by Dennis Smith
Maybe, I am thinking now, he can do the same for boxing.
There is a lot of noise in the locker room because some of the boys are having a towel fight, snapping the towels at their crotches. I run past them to the gym and see Billy taking a foul shot.
“What are you doing after the game?” I call to him.
“I don’t know,” he yells back. “Going home?”
“Could you take a little bit of time with me?”
“What do you want? Ping-Pong?”
“To learn how to fight.”
Billy looks at me like I am asking him for a loan of twenty dollars. He stops shooting the ball and comes over to me.
“You don’t learn how to fight,” he says at the sideline. “You just do it.”
“No,” I answer, “I gotta learn, ‘cause I fell outta the stroller and lost my thumbnail, and I have to beat the brains outta Peter Shalleski. I have to plan it.”
“What?” my brother says, a little confused. “Meet me in the weight room after the game.”
The weight room is below the swimming pool and has a punching bag hanging by a chain from the ceiling and a few pairs of old boxing gloves around the room. There is also a pair of black punching bag gloves on the floor, three sizes too big for me, but I put them on and begin to punch the bag.
As I punch away I am beginning to remember the dancing lessons in the church basement, just before the Christmas Pageant. They made me dance with Peggy Sheehy. Or, maybe they made Peggy Sheehy dance with me. I remember the rules of dancing that the nuns taught us. Keep your head up straight, your chin out. Don’t stiffen your knees, keep them buckled just a bit. Bring your shoulders back. Control the change of your weight from one foot to the other.
Maybe these rules are connected to boxing, I think. Maybe a good fight is like a good dance.
I am now bouncing around, jabbing at the punching bag, keeping my head straight and my knees buckled a little, and I am making it swing with each jab. Then I weave and bob, up and down, always throwing the jabs. Hit the bag, hit the bag, hit Shalleski the ratski. Swing the roundhouse. Keep the chin up.
Billy comes into the room and watches me some.
“You’re doing pretty good,” he says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You want to box?” He begins to pick up a pair of gloves.
I don’t want to fight with my brother, even if the gloves are ten times bigger than my fists.
“No,” I say, taking one last hard punch at the bag, pleased that I beat the bag to a pulp. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Six
Billy puts his arm around my shoulder as we walk up Second Avenue, past Gasnik’s Hardware, past Moe’s Diner, past the newsstand. He’s only nine, but he knows how to do everything. He’s the basketball champ, the baseball champ, and he’s never in fights, because nobody wants to tangle with somebody that moves as fast as Billy. And he is always good with lessons, no matter if it’s history or boxing. “Just don’t take any crap from people,” he is saying. “Shalleski may give you some lumps every time, but he’ll begin to respect you.”
“I don’t want his respect,” I say, trying to walk in step with my brother. “I just want him to stop bothering me and maybe kick the crap outta him. Like kick the can.”
Billy laughs.
“Maybe you hafta get madder,” he says. “Maybe you’re not mad enough to hurt him.”
“I could kill him.”
“You could? Paddy Gilligan has a zip gun.”
That was something I didn’t think about. Not only could I say I could kill Shalleski, but I really could kill him. I only had to talk Paddy Gilligan into loanding me his zip gun. But there is a problem. Paddy Gilligan is the toughest guy in St. John’s, and he is in the eighth grade, and he would never talk to me.
“Maybe I just wanna break his nose, give him a nose like Dick Tracy.”
We walk past Speece’s drugstore and over the Second Avenue cobblestone at 55th Street where they didn’t finish the new street paving. We turn at 56th Street, and when we pass the Hotel Sutton, we cross to the other side of the street. It is late in the afternoon, but we had just put the clocks forward and it is still light.
It is only at the stoop that my brother takes his arm from around my shoulder. He takes a good look at me and gives me a small smack at the back of my head, and laughs. I guess he sees the dried blood at the end of my nose, but he doesn’t mention it.
