During World War II, Jimmy Morrison swaggered into the draft board on his eighteenth birthday and announced that they were in luck, that he wanted to go that day. The board checked him and found him the sole support of a widow. He felt inadequate and began to go into strange bars. Then on St. Patrick’s Day over in the High Bridge section of the Bronx he met Agnes Hayes at a dance and, filled with beer, he told her that he was losing his manhood because of the 3A draft classification. She sympathized with him so much that he fell in love with her and married her forthwith.
A year later, working in High Bridge, Jimmy Morrison and three others got on a lift that dropped like a flowerpot off a windowsill, dropped down a nine-hundred-foot shaft with the four men on it trying to scream out but unable to make a sound. Jimmy was on his hands and knees and forcing an Act of Contrition through his frozen mind when the elevator cable caught and the elevator stopped at once. The four were thrown against the steel sides of the shaft with bones breaking and the first cries coming from them. Then the lift broke free again and dropped the last fifty feet to the bottom. It splintered and the four men were pulled out and had to remain in the shaft for several hours, until a new lift was fashioned and sent down to them. One of the four, Gene Cooney, went berserk and, when healed, had to be put away. The other two left sandhog work. Jimmy Morrison, with fractured vertebrae, was in a ward in Bronx General Hospital for six months. When he came out, he was given paperwork duty in the union office. He tried to enlist, but the Army now found him physically unfit for military duty and even in 1944, when they were accepting anyone who could make it to a physical while breathing, Jimmy still was turned down. At the start of 1945, however, he went on his own and found a bored doctor who certified him. Elated, Jimmy Morrison bought flowers for his wife and kept a protective arm around them so they wouldn’t be crushed on the subway ride home. At eleven that night, he was still protecting the flowers, which were in a water pitcher on the bar at the Galtee Mountains, 144th and Willis. Deep in the night, he left the bar; the flowers did not.
In the morning, he went around to the bar and retrieved them, and was so parched that he had a glass of tomato juice and three beers to get everything going. On the street on his way home, he suddenly became ill and, in throwing up, thought he held the flowers clear but did not. As they were covered with puke, he tossed them into a garbage can. Still, his intentions were good and he almost became the first Morrison in America to bring flowers to a wife in the kitchen.
Twenty-year-old Jimmy Morrison was in armored training at Camp Hood, Texas, when the war ended. He returned to Willis Avenue, where his wife had been working in a dry goods store, and pulled her out of the job; no woman works while a Morrison can stand, even if the mining jobs were nonexistent at the end of 1945.
Agnes suffered several miscarriages but finally produced a son, Owen, known instantly as Owney, who was born in 1949 into a neighborhood where less than five percent of the Catholic school graduates went to college, causing most of these Bronx Irish to spend the most glorious part of the day, their mornings, in gloomy depression and resentment on the subway ride to jobs they despised. Jimmy went for years without a steady job, surviving on odd work around construction yards and a small weekly payment for being an officer of the sandhogs’ union, an organization that at the time appeared to be dying.
“I met Krantz from the bakery on the street today,” Agnes Morrison told her husband one night.
“So?”
“He said if I needed work, he could use me afternoons.”
“Forget it.”
“I think that’s silly.”
“I work and you take care of the kid,” he said.
“But you’re home most afternoons,” she said.
The rage ran into Jimmy Morrison’s eyes and the subject was never brought up again. Except deep in Jimmy Morrison’s mind, when he sat alone at the bar and thought that the family trade, the work that caused the body to tingle with effort and that set him apart from all other laborers—as the miner’s trade is the most hated, it also is a revered trade, and a miner’s behavior is always acceptable—was of the past. If somewhere downtown, in Manhattan, a whole lot of people were making money as they sat and did nothing, then his son Owen would have to be pushed in that direction.
But then in 1955, work on a new water tunnel picked up. Soon, Jimmy Morrison was swinging into the places on Willis Avenue again, covering the bar with all the money he could pull from his pocket, toasting himself in his glorious line of work. Up the sandhogs. I’ll never be broke again, he promised himself in the mirror each night.
