World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

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  World Without End, Amen

  JIMMY BRESLIN

  For the former Rosemary Dattolico

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Epilogue

  A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

  prologue

  YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW you were in New York City if you stand on the beach in the late afternoon at Rockaway. It is a twenty-minute drive from the cement and El noise of 109th Place in Richmond Hill, where Dermot Davey lives. And it is only fifteen minutes from the terminal at Kennedy Airport. In actual distance, Rockaway Beach is only a couple of hundred yards from the tip of the runways at Kennedy. There are busses in Rockaway and a subway train to Brooklyn and Manhattan which comes through Rockaway on elevated tracks. Rockaway is only two blocks wide, with a bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. If you stand on the beach by the ocean in the winter, the way Dermot did through the days of the winter in 1970, you would think you were in Montauk, never in Queens, in New York City.

  Between waves, the pilings at the end of the wooden jetty rose out of the water three or four feet, three poles shining black from the ocean water, their tops coated with ice. The waves broke with a clapping sound before they reached the pilings, and the pilings were covered by tumbling white water. Far out, much farther out than where the others began, one big wave began to form. It was pulling itself together, sucking up water, swelling and rising high into the cold wind. It was the biggest wave he had seen in months. The wave was still climbing when it reached the end of the jetty. This time the pilings disappeared into a wall of green water. The wave grew faster and stronger, climbing into a threat. Dermot Davey stood on the sand, wanting to see the wave come up onto the beach and drag the rest of the ocean with it and then never stop. Come flooding across the beach where he was standing and go on through Queens, with the bottom of the water grabbing at the ground like big wet hands, pushing in foundations, tipping apartment houses, pulling up El pillars, grabbing thick trees. Then carry everything, cars from the streets, houses from the foundations, carry them all into Manhattan and break the place apart and drown it and keep going and never stop. Let me see, Dermot said to himself, how the world can stand up to one simple ocean wave that decides to keep going.

  The beach was empty, not even a dog running on it, and the sun was gone for the day, leaving big streaks of pink in the winter sky. The wind was cold and heavy with moisture. It was getting ready to snow again. When the wind gusted, it came along the beach like a hand sweeping a table, throwing the sand up in swirls and blowing it in sheets into the shallow water.

  The top of Dermot’s wave became white and began to curl over, forming a tube of water which was too much for the body of the wave to carry. The wave collapsed, first with a clap, then with a thud which turned into a booming sound which probably could be heard for blocks. Fingers of water ran up in the sand. They were not the strong fingers Dermot wanted wrapped around the buildings, shaking them until they fell. These were just narrow little puddles of water moving towards Dermot’s shoes. He turned away from the water and walked up the beach. The houses which fronted on the beach had their lights on in the late afternoon. The lights showing in the picture windows made the beach seem lonelier and colder. Bright white lights in a picture window reminded him of Christmas. He felt bad enough for Christmas.

  He had to be to work at midnight. The idea made him uneasy. Everything made him uneasy. He was young and he did not like one hour of one day of one week of his life.

  1

  HIS NAME WAS DERMOT DAVEY and he was twenty-nine and during this time he was a member of the Bow and Arrow Squad of the Police Department of the City of New York. If he was called upon to defend himself or to apprehend a perpetrator, Dermot Davey, or any of his fellow squad members, would have to put an arrow in your heart. When department officials locate a man they feel is too unstable to carry a gun, thus dangerous to the public, they relieve him of all armaments and assign him to units known, in police talk, as Bow and Arrow Squads. Which is what Sergeant John O’Donnell—Johno everybody calls him—kept talking about all through a gloomy Saturday night he spent with Dermot Davey in the dormitory building on the corner of Straight Street and Narrow Street in Paterson, in New Jersey.

