“I’m gonna get into the heavier weights,” he told his girlfriend with phony confidence. “I wanna start dealing with kilos, you know. That’s all I want to get with. That’s it.” He forgot what he was going to say next.
“You better stop smoking so much of that shit,” Alisha Watkins said. “Your sister says she’s ready to open up this new spot. She say she needs people to work for her.”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Alisha asked.
Darryl whirled around to glare at his sister, Joanna, at the table. She kept pointing at her astrological chart and talking to their mother, ignoring him completely. Neither of them was telling him what was going on anymore. One of them said something that sounded like his name. Maybe they were going to give him up to the cops.
Sometimes it seemed like everything was out to get him. The police, the people on television, the slippery bathroom floor. Maybe his own family too. He could be being paranoid, but that didn’t mean he was wrong.
“Yeah, I’m gonna open up a new spot too,” Darryl said loudly. He hadn’t thought of doing any such thing before and he was not sure if he wanted to do it now. But he raised his voice so his mother and sister could hear him.
“Yeah, I’m gonna get me some reliable people,” Darryl said. “I’m not gonna pay them right away until we build up the clientele. I want about four spots, and we’d run for six months, man. I’m gonna fold that money, and that’s it. I want a piece of land.”
“Where?” his girlfriend asked.
“The building across the way here.” Darryl pointed out the window as though Alisha could see him. From the twelfth-floor apartment in the Fortress, Darryl was looking at building B of the Charles J. Stone Houses. Its lights appeared blurred in the head-softening heat of the evening. “My family’s got all this action in this building, you know, so I wanna expand. Get me a spot to start off that would bubble about ten Gs a day.”
“That sounds like the right track,” said Alisha, pleased by her boyfriend’s new sense of enterprise. “You should get a little something for yourself. But you know when you first start something, it be slow,” she cautioned him.
Again, Darryl lost his place in the conversation, and he started chewing his thumb. Maybe he was smoking too much crack. It was getting harder and harder to finish a thought now. Besides getting high, there were just two things he could think about for two minutes in a row these days. One was the movie The Wild Bunch, which had several bloody scenes he watched over and over again on the VCR. The other was his probation officer.
He was beginning to think all his troubles began with his first meeting with Baum. Everything was wrong since then. He’d got caught breaking into Pops Osborn’s car, he’d had to show up in court, he’d had the shoot-out with those cops, and worst of all, he had to stay shut up in the house like it was prison.
He reached down to touch his stomach and noticed there was a lot less of it than there used to be. He’d lost a tremendous amount of weight in these past few weeks, and all his clothes seemed too big now.
“How long you think it takes to knock off half a kilo?” he asked his girlfriend after a few seconds.
“Darryl, who you talking to?” his mother demanded in her lazy junkie voice from across the living room.
“Alisha, Moms.”
“She ready to work for me?” his sister, Joanna, asked, without looking up from the dining room table.
“Maybe she work for me,” Darryl King said.
“Maybe I work for myself,” Alisha murmured on her end.
“Darryl, you can’t be selling no drugs with the whole world out looking for you …” his mother said in a voice that trailed off into nothingness.
His sister stood up from her chair and came lumbering toward him. Her handcuff-sized gold earrings banged against the sides of her neck.
“Ever since you shot at those cops,” she was saying, “we can’t allow the workers to come out until ten at night. We don’t get any money in the daytime.” She was standing beside him now, nattering at him while he cradled the phone to his ear with his left shoulder. “And after all the bullshit we been through ’cos of you, you turn around and say you wanna go start your own business … Well, I think that is about the most selfish thing I have ever heard.”
“Terrible,” his mother chimed in from across the room. “And with Aaron looking for the probation officer for you.”
“Fuck you,” Darryl said.
“Darryl, don’t you talk to your mother like that,” Alisha said over the phone.
He felt overwhelmed by women and their disapproval.
A cop would not take this. A real cop. Like the kind he had in his head. Not like those suckers he shot at. Or the one he popped just before Christmas. A real cop would cuff these bitches and throw them in the squad car and beat both their butts with a television antenna. A crackhead would just stand there, feeling paranoid and trying to figure out if he wanted to jump out of his own skin or peel them out of theirs.
“You wouldn’t talk like that there was a man in this house,” his mother told him.
“I am the man in the house,” Darryl King said.
He went back to chewing his thumb.
56
I’M SITTING IN THE office between appointments on Tuesday, my second and final report day, when the phone rings.
“What’re you doing?” the now-familiar voice asks me.
“Trying to make an honest living,” I say. “Something you ought to think about.”
“Why bother?” he says with a fatherly chuckle. “All that pressure. There’re easier ways, you know.”
“I know.” I throw away the file of a client who got killed recently. “So are you doing that community service program like I told you too?”
“Central Harlem Boys’ Club, I’ll be there with bells on,” Richard Silver says. “And have you thought about the conversation we had before?”
“Yeah, a little.” I glance out the doorway to see if anybody might be listening in on this. “I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if I’m ready.”
