by Clark Howard
Now he stood before the trembling, bony, whining thing that was the Chloe of today, and he felt ashamed for putting his mother’s face over the face of Frances Rozinski, and for not helping his mother when she needed him.
“Come on,” he said, helping her to her feet, “quit crying and come lie down on the bed. I’ll go get your . . . your headache powders. . . right now, and I’ll run all the way there and all the way back. Where’s the money?”
“I haven’t got any money!” she wailed, sweeping an arm out to indicate stacks of boxes of envelopes, piles of twine-bound circulars, and only one small box, half full, of completed work. “They won’t pay me until it’s finished. They said they won’t pay me for partials anymore because I take too long to finish the job—”
“How much does your stuff cost?” he asked. He could not force himself to call it “headache powder” again.
“Five dollars. They raised the price; there was a note with the last envelope.”
Richie’s mouth dropped open. Five dollars! “Jesus Christ,” he said, suddenly fondly remembering the fifteen-cent and twenty-five-cent bottles of paregoric.
“But here,” Chloe said urgently, hurrying into her tiny bedroom and returning with three cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes. “These cost a dollar fifty each and the man on Lake Street will allow us a dollar each for them, so that’s three dollars. Have you got two dollars?”
“Maybe,” Richie said, fishing from his trousers pockets a crumpled dollar bill and some change. “Yeah, I got two bucks,” he said. “But where’d you get the cigarettes?”
“Oh, Richie, I just got them,” she replied impatiently, reverting to being in charge again. “Will you go now? And remember, you promised to run all the way . . . .”
He did run both ways, as he said he would. The black man on Lake Street grinned as he took the cigarettes and said, “That Chloe, she getting this cigarette boosting down to a fine art, look like.” After getting the envelope, trotting back home through the snow, Richie recalled over and over again with astonishment the man’s words and what they meant. His mother was shoplifting cigarettes. Had he known how much she was paying for her dope, he would have realized that the welfare checks and her skimpy earnings were not covering it. But he had no idea, because she always sent the money in a sealed envelope, that her habit was up to five dollars a day. At that moment, he understood for the first time that he knew as little about his mother’s life as she knew about his.
When he got back, Chloe was waiting at the door again, without a shoe this time, and seized the little envelope as soon as he produced it. Without a word to him, she hurried into the bedroom and locked herself in. Richie stood there, cold and hungry, staring at the closed door for a long, sorrowful moment. Then he simply shrugged helplessly and went back out into the winter night to steal something to eat.
The long dreary winter continued, and somehow, day by day, with meager earnings, welfare fraud, and petty theft, Chloe and Richie got by. For Richie, it was a perpetual cycle of misery relieved only by his private time with Frances, which turned out to be a single two-hour visit once each week: on the day, Richie learned, when Walter Rozinski bowled after work. Other days, Frances had him in only for a few minutes in the middle of his route to let him warm up and have something hot to eat or drink. He was always gone before Walter, who worked in the stockyards as a meat handler, got home.
For herself and Richie, Frances created something once a week that was private, intimate, enthralling, and theirs alone. In their encounters, she did things with him and to him that were truly extraordinary experiences. And she helped him understand things that otherwise might have been frightening experiences to him.
Such as the first time he ejaculated. He had masturbated a few times with Stan Klein while looking in the window of the nurses’ locker room, and a few times in private, once looking in a window in the morning on his paper route and watching a woman suck off a man, and once after moving back to Adams Street and seeing Stan’s sister Janet bending over, her big tits almost falling out, to pick up a coin she dropped at the corner grocery; and he had climaxed, felt the incredible thrill of the sensation, but never actually produced any semen in the process. Then one day with Frances he did, and thought there was something terribly wrong with him. But she calmed him, comforted him, explained what his body had done, then masturbated him to let him see how naturally and exhilaratingly it happened. After that, Frances began to suck it out of him, luxuriating in what she called his “virginal semen, all mine, no one else has ever seen it or touched it or tasted it. I love it, love it, love it!” Sometimes in their two hours together she would make him come four or five times, in her mouth, on her nipples, on the little knob of soft flesh just inside her vagina that she liked for him to kiss and lick. Times when she fellated him, because he was yet so small and she had an unusually wide mouth, Frances was able to get his erect penis and his scrotum in her mouth at the same time, and the climaxes that it generated in both of them were momentous.
