Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  As Owney passed the nurses’ station, the woman at the desk, who was so heavy that her white uniform buttons couldn’t keep the front closed, said, “You won’t be back?”

  “Bet on it,” Owney said.

  “That’s what it say.” She held the folder.

  “All right.”

  “Tell the girl I was askin’ for her.”

  “What girl?”

  “She come here all the time holdin’ your hand and you ask me what one.”

  “Dolores,” Owney said. “I’ll see her this afternoon.”

  “You say hello.”

  He was depressed that she had mentioned Dolores because he had been walking along thinking about getting his prick sucked and you could get that done from one end of Myrtle Avenue to the other and he was stuck with somebody he made into a Madonna when his best move right now was to find a whore. He wondered why he was even worried about it. You get a woman trying to run with her baby so that from a distance it looked like she was carrying something bad and she gets everybody mixed up and crazy and they blow her and the baby away. Who the fuck cares about anything?

  He walked past the pay phones in the lobby. For the first time since he had been in these hospitals, he was leaving without being picked up by relatives or by some army officer. He just wanted to do everything himself today. He didn’t want to be picked up in the driveway in front of the hospital. He wanted to go out in the street and get wherever he was going on his own.

  He passed the workman in the grass plot and went through the gate and then turned right. The hospital grounds ended at the driveway to the J. Foster Phillips Funeral Home, which got more than its share of losers from the hospital. He walked under a railroad trestle and then past a bootblack, a Chinese laundry, a florist, a hair cutters, and then on the other side of the street was a two-story building decorated with imitation wood beams and a sign over the door that said it was the Tower Inn. Owney walked in and found three men and a woman at the bar. He put a dollar on the bar.

  “Give us change for a call, will you?”

  The bartender reached into the till. Owney suddenly felt a gladness about being in a bar. He had gone all the way, from the bus ride to Fort Bragg right through until today, without even smoking a joint. Not one. And he knew plenty of others who did the same. Raised on alcohol, they stayed with it. Others, who were from states where the drinking age was too high for them and who therefore never had been allowed in a bar, went to dope. The division was most prominent in the field, when the drinkers waited for their two cans of beer to be sent in iced bags, and the heads called for Coke. Everyplace you looked, they were using drugs like table salt. The throat working deliberately to cause a pill to slide down. That was a sin that covered the soul with slime. He felt great that he never used dope. He decided to have a beer before he made a phone call to get home.

  The bartender was bald and wore a blue sweater. The color of the sweater was pleasing to Owney.

  “Give us a shot of rye, too.”

  He took the shot first; it was bar rye, and it burned like it was poison and brought water to his eyes. He held his breath so he wouldn’t have to taste it, and then he swallowed half the glass of beer. But the beer was closer to lukewarm than cold and it brought the taste of cheap whiskey full into his mouth. He wouldn’t touch that again. He pulled a pack of Pall Malls out of his breast pocket and lit one. He inhaled deeply to overcome the whiskey.

  “Give us another,” he said.

  “Beer,” the bartender said.

  “And a shot,” Owney said.

  The second dose of rye went down like velvet. As Owney exhaled, he looked at himself in the mirror. He had his chin raised and saw the start of the scar, which began with a pink knot at the base of his throat and ran down to his stomach inside his shirt. He closed the top button of his shirt. I look like a fucking baseball. Now, with his throat covered, he felt comfortable. He took a deep drag. The doctor over at the hospital had told him, Don’t smoke, it’ll ruin your throat. And Owney had told the doctor, Tell them don’t shoot me in the fucking throat and I’ll be all right. Cigarettes? What about shrapnel?

  He went to the phone.

  “Four One’s Car Service.”

  “Fats.”

  “Owney baby. Where are you, baby. I’m busy.”

  “St. Albans. I’m at Linden Boulevard and 177th Street. Get me out of here.”

  “You’re out?”

  “On the street.”

  “Where are you going to?”

  “Someplace good.”

