Bloodbrothers

by Richard Price

  He took off the headphones after a while and pivoting himself on his ass swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached for the mug, finished the beer, yawned and made his way to the bathroom. The bagginess of the boxer shorts made his legs look even thinner than they really were but the elastic waistband was taut.

  He stood over the toilet and pissed, holding his dick with both hands. He hated the way Phyllis decorated the john with gold Florentine wallpaper, gold ceiling paper, a gold furry toilet cover, a fake brown wood sink, a shower curtain with brown, gold and crystal beads like a Chink whorehouse. The whole house looked like a whorehouse as far as he was concerned. Like his brother, Tommy, they lived in Co-op City so he only paid $200 rent including utilities for a four-and-a-half-room apartment with air conditioning in every room. He figured for that price he could afford to let Phyllis splurge on furniture and wallpaper and crap. He himself could give a shit what the place looked like as long as he had that air conditioning but she liked what Marie called "Jewish Renaissance." She couldn't buy goddamn lamps—she had to have chandeliers. Jungle-thick rugs all over the house so you couldn't touch anything without getting twenty-five volts up your ass. Plus you had to take your goddamn shoes off like you were entering a Dutch church. And the stuff he liked, like the purple velour couch and the red leather Barcalounger, she had wrapped in what looked like big Glad Bags—giant plastic slipcovers—so that he couldn't even relax and watch TV in the living room without leaving half the skin on his back stuck to the plastic every time he wanted to get up to make a sandwich or go to the bathroom. He was surprised she didn't put a slipcover over the color TV.

  Chubby wandered into the kitchen for some eats. He peered into the refrigerator, took out a bowl of tuna salad, two Schaefers and a hard-boiled egg. He hummed the theme from "Peter Gunn" that was on the Henry Mancini album. That was the other thing he liked in the apartment besides the air conditioning. That stereo with the headphones he got himself. He could spend all day with those headphones on listening to Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. He was fixing himself a tuna sandwich and wondering what the hell ever happened to Perry Como when the phone rang.

  "Yo."

  "Chub."

  "Tommy, how you doin'?"

  "Chub, lissen. I met this chick." Tommy was whispering. "Chubby, I'm tellin' you, she got a tongue like a anteater."

  Chubby snickered, scratched his belly.

  "I thought I was gonna die, Chubby. I hadda beg her to stop."

  Chubby lit a cigarette. It looked as thin as a kitchen match between his stubby fingers.

  "I swear to Christ, baby."

  "She a blonde or a brunette?" Smoke slipped and curled over the tip of his slightly protruding tongue.

  "Neither, orange."

  "Orange! Jesus Christ. Cuffs and collars?"

  "Cuffs and collars."

  "Tommy, I gotta meet this bitch. You know that, don'cha?"

  "How 'bout tonight? I tol' her all about you. She's gonna be waitin' at Banion's."

  "Oh my heart." Chubby closed his eyes and let his tongue hang out.

  "I tol' her what a steed you was." Tommy laughed.

  "Oh shit." Chubby turned pale. "Tommy, I can't do it tonight."

  "Whatta you talkin'?"

  "I tol' Phyll I'd take her to a movie."

  "Bullshit! Take her tomorrow."

  "C'mon, Tommy, I promised."

  "You pussy."

  "Hey, Tommy, c'mon now. It ain't right."

  "What time's the movie?"

  "Eight-thirty."

  "So, come after."

  "What am I supposed to say to her?"

  "You know you sound like a fuckin' teen-ager, Chubby. I tell everybody what a goddamn stallion my brother is and set 'im up with a million-dollar mouth an' a pair a jugs what belongs in the Museum a Modern Art an' he can't even get away from his wife."

  "Hey." Chubby grinned. "You really tell everybody what a stallion I am?" He ran a thumb around the elastic of his boxer shorts.

  "Chubby, you know what they call you down at Banion's now?"

  "What?"

  "The Prick."

  "Tommy, pick me up at the gas station." Tommy neighed like a horse. Chubby was about to hang up. "Hey, Tommy! Tommy, what's her name?"

  "Sylvia."

  ***

  "Lissen, I tol' Tommy I'd meet him for a drink in a half-hour," Chubby said to his wife as they came out of the movie theater.

  She shrugged. "So go."

  "You not mad?"

  She shrugged. She looked tired, with deep eye sockets and a bony face. There were always deep swaths under her eyes. She looked dehydrated.

