“I don’t know.”
“Dinny Meehan and his band of pikeys ’n tinkers, that’s who.
We’ll take’m down. With no work and full bellies, the ILA’s ready to finally take’m down. Are ye wid us, bhoy?”
“Sure.”
He points to my cup, “Put a hole in that, kiddo, and have another drop.”
I drink and drink, not realizing the brew is so powerful. It’s poteen, of course. Handmade in the tub; what we call back home “pu-cheen,” the rare ol’ mountain dew. Though the taste of it is awful, the feeling is wondrous and with the mingling of compliments and the potion in the drink, I become overwhelmed with the happiness. One of the men asks if I am cold in the bones. Standing over the fireplace, he pulls a hot poker and stuffs it into a full glass of ale, takes a sip for himself, and hands it over to me. I nibble on the hot brew a couple times until I am encouraged to take bigger slugs. Within moments I am not only warmed to the core, but happily dizzy from the drink too.
I speak openly about the docks and my new life for the first time. Words flow from me as they hadn’t in all my life flowed before. Realizing it all as a big adventure, I see it as one day to be a great story for recounting to my childhood friends in Clare, if I ever am to see them again. Uncle Joseph encourages more and more, and next thing I know I’m at a pitch of excitement what with all the new sights and smells of Brooklyn fresh in my mind. Standing from the sofa and waving my arms about uninhibitedly. It all comes rushing into my mind’s sight as articulate as the greatest of writers, or so I feel: the view of the canopy of bridges from our neighborhood connecting us to the mystical place called Manhattan. Manhattan! With its huge buildings erect and virile and austere across the East River from the docks along Columbia Street or right out the kitchen window of our Water Street room. It all makes perfect sense to me now and I am out of my mind with fervor and optimism.
Another of my uncle’s friends who’d been sitting in the kitchen with his legs propped akimbo onto the boiler played an old song on his “tenement house piano,” as they used to call it. Though it is no more than a simple penny whistle, it is good sounding. The music, the bitter weather, the smell of firewood, and the drink give me to thinking. And then I think again of the vantage point at the docks and its southern skyline of Lady Liberty standing tall over the water and so very proud too, my eyes foam up with dewy-eyed nostalgia. Now drunk, the fairytale comes alive. I realize then that my struggle is that of any other boy becoming a man and if a boy my age doesn’t struggle, then he may never become a man. Unable to scoff at my own sentimental epiphanies, I continue forth in my dream-drunk conclusions.
By the time all my thoughts are emptied, the room begins to spin in my head and a fierce sweat comes upon me. My stomach is light and airy and not understanding the predicament, I stand up and burst forward with all the liquor that covered the remnants of my thin dinner splashing onto the wood floor in front of me out of a sudden.
“Ye feckin’ ungrateful lil’ muck!” Uncle Joseph bellows and abuses.
I’d fallen to the ground among my own retching. Above, Uncle Joseph punches upon my head and face, my reactions to block them are slowed and incompetent, limp. I can’t remember all the things he says as he punches and kicks, but I do remember him gnashing and spitting in his fit.
“Yere fadder ain’t but Fenian swine from old and stupid ways!”
His boys stand up from their chairs and pull pipes from their faces at the spectacle.
“And yere mother’s a country óinseach,” Uncle Joseph kicked, pulling me up by my hair. “An’ ye’re the child of a great ignorance! Can’t even see the opportunity of yere life in front o’ ye, ye beggar’s spawn!”
Dragging me to the door like they did the insane starker on the docks, he opens it and throws me by the collar down the wooden stoops onto the icy pavement out front. When I try and rise, he leans down and punches with a closed fist onto my cheek by my eye. I fall back again and again he drags me across the sidewalk to the gutter by a lightpost, spits in my direction, and turns round.
“Ye don’ wanna listen to me? Go an’ beg ye’re way t’rough life, ye shanty Irish!” As the door slams shut, I can hear him slurring at his followers inside. “That goes for the each of ye, too . . . .”
