by Frank Conroy
There were quiet times, hot days when the streets were almost empty. I had a spot just behind the cab of the truck where I could sit in the shade and read, or put my chin in my hands and watch the slow, dreamlike movement around us. Jean stood at the end of the truck, one foot on the curb, his elbow on an empty apple box, smoking lazily and watching the girls. He wore sport shirts designed to hang outside the trousers, and huaraches without socks. “Now, there is a nice behind,” he’d say, nodding at a girl retreating down the avenue. It wasn’t lechery. He’d say it in much the same tone as a man commenting on the pleasing lines of a custom-made car or the gait of a thoroughbred race horse. He knew I was too young to appreciate behinds. Faces moved me, and occasionally a good pair of breasts, but the finer distinctions were beyond me.
One day a policeman stopped in front of us.
“You own this truck?”
“Yes,” Jean answered politely. He was terrified of cops.
“It’s against the law to stay in one place for more than an hour. You’re supposed to keep moving.”
“Ahh ... yes.” Jean stalled, not knowing what to say. “I’m sorry, Officer, I didn’t realize that law was enforced.”
The cop looked at him for a moment, suddenly suspicious of his good diction and bearing. He pointed his stick at me. “Who’s that?”
“He’s my boy,” Jean said. “My son.”
I looked at him quickly. He had never before called me his son. It felt slightly odd.
“You got working papers?” the cop asked me.
I shook my head.
Turning back to Jean, he said, “I can see you just started this racket so I’ll give you a break this time. You better talk to the guys down at the market. They’ll tell you what to do.”
Next morning, waiting at a coffee stand until we could load up, we learned the procedure from an old Italian. “You take this,” he said, slapping a dollar bill flat on the counter. “Make a small turn like this.” He rolled one corner very tightly. “Roll ‘em up.” His hand slipped forward over the counter. “And she look like this.” He held up the dollar bill, now rolled into a thin tube no thicker than a sipping straw and totally unrecognizable. “Stick ’em in corner box, front row. Stick ’em straight up, anh?” He paused, holding the tube at eye level. “Cop snitch it fast.” He brought his other hand across and plucked the bill. “Son of a bitch!”
When we got back to our corner I stayed in the cab for a moment and prepared a bill as the Italian had instructed. After two or three tries I made a particularly nice one, very thin, with almost no green showing, and took it out to Jean. “Okay,” he said, sticking in the appropriate box. “I guess this is what he meant.”
“Really clever,” I said, watching it being put in place. “Even if you noticed it you’d never be able to tell what it was.”
The cop appeared late that afternoon. No one had noticed the bill, not even an old lady who almost knocked it over reaching for some peaches. I saw him come around the corner, swinging his stick, and alerted Jean.
“Don’t watch him,” Jean said, and stepped to the back of the truck to sort paper bags.
I couldn’t stop myself. He walked toward us slowly, a tall man, his hips bulging with equipment, pistol against his thigh, the long stick twirling in that special way New York police affect, slapping neatly into his palm every few seconds like the piston of an engine. Somehow I couldn’t believe he was going to do it. It seemed impossible that a man would compromise himself to that extent for only a dollar. He came to the front of the truck. I was close enough to touch him. He knew I was watching, but he didn’t care. Reaching out an arm—a big arm, covered with thick, curly, ginger-colored hair—he calmly plucked the bill and walked away. I drew a deep breath and moved for the first time in sixty seconds.
I felt odd as I watched him go down the avenue, still swinging his stick as if nothing had happened. Approaching, he’d been a policeman, and now, retreating, he was just a man dressed in blue. The transformation stunned me. I couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d disappeared in thin air.
It eventually became clear that the fruit-vending business was not as lucrative as we had supposed. We worked long hours every day, seven days a week, we selected the fruit carefully, treated the customers politely, were honest to a fault, but we couldn’t seem to make any money. After five or six weeks Jean decided to give it up, explaining to my mother that the best corners were taken by Italians. He started talking about ambulance drivers and how they made a hundred and ten dollars a week and how this terrific character down at Stanley’s Cafeteria might be able to introduce him to the right man....
