He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

Lydia grabbed her baby from Disco Girl. She looked at Cosgrove and saw insanity. He looked at her and saw all the reasons he was in America.

  Out on the sidewalk, children in snowsuits ran in the dullness and one of them, about four years old, held a small bag of potato chips. When all the hands grabbed at the potato chips, he ran out into the street, shouting into the cold air, and Baby Rock ran after him and grabbed him just as a blue van stopped short.

  “Watch your little brother better than that,” Bushwick Taylor called from the van.

  “He be Lydia’s kid,” Baby Rock said.

  In the van, Sarah said that was probably one of the people they had on their emergency delivery list and she had Bushwick pull the van to the curb. As Bushwick was getting out, people were starting to run from all parts of the block.

  Food riot! Then Bushwick saw that they were all looking up. Across the street, a woman threw open a window at the top of a five-story building and screamed, “Stop him from jumpin’.”

  A young man in a checkered cap and coat stood on the roof. Cosgrove, running out into the street like a fast crab, called to the mother, “Who is he? What can I say to him?”

  “He’s my son. He be all beamed up,” the mother said.

  “Beam me up, Scotty,” Baby Rock said.

  “He mean crack,” Disco Girl said. “All beamed up on crack.”

  “Crack?” Cosgrove said.

  “Crack is whack,” somebody yelled.

  “Crack-a-Jack! Crack a bridge take you over the moat to the castle,” somebody else called.

  Cosgrove cupped his hands and shouted up, “Do not jump. You will lose your immortal soul.”

  The woman in the window leaned far out and twisted around and yelled to the young guy on the roof. He swung his hands in great irritation and jumped out into the air about three feet and landed on a fire escape jutting out from the fifth floor.

  “Now he got to jump again,” Baby Rock said.

  “Baby Rock, you makin’ jokes again,” Disco Girl shrieked.

  Cosgrove ran out into the middle of the street and called up. “You must come to your senses,” Cosgrove said. “If you jump again, then it is with sufficient reflection and you will be damned forever. Suicide is despair and despair is a loss of hope in God’s mercy. There can be no forgiveness for suicide. You don’t even have time to make a perfect Act of Contrition, one in which you truly are sorry for hurting God and are not saying the Act of Contrition merely because you are afraid of going to Hell.”

  “Where’s Hell?” the young guy on the fire escape called.

  “You must come down here and I will talk to you,” Cosgrove said.

  “People been talkin’ to me all my life and look where it got me. Ain’t no motherfucker be talkin’ to me again.”

  “That is disrespectful to the Lord to talk to me like this!” Cosgrove bellowed. Of course he felt comfortable saying this, for it was obvious to him that as long as the man was engaging in conversation with him, the man had no intention of jumping to his death and therefore, no matter what the situation, Cosgrove felt that there had to be some decorum in speaking to a priest.

  On the fire escape, the young guy in the checkered cap and coat turned his back to Cosgrove, dropped his pants, and bent his knees so that his rear end observed Cosgrove.

  “More disrespect!” Cosgrove bawled.

  The young guy now bent his knees even more and flung himself backward out into the air and zipped to the sidewalk.

  “Jumped twice,” Baby Rock said.

  Immediately a large crowd of people ran to the scene and Cosgrove had to fight his way through them and drop to his knees, and while the crowd around him cavorted and shouted, he gave the man the last rites. At the edge of the crowd, Bushwick Taylor and Sarah stood for a moment and, as the priest finished his task and was replaced by an emergency medical crew, one of whom carried a body bag, Bushwick thanked the priest. Suicide was not mentioned in his job description, but he thought that as a representative of New Opportunity, and one with ambitions, he should thank the priest.

  “The man is in Hell,” Cosgrove said sadly.

  Bushwick answered this with dead silence. He and Sarah went to the van and took out three industrial-size cans of corned beef hash and beef stew and gave them to Disco Girl, instructing her to give one can to Lydia. Then Bushwick and Sarah drove to the Redeemer Salvation Church basement, a few blocks away. There had been many phone complaints about the food center’s never having any food at all, yet the New Opportunity Hot Line computer printouts said this was an impossibility, that there never had been an absolute shortage at the center, which was open for only one meal a day, the dinner meal, and was staffed with professional soup kitchen workers, who understood that portion control would ensure that the end of the line, too, receives something.