Except for his time with Frances Rozinski, the rest of Richie’s life was a terrible reality. The cheerless little place in which he and Chloe lived was in a constant state of slovenliness. Chloe’s periods of somnolence increased in duration as her addiction, and the cost of it, grew. Richie’s treks to Lake Street for the heroin generated more and more resentment in him, especially on days when he did not get enough to eat; there were a few times when all he had eaten in a single day was what Frances gave him. He knew he could have asked her for money, but could not bring himself to; too often he had heard her say that if Walter found out this or found out that, he would beat her up. To think that Frances might be physically abused because she helped him in some way was completely repugnant; he would rather go hungry permanently. Many nights, on his way home, Richie would stop in one of the markets and steal several potatoes; the potato bin was seldom watched. When he got home, he would peel and fry them in round slices and make a meal of them.
The only person who knew the dark, shameful secret of his mother’s addiction was Vernie. Even though she was no longer his protector when he was on Lake Street, and he did not eagerly look for her as he once had done, they still ran into each other occasionally. Vernie would usually be sitting in the rib joint next to its steamy plate-glass window, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, and would motion for him to come in, asking, “How you be, Richie?” She could see how he was, of course; it was obvious from his appearance that his situation was worsening. “Po’ little white boy,” she said, brushing back his hair the way Miss Menefee used to do. If she happened to be eating, she would share her food with him, and twice she opened a little cloth change purse she carried in her waistband and gave him a quarter. “I’d give you more if I could,” she said, “but I got it hard over here too. Nights be so damn cold, I ain’t making shit mos’ of the time. I swear, I don’t know how I’m gon’ make it through this winter.”
Richie did not worry about making it through the winter. His concern was making it through the day.
He did not know when he again started to think about his father; one day he simply found himself thinking about him, and he was aware that it was not the first time Slim had reentered his mind. And just as it had always been when Richie was younger, he thought of Slim as savior, liberator, rescuer—one who had the strength, the ability, the means to lift his mother and himself from the black abyss of their lives and carry them off to a place where there was warm sunshine, lots to eat, many books to read, and no Lake Street dope, no schoolyard bullies, no people who changed the rules on you when you weren’t looking.
Where the hell could his father be? he wondered as he rode the interminable streetcars every day, pushed his newspaper cart along the street, hurried along Lake Street to the dope seller, or finally, at the end of another grueling day, haggard, expended, crawling onto his cot and drawing the threadbare blanket over him for the rest he by then imperatively needed.
Where in the hell was he?
“Your what?” she asked incredulously. “Your father? For Christ’s sake, Richie, I’m not sure you ever had a father.”
Chloe was in one of her blurred eclipses; when she was half hazy like that, Richie frequently did not know whether she was on her way out of reality after having just used her dope, or on her way back in as it wore off. But it was the only time he could talk to her. In her other two states—completely under from just having done herself, or sick from needing to do herself—she was neither rational nor responsible. He had to catch her halfway in or halfway out—or not communicate with her at all.
“Come on, you know I’ve got a father,” he prompted, keeping his tone light. “Where do you think he could be? You must have some idea.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Richie.” Shaking her head, she laughed and her foul breath reached him. “Maybe he’s back in some penitentiary.” Chloe waved a hand disdainfully. “He could be anywhere. Your father,” she accused, “was very light on his feet.” Then she smiled. “Kind of like you are, Richie.”
“Whatever happened to Estelle?” Richie asked. “If she’s around, maybe she’s seen him.”
