He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Of course.”

  “You promise? They take me out day after tomorrow,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  She sighed. “I never be havin’ an apartment. You know that? I always live in a shelter or a welfare hotel. My whole life. I see an apartment all empty and I say, ‘What do I put in it?’ and the man say I get a furniture allowance. I never bought furniture. How do you say to the man what chair you want? Then what do you do? Does he box it up and hand it to you? I can’t be carryin’ no couch home in a big box.” She thought. “Maybe it be fun except it has me scared. Don’t know anythin’ about apartments and furniture. All I know how to be doin’ is dancin’.”

  She jumped up and danced all over the space in front of the row of chairs, her summer shoes skipping across the cigarette-covered floor. “I be worryin’ about furniture for an apartment. I should be worryin’ about furnishin’ my whole new house. Look at me. I be the winner today.” She laughed and made the women sitting near them burst into laughter, too. Abruptly, she sat down.

  “Now just supposin’ I don’t win, I’m goin’ to apply,” she said.

  “For what?” Cosgrove said.

  “For everything. I studied all night for my face-to-face. I got to know all the answers. Ask me something. Ask me mortgage.”

  “A mortgage?”

  “Got no mortgage. I sure know I don’t. That’s one question I’ll answer for sure.”

  One of the women said, “Bonds.”

  Disco Girl closed her eyes. She shouted, “Got no bonds!”

  “Other investments,” another woman said.

  “Got no investments. Got no any other investments. And … and I got a new part of the answer that’s goin’ to make the woman laugh. I’m not tellin’ you. Tell you after I tell it to her.”

  Disco Girl stopped dead as she heard her name called over the loudspeaker and she ran around a partition and disappeared. Cosgrove sat and became drowsy, heard Elise Mabrey’s name being called but didn’t arouse himself to look for her, and then he heard his own name called. The security guard directed him around the partition to a large room with bare metal desks, where welfare workers sat and interviewed clients without looking at them. When Cos-grove walked in, he saw Disco Girl over in the far corner. A clerk directed him to an empty desk next to the one where Elise Mabrey was going over her application with the clerk. The Social Security clerk had written, right under where Elise Mabrey had written the same thing, that she was under sixty-five and not disabled. The clerk was very happy. Elise Mabrey said to her, “I didn’t get knocked off the computer?” The clerk said, “When was your deadline?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Then you are off the computer.”

  “You sent me out!”

  “That is no business of mine. If your deadline was yesterday, and you were not here, you are automatically off. But when you fill in a new application you do not have to go to the Social Security.” Elise Mabrey said, to the air in the room, for the clerk wasn’t looking at her and hardly seemed to hear what she was saying, “It’ll take weeks.” The clerk said nothing. “How does my child eat while I sit here for weeks?” The clerk still said nothing.

  At the next desk from Elise Mabrey, another clerk told a heavy woman in a blue raincoat that her rent allowance had been increased from $375 a month to $425, that this must go to the landlord, and that this adjustment also meant that she would receive $15 a month less in food stamps. “That is the regulation.”

  “My children got a regulation, too. They got to eat.”

  The clerk became angry. “Here is the pamphlet from the secretary of agriculture himself. Read what it says. ‘An American must be willing to sacrifice in order to have a good roof over his or her head.’ ”

  A clerk with a high-pitched West Indian accent appeared across the desk from Cosgrove and began to read his application.

  “Just for emergency funding,” Cosgrove said. “I am not a long-term person.”

  “I am reading this application that you have given to me,” the woman said coldly.

  He decided to go over and watch Disco Girl, who, biting her lips, was answering questions for her face-to-face hearing.

  “In the past six months, have you had any relatives die?”

  “My mother’s cousin be killed by a train in Virginia.”

  “Did he leave any inheritance?”

  “His picture.”

  “Do you have any mortgages?”

  “No, ma’am!” Disco Girl shouted.

  “Do you have any bonds?”

  “Sure no!”

