by Dennis Smith
Archie was ready to send me home. He showed me the box that the man had left for me, filled with all kinds of stuff, cookies and candies and games, but said that I didn’t deserve it. So he left it out in the dining hall at dinner for the counselors to give as rewards to their best campers.
It did not bother me that Archie gave away the goodie box. That’s the way things are at camp. You’re supposed to be having a great time, and if you’re not, it’s probably your fault. And if it’s your fault, you don’t get the prize, and that’s the way it goes. Archie would never do anything bad to someone, but he will never let you get away with anything bad, either. That’s the lesson at camp.
Now the sweat’s coming out of my neck like Niagara Falls. All I can do is toss and turn on the hard floor, and so I decide to sleep out on the fire escape. It could be cooler there, and it’s cleaner, anyway, than the roof.
The fire escape window is in my mother’s room. I don’t want to bother her, and so I grab a blanket and go out the front door and then down the long, narrow hall to the hall window. The hall back here is never mopped, and I’m walking in my bare feet through an inch of dust. I have to wrestle with the window a little before it opens, which makes me sweat more, but I can feel the live air as I climb out to the fire escape, and I am thinking that at least I’m out of the dead air of the apartment.
I am in my short cotton underpants, barefoot and bare-chested, and I throw the old army blanket across the rusty iron strips of the fire escape. I lie down. There is not much room between the building, the rails, and the fire stairs, and I’m curled up like a puppy in a corner. Still sweating like mad, I say a prayer to Saint Jude, the patron of hopeless causes, to send a breeze my way. I’m maybe as uncomfortable as I have ever felt in my life. I’m not sure of what is bothering me. The spaces between the iron slats of the fire escape, or thinking that I could be up at Kips Camp if we could afford another two-week trip, or maybe just that my mother still hasn’t mentioned anything about our father since we had that talk in her bedroom.
I don’t know why she avoids it. She could tell me what happened to him, how he got that way, why they won’t let me in to see him. There is still this big absence, this big empty hole, in the middle of our lives.
And, then, there is Barbara Cavazzine, who I now like more than Marilyn Rolleri. I asked her to go to the movies with me or to meet me there some Saturday.
She said no.
She didn’t say “No thanks,” or “My mother won’t let me,” or “I like you but I like some other guy more.” She just said “No,” and that was that. I guess I will have to ask her again.
But I saw someone else I also liked, but I don’t think she comes from this neighborhood. All I know is her name is Virginia. Maybe I can get to meet her.
Why is it so hard to get a girlfriend on 56th Street?
I don’t know how long I have been sleeping, but I awake suddenly because I feel the whole fire escape shaking. I smell smoke as I open my eyes, and try to adjust to the night’s dark. There is a giant in front of me, like a character in “Puss in Boots,” with big boots folded over below the knees, and he is picking me up as a group of other firemen are running up the stairs behind him.
“Hey, kid,” the fireman says.
“Let me down,” I say to him, thinking, I’m not a kid, for Chris-sakes.
A cloud of smoke sweeps down over us, and I begin to choke uncontrollably. I look up and see the flames coming from the apartment window above us, Mr. Sorenson’s apartment. My eyes are hurting like someone put mud in them.
“Sure thing, kid,” the fireman says, putting me down. “Let’s get you off this fire escape, anyway. You’d be in a lot of trouble when they break the windows upstairs.”
He has me by the hand as we go to the hallway window.
“The firemen,” he says, “have to break the windows, you know.”
He grabs a huge ax which he had put down, climbs in first, and helps me into the hallway. The fire is above, but I can still smell the smoke here in the hall.
“Hey, kid,” the fireman says as we walk into the hallway, him in his huge boots and me in my bare feet, “what do you think of that DiMaggio? Is he a hero, or what?”
Mr. Sorenson’s apartment, and maybe even Mr. Sorenson himself, is burning up, and he’s asking me about Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
“Nobody better,” I say.
I love this fireman. This fireman is like Father Luke, and I wonder what you have to do to be a fireman.
There is a lot of noise in the hallway as the firemen are dragging up the hose. I see that my mother is sticking her head out of the apartment door.
“Just stay in your house,” the fireman says to her, “and you’ll be okay.”
He messes my hair and runs back to the fire escape, and in a second he is gone out the window. My mother has no idea that I was out on the fire escape, and it must seem to her that I came out of thin air. She puts her arm around me and squeezes hard as the door shuts.
“It’s Mr. Sorenson’s apartment upstairs,” I say. “There’s a lot of smoke.”
“Ohh,” my mother says.
I look at her hazel eyes, and they show that she is afraid. Her eyes are like street signs to me, because you always know where she is when you look at them, and now I can see the fear in them.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say to her. “The fireman said so. He said that we’ll be okay and that DiMaggio is a hero.”
I am back on the floor in the living room, the wet rag again around my neck, and in the new quiet of the dark I am thinking about that fireman. It must be something to be a fireman. He was so cool, a real cool cat.
I wonder if he has children, maybe a boy or a couple of boys, that he takes to Yankee Stadium to see DiMaggio.
