The Deuce

by F. P. Lione

  I slowed my pace, walking to the boardwalk. A surprising number of people were out running and walking and doing all kinds of things. I never realized how busy the boardwalk kept the cops here. I saw two guys dealing what I guessed was crack out of the parking lot. They were sitting in a silver Mustang GT, and cars would pull up next to them, pass money, and grab something before driving away.

  The night was cool, with a light breeze blowing off the water. The farther I got from the bridge, the more I could see the stars. By the time I got to Miller Field, it was midnight. I walked the two and a half miles back to South Beach again and sat by the dolphin fountain. It was still too early to go home, so I walked some more. I estimated I walked about twelve miles that night, but I didn’t drink and that was what I wanted. My resolve grew stronger inside me on that walk—I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but at least I had found a path. I finally got home at 3:30. I was exhausted and fell asleep almost immediately.

  Denise knocked on my door at 8:00 the next morning. Now that I couldn’t blow my head off and leave the body for her to find, she was really getting on my nerves. In fact, if Fiore did leave me the gun I probably would have shot her. I told her to get lost. Okay, so maybe I was a little irritable from not drinking.

  Now she had the stereo blasting. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I picked up my new Bible to read. I was still reading the book of John. In the second chapter I read how Jesus broke up the temple. People were using it like it was a flea market, and he was mad. He tossed the tables and ran everyone out of there. I always remembered the “turn the other cheek” thing about Jesus, but I guess he got his point across when he had to.

  I was now on the fourth chapter, and I got up to the part about the woman at the well and the living water. I pulled out the Amplified version to understand it better. It said the water that Jesus gives will become a spring of water, flowing continually within him into eternal life. I’d have to ask Fiore about that one. I read on, not understanding a lot of it but feeling comforted anyway.

  I eventually fell back to sleep and woke up again at 11:45. The stereo was off, and it didn’t sound like anyone was home. For once I was glad to be home alone. I was about to get in the shower when the phone rang. I went down to the kitchen to pick up the cordless on the fourth ring.

  “Tony, it’s Joe.”

  “Hey, Joe,” I was glad that he was thinking of me.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I’m fine, but my legs hurt a little from running away from all the booze this weekend.”

  “I had a feeling it’d be coming at you from every direction,” he said quietly. “Between the basket of cheer from Garcia’s kid’s school and the family party, I knew the devil would come to steal the seed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. How are you holding up?” he asked.

  “I’m okay. Walked the boardwalk twice last night.”

  I heard him laugh.

  “With no gun to protect me.”

  “Donna and I have been praying for you.”

  “Thanks, buddy. I mean it, thanks for everything,” I said. “Hey, I was reading John again.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded thrilled. “Glad to hear it, stay at it. Listen, I won’t keep you, just wanted to see how you were.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll get the coffee,” he said as he hung up.

  I went back up to shower and shave, then went to Montey’s for a ham, egg, and cheese on a roll and a cup of coffee. I ate it at the kitchen table while reading the paper. The weather was cool, low eighties, and getting cooler in the evening. I planned to wash my truck and then watch the Yankee game. The Yanks were playing Boston at Fenway, and rival games were always good. Both our New York teams were looking good so far. Piazza had a seventeen-game hitting streak going; he was having some year. The Yanks were doing great as always; Paul O’Neill had an eleven-game hitting streak and Bernie Williams had a ten-game streak.

  I wish I could say that my weekend had some excitement to it. The truth was I climbed the walls until I left my house at 10:00 Monday night. The Yanks were humiliated by Boston seven to four. I shut it off in the eighth inning. The only bright spot on Sunday was Denise asking me to go to Dave’s for turtle races. Now that she wanted a drinking partner she was talking to me.

  “Get away from me,” I said as I turned the kitchen hose on her. “You’re not talking to me, remember?” I directed a spray of water across the room.

  “You psycho!” she yelled as she ran out the front door.

  11

  The next week flew by as I got used to life without booze.

  After the first few days, I wasn’t as obsessed with calculat-ing “I haven’t had a drink in four days, six hours, and twenty-seven minutes” as I had been.

  I spent Monday morning fishing under the bridge off the rocks by the Coast Guard base. I had bought a strip of squid and some live killeys at the bait shop on Sand Lane. The fluke on the Staten Island side of the bridge are nice, bigger than those on the Brooklyn side. I don’t know why, maybe the Brooklyn side is fished out. I had caught two doormat-sized fluke that my grandmother loved. I picked her up after work at her bus stop that day to give them to her. She insisted on cooking them for me, so I went back to her apartment while she cleaned and filleted them, fried them in breadcrumbs, and squeezed lemon over them. She made a side order of linguine with garlic and oil and a salad.

  The day was sunny and about eighty-five degrees with a warm breeze blowing. At least we had a break from the in-tense heat we’ve had over the past few weeks. The morning was quiet—the only sound besides the sea and the gulls was the occasional rumble of a truck overhead on the bridge. I caught a bluefish that was at least eight pounds. He bent my pole almost to my toes, and it took a good fifteen minutes to tire him out. I forgot how much I loved fishing.

