He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  The call that stuck this time came in the middle of the afternoon, from a woman who said, “You the ones got food?”

  “If you have a legitimate emergency,” Bushwick said.

  “How do I prove that to you over the phone?”

  “Put the phone against your stomach and let me hear the growl,” Bushwick said.

  She didn’t understand this and merely continued her story. “I had welfare until two weeks ago.”

  “Then what?”

  “Failed my face-to-face.”

  The face-to-face is the most important test many adults in the city must take. Every couple of months a recipient must appear at the offices of the local income maintenance center and bring all records, including birth certificate, to prove that in the last six months an uncle in Aiken, South Carolina, didn’t keel over and leave her the odd $500,000. After which she must pass a short written test failed by many because they don’t know how to study and have totally ignored the pamphlet “Read to Eat.” Others never even show up, for while welfare women know the day their check comes and wait in the street in front of their buildings for the mailman, the face-to-face notices always arrive unexpectedly and of course the buildings have no mailboxes since long ago kids pried the whole metal rack off the lobby wall. Therefore, the woman never knows about the face-to-face notice. Under the rules, she has fourteen days to appear for the face-to-face or her name automatically comes off the welfare computer, and then nobody can do anything about that.

  The New York social services computer center is located on two floors of a building running an entire block, from Eighth to Ninth avenues, on Manhattan’s West Side, where, at 4:00 P.M. each day, each welfare computer terminal, hospital Medicaid terminal, food stamp center, child services office, day-care center, every social services computer terminal in the city, thousands of terminals, transmit to the main control center, the lights on all the panels in all the rooms on both floors of the control center blinking in the torrent of names and addresses and statuses coming in from the offices that serve millions of people.

  At one big Univac mainframe, down near the Ninth Avenue end of the building, while a fat female technician sits with a Walkman on and listens to Minister Louis Farrakhan’s rap record against the Jews, the Univac mainframe in the cool hum in front of the fat technician erases names of face-to-face failures. Off the printout, off the terminals, off the mailing addresses, off the list at the local income maintenance center, off the notices list, and finally, their names race into this one room. At one Univac mainframe, here are all these smaller machines, cabinets with light blue sides and white tops, handling Job 3433, Task Term 00966, ZRZC 94 CMDOZOP25, which cause 250,000 checks a minute to spit out. Suddenly, at the next mainframe there is a speedy ripple of red lights and at that instant, with another clerk sitting and dreaming, the face-to-face losers drop off the computer that writes the checks. They now must turn to the safety men, the New Opportunity Hot Line workers.

  Once, on a New Opportunity junior management training tour of the computer center, Bushwick blundered into a room lined with instruments and long racks holding hundreds of tape drums, and the fat technician ripped off her Walkman and pointed to Bushwick’s coat, a brown down jacket with frayed cuffs. “Read that sign!” On the wall was a huge notice that read, NO BULKY COATS ALLOWED! Bushwick unzipped the down jacket. She shook her head. “They be walkin’ out of here with one of these drums under their coats.”

  “It looks like a film library,” Bushwick said.

  “Film all right. The whole world be on them tapes. Be walkin’ out with even one drum, the city be stopped dead.”

  She looked around in agitation. “How come you got in here anyway? Guard supposed to stop you.”

  “I used that door,” Bushwick said, pointing to the one he had used.

  “You be comin’ in the back way. You here already?”

  “I’m on the junior management tour.”

  “Well, you be in a sensitive room.”

  Bushwick, holding the jacket out so she could see he had no tape drum under his armpit, left the room.

  And now Bushwick was sitting in the fifth-floor office of the New Opportunity Hot Line, and the woman caller said to him, “I made my face-to-face, but the computer says I wasn’t there. The caseworker says she knows I made my face-to-face because she was the one giving me a face, but the computer says I didn’t. Don’t make no matter what I says or the caseworker says, if the computer say I wrong, then I don’t get my check.”

  As the woman was calling from the Bronx, Bushwick told her to go to the Saint Nicholas of Tolentine Center on University Avenue, which kept Spam and canned vegetables. Good they did, too, for there were so many hungry in the rich city that many pantries ran out of food before noon. As most callers have no carfare and have to walk, Bushwick jealously guarded his secret pantries, such as the Tolentine center.

  The woman thanked him. Then paused. Bushwick flinched, for he knew what was next. “I don’t want to be getting ahead of myself, but I was wondering about Christmas food.”

  “You mean Santa Claus?” Bushwick said.

  “He be my man.”

  “Santa Claus committed suicide,” Bushwick said and hung up.

  At 3:00 P.M., Jane again held out the flask. “Christmas drink?” Bushwick shook his head. “I still can’t do it on an empty stomach.”

  He went down to the Greek lunch counter where he bought a ham and cheese sandwich, which cost him $2.50. This left him with four dollars and change until payday. “You are now running a bit tight,” Bushwick told himself. He congratulated himself on having bought the tokens earlier. He brought the sandwich up to the office. “Some call it lunch. To me, this is early dinner,” he said to himself.

