11 Jan

I'm befuddled but talked to Lindsay...those umpire idiots can laugh and chortle over the e from Roy but I'm gonna put it in my book.

Mystery:

well, it was Our Father...who bit the dust a lil over a yr. ago. I revealed this discovery. Some sleuthing. How the McGi...well Steve had a take..but it was so vague.

Dylan was taken aback, echoing the gals, his insult of not reply.

we go forward:


well, I can't use the little floppy so I have to go with what is saved:

Portrait!

Daily Bible Verse
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.John 3:16 (NKJV)



# Manuscripts must be submitted between April 1 and May 31. (Postmark should be no later than May 31.)
# Send manuscripts to:
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
The University of Georgia Press
330 Research Drive
Athens GA 30602-4901
n order to be considered in the competition, each submission must include the following items:
1. $20 submission fee.
2. One self-addressed stamped postcard for acknowledgment of receipt of materials.
3. One self-addressed stamped envelope for notification of contest results
A Portrait of the Artist as a Dumb Man
By Ron Hartnett
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….
From James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Dumb Man
Chapter 1 Skywalker
It’s just one of those things that just jumps out at you. I was pretty content to put a few pieces here n there over the years about NYC: just a drop of tear here, a drop of blood there.
How much blood have you spilled out on the iron?
And therein lies the rub.
Like Jeremy’s letter that gave me the impetus to finis bk first, a somewhat laboring account of what many would call post-injury job market, I leaf through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stuck in the book, that rests between applications and envelopes and want ads and large manila folders, is a 20-year-old pay stub from Club El Morocco. After a move to the Big Apple, I remember how it was first job in the city—busing tables at a fancy Upper East side restaurant. I continue to pick my way through the flotsam that is the Big O job market—which resume should I present? And then how should I presume?
My own Portrait account, somewhere buried, maybe lost for good, I began writing when I invariably if inevitably followed in my father’s footsteps: a short stint in Sioux City, a move back to the farm. Of course, Mom had had a baby in Sioux City, so it was swaddling clothes in some down-at-the-mouth apartment. Then, I don’t know how old I was, a few months, perhaps, and Jim and Jack packed off to the farm. Mom always mentions how she swept oats from off the living room floor.
Did she not hear the train rumbling by? Did she not go to the window and watch its huge black magnificence turn and churn against the wind so long and loud as to take your breath away? Then, so big and expansive, the farm house, the thickly graveled road before her, the train from out of the hills and through the trees but a good stone’s throw from the farm house.
No, my sojourn back to the small farm town and the green house on the corner was not nearly so romantic or homespun, like a cloth that could be weaved into a fabric that could be worn for generations. Instead, it was colored by this marriage #2. I moved back into the house I not only grew up in—a haunting remembrance of things past—but where I’d lived during marriage #1.
Mom, meanwhile, oats in their proper place (in the near by lean-to by the barn), learned how to raise chickens and drive a tractor. However, she could handle the farm only so long, sun bathing on the wood roof of the storm cellar while Dad was on construction with the one-armed hired man driving the tractor around the farm. It made her nervous. She started hearing things at night. One night, she thought someone was trying to break in and called Grandpa and I remember squeezed into the catbird seat and smell the fragrance of D.L’s cigar filling the cab in the middle of a the night. Bill Russell never made an advance nor did any of the hired men that worked and walked the farm but sure enough I do remember watching him seated on the old F-20 Farmall, pulling a wagon of whatchamacallit up or down the farm lane--his coveralls, cap, whisker stubble.
I remember the day running water was brought into the farm house and Russell was workin’ on the pump. “Go tell your mama she wants ya,” he said.
So we moved to town proper when I was six, to the house on the corner. Dad’s brother Paul, who had been the Superintendent of Hubbard schools—the Hubbard Warriors wearing their colors tried and true—moved onto an administrative position in some other Godforsaken miserable preening small Nebraska town, dust rising up from the gravel, tickling your nose. Jim and Jack moved into a vacated two-story house on the corner where they’d stay for awhile: ten years and five kids later they moved into the house built on a section of land on the outside of town Grandpa owned. Below lay a small field where I remember picking up quite a few heavy bales of alfalfa, the little field always out producing itself.
But this was the house Kath and I moved into. It was in decline, years later, even though it looked pretty much the same from the outside. Grandpa had a door for one of the upstairs windows; thick cardboard covered one of the windows downstairs.
Kath, an ole farm gal herself, wasted no time in sweeping and cleaning. Although there were no oats to sweep out, it was more than made up for by bird and animal droppings, a kitchen floor that bubbled up and squeaked.
Nor were there traces of my young life there or first married life there, even though a dark paneling still covered a good share of the downstairs, put up the same time as the green siding that adorned the outside.
Yes, it was the green house on the corner first wife Kerry and son Jeremy and I had moved into from the hotel that stood proudly, almost majestically, on the town of Hubbard’s main street. When it acquired the name “Heartbreak Hotel,” I’ll never know but to this day, that’s how people remember it.
At any rate, the hotel rooms that had been converted to apartments—owned by Grandpa, rented by others—proved too small for our young family.
The green house, meanwhile, had followed its usual demeanor. It’d booted out the most recent tenants—maybe a couple from the city, maybe a small family, maybe a single mom with kids and a main squeeze, maybe an itinerant, tenant farmer. Just in town for a spell, for a planting or a harvest. “Not too shabby” they’d say over a beer at the Cottonwood bar, watchin’ a game of pool. “Not too shabby, doin’ pretty good at the lumber mill” and move on. Thus, the green house had stood silent and vacant for a few months, maybe not pretty enough to be made into a lasting abode. Just passin’ through, a stopping point for one to read the contrary currents of the muddy, channeled, whirl pooled Missouri River just down the road a spell.
I frankly don’t remember a whit about how much Kerry—a city girl like Mom—swept or cleaned or looked for the train rumbling out of the hills or how we even moved there—by pickup or borrowed Dad’s cattle truck. But I do remember that first fall in the green house on the corner a pix of me and a birthday cake; I was drivin’ up north of Sioux City everyday, CMI operator for Irving F. Jensen, smoothing out the shoulders of the highway that ran straight north of town to LeMars. James Jeremy was on my lap, the back door open so you got a final glimpse of the sun setting behind the tall hill that that rose like an audience behind a dull gray Quonset hut and a few metal corn bins that faced each other like soldiers in rectangle formation. And years before that, when the hill was a deep green alfalfa field, Denny Hale throwin’ bales of hay 5 tiers high, 3rd cuttin’ of alfalfa, shot and killed by his best friend Jerry huntin’ coon that fall.
But with Kerry and Jeremy I was again sequestered: I wanted to move out as fast as possible. My second time, as it were, in the green house on the corner of time, sleeping in the same bedroom my parents had slept in, lugging a typewriter upstairs to the same bedroom I’d slept in, shared with two younger brothers, sisters on the other side of the stairway in their little rooms.
I remember how, during the warm summer nights, you had the windows open and you could hear the thump of the self-feeders as feeder pigs in the barn behind Grandpa’s house would eat through the night. They raised the lid with their snouts. They packed their mouths full of ground feed then backed away, little pieces of corn spilling onto the dirt in the night. Many nights I went to sleep with the occasional light slap of tin against tin.
And, when I thought about it, the creepy sensation never left, that I was walking in all kinds of footsteps, that I was being called upon to perform some Herculean deed, some noble feat.
The green house on the corner, however, booted me out family not intact.
Now, with Kath, I walked the same footsteps for the third time. Now sobered up, the dizzying elixir of youth gone with the pigs, I again returned to my old bedroom, now the office where I never slept a wink but now plowed through graduate studies, poems and verses long gone, the stuffy sense of responsibility: a child was born, then another.
Couple years later, the green house kicked us out, family intact, third time bein’ a charm.
So Kath and I moved to Grandpa’s house, sans oats, sans heavy labor. Yes, I took those same footsteps from years past—a small town by-product—
run a few houses down to Grandma Pearl and help her get the chickens in or help with the garden. Sometimes, when Ma went with Pa on a construction project, paving a street in some Godforsaken preening Iowa town so the dust would stop from rising up and tickle you nose, we’d stay a few days at Dan and Pearl’s.
And then my office was where we’d stayed years before and years before that Dad said he used to sleep. This didn’t haunt me that much but I remember starting to write a story entitled “A Portrait of the Artist as A Dumb Man.”
I did come across it. It was not the gold I’d hoped to find.
The 750 Norton was good to me that day, firing on the 3rd kick. I was rollin’ on out to the Powerhouse that day and since it started quick I’d maybe be able to meet Tom Steven’s bus that met out in front of the El Charmino..
Things were lookin’ particulary good that day. It’s true the wife was in split city and had taken the kid but wasn’t she startin’ to slowly but surely coming around? The visits weren’t quite as shortened as me and the boy were getting used to these somewhat truncated visits, he’d sit maybe on my lap again.
These thoughts I usually had right before the longest day of the year as sure it was a day where the sun was apt to stay out and you could party. The weekend was only 5 days away and already I thought how wonderful it would be to maybe have a couple kegs of beer and get the band Dirty Duck to come on out.
Kerry’d been at the last Dirty Duck living room concert and tho’ the exchange of glances were remarkable only in their brevity, her friend in arms that worked on the assembly line with her at Zenith had pulled me into the bedroom and made something of a formal if somewhat terse announcement.
“You know, Ronnie, Kerry still loves you,” the girl said, staring intently at me.
“She does?” It was news to me. Yes, I’d been playing the successful hardworking ironworker role to the hilt. I was back to work at the Powerhouse, shakin’ out iron in the yard. After work, I’d show up at the doorstep, offering to take 3-yr.-old Jeremy any place to wanted to go.
So what else was new? Life so full of surprises. I had ole Mert Shep label me vegetable. I couldn’t even recall names of my younger sisters and brother Joe was always quizzing me on names of stuff, what the therapist told him to do.
“We gotta go hook up to that thing on the hill.”
“What thing?” Joe said.
“You know, that thing up on the hill.” It was a lazy August afternoon. Me and Joe were fixin’ fence.
“You know, that green thing.”
“What do they call it,” Joe said, steering the tractor onto the gravel road.
I thought for a minute.
“Manure spreader.”
“Right, that’s right. We gotta hook it up.”
But by the end of November Kerry and Jeremy were gone. I was vibrous and foaming at the mouth.
“Git her back, git her back.”
The tractor leaned up over the fields. I turned to see the chisel plow knifing through the soil.
“I dunno,” his dad said. “It gets kinda hot.”
It was the 4630 John Deer we’d bought used a few months ago.
“I don’t think they put a big enough of a cooling system in ‘er to cool down.”
Sure enough, I only pulled the tractor over the soybean stubble a few trips across the field before I saw the dial approaching the red zone.
“You’ll just have to park it and let it cool down, I guess.”
Foaming and frothing at the mouth.” Git ‘er back, get ‘er back.”
‘I’m heartily sorry for having offended thee.’
There was contrition, confession, absolution.
“I don’t know, Ronnie, we’ll just have to see.”
I wasn’t used to stoppin’ the tractor in the middle of the field in the middle of the day no how.
Mert, who now lived with Bert on the house just down from the alfalfa field, had been so unkind. Kerry was at the house already, tryin’ to clean it up.
I was just beginning to remember the names of my sisters in order, without failure. The second grade reading book Marlene’d given me.
“Hey, Mert, how’re you doin’?” I was headed down to the house to see how Kerry was getting’ along.
Mert moved quickly. He’d pushed the small mower almost madly up the top of the ditch and shut if off. Mert just bought a new pick-up and was mowing the grass around it.
“Well, hello, Ron, how’re you doin’?”
“Good.”
I hadn’t seen Mert since I fell. I always liked to see Mert, who looked a little bit like Johnny Cash, if was just to listen to him. Mert had this Midwestern twang I usually felt annoying but Mert had a deeper voice so it was a deep twang with resonance.
“That ole boy,” he’d always say and then talk about iron work in Wyoming.
Mert reached in his sweaty shirt pocket and pulled outta white filter cigarette.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Mert said, blocking the small gust of wind with his back and bending down to light the cigarette with the pack of matches he had in his pocket.. “They all thought you’d be a vegetable.”
Mert surprised the heck out of me. I’d a little bit of trouble coming down the hill and cutting through the old alfalfa field that was now a where a split level house stood but didn’t know I looked that bad.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
I hated bein’ called a vegetable.
“What the hell you been doin’, I ain’t seen ya around.”
“Oh, I been up with my folks. Kerry’s gettin’ the house ready again.”
“Oh, is she?”
“Yeah.” I tried to lighten the load a little. “It’s been awhile.”
“Yes it sure has.”
“Well, I better git this mowin’ done,” Mert said. “You take care now.”
“All right.”
I remembered a couple days later Joe Hayes, a farmer with a couple kids whose farm was just up the road a ways from the old farmhouse,, drove by in his old green Chevy pick up. He waved. I was running around the block. It was late August. It was hot. I was out of the hospital. It’s what I did before the accident to get in shape to paddle down river on a raft with Allan Graffis, beating any and all contestants from the Yankton Dam to the Combination Bridge to bridge and win the Grand Prize, some items from the local merchants, a $1,000..
It was the first time I ran after getting home.
Before the accident, I’d run with my collie Miranda up through the hills behind the house. This time, bein’ gone in the hospital for almost two months, the pretty dog didn’t really care to run with me. She just looked up and barked excitedly. She didn’t want to run along.
Now, Miranda was more into chasing cars, getting’ in with the pack of town dogs that ran after cars, the fascination of barking at a moving tire hub.
It must’ve been a new game for her because a couple days later she got run over.
It wasn’t love, Mom said, just goin’ after something he couldn’t have.
Nah, my portrait wasn’t what I’d hoped; the few pages were just some insufferable account of the accident, some musings, some wanderings about what it was like just after the accident, just before Kerry’d left, just after she’d left, my desperate attempts to have her and Jeremy return, you know, to the green house on the corner of the small town, almost tucked as an after thought between a small breasts of hills, the small farm town that lived and breathed between the fields of corn and soybeans and pasture, year in year out.
Maybe the only redeeming merit is that this was the start of a
book I began to write years later, far away from the farm, far away from the Powerhouse. The only other good thing is that, I guess it was something I’d been meanin’ to do but couldn’t get around to.
Then I finally did get around to it, an old ironworker’s comment made me get my dead butt off the ground, stop mewing about the goddamn teacher bullshit, that I couldn’t teach to save my soul. Then a title. Calling it “Fall from the Sky,” well, that’s a tad grandiose. However, it’s a nice ring. But I mean, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a title for pages strung together like rebar on a bridge deck. “School Teacher/Summer Ironworker” best I could come up with. But that sounded like a short story I assigned at the acute care facility, i.e., “The Summer of My German Soldier.” So I was never comfortable with it.
The “The Guy That Fell from the Sky” phrase I owe to the guy that used to run WIMR (Western Iowa Men’s Residence), Phil Spain. He was a hard-fisted, straight-shooting, old tough guy that used to bartend or bounce at the Skyline, one of those S.D. swill joints with 3.2 beer. I was walkin’ into Boston Market, hadn’t seen Phil for better ‘n a month of Sundays and he goes, “There’s the guy that fell from the sky.” I’d just about finished the book, and I was looking for a title. Thence it came.
I had no idea Phil even knew anything about the accident. It’s funny what people remember. But then, I remember Jerry Sullivan, who was runnin’ the Sul-Nel Co., when I got sent out on a job at the Farmland Packing house that he was runnin’, almost pointing at me, talkin’ to another hand. The ironworker said to me, little later, looking at me with curiosity, “heard you went flyin’.”
“Yeah,” I said, tryin’ to remain detached, indifferent. Walking miracle, walking wounded, walking mediocre, what’re you ‘sposed to say, how’re you ‘sposed to act? “That was me.”
I guess the first question they always ask on a job, after they get over the fact that I’m driving a rice grinder (Nissan) pickup (it helps greatly to be sporting the American made logo, i.e. Dodge, Chevy, Ford, etc.) is, “Can you weld?”
My answer is always the same. “No.” Like the doctoral program, I guess it’s one of those things I’ll be getting to one of these days. Well, actually, I did try to get in the doctoral program but my scores on the GRE were so abysmal I was not accepted.
I took it again but my scores were lower the second time. I said the professor in charge of admission to the doctoral program, “Maybe it’s because I had a head injury.” I just threw this as an off-handed comment. Only a couple years later did I realize that yes, some deficiencies show up, will always show up.
But then at this packin’ house job (ironworkers were adding on a section so more cattle could be run through. A huge section of thick prefab, about two stories high, was swung over by the SulNel crane and attached to the building, forming an outside wall. Inside, you could peak through a crack in the existing wall and there’d be men and women dressed in white smocks, many wearing hair nets, standing attentively over a shinny conveyor belt of red meat with long knives in their hands, some with botches of red on their shirt, on their smock. In a couple weeks, they’d all step back and repeat the process.) I remember was quite a jaunt down the road I’ll be goddamned go to hell if out of nowhere they didn’t start talkin’ about Joe Reed’s funeral, the iron worker who went flyin’ 300 feet building a smokestack in Detroit with a wooden plank in his hands. I remember I was sitting on an old plank that was on a couple concrete blocks, coffee break. And just outta nowhere they started talkin’ about Joe Reed’s funeral, how cold it was, Local 184 BA Jim Cahill one of the pall bearesr and a couple other of them were there and I remember this one iron worker sayin’ how he “just had my jacket on.”
It was just like yesterday.
“Man, that was a cold sumbitch,” the ironworker said, rubbing his hands, pouring some steaming coffee out of his thermos.
Now, Joe Reed, he went down 40 stories. He’s the one that fell from the sky.
Did I think I’d write a book? Well, no, not really. But, as I moved down the road, headin’ for work, I couldn’t help but look over miles of corn, soybean, and alfalfa fields and see the Powerhouse (official title Port Neal Station #3). Its smokestack, on the other side of the Missouri, punched out white fumes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, heating Siouxland homes and businesses in the winter, cooling same in the summer. A white light blinks near the smokestack’s very top, every three seconds, day in day, day out, a great eye in the sky watching over Siouxland.
That’s where I fell, I’d think, zipping my bike down the road, that’s where I fell.
I know this is jumpin’ around a bit. What I mean is, I was zipping northeast bound on my Honda Nighthawk and, every morning, I could look straight across miles of cornfields that jumped over the Missouri and see the Unit 3 Power House.
They only built one more Powerhouse after I fell and then the ironworkers had to drag up and boom in somewhere else.
That’s why they’re called boomers. That’s why, even yesterday, I asked an ironworker named Roger, who works for Davis Erection and is but a year or so away from retirement, were there many boomers in town. He thought there a few, many more will be needed when they start building what I hear is a 75 megawatt powerhouse on Lake Manawah.
That was the license plate of Local 21 Iron Worker Jerry Parish, my pusher at OPPD—BOOMER.
At any rate, it became a recurring theme, this struggle to come to grips and grasps with the accident and all. Why I went to NYC in the first place, why I went to school out east, why I put away my ironworker tools for what turned out to be 15 years and donned bus boy garb and drop a token in the turnstile and funnel myself to work.
Another time when I’d occasionally look over at the powerhouse in the far distance? Oh yeah, when I’d come back from NYC to work on the farm. I’d get sent down to the Eighty and Forty—one of the first fields we planted—and disc up the stubble as soon as the frost was out of the ground. It was two cornfields on flat ground, halfway, pert near, twixt Hubbard and Jackson Dad and Uncle Paul owned. From there, I’d have a direct line view when I had the tractor pointed east. There was the Powerhouse, not 10 miles away, doing its Powerhouse thing.
I could pick out the smoke stack, the steady blinking light. I remembered first day on the job: we were only 30 or so feet above the ground and I had to walk across this 6 inch beam to a cross section or something and I remember how scared I was, thinking what if I fell. But I thought how I walked on top of the cattle yard fence line. Heck that was a 2 x 4 so why not give the iron a try? So I did it, walked across and then after no problem walking the iron. It became so e3asy, in fact, that it was almost funny and I told ole Junior Hughes how I wanted to be a connector, ride up the iron with the crane then climb off and hook the iron, a real top dog.
Nearby, the first week or so, two stories up, I looked over at the steady rising circle that was to be the Powerhouse smokestack. I saw a couple ironworkers climbin’ on up, rebar goin’ higher and higher, Joe Reed and a couple other ironworkers moving upward in a spiral. One time they were just a few feet below us, the next thing you knew, they were a few feet above, climbing ever higher. Joe Reed did smokestacks. It was his specialty.
I didn’t think much about it then, those summer days away from NYC. The Powerhouse generally or accident specifically. I did, however, think a lot about what I guess you could call after accident, think a lot about Jeremy and would make calls from home to maybe send Jeremy back and he could stay with the folks and I for awhile, a couple weeks. But no, this was never permitted: the pretty blue-eyed gal with hair to her shoulders had made up her mind that the separation would stay like a winding river that separated two points, two states.
Now a NYer, I was just this young punk Joe College kid who liked to party and all, workin’ my way through college, get away from NYC for few weeks and work on the farm. It was then I’d have a good shot at it lookin’ at it all day. But, like I said, it didn’t matter to me that much. I just thought how much I wanted Jeremy to be out on the tractor with me, pullin’ the 4620 John Deere through the field, the green protruding from Nebraska soil now and forever.
This nature theme was replaced when I got to the acute care facility a few years later. Booted outta NYC, carrying pretty much the same bag of clothes with which I’d entered eight years before, I came back home for good. Eventually, I started using my degree. See, now I was a teacher. I’d poured enough credits in me to qualify for a certification and, bein’s I came out of NYC pretty juiced up and all, Sister Judith Meyers took me under her wing of the hospital so to speak, when I was dryin’ up.
She thought it quite nice when I said to her, “Don’t trip on the cord.”
I was vacuuming the back wing on the fifth floor, part of the routine of the 30-day inpatient program. An assignment or something for our temporary home, everybody had his or her chores to do.
Sr. Judith stopped and looked at me. She asked me to say the first three steps of the AA’s 12-step program. I, of course, still in some sorta cloud, could only come up with the first two.
You know, “God grant me the serenity,” etc.
Sr. Judith put it to me to have the first three learned when she came by the next day.
Of course, I was ready. Then she got to know me a little better. That I was a teacher from NYC, had taught at a Catholic School in New Rochelle, one year in the South Bronx.
I neglected to fill in the West Village, limo driving, the White Horse Tavern, the bus-boy bit, the 24-hour bars on the lower East Side, not germane to our discussion.
Sr. Judith mentioned something about becoming a teacher for a section of the hospital that was going to be devoted to drying out youth. Meanwhile, they could earn credits. The kids were comin’ in with adults dryin’ out and it wasn’t, so to speak, such a good mix.
The patients—the kid’s floor would be two below the adults—were out-of-control youth who had 30 days to regain it. With notes and addendum, as it turned out, many would do a couple 30-day stints. While the psychiatrist at the hospital, joined in by a slew of heavy-breasted nurses and small counselors, was able to give young boys and girls strategies on how they might get control in 30 days—sniff sobriety’s cold juice--and therein act accordingly, it was hard to say if it worked.
The only reason I belabor the work stint at St. Joe’s Acute Care Facility is that it was but a few blocks down, ten years before, where my head was drilled into, gut pulled apart and stitched back together, out of St. Vincent’s maddened, Kerry and Jeremy left for California, I to NYC and all that.
St. Joe’s was also where I went to see Ironworker Joe Reed—whose specialty, like I said, was smokestacks—battling cancer. We’d worked together at the Powerhouse. Our paths post trauma—me to NYC as joe college, him to Detroit as boomer ironworker. One day Joe said chemotherapy wasn’t gettin’ him any better, may as well go back to work.
Me? Upon my return after CDU (Chemical Dependency Unit), where I’d met Sr. J and gracious Father Burns a few months before I was heir teacher. While the kids got doses of coping strategies, I kept them up on their school work.
In my “A Portrait of the Artist as a Dumb Man” (the typed version) I think I wrote about some impressions of the quiet room, the group room. While it was okay at first, setting up the school room and teaching at the hospital, I got tired of seeing kids parked in their school chairs near the nurses’ station writing a few pages of the encyclopedia for punishment.
In fact, the longer I stayed, the consequences for out of control youth became stricter, sterner.
Our first child was born and I started drinking again.
There in the room, daughter Kaitlin but a few doors away from us, I toasted the baby with champagne with Kath. Of course, this would never do: we had to start going completely berserk crazy, a jump to back to the East Village. Whether or not this had anything to do with my heightened dissatisfaction with treatment modalities, my drinking, I began to distance myself.
For it seems—and I know not seems, madam--like the last few months I was there, the kids looked like monks copying the Bible. The marker board on the nurse’s station wore the day’s restrictions and writing attire.
Marci, Tonya, Dixie—not to be together.
Mary—1/2 hour in lounge with meals.
No computer during study time.
Paul—study time in Quiet Room, No exercise. Do 25 push ups and sit-ups with PCP.
Fred—clean kitchen, 9/10—9/17.
David—500 word essay on “Why it’s wise not to cuss!”
Jason—150 sentences all free time in chair.
Xavier—50 sentences
Paul—700 sentences ‘til done in Quiet Room
Leslie—200 word essay.
Dixie—I will leave linen for others to use—500 times.
Earl—24 hour restriction to his room.
Jason—200 words. What I would have talked about in my one on one’s. 24-hour restriction until 9/11 at 2.
Kids to make posters in craft room.
Marcie—700 word essay—I will be responsible for my belongings.
Jamie—all meals in front of nurse’s station
Tammy—5000 word essay-the dangers of breaking confidentiality.
2000 word essay—how to help my peers in a more positive manner.
Tonya—5000 word essay-How I can work in amore positive way. 5000 word essay—dangers of children running away.
Dixie—5,000 words dangers of children running away.
Earl—write pgs. 183—185 from encyclopedia.
So, after almost five years, I didn’t mind it too terribly when I was fired. There was the ole reorganization thing and Sr. Judith was gone andmy drinking was becoming increasingly episodic.
Then 2nd child Allison was born.
Sr. J, on the other hand, was more or less in charge of the health care section and, while it didn’t hit me at the time, I lost a lot of power when she left.
In addition, me an’ ole Roberts, the psych from NYC, weren’t getting’ along that good. I know we sparred a little bit in the basement of his luxurious house in the ritzy section of town. He had a boxing ring set up in the basement—the heavy bag, the gloves, the tape. I think he sparred with his four boys, more and more as they got bigger. They probably hated him. Oh yes, I stepped into the ring just to see what-the-heck. Roberts said he used to box professionally. While Roberts said a shot I got on his chest “was like a hammer” it didn’t take him long ‘fore he floored me.
In addition, the charge nurse, emulating Roberts, began to slowly erode any semblance of communication with me, I was met with diffident stares or mock cordiality and loathed the huge black and white picture of Neal Sedaka Roberts had put up in the nurses station. But, as would be the fate for year in, year out, she stayed, I left.
Let’s count it out, let’s run through the gamut, let’s go down the list.
Bridget stayed, I left. Myra stayed I left.
Who was the gal in Macy? Oh yes, now I recall. Joyce stayed, I left.
Ben stayed, I left. Jackie Berniclaw stayed, I left.
Frison stayed I left. And on and on.
Kerry left, I stayed.
‘Course, this is day’s away from my own little discovery channel; that the fall, the tumble off the iron, the bangin’ the body on the beams begat “Portrait.”
Hence, based on untold evaluations and public churnings, I am a dumb man. I can’t take any credit for this. It came on its own accord.
Then, along about ’86, Joe Reed and I both out of the hospital, taking, as it were, our respective paths: he boomed to Detroit and was puttin’ up skyscrapers. I went to NYC and tried to get unscrambled. I called the hall right away in NYC but there was just nothin’ goin’ on. They’d topped out the Twin Towers the year before and all the ironworkers were gone, scattered around the country.
A quick update to the Joe Reed story finds me stoppin’ by where Mert and his brother made startin’ gates. There was Squeek Ericksen, waitin’ for Olie, Mert’s brother. Squeek had done some ironwork but was now just pickin’ up odd jobs here ‘n there. He talked about how Local 184 BA Jim Cahill had gotten the call from Detroit that Joe had fallen off the iron 300 feet. Squeek said Jim really had trouble with that, containing himself and what not.
“I was there,” Squeek said. “He had trouble handlin’ it.”
So, what I guess I’m sayin’ is that Joe had gone flyin’: now he was a real McCoy Ironworker, a journeyman. Now he was the guy that really fell from the sky. I just had a minor accident. There I was, just usin’ it that summer of ’73 to get enough money to go to college when I went off. Joe Reed had come out of St. Joe’s battling cancer and chemotherapy.
Joe’d said, after another chemotherapy, “Well, I’m not getting’ any better or getting’ any worse. I might as well go back to work.”
So he went back to the hall—did I say that Joe Reed was the spittin’ image of the young Clint Eastwood that we knew from Rawhide?—and they sent him out and then they quit building powerhouses and, like I said, iron workers had to boom out.
Joe’s choice was Detroit.
The most recent update was at the folk’s 50th wedding anniversary. I ran into Stanly Martineck. He knew Joe real well.
“Yeah, it was really somethin’,” Stan said. “He said, ‘I fucked up” and went down 300 feet.”
Joe went flyin’ much further.
Junior Hughes, who was the foreman when I went in the hole, related that Joe had slipped on a plank on the scaffold. Stories have it that he went down craddling that plank in his hands and had to bury him with it as it went right through him.
“It’s not the iron that gets wet that will get you,” Junior said, “as much as the planks on the scaffold that get wet and get slick and you slide right off.”
For people who fly.
But, I continued to search for more NYC clues, more clues to my first starting the book i wrote about ten years later. ‘Course, I wouldn’t have been able to write anything about the accident, about goin’ back to workin’ iron, fired from teachin’ if I wouldn’t ’ve run into Danny Caskey. He made me get off my dead butt and get to writing. It was something he said that got me going. And he has good authority because he loaded me on the ambulance. “You got an angel on each shoulder, buddy. You should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
So I continue to search in all the notes and nonsense I never throw out. Not only did I stumble across the Portrait handwritten but another one, typed. Looking back, I guess I always wanted to write about the Powerhouse just like I wanted to work their again, run across the iron like Junior said I could do, like Francis Burcham said I could do, “You were good up there.”
These days, I’m afraid I’ll fall off.
Chapter 2 We Follow Joe Reed’s footsteps
Like Pete, the pusher in Lincoln, who strode across the 6-inch iron 30 or so feet above the ground like it was nothin’. I’m right behind him, with baby step, afraid I’ll go off.
“Let’s go down,” he said, and took off, striding easily across the I-beams 30 foot in the air.
I tried. Believe me I tried. It’s just not there, Mable. You’d think that, after seven summers workin’ iron in some fashion or other I’d be able to fly across the iron like the old days. But no, it’s not there. I mean, there I was, in the yard, shakin’ out the iron. UNL’s puttin’ up a small dorm for the students. Ole Pete, he says for me and another ironworker to come on and he needs help shakin’ out the iron. This is just havin’ the Linkbelt crane you know, swing it off the truck and spread it around the iron unloaded earlier.
Swing the decking outside the sea of red I-beams of different shapes and sizes, runnin’ in all directions. Eventually it’ll all go up.
Day one, decidin’ I was going to go through the 4-year apprenticeship, to hell in a hand basket with all the degrees and stuff, I get sent on a job for Davis Erection in Lincoln. I’m workin’ with this guy who informs me, “This time a year ago, I was beneath the knife.”
“Oh yeah, really?” I followed a pair of coveralls to where the headache ball had dropped down a set of chokers we grabbed and extended to each side of the 30’ I-beam.
“Let’s move some of this stuff outta the way.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I clipped the hook end of the choker beneath the lip of the iron, imitating my partner.
“Here, put yours on the other side so it balances.”
I hooked it coming the other way.
“That way it goes up level.”
I’m gonna be a journeyman ironworker, I got to learn the tricks of the trade.
Kevin raised his right hand above his head, his index finger in the air. The iron was lifted up off the ground. The ironworker then pointed for the I-beam to be swung to another section, crowding into other beams. Because they were in the middle of the campus in the middle of the city, space was a premium.
“We might as well get ‘em together as much as we can,” Kevin said, bringing down the load, “we gotta make some room for the decking.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” It was my first day back after a winter of substitute teaching. I’d just been relieved of my long-term sub duties. I said to heck with it all, I might as well tell Local 21 Ironworker President Rojo and tell him I’ll go through the apprenticeship program. Even though I didn’t miss a day, first one there, usually last to leave, I got run off anyway, not seein’ eye-to-eye with the paraprofessional who thought her classroom duties even more of high sentence given the regular teacher was gone to have a child. In fact, I didn’t even want to hear the raison d’ etre from the building principal.
“You don’t want to hear,” he began, with his hands beginning to open in explanation.
“I don’t wanna hear it, I’m outta here.”
I immediately left, midway through the day, walking past the Assistant Principal and the basketball coach deep in hallway conversation. They looked at my determined pace out the door and pretty much were sure what was up.
So Rojo welcomed me in the apprenticeship. It’s why I immediately got sent out on a Lincoln job to help finish puttin’ up a dorm.
Fuck all this teachin’ b.s. I thought. I mi’s well work iron.
“Cut open from head to toe for some cancer operation,” he said, signaling the operator to drop the load between equal like pieces coated in a deep red. We got some slack from the slings, unhooked the chokers and repeated the step. We followed the arch of the crane boom to another piece that was similar in shape and size, walking and zigzagging between a row of beams to our original destination.
“Watch you don’t get yourself caught up in there.”
“Sure, yeah.” It was easy to get caught between all the iron. If the crane set it down and it fell over, you could easily get pinched between the beams that would fall over. Of course, I was aware of that, but, at any rate, it’s something to watch out for.
