I never saw anything like it, the way he charged into them like a kamikaze. These guys were just minding their own business, and then this madman suddenly, unexpectedly, began punching at them, all four of them. One, then the other, then the next. A one-on-one fight is okay, and fair unless someone pulls a knife or something, but this was something the rule books didn’t cover, a madman, like a concrete truck running into these guys.
I didn’t know any of them, and I don’t know if I would care much about them if I knew them, but, as I watched Sutton flailing away, I couldn’t help thinking about anything other than my brother Billy.
The thought came to me that these guys might come back downtown someday and see Billy standing there on 56th Street, talking to a few guys in front of Rossi’s, and some wall might roll into the middle of Billy and his friends, punching away, or worse, they might have a zip gun of their own.
I guess it would be better to live without any fights in your life, and I began to realize while I was watching Sutton that I had no beef with these guys from 65th Street.
But here we were, in their territory, with Sutton punching everyone he could see, and I wish I could have stopped it, but I couldn’t. It’s not like the story of turning the other cheek that Sister Maureen talked about when I was a kid, the same one from the Sermon on the Mount I read in the Family Bible that my mother bought for a dollar a month for thirty-six months. We shouldn’t have been there to begin with, no matter if a cheek was turned or not. I don’t want anything terrible to happen to anyone, but especially I don’t want anything terrible to happen to my brother, and I wanted to tell Sutton to stop it, that we defended ourselves, and maybe now we could all go home.
But then, just as unexpectedly, the cops came running up First Avenue.
“Chickie!” somebody yells. This is the word that means somebody’s coming.
“Chickie the cops!” somebody is now screaming.
I ran like I was in a race in the stadium up on Randalls Island, first down to York, and, thinking that everyone would probably run back downtown, I made a left and zoomed up to 72nd Street.
I could walk then, across 72nd Street to Lexington, and down Lex until 56th Street, and then slowly, like nothing happened, around to 55th Street.
“Maybe,” I say, “you could slow up a little and give us a chance to breathe, huh?”
“Relax, huh,” Frankie says. “We gotta get to the Irish Riviera before all the broads are gone.”
“It’s amazing no one got caught,” Nicky the Greek says. Nicky just started hanging around with us, and I’ve been seeing a lot of him since I quit the job at Catholic Charities.
It was a boring job, and I felt like I was on one of those lines in a factory where you put lids on jars, just going from floor to floor and dropping the mail off at people’s desks. Also, Mr. Lacy began to yell at me all the time for being late, or not delivering the mail fast enough, or any little thing, and so I told him one day to get someone else who was willing to take his bullshit.
“Some cop got close to me,” Nicky says, “and got me with a good kick in the ass, but it just made me go faster. He never got up to me.”
“What are we going to do, anyway?” I ask.
“Go to McGuire’s Bar on 108th Street,” Frankie says, “maybe watch a little basketball in the beach court there, maybe have a couple beers, maybe shoot up.”
“Maybe get some Irish girls to sit on our laps,” Nicky says.
“I don’t want to shoot up,” I say. I like to let them know up front that I don’t want to do it.
“You can skin-pop,” Frankie says.
“I think I’ll drink beer,” I say, “ ‘cause I got a few bucks.”
“You can keep watch for us,” Frankie says, “but you hafta tell us if you want in ‘cause I can only cook up once, you know. You can’t change your mind.”
My brother is in the fenced-in basketball court alongside the beach near McGuire’s Bar. There is a fast full-court game going on, and I am thinking as I watch Billy break loose every time he gets the ball that Oberlin College lost a good opportunity to be champs with Billy.
I sit along the sidelines, watching, until Billy comes over at a time-out.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Looking for some broads, maybe,” I say. “How you doin’?”
“I got such a hangover,” he says, “I’m going to have to play fifty games to clear it all out of my system.”
“Where were you?”
“Jasper’s,” he says, “and I was completely ossified, drinking beer out of my shoe, and I put the shoe on top of the bar, leaking all over the place, and Jasper himself was there. It was a pretty dangerous thing to do. You just don’t do things like that in his joint. He threw me out, and told me that the only reason he wasn’t locking me in the refrigerator was because he knew I was a neighborhood kid, and neighborhood kids always get two tries.”
