Beyond Nostalgia

by Winton, Tom

  It was then that I felt her arm slide around the small of my back. Nothing pretentious about the gesture, just a heartfelt, benevolent reflex meant to help warm me up. Talk about being in heaven! This was it. Looking down at her, directly into those dark exotic eyes, I lowered my shivering hand and laid it gently around her slender waist. For a second or two we held this pose, then, slowly, allowing her ample time to pull away, I leaned to kiss her.

  She let me. It was nothing passionate, just a meeting of young lips, pressing gently, yet eagerly. Right then both our lives took on a whole new meaning. Instantly, my old world transformed into a totally different place. A wonderful alien place, saturated with new hope.

  It was nearing 1 a.m. when we finally arrived outside Theresa’s house. She pointed across the dark, deserted street, to a two-story house that was exactly the same as all the rest on the block. "That's where I live,” she said, “on the first floor." The happy glow that had been in her voice and on her face all night disappeared, replaced now by concern and disappointment. She focused intently on the front window. A pale light was on inside, and there was music playing, sad music, depressing bluesy stuff that kids our age definitely were not into.

  Still arm-in-arm as we stepped between two parked cars to cross the narrow street, I looked at her again and asked, "What's the matter, something wrong?"

  "Ohhh, nooo … nothing." She managed a melancholic smile. "It's just that I … I can't ask you inside, and I feel bad about it." Then we stepped onto the sidewalk and she turned to face me. "I'm sorry," she said. "I wanted to invite you in, let you get warm, make you a cheeseburger or something."

  Seeing the disappointment intensify on her face, I put my hands on her trim waist. Not having a clue as to what was troubling her, I said, "It's OK, I understand." Then I forced a smile, "Can I call you?"

  "Of course! You better!" she said, as she hurriedly fumbled through her purse for something to write with.

  In the time it took her to dig out a pen and a matchbook, she had twice glanced at her front window.

  "Please call me, Dean."

  "Tomorrow, I promise."

  Rising to her toes, she slipped her hand on the back of my neck and kissed me once again. God, she knew how to kiss! She eased her tongue inside my mouth, slowly sweeping it over my teeth and gums, exploring for a moment before bringing it to meet mine. Holding her in my arms, I felt through her coat the swell of her breasts as they pressed against my chest. I wasn't shaking any more. Our tongues now sliding against each others, I cheated a little. I opened my eyes, just a bit, to see if she was into this as much as I was.

  What I saw was upsetting. A single tear had spilled from where her eyelashes met. I pulled away, gently.

  "What's wrong?" I asked. "Is this something I can help with?"

  She bit her lower lip then said, "No. It's nothing major … I'll explain another time."

  She sniffled, then smiled for my benefit and said, "I won't go anywhere tomorrow. I'll wait for your call … Dean Cassidy." Then she kissed my cheek, turned quickly, and went into her house.

  I can no longer bring the feeling back, but I still remember how ecstatic I was waiting for the bus outside Bogart's Bar on Broadway that special night so many years ago. Looking up at the night-time city sky, I saw new stars, brighter stars, more stars than ever before. I even recall the misty stream rising from my mouth as I muttered to the heavens, "God, please, let there be many more nights that I'll wait on this bus stop."

  Chapter 2

  As usual, when the city sun rose Sunday morning, it was obscured from our first floor apartment. Secondhand rays delivered light to our bedroom but there were no visible horizons anywhere outside it. We never saw the sun down there until late morning, when it finally rose above the surrounding rooftops.

  Shortly after it had risen somewhere out in the burbs, the sun's indirect light managed to penetrate the urban grime coating the outside of our bedroom window, waking me up in the process. As the backs of my eyelids went from black to red, my first thoughts of the new day were of Theresa Wayman and the night before.

  Squinting across the room, seeing my parents' bed empty and rumpled, I sighed in relief.