  Oh, yes, there was now a job classification of Soup Kitchen Worker in New York, for the first time in the city’s history, too. Quite often, those so classified were reformed derelicts who had undergone health tests and training. New Opportunity had placed a couple, Jerry and Ellen Doherty, in the Redeemer Salvation soup kitchen to serve the meals. A fine couple, working for $3.65 an hour, two of them working three hours a day, giving them an income of almost twenty-two dollars a day. Bushwick could not understand why the center was in such continual trouble.

  Driving up the street, he happened to glance out the window and on the sidewalk he saw Jerry Doherty, his knees bent as he carried a heavy cardboard box into Santiago’s bodega. Behind Jerry was his wife, Ellen, lean and mean after a lifetime of ravaging her body on cheap wine. And on his knees, Santiago, the bodega owner, was removing sixty-ounce industrial cans of corned beef hash from a New Opportunity Hot Line box and putting them on the shelf of his bodega.

  The moment Jerry Doherty saw Bushwick, he ripped the top off a bottle of wine and began draining it.

  “Why do you hurry now?” Bushwick said.

  “Because I’m afraid you’ll take it from me.”

  Sarah Carter took out her clipboard and wrote a note saying that both Dohertys were officially discharged. She and Bushwick then grabbed the boxes from Santiago, who frothed at the mouth and screamed that he had purchased them legally. Bushwick showed him the New Opportunity Hot Line stencil on the boxes and said that he would be prosecuted by every prosecutor alive. Bushwick and Sarah carried the boxes out. Santiago smacked Jerry Doherty in the mouth.

  At the Redeemer Salvation Church soup kitchen, the noise from the basement exploded onto the sidewalk. Inside, perhaps a hundred people thumped the empty tables. “All cramped up. Can’t wait no more, can’t wait no more.”

  Bushwick and Sarah carried the boxes into the kitchen, turned on the lights, and set to work immediately, Bushwick opening the cans and Sarah Carter spooning the hash, chili, and beef stew into pans and warming them. The table pounding stopped and a line formed and Bushwick slapped food onto the plates and handed out rye bread. All the clients had a worn identification card stating that they were needy and assigned to eat dinner only in this particular soup kitchen. At meal’s end, Bushwick impressed a couple of the hungry to come into the kitchen and wash off the paper plates for use again; the cost of new paper plates for each meal was not included in the New Opportunity Hot Line service.

  As Bushwick and Sarah drove back along Fulton Street on the way to the bridge, there was Disco Girl, dancing and shouting happily in front of the hotel. A little girl who clutched a shopping bag stood beside her. Cosgrove, Baby Rock, and Great Big were with her, too.

  “Drive me to the city. Got me a job!” Disco Girl said.

  “What kind of job at this hour?” Bushwick asked her.

  “Traveling job. You know the lady whose son just jumped out the window? She just pay me to take the little girl — this is the lady’s little girl right here, this be Roberta, you say hello, Roberta — we goin’ to see her father and tell him what happened to the son. The father in Clinton.”

  By Clinton, Bushwick knew, she meant
Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, New York, which was closer to the Arctic Circle than to Brooklyn.

  “I’ve been talking to her about what she should say,” Cosgrove said.

  “I say the truth. His son jump off the roof.”

  “Jump twice,” Baby Rock said.

  Cosgrove shook his head. “I am prepared to go with them to the prison and see the man myself.”

  Bushwick explained to Cosgrove that Clinton was an eight-and-a-half-hour ride on a big old tour bus that was filled with women and children going to visit their men. He would of course take Disco Girl to Columbus Circle in Manhattan, where tour buses leave at night for the long ride to upstate prisons. They all piled in and Bushwick drove over the Brooklyn Bridge and into lower Manhattan, which was silent and dark; the streets turned bright as he moved uptown. He had to stop once because Great Big became carsick. At Columbus Circle, tour buses sat in the darkness in front of the Coliseum. The fountain in the middle of the circle was unlighted. But uptown, toward Lincoln Center, the street was an inferno of lights.