  At which point the elevator doors opened and looking straight at Bushwick were a woman in a raincoat that sure wasn’t good enough for the cold outside and two little girls with wool caps pulled down and the lower half of their faces covered with mufflers. Only the eyes appeared. The eyes were locked on Bushwick’s sandwich. Immediately, Bushwick slid the sandwich across the desk, intending to duck it. He saw the two pairs of eyes follow the moving sandwich. The group moved out of the elevator and advanced on Bushwick’s desk. Right away, the woman started explaining how she had been knocked off the computer and didn’t have a quarter and still had all these people to feed. Bushwick tried to listen and at the same time protect his sandwich.

  “It taste good?” one little girl said. She held on to the desk with one hand and swayed back and forth. “We be hungry.”

  Her sister stood behind her and nodded.

  He tried to outlast them, but the two little girls stood there until they stared him out of the sandwich. He ripped it in half and handed them the halves.

  “Where do you live?” he asked the woman.

  “Brooklyn.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “The cop let us on the subway.”

  “I have a pantry on Sixth Avenue and Thirteenth Street in Brooklyn. Do you know where that is?”

  The woman shook her head. “Be far from us.”

  Bushwick looked at the clock. “I have a pantry here in Manhattan. Saint Francis Xavier on West Sixteenth Street. It’s open until four o’clock.”

  “The cop let us on the subway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I be tired. Kids be tired.”

  Bushwick sighed. Slowly, painfully, his hand came out with the pack of subway tokens. He wrote down the address of the food pantry on a slip of paper. He handed tokens and paper to the woman.

  “I won’t say Merry Christmas to you because I have more brains than that,” Bushwick said.

  The woman thanked him and walked out. Bushwick swung around, his old chair creaking, and his hand went out for the rum flask from Jane. Bushwick took a great swallow. The rum burned down his throat and into his empty stomach. He knew the second swallow would go down easier. It sure did. The third went even better than that. The onl
y slug that gave him trouble was the last, when he raised the flask and found it was empty.

  “Sarah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You take me out, Sarah?”

  She nodded and put on her down jacket and they went into a Blarney Stone on Church Street, which was packed with postal workers and Wall Street messengers and they drank with their coats on and in the smoke and heat and soon Bushwick began to rub up against Sarah. “Nobody in your house?” he said to her.

  “My mother.”

  “So come out to my house in Queens,” Bushwick said.

  “Don’t push me, Bushwick,” Sarah said.

  “You told me you might want to. I’m ready.”

  “I only told you I was thinking about it. Please don’t push me.”

  They each had another couple of big beers and Bushwick took Sarah’s hand and she said, “I’ll come to Queens with you. But I don’t know what it’s going to be like. I told you, I was only thinking. Don’t blame me if it isn’t good.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bushwick said. “It’s new for me, too. I never was with a minister before.”

  They had a couple more drinks on empty stomachs, then left. Later, at the end of the ride home, Bushwick suddenly awoke in the Q11 bus and found he was in the middle of Howard Beach. “I thought you knew where we were; I never was here before,” Sarah said.

  They got out in front of the big Tilerama store on Cross Bay Boulevard. The bus stop for the ride back up to Myrtle Avenue was across the street, in front of the New Park Pizza stand. There was no bus in sight and Sarah said she was hungry in the winter night. Bushwick took her into the pizza stand and the counterman, who had sparse gray hair and a sour face, looked down at his hands and waited to hear the order.

  Bushwick opened his mouth to speak. But at this moment a plane came in so low that the plane’s landing floodlights bathed the room in blinding white light. The counterman put his head under the ledge. Pizza tins rattled uncontrollably. The pizza baker in the back dropped to the floor. Bushwick looked outside, where a man in a blue zipper jacket and a New York Jets cap looked excitedly into the sky and a woman in a red coat wrote determinedly on a clipboard. Both wore earmuffs. When the most shattering of the noise was gone, the man and woman rushed into the pizza stand. They went behind the counter to the pay phone alongside the oven. The man dialed a number and said, “Spring Rock Civic Association here. We want to complain right now —”

  “Alitalia 747,” the woman said.

  “Alitalia 747. Coming onto your runway right now. Right over my roof in Howard Beach and onto your runway. What? I can’t hear you. I got a earache. The lawyer’ll complain personal at the FAA office tomorrow morning.”

  He hung up. “Rome,” he said.

  The woman nodded. “Rome plane. Every night: They want us to die.”

  “So the lawyer goes in tomorrow, that’s all,” the man said.

  It is funny how complaints can coincide with each other so smoothly and obviously that even if it is supposed to be a coincidence anybody with sense knows that there is no way for it to be such. For on this very day, as the New Park Pizza counterman and baker, Bushwick and Sarah the Minister, the two watchers from the Spring Rock Civic Association, and the airport FAA noise control man who took the call know so well, they were present at only part of what actually occurred. For over in Manhattan at this moment on this night, in the computer center, on terminal and printout machine, terminal and printout after terminal and printout in all the cool rooms and floors, there was a rush of blinking lights and the paper in the printing machines squealed and on each printout was the phrase, and you can check all the printouts from that time on December 20, 1986, check them all out and see that they are on file, each computer said, “Unexpected Footprint.”

