by Frank Conroy
The old Greek made the sandwich without looking up, his stubby fingers picking out the ingredients with tremendous speed. The crusty rim of the mustard pot was lined with black flies. They didn’t move as he reached for the spoon. Behind him in the shadows four or five men were cutting bread at a rear counter. I ate slowly, conscious of the luxury of having the place to myself, watching the high, gleaming windows of Stuyvesant, listening for the bell. When it rang, very faint but audible, I bent my head and drank the last of the soda. The old Greek started to yell at the men cutting bread. They put down their knives and began sprinkling oil over the open loaves. I picked up my books and moved away.
Walking west on Fifteenth Street I heard the students pouring out of the building behind me, their voices joining in a long, continuous roar up and down the narrow cavern, building steadily as hundreds of them streamed from the exits to stand in the street. I had no friends among them. I knew some of them, and one or two interested me, but that was all. Most of them lived in other boroughs.
A few minutes’ walk from school there was a building on the south side of the street I always looked up at. A brownstone, four stories high, with a stoop and garbage out in front. I never knew I was going to look at it. Something would trip me off—perhaps the act of stepping up on the curb and turning to avoid the mailbox, or the quality of the surface of the sidewalk, or the sound of children’s voices from the small park nearby. My head would turn automatically, before I had time to think, and I would find myself staring up at that particular building. Because I’d been told, I knew I’d lived there for many years as a child. Passing it my mind became still. All the noises of the world stopped abruptly, like a movie running on without a sound track. I had lived in the building until I was eight years old and yet I lacked memories of it. No image of the apartment, no image of having lived there, no image of myself. It was spooky. Walking by, I watched the entrance as if expecting someone to emerge.
At Third Avenue I took a left along the sidewalk under the El. When a train rumbled overhead I’d look up at the buildings to watch the shadow streaking by. At Eleventh Street a cigar-maker was rolling stogies in the window of his shop. I stopped for a minute to watch him work, resting my books on my knee. At Ninth Street the smell of wine and urine began. A little farther on were the bums.
I walk with my head locked straight ahead, trying not to look, trying not to see. I walk close to the curb to stay as far away from them as possible. They stand against the walls of the buildings, crouch in doorways, or sprawl on the sidewalk. From the corner of my eye I see a man push himself off the wall near the end of the block. He means to intercept me before I reach the corner. I step off the sidewalk out into the street and make a wide semicircle around him. He stands quite still, watching me, the skin of his hands and face dead white under a mottled black crust, his eyes wet and gleaming like inner organs unnaturally exposed. He fakes a move at me, very slow, like a zombie, and I control my impulse to shy away.
One more block. They sit against the wall, their white, swollen ankles covered with sores, their limbs akimbo on the pavement, lifeless as bleached driftwood, as if some giant had thrown them one by one against the wall to lie powerless where they fell. Their clothing is all of a particular neutral brown. Their tanned necks and wrists are crisscrossed with black hairlines like ancient porcelain.
I turn the corner at Fourth Street and stop in midstride. Ten yards away in the middle of the sidewalk an enormous female bum is holding one end of a pair of black trousers trying to pull them away from a small, weeping man. With an audible grunt the woman jerks back with both arms. The man is lifted off the sidewalk like a feather and swung around in the air until he loses his grip. He hits the ground without a sound. Across the street two men laugh, applaud, and walk away. The fat woman rolls up the trousers and advances on the motionless man, her lips going in and out very quickly in a kind of silent kissing movement. Still weeping, the man starts to get up on his hands and knees. A gargantuan little girl, she skips once and kicks him in the stomach. The air goes out of him at both ends—a hollow whoosh from his gaping mouth and a fart from his anus as he falls on his side. She kicks him again, rolling him over onto his back. I am frozen in my tracks, unable to move or make a sound. Standing beside him, she raises both arms for balance, lifts her huge leg and stamps down on his crotch. As he screams his legs fold up and she stumbles over him, falling awkwardly on her hip. She gets up, spits in his face, and moves down the block with the black trousers under her arm.
