie’s candy, and it will never be missed.
So it’s probably a venial sin, and you’ll get a few Hail Marys in confession, and it will be over.
But if you steal a nickel from an old widow woman that’s on pension, you are sure to go to hell. Because that kind of sin is worse. No one ever said why.
Mommy says that if you steal from somebody one day, the next day you’ll lie to somebody else, and your life will be worth nothing, because nobody loves a liar. If you’re a liar, you’ll never have a true friend, and what’s the point of being alive if you don’t have true friends?
I have red wagon wheels in one pocket, and licorice in the other, and a bagful of Good & Plenty. It is like a miracle what a few beer bottles will do. Abbie is now helping someone who wants an egg cream, and I could put a hundred wagon wheels in my pocket. But I guess Abbie paid for that candy, and if everyone stole some, Abbie would wonder what he paid for when he looks at the empty tray.
Kips Bay Boys Club is just around the corner on 52nd Street, and I am going there to have a game of Ping-Pong, and maybe pool if the big boys ever left a table free. Near the corner, I see Peter Shalleski and his brother Harry, who is my brother Billy’s age. I know that I should put my Good & Plenty in a pocket as soon as I see Shalleski, but he is on me before I can take another step, punching like he was wound by a twisted rubber band. The bag of miniature white and pink logs goes out of my hand, and the candy spills everywhere, across the sidewalk, into the gutter, all over First Avenue. I am so mad that Shalleski does this. I want to fight back, but Shalleski has me by my shirt collar, screaming about his twisted ear, and how I got him into trouble with Sister Maureen.
What is the matter with me? I am frozen with something. I am not afraid. It’s a kind of mixed-up feeling. I’m getting smashed and I can’t help thinking that Shalleski shouldn’t be doing this. Why does Shalleski have to punch and knuckle people all the time?
Shalleski is just a little bigger than me, not much. I could dodge him, and floor him with a roundhouse on the blind side, like I heard on the radio at the Joe Louis fight. Why don’t I know how to hit him, instead of just putting my hands up to protect myself?
Shalleski is yelling with every punch. “Take that, you sonofabitch,” he is saying.
Stop, stop, stop, I am thinking as I press my arms into my face.
Finally, Shalleski stops, I guess because I am not fighting back.
No one says anything, not another word. The two brothers just walk away, and I look at my candy all over the ground.
Could I kiss it up to God? Is there any of it that isn’t too dirty to pick up? No, I am thinking. I don’t want it because it’s now dirty like the devil’s ashes. Shalleski did that, and someday I will make him pay for it.
Both my ears hurt, and I feel the blood at my nose. I put my fingers to the top of my lip. It’s not dripping too much, and so I throw my head back as I walk down 52nd Street.
Archie is standing at the top of the stairs at Kips. He is always there if he isn’t playing dodgeball in the lower gym.
“Where’s your club card?” Archie asks.
“Come on, Archie,” I say, “you know me.”
“Doesn’t matter if I’m your brother or something, you have to have the card.”
I have the black “midgets’ card,” the youngest age group. Midgets can just go to the lower gym to play school yard games, but the intermediates, like Billy, can use their gray card to play full-court basketball on the third floor.
I know that Billy will be in the upper gym. He’s always playing basketball, or baseball, or reading. Mommy goes to the library every week to get the books, and Billy always reads them.
I have lived with Billy all my lifetime, and when you live with someone, you don’t think a lot about them. They are just there like the kitchen sink. But, recently, I’ve been thinking that Billy has been pretty good with me, making sure I learn things that he has found out, like how to play rummy.
A few weeks ago he took me to Kips to teach me how to play Ping-Pong. We were hanging around 56th Street, doing nothing, and he just grabbed me by the neck, and like that we walked to Kips. All the while he was telling me that to get good at any sport where there is a ball, you just have to keep your eye on it, maybe just a little bit of your eye, but never take your eye off the ball completely for even half a second because someone was sure to do something just right then that you don’t expect.
Since he took me to Kips for that Ping-Pong game, I have been playing as much as I can, and now I am getting pretty good at it.
Maybe, I am thinking now, he can do the same for boxing.
There is a lot of noise in the locker room because some of the boys are having a towel fight, snapping the towels at their crotches. I run past them to the gym and see Billy taking a foul shot.
