He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  A woman in a white beret and a maroon down coat with the top button missing darted off the stoop of an empty house and into the bodega. She came out with three huge boxes of Pampers. A chubby woman with light hair tore along the sidewalk and into the bodega. She was coming out with Pampers piled high when the first two kids ran past her, one on either side, and she tripped and fell with her Pampers and suddenly there was a stream of kids, four and six years old, kids appearing from everywhere, running, running, running, into the bodega and coming out with potato chips and soda and rubber gloves and bread and cans of lima beans. Cosgrove went to help the Puerto Rican, who got to his feet and walked like a blind man away from the store.

  Cosgrove then ran into the store to prevent more damage and he was in the doorway when he was knocked down on his face and kids in sneakers ran across his back. He got on his hands and knees in roaring noise. The floor was packed with scuffling feet. Children moved along the walls without any visible support, like crabs, cleaning the top shelves of canned corn and toilet paper, another shelf of Chef Boyardee and bags of rice. There had to be fifty of them inside the store, grabbing, punching, climbing on shoulders. Alongside Cosgrove on the floor, an old woman clearly in her seventies, in lace shoes that had gaps at the soles, was crouched over the basket of sweet potatoes. An arthritic hand put one potato into the pocket of her raincoat and she was reaching for another when a little boy, ten years old, perhaps, with a lazy right eye, slipped in front of her and picked up the basket. The old woman tried to stop him. The boy spat in the old lady’s face. Wordlessly, she reached for the sweet potatoes. The boy took one hand off the basket and got it onto the old lady’s face and began scratching and tearing. He caught her eyes with his fingers and she made the first sound, a low moan. The kid shrieked at her, ‘Why you ol’ lady in Baby Lee’s way? I be takin’ this to my woman.”

  Cosgrove, furious, scrambled to his feet and grabbed the little villain by the shoulder and was about to shake the very life out of him when the old lady, whimpering hurt, dropped her old arthritic hand and grabbed the front of the kid’s pants. She intended to squeeze him to agony come, but instead all she got was a handful of Levi’s. “You got a woman? Y’all belong in a crib!”

  Cosgrove was mortified by this and could not move. The old lady instantly gathered much heart and her hand — stumpy, bumpy old fingers but with a couple of good long nails — went for the kid’s face and she was going to get to him good, maybe, when the kid rocked his shaved head back, and now he brought his little shaved head flying forward into the old lady’s face. It made a loud smacking sound and when the old lady put her hands to her face, he raced out with the basket of sweet potatoes.

  Cosgrove put an arm around the old woman and was trying to push his way out, against a new wave of kids, this time babies, knee-highs, who scrambled determinedly into the store. There were about a dozen older kids, the ten-and eleven-year-olds, fighting for the last thing standing in the store, the glass-globe gum machine, and in the middle of the crowd came a loud report, a gun going off, and the store emptied. One of the babies, shrieking the loudest, in the most terror, was left trampled. A red snow hood was pulled tight around a cocoa face that was bunched at the openings. Cosgrove murmured to the baby, whose eyes popped open at the sight of a last, single bag of Wise potato chips lying open on the floor. “Twenty-two chips.” The baby scurried through the smell of gunsmoke to the bag, picked it up, and ran out.

  Cosgrove looked about. Nobody was left in the store and the store was completely bare. Not even a rubber glove left. When he walked outside, the sound of his footsteps echoed on a totally empty street. The wind was blowing potato chips along the deserted sidewalks. Great Big and Baby Rock were up at the corner, each with a huge bottle of soda and bag of potato chips. Baby Rock waved for Cosgrove to hurry.

  A bus pulled up and Baby Rock jumped on it. Great Big followed and Cosgrove ran up and jumped on after them. Baby Rock slapped the change box as if paying, then went and sat down. The bus driver didn’t look up. So Great Big and Cosgrove did not pay, either. “I got to go to my sister’s and mother’s house on account of you,” Baby Rock said to Cosgrove. “I don’t like where they live. But now Manslaughter gonna be lookin’ for me, I got to go to my sister’s and mother’s.”

