A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  Frankie now opens the package and creases an edge of the paper to pour out the white powder.

  “Careful, man,” Mikey says.

  “I know what I’m doing, man,” Frankie says. “Don’t give me this careful bullshit.”

  “Easy, guys,” I say.

  This is the first time I have said anything since we got off the Second Avenue bus. The last time I was with them we just scored the horse, but today I’m going to try it.

  Frankie pours the powder in and goes to the water faucet on the side of the boiler where Mikey is washing the needle. He puts a little water into the cap and mixes the powder with the water. It looks like white mud, but when Frankie puts a match to the bottom of the cap, all of it begins to boil, and the white substance disappears. It now looks like water. Just plain unadulterated water, painless and harmless.

  “Perfect cook, man,” Mikey says. “Perfect cook.”

  “Okay, Dennis,” Frankie says. “You’re up.”

  Until this moment I was thinking that I could still be along for the ride, but now, in a split second, I am a real part of all this. I have heard so much about how taking drugs just once will make you a drug addict for life, and drug addicts are the slime and the sewer scum in any neighborhood.

  “C’mon,” he says.

  I never think about Frankie being a drug addict, but I guess he is. He’s far from being a dreg, though. He’s a good friend. I can tell the difference between a good guy and a dreg.

  But Mikey? Mikey pushed his mother, and being a drug addict made him do that, and so I think Mikey may be a dreg.

  “C’mon, Dennis,” Frankie says again.

  Maybe there’s still time to back out, I think. As exciting as this is to me, I know that I don’t care about it so much. There’s no reason for me to do this, except to try it.

  “Naw,” I say.

  I don’t know what to expect. So there’s nothing wrong with being worried about it. Yet, still, there is something that makes me wonder what it is all about, what it feels like.

  I think about my mother making me eat all those things I hate, like tripe and eggplant and brussels sprouts and beef liver, and I can hear her voice saying, “You have to try things, Dennis, you can’t just say you don’t like it if you don’t try it.”

  “C’mon, Dennis,” Mikey butts in. “You could snort some if we had some powder, but we cooked it all. You don’t have to take it mainline. You could skin-pop. Takes a few minutes, but then you’ll be off.”

  “Is it habit-forming?” I ask. I don’t know why I asked, because I know the answer.

  Mikey laughs.

  “Yeah, man,” he says, “but that’s what’s great about it. You’re always looking forward, man, and that’s where it is, you know, in looking forward. It’s all there.”

  “You can’t get a habit,” Frankie says, “if you just skin-pop. Don’t listen to this guy. You can only get a habit if you mainline. Like this, see?

  Frankie has filled the eyedropper with the solution and wrapped his arm with a belt, holding one end of the belt between his teeth. He is smacking his veins with two fingers, getting a vein to rise. And then he puts the needle into a vein and jabs it around a few times until he finds the hole he is looking for. Then he spits the belt out, just as he is squeezing the bubble top.

  I watch the solution disappear into his body, and I watch his lips change in a second from being pursed and all business and serious to a round smile.

  God, I don’t know what to think as I watch him close his eyes for a long minute. He tries to talk, but I can see it is hard for him to open his mouth. Finally, he is able to say something.

  “Just skin-pop, Dennis,” he says. “It is okay, man, I wouldn’t screw you up, you know that.”

  I do know that. Frankie wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. I am thinking I should try. If I was ever going to try, this is the right time. Frankie won’t let anything happen to me.

  “All right, man,” I say. “Just one time.”

  It is like diving into the cold water, I am thinking. Just tell yourself to do it, and you’ll do it. It wipes the questions out if you just tell yourself to do it.

  Frankie has his eyes closed again, and so Mikey takes the needle out of Frankie’s hands and refills it. He leans over to me and pinches the skin on my upper arm, around my muscle.

  “Watch, man,” he says, “it’s like darts.”

