The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  On the other hand, Lamont realised, it was also possible that Michael had set him up, that he and the younger man with the gun had planned all along to rob the liquor store without telling Lamont and then count on Lamont to drive them away. The simplicity of that hypothesis gave it a certain attractiveness. Lamont could drive and he had his own van. Not everyone in the neighbourhood had their own vehicle. This could have been why Michael had brought Lamont to meet the young gun-owner.

  It was a possibility Lamont did not entertain for very long. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that Michael had tricked him, not like this. It seemed more likely to him that when the kid decided on the spur of the moment to rob the store, Michael, not wanting to court his derision and put to risk a new and untested acquaintance, had abandoned all reason, not to mention a friendship that was almost as old as he was.

  Michael too had grown up in Co-op City and they had been friends since grade school. Michael’s mother had permitted him to go to Lamont’s place after school even though she knew Lamont’s grandmother would still be at work. She trusted Lamont. The two of them would grab a Hawaiian Punch or a High-C from the refrigerator and watch Looney Tunes, the Electric Company, old Tom and Jerry or Rocky and Bullwinkle, which Lamont enjoyed more than Michael. Lamont had always been more comfortable than Michael keeping his own company. Lamont’s apparent self-sufficiency was something Michael had often felt envious of without knowing that this was what he was feeling. It had only made him value Lamont’s time and attention all the more.

  They had learned to ride their bikes at the same time and had ridden them together on the bike path along the Greenway all the way from Section 1 to Section 4 to the movie theatre or the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream store. They even spent time in the pet store choosing the pets they’d have bought if either of them had been permitted to keep a pet. When they got a little older and a little braver they went further to Section 5, the newest outlying section, taking what was called ‘Killer Curve’ to get there. Michael had once lost control on ‘Killer Curve’, going over the handlebars and requiring five stitches in his chest. It was Lamont who had taken care of everything. Afraid to call Michael’s house for fear of getting him into trouble with his sometimes volatile mother and with his own grandmother still at work, he called his cousin, Michelle, from a payphone.

  Although she was only two years older, her role in Lamont’s life ranged between that of a friend and that of an older sister, according to the demands of the situation. When Michelle was convinced it wasn’t a prank she said she would call an ambulance and told Lamont to stay with him. She arrived there herself on her bike before the ambulance arrived. She saw Lamont sitting beside Michael with his jacket draped across Michael’s chest. The two of them went to the ER with Michael. While Michael was getting stitches in his chest, Lamont asked Michelle how she could have thought even for a moment that his call could have been a prank. If it had been a prank, it would have been Michael who had put him up to it, Michelle had explained as they waited at the hospital. He was about to protest that her explanation unfairly impugned his friend’s character when he remembered a couple of instances she could use to substantiate her point if she needed to so he didn’t press it, even though, in general, Michael had never really been able to exercise much influence over him. Sometimes he had done things out of boredom that he regretted but this was hardly due to Michael’s influence. It had just been that Michael happened to have been there at the time.

  It had been with Michael that Lamont had tasted the thrill of shoplifting at Cappy’s, the local stationery store. Lamont liked to read the magazines but Michael had always been more interested in the candy. Michael was the first to steal and it had been candy, Now and Laters and Hershey Bars he’d stolen. Lamont had had his head buried in a magazine and hadn’t known what Michael was doing until they’d left the store. Michael had said he had to try. No one saw a thing. It was too easy not to at least give it a try. The candy tasted better when you took it, Michael said. They’d ridden furiously to the Pine Island playground near Building Five and eaten the candy by the swings. But it hadn’t tasted better to Lamont. On the contrary, the chocolate didn’t seem as rich. Its taste was thinner on his tongue and on the roof of his mouth. It was as though someone had taken some of the chocolate out of the chocolate, as though the chocolate had been corrupted by shame. It had never really occurred to him before that his actions could dilute what should have been a standard almost manufacturer-guaranteed reward.

  Without fully understanding why, he’d been momentarily angry with Michael, who was eating his chocolate like a hungry animal and in between bites grinning like an idiot. What would Michelle say if she knew? It was the magazines Lamont had wanted more than the candy anyway. Later on he would take some magazines and comic books. There was shame then too, but at least he’d really wanted them. He could never have afforded them. Shame vied with excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Eventually he was caught.

  He wondered why he preferred the conversations he had with himself to most of the conversations he had with Michael. The self he would talk to understood things so much better than Michael did, better than anyone did. This self saw everything that happened to him and didn’t forget any of it. It always saw his loneliness even if it wasn’t always able to ameliorate it. When others misunderstood him this self did not. This self saw him want his grandmother to ask and want her not to ask how school was, both at the same time, when she’d come home in the evening. It saw him prefer to watch television than answer her question and then regret that he hadn’t. He didn’t want her never to ask. He couldn’t admit any of this even to himself. But he could to this self.

  Years later, while he was serving his sentence at Woodbourne, he thought about those times and wondered who was asking his grandmother about her day while he was in Woodbourne. He should have asked her about her day back then.

