Chapter one

 

"Cops again, that what you want?" His wife was inside their apartment. Connie was outside. He was trying to get inside.

Key in hand, he attempted to enter for who knows how long. Intoxication sometimes induced a palsy, coordination slipped, while the minutes blended into weeks and months. A rest period seemed in order. He closed his eyes and paused for a moment, like an old draft horse on its legs.

"When are you going to get it?" she said.

Slowly, with drunken deliberation, Connie glided his face toward the lock's cylinder, and the recognition of its gleaming new luster hit him where he lived. "Son of a." He considered removing his jacket, to show somebody, anybody, he meant business, but he ultimately couldn't be bothered.

"The cops, you hear me—"

Connie started his assault, but if closely studied, it was an assault tapered by self-consciousness. He witnessed his own behavior, watched himself attack the door like a second-rate actor of the presentational variety.

"Off the fucking hinges," he roared, pounding the door with the flat of his hand. But just beneath the surface of the scene he thought, Look at me go. What a fake, what a phony. I don't even want to be in there.

"Scaring the kids, you bastard. On their way the cops, think I'm kidding?"

Connie let the door have it. "Off the hinges." He was still slapping and hammering with the flat of his hand when his neighbor Willie appeared with farce-like speed at the door of 3-B: tank top, gold cross, a stingy brim of straw at rest above a gentle Puerto Rican face.

"Connie, Con-Con, what's happening?" Willie's tone nothing if not a sweet attempt to distract and diffuse.

"Believe this, Will?"

The elevator's outer door pushed open onto the landing to the sound of crackling walkie-talkies. Two New York City Housing Authority cops, Walsh and Pacheco, poised to dispose of one more midnight shift, joined Connie in front of 3-A, hitting their marks just so.

"Cornelius," Walsh said.

"Déjà vu," Pacheco said.

Through his stupor Connie felt a degree of mortification, not for the cops' presence, which was in fact an encore performance, but the new element.

"Changed the lock," Connie said.

"That'll happen," Pacheco said.

"Could be she's trying to suggest something," said Walsh, who then lit a beautiful Marlboro, because there was still time, back here in the spring of 1974, to excuse yourself from the world for a brief respite, just you and your best friend nicotine.

Connie produced his own crumpled pack of Camels. Walsh helped him pinch one out and fire it up. Pacheco glanced away with mild disdain.

They wandered into the shiny red interior of the elevator and Pacheco pressed a button on the panel. The inner door and its square foot of scratched, mesh-wired window slid closed, and they descended through a silo of graffiti.

"Connie," Walsh said once outside the building, "let's talk a minute. What's this, the second—"

"Third," Pacheco said.

"She gets the restraint order, we got no choice. You, this routine of yours, waking everybody up."

"My home," Connie bellowed. "I live here."

"Not anymore," Pacheco said. "You're done. Get that through your head."

"Remember now, Con," Walsh said, "up to you."

In the predawn stillness Connie looked like he'd strayed from a parade of damaged people, the doorman's cap cocked at an angle on his head. He watched the cops return to their double-parked squad car on 25th Street.

The front yard with its playground artifacts looked so mournful at this hour. The miniature ceramic horse on a spring, its chipped paint and missing left eye. The tarnished aluminum sculpture of planet Saturn leaning precariously on its axis. Had he ever played with his kids in this yard? Did he love his children? He did love them, in a sentimental fashion, they were his boys, he loved them completely, his entire heart, he'd do anything, damn near very close to almost anything for them.

He found his way to a bench in the yard for forty-five minutes of something like sleep.

If a camera were pushed up close to Connie's face where dry white saliva collected at the corners of his mouth and tiny bubbles burst on his lips, it would find him mumbling indecipherably, a few phrases to unravel: —shot his father's head clean off. The mother on all fours chasing chunks of skull across the chassis. Humpty Dumpty and such. Talk about a status reduction. Whereas my father put his head in the oven. Common style back then. Two dead fathers, two heads, one by suicide, one by—

A bench slat's rivet grinding at his hip bullied him back to consciousness. He winced, uncurled himself, sat up. Night had broken. The birds in the trees of the projects cried out with abandonment. The overcast sky made sense, given his life, and Connie acknowledged the cloud cover as subtle tribute. Blue skies would have added to the campaign of mockery waged not just against him—he wasn't that solipsistic—but against all sentient beings, birds included. A tenderness welled up in Connie, his chest went soft, before he patted himself down for a smoke.

He looked up to the bedroom window of his children.

His older son, Arthur, a long-haired twelve-year-old fired by rage, stood framed by the building's burnished brick facade. The apparition pierced Connie's drunkenness and hangover, he felt the kid's hatred beaming down at him.

Or wait, could it be—not malice, but care and concern? Arthur kept vigil so Connie would not get rolled or otherwise beat to death, that was a thought.

It crossed his mind to offer a sign, some gesture, to let the boy know, Yes, I see you, my son, you are recognized in my eyes, when Arthur, as if sensing his father's intentions, reached in a sudden flurry for the window shade and vanished.

* * *

"Come in, sit down here." The windowless office, a cubbyhole off the lobby's back hall, a few paces down from Superintendent Walter Mezzola's apartment, contained wooden furniture that could have come from the Board of Education. A black rotary phone sat there like a prop, while a spindle captured work orders on its spike.

"Good morning, Walter," Connie said.

"Mr. Mezzola," Walter said. "Call me Mr. Mezzola."

"Even when it's just the two of us?"

"Make it easy on yourself, please, Con." Walter sniffed softly, once, twice. "Okay, an example: have you been drinking let's say?"

"Me?" Connie said. "What, like today already have I been drinking?"

"Because this—alcohol, drugs, whatnot, you name it—just cause, immediate dismissal, follow me now?"

Certain supers walked around in suits and ties and jobbed all the work out. Walter wore dungarees and flannel shirts and even suspenders when not too desperate to hide the joy that lived in his heart. He did all the paint jobs in the house, he was a first-rate painter. He had learned the trade in the army. "All in the prep," Walter would say, "the paint forget about." He was a perfectly decent electrician and plumber as well. He'd break a wall in a minute. "You cannot be afraid to break," he'd say. Carpentry, for unknown reasons, he stayed away from.

"Tell you go downstairs, clean out your locker—one two three, boom, you're gone, that's it. They call it immediate dismissal. Like you don't know what hit you, follow me?"

"I hear you, Walter."

"Hope so. I hate to fire a man."

"I know you do."

"How's that, that you know that?"

"Every other word."

"And why? Because it's true . . . Believe me, Con, clear blue sky. And you got, what, two write-ups already in your file. I lost count. Main point being, I don't want to fire you, last thing believe me that I want."

"I know you don't, Walter, you're a good man."

"You sure?" Walter said, and brought a match to a cigarillo. Walter smoked cigarillos and regular cigarettes and a variety of cigars—everything but a pipe. "Got another complaint and I don't want to say from who."

"Who?"

"That woman on eight."

"Saxton?"

"Pain in the ass. She, I don't know, something about you got fresh with somebody, a friend of hers, the elevator."

"I'm not perfect."

"Who is?" Walter said. "These people, they lose track."

"Tell me about it."

"Of the fact we are human beings."

"Glad you said it."

"Bottom line," Walter said, "try not to get too fresh, all right? I know you're a good person. People like you."

"Certain people."

"The right people," Walter said. "Couple those tenants on the board think you're sliced bread. Some kind of saint they got you pegged for. Ever since the big buff job! I'll get fired before you get fired."

"Nah, they appreciate you."

"They do?" Walter fished.

"Plus, I always put in a good word."

"That right?" Walter said, then the phone jangled just once. "Hello. Tell her I'll be there. Right. Now. No. Right, right," and he hung up. "So we straight?"

"Thank you, Walter."

