Don't Worry About the Kids Page 10

  They got some boys from the Midwest, too, and some Catholic kids. Cardinal Spellman, he lived in the powerhouse, corner of Madison and 50th, next to St. Patrick’s, and every time I go by, I still spit. Divine intervention, that’s what Big Ed calls it when we talk, but I don’t laugh. Still, I got to smile now, to see the way things change. That Cardinal gone now and he can’t help these Catholic boys even if he wanted to.

  They gas on about the new fixes, how this one player, he’s a real altar boy, and how the big man this time, he was only doing it for a hobby, cause his main job was running the $5 million Lufthansa gig. Oh yeah, I think, there’s still guys dumber than me. Now that this guy puts the finger on guys in the mob, we don’t take bets on him getting social security.

  The kids on the court, they all in high school, when they sit down between games and hear us talking about the fixes, they don’t even blink. They talk to each other about how many tape decks they got and which truck they got it off of and they don’t pay these new fixes no mind.

  I close my eyes and think about the names of the new boys, and I lean back against the fence, try to see what they look like. I got no photos, though. I listen to how they set this new fix up and I hear the guys talk about how great Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown and Doug Moe would of been, they’d got their chance in the NBA when they were in their prime, and I even hear one of the guys tell me how I was robbed, I got blacklisted. I open my eyes a minute, tell him what I said back then, about what kind of list they got for the white boys. He laughs and when he does I got to close my eyes real quick. All that stuff about clean hands and blacklists and why I did it—who you fooling, Mack? I got this pain down low in my gut, and I’m trying to knock their words out of the way so I can see things clear, try to feel what these new boys must be feeling now.

  Oh yeah, that pain tell you something, Mack. You never even been inside that new Madison Square Garden they got, it gonna hurt so much. You never even gone to see Hawkins play, when he got in the pros. Sure. Who you fooling? They take away the only thing you love, and how you ever gonna tell anybody that? How you gonna live the rest of your life, you can’t do the only thing you good at, the only thing you been taught to do?

  These questions come shooting in my head and I try to knock them out of the way, too, and when I do, I get this real strange picture there instead. There’s this long hallway and I’m walking down the middle and I got to stop every few feet to shake hands with these guys I used to know, and they’re all sitting in wheelchairs. There’s Roy Campanella and Maurice Stokes and Ernie Davis and Junius Kellogg and Brian Piccolo and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Tom Stith and Darryl Stingley and even this guy named Pete Gray, who played baseball with one arm, and Monty Stratton, who played with a wooden leg, and at the end of the tunnel, there’s old Jackie Robinson, the greatest player who ever lived, you ask me, and he’s got his son sitting next to him. I bend over to shake their hands and I can’t figure out why they’re in wheelchairs if they’re both dead so many years now—Jackie Jr. strung out good on drugs, then clean just in time to get wiped off the highway in a sports car—and Jackie, all white-haired and fuzzy and smiling real broad, dead when he was about the age I’m at now. He reaches up to me with his hand and wishes me good luck with that soft, high-pitched voice, and I tell him I’m real sorry his son died first, before he did.

  I open my eyes and see that one of the guys been trying to get me to move and now he’s razzing me about my fat ass and how I don’t play no different asleep or awake. This kid named Jim, about my height, 6-6, only he weighs about 80 pounds less, he points to my belly and laughs. Why he got to worry? The ball comes to him first thing, down low, he gives me a head fake and he’s slamming the ball through and his men slapping his hands and he’s grinning real big. One of my guys says to show him how the old fixers used to do it. Jim, he asks me how come the other guy calls me a fixer—cause of the way I let him get around me? I tell him to shut his ass and give his mouth a chance, and he laughs some more.

  Oh yeah, I think. They take away my life cause I shave a few points, but that ain’t nothing to what athletes been doing since, sniffing and shooting up, and buggering each other and all the rest, only these days they get to write books about it after. Under the basket, back up against the fence, the guys still talking about how these new fixes got rigged, remembering the time, back in our day, when two teams played each other, both teams supposed to go down at the same time for different gamblers, and all I want to do is go over and tell them to shut their big mouths, too. The ball comes into my man and he gives me a head fake. This time, I don’t go for it, then he tries to go under me with his dipsy-doodle crap, I get my leg out quick and let him have it where he lives. Then I got the ball from him, he’s all bent over, and I roll over this other kid who ain’t nearly as big and I’m going up real high, as high as an old man can go, and drop that ball in without touching the rim. Two points for our side.

  The other two guys on my team, they try to rank me out about taking it easy cause I old enough to be my man Jim’s grandfather, but I don’t say anything. The only thing I wait for is the feel of that ball in my hands, dumb me.

  Department of Athletics

  FROM NOW ON he slept on the couch, she said. She slipped in his puke, she washed out his clothes, she dragged him home from Sheehan’s, she tried to believe him each time he promised to change, but she’d been a fool long enough.

