Naturally, this system separated the school into the haves and the have-nots. The favorite sport of the haves was exposing the have-nots and making certain they understood that theirs was a lower place in this tiny galaxy and, by natural extension, society at large.
Some scholarship kids were easier to spot than others. Skin color being the most obvious giveaway (the haves were often bred on prejudice for generations), and clothes a close second. Some of the scholarship kids were dirt poor, lived in the crumbling slums of the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy, and often had to wear the same clothes for two or more consecutive days. The repetition being duly noted by those who wielded the power of popularity and means.
Reconnaissance and intelligence were the other methods used to ferret out and denounce the underprivileged. A few of the haves had parents on the board of the school. Some of these noble altruists were bigger assholes than their kids and they liberally leaked information on who paid and who didn’t.
I was suspected of “being on the tit.” I kid you not, that’s what getting a free ride was called. The endowed beneficiaries being “Tittysuckers” and often just the diminutive “Suckers.” The most prevalent name for Hobart’s poor and indigent was the even more abbreviated “Suck,” as in, “I think the new kid’s a Suck.” This novel transposition of verb into noun a testament to the linguistic proficiency of our ruling class.
I dressed more like a Suck than a rich kid, which I wasn’t, even though we paid. I didn’t like a lot of the new clothes my mother bought me before school and I hadn’t grown much over the summer so I stuck with my Wranglers and T-shirts. I was called a Suck to my face by two athletic seniors who punted a stack of books out of my hands. You see, the white Sucks were more likely to be confronted physically than the black or Puerto Rican Sucks; racist urban paranoia instilled a fear of blades and jailbird siblings into our future titans of industry and stewards (and stewardesses) of culture.
The homecoming theme that autumn was “The Best Days of Our Lives.” But on the glittery blue-and-gold banner they hung over the gym’s big double doors, the word Lives appeared as Live’s.
Nobody bothered to change it.
eight
I noticed her on my very first day of school but it wasn’t until a few weeks had passed that I found the courage to speak to her.
“You dropped your pencil.”
That was it. The sentence fell from my mouth and tumbled into the abyss. The four separate words slurred into one unintelligible sound. At least that’s how I remember it.
By the time this magical pencil had fallen, I had imagined all kinds of scenarios that would crack the glacier that loomed between knowing her and being a mere stranger.
“You dropped your pencil.”
It’s strange how things that unfold into such monumental events begin with such tiny, mundane, and ordinary moments.
“Oh . . . thank you.” She smiled. It was warm and sincere, like her eyes as they focused on me and the tone and timbre of her words.
She looked down at the pencil and paused for a long second. I was paralyzed and failed to realize that she was politely (without a trace of presumption) offering me an opportunity to be chivalrous and pick it up. I was clueless and missed my cue. I just stood there timid and unsure.
I watched as she started to bend at the waist. A black shirt strained to stay tucked into a black skirt, but a small field of white flesh surrendered on the left flank. My brain reengaged itself and responded to the stimulus. Moving faster than I ever thought possible, I swooped down and scooped up her number 2 Ticonderoga. It was new: fresh-honed and stiletto sharp.
I handed it over. Standing closer to her than ever before, I was enveloped by an invisible fog, a cloud of sweet smoke and flowers. Essential oils of rose and lilac, I would later learn. It intoxicated me, made me high. I lost my bearings and my breath.
I knew her name was Veronica only because I’d heard Ms. Baker call out to her as she left the art studio one day. We had no classes together that semester, but I would see her in the halls between periods two and three and later between fifth and sixth. I knew nothing else about her.
“Who do you have for science?”
I have no recollection of saying this but Veronica later swore that I did as I gave her the pencil. I cringed when she first told me, but it doesn’t really shock me that I’d say something so idiotic at such a critical moment. No surprise at all. It’s a particular skill I have.
Veronica was Nica if you knew her well, but never Ronnie. Ronnie was too casual, too common, and too male for such a perfect specimen of human female. She was a beauty and a genius. She was open and innocent. Yet worldly and wise beyond her years.
She was also a Suck.
But she was one of the few, perhaps the only, Suck who hid her true identity from the population at large. This was a tribute to her intelligence and resourcefulness. Yet it required her to keep a distance from her classmates and create a persona of aloofness and eccentricity. Black clothes, eyeliner, fingernails, and hair. Clove cigarettes. Quiet, imperious, haughty, and disaffected. Nietzsche, Plath, and Yoko Ono. No interest in the school’s social scene or strata. No policy with the Hobart boys. No gossiping with the girls. A loner.
And the character she created had the desired effect: she gave off no Suck vibration and she was rumored to be very, very rich. But as compensation for her nonconformity she was branded a slut and a whore, a VD-ridden nympho who’d had an abortion. Maybe two.
Veronica was an autodidact (her word, not mine) who taught herself German and Italian over two consecutive summers after the sixth and seventh grades. This was in addition to fluency in Romanian, French, and English. She had aced the Hobart entrance exam with a perfect score. The first in the school’s history.
