He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  James Woods waited half an hour on the phone. Finally somebody picked up upstairs.

  “Case number?”

  “Ms. Singer, this is James Woods. I talk to you all the time.”

  “Case number, please.”

  “I don’t have it with me. My check and papers got burned alive in a fire.”

  “Woods? Let me see.” He stood for fifteen minutes. Ms. Singer returned. “I have your name. But I have nothing else. The last notation says you have been removed from the computer because you have not appeared for your PWP job.”

  “I couldn’t do my public works program job because they got me on jury duty. I showed you my jury duty notice. I be in jury all day long.”

  “You could not have given me a completed jury duty notice or you would not have been taken off the computer,” she said.

  “How could I show you a completed notice? I didn’t finish my jury duty.”

  “If you didn’t finish your jury duty then you did not have a completed jury duty notice. And a completed jury duty notice is the only excuse for not appearing for your PWP duty. So you are off the computer.”

  “I got to start all over again?”

  “Are you applying for emergency funds?”

  “I got burned out last night.”

  “Oh, then of course you must start at the very start of the process.”

  “That takes a month,” James Woods said. “If I don’t go back to jury duty, the judge puts me under the jail.”

  “Without a completed jury duty notice, you are a new applicant,” Ms. Singer said.

  James Woods hung up and sat down next to Mother Agnes on a tin folding chair. Both knew they had a long way to go.

  Many blocks away, people also sat at Kings County Supreme Court, Part 24, People versus Francis Anthony Teretola, a.k.a. Frankie Five Hundred. He was called Frankie Five Hundred because he had once kidnapped the mother of a man delinquent with his loan-shark payments of $500. In his present case, he was charged with violation of 110/120.5 which is attempted assault, the use of such a word, attempt, bothering Frankie Five Hundred greatly, for Frankie Five Hundred felt this indicated a failure at crime. Which he knew he was not, for on the day before this case started, he had been a shining star in the assassination of that arrogant bum Big Paulie, who happened to be coming from a courtroom himself. “He thought he was in the witness box, but we put him in a pine box.”

  Here in this case, Mr. Frankie Five Hundred also was charged with “at the time and place of this crime, the defendant did display a loaded gun and threaten serious physical injury.” The method Frankie Five Hundred used to display the gun was to nestle it into somebody’s ear. Most prosecution witnesses against Frankie Five Hundred failed to show up. “They all got ears and they don’t want nothin’ stickin’ in them,” Frankie Five Hundred enthused to himself.

  One juror’s mother died and the juror was replaced by an alternate, who suddenly became ill and that left exactly only twelve people in the jury room. And now, in court on this morning, Frankie Five Hundred sat with his lawyer and heard a clerk muttering, “Missing one juror.” Later, a door opened and the judge called out, “Has anybody heard from him?” The clerk said, “He never called.” The lawyer whispered to Frankie Five Hundred, “You got a mistrial. Your prayers are answered.”

  Frankie Five Hundred thought using the word prayers was funny; he had a contract from the Chief to find and blow away that little priest who somehow rode in the car to Big Paulie’s thing. Frankie Five Hundred still couldn’t figure out how the priest winds up sitting right next to him in the car. But the Chief blamed Frankie Five Hundred for this, and therefore it became his job to find the priest and shoot him. Too bad it was a priest, but he was a witness to the whole thing. What a witness! He was right there and he saw the Chief in person holding a gun over Big Paulie. “They shoot the Pope, I could shoot a priest,” Frankie Five Hundred told himself.

  Next, the judge looked out and told the clerk to draw a contempt warrant against juror James Woods.

  On this same cold morning, back in front of the Flatbush Arms, the normal small food riot ended, Bushwick had a cigarette with Sarah. When Cosgrove walked over, Bushwick explained, “I told them I’d run out. Last week I figured that we could keep food right in each welfare hotel so they could give it out easier. What do they tell me? The supervisor says the children would get hungry and steal the food. He tells me to put it in a storage room in Bayview, the women’s prison over by the river. I go there to pick up some food this morning, I know I don’t have half enough, and wouldn’t you know it, the guard doesn’t open the door for me. I have to tell you, I tried to kick the door in. You know what the guard does? Excuse me, Father, but I got to tell you exactly what he does. He calls out over the loudspeaker system in the prison, ‘Man be tryin’ to come in and fuck our ladies!’”

