Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

"Yes."

  "Your cronies."

  "Cronies?"

  "Do you have something you want to say to me?" Connie asked, his voice going thin with vulnerability.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "Uh-huh."

  "We took a walk together."

  "Go on," Connie said, draining his glass and refilling it. "Don't worry, I can drink and listen at the same time."

  "I think you're being a little—"

  "What? A little what?" Connie pulled on his cigarette, boxed it up, blew the smoke out with ill-defined hostility. "Go ahead, explain it. Was it something about me, personally?"

  "I don't know what you want explained."

  "Me, at Bickford's this morning with my Hefty bag. What, if a room opens up, you get your mark settled in, that how it works?" His voice didn't slur, but there was something wild in his eyes, his movements subtly possessed.

  "My mark?"

  "You a friend of my wife's?" Connie said.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "Why would you, hmm?"

  "You're drunk, and somehow got it into your head I set out to shanghai you in some way."

  "You said it, not me. Your words," and somewhere in the far reaches of his mind Connie thought, Poor David, having to put up with my nonsense. "Did you hear one of your pals, what he said to me?"

  "What?"

  "Am I a wet one, David? Is that what this is about?"

  "Look, I'm sorry if you thought—"

  "Live and let live," Connie said. "Isn't that one of your organization's dictums?"

  Vic Morrow gave orders in the battlefield to someone on the TV. Connie polished off the contents of his glass, poured another, and said, "Don't you think I've given some thought as to the nature of my drinking, vis-à-vis its ramifications?"

  "Really, it's not my—"

  "I met your leaders, believe me. Years ago. Sure, Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah. I know the deal. I sold newspapers to those guys started the whole fucking thing. Early fifties, I was a kid. Used to be a clubhouse right over here on 24th."

  "You know about that clubhouse?" David said.

  "It's gone: 24th, Ninth and Eighth. They tore the whole block down, but the main guy—"

  "Bill?"

  "With the big ears. He used to grab the stack of newspapers out of my arms, peel off a five-dollar bill—I'm nine years old."

  "You sold them newspapers?"

  "He'd throw a football around with me out on the street, Bill. First place I ever saw a television set, front room of that clubhouse. They all wore suits, the men, like a custom of the time. I'd walk out of there with a five-dollar bill and a bottle of Coca-Cola. See, the thing is," Connie said, and poured some more liquor into his glass, "there's a couple type of drinkers. Says so in your Big Book."

  "You're familiar with the Big Book?" David said. It was the affectionate name of the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, officially titled Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Connie had attended an AA meeting or two on his own visits to Bellevue years ago and was handed some of the literature. "I am. Are you?"

  "Yes."

  "You should be—you're a member, correct?"

  "Correct," David said, glancing around, as if planning his escape.

  "I have no personal grudge against the outfit. Besides which, the book says it plain: they draw a line, crystal clear, between what they describe as an alcoholic—they, follow me—as opposed to what you might call a hard or let's say heavy drinker. And I would say, my case, long as we're talking"—and here Connie broke wind, let one rip, a perverse punctuation mark in service to his speech, which sounded like a cardboard box getting violently ripped open—"would, according to their standards, fall somewhere in the category of what might be called a hard or heavy drinker. Granted. You know, speaking generally."

  David looked at him a moment before bursting into laughter.

  "Don't hurt yourself there, David," Connie said. "Easy does it," he added with a bizarre wink.

  After a little while David could not stop yawning, and Connie said, "Go ahead and yawn your way out of here."

  * * *

  He sat alone in the dark, save for the snow on the television screen. He got to his feet and considered this question: how does a nonalcoholic get ready for bed? He decided to brush his teeth. He reserved toothbrushing for the morning as a rule, but given the night's events he thought he'd brush before bed as a demonstration of his nonalcoholic nature. People of an alcoholic nature go to bed without brushing, he figured, and given the fact that he was not an alcoholic, he probably should brush. And then he thought, What else does a person who's not an alcoholic do? His mind drew a blank. Then he thought, I know what I can do, I can prepare my clothes for the morning. I can lay my clothes out so when I wake up I know what I'm going to wear. People of nonalcoholic natures do such things. If I'm not an alcoholic, he thought, and I'm not, I can lay my clothes out like a nonalcoholic in preparation for tomorrow's nonalcoholic day. Granted, I like to drink. Vic Morrow probably enjoys a drink himself. He got up and looked at his clothes in the closet and thought, What a strange thing to do, and decided against it. I'm not going to put my clothes out for tomorrow just to prove I'm not an alcoholic. If I'm not an alcoholic, why do I have to prove it? I don't have to prove my nonalcoholic nature to anybody. And who would I be proving it to anyway? And even if I am an alkie, whose business is that?