A few women are sitting there, newspapers shoved under them to protect their skirts. One is drinking out of a cardboard container of beer which she got at Billy’s Bar and Grill on the corner. It is the only place in the neighborhood that still sells beer in containers. This is Sue Flanagan’s mother. Sue Flanagan is sitting there, too. I love her, even though she is ten years older than me and in nursing school. She always pretends to want to kiss me, and she laughs when she squeezes me. She doesn’t know that I love her. Usually, I like to pretend that I don’t like to be squeezed, because I know that makes her squeeze me harder and longer, but now I just want to get home. If there is any blood showing on me, I don’t want her to see it, and so I whiz by before she catches my eye.
My mother sees the blood before I get a chance to wash it off. She is dishing out the tripe. The tripe is like the inside of a dead sponge, and she puts it beside a few carrots and peas. It looks limp, like it died just a minute ago. I hate the tripe, because it is like eating the cardboard from inside my shoe. It smells like that, too.
“What’s with the bloody nose?” Mommy asks.
“Dodgeball at Kips,” I say, sitting down.
I know I am risking all my future friends by lying, but she will strap me for sure if she finds out I was fighting in the street, even if you could call protecting yourself fighting.
“Go wash your face.”
I go to the sink in the middle of the kitchen and open the medicine cabinet above it. I take the soap from the shelf and wash the blood from under my nose as Mommy continues to talk.
“Don’t they have people there to make sure you don’t get hurt?”
“Archie was there.”
“Archie is always there,” my brother pipes in.
“What does Archie do?”
“He hits you with the dodgeball,” I answer.
“He just plays the game,” Billy says. “Archie is the greatest.”
The tripe is making me sick. This happened before, and it made me sick then, too. About a month ago.
“I can’t eat this, Mommy,” I say. Billy kicks me under the table.
“Eat it and shut up,” Mommy says, dishing out some peas.
“Isn’t peanut butter and jelly good enough?” I say. “I like that.”
“Sure, it’s like eating sugar. You need the vitamins of this, so I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
When Mommy says she doesn’t want to hear another word, she means it, and so I don’t know what to do. I can’t eat this tripe, but I know I can’t say anything again. I feel like crawling up in my bed and closing my eyes. I know I have to think of something to take my mind off the tripe.
“Tell me about Daddy in the hospital.”
I notice my brother squirm a little in his chair.
“Daddy is fine,” Mommy says.
“When did you see him?”
“I saw him last week when you went to Aunt Kitty’s to play with your cousins.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I forgot.”
“Why can’t I go?”
“I told you a million times that they don’t let kids in.”
“Not even a son?”
“No, not even a son.”
The tripe was getting cold. I knew it would be even worse if it got cold, if that’s possible.
“Tell me again about the accident,” I say.
“C’mon. Just eat your dinner.”
“How did he fall off of the truck?”
“He just fell, is all.”
“So why are his
legs so bad?”
“Because he can’t move them is why. You’re not touching anything.”
“So why can’t he use crutches or a chair with wheels or something?”
“They don’t want him to,” Mommy says, getting upset with me. “And you are going to be in trouble, young man, if you don’t begin to put your fork in.”
I notice Billy cutting the tripe into teeny pieces and mashing it into his peas before he puts it into his mouth. He doesn’t say anything. He never says anything when we are talking about Daddy.
“Mommy,” I say, “if we didn’t put the nickel into the sacrifice box on Sunday, would we have enough money to buy different food?”
This makes her mad, I could see, for she reaches for the strap behind her.
She puts the strap across her lap.
“I don’t want to hear another word.”
I am getting sick from the smell of the tripe, and I feel the tugging at the corner of my eyes. So I stretch my eyes upward and my chin down, and before I know it the strap has gone across my neck.
“Stop the faces and put the fork in.”