  “You’ll see me first. Stay there. Give me, let me see, about twenty minutes, Owney. I’m sending my best man, Rocket Man, after you.”

  When Owney hung up, he looked at an old picture that hung on the wall by the phone. It was a small young white basketball player in a uniform that said “St. Pascal Baylon.” The picture was from a thousand years ago, and was the only decoration in the bar.

  “Who’s that?” Owney said.

  “Cousy. Used to play basketball,” the bartender said.

  “I saw him announcing on television, I think,” Owney said.

  “Somebody say he used to live ’round here. Used to come in here or somethin’. It was here when we come here. So we leave the picture up.”

  The woman at the bar with the two men slid off the stool and walked over to the picture. She had on a gray sweat shirt with the sleeves rolled up and cut-off dungarees. She held her drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other and she looked at the picture.

  “What’s ‘St. Pascal Baylon’?”

  “That’s the church around here,” the bartender said.

  “And he was a famous basketball player?” the woman said.

  “He was with the Celtics,” the bartender said.

  “This little shrimp here was with them?”

  “Long time ago,” the bartender said.

  “Sheeeet. He ain’t big enough to sniff Walt Frazier.” The woman and the men with her roared.

  Owney had had three more beers and a shot by the time he heard the horn sounding outside. He picked up his change and went out to the car. The driver, Rocket Man, was slouched at the wheel with his left arm hanging out the window, the fingers drumming on the sign painted on the door, “Four Ones.” The apostrophe is a word that people in Ridgewood have heard of, but, as with the Pantheon, are unsure of its proper location.

  As Owney got in, Rocket Man had the cab rolling while the door was still open. The damaged muffler was too loud to allow conversation, so Owney watched himself exhale smoke as a couple of miles of black neighborhoods went by. After which they climbed a hill and went on the parkway toward Ridgewood. Along one winding stretch, cemetery headstones sprouted from the ground on either side. Rocket Man called out over his muffler, “You goin’ home?”

  “I’m going to see Fats.”

  While Owney was away, his father had met a hearse-driver at bar side, Putnam Inn, and through the driver discovered what he felt was the finest living arrangement in the history of the world: for being gatekeeper at one of the Jewish cemeteries along the parkway, he received not only a small fee but a rent-free family apartment on the second floor of the cemetery house, the bottom floor serving as offices. Owney didn’t look at the cemeteries as Rocket Man had the car racing noisily past them.

  Rocket Man went down Fresh Pond Road, which was Sunday afternoon empty except for saloons on every corner whose windows were filled with heads in baseball caps and the backs of colored softball shirts. He made a U-turn in front of a storefront that stood at the edge of a parking lot. The store window advertised the Four One’s. Fats sat inside at a desk with a microphone in front of him.

  “Yo, Owney! Give us a kiss, baby.”

  He kept looking down at the slips in his hand. Fats had light brown hair slicked straight back. He wore round glasses over a face that had the shape of a fat owl. When Owney bent down to kiss Fats on the cheek, his nose crinkled at the smell of old-time hair tonic. Fats’s hair was as s
tiff as a book cover.

  Then he spoke into the microphone.

  “Stumpy, when are you going to be light, Stumpy?”

  Fats kept looking at the slips in his hand.

  A voice came over the loudspeaker on Fats’s desk. “About three minutes at Halsey and Irving.”

  “Stump, keep right on and get the Half Moon for a deuce.”

  Stumpy called back. “Half Moon for a deuce.”

  Fats looked through the slips again. “Owney, they got me killed here. Killed.”

  At a second desk a short man with a crew cut answered a push-button phone, said little, wrote on a slip, and passed the slip to Fats. The crew cut then punched the next button. The private car service was a most radical change in Ridgewood, where for years the Germans had walked miles rather than pay an extra fare and ride the bus to the subway. The bones of cab drivers who had starved to death were buried somewhere. But the advent of blacks, the most feared people ever to walk the face of the earth, changed all this. At night at this time, the police of the 104th Precinct stopped an average of four hundred cars driven by blacks a month and refused to allow them to cross the border from black Bushwick into white Ridgewood. The people regarded this as self-defense rather than a transgression against the Constitution. No matter how strict the policing, the Ridgewood Germans thought it inadequate. Therefore, people who once walked miles to save a half dollar now called for a two-dollar door-to-door car in order to go a block.

