by Dennis Smith
“You can keep watch for us,” Frankie says, “but you hafta tell us if you want in ‘cause I can only cook up once, you know. You can’t change your mind.”
My brother is in the fenced-in basketball court alongside the beach near McGuire’s Bar. There is a fast full-court game going on, and I am thinking as I watch Billy break loose every time he gets the ball that Oberlin College lost a good opportunity to be champs with Billy.
I sit along the sidelines, watching, until Billy comes over at a time-out.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Looking for some broads, maybe,” I say. “How you doin’?”
“I got such a hangover,” he says, “I’m going to have to play fifty games to clear it all out of my system.”
“Where were you?”
“Jasper’s,” he says, “and I was completely ossified, drinking beer out of my shoe, and I put the shoe on top of the bar, leaking all over the place, and Jasper himself was there. It was a pretty dangerous thing to do. You just don’t do things like that in his joint. He threw me out, and told me that the only reason he wasn’t locking me in the refrigerator was because he knew I was a neighborhood kid, and neighborhood kids always get two tries.”
“Jesus, Billy,” I say. “I wouldn’t go back there for a while, anyway.”
“Right,” Billy says, “I’m banning myself.”
At least Billy goes to his jobs, and he never misses college. He’s getting things done.
But my life, lately, has been everything opposite to Billy’s. I don’t know when to stop, to ban myself from anything. But I want to try to change, and that’s why I told Frankie today that I don’t want any horse. I don’t want to be a dope addict, I know that, and I just have to tell them I don’t want it. I can still hang around with them. They are good guys, Frankie and Nicky and Mikey and those guys, friends, but I have to think about this dope stuff the way Billy thinks about Jasper’s Bar. Jasper could kill Billy, and Billy knows that. And, at least, Billy is smart enough to ban himself.
I made all those faces when I was a kid. It drove my mother crazy, and she decided one day, I guess, that belting me with the strap wasn’t changing anything. So she asked me to sit with her on the living room couch, and she was holding a hand mirror, which she took from the top of her bureau.
She held the mirror high in front of me.
“Now,” she said, “make those faces.”
I didn’t want to make those faces then, not with that mirror in front of me, but my mother kept prodding me.
“Do it, do it,” she kept saying. “Don’t brood about it.”
And she must have made me make those faces a hundred times, some with my eyebrows reaching up to my forehead, some with my lips going over to my ears, and I kept thinking that I was looking funnier and funnier, and weirder and weirder. I told my mother that I didn’t like the way I looked, but that I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t just stop like you stop swimming just by getting out of the water. Then she told me to cross the middle finger of my left hand over my index finger and to press down hard, and to say to myself that I won’t make a face again. Never.
“Now,” she said, her arms around me, the mirror on her lap, “when you make another face, just cross your fingers like that, press hard, and think about how funny you look. If you keep trying like that, sooner or later it will work for you.”
She then squeezed me, saying, “Not for me, Dennis. Don’t do this for me, but do it for yourself.”
I am sitting in the back of the car now as Frankie and Nicky are shooting up. My fingers are one over the other, and I am looking out the back window to make sure the police are not driving by. It is a hot day. I had about five beers in McGuire’s, and there were no Irish girls, not that I wouldn’t take a girl from Istanbul if I could get one. I am a little dizzy, but I think as much from the heat as from the beer.
Frankie and Nicky are nodding, and I am beginning to sweat. I can’t wait for the car to get going again so that we can open the windows and get some air in.
“Hey,” Frankie says, “Dennis, man … man.”
“Yeah, Frankie?”
“You got anything to eat, man, like a Yankee Doodle, man, or somethin’?”
“No, Frankie, I don’t got, I mean, wait… I don’t have any Yankee Doodles.”
“Man, we gotta go to 55th Street, man, to get some Yankee Doodles, and some Coca-Cola, man.”
Frankie starts the car, and I half know that Frankie cannot drive the car while he is sleeping. And nodding is a kind of sleeping. But I also half don’t care.
It’s hot, and I’m a little woozy. I should have gone to work at the florist today, but I asked Mr. Schmidt if I could take the day off.
I don’t like delivering flowers anymore, either, and I would quit if it wasn’t for my mother.
“If you quit,” my mother said, “it would be the last straw, and I will kick you out of the house.”
She would kick me out of the house, even though home is the place that when you go there they always have to let you in.
But poetry isn’t always right. It is hard to get back in the house when you have been kicked out. I know, because Mikey Fallon and Dennis Buckley have been kicked out of their houses and they live from park to park and cellar to cellar, and I see them all the time with dirty shirts and pimply faces. And they are not the kind of guys that Archie said we respect, the guys we look up to.
I always thought I would be one of those guys, the guys people respected, but it wasn’t working out that way. So if Frankie is awake or sleeping, I don’t care, as long as the windows are open and some air is rushing in, and I can sleep in the dizzy whirl of five beers from McGuire’s Bar.
