by Dennis Smith
I would rather have my own father, though, no matter what kind of a solid man Archie is. I think about this for a minute as I sit down in a hard wooden armchair, the kind that will dump you out if you lean back too fast.
I know so little about my own father. I wonder if he ever got any trophies. I saw a photograph of him in Mommy’s drawer where he is standing in an empty lot, wearing a baseball glove. Maybe he got a baseball trophy. Who knows?
It’s funny the amount of things I don’t know about my father, like would he want to go to the nine o’clock Mass with Mommy? Or would he go to the twelve-fifteen like so many of the fathers I know, like Mr. Walsh and Mr. Scarry? And I wonder if he would wear a suit, like Mr. Walsh. I never saw Mr. Scarry in a suit, but he is always in a shirt and tie with a sweater or a windbreaker. And I wonder if my father uses hair tonic in his hair. And would he make us eat tripe and beef liver, or would he buy us a dog so we could feed it the bad stuff under the table? Would he throw the ball around with us in the 59th Street park, even with his crutches? I bet he was a good ballplayer. I wonder if he would take us up to the balcony in the RKO 58th Street, or brush his teeth after every meal the way Mommy tries to make us do, or give us a good beating the way Mr. DeLisi gave to Bobby DeLisi when he caught him with dirty pictures.
I know so much more about my friends’ fathers, and it is hard to try to figure out what my own father would want me to do. Would he want me to be a doorman, or a bartender, or a construction worker? Would he get me a job, maybe, when I get big? Maybe a job on the railroad like Uncle Andy and Mr. Walsh. Maybe on the Railway Express truck with him if they give him his job back. Jeez, there are so many things to know, and I don’t know any of it at all.
Archie comes into the office and he closes the door behind him, a wide door covered with wire glass. He throws a pile of folders down on his desk. A couple of kids are out in the hall, and they press their hands against the door, like they were on a ship and looking for land. Archie gives them the heave-ho sign with his thumb as he sits behind his desk, and they disappear.
“You know what these are?” he asks, holding up one of the folders.
“How should I know?” I answer. I have no idea what Archie wants me in his office for.
Archie looks at me for a minute. I guess he thinks I am being a snotty wise guy, and he just keeps looking at me.
“These are reports,” he says finally, “that I have to send to the city youth agency about certain kids who have gotten in a lot of trouble.”
“So?” Why do I want to know this? I ask myself.
“So, Dennis,” he says, “the reason kids get into trouble is that they begin to not care about things—their family, school, homework—and then you find out they don’t even care about their future.”
I know if he is calling me Dennis, and not calling me “son,” that he means business here. Somebody from school must have talked to him. God. Maybe even my mother. She’s been harping a lot about doing better in school.
“So?” I ask, looking down.
“So,” Archie says, “I met Father O’Rourke on the street yesterday, and he told me that you were having a hard time at school.”
“I am not,” I say. I don’t like people talking behind my back, I am thinking, even if it is true. “Father O’Rourke has a big mouth, anyway.”
“He didn’t say you were in trouble or anything, but only that your brother gets such good grades in everything, and you are not doing so good. Are you?”
“What does Billy’s marks have to do with me?”
“I guess everybody expects more of you. You’re in the fifth grade, and you should be doing things the right way by now. Is it too much to ask that you pay better attention to your schoolwork?”
I don’t know why, I am thinking, I should have to do as good as my brother in anything. He gets all the good marks, and he is great at all the sports, and what has that done for anybody? He spends all of his time reading about history and religion and my mother is still over there every day on her hands and knees going from one end of Sutton Place to the other, nobody caring about her, nobody doing anything for her, and it’s all such a rotten full-a-crap business, anyway. Nobody cares if she has a good and decent day in her life, and she does everything right. So why should I have to learn to do things the right way?
My hands are sweaty, and I feel myself squirming in my seat, but I don’t say anything.
“You can do so much better, Dennis,” Archie says. “And you know it.”
