He closes his eyes and sees Shar again. Still waving from across the street. Wanting him to come get her. Hunks of metal flying between them. Molecules pushing molecules. The light turns green. The light turns red. Why can’t he reach her?
A cab hurtles by, spraying gutter grit in his face.
He wants so much right now that he can’t keep it all straight in his mind. He wants a place to stay. He wants more life. He wants the life he once had. He wants his baby back. He wants release from the past. He wants to get high and stay high until the moment he dies. And he still wants to hurt someone as badly as he’s been hurt.
But he can’t even stand up.
He thinks of a commercial he once saw—an old woman lying at the foot of her stairs, talking into the little microphone tied around her neck: ‘Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’
All of a sudden, it strikes him as funny. Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
He starts cackling to himself and when no one notices, the cackle turns into a loud chuckle. Then the chuckle becomes a gale-force roar. Soon hordes of people are stepping around him like streams diverging around a rock as they head to Port Authority. Help me, I’ve fallen. Help me. Help me. Help me.
But then the camera-ad light turns green and he hears that lady’s nice voice again. “I’m very worried about you, John.” She cares about him. She wants him to come back. He heaves himself up to his feet and starts staggering toward the bright lights uptown.
13
Jake and Dana’s son, Alex, is walking home with his best friend, Paul Goldman, just before twelve-thirty that night. They are both dressed slightly grunge, in black Nikes, oversized flannel shirts, and jeans as baggy as potato sacks.
“So what’d your father say about the nose ring?” Paul asks.
“He was cool about it.”
“Ah, that’s cool. Your father’s cool.”
“Yeah, he’s all right.” Alex puts his hands in his pockets and sighs as if he’s feeling every one of his sixteen years. “But I think I’m going to stop wearing it soon. What if I get a cold and have to blow my nose? It’ll come out three ways.”
Paul can’t think of an answer, so he keeps walking. “I think I’m gonna shave my head,” he says after a while.
“Cool.”
They are on the west side of Broadway, going past a drugstore full of white light and a newsstand where a frail Pakistani man arranges stacks of gay pornographic magazines.
“If I shaved my head, would you shave yours?”
“No way,” says Alex, flicking hair out of his face.
They keep walking. Paul bows his head and rocks from side to side, mumbling the words to a hip-hop song. “Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.” Alex has his mother’s straight back but his father’s slightly pugnacious bearing, so that he always seems to be leaning forward on the balls of his feet.
Paul flips a Turkish cigarette into his mouth as they round the corner and head toward West End. “Can I copy your paper from English?”
“What? The whole paper? Dude! Didn’t you read the book?”
“Dude!” says Paul. “I didn’t even know what book it was.”
“We’re up to the
Odyssey.”
“Huh.” Paul lights his cigarette and immediately starts coughing. “What’s it about?”
“Dude! That’s so bogus! We spent the last two classes talking about it. What’s the point of going to summer school if you don’t pay attention?”
“I was spacing, dude.”
Alex flaps his arms. “It’s about a guy trying to get back to his family after he’s been away twenty years.”
“Cool,” says Paul.
They cross West End Avenue, heading toward Alex’s house. The street is dark and lined with parked cars. Right before they get to the front steps, they hear a grunt and look over to see a skinny bearded white man in a Yankees cap and an MTA shirt, taking a leak in the gutter and singing in a cranky wayward voice.
“I been in the wrong place but it musta been the right time . . .”
“Yo, the Night Tripper, what’s up?” Paul calls out from twelve feet away. “That’s a golden oldie, bro. My father listens to that shit.”
The man looks up, dazed and slightly offended. “Ha?”
“You gotta pardon my friend,” Alex intercedes. “He acts kinda retarded sometimes.”
Paul punches Alex on the arm.
But the man doesn’t seem to notice. He trips coming out of the gutter and glares at the boys as if it’s their fault.
“Where you guys going?” he asks.
“I live here,” says Alex. “This is my house.”
In the light of the street lamp, the man’s eyes go up and then suddenly move over to the right. It’s as if he’s picking up some frequency no one else can hear.
“Is one of you here to see my daughter?” he asks.
“No,” says Alex.
“Like, we don’t even know your daughter,” Paul adds, bopping in place.
Somehow their words don’t make it across the eight feet of sidewalk that separate them from the homeless man. He’s hearing something else entirely.
