One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  Tina confided in me about Big Rich and their son Little Rich, how terribly they treated her, and how angry they were with her for being sick. Big Rich complained a lot to my dad about Tina. He told my dad that he was a young man himself, and although it was a shame Tina got sick, he didn’t want it to ruin his life too. Tina told me one afternoon that she was worried Big Rich was cheating on her with the bookkeeper from the garage, who was a puttana. My dad said the garage was “mobbed up” and he wouldn’t put anything past them.

  Tina worried that Little Rich was going to end up in jail. He skipped school and stole from stores. He was a strapping fourteen-year-old guido, slow and suspicious, with dirty fingernails and a sneer. He considered me, if at all, with contempt, as his mother’s handmaiden. Unfortunately I was wildly sexually attracted to his adolescent beefiness and thick neck.

  The Mastrianos lived on the second floor of a wood frame house, above Mr. Galluccio, an Italian widower in his seventies with a white handlebar mustache. He made his own wine in the basement, and in the autumn the whole house was filled with the pungent sour smell of grapes fermenting. But Tina didn’t notice, she said. The multiple sclerosis had robbed her of her smell. Out back there was a stable where Mr. Galluccio kept an old beleaguered donkey that he dressed in a felt hat and fake flowers, with the donkey’s ears sticking through. He made the donkey pull a cart up and down the block to give the children free rides. One day I was watching out the window when the donkey’s penis came out, slick and pink, like a misshapen bologna, and I gasped at its size and ugliness. Tina laughed and made fun of me all

  afternoon.

  Tina usually needed to lie down before Big Rich and Little Rich came home, and while she napped I went up to the attic and shot pool. There was a regulation-size pool table under the eaves. It was Big Rich’s pride and joy. It had a pristine emerald-green felt top with ivory inlays of cue balls in the bumper wood. For a year or two I spent almost every afternoon up there shooting pool while Tina napped, softly singing songs to myself and watching the sky get dark through a little window at the far end of the attic. Eventually I became a pretty good pool shooter, and some nights when Big Rich got home I could even beat him, which annoyed the hell out of him. A lot of things about me annoyed Big Rich.

  One Saturday night I bragged to Little Rich about the stash of pornography my father kept in a crinkled brown paper bag in the back right side of the top drawer of his dresser. While the adults were sitting around the kitchen talking, Little Rich and I snuck over to my parents’ apartment to look at it. We lay down next to each other on the bed and went through the contents of the paper bag, leaning in close to examine each piece, so close I could smell the Fritos on his breath. In my father’s stash there were a few black-and-white photographs with tiny holes at the top, as though they had been thumbtacked to a wall. One was a picture of a naked couple standing up with their faces turned away from the camera, the man hugging the woman from behind. Also in the frame of the picture was the bathrobe and belly of a man standing to the side. In another photo a woman lying on her back on a rock had an enormous shrub of pubic hair, but I could see no entrance. There was a photograph of the actor Robert Mitchum hugging a woman, with her bare breasts pressed against his shirtless chest.

  What held my attention most were the hand-drawn, pocket-sized comic booklets printed on colored construction paper, the pages held together with a rusty staple. One booklet featured Donald Duck, who had a surreal man’s hard-on extending from his belly feathers, which he used to fuck Daisy Duck. And in the Popeye booklet, before he fucked Olive Oyl he ate a can of spinach that made his cock get bigger and harder. It only seemed natural that I should suggest to Little Rich that he and I take our penises out. I was breathless with anticipation while he unbuttoned his pants and pulled down his underwear from which a throbbing penis sprang up and slapped against his stomach almost up to his navel, pulsing upwards a few times like it was yanked on a string. It was the first erect penis of another person around my age that I had ever seen, and it was huge.

  Big Rich knew a lot of crooked cops through the garage on Coney Island Avenue. One sweaty August midnight Big Rich and Little Rich and my father and I drove to Prospect Park, where we met up with two cops waiting for us in a black-and-white squad car. The park was deserted at that hour, and we followed the squad car off the road up onto the grass of Long Meadow, a scruffy green field that was the biggest open expanse in the park. “A million of ’em,” one of the cops said, nodding toward the dark meadow. I squinted in the gloom and realized that the meadow was alive with foraging rabbits.

