Young and Violent

by Packer, Vin

  “Huh?”

  “This thing Two Heads brought up, you know?” “Yeah?”

  “Well, for the record — I don’t blame you.”

  “Another dull blade,” Gober says, tossing a second knife aside. “I thought Braden was supposed to keep these sharp!”

  “What I mean is, Gobe,” Eyes continues, “sometimes a guy latches on to a broad he don’t figure is anybody’s goddam business.”

  “Okay,” Gober says, “let’s lock it up. Tell Braden about those knives when you see him, Eyes.”

  “I hope you’re not sore at me, Gobe, for shooting my mouth off like this.”

  “Hmmm?” Gober turns the key in the lock, his back to Eyes.

  “I hope you don’t take offense at my discussing this with you, Gobe.”

  Gober turns after he has locked the closet door, and looks coolly at Red Eyes. “Did you say something, Red Eyes?”

  Red Eyes gets the point. “No, Gobe,” he answers, “just that Dan Roan said he wants to see you some time before Friday.”

  “Sure,” Gonzalves says. “Detached Dan, the fix-it man. He’s going to straighten us all out, huh, Eyes? Isn’t that right? He’s going to straighten everybody out.”

  “Oh boy!” Eyes howls, “how I want to be straightened out!”

  The pair douse the light in the cellar and climb the steps. As they step into the night and start down 102nd toward Park, Gober says suddenly to Eyes, “This chick you keep in deep freeze, Eyes — you make out with her, or is it Emily Post?”

  “She’s my ‘wife,’ Gobe,” Eyes answers in a solemn voice.

  “Oh, yeah? Must be nice. Chicks like that are funny. Somehow you can’t figure them from the ordinary broads.”

  “Dolores ain’t nothing like these debs around,” Eyes says. “You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, Gober, sometimes a guy wants something that’s his, like, she moves him and all, not just a — well — ” Eyes is not used to philosophical discussions with Gober; he is a little awed over the idea they are speaking to one another on such a level; a little unsure how to proceed. He tries again. “Well, like I was saying in the cellar, Gobe — ”

  “Yeah,” Gober says, “Dan, Dan, the fix-it man, going to rehabilitate all the goddam juvenile delinquents from here to hell and back. Huh, Eyes? That’s the facts, huh, Eyes?” Gober grins and clamps his arm around Red Eyes’ shoulders, in a new gesture of mysterious camaraderie. “Rehabilitation blues, huh, you screw!” Gober laughs to Eyes. Eyes gives in to the new mood; the more familiar clowning mood, unfamiliar only in that Gober and he seem now to have some unnamed bond established between them. But to keep it light, to make it gay, to carry it off with the suavity expected of him, Eyes joins in on Gober’s spontaneous hilarity. He croaks, “Aw hell!” and chuckling hoarsely; goes along in step with Gonzalves, singing:

  They tried to rehabilitate me,

  Tried to reinstate me

  In the human race.

  “Oh man, are you a case!” Gober cries.

  Together they chorus, “I got the rehabilitation blues; the real re-ha-bil-i-ta — shun, bull-lew-oohs!”

  IV

  Let’s put some teeth in the laws dealing with juvenile delinquency! We can start by establishing a curfew for those under eighteen. Let them be cleared off the streets after 10 P.M. and in their homes where they belong!

  — GEORGE DAY, COLUMNIST FOR THE NEW YORK BULLETIN.

  AT MIDNIGHT, Red Eyes de Jarro climbs four flights up the rickety stairs of the five-story tenement on Park Avenue in the early hundreds. He opens the door and steps into the kitchen, where five of the occupants of this narrow, three-room, cold-water flat are assembled around a card table. In all, nine people live here; the Venturas, the Ricos, and Eyes and his mother.

  Eyes’ mother looks up from her hand of cards at him, a cigarette dangling from her red lips, her tired face cranky. In some remote way her son seems responsible for all the bad luck she has realized since Nick de Jarro deserted her, four years after Eyes was born. For one thing, Eyes closely resembles his father both in appearance and temperament; and for another, she imagines that without the burden of Eyes, she would have remarried long ago, and not have been ultimately forced to rent out her rooms in this shabby flat and work part time as a seamstress.

  She says, “Where you been?”

  “Out!” he answers.

  “I ought to beat you in the head!” she tells him.

  “Try it!”