  Michelle was infinitely better company than Michael, far more interesting and entertaining, though much worse at handball. Being two years older though and not living quite so close, it wasn’t as easy to get time with her. ‘Can I go see ‘Chelle?’ he’d ask his grandmother, who delighted in her grandchildren’s affection for each other. It was Michelle who had introduced him to the Piers Anthony ‘Xanth’ books. She took him to the library where, as she explained, the books would always be waiting for him. He liked to read and to draw there but was unsure to whom it was safe to admit this. He had taken Michael to the library but Michael had quickly become bored. Michael seemed to feel there wasn’t much in the library for him and he was bewildered and sometimes annoyed that Lamont wanted to go there.

  Michelle had parakeets and she’d let him feed them. She’d let him hold them and place them on his shoulder. When her father was buying her sneakers she’d make sure it happened on a day when Lamont was with her so that her father would end up feeling obliged to buy Lamont a pair too. And he did. One year he chose the blue suede Pumas and he showed her how you were meant to wear the laces; two colours intricately woven together, left untied and stuffed under the tongue of the sneaker to raise it prominently. His grandmother was always at him to tie his shoes. She didn’t understand. Michelle did.

  It was better to go shopping with Michelle. She encouraged him to wear the right jeans; Sassoon, Jordache or Sergio Valenti and especially Tale Lord. It was hard to get his grandmother to buy what he wanted when she took him on the bus to shop for clothes on Fordham Road. The older he got, the worse these trips got. The love he had for his grandmother never wavered but the only thing worse than having her buy his clothes was having people see him shopping for clothes for himself with her. At these times he had to fight a desire to run away from her or even, literally, push her away from him. He never did, nor did he ever even permit himself to show his grandmother his frustration.

  It was during this period of his life, he could recall, that he first began feeling a chronic low-grade nervousness, a restlessness coupled with an anxiety that was more or
less constant, one that was still with him. It was always as though he was expecting a calamitous event that he was unable to identify and was therefore completely unable to prevent or avoid. The exhaustion this produced was such that no amount of rest or sleep ever relieved him of it. Because it had been so long a time since he had not felt this way, being anxious seemed normal to him and, in a sense, for him, it was. He might even have had it from earliest childhood. He couldn’t be sure.

  He had thought of discussing these feelings with Michelle because if anyone would have understood how he felt it would have been her. She was the smartest person he knew, maybe smarter than his teachers, because she seemed to understand things he hadn’t wanted to say and even some things he didn’t say. Maybe it was because she was two years older. Maybe it was because she was a girl or because both her parents lived at home with her and everyone – her parents, their grandmother, grown-ups in the neighbourhood – they all knew she was going to be okay.

  He had told Michelle how he’d felt about the horseshoe crab incident and what had happened in class and just seeing the understanding written on her face helped him make sense of it a little more. At that moment, with all her concentration on him and her eyes so full of the story he was telling her, his love for his cousin was great enough for him to imagine it was possible that, just by knowing her, he might be all right.

  Mr Shapiro had been teaching the class about dinosaurs, Lamont had explained. Over a few lessons he’d gone through the origins of life from the single-celled amoeba to plankton through to the various kinds of dinosaurs, reptiles, birds, apes and finally on to people. He was getting kids to name existing animals that might be easily identified as descendants of now-extinct species. Answers volunteered included zebras, elephants and lizards. But Lamont felt he had the best example and, from his response, it seemed Mr Shapiro agreed with him. Lamont hadn’t known if he had ever felt so good. Horseshoe crabs! They’re descended from trilobites. Mr Shapiro exclaimed, ‘Man, that is a good answer!’

  Encouraged, Lamont took the matter further.

  ‘They’re real big. They got long pointy tails. And they … They look prehistoric.’

  Mr Shapiro said, ‘Excellent! Would you like to come out to the front, Lamont, and draw one for us on the board?’

  So Lamont got up out of his seat and went up to the front and started drawing a horseshoe crab.

  ‘They have eyes but they can’t see too good. It’s their tails that’s important. Maybe more than the eyes, not sure. They use their tails in the sand and dirt and stuff on the ground. I think they’re really old.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Mr Shapiro said. ‘You certainly know a lot about them, Lamont.’

  ‘I seen ’em.’

  ‘In a book?’

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve seen real ones too.’

  ‘Lamont, are you sure? I’m not sure about that.’

  But Lamont had seen them. Near Section 5 en route from Section 1 where Lamont lived, it was possible, if you were sufficiently motivated, to make one’s way down to the Hutchinson River. Lamont had done it often. There in the shallows of the banks of the Hutchinson River he had found a species of ‘crab’ that he’d learned at the library were horseshoe crabs.

  ‘I could show you, Mr Shapiro.’

  ‘That would be good. Maybe one day.’ Mr Shapiro was packing his satchel.

  ‘When? After school?’

  ‘Sure. Maybe one day after school.’

  ‘When? Next week maybe?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Next Wednesday after school?’

  ‘Well, okay, maybe next Wednesday.’

  ‘I’ll draw you a map. Show you how to get there.’

  ‘Okay, thanks. Thanks, Lamont.’

