Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (3 page)

“That’s someone who’s gone back to an old habit. This boy had promised Mrs. Hocker and the group that he’d swear off pills. He was taking uppers before he joined the group. And Mrs. Hocker found out he started taking them again. He’s a recidivist.”

“Too bad,” Tucker had commented.

“Why?” Natalia had said. “He needs those uppers. If Mrs. Hocker had been doing him any good, he wouldn’t have gone back to taking uppers, would he?”

“I don’t know,” Tucker said. “Dope addicts are too complicated.”

“But you shouldn’t have to need to do something,” Natalia said. “If you have to need to do something, and you don’t do it, then you’ll only do something worse.”

It sounded reasonable to Tucker and not reasonable to Tucker. He decided one reason he was not sure whether or not Natalia made good sense was that he never fully concentrated on what she was saying. He was always sitting there wondering things like: did he smell of perspiration because he had on a heavy wool sweater indoors? if he took off his shoes like everyone else, would his feet smell? and was his breath all right? He had never had such thoughts before, but now he had them, and he felt like all those characters in television commercials swapping anti-odor tips with each other, except he had no one to compare notes with. Sometimes he would go into the Hockers’ bathroom and raise his arms and smell his armpits, and often when he came back out he sat with his arms glued to his sides.

After Tucker left Woerner’s with Dinky, they walked down to Court Street on their way to the library. In front of Chock Full O’ Nuts, Dinky said, “Do you want to try out their new barbecue sauce? It has onions in it, and it’s really neat.”

“You try it out,” Tucker said. “I’ll come with you.”

“I’m not going to sit at the counter if you’re just going to take up space beside me. They don’t like that in Chock Full O’ Nuts.”

“I don’t know what I’d order,” Tucker said, trying to find a comfortable way to carry Mrs. Hocker’s four pies.

“All
right!
” Dinky said, as though she were going to have to make a big sacrifice on account of him. “I’ll order two franks and you can pretend one is yours.”

“How did that guy eat, anyway?” Tucker said as they went inside.

“Who?”

“The one with the cauliflower sacs on his head, whose mouth was out of line.”

“Who cares how he ate?” Dinky said. “There was more to him than how he ate. Everybody thinks about how much someone eats and not about what makes someone tick!”

Tucker didn’t say anything.

“Three franks,” Dinky told the waitress, “and a heavenly coffee.”

Then Dinky turned to Tucker and said, “She’ll be back Saturday afternoon. She’ll be going to St. Marie’s with me. I guess she’ll be around for a while.”

When Tucker got home, at ten minutes to five, the martini pitcher was on the table in the living room. His uncle handed him a glass of milk.

“Come on in, Tucker, we’re about to start the toasts.”

His uncle’s name was Guy Bell, but everyone called him Jingle, and he was not the type who minded. He was around forty. He had been divorced three times. He drove an old Rolls-Royce he called Betty Boop, and Tucker’s mother claimed he owed half of New York City money. He had once been an actor and now said he was a playwright, and he called people who weren’t connected with theater “civilians” and spent a lot of time worrying about grants coming through to “subsidize” him.

Tucker took off his coat, after putting the milk down on the coffee table. Once he sat down, Jingle handed him the milk again.

“Isn’t there any Coke?” Tucker said.

“Not for this toast,” Jingle said. “Coke rots your teeth.”

“Gin rots your liver,” Tucker shrugged.

Tucker’s mother said, “You’re in that same sour mood you were in at breakfast, honey. Now try to get into the spirit of things. Your father and Jingle have an announcement to make.”

The martinis were poured then. They all raised their glasses and drank to the forthcoming announcement. Then Tucker’s father talked for a while.

What he said was all news to Tucker.

He started off by saying he had never really respected himself for being a professional fundraiser, and that as a professional fundraiser, he had led a dull, unrewarding life.

All Tucker could think of was the excitement that used to fill the house when Tucker’s father was on the track of a “signer.” In professional fund raising, the whole trick was to rope in someone very important and respectable to be the signer of all the letters which went out to people, asking for money. A Rockefeller, a Ford, someone like Edward Kennedy—these were all logical signers. People would see one of their names on a letter asking for a contribution to a hospital or a college, and they would know that it was a worthy cause.

