Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  She kicked him in the leg again. It hurt. She tried to get away from him, he pulled her back. He fought for it. He was much larger than she was, though he had to avoid her legs, which were like powerful hammering machines. It frightened him to subdue her; he felt an anger and a taste for violence that he had buried very early in his life, expressed only two or three times, the last when he’d thrown his mother off him and broken her collarbone.

  Later she said, You know what a safe word is?

  I’ve heard the term, he said. She was looking at him.

  He said, What’s your safe word?

  Einstein, she said.

  Einstein, he said. Tasting it.

  Take off your belt, she said.

  So, as he told his friends, that was good. He did not say: it was a flickering of good interrupted by his fear, his sense of imminent nausea in expressions of power. He’d shoved her down once and she’d grunted and then said you want to bruise me don’t you, you want to leave marks—this had frozen him, stopped him dead.

  Aside from the sex, they shared minimal points of contact. She was looking for something, some place in the downtown scene with loud art and raw poetry and multi-pierced tattoo glamour that was already out there but she couldn’t quite hook up with, not with her undogmatic collages that invited you see in their textures and shapes what you wanted to see, not with her particular talents and certainly not alongside him, with his khakis and many worn blue oxford cloth shirts. (She’d counted after they did a big laundry. Eight, and she chased one out from under the bed, still dirty. Nine. How can you have nine of the same shirt? she asked him. How can they all be worn, none new?) And not on Staten Island. Her separation from what she wanted to be and where she wanted to be put her adrift in general, in relation to her own life and soon enough, specifically, from him. He was not brokenhearted.

  Your problem, she told him on parting, is you don’t want anything.

  I want to survive, he said.

  Some years later, near the end of the decade, he ran into her, she was living in a giant building in Kips Bay, the ink still showing on the back of one arm but she wore none of the metal; she’d had a kid, was married to some guy in marketing. That’s what they all had ended up doing—that was the compromise all the women had made with the ’80s, with infectious disease and even more infectious consumerism, with real estate prices missile-shot into the ozone hole: they had married some marketing guy. In order that they should spawn more marketing guys and the career-halted women who married them, and the species should in this way go on. At the time he was trying to avoid the knowledge that he too was by then, in essence, a marketing guy. There was still a bit of sizzle, burnt ions, in the air between them; but again as before, though he could recognize it now in minutes instead of months, there was that strong sense that whatever she had going on, he wasn’t going to stay interested.

  16

  He thought, he’d long thought, given his history, that he would never marry. But of course he did marry. In the end almost everyone does, at least once. It lasted eight years, as a marriage, far longer as a friendship and a locus of devotion. They had a son. His wife’s full name was Marina Schneider, forebears Mexican on her mother’s side, German on her father’s. He met her because one night on the verge of summer he went out to Queens to visit his uncle.

  This uncle, Ken, was his father’s childless older brother, lifelong celibate or who knew, maybe he’d been gay. George thought of Ken as his only living relation, aside from his maternal grandparents, who were in a home in Connecticut and not in touch, but it wasn’t really true. Ken lived in Queens and represented for George the working-class roots that his mother and her parents had always abhorred. Besides him, though, there was a sister, in Ohio, whom George had last seen when he was three. There were cousins via the sister, cousins he’d never met. The siblings had basically been blown apart by the early deaths of their parents and by George’s father’s marriage to his mother, who made no show of affection or regard for her in-laws. But early in June one day he got a card from Ken, forwarded from the Columbia alumni office, George was shocked they knew where he lived. Maybe got a summer job for you come and see me, Signed, Your Uncle Ken. Below that a phone number and an address out by Flushing Meadows. What was that—George had never contemplated it before—putting Signed before you signed? Wasn’t the signature itself the sign that you’d signed?

  It was strange but not bad to see the old guy. He lived just off College Point Boulevard. When George arrived, Ken said, Make yourself a sandwich, I got some bologna in the kitchen. The kind with the olives in it. Bread and mayo, mustard. You take mustard? You’re sophisticated now, I know. I got the Grey Poupon, it’s all there. Look in the icebox.

