Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Where to?” Owney said. He had the car rolling. In the mirror he could see Rocket Man standing back on the curb.

  “Just a little way,” Old Jack said.

  “Where?”

  “Roosevelt Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. Then we come back to my house.”

  “Where?”

  “Troutman Street.”

  “Is that for two-fifty?” Owney said. “I heard them say two-fifty. This trip costs way more than that. You’re going to Fifty-eighth Street. That’s all the way over in Woodside.”

  “They only charge me two-fifty. I go to California they charge me two-fifty.”

  As he drove, Owney said, “How come a big guy like you uses private car service?”

  “Chauffeurs no good,” Old Jack said. “Everybody who has a car and a chauffeur gets killed by the chauffeur.”

  When Owney got to Roosevelt Avenue, which sat under brooding el tracks, Old Jack remained still. A Peruvian restaurant was on the corner, and a young guy in a yellow shirt, gold chains, and bushy jet-black hair walked out, bent over to speak to Jack.

  “You stand outside like a good kid,” Old Jack said to Owney.

  Owney got out of the car for a moment, then Old Jack said, “All right, kid,” and Owney got back behind the wheel. The other guy walked quickly back to the restaurant.

  Owney made a slow U-turn. A city bus was bouncing along quickly under the el. The red light was against Owney, and the bus, which had a green light, was almost at the intersection when Owney pressed the gas pedal. The car tires squealed and the muffler roared and in the back seat, Old Jack made an involuntary sound. “Doo-doo.” He saw his life in a photo finish with a silver and green city bus, which by now filled the car window.

  The car just made it past the bus, whose horn blared. The street ahead was empty of cars and Owney went through a stop sign without bothering to look and that gave him a good idea and he pushed the car as it approached Queens Boulevard, which at this point has twelve lanes that are always heavy with traffic. On the far side of the boulevard, on the right corner, was a high fieldstone cemetery wall, and atop a sharp grass incline there was a large statue of the crucifixion.

  “Hey, Jack.”

  “You stop.”

  “See up there, Jack? You think the nails hurt?”

  The lights in the boulevard were yellow and Owney rushed toward them, and as Old Jack realized that they were going to shoot the boulevard he let out a high-pitched sound. The yellow light turned red as Owney was crossing the boulevard. Horns blared and grillwork shot at them. A gold Lincoln whipped out in the far lane and the driver saw Owney and got stubborn. He wasn’t going to stop. The distance grew smaller and Old Jack was whimpering and now the Lincoln stopped and Owney was across the boulevard and heading down a slope. He threw his hand out in a wave at the Cross in the cemetery.

  “What do you think he just said to us?” Owney called out.

  There were two cars in the street ahead of them and Owney went into the wrong lane to pass them and now Old Jack had spit at the corners of his mouth.

  “Please, kid.”

  “Kid? Me? I’m no kid, mister. I’m old enough to have a driver’s license. Want to see it?”

  He turned around and looked at Old Jack.

  Owney went under the expressway without looking and he was bouncing across a pockmarked street and had the car doing ninety when he came onto Troutman Street, which is Old Jack’s block. It starts on an empty factory street and goes for a mile up to Old Jack’s house, which was in a row of brownstones.

  “We better hurry up. I don’t want you to be late,” Owney said.

  The buildings danced as they shot past them. He shot the first red light without looking. One block up, a car was turning onto the street and Owney went to the horn. The car lurched to the curb and now all along the street there were cars and crowded sidewalks in front of houses and the muffler roared so loud that people looked out the windows. At Irving, pennants hung over the street and they moved at Owney so quickly he felt the onset of vertigo. A bus was lumbering across Knickerbocker Avenue. It paused in the middle of the street, completely blocking the way. Owney had the car at its limit, somewhere over ninety, and the level of thrill was rising and he wondered which way he was going around the bus, and then he saw more room to the left and he smiled at the red light staring at him and he burst out onto Knickerbocker and there was the green Plymouth on the right side of Owney’s car. The green Plymouth was death.