This guy was good, surgery or no. He was so good out around the pile of iron. He was relaxed, walked easily between the labyrinth of iron even though he was a denim-coveralls ironworker with a substantial girth. When he told me where to go, and where to position myself as the Linkbelt swung a load overhead and land it outside the corral of red iron, I had no problem helping shake out the iron, in response to his bidding.
We skirted around the long piece of iron now safe on the ground and unhooked the chokers. Kevin signaled. The operator got the signal to raise the boom of the medium-sized mobile crane and move to another I-beam where the action would be pretty much repeated.
“So you gonna get in the apprenticeship?”
Like the school building I just left, I’m always surprised how fast news gets around.
“Yeah,” I said, “I figure mi’swell. No enough money in that.” ‘Course, this wasn’t the real story. We had no time for any of that. I was gonna now be an ironworker, give it a whirl.
“Well,” Kevin instructed me. “You better start learnin’ the signals for the rig.”
He pointed at the signals pasted to the hood of the crane—down with the load, up with the load, swing, boom up, stop., etc.. It’s the phase of ironwork they call riggin’
He was so good, in fact, that Davis Erection sent him to another job in Lincoln in another part of town to oversee and coordinate that. So now it’s Pat and I, day three away from classroom contretemps. Pat and I kinda had a good ole time, good to see ya buddy shake hands sincerely cuz I worked at Lucent with him a couple years before.
Well, his partner Greg at Lucent was this huge weight-lifter-type ironworker that was packin’ himself so full of muscle and supplements he looked like he was getting’ bigger by the minute, and also looked a little like he was going to explode. Everyday it seemed he’d lug his gym bag to the cafeteria and pull out the latest concoction from GNC. Greg would pull out a clear bottle filled with orange fluid, dump some powder in, shake out a mixture, down it.
Pat and Greg drove around the various confines of Lucent on a used golf cart. They must’ve been foolin’ around a little too much because, before I got laid off, they no longer were on the golf cart.
Sometimes I’d see Pat standing over a short dark-haired diminutive girl, talking down to her intently at various stages of the building, at various stages through the day. He was lookin’ to make a score; it’d been an on-going relationship throughout the broad 45-acre confines of Lucent. Pat said, at one point, smiling and slightly fidgeting during break time with the ironworkers, that she was pregnant. He was quickly congratulated all the way ‘round, his fellow ironworkers razzin’ him about what they’d name the kid, where’s the cigars, hope the hell it didn’t look like him, etc.
The next thing you knew, Pat said, almost breathlessly, blowing cigarette smoke through his nose, leaning against the building, to a small group of iron workers assembled for where they’d go in Lucent’s huge confines, “She lost the kid.”
We all collectively shrugged our shoulders and moved on.
What can a guy do?
It was then a little different seein’ Greg and Pat walking around, rather than aboard the golf cart.
Now, Pat’s no longer at Lucent, me no longer teaching, we were in the yard in Lincoln, shakin’ out decking which had arrived with the fog. We were shaking out what seemed like a huge load of decking from a semi that had backed through the gate early in the morning and we were droppin’ it out on the perimeter. I watched as the decking was hooked to steel chokers and swung in our direction.
I don’t know whatever happened to the girl. But I figured Pat had already been asked that question enough.
I wasn’t payin’ too much attention to where the load was swingin’, still thinkin’ about Lucent and the girl and the ride to the plant via van everyday, a van full of workers with brow boots and blue jeans when I was told to get out of the way, the load comin’ directly over my head.
“Watch yerself,” Pat said, looking up, and pulling me from being right underneath the load. I was too deep in my conversation with Pat still locked into the Lucent confines and wasn’t payin’ that close attention to where I was ‘sposed to be goin’.
I’d also deigned find my balance again by walking on the iron that was still on the ground but I kinda stumbled and lost my footing and would have to step off. I already’d done this more than once.
In fact, I caught myself, instead of walking around the I-beams layin’ on the flat ground, sometimes would climb up on them and walk over them, acting like I had the best balance in the world and it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
Kath says I don’t pick up my feet, that I shuffle.
“Be careful, there,” they said, when I’d trip or stumble.
It must’ve made the operator nervous. I didn’t know he was watching. But, it wasn’t that good. “You always had trouble standin’ up,” Joe Lyons said. Lyons ran the gang of rodbusters on another job I’d get sent to. I’d be in the middle of a rod patch, rebar tied at 1 foot intervals and I’d inevitably fall backwards on my butt, pickin’ my way through layers of green rebar and plastic white braces stuck between the rod.
Not only was I having trouble walkin’ on the beams on the ground, I tend to stumble slightly. Before I raised his level of concern, when I looked like one of the guys, the operator started telling wonderful ribald stories about buildin’ the Powerhouse in Nebraska City and Browsnville Station, how, in Nebraska City, they’d buy the beer and drink outside the bar all night long when the bars closed and the cops didn’t care.
Yes, I remember that this was prob’ly so: there was v. much the frontier spirit about things in the early 70’s. You were an ironworker, high status in the community. You were prob’ly makin’ more money than most, and, to be quite honest, up high on the iron is pretty exhilarating.
A skywalker.
It’s not that way anymore. Not only is it a lot more strict with sauce on the streets, but now everyone and their mother is preachin’ safety. You have to tie off wherever you are on iron and people are always watchin’ you, bird doggin’. This is good, in a way, but it’s not as exciting as it used to be.
Now, the first thing you do, instead of goin’ to the job site, is go to take a pee test. Some little clinic where you sit down and they call your name and you give a urine sample. Davis I heard, even after you started workin’ there, could give you one.
In fact, sittin’ in the hall one morning (that’s what I do, sit in the hall, wait to get sent out. I get there early with my work boots on and sit and wait to be summoned to the window where I’ll get sent out on a job). A young kid was there, a 2nd year apprentice, I think he said, waitin’ to be sent out. Davis had given him a random pee test and he’d failed.
“Yeah,” he said, almost ruefully, “I went and smoked a couple joints and had a few beers a couple days after work and didn’t pass the pee test.”
Because he was 2nd year apprentice, Rojo looked through the screen of the half door and sent him out to American Steel.
“See ya later.”
“Yeah, have a good one.”
Yeah, the status isn’t as high anymore. Back then, because you were an ironworker, you were something of a top dog. You had the money, you started to buy your own little collection of boy toys. I know I was beginning to get mine: I think I went and bought myself a used pickup.
And you had something, besides being way high up off the ground on a daily basis, of an elevated status. Women would be at your side: you were a man, you leapt buildings with a single bound, you were an ironworker. You were daring and swashbuckling: you were slayin’ the daily dragon.
Not the case nowadays. Now you got all these computer geeks who are makin’ more than twice, three times as much as the old ironworkers drivin’ fancy 4 x 4’s we could only dream of owning.
Sittin’ in the office, pluckin’ away at a few of the keys and writing something or splashing graphics or something. Listenin’ to somebody about takin’ this piece of software and explaining in a manual how it works. Get up when you want to and have yourself a cup of coffee. Call your wife or girlfriend. Take a day off. Sittin’ down, in the air conditioned environs. Nobody botherin’ ya. Makin’ better money that you ever dreamed possible, makin’ so much money as to be almost sinful.
I’m here to say, I’ve done ‘em both. Which is to my liking? Keep me off a that iron, sir.
And that’s exactly what happened. I go to ole Rodeo-odeo-ode Rohoj at the Local and yeah, I’m gonna jump in the apprenticeship program, no problem or questions asked, finally after all these years.
Somehow, it’s just what I was destined to be, I guess.
So, first job in Lincoln, 50 miles away, no problem. Now, the other call was for a rod buster in Omaha. I wouldn’t have to drive, I can tie rod just about as good as the next guy. But me, this guy with no name and no career, I’m at the lowest rung, despite the fact that I’ve been comin’ to the hall and talkin’ to ex BA George Mattice or ex President Billy Pilant for three or four summers, doin’ some good work and now here we are, at the bottom rung I remain.
No fun, but that’s how I operate. I’m my own Boomer. I take it as it comes. I got to take it as it comes. I don’t ask for any favors or special treatment. I did with the school system: would you please reconsider, given my predicament, foreordained, as it were, let me try to teach English rather than the nefarious SPED?
Oh you won’t? Very well then. Let the respective chips fall where they may. You’ll keep comin’ in my classroom and tell me I ain’t doin’ too hot? Or somethin’ like that.
So I go to Lincoln. I shoulda just spoke up and say send me on the rebar job here in Omaha but, like I said, I tend to let the chips fall where they may, like there’s some great gigantic plan or something. The operator story teller tellin’ Pete third day in Lincoln, dorms empty, not much goin’ around in what you might more or less call a college town that I’m dangerous in the yard—I walked underneath the load of decking he’s swingin’ out to the perimeter.
“We’ll get ya boltin’ up pretty soon,” Pete says. He looks at me. He’s under pressure, got work to do, needs a man, but what kinda skill set is being brought forth?
I watch as Lucent Pat does all the shakin’ of the decking out by himself. While it’s more clumsy, took longer, I more or less had to start thinkin’ about getting’ the bolt bag ready, the safety harness thrown on, climb the ladder and get on up there.
“You gotcher safety harness?”
It’s like metal driver’s license for the iron workers.
“Yeah,” I said, “ it’s in the trunk of my car.”
“Well, you’ll need that.”
I made sure I drove the beat up ole jalopy instead of the pickup to the job site. See, the pickup truck is Nissan. I’d usually get razzed pretty good when I showed up on the job site with that thing.
“Who’s drivin’ that Jap truck?” would usually be asked at some point.
I’d own up that it was mine. I’d hear about it.
The thing was, anything from Japan or China wasn’t American made, generally, not American union made, specifically. See, pullin’ up at a teacher parking lot, it wouldn’t matter a whit what country the vehicle was from.
So now I have Pete help me get the safety harness on.
“Here, you don’t even really need that belt.”
I was trying to put the harness over my structural belt, havin’ a tough time of it. I fire back to the Cargill job six year before when I put my first safety harness on. Red has to help me strap it on. Yeah, now I know how to do it. But that doesn’t help because know it’s clumbsier that ever, tryin’ to put the safety harness over the structural belt.
“Yeah, you’re right.”
I got rid of my structural belt and put the bolt bag, spud wrenches, beater all on the safety harness. I then filled each bolt bag full of bolts. The harness was too big for me and so it all dropped down below the waist. I figured I wasn’t too far away from bein’ let go, my inability to grasp, my balance, everything so I just went forward.
“You all right there,” Pete asked. “Fit okay?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m okay.”
So I climbed the ladder
It was the first floor where I was gonna stick bolts. It wasn’t much above 20 feet. I had to stick bolts in where the 6 inch beams runnin’ horizontal had to be connected to the verts that had recently been hooked together by the connectors with a bolt on each side. There were five bolt holes to fill on each of the four sides of the 6-inch I-beams runnin’ into the vert.
This is exactly what I was doin’ when I fell. On the bolt-up gang. I was what you’d call “Good up there.” That means, I could just stride and stroll across that iron like it was nothin’. No, I wasn’t what you could say was good up on the high iron, 20 stories above the ground or so, the Powerhouse only goin’ to four stories, but I was so confident, moved so easily, I felt like it didn’t matter how high I was.
“You could run across that iron,” Junior said.
Now, 20 years removed, my feet failed me. The safety harness and bolt bags weighed me down. I had the safety harness filled with tools from my structural belt on: I had two spud wrenches, two bolt bags, a beater, striker, tape measure hangin’ between my waist and m knees. I could barely walk.
That’s okay, I reasoned. I’m in good shape.
This is what I always tell myself.
Up to the top of the ladder I notice is tied off, I step off and look at two 6-inch beams runnin’ parallel, a couple inches apart. I’m thinkin’ this is great and easy. I’m back to boltin’ up, just like days of yore, the Port Neal Powerhouse, flyin’ across the iron.
So just take the one I tell myself and practice movin’ across that point. But no, something about my balance made me walk across both of them, like I was straddling a horse. So it was better ‘n 12 inches of iron I was walking over.
This was okay until I reach the vert column that shot up in the air. Oh yes, I’m tryin’ to look cool. I’m walkin’ 20 feet across this wide skeleton of iron like I do it in my dreams—quick, with purpose. However, when I reach the end of my destination, I slide smoothly around the column like I’ve been doing it for years only now I’ve got the 6 inch beams to contend with.
I heard it’s called walking the open iron and I don’t do it very well.
No problem. Piece of cake.
However, my legs don’t respond to the command from my brain. I start baby steppin’ across the iron. Of course Pete’s watchin’. Of course, the Safety Coordinator ‘s watchin’.
I remembered in the shack that morning how Pete said Davis was sending the Safety Inspector to the job sight so “don’t do anything stupid.”
And yep, there she was, hands on her hips, watchin’ ironworkers and operators and the whole works puttin’ up the dorm room. There was a couple guys on each side of her and they just walked around and looked at things. Caught up in my own mental games, I didn’t pay too much attention.
I made it to the other vert, if awkwardly, kindofa cautious little baby step over the iron, feelin’ half like I was teeterin’ half like I was gonna fall any minute. The harness over my shoulders wasn’t fittin’ and the bolt bag was draggin’. I’m sure it didn’t look like a pretty site. I grabbed onto the column real tight and sat quickly down and began to stick bolts.
I did this for awhile, usin’ my spud wrenches, usin’ my bull pin. If the holes weren’t lined quite up, which was usually the case, I’d just stick my bull pen in and that would make the other three line up. If the beam was really off, I’d just pullout a barrel pin out of my bolt bag and pound that in to both steady and line up.
See, I told myself, you know what you’re doin’. This is what you were doin’ twenty years ago.
But then it came time to move on down the road to another vert and stick bolts in that. No, I still couldn’t help to get started off in small baby steps and then had to literally push myself off the column.
“She said you looked a little uncomfortable up there,” Pete said at coffee break.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Oh yea, it just takes me a little while.”
Post coffee, I’m back up on the iron. It’s not better. The harness is way too heavy, I have to baby step. I quit baby step and it now must look I lunged to the vert column where I was gonna stick bolts.
How can I hold the one end of the bolt? I remember how I’ve got a vise grip. This works fine. I’m thinkin’ how great it is I got a vise grip to just hold it while I stick the bolts and tighten with the spud.
Yeah, the gal is indeed lookin’ at me. I feel like I’m back in the BD classroom bein’ observed by the principal. I baby-stepped through that, too.
She’s the new safety gal from Des Moines I heard Davis Erection has just hired. At coffee, Pete reminded us the state boys and the new safety inspector was around so keep things picked up and all. Davis, one of the big success stories in Omaha nobody talks about because the construction trade is a gambit not that well grasped by many, has weekly safety meetings. It’s required and we sit in the shack after lunch usually on a Tuesday and the pusher will have one of the punkins (apprentice) read the dispatch from the front office. Safety dollars are passed out each week. They’re tiny little green monopoly-type dollars with the picture of the guy who does all the safety stuff for Davis printed on it.
Sixty or so safety dollars and you can get a Carthart jacket, gloves, etc. so Davis is pretty serious about safety. While other companies will skip the safety part or short-circuit, Davis always has them.
And many ironworkers are still surprised how fast Jeff Davis, an ironworker like anybody else, rose so fast and so furious. “I remember when he couldn’t rub two nickels together,” Jim Barnpowel said one time. “Now he’s one of the biggest sub contractors around. He bought up Northwestern in Des Moines and then he bought up Hughes Erection is Sioux City.”
And, Jeff Davis would come out sometimes and tie rebar like all the rest. Just to keep himself in shape or something. I remember goin’ on a job with him and another punkin to Alliance, Nebraska, four days tiein’ railroad casings. Oh yes, Jeff could tie fast but Steve and I went to his bidding. We finished up in four days and then drove back to Omaha. What some ironworkers after learning that I’d worked with the boss didn’t like is that he’d paid Steve and I Sioux City scale instead of Omaha scale, a difference of about $2.00 an hour.
“That’s not right,” Jim said. “Even though the job might’ve been for Hughes, he should’ve paid you our scale.” But I never did see Jeff Davis again. I just know that more and more jobs around town of Omaha and now in Lincoln there were Davis trucks there. I think he also started makin’ a lot of money buying cranes and rigs and then renting them out.
But, I had my own set of iron problems to deal with after break. Coonin’ the iron was out of the question. Then, for sure I’d look like I didn’t belong.
I figure I’ll get to walkin’ faster after a bit.
But now, I’m already at the next column, stickin’ bolts. The connectors are just ahead of me. In a way, I’m catchin’ up to them. I can see that, yes, maybe I will be able to proceed. Maybe I’ll get used to the safety harness, walkin’ the open iron again.
After all, isn’t this what life has planned for me?
But then, out of nowhere, the vice grip slips out of my hand—I watch as it falls 20 feet to the ground just below me. There’s no one near to call and have ‘em throw it back up at me. I had no desire to get up off the beam, turn myself around, take the ladder back down. My other spud won’t fit the hard bolts and there’s no way I can hold the head of the bolt.
Thus, I had a decision to make. A momentary lapse of raison d etre and I thought of the young ironworker just the other day climbed down the iron sans ladder. He just grabbed a hold the vert column and slid down.
I forgot about the Safety Inspector busying herself with officialdom. I remembered the ease of slidin’ down the column.
This I did. I climbed off the iron and slid down the column. Only then did I look over and see the lady in her place from which she was eye ballin’ me.
Pete came over a short time later.
“The Safety Inspector saw you slidin’ down the column,” he said. “We don’t want to be doin’ that. Use the ladder.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. I felt like crawlin’ into the one of the verts standing right next to me.
“C’m on,” he said. “It’s about lunch time. After lunch I’ll have you sort bolts.”
Somehow, it was hotter down on the ground. I was away from the light breeze that lifted up out of the Rockies, carried past all the sad and dying farm towns of central Nebraska and felt a sweat now building in my brow and beginning to drip on the dead ground before me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
And, like getting’ thrown back to puddling concrete, thrown back to the ISS room, thrown back to first rung. Sortin’ bolts is about as low as you can go: you garb the bolt, measure it, put the nut on it. Of course, if you’re not careful you can get mixed up pretty easy. A 2 1/4” bolt looks very much like a 2” bolt or a
2 ½” bolt. It is both tedious and demeaning.
The saving grace was that I was to report to Omaha to work on the World Herald building. They had rebar to tie. I was home again. Now, I wouldn’t have to drive 45-minutes one way but could just drop downtown and tie rebar. It’s prob’ly what I shoulda been doin’ in the first place
Yes, this was okay save to say that I was let go before noon.
“I gotta lay you,” the man said to me. I remember seein’ him at the hall not too long ago, payin’ his assessments. He was the Superintendent for Davis on the World-Herald job. “We’re at zero tolerance,” he said. “A guy was sliding down to column a couple years ago and fell and Davis had to pay up a lot of money.”
I took the safety harness back to Davis Erection, the yard right next to huge old Wilson Packing House building the city is tyring to get one of the tnenats to move out so it can be demolished. I went in and picked up my check. Davis will not give you your check unless you turn in the safety harness.
Ok, now what? I guess there’s a lot of work in town. I went back to the hall the next day but didn’t get sent out. I went back to the hall the next day but didn’t get sent out.
Only thing, a guy I knew was a foreman at Davis stopped by to pay his dues.
He sits down at one of the round tables and pulls out a cigarette.
“Been doin’ any work?”
“Oh, a little I guess.”
“Anybody that says to me he knows how to work iron, I ask ‘em how long they been doin’ it. If they say 5 years or so, I don’t believe they know how to do it. Now maybe 10 years on the iron, I’ll start to believe they know what they’re doin’.”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d been in the hall now for nearly an hour. It was prob’ly my 10th year workin’ iron off and on and I still didn’t know what-the-hell. Two ironworkers I didn’t recognize came in and sat down and pretty soon were called to the Plexiglas and given a copy of the work order and sent out on a job.
It’s helluva way I thought to start my apprenticeship.
“Do you know how to get to?” I could hear Rojo sayin’ to the guy in jeans, work boots, flannel shirt.
“Oh, yeah, I think so.”
“Just take I-80 to the 50th St. exit and go a couple blocks and you’ll see a rig in the air.”
“First you gotta take a pee test before you get on the job. You’ll be okay with that, won’t ya?”
“Oh yeah,” the guy said. “No problem. The ole lady, she keeps a good eye on me.”
These were two conversations, two guys get sent out, there I sat. The sun began to beat through the windows.
“Yeah,” I said to the older guy that sat down. “I was workin’ for Davis but I got laid off.”
“Oh-h-h,” he said. He then turned to me. “Wait a minute, Davis is hirin’. They didn’t get laid off, you got fired.”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
He got up to move to the window. He know had his own piece of information for the day.
Yeah, looking back, ironwork in the 90’s and 70’s and 80’s I guess I always wanted to write about it. Like an illness or an affliction, one of the ways for healing is to write about it.And, goin’ back to the Powerhouse, the Port Neal Station, early 70’s, where both Joe and I worked, the seeds planted: and then Joe College, workin’ on the farm in the summer a direct line from the 80, that cornfield I disked, rolling across it and the 40, discin’ 120 acres in one day, the John Deere 4620 with its engine turned up a notch, billowing a plume of black smoke, almost racing across the fields cattycornerd, the Powerhouse with it’s steady stream like a pale with breath across the plains in the far distance across the river. Me and You got a date.
We got a date up on the iron.
And then, digging through all the papers and letters and books scattered about, I see in this one green folder buried deep in a box, another bit of writing with a like title.
I look through, surprised that now there are three versions of my portrait.
POWERHOUSE REVISITED—PORTAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A DUMB MAN
And because it marked the 14th year since, he decided to take the next day off. Pull a few weeds in the garden beneath the early morning sun before it got too hot and then maybe have a beer or two, thinking back on how it used to be. Criminal mind or no, he felt he was, in some respects, entitled.
Besides, he just wasn’t up to seeing Roberts just yet. The Corsican Creep had taken a vacation the week before—hockey camp, for Chrissake, dragging his three boys along, oldest son Gator in tow—and things at the hospital, suffice to say, were quite pleasant and generally uneventful. ‘Course, there was yet a woman or two—supervisor nurse—that were vying for the upper hand but to him at least, that was nothing compared to the hot Corsican breath blowing near relentlessly like an old furnace heating a paper-thin shack. Was that not a quiet counselor’s hair being singed standing so close to this Eastern seaboard? 1000 Watt psychoanalysis firing point-blank at close range (the group room) with not a few of the cunning, cruel, cowardly street smarts of Manhattan’s Amersterdam Ave., a wild uncouth pack of dogs nipping at your mental heels.
Like the KOMA radio station outta Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where the signal seemed to be so strong one could hear it through the early night, late 60’s R n R from yours truly Jim Dandy.
Midwest savy vs. Manhatta street-smarts.
Somehow, somewhere, someone mis-wired on the mis-fire.
Couple bricks shy of a full load. (added 9/16/00)
To try is to attempt, to attempt is to fail. (handwritten)
The sign in the group room, a picture of an angus bull squatted, having dropped a load, its eyes slightly crossed, an X through a circle i.e. no bullshit.
And he gets $75 per hour per patient for this?
But I’m just gonna sit here on the dock of my own country bay and watch time roll away. Oh, I guess it’s said the criminal mind’s not ‘sposed to be drinkin’ but it feels good goin’ down. No, the thing is I’m trying to piece together that discordant puzzle that was my life pre during post mishap. The discordant puzzles and pieces no longer sharp or have an edge, story told so many times so as to have lost any spontaneity or sharpness that comes from first hand accounts scribed the moment after the event. Paste together now before it gets told again, embellishment notwithstanding, on through the years and finally take it to the grave.
But ‘fore scribing, now that that is out of the way, I can now freely respond to other impressions laid before me. Walking down from behind the house through a piece of land that we’ve come to know as the Big Sight the other day I thought I could smell somebody’s apple tree ripening—the sweet pungent smell of fresh apples that never seem to get picked because the climate over the years since Grandma’s time doesn’t allow them to get big enough.
It—the smell, that is—reminded me of what it was like to be walkin’ over to Grandma’s house to eat Graham crackers outta the red pantry. They were brown and had a sweet taste. Mom never bought Graham crackers but Grandma Pearl had a ready supply of them. They were in the red pantry.
One time, and this is how your life is shaped, I went to my usual walk over to Grandma’s. She was prob’ly in the garden. It didn’t matter. I walked into the kitchen, as familiar as rain. I scooched up on the little table and open the pantry drawer and went after to get my treat for the day. Just then, Aunt Mary had come into the house. She screamed, “Getcher hands out of that pantry right now.” Or something to that effect. I don’t know if I was scared or started crying but I was startled. Grandma didn’t care, Grandma didn’t give a whit. But ole Aunt Mary, she put me in my place.
I remembered how I’d heard she’d freely spank her kids. I was so glad she lived far away and rarely made it to the small town, even tho’ the kids seemed friendly enough.
But there’d be chickens and we’d help gather up the eggs and I remember liking to climb all the trees that were in the yard were the chickens went
And because this was my day away from Robert’s madness, I could think about the corn bins behind the house, the green house below, the hill rising up. I could think back on the time when we’d stack hay, when the field—now in a 10-year set aside program such that it’s hard to imagine when you galloped across, discin’ with the John Deere A I saw a snake dart in front of me and it was too late to stop—I liked to go fast, feel the power surging beneath me, get the work done—and I cut the slitherer in a few pieces.
No, wait a minute. I was so startled I stopped the tractor. I was gonna emulate hired man Guy Duckson. He said he used to, when he was a young kid on a small tractor out in a large field, get off if he saw a jack rabbit and run it down.
“Did you catch it?”
“Oh yeah,” Guy assured me, now scaling prob’ly 300 lbs., “I caught him.”
No, that writing wasn’t much, either. The only thing I’d like to add at this point was that all three “Portrait” accounts were pre-Omaha ironwork. Omaha was the town we moved to, having lost yet another teaching job. But, because I didn’t realize how much the accident had affected a few parts of the mental sphere, I blithely went from teaching job to teaching job. Because I hadn’t really been given such thing as a poor evaluation, because I was able to sight both progress and advancement of the kids on the reservation, at the health center, because I was getting an administrative certification, it sure did look like I was progressing well up the career ladder: teacher then principal. Then education coordinator. Here are my references. Here are some people I know. Like they say in NYC, “it’s not what you know it’s who you know.”
At any rate, it got me to Omaha. I was going to work, again, with out of control youth.
But the new addition was that I’d called the Local 21 Ironworkers, just on whim. I was able to mention Powerhouse, how I did a “turn around” at the Powerhouse the summer before.
I told them whom I knew in the hall up in Sioux City, Business Agent Jim Cahill my mom’s first cousin. That’s where I’d left my tools.
“Well, get your tools and give us a call,” the BA, whose name was George Mattice, said.
So, I remember how Junior Hughes said he always had some tools around. So I drove up 90 miles and got Junior away from the bar he ran and he went out to his shed and pulled out a couple belts, couple spuds.
He didn’t have any Kleins for me to start tyin’ rebar but, $30 later, I was off to a good start.
It’s how I got started workin’ iron again after 20 years. Oh yeah, a couple summers before, I did a weeks worth of work at about the same place I fell. I worked with a red-headed iron worker from Sioux Falls they called Red. The other guy on the job was Ed Trudell. He was there the day I fell. An Indian, and I don’t know what tribe he was from, if he hailed from nearby Winnebago or Macy, Trudell kinda was one of the old time ironworkers that put up coal-burning power stations before safety concerns, when, in many respects, the work could be down right dangerous but also an air of freedom.
“Yeah,” Trudell said, hookin’ up the chain fall to a large piece of I-beam we’d cut away, “this is ‘bout where you went down.”
“Oh yeah, really?”
But Trudell wasn’t in any kind of mood to romanticize or heighten the account with any kind of excitement. It was just on top of this stairway and it was hard for me to picture or gain any semblance to the day.
But, looking back, 18 years and three college degrees later, I was back at the Powerhouse.
I just wanted to be a skywalker. I just couldn’t believe I was getting a chance to do it all over again.
Chapter 3 Club El Morocco
Without further ado about nothing, the Club El M story: deciding to whom and to where I should send the “me” as represented by a single sheet of paper, I noticed some scribbles on the margin of Joyce’s Portrait. I don’t know how the green (for Ireland, for Sinn Fein you bet!) paperback ended up where it did.
As noted, front cover was gone. Blue ink over black print stood out like a handmade sign on a deserted highway.
The blue ink was a couple notes scrawled over the white background with the Daedalus-Icarus explanation—“king exiled them to a labyrinth, to escape they built wings.” A small hand-drawn rectangle was at the bottom. The sign, before Joyce, as it were, raised some questions. Was the student taking a class and had not bothered to bring a tablet to jot down notes, had not bothered to borrow a sheet of paper from a friend? Or was this short writing so short, so tacit as to be all that was needed and therefore mirror Portrait better than volumes of discourse and hours of discussion through the decades?
The notes at the bottom of the page, inside a hand-drawn rectangle were unusually cryptic. It says “St. Steven—first Christian martyr. Steve, Martyr for his art.”
But that’s just the front of the book. Actually it’s the cover because, as stated, the original dark green book jacket is gone. So what you see is the title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on white paper. Above “Young” is written “Stephen Dedalus.” Below the book title are horizontal notations, a couple horizontals thrown in for good measure: blue ink with arrows and underlines and one word in parenthesis, (cow). A large arrow informs the reader “almost a nation symbol of Ireland.”
But, there, half way or so in the book, page 86-87, to be exact, (the middle section of page 86 is heavily underlined and there is a phone number in the margin—355-1265) is a pay stub from Club El Morocco. There, in all its white and blue splendor—club colors, Zebra as Logo--is the pittance I’d earned in the year 1976 as a bus boy at the club, three years post-trauma, two years post divorce.
Well, I guess I’m not sure if that’s the right page because I’ve pulled it out and reinserted it a few times now. But, I make sure I leave it on page 86-87. Sometimes, 46-47 or 106-07.
KEEPING OLD NAILS,YOUNG WIVES
Like an old nail. Like the piece of the corn planter that now rests in my room. I picked it up a couple years ago, walking through the old shed at the farm. The shed that’s been there almost as long as I can remember: its tin roof cracks and bends and expands in the summer heat when a huge cloud races over.
There’s still a collection of farm junk around—old nails, tractor chains that fit the tires of a John Deere tractor many muddy springs years ago. (The chains did not accompany the tractor on its journey NSEW but will no doubt be—like Dad’s current status on the farm with the old buildings—just take or burn it down then bury it--buried.) Also, there’s a sail boat brother Joey has had parked in the middle next to an old wagon for I’d say better ‘n 15-years. It’s still white and gleaming, beneath the dust, ready to take to water. Like an old piece of barbwire, I just picked it up, the corn planter lid. Like the old horseshoe, pitchfork tines, hay bale hook, I took it with me.
Next time, maybe I’ll grab a piece of barbed wire.
Remembrance of things past: like after Kerry had been gone for a couple days, the only thing I remember noting she left behind was a blue spiral notebook. It’s what she used to write down some items she had to purchase at the store when she took Jeremy and her to town. She’d throw him in the car and off they’d go. I’d usually be working. First couple summers, I was away for a weeks at a time, paving highways to fight dust and drought and decay that scooted by the insufferable preening small farm towns.
The last summer we were together as the Homeric nuclear family (does not Odyssey ring so true, the back drop to Ulysses, post Portrait—dusty streets with a dog’s tongue hanging out, tail drooping, waiting for the hub of a tire to run and bark at?), never ever spend another summer sunny day together, I was a permit ironworker at the Powerhouse.
Kerry, as before, often would run to town, its paved magnet, driving away from the dust, the heat. She’d run to James Rexall Drug--where she worked during high school years--and visit her mother or maybe Lois Graffis.
At any rate, Kerry’d write it down, something on the list, before she piled Jeremy in the car and away they’d go. On this particular blue spiral notebook, the pages all blank save at the top of the first page was written--neat, pretty writing, you could tell she always got an A in penmanship. In blue ink the only thing of written record after 2 and one-half years of matrimony were two words: “wet ones.”
Kerry liked wet ones. It was something you could just stick in your purse and pull out if you needed to wipe baby’s face. ‘Course, this summer, Jeremy was a 20-month-old, growin’ like a weed. So, maybe it was to wipe toddler’s face—a description more apt.
To say that I’d come across that notebook and held onto it would depict a man desperate and a little touched. No, the “wet ones” notation never much made it out of the green house.
Jeremy was far too young to fight off suitors. Kerry didn’t know how to sew a button on a shirt.
But, because she’d made such a clean sweep of the place, because she’d moved with such speed and precision, I dare say it was, if not foreordained, was preplanned.
Those little items that we somehow let linger in the memory. It was the only one thing I can remember her writing, other than the letters she wrote to me in college. Come to think of it, while they were rather childish and sophomoric, I do think she liked to write. Or, at least, imagined she had something of a flair for it. I think she had said she was going to write about Jeremy’s birth in the little hospital on the border of a small town. She didn’t get past the first page before writer’s block set I, the Muse running to town.
I remember the first page said something like “Ronnie wanted to do it but I just couldn’t.”
Oh, I guess another time was when she was staying at her Mom’s with Jeremy shortly after she left. I was both inane and insane enough to grab her purse and pull out its contents. That is, I saw this writing. Even though my parents never opened my mail when I was growing up and never said anything about it, I was therefore assured that none of the silly traipsings with written word from friends or whatever over the years ever fell on their eyes I was pretty much the same way: I wouldn’t look at a letter not addressed to me.
