In the Nick of Time (17 page)

Some said he was a hit man, and someone got retribution. No one knew for sure it seemed, and no one could prove anything, either. One thing was for certain though; he did leave Mom of his own free will. He packed the few things he had and left her with two kids, one of whom was sick. Marco was born with a small heart and breathing problems. Something was wrong with his lungs; they weren’t fully developed. He had to go to the hospital all the time. One morning, Marco Andrew Vitale stopped breathing altogether. When you woke up, his mattress that lay beside yours was empty… and Ma was crying. She made you stay in the apartment with the old woman across the hall. That old woman smelled bad, like rotten bananas, and all you did was cry that day, too. She never told you he died, but you knew. You knew as soon as you laid eyes on that empty mattress. You used to make funny faces at Marco and make him laugh. It was like you were the big brother, and he was the youngest, because he couldn’t do much. You kinda liked him looking up to you, and taking care of him, too.

He didn’t talk that well, but he sure could laugh. And to this day, you remember his laugh. And he used to play with you. You’d roll a ball between your legs, or play Go Fish, stuff like that. And Ma would cook…and it would smell good, the onions and tostones and on special occasion, those Jamaican beef patties that her friend taught her how to make. She’d dump Adobo on them. And that is all you remember. So now, Franco Salvatore Vitale is gone, because he was never there. Marco Andrew is gone too, died in his sleep, right next to you. Jonathan is gone—you watched it happen—and many more friends are gone and worst of all, Mama is gone, too.”
And then, there was silence in the place. He began once more…

“Ma died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma…”

Oh my God… I wish he would just stop! This is horrible! I want to keep hating you… STOP. TALKING!

“She got to see you get accepted into the police academy, but not graduate. You were tired of losing people. So, to make sure you never lost anyone you loved anymore, you just didn’t let anyone else in. No one else was allowed to get close to Nick Vitale. You couldn’t afford to lose one more person. The way to not let other people in was to build a wall around your heart, and the way to forget the people you’d lost was to drink them away, cocaine them into the far distance.

“You never had to get close that way. The steel fence was up. You were finally safe, Nick. Everyone stays where you put them now. In a little cage…and if they don’t like it, they are free to leave. But you craved closeness, nevertheless, Nick, because I guess you’re just that type of person. And because your Ma loved you… Once you feel love, it’s hard to abandon that forever. And she’d kiss and hug all over you. She showed you while she was alive how to love, but you tried to deny it, act like you knew nothing of it all. You tried to figure out how you could love people from a distance; to still stay safe, but get what you need, too. So, you became a cop.

“That way, people would be good to you, if you were good to them, or so you thought. You could make the world a little bit safer even though you felt anxious on a daily basis. You could also put your life on the line, because you never felt your life was that important in the first damn place.

“You probably secretly wished you’d get shot in the line of duty, and you started testing the boundaries. You did the shit no one else wanted to do, because you wanted to die a hero and were always covertly disappointed that you’d survived. Why did you live and everyone else died? What made you so special? You keep toying with your life, but you are still breathing. Why? You even started messing with cocaine. That shit never appealed to you before. Why would you do that? You saw what it did to people on a daily basis. How it ruined peoples’ lives.

You went to your old childhood friend, now one of the biggest drug dealers in Brooklyn, and you asked him for some. You lied, said it was for something work related. But he knew better. He gave it to you, free of charge, said it was because you were his homeboy. Then, for whatever reason, you got lucky and weren’t dependent upon it but found out it gave you a nice high when you mixed it with booze. Therefore, you hand-made your drug of choice when it suited you. The prolonged use has a name. Cocaethylene is created, builds in the liver from prolonged users of alcohol and cocaine. You were an overheated walking science experiment ready to explode…”

What an intriguing man…

His story pulled her in, made a fool of her, made her smarter, wiser; her heart beat a bit faster. There was something about him. The way he spoke, the tortured truth of the words, and the simplicity of how he explained such horrific things…

“Your job is stressful though. You’ve seen some things you never want to see again. Like babies being thrown off buildings…your breaking point. It was a culmination of things. The pregnant woman shooting up heroin on her front porch steps, her dress pulled up over her thighs, exposing her unshaved vagina and hanging belly, filled with new life as she slowly killed it. You hated her more than anything in the whole world, cursed her, and resented having to help her.

“You’ve seen plenty of things like that, things you can’t imagine wouldn’t be a window into Hell… Like a man shoving a gun in his mouth and blowing his brains out in front of you after his wife left him. Or the guy that was raping his cousin and wouldn’t stop, even when you walked in with a gun drawn. How bad could Hell truly be? Aren’t we already living in it? This has to be Hell, because nothing about this is normal, right, good, or righteous. What do I, Nicholas Vitale, have to be grateful for? I ain’t got shit to be grateful for…”

He read the words on the paper, staying fairly removed from it all. It may as well have been the back of a cereal box, as monotone as he said the shit, but suddenly, it seemed to catch up with him. The words on the paper grabbed his ass by the ear and made him lean in close. He was FEELING it…

“I started off saying I had a good life, but no, I didn’t. I work for the city of New York, and I see all the shit the President acts like isn’t really happening and the news downplays for stories that are far more entertaining. I’ve seen babies dying from gunshot wounds. What the fuck do I have to be happy about, huh?”

“Jesus…” someone murmured.

“Ma used to say she loved you every morning, and by the afternoon, she’d curse you out in Spanish for stealing from her purse. That was something to be happy about, because Ma meant every word of it. She said you were a bad boy, a bad kid, but at night, she’d kiss your cheek anyway and tell you that you needed to grow up and live a beautiful life. Beautiful life, huh? You wanted to see where these opportunities Ma talked about were; you figured her head was in the clouds. But, you needed to be certain.