  They had tried to help his father, those men in suits. They came up to the house, spoke to his mother, the half-heard conversations lodged in Connie's memory. A strange word when you're seven years old: anonymous. Their clean-shaven faces, their pressed suits, a lucidity in the eye. Whispered words between his mother and those men, seeping through fabric hanging from doorway curtain rods, one doorless doorway after the next in those railroad flats, curtain after curtain through which muffled words floated.

  Did they know Connie's father killed himself? Of course they knew. They came to the house, tried to help, prior to the move uptown. They knew Sammy. And then, back in Chelsea, after the six-month nightmare that was Harlem, they paid Connie and his siblings special attention. They bought out Connie's stack of newspapers nightly, tipped him heavily, gave him cold bottles of Coca-Cola from the red machine that tasted so good. Those men in suits, that AA clubhouse right there on 24th, they tried, didn't they?

  Motherfuckers at that diner, and David playing dumb. Go ahead, David, keep playing dumb, see what happens.

  He decided on some light housecleaning like a nonalcoholic might. He picked up the ashtray, escorted it across the room, and was going to dump its contents out the window—but caught himself about to perform the act of an alcoholic. Your first night in the house and you want to dump your ashtray directly over the entranceway?

  He laid down and prayed aloud: "Lord God Father, please hear my prayer. Bless Maureen and Artie and Stevie, grant them peace and watch over them, Father." He called his god Father because he liked it that way. He never did have too much of an earthly father.

  That man for a time up in Harlem, after Sammy and Edward passed, the man who taught Connie how to find the constellations in the sky. From that spot in St. Nicolas Park, surrounded by the night, away from the streetlamps (to let the stars shine more bright, the man said). The man's breath on Connie's neck, crouching behind him, the heaviness of an arm on Connie's shoulder. The smell of talc on the man, a porkpie hat on his head. Did the man show Connie care and concern—was he really about astronomy? Holding Connie in a specific manner by the arms, directing his body to face a certain angle, to line up a constellation in the sky. The guy had his hands on me quite a bit: like that priest who taught me how to make free throws. They always position themselves behind you, these short eyes. They sure know how to pick out a fatherless kid, let me tell you. Eagle eyes for the fatherless ones. See a kid with no father coming a mile off, a short eyes can. The special talent of any moderately gifted pedophile.

  I cannot picture life without it. He
tried to feel out in his mind for an image of himself as a person who did not drink, and nothing came. The construct of a character named Connie Sky who lived a sober life eluded him, terrified him down to the ground, made him shudder.

  An alcoholic walks into a bar.

  He felt his consciousness abandoning itself, the gears of his thoughts slipping, failing to catch altogether, and his last internal ramble came as a refrain, a fervent appeal tinged by the martyrdom of his suffering.

  Let me go, Connie's heart cried, let me go, let me go.

  ARTHUR AND HIS FRIENDS

  Nothing was off-limits, especially not the dead. The body still warm and these kids pounced. Sometimes there were ground rules—no mothers, say—but not with these kids. Everything went with these kids.

  They met up intuitively, without appointment, in various late-night stairwells, on various floors and buildings of the Chelsea Projects: 466 or 443, 288 or 446, 427 or 426 or 428.

  Albert, Errol and Joey, Rennie, Michael, Arthur. The six of them high on reefer usually, but nobody was holding. They were talking about getting their hands on a bottle of Carbona, an automotive cleaning agent you poured into a handkerchief and huffed, but they never got around to it, so they sat there sounding on each other. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, they spat between their legs, making art on the stairwell steps, one o'clock in the morning, talking about each other's families.

