He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners

by Jimmy Breslin

  Now James Woods, wearing a security guard uniform, walked past, and upon seeing Cosgrove he issued greetings. “Are you our guard?” Cosgrove asked sleepily. “No, this is my home,” Woods said. “I got no home so they give me a day job guarding the rent-check computer. Make me jealous, I guess. This is my place to stay at night. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I told them. Do you know what they told me? ‘Take it or sleep under the trees.’”

  Woods went to find a cot. Cosgrove reached out and took the little Spanish baby’s hand and the child gripped firmly and Cosgrove, smiling, fell asleep in the huge drill shed. The birds chirped their evensong.

  The first sound in the pale light of early morning was “Shit in my eyes!”

  James Woods’s head came up and his hand began to wipe the bird dung from his face. This of course woke Cosgrove and he stared straight up to where pigeons flew through the air and their droppings came down through the morning light and hit the people sleeping on the cots under plastic blankets. Cosgrove suddenly was splattered just under the nose, and he froze when he thought that some went into his mouth, which he felt was a ridiculous thing to contemplate until he saw all over the drill shed people spitting bird dung onto the wood floor. Hundreds of pigeons cooed as they strutted about the rafters, then took off into the early morning air and dropped dung on the sleeping people.

  “My babies covered with shit,” Disco Girl hollered.

  Disco Girl’s three babies’ eyelids, covered with white bird dung, looked like white eye patches. Everywhere in the room the arising people were covered with about an hour’s worth of bird dung. At this point, with few people even complaining, the green canvas was pulled back and two soldiers and a man in a welfare jacket shouted, “All out!” Covered with bird dung, the couple of hundred people began to rise from their paper sheets. In the doorway stood a couple of black maintenance men holding brooms and a group of people in business suits, men and women dressed alike, and Cosgrove didn’t notice that Bushwick and Sarah were in the group.

  Cosgrove got up on a cot and began to scream. “I have discovered this country! Look up! Look up! And see these birds. Through all the ages they have been a symbol of beauty and peace. The doves released into the sky by His Holiness as a symbol of peace for the world. Dove in the sky. A sparrow on the bare branches of a tree, telling you that life is here even if leaves are not. Thrushes deep in the thicket calling out to the passerby. How settling! How calming! Birds at dusk, flying in magnificent formations through the sky.

  “In Africa, when there was a thirst and hunger, always, one saw the hope of birds in the sky. Only at the most bitter end, when we could neither breathe nor see, did the ugly vultures appear. And of course they had an appropriate presence because at the end the natural order must prevail and someone must be devoured by someone else. But now look what you have been able to do in America. You have the bird stand for something lousy. If it was a vulture, I could understand. But you have taken the pigeon, the lovely plump pigeon, who dares to tiptoe up to man, who often even trusts the hand of man, you have taken this bird that walks amongst our feet, and think of that, isn’t that a marvelous bird, he trusts us enough to walk with us. How marvelous. And we have made him the metaphor for America. A metaphor. Who here knows what a metaphor is?”

  The people stood in silence by their cots with paper sheets.

  “What sort of schools did you attend that they did not even teach you what a metaphor is? A metaphor is transferring a situation to something different, but yet with enough connections to the problem, by its presence in speech or on paper, to illuminate further the situation. Now I shall give you the metaphor for the times in which you live. The American metaphor. Oh yes, that is one thing we Irish are capable of doing. We do not tarry or dally with matters of the surface. We much prefer, in our less disciplined but far more talented way, to go to the core immediately. And, therefore, look about you and see the American metaphor, and you must excuse my language but I have seen it all now. Look about you and excuse my language, but here is the metaphor for America: ‘Birds shitting on the people!”’

  In the doorway, one of the group in business suits, Special Supervisor Harold Feinberg, sneered. “Now you see what we get here.”

  “Isn’t he a priest?” Sarah asked innocently.

  “Oh, he just is dressed that way. Catholics act much more responsibly. That is how you can tell the man is no priest. You never would see a Catholic priest making such a statement in a setting such as this. Oh no, this man is a fraud. Don’t listen to a word he says.”

