“What game?”
“I’m surprised you never heard of it.” He handed me “Shout” and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes.”
“See, Ernest, Mikey’s brother, no wait, lemme backtrack. Mikey had a sister, Linda. She used to blow the goddamn phonebook, both the white pages and the yellow pages. I mean, if you went up to the roof of her building now there’s probably still two permanent kneecap depressions in the gravel. So, anyways, the thing was, every time Ernest heard about his sister blowin’ some guy he went berserk, tracked the guy down and beat the poor guy to shit. You sure you didn’t know Ernest Feeny?” He became more relaxed.
“Hey, man, I hardly remember Mikey.”
“Well, you remember how tough Mikey was, right? Well, fuckin’ Ernest used to destroy Mikey, just as a workout before breakfast. That’s why Mikey was so mean. Anyway, so Linda would give head’ then Ernest would break head. In the spring of nineteen sixty, we were in junior high, you and I, Linda starts running with Freddy Victor, who played ball for Sacred Cross. This guy was hip to Ernest but he figures if he stays in his neighborhood he’s safe. So Linda always went over to his house because she didn’t want her brother beating on him.”
“Where’d he live?”
“All the way over in Marble Hill, and Ernest knew what was going down, but he knew if he started something in Marble Hill it would be like GI Joe stepping into a Vietcong stronghold and saying, ‘Who’s bad here!’ Okay? So he was very frustrated. Anyway, like I said, Freddy was on the baseball team at Sacred Gross and that year Sacred Cross won their division. Now, Ernest, he pitched for Our Lady of Sorrows, in a different division. I mean when he wasn’t stomping on Linda’s blowjobees. That year, Our Lady of Sorrows won their division title, okay? Of course there had to be a playoff between the two divisions to see who represented the Bronx and played whoever the Catholic school champs were gonna be in Manhattan, right? Big game in Yankee Stadium. Bronx versus Manhattan, dinner with the mayor, the whole thing.”
“Ernie is pitching. Freddy is scared because he has got to stand up there against Ernest. And fucking Ernest had a fast ball; his catcher, Frank Mazza, had to soak his hand in brine and tape sponges to his palm. I mean Ernest had a smoker. You used to get up there to bat, next thing you knew somebody had to hand you a -school newspaper so you could read that you were struck out. So Freddy’s fucking scared, and he is a good hitter too, but he didn’t know what was going on in crazy Ernie’s brain, and he felt very vulnerable. The first two times he gets up Ernie is not only not using his fast ball, but he’s feeding them over the plate so nicely that the ball was coming in, it should have had a knife and fork on either side of it. Freddy hits a double, then a triple. Ernie’s smoking out everybody else though, and by the bottom of the ninth, the score is one up. Ernie walks two guys, strikes out a guy, gives up a single, strikes out another guy. Now that is what you call your classic baseball drama situation. Score’s one up, bottom of the ninth, two out, bases loaded. And who do you think comes up to bat? Freddy Victor. Freddy is having illusions of Bobby Thomson. He’s got the golden bat that day and he’s not too worried about Ernie anymore. As a matter of fact, he’s thinking maybe Ernie is a little worried about him, you know? So… he’s up there. Ernie runs him to a three-and-two count. Okay, you got the tension mounting, the drum roll in the background. Ernie takes off his cap, just stands there, not winding up. Just glaring at Freddy for a long time, and then suddenly he rockets this smoking fireball down the lane. Boom it hits Freddy right in the fucking chest! Freddy gets blown back right into the umpire and -collapses. He’s dead. The ball smashed a rib, the rib punctured the heart. But dig! Here’s the irony. Sacred Cross, Freddy’s team, wins the game! Because even though he was killed, he was hit by a pitch, so he automatically advanced to first, the bases were loaded, so a run came in. Sacred Cross wins, two to one.”
We stared at each other for a whole minute. A scratchy 45 was stuck on “Kick mah heels up an’,” “Kick mah heels up an’,” “Kick mah heels up an’.”
“What a huge steaming pile of bullshit,” I said softly, shaking my head in amazement.
“I know, but it’s a great story, ain’t it? I love tellin’ stories about the neighborhood.” Donny reached over and removed the needle from the record.
