by Packer, Vin
“Okay, Papa. All right. Okay.”
“I wished maybe Riggie would be a doctor or something professional. He goes to school, George. We never did. We don’t know things except what we lived, but Riggie reads from books in school, he talks English. He talks two languages, our Riggie. Two! Fluently! Riggie, be a smart boy. Don’t be dumb like Mama and Papa. It’s a new world, Riggie. It’s a world that belongs to the people who know things. Don’t be like us. Finish school. You are smart in school. You flunked only one subject last term. Do you know how many your papa and me could pass?”
Mr. Gonzalves says, “It took more than brains at the refineria. A man had to be a big man inside of him, a big man to supervise. A man had to say, ‘Listen, I’m boss! You do what I tell you!’ He had to say it so they believed him. That’s not in the books!”
Mrs. Gonzalves puts her great arms around her small-boned, short, mustached husband, drawing him to her. She slips a hand under the neck of his worn cotton nightgown, and pats his chest playfully. “You were one big cheese, weren’t you, baby!” she says proudly. “I remember when I met you and listened to you talking — me, a girl of fifteen, and you in your thirties — and I thought, He’s so smart! He ought to be God, or president! And I still say so!”
“Yah! Yah! Yah!” Gober’s father laughs, and he ducks his head down, burying it in the immense folds of flesh at his wife’s bosom.
“Don’t bite!” she giggles and squeals, “Owwwww! Riggie, get this little bird off me. Oh! You crazy, crazy, crazy — ” and the pair laugh and laugh. Gober is grinning too, mildly; the cigarette burning down in his hands. He stands and watches them for a moment as they wrestle with one another in the tangled covers of the bed. Then he leaves the bedroom and walks through the living room into the tiny closet kitchen. Opening the square icebox, he studies the insides until he sees a dish of onion soup, pulls it out, and sets it aside while he plugs in the burner over which he will heat it. He stands and waits. Behind him, back in their bedroom, his parents make the noise of love; and from somewhere up above him, a radio blares a snatch of blues.
• • •
Again, she had lied to him.
She had said, “No, Pop, he wasn’t in the place tonight.”
“You know the one I mean?”
“I know who you mean.”
“Those spics got nothing better to do than move up from Puerto Rico and go on relief! Their kids organize gangs and go out looking for people to kill. I used to think it was bad enough with the black ones living a few blocks from us — now it’s worse. New York City is busting its seams with the scum of the earth!”
“All right, Pop. All right. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“I’d like to catch him coming around to the luncheonette. I’d show that brazen little bastard! Thinks he can associate with any daughter of mine! Filth!”
“Good night, Pop.”
“You stay away from the likes of them, do you hear? Even in school! Keep your distance from their kind.” “All right, Pop. Good night.”
In her bedroom, after she has undressed and brushed her black hair, and turned her blankets back, Anita takes the paper napkin from her pocketbook, and looks at the picture, a faint smile playing on her mouth. She tries to say the Spanish words, mispronouncing them. She whispers: No sabe como te quiero; puzzling over their meaning. From a popular song she had heard, she knows yo te amo means “I love you;” but what do these words say? No sabe come te quiero.
Turning the napkin over, Anita looks at the little game she had played with herself, after he had stalked out. It was a game where you wrote down two names; crossed out any letters in each which were the same; and then with the remaining letters in each, you said: “Love, marriage, friendship, hate,” in that order. Both had come out love.
She sits on the bed hugging her knees; remembering his eyes, how they had watched her; and how he had said her name — Nita.
• • •
Babe Limon rolls over in the narrow bed set against the wall in the one-room apartment on Madison and 106th. The red neon sign from the bar beneath her shines in, showing the shabby furnishings. Babe sighs and pushes a curler back around a lock of her hair. “You still awake, Babe?”
Beside her, Marie Lorenzi lies, dressed in bra and panties. Babe wears a faded pink slip.
“Yeah. It’s two o’clock.”