"Let me get back to work."

Connie lit a cigarette and they sat there smoking and neither of them moved.

And with a sad smile Walter said, "It's true."

"What's that?"

Swiveling in his chair, Walter stopped and looked up into a corner of the room, fully exposing his throat to Connie, as if to say, Go ahead and cut it if you must, before declaring, "I will miss you when you're gone!" and Connie could not help but laugh.

* * *

Connie worked a swing shift. A few evenings in the front of the house, a few days in the back, and one midnight. He had a mental block regarding his schedule, which he kept on a piece of folded paper in his wallet, but the wallet had found its way into the active cycle of a washer and the schedule became torn and brittle, and it never crossed his mind to grab a pen and write it out again on a fresh page. Or maybe he honored the raggedy copy out of vague superstition. In any case, every time he doubted whether he had to be in, he removed the schedule from his wallet like a cautious archeologist on a dig. Forceps would have come in handy but fingertips did the trick.

He didn't mind the back of the house and in some ways preferred it. He mopped the stairwells top to bottom, collected the garbage on the service car, and at shift's end stacked it in a smart pile on the sidewalk outside the service entrance. He polished all the brass of the house, the elevator panels, canopy poles, and standpipes. He changed a bulb here and there and did some light dusting. He cased the mail into a wooden cart on wheels a legendary handyman named Horace had built for the house twenty-five years ago, a slot for each tenant, the cart's wood having accrued a gorgeous patina. He enjoyed casing the mail and became proficient at it. He rolled the cart onto the service car and left each day's delivery at a preordained spot, or handed it to a maid or houseman. He looked in on the animals of tenants, no problem, and walked a dog or two with pleasure. He thought the dogs of the rich lived particularly lonely lives.

He enjoyed the buffing machine when he worked midnights. Connie had guided such instruments across many a lobby floor. To do it right took patience. You could not force the machine to do your bidding, it would buck you like a wild horse, going on to crack the handcrafted molding at the base of the lobby wall, and to your super you would have to deny any knowledge of the divot created by a machine that in your demanding willfulness got away from you.

A good buff job required a pace and momentum all its own, the work fostering a meditative state, helping Connie to slow his mind down. He knew how to strip a floor to its essence, then raise it back up to perfection.

He offered to teach buffing workshops to his Local 32B union brothers, making official announcements in the locker room at its most crowded changeover hour. He let the guys know his availability for buffing tutorials should they be so inclined, and oh how his coworkers laughed. Connie laughed too. His sense of humor was a lifesaver.

He kept the machine's pads in good shape, letting them air out on hooks down in the slop-sink room. Doing a floor right brought Connie peace in the middle of the night and carried him through some rough psychic spots. The toxins would escape him as he worked, the lobby reeking of a low-rent gin mill for a period of time. He'd open the front doors wide and let the breeze sail in off the street. To work the buffer on a midnight shift, to do a good job in peace. He knew it wasn't some special skill to write home about, but like anybody else he enjoyed doing a thing well.

Whenever he started at a new house (he'd worked in half a dozen buildings the last ten years), he'd do the lobby floor to make a good first impression. He'd get those backless benches, wing-backed chairs, and side tables out of the way, furniture collectively purchased by the house's board after great stylistic wrangling and contention, and he'd strip the floor of all previous half-baked attempts, to that point when he could relish the floor's vulnerability, its nakedness exposed, its flat matte look devoid of shine. He'd stop and look out over the lobby, the unvarnished marble now exhibiting a profound frailty in Connie's eyes. He'd smoke a cigarette beneath the canopy, then start the rebuilding process, slowly throughout the night, one layer at a time, coat after coat, letting the toxins escape his pores.

After the bundles of New York Times and Wall Street Journal got dumped onto the sidewalk with a thwap-thwap from the back of a news truck, and the sky's last star went out, whatever super he worked for would appear from the back hall to question how his new man held up overnight, and upon seeing the floor could not hide his astonishment. And Connie with his tour de force buff job would be in like Flynn for a time, getting looked upon as the house's second coming, as one by one the tenants inquired as to the artisan's identity. They sought out Connie to offer deep appreciation, having had no idea how beautiful their lobby truly was before his talents revealed it to them.

"Thank you so much, Connie, you're a godsend."

"Pleasure," he'd say, which wasn't untrue.

Connie would ride that introductory buff job for as long as he could, while the rest of the staff walked around with stiff shorts, stiff with envy and paranoia, the unspoken threat of termination looming over them now, their building-maintenance fraud having come to light.

Imagine, all this time, the tenants mused, having to accept such lackluster results prior to Connie's arrival. What other mediocre efforts lurk and linger? Tenants would start to examine their residence with sharper eyes, coming and going, walking their manicured poodles and schnauzers, trying to make peace with all the power and wealth implied by their house's limestone edifice.

Connie's buff job confused them. Is that the actual color of our canopy—or is it filthy? Perhaps we should petition Connie to investigate and have him perform one of his deep-scale transformations.

And the staff's long-timers would think, Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he is, to come in here and pull a buff job like that? Son of a no-good so-and-so.

Then, sure enough, and sooner than later, Connie's shadow would start to stretch itself across the job, revealing the gaps in his character, allowing his coworkers to exhale. Thank God, they privately reflected, he's human after all.

He would start to show up late, or not at all, unable to perform his duties, citing an adverse reaction to medication. Most supers were decent. They wanted to believe Connie. He had kind eyes, which the shock of black hair exploding from his head helped frame like two mismatched stones of crazy lace agate set into his face. They'd have a little talk, then quietly send him home. They saw a good man beneath the bullshit and wanted to save his job. But what can you do with a guy who not only doesn't show up but doesn't call, or shows up half in the bag smelling like the kind of alcoholism no amount of Listerine will camouflage, or, maybe most perplexing, shows up sober and clean-shaven, dressed in a freshly pressed uniform and ready to work, only to discover it's his scheduled day off.

Eventually Connie would test the waters verbally with tenants and their guests, working himself into a proletarian huff. He would think people were starting to look at him funny, and would find himself embarrassed by his uniform, the embroidered bands of gold or silver on the cuffs of his jacket, and the piping down his pants. I'm not a jockey outside some restaurant! he would self-declare. He would begin to challenge the job's boundaries. Most tenants went out of their way to be respectful, yet it was true some could not help look down their nose, and Connie bit and snapped at those tenants. He would start cracking wise, a statement here or there concerning Tricky Dick, or the SLA, or some such, statements carrying currents of dark innuendo. And who needs that? From staff? Coming and going from your own home, having to run the meager gauntlet of an opinionated, inappropriately acerbic doorman? At one house he wasn't long for, Connie mistook a mother-in-law for a nanny, and as the lady waited to be picked up with her grandchild, Connie took the opportunity to present one of his working-class soliloquies. "See this, all this here?" he said, indicating the expansive lobby with a sweep of his arm. "Rubble, nothing but rubble, six to eight years, mark my words," he said, chuckling at his own pomposity, just as the mother-in-law, behind a tight smile, started to mentally orchestrate the steps required for Connie's departure.

This is how it went: he received numerous verbal warnings, followed by a handful of written warnings, before management and union reps got called in. They would have a sit-down in the super's office and Connie would get fired over some last-straw incident, with the caveat that another position would be secured, though any seniority was lost, which was fine with Connie, as he didn't believe in the future. It was uncanny in what similar ways these terminations played out. He got hired in another house managed by Douglas Elliman–Gibbons & Ives, or Brown Harris, and upon his arrival he'd rip the lobby floor a new ass, before frustrations would once again start to build, up to that point where he could no longer hold the spring down, and he'd work his way toward another dismissal.

The job, ultimately—and Connie knew this—required too little of him. In the case of his current employment, his tenure would last just under two years, similar in duration to his other positions. Within a short week he'd get fired for actions even his friends on the board could not excuse, and Connie's exit would spoil Walter's peace of mind for a month.

