Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  This is how it went: he received numerous verbal warnings, followed by a handful of written warnings, before management and union reps got called in. They would have a sit-down in the super's office and Connie would get fired over some last-straw incident, with the caveat that another position would be secured, though any seniority was lost, which was fine with Connie, as he didn't believe in the future. It was uncanny in what similar ways these terminations played out. He got hired in another house managed by Douglas Elliman–Gibbons & Ives, or Brown Harris, and upon his arrival he'd rip the lobby floor a new ass, before frustrations would once again start to build, up to that point where he could no longer hold the spring down, and he'd work his way toward another dismissal.

  The job, ultimately—and Connie knew this—required too little of him. In the case of his current employment, his tenure would last just under two years, similar in duration to his other positions. Within a short week he'd get fired for actions even his friends on the board could not excuse, and Connie's exit would spoil Walter's peace of mind for a month.

  * * *

  They played a variety of board games, a variety of card games, but they always came back to cribbage. Gin rummy and five-card stud and crazy eights. They tried games that called for the exchange of fake currency and found those games ridiculous.

  "This money . . . it's . . . counterfeit," Connie said, giving the words ironic depth and discovery. John laughed and took a greedy hit off a bong he had bootlegged out of his room.

  They played pinochle and backgammon and an Asian game called Go, territorial in nature, laying down stones on a grid board smooth to the touch. They played Yahtzee and blackjack, chess and checkers, but cribbage was their mainstay.

  John rang whichever car Connie worked, the front or back. Connie swung the door open and the kid stood there, a look of hope in his eyes and a mouth full of braces.

  "Game of crib, Con, a little later maybe?" John said.

  He lived on the fifteenth floor, but they hung out in the back stairwell of the house's ninth floor, a spot they dubbed The Office. A two-tone, high-gloss battleship-gray painted the walls, a lemony disinfectant scented the air. A Swiss family who owned the ninth floor came into town one week a year in the fall, maybe a week in the summer—otherwise nine was dead.

  "Let's see what's what," Connie said. "I got to clear a couple dockets, but my guess, we could squeeze a few games in," and this speech bogus: there was always time for some cribbage.

  The building had twenty-seven units on seventeen floors, and with a staff of sixteen, even though nobody came right out and said it, this house was a piece of cake. Time could be found for a couple rounds of cribbage, never mind a nap in your favorite hideaway spot that hurt who, exactly?

  The kid was lonely in that thirteen-year-old way, moving through a transitional period, hoping to shed a piece of his childhood, trying to step into something along the lines of what might be considered a young manhood, maybe?

  He missed his sister. They used to ditch their Secret Service detail together—two little potheads out among the sordid throngs of Times Square. Who else could fathom their history but each for the other? The circumstances of their lives forged them together by blood, their connection shorthand and symbiotic.

  She lived at boarding school in Massachusetts these days, and his mother had started to spend more weekends in Washington. Frankly, the mother didn't know what to do with him and this attitude of his lately, which left John and the governess to pad around the apartment's nineteen rooms.

  They played on a board given to him for his eighth birthday, an heirloom of sorts, his father's surreal initials branded into the back of its antique wood. The original pegs had gone missing, so they used matchsticks that worked just fine. They talked and laughed and appreciated each other's company. They shot the breeze about sports. They smoked Connie's Camels and the kid's stash of reefer. They unfolded two stools, a foldout table, and created a foldout world.

  Connie didn't go strange. Most people in John's life, they met him and their faces did something. By the age of five he spotted it, the people who jumped out of their bodies and went strange on him. They had a hatful of ideas, a thousand and one ideas about him. They can't see me, John thought. Okay, not everyone gets to meet Muhammad Ali, he understood that. Still. I'm a kid, he thought. My father's dead, a lot of people are dead, what do you want? Even the coolest of customers tried to see behind his eyes, and John thought, You can't see behind my eyes.

  Give me a goddamn break, he whispered to the world. He had fallen away from any genuine connection to his peers. He'd get high in the park with a crowd out behind the museum, but he didn't consider them friends, really. He didn't know what was going on just lately, and since when for a thirteen-year-old is that a crime?

