by Dennis Smith
Oh, God, this is just what I was afraid of, something like this, and without somebody here to help me. And now I think of Harry Shalleski again, falling from the RKO fire escape, and Mikie Harris sliding down the rope, and Harry dead and splattered below. God.
Why couldn’t I just buy my ticket like everybody else, and walk in past the big marble goldfish fountain, past the candy stand, and into the dark of the movie house, feeling my way around until my eyes adjusted and I could see the lovely form of Marilyn Rolleri? Here I am swinging by one hand above the end of my life. Like that guy in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a story Sister Regina made us read, I have to do anything I can from falling into the black hole.
I know I have to use all my strength now to pull myself up, and so I try to rest for a minute, but the shoulder is hurting too much to rest. So I swing as hard as I can, to get a foot up and catch it between the fencing rods, and so I begin to say a prayer, and shift my weight with as much force as I can. Oh, yes, I have it, I have my foot between the upright rods, and now what? I have to inch my hands up, little by little, and I do, sliding my hands upward.-each inch giving me a little more room to get a better balance, until, finally, I am again standing upright, my foot firmly wedged again between the stair and the fence. God.
My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it through the breeze, but I climb up to the opening and slide my body through, like a snake, headfirst, and I climb down the fencing on the other side with my hands down below me. When I get down on the landing, I am sprawled out flat, breathing hard, trying to get over the shock of almost being flat like a pancake like crazy Mario Giambetta, down on the backyard concrete when he took a flier out the window, or like Harry Shalleski, probably wrapped in silk that looks like cellophane in his small coffin.
I am now at the door of the balcony. There is only one door, and so I know I haven’t made a mistake, but I can see that it isn’t open. I can’t believe that Walsh hasn’t gotten up to the balcony, and I never thought about what I would do if the door wasn’t open. But I have to get into the middle of this ptoblem, too, because I know I can’t go headfirst back out through that hole because there is nothing below but air for four stories.
Oh, Sister Regina, what now?
I know I am going to have to bang on this door, as hard as I can, until somebody comes and gets me out of this mess, this fire escape jail. But I’ll be caught then for sure, and I better think about what I am going to tell my mother. Maybe I can tell her I was playing hide-and-seek down here on 51st Street, but then I’ll be lying and the whole rest of my life will be ruined and I’ll have no friends, because nobody likes a liar.
God. I’ll have to tell her I was sneaking into the movies because she didn’t have the quarter to give me. But I’ll hurt her feelings for sure. And then I won’t have the good manners.
I’ve been on the fire escape a while now, and I’d better start banging on the door and get it over with. No one will like banging on the door during The Greatest Show on Earth, and they will come get me soon.
I hope Marilyn Rolleri doesn’t see me when they kick me out.
My fists are now tightened, and I am about to bang on the door, when, without a squeak, the door opens, and Walsh sticks his head out. He is like an angel coming out of the clouds, and he is holding a little paper cup of water.
“Quick,” he says. “C’mon.”
“I almost got killed,” I say, moving into the darkness. I am so happy to be out of the fire escape prison.
“Don’t complain about being killed,” Walsh says. “The usher almost didn’t believe me when I told him my mother needed a glass of water before she had a heart attack, but I told him my father was a doctor and I should know when my mother needs a glass of water, and if she doesn’t get it, her heart attack will be on his conscience. It was a close call.”
“Where is everybody?”
“All around. Some downstairs, some in the balcony here.”
“Where is Marilyn Rolleri?”
“Her? She couldn’t come, ‘cause her grandmother came to visit by surprise.”
“She’s not here?”
“A no-show for sure.”
After all of this there is no Marilyn, and suddenly I have lost all interest in the The Greatest Show on Earth. I feel like going home, but I know I can’t. I can’t just leave Bobby Walsh after everything he’s done to get me in the movies.
And, anyway, maybe I should just sit down, even if there’s no one to put my arm around. Maybe I could get my breath back. Maybe I should rub my shoulder a little. God, my hand hurts.
