Life is much less of a bitch if you can distract yourself with shit like that. Didn't work for me that morning, though. I sat there and went through my whole sorry fucking history, feeling like shit. I don't think I was looking for excuses, not really, I think I was just trying to understand what to do. History repeats itself, even when you ain't got much history. I never knew my parents, some sanitation guys fished me out of the trash in front of a building in Williamsburg. I don't remember that, naturally, but I heard the story often enough.
One of my earliest memories is having the shit beat out of me by a gang of kids in the basement of some institutional building, some government place made of cinder-block walls painted yellow, fluorescent lights, gray asbestos tile floor, white panels in a suspended ceiling. To this day, I am uncomfortable in those places. I don't remember if I cried or not. I might have, at that early age. It doesn't work, though. You learn, early on, not to indulge in it. Anyway, when kids are left to their own devices, they seem to bunch themselves in gangs, and rival gangs take turns working you over until you join one or the other. I don't know where that impulse comes from, maybe the gangs satisfy those shadowy cravings for family and acceptance, but that's just supposition on my part, I have no real information on the subject. I was never a joiner, so I had no other option than to take it until I could build myself up into someone who would make them think twice, send them in search of softer prey. I remember seeing Jack LaLanne on some television talk show, it couldn't have been too long after that first beating, and I only saw him that one time. He was wearing a fruity-looking blue jumpsuit and fucking ballerina shoes, but I remember thinking, I bet nobody fucks with him. From that age on I worked at getting bigger, getting stronger, getting faster. I sought out the gym rats and the iron heads, I attended the academies of the street, and I did my postgrad work at Rikers and Ossining. I didn't do it out of nobility or virtue. It was just easier, for me, than subjecting myself to another set of rules, putting up with shit from another self-important authority figure. To me, the only difference between a gang and any other institution was the color of the uniforms.
So make your left hand into a fist. Hold it out away from you, roll your shoulder and twist forward at your waist. Now hold your right up next to your jaw, somewhere about halfway between your chin and your right ear. I have kept you all at least that far away. That's my comfort zone. If you get too close, it will cost you. Get past the left and I've got the right waiting. Once, I saw a tape of Teofilo Stevenson, the great Cuban boxer, fighting a succession of Romanians and Bulgarians during the Olympics. Three-round fights, right, and they all thought they could survive. They would dance around and throw pitty-pat punches, piling up points while they tried to avoid that left jab. Stevenson, like a giant praying mantis, would wait patiently until they forgot themselves and got too close, and then he would drop that right hand like the hammer of God, and that would be that.
So now I'm two years shy of thirty, more or less. I can't give you an exact birthday. I do know the day they found me in the garbage. I'm six foot one, I stay right around two-twenty. It's a little heavy for a burglar, but it's my best weight. My hair is jet black, when I let it grow in, and my skin fades to a yellowish olive when I've been out of the sun for a while. I've got tattoos from my wrists to my shoulders. They were not the smartest choices I ever made.
I wasted a lot of time wondering where I came from. I don't mean the curb in Williamsburg, I mean the people. Could have been anything, anybody, almost any ethnicity. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm not a pygmy, okay, but I've seen kids from black families whose skin was as light as mine, and there are a lot of Jews in Williamsburg, and a lot of Spanish, too. And who's to say that my mother, whoever she was, didn't take the subway so she could dump me a safe distance from wherever she lived? Genetically, I could be a part of any one of those groups, but in reality I lack the credentials for any of them.
It's funny, though, when you look at all this ethnic shit from the outside. All of these convenient categories, white, black, Hispanic, Oriental, they only have meaning when you are standing too far away to see any detail. Get up closer and all of those terms become worthless. Chinese guys get pissed off if you mistake them for Japanese, the Japanese look down on the Koreans, and nobody can figure out the Tibetans. The languages don't even help much. The Mexicans can't understand the Cubans and the Cubans can't understand the Guatemalans and nobody can understand the Puerto Ricans. Get closer still, even those divisions break down into smaller subsets. You take two Mexicans, one guy from Mexico City and an Indio from Oaxaca, put them in the same room, they might kill each other. The same principle applies to white, black, and whatever other group you might care to name. I used to know a cracker from Alabama, okay, he got stationed in England when he was in the army. Pissed him off no end that everyone he met over there called him a Yankee.