  “How wonderful!” Cosgrove said. “I can talk to your mother about you getting married. You must, you know.”

  The bus rocked through quite desperate streets and eventually there was a stop and Baby Rock jumped off and Cosgrove and Great Big followed him as he ran into an old, high hotel called the Flatbush Arms. The lobby was cold, dim, and crowded with adults who smoked cigarettes while children in coats and boots raced around the lobby. The lobby had no furniture.

  The black curly hair of a man showed behind a Plexiglas window that had a cardboard sign taped to it. The marking pen printing on it said, THE BOILERS IS BROKE DOWN.

  The head behind the Plexiglas looked up. While the man’s hair was young and dark and curly, his face was seamed, and small blue eyes were almost lost in creases. He put his mouth to a metal screen in the window and spoke loudly and with great rapidity. He used a combination of vo and do for just about everything; all w’s became v’s as in vot for what, and all th’s became d’s, as in “dot’s the truth.” “What do you want here? The guard is supposed to stop you. That’s the guard’s job. Where is the guard?”

  “I be goin’ to my mother’s house,” Baby Rock said.

  “Oy, a house he calls it. You’re going to your mother’s room, that’s where you’re going.”

  “It’s my mother’s house,” Baby Rock said, with much stubbornness.

  “Wait for the guard,” the man said.

  A woman in a raincoat pushed in front of Baby Rock. “When we get heat? My little girl has a flu.”

  “Too cold the water to make heat today. All day the water is off. First, we must fix up the boiler. You see the sign. The boiler is broke. That’s the truth. Moishe doesn’t lie.”

  “We live like dogs here.” She noticed Cosgrove and turned to him. “You the crisis social worker?” Then, seeing Cosgrove’s collar, she said, “Oh, you a minister.”

  “Priest,” Cosgrove said quickly. He was irritated that the woman did not know the difference between a man of God and a Protestant.

  “You here to get us some heat?”

  “No, I’ve got something a bit more important to tend to.”

  “Oh. The lady on the ninth floor, she finally die?”

  “I’m not here for death, thanks be to God.” He clapped Baby Rock on the back. “We’re here for something happy. We have to get him married. That’s important.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s important. My radiator got nothing to say.”

  Cosgrove realized that this was all unimportant to his project, for what did it matter if in Africa people lived under too much sun and here there wasn’t enough sun? Their sins obviously thrived in any climate. While heat for a baby was hardly as important as getting Baby Rock married, Cosgrove still felt an obligation to give the appearances of assistance. “Her baby must have some warmth. Have you no fireplaces?” he said to the man.

  “They make the eleventh floor a fireplace six months ago,” the man said. “In the middle of the summer they burn the place up. They didn’t come here that day and say, ‘Moishe, give us heat.’ Now it’s cold one day and they want heat. They should have the heat they had from the bonfire they made on the whole floor in the summer.”

  “You see?” the woman said. “We dogs.”

  “Lady, excuse me, lady, but you don’t know what a dog lives like. I lived like a dog. I lived in a wooden house in Czemniki that had a floor that was the ground. The beds had no mattresses, don’t worry. Straw with a cover, that’s how I lived.”

  “I don’t care how you live. I care how my baby girl live. She got the flu. We livin’ raw mean.”

  “Moishe lived mean. In the camp where the Germans threw us, Moishe lived. Moishe saw some old lady that w
as reaching for a cup of soup and Moishe jumped in front of her. What do I care about you, old lady, you could die. Moishe wants to live. Moishe grabs the cup of soup. The old lady has a piece of bread, I tear it out of her hand. What do I care? Moishe lived. Moishe lived because I worked. I worked in the granites factory. You know, hand granites, what the Germans threw at the other people. What do I care who they kill? Moishe lived.

  “The granites had leather straps on the cases and we pulled them off and sold them for shoes to the Polacks. They give us bread. One day I’m outside giving the Polacks straps for the shoes and come the guards and Moishe ducks inside and I say, ‘What do I care what happens to the Polacks? Moishe lives.’ The German had one hand and he shot all the Polacks in the head. Right there on the other side of the wall. They had a young baby Polack. Huh. What do I care? They shot the baby in the head. So what? Moishe didn’t die. Let all the babies die.

