Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  There was a particularly loud noise in the doorway and Fats came into the vestibule, immediately grabbing Owney by the arm and pulling him to the bar … Fats was wearing a brilliant powder-blue jacket and gray slacks. Trailing him was little girl Cindy, who had not been invited to the wedding and was not dressed for it. She wore jeans and a yellow blouse.

  “Look who I brought,” Fats said.

  “Hi, Owney,” Cindy said.

  Fats got them both white wine, and a VO for Owney. He put an arm around Cindy and drew her close to his wide body. “Cindy wants to pay you back what she owes you,” Fats said.

  “Forget about it,” Owney said.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Fats said. “Cindy, tell him how you’re going to pay him back.”

  “Suck cock.”

  “My man!” Fats held his palm out.

  A hand grabbed Owney’s arm and without looking at who was tugging him, he allowed himself to be brought up to the bar, where a man with a pork face and neck of a blowfish stood in a semicircle of admiring faces. He wore pressed light brown. His eyes widened as he saw Owney. He waved with one hand, and with the other, he poked a man next to him, a bell buoy in a shapeless blue suit who was swallowing beer with his eyes closed. Dark curly hair, with the first gray in it, drooped onto a lightly sweating forehead. Upon feeling the arm poke him, the bell buoy opened his eyes.

  The pork face now held out a hand that was large enough to be menacing, but when Owney shook it, he found the skin as soft as pastry. On the thick wrist was a watch that told time with dots. “I’m Connie Heaney, the city councilman, yeah?” the man said.

  Owney murmured a hello.

  “You’re something, yeah?” Heaney said. Heaney introduced the bell buoy as “my associate.”

  “You have a drink?” the bell buoy said.

  “Give us some vodka, yeah?” Heaney said, not bothering to ask if Owney wanted anything different. Quickly, glasses were passed, and Heaney held his up in a toast. Owney drank his fast. Cold and cloudy. The bell buoy poured a bottle of Piels into a glass so quickly that it spilled down the sides. He took a big swallow and put the glass down.

  “Sandhog?” he said to Owney.

  “You got it,” Owney said.

  “We got to get you out of the sandhogging,” Heaney said.

  “If you know a better way I could make money,” Owney said. “I’m married now. I better make up my mind now.”

  “What would you like?” Heaney said.

  “A safety deposit box you can’t fit any more in.”

  Heaney laughed. His hand went out, holding an empty glass. The bell buoy took it, then took Owney’s empty glass and began rocking his head to summon the bartender.

  “You thought of anything, yeah?” Heaney said.

  Owney gulped the drink. Up to this point, the Morrisons had been a family that remained sheltered from the possibilities of American lightning. There was no poet, painter, doctor, lawyer, business success who rose from generations of work with bended back. Jack Morrison, who had worked for the lawyer Quinn, found that combining jobs with futures and a dry throat was irreconcilable. He died a bartender in Queens Village. The Morrison family history was one of loyalty to church, union, country. Beyond that, there was an interest only in those things that require no more thought than boarding a bus. There was an understanding that most American success originates in an obstetrician’s hands: if he pulls you out of a woman who is in the right marriage, your future is assured.

  Owney now put the glass down and said to Heaney, “All my family ever did was work. Someday maybe I’ll try running for office in the union. But I first got to show the men how good I can work. Men in my union won’t vote for anybody who doesn’t show them how good he works.”

  “You should get the world,” Heaney said loudly. “Hero like you. You deserve anything you want.”

  “The world,” the bell buoy said.

  “Man’s a hero,” Heaney said. He finished his drink and Owney raised his, but now the ice came against his lips and right away he had the glass on the bar for more.

  It was in the middle of the next drink, with the cigarette smoke streaming in the air, that Heaney said, “I know what this kid should be. He should be a deputy commissioner of Ferries, under Ports and Terminals.”

  “Good job!” the bell buoy said. Cigarette ashes fell on the suitfront.

  “You know that’s the job for him,” Heaney said.