“You think your old lady’s coming home tonight?”
“I told you I doubt it!”
“Well, don’t bite my head off. I didn’t want to stay over. Could of slept at home just as well!”
“If she does come home, I can push the chairs together…. She won’t.”
“Where is she? Downstairs?”
“Who knows? Maybe at my aunt’s.”
“You still thinking about Gober?”
“What if I am!”
“What’s so hard to forget! Cripes, I seen a million Gobers!”
“You don’t know — ”
“Don’t know what?”
“The way Gober could be, is all.”
“How could he be?”
“Well, before all this, you know? When I was first going with him he used to be special about me. Geez, I don’t know, Marie. He used to call me Princess. He used to tell me I was a princess.”
“Gober?”
“Yeah. I wish you knew him. I mean, I know lotsa guys, but till Gober come into my life, I never felt like anything. That’s what steams me, Marie. I always felt like something because of him, and now because of how he’s been acting lately, I feel like nothing. I mean, what he said about me washing my face, and the thing about the cat. Like I was nobody.”
Marie leans across Babe and grabs for her package of cigarettes on the chair, on the top of the pile of their clothing. She passes one to Babe, and they light up, blowing smoke out into the stuffy air of the room. Marie lets the cigarette dangle from her lips, and props her arms up behind her head as she lies there talking.
“How old were you the first time, Babe?”
“Twelve. Thirteen. I don’t know … How old were you?”
“Fourteen. It happened in a line-up. Eight guys, and me howling my lungs out. S’funny, it never occurred to me it’d hurt so damn much. S’funny — even hurting like it did, I remember something that hurt a lot more that night.”
“Yeah? What?”
“These guys were paying fifty cents, see. I was making four dollars. Cripes, I was so scared and just lying there wishing I was dead instead of there, and hoping it’d be over soon. This one guy looks down at me and says, ‘I wouldn’t pay a nickle for this piece! It’s got pimples, and it’s flat as I am!’ “ Marie exhales a cloud of smoke. “I never forgot that. I was just a kid. I didn’t even know what I was doing. My brother — you know Al — he arranged it, and I couldn’t believe I’d get four dollars for just letting some guys do that. And when it hurt, I thought they must be doing it wrong. But when that guy said that, I couldn’t say anything back, or move, or anything. I felt like dying. That’s where I got my inferior complex from.”
“I’d never go in a line-up,” Babe says. “Never! Not for anything!”
“I didn’t even get the four bucks. Al gave me fifty cents of the money.”
“Whatever made you do it?”
“Geez, Babe, you don’t ask yourself that, you know? You don’t ask yourself that. You’re just a kid and things happen. Geez, I don’t know why.”
“Yeah, yeah. Things happen,” Babe says. She says, “I didn’t know you had an inferior complex.”
“From that day on.”
“Yeah?”
“I never forgot it.”
Babe bends down and drops her cigarette in a half-filled cup of cold coffee on the floor beside the bed. “You ought to take some exercises — massage — you know? You can send away a quarter and get a book that tells all about it.”
“I tried that.” Marie Lorenzi yawns. “They don’t do any good. Geez, it’s ten after one. Here, put my butt out
, will you? Let’s get some sleep.”
“Pleasant dreams!” says Babe.
“Good night,” Marie answers, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
• • •
Sitting around the coffee table in the living room of the Roans’ apartment up in Morningside Heights, are Dan and his wife, and the Mannerheims.
“It’s one-ten,” Enid Roan says. “I vote we call it a night.”
“No, wait — just let me make my point, honey. Look, Nat, I’m not a fanatic. It’s just that I’ve seen these kids — ”
“Kids!” Nat Mannerheim exclaims. “Kids!”
His wife says, “Dan, Nat and I just don’t have your zeal. It’s a fine thing to treat youngsters individually; in fact, it’s the only way they can be treated. But to expect to accomplish anything with a gang of reluctant hooligans who don’t even want to be helped — I draw the line there!”
