Dead Cat Bounce

by Norman Green

  He stopped right at the top of the arch, the midpoint between the two stone towers. From there he could see the tip of Manhattan on his right, the residential neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights on his left, Governors Island, low, green and improbably empty, close to the Brooklyn side. The Statue of Liberty was out on her island in the bay, and Staten Island and Jersey were off in the distance. He could feel the bridge vibrating under his feet, almost as though it moved in harmony with the heartbeat of the city. He became conscious of the low rumble, the collective undercurrent of the ceaseless human activity that was New York. He had never really noticed it before. I been unconscious, he thought. I been right here all along, but I missed everything.

  Tuco was the superintendent of a five-story building on Clark Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was a nice gig, especially for a poorly educated Hispanic kid who was not yet twenty years old. It came with a one-bedroom apartment that was nicer than anyplace he’d ever lived before, even if it was in the basement. The work was easy, he could do it with half his brain tied behind his back. It’s the best job you ever had, he told himself that for the umpteenth time. You could stay here for the rest of your life…. The very thought of that made him want to go up on the roof and throw himself off.

  His friend Tommy Bagadonuts had gotten him the job, he’d introduced Tuco to Ms. McKinnon, the real estate agent who managed the building. The previous super had died, and they needed someone to mop the halls, take out the garbage, and so on. Tuco had been in need of a place to live, and it had seemed like a decent trade-off. A short time later, Tuco came into some money, and Fat Tommy had convinced him to keep the job and invest the money in real estate. Now Tuco owned a couple of co-op apartments in a building around the corner from where he lived. One of the initial problems had been that his windfall had come in the form of cash, but Tommy had winked at him, told him not to worry, everything would work out. Tuco didn’t even think of the places often anymore, he didn’t really have anything to do with them. Ms. McKinnon took care of renting them out, and rents came in, mortgage payments and management fees went out, all just numbers on a piece of paper. He couldn’t read very well, but numbers, he had no problem with.

  There was a couple that lived on the fourth floor of his building, and they’d caught his eye as soon as he moved in. He’d been told by someone else in the place that the woman had just recently moved in with the man, but it seemed clear to Tuco that a victor had already been declared. The guy was thirtyish, he worked in international finance, and he seemed to have everything that marked a man as successful in Brooklyn Heights. He drove a late-model Volvo, traveled on business often, carried a PDA and a cell phone everywhere he went. He spoke several languages, wore exquisite clothing, beautiful shoes. His army, however, was in rout, his cannons spiked, his balls taken, held in escrow by his diminutive blond girlfriend. He smiled nervously in her presence, was solicitous of her well-being and state of mind, deferred to her opinions. You could almost watch the air leaking out of the guy, you could see him turning into a pale and flaccid imitation of what he had once been. Tuco wanted to shake the guy, yell at him. Run, you stupid bastard! Or else throw the bitch out. But it was no good, he knew that. The guy was in love. For her part, she exercised her authority firmly, but without a lot of unnecessary fireworks. Tuco had heard them argue a few times, but in each instance the firefight was brief, sharp, and followed by a strategic withdrawal on the part of the financier. When the guy brought his garbage downstairs, he would linger in the alley, lean back against the cool masonry wall, mop his forehead, close his eyes, but just for a minute or so. Then he would hurry back.