* * *

They played a variety of board games, a variety of card games, but they always came back to cribbage. Gin rummy and five-card stud and crazy eights. They tried games that called for the exchange of fake currency and found those games ridiculous.

"This money . . . it's . . . counterfeit," Connie said, giving the words ironic depth and discovery. John laughed and took a greedy hit off a bong he had bootlegged out of his room.

They played pinochle and backgammon and an Asian game called Go, territorial in nature, laying down stones on a grid board smooth to the touch. They played Yahtzee and blackjack, chess and checkers, but cribbage was their mainstay.

John rang whichever car Connie worked, the front or back. Connie swung the door open and the kid stood there, a look of hope in his eyes and a mouth full of braces.

"Game of crib, Con, a little later maybe?" John said.

He lived on the fifteenth floor, but they hung out in the back stairwell of the house's ninth floor, a spot they dubbed The Office. A two-tone, high-gloss battleship-gray painted the walls, a lemony disinfectant scented the air. A Swiss family who owned the ninth floor came into town one week a year in the fall, maybe a week in the summer—otherwise nine was dead.

"Let's see what's what," Connie said. "I got to clear a couple dockets, but my guess, we could squeeze a few games in," and this speech bogus: there was always time for some cribbage.

The building had twenty-seven units on seventeen floors, and with a staff of sixteen, even though nobody came right out and said it, this house was a piece of cake. Time could be found for a couple rounds of cribbage, never mind a nap in your favorite hideaway spot that hurt who, exactly?

The kid was lonely in that thirteen-year-old way, moving through a transitional period, hoping to shed a piece of his childhood, trying to step into something along the lines of what might be considered a young manhood, maybe?

He missed his sister. They used to ditch their Secret Service detail together—two little potheads out among the sordid throngs of Times Square. Who else could fathom their history but each for the other? The circumstances of their lives forged them together by blood, their connection shorthand and symbiotic.

She lived at boarding school in Massachusetts these days, and his mother had started to spend more weekends in Washington. Frankly, the mother didn't know what to do with him and this attitude of his lately, which left John and the governess to pad around the apartment's nineteen rooms.

They played on a board given to him for his eighth birthday, an heirloom of sorts, his father's surreal initials branded into the back of its antique wood. The original pegs had gone missing, so they used matchsticks that worked just fine. They talked and laughed and appreciated each other's company. They shot the breeze about sports. They smoked Connie's Camels and the kid's stash of reefer. They unfolded two stools, a foldout table, and created a foldout world.

Connie didn't go strange. Most people in John's life, they met him and their faces did something. By the age of five he spotted it, the people who jumped out of their bodies and went strange on him. They had a hatful of ideas, a thousand and one ideas about him. They can't see me, John thought. Okay, not everyone gets to meet Muhammad Ali, he understood that. Still. I'm a kid, he thought. My father's dead, a lot of people are dead, what do you want? Even the coolest of customers tried to see behind his eyes, and John thought, You can't see behind my eyes.

Give me a goddamn break, he whispered to the world. He had fallen away from any genuine connection to his peers. He'd get high in the park with a crowd out behind the museum, but he didn't consider them friends, really. He didn't know what was going on just lately, and since when for a thirteen-year-old is that a crime?

Not last summer but the summer before, Connie swung the elevator open onto the lobby and John stood there, skin roasted brown, hair streaked by the Mediterranean sun, this before his mother's scene in Greece had come to an end. They looked at each other a moment.

"Coming in or what?" Connie said.

John stepped into the car, Connie swung the gate shut and dipped the lever. "Where you going?"

"Fifteen," John said.

Connie took him up, and after some quiet said, "Can you keep a secret?"

"Yeah," John said.

"Hungover like a son of a bitch."

John laughed.

"Do me a favor," Connie said, "you get in the house, think you could scramble me up a couple aspirin?"

"Sure," John said, and found himself making a direct line to the medicine cabinet.

"What do I owe you?" Connie said.

"On the house," John said.

"You're the best," Connie said, not strange at all, and Connie liked the kid because he thought to bring a glass of water with the aspirin.

Connie had the modest talent of bringing the car flush to a floor and swinging the gate open all in one fluid motion and with a certain comical panache. "Bang, you see that? No herky-jerky," he would say. "Don't believe in herky-jerky, against my religion."

He let John run the elevator. "Take over. Watch your hand at the gate."

A simple trust established itself, not a big deal, an in-house friendship limited to the parameters of the building.

"Game of crib, Con, a little later maybe?"

"Can you handle the agony of defeat?"

"In your dreams!"

The kid, it's true, had uncles and cousins and friends of the family with stories to tell about the old man, but at the end of the day was he not fatherless?

The Secret Service called him Lark. John disliked it.

Up in the ninth floor's back stairwell, just after lunch, Connie started to fade.

"You okay, Con?"

"Let's break this party up," Connie said. "See if I can hit the bags for forty winks." He took naps on bags of mixing cement down in the basement.

Funny thing: Connie didn't know who John was until after they had played cards and John had gotten him high a few times. Something in Connie refused to make the recognition. Not until John stepped into the elevator with his mother one day did the identification fully register. The mother, with her height and sunglasses, and the singular glamor of her encroaching middle-age beauty, was hard-pressed to pull off a stab at anonymity.

So the friendship of Connie and John established itself before Fame could work its voodoo—otherwise Connie might have gone strange himself. The starry-eyed often make the famous feel as if they're getting jumped: if anyone's ever rifled through your pockets without permission, it might offer a clue as to the burdens of celebrity. Many Americans wanted to use him to bolster some romantic national myth of their own, but even as a very young person John sensed its falseness and shunned the role.

* * *

In his dreams Connie endured old sorrows and loss, powered not by fleshed-out dramatic scenarios but the tableau stillness of sepia portraits his dream-eye slowly dollied past, taking in the faces of family and friends long dead, the faces of strangers mixed in as well. His dead mother, Mary. His dead father, Samuel. His youngest brother, Edward, dead at two and a half—all of them gone now, never to be seen again, not on earth, not in heaven, hell, or purgatory. Only in my dreams, Connie dreamed, can I see you.

He sat as a nine-year-old cross-legged in the dream, handcuffed to the radiator in the bedroom of the Harlem apartment where he and his mother, his brothers Patrick and Danny, and his half sister Ruth had lived for six months, a time and place which included the passing of their father and Edward. And on the tragedy's heels came their mother's new husband, Pete Cullen: the name after all these years still charged with the darkest of freight in Connie's psyche.

Connie had in reality been handcuffed as a kid, but never to that apartment's radiator. He started to cry with intense dream-grief. His body, curled on the bags of mixing cement down in the basement, shivered tightly. His mouth flooded with saliva. Footsteps approached. Images from the dream would return as he smoked on the sidewalk during intermission of a play he would second-act in a few nights, a show at the Morosco Theatre starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.

He slept for twenty minutes and, despite the dream's turbulence, woke refreshed. The cement bags, placed deliberately between the tenants' storage cages, catered well to the contours of his body, offering just the right give. He yawned and stretched. The footsteps came to a stop. Francis Ramey looked down at him.

"May I help you?" Connie said, wondering if the smell of unmixed cement influenced his dreamscape.

"They pay you to sleep?" Ramey said.

"What do you want?"

"Toilet paper."

Prior to meeting Ramey and his partner Henry Slovell, Connie assigned the qualities of stoic dignity and disciplined commitment to the Secret Service, but this changed with the reality of his dealings with them, especially Ramey. Slovell rarely exited their government-issued Impala, sitting beneath a weeping willow on the park side of Fifth. Complementing their presence were two containers of coffee from the Greeks wedged between the dash and windshield and a never-ending ball game on the radio.