  George made two sandwiches, which, when Ken turned his down, George ate both of. They watched the Mets for a while.

  How are things around here? George said.

  This is what you asked: the murder rate approaching two thousand a year in New York, wherever you were the first thing you wondered about were your odds of surviving the place.

  Lotta Chinamen moving in, said Ken.

  They were between innings. Vigorous singing ad for the same beer George and Ken were drinking. My beer is Rheingold the dry beer, think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer. Gold drawn from the River Rhine, indeed. Then brewed in the Bronx.

  Yeah? said George. Chinamen, huh? It was a word George associated with Cannery Row, where it was used in abundance and where he’d first learned it, at age fourteen or so, when he loved Steinbeck. His mother’s family, of course, never used such language. They did worse.

  Don’t get me wrong, Ken said. I got no problem with the Chinamen. The Japs, that’s another story. They tried to kill me. Every day. And they were good at it.

  Ken had been a pipefitter for the Navy, stationed in Honolulu in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He’d helped build the base at Okinawa after the war. He’d spent more than four years in the Pacific. For his last tour—he’d signed up for three in all—he was sent to the American sector in Germany, to help rebuild the shipyard at Hamburg.

  You can tell the difference, George said. Japanese from Chinese. You’re a man of the world.

  Oh, no, Ken said. I just assume they’re all Chinamen. Smooth sailing from there.

  George laughed at this, which made Ken crack up too.

  Smooooth sailing, he repeated and showed his yellow teeth and a dark strip of missing molars on the left side. The gums of old men laughing; they look like children in a horror film.

  He said: I mean, why look for trouble?

  You should have been a diplomat, George said.

  The old man’s place, three rooms plus kitchen on the parlor floor of a clapboard rowhouse, smelled like an old man’s place, sour, medicinal, needing air. That fine tang of faintly scented urine as with Bloom’s breakfast kidney. He’d told George over the phone he had asbestosis, a lung disease, emphysema, probably lung cancer too. So the Japanese weren’t his killers; Johns Manville was.

  * * *

  THE METS GAME on television. The stadium’s glow was visible over the rooftops outside, to the north and a bit west of them, maybe eight blocks away, maybe ten, and they could hear the crowd roar in real time a couple of seconds before they heard it on the television—when there was a hit or a long fly ball, it went roar—crack of bat—roar.

  That’s weird, George said.

  What?

  The way you hear the crowd before you see what they’re roaring about and then you hear it again on the delay on television.

  I can’t hear it anymore, I’m too deaf. You can hear it?

  Yeah, George said. You want to go over there? I could call a car service. We could probably sit down field level for a few bucks.

  Ken stared at the television. I have a lot of trouble breathing when I walk, he said. I get real tired. I got congestive heart failure. Not enough oxygen in my blood.

  Where’s the phone? George said.

  Kit
chen, Ken said. Get me another beer while you’re there.

  George called information from the wall phone. Flushing Meadows, he told the woman. I want a number at Shea Stadium, not the ticket office, please. Something like the medical or nurse or sick bay?

  Operator said, Infirmary?

  George: Yeah, that.

  He dialed the number, a guy picked up.

  Hey listen, I want to bring my uncle over there. He’s got breathing problems, emphysema, he’s got an oxygen tank, he can’t walk very far. I’m wondering if you got a wheelchair we can use to take him to and from his seat?

  Yes, they had that.

  From the living room: Where’s my beer?

  Forget your beer, George said. I’m calling the car service.

