by Winton, Tom
"No," I said, looking way back inside the cave, finishing my search, carefully balancing preoccupation with dread and panic. With the elimination process now complete, I said, "She wore that funeral dress. It's not here … anywhere. C'mon, let's call that cop back."
I yanked off the closet light without even thinking about the act, a reflex my father had conditioned in me with all his bitching about wasting electricity. Incredible how inconsequential things like turning off a light when your mother has probably just killed herself remain ingrained in your head. The subconscious is one hell of a mystery.
We'd just stepped back from the closet when Theresa held up a finger and said, "Wait … listen."
I froze, tuned in my ears, there were distractions now--noises. I heard a jet decelerating high above the building, someone yelling outside in the darkness, and tired old footsteps from the apartment above.
"What is it?" I whispered impatiently. "We gotta call."
"Shhh, Dean! I'm telling you I hear something, in the closet." She grabbed my wrist with both hands and held it still. "It sounds like … like faint breathing," she whispered
We froze. My chest felt constricted and tight. Then the noises faded and I too heard the breathing.
Desperately, I reached into the dark closet, frantically feeling for the damned light string again with my hands--like swatting flies in the dark. I found it, yanked it on again, dropped to my knees and started whacking away at the mountain of disarranged shoes.
Then I hit something, something solid. I swatted aside more shoes. Then I saw my mother's seemingly lifeless leg flat against the wooden floor.
Theresa and I were pulling her out of the closet just as Dad and Father Bianchi came rushing into the apartment. Father and I held Ma up, one of her arms around each of our shoulders, and we walked her. Her limp legs dragged along the living room rug as we walked in circles. Father kept talking to her, trying to break into her unconsciousness, while Dad called the hospital to get an ambulance dispatched. I looked at my father standing in the hallway next to Theresa. The phone in one hand, a Pall Mall in the other, I thought about how his damaged heart must be working triple time.
As Father Bianchi and I continued to walk Ma, Dad and Theresa went back to the closet to search for clues as to what my mother might have ingested. Amidst the shoes, they first found an empty pint bottle of Fleischmans, then Dad discovered that all his heart medication, about fifty pills, were gone. The prescription bottle was empty. Soon after that the ambulance arrived and raced Ma off to the hospital. The four of us followed in Father's Mercury.
Six hours later, in the morning's wee hours, after they'd pumped out Ma's stomach and stabilized her, the doctor at Booth Memorial Hospital told us her survival had been nothing short of a miracle. He said the amount of medication she ingested was enough to kill an elephant, let alone such a small woman. She was only an inch or two over five feet and had withered away to an emaciated eighty-three pounds.
And so Theresa and I had weathered another trauma. But once again, hard times, the truest test of love, had brought us yet closer.
Chapter 13
Those bleak cold months in the north-east always dragged on like prison sentences for me, sometimes like two consecutive terms. I think I had that winter phobia, whatever it's called, that brings on deep depression. But, elated as I was sharing my life with Theresa, the first two months of 1968 virtually flitted by. We were constantly on the go. We partied together, went to the movies and on double-dates. We even went to church together (yeah, I was going to mass once again). And, of course, we lay together. We made love in apartment building basements, stairway landings, meter rooms, wherever we could find warmth and privacy on those frigid New York nights. Sometimes while making out in my living room, our hormones whirring out of control, we'd do it right there on the floor. That was pretty risky business considering my parents were asleep in the doorless next room. That unhinged French door was still wide open, leaning uselessly against the bedroom wall.
We'd talk on the phone for hours when we couldn't be together, but we lived for the times that we could. And that's why I felt like a deserter when I asked Theresa if she minded if I went to Donny Scully's bachelor party.
