Between Men

Marge had long blond ringlets and eyes like poached eggs. He only ever wanted to be a housewife: the slippers, the curlers in his hair. Plus I think he maybe craved an accent. He talked like he was trying to keep from downing a bite of mush.

His mother had won the lottery years back and bought a building with ten rental units Marge could manage. Pronto he hired a crew, turned the ten into twenty-five—so measly, folks said, that if you sneezed in one apartment, everyone God-blessed you in the next.

Marge rented to pimps and prostitutes. The first of the month he slippered through the halls: “Pay-up time,” would come his porridge voice. The pimps rarely paid. They beat him up. He loved it.

He left his door open so the guys who loathed his type could stomp in and fuck with all his stuff: light his stove, melt his plastic plates. Next day, he’d chip the melted plastic from the stove and bustle right down to the five-and-dime, where he’d buy a new set of pink plates. Ah, he’d say, the landlady’s life!

He also adored the young boys. Eleven, twelve, thirteen. (Marge himself was always not quite turning thirty.) The whores and I would sit downstairs and watch the kids go in, then watch them come out twenty minutes later. If a boy left with a chocolate kiss in addition to his cash, it meant that he was very, very good. A tangerine or a gum-ball, only so-so.

Sometimes a boy gave me his tangerine as he left. Maybe he knew he’d been a disappointment. He would ask if that dude’s name was really Marge. Someone would say sure, of course it is. It might not have been the name that Marge got from his mother. How much of the truth do our mothers ever give?

Mom and I lived in the building next door. Mostly I stayed home alone. Who cared? Mom worked for one of the guys who clobbered Marge on rent days. My father was dead, or might have been.

One day I was cutting school, ants were in my pants. Hotter than it should have been for June. Crank a hydrant, maybe? Suck some ice? I went down to the street in my boxers, nothing else. Sunlight sharp and dogged as an itch. There was Marge, lounging on his stoop, next to ours: flimsy housedress, hair pulled back and tied. It made his face look bigger, flexed like muscle.

Out from Marge’s robe came a leg as long as lightning. Now I saw the bowl, the shaving cream. He used a Lady Schick, just like Mom’s. Stroke, stroke—one leg, then the next—stroke, like harvesting a crop. His skin got pearly, catching all the light. I peered into the rinse bowl: bits of hair sprinkled, all those zillion tiny twists of fate. It felt like the legs he stroked were mine.

“I’d shave you, too,” he said. His voice made me sizzle. “But your thing’s more a toe than a leg, ain’t it?”

The old neighborhood, two decades on, is getting chic. Bargain hunters troll the streets with ponytailed Realtors who talk about upswing, vested interest. Switchblading open their silvery cell phones, they call their mortgage brokers and say “Buy.” Way back then, we could have used those cells. One day Ma Bell came and yanked the public phones—stripped for coins too often to be worth it. Mom couldn’t afford a private number. How was she supposed to call for help?

We were natives waiting for our continent to be found. Street signs said NO STANDING, so we sat. Best seats in the house for Marge’s show. At last, would Marge discover true love?

Merge was what I dubbed him in my mind: part one thing, part another, all mixed up. But the pimps always called him Marge of Dimes, grand marshal of the freak parade.

He joked about the colors of his bruises, naming them with catalogue-type terms. Strife, he called a certain purple shade just shy of black. Yellow tinged with blue: Mottled Remorse. Beneath the flippancy, was that his mood?

Looking back, I think of him as Marginalia. His commentating made life almost graspable. “Prodigious!” he might say of a scorching August noon. “Hot as the hole of an overtime ho!” He evangelized his own low-down church. “Jesus and the holy-rolling three-way,” he once barked at a b-boy who wouldn’t mind his paws. “I’ll whup your ass to dingleberry jam!”

Most everything reminded Marge of food. The moles on a preteen Puerto Rican kid’s cheek were currants in a bowl of oatmeal. A chulo’s backside was his hot cross bun. (Best to lick it, Marge assured us during Lent.) Once, fifteen yards before I turned onto our block, I heard him call someone’s face tragically shapeless. “God must’ve forgot,” he said, “to preheat his griddle before he poured in that bit of batter.” From the way that he cackled when I cornered into view, I figured he was talking about me.

I was already too old for his taste, maybe. My upper lip was fuzzed with hair like lint. I was a tall drink of juice, he told me once. In two years, I grew thirteen luckless inches.

I was a good enough cheater to just get by. I studied boys: how they strutted, pop-’n-locked; the way they picked their hair but not too much. I cribbed moves and epithets, snuck peeks.

I learned people like all sorts of things. There was the bald guy who forked over two crisp Franklins weekly for Mom to twiddle her thumbs up in his ass. Another man—she called him Reagan, rich and overtanned—wanted lead fishing weights hung from his nipples. All manner of noises came from next door. People craved. People paid. There was no shame.

Where did he find the guys who would? The Y, maybe. The chop shop by the river. I envied their brassy finder’s-keeper’s view of pleasure, their bootleg happiness.