I can tell that he is angry about other things, but that matters not now. All of this means but one thing; I’d not return to Water Street again. Sent to the snow and the cold and the freezing December night air, disheveled and drunken I wander confusedly, and vomit more in the muddy snowbanks at the edge of the pavement. The ice sheets along it slide the world from under my feet. Dumb from shock, I hadn’t even considered the idea of grabbing for my coat on the way out. After a very long hour in the whipping winds that come jettisoning off the East River, my ears begin to sting and my face is frozen in place with tears stuck to my swollen cheek. Gathering balance from the corners of buildings, I begin simply trying to open one door after another regardless of consequence. Finally, at a six-story tenement house on Montague Street, a door is open just a crack to allow a frozen stranger’s entrance. Not much cooler inside the halled inner walls, I can feel a bit of heat coming from the bottom of a door on the first-floor. I huddle my frozen hands close to the warm breeze from the floor and finally resolve to lay my entire body along it to fall asleep like a wrecked ship among its own shambles.
A week goes by and I have disappeared from the docks altogether. Uncle Joseph being the connection, I forgave the thought of searching for work there. I lay my head at night in a disowned building along with a huddle of other abandoned children off the Flatbush approach to the Manhattan Bridge. Windows boarded and front door bolted, we steal up a hole in the flooring to gain access from beneath where the smell of old death and winter dirt mix. In the night wind, the wooden two-story building shifts in the air and creaks at the whim of the night gales. Not fearing the danger in it, we light some extra coals and floorboards in a barrel upstairs until one night when the barrel itself burns through the floor and falls to the lower level with an awful crash. We peek down the hole surprised by it all as embers fly below, leaving us cold for a night, scrambling for warmth.
I get by with eating dirty snow for water and stealing bread from horse carts and peanuts from the pockets of sailors that stammer from saloons and into view of a pilfering child. I still owned a dollar bill, so when I do buy a can of beans or so I slip longbread in the back of my pants slyly. I learn to conserve energy and plan out my thin meals, thoughts consumed only on how best to steal. It was many a night I slept on the wooden floor of that shack with a great emptiness in me and from it I come to see the immortal cunning of the thief and his relation to American ingenuity. An art form of necessity and urgency and competition. Breeding it in the child, they do. Bred in these children that sleep next to me with their faces pressed against the cold wooden floor and no sheet to cover them, no pillow for their eggshell heads. Some no more than five and six years of age huddled together motherless in the wintry night.
In a different language it’s said where I come from, “The well-fed cannot understand the hungry.” And so, not a soul wonders about me or stops to ask a question or offer help, only pitiless smirks and “I’ll fan ya ears, kid, ‘less ya beat it quick.”
I am regularly shooed by shopkeeps even when stealing is not on my mind, like they sense the hunger in my eyes and body language. Where empathy is with them I couldn’t know. Back home, my da would sometimes let a hungry wanderer stay with us a day or two and collect free meals so long as he helped about the house and farm. A common thing among the country Irish. But here a wanderer is leered at and cruelty lives in the locals’ eyes and in their stance like a mad child’s grudge. I swore to my mother’s soul never to lose what I learned from my family of mercy, empathy. No matter where I am to live.
I nick a wool coat with a big collar at a restaurant in Borough Hall and inside the pockets are a pair of heaven-sent gloves. Yule tidings for a lost winter gamin. Toward nightfall I w
ander back to the Flatbush orphanage, wind whipping in the ears. It is a brumal and barren hungry night wherein the streets are hollowed out by the promise of a piercing frost. My face feels dry and cracked. My groin is frozen and there is loneliness in the whistling cold and the dry-freeze of my thoughts. One of the kids at the makeshift orphanage is named Petey Behan. He has short legs with a long torso and some power in his shoulders, thin hips, and a box face with a mouth that never stops its blathering.
“Me and Pegleg an’ some others are extablished,” he boasts. “We gotta a couple gimmicks that’re gonna pay out soon, ya know? You guys should come meet’m, Pegleg. We gotta gang and we’re lookin’ to expand, but ya gotta be tough. If ya ain’t tough, don’t think about it. Pegleg’s a killer, he’ll kill ya. I seen ’em kill one feller. I did too.”
“Really?” Two other kids gaped as the light from the fire lit their faces orange in the dark.
