Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Come on, Davey,” my father said, and he pulled me with him. I held back a bit, trying to see through the black man’s sunglasses.

  “You’ll deliver my message? You’ll tell your brother-in-law that Mr. Fasalino wishes him a long and happy life?”

  My father tried to get the key to our building out of his pocket, but his hand was shaking so much he couldn’t grab onto it. He jerked his hand away angrily and his key ring and coins spilled out. I got down on my knees and started picking up the change. I looked back at the two men and whispered to my father, asked him if he wanted me to ring Beau Jack’s bell. My father’s hands were shaking so much now that I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold onto anything, so when I found the right key I put it into the lock myself.

  My father stepped into the lobby and grabbed me, his nails digging into my muscle, above the elbow. Then, with the door still open, he started screaming with all his might.

  “If you goons touch a hair on my boy’s head I’ll kill you, do you hear? Do you hear me? Do you?”

  The black man started toward us and I helped my father shove the door closed. The lock clicked. My father kept screaming, his hands in the air, his fists opening and closing the way they did sometimes when he argued with my mother.

  “You’re scum of the earth, that’s what you are! Do you hear me? You ain’t nothing but lousy scum of the earth! You ain’t nothing but dumb goons. You ain’t nothing but scum of the earth! Scum of the earth is what you are!”

  The black man’s nose was squashed flat against the glass. I heard I doors opening behind us, people shouting at my father.

  “Come on!” I said.

  He stopped screaming. He looked dazed.

  “What?”

  “Just come on. Don’t be a fool, okay? Just come on before they get in after us. All they gotta do is ring and get somebody to buzz the door open.”

  “Of course.”

  He let me lead him up the stairs. I opened the door, locked it behind us, took my father with me into the kitchen.

  “Should I call the police?” I asked.

  “Don’t do nothing.”

  He leaned on the sink with one hand, breathing hard, and I was afraid he was going to faint. His skin was a pale ivory white. He looked as old as some of the men in my grandfather’s home.

  “I could call Aunt Lillian,” I offered. “She’d know what to do. Abe must have left her instructions.”

  He sat and took off his glasses. Without them he looked young and helpless again, the way he did in the wedding picture my mother kept on her vanity table. I brought him a glass of water and he sipped it, bending over, tilting the glass toward his lips. The skin around his eyes was puffy, as if it had absorbed warm water, and the lid on his bad eye hung down almost all the way, the dead eyeball floating toward the outside corner.

  I tried to figure out what I would do if he had a heart attack. I imagined lifting him, laying him out gently on the floor, covering him with blankets, telephoning for help. I thought of how I’d felt, lying on the dirt behind the hedges in front of our building, my eyes closed, while my friends talked about my wounds, about field surgery, about plastic land mines. I thought of how wonderful it was when they caressed my forehead with their cool hands and put an imaginary last cigarette in my mouth. I was glad Mr. Fasalino hadn’t used Tony’s father as his messenger this time.

  My father licked his lips and moaned. He held his eyeglasses in his right hand now. I reached across, flattened his palm, took the glasses away from him. I thought of running upstairs to Stevey Komisarik’s apartment and getting his father to come and give my father an injection. Stevey’s father was a dentist and Stevey had once shown me the black emergency bag in their hall closet. I saw myself telephoning to California. If my mother answered I would ask her to put Abe on so I could tell him and he could break the news to her. I saw myself racing down the staircase, jumping five or six steps at each landing, swinging around the turns, knocking on Beau Jack’s door and taking him back upstairs with me. Beau Jack would know what to do. During the first World War he had been stationed in France with an all-Negro unit, digging up American soldiers and burying them again.

  “See?” my father said. “Do you see now? Now do you see?”

  “Are you all right?”

  He pressed against the inside corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. He reached across to me with his other hand.

  “Give me my glasses.”

  He held his glasses up to the light, then stuck the right lens into his mouth, fogged it, wiped it clean with his handkerchief.

  “I was scared,” I said.

  “Sure you were—bums like that—who knows what they wouldn’t do? Even for women and children they got no feelings.”

  “I mean I was scared for you when you were shaking so much. When you got all pale.”

  “Come,” he said.

  I followed him to the living room. He took a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass from the side cabinet of the breakfront. He drank the whiskey in one swallow.

  “You want a taste?” he said. “You’re okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Don’t answer it. It’s those bums. But they won’t get nowhere with me.”

  I tried to smile. “You really screamed at them,” I said.

  “I screamed at them.”

  “I mean, I never thought you…” I stopped, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He cocked his head to the side and sniffed in.

  “You mean you didn’t think your old man had it in him to stand up to them, right?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. You were screaming like a maniac.”

  “I wouldn’t say I wasn’t scared,” he said. “But that don’t mean I gotta let bums like that run my life, do you see?” He sat down in his red easy chair, under the window. He stared at me, sucking on the right corner of his lower lip the way he did when he was shooting set shots. His voice was stronger. “So listen. I’ve been wanting you to know something, okay? That what I used to say about your uncle when he was overseas, I want you to know that I changed my opinion. That first night he got home, didn’t I say that the war changed him, that he was different?”