Yet, here I was, like a teacher hovering over a student, reaching down and clutching it from her. It was addressed to her friend Lois. Lois and Allen Graffis were boon companions. There was an affinity, of sorts, Allen knocking up Lois and living in an apt. across the street from Kerry’s residence. Lois was cute, small, wiry, straight brown hair that almost went down to her ass. Allen, a farm boy, like me, expatriate, worked at IBP on the production line. Like I said, we’d become boon companions after Kerry insured that we would become friends. In a matter of months after Kerry met up with Lois and their husband and their young son Jarrod, Kerry was pg with our young son Jeremy. I don’t know if there was something in the drink that Lois stirred Kerry or visa versa, some concoction some elixir but, there it was, in the throes of matrimony, a pair of new-found friends.
They rented a house from the fat attorney, right next to the fat attorney.
More or less on Wayne Boyd later.
At any rate, the letter was a bit of drooling about Marty Lambert. He was a fellow construction worker. The year before, I’d called for Kerry to come to the bar on the border of Morningside outskirts, Mill’s Inn, I think it was. We’d gotten rained out. I called Kerry to come and sup with us. So she came by with Jeremy and we all gassed around, got drunk. So then, a few months later, a new construction season had dawned, the dust problem not abated from years previous, Kerry is driving the Pontiac convertible we had and ran into Marty. I was workin’ road construction, finishing up a few small projects in Sioux City before heading out on the road. That evening, I was just laying in bed, reading a magazine. It was prob’ly the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It was something in my anti kick—I had a subscrip to the Rolling Stone and therein was some sorta convoluted rock/underground/radical/whole earth catalogue circuit I imagined myself being part of, aspired to.
I remember being sprawled across the bed, prob’ly in my underwear. She came in from a night on the town. She’d gone to town to talk with her mom and pick up a few things, maybe some Wet One’s. Or stop by and see Lois.
Jeremy was in his bed, asleep. All quiet on the western front. It was the first and only time ever in my life I remember doing that—mom gone to town, put the kid in bed.
I leafed through the latest popular rock group, latest sensation.
“How’s everything?”
“Oh, fine.”
“Any problem with Jeremy goin’ to bed?”
“Oh, no, no problems. He went right to bed.”
“How was your evening?”
“Oh, good, just talked to Mom and Lois.”
“How’s everything with the Graffis family?”
“Oh, okay. Alan and Lois are thinkin’ about movin’.”
“Oh, are they really?”
“Yeah, Alan’s really getting’ tired of workin’ at IBP. Jarod’s getting’ bigger and they maybe want to have a place of their own in the country.”
“Oh yeah?”
At least, that’s what I think was the gist of the conversation. The Graffis family wanted to move on. Nothing new in that, I guess. What Kerry didn’t reveal was that she’d run into Marty Lambert around Walgreens and they went for a long ride in the yellow Pontiac convertible. Did she labor at length about the marriage constraints and dilemmas and what-have-you, this I think she told me later or I found out later. I didn’t confront Marty about it cuz it was just two ships passing in the night type deal. By that time I was workin’ at the Powerhouse and had quit the road construction gangs—there were just too many small towns in Iowa to pave and I could see I’d be paving forever. What Kerry’d failed to discern was that, on this particular construction gambit, I was an operator, Marty a laborer.
But in the letter, there’s reference to Marty. Marty, she wrote, “had a body that just won’t quit.” Like the phrase “wet ones” it’s the only thing I remember.
I gave it back to her. I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to do with it. Actually, beins’ she was filin’ for divorce, there was little I could do. I guess now it was Lois and Allen and Kerry and Marty. Or whatever. Jeremy, like an airplane you climb on board because you don’t have much choice, rode along.
But this Club El Morocco pay stub is something a bit more tangible. And it was more of a surprise. Why would that pay stub be put in that book? I hadn’t graced the NYC confines better ‘n 17 years.
Nor, do I remember reading any of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist, the paperback edition. Moreover, why Club El Morocco generally, Elmer’s—the more casual section of the club—specifically? To wit: post Elmers, there was Tavern on the Green, Windows of the World, Charley O’s and Phoebes in the East Village. I mean Tavern, I bussed the crystal room, lit the candles, served pretty bread beneath pretty tables beneath golden chandeliers. Like an altar boy at St. Mary’s in Hubbard, sometimes I got to light the candles before Mass was started. At the Crystal Room, I got to light the candles along the proscenium of the elegant room prior a sup for NYC’s upper crust.
Did I not learn how to make an omelet in French service style before the customer?
Did not Alison, dead ringer for Kate of Charlie’s Angels and boon companion the Summer of Operation sail, summer school at NYU, look for me in the Garden section of the restaurant? There I was, in my bus-boy finest. White shirt and black bowtie. I carved careful bread for the rich. I was listening to the Captain of the Waiters go on at length about the service in the Crystal Room—that they, the guests, always needed their bread and they needed their water glasses filled. Don’t let any of the candles go out.
There she was, just outside the Crystal Room, in the gardern, looking furtively for me. But did I have the guts or balls to just say excuse me and go and flag her down and give her that last gracious hug before she got in her car and sped back to Pennsylvania and then onto the University of Denver?
No, I thought she looked too plain and ordinary. I pretended like I didn’t see her, and watched as she walked on out of sight. I think she had to get going, could only just stay a bit. I didn’t even wave. Off she went. Then I didn’t see her until Christmas.
Now with that long-winded explanation of the small town houses and bits and pieces linger on, months on the iron, deaths in the neighborhood, I ask myself: How did it manage to get here? How do I find a pay stub a quarter century later? I couldn’t have made a careful departure from the Big A, my NYC days were trashed. Fuckin’ Hanley in the Park.
Niggers and spics outta the park.
It was his day to bus the Elmer's room.
“Hey, how you doin’,” said John, the tall waiter leaned over the corner of the bar, turned from his conversation with the bartender and grinned.
“Fine.”
Tex liked the Brooklyn nasality. You knew John was the kind of guy that went to Ebbet’s field as a kid and shagged fly balls and ate hotdogs when Pee Wee Reese and the Dodgers were still in town.
John pulled back from the bar a little. It was clean and white and spotless and empty. He turned to face the busboy; his salt and pepper hair combed back in a pompadour; his white jacket that was required attire almost covered his midsection.
The young busboy advanced to the bar, visions of ole Mert dancing in his head, leaning over him with a lighted cigarette, beads of sweat falling from his face. It was a humid August afternoon. “They thought you’d be a vegetable, they thought you’d be a vegetable.” Tex, the Nebraska boy, four months transplanted, felt the clip-on bow-tie sticking close to his chin. He loosened his collar. He put his hands in his pocket. He looked down the length of the bar at the marble façade on the stained glass door that led into the club: it’s intricate interweaving of glass, a picture of ornamental ironwork on either side.
The door was closed because it was early in the evening. It would be opened again by the concierge as guests began to arrive to make their way through the dark blue carpeted floors of the club and sit at one of the blue and white covered tables; the small restaurant’s floor laid out almost like a horse shoe. One leg that opened to a full view of the bar was wider and deeper. The other leg led to a small colored TV set and a few tables for four that was usually set up for the club’s favorite game, backgammon. The on-going tournaments took place for as long as Tex could remember, princely dressed couples pressed themselves against the table and threw a pair of white dice.
The tip of the horseshoe on this narrower leg led into a hallway with a small dip in the grade; the thick blue carpet gently descended into a rich red darkness where the women and men’s red-carpeted bathrooms were stationed on the immediate left. Down further to the right was a door that led to a steep stairway that was the basement of the El Morocco. Meals for decades had been prepared and whisked away to eager mouths, waiting palate. On consignment, lookin’ for a way he might return to the strands of normalcy, the young farmboy carried a dull white tub full of dirty dishes and glasses downstairs, down to the main kitchen, nodding at the tall black guy John, who took charge of the glasses. The busboy would nod, offer pleasantries and then bring up the clean plates and glasses back up the stairs to Elmers. He was careful to go fast but also not to drop anything.
“Not too bad. How are you?” It was the day-time head waiter, greeting John and the other waiter Thomas. Beneath the bald head, a little taller than Brooklyn John, he carried a slight accent that was of French origin. In fact, the busboy was to learn that one of the younger cooks was actually from France and was trying to save enough money to go back.
“Busboy,” Jean (pronounced with a “z”: for the “j” and “buz” instead of “bus”), said to him, “why don’t you go and see if that table in the far corner needs any coffee or water, huh?”
Jean as, head waiter, liked to give orders to the young busboy. He was a tad taller than Brooklyn John. He usually had something in his mouth, like he was always chewing on something. He believed that there wasn’t anything gained by standing around, even if there were but a few tables occupied.
“I know, I saw them. They just came in.”
“Well, you know,” Jean said to him, like he was shooing a child away from adult company. “Go and see if they need anything.”
“Oh, okay.”
The club was never very busy. There was plenty of time to amble around, especially when Jean left, get familiar with the surroundings. The young busboy liked it when the concierge would swing open the door and, looking down a little bit from his pince-nez glasses, hand Brooklyn John the names of the guests who’d arrived that evening at Elmer’s.
Paul, the evening concierge, chit chatted amicably with Tex. The farm boy was much impressed with the gentleman’s visage, the slow way he would come through the doors, as he if was going to pronounce something or say something spectacular, so solemn yet with a sprinkle of humor, his tuxedo and correctly fashioned tie with a gold pin on the lapel bespeaking volumes of understanding of world affairs.
He was, after all, like his friend Geoffrey, who was general manager of the Club, a Princeton grad. The farm boy would get to know more about Paul as he began to work nights more steadily at the club, the backgammon game gaining favor.
The farmboy related to John debacle with the Uptown vs. Downtown. How there was only two strikes and a foul ball counted as a strike. Such that if you hit a foul ball with the next swing of the bat, you were out.
“I know,” John said. “That’s how we play it here. Like they always say, ‘You can take a boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”
Chapter 3--FARMBOY GETS CITY SLICK
First impressions duly recorded, second week on the job. Trying to get used to his new wardrobe. Coming from Nebraska with a black suitcase he’d acquired at Bub’s second hand store located on the city’s run-down district, Lower 4th,—where he and the goodly wife had shopped for furniture—he hadn’t planned to stay in NYC very long. Didn’t he have to go to California to check up on up his young son’s life? Were the wet ones in good supply? Had there been toy tractors to push around? Someone to play catch with? Thus, the apprentice busboy only packed a few shirts and couple pairs of jeans and cowboy boots and his Stetson to take along. It didn’t matter if the suitcase didn’t have latches that worked and had to be bound together with a rope.
Like NYC, it was but a temporary thing. He still had the 750 Norton Commando to get him anywhere fast once he got it started.
In fact, Jamie Cowboy, what the guy who took his picture in his Soho loft had called him, hadn’t dressed for any occasion but farm or construction work for as long as he could remember. James—what the farm boy deigned be called at the Club--was in short shrift when it came to busing tables at what his Uncle Frank said was a famous private Upper Crust Eastside restaurant.
Uncle Frank, charge d’ affairs, saw to it that his nephew could at least make a try at getting dressed for bus boy duties. As always, the money supply was getting low. Frank knew a guy who knew a guy that had a job.
“Why don’t you bus tables?”
“Why don’t I do what?”
The young farm boy was hence outfitted with a pair of borrowed slacks and shirt and borrowed shoes. Frank was a few inches taller, feet a little larger. Almost flapping about, the young bus boy looked slightly on the ridiculous side.
But he could abide by all of that. The only thing that really bothered him were the shoes—it felt like they would fall off any second.
He looked down at the pair of black wing tips--church-going shoes, really--Uncle’d donated to the cause.
The young Nebraskan bawled like a farm calf, “These won’t fit.”
Uncle Frank mitigated.
“Can’t you just stuff a couple pieces of paper in there?”
“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t want to be the spoil sport to the plans. “I guess so.”
The wads of paper stuffed ahead of the big toe helped. It still felt like they flapped around when he walked. No matter. He’d be headin’ for California post-haste.
All in good time.
“Boy, you got some big feet,” John said, looking down at the pair of black shoes that protruded from the black pants.
“Yeah,” the farm boy said, “I know. I borrowed ‘em from my uncle.”
Thomas came back from waiting on the middle aged couple that had chosen this particular Thursday evening to dine at Elmer’s.
“You can take the boy outta the country but you can’t take the country outta the boy,” John repeated, looking down at him, a grin widening on his face. Brooklyn native tryin’ to make sense out of the Nebraska native.
Thomas had a spotless white cloth draped over his forearm. He removed it and set it on the cushion that skirted the long bar.
“Give me a half-carafe of Dom,” Thomas called to the bartender who, James noticed, had few if any customers.
The bar, then, was mostly outfitted with glasses that were never used, a stock of hard liquor that stayed in one place. It was so unlike the bars the farm boy was used to: where was the pool table, men stickin’ quarters along the edge, gals feedin’ quarters in the juke box, a waitress walkin’ by with a plate of food, the call “I got next game” while a farm hand racked ‘em up, a gal hushing her young ‘en fightin’ over the pinball machine?
This place was blue, silent, almost serene, like you had to apologize if you wanted to talk.
“How’s it going,” the bus boy said, waving at the bartender who’d turned and set the wine glasses and the liter bottle of red liquor on the bar.
The bartender, bald at the top, with a ready smile and long side burns, affixed him with a ready smile.
“Not too bad, Jimmy,” he replied with a light Puerto Rican accent. “Not too bad. Yourself?”
“Oh, not so bad. Can’t complain.”
“Thas good.”
“Yeah.” The farm boy stood there, surveying the empty chairs. He watched Thomas pick up the order. “I figure nobody listens anyway.”
“Thas right.”
One of the jacket and tied men rose from the table, went to the bar and requested change for some cigarettes.
“Well Jimmy,” he said, “I’m getting pretty busy now so I’ll talk to ya later.”
“Sure.” Maybe it was high time he got busy, too.
He went over to the table. He re-filled the water glasses.
“Thank you,” the lady said, briefly turning to him and acknowledging his actions.
“You’re welcome.”
He went over the man. The farm boy, walkin’ the high iron but 18 months ago, was waved away.
“No thanks,” he said. “I got plenty.”
“Okay.”
As the bus boy left the table, he saw the Princeton Grad slowly swing the door open for another couple that entered Elmers. He carried an empty glass in one hand and an empty white plate with a light yellow stain and walked stiffly to where the busboy filled a tub full of dishes and glasses. Suddenly, the young farmer realized it must now be the latter part of the evening. The concierge had already dined on club victuals.
It had been an unusually slow night.
The busboy walked out to see the concierge, sitting in his chair behind the half door that opened to a small square coat rack. The vestibule was richly decorated with the Club logo—the zebra in blue and white, a pastel that showed the picture of a little girl dancing next to a piano on which sat a smiling pink elephant, playing. The caption in pink read, “There is nothing prettier than a little girl.”
Concierge Paul, in his mid-50’s and graying, wore a shock of white hair above his tuxedo, also required Club attire, neatly combed. Paul walked slow, almost stiff, like a judge, as if his great mind dwelled over the issuance of some great sentence. Geoffrey’s right hand man, Jamie thought, a Princeton grad. Suddenly James was excited to be in NYC and at the club. There was so much to learn.
The concierge usually sat on a chair behind a door where the guests could leave their coats and assorted garments. The bus boy liked to visit. Next to looking at pictures of Clark Gable and Lana Turner and Mickey Rooney noted celebrities whose pictures adorned the wall as former Club members, he’d go out to talk to Paul. After all, he was a Princeton Grad and thus could lend a surfeit of knowledge James felt he could take to California. He’d need to summon all the ammo he could muster.
Paul could be found sitting on a small wooden chair and reading a weighty tome.
He looked up from his glasses.
“Well, hello, Jimmy, how ‘re you doin’?”
He put his book down.
“Not too bad. How’re you doin’?”
“Not bad,” Paul said. “Not bad at all.”
“Whacha readin?”
“Oh, this?” Paul said. He looked at the book. He looked up at the farmer, wondering how detailed he could be in his explanation. “It’s the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
“Oh, that sounds good.”
“Oh, indeed, it is. It really gives you a chance to see how people really are.”
“Yeah?”
‘Yes. It’s why I like to look at people and see them as an animal.”
“Really?” The farm boy was really excited to learn this. Perhaps Paul had really stumbled on something.
“What kind of animal am I?” the bus boy said, smiling. Just been divorced, could scoot across the high iron like a monkey, father of a real smart kid now in L.A. Yeah, why not. He wanted to know.
“Well, James,” Paul said, looking at him with a degree of intensity, “you remind me of a playful puppy.”
This came as a surprise.
“I do?”
“Yeah, just a playful puppy, coming up and greeting people.”
You mean, wagging my tail, the farm boy thought. He wondered if he was too outgoing.
Paul was smiling. He hadn’t really thought of James as any kind of animal but it was the first thing that really popped into the great man’s head and it sounded like it really fit.
“Oh.”
“Well, James, if you’ll excuse me, I have to look over the reservations tomorrow. I think we’re having a special function at the club this coming Tuesday.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Chapter Four—Uptown vs. Downtown
A few months later he was workin’ with his hands again, lookin’ to swing a stick.
Billy said, “You play ball?”
“Oh yeah,” the country boy said. “I played some.”
“You wanna play in a softball game, Tex?”
He’d thrown a cold bottle of Michelobe beer in front of the country boy.
“Wha’?”
“A softball game. Some guys are getting’ together for a game this Saturday.” Billy threw his head back and put a hand through a wave of curly brown hair that nearly touched his shoulders.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, taking a swig of the beer and feeling it’s coolness in the back of his throat.
“Yeah.”
Kevin Sullivan, a rough-hewn boy who worked over in Hoboken loading trucks chimed in.
“Yeah, it’s Uptown vs. Downtown. We have a game once a year. Cost ya $10 bucks.”
“Ten bucks!”
Shoulders were shrugged.
“Yeah, gets you beer and burgers.”
Sullivan moved away and began talking to his buddy, Joe Quigley.
“Yeah, then I said, ‘Mother don’t be fuckin’ around.’ He hit me twice in the face. I said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good.’ Then I kicked his ass.”
Joey Quigley looked at him and nodded.
“Them guys from Jersey come over, we’ll take care of ‘em for ya.”
Tex thought of how he was walking towards 6th Ave. the other night, the catcalls from a large car with Jersey plates full of teenagers.
“ I was wearin’ my cowboy hat. They said, ‘Hey faggot,’ the drove off. II felt like flippin’ ‘em off.”
“Yeah, Tex,” Kevin Sullivan said. “Don’t be givin’ them guys the finger. That means you’re a faggot.”
“It does?”
“Yeah, that’s what gay guys do, they give them the finger. You have to go like this.” Sullivan gave a demonstration. He put his right hand over his crooked elbow and swung it quickly to his face and formed an L.
“Oh, really.”
The young farm boy studied his beer and thought. There sure was a lot to learn.
But he most went to the White Horse Tavern so he could see Yarie. The first time at the Horse, she was a waitress. He remembered the waitress at the A & W in the nearby small town. They had little cowboy hats on, white shirts and black pants and served loose meats and root beer or malt concoctions to people that drove up. They served and flirted. The A & W was a fave teen hang out. Kerry and a couple other gals Tex dated worked there a couple summers.
Tex felt like Yarie looked at him a couple times.
“Where you from?”
She looked up from her pad, the bartender moving behind her. She wrote down and then added up drink orders.
“Ohio,” she said.
“Oh. I’m from Nebraska.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“Is Yarie your real name?”
He was able to catch her between rounds of beer and burgers.
“No, it’s Elizabeth. But I don’t like it.”
The bus boy thought of his sister Beth. Cute, friendly, with deep dimples. She was an Elizabeth also. He and all his family and all his friends thought Beth was the perfect match of name with physique. Through all the years—but now, thinking of sister Beth as young child on the farm, beneath the high dark ceilings of the Horse, it almost sounded quaint.
“Yeah,” Tex said. “I got a little sister named Elizabeth. We call her Beth.”
“That’s why I don’t like it,” Yarie said. She turned away form him.
Just then, John Short came over.
Short, all 5’ 3“ of him, cut a swath through the small bar on the corner of W11th and Hudson.
“God bless ya, Tex,” Short said, stroking on his long salt and pepper beard. “God bless ya.” He began to laugh. It was Short, a Horse patron and something of a regular, could be the one credited with dubbing him Tex.
But the farm boy had a lot of affinity for the man. Unlike most of the NYers, there was something of a connection.
“Whatdya say you do?”
“I told ya Tex. I work with cement trucks. You know, make sure they got the right mixture of sand and gravel.
Short indeed had a light dusting of lime about his countenance.
He was also politically astute and running for position of alderman for the Greenwich Village neighborhood.
“Yeah,” John said. “They gotta do somethin’ with that Westside Highway. What’s it doin’? Nuthin’ but standin’ there.”
Nebraska chimed in. “Yeah, I worked with concrete quite a bit. First year out high school. I had to wheel so much concrete.” He thought of those hot days, pushing a wheelbarrow load of concrete up the grade.
“God Bless Ya, Tex, God Bless ya.”
Short was also interested in Yarie.
“I dunno. Why you lookin’ at me, I don’t know what she does.”
Short seemed a little too abrupt. He didn’t like to talk about Yarie.
“Hey Tex,” Kevin said a few days later. The farm kid was in for a burger. He thought they had the best burgers around, even thoiugh they were a little on the expensive side. “Let hear you sing that song, “sugar bear.”
“Wha’?”
“You know, that song.”
The Horse wasn’t very busy. Tex looked around, to see if anybody was aware of the predicament that he was in. That he was being ordered to do something.
“No, Tex, c’m on let’s hear you sing it. Kevin Sullivan started singing, “And they call me Sugar Bear.”
“No,” said Tex. “You do it.”
“Oh, all right. C’m on, Joe, let’s show him how we can sing it.
The men started singing, seated on the wooden stools.
“See, it’s no big deal. Now it’s your turn.
“Nah, that’s okay.”
“Ah Tex, you’re no fun. We thought that was your song.”
It’d been quite awhile since he’d been harangued like that. He didn’t quite know how to handle it.
Sullivan and Quigley packed off to the other end of the bar. Tex nursed his beer.
What the hell’s up with them? He wondered if maybe it was more difficult to strike up a friendship than in the Midwest.
Yarie came over in all her finery.
“Want anything, Tex?”
He was down to the count on his money. The beer was expensive. He barely had enough for a burger. He was hungry and not only did he not relish the thought of going home alone, he did not relish the thought of going home alone hungry.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll have a cheese burger medium rare. Do you guys take checks?”
“Hey Dutch, Tex wants to know if we take checks.”
“Whatsa matter Tex, little low on cash?” Dutch called down to the end of the bar. Dutch told Tex one afternoon, the bar light and airy, not much traffic coursing by on Hudson street, he’d run errands for Babe Ruth.
“Well, ya kinda.”
“No, we don’t take checks.”
He was already feeling slightly embarrassed and put upon by the neighborhood guy abrasion. It seems like when you try to be nice they think you’re a fag or somethin’.
He didn’t care. The juke box was humming. There was a song by Billy Holiday he’d heard at the Corner Bistro last week. “Go to church on Sunday, cabaret all day Monday, ain’t nobody’s business if I do.”
It put things quickly in retrospect. Just like when he’d go to the rotting Bank Street pier and watch the sunset behind the New Jersey landscape, thinking how many more hours of light Jeremy yet had left an entire coast away. The huge Maxwell coffee cup tipped down into the water and lights from the distant shoreline bounced off the Hudson River. He was playing and swimming in the ocean, the Pacific. His dad was throwing a small pebble into the Hudson’s dark brown water, tryin’ to make it skip across the water, wondering when he’d make the great escape and head west.
He looked at the cold beer in front of him. Sullivan and Quigley guffawed loudly at the other end of the bar. He knew now he could get plastered cuz Billy Holiday would come on and there’d e a NY moment.
“Gitchie, gitchie, ya, ya,/Gitchie gitchie ya, ya,” Dutch, who alternated with Andy, sang out, walking the length of the bar, clapping his hand. Another NY moment. He had to smile. The beer was expensive, the burgers delicious. He had to leave a dollar tip.
That was customary, that was what was expected.
He’d never drank bottled beer before, much less Michelob. In Nebraska, it was out of a can. A cold can of PBR. The ole bar sayings from the veteran drinkers. “Schlitz gives me the shits.” “I can’t drink that PBR.” The young farm boy remembered how his dad would sometimes stop at the bar on Hubbard’s gravel main street after chores and buy him a pop and give him a couple nickels to put in the machine where you fired a gun and tried to hit a moving target.
Dad always drank Hams. The moments lingered in the bar and one of the older ladies would put in “Cry Me A River,” and put her head down between her knees and almost begin to cry, tears falling on the sawdust.
Hams the land of sky blue waters. It was on the glass advertisement. It showed a blue stream coming out of the mountains. It sat in the back of the bar, beneath the bottles of liquor. The can of beer in front of his dad’s large thick hands.
“Hams the beer from the land of sky blue waters/Hams, the beer refreshing.”
Billy Holiday had never made it west of the Mississippi.
But it didn’t take him very long to get used to it, the bottle beer. In fact, like the cheeseburgers, it had become part of his new NYC regime.
Besides, another thing. The bars didn’t close ‘til 4 a.m. Just when it’d be about time to tell Geno he wanted one for the ditch, and watch the old eight ball not be poked around a small green table cuz the sticks were bein’ put away, the bartender would reach down and pull a cold beer from out of the cooler and stick it in a brown paper sack and twist it’s mouth shut.
No, he wasn’t even close to getting’ one for the ditch. It was not even quite 1 a.m. He had more n three more hours to drink.
At some point in time he’d have his Holiday.
“So what is it, Tex,” Billy said, coming over. “You gonna do the Uptown vs. Downtown game or what?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Cost ya $10 bucks. Get all the beers you want, all the burgers you can eat.”
“Yeah,” he said, hesitating, “I guess so.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “It’s a good time. If the downtown loses Kevin Sullivan gets a pie in his face. You might like that.”
“Oh yeah, really?”
“Yeah, whatever team loses, the captain gets a pie in the face.”
“Okay, I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.”
Billy moved away. A new wave of customers came through the thick black door. Some show must’ve gotten over cuz now another was about to begin.
Maybe they were done with acting class at H-B Studios.
Yeah, he tried it once. Just to meet some people. How did he know that it gotcha goin’ from one class to the next?
Ten bucks. Why does everything cost so much.
He remembered the glove he’d brought back from Nebraska. After a couple months, it was quickly collecting dust. There was nobody to play catch with; he didn’t even know where in the heck they played ball. And it sure wasn’t baseball. It was just softball. He really had no desire to do any of that.
But then, what the hell. It sounded like a good time, that maybe it was something of a party scene and he could meet some gals.
Like the civility of some NYers, Tex, thought, they seemed to be short supply.
How did ya ever meet Hanley?
It was a few weeks later. He’d made a miserable showing for the Downtown.
He completely misjudged a fly ball.
“Cmon, Tex, whatya doin’?”
He ran at break neck speed to retrieve it. He’d never played on concrete before. The ball taking off and taking on a life of it’s own.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
He got behind the ball and fired it home. The throw was accurate enough. He got it to the catcher who tagged the runner who by this time was headed for home plate.
“He’s out.”
They started off the field.
“Man, I really misjudged that one,” Tex offered to the guy playin’ next to him in the outfield.
The player just shrugged his shoulders without comment.
It was his turn to bat.
“Cmon Tex, hit one back to Nebraska,” Billy yelled.
The farm boy felt like all the eyes of the neighborhood were on him. However, like the hard surface they played on, there was no three strikes and you’re out. It was two strikes. A foul ball counted as a strike. So many rules, so hard to get used to.
He looked at the first pitch.
“Cmon, whadya want.”
He gripped the bat even tighter. Not only was he a fool out in the outfield, he was a fool at the plate. He could feel his face reddening.
The next pitch came in like a big fat pumpkin. Tex swung mightily but managed to get under the ball just enough to be a high pop fly in the infield. He ran to first base at breakneck speed but could see how the ball was easily caught.
He could hear some derisive catcalls. Somehow he was the hapless character in some movie still. Streets of NYC playing stick ball. He remembered reading something like that when he was in 7th Grade at the Catholic school. Playing stick ball, using garbage can lids for bases. He always looked out at the tall windows of the old school and looked at the fields before him, a farmer pulling a tractor through the rows and couldn’t ever even imagine how it must be.
And yet, ten years later, here he was.
“Tex, I’m gonna have Mikey come in. Maybe you could go help with the burgers.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You wanna toss me your glove?“Sure.”
He’ll be darned if he’d help the women. Just have a beer but none was offered him so he went over to where the case of beer was and helped himself.
Behind up a couple rows on the concrete bleachers was a rather stout guy sitting and chatting next to a younger kid. Before them was an open bag of marijuana. He saw the man take out what the farm boy immediately recognized as rolling paper and put it between what looked like a pair of thick hands not delicate enough for the task.
The man caught his glance.
“Can you roll?” he said.
It was a NYC neighborhood accent.
Tex sat there with his jeans and jacket. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
He went up to the pair and took the papers and proceeded to roll a joint.
The game continued before them, occasional shouts and yells as Kevin Sullivan banged a hard line drive and started flying around the bases. Joey Quigley was the next guy up. He easily smacked a drive deep to left field over the fence.
“Good hit, Joey,” the fans called as Quigley lazily circled the bases behind Sullivan.
“Yeah, yeah,” said the pitcher from the uptown squad. “We’ll get them back.”
Behind the wire fence that separated the bleachers from the ball field, he saw a short plump kinda cut gal he was to learn was Kevin Sullivan’s wife begin to throw patties together on a grill. She chatted with a taller more shapely girl, Italian locks to her shoulders and a nice smile he found later was Quigley’s girlfriend.
“Here.”
The joint was passed to him. He took a hit.
“Hey, go ahead and roll another one, will ya,” the man said. “I’m Terry Hanley, I just got outta prison.”
There was no way to decline this request.
Don’t cops every come around? The farm boy thought. A full bag of grass between them. It’s like it was no big deal at all.
“Cm’on Chooch,” Sullivan called. “We got some runs to make up.”
The concrete ball diamond continued to be sparsely crowded for a few more innings then other neighborhood kids he recognized as those who hung out on the corner of Andy’s on the corner of Bleeder and W11th showed up. Maybe many weren’t comin’ to see what was regarded as the supreme goof, the coach of the losing team getting a pie in the face.
“Hey, you wanna walk back to the Horse?” Hanley asked, turning from the corner of the below, peeing against the concrete benches.
Tex had seen enough and he’d done enough. He knew he was now shy $10 and again mentally calendared the days when his unemployment check would come in.
“Sure, I don’t care.”
The pair began walking back downtown.
“You got any money on ya?” Hanley asked.
“No,” Tex said. “I’m broke.”
“Here, wait here. I’ll go get some.”
He watched as the square figure reversed his step and headed back on the direction of the ball field.
Tex hung a few minutes, feelin’ stoned and tired.
“Ah heck with it, I ain’t waitin’ around any longer.”
He walked the 10 blocks to his Bank Street apartment—that seemed just about the longest walk of his life—and crashed on the bed, stoned, hungry, tired.
Chapter 6 Uptown vs. Downtown
His woman supply was getting low.
“Oh, he’s all right,” his ex-wife assured him. “He had that Tonka truck stolen at the beach the other day.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. He really liked playing with it.”
“God, I can’t stand it. I got to come out there.”
“Well, everything’s okay. We he’s got a lot of toys he can play with.”
“Well, I’m just workin’ in this restaurant. There’s no construction jobs out here in New York. I think I’ll just save up a little money and come out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really, I think I should. I can find somethin’ to do. I really miss Jeremy.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
Kerry knew Tex had not kept up on his support payments. That until her ex-husband came up with the money, there wasn’t much of a legal leg to stand on.
“I gotta go.”
She was working as a waitress in a restaurant in San Bernardino. How much did he imagine that California was the place that they’d live when they were married.
He remembered saying to her, knowing she was pg. They’d both been kicked out of institutions of higher learning: she out of a Catholic school her senior year for being pg. He out of a Jesuit university for smoking home-grown cannabis.
He’d driven up to her house. It was getting warm. They’d got past the winter months.
“Let’s go to California.”
“We’ll need some forks.”
The notion was foolish, he reckoned. So they waited a little longer and then it was too late and too hopeless and they went through the usual constraints: a wedding in a church, a one-night stand honeymoon and then he went back to work slingin’ mud, young wife sweepin’ the dusty floors of the Heartbreak Hotel.
No, only two of ‘em ever made it out to California to stay for any length of time.
“Okay.”
“Tell Jeremy I really love him and miss him.”
“Okay. I gotta go.”
However, busin’ table did not a good throw of money make. It took him a lot longer to save up. Plus, he’d gotten a letter forwarded from Hubbard. I guess she doesn’t have my NY address, Tex thought, why does she send it there?
His Mom had forwarded it to him.
Dear Ronnie,
I really don’t think it’d be a good thing for you to come out and visit Jeremy right now. It just wouldn’t work out. I’m doing my best to get him settled down and in a routine and if you came out it would just upset him. So please don’t come out. It just wouldn’t be a good time. I’ll write you and let you know when you can.
Kerry
He was both shocked and dismayed at the letter. He slammed the wooden door of his apartment and looked at the tall windows in the front room of the tenement and through to the tall building of brick over the courtyard that was brown and dead and never used, the sun circling away so that there was never a drop of light.
Later, he used it as excuse to go hang out with the boys at the park.
Solace was in need immediate.
“Well, whatya think of this, Frankie?”
He was over at Uncle Frank’s apartment. Because it faced the south, there was always a good view of the street and morning light shone through two tall windows, dappled over a polished wooden floor. It made promise for a day of peace and contentment. He liked always to go over and visit. The tea, which he didn’t really like to drink, was nevertheless quite good over there and it just had a feeling of homespun Irish and the laughter and books against the white walls on one side, bricks on the others. No matter how the farm boy tried to arrange his apartment just a building away, it was always dark with dark floors and a feeling of no light so that he almost always had many of the lights of his apartment on and an excuse to leave the dark quarters so he wouldn’t have to think or to write.
