by Bill Scheft
So College Boy thought on the Number 6 downtown. I might do this again. Not much later, as he sat on the platform at Fifty-ninth Street waiting for the RR to take him the last two crosstown stops, he’d look at his cast, lying too docile across Bagzilla and sniff more insight. Well, sure I might do this again. What else am I gonna do now?
The plan, the immediate plan, was to count the cash in the house, divide by the rest of his life, and be in bed by 1:15. It took eighteen minutes for the RR to come. Had he walked, walked like College Boy, he could have been at his front door by now. But Bagzilla always got 20 percent heavier after eleven P.M. And tack on another hundred or so pounds this night, after College Boy found a first-edition Tuesday Post with Monday’s ninth race triple result:
7-2-5…
paid…$2,984.60.
Would have had it, he thought. Would have had it. But his thoughts were traveling in twos, exactas, so they ran like this: Would have had it…. If I have it, it don’t come in. Not bitter, just realistic. And so what? College Boy never played exactas. Just triples. And just not that Monday.
So, a little before one, and wrung out by hunger and self-pity, College Boy decided to treat himself to the elevator. The elevator in College Boy’s building must have been installed as an afterthought because the thing could barely hold two people comfortably. Many a Chinese delivery kid would hand College Boy his chow fun and say “Why elevator so small? Why you not tell me to use stair?”
And the elevator made up for being tiny by being incredibly slow. Not even New York City slow, which is a tick above regular speed everywhere else. But slow. DMV slow. Harvey Kuenn walking out to the mound to make a pitching change slow.
College Boy rarely bothered with the elevator. It wanted little to do with him, and absolutely nothing to do with him and Bagzilla. All that, and the fact that College Boy’s apartment was on the third floor of the eight-floor building. The last time College Boy had been on the elevator was Sunday. With Sheila. Damn chivalrous, especially since he was running woefully late—way past batting practice and perilously close to having ten dollars lopped off his pay—for the Riis Park doubleheader. (He ran off the Green and White bus in his spikes and ended up going 5-for-8 with two doubles and threw out the same guy—Rosado—at third twice, if you want to know. Even if you don’t want to know.)
Had he used the stairs he would have seen the two of them, sitting on the flight to the fourth floor, yakking in a whisper. He would have smelled the cigarettes. Menthol. Kool badass Kings. He would have been able to imagine the exchange that must have taken place at least three or four times during the night. “Can I help you guys?”/“No, we’re waiting for College Boy.”/ “Yeah, we play ball with him and he left his bat at the game.”/ “Yeah, we want to give him his bat.”/ “Well, okay. See ya….”
Turns out the bat was for their protection. In case College Boy had one. College Boy had a couple, but you try telling two smoke-laminated slugs waiting three hours in your stairwell to hang on just another couple of seconds while you fish your whupping stick out of Bagzilla.
In the end, their bat was used to pin his throat to the wall. Worked out quite well, too. The exchange was brief. Quicker than the one College Boy would have been able to imagine had he taken the stairs. As he disembarked from The Little Elevator That Might, the two J.V. goons stood up and simultaneously flicked away their cigarettes, as if they were there for a casting call of his building’s production of West Side Story.
“College Boy?”
“Fellas?”
“We have a message from Ernie G.”
“The Dirt King?” College Boy, thinking more deftly than he had a right to, held up his casted right arm. “Sorry boys, that message was already delivered.”
They were fooled for a few seconds. Whatever that amount of time it takes to put your key in the lock but not open your door. That long. Long enough to know it wasn’t long enough. After that, the bat, the wall, and College Boy’s throat got together.
“Well, then,” said the bigger one, the one holding the bat and, as it turned out, a pretty fair loanshark bon mot, “Well, then, we’ll just get a receipt.” College Boy closed his eyes, and the smaller one, the one holding his left thumb, gave a clean jerk down, the same ferocious move the bag boy makes at the end of the checkout line. Paper or limb? College Boy did not make a peep. Fainting helped. The fellas were nice enough to open his door for him, throw Bagzilla inside, then slap him across the face so he’d be awake for their good nights. A full-service muscle call.
This is why I don’t use a bookie. So thought College Boy just before he threw up, as he heard them giggling in the elevator, or because of the elevator. He rolled over and crawled elbows and knees almost across his threshold. Then he threw up on his otherwise all-weather doormat and thought, No, this. This is why I don’t use a bookie.
He would need ice and cabfare to Lenox Hill. The ice was in the freezer, and there was a twenty-dollar bill in Hiding Place E. Under the doormat. What a break.
There’s much better food here, College Boy thought. I have to remember that.
“Here” was the cafeteria at Lenox Hill Hospital. One of the women behind the counter had taken pity on him—three in the morning kind of pity—and cut his hot turkey sandwich into about fifteen pieces. Spoon-sized, which is what he had to use on his latest meal. Worked out quite well, as Mort would say. If Mort was here, he’d have said something like, “Damn fine invention, the spoon. No wonder they named a golf club after it.” But Mort was not here. He was in the other hospital. One mile north and two arm casts ago.