  Not last summer but the summer before, Connie swung the elevator open onto the lobby and John stood there, skin roasted brown, hair streaked by the Mediterranean sun, this before his mother's scene in Greece had come to an end. They looked at each other a moment.

  "Coming in or what?" Connie said.

  John stepped into the car, Connie swung the gate shut and dipped the lever. "Where you going?"

  "Fifteen," John said.

  Connie took him up, and after some quiet said, "Can you keep a secret?"

  "Yeah," John said.

  "Hungover like a son of a bitch."

  John laughed.

  "Do me a favor," Connie said, "you get in the house, think you could scramble me up a couple aspirin?"

  "Sure," John said, and found himself making a direct line to the medicine cabinet.

  "What do I owe you?" Connie said.

  "On the house," John said.

  "You're the best," Connie said, not strange at all, and Connie liked the kid because he thought to bring a glass of water with the aspirin.

  Connie had the modest talent of bringing the car flush to a floor and swinging the gate open all in one fluid motion and with a certain comical panache. "Bang, you see that? No herky-jerky," he would say. "Don't believe in herky-jerky, against my religion."

  He let John run the elevator. "Take over. Watch your hand at the gate."

  A simple trust established itself, not a big deal, an in-house friendship limited to the parameters of the building.

  "Game of crib, Con, a little later maybe?"

  "Can you handle the agony of defeat?"

  "In your dreams!"

  The kid, it's true, had uncles and cousins and friends of the family with stories to tell about the old man, but at the end of the day was he not fatherless?

  The Secret Service called him Lark. John disliked it.

  Up in the ninth floor's back stairwell, just after lunch, Connie started to fade.

  "You okay, Con?"

  "Let's break this party up," Connie said. "See if I can hit the bags for forty winks." He took naps on bags of mixing cement down in the basement.

  Funny thing: Connie didn't know who John was until after they had played cards and John had gotten him high a few times. Something in Connie refused to make the recognition. Not until John stepped into the elevator with his mother one day did the identification fully register. The mother, with her height and sunglasses, and the singular glamor of her encroaching middle-age beauty, was hard-pressed to pull off a stab at anonymity.

  So the friendship of Connie and John established itself before Fame could work its voodoo—otherwise Connie might have gone strange himself. The starry-eyed often make the famous feel as if they're getting jumped: if anyone's ever rifled through your pockets without permission, it might offer a clue as to the burdens of celebrity. Many Americans wanted to use him to bolster some romantic national myth of their own, but even as a very young person John sensed its falseness and shunned the role.

  * * *

  In his dreams Connie endured old sorrows and loss, powered not by fleshed-out dramatic scenarios but the tableau stillness of sepia portraits his dream-eye slowly dollied past, taking in the faces of fam
ily and friends long dead, the faces of strangers mixed in as well. His dead mother, Mary. His dead father, Samuel. His youngest brother, Edward, dead at two and a half—all of them gone now, never to be seen again, not on earth, not in heaven, hell, or purgatory. Only in my dreams, Connie dreamed, can I see you.

  He sat as a nine-year-old cross-legged in the dream, handcuffed to the radiator in the bedroom of the Harlem apartment where he and his mother, his brothers Patrick and Danny, and his half sister Ruth had lived for six months, a time and place which included the passing of their father and Edward. And on the tragedy's heels came their mother's new husband, Pete Cullen: the name after all these years still charged with the darkest of freight in Connie's psyche.

  Connie had in reality been handcuffed as a kid, but never to that apartment's radiator. He started to cry with intense dream-grief. His body, curled on the bags of mixing cement down in the basement, shivered tightly. His mouth flooded with saliva. Footsteps approached. Images from the dream would return as he smoked on the sidewalk during intermission of a play he would second-act in a few nights, a show at the Morosco Theatre starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.