  “Yes.”

  The telephone rang again and we sat there and waited until, after sixteen rings, it stopped. In my head I made up pictures of Abe dying in front of my building, of him saying to me that it was so crazy, wasn’t it, to have lived through the war in Europe in order to die in the streets of Brooklyn.

  “If not for your uncle Abe, do you see the kind of trash that would take over the neighborhood? Do you see? People don’t want to know how bad it would be if Abe surrendered and let them muscle into his territory. They don’t know how good they got it.”

  “Does Abe hurt people?”

  “What—?”

  “At school sometimes I hear stories that he hurts people.”

  “Does Abe hurt people.”

  My father rubbed his chin, pretending that he was trying to figure out my question.

  “All right,” he said. “Listen. I can honestly say to you that to the best of my knowledge Abe himself has never laid a hand on anybody. Not counting Lillian and Sheila, I mean, and what he had to do in the Army.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to answer me. I was just wondering, is all.”

  “You got a right to know these things, Davey. Only let me ask you a question. Did you get a look at that fat Italian with the shvoogie behind him? And the shvoogie with a knife or a razor in his pocket probably? Sure.” He pointed his cigarette at me. “That’s the kind of stuff they use, those types. Rough stuff is all they know. What’s so terrible if people make a few bets? Who gets hurt? When the state of New York gyps people at the track, that’s legal, but when a hardworking fellow like Abe, who risked his life for his country, gives people honest odds, that’s illegal. Why? You answer me that, sonny boy, and you’re a genius. And Abe ain’t no loan shark ei
ther, like he could be if he wanted, do you hear me?”

  I told him I heard. I could tell he was pleased now, to have me for an audience, and he kept talking about Abe and how Abe let people have credit when they owed him money and found jobs for them when they couldn’t make ends meet. I wondered if the fat Italian was related to Tony’s family. I imagined myself asleep, the windows open, a breeze coming through, the sheet to my chin. I reminded myself to put my baseball bat under my bed and I imagined what I would do if somebody tried to crawl into my room from the fire escape. Would I lie still until he was past me, and then attack? What if he had a gun or a knife? What if there was more than one person?

  “They won’t let you live,” my father was saying. “Sure. I don’t remember what the Black Hand did, the way Momma and Poppa were frightened so they would hardly leave the house? I don’t remember the way those momzers used to walk around the neighborhood like they owned us? So what’s Abe’s big crime—that he saved us from being lamp shades so that now their bums should tell him where he can and can’t live?”

  “What’s the Black Hand?”

  “Murderers,” he said. “Gangsters. When I was your age, if you got a note in your mailbox with a black hand on it, it meant you were dead.”

  “Did anyone you know ever get a note?”

  “Sure. The Italians and the Jews, we lived near each other then, first on the Lower East Side, then when we came to Brooklyn, in East New York. Like now.”

  “Did anyone you know get killed?”

  “Stop with the questions. Always the questions, this one. You just listen to what I’m saying, do you hear me? People like that with no education, they don’t value life the way we do.” He tapped the side of his head. “That’s why they’re so scared of Abe and Mr. Rothenberg. They know Abe don’t gotta use rough stuff the way they do. If all you got is muscles and guns, see, then as soon as somebody gets more muscles and guns than you, you’re dead. So why did God give us brains?”

  My father didn’t answer his own question. He walked from one side of the room to the other, as if he didn’t know where he was, and when he looked at me again after a while, he seemed surprised to find me there. He bent down, kissed me on the forehead.

  “It’s late. You should get some sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning if you want. Only you don’t ever tell your mother about what happened tonight, all right? You just let that be something between the two of us.”

  My mother came home from California during the last week of August, and from the moment she walked through the door all she could talk about was how wonderful California was. In California she had picked lemons and oranges right off the trees; in California the air was clean and there were no winters; in California Abe had found a job for my father that would enable us to move there and buy a home of our own.

  We were in the middle of a broiling heat wave and the air hung on our bodies, so damp and heavy that I felt as if it was falling through my skin and muscles, softening my bones. My mother moved around the bedroom in slow motion, unpacking, putting things away in drawers. She had on nothing but a brassiere and panties—her skin was brown and shiny, glistening with sweat—and each time she passed the open window my father yelled at her that she was giving the neighbors a free show. She yelled that she didn’t care, that she couldn’t wait to get out of this stinking city, that she couldn’t wait to get to California where a human being could breathe. Her lips were tingling already—she hadn’t had a herpes once during the six weeks in California, she said—and she began rubbing them with ice cubes and crushed aspirin. I thought of the jars our science teacher kept at school, alcohol and chicken bones in them, and of how soft the bones would get, so that you could bend them.

  My father sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over. Gray hairs curled around the nipples of his breasts. Sweat slid down his face and neck, ran along the folds of his stomach. My mother explained to me how easy the job would be, how all my father would have to do would be to stand in a booth all day and give out keys to cars. He would be a parking lot attendant in downtown Los Angeles. In hot weather the booth would be air-conditioned.

