World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  Patty Rolls was yelling. “That fucking spade prick, what do we need them for? That’s it! That’s the mother-fuck-ing ball game.”

  He got up and another guy in the room took his seat in front of the radio and phones and television. “We get a drink for a minute,” Patty said.

  “I don’t know, I’m just starting,” Dermot said.

  “Then start drinkin’ too,” Patty said.

  They went into a doorway that was the back entrance of the Prosit, which has its front entrance out on Fresh Pond Road. Dermot, in uniform, stood at the end of the bar, back far enough so you couldn’t see him from Fresh Pond Road. He had a beer. It was cold and the glass was clean and the beer had a taste to it. There are three big breweries in the area and so many workers live in Ridgewood and Glendale, Germans making beer, that the bars wind up with the best beer out of the breweries. Dermot finished the beer and put down his glass for another. The shift he was on, the four-to-twelve, is the worst physical enemy of the Police Department.

  He left the Prosit after three beers and walked Fresh Pond Road. He walked up past Pelligrini’s without looking in the window. A block away, Dermot turned around and came back to Pelligrini’s.

  At twelve-thirty a.m., through with his shift, Dermot was back on Fresh Pond Road, out of uniform, with no reason to go right home—his wife Phyllis and the three children would be asleep. Standing on Fresh Pond Road eight hours after he had gone into the Prosit for the first time. His breathing was heavy and when he started to walk he rolled just a little bit. He had short dark-brown hair that was almost black. Blue eyes were narrowed and set well back under dark eyebrows. His nose had been broken once and had a bump in it but was not spread. The skin over the cheekbones was taut. The chin had a little square to it, it could be a tough chin, and the neck flesh under it was firm. The wrestler’s bridge. You had to look under his eyebrows into his eyes and see tiny lines of blood to know anything.

  He was dressed in the clothes he had worn to church. A dark-blue jacket, blue slacks, white shirt, and a solid blue tie. He had a .32 in a clip holster behind the arch of his back. He liked having it there. That way, when he walked along with a good jacket on, like the one he had on now, there was nothing sticking out on his hip to bulge the jacket and rip the lining if he moved too much. He was five-foot-eleven and he weighed a hundred ninety pounds, fifteen more than he should have. The dark-blue jacket hid the weight very well.

  It was twelve-thirty a.m. and he had hours left in the night. He went into the Prosit, through the front door, for a drink.

  “Morrison played good,” a man of about fifty, with a crew cut, was saying. The man had on a zipper jacket with lettering on the back saying MIRACULOUS MEDAL.

  “He should play good,” the bartender said. “What the fuck else does he have to do with his Sundays?”

  Dermot had a couple of drinks, Scotch and water now. He was alone at the end of the bar by the window. He left and walked up to Pelligrini’s. They were talking football in there too. Dermot was tired of it. He walked around the corner and down two blocks to the Swallow’s Nest. Young kids were in there, heads rocking, loud guitars coming out of the juke box. Dermot sat in the noise and stared at his drink. He walked out without paying. He went over to the Lounge, under the El station on Myrtle Avenue. Jackie Scannon, from the Steamfitters, was at the bar.

  “What’s happenin’?” Scannon said.

  “Fuck,” Dermot said.

  “Oh my God, give him a gazzazza,” Scannon said to the barmaid.

  “What kind of gazzazza?” the barmaid said.

  “Scotch,” Dermot said.

  He went back a step because he had his weight on the feet wrong. He bumped into a short guy with horn-rimmed glasses who was walking to the men’s room.

  “Look out,” Dermot said.

  The short guy looked back. He was in a black suit. His hair looked like it had been sculptured.

  “Look out what?” he said.

  “Guinea,” Dermot said.

  Jackie Scannon’s hand came out to Dermot’s shoulder. “Come on, come on, have a gazzazza.”

  Dermot picked up his drink. He could feel the guy standing there, halfway to the men’s room, staring at him.

  “Are you a cop?”

  “Bet your ass I’m a cop,” Dermot said, not looking at the guy.

  “So come on in with me and cop my joint.”