In 1955, the first Puerto Ricans came into the South Bronx, and shots were fired on 141st Street during a dispute between two Puerto Rican families; the dispute was over a dispute. At the same time, in the Keeper Hill Bar on Willis Avenue, an Irish hoodlum, Reilly, walked in and shot a guy named Hynes over gambling territory. The bartender, Corbett, held up his hands and said to Reilly, “I don’t see anything.” To ensure this being so, Reilly shot the bartender. Jimmy Morrison then decided it was time to leave the neighborhood.
He found a six-room apartment on Central Avenue in Ridgewood, in Queens, with rooms as clean as a fresh shirt, but with a landlord named Kunzman who was insufferable: he wanted to get paid.
“The rent is eighty-six dollars,” Kunzman said.
“I’ll be the super for the building,” Morrison said.
“What does that mean?” Kunzman said.
“I’ll keep the hallways clean.”
“My wife does that,” Kunzman said.
“I’ll make sure the garbage cans are in and out,” Morrison said.
“That’s my job,” Kunzman said. “Your job is to pay the rent on the first of the month.”
Morrison moved the family in, although he woke up on the first of each month with a hot iron bar inside his chest. As the sleep went out of his eyes, the bar pulsated and expanded and shoulder to shoulder his torso was afire. Immediately, he wanted to squall for a doctor. Then he realized that the pain was beyond medicine: today, he had to pay rent. On other days, in searching through Ridgewood, he found the low-rise buildings ably attended by the German couples who owned them. If they could find a free apartment, they would have moved into it themselves.
Then one day, when Owney was eleven, his father took the last thirty dollars out of the house, muttering that he needed it for rent. The mother, Agnes, still in bed, nodded. When she awoke fully and realized her supermarket money was gone, she let out a wail. Twenty minutes later, the mailman changed all moods when he delivered an income tax refund of four hundred seventy-five dollars.
“I’m going to buy a couch with it,” she announced to her husband when he arrived home fairly late that night, filled with beer.
“Yeah, but we need some of it here,” he said.
“For what?”
“For the rent. What do you think, we live here for nothing?” The beer had robbed him of short-term memory.
“You stole the rent from me this morning,” his wife said. “You can just go out to where you lost it and get it back.” She waved the check. “This goes for the couch.”
That Saturday, when she started out to buy the couch, she found Owney’s father, holding his son’s hand, walking with her. As she understood that he was there to steal the change from any purchase, her eye remained fixed only on couches costing close to four hundred and seventy-five dollars.
Late in the afternoon, she decided to look in one more place downtown and they were standing on the IRT subway platform at Grand Central Station when the mother said something about dying before surrendering any more money and the father got so mad he said he would walk to the next station. The father waved to Owney and the mother began to yell, but the father led Owney to the end of the platform and down an iron ladder to the grease-pit train tracks.
The father went first and Owney followed him into the black tunnel toward 33rd Street, Owney shrieking in the darkness. They were deep in the tunnel, trying
to stay out of the puddles of dirty water, when the father looked back. Owney remembers the laugh stopping on the father’s face. The father said, come on, let’s run. He pushed Owney in front of him. Owney was dog-trotting, trying to keep his shoes out of the puddles. Owney remembers his father yelling, “You can fix a pair of shoes but you can’t fix a pair of legs.” Owney loved that. He began running directly through the water, howling, his feet throwing up splashes. The lights of the 33rd Street station were tiny in the distance. Owney’s father banged into Owney from behind and Owney remembers turning to see his father’s mouth open, sucking in air. “Don’t look!” the father said. Old family stories suddenly threatened. Behind the father, back in the blackness, making the first noise of movement, the rumble of a wagon on a bumpy road at night, was the train coming out of the 42nd Street station and starting after them.