Jean’s aristocratic appearance made it hard for him to get an ordinary job. At one point shortly after my father’s death, when the estate upon which we relied for support was temporarily in the hands of the court, there was literally not a dollar in the house. Jean applied for a job as counterman in a White Tower hamburger stand and was turned down, the only conceivable reason being that they thought he wasn’t serious. We’d have been in trouble if Dan, Jean’s brother, hadn’t come back from sea. A short, unassuming fellow, Dan got the White Tower job immediately.
When the fruit business ended I didn’t know what to do with myself. The one or two kids I’d known from P.S. 6 were gone for the summer, the streets of our rich neighborhood were empty, and even my sister Alison was away on a job looking after some children. I had a pair of roller skates, and with the key dangling around my neck I’d push off in the morning for the Museum of Natural History across the park, or the Metropolitan a few blocks away. (I liked the medieval armor and the Egyptian room. The paintings bored me.) But after being robbed a couple of times I gave up crossing the park. Luckily I wasn’t beaten up. I always seemed able to talk my way out of it. In those days the police ignored children and I saw bad beatings administered a stone’s throw from the precinct house. The park was dangerous for a kid on his own.
I took to hanging around with the Good Humor man on the corner. He let me sit on the seat of his cart and ring the bells. Very rarely he gave me a free ice stick. I went to the movies whenever I had the money. A lot of the time I’d stay in the house, or more exactly, on the fire escape. After a few weeks, out of boredom, I started to think about jumping. Every child plays with the idea. I played with it more seriously, simply for something to do. As a game it was fascinating. No playmates or special equipment were necessary. Alone in the house, I could go out on the fire escape and have something quite definite happen to me. It never failed, I was exhilarated and purged. Best of all it was a long game. I’d stare down at the squares of sidewalk for hours before making a move. I toyed with the idea of what would happen if I fell, but I never seriously considered going over voluntarily. After a few weeks the pavement five floors below, at first so far away, seemed almost close enough to touch. Every line in the cement, every cracked spot and variation in the surface was memorized. Like an old friend the sidewalk was too familiar to be threatening. It seemed to me that if I fell it would be a painless death. I watched the sidewalk without a thought in my head. I didn’t wonder why, it seemed perfectly natural.
At first I just stood outside the rail, hanging on with both hands for a minute or two. Then the trick was to go all the way around the fire escape before climbing back inside. Once or twice I hung by my hands and jumped to the platform below, but gave it up for fear of getting caught.
I discovered the roof of the building with its air-shafts and parapets. Eight stories up, it seemed tremendously high after all the time on the fire escape. I could spend a whole afternoon flat on my belly on the hot tar, my head and arms hanging out into space. After an hour or two of gazing down without moving, a pleasant drowsiness would come over me. As long as I felt the solid roof edge under my chest I knew I was safe. It was like flying. Half asleep, my eyes glazed and my head filled with a familiar buzzing, I’d lose all sense of time and direction. When I moved, or got up to go, I’d do it very carefully, making sure to orient m
yself correctly, moving each limb a fraction of an inch so I’d know where I was.
Once I walked around the foot-wide ledge of the main air shaft in a kind of slow, sliding shuffle. Eight floors below a cat sat in the exact center of the yard, over a drain, watching me.
The roof became my retreat. I threw little pieces of paper over the side to watch the breeze whisk them away, imagining myself floating down after them to land unharmed on the sidewalk. Pigeons would strut nearby and suddenly roll off, their wings outstretched. Sometimes I brought along a hand mirror to flash the sun at pedestrians. Few of them noticed, but occasionally someone would become aware of his extra shadow and look around, momentarily perplexed. I had fantasies of propping the mirror on the parapet and sliding down the bar of sunlight, holding the frictionless beam in my hands.