There’s much better food here. I have to remember that. That was the first thought, the thought that actually cheered and sated College Boy. It lasted all of three minutes, the time it took for him to devour the hot turkey sandwich. It was followed by the first frost of panic:
Oh my God. How am I going to jerk off?
Okay, College Boy thought. Settle down. He still had four free fingers and half the palm on his left hand. His “working” hand. Guys had made do with less. Hell, his freshman roommate (when he actually was College Boy, just lower-case) hadn’t even used his hands. Eddie Lonhoffer. It was an involved process whose main component was high-speed friction. No sense getting into it. Eddie Lonhoffer had made do. Show’s over. Move along.
Move along. Sure, but where? Home? Again? Why not? How bad could it be this time? Maybe this time, he might actually walk into his apartment. Why not? His legs, the wheels, still worked.
Some guys just live right.
Part Two
15
If your goal is to be left alone, nothing will turn the collective back of the public on you like Parkinson’s Disease.
A slight tremor, usually in the fingers or hands, is the opening metaphor for the rocking of your world. And like any good metaphor, it is sustained.
The brochure will tell you Parkinson’s is a neurological disorder that can strike anyone over thirty. In the world of diseases, it is a mystery. A bad mystery, with little plot, no hero, and an end that drags out long enough to hopelessly point fingers in every direction. Technically—and anybody knows people never use the word “technically” unless they want to back up a really weak point—technically, no one ever dies from Parkinson’s Disease. But everyone is lost.
College Boy first noticed the tremors in Mort’s hands three weeks after his uncle was released from Mount Sinai. They were out at a Japanese restaurant, and he saw that neither of them was using chopsticks. College Boy had an excuse, the casts, but Mort was eating his sashimi by hand. Normally, Morton Martin Spell took great pride in his chopstick dexterity and never missed a chance to tease his nephew about how he grabbed his sticks too low. “You’re choked up a little too much, kid,” he’d say, “unless you’re trying to hit that maguro to shallow right field.”
College Boy became aware of the shaking when Mort switched from vodka to tea. Until then, it just sounded like any concerned drinker trying to help his ice along.
“They’re idling.”
“You should see someone about that.”
“I’ll talk to that fellow. I think he went to Dartmouth.”
“Dr. Levitz?”
“You’re awfully sharp tonight.”
Since his release from the hospital, Mort had been confined to his apartment, except for six visits to Dr. Levitz, who was back on retainer with his Better Shrinking Through Chemistry Revue. To his credit, or his fear of litigation, Dr. Levitz let Mort know that his Valium days were over. College Boy, of course, volunteered to rid his uncle’s apartment of the demon aqua and canary tablets before he returned home. Why risk temptation? More important, why risk the possibility of Sheila grabbing them first?
Levitz instead put his prodigal patient on Halcion, a sleeping pill Mort was not interested in until he found out fellow Yalie George “Poppy” Bush (’46) had used the stuff to help him sleep through the bombing of CNN during the Gulf War, and a dim sum of antidepressants and mood sculptors for which College Boy had no knowledge or use. Levitz saw Mort three times the third week of July before the doctor left for his psychopath-funded villa near Milan for two months. That’s how good the man was. He could leave his patients in the lurch the last ten days of July, all of August, and half of September. During his second-to-last visit, Mort spoke of his anxiety about moving and mentioned the tremors in his hands. Dr. Levitz was curt. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I went through the same thing when I moved the office from Madison to Park. Could barely hold my scrip pad. Have a drink, Mort.”
Two days later, when Dr. Levitz cattle-called most of his patients for his annual Getaway Day Special—ten minutes at the regular hourly rate—Mort shook and shuffled in at 4:20. Levitz looked up in the middle of trying on tennis shorts. “Mort, my friend, you got yourself Parkinson’s Disease,” he said. “I’ll have Bernice call Graham the neurologist on the seventh floor. Try and see him today. He’ll put you on the stuff, the dopamine stuff. Sudafed. No, not that. Sinemet. That’s it. Get a wiggle on, Mort. Graham usually leaves by five.”
Mort finally got in to see Graham on the seventh floor ten days later, who confirmed Levitz’s diagnosis (while fully clothed) and prescribed Sinemet. By then, the tremors had progressed from occasional to steady, as if Mort was constantly trying to wave good-bye to Manhattan.
College Boy got both his casts off the next day, July 30, and then endured a rehab no physical therapist would recommend—a solid week packing up fifty-some years of Mort’s shit. Sheila dropped by when she could to help and they left the rest for the big Irish guys from Liffey Movers. (“Which one of you boys was married to Bernadette Devlin?” Mort kept asking, always just before College Boy or Sheila could shush him.) Everything but the bed, two chairs, the living-room rug, a five-foot tower of New Yorkers from the early ’70s, and the three-wood was loaded onto the van by noon, Wednesday, August 7. (Mort had another nineteen months on his lease.) Mort and College Boy were on their way no later than 12:15, after Mort had what could have been an emotional farewell with Sheila.
“Well, Mr. Spell,” she choked out, eyes red as that great red hair, “between my mother and me it’s been thirty years.”