“Oh, ‘Stelle’s around, all right,” Chloe replied with a grunt. “I see her sometimes, here and there. When that sailor divorced her, she moved back from California. But I wouldn’t count on her for any help. ‘Stelle drinks, you know.”
“Do you remember,” Richie probed, “on that train ride we took, when you and Dad were talking and I was sleeping on the other seat?”
“You mean pretending to sleep, don’t you?” Chloe winked at him. “Oh, yes. A lot more than you think I know. Oh, yes.”
Richie shook his head incredulously. “Okay, pretending to sleep,” he conceded. “Anyway, do you remember him telling you about a garage keeper, a mechanic, that he was working for?”
“I remember. Mack something. I made a couple telephone calls when we first came back, trying to find him, to see if he knew where Richmond was. But I was never able to talk to him. I think he was working for some gangsters or something.”
“He wanted to open a garage of his own,” Richie recalled his father saying. “I wonder if he ever did?”
“I doubt it,” Chloe said cynically. “People never do what they think they’re going to do. Plans never work out, Richie. Remember that. I’ve got to lie down now; I’m getting a splitting headache.”
As winter deepened and darkened, as his existence daily became more arduous, his efforts more fruitless, future bleaker, the turmoil in Richie’s desperate young mind fixated more and more on the only single, shining solution he could envision: finding his father.
He finally told Frances that his mother was a junkie. There was no other way to explain his deteriorating condition. She was outraged.
“No wonder you look so terrible. For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me sooner?” She took his face in her hands. “My poor baby, we’ve got to do something to help you.”
“What?” Richie asked. “What can we do? I don’t want my mother put in jail.”
“I don’t know,” Frances reasoned, “but look at you, for God’s sake. You’re skinnier than ever, some of your clothes are practically rags; Richie, it tears me up to see you like this.” Expression anguished, she helped him undress and get into the tub. In the hot water, he lay limply, all over. Frances did nothing to arouse him. “You’re the only gentle thing in my life, Richie,” she told him quietly. “I been thinking that when you got a little older, maybe you and me could go away together somewheres—you know, and not come back.”
“I can’t leave my mother. She don’t have nobody but me.”
“Well, then, maybe we could take her with us. If she’s sick, we could take care of her, or help her get cured. I could say I was her sister, your aunt; nobody’d know any different. I could work, you know, Richie. I been to beauty college, I can get a job at any beauty parlor in the city. If we did that, you and me, we could have all the time together we wanted.” While he mulled over what she had said, Frances lathered his tangled hair with shampoo, muttering to herself, “You need a haircut bad.”
“Are there doctors who can cure people on dope?” he asked.
“Sure, there must be; there’s doctors for everything.” Her eyes shifted away. “Most everything, anyhow.” As she rinsed him, she asked as casually as she could, “Richie, do you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, because of. . . what we do. Me being a grownup and you just a kid and all.”
“Most of the time I don’t feel like no kid.”
“I know, but do you think there’s something wrong with me?’
Richie shook his head. “No.” Leaning forward, he kissed her on the lips and tongued her mouth the way she had taught him.
“Thanks, baby,” she said with quiet, touching gratitude. Toweling him off, she rubbed his thin body all over with Jergens Lotion, saying, “We’re not going to do anything today, you and me, except fix you a good meal, and you’re going to eat every bite of it. And every day when you come at the regular time, I’m going to have a regular supper ready for you, I don’t care if it is the middle of the afternoon; I’m going to get some weight on you. Plus which, first thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to go see my parish priest and ask his advice about your mother. We’re going to see this thing through, Richie, you and me; we’re going to fix everything just right.”
Frances prepared a big meal for him, a breakfast actually: fried ham, scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, toast with jelly, and hot chocolate. Richie wolfed it down, even though he did not have to be in a hurry; on the one day a week he went to the Rozinski apartment last to spend time with Frances, he now used his school lunch hour to ride the streetcar down to Lake Street, get his mother’s dope and take it to her, and then hurry back to school for the afternoon session, usually just making it before the final bell. He did not want a repetition of the scene where Chloe hit him in the head with a shoe for being late. Most of the time he didn’t have money for lunch anyway.
