“First off, when you’re falling more than twenty feet, you don’t know diddley-squat about what’s floating around you. You could hit Jimmy Hoffa for all you know. You don’t know how deep the water’s gonna be. Make like you’re blind. A leap of faith.”
I got quiet. I got cold, even though the night was hot, and when I shivered, poking through my Danskin, my nipples mortified me. He wore only pale, unpatterned blue boxers. No shirt. No one was around, so it was okay, he said. He figured cops wouldn’t hassle us at 1 a.m., so we went then, in the small hours. It was to be our secret.
The distinction between secrecy and privacy. A tough one.
The sky was yellowish and bearing down, pressing the low roofs of the attached houses with green awnings beyond Seaview Avenue, closing in on the Pier’s hot concrete. He asked, all sympathetic and paternal, “Getting cold feet?”
“What are you? High as a kite on drugs?” The question had been popping out of Canarsie’s parental mouths.
“Then pay attention. I’ll explain it as many times as you need, but I’ll only demonstrate once.”
“Why?”
His features clustered to a pinch of nose and lips—a disgusted look, I thought, standing with my squinched-raisin nipples and ignorance. “I’m not allowed to jump in even once. I can’t go twice. They’d cart me to jail if they knew you were doing it, too.” I was dry ice, frozen and burnt. “Learning how to fall is the most important thing you’ll ever learn, and they won’t teach you that in school. The trick is to do exactly what doesn’t come naturally. When you’re falling, you won’t be able to see or even think, but if somehow you can, try to fall wherever the water’s deepest.”
“But then I’ll drown.”
“Drowning’s always a risk, but that’s a swimming problem, not a falling problem. And if drowning is your main concern, you lucked out big time, because you can only drown if there’s a miracle and you survive the fall and the hit. The deepest water is furthest from shoreline. Assume the water isn’t deep enough to stop you bashing yourself against the shore bottom. Hit bottom with your head, you break your skull. Hit bottom with your legs, they snap like Pick-Up Sticks. Go for the deepest part. Stay away from all objects, especially anything that supports the bridge.”
“Then there’s nothing to hold onto. To help me. Float.”
“This is true. Nothing to help you out, but also nothing to smash yourself into. All kinds of garbage collects near bridge supports. Sure, a little raft would be nice to find, but you’re more liable to find something a lot bigger and a lot harder than you are. Then you’ll pay.” He turned around, looked behind himself. “Checking for John Law. Coast’s clear. Okay now. Jump feet first. Stay straight. If you aren’t perfectly straight, you’ll break your back when you hit.” I was trembling, and not because of the extreme temperatures my skin had touched. He said, “I thought you wanted this. What’s with the Gloomy Gus punim?”
“I’m just listening.”
“Totally vertical. Feet first. Squeeze your feet together tight. And your butt cheeks.”
“Butt cheeks?”
“If you don’t squeeze your cheeks, water’s gonna rush in. Screw up your insides. Internal damage and such like.”
“Rush in where?” What fun, to watch a big strong man squirm. I knew where he was talking about, that it embarrassed him to talk about it. I knew that things could go inside that place just as things could come out of that place. “Rush in where?”
“Into your insides. Your tummy. And you’ll get one helluva stomachache. Always make sure to cover your privacy real tight.” Outside his boxers, he cupped his hands around his parts, like I was some guy at a row of urinals.
“Why? Why should I? Why should I cover my privacy?”
“You just have to.” I wanted to watch him wriggle out of this one. I remembered how one winter, when we’d gone to see the human polar bears go swimming at Brighton Beach, I’d asked him why men had nipples. He’d blushed and changed the subject to his favorite: ironwork. And a few years earlier, I’d asked him where babies came from. Flustered, pink-faced, without a trace of levity or irony, he said, in a voice possessed of an untainted, artless sincerity never heard out of grown-ups’ mouths, “Ummmmm, you should ask your mother.” My question was sufficiently stress-provoking to make him forget that I didn’t have much of a mother to ask, and that if I did ask the mother I came from, he and I wouldn’t have been having this conversation. This situation.
“Just do what I tell you and remember to protect your privacy.”
