Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “On the same night, Jose Torres got his chin broke and I got my prick broke,” the chubby guy said.

  The woman behind the bar shrieked. She bent over and when she straightened up, she took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them to everybody at the bar before she took one for herself. Maximo walked over to the wall, where there was a huge calendar from Cutti’s Superette, East 138th Street. The calendar girl wore great breasts and no clothes.

  “How would you like to have a drink right now in this bar with this girl?” Angel called to Maximo.

  “Love to,” Maximo said absently. He was staring at the girl on the calendar, but his eyes went beyond the white thighs and breasts and he saw Nicki. The vision produced an ache inside him that he did not know how to deal with. He had been lonely for a couple of years among the strangers at school, but it was a longing for his mother and the place where he lived, the street and the people he was used to seeing on it, the atmosphere that caused him to be whatever it was that he was. This thing that he had in him now was different: the center of his body had turned into a hot, lonely Sunday afternoon. There was no reason for it, he told himself. Nobody has to live like this. It was a situation that required defiance, not compliance. If he had trespassed on all the ancient customs to gather this woman into his arms in the first place, then why should he now force his heart to live unnaturally, to wander in search of pity because that is the way others say that it is supposed to be done?

  “What’s the matter, man?” one of them at the bar said.

  “Woman,” the barmaid said.

  At the end of the bar, El Viejo read the Spanish paper aloud to himself. “This is a very sad thing,” he said.

  “What?” Maximo asked him.

  “This man Ernesto in the projects on Alexander Avenue.”

  “What did he do?” Maximo asked.

  “He had this woman who was married. He came over to her house when her husband went away. Now Ernesto is in the house and the husband comes back. The husband hits on the door. The wife says he can’t come in. The husband says, ‘What is this, I can’t come in my own house?’ Ernesto hides in the closet and the woman opens the door for her husband. The husband says, ‘I can feel someone is here in my house.’ The husband starts walking through the house and Ernesto gets so afraid that he opens the door of the closet where he is and he shoots the husband. Bang! Dead.”

  “That’s no good,” Maximo said.

  “It is wrong,” El Viejo said. “The woman is supposed to be dead, not the husband. Ernesto should have come out of the closet and shot the woman and made her husband happy.”

  Maximo looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. No, he said to himself, that’s exactly what I’ve lived my life to be against. It’s thousands of years old and thousands of years crazy. Nobody hurts anybody, if you live properly, he said to himself. He saw Nicki with her head in the stars and he started climbing toward her. He loved her and he knew that she loved him. Why live in desolation, live in envy, when all you have to do is walk out of this place and call her on the phone, call her at her own house, forget this system of calling Angela. Let me call her at her own house and tell her that I am in love with her and that I am going to marry her and live with her and have children with her. Let me tell this to her and let her hear it and there is no way that she will say no to me. I am going to go out and call her and marry her, call all night and call all day. Get her on the phone and then into my arms for the rest of my life.

  He pushed the rum away, picked up his bar-wet money and went out the heavy metal door and onto the subway platform, which now in the night was completely empty. He found he had only quarters. He walked the couple of steps to the change booth and put a wet dollar on the counter. When the clerk kept his head down counting change, Maximo became irritated. He could hear no train coming; the only sound in the station was someone coming off the staircase.

  “Change, please,” Maximo said.

  “How many tokens?” the clerk said, without looking up.

  “Just change of a dollar, in dimes, please,” Maximo said.

  The clerk looked up, aggravated. He took the wet dollar bill and flicked the dimes back. Maximo took the dimes and, head down, started for the phone. He almost bumped into the man who had just come from the stairs, but he rolled his body away from the man and was walking up to the phone, a dime in his hand, Nicki’s voice in his ear, when the man took a step after Maximo and the man’s hand rose and put a black .22 Magnum Derringer behind Maximo’s right ear and pulled the trigger twice. Maximo pitched onto his face.

  The subway clerk looked up, but now Corky had wheeled, stuffed the gun into his pocket and had his head down and the brim of his hat well over the eyes and the clerk could see none of his face. Corky went up the stairs, stepped out into the car at the curb, which took off immediately, made a turn and headed for the traffic down on the Bruckner Expressway.

  “You could say one thing about us,” Corky said. “It took a long time maybe. The law gets Teenager, but that don’t stop us. We still had a show them we bite too. Don’t matter who as long as they know it’s from us.”

  “He got no complaints about us today,” the thug driving said.

  “I’m on the subway steps almost three hours waiting for the guy to come out,” Corky said.

  As the car blended in with the expressway traffic, Corky sat back and slapped the Derringer. “This is a nice piece.”

  “When I got it off Jackie he told me, don’t worry, it gives the best bang for a job like this.”

  “He’s not kidding. You should’ve seen it. The back of the guy’s head turned into tomato soup,” Corky said.

  Myles was home in his kitchen, throwing away the last can of beer of the night, when the phone rang. Martin, chuckling, said, “Do you know that Spic that give you all the abuse? The little guy with Teenager?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They just whacked his brains out on the subway station, 138th Street.”

  “Did they really,” Myles said. “Oh, what a shame.”

  “Yeah, I just thought I’d let you know so you could cry,” Martin said. “He was so innocent he got killed in a dope war.”

  “I’ll bet he forgot to ask them if they had a warrant,” Myles said.

