He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  They were taken through a doorway and inside was a row of six cells. Cosgrove, in the first cell, could hear the others locked in. A cop with a huge belly, whistling, keys jingling, walked past. Cosgrove asked him what would happen now. The cop said the fingerprints had to be transmitted to the state capital at Albany, where they were checked to see if anybody had any prior criminal record. “It takes a little while,” the cop said. He walked out.

  Buster called out, “The Chief blows up when he finds what happens to me. Serves me right, even havin’ a nigger in the car.”

  Great Big sensed what Buster was saying and called out to Cosgrove in Yoruba that he hated Buster and wanted to kill him. Buster, hearing the strange language, said, “What did that animal say about me?”

  “He wanted the time of day,” Cosgrove said.

  “Eleven-thirty at night already,” Buster said.

  Cosgrove sat down on the hard bench. He rolled his raincoat into a pillow and put his head back. He stared at a yellow tile wall that was covered with scrawling he could not read and with drawings of huge penises. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and, saying his evening prayers, fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the cell door opening and the light-haired prisoner walking in. The prisoner held out a hand to keep Cosgrove where he was. “We could be here for days,” he said. “They’re all backed up.”

  “And how did you have the misfortune to land here?” Cosgrove asked.

  The light-haired guy made a gun out of his hand.

  “I’m sorry you had to do such a thing,” Cosgrove said.

  “The trouble is, somebody got hurt,” the guy said.

  “Oh, dear God, what a shame. Hurt bad is he?”

  “A she. She worked in the cashier’s office. Food March supermarket. Dizzy bitch tried to slam the door in my face. I don’t know what happened. She gets shot. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I shouldn’t even be talking to myself, but I have to trust you, you’re a priest, right?”

  “Oh, of course I’m a priest and I say nothing. But, dear God, this unfortunate woman you shot, is she all right?”

  “They told me she only got hit in the arm. She’s all right.”

  “Thank God. I’ll pray for you, lad. And the young woman you were with outside?”

  “That’s my girlfriend.”

  “She was a participant? Oh, the poor misgui — ”

  “No, she had nothin’ to do with it. They’re lousy bastards for arresting her, excuse me but they are. I was asleep with her in her apartment and bing-bang-boom, they come in through the door, off the fire escapes. All over.”

  Cosgrove’s eyes widened. “Are you telling me that you were sleeping with a woman to whom you were not legally married?”

  “My girlfriend.”

  Cosgrove shook a finger. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  He rolled over so he would not have to look at the light-haired prisoner again.

  In the morning there was a shout, and a Hispanic cop opened the cell doors and told them to come with him. “Your prints were no good,” he muttered. When the cop looked at Great Big, his arrogant lips became more pronounced. Great Big, in turn, had an anger rising out of an empty stomach.

  “Do we get food?” Cosgrove asked.

  “You get something at dinnertime,” the Hispanic cop said. He supervised their fingerprinting and brought them back to the cells. No food materialized.

  Later, another cop looked in. “Do you have our food?” Cosgrove said.

  The cop laughed. “What are you, freeloaders? You got your sandwiches.”

  “No we didn’t.”

  “Oh. Then they’ll get you something soon.”

  The next time the door opened, midafternoon light spilled in and several new cops walked in and handcuffed everybody to a long chain. When no cuffs would fit over Great Big they put leg shackles on his wrists and attached him to the chain. Great Big was next to Buster on the chain. He bared his teeth and growled. Now a cop holding a small Puerto Rican by the shoulder walked up. The Puerto Rican wore a rainhat pulled over his eyes. He had a pencil mustache. “Come on, you fuckin’ spic bastard,” the cop said. The Puerto Rican, seeing Great Big, resisted. “Man, don’t put me near no black nigger bastard.”

  Cosgrove asked about the fingerprints. One cop said, “We used to get the prints back right away when the central office was in police headquarters. In Albany they got only civilians. They go to lunch and dinner while you guys sit here. Sometimes the farmers up there take days.”

