by Ned Vizzini
I stayed at East Fourth Street for three hours that day, and I made a point of coming back all through August and September. I liked Poppy; I loved dominoes; I didn’t mind the free beer;** I enjoyed spending my time with nutty old men; and for the low, low round-trip price of three dollars subway fare, this wasn’t a bad way to spend a summer evening.
One Saturday, a homeless black dude with a shopping cart came by the dominoes table.
“Major!” Poppy greeted him, jumping up. “Major, long time we have not seen you. Meet my new best friend, ah, wha’s your name?”
Poppy needed to be retold my fake name every time I visited. “John,” I said.
“Ah, yes, John. John, meet Major.”
I shook his hand.
“Ya wanna see my cart, right?” Major asked. I nodded.
Major led me into the street and beckoned me to a shopping cart. Like many homeless people, he made his living filling his cart with bottles and recycling them. “Ain’t you never heard of Major’s cart?” he beamed. “I got the best cart in the city. Man, this here’s the Cadillac of carts.”
I had to admit it was nifty. He had partitioned it with wooden planks, sorting his bottles by color. “Nobody messes with my cart, man. They just see it, and they go, ‘Hey, that’s Major’s cart!’ and they leave it alone. You know how much weight I can pull in this cart?”
“Forty pounds.”
“Twenty-one hundred pounds, man! I pulled that much when the cops was chasing me.”
“That’s a lot of bottles.”
“Damn right. Thing was full.”
Another time, a friend of Poppy’s came by the table and introduced himself as the world-famous French ballet composer, “Pierre.” (He gave me his business card. It read, “Pierre. Dance.”) I also shook hands with a self-proclaimed descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, who said he’d made millions in currency trading. (“Yeah, a millionaire, right, so what is he doing here?” Poppy asked.)
But in late September, I stopped going to play dominoes. It got cold, so no one showed up anymore. Also, I had to go to school.
Around December 23, I returned to East Fourth Street looking for Poppy. I wanted to wish him a Merry Christmas, plus I craved a real game with Fumo and Old Frankie (or Old Tony). Poppy wasn’t out on the sidewalk—it was far too cold—but I found him in the back room of his favorite bodega, sitting at a folding table. A jagged scar ran down his forehead, the stitches still in place.
“Whoa, Poppy, what happened to you?”
“Ay, cabron,” he smiled at me. “You come at a bad time.” He pointed at his face. “I get stabbed in the head with a bottle.”
“What?”
“Yes, yes, with a bottle! Happened a few days ago. These drug dealers come to my block; they mess with me.”
“Oh, man.” I sat down next to him.
“It’s not bad,” Poppy said, waving his hands at me. “It’s shown me many things. For example, my friend, I have stopped with the bottle. It is no good for my health. No good for my pocketbook.”
I couldn’t believe it; Poppy could pack away a lot of beers.
“No more!” he yelled, standing up. Then he sat down and pulled me close. “You know, John”—this was the first time he remembered my name, I swear—“They used to call me a ‘street father.’ I am friendly to everyone, get people things, right? Not anymore. Too much drug dealers, too much everything, I get stabbed in the head.” He pointed to his wound. “Now I say, let these people buy their own beer! Let everybody play dominoes by themselves! Merry Christmas!”
Poppy stood up, drew himself a glass of water, and turned on his radio to the Spanish station.
“I like you very much, John,” he told me. “But it’s no more dominoes for a while.”
“Okay.” Not much I could say. I shook his hand. “Feel better, I guess.”
As I walked out of the bodega, Poppy told me I could have some free chips, so I took barbecue. I had this urge to tell him my real name. I turned around to do so, more than once, but I was too embarrassed—of my real name and of the fact that I’d lied for so long.
*Cabron means “goat” in Spanish. It’s an all-purpose insult.
**I never did get to the birthday party I was going to. The girl hosting it was angry with me.
*Bodegas are little shops scattered all over New York. The Mini Mart where I’d bought beer with Owen (this page–this page) was a bodega.
*Ho boy, if you don’t know about Clinton and Monica (or “Clinton y Monica,” as Poppy would say), look them up. One of our truly great political scandals.
**You’d think I’d get in trouble as a minor openly drinking beer in the street, but the cops never came to East Fourth
METROCARDED
I was ashamed of the NYPD. Turnstile jumping is the sort of crime they’ve vowed to rub out, but there I was, having jumped to and from Manhattan for an entire summer, and nothing. No cops. No alarms. No token booth ladies kicking open their doors and chasing me down. Truth is, I was reassured when I got caught.
It was a Friday night; I was leaving a disappointing local concert with my semiconscious friend Hector. It was warm and misty out; for some reason, a lot of people were fighting. On our way to the subway, we saw a scruffy white guy hit a businessman with an umbrella and two huge black dudes with cell phones throwing punches outside a bar.
“You know, Hec,” I said as we approached the F train, “I have no money.”
He shrugged. “I have enough for one token.”
I wasn’t listening: I was confessing. “Hec, I really don’t want to jump tonight. I’ve jumped too much lately. It’s the law of averages. I’m gonna get caught sooner or later.”
