A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “Dumbo,” he yells again as the bus pulls away.

  I can’t just stand here, and I begin to run with the bus. I am pointing my finger at him as I run. I have to let these people on the bus know that I’m not going to just stand there and do nothing.

  “I’ll get you later,” I yell in return. “You punk.”

  I realize as I am running that I am not just yelling. I am screaming. And everyone on the street is looking at me.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I can hear DooDoo say as the bus gains speed down the avenue.

  I am sitting on a car fender now, across the street from DooDoo’s house. Walsh and Scarry are with me. Scarry has in his hands a New York Times, folded in three parts like a letter, and he is rolling it up. Rolled and tied together with strings, it is the closest thing to a free football that exists. A New York Times football sails through the air like a glider when you throw the bomber pass.

  “Let’s play touch,” Scarry says as he knots the third and last string.

  “Let’s wait a little while longer,” I say, “ ’cause DooDoo’s gotta come out sometime.”

  “Why don’t you just forget about it?” Walsh says.

  “You can’t let somebody spit on you, Bobby,” I answer.

  “He could kick the crap outta you,” Scarry says, “maybe.”

  “So,” I say, “as long as he knows he can’t spit on me, I don’t care.”

  “C’mon,” Walsh says, “let’s play football.”

  I can feel my stomach turning, waiting here for DooDoo. I don’t want to fight anyone, but you have to take a chance on getting hurt once or you’ll get hurt all the time. I learned that with Shalleski.

  Finally, I see DooDoo come out of his building, which is next to the Hotel Sutton on the other side of the street from my house. There is only one step on his stoop, and he is just stepping off it when he sees me charging toward him. He knows what to expect, and he puts his hands up fast. But it is too late, and I punch him five times in a row, right, left, right, left, right, and DooDoo is falling to the sidewalk.

  He gets up slowly and turns his back to me.

  I could hit him again, but you can’t Jap someone like that, hit someone whose back is to you. It would get around the neighborhood that you were a Jap puncher, and people would think you’re a creep and a coward.

  DooDoo turns, points his finger at me, and says, “I’ll fight you Saturday, down by the river. I’ll get you.”

  DooDoo then turns and walks back onto his one-step stoop and into his building.

  It is Saturday morning, and a crowd of us are down by the river, in the 56th Street park. Walsh is holding my Aviation jacket. DooDoo is taking things out of his pockets and putting them on a park bench. Other guys, like Jurgensen and the Harris brothers and Jimmy Burton, are standing around us. They heard there was a fight, and they came around to see.

  I got DooDoo good the other day, but I took him by surprise then.

  Now he is waiting for me to come toward him, his fists out to either side of him, clenched tightly.

  He moves in and throws a punch. The last thing I think of before it hits me is that I have to be fast and quick like my brother Billy. But I am not being fast enough, and it crashes into the side of my face. And before I can recover from this punch, I get a second one, just above my eye on the other side of my face. Shit, I am thinking. It is hurting, stinging like a hard slap.

  I know I have to move fast, and so I lunge forward at him, grab him around the neck, and pull him to the ground. He gets out of the headlock easy, and now he is on top of me, and he is fast, fast like Billy, punching like he was hammering nails. He gets me in the eye again, and in the mouth, and I feel the skin smarting, burning.

  I grab him around the neck again, and this time I squeeze like a vise, and there is no way he can get out of it. He is punching and flailing, but he isn’t hitting anything but my back. I am holding on like I’m on a branch over a cliff, and now he is pushing his hand just under my arm so that he can breathe a little. He keeps trying to punch with the other hand.

  But nothing is happening in the fight. He can’t do anything, and I don’t want to do anything except keep holding onto him. My face is hurting a lot now, and I know that if he gets a chance to belt me a few more times, I’ll get hurt good.

  “It looks like it’s even,” I hear Scarry say.

  “Yeah,” Frankie Harris says, “it’s even.”

  “You guys wanna break it up?” Marty Harris, Frankie’s twin, says.

  “Yeah,” Walsh says, “break it up.”

  “You want to break it up, DooDoo?” I ask.