  Yes, I was sharing a bedroom with my parents. Here I was, crowding my eighteenth year, a starter on Flushing High’s basketball team, had my own part-time job and all, and I had to sleep in the same room as my parents. All because my father was too damn cheap to spring for a place with two bedrooms.

  Thank God! I thought. Privacy! Well, almost. As usual, the door was wide open. It had been that way for a long, long time. I must have been about eight when its hinges pulled from the wooden jamb, and it had laid to rest against the wall ever since.

  I used to wonder, still do once in awhile, how such a beautiful, ornate French door with so many glass panes ever wound up inside our sixty-year-old, rent-controlled tenement. But, really, that didn't matter. What mattered was that it never got fixed. I'd rationalized this was because my father, like most New York apartment dwellers, wasn't much with tools. But deep down I knew his lack of aptitude had nothing to do with it. Even if he had been handy, he wouldn't have bothered to fix the thing.

  Dad had already gone off to drive his cab that morning. As for Ma, I heard her loud and clear, already going hot and heavy with her rosary beads. You see, excessive praying was just one facet of my mother's merciless mental illness. Every day she'd spend hours at a clip down on her knees in front of her makeshift altar rattling off her Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and whatever that other prayer was. But still, crazy as this was, I had to give her some credit. She'd actually fashioned our bargain basement chrome and glass tea cart into a first rate religious shrine complete with holy relics and pictures. There were a bunch of statues (two with halos), two crosses, and about a dozen flickering red candles just like the ones at Saint Leo's Church – the ones they charged you fifty-cents to light.

  Ma always prayed in a slow, deliberate, cantor that drove me absolutely nutso. Lord, it was so depressing. But not to her. To her way of thinking it would be irreverent, her all loving and forgiving God would surely get her, if she ever rushed through her prayers. No sir, not my mother. She'd get this long, rhythmic cadence going. A resounding chant so loud I believed if Jesus Christ himself was up on the roof, six flights up, standing right there on 'Tar Beach' (where me and the guys used to get our suntans), he'd hear her prayers, without turning on his super powers.

  Even my flat-assed, played-out pillow pulled tight over my head did little to muffle Ma's haunting chants as they rushed through the open doorway like an eerie draft. But, used to this as I was, my mind transcended her religious racket, and I was able to recollect all the wonderful events of the night before.

  I ran a mental chronology of the evening, playing it all back best I could on my mind's screen, that first heavenly vision of Theresa, all the walking and talking, her putting her arm around me, that first kiss, the last one. And I thanked God it wasn't all just some cruel, wonderful dream.

  Next I pondered when to call her. I wanted to do it right away but obviously couldn’t so early on a Sunday morning. Come on! I thought. You must be out of your mind! You don't want to come across as too eager. Shoot, even if you weren't worried about your ego, and it was the middle of the afternoon, you still couldn't call her from here. You see, our telephone was in the foyer, right off that dungeon of a living room where Ma was praying like a lunatic to be cured from a cancer she didn't even have.

  The decision was easy. I'd call Theresa from Cy's Candy Store. Cy's was where the guys and I holed up when we skipped Mass, which we were then doing with increased frequency. It had been five or six weeks straight this time, a new record. Sure, I was just as guilty as my friends, I wanted to skip church just as much as they did but, I have to admit, I felt like I was sinking closer and closer to the devil's flames. And that sometimes bothered me.

  That’s exactly what I was thinking about when the loud grating buzz of our doorbell sounded, long and hard,
as if somebody was leaning on it. I knew it could only be one person. I pulled the pillow off my face and jumped out of my folding bed. Ma would never have stopped her praying to answer the door. To her that surely would have been some kind of sacrilege. Lickety-split, I padded to the door and peered through the peephole. All I could see was blackness. I knew from countless experiences there could only be one thing blocking out the dim hallway light; Donny Scully's eyeball. He always got his jollies by aggravating people in such little ways.

  "Give me five minutes," I said to the steel door.

  "Hurry up, man. Curten and Waters are already here. We're gonna be late for Mass."

