by Stuart Dybek
“Qué quieres?”
The Disciple removes his sunglasses as if for emphasis, then rises to his feet like someone tired of sitting, in need of a stretch. He’s a handsome kid with a shadow of mustache, and now that he’s removed his sunglasses, Mick notices that what he took to be a mole on the kid’s cheekbone at the corner of one eye is a tattooed blue tear. The tear, Mick knows, is a tribute to a gang buddy who was killed. Every kid in this gang-graffitied neighborhood could probably be crying the same blue tear.
“Qué quieres, hombre?” Whataya want, man? the kid asks for what must be the fifth or sixth time. Now that he’s on his feet, it’s clear he has no intention of sitting back down.
“I grew up here, too. I thought I’d come back to see if the old place was still standing,” Mick answers in Spanish, and smiles. In New York, the surprise of a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy speaking rapid-fire street Spanish usually eases the reflexive hostility. In the Bronx neighborhood of his santero, Mick is known as the jibaro rubio, the blond hillbilly. But here, no one smiles back. Before Mick can continue explaining, the kid repeats the question.
“Qué quieres?”
We were at the Village Vanguard on Saturday, the second night of my visit to New York, when Mick told me the story of how he’d moved from New Orleans. We’d gone to hear Gato Barbieri, an Argentinean sax player with a tone like the screak of some great tropical bird. On the Vanguard’s stage, a stage that seemed too cramped for the club’s legendary stature, Barbieri soared in ecstatic flurries above a joyful racket of drumskins, maracas, and a berimbau. Between sets, Mick chain-smoked and chain-talked. He kept offering me cigarettes, and I kept telling him I’d quit. Finally, he observed that quitting must have agreed with me as I was looking fit, then insisted we arm-wrestle for drinks even though he could wrestle only with his weaker left arm. His right elbow was still healing from a break that had required surgery. Since I’m left-handed, it wasn’t a fair match.
“How’d you ever get them to hire your Yimmy Delabaloney ass as a bouncer?” I kidded, after pinning him a few times.
“I simply told them the truth, that the job of bouncer demands psychology, not brute strength. Being a bouncer is about acting.”
It was another of Mick’s ever-fomenting theories that life was essentially about playing roles. It seemed a dangerous idea to put to the test if the role was that of bouncer on Forty-second Street.
His elbow was injured outside the Kit Kat when he was stomped in a brawl he didn’t see coming with a party of crazed UFO conventioneers—some dressed like Star Trek characters. “Wouldn’t think Trekkies could be such mean fucks,” Mick said. “Whatever happened to ‘Live long and prosper’?”
After the cops broke up the fight, Mick went back into the Kit Kat and began pounding shots of Barbancourt rum. A Haitian friend had once told him there was a saying in Haiti that “Barbancourt can cure even peg leg.” Mick couldn’t bend his right arm, and the bad timing of the injury was ominous: his first real audition since arriving in New York was scheduled for the next morning. He was to read for a role in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, a play he had done in New Orleans. He’d long regarded Williams as his lucky playwright, and luck was something Mick increasingly courted. He’d become superstitious since moving to New York, addicted to lotto—a game he’d previously condemned for bilking the poor. You couldn’t pursue a career in acting, he now argued, without accepting that your life would be governed by chance.
The Kit Kat closed at three a.m., and by then Mick’s elbow was so swollen that he couldn’t roll down the sleeve of his bloodstained white shirt. Drunk, out of subway tokens, Mick hurdled the toll bar at the Times Square station. The exertion made the blood throb in his right arm as if the elbow joint might explode. He was dizzy, nauseous with pain, and figured he’d better get himself to an emergency room. The subway platform was empty except for a homeless guy asleep on one of the benches and an elderly Asian man doing tai chi. When the man saw Mick cradling his arm and woozily staggering, he paused in his exercises to ask what was wrong.
“I think it’s broken,” Mick said.
The old man gently traced his fingertips over Mick’s elbow; he studied Mick’s face as if examining his eyes.
“Will be all right,” the man concluded. “You need yunnan baiyao.”
“What?” Mick asked.
“Yunnan baiyao,” the old man said and had Mick repeat it. “It’s what the Viet Cong used on their wounds when they fought America.”
“Where can I find yunnan baiyao?” Mick asked.
As if sharing a secret, the old man told him an address in Chinatown.
