What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Corky’s grandparents said yes Blackstone was pretty good but couldn’t hold a candle to the Great Houdini who they’d seen in this same theater in 1923, now there was a magician.

  The greatest mystery about that day of mysteries—forever afterward the family teased Corky he’d been hypnotized by Harry Blackstone, he’d actually been up on the Palace stage hypnotized in front of a thousand people!—when, in fact, as Corky well knew, he never had.

  The hypnosis part of the program had excited him far less than the other parts, the true magic.

  Corky guesses they confused him with Peter Corcoran, maybe, or another child, as adults will. Not that Corky remembered Peter being hypnotized, either. But he, Corky, sure hadn’t been.

  Corky tastes cold, remembering. So many years. All that elder generation of Corcorans long dead and gone to dust, and of the middle generation only Sean Corcoran remaining. In whatever shape Sean Corcoran was. No matter what bullshit people want to believe and want everybody else to believe the fact is you die, you don’t have a clue when or how or to what purpose. Bullshit too about Time not existing well the only solid fact is Time, a conveyor belt like in the slaughterhouses carrying us all along. The only difference is between those who know they’re going and those who don’t.

  After the magic show on the way home to Barrow Street Jerome asked Daddy what is “magic” and Tim Corcoran driving his big shiny black Caddy smoking a cigar the ashes flying back out the opened window laughed and shrugged saying you want to believe in magic when you’re a kid, later on you want to know what the trick is so you can pull it yourself, and Corky’s thinking God damn, yes, fucking-A correct, but you never do learn, do you.

  And that includes Tim Corcoran, too.

  Need a drink, Jesus do I need a drink. South on Erie past Decker and over the canal bridge at Welland, old two-lane rattling bridge should have been replaced twenty years ago but now the neighborhood’s gone mostly black and nobody gives a damn. Crossing the placid mud-colored Erie Canal high from last week’s days of rain, Corky thinks of how as a kid he’d swum off the banks here, mud-shitty water even then but he, Nick, Cormac, the other kids swam in it anyway, and in the lake, too, stinking of fertilizer from the Cayuga plant. Quick glimpse of the backs of shabby rowhouses strung out along the weedy canal towpath, flash of wild-growing lilac, so familiar to him it’s like he’s seen it last week, with a kid’s eyes, unjudging. Corky grips the steering wheel tight to control the shakes.

  Too fucking sober for Union City. That’s Corky Corcoran’s problem.

  If he continues on Erie another two blocks he’ll be passing Barrow Street. But if he turns onto Welland then doubles back he’ll be passing the old site of Corcoran Brothers Construction and the lumberyard his grandfather Liam owned. A block to the east is Roosevelt where Sean Corcoran’s still living in the old house, weird and crazy to be back in the old neighborhood but it isn’t the old neighborhood, it’s someplace else and another time and Corky’s seeing with envy how on this warm-balmy overcast spring day everybody’s out on the sidewalks and streets blacks of all ages and attire bright colors spilling out of the African Zion Church in a woodframe building formerly a branch of the Union City Public Library, up the street the public grammar school and today kids are swarming like beetles in the playground, everywhere black kids on bicycles, skinny-gangly boys with weird zonked-up flattop hair like wedges atop their heads, beats anything white kids can come up with even those asshole punks with their waxed spiky hair. Seeing Corky Corcoran driving his Caddy cautious as he can along the busy street (he doesn’t want to run over one of these kids!) their eyes follow him, screw you, whitey, yeah you, whitey, we’re looking at you, whitey, you got it?

  Corky swings around on Dalkey, cuts back to Erie, then Welland again, approaching the Zanzibar from the potholed stretch of pavement descending to the docks. There’s the warehouse Corky’d worked at, one of his shit-jobs hauling crates and barrels for the Great Lakes Freight Co., looks like it’s still in business. Summers the heat was so bad mixed with the stench of fertilizer nitrates and oil he’d come close to puking, sweat stinging his eyes and soaking through his clothes and every muscle in his skinny body aching, and his hands, had to pay for his own fucking gloves that wore out in less than a week. Summer was bad enough but winter was worse, winds off Lake Erie dropping the temperature to as low as minus ten degrees Fahrenheit and still he’d be sweating working inside then coming outside the fucking gloves would freeze on his hands so he couldn’t get a good grip and a sudden tear in the fabric was like a razor slash in the flesh so like the other guys Corky tried to work without his gloves for as long as he could until his skin split and cracked and even the blood froze.

  Must be mainly blacks down here now, you couldn’t get a white man to work like that. Like the city sanitation crews where the only white guys are the ones driving the Dumpster trucks.

  Corky parks across the street from Club Zanzibar. A look of tattered half-melted grimy snow on the sidewalks and in the gutters here but it’s not snow, it’s litter, it won’t melt away. Raw-looking pink neon sign, unlit, CLUB ZANZIBAR, used to be THE SHAMROCK, there’s a sleazy video rental store up the block open on Sunday but everything else looks shut up or permanently out of business. Weird thing seeing these billboards advertising cigarettes, beer with black models, good-looking light-skinned blacks, gorgeous women on display, like one of those kids’ games What’s wrong with this picture. How you know a part of the city is black. Seriously black.

  Parking the Caddy and locking it Corky’s aware of black guys observing him, they’re hanging out on the corner close by the Zanzibar where maybe it isn’t that unusual for white men to come, on private business. A certain kind of white man streetwise and with dough to spend. Corky flashes his big-toothed smile and gives these guys the high five like the team giving Dave Winfield the high five and they look at him like he’s some kind of asshole from Mars and this pisses Corky off but he doesn’t let on, he’s got too much class to let on, just pushes inside the dump where there’s a sudden terrific mouthwatering smell, barbecue, Corky guesses, hot greasy French fries, God he’s starving he realizes he hasn’t had anything solid to eat in maybe twenty-four hours. That’s what’s wrong with him!—no wonder he’s got the shakes.

  Need a drink, a drink his throat’s so fucking parched but first thing Corky does is go to a cigarette vending machine and buy two packs of Camels, lights a cigarette inhaling deeply feeling a helluva lot better already, a man’s tobacco. He’s aware of eyes swiveling onto him out of the smoky interior, a sudden startled hushing of voices except for the TV on loud. Everybody wondering who he is, a mick-cop look about him maybe, undercover cop but it’s Corky Corcoran with $1000 in his wallet in his back pocket he’s serious about spending.

  And if he gets his ass busted down here, or worse, when she hears about it Christina is going to feel like shit. Knowing she’s to blame.

  And Thalia, and Kiki. Yes and Charlotte too, bitch never gave him a chance to be a real husband to her, that steady flow of interest and dividends into her bank account, protested it didn’t matter to her but it mattered to him, he’s never forgiven her.

  But Corky’s smiling taking his time choosing a table, one of the small diner-style Formica-topped tables where he can sit with his back against the wall facing out toward most of the room. Surprised how inside Zanzibar’s is a disappointment more a café than a tavern still less a funky cocktail lounge where there might be jazz weekends, and glamorous black women. And fuck it there’s a distracting racket of video games, a half dozen of them and guys dropping coins into them, Corky can’t stand those video games, goofy comic-strip screens and belching-farting-blipping-chirping noises, you expect it of half-assed mall-rat white kids with nothing better to do but not blacks. Like Thalia said, whites expect blacks to be better than we are, dedicated to a principle meaning the principle of being black in a white racist society thus perpetually alert and perpetually outraged unwilling to be suckered into squan
dering their best energies. Seeing black guys at video screens is just so damned depressing.

  What Marcus Steadman should do is preach against such brain-rotting crap. Get it banned from black neighborhoods. That’s what Corky Corcoran would do if he was a black Councilman.

