The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  It was then that I heard voices about two hundred feet behind me and to the right. It was certainly not the old men. These were the more vigorous, assertive voices of youth. As I turned, I could see, in the sparse light, three figures climbing the fence, and nimbly at that, into the park. There was a gleam off their bodies that became, on clearer view, the shining leather and silver accessories of motorcycle jackets, which were not usually the favored attire of honor students. After they had traversed the narrow grass section and hit the stone of the park walk, I could hear distinctly the definitive clack of motorcycle boots, which in the Bronx of that time (like the jackets) were a social statement, none of it having anything to do with motorcycles. They began walking in my direction purposefully. I could have bolted and outrun them to the park exit, given my lead; or jumped the fence and run down the hill. Shame overcame fear, and boyish pride took hold. I did not run, though I instantly changed my walking style to a more arrogant, tough gait, like someone not to be messed with. There was always hope—the hope that they had another engagement down in the belly of the Oval to drink beer, smoke, and get laid.

  But their steady encroachment and the awful sound of six heavy boots on stone belied any innocent stroll in the park, and I began to feel like a dead duck whose continued humming was so much delusional bravado. I felt like a boy who had made a bad decision. I dared not look back, not wanting them to see me sneaking peeks, though a proverbial chill ran up my spine, and my pulse was revved to frightening heights; I was trembling. Clack, clump, clack, clump. They were close now, and I could hear their voices like hissing snakes, but I could not distinguish what they were saying. Then they were surrounding me, two in front and one behind, and would not let me pass. It was a surreal instant when the numb distance of a dream—seeing the scene from the outside, as if I weren’t in it—momentarily overcame fear. I tried to keep walking, but the two in front gave me a vicious push so that I almost fell. They were big, maybe sixteen-year-olds, and they stood with their feet planted a wise-guy length apart. In the paltry park light, I could not clearly see their facial features, but something in their hands was shiny. “What do you want?” I said.

  There was silence for a few moments, as much silence as you could hear in the Bronx if you excluded traffic and fire engines and the screech of the elevated train and a million people. Where the fuck were the people now? To think that those distant sounds represented human beings, grown-ups with whom I could find sanctuary. But they were in the wrong place. Or, more accurately, I was. I thought of my mother: She could be looking out the window right now, five blocks away. Then the extraneous sounds faded out, and all I could hear was the quiet whoosh of the wind blowing through the barren branches, sweeping along a few leaves and twigs. It was as if there was no one else in the world but we four. Oh, for a beautiful green-and-white police car!

  “Whaddaya want? I got a rehearsal,” I repeated, in my best Bronx street dialect. Who knows, maybe they were TeenTone fans, but they had to notice my shaking knees. “I gotta go, I’ll be late,” I said.

  The tall one came right up to me, holding something in his hand, and pushed it against my stomach. “Shut up or you get this,” he said, like a cliché from an early James Cagney movie. I instinctively placed my hand on the object and explored it gently with my fingers like a sightless person. It was cylindrical and cold to the touch. This was no cliché. This was a homemade twenty-two-caliber firearm commonly called a zip gun: a device of wood and pipe, with rubber bands providing the tension for the hammer. It was pointed two inches from my gut, and the fucking moron holding it had his finger on the trigger. The newspapers were full of stories of boys killed by zip guns. The other two flashed switchblade knives that had sprung open with consecutive loud clicks. The light reflected not only off their leather apparel and weapons but off their shiny greaser hairdos as well, with the little spill hanging down over the forehead like Sal Mineo had.

  These observations were made by me in the span of a second, a very long and anxious second. My body was in full flight-or-fight mode, though running was out of the question, the gun having skewed that equation. Fighting was a poor option as well, given the weapons and my appalling dearth of fighting prowess and, I guess, courage. I knew instinctively that I could not joke my way out of this, as I had with previous minor scrapes. The situation did not look good, and there was nothing for a boy to do, so without thinking (or rather, thinking a mile a minute), I pretended to faint.

  I slid gently to the stone walk in a kind of pseudo swoon, being careful to avoid hitting my head. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Was it believable? “He fainted,” the tall one said. He sounded worried. “Holy shit,” said another one. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said the third, and he clicked his knife closed. After a few seconds of possumlike stillness, I opened my eyes and looked up and got a good view of the tall one. “McVay!” I blurted out. “Klein!” he said, just as surprised. It was a guy from my biology class: Ace McVay, six foot four, skinny as a rail, with a hideous complexion that looked like a relief map of the Himalayas. His real name was Percival, though it was generally considered that one called him that at significant risk. He had begun his high school career as an honor student but was now on the verge of flunking out, if he attended class at all. He was known as a tough guy at school, though I can’t remember much evidence to verify that fact. It was just the way he carried himself, the “I don’t give a shit” attitude, the boots and jacket, and a hell of a name—Ace McVay.

  “Oh, fuck, he knows you. What the fuck are we gonna do now?” said the one who had closed his knife. Much to my dismay, he clicked it open again and came toward me with his weapon at the ready. “I’m gonna cut the motherfucker,” he said.

