Tony tossed the ball to him and he lunged for it too soon, so that it hit him in the chin. He bounced it a few times, tilted his head, shot again. The ball zoomed toward the backboard in a straight line and this time it went right through the hoop. I was amazed. He smiled and took two steps backwards. “C’mon, c’mon,” he called. “Gimme.” I tossed the ball to him. He caught it, shot again, his right foot going up in the air backwards, almost as if he were skipping. The ball rattled the metal backboard and fell through the hoop again. I couldn’t believe it.
He started going around in a circle, from the right side to the left, the way we did when we played Around-the-World, and he made eleven shots in a row before he missed, all line drives.
“Not bad for an old man, huh?” he said. “Can I shoot or can I shoot? You answer me that.”
Behind his glasses, enormous magnified droplets of sweat dripped down along either side of his nose. Under his armpits his shirt was soaked. He waited a few seconds, listening to my friends tell him how great he was and asking him what teams he’d played for when he was young, but instead of answering he just looked at me, smiled, and repeated what he’d said before. “Can I shoot or can I shoot?” He told me to have a good time but not to come home too late because he had a surprise for me.
When we were done playing, Tony asked me to go to his house with him. He said he had a surprise for me too and that there was still plenty of time until supper. We walked up Church Avenue and then along New York Avenue to the Italian section on the other side of Linden Boulevard, and I felt a little nervous, being in Mr. Fasalino’s territory. But I told myself to act the way Abe acted—as if nothing were the matter and we were all at peace with one another. If you acted as if something were so, Abe said, sometimes everyone would believe it was so.
I liked being with Tony. He had straight, sandy-colored hair that fell over his forehead and into his eyes, and just before he asked a question he always gave a flick to his head that made the hair flap back on top of his head. He had small, sharp features and a smile that seemed to slant the same way his hair did, and sometimes he’d tease me about how, because of my dark curls, I looked more like a Wop than he did. While we walked and he asked me things I explained about how my father was blind in one eye since he was a kid and had almost no vision in the other and Tony agreed with me that if my father had had two normal eyes he would probably have been good enough to make it in the pros. Tony said that his priest explained to him how if you were a good person God made up for things—if you lost a leg, God might give you strong hands, or if you had rotten teeth, say, He might give you beautiful hair, or if you lost an eye He could give you good hearing, and when we came to Tony’s street we talked about athletes who’d had diseases when they were young or who got wounded in the war, and of how they’d overcome their handicaps. We talked about guys like Monty Stratton, who pitched for the White Sox with a wooden leg, and Lou Brissie, the Athletics pitcher, who had a steel plate in his head from the time he got hit while chucking hand grenades into a Japanese bunker, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and his great fork ball, and Ed Head of the Dodgers, who was wounded on the beach at Okinawa and had switched from being a right-handed pitcher before the war to a lefty after the war, and Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder who’d played for the St. Louis Browns.
When we were done discussing ball players and were at Tony’s house—it was a small two-story private house with a porch and a green roof and a big garage and lots of pictures of Jesus and Mary on the walls—I repeated things my father said about President Roosevelt and how he was the greatest president our country ever had even though he’d had polio as a kid, and when I talked about how Roosevelt had worked like a maniac, swimming and exercising, and about how terrible it was that he hadn’t lived to see the Japanese and Nazis surrender, I got tears in my eyes the way my father did when he talked about him.
Tony asked if I’d ever drawn a picture of Roosevelt and I said I hadn’t. Then he took me to his basement, and from a box under his workbench—Tony was good with tools and could make benches and birdhouses and doorstops and things—he took out a big package and handed it to me. Inside were five packages of different kinds of drawing paper: nice thick creamy white paper made from rags—the kind I’d look at in the art store but couldn’t afford to buy.
“I figured a guy who could draw like you should have quality merchandise to work with,” he said.
“How’d you get it?”
“I got my ways, you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Ah. C’mon, Davey,” he said. “Things fall off trucks sometimes, right? Only you gotta be there at the right time, that’s all.”
I said I had to get home to see what my father’s surprise was and he said that the paper wasn’t the real surprise. The real surprise was out in the garage.
“C’mon,” he said, and I followed him up from the cellar. The side door of his garage was locked with a combination lock, and when he had rolled the tumblers and opened it and turned the light on inside, he motioned me in.
“Take a gander, Davey. You take a good long gander.”
I stepped inside and gasped. The garage was filled with dozens of pinball machines, soda machines, candy machines, and juke boxes, all new and shining.
“Jesus!” I said.
“That ain’t all.”
He led me past the machines to the back, to a corner where there were still a lot of oil-soaked rags and sawdust and nuts and bolts and pieces of metal. He pushed aside a few window screens, and came up with a little machine that looked something like my mother’s meat grinder, except that where you would put the meat in, the opening was narrower, like a slot for letters.
“Watch this,” Tony said.
He reached up to one of the rafters, pulled down a sheet of thin metal, fed it into the machine, cranked the handle, and suddenly little round pieces of metal were dropping to the floor. Then he took a quarter out of his pocket, showed me that the slugs of metal were the same size as the quarter.
