He avoided television for fear of strike news. He unplugged the telephone in the event his mother was moved to make another futile attempt to broker peace. He was hanging with Travis Bickle, with Ratso Rizzo. But even they were merely a temporary distraction from his misery. Not long after a dinner of the chicken and chips, Jamie shut off the television and lights.
Why didn’t I think it through? Why did I go in?
Brief intervals of dozing were accompanied by dreams impossible to understand or recognize, ending when he’d snort himself awake and into that familiar moment of panic.
The worst insomniac hours for Jamie were always between midnight and three. After that, he was too exhausted to stress out over much—which was probably why he could finally drift off. It was easier, naturally, contemplating sleep deprivation when there was nothing planned for the next day. But its emptiness was reassuring only in those wee hours. By daybreak, a plan of nothing seemed worse than having to do something—anything—in a state of fatigue.
He was repelled by the thought of Ratso, still cued in the machine, looking like death warmed over or like exactly how Jamie felt. If nothing else, he was inspired to shave and shower. His face still tingled with sensation—but was it from the collision with the Trib driver or from the sting of his father’s open hand?
I’ve got to force myself to do something, he told himself. He decided on a run through the neighborhood.
He slipped into a pair of old basketball shorts with the official Lakers logo that reached only mid-thigh—out of fashion, thanks to those yappy Michigan players who reveled in being called the Fab Five. He yanked his favorite tattered Hunter College hoodie from the hook in the closet by the front door.
Jamie would have preferred exercising on a treadmill or stationary bicycle, but he couldn’t afford the membership to the neighborhood health club. He and Karyn had belonged, but that was a family membership on two salaries. He had never thought of himself as much of a runner. His style could easily have been mistaken for accelerated walking. And he often paused to admire the neighborhood brownstones and tastefully-situated carriage houses along the quiet, tree-lined streets he missed so much during his brief and spectacularly unhappy stay in the suburbs.
“I love how different all the buildings are,” he told Karyn one afternoon in the neighborhood soon after they met. The architecture contrasted so starkly from the numbing identicalness of the two-family brick row houses of his native outer Brooklyn. Sunday mornings they would stroll the Promenade, end-to-end, exiting at Montague Street for brunch before returning to the apartment. They would spread the papers on the area rug in front of the couch, sometimes making love amid the scatter of pages.
They would nap through mid-afternoon, grab a slice of pizza on Henry Street and catch a five o’clock movie at the neighborhood art house. The theater was old, almost decrepit. But it was local, artsy. It was decisively Brooklyn Heights, not mainstream Brooklyn.
Jamie relished those days. But when he began to feel nostalgic, he would ask himself, Was it really the relationship or more a sense of self-discovery? In the Heights, he felt like an explorer uncovering an invigorating new world, his stylish paradise.
He made himself run. It’ll be therapeutic. He knew he could use some real counseling—if only he wasn’t terrified of what he’d find out. His standard route took him from his apartment on Hicks Street over to Henry, down past the cinema. He turned left onto Poplar, over to Columbia Heights, closest to the river and down to the lower Promenade. He liked to treat himself to a waterfront view while working his way back. He always exited by the toddler playground onto Pierrepont Street, where he would occasionally run past Karyn’s old friends. If they spotted him they would wave enthusiastically—as if he and Karyn were still together, and they were all part of the noble society of posh-Brooklyn sophisticates who had resisted the clarion call of the suburbs, the comfort and security of the two-car garage.
“Jamie…Jamie…”
Oh no, too late. Keep your head down. Maybe she’ll give up.
He recognized the voice. It was Lucy, a redhead with soft, freckled skin and somber blue eyes. She had been a member of Karyn’s book group and at some point had sent out cards to friends asking that they address her from then on as Lucinda. She and her attorney husband owned a spacious co-op on one of the neighborhood’s most desirable blocks. In the time since Karyn and Jamie had left the Heights and he had returned, they had added a daughter and a golden retriever, both several months younger than Aaron.