  “But do I got a brain or do I got a brain?” my father asked. He said that to spend the rest of his life in a booth giving out keys would be like moving into a coffin.

  My mother laughed, said we were living in hell already, so what was the difference.

  “If it’s so wonderful out there, let Abe go first,” my father said. “Sure. And if he loses his connections and we get stranded out there, who’s gonna get me another job? You answer me that. Your big-shot brother fills your head up with his lousy dreams, but I’m the one who gets left to pay for them.”

  “And what about the boy? What kind of life is there for him if we stay here? Can you answer that?” My mother turned to me. “You wanna be like him, Davey? Come on and answer me. You wanna grow up to be a nothing like your father, then you just go on and take lessons from him. If Abe didn’t take care of him, he wouldn’t have a pot to piss in and you wouldn’t have clothes on your back, him and all his talk about brains. Where’d his brain ever get us?”

  “You’re hot and bothered,” my father said. “You should of waited to come home until after the heat wave, is what I think. But I’ll tell you what—how about a nice movie, where it’s air-conditioned, all three of us together? They got a good double feature at the Granada and maybe by the time it’s out things’ll be cooled off and we’ll all feel better.”

  He stood and tried to put his arms around her. She pushed him away, pulled a stack of postcards from her suitcase, and came toward me.

  “Let Momma show you how beautiful it is, Davey! Let Momma show you, so you’ll see the new life you can have, with new friends and fresh fruit and palm trees and beaches…”

  “I gotta go,” I said. “I promised the guys I’d meet them downstairs.”

  “Hey—don’t you be walking away from your mother like that!” my father shouted at me. “You get back in here.”

  “Leave him be, Sol.”

  “Leave him be? Is that fresh or is that fresh, to walk out on you when you’re in the middle of talking to him?”

  Downstairs people were sitting on chairs, listening to radios, cooling themselves with paper fans. Rosie sat on a wooden stool, her skirt up over her knees, her feet in a bucket of ice.

  On Rogers Avenue the older kids were leaning against cars. I saw Sheila necking with a guy. She wore red shorts and a green halter, and I couldn’t understand how she could let a guy’s body press against hers in such sticky weather. I turned right on Linden Boulevard, ducked down the alleyway between the first two apartment houses, thinking I might find some of my friends out back in the courtyard. It was usually I cooler there at night, where there had been grass and shadows all day long.

  “Hey Davey. C’mere a minute—that’s you, right?”

  Avie Gornik was standing in the doorway to the cellar, holding a bowl.

  “You wanna suck on some ice chips? I got plenty.”

  I reached into the bowl and took some chips.

  “Your uncle got back today, yeah?”

  “Yes. But I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Yeah. Me neither. He got lots on his mind these days. Things got out of hand some while he was gone, but you know all about that, right?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you did. I mean, you and the Cremona kid being such buddies. He didn’t tell you that we lost two trucks?” He laughed. “I mean, if you think about it, it ain’t easy, to lose a truck. You got no idea where we could find what was in the truck?”

  “No.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re okay, Davey. I mean, you’re like Abe—you got so much ice water in your veins you don’t need old Avie’s chips. Only you should be careful who your friends are, get what I mean? You wouldn’t want your uncle to get mad on you—to know things you do when he ain’t here. You get my drift?”

  “No.”

  Avie leaned toward me
and I could make out his features now. He looked as old as his mother—big-nosed and thick-lipped and pasty-skinned, with small, mean eyes set too close together. He wore a sleeveless undershirt like the kind my father used.

  “So tell me—where you going down here at night?”

  “Nowhere. Just looking for my friends.”

  “They ain’t here, but listen. I been hoping to meet you sometime, you know what I mean? Not because of the trouble we got, which ain’t your fault—just some of our boys seem to trust some of their boys when they should know better—but because I been hearing a lot about you from your friends.”

  I sucked on the chips, let the freezing water glide down the back of my tongue.

  “You know what all your friends say? They say you got a real big cock—that you got the biggest cock of all the guys your age.”

  “I gotta get going.”

  “Let me ask you a question first.” He held my arm. “When you grow up, what are you gonna be—a big shot like your uncle or a little pipsqueak like your father?”

  I turned to walk away—it was too hot for trouble—but he grabbed onto the back of my neck and forced me around. He laughed at me, his teeth yellow like old lamb bones.

  “Ah, don’t get mad on me, Davey. I didn’t mean nothing. Your old man’s okay. He don’t bother nobody, I guess. Only c’mere a minute with me where nobody can see us, yeah?” I didn’t move. “Hey—you ain’t scared of me, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Sure. I mean, why should a big kid like you be scared of an old fart like me, works for your uncle? I mean, if I did anything bad to you, I’d be in big trouble, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I knew your uncle when he was in diapers, right? I knew his old man and his old lady.” He made a sucking noise with his lips. “Ah, the old lady was really a knockout. He ever tell you about her?”

  “She died before I was born.”

  “All the men had the hots for her. All them fancy clothes and fur coats.”

  He pushed the cellar door open with his shoulder.

  “C’mon in with me—it’s real nice and cool in here. It’s always cooler where it’s been dark all day, so you come on inside, yeah?”