Johno started the moment he came through the restaurant doorway.
“All right,” he called out, almost happy, “here we are.”
He put a hand on the waiter. “Excuse me, sir. That’s fine. All right. Here we are.”
“She’s havin’ a heart attack!” the waiter shouted.
The woman slumped in the booth looked even more frightened.
Johno leaned over and ran a hand over the woman’s forehead.
“Well, dear, you’re not having a heart attack,” Johno said. “How can you have a heart attack when you don’t sweat? You ought to know better than that. What did you eat? That’s what’s bothering you.”
The frightened eyes closed. When they opened, the woman in the booth looked five years younger.
“Pain is in the chest, right?” Johno said.
She nodded yes.
He had her hand and was feeling for the pulse. “I’ll tell you,” Johno said, “I play horses, lady. I’m betting gall bladder. That’s a four-to-five shot, dear. Relax, nobody died from gall bladder.”
By the time the ambulance came, he had the woman in the booth quiet and smiling a little. The other women were calmed down. The waiters were relaxed. When the place cleared, Johno sat in a booth as if it were a broken car seat. “Hey, you,” he said to the waiter, “bring me a straight VO.”
Johno said to Dermot, “You see that cocksucker standin’ in everybody’s way when we come in? Doin’ fuckin’ nothin’. Scarin’ the poor woman half to death. I would of done some scream job on him, but I was afraid I’d make the woman scared. What the fuck do I know what was the matter with her? She could’ve gone out right there on us.”
“It was gall bladder,” Dermot said.
“That’s what you say,” Johno said. “I don’t know what the fuck she had. I told her she wasn’t sweatin’. Chris-sake, I touched her head, it was like a faucet.”
Johno lives in Ozone Park, down by the race track. When Dermot and Johno and their wives go out, every fifth or sixth week, Dermot and his wife drive down to the Cross Bay Theater, on Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. The wives go into the movie and Dermot and Johno walk up the block, past Shep’s Army & Navy Store, Aid Auto Supplies, Chen’s Chow Mein to Tommy Madden’s bar. Always, in Tommy Madden’s, it is the same. Dermot and Johno sit at the end of the bar, near the window, and Tommy Madden, bald, his ears lumps of skin, sits on a stool and talks about his days as a fighter.
“Al Weill managed me,” Tommy Madden said one night,
“He was a hump,” Johno said.
“He was a cutey,” Tommy Madden said.
“A hump,” Johno said. “I may be a prick, but I’m not a hump.”
Nobody talked for a while. Then Johno said to Dermot, “You know, that play never worked once.”
“What play?”
“What play? For Chrissake, what’s the matter with you? Hump. The Long twenty-two. How many times do you think it worked?”
Dermot was trying to think. “Fuck, I don’t know,” he said.
“My ass you don’t know. Hump. We had the Long twenty-two when I was playing and when I come to see you play, you had the same play. Don’t shit me. You humps couldn’t make it work either.”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Dermot said.
“Well, I’m tellin’ you again, it never worked when I played. We couldn’t even make it work against Flushing the year we beat them thirty-seven points. We used to make it out of a double wing. Second and short yardage. Or right after you recover a fumble and you’re lookin’ to—boom!—hump ’em. The ends go away down and cross over. You throw the fuckin’ thing as far as you can. What are you tellin’ me you can’t remember. Chrissake. You had the same thing. I seen you try it against Stuyvesant. Out of the T, but the same thing. Long twenty-two. You humps couldn’t make it work, either.”
When the movies got out, the wives came to the sidewalk in front of the bar. Johno and Dermot came outside and took them to the pizzeria two doors down. They ordered pies. Johno swallowed wine. His wife, Emily, kept her cloth coat on. She was so fat that she wore the same smocks, faded and worn, that she used when she was pregnant.
“We don’t have long to go,” Emily said.
“Twenty-three months,” Johno said. “Then right to Fort Lauderdale. No geese there. People down there know what to do with the niggers. They’re not humps, the people in Fort Lauderdale.”