“What are you doing after the game?” I call to him.
“I don’t know,” he yells back. “Going home?”
“Could you take a little bit of time with me?”
“What do you want? Ping-Pong?”
“To learn how to fight.”
Billy looks at me like I am asking him for a loan of twenty dollars. He stops shooting the ball and comes over to me.
“You don’t learn how to fight,” he says at the sideline. “You just do it.”
“No,” I answer, “I gotta learn, ‘cause I fell outta the stroller and lost my thumbnail, and I have to beat the brains outta Peter Shalleski. I have to plan it.”
“What?” my brother says, a little confused. “Meet me in the weight room after the game.”
The weight room is below the swimming pool and has a punching bag hanging by a chain from the ceiling and a few pairs of old boxing gloves around the room. There is also a pair of black punching bag gloves on the floor, three sizes too big for me, but I put them on and begin to punch the bag.
As I punch away I am beginning to remember the dancing lessons in the church basement, just before the Christmas Pageant. They made me dance with Peggy Sheehy. Or, maybe they made Peggy Sheehy dance with me. I remember the rules of dancing that the nuns taught us. Keep your head up straight, your chin out. Don’t stiffen your knees, keep them buckled just a bit. Bring your shoulders back. Control the change of your weight from one foot to the other.
Maybe these rules are connected to boxing, I think. Maybe a good fight is like a good dance.
I am now bouncing around, jabbing at the punching bag, keeping my head straight and my knees buckled a little, and I am making it swing with each jab. Then I weave and bob, up and down, always throwing the jabs. Hit the bag, hit the bag, hit Shalleski the ratski. Swing the roundhouse. Keep the chin up.
Billy comes into the room and watches me some.
“You’re doing pretty good,” he says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You want to box?” He begins to pick up a pair of gloves.
I don’t want to fight with my brother, even if the gloves are ten times bigger than my fists.
“No,” I say, taking one last hard punch at the bag, pleased that I beat the bag to a pulp. “Let’s go home.”
B
illy puts his arm around my shoulder as we walk up Second Avenue, past Gasnik’s Hardware, past Moe’s Diner, past the newsstand. He’s only nine, but he knows how to do everything. He’s the basketball champ, the baseball champ, and he’s never in fights, because nobody wants to tangle with somebody that moves as fast as Billy. And he is always good with lessons, no matter if it’s history or boxing. “Just don’t take any crap from people,” he is saying. “Shalleski may give you some lumps every time, but he’ll begin to respect you.”
“I don’t want his respect,” I say, trying to walk in step with my brother. “I just want him to stop bothering me and maybe kick the crap outta him. Like kick the can.”
Billy laughs.
“Maybe you hafta get madder,” he says. “Maybe you’re not mad enough to hurt him.”
“I could kill him.”
“You could? Paddy Gilligan has a zip gun.”
That was something I didn’t think about. Not only could I say I could kill Shalleski, but I really could kill him. I only had to talk Paddy Gilligan into loanding me his zip gun. But there is a problem. Paddy Gilligan is the toughest guy in St. John’s, and he is in the eighth grade, and he would never talk to me.
“Maybe I just wanna break his nose, give him a nose like Dick Tracy.”
We walk past Speece’s drugstore and over the Second Avenue cobblestone at 55th Street where they didn’t finish the new street paving. We turn at 56th Street, and when we pass the Hotel Sutton, we cross to the other side of the street. It is late in the afternoon, but we had just put the clocks forward and it is still light.
It is only at the stoop that my brother takes his arm from around my shoulder. He takes a good look at me and gives me a small smack at the back of my head, and laughs. I guess he sees the dried blood at the end of my nose, but he doesn’t mention it.
A few women are sitting there, newspapers shoved under them to protect their skirts. One is drinking out of a cardboard container of beer which she got at Billy’s Bar and Grill on the corner. It is the only place in the neighborhood that still sells beer in containers. This is Sue Flanagan’s mother. Sue Flanagan is sitting there, too. I love her, even though she is ten years older than me and in nursing school. She always pretends to want to kiss me, and she laughs when she squeezes me. She doesn’t know that I love her. Usually, I like to pretend that I don’t like to be squeezed, because I know that makes her squeeze me harder and longer, but now I just want to get home. If there is any blood showing on me, I don’t want her to see it, and so I whiz by before she catches my eye.