Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  At nine fifty they came out into the crowds of street whores in short imitation fur jackets and fake leather boots and pimps in big hats hanging around pinball machines in games arcades. Maximo led her to 43rd Street to the New York Times building. Its editors sit upstairs and debate American policy toward Namibia, while on the street in front of the building a pimp cuts his whore’s cheek because she held out twenty dollars. At the Times on this night, there was a crowd of young men and women pushing excitedly through the revolving doors and into a lobby that was a tangle of young people, many of whom were waving to a battery of lights set up for television cameras.

  “What is this?” Nicki said.

  Distaste showed on Maximo’s lips. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They went back to Broadway and 42nd and stepped into a Nedick’s, which was on the corner with the newsstand. They sat at the empty end of the counter and had coffee.

  “Tell me what we’re supposed to be doing here,” Nicki said.

  “You’ll see,” Maximo said.

  Two pimps came in and sat alongside them. “Got his hands cut all up,” one of them said, “just like he was out picking up old garbage cans.”

  “Teach him to behave,” the other said.

  Maximo discarded the conversation as it was being held. He kept watching the newsstand outside. At a few minutes after ten, a Times truck pulled up and the door was pulled back and the driver’s helper carried out two bundles of papers. The helper had to push through jostlers and whores to drop the papers on the newsstand.

  The coffee cup in Maximo’s hand came down, and he pushed change across the counter and took Nicki by the hand and led her out to the newsstand. The dealer was cutting the wires on the papers and arranging them to sell. The Times was placed alongside the Daily News on one side, and on the other, a magazine whose title was Girls! Girls! Girls! Maximo picked up a paper. He stepped into the light coming from the Nedick’s stand and flipped the paper to the first page of the second section. He looked at the index and then quickly, rattling the pages, went through the paper, stopped, eyes scanning rapidly, then riveting on a story.

  “Here you are,” he said, handing the folded paper to Nicki. His finger tapped a story. Nicki read it. The story said simply that the results of the State Bar Examination had been released. Underneath, in agate type, was a long list of names. Nicki’s eyes raced down to the E’s. “Escobar, Maximo, 252 Pinto Avenue, the Bronx.”

  Her body told her to throw her arms around his neck, grab the back of his hair, press herself against him, kiss him in front of everybody on the street and then scream to the night sky. She remained motionless while continuing to study the newspaper. She had been raised, as had all of her blood for all of the year they had been present on the crust of the earth, to conceal emotion as if it were a wound in the middle of a fight. A stranger should know! Yet this time there was so much wonder and craving inside her that only the most pain-causing effort kept the feeling private, prevented a shriek from leaving her mouth. With his eyes, smile, beard, his wonderful sloping neck, he had gone out and done something that nobody she ever knew could do. Look at the paper and see how smart he is. A movie star who is a genius. Oh, am I falling in love with him? Stop that. You can’t even think of things like that. A Puerto Rican!

  Maximo brushed against her. He had a Latin roar inside him, a crowd in the sun in the stands, but he could not afford to release any of this while he stood with this strange woman, a woman who did not feel enough to put her arms around him. To protect himself against this woman, Maximo concentrated on maintaining a stolid face. He started to walk into Nedick’s ahead of her.

  “Come back here,” she said.

  She stood with her head turned, the cheek waiting to be kissed.

  Maximo walked up to her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “That’s very good,” she said.

  “Is that all?” he said.

  “I want a cup of coffee and then I have to go home,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “I told you today when you called me.”

  “That was before this,” he said, taking the paper from her.

  “Well, I didn’t know then. And all I know now is I have to be home.”

  “Call.”

  “I can’t.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “Then I’ll get you to the bus.”

  “I said I’d have a cup of coffee.”

  Maximo shook his head. “No, I’ll get you to the bus.”

  She started down the street with him in silence. They had gone four or five doorways like this when she decided that she was the one who had to start the talk.

  “The other people we saw waiting at the newspaper office, were they there for this?” she said, indicating the paper under his arm.

  “I guess so.”

  “Did they want this for a souvenir or is this how you find out if you pass?”

  “Find out.”

  “How much sooner did they see the paper than you did?”

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes. Standing there like beggars. If this is how they act now, imagine what they’re willing to do for money on a case.”

  “But that’s going to be their business,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Stealing money.”

  “That’s not what I want.” he said.

  “What else is there but money?”

  “Accomplishing something.”

  “A big diamond, that’s a real accomplishment.”

  “What about a big help to people?”

  “I like possessions. They don’t bother you.”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong man.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  She told herself again that she had to remain in one universe at a time. He’s not money, she reminded herself, he’s a movie star. Lawyer. The only lawyers she ever met were Jews, and she never had known anybody who could compete with Jews when it came to books. Yet, here was Maximo, a marvelous savage in bed, just like the Puerto Ricans are supposed to be, and he still could get up and sit down at a desk like he was a Jew. Nicki found this thought stunning. She looked at him and wanted to throw her arms around him.