The sting at the side of the neck feels like it is glowing, like the saints glow in the picture books. I want to curse and I want to cry, but to keep my mind off everything, I begin to cut the tripe into bitsy pieces and mash it into the peas and the carrots. I make little balls the color of green and orange and a kind of tan that looks like an old baseball glove. And I hold my breath so that it hurts more than the sting at my neck, and I chew one of the balls as quickly as I can before I blow up, and I swallow.
It works. If I hold my breath long enough.
My brother even knows how to eat the tripe without getting into trouble.
“Run the water for a bath,” Mommy says.
I look at Billy, who is putting his plate in the sink. He disappears into the bedroom.
“Run the water for a bath.”
There is no one but me and Mommy in the kitchen.
“I can’t get the tub top off,” I say.
“You did it before, so just run the water.”
I don’t want to take the tub top off because I know there will be the roaches there, standing upside down under the tub top. Sometimes there are ten or twenty of them and I am afraid that one of them will get on my arm, or worse, into my shirt. I could get Paddy Gilligan’s zip gun and kill myself if one of them got into my shirt.
I pretend to try to take the top off the tub.
“It’s too heavy, Mommy.”
“For goodness’ sake. Billy, get in here.”
When my brother comes into the kitchen, I go into the bedroom. I don’t want to see Billy open the tub top, because I know the roaches don’t scare him the way they do me, and he could pick one up and throw it at me. Billy just does things without complaining, that’s what everybody says, and he gets all hundreds on his tests.
Aunt Anna came over one day not long ago to have tea with Mommy, and Mommy was telling her about Billy getting such good grades and all. Mommy had Billy and me in new shirts sitting there in the kitchen with Aunt Anna, because Aunt Anna is the manager at the Wanamaker’s store on 42nd Street. She is my mother’s aunt, really, and the only rich person in our family. I know she is rich, because Mommy says so, and she lives in a house in Queens where you have to wait for the buzzer to buzz you in, and the floors are made of marble.
Mommy told us to be on our best behavior, and to be especially nice to Aunt Anna, because she said she was going to pay for Billy to go to camp this summer, some special camp where they read a lot of books and play tennis. No one on 56th Street plays tennis.
This is the first time I have ever seen Aunt Anna at our house. Billy and I are happy to be with her because she has brought us a box of chocolates, the kind where you don’t know what it is until you bite into it, and we are just chewing away as Mommy gives her a cup of tea. Aunt Anna is sitting next to the icebox, and her arm is just a couple of inches away from it, and as she thanks Mommy for the tea, I can see just behind her that a small roach is walking slowly up the green enamel side of the icebox.
I get suddenly afraid, as afraid as if someone has broken into the house with a gun and is going to mow us all down. This is so terrible, so unlucky for Mommy.
Oh, Mommy, I am thinking, what will happen to us all if Aunt Anna hates roaches the way I hate roaches and sees that roach and begins to scream? Oh, Mommy, isn’t there some way we can get that roach to turn around and go back where he came from? Oh, Mommy, why do these things happen to us, why aren’t we living in a house where they have to buzz the buzzer to let you in?
Aunt Anna is just talking away as the roach gets higher and higher on the side of the icebox. I can see that Mommy and Billy now have their eyes on the roach, too, and Mommy is trying to smile, and I know she is hoping that Billy doesn’t get up to give it a good swat, and that she is praying that the roach will change its mind. But the roach just stays on its course, and it will soon be high enough and over enough so that Aunt Anna will be sure to see it, and she will run out of the house and we’ll never see Aunt Anna again in our lives.
“You know, boys,” Mommy says, “I think that Aunt Anna will be more comfortable sitting in the living room, so why don’t you go in there and fluff up the pillows on the couch for her?”
I am so glad to get out of the kitchen, and I go right to the couch. I have never before fluffed up the pillows on the couch because they are hard pillows and have springs pushing up on the tops, but I try to fluff them up as Mommy asked, and Mommy finally comes in and gives me a kiss on the side of the cheek and tells us that we can change clothes and go out now.
