The following Monday morning three things were fighting for my attention: pain, the dream, and the telephone. The dream, unfortunately, was being edged out. It involved Lisa from the paint store and was erotic in nature. I tried to keep it but the ringing became more and more intrusive. Eventually I realized I was awake. With consciousness came pain, ebbing in slowly at first, but soon swallowing me completely. I reached out and grabbed the phone.
“Mikey. Seven o’clock.”
“Oh God, no,” I moaned.
“Up, Mike. Let’s go. You up?”
“I’m up.”
“You’re not up.”
“I’m up, I’m up.” I wasn’t up.
“Come to the window. Wave to Stix.”
“Lou, I can’t come to the window. I’m in the kitchen. I’m making coffee.”
“You don’t know how to make coffee, you lying prick; come to the window. Wave to Stix.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
I swung my legs around and rested my feet on the floor. My stomach started to shimmy and I had to remain perfectly still for a few seconds. It subsided. I tried standing and then, tentatively, walking. At the window, I pulled the shade up and sunlight streamed in. The effect on me was vampiric. Across the street on the opposite corner I saw the scarecrow outline of Johnny Stix waving his hand slowly over his head like he was signaling aircraft. I inched the window open, stuck my hand out, and shook it weakly. He saluted, then turned and walked around the corner. I collapsed back on the bed and snatched up the receiver.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Stix seen you. You’re up. Now c’mon, let’s go. I got two guys out and Manhattan calls are gonna start rolling in. Come make some money.”
“You don’t need money when you’re dead.”
“That’s what you think.” He hung up.
I put my left arm over my face and lay still. By doing that I managed five more minutes of relatively passive pain before I hiccuped, and felt the shaking and throbbing begin. This was a bad one. No solid food today, I thought, bracing myself. I raced down the hallway, bounced violently off the bathroom doorjamb, and made the bowl with two seconds to spare. It pays to train.
Half an hour later I staggered around the corner to Big Lou’s, my sociology textbook under one arm. I’d recently taken to carrying a schoolbook into work now and then, but as yet I hadn’t found any reason to open it. Though I would have denied this to anyone who asked, I was already feeling that college held little attraction for me and that it was more the idea of school that had been appealing.
My shift started at eight, so I thought I’d have a few minutes to pull myself together. As soon as I walked in, the glare from the naked bulb that hung over the card table caught me at just the right angle to set off a small explosion in my head, and I thought I might lose it again. I knew I’d be blinking the image off my retinas for the next twenty minutes.
Lou’s had been there, in one incarnation or another, for as long as I could remember, and it still looked like a place you’d use temporarily while setting up a real car service. Painfully cheap, pale green woodgrain paneling had been thrown up over the crumbling plaster walls, which showed through at the seams and corners where the particleboard was starting to crack and disintegrate. There had never been a shade or fixture over the light that hung from a wire, and what chairs and tables there were seemed to be of the sort that get older and older without ever achieving the charm of antiques. In contrast to all this was Lou’s desk. It was stunning and ridiculous at the same time. It easily occupied a third of the floor space in the store, and looked like a football field done in mahogany. He’d bought it some years back from one of the rip-off furniture places on Atlantic Avenue downtown, and they had to remove one of the storefront windows to get the damn thing in there. Lou sat behind it, booking three-dollar calls and ordering pizzas, all the time acting like a nineteenth century railroad baron.
When he saw me, he began struggling out from behind the desk and reaching in his pants pocket at the same time, which meant I was going to be sent out for coffee. Lou was massive, and watching him try to get around his desk in a hurry in the close quarters of the store was usually amusing. He stood about six two and weighed well over 220. He wore his curly black hair fairly long and had a woodsman’s bushy beard. The overall effect inevitably invited jokes about Lou Albano, the old-time professional wrestler. Big Lou didn’t mind at all. He seemed to like it. Sometimes, after a few drinks, he’d hang rubber bands from his beard like Captain Lou used to do before a big match. Then he’d take turns holding everyone in the bar in headlocks, including the women.
Lou always ran a tight ship at the store, but I had the feeling that Tony, being neighborhood poobah, was a little embarrassed by his kid brother. He didn’t seem to think Lou was serious or presentable enough for a right-hand man, someone who could be groomed to fill his shoes. Even though Tony was fairly young, I occasionally wondered who would take his spot when he retired or died.
I was trying to maintain my equilibrium in the doorway when Lou got over to me and handed me five dollars.
“Go around the corner; get some coffee for the guys. It’s on me.”
