"We had some guys like that at the Mount," Stony said.
"Really? Boy, when I went to school the fuckin' priests, man, you look at them cross-eyed, you got clocked on the head. An' the goddamn nuns were worse. I got a sister that went to Catholic school in Brooklyn. She comes in one day with pierced earrings, some fuckin' nun pulls her outta line an' rips the fuckin' things right outta her ears, can you believe that?"
"So what else is new?" Stony had sixteen million horror stories of his own from those days.
"Them fuckin' fascist penguins is somethin' else, hah? So, anyways, kid, whatta you doin' now? You workin' anywhere?"
"Not yet. I got some bread stashed from when I was doin' summer jobs. I dunno what I'm gonna do yet."
"You got all the fuckin' time in the world, kid. You got some dough? If I was you I'd go to Europe for a couple a months. About ten years ago I had some money. I split for Europe, wound up in Amsterdam. The most incredible fuckin' city in the world. They got this red-light district they call The Wall. Two million hookers but young, nice, blondes like you never seen. Each one sits in a ground-level window with a red light over the door. They got beds right in the window. You.go in, say how do you do, they pull the curtain an' you get laid right in the fuckin' street. The people in the city are nice too. Everybody speaks English."
As Cleanhead talked on, Stony studied the Bronx terrain. He never thought of traveling. The cab pulled into Co-op City.
"Where you goin', babe?"
"You know where the shoppin' center is? Drop me off there."
Stony threw him two-fifty and hopped out of the cab. "Hey, kid." Cleanhead motioned Stony back to the cab. "Here." He handed him a printed calling card and watched Stony's face as he read it:
They know me uptown, downtown, in the Bronx and in Queens.
When folks ride with me, I split their seams.
Behind this wheel, in all my glory
A day doesn't pass without a good story.
I keep alert and on the beam,
Because my head is shiny clean.
So if you can't use a bus and want a cab instead,
Here's my card—just dial cleanhead.
He laughed, slapped Stony on the arm and roared off into the sunset.
***
"For the life of me I can't figure out what happened," Tommy fumed. He sat between Chubby and Stony in the back of the cab they'd hailed at Jacobi.
"I never liked that fuckin' hospital," Chubby said. "How long's he in for?"
"Stony, what'd that doctor say?" Tommy asked.
Stony didn't answer, he just stared straight ahead.
"I just cannot fuckin' understand it. Marie said she woke up when she heard him screamin', ran into his room and he was just like that," Tommy said.
"Maybe he had a nightmare." Chubby lit a cigarette. "Whatta you think, Stones?"
Stony acted as if he didn't hear him.
"What's with him?" Chubby nodded at Stony.
"Poor fuckin' Marie, she's a nervous wreck."
"It's tough for a mother," Chubby said.
"He'll be O.K.," Tommy mused. "That doctor what's-his-name, he looked like he knew his stuff."
"When a' they gonna take that tube out his arm? Those things always give me the creeps."
"I dunno, I didn't ask. When he wakes up I guess. Hey, the union covers for this kinda stuff, right?" Tommy asked.
"I don't see why not. Whyncha call Joe Ginsberg when we get upstairs?"
"It's a tough fuckin' life, Chub."
"Yah kid's in the hospital?" the cabdriver piped. "What's he got?"
Tommy and Chubby exchanged looks. "Tonsils," Tommy answered.
"No sweat." The cabdriver shrugged. "He'll be back in two days."
When the cab stopped in front of their building Stony strode ahead of his father and uncle into the lobby. He shouldered a kid who crossed his path. When Chubby and Tommy entered, Stony was already in the elevator. The door began to slide shut. Tommy stuck his arm in in time. Stony stood rigid in the corner of the car.
"Thanks for holdin' the goddamn door." Chubby was puffing from the short sprint.
"Leave him alone, Chub," Tommy said.
When the elevator opened Stony pushed open the apartment door and marched into the dinette. Marie sat at the dinette table in the approaching evening darkness. She was still wearing the raspberry bathrobe. Her eyes were circled in black and her hair was unkempt. Phyllis sat next to her, one arm protectively around her shoulders. Cups of coffee sat in front of them, but no steam rose from the cups. Stony stared at his mother.
"What'd you do to him?" His voice was flat.
Marie raised her eyes.
"What'd you do to him?" Stony repeated louder.
Marie sat up as if stung.
"What'd you do to him, ya fuckin' bitch!" Stony lunged over the table, snagged the collar of his mother's bathrobe with one hand and smashed her in the face. She fell backward, cracking her head on the rear wall, a whiplash of blood from her nose splattering the table.