The thick yellow sky pushed down on my skull and brain. “First you said I couldn’t think or see straight. Then you said to remember to cover my privacy. How’m I gonna remember if I can’t think?”
“Trust me.” To trust someone who kept checking behind his back did not come easy.
“Explain why you did that.” I pointed, accusing his shorts of something. The idea of his parts poked out; the idea of his sheltering hands obscured the idea of the bulge. “Izzat fair? You said you’d explain it however many times, then you don’t explain it, not even a tiny bit?” He looked around frantically. “Dad, we’re alone, but it doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause everything’s all wrong.”
“Wrong? What’s wrong? I’m steering you wrong?”
My talking-out-loud voice said, “No,” but my thinking-inside-myself voice bawled, You already did. This was supposed to be something else. You’re pulling a change-up on me and you don’t even say you’re sorry. I started crying, then I stopped myself.
“I know it’s scary, Butterfly,” he cooed, all kissy-face-buddy-buddy. “I’ll demonstrate. Better to learn by example.” He plopped onto the concrete and lay flat, flat everywhere except for the forcefully un-flat, trace afterimage of the ghost in his shorts. “Another thing to know. Remember how we make snow-angels?”
“That’s winter. In the snow. It’s summer now. Everything’s different.”
“Pretend with me. As practice.” He spread his arms and legs apart, wide. His pectorals and deltoids emerged, tauten-ing, hardening, and his boxers gapped, puffed, and puckered in places I thought would’ve worried him if he hadn’t been busy trying to get in good with me—after he’d rooked me, no less. His arms and legs described arcs on the concrete. “While you’re falling, making snow-angels in the air generates resistance and slows down your plunge.” He flapped his limbs like a dying bug, too stunned to flip from his back onto twitchy, kicky legs.
I was done. No more pretending. No more practicing. I wasn’t lying down on hot concrete, no way no how, to make fake snow-angels in the summer. I was done bench-pressing, too, because falling lessons, and all the practicing building up to it, had always held zero promise. For me. I said, “This is C-R-A-P crappola.”
“I don’t like that word.”
“Well, tough titties. I don’t like this. I don’t even think I like you. I’m going home.” As if it would work this time, I said it again—I’m going home—as if I had any say at all in the matter. He appeared embarrassingly eager to scuttle like a caught cockroach off the Pier, but if he hadn’t been ready to leave, if he’d wanted something else, somewhere else, or something more, I would’ve been stuck. I had no keys. I wondered whether it was accurate to call it our house if only one of us had keys.
* * *
Chicky Testaverde came by a couple of times that summer to have grief-drinks with Dad after he’d already been at the bar, talking ironwork, having several after-work drinks with the guys. He never confessed to suffering days so stricken it took five after-work drinks to calm his once-nervy nerves. He never confessed to icing over with bone-seizing fear while on bridges now, unable to move in any direction, sometimes hugging a girder or a beam, eyes crushed closed for five minutes. But he spoke like a man indicting himself for murder, which implicated us as coconspirators, when he wept, “I shoulda known to keep my kid off the bridge.”
* * *
Later during the summer of the Pier business, the three of us—Da
d, awkwardness, and I—got in the car, tooled around, listened to AM radio and the wind roaring through the open windows. The drives were probably his uncomplicated method of getting through the hours. His directions and destinations were always questionable and unquestioned. One night he’d gotten lost, maybe missed an exit if he’d had one in mind, near the Belt Parkway’s labyrinthine, accident-prone Ocean Parkway intersection, a snaky Mobius-mess of ramps, exits, merges, under- and overpasses. Traffic was slow.
He drove the Olds below an overpass on whose brick someone had spray-painted in darkest black, Hi Scummy.
We noticed it, read it, and looked at each other. Hi Scummy jetted us into laughter so belly-felt it was unbearable, like being too-tickled. Our hysterics were a relief, too, the discharging of something that needed letting out. Laughter was going to kill us, because Dad was losing control of the wheel, swerving like an alkie. He pulled off at the nearest exit and parked. We genuinely could not stop laughing. We were having An Episode. I was scared I might wet my pants, but I also didn’t care if I did.
When he could talk again, Dad asked, “You think the guy who wrote Hi Scummy was pissed off at somebody who drives under that overpass-thing every day? To make sure the other guy really gets the message?”