  Somebody said something hysterical, which caught Rennie by surprise, and snot shot from his nose. A dark-skinned Puerto Rican, the kind they sometimes call chocolatte. His father collected welfare and talked on a CB station.

  Albert, Puerto Rican, quite physical in his humor: he'd grab you and rub his head into the middle of your chest like a dog. Later, Albert would go to prison for selling drugs, and the experience wrung the laughter from him for good.

  Errol and Joey, two brothers, their family something of a project anomaly in that they were Jews. (Or, at 2 percent of the population, are Jews an anomaly the world over?)

  Michael, black and Puerto Rican, yet fair-skinned and nerdy. His father had a vaguely effeminate manner about him.

  "Artie," Errol said one night, "I wanted to ask you a question about your dead grandfather."

  Arthur grinned, let the saliva hang as close as he could get it to the stairwell step, before he sucked it back up.

  Maureen's father had gotten an apartment of his own in 443. She would make a monthly pot of tripe, and Arthur, who hated the smell of it, delivered it at arm's length across the yard to his grandfather. He and Steven would watch TV and eat potato chips and drink Pepsi-Cola over there. Once they watched Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye, and Arthur felt so safe on the couch next to his grandfather, who died two years ago at the age of fifty-three, a subway staircase heart attack.

  "That white-haired motherfucker used to walk around like a ghost, remember?" The kids made sounds to inspire Errol to find a groove for his riff. "Who told that son of a bitch to go and die? I wasn't done with him yet."

  Arthur let his spit collapse onto the step. "Oh yeah, and what about your bald-headed Jew father? That fuck's probably having anal sex with Michael's father right this minute."

  "Say what?" Michael said.

  "Like your father's not a faggot."

  "Look who's talking," Rennie said.

  "Oh, don't get me started on your fat fucking father," Arthur said to Rennie, "sitting up there in front of his base station, talking to some spic truck drivers, collecting welfare, smoking his L&Ms, that crippled stupid Puerto Rican fuck. Big nasty ashtray on the windowsill, you saw it, Albert—Errol, you seen it, all them empty Rheingolds—talking to who-the-fuck-knows on that stupid base station. It's like your father's our age. He's a fucking grown-up—what the fuck is he doing talking on a base station all day long, can you answer me that? Albert, let me get a cigarette."

  "Least I got a father," Rennie said quietly.

  Arthur, sensing a trap, responded cautiously. "I got a father."

  "You call that drunken-ass bum a father?" Rennie said, and the kids made a sound, feeling Rennie's rhythm. "That white-milk son of a bitch, stumbling around, his stupid-ass doorman's uniform. I bet he sleeps in that shit too. That bastard's never been sober, not a day in his life, long as I been seeing his ass, since we're babies in baby carriages that son of a bitch been drunk. It's amazing when you think about it, a truck hasn't ran his ass over yet. That that motherfucker's still alive is a bigger-ass miracle than the Miracle on 34th Street."

  "That right?" Arthur said.

  "Out of all the drunk-ass alcoholic fathers in these projects," Rennie said, "and I'm sitting up in this hallway with the son of the one who takes the cake."

  "Worse than Kenny's father?" Albert said.

  Rennie reflected. "Okay, nah, nobody's as bad as Kenny's father, that's too hard to beat. But Mr. Sky in his stupid-ass doorman's uniform, sleeping on benches and shit? At least my father sleeps in a bed, Artie. I saw your father take a piss in a telephone booth on Ninth the other day, middle of the afternoon, fucking doorman uniform had all kinds of stains on it and shit, old ladies and little kids walking by, tell me I'm lying. Shame on your father, that intoxicated douchebag. Looked like a straight-up crazy-ass drunken bum on the street, which, when you think about it, basically that's what he is." Rennie had found a stride, and the stairwell buzzed. "If I didn't know he was your father, Artie, I would have pushed his ass in the river and watched him drown just to pass the time a good while ago."

  "That right?" Arthur said. Rennie's deluge threw him. He tried to consider Rennie's mother but could not call up any details. You needed details, specifics—that's the funny part. "And what about your mother?" Arthur said, but his tone held a lost quality and gained no traction.