“Jesus, Billy,” I say. “I wouldn’t go back there for a while, anyway.”
“Right,” Billy says, “I’m banning myself.”
At least Billy goes to his jobs, and he never misses college. He’s getting things done.
But my life, lately, has been everything opposite to Billy’s. I don’t know when to stop, to ban myself from anything. But I want to try to change, and that’s why I told Frankie today that I don’t want any horse. I don’t want to be a dope addict, I know that, and I just have to tell them I don’t want it. I can still hang around with them. They are good guys, Frankie and Nicky and Mikey and those guys, friends, but I have to think about this dope stuff the way Billy thinks about Jasper’s Bar. Jasper could kill Billy, and Billy knows that. And, at least, Billy is smart enough to ban himself.
I made all those faces when I was a kid. It drove my mother crazy, and she decided one day, I guess, that belting me with the strap wasn’t changing anything. So she asked me to sit with her on the living room couch, and she was holding a hand mirror, which she took from the top of her bureau.
She held the mirror high in front of me.
“Now,” she said, “make those faces.”
I didn’t want to make those faces then, not with that mirror in front of me, but my mother kept prodding me.
“Do it, do it,” she kept saying. “Don’t brood about it.”
And she must have made me make those faces a hundred times, some with my eyebrows reaching up to my forehead, some with my lips going over to my ears, and I kept thinking that I was looking funnier and funnier, and weirder and weirder. I told my mother that I didn’t like the way I looked, but that I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t just stop like you stop swimming just by getting out of the water. Then she told me to cross the middle finger of my left hand over my index finger and to press down hard, and to say to myself that I won’t make a face again. Never.
“Now,” she said, her arms around me, the mirror on her lap, “when you make another face, just cross your fingers like that, press hard, and think about how funny you look. If you keep trying like that, sooner or later it will work for you.”
She then squeezed me, saying, “Not for me, Dennis. Don’t do this for me, but do it for yourself.”
I am sitting in the back of the car now as Frankie and Nicky are shooting up. My fingers are one over the other, and I am looking out the back window to make sure the police are not driving by. It is a hot day. I had about five beers in McGuire’s, and there were no Irish girls, not that I wouldn’t take a girl from Istanbul if I could get one. I am a little dizzy, but I think as much from the heat as from the beer.
Frankie and Nicky are nodding, and I am beginning to sweat. I can’t wait for the car to get going again so that we can open the windows and get some air in.
“Hey,” Frankie says, “Dennis, man … man.”
“Yeah, Frankie?”
“You got anything to eat, man, like a Yankee Doodle, man, or somethin’?”
“No, Frankie, I don’t got, I mean, wait… I don’t have any Yankee Doodles.”
“Man, we gotta go to 55th Street, man, to get some Yankee Doodles, and some Coca-Cola, man.”
Frankie starts the car, and I half know that Frankie cannot drive the car while he is sleeping. And nodding is a kind of sleeping. But I also half don’t care.
It’s hot, and I’m a little woozy. I should have gone to work at the florist today, but I asked Mr. Schmidt if I could take the day off.
I don’t like delivering flowers anymore, either, and I would quit if it wasn’t for my mother.
“If you quit,” my mother said, “it would be the last straw, and I will kick you out of the house.”
She would kick me out of the house, even though home is the place that when you go there they always have to let you in.
But poetry isn’t always right. It is hard to get back in the house when you have been kicked out. I know, because Mikey Fallon and Dennis Buckley have been kicked out of their houses and they live from park to park and cellar to cellar, and I see them all the time with dirty shirts and pimply faces. And they are not the kind of guys that Archie said we respect, the guys we look up to.
I always thought I would be one of those guys, the guys people respected, but it wasn’t working out that way. So if Frankie is awake or sleeping, I don’t care, as long as the windows are open and some air is rushing in, and I can sleep in the dizzy whirl of five beers from McGuire’s Bar.
And, I begin to think, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get out of that cramped room with Billy and find a home somewhere on my own, somewhere I could find myself in a corner of a cold city.