Connie didn't care for Ramey, not only because he thought they dropped the ball when it came to protecting John. Ramey reminded Connie of a kid who sat behind him in homeroom for the month he attended ninth grade at Cardinal Hayes High School, a granite-winged structure up on the Bronx's Grand Concourse. This kid had tapped Connie's desk with his foot, and for Connie, Ramey and the kid descended from the same bloodline of arrogance.

"Nerve, making comments like you do."

"Is that right?"

Connie got to his feet. He tucked in his shirt, moving past a series of storage cages containing lonely armchairs and loose-wired fixtures. He stopped. "Don't cast aspersions on the job I do."

Ramey walked by him, and Connie followed.

"Now that I think about it," Connie said, staring at Ramey's back, "who are you to judge the caliber of my work?"

Connie caught himself reaching for a higher lexicon. Aspersions. Caliber. Ramey and the kid who foot-tapped his desk at Hayes both possessed a threatening look in their eyes, and Connie figured both of them had grown up with fathers who drove a sense of unwarranted superiority into them. He wanted to stove Ramey's head in with a pipe and see what his face looked like then.

"Walk around like you own the joint," Connie said.

"I do, far as you're concerned."

"Oh, is that right?"

"That is right."

Ramey looked at him as Connie took the lead again, walking by the washer machines nobody much used, when Connie stopped and unlocked the supply closet. He reached up to a shelf for a roll of toilet paper, turned, and tossed it to Ramey.

Ramey walked down the hall, entered the bathroom, clicked the lock behind him, and through the door Connie barely caught it but he did hear it when Ramey said, "Little drunk."

"Say what?" Connie called.

"Like it takes the Secret Service to figure that one out."

Connie jiggled the loose change in his pocket in search of some retort, but came up empty.

* * *

Connie on the housephone called upstairs, where Walter tried to fix a tenant's broken music box—a smallish model of a French Alps chalet, replete with snowcapped roof. Walter turned the piece over in his hands with innocent curiosity, a little like King Kong.

The tenant offered Walter leftover sandwiches from her bridge game. He declined, wondering if the lady did not understand he was of Italian heritage. Some mayo salad thing, little white bread squares, no crust—you putting me on or what?

"Thinking about taking off," Connie said on the phone. "Need me to do anything before I hit it?"

"Go ahead," Walter said. The fact that Connie sought him out before departing wasn't lost on Walter—most of these guys scurried away at shift's end. He sees my humanity, Walter thought with fondness, I can talk to him.

Connie popped out through the service entrance. He went to his spot on Lex and picked up a pint, came back west, and meandered his way south through the park, stopping for a moment to admire a family of ducks motoring by on the reservoir.

Thank God for hip pockets. Just knowing he had a taste on hand, the bottle safely deployed on him, its sensuous curve snuggled up good and tight against his own body, was oftentimes in and of itself enough to quiet the storm, the otherwise nonstop psychic brouhaha that ran him ragged. Connie's goal: to maintain a steady hum that would prevent him from slipping off the planet.

Of course he frequently overshot or, just as troubling, undershot this course of maintenance. He had over the years encountered people here and there who did not indulge and marveled at them. He'd stand back and watch them refrain and scratch his head, unable to conceive it, unable finally to trust such individuals. Safe to say, he was not a take-it-or-leave-it drinker—it was intricately woven into the fabric of his days, he lived in bars—and though he had a rule never to feed them money (except on the rare occasion to impress the odd, stray drunk woman toward the four a.m. hour), he shamefully relished the sounds of the jukebox, all the pity songs, the repertoire of lost love, the chronicles of yearning: music, every sloppy lick of it, geared to pump your chest with the surging, pathetic flood of remorse.

As Connie headed toward the park's bandshell he stopped to observe a brown-muscled Doberman stalk a squirrel, the Dobie's nose down close to the hexagonal stones of the promenade. It crept up in predatory style on the distracted squirrel, playing all alone at the base of a tree. The dog snatched it by its back, squeezed it in its jaws, shook it, let it drop. It looked down at the lifeless squirrel, glanced around embarrassed, before trotting back toward its owner, a woman whose face lay half-obscured beneath a floppy hat. She carried an L.L.Bean tote, wore a pair of Wallabees and a peacoat purchased, to judge from its cut, not at Alexander's or Klein's, but Saks or Bergdorf, Connie surmised. Overdressed for mid-May, her lips parted slightly with the hint of satisfaction. Connie sensed she lived vicariously through the animal, the glint of murderous delight alive in the woman's eyes.

Connie was a fan of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the TV show hosted by Marlin Perkins, and had CliffsNotes comprehension of Darwinian theory, but something about this squirrel's gratuitous death disturbed him, how the dog's owner maybe encouraged it.

He thought he had heard the sound of the squirrel's bones crack in the dog's mouth but wasn't sure if his mind made it up. He produced his pint and washed these thoughts down.

"Hey, Mr. Doorman," some kids called, "over here."

Connie turned toward the bandshell.

"Come on over," they called.

Moving through clouds of patchouli and marijuana, Connie approached the hippie kids who acid-tripped there. They hung out in small clusters, a United Nations of teenagers, black and white, Jewish and Puerto Rican. They passed around joints and sweaty quarts of Olde English 800. Couples cradled each other with the tenderness of youth and made out off to the side. They drank and got high and listened to Let It Bleed.

Connie went to the four-pack of kids who called to him. They sat downstage right, letting their legs dangle and bounce.

"Nice uniform," a girl with frizzy hair said.

"I smell reefer," Connie said, and they laughed.

"Want to get high?" a ponytailed kid said.

"Yes please," he said, and they laughed some more.

From a small manila envelope the kid shook some pot onto the bandshell's stone stage and started to separate out seeds and twigs. He got the pot good and clean before he crumpled it up into a smokable grain. With a soft matchbook cover he scooped it up and sprinkled it into a single folded sheet of Bambú. They watched the joint get rolled in silence, bearing witness to a sacred ritual. He sealed it with a lick, stuck the thing in his mouth, then held the joint up to air-dry a moment, before he extended it to Connie with just a subtle show of ceremony.

"Thank you, sir," Connie said. "I like your style."

Connie put it in his mouth, flipped open his Zippo, and brought its wild flame toward the joint with respectful caution, as he did not want to light it haphazardly and thereby waste any of the precious herb. He gave it a thorough toke and held the smoke in with theatrical flair, his eyes blinking, doing this and that, and the kids got a kick out of the guy, probably even over thirty, maybe, in his doorman's uniform, getting high with them, and Connie could tell they were good kids. They were different than the kids in the projects in that they had been afforded the chance to develop a greater gentleness of spirit, which he found attractive. They came from homes with books and record collections and art on the walls, you could just tell. Their parents were doctors or lawyers, teachers or artists, and perhaps a few of the kids in the crowd were from the projects or tenements, kids naturally drawn to a more kind and literate scene. This crowd had genuine Swiss Army knives in belted leather sheaths, and wore Italian hiking boots that cost sixty-five dollars at Paragon, and the pot's quality was stellar.

He passed the joint and held the smoke in his lungs. Without exhaling he said, "Good stuff," and the kids laughed. He choked and sputtered from deep inside his chest. Finally, he let it go, bent over, and caught his breath. He stood up straight, produced his pint, and took a hit.

"Who wants a taste, anybody?" Connie said, and they looked at him. "Wow," he said, "discriminating palates." Connie spotted a kid spinning a Frisbee on his finger upstage. "Yo, yo, with the Frisbee and the 'fro!" he called, then broke from the four-pack of kids and started to sprint between the wrought-iron chairs sitting vacant and scattershot before the bandshell.