You see, Donny had knocked up the super's daughter and they were going to have a shotgun wedding. Some chance that union had, with both of them still eighteen and marrying out of fear and nothing else. Their minuscule odds of a blissful marriage were diminished even more by Donny's irresponsible ways. Donny, just like the rest of us guys, had a penchant for boozy good times and an affinity for the sexy young ladies that seemed to be on every Queens' corner: blondes, brunettes, red heads, girls with long black hair that shined like coal.
Don't forget, these were the late sixties, when young women still knew how to dress, before the style-dictators put them into shorts that look like my Father's old wrinkled curtain-underwear, before those baggy-ass sweaters that hang to the knees like tents. Uhhhhh!
Back then, the sight of a pretty girl strutting the sidewalks was something to behold. They dressed in jeans tighter than their own skins and, in summer, cut them off so short that today they'd probably be illegal. Then there were those wonderful miniskirts. There was what seemed a city-wide contest to see who's was the skimpiest--who could show off the most thigh. And girls still had hips! When they wore hip-huggers, a guy's libido rocketed with every step a female took. It was impossible to take your eyes from all those low, low waistlines that rested mere inches north of the Promised Land. Like tree leaves appear when the weather warms, so did those bare bellies. Young, tight female stomachs were in motion everywhere you looked, twisting, flexing, gyrating--tormenting us guys to near insanity. And then there were the braless young ladies, the biggest temptation of them all. There wasn't a red-blooded male anywhere who wasn't eternally vigilant in his search for the tell-tale shake, tremble and jounce of bare breasts.
Though our style of dress evolved like everyone else's, Theresa kept her bras. I never had to tell her, but she knew I wouldn't want her walking around like that. She wouldn't have anyway. It wasn't her style. As it was, without any such added attractions she got more lust-filled looks in a day than most girls got in a month.
But, despite Theresa's beauty, I was a still a guy, and when I wasn't with her, I had this uncontrollable urge to check out every female that walked. Sorry but, for the most part, males have a more highly-charged sex drive than females. That is something that can never be changed, no matter how hard society tries to modify our thinking. The hyper-active drive that my gender is damned with, plus all those pitchers of Rheingold I put away, were both to blame for the irreversible damage I caused the night of Donny's bachelor party.
For the big event, we reserved the back room of Margo's Bar, a working stiffs joint on Lawrence Street. A blue-collar place with five layers of apartments stacked on top of it, Margo's was frequented every afternoon by Con-Ed workers, sanitation men, and construction dudes, all on the clock, all hiding out. The same type of clientèle hung out there after work and late into the night also. Margo's barmaids drew them in just like queen bees attract drones. I could never figure out why any bar owner would even entertain the idea of having men tend bar. As long as there's one decent looking female working in a place, the men will come, always lured, no matter how remote the odds, by one single possibility.
Since Margo's had such ladies drawing drafts and mixing drinks, there was always a horned-up, thirsty crowd of raucous, hard-working, hard-drinking men there. Guys in their twenties, on up to some in their sixties, two-thirds of them with wedding bands on their fingers, frequented the place. On weekends, a smattering of women would drop in also, many of them leaving with somebody else's man.
The back room at Margo's was certainly no banquet hall, but it would work just fine for us guys. About thirty of us showed up for Donny's shindig. Margo had set up two tables full of cold cuts, cheese, bread, potato and macaroni salads. When I first arrived, it felt weird being without
Theresa on a Saturday night. It wasn't that I worried about her going out on me or anything like that; I knew her too well. I just missed being with her.
Early in the evening, before things got crazy, I called her from a booth inside the bar room. She had been watching a movie and looking through a new issue of Seventeen Magazine. As was usual on the weekends, her mom was out painting the town, once again trying to escape her torment if only for a few hours. Knowing the possibility was very strong that her mother might bring home another strange man had Theresa very upset. I thought she was overreacting, but I didn't tell her that. Instead I did my best to settle her down, maybe rushing it just a bit, wanting to get back to my friends and all the festive atmosphere.
