by Dennis Smith
“I don’t have any carfare,” I say. “How are you getting there?”
I am thinking that going to Harlem is something I am not so hot about doing. Harlem is a dangerous place, and going there is like walking the wood on the third rail, like testing the saints and the angels. Guys carry knives up there and are pretty easy about using them. And suppose we meet a gang like those with the chains that were on the Lexington Avenue Express?
“First Avenue bus,” Frankie says. “I’ll give you the carfare.”
One o’clock is more than three hours away. And I guess testing the saints and the angels is as good a way to pass the time as any.
“As long as you pay the bus both ways,” I say to him. I can tell he just wants company.
“Great,” he says. “We’ll go pick up Mikey around the corner.”
Mikey Fallon lives in the building next to mine on 56th Street, but he never hung with the 56th Street crowd. He was always a loner, at least until he started hanging around with Frankie on 55th Street.
I see Mikey on the front stoop of his building. He is yelling at his mother. And he is cursing like mad. A few people have stopped on the street to see what it is all about. I don’t see anyone I know, and I’m glad I don’t see my mother around.
“Just leave me the fuck alone,” Mikey is yelling, and his mother begins to slap him across the face. But, Mikey turns his back and goes down the stoop stairs, and his mother is following him.
“You’re a goddamn thief,” Mikey’s mother is yelling after him.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Mikey says again.
They are on the sidewalk now, his mother slapping him on the back of the head. Mikey turns to her, and you can see the veins of anger popping up at the side of his neck. I know he wants to strike out at her, but he wouldn’t dare. No one I know would hit his mother.
In fact, I never heard anyone curse at his mother before now.
“You’re a goddamn thief,” Mrs. Fallon says again.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Mikey is saying over and over. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
They are in the street now, between two parked cars. The traffic on 56th Street has stopped.
“Maybe we should come back later,” I say to Frankie.
“Naw,” Frankie says. “Just wait a minute.”
Mrs. Fallon has her son by the shirt now, and the shirt is ripping out of his pants. Mikey now yells at the top of his voice.
“Stop it, stop it, fucking stop it!”
And he grabs his mother and pushes her hard against the parked car. She loses her balance and begins to fall over, but grabs a radio antenna. The antenna bends way back and then breaks off the car, but she has stopped herself from falling.
I am thinking that I have to run over there to help her, to try to stop Mikey from being so crazy. But, suddenly, Mikey turns and begins to run away from her, up toward First Avenue and us.
Mikey’s mother is a fat woman, and she tries to run after Mikey but gives up after a few yards. She is still yelling.
“And,” she yells as loud as she can, “don’t you ever come home again.”
Mikey goes past us pretty fast, and without stopping tells us to meet him around the corner.
“Did you see that?” Frankie says. “He almost beached the whale.”
I don’t say anything because I don’t think it’s so funny. I don’t know how someone can push their mother like that.
We get to the bus stop just as the bus arrives.
“She caught me,” Mikey is explaining, “taking a few bucks from her pockabook. I tried to get away, man, but she stuck to me like the subway to the train tracks.”
He begins to laugh now, saying, “Man, did you ever see anything like it, banging away on my head. Shit, I won’t be able to go home for two days.”
I am thinking that my own mother would be mortified to be seen beating me in the street. Even when she was so mad at me the time I ran away from home and looked through her drawers for the welfare money. The neighbors would never get over it, just like they’ll be talking about Mikey’s mother for weeks. I don’t know how Mikey could push his mother like that. I would get murdered if I ever tried to do that.
“You can always sleep on the roof,” I say. “A lot of people sleep on the roof in the summer. You just have to push the dogshit away.”
“I’m going to sleep with your mother,” Mikey says.
“You don’t have enough money,” Frankie says.
I don’t say anything. I know they think it’s funny, and I suppose it is. But I just can’t say anything because I don’t understand how guys can talk about their mothers like that. I know they don’t mean anything by it, that they are joking around, but still, I think you have to respect your mother, even if she gets on you about cleaning the floors or the windows or taking down the garbage.
Your mother is your mother. She’s not your brother or sister, or a priest or nun at St. John’s, or someone at Kips Bay Boys Club. She’s different from all the people in the world you can make fun of.
My mother can be a real pain sometimes. And I guess everybody’s mother can be. But she doesn’t stop being my mother when she’s a pain.
We are walking across 120th Street toward Second Avenue. It is a strange feeling being here. Everyone sitting on the stoops, walking along the street, driving cars, managing the shops, looking out the windows, is colored. We’re the only whites in the neighborhood, sticking out like three snakes on an empty dance floor.
“Are we all right here?” I ask.
“They know we must be here on business,” Mikey answers. “They ain’t gonna mess up somebody’s deal without knowing whose deal they’s messing up, you know? People are cool up here.”
“They know,” Frankie adds, “that we just want some smack, and that nobody will see any trouble while we’re here.”
“How do they know?” I ask. It’s like walking into the lion’s den because the lion’s eyes are closed and somebody tells you the lions sleeping.
“They just know,” Frankie says. “What else they gonna think, that you’re the insurance man? Shit.”
