He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  Seneca shook her head. “Baby Rock and me have to be engaged first.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Baby Rock, you be wantin’ to get married?” Baby Rock nodded. Seneca stood up straight. “We be engaged. Now we be married.”

  Cosgrove hurled his voice out as if presiding in a great cathedral. “Seneca, do you take Baby Rock for your lawful wedded husband, to love, honor, and cherish, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”

  “I be,” Seneca said in a small voice.

  Elise Mabrey and the other women cried.

  “And do you, Baby Rock …”

  It was over quickly and Cosgrove had the women sign as witnesses and he pushed Baby Rock and Seneca on their way. Holding hands, they ran to Baby Rock’s job in the Chinese restaurant.

  “Now Baby Rock gets the house,” Cosgrove said to Feinberg.

  “Oh, we’ll see.” Feinberg chuckled. “The license is probably invalid because of the girl’s age.”

  “God has joined them,” Cosgrove said.

  “Perhaps,” Feinberg said airily. “But I will check you out to the ends of the earth and I am certain I can find a way to block you and your charges from getting what you want. Who are you people to try to slip around my ruling?” he said.

  This depressed Cosgrove, for he felt that Feinberg probably would be able to obstruct as he pleased. Well, you tried, he thought glumly, now best be on your way.

  Getting off a subway at Jackson Heights, where they would catch the bus for the airport, Cosgrove and Great Big were in a dim hallway between staircases and here was a door with a sign that said, BAR. Of course Cosgrove would not go into such a place, for he had to get to Ohio, but upon thinking he decided that there were many planes to Ohio, and into the bar he went, patting the envelope in his inside jacket pocket, the five hundred in twenties nestled there safely, God bless this Frankie Five Hundred’s soul, and I will deal with that later and at length in the sanctity of the seminary in Ohio, he told himself.

  He and Great Big first walked into an empty lounge room and took a staircase up to a large dim bar that was empty in the midmorning. A gaunt, bald man was dusting bottles. His eyes fell on Great Big and widened, but the shine of fear went away as he saw Cosgrove’s collar and heard his voice.

  Cheerfully, the barman served rye and soda water in little glasses and Cosgrove flipped one down, ordered another, and drank it as quickly and almost as enthusiastically as Great Big. They had a couple more and Cosgrove, looking out on the gray cold morning, was satisfied that they had all day for planes and certainly could use some warmth and pleasurable drink, so he settled at the bar with Great Big and gave a long, thoughtful sigh.

  The benighted adventure now was over. He at first told himself that it certainly had been a horrible experience, but on another drink he scolded himself for this attitude. He and Great Big were alive, and this is the only reward a human being truly should expect, that of being allowed to breathe in the morning. That simple act of breathing of course is proof that man comes from God, and, Cosgrove reminded himself, one must never forget it. The most learned people have never been able to understand what causes a baby to take its first breath. Oh no, nobody understands that without professing a belief in God. The second thing is, how can humans, all other senses stilled, sound asleep, know enough to breathe?

  Furthermore, Cosgrove scolded himself, he should be ecstatic that events had allowed him to come to America, for certainly he had discovered things about America. The poor were everywhere and would be with us forever, was that not in the oldest of stories, in the very tale of the Agony? Of course he had made a promise to Disco Girl to assist her in finding someplace to live, but this was unimportant when matched against his duty to go to Ohio and prepare a most forceful presentation of his case to the Pope’s speech-writers.

  Think of the opportunity that God has handed you, Cosgrove told himself, to influence all of Catholic thought everywhere. Good boy yourself, Cosgrove! He had another rye, bought cigarettes, touched the thrilling twenties in his jacket pocket, brought another of them out and into play on the wet bar, and considered over new rye whether he had discovered in his subconscious one way to address the complexities of the true religion and its relation to modern science.