  The other cop popped open the trunk of the squad car and took out a rifle. He checked the ammo, cocked and uncocked it, and handed it to Big Rich. The first cop used the squad car’s spotlight to roam through the field of rabbits and pick one out for a kill. A ball of white fur froze in the intense beam, its eyes two red reflector buttons. Big Rich aimed through the gunsight, the rifle bucked in his arms, and a sound like a cracking whip echoed through Prospect Park.

  The rabbit in the spotlight jumped straight up in the air when the bullet hit. Then it lay twitching on the ground until it died. The men all said what a good shot Big Rich was, and he handed the rifle to my father. The cop picked out another rabbit with the spotlight, my dad took aim, squeezed the trigger, and missed. You could see where the bullet hit the ground short of the rabbit and blew a puff of dirt into the air. Red-faced and mumbling excuses, my father handed the rifle to me.

  The spotlight picked out another bunny sitting motionless, its nose twitching. Everybody was saying, “Hurry! Hurry!” but all I could think about was the rabbit from Camp Lokanda who was my friend, so I aimed two feet over its head and pulled the trigger. But the trigger wouldn’t pull—my father hadn’t re-cocked the hammer before handing it to me—and Little Rich yanked the rifle out of my hands, re-cocked it, aimed haphazardly, and shot the rabbit. With its last breath it tried to hop away before it keeled over. “Ha!” Little Rich laughed smugly. I waited at the car while Big and Little Rich shot another half dozen rabbits. On the way home I stared out the window. Big Rich asked me over his shoulder from the front seat, “What’s with you?” I didn’t answer.

  One afternoon not long after the bunny-shooting expedition, Tina put a big pot of water up to boil to cook pasta, and when she tried to take it off the stove she lost her balance and the boiling water poured on her chest and stomach and legs, scalding her to the bone. When I got there for my regular afternoon visit she was unconscious on the kitchen floor, barely alive. I called my mother at the store, and while she called Big Rich at work, I called the fire department down the block, and soon an ambulance arrived. Tina was taken to the burn unit at Kings County. Big Rich said to me, “And where were you?” as if I should have been there.

  I never saw Tina again. In the time it took to recover from the burns her MS got so much worse she needed full-time care and was moved to a nursing home. Big Rich divorced her and married his girlfriend and moved to Florida. Little Rich stayed in Brooklyn and got married and had four kids, and when he was in his late thirties he had a heart attack and died. I don’t know how Tina eventually found peace. I lost track of her, but she lives brightly in my memory.

  After Tina scalded herself I had nowhere to go in the afternoons, so I began to ride the 18th Avenue bus. I would get on at the corner and take a window seat and stare out the window, looking. I never got off the bus. I waited until the end of the line all the way on the other side of Brooklyn, where the bus turned around and took me back. I observed as familiar places morphed into somewhere else. I stared curiously at houses and people in strange neighborhoods, flashes of apartments through open curtains and venetian blinds flew by, beds, table, lampshade, woman in a bathrobe. I wondered who I would be if I lived there, that window, that house, that life instead of mine. I searched up and down the streets we passed, hoping for a glimpse of the lawnmower boy, thinking that maybe I would find the courage to
get off the bus and speak to him.

  Three

  Knish Man

  Cushioned in cotton and pressed behind glass, like a butterfly in the nature shack. My mother and father, the pale ochre of a daguerreotype, the Jewish American Gothic, standing in my hospital room, drawn into themselves with shame. Voices fading in and out like boggy radio signals. Sometimes my grandfather hovered near me, or sat in a chair, reading the torah, or maybe it was just a newspaper. I couldn’t tell from my morphine funhouse.