  McVay extended his long arm and stopped the guy’s advance. The other guy with the knife said: “Ace, we gotta do something, he can identify us, he’ll talk.”

  “Not here,” said McVay. “We’ll bring him down into the bushes and take care of him there.” With a gun pointed at me, I opted to stay on the ground and avoid any sudden movement that might send me six feet under (those thoughts again). I definitely thought at that moment that my life might end here. I was sorry I had not requested above ground burial, but I was fourteen and had not expected my demise so soon.

  Suddenly, there was the faint sound of voices borne by the wind—it was the two old men. McVay stuck the pistol down the front of his pants. With any luck, maybe it would fire and blow his balls off, the bastard. He bent down and pulled me violently to my feet. The two old men approached, which seemed to unnerve these shitheads, who hid their knives and assumed a nonchalant pose. Thank God for grown-ups. But why did the two available ones have to be enfeebled and seventy-five?

  They stopped briefly. “Everything all right?” one of them said in a European accent. McVay, whose back was toward them, put his hand on his gun and glared at me. “Everything’s fine,” I said. The men walked on. A thought shot through my mind that the old gentlemen knew exactly what was happening but were too afraid to intercede. Who could blame them? I hoped they would call the police.

  “Shit, those fuckin’ old geezers saw us now. Too many witnesses, let’s bug outta here,” said the one who wanted to cut me.

  “Bullshit. It’s fuckin’ dark, they couldn’t see us, the nosy fucks. But he knows me and that’s a problem,” said Ace McVay, who withdrew the gun from his pants and pushed it into my belly once again, harder than before. He made the most menacing face he could, a face I would remember for a long, long time. I thought this was it.

  Then he said, “This never happened, you understand? You better keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. Now, get going and keep walking.”

  This seemed like an excellent, not to say reasonable, idea. I acceded to it immediately, my prospects for a fifteenth birthday having improved considerably. I could hear the threesome grumbling behind me, then the clack-clump of their boots across the walk, followed by the crackling of the bushes that descended to the playground
. I was in a kind of trancelike shock as I hurried away at a respectable medium pace: I did not run. But after a couple of minutes, the reality of my acute humiliation began to set in. The awful thought of having been violated, and my strategically sound but hardly courageous fainting shtick, commenced to haunt me and gnaw at my self-esteem. This feeling became a familiar one in the coming weeks, as omnipresent as the air I breathed: the air of abasement, of shame.

  As I passed the old men yet again, they seemed concerned and looked me over. One of them said, “You all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I just fell.”

  But I was not fine. I was furious and deflated and chagrined. I arrived at rehearsal with forced composure to find three thoroughly jolly TeenTones horsing around and laughing. Sure, nobody had just threatened to kill them. When I told them about my experience, I intentionally chose to underplay the intense emotion of the event (again, boyish pride) and emphasize the fortunate outcome: the result of the assailant being my classmate, and of course my fainting ruse, which I recounted humorously. The TeenTones found the story quite funny, and I even pretended to agree, though I could not yet, with the event so fresh in my mind, see much humor in it. I hid my disappointment at their lack of compassion and their failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the affair. Apparently, TeenTones are easily amused, though I had contributed to their attitude with my evasion of emotion.

  After rehearsal, for which I had little enthusiasm, I took the longer but well lit and heavily traveled route of Gun Hill Road home. I thought of the future, and of the irony that the very thing that had saved me from physical harm—my acquaintance with my assailant—was also to be my curse. We were schoolmates. Despite the fact that Ace McVay’s attendance at DeWitt Clinton High School was becoming sporadic at best, I dreaded encountering him. It was not so much that I feared another physical confrontation, though I did; it was the mortification I dreaded most: the shame of a marked man. He and his goons had been witness to when I was demonstrably the weak lamb to his menacing lion, and he knew it. I fantasized many times about blowing his head off, about punching his ugly face so many times that he would bleed from every pimple. I almost bit my own lower lip just thinking about it. Now it was his smirking countenance on my living room ceiling morning and night, instead of my favorite images of the TeenTones and rock-and-roll stardom. In fact, my enthusiasm for the whole TeenTone enterprise diminished. I had trouble falling asleep, and previously innocuous noises set me on edge: I was not the boy I had been before the outrage.

  I did not see him again until a week after the incident. There was McVay, between classes, walking in my direction in one of the long, crowded corridors of the huge building. When he spotted me, I saw an instantaneous change in his demeanor. He toughened his walk as he approached: more resolve, more intimidation, more of a clack from his boots. His steely gray eyes were focused on me, bespeaking the unmistakable message “Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut.” This behavior was repeated every time he saw me, especially in biology class, where he was, of all things, my lab partner, though he never said a word to me. These encounters precluded any closure to the traumatic event, a constant reminder of my helplessness.

  As the weeks went by, McVay continued to glower when he saw me, though he would sometimes throw in a simple, not unfriendly nod of recognition. It began to dawn on me how afraid he was that I would report the incident, which I never did. I didn’t even tell my parents, for somehow, in my mind, it was not an attempted armed robbery, as it would be in the grown-up world, but the business of boys, and exempt from the purview of grown-up authority. The thought, however, that I might engender fear of any kind in the likes of Ace McVay gave me mild satisfaction, though the fact remained that he and his buddies had committed a felony and had seen me collapse to the ground believing I had fainted. Which of us had the more dreadful secret about the other?

