by Rob Sedgwick
An alternately brilliant and abusive man, Ben may be at the forefront of the Modern Abstract Expressionist movement in America, having the courage, foresight, and brilliance to be one of its leading collectors when it’s not popular to be so, advising the likes of Rothko, Pollock, and Barnett Newman. Yet now, as his stepson, living on his turf, I am routinely bullied, chastised, and ground down to a fine powder just for being there.
I would rather face a firing squad than help him move a painting.
“Robbie, son, come help me move the red Rothko from the bedroom into the living room.”
“Yes, Ben, but the painting is too big to fit…”
“Now, son, please.”
To try and reason with him that the painting can’t fit through the doorframe is pointless. And when it gets stuck, I will be blamed.
“Yes, Ben.”
You have to grab the painting gently from behind on the wooden frame. He gets the painting from the front and I pick it up from the back.
“Now, Robbie, son, move the painting to the left.”
I do.
“No, son, not that way!”
“Which way? Sorry.”
I assume he must mean move to the right. There is nowhere else to go but right. So I move slimly to the right.
“No!”
“Sorry.”
I have moved to the right without him having told me specifically, so I wiggle my feet left to compensate.
“And don’t wriggle your feet to compensate, Jesus!” High whining.
“I’m sorry. Which way should I move?”
“Just follow me.”
I do.
“Do what I do.”
I do.
I am riveted on him now, determined to follow every motion, every twitch.
“Forward.”
“Yes.”
“No, now backward.”
“Yes.”
“To the right.”
“Yes, yes.”
“To the left an inch, and…
“Yes.”
“Nononono! Robbie! Look what you’ve done! Jesus Christ, son of a bitch, fuckmefuckmefuckme!”
The painting is now wedged in the doorframe.
“I’m sorry, Ben.”
Nikko and Kyra are watching this, and they laugh at me for saying I’m sorry so many times in a row.
“And Kyra and Nikko, stop laughing! You’re all so fucking loud. Son of a bitch!”
He goes back to the painting to try and dislodge it from the doorframe, the weight of Job on shoulders.
Early one morning, Ben gets a long-distance call from Africa. I run into the bedroom to get him because it sounds important, they need him right away. I swing open the door and Ben is on top of Mom, smiling and heh-heh-ing. She is laughing obscenely. The sheets are swimmingly alive. I try to spew out the words, “You have a long-distance phone call.” Then back out of the bedroom, wishing I could rewind my life back to the Gingerbread House.
When Ben wants to see you, you are summoned. He reads in the vast living room. Alone. He sits in one of the two powerful heavy club chairs, always the one on the left, the basketball court of a living room completely dark except for one light from a reading lamp reflecting off his huge bald head. It is a chillingly bright planet that floats by itself.
“What the fuck is this I hear about __________?!”
Fill in the blank.
The criticism drones on. Comprehension is impossible. The light mirroring off his bright planet skull makes me squint. I must look impossibly stupid.
I can’t wait to leave the house in the morning and usually get to school an hour early. It is blessedly loud, and unlike Ben’s pin-drop quiet house, it is home. The school is called the Church of the Heavenly Rest or the Day School, located on Ninetieth and Fifth Avenue. There are as many green kids as purple kids as yellow kids as black kids as white kids. The teachers care about teaching and their students. Mr. Pontone is the Latin teacher via Brooklyn when it wasn’t such a fancy place to be from. He teaches me that the plural of you in Brooklyn-ese is yous. He loves Latin and makes the dead language come alive. We talk about particular Latin declensions, translating, Rome, Tuscany, the vineyards, Simon and Garfunkel, Brooklyn, Harvard, and that I want to go there because my dad went there. We play tag in gym. He wants to start a school yearbook and make me the editor.
Mr. Smith, the math teacher, gives me a private tutorial in the morning because I’m so hopeless at math. He is drinking coffee, and I sit so close to him it’s still hot on his breath. I love the heat and smell. He taught Nikko last year, and Nikko says how much he liked him, so I feel related. Mr. Smith knows Nikko and I are obsessed with football. He tells me he played pulling guard and blocked for a current NFL all-star halfback in college. Nikko and I have many football trading cards of this player, so I am awestruck that Mr. Smith is, in addition to being a math teacher, a real-life celebrity.
“I got his cleat marks in my back,” says Mr. Smith.
At one point, Mom sends Nikko and me to the Goddard Gaieties, a sort of societal establishment for upper-crust kids to mingle with other upper-crust kids and also learn how to dance. There’s a supreme dancing couple that wins every round and looks forever happy and gay. He has succulent and delicious golden hair, a grown-up suit, a perennial smile that belongs on the Lawrence Welk Show; she’s a towhead and pretty in a you’ll-never-touch-me way.
I ask Nikko, “Why is this place so disgusting?”
Nikko says, “There’s not one black kid or Puerto Rican kid in this place. And the music is stupid.”
We don’t last a week.
Robert is my best friend at the Day School. Mom has given me twenty dollars (she does this every now and then) so Robert, Nikko, and I can go to amazing Schrafft’s by ourselves and have hot fudge sundaes after school. The sundaes are perfect. Robert talks about his street toughness and how experienced he is at being mugged.