Her fingers were always stained with violet ink and she was endlessly filling up pages of notebooks during, in between, and after classes. She was a writer and said so. Not “one day I hope to be a writer.” But was in fact at work on her second novel. She had read in an interview with Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or someone like that that one’s first novel should be put in a drawer until the second novel was finished. True to this axiom, she stowed her debut in a box under her bed as she toiled away on volume two.
“Never give them any ammunition.”
This was the reasoning behind keeping herself a mystery to our fellow students.
“Subvert them from within their own rank and file.”
Brave words from a courageous young woman, but deep down I think she was embarrassed about being poor. I think it made her feel ashamed.
nine
My mother thought it would be a good idea if I got a part-time job. I agreed with her. I liked to work and I liked having my own money. It made me feel mature and manly. When I was fourteen I got a job stocking shelves in a small hardware store not far from our house in Jackson Heights. The store was called Halloran’s Hardware but it was owned by a Jewish man named Lippman.
Mr. Lippman was very old by the time I started to work for him. I gathered through his stories and reminiscences that he probably bought the business sometime before World War II.
Mr. Lippman liked me a lot. The day I started my second week of work he bought us egg rolls, fried rice, and steak kew from Lum’s Chinese restaurant. It became a weekly ritual. We would eat together at the counter and he would talk about the history of the neighborhood and how sad it was that things were changing so quickly and that soon we would all be speaking Spanish. I wasn’t so aware of the rapid metamorphosis that was happening around us but it made Mr. Lippman sad.
Mr. Lippman lived with his wife above the store. She had become sickly in recent years, so every few hours he would go upstairs and check on his beloved Zohra, leaving me alone behind the register. He trusted me that much. And in return, I stole from the man.
I justified the thievery by convincing myself that I wasn’t being paid enough. But this didn’t help. I still felt horrible doing it, though not horrible en
ough to stop.
I never got caught.
It was a very simple scheme: when a customer would pay for something small like a box of nails or a bottle of glue, I would “accidentally” push a pen off the counter so it fell near the customer’s feet. As the person bent to pick it up, I would hit No Sale and open the register without entering the price of the item. By the time the customer stood back up I would be handing him the change and bagging his order.
My fear was that Mr. Lippman would notice a discrepancy between inventory and sales, but that never happened. What did happen is that I put a few extra bucks in my pocket and felt like a royal piece of shit. And after each heist, I vowed to never do it again. But I did it many times.
The worst was always when he came back downstairs from god knows what kind of miserable scenario with his invalid wife.
“No fires or tornadoes?”
This was always the first thing he would say upon his return and he would crack a little grin. I couldn’t face him as I answered, “No.” I couldn’t bring myself to return the grin.
They say the first time you commit a crime is the hardest and that the subsequent crimes become easier and easier. You become immune and hardened to the transgression and whatever suffering is inflicted on the victim. This was not the case for me. I felt worse and worse each time I did it. And the question “No fires or tornadoes?” became more and more unbearable.
When Mr. Lippman’s wife died he closed the store, ending my life of crime and relieving me of the shame of facing his bushy gray mustache, his heavy shoes, his kind and trusting nature, his shuffling steps on the weary stairs.
I promised myself things would be different now that I was older and had started my life over in a new city (or borough, to be precise). I vowed to never steal again as I walked down the street to the Wellington, my favorite place in the neighborhood so far. I asked the woman behind the register if they were hiring. She stared at me while poking at her teeth with a toothpick.
“What do you do?” she asked.
I didn’t know quite how to answer so I just said: “I’m flexible.”
“Well, we don’t need no acrobats.” I didn’t realize she was making a joke and thought she had somehow misunderstood me. But as I stammered and searched for a reply, she yelled toward the kitchen: “Hey, Ciro, do we still need another delivery guy?”
The owner, a squat man who always looked as if he had just received some sort of bad news, came through the swinging doors wiping his hands on his apron. His eyes were immediately upon me, sizing me up and down. Then he jutted his chin in my direction and said with a European accent: “Do you have any experience?”
“Yes.”
I guess he believed me because his next question was: “Do you go to school? . . . Where do you go to school?”
“Hobart.”
“Hunter?”
Hunter was a college a few blocks up the road. I was confused. There was no way I could pass for a college student at that point in time and he didn’t look like he was teasing me. So I told him the truth: “It’s a private high school.”
“Oh yes, that’s a very good school . . . you must be a very smart boy.” He seemed genuinely impressed. If only he could see some of the morons who were my classmates. “When can you work?”
“Weekends and after school . . .”
“Can you work after school and do all the homework?”
“I don’t get much homework.” That was the truth. We didn’t get much and you had to be really dumb not to do well. (Plus, the grades were inflated to make the school look better than it really was, but that’s another story.)
“Your father, he lets you work?” said Ciro.
“My father’s in California. I live with my mother. It was her idea that I get a job.” I wasn’t telling many people the truth about my father at that point.
“California dreamer . . . and such a winner say . . .” Ciro raised an arm in victory as he sang the chorus. “You know the song?”
I nodded.
“I want to go to California. If I live in California maybe I have ten restaurants by now.”