  “I don’t think he’s a fraud,” Bushwick said.

  “I think it’s the first time the man has been lucid since he arrived here,” Sarah said.

  “No, he is a welfare thief. So is that big goon with him.” Feinberg pointed at Great Big. “I am the only person in the city stopping these two and some woman and a couple of kids they are using from falsely getting a house from this city.” He looked up at the clock. “See what they are doing. I have to call the commissioner at breakfast.”

  Bushwick and Sarah picked their way through cots and found Cosgrove wiping bird dung from himself and Disco Girl wiping Latasha Yee’s eyes with one hand and running the other through her hair in hopes the bird dung would go away. Cosgrove looked at Bushwick and Sarah in their business clothes and said, “The weapons of surrender.”

  “Brooklyn!” A van driver in a welfare worker zipper jacket was in the entranceway to the drill shed. Another worker came out and called, “Bronx.” There was general movement. Sarah took Disco Girl’s black baby, Bushwick held her Spanish product, and Disco Girl carried her Chinese, and together they walked out to the Brooklyn van. James Woods walked with them, wiping bird dung off the shoulders of his security guard uniform. They packed into the van, which first went all the way crosstown to Eighth Avenue, where the van negotiated through thick traffic and came to a halt. “There they go, in the instruments of surrender,” Cosgrove said tartly.

  Bushwick turned around. He pointed at Cosgrove. “Do you want to fight?”

  “Of course. That is my life. I fight for Christ,” Cosgrove said.

  “Then why don’t you just follow us and see what happens. I have something you can do that would help everybody in the city if you got away with it.”

  Bushwick told the van driver to wait for Cosgrove. He and Sarah, acting as if they didn’t know Cosgrove was behind them, walked into a building. Cosgrove walked with Woods. Inside the building, everybody showed a pass to the guard at the desk and the guard studied each pass intently and Cosgrove, by now so used to sneaking on subways, slipped past the guard without causing the air to move and waited for Woods, Sarah, and Bushwick at the elevator, which they rode to the ninth floor, where, as another guard carefully inspected Woods’s pass, Cosgrove flopped on his hands and knees and gave it the full turnstile crawl, straightened up, and waited.

  Bushwick sauntered by and said, out of the side of his mouth, “You go inside and just look for the two drums for the rent. The drum and the backup drum. They’ll be marked. They got them in racks. You take them out of here and you’ll have some big shots walking around thinking of suicide.”

  “We can’t promote death,” Cosgrove said.

  “What do you think we do all day?” Bushwick said. “We just try to keep it quiet.”

  Cosgrove wandered into the room with the white cabinets and blue tops of the computer mainframes. Sitting in a corner office, Bushwick listened to a lecture by the head of the computer room. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Cosgrove strolling about. Right over Cosgrove’s head was the big sign, NO BULKY COATS ALLOWED. And here was Cosgrove in a floppy black raincoat — a filthy raincoat, too — and he had a cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth and a wild look on his face as he paced about the room. Bushwick nodded solemnly to Cosgrove.

  The director of the systems room and the assistant director were explaining that all the tapes were kept on drums and that, for each category, there were a tape and a backup tap
e kept in canisters on the racks. And Cosgrove paced the room and his eyes scoured the cream-colored canisters, each with its tape markings down the spine, and he saw one tape that said, “Two-Party Rent Checks” and he had it under his raincoat with one move and he froze as he saw a tall black in a striped Brooks Brothers shirt and dungaree pants and wearing low blue Nikes striding toward him so quickly that he was certain that he could not get away. “Excuse me,” the tall black said. He reached past Cosgrove and slapped into the rack a canister whose tape marking said, “Two-Party Rent Checks BACKUP.” Cosgrove ditched this under his raincoat as well and strode out.