He repeated, “I have enough for one token. You can slip in after me.” But I don’t like slipping in after people. It looks stupid, plus you can give your hip a nasty bang on the turnstile.
We headed into the F station; I picked up speed. You don’t need a running start to jump turnstiles, but it goes more smoothly that way. I flew by the token booth, planted my hands over the MetroCard slits, and vaulted sweetly over the bars. Hector did the same, even though he had money.
As soon as my feet hit the ground, I heard the cops yelling, “Hey! Yeah, you two!”
I stopped. I’d seen this coming, hadn’t I? I flashed forward through the consequences: me explaining my arrest to my parents, me with a criminal record, unable to get a good job, kicked out of high school, living on the street. But if I was apologetic and nice, maybe I’d come out okay.
I looked at the cops. Damn, they looked like cops. Both were Italian; one, a pudgy guy in his forties; the other, young and jumpy. They had brown hair and mustaches. They were in plainclothes. At some point, they must have produced badges, but they didn’t need to. They were movie cops, perfect for the part.
“C’mere,” the young, jumpy one said. He was standing in front of an open chrome door, one of those unlabeled doors in subway stations, which I had thought led to janitor’s closets. There were little slits in the door, and I realized: the cops had been sitting in there! They stared through those slits all day, keeping watch for offensive citizens. It was a setup!
Hector and I walked through the door. There was a room with a table, a bench, a lot of pipes, and some cop stuff like radios and jackets. The young officer aimed himself at Hector, the older one turned to me. They both pulled out pads of paper.
“How old are you?” mine asked.
“Seventeen,” I nodded as I said it.
“And how old are you?” Hector’s cop asked, shaking his pen.
“Uh …” Hector seemed really flustered. “Sixteen—no wait, I mean seventeen.”
“Excuse me? Is it sixteen or seventeen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I get a little confused because I just turned—”
“I hope you’re not lying to me. Because I don’t like being lied to. If you start that, we’re gonna have problems.”
“I know you don’t believe me—”
“You’re right. I don’t believe you.” Now it was clear. Just like in the movies: there was a nice cop and a mean one, and Hector had gotten the mean one.
“What school do you go to?” my cop asked. His nameplate said, “Patillo.”
“Stuyvesant.” I showed my I.D. card.* Patillo studied it.
“What does that say?” He pointed at the lettering. The words were in an unintelligible gothic font—to give my school some class, I guess.
“It says ‘Stuyvesant High School.’ ” I indicated each word.
“How come they write it that way?” he sounded suspicious, as if I’d faked the card.
“I dunno.”
“Any other I.D.?”
I emptied my pockets. Standard nerd fare: a paperback version of The Two Towers, a floppy disk, a graphing calculator. Patillo eyed the calculator as if it were a bomb. He wrote down my address and my phone number and told me to sit down next to Hector, who’d finished his interview.
“You guys sit tight. We’re putting a call in to headquarters to find out what to do with you,” the jumpy cop said. He and Patillo walked out, leaving me alone with Hector. We twiddled our thumbs—literally, like in a Norman Rockwell painting: Caught Jumping Turnstiles. Hector traced patterns in the bench with his fingernail.
“What are they gonna do to us?” I asked him.
“I think we get a ticket. Like a parking ticket.”
“Do we get a criminal record?”
“Nah. Not unless they fingerprint us.”
I started calculating the economics. A token costs a dollar fifty; I’d jumped turnstiles since June, which meant maybe forty free rides. So as long as my ticket was less than sixty bucks, I would come out ahead. That was comforting.
“All right, kids,” the two officers said as they returned. “You’re both old enough to be issued summonses so you’re getting summonses. We’ll notify your parents of this incident by mail.” Well, that wasn’t going to be fun, but I’d live. I was handed a sixty-dollar ticket that looked exactly like a parking violation.
“As for you,” the mean cop said, turning to Hector. “Don’t you ever lie about your age to a police officer. You do not know how close I was to taking you down to central booking. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to be brought in and strip-searched? To spread your cheeks?” I had known that was coming. Before we could be released, the cops had to bring up the most compelling threat of our justice system: spreading one’s cheeks.
“You’re free to go.” They opened the chrome door and shooed us out. I glanced at my ticket and started to chuckle. Exactly sixty dollars. Which meant I was repaying my debt to society, give or take a buck. I felt clean, like I should pay the ticket right there. I was proud of the police, and New York in general, for catching me.
“What are you laughing at?” Hector asked.
I couldn’t tell him the sappy stuff so I said, “You know, Hec, high school and summer camp and girls are all different from the way they are on TV. But cops. Cops are exactly the same.”
*This was the same I.D. that duped the Mini Mart clerk back when I was a sophomore (this page–this page).
SENIOR YEAR
FORCED MARCH
I should have spent the summer before senior year volunteering in a soup kitchen or practicing violin five hours a day, but instead I disrupted a television show, played a lot of dominoes, and painted houses with a guy named Carlo. That didn’t serve me well when it came time to apply for college.
