As he waited for the bus, his thoughts raced. If only he’d gotten to this doctor before; he’d have been safe. She’d never have latched onto the Peace Corps. He could have looked for a real job and moved them to a place he could pay for. He’d have taken better care of her, been less distracted. They might have lived instead of waiting and waiting. Surely, he could conjure another life to escape to, another past that spared everything and kept her alive.
An old woman walking by shoved a dollar into his hand. He had to get out of Oxford Circle.
He found his father alone in the living room, listening to a radio call-in show and dialing a number over and over. “Keep trying,” Robert said, patting Vishniak’s shoulder. In his current condition, Vishniak’s one remaining passion was radio call-in shows. Stuck at home, unable to hunt for scarves or umbrellas, he spent each afternoon trying to get on the air to give his political opinions. Larry from Kensington was on the air now, saying how Nixon would end the war in a dignified way. Cambodia was necessary; they had to help the Cambodians, or who were they?
“Sheep! Sheep!” Vishniak screamed. “Nixon feeds them, You have to stay in to withdraw. You have to fight to have peace!—Tricky Dicky could sell ice to Eskimos… !”
“I know, Pop, I know.”
“You know what I wish on him? Sons! Instead of those two daughters of his. And let him watch them… !!” His voice trailed off, anguished.
He was only making his parents miserable. And they were treating him too well. He didn’t know who he was anymore or what he wanted, but he sure didn’t want to be cooked for and worried over. He could suffer for his mistakes just about anywhere except in front of them.
His father continued ranting. His fury gave him focus, a reason to live. If Nixon didn’t exist, Robert and his mother would have had to invent him. Robert wished he had someone like that, someone he could hate as he’d once loved, totally and completely, so that his rage was all that mattered, an all-consuming, cleansing fury.
THE NEXT DAY HE CALLED his father’s sister, Henry, and her husband, Danny, now living in Queens. Plenty of college graduates were driving cabs these days, they told him; there was no shame in it. Danny owned his own medallion now, and Robert could work for him if he was willing to drive off-hours. Robert wanted to leave for New York as soon as possible, but Danny told him to wait. The cabbies were about to go on strike, and rumor had it that the police would follow right behind them, in January. Then it took Robert awhile to get used to the asthma medication, and for a few weeks he was sicker, but finally, in March of 1971, he said good-bye to Stacia and Vishniak again, hardly knowing what he was doing—only knowing that he needed to do it on his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Eighty-fifth Street
All the way to Midtown, the couple argued about the baby who now lay stretched out across the woman’s lap, half covered by a pink blanket. It was almost midnight, and the man thought they should have taken the kid to his mother’s.
“You’re a lousy father, you know that,” the woman spat, then lit a cigarette. The light turned red, and Robert caught a glimpse of her in his rearview mirror. A pretty peaches-and-cream blonde in a short skirt and long leather jacket. “You never want to spend any time with her.”
“You’re lucky I don’t call social services on your ass, what with you and the guy upstairs and the —”
Robert cracked the window, feeling a cold breeze and the occasional drop of rain on his face. They were yelling now. The man, tall and lanky, had so much bushy brown hair that his head appeared smashed down by the cab roof.
“She needs to be fed!” the woman shouted, though the baby had not made a sound.
“That’s not how you do it; she’ll get gas. You tilt the damn bottle too high!”
“Like you ever feed her!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Luckily, the woman announced to the man that she wasn’t speaking to him, and they were silent until Times Square, where the man directed Robert to a storefront. Two fat guys in jeans, cowboy hats, and sheepskin jackets barked at each other like cheerleaders for opposing football teams: “Naked naked naked!” yelled one. “Nude nude nude!” replied the other.
“That’s two seventy-five,” Robert said, turning off the meter.
“You want a free pass,” the man whispered by his ear.
“No, just the two seventy-five.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, handing Robert three crumpled dollars. The couple got out and walked toward the door. The woman now dragged the pale infant by its feet, the blanket falling away, skimming the sidewalk. Only then did Robert realize that the child was made of plastic.