  Disco Girl got out and ran up to an old toothless man in a shapeless gray overcoat with a badge pinned to it. He wore a policeman’s cap with a badge that said, BUS DISPATCHER.

  “Which one is Clinton?” she asked.

  He pointed to a cluster of women with children who carried shopping bags and waited in front of an old red intercity tour bus whose door was open. Inside, the driver’s cigarette glowed in the dark. The drivers never let the people on the bus until departure time, for they are going to live with the people for far too many hours and the later they all get together, the better.

  “It cold,” a child on the line said.

  “Soon,” the mother said.

  Disco Girl and the little girl Roberta got on the line.

  “Do you have your money?” Bushwick said.

  “The lady gave me a hundred dollars. Cost sixty-four dollars for the bus. Then the bus stop twice on the way up and back.”

  “Stop three times each way,” the woman in front of her said.

  “Three times, then,” Disco Girl said. “We stop three times for Burger Kings. That’s three Burger Kings goin’ up and three Burger Kings goin’ down. That takes all the money, don’t it? How’m I goin’ to make any money then?” She thought. “Maybe I eat Burger Kings only twice.” She looked at the little girl. “No, Roberta, she be wantin’ Burger Kings every time, I know that. Roberta, you got your change bag?”

  Solemnly, Roberta held out a small paper bag filled with change. “I buy my daddy a cheeseburger!” she said.

  “Roberta, you little liar. You buy yourself a cheeseburger. You see this child? She knows only a visitor can use the cheeseburger machine in the visit room. The man in prison isn’t allowed to go to the machine. The guard, he can’t make change. So you got to bring your own change for the machine. If the man in prison want something only the visitor can get it for him. You see today, Roberta, she go to the machine for her father, then she stand by the cheeseburger machine and eat it all up right in his face.”

  “Let’s talk about what you are going to say to the man,” Cosgrove said. “What is he in this accursed prison for, anyway?”

  “What else do you go to prison for? Drugs.”

  “How long does he have to serve?”

  “A nice cool six year.”

  “And what is it you are going to say to him?”

  “Tell him his boy die.” She thought for a moment. “Tell him his boy jump off the roof.”

  “Jump twice,” Baby Rock said.

  Now, from up the street at Lincoln Center, people were walking from the opera, the men in tailor-made clothes and the women in fur coats and diamond earrings and just as they came to the women waiting on line to go to the prisons, many of the operagoers turned into a door leading down to the building’s parking garage. In doing this, they had to pass through a couple of lines, one waiting for the bus to Elmira, the other for the trip to Attica Prison. The men coming from the opera held an arm out to guide their women through the prison lines and the women, as a reflex, held their hands out, showing fine leather gloves. Their ears were ablaze with diamonds, which now had as a backdrop the snow jackets of the women on the line for Attica.

  Octavia Ripley Havermeyer was one of those walking. The opera, a benefit performance for the New Opportunity Soup Kitchen, was attended, as usual, mostly by New York builders, not a precise description because they are men who by sneakery and bribery get valuable land and have designed for them the most grotesque structures. Legitimate workingmen do the building. She was on her way to a gala dinner party with these “builders.” Upon leaving the opera up at Lincoln Center, Octavia walked with builder Golden’s wife who, at twenty-five, was about half of Golden’s age, Octavia surmised. Golden’s wife had hair that was much lighter than her antecedents ever had, and she also had not listened to more than a few bars of the entire opera.

  Octavia knew that because, rather than listen herself, she had studied the faces around her and seen Golden’s wife ready to expire from boredom. Outside of one or two popular arias, Octavia hated every opera she had ever attended. As did, she knew, Golden’s wife and about eighty-five percent of the people at the benefit. Octavia and Golden’s wife walked together because they were in matching sable coats. They passed a long line of limousines, all with smoked-glass windows, but they did not feel deprived because they knew that they were going only a short distance. As Octavia Ripley Havermeyer and Golden’s wife walked out of the Lincoln Center plaza in front of the opera house, a man and woman with rags wrapped around their heads stood with a baby in a shopping cart that was filled with newspapers and rags. “Help us!” the man screamed. “We are homeless. Help us!”

