Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Are you working today?” Grandma asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Why not today?”

  “I got a lot to do today,” Owney said.

  “You got union and all that?” Grandma asked.

  “Doesn’t mean anything if you don’t work one day,” Owney said.

  “You don’t get no benefits for being off?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t somebody come up with something?”

  “Nope.”

  “I thought unions were supposed to do everything,” Grandma said.

  “I need the day,” Owney said. He sat in silence and suddenly became comfortable with the squeaking sounds of boxing shoes on a canvas as the opponent began to move as he pleased, the left hand snapping.

  An old man in a black overcoat, with dandruff-whitened shoulders, came in and read a newspaper over a beer. The Con Edison meter reader came in for rye. Two Budweiser beer truck drivers came in next. They had a beer, then the heavier of the two handed Grandma the yellow slip.

  “We got ten cases for you.”

  “Ten? I’m supposed to get thirty.”

  The beer truck driver looked at the slip. “It says only ten here.”

  Grandma shook her head. “I’m supposed to get thirty. I got to think about this.”

  “What can I do, Grandma?”

  “Have a drink while I think.”

  Owney fingered his change on the bar and looked out the window. Now, a bus with seats vacant in the midmorning pulled around the corner in a turn so wide the front of the bus seemed to be coming through the bar window. The driver was in a black sweater. On a hook behind him, the orange lining of his zippered jacket showed. Owney’s eyes followed the orange lining as the bus swung past the window and went up the street. He remembered walking into school late and everybody sitting at desks and their clothes hanging on the hooks in the back of the room.

  The shot glass dropped out of Owney’s hand.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Grandma said.

  “About what?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re supposed to drop things.” She was wiping the bar in front of him. He had knocked over the beer too.

  Owney went to the men’s room.

  On the way back, the squeaking became loud and now alcohol came off his toes and stood flat in the middle of the ring and threw a flurry of punches. He ended the combination perfectly, with a left hook, and Owney, his hands down, stopped at a table in the back of the barroom.

  He decided he wanted to sit down alone and rest. He knocked over the first chair and slumped onto the chair against the wall. He put his shoulder against the wall. Behind him were stacked cardboard cases of Rheingold beer. He sat there and listened to Grandma and Louie talk to each other about getting fucked. After a while, Owney heard a small noise, a pop, and felt something pushing out of his pulse. A worm had broken through the skin on the inside of his wrist and was starting to wriggle out of the vein. Dark brown, a hint of red, the worm bunched fat in the opening. Just a little of the worm was coming out of the skin. Then the worm was getting as much of its body as possible through the opening, pulling up its skin like a pair of socks, trying to get the rest of the body down inside the vein, to just slide through the vein like a tail and come out through the opening in the skin.

  Owney plucked at the head of the worm, trying to catch it so he could pull the whole worm out of his wrist. The worm began to roll inside itself, the outer skin running over the front lips and then going down inside. Owney wondered how the worm saw his fingers coming. Does a worm see? Perhaps the follicles around the front lips serve as some kind of eyes. As Owney got his fingers on the worm, the head withdrew into the body, the worm skin rolling rapidly inside, the bunching of the worm’s body becoming noticeably less in the opening of the skin at Owney’s pulse. Inside his wrist, Owney could feel the worm going back through the vein, back up into his arm. He pressed his thumb hard against his wrist, a half inch above the opening the worm had made. This trapped the worm. The head of the worm, with a fat roll of escalator-motion skin, sat in the mouth of the open pulse. Owney worked his thumb so that he pushed the skin on the inside of his wrist down toward the heel of his hand. The fatty roll of worm head now came out of the hole in his wrist. Owney worked his thumb more. The worm came higher out of the hole. Enough worm so that Owney could pick it off with his thumb and index finger. The head of the worm now was touching the first creased line between the bottom of Owney’s wrist and the start of the heel of his hand. Owney plucked quickly, too quickly for the worm. He caught the worm by the fatty roll and pulled. He could feel the worm coming through his vein. Long, wet, brown wrinkles. Pull easy, he told himself, don’t rip it off and leave the tail inside. As the worm came out, he worked his fingers down the worm so that he couldn’t pull the top half off, and he kept pulling carefully until it all came out. The worm was four inches long.

