“Maybe it’s all I need.”
He shook his head slowly, and squinted, as though peering through the dirty windshield for an answer. “It was different. That was a long time ago. Back when all this was Bay Ridge. You could live like that then.”
When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn’t say when it was white, when it was Irish, even the relatively tame when it was safer. No. When all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography. As though, somehow, the tectonic plate beneath Sunset Park had shifted, moving it physically to some other place.
I told him about seeing the hand.
“Did you tell the officers?”
“No.”
“The people you were with?”
“No.”
“Then don’t worry about it. There’s body parts all over this town. Saw enough in my day to put together a baseball team.” He drove in silence for a few minutes, then nodded his head a couple of times, as though agreeing with a point made by some voice I could not hear. “You’re going to college, you know,” he said.
* * *
That was what I remembered at the funeral. Returning from the altar rail after receiving communion, Pancho walked passed me. He’d lost a great deal of weight since I’d last seen him, and I couldn’t tell if he was sick or if it was just the drugs. His black suit hung on him in a way that emphasized his gaunt frame. He winked at me as he came around the casket in front of my pew, and flashed the mischievous smile that—when we were sixteen—got all the girls in his bed and all the guys agreeing to the stupidest and most dangerous tunts.
In my shirt pocket was a photograph of my father with a woman who was not my mother. The date on the back was five years ago. Their arms were around each other’s waists and they smiled for the photographer. When we arrived at the cemetery I took the picture out of my pocket, and looked at it for perhaps the fiftieth time since I’d first discovered it. There were no clues. The woman was young to be with my father, but not a girl. Forty, give or take a few years. I looked for any evidence in his expression that I was misreading their embrace, but even I couldn’t summon the required naïveté. My father’s countenance was not what would commonly be regarded as a poker face. He wasn’t holding her as a friend, a friend’s girl, or the prize at some retirement or bachelor party; he held her like a possession. Like he held his tools. Like he held my mother. The photo had been taken before my mother’s death. I put it back.
I’d always found his plodding predictability and meticulous planning of insignificant events maddening. For the first time that I could recall, I was experiencing curiosity about some part of my father’s life.
I walked from Greenwood Cemetery directly to Olsen’s bar, my father’s watering hole, feeling that I needed to talk to the men that nearly lived there, but not looking forward to it. Aside from my father’s wake the previous night, I hadn’t seen them in years. They were all Irish. The Irish among them were perhaps the most Irish, but the Norwegians and the Danes were Irish too, as were the older Puerto Ricans. They had developed, over time, the stereotypical hooded gaze, the squared jaws set in grim defiance of whatever waited in the sobering daylight. To a man they had that odd trait of the Gaelic heavy-hitter, that—as they attained middle age—their faces increasingly began to resemble a woman’s nipple.
The door to the bar was propped open, and the cool damp odor of stale beer washed over me before I entered. That smell has always reminded me of the Boy Scouts. Meetings were Thursday nights in the basement of Bethany Lutheran Church. When they were over, I would have to pass Olsen’s on my way home, and I usually stopped in to see my father. He would buy me a couple of glasses of beer—about all I could handle at thirteen—and leave with me after about an hour so we could walk home together.
From the inside looking out: Picture an embassy in a foreign country. A truly foreign country. Not a Western European ally, but a fundamentalist state perennially on the precipice of war. A fill-the-sandbags-and-wait-for-the-airstrike enclave. That was Olsen’s, home to the last of the donkeys, the white dinosaurs of Sunset Park. A jukebox filled with Kristy McColl and the Clancy Brothers, and flyers tacked to the flaking walls advertising step-dancing classes, Gaelic lessons, and the memorial run to raise money for a scholarship in the name of a recently slain cop. Within three blocks of the front door you could attend a cockfight, buy crack, or pick up a streetwalker, but in Olsen’s, it was always 1965.
