Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  He kept pressure on the back of my neck with his thumb and forefinger. I could smell the damp coal dust, the garbage cans full of winter ashes.

  “Now listen. If you don’t trust old Avie, you just let me know, only I figured from what your friends told me that you got the most courage of them all, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This’ll only take a couple of minutes, so if you don’t want to do it, you say so now.”

  “Do what?”

  “All I want is to see if the guys are right, if your little fire engine is really bigger than theirs. They all showed me theirs—to brag, yeah?—but if you wanna be left out, that’s okay by me. Only I figured a big kid like you ain’t scared of much.” He was unbuttoning my fly. “I mean, anytime you want me to stop, all you gotta do is say the word.”

  He let go of my neck, but I didn’t move.

  “Let me ask you something. You do it yourself yet?” He reached inside my shorts and touched my penis very lightly, as if to see if it was there. “Hey, that’s nice—I mean, your friends all bragged to me that they do it to themselves already fifteen or sixteen times a day, only between you and me, Davey, they ain’t big enough yet. They just wanna impress people, you know what I mean?”

  He started stroking my penis and what surprised me was that the huskier his voice got, the more gently he touched me.

  “Hey, I think your friends were right, did you know that? For a kid your age you got a terrific pecker, Davey. I mean, how old are you already? You’re gonna make the ladies very happy someday, just like your uncle does. So how old did you say you were?”

  “Twelve. I’ll be thirteen in September, after school starts.”

  “Oh yeah? Thirteen, huh? I would of figured fourteen or fifteen from your size. See how nice and hard it’s getting? That feels good, don’t it? I mean, if you don’t trust old Avie, you just say the word and I’ll stop, yeah? All you gotta do is say the word.”

  The cellar was pitch black, no light leaking in, and in the blackness he kept rubbing me and talking to me, telling me that if I didn’t beat my meat yet I should take a tip from him and not start, because once you started you had to do it all the time, every few hours. In my head I saw myself running away and I saw him falling on top of me before I could get the cellar door open. He was twisting my arms back behind me and spreading my fingers apart and breaking them, cracking them one at a time with his bare hands. I’d seen a photo of an artist once who had so much pain in his hands that he strapped them to boards so that he could keep painting. I thought of the men in my grandfather’s home, lying on their beds, the lights out. I wondered if anybody had ever done this to Tony and what his brothers would do to him if they found out. I felt sick. I wanted to go home. Avie scooped up ice chips, moaned, and then started talking again.

  “You really like your uncle, don’t you, Davey? I mean, he’s the big man, yeah? He’s the really big man…the big man….”

  If I wanted a thrill my friends didn’t know about I should do what he did, he said—that when I felt the stuff about to explode I should shove ice chips under my little acorns. He opened the door, told me it was best for us to leave separately. He told me my erection would go down by itself in a few minutes and that I shouldn’t say anything to my friends about me being the biggest because it would only make them jealous.

  “Your uncle was big like you when he was your age.” He held me by the shoulder. “Listen. You don’t believe old Avie, you ask your uncle sometime about how he did the same thing with me when he was your age. He liked it too.”

  You’re a liar, I wanted to shout. You’re a dirty liar! I tightened all the muscles in my face and neck and chest, to make sure tears wouldn’t come bursting forth, and from the way he forced a laugh I knew it bothered him that I wouldn’t show him how angry I was.

  “Here,” he said, shoving coins into my hand and crunching my fist closed around them. “You go treat yourself to a movie or a malted or something, yeah? You’re okay, Davey. I mean, you’re a real man now, you know what I mean?”

  In the morning, I was the first one awake. There were no sounds in my parents’ room or from the courtyard below or from the other buildings. I took out my paper and pencils and drawing board and sat in front of my window and stared at the apartment house across the way. The world was wonderfully quiet and still, and I felt again what I’d often felt when I was younger—that in the room next to mine my parents were lying in the bed, dead. For miles and miles, in every direction, there was no sound because all living things were dead. I was the only person left alive in the whole world, and that feeling—of being able to live inside total silence in a world where nobody would talk to me or want things from me or do things to me, where people could never be mean to one another again—comforted me.