I suppose I have given up on the idea that I could figure out, somehow, whatever subspecies of human being to which I belong, that I could compare the shape of my fingers, say, or my ears, or that some clue to who I am lies buried in the unconscious patterns of my speech. And even if I knew, even if I did figure it out, I wonder if I would feel any different. When I hear the word "we," I accept that it never includes me unless it is used in a limited and mercenary way by some guy like Rosey, with whom I may have formed a temporary alliance in order to better separate some fool from his money. I am the other guy. I suppose I should feel happy I didn't get tossed into the garbage truck. Anyway, you can probably guess the rest of it, except for the part about my son.
Little Nicky, I call him, five years old, he is the most beautiful fucking kid you ever saw. I know, everybody says that about their kids, right, but in my case it might be true. Little Nicky looks like Elvis and Sophia Loren had a baby. He's got curly brown hair and this smile, Jesus, it could break your heart. I don't generally make a great first impression on women, but when Nicky's with me, they swoon, man, young, old, and in between, they just melt. Everybody wants to stop and say hello, and Nicky will talk to them all. The only woman I ever met that didn't love Nicky is the Bitch who runs the foster home he's in. I guess she is more in love with the money the state gives her to take care of him. "Poppy!" That's what he calls me, and he yells it out every time he sees me, which isn't all that often, "Poppy!" and he'll come running, wrap himself around my leg. I'm not supposed to hang around where he lives. The Bitch doesn't want me visiting, so she got an order of protection on me to keep me away.
Nicky's mother and I never married. I mean, we talked about it, went to the parenting classes and the whole bit, but that was when I got sent upstate for the second time. She got into crack while I was away, she was dead by the time I got out, the state had Nicky, and that was that.
I'll tell you what a supervised visit is like. Somebody's office, right, another one of those government buildings, cinder-block walls, fluorescent lights, all of that. I'm uncomfortable, they bring Nicky in, he's uncomfortable, we got this woman sitting there watching us, we can't go anywhere or do anything. I can't give him money, but I can bring a toy, or a T-shirt, something like that. Nicky isn't really interested in presents, he just sits right up next to me as close as he can get, talks to me in a voice so quiet I have to lean down close to hear him. It's fucking torture, I love this kid, man, but I hate seeing him like this, it puts me in a rage. I really want to kill the Bitch for doing this to me, and I know Nicky can sense that. The half hour blinks past and it's gone, Nicky tries not to cry when they take him away, and so do I. I walk out of the place cursing the Bitch, God, Nicky's mother, and everyone else who's had a part in this, but I never once look at myself. I always want to skip these visits, but I can't. I want to do the right thing, but I don't know what it is.
Once in a while you get one moment when you can see the future, it's like a present from God, "Here, asshole, here's how it's gonna play, and what are you gonna do about it?" That morning on the park bench I could see it all. If Rosey didn't get me the Russians would, either that or my luck would run out and I'd wind up back in Ossining, and this time they weren't gonna let me back out until I was old and gray. And the worst of it was that Little Nicky was coming up the hard way, just like I did, and he was gonna turn out just the same, maybe worse. I did not want to sit in some fucking jail cell and think about that.
That was when I decided I was gonna steal him and run.
