Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “I’m Father Joe and I’m an alcoholic,” the priest said, rubbing his hands together, smiling, looking around at the crowd. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Hi, Father Joe!’ Let me hear it now.”

  “Hi, Father Joe.”

  “Good, good.” He patted the sides of the halo of white hair that provided a setting for his pink scalp. His eyebrows went up, and with a pleasant motion, smiling and swaying back, he pointed at two women who sat in their coats at one end of a row. Neither woman moved.

  “Ladies?”

  One rose. Dark brown hair shot with gray was shaggy from being rubbed by her nervous hands. She wore round glasses that were perched on her nose. Seams ran out from under the glasses and down her hollow cheeks. She spoke so slowly that at first she seemed to be retarded.

  “My name is Catherine and … ah … I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Catherine,” the priest said jovially.

  “Hi, Catherine,” the audience called out.

  Now the woman stood in the silence as the priest looked at her and made a circular motion with his hand to start her talking.

  “I don’t think I have much else to say just now.”

  “Fine!” the priest said. “And now …”

  The second woman, much heavier, with her hair obviously dyed light brown, stood up with both hands holding the front of her maroon coat. One hand, in a fist, came to her mouth.

  “My name is Dorothy, but I am certainly not an alcoholic. I came here with my sister simply to observe.”

  “Wonderful,” the priest said.

  “I want you to know I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t think you believe me.”

  “Of course we do.”

  “Well, some of these people here are looking at me like I’m a common drunk.”

  “Please, ma’am.”

  “Please? This whole room thinks I’m a stumblebum.”

  “Now, I think you’re a little edgy. Why don’t you have a seat and be comfortable.”

  She sat down. The priest suddenly looked at Owney. Slowly, Owney got up and stood in the overhead lights and the silence and he called out, “I pass.”

  “Fine, glad to have you,” the priest said. He pointed to a man in a blue rain jacket, who bounced up, picking up his head so that a double chin unfolded.

  “I got a name. But, I mean, can I use another first name?”

  “Sure you can,” the priest said.

  “Well, I don’t want to lie, even at a thing like this, but you see I have a business here and I don’t want it to get around that I’m some drunken slob.”

  “Of course,” the priest said.

  “You see, Father, I’m liable to lose all my business. Some rumcake staggering around their house liable to take a pass at the wife, while he’s supposed to be fixing the faucets.”

  “I understand,” the priest said.

  “Oh, that happens, Father, believe me. You get some drunken pig he sees a good-lookin’ woman and he figures what the hell, and he reaches right out there and makes a grab. He thinks he’s home. But he’s right in some other guy’s kitchen with a tool kit. The woman lets out a holler and what do you have now? You got a rape charge, that’s what you got. Oh, they do that, Father. Here comes the police and they take you down the precinct and then right upstairs to the detectives. You bet detectives. You’re in there on a rape charge, no patrolman handles you. No, sir. Right up to the detectives. Oh, yes, Father, that’s what happens when you get some guy got his own business and he’s nothing but a real, excuse me, ladies, but a real pissbum. Now let me tell you some——”

  “Why don’t you just give me any name you feel like?” the priest said.

  “I’d like to finish,” the man in the rain jacket said.

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that later,” the priest said. “Now just give your name. Any name you feel comfortable with.”

  “It can’t be the right name.”

  “Fine.”

  “All right. My name is Bob and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Bob!”

  “Hi,” he answered. Written across the back of his jacket, bright in the ceiling lights, was “Eddie Mulqueen, Ozone Park Plumbers, 82–04 Liberty Avenue.”

  When another hand went up, Owney slid out of the chair and walked quietly to the double doors and was through them. “Bedbugs,” he said to himself.

  When he stopped by the cemetery house to see how his father was getting along, his mother sat with tea at the kitchen table. Tea like hell for me, Owney told himself. He opened a twelve-ounce can of beer and took a huge gulp of what felt like a cold brook.

  “I thought you were stopping,” his mother said.

  “One beer?” He placed the can of beer atop his right hand and balanced it there. The hand was a statue and the can did not move.

  “That still don’t mean you can drink.”

  When he finished the beer, he threw the can away noisily and swaggered off to see the father.

  Later, in bed in the darkness, he thought about the plumber at the meeting. Fucking molester. He wanted to go get another beer.

  In the morning, at six-fifteen, Owney stood at the table in the hog house and poured evaporated milk into coffee with an easy hand. When he saw Navy, he held the coffee container straight out.

  “Is this okay?” Owney said.

  “Sure it is.”

  “I went to a meeting last night,” Owney said.

  “And you didn’t call me?” Navy said.

  “Did I need your permission?”

  “No, I just usually go with a guy the first time. But that’s all right. How did it go?”

  “I guess all right. I just listened. They’re not like me.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No. Weak guys. One guy was a molester. Weak. That’s not me.”