  They walked down 42nd Street toward the terminal for the New Jersey buses, which was at the end of the street. Maximo had one hand on Nicki’s elbow, protectively, for they were passing clusters of winos and doorway loungers. The newspaper was folded under the other arm. At the end of the block they stood in front of a peep show that had a twirling red light over the entrance. He walked over to a trashcan to throw the paper away.

  “Give me that,” Nicki said. She grabbed for the paper.

  “You won’t come home with me?” Maximo said.

  “I can’t,” she said. The avenue was filled with yellow cabs. Wave your arm for one, she told herself, and go to the Bronx with him in a cab for once. She could feel herself with him in his bed. Go ahead, hold up a hand and wave, she told herself. Get in a cab with him and never come back.

  She held out her cheek again. “Kiss me goodbye.”

  “I’ll walk you to the bus.”

  “So half of Jersey could see me with you? They’d all swear I picked you up at the bus terminal. Kiss.”

  “Forget it,” Maximo said. “Go home.”

  He held the paper up to the red light from the peep show. “I guess we’ve seen enough of this, then.” He dropped the paper in the trashcan, where it sat with dented soda cans and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes. “So long,” Maximo said.

  That’s a nice baby, she thought, watching him disappear, feeling the ache in her gut. I love you today.

  She turned and walked across Eighth Avenue toward the bus terminal and Maximo walked up 42nd Street toward the subway. When Nicki crossed the avenue and got in front of the bus terminal, she stopped and lit a cigarette. On the second inhale, she walked back across Eighth Avenue and came past pimps and junkies and into the twirling light and the blare of music for blacks and, nose crinkled ag
ainst the slime she was certain she had to touch, she held her hand out and walked up to the trashcan, in which there now was no New York Times newspaper.

  “Why that son of a bitch,” she said. She saw Maximo no-where on the street, but as she walked back to the bus terminal she now felt pleased that she had it on him, for he most certainly had doubled back and grabbed the paper, and at the same time there was this tenderness deep inside her as she thought of Maximo standing in the subway train and looking at his name in the paper.

  At the bus terminal, Nicki bought a Times and turned it to the page and looked at it during the bus ride home.

  Oh, what’s to do about you? she said to herself.

  In the morning, when Nicki’s mother came into the room to wake her up, the mother said, “What the hell is this?” The mother poked the copy of the newspaper that was on a chair.

  “I bought it for the ride home,” Nicki said.

  “What’s in it?” the mother said, apprehension causing her voice to rise. “Your father’s upstairs, so it can’t be anybody here.”

  “Nothing.”

  “How could it be nothing? You don’t buy a paper unless there’s something you got to know about.”

  “It’s nothing, Ma.”

  “This new boyfriend of yours, he got himself in some big bust that made the papers?”

  “Ma.”

  “What’d he do, shoot somebody?”

  “Ma.”

  “Well, he must’ve done something big to make the newspaper. This here newspaper don’t print a lot of cheap crime. When they got you on something big you get in this newspaper. Is it drugs?”

  “Ma, it’s nothing.”

  “A swindler? A conspiracy. That’s a bad charge. Everybody gets sent away on conspiracy.”

  “I promise you there’s nothing,” Nicki said.

  “I’ll bet,” the mother said.

  When the mother left, Nicki got out of bed and looked at the paper again. “Escobar, Maximo.” She brought the paper to her mouth and kissed it. Suddenly, she shook her head. That was yesterday, baby, she said to herself. Today is different. Today I don’t know what’s going to be.

  26

  IT WAS A FRIDAY AND with the office open until 9:00 P.M., Maximo went to the San Juan coffee shop for dinner and then came back and saw people. The first was a slender man of twenty, who explained that he was a transsexual. As a girl of seventeen, the transsexual had been married to an impotent old man and the transsexual left him and went for an operation to change into a man.

  “How did you get the money to go to Sweden for an operation like that?” Maximo said.

  “I didn’t go to Sweden. I went to Johns Hopkins. Hardly had the carfare to Baltimore.”

  “And they did it there?”

  “Of course. I told you. I’m a transsexual, not a transvestite. I was born with two sets of organs. I had a vagina and then I had my prick tied up in my intestines.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “Well, I got married last year to this dirty bitch who’s running around on me. She says my prick is no good even if it did come from my intestines.”

  “Did you obtain a legal divorce from the first marriage?”

  “I walk out on that useless old man, I never look back.”

  “You’re telling me that you never went to court?”

  “Never.”

  “If you’re telling me the truth, then it makes the case easy. You are still legally married to the man. Therefore, this marriage you now have to the young woman is not legal. You don’t have to divorce her. It’s the old man that you have to divorce.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Get me all your papers, the marriage license, something to prove that you earn less than five thousand dollars a year and be back here on Monday.”

