Seventh Avenue

by Norman Bogner

  “You, me and Zimmie. The three Musketeers.”

  “Whaaat, Zimmie? After what he said to me! Not if he shit wooden nickels.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Neal affirmed.

  Moony’s eyes were transfixed on the money.

  “Waaal,” he drawled, “if he’s such a buddy of yours . . . he must have sompin’.”

  “We can be buckers,” Neal generously offered. “We’ll split the money.”

  “Aw, Neal, that’s crazy.”

  “I want to.”

  They walked up the Utica Avenue Hill and stood by the movie theater. The lights of the marquee were blacked out, and a man on a ladder was hanging the letters on top for the new feature, which began the following day. Neal was restive and anxious.

  “What’re we waiting for?”

  “We’ll do a job first,” Moony blandly replied.

  “What for? We’ve got enough money. More than enough.”

  “That don’t matter. I like to do jobs. If I miss a week, I get rusty. Lookit, if you don’t wanta go wid me why don’tcha wait in the drugstore?” he added diplomatically, not to put Neal’s courage to the test. “You have an ice cream soda, and I’ll meetcha at ten.”

  “Isn’t that late for . . . ?”

  “Naw, it never starts before then. She works in Woolworth’s or somewhere and she doesn’t get finished till late.”

  The theater began to empty, and people crowded into the lobby. Moony peered at the photographs advertising the coming attraction, but out of the corner of his eye he hungrily sought a victim for his assault. Two girls, one chubby and about thirteen and the other tall and angular, chewing bubble gum, passed them.

  “C’mon,” Moony said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Where?”

  “Them. We’ll get them. They both got pocketbooks.”

  “Do we grab them and run?”

  “Just follow ‘em, till they go down a dark street.”

  “Maybe they live close,” Neal said hopefully.

  “Like a hunter in the jungle after a lion. We track. You Sabu, me great white hunter with gun. Then bam! We scare their tits off.”

  “If they recognize us . . . ?”

  Moony took out two black handkerchiefs and gave one to Neal.

  “Before we attack, we put these on.”

  They followed the girls for about ten minutes. They were headed in the direction of a large park called Lincoln Terrace, which covered about two square miles, and had innumerable exits that led to narrow winding streets.

  “They don’t want to walk up the hill, so they’re taking a short cut,” Moony whispered breathlessly. Neal could not understand his accomplice’s mounting nervous excitement, for he felt only terror and apprehension. What if they were caught? The park was patrolled by policemen at night. Moony took his hand, and they rushed through a narrow, muddied path, overgrown with bracken and low-hanging trees.

  “. . . Cut them off before they get to Eastern Parkway. We jump out of the bushes, and they’re too scared to do anything.”

  Moony stuck his head out furtively over the bushes.

  “Put your hankie on,” he ordered.

  Neal did as he was told. The handkerchief had a stale, rank odor of sweat and Neal gasped when he had tied it around his face. He couldn’t control his breathing, and he thought that he would have an asthma attack before they did anything. He heard a mechanical flicking sound and watched Moony rubbing the blade of his knife across the palm of his hand with the same indifferent manner as a barber about to shave somebody. After a second, he closed it.

  “You’re not going to use it . . . ?” Neal protested. His voice squeaked ridiculously.

  “Just scare ‘em, so they won’t try anything.”

  “Couldn’t we scare them without the knife?”

  The girls were giggling stupidly as they approached, now only a few yards away. Neal’s eyes began to tear, and his knees shook uncontrollably.

  “Why am I doing this?” he asked himself, but before he could answer, his sleeve was tugged, and he and Moony jumped in front of the girls who stood stock still, staring at the masked figures.

  “Gimme the bags!” Moony demanded in a high falsetto.

  “Whatcha doin’?” one of the girls asked.

  “I’ll stick this into your tits,” he said harshly, moving up against the short dumpy one whose eyes opened wide with shock. The knife made a loud noise in the quiet darkness as it flicked open, and the girl pressed her hand against her mouth.