The Afroed kid watched Connie break into his long pattern, grinned big, and with a short one-two-three-step release let the Frisbee rip. It flew up and off the stage as Connie zigged and zagged through the wrought-iron chairs. The Frisbee soared and they all watched him work to track it down, calling, "Go, Mr. Doorman, go!"

A desperation fueled Connie, and something in him, now that he had committed, wanted to make the grab. He felt emotions he had not experienced in years, a single-minded intensity that sport produced, wherein all internal clutter falls away. His head and chest pounded as the rhythm of his stride began to synch up with the Frisbee, they were one and the same, and the bandshell kids picked up on it, calling to Connie with ever greater excitement.

"You got it, Doorman, you got it!"

He had to negotiate a few stand-alone garbage cans and a couple of human beings—a homeless man and a bald-headed toddler on the loose—when a wind came, a gust from nowhere, and the Frisbee hovered midair. The kids made noise to guide and direct.

"Ho, Doorman, wait up! Ho!"

The Frisbee tried to make up its mind, before it slowly, with coy prerogative, reversed gears and started back toward the bandshell.

"Back, Doorman, back, back!"

Connie retraced his path and the Frisbee picked up speed, boomeranging its way toward the bandshell with a fickle change of heart, and with the turnabout Connie caught a second wind, hissing under his breath, "You motherless son of a." He spoke to the Frisbee, gave the thing its own volition and consciousness, he conjured the Frisbee into a supercilious bitch of a human being. "Pull that shit on me," he said. He again negotiated the wrought-iron chairs but the effort less than half as hard now, needing only an inverse take on a course his body had intuitively retained, as the Frisbee descended, descended.

"Watch it, Doorman, watch it!" the kids cried.

The Doberman that had taken the squirrel's life galloped at him from a disturbingly obtuse angle. And Connie thought, If it bites me, it bites me, I'm not scared of dogs, never have been, and the Dobie vanished like cowards always do.

Down the Frisbee came, and with it Connie downshifted—it was going to happen now, the wind had

dissipated—and the kids smiled for Connie, the grab was imminent, but for no discernible reason he overshot the thing and the kids flashed sad Connie had blown it at the last moment . . . when he took them unawares with a behind-the-back snatch which blew their minds, just as he spun and quick-flipped it back to the Afroed kid upstage, having possessed the Frisbee for no amount of time worth counting, and the upstage kid caught it where he stood.

They slapped each other five, hugged, and shook their bodies. A tall kid with a soul patch placed a hand on Connie's shoulder and said, "That was so cool." He offered a quart of Olde English and Connie took a victorious guzzle.

"Later, kids."

"Come back soon, Mr. Doorman," they called.

Connie waved goodbye, and he never did return to them.

* * *

South he roamed on pedestrian paths, gently swaying this way and that. He stopped to watch a shaft of light infiltrate a canopy of green, the trees leaning, the branches reaching with desire for one another above him. How the light landed on a boulder just off the path. Like a painting at the Met Connie took in on a recent rainy lunch break. But this, the actual sun and trees of the world, and the sight of it spoke to the unschooled artist in him. He considered the stains on the boulder, the mildew, tried to regard the shapes not as some Rorschach for his longings, but something which had nothing to do with him personally, like a painting hanging in the Met.

He left the park at Columbus Circle. The marquee of the Coliseum read Boat Show, and a few salesmen in loosened, fat-knotted ties and one minidressed woman stood smoking together outside. From their countenance Connie decided they hadn't written much business at all.

One of Connie's brothers, Patrick, a teamster, worked the Coliseum. Connie rarely spoke to his siblings; even throughout the holidays the last number of years it stayed quiet between them. They suffered such decimation when they were children that the brothers and half sister Ruth seemed to prefer no contact, as spending time together only served to rehash a past better left to wither on the vine. The suicide of their father, the negligent homicide of baby brother Edward, followed by the violence of Pete Cullen, its horror doubled by their mother's inability to protect—all this could not help but flood its way back when they saw one another. When they did get together, the result of some spouse's insistence, it produced in Connie a hangover of shame which lingered for a week that no amount of booze dissolved. Still, whenever he walked by the Coliseum he naturally thought of Patrick, who now lived, Connie believed, in Bronxville with a Spanish wife and kids. He thought of Danny and Ruth as well, and the memories of his brother Edward, and what a kick he used to get as a kid himself holding Edward in his arms.

He loved to walk the streets of Manhattan, and Brooklyn too (he loved the generous, open skies of Brooklyn, it was always what he first noticed coming up out of the trains). He would hate to consider a day when he could not step out and just start walking, a simple pleasure which had yet to fizzle or fade.

He headed down Ninth Avenue, passing Port Authority and the fruit stands, when it hit him: he no longer had a place to call home. He managed to put this out of his mind. It happened this morning, did it not?

A sadness accosted him, as post office drivers in their elevated cabs careened their trucks rudely across his path into the loading dock. His sense of destination abruptly dissolved. Where am I going? he thought.

He produced his house key, recalling the door's new cylinder, and the memory collapsed over him. He removed the key from its ring and surreptitiously brought it to his nose—the smell rancid, metallic. He crossed the avenue and, as he did, let the key fall from his hand, and he thought, Maybe the sun will soften the pavement and downtown traffic'll punish the key into the tar. And whenever I'm on Ninth I'll see the key embedded in the street and only I will know what door it used to open. I'll remember how I let it slip from my hand, May of '74, and how the key represented my failed shot at love and family.

His mind revved up for its blunt assault: Never should have tried it. Should have left well enough alone and never brought other people into the mix. Should have stayed a bachelor. A room in a rooming house. Falafels, pizza slices, Chinese takeout and double features in dark movie houses to muscle your way through long holiday weekends alone.

He cut through what was known in the neighborhood as Bums Park, the centerpiece of the space a free city health clinic, a squat three-story structure surrounded by strange homeless nomads with wild hair who slept on benches. Children were notoriously frightened to enter its confines, the dangers of which had taken on mythological proportions.

One bearded man in an army jacket talked quietly to himself on a bench across the way: Tommy Dunn. Connie had known him forever. Tommy got kicked out of the projects—not an easy thing to do. How do you lose a project apartment, Tommy? If I had a nickel for every time Tommy made somebody laugh, Connie thought. Don't get Tommy started on you in front of a crowd, watch out! And it was a good humor. Deeply offensive, yes, deeply racist, sure it was, but somehow devoid of malice or vitriol. There is love underneath it, isn't there, Tom? Tommy'd stroll up to half a dozen guys sitting around a concrete checker table and just start riffing. What a natural, what an athlete. And now? Relegated to a bench in Bums Park, clutching a pint of MD 20/20, a knotty beard of chaos defacing him.

God Almighty, Tom, what did they do to you?

They used to shoot the breeze when they encountered each other, spent a good twenty minutes catching up, but now Connie prayed to go unnoticed, as Tommy represented a frightening projection of his own potential future.

Connie cut past the sandbox and basketball court, the monkey bars and swings, the horseshoe pits and handball courts of Chelsea Park, before he leaned against the fence on 27th Street and peered into the thickening fog of the softball field. He wondered how they could still see the puck, but as the sun had gradually set over the Hudson, the kids developed night vision.

He spotted Arthur. The informal roller hockey scrimmage had started to dissolve. Kids on opposing teams stopped skating to talk to one another. The goalies stood bored between two garbage cans, hoping for the chance to make one more Eddie Giacomin–style save before calling it a day.

Connie listened to Arthur teach a younger player how to spear somebody, his words drifting across the field. Arthur told the kid he should only spear a player who messed with him, that the kid shouldn't do it just for fun. Use your spearing skills judiciously was Arthur's point.

