Sleepers (20 page)

The moment arrived for me and my friends on a day and time when Mickey Mantle was crossing the plate with a home run we would have all been proud to witness.

Michael held the cart the longest, his arms bulging at the strength needed to keep it from falling down the steps. John had slipped on his side, his back against the station’s wooden banister, both hands sliced by the wooden handles. Tommy fell to his knees, desperately grabbing at one of the wheels, his knees scraping concrete. I held both my hands to the base of the umbrella stand, grip tight, splashes of hot water showering my arms and face.

The vendor was a few feet behind us, on his knees, his hands spread out across his face, his eyes visible.

“It’s not gonna hold!” Tommy said, the wheel slipping from his grip.

“Let it go,” Michael said.

“Don’t stop now!” I said. “We can’t stop now!”

“Let it go, Shakes,” Michael urged, his voice a surrender to the inevitable. “Let it go.”

Watching the cart tumble down the stairs was as painful as trying to keep it from going down. The noise was loud, numbing, and eerie, two cars colliding on an empty street Hot dogs, onions, sodas, ice, napkins, and sauerkraut jumped out in unison, splattering against the sides of the stairwell, bouncing and smacking the front of a Florida vacation poster. One of the rear wheels flew off halfway down the landing. The umbrella stand split against the base of the stair wall.

Then came the loudest noise, one that rocked the entire subway station. It was a sound no one expected to hear.

A crunching sound of wood against bone.

It is a sound I have heard every day of my life since.

J
AMES
C
ALDWELL WAS
a sixty-seven-year-old retired printer. He had been married to the same woman for thirty-six years, had three grown children, all daughters, and four grandchildren, three of them boys. He had spent his morning in Lower Manhattan, visiting with one of those daughters, Alice, newly wed to a junior executive working for a midtown accounting firm. He had stopped in a bakery in Little Italy to buy his wife a box of her favorite pastries, which he carried in his left hand. On doctor’s orders, Caldwell had turned his back on a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit less than a week earlier. He refused to give up his Scotch, however, a drink he liked straight up, ice water on the side, a bowl of pretzels at the ready.

He was chewing two pieces of Juicy Fruit gum and was digging into his front pants pocket for enough loose change to buy the late edition of the
Daily News
when the cart landed on him, barreling in at chest level. His hands reached out to grab the sides of the wagon in a futile attempt to ward off its runaway power.

The cart was a destructive missile, taking with it all in its wake. That wake now included the body of James Caldwell, who had no bigger plans for the rest of his day than reading the sports pages.

Together, both cart and man came to rest as one, slamming against a white tile subway wall. The cart crumpled, wheels rolling off in opposite directions, handles splintered, boiling water and pieces of ice crashing on top of Caldwell’s bloody head, looking no bigger than a hairless tan ball, lodged against the sharpest edge of the wagon.

The silence after the crash was as numbing as the noise during it.

We held our positions, feet cemented in place. No one spoke, and the three of us choked back tears. We heard the wail of sirens and prayed they were headed our way. I looked down at the wreckage and saw the lower half of Caldwell’s legs twitching under the weight. Thin lines of blood mixed with dirty hot dog water to form a puddle in one corner.

The smell of excrement filtered through the air.

Michael turned to me and, for the first time since I’d known him, I saw fear on his face.

John and Tommy didn’t move, their bodies trembling, faces ashen, both unnerved enough to pass out. The four of us felt much older than we had less than an hour earlier, the ticking of our personal clocks accelerating with the speed of the unfolding incident.

To our left, a thin, middle-aged woman in a checkered housedress and white apron, strands of long, dark hair hiding the anger fanning her eyes, crossed the street in a run and stood at the top stair of the subway station. Hands on her hips, shoulders hunched in a tight pattern, she stared down at the scene.

“My sweet Jesus,” she shouted, turning her gaze toward us, her voice a sharp, loud, high pitch. “What have you boys done? What in God’s name have you boys done? Tell me, now, what have you done?”

“I think we just killed a man,” Michael said.

15

T
HAT AFTERNOON, THE
police issued an order of immediate custody, a juvenile arrest warrant, against the four of us. We were charged with a series of crimes: reckless endangerment; assault in the first; possession of a dangerous instrument; assault with intent; misdemeanor assault; petty theft. We were each assigned PINS status, branding us persons in need of supervision. We were also tagged as youthful offenders, Y.O. on the streets. The label came with the luxury of keeping our records sealed and the knowledge that Y.O.’s were seldom dealt adult-length sentences, even by the harshest family court judge.

While James Caldwell lay in critical condition in the intensive care unit of St. Clare’s Hospital, clinging to life on a respirator, we were remanded into our parents’ custody. The shock of the day still had not worn away as we moved with great speed and little care through the system of arrest and booking, our eyes and ears closed to the sobs and screams surrounding us. We were in another world. Above the action. Our parents cried and cursed, the cops were stone-faced, Caldwell’s family wanted us dead, and the whole neighborhood, it seemed, was waiting for us outside the station house. We’d always been on the other side looking in at the guys getting busted. Now it was us. We were the ones they pointed at. The ones they talked about. We were the guilty ones now.

M
Y FATHER HAD
just slapped me, hard, across my face. I stared at him; he was slumped on a chair next to the kitchen table, wearing only briefs and a T-shirt. His face was red, his hands were twitching, his eyes welled with tears. My mother was in a back room, facedown on her bed, crying.

My parents had always granted me free reign, confident in my ability to steer clear of street jams, believing I was not the type to bring trouble knocking at the front door. This freedom also served to keep me out of view of their daily physical and verbal battles.

I lost that freedom the instant the hot dog cart crashed against the body of James Caldwell.

“I’m sorry, Dad” was all I could manage to say.

“Sorry ain’t gonna do you much good now, kid,” my father said, softening. “You gotta face up to what you did. The four of you.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked, my voice breaking, tears falling down my cheeks.

“The old man lives, you might catch a break,” my father said. “Do a few months in a juvenile home.”

I could barely ask the question. “And if he doesn’t?”

My father couldn’t answer. He reached out his arms and held me, both of us crying, both of us afraid.

O
VER THE NEXT
several days, Hell’s Kitchen, which, in the past, never failed to embrace its criminals, seemed a neighborhood in shock. It wasn’t the crime that had hands raised to the sky, but the fact that Michael, John, Tommy, and I had committed it.

“You guys were different,” Fat Mancho told me years later. “Yeah, sure, you fooled around, busted balls, got into fights, shit like that. But you never went outta your way to hurt anybody. You were never punks. Until you
did the job with the cart. That was an upstate number and that’s something nobody figured on.”

By the day, two weeks later, when we stood before a family court judge, we knew that James Caldwell was going to make it out of the hospital alive. The news had been relayed to us by Father Bobby, who counseled all the families involved.

During the time between our arrest and scheduled judgment, I was not allowed to associate with my friends, be seen in their company, or talk to them by phone. We were each kept under close family scrutiny, spending the bulk of our days buried inside pur apartments. Father Bobby visited each of us daily, bringing with him a handful of comics and a few words of encouragement He always left a little sadder than when he arrived.

Our crime had not been terrible enough to make any of the papers, so our notoriety did not move further than the neighborhood. Still, we couldn’t help but feel like public enemies. There were whispers behind my mother’s back whenever she went out for groceries or headed off to church. John’s mother missed so many days of work she was close to losing her job. When Michael Was sent out o
n
a fast errand, a beer bottle was tossed his way. Tommy was denied entry to a local movie theater.

“Your kind ain’t welcome,” he was told. “Not here. Not in my place.”

“I didn’t do anything to you,” Tommy said.

“You got a problem with what I done?” the theater manager asked. “Call the cops.”

During those two long, frightening, and tedious weeks, I left my apartment on just three occasions.

The first two, I went to church with my mother.

The third, I went to see King Benny.

I
POURED MYSELF
an espresso from a two-cup pot, King Benny staring across the table. It was a late Sunday afternoon
and a transistor radio resting against the window behind me was tuned in low to a Yankee game. Two men, wearing dark slacks and sleeveless T-shirts, sat outside the club on wooden chairs.

I drank my coffee and listened to Phil Rizzuto call the game, taking it into the bottom half of the eighth inning, Yanks down by three runs. King Benny’s hands were spread flat on the table, his face a clean-shaven mask.

“They suck this year,” he said, lifting a finger in the direction of the radio.

“They sucked last year,” I said.

“Gets to be a habit,” he said. “A bad habit. Like going to jail.”

1 nodded and lowered my head, averting his gaze.

“We didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” I said.

“You didn’t mean it don’t make it not happen.”