  My mother was right. I loved to stare, and the longer I stared, the more I saw. A warm breeze came in across the fire escape. I heard sparrows. I saw pigeons lift silently into the air from the roofs of apartment buildings. If I strained, I could make myself hear cars and trucks in the distance.

  Why did I love the face of the building across from mine so much? In my drawing there was no sky, no ground, no sidewalk. There were no birds, no dogs, no cats, no people. Nothing moved, nothing lived. I concentrated on a section of the building that ran from just above the first floor windows to just below the fifth floor windows, so that all you saw on my paper were bricks and windows and fire escapes—squares and rectangles and diagonals—so that from my drawing there was no way of knowing where the building began and where it ended.

  What I wanted was for somebody looking at my drawing to feel he could reach into it and rub his hands across its surfaces, along the iron slats of the fire escapes, the smooth glass of the windows, the pocked clay of the bricks. If you looked at my drawing long enough, I wanted you to be able to feel the difference between each brick, to feel the tiny pebbles caught in the mortar, and I was frightened that I would never be able to, that I would never get it right. I was afraid that no matter how long I stared, or how hard I worked, or how well I learned to draw, I would never be able to make people see what I saw when I looked at the world.

  I sat perfectly still, waiting for the sun to rise just a little higher so that, coming from behind, it would use our apartment building to cast a long horizontal shadow across the bottom half of the other building—a line that cut straight through the fourth row of bricks between the second and third stories.

  The shadow moved up slowly from the middle of the second-story windows. I let my eyes move from window to window, from apartment to apartment, amazed, as always, by all the different things people kept outside on their sills and fire escapes: flower pots and jars and shoes and bread boxes and toasters and cereal boxes and scatter rugs and brooms and mops and chairs and shower caps and egg cartons and telephones and radios and clothespin bags, litter boxes for cats and small iceboxes for milk and juice, and old farmer-cheese boxes to grow radishes and parsley in, and toys and wigs and underwear and lamps and stacks of newspapers and even enema bags. I left most of these things out of my drawing. I put in a few flower pots and wooden boxes and clothespins. But the clothespins held up no clothing and the flower pots contained no flowers and the wooden boxes had nothing growing in them. I liked sketching in the curtains behind the windows, as if through fog, and then layering the reflections from my own building—bricks and ladders and drainpipes—over that.

  When the sun was almost up to where I wanted it, I began working, a piece of blank paper under the right edge of my hand so that as I moved along I wouldn’t smudge things. I used my kneaded eraser, twisting the putty to a fine point to create highlights along the edges of a clothesline that went out from a window on the third story, looping down from its pulley in two long widening lines of pale gray that were cut off by the right edge of the paper.

  The heat hung in the air like thin sheets of damp gauze. It was only when my father burst into my room, making my door crash open again
st my bookcase, that I realized I’d been hearing noises behind me.

  “What’s the matter with you, you’re deaf or something? How many times do we gotta call you to get out here?”

  He stood in the doorway, hands on hips, his face red. He wore only his underpants, a pair of green-and-red flowered boxer shorts, stained at the fly. I slipped my drawing under the cover of my pad and I put the pad on my desk. I moved deliberately. When I started to pick up my pencils, he grabbed my arm and yanked on it.

  “When I say to move, you move, do you hear me? When I call you, you listen to me the first time!”

  I jerked my arm free and the pencils went flying. They rolled along the linoleum, clicking. I bent down to collect them. I couldn’t believe how angry I felt. I was ready to burst, to spring at him, to claw at his face with my hands. Could I hold my anger back, the way Jackie Robinson did?

  “You don’t touch my drawing,” I said. I moved back, my fist clenched around pencils, and I wondered what I would do, really, if he came at me again. I thought of Tony, watching his brothers beat up their father.

