Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “You listen to the Dodger game today?” I asked. “They really creamed the Phillies, eleven to two. I bet they’ll win the pennant easy.”

  “Hey listen, Davey, do you know what I really think?”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re crazy, calling me. That’s what I think. I mean, I really think you’re nuts. Or else—”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else you’re trying to trap me somehow. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Nobody told me to call you,” I said. “And nobody’s listening to me. I just felt like talking to you about the game and things. That’s all.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t have to believe me, but I’m telling the truth, Tony. I still have some of that good paper you gave me, and I’ve been making a drawing I think you’ll really like. Maybe when I get out of this house again and we’re back in school, I’ll show it to you. Would you like to see it?”

  “Jesus Christ, Davey. Are you for real? If my brothers came in now, you know what they’d do to me? Do you? They been after me all week about that creep Gornik and if you ever made me visit him, and I don’t think they believe me when I tell them no.”

  “How about if I write a note and sign it, saying you never did?”

  There was a brief silence. Then Tony started laughing and I did too. He told me that I really cracked him up, to say a thing like that, and he left the phone for a few seconds to make sure the doors were all locked so no one could know he was talking to me. After he came back and we kidded around for a while, making jokes about me giving him notes for his father and brothers and Mr. Fasalino to read, and him giving me notes to give to Abe and Little Benny and Spanish Louie and Mr. Rothenberg, we agreed that we were glad all the trouble between them was taking place before school started, because both sides would probably have had guys spying on us there to make sure we never talked to each other. I tried to find out why his brothers were interested in Gornik, but he said he didn’t really know, just that he thought Gornik had had some kind of meeting with Mr. Fasalino. I said that my uncle used Gornik as a messenger a lot and that maybe that meant they were close to a peace settlement.

  Tony whistled. “Not from what I hear,” he said. “I think they got something on Gornik. I think that old bastard got trouble going both ways.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know. Trouble, you know? Just trouble. Only one question I got for you, though, Davey—”

  “Yes?”

  “Did he ever get funny with you?”

  “What do you mean, funny?”

  “I don’t know. Funny! I think he gets funny with guys and it don’t matter to him if they’re from my neighborhood or yours, if they’re Italian or Jewish or black or white or yellow or purple. From what I hear, whoever gets him first—your uncle or mine—is gonna have a good time with him.”

  “Jackie Robinson got three hits today. It puts his average over .300.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I bet he wins Rookie of the Year.”

  “So what?”

  “Nothing. When you said black, I thought of him.”

  “You really dig that spook, don’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Victor says that if they ever catch him with his black dingus in a white muff, they’re gonna make sure he ain’t got balls left to play ball with.”

  “Don’t you think he’s a good player?”

  “He’s okay. I mean, he got courage, I guess. Only that don’t change that he got black balls and my brothers hating him. They’d love to put him on one of those trucks that never comes back. But listen—you took a chance calling here only you got lucky that I was the only one home, so don’t do it again, yeah? Don’t be crazy like me and act like a dumb guinea. It’ll make sure we both live long enough to see the World Series this year, right?”

  “If I can get tickets, would you go with me?”

  “The only place I’m going is off the phone. A car just drove up. Hey Davey, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m glad you called, you nut. They got me pretty locked in too. When this is all over I’ll show you the stuff I been making in the cellar, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t take no wooden nickels, you hear? No slugs neither. Go fly a kike, okay? Then I’ll see you around.”

  “I’ll see you around,” I said, but he was gone by the time I said it.

  When my father came through the door about an hour later, he looked awful. His good eye was bloodshot, his short-sleeved shirt drenched. My mother wandered into the living room, holding a towel around her, at the hip.

  “So?” she asked. “Is he dead yet?”

  “Who?”

  “Abe. Who else?”

  “What kind of smart talk is that?” He looked at me, head tilted. “You should have your head examined, talking like that in front of the boy. It makes me very happy I came home, a greeting like that.”

  He walked into the bathroom and she followed him.

  “Just tell me yes or no, so I can decide if I should go back to sleep or not.”

  “Abe ain’t dead. They don’t kill a guy like that so easy.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. So you’ll wake me when it’s over, right?”

  My father came out of the bathroom, his shirt off. My mother was in the bedroom, singing.

  “I saw what it said in the newspaper this morning. About the gangs shooting at each other. Is it true?”

  He put his eyeglasses on and the lenses fogged up at once. I almost reached out to touch his face, to feel the heat there. He took his glasses off, wiped them with a handkerchief.

  “Your mother been letting you go down there all day with the shvartze again, right?”

  “I guess.”

  He grabbed my arm and shook me. “Why all the time with the shvartze, huh? Can you answer me that? What’s going on down there with you two, huh? What kind of monkey business?”

  “Leave me alone,” I said, and yanked my arm away.

  “I’ll leave you alone when I’m dead,” he said. He grabbed my arm again, and even though his hand was wet I couldn’t get out of his grip. He pulled me to the kitchen. “You get in here with me, sonny boy. Abe wants to speak to you.”

