by Pete Hamill
Then one evening in that second summer, while Grady worked at the A&S department store, the boy was drawing in the store. The heat was wilting; great splotches of sweat fell on the newsprint, and the charcoal pencil cut holes in the paper. He opened the door to let a breeze in. About one hour later, two of the Tigers paused at the door. Junior and Cheech. Their faces were bleary, and each was carrying a quart bottle of beer. The boy was suddenly afraid.
“Well, lookit dis,” said Junior. “An ahtist! We got ourself an ahtist, right here in da neighborhood. The boy ahtist!”
“Whyn’t you draw our picture?” Cheech said. They moved into the store, and the boy couldn’t bring himself to move. Then Cheech saw them open the top of the chest, revealing the treasures of the Collection.
“Well, how about this!” he said. “Comics! They got comics in here.”
“Leave them alone,” the boy said. “They’re Mr. Grady’s.”
Junior switched to a singsong voice: “They’re Mr. Grady’s. They’re Mr. Grady’s.…” They started tossing comics back and forth, over the head of the boy, who ran back and forth from one to the other. The more upset the boy became, the more they laughed. Then they started tearing pages out of the precious books, balling them up, pitching them to each other, while Cheech echoed the old radio show: “Terrrreeee an’ da pirates!” They found the precious originals, neatly stacked on the bottom of the trunk, and started scaling them through the air. Then Cheech put his thumb over the top of his bottle, shook it up violently, and let the hot beer fly at Junior. The beer cascaded over Junior’s head and spattered across some unfinished signs. The colors ran like blood.
The boy flew at Junior, frantically throwing small punches, crazy with rage and grief, and Junior shoved him toward Cheech, and Cheech kicked him, and then Junior knocked him down. They were in a snarling fury now, and they pulled over the taboret, spilling poster colors and water over the floor and onto the ruined comics. They sprayed the signs one final time with beer, and went laughing into the evening.
The boy sat there crying harder than he ever had before.
He was still there when Grady came in, and he tried to explain, but Grady exploded in injured anger: “Why’d you leave the door open? Why’d you come here, anyway? Lookit this place! You know how long it took me to save this stuff? Why’d you come here? Why? Why?”
The boy ran out to the darkening street. He never went back. That winter, he took another route to school because he couldn’t look at the sign shop ever again without thinking of that terrible summer evening when he’d opened the door to blasphemy. He didn’t become a cartoonist, either, but he had learned things in that shop that he carried with him for the rest of his life. In that place in the gardens of Brooklyn, a one-armed man had given him art.
The Man with the Blue Guitar
LATER, AFTER THE TERRIBLE thing had happened, people in the neighborhood remembered the day that Andreas Vlastopoulos had arrived among them. Marie from the dry cleaner’s remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early summer and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. Mrs. Caputo remembered that he asked her for directions to the Griffin house, and that his accent was thick and strange, because it wasn’t a German or a squarehead accent and he was so blond. George, the bartender at Rattigan’s, remembered seeing the young man staring up at buildings and street signs as if he were lost. Some remembered his blue eyes, others his battered brown canvas suitcase, tied shut with a rope. They all remembered the blue guitar.
“He finally went into Mary Griffin’s,” George said later. “I remember thinkin’ there was somethin’ wrong with the way he looked. It wasn’t just he was a big handsome guy; hell, there’s lots of big handsome guys in this neighborhood. No, this guy was, I don’t know how to say it. Beautiful?”
The young man—he was nineteen that summer—took a room in the back of Mary Griffin’s house, which was the first building on the street below the avenue, one of two wedged between the tenements and a large garage. Since the tenements along the avenue had no backyards, their clotheslines stretched across the space above Mary Griffin’s yard, and that of the Chinese house beside hers, to hooks drilled into the wall of the garage. The clotheslines were always full, blocking the sun.And on the top floor of one of the tenements, living alone with her six-year-old son, was the Widow Musmanno.
“She shouldn’t live like that, alone,” Mrs. Caputo used to say. “It ain’t right. She married a bum and the bum got killed. But why should she pay the rest of her life? His family says she can’t go out, she gotta wear black like an old lady. Hey, this ain’t the old country. This is America. It ain’t right. A young woman like that. A pretty girl like that…”
But for two years, Widow Musmanno had lived her sentence of solitude, worrying about her son as he played in the street, scrubbing the apartment, mumbling prayers in church each morning for her husband, and washing clothes. She ate too much. She added pounds. And then one day, that first week after the young man’s arrival, she was hanging clothes on the line and glanced down into the yard and saw Andreas Vlastopoulos.
He was sitting alone on the wooden back steps and he was playing the blue guitar. The guitar was the blue of spring skies, the blue of postcard skies, the blue of the Aegean. The sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. Widow Musmanno did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute. And then she began furiously to scrub the table, to clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, a few hours later, her son came up from the street, he found her lying on her vast bed and when her eyes opened to look at him, they were sore and red.