I wanted to tell Donny he didn’t have to entertain me, but I thought, who the hell am I to tell anybody to lighten up on rifling? I didn’t know how to tell him’ without incriminating myself and getting into a whole heavy thing about our heads, and frankly I would have rather riffed.
“Lemme check the chicken.” I got up. The chicken wasn’t ready yet.
“Did Mikey really have a brother and sister?” I squatted back down. I bet the old merchant marine sat around the Poseidon Club telling bullshit sea stories with the boys just like us. The only difference was he was pushing seventy-five and Donny and me were thirty.
Donny shrugged and pulled a Brasil Danneman cigar tin from his breast pocket. He flipped it open with his thumb and extended it to me. “Before-dinner mint?”
There were six joints rolled in banana-colored paper. “Awright, Mr. Donny!” I extracted one and put it between my lips. “Okay, I gotta watch this now, ‘cause I’m prone to the horrors when I’m high,” I cautioned.
“Oh, you know from the horrors?”
“Huh.” I half-laughed. “I know the horrors like a nigger knows the blues.”
“Shit. Me too.” He shook his head.
“Sometimes, man, I’m by myself. It’s nine o’clock at night, but I got a full refrigerator, there’s sixteen Bogart movies on the box. I figure shit, I’ll blow this little jay and… wail! Raid the box, hole up with the Bogey, you know? I do the joint, next thing I know I’m curled up in a fuckin’ ball on my bed, TV’s off, lights off: I’m wiggjn’, like what’s it all mean. Whew!”
“Fuckin’ Kenny. Maybe we should pass on the grass.”
“Nah, it’s cool. That shit only happens when I’m alone.”
“Yeah.” I leaned toward him and he lit me.
“This is very strong.” I snorted in raw throat pain.
“Uh-huh.”
I put on an album so we wouldn’t have to keep changing the record every ten seconds and we did the whole joint listening to an old Nina Simone record.
After about ten minutes of nonblink space cadet paralysis I rapped Donny on the knee. “So, Donny, what’s the story? What’s it all about, huh?” We stared at each other, half-smiling. “What’s your old lady like, Donny?”
“My old lady!” He stretched, his clasped knuckles cracking in an arch over his head. “I don’t got an old lady. I ain’t married, I’m divorced. I was married to some girl I met at NYU like twelve years ago. I’m divorced.” He yawned, clasping his hands behind his neck.
“You told me you were married.” I knew he did, and - it freaked me out.
“Nah, I said that? I’m divorced.”
“You seein’ anybody?” I ditched the roach, squashing it with my thumb.
“This one and that one. How about you?”
“I told you, man, I’m living with someone.” I felt angry that he had lied to me.
“Oh, tight, right. Sorry.”
The dope had us both whipped to shit. I started getting hungry and brought in the salad bowl so we could nosh. The minute I sat down I realized I’d forgotten about the chicken so I got up again and went back to the kitchen. The chicken had about twenty minutes to go, but I was afraid of a fire so I turned off the oven. Donny began nibbling salad, bringing diced vegetables blindly to his face, his jaws working on automatic pilot, his eyes never dropping to his food.
I snagged a diced cucumber. I wanted Donny to tell me I looked good. I looked good. “You’re looking good, Donny.”
Slowly he turned to me and nodded a drowsy thank-you. I speared another cucumber wedge, then realized I hadn’t done my sit-ups yet that day. I slid across the polished wood floor to the couch, jammed my feet under the bottom, took off my shirt and s
tarted doing sit-ups. After about fifteen, Donny watched me go to thirty.
“Kenny, what are you doing?” He laughed.
“Sit-ups, man. I do fuckin’ sit-ups every day.” I grunted. “I been doing this shit for years. I got a stomach harder than boilerplate.” Fifty.
“Huh.” Donny watched me with an amused grin frozen on his face, then turned away.
After seventy-five, I couldn’t do any more. I lay flat on my back, my feet still under the couch, my hands still clasped behind my neck. And I had even forgotten the barbell.
I stared at Donny’s hunched back for a while, then my eyes zeroed in on the ceiling.