Oh, Mommy, I am thinking as I button my flannel shirt and open the kitchen door, watching the roach now planted on the top of the icebox, I wish I didn’t have to leave you alone to worry about things like Aunt Anna seeing roaches in our house.
I am now sitting on the windowsill waiting for the water to get high enough to get into the tub. It is dark, because the room is so small and the window is at a corner of the courtyard where there is hardly any light. The room is just large enough for the small bunk beds and a four-drawer dresser edging the window. There are some pants and jackets hung on the back of the door on a nail. It is a crowded room, and I have to squeeze between the bunk beds and the wall to get to the dresser and the windowsill. Suddenly, I hear a great thump, like somebody threw an elephant from the roof. And then I hear a great scream coming from the apartment next door.
The window in our bedroom cannot be opened, because it has been painted over a hundred times, and so I run into the kitchen.
“It’s the guineas again,” Mommy says.
I look out of the kitchen window into the back courtyard, and I see Mrs. Giambetta next door at her window screaming her head off. My mother looks over my shoulder and then pulls me away from the window.
But just before she does I can see crazy Mario sprawled and splattered across the yard concrete five stories below. Crazy Mario is Mrs. Giambetta’s son.
“Just stay away from the window.”
“I want to see,” Billy says.
“There’s nothing to see,” Mommy says, blocking Billy’s path to the window. “Go take a bath.”
“Crazy Mario jumped outta the window,” I say to Billy.
“Shut up, and take a bath, both of you.”
Mommy turns away from us. It looks like she is looking for the strap, but I can see her shoulders going up and down, and her body vibrating like the radiator when the steam comes up. She goes into her room and she tries to shut the door, but it can’t shut because there is no closet in Mommy’s room and all the clothes are hung on the back of the door and the doorknob.
I go in and see her on the bed. She is thin, and the bed takes up almost all of the room. The bed looks so much bigger than she is. Her face is pressed against a pink spread, and she is crying. I never knew she cared about crazy Mario.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” I say to her.
She
turns to me and catches her breath. Her eyes are so pretty, and it makes me sad to see them so red and swollen.
“Oh,” she says, trying to smile, “it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Tenement tears, you know? It’s just that everything is so hard for everybody … especially mothers… Poor Mrs. Giambetta.”
“She’s still screaming, Mommy. Do you hear her?”
Mommy gets up and sits on the side of the bed. There is just enough room for her legs to fit between the wall and the bed. “Sure,” she says, “I hear her. I just wish we could move out of midtown, maybe to a housing project in Queens, or maybe back to Brooklyn.”
It seems she is talking to me, but not talking to me, because she is looking out the window at the fire escape and the back of the buildings on 57th Street.
She takes a deep breath and looks at me. She smiles, and gets up and pats my fanny. “If I could only get off this welfare, we could get a better place. Someday.”
I never think much about being on the welfare, because Mommy told us to never tell anyone about it. I know she doesn’t like it, though. She keeps saying if only me and Billy were older, she could leave us at home and go out and get a real job instead of running to all these Sutton Place apartments to do the cleaning and then hide the money from the welfare. The welfare is like some disease that you can’t talk about, and I guess it’s something you don’t really want.
“Why don’t you like the welfare, Mommy?” I ask as we move into the living room.
She chuckles a little. “You know how in the morning,” she says, “when you try to pour the sugar in buckets on top of your farina?”
“Yeah,” I say, “and you always grab the sugar bowl and take it off the table.”
“Well,” she says, “welfare is like a bowl of sugar. It makes things taste better, but it can make you fat in the long run, and if you’re fat it’s hard to move around.”
“Can it kill you?”
“Kill is pretty final, Dennis. New York City has been good to us with the welfare, and God knows where we would be without it. It’s just, if you can get away without any sugar in your life, then you’re better off. But you never know about anything. Mrs. Giambetta was never on welfare and look what is happening in her family.”