  They got to the stadium at the beginning of the fourth inning. Mets versus Phillies. Perhaps the best team in the league. Official attendance was 11,275 but there weren’t 9,000 people there, a Tuesday night. Ken, set up in his wheelchair, palmed a ten over to the usher who showed them to an empty box among many other empty boxes near third base—here were the missing from the eleven thousand, season ticket holders not shown up. It had hit George as it always hit him going through the tunnel, the beauty of the game, the dazzling emerald of the field under the white lights. The smooth caramel of the infield dirt. The pop of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt, like a musket fired off in the woods. Not far from here the British had chased Washington’s army across the grassy Hempstead plains into the mists and fogs of the forests of the north shore. The British couldn’t find him. Washington took the battle up to the heights of northern Manhattan then retreated farther up the Hudson. The British controlled New York thereafter and Washington’s army escaped to fight another day.

  Nice, Ken said, appraising field and seats. The wheelchair was folded and sat before the empty chair beside him. George sat on the aisle. Ken was a little out of breath, but not so much he didn’t catch the beer vendor at first sign of his appearance.

  Is it really ice cold? said Ken. The sign on the carrier which held twenty-five paper cups of beer said in all caps ICE COLD.

  Ice cold beer here! the vendor cried out. It wasn’t a real answer: more an incantation stirred by the question, in the way of a parrot responding to a familiar prompt.

  Look at Schmidt, Ken said. The Philly hero was smoothing the dirt in front of him at third base.

  Great player, George said.

  I hate the fucking guy. Looks like Tom Selleck—who I also hate, because he reminds me of Schmidt. He fucking kills us. Kills us.

  Next time up Schmidt homered to left with a man on.

  See what I mean? See what I mean? He fucking kills us.

  Schmidt passed before them as he approached and rounded third. Fucking bum! Ken called out. Fuck you! Kraut! People looked at them. Schmidt did not. Ken coughed once, twice, then for an endless-seeming minute, gasping for breath.

  I shouldn’t shout, he whispered, when it was over. But fuck him, I enjoyed that.

  The car service that brought them home provided an old Chrysler Imperial. In red. With a red velour interior. Ken was tired now, the walk from the stadium portals out to the car, fifty yards or so, had been an ordeal.

  You want to make some quick money for five or six weeks this summer, I know a guy, Ken said when his breathing settled.

  What’s the job? George said.

  You go around to these fairs like at churches and shit and run one of the rides. You tow the ride in, between fairs you garage it out here, my guy I think said in Elmhurst. Call him.

  George wrote down the number.

  * * *

  ANTHONY DOBRONE WAS the pal of his uncle with the ride he wanted to farm out.

  It’s called the Basher, Dobrone said. Kids fucking love it. Cars that go around and crash into each other. Two seats to a car they both have dummy steering wheels but the whole thing is run on cables and pinions underneath—the kids don’t actually control it. The cars hit each other it seems like at random but it ain’t, you can learn to track the pattern. Anyway they love it. They’ll line up. You’ll roll in the money.

  The deal was the church fairs got twenty-five a day plus forty cents on every dollar in tickets. Dobrone paid the twenty-five dollars rent and expected profit on it. George would pay everything else, gassing and parking the car he towed the thing with, the incidentals.

  Listen. Are you listening to me? Don’t let these fucking mafia priests rob you with the tickets. They want to rob you with the whole ticket thing. You gotta go in with a count and be there when they count otherwise they cheat you.

  What do you mean? George said. Go in with the count?

  The kids pay you in tickets, he said.

  He was the kind of guy who sounded exasperated whenever he had to explain anything.

  The church or whoever, the, the, the street fair, whatever—they sell the tickets let’s say it’s fourteen tickets to the dollar. So to ride the Basher is seven tickets. Okay? Because basically you’re charging the value of fifty cents a ride. So you get the tickets. The church or whoever cashes them out at the end of the fair. You’re supposed to get sixty percent of the ticket value. So for you twenty-five tickets is a dollar. You get thirty cents on every ride they get twenty cents on every ride.

  Plus they get the rent?

  Plus they get the rent.

  You can make money at this?

