Below, in the company of his West End friends, Perry had been all menace. Now it seemed we were suddenly pals. After a moment he chuckled, at something on the screen, I thought, though nothing funny had happened there. “Damn,” he said. “I thought you were going to pee in your seat down there.”
“Why were you so mad?” I said, which in truth was only half of what perplexed me. The other half was Why wasn’t he mad anymore?
“Who, me? That was for show. Like I care if you feel Karen up.”
“Then why—”
“You crossed the line.”
“What line?”
“What do you mean what line? The line.”
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t know? I could tell that. Now you do, right?”
Actually, I wasn’t sure. Had I crossed the line by paying for Karen’s popcorn? Her ticket? By sitting next to her instead of between her friends, where apparently a person could sit and still be alone? Or was it the row itself I wasn’t allowed in?
“It’s like Division Street,” Perry explained. “You gotta know where you are. You gotta know who you are. Anyhow, it’s over. Forget it. And like I said, Cirillo’s all tease. You don’t believe me, ask Jerzy.”
As if I would. “Why doesn’t he—”
“Dump her ass? ’Cause he’s pussy-whipped, is why.” He shot me a sidelong glance. “You know what pussy-whipped is?”
I’d heard the expression before, maybe at Ikey’s or the Cayoga Diner. It was the sort of thing a man would say if somebody said he had to go home or his wife would get mad. The sort of thing Uncle Dec might say about my father if he was in one of those mean, kidding moods. So I nodded. Yeah, sure, I knew what pussy-whipped meant.
“Here’s something I bet you don’t know,” Perry continued, his voice still barely audible, though the theater had grown quiet now that the feature had started. “The girls that come across usually aren’t the ones you figure. I could tell you which ones put out, if you’re interested.” What did he have in mind? I wondered. To name them? Point them out in the dark theater below so I’d be able to recognize them by the backs of their heads? “It’s usually the tweenies,” he continued. “You know what I mean by tweenies?”
Unlike “pussy-whipped,” I hadn’t any idea what a tweeny might be, but I said sure, I knew what he meant.
Which elicited a lip fart. “The hell you do,” he said. “I made it up.”
I told him I meant that I sort of knew.
“Okay, tell me what a tweeny is.”
I took a wild stab. “An in-between?”
He looked at me in astonishment. “Right,” he admitted. “Not that pretty, not that ugly. An ugly girl? She just gives up, ’cause nobody wants to do it with her anyhow. If she’s real pretty like Nan, or she’s got tits like Karen, she doesn’t have to put out, ’cause guys are gonna drool anyway. Tweenies are the ones gotta give you something. Otherwise they might as well be ugly, am I right?” When I couldn’t fault his logic, he went on. “Something else you wouldn’t necessarily expect. East End tweenies put out the most, ’cause they’re tweenies twice. Not ugly, not pretty, not West End, not Borough. They don’t know what the fuck they are, so they gotta put out.”
I could tell he was proud of his careful reasoning, and also glad to have an audience. What I couldn’t tell was whether Perry was just a theorist or if he was speaking from experience. His face was full of purple acne; Perry was not a handsome boy.
“You live in the East End, right?” I said I did, and he nodded. “Hell, you could be getting laid all the time if you wanted,” he said. “Talk about crossing the line, do you believe that shit?” He leaned close so I could sight along his index finger.
At first I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at, but then the movie went from a night to a day scene, and I saw he was pointing at a Negro boy. That in itself wasn’t so surprising. There were usually Negroes present at the Saturday matinee. They sat together in two rows down in front on the far left-hand side, where the angle at the screen was bad. Behind them a buffer zone of another couple rows was always left empty, the white kids not wanting to get too close. From the balcony those rows looked like a wide aisle, as if the seats themselves had been removed to allow for better access to the exit.