Dan Roan leans forward and knocks the dottle out of his pipe, holding it in his hand as he talks. “Martha, you and Nat are both psychologists. Child psychologists. I’m just a social worker, more or less. My only point is that all of us should work side by side to tackle this problem.”
“Why, Dan? It isn’t the only problem in the world. Give me a nice complicated schizophrenic child any day, but save me from a bunch of characters straight out of ‘Blackboard Jungle.’ I wouldn’t know where to begin, and as Martha says, I don’t have your zeal, so I’d probably not get anywhere. No, no, Dan — I’m a Freudian, a real party-line Freudian. One at a time, individually; analysis — that’s the only answer. Otherwise you have bedlam!”
“We have it now, Nat. Have you ever seen a rumble?”
“Well, perhaps that’s the answer. Remember the Malthusian theory, Dan? If the population increases more than the means of increasing subsistence does, in time many must starve, or be ill fed — or rumble. Rumble and finish one another off. It’s not exactly the Malthusian theory, but it may be nature’s way of taking care of these young hoods. They’ll destroy one another in rumbles. Hmmm?”
“It’s late,” Enid Roan says. “Let’s call it a night.”
“Enid’s right!” Martha Mannerheim agrees. Her husband stands up and slaps Dan Roan across the back. “Buck up, old man. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders tonight. These kids are getting you down. Why, they’re probably all home right now, tucked in their beds, dreaming of zip guns.” Nat Mannerheim chuckles. “To say nothing of bims, ah, Dan? Do I have the jargon right?”
“You have the jargon down pat, Nat.”
“That’s what would be of interest to me,” Martha Mannerheim muses, “this lingo of theirs. Its origin. It would be interesting to speculate how many of those terms have oral allusions. Somebody ought to do a paper on it.”
V
Walking cool is importint. For if someone shuld walk by you cool, and you dint know how to walk by them cool rite back, then you wuld be a square with sharpe corners as wel as made fun of …
— FROM A COMPOSITION BY JUNIOR BROWN. ASSIGNED SUBJECT: “AN IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW IN GETTING ALONG WITH PEOPLE.”
WHY, GOBER WONDERS, is Flat Head Pontiac asking for it? To walk by cool is really asking for it; and this, added to Pontiac’s promise to make the scene with Babe on Friday night, comes out rumble. What is it that makes the Jungle chief so rumble-hungry? Gober ponders this as Pontiac passes him, in front of the candy store on 100th and Madison. It is four o’clock on a Monday afternoon; and Gober is standing there with Eyes, both having just come from school.
“He’s coming on like a goddam snowman, Gobe. Look-it.” Eyes says under his breath.
“Yeah, I see him.”
Pontiac is a six-foot, broad-shouldered, husky Italian. He walks toward them with a slow, deliberate, panther-like tread, chin held high, eyes half closed, head swaying very slightly from side to side.
He takes his time. He knows what he is doing. He is the coolest of the cool.
As he is parallel with Gonzalves, Gober sneers at him.
“How’s your hammer hanging, Pontiac?”
Without looking anywhere but straight ahead, and without batting an eyelash or moving a muscle in his face; Pontiac says, “Heavy — but gonna be a lot lighter Friday night, King-man.”
This is the extent of their conversation; but now everything between them is spelled out unmistakably. This is the engraved invitation to rumble, the real personal touch.
“Whooooo!” Eyes exclaims after Pontiac is a yard beyond them.
“Yeah,” Gober answers. “He wants it real bad, all right. Well, we’ll see if he’s all talk and no action.”
“I’m jap-happy now, if I never was, Gobe. Some gangs I wouldn’t pull a jap rumble on, but the Jungles are crying for it.”
“I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea you and Tea mosey around and smell the wind in their turf. Be sure they don’t jump us before we jump them.”
“I’m thinking the same thing myself. Wonder where the hell Tea is?”
“ ‘S Monday. I think he usually scores on Mondays. Probably sleeping under a blanket of the snow now. He in school today?”
