On the Brinks

by Sam Millar

  Be careful what you wish for …

  Chinese proverb

  Trust one who has gone through it. Virgil, Aeneid

  This summer, as in all previous summers, I went upstate New York, to the town of Rochester. It was always good to get out of the city for a while.

  Much of my time was spent meeting old friends and going to the many picnics – gatherings dedicated to beer-drinking.

  “How’s everything going down there?” asked Tom, a retired cop and friend.

  “Could be better …”

  “What’s the problem? You don’t seem yourself.”

  An idea had been germinating in my head for the last few months, an idea so audacious I knew I would have to tread very carefully.

  “I’ve been having problems in the casino.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  Tom looked upon me as a son. When I first arrived in America, he helped me get a place to stay. If I was short of money, he was the one I asked.

  “Those Italian pricks down in New York are trying to put the squeeze on me,” I lied. “They keep looking for more protection money.” That lie couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact was that the Italians never fucked with the Irish. They knew better.

  “I don’t like you being down there. They’re all crazy. I wish I could get you a job with me, working as a security guard at Brinks.”

  I started laughing. “That would solve all my problems. I’d rob the fucking place and open my own casino!”

  Tom looked at me strangely, and I knew I had insulted him. As a New York cop, he was highly respected, both by colleagues and by the community he served. He was an ah-shucks-Jimmy-Stewart kind of a guy, who did everything by the book.

  “It’s just the beer, Tom,” I assured him, none too convincingly.

  I had already visited the Brinks depot – Tom had taken me over for a tour when the other guards were gone for the day. I had been amazed at the lack of serious security in the place, and this was highlighted by stories of how a pizza deliveryman had simply walked straight into the place one day without being stopped. He had found the security door wide open and, to his amazement, piles of money sat unguarded in corners, waiting to be placed in the massive vaults – when the guards found time, after the baseball game! But the most glaring lapse happened whenever a guard ran out to one of the local stores, leaving the doors ajar, held with nothing sturdier than a pencil! Millions, guarded by a pencil! Their laziness had turned this transgression habitual. There was no doubt in my mind, all this money was there for the taking.

  Tom’s reaction had told me what I had wanted to know: there was no way he would go along with my mad idea. And so I quickly put it out of my head.

  For now …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Opening Doors

  There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest. For I did dream of money-bags to-night.

  Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

  General Harry Vaughan

  Upon my return, I started searching for a job. Anything would do, and I finally ending up as a doorman on affluent Park Avenue, opening doors for the rich and famous.

  Four months later and Ronnie was still in my apartment, driving my wife crazy with his daily recitals of Marcus Aurelius. I knew it was time for him to go when he borrowed the complete works of Socrates from the local library. Enough was enough.

  “Look, mate, you’re gonna have to find some place to live. I hate having to say this, but you’re driving us all nuts.”

  He only laughed, annoying me further.

  “Don’t worry, mate. I’m meeting that new partner of mine tomorrow night. You’ll be able to tell those rich wankers in Park Avenue to stick their job.”

  Two weeks later he was still sleeping on the floor of our apartment. Socrates was replaced by Homer, and my wife was threatening to go back to Belfast if I didn’t get Ronnie out of there.

  “Sorry, mate,” I said, helping him into the elevator with his sole suitcase.

  “Don’t worry, mate. I’m seeing that new partner –”

  I watched as the elevator door closed over, drowning out his self-deluding words.

  No sooner had I waved a joyful goodbye, than the phone rang. Something told me it was Ronnie, probably in the telephone box across the street, begging for one last week.

  Don’t answer it. Let it ring.

  But it wasn’t Ronnie. It was Marco, a former bouncer at the casino. He had served time in the US Army, and was a veteran from the Gulf war.

  “Listen. About that other thing …” he cryptically began.

  “Yes?”

  “No problem.”

  “Can we meet next week?” I said.

  “No problem.”

  * * *

  When I met him later in the week, he was smiling, his hand outstretched as if greeting me for the first time in years.