  I fished for a few hours, then packed up and walked around to the beach. The tide was going out. When I was a kid I would spend hours here, looking under the seaweed-covered rocks for crab or eel. There’s a rock jetty and it’s amazing what you could find when the tide goes out. Mussels, clams, and small fish would get trapped, not able to get back out to sea. I would have waded in the water, but it didn’t look too good. There was a lot of garbage strewn along the shore. Apparently the barge that transported the garbage from the other boroughs spilled trash out as it went. There was also a lot of Coney Island whitefish, so there was no way I was taking off my shoes and putting my feet in the water.

  I didn’t jog that morning. I had gotten into a routine of jogging on the boardwalk when I got home in the morning. It was really a walk/jog, but I was jogging more now. Eventually, when I quit smoking, I wanted to start running. The biggest thing I dealt with was not the exercise but the boredom and the knowledge that I had come to a crossroad in my life and had some decisions to make. Fiore made a commitment to God sound so easy. I’ll admit there was a tug—the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

  Fiore and I fell into a routine at work of talking about God. We talked going to and from jobs and if possible while we were on them. In between we would read the Bible. I drove him crazy with my questions, and he was worried that he wasn’t teaching me the right thing.

  “You need to go to church,” he said. “I’m not a pastor, and I don’t want to teach you the wrong thing.”

  “I’m going to your church this week,” I said.

  “If you’re interested in learning about God, you need to go to church every week,” he said. “If you want to be taught.”

  “I haven’t gone to church in twenty years. What difference is a week gonna make?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ve been thinking that we should just stick to the basics about salvation,” he said seriously. He put out his thumb. “John 3:16.” He held out his index finger. “Romans 10:9–10.” He put out his middle finger. “And Romans 8:2. Write them down. I’ll read them now, but I want you to go home and study them.
Remember what John 3:16 tells us?”

  “About how much God loves us?”

  “That’s right! You remember!” He was grinning like crazy. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  I nodded, remembering the verse.

  “Think about that, Tony, he loved the world. You and I see the world all the time, and it’s not loveable. All the skells, all the perps, the rapists, the child molesters, all the good and bad. Jesus died for them and for us.”

  I let that sink in. I had a hard time tolerating the sight of perps like that.

  Then Fiore really shocked me. “We’re supposed to love everyone like that too. He said we should love one another like he loved us.”

  I thought about that for a minute.

  “But let’s not get off track,” Fiore said as he flipped through pages. “Okay, in Romans 10:9–10 it says: ‘If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes to righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made to salvation.’ That’s the prayer of salvation. Have you thought about saying the prayer of salvation?”

  I nodded. “I just want to think about it a little more. I don’t want to say it unless I really mean it.”

  He agreed. “Have you been praying and talking to the Lord?” he asked.

  “Is that what you call him, Lord?”

  “I call him Lord. Sometimes I talk to Jesus. The Bible calls God a lot of different things, but let’s just stick to God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Just talk to him. He loves you, Tony, and he’s waiting for you to come to him. I think by now you know he exists, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew God was reaching out to me and using Joe Fiore to do it.

  Joe and I really had become good friends in such a short period of time. Honestly I’ve never had a friend like him. On my first night back after Vinny’s party, when I told Fiore I still didn’t drink, I thought he was gonna cry. He hugged me and called Donna to tell her. I wished he’d stop hugging me like that—I didn’t know what the guys would say if they saw it. I didn’t want to say anything to him and hurt his feelings. He really let me know he was standing by me, whether I drank or not. It made no difference.

  My being on the wagon was challenged almost a week after the night it began. Fiore and I took a job for a dispute at a triple-X place on 8th Avenue south of 41st. The job came over at about 1:30 a.m. It was out of our sector, but sector Henry was busy.

  We got out of the car and proceeded to the establishment. As we approached it and walked past some phone booths, a white male in his late twenties wearing shorts and a muscle shirt hawked up some phlegm and spit it at us as we passed. He was built like a bull, six feet tall, probably about 275 pounds. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was the guy we had gotten the call about.

  I heard the sound as he coughed it up and then felt it hit the back of my head. I turned around and looked in the direction it came from and saw the bull standing there. He was all muscle, swaggering with a hip-hop walk. His hands swayed back and forth, with his thumb and pinky out, the rest of the fingers folded in. He wore a baseball cap turned to the side and bopped to an internal beat.

  “Did you just spit on me?” I asked, stunned.

  “Officer, he did spit on you,” a middle-aged man said as he walked out of the store.

  This being a porn place, his word was questionable.

  The bull ignored me and pretended to be surprised when I went to grab him. “What are you doing?” he yelled. “What’s going on?”

  A white, male hippie-looking guy in his early forties with round wire-rimmed glasses wearing leather sandals, khaki shorts, and a white shirt stopped to watch.

  When I put the spitter up against the window of the triple-X place to lock him up for disorderly conduct, he went berserk. As I tried to pull his arm behind his back, he pulled his arm out and pushed off the glass to turn around and grab us. At that point I grabbed him by his left shoulder. Fiore grabbed him by his right shoulder, and we put him up against the window of the store. As we attempted to cuff him, his right hand was up against the window. I had his left hand down, close to his waist. Just as I got the cuffs onto his left wrist, he swung his right arm around, catching Fiore with the force of his body and knocking him into me. I was bent down, with his left arm by my stomach as Fiore hit me. My left shoulder went right through the window.