All the statues in Archie’s office are shining with the light that is shooting in from 52nd Street. They are like golden treasures. Billy has a couple of trophies, but all I ever got is a silver medal for coming in second when I swam the breaststroke at the all-city swim meet at Madison Square Boys Club.
“I don’t give a shit, Archie,” I say, still looking down.
“Watch your language, pal,” Archie says. “Don’t be like that with me.”
“I just want people to mind their own business,” I say, looking up at him.
“Business, Dennis, can be all of life, caring about everything. That’s the way it is at Kips Bay. If you’re a part of this boys’ club, we’re going to care about you.”
“But,” I say, getting up from my chair, “there’s nothing wrong with me, and, anyway, I don’t care who cares.”
I know I don’t have to talk about it to Archie or to anyone if I don’t want. It’s a free country, and I can do what I want and when I want.
I go to the door, thinking that if I could just get outside I wouldn’t have sweaty palms. I don’t need Archie, and I don’t need Kips Bay. There are a lot of things to do on 56th Street, and I can hang out with guys who never come to Kips Bay.
I turn the doorknob and pull, but nothing happens. The door doesn’t budge. I yank at it with all my might, and it is like it is riveted shut. I turn and look at Archie.
He is smiling.
“I can’t get out,” I say to him.
Archie gets up and walks to the door. He grabs the doorknob and kicks the bottom of the door.
It opens like a garden gate.
“There’s a certain way of doing everything, Dennis,” he says, winking at me. “Running away from me now, here, is just not the right way.”
Archie puts a hand on my shoulder and leads me back to the chair.
“We just want to give you a boost up,” he says.
All right, I am thinking. I’ll have to sit now, and tell Archie that I’ll do better in school. It won’t take long.
I am kicking a can all the way home, thinking that with every kick I am telling everybody to leave me alone. I don’t care what any of them think. School is not the greatest place in the world, anyway, and if I wanted a trophy, I would practice my breaststroke. If I wanted good grades, I’d spend more time with my homework. Everyone always says you can do so much better. They sound like a record.
I give the can one last, mighty kick, and I can see the small crowd of women in front of my building. My mother says that women who just sit on stoops envy the rich and judge the poor, but I never see many rich people on 56th Street, unless they are walking down to Sutton Place. I guess there are women in the world who don’t do anything at all. They don’t work or take care of children or even play sports. They just sit around with their friends, like they were royalty. My mother keeps to herself. She never sits around with the women of the building, on the stoop or anywhere, and she never tells anybody anything. She doesn’t want us to tell anybody anything, either. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, she always says.
Sue Flanagan is sitting on the top step of the stoop with her mother. She has her student nurse’s uniform on, and a blue jacket that is open so that you can see her name written on the side of her white dress. The dress is like silk, shiny and hugging her tightly. She gets up and throws her arms out as I walk up the three steps of the stoop.
“Here’s my little Dapper Dan,” Sue says. She always calls me Dapper Dan because my mothe
r makes me wear a clean shirt every day, and I have to have it tucked tightly into my trousers.
I have a feeling Sue will hug me.
“Hello.” This is all I can say, but I am thinking that I could kiss her if she would let me.
How do you kiss? I am wondering. I mean, kiss a real girl, and not someone who is an aunt or your big cousin or your mother. I am ten years old and I’ve never been near a real kiss.
Sue puts her arms around me and squeezes hard. I am pressed up against her shiny uniform and what’s under it. My ear is right on one of her bazooms, and I feel the skin around my eyes tightening. And now Sue begins to move back and forth like she is dancing with me, and the dancing is like swimming in water. I can smell her perfume, which smells like a procession of girls in white dresses with garlands of roses. She is dancing with me and I can smell her perfume, and the dancing and the smell make me want to close my eyes and dream.
Oh, will I ever get old enough to kiss her?
