Return to Shepherd Avenue

by Charlie Carillo

  “You gonna pour the coffee or what?”

  She asked for it light, with one sugar. I passed her the mug and watched her take a slow, thoughtful sip.

  “It’s good,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment as she let the caffeine take her on a ride to a saner world, where gray-haired white guys didn’t go running with young Puerto Rican baseball stars.

  When she opened her eyes I was still there, a problem to deal with, but at least I could make good coffee.

  “I’m Rose,” she said. “What am I smellin’ here, paint?”

  “I’m painting the house, yeah.”

  I showed her my spattered hands and arms. She chuckled.

  “You gettin’ any on the walls?”

  “Now and then.”

  She couldn’t help smiling. I wasn’t exactly winning her over, but the chances of her killing me were dropping by the moment.

  We clinked coffee cups, a gesture of peace.

  “Sorry I was such a bitch.”

  “You’re not. You’re a good mother.”

  “Justin don’t think so.”

  “He’s a good kid. You’ve done a good job.”

  “It ain’t over yet. Luckily his father ain’t around.”

  I proceeded with caution. “Divorced?” I ventured.

  “Dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Best thing he ever done for us. Fell off a bridge he was paintin’ when Justin was two. Probably hungover, or maybe still drunk.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah? I’m not. You didn’t know him. Handsome black dude, but a real prick.” She shrugged. “Hey, his life insurance pays the rent, so everything works out in the end, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yeah, I say so.”

  “Which bridge was he painting?”

  “The Williamsburg. Not the one you climbed.”

  I felt my face flush as Rose winked at me, chuckling in a friendly way.

  “So you know about me.”

  “Saw you on the news when you done that crazy thing. Hey, no big deal, we all go nuts sometimes. Just as long as you ain’t harmin’ my boy.”

  I had to admire her. It was rough enough to be a single mother in East New York, and unimaginably tougher to be a single mom whose son was on the verge of being chosen number one in the Major League Baseball draft. Such a success story could not have happened without a mother possessing the vigilance of a lioness guarding her cub against the perils of the street. Justin had undoubtedly been raised in the midst of a hailstorm of troubles, and Rose had shielded him from every one.

  He was a mama’s boy who could hit a baseball five hundred feet, but I’m guessing he couldn’t walk ten feet without his mother asking him where he was going.

  I topped off her cup while she looked around the kitchen.

  “Hey, Joe. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you really pay half a million for this house?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “Damn. I thought Rico was bullshittin’ about that. Always talkin’ big, that guy. I’m glad he’s gone.” She took another sip of coffee and pointed at the ceiling. “And is it true you ain’t rentin’ the upstairs, even though you’re all by yourself?”

  “That’s right.”

  It was kind of exciting to find out I was being gossiped about on the block. Thank you, Eddie Everything!

  Rose wouldn’t let it go. “I don’t get it. Why do you need that whole upstairs, a bachelor like you?”

  It was funny to hear the word bachelor, a term long gone out of style, but not to Rose. Men who lived alone were bachelors, and probably gay. She’d established to her satisfaction that I was not a chicken hawk, but I could still be a homosexual, and this was knowledge worth having. It was time to put her mind at ease.

  “Thing is, I have a daughter,” I said. “I want her to have a place to stay overnight when she visits.”

  That was true, but it was also bullshit. The chances of Taylor ever setting foot on Shepherd Avenue were remote, and the chances of her staying the night were nil.

  But I’d given Rose what she needed to hear. Her face brightened with relief. I was a father, no menace to her son in any way.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Your daughter comes to see you, you don’t want her goin’ home after dark. Not around here, that’s for damn sure.” She drained her coffee cup, put it on the table. “Gotta go to work.”

  She jumped to her feet and hurried to the front door.

  “It was nice meeting you,” I said to her back.

  “Yeah, you too,” she said over her shoulder, and then she was gone, out the door and down my front steps.

  But she did look back at me just once as she crossed the street. A little peek, that’s all, but there it was.

  * * *

  “So,” Dr. Rosensohn began at our second session, “how goes it?”

  “Not bad.”

  “How are you spending your time? Working on a new book?”

  I hadn’t published a children’s book in three years, and had nothing in the works. “No,” I said. “Been busy painting my house.”

  “You’re doing it yourself?”

  “Yeah. I’m enjoying the process.”

  “What is it you enjoy about it?”

  Was this a trick question? I gave it a moment before saying, “Clean surfaces. A fresh start. You know. Nothing too mysterious about that, is there?”

  “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “I don’t know . . . any strange dreams?”

  “Jesus, Doc, is that the best you’ve got?”

  “Hey, it’s what they tell us to ask in shrink school. Sometimes a new environment can generate some interesting dreams.”

  “It’s not a new environment. It’s an old environment. I used to live there, remember?”

  He sighed, like a father struggling to be patient with a precocious child.

  “I’m just trying to get a sense of things, Mr. Ambrosio.”

  “Tell you the truth, Doc, they’re not much like dreams. More like home movies from my life, playing while I sleep.”