  My mother was on the phone, complaining to her sister Margaret about my father, who’d come home the night before, twenty-eight sheets to the wind. Nothing new there, only this time—she was already sleeping—he’d sworn he loved her more than Jane Russell, had come up to the bed, unzipped his fly, and pissed on her.

  My mother heard me close the front door. She put her hand over the mouthpiece, asked if I’d gotten a job yet.

  Not yet, I said.

  You know what a good job for an Irish boy is? she asked.

  I shrugged.

  Listening to somebody else’s radio!

  She laughed and blew me a kiss. You know what they say, Jimmy—a good joke’s like money, right? It can’t buy happiness, but it sure helps when you’re miserable…

  I’d heard it all before. I went to my room, set down my books, looked at my homework assignments, at letters from colleges. I’d been named third team All-City in basketball, and the scouts were after my ass: Notre Dame, Manhattan, Fordham, St. John’s, St. Francis, St. Joseph’s, St. Peter’s, St. Wherever. Priests, brothers, sisters, nuns, political hacks—they were all hassling me to go here or there, but I wasn’t buying what they were selling. The truth, which I couldn’t tell my coach or my guidance counselor or any of the deadbeats who were sucking after me, was that I wanted to go to a place that didn’t specialize in Catholic girls.

  Catholic girls held out on me, not because they wanted to, but because they always got scared that the Zorro who took confession at Holy Cross Church, where we all went, would know us both, would find a way to get the word back to their parents. It was better with Jewish girls, because instead of closing down on me, or cracking gum and making believe they didn’t know what was going on while they hurried to finish me off, they could never get enough. What drove me wild most of all was that they talked about it while they were doing it, asking me if I liked the way they kissed, if I liked the way they did me, if I liked the way they spread their legs.

  Some nights, coming home to my place and dreaming about leaving, the only thing in the world I wanted was to spend the rest of my life in dark hallways and carpeted living rooms, hot Jewish pussy coming all over me. When I shot foul shots, no matter how loud and crazy the crowd got, that was what I thought of—their sweat and juices dripping on me, their tongues licking me everywhere, me dozing off afterward and then waking with one of them kissing my eyes or nibbling at my stomach—and it relaxed me, let me shut out all other noise, let me concentrate on what I had to do.

  I kept my mackinaw on, left our apartment, my mother yelling after me tha
t there were phone calls to answer, that I should be careful not to ruin my future.

  The temple of my body, I said. Sure. Light a candle, Mom.

  That’s my boy, I heard her say. That’s my boy Jimmy. His sense of humor’ll save him yet, even if it can’t peel potatoes.

  I went down to the corner and walked past the Florist Shop three times before Mr. Baldwin waved me in. Did I want to make a delivery for him? It wouldn’t take long, he said.

  He wrote out directions, and gave me the order—yellow and red flowers in a wicker basket, a black ribbon on the handle, a condolence card taped next to it. He wrapped green paper around the flowers to protect them.

  I took the IRT from Church Avenue in Brooklyn to Columbus Circle in Manhattan. It was rush hour and I stood all the way, holding the basket. Between 14th Street and Penn Station the train got stuck for twenty minutes. Under my mackinaw, sweater, shirt, and undershirt, I was slick with perspiration. My palms were pale green, damp from the dye.

  At 59th Street, I switched to the IND. I shoved in, grabbed a seat, set the flowers between my feet. Then the longest run of all, rocketing underground from 59th Street to 125th Street. At 181st Street I got out, walked to the funeral home on 183rd Street and gave them the flowers. The man didn’t say thank you. The hell with him. The hell with everybody, I thought. If I didn’t get into college where I wanted, maybe I’d fool them all and just not go. Maybe I’d do the very thing they were telling me my gifts as an athlete were supposed to keep me from. Maybe I’d become a cop. Another Irish cop, my mother would say. Just what the world needs, right? And he’s your son, Mom, I’d reply. Only he’ll be gone from home. He’ll be a cop out, right?

  Coming home, the trains were nearly empty, so I slept. I liked sleeping and dreaming in subways because I woke up at every stop and then when the train started out again from the station and I fell back to sleep, I could have a new dream. I liked having so many separate dreams in such a short time. It was like going to the movies without paying.

  By the time I was back in my neighborhood, it was dark, and all the stores, except for eating places, were closed. Mr. Baldwin’s store was locked, but I saw him going in and out through the curtain at the back, where he lived with his mother, so I pounded on the door until he opened up for me. He gave me three dollars, plus carfare.

  The delivery took me four hours, I said. I want more.

  I’m sorry, he said. I don’t even make a profit on this kind of order, my having to pay you. It’s a courtesy merely.

  I shoved my foot in the doorway so he couldn’t close me out, then grabbed him by the arm and pressed hard. You cheated me, I said. You told me less than an hour each way when you knew it would take longer. You lied. I want more.

  Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, young man, he said. I’ll tell your mother. I’m warning you.

  Pay up, I said, or I’ll tell your mother, you cheap creep. I lifted him into the air so that his forehead touched a light bulb. I imagined smashing him against the bulb so that it wound up inside his head, with the chain hanging out of his ear, and his mother tugging on it, to see his face.