La Donna grew up in Trumansburg, New York. I’d never been there, but every time I thought of Trumansburg, it broke my heart. Anytime I fell in love with a girl and I would think of her town, or her block or her state if it was out of town, it would tear me up. When I was a kid and a girl I loved lived on a certain street in the Bronx, anytime I heard the name of that street I would get a melancholy pang.
I was lying there staring at my ceiling thinking of little baby La Donna growing up in Trumansburg, New York. La Donna was the baby of the family—that tore me up. The baby. I had this picture of her at two years old frowning in a highchair. Her gigantic head. She still had a gigantic head. She would crack up anytime I made a joke about it Her sweetest baby-faced head. Baby, face. When La Donna cried, her forehead wrinkled up and two little red storm clouds formed over her eyebrows right before the downpour, »
Donny had asked to see a picture of La Donna, and I had forgotten about the highchair picture when he asked me. It was somewhere in the bedroom. I struggled to my feet. Donny was squatting cross-legged like a Buddha surrounded by a fan of old 45s, glassily eyeing the lit dials on my amplifier. In the dark bedroom I forgot what I’d come in for and wound up lying down to take a fast nap.
La Donna’s baby face floated like a balloon around my head. Rushes of angles of her expressions, her sadness, tier fear, her eyes. I pretended I was hugging her, pretended we were naked, and hugging. Kissing. Hugging and hiding under covers. Everything was okay.
I was a very lonely man. A lonely man. I never thought of myself as a man but as a kid or a guy. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a man. A lonely man.
“It’s the horrors, Kenny.” I could make out Donny’s silhouette in the doorway. “Don’t let it get away with you, it’s only the horrors.”
“I’m good. I’m good.” I hooded my eyes with my hand although it was totally dark.
“Snap out of it, kid. C’mon, we gonna eat, go downtown, do a fuckin’ movie, nice, nice.”
“I’ll be out in two minutes, Donny.”
“It’s just the horrors, man.”
“Two minutes.”
Donny walked back into the living room.
Donny. Donny was A-OK.
It was freezing. Get up, asshole. I didn’t have a shirt on. I took a T-shirt from the dresser and shaking my head to rattle out the crap I went into the bathroom to wash up. I didn’t feel stoned anymore. As I was washing, I thought about the lonely man riff. Yeah, I was lonely, but I chose to be lonely. Nobody was telling me to be lonely. And if I could choose to be lonely, I could also unchoose to be lonely. I was just promising myself how I would turn a new leaf and make friends, millions of friends. There was an old, good friend right in my living room and I was crying like a goddamn mope about loneliness. Now, what kind of bullshit was that? I felt a strong rush of optimism, of manifest destiny. The bullshit was over! We were going to party, and we were going to party hearty!
“Okay, Mr. Donny! Here we go!” I danced back into the living room. Donny was on the floor, his back to me, his head resting on his extended arm, like the Statue Of Liberty lying on its side. He didn’t move. The record player was off. I took a seat at the dining table and watched him lying curled up in his own private cross on my floor. It was eight-thirty. My buoyancy and optimism hitched a ride out of town.
Donny. Who the fuck was Donny? He was a memory. A character from some novel I’d read years before.
An hour later, I heard a deep, long nasal inhale, a groan, and Donny slowly dragged himself to a leaning position, propping himself up with his arms. I was still sitting at the table, my head against the wall. Donny rubbed his face, then squinted at me as if the light killed his eyes.
“Whew!” He shook his head and looked around him. “I’m sorry, man,” he croaked. “Mmph, nine-thirty.” He held his wristwatch to his nose, then struggled to his feet. He wobbled into the foyer, put on his coat and wobbled back into the living room.
“Listen, Kenny,” he whispered hoarsely as though he had a sore throat, “should go, man, okay?”
“It’s cool.” I’d hardly moved since he woke up, my knee running, my thumb knuckle in my mouth. “It’s cool.”
“Yeah.”
I held out my hand for a slap. His half-swipe at my palm ended in a brief clasp, then he split.
After Donny left I put away the records, not looking at the labels. I just wanted them packed and out of sight. “Oh What a Night” by the Dells. Son of a bitch. I hadn’t heard that in a decade. What a dynamite jam. I slipped it on the box. Just one record.
