by Con Lehane
“Where?” I asked her back.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.” It dawned on me she was saying yes.
“How about Chinatown?”
I was thrilled. Mainland China would have been fine. I racked my brain trying to remember the name of one of the twelve hundred restaurants in Chinatown, most of which I’d eaten in at one time or another, but I couldn’t remember a single name.
Dr. Parker didn’t seem worried. We decided she’d pick me up at Pop’s apartment on Cortelyou Road, which was only a few minutes from her clinic, and we’d search out a restaurant from there.
I found a gypsy cab in front of the clinic, and Pop buzzed me in a few minutes later. He was sitting at his round dining room table, reading a book of Maksim Gorky stories, when I hobbled in.
“You’re still limping,” he said, putting the book down carefully after finishing the passage he was reading and marking the page with a bookmark.
“I didn’t change the bandage, so it got infected.” I felt guilty in the same way I once did for not doing my homework.
Pop appraised me in his fashion. “I see. You have one good leg; that should do you.”
“No. I’m getting it fixed.” I found myself smiling. “I’m having dinner with the doctor tonight.”
“That should do it.”
Poor Pop. Despite his quick wit, he felt the pain of my failure as his own. I had my own kid; I knew how it felt to believe you’d messed up a child’s life.
“I need your advice.”
He nodded.
Standing behind his chair, I looked down at his gray head and wanted to hug him the way I did Kevin, but I couldn’t. I didn’t even remember hugging him when I was a kid. I went over what had happened since I saw him last. He didn’t know what to make of the fact that both Greg and John’s father had more than one identity. When I told him John wanted me to forget the whole thing, he seized on it immediately. “So why don’t you give up?” He has this peculiar way of pretending to sound convincing when he means the opposite.
“I guess I should.”
He glowered at me for a moment, the intensity in his eyes at the level where he could see through steel. This was his temper at half throttle. “Make up your mind.”
“I don’t know what to do … . Someone was killed a long time ago. Maybe it had something to do with John and Greg. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it has something to do with Aaron getting killed.”
Pop didn’t seem surprised. If anything, the expression in his eyes hardened a bit. “Your friends are corrupt. In John’s case, that’s a shame, because he has so much to offer.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes—a familiar reflection of his own angst.
In another of my ongoing efforts to show Pop I was something other than—or at least in addition to—a ne’er-do-well, I showed him the official-looking letter I’d found under my door when I got back from Atlantic City. It was from the Labor Department, upholding our rank and file challenge to the bartenders’ union’s election. I had neglected to tell John I’d taken my battle with the bartenders’ union to the Labor Department when they stole the shop stewards’ election.
Pop was as pleased as punch. “You need to pay attention to this now.” He looked at me steadily, like he must have looked when he spoke to the workers at rallies. “The men you’re challenging in that local are ruthless. They control by terror. You need a plan to fight them; you don’t have time for John and his shell games.” The old man paused. Fear flickered in his eyes. “You need to begin working on the new election. You may need to ask the Labor Department for protection.”
Before he got carried away, I told him he was wrong on a couple of counts. Number one, John had made me a boss. So, technically, I wasn’t in the union anymore. And I couldn’t really go back to the bargaining unit until I could walk again. Number two, John had gotten me out of the unit precisely to get me away from the union thugs. And finally, John had been a big help when we organized the union down at the shore and might be able to help with this one.
The old man looked skeptical. “John has a good heart. But he wants to be a boss too much to help you with the union. You can’t trust someone who wants to be a boss.”
He stopped to look at me because I’d begun to laugh quietly. Once more, I felt this overflowing affection for him. At times like this, it practically gushed. However he’d done it—and I still didn’t know how—when push came to shove, it was my old man I’d follow. His values, his way of being, that’s how I was—his image and likeness. “You wanna be the boss, you gotta fuck over your friends, right, Pop?” I laughed at his perplexity. “Look,” I said more quietly. “John has been a good friend to me, whatever you think of his workplace politics. You used to like him, too.”