“Remember what I told you about opportunity,” he says in a quiet, assured voice. “Do you want to be a probation officer the rest of your life? That’s what you have to ask yourself.”
I must admit, he does have the gift for knowing his customer’s soft spot.
“I gotta jump, Richard. Be good.”
“Yeah, you too,” he says.
57
AARON WILLIAMS SAT IN the waiting room of the Manhattan probation office, touching the thin new mustache on his harelip as though he wanted to make sure it was still there. He wore a red Troop shirt, green shorts, white athletic socks pulled up to his knees, and a pair of blue-and-white Avia sneakers. He was looking for just the one probation officer, but now he couldn’t remember the name.
Darryl said something about the guy having curly hair and a big nose. That didn’t help much. All these white people looked the same to him.
Everyone expected a lot from Aaron now. He proved he had heart with the way he took care of Eddie Johnson with the razor blade at the swimming pool. And Eddie was a friend of his. But he was a snitch and Aaron needed the juice with Darryl and the rest of the crew.
But now he was getting angry and tired trying to recall anything Darryl and the others had told him about the probation officer. The only thing he could think of was that the guy had definitely disrespected Darryl by calling him “Dooky.”
By early afternoon, he was wishing he’d stayed home in bed, looking at his Michael Jackson poster and enjoying the clean, strong ether smell from his pipe. He shifted in his seat so the gun in his waistband wouldn’t keep sticking him in the back. He still couldn’t believe the metal detector at the front hadn’t picked it up, but everything around here seemed pretty broken-down anyway.
The other people in the waiting room noticed him twitching and cursing to himself. He went
out of the building to smoke a vial and beam up. When he returned, the metal detector remained silent. The white court officer at the reception desk didn’t even look up from his television to see him going by.
As he sat back down, the older men ignored him and went on talking quietly among themselves. The younger guys made fun of his harelip and women looked away as soon as they noticed it. He looked down and started tying and untying his sneaker laces.
Probation officers came and went past the front desk. More of them were black than Aaron expected. The whites all seemed pale and doughy to him. His mother said he needed glasses, but then why hadn’t she gotten him any? She was always hassling him, but never doing anything about things she didn’t like.
After another hour or so, Aaron began to notice that many of the probation officers and their clients were stopping to look at something on the table near the receptionist. When he got the chance, Aaron drifted over to take a look for himself.
From being in Family Court, Aaron recognized it as the sign-in table. More than a dozen white sheets were taped to the table, with a box of eraserless little yellow pencils on the side. Aaron knew that each sheet had the name of a probation officer on the top, and that clients were supposed to sign in underneath. If he could have recognized the name of Darryl’s probation officer on one of the sheets, Aaron thought, he would have had a good start.
He could have stood there and seen which probation officer checked the sheet with his name on the top. Then Aaron would have been sure he had the right guy. He could have tracked the probation officer home from work and shot him in the head from across the street. It’d be easy.
But the plan would not work. Because Aaron Williams’s mother had not sent him to school regularly since the second grade and he could not read the names on the sheets or anything else. He looked around to see if there was anyone who might help him. But all he saw were unfriendly faces. Panic and shame went through him like electrical shocks. Everyone was looking at him. He was sure of it. They all knew he couldn’t read. His heart started pounding and his face began sweating.
A very fat white man, wearing a fedora and a white polo shirt, came barging by. “Can I help you?” he asked.
Aaron could not speak. The fat man was looking right through him. He knew Aaron couldn’t read. Aaron’s mouth trembled and twisted. “What’s the matter with you?” the fat man demanded.
Aaron backed away quickly, with his eyes cast down and his head shaking. He nearly fell over his own feet as he turned and ran for the elevators.
After Aaron got home, Darryl King and the others spent hours questioning him about what went wrong. It was Winston Murvin, Joanna’s boyfriend, who finally got him to admit his reading panic. The others threw things and screamed at Aaron, but Winston took Aaron’s face in his hands and smiled.
He said that Aaron was now the first man in the history of the drug business who failed to get ahead because he lacked a formal education.
58
OVER THE NEXT FEW days, I find myself struggling more and more to hang on to some standard of patience and decency.
On the subway platform, I curse silently and clench my fists in anger. On the street, I’m getting rude and shoving people out of the way. And it’s getting harder and harder to put on a civil face when I see Andrea after a day spent kicking ass in the field. Maybe I should consider this thing, Richard Silver’s offering. At least that way I could afford one of those fucking ski vacations she’s always talking about.
The last person who I should try and discuss this with is my father. He’s busy stockpiling Gatorade in his basement for some imaginary race war. But you never know what’s really driving you until you get there, so I call him and set up a time for us to go for a walk in Flushing Meadows Park.
He meets me early on a Saturday afternoon. Dozens of other men, all of whom look like divorced fathers, are playing with children they barely seem to know around the lake nearby.
“How come you never took me out like that when I was small?” I ask my dad.