  “Don’t say a word in the car,” I said, a plastic grin still on my face. “It’s bugged.”

  We drove down Lake Avenue towards the beach in silence.

  When we reached the beach, I parked the car, removing a few Buds from the back seat. As soon as we were far enough away from the car, I came straight to the point.

  “How’d you like to make some serious money?”

  It was late evening, but the heat was still horrendous. Mosquitoes bit my ears as I watched calmness come to splintered waves.

  “How serious?” he asked, taking a slug of Bud.

  “Maybe a million.”

  The Bud hit the back of his throat, making him cough.

  “Are you shittin’ me?” he asked.

  I knelt on the sand and, with my finger, started to draw. Before long, I had sketched the rough layout of a bird’s-eye view of a building, a collage of rectangles and squares.

  I didn’t speak. Even when the waves slowly crept in, erasing my work, I said nothing, waiting for it to disappear.

  “Let’s go,” I said eventually, brushing the sand from my jeans.

  We walked along the beach, whispering in each others’ ears, like lovers on a first date. An old lady walked by, exercising her dog. Shaking her head with disgust, she watched us disappear behind sand dunes, as if for some sort of illicit sexual encounter.

  As it turned out, I was shitting him. It was more than a million. A hell of a lot more …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Whale Hunter

  The unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates

  Call me Ishmael.

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  It was hot and sticky when I returned to Manhattan on Sunday afternoon. Stained shirts and biting underwear. Ninety in the shade and rising. A record was in the making. They say this muggy, claustrophobic weather makes New Yorkers strange. Sometimes it makes them do strange things.

  I was feeling isolated for the first time since my arrival in the city, all those years ago. Most, if not all, the Belfast lads had returned home. The casino had been their source of income, so most had decided to get out while they still had a few bucks in their pockets. I couldn’t blame them. I would probably have followed them had it not been for the schizophrenic thoughts of breaking into the Brinks. I couldn’t help wondering if I could really get away with something so audacious, so dangerous, and live to tell the tale.

  Above me, the sun floated in a ghostly haze as I entered the narrow street, containing a conglomerate of amorphous homeless people covered in liquid shadows, their slim belongings nipping at their feet. An old, dilapidated church was now their home.

  “Yer axin’ fer trouble, pal,” a deli worker said, watching me walk towards the homeless. “Moiderin’ moither foickers, dem. Tha woist.”

  He pointed accusingly at them as he denuded a tiny runway of Juicy Fruit and popped it in his mouth. His jawbones ballooned nervously as he chewed, like Norman Bates in Psycho.

  I nodded, but otherwise ignored him. As one
who had traversed the streets of Belfast, New York and its people held little, if any, fear for me.

  The abysmal conditions of the homeless, in this the richest city in the world, never fails to shock. Their accretion is emphasised by an obscene dichotomy in which, a few streets away on Park Avenue, the affluent feed and pamper their pets sumptuously. Worlds overlapping, but rarely if ever touching.

  At one time, these homeless people were the salt of the Earth, pillars of society. Now they were the dregs, witnessed but unseen, screaming apocalyptic profanities in splenetic asperity.

  One man, his left leg truncated at the knee, was ensconced in a dilapidated wheelchair. Older than his years, his face sagged, as if the dogs of poverty and depression had stolen every bone from it, highlighting tiny dark webs etching his eyes.

  Near the end of the street, a bulging garbage bag lay gutted, a desiccated sanitary towel protruding from it like a bloody tongue panting in the heat. The stench oozing from the bag was stomach-churning to people walking past. Not me. I had encountered worse. The Blanket Protest. The abattoir.

  As I sidestepped the bag, a man covered in a Paisley-print shroud bumped me, mumbling: “Dirty my skin with bruises, punk? Ya betta kill me cuz I’m cumin’ fer ya! See? See? Whaddya hear, whaddya sssayyyyy?” He stuck out his tongue. It was carpeted in baked-bean sauce and sores.

  “Leave the man alone, Jo Jo,” said the man in the wheelchair. “He done you no harm, no way.”