  Dermot pushed himself away from the bar and was in the middle of the floor ready to go after him. And the guy was standing there waiting. Jackie Scannon grabbed Dermot and put him up against the bar and then he went up to the Italian and spoke to him and followed him into the men’s room and they came out smiling. The Italian guy walked up to Dermot, his hand out. “Come on, what are we talkin’ crazy for?” he said. “We’re supposed to have charity.”

  “Well don’t fuckin’ bounce me around,” Dermot said.

  “Ah, come on,” he said.

  “Gazzazza!” Jackie Scannon said.

  When they finished a drink, the Italian guy pushed three dollars at the barmaid. Dermot stared at him. “All right, boys,” the Italian said.

  “I’m coming with you,” Dermot said.

  “Hey, come on,” Jackie Scannon said.

  “No, I want to take care of this right. I was wrong,” Dermot said.

  The guy was at the door. “Don’t worry about it, pal, I’ll see you around, pal.”

  “No, I’m going with you,” Dermot said.

  He pulled away from Scannon and went outside and came alongside the Italian with the black hair.

  “I’m sorry I was a ballbreaker,” Dermot said.

  The Italian guy threw his right arm around Dermot’s shoulder as they walked along. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Dermot put his left arm around the Italian guy’s waist.

  “I just want you to know I had the fresh fuckin’ mouth,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it, pal,” the Italian said. His leather heels sounded on the pavement.

  “I’m going to shoot you,” Dermot said.

  The Italian guy dropped his right arm from Dermot’s shoulder.

  “I’m going to walk you around this corner and I’m going to put a hole in you so fuckin’ big that I could reach in and pull out your heart,” Dermot said.

  “You talk crazy,” the Italian said.

  Dermot tightened his grip on the guy’s waist. Dermot’s right hand started to come around his back, for the .32 in the clip holster behind the arch of his back. The Italian guy got the flat of his right hand against Dermot’s side. The Italian guy pushed. Pushed as hard as he could. Dermot went off balance. He still was holding on to the Italian guy’s jacket with his left hand and the Italian guy hit him in the face with his right hand. Dermot felt a pain, like a needle going into him, when the Italian’s pinky ring cut into his left eyebrow.

  Dermot went to the Interlude, where the Italians hang out, looking for the guy. When he described him to the bartender, the bartender said the guy had just left to go up to Tippy’s, way up on Myrtle Avenue, into Brooklyn. The bartender gave Dermot some cracked ice wrapped in a bar rag. Dermot held it to his left eye. He told the bartender he was going to get a cab and go to Tippy’s.

  Dermot woke up at home in the middle of the afternoon. He woke up because he had to throw up. He had been sleeping on his face with his clothes on from the night before. He was leaning over the toilet, waiting for the second heave, when for some reason his right hand went back to the pistol. He was looking down at it and tried to puke past it. The cylinders were empty. Right away, he heaved.

  He sat on the top of the toilet seat and tried to put the night before together in his mind. He remembered the music in the Swallow’s Nest. He shook his head. What came after that? He remembered the Lounge. Somebody yelling “cop my joint.” He saw the Interlude now. Dark, smoky, a rock band in the back. But was that last night, he said to himself, or was it the other time? He ran a hand over his eyes. He felt the crust in his eye
brow. He looked at himself in the mirror. The eyebrow was tufted, dry blood on the dark hair. A small hole, the blood dried to dark red, was in the skin under the eyebrow hair. Blue seeped out of the top of his eyelid and spread down the right side of the eye. Jesus Christ, Dermot said to himself. He was frightened.

  He went to work hardly able to walk to the bus because of the nerves. Water was streaming from his eyes. In the locker room in the basement nobody said anything to him out of the ordinary. They hardly looked at the wide Band-Aid Dermot had over his eyebrow. At roll call the sergeant did not mention anything unusual.

  On Dermot’s first tour of the area, he drove down Sixty-second Avenue and had to stop in the traffic behind a bus which was blocking the way, right in front of Frenchy’s Car Service. When Patty Rolls, inside the storefront, looked up from the television and saw Dermot in the squad car, his fat arm waved. He scrambled up from the desk and came lumbering out onto the street. Dermot was terrified. He gagged. He did not have anything in him to throw up. Rolls had him park the car and come inside the storefront.