  Bushwick got out of the truck. “Drives me crazy that I know most of these kids. I’m sorry, but I’m going to get a drink.” Cosgrove asked him where he was going and Bushwick pointed to the bodega across the street and said that there was a liquor store right around the corner from it. Bushwick now remembered Cosgrove’s scrawny face. “You were here when the kid went off the roof across the street. What agency do you work for?”

  “For Jesus Christ.”

  Bushwick held up his hands. “All right. I’m sorry.”

  “And for whom do you work?” Cosgrove asked.

  “B. B. King,” Bushwick said.

  Bushwick had only a ten-dollar bill and he asked Cosgrove about money, and Cosgrove said he certainly could help buy something good in a bottle. They started for the liquor store. Seeing Disco Girl hugging herself in the doorway while chattering to Great Big, Cosgrove said, “Can I get you something?”

  Everybody in front of the hotel heard this. All bolted for the bodega. Right away, a girl ran in front of Disco Girl in the cold day. She was wearing a frayed red coat with a hood that had no string and when she ran it fell from her head. She was tall, with cornrowed hair, and looked older than the others, but when she turned her head, Cosgrove could see that she was only about nine. She was dressed in scraps, with no socks and summer shoes of frayed red cloth. Her yellow flowered summer pants did not look clean. There were four other young girls running through the traffic and after them, a couple of boys.

  At the bodega, Bushwick, being thin, was able to wedge himself through the crowd to the counter. Cosgrove was squeezed against a bin of dusty roots. He held up a ten-dollar bill and Bushwick reached over heads and snatched it from him. “We’ll split whatever it comes to.” At this, the sight of sure money, hands grabbed at a shelf of honey buns, white icing showing through packaged cake. The tall girl with cornrowed hair cried out, “Toast and butter and jelly.” She burrowed through the dusty winter jackets, grabbed at a shelf, and held up two jars of baby food. “Something for my baby sister.” As she was standing at the counter with her jars of baby food, all the others hit her.

  She smiled in embarrassment but did not hit back. “Leave Dawn alone,” Disco Girl said. “People in the hotel always smackin’ her. She never does anythin’ back. She just walks in the hall and they smack her. They used to do it to me. I sure stopped them. Had me a baby. That’s what you have to do, girl. Make you feel better. You won’t go around lettin’ people smack you. Soon as you’re able, you have yourself a baby, Dawn.” Baby Rock said, “I help you.” Dawn giggled and tried to hide her face inside her jacket. When she did this, the top of a soiled blouse showed. She fell to the floor, trying to hide. Disco Girl hit Baby Rock on the head. “Baby Rock, you be crackin’ jokes.”

  Cosgrove could not contain himself. He called from the corner of the store. “That is no joke. That’s the mortaler!”

  Everybody burst out of the store at once. Dawn remained. She leaned on the counter and chewed on a piece of toast with jelly. She pointed at pads of paper on a bottom shelf. Cosgrove said, “Good girl yourself. Taking that to school with you, are you?” Dawn stuffed the othe
r piece of jelly toast into her mouth.

  Bushwick said, “They get embarrassed in school. They got to give a welfare hotel as an address. That’s worse than giving a prison as an address. A lot of them lie when the teacher asks them where they live. Some like Dawn here don’t even go.”

  “What do you need the pad for?” Cosgrove asked Dawn.

  “Draw.”

  “Draw you shall.” Cosgrove took a pad and pen, paid the counterman with the ten, told himself that God would provide, and gave the change to Bushwick, who went to buy a fifth of Scotch.