We are almost at Second Avenue when, suddenly, Mikey turns up a stoop and slips into a building. We follow him. The hall is dark. There are no lightbulbs in the fixtures. There is garbage in the hall, papers and crunched cigarettes. And it smells of piss and stale booze. It is a hard smell, like sulfuric acid in the jewelry shop at Kips, and it fills my nose to the brink.
If my super kept our halls like this, the neighbors would beat him up.
I am beginning to wish I stayed with the pinball machine in the back of the candy store.
It is like another world. I don’t know anything about any of this. Maybe it’s a little exciting, this colored world up here in Harlem, but it is also making me feel a little nervous. One brawl in this hallway and I could be down for the forever count, and there will be no one to pick me up.
Just one flight up, there are four doors in a square hall.
Mikey knocks lightly on a door. A dog barks behind a door across the hall. All of a sudden a short colored man is pulling us into his kitchen. The kitchen has a bare wooden table in it, with one chair. There is a pot on the stove and a box of breakfast cereal on the table. Nothing else. We go to the next room. There is a woman sitting in this room on another kitchen chair, and she seems to be sleeping. There are three wooden milk boxes also in the room. There are some newspapers on the floor next to a Hollywood Confidential. Nothing else.
“My man,” the colored guy says. He is slapping Frankie’s hand. “What’s the word?”
“Thunderbird,” Frankie says, repeating a radio commercial for wine.
“What’s the price?” the guy continues.
“Sixty twice.”
“Where do you cop?”
“At the neighborhood shop.”
“Yeah, man,” the guy says. “Let’s get some money up so’s we can send my mama here out for some of her fine wine, you know? Like I ne
ed two dollars. Two dollars will give us some privacy so’s we can do us some businness, you know?”
The room has two windows that are covered with a blanket that is hanging from a curtain rod coming down from the ceiling. The floor beneath the newspapers and magazine is covered with an old linoleum that has holes worn through it just before the kitchen door. The linoleum is a maroon color that might have once been red. It hasn’t been washed, I am thinking, since it was brought into the building.
“Here,” Mikey says, “I got some money.”
“My man,” the guy says, “you are so cool.”
He pushes the woman out of the chair, saying, “Hey, Mama, here is some money for you.”
The woman opens her eyes and staggers a little. She almost falls down but catches herself on the door frame.
“All right,” she says, taking the wine money, “all right.”
When she is gone, the man goes into the kitchen and takes a shoe box from inside the stove. I can see the roaches scurrying around inside the open oven.
“How many?” he asks as he opens the box.
There are a great many small packages wrapped up in white paper and Scotch tape.
“Just one,” Mikey says.
He takes one and hands it to Mikey. It looks to me that Mikey has done this a hundred times.
What if the cops come? I am thinking. What would happen to me? This is not like playing hooky or even riding around in a stolen car. Drugs is serious business, and some judge could send me to jail for years.
Shit, what am I here for? I don’t even want any drugs.
“Can I taste?” Frankie asks, taking the bag from Mikey.
“Shit no,” the guy says. “You can’t taste. How you expect to come to Harlem to buy some horse and taste it first, ‘cause that don’t sound like you think I am your friend. And I am your friend, you know that.”
Frankie just nods his head and takes three dollars from Mikey. He adds this to another two dollars he has pulled from his pocket and gives the five to the colored man.
Frankie gives the package back to Mikey. We all watch now as Mikey unbuckles his pants, pulls his drawers to his knees, bends over, reaches back, and pushes the package hard up between the cheeks of his dumper.
I am wondering why he is doing that when the colored man begins to laugh.
“Yes, my man,” the guy says, “the poleece will never put their nose there if they stop you in Harlem, the land of jazz and mo jazz.”
In the street again I am glad to breathe in a chestful of air that is lighter and cleaner than that dank tenement smell. It is all done. We have scored a hit, and I am feeling a little safer now.
And, strangely, I feel like I won something. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I did it. Something scary. Something I was afraid of.
I like this feeling I have, this strength, knowing that I have done something that Scarry, Walsh, Jurgensen, any of those guys, have never done. Scoring horse in Harlem.
Even if all it proves is I did it.
Chapter Forty-four
I wonder how long it will be before everyone finds out.
I’ve been putting on a shirt and tie when I get up every morning to do the papers, and Billy and my mother think that I go straight to school when I’m finished. But, instead, I go to the greasy spoon Greek diner on 53rd Street where I read the Daily News and drink coffee until the florist shop opens.
I’ve been reading a lot about the polio epidemic that has all these kids locked up in iron lungs. They show photographs of them, and they are always smiling up in the reflection of a mirror. They are trapped in this iron tube and they can’t even see the world straight on, but through the reflection of a mirror.
I guess there are worse things, to be blind and crippled, to run into a tree like Spango. I don’t know how my father sees the world, but I don’t think he has to look through a mirror to see it. Maybe he sees his own world, a world nobody else sees, but he sees it straight on, anyway.