  I was telling him the truth. Shepherd Avenue had become a silver screen for memories that hadn’t visited me in decades.

  Rosensohn leaned back and folded his hands behind his head.

  “Take me to the movies,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Okay. I’ll tell you about Casablanca and Milan. Two memories that made for a hell of a double feature.”

  * * *

  My father decided he wanted to live in Italy for a while, and booked passage for the two of us on the SS Constitution. A twelve-day trip across the Atlantic.

  I liked the voyage best when we were in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. Somehow that made me feel safe. The only thing that existed was our ship, and the rest of the world was water. That should have freaked me out, but it didn’t.

  Every few days we’d stop somewhere on the way to Genoa. The ship docked in Casablanca, and that’s when it happened. I was walking the crowded streets with my father, clinging to his hand as tightly as I could. I’d never seen anything like the horrors of Casablanca.

  The stench of raw sewage filled the air. Beggars were everywhere—blind beggars, beggars with milky eyes, beggars with missing eyes, beggars whose outstretched palms ended in blunt knuckles. Leprosy. It was like walking down a corridor of hell.

  And suddenly I was out of my father’s grasp. I looked around wildly and he wasn’t there. I was eleven years old, alone on the fetid streets of this foreign land, with no idea of how to find him, or how to get back to the dock and the safety of the ocean liner.

  So I stood there and screamed to the sky. The blind beggars turned their faces toward the noise and chattered at me like a cluster of enraged monkeys. A man with a long beard and a tasseled cap grabbed me by the shoulders, staring at me with eyes that looked as if they were about to burst into fl
ame. I twisted out of his grasp and ran ten steps before slamming blindly into somebody’s belly. My father’s.

  “Why are you trying to get rid of me?” I roared.

  He was frightened. “For Christ’s sake, Joey, I’ve been here all the time!”

  “The hell you have!”

  He smacked my face to quell my hysteria but I kept screaming. A man with an official-looking cap entered the fray, blowing his whistle.

  “He’s my son, he’s my son!” my father told the apparent cop.

  “Take me back to the boat!” I roared. “I wanna go back to the fucking boat!”

  Here the film in my head snapped and another reel began playing, this one in the city of Milan, where my father and I had settled when we reached Italy. It was a gloomy city, gray and smoggy. We had an apartment near the Duomo, and I was enrolled in an international school filled with kids from the United States, England and Australia. All the kids seemed to be in a state of mild to severe sadness because they were so far from home, for reasons only their parents could explain.

  The playground was a dusty field without a single blade of grass. The only game to play was soccer and I was no good at it, having been raised in America, where hands and arms play such crucial roles in sports.

  While I was at school my dad went to museums and cafés all day with his notebooks, trying to write another book. At least, that’s what I think he was doing. I had a feeling he was trying to write about my mother, but somehow that book never came together.

  He was overly cheerful about the great adventure he said we were having in Milan, and when the cheer wore off—it takes a lot of steam to sustain cheer, and my father was not a naturally cheerful man—he’d fall into a funk that put him at the bottom of the ocean.

  That’s when I’d try to cheer him up, with my own false cheer. We lived like a pair of human pistons: one up, one down. Never up or down together.

  One day not long after we’d moved to Milan he sent me on a solo mission to buy bread at the bakery around the corner. We’d been there together a few times and I knew the drill: Walk to the window display, point at a long loaf of Italian bread and say, “Uno di questi”—“one of these.” He gave me the exact amount of lire I’d need for the bread, so there’d be no fussing over change. Pay and go.

  But when I got to the bakery the long loaves were all gone. I looked in panic at the bottle blonde behind the counter, a scary sixtyish woman with a wart near her lower lip that an American woman would have had removed. Her eyes were kind but her voice was fierce.

  “Cosa voglia?”—”What do you want?”—she boomed.

  I wanted to run but I was too scared to move. I squeezed the coins in my hand so tightly that I later found ridge marks on my palm. The woman came out from behind the counter and squatted in front of me, talking even louder, as if sheer volume would help me understand.

  Then her husband the baker joined the fray, attracted by the noise. He stood there waving his fat, hairy arms, the hairs whitened by flour. Then a customer joined the scrum, a bent-over crone all in black. The three of them jabbered away, and all I could do was point to the empty place where the long loaves used to be.

  “Non ce anchora!”—“There aren’t any more!”—the bottle blonde roared, and that’s when I snapped.

  “Why’d my fucking mother have to die?” I shrieked, and the three of them fell into a stunned silence. They didn’t know what I’d said, but they clearly thought I was a crazy American, and while they murmured among themselves I gathered my wits, pointed at another bin with smaller loaves and held up two fingers.

  “Due,” I managed to say, remembering the word for “two” from the elementary one-to-ten count my dad had drilled into me. The blonde put two small loaves in a paper bag. I gave her my coins, tucked that bag under my arm and ran home, ignoring the shouts behind me.

  I was out of breath when I burst into the apartment and broke down sobbing. My father asked me what was wrong and I told him.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked in wonder. “You did great. It was a new situation, and you handled it like a man.”