We are now on Queens Boulevard at 78th Street, and we stop for a red light. A car behind doesn’t stop in time and bumps us. It is not a hard bump, but enough to wake Frankie up completely.
“Hey, man,” Frankie says, “my old man’s car. Any dents and he’ll know we took it.”
Frankie looks in his rearview mirror as I look out the back window. There are six guys in the car behind us, men, maybe in their late twenties. As the light changes and we go forward, I can see that the car has a license plate from New Jersey.
“From New Jersey,” I say.
“The other side of the Washington Bridge,” Nicky says.
“I know where it is,” I say.
“Not even America,” Frankie says.
“Six guys,” I say.
“If they’re from New Jersey,” Nicky says, “you count in halves.”
“So, man,” Frankie laughs, “there’s only three of them?”
“Yeah,” Nicky says. “In American math, anyway. In Machine and Metal Trades math, there are two of them.”
Nicky goes to Machine and Metal Trades High School, too, but he hasn’t quit yet like Frankie.
At 74th Street we again stop for a red light, and the same car comes behind us and bumps us again, this time a little harder.
“Oh, man,” Frankie says, “they ain’t gonna do that again, man, no way.”
I watch Frankie as he opens the door, and I see him grab a monkey wrench from under the seat as he gets out of the car.
“I’ll break their windows,” Frankie says.
I am still dizzy, and I am thinking that I would love to close my eyes and fall asleep as I find myself climbing out of the car behind Nicky.
The six men
from
New Jersey are all out of their car, and each one seems to be bigger than we are.
Why did they bump us, not only the first time, either? What did they want? Why do people do things like this? Maybe Frankie cut them off or did something he didn’t know he did. I don’t know. But he was driving slowly, not like he drove out to Rockaway this morning, fast and crazy. It’s hard to drive fast and crazy when you’re sleeping at the wheel.
But now here I am in the middle of Queens Boulevard, punching some guy who has me around the neck and is dragging me to the street, kicking me as he pulls. It is like I entered some weird ride out in Coney Island where you never know what to expect, and this time the ride put you in the middle of a donnybrook with guys from New Jersey who should know better, and all you have to do is fight as hard as you can without knowing why.
And so I am lying on the ground, horns blaring in the middle of traffic, with some guy’s hair clenched in my fist, and I won’t let go, and he is screaming as he punches me, and I am punching him as I am pulling on his hair, and another guy comes and starts to kick me in the legs trying to kick me between my legs, and I am covering myself and punching and holding and pulling, and with every punch I get in I get one in return, and I feel my skin breaking apart and the blood running down my chin.
And in the middle of all of this I look over and I see Frankie on the ground and he is hitting some poor luckless fellow who made the one mistake of getting out of his car, hitting him again and again over the head with the monkey wrench, and their clothes are full of blood, and there is blood everywhere on the street, and I can hear the sirens in the distance.
Now I am in this strange place, gray stripes falling in shadow all around me, and I am feeling as if I have been let out of one ride in Coney Island only to find myself in another, a place dark in the corners except for the bare lightbulb in the hall casting the shadows within, dim stripes shooting over the bare mattress and the black-stained stainless-steel bowl, all around a deadly quiet broken by some unknown, unseen human being in the next cell, breathing heavily and cursing in whispering exhales, and I am thinking of my mother, remembering that our telephone shorted out recently and isn’t working, and that Mrs. Fox upstairs will have to tell her that there is a phone call for her from Queens, and I can see my mother walking through the dark hall and up the stairs, wishing that they would come and fix our own telephone, knowing that Mrs. Fox upstairs would only be called in an emergency, and with each step worrying about who is dead and who is injured, and where were her two sons?
Oh, Mom, I think, I am sorry I am making you go through this.
And so many thoughts follow this one, the thoughts that go through the head when you are alone like this, because you know that you are powerless to change your life all by yourself, that you can only change your life if the people around you are good people and they let you make the changes, because you know you are alone with the dark, and you feel alone like Ann Kovak, or Harry Shalleski, or Spango in the coffin, where nothing will help you but a prayer, and maybe a helping hand from Blessed Maria Goretti, who was made dead for no reason of her own.