  Owney held the worm in one hand and lit a cigarette with the other. He held the cigarette against the worm. The worm shriveled as he crushed the cigarette against it. Carefully, Owney folded back the skin flaps of the hole the worm had made coming out of his wrist. When he had the flaps of the skin in place, he pressed a thumb against the skin so it would begin knitting. It’s a good thing, he told himself, that I heal so fast.

  He got to the diner early, took one look inside, and went across the street to a big place that was empty, except for a man with watery blue eyes who was at the window. Owney ordered a beer and then decided to have a shot with it.

  Five days, he said to himself. So I’ll do five days.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, he couldn’t remember when, he knew he had tried to call Dolores and she had snarled and hung up on him. And then he had called Navy; he agreed to go away with Navy. Now he sat at the bar and swallowed his drink. Outside, the traffic on Fourth Avenue in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn was heavy. Across the street was the diner, on the corner of 69th Street. At night, the entranceway to the diner, and the sidewalks right outside it, are the scene of the most fistfights of any place in the entire city except Madison Square Garden. In the morning, there are bewildered men, the coffee shaking in their hands, who wait for union alcoholism counselors to pick them up and take them off to dry-out centers.

  Owney pushed money at the bartender and went out into the street. He walked into a delicatessen and bought nine bottles of beer. Then he walked down to a liquor store and bought a small bottle of Mateus white wine. It would taste good in the morning if it was chilled, he thought. Maybe if the car window was open on the ride down to this place in New Jersey, the cold air would chill the bottle.

  He went over to the diner. Navy sat in a booth alone with coffee and a nervous cigarette. “We have to make one stop on Staten Island. You know Pete Toner?”

  “He works the Sixty-third Street tunnel?”

  “That’s him. I got calls from him all last night. The last time was three in the morning. This is about the fifth time I’ve had him.” He paid the cashier and led Owney out to the car.”

  On Staten Island, in the middle of a row of two-story attached houses, a woman was at the upstairs window. She had a mattress hanging halfway out the window. A man on the front stoop stood up unsteadily. He had on a white golf cap and clutched a small paper bag. He looked up at the woman.

  “Go ahead,” she said to him.

  Then she called down to Navy, “Thank God you’re here.” She pushed more of the mattress out into the air. “If you didn’t come today I was going to make him start wearing Pampers.”

  On the stoop, the man yelled up, “Would you shut up? Everybody will hear you.”

  “It’s good everybody wasn’t sleeping in bed with you last night.”

  The man on the steps snarled something.

  “The big shot,” she said. “Now he’s going to hit me.” She pointed at the mattress. “I go all through this business with three kids. Now I got him.”

  “It happens,” Navy said
to Owney.

  The man in the white cap, Toner, walked to the car and flopped into the back seat. He immediately went into the paper bag and brought out a can of beer. The car was moving when Toner suddenly wailed, “It’s frozen!”

  “She’s got to get back at you some way,” Navy said.

  Toner raised his right leg and shoved the beer cans under it. He brought the leg down and settled himself with a hen’s grunt. “I’ll just wait till they get warm,” he said. His chin dropped onto his chest and he fell asleep with a cigarette burning down between his fingers.

  “Driving drunks,” Navy said.

  “He’s not doing anything,” Owney said.

  “I’m driving you, too,” Navy said. On the Jersey Turnpike, Owney pulled out a bottle of beer.

  “How long does it take to get there?” he said.

  “Another two hours,” Navy said.

  Owney began to measure the trip. Nine bottles. No, better make it eight, this guy Toner will be taking at least one of them for sure. That leaves eight bottles for two hours. A bottle every fifteen minutes. He looked at the one bottle in his hand. It was nearly gone. Owney started getting nervous. I’ll never make it, he thought. Then he remembered the wine. He relaxed. That’ll take me through the last half-hour, he thought.

  Toner woke up a short while later. “Where are we?” he said. His hand went under his leg for the beer he was trying to hatch.

  “Soon,” Navy said.

  Toner took the tab off one of the beers and moaned, “It’s still frozen.” He swallowed the small bit of foam that had collected at the top. He licked the amber ice underneath. Then he held the can between his hands, trying to warm it. Whenever some of the ice melted into the foam he brought the can up and licked it.