  “I’ll tell your probation officer and I hope he sends you up for good!”

  “Drop dead!”

  This is the usual exchange between mother and son, prompted by little more than the fact that they are face to face, neither especially pleased with the other’s presence. Beppo Ventura, father of Dolores, Eyes’ “wife,” growls, “C’mon, play your hand, Lucy! Don’t waste your time on him!” Beside him, Jesus Ventura, uncle of Dolores, swigs whisky through half closed drunken eyes, and ignores Eyes’ presence. Only the Ricos, a skinny couple who look remarkably like one another, grin up at Eyes over the cards they hold in their hands. It is a grin of embarrassment. They are new to these surroundings, and neither speaks English. There are perpetual fights between them and the Venturas, who must always translate for them. Now the Ricos are unsure what has been said in the interval alter Eyes’ arrival, and so foolishly and helplessly they smile their vague discomfort.

  Eyes walks through the kitchen into the second room, and in the darkness makes his way past four mattresses strewn on the floor, more orange crates standing on their ends, and a couple of ripped plastic hassocks. He glances over at the mattress in the far corner to see if Dolores’ sister, Jo, is asleep there, or out making the rounds of the bars in Spanish Harlem. Satisfied that she is out, he passes on to the last room. In this one there are only two mattresses, a metal frame bed, and an old aluminum porch swing on which Eyes sleeps.

  The bed belongs to Mrs. de Jarro, and one of the mattresses to the eighty-seven-year-old grandmother of Dolores Ventura. In the dim light from the window, Eyes sees the old lady’s hulking body wrapped in a blanket; moving rhythmically in the deep breathing of sound sleep. Quickly Eyes slips off his pants, under which he wears no shorts, and unbuttons his shirt and drops it on the floor beside his pants. Naked, he walks to the other mattress, slips down on it and slides under the coarse blanket. His hands curl around the lithe body of the young girl asleep there and come to rest, one on the elastic of her panties; one up under the over-sized T-shirt she wears, on her small pear-shaped breasts. His lips rub against the back of her neck longingly, and as she stirs, he caresses her gently, lovingly.

  Sleepily she murmurs his name, and her hand reaches up and folds over his hand on her breast.

  “You asleep, Lorry?”

  “Ummm. I didn’t hear you come in. I tried to stay awake.”

  They whisper their words softly, Eyes touching her lightly as they talk.

  “You with the Kings, Dom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t get a chance to see Mr. Roan then?”

  “I saw Dan for a minute, Lorry.”

  “And did you show him the letter about your song?”

  “I couldn’t, honey. I didn’t get the chance.”

  “You should show him, Dom. Get his opinion.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “Dom? Remember what I told you about Uncle Jesus the other night?”

  “That dirty — ”

  “Well, tonight, Dom — just a little while ago — I was awake, and he came in here, pretending to be checking on Nanny. He came over to my bed. He was all smelly of liquor. He pulled the blanket off me and started running his hands over me, and I called Pa, but he didn’t hear me, I guess. I told Uncle Jesus I was going to scream, and he said, ‘I thought you were Nanny, Dolores, but you aren’t Nanny at all. Why, Nanny doesn’t have these! I should have known you weren’t Nanny, Dolores. A thousand apologies!’ And he was pinching me when he said it, and p
ulling at me. And when he got up he was laughing, the way he does. Dom, I was scared of him! I wanted you to be here so bad!”

  Eyes curses and pulls her to him tightly. “I’ll kill him, Lory! I swear to God some day I’ll kill that bastard!”

  “And he said to me, ‘You tell your pa, little bright eyes, and I’ll tell him something about you and your wop boy. I’ll tell him what you and that dago do when Nanny’s dreaming!’ “

  From the other room there is raucous laughter as Eyes curses again; and across the room from Dolores and him, the old lady begins to snore.

  • • •

  Tea is alone in the basement room he shares with his stepfather. It is a small, dank area squared in by plywood boards which do not reach the cellar’s ceiling; and it is reached by a crooked staircase leading down from the vegetable market above it, facing Park Avenue around 99th Street. In the room there are two old iron beds, a legless glossy white bureau, and a folding chair. Salvadore Hostos, Tea’s stepfather, is a night watchman for a housing project going up on 111th Street. Tea pays him board; $25 a month, which is what the total rent on the room is; and which Tea earns by pushing caps for a smart money man Tea knows only by the name Ace. With what Tea makes from his sales of the small quantities of narcotics Ace supplies him, he has enough left over, after giving Ace the bulk of the profits, to support his own habit, pay Hostos, eat, and buy sweet clothes every now and then. Tea would just as soon cut out on Hostos as look at him, except for the fact he was paroled from Coxsack to Hostos’ care, and the fact Hostos is the only remaining tie Tea has with any family at all. Without his stepfather to claim him, Tea could be in a home of some kind.