  They were taken down the staircase to the garage and into another van and this time for a long ride and finally, after much lurching, the van doors were opened and they were in another garage, one much older, and this time they were taken down a flight of stairs and into a grimy dungeon with a bare light in a ceiling painted sickly green. They were pulled off the chain and shoved into small filthy cells by a black cop with a bald head.

  “I be hungry,” Baby Rock said.

  “Don’t play with me,” the black cop said. “I’m a cop, not a brother.”

  “I be hungry, not be playin’.”

  “You’ll be fed.”

  The door slammed and Cosgrove began to pray in the dim light. And for the first time, the dull hunger in his belly kept him awake.

  Now there was a kicking and rattling of the cell door by Great Big. He kicked and rattled for the next eight hours, for by now he had Africa in his belly. Cosgrove, knowing this, prayed for help.

  Sometime in the middle of the next morning, a cop looked in and shouted, “We’re moving you all out.”

  Cosgrove, expecting to embrace freedom, got up and was met with the sound of more chains rattling. The police brought in chains of the size used on trucks during snowstorms. As they were led out of the cell block, Cosgrove said that they were truly hungry, but nobody listened to him. They were again in a van and this time found they had been taken back to the original police station. Great Big said in Yoruba that he was starving. This disturbed Cosgrove. Buster, whose eyes were glazed, stumbled into Great Big, and when Great Big elbowed him away, Buster, with a fury that caused him to lose all caution, kicked Great Big. A furious whine came out of Great Big and Cosgrove had to place his head on Great Big’s chest to calm him.

  The four suddenly were nearly dragged off their feet by a squad of cops yanking the chain as if mooring a ship and taken through a door and into another dark cell block. Cos-grove was put in with Baby Rock. He heard Great Big and Buster the Cabdriver being put into the same cell.

  “What of food?” Cosgrove said.

  “We’ll get you sandwiches in a few minutes,” the cop said.

  Cosgrove, for the first time since the African dust, had hunger cramps, severe ones, and as he doubled over in the cell he suddenly thought of Great Big. Alarm raced through his mind. Some hours later, a young cop with large brown eyes and black curly hair looked in.

  “Our sandwiches,” Cosgrove said.

  “You got them already,” the young cop said.

  “We did not. The last lad who was in here promised us sandwiches.”

  The young cop ran his hand over his head. “He told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He went home. You got a new tour now.”

  The young cop slammed the door and Cosgrove sat through the hours, trying to pray, with Baby Rock now squalling and, in the last cell, Great Big starting a tremendous attack on the barred door. He got something loose, for the door began to make even more of a racket. Finally Great Big stopped and Cosgrove went into a coma. He partially heard a snarl and an inhuman scream, but as he only heard it partially, he passed it off as more normal suffering.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  The cell door was open. The cop took Cosgrove and Baby Rock out to the deck, where a fat red-haired cop sat in his lieutenant’s white shirt. He held up white slips of paper.

  “You know what these are? These are desk appearance tickets. You got to appear in court on March twent
y-third.”

  “What do we do until then?”

  “You go home.”

  “But we have been held all this time?”

  The red-haired cop looked at papers. “Well, you know there was all that trouble getting fingerprints. Then the charges had to be changed. They were excited the first night. We had to rewrite them to menacing and harassment. That’s only a misdemeanor. So you got lost in the system a little. Sorry.”

  “What about the other man with me?” Cosgrove said, turning to the open cell block door.

  “Oh yeah, him, too,” the red-haired cop said. He nodded and the other cop stepped into the cell block and, without bothering to look inside, opened the door and Great Big stepped out. The cop slammed the cell door and locked it without deigning to look inside. “We got to hold the last guy. This Buster. He got a long sheet and the district attorney wants to see him,” the red-haired cop said. “Now go over there to the desk and the property clerk will give you back your belongings. By the way, it’s a little late, but I’ll wish you a Merry Christmas.”

