He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  The young people did sit in the basement and go crazy getting hard-ons, no question about that.

  And then, as the Vatican report noted, sex destroyed life. When Cindy the Cop finished her act and flounced up the stairs, the young people, half drunk, sex berserk, went out into their cars and a couple of them got onto Cross Bay Boulevard where three blacks, whose car had broken down, walked in the night. One of the cars full of whites nearly ran over the blacks, who said fuck you to the car, and the white young men in it said, “We’ll be back, niggers,” and the blacks waved in disdain and walked on to the New Park Pizza stand, which is a low hut with a glass front and a cement floor and wooden picnic tables.

  The whites did return. In force, drunk with whiskey, crazy from Cindy the Cop. When the blacks came out, the gang of whites chased them with baseball bats and a tree limb or so and the blacks ran. Whites chased blacks through Howard Beach. One black ducked through a hole in the chain link fence running along the parkway. The whites chased after him and in blind fear he ran onto the parkway and was hit by another white guy who was driving home from Brooklyn. The white kept going. He explained later that he thought he had hit a dog. On the streets, the other white kids kept chasing and beating the other blacks.

  All over Howard Beach on this night there were Christmas decorations on the lawns and the brick ranch houses were festooned with lights. Brilliant spotlights showed Santa Claus and the reindeer flying over roofs.

  And out on the parkway, police flashlights played on the dead body — a black killed at Christmastime in Howard Beach.

  2

  WHEN THE BUS CAME to the curb, the woman, a mean-looking woman, with a scarf the color of stale mustard pulled tight around her pinched face, pushed in front of Bushwick Taylor. In her hand she had a dollar bill, which was useless and she knew it. Fare must be dropped into the box in change or a token to discourage holdups; drivers have a sign pasted right on the fare box stating that they carry no money to make change. Of course the woman knew all this, but she pushed on anyway with the dollar held out to the driver, who wouldn’t even look at her. Immediately, she turned and thrust the bill at Bushwick. “Mister, you got any change?”

  Bushwick had four quarters in his hand and, as he was so used to giving away things — he does that for a living — he unconsciously held out his hand and the woman snatched the change, handed him the dollar, and went off for a seat. Bushwick stepped onto the bus with the dollar. He went through his pocket for change, but he had none. The driver told him to get off the bus.

  This was how the morning started for Bushwick Taylor, whose real name was Fred, but nobody ever called him that. He was originally from Bushwick Avenue, and as he took the nickname of Bushwick early in his life, he retained it when he moved to another neighborhood in Queens. This morning he was at his usual bus stop, the B55 bus stop, at Sixty-eighth Street and Myrtle Avenue.

  He went across the street to a delicatessen and asked for change, caught the next bus, dropped his quarters into the box, and asked the driver for a transfer. He rode this first bus, the B55 bus, for fifteen minutes, with his face against the window and his mind full of yesterday’s ache. Late in the afternoon, he had taken a call at his desk from a woman who said that she had four children on the street with her and no food for the last two days. Bushwick said to her, “Prove it to me.” When the woman asked how, Bushwick said, “Put your kids on the phone and let me hear them cry.” He always started out with the proper smart remark, but then at the odd moment, such as this, he became dazed. He had to get over this weakness, for if he was to succeed in the city’s chief industry, the Poor, he had to ignore their pain of the moment and understand that most of these people forget immediately, which is why their suffering usually is overrated.

  On this morning, it took Bushwick an hour and a half to get to his job at the New Opportunity Hot Line, a place where the poor call for food when they have no other out. Offices are on the fifth floor of an old creaking building on Church Street in downtown Manhattan. Leaving the subway in Manhattan, he saw nobody waiting at the change booth, and he seized this moment to buy a pack of tokens, ten for ten dollars, so he would have no more trouble with fare boxes. This left him with seven dollars until payday; he became apprehensive when he realized what he’d done. He believed strongly that working with the hungry could turn him into a client. “You could catch hunger quicker than a cold,” he told himself.