  “Beauty,” the bell buoy said.

  The bartender handed out more vodka, which Owney found wonderful. Then Dolores walked in and Owney introduced her to Heaney, who kissed her cheek. “What about this guy?” he said.

  “I love him,” she said.

  “What are we going to do with his life?”

  “It’s up to him,” she said. “He has to live it.”

  “Then I know what to do,” Heaney said.

  A man in a Legion cap gave Heaney and the man with him roast beef sandwiches, with dripping cole slaw sticking out from under the bread. Heaney held the sandwich far out and craned his neck as he took a bite. His brown suit was clear of the juice as it dripped on the bar. The bell buoy ate with cole slaw dotting his suit.

  Heaney got up to leave. “I just wanted to show my face and give you congratulations. And I got to tell you, I won’t forget a word I said.”

  He and the bell buoy left. Dolores took Owney’s hand and led him back to the vestibule. Owney stepped away from her to talk to an aunt. In the middle of the vestibule, Dolores swung around and noticed a thin guy in his early thirties. His name was Robert Hale, and he had been her favorite teacher, of biology. He had obvious difficulty with his own gender, something the wedding party noticed immediately. Dolores’s cousin, Virginia, was supposed to ease the day for him, but she was lost in the crowd. A hand went nervously to light brown hair. He relaxed when he saw that Dolores was paying him immediate attention. He kissed Dolores on the cheek and then held up a finger and said, “No matter what happens, I’m going to see you finish school. Remember that.”

  Owney’s uncle on his mother’s side, Jerry Hayes, standing directly behind them, said loudly, “What school? She got no time for school. She’s going to be raising a whole school of her own.”

  Hale said, “I’m sure she’s capable of doing both.”

  Hayes growled. When Dolores stared at him, Jerry Hayes gave a false laugh and started to push her toward the bar.

  “I’m right,” Hale said to her.

  “We’ll see what happens,” Dolores said.

  “Make sure that it happens,” Hale said.

  “I’ll try,” Dolores said.

  Hale stepped out of the way as Queens women advanced on the bride.

  At this point, the high, soft sound of a saxophone warming up came from inside the Legion hall. At the reed’s sound, the bartender ducked out from his station and left the barroom, which was a direct way of announcing that the cocktail hour was over. The transition caught Owney’s uncle Jerry with an empty glass.

  “This is a fuckin’ disgrace,” he yelled at the bartender. His head, a cement block, swiveled until he caught sight of Matty Kearns, Sr., who, as the man who gave the bride away, was the official host. “Hey, Matty, be a good fellow and have the guy give us another drink.”

  Kearns laughed. “Come on, Jerry, this is a party for the kids.” Alongside Kearns, his wife, Winifred, said, “I’m so dry I barely could talk. We’ll all have a drink inside.” Winifred, who was called Winnie by everyone, was five foot three and weighed more than two hundred pounds, most of which was stuffed inside a gold evening dress that had a cape arrangement at the shoulders so as to cover her great fleshy upper arms—Her girdle was so tight that she took steps like a penguin. A great pile of taffy-colored hair did nothing for her jowly face.

  “Be a good girl and tell your husband to get us a drink,” Hayes said.

  “We’ll have one inside,” she said.

  “They make us wait too long at a table,” Hayes
said.

  “You’re an asshole,” Matty Kearns, Sr., said to Hayes.

  “Were you talking to me?” Hayes said.

  “Right to your face,” Kearns said.

  “Then you’re going to get a bellyful of me before we’re through here today,” Hayes said.

  His attention was taken away by the appearance of the Colombian boy, who was tugging an ash can full of ice to the bar.

  “Give us a round,” Jerry Hayes said. He held out a big hairy hand. The South American kid took the bill, stuffed it into his shirt pocket, and went back to moving the ash can of ice across the floor. Jerry reached into the kid’s breast pocket and took the money back. Everybody in the room was saying, You see, there is no way you can trust a fuckin’ South American spic. They all then began reaching behind the bar to grab bottles of beer. Drinking beer from the bottle, they went into the hall. All walked as stiffly as hospital patients. This was the result of many hours through many years of standing at bars. Also because their thighs were so fat that in order to move without chafing them they were forced to walk with their legs quite wide apart.

