by Dennis Smith
“It’s in the hallway,” Billy says.
“What’s in the hallway?” I ask as I put my dish in the sink.
“Take a look,” he says, “and I’ll get the saw under the bathtub.”
The hallway is completely filled by a huge Christmas tree, its branches cramped against the hallway walls. The tree is lying on its side but it must be fourteen feet high.
Billy is now behind me with the saw in his hand.
“What did you do,” I say, “rob it?”
I am joking. Billy would never steal anything. There are just some things Billy would never do, and stealing is one of them, and cursing. He is too busy studying his Latin and working at all the side jobs to think about getting into trouble. But a lot of Christmas trees ended up in the apartments on my block after falling off trucks or being left mysteriously under a lamppost, and I am thinking maybe someone gave Billy one of these.
“No,” he says. “Mr. Goldfarb himself gave it to me because I worked all day without the truck. I had to carry everything through the streets.”
“Couldn’t Mr. Goldfarb give you one that fit in an apartment instead of one made for a church? And did you get the Mayflower Moving Company to get it here?”
“Michael Harris helped me,” he says, “and it will be okay.”
Billy jumps into the branches and makes his way to the top. He saws away about five feet of tree and stands it up. It looks pregnant, like there are two more trees inside of it. We pull and shimmy the thing through the kitchen door, move the kitchen table onto my mother’s bed for a minute, and drag the thing into the living room. I take the chrome-legged chair that is in the corner and put it on the couch for another minute, as Billy shifts the tree into its place. There is hardly any room to walk into the living room now because there are branches all over the place.
“Saw some of these off,” I say, “and clear a path, or we’ll never get the kitchen table back from Mom’s room into the kitchen.”
Billy gives the tree a haircut, and then, with the kitchen table returned to the kitchen, and the chrome-legged chair shoved in front of the couch, we admire the way Christmas has taken over the apartment.
“I’m going to eat,” Billy says, “and then take a bath. In an hour we’ll decorate the tree together. I promised Mom it would get done.”
“I’m going to go out for a while,” I say.
“Right,” he says. “You just better be here in an hour. I’m not going to do this alone.”
“No sweat, Chet.”
In the candy store on 55 th Street I meet Frankie and Raymond Connors. Frankie looks like he has already scored today. His eyelids are half down over his eyes, and his speech is a little slurred, but he is not nodding. I think when you mainline as much as he does, once a day, anyway, that the nodding wears off in a short time.
“Hey, Dennis,” Frankie says. “Good to see you, man.”
The candy store is long and narrow, and the front window is steamed up from the cigarette smoke and the hissing heat. Newspapers are piled high in the back of the store, and there is a musty smell everywhere. Frankie’s mother is sitting behind the counter reading a Daily News. She is a quiet woman, and hardly says anything to anyone except a smiling hello.
Raymond Connors is laughing as he reads from a magazine.
‘”Love for Sale,’ it says,” Raymond says, looking up, “and I’m going to go over to Amsterdam where it says here the girls sit in the storefront windows, and you just walk up and down the street window shopping, and you can take your pick.”
“Where’s Amsterdam?” Frankie asks.
“Someplace over there,” Raymond answers, “next to England and France and places like that. I need a new girlfriend, too, since Marilyn moved to New Jersey.”
That’s where Marilyn Rolleri is, I think.
“You should go out with Maryanne Maniscalco,” Frankie says. “And you don’t have to go over the ocean. I saw her yesterday, short skirt, crinoline slip, she bends over and you see the big planet.”
“The big planet?” I say.
“Venus, man,” Frankie says. “Venus, the only planet that matters, and she’s not going out with anyone anymore.”
Raymond is still laughing. I lean against a wall and light a cigarette, thinking that Marilyn Rolleri is probably better off in New Jersey if Raymond doesn’t even care about it. All my life I have been dreaming about having a girl like her, and I never came closer than a fast hallway kiss. I would care a lot more than Raymond does about it, I know, if it was me.
“I’ll talk to her,” Raymond says, “maybe.”
“Man, what should we do tonight?” Frankie asks.