“Yeah,” Behan says. “Beat ’em wit’ his own fists and then shot ’em with a gun right in the face. An I-talian kid that thought he could steamroll Pegleg into sellin’ junk for him. Just kilt ’em dead. The cops caught up to Pegleg too, but they let’m go.”
“They let’m go?”
“Yeah, they couldn’t make it stick. My brother’s a Whitehander too.”
“He’s one of Dinny’s?”
“Yeah, kinda. He’s done work wit’ both the Whitehanders and the Jay Street Gang back before the Jay Streeters agreed to work wit’ the Whitehanders. He had to do a job once too, my brother. Him and Wild Bill Lovett together, they stole a bunch o’ stuff from a warehouse and then sold it to someone in Manhattan. Like a real job, ya know. They made real good money doin’ that. My brother said he got twenny dollars pullin’ that off. And he did it with five other guys who all got twenny dollars too. Dat’s what we’re gonna do, me and Pegleg an’ us. So if yas wanna real job, just ask me. But ya gotta be tough, see. If ya ain’t got tough, ya better go’n get it.”
Lying across the hardwood floor with the rest, I shared bits of bread with a thin four-year-old that refused to speak. Unable to close her own mouth, or unaware it was open, she just looked at my hand every time it disappeared inside my pocket, then poked me on the leg for more bits.
Appearing from the dark and standing over me, Behan says to me, “Hand over the coat, it’s my place to be askin’ for it.”
I look up at him. “This is my coat.”
Next thing I know he’s dragging me across the entire room by the collar and trying to shake me free from the thing with a couple kicks to my side and some more shaking. Instead of fighting back, I let it slide through my arms and look up.
“I was the first one here,” he says, making a big scene of it in front of the little ones. “I got rights to charge rent and seein’ as though I know y’ain’t gotta a penny to ya name, I claim dibbies on this here coat.”
I watch him disappear to a corner farther away from the glim of the dying flame in the barrel. The wee one I was just feeding then realizes I have no more bread and gets herself up to find a corner to sleep in too. Eventually I do the same.
The week before Christmas and wandering through the maze of buildings by daylight, I walked around a snowy corner and was surprised by a man running for his life, striding desperately past me. On his coattails are two others whom I recognize immediately from the docks: Tuohey the pavee fighter and The Swede whom you never can forget once you put eyes on him.
“Ya fookin’ better run, Leighton,” I hear The Swede yell as the three men continue running toward the middle of the street, moving to the opposite sidewalk. “I catch ya and ya pay for ya brother’s ills!”
A main thoroughfare is Fulton Street. It has a terminal and used to be the road that lead to the Fulton Ferry for the Manhattan crossing. In 1915, though, it was next to the Empire Stores, the port warehousing structure scurrying with workers winching pallets of tobacco through the iron-shudder windows above. It ran parallel with the Brooklyn Bridge where the three-story Sands Street train station fed the elevated trains that snaked through the neighborhoods and across the bridge to Park Row, in Manhattan. A city on its own, Sands Street station also housed Richie “Pegleg” Longergan’s gang of cutpurses and pickpockets. With such dense commuter transience, it was the perfect headquarters for a gang of teenage thieves. Of course, among this gang was Petey Behan. Himself the thief of my much-needed coat.
A week or so after that, I am wandering over by Jay and York streets on the east side abutment to the Manhattan Bridge with the belly falling out of me in hunger. After long bouts of fasting in the desolate wind and dry crisp air, it begins to seize up in me. I can feel my eyes in my face glowing with visions. New splendors come across my mind and just as soon as they swirl beautifully around my imagination they disappear, and I became enraged under faulty logic. No money and no plan, I am alarmingly unafraid of my fate and when reason does come over me, my stomach turns in concern while my eyes light up in fear.
I go back to Water Street ready to grovel back into my uncle Joseph’s good standing and a woman answers the door.
“Don’t know any Joseph Garrity, child, must o’ moved out,” and the door closes.