“Maybe someday we all could be livin’ in Fort Lauderdale,” his wife said.
Dermot’s parents were born in Queens. His father in Woodside, his mother in Jamaica. His father played the piano in taverns in Sunnyside and Woodside, and in the summer at Long Beach, out on Long Island. All the saloons in the west end of Long Beach, the Irish end, had piano players on Sunday afternoons.
Dermot can remember only two scenes involving his father, both of them during the winter.
He came home one day and said to Dermot’s mother, “I saw Carmen Cavallaro today.”
“Did you?”
“He was having a cup of coffee in the Automat.”
“Really? What did he look like?”
“Looked like a million dollars.”
And Dermot remembers the afternoon in the winter. He was in second grade then, and he and his sister, who wasn’t in school yet, were running toy cars over the linoleum on the floor of the apartment in Sunnyside. Dermot and his sister kept asking the father if they could go downstairs and play out on the street. All the father did was stand at the window with his hands in his pockets. The day was cold and became dark early. Dermot and his sister sat on the couch and the sister began picking on him and he pushed her and she began crying. The father kept looking down at the street and not seeming to hear them. Finally, his mother came in from work. She had a city job with the Department of Purchase. His mother did not talk. She put on a light, stood there with her coat still on, and glared at Dermot’s father. Dermot remembers his mother going into the kitchen and his father walking into the bedroom. In the kitchen, dishes still were on the table and sink. Dermot heard his mother taking ice out of the refrigerator. When the father went in to see her, she had her back to him.
“Just stay out of here now,” she said.
He and his sister were on the couch, pushing each other, when Dermot’s mother came out of the kitchen and walked into the bedroom. She slammed the door behind her. First, there was whispering. Then his mother shouted, “You!”
There was a big noise now, and his father was shouting and his mother shrieking. One shriek after the other. Dermot opened the bedroom door. His father, standing nearest to Dermot, was trying to ram the bed against Dermot’s mother and pin her to the wall. Dermot grabbed at his father’s arm. His sister came into the room crying. His mother threw herself onto the bed. She was half sitting, half kneeling, grabbing for her husband’s face. The father shoved Dermot away and walked out of the apartment. The mother sat on the bed crying with her mouth open. His sister had her arms wrapped around her mother. Dermot went into the kitchen and got a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. The same red-and-white label they have today. He put the can of soup against the apartment door. This made him feel like he was protecting his mother and sister and he stood by the door, watching his can of soup that kept the door shut. He heard his father come back to the door. The lock turned. He still can see the apartment door swinging in, the can of soup rolling into the dimness in one of the corners of the living room.
Dermot does not remember ever seeing his father after that day. His mother took his sister and him to his grandmother’s house, her mother’s house, in Jamaica. The grandmother was a widow. Dermot’s two uncles lived in the house. The grandmother’s other child, an aunt, was married and lived in White Plains, up in Westchester. Nobody ever mentioned his father’s name in the house. Whenever somebody in school asked Dermot about him, Dermot said his father was dead. Dermot was terrified that one of the kids would find out that his father really was alive and was not living in Dermot’s house.
One day when he came home from school, Dermot found his grandmother in the kitchen talking to an older woman and the older woman made a fuss over Dermot.
“Looks just like his mother,” Dermot remembers his grandmother saying.
“And he’s got a lot of somebody else in that face too,” the other woman said.
The grandmother held a finger to her lips and Dermot remembers her saying, “Shhhhhsh now,” and the words went through him and he ran out of the kitchen.
One day, Dermot was in the bedroom he shared with one of his uncles, and his sister was trying to get in and Dermot tried to keep her out. He slammed the door on his sister’s hand, cracking one fingernail badly, and she ran downstairs screaming. His mother stood in the hallway looking at the finger, and Dermot remembers hanging over the banister and his mother looking up at him and saying to him, “You’re no good. You’re just like him. He’s no good and you’re no good.”