Tony the elevator man didn’t speak English, but he smiled and nodded as we rode up. He had a scar over his right eye where a young Negro had struck him with a revolver during a payroll robbery the previous year. Whenever a Negro shared the elevator with us he’d let the man off, hold me back by the arm and whisper into my face with tremendous intensity, “Goddam blacks no good!” I always smiled and nodded, touching the place on my brow where he’d been hit. “Yes yes,” he’d say, delighted. “Fie day doctor. No pay. No good.”
I got off at the fourth floor and went into the office. Mr. Malinos, the boss, to whom I’d spoken only once, when I was hired, was at his desk in the rear with Shad, his impeccably dressed West Indian secretary and clerk. They twittered and murmured through the day like old pigeons, rustling papers and cooing into the phones without pause, oblivious to the rest of us. A year earlier I’d stood in the Student Employment Office at school listening to a description of the job I now held. “Lab assistant,” the man had read from a white card. “Electro Research, a service company for electroplaters. Knowledge of chemistry and math desired but not necessary. Chance for advancement.” Immediately there had risen in my head visions of white-clad workers moving softly through a world of ethereal cleanliness and purity. My ears seemed to catch the murmur of hushed voices as chemists huddled over elaborate projects of glass, flame, and fluid constructed on immaculate marble counters. I took the job on the spot before anyone else could snap it up. It was too late to back out when I discovered the place was situated in a dilapidated building in one of the worst slums in New York, and that the laboratory for which I’d held such high hopes was in fact a large, dark, filthy room filled with a twenty-year collection of industrial-scientific refuse.
I presented myself to Willie, my own boss, who ran the lab by remote control from behind his desk.
“All right, Conroy. Today you get off your butt and do some work for a change.” A fat man, Willie was quick-witted and nervous. He shifted his Life Saver from one cheek to the other (click! over his teeth) and smiled. “There’s a limit, you know. I don’t know why we keep you.”
“I add tone to the place. My English is good.”
“Three boys from Stuyvesant. They all stayed till college. You are the first fuck-up.”
“Everybody likes me. I’m a sort of mascot.”
Rocky the bookkeeper looked up from the next desk. “What a wiseguy,” he said evenly.
“You see?” Willie said. “Better shape up, pal. Your days are numbered.”
“Don’t joke about it. Please. This job is one of the few decent things in my life.” I paused. “You can imagine what the rest of it is like.”
He snorted, shifting his huge, almost liquid bulk in the chair. “Conroy, I like you. I like your sick sense of humor, but you must stop being such a fuck-up.”
“Can I run the nickel solutions? You said you’d let me.”
“We have Bernie for that. Anyway, you’re too slow and your math stinks.”
“I can titrate as fast as Jimmy.”
He sighed. “Forget it, Conroy. Now get in there and wash the flasks. After that you can make a load of Plate-Rite. Ten-pound cans.”
“Right.” I turned away.
“And for Christ sake get a little zip into it!”
“Right,” I called from the hall.
The lab resembled nothing so much as the homes of eccentric recluses one reads about in the newspapers, an immense, junk-filled rabbit warren shot through with
a network of narrow paths along which one scurried with tucked-in elbows. The long work counters, most of them unused for years, were buried under piles of rags, tubes, clamps, stoppers, newspapers, bottles and jars, broken gauges, beakers, flasks, and ancient scientific machines like props from a Jules Verne movie. High, overloaded shelves leaned this way and that in the air above and every surface was coated with grime. I went over to Jimmy’s bench by the window. “Hey.”
“Hey slugger,” he answered, looking up from his computations. He was a small man, not much heavier at twenty-five than I was at a skinny sixteen, but in perfect shape, his chest and arms well muscled and hard as oak. There was an air of mystery about him, a hint of strangeness in his almost painful gentleness, his oddly impersonal style of dress, and the ritualistic neatness with which he performed even the smallest tasks. After months of working together he told me he’d been in prison for ten years. More than once, since then, I’d walked him to the State building for his visits with the parole officer. “How was school?”