  The sound of shattering glass echoed around us. I moved my head out of the way so I wouldn’t get hit with it. That’s when I saw the hippie filming us, hoping to get some police brutality on tape so he could sell it to the news. He moved in with his camera, close enough to distract us.

  Glass was on my shoulders and in my hair as I still held the cuff in my hand. Fiore grabbed the spitter by his right arm and shoulder and pulled him to the ground. Because he was so big, I started to go down with him. I had to let go of the cuff. I heard the whack as he hit the pavement, landing facedown. I dropped on his back and grabbed his arm in a hurry. He started making roaring noises, straining with all his might to get up.

  As I was on his back I held his left arm down, with the cuff in my right hand. The metal link between the cuffs was in my right hand so that I had a grip on his wrist and he couldn’t pull his arm away. As I was doing that, I looked up because there was a camera in my face on the left side. We were by the curb now, rolling on the filthy sidewalk while this idiot was filming me. I put my left arm up. “Get out of here! What are you doing?” I asked, appalled. “I’m trying to cuff this guy.”

  Now that the spitter was pinned on the ground we could cuff him. Fiore had his right arm. I pushed with my knee into the guy’s back and pulled his left arm up so he had no leverage to stand. Fiore pulled his right arm up to the middle of his back, and we cuffed the guy. Immediately he started kicking and screaming again, trying to get up. Judging by the way he acted, he was on something, and it wasn’t just alcohol.

  “That’s him, Officer,” came a voice from behind us. I turned around to see a short, middle-aged man coming out of the triple-X store. The camera was in my face again as I turned. I said, “Get out of here!” holding up my hand. When the hippie didn’t move, I said, “If you don’t step back, you’ll be locked up for obstructing.”

  “I know my rights,” he sneered. “This is a public sidewalk, and you can’t stop me from filming.”

  “Then get away from me!” I barked out.

  The manager of the porn place started telling us the cuffed guy had been breaking up the store. The cameraman came up again, this time on my right side. I turned to my left so I could listen to the store manager. I was holding onto the perp’s left arm with my other hand, pushing down on his left shoulder. I mentally tried to calm myself down because I felt myself starting to explode.

  Fiore stepped in front of the guy with the camera, pushing him back. “Listen, I am only going to tell you this one more time—get back or you’re getting locked up for obstructing.” Fiore was angry. This was our second warning for the guy to step back—on the third he’d get locked up. He knew this and backed off just enough.

  Fiore had called for backup, nonemergency, once we had the EDP cuffed. Since this was an EDP, we would need the sergeant at the scene and an ambulance to take the perp to Bellevue. The guy was on something, and we didn’t want him going into heart failure from exerting himself during the psychosis. As it was, he was getting a burst of energy every twenty seconds and fighting and screaming all over again. When he stopped fighting he would take in deep panting breaths until he got his next rush of strength. I was exhausted from grappling with him.

  ESU arrived first, then the ambulance and Sergeant Hanrahan were on the scene. They wrapped the perp in a mesh blanket, keeping his arms and legs close to him so he couldn’t hurt himself or anyone else. The mesh would keep him from overhe
ating. They put him on his stomach with his head to the side on the gurney because he was biting and spitting.

  Once he was in the ambulance I noticed that my hands and face were cut from the falling glass. Nothing serious, but the ambulance worker took a look at me. The cameraman didn’t bother filming the blood on me—he was filming the perp wrapped in the mesh blanket being taken into the ambulance.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “The show’s over. Now get out of here.”

  He took his time putting away his camera, mumbling that I couldn’t tell him what to do. Fiore could see how angry I was, and he went over to the guy and said, “You had your two warnings. Get out of here now or I’m locking you up.”

  The cameraman moved away—he knew the third warning would mean an arrest. He’d done this before. The department had had problems like this before. If I had taken his camera and locked him up for obstructing, I would be the one under scrutiny. If push came to shove, the brass would feed me to the wolves. It would look like he was locked up to cover a brutality conspiracy he caught on film.

  While the perp was in the ambulance, Fiore spoke to the store manager. Now the spitter would be a collar, not just an EDP. Fiore would take the collar so it didn’t look like I took his spitting personally and locked him up for it. The complainant at the store wanted to press charges anyway.

  Fiore went by ambulance to Bellevue, and I followed in the RMP. The hospital shot the perp up with tranquilizers and took off the mesh blanket. They tied him down with sheets to the gurney and put him in a room. The hospital had his wallet and gave us his name and pertinent information needed to process the arrest. Fiore went to the station to start the paperwork. I stayed at Bellevue until 7:00, when someone relieved me. I saw Fiore when I got back to the precinct. I was still angry about the guy with the camera.

  “I should have locked him up,” I said, pacing. I don’t know why I was letting it get to me. It’s not like it hadn’t happened before.

  “Let it go, Tony,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Stop a minute and pray, just talk to the Lord and ask him to help you.”