Owney’s father, face crimson, said, “Want to sit down and rest?” Owney put his head down and started running as fast as he could. Legs flying out, running through puddles. Behind Owney, over the sound of his father’s heaving for air, he could hear the train. The tunnel they were in had no notches or cutouts for trackwalkers. The train behind them was running through a series of green lights. The running became serious and sapping, and then Owney and his father finally broke out into the glare of the station lights at 33rd Street. They scurried up the ladder and Owney remembers his father, wobbling, holding out his arm, palm flat against a post for support, heaving and spitting as the train rushed past them and stopped quickly far down the platform. It was a three-car train used for trash collection from the stations. The porter working the 33rd Street station walked up to the train, threw in the trash bags, and the train quickly pulled out.
Several minutes later, the regular downtown local from 42nd Street pulled in. Owney remembers how he danced back and forth, arms waving, as he looked through the windows for his mother. When she stepped off, she was furious, but the hands remained clenched on her purse. It was one of the few times in her life when she stood her ground financially. Which caused the pain to be all the sharper when, on the third day of the couch’s reign in the living room, her husband spilled beer over most of the right side.
2
OWNEY ATTENDED FOURTEEN HOLY Martyrs School, where, as always, the Catholic religion made its fiercest fight against nature’s call, suspending this only to honor the dead. The Catholic religion’s doctrine on the subject of sex, from impure thoughts and desires through masturbation and intercourse and thence to the homicide of abortion, has as much give as a tree trunk. In many places, Catholics may suggest a thought considered modern, but in Owney’s family blood, and in the cold churches where the family prayed over the decades, Catholicism remained as it always was, a form of worship that suggests flashing swords and velvet cloaks.
When Owney was in the fifth grade, his job was to look out the classroom window and count the number of mourners walking to the nine-thirty Mass. There was one morning when he watched an usher, who was bending over to take the last drag of a cigarette, open the door of a lone car behind the hearse. Out struggled parts of an old lady. After her came two more people. Nobody else. “Three people, Sister,” Owney called out.
The nun put the chalk into the gutter of the blackboard and had the class chant a Beatitude: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Then the nun took the class down to church, and everyone knelt in rows behind the three mourners as the nun paced the aisle and led them in prayers for a man who, even by taking his last gasp, could raise no crowd of his own.
Owney attended Bushwick High School, whose concentrated field of study was its cement schoolyard. And during these years, Owney Morrison was fashioned by the neighborhood where he lived, Ridgewood, which sits like a stone fort on the border of white Queens and black Brooklyn, with the line separating the two showing only on tax maps of the city of New York. There are no official markings on the streets to show which is Queens and which is Brooklyn and none are needed; the skin tone and living habits of the people on a block marked the address. The intersection of Myrtle and Wyckoff is the boundary, in fact. On the eastern side of the intersection, the gleaming Queens German streets run to the border as dentine to a cavity. Across the intersection, past the subway kiosk and bingo hall, into the all-day darkness under the low, dirty el tracks, along streets that run downhill from the intersection, run downhill so far that they narrow in eyesight, on these streets are crowded the most feared of all people: the sons and daughters and grandchildren of field-hand niggers and Puerto Rican hill people who stand on streets of concrete in a city of office workers.
When the blacks first edged out of Bedford-Stuyvesant and toward Ridgewood, they followed the bus routes and subway lines; the poor do not travel privately. First, the Bushwick-Aberdeen stop on the LL subway line, then Wilson Avenue, where in Carmine’s Bar, across the street from Fourteen Holy Martyrs Church, the owner put a shotgun under the bar. Then the blacks reached Halsey Street, and the whites there formed a gang called the Halsey Bops in order to protect their rights in the park, a place with benches and cement tables for checkers and a basketball court. The basket at the west end of the park was loose and if the shot was a little high and hit a dead spot on the backboard, the ball simply dropped through the hoop; there was no chance of it kicking off into the air. Owney always played in that park, and used that dead spot, and he joined the Halsey Bops, whose leader, Tommy Clarity, eighteen now, had been in trouble since he was twelve. The enemy of the Halsey Bops soon was the Head Stompers, run by brothers called Big Cheese and Little Cheese.
