“It’s almost midnight,” I say, thinking that most of the people on 56th Street are asleep at eleven.
“C’mon, don’t be such a punk,” he says. “She’s got some beer in the fridge, and it’s something to do. Your mother waiting for you or something?”
“Don’t be a pain,” I say. “My mother went out to her sister’s house in Queens.”
“So you don’t have to go home. C’mon.”
“Can you call her first?”
“Yeah,” Jackie says sarcastically. “Like her husband has a good job so they can get a telephone, right?”
We finish the last two cans of beer before we hit 56th Street, and we walk down to 333, the building next to mine.
Jackie has his finger to his lips as we creep down the wooden stairs that lead to the alleyway to the backyards.
“Shh,” he utters in a kind of whisper. “If we wake up old Mrs. Dunne, that will be the end of it.”
Old Mrs. Dunne is Annie’s mother-in-law, and she is the super of the building. Her apartment is in the front, and the wooden stairs creak like an old ship. We go through the first yard and then under a tunnel passageway to the yard in the very back.
Underneath my windbreaker, I can feel my polo shirt sticking to my back. I guess it’s sweat made from the heat, but maybe also because I am a little afraid. Jackie is three years older than I am, and I don’t know him the way I know Walsh or Scarry or even guys like Frankie and Mikey. Jackie has a reputation for being a little wild and crazy.
Jackie Morgan once bet someone that he could steal a fifteen-foot fishing pole from Bloomingdale’s up on 59th Street. A guy named Jimmy Ginty then bet that he could steal a shotgun if Jackie could steal a fifteen-foot fishing pole, the one that is used for whales or something, and doesn’t come apart. It happened on a day when there was a snowstorm. Jackie shoved his jacket into a Third Avenue trash basket and walked into Bloomingdale’s in his undershirt and went right to the sports department. He told them he was the new stock boy, and he had to take the fishing pole to the stockroom so they could get the numbers to order new ones.
Jackie then walked straight out the front door, dragging the fifteen feet of fishing pole behind him, asking the security guard at the front of the store to open the door because the elevator wasn’t big enough to take it down to the stockroom. “The security guard told me not to catch cold as he opened the door,” Jackie told us. He was back on 56th Street in less than half an hour with a fishing pole that was for sale, and sent Ginty out for the shotgun.
Ginty never got the shotgun, but Jackie made himself a neighborhood legend.
Now we’re in the backyard with a canyon of windows going up either side of the alleyway, and Jackie wants to climb up the drainpipe to the second floor.
“Up the drainpipe,” I say. “Why can’t we go in the front door?”
“Somebody might see us,” he says.
“So what?”
“I been thinking about what you said about the jailbreak,” Jackie whispers, “and I gotta make sure nobody sees us.”
Jackie has his hands and feet around the drainpipe like a monkey, and he is shinnying himself up. I am right behind him. I don’t know Annie Dunne hardly at all, but she is a looker, and I am wondering as I am in the middle of this circus act if I will get to see her in her nightgown.
Maybe kissing Jackie.
Maybe she’ll kiss me.
Finally, Jackie gets to the window above us and shoves the kitchen window open. He climbs in and pulls me in after him, all the while holding his finger to his lips. I feel a strange sensation inside my body. It’s not that I am afraid, but I just know that we are doing something that is very wicked. I know they could never send you to jail for this, but if the cops came for any reason, we would have a tough time telling them we were delivering newspapers to Annie Dunne at midnight.
Jackie takes his clothes off in the small light that is shining in from the alleyway. I look over and see him right there in the middle of the kitchen, and he is as naked as the day the doctor smacked him on the ass.
“You go sleep on the couch,” he whispers, pointing to the living room.
I don’t like that he is telling me what to do. I thought I would get to see Annie in her nightgown, or that she would give us a drink or something, but I didn’t expect to climb up a drainpipe all this way to go sleep on a couch.
In a moment, though, Jackie is gone, his clothes spread around on the kitchen floor, left there like he was a leprechaun.