  When the transsexual left, Maximo was depressed. I didn’t come to work for marginal concerns, he told himself. He even thought, for the first time, of leaving the job.

  A tall woman with huge lips and a left eye that was reduced to a slit by a bulging, red-black lump, walked into his office.

  “You the lawyer?” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” Maximo said.

  “That’s right, you are.”

  The woman had on a black cap, which she took off to show thick bandages wrapped around her head.

  “We tried having a meeting two weeks ago and this is what happened,” she said. “They sent those rotten kids in here beatin’ on us with baseball bats.”

  “They won’t do that again,” Maximo said.

  “I know they won’t,” the woman said. She reached for an old handbag that was on the table, opened it and pulled out a nickel-plated .25.

  Maximo pretended not to notice the gun and sat down at the table. The woman was from the home-aid program, a program for poverty areas, which hired neighborhood women to care for those who, by age or infirmity, were unable to care for themselves in the housing project. Maximo had helped work on the case for the last two months. A poverty community corporation, run by a man named Anders, received the government grants and hired and paid the workers, women such as this one. They were paid two-fifty an hour by Anders, and research by Maximo showed that Anders was reimbursed by Medicare at the rate of four dollars and fifty cents an hour for each worker. Administrative expenses, Anders claimed, when the women complained individually.

  Maximo opened a manila envelope and took out records and papers pertaining to the program. As he looked at the papers, his level of annoyance rose. Anders, running the community corporation, was making a profit center out of the women home-aid workers. In doing this he merely was following what every landlord in New York did: charge tenants so much for maintenance and cleaning people that a clear profit was made off the back of every porter and scrubwoman. A midtown landlord, whose last Cadillac came from the brows of forty porters, would, upon inspecting the books of the poverty organization, scream that the director, Anders, be placed in leg irons. Trouble was, Maximo thought, Anders was not only taking money from his own people, he also was taking it from the federal government. Yet Maximo knew that if this woman were given her money, she would be the first to demand that Anders be given a medal for stealing from the federal government.

  “We’re having a meeting on Sunday night,” she said.

  “I’ll see you there,” Maximo said.

  “Will the other woman be there too?”

  “Haydee,” Maximo said.

  “That’s the one. She’s good.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Nobody talked as nice to us as you people did.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “That ain’t being nice. That’s just what things is.”

  “Thank you,” Maximo said.

  When he reached Southern Boulevard, he began thinking of her. She had a new schedule for him, she had told him on the phone. Starting tomorrow, she had said, she would be around on Saturday. Through the truck fumes, through the grease smell of fish frying in stores with windows too smeared to see through, Maximo could smell her neck. At the first corner on Pinto, four men were sitting on milk crates, playing dominoes on a piece of plywood propped on a cardboard box.

  “Maximo,” one of the men said, “David’s mother is looking for you, man.”

  “What for?”

  “Trouble, man.”

  On the next corner, David’s mother stood by the phone booth, her head down, the hands fidgeting with a piece of folded paper. When she saw Maximo, she did not pick up her head.

  “What’s the matter?” Maximo said.

  A sob caused her body to move.

  “What is it?” Maximo said again.

  She handed him the folded paper. It was a birth certificate made out to David Robles, born May 19, 1964, in District Number 13, Caguas, Puerto Rico.

  “The police take him,” the mother said. She was crying, but did not lose her small, embarrassed voice.

  “For what?”

  “The poli
ce say he make a fire that killed two people.”

  “When was this?”

  “They say the fire was last night. They take him tonight. He is only eleven. The police say he is fourteen. They say he is a man.”

  “Did you get a lawyer?” Maximo asked her.

  Her wet face turned away in embarrassment. You.

  “You mean no lawyer has seen you and your boy?”

  She gave him a card from a Legal Aid attorney named Katz.

  “He saw your boy?”

  She nodded.

  “Then he’s your lawyer.”

  Maria Robles said, “He told me that he wouldn’t be in court tomorrow. He say another lawyer do that. He has to go away.”

  “I have a problem,” Maximo said. “I’m not supposed to be doing criminal work. I do things like rent and people who should get welfare. I don’t do criminal.”

  Large soft eyes directed him to the ridiculousness of what he had just said.

  “Where is he now?” he asked.

  “The police.”

  “And what did they tell you?”

  “They tell me come back to the court in the morning.”

  “In the morning I’ll try to help you,” Maximo said.

  “They put my boy on TV.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He say nothing. But they say about him.”

  “Say what?”

  “That he set a fire to kill people he hates. He does not even know the people in the fire.” She unfolded the birth certificate again. “They say he is fourteen, a man. He is not. He is only eleven.”

  Maximo said, “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. I will meet you here.”

  When he got upstairs, he pushed the dog back. Disappointed that he wouldn’t be taken for a run, the dog’s claws sounded as he sprawled on the floor. Maximo turned on the television, and at 10:00 P.M. the David Robles story led the news.