I shrugged. “Same old shit.”
“You’re making a mistake,” he said. I avoided his hypnotically clear blue eyes. “You want to get those grades. Go to college. Get the jump on the other guy.”
“I know. I know.” I picked up one of his Erlenmeyer flasks and swirled the solution around. “Finished already?”
He nodded and looked down at his clipboard. I envied him. While I spent most of my time cleaning up, running errands, and labeling bottles, he was working with pipettes, flasks, reagents, and solutions, analyzing samples from electroplating baths for metallic content. It was respectable work, and moreover it could be done sitting down. He gave his figures a last, quick glance and moved away. “If he finds a mistake I’ll drink the samples.”
Eight at a time, I carried the dirty flasks from his bench to the sink. I washed them under the open tap, my hands tingling at the slight sting of the chemicals. From the old radio on a shelf above me Les Paul and Mary Ford played “How High the Moon.”
Sid, our man in the field, arrived at about the same time every afternoon with the day’s load of sample solutions from the electroplaters of New York. He was six and a half feet tall. His short black hair merged with the afternoon stubble on his round face, leading me to believe that, like those trick drawings one used to see in the puzzle section of the Sunday comic strips, his head would look exactly the same upside down. The floor trembled as he walked in, an enormous hairy bear, his arms bulging out from his body as he held a dozen ammunition boxes filled with samples against the sides of his chest. “Yo!” he bellowed. “You!”
“Hey,” Jimmy answered.
As Sid approached I slipped around the counter to get between him and the door. He stacked the boxes on Jimmy’s counter and caught sight of me leaning against the sink. Pausing, he made a kind of growling sound in his throat.
“They gave him raw meat again,” I said.
“Suicidal,” he said to Jimmy, as if I wasn’t there. “He wants to die.”
“You have to catch me first, big man.”
He waved an immense paw in the air. “Go away.”
“Is it true you once did the hundred-yard dash in twenty minutes?” I asked. “Is that true?” He unloaded the bottles without answering. “Is it true it takes so long for the signals to get from your- brain to your extremities that you have to make up your mind about everything a few seconds ahead of time?”
“Where does he get the nerve? I ask you?” He shook his head. “I could kill him with one arm tied behind my back.”
The suspense was delicious. I felt light and fast and went up on my toes. “Is it true ...” I started, but he lunged down the counter. Two strides ahead of him, I turned the corner and ran down the side of the lab to the door. I could hear him slowing down as he saw I was going to make it. I even had time to pause at the door and look back, laughing, before I slipped outside.
Going into the office I composed myself. “Tea break!” I called out. “Orders please!”
“What’s going on in there, Conroy?” Willie asked.
“In where?”
“You know where. In the lab.”
“Nothing at all. Sid just brought the samples.”
“Fun and games?”
“No.”
“Playing chemistry set? You couldn’t have been working.”
“I was helping Jimmy set up the next run.”
He pursed his lips and gave me a wry look.
“Now, you want black coffee and a prune Danish I presume?” I asked, taking a pencil from his desk.
“Yes, and give that pencil back when you’re through.”
“Tea break! Orders please!”
We were sitting in the small packing room just off the lab —Sid at an old desk, Jimmy on a mailing crate, and myself, feeling vaguely like a host since it was my workroom, on the window sill.
“My God, what a crud heap in here,” Sid said with a mouthful of Drake’s Raisin Pound Cake. He looked up at the junk piled high against the walls. “How do you ever find anything?”
“I manage,” I said. “It’s no worse than the lab.”
Jimmy finished his coffee and forced the empty container into the overflowing trash barrel. “Got to start the next run,” he said, standing up. “I want to leave on time tonight.”
“Got a date, uh?” Sid asked.
I ignored my automatic twinge of jealousy. The only girls I knew were the ones I picked up in the balconies of Loew’s Orpheum and the R.K.O. Eighty-sixth Street, girls I never saw, and would probably not have recognized, in the light of day.