Instead of going to the emergency room, Mick rode the train to Chinatown and wandered the shuttered streets. At six a.m., he stopped for tea in an all-night Shanghai place and, deciding soup might be medicinal, ordered a ginkgo-nut congee, and when he noticed on the menu something translated as “embroidered fish balls,” he ordered that, too, out of sheer curiosity. At eight a.m., he was waiting in the doorway when the Chinese herbalist came to open his pharmacy. Mick stepped into the shop’s alien atmosphere of dried herbs and powdered animals and inhaled a smell that seemed in itself curative.
Perhaps things would have gone differently if Mirza, who’d been taking classes at NYU, hadn’t been away at a weeklong dance seminar at SUNY, Purchase. She’d left a note dusted with glitter and embossed with a lilac impression of her lips, wishing Jimmy luck on his audition. Alone, Mick took the first dose of yunnan baiyao and washed it down with rum; then he settled onto the mattress in the pantry and fell into a fitful sleep with Leon purring against his wounded arm. It was as if the cat understood he was injured and would help heal him. For the next two days Mick lay tended by Leon, religiously taking the yunnan baiyao and rum, but otherwise fasting. By the third evening, when he dragged himself to work at the Kit Kat, his right elbow was the size of a melon and turning shades like rotting fruit. Vince, the bartender, took one look and hailed a cab to rush Mick to the ER at Lenox Hill. There, they had to put him under and rebreak the elbow in order to pin it together. Mick said he never fathomed the word pain until he woke from the anesthetic.
The injury ended his career as a bouncer. When he got out of the hospital and recovered enough to return to work, Mick found a job at a midtown clam bar. He was back to waiting tables, a role he’d already played for too many years in New Orleans. Mirza was through with the Kit Kat as well. She’d been accepted as an understudy in the Alvin Ailey company, and was devoting herself full-time to her dream of becoming a serious dancer.
“I know that dream stuff sounds like corny Hollywood shit, but I don’t know what else to call it,” she’d told Mick on the very first night they’d met at the strip club. And Mick said, “No, not corny, dream is a beautiful word—sueño, träumen, marzenie—a. word we’d die without. You can’t let cheeseballs fuck it up for you.” It had taken only a few weeks from that freezing night when Mick first saw Mirza dancing to Coltrane for them to move in together.
When Mick told me that they’d been “having their little squabbles lately,” I guessed that probably meant they’d been at each other’s throats. They didn’t argue during my visit, but they couldn’t conceal the tension. In contrast to Mick’s manic humor, Mirza brooded. Yet it was obvious she was still nuts about him. I could hear it in the teasing way she called him Yimmy as we roused Mick that Saturday morning from the mattress in their pantry bedroom. The way she called his name made him sound like a different guy than the kid I’d grown up with.
We roused Mick up, and the three of us, with the borzoi in tow, hailed a cab on Delancey and rode all the way uptown so Diablo could romp in Central Park, and from there we walked to a mercado on the West Side where Mirza bought the ingredients for pastellas. We spent the rest of Saturday afternoon rolling pastellas, which reminded Mick and me of the gowumpki Moms used to make, except that instead of a cabbage leaf, the filling was wrapped in a banana leaf. The pastellas were for a baptism party the next
day in Astoria. The baby’s mother was Mirza’s younger sister, Chiqui. Mick was to be padrino. As his brother, I was welcomed, too.
Mirza’s family lived on welfare and couldn’t afford both a church service and a party after, so the priest performed the ceremony at the kitchen sink. He baptized the infant Milton Jimmy Marrero—Jimmy after his padrino, Jimmy Delacroix. That Sunday, on the Marreros’ little concrete patio decorated with balloons, beneath the canopy of low-flying jets from LaGuardia, it looked like my brother had found himself a new life complete with adopted family.
Mirza hadn’t asked me his age or anything about him, but at the christening party, on that last day of my visit, while Mick salsaed with her wide-hipped tias, two at a time to the tape of El Gran Combo, Mirza told me as if confiding, “When he’s not acting crazy, your brother is so sweet and has such a big heart. So generous! Chiqui loves him. He got her a job in the restaurant where he works and helped her sign up for night school.” Then she asked, “Perry, does your father like to drink?”
“He’s not much of a drinker,” I told her, and left it at that rather than explain that our father was the child of a brawling drunk who’d died in the state mental hospital, a father he never talked about.
“I guess I don’t even know if that’s good or bad news so far as Jimmy. I don’t know what he’s looking for or running from.”