  I feel the steel going into my arm, and I flinch. But he is holding me firmly, and I don’t go out of his grip. And then he lets go of my skin as he squeezes the bulb quickly, and I feel the solution going into me like a shot at the doctor’s office. And then there is nothing, except that I can see a little lump on my arm where Mikey has taken the needle out.

  I begin to watch Mikey load up for himself and tie the belt around his arm, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, it feels like someone has coated my eyelids with lead. They are so heavy. I am thinking, okay, I am not spinning, but everything is so heavy. My hands, my head, my fingers, all feeling like they are nailed down. I try to open my eyes, but I cannot. I think about that water bug I saw, and I begin to worry about it. I’m getting afraid. I know that the water bug on the ceiling has moved to just above my head, and that it is going to let go of the ceiling and fall through the wet air of the boiler room and land in my hair, and I try to open my eyes to see where it is, but I can’t, and I am picturing the three-inch feelers coming down my face, the bug stopping high on my cheek and rubbing the feelers together, and I think I can feel it there, and I am sweating with the fear, and I can’t move my hands to smack it off, and I am beginning to smell it now as it gets close to my nose.

  But, then, just as suddenly I forget about being afraid, and I am not thinking about the bug. I don’t care about anything except raising my hand. But my hand is made of concrete, and it is welded on my lap, and I can’t raise it, but I don’t care. And time begins to pass. I can’t think of time. There is no time. There is just now, and the now seems to be endless, with no beginning and no end, like God Himself.

  I don’t know where we are, but all of a sudden, we are moving. I sense these moving shadows along the walls of the cellar, and I realize that they are our shadows. And then there is sunlight, and we’re in the park on 57th Street and the East River, where my mother took me every day for all those years when I was trying to grow up in New York. I sit on a bench, and it seems like days go by as I sit there, the green strips of wood gently wrapping around me, keeping me from floating up into the trees, my body like a tub of granite floating miraculously over the trees and then down into the East River, like a concrete coffin floating on top of the water. I am so afraid. I don’t know why I have done this.

  My hand is now on my face, glued to my face, trying to stop the itch on the side of my nose, and the itch on my ear, but my hand doesn’t move, it just stays glued there until I forget why I raised it, or how.

  I can’t feel my heart beating, but I sense I am sweating because of some cloudy fearfulness. I know I am afraid. And what makes me most afraid is that I don’t know what to do when I’m afraid.

  I just want to float in this blackness, thinking that if I had one wish in the world, I would wish that my brother and my mother knew to come get me.

  Maybe then the itching would stop, and I could open my eyes.

  Chapter Forty-six

  I have been trying not to think about all the letters from Cardinal Hayes High School that I have been ripping up.

  I guess they will send someone down to 56th Street sometime soon, but it won’t get me anywhere by worrying about it. I worked a long day today at the florist, and I have a few extra dollars in my pocket besides what I spent on a case of beer.

  It is a hot night now, one of those Indian summer nights just before Halloween, and I have been drinking the beer all night with the Morgan brothers down by the river. I was going to meet the guys on 55th Street, but I met Terry and Jackie Morgan just as I came out of my building. They’re always a lot of laughs, an
d so we came down here to the Beekman Place park by the river, and we’ve been arguing now for more than an hour about why the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in the World Series, and how Marciano could beat Archie Moore with one hand tied behind his back. Park talk. Sports bullshit.

  Terry Morgan just left us. He went to have dinner with some girl he met in a hallway when he was delivering papers down on Sutton Place. Her parents were taking him to a restaurant called the Russian Cafe, and we told him that if he got caught there, he would be arrested for being a communist.

  Except for Joe’s Original Restaurant and Emiliano’s pizza place, I still have never been to a restaurant for a meal, and I envy Terry for finding someone to take him.

  The park on 51st Street is dark, and we are alone except for a few strolling couples who pass back and forth giving us strange looks. The sound of the traffic on the East River Drive is never ending, just as the neon Pepsi-Cola sign on the other side of the river never goes out. There is a constant grind of tires against the concrete, like there is a sawmill somewhere in the distance.