  It is not that Salvador Hostos and Tea Bag Perrez do not get along. They get along. They pay no attention to one another, so long as Tea forks over the twenty-five on schedule. It is simply that there is a tacit understanding between them that they dislike each other; so neither makes the effort to pretend it is any other way. Hostos is a drunk, a petty thief, a periodic loafer. It is beyond Tea why his mother ever married him; save for the fact she was young, alone in New York City, and he was the first Spanish-speaking man she met.

  From the bureau drawer, Tea takes a teaspoon, its handle broken off, its bottom charred from the matches which have been lighted under it. He reaches into his pocket for a capsule, opens it and empties the white heroin into the spoon. Then he gets a hypodermic needle and an eyedropper from the same drawer, and lays them on his bed. There is a glass of stale water on the top of the bureau, and he dips the spoon into it, being careful not to spill the powder. Sitting on the bed, he strikes a match and holds the flame under the spoon. Then with the eyedropper he sucks up the milky fluid; next he jabs the hypodermic needle through his trousers into his thigh. Hurrying, he puts the eyedropper over the needle, and presses the fluid into his flesh.

  “C’mon, boot!” he says to himself, grinning. “Boot up!”

  Whenever Tea joy-pops he thinks of his mother, and giggles to himself, imagining that day his mother told him about the day she brought him to this country. Tea was born when she was fourteen, out of wedlock, down in Puerto Rico. His mother worked as a sugar sorter until she saved enough for the trip to New York, made in a bucket plane in which she stood all the way, holding Tea, then three, in her arms. Tea likes to think about it. Tea likes to say, “bucket,” when he does, and laugh. “Bucket!”

  “You give me the name Tea!” Tea says to the air, remembering how his mother used to let him pick up on “pot” and call him Tea Bag, and put her arms around him and call him Bendito. He didn’t even mind then when she’d kiss Hostos too; didn’t even mind hearing them in the next room together, because he felt so good, so high.

  “Mamita mia!” Tea titters.

  For a second or so Tea’s thoughts sidetrack; and he just sits rocking on the bed, singing.

  “What about that day in lollypop court, boy!” Tea interrupts himself in the middle of the song. “Hey — that goddam judge!” He smiles in spite of the memory, because he feels perfect. He is remembering adolescents’ court, the morning he was sentenced to Coxsackie. All that loot he stole was for her. She could sell anything he could steal, his mother. Even an old clothesline or something. She knew how to get rid of it for cash. People all liked her because she was so pretty and looked just like a girl; not like a grown woman with a kid. She was little.

  “Lollypop court!” Tea repeats, “an then Coxsack U. I did it for her. She said, ‘You go on out now, Tea, and see what you can find.’ “ Tea smiles pleasantly at the walls. “She used to be surprised at the things I could find. ‘How’d you do that,’ she’d say. ‘Diablo!’ “

  Tea gets up and whistles and walks around the cellar room. He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to stay with Hostos. Would he want her with Hostos if he had his way! Anyone but Hostos! She was probably with someone a whole lot better, so she doesn’t have to work even. She doesn’t have to steal. Wherever she is, she is better off than with Hostos. You couldn’t expect her to stay with him. Tea in Coxsack and her stuck with Hostos — no! No wonder she cut out, left no word; just quit the scene. Hostos told him about it the day Tea got released. Hostos said, “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Ma?’ I’d like to know too. She took off! Found herself someone else when you was in the clink-school. She cleared out and left her baggage behind — you!”

  Tea socks the air with his fist and keeps on smiling. From somewhere far off in the distance a clock bongs one. It is good to be home. It is good to be home with the white, white, snow, for there is nothing like it.

  Through a dark corridor littered with refuse, up a flight of stairs, and into the front apartment facing Park at 100th, and Gober is home.

  “Riggie? Riggie?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “That you, Riggie?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Come here, Riggie, talk to us. Your papa and me are in bed. What time is it?”