  Now right here you should know that such expressions are part of the terminology of computers and yet for these words to appear suddenly at this precise hour can be explained by no technician, but instead only by those with the wisdom to believe in the power of mystery, and to understand that the phrase “mysterious warning” should never be taken for granted, for it is as real as the center of the sky from which it comes.

  3

  THE MONSIGNOR IN THE Vatican who had plucked Cosgrove out of Africa was an ambitious man who had performed the initial part of his task with speed in order to impress superiors. He had things moving in weeks when usually they took months. When Cosgrove indicated that he had to think about placing a lay person, some large African who had assisted him, the monsignor wrote that Cosgrove simply should bring the African along. Anything but delay.

  When Cosgrove got to Rome, the monsignor in the Vatican immediately had him attend orientation courses at the Vatican Secretary of State’s office. There, a lecturer stated that Rome was going to put its hand directly into the religious and political life of all American Catholics and, eventually, into the secular life as well.

  The new American technology, which was being displayed as a way to think past what the arrogant Americans described as nature’s mistakes, actually was only another way of thwarting God’s will. “If these people are left alone, someday a woman can enter a booth, the same sort of booth we use for passport photos, and she can press one button that will make her pregnant, another button to find out if the baby is perfect, and if it is not absolutely perfect then of course there would be another button to push and a ray would come out of the machine and destroy the fetus in the womb. And most certainly if the woman wanted a boy and the machine told her it was a girl, why, press the button, and the girl is gone. Tomorrow we will try a boy.”

  Cosgrove, who had studied the latest decrees, said to the lecturer that he had one observation. “If for some reason, blocked Fallopian tubes being the most common, I suppose, a woman who desperately wants a child, as does her husband, and cannot have one, then because of the compelling force of this love, I’m trying to understand why it is so morally corrupt to remove the egg from the woman, fertilize it with her husband’s sperm, and then replace it in the uterus. For this is love with which we are dealing, not human selfishness or disorder. It would seem to me that there are mitigating circumstances.”

  The lecturer, a squat man, exploded. “To give sperm, the husband must masturbate!”

  “Oh,” Cosgrove said. It was his last defiance of his church.

  On his last day in Rome, Cosgrove asked the monsignor about conditions in America besides the fantastic immorality of sexual technology. The monsignor was suddenly impatient. “What exactly would you like to know?”

  “Perhaps it is because of my recent past, but I am thinking of hunger.”

  “In America! Why, many priests who come to this very office where we are sitting after having been in America tell me that they were forced to overeat in that country in order to prevent food from spoiling. Even with that country’s great technology, and you certainly have heard of it this week, they still do not have enough refrigeration to keep all the food they raise. Why, of course you know that the Papal ban on eating meat on Friday really ended after people from America beseeched His Holiness to allow them to eat such meat, not out of selfishness but out of concern for the ranchers who had so many cattle on their hands that there was no room for grazing grass to grow. The Pontiff was afraid of food riots in reverse. Can you imagine people fighting because there is not enough being eaten? That is America.”

  “Then I’m thrilled to the bones to go there,” Cosgrove said. “The wonderful man I’ll be going with has simply starved for too many years in Africa. The man went with virtually nothing to chew. He now has a nervous system unable to handle the slightest feeling of being hungry.”

  “The man suffered quite a bit in Africa?” the monsignor said.

  “Oh, dear Lord, yes. Shocking,” Cosgrove said.

  “He must then beware of people forcing him to overeat in America,” the monsignor said.

  Once the monsignor had set up Cosgrove’s urgent trip so speedily that he was certain the Pope
would hear of it, he was through, for he had never been west of Rome and had no idea of what was happening in America or what this Irish priest was actually going to do there. “It is the idea that counts,” the monsignor assured himself. “A man representing the Pope’s determination can have an effect just by sitting there.” The monsignor wrote to a very close friend from seminary days who was stationed at the Papal delegate’s office in Washington. The letter was long and admitted confusion and begged for help. The letter also contained a grievous omission: the monsignor in Rome neglected to insert a check.

  He got what he paid for. Not only did the Papal delegate have difficulty understanding the complicated letter, and of course I must reiterate here that he was wounded by its absence of respect, a check, but the delegate also was deeply suspicious of motive. If this supposed friend, the monsignor, was sending a man over here on such a mission, then it was plain to the Papal delegate that the priest would roam the land and extort money from other priests at will. For what other reason was he coming except to collect money for the monsignor by using the very name and seal of the Vatican as a weapon?

  The idea of this offended the Papal delegate who, because he was affiliated directly with the Vatican, received gifts from the very same priests this other man, this horrible little Irishman, was going to extort. And he was to be in Howard Beach! Of course, that would be only as a start. The Papal delegate thought of collections at a big, spanking white, cash-money parish such as Howard Beach parish. A special messenger from the Vatican, indeed! If any treasuries were to be raided, the Papal delegate had one question: Where’s mine? So the Papal delegate made arrangements to house Cosgrove at Saint Lucy’s on Cozine Street in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, which in actual measurement is only yards from Howard Beach and illustrates again that a miss truly is as good as a mile.