Phyllis screamed as Stony leaped on top of his mother. He pummeled her blindly through his tears until Tommy and Chubby burst in and dragged him away. "What'd you do to my fucking brother, you fucking cunt bitch!" he screamed as they hauled him into the living room. Chubby sat on his chest, crushing his back into the burnt orange carpet, and his father pinned his flailing arms. The last thing he remembered before blacking out was his father's chalk white, horror-stricken face.
S
TONY LAY IN BED
that night, hands behind his head, trying to make out the titles of books in the dark. Some he knew from their shape on the bookshelf, others were too uniform to identify. The row of books reminded him of the New York skyline. He could still feel Chubby's knees digging into his shoulders. The fat fuck. He got out of his bed and crawled into Albert's. The sheets smelled like his brother. After a few minutes he sat up, took his cigarettes from his shirt hanging over a chair and lit up. By the light of the match he identified some of the books he couldn't make out earlier.
Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, Brave New World, David Copperfield, 1984, Animal Farm, Silas Marner
—all paperbacks, all required high school reading. All bullshit boring.
Stony ditched the cigarette and got dressed. He took down his suitcase barricaded on the top of the closet by the old games he or Albert hadn't touched in years—Video Village, Parcheesi, Stratego, a Gilbert microscope, two shoeboxes of baseball cards, Careers, a Nok-Hockey board and a big crumpled bag filled with the pieces of half a dozen never attempted jigsaw puzzles.
He threw in underwear, socks, a few pairs of dungarees and a couple of shirts. He slipped quietly into the bathroom, collected his toothbrush, his hot comb and his razor, dumped this stuff in and snapped the suitcase shut. Amsterdam. You pick them out of the windows, Cleanhead had said. Ten bucks a throw. Nice blondes. They'd go for him too. A guinea stud with New York soul. Cleanhead said everybody spoke English there, but even if they didn't all you had to do was throw in some ooks and icks every few words and you could make out O.K.
Stony took out his bankbook: 638 dollars and 41 cents.
Amster, Amster, doity woid
Amster, Amster, doity woid.
Two-thirty in the morning. Stony picked up the suitcase and headed down the foyer.
"Stony..." Marie stood behind him like a ghost in the dark. She turned on the hall light, blinding them both. She wore a white nightgown. A bloody brown piece of cotton hung from one nostril. A half-moon of dull red under her left eye. She grabbed Stony's hand. "Stony, I just want you to know, that whatever you do, I'll always love you." She pouted, ready to cry. "I'll always forgive you."
Stony was dumbstruck. "Ma?" He tightened his grip on the suitcase. "You're a fuckin' hoowah." He pulled the plug of cotton from her nose. She winced, letting go of his hand, and he was gone.
***
"I couldn't do it, Butler. Last night I got down to Kennedy, first thing I realize, you can't pay for a plane ticket wit' a bankbook, so I come all the way back up to the Bronx, hang around till the bank opens an' take out all my money. I was gonna take a cab back out to Kennedy, I think, at least lemme say goodby to Albert, so I go to Jacobi instead. I walk into his room there an' he's sleepin' like a baby. The doctor says he gonna be O.K., he just needs to rest for a couple a days. The doctor wants to start puttin' him on tranks, see a shrink for a while,
that
scares the shit out of me. You know, seein' a shrink. The kid's eight years old."
Butler and Stony aimlessly tossed around a basketball on a concrete court. Stony took a one-handed jumper from twenty feet out, missing the basket and backboard completely. The ball clanked noisily into the chain link fence separating the court from the sidewalk. The noon sun was hot. Made them slow.
"Anyways, so I just sit there in his room with my suitcase watchin' him sleep. That kid never sleeps at home. Lays in bed late at night until two and he's up at dawn. I never really seen him sleep an' he's always having nightmares. He told me this dream once about Mrs. Halzer, his teacher, makin' him drink this big glass of milk that turns to blood when he's halfway finished."
Underhand Butler tossed the ball from the foul line, hitting the pole. "I remember this dream once I had. My old man is tryin' to screw me up the ass. What's with this fuckin' ball? Next mornin' I find out he had to go to Jacobi with a blocked prostate. Served 'im right, the bastard."
Stony tried to drop-kick the basketball into the hoop, almost booting it over the fence. "I was just sittin' there watchin' him sleep. I figure, shit, I'll leave next week when he comes home, make sure he's O.K., you know?"
"You got a passport?"
"A what?" Stony blinked. "Aw, for chrissakes!" He kicked the basketball into the fence again.