  I pretended not to hear the people who wafted by my bed asking why. Instead, I played the automatic-door game at the store, the one where if I looked into the thick edge of the glass the customers and saleswomen splintered into rainbow slices, while I hid under the glove counter and pulled the door open with a rope. I stuck my head inside my grandmother’s suitcase and tasted the coconut sweetness of Miami Beach at night. There were colored lanterns in Miami Beach, and pink man-of-wars like half-blown bubbles from Bazooka gum strewn up and down the beach, and Royal Palms two stories high. The egg-salad sandwich was gritty, from eggshell or from sand, I couldn’t tell which, except now it was a blistering August Sunday in Coney Island, not Miami, and I was beet red from the sun, slathered in Noxzema. I sat under an umbrella on a chenille spread held down at the corners with our shoes. The knish man, leathery and stoop-shouldered, weighted down by double shopping bags of oily knishes and soda on dry ice, trudged through sand as hot as coals. “Hot kin-ishes! Hot kin-ishes!” he cried out. “Hot kin-ishes! Cold drinks!”

  The knish man was standing next to my bed in the hospital wearing a white lab coat, dolefully staring at me. He wanted to know if I would help him carry his shopping bags when he got old, because the bags were getting too heavy. When he died I could have his job. But I didn’t want to stumble back and forth in the sand at Coney Island, and I shook my head, but my father said yes, when I grew up, I would be the knish man’s apprentice. The knish man stared at the bandages on my arms. I had been sewn up like Frankenstein’s monster, with zigzagging black threads.

  “Vus makst du?” he asked me, staring at the stitches. He was wearing a round black hat with a flat brim, like a Dr. Seuss character, and he had a long beard with a crumb caught in it.

  “Tell the rabbi why you did this,” my father said.

  The knish man said that phumphy if I didn’t tell him phumphy phumphy I couldn’t be his assistant, and I was glad. He had only contempt for me. For him I would have been better off dead. Suicide was an abomination to Orthodox Jews; to try to destroy yourself was considered not just crazy but irretrievably unholy. They always hated me at Hebrew school, where like a wolf pack they smelled out my homosexuality and expelled me as a weak pup. Without a rabbi to teach me, I had to mimic a scratchy old recording to be able to say my haftorah in synagogue and be finished with the farce of becoming a man. The knish man tied black leather boxes around my father’s head as a sign between his eyes and wrapped his left arm down to his fingers. They chanted in the language of my exclusion, and my father wept. He pressed a twenty-dollar bill into the hand of the knish man, who dispersed like smoke in a breeze.

  “What do I say at school?” my aggrieved father asked my mother after the rabbi left. He was a guidance counselor in a Brooklyn high school, and his fifteen-year-old kid tried to kill himself. How do you explain that? His cheeks puffed up as he blew air out of his lips in a silent whistle of grief.

  My bewildered mom, gutte neshuma that she was, in over her head for many years by that point, sat in a chair across the room looking exhausted, her eyes puffy from crying, wiping her tears with a crumpled tissue. Her jet-black hair was pulled back behind her head in a chignon, and her eyebrows were drawn in an exaggerated arc, which gave her a vaguely Oriental look.

  My dad pulled his chair to the edge of the bed and tried to put his hand on top of mine but he couldn’t really relax his palm, so it just rested there. Even when he petted a dog he did it with a rigid palm. He sat next to me, slack-jawed, dwelling on the consequences of my actions for a long while. “Is this my fault?” he asked my mom.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she answered. “We have a sick child.”

  I fell into a deep sleep and when I woke in the middle of the night my parents were gone, the room was dark, and the halls were quiet. An orderly appeared at the door carrying towels and fresh sheets. “Hi,” he said from the shadows.

  “Hi,” I answered dreamily.

  He stopped a distance from the bed. “I heard you were here,” he said. “I saw your mother and father leave the building tonight.”

  My mother and father? “Who are you?” I asked.

  “It’s Michael, who lives downstairs from Gertie.”

  My god, it was Michael/Michelle.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I work here,” he said. “In the laundry room.” I remembered now—he worked in a hospital. What was he doing coming into my room? “I thought maybe you could use some company,” he said. “I thought maybe you could use somebody to talk to.”

  I knew what he meant, that I needed somebody of my own kind to share my secret. “I don’t need you to talk to!” I said. “Why should I talk to you?”