  He held me with one hand and dialed Abe’s number with the other, then handed the phone to me. His voice shifted.

  “Be careful,” he whispered. “Watch out for his temper.”

  “Davey?”

  “Yes, Uncle Abe.”

  “All right. I don’t have time for anything except the truth, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “The night you saw Sheila, did you notice anything unusual?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “You saw Avie that night, though, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” he said. “That’s what I needed to know.”

  “Did Avie tell you?”

  “I ask the questions, Davey.” Then, “Is your mother all right?”

  “The same as always. She’s lying down now.”

  “I’m glad you told me the truth, that you didn’t hesitate.”

  “Will Avie get into trouble?”

  “None that you made. Listen. You go and take care of your mother now. You be good to her. If things go as planned, you should all be able to leave your building by the end of the week. You tell her I said so.”

  He hung up without saying goodbye. I turned and saw my mother standing in the doorway, dressed in a flowered housecoat, smiling at me in a crazy way, singing to herself. Her arms were way up over her head, as if she was going to spin around, as if she was dreaming. I told her what Abe told me to tell her, but she didn’t act as if she heard my words. I wondered which way Abe would have hated me more—if I’d done what I’d done and admitted seeing Avie, or if I’d lied. I imagined Abe riding in the back of his black sedan, Little Be
nny and Spanish Louie on either side of him, the car floating a half-foot above the road, sliding through the heat waves in slow motion, through rainbows of shimmering oil slicks. My mother kept grinning at me, glassy-eyed, and the longer she grinned at me, the more I hated her.

  “Listen,” she said, and she leaned her cheek on my father’s bare shoulder. “Once you make up your mind you can’t be happy, there ain’t no reason you can’t have a pretty good time, right, Solly? Didn’t you teach me that way back?”

  “I saw the sentence in the newspaper once. Sure. Moe Berg said it, I think, from the time when he was playing catcher for the Yankees.”

  My mother twirled around, left the kitchen, yelled to us from the living room to come in and join her. I followed my father through the foyer. My mother was pouring two glasses of whiskey. She handed one to my father, then drank the whiskey from her glass in one swallow. She switched on the phonograph and began moving around the room, dancing to the music but singing a song different from the one playing. She took my father’s hands and tried to make him dance with her, singing words about being close together dancing cheek-to-cheek. I backed up against the door to my bedroom.

  “It’s too hot for funny business,” my father said, shoving her away. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Are you crazy or something?”

  “What’s the matter with you—ain’t you in love with me no more? You don’t want to dance with a beautiful lady?” She pushed him aside and came towards me, arms out, eyes half-closed. “Then maybe my handsome son will give his mother a dance. I mean, we may all be dead anyway in a day or two, so why not dance, right, fellas? Why not have a good time? Let’s break out the booze! Let’s be happy! Strike up the music! Let’s live a little!”

  My father moved in front of me, to block her. She turned away, drank from the bottle the way I remembered her drinking on the night the war ended, her head way back, her throat stretched to its full length.

  “Am I the only one wants to have a good time?”

  “I think the heat’s getting to you,” my father said. “You heard what Abie told the boy, about finishing his business by the end of the week, didn’t you? Only I’ll tell you the truth, on a day like this, it’s the heat that’ll kill me before any of their dumb bolagulas do.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears,” my mother said, and then she drank some more, laughing and sputtering so that she spat some of the whiskey right back out.

  “What’s a bolagula?” I asked.

  My mother clicked off the phonograph, swayed from side to side to silent music. She licked whiskey from her wrist.

  “Oh Solly,” she said. “I ain’t heard that word since I was a kid. Bolagula! What a memory you got for a blind man! What a brain you got that’s melting there in your tiny head. Only you know what—?”

  She stopped, set the bottle down on the arm of my father’s easy chair, steadied it so that it wouldn’t topple over. Then, without finishing her sentence, she walked into her bedroom.

  The next morning my mother and father slept late. I dressed, made my own breakfast, knocked on their bedroom door so I could tell them I was going to Stevey Komisarik’s apartment to play Monopoly. They didn’t answer, and for a second I was frightened, thinking they might have been murdered during the night. I pressed my ear to the door—the keyhole was stuffed with cotton—and I heard my mother giggling, telling my father to stop, asking him if he was crazy or if he was crazy. I yelled in that I’d eaten breakfast and about where I was probably going and before they could shout back anything to stop me, I was gone.

  Stevey’s mother looked through the peephole in the middle of their door, and when she saw it was me she put the latch on. She told me to go away, that she didn’t want trouble.

  Beau Jack let me into his apartment, handed me the morning paper. Kate nuzzled my hand. I sat and looked at the photograph on the front page of a beat-up old Ford, from behind, its trunk wide open. A policeman stood at each side of the car, at attention, looking straight into the camera, and on the ground—you almost didn’t notice them at first—were two bodies, the heads facing down into the gutter, over the curbstone. According to the caption, the bodies had been found in the car’s trunk, the car discovered next to an open lot in Canarsie. The dead men were rumored to be thugs who worked for Mr. Fasalino.