I am so afraid of being trapped like these kids, of being locked in a tube, or a room, or a building. Every time I read the newspaper I take a little time out to explain to God that it’s the biggest fear in my life to be trapped like that, and that’s why I do all this shuffling from the papers to the florist, all this lying to my family about going to school.
I like the florist. I like the forty cents an hour. I like being on my own, controlling my own life. I wish I could get around the lies. My mother thinks I’m working only on Saturday, and that Monsignor Ford wouldn’t mind if I made a few extra dollars for the family. I wish I could tell her the truth.
I told Mr. Schmidt that I had something special to do this afternoon, and he let me go early, and I am now coming back from Bloomingdale’s, where I finally bought the ring with the blue stone for my mother. I guess I could wait for her birthday to give it to her, or even Mother’s Day, but I want to give it to her now. This is the day I finally put the forty bucks together, and this is the day I want to give it to her, no pause, no waiting, no excuse. It’s like something to celebrate, this forty bucks.
I pick up my three-ring binder from under the stairs, the same place I always hid my cigarettes before I was allowed to smoke. My mother’s working the four-to-twelve at the phone company, and I catch her as she is putting on some lipstick before the mirror over the kitchen sink. I throw my binder on the top bunk in my room, and I come out to the kitchen, the little blue box deep in my pocket and burning a fast hole.
“How you doing, honey?” she asks.
I go over to the sink and I give her a kiss on the cheek. She seems surprised.
“I’m okay, I guess,” I say to her, “but I have this pain in my leg.”
She turns quickly to look at me.
“What pain, where?” she asks.
“Up here,” I say, patting the upper part of my thigh. “I don’t know what it is.”
And then I try to look surprised.
“It’s like there is something pressing into my leg,” I say, “like a sharp corner of something.”
She’s looking now at where I’m patting my leg, and I say, “Holy cow, there may be something here. What’s this?”
I’m patting my leg like crazy, and she has no idea of what’s going on. Finally, I pull the ring box out of my pocket, saying, “Look, Mom, this is the thing that I’m up against, a little box with all these sharp edges.”
I give the box to her, a dark blue box with a gold stripe around the sides, and I watch as she takes it in her hands and holds it to her breast.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“Just something I think you need,” I say, “and it’s brand-new.”
She opens the box and then sits on a kitchen chair as she pulls the ring out.
“And expensive,” I add. She always thinks things are better if they’re expensive.
“Oh, Dennis,” she says, “you’re something else. This is …”
She can’t finish the sentence right away, and she waits.
“You drive us all to the brink of despair,” she says finally, “and then you do this.”
I don’t say anything, and I am happy to see how she likes the ring as she slips it over her finger. It fits perfectly.
“How could you afford this?” she asks. I knew she would ask.
“I just saved,” I answer, “a little here, a little there.”
“You know, Dennis,” she says, holding the ring out in the light, “to do this shows something that’s in your soul.”
I don’t want her to make such a splash about it. I know she has most of what she needs, like food and clothes and this apartment, and I don’t guess anyone really needs a gold ring. Especially since I don’t want the ring to do anything except give her something to be happy about, something out of the blue that will make her smile.
“Oh, c’mon,” I say. “I just wanted to give you something.”
“Yes,” she says, “you have given me something. And I hope you never lose it.”
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“The ring?” I ask.
“No,” she laughs. “Not the ring. C’mere now and give us a kiss.”
I laugh, too, saying, “I already gave you a kiss, Mom, and I gotta go to meet the guys on 54th Street.”
Going down the stairs to the street, I think about what I said to my mother. It was a little lie, but still it was a lie, and I wonder if I’ll be able to get it out of my head. Why am I lying to my mother like this? I’m not meeting the guys on 54th Street at all. I’m meeting the guys on 55th Street, but I don’t want to tell her that.
I don’t want her to know.
Chapter Forty-five
It is now two weeks later, and the three of us are sitting around in the basement of number 2 Sutton Place South, on 57th Street. I come to this building a lot with the flowers, and I know the lay of the basement delivery area. So does Mikey, because his father is a janitor here. We are in the boiler room, down a deep stairwell from the basement, the deepest part of the cellar, and there is a constant background of hissing steam.
We came here straight from making a score on 120th Street.
“Nobody will ever come here,” Mikey says, “unless the boiler breaks down and they run outta hot water.”
It is hot, steamy. The walls are dark and shining with the sweat of the moisture. There is a water bug on the ceiling, a large one with feelers that shoot out about three inches. It doesn’t move, and seems frozen by the sound of our voices.
There are no chairs, and so we are sitting on the floor. Frankie takes a set of works from under his shirt. There is a small metal cap from a medicine bottle, and he puts it between the prongs of a bobby pin, which acts as the handle. It is like a miniature cooking pot.
There is a weird sense going through me as I watch this. It is like being at a High Mass where the priests are doing things that you haven’t seen before, that you don’t quite understand.
Mikey wraps thread around the tip of a large eyedropper and jams a needle on it. Frankie has the junk this time, and we watch him drop his pants and pull the glassine envelope, half the size of a pack of matches, out from between the cheeks of his ass. It is almost as if he has farted it out, but no one laughs. There is nothing funny about it.