  “Everybody needs somebody to talk to,” he said. “I do.”

  “Well I don’t!”

  “I only came to bring clean towels and pillowcases,” he said primly, putting them on a shelf in the closet. “I was just leaving.” He walked out of the room without looking at me. I’ve thought about that moment many times, and how I would like to thank him for trying, but I never saw him again.

  Dr. Doris

  Dr. Doris Milman was a paraplegic in a wheelchair. My mother said she was paralyzed giving birth. I didn’t understand how giving birth could paralyze a woman, so I chalked it up to the treachery of female plumbing I heard so much about in the store. Dr. Doris’s wheelchair was a clunky thing with huge rubber wheels and squeaky gears. The way her paralyzed legs were positioned to the side, the stiff way she sat in the chair, gave her a sort of ominous, Dr. Strangelove quality. Doris Milman was a star in the field of adolescent psychiatry and an expert in adolescent suicide. She had been brought in from Kings County Hospital to consult on my case. I was impressed they were calling in a specialist but still too goofy on morphine to get enthusiastic about much of anything.

  When she first arrived in my hospital room, a file folder jammed into the seat next to her, my father ham-handedly offered to push her wheelchair next to my bed, to which she responded firmly, “No thank you, I can manage it.” And she did, with considerable determination and strength for a small woman, deftly maneuver herself next to my bed and locked the chair in place. She was wearing a navy blue suit a white blouse, and cutesy ID tag, “Dr. Doris,” pinned to her lapel. I wondered who dressed her, or how she went to the bathroom.

  “My name is Doctor Doris. Are you Steven?” she asked.

  I nodded. Her brief, tight smile told me that compassion aside, she was pure business. “How are you doing?” she asked, opening my file. “Are you in much pain?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “I’ve read your file and you’ve been through an awful lot. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m here today to help you begin to feel better.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She scanned my file for a moment and asked, “When was the last time you went to school?”

  “On and off, for a couple of years,” I said.

  “And what about counting and touching things?”

  “That stopped,” I lied. “But not altogether,” I amended. “Sometimes, when I feel nervous.”

  “And what about saving things, do you still do that?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “I see.” She tucked the file back into the seat next to her. “You must have been very angry to hurt yourself like that,” she said, nodding toward my arms.


  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “I want to help you feel better about yourself,” she said. “But in order to do that, I need to know what made you so unhappy that you wanted to hurt yourself so badly.”

  I shrugged again and focused on the sink across the room.

  “I know that you don’t want to talk about it, but can you understand why we need to know what made you hurt yourself?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Will you tell me, then?” she said. “You can whisper it to me, if you want. Or I can ask your parents to leave the room.”

  That’s when things started to go awry.

  I pretended I was deaf and mouthed the words, “I’m sor-rey, I cahn’t hear yew.” I said it partly because I had been asked so many times why I tried to kill myself without responding that I was deaf to the question, and partly because it was a punch line to one of my grandmother’s enduring stories. She was watching TV in her house in Freeport and she could see from her chair that a Seventh Day Adventist rang the front doorbell. Gog said to her, “Don’t answer the door, they’ll talk your ear off for an hour!” But my grandmother went and she was back in a minute. She told Gog, “I pretended I was deaf, and I said, ‘I’m sor-rey, I cahn’t hear yew.’ ” And the Seventh Day Adventist nodded and smiled and left. My grandmother told that story a dozen times and always got a big laugh.

  So when Dr. Doris was about the hundredth person to ask me why I tried to kill myself, I said, “I’m sor-rey, I cahn’t hear yew,” like I was deaf. It did not get a laugh.

  “I think you can hear me perfectly well,” Dr. Doris said, not happy.

  “It’s a family joke,” my mother explained anxiously.

  Dr. Doris unlocked and did a 180-degree turn to get a good look at my parents. My mother, in size 16 Joshua Tree coordinates, had come directly from work at the store and she still had a pencil stuck in her chignon, like a Chinese hair stick. “Can you people shed some light on what’s going on at home?” Dr. Doris asked.