  You gotta hustle. You gotta put in the hours. You run it noon to midnight that’s twelve hours you’re running the ride. Or ten if you take a couple breaks. Start at nine on weekends. Six seven minutes you unload and load you got eight rides an hour if you keep it moving. Let’s say you average eight kids a ride—peak times is better but let’s say average. That’s sixty-four kids an hour. That’s sixteen dollars an hour to you, to us. So ten hours a hundred sixty you make for the day, after my forty comes back it’s one twenty so another twenty-four to you on your guaranteed twenty-five let’s call it fifty bucks, four days two hundred dollars you can’t complain.

  Minus expenses, George said.

  Minimal, Dobrone said. He was getting ready to go out he said, and George had to talk to him while he changed his clothes: shirt some sort of coffee brown and caramel swirly pattern with the pointed collar, tan slacks, chocolate-brown linen jacket thrown over the back of the couch. He sprayed the shirt and the crotch of the pants with Right Guard after he got them on. Pulled his leg up like a Doberman and really got the spray in there.

  That’s attractive, George said in a low voice.

  What? Dobrone said.

  I said, you look like you have a date. You got a date?

  Party, Dobrone said. It’ll fucking end with a date, know what I mean. Come with me, I’m going to take you over the garage and show you the setup and give you the keys. Did I give you the calendar? I got a copy here for you.

  The setup, in a garage in a godforsaken dead industrial section of Woodside, not Elmhurst, involved a trailer hitch on which a blue-painted wooden box had been attached. Box was somewhat of a wide load, wider by six inches on each side than the big Econoline E300 van that pulled it. The van carried the generator for the electrical operation of the ride and six mini-cars that got attached by hooks to the contraption under the platform of the ride, a series of arms.

  Dobrone said, I need you to handle the thing, I don’t want to get any fucking grease or shit on my clothes. I’ll walk you through. First you gotta drop the trailer to ground level it becomes the base. These levers.

  Of course George had trouble with the levers.

  C’mon, Dobrone said. You’re a young guy, put some fucking muscle into it.

  George leaned in on it a little and the lever snapped down. It dropped the frame and lifted the wheel on that side.

  Good now the other side.

  The box opened to three times its width and twice its length, like an unfolding poster. There were wooden lifts, six big blue blocks essentially, same height as the lowered trailer, and he was to put these unde
rneath the corners of the ride and halfway down each side, to stabilize it. Everything about the thing looked like trouble but not to Dobrone, who showed him how the ride opened up, how it ran. It needed gasoline for the generator. The generator started with a lawn mower/outboard motor–type pull cord. George hated these things, which always acted up when you least could afford the delay, which clamped to a stop pulling one’s arm nearly out of the socket. The Econoline looked beat to shit. Three on the column. The clutch was not tight. The whole operation was going to be a fucking nightmare.

  Sure, he said to Dobrone. He kept saying it: Sure, sure, to everything the guy said.

  Of course the expenses were somewhat above minimal. Of course the van was trouble, of course setup was trouble, of course he almost broke his arm yanking on the uncooperative pull cord of the generator. Of course there were fewer riders than predicted. In the old Italian part of the Village, St. Carmine, they shook him down for an extra ten a day. For security and sanitation they said. In three days no one swept around his area and he saw no security whatsoever. The more wily unparented kids started sneaking on, he had to run them off or give up and start the ride up. By noon he was in a fury. There had been some busy points in the late morning but it was plain he wasn’t going to be making the money Dobrone had predicted.

  Next to his ride was a red canvas tent. Fortunes Told. When George was setting up in the morning and saw the sign he’d assumed this would be a facsimile of the usual Gypsy storefront fortune-telling operation—but then he saw the girl, who did not look the part. She looked more like Princess Caroline of Monaco. She belonged to a particular type, dark hair, bright eyes, not tall, that tended to buckle him at the knees. They had nodded at each other earlier. She spent the morning inside the tent, setting up, he guessed, but she was sitting now in a lawn chair, no customer, reading a thick paperback.

  He slowed then stopped the ride and seven children filed off. He spoke to the three stowaways.

  You guys got tickets for the ride you just took? he said.