From time-to-time he would run into Lucy/Lucinda and her husband. They always agreed that it had been much too long and they should all get together for a drink, a bite. Jamie knew before his smile had faded it was just congeniality. Jamie had enjoyed their company. But the foundation of these friendships was no different from those developed in high school, stitched together by a mutual interest—a family life they no longer had in common.
“Jamie…Jamie.”
Slowing his pace, Jamie looked up, forced a smile and waved. He recognized the woman sitting with Lucy/Lucinda but couldn’t recall her name. Only that her husband had once, at a couples-night-out dinner, corrected Jamie when he misidentified Neil Simon as Noel after raving about Lost In Yonkers.
Karyn couldn’t get enough of Manhattan—the museums, the Broadway shows and the pricey restaurants that made Jamie cringe. On his salary, he was happier to go to the movies in the neighborhood and eat pizza. He could admit she had helped him expand his city horizons but that only made Karyn’s sudden compulsion to leave more bewildering. Many nights when falling asleep was an hours-long process, Jamie’s head filled with contemplations of paths not taken.
What if Karyn had not been trapped in that subway elevator—would it have made any difference? What if he’d argued that he was happy, truly happy, to be living in Brooklyn Heights and did not want to leave? What if Aaron had been born in a hospital downtown and Jamie had been by her side?
In those dead-of-night hypotheticals, he wondered: might they have lived happily ever after? In the light of day, he had to admit that their compatibility was always in question. It was possible that they were together only because he had needed to latch onto someone at that point in his life. So apparently had she.
Jamie was coming up on the entrance to the park. He wondered, Should I go over and say hello?
He wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. Fortunately, Lucy/Lucinda relieved him of the responsibility by yelling, “Say hi to Karyn” and resumed her conversation. Jamie continued his run, veering left onto Pierrepont Street. He turned right onto Henry, where he jogged the rest of the way to Montague. He completed the mile and a quarter run that left him, as planned, across the street from the newsstand.
Once again, the Trib was stacked alongside the Times, the Sun and the Journal. It was another blow to the unions, but no doubt also to Willis. Jamie could picture him in the back seat of a taxi, resisting the temptation to peruse his night’s work. Does he take a copy of the paper home? Can he even stand to look at it? W.J. Clinton…the least they could have done was come up with clever bylines that were not so damn obvious.
But, he guessed, that was the point. Brady was trying to ridicule the reporters, assure them they could easily be replaced by absurdist fiction.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe all our readers really want are crime and gossip with bold headline and big pictures. Like whatever this crap is they threw out there today…
FAMILY FeuD
Below the Trib’s front-page headline was a blurred photo that was clear enough to distinguish the fingers of a hand brushing a cheek…glasses askew, tilting right…facial contortions…recoiling in astonishment…a newspaper, suspended in mid-air…a third man nearby, mouth agape, hands reaching out, fingers spread apart…the sub-head, which Jamie read like a first-grader carefully enunciating his first oral class presentation, as a dreaded realization began to set in:
TV Crewman Records Picket Drama Outside Trib
Jamie froz
e with two fingers pressed against the top copy of the Times. Bewilderment gave way to panic. A hand with long, feminine fingers sporting a glittering diamond ring and fire engine red nail polish reached from behind his waist—“excuse me”— to grab the copy of the Times. Jamie tried to apologize but was unable to speak.
It was him on the front page of the Trib. Him and his father and his Uncle Lou, starring in today’s twisted tabloid tale, a “Family Feud” that was no standard mafia fare.
How could Willis have made this the wood? How could he have done this to me?
No, he would never stoop so low. But who? And how?
Maxwell Brady!
Jamie recalled Brady’s primal glee upon learning what had happened outside the building. How he had gone off cackling, no doubt straight to his father’s office to share his scoop, to revel in another moment of comic striker futility.
But where the hell did this photo come from?
TV Crewman Records Picket Drama Outside Trib
He re-read the sub-head, lip-synched the photo credit, confirming the nightmare: “Courtesy of NY1.”