“Where are Nicky and Mikey and those guys?” I ask.
“I’m going to meet them later, man,” Frankie says. “At the Tavern Bar on 48th Street.”
“I got something great,” Raymond says. “C’mon with me, under my stairs in the hallway.”
“I hafta go home in an hour,” I say. “Maybe I’ll just stick around for a little bit.”
“Don’t be such a queer,” Raymond says. “You have all year if you want it.”
Frankie’s mother doesn’t look up as we pass her and leave the candy store for the hallway next door. Under the stairs in the back of the hall, Raymond puts his finger to his lips as he picks up a brown paper bag and pulls a bottle from it.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Pernod,” he says.
“Bernard?” I ask.
“No,” Raymond says. “Pernod, like p-e-r-n-o-d.”
“I don’t think that’s how you say it, man,” Frankie says.
“It’s like anisette,” Raymond says, “but I don’t know how to spell that.”
“A-n-i-s-e-t-t-e,” Frankie says, spelling it out.
“You go to the head of the class,” Raymond says as he breaks the seal, and hands the bottle to me.
It has a sweet taste, and it doesn’t make my throat hurt the way whiskey or Scotch does. I take a second swig, this time a big gulp.
Frankie drinks some, too, and then Raymond, and then it is back to me. I take two more gulps. I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all.
Two hours later we are sitting in a booth in the back of the Tavern Bar down Second Avenue. We’ve been hanging around here, or in a bar called The Studio, for a couple of months now. You have to be eighteen to drink in New York, but most of the people I see are sixteen or seventeen. I get away with it because I use a duplicate of my brother’s driver’s license.
Frankie had to carry me down most of the way to 48th Street. The liquor hit me like I walked into an airplane propeller under Raymond Connors’ stairs, and we just sat there trying to make words with the sounds that were coming out of our mouths.
Now I am drinking glass after glass of soda water, trying to dilute the stuff before I pass out. Raymond is still laughing. He laughs at everything everyone says, funny or not.
“Where’s Nicky?” Frankie says.
Raymond laughs.
Jurgensen walks into the bar and sees us in the booth. I don’t see Scarry or Walsh.
“Hey, Dennis,” Jurgensen says. “Hey, Frankie, Raymond.”
Jurgensen sits at the bar.
Raymond laughs.
“You got twice as much teeth as you need, Raymond,” I say.
Raymond laughs.
“And your head looks like a cue ball balanced on top of a pool stick.”
Raymond laughs.
I realize then that Raymond doesn’t hear anything at all. He is just laughing to have some response. The Pernod has made him kind of delirious, and he can’t shake that stupid smile on his face.
I know I am drunk, I am thinking, and if I could only get to the bathroom and throw it all up, I would be all right again. I am seeing two of everything. I see Jurgensen, both of him, sitting at the end of the bar by himself. There is a thin wall of a bar separation between him and me, about five feet high, and Jurgensen is watching John Conroy put a glass with an inch of water on th
e top of the separation.
When you sit at the end of a bar, you see everything. Jurgensen will watch that glass until somebody knocks into the separation, and he will watch the glass fall to the ground and break, and he will watch as John Conroy demands that the clumsy guy buys him another drink, a full glass of gin, or risk a broken nose. I know that Jurgensen will sit there amusing himself with Conroy and ten other neighborhood guys until he falls off the stool in another two or three hours.
I don’t want to pass out like that, and if I could get to the bathroom, I could have another two or three hours of some good time here.
Suddenly, I remember that I was supposed to go home to decorate the tree for Christmas. I said I would be an hour, but that was two and a half hours ago. Maybe Billy is still there. Maybe I could still help him do the tree. If I could only get to the bathroom.
“Lemme out, Frankie,” I say.
“Where ya goin’, Dennis?”
“Baretroom.”
Frankie gets up and I slide over the leather seat and fall right to the floor. Shit, I think. Here I am lying flat out on the floor of a bar that would serve kids from Sister Stella’s third-grade class. I leave my head on my arm. I feel a bit of a comfort here, and I want to close my eyes and go to sleep, but Frankie has his arms around my waist pulling me up from the center. It would be so easy to just go to sleep, to be anything but drunk like this.