  The building was once a brewery owned by Dutch Schultz, the gangster. Now it is very important to the New York Police Department. It is the place where alcoholic cops—piss bums they call them in the precinct—go to dry out. The place is run by Catholic priests. No one ever has heard of a rabbi opening a building for alcoholics. The Paterson City Council named the street in front of the building Straight Street and the side street Narrow Street. This gives policemen in New York many chances for humorous remarks. Besides piss bums, civilians use the place too. The first time Johno was put into Straight and Narrow he had a man next to him who looked like a gray prune. When the gray prune woke up a day later he told Johno that he was a senior pilot for Pan American. He had identification. He told Johno about good places to get drunk all over the world. After that, Johno began taking his kids out to Kennedy Airport a lot. He told them they were going to see a lot of plane crashes.

  Anybody who gets lugged over to Straight and Narrow has the guns he owns taken from him and locked up at Police Headquarters. The other police regard a man not carrying a gun as half a man. I might as well go around without a prick, Dermot Davey said to himself, after handing in his guns. He would not be around another policeman for more than five minutes when the policeman would say, “I see they took it away from you.”

  Straight and Narrow is part of the program run out of a building in lower Manhattan. Monsignor Carrigan, a department chaplain, is in charge. Each day he and his staff go over the sick reports watching for men with chronic absences because of gastritis or intestinal flu. Picking out Dermot was like finding Africa. The records showed he had gone sick on five occasions when he was due to return to duty after having forty-eight hours off. The Monsignor was very warm and understated when Dermot came in. A smile, a clap on the shoulder. The Monsignor had Dermot sit down with a clerk. There was a form for Dermot to fill out. The form had twelve questions to it. “You don’t have to fill out the form if you don’t want to,” the clerk said. He looked over his shoulder toward the Monsignor as he said this.

  “Oh, of course you don’t have to fill it out if you don’t want to,” the Monsignor said.

  Dermot began reading. At first he was going to put “no” after every question. The first one to catch his eye was “Do you find yourself desirous of alcoholic beverages upon arising?” That did not mean much to Dermot. A beer or something in the morning, or when you get up in the middle of the day after working midnight-to-eight shift, what difference does that make? When he looked at another question, he had to think. It said, “Do you suffer blackouts from social drinking?” He was afraid not to answer it.

  Dermot was sent to the department property clerk to turn in his guns. He was assigned to a group of policemen under thirty who were to meet in the Counseling Unit offices on Tuesday nights for lectures. On the job, he was reassigned from patrolman to file clerk in the office where they keep motor-vehicle records. At this time, i
n the spring of 1970, there were seventeen hundred New York policemen on special duty, working as elevator operators and clerks. The Monsignor said he was sure there were another seventeen hundred who had not been spotted yet and were highly eligible for special duty. Special duty means no guns. There were in New York at this time about five hundred cases of off-duty policeman discharging guns, mainly in bars. There were fifteen people killed by patrolmen in circumstances which warranted much questioning and some doubts. A policeman in the Bronx was convicted of homicide. “There should be a dozen of them convicted every year,” Arnold Friedman, the Bronx District Attorney, said.

  In Straight and Narrow there were five days of black coffee and B12 shots. And in the day room, called Duffy’s Tavern, there were Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets to read. There was no television or newspapers. The people running Straight and Narrow feel that a man coming in after a bender could spend four days drying out and attending the three lectures each day, and then he could pick up a magazine and see a four-color vodka ad and go berserk. Or he might turn on the television and see all cowboys drinking at the bar. Many times the people in Straight and Narrow are urged, which from the Monsignor is a command, to go up to a health farm at Pine Grove, New York. In precinct conversation the farm is called Piss Bum Pines. It is run by a retired detective. Board at the place is eighty-five dollars a week. The Counseling Unit advances the money to any policeman who cannot afford to pay for Pine Grove.

  When the Monsignor first started his program he had great opposition from older bosses in the department. The chief of detectives, Mike Leary, refused to allow any of his men to enter it. “We got no alcoholics in the detective division,” he said. “We only got all good decent men.” The Monsignor always makes a point of remarking, “Poor Michael died of cirrhosis, you know.”