Pop sat back down to his book. He opened it but looked up at me. “I’m glad you beat the bastards. I hope you keep after it.” The expression in his eyes reminded me of a lake I’d been on once long ago in New Hampshire. The water was so clear that when I looked down over the side of the rowboat, I could see twenty feet or more through the water to the bottom. “I’m an old man. I can’t tell you how to live your life.” He picked up his book, but before he started to read, he again turned to look at me. “Forget what I said about John. I do like him. I’d like to see him again. Is he coming with us to the ball game tonight?”
“The ball game?” Then I remembered I was supposed to take Kevin to the ball game. “Shit. What about the doctor?”
Pop was unsympathetic. “You said dinner. Have an early dinner.”
Dinner? What about a walk from Chinatown up through Little Italy? An espresso and a latte? A few drinks at the Village Vanguard? A nightcap uptown at the Terrace, a joint in my apartment, dim lights, Lester Young on the stereo, a tentative first kiss, soft caresses?
I called the doctor’s office, but she’d already left. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang, and I buzzed her in. While Pop poured her some coffee from his perennially scorched pot, I told her my dilemma. She laughed and said she’d love to go to the ball game. I called Big John, who actually was at his office for a change. He hemmed and hawed until I reminded him Pop was going. “Great,” said John, “just like the old days.” He was remembering the 1978 season, when he used to bring his son up from New Jersey to go to the stadium with me, Kevin, and, Pop. He and Pop, die-hard Yankee fans, were the best of buddies. I was a Mets fan myself, but I never actually admitted this to either of them.
When Kevin arrived, he seemed impressed that I’d gotten myself shot. “Are you going to go after them?” he asked.
“After them?”
“Yeah … get a gun and track them down. You can’t just let someone shoot you and get away with it.”
The law west of the Pecos. Kevin was serious. This is how young men thought in Brooklyn, the best efforts of parents, teachers, police, and pillars of the community notwithstanding. You settle scores the manly way. How could I explain to him that there were better routes to becoming a man, when everything around him argued something else? Be a man. Track them down. And the truth was, part of me felt that way, too. Why wasn’t I such a man?
What I did do was tell Kevin that my getting shot was tied up with the killing at the Ocean Club and that all of it would get cleared up sooner rather than later. “I need to work some things out with Big John,” I said.
This reassured him. “You and Big John can handle it,” he said confidently, then thought about it some more. “But why would someone shoot you?” He seemed to agree with John’s assessment that I was hardly worth shooting. Kevin was less impressed that I was bringing along a doctor for a date. “A lady doctor,” he whispered to me in the kitchen. “Jeez, Dad!”
We ordered a pizza. After we ate, Dr. Parker drove us all to Yankee Stadium. Thus began Dr. Parker’s first date—with three generations of the McNulty clan and Big John Wolinski. As we were crossing the bridge over the Harlem River at 155th Street in thick traffic and the stadium was in sight, she was gleeful, “I love the Yankees,” s
aid Dr. Parker.
Pop, in the backseat, perked right up. “Me, too.” He’d seen Gehrig and Ruth and King Kong Keller, DiMaggio, Mantle, and Whitey Ford. Not only had he been a known Communist in Brooklyn during the height of the McCarthy era in the fifties; he’d been a Yankee fan, too. Bad enough to wear SAVE THE ROSENBERGS buttons; he wore a Yankees cap on the subway.
Big John said to meet him at the general admission booth in front of Gate E. When we found him, he’d already bought a string of tickets. A few minutes later, he was down next to the mezzanine-level railing in whispered but intense negotiations with a short, stubby usher. When I saw him pushing something into the man’s hand, I realized he was bribing the guy to get us into some box seats that wouldn’t be used that night. Soon enough, we were about eight rows back in the boxes behind third base.
Being at the stadium like this naturally reminded us of times past. John was quick enough to sense what was missing and brought it up himself. “Boy, I wish Robert was here,” he said.
“How is the boy?” I asked, knowing I was treading on difficult ground. John had a strong sense that he should do right by his son but knew he’d fallen down on the job over the years.