Chapter Twenty-eight
My Aunt Kitty lives down on the ground floor of our building, and she always has her door open. She is my father’s sister, the one that always has a bottle of beer in her hand, and even though she was born in Ireland, she never comes up to sing Irish songs on Sundays like my mother’s family does.
Aunt Kitty has a high whining voice, and I can hear it as I jump the last five steps of the stairs. So I walk down the hall to her apartment and find her sitting at her kitchen table with my Uncle Tracy, who has come down from Mount Vernon. Tracy is married to my father’s sister Josie.
Kitty and Tracy are sitting there in the kitchen, and there are two quarts of Ballantine beer on the table. I begin to think about the empties. I wonder if Aunt Kitty will give me the empties if I ask her, but I know that I won’t ask, because my mother would be pretty mad if I asked Aunt Kitty for anything.
“How’s the little rug rat?” my uncle says to me.
This is what my Uncle Tracy calls everyone under fifteen, so that he doesn’t have to remember anyone’s name. He’s got eight kids, my Mount Vernon cousins, and he calls them Doodlebug, the Wheel, Sore Thumb, Kat Kat, Hole in the Head, Granite Head, Betty Boop, and Tarzan. They have real names like Tommy, Joey, Janet, Elizabeth, and so on, but I think he has forgotten the originals. I know that he doesn’t know my name, but he knows that his wife is my father’s sister.
“Great, Uncle Tracy,” I answer. “What are you doing?”
He’s got a puddle of beer in front of him, and he is soaking a dollar bill in it. On the other side of the table he is soaking a twenty.
“I’m going to show Aunt Kitty,” he says, “how to make eighteen dollars seventy cents, and two beers, out of absolutely nothin’, that’s what.”
I sit across from him, next to my aunt. She is talking at the top of her lungs, and so I pretend to lean on my elbow and hold a hand over my ear to soften the cackle of her voice. I am interested in what Uncle Tracy is doing.
It is only ten-thirty in the morning, and they are both red-eyed. I wonder if they’ve been here since last night, or maybe two days ago. My Aunt Kitty never wears a brassiere, and her small breasts are pushing against her housedress. I can see the roundness of her nipples clearly through the material, and I wonder if it counts as a sin to be looking at her nipples even if they are behind the material.
“See, Kitty,” Uncle Tracy says, “just take the corner of the bill like this and keep picking at it, slowly. You don’t even have to look. See? The corner will begin to separate, because a bill is nothing but two pieces of printed paper stuck together. See how it is splitting apart at the corner here? Now you can just tug at it, very easy, like it’s your missing husband’s privates. And now you can break it, like you prob’ly wanna to your missing husband’s privates. And look, see, it is splitting apart.”
The twenty-dollar bill is now in halves, and he lays them out carefully in the puddle of beer, pressing every wrinkle out of them. And now he does the same with the one-dollar bill, which comes apart much more easily because it has been soaking in the beer for so long. It is so interesting to watch him. He is like a surgeon doing an operation, and when he has the four parts of the two bills laid out before him, he puts the back part of the dollar on the front part of the twenty, and then he puts the front part of the dollar on the back part of the twenty so that it appears he has two twenties when the twenty sides are lai
d faceup.
“You see,” he says as he presses them smooth, “you have to do this in a bar that has just a little light, ‘cause the bartenders never turn the bill over. And so you lay the twenty down, dollar side down, twenty side up, and he picks it up and you pay the fifteen cents for one beer, and he shoves it in the cash register and gives you nineteen eighty-five change. And then you go into the next bar and you do the same thing. So, for your twenty-one-dollar investment, you have given yourself thirty-nine dollars and seventy cents, and two beers to boot.”
