Table Money
Page 51
“Did you think of that because of where you were?”
“That’s not me,” he said, and she knew that it wasn’t.
“Then were you thinking that way because that’s the way you were supposed to?” He made a face.
“Do you really want all this responsibility?”
“I just told you that I thought another baby would’ve straightened me out.”
“Do you mean that I’m supposed to give birth immediately so you can stay out of bars?”
“No, I mean before. Forget it. I’m grown up now. We’ll put a lot into every day and make up for what we lost.”
He said this as dryly as the recitation of a ledger and she found herself standing in the hospital hallway and accepting it.
When his mother returned, he held each of them by the arm as they walked toward the elevator. On the way home, Dolores tried to deal with her inner confusion. Danny Murphy, who sat in the front seat and talked incessantly, saved her from the trap of any conversation. When they came up to the cemetery house, Dolores got out of the car and stood with Owney and his mother. She kissed Owney’s mother on the cheek and then brushed her lips across his cheek.
“What time tomorrow?” Owney said.
“I don’t know,” Dolores said, hesitantly.
“I’ll call you from the hospital and come around the house then.”
“Which house?” Owney’s mother said.
Dolores said nothing.
“You pay all this rent for a house you don’t live in,” the mother said.
Dolores’s foot almost slipped and brought her to another level and some impulse to surrender. She heard herself saying, “Well, right now, I have to get to the baby.”
On Saturday, Owen Morrison was allowed to see his father for ten minutes. Then as he headed for the car, a block down, he passed a bar whose window was filled with faces, and one of them moved quickly and flung open the barroom door. Danny Murphy stood there. “The whole mob is inside. We’re here to see your father if they’ll let us.”
On the hot street, the opponent, grunting like an old cow, tried to dig a left hand into Owney’s stomach. With dirty sweat on a pasty face, eyes looking out from a circle of scars, bandy legs that would not buckle, the opponent dogged Owney. The opponent looked for that greatest opening, uncertainty. He stood in the center of the ring and the crowd’s derision of Owney rang to the rafters. The opponent motioned with his gloves for Owney to come out and mix it up.
“We’re everybody here,” Danny Murphy said. The noise of the bar came out the open door. Cold beer in a clean glass in the morning sunlight. “Come on,” Danny Murphy said.
An hour and a half later, Owney and Dolores Morrison were at a table in the AA meeting in Park Slope, listening to a man say that because of trouble with his children the night before, he had nearly gone to drink and that he was thankful that everybody now would listen to him, as seeing their faces alone was of great assistance to him.
The man running the meeting pointed at Owney, who stood up with cold beer in his mind and his opponent only inches away; the opponent became more agile as the fight grew tougher, and he was here to let Owney know it in front of all of those who sat in the low-ceilinged, smoky room. Now the opponent got in a good shot. Owney standing, looking at a blank wall in the front of the room, became embarrassed and resentful. What he was doing was an exercise to please the others in the room. Pathetic wrecks. He stood in doubt and said nothing. Then the opponent threw the punch that would knock Owney back into the seat, humiliated and angry, and send him out for that cold beer. This one time anyway, Owney bent his body and let the punch go around his neck.
“I’m Owney and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Owney,” the people in the room called out.
Owney felt the hand on his arm and he looked at Dolores, who now was standing next to him.
“I’m going to go so you don’t have to talk in front of me.”
“Don’t worry about me. I can do anything now,” he said.
“I know you can,” she said. If there was one thing she knew, it was that. If he had made a vow to himself, and he certainly had, right in front of her, she knew that it became an issue of life and death to protect it. In one tiny space in life, with these few words wrung from his soul, he had returned to himself his own fortune. And suddenly, she felt her anxiousness smoothed. She wanted to go for a walk in the sun. “You are going to be all right now. And I have to tell you that I have a lot to do for myself. I’m going.”
At first, it didn’t register. “How are you going to get home?” he whispered. Then, looking at her, he felt it: a sense of elation, of freeness, a sky somewhere inside her that caused her to soar as she stood next to him.
“Aren’t you going to listen to what I say?”
“Owney. The whole last three years?”
He said nothing.
“Owney. Yesterday makes me tired.”
She pointed to the front of the room, where the leader patiently waited for Owney to talk.
“Take care of your business; don’t worry about me.”
Nodding, smiling, she left the old room, the wooden floor creaking under her tiptoe, and she was in the vestibule when she heard Owney’s voice. She hurried through the door. She walked the wrong way, away from the subway and down a street of brownstone houses on a street blinking with sun.
On the drive to Syracuse on Tuesday, the baby lasted all the way up to Exit 23 on the New York State Thruway before she became carsick. At the rest area, Dolores walked to the cafeteria to get a couple of wet towels for the baby.
“Dolores!”
“What?”
“Bring me back something,” her mother called from the car.
A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.
Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.
In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.
Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 197
0s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.
Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.
Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.
Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.
Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.
Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.
Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.
Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.
Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).
Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.
Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.
Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.
The Breslin family in 1989.
Breslin with columnists David Anderson (left) and Murray Kempton (right) at a book party for Damon Runyon: A Life in New York City, 1991.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in the New York Daily News.
The quotation from “Prisoner of Love’ by Clarence Gaskill, Leo Robin, and Russ Columbo is used by permission of Edwin H. Morris and Company, a division of MPL Communications, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
copyright © 1986 by Ronridge Publications, Inc.
cover design by Mimi Bark
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JIMMY BRESLIN
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