  “Do you own any municipal debentures?” the woman asked.

  “Wha’?”

  “You do not know what municipal debentures are?”

  Disco Girl shook her head.

  “You must be sure. I cannot fill in the form if you do not know whether you have them or not. There is a line here for municipal debentures. If you had even one municipal debenture in your house and you said no on this form, you could go to federal prison.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know these things. I know only that the question is on the sheet. You didn’t even bother to study for it. This will cause your application to be rejected. You will see that this will happen to you. You were told to study all the questions.”

  Disco Girl was silent. The clerk went back to the form. “Do you have investments in the stock market?”

  “I can’t even go to the food market.”

  “Any other investments?”

  “I got no investments. I got no other investments. And … and I got no vest!”

  The clerk’s face did not change. Her eyes remained on the application. She became irritated. “You have no first name on the birth certificate of your third child.”

  “She be Latasha Yee. You talk to her. She say to you, ‘Mi Ma.’”

  “You don’t have the first name filled out on the official birth certificate. All I see here is baby, female.”

  When Disco Girl said she would just fill in the name now, the clerk shook her head. She said that Disco Girl had to go to the Board of Health and get a proper birth certificate for the baby. Disco Girl said that for several months the baby had been held by the Bureau of Child Welfare.

  “They never ask her name when they come take her away from me,” Disco Girl said.

  “Well, I must have the proper first name,” the clerk said.

  Disco Girl said it would take hours to go to the Board of Health and the clerk said it was no matter of hers. Cosgrove turned and called, “You are being unreasonable over a simple form.” At this, his own clerk looked up and called across the room to him crankily. “Look at this. You filled in all the blue blanks. You are the only person today who has not been sent back for writing in the blue blanks.”

  “What do I do now?” Cosgrove said.

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Why do I have to wait?”

  “Why? You should thank us for giving you something to look forward to.”

  Outside in the lobby, Cosgrove, Disco Girl, and Elise Mabrey stood moodily. It was drawing close to three o’clock. Disco Girl bit her lip. Now a small group of women gathered at the last window, a few steps across from the doorway to the special supervisor’s office. At the last window, the curtain was pulled back and the women pushed around it. Disco Girl, who was forced to stand in the second row, got up on her tiptoes, saw that wasn’t good enough, and pulled up a tin folding chair. She got up on the chair, hunched over with her hands on her knees, and watched through the window to where a clerk sat stonily at a computer screen.

  “One more minute!” Disco Girl called to Cosgrove.

  Everybody in front of the window took out social assistance identification cards and studied the numbers. “Mine be seven two six seven,” Disco Girl said, reading it aloud as if reciting in class. She concentrated on the window and there was the sound of breath being sucked in and held and the computer screen was bla
nk and dark. The screen flashed and everybody writhed and looked at their cards. Peering between shoulders, Cosgrove saw the computer screen blink and all the women exhaled in disappointment. Disco Girl jumped off the chair. She jumped high and screamed and threw her legs straight out. She landed on the dance.

  “I win the roof!”

  At the counter, the woman held her hand out and demanded Disco Girl’s card and Disco Girl gave it to her and kept dancing and the clerk checked the card against the computer and came out and knocked on the special supervisor’s door. Harold Feinberg stood in the door with his head down, to show deep thought as he listened to the clerk. His head flew up when he saw Disco Girl, with Cosgrove alongside her. He shrieked, “Stop celebrating! You win nothing! You are disqualified!”

  Disco Girl turned into a statue.

  “You see, you are not married. I distinctly told you the last woman who won a house was killed in it that very night by her boyfriend. That caused us to change the rules. I told you so! This lottery is pro-family. You must have a legal husband before we can let you have the house. We can’t allow transients to be killing each other all over the place in our houses.”

  “I won fair and square. I won the roof!”

  “You can appeal it to the Central Welfare Board. I can do nothing for you here.”