  “Jesus!” I exclaimed.

  “He ain’t gonna be no help now.”

  I turned to the story on page three, searching for Abe’s name. It wasn’t there. I told Beau Jack about what Abe had said to me on the phone the night before.

  “That man dotes on you. I don’t deny it, only if you want to stay down here, Beau Jack do what he can.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I killed men before, I guess I can do it again, they try to hurt you.”

  “It’s not my uncle’s fault, what’s happening.”

  “Didn’t say it was.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “Sure I do. You a boy a man can trust.”

  “But you don’t believe my uncle, do you? You never say his name. I noticed that.”

  He pointed to the newspaper.

  “Those bodies real enough, Davey. I’m scared for you, is the truth. I’m just scared.”

  “But Abe loves me,” I said. “I’m his nephew. Don’t you understand?”

  “Oh sure. I understand that. Lots of people gonna love a boy like you. That part’s easy.”

  “Do you have a gun here?”

  “Yes.”

  “From when you were a soldier?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve already killed with it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think I look like my uncle?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you really? We have the same color eyes. The same kind of dark curly hair….”

  “You know who Beau Jack thinks you look like most?”

  “Who?”

  “Jackie Robinson.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Be serious. How can I look like Jackie? I’m white.”

  “You sure are,” he said, and he brought me a glass full of ice cubes, poured a bottle of Coke over the cubes, let the copper foam rise to the top of the glass, then settle. He poured again. “You drink this and then I give you something to eat, so we bring some color back to that handsome face of yours.”

  “Do you really think I look like him?”

  Beau Jack started making us ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches.

  “When I look in your face, Davey, all I see is young Jackie, don’t ask me why. You got a look in your eyes like he must of had, he was your age, is what I think.”

  The next morning there was another front-page photo, this time of two bodies lying on a waterfront pier on Red Hook. “GANGLAND REVENGE,” the headline said. The bodies had been fished out of the river and I recognized the names of two of my uncle’s men, Mel Weiss and Skinny Epstein. An hour after the men’s bodies were recovered, the article said, the District Attorney announced that a key member of one of the gangs had been arrested and was turning state’s evidence. The man was known, the newspaper said, as Spanish Louie.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  Beau Jack smiled.

  I went upstairs right away, but my father was already gone and my mother was walking from room to room in a bathing suit, cleaning the furniture with a feather duster, singing songs, asking me if I wanted to learn the words, if I wanted her to teach me how to dance.

  I stayed in the kitchen so I could be there with her in case she turned on the radio and heard the news. I tried to draw, but I couldn’t concentrate and decided to work on my baseball card collection instead. Sometimes my mother and father bragged about my drawing so much to other people—arguing with each other to prove which one of them believed in my talent more—that I felt as if their praise made what I did more theirs than mine. And sometimes, listening to my mother go on and on about how I would wind up running Abe’s business someday, I had to agree with
her that I could never do that and be an artist at the same time.

  Abe came to our apartment that evening with my father, and after she heard the news my mother screamed and begged Abe to do something—to take us all to California, to give us new lives—but Abe stayed calm, even when she started bringing up things about their life from when they were children, from when he’d begun living the life he was leading now.

  “If I had a different life, I’d have had a different life,” he said to her. “I didn’t. Here I am.”

  “Sure,” my father added. “Like we used to say—if my aunt had balls we would of called her uncle.”

  Abe told us not to worry, that Spanish Louie was a very weak man. He told us that he had posted extra guards around our building and that if trouble increased, he would send us out of the city, to be with Lillian and Sheila.

  The next day, before the sun was up, when the apartment house across the way was all in shadow so that the bricks were dusty white as if covered with old chalk dust, I went down to Beau Jack’s. He nodded once, handed me the newspaper. He wasn’t smiling.

  Spanish Louie’s photo was on the front page—a police photo from when he was younger that made his dark, milky eyes seem even sadder than they were in real life—and next to his photo there was a picture of the Hotel Mirapol in Coney Island, a circle drawn around a window on the eleventh floor. The article said that Spanish Louie had either jumped or was pushed from the window. It said that the District Attorney had been hoping to use Spanish Louie as his star witness in cleaning up the borough. At the time of his death, Spanish Louie’s whereabouts were supposedly top secret. He was being guarded by six New York City detectives. At 1:23 A.M., when he fell, there were two detectives in the room with him, two detectives in the hallway outside his room, and two more in the hotel’s lobby. They all claimed to be either in the bathroom or taking naps. The District Attorney was furious. He suspended the six detectives and declared that his investigation would now expand to include possible police corruption.

  Less than an hour later my father came banging at the door. He ordered me to come with him, and kept trying to slap my face all the way up the stairs, yelling at me for having snuck away, for being with Beau Jack again.

  Abe sat in my father’s easy chair. He spoke in the same calm way he had spoken the night before. He told us that we were now free to come and go from the building whenever we wanted. My father could resume his regular route, my mother could get out and do her shopping, I could play with my friends. Sheila and Lillian were on the way in from the country.