  He thought that the church could not block the proper advancement of science, but at the same time, if the only way to get the male sperm was to have the man masturbate, then there was no way for scientific advancements to be countenanced in the facts of sin. Somewhere, however, there was a way around this that was acceptable theologically and scientifically. He, Cosgrove, exposed to America the most, merely had to come up with the correct answer and he would be a most powerful figure in the Vatican. Good boy yourself, Cosgrove, have another and think on!

  For a moment, Cosgrove saw Disco Girl in his mind. You really should have gone to see her, he told himself. Sadly, he thought of Disco Girl in the G Building lobby. By now, he had completely forgiven her for trying to push his poor face into that black bush of hers. Oh, he understood that the black bush could destroy the world, but that was in a general sense; the individual must always be forgiven. At the G Building, Disco Girl couldn’t even get the doctor to look at her. Cosgrove remembered the doctor’s just waving a hand, his eyes not even bothering with Disco Girl’s naked body, and saying in such a bored voice, “Please get dressed.”

  Here in the bar, Cosgrove had another drink and stared out at the old El whose pillars were streaked with rust. The street under the El was lined with small shops, the sidewalks crowded with blacks and Hispanics. Cosgrove decided that this would be the last drink and they would leave for Ohio. As he threw his head back to down that last good drink, he saw outside the saloon window a young woman, cheerful, her face smooth and round, carrying a baby in a faded snowsuit into the subway. He noticed that the woman was holding a little boy by the hand. Cosgrove saw that the mother was wearing green fabric summer shoes on the cold wet pavement and the little boy’s sneakers did not appear new. He closed his eyes against this sight and swallowed his drink quickly, for he and Great Big had to get the plane to Ohio, where they would have both comfort and an important duty.

  At 2:00 P.M., Cosgrove and Great Big were crowded into the rear of the van in front of the Flatbush Arms Hotel with Disco Girl sitting in front of them. She had a baby in the crook of each arm and Great Big had the third baby, the Oriental, a blanket over all but her slant eyes, in his lap. The driver, a bald black man, wore a blue rain jacket with some sort of gold lettering on the back proclaiming WELFARE WORKER. In the front seat sat a white woman with short dark hair and glasses and protruding teeth. She introduced herself as Arlene Schneider, and the moment the van moved she turned around and lectured Disco Girl. “Now, you know, this is your last chance. If you do not take the apartment we show you today, you must go all the way down to the bottom of the ladder. You must go back and live in a shelter and work your way up to a hotel. This lottery is totally new to us. We must see if it works. But you are a player. So today is so awfully important for you. It is three-and-two day on the batter.”

  “Why are there only three chances?” Cosgrove said.

  “Because the rules are patterned after baseball. Three strikes and you are out.”

  A woman with Arlene introduced herself as Ms. Saturday. When she was asked her first name she said, “Just Mizzz.” A light-skinned black with light red hair, she held a new black briefcase on her lap. “I am from the Bureau of Child Welfare,” she said. “I must see that the apartment they furnish this young woman and her children is up to livable standards for the children. If not, she cannot have the children in the apartment. If she takes an improper apartment, then we take the children away from her on the spot. I merely call the precinct to have this done.”

  “What happens,” Cosgrove asked, “if she does not take the apartment today, which is her third strike, as it were?”

  The two women shrugged.

  “I be
out,” Disco Girl said. “I be back to tryin’ commotions at the G Building.”

  The van rocked over streets of deserted old apartment houses whose vacant doorways fronted broken streets. They reached a street that was a block from the ocean in Coney Island, a street that was the difference between Heaven and Hell, a street of frame houses that had been burned and an apartment house with a narrow, dark entrance that was stuffed with children.

  “Crack-a-Jack?” one of the kids said.

  At the end of the dark hallway, Arlene and Ms. Saturday banged on a door and a dog snarled and tried to scratch his way through the door. The superintendent, a Puerto Rican in a straw hat, opened the door slightly, slipped out so the dog, whose yellow teeth showed in the opening, couldn’t rush out to bite the visitors. He led them up three flights to a landing on which one apartment, doorless, was charred from a fire. Inside, men stood in the half light and smoked glass crack pipes. A young woman in a housedress and old sweater was knocking at the door of a second apartment and when it opened two men in undershirts looked out. She handed them money, and they gave her two plastic crack vials.