  “You scream, and I’ll kill her. Now gimme the bags.”

  The tall girl was just as frightened as her friend, but she maintained a show of composure and said:

  “Give ‘im what he wants, Shirley.”

  Shirley handed over her bag and started to cry.

  “My mother gave me a ten-dollar bill for the movies. I gotta bring change . . .”

  Moony threw one bag over to Neal and then started to run into the bushes.

  “C’mon, go, go.”

  Neal ran as fast as he could. The two ran out of the park, cut down the long hill and slowed up when they reached Montgomery Street, two blocks from Neal’s home. They went into the basement of an apartment house and caught their breath by the boiler room.

  “I ohways come here. Nobody bothers yer.”

  Moony rifled open his bag and found a lipstick, two jacks, a packet of rubber bands, a wallet that contained no paper money but innumerable school cards, and thirty-seven cents. He pulled Neal’s bag away and tore it open, breaking the lock in his excitement and there as the girl said was nine dollars and change. He crumpled the money greedily in his fist, then he flattened out the bills and began to count.

  “Four seventy apiece,” he said, thrusting Neal’s share on him.

  “I don’t want . . .”

  “Shit, you don’t.”

  “I’ve got enough.”

  “You take your share.”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Because we’re Indian Braves and we share and share alike. You did it with me, and whatever happens, we gotta stick together.”

  Moony picked up both handbags and thrust them into the boiler.

  “The super shoves some coal in and the bags burn wid it, and they can’t prove nuttin’. Now I got my own dough. After we finish at the clubroom, we go out and have ourselves some pizza. I know a place where the waiter lets you drink beer wid it, so we’ll get ourselves stinko.”

  The clubroom was the basement of a two-family house on President Street, and it belonged to a boy called Rudy Feld whom Neal vaguely knew from the schoolyard where all the boys played baseball. Feld was fourteen and the captain of his club team, and his mother had allowed the boys to use the basement for meetings. Most of the faces were familiar to him, but none of them were Neal’s friends or were in any of his classes.

  Feld was standing at the door like a ticket-taker and when Neal entered said:

  “Wall, wall, lookit who we got here! You ain’t a member.”

  “Aw let ‘im in, Rudy,” Moony pleaded. “He’s okay.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You let me in, an’ I’m not in the club.”

  “I like you, but I don’t know this creep. How do I know he won’t go home and tell his momma that he gets fucked in my clubroom?”

  “Because I won’t,” Neal said sharply, “I never speak to my mother.”

  “You know Neal Blackman. His mother and father are divorced.”

  “Oh, yeah? Is your father the guy with three Cadillacs?”

  “No, one,” Neal said.

  “Money dripping from his asshole like dingleberries. Well, maybe I’ll give you a trial tonight. But ‘cause you’re not a member, the price is a buck fifty. Take it or leave it. We draw to see what order we fuck her in.”

  Neal paid his money and walked into the large basement room where eight boys stood talking loudly and drinking Cokes.

  “Hey, Neal, hello,” a boy called Patsy said. “Your momma
know you’re out so late?”

  “She doesn’t give a shit,” Neal said sharply, hoping to silence the others.

  “Have a Coke,” Patsy said. “Unless you want some wine.”

  “I’ll have wine,” Moony said.

  “You sure? It’s the Sneaky Pete poison for the whores. They’ll drink piss.”

  “Nuttin’ wrong wid it, it’s just strong.”

  “At sixty cents a bottle it must be lighter fluid.”

  The radio was turned on, and the boys listened to the final scores of the night baseball games. Neal had a vision of Sports with his ear glued to the speaker of a radio somewhere, writing furiously and totaling up his winnings at the end. It never occurred to him that Sports might lose more than he won. He wanted to boast to the boys that the man who was to be his new stepfather was a bookmaker and bet thousands of dollars each day and that he knew all the important mobsters and killers in New York. Sports could probably get all their parents murdered if he decided to. That would give them all something to think about. Yes, his parents were divorced, and he was different from all of them. He couldn’t alter the legal status of his parents, but one day he’d show them what it had meant to be different. He would be different because they had forced him to be different.