When I hung up the phone, I felt guilty. I had put what seemed a premature end to our conversation just so I could get back inside with my friends. I could have, and should have, been a little more compassionate about her anxiety. I should have spent a few more minutes reassuring her. But I didn't. Instead I quickly went to work drowning that guilt with cold beer.
We all sat around one huge table - actually it was four or five long ones like they used at Saint Leo's Bingo, juxtaposed together - drinking like there'd be no tomorrow. It was great being with the guys again, talking about old times, reliving different happenings from our collective past, many of which I'm not so proud of today.
Like everybody else in Margo's smoke-filled back room that night, I got very, very drunk. I can’t remember a single fragment of our bawdy animated conversations, but I do remember one thing. How can I not?
Jimmy Curtin and I, each with an arm around the other, were still chuckling when we stepped out into the bar room to use the head. The place was packed and almost as rowdy as our party. Men and women were three deep – standing, wobbling, talking, shouting - all of them counterfeiting a good time, all of them trying to escape, even if only temporarily, the endless grind of their nothing lives.
After Jimmy and I finished doing our business, like two drunken animals, we snaked and crab-walked back through the crowd when suddenly, from a cluster of men gathered around a pool table off to one side, a woman emerged. This object of all these rough-hewn grown men's attentions stopped right smack in my path. She slowly lowered the butt of her pool stick to the floor, cupped both hands over the tip, rested her chin on them and, without saying a word, glared at me with what I only can describe as a sexy smirk.
I stopped in my tracks. People were standing all around me and there was nowhere else to go, even if I had wanted to. With her face only inches from mine, I stared back with an alcohol-inspired cockiness. Her tight, tight, silver-sequined jumpsuit coordinated well with her flowing platinum hair, surreal and artificial yet incredibly alluring. Parted center-head, it fell straight and feather-like all the way to her teeny waist. Her skin-tight outfit accentuated every curve, dip and swell, one of those jumpsuits with a neckline that plunges beneath both breasts, lifting them, presenting them as if on a silver platter. These tits stood proud like that, bulging, stretching her sheer white blouse like they were about to bust right out at me. Somehow my eyes tore away from them and made their way along her solid hips on down her legs, legs stretched sensually in the ready position atop towering 'do-me' heels. Then she slowly led my eyes back up with hers until they met. She wasn't smiling. Instead there was this raw, seemingly uncivilized, animal desire all over her face, exuding from her gray, sly, alley-cat eyes that angled sharply beneath silver eyeliner.
This quintessential honky-tonk woman looked to be in the tail end of her twenties. Despite the fact that she was about ten years older than me, I had no problem holding up my end of this lust-filled visual exchange, duel, whatever you want to call it. I even felt a smile rise on my mouth, a cool, confident smile I never would have managed had I not been flying-high.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
She didn't answer right off, not with words anyhow. She was too busy undressing me with her eyes. Finally, with a discernible Spanish accent that I found very, very provocative and mysterious, she said, "I wuss just wandering … " She broke off her sentence there, paused, and checked me out a second time
"Wondering what?" I prodded, standing there ten feet tall from all the beers, flattered that she had singled out me, a boy, amongst all the men in Margo's.
Her eyes returned to mine, and she said, "I wuss wandering how good a piece of ass you would be."
Bingo! Woweee! Jackpot! Bells and sirens, whistles and fireworks went off in my head. My ego and animal instinct easily overwhelmed any possibility of cerebral reasoning. All that beer had gone straight from my brain to my pecker. What little that still functioned between my ears was now on overload. Theresa Wayman no longer existed in my alcohol sodden brain.
"You got about a half hour?" I shot back. "We can find out."
Hoarse, gruff, loud voices from all around the pool table called out to her now. There was no problem hearing them, even with all the bawdy bar room conversations and the ear-splitting music from the Wurlitzer.
"Come on, Tina."
"Yaw shot, sweet ding."
“What's dis bullshit? C'mon."