  Jo Jo glared at me, then his friend, before stalking off backwards into the shadows.

  “He don’t mean no harm, really. Just suspicious of folk.”

  I didn’t know if I should say my thank yous and get out of the street as quickly as possible. Instead, I opted to put my hand in my pocket for some change.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t insult us,” said the man.

  My face reddened.

  “Sorry …”

  “No need for that either. Your face already done apologised.” He laughed, galvanising his entire body into coughs and shakes. “Don’t laugh enough. Out of practice.”

  “You don’t sound like a New Yorker,” I said.

  “Neither do you, if you don’t mind me sayin’.”

  The coughing didn’t come this time, only a smile.

  “Ah come from Tennessee, if a man can say he comes from some place. Ah write, mostly, but do can-gatherin’ to survive. You?”

  “I’m from Belfast. I used to work in a casino – when it wasn’t being shut down by the cops, that is.”

  “Well, ah learned somethin’ today. I didn’t ever know that New York had casinos. Must put that in my writin’.”

  “They’re illegal,” I explained.

  “Nothin’ wrong with that. Hell, being homeless in this city is illegal, if you were dumb enough to listen to the Mayor!” He pulled the wheelchair up to me. In his lap rested a bag of empty cans. “Belfast? That’s a tough ol’ place. All that killin’. Sheer crazy.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. There are more people killed in New York on a weekend than there are in a year in Belfast. It seems everyone creates bigger monsters so as to diminish their own.

  “Must be tough,” he repeated, wondering.

  “Not as tough as trying to survive in a wheelchair in New York,” I said.

  “Could be worse. Wheels could be gone.” He smiled, not meaning it. “Ah’m not a regular at this can-gatherin’, you know, but it’s part of a strange adventure Ah fell into since comin’ to New York City from Tennessee this last Christmas time.”

  He searched his pockets for something, found it and lit it up before inhaling it, deep down into his lungs.

  “Ah did have a better Saturday myself, on account of the eight bucks plus Ah got for the cans, and an idea came to me that same mornin’.”

  He blew a small amount of smoke into the air, as if not wanting to waste any. “Usually Ah get just enough cans for cigarettes and coffee, so Ah can set awhile inside and look over the ideas and writin’ that Ah’ve been workin’ on for going on eleven years now. In all that time, Ah’ve travelled all over America, truck-ridin’. Ah rode all across the edge of Canada on freight-trains and went painting on a ship out of Montreal that took me to Hamburg in Germany. That was when I lost my legs, on board a rusted old whaler. A message from God not to hunt His creatures without feeling His wrath.”

  I thought he was going to tell me he had lost his legs in Vietnam, and in a perverse way I thought the truth more fascinating, almost romantic. I was late now, but I no longer cared. Along the avenue, people were waving down air-conditioned cabs to avoid the oppressive air. The cabs’ skin shimmered nervously, like stranded salmon, all silvery and scaly.

  “Ah spent almost eight years in Dublin City in Ireland,” he continued, “and travelled all up and down over there, lookin’ into the folk-music traditions that together with the blues and baptist gospel singin’ was the roots of our country and rock’n’roll music. Then, living as hard and rough as I mostly did got me interested in the people at the bottom of society, and in all the strange, wanderin’ homeless ones who live on the streets of cities and out in the hobo-jungles. Living with these people and watching them has taught me many ways to survive, and a whole heck of a lot besides about society. Then my grandpappy, who half-raised me, is a reading man. He got thousands of books, all kinds, bought out of the moonshine he makes and sells. He planted some seeds got given to him by a biker club from Philadelphia. They come down every year on their ’cycles to collect the weed and bring him a two-pound sack of speed from the crack-capital.”

  Jo Jo mumbled, somewhere in the shadows. I wondered if he was searching for a knife.

  “He’s a readin’ man, my grandpappy, so Ah also have a deep interest in mechanics, electronics, science, inventions and technological innovations. He’s all but disowned me now, because of the way Ah’ve been livin’ and my areas of inquiry. He and Ah’ve had a feud goin’ on, because he never did tell me who my daddy was or how he came by me for certain. He tells me versions until Ah don’t know who to believe.”