“Lou, I’m dying here. Nicky didn’t go? Where is he?”
“Shades didn’t even have money for gas this morning. Anyway, he went to King’s Plaza. He won’t be back for an hour. C’mon Mikey, before we get busy.”
Mornings, Nicky was broke about half the time. The way you could tell was that if he had money in his pocket, nobody else could buy breakfast. Coffee, rolls, even an egg sandwich; whatever anybody wanted, Nicky had to pick up the tab. It got annoying but it was just the way he was. “Nigger rich,” Little Joey called it. Joey managed to come up with an anti-black sentiment to cover just about every character flaw known to man. I got a big kick out of him pacing the store, pulling on his dick, and spitting in the corners, all the while lecturing me about what a bunch of animals spades were.
Four drivers were playing brisk at the card table in the back. Fat Sal was partnered with Danny, a born-again Christian who only drove seasonally when he was laid off from his job at an air-conditioning place. They fought so loudly that sometimes I thought they had to be playing different games.
“Leash, you cocksucker, leash! You unnerstan’ English? LEASH!”
“I got no leash. You take a load or I throw trump.”
“Big trump?”
“Enormous.”
“Throw the load.”
Danny threw the load and it was picked up immediately by the other team.
“Your mother’s cunt,” Sal said, and threw in his hand.
“You said throw the load.”
“That’s cause you got no goddamn leash, you useless fuck.”
Sal laboriously stood and paid off the other team. Anybody who played partners with Danny paid off double if they lost because he didn’t gamble. If you won, you won double, but I didn’t see where the incentive was for Danny to put his heart into the game. He didn’t drink either. He was probably allowed to screw his wife, as long as he didn’t enjoy it.
I took the coffee orders and left. When I got back the calls were coming in. I dropped off the coffees, took mine with me, and went to work.
By early afternoon I felt almost human. The calls had slowed to a nice steady pace with about a half hour between each run. I was resting with my eyes closed, listening to Danny preach loudly at Sal.
“God’s not gonna care that you had a heart attack behind the wheel in the Battery Tunnel. He’s not gonna care that you couldn’t get to confession in time.”
The phone rang. “Car service,” Lou barked, before he had the thing halfway to his mouth.
“He’s not gonna care that you meant to straighten out; that you didn’t know you were gonna die.”
Lou hung up. “Mike,” he said, “that was Shades. He’s stuck in Sheepshead Bay. Emmons Avenue just off the belt. He wants you to give him a boost.”
I knew that would kill the rest of the afternoon. I paid Lou my commission and put my jacket on.
“When you die, all that counts is the state of grace you’re in right then.”
I walked out and turned to pull the door closed behind me.
“You see, when you die... when you die...”
“When you die,” Sal screamed suddenly, leaning into Danny’s face, “God says Fuck You.”
Shades was sitting in his car reading an old TV Guide when I arrived. I pulled a U-turn and parked nose-to-nose with him for the boost. It wouldn’t take at first, so we left the wires hooked-up and let it charge for a while. Finally it turned over.
“All right,” I said, letting my hood drop. “I’ll follow you back in case it goes dead again.”
“I don’t want to take it through the street. I’m gonna run it back and forth on the highway a few times to let it take a charge.”
“What am I gonna do? Follow you?”
“Come with me. Leave your car here. I’m not gonna stall out on the highway, man.”
We ran Nicky’s car up and down from Sheepshead Bay to Starrett City about six times, then rode back to where my car was parked. Nicky killed the engine and started it three or four times just to make sure. Having done all those important, intelligent things, we left both cars there and went to Joe’s Clam Bar for dinner and a few beers.
We both had salmon, and an order of raw little necks as an appetizer. Nicky had a shot of Johnny Walker, but I stuck with beer until some real food arrived. My father had told me years earlier that hard liquor caused raw clams to congeal and harden in your stomach. I didn’t know if it was true or not—or even why that would be a bad thing—but the image was disgusting enough to keep me clear of the combination.
“Cutting back?” Nicky asked.
“Just till I get something solid in me.” I was too embarrassed to mention my father’s clam theory.
“Lou say anything about my commissions?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He says don’t worry about it. You can even up when you see him. And he said the last one is on the house, because you broke down.”
“No shit?” Nicky brightened visibly. “I guess that’s another round on me. Lou is all right. Too bad his brother’s such a scumbag.”
“Tony?” I was a little surprised. “I didn’t know you didn’t like Tony.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said he’s a scumbag,” he said evenly.
“He seems all right to me.”