  They both laughed and Myles hung up and went into the refrigerator for another beer.

  It was after midnight when Nicki finished straightening up the room. She had two things on the bed. The Times and two clean, fluffy folded orange towels. She took the Times and put it under the shoeboxes. Staring at the towels she imagined using one of them gently to rub the head of a baby she had just bathed. Sure she could. The towel was soft enough for any baby. Rub him dry, ruffle the hair with the towel. Make him laugh. Maximo’s baby. Oh, you’re crazy. No, I’m not. Maximo’s baby. Suddenly, she was unashamed. Her body shivered at the idea. She looked around the lovely, neat room and could see only its vacantness, that she was standing here isolated and desolate, as she would be for all the days she remained in it.

  “Are you all right?” Her father was not smoking a cigar so she had no warning of his arrival. He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

  “I don’t think so,” Nicki said.

  “Of course you’re not,” he said. “This is a terrible thing. My poor little girl has to leave a husband like this.”

  “It’s no fun,” she said.

  “But at least you’re home,” he said. He began to reach into his shirt pocket for a cigar. The cellophane crackled as his hands fumbled to get it off. Nicki had never seen him this nervous before.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to stay here,” she said.

  “Where would you go?” he said. The fingers now were unable to deal with the cigar and he put it back in his shirt pocket.

  “I have someone I love,” she told him.

  “You’re not supposed to do that to a husband just home from jail,” her father said.

  Nicki looked steadily at him. His eyes
looked down, then to the sides. The words came off troubled lips. The man supposed to spread fear stood in alarm in the room of his daughter and did not know how to protect himself.

  “I’ve got a life,” Nicki said.

  “Sure you have. Nobody ever said my baby don’t have a life.”

  “And I intend to live it.”

  “Well, you mean you’re leaving here too?”

  “I think so. I told you I love somebody. I want to go with him. I want to marry him.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re supposed to stay here,” he said. She noticed his eyes glistening.

  “I’m supposed to do what I want to do.”

  “That’s right. That’s my baby. You could do whatever you want.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy, but that’s what it’s going to be.”

  “But you can’t leave right now,” he said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Daddy. Let’s not—”

  “You got to have something to eat first. Lasagna. I got lasagna inside. I’ll go heat it up. You got a bad thing happening to you. You got to eat something. Let me get my little girl something to eat.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “But you’ll eat it?”

  “I don’t know. If I come out and eat it, I come out and eat it. I feel like being alone.”

  “I’ll go get it ready,” he said. “You’ll come eat with your father.”

  As he went down the hallway, she picked up the orange towels and put them on her bureau. She would have these in her arms when she went back to Maximo. She felt in her bag for the bankbook. In doing so, her fingers came upon a joint. She picked up the matches and went into the bathroom. As she walked, she felt the corn leaves brushing off her arms. She was walking with Maximo through a cornfield. In the bathroom, she opened the window and lit the joint. She blew the smoke out the window and looked out at the night. She wished there were somebody who could clean the house for her husband. The poor guy was in jail for so long, he deserves a clean house. As she smoked, the pot made her sleepy. She was surprised that the pot was any good. She began to think of the day she and her husband rode the speedboat in Long Island Sound. The sun was bright and caused the white spray to glisten like thousands of rich stones. She thought that she was living in freedom that day, riding through the water in the boat. Then right after it, he was gone and here was Maximo. I love Maximo, she said to herself. I am going to marry Maximo. She could not believe that she was saying this, and for a moment she thought it was the pot, but then she reminded herself that, no, this thought had been with her maybe from the day she first saw him.

  Say the truth: you always loved him, even if you didn’t admit it, even if you were afraid to. Afraid of what? I spent my life worrying about my father and now he’s heating lasagna so I don’t walk out tonight.

  She thought of Maximo. She would call him tomorrow morning. No, she would punish him and wait until the next day before she spoke to him. Spoke to him and then brought him his clean towels and herself. After all, first she had to punish him because she had told him not to see Teenager and he had broken his word to her. It didn’t matter why. He had told her he would do something and he did not. In one more day after tomorrow I will live with Maximo, she told herself. She blew more smoke into the night air, took the last drag, flicked the joint out the window and went to bed.

  She fell asleep immediately. She never heard her father calling to her to come and eat the food he had prepared. She dreamed of Maximo and all the tomorrows.

  A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

  Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.

  Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

  In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.

  In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.

  Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.

  Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.

  Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.

  Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.

  Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.

  Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

  Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.

  Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.

  Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).

  Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.

  Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.

  Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.

  The Breslin family in 1989.

  Breslin with columnis
ts David Anderson (left) and Murray Kempton (right) at a book party for Damon Runyon: A Life in New York City, 1991.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to use the following:

  MANANA by Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee, © 1948 Criterion Music Corp. © renewed 1976 Criterion Music Corp. USED BY PERMISSION.

  Fermata International Melodies, Inc.: Excerpt from “Toro Mata.” Spanish lyrics and music by Carlos Soto De La Colina. Copyright © 1975 by Consorcio De Editoras Musicales Peruanas S.A., Lima, Peru. All rights for U.S.A. and Canada assigned to Fermata International Melodies, Inc., 6290 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California 90028.

  copyright © 1982 by Rodene Enterprises, Inc. and Team C Associates

  cover design by Mimi Bark

  978-1-4532-4537-8

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