Chapter fourteen
My mother is sitting at the kitchen table, going over the little notebook where she writes down all the money she spends. The sun is shining through the kitchen window, and her hair looks very soft falling over her shoulders, like little waves of melted butter. She has a pencil in her hand. There are just three things she has to have money for all the time. She has to pay the bill at Rossi’s grocery store or we won’t be able to get milk and bread. We don’t get milk and bread every day, but we always have it. My mother is always saving milk, and when she pours it into a cereal bowl, she never covers the cereal with the milk. She pours it an inch from the top and tells me to mix it up. Do this every day for a week, she says, and you have saved a whole quart.
I love breakfast, and my mother makes sure it is out at a quarter to eight every morning. Billy is always on time for breakfast because he loves breakfast even more than I do. If we are more than five minutes late, there is no breakfast, and she pours the cereal back into the box, and sometimes I have to punch Billy away from the kitchen sink so that I can wash my face and brush my teeth. My mother is very strict about time. “How will you ever go to work on time,” she says, “if you can’t be on time for breakfast?”
Billy has a job, but I don’t have one yet.
Another thing my mother has to pay is the man that comes from the landlord every month, and if you don’t give him the money, they take your furniture and put it out on the street, like they did to Mrs. McClusky next door. I felt sorry for her then. She was sitting on her furniture in the middle of the sidewalk, holding a cat in her hands, and an hour later she was gone. I never saw her again, and that is what happens if you don’t pay the rent. You disappear from the face of the earth, that’s what my mother says.
Also there is Mr. Karp, the insurance man, and he comes every week to get twenty-five cents from us. Mom has to sign his book each time, and he has to sign a piece of paper that she has. He must be very rich because he gets twenty-five cents from almost everybody in the building, and in all the buildings on the block. My mother says she has to pay the insurance because if she dies without insurance, they will just throw her in the river, and the tide will take her to Africa or somewhere she doesn’t want to go.
“If the tide would take me to Ireland,” I remember her telling the insurance man one day, “I wouldn’t have the insurance at all, but I’d put my bathing suit on and hope to die.”
My mother has never been to Ireland, but her mother and father were born there, and told her that it was more beautiful than heaven. I believe it. Everyone is always saying how beautiful Ireland is, and I wonder why they left it at all.
Now she stops writing in her little book and stares off for a minute.
“Dennis,” she says, “I think you should get a job. Every little bit that we can put together would help. And now that you are ten, you are getting old enough to have a real job. Working, you know, is the second key to heaven.”
I never thought about heaven having a lock on the door.
“What’s the first key?” I ask.
She laughs, saying, “Obeying your mother.”
“I had a job, Mom,” I say, “but you told me to quit it.”
I worked for two Saturdays at the drugstore on 49th Street and First Avenue. It was a delivery job, and the doctor there paid me ten cents a delivery, which I thought was pretty good. The only thing was that, after dusting every bottle and box on every shelf in the store, and washing the floor in the back, and cleaning the glass in the cases with the perfume, there were only two deliveries all day, and the doctor gave me twenty cents.
After the next week when there was only one delivery, and I did the floors and the cases and the bottles, my mother went down to the drugstore and showed the doctor the ten cents and told him he should be ashamed of himself. I was very embarrassed and kept my eyes down all the time. My mother gets on her high horse sometimes, and she would tell off the queen of England if she wanted to.
I wish I could have kept the job, but my mother told the doctor that she wouldn’t let me go to his drugstore again, even if I was dying with the consumption and he was giving away cough syrup. She then left the dime on the counter, and she held my hand as we walked out of the store.
I would never tell my mother that I wish she didn’t do something, but I did think about that dime as we passed Abbie’s candy store on 53rd Street, and of the new Yo-Yos that he just put out for a dime.
“You have to be careful about people,” my mother said as we walked up First Avenue, “because you’ll meet some who are never sorry for their sins.”
“And I do want a job, Mom,” I say, “and I’d even go back to the drugstore.”