  “If I get free,” DooDoo says, “I’ll kick the shit outta you.”

  “You’re not doin’ anything,” Scarry says.

  “If it’s even,” DooDoo says, “I’ll break it up.”

  And so I let go of DooDoo’s neck, and he gets up.

  I put my hand out.

  “Friends,” I say.

  It would be hard, I know, for DooDoo to refuse to shake. No one would like him if he didn’t shake.

  DooDoo shakes, and goes off up the block with a couple of guys. Walsh is putting my Aviation jacket around my shoulders. I don’t feel bad that it was even. At least I didn’t lose. I stood there, face-to-face, and he knows I stood there because I couldn’t just let him spit on me like that.

  It is worth a black eye and a bloody lip to let him know that.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I am on my way to Kips Bay Boys Club. It is early afternoon, and it has just stopped raining. I walk past the Hotel Sutton, just across from my building. Charlie Ameche, a squat, fat guy, is the doorman there, and he calls me over.

  “Here, kid,” he says, handing me a dollar, “go get me some coffee, four sugars, no milk.”

  He doesn’t ask me to do this. He just orders. But I don’t mind, and I go to Harry’s Luncheonette next to DooDoo’s house for the coffee. It’s hard to get Harry’s attention because he’s talking to his wife about a bunch of Puerto Ricans who broke into the Congress this morning and mowed down five congressmen.

  “Just leave me alone,” Harry’s wife says, “and let me do the scrambled eggs on toast, huh?”

  I don’t know any Puerto Ricans at all, I am thinking as Harry gets the coffee for me. Not even at SAT. Almost everybody in New York is Irish or Italian. There are a few exceptions, like the man in the Chinese laundry, or the Jews that run the delicatessen on 55th Street, but not many. Maybe Henry Castle on 54th Street could count as a Mexican, but I always think of him as Irish.

  When I give Ameche the coffee and the change, he gives me a tip.

  “Here, kid,” he says, flipping a quarter to me, “go buy yourself a blow job.”

  I am laughing as I walk to Second Avenue. I would put the quarter in the poor box if I could just get Virginia Sabella to kiss me, and here is Ameche talking about a blow job.

  Every neighborhood has a guy like Ameche, someone everyone knows to be a little off, a whack job they call him. The story is that he got to be crazy because when he was a kid his father beat him over the head with an anchor that was hanging in their living room on Second Avenue.

  Ameche and Louie Daly were going fishing out in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and they had to leave at five-thirty in the morning to catch the boat. But Ameche had no alarm clock, and so they hung a rope down from the roof, a rope that Ameche was going to tie around his leg when he got into his bed down on the fourth floor. Louie was going to tug on the rope in the morning to wake him up.

  “Just keep pulling on that goddamn rope, Louie,” Ameche ordered him, “until I tell you it’s okay, ’cause it’s hard to wake me up.”

  “Right,” Louie said, “right.”

  And then Ameche tied the rope to his father’s leg when his father was sleeping, and in the morning the father was dragged out of his bed, and then his father practically went out the window before Ameche yelled up to the roof to tell Louie to stop pulling.

  “You-a wanta to go
fishin’,” the father kept yelling as he hit Ameche’s head again and again with the anchor, “you-a needa da boat, and den you needa da anchor.”

  The street is crowded with people because the sun has finally broken through the winter, and it’s getting warmer out. I go toward Second, back past Harry’s, past Ling’s, the laundry down in the cellar, next to the auto repair shop, past the radio and TV repair shop, past Jasper’s candy store where everybody plays the horses, past the empty lots and the corner vegetable stand. The old cobblestones on Second Avenue are shining with wetness, and everything in the neighborhood looks clean, like it has all been buffed with a rag.

  I turn down Second because I’m meeting Walsh and Scarry and Jurgensen down at Kips, where they are playing basketball.

  Pretty soon I won’t have much time to just hang around and play ball. I’ve been going after this job at the East River Florist, and they just told me yesterday that I can work for them on Friday afternoons and all day Saturday. It’s not a bad deal, either, thirty cents an hour.

  I’ve been giving all my newspaper money to my mother, but I’m going to get to keep half of the florist money I earn, after I pay her back for a pair of Thom McAn shoes she bought me.