“Get up, Dennis,” Frankie is saying, “before the bartender sees you and kicks us all out.”
I stagger to the bathroom, and as I pass by a back booth I see Buckley sitting there with a woman. I don’t pay much attention because I don’t like him much, anyway, and I rock from side to side until I am before the bathroom sink, and I lean over and the Pernod comes out as I open the faucet and watch everything mix with the water, and I hear myself wretching as half my stomach goes down the drain. I take a big mouthful of water and gargle, and then I clean the sink out.
“Always try to clean the sink when you’re out,” my mother told us the night we were at Joe’s Original Restaurant, “because there will always be somebody behind you that might want a clean sink.”
I cup the water in my hand and splash it up to my face. It feels like a curtain of ocean air has swept across my skin. I am feeling less woozy now, less legless. It would be a gift from God to be home now sleeping in the top bunk.
“Sit down, Dennis,” Buckley says as I begin to pass them by.
I am now in the red leather booth, next to a woman who I guess is twice as old as I am. She has a round face and full red lips, like you’d see on a billboard. I watch her figure going back and forth from being one person to being two. I guess she’s pretty, but I don’t like the way she has her hair, a million little crispy curls coming down over her forehead. I squint to make sure I see only one of her.
“This is Loretta,” Buckley says.
“Hello, Loretta,” I say, holding my hand out to shake hands.
She leans over and kisses me on the mouth.
Even in this dizziness, I am thinking that I never knew a woman could be like this, that she could just say hello, a simple hello, and then open her mouth and the full force of a hot breath mixed with alcohol and cigarette smoke could shoot into your body with a kiss.
I don’t know what to say when she stops, but I am glad that I gargled. She turns fully toward me on the leather seat. I can see her legs now, and the way her polka-dotted green skirt hangs loose between her legs and over her thighs. Her clothes are clinging to her, and even in this fog I can sense the hard muscles of her thighs and the solid firmness of her breasts.
“So you’re Dennis,” she says.
I look at Buckley, wondering what the score is here. He’s smiling.
“Loretta,” Buckley says, “is a friend of mine. She’s been lookin’ at you and told me you remind her of James Dean.”
“My mother,” I say to them, “says that I look like Gabby Hayes in the morning.”
“Well,” Loretta says, “you look like James Dean now.”
There are two shot glasses filled to the brim before her, and she lifts one to her lips and downs it like a longshoreman.
“And,” she adds, “I like you.”
I look at Buckley again, as I feel Loretta’s hand on my leg. He is still smiling.
“Lookit,” Buckley says, “I gotta meet Ray Dececci up on 54th Street. If you want, you can take Loretta to my house for a drink or something, ‘cause my whole family went to Pennsylvania for Christmas. I can meet you there later.”
What should I think about this invitation? I wish I was back on the floor, my head on my arm, falling into a deep rest that would take me out of this world.
I can see my brother waiting in the living room for me to help him with the decorations. He said he wouldn’t do them without me, but I am also looking at Loretta, and I am wondering what is going on here.
It looks like a fix-up, but it could also be a setup. I never liked this Buckley guy too much, until now. It seems to be a generous thing if it’s the real McCoy, to let me go with Loretta to his house. Real generous.
Or why didn’t I think of this before? Maybe this is a prostitute, a woman that Buckley has gone together with in some deal. He is in with those kind of people, I know.
I better ask him straight out, I think, and I get up from the seat.
“Could I see you a second?” I say to Buckley, waving him away from the table.
“Hey,” Loretta says as he gets up and leaves.
“Look,” I say to him, standing just a few feet from Jurgensen. “I am tapped out and can’t even buy a drink here, so if you’re lookin’ for a few shekels to be with this Loretta, I don’t know where I’ll get it.”
“Hey,” Loretta calls again, I guess feeling abandoned. She has the second shot glass to her mouth.
“No, no, no,” Buckley says. “It’s nothing like that, man. Damn, I am giving you a hundred percent luck here, and you are breaking my horns.”