  A dark-eyed girl with a nest of black hair piled high on her head walked in. She sniggered silently to herself as she walked up to the bar where Patsy, who played bartender, stood with silent, admiring eyes. She opened the bottle of wine, seized a glass that had some Coke in it and spilled it on the floor. Then she proceeded to fill the glass up with wine, and she swigged half of it down in one gulp. Patsy took the bottle, filled the glass again, and she winked at him. The other boys muttered quietly to each other.

  She polished off another glass of wine, then turned to a small sandy-haired boy, who kept adjusting his glasses as she moved towards him. He stepped back.

  “Wha’s yer name, huh?”

  “Irwin,” he said cautiously, conscious of all the eyes in the room on him.

  “Well, Irwin, you gonna volunteer. Huh? A nickel a schtickel.”

  Rudy Feld led the room in a hiccupy nervous laughter that grew to a hysterical crescendo, then stopped abruptly.

  “So, Irwin, I’m waitin’.”

  “What’s your name?” Irwin asked timidly.

  “Wha’s my name?” she said, playing to the older boys. “You tell him.”

  “Margie, Margie, Margie,” they chanted.

  “Hey, Marge, he ain’t first,” Feld interjected when the boys had come to order. “We draw lots.” He started counting heads around the room. “Eight.” He wrote numbers one to eight on small bits of brown paper, then tossed them in a baseball cap, mixed them up, and said with the studied air of a professional organizer. “Lowest number last, highest first.”

  “Fifty cents to watch,” Margie added.

  “Yeah, that’s right. If you wanta see anybody in action, it’s an extra half a buck.”

  The boys giggled nervously and went towards the hat, sticking out anxious, shaking, hairless hands, dreading the thought of going first.

  A tall pimpled boy, destined to be a rabbinical scholar, with a scholarly stoop, and a large wine-colored carbuncle on the tip of his nose declared himself.

  “Me first.”

  “Sloppy seconds,” Patsy said, looking at his number.

  Neal had drawn number five and Moony number eight.

  “Know what I do, Neal?” Moony said quietly. “I come two, three times without losing my hard-on and the broad never knows it.”

  “How old is she?”

  “About fourteen. She used to go to Lincoln Park until the principal caught her fucking the gym teacher in the locker room. Everybody heard about that. She got expelled, and he’s doing time. They said he raped her, but how could he? The poor schlemiel just got caught with his pants down. You can’t rape that girl, ‘cause she’d be undressed before you could. Tough on him.”

  Margie stood on top of the bar and Feld put the phonograph on. The record was “Deep Purple” and Margie made a vague attempt to strip to the music, but she had no sense of rhythm and she was completely naked before the record was halfway through.

  “See what I mean? Anxious. Can’t get enough.”

  “You do it to her before?”

  “To her and ten like her. You nervous or somethink, Neal? Just watch . . . it’s simple.”

  Margie had large pendulous breasts which drooped down to her stomach, and a roll of fat around the abdomen that wobbled when she moved. She was wide-hipped, and Neal’s blood boiled in his veins. He had never been so excited by a female before. He longed for his turn to come. He had wondered if he were ready, but he knew now that he was, and he counted silently as one boy after another jumped onto the couch with her. The longest took five minutes: Number four was with her and having difficulty.

  At last, Neal’s turn came, and he approached Margie with dread and desperation. She opened his trousers matter-of-factly without moving from her position on the sofa, played with him and said softly:

  “Mount me, little boy. Like a pony.”

  He felt himself slide into a greasy, wet abyss, and the girl said:

  “Pump me, c’mon. I ain’t got all night.”

  He slipped in deeper and deeper and spots danced wildly across his eyes. Margie blew some smoke into his face, and he began to cough. He was blinded and choking. The semen oozed out of him, and his member went soft with astonishing rapidity.

  “Okay, Junior. Do your buttons up walking. Next,” she called out.