When the time came that the Bops had to sit down and negotiate with the blacks, Owney was there, standing with his arms folded, to make sure Tommy Clarity didn’t give away his favorite basket.
“Down the middle,” Tommy Clarity was saying at the park bench.
Tommy Clarity had lived with blacks in Elmira Reformatory, but it had done nothing for him. Dark hair slicked straight back, eyes narrowed, he showed contempt for the Cheese brothers who were accustomed to scaring whites.
“You wants the park and we wants the park,” Big Cheese was saying. “We both intends to do, we goan cut it right down the fuckin’ middle.”
“Split it right down the middle,” Tommy Clarity said.
“Fahn.” Big Cheese gently patted his big high nigger pompadour.
“Then nobody fucks with our people,” Tommy Clarity said.
“And nobody fucks with mah people.”
“Anybody comes up your end of the park is—”
“—is prey.” Big Cheese grinned. The scar on his face, long enough to be the result of a duel, became wider and resembled webbing as his face opened into a smile.
“Same as us,” Tommy Clarity said. “Any of your fuckin’ niggers come up our end of the park.”
At the end of two hours of bargaining, a peace treaty was confirmed with a handshake.
“You owe me, I saved your ass, you can still be a star with the backboard goin’ for you,” Tommy Clarity said to Owney.
Under the peace treaty, the Halsey Bops kept the west end of the cement basketball court and the Head Stompers were allowed the other half. And then late one Friday afternoon, several days after the treaty, Owney was out on the Halsey Bops’ end of the court, the white man’s end, the end with the dead loose tin backboard, playing in a four-man game. He took a shot from the top of the keyhole and didn’t even need the backboard. The shot went through clean. Turning in triumph, he faced the other end of the court where a black man in his forties played with two boys of about fourteen. Owney then walked out of the park as Tommy Clarity came along with two whites he had met in the reformatory, Jackie Scanlan and Crazy Carl. The three of them were drinking canned beer. Clarity sat on a park bench and watched the black man laugh as he kept missing shots that his kids were making easily. Clarity got up and walked to the brick Parks Department house and came out with a hammer. He walked out onto the court as the black man was bending over, bouncing
the ball on the foul line before taking a shot. Tommy Clarity hit the black man on the head with the hammer. Jackie Scanlan punched one of the fourteen-year-olds in the face. The other kid was running to help his father and Tommy Clarity spun around like a shot-putter whirling and hit the kid in the chest with the hammer, sending him onto his back.
Somebody yelled that a police car was coming down the block. Owney, on the sidewalk outside the park, began running, along with the others he had been playing basketball with: Jimmy Reilly, Mike Minelli, and Victor Koenig.
It happened the next night, Saturday, and it happened very fast. The black kids came out of the park at the white end, the end with an exit onto a street called Knickerbocker Avenue. The blacks came up the block toward the pizza stand on the ground floor of a four-story tenement. There were eight or nine of them and they all had their shirttails out and in their hands they were holding these folded newspapers. They walked through the screaming and music and the other night noises coming out the open windows of the tenements on both sides of the street. There were twenty Halsey Bops in front of the pizza stand.
“What do they got in the newspapers?” Jimmy Reilly said.
“They got shit,” Tommy Clarity said.
“What could the niggers have in there, fuckin’ long rifles?” Crazy Carl said.
“They got fuckin’ bats and they think they’re tough,” Tommy Clarity said. He walked out to the curb and ripped an aerial from a car. He whipped it around.
Salvatore, the eleven-year-old kid who had a job mopping the floor in the pizza stand, came out and grabbed his bike, which he had leaning against the front of the stand. He pushed the bike through the crowd of the Halsey Bops and into the chalk-marked green doorway next to the pizza stand. Owney was in Salvatore’s way. Owney had a bottle of orange soda on the floor in the doorway and he was bending down to pick it up and Salvatore was trying to tug the bike into the doorway when the two of them saw the blacks in the middle of the street tear the newspapers off the machetes they were carrying.
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