Chapter Thirty-four
It is now fall. I am fourteen years old, and in public school.
There was a big ruckus about going to a public school. Everybody knows that kids go to Catholic high schools when they graduate St. John’s, and it’s like getting caught at first on a bunt to go to public school, like you’re destined to be out. Even Sister Alphonsus, who was going to fail me in everything, told me that I would be better off going to a minor-league Catholic school like St. Agnes than to go to public school.
And my mother, too. She went on and on about how good Billy is doing up in the Bronx at Cardinal Hayes High School. Billy would do good at Nortre Dame if he was there, but my mother doesn’t realize the difference between us, which is a simple difference. Billy likes school.
I begged her.
Another Catholic school would kill me, even if I could get in one of the not-so-good ones, which I thought pretty doubtful because of the bad grades. I just want to be out of it, away from the nuns and the priests. It’s like being a duck-stepping Nazi storm trooper to be in Catholic school. Everything is all precision and discipline, and you can never talk without being first asked a question. And you are reading all the time, breakfast, lunch, and supper, in these big books they give you with stories about history or people who invent things or about soldiers going off to war to fight the Japs and the krauts.
All my friends who go to public school tell me that no teacher ever makes you do things like read, or gives you a bad time, and you can either do your homework or not, no difference to them, no sweat off their back. That was for me, to get away from the standing-up-straight-in-line stuff.
Public school is like heaven, where nobody bothers you.
And so now I’m in a school where I never go.
The School of Aviation Trades is on East 63rd Street. I get up in the morning, and I go to Jimmy’s candy store on 62nd Street where “Sh-boom, Sh-boom” is always playing on the jukebox, and the guys who hang around wear leather jackets and have key rings hanging from their belts.
At least I don’t have to wear a white shirt and blue tie anymore. I have this black windbreaker with my name printed on the front pocket. I know my mother would never be able to afford to buy me a l
eather jacket, but those leather jackets are so cool. Some of the guys put gloves through the shoulder flaps, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and nothing looks cooler than that.
I did go to class a few times, but the homeroom teacher kept changing, and each teacher who came in thought he was just there for the day, and no one ever took attendance. There is no point in going to school if no one takes the attendance, because you’ll never be missed, and no one will think that you are in Jimmy’s candy store where you can use the fifteen cents your mother gives you each day to buy singles, Lucky Strikes or Camels. And you only had to stick around the candy store until noon. The school is on a half-day schedule, because there are so many students who want to fix airplanes, and there’s not enough space for everyone to go at the same time.
I never thought much about fixing airplanes, but SAT was a public school, which I wanted, and I could walk there from 56th Street, which by itself is a good enough reason to go there.
My mother thought I was doing great things in my new school, because each day I would tell her about these swell guys I knew, and how smart they were, and I would mix in a few names of books to make everything sound A-OK.
My mother would ask about the teachers, and when did the school have parent-teacher day like they did at St. John’s, and I told her that they did things differently at public school, that they sent reports in the mail at the end of the term.
I was thinking that I could always tell her that the reports got lost in the mail.
Today, most of the guys went over to play pool, but I don’t have the money for even a game of eight ball, so I am sitting in the rear of the candy store, on the back legs of an old wooden chair, leaning against a wall, watching Antone and a guy named Bullboy whose real name I don’t know as they are dancing to the new Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers tune, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” They are not dancing with each other, but they have imaginary partners and they are twirling them out and in and it looks pretty funny.
Antone comes over to me when the music stops. He’s a couple of years older than I am, and I think he lives in Queens or Brooklyn, maybe the Bronx.
“Hey, Smitty,” he says, “give me a butt, huh?”
I have only two cigarettes left, and it isn’t even noon yet. If I give him one, I’ll be stuck for the rest of the day until I get back to 56th Street where I can grub some.
“C’mon, will ya,” he says, holding his hand out.
His black leather jacket is open, and all the zipper chains are swinging back and forth. He has on a white shirt, and the collar is open and standing high in the back. He told us he has his shirts starched and pressed so that the collars stand up like this, like billboards. His hair is in a million curls and falls down into a point just above his nose, and with the collar sticking out like wings it looks like his head could fly away. He’d fly fast, too, I’m thinking, because the sides of his hair are greased down with Vaseline petroleum jelly, and smooth like the sides of an airplane.
He doesn’t like it that I’m taking so long.
“C’mon,” he says again, “give me a fuckin’ bitchin’ bastard cigarette. What are you, some guy who hugs the pillow and takes it in the brown spot, or what?”
The guys I grew up with don’t talk like these guys do. Up here at SAT there is a never-ending contest to see how many curses you can get into a sentence. I look over and see that Bullboy is laughing. I am hoping that he doesn’t ask me for a cigarette, too, as I reach into the pack and take out one cigarette.
Antone doesn’t say thank you, but this doesn’t bother me too much. He’ll never meet my mother, anyway.
Some other guys come in, and Antone and Bullboy leave, and then some more guys come in. The candy store is just a place to smoke, and to waste time, and I am tired of just sitting back on this chair. No one has put any money in the jukebox, either, and so I think about going around to the school yard to see if anyone is playing against-the-wall stickball. I look around to see where I left the three-ring binder I carry around, and I see that some guy is sitting on it, on the floor next to the jukebox.