  I continued to daydream about revenge and physical destruction in which I would subjugate my tormentor. I thought of enlisting one or more of the tough rocks who hung out at the fence on Mosholu Parkway and appreciated the TeenTones, like the fearsome Lefty Farrell and the borderline psychotic Roy Drillick, who many years later would kill his father and himself. I had visions of them beating McVay and forcing him to apologize to me in a victory of good over evil akin to the Allies over the Nazis. But with Lefty and Roy, it would be more a case of victory of evil over evil, and I concluded that it was nobody’s business but my own—and Percy McVay’s.

  The weeks went by, and McVay’s glares began to disappear, replaced by a kind of self-absorption; thoughts, I surmised, that were far from the Reservoir Oval. Perhaps he was contemplating subsequent armed robberies and beatings, or that he was shortly to be expelled from school for nonattendance. The tension in me had abated somewhat as well, but not my desire for vengeance, which I knew realistically would never come.

  The TeenTones continued to harmonize and improve, though Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour was still up in the air. We were invited to sing at a couple of local dances, for which we bought red-and-black-striped vests that were cheaper than sport jackets. Though I still enjoyed my involvement, I had developed an ambivalent attitude toward the TeenTones, with whom I made an associative connection to my recent catastrophe. My journey to the rehearsals was now an ordeal, conducted with a vigilance like never before. Every person on the street, every noise and shadow, was cause for alarm, and I did not venture through the gates of the Oval after the daylight hours, preferring the perceived safety of the more populated streets.

  One day, sitting with some friends and TeenTones in the huge high school cafeteria, I observed a crowd and potential ruckus at one of the doorways. Arguments and fights in the lunchroom were not uncommon in a building containing several thousand male students, and we were accustomed to watching, fights being more interesting than cafeteria food to teenage boys. I personally hated to fight, as I’ve said, though I had been in a few that were unavoidable. The strange thing was that I loathed the feeling of my fist connecting to someone’s face only slightly less than the feeling of being hit, with its painful, throbbing sting and the need to fight tears.

  We ambled over to the tumult, where Bill Haroldson, a lunchroom monitor, was attempting to prevent a boy from ascending the stairs to the halls and classrooms. It was against the rules until one’s lunch period was over, and Billy, a spirited but diminutive kid, meant to enforce them. The miscreant was none other than Ace McVay. Twice Billy tried to block the door and twice McVay arrogantly pushed him aside, having sport with Billy. Finally, McVay took a step back, assumed his macho feet-apart stance, put a suspicious hand in his jacket pocket, and said, “Hey, asshole, you looking for trouble?”

  Just then a burly figure broke through the crowd and said, “I handle the trouble here.” It was said in a most understated manner, but it was a dramatic moment, and the crowd hushed. It was Al Gorden, the chief lunchroom monitor, who did not look the part of a tough guy, with his glasses and preppy clothes, but he was strong.

  McVay’s smiling face twitched slightly as he observed what seemed to be slightly more even odds. Gorden was a respected guy who would fight only over the proper beef. “Who the fuck are you?” McVay asked with all the confident venom he could muster, and he proceeded to try to exit yet again.

  Gorden removed his horn-rims and carefully placed them in his breast pocket as he blocked the door. “I’m in charge here, and you can’t go up into the halls.”

  McVay smiled again, or rather smirked that smirk that I knew so well, and looked down at the floor as a ruse. Suddenly, he released a right-hand roundhouse at Al Gorden, who blocked it with his massive forearm. At the same time, Gorden hit the tall, skinny bastard with a powerful left hook to the stomach, which made him grunt like a pig and took the wind out of him, doubling him over.

  There was a tense pause as McVay caught his breath and straightened up. It had looked like it was all over with one punch, but “Fuck you,” McVay said, and he put up his duk
es to continue. He tried some flailing punches to Al’s head but got caught with a stunning combination to his face that made the sound of smacking meat and bone and sent his head crashing into the steel-meshed glass of the door and his body to the ground.

  I found myself biting my lip, and my fists were clenched as if it were I, not Al Gorden, delivering the punishment. Blood was pouring out of McVay’s nose and several of his multitude of pimples, not unlike my fantasies. My fellow students were screaming the usual “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” like convicts at a prison riot. Gorden stood over McVay, fists at the ready, and prepared to stop fighting, when McVay kicked out at his legs, trying to trip him, then rose, all the while cursing: “You motherfucker, I’ll kill you. You’re dead, you fucking Jew bastard.”

  Percival McVay had said the wrong thing. Allen Gorden was the child of holocaust survivors—his parents had in fact met at Dachau—and McVay’s words sent the head lunchroom monitor over the top. He grabbed the bleeding, reeling boy by the collar of his black leather jacket and jerked him upright, holding him with his left hand while beating him unmercifully with powerful, true punches with his right fist, grunting loudly with each one like a tennis player on his serve. “What am I? You piece of shit! What am I?”