“Well, I don’t think that’s right, a girl her age going out with anybody,” he says, completing the non sequitur. “She’s too young. I’m gonna have to talk to my wife in there.”
“Mister, you don’t live here. I do.”
The homeless man seems thrown by that answer. It’s as if someone has just changed the channels in his mind. He looks confused and then upset as he tries to regain his bearings on the street.
“Where am I?”
“You’re on the Upper West Side.”
“Then gimme some money,” he says.
“Paul, go up and ring the buzzer,” Alex tells his friend. “Wake my parents.”
“Don’t go in there! Don’t go anywhere!”
The man’s switched channels again. He suddenly seems angry and feral. He even crouches a little, like an animal sniffing the sidewalk between them. Getting ready to pounce.
“You come to take her away. Right?! Well that ain’t gonna happen.”
He reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a boxcutter with the edge exposed.
“You touch my daughter or my wife, I’ll cut your fuckin’ balls off,” he says, grinding his teeth and advancing on the boys. “Fuckin’ little parasites.”
His blade catches a glint from the streetlight as he holds it above his right ear.
“Hey, Paul, forget the bell. Let’s get out of here,” says Alex, backing up slowly.
But Paul is frozen. He’s too scared to take his eyes off the boxcutter. The homeless man’s grinding teeth begin to make a cracking noise.
“What, you think I’d do a thing like that to my own daughter?!”
he yowls, as if he’s indignant at some invisible interrogator. “How could you think a thing like that?”
Without warning, he turns on Alex and the blade slices the air a foot or two from the end of the boy’s nose. It makes a sickening whoosh as it goes by and Alex feels his scrotum seize up like someone just grabbed it.
“How could you think that?!”
The man takes another step and kicks a green Heineken bottle that was lying on the sidewalk. It shatters and sprays glass on the front steps. He’s now less than a yard away from Alex. He smells so terrible that the air seems to die around him. Flies wouldn’t get near him. Oh shit, Alex thinks. He’s going to kill me. I’m gonna die without ever getting laid.
He catches sight of Paul whimpering and cowering by the wrought-iron courtyard gate, and it occurs to him that this might be the last thing he’ll ever see.
“What do you think I am? A fuckin’ animal?” the man shouts.
Just then there’s a loud squeak and a wash of bright light from the top of the steps. Alex looks up and sees his father standing at the front door. For the first time in years, he allows himself to feel a full rush of love for the old man.
“I thought I told you to get out of here.” Jake comes pounding down the steps, fists clenched.
The man in the Yankees cap doesn’t pause to face him or pocket his boxcutter. He just turns and runs off toward the park, knocking over a plastic garbage can on the way.
“You all right?” Jake says, coming down the rest of the stairs and putting an arm around his son.
“Yeah, fine, Dad.” Alex squirms and shoots a sidelong glance at Paul. “Don’t make a big thing of it.”
14
How’s your boy doing?”
The man coming up the front steps looks familiar, but Jake can’t quite place him. A stocky guy about his age—maybe a year or two older—with wheat-colored hair, a middleweight’s physique, and a drinking buddy’s face.
“He’s all right, I guess,” says Jake, sweeping some more of the broken glass off the stairs. “Pretty shook up, at first. He’s never had anybody stick a knife in his face before.”
The man exhales and shakes his head. “They’re taking over, aren’t they?” He looks beyond Jake’s shoulder at the exploded star of broken glass in the front-door window.
It’s just after ten in the morning. Fragments of green glass sparkle in the sunlight. Jake sweeps them into a yellow dustpan and dumps them into a garbage bag. He still hasn’t figured out how the glass in the door got broken. Maybe John G. threw a rock at it before the boys came along.
“Philip Cardi,” says the stocky man sticking out his left hand. “I’m doing some work rehabbing a couple of my man Thomas’s apartments across the street.”
He points to a red Dodge van parked outside the town house on the south side. Jake remembers the buzz-sawing and the hammering he’s heard the last couple of mornings and everything starts to fall into place. He even recalls some vague discussion he
had with Thomas, the pale, squinty-eyed landlord, about the legal complexities of converting his building into a small co-op.