From what Mick had told me the night before at the Village Vanguard to the yawp of Gato Barbieri’s sax, the problems with Mirza began after he broke his elbow. Mick implied that his inability to get roles was corroding their relationship. After too many drinks he’d referred to himself as “just another fly on the wall of the New York theater scene” and ranted about actors being treated like “the niggers of the art world,” phrases of a kind I’d never heard from him before. But Mirza told me that what worried her was that Jimmy wasn’t doing the things necessary to help himself, the way she was in pursuing her dream of dancing. He still hadn’t arranged to have a set of publicity pictures made, or typed a resume, or contacted an agent, and he refused to audition for what he called shitwork—which included anything other than serious drama.
“You’re his older brother, maybe you can tell him he needs to be more practical,” she said.
“I’m afraid that’s exactly the lecture our father constantly gave us,” I said, laughing.
She seemed to recoil, and I was sorry I’d laughed, as I could see she was by nature proud and private and wouldn’t be having this talk if it wasn’t terribly serious to her.
“Did Jimmy tell you how he got involved in Santeria?”
“No.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that anything in particular was necessary to get Mick interested in Santeria. He’d always felt most alive when crossing borders, most at ease in the foreign outposts of America. Our father was an immigrant, but Mick was the one who seemed to feel foreign—foreign in the church and Catholic schools we went to as children; foreign in Memphis, Tennessee; foreign in the face of My-Country-Right-or-Wrong and the government that jailed him for refusing to fight a war he believed was a crime against humanity.
“Once, after a terrible argument with Jimmy,” Mirza said, “I felt so bad I went to see the santero. It was something I hadn’t done since high school. It’s supposed to be private, like confession, but when I came home Jimmy wouldn’t leave me alone until I told him what the santero said. So, finally, I broke down and told him: ‘You are living with a man cursed by his father.’ That’s what the santero told me. And when I told Jimmy that, it was like I’d stabbed him in the gut, and then he began to laugh that crazy laugh and he became like happy, and he said, ‘Now I understand.’”
“Qué quieres?” the Disciple demands. Though he’s taken only a few drags, he drops his lit cigarette and grinds it beneath his high-topped basketball shoes.
“Just wanted to walk around the old hood,” Mick tells him in Spanish, “check out our old building, take a look at the back yard where we used to play. You know that oil shed back there? My old man built it out of scrap wood we stole after urban renewal bulldozed a square block on Cermak and Western. I saw there’s a big Jewel on that corner now. Me and my bro used to sneak out after supper and smoke behind that oil shed. It was our secret place. But it really pissed us off when our father first built it because that little back yard had been our baseball field, you know, when we were small and couldn’t hit a ball farther than we could spit. It seemed as big as Sox Park to me then. A home run was over Kashka’s fence. You guys probably never heard of Kashka. See that parking lot next door? It used to be a falling-down old house surrounded by a wooden fence where this crazy, fat woman named Kashka Marishka lived. She kept chickens even though it was illegal. Her fucken rooster would wake us up every morning—”
It’s too long a story to tell them now, even for my brother, who can talk nonstop all night, but he’s remembering Kashka’s old house, and how the cops had to come the day it was scheduled to be wrecked in order to tear Kashka away from its warped rooms. Her enormous body bulged through rips in the slip she was wearing. She was cursing in English and Polish, weeping and screaming and fighting the cops, while a bulldozer mowed down her crooked home-run fence, and her chickens flapped a getaway down the alley with the cops in pursuit. Mick remembers watching the spectacle with the rest of the neighborhood, and feeling sorry and ashamed, knowing it was Sir who’d finally bribed the alderman to get Kashka’s house condemned.
“Qué quieres?”
It was Sir who bribed the cops to keep an arrest off Mick’s record after Mick was clubbed and detained when an antiwar rally he’d helped organize in his freshman year at Memphis State turned into a riot. Our father drove a bloodied Mick from the police station to a deserted industrial lot that overlooked the Mississippi. There, he told Mick that all his life he’d lived with the dread that “the family curse,” the madness responsible for his own father’s incarceration in a state mental hospital, would be inherited by his sons. Then, our father apologized to Mick for passing it on to him.
It was Sir who gave Mick’s address on St. Philip Street in New Orleans to the FBI.
Two feds in suits and ties showed up at the house in Memphis looking for Mick. He’d dropped out of Memphis State, lost his student deferment, and was evading the draft. Not just evading the draft but sending his draft board a steady stream of antiwar literature—posters of Che Guevera, the poems of Ho Chi Minh, all of which were by law required to be kept in his file. One of the agents said to Sir that it must be sad to no longer hear from his runaway son, and Sir replied that sure he heard from Mick, he’d received a letter just the other day. The agents told him they’d have to confiscate the letter, and he handed it over. On the envelope was Mick’s address in New Orleans.