  “Moishe gets brought on the boat here. To Westchester for the young boys from the concentration camp, and a woman says to me, ‘Do you want to play a game?’ A game, she’s a nice woman and I can’t tell her I want to shoot dice. I want to gamble. One day they say do you want to see the beach and I say, all right, I’ll go to the beach. We’re driving down this street in Queens to the beach and I see this big crowd. I say, ‘What’s that?’ And the woman says, ‘That’s the racetrack.’ I say to them, ‘Stop the car.’ I run out into the racetrack. I never came back. I meet a guy steals the purses from women. So I steal one too. What do I care, some woman cries about her purse. Moishe got her purse! I never came out. Now you want me to worry about too cold the water for heat?”

  “My baby ain’t no purse.”

  “Baby. Moishe saw babies shot in the middle of the mouth.”

  While the man behind the window kept talking, Cosgrove was readying a crushing answer, but then he could not feel Great Big in his presence and he became panicky and whirled around. Great Big was staring at something out the front door. “We best go, lad,” he said to Baby Rock. He left the woman arguing the differences between a dead baby and a sick baby with the man behind the glass.

  Baby Rock led the way to the elevator, which had a cardboard sign saying BROKE. Baby Rock swung through a brown metal door and onto a staircase and ran up eight flights of stairs, with Cosgrove panting after him and Great Big leaping two and three steps at a time. Baby Rock loped down a hallway covered with a worn tan carpet that reeked of stale urine. Chicken bones and orange soda cans and little plastic bottles over the floor. Baby Rock stopped and gathered up the plastic bottles and shoved them into his pocket. “The crack man give you ten cents apiece for them,” he said.

  From the last door came the sound of wildly loud music and Baby Rock banged both fists against the door many times until a young woman in her late teens, with a round face and beaming smile, opened the door. She wore a red velour cap. A crimson T-shirt stretched mightily across a tremendous bosom with lettering proclaiming her name, DISCO GIRL. Her breath showed in the cold air.

  Behind her was a room with two beds and several mattresses on the floor and in a cleared space along the wall by a lone window there were stacks of cassettes, perhaps as many as a hundred and fifty of them, and on a table a cassette player so big that it could be used for a weight-lifting competition. Disco Girl began to pump her arms to the music shrieking through the room.

  “Michael Jackson!”

  In the doorway, Baby Rock began to sway. Great Big moved once. Disco Girl’s body exploded beneath the crimson T-shirt. “You Captain Nemo!” she screamed at Great Big, who reached out and covered her breasts with one hand. Cosgrove jumped between them. Disco Girl went dancing backward, her chest moving crazily, and the sound was driving Cosgrove mad. Cosgrove stepped around the mattresses, using peripheral vision to watch Great Big, and looked for a way to turn down the sound. Cosgrove’s eye fell on one of the tapes. A sticker said it cost $6.95. Clearly, the stack of tapes was worth a thousand dollars. He looked at the big complicated tape machine and decided to twist one knob, and this immediately increased the volume to an unbearable level.

  Disco Girl, deliriously happy with the higher sound, danced brazenly right up to Cosgrove, placed her head alongside his, and shouted into his ear, “I thought you the person bringin’ food. Man at my food place, New Opportunity Hot Line, say he gonna drop off to us.”

  “You have no food?” Cosgrove shouted.

  She shook her head no and danced on.

  “But you have this,” Cosgrove screamed, pointing to the tape player.

  “I pay two of my checks and my mother pay one and the man say it still not paid for,” Disco Girl shouted. The tape finally ended. “We miss our face-to-face ’cause we move here and the man downstairs don’t have our names right. We used to wait for the mailman every day. The day we decide to go buy the box, that’s the exact day the mailman come with the face-to-face notice and the man at the desk said he didn’t know us. The mailman took the face-to-face notices back and we never knew. Next thing we know, we just got knocked off the computer. We get no more checks till we have our face-to-face. Now the man in the box store say he want his money or he be takin’ the box back. We got no welfare checks. Now we gonna have no musics and we already got no food.”