And, I begin to think, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get out of that cramped room with Billy and find a home somewhere on my own, somewhere I could find myself in a corner of a cold city.
We are now on Queens Boulevard at 78th Street, and we stop for a red light. A car behind doesn’t stop in time and bumps us. It is not a hard bump, but enough to wake Frankie up completely.
“Hey, man,” Frankie says, “my old man’s car. Any dents and he’ll know we took it.”
Frankie looks in his rearview mirror as I look out the back window. There are six guys in the car behind us, men, maybe in their late twenties. As the light changes and we go forward, I can see that the car has a license plate from New Jersey.
“From New Jersey,” I say.
“The other side of the Washington Bridge,” Nicky says.
“I know where it is,” I say.
“Not even America,” Frankie says.
“Six guys,” I say.
“If they’re from New Jersey,” Nicky says, “you count in halves.”
“So, man,” Frankie laughs, “there’s only three of them?”
“Yeah,” Nicky says. “In American math, anyway. In Machine and Metal Trades math, there are two of them.”
Nicky goes to Machine and Metal Trades High School, too, but he hasn’t quit yet like Frankie.
At 74th Street we again stop for a red light, and the same car comes behind us and bumps us again, this time a little harder.
“Oh, man,” Frankie says, “they ain’t gonna do that again, man, no way.”
I watch Frankie as he opens the door, and I see him grab a monkey wrench from under the seat as he gets out of the car.
“I’ll break their windows,” Frankie says.
I am still dizzy, and I am thinking that I would love to close my eyes and fall asleep as I find myself climbing out of the car behind Nicky.
The six men from New Jersey are all out of their car, and each one seems to be bigger than we are.
Why did they bump us, not only the first time, either? What did they want? Why do people do things like this? Maybe Frankie cut them off or did something he didn’t know he did. I don’t know. But he was driving slowly, not like he drove out to Rockaway this morning, fast and crazy. It’s hard to drive fast and crazy when you’re
sleeping at the wheel.
But now here I am in the middle of Queens Boulevard, punching some guy who has me around the neck and is dragging me to the street, kicking me as he pulls. It is like I entered some weird ride out in Coney Island where you never know what to expect, and this time the ride put you in the middle of a donnybrook with guys from New Jersey who should know better, and all you have to do is fight as hard as you can without knowing why.
And so I am lying on the ground, horns blaring in the middle of traffic, with some guy’s hair clenched in my fist, and I won’t let go, and he is screaming as he punches me, and I am punching him as I am pulling on his hair, and another guy comes and starts to kick me in the legs trying to kick me between my legs, and I am covering myself and punching and holding and pulling, and with every punch I get in I get one in return, and I feel my skin breaking apart and the blood running down my chin.
And in the middle of all of this I look over and I see Frankie on the ground and he is hitting some poor luckless fellow who made the one mistake of getting out of his car, hitting him again and again over the head with the monkey wrench, and their clothes are full of blood, and there is blood everywhere on the street, and I can hear the sirens in the distance.
Now I am in this strange place, gray stripes falling in shadow all around me, and I am feeling as if I have been let out of one ride in Coney Island only to find myself in another, a place dark in the corners except for the bare lightbulb in the hall casting the shadows within, dim stripes shooting over the bare mattress and the black-stained stainless-steel bowl, all around a deadly quiet broken by some unknown, unseen human being in the next cell, breathing heavily and cursing in whispering exhales, and I am thinking of my mother, remembering that our telephone shorted out recently and isn’t working, and that Mrs. Fox upstairs will have to tell her that there is a phone call for her from Queens, and I can see my mother walking through the dark hall and up the stairs, wishing that they would come and fix our own telephone, knowing that Mrs. Fox upstairs would only be called in an emergency, and with each step worrying about who is dead and who is injured, and where were her two sons?
Oh, Mom, I think, I am sorry I am making you go through this.
And so many thoughts follow this one, the thoughts that go through the head when you are alone like this, because you know that you are powerless to change your life all by yourself, that you can only change your life if the people around you are good people and they let you make the changes, because you know you are alone with the dark, and you feel alone like Ann Kovak, or Harry Shalleski, or Spango in the coffin, where nothing will help you but a prayer, and maybe a helping hand from Blessed Maria Goretti, who was made dead for no reason of her own.
You need help because, after everything is said and done, all the prayers uttered, the Sorrowful Mysteries finished, and you’re alive and in trouble like this, you know that it is all your fault. That you got here on your own, but you can’t get out without somebody who cares about you.
The Queens County Court building looks more like a school than a courthouse, red and gray stone with two dozen charcoal-colored stone steps up to the front door.
I see Marty Trainor on the steps, his arm around my mother’s shoulders. For the first time in my life, she looks frail to me, huddled there in a yellow flowered dress beneath Marty’s arm.
I have no clue as to what is going on, except that I know I am in trouble, and that Marty Trainor is the guy everyone in the neighborhood calls when there is trouble. I haven’t seen Frankie or Nicky or any of those guys from New Jersey since I got up from the ground on Queens Boulevard.