“Goodbye, Helga.” And he was out the door and ten feet down the hall before he yelled back, “Ah…Sheila!” College Boy was still inside the apartment, and he gave Sheila the hug his uncle was incapable of, and one which he could only deliver as a messenger.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Piece of work, isn’t he?” she said. “Go take care of him. I’ll lock up.”
College Boy had never done his Mort impression for anyone outside his family. Who would get it?
“Goodbye, Helga.” He saw the shock in her face and got half a shriek. Perfect. He might have heard her still laughing as the elevator closed. Then again, maybe crying, mistaken for her mother twice in the space of half a minute. Helga. The last person she had taken care of. He’d have to ask Sheila about that the next time he saw her. Maybe after he returned from unpacking Mort in whatever this new life was. That was the plan.
Other than Mort mistaking College Boy for Victor Mature twice (“By the way, damn nice job in Red Hot and Blue….”), the drive to Massachusetts passed without incident. They stopped in New Haven for a late lunch at Sally’s, the brick-oven pizza grail which had opened long after Mort left Yale and he’d been meaning to get to for thirty years. After College Boy had cut up Mort’s two slices into workable canapés, mission accomplished.
This is the last time I do anything like this, College Boy thought. And then, as if looking for a reward, he wondered aloud if there might be a matinee at Milford or Bridgeport Jai-Alai that day. No such luck, but it did give Mort a chance to retell the story about the time in the early ’70s when he stormed into William Shawn’s office at the New Yorker after his jai-alai piece had been shelved another month and announced to the editor, “Mr. Shawn, I’m putting all my basques in one exit.”
“That’s a great story, Mort.”
“Okay, Victor. Now tell us all about you and Hedy Lamarr.”
Dottie Sussman had found Vinnin Estates in Salem, just up the street from Hawthorne Hospital, when everyone, College Boy included, was still under the impression that Mort could return to Massachusetts and live on his own with little problem, other than not knowing how to do anything. Dottie had her brother’s tastes, which were her tastes but with more tan and burgundy, and decorated the white, two-bedroom cape house accordingly. Mort would pay $1,800 a month, almost four times his Manhattan rent, but would be only ten minutes from his sister in Lynn. And really, you can’t put a price on being that close to the only surviving member of a family you had kept on a 206-mile tether for over a half-century.
We really should clarify, or qualify, do something, about what was meant by the remark that Morton Martin Spell didn’t know how to do anything. By anything, that would be anything other than showering, dressing, hailing a cab, hailing another cab, making himself a drink, reading a delivery menu, and successfully dialing the restaurant by the fifth attempt. In other words, anything other than living in New York City, where the hermit-inclined are not only tolerated, but ignored.
That was the plan. College Boy would drop his uncle off at Vinnin Estates, set him up, build a lifetime of equity with his mom, then maybe get a ride back with the big Irish boys from Liffey Movers. Or, in a perfect world, work up some scenario where he could drive the Buick station wagon back to New York, keep the car, and make it seem like he was doing Mort a favor.
There’s a term for this. Years ago, he’d overheard a woman in the Heckscher Field bleachers tell a friend how she convinced a bank teller to cash a double-endorsed, third-party out-of-state check by saying she was new in town and had to get some medication for her kid. A bank teller at a bank where she did not have an account. Cash for a kid she did not have. “I really dope-fiended her,” the woman said to her friend. College Boy had never heard that expression before or since, but he pocketed that image, that notion, like that one Jews For Jesus pamphlet that seems reasonable. To dope-fiend. The pious simplicity of it. The implied bonanza that you don’t have to be a dope fiend to dope-fiend, and it probably helps if you aren’t.
Since then, during those half-moments when he would briefly, so briefly, examine his behavior, College Boy would inevitably wind up saying to himself, “Nice going, College Boy. You dope-fiended that (choose one) guy/girl/pitcher/landlord/Con Ed operator/horse race/ clerk/waitress/teammate/family member.”
Until recently, as recently as the moment when the softball season crashed against his wrist, dope-fiending was a muscle College Boy kept eternally flexed. It fit comfortably within the Ringer Philosophy of Life. So comfortably he didn’t have to break it in. And it sprung his innate first step toward getting over. Getting Over. A wholly owned subsidiary of Getting By.
“You know, Mort, you have to change your registration and get new plates anyway. You might as well get a new c
ar.”
“Good point, kid. There’s a Sunbeam I had my eye on.”
Nice going, College Boy. You dope-fiended your delirious uncle. Then thought again, this is the last time I do anything like this.
The plan worked for all of three days. That’s how long it took College Boy to figure out all the places he could not go anymore. Heckscher Fields. The Dan Drake Show. His apartment. Actually, that took about ten minutes. The other three days were spent ducking Mort’s landlord at 301 East Sixty-fifth, who wanted to make sure he knew how difficult it would be to legally assume his uncle’s lease.
“I’m not running an SRO here, Mr. Spell’s nephew, whatever your name is.”
“Hey, I’m just here to pick up a few more things. My uncle’s paid up through October, I believe. The garage, too. He’ll be back. And I’ll be gone Monday.”