"So get one."
"Ah, fuck it." Stony blew down the front of his shirt to cool off, sitting on a low concrete ledge behind the pole. "Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it." Grimacing, scratching his head.
"Albert'll be O.K." Butler took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and sat down next to Stony.
"It ain't just that, it's, I dunno, you can't just ... I dunno, I kept doing these weird numbers in my head all last night. I kept runnin' down all these ... memories. I keep thinkin' about all these crazy things. Like this one time when I had ringworm on my scalp when I was a kid. My mother took me to a skin guy who was gonna use ultraviolet rays on my head, but he said if I moved a half inch or so my brains would turn to Cream of Wheat, so she said no dice, and I had to do this other treatment where they shaved my head. Can you imagine that? I was bald at six. And it was a real motherfucker too. I wore this stocking hat and all the kids called me Baldy. I would come home cryin' everyday. Fistfights, the whole shtick. But the real bitch was when the mothers found out I was bein' treated for ringworm and told their kids they couldn't play with me. I remember comin' upstairs after my best friend, Mitchell, told me his mother said I have a disease in my head and he couldn't go near me. I came home and I was laughing my ass off. I just bopped into the house and said, 'Mitchell's mother says I got a disease in my head'; laughin', laughin' and all of a sudden I just break into tears like I thought I was gonna choke.
"My mother got so damn mad she calls up this kid's mother an' that was the first time I ever heard an adult curse. She was screamin' and wavin' her arms. She called her a no-good lousy pig, told her to drop dead an' get fucked an' God knows what else. When my old man heard about it, he took me right down to this toy store an' he says, 'You don't
need
those other kids,' an' he bought me forty bucks' worth a cowboy stuff. I mean not just a goddamn gun an' holster either. I mean spurs, chaps, leather cuffs, a shirt with pearl buttons, goddamn bandileers even."
"These foolish things, remind me uh-huh yooo," Butler crooned.
Stony laughed. "That ain't all. My father got me this big cowboy hat. It was a little too big so no one could tell I was bald. I used to wear it everywhere, even when my hair grew back, but about a week after he got me all the cowboy stuff, my family went out with Chubby and Phyllis to Nino's, this Italian restaurant in Monticello. I was all dressed up with all the stuff, the hat, the guns, the whole shtick. We're all sittin' there an' some mook puts 'High Noon' on the juke. You know, Frankie Laine? 'Do not forsake me, oh my dar-ling.' So all the grown-ups are talkin'. I start stalkin' aroun' the restaurant like Gary Cooper with my hands by my guns, right? Everybody in the whole place starts laughin'. I was so fuckin' cute. This waiter comes out with this tray an' when he sees me, he puts down the tray an' starts walkin' towards me like
he
got two guns an' we square off about twenny feet apart. Everybody's goin' berserk, Frankie Laine is singin' in the background and
I'm
serious as hell an' we're slowly gettin' closer an' closer. All of a sudden I pull out my two guns, they're loaded with caps, an' I shoot him. The fuckin' guy falls on the floor grabbin' his heart like he's dead. Everybody stands up and starts cheerin' and clappin'. I jus' blow the smoke from my guns. put 'em back in my holster and go sit down. Chubby was laughin' so hard he had to have two glasses a water to stop gaggin'. My mother had tears on her face from laughin'. Later, Nino himself came out and gave me an ice cream sundae for dessert. I didn't see what was so funny. I thought everybody was laughin' because they knew I was bald under my cowboy hat." Stony wiped the sweat from the side of his face with his shoulder. "That's how I got my nickname."
"Stony?"
"Yeah. When Nino came over to the table with the ice cream, he slapped my father on the back an' said, 'Your kid got real stones.'" Stony examined his nails, then squinted at the sun. "You know somethin', Butler? I
knew
I wasn't goin' to Amsterdam las' night. I think I jus' went out there to see what it would feel like."
"Like what would feel like?"
"Leavin' home."
A
LBERT'S DOCTOR
was Ralph Harris, ne Hochman, a thirty-five-year-old heavy, bearded, pediatric resident who spent two of the first five years of his life in a concentration camp. He was saved from the gas chamber by a sympathetic guard who smuggled him out of the camp in a truck loaded with corpses. In 1955, at fifteen, Ralph Hochman migrated to America from Poland, where he had been living with relatives of the guard who saved him. The guard himself was executed in 1949 on atrocity charges. It had been his job to keep the children orderly on their way to the gas chambers. He had developed a whole repertoire of hand and shadow games to keep them amused and distracted while they waited for the chambers to be cleared of previous tenants.