The first time I got mugged was when I was around eight and we were living at 300 Central Park West. The address sounds fancy, but in 1969, it was the Gaza strip without guns. I was taking our dog Golden Boy across the street to Central Park and was attacked by about six kids wanting money. I was punched to the ground. Still, even on my back I managed polite acquiescence because I wanted to get out of this episode in one piece. Golden Boy did nothing.
The cops end up barreling in on foot and in a squad car and apprehended all of the muggers. Sometimes there is a God. I had to testify against all of them in court, against my will. I felt badly for them that they were black and poor and didn’t want to get them in trouble. Nikko tells me later that he saw the whole thing from our second-story apartment and ran to tell Mom. She was on the phone talking to my godmother.
“Mom! Robbie’s getting mugged!”
“What?”
“Mugged, Mom! He’s being mugged!”
She put the receiver on her shoulder and said, “Oh, well. I’m on the phone. He’s going to have to deal with this at some point. Life is a rat race…”
Robert says that his getting-mugged story is much worse than mine, but he won’t tell us what it is.
After we’re done, I buy six pieces of hard peppermint candy cane from the Schrafft’s counter, two for each of us, and pocket about ten dollars in change. We decide to walk home through Central Park. We take the bridle path. It starts to snow. There’s something about that first snowfall in Central Park—silent, majestic—that makes you believe in Santa Claus. We skip and sing “Jingle Bells.” We almost make it back to the West Side, but then a much older wiry black kid darts out of a bush in front of us with a thick strip of ripped-up sheet wrapped around his head that’s supposed to be a cool headband. I’ve been mugged so many times by now I know we’re about to be mugged, but more importantly I know how to put the mugger at ease.
But when
he whips out his machete, a two-foot-long blade that is used in the Caribbean to hack stuff to ribbons, I know we’re in trouble. Then I find out that kid is just the front guy. Suddenly others pop out of the bushes, and six black guys surround us in ripped-up headbands. They seem nervous. Robert and I each get a machete pressed to our throats, Nikko gets one to his chest.
“Give us your money.”
Usually hyperactive, I’m weirdly calm. I don’t want to make them even more nervous than they are already, because then we might get sliced, or worse.
“Yeah, sure, I have ten bucks and some candy,” I say.
They take the money and the six pieces of candy. Nikko looks bravely ahead with the tip of the machete pointed to his chest. Robert starts to cry. Wildly.
“Hey, man, stop crying. Stop,” says one of the kids.
This makes Robert cry even more.
Now there is adolescent confusion amidst the machete hoodlums.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll give you half the money back—”
But the wailing from Robert cuts them off.
“Okay, okay, we’ll give you all the money back and take just three pieces of candy.”
They sprint away with their take: three pieces of peppermint candy cane. We get to the street and can’t find a cop. “You can never find one when you need one,” I say to Robert. I’m sorry for Robert because I know he must feel embarrassed to be crying so much in front of me and Nikko, especially after having told us what an experienced mugee he was.
12
It was late when we arrived at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison.
We got stuck in a holding pen.
We saw Diego Robles, the badass outlaw and erstwhile supplier from Mexico, passing by in another group. Jordan was shocked. “That’s Diego! What the fuck is he doing here?”
I hadn’t a clue.
But Jordan realized Diego had probably been caught up in the same sweep.
In the holding pen, we were rubbing up against a scary cast of characters: lowlifes, undereducated hoodlums, bad sorts, thugs—people you would not run into at Bennington. The tiled floors were greasy and slippery and there was a nauseating blech and yuck that hovered just above everything. No way would I sit on that floor, and all the benches were taken, so I just stood. For hours. Then squatted. For a couple more hours. Then to hell with it: I slid onto the awful, syrupy ground with everyone else.
The community toilet looked as if it had lived through five hundred Yankee and Mets games combined without a single cleaning.
I dast not urinate.
Diego was thrown into our pen. He talked to Jordan; I didn’t exist.
Jordan slid over and said, “Diego has a lawyer in Mexico named Corrado who’ll take us all on, but we have to get our story straight.”
“But they caught us red-handed, dead to rights, hand in the cookie jar and all that.”
“Yeah, but if we stick together and get our stories straight, Diego thinks we can beat this.”
Maybe Diego was privy to some profound, mystical Mexican gangster wisdom that was escaping me at the moment. I didn’t think he took to me.
After forever, we were transferred to general population. Jordan was terrified. “We’re going in there?”
“Yup.”
“There are going to be some bad motherfuckers back there.”
“Yup.”
“They might fuck with us.”
“Not me.” Remembering Hank’s advice, preparing to go down swinging, my mental Rolodex whirred for pithy comebacks to hair-raising threats.
