Raising Jake

by Charlie Carillo

  Jake senses the sanctity of the moment and whispers, “Why do you call him the Walking Holiday?”

  “Because he was such an old man when I went to this school, we all figured we’d get a day off when he died.”

  “He sure screwed you, huh?”

  “Yeah. Me and thousands of other guys since the class of 1974.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. You’d have to saw him in half and count the rings, I think.”

  We watch him work. Father Walls is doing the best he can, but the leaves are not cooperating. Most of them resist the bite of the broom bristles, staying behind as he plows onward toward the curb. But it doesn’t matter that he’s doing a shitty job. What matters is that he’s alive, he’s out there, a man who’s certainly within a whisper of his hundredth birthday, or maybe even past it and gunning for two hundred.

  I’m gripped by a weirdly optimistic sensation, watching that old priest at work. Somehow, some way, my son is going to be all right, and so am I. I reach over and squeeze the back of Jake’s neck.

  “Let’s walk,” I say.

  “Hang on, Dad. Maybe we should offer to help this guy sweep.”

  “No! That would kill him! Don’t you get it? In his head, he’s the only man in the world who can do it right. You take away his task, he might as well be dead.”

  Minutes later, Father Walls decides that his job is done, though he’s managed to sweep a total of maybe a dozen leaves into the street. He shoulders the broom like a rifle and baby-steps his way back into the school. The door booms behind him with an echo that goes right through me.

  “Okay, the show’s over,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  I lead the way around the back of the school past the athletic field, where I heard the words “We Got Sullivan” innumerable times. It’s a dirt field ringed by a running track, and the only person there is a fat kid in a full sweatsuit, puffing around the track in an obvious effort to lose weight.

  “He shouldn’t be doing that,” Jake says. “He’s too heavy. He’ll wreck his knees.”

  “He’ll find that out the hard way.”

  “No, he won’t. Wait here.”

  Jake calls to the kid, who slows down to a waddle and meets Jake at the fence. Jake seems to be giving him serious advice, and then he says something that makes the kid laugh out loud. They high-five each other before the fat kid hobbles off to the showers. Jake returns to me with a grin on his face.

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “The truth. That he’ll grind his knees into bonemeal if he keeps this up. Told him to use an exercise bike to drop some pounds before he starts running.”

  “He could have told you to go fuck yourself.”

  “That was a risk I was willing to take. Got to take some chances in life, Dad.”

  “What made him laugh?”

  “I told him the girl he was trying to impress wasn’t worth spending a lifetime in a wheelchair.”

  “He found that funny?”

  “It’s all in the delivery, Dad. Now come on. Show me where you lived. I want to see the house.”

  “It’s the next stop on the tour,” I say, but as it turns out we run into a bit of a detour on the way.

  We walk a few blocks in the direction of my old house when suddenly my heart begins gonging away in my chest. Jake sees that something is wrong, and he’s actually frightened by the way I’m breathing.

  “You okay, Dad?”

  “I just realized something.”

  “What’s that?”

  I point at a small brick house across the street from where we’re standing, a house fronted by a ragged lawn and wildly overgrown privet hedges.

  “Is that your old house? It looks abandoned!”

  “No, that wasn’t my house….”

  Should I tell him? Maybe not. And then it just bubbles out of me. “That’s where I lost my virginity.”

  “No kidding?”

  “I wouldn’t kid about that.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I was seventeen years old. My mother had been dead for a few months, and I was working for Napoli’s World Famous Pizza, making endless deliveries on a bicycle. It was a big old clunker of a bike with fat balloon tires and crooked wheels and an oversized wire basket on the handlebars, big enough to hold six pies at a time.

  Saturday night was always our biggest delivery night, and the night with the most problems. People were usually half in the bag when they called in their orders and often totally bombed by the time I arrived with their pies. Usually there was a party going on and they had to take up a collection to pay me, with a lot of stupid arguing over who owed what, and who still owed from the last time. I’d be standing there in the apartment hallway like an idiot while all this went on, but on the advice of old man Napoli I never handed over the pizza until I had the money. That was the surest way to get a door slammed in your face.

  I was tired. Napoli made the best pies in Flushing and I’d been on the go nonstop since five thirty in the afternoon. Now it was past midnight, and this was my final delivery of the night—four sausage and pepperoni pies to the top story of a five-floor walk-up.

  I could hear music and screaming and laughter from above as soon as they buzzed me into the vestibule. It was a shabby building, the walls starved for paint, the linoleum floors crowded with banged-up baby carriages. An old lady on the second floor opened her door and glowered at me as I approached. She was obviously the closest thing this building had to a guard dog, and none too happy about the noise from above. She wore curlers and a hair net and she clutched at the lapels of her bathrobe to keep me from sneaking a peek at her withered breasts.

  “Whaddya, bringin’ ’em food at this hour?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You tell them to pipe down!”

  I ignored her, kept climbing, and paused to catch my breath at the door before knocking. I had to knock again, harder, to be heard above the racket. Suddenly it opened, and a fat, balding young guy with a cigar jammed into his mouth was grinning at me.