  “Now, I don’t want to get you upset. We’re all drinkers. I just want to show you.”

  He took Dermot into the back and tapped the red Coca-Cola machine in the room where the drivers sit while they wait for calls. The red tin machine had bullet punctures in the front. The plaster-board wall alongside the machine had a hole in it.

  “You just come in here last night and started fuckin’ wingin’ away,” Patty Rolls said. “I don’t know what the fuck you had on your mind. One of the drivers, Billy there, was gettin’ a Coke for himself. You never seen him. You fuckin’ near belted him out. It’s a good thing. It’s a good fuckin’ thing. Whack a guy out like that. I mean, Jesus Christ, Davey.”

  Nobody ever heard about the night with the guns. Nothing stronger than missed days showed on Dermot Davey’s record. He was put in the Bow and Arrow Squad, with his guns locked up, and then he was let out of the Bow and Arrow Squad, given guns, and returned to regular duty. The record showed he had turned himself in for Bow and Arrow duty. Some policemen are in and out of the Bow and Arrow Squad several times during a career. With Dermot, he was first reassigned from the 125th Precinct to a job handling auto-identification files in Manhattan. After six months of good attendance records on both the job and the weekly alcoholics’ meetings, Dermot was given his guns back and returned to duty in the 125th. Six weeks after returning from Bow and Arrow Squad duty, on a Thursday, in January of 1970, Dermot Davey was scheduled to work an eight-to-four tour at the 125th.

  Nobody in his house woke Dermot up until seven-thirty. In fact, nobody woke him up at all. He heard his mother-in-law in the kitchen downstairs yelling something to his wife, who must have been in the cellar. Thursday was their day to work together in the house, both apartments, the Daveys’ upstairs, and the mother-in-law’s downstairs, and for all they cared about anything else, you could drop dead on the kitchen floor and either one of them would pour wax on you.

  “Phyl,” Dermot called over the banister.

  “Oh, my God,” his wife’s voice yelled up the cellar stairs.

  “Well, I mean, what the hell,” he said.

  She came running up the stairs and looked up at him with one hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t you know what eight-to-four means yet?” he said.

  “I’ll drive you. Get ready quick and I’ll have a cup of coffee ready and I’ll drive you.”

  “No, it’s all right. I have to go to court.”

  “Oh. Then what’s the matter with you? You’ve got time.”

  “Yeah, and it costs me five dollars.”

  “Oh, give it to him. What’s the difference? It’s worth it this time.”

  Dermot called the precinct and got Gene McGuire, the clerical man. He told McGuire he was going straight to court. You’re supposed to report and turn out with the eight-to-four shift and then leave for court. He asked McGuire to sign him in. McGuire said, “Pleasure.” Which it was. You had to give him a five-dollar tip for doing it. A few years ago clerical men got only two dollars for a favor. Now it’s a pound.

  “Am I going to see you today?” McGuire said.

  “Maybe in the afternoon. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “If you get in here before two o’clock I’d like to see you,” he said.

  “Do the best I can,” Dermot said. Gene McGuire goes sick two, three times a year on a Thursday afternoon. He gets chest pains. The police surgeons all take Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. So the soonest Gene gets to see a doctor is Monday. They send him for X-rays. He gives the girl working in the X-ray place a few dollars. She loses the plates. By the time he’s finished screwing around, McGuire can get eleven or twelve days out of chest pains in the afternoon.

  Dermot took his time getting dressed and came downstairs at eight o’clock. The wife called up from the basement. “I’m just puttin’ some wash in.”

  “Here, I’ll get you a nice cup of coffee,” his mother-in-law said.

  The front of the stove was lined with Clorox bottles and sprays to clean the stove. When she put a cup of coffee on the table her hands were wet with soap suds and the coffee was lukewarm.

  “You got the paper?” Dermot asked her.

  “It’s a good thing you mentioned it. I was just putting it out.”