  She, on the other hand, altered her regal pace for no man. It fell to her to take the garbage out when her financier was out of town, and it seemed that every time she did so, she went out of her way to find Tuco. He was in the habit of leaving his apartment door open, with just a screen between him and the common spaces when he was home, and she would rap on the door, call out his name, offer her comments on the repaint that he was doing on his living space. Each time it happened, Tuco would wonder, afterward, what it was he had been supposed to do, what cues he had missed, what it was that she really wanted from him. Tuco had always been intrigued by the ways in which people affiliated, how they attached themselves to this group or that, and in particular, how they paired themselves off into couples. Whether they got married or just lived together, whether they were straight, gay, or some combination of the two, their behaviors seemed, to him, remarkably uniform. The first phase of a relationship was love, or failing that, at least a period of unwarranted optimism during which they tried hard to ignore the other person’s flaws, because they had their own, after all. Didn’t they? But that initial promise rarely lasted. You could watch it decay, if you were around them long enough. This one liked Leno, the other preferred Letterman. He wanted a new Acura, she would rather spend the money on plastic surgery and European holidays. The contest of wills signaled the end of the first phase, and the beginning of the struggle for supremacy that would last, generally, until there was a clear winner. And a clear loser. If the couple stayed together after that, you could always tell which was which. The winner became a bit louder, a bit more confident of their opinions, while the loser, by degrees, surrendered their capacity for independent thought, their personality withered, faded away until they became a poor and dog-eared carbon copy of their dominant partner, to whom they began to look for opinions, ideas, desires, and ultimately, permission to be.

  When he pressed himself for examples of what he thought a healthy relationship might look like, he could not think of any. It was discouraging, because he wanted to fall in love, he wanted that mad infatuation, that ecstatic high, but he could not abide the thought of the battle for control that seemed inevitably to follow. He emphatically did not want to be responsible for some other person’s life, he could barely manage to be responsible for his own. On the other hand, he didn’t know how much of himself he was willing to surrender in order to gain someone else’s conditional approval.

  In the first week of the fourth month of his tenure as superintendant, she had come to him with a problem. Her financier was in Singapore, and therefore unavailable. The thingy in the tank part of the toilet must be broken, because the water would not stop running. She didn’t like to bother anybody, normally she would wait, but the noise was making her nuts, she couldn’t sleep. Did he know anybody? Or could he, by chance, fix it for her himself? He would be such a lifesaver….

  She was a white girl. Technically she was no longer a girl, but she had flawless skin, and she spoke in a junior-high-school voice which fostered the impression, so that’s how he thought of her. Five foot four or so, with breasts that seemed a bit large for her thin frame. There was something about her lips, too, they may not have been precisely what God had given her, but Tuco didn’t really know much about such things, and she looked fine, either way. “Yeah, I can probably fix it,” he said. He had a closet full of repair parts, left over from the previous administration. “Would you like me to come have a look?”

  “Oh, that would be great,” she said. She started in on him during the elevator ride upstairs. “So, Tuco,” she said. “Tell me about yourself.”

  It was the question he hated most in life. It wasn’t what she really wanted to know, he was sure of that, it was just the opening step in a verbal ritual dance that would continue until she had him pigeonholed. She wouldn’t be direct, either, it would be, “What kind of work do you do?” and “Where do you come from?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” In the part of Brooklyn where he had grown up, your physical stature and your reputation for toughness went a long way in establishing your manhood, and he had grown comfortable with himself, measured by those standards. In Brooklyn Heights, though, what they really wanted to know was how much money you had, and how you had gotten it.

  “I’m the super,” he told her. That was the first answer his brain handed him, along with a tickle of self-loathin
g, every time the subject came up. I’m a custodian. I mop floors, I coax that ancient boiler to send you heat, I brought the garbage out to the curb. There were other things he could say. He was a mechanic, and a gifted one at that, he was an investor, he was a student in search of a teacher. And when he worked with Fat Tommy and Stoney, he was a liar, a thief, and a con artist. Any of those answers were true, but his mouth did not seem to want to form the words that would make him look better in her eyes.

  He didn’t understand why he felt ashamed. He made a nice living, he sent a few bucks home to his mother, what was wrong with that? The problem was, he knew that he had potential, he just didn’t know how to unlock it, so he condemned himself to loser status. A custodian in a neighborhood of stockbrokers and lawyers. Short-dick motherfucker…It seemed that everyone else could unzip and lay it out there. “Hey, kid, look at this. You see this? This is a man, by God…” And he was just a boy.