  Cosgrove signed and was given his wallet and passports and the three — he, Baby Rock, and Great Big — stepped out of the station house into a cold evening. Cosgrove, on a whim, went back into the station house and yelled at the desk officer, “I’ll have you know that we had not a morsel of food during our captivity!”

  The desk officer failed to pick up his head. Cosgrove, Baby Rock, and Great Big began walking until they came to a coffee shop and they went in and sat at the counter and Cosgrove ordered huge stacks of pancakes. Baby Rock ate until he got sick. Cosgrove wolfed them down. After about twenty minutes he happened to notice that Great Big was toying with the food and eating none of it.

  Great Big began to push the pancakes around the plate in disgust. He opened his mouth and gave a loud burp. Cosgrove switched his fork to his left hand without missing a chew, dug into his jacket pocket, brought out a pack of Tums, and rolled it across the counter to Great Big, who dropped all of them into his mouth.

  After Cosgrove paid the check, Baby Rock said that once they found a subway he could get them back to East New York. He asked two white men, who were unsure. A black delivery boy knew the line they wanted immediately and Baby Rock led them along Fifty-seventh Street and across a splendid avenue where a gold tower rose so high into the sky that Cosgrove grew dizzy looking up at the top.

  A couple of blocks later, they saw a man standing in an alcove alongside the entranceway to a building still under construction. He had tangled hair hanging into a face covered with dust. Blank gray eyes were sunk into his gaunt face. He was wrapped in a greasy, once-pink blanket, which he clutched in front. In back, the blanket hung only to his waistline and underneath that the baggy pants were ripped and his bare bottom, stung red by the cold, was out for all to see. Including a woman who stepped out of a Bentley that was almost too rich for the eyes. Cosgrove’s blood quickened. He ran up and yanked the blanket down, causing it to drop from his front and the man to bawl, “You want me to freeze to death?”

  Cosgrove turned from the gray-faced man in disgust. He addressed the elegant woman alighting from the car. “How can they permit such nudity in a civilized country?” The woman, Octavia Ripley Havermeyer, was taken aback by the sight of the huge man with this rumpled priest, and also the young black boy. This was obviously a homeless mugging team; she walked on rapidly. Stepping into the sweeping lobby, however, she did have the vision of a night in summer with all these homeless people walking completely naked about the streets. They could depreciate real estate values simply by displaying their private parts. This certainly was something to think about.

  All Bushwick knew was that the building was next to the Russian Tea Room on West Fifty-seventh Street. He wore a jacket he had borrowed from Roberts, who worked in accounting, and a tie purchased from a street peddler. Earlier, called by the New Opportunity office and asked to appear at the fund-raising party, he had suggested that they take Roberts, who at least could wear his own jacket, but the New Opportunity P.R. woman said they needed exactly what Bushwick could bring them, somebody a little seedy from working with the Poor, thus authenticating the reason for the party, which was to raise blocks of money for the soup kitchens.

  The party was being held after the opera in the penthouse apartment of an unfinished building whose address was given to Bushwick as “next to the Rush” and when Bushwick didn’t know what that meant, the P.R. woman had laughed and told him, why, of course, the Russian Tea Room. The building was a shaft of smoked glass set on the ground so that it appeared to be marching to the left obliquely.

  As there was not enough room to plant the entire front of a building on Fifty-seventh Street, the builder one day stood at the drawing board, tilted the blueprint, and told everybody to start putting the place up. He immediately applied for tax relief from the city, which he got, and on top of the tax break he asked for permission to make the building four stories higher than the permit specified, and four stories higher at the same tax rate, or absence thereof, and of course he got exactly what he wanted because New York taxes and land were being given away in the 1980s with more speed and efficiency than any bowl of soup. When Bushwick got to the building, scaffolding hid the entrance, where two smiling young women sat at a desk and checked his name on a list and handed him a hard hat.

  “I don’t work here,” Bushwick said.

  “Oh, you must wear one,” one of the young women said.