As letters go, it wasn’t particularly incriminating:
Dear Folks, Don’t worry that you haven’t heard from me. I was in Mexico. Now I’m back here, doing okay. Got a job cleaning ships. The food in this town is sure good.
Peace, Mick
Mick was in bed with a nun when the FBI broke down his door, which was unlocked, and stormed in with guns drawn. They made Mick and the nun lie facedown and naked on the floor while they cuffed Mick. The nun—her name was Sister Claudia—was in the process of leaving her order. Mick had met her at a protest rally. U.S. marshals took Mick to the New Orleans Parish Prison, where he was thrown in with the general population. He was twenty-one, blond, and really did bear a resemblance to the dead actor James Whatshisface.
I didn’t know what had happened until several days later, when I got a message to call a Sister Claudia, whom I’d never heard of. I was teaching at a junior high in the Caribbean; I’d finally made it from Blue Island Avenue to a real blue island. She’d had a hard time tracking me down.
“You have to get him out,” Sister Claudia pleaded on the phone. “His cell mate, who’s in for murder, is a psychopathic weight lifter covered in Klan tattoos. Mick’s fighting for his life every night in there. Th
ey broke his nose, they knocked out one of his front teeth.” She began to cry.
I telephoned our father immediately.
“A little time in there might straighten him out,” he said.
“Are you nuts? Do you know what goes on in prison? They’ll gang-rape him.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“Don’t you know what happens in prison to young guys, Dad?”
Then I realized he didn’t know, or didn’t want to. I pictured him after dinner sitting before the TV, Mammy darning socks while he pondered his monthly issue of Forbes, calculating market forces for investments he never made. And then, although the events weren’t connected, I recalled how, long ago, when he was told by the nuns that, given his IQ scores, Mick should be sent to a special school, our father became alarmed. He thought they were talking about reform school.
“It’s true what I’m telling you,” I said. “Look, I can’t do anything from here, but I’ll fly in and get him a lawyer.”
“What’s wrong with you guys?” he asked. “I don’t understand my own sons. If it ain’t one mess, it’s another.”
One mess or another—an expression we’d been raised with, not that it applied strictly to Mick and me. When our father was hospitalized, bleeding internally and awaiting exploratory surgery, I called from the airport, on my way to Memphis, and asked, “How you doing, Dad?” and he answered, “I’m in kind of a mess here, sonnyboy.”
I didn’t have to return to the States to try to get Mick out of prison. After talking to me, Sir packed a suitcase, got in his gold Chrysler, and drove in the middle of the night to New Orleans. He hired a lawyer and had Mick out two days later, then took Mick to the dentist and got him a new front tooth.
“Qué quieres?” the Disciple demands.
The kid hasn’t indicated that he’s understood one word Mick has said in Spanish, but now he makes a gracious gesture toward the gangway, inviting Mick to step into it and visit the back yard he’s been describing. Mick glances toward the gangway—a narrow, shadowy corridor between apartment buildings. At the end, bounded on three sides by the brick walls of apartment buildings, a square of trampled mud is crosshatched by shadows of clothesline and power wires. It’s the patch of earth Mick has come here to stand on again. He can still predict the angles of ricochets off the brick wall of the building next door, whose mortar was knocked loose years ago by the countless hours of pounding he gave it with a rubber ball. And down the crumbling, cobwebbed basement steps that smell of leached lime, he knows by heart the recesses where spiders, rats, and alley cats harbor their wildness in the musty darkness. Behind the oil shed Sir built, under the rafters, are caches where we hid cigarettes and lighters, pints of muscatel the winos bought for us, dirty playing cards, illegal fireworks, a Wham-O slingshot and a bag of ball bearings with an affinity for factory windows, a throwing knife we’d practiced with on Kashka’s fence. He wonders whether any of our treasures are still hidden there. What might he remember standing in the back yard? He can visualize how the shadows of clothesline and hanging laundry are swallowed as the deeper shadows of the brick walls extend across the yard. It’s a place composed more of shadow than of earth. Shadows familiar enough to be recognized by their smell, the smell of a past that sometimes seems more real than the present, a childhood in which degrees of reality were never a consideration, when reality and the sense of identity that went with it were taken for granted. That unquestioned conviction as to who they are is the advantage the Disciples on the front steps have over him.