  “Oh does that one have a temper!” my mother said. “Sol—get in here and leave the boy alone, okay? We got troubles enough as is.”

  I looked past my father and saw Abe. His skin was very brown and smooth. He looked handsomer than he had when he’d left for California.

  “Hi uncle Abe,” I said. I felt embarrassed. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Did you see Sheila last night?”

  “Yes.”

  I gasped. Abe had pulled me from my room and was holding me up against the living room wall so that my feet were off the floor. “Yes. You say yes to me? That’s all?” His eyes were blazing. “You talk and you talk fast.”

  “He’s only a kid,” my mother said. “So listen, darling. You shouldn’t do anything to the boy that you’ll be sorry for later. I love my brother and my husband, but if it’s only my son who wants to be saved, I’ll take the boy. I mean, just because you saved Momma, does that mean I gotta do what you want for the rest of my life? Did I ask you to save her?”

  “Shut up.”

  Abe set me down, told me to tell him what I knew.

  “I saw her down on Rogers Avenue, near where she always hangs out, in front of Lee’s luncheonette.”

  “And—”

  “I don’t know.” I swallowed hard, to keep from crying. My mother was smiling at me as if she was glad to see Abe hurt me—as if this would prove that she was right about him. Abe let go of my arm. I could hear myself screaming at him that I didn’t know anything, but no words came from my mouth. I wanted to be back in my room. I wanted to be staring at the fire escapes on the apartment building across the way. I wanted to be in the schoolyard with my friends. I wanted to have a different mother and father, to be living some other life than the one that was mine.

  “Listen,” my father said. “You tell Abe what you know. What happened is people did things to Sheila last night—she’s home now and she’ll be okay, so you don’t gotta be scared—but Abe is trying to find out who the people are. Do you understand me?”

  “No.”

  “See?” my mother said. “The boy’s like his mother. He don’t understand none of this stuff.”

  “Because he don’t want to understand!” My father came at me, his hand in the air, to slap me. I still had a few pencils in my fist and I let the points press into my thumbs. If you touch me I’ll stab your good eye! I heard myself say. If you lay a single finger on me…

  “It’s too bad we didn’t have another child,” my mother said. “Because what I was thinking, Sol, was that even if I couldn’t save Davey, maybe I could have saved his brother or sister when Abe wasn’t looking, one out of two, so at least I wouldn’t come out of this life with nothing. What I was thinking was—”

  “Shut up,” Abe said, softly. “Your father is right. Sheila is home, scared but unharmed. Only there’s going to be trouble. Do you understand?”

  I started talking. “I saw her when I went downstairs at about nine-thirty. I know it was nine-thirty because Mr. Lipsky had his radio on in front of the house and he was listening to the ‘Lux Radio Theater.’ I heard the commercial. Then I went around the corner and Sheila was where she usually is at night, in front of Lee’s, with her friends. They were leaning against cars and smoking. She had her back against Mr. Waxman’s blue Ford and she was letting a guy neck with her. The guy’s name is Marty Reiss and he’s in a gang called The Flashes and he was there with his friends. He goes to Erasmus with Sheila and he’s on the football team. He plays wingback. He hangs out in the Pigtown section usually, by Empire Boulevard, except he and his gang have been coming over to visit Sheila and her friends at night this summer. They come here looking for guys to beat up and girls to make out with. They don’t fight much if it’s hot. Sometimes they stop you and ask you to loan them money and if you say you don’t have any they grab you and say, ‘Then all I find I keep.’ So I didn’t stop to talk with Sheila and they didn’t bother me. That’s all I know. I came home through the courtyard on Linden Boulevard instead of going back around Rogers Avenue, so I didn’t see her again.”

  “See?” my father said. “Didn’t I tell you the boy got a voice when he wants to? Didn’t I say so?”