Oh what a night, to ho-old you, dear
Oh what a night, to ki-is you, dear
It was scratched horribly. Almost inaudible, like playing a radio station too far out of its signal range. It was almost as if that time was crackly and losing its power, its clarity, and all that could get through from those days of my life was some weak hazy echoes. Blast from the past my ass. It was fading, going. How sad, how very goddamn sad.
I didn’t dare put on another 45. I piled them in their beat-up boxes and put them in the closet I saw La Donna’s stack of sheet music. The top one was “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” I tried to envision her singing that song. If I had had it in me to laugh I would have bust a gut. Despite myself, I sat down on the closet threshold and thumbed through her music— “Feelings,” “I Who Have Nothing,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Blue Moon,” “My Way,” “I Am Music.” She was another one. Me, Donny, her. We were all hurting so bad we were beyond pain.
I moved to the phone, my heart going like a tomtom. My grip was sweaty on the receiver. I could slide my palm back and forth over the plastic as if it were lubricated. I had to shit my brains out.
“Hi, is La Donna there?” I sounded as though I’d just run up a flight of stairs.
“Who’s calling?” Her sister knew my voice. Bitch.
“It’s Kenny.” I rubbed my chin on my shoulder for three hours.
“Hi.” It came out angry and short.
“Howya doin’, kid?” I started calming down.
“I’m okay. What do you want?”
She was putting it on. I could tell.
“I just called to say I’m sorry. It was stupid what I did. It was an emotional thing of the moment.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I didn’t know what to say next. I didn’t even feel like asking her to come back. I just wanted to talk to her, explain something to her.
“Are you okay there?” I asked.
“I’m fine. I really have to go.”
“La Donna?” The panic returned.
She waited on the other end. Are you coming back? You’re lonely. I’m lonely. We’re cut from the same fabric. We could help each other. I was looking at your sheet music. If I can’t love you, I can’t love myself. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Yeah… I’m fine.” She said that with a hesitating mutter of disappointment. She was waiting for me to say “Baby, come back,” and I didn’t She needed me. She wanted me.
“Baby, come back,” I said, breathy with hungry joy.
“No,” she responded too fast, as if she’d been waiting for the line. It was okay; she was just saving face. She was mine.
“Come back.” I winked at the phone.
“Lay off, Kenny.” Flat.
“I’m coming over
, Mommy.”
“No you’re not.” Clenched teeth.
“I’m coming over.”
“I’m not gonna be here!” she almost shouted. Maybe she wasn’t playing after all.
“I’m coming over.” Neither was I.
“Kenny, I’m not kidding. I’m leaving!”
“Good.”
I grabbed my coat and cabbed it over to her sister’s brownstone on Eighty-eighth Street. I sat back in the taxi wobble-jawed, heart thumping. Like I was taking a cab to a fistfight. The cabby was a young curly-haired Porto. He popped in a cassette of some disco Mau Mau noise, checked me out from the corner of his eye, decided I was a young groover too and slid back the partition so I could dig his taste in jams. Sixteen thousand soul sisters backed up by every violin in New York chanted dance, dance, dance, dance, into every opening in my head and face.. I wasn’t going to leave without her. I rubber-fingered a dollar-fifty through the bulletproof partition and leaped from the car like a G-man getting ready to take off a speakeasy. The hushed street consisted of thirty brownstones and twice as many nude trees.
She was standing outside at the top of the stairs like a street patrol sentry. I strode halfway up, stopped six steps below her and extended my hand upward.
“Let’s go home.”
“Not!” she barked. I moved up one step. She shifted to the left. It looked like we were dueling in a swashbuckler.
“La Di, I’m for real. Come home.” I stretched out my hand again and looked away like time was tight and stop wasting it.
“Kenny? Leave!” She fanned out her hands in front of her in a short sharp motion as if to make me vanish.
“I need you, La Di. I can’t make it there.” I shrugged.
“Kenny…”
“You need me, too, La Di. I know you do, I know you do.” I was still staring away, swinging my head like a metronome. I moved up another step. “Come on.” I almost touched her.
“I need you?” An outraged hiss, furious amazement.
“Yeah.” I inched closer.
With a sidearm swipe she slapped my hand away. I gasped and staggered down two steps.
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