“How would Scummy know the guy’s handwriting? And would Scummy know to look up there for a message?”
“Hmm. Smart one. Good point. Also, how would Scummy know that he was the exact Scummy that the Hi was meant for? ’Cause for sure there’s more than one person who takes this route and fits that description.” He paused, changed tone, adding a grim voice to his voice. “That’s if we used words like that, Beth. And we don’t. Those words aren’t allowed, so we don’t use them.”
“Oh,” I said, earnestly. “What about words like Dummy-fuck-o?”
“Beth! Brat! Enough! You know the rules about words.”
“Rules schmules!” I waved away his admonition. Laughter was lots better. “What about this? Maybe the person who wrote … that thing … that Hi … is mad at the drivers.”
“All of ’em? In every single car?”
“Well, not mad, exactly, he just thinks they’re, you know, that they’re scummy!”
“What did you just say?”
“Scummy!” I hooted. I hollered. I spat a few spit-bubbles out my mouth, not on purpose, but a couple hit him, which was nice. “I can say that! You can’t stop me! I’m Scummy! You’re Scummy! Everybody’s so Scummy, Scummy, Scummy!”
He tried to paste his I-am-stern-and-strict face onto his face. “Cut out the crap, Beth! What did I just—?” Mid-scold, he gulped, gagged, as he tried to swallow back laughter, quacking glottally at the precise moment he was trying to play the part of an I-know-what’s-best-for-you type Dad—“What did I just tell you?”
“You told me not to say scummy But you also said crap and before that you said scummy a million-zillion times, so you can’t be mad. Nuh-uh. The rule is phony baloney. Like you.” He gunned the engine again, and we went quiet, listen-ing to the Olds’ hum, meandering on small streets toward wherever he and I were headed, that night, that summer.
Then, I Eureka!-ed. Out my mouth, before I knew it was coming, I shouted, “But maybe it might be a nice thing! Think about it. Maybe the person who wrote Hi to Scummy isn’t a mean Dummy-fuck-o. Like it’s the opposite. Maybe he and Scummy are bestest best friends, and Scummy doesn’t mind. It’s only a bad name if it hurts Scummy’s feelings, but Scummy likes him, so he likes it, he likes his name, so it’s nice to be Scummy.”
Dad shook his head hopelessly. “I’ve been around a lot longer than you, kiddo, and I’ve heard all sortsa nicknames, but I never heard anyone call a good buddy Scummy. Nice try. Close, but no cigar.”
My hands fluttered up dismissively, then flopped in my lap as I kept myself from sighing, “Some people just don’t ever get it.” I twisted, faced him head-on. “Dad, will ya use the noodle God gave you? This guy went to a helluva lotta trouble. He walked on those highways, with the cars and trucks zooming by. Look! There’s no road shoulder. He must of been scared.”
“You got that right. He was shit-scared.”
“But we don’t use words like that, do we?” I inquired, all innocent. He reddened. I let him sweat that one out a minute, then continued, “This guy climbed up the walls, and he had to tiptoe around those No Pedestrian Traffic signs just to hang upside down, like bats do, off that overpass. It’s high up there, especially to be upside down, and the bricks are crumbling. That’s scary.”
“Well taken,” he said. “Go on. Argue your point.” His gaze burned a dimple into the side of my face.
“I’m tellin’ you. All that tsuris? Why bother with it? To say hi to some scummy stranger-type of person who wasn’t his friend? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless he likes Scummy.”
He added, in his dropped-register, this-is-cautionary-so-pay-attention tone, “But Beth-Bug, a lotta times people like things that aren’t so good for them. Especially small people like you.”
“You call me Boll Weevil all the time. A lot of people think boll weevils are icky and gross, and they would say you’re being a big Dummy-fuck-o by calling me by a bug-name, but we know you mean it nice. Same with Scummy. Personally, I think Scummy and his best friend have these private names. Scummy likes being Scummy.”