  Sarah Carter waited with paper cups and now everybody went into the hotel, where Great Big stood holding hands with Disco Girl while the guard with the red bandana gripped his club and had his feet in position to flee Great Big, but upon seeing Bushwick and Sarah, he exhaled. Sarah headed for the soda machine on one side of the dim lobby and Bushwick went to the opposite side and yanked on an old wooden door until it opened to a big dark barren place that in the past, when the Flatbush Arms was a regular hotel, had been a barroom.

  The sound of Bushwick’s feet caused a rat to leap from a mound of empty soda cans and crushed cigarette packs. The rat climbed a steam pipe and disappeared into the torn ceiling. The dusty bar was along one wall and Cosgrove went to it most eagerly, slapped his belly full into the wood, and put one foot up for the bar rail but found nothing there, brass being highly perishable. Bushwick put the Scotch and paper cups on the bar and Sarah came in with cans of ginger ale. Whether ginger ale was good or bad as a chaser didn’t interest Cosgrove, who drank the Scotch straight and warm out of a paper cup and immediately wanted more, which he grabbed.

  Not until then did he notice that Great Big was missing. Dawn was seated on the floor, her back against the far wall and her knees pulled up as she drew pictures on the pad. He inquired of Dawn, who reported that Great Big had gone upstairs with Disco Girl. Fair enough, Cosgrove told himself. I’ll just have a wee drink or two and go collect him. He reached for the bottle. The garbage dump of a room had taken on the proper glow of a real barroom.

  When she had her second drink and lit another cigarette, Sarah hummed and then broke into a rousing hymn:

  A Mighty Fortress is our God,

  A bulwark never failing;

  Our helper He amid the flood

  Of mortal ills prevailing;

  For still our ancient foe

  Doth seek to work us woe;

  His craft and pow’r are great …

  Cosgrove raised his voice and joined her in the final line:

  And arm’d with cruel hate,

  On earth is not his equal.

  Cosgrove was quite pleased with his rendition. “Marvelous hymn. Notwithstanding that the words are Martin Luther’s.”

  “He wrote both the words and the music,” Sarah said.

  “Imagine such music flowing from such an evil man,” Cosgrove said.

  When Sarah laughed, Cosgrove frowned. “I say that as a matter of actual fact. By my lights he was. He preached the promulgation of sex from the pulpit.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “How in the name of God did he do that?”

  “By advocating artificial birth control from the pulpit, that’s what he did. Funny thing, a man can be exalted for committing a sin of that magnitude.”

  “I met a nun the other day you might be interested in,” Sarah said. “She told me she was on an ‘erotic’ schedule. I said to her, ‘Oh, it must keep you busy.” She said, ‘It sure does. It has me going around crazy.’ I said to her, “Boy, do I know the feeling.’”

  “Please don’t talk to a member of the clergy like that,” Cosgrove said.

  “I’m in a better religion,” Sarah said.

  “There is only one true religion,” Cosgrove said.

  “Methodists are better than Catholics because we have better music,” Sarah said.

  When Cosgrove chuckled patronizingly, Sarah said, “I’m in a very active church. I’m going out to Las Vegas to get arrested at the nuclear testing site. They told me yesterday the best honor was to have a nuclear arrest on my record. My commitment gets a little shaky when I think of jail toilets. They have no door on them. Maybe I’ll weaken and sell my soul as a prostitute if the guards give me a toilet with a door.”

  “Now your humor fades,” Cosgrove said.

  “What have you done about nuclear war?” she asked him.

  “I think of the eternal soul, not some temporal explosion.”

  “When that thing goes off, it takes temporal with it,” Sarah said. “Where do you come from, anyway?”

  “I am a member of the Holy See’s African missions.”

  “No.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “If that’s so, then why do you talk like such a hot-eyed little man about irrelevant things?”

  “In Africa it is a shame that the true message of the faith is difficult for many to receive. But in a civilized land like this, one can demand that people adhere to rule. Rule of Rome.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that you call this a civilization?” Sarah said. “I have a notion that at least in Africa you can starve to death without being despised. Here, if you’re black, they hate you while you die.”