  Bushwick Taylor, age thirty-five, had long black Irish hair that framed a tough face that always seemed to be looking for humor. Bushwick closed his eyes when he laughed. He was a rock composer and singer and his best work (“Why Make Me Different?”) was done with his rock group called the Fourteenth Street Line. The best date the rock group could get, however, was at the Dry Harbor Recreation, an old bowling alley used as a club on weekends. So Bushwick started working part time answering phones and doing other such jobs at the New Opportunity Hot Line. The callers are mostly women with children who learn about it from other hungry out on the streets, and there are so many tens of thousands of them in this city, women with children and without as much as a piece of bread. No food is kept in the offices, but the workers, such as Bushwick and two women, interview the hungry over the phone and direct them to a food pantry, usually in the basement of a religious institution, where there are limited stocks of canned vegetables, some canned meats and Spam and beef stew, and sacks of rice.

  There were three ways to work in the Poor business. One was to take a grubby government job and live a frozen life at a fixed salary; there were in New York City some five hundred thousand city, state, and federal employees, most of whom worked directly on the Poor. Then there was the more leisurely way, a position at one of the dozens of foundations that each year gave away as little as possible, as low as five percent of a total trust fund that earned close to ten percent a year. The five percent in grants kept the foundations free of taxes and the ten percent in earnings ensured that the size of the staffs and their salaries expanded, and the length of service they could expect was at least long.

  The last and most preferable way to work at the Poor was to be anywhere on the staff of a most prestigious and amazingly powerful organization, the New Opportunity Partnership. When New Opportunity was first formed, Sam Daniels of the New York Times wrote,

  The formation of a private non-profit corporation, the New York Opportunity Partnership Corp., which is a private civic group whose membership includes the city’s leading business executives, was greeted yesterday with praise for its “awesome” undertaking by political leaders. The new organization, to be known as New Opportunity Partnership, is seen as a cooperative venture using federal government and state and city money for private developers to build affordable housing on a cost-plus basis, cost plus profit. New Opportunity is pledged to oversee the city’s insoluble problems. One answer to the questions may be that the city itself owns large parcels of land and could make them available for development by New Opportunity at nominal fees.

  This was a private group of the rich, led by David Rockefeller, using all the federal housing funds in a city of the Poor. New Opportunity went along with a calmness befitting its moral superiority, while at the same time using exciting language, particularly the federal Urban Development Action Grants, carrying the bang-up initials UDAG. These grants were supposedly for immediate rebuilding of devastated city neighborhoods — action grants, government making a frontal attack.

  Big bang! The thing worked magnificently. The first action grant was supposedly to fix up an RKO movie house at 181st Street in the Bronx, but when the movie manager, Francis X. Walsh, said, “There will be niggers in the balcony no matter how you fix it up,” the action money stayed on the bench. Later, the best UDAG quick-action money, tens of millions, right from the taxpayers, was put into play building a new hotel for a nice rich company in Times Square. Not a whimper from the taxpayers, either, which is how it should always be done. The total control and ability to suppress nearly all pu
blic complaints made New Opportunity Partnership a magnificent success. It surpassed anything ever seen in the city and there was such perfect control that the governor sent his wife to serve tea at a function in order to get the promise of a tiny amount of funds that he then in turn could boast of as the start of a great program to help the public. Meanwhile, the federal housing money was in action right where it belonged, smack on the thigh of a good fellow rich man.

  Everything was fine until the 1980s, when the distance and difference between rich and poor in New York became so vast that it threatened the rich with being seen as barbarians. Many — such as Bushwick Taylor — started working full time, conducting studies on the “plight of the Poor.”