Loretta is now sitting on a worn velvet couch in Buckley’s apartment on 48th Street, just around the corner from the Tavern Bar. She is so much older than I am, maybe thirty I am thinking, but she has something warm about her, like she is a little girl being quiet and polite.
She has a very nice body beneath her green skirt with the white polka dots and her red sweater. She is like a Christmas present. Raymond would laugh now if he thought I had a Christmas present like this.
But what do I do now that I’m here? I’m not sure how I should act. I have never been with a girl alone like this in an apartment, where it might lead to something. I hear guys like Jackie Morgan talk about it, but I have never had a steady girlfriend who would even let me feel the cloth of her brassiere.
And no one has ever talked to me about what I should do with a girl like Loretta. She’s not even a girl anymore, and if Father O’Rourke was here, he would say that I am in the near occasion of sin, and I should think of everything that is dear to me, to think good thoughts, to think of everything I respect in life, like Archie, and my brother, who is going to beat me, I know, because I didn’t help him with the Christmas tree.
This is the famous Penn Station of the Our Father. I am thinking this as Loretta puts her arms around me. And lead us not into Penn Station. Maybe I could talk to her some, get her to relax a little. I could relax, too, I feel so edgy.
“I wonder,” I say to her, “why Buckley didn’t go to the country with his family. My mother never goes on a trip without us.”
“Maybe,” she says, “they didn’t want him to go. C’mon, Jimmy, loosen up, will ya?”
What is this Jimmy stuff? Does she want me to be James Dean or something?
“Why not?” I ask. “I wonder how they let him stay here alone.”
I’m thinking of when my mother told me she was going to Aunt Kitty’s, but then ended up back in the kitchen to catch me coming home late. What would I do here, I am thinking, if Buckley’s father walked into the house?
Sudden
ly I can feel my eyes beginning to close. It is like I have taken a pound of horse and my eyelids weigh a hundred pounds. I know I want to keep talking to Loretta, but I am so tired.
I just want to fall into her lap, close my eyes, and sleep for a week.
“The family hates him,” Loretta says. “He told me.”
How could a family hate someone in their own family, even someone as pimply as Buckley? I look at Loretta, try to focus on her, but I am too dizzy to see her clearly. All that Pernod. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so many club sodas. Maybe it just spread the Pernod out.
I know I could kiss her if I wanted to, but I keep my body a few inches away from her on the couch. I don’t know why I am hesitating to make out with her, but I feel that it is not the normal thing, to just meet a girl or even a woman like Loretta, and then two seconds later end up on a couch with her on 48th Street.
But, still, she is a good looker, and I don’t know how long it will be before I ever have this kind of a chance again. As Buckley said, he was dealing me one hundred percent luck.
Loretta takes her sweater off. Just like that, she crosses her arms and pulls her sweater right over her head, and she is sitting there in a white brassiere, again looking like a little girl waiting to be told what she should do next.
“I wish I had some whiskey,” she says.
“Maybe I could find some,” I say quickly, beginning to get up from the couch, happy that I could move even for a minute. I am now feeling the sweat in my hands, and I wipe my hands on my pants.
“No, no,” she says. “You just sit here, and I’ll look.”
Loretta gets up and walks through the Buckley apartment. It is much bigger than my apartment, but it is way down here on 48th Street. I wouldn’t want to live here, I am thinking as she disappears into the darkness of the kitchen. It is so far away from 56th Street.
God, if I could just rest a little, maybe I could feel better, and maybe I could talk to Loretta some more. I have never done anything like this, and if I just felt a little better now, maybe I could tell her that I have never done this.
I mean, I am still only fifteen years old, but I guess she thinks I have done this with thousands of girls. This is the 1950s, right? And in 1955 lots of guys do this, some of them almost every day. Things are changing in the world. The Korean War is over, and everybody is working hard in the neighborhoods, and they all need to have a good time on the weekends. The bars are always full, and the dances my brother goes to up at the Jaeger House on 86th Street are always packed. Everyone is drinking and making out in the corners. It’s not like it used to be anymore where the girls all run home to their mothers when a guy tries to kiss them or grab them. Guys just do it whenever they get a chance, right?