In some other neighborhood, or some other city, people like Marge marched and waved flags. They’d have hated him more than they hated the guys who beat him. Every time that Marge smiled at a fist, he set them back. The last thing Marge wanted was toleration.

The plate-melters asked me along once. Damon, whose crackerjack moonwalk I’d tried to copy. Pedro, whose track pants always bulged. It was Halloween. The air reeked of dried-up country stuff. The smell of plastic jack-o’-lanterns melting.

Shaving cream was part of the night’s plan, and rotten eggs. A can of Crisco, too—who knew why? This would be my chance, I thought, to look at Marge’s life. My chance to prove what I didn’t want.

I’d been in his building a bunch of times before, but now it felt a shade of unfamiliar. The light was like a stain on normal light. Behind a hollow door, someone’s hand slapped someone’s something. I heard: Feels good. And: No the fuck you don’t.

SWAT-style, we slithered up the stairs, down the hall, rotten-egg grenades set for launching. As per legend, Marge had surely left the door unlocked, but Damon karate-kicked it anyway. In we blitzed, screaming skinned alive.

And when we slowed enough to see past our own bluster, there was Marge, in his bathtub, knitting. His creation, pink and cabled, looked to be a baby blanket. He might have had a niece we didn’t know.

The room was all lace and fake flowers. Flesh-colored candles like dildoes on every shelf. Foil-wrapped kisses in a pink plastic bowl. You know how, when you’re sick, puking actually feels better? I wanted to spit up my whole self.

“Yeah,” I said, wanting the guys to know that I was with them. Plus because I hoped to catch a glimpse.

Damon’s arm stayed cocked but didn’t move. Above his elbow’s hinge, a tiny pulse showed. It fluttered. He wasn’t yet fifteen.

“Fuck ’im,” he said. “Her. Whatever the fuck: it. I hate the way it won’t quit lookin’ at me.”

They scrammed, spurting foam across the walls and on the bed. Damon hurled the Crisco at a lightbulb-bordered mirror. Two bulbs popped like back talk: yap yap.

The way you see a lightning bolt before you hear the crack, at first I watched the yolk ooze down in streaks. All three scored: the jaw, above each eye. Pretty in a certain way, like drippy abstract art. Then boom! came the thunder of the smell. A death stink. Abortions, gangrene.

Egg yellow clashed on the pink of baby blanket. Red, then: blood above his brow. I guess his skin wasn’t all that thick.

The other guys hoofed it out to the hall, and I followed. But when I hit the threshold I stopped short. My brain was a coal that Marge was fanning.

I turned back and found one of Marge’s bath towels, as soft as my grandmother’s cheek. (Bull! I never met my grandmothers.) I stepped up and handed it to him.

Closer, inside the smell, it wasn’t quite so bad. Nasty still, but flowery, too, perfumed. Marge had his left eye half closed like a wink, which made him seem forgiving, even charmed. Slimy white stuff dripped along his cheek.

“Much obliged,” he said in a dinner-party voice, and dabbed the towel elegantly on his brow. Then the bubbles parted and he rose. He stood facing me. His skin shone.

For the first time I understood that shameless isn’t bad, but maybe an ideal, an aspiration. Marge was so much taller than I’d thought. His hair down there was reddish—the parts he hadn’t shaved. His thing curved like a smirk. It looked like mine.

I’d never run so fast in all my life. I caught up with the other guys and said the freak had grabbed me. “He’s stronger than he looks,” I said. “I swear.”

I kept waiting for Marge to say something. One day. Another. A week. I was mortified and hopeful and confused. What I wanted was to never see his fuckhead face again. What I wanted was reassurance, an invitation.

The boys came and went (Marge joked: came, came, and went). I searched their faces. Triumph? Resignation? They had a talent or a recklessness I lacked.

The country reelected an old actor. I didn’t know a single soul who voted. Plus there was a referendum on a new subway line, an extension into our neighborhood. The verdict? It wouldn’t kill us to keep walking.

Clementine season came: for a month that’s what the so-so boys left with. One kid, with freckles and a harelip, gave me his. “Sick,” I said, and threw it at his ass. He dodged into traffic. The fruit missed.

Marge couldn’t find enough boys who were willing. He had to make do with real men. Their moods were unstable, their knuckles harder. New shades of bruise were soon coined. Misdemeanor (grayish). Loss of Face.

For Christmas, Mom surprised me with a leather basketball, too nice to dribble on blacktop. I kept it in its swanky box, unopened, like a wish that still has not come true. Mom split for a week with José, the guy who kept her. Reno, she said. So they could tie the knot. (What she tied, I’d find out, was her tubes.) All week, I ate SpaghettiOs and whacked off.

My body was like a TV that someone was channel surfing, sweat and hair and hormones, click click click. Everything was changing, up for grabs.

Pedro and Damon formed a gang. Which side are you on was now the deal. With heated pins and ballpoint ink they tattooed their right forearms: a time bomb with a clock face that read SOON.