Leaning in toward the windshield, my father peered at the sky through the streaky, dirty glass. Refusing to look at me, he smiled. Then he tried to quash the smile by contorting his face, cranking his jaw around to set his lips in their man-who-means-business-no-kidding-for-real arrangement. Then his whole face relaxed, forfeited its struggle against its own mouth, and he smiled like he was the man who’d invented the light bulb. He touched my cheek. “And you, Boll Weevil. In my book, I’d have to say that you are one terrific allrightnik.”
You
We stayed stopped at the Stop sign for longer than a Stop sign mandated legally. He was staring ahead of himself, into the middle distance. Then his face changed, dropped, and he stared at his lap. His smile faded, his eyed looked darker and more heavily lidded than they had moments before, and the car’s temperature seemed to fall fifteen degrees. He was thinking, I could tell, and it wasn’t about anything good. “What now?” I asked. “Am I in trouble?”
After an empty pause, he spoke absently. “Nah. It’s just … I just still think it’s not a very nice thing to call a friend.”
“Uh-duh-uh,” I muttered. “Guess what? Just because something’s not very nice doesn’t make it wrong.”
* * *
Some thirty years later, I was still alone and without plans to forgive myself for something I’d said in a conversation we’d had when I was six. After work and school, first grade—we both “knocked off,” as he put it, at 3 p.m.—I hung around him in the living room while he read the paper. Then he made dinner, such as it was. That unforgivable evening, he cooked up a vat of “Jewish Spaghetti.” I never knew what inherently Jewish characteristic was discernable in these pale, overcooked noodles—People Like Us called them noodles, not pasta—that he boiled and smeared with a sugary, gummy, aggressively orange sauce—as orange as laboratory signs indicating the presence of radioactive biohazards—spicelessly dotted with sticky, translucent tiles of onion.
Jewish Spaghetti was disgusting. Jewish Spaghetti was nearly inedible. I loved Jewish Spaghetti. I loved how one small bowl of Jewish Spaghetti became seventeen oil drums of Jewish Spaghetti in my gut. A gift that kept on giving.
As we chewed and chewed and chewed, I ruminated on my teacher’s introductory lesson—hurled at us first thing that morning, right after she took attendance—about the dizzying, fearsome procedures involved in telling time. The devices: sun dials, hourglasses, wristwatches, atomic clocks, mechanical clocks. The standards: Greenwich mean, Tidal, Atomic, Geologic, Standard, Coordinated universal, Ephemeris. The calendars: solar, lunar, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Muslim, Julian, Gregorian, Worldsday, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, Chinese. The Maya Grea
t Circle.
Not even to mention the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.
Topping it horrifically off, the Metric System and New Math were hurtling respectively across the Atlantic and through deep space toward Public School 276. I wasn’t smart or good enough to keep up with it or figure it out. Dad, who was unquestionably not when I got him, couldn’t help me. I could only try to tattoo facts on my memory, to remember without understanding.
Suspiciously, I asked him, “Are you old?”
“I’m a little old, but not too old. Like you’re a little young, but not too young.”
A suction grabbed at whatever lived between my ribs and started draining it out. “If you’re a little old now, then soon you’ll be a lot old. When you’re a lot old, you die, right? Isn’t that what happens?”
“Yeah, that’s how it goes. I won’t be a lot old too soon. That’s much later. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.” I coughed. With my fork and fingers, I shaped and reshaped orange spaghetti spirals, not piles of the pasta, but plain, wormy lines of it, flat on my plate. Then I worked on spirals within spirals, still two-dimensional. I gulped. I gulped hard.
“Lookit. C’mon now,” he cooed. From the spirals on my plate, I made and unmade a maze. He slapped his big hands on the table. “Look at me, Beth.” I couldn’t look at him. I concentrated. I complicated my noodle-maze. It looked maze-like. It was crap. Its twirls nauseated me. If I, who’d created this, couldn’t find a way—not one workable entry or exit point—to get myself into and out of the maze, then no one else could lead. Just going in circles and more circles. Round and round forever. Like clock-hands. Like fears. “I said, look at me. Listen good. We got Jewish Spaghetti to eat. Food to mess with. Bridges to climb. We got a lotta living to do before I do something stupid like that.” I ditched my fork, busied my orange fingers making braids, then helices.
“But Daddy, when you die will you be died forever?” Aniline blue. Dyed forever.
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