  "You sure you ain't mad?"

  She shrugged again.

  " 'Cause if you want I won't go." She didn't answer.

  "O.K. I'm goin' now." Chubby took a few steps. "You sure? You don't wamme to watch Johnny arson with you?"

  ***

  Banion's was a bar up in Yonkers where Tommy and Chubby liked to hang out. It was long and dark with yellow lights and wood paneling. Banion was the bartender as well as the owner. He was paralyzed from the waist down and worked in a motorized wheelchair. Behind the bar was a three-foot-high platform with a ramp at the end so Banion could be eye level with all his customers. He knew the De Coco brothers from the time he was a construction electrician with them and they were all working on Freedomland back in 1957. In 1960, a steel beam fell across his back when he was working on the Albert Einstein Medical Center. Disability paid for the bar.

  ***

  Tommy let Chubby off in the parking lot and sat in the car for a half-hour smoking cigarettes.

  "Then I had this dream..." Sylvia delicately scratched her nose with a long red pinkynail. "I had this dream where this man comes to my door and gives me two jugs of wine..."

  In the almost brown, subdued light of the bar Chubby looked interested. He looked sincere.

  "...and I went to this old Jewish lady in my building, and you know, I told her the dream because she knows about things like that and the old lady asks me if I got children and I said yeah I got two boys in Vietnam and then she said the man in the dream was God and the two jugs of wine were my boys and God was giving them back to me safe and sound from Vietnam."

  Chubby smiled, motioned for another seventy-seven for the lady, rested his hand on hers and looked into her eyes. She squeezed his hand. He was in.

  "An' your boys are awright, right?"

  Sylvia started weeping into a pastel Kleenex. "Larry died three days later."

  "Aw shit! Hey that's terrible!" Looking at the bar mirror he saw Tommy finally walk in. Chubby caressed her veiny fingers and cursed himself silently. "The other one's O.K. though, right?"

  She blew her nose and sneered. "He comes back and in two weeks he marries a Puerto Rican."

  "Aw Jesus!" Chubby said with real feeling.

  "She'll break his heart. They don't know from faithfulness, those animals. All they know is this." She shot her middle finger through a ring of her thumb and forefinger moving it back and forth rapidly.

  Tommy sat at the far end of the bar. His eyes met Chubby's in the mirror. They both stifled laughs.

  "He'll come crawling back to me"—her face turned ugly—"but I won't be there."

  Chubby took in her jugs again. Nice big hangers. Come in Rangoon. She was about fifty he figured. Frosted orange hair. Wrinkle cream. He wanted to change the subject.

  "So now you live alone, hah?" He extended a lighter under her unlit cigarette, caught Tommy's eye again and smiled.

  "Just me and Shaintze."

  "Ha?"

  "Shaintze my Siamese."

  "Oh, haha."

  "Do you like cats?"

  "Oh yeah, haha, I love 'em to death."

  "Nat loved cats too."

  "Your husband?"

  "He died two years ago. He died of cancer," she said, raising her chin and tapping her throat. "Right here."

  Chubby automatically swallowed and felt a half-dozen pain
ful lumps as the saliva went down his gullet.

  "They put in a rubber tube," she said, still tapping.

  "He's prob'ly happier where he is now," he offered.

  "How do you know?" she asked. She cupped his hand between her palms and lowered her head to light another cigarette, forgetting the just-lit one in the ashtray. The dry warmth of her fingers gave him a hard-on. He motioned to Banion for another drink.

  "Cancer's a real bitch," he said.

  "My whole family had cancer," she said. "My father had lung cancer, my mother had ovary cancer, my sister had stomach cancer." She counted off on her fingers. "And me..." She stopped counting and stared at him. "I got cancer of the rectum."

  Chubby closed his eyes and felt himself falling off the barstool. He saw the walls rushing past him and the floor zooming up into his face. When he opened his eyes a second later he was still sitting on the barstool, his cigarette between his fingers. Pearls of sweat formed at his hairline.

  "They just keep cuttin' and cuttin' and cuttin'..." Sylvia droned on.

  Chubby jumped as he heard the whine of Banion's wheelchair. Sylvia touched Chubby's hand. He jerked away from her touch. He looked into the mirror for Tommy. The bar was deserted. He jumped off his stool and looked around frantically. Sylvia's face managed to look sharp and cold in the soft shadowy light. "Motherfuckin' bastard!" Chubby clenched his teeth, looking for his brother.