“Listen,” he said. “I ain’t shown this to nobody else and if my old man knew he’d kill me, but I figure you’re a guy I can trust, right?”
“Sure.”
“You got brains, Davey. Everybody knows that. You ain’t gonna be like the rest of us. Me, I’ll probably wind up like my brothers and my old man, running dirty trips for Fasalino and taking a rap once in a while, but you—I got the feeling, even though your old man works for your uncle—that you ain’t gonna wind up as dumb as the rest of us.”
“You’re not dumb,” I said.
“Well, I ain’t smart like you.” He laughed. “You want proof?”
“Sure. Give me proof.”
“The proof is that you’re here and I’m showing you all this stuff my old man got stored for Fasalino.” He grinned and I grinned with him. “I mean, how dumb can a guy be? See those big cartons over there?”
“Yes.”
“Got enough fags in there to keep your old man happy for the rest of his life. They fall out of trucks too, them cigarettes, only they ain’t got their tax stickers on them yet. My brother Victor, that’s his deal, peddling the cigarettes. Phil, he works the juke boxes and pinball machines. And my old man, what’s his racket? He’s the doorman, see? He opens and closes the door for his sons. What a drip!”
I moved back a step. “Why are you showing me this, Tony, if it can get you in trouble?”
“I don’t know. When I saw your old man, and the way you looked down when he started shooting, I just kind of felt like it. Only he surprised you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. Let’s face it, Davey. You and me, we got drips for fathers mostly, only your old man might have been better with two eyes, so you can’t blame him completely, and I got these fucking brothers too who like to beat up on me. They found me in here with you, they’d pound the shit out of me till you could hear me in Canarsie. Only what’s the fun of having all this stuff, I say to myself, if yo
u can’t show it to somebody, you know what I mean? C’mon—you and me are gonna have some fun.”
Tony got a paper bag and filled it with the slugs. Then he put the machine back under the screens.
“You’re lucky you ain’t got brothers,” he said when we were walking again, away from his house. “The thing of it is, even if I wanted to be different from them—more like you—they’d fry my ass. They’re bigger than me and when I try to say no to them, all the shit they want me to do, my father sticks up for them, and you know why?”
“No.”
“Glad you asked,” he said, laughing. “Because they pound the shit out of him too, see? They’re bigger than he is and it’s really something—I wish you could be there to watch, to see the way they slap him around sometimes, him whimpering and begging. Nobody would believe it, the way it is in my house sometimes.” He stopped. “Listen. You won’t tell on me then, will you—to Abe or your father?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Good for you, Cremona.” He slapped me on the back. “I figured I could trust you, that you and me could be buddies, no matter what happens in the rest of our lives. I mean, when we’re on the same team in the schoolyard, is there any two guys can beat us? It’s like when I’m about to make a move toward the basket, you always know it ahead of time and get the ball to me. We’re a good team, you and me.”
“Sure.”
“So that’s why I figured I’d choose you to go in partners with me.” He jingled the bag of slugs. “What we do, see, is we go somewhere where they got candy and soda machines, and then we put a slug in, and that way we get ourselves a soda for a nickel and twenty cents change too. Got it?”
“But won’t your father and brothers get mad when they open the machines and find all the slugs?”
“You think I’m some kind of idiot? I know which machines are theirs and which aren’t, and I know which ones are your uncle’s. What we do is we work different territories. C’mon.”
So Tony and I got on the subway at Church Avenue, rode to Atlantic, and went into the big station there, where people took the trains out to the racetracks and Long Island. Then we started in on the different machines, trying to act as nonchalant as we could. Tony let me put the first slug in. A cup dropped down and filled with Coke, and four nickels came spitting out of the change compartment. I drank the soda and put the nickels in my pocket. Tony put a slug in and the same thing happened for him, and then we did it again—I couldn’t believe it—and when we got twenty nickels each we went to a change booth and asked the woman there to give us dollar bills for our nickels, and then we ran out of the station, laughing like crazy and pounding each other on the back and telling each other what a great team we made! We walked a few blocks, went down into another train station—Tony said it was best to use train stations because of the noise and how people were coming and going and not hanging around—and we filled our pockets with change and our mouths with soda and food: Clark bars and Oh Henry bars and Baby Ruths.
“Jesus,” I said, banging on my belly. “What if my father wants to take me to a restaurant?”
“Then you stick your finger down your throat first and barf.”
“Like the Romans, right?”
“Yeah. Only you come to my house and do it all over my brothers, okay?”
It was still light out when we’d used up all our slugs, so we decided to walk off our eating by heading back along Flatbush Avenue and cutting left at Parkside. It surprised me that Tony could talk so easily about trusting me, about how I was the only guy at school he considered a friend. During recess sometimes he would get one of the Italian girls up against a car fender outside the schoolyard and everybody would yell to come and see, that Tony Cremona had his finger right up somebody’s pussy, and we would all come running. It would be true that he was fingering one of the tough Italian girls, but Tony confessed that he only did it because he felt he had to, because it was the kind of thing his brothers bragged about having done when they were his age and that if they didn’t hear he was doing it too they would knock him around even more. In the classroom he was quiet in the same way I was, and even though he didn’t get the best grades, you could tell from the brightness of his eyes—the way he listened to things—that he was a lot smarter than he let on.