“How are you doin’?” Frank said, advancing towards him with a cup of tea, warn slippers stepping over from the kitchen that had a small gas stove, a sink, a small waist-high refrigerator you needed to bend over to retrieve items.
“Fine.”
“Here, I made a little tea for your baby self. What’s going on?”
“Oh,” the farm boy said. “I got this letter from Kerry. Do you want to read it?”
“Sure,” Frank said, pulling the light bathrobe about his chest and coughing. “I can’t get rid of this cough. What does it say?”
“Here.”
Frank was handed the letter. He sat down and quickly scoured the contents.
“Well, it’s obvious she doesn’t want you to come out.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And why would you want to anyway? You’ve got your apartment, you’re thinkin’ about going to college. Why bother her, why don’t you just leave her alone? You don’t need her.”
“Well, Jeremy’s toy was stolen and I just feel like if I was closer I could help out.”
“Well, it’s obvious she wants to sort some things out on her own. How long she’s been out there, nine months? And you’ve been only in New York for six? Just give it some time. You can see Jeremy at Christmas, can’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Well see him then. There’s no sense you giving up your apartment and trying to move out there. You guys already tried that once. Get your act together here.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t even bother. You’re just wasting your time.”
“Well, I guess I want to talk to him and see him.”
“Well, doll, you can see him at Christmas. Write him a letter, send him somethin’.”
“Yeah, how do I know she’ll even let him see I wrote it.”
“Well, that’s for her to decide.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“But, if I were you, I’d keep that letter.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you can always show it to him later.”
He was about to throw it away. He wasn’t good at keeping rejections.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Give it to your mother and have her keep it for ya.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I would. Then someday you can always show it to him.”
The young farm boy wasn’t too sure about this ploy. Why leave it around.
However, adhering close to what Uncle Frank had to say, why not. He’d be going out there soon, anyway, what difference did it make.
“Yeah,” Frank continued, “I wouldn’t even bother her. It just stirs things up. I thought you said you might go back to school.”
“Yeah, I guess so. I’ve gotta see if I can get any help from NY Rehab.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’d do. If they’ll help you out, why not.”
He looked at the slow traffic moving past. Frank’s second floor apartment facing south was an ideal chance to get the sweep of the land before them. The farm boy liked to hear the sound of tires on cobblestone, almost making him feel like he was in some enchanted land.
“Yeah, maybe so.”
“I would. I know that’s what I’d do. You’ve already done all that doll. Time to move on.”
The farm boy watched across the street as a slew of young people queued up near the basement door that led into a small set of stairs that was the acting studio. They talked and chatted amicably, excited to go on stage While it was but a small stepping stone, the eternal spring of hope told each and every one of ‘em they had as good a chance as any.
He sorely wished he could have a front building apartment, thinking about returning to his dark apartment.
“Yeah, you’re right. I got things I gotta take care of here.”
“Yes, doll, get cher act together here. I’m sure she loves Jeremy and she’ll take care of him.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Get your degree, get a job, then get established then maybe you could go out there.”
Uncle Frank continued to busy himself about his apartment. Sprawled out on the bed that folded into a couch was bits and pieces of a skit he was putting together.
“Yeah, I’ve got to be at Reno Sweeney’s next week. I’m going to go on an audition and I’m working on some material.”
“Yeah,” said the farmer. “I’d better get rolling along. So just stick around, huh?”
Frank’s voice picked up a little beat, “Oh, no, no, no. You don’t need to go out there. Let her alone, get it all together, here, doll. I’m waiting for you to write a play and you can make me the star.”
“Oh, yeah, right, I forgot.”
“You don’t need that. Do what she says, let her do what she wants to do. I’m sure they’ll be all right.”
The farm boy had got all the hogs in the barn at least for the day. He was relieved that now he didn’t have to make the next step and fly out there.
“Yeah,” he said, opening the big thick wooden door. He hated leaving the sun and the warmth from his uncle’s apartment. “I guess you’re right. See ya.”
“Okay, doll. Just keep track of the letter. Maybe you can show it to Jeremy later.”
“Yeah, okay. See ya.”
He looked down at it, but quickly re-read it. No, she definitely didn’t want him out there, or have anything to do with the current state of affairs. Yeah, just leave her alone. Why not? Finish out at the New School. See if NY Rehab will pay for school then get the degree. Although he didn’t like pushing through the door of his apartment, he now had some resolve.
Hugh Allen, the El Morrocco general manager, had hired the farm boy.
Just this farm boy from Nebraska.
Had to make a little money so he started busing tables at Club El Morocco.
Chapter 7 PAY STUB
The sojourn must’ve been something of a long one: I think I started there pre-Christmas of ’74. This check stub says 6.5.76. That means there was some 2 and one-half years busin’ at the club.
But I’m glad I got the stub, it puts certain things in context. Uncle Frank always said keep a diary and I did so faithfully about eight years I was in the city but because I was in a hurry to get out, my apartment was trashed, it’s hard tellin’ what happened to ‘em. But that was towards the end.
I can remember the big guy from Brooklyn. There wasn’t ever that many people there. I had to go down and drop off the dirty dishes. I remember how I carried them—in front of me. It was only ‘til maybe a few weeks later I started putting the dirty dishes over my shoulder.
It was down the stairs.
By the time I quit, this was probably my last check, I was getting’ a little of the Hanley run. He was takin’ the country outta the boy.
I said to the guests, who inevitably were playin’ backgammon. They had this constant on-going backgammon tournament. And scores would be kept and sometimes, after the meal, these people would sit at these small tables across from each other in the Elmers’ section of the club and play these long-winded games of backgammon that was like a sonata. Just a long bit of playing, is what I’d like to say.
Yeah, it had to be post-Hanley. I didn’t meet brother Dennis until later but ole CI, is what they used to call him, was as ruff and tuff and gruff as any of ‘em. He’d just gotten outta Sing Sing. There was somethin’ about killin’ a guy during a fight.
“I never lost a fight,” CI told me after I got to know him a little better.
I think Ali Buba was on the scene then, too. No, she was in the horizon. It was a wild and crazy summer in NYC, the ’76 one was.
I’d take the subway and whip over to the Club. I’m just noticing the address. And now, this July 9, 2000, I’m not only writing down the address, I’m seein’ if the club’s still in operation.
It is: 212/355-1254.
Which is one way to surprise the heebie jeebies outta me. Like the Hanley’s, I’d thought they’d long met their demise.
I know Jerry Mud’s gone. I know Eddie Quig’s gone.
(See, I remember how Eddie never wanted to be called a punk.)
There were a couple people interested in the young boy’s progress: “Cal’s gonna teach me how to box,” Eddie said.
I don’t know how much the boxing lessons prevailed. I just know I was a little bit afraid of his older bigger brother—I can’t remember his name, now--who got all over my ass one time at the Horse and I found myself exiting stage left.
See, I was just this guy named Tex and I was startin’ to invade some of the neighborhood turf. Like I said, I just wanted to meet some people and hang out, like I was used to doin’. NYC guys and gals from the West Village neighborhood had something of a different take on it.
This Quigley was the middle brother between Joey and Eddie. Eddie’s problem, he wasn’t as big as his older brothers, kinda the scrawny runt of the family, tho’ I heard there was another brother who didn’t come around at all or hang out with any of the gang or crowd.
And then, that’s where I met Don, at the Club. He was originally from the South Bronx. He musta been tryinin’ to pull a few bucks together. I think he worked in the Club section and was a waiter.
But Don was the kinda guy you took an instant liking to. He had a great South Bronx accent. I remember how I’d have a little grass or he’d have a little grass and we’d go outside the Club after work and just stop in this doorway and smoke a joint.
I was pretty cocky then. Don moved in with me a ocuple weeks later but then moved out a couple weeks later because while I always thought quite wonderful to have someone share my space with me to help with the rent, somebody to socialize with, shoot the breeze with. But that never lasted too long because it was such a small apartment, pretty soon we’d start bumpin’ into one another.
So like Alex and this other guy, they’d hang on with me a couple 3-4 weeks then drive me nuts and I’d have to ask them to leave.
Chapter 8 When It All Started Comin’ Down
“Niggers and spicks out of the park,” screamed a few of the boys, chargin’ into a crowd of black youth. These boys hung out at Abingdon Square Park, some regular attendees at the Downtown vs. Uptown game. While it only happened in a brief warm summer afternoon, it set not a few things in motion.
It seems they’d been burned on a bag of grass. Mikey and Joey Chappetti and a couple others decided they’d go and punish the guy who sold ‘em the bag grass.
However, upon return, they were bested in a bit of fisticuffs. Somehow it came to be reported that the youth of the West Village weren’t as tough as the youth of the East Village. At any rate, they were bested. They were bested by a black guy Mary Jane dealer. In front of what musta been a small crowd.
Oh ignominious defeat!
Not only did they not get revenge for the bad grass, they got their butts kicked.
Well, maybe not butt’s kicked exactly. But the young warriors did not come out ahead.
Joey Chappetti? I remember him. He was drinkin’ at the Horse. Like I said, I was havin’ my usual NYC fling at the White Horse Tavern, havin’ a couple beers and a burger. I knew it was where Dylan Thomas had drank at the place in his heyday; sometimes I’d read part of “Fern Hill,” a copy of which was laminated onto the wall on the entry between the main bar part and the back seating room. Sometimes I’d stop and glance at it, trying not to be too literary pretentious.
Tryin’ to inveigle myself with the neighborhood group, I’d sometimes strike up a conversation with guys about my age who looked like they’d be good to get to know.
At any rate, Chapetti was there one time and he and other guy I brought over to my apartment on Bank Street not too far away, walkin’ around a little bit at the Horse. I’d never seen ‘em in there before.
Of course, it wasn’t just to come over to my apartment and drink beer, they prob’ly thought I was gay and was lookin’ for action. ‘Course, nothin’ could be further from the truth: I just wanted someone I could bs with.
So Chapetti jumped me. He got behind me and put a knife to my throat.
“Hey, give us some money.”
“I don’t have any money.”
He had a young friend with him.
“Let’s take his radio.”
So while I’d fought a couple times in Nebraska, it was the first time I’d had a knife in my throat. I let ‘em go with the portable radio.
I didn’t try to chase ‘em down or nothin’. However, I sorely missed the radio. When buddy Alex Petalie, who’d stayed with me for a couple months to help defray month rent, was told about it, he instantly marched to the park.
There the neighborhood guys were. Standin’ there, hands in their pockets, most of them wearing bomber jackets.
“Are you Joey Chapetti?”
There was a group of neighborhood kids there, looking on.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“This is my friend Ron’s radio you took. We want it back.”
I stood there with Petali in front of Andy’s. Old Andy on the corner with his short white dog and his son who’d sell the New York Times, New York Post, the Daily News. Sometimes, I stopped and I’d buy one of the papers. I don’t know what we would’ve done if there would’ve been action but Chapetti solved our worries. It was Sunday and Andy’s was closed for the afternoon. So he wouldn’t have to observe the festivities which were completely becoming an embarrassment
“Ah,” he said, “don’t worry about it. We was drunk, just doin’ a goof. You’ll get yer radio back. I’ll leave it at the Horse.”
The reason we found out the name is Chapetti, in his haste, had left his light brown Bomber jacket in the apartment. He had some id.
“Yeah, okay,” Petalie said. “That sounds like a good idea.”
Later, a couple of the neighborhood kids came up to me.
“That friend of yours, he’s got some balls, comin’ up to Chapetti with all us standin’ around.”
I shrugged my shoulders. For some reason, I didn’t want anyone to think that Petalie was that much tougher than me. We’d sparred with a pair of boxing gloves I had in my apartment and I could beat him pretty easily.
“Yeah,” I said, admitting the obvious. That I was the coward and he was the hero. “Yeah he did.”
I took Chapetti’s light brown jacket to the White Horse a few days after I picked up the radio.
Andy, the bar keep, handed it over to me. “Here’s something a kid left off for ya, Tex.”
Oh, by the way, it had become my nickname: Tex. It was due in large part to the Stetson I wore first entry into the Horse.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
Andy had just brought up a bucket of ice from the basement and dumped it into the coolers that kept the beer iced and cold for the regular customers. Some would just get the Michelobe from the small cooler behind the bar.
He could sense the chickenshit guy. Andy looked at me a little aloof. We were about the same age and here’s a younger kid takin’ advantage of the kindness of strangers and rescued by a New Jersey friend.
This day, Andy, who usually said, “Hey, you wanna beer,” just kept busy with his ice duties.
“Hey,” Tex said. “We’ll see ya later.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. “All right.”
It looked like a well-worn bomber jacket the boy had been wearing. The Nebraska farmer let it hang on one of the park-bench type chair he’d borrowed from Uncle Frank’s friend Don. Although he tried to sit on it a couple times, it was just not for the making of any comfort. It did fit nice in the corner of the small room that ran straight north to a pair of windows separated by dark red brick that looked out onto a desolate courtyard and an abandoned building across the way that he’d heard was the remains of an old Chinese noodle factory and from which the sound of a large door slamming could be heard when a gust of wind kicked up and stole itself into the dark confines.
He’d bet in all the years he lived there, he’d probably sat in it for less than a minute twenty times.
The jacket, meanwhile, seemed to tell a story unto itself: it was a light tan but thick. He put it on and thought he could smell where a pack of cigarettes had been stuck in a lined pocket. While it was warm, it didn’t feel right. Small petty thief stuff, just worn on a night to go out with the neighborhood boys and stir up some action. Like all the young New Yorkers of the neighborhood he was to get to know, there were no gloves in the pockets. He never seen so many people in all his life walking around with their hands in their pockets.
But Chapetti, after the jacket/radio exchange, got himself into a deeper pool of trouble. He was the ring leader—or one of the go-to guys—when it came to take the revenge in Washington Square Park.
Joey took along with him Mikey, one of the boon companions. They assembled a mass of kids. Stopping at a small bench area off 6th Ave., carrying chains and baseball bats plans were, like an impromptu stage production, quickly rehearsed. They flew into the park a block or so away and attacked with baseball bats and chains.
“Niggers and spicks outta the park,” they yelled, swinging at people of color. The only ironic part was that, with the entourage, there were both a black and Puerto Rican in the gang.
And they tore up the park but a black NYU student, sitting on one of the benches that circled thr water fountian in the middle of the park, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though not aware of any West Village boys pot dealer contretemps, he was the only one killed in the melee.
Of course, this was a couple years after what was probably the last pay stub from Club El Morocco. Tex’d since moved newly acquired bus boy duties to Tavern on the Green, a shorter subway ride, a newer club, a chance to become a waiter. He always wanted to be a waiter. It was such higher dollar, it was a status, he didn’t have to listen to waiters telling him what to do or where to go. I mean, he always thought, how difficult is it to pour water? How difficult is it to remove the dishes and glasses post-feast then take the tub to the dishwasher.
Plus, the Club, while taking on an expression, seemed to be forever losing any spark of the old days when the rich and famous would freely consort.
In fact, he’d taken Paul’s place as concierge. They tried to work him in as waiter but the constant change of drinks was too overwhelming. There was such fancy names; he had just as much trouble remembering what they were let alone how to set it up for the bartender.
Plus, waling to the subway, uniform he’d wear as a bus boy at Tavern on the Green stashed beneath his arm, he decided he’d best get his act together and finish college. A nibble here, a dibble there, a marriage here, a divorce there, it was time he got it all going.
Quit horsin’ around, he told himself.
Thus, filling in as concierge was a good way to let him study while making a little extra money. Emmanuel Plutzik of New York State Rehab allowed that tuition from the Rehab was a go. He might as well take a shot at college and go at it ‘til he got his degree.
So the last check has a little clarification in order. It’s not the last busboy check, it’s the last concierge check.
And, with his new-found friends in the Neighborhood, he’d grown tired of Paul. While the Princeton grad was always the more nattily dressed, he could tell that when Paul came up close to you, he had an advanced case of periodontal disease. It wouldn’t be too long before his teeth would be falling out and he’d have to be wearing braces.
But Chapetti and Mikey got in big trouble. Going into Washington Square Park yelling, “Niggers and spicks outta the park,” was perhaps an inspiration but crude war cry but they ended up bludgeoning a black youth. The black youth, like Tex, was a senior at the college.
And then, as way leads on to way, Tex sympothized with their plight but down deep he felt it was a cowardly act. Sittin’ at the stool at a crowded White Horse Tavern, more busy in late afternoon than he’d ever seen it, mothers of the attackers were collecting donations for their defense fund.
So when the charge came for him to pay up—one of the suspects Mom’s came over and held out a small bowl like for collection that had a few bills in it—to me and donate to the defense fund for Mike and Joey , who were, as they like to say, “carrying the weight,” he’d just finished his final final exam NYU: he remembered writing his level best to draw and accurate portrait of the Wife of Bath but, like all his labors, earned him but a B for the course and for the semester.
So he decided it would be to the Horse to celebrate.
The old rustic bar was filled with people and tension. Red, the bartender who was great friends with CI, reported a comment Tex made.
“Do you wanna contribute to the defense fund, for the boys?” It was a lady wearing a thin scarf around her head, holding a cup of money in front of him.
He was in the middle portion of the bar. It was but mid-afternoon but it was nearly full. Many people had already been drinking through much of the day.
Tex was feeling a bit on the fuck you side.
“No,” he said. “I’m not gonna give anything.” He thought of the college, #4 out of other failed attempts. Just finished his final final exam from, how a fellow student’s hopes had been permanently dashed when he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had been killed by Chapetti and Mike Adriani and a couple others that had sought revenge on the drug deal that had gone bad.
“I think they should do more time.”
The lady quickly turned from him.
Red, who’d taken Andy’s place as pt day bartender, had overheard the comment. He went to the end of the bar and reported it to Terry Hanley.
He watched as this news was reported by Red. Hanely recorded it with a nod and walked over toward Tex.
“John Wayne, take your hat and your beer get out of here,” he ordered, advancing menacingly.
The farm boy was lookin’ to celebrate his college completion. He didn’t care. He didn’t realize that until that moment that Mikey was tall and black haired and good-looking and would soon quite possibly be following in Uncle Terry’s footsteps and going on up the river for murder during a fight.
“Yeah,” the farm boy said, shrugging his shoulders. “Okay.”
He still didn’t care. It was still wrong for them to act like that and kill somebody innocent.
He left the Horse. Still he felt like getting drunk. He needed to properly celebrate the graduation.
What had he written about the Wife of Bath? It was all for the nones. The lady professor, he could never inveigle her countenance. Course, he was surprised to learn that the goodly wench was the first women’s libber. He didn’t like Steinem and all the rest, their pronouncement of the power of women he felt he was increasingly subject to.
He remembered how the written final final exam was in a different room. He wrote more than any of them, and perhaps said the least. He knew he’d prob’ly get a B. That’s what he always got. Either a B or C+. Where was he going wrong that he could never earn an A? Of yes, one class. A speech class but that was with mostly a group of gals already that looked dowdy, larger than their peers, a little down at the mouth. Yes, they looked like, he imagined, they belonged in a classroom.
He remembered after finishing he cut through Washington Square Park. It had been the site of a violent scene late last summer. From what he could gather from second hand, having drank with a couple of the neighborhood kids, Chapetti’d gotten burned on the deal. He came back for revenge and got his ass kicked. He called on Mike Adriani. The popular youth, thick black hair that made him look like a handsome John Travolta, got the rest of the gang together. They attacked the park, swinging chains and baseball bats with nails in them. They’d killed an NYU student.
Who’d no part in the deal. Just sittin’ there and a mob came upon him and killed him for no reason.
But by the time he headed down the street, the half buzz he had from the beers made him stubborn instead of rational. Rational, maybe he woulda kept his mouth shut and paid out a few tokens for the defense fund. What was to defend? They attacked someone and killed someone. It was hasty and cowardly. It made him sick when he thought about it.
It just as easily, he reckoned, coulda been him. Chapetti was just a punk that couldn’t fight and liked others to do it for him. Chapetti had jumped Tex in the apartment and took along a radio but Alex got in back without a whimper.
“Hey, Andy, what’s up?”
The bus boy had walked to the Cookie Bar. It was just about on the corner of Bank Street. If it wasn’t the White Horse it was the Cookie Bar the young would-be talent from HB Studios went to after rehearsal. Excited, they carried themselves with a pronounced step, visions of grandeur in their head. It just took a couple nods of approval from their acting teacher.
“Hey, Tex,” Andy said.
He was seated with a couple people the farm boy didn’t recognize.
“Could I get a beer here.”
He’d only been in the Cookie Bar once or twice before. One of his scene partners form the studio had suggested they go there and they could go over the lines together. It was from the play, “The Day’s and Nights of BB Fenstermaker.” He was this itinerant goof of a farm boy, southern accent and all.
There was nothing whatsoever wrong with that save to say his scene partner, twice his size in girth and height, he could find little pleasure in rehearsing with.
But she’d start chatting amicably with other friends, who swooned about her with smiles and graciousness and soon, the southern farm boy despite attempts to interject, was drowned out of the pix. Tex was glad to beat a hasty retreat.
“I gotta go know.”
“Ok. Tata.”
See, Tex just hated the way they said that. Like they were in the inner circle of casting director’s sight that someone would be bound to overhear and quickly pick them up as an aspiring new personal to capture stage and screen.
“How could I ever be romantically inclined to that wide body,” Tex thought, sorely missing what he thought was his ex-wife’s sinewy beauty.
But this day at the Cookie Bar was different. He’d taken his final final. Because he attempted to get in with the neighborhood crowd, and therein had had a few beers in the nearby Abingdon Park with them, should he not enlist his aide.
No more would he have to lug books up and down the street, crowd himself into an elecator.
After two colleges pre-accident and one semester after, trying to pull brains and family together, after the New School for Social Research when things at least seemed to be turning the corner for at least a smattering of the positive he’d finally strung enough semesters together to get to that point. Graduation.
Tex knew it was time to celebrate, time to dance to the music.
“Yeah,” he said as the bartender set the beer down. “Gimmie a shot of Wild Turkey.”
He rarely drank shots. In previous days, when there’d be a party at the small green house on the corner when he was married, Walshie’d come out with his buddies and they’d drink shots of Gold Tequila. They’d lick the back of their hands, pour some salt on it, toss the tequila down in a single swallow then lick the salt off their hand, stick a slice of lemon in their mouth and eat it.
Walshie challenged ‘em all. “Cm’on you half stepper,” he called. “Your turn for a shot!” The band Dirty Duck would be playin’ in the living room, people were dancing and partyin’. The house rang with laughter and shouts and challenge, the music thunderin’ out the windows and down through the street.
But this was different. Party days in Nebraska were long gone: The little shot glass stood full in front of him. He studied it and turned his attention to the game.
The Mets had a runner on third base.
Andy, deigning that Tex was without courage, didn’t offer up more than a few words.
The Nebraska boy was feeling on the mouthy side.
“Hey, Andy,” who was intent on the game. “I bet they don’t score.”
“All right, Tex, you don’t think so? Here, I’ll betcha two bucks sez they do.”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
He drank the beer and started sipping the whiskey. An odd sensation, a warmth came over him.
The Cookie bar was lighter than the Horse. He forgot quickly about the somewhat diminutive night he’d spent with the actress. They only did a couple nights of rehearsal of “BB Fenstermaker” and he grew quickly tired, unable to concentrate, as the lady next to him did not look like anyone he’d have the slightest inclination of knowing further. He just said the heck with it.
In fact, it was when, for some reason, he decided he’d enough of the acting class. At first, going right across the street and joining in with the group that thought of themselves as having a potential career in acting was in and of itself as they say in NYC, “a goof.” He goofed around with it for awhile, met some people, found that it wasn’t that bad of a thing to be considered but then some things began creeping into him, like the new teacher, why did she pair him up with such a homely dame?
Yes, try as he might, he couldn’t overcome it. She was forever going onto more singing and dancing lessons. She was devoting full time to the study of.
He just quit going to the class. Tex watched as a line of students more than a block lock waited patiently to get in to audition, to see if they could be part of Uta Hagen’s class.
But that didn’t matter, now he was head of the class. He knew the neighborhood kids thought of him, in one respect, “Joe College.” But they had no right to go over to the park he’d been walking past for more than three years and just make a complete piece of mayhem and violence out of it.
Jesus H. Christ how could you be so dumb.
Of course, he didn’t know who the black person was that was killed the week before but it didn’t matter. He pedaled his old bike slowly through the south side of Washington Square, late for class. Other days there’d be a warm spring morning and he stopped and watched a filming of “Kojack.” Another time, he remembered how his girlfriend Alison and he had sat down at the partk before class. Alison smoked a light Kent cigarette. A guy came up to her.
“Could I have a smoke?”
Alison, a sophomore, wearing a blue windbreaker and immediately pulled it from her pack.
“Hey thanks,” said the man and walked away.
They kept on talking about the most silly things. About her dad in Pennsylvania, her mom planning to move to Houston, Texas.
“Why does she wanna go there?”
“I don’t know. She’s getting’ tired of Manhattan.”
“Oh.”
“And,” she said, lighting a cigarette from the green colored pack of Kool cigarettes, “I’m getting ready to head for the University of Colorado in Denver.”
“Yeah,” said the farm boy, I know. Please don’t remind me.”
He had gotten to know Alison fairly well and pretty quickly. Always looking for romance, they both pretty much hit it off. She was young and pretty. She looked like his sister Beth. But just when things were getting’ interesting, she was moving away.
Just then, the same guy approached ‘em. They were on the corner of the park where there was a small circle where water could’ve run if it was hooked up. For as long as he could remember, it was always dry. Like the fireplace in his apartment, it was for show only.
“Hey, do you mind if I get a cigarette from ya,” the man said. He was bearded and a little hunched over. It didn’t like he had taken a bath for a couple days.
“Didn’t I just give you one,” Alison said.
The man looked at her plaintively.
“Oh, okay, here.”
The morning was just too perfect and too beautiful to throw any negative vibes.
“Oh my God,” Alison said, throwing back a head of thick black hair. People can be just a pest.”
“Oh,” Tex said, standing up and stretching, watching the man limp away. It’s just such a beautiful day. Who wants to go to class?”
“Oh, I know,” Alison said, taking out her cigarette and beginning to crush out the head on the concrete. “I’ve got to go. I know I’m falling behind.”
“Me, too. I don’t know why I decided to take the Psch class. I’m doin’ terrible on the tests. What’re you doin’ tonight.”
“Oh, my mom wants me to go to Lincoln Center for an opera performance.”
“Oh. I hate opera.”
“Well, she’s going to be moving soon and I’m going to be leaving so we won’t have that much more time together.”
“Yeah, right. I’ve got to go try out at the new restaurant in Central Park, to see if I can get on.”
“OK.”
He thought about these short little scenes he had at the park. Sittin’ on the bench, shootin’ the breeze. And then somebody from out nowhere comes and tears at ya with a baseball bat or chains.
It was just the wrong thing to do.
But the beer and the shot and the lightness of the bar made him forget about a good share of that. The Cookie Bar was lighter. He didn’t feel the constricted darkness of the Horse, the tightening in his throat, the pressing in of favors. No, there’d been something of an ugly tension. But because he could finally say he did it, he’d graduated from college, it didn’t matter if he was Pal Joey or not: it was a goal he’d reached, a personal milestone.
Yes, James Jeremy, I’ve graduated. I’ve got my degree. Now, I can make something of myself. Like Grandpa said, “It’s somethin’ they can’t take away from ya.”
He looked at the colored TV on the bar and saw the third baseman and the man on third leaving the field.
The farm boy chortled. It was the first money he’d made after graduation.
“See Andy, I told you they wouldn’t score.”
“Here ya go, Tex, knock yourself out,” Andy said, throwing over a pair of dollar bills.
“Hey, thanks Andy, ‘ppreciate it. I really didn’t think they’d come away without scoring. Man, they’re hopeless, can’t score from third with one out.”
Cal, who cleaned up the White Horse and could always be seen sweeping the bar or cleaning the windows, usually with a glass of beer on the bar in the mid afternoon. He’d warned Tex on another night. The farmer’d been talking with a literary friend. Some wild spiel of a tale. It was just one of those oncversations you can strike up in a bar, finding you had a lot of commonalities. Tex was more than beside himself, a true compatriot in the dark literary denizens.
They even went to the john together. They were both pissin’ still talkin’ excitedly. Cal came in through the door and cornered them, washin’ up.
“Hey guys, you kinda wanna be careful what you’re sayin’,” Cal said, a curly mop of black hair and serious look on his face.
“Huh, what?” The farm boy looked at his friend. He felt Cal’s arm around his shoulder. He looked over at his friend. He was just as surprised. Cal’s arm was around his shoulder to, like he was going to know their heads together.
“You guys are getting’ too loud, you know. I’d take it easy if I were you.” Cal had an edge of sinister in his voice. That he would take the both of them and pummel them at a moment’s notice.
Tex didn’t know what to say. “Yeah, sure, I guess so.”
Cal left them at their stalls.
“Do you know that guy?”
“Oh yeah, that’s Cal. He works here most of the time. Manager or something.”
“What’d he want?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hey, listen, I better be goin’. It’s getting’ kinda late.”
“Oh, yeah,” the bus boy said. “I guess so.”
The both left the bar. And now Cal was sitting next to him again at the Cookie Bar. There was the perennial glass of beer in his hand before him.
Cal leaned over to him and talked in his slow low tone.
“Hey, there, sonny,” Cal said. “You’re getting’ a little loud ain’t ya? I’d quiet down if I were you.”
His final final exam.
He’d just won a small bet from Andy. He’d already been kicked out of the White Horse. He was damned if anyone was gonna keep him from his small celebration.
He turned to Cal and felt a flash of anger.
“Hey Cal,” he said, “why you bein’ such a hard on? I’m just havin’ a couple beers.”
“Oh yeah,” Cal said. He was quick in his response. “You wanna go outside and talk about it?”
“Yeah, okay, I don’t care.”
They both left the bar. He walked right next to Cal. He thought Cal was going to talk about the rudiments of quiet conversation in bars generally, Greenwich Village bars particularly.
“Well, whadya wanna,” Tex began.
“You little punk,” Cal said and slammed him in the face with a fist and began to throw another one.
Tex, now a few sheets to the wind, the punch felt almost like a slap in the face.
“Why you motherfucker,” Tex said. He grabbed Cal by the neck and threw him to the ground. Cal was helpless to move. He couldn’t free himself.
“Why you always talkin’ such shit, thinkin’ I’m weak or somethin’. I’ll show you who’s weak. He hit Cal square in the face with his fist. It was not fair. He shoulda let Cal get up. And then they could go after it like two combatants.
“Okay, Tex, you got him, let him up.”
A couple of the younger neighborhood kids had come over. They pulled him off Cal.
Cal quickly walked away.
“What was that all about,” Mikey Stewart said.
“I dunno,” Tex said. “I was just havin’ a couple at the Cookie Bar and Cal starts getting’ on my case and we go outside and he hits me in the face and so I just grabbed him.”
“You hit him pretty hard. I think he’s comin’ back.”
“Well, I dunno. That’s what happened.”
Just then Cal came from around the corner. Two or three of his friends grabbed him. He started feeling blows raining on him.
There was Cal in the middle.
“Why don’t you fight like a man,” he said. Tex was down. He felt himself being kicked in the side. Cal stood up. His fists were up.
“Okay,” Tex said. He got up and advanced toward Cal, his fists up.
Suddenly, from out of his right, a kick nailed him in the rib, it sent him to the ground again. He felt kicks again, he tried to cover up his head. He heard a voice call out from the apartments of Bleeker Street.
“Hey, why don’t you leave the kid alone.”
“Yeah, why don’t you leave me alone,” Tex said to the feet and fist flying.
Suddenly, the fists and feet stopped. Tex staggered to his feet.
One of the men sitting on the bench said, “Hey, you wanna beer.”
It was a Schaffer’s beer. It was an east-coast beer that he’d never drank before.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Tex said. He took the cold beer and began walking to his apartment, his gut hurting.
It’d been one heckova day. It’d been heckova graduation day.
“Whadya mean he didn’t have nuthin’? He struck you out.”
Chapter 9—Abingdon Square Daze
A few months later, after Tex’d been booted out of the Village apartment, he was at the bar, reminiscing with a guy he hadn’t seen for a month of Sundays.
So how’d it all begin? You were at least makin’ your rent in NYC. Whydya leave?”
“Oh, I dunno,” the man said, turning from his bar stool and looking out at the traffic on the small town’s main street go by; the men going to grind a batch of feed and finish up their chores, the wives return home from some shopping.
It was prob’ly the first time Tex’d sat at a bar without the feeling that if he stepped outside, someone would be waitin’ to get him. No, this was just a small Nebraska farm town. He was at a small Nebraska bar, havin’ a few beers with a couple guys he used to know, hadn’t seen around for awhile. He felt safe. It was good to be home again.
“There’s a bunch of different reasons. I started hangin’ with some guys at the park.
He tried to sound valiant, instead of a hopeless drunk. After awhile, it was not only no use, but it was boring. Who cared? They wouldn’t understand anyway.
But he couldn’t help but replay the scene, the series of scenes that saw him one minute lookin’ to finish out the school year at Wade JHS up there in the South Bronx, not far from the Grandview Parkway, the next minute tellin’ Frank he had to go.
“Hey, anybody wanna shoot a game of pool?”
Mike called to a couple hunters that had just sat down with a red beer and a hot ham and cheese sandwich in front of him.
“Yeah,” said one of the guys with a beard and a pony tail, “I don’t mine.”
“Okay, I’ll rack ‘em up.”
“Hey,” said Mike to Tex. “I’m gonna shoot a game. You wanna go partners.”