* * *
I didn't have a fixed address. All I really had was two regular-sized duffel bags and a laptop. I paid my bills on-line, I carried a cell phone, and I lived in sublets. The way it worked, there are Web sites for people who want to rent their place out while they're away, and I would log on to one of those and find something I liked, usually just for a month or two. Sometimes you could even work the whole thing out without ever meeting face-to-facepeople's faith in their fellow man can be astonishing. I used a variety of cover stories. Usually I would claim to be an artist or a musician or a college student, and if I had to meet someone to pick up a key or drop off a check I would wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover the tats, and maybe a beret, grow a little goatee. If I managed to look boho enough they almost always trusted me. Hard to figure. And anyway, I never robbed any of the places I stayed in, though a few times I would hit a different apartment in the same building. I always left the places I'd stayed in nice and clean, though, everything intact.
The place I was living just then happened to be in a very nice building in Cobble Hill. I had been keeping my eye on this little old lady down the hall. She loved jewelry, she had like ten different watches she liked to wear, Cartier and Patek Philippe and Rolex, plus diamond earrings and bracelets, very old and very nice. Problem was, she was a sweet old bat. I carried groceries up for her a few times and she would always try to give me something to eat. She kept a pair of binoculars next to her patio, but the only birds she was interested in were the ones living in the building across the courtyard. She had this little dog, and she took him out for a walk every day. It was almost criminal not to, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, she was too nice. I thought I might hang around for a while, though, see if she croaked.
So I'm walking back that morning, the morning after Leonid, and I'm feeling very jumpy. I'm thinking about Little Nicky, I'm worrying about the deal with Rosey, I want to get away with the kid and the money, both. Anyway, I notice some vans I hadn't seen on the block before. Two big Ford cargo vans, the kind tradesmen use. They had the windows blacked out, both of them had the engines running and one of them was bouncing around a little bit, like there were guys inside, moving around. I turned back when I saw that, went off to think about it.
I could have just walked away. That's what I had been telling myself, that was one of the reasons I was doing the nomad thing to begin with, but I found out I was wrong. That paper bag with the hundred large was up there on the kitchen table, but it was not worth getting killed or busted for, I mean, there was plenty more where that came from. Aside from that, all I had up there was just, you know, personal stuff. But it was mine, you know what I mean? I didn't like the idea of someone I didn't know going through my shit, whether it was cops or the Russians or even the people I was subletting from. I got a flash then, how all those people I had ripped off must've felt, but I put it out of my mind. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or lateronce it comes up you've got to decide what you're gonna do about itbut just then I was too worried about getting back into that apartment. See, there were two things up there that I wanted. I know it sounds stupid, but I really wanted that laptop. It was nobody's business how much I spent on food or dry cleaning or women and it was all right there in Quicken, I hadn't even bothered to put a password on the file. And the other thing was my life list, which I had folded up in the front page of my copy of the
Sibley Guide to Birds
.
A life list is a record of every bird species you have personally seen and identified, and mine isn't even official because you're supposed to have someone with you to verify your sightings, is that a cedar waxwing, yes, by God, mark it down. That would have ruined it for me, this was a thing I had to do on my own, don't ask me why. I had never spoken a single word about it to a soul. But it was up there, and I had a lot of birds on it, too, everything from house sparrows to a great big beautiful son of a bitch of a barn owl, what he was doing in Brooklyn I'll never know, but I wanted that list. No way was I gonna start all over again.
There were some kids shooting baskets in a schoolyard not far away, and I hung out and watched them for a while. I picked out two of them. They were both tall, looked like they could run, and I gave them twenty bucks each to go put a couple of bricks through the back windows of one of those Ford vans. It was pretty funny, the way it went down. The kids come walking down the sidewalk, boom, there go the windows, they take off, the doors of the van burst open, the guys inside are cops and they can't help themselves, they come boiling out and go chasing after the kids, guy in the front seat hops out, he's red-faced, yelling at his guys to come back, and right then a car that I hadn't noticed which had been parked just up the block pulls out and goes screaming away, had to be Rosario waiting for me. The other Ford van jumps out and goes after him, and after a few minutes the cops all come back and get into the one with broken windows, and they take off, too.