When we got to the corner of Nostrand and Linden—we stopped at his house to pick up my drawing paper—we separated. I told Tony that I’d hide the money and tell my father I found the paper next to a trash can near the art store. Tony said he hoped we could do more things together in the fall when school started. He said we could use the money from the slugs to go downtown to movies at the Paramount or the Fox or the Albee. We could pick up girls together if we wanted and sit in the balcony and neck, or we could go for walks in the park. He figured that if he was with a guy like me he could meet girls with more class. I thanked him again for the paper and for showing me his father’s garage.
“Yeah, we’re kind of like blood brothers now, I guess, don’t you think? I mean, like in the movies when the white guy and the Indian slit their wrists and cross them and mix the blood, except that instead of us cutting our wrists, what’s gonna keep our secret bond is that if either of us tells on the other we’re gonna get our wrists slit, right?”
“I suppose,” I said, and when I did he laughed and pounded me on the back and told me that I was all right in his book, he could tell it from the way I didn’t hesitate about going to his house, even though we both knew it might make Abe or my father angry if they found out. “You got real courage, Davey,” he said then. “That’s why I’m glad I was smart enough to choose you to be my friend. I mean, we’re in the same boat, you and me—except the boats are separate, right?”
“I suppose.”
He took out his roll of dollar bills. “Wow!” he said. “We really did it, you and me, didn’t we? We really did it, partner!”
“We really did it.”
“You wanna do it again soon, now that you lost your cherry and we got the jitters out of us? My old man, what he does, see, is he goes into the city and sells bags of the stuff in kangarooland to spics and niggers so they can do what we did, but if he found out I was doing it, he’d cream my ass. You watch your own ass, partner. With Abe and Fasalino and my brothers and all, we gotta make like nothing happened, right? Like we hardly know each other, see—like we maybe just like to play ball together sometimes on account of we go to the same school and we’re the two best athletes there.”
I was scared my father would ask me where I’d been and why I was late and how I’d gotten the new drawing paper, but instead he just smiled when I got home and handed me an envelope. Inside were two box-seat tickets to the Dodger-Giant game that night—Abe had left them for us—and I threw my arms around my father’s neck and hugged him.
During the game my father bought me everything I wanted—a program and a yearbook and a pennant and hot dogs and a Dodger hat—and when Jackie Robinson doubled in the bottom of the ninth to drive in the winning run, it made the day seem perfect. It was Jackie’s rookie year with the Dodgers and he was playing first base and leading the league in stolen bases. On the way home, for the first time I could remember, my father was willing to go over the game with me, inning by inning. He teased me about how articulate I was when I wanted to be and how I’d make a good lawyer someday—a fine public speaker—if that was my choice, and how he would give my mother a full report so that she’d stop calling me her silent one. We held hands too, which we hadn’t done for a long time, and I liked the way his skin felt against mine—soft in the middle, but hard and calloused along the edges from all the years of breaking off twine.
We stopped at Carsten’s, on Flatbush Avenue, for ice cream sodas, and when he gave me a small speech about democracy and how terrific he thought it was that the Dodgers were the first team in baseball to hire a black man, I almost told him how proud it made me feel too, that Jackie was a Dodger. But I was afraid that if he knew how much I cared about Jackie—how
scared I’d been that Jackie might have a hard time under all the pressure and get sent back to the minors—he might use it against me sometime later on, when things weren’t going so well for the two of us and my mother was home again.
The air was nice and cool when we left, and we talked all the way to our block about the Dodgers, with me asking him questions about the crazy players he’d seen play for them in the twenties and thirties—Babe Herman and Casey Stengel and Van Lingle Mungo and Dazzy Vance. In front of our building two men stepped out from behind a parked car. One of them was a thin black man wearing sunglasses and a flowered yellow shirt. The other man was fat and wore a dark double-breasted wool suit.
“Mr. Voloshin?” the fat man asked. “Mr. Solomon Voloshin?”
“That’s my name.”
“And this is your son David, yes?”
My father didn’t answer, and the fat man smiled and reached toward me. I pulled back and stared hard into his face so that I could memorize his features.
“He’s a nice-looking boy. Looks a little like his uncle, wouldn’t you say? You must care a lot about him, Mr. Voloshin. I got sons too. Three boys. So believe me when I tell you that you yourself don’t got a thing to worry about. I ain’t here to make no trouble. I’m only here to say that if you get word from your brother-in-law you tell him that maybe he shouldn’t come home. That maybe he should consider settling in California.” He laughed. “They got no winters in California, I hear, so it should be much better for his health out there. Okay, Mr. Voloshin? I can count on you to deliver the message?”
“Get out of our way,” my father said. “Get out of our way, do you hear me? You just get out of our way.”
The black man stepped forward, but the fat man put a hand on the black man’s arm.
“I told you once, Mr. Voloshin. I ain’t here to make no trouble. I’m just a messenger making a delivery, yes?” He laughed again. “You make deliveries. I make deliveries. We all make deliveries. So we should understand one another, yes?”
Before My Life Began Page 8