"Say I messed with you all game, so you go digging for the puck and I'm coming up behind you." Arthur produced a roll of electrical tape from inside his glove and let it drop to the ground. "Ready?" he said, and fired a snap-shot against the fence near Connie. The kid dug hard and fearless for it with Arthur bearing down. "Stick in position," Arthur said, and the kid lowered his grip on the butt and centered it behind him in a manner which would prevent a player from crushing him into the boards. "Good," Arthur said, and smacked the kid's stick out of the way and crunched him anyway.

"Hey," the kid said, laughing.

Arthur banged him into the fence with a dry humor, not for real, not too aggressive. The kid was smaller and younger than Arthur. Arthur kept playing dumb, saying, "What?"

"Hey!" the kid said, laughing again, and Arthur continued to crunch the kid, but when he looked up and saw his father, he stopped and skated away.

"Arthur," Connie said.

"Hey, Mr. Sky," the kid said.

"How you doing, son?" Connie said to the kid. "Arthur, come here a minute."

"What?" Arthur said.

"Meet me over the hole."

Somebody had cut a hole in the fence. Arthur skated reluctantly toward it as Connie walked that way, the fence dividing them.

"Still playing," Arthur said.

"I know," Connie said, "want to talk to you a minute." He slid through the gap and stood with Arthur, who skated in small, choppy circles. "Come here, can't see you."

"Yeah, 'cause it's dark."

"Want to get some dinner?"

"Can't."

"Come on, couple slices."

"Mommy's cooking," Arthur said. "Told her I'd be there."

"All right, all right," Connie said. "Well then, let's just talk."

"About what?" Arthur started to skate in faster circles, smacking the blade of his stick down onto the ground harder.

Connie said, "Stop with the stick, going to crack it," and Arthur obeyed for the moment, almost grateful for the instruction. "Listen. Your mother and me."

"I know, I know."

"What do you know?"

"Separating, she told me."

"For now," Connie said. "Temporary."

"Until when?"

"Until we see what's what is when," Connie said.

"Yeah, right."

"Yeah, right, what?"

Arthur sniffed the air. "Nothing."

"Say it," Connie said, "it's all right."

Arthur stayed quiet.

"What is it?"

Arthur took a glove off and wiped his face, snorting back a sudden flash-flood mélange of tears and snot and saliva. "Yeah, right, what, okay—and like I wish you were dead already," Arthur said, "that's what's fucking what," and he skated away.

"Arthur," Connie said.

Arthur kept skating. "Die already, get it the fuck over with. I hate you. Find a bench, leave us alone already, if that's how you're going to be already."

"Arthur!" Connie called out. "Artie!"

"No!" Arthur yelled across the park. "Banging on the door like that! Don't love us! And I'm not going to your funeral either, tell you that shit right now!"

The sound of Arthur's stick slapping the ground grew more distant until Connie lost him, sight and sound, to the fog. He stood there for a moment, half hoping Arthur would return to do who knows what—apologize, say worse things, or skate into Connie's arms and cry his eyes out.

Thick white clouds had descended, filling the space, white zeppelins straight from the Hudson, landing in Chelsea Park.

Connie stood still. There had been words between himself and Arthur throughout the last number of months, but none like what he just heard. The kid had found a strong voice. I hate you, Arthur had said. Wished Connie was dead.

Connie listened to some kids at a distance skating home for dinner. The fog grew thicker. He stood there, short of breath, strangely exhilarated. A fog-cloaked stillness filled the park, muting the world. So little open space in the neighborhood, on the island of Manhattan altogether, the fog seemed thankful to have found a spot to do its thing. How nice would that be? Scooped up and carried out on a bed of fog, sliding beneath the belly of the Verrazano, right on out to sea.

Connie listened to the sound of his own breathing, stunned by Arthur's tumult. And with it also a strange pride for his son. He sensed Arthur was onto something, glad the kid had found words for it, managed to fire it out of him.

He could teach me a thing or two . . . I never got angry, did I? I forgot to get angry.

What was my father's name again? A wiry man they called Jumbo. But his name—his name was Samuel. Sammy.

Samuel Sky, the printer. That's what he did, what Connie's mimeographed birth certificate said, the one Connie discovered in a brown file of corrugated cardboard hidden deep in his mother's closet, searching through it as his mother smoked her Salems out on the stoop in her one iconic housecoat of impoverishment. Trying to glean some information about his own father from the shadowed document. My father, Connie thought, the printer. Turned the oven on, late afternoon, January 19, 1951. This side of dusk, first star in the sky. Turned the oven on and took baby brother Edward with him.

Connie adjusted his cap, and for a moment considered himself a captain on the bow of a ship in the middle of a fog-shrouded ocean. He stepped deeper into the thickening fog, in search of its epicenter. The ground of the softball field rocking slightly beneath him, the cigarette in his hand not visible, save the faint glow of its tip, the glow of a distant lighthouse between two fingers.

Kid had a lot of nerve, he thought. Little punk. Lucky you got a father. If I took myself out, then maybe. Let me pull a suicide. Then the kid might have something to smack the blade of his stick down on the ground about. Talk to me like that on the street. Pull that shit on me.

He moved deeper into the field, fog-blinded. Now came the soft toot-toot of a car horn on Tenth Avenue, not a sound of impatience, but a gentle, caring goodbye, to and from a loved one, Connie decided.

Here I stand, blind to the world. And if I went missing for good, who would mourn me? He surrendered to his pity, took a hit off his pint, let the fog envelope him. He stood captured by it, white and blinding, blinding wet and white.

* * *

One day over a round of cribbage John out of the blue said, "What did your father do? You know, for a job."

"My father," Connie said. "When he did work, he was a printer."

"In what, a printing plant?"

"Down the docks of Chelsea." And as he nonchalantly considered the cards in his hand, Connie said, "What'd your father do?"

John grinned. "My father? Public service. Yeah. Like a family business." He grabbed Connie's Zippo off the table, opened and banged its small rough wheel against his leg in one fluid quick-draw motion, producing a flame toward which he brought a fresh joint.

* * *

Steven called Alfonso "Fonso." Nobody's name needed three syllables when you were nine years old, come on. Steven and Alfonso were best friends, simple as that. Alfonso, part Panamanian, had a football-shaped head, small teeth, and large gums. These physical oddities in no way put a halt to Alfonso's vanity. The kid was full of himself and stayed on perpetual alert for a chance at physical self-reflection, often stopping to take advantage of a parked car's side-view mirror, even a puddle in the gutter.

Steven sat on a bench by the skelsies board Alfonso had meticulously designed with large, round pieces of chalk in the yard of 466. Alfonso ran the board and Steven waited.

Alfonso possessed substantial skelly skills, and he created superbad caps, mixing and matching his waxes, producing psychedelic results. Both boys stayed on the lookout for new cap possibilities. Lately they had discovered a series of chairs at PS 33, not in the classrooms but in the offices where the secretary lady and nurse lady sat, chairs with particular knobs on their leg bottoms: made of silver, they carried a good, balanced weight, and seemed born to glide. The challenge was to not get busted. Messing with school property—they didn't like that. Steven and Alfonso took turns keeping chickie.

Alfonso was serious and fastidious and took all kinds of extra time setting up his shots, not a trace of chalk on the kid's clothes. Whereas Steven's T-shirts always had a stain, he could not draw for beans, and the wax in his cap collection was unbalanced and generally unattractive.

"Daddy!" Steven jumped off the bench and ran like a shot toward Connie.

Connie embraced and kissed him. "How you doing, son?" A lady up in Harlem who wore a red bandanna and lived across the street had called Connie son. She took his face in her dry, black hands, and Connie always wondered if she knew about Pete Cullen, if that was the reason she showed Connie love, or was it simply who she was?

They went and sat on the bench and watched Alfonso run the board, his cap slowly sliding to rest smack dab in the middle of each box.

"Nice," Steven said.

"Good shooting there, Mr. Alfonso," Connie said.