“He’d come in every Monday morning,” said Marie from the dry cleaner. “Always six shirts, medium starch, and a suit, always nice and polite. One day, one shirt. One week, one suit. He didn’t flirt. He was the kind didn’t know how good-lookin’ he was. He told me he worked nights in a restaurant over New York, and he used to laugh at his bad English. He was a Greek, the kid. And tell the truth, it was hard to keep your eyes off him.”
On the morning of her thirty-first birthday, after her son left for Coney Island with his Uncle Frank, Widow Musmanno was hanging wash while Vlastopolous played in the yard below. She heard the aching notes. Her thick body trembled. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped from her hands and fell three stories into the yard. Vlastopolous glanced at the fallen piece, then up at Widow Musmanno, frozen in her window frame, and he smiled. He walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a woman’s slip. He waved it like a wet silky pink flag at Widow Musmanno and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no, almost desperately pointing to herself and then to him, meaning that she would come down. But Vlastopolous just smiled and went into the back door of the Griffin house with the wet woman’s slip and his blue guitar. He went out into the street and found her building on the avenue and went up the hot dark stairs to the top floor and she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks swiftly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that.
There were few secrets in that neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Musmanno and the beautiful young man with the blue guitar. They knew from the look on her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in mauve and pink and yellow summer dresses. They knew when she stopped going to Mass. They knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon while the six-year-old was off at a ball game with his uncle. Somebody saw them in the hills above the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. Sitting under a tree, eating sandwiches while the young man played the blue guitar. And one hot night, Sadie Genlot climbed to the roof for air and saw them a few tenements away, leaning on a chimney, holding hands and
staring at the glittering towers of Manhattan.
Of course, the old women gossiped about Widow Musmanno; it was too bad, they said, that she had gone “that way”; she sure wasn’t showing proper respect for her poor husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious. There was nobody in any of their lives who announced himself with a blue guitar.
“The trouble was, how long could it go on?” Mrs. Caputo said. “It was the husband’s brother was the problem. Frank. He took over when the brother died. He paid the bills. He was like a father to the kid. That was the trouble.…”
Late one Saturday night, Vlastopoulos came out of Widow Musmanno’s building. At the corner, as he turned toward Mary Griffin’s house, he saw two men in gray hats sitting in a Cadillac. They were staring at him. A few days later, he came up from the subway and saw the same two men peering at him from behind the café curtains of a bar called Fitzgerald’s. One of them nodded. Late that night, after the boy was long asleep, Vlastopolous mentioned the two men to Widow Musmanno.
“Oh, my God,” she said, the words more prayer than exclamation. And then, after a long silence, she told the young man that it was all over between them and she could never see him again. He protested; she insisted. He said that she was grown up, she lived in a free country, she could do what she wanted with men. He said that if marriage was the problem, then they would get married. But Widow Musmanno turned her face and whispered that there were some things he would never understand. And Vlastopoulos answered that no matter what she said he would be around to see her again the following night. She took his beautiful face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth.
They found him the next morning on his back in the yard, as broken as the blue guitar beneath him. The police decided that he must have fallen from the roof of the tenement, and nobody in the neighborhood offered any other theory. But when the ambulance came from Kings County to take him to the morgue, Mrs. Caputo began to cry and so did Marie from the dry cleaner’s and Mary Griffin, too. They waited around and after a while a short mustachioed man came to Mary Griffin’s and said he was the uncle of Vlastopoulos and would pick up the young man’s belongings. He was inside for about an hour, and came out with the brown canvas suitcase, and the broken pieces of the guitar. He put the broken pieces in a garbage can on the corner, sighed, and started trudging heavily toward the subway.
Late that night, when the bars had closed and the last buses had gone to the terminals and everybody in the neighborhood was asleep, Widow Musmanno came down to the street. She was dressed in black. She wore no makeup and her hair was blowsy. She pulled a shawl tightly over her shoulders, and then began to shuffle to the corner. The pieces of the blue guitar jutted from the wire garbage can. She looked at them for a long moment, and then removed them, all fractured wood and twisted wire strings. She held them to her breasts, the way a mother hugs a child, and then with a dry sob, she entered the country of the old.
The Hitter Bag
AT FORTY-EIGHT, SONNY MARINO lived with his wife and three daughters in a small brick house up the block from the Store. He wanted to live there until the end of his life. In a way, the Store was his life. For more than twenty years, starting in the Depression, the Store was his father’s, and from his first moments of consciousness, Sonny lived in that plump, full world of tomatoes, cantaloupes, lettuce, potatoes, and garlic, inhaling the smell of fresh basil, or summertime apples, or ripe onions. When his father dropped dead one morning, unloading a crate of watermelons, the Store went to Sonny. There was no real choice: his mother was long dead, his brother, Frankie, had been killed at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. If Sonny didn’t take over the Store, it would close.