After that, he picked up a small, silent man who needed to get to Riverside Church in Harlem. On his way back down Broadway, at 110th he spotted a young guy in nothing but slacks and a sweater jumping from foot to foot in the cold rain. Next to him a small girl stood doubled over, clutching her stomach, with an oversized jacket over her shoulders. The guy asked for Columbia-Presbyterian, said it was something she ate.
“She gonna retch in my cab?” Robert asked. He cleaned up enough shit back there as it was. The girl was shaking now; he didn’t think it was from something she ate.
“Come on!” the guy pleaded, helping the girl in, then getting in himself and slamming the door. “Get going!” The girl lay across the seat, her head in his lap as he stroked her hair.
“St. Luke’s is just a few blocks away,” Robert offered, “if she’s that sick.”
But he insisted on Columbia, and Robert wasn’t going to argue with driving an additional fifty blocks. He turned onto 110th and then got on the Henry Hudson going north. As they were pulling up to the entrance, an ambulance sped ahead of them and workers quickly pulled a patient out of the back. Robert’s young passenger flagged someone down, but they pushed him away, and he returned, saying that he had to get her in there himself.
“Good luck,” Robert said. “That’s five dollars.”
“You’re not gonna help me?”
“Five dollars,” Robert said. “I can’t leave the cab, and they got a hospital full of people.”
“But she’s heavy!” he pleaded.
“Five dollars!” Robert repeated as the girl opened the door and vomited. “Make sure she aims at the sidewalk!”
The boy threw the money onto the front seat, no tip—and then he and the girl limped together toward the double doors. Robert drove back down the driveway; the cold February rain had turned to sleet. He would continue driving until morning, 5:00 a.m., when he’d drive to Forest Hills, drop the cab at his uncle’s spot, and then take the subway back to the Upper West Side, making two transfers. He’d be lucky to get home by seven.
ELEVEN MONTHS EARLIER, during Robert’s first weeks on the job, Danny, older now and with a baby daughter, had sat him down, this time at a bigger kitchen table, and told Robert not to carry a weapon—too many drivers were having their guns turned on them. He and his friends issued warnings—the Caribbean drivers told Robert not to pick up blacks, the Puerto Ricans said to stay away from Spanish Harlem, and the public-school teachers, moonlighting to make extra money, warned against picking up anyone under twenty-five.
Robert paid no attention; he went wherever he wanted, picked up anyone and everyone. And perhaps because he cared so little about his own safety, no one held him up. He worked 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. except for every other Saturday night, leaving the morning rush and the after-work crowd for Danny. But he picked up other shifts, too, from friends of Danny’s looking to sublease to someone reliable. He drove and drove and drove, the nights blending endlessly into days.
His main expense was $167 a month for rent, which he paid in cash. He did just about everything in cash, small bills. After two months on Danny and Henry’s couch, he had gotten his own apartment on a tip from one of the other drivers. The one-bedroom on West Eighty-fifth Street, between Columbus and Central Park West, was rent stabilized and, as instructed, Robert had bribed the super,
a guy named Ramon Arzuega, with $500.
Arzuega said it was a good block, one with a block association, where a combination of neighbors and police had gotten rid of the rooming-house types, kicked the junkies off the corner.
At that end of the block were small prewar walk-ups in limestone and sandstone, and a few intact brownstones. But closer to Columbus, three brick boxes stood with prominent fire escapes in front. They’d been renovated in the 1960s, and Robert’s was the easiest to spot—the other two had been painted neutral colors, but Robert’s building marked the halfway point in the street, standing like a beacon of bad taste, in a lurid blue the color of a robin’s egg.
He could hear his neighbors doing just about everything—frying food, sneezing, making love—and could tell what footwear the woman upstairs wore by the variations in sound her feet made clomping overhead. Many of the tenants worked nights and slept days, as he did. When he returned from work, the streetlamps turning off one by one, the first bits of grayish light visible on the horizon, he sometimes ran into a few of his neighbors; most kept to themselves, nodding hello but rarely speaking, perhaps because they already knew too much about each other.