Upon entering the bar for the first time in several years, I found its pinched dimensions and dim lighting more oppressive, and less mysterious, than I had remembered. The row of ascetic faces, and the way all conversation trailed off at my entrance, put me in mind of the legendary blue wall of silence in the police department. It is no coincidence that the force has historically been predominantly Irish. The men in Olsen’s would be pained to reveal their zip code to a stranger, and I wasn’t sure if even they knew why.
The bar surface itself was more warped than I’d recalled. The mirrors had oxidized and the white tile floor had been torn up in spots and replaced with odd-shaped pieces of green linoleum. It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I’d been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country, and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on my corner was authentic. In that they served coffee, I suppose she was correct.
I sat on an empty stool in the middle of the wavy bar and ordered a beer. I felt strangely nervous there without my father, like a child about to be caught doing something bad. Everyone knew me. Marty, the round-shouldered bartender, approached first, breaking the ice. He spoke around an enormous, soggy stub of a cigar, as he always did. And, as always, he seemed constantly annoyed by its presence in his mouth; as though he’d never smoked one before, and was surprised to discover himself chewing on it.
“Daniel. It’s good to see you. I’m sorry for your loss.”
He extended one hand, and when I did the same, he grasped mine in both of his and held it for a moment. It had to have been some sort of signal, because the rest of the relics in the place lurched toward me then, like some nursing-home theater guild performing Night of the Living Dead. They shook hands, engaged in awkward stiff hugs, and offered unintelligible condolences. Frank Sanchez, one of my father’s closest friends, squeezed the back of my neck absently until I winced. I thanked them as best I could, and accepted the offers of free drinks.
Someone—I don’t know who—thought it would be a good idea for me to have Jameson’s Irish whiskey, that having been my father’s drink. I’d never considered myself much of a drinker. I liked a couple of beers on a Friday night, and perhaps twice a year I would get drunk. I almost never drank hard liquor, but this crew was insistent, they were matching me shot for shot, and they were paying. It was the sort of thing my father would have been adamant about.
I began to reach for the photograph in my pocket several times and stopped. Finally I fished it out and showed it to the bartender. “Who is she, Marty?” I asked. “Any idea?”
The manner in which he pretended to scrutinize it told me that he recognized the woman immediately. He looked at the picture with a studied perplexity, as though he would have had trouble identifying my father.
“Wherever did you get such a thing?” he asked.
“I found it in the basement, by my father’s shop.”
“Ah. Just come across it by accident then.”
The contempt in his voice seared through my whiskey glow, and left me as sober as when I’d entered. He knew, and if he knew they all knew. And a decision had been reached to tell me nothing.
“Not by accident,” I lied. “My father told me where it was and asked me to get it.”
&n
bsp; Our eyes met for a moment. “And did he say anything about it?” Marty asked. “Were there no instructions or suggestions?”
“He asked me to take care of it,” I said evenly. “To make everything all right.”
He nodded. “Makes good sense,” he said. “That would be best served by letting the dead sleep, don’t you think? Forget it, son, let it lie.” He poured me another drink, sloppily, like the others, and resumed moving his towel over the bar, as though he could obliterate the mildewed stench of a thousand spilled drinks with a few swipes of the rag.
I drank the shot down quickly and my buzz returned in a rush. I hadn’t been keeping track, but I realized that I’d had much more than what I was used to, and I was starting to feel dizzy. The rest of the men in the room looked the same as when I walked in, the same as when I was twelve. In the smoke-stained bar mirror I saw Frank Sanchez staring at me from a few stools away. He caught me looking and gestured for me to come down.
“Sit, Danny,” he said when I got there. He was drinking boilermakers. Without asking, he ordered each of us another round. “What were you talking to Marty about?”
I handed Frank the picture. “I was asking who the woman is.”
He looked at it and placed it on the bar. “Yeah? What’d he say?”
“He said to let it lie.”
Frank snorted. “Typical donkey,” he said. “Won’t answer a straight question, but has all kinds of advice on what you should do.”