  He slept for twenty minutes and, despite the dream's turbulence, woke refreshed. The cement bags, placed deliberately between the tenants' storage cages, catered well to the contours of his body, offering just the right give. He yawned and stretched. The footsteps came to a stop. Francis Ramey looked down at him.

  "May I help you?" Connie said, wondering if the smell of unmixed cement influenced his dreamscape.

  "They pay you to sleep?" Ramey said.

  "What do you want?"

  "Toilet paper."

  Prior to meeting Ramey and his partner Henry Slovell, Connie assigned the qualities of stoic dignity and disciplined commitment to the Secret Service, but this changed with the reality of his dealings with them, especially Ramey. Slovell rarely exited their government-issued Impala, sitting beneath a weeping willow on the park side of Fifth. Complementing their presence were two containers of coffee from the Greeks wedged between the dash and windshield and a never-ending ball game on the radio.

  Connie didn't care for Ramey, not only because he thought they dropped the ball when it came to protecting John. Ramey reminded Connie of a kid who sat behind him in homeroom for the month he attended ninth grade at Cardinal Hayes High School, a granite-winged structure up on the Bronx's Grand Concourse. This kid had tapped Connie's desk with his foot, and for Connie, Ramey and the kid descended from the same bloodline of arrogance.

  "Nerve, making comments like you do."

  "Is that right?"

  Connie got to his feet. He tucked in his shirt, moving past a series of storage cages containing lonely armchairs and loose-wired fixtures. He stopped. "Don't cast aspersions on the job I do."

  Ramey walked by him, and Connie followed.

  "Now that I think about it," Connie said, staring at Ramey's back, "who are you to judge the caliber of my work?"

  Connie caught himself reaching for a higher lexicon. Aspersions. Caliber. Ramey and the kid who foot-tapped his desk at Hayes both possessed a threatening look in their eyes, and Connie figured both of them had grown up with fathers who drove a sense of unwarranted superiority into them. He wanted to stove Ramey's head in with a pipe and see what his face looked like then.

  "Walk around like you own the joint," Connie said.

  "I do, far as you're concerned."

  "Oh, is that right?"

  "That is right."

  Ramey looked at him as Connie took the lead again, walking by the washer machines nobody much used, when Connie stopped and unlocked the supply closet. He reached up to a shelf for a roll of toilet paper, turned, and tossed it to Ramey.

  Ramey walked down the hall, entered the bathroom, clicked the lock behind him, and through the door Connie barely caught it but he did hear it when Ramey said, "Little drunk."

  "Say what?" Connie called.

  "Like it takes the Secret Service to figure that one out."

  Connie jiggled the loose change in his pocket in search of some retort, but came up empty.

  * * *

  Connie on the housephone called upstairs, where Walter tried to fix a tenant's broken music box—a smallish model of a French Alps chalet, replete with snowcapped roof. Walter turned the piece over in his hands with innocent curiosity, a little like King Kong.

  The tenant offered Walter leftover sandwiches from her bridge game. He declined, wondering if the lady did not understand he was of Italian heritage. Some mayo salad thing, little white bread squares, no crust—you putting me on or what?

  "Thinking about taking off," Connie said on the phone. "Need me to do anything before I hit it?"

  "Go ahead," Walter said. The fact that Connie sought him out before departing wasn't lost on Walter—most of these guys scurried away at shift's end. He sees my humanity, Walter thought with fondness, I can talk to him.

  Connie popped out through the service entrance. He went to his spot on Lex and picked up a pint, came back west, and meandered his way south through the park, stopping for a moment to admire a family of ducks motoring by on the reservoir.

  Thank God for hip pockets. Just knowing he had a taste on hand, the bottle safely deployed on him, its sensuous curve snuggled up good and tight against his own body, was oftentimes in and of itself enough to quiet the storm, the otherwise nonstop psychic brouhaha that ran him ragged. Connie's goal: to maintain a steady hum that would prevent him from slipping off the planet.