  "It's not contagious," Sylvia said in a weak yet bitter voice not even directed at Chubby.

  Chubby kicked open the "Gents" door and saw Tommy doubled over with laughter by the urinal. Tommy tried to whinny but he was laughing too hard. Chubby took a swing at him. Tommy caught Chubby's fist with his own big hands but the force of the punch knocked him down anyhow.

  Tommy kept laughing. "You—you shoulda seen your face." He pointed at Chubby.

  Chubby pulled back his leg to kick him in the ribs. Chubby's skin was gray and his hands were trembling. Tommy saw the kick coming and rolled away. Chubby suddenly smiled. The color came back to his face and he turned, moving swiftly into a stall, and emerged two seconds later with two sopping-wet balls of toilet paper that he threw at Tommy, hitting him in the face with one and in the crotch with the other. Tommy jumped up and ran into the other stall. Chubby ran back into the first stall. In less than a minute they were laughing and yelling, having a toilet paper war, covering themselves and the walls with gray clots of wet tissue until they were both exhausted. Laughing weakly and panting, they staggered from the bathroom, through the bar, ignoring Sylvia, who stared rigidly at her hands, and out into the street.

  ***

  "Did you really ball her, Tommy?" Tommy cruised slowly down Central Avenue, Chubby sprawled in the shotgun seat.

  "Nah." Tommy popped a piece of Dentyne that was on the dashboard into his mouth. "I was talkin' to her Friday night. She tol' me like she tol' you. I almost fell through the floor." Tommy never took his eyes from the road. Chubby stared at the swaying brown-beaded rosary knotted and dangling from Tommy's mirror.

  "She ain't never gonna get picked up tellin' guys that shit about herself." Chubby yawned.

  "Banion's is startin' to give me the creeps, with Sylvia there startin' to hang aroun' an' Banion in his goddamn wheelchair," Tommy said.

  "Maybe we should find some new place."

  "How about this here?" Tommy slowed the car as they approached a low, rambling roadside discotheque—the 88 Club. More than a hundred cars were parked across the road. Tommy pulled the car over by the parking lot on the shoulder of Central Avenue. Six teen-age girls came out along with a blast of live rock and roll music. The girls trotted across Central Avenue to the parking lot.

  "Oh Jesus, look a' that one!" Chubby gawked.

  "Hey, Miss! Hey, Miss!" Tommy yelled out the car window. All six of them turned their heads.

  "You need a ride?" Chubby leaned out his side.

  They kept walking.

  "Jesus Christ, look a' that one." Tommy pointed to the tallest one, who had a skirt up to her crotch. "I'd eat a mile a shit if it led to her asshole."

  The girls piled into a Mustang twenty feet in front of Tommy's car. When the tall one bent over to crawl into the back, her skirt hiked up, flashing flowered panties in Tommy and Chubby's direction. Chubby grabbed Tommy's arm. Tommy flicked his brights on and off. One of the girls shot them the finger as the Mustang backed out onto Central Avenue. Chubby jumped from the car, whipped out his cock and started running after them, yelling and laughing.

  "Looks like a prick, only smaller!" one of the girls shouted out the window as the driver shifted into forward, burning rubber.

  Chubby stood on the shoulder of the road wiggling his dick in the wind, laughing and shouting. More kids left the 88 Club. Tommy started the car, drove to Chubby and pulled him inside.

  "Oh, Tommy, that one likes me!" Chubby was out of breath. "Le's follow 'em!"

  "Nah, c'mon, they're kids." Tommy pulled onto the road.

  Chubby tried to catch his breath.

  "You wanna get pneumonia?" Tommy asked.

  "Hah?"

  Tommy looked over at Chubby's crotch. Chubby looked down. His dick was still hanging out.

  "Shee!" Chubby arched himself, lifting his ass out of the seat, and shoved his dick back in. "That's a nice place there, that 88 Club." Chubby zipped up his fly.

  "Too young," Tommy said. "That's for Stony, not us."

  "Stony," Chubby chuckled. "He gettin' any a this?" he asked, making a loose fist and shaking it like he was going to roll dice.

  "What, a' you kiddin'?" Tommy laughed. "He got that hot little girlfriend a his."

  "That little blonde with the big tits?"