“Forgive me for intruding,” says Philip Cardi, running a hand through his close-cropped hair. “But when I heard about what happened to your boy and his friend last night, I had to come over.” He shields his eyes from the sun. “What are the police gonna do?”
“I don’t know.” Jake sets the broom against the black iron rail for a moment. “We were up until three in the morning, waiting for a cop to show up and take a report. And then they say they’ll only take the complaint over the phone because they don’t have enough people on the shift to send one around. So now I’m going to have to go to the station myself and make sure they’re going to follow up and investigate.”
“Ah, they don’t care.” Philip mops his brow with a red bandanna.
“Yeah. Well. You didn’t see anything last night, did you?” Jake notices a particularly jagged shard near his feet. “I don’t suppose you live around here.”
“Nah, I didn’t see anything. And neither did the people I was talking to. I’m from out on the Island. I got a place, Massapequa. Beautiful out there, you know. I got a pool in the back and I can barbecue every night in the summer. It kills me to see what they’ve done to the city. You know? I used to love it here. But now with all the dirt and the crime ... It’s starting to be like I get a headache every time I get on the LIE to drive in.”
“I know what you mean.” Jake shakes his head. “I’m beginning to think I should’ve done the suburban thing too. For my kid, you know.”
“Hey, children, they’re the most valuable things we’ve got.” Philip throws out his right arm and winces slightly. At first it looks like an aggressive gesture, but then Jake realizes it’s just an involuntary reflex.
“I got two of them,” Philip says. “A boy that’s five and a girl who’s eight. And I swear if anyone ever laid a hand on either of them the way that bum tried to lay a hand on your son, I’d be right after him with a baseball bat and a crowbar. Botta beep,
botta bing. His brains are on the sidewalk and that’s the end of your social problem.”
“Botta beep, botta bing.” Jake laughs. “Hey, where you from anyway?”
“Sixty-fourth Street in Bensonhurst.”
“No shit. I grew up on Avenue X. Marlboro Houses.”
“Hey...”
They shake hands again, with a different feeling this time. It’s not the exact same neighborhood, but who cares?
“Sixty-fourth Street, huh?”
“Yeah, and Twentieth Avenue,” says Philip. “Right above the surgical supply store. You remember it?”
“Sure. With the prosthetic arms and legs in the window.”
“Where’d you go to school?” asks Philip Cardi.
“John Dewey.”
“Lafayette, Class of seventy. You hang around Eighteenth Avenue?”
“I was down at Sweet Tooth’s about once a week,” says Jake, hearing himself slip into his old neighborhood attitude without feeling self-conscious about it for once.
“My place was the Milano sports club on Seventy-third Street. Associazione Italiana. You ever go there?”
Jake remembers the hard-eyed old men in their straw hats sitting in the lawn chairs out front, listening to soccer games from Italy on the radio. Through the front window, you could see the plaster saints and the local knock-around guys standing by the pool tables, brandishing their cues like Revolutionary War soldiers’ muskets. Not a place for a nice Jewish boy.
“Eighty-sixth Street was more my turf,” says Jake.
He finds himself hoping this doesn’t cost him any status. Twenty-five years later and he’s still worrying what people in the neighborhood think of him.
“Hey, Brooklyn is Brooklyn,” says Philip Cardi, letting him off the hook.
“Brooklyn is Brooklyn.”
“And we wouldn’t let the neighborhood go all to hell like they have up here. Am I right?”
Jake nods, though he can’t help noticing this stretch of the Upper West Side still looks pristine, while Bensonhurst was full of vacant lots and graffiti-smudged walls the last time he drove through. No wonder he’s never taken Dana for a visit.
“So your boy’s going to be okay?” Philip asks. “He need somebody to walk him to school this morning?”
“Ah, he’s fine. He’s a stand-up kid.”
Listen to this, Jake thinks. A stand-up kid. As if he’s suddenly inducted Alex into the Bensonhurst tribe.
“Well, all the guy that did this to him needs is a little attitude adjustment,” Philip says, with a smile like a grimace. “You let me know if you want me to go with you, have a talk with him.”
“A little attitude adjustment,” says Jake.
Botta bing. He remembers Nunzi the Knuckle catching a beating outside a candy store on Twentieth Avenue because he’d been propositioning little boys in the bathroom. From then on, Nunzi wore a head bandage and kept his eyes to himself when you stood next to him at the urinal.