by Frank Conroy
I removed a couple of bottles from the shelf in front of me and waited. Jimmy’s back was to me. I could see Sid and Bernie moving on the other side of the next row of shelves. Sid went to the window and I threw off a quick shot that missed, but struck the glass right in front of his nose and sent him scurrying back to shelter. He retaliated immediately, getting Jimmy on the arm. Jimmy stalked back and forth with his squeeze bottle looking for an opening. He found one and got Bernie.
Biding my time, I waited till Sid’s head appeared between a box of cadmium powder and an old pH meter. I squeezed off a short, quick shot in his ear. Bernie tried to edge around the corner for a try at Jimmy and was met by a blinding deluge. I shifted my position and got off another shot through both shelves with rifle-like accuracy. Confused, the enemy became cagey, shooting blind to avoid the risk of exposure. When I started arching long, curving streams that almost struck the ceiling before raining down on the far aisle, everyone caught on. Jimmy turned, expecting an ally, but filled with a sense of reckless power I let him have it. They advanced en masse, trying to get close enough for a shot with their inadequate squeeze bottles. I retreated slowly. They marched forward with their arms in front of their faces. As I passed the door I put my back against the wall and squeezed faster, forcing them to duck behind a counter. “Intelligence wins again,” I shouted.
Willie came through the door, right into the line of fire. He flinched as the water struck his chest—not with his huge body, a body he had long ago stopped trying to move quickly, but with his head. It jerked back a fraction of an inch, turtle-like, his mouth slightly open.
“Willie, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t hear you coming.”
He tucked in his chin and looked down at the dark stain across his chest.
“Really. I swear to God.”
He pinched the material between thumb and index finger and pulled it away from his skin as if he could somehow get rid of the wetness without taking the whole shirt off. His mouth closed slowly and he looked up at me.
“Willie,” I gave a sick little laugh that died in my throat. “Willie ...”
He reached out, took the water gun from my limp hand, and held it in the air, turning it around several times. Then he put it down. “Okay, Conroy,” he said evenly. “You’re fired.”
My hands came up involuntarily, palms outward, as if I could somehow catch his words in the air and push them away. “Wait a minute,” I said quickly. “You can’t mean it.”
“You were warned,” he said, turning away. “You get paid off on Friday and that’s it. Period.” He went out the door.
Stunned, I walked past the end of the counter and looked down at Sid, Bernie, and Jimmy, all sitting on the floor, hiding. Only Jimmy met my eye.
“What am I going to do?” I asked him. In the silence I felt a gulf opening between us—a kind of slipping away, a telescoping away, as if he were a visitor at my bedside when the doctor told me I was going to die. They got up from the floor, still holding their plastic bottles, and moved back to work. Jimmy clapped me on the shoulder.
“It’s a cruddy job anyway,” he said gently. “You can do better than this.”
His solicitude scared me. “Jimmy, they can’t fire me. They can’t just fire me after all the time I’ve been here.”
“Sure they can.”
“I’ll stop horsing around. I’ll really work.”
He looked down at the floor.
“I’ll clean up the packing room! I’ll fix it up!”
“You can’t do that in two days.”
“Yes, I can. I bet I can.” I started to move away and he caught me by the arm.
“Don’t count on anything,” he said. “Willie’s a nice guy, but like a lot of fat men he’s stubborn. You’ll probably be breaking your back for nothing.”
I nodded. “I know. Okay.” I went to the packing room and closed the door behind me, amazed at the tears starting in my eyes. “Jesus,” I said as I bent down and started cleaning out junk from under the work table, “they can’t just fire me.”
For the next two days I avoided everyone. I’d come up in the elevator and go directly to the packing room, walking quickly with my head low. If Willie had expected me to continue coming into the office for my daily orders he was tactful enough to let it go. Jimmy brought tea and remarked on my progress, but I was so quiet he could tell I wanted to be alone.
First I washed the window, removing years of grime and doubling the available light. I moved the large work table to a new position and drew up a map for the rearrangement of the entire room. (The packing room was used primarily for the bottling, sealing, labeling, and packing of Plate-Rite, an electroplating additive. I made the stuff myself most of the time, working from a simple recipe, pouring the various solid and liquid chemicals into a huge crock and stirring till clear. It looked like cherry soda and smelled like wet leaves.) I installed a bank of metal shelves over the table, put fresh paper and tape in the dispensers, nailed three balls of string overhead, and cleaned out the drawers. I made a special water-tight tray for the white sealing strips and the solution that kept them flexible. Squatting on the floor, I sorted thousands of bottle caps according to size. I repaired the faulty latch on the door, washed the woodwork, and scrubbed the floor. Toward the end of Friday it was done. The transformation was astonishing. From a dark, crowded, junk-filled cave to a bright, open workroom with a place for everything and everything in its place. Jimmy whistled when I called him in. “Beautiful,” he said, sincerely impressed. “I hope it works.”
For a moment I didn’t know what he meant. I’d gotten so involved in the job I’d forgotten why I’d started it. “Yes,” I said. “So do I.”