“Yeah, he’s a fuckin’ prince. You weren’t too thrilled he took the television from that poor fuck with the kids.”
“That’s collecting,” I said, suddenly sounding to myself like my father. “It’s just the nature of the game.”
“Then the nature of the game,” Nicky said, shrugging, “is being a scumbag.” He popped a sauce-drenched clam into his mouth.
While I thought that one over, the waitress arrived and set our dinners down. If taking that television made Tony a scumbag, just what did it make us? It was the first job I’d ever been asked to do for Tony, and as far as I knew, the first for Nicky as well.
We’d been approached by Lou to pick up the set from a guy down the block who owed money. I never found out if it had been a gambling debt or a loan, but given the gentleman in question it could easily have been either. Lou came to us with the same solemn look and tone of voice he used for anything more important than sending out for coffee, and asked if we could do Tony a favor. He explained that this poor guy was out of work and had made an offer, and that Tony was generously accepting the TV as payment.
Nicky agreed immediately and I agreed more or less because he did. We took his car that afternoon and drove down to the address on the corner that Lou had given us. I rang the bell and we were buzzed into the hall. We walked up two flights, and an apartment door was opened by a dark-haired woman who looked like she’d been frozen in time around 1964.
“We’re here...” I started.
“For the TV. I know,” she said.
She spun around and walked back into the dark apartment, a blur of beehive hair and cigarette smoke, and left us standing in the open doorway. Nicky shrugged at me and we followed her down the long hallway. She walked into the kitchen, which was a mess, and we were at her heels before we realized it.
“Not here,” she said, annoyed. “They’re in there.” She gestured through the doorway, though not in any specific direction. We went back into the hall and stopped for a second to get our bearings.
“This is a little fucking weird,” Nicky whispered. “We shoulda brought miner’s hats.”
All the rooms were off the main hall, and there was only one, farther than the kitchen, with an open door. It didn’t seem any more promising than the rest of the gloomy place, but we walked in anyway and we found the TV. It was on, and there were two little kids sitting on the floor watching a Scooby-Doo cartoon with the sound off. Behind them on a sofa was the guy who owed Tony. He was snoring and he reeked of booze. The shades were drawn and the room was bathed in that bluish television light. One of the kids, the girl, was obviously retarded. She stared directly at me with her mouth open, a strand of drool from her lower lip trailing into her lap. The boy never took his eyes from the set.
I wanted to take Nicky and get out of there, but he seemed resolved to do the job. Actually, he looked furious.
“This is it, right? This must be it,” he said loudly.
I didn’t know if he intended to scare the kids but he certainly scared me. The guy on the couch woke up for a few seconds and sort of mumbled at us.
“S’good,” he said. “Tellim s’good; good picture.” He gurgled a bit, then went back out. I looked at the picture. It was a new-enough set to be color but it was showing only black and white, and one antenna was broken off halfway up.
“C’mon,” Nicky said. He almost jumped over me to get in front of the set, then picked it up by himself while it was still on and took a couple of steps. “C’mon. Get the cord. Let’s go.”
I walked over, past him and the kids, to the outlet near the floor. I unplugged the set and Nicky went out the door like a shot. I watched the cord drag along in front of the kids and snake slowly through the doorway; then I was alone in there with them and it was even darker than before. The girl still looked at me and the boy continued to stare at the spot where the television had been. I walked around behind them and followed Nicky out of the apartment, leaving the door open. He was almost running and I thought he’d trip over the plug, but he made it down the stairs. I got in front of him and held the hallway doors. We stowed the set on the backseat. When Nicky was starting the car I tried to talk to him.
“This is fucked-up. How can we do this?”
He looked at me, and for a second I thought he was going to swing at me. “What?” he screamed. “What? Forget about it, okay? Just fuckin’ forget all about it.”
I didn’t forget about it, but I was smart enough not to press the issue. I’d never seen Nicky so enraged.
When we got back to the store he brought the TV in and Lou placed two twenty-dollar bills on the desk. Shades took one, and when I made no move, he took the other. He never offered it to me and I never asked for it, but I knew it found its way onto bars where he was paying and I was drinking, so wasn’t it the same thing? Two days later I saw the television sitting on the trash outside Tony’s club.
A day hasn’t passed since then that I haven’t thought about that cord going out the door, and how, for just a few seconds, I was part of the group in the room watching as it happened.
We finished our dinner in silence, and when we were done Nicky ordered another scotch. Bolstered by the food, I switched over to Jack Daniel’s. The place was almost empty and we weren’t holding anyone up, so we sat for a while and ordered a few more rounds.