  “I know that, silly,” she said, reaching out, touching him on the shoulder. “It says so right on your doorbell. But you only do that to pay the bills.” The elevator reached her floor, the doors opened, and she preceded him out and down the hall. She stuck her key in her front door. “This isn’t what you do for your spirit,” she said.

  “I suppose not,” he said. “What do you do, for your spirit?”

  She turned, looked at him over her shoulder, grinned. “Come on inside,” she said. “You want a beer?”

  He never got an answer to his question.

  He didn’t think of it until later, how odd it was that a woman could have such large breasts and yet be so thin you could count her ribs. He found her tan lines incredibly sexy, though, he’d never seen such a thing before. He tried to apologize after he came the first time. “You young guys,” she told him. “You’re always in such a hurry.” She held him there, kept him occupied until he came back to life, then she showed him things he had never dreamed of. It was like being in the hands of an accomplished mechanic, a technician who knew how to coax every last ounce of torque out of an engine. Tuco was nothing if not a student, he dropped his inhibitions on her floor next to his clothes and dived in. She did not, however, give up on her attempts to classify him, she would choose what seemed like the most inopportune moments to stop what the two of them were doing to ask him another question. “I should have put some music on,” she said, at one such time, holding him in a disbelieving state of suspended animation. “What kind of music do you like?”

  He held on, reeling. “Don’t need music,” he croaked. She laughed that teenage laugh of hers, and then she posed, a little bit, lay back on her pillows, looking like an adolescent’s wet dream, before she continued. She left no doubt in his mind, though, who was driving, and who was the passenger.

  She didn’t bother to get dressed, afterward, she strolled naked into her kitchen for two more beers while he put on his clothes. She handed him one when she got back. “You can fix the water some other time,” she told him, and laughed her schoolgirl laugh. “Give me a couple of days to recover.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “I’ll call you,” she said, walking him out to the front door. “I’ll let you know when to come back.”

  “Okay,” he said, wishing he could think of something else to say to her, but he could not. She let him out, closed the door behind him. All in all, a nice friendly fuck, he thought, waiting for the elevator. Still, he felt strangely unsettled. Are you crazy, he asked himself, what’s wrong with you? What more could anybody ask for? But it seemed like there ought to be more to it.

  “It ain’t like it’s a bad job or nothing.” Tuco and Stoney walked down the slate sidewalk, past the brownstones and carriage houses of Brooklyn Heights. Stoney looked thinner than Tuco remembered him, and his face was different, too, but he was still big, still intimidating. Tuco always thought of him as looking like a guy who had a toothache and was pissed off about it. Something is happening to him, he’s different now, Tuco thought. He’d known it for sure as soon as Stoney told him he preferred walking to sitting. “I mean, it ain’t any work to speak of, especially in the summer. Couple more months, there won’t be no boiler to run, half the people in the building will have went off to the Hamptons for the summer. It’s really nothing, all I gotta do is take the trash out, mop the hallway once in a while. And for that, I get a free place to live in a nice neighborhood. They even pay me a few bucks. I know I oughta be happy with that.”

  “So? You bored?”

  “Stoney, I keep thinking like there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t know what it is.”

  “Yeah? What are you doing about it?”

  The question surprised him. I suppose, he thought, it is up to me. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, that’s a problem. Don’t feel bad, you ain’t alone. There’s a lot of people walking around, don’t know what they wanna be when they grow up. Lotta people die without ever figuring it out.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t life a bitch?”

  “You been a big help, you know that?”

  “Look, what are you, nineteen? You’re still just a kid. Lotta directions you could go in. All you gotta do is figure out what it is that you like, okay? Once you find something that winds your clock, then you find out what the process is, how you get from where you’re at to where you wanna go. You break that process down into steps, you start taking the steps one at a time. You don’t give up and you don’t die, sooner or later you’ll get there.”