  He inhaled once more on the butt, and it disappeared between his finger and thumb. There was a smell of skin burning in the air. It reminded me of an incident in Belfast.

  “Ah got a draft version of my book just about hammered together, usin’ a lot of songs Ah’d written, when it all got burned in a fire in west Philadelphia, October last. This, along with every other thing in the world Ah had and carried. Guitar, too. A beat-up and beautiful old guitar. That almost broke my old darn heart. Ah did go back to Tennessee then, but Ah could not stay and listen to Grandpappy tellin’ me ‘Told you so! Temptin’ fate.’ He’s retirin’, and wants me to stay there and learn ‘the mixture’ – moonshine – and tend him ’cause he’s old. Hell Ah will if he’ll last, but Ah gotta burnin’ to do my own work. Besides, he could buy himself a nice old lady nurse if he really wanted.”

  He spun the wheelchair in a semi-circle, faced the sun, then said, “Say, Ah’m sorry. Ah guess Ah just had to open up to someone. Ah can tolerate hunger; but silence has always been a mean torture for me.”

  I said nothing, fearing I would ruin the stillness of time. Even the old church seemed to be swelling in the heat, listening, casting shadows further down the street. Long gone were its begging tongues and burning candles, but somehow it still infused the imagination with vitalised, agonising angels with alibi faces, all majestically attuned to a vivid tapestry.

  “Ah know you gotta go, but Ah may as well finish what Ah started. Ah decided to take my own final challenge of this journey – to come to New York City with no money or nothin’, and see if Ah could make it through the winter and find the people that live so hard all the time, and learn their way and see what songs and ideas this gave me. Ah’ve done this now, and it was pure hell mostly, because of the attitudes of so-called normal folk and because of the hopelessness felt on the streets. Now Ah’ve emotional scars and a bunch of new songs and ideas, but Ah’ve gotta get above this condition to get
a little distance, if Ah’m to write about it or try to help these people. And Ah hope then to find a business manager so Ah can sell some of the material.”

  The silence of the street became eerily beautiful. Like a symphony performed by ghosts of fallen warriors. You could fall right into it and be carried away, forever and ever and ever.

  He had talked for an hour, but it seemed barely a minute. An hour ago I had been wrapped in self-pity; now it was gone. He was telling me, a stranger, his life story of family intrigue and dirty dealing, of the rusted hopes of life’s oppressive deepness and the unassailable belief that acuity of hindsight conquers all the dark guilt that clings stubbornly to our souls.

  I wanted to tell him of a life I once knew, of madness, brutality and death, where auricular whispers recruit the emotions, destroying them forever. I wanted to tell him what it’s like to hurt until you feel so empty that the only possible release is death, making you afraid of your own emotions.

  But before I could answer, an allegoric rain was upon us, stinging. Potholes became pregnant with it, gurgling as they choked on it. A troop of yellow cabs navigated the slick, aqueous streets, while the homeless squeezed their backs tight against the church walls, preventing most of their belongings becoming waterlogged. The cabs drenched me with their indifference for I, also, had become invisible, a nothing.

  Overhead, a tribe of starlings flew for shelter, screaming like their cousins in Long Kesh.

  I turned to say goodbye, but he was gone – they all were.

  “Hey!” shouted the deli worker, wiping his massive hands on a powdered apron. “Ya really shouldn’t be down here on yer own. Dem scum moither foickers wud cut yer throat and think nothin’ of it. Go on, now! I’ll watch yer back.”

  For respite, I quickly entered the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, and began browsing through its army of new and used books.

  No sooner had I touched a book titled Silver’s Goldmine, than latent memories flooded back to me. Memories as potent as perfume on a lover’s skin. I thought of JCB, his head banging off a cave, pounded by cavemen with clubs. It was selfish, I know, but I was glad I was here – no longer there.