Partners. Instantly, the game, the day, the bar, the offer, had a beautiful ring to it, the setting sun over the muddy Nebraska fields Tex suddenly felt tears spring to his eyes. He turned his head away quickly, put it down and turned to his beer.
“Sure,” he called.
There he stood, a little drunk, suddenly felt pride in his boots that were muddy and caked with flakes of corn he pushed the sweep auger of the green grinder up over the fence and climged the fence and lifted the lid of the self-feeder and let the contents fall out.
“You’re turn.”
“What we got.”
“We got stripes.”
Tex shook himself from the confines of NYC apartment. He went to the wall and picked out a pool stick and looked at the long table of balls in an assembly like kids at a playground.
Yeah, there was a couple stripes all right. But they were buried next to some solids.
“Christ,” he said, putting some chalk to his stick, “you didn’t leave me much.”
He bent down and looked at a #12 just off the rail. Maybe if he just shot straight with a little curve to the left, a little English, maybe he’d have a chance. He lined up the cue with the ball and eyed the hole and shot. The ball moved quickly down the rail but just as if got to the hole, it bounced off the cushion and went along the other rail.
It would’ve been a pretty decent shot if it would’ve went it. But it didn’t.
Even though it was just a pool game, nobody cared, one way or another, he nevertheless felt deflated. That he wasn’t holdin’ up his end of the deal with his partner.
“Oooh,” he said, goin’ back to the bar and leanin’ the pool stick against his shoulder and then grabbin’ his red beer, “just a little off.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Mike said. “I thought for a minute it was gonna go in, that sorry ass sonava.”
They stood there now silently and watched as their opponent hunters cleared the table.
“Ohh, man,” they said, congratulating themselves, “I can’t believe some of them went in.”
“Yeah,” said the hunter with the funny hat, you shoot pool better ‘n you shoot deer.”
“Yeah, no lie. But I still say there’s just not that many around.”
The thrill of the pool game gone as the unter took on another pair, it somehow didn’t seem like the NYC story Tex felt like he needed to tell lost its audience.
“Oh, well,” Mike said. “I guess you can’t win ‘em all.”
“No shit. We’ll get ‘em next time.”
“Shit, what time is it? I got to be movin’ on outta here.”
“I got goin’ on 3 bells.”
“Yep, better go. Got a couple sows comin’ in.”
“Oh yeah,” and now Tex felt warm and comfortable. “We just bought some gilts from Miller and they should be comin’ in pretty soon.”
“Catcha later.”
“Oh yeah.”
No one to bs with. The hunters already were on their next game.
That’s okay. He still had to think things through.
“I’d have a 10 spot. I’d have a 10-spot from limo drivin’. The guys’d be sittin’ on the bench. They’d see me comin’ towards ‘em. Ole McInerny, red head of hair, usually had on a little blue stocking cap. Dennis Hanley and a couple other guys I didn’t know sat across from ‘em. The table was concrete, and there was lines made so that you could either play checkers or chess. Over at Washington Square Park, there’d always be by mid-afternoon in the spring and summer, a chess game going on in either corner of the park that that was I guess you could say was the northwest corner.”
He continued to his make-believe conversation to his audience of none. Tex saw an old cattle truck goin’ by, the box shifting and rollin’ a load of hogs on the way to the stockyards, squealin’ down main street. Sunday was a good day, for some reason, to take a load of hogs to the market. He remembered growin’ up they did that more than once. Tex and his brothers would help their dad load the hogs. Dad would drop ‘em off at home and ask his Mom if she wanted to go along. She generally would and then it became a Sunday evening that had a special significance, that said something about the way things were, the green house on the corner of time settling down to the evening but Mom and Dad had gone to town with a load of hogs and maybe they’d bring somethin’ back.
He thought of that one night in early June and it was Sunday and they’d been drinkin’ all morning and now it was into the late afternoon.
“Hey, that’s pretty good,” commented an old man he’d never seen before. Tex had decided outta nowhere, just out of the clear blue, to thrown down a book of matches and grab it with his teeth, a one-hand push up. The seed had been planted early spring.
“Over at Abingdon Square Park, where I’d walk to after teachin’g school in the South Bronx, there’d be the guys sittin’ on the benches. ‘Get a pound up for a 6 pack’ ole Dennis Hanley would call, moving his slitted eyes over the trees and benches at Abingdon Park and over in my direction. Like I said, that’s where I’d go after school some days. I just couldn’t see myself goin’ home right away.
“Sometimes Hanley’d say, after I was there a little while and started bsin’ with Jerry Mudd, ‘Who’s gonna get up a pound for a 6-pack?’
“Then I’d always look over at Jerry Mud, sittin’ down with a blue stocking cap on his head, leanin’ slightly forward, his hands on the bench.”
‘Don’t look at me, Nebraska. I’m tap city. I ain’t hardly got enough money for a pack of smokes.” Jerry Mudd always smoked Newport cigarettes. He’d have the green pack in his hands and pull one out of his mouth. I remember how ole CI he’d smoke Pall Mall. He’d rip the top of it off so that all the cigarettes would freely show, like it was inviting all and sundry to come into party.
The noise of the juke box now came in the Lariat. Like the Horse, with it’s picture of a horse on its exterior, in a thick rectangle, the Lariat had a cowboy with a rope throwin’ it over a calf. It was an old time Western bar where men came in to drink, some of them to spend the night.
A couple more couples came in the front door, some came in the back door and the noise and the smoke went up an octave and now it was hard to make out anyone over at thei fillin’ station pumpin’ gas. Dale Morrow and his live-in Sue had been
And sure, Tex in the neighborhood would go get the beer. After all, he was the only one workin’. Sometimes Hanley and McInerny would get a call from Padded Wagon but
“Tex, the alcoholic teacher,” greeted a young boy with a smile, walking past. “How’s it goin’?”
“Not bad. Made it through the day.”
See the D-train to the Bronx took me there, E usually took me home. Even tho’ it only took me an hour, tops, it was a world away,
And had it not been one of those typical days in the South Bronx? The classroom had it’s own share of mayhem, matching the cluttered street below. Nobody cared, nobody wanted to listen.
“Hey, home boy,” called the young kid who looked like he stepped out of Walt Disney’s Aladin, “come with me, I’m gonna go smoke a joint.”
“Hey,” the teacher called, turning his attention away from another dadless personages before him, “don’t be leavin’ the classroom. You need to getcher work done.”
“Don’t worry about that, home boy,” the young boy Rajan said. “I’ll be right back.”
His drinkin’ buddy wondered how much was true. Just another NYC wild tale.
“Yeah, really? They smoked marijuana in the classroom?”
Their attention was drawn to the comforting sound of an old John Deere tractor moving down main street, pullin’ a hayrack full of baled hay.
“Who’s that?”
“Oh, that’s Jerry Ryan. I think they’re getting’ their alfalfa in.”
“Ohhh.”
“Now, what wuz you sayin’, they smoke dope in the classroom?”
“No, no, not in the classroom. You’d go up the back stairways and you could smell where somebody’d been smokin’ some weed. And that’s what that kid said to me: ‘Hey, home boy’—see, that’s what they called me, home boy—‘let’s go smoke a joint.’ I mean, the kid couldn’t hardly read or write.’
Tex stopped and looked at the section of the bar that had all the hard liquor. Rows upon rows of it. It cut away from the bar a little bit so if you wanted to, you pretty much could go in and take one out of the shelf. He turned his attention to the guy at his side.
“No shit?”
“No shit. Just right there in school. I mean, I’d get so frustrated, I’d just head for the park instead of goin’ home. I’d look out the window, all the boarded up buildings, like a war zone. Couple timed, comin’ in the morning, there’d be an empty quart or beer or bottle just one the steps that led into the school. Ole Wade JHS, whatta trip.
“Ole Wasserman, he’d give me a ride to one of the subway stops.”
“No shit, is that right?”
“Yeah, he taught Social Studies, I taught Remedial Reading. We had to follow this procedure to help the kids learn how to read. It was tough cuz a lot of the kids, their native language wasn’t English.
“Plus, they’d always be stealin’ the batteries.”
“Who would, the kids?”
“Oh, I dunno, it’s hard tellin’. The teacher I rode with part of the way home on some days when he taught at the Jewish school, we’d drive through the South Bronx neighborhood.”
‘See,” Steve Wasserman would say, ‘that’s why I got a log chain—they’re always goin’ after batteries. Capelli’s lost three so far this year. He finally got a log chain. Wasserman said. ‘See look at ‘em. They’re always workin’ on their cars.’
“And sure enough, the hood of what looked like a mid 70’s Galaxy 500 2-door was raised, front end jacked up. One guy was leaning over the hood, another below.”
“Ole Wasserman said, ‘That’s prob’ly one of the batteries from one of the staff members.’
‘Really?’ I said.”
‘Yeah, they’re always goin’ after batteries. They pop the hood.’“Then somebody’d shout from a tenement window. On the stoop there’d be a full quart of beer and a joint.”
“Jesus Christ, how’d anybody every get anything done? What they needed was a good swift kick in the ass.”
“Yeah, no shit. Like I said, then Wass’d drop me off. I’d get on the IRT, sometimes, sometimes the E. The IRT was closest. I always thought that was interesting how they dug the tunnels for the subweays but they didn’t dig the IRT 7th Ave. line big enough so they got to stick with old trains. The BMT and the IND, they got knew trains. You really fell like you’re riding on old trains your ancestors did year and years ago.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. At any rate—hey, bud,” he saw the bartender facing him, “can we get one here?”
Tex could see he was down to a quarter bottle. Time for a refill. “You ready for one?”
“Uhh, I don’t know if I’m ready,” his friend said. “I got to get home to the missus. She don’t like it when I come home late.”
“Ah, hell, take for the ditch anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
They both stopped and watch the bartender open up the door where they had the beers and pull it out and walk over to ‘em.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, no problem.”
“At any rate that let me out at 7th Ave. and 12th St. If I walked down W11th to Bleeker, I could skirt the Abingdon Square Park, go on the other side of it. But I’d be so hot and tired and frustrated, I’d walk down W10th St. to Bleeker. This took me right through the park. Jerry Mud and Hanley and a couple other guys ‘d be there, sittin’ on the bench.
“Then ole Hanley’d say, ‘Hey, Tex, get up a pound for a six-pack.’
‘Who me?’ I’d say, ‘What about McInerny?’
“Then ole Mud would say, ‘Hey, I’m tap city. Nebraska, you’re the one with the money, teachin’ and drivin’ a limo.’
“That’s what Mudd called me, Nebraska. The other guys’d call me Tex. Dennis Hanley’s brother Terry, they called him CI, he was the one that did time for murder, he called me John Wayne or Duke.’
The big front door of the Lariat swung open. A diminutive woman walked in, carrying a small child in her arms. A guy that must’ve been her husband, a step or so behind. He must’ve just got back from chorin’, his cheeks were chapped and the flaps were still over his ears.
He thought of how the walked into the Horse. There’d not usually be anyone wearin’ a feed cap. If it was a cap, it’d be a kinda Irish lookin’ cap or a skull cap but mostly no caps at all. In the years he drank at the Horse, he never ever did see anyone walk in wearin’ five-buckle overshoes. Not once. The only time he did see anyone wearin’ five-buckle overshoes was a guy walkin’ into Andy’s Candy Store on the corner of W11th and Bleeker. He was stalkin’, his arms swingin’ like he was gonna pounce on someone or something.”
‘Who’s that?” I said to McInerny.’
‘Oh, that’s CI’s brother. He’s crazier than Terry.’
“At that point, it was hard for me to believe anybody could be crazier than Terry. I mean, he always treated me okay but I know he had a streak in ‘im.”
“Hey, partner, what’s up?”
Dale Morrow had come in from across the street. He closed the gas station for the day. Live-in Sue was right behind him.
“Hey, not much, how you guys doin’?”
“Good, good,” Morrow said. “I usually don’t come over here but what the hell. Whacha drinkin’?”
“Oh, I’m just havin’ a couple beers, goin’ over some NYC stories, you know.”
“Oh yeah, man,” said Morrow. “I ‘spose you got a lot of ‘em.” Morrow’s face lit up.
“Prob’ly not as many as you.”
“Oh no,” Morrow said. “I did my stitch in Nam, that’s as far away as I need to go.”
“Yeah, I was sayin’ that they get pretty crazy out there sometimes.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.”
Tex suddenly grew tired of hearin’ ‘em self talk. It was just like it was so hard to make him come out a tough guy, could handle himself, handle the city when in reality it was just like he went out on an army bag full of clothes. In fact, he knew, he came back with just a little bit less than he’d started with.
But, what the hell.
“Now why did you say you hung out with those people?” Mike asked. It was a bs conversation. Mike had been in Texas and had like to some partyin’ too. Maybe that was where it was goin’.
Tex took a long drink, what the fuck. He was definitely in the party scene then. Tryin’ to get on top of the pile of shit that constituted what those guys in the park were all about. Hadn’t Uncle Frank told him not to be hangin’ with that crowd? But, it really was too late. Now he had Hanley comin’ over and bangin’ on the door of the apartment.
“I need a place to sleep,” Hanley said one evening. “Mudd’s dad said I can’t sleep there the rest of the month. I just need a place to crash.”
Tex had to teach the next day. He had to get up early in the morning to hit the subway train to the South Bronx. And here that Hanley guy was not only hangin’ out, but now he was sleepin’ over. He didn’t feel like movin’ into any of those details.
“For me, it was the camaraderie.”
“Hey, Nebraska, what’s up?” Jerry McInerny’d say. “How’s teachin’?”
“Really? A park?”
“Yeah, you know, squeezed between the buildings. Some red brick and some tables sit on it and they got some trees planted. Guy’s bring some beers, Eddie Quigley go and get a nickel bag of grass and there’d we’d have a little party.”
“You shoulda kicked Hanley’s ass. You shoulda kicked Quigley’s ass.””
“Well I just wasn’t into fightin’ in those days, just having gotten my fair share in the Big Red state with the Kane mutiny.”
Ryan’s hay rack went by in the opposite direction.
“Looks like ole Ryan got ‘er in the barn.”
“Yaaup. ‘Sposed to rain tonight.”
“I have no idea.”
They watched the small procession that automatically formed when a tractor and wagon went by, the motorists half-expecting a delay of some kind drivin’ through a small farm town.”
The NYC boy, now feelin’ he was in need of a joint instead of a cold beer, rambled on.
He knew he wouldn’t remember none of it the next day.
“And, I’d tangled with Jerry Walsh. So there was like two big fights and I didn’t really come out the winner in either. It wasn’t too much past the hospital that younger brother Joey clocked me cuz we were undecided upon which way we were going to run the cattle up the yard to get in the shed.
“His punch was hard and I was dazed but I didn’t go down. I was surprised that he could throw such a hard punch. I was stunned. I immediately went to look for a 2 x 4 to clock him on the head but, for some strange reason, the first time I think in early farm history, all the boards had been picked up. I mean, usually there was one or two around, a stick or two to hit the cattle with.
“While I was looking for a weapon, he came up and hugged me and apologized.
“It was all just part of the general demise and malaise.
“At any rate, I didn’t tangle with the big Quigley dude at the Horse, nor did I try to clock Hanley a couple years later. They were all West Village neighborhood guys. I just left the wood and the smoke and the beer. I guess I got a few more of my spurs back when CI started talkin’ his talk of bein’ in solitary confinement for so long at Sing Sing. Something about a signal he’d give them and a signal they’d give back and how he was in there for nine months at a crack.
“A stretch.”
“Man, that doesn’t sound like it was too much fun.”
“Oh, I dunno. It wasn’t that bad. I mean, those were just a couple things over the eight years I was out there. I mean, it started really getting’ crazy when, like I said, I started hangin’ out at the Park. Then ole Hanley’d come up to that apartment with Mudd. I mean, I liked Jerry Mudd, he was a cool dude.”
“Yeah, he sounds like it.”
“But then it’s rainin’ or somethin’ and we come up to my apartment so then Hanley figures he can stop by and time. One time, he rings the door bell and I let him in. Or I don’t let him in. You just have to push hard and the door’d swing open.
‘I need a place to crash.’ So there I am, I got to teach school in the Bronx the next day, I gotta get up at 4:30 to get ready and make the train. So, it’s about 6:30. I try to get him to leave.”
‘Don’t worry,” he says, “I ain’t gonna take nuthin’.’
“So cuz he walked in the night before with a sack full of beer, he goes and puts it in my refrigerator.”
“No shit.”
“No shit. Then he crashed on the floor, like I said. I’m getting’ up and showerin’ and stuff and then I say, ‘I’m leavin’.’ This means I’m ready for him to, you know, go.”
Oh Hanley, he kinda gets up and goes and gets a beer outta the refigerator and starts to drink it, like its his place or somethin’.”
“I woulda called the cops.”
“Yeah, but then you’re a rat. And ole Hanley, he knew now where I lived, he was just a drunk ole bum. So there he sits on the chair at 6 in the mornin’ and he’s drinkin’ a beer. I went ahead and went to the Bronx, Wade JHS. I thought about it all day. But then, when I got back, nothing was taken. I just didn’t like the idea someone was crashin’.
“’Course, like I said, I was getting’ to hang with that bunch. Pretty soon, you’re kinda caught up in it. ‘Course Hanley didn’t have a place to stay.”
‘Jerry Mud’s dad said I couldn’t sleep there anymore. I need a place to crash. So he comes and crashes at my place. It really game me the creeps. All day, teachin’ in the Bronx, I’m thinkin’ of Dennis Hanley in my apartment. ‘Course, when I got home, he was gone and there was nuthin’ missin’ or nuthin’ but it was just the idea.”
“Yeah, no shit. I still woulda called the cops.”
“Yeah, it was too late. I was already in with that crowd. You know, if you’re gonna hang with ‘em, you gotta put up with the bullshit. But, like I said, I was always a nice guy. It was just too late to do anything about it.”
Chapter 10 Roomates
But I did throw the gauntlet down to one of the taller black helpers in the main restaurant at Club El Morrocco.
No, here’s how it was: we were sitting at the table not too far off from the cooks. He was prob’ly a few years younger than me but I threw down the gauntlet. I think the cooks below were egging him on.
I wanted to say, at this juncture, those extensive games of backgammon were prior to the birth of the internet.
A cook’s helper, was he?
Yeah, he was egged on.
“Do you wanna go outside and talk about it?” or something is what I’d said. I don’t know what it was he was sayin’ to me, or I was sayin’ back to him.
“I just said, him sittin’ at this small table where we ate some stuff the club fed us. It was left over stuff, it wasn’t’ very good. I just said, ‘You wanna go outside?”
I don’t even know what we were pissed at each other about. Like I said, I have to get beaten up a couple times and then I’ve got my fightin’ stuff back on, I think. At any rate, I was ready to go. I’m not that fun of a character to mess with.
Or so I’d like to believe.
A couple of the waiters intervened. Big John stood between us.
Settle down, settle down. ‘Course, in NYC, they didn’t say settle down. It was bustin chops or breakin’ balls.
So even tho’ the guy quickly rose to his feet, John from Brooklyn and another waiter stepped in.
“You don’t need to be doin’ none of that,” or something to that effect. Tho’ quite frankly, I’m at a loss to remember what they exactly did say.
We both were partially relieved, I think, to sit down.
But then he laid off me. There were no more taunts or sallies in my direction so I was able to continue with my busboy duties so it was no big deal. Of course, as luck and chance would have it, we ended up that same night on the same subway train ride together.
He nodded and smiled at me, I smiled and nodded back at him.
It’s where I met Don U a few weeks later. He came in as a waiter at the Club. I don’t remember what his last name was. I think he wanted to go to NYU and study Math. He was gay and he was something of a disappointment, I think, to his father. But, he didn’t come out and try to hide the fact he was gay.
“Did you ever sleep with a woman?” I asked him at one point. Like Petalie, I figured I’d take in a roommate to help pay the rent. Like Alex bro’, it wasn’t long before having someone close to you in such close quarters gets to ya. I mean, to have someone next to you in the next room, almost hear them breath.
“Sure,” and Don had this Bronx NYC accent I was so much drawn to: whadya talkin’ about, whas up, etc., the way they had the clipped accents with their speech. He was good looking. He had charisma, easy grace and manner.
“Yeah,” Don said, passing the joint along, laughing, “I did.”
He said it almost in a matter of fact no big deal attitude. I was always lookin’ to score.
“Well, how was it?” I couldn’t imagine getting laid as being anything but grand. I could number my conquests on my hands after wife and I split up. I was definitely no Don Quan.
He took the joint, inhaled, blew the sweet aroma back away from my hair. We were standin’ in a building on Lexington Ave. People walkin’ by, cars drivin’ by, just, you know, smokin’ a joint. It was like it was no big deal.
“We fucked like a pair of rabbits,” Don said, handing me the joint and laughing.
“No shit.”
“That’s no shit.”
“Wow,” I said, tryin’ to imagine Don in high school and then, because he was attractive guy, have his share of female admirers. I envied his good fortune.
“Yeah,” Don said, passin’ me the joint. “I know I’m gay. There’s no sense hiding it. I went to a party the other night. This guy I knew saw me at a porno shop. He starts getting’ on my case, laughin’. I said, ‘Look, I’m gay. There’s nothin’ I can do about it.’”
“Weren’t your parents pretty disappointed?”
“Yeah,” Don said, “they were. But what could I do about it. That’s just the way things are.”
Don had a fresh dose of New York honesty.
“There’s no sense hidin’ it from ‘em, is there. I mean, I’m not gonna go around pretendin’ to be straight when I know I’m not.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re right.”
“Hey, you know what you should do?”
The joint was near extinction. One of the big sellers at Uncle John’s was these bongs and roach clips. The Nebraska pot smokers would take it when it was down to it’s near bitter end and stick a roach clip on it. There was some status, they felt, in the kind of roach clip you could pull out of your pocket or the lapel of your jeans and begin to smoke it down to the bitter end.
“Yeah, what?”
“You should come with me to a Halloween party.”
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
“There’ll be a couple girls there.”
“Okay, great.”
Tex wore his Stetson, tried to dress up. He met a cute girl he danced with and with whom he got intimate with in the bathroom. But he couldn’t get her to go home with him. He rode his bike down Broadway and stopped at a topless joint.
“Hey, I saw that girl you were with on the subway the other day.”
“Yeah, what’d she say.”
“She didn’t say anything. She just looked over at me. Before I could go over and get a chance to talk to her, she got off on the next stop.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even know her name.”
“Yeah, Tex, I think she was after your cowboy hat.”
“Yeah, musta been.”
“Jesus Christ, Ron, I’ve been callin’ your name.”
“Oh, huh, wha?”
Dale Morrow brought him out of the NYC trance.
“I was askin’ if you wanted to go out with me and Sue and smoke a joint.”
“Hey, yeah sure.”
“Man, it looked like you were in some kinda zone.”
“Oh yeah, I know. I get that way sometimes.”
Chapter 11 POST OFFICE RECEIT
It was a thing I did bring back from Nebraska. I had a lot of firsts in the town: the first to smoke grass, the first to booted from college, the first to have it transported from Arizona.
Wasn’t I also one of the first to get a gal knocked up?
I can imagine Lucille Green and the visage she had on her face when she looked at the package from Tempe, Arizona.
Oh, she probly thought, one of Ronnie’s friends is sending back a shirt he forgot.
Brown envelope. Large. You just unwrapped it and out spilled out a pound of Mary Jane.
I was just newly married. It was in our first summer at the hotel. Grace Slick and Jefferson Starship, blowing their tunes on the stereo set. I used to go to Uncle John’s there in Sioux City. It was the place you could buy the latest in records. The other side of the store and tee-shirts, incense, roach clips.
Like I said, I was prolix when it came to describing the wonders of rock, the revolution, the rebellion against the status quo.
“It’s all rhetoric,” I remember saying to Dave Marran, a fellow h.s. grad. Dave was always doing something to make himself a better basketball player. He would shoot for hours along the baseline. He made tons of baskets but then when it got to be later high school, other players, a shade more height, a shade more athleticism, began to outplay him.
I remember Marran just throwing his head back and laughing.
So, I got married. I kept the peace sign symbol ever most in consciousness.
I carried the counter-culture to the hilt. My symbol of anti: we never had a TV set in the house. In fact, Jeremy never watched TV, unless it was at Mad Mad’s small blue split-level. Poor darling, sweeping the dust from the floor of the upstairs of the hotel that sat both stoically and magnificently on Hubbard’s main street, the windows looking out and facing the west and the setting sun and the farmers driving their tractors through main street, the kids going to Jack’s to buy a bag of candy or a pack of gum.
That scenery didn’t mean anything to the young bride, a broom in her hand, her hair in curls, sweeping the floor, baby in her womb trying to stay cool not a darn thing for her to watch.
I remember walking to Grandpa and Grandma’s house one night with her. I paid Grandpa the $30 monthly rent.
“Hello, Ronnie,” Grandma would say in her outdoors work dress. Never in my life can I think of Grandma wearing anything but a dress. I don’t think it was lady-like to wear pants.
“Hi.” I intro’d her to Kerry.
“And this is Kerry.”
“Hi Kerry. Dan, Ronnie and Kerry are here.”
“Umph okay.” Grandpa would rise from the bed wear he’d be reading the paper “Hello,” Grandpa would say with warmth.
“Oh, heh, heh,” he said, when I paid over the $30 for the rent.
We walked back to the apartment and made love and sweated through the night, the 18-wheelers rumblin’ by on Highway 35.
Of course, after Kerry split, I came by the apartment one night. Again, it was at an upstairs apartment. Now she was just across the street from whence she grew up. ‘Course, she hailed originally from Dixon. Born in California. Mad Mad’s hubby Harry was tryin’ to raise honey. I don’t know how successful was this business because they were pulled from the small town to the larger environs.
At any rate, there she was, sittin’ on the new couch the Ironworkers had bought her. She was sitting on the couch and there was a small black and white TV. It was turned on.
It was an unusual collection of noise in the place.
“Where’d you get the TV,” I said.
“Oh, Santa Clause dropped it off,” she said shyly, not looking at me.
Maybe it wasn’t Santa she said but simply “someone” dropped it off.
I pressed her on this point.
“Who dropped it off?”
“Mick dropped it off.”
“Oh,” I said, not knowing what more to say.
Jeremy was too young to fight off suitors. I knew I should’ve taught Kerry how to sew.
Even though I was paying visitation, I wasn’t paying support. Oh yeah, I slipped her a couple twenty’s now and then.
The Ironworkers, bless their heart, had had a benefit softball game. Now, there wasn’t that much money.
“All we had when you were in the hospital Ronnie was that check you gave me.”
Of course, I couldn’t remember that. I just remember bein’ in the bar from late afternoon. I know I was late for work the next day. If they would’ve done a urine sample on me the next day, they no doubt would’ve come up with excessive booze.
It was my idea, I guess, to not have a TV set. And then a spool of cable wire would be the coffee table. Around which we could have bongs and grass and throw parties.
But I do remember listening to Jefferson Starship that first winter after the first summer at the Hotel. It was on the highway. And sometimes, when I’d be making love, I could hear the 18-wheeler thunder by on Highway 35, right below the window.
But the winter I remember we had as ornament decoration some candles from the church that before Fr. Begley took over was what the parishioners would go up to and light and drop a dime or quarter in the box and light a candle and pray.
They were devotion candles.
Now it was given a second life. I remember there was a girl friend of a cute kid that was maybe a year or two younger than me that was popular in the crowd, Persinger, was that his name, who’d drowned in the Missouri that summer and now a few months later his girl friend was lighting a candle and now we were smokin’ and listenin’ to Grace Slick, Jefferson Starship.
It was a silence as the incense filled the air. Jeremy was in Kerry’s lap. I was the head of the household, listenin’ to Grace Slick.
It wasn’t much but it was their new album, there was a picture of a baby in the middle.
“Yeah,” I said, “the Rolling Stone sez Grace Slick used to be with the Great Society. Right here, September 1965, Grace Slick makes the stage debut at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach California.”
“Wow, Dude.”
“Then, one year later, October 1966, she makes her first appearance with Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore West in San Francisco.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” I was growing excited. “She replaced Signe Toly Anderson who had left the band to have a baby.”
“Not to mention her Smother’s Brothers appearance in ’68, her face in blackface make up. At the end of Airplane’s “Crown of Creation,” she raised her black-gloved, clenched fist.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it was a tribute to black power but was one of the reasons the show got canceled.“No shit.”
Chapter 12 WHERE ARE THEY KNOW
I remember getting’ full of Hanley. He was startin’ to bartend at the Horse. Because I’d somehow made his acquaintance at the uptown vs. downtown slow pitch softball game.
For $10 bucks, I could go to the game.
I was tryin’ like hell to meet up with what I considered be the normal crown of cronies and partiers from Nebraska.
“Yeah, $10 bucks,” Billy said. He was the night-time bartender at the Horse before Hanley started pullin’ some evenings. Andy was the day time guy. He was there when Dutch wasn’t
“Hey, Nebraska, how ya’ doin’?”
I was always affable and friendly. It was a busy bar. I met John Short. Hanley, when he got out of the joint, took over nights.
So, at any rate, I’m cleanin’ up the tables at the Club. I think we shut down at 2 a.m. But this gal and this guy have no intention of giving up the backgammon game. It was well nigh 2 a.m.
I’m walkin’ over to the bar. The bartender shrugs his shoulders. The cooks are all gone home.
I pull the Hanley caper.
“Hey,” I said, tryin’ to sound gruff and mean. “Do you mind finishin’ up there? Some of us gotta go home and get laid to.The man became immediately incensed.
He was hard into his backgammon game with his female partner.
“Who are you? What is your name?”
He started to come on with full force.
Tex, not losing his cool, shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re the only ones here.”
Maybe it was his duty to do the glasses that night. The club had had a gala affair and they needed a fresh supply of wine glasses. He remembers leaving a half of half carafe of wine that he began to sample.
“I’m going to report you.”
James again shrugged his shoulders.
“Cm’on, let’s get out of here.”
“Whatdya say to them,” John asked.
“Oh, I told ‘em it was time they needed to getting’ on home.”
“Oh did ya,” John said. “You know, sometimes you crack me up. I hope you don’t get into trouble.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.” James, his take on the evening, the long walk to the subway, the train home. It was all the same to him.
Chapter 12 Last Daze
My last day, I left almost the same way I came—one bag full of clothes: a few jeans, a few shirts, a pair of shoes. I don’t know what happened to the old suitcase and I left my diaries behind.
I thought of the Frank Sinatra song as I watched NYC disappear in a bank of clouds and soon I was over check-marked corn fields.
Today, I note, writing all a.m. the corn tasseled.
Like Jeremy’s letter that gave me the empitus to finis bk: I somehow leaf through Portrait.
My account, somewhere buried, is Portrait of the Artist as A Dumb Man. At any rate, I saw myself looking at some of the scribbles on the margin. It was preface the bk.
It was somehow a capsule scrawled over the 2nd page with the Dedalus-Icarus explanation. And a small hand drawn rectangle at the bottom. It says “St. Steven—first Christian martyr. Steve, Martyr for his art.
But that’s just the front of the book. Actually it’s the cover because the original one has gone.
But, there, half way or so in the book, page 87, to be exact, is a pay stub from Club El Morocco. I’m filled with fear and loathing and hate and wonder and love and blessing.
Quigley, you left him behind.
McInerny, you didn’t find his five acres.
There Jerry’d be, sittin’ on the park bench, havin’ a beer or a smoke. Mudd always smoked Salem. I never saw him smoke anything else.
“Just give me five acres, Nebraska, just five acres.”
Then I started thinkin’ about which 5 acres I could requisition to him. How about the field Dad called “Up Back of Walshes?” There, back there on the other side of the West Crick is the dam. This late spring, it was filled with water. There was just a few weed trees and native grass growing, a few cow patties where on the bank.
As I pulled the tractor around I thought, “Yeah, this might be a place for Mudd.” The land sloped gently upward to small hills on either side, curved around to another slew of waterways that went up to a hill. Looking south, the highway could be seen two miles away, shimmering slightly from the heat. The air was pure and a guy had urge to reach down and stick a blade of grass in his mouth.
He spun the tractor around and climbed back over the waterway to the field he’d yet to cultivate, thinking further.
But then, he’d need wheels to town. I mean, you had to go after some groceries. That’d be a little bit of a walk. Then, you’d have to carry ‘em home. So the bag of groceries couldn’t be that heavy. You’d walk a mile or so on the highway, then another mile or so to the field. There’s basically no road, no lane, just field. So you’d walk through the field.
And running water? No, you’d have to rely on the dam, you’d have to rely on the crick to furnish. ‘Course, the settlers made it there way all the way, way back when.
But then surmount the water obstacle, what about electricity? It might take a little bit of doin’. He didn’t doubt Jerry Mudd wouldn’t be hardy enough but, come to think of it, Tex never saw him lift heavier than a can beer to his lips.
And sure, he knew Mudd worked for the Padded Wagon. They’d haul furniture from place to place. They’d park the step van at the Horse after a job. A nice large truck; it had the words Padded Wagon painted in green on both sides.
“Yeah, they’re always hirin’,’ Mud said. “I just got done with a job but kinda thru my back out a little bit, so I’m layin’ low.
CONCIERGE
In a few short years, the country was virtually out of the boy:
Paul, the concierge, his breath smelled. Because he got to go to NYU Dental School to get his teeth put back in place from glancin’ ‘em off the iron, he knew Paul had a serious bout of periodontal disease.
His breath smelled he had rotten teeth.
The closer he got
He said he like to think of as people as animals, he said at one point.
“Oh yeah,” the farm boy said, “what do think of me?”
“I think of you as a playful puppy.”
“Oh yeah.”
But Paul was long gone. And then his youthful exuberance left him, replaced by a newfound cynicism. He was now in his senior year at the university.
The call from the Italian girl.
“Club El Morrocco, Elmer’s section.”