From a distance in the dark bar I would have said that Frank Sanchez hadn’t changed much over the years, but I was close to him now, and I’d seen him only last night in the unforgiving fluorescent lighting of the funeral home. He’d been thin and handsome when I was a kid, with blue-black hair combed straight back, and the features and complexion of a Hollywood Indian in a John Wayne picture. He’d thickened in the middle over the years, though he still wasn’t fat. His reddish brown cheeks were illuminated by the roadmap of broken capillaries that seemed an entrance requirement for “regular” status at Olsen’s. His hair was still shockingly dark, but now with a fake Jerry Lewis sheen and plenty of scalp showing through in the back. He was a retired homicide detective. His had been one of the first Hispanic families in this neighborhood. I knew he’d moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey long ago, though my father said that he was still in Olsen’s every day.
Frank picked up the picture and looked at it again, then looked over it at the two sloppy rows of bottles along the back bar. The gaps for the speed rack looked like missing teeth.
“We’re the same,” he said. “Me and you.”
“The same, how?”
“We’re on the outside, and we’re always looking to be let in.”
“I never gave a damn about being on the inside here, Frank.”
He handed me the photo. “You do now.”
He stood then, and walked stiffly back to the men’s room. A couple of minutes later Marty appeared at my elbow, topped off my shot, and replaced Frank’s.
“It’s a funny thing about Francis,” Marty said. “He’s a spic who’s always hated the spics. So he moves from a spic neighborhood to an all-white one, then has to watch as it turns spic. So now he’s got to get in his car every day and drive back to his old all-spic neighborhood, just so he can drink with white men. It’s made the man bitter. And,” he nodded toward the glasses, “he’s in his cups tonight. Don’t take the man too seriously.”
Marty stopped talking and moved down the bar when Frank returned.
“What’d Darby O’Gill say to you?” he asked.
“He told me you were drunk,” I said, “and that you didn’t like spics.”
Frank widened his eyes. “Coming out with revelations like that, is he? Hey, Martin,” he yelled, “next time I piss tell him JFK’s been shot!” He drained his whiskey, took a sip of beer, and turned his attention back to me. “Listen. Early on, when I first started on the job—years back, I’m talking—there was almost no spades in the department; even less spics. I was the only spic in my precinct, only one I knew of in Brooklyn. I worked in the seven-one, Crown Heights. Did five years there, but this must’ve been my first year or so.
“I was sitting upstairs in the squad room typing attendance reports. Manual typewriters back then. I was good too, fifty or sixty words a minute—don’t forget, English ain’t my first language. See, I learned the forms. The key is knowin’ the forms, where to plug in the fucking numbers. You could type two hundred words a minute, but you don’t know the forms, all them goddamn boxes, you’re sitting there all day.
“So I’m typing these reports—only uniform in a room full of bulls, only spic in a room full of harps—when they bring in the drunk.”
Frank paused to order another shot, and Marty brought one for me too. I was hungry and really needed to step outside for some air, but I wanted to hear Frank’s story. I did want to know how he thought we were similar, and I hoped he would talk about the photo. He turned his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth like a child catching rain, and he poured the booze smoothly down his throat.
“You gotta remember,” he continued, “Crown Heights was still mostly white back then, white civilians, white skells. The drunk is just another mick with a skinfull. But what an obnoxious cocksucker. And loud.
“Man who brought him in is another uniform, almost new as me. He throws him in the cage and takes the desk next to mine to type his report. Only this guy can’t type, you can see he’s gonna be there all day. Takes him ten minutes to get the paper straight in the damn machine. And all this time the goddamn drunk is yelling at the top of his lungs down the length of the squad room. You can see the bulls are gettin’ annoyed. Everybody tells him to shut up, but he keeps on, mostly just abusing the poor fuck that brought him in, who’s still struggling with the report, his fingers all smudged with ink from the ribbons.