  I see this guy I know, Frankie, on the corner of 54th Street.

  I know him for a long time, since when we were kids and we all had bikes. We used to ride through Central Park, a gang of us from different streets. We all wore the same kind of hats, like that hat Marlon Brando wore in The Wild One when he walked around with his leather gloves through the straps across the shoulders.

  Frankie is a quiet kid, but as tough as Rocky Marciano. Nobody mistakes his being quiet for a guy who can be pushed around. Now he is just standing here on the corner, and I am wondering what he is up to.

  “Hey,” I say to him.

  “Hey, Dennis,” he says, “where you going?”

  “Kips.”

  “I never go there,” he says.

  “How come?”

  “I dunno,” he says. “Faggy stuff, waiting in line to play Ping-Pong. Got any smokes?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m gonna buy one-for-a-penny from Abbie. Want to walk me down to Moe’s on 53rd Street, and I’ll buy some potato chips?”

  The quarter Ameche gave me makes me feel flush enough for a bag of potato chips.

  “I can’t,” he says. “I’m waiting for a guy.”

  “What guy?” I ask.

  “You ever smoke pot?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer. This is something we never thought about in our crowd on 56th Street.

  “This guy,” he says, “is supposed to come with some pot.”

  “You’re gonna smoke pot?” I ask. I don’t think I know anyone who smokes pot.

  “Yeah,” he says, “you wanna stick around I’ll give you some tokes.”

  “What’s a toke?” I never even heard this word up at SAT.

  “A drag,” he says. “You know, a puff.”

  “You ever smoke it before?” I ask.

  “Yeah, sure,” he says. “Everybody in my school smokes it.”

  Frankie goes to the Machine and Metal Trades High School up on 96th Street, and I am thinking if they are all smoking pot and working those big machines to shape the copper and sheet metal, they will all end up like Captain Hook looking for the alligator. “I heard it makes you dizzy,” I say.

  “No, man,” Frankie says, shaking his head. “High is not dizzy. High is like dreaming a great dream where all the colors are like on fire. And the sound is like you’re in the middle of the phonograph. Stick around, Dennis, ’cause here he is now.”

  I do not recognize the guy who comes to us. Everyone says “Hey,” and the boy gives Frankie a small brown paper bag. Frankie gives him two dollars.

  “It’s that easy?” I say. “Just stand on the corner and some kid brings you pot?”

  “Naw,” he says. “You hafta set it up. I set it up yesterday with this kid. He comes from Third Avenue, up around 59th Street, and he goes to my school.”

  “You like your school?”

  “No,” he says, “I never go. I just hang around there, you know? C’mon, we’ll take a walk down by the river and smoke one of these.”

  Frankie lifts the opened bag up to my eyes, and I can see four hand-rolled cigarettes at the bottom.

  “No,” I say to him, “I gotta go play basketball. Maybe Saturday night when I get through with work.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he answers, “maybe Saturday.”

  I don’t think much about this, and I give him a small punch on the arm to say goodbye. He is such a friendly guy, but very different from my other friends. A mysterious guy, a loner. I could hang around with him, and I’d probably have a great time getting to know what makes him tick.

  At Kips, I change into the club shorts and run out onto the basketball court in my undershirt. Scarry and Walsh and Jurgensen are there, doing layups, jump shots, sets from around the rim.

  There is no place like Kips. The thing of it is that it’s a building, and it is always there when you want to go there, like St. John’s Church or the Metropolitan Museum. You can go as much as you want to these places, but some guys never go to any of them.

  “About time,” Scarry says to me. I guess they’ve been waiting to play two-on-two.

  Scarry is semi-kneeling as he throws a set shot. It is a basket, but I knew it would be. Scarry is playing ball for LaSalle Academy, and he is the team’s star. A basketball to Scarry is like a steering wheel to a bus driver, just something that makes everything else work.

  Scarry is like my brother Billy, and he could even be better than Billy if he keeps working at it. He’s broad-shouldered, and a tough player, elbows and hips all the way. If there is a way to get the ball on the rebound, he’ll get it. Some college will pick him up someday, I am thinking, and if he was a little taller, he would go straight to the pros.