“Yeah; left before last bell, though.”
“That’s where he is. Out scoring. He’ll be by.”
“Shall we amble on into the store, Gobe?”
“You go on in. I want to catch Nothin’ Brown when he comes around.”
“You gonna talk to Babe about Friday? I see her in there. Back booth. With Easy Marie.”
“Yeah, I’m setting things straight with her. Probably take her over to the clubhouse.”
“Atta boy!” de Jarro says.
Gonzalves stands alone then, looking up the street for a sign of Junior Brown. Under his arm, tucked in a copy of an English book, is this letter:
Dear Anita,
I’m sending this by messenger so as not to get you in trouble with your pop. I wonder if it would be possible that I could meet you after school and just talk some day??? That is all I’m interested in, to talk because we never had the chance really. I know the spot you are in with your pop, but unless I’m wrong, you do not feel the same way as he does toward me. I do not know what school you go to so you would have to let me know about this, and beside maybe you can make another sugestion about meeting me. Maybe I have got it all wrong or something stupid like that but then I can usually tell about things like this. You never said anything I know but people don’t always have to say words.
Naturally I know you love me (ha! ha!) but if we could just get together it would be nice I’m sure. What do you say about it??? My messenger will come back tomorrow for some answer. I hope you will say yes and not punk out on the deal.
Your friend Rigoberto Gonzalves.
In the distance, ambling along licking a fried chicken neck, Nothin’ Brown heads for the candy store; and seeing him, Gober goes to meet him….
• • •
Everybody calls the candy store Dirty Mac’s; and this afternoon as Red Eyes enters, it is like all other afternoons. Everybody is there. Blitz Gianonni stands by the peanut machine; not that he would try to pinch it — he would not, though this is his specialty, swiping them and selling them to a vending machine dealer up on 125th — Blitz would not pull that on Dirty Mac. But he stands by it out of sentiment; looking at it with loving concern, because it is a very new and shiny red peanut machine, and he cannot keep from admiring it.
He is telling Braden, who stands beside him, how easy it would be to “just vamoose wid de machine. It’s like nothing,” he explains, fondling the little chain attaching the machine to the wall, “you spread de link wid de chisel, take de bolt out, and walk off wid de thing.”
“How much you get for those, anyway?” Red Eyes asks, stepping up to the pair, looking around at the others in Mac’s. Flash is in a booth with two girls, his leg up on the table, showing off his new blue lizard shoes. Two Heads Pigaro is playing the pinball, punching and jamming himself into it until the red light tells Tilt!
“How much?” Blitz says. “Fifteen dollars, usual. Can get three on a good night. The outside ones the easiest.”
“You hear about D.&D., Eyes?” Braden asks.
“Uh-uh.”
“He got sent off to finishing school. Came up this morning in lolly-pop court. He got sent off by that horny judge with the lisp. You know him?”
“Know him? He’s the creep put me on probation!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He says to me he’s gonna give me a chance. He says he’s got his eyes on me; I come around again, I go off to college too.”
“ ‘At’s cause you’re too obvious,” Gianonni says. “You got picked up stealing, dint you? Dint you get picked up on a fire escape wid a pipe?”
“Yeah. I was just breaking this window, you know-cracking it with the pipe. Lady downstairs hears the noise ‘n starts in screaming.”
Blitz nods his head sympathetically; then he points a finger at Red Eyes, wagging it as he talks, “Listen, next time remember somethin’. You going to steal by breaking in a window, you take a pillow for your tool, see? A plain old pillow, see? Somebody see you walking along with a pillow, they ain’t gonna suspect, even going up a fire escape. So you’re going to a roof to sit and you brung a pillow, see? Then you take this pillow and break the window, ‘n you got the sound all muffled and somethin’ to catch the glass in, see? It’s a natural. Nobody gonna suspect a guy walking along carryin’ a pillow.”
Red Eyes shrugs. “Ain’t gonna be no next time.”
“No?”