That morning, as usual, Robert went upstairs and put his tips away in a padlocked box he kept in the back of the closet. He took a shower, then wrapped himself in a towel, drank some water, and took a sleeping pill. He no longer had many nightmares, but then, he hardly slept. He still didn’t eat much, either, nor did he have any desire for women. He had long ago stopped looking in the mirror because the gaunt face that stared back at him, half-hidden by brittle, dry hair, with only the black eyes staring out like some crazed monk, was surely not his own. This was why people joined religious orders, took up robes and vows: this desire for nothingness, the eradication of want, which in itself was addictive.
He lay down on the floor on his mattress, an old one donated by his aunt and uncle that was his only furniture along with a beat-up bridge table and two chairs in the living room. He watched a mouse scurry hypnotically back and forth in the hallway outside his bedroom, then listened for a while to a fight going on next door. She didn’t like how he dressed—his shirts were too loud! He looked like a clown! He said nothing, but then she was crying. Had he whispered something cruel? And then Robert dozed off, awakened a few hours later by shouting. He rolled over and put the pillow over his head, but that didn’t help. Now there was talking out in the hall; an angry neighbor, the same one who hated her boyfriend’s clownish shirts, was out in the hallway screaming: “People are trying to sleep around here!”
The knocking grew louder, and Robert, now hearing his own name, pulled on his pants and went to the door, putting the chain on the lock and peering into the hallway. Standing there in hiking boots, jeans, a gray sweater, and an anorak, and carrying a beat-up leather backpack over one shoulder, was his brother.
“Why aren’t you at school?” Robert asked, as he unchained the door and opened it.
“I dropped out,” Barry replied. “Man, you look lousy.”
“You want to kill them?” Robert asked. “You give up your scholarship and everything?”
Barry stepped inside and surveyed the apartment. “This should be big enough.”
“Big enough for what?” Robert asked. “Am I dreaming? I just got up.”
“I’m going to sleep on your couch.”
“I don’t have a couch.”
“So we’ll buy one,” Barry said.
“No way in hell are you moving in here,” Robert said, watching Barry set his backpack on the floor. “It’s a terrible idea.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The blind lead the deaf
You didn’t get some girl pregnant, did you?” Robert asked. They were sitting at the small table, on his only chairs.
“What are you, my father?” Barry replied. “I just came from there, and believe me, I heard enough lectures; I don’t need another.”
“No one ever knows what cockeyed thing you’re going to do next,” Robert said.
“I could say the same about you,” Barry mumbled.
“What about all your ambition? And you have a low number, don’t you?”
“I still have lots of ambition; I’m just relocating it. As for the draft, I got a doctor to say I have a heart murmur. Actually, I have a real honest-to-God heart murmur. Who knew? But it’s not the kind that kills a person or anything.”
“So that’s why you left school?”
“I left school because I hated that damned place,” he said. “I’m not dropping out, really. Technically I’m transferring.”
“Transferring where?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“And how do you intend to pay for two more years of college?”
“I’ll manage,” Barry said. “I can always earn a living.”
To Robert, Barry did not look like someone who had been unhappy at school. He’d lost some weight, but it did not make him gaunt; rather, he looked good. His hair, like Robert’s, hung to his shoulders and, like Robert, he had a beard, but his hair was curly and somehow the look suited him. He removed a package of M&M’s from his pocket and offered some to Robert.
“No thanks,” Robert said. “I don’t eat much during the day.”
“What are you, a bat?” Barry asked. “Take one, it won’t kill you.”
Robert took a yellow M&M, put it in his mouth, and began to chew slowly. The M&M tasted suddenly sour to him, like bile. “Stop studying me!” Robert said to Barry, who’d been watching him chew. Then he began to cough. He took a Kleenex out of his pocket and spit out the glob of chocolate and yellow shell. Barry went to the kitchen and found the one glass Robert owned, which was in the sink. He rinsed it out, filled it with water, and brought it back. Robert took a sip of water, then removed a plastic inhaler from his back pocket, put it over his mouth, and took two slow breaths.
“You want to smoke something?” Barry asked. “That might calm you down.” He sat down again and began searching through his backpack.