  On the Saturday night in the dormitory, Johno was on the bed next to Dermot. Johno had his hands clasped over the front of a blue robe that would not close. The robe belonged to his wife. Johno’s belly is so big that even a wife who has nine children does not wear a robe large enough to cover Johno’s belly. Johno lay there and listened to the snoring and mumbling and little shouts in the night of the others in the dormitory. Finally, it became too much for Johno. He jumped out of bed.

  “Freeze!” he shouted. “You there! You freeze too! Nobody take a breath. Don’t move your hand anyplace or you won’t be alive. I am Sergeant O’Donnell of the Bow and Arrow Squad. Whoa! Stop! Oh? Try to run off on me, hah?” Johno shaded his eyes like he was the first Indian. He gave his version of a war whoop. “Woowoowoowoowoowoo.” He reached over his shoulder to get an arrow out of the quiver. He squinted, bit his tongue, and drew the bow far back. He let the arrow go.

  “Kachum! Another D.O.A. Lady, I’m sorry we had to kill your son. But he shouldn’t have messed with the Bow and Arrow Squad!”

  Once, Johno was both big and strong, but the years and his life have reduced him to a cow, a big shambling man with huge deep eyes that turn fire-red when he drinks. Johno is forty-seven now, and he is up to two hundred eighty pounds and has to be hidden in the precinct basement if somebody from borough headquarters comes around to inspect the precinct.

  The face in the bed next to him raised up from the pillow. The face was a gray sheet dotted with little red veins snapped off every inch or so by the force of bad habits. The flesh sagged against the cords of his throat. The mouth parted a little. The guy looked like he wanted to scream, but the needle they had given him was too strong. He looked sixty-five, but at the most he was forty. They had brought him over in a squad car, handcuffed so he wouldn’t try to grab the wheel and crash the car. The U-Haul Squad, which is in charge of picking up drunk cops and taking them to Straight and Narrow, is always wary of its clients. A young boy, fourteen or so, terrified, his head hanging in shame at the same time, helped the handcuffed father up the steps of Straight and Narrow. The boy had short hair with plenty of machine on the sides. His dark-blue All Hallows School blazer was a little short at the wrists, which showed how quickly he had been growing. The father had just short-circuited the main switchboard at Brooklyn Headquarters on Bergen Street. The father kept seeing cunts coming out of the holes you put the jacks in. He began tearing at the extension cords; after that he got at the wiring behind the switchboard. By the time they had him under control, emergency power had to be used to handle the calls for almost all of Brooklyn.

  This was Johno’s second trip to Straight and Narrow. Both he and Dermot made it to the building under their own power. The first time for Johno the U-Haul Squad came into his house in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. Johno was sitting there with his wife and nine kids, the oldest thirteen, and he was making all the young kids laugh because he was eating with a knife. The peas and mashed potatoes kept dropping from the knife onto Johno’s belly. Johno had no shirt on and he would rub the food all over his belly. He told the kids, “I can make the food go through my skin and fill up my stomach.”

  Johno put down the knife, picked up the gun, dipped the barrel into the mashed potatoes, and stuck the gun into his mouth and stared at his wife until she screamed. The U-Haul boys didn’t say a word when they walked in. One of them grabbed the pistol. The other two handcuffed Johno. They lugged him out of the house. All the kids were screaming and the mother began to cry.

  Dermot was on his bed looking at the ceiling. The depression was so deep he could not talk. Just the idea of being in the place, of coming down this far, meant to him that he had lost. He tried to brush it off with a sports score. Life twenty-nine, me zero, he thought. Even that was putting it too lightly, he told himself. He became more depressed when he understood that for a long time now he seemed to have no other way to go.