But first the strip search. Kind of humiliating, especially if you didn’t wipe well. Jordan’s two asses, courtesy of a motorcycle accident some years back, injected some much-needed levity into the situation. He and Seth had scored some hash in Morocco, stuffed a bunch of it into the motorcycle’s innards, blinkers, underneath the gas tank—basically any aperture they could find. They crossed over on a ferry into Spain. Soon after they resumed riding, Jordan hit an oil slick, wrecked his bike, and ripped open his ass. He’d been stitched up so badly that one big flap of skin just folded over, eventually melding together into—voila!—two asses.
Next, prison skivvies. You handed in your street clothes and were given a number to memorize (in case we ever wanted them back) and your own prison jumpsuit. Then bedrolls. Then finally the elevator up to the seventh floor, opening like one of those garage elevators, and there we were.
Boom. Prison. The real deal.
The opposite of greasy kid stuff.
“Halt!” a guard barked at us as we got off the elevator.
Our sphincters clamped tight enough to produce diamonds.
The main common area of the prison was enormous and teeming with activity. One inmate, who seemed to be practically dragging his cock on the ground as he walked, was accosted by a newbie. A fight broke out, and you saw prison politics spring into action: the guard took one look at the veteran inmate, turned on his heel, and walked away. Jordan and I both turned around, pretending to look at wallpaper that wasn’t there, hoping we were invisible.
We were assigned our own little cell, or “cube” in prison speak. At last, a respite.
We tried to sleep. Pointless.
Jordan started to float some questions. “Now, what did you tell them again?”
“I just said we broke down the boxes and people would come and take trash bags full of the stuff in exchange for cash.”
“Rob, why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you say about me?”
“Just that you were in charge.”
“Oh, Jesus, why did you say that?”
Why did I say that? I suppose I was stuck, didn’t know what else to do and wanted to be sociable, helpful. I was trying to make conversation. “I didn’t know what to say and it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I did stop answering their questions, and I did ask for a lawyer after a while, but they kept asking questions and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“I know, but this is really bad. Didn’t you ever watch Adam-12 or Dragnet, where they do the whole ‘you have the right to remain silent’ and that sort of thing?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
God, did I feel like an idiot. I got off the bunk to pee. When I peeled off my prison jumper, Jordan noticed the gaping hole in my Superman underwear. “Rob, what’s the first thing I told you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a huge hole in your ass! What’s the first thing I told you? The basics. You got to get the basics: underwear and socks. Didn’t I pay you enough? Heavens to Methuselah, what a cheap bastard you are!”
Outside, a beautiful January morning at 1 St. Andrew’s Plaza beckoned me through the metal bars of our window. I could see guys in suits walking around without winter coats.
Mommy couldn’t write me a note and get me out of this one.
13
I am eight and Mom is picking me up from school and we are going to go to Schrafft’s! It’s our date! I have died and gone to Heaven. Mom all to myself…and Schrafft’s!
It’s two blocks from the Church of the Heavenly Rest, my great elementary school, and she picks me up and I am smiling and we float all the way to Eighty-Eighth and Madison.
We go through the revolving door. It’s always so quiet in there, dark with endless booths, which are much better than tables, much cozier.
We sit down.
“How was school today, my angel?”
“It was fine, Mom. Let’s order!”
The waitresses, in their long black skirts that go down to their ankles, are never mean to me. I always say “Please!” and “Thank you!” because my mother and father taught me to do so. A sad waitress asks us what we wou
ld like, and Mom and I order together, me first: “Yes, please! We would like a hot fudge sundae with—”
Mom prompts me, because I must remember for the rest of my life that this is the only ice cream to have in a hot fudge sundae at Schrafft’s.
“Butter pecan ice cream?”
“Yes, PLEASE, and extra hot fudge if you don’t mind and—”
“No whipped cream,” Mom says.
“It’s fresh,” the waitress says.
Mom is repelled by the notion of whipped cream on top of a Schrafft’s hot fudge sundae.
“But if you don’t mind, my mother doesn’t like it with whipped cream. And pecans on top, please. Thank you so much!”
She takes the menus and leaves.
“Mom, I wrote a poem! Here, you read it!”
When she reads out loud, Mom always has a mid-Atlantic accent because of her speech teaching background. When her students come over, both she and her students talk that way and it sounds phony. After they leave, I always say: “Mom, stop talking in speech.”
But when she reads out loud, she sounds like an angel.
“‘I wish I were an antelope that could scamper and play in the forest. I’d be swift and light and could leap high and come down with running steps.’ Sweetheart! That’s wonderful!”
I could fly. The sun must be shining out of my face.
The sundae arrives, such a solemn moment.
“Best sundae in the world. Scan the globe, and you will never find such hot fudge. It exists nowhere except here.”
“Yes, Mom, I know.”
It is a work of art. The dish is clear and properly midsized, never gauche or ostentatious. The ice cream is in two perfectly round scoops that are beginning to melt, so gently, so modestly, because the fudge is really hot and caramelizing and hardening on the ice cream now. The hot fudge swooning on the ice cream makes the butter pecan darken, and with the whole pecans on top it is perfect.
The first taste is cold and then very warm, the oozing hot fudge that sticks to your teeth like taffy, then the butteriest of butter pecan, then crunchy crumbling nuts. Food of the gods cannot compare.