  Inside the hall, the formalities of a Queens sit-down wedding reception were handled expertly by bandleader Bobby Duffy. For thirty-five years Bobby Duffy had played at every Irish occasion worth attending in New York. Bobby Duffy was dressed in a red plaid dinner jacket and had hair that could be viewed as modish by the young or merely acceptably short by those older in age. Very early in his life Bobby Duffy learned that antagonism does not feed.

  “Here goes, ladies and gentlemen,” Bobby Duffy announced. “Here goes for the first time, dancing as husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Owen Morrison.”

  Bobby Duffy’s saxophone led his musicians into “Prisoner of Love.” The bride and groom stepped into a yellow spotlight. All the people stood applauding at the long bingo tables that had been covered with red table linen and set for dinner, ten at a table, thirty tables about the room. Lowered lights kept the electric basketball scoreboard and the Fire Department’s occupancy limit sign from intruding on the regal atmosphere. Overhead, flattened against the ceiling, were the baskets and backboards that could be lowered in case there was a basketball game, although a sparsity of white kids able to jump high enough to play the game even for amusement made the baskets obsolete.

  Playing his music, Bobby Duffy came to the end of the stanza: “I can’t escape, for it’s too late now. I’m just a pris’ner of love.”

  He had the wedding off to a good start. He played “Danny Boy” and then he asked everyone who was seated facing the band to place an arm around the person to his right, and everyone seated with his back to the band to place an arm around the person to his left. Bobby Duffy told the crowd that when he started playing the next song, those with right arms out should sway to the right on the first note and those with left arms out should sway to the left first. Bobby Duffy then played “East Side, West Side” and the mirror effect of one line of people swaying one way and the next line the other made everybody dizzy. Immediately, the first whiskey appeared on tables, followed by thin soup and dried banquet roast beef slices.

  The room turned into crumpled napkins, spilled drinks, and rising egos. When Dolores arrived at the table where Robert Hale was sitting, she found him being lectured to by one of the sandhogs—she had trouble with the names—who kept poking a thick finger into Hale’s chest.

  “Puttin’ in kitchens, that’s the work,” the guy was saying. “It’s better than plumbin’. Or what I do. You know why?”

  “I don’t think I do,” Hale said.

  “Ha! I knew you didn’t. I could tell by lookin’ at you. I come into your house, and say even if I only put in new doors, cabinet doors, new countertops, it’s still like fifteen hundred. I take fifteen hundred off you. But now every time you come in the kitchen for a drink of water, you see that countertop, you see them new doors. But if I put in plumbin’, if I put in fifteen hundred dollars of new plumbin’, it’s buried. You never see nothin’ of your money. You know? And then when you ast the public to pay millions for where I work, a water tunnel they can’t never see, then, forget it. You know? You know what I’m talk——?”

  From a table, she heard a growl. “Look at this little hump!” Jerry Hayes glared at Hale. Dolores stepped back from Hale and then walked up to Hayes.

  “What is the matter with you?”

  Which of course did it. Matty Kearns, Sr., and Jimmy Morrison, Owney’s father, stepped quickly through tables toward Hayes, and Kearns was there first. The sense that keeps most people from stepping off mountains told Jerry Hayes to get up, which he did, exactly in time to see Matty Kearns, Sr.’s right hand, a sloppy right hand, thrown from too far back. Jerry Hayes ducked and the right hand skidded across the top of his head, rippling the slicked-back hair. Jerry Hayes half punched and half shoved Matty Kearns, Sr., back. Immediately, both Dolores’s mother and Winnie Kearns were out in front of the wedding cake, which sat on the edge of the dance floor, for all to admire while gliding by. Winnie Kearns, being wider than Dolores’s mother, stood in front of the cake, as if a hockey goalie.