  Of course he frequently overshot or, just as troubling, undershot this course of maintenance. He had over the years encountered people here and there who did not indulge and marveled at them. He'd stand back and watch them refrain and scratch his head, unable to conceive it, unable finally to trust such individuals. Safe to say, he was not a take-it-or-leave-it drinker—it was intricately woven into the fabric of his days, he lived in bars—and though he had a rule never to feed them money (except on the rare occasion to impress the odd, stray drunk woman toward the four a.m. hour), he shamefully relished the sounds of the jukebox, all the pity songs, the repertoire of lost love, the chronicles of yearning: music, every sloppy lick of it, geared to pump your chest with the surging, pathetic flood of remorse.

  As Connie headed toward the park's bandshell he stopped to observe a brown-muscled Doberman stalk a squirrel, the Dobie's nose down close to the hexagonal stones of the promenade. It crept up in predatory style on the distracted squirrel, playing all alone at the base of a tree. The dog snatched it by its back, squeezed it in its jaws, shook it, let it drop. It looked down at the lifeless squirrel, glanced around embarrassed, before trotting back toward its owner, a woman whose face lay half-obscured beneath a floppy hat. She carried an L.L.Bean tote, wore a pair of Wallabees and a peacoat purchased, to judge from its cut, not at Alexander's or Klein's, but Saks or Bergdorf, Connie surmised. Overdressed for mid-May, her lips parted slightly with the hint of satisfaction. Connie sensed she lived vicariously through the animal, the glint of murderous delight alive in the woman's eyes.

  Connie was a fan of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the TV show hosted by Marlin Perkins, and had CliffsNotes comprehension of Darwinian theory, but something about this squirrel's gratuitous death disturbed him, how the dog's owner maybe encouraged it.

  He thought he had heard the sound of the squirrel's bones crack in the dog's mouth but wasn't sure if his mind made it up. He produced his pint and washed these thoughts down.

  "Hey, Mr. Doorman," some kids called, "over here."

  Connie turned toward the bandshell.

  "Come on over," they called.

  Moving through clouds of patchouli and marijuana, Connie approached the hippie kids who acid-tripped there. They hung out in small clusters, a United Nations of teenagers, black and white, Jewish and Puerto Rican. They passed around joints and sweaty quarts of Olde English 800. Couples cradled each other with the tenderness of youth and made out off to the side. They drank a
nd got high and listened to Let It Bleed.

  Connie went to the four-pack of kids who called to him. They sat downstage right, letting their legs dangle and bounce.

  "Nice uniform," a girl with frizzy hair said.

  "I smell reefer," Connie said, and they laughed.

  "Want to get high?" a ponytailed kid said.

  "Yes please," he said, and they laughed some more.

  From a small manila envelope the kid shook some pot onto the bandshell's stone stage and started to separate out seeds and twigs. He got the pot good and clean before he crumpled it up into a smokable grain. With a soft matchbook cover he scooped it up and sprinkled it into a single folded sheet of Bambú. They watched the joint get rolled in silence, bearing witness to a sacred ritual. He sealed it with a lick, stuck the thing in his mouth, then held the joint up to air-dry a moment, before he extended it to Connie with just a subtle show of ceremony.

  "Thank you, sir," Connie said. "I like your style."

  Connie put it in his mouth, flipped open his Zippo, and brought its wild flame toward the joint with respectful caution, as he did not want to light it haphazardly and thereby waste any of the precious herb. He gave it a thorough toke and held the smoke in with theatrical flair, his eyes blinking, doing this and that, and the kids got a kick out of the guy, probably even over thirty, maybe, in his doorman's uniform, getting high with them, and Connie could tell they were good kids. They were different than the kids in the projects in that they had been afforded the chance to develop a greater gentleness of spirit, which he found attractive. They came from homes with books and record collections and art on the walls, you could just tell. Their parents were doctors or lawyers, teachers or artists, and perhaps a few of the kids in the crowd were from the projects or tenements, kids naturally drawn to a more kind and literate scene. This crowd had genuine Swiss Army knives in belted leather sheaths, and wore Italian hiking boots that cost sixty-five dollars at Paragon, and the pot's quality was stellar.