A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  “Part of it, anyway.”

  “Jesus Christ, Wolfie.”

  Rena opens her eyes. “I’m not really asleep,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” Wolfstein says.

  “It’s fine. I understand.”

  Rena straightens out against the wall, adjusting Lucia’s head on her shoulder while simultaneously stretching and yawning. “She looks so peaceful when she’s sleeping,” Rena says.

  “She’s a tough kid,” Wolfstein says. “It’s good to be tough.”

  “What you were talking about, all those years, I never did see somebody get shot. I found Vic, like I said.” Rena turns to Mo. “Vic was my husband. He never ever let anything happen in front of me. I heard of some things, sure. Hard to keep totally removed from that. Some rat got cut up, buried in cement. I don’t know, that’s different.”

  “Your daughter,” Mo says. “I’m so sorry.”

  Rena nods into her chest, looking down. “We were, what’s the word? Exiled from each other. Not exiled. Disconnected? I can’t think of the word.” She pauses. “Estranged, is what I mean. Doesn’t make it hurt less. I just . . . I hardly knew her anymore.”

  “Me and Wolfie, we never had kids, thank Christ.” Mo shakes her head. “That’s not an appropriate thing to say. I’m sorry. I’ve been drinking for days.”

  “It’s okay. None of this seems real right now.”

  Wolfstein can’t imagine what Rena’s going through. She really can’t. How torn up and confused she must be. She wants to keep her talking, though. You disappear too far into your own head after something like this, there might be no coming back. You start seeing replays. So Wolfstein turns the conversation away from Adrienne. “I tell you me and Mo knew some mob guys out in Los Angeles? Few guys involved in the industry. This one, Lenny Olivieri, I really liked him. Class act.”

  “Vic was a class act.”

  “I’m sure. Lenny, he’d always bring me bread from my favorite bakery. Flowers every now and again. This wasn’t a guy trying to get his dick wet. He was just a gentleman. Nice suits. Like De Niro in Casino. You ever see that? He’d be wearing suits like that, hair slicked back, always clicking a breath mint around in his mouth. Just nice. With me, anyway.”

  “Vic liked that movie. Goodfellas, too, of course. There’s a picture up in the Meats Supreme I always go to on Eighty-Sixth Street, Vic and two of his guys with Scorsese, De Niro, Pesci, and the other one. What’s his name? Guy played Paulie. I go in there now, the owner’s dead, his kids run it, they don’t even know that was my husband. Signed picture. Right there on the wall. I should’ve stolen it.”

  “You should’ve.”

  “How am I supposed to know what I really want anymore?” Rena says, and then stops herself. “I want to take Lucia with me to Vic’s grave. How’s that gonna happen? Are we gonna have to run forever? Does she even love me?”

  “We need some music,” Wolfstein says. “On low, so the kid doesn’t wake up. You got anything, Mo?”

  Mo takes out a couple of the other cassettes she brought along. “Paul Simon and Peggy Lee,” she says.

  “No Stevie?”

  “My mother hid my Stevie tapes.”

  Wolfstein laughs. “Peggy Lee.”

  Mo puts in her Peggy Lee All-Time Greatest Hits cassette and presses play. The sound is distorted, a bit too slow, but it’ll do. Miss Peggy’s singing “I’m a Woman.”

  Wolfstein had a friend in Florida named Gloria Levene. Got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer one summer, and it took her out fast. Six months. Wolfstein used to sit with her and listen to tapes like this. On a stereo, though. Gloria always wanted to hear Linda Ronstadt.

  “My friend Gloria used to imagine lives for us where we were famous singers,” Wolfstein says, tilting back the bottle. “She was sick, and she’d tell these stories like they were real memories. Like we were on the road together, singing our hit songs. I’d go along with her. I’d really start to elaborate. I’d say, ‘Remember the time we played with the Rolling Stones?’ I’d say, ‘Remember the time we played Red Rocks?’ That was how we got through it. I’d tell stories about the dresses we wore, how we did our makeup, and Gloria would just be nodding and smiling. We could’ve had that life. I’m not sure we didn’t. I believe there are parallel worlds where things you think and dream like that are absolutely true.”

  “I remember Gloria,” Mo says. “Sweetheart.”

  No response from Rena. Maybe she’s weirded out. Or just tired.