10
The Coldness of Public Places
EYES CLOSED, head back, I drank directly from the carton of milk, taking long gulps while cold air from the refrigerator spilled out onto my bare feet. Leaving an inch for Jean’s coffee, I replaced the carton and pushed the fat door shut. End of breakfast.
In the morning quietness sounds from outside seemed magnified. A bus wheezed across Eighty-sixth Street. Voices from the sidewalk rang out for a moment, trapped in the alley on the other side of the window. The bottom pane was covered with paper from the five-and-ten, a pattern of triangles under a thin glaze of grease. When a train pulled into the subway station two blocks away the window rattled in its frame.
On the table were last night’s coffee cups and a few sheets of paper covered with calculations. Bending over, I recognized Jean’s almost indecipherable scrawl, and here and there, as if annotating, my mother’s larger, firmer hand. No pattern emerged from the jumble of numbers. They’d argued late into the night. I’d heard them as I read in my room, their voices a dull backdrop to the evolving action of the novel in my hands, barely noticing even as my mother began her nightly bout of weeping. Mechanical sobs, regular as clockwork, faintly girlish, expressing exhaustion rather than sorrow. As a plea to Jean, they never worked. “Well if you’re going to cry ... ,” he’d say, and throw up his hands.
In my room—a bed, closet, table, and hundreds of paperbacks—I collected my schoolbooks. A mild but quite definite nausea filled me at the sight of them. I hadn’t done my homework.
Down the long, dark hall to the front door, my eyes still bleary, my brain numb. In some unthought-out fashion I’d trained myself to get out of the house before becoming fully conscious. On the street corner, waiting for the bus, I’d wake up, my books under my arm, a small crowd around me, like a man on the stage of a theater who finds himself in the midst, as the hypnotist brings him round, of a perfectly normal but somehow inexpressibly mysterious act.
Punching the time clock was a fascinating game. My card seemed to exist on a higher plane of reality than myself. I’d have come to work for no other reason than to hold it in my hands. My name blazed unapologetically. Numbers crowded one another in purple ink. I was reassured, soothed almost, to know that something about me was recordable.
The sleeves of my gray attendant’s jacket were starched flat as boards. Putting it on I’d drive my fist through like a wedge to separate the cloth. I paused at the door to check my fly. With my palm flat against the SILENCE sign, I pushed through into the reading room.
A vast space opened over my head. For a moment I felt painfully conspicuous. Row upon row of tables. Dim lamps with green shades. The girls working with bowed heads, their pens scratching like the whispers of a crowd. (How can girls be so good? How can what is so difficult for me be so easy for them?)
As I reached the main desk the woman on duty glanced at me briefly and returned to work, her gray head bending as she searched a file, skinny fingers flipping the cards expertly, her lipless mouth moving in nervous accompaniment. A dolly waited, half full of books. I got behind it and pushed, gliding it slowly away from the desk and out across the cork floor. Far away at the other end of the room, under the tall columns of light from high windows, a girl coughed discreetly.
Safe in a balcony alcove, confident I could hear anyone coming up the spiral stairs in plenty of time to return to work, I settled back in a comfortable armchair with a book on Egyptian tombs. I leafed slowly through illustrations of pyramids, underground chambers, white men in pith helmets, and natives digging trenches. A large color plate of a cat statue caught my eye and I gazed at it for several moments, my mind empty of thought. Without an ego, one simply looks. The image of the cat, entirely whole and entirely static, is a signal to the mind to come to rest. There is no immediate sense of beauty, only the act of seeing. A scanning mechanism in the brain locks in a cycle of cat. Without an ego to break the equipoise one’s mind is like an electric motor with the poles perfectly balanced at positive and negative. Flip the switch, the apparatus hums with power, but there is no movement. My eyelids grew heavy. With the book on my lap I let them close and drifted away. When someone started up the stairs I was on my feet instantly, shelving books.