  Walsh is big and skinny. Lanky. And his body moves like it was made of hinges. Walsh is more like me in playing this game, because he doesn’t have that killer way to stop the other guy. He just wants to take shots from the outside and look like he has some style.

  Jurgensen is heavier and stockier than all of us. He moves over the court like a farm tractor plowing a field of rocks, but he puts his heart into everything. Sometimes we call him Two-Wallet Joey, because he is always losing his wallet, and so he carries two, one in a back pocket and one in the front. He would be a good ballplayer if he was lighter and if he didn’t drink so much beer. Anytime we go down to 51st Street park to drink beer, Joey always has his own package. Sometimes I’ll drink two cans of Rheingold, and Scarry might drink one, but Joey gets two quarts, and puts his package between his knees and sips it in small gulps until he becomes legless. This is one of the reasons he is always losing his wallets.

  It is a real pain carrying him to his hallway on 55th Street, and leaving him there to crawl his way up to his apartment. Joey’s father has a good job, an engineer on a boat, or something like that, and so he goes away for days at a time, and that’s when Joey puts his package on.

  Joey was the smartest boy in our class at St. John’s and got straight hundreds on all the tests. Things just come to him easily, and he made all the good high schools. He’s in LaSalle with Scarry, but I know he likes the beer more than the books. His mother died when he was a kid, and maybe that’s why.

  I don’t know what I would do if my mother died. Goddamn, it’s something I wouldn’t want to think about.

  At least Joey has a good father who takes him to ball games, and if his father ever found out that Joey was drinking beer, I guess he would get beat, or maybe his father would send him away to a military school. I know his father wouldn’t let him get away with swimming in a beer bottle if he knew about it.

  Walsh and I play Scarry and Joey, and we have been at it for over an hour. We haven’t won a game yet. Every time I pass the ball to Walsh, he shoots it. He never passes it back to me, even when I’m free and under the b
ackboard. Walsh believes in himself and thinks that his one-man team is pretty good.

  But Walsh never makes a basket. Sometimes I wave like I am trying to stop a locomotive, but he never passes the ball. I wouldn’t pass it to him, except that Scarry is a hard and close ballplayer, and he gets so tight on me that I have to pass the ball out.

  Scarry quits suddenly.

  “I gotta go,” he says. “I have homework.”

  “C’mon,” I say, “we could do another half hour.”

  “I have homework, too,” Jurgensen says. “If I don’t get it done, they’re gonna throw me outta school.”

  “It would take three Irish Christian Brothers,” I say, “to lift you in order to throw you out.”

  “Naw,” Jurgensen says. “I’m light, like a ballet dancer. You’d be surprised.”

  “Hey,” Walsh says as they leave the court, “watch that talk about ballet dancers. I don’t see you hanging around with the girls too much.”

  Jurgensen just raises his middle finger behind his back as the locker room door closes.

  And so Walsh and I are left alone on the court to play horse, which is when one person has to duplicate the shot another person makes, if it is a bucket. I take three games straight because Walsh can’t do the around-the-back layup that I have perfected.

  I can tell Walsh is getting bored. He has a defeated look on his face.

  “Let’s quit,” he says finally.

  “How come?”

  “I have to go home and do homework,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You’re such a queer, Walsh,” I say, “like Scarry and Jurgensen. Where is all that homework going to get you, anyway?”

  Walsh laughs, saying, “It will get me through the night without my father beating my head against the wall with my algebra book.”

  Archie grabs me as I am pushing open the big doors to the stairs out to 52nd Street.

  “Hey, son,” he says, “give me a minute.”

  Archie has a different office ever since a guy named Russ came to work at the club, an office in the back by Mr. McNiven’s office.

  None of his trophies are in Archie’s new office, but there are photographs of kids all over the walls. I see Scarry in a couple of them, and my brother Billy is in a few, too. There are a lot of the Friday night dances, and I see Barbara Cavazzine in a couple. I should ask her out again, I am thinking as Archie pulls his chair from around the desk and sits next to me.