“So, one day, you got on train after train and visited other boroughs to see if they were better than yours. You were going to do some social studies, be your own street reporter. Find out the truth…

“You went places, and some were a little better. The South Bronx was a tad worse, but in the end, it was all the same…one big, ridiculous ass place to go to be destroyed, or be the destroyer. All the neighborhoods had decent areas, even what some would classify as affluent, but you weren’t interested in that. You wanted to see if there were shady nooks and crannies, dark things that reminded you of home sweet home. You dared to step foot in Manhattan, made your way into Harlem. It even had a few places that looked like home, though overall, the snobs on the hill made you angry. You shouldn’t have gone to Manhattan, Nick.

“You’d saved the best for last. You were happy when you’d only been to the Bronx and Queens. They all had enough spots like home to make you not feel so bad about being stuck in a hamster wheel, but when you went to Manhattan, you saw the world wasn’t all dirty and covered in shit, piss-stained and drowning in lackluster graffiti. You thought the clean places were only make believe, only for TV. You believed the whole world was like B-Ville. But it wasn’t. You stood there and looked up at all the big buildings and felt sick to your damn stomach. Instead of feeling like you could get out, had a place to aspire to be in, you felt trapped.

“Who was going to hire a little half Puerto Rican, half Italian boy who liked to steal and carry a knife, beat up people, and ran with a gang of thieves? You were filthy, you couldn’t speak a grammatically correct sentence to save your rotten, miserable life, and you thought you deserved exactly what you had, which was little of nothing, served to you on a shit covered platter 24-7. Everyone left you, Nick. Everyone left you because you weren’t important enough to stay for. People don’t leave good things, good gigs, and good people. They only leave messes and useless bullshit. It’s lonely at the bottom, and it’s lonely at the top, so you may as well stay in your fucking place.

Love,

Nick.”

The room went eerily quiet after he’d finished and slumped down in his seat. The bastard left everyone feeling touched, moved, hurting, and crushed. Taryn had betrayed her angry vows several minutes prior and now stared right at the man, this time not turning away. He wasn’t looking at her; rather, he kept his attention fixed on his knees, avoiding eye contact with every single soul in the room.

“Nick, I first would like to thank you for opening up like that and sharing something so personal. I must say, that you are the first person I’ve had in a long time to handle this assignment in a way that forced you to really dig inside yourself. I think I can speak for everyone by saying, we were all moved. This is good, very good. Do you feel more self aware now?”

He shrugged, kept his head down, and pushed his leg slowly back and forth, as if the words just wouldn’t come.

“I, uh, honestly don’t think that I am an unaware person. It’s my job to be aware, you know?”

She nodded in understanding.

“I think that was the problem. Because I am
so
self-aware, I tend to hide from myself. I have to shut everything off. Everything I’ve done and been through made me
more
self-aware. Like, as I stated, I used to steal a lot as a kid. I was often the lookout, too. That calls for knowing what to look out for.” He moved his fingers about, talking with his hands, but kept his head down. “I didn’t watch people, I’d watch the pigeons.”

“Pigeons?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He slowly lifted his head, looked at Frieda and explained himself. “If you saw a bunch of pigeons suddenly move, you knew a car was coming. They would move for nothing but a fast moving car and that was my cue to whistle for my friends to get out of whatever apartment or store they were ripping off because it could be the police. I watched birds, things like that, because watching other people was far less reliable. Animals see and hear stuff before we do.”

“Nick, can I ask you something?” Amber, another member of the group, asked.

“Yeah…”

“Do you think your job made things worse? You said you love your job but it was stressful, but… did it help or hurt in the long run? I couldn’t imagine being a police officer. That’s just too much…”

The guy sat there and seemed to deliberate over the woman’s question for a moment or two.

“Amber, I just can’t turn this shit off. I did start feeling strange at work sometimes.”

Everyone nodded in understanding.

“You keep seeing horrible things, and you think you’ll become immune to it, but you never really do. You adjust, you acclimate, but you never really are the same person ever again. People expect me to be a certain way at work, and it gets tiring, you know, the expectations. I get tired of being strong all the time. Shit.” He shrugged. “But, I want it both ways, you know? I want to be the hero, too.”

“Yeah, I can get that, man,” someone else stated.

“Sometimes I want to hug the crying mother that lost her son to the streets, but I can’t. Sometimes I want to tell the grieving grandparents that their grandson will get back home safe, but I can’t… because I don’t know that, and don’t want to give false hope. I just get tired sometimes, but you don’t understand that you’re so exhausted because every time you step out there, you have to, in some way, deal with yourself, too.”

“You have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, man,” Maurice called out, another resident. “I was a fireman. I have been on crack for the past seven years, man, and I know
exactly
what you’re talking about. If you go into these buildings one more time,” he pointed towards the window, “and see one more burnt up kid, hear another mother or father moaning about their child being trapped and you can’t save them, sometimes something goes POP!” He pointed to his skull. “You lose your damn mind. I was afraid to tell people I was crackin’ up, you know?” Maurice laughed grimly as he exposed several missing teeth. “You’re afraid you’ll lose your damn job, so you don’t say shit. You just be quiet and like you said, you don’t want to be perceived as no punk, like you can’t take it, weather the storm. You and me was supposed to be the superheroes, you know?” He grinned.

Nick nodded, seemingly hanging onto the man’s words.

“But sometimes the superheroes need the most help. It’s like we’re in a war that never fuckin’ ends and even if it did, we never get to go home afterwards because the war is in our own damn backyard…”