“I’m in the hospital. I had an abortion.”
He ran through his mind, the voice. Oh yes. They were in the same Shakespeare II last year. They got together a few times and then she had him come up for a Thanksgiving dinner. They’d made it in the attic of the Victorian home.
“You did?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”
“I didn’t even know you were pregnant.”
“Well, I’m in the hospital. I told my parents I was pregnant. They said I had to have an abortion.”
There was a chill in the little entry-way to Elmer’s. He looked at the painting on the wall. The pink elephant playing the piano. “There is nothing prettier than a little girl.”
“Well, I ….” He couldn’t think what to say.
“I just wanted to call you and let you know I had an abortion.”
“Yeah, well maybe I’ll see you at the campus.”
“Yeah. Maybe. I gotta go.”
“Yeah, okay. We’ll talk to ya later.”
He had taken Paul’s place and was now concierge. He sat in the same small wooden chair Paul had always sat in. He now looked out the same small vestibule window Paul had looked out on, the 2nd Ave. traffic hurtling a few blocks downtown where they’d jump on the 69th St. bridge and go to Queens or maybe the airport.
His teeth were definitely not rotting. He kept ‘em pearly white. His liver was getting shot.
“You’ll probably have a lot of guests tonight,” Hugh Allen said. “There’s a lot of people came over to the main club and there’s some spill over.”
“Oh, okay.”
It was boring boring.
John’s brilliantine hair in contrast too thick mop that covered CI’s brow. Like his brother Dennis, he had a thick small forehead.
Chapter 14 NYC STORIES
Salvador Dali’s Lawyer.
For Dav El for some reason I’d had a few beers before. Miller bottles in a six pack, I’d downed a couple and maybe pickup a few more. I stuck ‘em under the seat.
Dali’s lawyer came onto me pretty quick.
“Can I give you a B Jason?”
I looked over. It was raining in my head even tho’ I’m visited with same in the Spanish teacher’s room.
There’s a couple books and it’s Dali’s garish imprints on canvas.
Dutch, Billy, Andy. Dutch—gitchie, gitiche ya ya, gitchie gitchie ya ya.
Soho French cigarette.
It was a careful in the Lincoln town Car I don’t know for sure if I’d drive to Montreal Canada in the same one, smokin’ weed all the way up.
On p. 15 I see he’s in a wheelchair gaunt and stricken.
“In 1984 Dali was rescued from a fire at the medieval caste of Pueblo into which he retired after Gula’s death in 1982. The world was shocked at his appearance: he believed himself unable either to stand or to swallow and was suffering from severe malnutrition, weighing only 100 pounds.
Doin’ the goof.
Cuz we know time.
The complete accompaniment of time: I’m on a drunken bash. The way tuff fisty NYR Tim would dismiss “Ok” we’ll see ya later.”
CHAPTER SIX—TEX IN DA NEIGHBORHOOD
Tex in the neighborhood. He like the sound of that.
“Tex the alcoholic teacher,” said in jest by a young teenager still in school.
Tex pullin Quigley out of the park like he was a vermin. To be quickly rid of and dispersed.
Joey Quiqs saw him later and stopped him. “You know Tex, you should be in the comic books.
Tex this, Tex that. Falling through the trees. The incidents.
And then CI pullin’ him out of the park—there was no chance.
CI’s brother pulling into his building, banging through the door.
The final escape. Check to see if the lights are out.
He woke up, hardly knowing where he was.
Over to the Opera Deli. It was 11 a.m. Because this was pretty early in the morning for most NYers, the intersection of Bleeker and Hudson, the corner on which the deli sat was virtually empty.
There was hardly anyone at the Deli. Dom and another guy, both wearing white aprons, were talking and making sandwiches.
The farm boy went to the cooler and pulled out a 6-pack of Bud tall boys. He went over to the counter and set them there.
The swarthy Italian looked at him and ran it up.
“Thanks, Dom.”
He walked out of the Deli. One of the guys he recognized as one of the bums that slept in the park. He’d skirt the benches and the thick growing trees and he’d be on W11th and see the pile of papers dropped off in front of Andy’s. The short square-built man would come out later and pick up the stacks of papers and magazines and spread them over the large double-sized pool table in the middle of the store.
“How ya doin’ kid.” Andy would say.
“Pretty good.”
No, he’d be already past before Andy got up to retrieve the magazines and papers.
No, the farm boy thought. I should be headin’ for the South Bronx to teach instead of going after a six-pack of beer.
No, that’s okay. He was now beginning to lose track of days. It’s Saturday, I’m okay.
The bum came towards him and regarded him.
“One beers too many, a thousand ain’t enough.”
“Yeah?”
He didn’t care. He put down a couple cold ones.
Earlier in the morning, Uncle Frank had called.
“How’s it goin’?”
“Fine.”
“How’d you make it home last night, do you remember?”
He looked out the pair of windows in his front room. He saw the ray of sun shining on the abandoned Chinese noodle factory across from a deserted courtyard. A gust of wind came into the courtyard and banged one of the metal doors against the brick.
“Uh…” he hated the fact that there was no direct light into his apartment. For eight years he’d been waiting for light to come in. He reckoned, the way things were going, he’d be waiting for awhile longer.
“I got your fat ass home, doll.”
“You did?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “You were passed out on one of those benches over there. A few black guys were standing over ya. I was comin’ home from doing a show at Reno Sweeney’s.’
Yes, Tex thought. His keys were thrown in the middle of the front room. He’d wondered how they’d got there.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I carried that fat ass of your up those three flights of stairs.”
“You did?”
“Yes, doll. Now you be watchin’ youself.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Okay. Now I’ve got to go. Do you need anything?”
“No,” that’s okay.”
“All right, doll, I’ll see ya later.”
“Okay. Thanks again.”
“Bye.”
No, he didn’t feel like doin’ laundry, he didn’t feel like doin’ any picking up.
The beer and the shots wouldn’t get out of his head. He looked at the light shining across on the Chinese noodle factory. A small gust of wind moved the heavy door three floors above the ground to a light touch against the brick.
He couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to get to the sun.
The farm boy walked to Opera Deli. He got the beer. He needed to get it out of his system
He walked past the restaurant on the corner. He could see the young Puerto Rican’s preparing meals and serving what looked like a fairly busy morning for the restaurant.
My mouth is so dry. It felt like the time he’d tried to walk home from the Catholic School because he was afraid to face Sister Teresa. He’d heard she was going to discipline him. That she had a paddling machine in her office and she’d found out that he’d accidentally wet his pants in church.
It was all Jerome Dillon’s fault. The young farm boy had started thinking about a scene from the TV show National Velvet. The father had said to the young girl, “Hold your tongue.” The girl had replied, “I can’t it’s too slippery.”
He tried to watch the Mass. Father was at the point of offering up the communion host.
The 4th Grader, his first year at the Catholic school, couldn’t stop his giggling. The only other kid from his small town, was twice his size. Jerome Dillon, later to become a Catholic priest while Tex battled his drinking problem, looked down at him and made a face. He’d had to go to the bathroom so bad and now Dillon made him lose it. He felt a huge stream of hot liquid stream down his legs, dripping down on the church floor.
He was so embarrassed, he couldn’t even go up to Holy Communion. He was petrified and mortified. He’d tried to cover up his embarrassment, holding his hands over his wet crotch.
They went to lunch shortly after and then recess. He was quickly drying. But then towards the end, Teresa Starzl and Patty Kiel had come up to him
Sister Terreseta wants to see you,” they gleefully reported.
“Why?”
“For wetting your pants in church.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
He decided he’d head home. He followed the bus route. He hid beneath a cornpicker and watched as the student’s were ushered in the big door of the school.
After walking five miles through the hills, he was so thirsty he walked the long lane of a farm.
“Where’s your parents,” the lady said who opened up the hydrant.
“Oh,” he said. “I just live up the way. Thanks for the drink.”
Now, twenty years later, the same lack of water attacked him. He saw a hydrant and drank so much water he almost felt like he couldn’t stop.
He needed a place to sit down, he needed sunshine.
Yeah, the park of the uptown downtown game.
“Is that where you met Hanley?”
“Yeah,” Nebraska said. “He said, ‘Do you smoke?”
CI, tending bar at the Horse, corrected him, his gruff voice dropping a couple octaves.
“No, I said, ‘Can you roll?’”
“Oh, yeah,” Tex said. “You’re right.”
And they were pretty much acquaintances before the farm boy said Mikey and Chapetti and all the rest should do more time.
Nope there were no adults and the playground.
A bunch of kids had formed a game and the taller and thinner one of the boys was shouting and waving.
“He’s not out, he was safe, whadya, blind or somethin’.”
Shoulda waited ‘round co before and it was upstairs where I slept when Ma would go with Pa on a construction project, paving a street in some Godforsaken preening Iowa town so the dust would stop from rising up; the children would stay at Grandpa Dan and Grandma Pearl’s. uple more days. Sabrous affairs.
The New York City Stories
Well then, we sojourn.
I’m just wondering how it is that you try to be nice to a kid and he turns on ya.
Is that the unwritten credo of teachers?
This teacher, he went down, carried out of his apartment in a body bag. Me, I should well have—my fluids from the day or so of booze would’ve no doubt been seeping out. A disgusting spectacle.
From the mug shot, one of his charges did not altogether look that different from the ones I know teach. The further connection is that it is the school I had taught at for three months. l Actually, it was from Sept. to Nov. Taft H.S., South Bronx.
D train to the Bronx.
Hanley in the Park.
Niggers and spicks outta the park.
Of course, I didn’t know how to get from West Villlage to the Bronx. I got lost a couple times. Well, not actually lost underground, just off on the wrong stop. Or not sure of what stop to get off on; the conductors were so helpful even though only towards the end could I read a subway map.
Mr. Sokoloff—I wonder if he’s still there—was the first person I met and had a discussion with. He’s the chairperson of the English Dept. l I met him when one day when St. Grace Maureen’s Catholic School—St. Joseph—was not in session and I was “sub for a day.” The class I stepped into I remember one of the girls remarking “You ain’t no teacher you can’t write” reviewing my slapstick slapdash handwriting on the chalkboard.
Then, desiring to get in the NYC Public School system, it was the first place I headed. Purely for Eco reasons. $8,350/year did not cut it. Were there any openings? It was easy to read this expression on my face. Sokolof, for his part, steered me in the proper direction: I remember I took the place of this one gal who was on maternity leave. I had to teach them—these students that were mostly non-white—shades and hues and all—how to read. I just remember how many different hues and all—how to read. I just remember how many different hues of shades of color.
The one gal, I remember, already more of a woman than many I had known, was just a mere 10th grade student. She said she liked my shoes, I remember. I always thought happy in that I’d purchased them and they, in turn, had elicited a compliment from a student.
I also was called “teach” by a couple of the students. Was it when I was waiting for the D-train to funnel me back to my apt? In the Village? It was from the guy I ended up giving a failing mark to. He had been a jocular PR who would joke with me until he saw his grade. He felt there was something of a betrayal.
Another teacher, also like me, coming in as a sub—and, I think, staying longer because she’d been assigned a longer term—saying how she just loved to be addressed n that manner, i.e. “teach.”
I think we were all glad when the regular teacher came back after maternity leave. I was pretty full of myself, having taken the summer off and getting my certification from student teaching at Smith College (see Northampton H.S. nee Dr. Fink). For some reason, no school has ever asked for my student teaching, that blissful summer of 1979. Yes, the teachers who supervised the student teaching, yes, are still there.
(I know cuz I’ve had to come up with the supervising teacher’s names when I fill out one of those insufferable applications for a position at another school.)
And, as it turns out, ‘though I didn’t know it then, there was a good reason I was having so much trouble just doing the most simple thing as teaching even though the credential pages was quite promising and Sokoloff, I think, wanted to give me the honest-to-goodness go-ahead.
Like many of us, it’s hard to detect the brain damage.
Some other things, the three months. The teacher said that she was an English teacher certified but “would not teach under Sokoloff, coming into my classroom and trying to tell me how to teach.” She said, and it’s a precept I still follow and find is true even today, how teaching math was easier because the rules don’t change. Two plus two is always four, and the like. Whereas the language is vibrant and fluid, subject to all sorts of debits and credits.
Sokoloff, for his part, did venture into the class I was teaching. He sat down at a vacant seat, penned a couple notes, got up and left.
I never did see what he wrote nor did he ever share it with me.
I can see, too, how Levin got set up. He didn’t befriend the kids so much as sticking out his hand to give him help up. However, it’s regarded as a weakness, by some. I do it all the time, half-natural friendliness, half-sure why-not-ness.
The kid also picked up somewhere along the line that Levin had access to a bundle of cash. My kids think I’m broke cuz I never have any money, I don’t bring any to school. So the word gets round that I don’t have any money and no one asks me for any.
The kid, though, of a meaner streak because he was playing on a larger stage, had his street research. He had to keep his little chump change drug thing going.
Like me, the ilk got a little carried away one evening.
Just like me. I’d let my guard down in the Neighborhood.
‘Course, my attackers weren’t quite so quick to pull the trigger. Levin’s attackers prob’ly had their head full o crack and were crazed. Mine were full of booze—in retrospect, I guess, we all were—and therefore clumsy.
Our NYC days had ended those respective years.
I, fortunately, was able to take the long tunnel home.
899889999
The fissure of another NYC story. Seems like the owner of the Lion’s Head—father of six, husband to three—has left this world, God Rest Him. There was quite a few lines devoted to his passing. My damask demurring of the Lion’s Head was but a flash in the pan. I only can speak of it because I quaffed a few there.
The big burley bartender, I can still see his face now, a crown over his head, had complete control of the bar. I don’t think he had much trouble serving me. Save one time, I think, I’d been knocking a few down with Pete—a gay boy who deigned get me in the sack but I was so ardently heterosexual I think he finally gave up. He’d called me over to his new apt. And there we knocked down what he said was moonshine from W. Virginia. I couldn’t believe how smooth it was. I expected moonshine to be dry and raspy and foul tasting, much like a low grade of Mary Jane. However, I had to keep taking repeated thrusts at the bottle because I couldn’t believe how smooth it was. Nor could I believe the affects it had. The stuff managed to paralyze me. I didn’t feel drunk, but I could hardly walk around.
It was then I think we sojourned our way to the Lion’s Head. I didn’t feel like hitting the White Horse (know, for those in the know, as “the Horse.” I find in the article—probably written by a compatriot (cuz that’s how it sounded—sortofa obj/tribute type)—that the pub’s a stone’s throw away from wher I’d deign buy the Sunday Times alone Saturday night known, for those in the know, and by chance, are now reading the article, was known as “the Head.”
Another though revolving to the surface. It’s lucky John passed away when he did. Because if he’d made it to the grand old age of say, 89 or 91, the pub would’ve been of little importance because no one would know that yeah, verily, this used to be the Lion’s Head and this is where writer’s hung out and this is where they had the jackets of those who wrote and, in turn, published books and the jackets adorning the wall you’d walk down to and there, right near the juke box, would be a dark paneled mahogany wall filled with bright book jackets of published working authors.
Most, I think, were living.
My first glance or tow, I thought, yes, dare I dream that my own jacket will be there someday? However, it looks like there was the Lion’s Head demise before I could get a publisher to bend an ear in my direction.
Did we mention Yarie? This was the smoldering sexpot I took to Lion’s Head. She wanted to be a dancer. She went to ballet classes. I like her a great deal—just the way she cut and carried herself. Did she say she originally was from Ohio? She and I, transplanted Midwesterners, takin’ a bit of the Big Apple.
We arrived ‘bout the same time.
Not only did she have this look, this longhaired artistic-type look; she had this attitude of disdain not a few of us men that were trailing her found appealing. John Short, who dubbed me the nickname Tex—and which I wore from day one to day end—sired the Yarie stead quite well. He was even shorter than me but had this gruff NYC accent that gave him the bearing of Mayor Abe Beame, the city boss when I first moved to town, both with somewhat of a diminutive stature, both political animals if of varying degrees.
I guess she’d be plaintive if she had freckles but essentially it was just long straight black hair she sometimes wore in a bun over her head. I liked the longhaired look better but the bun also served to have you remember that she could easily unfasten the claps and therein would descend waves of hair falling about her shoulders, cascading like a stream.
What was our first meeting? Ah yes, at the Horse. It was a bar I happened to walk into, not far from where I lived. ‘Course, I had a few dollars in my pocket so therefore the night ahead was not entirely unconscionable. I think Yarie had her hair in a bun when I first met her. She was sitting on a stool behind the bar with the small book on her hand to take orders. She affixed the gaze I gave her with something of a scowl and a mutter and walked on. Did I hit the Horse with my Stetson? It was a look I sometimes proffered.
I think later that evening she did talk to me, but only in short, brief exchanges. In the time that ensued, days becoming weeks and weeks becoming months, I’d sometimes talk to her—brief exchanges as before---until it came time to possibly “hook up” with me. They—she and another gal who also carried drinks and beer burgers about the cozy confines of the old bar—saw to it that at least we’d get together. However, in the wider scope of things, I was to found out not only was John Short and I interested in squiring her affections, Peter Jason had also expressed interest
Now Jason—they dubbed him “the Jace”—came upon me a little with a bit more directness. There I was at the Horse—now in my short time in NYC, already evidencing itself to be a local watering hole though I couldn’t quite believe the prices—at one of tables near the door, wearing my transplanted tan Stetson, when Jace came up and invited me to a party. I don’t know who he thought I was or what had been told but he mentioned something about an actor he knew who’d just have to look at the script one time and had it down.
This was one of the first things he said to me. I don’t know if he’d heard that I was one of those people who came to NYC as an actor and thus trying to get on stage and screen.
I didn’t make it to the party nor did I ever meet the actor in questions.
Really, it was just a brief respite from Nebraska particularly, Midwest generally, cool my heels for awhile before I’d get enough together to go out after my son.
Oh, that’s right. I guess I was taking some acting classes for the sole purpose for meeting more people and so eventually got up a resume and a shot around the borders of the midsection of town I’d take the subway to and try to land some kind of part. Like my NYC stint it was more of a diversion, a diversion of a diversion.
What were the names of those places? SAG, Casting calls, Midtown Photography, After Dark. Was that name or what am I forgetting? “That cigarette smoke is so obnoxious,” I remember one of the guys that was at the studios where Uncle Frank's friend and erstwhile boon companion et photographer John Hart got his shots developed. ‘Course, like the Lion’s Head, the place is prob’ly long gone. I remember the elevator was crowded. Most of the passengers, you could tell, silently agreed. The guy was right, not a few years ahead of his time. The mid 70’s, of course, people pretty much smokes and drank at their leisure, at their own risk, as it were, free of the encumbrances a health conscious America now places on its subjects. The smoker, of course, with no place to put it out, had to suffer, puffing in silence to ground floor before he was let out into the wild of the midtown afternoon crowd.
But there was none of that when I first me Yarie. I came into the Horse unsophisticated. Stepping into their midst was the Midnight Cowboy. I was often referred to as a character in such, due, I ‘spose, to the tan Stetson and the boots.
So then Yarie, in her own way, not the acting bug. I don’t know if she officially went so far as to get pictures and start going out on casting calls. But I know that she did go to ballet classes frequently.
Jace, on the other hand, he had better luck than all three of us, insofar as the acting went. I heard somewhere that he’d died in John Wayne’s arms, or something, and thus was early in stage and screen, West Coast version. He, too, feted the Yarie trade. Oh, of course, Yarie wasn’t her first name. She just went by her last name.
This further intrigued me. It just was her whole manner—short, abrupt, a slight interest in me.
She deigned, however, to go out with me one time. I think she wanted to see the move “The Red Shoe.” It was playing at a theatre near New York University campus, in a small building where there were some jazz clubs south of Washington Square. Was there a long line or what? I don’t remember the exact reason but we didn’t attend the performance. She look quite darling: her hair was not in a bun—a style I’d begun to look at as intimidating—but falling down to the middle of her back. I remember we didn’t hair a cab, neither of us having any money—I not have v. much at all—pulling out a few dollars here and there so I could take her.
I remember we walked what seemed o be quite a ways. We pretty much ran out of things to say pretty much after the first block and a half. I was trying to be witty and charming and I remember she smiled a couple times. Both us were uncomfortable. Since we didn’t go to the move—it was something about ballet, Yarie had said—we then walked about aimlessly for something to do. I was thinking of what bar we could go to. Was that the right thing to ask? Neither us mentioned the Norse our first meeting place. Was she still working there? I think she was. Neither of us wanted to go there, what with all the poking eyes and comments. “Tex hooking up with Yarie” or “Look at Yarie and Tex” would be muttered and uttered. And then John Short would prob’ly be looking over, a cigarette in his mouth, dark mug of beer in his hand, his natty cap and deep voice that belonged to a man twice his size. He’d be laughing and prob’ly say something to Yarie who would smile like the infectious Mona Lisa smile she had and go on over
In other words, it was such a special time for us together; neither of us wanted to go over. So the next logical choice—and then we’d be safe—would the “The Head.” Was she wearing a long black cape? I almost want to say that I think she was. I remember we were now in the northern edge of Soho, walking by the small now-dark restaurant where I’d first gone with Uncle Frank to have a cup of coffee and a guy asked if he could “shoot me.” Having landed in the Big A but a fortnight, I was taken aback.
“You know, take your picture.”“Sure, why not,” I said. Thus my acting career was launched. I went across the street to a studio and joined in with many young players of a somewhat similar bent. A diversion of a diversion of a diversion.
But I didn’t feel like going into this story about getting hit on my a gay guy to Yarie, even though it probably would’ve helped matters if I’d lightened up a little.
Our aimless journey continued.
“You want to go to the Head?”
What did she say, and how did she reply?
“Oh, ok.” “I don’t care.” I’m not sure what she did say but I remember the black cap and her hair longer than ever before. Her light dancer feet picking across the sidewalk.
We walked by the bar section and I know that the bartender, who did know me, who prob’ly wanted to talk and thereby, like John short at the Horse, make all kinds of observations and pronouncements, his deep voice cascading the length of the bar.
We safely made it to the back where we could be alone and private.
“Some of my friends are vegetarians but I like meat,” Yarie said at one point, in one of the few sentences she managed to utter from her what he thought was beautiful white countenance enhanced by the dark surrounding her.
As my wont, I was somewhat taken aback by this statement; I didn’t know what so say in reply, hearing the man at the table next to me who said he was a reporter for the New York Daily News. He was entertaining a table of well-dressed ladies turning their attention to his pronouncements. For every witty think he said, the banter, the repartee, I found myself almost to the point of being tongue-tied. Was this a spate when I’d quit drinking? Moreover, if I had no lubrication, there wasn’t much witty I could say.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” I head one of the ladies say, lightly. I was there, riding high. I’d been altar boy, see; I knew what it meant.
He had a quick rejoinder.
“Mea cuplap,” he said. “Cm’on, what is that? How about” and he said something that sounded like it was in French and so had the upper hand returned in his favor.
To drink? I thin I was still on my pledge year, maybe midway though, the first year able to keep a cork in the bottle.
Because I was not only stuck dumb, I was speechless, the waitress standing over us to take out order.
“Coffee,” I think I finally said. Yarie ordered a cheesecake.
Did I then order cheesecake, too?
In a bar, cheesecake and coffee in front of me. I was definitely out of my element.
It was all absolutely insufferable. I remember thinking I only had a couple more dollars in my pocket.
We left the banter and the reporting. We walked her to her apartment on Perry St. Yarie only lived a couple blocks away, Perry St., just off Hudson. I was Bank St., just off Bethune. We were separated by W11th St., the Horse between us, rising high, it seemed, above all else, it’s picture of a Horse that would be colored dark pink and white as the evening in the city wore on.
Tongue-tied as ever, I had little to say. Feeling both sheepish and foolhardy. I felt like robbing a bank. Somehow, I was responsible for a disastrous evening in Goth.
3333333
Just a cold beer and roof over my head Short would quickly and announced when pressed for the responsibilities of life. The teaching bug bit him, then the acting bug. We saw a play together that I couldn’t understand.
“Hey, Tex, let’s split a cab,” Short said, a few months later. We both took a ride uptown to some play. I can’t remember what it was. Was John Short in it? I think he was. He’d also caught the acting bug.
“Get outta here, Tex, what’re ya talkin’ about?” Short would often say. It was his gruff manner. All the time we were together, I know what was on his mind: Yarie. But he, an Irishman like myself, played it like the Knight’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales. We loved and swooned over her from afar.
“I’ll be annexing my apt. to Cuba,” Short would inevitably say when the tax man commeth I bemoaned my owing money to the Federal govt.
It sounded like a good idea.
“I think she might be, you know,” was all Short said, pulling at his lengthening beard. I don’t think he ever did go out with her but he did manage to talk to her a great deal more than me.
“Oh really?” I guess what he meant was that maybe he felt that Yarie was a lesbian. While this didn’t necessarily exclude us from the Knight’s Tale, it certainly put an 80’s spin on our quest. Short was desperate, I decided.
No, was that before or after our chance date? I like an Irishman who keeps secretes, didn’t inveigle Short with the info of that night when Yarie jumped nearly into my arms. It was a night of high lubrication. It must’ve been after the year was up sans imbibing. I was plying my usual Horse tricks of being quiet until the beer started taking effect. It was Michelob. They’d pull it out of the stainless steel ice-filled sink just beneath the bar. The barkeep would then set it up on the wooden scared bar. Scared, in the sense that some initials have been carved at one end that had been since long been polished over but the dark wood had had many an elbow of persons great and small, evil and valiant wresting upon them. I threw out my buck and the barkeep set the beer on there. Was it Andy? No, he worked only during the day. Was it Dutch? No he was only there a short time before he moved on. There were a couple others and now I can’t recall their names.
Marmalade’s Gitchie Ya Ya somewhere in the background. Disco was invading horse sense.
“Voulez-vous couches avec moi ce soir?”
One of them set the tall beer on the table. Was I standing next to Short? It seemed he was never too far away from ear shot. Short always drank the dark ale in a mug. “Ah, hah, heh, heh,” I can still hear him now, pulling on his beard and laughing. No, Short was not in presence that night. Perhaps he was working on lesson plans. See Short, when I first met him, was working with a concrete company, looking over it—the concrete that is—watching it come out of the mixer and testing it. He would have the concrete experience about his personage—some white specks here and there, some on his boots. I, of course, had had much to do with concrete business, having puddled not a few truckloads along sidewalks and driveways then later on streets and highways. Those with strong backs need apply. ‘Course, nowadays, they really don’t much care if you’re strong back or not, the soldiers in the Midwest realizing that a fella could get just as far—and meet damsels on the rebound—if they stepped into a telemarketing place. Particularly if they had most of their teeth and polished white there’d be little or no reason to stand beneath a hot sun and seeing a heavy load to the form or grab one end of a two by and strike the mud off.
All day long.
And short did this for awhile—thought there’s a safe debt to his society that he didn’t v. much pudding. Thus, we were able to strike up something of a conversation. Later, he went to teaching, he said, at one of the alternative school or something. And therein his dress changed slightly if not his manner or his speech.
But Short was not around the night that Princess Yarie made her play. I was just there, watching the top of the Michelob bottle fall partially off, the bottle that was loosened if it had sat in the ice that Andy had brought up earlier in the day for quite some time. I was dwelling on this and other concerns when Yarie with Maureen and the large lady named Phyllis all came striding in the front door of the White Horse.
Yarie, of course, had her hair down and entered laughing. I tried no to look at her and thus reveal my longing. She seemed a bit on the tipsy side. I’d never ever seen her in any state before but sober and serious. The lubrication made her appear soft and languid, almost like a pebble across a lake she moved first to the corner of the bar where it takes an L-shape, joining her friends at the corner beneath the small color TV set at the shoreline.
At one point did she come over and start talking to me? I feigned interest in the show, looking at the beer.
Seeing me, she quickly came over and her white sleeves across the bar.
She looked wonderful in black. She looked heavenly in white.
“Take me home, Tex,” she said, looking deep in my eyes.
And maybe I don’t remember what exactly she did say. Could be I got it wrong, just like when I was asked how I ever got to know Hanley. “He asked me, ‘Do you smoke?’” I’d said. Hanley, within earshot, said, “No, I said ‘Can you roll?’”
It then brought it all back to me that early cloudy afternoon at a concrete park slightly above 14th St. on the Westside. It was the annual softball game, Uptown vs. Downtown. The jist of the game was that whoever lost, the captain would get a pie in their face. Kevin Sullivan, one of the guys I met shortly and slightly before I met Yarie, was the captain of the downtown team, prob’ly the first time I went into the Horse.
Even though I contributed $10, it was only a few innings I got to play. One of the White Horse bartenders, who later asked me for a couple thousands so he could get his teeth fixed, was also in both abeyance and attendance.
I remember him one time wondering who “N. Davis” was.
“I wonder who that “N. Davis” is, Billy said, almost to himself.
“N. Davis?” I replied. I had no idea who or what he is referring to.
“Yeah, every one of the elevators I se his name at the bottom as an inspector. The bottom is always signed “N. Davis.”
I congratulated him on his observation. Sure enough, I noticed the name when I thought to look, on most elevators.
Just like John Short, when he heard how I had a little patio-type garden on my fire escape upon which I grew marijuana and sweet corn.
“You brought that dirt back from Nebraska?” Short asked, picking up on the tail end of the conversation on how I had to lug the dirt from the courtyard three floors below.
“Nah,” I said. “I just got in back from the courtyard.
At any rate in the clash of the titans, Uptown vs. Downtown, I did get to go in: I remember him yelling, “Hit it back to Nebraska, Tex.” I could not very much honor this request, hitting a meek high pop fly to the infield
It wasn’t long before I was replaced. They played pretty different in this area: if you had two foul balls you were out. And something like you could only have two strikes. While I felt my performance miserable, not only at the plate but horribly misjudging a fly ball that sailed over my head, it was my intro to Hanley. This sturdy-looking guy sitting on the concrete bleachers. There it was, an open bag of grass, just to the right of him. Hanley was pretty burley and husky. He was pretty much sitting by himself and looked pretty much like he was enjoying the proceedings.
After we smoked a couple joints—more people beginning to crown around the smoke—he asked me if I wanted to walk to the Horse. We started but then he said he needed some money. I told him I didn’t have nay. He also told me he had just gotten out of prison.
And, as things developed, I began to see Hanley more that I saw Yarie. It’s something like my stubbornness, born of a thousand insults and injuries, pulled me to the Abington Square Park where the downtown guys—and I think a few of them were in a gang---hung out. I deigned it my responsibility to begin to emulate their behavior.
So, I don’t know what Yarie had said to me. But her features were hot and languid. “Tex, are you gonna take me home?” or something like that. Maybe it wasn’t even a question. Maybe it was just, “Take me home, Tex.”
I was taken completely aback. Yarie, the ballet dancer, the beautiful chickie from Ohio, the Boilermaker state, was seducing me.
As was my haste in such matters, like I’d won the lottery or something, I didn’t know what to do. I immediately ordered a shot of tequila or some such nonsense to steel my courage, which would portend for us to be rolling in the hay in a v. short time. I know her friend Maureen had already scooped my dim, no sunlight apt. And, while it was always looked ever after I’d live in NYC for eight years as if I’d moved in three weeks before, it nevertheless must’ve come back with something of a favorable rating.
So there I sit. Or stand, rather. I rarely sit when I’m drinkin’ at the bar, prob’ly because I’m short it’d almost be like, say a lady was talking to me I’d be sitting there, looking up at her. Yarie has told me to take her home. Short is nowhere in sight. Jason is on the West Coast. There just aren’t many people around, for that matter. Yarie’s request pretty much fell on deaf ears, even though it was a Friday night.
The shot did little to help my hormones. It did not have the intended effect of making me feel suddenly that I was sexually powerful. In fact, it made me somewhat sleepy and made me feel not only that I was suddenly even more awkward than before but also somehow I now had a mental block
I was really lucky Short wasn’t around.
And when did the dog come into the picture? Somehow Yarie and the three ladies had a god to deal with. Did she go up to her apt. and get it? Did she say that she was watching it for someone? Many times the living arrangements in the small Village apts. were unusual. A guy who was gay was living with a girl who was straight. A guy who was straight lived with another guy. The living arrangements in other words were surprising. Another Horse waitress, I don’t remember her name but she had short thick black hair and was really quite full in the chest. She also had a dancer’s build, if slightly taller than rounder than Yarie. Was she also in Yarie’s ballet class? No, I think not. Only, she had me come over and try to put some bricks together at her fireplace. She was living with a gay guy.
She had come out of the bath and had a large towel wrapped around her and gave me an idea on how she wanted the bricks to be laid.They got along well.
And, for that matter, I lived with a gay guy. I can’t even remember where I met him. His name was Don. He was from the Bronx. He was v. friendly, straightforward about each and everything. He really made no bones about his being gay. I told him, when he came to my apt., that there’d be no sex there. He kept to this pledge. I didn’t. I picked up some itinerant floozy and she slept over. He said to me, “I thought you said we wouldn’t be have any sex here.”
Although I had this twisted notion that somehow this was an assertion of my maleness, my heterosexual virulent, somewhat proud of this double conquest, I did not feel the same way when it was all said and done. I felt low. I felt somehow what I always hated but knew was part of myself, that of a bully. Well, in this instance, I certainly had the sand kicked in my face.
Like my first roommate, Alex, the partnership in the small dark tenement walk-up on the 3rd Floor on Bank St. dissolved after a few weeks. What had to look of a swinging affair—i.e. half of my rent being shared—dissolved into my dislike of having someone else breathing in the other room, coming in the door, sharing all the private things that for some reason—even though they were small and trite and somewhat ridiculous, somehow had v. important concern to me.
So, then, I think, Yarie was in one of those non-sex cohabitants. Anyway, she had this dog she was taking care of. Tex, take us home meant, of course,
Tex, take the dog home and me.