I waited until almost everyone had left for the night. I paused in the hall to get control of myself—my pulse was racing and my throat was tight. As I entered, Willie looked up from his desk, his quick eyes betraying nervousness. He spoke gently, as if reassuring me that he held nothing against me. “Ah yes Conroy,” he said, and reached into his drawer for the check. He held it gingerly, flicking a corner of the blue paper with his nail. “I’m sorry about this, but there it is. Work is work.”
I kept my hands at my sides. “Have you got a second?” Despite my plans to surprise him, I rushed on. “I fixed up the packing room. I reorganized the whole place.”
“The packing room?” He was surprised, as if he’d forgotten there was one. “Okay,” he said, and got up and followed me through the hall into the lab.
At the door I said, “I used the principle of the assembly line and organized the room accordingly.” Then I opened the door and turned on the lights.
He stepped into the center of the room and looked around slowly. “It’s big,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was this big.”
“It was all that junk.”
He went to the work table and walked slowly along its length, trailing his fingers across the surface. He stopped at the watertight tray. “What’s this?”
“A tray for the sealers. Before you had to fish them out of the jar with a pencil.”
He nodded and moved on. He noticed the cartons of bottle caps. “These were all mixed up, weren’t they?” He examined the entire room carefully, not saying anything more, and we went back to the office. He sat down, rubbed his eyes behind his glasses, paused, and then lowered his hands. “That’s a beautiful job. It shows intelligence and hard work. I only wish you’d done one-quarter as much before.”
Carefully controlling my voice, I said my piece. “Couldn’t you give me another chance? I’ll stop screwing around, I really will.”
“I don’t believe in personality changes. It doesn’t happen .”
I stood silently, unable to think of anything to say, because I agreed with him.
“Anyway,” he went on, “it’s not just me now. Rocky is seeing another kid from Stuyvesant tomorrow.”
“He is?” I was hurt in a new way. The loss of the job was bad enough, but the thought of so
meone else in my place was especially painful.
“Look Conroy, I’ll tell you what. First, I’ll give you a week’s pay. I’ll get the bookkeeper to make out another check and you can pick it up tomorrow. I don’t have to do that. Second, I’ll write the recommendation for your next job myself. No mention of all the screwing around. I’ll make it good. That’s all I can do.”
I lowered my head and he held out the check. “There’s no reason to feel bad about it, you know. Everybody here likes you. The boys in the lab all put in a word for you. It’s nothing personal, Conroy, it’s just one of those things.”
Saturday morning I stationed myself at the window of a small grocery store across the street and watched everyone arrive for work. While the proprietor and his wife yelled Italian at each other through the curtain separating the store from the apartment in back, the man gesturing as if she could see him, I sipped a container of hot tea and ate a doughnut. One by one they arrived—Jimmy and Bernie on foot from the subways, Willie, Rocky the bookkeeper, and Sid in their cars, and finally Malinos himself in a taxi. I watched and waited, the hot tea warming my belly and the spicy odor of hanging salamis sharp in the air.
After half an hour Bernie came down for coffee. He went into the neighboring candy store, emerged with both hands holding a cardboard tray full of coffee containers and Danish pastry, and went back upstairs. I finished my tea and pushed through the door.
The street was quiet. Up toward the Bowery a few bums drifted at the corners, moving slowly back and forth like underwater plants. In the other direction a jungle of fire escapes stretched away, long, curving lines of motionless wash threading them together. A few kids played stickball in the distance, moving silently through the haze. I crossed the street and went into the building. Tony got up from his chair and started toward the elevator, but I waved him back. I sat down next to him on the floor.
“No up?” he asked.
“No up,” I said. “Later.”
He nodded and leaned back in his chair. We stared out at the brightness of the street.
The kid showed up at about ten-thirty, hesitating on the sidewalk, looking up at the number and then down at a slip of paper in his hand, peering into the dark hall, backing up and shading his eyes to look at the higher floors. I knew what was going on in his mind. Like me on my first day, he couldn’t believe there was a lab inside. I sat in the darkness watching him decide to come in. He was about my own age, well turned out in jacket and tie, with a clean, chubby, intelligent face and feminine hips. He entered and began searching for a directory on the filthy walls. Finally he caught sight of us and came over.
“Electro Research?” he asked. “I think I’m in the wrong building. Is there an Electro Research here?”
“Fourth floor,” I said. “Did you come about the job?”
“Yes. Why?”
“It’s gone. Filled.”
“What?”
“Some kid was here at nine in the morning and got it.”
He fingered his tie nervously. “But they told me to come at ten-thirty. I had an appointment.”
“Yeah, well I had one at ten and they didn’t even see me. Told me it was filled already.”
“But I came all the way from the Bronx. They can’t do that!”
I took out my cigarettes, offered him one, which he refused, and lighted up. “I know,” I said: “I came from Brooklyn, but to tell you the truth, after seeing the place I’m just as glad. A really crummy outfit. Dirty and dark with stuff lying all over. They call it a lab! What a laugh. Are you from Stuyvesant?” He nodded. “Me too. They ought to check these places out before they send us.”
“I thought they did,” he said.
“Then couldn’t have.”