  Joey said, "I saw Mr. Sky take a shit on his own couch one day—remember that, Artie? Pants down to his ankles, his own living room. Motherfucker thought he was in the Grant's Bar bathroom."

  "Amazing when you think about," Rennie said, "he still got a job, 'cause that motherfucker, all he does is drink, did you notice that? That scumbag's always packing a taste. He don't blink without a drink your father, Artie. Son of a bitch'll be drunk at his own funeral, which by the way should be any minute."

  Arthur kept his head down, and the kids watched him.

  "Let's be real," Rennie said. "Tell me that motherfucker don't urinate in the bed three times a week and I'll eat my straw hat."

  "Oh shit," Albert said.

  "Ho snap," Michael said.

  "Bitch is crying," Errol said.

  It happened sometimes. The point, in fact, to find a soft spot, to hemorrhage somebody.

  "See what you did, Rennie?" Albert said.

  "Your mother," Arthur said through tears. "Mother's so fat." But his thoughts couldn't find their way. "She's like . . . a blob . . . like I don't know where your mother's titties end . . . and her pussy begins."

  "That's dry," Rennie said.

  "Like a desert breeze," Michael chimed in.

  "Speaking of mothers," Joey said, "I'll tell you the truth, Artie, straight up: I'd like to fuck your mother. Is this possible?" They all laughed, Arthur included, wiping his face. "Square business," Joey said, "you think I could catch a rap with your mother?"

  They were, each of them but one, virgins.

  "Oh shit! Reminds me of a rumor I heard," Errol said, "that Jondie and Ray-Ray fucked Ritchie Velasco's mother at the same time, you heard that?"

  "That's not true," Michael said.

  "How you know it's not true? Your faggoty-ass father carries a pocketbook on a strap."

  "It's a satchel, moron," Michael said.

  "Two on one can be okay," Joey opined, "but I'm not in the mood to share Mrs. Sky: thanks but no thanks." They roared at Joey's delivery. "I want that pussy all to myself, and if that makes me selfish I sincerely apologize. Artie, I'll be a good stepfather to you and Stevie. Take you to Whelan's counter every Sunday, let you split an egg cream."

  A
rthur leaned back and howled at the flashing mental image of Joey as his stepfather.

  Chapter three

  Susan entered Connie's room bringing kisses, and they went on to make love in quiet morning fashion. In the shower Connie genuflected before her and soaped her up good, starting with her feet. He washed her bottom like it was his own bottom, and he scrubbed her back gently with long flowing strokes of the cloth. He took the showerhead and rinsed her thoroughly. Susan reached for the cloth and started to wash him. "No," Connie said, "leave me." She mock-frowned and got out.

  He took a guzzle of bourbon to set the pins of his mentality straight. There was a full-length mirror inside the closet door, and as he put on his uniform he wondered if anybody had ever seen him for who he was, wondered if he himself knew who he was. There was a school of philosophy which dismissed identity. To know oneself: give me a break. You show me somebody claiming to know himself and I'll show you a bullshit artist. He considered Susan. I don't know her, but here we are under the same roof and we made good love a few times, so why not leave it alone? The ability to know somebody—how possible? From day one he had known Maureen. He held his wife's hand during fire drills in first grade. Have you ever seen me, Maureen? Have I ever seen you?

  On the job he had witnessed poses of identity crumble and dissolve, self's house of cards collapsing despite the finest external trappings—the country homes, the luxury station wagons, the purebred dogs, the wraparound terraces. And at day's end all was mystery, vulnerability, and—life's great equalizer—death. As a doorman he watched the posturing, padded by material wealth, nonetheless fold under the blunt-force trauma of illness, betrayal, and the like. There were tenants who walked by Connie for months, barely acknowledging him, until one day the marriage implodes and the passage through the lobby becomes less cocksure. Life stops you, softens you—an adultery, say, or some serious diagnosis—and there you now sit, openly weeping in the lobby before your doorman, and more than once Connie consoles you with a hug and a few kind words. The job funny that way, offering windows into lives even the closest of family and friends did not access. Women generally liked Connie. Men from old money liked him fine, as well as men who made their money. Younger men living off the wealth of still-living parents he customarily had problems with.