  Bushwick even wound up doing actual work as a result of a fire in the Flatbush Arms Hotel, a welfare hotel in the most miserable section of East New York. The fire started on the eleventh floor, where three children in an end room, none of whom were in school because they were ashamed to give their hotel address in front of other children, spent the day collecting the small empty vials dropped by crack users in the hotel hallways. At the end of the day, the children, ages eleven, nine, and seven, had three plastic garbage bags filled with the vials, which they sold to a crack pusher. They asked for a nickel apiece. The crack pusher, a private security guard hired to keep order in the hotel, paid them with a ten-dollar vial of crack.

  The three kids went into a room and started smoking the crack in a glass pipe. They had to use many matches to keep the crack smoking, and one of the matches, still lit, fell on a mattress. The flames from the mattress made no noise until they touched an old paper shade, and the three children turned around and tried to get out, but only the oldest made it; the other two were trapped in the room and the fire spread over the entire floor.

  When firemen arrived, the sidewalks were crowded with tenants who had fled the place. In one crowd in front of the hotel, a woman screamed that her children were missing. The owner of the hotel shook his head and said to the firemen, “Don’t worry about the kids. They are all gone. Dead! We tried to look. Believe me. Forget the kids.”

  It took long minutes, maybe twenty, before the flames seemed under control. The building was sealed and the firemen who had been fighting the fire from the top of a hundred-foot extension ladder came down and caught their breath. The remainder of the fight would be made from inside the building. The ladder was one story short — ten feet — for the eleventh floor. One of the firemen who came off the ladder, Georgie Larson, walked over to the wrench on a hydrant and he was starting to shut off the water when, right away, a man on the sidewalk, just a guy watching a fire, said to him, “Kid in the window.” Larson looked up and there in the top floor, the eleventh, a kid was standing on a window ledge. Suddenly the room behind him danced with flames.

  “Kid in the window,” Larson screamed as he ran. He ran up to his truck, Ladder 265, and hit the ladder and started going up.

  “Kid in the window!” A lieutenant named Albanese was behind him, screaming and running.

  Georgie Larson went up the ladder. Up, up, up, his head down, his legs pumping, cursing and spitting and screaming to God that somebody had let this kid go back up to the eleventh floor and the motherfreaking fire started up again. Larson looked up and saw the kid standing there, a black kid — what could he be, twelve, maybe? — in some kind of a jacket, and Georgie Larson hoped it was a good one, a jacket that you could hold on to. The kid also was holding a box of some kind in his hands, and Georgie Larson didn’t care about that, he was only thinking about being able to grab on to that jacket and hold it, and Georgie put his head down and pumped harder, and now he got higher and he saw that the flames from the room were all over the windowsill, and they were licking at the kid and the kid was flinching and he screamed and looked right down at the sidewalk, this kid did, and he was going to jump to get away from the fire.

  Georgie Larson screamed up at the kid, “Don’t jump. ‘I’ll get you. Don’t worry. I’ll get you.”

  Now it was personal for Georgie Larson. He had spoken to the kid. And what Georgie Larson was going to do, he was going to go up these few more steps, right to the top of the ladder, then reach and somehow, by jump or snatch or rope or miracle — who cares? — get this kid from the ten or twelve feet above the end of the ladder. I’ll get him, Georgie told himself. He’s mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

  He was almost at the top and he saw the kid’s face, saw that he was holding this thing in his hands, and then there was a sudden rush of wind and the flames inhaled, sucking back inside the eleventh-floor room and the kid was on the windowsill with fire dancing on his back. There was a liquid sound and a fiery tongue came out of the window and into the sky, and the kid on the windowsill stood in the middle of the flames. Every part of the kid was afire, flames crackling on his jacket shoulders, hair blazing like a pile of leaves, and the kid jumped with the box or whatever it was in his hands. He went out into the night air covered with flames. Georgie Larson took his shot. He held the ladder with one hand and swung most of his body right off the ladder, a leg hanging in the sky, and he grabbed for the fireball. He caught the kid by the shoulder. The jacket shredded and the kid, a fiery pinwheel, fell eleven stories.