“Robert’s in military school. He got in some trouble, so his mother thinks she can’t handle him anymore. I’m paying for him to go to one upstate, and he’s doing good. He comes home once a month. Maybe we can all get together again the next time he comes down.”
Guidry was pitching, and Big John had two hundred bucks on the game. As Guidry strode out to the mound for the first inning, it was clear that he, like Pop, John, and the rest of the smattering of fans, was pretending it was still 1978. The Red Sox disabused him, and us, of this notion with four runs in the first inning. John and Pop complained about George Steinbrenner and talked about the economy. Kevin raved about the wonderful seats and watched for foul balls. And I held hands with Dr. Parker, stoically braving the pain in my leg. The Yankees lost seven to two.
We left John at the ballpark, without my bringing up the question of his father versus Dr. Wilson. I didn’t want to get everyone else involved, for one thing; for another, I didn’t want to mess up my date with Dr. Parker. I did tell him there was something I wanted to talk to him about, and he said to call him at his office. Dr. Parker dropped me at my apartment after the game and took the rest of my family back to Brooklyn. She promised we’d go out again on a night when she could stay out later—then she bit my lip when she kissed me good night.
I was back in my own apartment for all of fifteen minutes, still starry-eyed from Dr. Parker’s kiss, when the phone rang. Maybe the phone rings differently when it senses anxiety; maybe I have a sixth sense. Or maybe I’m just used to getting bad news. Whatever the reason, I knew before I answered the phone that this call meant trouble.
“Mr. Magnolia?” the voice inquired in a thick Spanish accent.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” the voice insisted, with the slight quickening of panic people unfamiliar with a language get when what they’re saying isn’t understood. “Brian Magnolia.”
“Right … . Brian Magnolia. What do you want?”
“I call for Ernesto Hermanos.”
Remembering the phone call to my service, I felt my pulse quickening.
“Come to Ninety-two East One Hundred and eighty-ninth Street tonight.”
“Now? You’re nuts. Why would I do that?”
“Because you are a friend, señor,” the voice said with a solid note of conviction, as if friendship and loyalty were commonplace. The guy must not have been in the country long. But before I could straighten him out, he hung up.
At midnight, on East 183rd Street, in the bowels of the South Bronx, an adult man has about the same potential for survival as he does in a squad-size firefight in pretty open terrain. But I’d been tricked by someone—my fucking father, probably—into believing I had a duty to respond to people like Ernesto, who, I’d been told since birth, were the salt of the earth. Political correctness notwithstanding, I was scared shitless. For sure, I wasn’t about to go to the South Bronx on the Lexington Avenue subway at night with a bum leg.
Of course, the first person I thought of was Ntango. When he dropped me off at the hospital earlier in the day, he’d told me he was going home to sleep. I trekked over to his apartment on 109th Street on my crutches on the off chance he’d kept the cab. I was in luck. He answered the door in boxer shorts, sleep and irritation wrinkling his normally impassive face. Standing in the doorway with that regal bearing of his, he made me feel like a messenger disturbing the king with bad news. Not only was I the messenger; I was also the bad news.
“You wouldn’t by any chance want to take me to the South Bronx tonight, would you?” I asked. I still had some of John’s stash left after paying Ntango for the Atlantic City trip, so I said—as if it meant something—“I could pay you.”
Ntango’s face clouded; a rush of anger smoldered behind his eyes.
I looked at him helplessly, shrugged my shoulders, and held my hands toward him, palms up. I explained about the phone call and Ernesto.
Ntango’s calm returned, and with it his long-suffering sympathy. “One adventure after another, my friend.”