“What set you off that day with the TV?” I asked.
Nicky shrugged and let out a small chuckle. “I don’t know, man,” he said, signaling the waitress to bring another round. “You were pretty upset too.”
“I was upset, but you were nuts.”
“Yeah, well, it’s just that—you know—what are you gonna do? You gonna take those kids and adopt them? Cause otherwise you gotta forget it. We can’t do one fuckin’ thing that’ll make a bit of difference.”
The new round arrived and Nicky tossed his down. I sipped mine.
“I can’t even go fishing anymore,” he said quietly. “I used to love to fish with my old man. But it’s been too long now; it’s no good. I tried again last year with him out here,” he said, gesturing out the window at the bay. “It made me sick. Fish suffocating, dying, taking hours to go. All over the boat. I couldn’t look at anything else.
“It’s bad to see too much. It ruins things for you.”
We left Sheepshead Bay after dark and wound up in Coney Island. There’s a bar in the B.M.T. station at Stillwell Avenue. Coney Island is the end of the line for a lot of trains and a lot of people, so the crowd was pretty strange. Actually, it reminded me of the bar in Star Wars. It was a good place to drink for a long time without spending much money, which was what we did. A group of pimps were playing joker poker on a TV screen suspended over the bar. They were passing the remote back and forth and alternately cheering or cursing in impressively flowery language. Every few minutes a whore walked in, bored or tired, and pestered them. They’d either yell and chase her right out, or set her up with a drink first. By the time we left some of their girls were looking pretty good.
I tried to talk Nicky into going to the house my father used, but he was reluctant. He had some coke, so we did it up, and soon I was drunk and wired and horny. We stopped at the light on West Fifteenth and Mermaid, and I swear I saw the most beautiful girl who ever walked the streets in Brooklyn. From across the intersection she was a double for Whitney Houston. I was hanging out the window, screaming. She smiled and waved but Nicky kept going. I started to protest, then realized that he was even further gone than I. He hung a left on Neptune and another on West Seventeenth and circled back. Coming down Seventeenth between Mermaid and Surf, Shades decided it was time to test the car’s maneuverability, and turned the street into an Olympic slalom. He weaved in and out around parking meters, jumping the curb repeatedly and scrambling my already-punished brain. We turned back onto West Fifteenth, and my dream girl was now in front of Dempsey’s Crown Bar. She sauntered over to my side of the car. I smiled up at her and only slowly realized that I was looking at a monster. From across the intersection at night she was a doll. Up close she was meant to be seen from across the intersection at night. I shrieked and rolled up my window. Nicky drove away and we left her standing at the curb cursing us.
“No more stunt driving,” I told Nicky. “We’re both too fucked-up. Pull over by the bodega on Sixteenth. I’ll get us a six-pack and we can drink it driving home. I think it’s time to call it a night.”
He managed to get the car something like parked in a spot on the corner. I abandoned any notion of retrieving my vehicle that night, and was calculating the number of tickets it would collect by the time I was mobile the next day. Shades bought the Schaefer—he was paying for everything again—and we went back to the car. It had been my intention to drive, but I was pretty fuzzy, and Nicky got behind the wheel before I realized it. A station wagon pulled up behind us just as the engine turned over. Nicky put the car in reverse and accelerated into it so hard that his sunglasses were thrown off from the impact. I didn’t know what was more shocking, the crash or seeing Nicky’s naked eyes. I wanted to cover them. Even in the darkness of the car the whites glowed a sickly junk-yellow, like old newspapers. I leaned over into the back to find his glasses, and through the rear window I saw the largest black man on the planet getting out of the station wagon.
“Nicky, put it in gear. Drive. DRIVE! Get us the fuck outta here. This guy’s gonna kill us.”
Shades put the car in drive and floored it. We surged forward, ripping the bumper off the station wagon, traveled about ten feet, and stopped. The engine died. The black guy was approaching Nicky’s door.
Shades looked at me, shrugged, and got out. I reached under the seat and felt ashamed as my hand closed around Nicky’s tire iron. I opened the door and stood up. We were a hundred percent wrong, but this guy was going to get hurt before either of us.
“I hope you got about five hundred dollahs,” he bellowed. “I hope you got it in cash in your pockets right now or I’ma take it out your white ass.”
“Listen,” Nicky said calmly. “I got no money. My friend’s got no money. We fucked up. We shouldna tried to take off. Now, we can roll around on the ground and get all messed up, or we can split the cold six I got on the front seat and forget the whole thing. Whaddaya say?”