  "Cheri," Tommy said.

  "I wouldn't mind a piece a that myself," Chubby said.

  "Hey, don' tell Stony that, he'll tear ya heart out."

  "He got it bad, hah?" Chubby lit a cigarette.

  "I think she cheats on him too." They passed an open diner. "You hungry?"

  "Nah. So she's a little tramp, hah?" Chubby nodded sadly. "Poor fuckin' Stony. I love that kid. He deserves the best."

  Tommy cruised through a red light on the deserted road, and turned left up a hill into an expensive residential section. "Every time I go through here," Tommy said, maneuvering the car on narrow winding curves and peering at the darkened brick and stone mansions, "every time I go through here I feel like a fuckin' kid, you know? I feel like sayin'...when I grow up this is where I'm gonna live... an' then I remember I'm fuckin' forty-five an' I ain't never gonna live here. I live in fuckin' Co-op City an' that's straight life." He stopped the car in front of a fortresslike house with a widow's walk and lead castings on octagonal windows. "Here, this is my fuckin' favorite." Tommy winced. "I would give anything to live here."

  "Hey, you know what kinda land taxes this guy must pay?" Chubby said.

  "When you got a place like this you don' fucking care about no land taxes."

  "Bullshit. These guys are all prob'ly up to their asses in mortgages." Chubby flicked his cigarette out the window.

  Tommy started driving again.

  "I dunno." Chubby squinted. "I like Co-op City, no hassles, no utilities, you got a Chinese restaurant right there, air conditioning in every room, you can take yogi classes in the community center, no niggers."

  "You got plenty a niggers."

  "Yeah, but they're the ones that moved outta the old neighborhood because of the niggers movin' in, they're almost like us."

  Tommy turned onto the Parkway going to the Bronx. "You know, I bet Stony's gonna have a house like that one back there," he said, flooring the accelerator on the deserted, unlit Parkway. "If he comes in the local in July, you know? He puts in his four years apprenticing he'll be... lessee twenty-two when he turns journeyman, right? Four years from now journeyman's base'll be up to ten an hour I'll figure... so that's like maybe... with time-and-a-half after twenty-five hours... it'll come to... I dunno, fuck, let's say twenty grand a year, O.K.? I give him
two years he'll be straw boss 'cause he is one smart bastard that kid. So I figure at twenty-four, he'll, say twenty-five, he'll be makin' twenty-five grand. Another five years he'll be a goddamn foreman pullin' down forty a year like Artie Di Falco. So figure when he's thirty I come an' visit my son in fuckin' Scarsdale, New York."

  "I thought he was gonna college?"

  "Nah. He got into this dipshit school in Louisiana. Cracker State or somethin'. He'll go into the union. He don't need college. What'll he do? He'll fuck aroun' down there four years, then get a job jerkin' off a pencil for eight grand?" Tommy turned on his brights. "He's too smart to go to college. He knows where the action is."

  2

  9:30 FRIDAY NIGHT, Stony stood bathed in the soft red light of D'Artagnan's, leaning against the bar. The walls were white stucco with crosshatched beams of dark wood. Over his head was a black-light poster of a voluptuous nude chick with an enormous Afro standing spread-legged in a jungle clearing. Her eyes, nipples, the lush vegetation around her and the legend "Lilith" gave off a sinister phosphorescent gleam.

  Stony was waiting. Every once in a while he glanced at the tables to his right. Three guys sat there checking out the scene. One of them, Mott, kept staring at Stony. When Stony looked over that way, he would lock eyes with Mott for a second, then they would both feign disinterest and look away. Stony kept clenching and unclenching his fists. His gut was rippling. He was chain-smoking and chugging seventy-sevens. The slick mixed crowd of whites, blacks and PRs shook the floor to Al Green's "Love and Happiness." Stony heard the music as if it was three rooms down. At the end of the song, Butler staggered off the floor, his silky flowered shirt sopping wet. He stood beside Stony, wiping away a bead of sweat from the tip of his nose. "Mother- fuck!" He gasped and collapsed hunched over the bar. "If that bitch can hump half as good as she can bump..." Stony ignored him, staring grimly at Mott. Butler looked at him. "You hear what I say?"

  "Huh?" Stony turned as if just noticing Butler's presence. Butler looked over at Mott. He punched Stony in the arm. "Hey! You gonna do a number tonight or what?"