  “Pizza’s here!” he shouted. “Come on in, kid!”

  I knew immediately that this was a bachelor party. I hated these things, knew I’d probably have to go through hell to get paid, but what could I do?

  I followed him into a room so thick with smoke that I could hardly breathe. There were at least a dozen cigar smokers there, twenty-somethings with a smattering of thirty-somethings, all standing with their backs to me, shoulder to shoulder in a sloppy semicircle. Empty beer bottles were everywhere, and I looked in vain for a place to set the pizzas down. “Where do you want these?”

  “In a minute, in a minute. First enjoy the show, kid.”

  “What show?”

  He nudged one of the guys aside, pushed me into the gap. “This show!” he cried.

  I blinked my watery eyes and saw a girl in a white cowboy hat, white skirt, and white boots dancing around a young man sprawled in a lounge chair, obviously the man due to marry in the morning. The men were whooping and yelling so loudly that they drowned out the stripper music coming from the girl’s pathetic little boom box.

  But the girl could hear it, or at least she pretended she could. She whirled and strutted and pointed an admonishing finger at the groom to be. It said MANDY in silver letters across the front of her hat, so the guys began chanting “Man-dee! Man-dee!”

  Off came the halter top, off came the white skirt, and just like that Mandy stood naked before us, save for the hat and the boots.

  This was the first naked woman I’d ever seen. I was unaware of the fact that I’d tightened my grip on the pizza boxes, hugging them as if they were a life raft. Mandy was blond haired and blue eyed, maybe two or three years older than me. She was dazzling but not beautiful, but the point was that she was there, in the flesh, almost within touching distance. I watched the rest of her blurry-fast routine, which ended with her blowing kisses to the crowd as she deftly picked her clot
hes up off the floor. She ducked into another room and within seconds she emerged wearing a trench coat that went all the way to her ankles. Without another word or gesture to the catcalling crowd, Mandy the stripper scooped up her little boom box and was gone. Obviously she’d been paid up front, unlike me.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Mandy has left the building!” said one of the guys, and they all laughed at that.

  “Here, kid.” The fat guy who’d let me in stuffed some bills into my shirt pocket, took the now-cold pies from me, and pointed at the front of my pants.

  “Hey!” he said, “looks like somebody got a little excited here!”

  I looked down. Streaks of pizza oil ran from my crotch to my thighs. I’d been squeezing those boxes even harder than I realized.

  They exploded in laughter at the sight of me. I made the cardinal sin of not counting the money as I ran for the door and dashed down the stairs, thinking maybe I’d catch up to the stripper, half wanting it to happen, half fearing that it would.

  But she was gone, and so was the delivery bike I’d left in front of the building. Somebody had stolen the fucking thing.

  I couldn’t believe it. That old clunker was such a hunk of junk that I couldn’t even imagine anyone wanting to steal it, so I never bothered with the wheel lock that old man Napoli provided. The double bang of the stripper and the bicycle theft had me numb. I began the long walk back to Napoli’s, wondering what I was going to tell him, wondering where the stripper had gone, wondering if “Mandy” was her real name and how often she stripped. I wondered if she had a real job as well, or if she was just a stripper. It was amazing to me that a woman could do something like that for money. I didn’t think it was wrong, just amazing.

  I took the money from my shirt pocket and counted it. The tab for the four pies had come to forty-eight bucks, and the guy had slipped me three twenties. Twelve bucks, the best tip I’d ever gotten. If the bike hadn’t been stolen and my pants hadn’t gotten fucked up, this would have been a hell of a good night.

  Napoli was in a bad mood when I got back, eager to close up shop. He was about sixty years old, one of those lean, surly Italians whose eyes grew narrower with suspicion each and every year of his life. All those years of pulling pizza pies out of hot ovens didn’t do much to improve his personality.

  “Hey, Sammy. What’d you do, get lost?”

  I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d stopped to watch a stripper. “They took a long time to pay.”

  “Son of a bitch bastards.” This was one of his favorite expressions.

  I gave him two twenties and a ten from my wallet, and he gave back two dollars in change. I didn’t want him knowing I’d gotten a twelve-dollar tip. It would hurt me the next time I was due for a raise. He gave me my weekly pay in cash, and then I had to tell him.

  “Mr. Napoli—”

  “Hey, your pants are all fucked up.”

  “I know.”

  “And you forgot to bring the bike inside.”

  I sighed, looked at the floor. “Somebody stole it.”

  “Stole it?”

  “It wasn’t there when I got downstairs from the last delivery.”

  He rubbed his face, muttered an Italian oath. “Who would steal such a piece-o’-shit bike?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He cocked his head at me. “I bet you forgot to lock it! You didn’t lock it, did you?”

  I thought about lying, changed my mind. “No, I didn’t lock it.”

  “Sammy. Sammy.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You gotta make good for that bike.”

  I knew this would happen, and I also knew the old prick was enjoying it. Might he have sent someone to steal it, so his faithful employee could get stuck for the price of a much-needed new one? I wouldn’t put it past him.

  “How much?” I ventured.

  He rubbed the back of his wrinkly neck. “I dunno…forty bucks?”