  “How do you get a rich girlfriend like that?” I ask, holding a can of Rheingold beer.

  “Just walk the streets around Sutton Place,” Jackie says. “They are desperate over there for guys like us. They go home at night and put diamond rings on their fingers to play with themselves ‘cause they don’t have guys like us.”

  “How come you don’t have one,” I ask, “with or without the diamond rings?”

  “Because I have Annie,” Jackie says, “that’s why.”

  “Who’s Annie?”

  “Give me some beer,” he says. “Can you keep a secret, a secret like if you tell anyone at all, I will personally cut your personals from your person?”

  “I can keep anything,” I say, “even a girlfriend if I could find one. A secret’s easy. So who’s this Annie?”

  “Annie Dunne.”

  “Annie Dunne with the husband in Sing Sing Annie Dunne?”

  “That one,” he says. “I went to bed with her three times.”

  “Jackie,” I say, trying to remember the things I heard about the Dunne family, beside the fact that most of them are a little crazy, “isn’t the husband in jail for murder?”

  “No,” he replies, “I think for beating somebody up, but he’s in jail for another ten years or something.”

  “Jackie,” I say, swigging the beer, “you ever hear of jailbreaks?”

  “This ain’t the movies,” Jackie says, laughing.

  “But, Jackie,” I say, “even in the movies they don’t all get killed in the jailbreak. Some of them go on to become priests, and some others come back to kill the guy what was banging his wife.”

  Jackie gets up from the bench, laughing loudly now. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go pay her a visit.”

  “It’s almost midnight,” I say, thinking that most of the people on 56th Street are asleep at eleven.

  “C’mon, don’t be such a punk,” he says. “She’s got some beer in the fridge, and it’s something to do. Your mother waiting for you or something?”

  “Don’t be a pain,” I say. “My mother went out to her sister’s house in Queens.”

  “So you don’t have to go home. C’mon.”

  “Can you call her first?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie says sarcastically. “Like her husband has a good job so they can get a telephone, right?”

  We finish the last two cans of beer before we hit 56th Street, and we walk down to 333, the building next to mine.

  Jackie has his finger to his lips as we creep down the wooden stairs that lead to the alleyway to the backyards.

  “Shh,” he utters in a kind of whisper. “If we wake up old Mrs. Dunne, that will be the end of it.”

  Old Mrs. Dunne is Annie’s mother-in-law, and she is the super of the building. Her apartment is in the front, and the wooden stairs creak like an old ship. We go through the first yard and then under a tunnel passageway to the yard in the very back.

  Underneath my windbreaker, I can feel my polo shirt sticking to my back. I guess it’s sweat made from the heat, but maybe also because I am a little afraid. Jackie is three years older than I am, and I don’t know him the way I know Walsh or Scarry or even guys like Frankie and Mikey. Jackie has a reputation for being a little wild and crazy.

  Jackie Morgan once bet someone that he could steal a fifteen-foot fishing pole from Bloomingdale’s up on 59th Street. A guy named Jimmy Ginty then bet that he could steal a shotgun if Jackie could steal a fifteen-foot fishing pole, the one that is used for whales or something, and doesn’t come apart. It happened on a day when there was a snowstorm. Jackie shoved his jacket into a Third Avenue trash basket and walked into Bloomingdale’s in his undershirt and went right to the sports department. He told them he was the new stock boy, and he had to take the fishing pole to the stockroom so they could get the numbers to order new ones.

  Jackie then walked straight out the front door, dragging the fifteen feet of fishing pole behind him, asking the security guard at the front of the store to open the door because the elevator wasn’t big enough to take it down to the stockroom. “The security guard told me not to catch cold as he opened the door,” Jackie told us. He was back on 56th Street in less than half an hour with a fishing pole that was for sale, and sent Ginty out for the shotgun.

  Ginty never got the shotgun, but Jackie made himself a neighborhood legend.

  Now we’re in the backyard with a canyon of windows going up either side of the alleyway, and Jackie wants to climb up the drainpipe to the second floor.