At home, all Dermot ever heard from his uncles was police talk. Early one morning when he was about nine, he came downstairs, it was about six-thirty, and he found his Uncle Tom had his pistol and blackjack on the table and he was drinking beer out of a Kraft-cheese glass that had blue flowers on it. Uncle Tom took a quart bottle of Piel’s beer and poured it like ketchup. The beer splashed and foam ran up over the sides of the glass. Uncle Tom’s head dropped like an elevator and he began sucking up foam. “The people dyin’ in the desert!” he said. Dermot went over to the refrigerator to get milk for his Rice Krispies. On the wall alongside the refrigerator was the Proclamation of Irish Independence of 1916. Everybody in the family, the uncles first of all, had Dermot memorize it. “Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to the flag and strikes for her freedom… .”
Dermot remembers sitting over his cereal on the opposite side of the table from Uncle Tom. Tom patted the blackjack. “Ah, your Uncle Tom got plenty use out of this last night,” he said.
“Where?” Dermot asked.
“Bedford-Stuyvesant.”
“Bedford-Stuyvesant?”
“Niggers,” Uncle Tom said.
He produced some whisky to slop into the beer and he threw one big drink down, this one so quickly that it splashed against his bottom lip and brown drops fell on his undershirt. He took the pistol out of the holster. He released the cylinder, dropped bullets onto the table, pushed the cylinder back, and held out the gun. “Listen to your Uncle Tom now. Good boy! Go upstairs and poke your Uncle Jack with this. Just poke him and say, ‘Post time!’ Do that now. Good boy!”
Dermot took the gun and ran upstairs. The grip and the ridges of metal felt nice in his hand. The finger on the trigger gave him the same feeling he has had every time he ever holds a gun. It starts between the legs.
Uncle Jack was asleep on his face. Dermot shouted, “Post time!” and poked the gun into his ear. He moved his head and his face rolled out on the pillow and Dermot held the gun steady so that when his Uncle Jack opened his eyes for the first time he was looking into the barrel of the pistol. His mouth popped open. In one motion he grabbed the pistol and gave Dermot a clout on top of the head.
He remembers his Uncle Jack walked into the kitchen, opened the cylinder, poked it with a finger, and a bullet fell onto the kitchen table. Gray and brass rolling around in the spilled beer, the sun from the kitchen windows shining on the wet metal. Dermot reached to grab the bullet. Uncle Jack hit him on top of the head again, this time so hard that everything went black.
When Dermot came home from school that day, Uncle Jack was still in his pajamas at the kitchen table. He was sitting across from Dermot’s grandmother and they both were drinking from a quart bottle of Piel’s beer.
“You really saw it?” the grandmother said.
“I saw my whole life,” Uncle Jack said.
Uncle Tom was back on the living-room couch. He was snoring loudly. He smelled so badly from his breath, armpits, and socks with caked soles that Dermot could not stay in the room with him.
Dermot Davey came out of St. Monica’s grammar school with the same grounding in life as so many other policemen in New York. The girls in his class were told by the nuns never to wear patent-leather shoes. The nuns said, “They give you headaches.” In the higher grades, in the boys’ room, Dermot learned that the nuns were against patent leather because a man could look down at a girl’s shoes and see up her dress.
The rest of the education which stuck, the religious education, came out of the Baltimore Catechism. The name “Baltimore” comes from the Council of American Bishops, which first approved the book. The Baltimore book used by Dermot had a blue cover, which he still remembers, and it taught him the basics of the Roman Catholic belief, which he, like everybody else, still can recite with no preparation.
Q Who made the world?
A God made the world.
Q Who is God?
A God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
Q What is man?
A Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
Q Why did God make you?
A God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.
Q Are the three Divine Persons one and the same God?
A The three Divine Persons are one and the same God, having one and the same Divine nature.
Q How do we know this to be true?
A It is a mystery.