So at nineteen, Sonny moved into the world of men. This was no easy matter, for Sonny was a leader of the Cavaliers. With Nit-Nat, Wimpy, Stark, and Midnight, he was one of the toughest street fighters in that part of Brooklyn, a defender of the holy neighborhood turf against the incursions of marauding vandals. When he was in what he called the hitter bag, he could beat you with his hands, cripple you in a wrestling match, or confront your ball bats with an iron pipe. In that neighborhood, his ferocity was legendary; so was his ability to absorb punishment.
“That’s it, guys,” he announced at his father’s wake when the other Cavaliers came to console him. “I’m giving up the hitter bag. I got a business to run.”
The Cavaliers did not long survive his retirement. Some went into the army, a few joined the police department, five fell to heroin. Most of the others married and moved away. And after a decade, Sonny Marino realized he was the last Cavalier left in the neighborhood. When he showed pictures of himself and the others to his daughters, they giggled at his “Duck’s Ass” hairdo, his tight, pegged pants, his T-shirts rolled high on the shoulders with a cigarette pack tucked in the roll. They didn’t understand how people could dress that way or do the things Sonny said they used to do when they were young and tough, feared and respected.
“Things aren’t like that anymore, Dad,” the oldest one, Rose, said to him. “The world is different now.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Go to college. Get a career. Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”
Occasionally, one of the old Cavaliers would show up in the neighborhood and Sonny Marino would be joyful. Nit-Nat saw his mother once a year, on her birthday. Stark drove in from Sayville with his kids to eat pasta at Monte’s on Fifth Avenue. Midnight would come up out of the subway alone and pop a beer at the Store on his way to his sister’s house. They always talked about old times, of course, the way soldiers do who once have shared danger and have survived. Sonny’s wife, Maria, who was much younger than the Cavaliers, was amused; the girls always giggled. Sonny would turn to Nit-Nat or Stark and laugh at himself and say, “Hey, whatta they know?”
The neighborhood gradually changed, and so did Sonny. He had less hair and more paunch. He hired a Puerto Rican kid who could speak to some of the new customers. He learned a little Spanish himself. He added fresh yames to the vegetable section, cans of Goya beans to the shelves. He realized that the new people were not any different from his father’s people, struggling with a language that was not their own, scrambling to make a living and raise their kids in a hard world.
Then a new gang began to form. They called themselves the Savage Lords and wore shiny black jackets and dungarees studded with metal. There were only a half dozen of them at first, but through one long, snowy winter they grew in numbers, and by summer there seemed to be fifty of them, maybe more. Most were Latinos, but there were some Irish in the gang, too, and the last of the Italians, and when Sonny Marino saw them moving together along the avenue, like some black-jacketed army, he felt uneasy, even afraid.
But he couldn’t really judge them. He would look at the Savage Lords walking in their own version of the diddy bop, the weight heavy on one foot, the second swinging along loosely behind it, and he remembered the thrill of old summer evenings, the sense of power that came from being part of a large, hard group like the Cavaliers, afraid of nothing, makers of fear themselves. But looking at these young men, Sonny Marino, out of shape and growing older, couldn’t rid himself of his fear. The Cavaliers were long gone, but this was the new guerrilla army of the neighborhood, and he knew that eventually he would have to deal with them. And he was alone.
“Did you hear what happened?” his wife said one morning. “They took over a building over Twel’ Street. One of the abandoned buildings. They’re movin’ into the place. It’s their headquarters, they say.”
Almost every day after that, she would ask the same question of Sonny Marino: Did you hear what happened? The Savage Lords had wrecked Canavan’s Bar, because the owner wouldn’t serve them. They’d broken the doors off the emergency exit in the subway because the man in the token booth asked them to pay. A neighbor told them one night to stop playing disco music at two in the morning, and they set his car on fire. Harry Perez came into the Store, heartsick and desperate, to say that his d
aughter was forced to live with them in the headquarters, and when he came to take her home, they threw him down the stairs. The cops came around and made them move along in the evenings, but the cops couldn’t watch them all the time.
In midsummer, Sonny Marino first heard about the “Lords Insurance Company.” They were working their way through the neighborhood, explaining to the shopkeepers that for fifty dollars a month they could guarantee the safety of a store. “You know what that is?” Sonny Marino told his wife. “That’s an old-fashioned protection racket.” She looked at him gravely and said, “What are you gonna do about it? Go to the cops?” Sonny shrugged. He wasn’t raised to call the cops.
The young insurance men came to the Store late one Saturday. Three of them: two were large, beefy, muscle-bound; the third was a short wiry kid with glasses. All wore black jackets. The short kid did the talking. “So that’s the deal,” he said. “Fifty a month and you’re safe.”
“Get out of here,” Sonny Marino said, in a low, hard voice.
“Whajoo say?” the short kid said.
“I said get outta here before I break your head.”
The short kid’s face went blank, and then he turned on his heel and walked out, with the two muscle boys behind him. The short kid helped himself to an orange.