A lot of work that didn’t look like work went into getting just the right signer: golf games and lunches and telephone calls here and there, and little Sunday supper invitations, and everything Natalia would probably call “sly.”

Tucker’s father was always at his best in pursuit of a signer. He’d come home and give blow-by-blow descriptions of his progress to Tucker’s mother. When the signer was finally in the bag, Tucker’s father would take Tucker and his mother to dinner at a swanky restaurant.

“I never had any elation about what I did!” Tucker’s father was saying as he poured himself another martini. “I never had any joy about the job.”

Tucker’s mother made no comment, but sat with this broad smile cemented across her face, waiting for the new scheme to unfold.

Jingle said, “What Cal is trying to say is that fund raising didn’t do anything for
Cal
. Sure, it did a lot for Lenox Hill, and The Lighthouse, and American Cancer, and Backwater College for Girls, but it didn’t help Cal!”

Tucker finally said, “What’s the new business going to be, then?”

“Health food!” Tucker’s father said, raising his glass again. “Tonight we are christening a new baby called Help Yourself, Inc.”

“Help Yourself!” Jingle raised his glass again, too. “Here’s to a new business, a new philosophy, a whole new way of life, all wrapped up in one little combination store-restaurant.”

“Where do you plan to open this place?” said Tucker’s mother.

Jingle said, “Right here in Brooklyn.”

“Right here in Brooklyn
Heights
,” Tucker’s father said.

O
N SUNDAY, TUCKER, DINKY
, and Natalia took the IRT 7th Avenue subway to the Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum station. From there they walked to the high path along the Overlook of Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. They found a bench, and the moment they sat down, Dinky took a turkey sandwich, in a Baggie, from her coat pocket.

No one said anything about the fact Dinky had just finished Sunday dinner, which was turkey with gravy, yams, string beans, biscuits, Waldorf salad, and pumpkin pie.

“This place,” said Dinky, “is really something in the spring and summer.” She pointed her sandwich down at the gardens and said, “In the spring and summer there are roses, lilacs, tulips, and flowering cherries. I like to bring a picnic here. We’ll bring a picnic here in the spring.”

Dinky was wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt which belonged to her father, and her father’s red-and-black-wool hunter’s jacket. Tucker was in old clothes, too. But Natalia was in a black velvet dress with a white lace collar, a black wool coat, and a black fur hat. She wore black patent-leather shoes, and stockings, and a white angora scarf with matching mittens.

“I was glad to get out of the house, anyway,” said Dinky, “even if this isn’t the ideal time of year to come here.”

“I like it here this time of year,” Natalia said.

“So do I,” said Tucker.

Dinky said, “That’s because neither of you know better. You can see anything here in the summer, even more than the spring. I saw a woman nursing a baby here last summer right in the middle of the Cranford Rose Garden, and you always see kids making out on blankets down near Cherry Walk. This isn’t a good time of year for the Botanic Gardens.”

“People live in the past,” Natalia said. ‘“In the carriages of the past you can’t go anywhere.’”

“That’s neat,” Tucker said. “Where’d you hear that?”

“It was on our bulletin board at school,” Natalia said. “Maxim Gorky said it.”

“What school is that?” Tucker said.

Dinky said, “I don’t live in the past. I just happen to know more about the Botanic Gardens than you two, and I’m telling you this is the wrong time of year to see them!”

“It was your idea to come here,” Tucker said.

Natalia said, “She wanted to get out of the house because her parents were having a disagreement.”

“They were having a fight,” Dinky said, “at the top of their lungs.”

“Dinky’s mother wants her father to defend this heroin addict,” Natalia said. “The court assigned him a lawyer, but Dinky’s mother said he isn’t a good lawyer, not as good as Uncle Horace, anyway.”

“My father’s right,” said Dinky. “There’s nothing he can do for the guy. The guy’s been shooting smack since he was thirteen. He’s a recidivist in capital letters!”

“Is shooting smack taking heroin?” Tucker said.

“It’s not just
taking
heroin,” Dinky said, “it’s wallowing in it. That guy lives to shoot up. He’d kill his grandmother for a ten-dollar bag. He’d hammer you to death for half the price of a snort.”

“I like things out of season,” Natalia changed the subject. “That’s why I like coming here in late November.”