  His bellowing made the people coming from the opera walk more erectly, the better to look over his head as they passed the bawling man.

  “My husband says it’s a shame,” Golden’s wife said.

  “It is just horrible,” Octavia said. She was digging into her purse, trying to find a single dollar.

  “That’s why my husband says we always have to do things for them,” Golden’s wife said.

  “That’s gracious of him,” Octavia said.

  “That’s why he said we got to go to this dinner. To help the others.”

  Octavia Ripley Havermeyer went into her purse and brought out a dollar, which she pushed into the man’s hand. “Help! Help!” the man screamed at the next people.

  Golden’s wife, embarrassed that she had given nothing, went into her small purse and brought out a dollar, which she gave to the man. “Now just a minute, I must do one thing with you,” she said. She produced a small notepad, ripped off a sheet, and handed the slip and a pen to the hungry man.

  “You have to write a receipt for me. My husband told me never to give anything unless I get a receipt for the taxes.”

  The hungry man looked at her with half-shut eyes. “You want a receipt.”

  “My husband told me to get one.”

  He nodded numbly. “You want a receipt for a dollar.”

  “Oh, just put down anything,” Golden’s wife said.

  The hungry man nodded. He handed the dollar to his wife. He put the slip of paper on top of the newspapers in the cart and carefully and in big letters printed his receipt. He handed her the receipt and pen and turned and again bawled at the crowd, “We’re starving!”

  Golden’s wife glanced at the receipt and her eyes widened. “Oh! That louse!”

  Octavia read the receipt, whose big bold letters said, THE BEARER IS A DIRTY CUNT!

  Octavia took Golden’s wife by the arm and hurried her away. “What are we going to do about these people?” Golden’s wife said.

  “They are just going to wait until we do everything for them,” Octavia Ripley Havermeyer said.

  To evade beggars, Octavia and Golden’s wife went across Broadway. A block down, a man had an old upright piano placed smack on the sidewalk, against a fence, and he sat on a stool a
nd pounded a fast tune into the cold air. He played with his nose close to the keys and his back to the people passing on the sidewalk. As Octavia and Golden’s wife got close, Octavia recognized the tune as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” The piano player had a washtub on the sidewalk alongside him and people walking past threw coins into it. As the coins clanged into the tub, the piano player threw one hand in the air in thanks and kept pounding away. When a man and woman walked past and did not throw in anything, the piano player half spun on his stool, to check his washtub, then threw a middle finger into the air at the two people walking away.

  A little man in his fifties, wearing a sleeveless down jacket and a head as bare as a doorknob, he began to swing into the start of the song again, the music to the lines “You’ll be swell, you’ll be great … ,” as a man in rags came up to the piano. Obviously, the bum was only pretending to listen to the music, for his eyes were fixed on the coins, which caused his head to lower and the shoulders were following the head and soon he would be in a full stoop over the tub of money.

  The piano player’s head was down close to the keys, and he pounded with his right hand and reached out with the left, feeling until he had his hand on the bum’s chest. He had his elbow bent. He spread his fingers against the bum’s chest for leverage and then with a great jerk the elbow straightened stiff and the bum went quickly backward and up on his toes and nearly off his feet and out into the traffic. Quickly the piano player brought his left hand back to the keys and his nose went lower and lower to the keys and he was pounding, pounding, pounding, and he heard the bum making a comeback at the tub of money. The piano player was at “Curtain up!” when he lifted both hands high and spun around on the piano stool and kicked with his right foot. Kicked with much effort showing in his lined face. He was wearing big tan lace-up winter boots and he caught the bum right full in the face and it was a beauty, a clout in the face on a freezing night. The bum clapped both hands to his long, shaggy face in pain and stumbled away.

  “I only needed something to eat,” the bum said.

  The piano player now had his nose almost to the keys and he raced through “Roses.”