“Hey, man,” Robin says, looking dead at Binky, “I want to talk with you.”
Gloria, who had been sitting on the stoop reading a comic book, got up and called some other girls over and said there was going to be a fight. You know how some girls are always ready to see somebody get their head whipped. She ran up to the top of the stoop and started calling all the other girls over and yelling that there was going to be a fight. So everybody came over and stood around.
“What you want to talk to me about?” Binky says. My man got his head laying over to one side like Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and his hands were folded in front of him.
“I heard you was talking about me, man. And I don’t dig people talking about me behind my back.” That’s what Robin said even though everybody knew they was going to fight over Debbie. But I don’t think they wanted to admit fighting over a girl.
“Your name’s Robin, right?” Gloria asked. Gloria was one of those girls that was always signifying—saying something to get something started or to make somebody mad.
“That’s right,” Robin said, rolling his eyes in Gloria’s direction.
“You know, Binky, I think you were wrong,” Gloria went on. “Robin looks like a nice cat. I don’t believe half those things you said about his mama.”
“Say what? What you say about my mama, man?” Robin’s scar was twitching and the veins started standing out on his neck.
“I didn’t say anything about your mama, Robin. She’s just signifying, that’s all.”
Now everybody knew that Gloria was just signifying, but we didn’t figure Binky to back out. If he got beaten it was one thing, but if he backed out he’d be letting down the whole block. I mean, if you’re the baddest dude on the block you’ve got responsibilities. If you got the weight you got to take the freight. Even Robin was surprised because he had heard that Binky was a bad dude, and he called Binky a punk.
Robin could say “punk” so mean. He’d hesitate just a little bit before he said it, see, then his lips (and he had some big lips, too) would kinda curl up at the side and he’d shake his head and just let the word drip off his bottom lip. “Punk!”
“No, really, man. I didn’t say anything about your mother. Please, you have to believe that.”
“Well, just see that you don’t either,” Robin said. “And don’t let me catch you on 118th Street no more either.”
Well, we felt pretty bad about the whole thing, see. I’d heard Clyde and Sam and them say Binky was really tough, but I figured now that maybe Robin was just a lot tougher. Everybody was looking at Binky like he was supposed to do something but no one said anything. Even the girls, who were signifying in the beginning, didn’t say anything when it seemed Binky was backing out of a fight. But just then Binky made his comeback.
“Look, Robin, I don’t want to argue with you. I believe in equal opportunity for people who’ve been in terrible accidents, and from the way you look, I can see your face has been in just about the most terrible accident I’ve ever seen.”
Everybody jumped up behind that. Binky was going to stand up to Robin after all.
“What did you say, man?” Robin’s boys backed off because they knew the fight was on.
“I said if you were any uglier they’d put your face in a museum and sell tickets to gorillas.” Binky stood up. “The worse thing I could say about your mama is that you’re her son. And hasn’t anybody told you yet that that toe-jam you keep between your teeth don’t do nothin’ for your breath? If you ask me you must be the retarded son of the Heartbreak of Psoriasis.”
Right then and there it was on. Robin threw a punch at Binky and the fight started. They fought from Lenox Avenue, down one side of the street, all the way to Seventh Avenue, and then fought back on the other side. These cats weren’t playing, either. Robin was throwing punches and beating Binky upside his head something terrible. But Binky had heart and hung in there. I mean, Robin was hitting him so hard that I wanted to cry. Binky’s nose was puffed up and his lip was cut. He looked terrible. But he was taking Robin’s stuff.
Then it started to turn around and Binky started to get his stuff together. Binky didn’t even know how bad he really was until he got into the fight with Robin. Man, he got his stuff together and commenced to kick rump. He went to work on Robin like he was a bricklayer or something. No emotion. Nothing. Just went to work, doing his job. Wherever Robin looked there was a fist coming at him. He must have thought there were two or three guys fighting him. You could see when it turned around, too. At first, when Robin had his stuff together, he was saying things like “How’s that, baby?” and “What do I look like now, punk?” But Binky had shut him up good and he wasn’t saying anything now. After a while you could see the fear creep into his eyes. He looked pitiful, really. And all the girls were standing on the side signifying. Especially Gloria.
“Hey, Binky, you forgot this is national Be Nice to the Ugly Week!”
And everybody would crack up and even Robin’s boys smiled a little. But that’s when the real mess started. Because Binky knocked Robin down. Bam! Robin got up real fast and Binky knocked him down again. Bam! This time Robin just lay on the ground, figuring the fight was over. But Binky kicked him on the leg and he had to get up. This time he was crying. He knew he didn’t have no win so when he got up he just charged at Binky and they both went down to the ground. They rolled around a little bit, and all of a sudden Binky started hollering. We couldn’t figure what was happening because Robin wasn’t throwing any punches and Binky was just hollering to beat the band. Finally he got Robin off of him, punched him in the mouth, and then grabbed the side of his head. Robin took off, running down the street, glad to be out of the fight.
Everybody gathered around Binky to see what was wrong, and that’s when we found out that Robin had bit part of his ear off. No lie. Part of his ear was off. You couldn’t see it too clear because of all the blood and everything, but you could tell it was off.