  When Georgie Larson came down the ladder, he went out to the curb and sat down in the dark. A few minutes later, Jack Russell, an old guy from Engine 52 in Brownsville, walked over and said, “You know what the kid snuck back to get?”

  Georgie Larson looked up.

  “A cat,” Russell said.

  “Cat,” Georgie said.

  “That’s what he had in the box. He had a cat in a box. I guess that was all he had in the world.”

  The story of the kid with the cat in the box, and the fact he was the fourth dead kid of the night in a welfare hotel fire, was regarded as a threat by those at the very top of the New Opportunity Partnership. The Poor are the most important people in New York, for their social welfare billions blow through the air for all the well-off to grab; where are the rich supposed to get their money from, the rich? In order to tell each other and outsiders that they were trying to prevent so many of these particularly alarming things from happening, and interfere with the orderly flow of poor money into rich bank accounts, in order to keep suffering, tempers, and crime down to an acceptable level, or at least find a way to deflect the effect of publicity and allow the rich to function, New Opportunity Partnership attempted to put a better veneer over the Poor and began trying to assist millions to go through the act of dying each day without noticing it so much. Of course they were not going to change anything. Nobody ever did a thing like that. But they were going to appear to try, so that those of station and grace could continue to live in order in a city covered with a roof of gold. It is not the streets of New York that are paved with gold; let the imbeciles trudge the streets for a lifetime and they will get nothing. The gold in New York is in the sky, and when people of substance desire something, they reach out and snap off a piece of the sky.

  When Bushwick got to his desk, an old gunmetal gray desk in a small crowded room that had no lobby, the elevator doors opening smack onto the first desk, the woman next to him, Jane, who was a radical gone gray, brought out a flask of rum and offered it to Bushwick. “Christmas drink?” He refused, for he knew that even a little drink at this hour would put him in bed by noon.

  He nodded to the girl he liked, Sarah Carter, who was at a desk in the corner, talking angrily on the phone. Bushwick knew that she was from either Vermont or Ohio. Lanky, and perhaps an inch taller than Bushwick, she was wearing an Ohio Wesleyan sweatshirt, which is where she received high honors in her undergraduate studies in preparation for the Methodist ministry, which she intended to pursue to ordination, and while at it, to write new hymns for the Methodists and any Protestant church that needed them, thus keeping the level of music at a consistent high. She found out later, however, that the Methodists would not ordain her as a minister because her midwestern board refused to classi
fy her work as religious. Feeding the hungry in New York has become a business, the Methodists said, and as proof showed that the city in 1986 had the first professional soup kitchen workers in memory.

  Sarah Carter suspected that the Methodist board had some notion that she might be a lesbian, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. She liked men all right, as long as they didn’t get in the way. Even so, Bushwick had taken Sarah out for a beer and they talked about music and had a very good time and, after a few more beers, Sarah allowed as how she could fall in love with him, maybe.

  Now, in the office, Sarah hung up and rubbed her face with her long hands. “Every time Bethany calls!”

  “For what now?” Bushwick said.

  “Sanitary napkins.”

  “Come on.”

  “You come on.”

  Bethany was a Catholic hostel in Brooklyn for homeless mothers.

  “She asked me for fifty boxes. I said to her, ‘Sister, I’ll call around for you, but do you really need all that many? You only have ten girls, a box should take you through a month.’ Know what she said to me? She said, ‘I want them here as a sign of hope. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if they ever used them all up?’”

  “A miracle,” Bushwick said.

  “And her girls get pregnant over there every half hour,” Sarah said.

  The one next to Bushwick, Jane, with the flask of rum, had a caller with three daughters in the Bronx and no food. He said he was going to kill himself. Jane told the man to forget about killing himself, that he’d best worry about feeding the kids. “Now just get a pen and take down where you have to go,” she said. When she finished, she went to the rum flask. “The official New Opportunity manual says you can’t drink in the office.” She took a slug of rum and held out the flask; Bushwick again refused. The phone on his desk rang and he began his day.