  She led them through a door and into a tiny kitchenette, which had the suggestion of warmth. Baby Rock, Disco Girl, and Cosgrove were just able to squeeze in. Great Big then barged in and the lead edge of his hip pressed everybody together tighter than a canned Polish ham. Cosgrove was smack up against a heavy woman who sat on a tin folding chair directly in front of a stove, an old stove, small and rusting. Her face was stuck into the open stove door. She smoked a cigarette slowly with her eyes closed. “Mama,” Baby Rock called. The woman nodded. “She be Mother Agnes. She be me and Baby Rock’s mother,” Disco Girl said. The mother looked sleepily at Cosgrove. “I be Agnes O’Dwyer. You from what social office?”

  Cosgrove said delightedly, “An O’Dwyer! Why, you’re Irish someplace! I’m from no social office. I’m from the Mother Church. Irish! I was born in West Cork. Where are your people from in Ireland?”

  “Island of Bimini.”

  “You’ve nobody from Ireland?”

  “Not that I know of. ‘Less some ol’ cop messed around sometime. All cops be Irish, right?”

  Mother Agnes wore a gray leather cap perched on a high pile of dyed blond hair and a green basketball jacket zipped up to her neck. There was a large nick in her right eyelid that had been there for some time, perhaps years. She seemed uninterested in Cosgrove, particularly after learning he was not a social worker. Nor did she bother to inspect Great Big.

  Mother Agnes looked down. On the floor at her feet was a baby who was asleep on his back and smelled from need of change. Beside the baby was a black dog with fur stuck in clumps all over his body. The small amount of warm air coming out of the old oven had a foul smell that immediately took the air out of Cosgrove’s nose. The four jets on the stove were also lit. Jammed in the far corner of the tiny space was a young man who wore a robe and an earring and smoked a cigarette with an elaborate feminine motion. On top of the stove was an old black and white television set on which was a rerun of “Hawaii Five-O.”

  “At least it get a little warm in here,” Agnes said. The dog on the floor was suddenly on his feet, his nose sniffing. A whine came out of him.

  “He hear a rat,” Disco Girl said. “He catch so many rats that he don’t know whether he be a dog or a cat anymore.”

  Cosgrove breathed with his mouth open and tongue motionless.

  “The social worker downstairs say we supposed to keep a pot of water inside the stove,” Disco Girl said. “But we got no water today. We be up and down, up and down, all day long.”

  Agnes pointed to a large pot. “Baby Rock, you get us water?” There were three pots and Baby Rock, Cosgrove, and Great Big carried them down the eight flights of stairs to the lobby, where the man behind the Plexiglas window, seeing the pots, called out, �
�I told all of you, we got no water in this building today. For the water, you go outside someplace.” Which they did, to a high charcoal-coated snowbank at the curb. There was a crunching sound as Baby Rock shoved the pot into the snowbank.

  Cosgrove saw that the snow was streaked with yellow from dogs pissing on it. He gagged. Next to him, Great Big simply grabbed snow with both hands and threw it into his pot. Cosgrove closed his eyes and dug in. Baby Rock smacked the snow down in the pot with his fists and scooped up more. Cosgrove and Great Big followed his example. Upstairs, Mother Agnes put the pots into the stove. Some minutes later, the snow water in the stove put some moisture into the gas heat and now the air was foul to breathe, but not stupefying.

  “Hawaii Five-O” went off and Agnes, in front of the stove, stared down the length of a new cigarette and said, quite pleased, “Here come ‘Santa Barbara.’” On her television set were white people dressed in finery who stood in the sunlight outside expensive homes. “We gonna see ‘Donahue’ next. After that, ‘Hart to Hart’ and ‘Casper, the Friendly Ghost,’ and that run us right into ‘Dallas’ tonight.” She looked down at the baby, who had revived and lay with open eyes. “Only infant we got now. Used to put them all to sleep at one time. Now he be the only one here.”