  “What nonsense,” Cosgrove said. “Looking at it from Rome, with fantastic objectivity, it was plain for all to see, from the Pope to the lowest clerk, that the trouble with America is wanton sex.”

  “We were in bed with each other all last night.” Sarah kissed Bushwick.

  “You speak like some brazen hussy.”

  “What did she do, kill somebody?” Bushwick asked.

  “You spent the night in bed with a man to whom you are not married in the eyes of God?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s the mortaler.”

  Sarah laughed and Cosgrove, in utter confusion, let Scotch splash full to the lip of the cup and threw it down, and to break the religious tension, which was going to split his heart, he roared into song:

  The wheel fell off of the hearse,

  The coffin fell out on the road.

  The mourner looks out of the windows

  And remarks: “Well I’ll be blowed.”

  The widow goes up to the driver,

  With tears in her eyes and she says:

  “What’s my poor Henry done to you,

  That you muck him about when he’s dead?”

  Sarah was surprised that this man, whom she obviously regarded as being insane, could sing with such charm. She laughed so delightedly that her head rocked almost into Cosgrove’s chest. There was just enough of a smell, not full perfume but certainly sweet soap, to cause Cosgrove’s prick to leap into life. He had another drink to drown it, but of course that only made his lust so rampant that he trembled from the insides of his shoes to his ears. He held out his arms to embrace Sarah, but she knew well enough to pull away. Cosgrove did not know enough to stop and he kept moving toward her, arms out, and she retreated along the bar and finally said, “Oh, I know you Irish priests! The first man into the house to comfort the widow!” This caused him pain and embarrassment and he said that he had to retrieve Great Big.

  On the way out, he stopped to ask Dawn what she was drawing. She showed him rough drawings of Bushwick, Sarah, and himself at the bar. All had wide flat noses and thick lips and the dress on Sarah had the word Love going down the front like buttons. Bushwick’s shirt had a sign across it with the word Love. And Cosgrove had a crucifix on a chain which was made of the word Love.

  Cosgrove and Dawn walked up staircases where men stood lighting their glass crack pipes. Up on the ninth floor, the hallway was filled with kids screaming and running around playing tag. They stopped playing and all turned and hit Dawn. “Your clothes stink!” they yelled. She hid her face. “Your mother makes you wear stinky clothes.”

  Cosgrove paid no attention to this silliness. “Which room?” Cosgrove demanded. Dawn pointed to one, and Cosgrove pounded on the door until it was answered by a
woman with a wrinkled sheet around her. Behind her, a man wearing nothing held the collar of a large yellow dog with a mean mouth, who struggled to get at Cosgrove. The room had a bed with no sheet on the stained mattress. On the windowsill, a hot plate sat on cardboard whose edges were black from a fire of some sort. Directly over the hot plate was an old paper shade. The window, lined with rags, looked out onto a brick wall. The floor was covered with scraps of clothes. The woman glared at Dawn. “Go play, child.”

  “I want something,” the girl said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Clean shirt. They say my clothes stink.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everybody.”

  The mother stepped out into the hall naked and screamed at the kids, “Who says her clothes stink?”

  Nobody answered. “You better not say anything about my daughter!

  “Go play,” she said to her daughter. She slammed the door and all the kids fell on her daughter and began hitting her. “Clothes stink!”

  Cosgrove, looking for Great Big, banged on the next door, and a man in a baseball cap looked out. He saw Cosgrove, but then his mouth broke into a great smile, revealing one tooth in the top of his head. “Come in here, see me,” he said.

  Dawn hid her face again.

  “She will do nothing of the sort.”

  “Girl! I said to you to come in here, see me,” the guy with one tooth said.

  Dawn obeyed the man. Cosgrove grabbed her by the arm and was about to lead her away when the man with one tooth reached out with a bat of some sort. Cosgrove never saw it coming, but it sure did arrive. When Cosgrove came out of it, the kids in the hallway were standing over him and passing a glass crack pipe around to each other. Crack smoke streamed from a little girl’s nostrils.