The boy Perry indicated wasn’t sitting with the other Negroes, but rather on the opposite side of the theater, where the Borough kids usually congregated, and the girl sitting next to him looked white. Not surprisingly, they were the only two in that row. Another buffer zone, smaller than the one where the other black kids sat, had been created in deference to this one boy.
Perry shook his head in a kind of weary, grudging admiration, or so it seemed to me. “Fucking Three. That boy’s always been crazy.”
Three. Of course, I thought. Gabriel Mock the Third. Who’d told me, the only time we’d ever spoken, that he had no father. At the time this had struck me as something akin to blasphemy, and I remembered it now with a chill, because here was a boy who not only had a father but was also repeating his father’s mistake. I also recalled the words the boy’s grandfather had spoken when he dragged his son up my grandfather’s front porch steps to apologize. “All took care of,” he’d kept repeating. “All in the past.” What I had no way of knowing, of course, was whether this boy had any idea that his father had kissed a white girl and gotten punished for it. Had he, like me, little or no understanding of the line he’d crossed, of where exactly he’d crossed it? Was he sitting next to this white girl on impulse, like I’d done with Karen Cirillo, realizing only when people turned to stare what a foolish and dangerous thing he was doing? Or was he perversely determined to do exactly what his father had done before him? And what of the girl? Was she just foolish and kind, like my mother had been, or was she actually his girlfriend?
“I mean, he’s gotta know, right? That kind of shit you keep secret, man. You bury it with a shovel, then you bury the shovel. Out there in plain sight? You’re making people give a shit. Maybe all they want to do is mind their own business, if you’d let them, but you don’t.”
I would have liked to hear more about this, but Perry abruptly lost interest in the subject. “So, you live where in the East End?”
“Third Street?”
“Near Ikey Lubin’s?”
“We own Ikey Lubin’s.”
“No shit. Hey, we might end up being neighbors,” Perry said, sounding more pleased than I would’ve predicted. “My old man got on at GE.”
He didn’t have to explain the rest. A job at General Electric in Schenectady meant your ticket out. Out of the tannery. Out of perpetual low wages. Out of the Gut. Out of the whole West End.
“This time next year I’ll be wearing plaid shirts, I guess,” he said with great sadness, indicating my own. He himself was dressed in his West End uniform: pegged black pants, thin white T-shirt, worn black boots. “Probably get promoted into the advanced classes, too.”
I didn’t think there was any danger of that, but didn’t say so. I’d come to understand that Karen’s most cherished conviction—that our teachers had our fates all worked out in advance, based on who had money and who didn’t—was widespread in the West End. The idea that Perry’s teachers might suddenly find him worthy of their attention because his family moved across Division Street struck me as comical, but he seemed to think it followed as naturally and unavoidably as the necessity of wearing plaid shirts. There was more to say, of course, but the movie caught our attention, and we fell silent until, with about fifteen minutes left, Perry announced he had to visit “the shitter.” When he was gone, I took the opportunity to peer over the railing at Karen and Jerzy below. They were still holding hands, and she leaned over to whisper something in his ear, but otherwise nothing was going on. Down front, Nan Beverly’s head was resting on her boyfriend-of-the-moment’s shoulder, and I cocked my head to see what it was like to view a movie sideways.
Nan’s presence at the matinee each Saturday afternoon
was enormously reassuring. The FOR SALE sign was still up outside the Beverly home. My father and I drove out to the Borough to check every Sunday. He never said that’s what we were doing, but I knew. We didn’t park across the street, and he never commented on the sign again, but when we rounded the corner I could see his eyes search it out, anxious and relieved at the same time when he saw it was still there, which was bad, but no SOLD sign attached, which was good. “Who around here can afford a house like that?” he was fond of asking his coffee drinkers at Ikey’s. Answer: nobody, he hoped.