At Front Street just a few blocks away, I see playing among the garbage and muddy puddles in the cobblestones a motley band of eight or nine shanty children, parentless in the long misshapen shadows of late afternoon. A few of them have their feet dangling in the sewers where the excrement of neighbors mingles in the mud and whatever else accumulates in the rectum of the streets. Remarkable though was, next to the ragged kiddies, a lounging horse that had finished her last breath and lay there on her side retired from her slavery. With a gaping mouth, staring eyes, and a mountainous rib cage in the air with a thin layer of skin over her, the old girl was a daunting figure there in the road sprawled aside the impervious imps and refugee nurslings. The eldest boy stands over the others with a cap over his eyes and his hands in his pockets keeping at a stern stare on me, shoulders hunched under two floppy suspenders. A bit younger than myself, he is the most like a parent among them and orders the others around, ballyragging them for saying dumb things. I feel sad for the beast and believe he does too, so I ask him whose draft horse it was.
“Well it ain’t yours is it?”
The youngest, barely able to speak, spoke up to me, “The butche’s on he’s way ter pick up da ol’ nag and make a . . .”
“Shaddup!” the eldest says to the nursling, then motions for me to keep moving.
The child looks up behind him to the eldest and scowls. The type of scowl a four-year-old shouldn’t know how to cast just yet.
“G’on, don’ get ya’self thinkin’,” the eldest reiterates.
A day or so later and still without even bits of food in me I go back to Borough Hall and wander around some more. Hoping maybe someone will see me this time. I think of a plan. Rather, of needing a plan. Needing to come up with some sort of resolution where my daily routine will be more fruitful. A plan is a fine idea. If only I can get something to eat so I can think more clearly so I can make this plan. Snowflakes begin to populate the air like floating crystals. It’s all dreamy inside me and I stare ahead while my thoughts turn soft again, lucid. I allow myself this purposely. Irresponsibly. Without the wool coat, I stuff my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and shiver obviously, significantly. It is Christmas Eve, so I say a prayer and think about the warm choruses sung on such a night at the church of Clooney back home to celebrate the birth of Christ together. I think about my mother too, and sisters so far away.
Moments later I am overcome with distress. Distraught by pookas whispering in my ear and cursing the fact of it being so cold. I walk with a wild pace looking around everywhere for loose morsels or opportunity like a gull circling behind the ferry’s foam. I walk myself right out of Borough Hall and toward Columbia Heights. When I see a lazy dray with a cover over the back, I sneak up behind it regardless of consequence and rip open the sheet.
“Hey!
The fuck’s wrong wit’ ya?” the driver belches.
I look at him with cat’s eyes and scurry off.
“Kid!” I hear a yell from across the street, then see a young man crossing the cobbles in my direction. “C’mere, yeah. C’mere. What ya doin’?”
He looks healthy, fit. Maybe twenty-two years old. Handsome and with his cap over one eye and a toothpick out the other side of his mouth, he walks with a rhythm. I recognize him, but can’t remember from where. I stand still, hoping he can lead me to some food.
“Yeah, ya stealin’ in my neighborhood widout me knowin’ first? Is that it?”
I look at him.
“Ya ain’t gonna answer me?”
“I’m not.”
“Oh yeah? Wha’s ya name?”
“Liam Garrity.”
“Garrity?”
“Garrity.”
“Joe a relation o’ yours?”
“Uncle, but I swore him off as he did me.”
“You got nowhere to go?”
“Not yet.”
“How old are ya?”
“Still fourteen.”
“‘Still fourteen,’ he says,” laughing at me, then looks around.
“What are ya, right off the boat?”
I don’t answer.
“Listen, come wit’ me. Ya hungry? Come wit’ me. I gotta be somewhere an’ ya can come wit’. C’mon,” then grabs my arm and walks me quickly through the cobbles toward the sidewalk.
After a few minutes of walking I ask his name.
“‘What’s my name,’ he says,” again making fun and repeating.
“Guy, just call me Guy.”
“Guy?”
“Yeah, or Patrick Kelly, like everyone else around here.”
I would get to know him quite well over time, his real name was Vincent Maher and he walked me into a flower shop and dropped some coins on the table, left with a bouquet. “Ya ever been to a wake?”
“Uh . . . I have.”
“Good, le’s go.”
Light of the Diddicoy Page 5