  “I didn’t like it,” I replied. “And anyway, I’m not a man!”

  A funny smile crossed his face, the kind of smile I’d see whenever he was privately amused, usually by something bittersweet.

  “You’re not supposed to like it, buddy,” he said softly. “You’re just supposed to be able to handle it.”

  “Why?”

  “Good practice for the future, when things really go wrong. Situations always change. You’ll see. Today it was bread. Tomorrow, it’ll be something else.”

  He was right, of course. Situations change all the time.

  But it’s not the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re eleven years old, and motherless, and thousands of miles from home.

  * * *

  Dr. Rosensohn didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “Sounds like your father had some unconventional parenting skills.”

  “To say the least.”

  “But you hit the nail on the head, with that tantrum in the bakery. If your mother hadn’t died you wouldn’t have been in Casablanca, or Milan, or Brooklyn. Her death really spun your world off its axis.”

  “You can’t blame a person for dying.”

  “No, but feelings are feelings, and the worst thing we can do is ignore them.”

  “I’m not ignoring my feelings, Doc. I’m just telling you what’s been going on in my head since I moved back to Shepherd Avenue.”

  He pursed his lips. “All in all, would you say you’re happy with the move?”

  “Well, I wish my daughter would call me, but other than that . . .”

  “You haven’t called her since you were arrested?”

  “I have called her. She told me to wait for her to call me.”

  “So you’re obeying that command.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a command. More of a request, which I’m respecting, if that’s okay with you.”

  “The main thing is that it’s okay with you.”

  “It is, okay?”

  “What caused this rift between you and your daughter?”

  I was the one who brought it up, so I must have wanted to talk about it. I took a deep breath and said, “I didn’t go to her mother’s funeral.”

  Dr. Rosensohn just stared at me.

  “Big mistake, right?”

  “Were you on bad terms with this woman?”

  “We weren’t on any terms. She lived three thousand miles away. She never came to New York. I hadn’t seen Moonchild in years.”

  “Moonchild?”

  “Yeah, and she really fit that name. Good-natured, but a total space cadet. I knocked her up, she had the kid, she left town. I did the long-distance-dad thing, but Moonchild and I hardly ever spoke. She had a husband by the time she died, so what the hell was so important about me being at the funeral?”

  Dr. Rosensohn hesitated before saying, “Have you ever heard the expression that funerals are for the sake of the living?”

  “Yes I have. It’s bullshit, Doc, and if there’s one thing I’m really grateful about regarding my father’s death, it’s the fact that I didn’t have to stand in a room with him in a box, and his dead hands holding a rosary while all the fucking mourners stood around, talking old times.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Ambrosio.”

  “See, I don’t do death very well, probably because I got my first taste of it when my mother died, and then my grandfather died right next to me on a Ferris wheel, and then my grandmother died, and then I turned eleven.”

  His eyes widened. “Your grandfather died on a Ferris wheel?”

  “Yes, he did. A fatal heart attack, with me sitting right next to him. We were at the top of the ride when it happened, and that’s when they started unloading the passengers, so I had to sit there for like twenty minutes with the corpse while the wheel went down, a notch at a time. Took two guys to pry his dead hands off the bar. He had some grip, my grandf
ather.”

  Rosensohn shook his head. “Wow.”

  “Is that dramatic enough for you, Doc?”

  He nodded. “Almost as dramatic as climbing the Brooklyn Bridge to scatter your father’s ashes.”

  “Are we back to that?”

  “Back to it? It’s the reason you’re here.”

  “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You thought about jumping, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, Jesus—”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Fucking-A right I did!”

  The words burst out of me as if I’d been Heimliched, and the sudden silence that filled Rosensohn’s office wasn’t really silence. It was more like a high-pitched scream no human could hear. But we were both aware of it and sat quietly for its duration.

  “Can’t believe I just said that,” I said at last, more to myself than to him.

  Not that I ever would have done it, but let’s just say it had flashed through my head like a bad movie—a running jump off that tower to follow my father’s ashes into the sky, and then into the water. From that height, it would have been like landing on a highway. Instant death. Painless. Or so I told myself.

  But I didn’t do it. That was the main thing. Wasn’t it?

  “I thought about what it would be like to jump,” I said, trying to make myself clear. “That’s not the same as intending to jump, right, Doc?”

  Rosensohn sighed and jotted something in his notebook. I had a feeling I was making things worse for myself, like a man struggling in quicksand.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now I think maybe we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Shit, what’s next? Going to have me put on suicide watch?”

  “Of course not. The fact that you’re painting your house is a good thing. Life-affirming. Optimistic. I believe you’ve turned a corner.” He looked at his watch. “Time’s up. Go home, keep painting. By the way, judging from the splotches on your elbows, I must say that’s not a very practical color for Brooklyn. Brilliant white? Jeez, I’d have gone with cream, or even beige.”

  Chapter Ten

  I was wired when I left Rosensohn’s office. I needed someone to talk to, but I had no real friends and just two relatives, one of whom wasn’t talking to me.