Again, perhaps due to plumb now sitting on my lap, and I know what in blazes to quite exactly do about it, ordered up another shot. Now this was another deleterious choice as now, what with the beers I’d had, I was now getting drunk. However, while I was trying to match the elegance of Yarie’s mood—because she’d probably only got drunk a couple times—there was no way I could do it. While she was light and aerie, I was slumped and cold.
“Let’s go,” I think she finally said.
I think I waited on Perry St. while she went up to get the dog, pondering my fate.
Did I want to go straight home. No, let’s go to the Bank St. pier and talk. And there it was, late at night, Yarie and I on the pier. She talked soft and long and in my heart, I knew I’d never loved anyone so much, the final union and she’d be mine.
I began to fret like some maiden. Was my apt. picked up, was my bed made? What small trashy thing was I involving myself in with now?
It didn’t matter; it’d mostly be in the dark, anyway.
Walking back our first union together, our first consummation I turned and stopped near the Westside Highway.
“Oh, my God, I left my blue Jean jacket.” For some reason, I just couldn’t walk away from it. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.” We’d walked a good halfway up the pier and thus it was a good 50-yard sprint. Oh yes, the jacket was still there. Why would it not be?
I grabbed the jacket and raced back to the spot. No Yarie. No dog. Did I see a form with a four-legged something or other walking ahead, far off in the distance.
“Yarie, Yarie,” I called out into the darkness ridiculously. The figure, whether it was Yarie or no, kept on walking.
I went back to my cold dark narrow Bank St. apt. realizing I’d missed the chance of my young lifetime.
But the next day, Saturday, was even brighter. I remember it being Saturday because the next day I was again at the Horse. This time it was the afternoon. I was all dressed up in my Cornhusker best. For birthday, as something of a tribute or something, my brothers had gone out of their way and for my birthday—which was maybe a month before—had sent me a complete Nebraska Cornhusker warm-up outfit. I was emblazoned in Husker red and white. It was a pretty sharp looking outfit if slightly on the overstated side. Nevertheless, I wore it with pride. Otherwise, I felt that there was always something a little self-serving and teasing I got from the NYC natives.
Moreover, Husker football was that good that their important games would be on TV. This one, of course, which I was suited up for, 1800 miles to the east, was the yearly battle with the Oklahoma Sooner. See, the only thing those Dyers knew about Nebraska was that they had a good football team. Penn State, Nebraska, Michigan, Note Dame was all said in the same breath. It therefore became something of a jumping off point for me. Not only was I Tex from Nebraska, it was Tex from Nebraska with a good football team.
And, other than Short, there were a couple guys that hung out at the bar that bet the line and in those days, Nebraska always—like a canvas over a wagon train—covered the spread. So, I had something of a prognosticator when it came to college football. You can always predict, I’d like to say, that Nebraska would cover the spread. And, I invariably put a footnote with, expect Oklahoma. It didn’t seem how many horses Nebraska would bring on the field; the Sooner would find the magic to win.
And thus was it this day. I remember being at the White Horse in the middle of the afternoon, Michelob in my hand, the small color TV on the shelf above the edge of the bar Yarie had leaned just the night previous with her friends. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been the night before. I dropped the pass in the end zone.
And, as fate would have it, Nebraska was not having a good game. They were behind and I was catching it from some of the guys, who, of course, based on what I’d said about Nebraska and maybe didn’t hear the footnote, were losing some money on the game.
Moreover, I felt a little sheepish. Had this really happened last night with Yarie? That I was there in the bar, leaning on it and she came on over to me v. direct and said “Take me home, Tex.” And I walked with her to the Bank St. pier with the huge white dog and forget my jacket and go back and get my jacket and there was no Yarie. The one girl in all my life I wanted so much to come up to my apartment, carry the languid fluidity; months of iciness had melted with the evening she had out with her girlfriends.
No, no one was the lesser for it. That I was now the fool for having let something fall out of my fingers. Like someone else had said to me, I had the ability to talk myself out of a good lay. In other words, it’s much better be mysterious and get and direct. I tend to talk at length about almost nothing. Some might think it entertaining enough while others might grow quickly bored.
So, there I am, watching the same. I’m drinkin’ a Michelob. It’s become my favorite beer. Cold, from the ice that I can see below, the upper label wet so you can peel it off if you so choose. I’m not having a good time with the Nebraska game, still kicking myself about last night. All this and more when who pops her head in the door but Yarie. She still had on the long white coat, her hair still down, one hand holding the chain that was around the dog’s neck.
Playin’ Joe Cool, I maybe noticed her out of the corner of my eye. While I evinced the part of being macho stud, gitchie gitiche ya ya was not know circulating in my head and I was as inept as the Nebraska offense, spooked by the goblins and gremlins that were the Oklahoma Sooner.
She looked over at me for a minute to lend her a hand, rekindle the fires that were last night.
I fumbled out of bounds.
Later it was said that Yarie reported that yes, she was with Tex but didn’t know what happened to him that he might’ve fallen in the river.
It was definitely an opp. Missed.
I don’t think we said more than 10 words to each other after that.
Gitchie gitiche ya ya. Voulez-vois couchez avec moi ce soir?
Tryin’ to grab the rung but my horse just wasn’t tall enough.
Even if Yarie was gone, the Horse remained.
And then I began to see more of another guy and my visits to the Park became more and more frequent. The Uptown vs. Downtown game continued.
Gitchie gitchie ya ya. Voulez-vous couchez avex moi ce soir?
And that I was gone and the Horse remains.
Gitchie gitchie ya ya. Voulez-vous couchez ave moi ce soir?
Ch 15 Another Eddie
Now, this one he did have exposed. I was workin’ at the post office. Pullin’ the male off the trucks. Tryin’ to decide when and where I was gonna duke it out with Eddie.
“I figured as much,” Eddie said, looking at me accusingly.
“Hey,” I then said. “You don’t have to make a comment. If you don’t know, don’t tell me or whatever.”
It was something along the lines of my first heated exchange with Eddie.
“Call me prick again, I’ll see you outside.”
“Hey Eddie, I never called you that.”
Little bit later, walking into help with the tail end of the load, I further tried to explain my query.
I didn’t want no trouble from nobody.
“Hey, Eddie, that’s not even in my vocabulary.”
I could feel my throat tightening.
Fear or madness or whatever.
This overture was offered again. I tried to help him unload, the conveyor belt was fastened over the hole that started the mail moving through the system pulled off by attendants standing in other places throughout the building.
“Get up over there,” Eddie ordered.
It was my turn this time to get a little under the weather.
“Hey, don’t tell me what to do.”
“Because you’re a fuckin’ idiot, that’s why,” Eddie said, a little later.
I went to Larry this time. “He called me a fuckin’ idiot and I don’t want anymore of that nonsense.
“Well you called me prick.”
“Well, I don’t want anyone callin’ anyone prick or anything cuz next time I’ll send you both home and I’ll fire you.
It finally reached a head, so to speak a couple weeks later.
“Somebody wanna help me push this?” I had a hold of the large conveyor belt and was tryin’ to push it outta the way.”
Eddie was standing with a cohort and more or less ignored my entreaty.
So I started doin’ it myself.
“Hey,” Eddie yelled, seeing my efforts, “don’t be pushin’ that by yourself.”
“Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do,”
The overture was extended to meet me outside.
“Yeah,” I said “that’s all right.”
Or something like that.
So then as the morning wore til 5 a.m. I had to decide how I would answer to the challenge. I’d punch him and throw him on the ice. Then I thought, we’ll both get fired and then it’ll be no good for any of us.
I saw him talkin’ to his dad Rick later in the day as the 5 a.m. approached. That he had a dad and I’d have to tangle with the both.
But, I punched out and noted that Eddie had left a little early and as I pushed out through the door, his small car drove by and he kept on going.
We never saw Eddie again.
Chapter 10 WE NEVER SAW EDDIE AGAIN
Next to my uncle and a bum on the street, Eddie was the last person I was to see in NYC.
Is that when the street bum—I call him that because, I don’t think he’d mind bein’ called that, he’d be there at Abingdon Square Park and sometimes he’d bring his bottle of booze over or share a quart of beer with us.
I was comin’ outta the Opera Deli. I’d just gone in, middle of the morning, snagged myself a cold twelve-pack.
The guy at the counter, it wasn’t Dom, but he musta got word from Dom that I was okay and go ahead and give me this little instant credit and I just picked up the twelve pack—or maybe it was only a six, there was only Eddie there in my apartment to drink it.
So this middle-aged, midde heavy middle-haired bum—you know, the unshaven look, theexcess layer of ragged clothes, no matter what the temp—see’s me comin’ outta the Opera with a bag of beer. In Nebraska, we always called it a sack. A sack of groceries, for instance. Here in the NYC, it’s a bag. So while I was reckoning to be carryin’ a sack of beer, Mr. Bum looked upon it as a bag of beer.
He also looked upon it with a mild look of concern. No, I wouldn’t call it concern so much as a comment to an equal, soon to be equal, past equal.
“One beer’s too many,” he said. “And a thousand ain’t enough.”
I think I grunted and went on to my journey to my apartment.
For the first time in as many moons as I can remember, I didn’t want to go it there. It was a cloudy June morning. There wasn’t that many days of teachin’ left. But, given my current state, I’d pretty much forgotten what day it was. And even if I knew what day it was, it really didn’t matter. I’d called in enough to the ole Wade JHS, saying I was sick when, in reality, I was deadly hung over.
I didn’t want to go back to my apartment cuz I knew what faced me there: my clothes torn in ruins.
“I couldn’t find Hanley,” Eddie Quigley said, coming in the door. “He’s not at the part and he’s not anywhere around.”
I again looked at the melee that was my clothes on the floor. I couldn’t have made it to school anyway: the only clothes I had to wear were a couple pairs of jeans and a shirt I had in the dirty clothes.
“Yeah,” Quigley said. “That Hanley got pretty crazy.”
I’d gone out earlier and saw a shirt my brother Joey really thought was cool and which I’d purchased at Macy’s was now one landing below. I picked up shards of small red pieces and could see the Hawaiian design of blikes and frisbees and palm trees now in little pieces.
This was some signal, or something. I knew the girl who lived in the apartment. We’d been fast friends but then since I started drinking again a few months before, any intimacy I had quickly cooled. When I told her I needed a college book back I’d let her borrow, the cool went to anger. While we didn’t see each other hardly ever, there wasn’t much of a greeting when we passed.
But whatever and despite any and all over the bridge water, I still wasn’t going to have my once good shirt resting against her door, other shards and shades in the hallway of my downstairs companions.
This was only part of it. There musta been a trail Hanley had concocted in his drunken stage.
I remember how Jerry Mudd said that he’d thrown a color tv set through the window of his ex-wife’s 5th ave. apartment.
“Yeah, through it right out the window.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, “why the heck did you do that.”
“Ah,” Hanley said, swiggin’ down the beer, “she pissed me off.”
“Yeah,” Mudd said with a laugh, “be careful or Hanley’ll throw yours out the window too.
Of course, it was nigh impossible to determine what contretemps Hanley’d gottem himself into. He really didn’t have a place.
“Hey, can I sleep tonight,” Hanley said. “Mudd’s dad said I can’t sleep there anymore til the end of the month.
So know it came down to the money thing. I was onna binge. Quigley had latched on. In need of succor from the debilitating teen angst, I think he was beginning to develop some sorta attachment to me.
Hanley, the Dennis version, on the other hand, was prying in, lookin’ to get over. He’d thrown his wife’s color tv set out the window. He was sleepin’ at Jerry Mudd’s apartment. I don’t know if he was doin’ the Padded Wagon thing, or not.
One time, beginnin’ to feel the fumes now slowly start to evaporate from the skin, getting’ a shower in, some dressed up, I’d gone into Andy’s. I think I was mad because some of the money I’d stashed in one of my books was gone. In fact, my friend from England, John was callin’ wonderin’ what the heck was up. Rita thought maybe we should get together. At least she’d called.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m always comin’ up a little short.”
Of course, I don’t know exactly what I said. Maybe it was along the lines that some of us had to work for a living. Cuz, the way things stood, neither Mudd nor Hanley had anything like a guy would call a steady job. Now, I think Jerry Mudd worked for The Padded Wagon a couple times, off nad on, haulin’ furniture and what-not. Sometimes you’d see the Padded Wagon parked in front of the Horse. Then a couple of the neighborhood guys would go in there and have a couple beers.
I don’t think Dennis Hanley, however, was always on to this gig. I to this day don’t know what he did. Where he slept, how he ate, how he showered, how he dressed.
“Yer startin’ to sound a little like your brother,” Dennis.
Andy’s son, s shade taller ‘n Andy, commented.
He was referring to Terry Hanley, the guy from ball park fame. The guy that did a stretch in San Quentin for killin’ a black guy.
“I never lost a fight,” Terry said. They also called him CI. He was big and menacing. His dad or mom must’ve been solid and heavy set because beneath the narrow forehead was a square build. CI could also be characterized by a gravely voice, droppin’ the vocal chords down a few notches. He’d sound like a mobster or a gangster. I didn’t have the sound pinned down too good until I happened across a record album—Heart Attach and Vine—cut by singer Tom Waites. “Cigarettes all the goddamn time, some with a broken pair of legs” or something like that. I’d given a tape copy to an AA gal I’d met in Seward. I’d see her each and every Sunday morning, had pretty good attendance that meeting. I listened to it all the time, imparted it to her, but don’t remember where or what I did with it.
But Tom Waite’s voice sounded so much like CI. And Andy’s son—I can’t think of his name off the top of my head—said that Dennis was startin’ to sound like his brother. Roar like the lion.
I don’t know if Dennis Hanley got pinched big time or not later. But in that point in time, he was justa two-bit hustler, shakin’ out a few of us for some chump change.
But I went along for the ride. Partially because I felt obligated to, partially because I was chickenshit or getting’ in a tussle with Hanley.
Oh yeah, he seen me fight Cal. “Yeah, doncha remember, I gave you a beer,” Hanley said a few month removed, after Jerry Mudd had made a formal acquaintance in the park.
So then he grew into a leach.
“That fuckin’ Dennis Hanley,” Eddie Quigley said when I returned with the beer. “He’s getting’ too crazy.”
I set the beer down on the middle table. I looked at the ruins of my clothes strewn about floor of the slopping floored apartment. Suddenly, when I had a chance to think a little bit of twice, I wanted to cry. See, some of the clothes were Uncle Franks. Even though he picked up from the thrifts, he had excellent taste. Like the red Hawaiian shirt I wouldn’t part with to give to my brother, I’d developed something of a fondness for them.
I don’t remember what happened next. I think Eddie mighta put on some music. At any rate, I decided to go outside. Why was I going to the Opera Deli again? I had no idea. But I do remember just trying to come outta the haze that was in the sky and in my brain.
Jenny, of course, had a different weight of issues on her mind when she placed the call to the club.
Yes, I no longer had to be relegated to the strain of pouring a bit of water on a clear glass or seeing that a table was set or that bread was in the right place. Paul was cutting back in his hours at the Club and therefore, because I considered myself the erstwhile student, hail holy Queen mother of writers, I could study and sit in the old grad’s chair and look out the slew of traffic that coursed down 2nd Ave. and head for the 69th street bridge and the onward to Queens or the airport.
It wasn’t much of a window to look out of. Owing to the fact that it was moving on to the late evening, there wasn’t much life or activity on the street—no quick impromptu performance by a street clown, a juggler, a fire eater as sometimes would appear on the busy intersection 7th ave. and Bleeker.
Like the restaurant confines of Elmers, there wasn’t much business or calls from prospective diners. In fact, it was so dead and lifeless, I took upon myself to saunter out into the restaurant proper. There’d be John in the corner, leaning against the bar, looking down on Walt with his Brooklyn accent, Walt looking up at John gesturing and gesticulating. The cooks were in the back: they could throw something very fast together but, because the club was not that buys on any given evening, especially during the week, it wasn’t like there was a movement anywhere in the club, the fastest bit of action being the on-going backgammon tournament that had been going on as long as I could remember.
“Good evening, this is Elmer’s, how can I help you?”
“This is Jenny.”
“Hey, how’re you doin’?”
I was beginning to get the feel of academia. I had a party. It was my junior year. I hadda speech class, the only class that I’d earned an A in. The cute gal with the redhair, such a gigantic chest. She was from the East Village. And she’d invited him over. Her boyfriend was a hockey player. So if I wanted to tangle with him, it woulda been a skirmish.
But she didn’t make it. None of the neighborhood guys showed up either. However, the gal he’d slept with in the attic of her parent’s beautiful house in the island drove down with her brother.
The hockey player miss called. She was an East Village gal with a bunch of friends.
She had to check it out.
“So you’re havin’ a party are ya?”
“Yeah, I am, come on over.”
Maybe she could detect the urgency in my voice. There was a few voices that could be heard in the background. Jenny and her brother sat there on his bed he used as a couch and looked a little out of place, slightly uncomfortable, both of them wearing smiles.
“Is many people there?”
“Oh yeah, there’s a lot of people here. Come on over.”
“Oh yeah, okay. I’m with a bunch of my friends. We’ll try to make it over.”
“That’d be great.”
But the red-head hockey player gal never made it over. The evening wore on and there wasn’t very many people comin’ over, Jenny and her brother and that was about it. A couple other people.
“Hey, we’ll see ya later,” I said to the brother. I drank excessively and pretty much ignored ‘em the whole night.
And then I forgot about her, I can’t remember why. It was just one of those quick NYC hustle-type things.
I heard the phone ring at Elmer’s. Usually it was an old person, askin’ about the Club hours or confirming a reservation. ‘Course, why would they confirm a reservation if they really had no way to worry about not finding a place?
“Hello?”
“Hey, James, is that you.”
I recognized the voice almost immediately. It was a couple months after the party.
“Hey, yeah, Jenny, how’re you don’?”
“Good.”
Her voice sounded a little away and strained.
“I’m calling from the hospital,” she said.
I stood and looked at the few names that were written down. Tomorrow evening would be just as slow as tonight. But the names were now a blur.
“What,” the Ironworker said. “You’re calling from the hosital?”
“Yeah,” and now there was a touch of definace in her voice.
“I just had an abortion.”
“What? You had a what?”
“I just had an abortion.”
All the Club frills, all the nicety, all the scenery now looked cheep and gaudy.
“Well, well, why didn’t you tell me…I didn’t even know you were pregnant.”
“My parents made me do it.”
“Well, what…”
“Look, I gotta go. I might see ya in class or somethin’.”
“Yeah, yeah, right. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, everything’s takin’ care of. It’s all over.”
“Well, I want to do somethin’.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be all right. I gotta go now.”
Suddenly, the door before him swung open. This was unusual because it was a weekday night and early in the evening.
“Oh, could I talk to ya later, I got a couple people comin’ in.”
“I gotta go,” Jenny said. “’Bye.”
“Bye,” he said into a an empty line. He smiled.
“Good evening,” the boy said, his smile to the guests who, like most that visited Elmer’s, were well-to-do but gray and dying.
“Good evening,” came from the man pushing his wife past the phone and reservation list. “We’re expecting a couple a little bit later in the evening. Could you tell them the Jansen’s are here when they arrive.”
“Oh sure,” James said, as he opening the wrought-iron door and watched as they made their way into the Club.
Chapter 11 The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby Part II.
It’d just been one of those typical days in the South Bronx. James covered a few classes because the JHS couldn’t get a sub. I mean, he thought, what’re ya gonna do? He looked over at Wasserman, comin’ out of his classroom.
“You ready to head?”
“Sure.”
“I gotta get home early, my kid’s gotta game.”
“Yeah sure.”
The farm boy liked riding with Wass. His tall lanky bearing, it never seemed like much bothered him. Wass did some night teaching at a Jewish school down the road a ways so sometimes James got a ride out of the Bronx. Steve dropped him off on 90th and Broadway and then he took the E-train to 14th St. and Eighth Avenue.
Plus, it was gettin’ to be the end of the school year. It was the first week in June and it was Friday; the mid-afternoon--with sun and blue in NYC--held forth all manner of possibilities. Wouldn’t be long ‘fore he could maybe sublet his apartment and then head home, back to the country. Even though he didn’t like it much growin’ up, now he looked forward to feeding the hogs and the calves and then, like his dad always seemed to do, pass this chore test, about the barns and feed lots with an old green John Deere chore tractor and a dark green Oliver grinder, from whence he was then put on a bigger tractor and put back in the field.
For some reason, he could still remember the day he was to go to commencement exercises on the New York University commons for the 10 a.m. graduation. Instead of a diploma handed to him before a sea of caps and gowns, tiny granules of ground corn fell like sleet on his hair, down the back of his neck. The white and yellow dust made a small cloud before the nearby highway that began to fill, as the day grew on, with an uneven stream of pickups and semi’s—and an occasional jalopy—that rounded the hill and went on towards the small farm town a mile a way.
James remembered, and hence would always remember, how he ground five batches of feed graduation day. Several wooden gates were opened for this, his immediate future. He lifted the old gates then dragged them over the mud. He jumped back on the tractor ahead of the animals advancing to the unexpected opening and drove the tractor and grinder through. He got back off the tractor quickly then closed the gates, the hogs impatient and running at him and calves silently watching. He swung the auger over the feeder’s round mouth and watched as the ground corn and soymeal and mineral concoction filled the feeders. The pigs ran to tin lids they lifted with their snouts; larger hogs kneeled before the offering and ate. He watched, his grinder emptying, the pigs oblivious to his passing, squealing to the self-feeder. They pulled their white snouts away, heads slightly elevated, mouths full of yellow and white powder, toothless mouths chewing happily.
“They’ll be cultivatin’ first time through,” James thought, pulling a round NYC transit authority token form his pocket, pushing his hip through the turnstile. “I can’t wait to get on the 4420 and power it across the field.” Full throttle, that’s the only way, that’s the way we like it, marching the tractor and the tandem disc across the field, sun up to sun down.
Just the other day he’d talked to his dad and dad said he was done planting. James could just see his dad leaning on the kitchen counter, phone in his ears, blue denim coveralls faded on the pockets where he’d stuck his tools, his cheeks a deep red from the chafe of the spring wind that chased the clouds over the hills. James could also just see the last small field his dad’d taken the old 4020 John Deere and the four-row planter over, prob’ly one of the fields a good ways from the farm so Mom would maybe have to bring supper out if Dad worked late into the lengthening day.
“I got this girl I might get married to,” the teacher reported, standing in the middle of his small Bank Street apartment, looking over at the empty Chinese noodle factory across the courtyard, the large metal window of which would roll and slam in the wind. His Bank Street apartment, so dark and so small, a place he never’d grown comfortable with being in for very long because of the no sun and so, as the days grew longer and the streets became warmer, he’d spend more time outside then in: with Johnny on the stoop with his brown teeth, a flask and a paper bag James could never ever stop very long just say hello when Johnny was drunk and unintelligible and then onto the boys at the park and grab a few beers. Spook Eddie Quigley who’d take off somewhere and come back with a nickel bag.
Like all parents, Dad was concerned that his oldest son was in the city now for about eight years and, as the saying goes, hadn’t settled down.
“Iz that right?,” Dad said, a moderate excitement rising in his voice. “Who is she?”
“Oh, it’s this girl I got to know for a couple years.”
“What does she do?”
“Oh she’s a student at Parsons, wants to be an artist. She works at the World Trade Center managing the shoe department."
“Well, that’s good, Ronnie, I’m real happy for ya.”
The teacher knew he’d already said too much, too much fabrication in the fish story.
“Well, I guess it’s a ways off. She has to get through school and all.”
“Well, that’s good Ron. Here, I’ll letcha talk to your mother. Me and Russ gotta go bring in a couple of cows from the pasture, we lost one cow in the crick and still got the calf and we’re tryin’ to get another cow to take it up.”
“Ok.”
Actually, marriage was prob’ly the farthest thing from his mind. James, his NYC moniker he couldn’t shake, barely made rent.
But the sound of Dad’s voice and the news of the harvest in the ground made him talk foolishly, like he was on some idyllic plane fashioned by all the Romance poets he’d been imbued with over the years as an undergrad. And it was a dark sin to bs dad but what if that remote and far reaching possibility somehow did reach fruition?
Oh much craziness in NYC. It’s like he couldn’t drink enough of it, couldn’t swim in the swirling current fast enough. Time to go home for a spell, marriage or no.
Plus his brother-in-law Russ would be there. He was always good to work with. Only a couple years younger, Russ and Beth had a couple little girls who stayed with the baby sitter while Beth drove to her first teaching assignment on the reservation with a couple of other teachers she car pooled with, taking the back country roads from one small town to the next, linked by winding gravel roads.
But thoughts of life in the country were quickly replaced by thoughts of life in the city, the night ahead. While it looked like many fellow riders on the downtown E train had weekend plans ahead of them—a more relaxed ambience among fellow New Yorkers, if only barely discernible, was nevertheless in place—he knew he’d just barely have time to get off the train, get to his apartment, pull out his school uniform for his second job—limo drivin’.
“Man, would I not like to go to work tonight.” There were just too many things beckoning. Could he not call Rita and see if she was working? ‘Course, the young girl said her parents were very strict. It was such that she could hardly get out of the house. In fact, after she left her job at the local D’Agastino’s, and switched to a shoe department on the ground floor of One World Trade Center, it was hard for her to even come around.
No, he’d have to avoid goin’ to hang at the park with some of his drinkin’ buddies, avoid callin’ Rita. He couldn’t talk to her anyway.
“Yeah,” Rita had said. “Don’t call here. My dad gets very upset. I’ll just come by after work.”
And, when he thought about it, what could possibly be the attraction? Here he was, a teacher in the South Bronx, a limo driver on the weekends. Here she was, family from Ecuador, now living in Queens, first-year art student. Still, he couldn’t help but be attracted to someone so young: she had the infinite curves of wonder, packed with girlish enthusiasm. Save for the fact that her calves maybe a little heavy, she could turn heads and he liked to be seen walking around the West Village neighborhood with her on those exceeding rare occasions when she had time and he could spare a moment.
He stopped at the Bank Street apartment and looked down towards West Beth, on down to the rotting pier that jutted out onto the fast-moving Hudson River on the off-chance that maybe she’d just, like somebody’d waved a magic wand, appear from around the corner. Looking over at a few of the actors line up to walk into their acting class at the H-B Studios across the street, gesturing like they were auditioning for an Academy Award winner, he knew it was but a Chinaman’s chance in hell she’d turn the corner and come running to him.
No, it was time to just throw off his school duds, stick some deodorant up under his arms, throw on his white shirt and black pants and jacket, pull his gray cap out of the closet. Besides, the limo company he was now working at, Bermuda, was not much of a bike ride away. He could just hop on his 10-speed. Twenty minutes later he’d be there.
“James, LaGuardia l/o. James, JFK p/u and then Newark l/o” would almost automatically be handed him when he went up to the dispatchers in the late afternoon. Just a pt driver on the weekend, he and a couple other part-timers picked up the low fare jobs while the regulars got the good stuff. “Joseph Papp Theatre, A/D, with a stretch: Tavern on the Green, A/D with a stretch” and off they’d go, backing the beautiful long Caddys out of the stalls and then down onto the West Side Highway northbound, falling in step with NYC traffic first, life later, you and your beautiful candy-apple machine stepping into the great unknown.
No, the Caddy stretches and the “as directed” jobs were reserved for the regulars.
It didn’t matter. James would be headin’ home in just a couple weeks. Say so long to his park cronies, Rita, all the rest. High time to get out of the city and head for the wide-open spaces.
“James, how’re you doin’?”
Oh no, he thought. John the dispatcher. John always gave him a collection of LaGuardia l/o’s, JFK p/u’s. He’d have to scramble through the traffic of people and vehicles and hold up a sign that said “Bermuda” on it in large black letters.
‘Course, he was beginning to prove himself. After the last company, Dav-El, had gotten rid of him for drinkin’ with the passengers. And, was it not the first time? No, maybe it was the complaint or something. Who knows? In addition, it was like a 60-block bike ride all the way up to Columbus Circle, through the village, up 8th Avenue, past Time Square, onto Broadway, skirting Central Park. No, with Bermuda he got there faster, jump right in and step right up into the quick pace of the city.
He figured this would be a normal evening with the black limo with darkness settling over the city.
Oh Rita, where are you now, he thought as he pedaled past the small restaurant a few blocks away Rita said her boyfriend worked. He looked in through the window and there was a waiter standing over a small table looking down at a couple. It was one of those small places—no real advertisement, no real promotion—that occupied small crevices in the arm of the city. So therefore, it was possible to see the place, but only if you looked. James had no idea what he looked like, talked like, acted like, just that he was Rita’s boyfriend.
I guess that’s all I need to know, he thought, pushing his blue bike past Jane Street, past Bethune, past Charles on towards Bleeker Street where he skirted a couple empty truck trailers that’d be loaded early in the morning and where the gays in the city hung out in the night and had brief and violent and passionate exchanges there on the docks, standing in their black leather near a trailer and kneeling in prayer against a building and then walking a little bit away and disappear into another dock where they’d come out again for a brief moment and then again begin and then leave again as quickly as they came.
“Man the traffic.”
He was on to 14th Street and had to stop. That was okay because now he was starting to sweat and his white shirt beginning to feel liquid around where he fastened the tie maybe a notch to tight. That’s okay. He had plenty of time. Now it was no longer dodging traffic through the zigzag of cobble streets through the village where America was first settled in small little communities onto the streets past 14th where later Americans decided they wanted streets to run in straight angles east/west and north/south and the villages formed one teaming metropolis.
He made it to the garage. Plenty of time to spare; the noise and clamor of the South Bronx classroom, the green and dirt of the farm,hat evaporated into the smell of grease and grime and silver engines pointed to the night ahead.
“Hey James, how’s it goin’?”
“Not too bad, how’s things.”
“Okay, startin’ to get busy.”
James could tell the dispatcher didn’t like him. He was just this kid comin’ in part-time, tryin’ to make a few extra dollars.
“Listen James, I gotta job for you up in Westchester County. You’re gonna do a wedding, pickup the bride and groom and the reception hall just outside of New Rochelle and then maybe back to the city A/D.”
The huge metal door of the garage pulled open and in came a sleek black Caddy stretch, magnificent and making its own statement with the black and red so intricately styled from the whitewalls and silver lining danced around the rooftop and lightened up the garage. Outside, on the clear bright street, the sun glinted off of passing vehicles and people were rolling down their windows and calling out.
“He’s kindofa big shot millionaire doin’ this for his son so treat ‘em nice.”
James, despite not liking the airport pickups and leavouts, had nevertheless handled it with aplomb. Always there on time, always snagging his passenger, he could be counted on, he thought. Now the dispatcher was throwin’ him an a/d, for one reason or another.
“Yeah, sure, no problem. I’ll get right to it.”
“Just take that black Caddy over there.”
“Yeah, right.”
No big deal. The Caddy along the wall. Dark black and sleek clean, ready to do battle with the NYC night, James at the helm, captain of the powerful ship. A full tank of gas. After a couple years, he’d learned to get around city and boroughs pretty fast.
This’d be fun. Wine and dine with bride and groom, then later a/d in the city. What a night to be in the city with a black Caddy a/d, the streets coming alive with life and laughter.
He’d love to pick up Rita, now, and dance the night away. No, better yet, he’d just like to swing down to the WTC and see if she was working.
“Hey,” Rita’d say. “How are you doing?”
She’d be over a stack of medium priced shoes; she’d look over at him and smile.
“Great. Say, I got my Caddy outside. You wanna go for a ride around the city?”
“Sure. I get off in just about a half hour.”
Rita was looking particularly good. Her long black hair to the middle of her back, her upper body leaning over some shoes and he’d not be able to keep from looking down her blouse as Rita always had her bright shirt open, bra as white as snow, but most of the time she didn’t wear any, coming back from Art class, a stencil pad stuck up under her arms.
Bllleep came from the car behind him, NY er’s always in the hurry up and weight mode.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m goin’. Don’t worry about it.” Such a hurry. They must be headin’ outta town for the weekend, prob’ly the islands.
Such a hurry, no big deal. James eased the Caddy onto the FDR and sped up to where he got the Triboro Bridge that linked the boroughs. Comin’ on with enough quarters in a pocket, he just went to the express lane and waited for a couple cars ahead of him, drivers ahead leaning to their left, pulling change out their pocket and throwing it into the large grated cup through which a handful of quarters disappeared and the toll booth gate swung open.
His turn. James pulled the black machine between the booths, simultaneously dropping the auto window, throwing the quarters in the yellow grating that was about the size of a basketball sliced in half bolted to the toll booth wall.
A meaningless, if necessary, currency exchange. The gate ahead swung open and he looked out onto a fast-moving Grand Central Parkway, motorists bound for airports or islands or suburbs. James pulled his cap down a notch and adjusted the mirrors as he liked to have a clear shot of all those ahead, behind, and on the side of him. Tonight should be a different gig, an a/d. At least he wouldn’t have to go to the airport and hold up a sign and feel like a fool. At first, he delighted in greeting the passenger just stepping off the plane and then filling them full of stories about NYC if they were new arrivals but then, after awhile, the stories grew stale through repetition and you felt you were just a very little part of the means to someone else’s end, as insignificant as Johnny’s empty flask on the Bank Street stoop and none of it really mattered.
And he knew pretty much how to get to New Rochelle: it’s where he taught school just the year before. It quite possibly was one of the hardest jobs he ever remembered having for as low of money he could ever have imagined earning after four years of college. Up at 4:20 in the a.m., it was shower and shave, listenin’ always to WINS news, an all night newscast and the repetition calmed and readied him for the day ahead. He always wondered if he waked many of the sleeping tenants above and below, out the door at 5 a.m. The NYC morning was always cold and brisk and he’d hustle his attaché case to the 7th Ave. IRT to 42nd then shuttle over to Grand Central Station where he climbed a series of stairs after the escalator always the rich sick smell of butter popcorn and taffy and cotton candy co-mingling and stifling. Maybe a worker or two would be sweeping the platform between the tracks that never seemed to be clean and then he’d walk the Grand Concourse of Grand Central Station, no longer awed by the beauty of the elaborated ironwork, just wanting to make it to the Amtrack to Pelham where he’d get off. And then get off at Pelham and walk another half-mile to the school, up three blocks, turn left by a small restaurant then over to the school, 45 minutes after he’d walked out of his apartment door in the Village.