  Wolfstein keeps going: “My earliest memory, I’m four or five. Back in Riverdale. Wearing an eyelet twirl dress. Standing in front of a piano. Some guy in glasses is playing. No idea who he is. Greasy hair, bad teeth. His fingers are really plunking down on the keys. The piano sounds off, like this tape. Warped a little. I’m singing. Not a real song. One I’m making up as I go. The thing I most remember is that I was seeing myself from outside myself, like a movie. Like I was this girl, but I was watching her, too. Later, when I chewed it over, I got to wondering if that was me seeing another me, you know?” She pauses. “The stories Gloria and I told each other, it seemed like we were making them up, but maybe we were just telling about other lives we lived.”

  “I think I need to stand up and move around a little,” Rena says.

  “You okay?” Wolfstein asks.

  “A little sick to my stomach.”

  Rena gets up, moving the briefcase under Lucia’s head as a makeshift pillow. Lucia stirs a little but doesn’t wake up.

  Rena paces back and forth.

  “You need to puke, puke anywhere,” Mo says. “Who cares?”

  “I just need some fresh air.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Wolfstein says.

  “I’m just gonna duck my head out the back door a sec.” Rena goes out of the room, letting the door crackle shut behind her.

  Wolfstein wonders why she bothered talking about Gloria and that childhood memory. Must’ve added to Rena’s unease. She sits there with Mo and the music. An automatic tension comes with tapes. When a song ends, she’s wondering if it’s the end of the side. No one likes when a side ends. It’s a lonely sound, the clatter of the tape stopping, the play button popping back up. Back when tapes were the main way to listen—not a very long window when it comes right down to it, but a prominent one for her—Wolfstein always feared that sound. She liked the act of flipping a tape to the other side but not the sound of a side ending. She remembers wondering if that’s what happens when people die. Things just click to a stop and then silence. You’d look behind that little window and see stillness. Nothing left to spin. A heartbreaking sight.

  A bar she used to hang out at occasionally in Hollywood, Frolic Room, had this guy who used to come in selling bootleg tapes. She’d be sitting at the bar with Mo or Hunny or someone, and he’d waltz in, all wild strides. Ulmer, his name was. Baggy T-shirts, construction boots, torn jeans. Always smiling, always hustling. She loved him. She loves all the hustlers of the world. To be a hustler is to be free of some agony that regular folks seem to hold on to. Hustlers know the quick demise, failure no stopping force. You have to hustle through failure. She admired hustlers even before she became one. Ulmer, sure, but also pool sharks, girls in the business, anyone with the smarts to hustle hard. She sees a little of that fire in Lucia.

  What she’s thinking of now, she’s thinking of one afternoon in the Frolic Room, Ulmer spreading out some tapes on a little fold-out mat he carried everywhere with him, talking up live shows, mixes, dubs of dubs. The tapes were cheap. Two bucks. Wolfstein always willing to plunk down for one, no matter the quality. Ulmer usually kissing her hand after accepting the cash. This time, though, Ulmer downtrodden, no smile, weepy-eyed. Wolfstein asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Ulmer said.

  “You look really upset,” she said.

  “I don’t know what it is. I just feel everything crashing down on me.” A rare glimpse into a hustler’s heart, she thought at the time. That fear is
there, but you learn to beat it down. Something about that moment, Ulmer just let his guard fall. Maybe something about her telling him it was okay, she wouldn’t spill his secret sorrow.

  She bought eight tapes from him.

  It took her a few days to realize he’d gotten her good. That he’d figured out how to make a true mark of her. Letting his guard fall his most effective hustle against her.

  A great lesson.

  “When I hold you in my arms,” Wolfstein’s aunt Karen used to say, “I can feel all that God has planned for you.” Wolfstein, even at ten, scoffed at this on the inside. Aunt Karen had soft skin that glowed with a sullen ripeness. From the right angle, she looked like a pudding-soft banana, one that you needed to use in a recipe for bread or throw away. Wolfstein hated her aunt. This the aunt who she’d been dumped with unwillingly. Who made her stay on her knees and pray every night for ridiculous things. Space on a new ark when a new flood roared upon them. Forgiveness for things she didn’t feel bad for. For hateful policies to take hold on God’s behalf. The feeling that Wolfstein had in those days could best be expressed as a sort of raging readiness, for something, anything, else. When the opportunity came to leave, she never looked back. She could’ve never imagined the life she wound up having. Praise be random adventures. Praise be survival. Praise be not having a plan.

  She finds herself thinking of her aunt now as she goes out to check on Rena. Whatever she feels, whatever she sees, whatever horrors she’s encountered, she’s just glad she had the smarts to break free from Aunt Karen so young. That’s a form of being positive. That’s the optimism that’s always hovered over her, even in dark stretches. Talk about parallel lives. She sees a poor girl trapped in Nyack. She sees a poor girl Bible-battered by a glowy, bitch-wild aunt. She sees the fat hand of a God she doesn’t believe in crushing her windpipe. She sees this girl still trying to escape.

  Her aunt probably died years before. Or maybe she’s alive, a bony witch in some woebegone nursing home, still praying for a long-gone niece who had no gratitude, who never lived with the right kind of fear.

  In the darkness just outside the back door, Wolfstein suddenly swears she sees Aunt Karen, edging off behind the pool. It takes her a moment to realize it’s just Rena, who looks nothing like her aunt.

  Wolfstein says her name as quietly as she can, and Rena doesn’t answer. She goes over. “Rena, you okay?”

  Rena falls to her knees and pukes on a patch of leaf-strewn cement beside the pool. She leans back, wiping the corners of her mouth.

  “It’s just nerves,” Wolfstein says.

  Rena retches. Tries to puke again. Nothing comes.

  “Take it easy,” Wolfstein says, massaging Rena’s neck.

  Watching Rena try to puke is strangely comforting. Wolfstein knows her purpose in the moment: help Rena get better. Like with a pilled-up Hunny or a sick Gloria. Rub her back. Say gentle things. Bring the softness. Wolfstein, usually hard, likes having such a purpose.

  “I’m done,” Rena says after a few more throaty tries.

  “You feel a little better?” Wolfstein asks.

  “I think so.” Rena stands up, dusts off her knees.

  “We’ve got to get back inside.” Wolfstein looks all around, trying to see beyond the edge of the house. No action over at Mo’s as far as she can tell.

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Rena wipes her mouth again and walks to the back door.

  Inside, standing in the dark and closing the door behind them, Wolfstein says, “My aunt Karen was a real bitch.”

  Rena looks at her, puzzled. “Were you talking about your aunt?”

  “Thinking about her. I don’t know why. Head’s all over the place tonight. I hate her so much, but I’m thankful for her, you know? That kind of hate breeds real resiliency. She made me tough, whether she meant to or not.”

  They move farther in, standing outside the closed door of the room where Lucia and Mo are. They can hear another Peggy Lee song winding down.

  Wolfstein says, “My aunt Karen, I’m not lying now, when I did something she didn’t like, she’d make me get down on my knees and say my prayers on a tray of broken glass. No kidding. She had this big silver serving tray. I don’t know where the hell she got all the broken glass, but she had quite the collection, apparently. Green glass. Old Mason jars, maybe. My knees would get cut up pretty bad. When I was done, she’d leave me a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, some cotton balls, and bandages. I always said, later on, that’s why I was so good at staying on my knees for so long.” Winking into the darkness.

  “That’s terrible,” Rena says. “How long did that go on?”

  “Until I ran away. You look at my knees close enough, you can still see these little horseshoe scars. They mostly healed okay, but there’s some thin cords of tissue. After I first ran away, I was pretty scared. I was a kid still, really. I used to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘There’s no time for sorry. There’s no time for sorry.’ I’d say it fifty times. It became my mantra. And then I’d say, ‘Make a move.’ I’d only say that once.”

  “I like that.”

  “Got me through.”

  They fall quiet and go back into the room. Lucia is awake and sitting up, hugging the briefcase. “Where’d you go?” she says to Rena.

  “I was feeling sick,” Rena says.

  “Any action out there?” Mo asks.

  “Nothing I saw,” Wolfstein says. But she’s learned that the dark can hide so much.

  RICHIE

  Richie is on his back in the parking lot, Crea having clubbed him in the knee and then raced off to deal with Enzio. The pain is enormous. He’s biting his lower lip. He’s looking up at the sky. His head is spinning from being flipped in the Impala. He’s trying to straighten out the world. He’s afraid to reach down to touch his knee. His body is sore in other places. Broken ribs from the crash. His neck stiff and hard to move, as if he’s already wearing a steel brace. Damage to his hip. He can taste blood between his teeth. He guesses this is how it will end. He was stupid. He didn’t plan well. He deserves to die in this lot. He’s not smart. He’s never been smart.

  When he turns his head to the left just a little, what he sees is Crea off in the distance going to town on Enzio with the hammer next to the Explorer. It’s like he’s demolishing an old statue, as if he’s sick of looking at this statue and hammering it down to ash piece by piece. First the arms and then the legs and then the body. Enzio’s moans are wet and terrible.

  Richie tries to roll over onto his side. The piece was thrown away from him on impact, Crea’s Town Car lunging for him, the Impala taking that first blow like a stocky, grief-waddled old boxer. If he had the piece back and if he had the two bullets he’d fired so stupidly, he’s honestly not sure if he’d try for Crea or if he’d just put himself out of his misery.

  Fully on his side now, the pain is worse. He has to try to get to his one good knee. Try not to involve the battered, bad one. And then what? Hobble out on the long exit road to the parkway? Won’t be long before he turns around and Crea is there, grinning.

  In his mind he’s playing stickball in the PS 101 schoolyard. He’s holding his trusty stickball bat, the handle crisscrossed with electrical tape. Hank De Simone is getting ready to pitch the Spaldeen. He looks back at the white strike zone chalked on the wall behind him. Hank unloads. Richie swings, cranks it over the far fence. A miraculous homer. He throws his bat down and jumps in place. “The kid does it again!” he says at top volume.

  “Luck,” Hank says, spitting.

  “Luck and power,” Richie says.

  Hank is his best friend at the moment. This is eighth grade. Him and Hank, they’re inseparable. Reading comics. Playing stickball. Stealing magazines. Doing little jobs for Stacks Brancaccio, Sonny’s old man, and for Gentle Vic, who was pure class from the start. He’s one year away from not talking to Hank ever again. One of the strange things about being a kid is how you just stop being friends with people. Go a different way or cut someone of
f because they cease being interesting to you. He cut Hank off. Found tougher friends who took him to a nice joint in the city to get his cherry popped and scored him a beginner’s piece. Hank was still a kid. He’d see him around now and again, trudging somewhere with a comic book, chewing gum like a dumb horse munches hay, and he’d feel bad for the kid. Now he feels bad for himself. He wishes he’d been a kid more. He wonders about Hank. He probably lives somewhere up here. Trees in the backyard. Treehouse. Got a couple of kids. A wife who says things like, “Hank, you stop that now.” Waking up in a few hours, putting on coffee, taking the bus into the city for his job. Monday. Feeling refreshed. Ready to get going.

  The Hank memory, which feels so present, dissipates.

  Richie is on his hands, using his good leg for leverage, in what seems like some sort of bullshit yoga pose, his ass turned in the air. He knows yoga. Adrienne made him go once. She was into it for about two weeks in the summer of ’99. Bronx-style yoga. Place was in a strip mall next to a Barnes & Noble in the Bay Plaza Shopping Center on Baychester Avenue. He farted loud when he bent over, and the whole class laughed. He stormed out. “You fucks are better than a fart?” he’d said. Roomful of women in spandex or whatever looking like he’d just shit a pigeon and smashed it against the glass wall of the studio.

  The sound of a train in the distance. Maybe not a train. He’s afraid to look over at Crea and Enzio again. Afraid to see Enzio hammered down to dust. Afraid to hear Crea’s feet smacking against the pavement, rushing at him with violent energy. Afraid to hear that hammer dragging against the ground. Afraid to bring his eyes up to the level of Crea’s eyes. He feels turned inside out, the world on the other side of midnight raw against him. He’s a coward. He’s always been a coward. He hops forward and crashes to the ground.

  “Whoa there, you graceless fuck,” Crea calls out.

  The pain is worse. His knee feels shattered. Richie leopard crawls now, pulling his pain with him. He’s headed for the wreckage of the two cars. He hopes he can crawl under the still-right-side-up Town Car. Hopes he can shelter there, just out of reach. Hopes he can disappear inside the smoke.