Cable television…Debbie Givens…
This photo had to have been reproduced from a frozen screen image. And that meant the entire scene with his father had been captured on tape, rewound and rebroadcast, running like a train through the Kramer family every 30 minutes.
The caption with its own bold heading—Kramer versus Kramer—was one long paragraph.
Trib printer Morris Kramer decks son, Jamie, a reporter returning to work, as the newspaper continued to publish without its striking workforce. The junior Kramer was knocked off his feet but quickly recovered and courageously advanced across the picket line—Full Story, Page 3.
Inside, surely there was another photo or two pilfered from TV, probably of Jamie on the ground. To complete the humiliation, there would be an expression of appreciation for Jamie from management—perhaps from Lord Brady himself.
Grabbed by the shirt collar like millions of tabloid gawkers before him, Jamie desperately wanted to turn the page, survey the full extent of the wreckage. Instead he made a closer inspection of the shadowy reprint. His father’s hand obscured the left side of his face, which was angled just enough so that it was more of a profile. The clarity was further compromised by the process of reproducing it from television.
Still, he thought, the damn thing was on television! Jamie remembered that his parents at least did not have cable—he was always complaining about that to his mother. But what if Molly raced downstairs to Becky’s apartment? Mickey insisted on having a box installed for the Knicks games. He could only imagine his mother watching—Becky at her side on the couch, weeping into a tissue pulled from a rapidly emptying box.
The vision of Molly’s inconsolable misery produced deeper, labored breathing. Have to get away from here. He reached into his pants pocket for change, dropped the coins in the tray on the ledge of the open window. He lifted a Times, folded it against his side, under his arm, turned and walked away with an aimless leaden gait. He crossed to the north side of the street between cars stopped for the light.
He’d lost his appetite. Just get home. But he felt lightheaded, nauseous. He suddenly was bent over, vomiting into a perfectly situated trash basket.
The contents of the previous night’s shut-in dinner—the wings, chips and cola—erupted with a fury. A pause for breath was followed by another round that splattered onto a mound of Burger King wrappers.
“You okay, mister?”
The inquiry—female voice, again—came from inside a car, stopped in traffic for the light at the corner. Jamie almost smiled at the absurdity of the question, but he refused to look up. He nodded like a drunk about to pass out more than a man trying to convince the unseen Samaritan that there was no need for alarm.
In fact, now that he had unburdened himself, the nausea was making its inevitable retreat. Jamie still held tight to the topsides of the basket, like a gnarled geriatric gripping his walker. The autumn breeze soothed the flush of his cheeks, as he took deep, desperate breaths. The third one finally registered the fetid contents of the trash basket, repelling him upwards.
An elderly woman, having watched Jamie purge, stood twenty feet away with a hand over her mouth. Jamie did her a favor by stepping into the street and walking alongside parked cars.
The street was largely empty, the lunchtime rush still a half-hour away. Jamie turned right at the corner of Hicks, walking unsteadily, past a smiling mother holding hands with her young son in a red Power Rangers costume.
Just a block and a half to go, keep moving. In the crosswalk, just a few doors from home, Jamie looked up to see a neighbor from the floor below him passing by. He dabbed at the corner of his mouth, wiping away, he hoped, the last vestiges of vomit. He smiled weakly and said hello. The distraction left him unprepared for the one-woman reception committee at the front of his building.
She was sitting in a hunch on the third step, hair characteristically tied back, hands resting on the edges of a newspaper folded on her lap.
Carla Delgado was smiling and sarcastic.
“Hey there, Mr. Celebrity?” she said. “Can I have your autograph?”
Chapter Twenty-two
Morris boarded the downtown express bus, eschewing the faster subway ride from the nearest station at the Flatbush Avenue junction. With morning rush hour past, the bus was more likely to accommodate his preference for a window seat from which he could observe Brooklyn as it went by in an ambiguous blur. Better that than facing subway riders holding up the humiliating Trib front page.