  The superintendent opened the third apartment and showed Disco Girl in. The ceilings were rust-stained from water dripping through and the floors sagged noticeably underfoot. Garbage was piled in corners, old garbage, soda bottles, and potato chip bags, and in the kitchen new plaster chips showed that rats had been eating a large hole around the pipes.

  “I could fix it up,” Disco Girl said sorrowfully.

  Cosgrove looked for a bathroom. “It’s right out in the hall,” the superintendent said. “It’s all right. You only got two apartments using it up here. Know how many hours a day a bathroom goes empty? Bathroom is empty twenty-three hours a day. Maybe even high-class buildings should have two, three families using the same bathroom.”

  Ms. Saturday, standing in the doorway, said, “Who is in the other apartment?”

  “I don’t know. I just rent. You want to know who they are, you go ask them.”

  “I have seen enough,” Ms. Saturday said. “I’m sorry,” she said to Disco Girl, “but if you move in here, you must surrender your children to my agency.”

  “And if you don’t take this apartment, you must go back to a shelter and start all over again,” said Arlene Schneider, her teeth seeming to protrude more, as she was speaking with pursed lips.

  Disco Girl looked at Cosgrove and her face further saddened when she saw that he had no solution. “I don’t know why I told myself you be helpin’ me,” she said. “I know more than you do.”

  On sad legs, she walked out of the apartment and went out to the van, where Great Big was throwing the babies up in the air like Indian clubs, and although they were too young to understand fully what was going on, they gurgled in delight.

  Cosgrove was mortified because he had no helpful thought for Disco Girl. But then, he had nothing particularly helpful for the Pope, either. Howard Beach, a little perhaps, but somehow one major new thought must flare inside his brain and be introduced in a magnificent display of Catholic articulateness, subject, verb, object, one sentence connected to the other to form a flow, yet always simple; one does not require a complex sentence to introduce a complex thought. Think on, Cosgrove! He winced. He couldn’t even assist this poor wretch, Disco Girl. He huddled in the van and tried to think.

  Arlene Schneider told the driver, “Let us off here,” as she ripped a blank off a pad and handed it to him. “Here is the address for their shelter for the night.” She and Ms. Saturday walked off.

  In the van, Cosgrove’s head drooped and he fell asleep. Nausea awoke him; the van was rocking to a stop in traffic that was thicker than grass. By now it was dusk and past. The driver gave it one more stop and start, shook his head, and turned onto a street where the potholes caused the van to bounce so high that Cosgrove was certain he would throw up. He also realized that he had a fierce need to urinate. The driver said that they were assigned to an armory all the way over in a high-class part of Manhattan because the shelters in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan were chock-full. “Take us about twenty minutes,” the driver said.

  Cosgrove sat in pain and the van bounced up to East Sixty-fifth Street, turned, and rocked to another halt. Ahead, the wide avenue was motionless with traffic that had the cross streets blocked. On the side street in front of the van, limousines were triple-parked in front of a place that was obviously a restaurant, but one that was so important it had no neon sign. His personal plumbing causing agony, Cosgrove yanked the van door open and ran for the double-glass, lace-curtained restaurant doors. Entering the place at this moment were the two oldest blond women he perhaps had ever seen, diamonds swinging from their earlobes. Behind them came two elegantly dressed ancient men, shuffling. Cosgrove rushed in ahead of the two old women and immediately inside a maître d’ looked up in horror at Cosgrove, who had the smell of welfare life all over him. This prompted the maître d’ to try to place his body in front of Cosgrove, who made a proper selection of directions. He headed for a spot at the far end of the bar, which was so crowded with old people — ancient people to be factual — awaiting tables that Cosgrove caused the maître d’ to be stacked up against the old people, a pickoff.

  At the end of his short dash, Cosgrove found he had been correct, and he flew into a splendid men’s room. Emerging, he had to pass the bar, where an old barman in white linen and matching hair placed drinks in wrinkled hands that shook.