  She went into the garbage can under the sink and came out with the Daily News. Coffee grounds were stuck to the front page. The headline said, MILLIONS LOST ON UNWED MA’S. Underneath the big headlines was a picture of Marzullo, a City Councilman, shaking his finger at the Mayor during a confrontation at City Hall.

  His wife sat down at the table. “Is that the thing about the day-care centers?” she said.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t read it yet.”

  “All that money for them,” Phyllis said. “What about a day-care center for my children?”

  “You said it,” her mother said. “We had a day-care center, all right. A day-care center cleaning shit diapers right in this house.”

  “They had the babies, let them take care of them,” the wife said. “Why should we pay?”

  “They had the fun too!” her mother said. “Want to have fun in Harlem, that’s fine. Just don’t ask me to pay for your fun, sister.”

  “What time did the kids leave?” Dermot asked.

  “They ran up to Aunt Grace’s house at seven o’clock. You know how they love doing that. Then she walks them to school.”

  “Is there anything in there about the school?” the wife said.

  He had the paper open to the sports section. “I don’t know, I didn’t notice it,” he said. “You can look for it after I’m gone.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I have time. All I care is that they keep the school just the way it is.”

  “I heard one whole floor is empty,” Dermot said. “I don’t think they can keep a whole floor of a school empty.”

  “Well, it’s better empty than filled with a lot of troublemakers.”

  “Our kids don’t even go to the school, what do we care?” he said.

  “Because we live on the same block with a school that’s paid for with our taxes. And I don’t want troublemakers walking around our block.”

  “Thank God our children don’t go there,” the mother-in-law said. “Could you imagine poor Tara trying to learn something with these nigger kids shouting in her ear?”

  “All I care is my kids learn something and go to college,” Phyllis said.

  “That’s all I care about,” Dermot said.

  “Well, nothing else counts,” the wife said. “And they’re going to Catholic schools right through. I don’t care, it’s the only place to learn. You should have seen when I came out of Dominican Commerical and went for jobs. All these other girls from public schools, they came walking in chewing gum and combing their hair. Imagine that! Thank God for the nuns. And least I knew how to act.”

  “They make you sit on your ass and pay attention and have a little respect,” her mo
ther said.

  “I’m going to have one cup of coffee with you and then get going on the house,” the wife said.

  She was wearing an old chenille robe that had a design of blue flowers all over it. She had a big safety pin holding it together in the front. When she stood at the stove you could see on the bottom of the robe this inverted V bloodstain that had dried black.

  “Hey, Phyl!” Dermot said.

  “What?”

  She saw him looking down. She took the hem of the robe and twisted it around the front and looked down at it.

  “Oh. Look at me. I have everything in the wash. I don’t know where this was. I guess I dug it out of the bottom of the hamper someplace. I got so busy.”

  She poured herself a cup of coffee. The mother-in-law got busy.

  “I wouldn’t know when you have a period or when you don’t. You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  “Dermot!” She pointed with her eyes at her mother.

  “Fuck it, I’m going to work,” he said. The two of them jumped like a gun had gone off.

  “What can I tell you?” he said. He walked down the hallway, picked his coat off the banister, and went out.

  He walked down to Jamaica Avenue and over to 111th Street for the bus. It took ten minutes to get up to Queens Boulevard. You get off by the subway entrances at Kew Gardens, where people take the subway to the city. At the top of one of the subway staircases at Kew Gardens there is a big white statue of a naked warrior standing with a sword in his hand and his foot on a naked woman’s neck. The statue used to be over in the city. Right by City Hall. When LaGuardia was the Mayor, he had to look out his window every day and see the statue. One day LaGuardia said, “I have enough big pricks right in this office without having to look out the window.” The statue was sent out to Queens. Quite often, lesbians take turns climbing up the statue and sitting on the woman’s face.

  Dermot walked down Queens Boulevard and went into the coffeeshop across the street from the courthouse. It has a sign in the window saying eggs are forty-four cents. Johno was sitting at the far end of the counter, on the last stool. He was directly under a fluorescent light. He had a bald spot. So he sat there with his hat on. He was the only cop in the place who kept his hat on.