Q What is the Sixth Commandment?
A The Sixth Commandment is: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Q What are we commanded by the Sixth Commandment?
A We are commanded by the Sixth Commandment to be pure in thought and modest in all our looks, words and actions.
Q What is forbidden by the Sixth Commandment?
A The Sixth Commandment forbids all unchaste freedom with another’s wife or husband; also all immodesty with ourselves or others in looks, dress, words or actions.
The last one always sticks. Dermot and his wife had their first two children in the first two and one-half years of marriage. They spoke of not having any more children for some time. Dermot came home one night after working a four-to-midnight and having a couple of drinks on the way home. Phyllis was sleeping with her back to him. He reached over her shoulder and ran a hand over her. She shook her shoulder. He began kissing her neck. She moved away. “Come on now, it’s a very bad time,” she said. Dermot said he would be careful. He put a hand onto her breast. She shrugged her shoulder to get his hand away and pulled the cover up over her. “Come on now,” she said. “I’m telling you it’s a bad time.”
Dermot went to sleep irritated with her. In bed, Phyllis always took the last look to be sure the bedroom door was closed. She never wanted sex in the daytime, and Dermot worked many nights, and when they were having sex she seemed to be trying to control her breathing. She was now going even beyond this.
When they got up the next morning, Dermot was even more irritated with her. Phyllis acted as if nothing had happened. Phyllis’s mother had agreed to take care of the kids for the day, and they were going to take a drive out to Long Island. Dermot gave Phyllis the car keys. He sat in the front seat with his eyes closed. When Phyllis got in next to him, his left side, the side touching her, squirmed. Phyllis drove on the Northern State Parkway.
It was the last week of October and the trees were changing colors. As they got farther out on Long Island, the trees had brighter reds and yellows. Dermot said nothing during the drive. For an hour and a half he sat in the car and looked out the window and he did not speak to his wife and she did not speak to him. Finally, when they were out at the end of the parkway and were going onto Montauk Highway, Dermot turned on the car radio. It made a loud static and nothing else. They were going down an incline at Eastport, with a pond in the incline covered with red and yellow leaves on on
e side, and on the other side the sun glinting off the bay that leads to the ocean. And Dermot said the only words he was to say all day. “Just take me home.”
She pulled into an old gas station with thick trees and a portico hanging over the gas pumps, turned around, and started back for Queens.
They were almost home when she said, “That’s why you’re mad.”
Dermot didn’t answer.
“You’re mad because of that,” she said.
He still didn’t answer.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
Sometimes, Dermot felt that if he and Phyllis had been born a little later, just a couple of years later, they might be like so many of the young Catholic couples of today. Dermot always noticed that younger, people do not seem to become embarrassed or to lapse into Queens words at the subject of sex. He and Phyllis received the old Diocese of Brooklyn schooling. She was taught that sex is solely for having children who will become good Catholics. And never to wear patent-leather shoes. Dermot was taught that it is perfectly natural for a young man to have severe temptations, but there is no temptation which cannot be overcome by an Our Father and ten Hail Marys. The one line that stayed with Dermot the most during his life was said to him late one Saturday afternoon by a priest in confession. Dermot was in his first year in high school. Eyes closed, highly nervous, he told a priest that he had committed a sin of touch. “How?” the priest said.
“I touched a girl with my hand,” Dermot said. “Externally or internally?” the priest said. “Internally.”
“Would you like somebody doing that to your sister?” the priest said.
Dermot and his wife, like so many others from the same background, were unable to discuss sex. Many times they went two weeks without sex. And immediately after that, two or three more weeks. It seemed to Dermot that his wife was always heaving herself onto her side, her back to him. It would make him angry and he would move out onto the edge of the bed on his side. And then he would not come near her for weeks. Once, they went seven weeks without sex. There was no way for them to handle the subject in conversation. It always came out to be a fight over wallpaper or weak coffee.
World Without End, Amen Page 6