I open the refrigerator door and look to see what is inside. There is no light, and I can hardly see anything. I feel around looking for a bottle of beer. I am a little bit dizzy from the beer I had in the park, and it feels funny in my stomach, too, like I ate a bad fish cake or something.
Suddenly, I hear a long scream, a woman’s scream. It is like the end of a song in an opera, and like in a whirl Jackie is going through the kitchen. He’s speeding like a racing car, but he stops short at the living room and comes back to the kitchen for his clothes. He is naked, searching madly for his clothes, picking them up, and then running again.
I am still standing here, holding the refrigerator door open, feeling my stomach turn over and over.
“Get going!” he yells to me.
God, I’m thinking, what’s going on? I have such a pain in my stomach, and Jackie is yelling. Did he try to kill Annie Dunne? What’s wrong with my stomach?
I race after him through the living room, running fast, and into the back bedroom. I can hear Jackie either laughing or crying, I am not sure which, and he is tugging at the bedroom window, the one that leads out to the fire escape. He shoves it all the way open, and, still naked and holding his clothes, he climbs out the window and runs up the fire escape stairs. The screams seem to be following us into the backyard darkness. I am following close behind Jackie, but I have to stop, because my stomach seems to be pouring out of my mouth and nose, and I lean over the fire escape railing and I heave all over the backyard below, and I hope no one is looking up, because they’ll get more than birdshit in their eye, and I know I don’t have time to lally-gag on a fire escape after midnight, and I run like crazy to the roof trying to catch up with Jackie.
I find him there, in the darkness of a corner of the roof, doubled over, out of breath and laughing madly. He doesn’t say anything at first and begins to hop frantically on one leg as he puts the other through his pants.
I am leaning over, trying to get hold of my own breath. My stomach is still churning, and I want to throw up again, but I can’t get anything out of my throat but a belch.
“Holy God,” he is saying over and over. “Holy God. Holy God. I climbed into the bed. I saw her lying there, and I climbed into the bed, crown jewels and ass like a jaybird, and she turned around and she yelled like hell, and she scared the living goddamn crap outta me, and it wasn’t even Annie Dunne, Dennis, it was, Holy God, old Mrs. Dunne herself, there in the bed, and I am in the bed with her, naked, my underdrawers in the kitchen. And I’m there putting my arms around old Mrs. Dunne.”
“Fat Mrs. Dunne?” I say. “What’s she doing there?”
“Annie must’ve gone away, who knows, up to Sing Sing maybe.”
“With a file in her girdle,” I say. “That guy is gonna escape, Jackie.”
Jackie laughs a big one and pushes me.
“Yeah,” he says, “and he’ll end up in bed with his fat mother, too, and then he’ll want to go back to jail.”
Now I raise my finger to my lips. Jackie is making too much noise with his laughing and carrying-on.
“The cops are sure to come,” I say, whispering.
“Who cares?” Jackie says. “I’m going home anyways. Just be quiet in your hallway.”
Our buildings are all in a row, mine and Annie Dunne’s, and the Morgans’. I watch Jackie as he crosses over two roofs and goes down the stairs in his building, and I cross just one roof in the other direction and go down the stairs in mine, thinking that this has been a crazy thing to do, climbing into someone’s window in the middle of the night. And why do I do these things when I know that for every crazy thing like this I do there are fifty others I’ve done, and fifty more that I’ll probably do tomorrow and the next day? Why am I living outside of the normal? And is it, I wonder, just on the outside of the normal? Or is it below?
I tiptoe down the stairs, feeling the sweat on my shirt sticking against my jacket. I know that if I meet a policeman in this hall, I will have to explain why I am coming down from the roof and why I am sweating so much.
I am now on the fourth floor, and I can hear someone below me running up the stairs in twos. I run quickly down the dark narrow hall to my apartment and search for the key under the ripped hall linoleum. I quickly shove the key in the door and swing it open. And then I am flabbergasted. My mother is standing right there before me.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
I am completely surprised. Here is my mother standing in the middle of the kitchen, and I am still out of breath. She told me she probably wouldn’t be home, and I promised her that I would be in by eleven-thirty. She is just standing there in her pink bathrobe, her arms folded in front of her. The kitchen light is still moving from side to side, and so the shadows of her face are moving back and forth, making her seem like she is some advertisement sign.