Louie had warned him about what was coming the previous afternoon. He followed that up in the early morning with a piercing rant against the Trib. Morris’ advice to Molly—not that she was in the mood to take any from him—was to avoid the newsstand altogether. Becky and Mickey had been out late and were gone to school early. Molly thus was spared the misery of rushing downstairs to watch her men lead the cable news cycle from the dinner hour late Wednesday afternoon and well into prime time.
How would Morris have recounted the event to Molly had it not been recorded and reported for public consumption? He wanted to believe he would have come clean. That he would have admitted losing control. That he had tried to wish away the inglorious act even as his fingers splayed across Jamie’s face.
He just couldn’t be sure that the version of the spectacle he would have shared with Molly would have matched his shame. So he didn't utter a word about it when he returned home. He retreated to the bedroom and tried to nap. But the telephone kept ringing and Morris’ game plan became a moot issue. A flood of pitying calls reduced Molly to tears.
Infuriated as Morris was to learn just how much of his confrontation with Jamie had been broadcast, his immediate instincts were, however belatedly, to comfort his wife. She shooed him away, spurning all requests to let him explain.
“How could you do such a thing?” she kept saying. “Your own son!”
“He was disrespectful,” Morris said.
“Why? Because he disagrees with you? He has a right to figure out his own life.”
The tears streaming down her cheeks and the disgust in her eyes made Morris back off. Molly dialed Jamie’s number without knowing what she would say.
He wasn’t home or answering the phone. But the machine didn’t pick up either. Molly busied herself with dinner and avoided eye contact with Morris. While she fiddled with dishes at the sink, he picked at her grilled chicken and baked potatoes. The silence continued, Morris feeling like a schoolboy sitting outside the principal’s office.
Giving the final plate a cursory wipe, Molly coldly announced, “I’m going to bingo at the temple with Becky.”
“Okay, call me when it’s over,” Morris said. “I’ll pick you up.”
“Don’t bother, it’s only a few blocks,” she said. “We’ll walk.”
“You shouldn’t—you know what’s been going on around here late at night. They come up from behin
d and grab your purse. They’ve been writing about it in the weekly paper, been going on for weeks. Just call from the pay phone in the lobby.”
On her way to the door, Molly said, “If anybody here needs to use the phone, it should be you calling your son.”
She walked out before Morris could respond. He took a deep breath and leaned back on the sofa. He worked over a bowl of pistachio nuts, piling shells on the cushion alongside him. He tried but couldn’t pay attention to a rerun of M*A*S*H. Alone, he could at least admit to himself something he could never say to Molly. Bad as he felt about what happened with Jamie, the day’s most chilling event had been his brief conversation with Colangelo.
It was the agitation that Morris couldn’t shake, the evasive body language. How Colangelo had drained his glass as soon as Morris and Lou materialized. Even Kelly Murphy had raised an inquisitive brow as Colangelo dashed for the door. It gnawed at Morris that Colangelo was withholding something strike-related.
While he mulled over the possibilities, none of them promising, the telephone rang. Morris feared it was another busybody calling to sympathize. He only answered because during a strike he believed it was his responsibility to be available twenty-four/seven.
“Tough guy, big fucking media star.”
Morris instantly recognized the unflinching, gravelly voice—the Boston working-class accent that made his name sound more like Maris.
“You there, Mo?” Ryan said.
“Jackie…?”
“Yeah.”
“Hello…how are you…what can I…?”
Morris was embarrassed by his stammering and by the immediate reference to what had happened with Jamie. But Jackie Ryan wasn’t the type to begin an inquisition and Morris knew why. Across the years, he’d seen much worse during a strike—men bloodied, livelihoods battered, families broken. Morris knew that Ryan, more than anyone, would know how painful the subject had to be and why it needed to remain respectfully unaddressed. So he relaxed and they chatted amiably for several minutes about nothing union-related. Ryan did wedge in a few choice words for the baseball owners, a miserly fraternity if ever there was one, he said, for provoking a strike and depriving him and millions of hard-working Americans of their rightful Fall Classic.
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