  Yeahhh right! I thought, but said, "Aw right, aw right."

  I hustled back to the bedroom to get dressed, not daring to interrupt my mother's now-perturbed praying with something as trite as a hello.

  From my mismatched chest of drawers, shoved in the far corner of the room, I quickly, but scrupulously, grabbed some clothes. First, I pulled out a powder blue button-down shirt, freshly laundered, the paper band from the cleaners still around it. I jumped into a pair of beige Smith's jeans, ran a madras belt through the loops, then pulled on a pair of white sweat socks with holes in the toes. Plucking my oxblood penny loafers from beneath the bed, I thought how tired they looked. At least they fit. I'd vowed two years earlier (when I got my first part-time job delivering groceries on a funny looking bicycle with a huge wire basket mounted over an undersized front wheel) that I'd never again wear hand-me-down kicks with crumpled newspaper stuffed in the toes. Since then I had also been taking my shirts (extra starch, please) to Prosperity Cleaners.

  There was no need to shave since I'd done that before going out the previous night. I just splashed on some of the Jade East my brother, Sylvester, left behind when he went off to basic training, dragged a brittle plastic comb with a bad smile through my hair then gave the whole works a quick spray with Ma's Aqua Net. The coast was clear, so I 'borrowed' a pack of Pall Mall's from an open carton in Dad’s top drawer. As I made my way through the living room and then the foyer, Ma turned up the volume again so as to drown out the small but intrusive sounds of my footsteps and the rustling of fabric as I pulled on my basketball jacket.

  I filled the guys in on all the details of the night before as we made our way across the asphalt schoolyard at P.S. 20. Boy, was that place a mess. Obviously the hitters and hop-heads that hung out there had a hell of a time the night before. Beneath the wooden benches, empty now except for two gray pigeons strutting atop the back rests, were a dozen or so paper bags, small brown bags distended like balloons, the tops rolled back, shaped to fit over a glue sniffers nose. A few feet out from the benches, empty cans and broken beer bottles, mostly Rheingold, littered the third base line of the blacktop softball field. Bagged empty bottles of Tango, Gallo port, and Thunderbird wine were strewn along the long row of benches and on the other side of a high cyclone fence that cordoned off the handball courts.

  Coming out the other side of the schoolyard now, I started telling the guys about Theresa and how she'd saved my butt. Right away Donny's got to know, "She any good lookin'?"

  I didn't answer right away, just shook my head a couple of times as we crossed Union Street to Saint Leo's.

  Throngs of people were milling around the church, conversing, some making their way to the entrances. Though my eyes were taking in all the bustle, my mind was occupied, working hard to bring back Theresa Wayman’s mesmerizing eyes and magnificent face. But Jimmy soon snapped me out my dream state when he stuck his mush in mine. "Yo, Dee Cee, anybody home? I asked you what she looked like, she any good?"

  "Any good, she’s gorgeous man!"

  Donny came right back with the standard follow-up question. "Whudja get offa hu?"

  "Nothin' man!" I snapped. "This one's different."

  "Awright, awright … relax, man." He gave me maybe four seconds to cool down then asked, "Ya gonna call huh?"

  "Yeah, I'm gonna call her, if that's OK with you."

  "Geez, De Cee," Jimmy Curten said now, "lighten up a bit."

  Of course, Donny had to get in one more zinger as we shouldered our way through the legions of faithful souls crowded outside the church. The jerk lifts his arm straight up, points down at my head and yells in front of all these people, at the top of his lungs, "This boy's in love! Don't mess with 'is woman!"