  “Forty bucks! It’s a twenty-year-old bike!”

  “Sammy—”

  “You said yourself it was a piece o’ shit!”

  “Yeah, but it worked, didn’t it? And I have to replace it, don’t I?”

  “I’ll replace it, okay?”

  He hadn’t thought of this possibility. His already narrowed eyes became razor slits. “Where you gonna get a bike?”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “All right, but it’s gotta be a bike that can do the job.”

  “It will be. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t get mad, Sammy. You gotta be responsible in life, know what I mean?”

  This was the perfect lesson for a fallen young Catholic, absolutely flawless. I’d sinned by watching a stripper, and for my instantaneous penance, I was hit with oil-stained pants and a stolen bike.

  We turned off the lights and stepped outside. I helped him pull down the burglar gate.

  “You want a ride home?”

  “No, I don’t want a ride home.”

  I walked off without saying good night. The oil stains on my pants were going to be hard to get out. Maybe I should present Napoli with a cleaning bill, as long as I was being dunned for the bike. If my mother were still alive she’d know how to get the stain out, but she was dead, and it was times like this that I thought of her.

  Were people in heaven able to watch us down on earth? My mother wouldn’t have liked to see me ogling a stripper. That would have made her suffer, and that brought up another point—would God let his good little souls in heaven suffer by witnessing the deeds of their sinful loved ones down on earth? Or did they just play their harps and hang out with each other in a blissful state of grace, ignorant of the sinning being done by their survivors down on earth?

  I needed advice. I needed comfort. I needed a shoulder to cry on, but whose? My father’s?

  Well, it was worth a shot. He was bound to be at Charlie’s Bar, as he always was on Saturday nights, not to mention Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Charlie’s Bar became my destination.

  It was past 1:00 a.m. when I entered the joint, a place I’d only ever been to in search of my old man. Charlie’s was a dingy, grimy gin mill that was more like a slovenly friend’s finished basement than a licensed saloon. It had fake wood paneling in the halls, and bar stools with fake leather seats.

  But Charlie McMahon was real, a burly, gray-haired retired fireman who worked the stick six nights a week, serving the working-stiff locals. He didn’t seem to like his customers very much, but for some reason he liked my father, probably because they were both Irish, and for that reason he was always friendly to me.

  “Sammy! What the hell happened to your pants?”

  “Pizza box leaked on ’em.”

  “You still workin’ for that miserable guinea?”

  Apparently he’d forgotten that I was half Italian. “Yeah, well, it’s a job…. My old man around?”

  “He came and he left. Looked kinda tired. You guys doin’ all right, Sammy?”

  I shrugged.

  “He misses your mother somethin’ awful.”

  The hell he did. “So he went home a while ago?”

  “Maybe half an hour.”

  “All right, I’ll see you around, Charlie.”

  “Wait. Sit. Have one on the house, you had a rough night.”

  Before I could object he set a longneck Budweiser in front of me, dripping foam. “Happy days, kid.”

  “Thanks.”

  Why did he want me around? Maybe because it was so damn depressing in there. Three or four middle-aged guys were sitting at the other end of the bar, shell-backed men solemnly staring into the foam at the bottom of their beer mugs in search of that elusive key to happiness. What a place to look for it!

  At least I was young—underage, in fact. Even if I just sat there without saying a word, I’d bring some vitality to those dismal early morning hours. Charlie went to the other end of the bar to refresh the shell-backs’ drinks, and that’s when she walked in and
sat down next to me.

  She didn’t even look at me at first. Charlie came over when he was through at the other end, and he seemed less than delighted to see her.

  “How’s tricks, Fran?”

  “Lousy.”

  He asked her what she wanted, and his eyebrows went up when she told him to make her a white wine spritzer. Charlie’s usual customers were beer and whiskey people, the women included, and it was easy to read the unspoken thought in his head: who does this broad think she is? He made her the spritzer with cheap Gallo wine from a gallon jug, took her money, and went back to the other end of the bar. She sipped her spritzer, made a face at it, and set the glass on the bar. At last she looked at me, and I knew she’d been drinking heavily before she got here.

  “What are you starin’ at?”

  She was right. I’d been staring at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “It’s rude. Don’t do it.”

  She was around thirty-five, not bad looking but frazzled, the way women often get when their marriages go wrong and they’re stuck with kids. Her dark blond hair was cut in a stylish shag, and she wore stone-washed jeans and a brown leather jacket. She took out a pack of Kools, shook one into her mouth, and looked at me again. “You got a problem if I smoke?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ma’am me! You want one?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Good for you. You’ll live longer.” She lit up, inhaled deeply, breathed it out through her nostrils. “What the hell happened to your pants?”

  I didn’t want to tell her, but I had to. I had to talk to somebody, and it came spilling out of me as if a dam had burst—the pizza delivery, the stripper, the leaking pizza boxes, the stolen bike. By the time I finished talking she’d smoked the Kool down to the butt and crushed it out in an ashtray. “So you gotta pay for the bike, huh?”

  “Well, I have to replace it.”

  “What a prick. I always thought that Napoli was a prick, and now I know for sure.”