  “Barman, I’ve an idea,” Cosgrove said. “Serve your drinks in the heaviest glasses available. It will help these poor old souls to hold them without so much spillage. Look about you.”

  The old people gasped and inspected their clothes and in doing so they of course put their glasses on the bar and Cosgrove snatched a martini and threw that down with a gulp, saw a large white wine, which took a couple of slugs, and by the time the maître d’ rushed up, Cosgrove had somebody’s big vodka and soda and he was down to the lime when Puerto Rican janitors enthusiastically carried Cosgrove to the door, which the maître d’ held open.

  The maître d’ knew immediately that he had made a mistake, but such was the glee of the Puerto Ricans that it was too late to stop them from heaving Cosgrove high into the air, where he flew directly into two old women, huddled in their fur coats and nearly being blown over by the wind on the street. One woman, having no balance at all, fell with her ankle under her, and it cracked like a stick. The other woman was so concerned about choking on her false teeth that she clapped both hands to her mouth and cared nothing about balance and of course tumbled to the ground with limbs clearly injured but her hands still at her mouth to prevent choking on false teeth.

  Since Cosgrove was pitched so high into the air, one of his shoes just happened to graze the hand of an approaching old man, who hollered in pain, for the shoe chipped a wrist bone.

  A heavy woman alighting from a car with a pad and pen in her hand screamed out, “You have just visibly damaged New York nightlife.”

  The van was just pulling out of the street and going to what was obviously a public building of some sort, the armory, of course, on the far side of the wide avenue. Cosgrove thought the grass plots in the center of the avenue looked familiar. With that first truly great rush of whiskey warmth, he walked straight out into the wide street, headlights playing on him as the cars either stopped or whisked around him. How jolly, he thought, and he caught up with the van at the entrance to the armory, which was under a long canopy.

  More old women in furs and men in scarves and white hair, if indeed they had any left, walked up the steps under the canopy. As Disco Girl, Great Big, and the babies got out of the van, another large black man in a welfare worker jacket and two soldiers closed in on them and had them wait against the wall until the rich were off the stairs under the canopy. Then the soldiers led the welfare van riders into the building, with its gold lights on old wood and pictures of great past generals. Immediately inside two young women were seated at a desk with a discre
et sign on it saying, WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB COMMITTEE.

  Clearly, from a distance of many yards behind them, which is the closest Cosgrove and the others were allowed to come, the old women thought it was delightful to be in such a masculine place as the armory and the old men looked at the pictures of the past generals knowledgeably. They strolled along a polished wood hallway toward the elevator.

  One of the women admired the dress of another, and the one in the dress said, “When I got this in Bloomingdale’s, I found it so disgusting. When you used to buy something for a thousand dollars and more, at least they put you off in a corner where you had some privacy and people didn’t have to notice. When I picked this out the other day, I was standing with everyone else, a cattle run, and I found it all so distasteful. They had shopgirls paying four hundred dollars for a blouse right next to me. I couldn’t decide whether they were trying to bring me down to the shopgirls’ level or bring the shopgirls up to mine. At any rate, I think that store has lost its standards.”

  When they were gone, the soldiers and the man in the welfare worker jacket rushed Cosgrove and the five with him through huge double doors and into the gloomy drill shed of the armory, where, far down the end, behind a green canvas partition, they saw hundreds of cots covered with paper sheets and people sitting stooped over on the edges of the beds. There was a low murmur from the few who spoke to each other. Cosgrove seized the first cot in his way and flopped on it in fatigue from his day and in befuddlement from the whiskey. Disco Girl and Great Big, their arms full of babies, put two of them on one cot and Disco Girl jammed pacifiers in their mouths. The third, Latasha Yee, the Oriental, was snuggled in her arms. Disco Girl wearily stretched out on the cot. Great Big took the one next to her; his head and most of his back were on the bed, and the rest of him hung over the end. In the rafters of the huge drill shed, they heard the sound of birds chirping vespers.