“Hey,” I say to him, “you’re sitting on my book.”
The guy looks me up and down and gets off the book.
“Here,” he says, shoving it across the floor, “take your fuckin’ book.”
It’s easier most of the time to keep your mouth shut when somebody curses at you up here, because most of the time they don’t mean anything by it.
I am walking down 63rd Street, toward the school building, and I suddenly hear my name called out.
“Dennis,” I hear.
I am stunned to hear my mother’s voice. I know I’ll be in big trouble because I should be in class.
“Hey, Mom,” I say. She is wearing her red coat that ties around the waist, and she has her head wrapped in a red kerchief. She looks good in these clothes, like she coordinates it before she leaves the house.
I am trying to be nonchalant. It is always good to be nonchalant because it is cool not to be raveled by things.
“Give us a kiss,” she says. She is carrying a big paper bag, and she swings it as she puts her arms around me.
I know I am not in such trouble now, because she would never want a kiss if I was in trouble. And so I kiss her on the cheek, hoping none of the guys are around to see me.
I know I have to think fast, before she asks me any questions.
“I just came from shop class,” I say. “Now I’m going around to history and social studies.”
I know I am lying.
“Where is shop class?”
Her eyes now are like pinpoints, like she is a detective studying some clue.
“Around on 64th Street.” The school is divided between both streets.
She thinks for a minute and shrugs her shoulders.
“I have a surprise for you,” she says.
She is smiling as she changes from a detective back to my mother. I can tell she is happy for some reason. My mother is not happy so much, and I always feel good if I see her smiling.
“What’s that, Mom?”
“Just take a look at this,” she says, opening the bag.
She pulls out a green wool jacket and holds it up, here in the middle of the street. Across the back, in big white letters, it has the name of the school: AVIATION. It is brand-new, and I wonder how much money she had to pay for it.
My mother just began working for the New York Telephone Company. After all those years on welfare, I am finally old enough to leave home alone after school so she could go out to work. I know she doesn’t make much money, especially as an operator in training.
Oh, man, I think. I feel so bad that she went and did this, spending all this money on this jacket.
Maybe I could have gotten a cheap leather jacket with all the zippers, and here she has gotten me this jacket from the school where I never go.
She is looking at me now, waiting for some response.
Now is the time I could tell her about the black leather jackets, but I don’t know if she would like those. There are certain clothes she hates, like pegged pants with pistol pockets, and maybe she would think leather jackets are bad for me.
But she is gleaming at me. She is so proud that she has given me this jacket.
I should smile, I think, and I do as I take my windbreaker off. Even if I don’t like it. I can see in her eyes that she has a little happiness, and I wish I could add to it by loving the damn jacket. But I can’t. The only thing I can do is to not cut down that little bit of happiness that came to her by giving the jacket to me.
And so I put it on. It fits just right, and I put the collar up, so that I feel a little like a brizzer, a king of the hill, a guy who’s cool and with it.
“It looks great,” she says. “It is just the thing, now that you are in high school and everything is going so good for you.”
She stands back a little and folds her hands one into the other the way she does when she is studying something. Her smile goes f
rom one end of her face to the other.
I am feeling worse now, because the first thing I think about is I wonder if the guys around the jukebox will think the jacket is for faggots.
But my mother has taken the windbreaker, and I have no choice but to wear this one.
“Thank you, Mom,” I say, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I have to go or I’ll be late.”
I am walking down Second Avenue when I again hear someone call my name. This time I don’t recognize the voice. I look around, but I don’t see anyone.
“Over here, Dumbo,” the voice cries.
I turn and see a guy I know from 56th Street, an Italian named DooDoo, his head hanging out from a window of the Second Avenue bus. The bus is stopped for a light, and I walk over to it. I can see the bus is packed with people. I look up at him.
DooDoo is a kid who works on a garbage truck that his father owns, and is maybe a year older than me. His little sister could never say Dominic, so he got tagged with DooDoo, because his father could never stop laughing when the sister called him that.
It is a stupid name, but it is the only one that anyone knows to call him, and reminds me of guys who have names like Lipshitz or Fokker or Handman. And then there’s the Dicks of the world. I don’t know a single Dick who doesn’t wish they named him something else.
“Who you calling Dumbo?” I say. “At least my name doesn’t mean crap in a diaper.”
“Oh, yeah?” he says, laughing, and squinting his eyes so that he looks Chinese.
“Yeah,” I say.
DooDoo then fast pulls up a lunger from deep within his throat, and he spits it out at me. I jump away as quick as I can, but part of it lands on my face. More goes on the jacket that I haven’t been wearing more than an hour.
I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I must be beet-red, and I look around to see if anyone has seen what DooDoo has done.
DooDoo is laughing, and I feel my face stinging from all the redness. The muscles around my eyes are tightening. I don’t know what to do, being out here on the avenue, all alone, looking up, the whole busload of people looking down at me.