Uncle Tracy always does things that are like magic. He works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and since he has so many kids, he never has enough money for a couple of drinks after work. So he has all these tricks that he bets on at the bar, and he can get a free half a load on. Most of his tricks have to do with toothpicks, the tools of his trade, he calls them. Uncle Tracy can make an eight-toothpick square into an eight-toothpick rectangle by moving just two toothpicks.
“Uncle Tracy can do anything,” Aunt Kitty says, wiping up the beer on the table.
Uncle Tracy is the only relative I know who has a car, except for Uncle Phil, who had one before he died a couple of years ago. And he has a great car, too, a ‘38 Buick, a huge boat with a floor shift. I was in it once, and I am thinking now that Uncle Tracy doesn’t seeem to be doing anything with Aunt Kitty, and so maybe he’ll take me out and teach me how to drive.
Uncle Phil would probably teach me if he didn’t die. He was always helping out, and he used to drive my mother up to the hospital to visit my father. He also used to give us the best Christmas presents, things my mother could never afford, like shoulder pads for football and real-leather basketballs.
“Hey, Uncle Tracy,” I say, “can you teach me how to drive?”
“Are you kiddin’?” he says. “The cops will throw away the cell key less I get three hours’ sleep to get sober. Don’tcha know anybody else?”
“I know lots,” I say, “but they don’t have cars.”
“Why don’t they have cars? I could put a car together with milk boxes and an old washing machine.”
Aunt Kitty laughs at this and pours another beer for Uncle Tracy.
“They did before the signs and the insurance,” I say.
“The signs?”
“Yeah,” I say, “they put signs up saying you can’t park some days.”
“So why don’t they move ‘em?” Uncle Tracy asks.
“They can’t,” I explain, “’cause they’re at work, and anyway they can’t afford the insurance.”
“That’s too bad,” Uncle Tracy says, like he really cares about it.
“Yeah,” I continue, “so that’s why the cars out on the street belong to people like you who don’t live in the neighborhood, or who don’t have jobs and have no insurance.”
“That’s too bad, too,” he says, “about the insurance. I don’t have the insurance, either, but I got the job, and I’m lucky to find an extra dollar now and then to get gas to drive the goddamn thing.”
“So,” I say, looking up at him and smiling, “I can’t find a car to learn how to drive.”
“Hey, rug rat,” Uncle Tracy says, “here.”
And Uncle Tracy throws the keys to his car into my hands. I am twelve years old, and my uncle has given me his car keys.
“Find someone to teach ya,” he says. “The car’s in front, but don’t use too much gas, will ya?”
Aunt Kitty is now bent over as she laughs.
“Uncle Tracy is a riot,” she says in a very loud voice, and I hope my mother isn’t passing in the hall. My mother would give back these keys faster than a camera could take a picture.
On the stoop, I see Davy Weld coming up the block. I think he is sixteen, and maybe he has one of those junior licenses I heard about. I know he’s got a piece of a sister named Tuesday, and they live down on 53rd Street. She’s a model, and I heard she’s an actress on television. We still don’t have a television, but Uncle Andy said he was going to find a cheap one for us at the railroad where he works.
“Hey, Davy,” I call out to him. “You have a license?”
“Yeah, sure,” he says. “I have a license from California.”
“You want to teach me how to drive?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says, grinning. “You got a Cadillac? I only drive Cadillacs.”
“No,” I say, “I got a ’38 Buick, floor shift with an on-the-floor starter.”
“No bullshit?” Davy says, his eyes now open pretty wide.
“I wouldn’t bullshit,” I say.
Fifteen minutes later we are driving down the East River Drive. The speed limit is thirty. But Davy is going seventy, and I am beginning to worry that the cops might be around.
I am yelling over the wind that is pushing through the car.
“Do you have any cigarettes?” I ask him. I don’t smoke yet, but I am thinking that this might get him to slow the car up so that he can teach me how to drive, and so we won’t have to go to jail if there are any cops around.
Davy pulls a cigarette out from his shirt pocket and hands it to me. There is no cigarette lighter in the car, and Davy has to pull over on 14th Street to strike a match.