“Ask a psychiatrist,” he says sourly.
A sea gull flying over his head shrieks loudly. My father and I are wearing the exact same kind of blue windbreaker from Sears with the plaid lining, but for the first time I notice that I’ve developed two of his strangest old habits—not only do I carry a hundred things around in my pockets at all times, but I also never take my jacket off. He always said he kept his pockets stuffed and his jacket on because he thought he might get taken some place unexpectedly. Like Auschwitz or something. I don’t know why I’ve fallen into doing the same thing.
“So what’s it all about?” he says with his thick accent, walking a little bit ahead of me. “Why the big talk now?”
“I’m thinking about changing jobs maybe, and I wanted to talk it over with you.”
“Feh!” He waves his arm and starts shuffling along again. “You want my advice now. I told you before not to take that farchadat job, but your mother raised you to be soft.”
I hate it when he talks that way about Mom, but I don’t feel like arguing about it now. A plane passes overhead and the traffic hums on the Van Wyck Expressway. The old man starts walking with the stiff-kneed gait of a man who’s recently had surgery. Which he hasn’t. We pass a lawn full of young people sunning themselves. More than half the women are wearing just bra-like halter tops and tight shorts, leaving their stomachs and thighs exposed. My father gazes across the landscape of flesh and raises a rigid arm and a clenched fist.
“Oh boy,” he says. “If I were your age, ahhh!”
He nods as he navigates between the bike riders on the stone path called Robert Moses Walk, which leads to the World’s Fair grounds. I wonder what I’m doing trading barbs with a crazy old man on a nice afternoon like this. The same question seems to occur to him at the same time.
“Enough standing on ceremony,” he says. “What do you want from me?”
“Not much,” I say a little sheepishly. “I just have some things going on in my life, and I wanted to see what you thought of them.”
He plops himself down on a green bench along the side of the path and looks at me with mild curiosity. I notice his stomach is about the size of a small baby sitting on his lap.
I sit down beside him. “I’m seeing a girl now,” I tell him. “She’s very nice. You wouldn’t like her, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But she likes nice things. She wants a good life. Things that cost money.”
He sticks out his bottom lip. “So don’t look at me,” he says. “I’m retired. I don’t have anything.”
“Yeah, I know.” Though I guess in some strange abstract way, I’ve been hoping he would suddenly turn out to be a millionaire, which would solve all my problems. “Anyway, she’s come along at a peculiar time for me. Work’s been very hard lately …”
He gives me a “what did you expect?” look.
“And then this other thing came up, which you can’t tell anybody about.”
He looks around in disbelief, with his sagging eyelids opened wide. “Who am I going to tell?” he says. “The mice in the kitchen?”
“It’s just something that I’m trying to keep quiet.”
He leans toward me a little. “What?”
“One of my clients is offering me a job.”
My father is stunned. “Some schvartze’s going to give you a job?”
“Well, who it is isn’t so important,” I say sharply. “He wants to keep his name quiet anyway. Anyway, the point is he wants me to … neglect my responsibilities. To look the other way.”
“So?”
“So. I have a problem with that.”
“Does this job pay well he’s offering you?” he asks.
“Pretty well. Probably twice what I’m making now. But that’s not the point even. I’d have some real power to do the things I want to, especially since he can’t get involved directly. I could get to be like an assistant commissioner over at housing, or somet
hing.”
He looks at me like he’s suddenly discovered a dismembered animal sitting on the bench next to him. “Forget the housing, take the money,” he says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“I can’t do that so easily.”
“Why not?”
“It’d mean everything I tried to do before was wrong. I can’t just give up like that.”
His head goes up and down. Someone who didn’t know him might think that he’s nodding in agreement. But I know that my father actually just wants me to stop talking so he can interject his own vehement opinions.
“You wanna know what I think?” he says. “You wanna?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“Ideals are nice. I had a few when I was younger than you are now. But…” He clears his throat with a noisy hacking sound. “A man,” he says finally, “does what he does …”
I can’t bear to hear this again. The story about him almost killing the Polish carpenter in Auschwitz over a scrap of bread. The survivalist reduction of all right and wrong to his own material comfort. “I woke him up in the middle of the night and told him I would cut his throat from ear to ear with an aluminum knife while he slept,” my father is saying. “They had him killed a little later anyway. He was too weak to work by then.”
Whenever I hear this, it’s like running straight into a brick wall. The same one I’ve spent my whole life trying to get past. I can’t accept that I’ve ended up in the exact same place as him in spite of everything. “And you’d do just like me …”
“Hey, Pops,” I say. “Skip it, will you? I know how it ends.”
“You never understand,” he mutters. “I’m the only one.”
I stop talking and just stare at him for a minute. “I’m the only one,” he said. It’s like catching a glimpse of something shimmering out in the middle of the lake. Maybe the reason he’s been this way for so long is because he feels guilty for surviving when so many of the other people he knew died in the camps. But the moment is over between us before it really gets started. He’s already walking away and cursing me under his breath.
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