  In the circular lobby, James Woods was leaning on a counter and talking to a young woman, who indicated that Cosgrove had to show a pass to be allowed to go through the exit turnstile, and Cosgrove said to Woods, “See what I’ve learned in this country?” He ran up to the turnstile, slapped his right hand on it while hugging the bulging left side of his coat, and with one amazing pirouetting spinning leap he was over the turnstile. He faced the woman and bowed. “And that was taught to me on the number two train.” The woman behind the counter broke into a giggle and Woods thought it was amusing and Cosgrove whisked out through double-glass doors to the elevator.

  “You be livin’ here?” Disco Girl said, walking about what seemed to her to be the vastness of the empty rectory. One of her babies, the black one, was crawling on the floor and the other two were asleep on the only bed left in the place.

  “Soon everybody will be living someplace,” Cosgrove said. He sat on the floor, back against the wall, knees up, and wrote the second ransom note of his life, this one with deep anger rather than the trepidation of seeking ransom for Frankie Five Hundred. Or, to be precise, the late Frankie Five Hundred.

  His note said,

  I not only have your computer tapes but I fully understand their significance. I am not diabolical. I am merely attempting to prevent you from being consigned to the fires of Hell. No longer can I stand by and see people living as they do in this city. Therefore, you should immediately write down a plan to put all these poor people in a house and find them a job and submit the plan to me. By no later than midnight of Saturday. Have someone post your answer on the telephone pole in front of 365 Pine Street and depart immediately. If you remain in the area, it will be a sign of bad will and as you stand there the tapes will be destroyed. Do as you are told and catastrophe will be avoided.

  Cosgrove ducked out and took the note to the East New York Income Maintenance Center and stuffed it into the in-house mail slot under the information windows, wheeled, and left. Nobody on the long lines noticed him. At 4:00 P.M., the atmosphere in the income maintenance center became one of the deepest and most silent apprehension and there was neither sound nor commotion as the great computer shootback from welfare center to welfare headquarters was supposed to begin. The lights blinked and the whirring tapes stopped dead in the main center and suddenly all two floors stopped and on computer terminals in maintenance centers all over the city, including here in the East New York center, there appeared on the screen, flashing urgently, the message “Please Log Off Immediately.” The largest single industry in the greatest city on earth was at a standstill.

  It was at that point, late of a Friday, and with only forty-eight hours to go to save his system, that Harold Feinberg, in talking with Bushwick Taylor, heard enough to promise Bushwick Taylor the job of special chief assistant. Bushwick, who wanted to get married soon, found the offer irresistible.

  Cosgrove returned to the church basement on Friday evening to find Great Big and Disco Girl looking at each other lasciviously. Cosgrove found he didn’t care anymore. Late that night there came sounds from the rectory above. People had broken in. In the basement, Cosgrove placed a finger to his lips. He and Great Big sat in silence for many hours. During the silence, Great Big’s stomach recalled Africa. It was sometime after this, when there was complete silence in the place, that Cosgrove, from pure nervous exhaustion, fell asleep. And upstairs there was a loud sound in the church, as if someone had tripped over one of the broken kneelers that jutted out into the aisle.

  In the basement Cosgrove awoke with a start and said to Great Big, “What’s that?”

  Great Big, awake and hungry, said grumpily that he would look. As Cosgrove figured that he, too, would have to climb stairs, he counseled waiting for another sound. Exhaustion overtook him and he fell off. Upstairs there was another sound, as if someone in anger had just kicked something. Great Big went upstairs, where Harold Feinberg was tiptoeing through the church in the darkness.

  Imagine that fool Bushwick telling me not to come alone, Feinberg thought. If I had brought somebody with me, they would have two of us on television instead of just me. He had such dreams of gloriously carrying the tapes into a full New Opportunity meeting that he had no fear of the large cross in front of the church, even though, in growing up on Manhattan’s West Side, he had been assured, in attempting to walk by a red-haired Irish kid at Blessed Sacrament School, that Jews were Christ killers. As he stepped from the deep shadows of a pillar, Harold Feinberg found himself being struck by pale moonlight, which came through a broken, uncovered stained glass window. The pale moonlight was hesitant at first, but a cloud drifted away and the pale moonlight developed far more intensity and revealed, for all to see, Harold Feinberg, holder of a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College and of ambition unknown to reasonable man.