Marge proclaimed that tattoos were for fools. Mutilations must be mutable, he said, and momentary, flaunting his own latest laceration. (Flaunting and flinching sometimes look the same.)

I took Marge’s advice. I resisted. For two weeks, I kept my sleeves rolled up as living proof that my loyalties lay more with him than with Damon.

If Marge noticed, he didn’t give a damn. I’d stood in his room, face-to-face, seen his all. I’d almost apologized. I’d almost begged. But that moment, so monumental to me, for him was nothing. Battered and bare was Marge’s every night.

“Chickenshit,” Damon said one day, grabbing my inkless arm. He twisted an Indian burn. Thrilling pain.

That spring, I tailed one of the chocolate-kiss boys. I’d seen him around school but didn’t know him. He was a mutt, skin the rust brown of the grates that barred our windows, but whetstone gray eyes: they sharpened you.

Leaving Marge’s, he walked with an extra fuck in his stride, tossing his silver kiss like a coin. He had braces that yanked sunlight, beamed come-on when he grinned. With each step, he kicked his own future.

I followed him down Washington, then behind the Laundromat into an alley that was Bomb Squad turf. The week before, Pedro and I had bopped a kid back there, a smart-mouth who called us “fucking cretins.” All we shook loose was a pack of Camel Lights, but the heat of his cheek on my fist was worth it. Recently, we’d also lifted pints from Sully’s Liquor. We practiced pickpocketing each other. Damon talked big about going back to Marge’s and nailing him this time, no retreat. My tattoo was the color of a vein.

In the alley, a rat nosed a Zero Bar wrapper. A broken mirror cut the sky to bits. The kid—I couldn’t think of his name, but he looked like a Leon—bent and fished fivers from his sock. Counting, maybe. Maybe glorifying.

His money wasn’t what I was after. But how do you ask for what you really want? I gunned my hand and jabbed him. “Fork it over!”

When Leon stuffed the cash back into his sock and stood up, I felt like someone’d swiped my cheat sheet. I was tall, but he was taller. Awfully thick.

He snorted and said, “You don’t know shit.” Half of his mouth smiled, and the other half stayed mean. His braces looked made of razor wire.

Laundry steam hovered like something consequential. I thought about bolting, but I couldn’t. “How does it feel?” I might have asked.

He grabbed my arm, his thumb on the double O of SOON, and pressed like he was digging clear to China—to the opposite of wherever he lived now. I remembered that his father coached the basketball team at school, and his name wasn’t Leon, it was Darrell. Darrell was the youngest but the best varsity player. A power forward. All-city. Eyed by scouts.

“I want,” he said—then paused long enough for me to wonder—“to hear it come out of your mouth.”

He tippy-toed nearer, his mouth up in my face. I saw a smear of Hershey’s on his teeth. His breath was like the Y locker room at closing time: bleach trying to hide a human stink. I made a guess about what he had swallowed.

“I’m not,” he said, still pressing, even stronger than before, “what you think I am, or what you maybe are. I’m gonna be huge. I’m gettin’ outta here. Is anyone gonna try and mess with that?”

Friday: a few of us loafing on the stoop, tiddlywinking beer-bottle caps. Mom was there, bra cups stuffed with cash, painted smile. Alley drafts tickling our ears.

Damon and Pedro had some Bomb Squad mischief planned: a rooftop, a case of beer, some girls. I wanted time to shower, clean my teeth.

Just when I stood up, I saw him leaving: flash of silver fang, scissor stride. Darrell, headband skewed, making tracks from Marge’s building. Darrell, both hands empty at his sides.

They chuckled, but I couldn’t. Already I was scrambling—into Marge’s building, up the stairs. The door was open. Fruity smells leaked out.

It’s been twenty years, but I still see it. I see that scene more clearly than my high school graduation, the first diploma in my family. More clearly than the day I finished Rutgers. It’s sharper than my wedding, six years later, to Samantha, whose hair, when it’s damp, curls like Marge’s. Sometimes when we’re making love, I twist some on my finger, and Sam has no idea what I’m thinking. It’s clearer to me than this now, today.

Shards of pink plastic bowl were scattered on the floor, half a dozen chocolates smeared around. Centered in the midst of it lay Marge: long blond ringlets free like sunlight in fast water, cotton robe bunched around his hips.

His mouth, stretched past normal, was crammed with chocolate kisses. Two dozen? Three? Maybe more. Most still in their foil, some smushed out.

I checked for breath and pulse. Nothing doing. Already his skin was going gray. Then I saw the thumbprints on his neck.

I straightened out the robe so his legs were mostly covered. I spread his ringlets nice around his face. Then, with my finger, I dug into his mouth to clear away the mushy, melting chocolate. At first it felt nasty—scooping giblets from a chicken—but then it felt OK, then almost good.

When all of the kisses I could reach were emptied out, I saw his mouth had fallen to a smile. I tried to smile at him, but couldn’t. I faced a long lifetime of restraint. Backing away, stumbling, I sucked my messy finger. It’s still the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted.