The man had muscle. Nonetheless, he was determined to bench-press me, sans bench, every night. For strength. For practice. A delaying tactic, I understood later, but then, like a fool, I’d already reversed my own prior, better judgment. Stupidly, I again hoped, and I believed that his teasing promise had finally and for real tipped away from the tease toward its promise: the bridge—although I would have gone with him anywhere. I would have had to have gone with him anywhere. Lucky, lucky me: As it happened, I’d been hungering to go up on a bridge with him for years, but if he’d have wanted to go somewhere else, or if he’d have wanted to do something else, there wouldn’t have been much else for me, other than to go, and to do.
After dinner we’d meet in the living room for practicing. He’d go horizontal on the floor, stretching his arms to their widest span. Like a career waiter, deftly steadying a sterling tray, piled nearly to toppling with fragile tableware, he’d broaden and flatten his right hand’s fingers, balancing me delicately, without a flinch, at the bony hollows of my throat and chest. I’d soften my scrawny structure, make myself pliant. When he’d stabilized my torso, he’d wrap his flung left palm around my ankles for lift-off. Muscles and veins popping out all over him, our bodies perpendicular, his arms pumped my body—first up and aloft, far from his, then down, low and close—up and down, up and down until I was flying and falling, flying and falling, breathless, giddy, shrieking, stoned with giggles. He grunted with pretend exertion, like it was so laborious. When he decided we were finished—always, always, he made this determination unilaterally, so I could never anticipate when the end was approaching and temper my wishes accordingly—he lowered me, I rolled off him, and he moaned, exhaling gigantically, like he was so winded.
Bedtime followed. He’d toss me like a gunny sack over one shoulder and carry me firefighter-style to the living room couch, which was my bed, right there in the room where we practiced. Not far to get to my bed. No transitional cooling-off time. After the wild velocity and proximity of practicing, the end’s abruptness, the severance accompanying his “Goodnight, you”—separations always hitting the one who stays behind harder than they hit the one who goes on ahead—I’d marinate in a living room redolent with breath, heat, his man-smell, my flannelly kid-having-fun smell, while he went away to his own bedroom. I’d have trouble falling asleep in that still-buzzing living room. Overstimulated, alone, all jagged up, for hours I’d twist myself into pretzels of indecision.
Should I or shouldn’t I? I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I knew that I shouldn’t.
Much later on, comfortable without the burden and benefit of empirical evidence to negate or support my hypothesis, I’d maintain that sexual acts per se were meager foreplay for the truer pleasure, the deeper intimacy, of shared sleep. Whoever has access to a helpless, sleeping body owns it, controls it, can do anything to it, so it was natural that I’d only ever slept with Dad. Sleeping with him was bad. I knew that. I also knew that bad things weren’t necessarily wrong things, but interrupting his sleep was criminal; if we’d had religion, it would have been sinful. Hours before completely confessing to my sorry self that I’d already decided to go ahead and do it, I’d cringe with the afterward-shame, the dirty regret that should have sunk in later—or the next morning, his eyes still bloodshot, his features absent of all signs of being rested—and which should have deterred me. I hated myself for interfering with his sleep, even more so for loving to do it. For exploiting the wakeful one’s God-like power of ultimate say-so over a defenseless body. He worked very hard at a dangerous job to keep me housed, schooled, fed, clothed. He needed rest. Badly. Too often, always knowing better, I couldn’t defeat the urge to do wrong, especially once the light appeared, and I’d re-remember that not having closed my eyes during the night would neither retard nor prevent the arrival of the too-bright morning, of another next day with unbounded possibilities to be survived or not.
The dark was a mild worry. What kept me awake and afraid was me. Something about me. I scared myself. Lots. Grow up. My thinking-inside-myself voice told me off. Stop being a baby. I’d abandon the couch, slip into his grown-man’s bed, straddling his chest, gently, gently alighting my fingers along his lash-lines. Softly, softly, and firmly, too, I’d press his lids up and open, until I saw his red-webbed eyes’ whites, and I asked, I begged, “Dad? Are you in there?”
“Of course, Bee,” he’d mumble sleepily. As if the answer was a certainty beyond all doubt, that his still being in there, inside himself, whole within his own intact body, as planned, as promised, would always be the case.
NEW YORK CRIMINAL LAW STATUTES: PENAL LAW, PART 3.
Title O. Offenses against Marriage, the Family, and the Welfare of Children and Incompetents.
Article 260. Offenses Relating to Children, Disabled Persons, and Vulnerable Elderly Persons.
§ 260.10. Endangering the welfare of a child
A person is guilty of endangering the welfare of a child when:
1. He knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his life; or
2. Being a parent, guardian or other person legally charged with the care or custody of a child less than eighteen years old, he fails or refuses to exercise reasonable diligence in the control of such child to prevent him from becoming an “abused child,” a “neglected child,” a “juvenile delin-quent,” or a “person in need of supervision,” as those terms are defined in articles ten, three and seven of the family court act.
Endangering the welfare of a child is a class A misdemean-or
If caught, that’s a year or less in jail. No one with even half a brain in his head gets caught.
Canarsie Pier’s stink of briny rot rendered plausible what otherwise seemed unlikely: that Canarsie had once been a sleepy fishing village. Ninety years before Dad and I stood at our jump-off point for more sophisticated practicing—“a whole new level,” he’d said—most of the neighborhood’s few thousand residents, mainly Italian immigrants, made their living fishing, crabbing, clamming, or oystering Jamaica Bay’s rich waters and beds. By the 1920s pollution and the Great Depression had destroyed Canarsie’s shell-fishing industry. Shellfish, aquatic homebodies, were loath to travel far from home, and they generally remained inside the calcareous houses they built for themselves. Food was delivered to their bodies by built-in siphons that drew water into their shells for filter-feeding: first capturing food, then spitting out water. I’d guiltily consider the attachment of shellfish to their houses whenever Dad and I collected shells at Brighton Beach: Every shell in our dry, deadly hands was once someone else’s house! How selfish to bring back to our home, for frivolous ornamentation, the self-made homes of other beings who’d have preferred to stay put, soft bodies encased under solid cover, however temporary and illusory the protection might be.
If sedentary living made clams and other shellfish susceptible to accumulations of high concentrations of human-made poisons—bacterial coliforms from sewage, polychlorinated biphenyls from industry—the Bay’s fish traveled for food, in mobile homes of skin and scale, to mixed and open Atlantic waters, so fish weren’t as vulnerable to dire accumulations of pollutants. In warm weather, crag-faced, gravel-voiced old-timers would cast long for eel and fluke or snag butterfish or samplings of Jamaica Bay’s increasing population of Canarsie White Fish—floating used condoms—right off the Pier’s decaying edges. Word on the Pier, from above, state and federal environmental officials, and from below, locals, people like us, was: “You can fish, but you can’t clam.”
Canarsie Beach Park was part of Gateway National Recreation Area—not a National Park, as if a park was too much to wish for; we needed to maintain realistically low greenery expectations—but a Recreation Area Still, the place was Federal enough to have behatted, uniformed rangers. And rules. The Department of Health had officially and consistently
declared Jamaica Bay unswimmable for fifty years: No primary-contact recreation—activities in which bodies made direct contact with raw water, especially total bodily submersion—allowed. Secondary contact recreation, like fishing or boating, where skin contact with water was minimal and ingestion improbable, was permitted. Clamming, I guessed, was ultra-forbidden because it required getting the whole body into the water to dig.
Practicing here, jumping off Canarsie Pier into Jamaica Bay, to simulate the worst potential payout of our gamble with gravity—falling together off a bridge into deep water, which he risked every day, just not while toting me along—required forbidden primary contact recreation. Immersion in Jamaica Bay “violated Federal rules,” Dad warned, voice somber, conspiratorially soft, “As in, the Feds You get it?”
“I got it.”
“Good.”
Bench-pressing hadn’t been practicing; it was pre-training, basic conditioning, a barely callisthenic, chicken-feed beginner’s warm-up leading us to this. To Canarsie Pier. For the for-real practicing—if those particular words, strung together and placed next to each other, made sense. Which they didn’t.
Dad started when he was fourteen. Until his death at forty-five, every workday of his life, he was scared. Two kinds of work were obtainable in the world: the safe and the dangerous. Experience and practice never made Dad unafraid. Silently, without fanfare, he tolerated extreme fear-states and accepted the probability of grave injury or death as standard workaday inevitabilities, like lunch with the gang or alone up on a scaffold, like fatigue, like fumes. His morning routine: get into whites, shave, shower, shit, like a military man, brush teeth, drink pot of coffee, slap on boots and cap, drive to site, start working, get crushingly, heart-stoppingly, fittingly panicked about dying in the coming hours. Dad did frightening things that other people didn’t want to do; other people didn’t have to do them, because people like Dad did. Blood poisoning did him in after twenty-four years of exposure to industrial chemicals, mostly paints containing an odorless, oily, poisonous benzene derivative, absorbed through skin: aniline blue. Aniline blue sounded like a song title or poem, the name of a daughter or lover. Lyrical, sing-song aniline blue killed him, but before that happened, I’d planned on his dying in a bridge fall.
* * *
There were laws against it.
Child protection laws with tucked-in bylaws that defined bringing children to dangerous workplaces as criminal offenses. Take Our Daughters to Work Day wasn’t designed for the daughters of pile driver, jack hammer, or forklift operators. Taking kids to perilous worksites violated child endangerment laws, laws ratified and upheld—lackadaisically, since the continuance of selected human genera wasn’t a big deal, even when specimens were found in bulk—for protection I didn’t want.
The laws against it didn’t stop us. Did laws ever stop anyone who wanted to do something really bad from doing something really bad? A failure of nerve stopped us. His All his. He, the adroit, well-built, well-practiced man, who did it daily, for real, chickened out. I, who hadn’t yet mastered long division or my dread surrounding it, was ready to jump right in.
Upon starting work at a new job, Dad would half-promise and half-threaten to cart me along to the worksite, fix me in place around his tough neck, my legs parted, one leg dangling off each of his shoulders, and lug me around the job all day, up and down the tiers of the bridge, everywhere work required him to be while he painted. A regular workday, but with a Beth on his back. He’d try not to let me fall. He’d do the best he could. His six feet and three inches—a tall Jew!—guaranteed me an even better view than his of water, sky, skyline, land, of the whole place that Mark LaPlace, a mixed-blood Mohawk, who, along with many Indian ironworkers, drove in every week from the Caughnawaga reservation near Montreal, called the City of Man-Made Mountains.
Earthbound, at home or school, the world was scary and too big as it was. High on a partially completed bridge, higher yet on Dad’s shoulders, the world would swell to unmanageable dimensions, awesome frights, sickening beauties. The anticipation of visual sublimity wasn’t what thrilled me at every promise-threat. I thrilled to Dad’s singular power to scare me, to his correspondingly exclusive power to soothe me. Dad could reassure me; I’d believe his reassurances, trust in them, because he knew, the cells that made him him understood how bad fear could get. Climbing together, he’d have his rope, hook, muscle-meat, and deeply treaded, break-a-leg boots, acting on behalf of his physical integrity and safety. All I’d have was a perfunctory pat on the head, knock ’em dead, kiddo, and his body. I’d be terrified and love it, love him for terrifying me, for his unique capacity to assuage terror he’d authored himself. If some evening, he’d casually, passingly mention taking me up—maybe tomorrow … you never know, do you?—the next morning, suited up in my dungaree overalls, prepared for action, I’d park my tush on his lunch pail, so he couldn’t leave without first reckoning with me, as a housecat might tuck her body within the lining of a suitcase her owner was packing for a journey, not-so-subtly notifying her master, You’re not going anywhere unless you take me, too. As if the cat, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.
Every day he left without taking me, until I was twelve and God damn it to Hell he died and stopped no taking me.
Before he pulled that stunt, he kept on pledging and daring me to go. I’d dare him back with a fiercely incautious, You’d better believe it! As if I, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.
* * *
Every one of New York City’s children grew up in the shadows of bridges. A smaller subset grew up or died in the penumbrae of bridge deaths. Child endangerment was a Class A misdemeanor, as naughty as a misdemeanor could be before it graduated up a grade to felony. So it was one crime, child endangerment, if I hung around bridge bases when school was out so Dad could half-look after me—babysitters and summer camp didn’t exist in our economic cosmology, the unfeasibility of camp accounting for my never learning how to swim—and it was another crime, child neglect—which was often a felony, not to mention a big fat bore—if he left me alone at home.
An outlaw either way.
Even when school was in session, most of the guys in all the gangs brought their sons to work, where they received their real education. Bridge-building was existence itself, what their fathers before them had done, what their sons after them would probably do. Ironworkers formed multi-generational lines of risk-takers, cold-nerved men bonded together like the high steel it was a life’s assignment to connect. Those burly, balletic men—who took chances only circus acrobats, suicidal souls, Wallendas, or bridgemen would take, who pronounced me cuter than a button, who bear-hugged me till the guacamole would come outa them ears, who gave me quarters just because I was Lefty Tedesky’s girl—were criminals? Plain as day, it couldn’t have been a crime when Chicky Testaverde, who spun cable, brought his fourteen-year-old, Danny, to a job, and it couldn’t have been a crime when a tall ladder caught Danny’s curious eye, and the boy asked, “Can I climb that?”
Chicky replied, in a resigned, benumbed, oh-no-here’s-where-it-all-begins voice, “Awright, but don’t fall.” Could Chicky authoritatively have refused, without Danny laughing in his face as father and son stood right there on a bridge-construction site, where Chicky was now working iron, where both might have been remembering that Chicky’s father, Danny’s grandfather, had worked the Williamsburg Bridge, lifting steel beams with derricks pulled by horses?
Danny climbed that ladder higher and higher, until he stood alone on a slippery top beam—a beam much higher than Chicky had bargained for or would have allowed if Danny had asked—and looked around, taking in the world’s magnitude, and marveled at how extraordinarily far he could see from that height, and instantly decided that ironwork was what he’d someday do. Down at the base, Chicky went all-out ape. “Get down, Danny, you crazy fuck, damn you! You’ll kill yourself up there. And if you die, Danny boy? You know what’ll happen if you die?” Danny sm
iled down at everyone, smiled what the men called a shit-eating grin. I couldn’t see how eating shit was anything to grin about, but I figured adults knew things I was too young to understand. “If you die,” Chicky screamed at the sky, “I. Will. Fucking. Kill. You.”
Wearing an aw-shucks-I’m-caught-but-I’m-cute mug, Danny climbed down. Everyone, high and low—physically, up on the bridge and down at the base, and professionally, at every station within high steel’s complex system of ranking its men—applauded and cheered. One after another, ironworkers thumped his back hard; sometimes truly to hurt him, because he’d done wrong, he’d gone against his father, and sometimes to congratulate him, as a display of respect, because he’d proven himself bridge-worthy. Danny had demonstrated his passion for and merit within his family’s legacy precisely by defying it in its current incarnation: Chicky. Mostly the men’s back-clapping extended both—contempt and admiration—through the infliction of pain. Just a little pain.
Or a lot. But a lot usually happened at home. Like what they did in public was practice for what they’d do at home. Like they saved a lot up during the day. For later.
Chicky played at grumbling and grousing but couldn’t persuasively beat down his smile—crooked-lipped, prominently lacking some teeth, but jam-packed with filial pride—when he submitted that Danny’s ascent had earned Danny his first beer. Chicky kept a cooler with sodas and beers in his Buick’s trunk on days when the walking bosses weren’t around. He called, “Little Tedesky!” I jumped to attention. “Couldja make yourself useful? Shake a leg? Get my boy here a beer?”
Chicky tossed me his car keys and threw me an approving nod when I caught them no problem. Keds crunching gravel, I ran toward the parking lot, delighted to have a task to fulfill for the men. Danny, overjoyed with his big day’s second distinct launch into masculine adulthood—his illicit, under-age drink, perhaps not his first, as Chicky chose to think—jogged close behind me.
Brooklyn Noir Page 8