“Okay,” he said, so quickly that I had to look back and forth from him to Shades a few times to make sure I’d heard correctly.
I was standing half behind the rear passenger side of the car, keeping the tire iron out of sight. I was suddenly aware that I’d been holding my breath, and allowed myself to exhale while Nicky got the beer off the front seat.
The behemoth turned to me. “You can put the crowbar away now; no point in any of us gettin’ hurt.”
“Glad you feel that way,” I said, trying to sound casual. My pulse was racing and my hand shook when I tossed the tire iron into the car through my open window. I walked back to find Nicky and the giant sitting on his mangled hood drinking beer.
“Mike, this is Leonard. Leonard’s decided not to kill us. We’re gonna have a few beers and be good friends and all go home.”
“Swell,” I said, breaking a beer loose from the pack. Leonard still had the piss scared out of me and I wasn’t at all happy about having put down the tire iron. We each drank two beers and made some meaningless drunk conversation with one another, and when I finally thought we might leave alive, Nicky insisted on going back into the bodega for another six. At that point I decided that if Leonard didn’t kill him, I would.
When he came out, I noticed for the first time how really unsteady on his feet Shades was. For a moment I didn’t think he’d make it all the way over to us.
“You better not let your frien’ drive home,” Leonard said. It occurred to me that maybe he really didn’t intend to tear our heads off.
“You all right?” I asked Nicky. “Why don’t you lie down in the car. I’ll drive home in a couple of minutes.”
“I’m all right. I’m fine.” He broke a can off the new six and dropped it while handing it to me. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m really sorry. I thought I had it—you know—under control.”
“It’s okay; don’t worry. I had too much already anyway.” I handed Leonard the rest of the beer. “I think I better get him home, Leonard. I’m sorry about what happened here.”
“Sonny,” he said, “tomorrow if I see you or your frien’ you’re jus’ two more assholes and I’m the nigger’s gonna cut your throat. Tonight, though—tonight we’re frien’s.”
His eyes were red-rimmed and the pupils were the size of pinheads. He held out a hand Fay Wray could have slept in. I shook it and felt like I’d put my fingers in the space between two bricks in a wall. Whatever universe Leonard was visiting, I was happy that it made him a peaceful beast. I was also happy that we wouldn’t be there when he returned from the trip. I took the keys from Nicky and Leonard deposited him in the passenger seat. He pulled his car perpendicular to ours, completely blocking Mermaid Avenue, and gave us a boost. I was able to locate Drive on the first try, and we were off.
Shades passed out within five minutes and I damn near followed suit. It was one of the roughest times I’ve ever had driving home. I parked halfway down the block from Nicky’s building and tried to roust him, but he was dead to the world. I walked around the car and opened his door from the outside. He tumbled out onto the sidewalk and hit his head on the curb, giving himself a nasty gash right over the bridge of his nose. That sort of brought him around.
“Jesus, Nicky, help me out a little,” I said, trying to hoist him up from under the arms. He was mumbling and he’d started to cry.
“You shoulda left me back with that big jig, man. You shoulda left me to die.”
“You don’t want to die. Sal says when you die, God says fuck you.”
Nicky was still crying when I got him to his building. I dragged him up too many steps and had his keys out when his girlfriend, Louise, opened the door. I was very shot, and I’d had all the surprises I felt I could handle, so seeing Louise pregnant nearly pushed me over the edge. Nicky hadn’t said a word about it in the months we’d been hanging out.
She helped me walk him to the bedroom and sit him on the bed. Louise was from Colombia, and looked to me like an American Indian. Her sharp, angular features, which had always appeared stern, seemed even more so in contrast to her rounded belly. She didn’t say anything to either one of us. I stood there while she wet a washcloth and went over his most obvious abrasions. She usually seemed to be about to scold Nicky, but now she looked more sad and tired, which only made me feel awful.
There wasn’t anything else I could do, and the booze and exertion were taking their toll. I had a four-block walk ahead and I knew I wasn’t up to it, but I wouldn’t crash there. I didn’t want to see Nicky licking his wounds and Louise being self-righteous first thing in the morning. I tried to sneak out while Louise was in the bathroom rinsing the washcloth, but Shades reached out and caught my arm as I turned. He had stopped crying and was just sitting, zombielike. I had thought he was out again. He pulled me very close—uncomfortably close—to those naked, sunken eyes.
“You know what?” he whispered conspiratorially into my ear. “God already told me fuck you.”
The room started to spin and I yanked my arm free and ran out.