  “Eddie, where are you, Eddie?”

  “On the expressway.”

  “Turn around and go back to the city. Pick up Kimmie at Gordon’s. Thirty-fifth and Eighth.”

  “Pick up who?”

  “Kimmie. The Chinese whore. She’s waitin’ in Gordon’s, Thirty-fifth and Eighth Avenue. Eight dollars. Got that?”

  “Kimmie the Chinese whore for eight dollars.”

  “Beauty.” Fats looked and saw he had still more slips in front of him. “I can’t get out of here. Give me like a half hour. I’ll meet you across in Jimmy’s.”

  Owney walked across Fresh Pond Road toward the bar with his head down and his hands in his pockets and when he looked up, here was little girl Cindy dancing out of the doorway of Borchert’s Paint Store. She wore the first psychedelic skirt in Ridgewood, orange and short. Owney then noticed Jackie Kranz huddled in the next doorway. A good place for Jackie, as this hallway went straight back and into an alley behind the building. Most policemen, built like canned hams, would have no chance to run down Jackie Kranz, whose pockets were full of the best dope and smack.

  “Got four dollars, Owney?” little girl Cindy said.

  “I’m gone over a year. That’s the best you could say hello to me?”

  Her bitten fingernails dug into a small wad of money in her palm. “Owney, I want to cop, Owney.”

  “What have you got there?” He pointed to her hand.

  “I need four dollars more, Owney. I have to get three bags.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Seven dollars.”

  “Fuck him. Seven dollars.”

  Jackie Kranz’s square, acned face stared from the doorway.

  “You’re robbing this girl,” Owney said to him.

  “I got to get seven.” Kranz’s gray eyes looked up and down the street. “I got to meet a guy in Bickford’s pretty soon.”

  “Owney.” Little bitten fingernails pressed into his arm.

  Owney took her by the arm. “Fuck you,” he said to Jackie Kranz.

  “Owney,” Cindy said.

  “Come on, I’ll step you up,” Owney said. He guided her through the door and into the Idle Hour bar, where they were met with dimness and a Crosby, Stills & Nash record blowing out of the juke box. The bartender was in his middle thirties, but he had seams under his eyes that seemed to put him in his late forties.

  “Give us two martinis,” Owney said. He had an arm around Cindy.

  The bartender opened his mouth to roar over the juke box. He had a front tooth missing.

  “I wouldn’t know what a martini looked like,” he said.

  “Give us two shots of rye and two beers,” Owney said.

  Cindy shook her head. “I don’t want this,” she said.

  “It’s the best.” The door opened, but instead of Fats walking in, there were two guys in warm-up jackets. They were in their fifties, but both the jackets and the bar were essential to them. The jackets, with a team name written on the back, were a cloak of youth. Without the bar, on a Sunday afternoon, the men would stay home and screw and since none of them used contraceptives, half the women in Ridgewood would get pregnant before dinner was cooked.

  When the bartender put the shot glasses down, Owney put a twenty on the bar. He held up the shot glass.

  “It beats dope,” he said to Cindy.

  Hesitantly, she picked up the shot glass.

  “I never had one of these in my life,” she said.

  “Never? What the hell have you had?”

  “Acid.”

  “Are you nuts? Here you go!”

  Owney threw the shot down. Next to him, Cindy choked and put the shot down, with half the whiskey still in it. She grabbed the beer and took two huge gulps. She made another face.

  “I don’t like this, either. Can I have a Coke?”

  “Drink the whiskey.”

  “Never.”

  “It’ll step you up.”

  “Give me a Coke.”

  “Will you drink the whiskey?”

  “Owney, I want four dollars to smoke dope and have fun. And you want me to puke on the floor: That’s not being nice.”