  In the morning, Cosgrove’s eyes watered as he swallowed. Red cabbage or horseradish or something like that.

  Late that afternoon, Disco Girl, good and cold, pulled the large old metal handle of the furnace door, which creaked open. She wondered if there was anything to burn. Disco Girl stuck her head inside.

  She let out a squeal that went up through the steam pipes. She ran over to Great Big and shook him. He refused to awaken. “I don’t make a baby with no one like you,” Disco Girl yelled at Great Big.

  She scooped up her three babies and ran out of the church. Hearing her, Cosgrove jumped up and rushed after her. Disco Girl, arms full of babies, was down in the gully and up on the other side by the time Cosgrove was in motion.

  “You don’t understand,” he yelled to Disco Girl.

  “You crazy,” she called.

  Cosgrove knew that if she made it to the corner, she could summon others, and there was no way to prevent such an occurrence, for she had too much of a lead on him and those legs of hers were simply gliding along.

  “You don’t understand that you are the ones who are being eaten alive. The other people are the cannibals!”

  “Nobody be eatin’ my whole leg!”

  “Of course they do. You just don’t notice it because they do it to you and your babies a little each day.”

  Cosgrove thought this was good and profound. Disco Girl thought it was good and crazy. She disappeared around the corner. It took thirty seconds before Cosgrove saw the patrol car tear around the corner and stop dead when the two patrolmen spotted him trudging alone in the cold rain toward the church. The cops in the car appeared to be using the radio. Sure were. Soon the city was in East New York.

  “Does he have them in there?” Pocantico Hills’s personal envoy, an in-law dispatched from Westchester, said, pointing to the huge furnace. Cosgrove was crouched in front of it like a hockey goalie. His arms were folded across his middle, covering the two canisters of computer tapes.

  “I don’t know,” Octavia Ripley Havermeyer said. “What does he have behind those arms?”

  “That’s just it,” the head of the emergency service squad said grimly. “If these tapes are that important and he has them on him and we shoot him, we shoot the tapes, too. Can’t do that, can we?”

  “My Lord, no,” Mrs. Havermeyer said.

  “If you could find some way to shoot him without hitting the tapes. I wish we had the Pinkertons here. They did it well for the family at Ludlow.”

  “I wish the mayor was here,” the inspector in charge of the
emergency service team said.

  “Mayor?” Pocantico Hills said. “Why in the world would you need him? Politicians have nothing to do with this city. I can tell you that.”

  “But in case something goes wrong, if he’s here he got to take the blame in the report instead of us.”

  “We don’t know who the mayor is,” Pocantico Hills said, in thought. His eyebrows raised. “But if you want a civil servant, we’ll just have Jimmy Carter fly up here from Washington. It won’t take long. We can wait.”

  “Excuse me,” Octavia said.

  “Oh, of course! Look what happens to me in tension. I completely forgot that we let Jimmy Carter go. Who did we replace him with? Oh, no wonder I didn’t recall. Much too old to get downstairs on fast notice, much less all the way up here. No, let’s just do this as is.”

  Cosgrove’s little body twitched. The cops, unsure as to whether Cosgrove was an evil spirit or insane man, jumped back. They had spent an entire day outside the church, hoping the thing would all go away, and now, on a Sunday afternoon, they had finally stormed the place. The outside help they felt could be useful was gathered on the wood staircase leading from the church to the basement: Bushwick and Sarah, Disco Girl, Baby Rock and Seneca, and a dark, obviously Italian priest who was introduced as the Papal delegate. They faced Cosgrove, who crouched in front of the furnace. Behind him were cement steps going up to the back yard of the church. On these steps, head down to avoid hitting the ceiling, was a glowering Great Big.

  “You didn’t burn them?” Pocantico Hills called over the heads of the crouching, nervous police to Cosgrove, who was frozen in front of the furnace.

  Cosgrove nodded.

  Pocantico Hills vaulted the crouching police and rushed forward, trying to push Cosgrove aside. When Cosgrove didn’t move quickly enough, Octavia Ripley Havermeyer simply reached around him and pulled open the furnace.