  One night, a year and a half before this, he figured, he had been working a four-p.m.-to-midnight shift in the 125, which is in Glendale, in Queens. He was called off the regular run and told he had to drive the sergeant. When Dermot got to the 125th, here was Johno, roaring, out on the sidewalk.

  “Hello, hump,” he said. “Let’s give these humps something to talk about.” He made Dermot put on his sergeant’s tunic and he wore Dermot’s tunic with the buttons open. Johno switched the radio off and turned on the roof light. They started rushing through the streets, the roof light twirling in the evening darkness, it still was only six o’clock, and they stopped first at the Glen on Myrtle Avenue and Sixty-fourth Place. A guy named Leo, a five-hundred-pound guy, runs the place. When he saw Dermot in the sergeant’s tunic, he let out a yell. “I studied hard,” Dermot said. Leo clapped his hands. “Christ, but that’s great,” he said. He went into the refrigerator and came out with a bottle of champagne. He had the bottle uncorked and on the bar when Johno shambled in, wearing Dermot’s tunic.

  “El Humpo!” Johno yelled.

  “Fuck you guys,” Leo said. He tried to pull the champagne back. Johno got both hands on it. He lifted it up and chug-a-lugged a third of the bottle.

  At eleven o’clock at night, they were coming from Duro’s, down at Eightieth Street and Myrtle Avenue. They were all the way up to the A&P on Sixty-eighth Street, right on the corner with St. Pancras, when Johno saw this kid running along and pushing one of these wire carts from the supermarket. Johno made Dermot pull the car over, and he grunted and lifted himself out. He rolled around the fender and caught the kid. The kid was about twelve. Johno clouted him on the shoulder hard. The cart rolled into the middle of Myrtle Avenue.

  “Get that fucking cart,” Johno told the kid.

  The kid stood there looking at Johno. Dermot could see the kid was afraid of Johno. The kid started to the curb to get the cart. Then the kid dropped his head and took off. Running for the corner, with his young feet beating the pavement. Johno reeled backward, trying to keep his balance. Something made Dermot come scrambling out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Johno had his pistol out. His feet were set and he was down in a military crouch. He had the pistol aimed at the kid’s back. Dermot pulled Johno’s arm down.

&n
bsp; “Get away from me, hump,” Johno said.

  “Jesus Christ, come out of it,” Dermot said.

  The kid was around the corner and gone into the night. Johno was still in his military crouch, the pistol out. “Fuckin’ hump kid,” he said.

  Later, when they came in for the night, Dermot said to Johno, “Jesus, what happened to you?”

  “You shoulda let me scare the hump,” Johno said.

  “What ‘scare’? You were aiming right at the kid’s back.”

  “Why, you hump, I had the fuckin’ thing up in the air. You hump. What do you mean I was aiming it at the hump kid?” Johno was drooling.

  And then last year, in 1969, Dermot was working another four-to-midnight shift in the 125. It was a Sunday. The saying in the 125 is that the most commotion in the precinct on a Sunday comes from a German rolling over in bed. They had the Giants football game on the television in Frenchy’s Car Service on Sixty-second Avenue, and Dermot stopped in to watch. Frenchy’s cars are radio dispatched and the big fat guy, Patty Rolls, sits at the desk in the storefront with two phones, a radio set, and a television in front of him.

  “They got to have all these niggers playing halfback,” Patty Rolls was saying. “Look at this yam. What a piece of shit he is, I don’t have to tell you. Giants got too many niggers on defense.”

  On the television there was this one small tangle of hands clawing from one side and elbows hooking from the other and a step or so away from it, Gabriel, the Los Angeles quarterback, beginning to rock on his feet so he could throw.

  “There you go, look at this!” Patty Rolls said.

  The television showed a big white guy running, his face turning up and the hands coming up past the face and into the air. A black arm was in the picture but the white hands grabbed a ball out of the air and now there was a full picture of the big white guy running with the ball and a little black guy throwing himself at the white guy and missing and the white guy striding into the end zone.