  “I’m sending Sheila and Lillian to the country for a while, for a little rest,” Abe said. “In the meantime I want the three of you to keep out of sight. I’ll have a man posted downstairs. If you need to go to the store, you tell him and he’ll get somebody to go with you. No movies, is that clear? You go nowhere where there are crowds. You stay away from open windows.”

  “In this heat?” my mother said. “Thanks a lot. So why did we come back then? Tell me that. Maybe now, my brilliant brother, you’ll tell me why did we have to come back to this stinking city. A goddamn oven is all it is, a goddamn stinking oven for us to bake in.”

  “Be quiet, Evie,” Abe said. “I’m not through.”

  “Sure,” my mother said, and she slumped down in my father’s chair. “When you’re through you send me a telegram, yeah?” She closed her eyes, reached across her chest with her right hand, let it slip inside her housecoat to touch her left breast the way she did when she was drowsy. Was that where she was sick?

  “If you follow my instructions, you’ll be safe.”

  My mother leaned forward. “But you promised me,” she said. “Goddamn you, Abe, you promised me! No more rough stuff, Evie, you said. I give you my word. No more rough stuff.” My mother stood and shook her fists at the air. “I’m begging you, Abe—I’m down on my knees except it’s too hot—but in my heart I’m down on my knees and I’m begging you not to start up again. Please. For me, Abe. For Lillian and Sheila. For Davey. Please! Like Poppa used to say—if you touch shit, your own hands smell from it. You’re too good for them, darling. You don’t—”

  “What do you mean, start up again?” my father said. “They’re the ones who started, ain’t they? If you don’t stand up to bums like that, they walk all over you. Didn’t Roosevelt do his best to keep peace in the world? But when the Japs and the Nazis went too far, then he stood up to them. So I want you to know I think you should keep your trap shut, because I agree with Abe.”

  My father turned and grinned, looking for Abe’s approval.

  “I meant to ask you, Sol,” Abe said. “While I was gone, did you have any trouble?”

  “Trouble? What kind of trouble should I have?”

  “Just answer the question. Did you have any trouble? Did anyone leave messages for you to give to me?”

  “No, Abe. None.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be sure? You ask Davey here if you don’t believe me.”

  “How many times do I gotta tell you to leave the boy out of it,” my mother said. “This ain’t none of his business, all this crap. The same goes for you, Abe. Do you got a brain or what to come in here scaring the kid this way? Look at him—look at h
ow pale he is.” She came towards me, arms extended. Was my father lying to Abe to protect me—so that Abe wouldn’t get after me for not having told him about the message? “My little baby Davey—let Momma hold you, all right? Let Momma—” She stopped, turned on Abe again. I felt dizzy because what drove me craziest of all was not being able to figure out when my mother would be for Abe and when she would be against him, or when my parents would switch around in deciding to protect me. I slipped away from my mother, stood apart from all of them, in front of my bedroom.

  “Can’t you see what you do to him?” my mother said. “You want I should bang my head against the wall first so then you’ll see what it is you’re doing? Here!”

  My mother turned her back to us and began banging her forehead against the wall. “Now are you satisfied?” she asked. “Is this what you want?” She reached sideways, grabbed onto the moldings around the door—she was facing the narrow width of wall that separated their room from mine—and whacked her forehead against the wall again.

  “That’s very brilliant, Evie,” my father said. “Oh that’s really smart. I mean, you’re really helping the situation a lot.”

  There was a small red circle on my mother’s forehead, as if she’d been hit by a baseball.

  “So why should I wait for somebody else to break my head? You tell me that. Why should I wait for somebody else?”

  “You’re exaggerating, Evie, the way you always do. If you follow my instructions there’ll be no trouble. I’ll speak to you at least once a day. If there’s a problem, you buzz the downstairs door four times. That will be the signal. I give you my word that I didn’t look for trouble.”

  “Not much. Sure. Tell me another one.”

  “If I don’t take care of things they’ll only get worse for us all. They made a mistake, you see, and they have to be shown what the mistake was, so that they don’t repeat it. They should not have touched a member of my family.”