  When she looked at the hard hat, she saw an oh-so-gay costume for the evening, a dress-up in the uniform of a workingman. When Bushwick looked at the hard hat, he saw the bus to work at six in the morning.

  The elevator operator was a young man in a tuxedo and white hard hat. “Here’s another workingman,” he said.

  “Only I work,” Bushwick said.

  The elevator opened to the penthouse, where people sat at tables with a triangular setting of candles four feet high that allowed them to have the simultaneous thrills of seeing diamonds flashing in and out of near darkness and then, whenever they felt like it, they could tilt their white hard hats for all to see that they were working-class jaunty.

  Bushwick stood in the foyer uncertainly, until a smiling young woman with a clipboard walked up to him and he asked for the managing directress of New Opportunity, Octavia Ripley Havermeyer, and the young woman said, “Why, of course, she is right inside,” directing him to the master bedroom, where Octavia, about sixty-three, with short gray hair and head held high in order to draw her neck as long and tight as a goose’s, stood and admired the place and then stepped into the bathroom, which was a tile arena.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you could come,” she said to Bushwick.

  “Thanks for having me,” he said.

  “Not at all. When we have these fund-raisers, we need field workers so people can see exactly what we do. This one was so poorly planned. We have all the givers but promotion completely forgot about getting you people.” She shook her head and sat down on a French Provincial chair, which was placed in a seating area outside the shower. “My feet hurt. I went to the podiatrist today and he made me these little pads that I put under my toes. That eased the pain somewhat. But I’m afraid I’m going to be wearing these horrible old ladies’ shoes. Custom-made, luxurious boats.” She sighed.

  “I just wanted to ask you one question,” Bushwick said.

  “Of course.”

  “Is this a real bathroom?”

  Hearing this, Octavia gave a tight little smile. What else could the room be but a bathroom? A long room with a high ceiling that had spotlights in it. The walls and floor were marble and there were two gleaming sinks, floor-length mirrors, two separate compartments for toilets, a large area for a shower, and another for a sunken tub. She looked at Bushwick and thought, Of course he doesn’t understand all this. How could he? He has never seen anything, much less been trained in how to regard it.

  She thought of the time, at dusk of a spring night, when she had sat o
n the great lawn at Pocantico Hills and Nelson Rockefeller squeezed her arm and said, “Now, fella, it’s the old story. For every action, there is a reaction. And on balance, you have to go with the people who have ownership. Perhaps when they react, they overstep, but you always have a next time with them. Maybe you can bring them back in line a little. But once the ones who own nothing overstep, what is there to bring them back? They’re right inside someplace they never were in before, and they sure don’t want to leave. It’s that simple. Right there goes your whole game. On balance, fella, stay with ownership.”

  As she certainly owned enough herself, Octavia Ripley Havermeyer decided that her mission here in later life was to work for the Poor as long as they stayed in the alley. That wasn’t a bad deal for anybody, she felt. Her name was familiar in both social and financial circles and at the same time she threatened nobody and had much time — she was a widow of twenty-one years — so those important in the city were content to allow her to assemble the huge organization, agency by agency, and pose as directress. This allowed her an office and the services of a staff and the only time she had to drop pretenses and understand her true position came when David Rockefeller arrived at the New Opportunity offices. Rockefeller security people had the hallways cleared, and any secretary out walking papers to another office was shoved into an alcove, for Rockefeller preferred serenity and silence as he walked to his private suite of offices. Octavia Ripley Havermeyer was alert enough on those days to remain in her office and thus spare herself the humiliation of being asked to clear the hall for David Rockefeller.

  Now, on a French Provincial chair in the shower area, regarding her aching feet, she said to Bushwick, “Why don’t you just go out and … mingle?”

  “Because to tell you the truth, ma’am, I’m a little leery. I don’t know one person. What’s here, a lot of politicians and things like that?”

  “No politicians. These are all new builders and they don’t know quite so much about anything. They run themselves and that’s it.”

  “What am I supposed to talk to them about?”