He stood quite still. I got up, took a couple of steps toward the entrance, and then came back. “I thought it was my father,” I said. “He’s picking me up.”
Tony sat watching us, picking his nose with a gnarled finger. The kid looked down at him, not really paying attention, but with a faint, automatic expression of distaste on his face.
“If you go up watch out for the fat guy. I think he’s a queer.”
“What?” His head snapped around.
For a moment I thought I might have gone too far. “Well I don’t know, but he kept giving me these little pats on the ass on the way out. Hardly touched me. Just these soft little pats.”
He laughed, incredulous. “You’re kidding!”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
The kid turned away. “The hell with it. I can tell I wouldn’t want the job anyway.”
“You ought to go up and complain,” I said.
“It isn’t worth it,” he said, and walked out.
I sat down next to Tony and took a deep breath. My hands were shaking. After a few minutes I got up and went into the elevator. “Now up.”
“Hokay, boy!” he said, sliding the gate shut with a crash. “Four floor!”
It worked. Saturday I hung around and left without picking up my check. Monday Willie asked me if I thought the place was an orphanage. Tuesday there was no one else to make a quick load of Plate-Rite. By Wednesday I knew I was safe.
16
Losing My Cherry
ALISON and I were fond of each other, but we lived in different worlds. To defend ourselves we had been forced to extremes—Alison’s of disengagement and calmness, mine of rebellion and anger. We sent heartfelt but necessarily simple messages to each other, like mountaineers from peak to peak. “How are you over there? I love you, but I can hardly hear you. I don’t pretend to understand you, but I wish you well.” By a monumental effort Alison had created a life for herself quite separate from the chaos of the family. As a child she’d shown remarkable self-sufficiency, reliability, and good sense, and had therefore won the right to be left alone. Or so she thought. Actually it was not so much a right she had won as it was Jean’s and Dagmar’s lack of interest. They were preoccupied with their own problems. As a teen-ager she did nothing to endanger that privilege. She was a model student and eventually became president of the student government at Washington Irving High School. She never argued with her mother, or allowed herself to be sucked into Jean’s harangues. In many ways it was as if she were a guest in the house, or a boarder who had her own family somewhere else. When she won a scholarship to Barnard College no one was surprised. She’d been a good, industrious girl for so long everyone took it for granted. “I never have to worry about Alison,” my mother would say. “Alison is a sensible girl.” What we didn’t know was the terrible price she was paying to keep up the front.
In her senior year at college Alison acquired a steady boy friend, Jack, a tall, good-looking fellow she’d met in the dramatic group. Because of an anomaly in his earlier education he was a freshman, although only a year younger than herself. I liked him immediately. In classic little-brother style I made something of a pest of myself, but he never seemed to mind. Coming home, I often went straight up to Alison’s room, eager to talk and enjoy some reflected warmth. Her room, separated from the others by a long hall, was always tidy and managed, in a cold house, to convey a bit of cosiness. There was a fake leopard-skin bedspread, brown corduroy drapes, books, a throw rug, and a few tasteful knickknacks. It was like the rooms one sees in magazines. I’d knock on the door, give them a couple of seconds, and walk in. They were usually on the couch on the far side of the room, in mild disarray, but fully clothed. Unlike young people these days, it took Jack and Alison quite a while to achieve the ultimate union. She had, I later learned, a hymen as tough as the plastic window on a convertible.
“Hi. Can I come in?”
“You are in,” Alison said, taking her arms from his shoulders.
“Well, I can come back later if ...”
“You’re here now. It wears off after a while.”
“What wears off?”
“Never mind.” She laughed, sitting up.
“How’s the boy?” Jack asked.
“Pr
etty good. There’s a great movie on the late show tonight. Mickey Rooney.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We have to go over your history paper,” Alison reminded him.
“Oh, it’s okay,” he said. “It’s good enough the way it is.”
“No. We’ll rewrite it together.” She reached forward and smoothed down the hair on the back of his neck. “We’ll make something of you yet, young man.”
“Anybody want a glass of milk?” I asked.
When I came back they were kissing. I sat down and drank my milk, watching abstractedly.
“Hmm,” she said. “Delicious.”
“You sound like you want to eat him.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Disgusting,” I said. “Cannibalism. That’s very unhealthy sexually.”
She laughed, and sticking her finger in his ear, said coyly, “I’m a very sexually unhealthy person, in a certain healthy kind of way.” She jumped up from the couch. “Oh, isn’t he beautiful?” she cried. “Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
“All right,” I said. “Cut it out.”
“My sexy freshman. My wild black Irishman.”
“Alison, for Christ sake.”
“Well, let me preen a little!” she said, suddenly annoyed. “Let me enjoy it.”
“I don’t know how you put up with all that goo,” I said to Jack.
He winked. “It’s not so bad when you get used to it.”
“He loves it,” Alison said. “He loves every minute of it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
“You’ll find out about it,” she said. “It’ll happen to you.”
“In a pig’s ass.”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“How about Mickey Rooney?” I asked Jack. “I’ll go down and get some oatmeal cookies.”
“Is it a western?”