  Gober pauses in the living room of the small two-and-a-half-room flat, and lights a cigarette. The china lamp, shaped like a heart with a gold arrow piercing its red middle, stands lighted on an end table beside the sofa upon which Gober sleeps. The room is overcrowded with big stuffed chairs, a tall old-fashioned radio and phonograph, several cotton scatter rugs, and here and there gaudy satin pillows. Wherever there is space, there are china dogs, china pitchers, glass candy dishes filled with peanuts and raisins; and on all the arms of the furniture, there are crocheted antimacassars. Banners and calendars fill the walls of the room, and the room is very clean.

  “You hear, Riggie? Your papa and me are in bed. Come talk to us.”

  “Yes, Mama, Yes. I’m on my way there, Mama. Just lighting a cigarette.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke and ruin your lungs, Riggie. Cancer comes from those weeds. If you got to smoke, don’t inhale! You don’t inhale, do you, Riggie?”

  Gober talks as he walks into his parents’ bedroom, “No, Mama, I don’t inhale.”

  The Gonzalves sleep in a large iron frame double bed which occupies three-quarters of the space in that small area. The rest is taken with cardboard chests of drawers lined along the wall, upon which a huge gold crucifix hangs, with an ivory figure of Christ.

  “You been with your novia, Riggie? Your girl friend?”

  “No. Just some of the guys, Mama.”

  Gober sits on the edge of the bed, in the dim light shining from a street lamp on Park Avenue. His mother is a plump woman in her forties, with black hair worn in a bun, but loosened now as she sits up in bed to talk with her son. It falls to her back, and she pulls it around her shoulders to the front of her, to cover her large breasts which show through the flimsy cotton nightgown. Beside her, lying so that he faces the wall, is her husband, George. In addition to the three of them, there are Gober’s two brothers: one a Marine, the second a longshoreman, married and living off in Brooklyn with his wife and four kids. Gober is the baby. All speak Spanish when they are together.

  “What’s the mat
ter with Papa? Asleep?”

  “No, Rigoberto, your papa is not asleep. How is it he could sleep, hmm, Rigoberto? You tell me that.” His father says this without turning away from the wall, or moving the position of his body.

  “Papa don’t feel happy tonight, Riggie.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Whatever you do in this life, Rigoberto, learn a trade. Learn a trade. Learn a trade. Learn a trade.” “Sure, Papa. I’ll learn a trade.”

  “Because then you can always do something. Always. You know how to do plumbing, you always got a job. Grind lenses, set type, lay bricks — I don’t care — a trade is a guarantee. A guarantee.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, Papa, you’ll find something. Something will probably come up tomorrow.”

  Gober draws in on his cigarette tiredly, listening while his father turns, sits up in bed, and begins to rant. “Sure, I find something. But something is nothing. Something is running errands for a liquor store, that’s what something is, or delivering for a florist — a messenger boy! Isn’t that something! That’s something, I’ll tell you, I don’t want to find it tomorrow. God, when I think! God and Mary, when I remember! When I remember how many men worked under me back in San Juan — all sugar men, all processing, and me their supervisor — and they coming to me and saying, ‘I can’t come tomorrow, Mr. Gonzalves’ — mister, they’d say — ’because they need us in the rum plant.’ And I’d say, ‘Listen, you lousy little pack rat, you come tomorrow! You come!’ And they obeyed me. They obeyed my words!”

  Mr. Gonzalves sits smiling wistfully to himself for a moment, nodding his head up and down, his hands clasped together peacefully. “Yes, yes,” he says. “Yes, yes.”

  His wife consoles him. “Who knows what would be now if the market had never dropped on sugar? Who knows what would be, George?”

  “What would be? I would be big! A big man! Maybe head supervisor; maybe manager, even. Yes, manager! A manager!”

  “Sure, Papa. Sure,” Gober says.

  “And no one would look down their nose. I would know my business. I would be in my business all my life and they would need me to tell them what to do, and they would not even let me retire, they would need me so. Not like here. ‘Lie, George,’ someone tells me yesterday when I go to the project to see for a job, ‘Sixty is too old. They don’t want a heart case.’ I have to lie to them, who are no better then me. To them, who say, ‘Talk more slowly. I don’t understand you.’ They say that to me like I’m a bug they will squash next … You listen to me, Rigoberto, son of my heart, learn a trade. It’s the only way you will be somebody!”