  Old Jack screamed.

  Owney braked the car, which howled and skidded. His shoulders rose as the front of the car made it past the Plymouth and then Owney was in a dynamite explosion and he was thrown forward and his stomach was instantly sick. Owney’s car spun halfway around. The green Plymouth stopped dead in its own glass.

  “Are you all right, guy?”

  A kid from the neighborhood, muscular arms sticking out of a black T-shirt, was a couple of paces away from them. The kid was properly afraid of blood. Owney moved his arms. He shifted his feet. His chest pained him as he breathed, but when he touched the chest nothing seemed broken. All that really bothered him was the nausea and a pain at the base of his neck. He rotated his neck against the pain. Then he looked at Old Jack.

  He was alive but motionless, somewhere between mortal terror and deep shock.

  “That’ll be two-fifty,” Owney said.

  “You dead,” Old Jack said.

  “Two-fifty.”

  “You die.”

  “You already told me that. Where’s the two-fifty?”

  “You cockasuck.”

  “If you don’t pay me the two-fifty, that’s what I’m going to have you doing.”

  Old Jack’s fingers crept to his shirt pocket and he brought out three dollars.

  Owney took out a half dollar, which he gave to Jack as he took the three dollars out of Jack’s other hand. In doing this, Owney had his face into the odor coming from Old Jack.

  “Hey, Jack.”

  Old Jack tried to shift his body.

  “Jack, you shit your pants. What are you, a gangster or a fag?”

  “I kill your fuckin’ head.”

  “And I’m going to tell the whole world you shit your pants.”

  Owney started walking for the Idle Hour bar.

  In the middle of the night or the start of the morning, or whenever it was, he sat on a wicker hamper in the bathroom of Fats’s apartment. He knew it was Fats’s apartment and he knew his throat throbbed. She stepped out of the shower and stood directly in front of him with the towel held up under her chin. Damp seaweed neared his face. He put a hand flat against her stomach.

  “Irish,” she said.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You don’t mind going near it when you’re drunk,” she said. “I did it to you sober. You had to be drunk, to go near me.”

  Personal shame rose through the nausea.

  The towel still under her chin, little girl Cindy smiled at him. “Irish.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Owney muttered.

  “It’s Monday. I got to go to school take my last Regents’,” Cindy said.

  The first time Owney used the cemetery as an address was the day in Washington when a colonel took him by the arm and led him into a circle of microphones.

  “In Pleiku Province, Specialist Morrison’s unit encountered intense fire from well-fortified enemy bunker positions. Specialist Morrison jumped across a canal, moved through heavy enemy fire to within a few feet of the position, and with disregard for his own safety, assaulted the bunkers with hand grenades and rifle fire. Two soldiers were seriously wounded. Specialist Morrison ran through heavy fire from another bunker to assist his fallen comrades. He was hit by a burst of fire from the bunker. In spite of his own painful wounds, Specialist Morrison unhesitatingly attacked the bunker in order to shield the wounded men from enemy fire. While wounded, he again used hand grenades and rifle fire to destroy the enemy position. The sustained, extraordinary courage an
d selflessness exhibited by this soldier over an extended period of time are in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Army.”

  Suddenly there was this toneless California voice. Owney found himself looking first at all the rosebushes and then his eyes fell on the lawn. Sun striking a blade of grass sent a lonely feeling through him. When somebody called out that Owney was another one from Brooklyn, Owney corrected him. He gave the street address of the cemetery, 1176 Taylor Avenue, Queens, New York.

  That night, when the colonel flew up from Washington with Owney and, going up the driveway between the headstones, saw what the address meant, he slapped Owney’s knee. “Damn, but you got the smarts. If you told them where you actually lived, they would’ve gone into all sorts of things, drive us crazy. Man comes from a cemetery, likes dead bodies so much, the man goes out and makes a whole batch of new ones. Mister Original Body Count, Mister Macabre. I tell you, you’re some quick-thinking character.”

  Owney didn’t answer. If he had told the guy the truth, that they lived there because his family would sleep in graves to beat the rent, the guy would have jumped out of the car, Owney felt.

  Owney put his head into the kitchen sink and let cold water pour on the back of his neck. The inside of his head was still a dance hall. A few months ago, he had only needed to splash his face in the morning and the day became his friend. Now, he had washed his face in the bathroom and by the time he got in the kitchen, the dance hall was throbbing again. He mopped his wet auburn hair with a dishrag and went to the kitchen table. His hand shook as he put a cigarette to his lips. The big flame lighter also wavered in his hand as he brought it up. His mother kept telling him on mornings like this that he was too young to shiver. And now she sat across the table from him and wore a prosecutor’s stare.

  “You shake like you just got out of an auto accident,” she said.

  “I’m still jumpy from the thing,” he said.

  “Something at work?”

  “No. The other thing.”

  “I don’t see you shake when you don’t take a drink. I’ll say it again. You’re too young to get like this.”

  He became silent. His answer, that he still was unnerved from being shot at in Vietnam, was not a direct lie, he thought. Of course, it was; whiskey was more dangerous than Verdun.

  Owney focused his eyes by sighting across the top of the toaster on the windowsill alongside the kitchen table. Across the top of the toaster on this morning, jiggling a bit in his vision but polished by a fresh spring sky, were the tips of many spires. When the toast popped up, Owney stood up to grab it and now through the window he was looking at a field of tombstones, many of them topped with spires, spreading as far as he could see. The graves began under Altman’s gray spire, which was almost directly under the kitchen window, so close that Owney, standing with his toast, could read the inscription on the base of Altman’s spire.

  WE LIVE IN ILLUSION

  AND WE DIE IN DESPAIR

  Alongside Altman was the square white headstone for dead Zucker. Owney remembered back in the winter, probably on an anniversary of his death, when Zucker’s two wives came at separate times and stood on the tan-yellow grass and regarded the headstone with equal disdain. As the old cars in which they arrived and common coats indicated, Zucker’s love might have been enough to go around, but not his estate. Owney had been walking by when the second wife stood with a hand running through a pile of white hair as she told the headstone, “You said you’d take care of me. You certainly did. You put me in a hole deeper than the one you’re in.”

  Next to Zucker was a light gray mausoleum in which a half dozen Roths were stuffed. Then came monuments, spires, mausoleums with stained-glass windows, narrow headstones, curved headstones, all in irregular rows and uneven heights and spread across the grass like chess pieces. Thousands of gravestones, the stone all of the violet register, all the finest granite, Rock of Ages granite, for marble cannot be used in cemeteries in Queens because the moisture in the air coming from the sea eats at a mother’s headstone just as surely as the chipmunks devour her eyes. The graves climbed hills, spilled over the tops, and ran down the far sides. Almost everything in this part of Queens’s earth was made prosperous by the dead, with over a dozen cemeteries running into each other: from the Jewish Machpelah and Beth-El to the Cypress Hills National Cemetery to the nondenominational Cemetery of the Evergreens to the other side of the low hills, over on Queens Boulevard, the true power of a Catholic bishop, Calvary Cemetery, some 315 acres, for which Catholics humble themselves for plots so small that the deceased would be more comfortable if inserted vertically. All this melancholy earth was essential to Queens, for at this time, in the spring of 1970, there were two million reportedly alive and four and a half million dead, the deceased therefore outnumbering the living in Queens by more than two to one. Where Owney now stood, in the center of this deadness, was the caretaker’s apartment of Mount Sinai Cemetery, five rooms atop an archway whose gloom demanded the sound of horse carriages clopping through the mist.