Alfonso roamed the board's periphery, paving the way for each shot's trajectory, reaching down to pluck away some invisible piece of debris like a golfer on a green.

Steven's legs swung with impatience, and he gave his father a look and made the smallest cluck sound with his tongue, to which Alfonso stopped and said: "What?!"

"Take so long! Just shoot, know you're going to make it."

Connie slept with Alfonso's mother Melba years ago, during a long night of partying. She had large breasts and wore eyeglasses. Melba got on top of Connie and gyrated, and as she did she sucked on one of her own knuckles, which Connie found to be an open and generous display of her sexuality. Baby Alfonso asleep in a crib across the room, back when Melba's mom lived with them. Melba gave him a kiss at the door, and whispered, No more, it's wrong, I like Maureen.

"Stevie, listen: Mommy home?"

"Uh-huh. Going up?"

"Me and Mommy, we're having a few problems."

"I know."

"You do?"

Steven exploded off the bench, saying, "On the line, on the line, on the line," just as Alfonso himself jumped back, saying, "Na, na, na, na," pointing to his cap, saying, "It's in, it's in, it's in, it's in, from here you can, come on," to which Steven said, "Trust you, trust you, trust you, trust you," before plopping back down onto the bench.

Connie waited a moment and said, "How do you know?"

"Changed the lock is why," Steven whispered, his voice going hollow at the center. "'Cause your drinking and how you wet the bed, she said, and the fooling around and stuff like that, how she said on the phone to Aunt Carol and all them."

"Listen to me now: I love Mommy and Mommy loves me, and I love you and Artie, nothing's ever going to change that, bottom line, no matter what."

"I know," Steven said, barely audible.

"Period, end of story," Connie said, and waited for Steven to kick in with his part. It was a routine of theirs.

"Cut and dried, my friend," Steven said, but his heart wasn't in it.

"Day you were born, that deal went down hard," Connie said, hugging Steven to him. The deal being Connie would love his son forever and always, no questions asked, no doubt about it, the deal gone down, day you were born, cut and dried my friend, my son, my beautiful boy. "Stevie, would you shoot upstairs and let Mommy know I want to pick up a couple things?"

"Right now?"

"If you don't mind."

"Take my place?" Steven said, jutting his face toward the skelsies board.

"If he gives me a chance."

"I know, Fonso's good," he said, then jumped up and ran toward the entrance of 466. "My father takes my place, Fonso!"

Connie lit a smoke and watched Alfonso. The kid had a humorous way about him. So neat. "When's my turn?"

"If I mess up," Alfonso said, making his way around the board like a pool hall hustler. He had the touch, and after each successful flick-shot he snapped his fingers.

"You're good, Alfonso."

"I know," he said, and Connie laughed, and as Alfonso set up his next shot he said: "My father, he was a doorman too," saying it almost as a question.

"I think he was," Connie said tentatively. "He worked over at London Terrace. A good man, your father, Alfonso. Very talented, like you."

"Like how?"

"You name it, like how. Played softball. Some shortstop."

"For real?" Alfonso said, glancing now at Connie.

"He could draw too, like you. Always with his pencil."

Alfonso's father one day up and disappeared, and who better than Connie to know about a father gone missing.

Here came Steven, and behind him Maureen, splitting off to the middle of the yard, carrying a black Hefty bag to keep it from scraping the ground. She stopped and waited by the Saturn sculpture.

"She's there," Steven said, pointing. "My turn?"

"Yeah," Alfonso said, "to warm that bench some more."

Maureen looked around in anticipation of an ambush. Or maybe she was just beat down by her weary marriage. Something about the language of her body seemed new to Connie, her stride, a defeat in her step. Yes, she looked drained, but also, beneath the exhaustion, signs of something which posed a subtle threat to Connie, and he couldn't pin it down.

She rested the Hefty bag on the ground and reached for the ring of Saturn with both hands, and Connie noticed her manicure as he approached. She stretched her legs and back as if in preparation for a long run.

"How you doing, Maureen?"

"Some of your things in the bag," she said. "Everything from the bathroom, a bunch of your clothes. Want to take a look, see if there's anything else you need for now?"

"What, I can't come up and go through my own things?"

"Prefer you didn't."

"Why's that?"

"You're not welcome in the house anymore." She shot a mindful look across the way at Steven, who pretended to watch Alfonso run the skelsies board.

The trees shimmered in the yard. Maureen glanced up at the identical brown roller-shaded windows, smacking of institutional ennui.

"You don't know what it does to the kids. Pounding on the door like that, middle of the night. I hope you don't know, 'cause if you knew and still did it? Stevie's happy-go-lucky, but when you're out there banging at four in the morning, loaded to the gills? And the other one, forget about," she said. "I'm worried about Arthur, Con, honestly."

"But you changed the locks."

"That's right."

"Why did you—"

"To keep you the hell out," Maureen said with a mock laugh.

Connie considered her, her tight jeans and sneakers and sweatshirt. Her hair. The manicure. He thought, She's turned a corner.

He always thought he had lucked into Maureen for a lover, a partner, a wife. From the start, the softest of spots responded to her in him, their sex a deeply spiritual communion unlike any Connie had ever known. He felt he could not have loved her more. They had once fucked the legs off a kitchen table, Connie watching one of the legs pogo-sticking its way out of the room in fear of further fucking as they hovered midair, a frozen moment on the tabletop like out of some cartoon, before collapsing down onto the floor in a heap together, still connected, laughing in shock and wonder, where they kept on fucking.

"I mean, who gives a shit, I'm still paying the rent," he said. "So what, I'm a little disjointed."

"Disjointed altogether, only you don't have a clue. And I'm fed up. For real now."

Connie reached for her hand, and Maureen pulled away.

"Hell are you doing?" she said. "Out of your mind."

"All right, look," he said, "are you saying we're done for good, or what?"

"Forget for good."

"Well then, or what?" he said, not knowing what he meant.

"Been done for good for years, Con. Years. Listen to me."

"And what about the kids?"

"Let's keep the kids out of it. Here's the deal: you say, Are we done for good? I say, I don't know. I changed the lock for a reason, not some whim, okay? I'm tired, Con. I can't take it anymore. You got a bad problem, and I cannot sit around and watch you. It's simple: tired of you wetting the bed. Tired of you sleeping around. I don't know another way to say it. Tired of our life together, it's a joke."

"All right," Connie said, "I hear you."

"Hear me? This conversation's older than the hills, pregnant with Arthur, you kidding me? Don't get me started. Point is, you say, Are we done for good? I say, Who knows? I'm not looking that far down the road. You go do what you have to do, show up for the kids, get the booze out of the picture. I don't want to tell you what to do, but if you're drinking . . . You just shouldn't drink, Con, honest to God. Forget it, if the drink's still in the picture. You show up as a father, and who knows, maybe we meet up again down the road, who's to say? You might not like me by that point. And I'm not laying it all on you, God knows I'm no angel. But for now I'm done. I can't anymore. You sober up, show up for the kids, and more than that I can't say."

Connie watched her a moment. He sensed she'd been talking to somebody, a friend, somebody. He knew he didn't have a leg to stand on, yet his mind continued to balk.

"You need help, hon," she said, and if she'd been on the phone you wouldn't know she was crying. "You need help, I need help. The kids . . ." she said, turning from Steven's eyes. "Find a place to stay?"

"Yeah," he lied.

"All right, so take the bag." She turned and headed back upstairs. "And stop walking around in that uniform." She said it over her shoulder, an afterthought, and Connie felt it betrayed a proprietary interest she maintained toward him.

He went over to the skelsies game, kissed and hugged Steven. He gripped Alfonso lovingly by his football-shaped head, before he strolled through the yard toward Tenth Avenue.

Steven watched his father walk away, the Hefty bag tossed over his shoulder.