“Man, what a gig,” he thought to himself as he turned off the Grand Central and then jumped onto the Merrit Parkway. “I never want to do that again.”
While his ride to South Bronx every day wasn’t as long, it was just about as time consuming: a lot of subway, a lot of riding, a lot of walking save to say the riders that looked over at him were different hues of black and Puerto Rican, nobody ever paying him much mind.
“Now where is this place.”
He glanced at the directions the dispatcher ’d given him and turned the corner and went up a small grade, turned onto another road and saw how the buildings fell away, trees and shrubs taking their place.
He came to a white cul de sac. Over to his left was a one-story white ornate building, opaque and resilient against the waning sun; the address said this was the club where he was to pick up the bride and groom. He was happy to see he was there a good 15-20 minutes early. The farm boy parked the sleek black Caddy in a circle of expensive-looking vehicles in front of the building. To his right, when he got out, there was like a lush small escarpment below when he turned away from the dull white of the building. It reminded him even more of farm and country , pulling him briefly away from the noise and clamor of the city, onto, like he always thought, 1800 miles from the homestead, “the fields of praise.”
“Hey, yeah, right,” he could hear behind him, laughter and loud voices coming from behind him as the large white door of the ornate structure swung open and a hand full of men stepped out laughing.
The limo driver knew he was a tad early but mi’s well get into the late afternoon fray.
It was like someone had told a joke that needed to be said outside the reception hall; they guffawed and went back in. Dressed in tuxes and expensive-looking suits, clear wine glasses in their hands, a few of the gents were almost bending over in mirth, putting their hands to their eyes, laughing so hard they had to hold their hands to their faces.
“What could be so funny,” James thought, and began to advance to the handful of men who quickly opened the door of the building and went back in.
Typical party scene, he thought. But yet, he found himself a little bored and only slightly amused. I mean, you were just a servant, you were part of the valet, you were just really only called upon, just to be at a distance and drive the car when the time came.
‘Course, as with anything, there were a couple exceptions to the rule. Sometimes he found himself invited to be swept up in the current. Salvadore Dali’s lawyer, what a trip. He imbibed with this lawyer guy who sat in the front seat and who promptly asked the farm boy a quite intimate question.
“Whaaatt, no, are you serious?”
“No problem,” the man said and shrugged his shoulders. “I just didn’t think it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
James grew red in the face. He’d already had a few beers before he went to work and now this was cause for a couple more. So he took Dali’s lawyer to a loft in Soho. The guy said he wanted French cigarettes. It was night. And so while he found a deli that was open that did have some French cigarettes after he tried a couple times, he could not find, no matter how he tried, his limo. For Dav-El, the limo company before, it was one of the sharp and fast Lincoln Town Cars. He had the same one, a deep tan, that he’d taken this one guy all the way to Montreal, Canada. If he didn’t have cruise control, he’d never have made it. He frantically searched for almost an hour up and down the Soho narrow streets and finally found his car just as the party was getting out and was just as glad to go home as anyone.
No, it was best just to keep yourself at a distance and get the party safely home, ferry them about the island with your four wheels then punch out maybe after an LA red eye.
It was with all these thoughts in mind that he entered into the dance hall. Standing before him were a couple of the guys that had been outside before. They were smiling, still laughing and greeted him as he came in.
“Are you the limousine driver?”
“Yes, yes, I am.” James pulled his cap down a notch and straightened his tie.
“Care to have a little champagne?” the man standing closest to him said, turning to James with a full glass. He had on a light tan coat, curly red hair that went to his shoulders, a light Southern accent that was appealing.
“No,” James proudly announced, “I never drink on the job.”
The man then leaned over and turned to him slightly and asked, like a conspirator, “Do any ‘shrooms?”
The farm boy looked over at the tuxedos and white dresses and suits mingling and milling before him. The music in the background for the first time he noticed had a particular strain from what he recognized as a couple takes from the Allman Brothers band. He shrugged his shoulders. Wasn’t no out-of-towners gonna show a NYC guy how to party.
“Sure,” James said. “I do ‘shrooms.”
The man went to his inside pocket and pulled out a few strings that looked like thick brown shoelaces.
“Here, ya go,” the man said, smiling, handing it to him, jacket lapel to jacket lapel hiding the transaction. “Grab a coke over yonder to wash it down.”
“Yeah sure, right.” Without thinking, James threw the stuff in his mouth and swallowed like it was a Holy Communion host.
He now was on a spiritual journey all his own. Hard tellin’ where it’d take him.
But he was cool, he thought, “Hey, no problem, I can handle this.”
And, indeed he could: he’d taught at the South Bronx now for a year, school winding down, he’d been drivin’ a limo a couple years, new his way around the city.. Git a chance to head on back to the farm in a short time. Take Rita along.
Course, like Allison, his boon companion of a couple years before, the chances of that, regretfully he felt, were slim and none.
The redheaded gent turned away from the limo driver and so the driver, content with his own musings, decided he needed to start acting like he knew what he was doing, command some sorta presence.
“I better git back to my car,” he thought to himself and pushed open the door of the large building and stepped out on the front portico, looking down at the escarpment below, a string of trees like they were covering a lake or a body of water in the far distance.
He walked to the car and looked in it. The black of the machine suddenly had a voice, suddenly had a dissonance he couldn’t quite connect with. Suddenly, his head felt warmer and felt his hand rest on the still-warm engine. He turned and looked back at the white building that suddenly seemed to grow a little taller, a little whiter right before his eyes. The warmth in his head seemed to spread out among his cheekbones and his ears were tingling.
No, quite frankly, he’d never done live ‘shromes before. Yeah, sure, psychedelic drugs maybe a decade ago and one time he drove St. Cyr and a couple of his rez buddies to the reservation where a guy he’d never met or seen before said he could get hold of peyote. So they drove a country back road all the way to Winnebago where his sister would teach years later but while he waited in the car for a good spell, St. Cyr and the other guy came back empty handed and so they just proceeded to buy a few more beers and get drunk.
No, he’d not have any of that, thank you. He thought he could escape all the headache of the booze brought him if he just smoked a bit of reefer and maybe some hashish once in a while. A gal he was hot on a few months ago he knew she didn’t have any that much of an attraction for him but she was even prettier than Rita: she had light brown hair to her shoulders and was slightly buxom and was very pretty. He was drivin’ limo for Eastwind then: instead of a cash tip, the passenger, connected to the Jewish owner in some sexual way, offered him a few lines in crumpled aluminum foil instead of two $20 bills.
A trifle pretentious, a little noveau riche.
So, that’s what he did with the gal. Up in his apartment, they did a couple lines. James tried to make the moves but could tell it wasn’t going anywhere. It was like, she’s just obligating his cocaine high with a grab on her ass, feeling the outlines of her white panties. It was along the lines of “Now what are you doing?”
“I better get going,” she said, after James tried to seduce her without success.
“Yeah, let’s go,” James said, feeling at once uncomfortable and awkward. He rode her home on the bus and said goodbye and never saw her again.
He wondered where the fire was she so wildly displayed when she described Eddie. How she was so hot on him and so pissed that he was gay. Yes, Eddie was suave faire and handled himself well, very cool, very laid back. James still couldn’t place the attraction.
His friend Don, who’d shared the Bank Street apartment with him for a spell to defray the rent, had introduced him to both Eddie and Rachelle. It was a curious tri-angle of hetero and homo James’d ever been involved in. See Don was hot on Eddie. The trio all went to Studio 54 one night.
“I wanted him so bad,” Rachelle said. “He was so hot when I danced with him and I was so pissed when I found out he was gay.”
And of course, after he booted Don out of the apartment, Don and Eddie hooked up for a while, shared an apartment but then James heard that that broke off. So here it was: James wanted Rachelle. Rachelle wanted Eddie. Don wanted Eddie. Yes, he thought ruefully, that’s how it also was. Eddie wanted James.
What a mess. Don was now takin’ classes at NYU, majoring in math. Eddie moved on to sojourn somewhere else in the West Village and Rachelle went on somewhere else.
Rachelle’s comment, when the farm boy pressed for the why for of her attraction to him, “We march to beat of our own drummers and I like the sound of your drummer.” He always could see her just standing there on the street corner and saying it.
James was now past his limo and walked a little on the edge of the escarpment and watched as the sun began to lower itself over the bank of trees west. The ‘shrome was really starting to hit him now as now looking in the direction of the sun, the warmth in his head was gone, replaced by the special radiance of the setting sun—like there was some small shoots and rays and colors coming out of it.
“Pppphheeww,” James said. “That stuff has kind of a bite.”
He turned to voices and noise coming out of the hall as now an assembly of people began to emerge from the confines.
Yet in a relaxed manner, the young limo driver turned and made his way peaceably to the building. A young man, wearing a dark suit, immediately strode up to him.
“Are you our driver?”
He was quick and almost abrupt. James could feel the high now traveling up his throat to his head, an odd ticking sensation.
“Yes I am.”
“Good,” he said, almost as if he was snapping his fingers. “We need to get going.”
Just then the bride in white flowing gown emerged from the crowd of people. She looked over and began walking towards her new husband with a bright smile.
“Sure, you bet.”
James waited for the couple to advance close enough to the rear door, which he swung open for them to step in. The lady gathered her skirt and let herself in the car, ducking her froth of hair beneath the shiny roof of the black limo.
Her gentleman caller stood and waited for her to get in the car the followed, sitting next to her, now white in the middle black at the end and James closed the door tightly behind them.
Feeling his gray cap seeming to want to lift itself from his own hood, he went around the front of the car, again placing his hands on the hood of the engine, feeling how, in a span of less than a few minutes, it had cooled considerably.
He opened the door, the alarm bells given their slight ting ting ting unit he closed it then locked them all in and turned the crank.
The engine sprang immediately to life with a gentle roar. James looked through the rear view mirror and could see the couples close to one another, had a brief kiss and they smiled.
The husband, now more relaxed, called over to the front.
“We first need to go by my place,” he said. “I gotta couple gallons of wine. We’re then we got to go to a motel I rented for the reception.”
“Yes sir,” James said, his voice feeling hollow and tiny, like he was talking through a pipe. “That will be no problem.”
The husband directed him and they drove downhill, winding their way past split level houses back from the single road a ways.
“Yeah,” instructed the husband, “just take a left up there a ways and you’ll curve into our driveway.
Like the other split-levels, it was made of brick, had an expanse of trees growing about, a two car garage.
James angled the Caddy to the edge of the driveway and made a loop, facing back the direction he came. He unlocked the doors and walked quickly around the other side to let out the groom who’d already alighted onto the street.
“I’ll be right back,” the groom said.
“Ok.,” James said, feeling his feet beginning to propel him from the ground. “No problem.”
In a short time, the man came back with two huge gallons of red and white wine and some plastic cups.
“We can just put one of these in the truck,” the man said. “I’ll just take this one with us.”
“Sure.”
James had door open before the man could get over.
“Thanks.”
“You bet.”
James shut the door of the limo and walked to the front of the car. He just couldn’t believe how light and airy and beautiful the day was, like hardly a could in the sky, barely a breeze but a bit of salt and water in the air from the light breeze that seemed to have its origination from off the ocean.
He drew his breath and climbed back in the limo, to the sound of the engine idling, clicked the locks that fastened them in for the voyage.
Blast off, he thought, as he pulled the car around the edge of the driveway then up the steep grade then onto the main lightly traveled thoroughfare.
“We rented a motel in New Rochelle,” the groom said from the back the back seat. James tried to drive slowly as in the rear view mirror he could see that the groom had turned and was beginning to pour a glass of white wine from the tumbler onto the small plastic glass, the wine filling quickly the glass and a few fizzes and a pop.
“Yeah, sure,” James said. “That sounds good.”
Of course, he didn’t really know what he was saying. He just simply offered an obligatory acquiescence to the request.
“Everybody’s gonna meet there,” said the groom. “Would you care for a glass of wine?”
Now, James was being invited into the celebration. The ‘shromes had now taken full residence in his brain and he felt so extremely light and airy that, not only could he drive them to whatever destination they so choose to go to, he could fly them there, if need be, he could handle it all.
Caution was thrown to the winds.
“Oh yes,” James said. “Sure.”
“Here you are,” the groom said and handed over a full glass of white sparkling wine.
“Oh thanks,” James said. Ever the scholar, ever the party animal, ever the one with a quick retort and rejoinder he added, “anything to toast the bride.”
James held the glass up in the air, like they’d just dashed a bottle of Dom Pergnon on the bow of a ship that was headed for its first ocean voyage.
He downed the vino quickly, almost with a thick bubble-gum taste, almost greedily. He hadn’t imbibed now for a couple months and the new taste rekindled a long desire and sent him off to a thousand flash points but the farm boy kept his foot firmly on the pedal.
They drove on a pace.
“Yeah, it’s right over there,” the groom said, pointing to a clump of low-hung buildings off the main road atop a small hill.
James pulled the car, still driving softly, through a row of cedar and maple, on up to the top of the hill where an L-shaped row of rooms connected by black awning stood empty looking behind a car less lot.
Of course, it was the economy lodging for Midtown wayfarers who just needed a night to drop a suitcase, grab a bite and rest for the night before. While the motel was on the top of the hill, it was about the only thing it had going for it: while the portico white banquet hall, with it’s simple Doric pillars carried a state of understatement, of simple elegance, this L-shaped collection of buildings was glaring and run down that would have stood out with it’s ugliness if not shaded by a straight bank of pine trees.
The farm-boy limo driver, now spinning expensive wheels around the city, almost as expensive as a good John Deere tractor if not as valuable, watched as the newly weds stepped out of the car into a procession of smaller cars that followed in mini-procession. Along the bank of trees he parked the limo and a few others followed in formation. Next to him was a natty little sports car, two doors, parking parallel to the black Caddy that was quickly cooling with the evening. James, alighting from the car, stood motionless after the bride and groom made their way from out of the back and he felt like he could stand in that same position for a good part of Eternity. But he noticed the purveyor of the ‘shromes, the Red Headed Stranger, get out of his car and come over to him and stand like an attendant lord.
“Hey, man, how’re you doin’?” he asked with a wide smile, coming towards him. The easy self-effacing grace when he just so easily parried James’ proud “I don’t drink on the job” with “do any ‘shromes?” a question that now seemed like it was a good long time ago instead of a couple hours.
“Fine, fine,” James said, taking a sip of the wine, realizing that it was still in his hand by looking down at it.
“Them ‘shromes hitcha yet?”
“Oh, yeah,” James said, trying to match his savoir faire, “I guess a little bit.”
“I see you started having a little wine.”
James had completely forgotten he was still holding a glass of champagne, or wine, he really, at this point, couldn’t really tell the difference.
“Oh, yeah,” the farm boy said, recovering somewhat, remembering his pledge, “I had to toast the bride.”
He looked at the glass and noticed, too, it was but half-full. Moreover, the hand seemed to be an extension of his arm, rather than attached to it.
“Looks like you’re ready for a refill,” his West Virginia friend said.
And James, who did not feel any affect whatsoever from the clear liquid, felt like he could drink the entire white gallon and still not be phased. Still he didn’t want to leave the confines of his black Caddy to which he felt sufficiently moored.
“Here,” said the Appalachian mountaineer, ancestors distilling liquor in the deep crevices of the mountain, “I’ll fill that up for ya.”
His NY resolution and resolve were being quickly spirited away by the evening.
“Uh, sure, I guess so.”
“Ah, man, you can relax, we can take care of ya.”
Still same aloofness. He was not gonna be bamboozled.
“Yeah, sure, I guess so.”
More cars arrived and doors swung quickly open, both from the car and the motel, the yellow doors garish and ugly but the guests traipsed in and out with laughter and song.
James leaned against the Caddy and put his hand in his pocket and looked at the revolving doors. “Ah well, what the hell,” he thought and walked to the open door on which a gallon of white wine ¾’s full stood on one of the little tables butted against the wall. He took his glass from his hand and put it beneath a tumbler of white wine carafe and helped himself.
He went back to his limo and leaned and talked. It was now an hour or so and then the groom came up to him.
“We’ll get to the city ourselves,” the man said. “You can send this back to the garage.”
Dumbfounded, James stared at him in the hotel room and looked out into the darkness.
“I called the garage and the dispatcher said to bring it back.”
The limo driver felt a cold splash of reality in his face.”
“Sure.”
The groom had turned to the demeanor of serious and severe when they’d first met, the same “Are you the driver” tone had returned
He’d returned to his first meeting demeanor: somewhat cold and a little brisk.
“Ok.”
James left the door ajar and walked to the limo and began to get in.
The Red Headed Stranger immediately came up to the farm hand.
“Hey, pardner, where you goin’?”
“The guy said he’s done with the limo. I’ve got to get her back.”
The thought of leaving that particular moment in time did not sit will with either of them.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the Red-Headed Stranger said, “we’ve got money. How much is it, we’ll pay.”
“Well, let me call the garage. The car might be ‘sposed to go somewhere else. Is there a phone anywhere?”
“Yeah, there’s one in the rooms.”
James called Bermuda. “Yeah,” he said, “the bride and groom said they’re done with the car.”
“Yeah, ok. Give me your 10/30 when you get a little closer to the city.”
“Yeah, sure, ok.”
James put his hands in his pockets and walked back towards the Caddy. The Red-Headed stranger and a couple of other guys were talking and laughing. James really couldn’t really see himself flying back to the city just yet. Moreover, the millionaire’s son McCarthy had affixed him with a steady gaze. “We’ve got a ride to the city so you can send the limo back to the garage.”
James walked back to the limo, silent as the night, and reported the news.
Oh well, he’d be gone in a couple weeks anyway, leave the madness behind for a time.
James walked into the guys and began to open the door.
“Hey,” the Red-Head Stranger exclaimed, turning from the group “What’d ya find out?”
“Ah, um, I’m headin’ back to the garage,” James said, resignation in his voice. He was in no mood to hie to the airport, holding up a sign, listen to the nervous gaggle of someone or some couple that had just alighted from their flight from another party of the country.
“You’re takin’ the limo back,” the RH exclaimed. “You can’t do that.”
“Got too.”
“Hey,” the Southerner said, “can’t you keep it here? I mean, we’ll pay you. We got money, we’ll just pay you whatever it takes. What’d you say. $32 bucks an hour, hey, that’s nuthin’. We can pay for it ourselves, right guys?
“Sure, no problem,” came from a chorus of voices.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
James saw an avenue, an opening in the night’s dark roadway.
“Well, let me call the garage.”
James dialed the number and filled ‘em in. He tried to sound casual and coherent.
“Yeah,” said Dan, the night dispatcher. “If they wanna keep you, go ahead. Make sure you get the money and give me a 10/30 when you’re done.”
”Ok., no problem.”
James walked back to the limo, silent as the night, and reported the news.
“Yeah, we can keep the limo.”
“No shit. Really? All right. You’ll take us to the city.”
“Yeeapp.” And now James donned the mask of coolness, like he knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. “Yeah, I’ll getcha around the city,” the farm boy said, confidence returning.
“Hey,” said the Red-Headed Stranger, “let’s have another glass of wine to celebrate.”
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
“Suddenly, what looked like a couple of New Rochelle locals came up. They weren’t dressed in the wedding party attire.
“Hey, is this you limo?”
James turned and looked at the pair of young men who seemed to have something of a swagger bordering on attitude.
“Yeaap.”
“Hey man,” the man, dark brown hair to his shoulders and curly up around his ears, “mind if we take it for a spin? I’ll go get some beer ‘case you’re runnin’ low.”
The Stranger chimed in. “Yeah, let ‘em take off, they’ll be okay.”
“Oh no,” James said. “That limo ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
For some reason, the dude looked like a guy James had a quick tangle with a couple years before in the park. The height and build were near identical, if this New Rochelle dude a notch taller. So James was almost like he was in the face, not afraid to, like the Caddy engine James leaned on, engage.
“Yeah,” said the Red-Headed Stranger, acting as facilitator, motioned to the man in white standing before them. “He’s right.”
James felt victor in the small skirmish in the dark parking lot.
And so the partying commenced and James was in the room again, helping himself to a beer, talkin’ with a few of the Southerners. But, when he came back out, he saw the straight row of pine trees the car had been parked next to were still there but the limo was gone.
He almost shit a brick.
“Hey,” James yelled, “where’d my limo go?” He remembered how one time at Eastwind limo, the second company he’d worked for, the driver had popped into a Deli for a sandwich one night and the next thing he knew, when he came out, his limo was gone. James remembered how embarrassed the driver was having to call into and say how his limo had been stolen, explaining it to his fellow drivers, a sheepish look he could not wipe off his face. How really stupid and careless he was. A young driver at the time, for James at his second garage, he swore right then and there something so foolish would never happen to him.
“Oh, don’t worry,” the Red-Headed Stranger said, almost like he could see all and know all. “They just went on a beer run. They’ll be right back.”
And sure enough, just as they were speaking, a sleek black Caddy cut the corner and advanced powerfully up the hill. Driving was the brown-haired guy in tan pants, curly brown hair to his shoulders.
James immediately went to the driver.
“Hey, what’re you doin’, I didn’t say you could do that.”
“Hey, I just went down the street to get some beer.”
James thought how much the guy, getting out of the car, looked like the guy he got in a fight with at the Park a couple years ago. He was bigger and had wide shoulders but because James might stand right up he’d come back with the limo and the beer.
“Man,” the guy said. “That sure did drive nice. It sure’d be easy to do. What if we stole a limousine,” he said, laughing, turning to his friends.”
“Hey,” James said, give me the keys. Don’t even think about it.”
The farm boy walked around the rest of the night with keys in his pockets going from room to room, getting refills of wine or beer or whatever was closest wherever he happened to be. The next thing he knew, he was in the back seat of the limo and a NYC police officer was leaning in through the window. James noticed how the back seat was full of people and James could barely rise himself from the soft black cushion that seemed to swallow him whole.
“Are you the driver?” the officer said.
James looked up and saw they were at the outskirts of the FDR drive near 90th St. He had no idea how they got here. He looked at the driver. It was the Red-Headed Stranger.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well, that guy ran a red light.”
“Sorry about that officer,” the Stranger said.
“You get where you gotta go,” said the officer. “And park this thing.”
The next thing James knew, it was morning. He looked at watch and it was 7:00 a.m., a time he always arose from years of work on the farm.
Moreover, he was in the back seat, a place where he’d never been in any number of the eight years in NYC he could easily count on one hand. There was a small hill of white rice over the black and a single black and a white shoe on the floor.
James then looked out and saw a different set of trees, those that bordered the eastern section of Central Park. He then looked at the street sign to answer the vague question of ‘Where am I?” and saw that he was at the intersection of 85th and Edgar Allen Poe Boulevard. He noticed the keys were on the floor and then the farm boy collected himself and drove off, his head running, so thirsty he was dying for a pop.
He thought of the cold morning he was sitting in Abington Park and Jerry Mudd came up to him with his light blue spring jacket, shivering in the early morning.
“Hey, Nebraska,” Mudd said. “You gotta joint on ya?”
The farm boy looked up from his paper. He couldn’t oblige him at this point in time.
“Uh, no. No, I don’t.”
“I’ve been doin’ coke all night with Hanley, I’m tryin’ to come down.”
Mudd didn’t sit down. He just kept pacing. “I need somethin’ to take the edge off, bring me down,” Mudd said. He’d usually sit down and help the farm boy with a quart of beer. “I’m gonna head, I’ll catch ya later.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He watched Mudd walk on over to Andy’s Newspaper and Cigarette store on the corner of Bleeker and W11th, tryin’ to come down, saw the back of his light blue jacket round the corner and was gone. James hoped Mudd would be all right.
And now, a few months hence, is the way James felt. He was tryin’ to come down.
James made one stop to quench his thirst and then headed back to the garage that early Sunday morning.
The dull luster of the black Caddy he backed into the stall after he’d filled the tank. He vacuumed it up and threw away the shoes and rice and tossed the keys to the dispatcher.
He’d be headin’ for Nebraska pretty darn soon.
Chapter 12 Departure
The boy from Nebraska gingerly carried the blue bike up the stairs, falling a couple times against the walls recently painted a dull white, his bike’s handles making indentures against the support beam as he swung the bike around and began to ascend another flight of stairs. It was now late morning. It was a Sunday. He could feel the pangs in his stomach. Like Dennis Hanley said his mother always said, you got to eat. That means, if you’re on for a few days of drinkin’, you better get some food in your gut.
This was a precept the farm boy could adhere to: get some food in ya. But that would require some cash, none of which he had. And to go get some, he’d have to go over to D’Agastino’s and see if he could write a check. But this was almost out of the question because here he was, white shirt pulled out of his black polyester pants, tie loosened up, his black limo cap on his head, head swirlin’ he thought a better plan would be to get some rest.
He staggered again against the wall, stopping for his final ascent. He heard a voice down the upstairs hall and a door slam shut. So who gives a fuck? Who needs it anyway. Maybe there was a cold beer in refrigerator. But no, there was more likely a mixture of tuna fish mixed with Heilmann mayo, a sandwich he’d been fashioning for himself now for almost eight years.
Sweating again, take he home James reached the last stair and lunged forward, nearly falling headlong into the unswept floor.
“Jesus, I can’t even walk,” he mumbled and sighed, reaching into his left pants pocket for his keys.
Walking into the small fairly spiritless apartment he wheeled his bike against the fireplace. Now what could he do? Give Uncle Frank a call. Uncle Frank could cheer him up. But, for some reason, did not Frank say he didn’t like to be called on Sunday? Well, not called but maybe it was Frank’s day not to be bothered.
And Rita, she’s already at her apartment in Queens, no doubt skipping church again. “Don’t call here,” she said. “My father is very strict.” James couldn’t help but wonder what Rita’s father looked like, what he did for a living. Rita had said she had a sister that was a little older than her and people got them easily confused but that was all, after darting in and out of a relationship for a year or so, that had started last winter when Rita was a senior in high school and needed help on her term paper. She’s always be at the counter at D’Agasitino’s, smiling brightly at him. Shorter than him by a half foot, James just shrugged and said she could come by if she wanted to and he’d see if he could help her. But when she did come by, this time coming from school rather than work, in front of him stood a pouting pretty girl that readily smiled and was very self-assured, unafraid to come into his apartment.
James looked at his watch. It was only 10:30. D’Agastino’s was prob’ly open but he knew that he couldn’t buy any beer ‘til noon. He definitely didn’t feel like he could present himself to the public.
“Man, do I need something to eat.”
‘Course he didn’t have a dime, he wasn’t able to collect any cash from the Southern boys, waking up in the backseat of the Caddy drunk.
He thought of what Jerry Mudd would always say when it was time to ante up some money for a beer run would inevitably say, “Man, I’m tap city.” It was more the exception than the rule if Mudd had any money.
The farm boy advanced to the kitchen and looked at the small refrigerator into which not much would fit—nothing hardly. Some eggs, some cheese. He never did like eggs that much. But now he didn’t know what he felt like. He didn’t know what he felt like eating.
“Eggie in the eye. Eggie in the eye.” Dennis Hanley always would open his wide mouth and smile recalling one of the favorite dishes his mother made when he was a kid. “She’d always make eggie in the eye. We just loved it.”
James could never quite picture the Hanley household. There was never mention of a dad around. Four or five brothers. Two of ‘em in prison. And now Dennis made a habit of beginning to crash at Nebraska’s pad—one time was too much.
But James, hungover, a tad lonely, knew this was getting close to a cul de sac.
No tuna fish, no bread.
Fixing himself a breakfast or fixing himself a lunch. In between the morning and the afternoon, between today and tomorrow.
Yes, there was a couple tall Buds in lower shelf. James thought of how he had to raise a small shelf in the refrigerator just to put the beer in. And now the idea of popping the top of a cold beer began to grow in favor in his subconscious. Maybe if he had a beer that would take the edge off. Maybe he’d forget how hungry he was.
He popped the top. The aroma of the hopps and barley heading for his nostrils, amazing how good it smelled. James’d forgotten how much he liked to drink a cold beer in the morning.
“Put some tunes in.” he got his Doors tape and advanced it to the song with the lyrics “Woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer/Woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” James gave it a strong pull and raised the beer aloft in salute of the day. Music blasting and every light of his small apartment on and it still wasn’t loud enough and still wasn’t light enough.
Yes the beer emboldened him. He stuck the open beer in a small sack and headed out the door.
“Yeah,” he told himself, “I’ll head for the park. Maybe Mudd would be around. He didn’t know, he’d have to see.
No, it was too early, wasn’t it. He sat down on warming park bench in Abingdon Square and continued his drinking, a few people single or double, walked past, dressed for church or heading for a brunch, throwing back their head and laughing, smiling broadly, not looking over at the disheveled young bum sitting on the park bench waiting for other bums to emerge from their slumber.
A large cloud raised over and covered the sun and suddenly he felt a small chill on his arms.
He sorely missed the school jacket he’d bought but then one night, when there were havin’ a few beers on these very tables, there was Dennis Hanely with just a long shirt, beginning to shiver. Nebraska, ever showing kindness to animals, and didn’t feel in the least bit cold, took the dull red jacket that said Wade JHS on the front and Bronx, NY on the front. It was red and it was warm. Nebraska imagined how he’d wear it home and to parties and country dances or to a bar and there’d be his own bit of self-promo—teacher in the South Bronx, NYC.
But no, he’d now this night give it Hanley. Because he was shivering.
“Here, put this on.”
“Huh, yeah, ok.”
So the square=shouldered Dennis put the jacket on, buttoned it up and his shivering stopped.
“Hey, Nebraska, thanks.”
But then when James saw Mudd and Dennis at the park a couple days later, standing and drinking and laughing and talking amongst themselves and a couple others he didn’t recognize, Hanley had no recollection of the exchange.
“You what? Man, I don’t remember that.”
“Yeah, remember lat Tuesday night when you and Mudd and Eddie and me were havin’ some beers and smoke?”
Mudd interjected. “Are you kiddin’, Nebraska. Dennis don’t even know where he slept last night.” Mudd threw his head back and laughed, his belly shaking. “Do you Dennis.”
Hanley’d put a tall Bud to his lips and tipped the beer in his head back almost in defiance of the South Bronx teacher, like a huge recalcitrant teacher. Dennis reached in his mouth and pulled out two false front teeth, readying himself for battle.
There wasn’t much you’re gonna do about it.
Chapter 12
Tex and the City
He pulled the covers over his head and closed his eyes. How many days did he have left before Nebraska? It was the middle of the day and he tried to sleep. He was hoping it would come over him in wave of insomnia.
He started thinkin’ about the limo drives to the airport when he first started driving. He didn’t even know how toget out of thecity. Scripps-Edward. There was eddie, imploring us to keep the white walls clean. “if you can’t keep them clean,” Eddie reasoned, “what’s the sense of having them.”
So he and another driver who hailed from Queens, dutifully secured Brillo Pads and washed the whitewalls in the basement of the garage that had a small office where they’d sit and wait until any calls came in. the door would open every now and then, letting in tufts of light and the breeze from off the East River beckoned a guy to hop out of the bowls of a paved Manhattan and head for the mountains.
The mountains. It’d been so long ago when he’d gone with Kerry and Jeremy and Rick Dryden and Susie McCright on a camping expedition in the Rockies. Was that a long time ago or was that recent? Why did he always think about it? Why couldn’t he get it out of his mind?
No, Mother sleepwasn’t with him. May as well get up and see what there is toeat. But really, he’d crank up the doors and grab a tall Bud from the frig.
He raised the beer to his lips. Same o, same o. Tokin’ and dopin’, shuckin’ and jivin’, scorin’ and whorin’. Jim Morrison of the Doors “woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer” blasted through and Tex made a toast. He toasted the fire escape and further to the abandoned building that had windows the banged when the wind was up beyond the courtyard. He toasted his Smith Cornoa typewriter with which he dutifully plucked keys, his one poster from the only concert he and Allison went to in Central Park. What ever happened toher?
******
It was the usual NYC cluster fuck. Rita’d shorn her hair and was kinda on the outs. Shorty had taken the ole lady’s dog and Eddie Quigley was doin’ his level best to try to get some traction.
It really pissed him off when he was called a punk. He backed the care of out the garage tryin’ to think what he did with Ken’s phone number.
No, not Ken, Preston. Preston had fallen back tothehills of the hollow takin’ a rather plain-looking NYC babe with him. He watched as Preston and the babe peeled an onion with his mate almost artistically and the young South Bronx teacher thought ruefully how his mom just leaned against the counter and flew through the onion and flopped it in the pan of roast beef and potatoes she was making for lunch, something a little crude about it, in a hurry doin’ it that way for the men that would come in from the farm for noon meal and therefore smacked of bein’ uncool and therefore translated into a small part of his existence that he know thought was somehow incorrect.
He also envied Preston because the Southerner with the wide blue eyes had a quick intelligence and had built his own Geodesic dome in the Kentucky wilderness. Preston had pictures to show and said there wasn’t hard at all and here the young farm kid around machinery and buildings and construction all his life didn’t have the foggiest notion where he should start.
It was almost know the same when he thought of his classmate Mark in high school suddenly realizing that Mark had more intimacy with the opposite sex than all of the snotnosed seniors combined. He had the mark of a true fighter our warrior our senior class president.
Tex sighed. What’re ya gonna do? What will you do? The ole lady had
And hanleys were on a bee line to take over his apartment, one way or another.