  Michael was with him after school the following Wednesday afternoon on the banks of the river. An hour and a half had passed when Michael told Lamont what he already knew, that Mr Shapiro wasn’t coming.

  ‘He don’t want to hear about that stuff no more. It’s over.’

  ‘Well, he mighta got held up or something. Mighta got lost. Maybe he thinks it’s gonna rain. Michael, be bad if he comes later and I’m not down here.’

  ‘He ain’t never comin’, Lamont.’

  ‘Well, maybe. I don’t know. But I know there are horseshoe crabs in here. I’m gonna show Michelle too. You see how they use their tails when they walk?’

  ‘Shapiro … He ain’t comin’,’ Michael insisted. ‘He knows there ain’t no dumb ol’ horseshoe shit … but you get your cousin down here … I sure show her somethin’ … real pointy tail!’

  That was all he had a chance to say before Lamont landed a punch to Michael’s face, the force of which pushed Michael on to the ground. Lamont stood there for a moment looking at him. It shocked him to think that he’d done that.

  Lamont didn’t know why he’d let Michael make him so angry. They rode their bikes home against the wind without speaking. They didn’t see each other for a while after that. It didn’t bother Lamont much.

  He hadn’t been seeing so much of Michelle at the time either. She was going to Bronx Science now and claimed to have more homework than ever. She made it sound genuinely heroic, like something to which Lamont might aspire, but she did it without ever being at all self-promotional or sounding in any way as though she thought herself superior to him, or to anyone else. At least that’s how it sounded over the phone whenever he said a little sadly but without accusation, ‘You sure are busy now, ‘Chelle.’

  But on his birthday Michelle’s parents had taken him, Michelle and their grandmother downtown to a steak restaurant. He didn’t remember now exactly where it was except that it was near Union Square. He remembered that. It had to have been around there because they walked through Union Square on the way to and from the place Michelle’s father had parked the car. Lamont liked going out with Michelle’s family. He’d wanted it to happen more often. Her mother, obviously on Michelle’s instructions, had bought Lamont more books from the Xanth series, books only Michelle would have known he hadn’t already read. Her father, again clearly guided by her, had got him a few action figures, Micronauts with translucent plastic limbs and a couple of accessories, which Michelle knew he admired. In addition, he got two of the original highly complex Shogun Warrior action figures, which Michelle explained later could only be bought in Chinatown. This was before Mattel started turning them out. Owning these could definitely enhance the social life of someone in Lamont’s position. It was as though, recognising that she was seeing him less and less often and that this was the way it was going to be, Michelle had engineered the day by way of partial reparations. It worked.

  Lamont had started spending time with Danny Ehrlich. This pleased Lamont’s grandmother because Danny’s father was a teacher at Truman High School. She thought Danny Ehrlich would be a better influence on Lamont than Michael was. Mr Ehrlich was said to be just about the most laid-back teacher there was, a mellow hippy throwback. That was partly why the story about him, the famous Mr Ehrlich story, spread as fast as it did.

  The story involved a student in Mr Ehrlich’s class, a skinny black kid from the neighbourhood known as the ‘Valley’ in Boston Secor outside Co-op City just across the highway. This student once drew a swastika on the blackboard. One of the worst-behaved kids in the class, he knew it was a bad symbol, one that shocked people, one that offended, even frightened some people, but he didn’t understand why. On that day he learned why and so did everyone else in the class. Mr Ehrlich was said to have gone temporarily insane.

  Of course there were various versions of the story that made the rounds. In one, he hit the boy repeatedly. In another, the kid peed himself because of the verbal lashing he got. In some versions it was racism that Mr Ehrlich talked about. Some said it was slavery. Some said he made the class write an essay about being different. Others said Mr Ehrlich gave a long talk about something called ‘Nazism’ after which he just calmed down suddenly and it was all over. What was common to all the ver
sions was that there was a day, just one, when that old hippy teacher, Mr Ehrlich, absolutely lost it. That became the canonical story.

  Lamont was in Danny Ehrlich’s class and neither of them had ever been students of Mr Ehrlich. Danny too was a fan of the Xanth books. After spending some time together in class, Danny invited Lamont to come over after school. Lamont’s grandmother first learned of the boys’ friendship when Lamont asked her permission to go. He couldn’t help but notice her pleasure at their association. Lamont took along one of the Shogun Warrior action figures Michelle’s father had bought in Chinatown for his birthday. He chose one of the bad guys, a fabulous mix of dye-cast and plastic articulated limbs with ball joints in the shoulders, feet and even the neck. The paint job was smooth and clean. There was no bleeding of colours, just a well-defined fierce-red shield with yellow rib-like indents covering the chest. The head, disproportionately small and, by virtue of this, extra creepy, consisted of almost nothing but a skull with two blue stripes going from the front at the top of the eye sockets over the crown all the way back to where the skull joined the neck. Other than his feet, which were blue, the rest of him was a metallic silver. To see him was to want him because without even holding him he could set a boy’s imagination on fire. The first time you actually held him you were smitten, you were in awe.