A girl. I could tell from her footsteps. She went directly to the next alcove without seeing me. A chair scraped. Papers rustled. I stood frozen, my nose three inches from an eight-volume set on birds of North America, suddenly paralyzed by the knowledge that only a couple of feet away on the other side of the books, completely unaware of my proximity, a young but physically mature female sat defenseless in her imagined privacy.
I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter in nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances toward a hot sphere of turbulence and unimaginable density, in such a way my body, which only a moment ago as I’d watched the cat might best have been described as a vapor, a dimly perceived cloud around my soul, began to coalesce. Warmth flooded my limbs. Fingers and toes, nose and ears, my knees and remote regions of my back defined themselves in space like objects looming up out of a fog. I sank down until my knees touched the ground, and sat on my heels, almost reverently, wishing to disturb nothing in the suddenly harmonious world. With exquisite care I made the necessary adjustments and delved into myself. Hello, old friend. Companion in the wilderness. Gift-giver.
I moved a few books quietly and found her, or rather found a piece of her, neck to breast in white cotton. It was at once frustrating, and for some reason extremely exciting to see only this small part of her. Switching to a lower shelf I cleared the way for a view of her legs, feeling a remote sense of disappointment when I found them primly crossed, although enough thigh showed to hold my interest. My brain raced, dealing with a thousand things—listening for someone on the stairs, wondering if there weren’t a better angle from which to watch her, reminding myself that I hadn’t done my homework—and all the while the warm steady voice of my old friend speaking to me silently, below my thoughts, sending messages up my spine to the back of my head, telling me I was indeed alive, I was who I thought I was, and that nothing else mattered. At moments like this, as all men know, one becomes oblivious to everything in the outside world not directly related to the business—and I choose my words carefully—at hand. Entire areas of perception close down and the senses focus on a small, highly charged target, be it oneself, a few inches of female thigh, or a mixture of both. In this state one sees with the clarity of a mystic. A breast, a wrist, a curved hip become images of pure significance, passing directly into the tenderest part of the brain. (I go into all this only to give some idea of what the next moment was like.)
As a glutton standing before a splendid buffet might suddenly decide to move his poised fingers from the olives to the lobster cakes, so I chose to return to the higher level of books for another glimpse of breast, against the chance that she might have moved to a more revealing position. Standing straight up on my knees I pressed my eye into position. There was a moment of confusion. I saw something, but without a larger frame of reference I couldn’t tell what. Were these fingers? Objects I finally
recognized as hands moved away to reveal, very close, a face. It was like straining to hear a faraway sound and having a gun go off in your ear. Her eyes were shut tight, tear stained, squinting hard as if to avoid some overwhelming source of light. She wept, her mouth spread wide in a queer, tight-lipped smile of anguish, her head nodding slowly. I recoiled from the peephole as if a needle had pierced my pupil.
In a frenzy of confusion I began sorting books as if nothing had happened. She had not seen me, I was safe. Only much later did I wonder what she was crying about, and if I should have told someone.
The Street
I was already late, having completely missed home-room period, so there was no great harm in waiting a bit longer. I bought a hot dog and watched two boys from the morning session pitching pennies against the wall of Stuyvesant High School. The sun was high, filling half the street, and I moved out from under the vendor’s striped umbrella to get its warmth. My heart was calm. Nothing could be done about my lateness and in the meantime there was the street, wonderfully quiet in the steady sunlight, the sharp taste of yellow mustard in my mouth, and the slow rhythms of the game to contemplate. For a few moments I was free, relieved of thought, temporarily released from the faint sickness inside me. Although I refused to admit it, I was getting sick. Delicate changes were going on—the subtle adjustments of a mind that feels itself threatened but cannot localize the threat, the hidden wariness toward all things and all people, a certain suspension of sensibility, like holding one’s breath in a moment of crisis and finding when the danger passes there is no need of breath, that one can live without air.
“Get in there, you cocksucker,” said one of the boys. Toeing the line, his body bent like a racer waiting for the gun, he launched his coin in a flat arch and smiled as it came to rest a half inch from the wall. “Wins.”