“I know, honey,” she says, “but that was not such a real job, and maybe a different kind of job would be better. Maybe Billy can help you find something.”
I wish I could find a good job because every time I hear someone talk about somebody being rich they say he has a good job. I don’t know where you get these good jobs, but I am going to ask Billy to help me.
Chapter Fifteen
It is Saturday morning, and I am playing off-the-point with Bobby Walsh down by the tennis courts on 55th Street. I am wearing a brand-new pair of dungarees my mother just bought me, and I’m feeling like I could win at anything today. Usually, I get Billy’s old dungarees, or worse, his old corduroys, but these were a surprise, and fit just right.
We are playing games of eleven, and I am a little behind, but I know I can beat him if I put my mind to it. But I’m a little tired. I started the paper delivery job this morning, and I had to get up at five-thirty to carry all those New York Times and Daily News through the hallways of Sutton Place.
Before me is a brick wall about ten feet high that goes all around the tennis courts on York Avenue, and the wall has a brick edge that goes across the bottom and another edge about three feet up from the sidewalk. I am trying to hit the spaldeen hard enough off the top edge so that it will land just about in the middle of a parked car across the street. I stop to make a big yawn, but then I concentrate on what I am doing. I pinpoint myself. That is what my mother always says, pinpoint yourself to something and you will get it done. So I am pinpointing the point of the tennis court wall, and the ball is coming closer and closer with every try.
Now Bobby is sprawled across the fender of the car. He missed the catch, and so it is my game, third in a row.
We go to the cellar of 25 Sutton Place South where there is a Pepsi machine. We are pretty quiet because we know that the service elevator guy will try to give us a kick in the seat if he sees us here. The soda machine costs a nickel, and Bobby has fifteen cents of his thirty cents’ allowance with him. The Walshes have some money because his father works for the railroad and plays the Irish fiddle in the Third Avenue gin mills for extra cash.
Bobby puts a nickel in the machine, and we share the bottle of Pepsi, though he drinks most of it. He gives me about two inches in the bottom of the bottle to finish off.
And
as Bobby heads up the stairs to the street, I stand there and drink the bottom of the soda, and then I shove the bottle back up into the machine.
I should have some money soon, too, because Billy got me the job. It’s not a good job, but it will help. I am getting twenty cents an hour for delivering the papers. Fat Walter who runs the candy store on 57th Street and First Avenue says that he pays for one week the week after. Billy told me that Walter does this so that the kids will come back again to deliver the papers. It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to take the papers from building to building, up the service elevators, and through the hallways, but they only pay for an hour. “If you go fast,” Fat Walter says, “you can do it in an hour.”
Next week I’ll have my own thirty cents to spend. I told my mother that I will give the rest to her.
We quit the elevens after three more games, and we are sweating good now.
“I’ll race you to the Pepsi machine,” Bobby says, “and I’ll buy another soda.”
“Great,” I say, and we take off like Olympic sprinters to the basement of 25 Sutton.
We race as hard as we can until we get to the bottom of the stairs, and then we run quietly like we are ballet dancers. Bobby puts the nickel in and pulls down on the handle. I hear the bottle drop. Bobby sticks his hand in the machine, and he pulls out the empty bottle I had left there an hour before. His chin drops to his chest, and he looks as if someone told him he was really adopted.
I am disappointed, too, because I want some soda.
“What’s this?” Bobby says.
“Damn, Bobby,” I say, “I don’t know. What’s that?”
“It’s a friggin’ empty bottle is what it is,” he cries.
“What are you gonna do?” I ask.
I am doing everything I can to keep from laughing, especially since I am really thirsty and want some Pepsi.
Bobby sinks into his pocket and pulls out another nickel, his last one. This time the machine gives him a whole deal, and we return to the street, Bobby sucking down the bottle as we go up the stairs. When there is an inch left, he hands the bottle to me. I take my shirt out and wipe the top. This is going to taste good, and there is nothing like a cold soda after sweating it up. Even if there is just an inch.