  By now Owney’s father regarded the apartment and the land on which it sat as a Sutter’s Mill with headstones. As the job called for a Christian who was available on Saturdays and Jewish holy days, when Jews were not allowed to lift a finger, Owney’s father wore a Miraculous medal large enough to thrill a Puerto Rican, and prominently, outside rather than inside his T-shirt, with the street shirt over it unbuttoned in order to remind the cemetery manager that his caretaker was of the correct persuasion. For opening the gates at six each morning and closing them at five each night, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and doing exactly nothing else, the Morrisons lived rent-free, and in an apartment that was a level above anyplace before this that had served to keep their heads dry. Nor did the munificence end there; for simply swinging a gate twice a day, Owney’s father also received two hundred a month, which was money dropping from the sky. Furthermore, out of the sandhog’s pay, the father needed to extract no rent, which permitted him almost always to have something on the bar besides his elbow. He then could take this extra two hundred a month from the cemetery, from a side job that required no work, and throw the two hundred on the kitchen table as a sign that he truly loved his wife. (The fact that his wife had to close the gates at night because he was in the bar didn’t bother him.) If he had to take back forty or fifty dollars for something important, that was fine, that was a personal loan, and it did nothing to detract from the original grand gesture of throwing the whole two hundred on the kitchen table.

  Psychologically, the cemetery was a smashing arrangement, as it freed the Morrison family of the sandhog’s first fear, inability to pay the rent during the long periods of unemployment that went with the trade. In the first months in the caretaker’s apartment, though, Owney’s mother kept the shades drawn during the day in order to keep her from glancing out a window at death.

  Taking the toast out of the toaster now, Owney gagged at the thought of pale butter on it. He opened the window and threw out the toast. Starlings dived for it.

  “You can’t eat,” his mother said.

  “I feel sorry for the birds,” Owney said. He opened the refrigerator and brought out a twelve-ounce can of Piels, pulled the tab off, and took the first swallow with the tab still in his hand. The beer was cold and high and he swallowed more.

  “I’m sorry for the birds, I’m sorry for you, all that drinking,” his mother said.

  Owney extended his left arm and placed the can of beer atop his head. The hand was that of a statue. The can did not move.

  “I told you what it was from,” he said. “I just made myself stop thinking about it. Now look at me.”

  The mother indicated the beer. “Have some more and you’ll be singing me a song,” she said. “What time did you get in last night?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  Owney worked in tunnels under the implied agreement that his past gave him personal power, and also that respect was best offered in silence; th
e fawning need not apply.

  By age, he was one of those who split the union down the middle: the young who banked by check and went from the job to home, and considered the raw work of the job as something that would lead to a business above ground. Several even used the job to support their habit of learning. One, George Carroll, worked nights at the High Bridge job, finished college in the Bronx, and wanted to attend law school, but his aptitude test score caused every New York school to relegate him to night classes only. Leaving work one night, he drove past Yeshiva University, a few blocks away from the job. Inspired suddenly, he went there the next day and applied at Yeshiva College Law School as a minority, an Irish Catholic. The admissions man at Yeshiva allowed nothing to cross his face. “We don’t embarrass easily,” the admissions man said finally, and Carroll said, “Well, I do. So why don’t you embarrass me by letting me in so I can become a lawyer?” In the mail a month later, Carroll received a letter saying he had been accepted. He showed early on the first day and never left. Another young guy on the night shift at Roosevelt Island attended City College and became a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he said to Owney one day. “I have to go up there while this old guy buffs me up for the interview. I say, ‘Look at my marks. I have all A’s.’ He says that I have ‘an inner anger’ that sometimes comes out. He wants me to subdue it. I told him, ‘Hey, my name is Finnegan.’ You know what he said? ‘I know. It shows that we’ll never truly understand why brains end up where they are.’

  The other half of the union was of the past, of men who threw their pay on the bar and then took the remainder and threw it on the kitchen table when they got home. Owney, fresh from the war, a hero to both young and old, had his choice of going either way.