  As always on Sunday mornings, Cy's Candy Store was mobbed inside. Customers clutching The Daily-News and The Star-Journal lined up by the register. Diners packed the food counter, some working on eggs and bacon, others wolfing down bagels and cream cheese. Behind them stood a row of soon-to-be-diners waiting patiently, chatting with friends, reading The News. All four booths along the wall were occupied, but at one, three guys were getting up to leave, guys we knew, though only casually, and wanted to keep that way. Hard-core dopers in their twenties who, true to form, were way overdressed for such a fine spring day. All of them were in their trademark junkie coats - knee-length, baaad-looking black leather jobs. Beneath those coats, they each wore hugely-contrasting frilly tab-collar shirts, lavender, yellow and white. These guys were some messed up hitters still trying to hold onto the doo-wop days.

  When they brushed by us, alongside the counter, we all nodded at them, just the smallest hint of recognition. We knew not to ignore them, but not to be overly friendly either. These messed-up dudes were probably doing six maybe seven bags of 'H' a day. They were exactly the type of bad actors the streets, and our parents, always taught us to stay away from. But they knew us from the neighborhood, and this small hint of familiarity might just prevent them from jumping us some night, unless of course, they happened to be strung out.

  As I slid by the short one, the one with the deadest, yellowiest eyes, the one they called 'Apache', I heard him mutter "fuck" under his breath. Once they passed I turned to see what had pissed him off so much. It was Father Bianchi, the youngest priest in our church. He had just entered the store. Good old Father Bianchi with his olive skin and greased-back DA haircut always looking more like a wise guy than a man of God. But forget book covers. This man was one of the most caring human beings I've ever known, anywhere.

  Father B's prime concern in life was looking after the young people of Saint Leo's Parish, and he was damn good at it. And he always seemed to take a particular interest in us guys. Sure, he knew our fathers, but that had nothing to do with it. Unlike most adults we knew, he truly liked us. He cared about where our lives were heading, and he showed it. Countless times, on his days off, this selfless young man who'd been reared in Hell's Kitchen (a place most people wouldn't stop to defecate in), would take us to different fun places. You know, the old 'get the kids out of the city for a while' routine. He’d sometimes take us fishing to Little Neck Bay or a Mets game up the street in the nosebleed section of Shea Stadium. Other times he took us to 'The Garden' to see the Knicks, or swimming out in Rockaway Beach.

  Paying for his newspaper and Lucky Strikes at the register now, Father Bianchi nodded and smiled at the three junkies. He said something to them, then he turned to watch Cy count his change into his hand. These hard core addicts (dope fiends who didn't care about themselves, their own mothers, living or dying) shared an exasperated look, but they remained right where they were alongside Father B. A moment later the four of them stepped outside to talk.

  Sliding into the booth, knowing well and good that Father Bianchi would soon be back for his morning coffee and to socialize with the parishioners, we huddled over the table, hurrying to get our alibi straight. If he asked, we'd tell him we already went to church. Eight o'clock Mass we'd say. Then I'd really pour it on by voluntarily telling which priest said the Mass. You see, ever since Father Bianchi had gotten me a part-time job at the rectory's office that past December, I'd had privy to the priest's Mass schedules. I knew this week the eight o'clock had been assigned to 'Father Speedy'. Yes, I know, Father Speedy is a weird name for a priest, but that's what we guys called old Father Toomey. Time
and again he earned the nickname! He may have been getting on in his years, but he could still say Mass faster than any priest half his age. The reason Father Speedy had such a swift delivery was no secret in the parish. Everybody knew. You'd have to be living under a pew not to know that Father Toomey was a heavy boozer. The general consensus was that the octogenarian priest always rushed mass so that he could get back to the rectory for 'a hair of the dog'.

  Finished with the druggies now, Father Bianchi came back inside and marched directly to our booth. After saying hello and talking a few minutes, we fed him our prefabricated line. But he didn't buy it. He didn't say as much, but we could see it in his kind and forgiving dark eyes. He could have verbally backed us to the wall, and we knew it. But, as usual, he chose not to press the issue. Father had way too much class for that. Knowing that he realized we had lied to him would be punishment enough. When he left to mingle with the other parishioners, we were far more remorseful about lying to him than the act of skipping Mass itself.