The woman behind the register who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to us rolled her eyes and muttered a derisive “Hmmmph.”
Ciro turned to her, the news he wore on his face going from bad to worse. “You don’t think so but then you complain! Lots of complain, complain, complain!”
She bore no resemblance to him so I assumed they were married.
“Who complains? I’m too busy to complain!”
Ciro dismissed this last comment with a wave and turned back to me. He agreed to hire me on a trial basis. The trial being that if he didn’t like the way I worked, he would fire me. Made sense to me.
I was to start that Saturday at seven in the morning. He told me that weekends were busy with breakfast deliveries and the tips were pretty good because it was working people enjoying their days off after payday. Weekend customers were in better moods than weekday customers, and they tipped better. The weekend shifts were eight hours each, seven am till three in the afternoon. He also offered me three weekday shifts after school from four till eight in the evening. I could have a free meal for every shift I worked—any sandwich, an omelet, a hamburger, eggs, pancakes, or waffles. I thought this was a very fair arrangement and was eager to get to work. On this we shook hands and he gave me a Coke to go.
ten
Right away, I loved my job. The people I delivered food to fascinated me; their personalities, their families, their lovers, their pets . . . every customer was different. Some wouldn’t allow you so much as a glimpse inside their apartment, preferring to a make the transaction in the hallway, lobby, even the street. But more often I’d be invited into the apartment and would stand in the doorway, the kitchen, or the living room while my customer went searching for cash.
Ciro was right: the weekend customers and the weekday customers were a different species. Weekenders were likely to be family people sleeping in on Saturday or Sunday; lots of coffee, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bacon, hot chocolate, and donuts for the kids. They were in good spirits, rarely in a hurry, and yes, they tipped well. Weekdays, at least the hours I worked, were mostly single people or couples without kids; soups, burgers, chili, goulash if we had it, London broil, flounder, and salmon. These weekday folks tended to be lonelier and wanted to talk a bit and ask me questions. This could easily cross the line into creep territory, as it did with Mr. Gebberts of 301 East 66th Street, apartment 6D. The D for deranged, demented, and degenerate.
Mr. Gebberts lived in a small and sparse flat that was cleaner than any home or institution I’d ever been in. It smelled of bleach, like some kind of industrial cleaning fluid. There was a strange sterility to both the place and the man. Something was off. Like the hypercleanliness was an effort to compensate for things twisted, filthy, and perhaps diabolic.
When I would deliver his food (always a BLT on toast, extra mayo, but all the mayo on the side and a Coke with no ice and two lemons), he would have me stand on paper towels which he would spread into a large rectangle by the door. This was a tedious ritual that always took far longer than it should have. The unrolling of the paper, the slow tearing along the perforations, the exact parallels and perpendiculars he sought as he put the pieces of Bounty in place.
“If you want to come in and sit down you have to take your shoes off.”
I didn’t want to come in. I didn’t want to sit down. And I definitely wasn’t taking anything off.
Gebberts was well into his sixties but his hair, eyebrows, and mustache were all dyed way too black. His face was pink and shiny, greasy shiny, and his head was tilted strangely off-axis. He always wore these tight red-and-black exercise-type clothes. His fingernails were as shiny as his face and were lacquered to a mirror glaze. He wore buckets of cologne—clouds of it fogged the room and I would smell like him for hours after leaving his pad. It revolted me. He revolted me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was som
e twelve-year-old girl gagged and hog-tied in a spotless bedroom closet.
The man never knew where his wallet was despite the lack of clutter in the antiseptic apartment he called home. It always took like fifteen minutes of shuffling around, clearing his throat every five seconds, disappearing and reappearing in and out of the few rooms he occupied. He would attempt conversation while the search was on:
“Are you Ciro’s son?” I don’t know how many times he asked me this.
“No.”
“Well, you must be a relation. I can see the resemblance.”
I looked nothing like the man.
“I’ve known Ciro for fifteen years. Did he tell you that?”
Yes, of course, we have nothing better to do down at the diner than discuss you, our dear Mr. Gebberts.
“I was his first customer when he took over from Mr. Edelman.”
Everybody claimed to be Ciro’s first customer.
“We’re not related. I just work for him.”
“Which parish do you belong to?”
What? Was this guy fucking serious?
“I don’t belong to any.”
“No? Are you new to the neighborhood?”
“We just moved here from Queens.”
“A Queens boy! You must be a Met fan like me. I’m obsessed with them! Haven’t missed a televised game in over ten years.”
“I like the Yankees,” I lied; the notion of having anything in common with this deviant was unbearable.
“A Queens boy who likes the Yankees? What’s wrong with you?”
What’s wrong with me?
“My father liked the Yankees.” Another lie. My father was a Dodger fan before, during, and after the defection. Maybe that’s what lured him to California and his fiery demise.
“Well, I won’t hold it against you.”
Please do. Hold it against me. That was the point of the lies.
“Where do you go to school?”
“Hobart.”
“Very chic.” He raised his eyebrows to sharp jack-o’-lantern points. “Do you have a girlfriend?” He handed me the cash finally.
The Perfume Burned His Eyes Page 3