My mother doesn’t say anything, and I can hardly look her in the eyes, those keep hazel eyes now reddened at the corners.
“Your mother and I have talked this over,” Marty says, “and I think I can get you off, but you’ll have to give us your word that you are willing to change your life.”
Marty Trainor is an old Kips Bay Boys Club guy, and he knows that giving your word means something here. But I still don’t know what he is talking about, get me off from what?
“What kind of trouble,” I say in a shaking voice, “is this?”
“Pretty serious,” Marty says, grabbing me by the arm, pulling me away from my mother’s earshot.
“Felonious assault is pretty serious,” he says, “and a lot of people go to jail for felonious assault. The guy you were fighting with has twenty-six stitches.”
“Not the guy I was fighting with,” I say. I was thinking that the worst thing with the guy I fought is that he could be bald.
“It doesn’t matter who,” Marty says. “The fact is someone has all those stitches from a fight on a public street, and the judge won’t care about who actually did what.”
“The guy hit me first, Marty.”
I have always believed that if someone hit you first, it was not only fair to hit him back, but almost a personal responsibility. But you have to forget about Sister Maureen and the Sermon on the Mount first.
“Look, Dennis,” Marty says, “we have to go in. Your mother is a wreck. This is going to cost her three hundred and fifty dollars for getting me out of bed and coming all the way out here, but I am not going to take the money from her. I want it from you, do you understand?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, “but I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You’ll pay me ten a week until it’s paid, understand?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“And this is what you are going to do.”
“What’s that?”
My voice is not so shaky now, and I am thinking that Marty Trainor is a smart man and a good lawyer—that’s what everybody says—and he belongs to the Jim Farley Democratic Club, and so he knows all the big shots in the city. I don’t have to be so nervous, but still… still, my mother has not said a word to me.
“You have never been in this kind of trouble before,” he says, “and this is the first time you’ve been in a courtroom. The judge will like that. But what he will really like is when we tell him that you are going to be seventeen years old in just three weeks, that it has been your lifelong ambition to join the United States Air Force, that you are making an appointment with the enlistment officer, that you will be on your way to a boot camp in a month, and that you will be far from your friends and the neighborhood that have made it possible for you to end up here in a courtroom for criminals before your weeping mother.”
I don’t know what to say to Marty, but I am thinking that I don’t have much to say about any of it, anyway.
I guess that he has talked this over with my mother, and so I just shrug my shoulder in agreement. I look over at my mother, hoping that she will smile or say something, but she has a rock-hard look on her face, like she is worrying that the judge might yell at her for having a son like me.
It is still early morning now, and we are again at the top of the court’s stone steps. Marty Trainor has just gone, and my mother and I are standing quietly for a moment, looking at one another, waiting for the right words to come.
My mother has had such a hard time of it with me, I know. I wish she had someone to share the hard time with, maybe to soften it a little. I don’t think any of this fight was my fault, but still…
Still…
Here she is in the Queens County Courthouse, prim and proper in her yellow flowered dress, but haggard, looking beaten from a sleepless night, and from being forced to stand behind her son before a ruddy-faced judge who only wants to know if her son would join the air force, and if her son would join the air force he would dismiss the charges so that her son could still be a cop or a fireman or a postal clerk or anything you could be if you aren’t convicted of some crime even if the crime was something you didn’t start. And so I know there is only one thing to say to my mother, only one thing she will expect.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say to her, “I am.”
She smiles for the first time and begins to walk down the courthouse steps.
“I know.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I’ll pay him back, Mom,” I say, “I promise, every last penny. If it’s the last thing I do.”
This is the first promise I ever remember making to my mother. I have said a lot of things with good intentions, but I have never promised before.
It’s a start.
“I’ll remember,” she says. “And for you, remember that the road to going backwards is made out of unkept promises.”
On the subway now, the train rollicking at sixty miles an hour beneath the East River, my mother puts down the Daily News she has been reading, and holds my hand.
I shift a little on the airy, cane-covered train seat, uncomfortable with having my hand held, not only by my mother but by anyone. She sees that she has taken a reluctant hand, and she squeezes my fingers.
“Time goes fast,” she says. “It seems just yesterday you were studying to be an altar boy, and now you are going to go into the military. I know you’ll look handsome in a uniform. What do those air force uniforms look like, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I never saw one.”
“You never saw one?”
“No.”
“Then,” she says, “why are you joining the air force instead of the marines or the navy?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought you and Marty Trainor agreed about it.”
“Oh, goodness,” she says.
My mother is laughing now.
“I guess,” she says, “when I told him that it was a great hope of mine that you would finish the Aviation High School, he just thought that the air force was the thing for you.”
I am laughing now.
“Yeah,” I say, “I guess so. What difference does it make, anyway? They say that the food is better in the navy, but that the beds are softer in the air force, and that there’s no food and no beds in the marines. I’ll be okay.”
She laughs a little more, quietly to herself, and lets the train rock her back and forth. She sighs.