“I thought,” I answer, “that you were going out to Aunt Kitty’s, that you were staying over.”
“Well, young man,” she says, “I came home because I want to know where you are spending your time when you go out at night. It is almost one o’clock in the morning. I just had a feeling that you wouldn’t do what you said you were going to do. Where were you?”
“I was just out.”
“Who were you with?”
I know she doesn’t like the Morgan family, because the mother and father come out on the street drunk once in a while. My mother thinks that if you have to be drunk, you should be drunk in your own house and not share it with everyone on 56th Street.
“Walsh and Scarry and those guys,” I say in a low voice.
“Did you say Walsh and Scarry,” she says in an angry tone, “and those guys? Huh? Listen, Dennis, tell me who you were with.”
“I was with them,” I say, lying. “We went to a movie.”
“Where did you get the money to go to a movie, huh?” I can’t tell her that I have this extra money from the florist, that I’ve been working more than just on Saturday.
“Scarry treated us all.”
I know it’s another lie, but I can say Scarry treated us, because she knows that Mr. Scarry has a good job as the bartender at Billy’s on First Avenue, and so there is a lot of money in that family.
My mother looks very angry, and the shadows moving back and forth across her face seem like a clock ticking away, and that soon it is going to come down to zero and then she is going to explode. She throws her hands out and begins to walk into the living room, but she stops. And she turns again to me, pointing her finger.
“I don’t believe you, Dennis,” she says, shaking her finger at me. “You were not with Scarry and Walsh, because they would not be out at one o’clock in the morning. And you don’t want to tell me who you were with.”
“I was so with them,” I say in one last try to get out of it.
“You weren’t,” she says. “And I’ll say this to you. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you what you are. And just as you are ashamed to tell me who you were with, you will be ashamed of who you are.”
“Can I go to bed now?” I say more than ask.
“Yes,” she says, now with a biting, bitter voice, and that terrible look on her face, disgusted, as if we were passing a subway toilet. “You go to bed now and think about who you are.”
I turn into our room, and she is following me.
I just wish she would shut up and leave me alone. She never stops when she is complaining about something. She just keeps going at it all the time. I don’t take my clothes off, but jump up fast into the top bunk and turn my body away from her and into the wall. My head is spinning, and my stomach is turning, and I know that if I can just have some quiet, I can go to sleep and get away from the spinning and the turning. But she is right behind me. She reaches me and gives me a good shove so that my whole body moves.
“And don’t think,” I hear her say as my body goes flat against the wall, “that I don’t smell the beer along with the cigarettes.”
A
few weeks pass, and my mother doesn’t say much more than hello to me.
It is now Sunday morning. Early. My brother has just come back from a midnight-to-eight shift throwing the mail sacks for the New York Central Railroad, and he is sitting in the bathtub in the kitchen. I don’t say anything to him as I go to the sink to brush my teeth. The sink is right next to the tub, and I can see the water in the tub making small waves.
I didn’t get up to do the papers this morning, and I didn’t do the folding last night. Instead I hung out with Frankie and Mikey, and, besides the junk, I also took a few tokes on some pot. My head aches. I am still half asleep, and I wonder since my head feels like it is the size of a watermelon if I will ever get completely awake again. I am also wondering, as I grab the toothbrush, if Billy can see the marks in my arm muscle where I have been jabbing myself, doing my own skin-popping. I should have worn a long-sleeved shirt when I got out of bed.
My mother is in her room. Thank God. I don’t want to talk to anyone, especially my mother, and especially when she’s not talking to me. She only has questions when she’s not talking to me, and she wants answers and explanations.
Billy is quiet, which is odd. He usually has something to say, like where did you go last night, or who was that girl I saw you with yesterday, or how come you didn’t get up to deliver the papers this morning? But now he’s quiet.
The
New York Times
is on the kitchen table, the thick Sunday paper. Billy may tell people he just reads the sports pages, saying things like “They even tell you what the jai alai players did in Cuba last week.” But I see him when he is reading it, and he reads every page front to back.