The colleges, you see, want a lot these days. They don’t just want you to be a good student. They don’t just want dedication, good-naturedness, and self-sacrifice. They want you to be angular. That’s a real term; I read about it in The Wall Street Journal. Today’s colleges are looking for angular students—passionate about a field of interest they’ve discovered in high school. They don’t want well-rounded; they want you to be exclusively devoted to one thing—if you say you’re into computers, you’d better have won some high-tech award.
I could have been angular, no question about it. I could have written for the school newspaper, been an active member of whatever literary clubs Stuyvesant had, or attended readings in the library. But I never had time. I was doing far more important things:
FRESHMAN YEAR
• Played a lot of Magic: The Gathering.
• Got really, really good at sliding down escalator handrails.
• Wrote a science fiction story that appeared in the very back of Stuy’s science fiction magazine.
• Entered the Scholastic Writing Awards, winning an award for, uh, honorable mention.*
SOPHOMORE YEAR
• Spent a year and a half on the math team, then left because it got too hard.**
• Joined the computer science team, where I learned a lot about computers and a lot more about The Simpsons.
JUNIOR YEAR
• Continued not to participate in team sports of any kind.
• Began writing and self-publishing a profane comic book called Uncle Tumba.
• Failed at a run for class president on a ticket with someone who had the same initials as me. (That was the big selling point—we were both “NV,” and our signs read “eNVy us!”)
At the beginning of my junior year, I was dragged along with eight hundred other juniors to the Stuyvesant theater, to hear our college advisor tell us how to get into college. I remember very little about the event because I was reading Rising Sun.* But I do remember scrunching in my seat, jotting notes on the book’s inside cover, and thinking, “Here you are, Ned. This is the last race. If you were in a sitcom, you’d be going all sappy and moralistic before the final laughs. You are finally, truly, going to get out of high school, and if you work hard enough and get into a Good College, you’ll end up with a sweatshirt, a bumper sticker, and a fulfilling life.”
That evening, I approached Mom and Dad in the living room.
“Okay, guys,” I told them. “We need to talk about college.”
“Thank God,” Dad said. He was playing Tetris, and he didn’t look up. “When are you leaving?”
“Jim!” Mom scolded. “What do we need to know, honey?”
I pulled out my comprehensive notes from the college meeting and read them off:
(1) Take SATs.
(2) Take Achievements.
(3) Get teacher recommendations.
(4) Get an SSR.
(5) Fill out applications.
“That’s all I have to do,” I added.
“Is this about money?” Dad asked. “How much money do you want?”
“Ignore him,” Mom told me. “Ned, as far as I can see, you have no problems. You’ll take the SATs and do fine; you’ll take the Achievements and do fine. And you can get teacher recommendations. What’s an SSR?”
“Secondary School Recommendation. That’s, like, a big departmental recommendation that they do for you.”
“Right! So you have everything covered! Do you want a tutor for the SATs?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want one, but I figured a tutor might motivate me for this whole muddy deal.
Dad actually paused Tetris and looked up. “Why are you going through this charade of applying to different schools?” he asked. “Don’t you only want to go to Harvard?”
“Uh …” I didn’t like it that Dad knew me so well.
“Oh yes, I know. I was once like you. You have to go to the best school, don’t you?”
“Jim!” Mom exclaimed. “Leave him alone! Harvard is not ‘the best school,’ for goodness’ sake.”
“You want that grand intellectual—what do they call it?—bitch slap, don’t you, Ned? You want to prove that you’re smarter than not just 90, not just 99, but 99.9 percent of your generation.”
“I guess.” He had me there.
“Well, then.” Dad returned to Tetris. “Apply to Harvard. You apply, you get in, and it’s all settled. You don’
t need a tutor. I took the GREs cold and got eight hundred on the math part. And that was before all this grade-curving.”
That winter the mail started coming. University of Oklahoma, Pitzer, Albany … brochures, postcards, “inside looks,” newspaper clippings, excerpts from U.S. News & World Report … papers from schools clogged our apartment every day. That’s not to mention the secondary mail: letters from test-prep centers, scholarship search services, tutors, seminars, and “college agents” who would handle the whole process for me as if it were taxes.
That spring, I had my first meeting with my personal college advisor, Dr. Arnold. Stuyvesant gave every student an advisor to ease us through the college process. Dr. Arnold was tall, bearded, kind-hearted, and quiet.
“Well, Ned,” he said as I sat in his office after class. He put his index fingers together and wiggled them under his nose, like the Grinch. “Where would you like to go to school?”
There was a prevailing notion in American high schools at the time that students must apply to seven colleges: two “dream schools” (the ones you want to go to), three “middle-of-the-road schools” (the ones you wouldn’t mind going to), and two “safety schools” (at least you’re going to college). The idea of applying to just a couple of schools you’re interested in was long dead. It’s easy to understand why. With the seven-school system, the colleges received thousands of dollars more in application fees. And the high schools could maneuver even the least promising kids into safety schools, boasting a higher percentage of students who “move to pursue their education.”
I gave him my list, with Harvard at the top.
“Okay,” Dr. Arnold nodded, taking notes. “What have you done that you would like me to mention in your SSR?”