  “Up the drainpipe,” I say. “Why can’t we go in the front door?”

  “Somebody might see us,” he says.

  “So what?”

  “I been thinking about what you said about the jailbreak,” Jackie whispers, “and I gotta make sure nobody sees us.”

  Jackie has his hands and feet around the drainpipe like a monkey, and he is shinnying himself up. I am right behind him. I don’t know Annie Dunne hardly at all, but she is a looker, and I am wondering as I am in the middle of this circus act if I will get to see her in her nightgown.

  Maybe kissing Jackie.

  Maybe she’ll kiss me.

  Finally, Jackie gets to the window above us and shoves the kitchen window open. He climbs in and pulls me in after him, all the while holding his finger to his lips. I feel a strange sensation inside my body. It’s not that I am afraid, but I just know that we are doing something that is very wicked. I know they could never send you to jail for this, but if the cops came for any reason, we would have a tough time telling them we were delivering newspapers to Annie Dunne at midnight.

  Jackie takes his clothes off in the small light that is shining in from the alleyway. I look over and see him right there in the middle of the kitchen, and he is as naked as the day the doctor smacked him on the ass.

  “You go sleep on the couch,” he whispers, pointing to the living room.

  I don’t like that he is telling me what to do. I thought I would get to see Annie in her nightgown, or that she would give us a drink or something, but I didn’t expect to climb up a drainpipe all this way to go sleep on a couch.

  In a moment, though, Jackie is gone, his clothes spread around on the kitchen floor, left there like he was a leprechaun.

  I open the refrigerator door and look to see what is inside. There is no light, and I can hardly see anything. I feel around looking for a bottle of beer. I am a little bit dizzy from the beer I had in the park, and it feels funny in my stomach, too, like I ate a bad fish cake or something.

  Suddenly, I hear a long scream, a woman’s scream. It is like the end of a song in an opera, and like in a whirl Jackie is going through the kitchen. He’s speeding like a racing car, but he stops short at the living room and comes back to the kitchen for his clothes. He is naked, searching madly for his clothes, picking them up, and then running again.

  I am still standing here, holding the refrigerator door open, feeling
my stomach turn over and over.

  “Get going!” he yells to me.

  God, I’m thinking, what’s going on? I have such a pain in my stomach, and Jackie is yelling. Did he try to kill Annie Dunne? What’s wrong with my stomach?

  I race after him through the living room, running fast, and into the back bedroom. I can hear Jackie either laughing or crying, I am not sure which, and he is tugging at the bedroom window, the one that leads out to the fire escape. He shoves it all the way open, and, still naked and holding his clothes, he climbs out the window and runs up the fire escape stairs. The screams seem to be following us into the backyard darkness. I am following close behind Jackie, but I have to stop, because my stomach seems to be pouring out of my mouth and nose, and I lean over the fire escape railing and I heave all over the backyard below, and I hope no one is looking up, because they’ll get more than birdshit in their eye, and I know I don’t have time to lally-gag on a fire escape after midnight, and I run like crazy to the roof trying to catch up with Jackie.

  I find him there, in the darkness of a corner of the roof, doubled over, out of breath and laughing madly. He doesn’t say anything at first and begins to hop frantically on one leg as he puts the other through his pants.

  I am leaning over, trying to get hold of my own breath. My stomach is still churning, and I want to throw up again, but I can’t get anything out of my throat but a belch.

  “Holy God,” he is saying over and over. “Holy God. Holy God. I climbed into the bed. I saw her lying there, and I climbed into the bed, crown jewels and ass like a jaybird, and she turned around and she yelled like hell, and she scared the living goddamn crap outta me, and it wasn’t even Annie Dunne, Dennis, it was, Holy God, old Mrs. Dunne herself, there in the bed, and I am in the bed with her, naked, my underdrawers in the kitchen. And I’m there putting my arms around old Mrs. Dunne.”

  “Fat Mrs. Dunne?” I say. “What’s she doing there?”