"Yesss," she purred to me. "I haf a half hour, I haf all night. But I haf been waiting almost one hour to play," she said, nodding at the felt table. "Geeve me fifteen minutes to feenish dees game."
Then she leaned to me, touched my chin with two fingers, maybe it was three, and kissed me. Even in the state I was in, I remember her tongue, wriggling frantically inside my mouth. It put me to mind of a deadly serpent's tongue. I should have realized right then that this was all wrong. But I didn't. Her kiss was delicious, inviting, like Adam and Eve's evil apple. I was both unable and unwilling to let this end there.
When our lips separated, I tried to be cool, like double O seven in 'Goldfinger'. I smoothed my tongue across my upper lip one time, slowly, deliberately. Then, jutting my head at the door just a few steps behind this temptress, I said, "I'll be at the bachelor party … in the back room.
"I will come for you." Her lips pulled tight into that snarl-smile and she swerved around and strutted back to her game. Jimmy and I watched as this show-on-heels leaned over to bank one off the rail. When she did, the most perfect heart-shaped ass you've ever seen tilted way up and seemed to be pointing right at us. She took aim, blue-nailed fingers spread on the table before her, easing the cue back and forth seductively through a curled index finger. Her legs spread just right, stretching atop those spiked-heels, those solid silver cheeks looked like they were hoisted on stilts.
Damn!
"Shit man, I don't believe you!" Jimmy said, still gawking at that sequined behind. "You are one-lucky-sumbitch!"
After she sunk the three balls, Jimmy and I slipped back into the banquet room. By now a few women from the bar had found their way in and were flirting with some of the guys. In the far corner of the room, little Stevey Waters was puking a stomach full of yellow beer into a glass pitcher. Still shirtless, Donny was trying to put the make on one of the chicks, working on a sympathy lay, telling the homely thirty-something woman that she could be his last memory as a single man. Sunnyside Slim's addicted eyes were intent as he and the dope fiends he'd brought along talked about heading up to Harlem to cop some H. All the other guys were carrying on, their conversations and antics growing bawdier with every drink. As for me, I didn't have a clue where the rest of the night was taking me, nor did I have the slightest inkling of the tragic consequences I would pay for, both that night and the rest of my life, for making that ill-fated hedonistic trip. Needless to say, I know now that I should have left right then, gotten the hell out of that bar, ran all the way to Main Street and jumped the first bus to the Point. To my Theresa. But no! Instead, twenty minutes later, I walked out of Margo's Bar with a strange woman and misguided intentions.
All was wee hour-quiet on Lawrence Street when me and this 'Tina' (or whatever the hell her name was) tramped through the succession of somber-lit showers drifting down from the street lamp
s. Heading for her apartment, we walked quickly and said little. The only signs of life came from the all-night diner and an occasional passing delivery truck or weaving car. In the silent moments, the quick click of her heels spiking the cement sidewalk amplified as they bounced off dark storefronts. There really wasn't much to be said. Neither of us, for sure, was looking to build any lasting relationships. Our common purpose was solely to satisfy each of our own carnal appetites. But, dysfunctional as my mind was, guilt crept into it. Though I truly didn't realize what exactly I was doing wrong, for a fleeting moment I felt like I was about to commit a crime, a crime I'd be caught for, an underhanded infraction I'd have to pay, and pay big, for. But, unfortunately, this glimmer of foresight was just that, and it passed as quickly as it appeared.
Ten minutes after we left the bar, we came upon 'the projects'. That's where she lived, the Flushing Projects, a place any white-boy-outsider with even half his marbles (sex at stake or not) would have stayed clear of, particularly at such an hour, especially during the racially-charged sixties. But none of that bothered me because the beer had diluted any fear I should have had, plus, since I played basketball, I knew most of the black kids who lived there. Hell, they'd even given me a nickname, 'Dribbles'. Odds were pretty good that if anyone tried to jump me, I could prevent an ass-kicking simply by dropping a few names.