  In the scuffling, Jimmy Morrison suddenly pushed Kearns out of the way and punched Jerry Hayes hard. Ducking, Hayes took the punch on the back of the neck, and went down on his face in a rage. He grabbed a chair alongside him and, rising from his knees, folded the chair—a folded chair being a far better weapon than an open one. Jerry Hayes swung the chair like a baseball bat. Jimmy Morrison ducked. Matty Kearns, Sr., swayed backward. The chair whirred through the air and whacked the side of Winnie Kearns’s pile of taffy hair. Winnie Kearns’s elbow went into the cake as she fell, gold tips of her shoes straight up, oblivious to the riot occurring over her. There were at least four people fighting now.

  From his seat at the head table, Owney slipped under the table, crawled out the other side onto the dance floor, and went to help Winnie Kearns, who now stirred. Eyes rolling, attempting to focus, she rolled in her beautiful gold dress onto her right shoulder. Seeing Owney, she smiled. “You’re a good boy.” Seeing the smear of white cake frosting on the elbow of her dress, she looked up with fear at the cake. When Winnie Kearns saw the gash in the side of the cake, she came off the floor rapidly, her bison’s behind pushing her erect, and Owney tried holding her but she yanked her arm free. And with all the anger of all the years of Queens womanhood and the sanctity of wedding cakes rushing through her, she found Jerry Hayes in the fight, brought back her gold foot, and then sent it forward into Jerry Hayes’s testicles.

  Bobby Duffy was running from the vestibule to the bandstand, with his musicians after him, and Bobby Duffy, with thirty-five years of working in jungles such as this, grabbed the microphone and without waiting for the music, began to wail: “Oh-ho, say, you can see …”

  By “what so proudly we hail’d” the other musicians were coming onto the stand. Matty Kearns, Sr., gasping for air, pulled himself together. Solemnly, he saluted. The sounds of the other musicians picking up knocked-over chairs and music stands distracted Bobby Duffy. He stopped singing for a moment. This moment of silence was used by Jerry Hayes, testicles shriveled in pain, who threw a right-hand punch that caught Matty Kearns, Sr., under the salute. Matty Kearns, Sr., went down like an air raid victim. His fat wife, fingernails flashing, went for Jerry Hayes’s face.

  On the bandstand, Bobby Duffy’s mouth was numb as his mind refused to hand him more words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Without this patrio-religious music, brush fires burst out all over the auditorium.

  “Play something!” Bobby Duffy said to his musicians.

  Without thought or hesitation, the group swung into “Tiger Rag.” This caused the heavy-equipment union people to roar against each other, the women’s handbags flying, and as the music drove everybody wilder, Owney grabbed for Dolores. He moved quickly to the side exit, as he knew he was only instants away from the point when somebody got the great idea of taking on the war hero groom and knocking him dead.

  O
utside in the alley he lit a cigarette and they listened to the noise inside. Owney and Dolores laughed.

  They went on a two-week honeymoon to Fort Lauderdale in Florida. They came home and moved into the first-floor apartment of a semi-attached two-family house on 74th Street in Glendale, a half block down from Myrtle Avenue. Dolores had quit the ice cream truck. She went back to school and Owney went to the tunnel. They were home for three days when Heaney, the councilman, called Owney and said that an appointment had been made for him with a man named Mortarano of the Department of Ferries, under Ports and Terminals. Owney wrote the name down on the inside of a wide matchbook, and when Heaney had further instructions, Owney had to go to a second matchbook to put the time and location of the meeting, noon on the following Thursday at City Hall.

  “I deliver, yeah?” Heaney said.

  “I guess so,” Owney said.

  “Well, you’re a hero and you deserve the world, yeah?”

  Owney met Dolores later in the back yard of Caffee Licata. They had Italian sodas at a table along a brick wall that was thick with ivy. Through a black grille gate at the end of the yard they could see a tomato garden that was being tended by an old man in a white shirt and baggy pants who had a short black cigar between his teeth.