  He took five dollars off the bar and gave it to her. “I tried.”

  “Oh, wow. Thanks, Owney. I’ll give it back to you, Owney.”

  Her orange skirt burned in the dimness of the bar. Then the skirt halted.

  “Owney, you want to come, too, Owney?”

  “That’s not my game.” Then suddenly his prick came into his mind from nowhere. “Are you coming back?”

  “You want me to?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here.”

  “I’m going to be a while.”

  “What time?” he said.

  “Seven o’clock?”

  “I’m here,” Owney said.

  She was gone and he sat at the bar and had a couple of shots and beer, he wasn’t keeping track, and he kept waiting for Fats, and when he didn’t come, Owney walked across the street to the cab office. Fats held up his hands in surrender.

  “I can’t move, Owney. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Rocket Man was standing in the window.

  “Get Old Jack, Irving and DeKalb,” Fats said.

  “I stop here for a second to piss,” Rocket Man said.

  “Then do it fast. We don’t have any time. Pick up Old Jack. Two-fifty. You know who Old Jack is, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Rocket Man said.

  “You better,” Fats said. He looked at Owney. “You know who he is, don’t you?”

  “Fuck him,” Owney said. “Come buy us a drink.”

  “Own, I’m jammed here an hour at least. I’m sorry I made you come here like this. I’m such a fucking liar. I thought I could get out.”

  “That’s all right. I got to meet somebody there seven o’clock. I’ll be around.”

  “Meet who?”

  “Cindy.”

  “Cindy girl! Oh, I love her!”

  Owney felt his eyelids droop with whiskey. When he walked out into the air he saw Rocket Man’s car pulling out of the driveway. He waved and got in the front seat. “I need to hang my head out the window like a dog so I can straighten out,” he told Rocket Man.

  At the corner of Irving and DeKalb, Rocket Man honked the horn. Old Jack sat at a window table in an espresso shop. Three younger men stood at the table as if praying at a grotto. Old Jack didn’t move. He said something to one of the young men, who dived for the counter and brou
ght back a sugar bowl. Old Jack carefully spooned out sugar. He then held the cup of espresso high, to indicate that a man of his stature, a gangster, proceeds only at his own pleasure.

  “Fucking guinea,” Rocket Man said.

  Owney lit a cigarette. He and Rocket Man sat in silence for almost ten minutes. Then Owney grabbed the radio.

  “Fats, this man is making a fool of us.”

  “Owney, baby, what can I tell you? You know who the man is.”

  Owney sat in silence for another five minutes. He was going to put his hand on the horn and keep it there. Now Old Jack came out of the place. Three strands of white hair were arranged over the skin of his head. The dark blue suit seemed to have been ironed onto his little body. He stood on high Cuban heels. One of the young guys, who wore a mustache, black bell-bottoms, and lavender patent leather shoes, came out of the espresso shop and took Old Jack’s hand. The diamond pinkie ring on Old Jack’s hand became a silver fire in the sun, glaring off the espresso shop window. The young guy kissed Old Jack’s hand. Old Jack beamed. He walked up to the car, took out a cigar, and elaborately bit off the end and lit it. Now Old Jack motioned with his hand that he wanted the back door to the cab opened for him.

  Owney realized that Old Jack was looking at him, and he expected the door to be opened for him. Owney stared straight ahead.

  “Be nice,” Old Jack said.

  Owney said nothing.

  “My back. I can’t get in and get out so good because the back hurts.”

  He stepped up to the car and reached in and pinched Owney on the right cheek.

  “Nice kid.”

  He pinched the cheek just a little too long for affection and when Owney pulled his head away, Old Jack’s dark eyes became lifeless. The man gets mad inside in a hurry, Owney thought. Rocket Man slid from behind the wheel and walked around and opened the door. Old Jack smiled and stood in front of the open door for several moments in order to let everybody in the espresso shop see that the door was being held out of respect for him. Then he put a hand onto Rocket Man’s arm, as if his back were bad, and climbed into the car.