  Navy spoke softly. “If I was ever in trouble, in the tunnel someplace, you’d be the guy that I’d pray would come for me. But we’re talking about something that is a lot different.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Owney said.

  “Anything I can do?” Navy said.

  “There is.”

  “What?”

  “Give my wife a call.”

  “And tell her what?”

  “Tell her I went to a meeting and that the thing is all over.”

  “No.”

  “What’s this, ‘No’?”

  “What you really want is a note from a schoolteacher.”

  “You won’t even talk to her?”

  “I’d be delighted to talk to her. Not on the phone. I’ll go with you and the two of us will talk to her face to face.”

  “Good.”

  “Except for one thing. You may not like what I tell her.”

  “Hey, Navy, I’m not some baby.”

  “I might perform a horrible act. I might tell her the truth.”

  Owney’s laugh brought a smile from Navy, who said, “I’ll tell you what I tell everybody,” he said. “You’ve got to realize that just because you put the glass down once, that doesn’t mean you can go home and start cuddling your wife like she’s some little pet. I remember one time I stopped drinking and I sat home in one of my moods. I always thought of myself as a very important guy. She said to me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘Are you sure? You act like something’s the matter.’ I said to her, ‘If you really loved me, then you’d know what’s wrong with me.’ I was sure that I was that important to her. When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place. You don’t do that in one day.”

  “Then maybe I’ll go to another meeting.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What else do you want off me?”

  “I want you to do what you want to do. Just as long as you don’t hurt yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That we ought to sit down, go to a couple of me
etings together, slide into a nice routine.”

  “I got into this by myself. I’ll get out by myself.”

  “I don’t think you should be thinking of doing it alone.”

  “What am I, a fag? I can do anything by myself.”

  “This is different even from a war,” Navy said. “Like I say, I wish I had your guts—”

  “And I’m going to use them.”

  The footpaths running across Navy’s face remained fixed and he looked at Owney the way fight trainers do at a young kid in the gym, arms draped over the ropes and faces showing nothing as they watch for the kid to let the left hand drop after a jab and leave an opening that, some night, will get his jaw broken. As Navy looked now, he saw a green fighter, and he knew that the opponent, alcohol, was out there somewhere, old and scarred and mean, spitting out water and waiting for the chance to come out into the middle of the ring and lure this kid into mixing it up.

  “Why don’t you give her a call, tell her to come back?”

  Navy shook his head. “I hate to tell you what I’d tell her.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’d tell her not to come back.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Owney, I only got one thing backing me up. That I tell the truth. I tell the truth to you, to your wife, and these days I even tell the truth to myself. So I’m not going to lie to you, to your wife, or to myself.”

  “I got to put more than one of these here, mon,” James said. James was on his belly, his back brushing against a rock ceiling that had too much white in it. Iron rings spaced closely together, standing on heavy girders that were sunk into the floor, were tight against the white rock. The iron ring James was on, however, was about a foot short of the ceiling. The space was packed with wood planks in order to keep constant pressure against the white rock, but water dripping out of the rock at this point had so soaked the wood planks that the walking boss, Delaney, inspecting the ceiling with a scaling hook, had decided that new wood was needed. After replacing the rotted plank, James thought he needed another. Owney, on the ladder, arms full of wood, pulled out a plank and held it up. James wriggled his body into the space at the top of the ring and he had his face down, looking at Owney, who held up the plank, and James reached for it and the rock gave a small scream. Owney dropped all the wood and he threw both hands at the rock ceiling, trying to keep millions of years and millions of tons from doing as it pleased, and he knew what it was but he still put both hands flat against the ceiling and then the rock flew open and here was the woman with the wind blowing her long skirt and her arms held out. As she moaned, Owney’s arms suddenly were jammed into his chest and he lost footing and fell from the ladder. The rock ceiling fell and crushed James against the iron ring and then the iron ring put its dull red shoulder into the rock and held it. Owney fell feet first and dropped hard on his hands and knees and looked up in pain and then closed his eyes against the shower of blood that came as the rock squeezed every drop out of James’s body. First, the blood poured, and then it turned into a steady drip. And then Owney was on his feet and he was back on the ladder, one hand out for James, but all Owney could see above him was white rock on bent red metal that dripped blood. He kept going for the ceiling and there were shouts everywhere and he was reaching for nothing and he felt a hand clamp on his right leg.

  “That’s it, lad,” Delaney, on the ladder, said. Owney followed him down. “You’ll be able to smell him a long time before you get to see what’s left of him,” Delaney said.

  Owney walked. He walked with a limp and bleeding hands. He walked into the darkness and stumbled and cursed and kept walking and he wasn’t sure of where he was going or how long it was taking him.

  “Owney!”

  He was standing in the lights by the lift to the surface. He closed his eyes and somebody played a hose on him to wash off the blood.