“That guy has track marks on his ankles,” Dinky said. “He’s got acne everywhere, including the insides of his ears, just from being a smack-head.”

“Does heroin give you pimples?” Tucker asked.

“All junk does. Junkies love sweets,” Dinky said authoritatively. “I never met a junkie who didn’t verge on bulbous acne.”

“How can you eat and talk about bulbous acne?” Tucker said.

“I’m not finicky,” Dinky answered.

She finished her sandwich and they walked from the Overlook down to the Cherry Esplanade, and across to the Oriental Garden. They talked about dope addicts, and the man Dinky was doing the book report about who had the big cauliflower sacs on his head and no hands; and they talked about dwarfs and pinheads and a woman Dinky had read about whose ears were attached to her shoulders. Dinky did most of the talking. They sat around the lake near the Oriental Garden staring up at the fir trees and ginkgoes, the mountain ashes and locusts, and Dinky passed around a 45¢-size box of Milk Duds.

“One of the strangest things I ever heard,” said Dinky, “was the story of this doctor my mother knew. He specialized in hydrocephalics.”

“What are they?” Tucker said.

“They’re people with water on the brain. They have oversized heads. Their heads are so big they can hardly carry them on their shoulders. They don’t live long.”

“I’ve seen one of those,” Natalia said.

Dinky said, “This doctor never treated anyone but hydrocephalics. They were all children whose parents brought them to him, to see if there was anything he could do. He had three normal children of his own. How he got interested in hydrocephalics is anyone’s guess. That was just his thing.”

“That’s not so strange,” Natalia said. “He just had a specialty.”

“
Fermay la bush
and let me finish,” Dinky said. “The strange part of the whole story was that his fourth child turned out to be a hydrocephalic.”

“Oh wow,” said Natalia.

“His wife turned into a drunk,” Dinky said. “Even though it’s a scientific fact you can’t catch hydrocephalus, or even carry it in your genes, his wife believed that somehow his whole interest in the subject was responsible.”

“That’s quite a story,” Tucker agreed.

“What’s the strangest thing
you
ever heard, Tucker?” Natalia asked.

Tucker remembered one of the confession stories for
Stirring Romances
his mother had been working on some weeks ago. It wasn’t a true story, none of the confession stories in those magazines ever were true. It was supposed to be this nurse’s confession of something she had done years ago. The photograph accompanying the story showed a nurse in her white cap, sitting on a high stool, weeping, with her face buried in her hands.

Tucker said, “The strangest thing I ever heard was the story of this nurse my mother knew. She’d worked in this hospital for about twenty years, in the small town where she lived. She was very bitter because she was from a poor family, and besides that she couldn’t have children of her own.”

“Why couldn’t she?” Dinky said.

“She just couldn’t,” said Tucker. “Some women can’t.”

“What happened?” Natalia said.

“She confessed one day that for twenty years she’d been switching newborn babies around. She’d been changing their name tags. She’d take a rich man’s new baby and switch name tags with a poor man’s new baby. No one in the town had the right baby. No one knew who their real brothers and sisters were, or who their real mothers and fathers were, after she made her confession twenty years later.”

Dinky whistled and hit her forehead with her palm.

The title of that
Stirring Romance
story had been “I Made Their Lives a Mockery.”

Natalia said, “Didn’t she keep track of whose baby she was giving to who?”

“No,” Tucker said. “She kept no records. She just made their lives a mockery.”

Dinky said, “Probably something like that happened when I was born. That’s probably why I have a gland problem and no one else in the family does. I’m probably some circus fat lady’s illegitimate child.”

Dinky got thirsty and the trio made their way toward Flatbush Avenue where Dinky remembered there were street vendors selling orange drinks. For a while they discussed nothing but the awful possibilities which could have resulted from the nurse’s actions, and finally Tucker became aware that he and Dinky had been hogging the conversation.

“What’s the strangest thing you ever heard?” he asked Natalia.

She had this funny little faraway smile, and she just shrugged and replied, “I know a lot of strange things.”

Dinky said, “One strange thing is the fact they don’t sell food or refreshments of any kind in this place. They do in Central Park, in Manhattan. You can buy a whole hot meal at the cafeteria by the zoo.”