  Navy said, “I took four guys down here once. When I left, I wouldn’t have given any of them more than two weeks. But three are still sober. That’s two years later. They’re sober. And you’re the only one that’s still drunk.”

  “Yeah, well,” Toner said.

  “I guess it’s tough for him,” Owney said.

  “He’s not alone,” Navy said.

  The car swerved to pass a bus. The bottles between Owney’s legs clinked.

  “What’s that?” Toner said. His head hung over the front seat and his eyes widened as he saw the beer on the floor between Owney’s legs.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Toner said.

  Owney opened one for Toner and one for himself. They drove in silence for a while and then Owney asked, “What is this place, a hospital?”

  “No, detox and rehabilitation. Mostly rehabilitation. They keep you the first five days in a separate section, then they move you over.”

  “Five days in?” Owney said.

  “That’s right,” Navy said. “Then twenty-three days with the others for rehabilitation. It’s AA. Nothing else works.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” Toner called from the back.

  “Go ahead,” Navy said.

  “Did you ever drink cold duck?”

  “Of course. I always thought that when I had that drink I’d have on a nice velvet robe and I’d be drinking it out of a snifter. Like a gentleman. But one morning I came down in my underwear and I drank two quarts of it out of a Welch’s jelly glass.”

  Later, Navy got off the turnpike and went onto a road that ran through South Jersey farmland that was brown in the cold weather. Toner now became nervous.

  “I need cigarettes.”

  “You’ll get them,” Navy said. “Just about now you’re wondering why you called me.”

  “No, in two days I’d of been dead,” Toner said.

  “Well, I’m wondering a little,” Owney said.

  “That’s normal,” Navy said. “Just concentrate on what you can do for yourself here. Think ahead.”

  “Is it far from anyplace?” Owney asked.

  “Pretty far. That’s why you’re only allowed to have ten dollars for cigarettes. As long as people don’t have any carfare, there is no way that they can leave the place. It’s too far.”

  Owney took a couple of fierce slugs of white wine. He had a hundred dollars stashed in his shoe. He wondered if they would search him.

  They went down a road that had only one farmhouse for half a mile. Then they came up to a long white fence and Navy turned into the driveway of what had been a private estate. There was a large white house and behind it was a long, low building of gray wood.

  Navy parked the car and went into the white house through a side door. He stood in an office and talked to a man with a round face and thick glasses. The man laughed in greeting as Toner and Owney came in.

  “Hey! Hiya!” He looked at Toner. “Where’d you get the hat?”

  “Staten Island,” Toner said.

  “Boy, it sure looks like it,” the man said. He laughed uproariously. Toner and Owney sat down and a secretary took their names and addresses and asked questions about their medical history. They turned over their personal belongings and Navy gave her twenty dollars to buy cigarettes for the two. Then he took Owney aside.

  “I’ll call the wife. I’ll go to the house and pick up any clothes she wants to send down. You think you’re here to get out of trouble at home. If you think a little bit, you might realize that you’re here for more than that. That’s all. I’ll see you around.”

  The man in charge took Owney and Toner over to the gray dormitory building. The man showed Owney into a room that had four neatly made beds. Dull red bedspreads were unwrinkled. The shades were drawn. There was a small television set in the center of the room.

  “We don’t have single rooms here. We believe in people helping each other. We allow television only in the detox unit. After you get over the first seventy-two hours, we don’t feel you’re here for television. We have too extensive a rehabilitation program to allow time for television. Let me show you something else we have.”

  Owney followed the man out a door and through a small gate that led into a large garden.

  “Isn’t this perfect?” the man said. “You stand here and it reminds you of how much you have forgotten about God. People come here and think about a power greater than themselves. It’s very important to rehabilitation.”

  “It’s nice,” Owney said.

  They walked back to the dormitory building. “I’ll just step down the hall and see how Toner is doing,” the man said.

  Owney stepped into the doorway of his room. Restful. If you have to be someplace, it’s not a bad place to stay at all. He walked over to the window and lifted the shade. Outside, on this side of the dormitory, the afternoon sun was falling on empty farm fields that ran as far as he could see. He walked out of the room and went to the door that led out to the gardens, which sat silent under the trees. He walked slowly down a path. When he came to a low wall, he stepped over it and into a field on the other side. It was a corn field, and the nubs of stalks crackled under his feet as he walked. Crackled louder as he began to pick up the pace. He figured he had a long walk until he hit someplace that would be fun.