* * *

With invigorated purpose Connie moved toward Grant's Bar at the corner of 25th and Tenth. On his lips, the cooling vespers of hate: "Let them all go fuck themselves," his ironic tone that of a lighthearted ditty, and by them he meant his wife Maureen and his son Arthur, but not his son Steven. Also, as to who else might go fuck themselves, his dead parents, Mary and Samuel. And Pete Cullen, of course. This the main cast of characters on whose hooks his mind presently hung its anger, but the sentiment simultaneously held open an invitation to every other cocksucker he had ever encountered, ever glanced at on a subway platform throughout the course of his life. Such was the inclusive nature of his darkness. His talent for hate did not play favorites, his hate talent a bighearted and generous talent. Fuck them, fuck them all, as the slogan went. Go ahead and rot, and as long as you're rotting, why not rot in hell? He saw billows of black smoke chugging out of the rooftop chimney of 466, and with it his mind considered the lock removed from what was now his former front door, the old cylinder which had served so well and long no doubt tossed down the incinerator by some locksmith who would have banged his wife given half a chance, as his wife, Connie knew, was highly desirable, the lock now melting away in the furnace of what used to be his marriage, the incinerator's thick black clouds signifying love's end, and, when you thought about it, what good was a life without love?

His Rolodex of drunks included full-blown blackouts, wherein days and, in a handful of cases, weeks of the calendar got recessed for good, but more generally he browned out. Come the period following a run he could more or less piece together basic events and chronology, though he could never keep his boroughs straight. Who knew half the time if you were in Brooklyn or Queens anyway? It didn't take a drunk to produce that confusion. It was all the same nonsense out there, though the Bronx somehow remained special, while Staten Island was basically Jersey in his mind.

Some drunks he walked right into face-first with a vengeance. Others took him unawares, episodes which exceeded his daily maintenance intake, his ubiquitous hip-pocket pint of Myers's, or Bacardi 151, or any decent brand of bourbon, episodes which ended with Connie coming to on a park bench, subway car, or vestibule—or lately a hard-tiled patch of floor on Penn Station's lower level. Which disturbed him. It's one thing to wake up in some miscellaneous spot, another to find yourself retreating to the same location. Was he staking a claim? There was a word to describe such a person.

Grant's fancied itself a workingman's establishment, but fights rarely broke out. The clientele didn't possess the requisite passion for a good brawl, being largely broken men.

Whitey tended bar in rolled-up sleeves, the shirt's whiteness making the blotchy glow of Whitey's face glow harder. The bones of his hands barely distinguishable, a walrus in long pants, drinking behind the bar for free all day—isn't that right, you son of a bitch, you, Whitey?

Longshoremen, mailmen, factory workers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, the unemployable, a couple of wet-brains, a misanthropic PhD or two hiding behind what they hoped people would consider academic beards of distinction, flabbergasted occupants of Chelsea's swankier brownstones because their lives still somehow sucked despite impressive curriculum vitae and substantial earning power—all stood and drank at the bar together.

On the opposite wall lived an oak-paneled telephone booth with a door which, when unfolded and slid shut on its track, triggered illumination and ventilation from above. The phone itself sported various-sized apertures to deposit various-sized nickels, dimes, and quarters—a pair of brass knuckles reconfigured for the reception of change.

On an extended ledge of plywood a large Motorola oversaw the front room, its convex screen collecting dust at four soft right angles. The box hovered like a deus ex machina.

Connie entered with second nature. Whitey set him up with a bat and a ball. Sometimes he couldn't catch a buzz for love or money—other times half a beer put him on his ass. For the next several hours he had a difficult time forgetting himself in the manner he sought, and after countless boilermakers he rapped on the bar as a good night to Whitey, but the gesture rang hollow, and on his exit a barrage of shame captured Connie's mind.

A light rain fell. He removed his cap and shook wet from it. He watched every move he made, mocking himself with harsh viciousness for a lifetime of fraudulence. The dark beat of self-recrimination kicked in hard. No wonder she changed the lock. Not one, he told himself, not one solitary clue, fucko, how to show another human being any love at all. He walked, suffering desertion and hatred of self.

He turned right onto Ninth to not even Connie knew where, when he heard a bang. He saw Arthur and three other boys carrying pieces of two-by-four the length of baseball bats. One of the kids had smacked the hood of a parked car. They whooped and sprang like a pack of animals, and as one of them banged the wall of the bank on the corner Arthur swung his two-by-four at a garbage can and knocked it over, the trash spilling into the street. Crossing the avenue, Arthur turned and locked eyes with Connie and snapped his face away, his long hair swinging wild to catch up to his head, before the four kids rumbled toward the projects, out of sight.

Connie glanced at the clock inside the convenience store owned by Jimmy the Greek, who gave credit, on the corner of 24th. Coming up on midnight and Arthur swinging a two-by-four. Twelve years old. A school night.

He had to find a way back. Reconcile with Maureen. Be the father he himself never had. A now-or-never vibe galloped up into his consciousness. What's it going to be? something asked him.

He stopped for a pint at his spot on 23rd, where Herbie the liquor store clerk demonstrated his sexy style for Connie, flicking his tongue toward a case of Cutty, the tongue coming quite close to but never touching the box's cardboard.

"Do you see," Herbie said, "how I love them?"

Connie stared at him without judgment, an objective anthropologist.

Later on Greenwich Avenue, after purchasing on a lark a quart of Olde English 800 in honor of his Frisbee grab, he took a last guzzle and threw the bottle against the wall of a Bing & Bing apartment house.

A man in a leather jacket whose pinky ring shone beneath the streetlamp yelled at Connie: "What the hell do you think you're doing?" He reached down to pick up a small dog.

Connie entered four or five bars, from which lingered various images in his mind. He stepped out onto the street at one point late into the night just as the sky was opening up, and he made a dash for the 4th Street station using the Hefty bag as a ridiculous umbrella.

* * *

On a dark and motionless CC train, the last of its kind, he opened his eyes and could not remember his own name. The cross-stitching of a wicker bench impressed itself upon his face. He stared at his own hand and wondered for a moment who it belonged to. The subway car dark and motionless; stillness abided. He reached for his bankroll, bottle, and Hefty bag, found all intact. (He had come to on the subway another time to find his pockets slit open by a straight razor.) "Who?" he said, listening for the sound of his own voice, a lost child trying to purchase anchor on himself. The ceiling fan turning slowly above him, propelled by the breeze from the open windows of the car. He scrambled internally, found a moment's peace in the fan's gentle revolutions and the shadow play it produced. He navigated into an upright position, stood, and looked out over the yard where the train had come to rest. The yard itself terrifying and pitiful, the endless expanse of track, the god-awful industry of it.

At a distance he spotted a figure, a graffiti writer working by the light of a predawn moon, balancing on the highest rung of an orange Day-Glo ladder. Up on the balls of his feet, arm fully extended, he reached to put the final touches on his whole-car piece.

STAY HIGH, the tag read. STAY HIGH 149.

Connie started to weep, and with it broke the spell of alienation. He wept for his own loneliness, his fractured psyche, for all the years of longing and yearning from which he had failed to escape and continued to run. He let his pity find its release, and he wept as well with a gratitude that surprised, moved by the sight of this young man making his mark, doing his thing out here at ten minutes to five in the morning. How could you not admire the guy's desire, his raison d'être? What else but artistic compulsion could provoke such unpaid dedication at this hour? It must be so fulfilling, Connie imagined, such a life to live, that of an artist of one kind or another, so rich inside.

The echo of the ball's rattle inside the can of spray paint floated clear across the yard as the writer shook the can dry for all its worth. Connie watched him a while, before he heard another sound, that of a Metro-North train speeding toward Grand Central on a set of tracks perpendicular to the yard, and with it Connie moved to find his own way downtown.