That very week Mrs. Beverly, the slender woman we’d seen getting into the Cadillac, had come into Ikey’s, and Uncle Dec had cut her a standing rib roast. “Now let’s hope she knows how to cook it,” he said when the door swung shut behind her. “If she leaves it in too long, it’ll be our fault and that’ll be the last we’ll ever see of her or her friends.” When I asked why that should be our fault, he just looked at me, and I understood now that he’d been trying to tell me pretty much the same thing Perry was saying in the balcony—that things just were the way they were and that it was your job to figure out how they worked, not why.
Speaking of Perry, I noticed he’d slid into the back row next to Karen and Jerzy, who shrugged at whatever he was whispering to him. Then both boys rose half out of their seats and Perry pointed in the general direction of Three Mock and the white girl. An on-screen gunshot drew my attention to the movie’s climax right then, and by the time I looked back Perry had moved over to the other side of the theater. His lips were moving, but I saw it was himself he was talking to, his body rigid, his hands balled into fists. He gave the impression of somebody talking himself into something.
When the credits began to roll and the lights came up, he strode purposefully toward the couple. Kids were spilling into the aisles now, but quickly stepped back into the row when they saw him coming. I saw, rather than heard, Perry shout something down the row, then a surprised Three Mock turned toward him and shook his head. The white girl, who was standing between them and looking scared now, said something—maybe Go away!—but Perry paid no attention, lunging across her and shoving Three Mock, hard.
A chant went up then, like it always did—“Fight…fight…fight”—and I saw the usher pushing through the throng. Perry and the black boy were scuffling now, right in front of the white girl, who got knocked back into her seat, clutching her nose. When the usher finally arrived, he pulled the boys apart and pushed them out the side exit into the alley, then closed the door, as if what happened out there was none of his business. The Negro kids, I noticed, were standing on their seats to see what the fuss was about, and I could tell by the way their heads went together that they knew one of their own was involved. Wondering what Jerzy’s reaction to all this might be, I glanced down to where he and Karen had been sitting, but they’d disappeared.
In order to avoid being seen coming down from the balcony, I had to wait until the theater emptied. The usher had positioned himself at the foot of the stairs, on the other side of the velvet rope, flexing importantly at the knees until the last kid (he thought) was safely out the door. Only when he disappeared back into the theater—presumably to start cleaning up the mess left behind by a hundred-plus heedless junior high schoolers—did I dare steal down the staircase and around the rope. Heading outside, I noticed that the door marked OFFICE was partially open and a girl was sitting there with her head between her knees. Her dark curly hair hung down, so I couldn’t see her features, but I knew it had to be the girl who’d been with Three Mock. She was holding a bloody handkerchief.
A voice from behind the door said, “Still no answer,” followed by the sound of a phone being hung up. “Is there someone else we can call?”
“It’s okay,” the girl said, her voice weak and frightened. When she raised her head to speak, I could see that her nose was crusted with dried blood and her eyes swollen from crying. Even so, I recognized her as Sarah Berg, an eighth grader, and I think she recognized me, too. “I’m better now,” she said, but then lowered her head again, and I went out into the street.
Fights in the parking lot behind the theater on Saturday afternoons were not unusual, but they had a lazy, obligatory feel to them. Often they seemed to originate in the lurid melodramas of the movies themselves. So many teenagers crowded into a theater watching a story of passions run amok invariably created an excess of energy. The result was usually just a shoving match, the combatants taunting each other, calling names, without any real fear of escalation. After all, the police station was just a couple of doors down, and Mount Carmel’s church and convent were right across the parking lot. Even a noisy throng of excited spectators wasn’t often able to produce any real hostility, and this was the sort of flaccid conflict I expected to find when I joined the crowd that had gathered there today.
But halfway down the alley I sensed that something was different. Perhaps it was the relative quiet. The circle of kids surrounding the combatants was three or four deep, so at first I couldn’t make out exactly what was going on, but then I noticed the theater’s fire escape was down, and I climbed the bottom two rungs for a better view. Three Mock was just picking himself off the pavement, and he had a split lip, the red of it contrasting vividly with his dark skin. Something about his manner suggested that this wasn’t the first time he was picking himself up. Perry had probably begun by shoving him, hands to the chest, but apparently the most recent shove had been to the face. The boy ran his tongue over his busted lip and must have tasted blood because he spat—nowhere near his adversary, though Perry chose to interpret this differently. “You think you can spit on me? Is that what you think?”
The boy just stared at Perry darkly, his arms hanging limp at his sides. He was a skinny kid, much taller than his father but no match for Perry, who shoved him again. Though Three Mock tried hard to keep his balance, he went down anyway and for a moment just sat there examining his gravel-scraped hands. Perry stood over him, fists clenched.
“Fuck it, Perry,” Jerzy Quinn said. He was standing at the inner ring, with Karen at his elbow, looking bored as usual. “Let it alone. What do you care?” But if Perry heard this advice, he gave no sign, and Jerzy seemed disinclined to interfere more forcefully. Everybody knew that he was just one fight away from returning to reform school, which is why the rest of his gang had been delegated so many responsibilities.
“Tell me why this is happening to you,” Perry told Three Mock. “I know you know.” When the boy tried to rise, Perry planted a big foot on his shoulder and sent him sprawling. “Sit there till you tell me what I want to know.”
Some distance off, maybe a half-dozen Negro kids clustered together. You could tell they didn’t like what was happening, but they kept their distance. Probably they’d warned Gabriel Mock the Third about his foolishness, but he’d persisted, so now he was alone. Even from where I stood on the fire escape, I could see there were tears in his eyes, but determination as well.
“You’re doing what I just told you not to do,” Perry said when the boy scuttled backward like a crab and got to his feet again, his arms still at his sides. “You gonna tell me why this is happening to you?” When Three shook his head, you could tell he was preparing himself for another shove, but this time Perry hit him right in the face. The blow surprised everybody, not just Three. It wasn’t only that fights out back of the theater in broad daylight seldom went this far. It was also that the boy who’d been struck neither flinched nor tried to avoid the blow, accepting Perry’s fist as if he’d been receiving punches like this one all his life and understood they couldn’t be avoided. His head snapped back, and he sat down hard on the pavement, his nose gushing an astonishing amount of blood down his white shirtfront. Everyone gasped at the horror of it, and a girl—maybe Nan Beverly—said “Make them stop” to no one in particular, as if she held both boys equally responsible. It was clear that even those who’d crowded in so eagerly had now taken a step back, wanting no more of this. You couldn’t
really even call it a fight. It was just one boy punching another. Three Mock might as well have had his hands tied behind his back. I’d not been there to witness Bobby Marconi’s legendary battle with Jerzy Quinn, but I knew it couldn’t have been anything like what I was witnessing now. That fight had been drenched in glory, whereas this one offered only blood.
Three now sat blinking on the pavement, shaking his head, probably trying to clear it, an effort that sprayed blood left and right, causing another gasp to run through the crowd. The other Negroes began to stir now. The boys seemed to know it was their duty to intervene, but they clearly feared what might happen if they did. The girls whispered to them to do something, though no one seemed to know exactly what. They weren’t alone in this. Perry himself didn’t seem to know what to do next. He was still standing over the boy with his fists clenched, but when he spoke again, his tone was different.
“Tell me why this is happening,” he repeated, but this time there was a plea in his question, as if he desperately needed to know how things had come to such a pass. I recalled what he said in the theater about how people who wanted to mind their own business sometimes just couldn’t. And when Three, still wobbly from the blow, began to struggle to his feet again, I saw Perry steal a glance at Jerzy, who said, “Let it go,” his voice barely audible, and I could tell from the slump of Perry’s shoulders that he’d have liked nothing better. Three was now on his feet again, swaying, his eyes glassy. “You did something wrong,” Perry reminded him, coaching him, really, toward the correct answer that would make further punishment unnecessary. “Tell me what it was and I won’t hit you again.”
Bridge of Sighs Page 31