  “Yeah, but I got this other problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dyslexia. It makes it hard for me to read. I don’t see what everybody else sees when they look at a newspaper.”

  Stoney did not look surprised. “So?”

  Tuco’s stomach was churning. He knew better than to expect sympathy from Stoney, but he had expected compassion. “It makes things more hard. It means there’s a lot of stuff I can’t do.”

  “Look, kid, everybody’s got something. Everybody’s got some kinda monkey on his back. Look at it this way: this thing you got, at least you know what it is, right? It’s got a name, you could look it up in the dictionary.”

  “Maybe you could.”

  “Whatever. But it’s in there, ain’t it?”

  “So what if it is?”

  “Well, if it’s in the dictionary already, then you ain’t the first motherfucker to get it, are you?”

  Tuco blinked. “No,” he said.

  “Fine. So somewhere, somebody’s working with you assholes that have this thing. You get me? Someone, somewhere, can show you how to work with it. All you gotta do is find the guy.”

  “How the hell do I do that?”

  “Easy. You ask for help.” He looked over at Tuco’s face, saw the doubt there. “Although,” he said, “asking for help used to be the hardest thing in the world for me to do. I had to pick something up, right, I would rather break my back than ask you to help me. I don’t know why that is, but I would strain until my dick fell off and my balls ran down my pant leg before I asked somebody to give me a hand. Now, my problems are different from yours, okay, but I wasn’t asking anybody for anything. Fuck you, I’m fine, maybe I got blood coming out of every orifice in my body, okay, but I can handle my own shit. That’s what I thought. It was just through sheer stupid fucking luck I ran into a guy who had the answer I needed.” They walked on in silence for a half a block, and Tuco began to think Stoney was done, but he wasn’t. “I tell you what,” Stoney finally said. “I’ll talk to Tommy about it. You know Tommy, if he don’t know the right guy, he knows somebody who does.” He looked over at Tuco. “Once you find the right guy, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he’s happy to help you. Sometimes, you even find out he was waiting for you. You get me?”

  Tuco wasn’t sure what to say to that. What Stoney said might be true, but it ran counter to his experience. In his l
ifetime, Stoney and Fat Tommy were just about the only guys he could remember who had showed any interest in helping him at all. “All right,” he said, feeling the butterflies in his stomach. “Thanks.”

  “You taking care of my car like I asked you?”

  “Yeah, ’course. I told you before, it’s in a parking garage over on Henry Street.”

  “You had it out lately?”

  “Couple of weeks ago, I took it for a ride out on the Island.”

  “Okay. I guess it ought to start, then. I gotta borrow it for a few days.”

  “You get your license back? You want me to drive you?”

  “I didn’t exactly get it back. What I got is a new one. I found the right guy, he works at a New York State Motor Vehicles place up in the Bronx. He fixed me up. What I gotta do, I got this thing I gotta do over in Jersey.”

  “You need a hand?”

  Stoney shook his head. “Not right now. There’s this guy I gotta check out, but I don’t know what I’m gonna do with him yet. It ain’t business, anyhow, it’s personal.”

  “Whatever,” Tuco said. “You need me, you just yell.”

  “All right,” Stoney said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  FOUR

  It was a strange sensation, driving again after all the months of walking. The only cars he had been in for ages had been taxicabs, and they were usually beat. Plus, it’s different, being the driver instead of the passenger. A thought struck him, and he pulled the Lexus over to the side of the road and got out, reached down underneath the driver’s seat and felt around. It seemed like a previous life, but not that long ago he had kept a pint bottle of scotch under there. It was gone, though, along with the accumulation of trash that had been in the back, last time he saw the car. Tuco, in his intensely serious way, must have cleaned it all out. The car looked clean, too, and Stoney could not remember ever washing the thing. The kid probably changed the oil, too, Stoney thought. And paid for the garage. Be just like him. I’ll have to remember to ask what I owe him.