“Maybe later,” I say, putting the cigarette in my pocket, “but, for now, could you teach me something?”
Davy lights one and then drives into a deserted street by a large Con Edison plant down by 14th Street. He tells me to get behind the wheel.
“You can drive home,” Davy says.
I can drive home, I am thinking, and I haven’t even had my first driving lesson yet.
“Anyway,” he says, “I don’t want to take the risk anymore.”
“What risk?” I ask.
“Getting caught,” he says, “without a license.”
I think about this as I go around the car to get behind the wheel. Uncle Tracy would be happier if Davy had a license, even a phony one.
“I thought,” I say to him, “you had a license from California?”
“Naw,” he says. “I have a sister lives out there, but I’m not sixteen yet.
I should have known that no one likes to say they don’t have something, so it doesn’t surprise me too much to learn that Davy doesn’t have a license. I just better not let Uncle Tracy know.
Davy offers me another cigarette.
“It looks cool if you are smoking behind the wheel,” he says. “It will make you look older.”
But, I am thinking, I’m still only twelve, and I can’t even see over the steering wheel. So how cool can I look?
I am not so sure I want to try to smoke yet. Maybe if I just hold the cigarette in my hand, it will make me look older.
I think of Humphrey Bogart as I take the cigarette. I want to learn how to blow smoke out of my nose the way Humphrey Bogart does in all his pictures. He is always such a big shot. If I ever smoke, I want to blow the smoke out of my nose and talk at the same time with the smoke coming out of my mouth, too, just like Bogart.
I am behind the wheel now, the cigarette between my fingers, and feeling like I have been graduated to some new level of life. I am learning to drive and I am getting older.
I have only been in a car a few times before, and even though it is Uncle Tracy’s car, I feel that this one is mine, that it is in the family. I put the cigarette between my lips, and both hands on the steering wheel. This is as close to king of the mountain that I’ve ever been. I turn the wheel back and forth, and I remember a movie I just saw and think I am like James Cagney speeding away from the cops. Maybe I’d rather be Jimmy Cagney than Humphrey Bogart, because what mother would name her son Humphrey, anyway?
Davy lights a match for me. He is already smoking heavily on his cigarette, and flicking it like crazy before the ash has a chance to grow thicker than a strand of hair. He lights the match with one hand, which I think is a pretty hotsy-totsy thing to do. But I think of my mother and what she would do if she ever found out I was smoking. She has a way of finding out everything.
She will smell smoke in my clothes or in my nostrils. She will sniff at my nostrils, and she will say you’ve been smoking. And then she will take me to Father O’Rourke, who will throw me out of the altar boys and make me take an oath of some kind, a don’t-upset-your-mother pledge or something. Or worse, he’ll give me to Father Hamilton to face my punishment, and I’ll have to say three months’ worth of prayers.
I hand the cigarette back to Davy.
“Not today,” I say. “I don’t want to smoke and drive at the same time.”
“Okay,” Davy says. “So step on the clutch and put the gearshift way up into first.”
I look down, and I can see that there is about three inches between the clutch and the end of my foot, even with my toes stretched out. I am already on the edge of the seat, and the only way to press the clutch down is to go over on the right cheek of my ass and stretch my whole body out.
It is impossible to drive this way, and so I get out of the car.
I know, though, that this is an opportunity for me, and I don’t want to miss it. I really want to know how to drive, and I have to learn as much as I can. Davy gets back in the driver’s seat.
“So teach me how to drive, anyway,” I say. “Just show me.”
Davy goes through the motions, and I ask him to do a couple of things twice, like how he presses down on the gas and lifts the clutch up easily, and how he presses the clutch in just before he brakes the car to a complete stop.
I think I know it all by the time Davy parks the car back on First Avenue and 56th Street, and I can’t wait until I get another three inches on my leg. I know how to drive now, anyway, and I can tell everyone, Bobby Walsh and Jurgensen and those guys, that I can drive better than them.