  Moony reluctantly acceded to Neal’s demand that they leave before the colored girl arrived. It was well past midnight as they strolled down the hill. The night air was heavy, humid and oppressive, and Neal’s underwear stuck to him.

  “Let’s cool off.”

  “Okay,” Neal said.

  “Drink some beer and have a pizza between us.” He wrapped his arm around Neal’s shoulder. “Well, how does it feel to get off the nut?”

  “Awful . . . and marvelous. What a pig she is!”

  “You gotta wait till you’re older before you bag nice gash. The only-for-you kind.”

  “Have you?”

  “Not yet. I come close. A few accidental elbows in elevators and in the wardrobe at school, but not yet with a girl I really like.”

  “Must be great.”

  “That’s why people get married. They like making it so much that they decide it’s got to be forever.”

  “I wonder if they get divorced when they stop liking it,” Neal said.

  “Hey, pal, asshole buddy, you gotta stop worrying about things like that. They’re finished altogether . . . your old man and your mother, so forget it. When you’re older, screw ‘em where they breathe. Lookit me? My folks are together, but I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. Give ‘em both a swift kick in the ass.”

  “Why? I don’t understand.”

  “I got a gripe too. They don’t give a damn about me. So they’re together; it don’t do me no good. Not many parents really care about their kids, so don’t feel sorry for yourself.”

  “I don’t.” Neal hated the accusation, but it stuck to him like glue. Zimmie and his mother always intimated the same thing when he said that he couldn’t stand his parents and wished he were an orphan. “You know what’s wrong?”

  “No, tell me.”

  “They got a divorce, right?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Well, when they’re divorced they make the same lousy mistake again with somebody else.”

  “Your mom isn’t married again . . . ?”

  “She will be.”

  “Oh, what the hell!”

  “That’s right, Moon, what the hell.”

  At a quarter past two, he and Moony were singing as they approached the apartment house.

  “You’re drunk.” Moony squealed with laughter. “Neal’s drunk. What’ll your momma say?”

  “Probably still out.”
/>   “Should we wake up the whole neighborhood?”

  “Nah, g’night, Moon. See you tomorrow.”

  Neal lurched against the rail in the elevator. The movement made him dizzy, and he was afraid to close his eyes because he knew he would vomit if he did. He spent several minutes unsuccessfully fiddling with his key in the lock. It was slippery, or was it? The key didn’t fit. He tried another key, and as he was about to turn it, the door was swiftly yanked open, and a hand pulled him inside. He blinked in the blaze of light, but he could not believe it was actually Jay who was there.

  “Daddy!”

  “I’ve been half outa my mind. Two-thirty in the morning! I’ve been calling all night. Where’ve you been? Where’s Rhoda? Why are you out so late?”

  The flurry of questions startled Neal and he stood before Jay, listlessly swinging from side to side.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you, Neal? C’mere. Hey, Neal” - he shook him vigorously, and Neal sank to his knees – “you sick?” Jay pulled him up. “Neal, goddamnit, you’ve been drinking.”

  “Beer.”

  “Beer? This is ridiculous. You’re twelve years old. A baby. Drinking beer? Where’s Rhoda for God’s sake at this time of night? Leaving you alone. What else have you been doing? I want to know.”

  “Just had a pizza and some beer with a boy.”

  “Where? I’ll see that dirty bastard loses his license. Selling beer to a minor. Where?”

  “Can’t say. Somebody took me. Daddy, I’m not feeling so well. Got to go to the bathroom.”

  Neal rushed past his father down the corridor, and Jay followed him. He was already retching. Jay put a towel under the cold water and made a compress of it. He held it against Neal’s forehead.

  “You didn’t vomit any food. Just a few bits of pizza. You didn’t have anything in your stomach. Why didn’t you eat? I don’t understand what’s happening here. Your mother gets plenty of money from me for your upkeep. You could eat steak four times a day. And you come in drunk at this time of night! What in God’s name’s happening to you? Doesn’t she give a damn about you? Where is she?”

  “I dunno,” Neal said weakly. “She went out with this man Sports, who’s gonna marry her.”