  Down the hill from the job, in Brendan’s, there were two old men who wore rain jackets and coughs. The bartender had the suggestion of white hair on scalp that was blood red from alcohol. Rose light from the juke box picked out crumpled cigarette packs, and the rest of the place was almost totally dark because of windows that had been bricked up by the owner to prevent sandhogs from throwing each other through the glass.

  “Yes, sir,” the bartender said.

  Owney’s throat was frozen and his eyes focused on nothing.

  The bartender said, “Whenever.”

  Outside on Katonah Avenue, a woman walked along, her arms filled with packages from the supermarket, and seeing her through the door of the saloon, Owney had a gnawing feeling that was on the fringes of pain. He wanted to be with his wife and baby. The woman walked into the bar as Owney went to the wall phone. When Dolores answered the phone, Owney closed his eyes in relief.

  “I’m not in work because something happened,” he said.

  “To you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?” The tone of his voice had her anxious.

  “One of the guys.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I just want to come home.”

  “Then go. Leave right now. What happened?”

  “I just want to come home with you and Christine.”

  “Oh.”

  “Dolores, the ceiling came in on a guy.”

  “How bad?”

  “You can’t do worse, don’t ask me. Just let me come home.”

  She said nothing.

  “I haven’t even had a glass of water. I’m just standing here at work. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be wandering around. I want to come home to you.”

  He was concentrating so deeply on the phone that he did not see the woman shopper step from the bar to the rose light of the juke box.

  “Play E Seven,” somebody shouted.

  “No,” she said, dropping a coin into the juke box, “I got my own nice numbers. There.” She punched two numbers and then turned to go back to the bar.

  “Owney?”

  “Yeah, uh …”

  He dropped the phone and his scraped hands reached for the side of the juke box, for anything, the reject button, the electric cord. And now out of the juke box there was a blast, a foot-stomping, shouting, “We’re off to Dublin in the green, in the green …”

  “Dolores?”

  “Did you get papers from the lawyer?” she said, her voice low.

  “Dolores.”

  “Sign them and send them in or we’ll just go without you. Have fun at your wake. Bye.”

  O’Sullivan sat in the beginning of the chill evening and watched the people, all black, walk out of the subway and along the walkway into the housing projects that were a block deep. O’Sullivan really saw Joe DiMaggio, who had been right at this spot, maybe a yard or so away, but that could do, you could say right at this spot, O’Sullivan said to himself. DiMaggio was here before there was a housing project, when the place was the Polo Grounds and the Giants played the Yankees in a World Series. If they hadn’t pitched me inside, I would have been in a World Series myself, O’Sullivan thought. Now he stared into the night and watched DiMaggio, who was waiting in center field. With two out in the ninth inning, there was a long fly to center and DiMaggio ran across the grass with his head and body like a statue. The real big guys don’t waste motion, O’Sullivan thought. Running across the grass after a ball flying through the sky. Of course, DiMaggio reached up and caught it right at the foot of the steps leading to the clubhouse. And then he never missed a beat. He just flew up the flight of stairs with the back of his gray road uniform billowing in the breeze and he disappeared into the clubhouse. The game was over and DiMaggio was gone and he left the whole ballpark in silence. That’s how you do it to them, baby, O’Sullivan told himself. Put them into shock.

  O’Sullivan got off the bench and stood for a moment. “All right, let’s go,” he said to Old Jack.

  Then they got in the car, and O’Sullivan patted the shining new baseball bat re
sting on the front seat. He felt better with the bat than he ever had with a gun, which he had used until 1955, when he shot a man in a hallway on West 55th Street for the carpenters’ union. He was held without bail for nine months awaiting a trial that his lawyer kept postponing until the two witnesses against O’Sullivan, a janitor and a night watchman on Pier 86, disappeared while O’Sullivan sat in his cell. Sat with the fucking niggers jerking off in the cells on either side. Jerking off with so much noise that it sounded like they were trying to break through the walls. The day he walked out of the jailhouse, the old Tombs, he walked away with his neck held stiffly so he wouldn’t have to look back at it. After that, he went to a baseball bat. The way he swung it, it did physical damage and spread all the fear he needed, while at the same time dissuading people from launching widespread homicide investigations, as they did over guns.

  “I taped the handle for you,” Junior said as he started the car.

  “Do you know they don’t use tape anymore?” O’Sullivan said.

  “I never heard that,” Old Jack said.

  “Everybody in the major leagues wears gloves. Nobody tapes a bat handle anymore.”

  “Then you got the last taped bat in the whole country,” the old man said.

  “I might be the last man out in the street who uses a bat at all,” O’Sullivan said. He peered down at the bat. Thirty-three ounces. Too light for a big guy like me, he thought. Then he decided that, no, that isn’t right. Stan Musial used a thirty-two-ounce bat.

  “Every time I come around here, I think of that rat kid,” Old Jack said.

  “That’s personal,” O’Suilivan said. “You do what you have to do with him. He don’t live but ten blocks from you. I’m only thinking of business. We’re supposed to get our end, every week from that job. They try to give me nothing. Morrison cries.”