  Cosgrove rushed forward to protest and immediately Harold Feinberg pointed at him and said, “You are a thief. You probably found a way to fix the lottery. You are a nobody thief. You don’t even know a district leader. If she had a chance to appeal my ruling, you cost her that chance. Who would listen to her with you around?”

  He slammed the door shut and Disco Girl pounded on it for several minutes, but Harold Feinberg never came out.

  Disco Girl pouted. Then she snarled. “I’m goin’ to the G Building. I’ll act up so much they’ll give me two checks just to get out of there.”

  Elise Mabrey shook her head. “I got to get home to my little girl. If I overact in the G Building, who takes care of her?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I be at the ‘G,’ “ Disco Girl said. Disco Girl left, with Cosgrove walking rapidly in an attempt to keep up with her because in her anger she was taking huge strides toward the bus stop.

  The G Building at Kings County Hospital was one of many high, gloomy buildings that glowered down on the two-story neighborhood. In front of the G Building, cars were double-parked, and the sidewalk was crowded with people who appeared to be on drugs or had had too much to drink or, it occurred to Cosgrove, were simply nuts.

  Disco Girl walked up the steps and into the lobby, which was covered with cardboard signs handwritten in English and Spanish. People waited on lines, but much shorter lines than those at the income maintenance center.

  A male in a security uniform looked up from a desk and waited for Disco Girl to announce herself, but rather than speak, she pulled her coat off. Then swiftly, so swiftly that Cosgrove could only stand in shock, she removed all her clothes. She stood with her back to Cosgrove, the ceiling lights glaring on her ebony bottom, and her last motion was to grab her Disco Girl T-shirt and pull it off and stand there in her bra, which she got off and now, naked, she started to dance in the lobby, but the people on the lines didn’t bother to turn and watch. Suddenly she spun around and here she was, facing Cosgrove full-on, facing him with all she had, two big black breasts and, far worse, this great black bush wavering in front of him as her hips swung all over the room.

  “Come on, little man!”

  “You lewd woman!” Cosgrove screamed.

  He was red as a rose and had spittle flecking his lips and he rushed at Disco Girl and, like a matador, she danced away from him, this black bush of hers clearly driving Cosgrove into a frenzy. He put his head down and ran with tremendous initial speed right across the lobby at the waving bush and Disco Girl shrieked, “He be dancin’.”

  A man in a white jacket, holding a clipboard, emerged from an office and the security guard, regarding this as a sign of concern, stood up, but the man with the clipboard seemed unconcerned until he looked at Cosgrove. His brow then furrowed.

  Cosgrove made a low rush at Disco Girl and she stopped dead, clapped both hands behind his neck, and pulled his face into her bush.

  There was a primal scream and an upheaval and Cosgrove, with superhuman strength, flipped Disco Girl up into the air. “You will be consigned to Hell and you will have darkness inside your mind and the exterior will be fires in darkness forever!”

  The man with the clipboard made a move on Cosgrove, who found himself surrounded by security guards.

  “Put your clothes on,” the man with the clipboard said to Disco Girl.

  “I’m starvin’. I be dancin’ here till I get back on welfare.”

  “Go into the office and they’ll help you fill out all the emergency forms right now. We’ll see you get aid before you leave here,” the doctor said.

  Disco Girl, calmed, walked over to her clothes and began putting them on. “It work,” she called to Cosgrove as he was being taken into an office by the doctor and one big black security guard. “How dare you talk to me, you lascivious woman!”

  “Are you all right?” the man with the clipboard said, slipping behind a desk. “My name is Eric Gross. I’m a doctor here.” The black security guard left and a new one slipped in. The security guard was a strong-looking young white guy with a thick neck. He chewed gum confidently.

  “I am to be about my Lord’s business,” Cosgrove said.

  “And what is that?” Gross said.

  “I just followed my calling outside here,” Cosgrove said. “And you people followed yours. The Devil’s.”

  “Why do you say that I follow the Devil?”

  “Because you permitted that filthy lewd sin.”

  “What would you say if I told you that we had people in this building who cut heads off and tried to eat them?”