There are neighborhoods New York has given up for lost. Buildings are burned-out hulks; others are abandoned and stripped of all their wiring, plumbing, and most of their wood, all of them with sheet metal or plywood covering what once were windows and doors. Here, the streets are littered with debris that includes everything from the rusting bones of old cars to beams and joists of a building’s former life. Yet the streets are not deserted, nor are the buildings. Winos and junkies live in the four- and six-story brick shells—and some families, too, with small boys and baby girls. Some of the children still played that night in the darkness after midnight on the block Ntango detected would house 92—if by any chance in the world the building had a number. A couple of buildings still had windows and light—probably through bootleg hookups providing electricity for the entire block. There was even a neighborhood grocery store in a narrow building surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up storefronts; it shone through the Lindsey riot gates like a campfire from deep in the woods. When Ntango slowed to try to catch a number, I looked into the store and saw a young Hispanic guy looking back from behind a bulletproof window.
Clusters of young men, who leaned against the fronts of other buildings, watched us with some interest, since we were the only car moving on the street. I got the clear sense that nothing of society as it’s generally known penetrated this street. I felt like the guy with the white hat in the old Western, riding into the mountain camp of the outlaws, where lookouts watched from high places, the law had no authority, strangers were not taken kindly to, and where those strangers, once having crossed the threshold of the badlands outlaw town, were at the mercy of the outlaws.
The number 92 was faintly visible on the weathered doorjamb of a building with corrugated-tin windows. To say that the entrance—a a sheet of tin peeled back like a jaggedly opened can of sardines—looked foreboding is to mince words. Nobody in his right mind would walk through that entrance. Ntango stopped the cab and watched me out of the corner of his eye in the rearview mirror. “There’s light,” he said. “But if you get out of the cab, I’m leaving. I’ll gather the fare from your estate.”
A sinister darkness settled around the cab. “I came all the way up here,” I told Ntango. “I ought to just go in.” I pictured myself getting out of the cab and marching up to the door. But in reality, I didn’t move a muscle. Just sat in the backseat. Huddled might be a better word. Cringed.
Taking matters into his own hands, Ntango gave the horn two short toots, the sound ringing out through the neighborhood like shots. But it worked. The tin door waggled and shook and two men pushed through the doorway. Both were short and stocky and had wavy black hair, bushy eyebrows, and thick black mustaches. With their furtive manners and hard-chiseled faces, they looked like extras from a
Pancho Villa movie, except that one of the men smiled at us, his expression almost shy.
“Mr. Magnolia?” the smiling man inquired.
I said, “Yes,” and looked at him, I’m sure, with eyes as wide as manhole covers.
“It’s better inside,” he said. Then to Ntango: “You, too.” Nodding toward the door, “Alberto will watch the cab.” Alberto didn’t move or change expression, but by the breadth of his shoulders and the darkness in his eyes, he gave clear indication the cab would be safe.
We crawled through the corrugated tin to a dank and dark hallway. The musty smell of desertion seeped from the walls. The warped wooden floorboards creaked and trembled, so that I expected to fall through to a pit below. The apartment had a steel fire door, which seemed appropriate for this cubicle in Desolation Row. The room we entered was lit by a single lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling. Three men sat at a table as if this might be the regular Friday-night poker game. One of the men was Ernesto. Everyone looked up. A sea of gently smiling faces made me feel like I was the thug.
Ernesto rose from his seat. He seemed unsure whether to hold his hand out toward me, so I held mine out toward him, and we shook hands. I liked that his grip was gentle rather than firm. “I’m very glad you came,” Ernesto said. “And very sorry for causing you so much trouble.”
“No trouble,” I said cheerily.
“Much trouble.” Ernesto’s dark eyes softened with sympathy. Everyone nodded sadly, even Ntango. I myself suspected a bit of difficulty might lie ahead.
“So what’s up?” I asked Ernesto. He noticed my crutches but didn’t say anything. Instead, he looked over his shoulder at an older man who sat at the table. The man, maybe in his late fifties, wore glasses and had gray hair. He was dressed in workingman’s clothes—the thick green cotton shirt and pants you’d expect to see the building super wearing. He was squat and short, his skin dark and somewhat reddish, his eyes dark and clear, and his expression straightforward. The whole group was like this. No posturing. No role playing. No one trying to impress me. No one trying to scare me. Just a group of regular working guys. I expected someone to switch on the ball game and offer me a beer—uh, una cerveza.