Nicky Shades was maybe the best sewer-to-sewer football player I ever saw. Of course that was before he became a junkie. When I was a kid I would watch him and the rest of the older guys playing rough tackle on Sixty-ninth Street, black leather jackets and watch caps bouncing off car fenders and each other. No one got seriously hurt, stitches here and there but nothing to speak of. All of them seemed to play with the passion of pros, but Shades was Namath at the Super Bowl every afternoon.
Nobody was playing now as I turned and drove by with my father, and that was surprising, since it was perfect football weather. Overcast but not too cool, and the kind of cloudy that didn’t portend a monsoon. I went down to Fort Hamilton Parkway and along it to the Keyboard Lounge, my old man’s last stop of the morning.
“Five minutes,” he said, getting out of the car.
I remained behind the wheel, just off the corner, and thought about watching Nicky play. When the game used to end, several of the players would stay and toss the ball around for a while. If Nicky was one of those who lingered, he usually invited me to join them. I’d go the distance until I swore my arm would fall off. Sometimes we’d keep throwing past dark, then I’d have to call it quits and head in for dinner. Shades never looked tired, and if he didn’t run off immediately he was usually the last to leave. He was about four years older than me, which meant adult when I was fifteen. After he got jammed up and went away for a while we lost touch. I didn’t run into him for over three years. That was why it was so shocking to see how he’d deteriorated. He’d probably started on smack in the football days. It would explain the black-lens aviators he was never without. But who knows? What was it at first, fashion or crutch? Anyway, by the time I came to drive for Big Lou’s car service, Nicky was already pretty much a wreck.
My father, true to his word, stepped out of the bar within five minutes. I knew he must have hustled to come back that fast, and he was still sorting policy slips and cash as we pulled away. The placement of these scraps of paper in his shirt, pants, and jacket pockets represented an elaborate filing system which, although observed by me for years, I’d yet to crack. That it worked was clear, as I’d witnessed him fairly toasted more than once, getting every bet phoned in and all action correctly covered.
Sometimes I worried about my father. Since my mother died he seemed to have given up on women, and I’d developed a fear that he would grow old alone after I left. Whenever the urge struck, he took himself to a whorehouse in Coney Island, dragging me along if we were both drunk enough. Otherwise, his only social contact was with men. He was out on a disability pension from Sanitation, which he supplemented nicely by taking numbers in a few neighborhood bars. Every morning, seven days a week, he made the rounds. That was where the car service came in. My father didn’t drive. He was paranoid that for the rest of his life the Sanitation Department beakies would be watching for a sign of miraculous recovery. So everywhere he went, he went by cab or with me. He was Big Lou’s most dependable customer. He also tipped generously, though most of the drivers gave it back to him on a number. He usually completed the circuit by noon and dropped his receipts off with Lou’s brother Tony, who ran the social club on Sixty-fifth and most of the neighborhood action as well. Then he’d hang around the car service for a few hours, playing cards and bullshitting. When I got my license he hooked me up with a job, which was how I came to see Shades again.
Driving car service was supposed to have been a summer job, but I angled such a good schedule at the castle-in-the-air university I’d started that I’d be able to work almost full-time every week through fall. Going to college had been my idea, and with the exception of my high school guidance counselor—who probably got a kickback—nobody gave a shit. My father thought I was wasting my time and going into debt, but he wasn’t in a hurry to see me leave the apartment, so my being a student kept me poor enough to suit him. Gina lost her mind over the idea of not being able to get married right away. Pretend I got drafted, I told her, but the girl had no sense of humor. It was a stall and she knew it, but she let it go for the time being. I figured I was good for about a year. If the school thing panned out I could always finish up part-time at night.
Gina lived with her mother in a two-family up on Twenty-first Avenue. We started going out when I was fifteen, and a year later the old woman who was renting the second floor in their house died. Gina’s mother kept the rooms empty and said that they were for us when we got married. They had been vacant for three years and I could feel the weight of them over my head when I ate dinner there. Once we tried setting my father up with her mother, but that was a disaster. It was just as well. If it had worked out, I figured I’d have the two of them to contend with when I tied the knot.
“What are you thinking about?” my father asked abruptly, almost as if he knew.
“You and Gina’s mother,” I said. “Just picturing the two of you as a couple.”
He snorted. “That was one historic fuckin’ meeting, hah? Her house looks like a church. I’d have to go to confession every time I farted. How could a person live like that?”
I dropped my old man off, accepting the dollar and a quarter commission on the call. When I first began driving for Lou, my father insisted that he would pay and tip me like he did the other drivers. When I told him to fuck himself, he tried to at least pay the fare. I hadn’t planned on taking anything. Ultimately, we settled on the commission Lou would take from the ride, so in a sense we both saved face.
I pulled a U-turn and headed for the store. It was Friday afternoon and the next day was one of my every-other-Saturdays off. I looked forward to sleeping in. Shades was parked in front of the car service, hood up as usual. Even if there was nothing wrong with his car—and that was rare—leaving the hood up kept him from getting tickets in the bus lane.
I knew Nicky was supposed to be cured, but I’d seen right off that it didn’t matter. After he was released on parole the last time I’d heard that the state sent him to Florida for free to enroll in some experimental program, but that first day at Lou’s I was stunned. The years of junk were written all over him. Still in the dark glasses, thank God. I didn’t want to think about what Nicky’s eyes looked like. His face had become tighter—skeletal—and the cords in his neck were prominent from the years of working out. The rest of him just looked used up. If I hadn’t known him I would have guessed he was in his late forties. He was twenty-three; that made the two of us and a guy called Little Joey about thirty years younger than almost all the other drivers. It was a typical car service crew, evenly split between retired and retarded, with a few degenerate gamblers thrown in. Surprisingly, no drunks, but then maybe they’d hired me for my potential.
Nicky and I had never been friends, but our acquaintanceship was renewed over the first couple of weeks I was driving. We discussed mutual allies and enemies; who had married, moved, or died; who was on the way up and who was a loser. These were ambitious judgments for two guys with ten-year-old cars shuttling old women to their bingo games for two bucks a pop minus commission. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but Nicky was always so serious when he spoke that I didn’t bring it up. He never talked about being a junkie either, so I hoped he might be temporarily straight. He was able to get to work on time anyway, something I wasn’t all that good at.
Around mid-summer, Little Joey, Nicky, and I began stopping off at Peggy’s, a gin mill on my father’s route, for a few beers after work. Little Joey wasn’t dazzling company. He was aggressive almost to the point of being nasty, probably because he was short and, at twenty-one, nearly bald. He had been laid off from a damn good job as a paper handler at the Daily News and had a bad attitude about the nickel-and-dime money that driving brought in. But we were the three kids and we were sort of thrown together. Besides, Joey loved baseball, and since it wasn’t a big betting sport, no one in Lou’s except me would discuss it at any length. Relationships have been forged on less.