  “Hey, what’s it take to be waited on?”—Corky’s question is good-natured, just a little impatient but that’s only natural, he has been sitting long enough for the waiter (if that’s what that black guy is hanging out at the back) to notice him. There are maybe twelve tables in the place of which eight are occupied and everybody’s been served and whatever they’re eating, Jesus it smells good. Corky’s question hovers in the air not so much unanswered as unheard, unacknowledged. “Any menus?” Corky asks.

  Noticing then at a nearby table a guy Corky knows from City Hall, mustached middle-aged black man with a head shaved bald like Marvelous Marvin Hagler, he’s a Democratic alderman from the Fourth Ward so Corky calls out, “A.G., my man!—how’s it going?” and A.G. contemplates Corky just a beat too long before replying, with the faintest of smiles, “Ain’t bad, Mr. Corc’ran,” and no query put to Corky in return. The black prick!

  A.G.’s with a table of black men, beer bottles crowding chunky blue plates heaped with this delicious-smelling food, baking powder biscuits, heavy gravy, what looks like pork chops, some kind of fried fish, corned-beef hash maybe, Corky’s mouth is watering so hard it’s like his saliva buds are weeping. He’s so hungry by now he’d forgo a drink for food.

  TV’s on loud broadcasting another baseball game but Corky isn’t in the mood to get into it, and those God-damn video games sending up an interference, and somebody’s got a transistor radio tuned to a local rock station, so when the Zanzibar patrons get back to talking with one another and laughing like this pissed-off white man isn’t there or if there invisible Corky knows it’s maybe a mistake for him to be here but fuck it he’s not going to give up.

  Maybe anyway you don’t need to be waited on, maybe you walk up to that open counter looking into the kitchen and give your order direct to the cook, this is fine with Corky who’s too restless to sit still, he’s on his feet affable and smiling threading his way through the crowded tables trying not to be spooked at how he’s being looked at or resolutely not looked at, a good-looking young couple cutting their eyes at him like he’s giving off a bad smell, a table of older black men and women playing cards who fall silent as he passes their faces blank with what Corky senses is withheld mirth, but it’s the younger men who eye him coolly and appraisingly then look away leaning together grinning and murmuring words he can’t decipher, Corky wants to protest, Hey, cut the shit, I’m one of you.

  The Irish are the niggers of Great Britain, that’s a known fact.

  The Irish used to be the niggers of Union City, shit on the WASP shoes, that’s a known fact.

  Corky leans his elbows on a counter at shoulder height looking directly into a kitchen where a stout black woman with her hair tied up in a head scarf is frying something in a heavy iron skillet—butter, onions, chicken wings and legs covered in breadcrumbs. There’s others in the kitchen too, busy or anyway acting busy and paying Corky no heed. Corky can see through an open door into a rear storage room and guesses that’s where the firearms are kept, it’s possible that deals are made exclusively from the rear and you approach by the alley, that’s the signal?

  Corky leans forward smiling inhaling the rich cooking odors. Hoping to hell he doesn’t look as dazed as he feels. Christ on a crutch!—I’m starving. The dizzy memory washes over him, like a bad joke, he’d actually had a fantasy of meeting up with Thalia at Kiki’s and taking the two out to Sunday brunch! Of all his dumb-fuck notions, that’s the saddest.

  “Hey, h’lo? Can I order some dinner?”

  Seeing he’s there and not going to go away the tall lean black guy who’d be the waiter if there was a waiter asks Corky politely but unsmilingly what does he want, and Corky says he wants a couple of things but to begin with how’s about some coffee, and how’s about a menu?—and the waiter shakes his head, polite as all hell, a fox-faced light-skinned guy with insolent bug eyes, sorry, no menus, “—So how d’you know what to order?” Corky asks reasonably, and the black woman handling the skillet lifting it effortlessly with a muscled arm as she stirs the sizzling chicken parts laughs without so much as glancing at Corky. It’s the kind of rich laugh makes you yearn to join in whether you know what’s funny or not.

  The idea is, Corky guesses, if you don’t know what to order in a place like this you got no business being here.

  Corky sucks on his cigarette. Says, with a smile, “Something smells good, that’s for damned sure.”

  Says, “You got, uh, barbecue?—ribs, chicken? How’s about pork chops? Colored greens, grits, cornbread, gravy, that kind of, what’s it, catfish—fried catfish? Black-eyed peas, chitlings?” He doesn’t know for sure what colored greens, grits, chitlings are but in the state he’s in it all sounds good. “Sweet potato pie?”

  The woman at the stove laughs now scraping the still-sizzling food onto a plate, biscuits too on the plate, and a mess of greens that’s possibly what Corky means by “colored greens,” and the guy who’s the waiter takes up the plate and a thick white mug containing coffee and without a glance at Corky sidles past him and out into the restaurant to serve some lucky son of a bitch but Corky’s trying to keep civil, knows he’s got to win these people’s confidence if he wants to be fed let alone sold a gun.

  “Sure was sad about Marilee Plummer, wasn’t it,” Corky says somberly, “—I knew Marilee, she was a good girl—woman, I mean—I imagine everybody around here is pretty upset—” though it occurs to Corky even as he speaks that in this neighborhood with so many welfare blacks, blacks on probation or parole or just out of prison or on their way in, sentiment would be for Marcus Steadman and not Marilee Plummer. “—And I know Marcus Steadman, too—not well, but we’re what you’d call colleagues.”

  Colleagues!—what kind of an asshole word is that?

  “—I mean, we run into each other pretty often. At City Hall.”

  Now this is calculated; Corky’s playing poker here and he’s shrewd; but “City Hall” comes out sounding wrong even to his ears. So quickly he adds, frank as he can be, “Look, I’m not a cop. No bullshit, for sure I’m not.”

  The waiter’s back conferring now in an undertone with the woman in the head scarf, there’s another black guy there too, and a puffy-faced sullen girl of about fifteen with lips so swollen thick and shiny Corky can’t keep his eyes off them, and what, red-fleshy as they are, blood-hot, they remind him of he’d just been mashing his face, teeth, tongue against so very recently, he’s trying not to think. Corky sucks at his cigarette exhaling smoke furiously, wonders if he’s losing it, hell no he isn’t losing it, these black folks can perceive beneath the color of his skin he’s the man he is, he’s their friend he’s on their side he’s one of them.

  “A.G. over there—A.G. can tell you who I am. I’m no cop.”

  This gets no response Corky can gauge, the waiter and the cook are still conferring, and when he looks over to where A.G. was sitting he sees the chair’s empty. And the plate at that place empty too, wiped clean—the fucker!

  Corky says, more pleading now, “Maybe I look like a cop, but I’m not. I swear. In fact I’m what you’d call”—rubbing his knuckles in his eyes like a guy suffering a colossal hangover—“the opposite of a cop.”

  Still no response.

  “I’ve got cash, I need to make a purchase. I know this is the right place—there’s only one Zanzibar on Welland, right? And I need to eat, too. And—did I ask you for some coffee? Please?”

  The big-boned no-bullshit black mama in the head scarf is looking at Corky Corcoran now. Not like she’s been listening to him but she sure is looking. Something so raw and yearning in the honky motherfucker’s face any female human being no matter the color of her skin, and this lady’s skin is the color of black raspberries, is going t
o take pity on him. Saying, with a sweep of her hefty arm, like she’s the boss here, “O.K. y’all go sit down, mister, somebody take care of you.” At least this is what Corky thinks the woman says, her words run together like syrup and her voice is a deep throaty growl. A quick baring of her big broad teeth with a glimmer of gold that’s as much of a welcoming smile as Corky’s going to get.