As we entered the lab Sid said, “You know why I don’t fool around? Because I’m scared of catching something and giving it to my wife.” Even the thought seemed to upset him. “I’d never forgive myself.”
I walked away to go set up the cyanides and he gave me a quick blast from a plastic squeeze bottle of distilled water. I wiped my neck with the side of my hand and said nothing. Water fights were a traditional part of the late afternoon scene in the lab. At the counter I took down clean flasks four at a time and lined them up in front of the sample bottles.
“Shall I pipette the samples?” I called to Jimmy in the next aisle.
“Better not. Willie’ll give me hell.”
“That old fart.”
“A little respect for your superiors there, Conroy,” Sid said. I could see him through the bottles stacked on the shelf dividing us. Unaware that he was being watched, he leaned against the counter beside Smitty, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. I raised a plastic squeeze bottle, aimed with care, and hit him square in the eye. I had to move fast. I could hear him running on the opposite side, his huge feet pounding the wooden floor. As I turned the corner his outstretched hand plucked at my clothes but, laughing, I broke away. Running for the door with Sid in close pursuit, I heard ominous noises in the hall. A huge crate was being rolled out of the elevator, sealing me in. For one mad instant I thought of leaping over it, but momentum carried me past before I could make up my mind. I ran directly to the farthest corner and jumped behind an empty cardboard barrel—the only protection I could find.
“Aha!” said Sid, slowing down. “Ahaa!”
“Wait a second, now. You started it, remember. You got me first.”
“This is it, Conroy.”
I laughed nervously. “Sidney. Act your age. You’re too old for this sort of thing.”
He advanced slowly, the fingers of his immense hands flexing rhythmically. Grabbing at straws, I looked out over his shoulder. “Mister Malinos! It’s not my fault, sir. He’s always chasing me.” He was so close I had to begin dodging behind the barrel. “Jimmy! Help!”
“Four buttons down from the top, kid,” Jimmy called back. “One good punch. The bigger they are the harder they fall.”
Sid reached out with one hand, grasped the lip of the barrel, and tossed it across the room as effortlessly as a bear brushing away cobwebs.
“Oh God,” I said.
“You big ape!” I yelled, fighting back. I struck out at him, or rather at what I could see of him, a vast wall-to-wall chest looming over me. My fists bounced off without effect except for the pain in my hands. I felt myself rising mysteriously into the air, lifted up and away with incredible smoothness by an irresistible force. My arms pinned to my sides, my legs dangling helplessly, I hung squirming in space while Sid laughed.
Half an hour later I lighted a Bunsen burner, adjusted the mixture of gas and air, and held a glass tube over the apex of the flame. When the glass softened I bent it to a right angle. At the sink I filled a large, narrow-mouthed flask with water and plugged it firmly with a two-hole stopper. I pushed a short piece of tubing into one of the holes and slipped a rubber squeeze bulb onto the exposed end. By then the other glass tube was cool. I pushed it through the stopper and stepped back with my hands in the air. Unsuspecting, Jimmy whistled “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” on the other side of the lab. Bernie, the nickel man, was talking to Sid while cleaning up his counter after the last run of the day.
The effective range of the plastic squeeze bottles was roughtly one aisle—that is, a man in aisle A could reach aisle B, but not aisle C. This limitation had been the mother of my invention. Well-hidden behind a wall of cardboard boxes, I pointed my apparatus at the sink and squeezed the bulb. Instantly a fine, steady stream of water shot through the air as flat as a tracer bullet, striking the back of the sink exactly where I’d aimed. It was beautiful. I tried a few more shots to get the feel of it and noticed with satisfaction that the water level fell very slowly. Hunched over so they wouldn’t see me, I slipped across the lab to the aisle behind Jimmy. They were already at it in a desultory sort of way, trading shots through the shelves every now and then, Jimmy directly in front of me alone against Sid and Bernie in the aisle ahead of him.