Everybody was ooing and ahing and saying dumb things and being like 116th Street in general. That’s when Clyde had to stick his two cents in.
“Hey, man, dig. I read in The New York Times about this dude that got his finger cut off and they rushed his finger to the hospital and they sewed it right back on.”
“You a cold dude, Clyde,” said Light Billy. “The cat got his ear bit off and you talking about…oh.”
It finally hit Light Billy what Clyde was talking about. It hit everybody else the same time. Then Clyde sort of took things over.
“Don’t nobody move,” he said, “so we won’t step on Binky’s ear. Just look around real careful.”
“Suppose Robin swallowed it?” Gloria asked.
Well, that was kind of funny but nobody wanted to crack up. Binky was like a hero and you didn’t want to crack up on some cat that was a hero just because he got his ear eat up.
At any rate one of the girls found his piece of ear under a car. I don’t know how it got under the car unless Robin had just spit it out when he started to run. So they wrapped that piece of ear in a Kleenex and gave it to Fast Sam and he took off to the hospital. I mean he was moving. Binky and everybody else was running toward the hospital, too. I mean everybody else. That might have been our mistake, I don’t know. We hit the hospital and ran into the emergency room and everybody started talking about how Binky got his ear bit off by Robin, and Clyde was shouting something about how he read all about it in The New York Times, when the first thing we knew they shut the emergency room doors from the inside and locked them and the place was full of police. They started cracking heads and dragging us out of there. The next thing you know, there we are, in jail. Charged with disturbing the peace, rioting, and everything else they could think about. They made us roll up our sleeves and stuff to check out whether we were junkies or anything.
They had this little Chinese doctor down there and he said he was treating a patient when a bunch of us hoodlums came in and tried to take the place ove
r. So we finally got everybody quiet and told the sergeant about Binky’s ear. And Binky said he was going to handle his own case and then appointed Clyde to be his lawyer. Clyde said they wanted to press charges against Robin for being a cannibal but first they wanted to have exhibit one sewn back on Binky. Exhibit one, of course, being the rest of his ear.
The sergeant asked where the ear was now, and Fast Sam fished it out of his pocket. It had come out of the Kleenex and had got some dirt on it from Fast Sam’s pocket, and Binky wanted to punch Fast Sam in the mouth for not having any respect for his ear, and Fast Sam told him he’d better shut up before he bit his other ear off. Well, the doctor looked at the ear and wiped it off and then he said it was too late, that they couldn’t sew it back on. He said something else, too, about how you could only stick on certain parts of the body and that part of the ear wasn’t one of the parts. But by that time I wasn’t even interested. I mean, here he’s giving us this scientific talk and everything, and the only thing that science had ever done for any of us was to get us in jail.
Finally, after everything was explained and the sergeant was satisfied, they let us all go. Then we all went back to 116th Street. Modern science had got us in jail for a little while but it broke up the day. That’s something, right?
That was really the first thing I did with the guys from 116th Street. And afterwards, when we sat around and talked about it, I really felt that being in jail was the best part in a funny way. Because if I hadn’t run down and gotten myself in jail then, we wouldn’t have done anything together. And it seemed to me that it was what you did that made you part of the group. More than if you had a lot of friends.
We didn’t have to stay in jail for very long, either. Just about long enough to say we’d been there. And after that I found out that they all just accepted me even though I was new and all. But even so, it took a long time to really know them well. I hadn’t, until then, really known anyone well except Sharon, my sister. And, as I said before, I knew her too well because we used to sleep in the same room. Everybody else I played with or went to school with and everything, I knew about but really didn’t know. I never knew what anyone was thinking or how they felt. Sometimes you knew if somebody was hurt or something like that because you could see them crying. Or if they laughed you could see that, but all the in-between things, like not hurting but feeling sad, or not laughing and feeling happy, you couldn’t tell. And since most people most of the time weren’t crying or laughing, you couldn’t tell about them most of the time.
Now for some people that’s really not too important, I guess. At least I never heard anybody else running around talking about knowing how people felt. But to me it was pretty important. You know why? I really wanted to know if they felt like me. Sometimes I thought that some of the kids I knew, or kinda knew, didn’t feel the same way about things that I did. I don’t mean they didn’t like the Mets or anything like that, but they didn’t feel sad about things that made me feel terrible. And things that made me happy sometimes didn’t make other kids happy.
Okay. Now the real problem (and it always takes me a while to get to the real problem) is that I’m kind of scary. If something happens that’s a little scary, then you know I’m one of the people that’s going to get scared. And I cry easy, too. At any old dumb thing. Sad movies or sad television shows, for instance. That kind of thing. Sometimes if I see a little kid getting beat up by a big kid, then I start crying for the little kid. Once I walked right up to a big guy who was picking on this little kid and told him he shouldn’t. He bloodied my nose. Now I just feel bad and walk away.