“On and on he goes: ‘Your mother blows sailors … Your wife fucks dogs … You’re all queers, every one of you.’ Like that. But I mean, really, it don’t end, it’s like he never gets tired.
“So the guy who locked him up gets him outa the cage and walks him across the room. Over in the corner they got one of these steam pipes, just a vertical pipe, no radiator or nothing. Hot as a motherfucker. So he cuffs the drunk’s hands around the pipe, so now the drunk’s gotta stand like this”—Frank formed a huge circle with his arms, as if he were hugging an invisible fat woman—“or else he gets burned. And just bein’ that close to the heat, I mean, it’s fuckin’ awful. So the uniform walks away, figuring that’ll shut the scumbag up, but it gets worse.
“Now, the bulls are all pissed at the uniform for not beatin’ the drunk senseless before he brought him in, like any guy with a year on the street would know to do. The poor fuck is still typing the paperwork at about a word an hour, and the asshole is still at it, ‘Your daughter fucks niggers. When I get out I’ll look your wife up—again.’ Then he looks straight at the uniform, and the uniform looks up. Their eyes lock for a minute. And the drunk says this: ‘What’s it feel like to know that every man in this room thinks you’re an asshole?’ Then the drunk is quiet and he smiles.”
Marty returned then, and though I felt I was barely hanging on, I didn’t dare speak to refuse the drink. Frank sat silently while Marty poured, and when he was done Frank stared at him until he walked away.
“After that,” he continued in a low voice, “it was like slow motion. Like everything was happening underwater. The uniform stands up, takes his gun out, and points it at the drunk. The drunk never stops smiling. And then the uniform pulls the trigger, shoots him right in the face. The drunk’s head like explodes, and he spins around the steam pipe—all the way—once, before he drops.
“For a second everything stops. It’s just the echo and the smoke and blood on the wall and back window. Then, time speeds up again. The sergeant of detectives, a little leprechaun from the other side—must’ve bribed his way past the height requirement—jumps over his desk and grabs up a billy club.
He lands next to the uniform, who’s still holding the gun straight out, and he clubs him five or six times on the forearm, hard and fast, whap-whap-whap. The gun drops with the first hit but the leprechaun don’t stop till the bone breaks. We all hear it snap.
“The uniform pulls his arm in and howls, and the sergeant throws the billy club down and screams at him: ‘The next time … the next time, it’ll be your head that he breaks before you were able to shoot him. Now get him off the pipe before there’s burns on his body.’ And he storms out of the room.”
Frank drank the shot in front of him and finished his beer. I didn’t move. He looked at me and smiled. “The whole squad room,” he said, “jumped into action. Some guys uncuffed the drunk; I helped the uniform out. Got him to a hospital. Coupla guys got rags and a pail and started cleaning up.
“Now, think about that,” Frank said, leaning in toward me and lowering his voice yet again. “I’m the only spic there. The only other uniform. There had to be ten bulls. But the sergeant, he didn’t have to tell anybody what the plan was, or to keep their mouth shut, or any fucking thing. And there was no moment where anybody worried about me seeing it, being a spic. We all knew that coulda been any one of us. That’s the most on-the-inside I ever felt. Department now, it’s a fucking joke. Affirmative action, cultural-diversity training. And what’ve you got? Nobody trusts anybody. Guys afraid to trust their own partners.” He was whispering, and starting to slur his words.
I began to feel nauseated. It’s a joke, I thought. A cop’s made-up war story. “Frank, did the guy die?”
“Who?”
“The drunk. The man that got shot.”
Frank looked confused, and a bit annoyed. “Of course he died.”
“Did he die right away?”
“How the fuck should I know? They dragged him outa the room in like a minute.”
“To a hospital?”
“Was a better world’s all I’m saying. A better world. And you always gotta stay on the inside, don’t drift, Danny. If you drift, nobody’ll stick up for you.”
New York City Noir Page 7