“No, grass doesn’t really help me anymore, if it ever did.”
“How about Valium? You drop one or two in some methadone, and then —”
“And then when I wake up from my coma, will you leave me the fuck alone?!” Robert snapped. “I’m on a reality trip these days.”
“And how’s that going?”
Barry put a hand on Robert’s shoulder and the two began to laugh. They had always been able to make each other laugh.
“I’m sorry about what happened in Boston,” Barry said. “I mean, I have no idea what happened, Stacia doesn’t tell me a damned thing, but I can see that something sure did. And then Gwendolyn —”
“What the hell do you know about Gwendolyn?”
“I know she’s not here,” Barry said. “And that’s not good.”
“She’s dead,” Robert said. He had never said it out loud before.
“Oh, man.” Barry cleared his throat several times, staring intensely at the bare floor. “We don’t have to talk about it now, if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t ever want to talk about it,” Robert said softly, and Barry nodded.
THEY BOUGHT A FOLDOUT couch. Barry, rarely bothering to put a sheet down over the couch cushions, slept in the nude. The apartment was not visibly cleaner—clothing now collected in heaps in the corners, the shower curtain developed a larger pattern of black mold—but Barry did attack the roach problem, spreading boric acid around the tiny kitchen and, each morning, sweeping the tiny corpses into a dustpan. The refrigerator amassed, slowly and then all at once, a collection of Chinese take-out boxes, a dozen eggs, containers of orange juice, bottles of Coke and black cherry soda. The freezer was no longer empty—now there was ice cream, a freezer bag of marijuana, a bottle of vodka; the ice cube trays, once frozen cavities of plastic, now contained cubes. On the counter in the tiny kitchen sat a beige plastic percolator.
Barry surprised Robert by getting up early each morning to make him b
reakfast when he came off his shift. He had not known that Barry was capable of getting up at seven, let alone shopping and cooking. On one such morning, Robert arrived home to find Barry scrambling eggs and frying bacon, the smell so seductive that he had to come closer. On the counter was a paper bag from the supermarket on the corner—inside was an Entenmann’s crumb cake, the only kind of store-bought cake his mother ever allowed into the house, and then only under duress. It was Robert’s favorite. As Barry scraped the eggs from the side of the pan with a spatula, he informed Robert that he’d enrolled in City College on 138th Street.
“Don’t you know what’s going on up there? They’re rioting in the streets,” Robert said.
“That was last year,” Barry replied. “With the open admissions, now it’s perfectly calm. And tuition is cheap.”
“You don’t live in New York.”
“I do now; I used your address,” Barry said. “Make some coffee.”
“None left.”
“Check the bag.”
Robert obeyed, and a few minutes later they heard the slow squeaking and thumping of the percolator. “City College is nothing more than an experiment now. Anyone off the street can walk in there.”
“Exactly. It’s fair, it’s equal. So by definition it’s not a racket and people won’t have an attitude,” Barry said, scooping up the eggs and placing them on a plate, “like they did at Syracuse.”
“What kind of attitude?” Robert asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee. For weeks he’d been trying to get out of his brother exactly why he’d left school.
“I don’t mean to smear our people, but honestly, sometimes I thought the Jews were the worst. Not all, but you know the ones I’m talking about—they weren’t like the kids in Oxford Circle, that’s for sure. You sent me off totally fucking unprepared, brother. Not a word of warning. Their doctor and dentist parents worked their way through school, but now they want their babies to go in style. They send them with stereos and cars and blank checks. And those were the hippies! Running around in their flowing clothes, their noses surgically tilted in the air! Talking about oppression and the common man, and running off to volunteer at some job, calling it righteous because they don’t have to earn money. Or my favorite, going to summer camp until they’re like forty-five. You’re not a socialist because you sleep in a log cabin and dance in a circle! And who are they angry at, really angry at? Not the Man—they wouldn’t know the Man if he froze their Bloomingdale’s charge cards. No, they’re angry at their parents! The people who fund all this in the first place. If they don’t want their parents, send them my way. I’ve been looking all my life for someone to wipe my ass and pay my bills.”
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