But on 116th Street I got to know a lot about how people felt. We all did, I guess. And it was real cool. I didn’t always know how they felt but I did sometimes. Also, I got to talk about it some. Or listen about it, really, because that’s what I usually did. Listen. I was about the best listener around.
2
the funeral
The next thing that happened on the block was very sad. I didn’t ever have anything sad happen to me personally. And when I saw it happening to other people I didn’t understand it very much. Sometimes I think you have to live through something yourself before you can really understand it.
Cap was the first one to spread the news that Mr. Jones, Clyde’s father, had been killed. His mother had gone down to the hospital with Clyde’s mother, and when she called Cap to tell his father that she’d be getting home late she told him that Clyde’s father had died in the hospital.
“How come he died?” Gloria asked.
“I don’t know exactly, but there was some kind of an accident. My mother said something about a fork-lift truck falling over. Anyway, they took him to the hospital and then he died.” Cap shrugged his shoulders.
“Where’s Clyde?” somebody asked.
“He’s over to his aunt’s house,” Cap said. “I didn’t want to see him, you know. He was crying and everything.”
Clyde’s father was buried at the New Hope Memorial Cemetery in Long Island. Clyde was almost fifteen and had never been to a funeral before. The next day, when he came out on the stoop, he said that he couldn’t remember all the things that had happened. All the time he was talking it looked as if he might cry any minute.
“They take so long. You have to sit around and wait for everything. First we had to wait for the funeral cars and for everybody to show up and everything. My mom was crying and my aunt was crying.” Clyde was looking down at the ground and twisting his foot like he was trying to grind out a cigarette. “I had seen my mother cry before, you know, when she got real mad she’d cry, or that time when she cut her finger she cried, but she cried different this time. She cried so soft. You could hardly hear her. She was crying so private that it hurt, you know?
“Anyway, then you got to ride to the church and everybody looks at you and then Bishop Glover says that people should ask God to help you. Then the choir sang ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee.’ That was my father’s favorite hymn. Then you get up and walk past the coffin—they had the lid up…”
Clyde was crying and Gloria gave him her handkerchief.
“Then I looked at him laying there, and there wasn’t anything I could do. My mother was crying and Kitty was holding my hand, and she was crying, and she was scared, too. Then after that we went out to the cemetery—that doesn’t last too long. Then we came back. And it was a nice day. Came down Fifth Avenue and some guys were playing stickball in the street. I still can’t think of him as being dead. I keep thinking of him sitting in the living room and drinking iced tea. He always drank iced tea when he watched the ball game. Just saying that somebody is dead doesn’t make it any more real. The only thing that makes it real is Mama sitting up at night and reading from the Bible and crying to herself. That makes it real. You know?”
We all nodded and I saw that everybody else was as sad as I was.
Clyde told me much later that the first day back at school he was surprised to find out that most of the people in the school, teachers and children, didn’t know about his father. A few that did said something but most didn’t. And even around the block no one spoke about it, and after a while things were pretty much like they always had been. Except that his mother, who hadn’t worked before when his father was alive, began to look for a job. Sometimes she wouldn’t get home until after six o’clock. Kitty, his sister, was staying with his aunt until her mother found a job and made other arrangements. So when Clyde saw Fast Sam and me one day and it was raining too hard for us to sit on the stoop and talk, he asked us to come upstairs with him, not wanting to be alone until his mother came home.
“Hey, man, that’s a good idea. We can go up to your house and drink sodas while we rap,” Fast Sam said, thinking about food as usual.
We put on a soul station and Clyde looked into the refrigerator to see if they had any sodas. They had one full can and one half can he’d started yesterday. Clyde gave Fast Sam the full soda and took the other for himself. I didn’t want any.
“Nothing much. My mother’s looking for a job.”
“Yeah, look, I haven’t said anything to you about your father, but I’m really sorry he died, you know.”
“Thanks.”
We sat for a long while without saying anything. We didn’t know what to say. Fast Sam, who was a good dancer as well as the fastest guy in the neighborhood, snapped his fingers in time with the music.
“Say, dig, you know the center’s giving a dance next week. Why don’t you come?” Fast Sam asked.
“I don’t know.” Clyde looked down at his sneakers. “I’m not really in a mood to dance.”
“It’s easy for me to say, but why don’t you try to get yourself in a mood? You can’t keep yourself down forever. You’re about the coolest dude I know, man.”
“I don’t feel cool. I feel like I’ve got a heavy weight in the middle of my stomach. No jive. That’s just the way I feel. When I walk around a few hours, go to school and whatnot, I get so tired I can’t even stand up. I feel like I should have done something. I mean, my father’s dead and I—” Clyde’s eyes began to get teary and he couldn’t talk for a while. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said finally.
“Nothing wrong about crying because your father died, man. I can understand that. What do you mean, you think you should do something?”
“I don’t know. My father died and he’s gone and I can’t say anything to him. When I got to the hospital he was already gone—that’s the word my mother used—and I couldn’t say anything.”
“What did you want to say?”
“Nothing then. But now I wish I could say something like…you know, that I dug him and appreciated him and that kind of thing. I wish I could do something now, I guess.”
Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff Page 2