  “I would say that does not change what just occurred.”

  “It means nothing to you? A head cut off?”

  “Of course not. I’ve seen it all before.”

  “Where?”

  “In Africa.”

  “Oh, you were in Africa.”

  “Yes, and when people are hungry they can be expected to do anything. It is all right. You know the theory. Quisquis agit, agit propter finem. »

  “I see,” the doctor said.

  “But there was just an extraordinary occurrence there. The presence of the Devil in your very room. That woman, and I know her well, was clearly possessed of the Devil for the moment. And you chose his side.”

  “How did I do that?”

  “By allowing that woman to sink into sin in front of your eyes.”

  “Was she doing something as bad as cutting somebody’s head off and eating it in Africa?”

  “Africa. Don’t be smug. I have seen that done right here in New York.”

  “You have?”

  “Of course. I didn’t feed Great Big properly and therefore he got hungry and forgot his manners.”

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t. You are a man who sees nothing. You just stood in front of sin, sin in your very eyes, and you talk to me of utter nonsense.”

  “Eating somebody is nonsense?”

  “That is something done for hunger. Sin is done for the Devil.”

  The doctor stared at a pencil in his hand. He looked up at the security guard. “Why don’t you just wait here a moment,” the doctor said. He went out a door in the office that led into the hallways somewhere.

  Twenty minutes later, sitting in silence, listening to each other breathe, Cosgrove and the security guard looked at each other. “Do you have a cigarette?” Cosgrove asked.

  “Sure do,” the guard said. He held out a pack and carefully lit Cosgrove’s cigarette for him.

  Cosgrove inhaled and closed his eyes. “When is your man returning?”

  “He said he was coming back,” the guard said.

  “I heard him say no
such thing,” Cosgrove said.

  The guard did not move.

  “He didn’t go to get me welfare?”

  “No, I know he didn’t,” the guard said.

  “Then I believe I shall leave.”

  “He asked you to wait.”

  Cosgrove opened his eyes, fixed them like headlights on the security guard, sat erect, and was about to say something when the guard said, “You were fooling with the doctor, you tell him you got somebody eats people?”

  “I never speak anything but the truth.”

  “You got a cannibal with you?”

  “If that’s what you care to call it. Actually, it isn’t that simple.”

  The security guard took out a key and unlocked the door and looked out into the lobby. The guard was trying to watch Cosgrove and still attract the attention of somebody in the lobby. “You’ll have to wait,” the guard said.

  Cosgrove was breathing onto the guard’s neck and the guard tried to hold him in.

  “There’s the little man!”

  Disco Girl came bounding through the lobby, her brown down coat held together with the big safety pin, and the guard trembled as Disco Girl kept coming.

  “Is she with you?”

  “Of course.”

  The security guard tried to shut the door, couldn’t, and simply ran out into the lobby in the late afternoon and tried to find somebody.

  Disco Girl and Cosgrove walked out of the building and into the crowds heading for the bus. Disco Girl grimly held her emergency check. When Cosgrove mentioned her behavior in the G Building, Disco Girl exploded. “You the reason I can’t even appeal the ruling on my house. You worried how I act? What about how you act? You lost the appeal on my new roof!”

  “I’ll try to rectify this tomorrow,” he said.

  Disco Girl snorted in annoyance. “You don’t even take care of yourself yet.”

  “I will tomorrow,” Cosgrove said. “Then I’ll get you that house.”

  10

  ON THE NEXT DAY, COSGROVE stood for hours in the East New York center and finally, when the four o’clock eruption subsided, a clerk asked Cosgrove for his name and after carefully writing it on a form, she gave him a mimeographed slip of paper with an address on East Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. He was to present this slip of paper before five and would be sent to a job training place and at the job training place a man would sign the slip of paper, which, when brought back to her, the clerk, would be an initial qualification for getting emergency funds. She gave him a second slip of paper, which entitled him to get $9.30 carfare for job hunting.