  He kept walking through dirt fields for what seemed like an hour and then one field ended at a crossroads where there was a silver corrugated diner. Owney’s eyes picked out the blue neon sign in the window that meant there was beer inside. A trailer truck and a couple of cars were parked in front of the diner. Owney came out of the field and walked briskly across the road and now he could read the blue neon sign. SCHMIDT’S. A Philadelphia beer. He was that far down from New York. Something, he told himself. He walked briskly across the road and into a vestibule that was decorated with color snapshots of truck cabs, the owners posing proudly in front of them. Reds and blues, with big gleaming metal fronts and painted decorations. Maybe there would be a couple of them around to have a drink with, Owney thought. He grabbed the sliding door handle and pulled it and walked into the diner.

  “You got here fast,” Navy said. He sat in the first booth with coffee and a cigarette. He pursed his lips and look
ed at his watch. “Twenty-two minutes, from your room to here. Last guy I had here took a whole half-hour.”

  “He must’ve got lost,” Owney said.

  12

  AS A CHILD SHE never had realized that her mother snored at night. Her mother fell asleep with the suppleness and consciousness of a cinder block dropped onto the bed; within moments, her mouth opened and she snored with extraordinary velocity. Dolores’s baby slept in the crib against the wall; Dolores, denied sleep, her foot switching back and forth as it investigated her empty bed, felt trapped in the small room by the noise. On the first night that she had returned to her mother’s house, Dolores had walked into her mother’s bedroom and shaken the woman by the shoulder. As this was the first time since, her husband’s demise that she had been touched in bed by anything more than an old dream, the woman awoke with a yelp. “I got my own way to sleep, after all these years. You don’t like it, you don’t have to listen.” Dolores, standing barefooted, as she had on so many nights of her early life, suddenly realized that she was a stranger under the roof.

  On many nights, she lay awake and waited for the noise to diminish, or for exhaustion to cause her to fall asleep. Never had Dolores envisioned the passion that noise at night could produce. Prisoners in large penitentiaries understand the reasons for strict rules of silence after the night bell; there have been too many murders over prolonged whisper. A wife leaving her husband to return to her family home has no such lore. In bed each night, Dolores was furious at her mother and gave the sheets an extra kick as the sound keeping her awake caused her to become furious. She put her hand flat on her midsection, which was a mistake at this hour, for she could feel the new fat; she had accepted the notion that she had gained ten pounds from late-night eating, but now her touch told her it was more like fifteen. When Owney is in a bar, he drinks up at least three thousand calories and he weighs less than when I met him, she thought. I watch him drink and I gain weight. Immediately, she thought of the Baby Ruth in her purse: big red lettering on white paper. The peanuts delightfully resistant against the teeth. She reached into her purse, gladdened as she felt the Baby Ruth bar and pulled it out. She stared at the darkness above her with the candy bar in her hand. I have to stop doing this, she told herself. I don’t even like it now. She knew the eating came out of a disorderly mind and her success depended on her mind’s eye collecting orderly sets of thoughtful pictures, and not these sudden blowups of Baby Ruth bars. Of course she took another bite. The absence of money in a woman’s life, Dolores realized, does as much to deform a woman’s figure as having children. There are no sit-ups that can reduce the effects of missing money, an ailment that goes right to the jawbone. Only the most stringent discipline, which she could not summon, could prevent this. Through the month before this, while Owney sat in a dry-out home in New Jersey, and received no pay, Dolores found herself grabbing cold ravioli in the morning. Then, two weeks into this month, when she went around to their old apartment on 74th Street to look for the check that Owney received for his medal, she found only a sheaf of white envelopes, junk mail, on the vestibule floor under the mail slot. She put them atop the radiator and looked on the floor again for the brown window envelope, and finding it missing, she walked immediately up to the Glendale Bake Shop and bought four charlotte russes, two of which she ate on the seven-block walk home, where she called Owney’s parents’ house and got his mother.