When he had eaten as much as he could without making himself sick, Frances bundled him up in his worn coat and cap with earmuffs and the muffler she had bought for him, and at the back door kissed him passionately on the lips. “See you tomorrow, baby.”
“Sure, see you tomorrow.”
As Richie crossed the Rozinski back porch, he saw looking out her kitchen door on the adjoining porch the old woman he had been spying on the first time he met Frances. Clutching her sweater close around her neck, the old lady had the door open about six inches and was looking out, leering at him, her thin shoulders shaking from what Richie at first thought was the cold, but then, when he heard it, discovered was a quiet, obnoxious cackling. What the hell’s her goddamn trouble? he wondered.
Carefully negotiating the slippery back stairs, which still had ice on them, he was hoping that the wheels of his pushcart had not frozen again. Then abruptly he stopped and stared at the bottom step. Setting on it was a black leather bowling ball bag. Frowning, Richie went on down, his eyes beginning to dart about. As his foot hit the backyard sidewalk, a strong, beefy hand reached from under the stairs and took hold of his coat, stopping him.
“Hey, lay off!” Richie said, twisting around to face a square-headed man with eyes set close together and a thin line of a mouth, the lips of which were parted incredulously.
“Jesus Christ, you ain’t nothing but a goddamned kid,” he said in disbelief.
“Lemme alone,” Richie protested, trying to pull away. “I ain’t done nothing!”
The square-headed man nodded thoughtfully. “Oh, yeah? Well, we’ll see.”
Richie opened his mouth to yell, but the man immediately clamped a huge hand over his mouth and dragged him down four steps into the basement laundry room. He shov
ed Richie against a wall.
“Drop your pants and drawers,” he ordered.
Mind racing desperately, Richie intentionally let his shoulders sag in submission. “Sure, mister, okay, take it easy. I’ll do like you say.” Opening his coat, Richie pretended to fumble with his belt, then suddenly bolted for the door. When he was almost there, something hard hit him on the side of the temple and he dropped to the cement floor, stunned. Kneeling next to him, the man undid Richie’s belt and fly and pulled down his trousers and long underwear. Bending his face close, he sniffed at Richie’s genitals.
“Jergens Lotion,” he said quietly. “So you ain’t done nothing, huh?”
Closing his hand into a fist, he drove it against Richie’s mouth, splitting his bottom lip, letting blood spurt. With his other fist, he hit him in the eye, then in the nose, the jaw, the other eye, on the chin. When Richie’s head flopped slackly to one side, the man dragged him to his feet, held him up and pounded his ribcage and stomach with short powerful body blows.
Richie was not unconscious, but he was close to it; his eyes had rolled up and he could not focus or keep his head erect. With his hands he tried to tug at his underwear and trousers, which were down around his knees. As he did that, he was aware of being walked roughly outside and half dragged, half pushed back up the four steps and along the backyard sidewalk to the alley.
“Lemme get. . . my . . . pants up . . . ,” he pleaded thickly, feeling the thin, bitter air on his exposed buttocks.
“You should’a kept ’em up, you little bastard,” the man growled. He drove a final, brutal blow into Richie’s genitals, then with a shove sent him sprawling and sliding across the icy alley. “Ever come around here again, I’ll kill you,” he said before he walked away.
Groping, clutching, stumbling, feeling ice against his flesh, Richie managed to get his underwear and trousers pulled up and some of the buttons on his coat closed. His cap and earmuffs were gone; he looked around but could not find them. Blood was flowing from his nose and mouth, and before he realized it he was vomiting up some of the food he had eaten a little while earlier. He could only see out of one eye and it frightened him so that he started to cry. Cocking his head to one side, he felt his way along the alley to where he had left his pushcart. When he got to it, the wheels were frozen.