  His mother came through the curtain then, to where we were. Is everything all right, Arthur? she asked.

  I set Mr. Baldwin down and he opened the cash register and took out another two dollars.

  Hoodlum, he said.

  You watch the way you speak to me, chiseler, or I’ll get the police after you.

  It confused him, for me to tell him I’d be the one to call the cops.

  I used to love Mary Astor best of all, his mother said to me, her hand on my sleeve. Some people said I resembled her. My, but she was a looker. She was wonderful in The Prisoner of Zenda, which was before she cut her hair. She spelled her name differently from the flower, of course, but did you ever think of it, of how many people are named for flowers? Rose and Lilly and Daisy and Iris and Buttercup and Hyacinth and Dahlia. When I was in the second grade, my best friend was a girl named Hyacinth…

  It’s been nice seeing you again, Mrs. Baldwin, I said. My mother sends regards. Take good care of your son for me, okay?

  Of course, she said, and smiled. What a sweet young man, Arthur. It’s lovely to see them grow up and turn out so well.

  I walked to where the party was, in an apartment house on Linden Boulevard that doctors, lawyers, dentists, and successful businessmen lived in. The building had a large courtyard, with separate entrances to each of its four wings. When I knocked on the door a second time, the peep-hole opened. Jane Silverman unlocked the door, pulled me into the front living room, closed the door behind us. Three other couples were already going at it. The lights were out. Toni Arden was singing “Come Back to Sorrento.”

  I thought you’d never get here, Jane said.

  She led me to her couch and even before we lay down she was in my pants with her hand and in my mouth with her tongue.

  I smell bad from sweat, I whispered. I’m sorry. I had to make a delivery and it was rush hour.

  She licked my chest. Do you like me? she asked.

  No, but I trust you.

  She laughed and told me I was crazy. God, but I was the craziest guy she’d ever met. I had three fingers in her and she moved round and round as if she were spinning in circles on a bar stool. She’d saved the news for me, that she’d received the letters after school a few hours before: she’d been accepted into both Vassar and Mount Holyoke Colleges. Doris had acceptances from Radcliffe, Tufts, and Cornell, but didn’t know where to go.

  I do too. I’m going down, Doris said.

  Freddy Cohen got into Brandeis.

  Jew U, Freddy said.

  If the Jew fits, wear him, I said.

  You’re nuts, Doris said. Your boyfriend’s really nuts, Jane.

  He sure is, Jane said, and she began kissing me everywhere. I closed my eyes, to make things darker—so it would seem more like a dream—and let her do what she wanted. When she unbuckled my belt, I grabbed her hair in my fists and pulled the way she liked, just hard enough so she could pull back and keep doing what she loved most. Then she held me close, her cheek against my stomach and I knew she wanted to talk for a while, so I opened my eyes and listened to her tell me about everything she was feeling—about how much she hated living at home, about all the things she might do with her life after college, about how much she’d miss me, about how she had this awful feeling that except for a few rare moments, like the one we were living in now, together, she was never going to be happy. Will you visit me? she asked. Will you come visit me? Please. Say you will. Please…

  I’ll come, I said. Sure. A Mick in time, right?

  God, I’m so crazy about you, Jimmy, she said. You’re the best. You’re wonderful. I hope you get everything in life you want. I really do.

  I let my fists open then so I could rub her head and feel the shape of her skull with my fingers. I did that for a long time. Jesus, Jimmy, she said later. Oh sweet Jesus. She was crying and she didn’t wipe away the tears. It’s like the ocean coming right through me. Oh sweet Jesus, I feel so happy now—like I’ll never feel this happy again. Is that all right, do you think? she asked, and before I could answer, she took my hand and covered her mouth with it, to keep from screaming.

  My father was sleeping on the couch again. I walked by him, went into the bathroom, took my pants off, and washed myself. Then I put my pants back on.

  Get out, Jimmy, my father said.

  I tried to be quiet. I didn’t know you were still up.

  Get out and keep going, he said. That’s what you should do. You’re a good boy. You never said nothing against me. They open the gate and then they close it.

  Who?

  Women.

  Sure.

  You know what my father taught me, son? So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it… and sometimes three.

  Sure, I said.

  Do you get the joke? he asked.

  I get it, I said. It’s a good joke.

 
Listen, son—this is only temporary, my sleeping here. You know that, right? It’s just until your mother gets off the rag.

  Sure, Dad.

  I went into my room. My kid brother Tommy was asleep, his baseball bat next to him on our bed, to keep us separated so that we didn’t roll over onto one another. It was ten past three in the morning. On my desk was a new stack of letters waiting for me from all the Saint Colleges, but there was also one with a return address that said Department of Athletics, Brandeis University.

  I opened it and read of their genuine interest in me as a student and an athlete.

  It was March 17, 1955. I was 17 years old. I read the letter and I felt warm inside my chest, the way I did when Jane rested her head there. I thought of going into the living room, to wake my father and give him the good news, and I imagined how happy he’d be, how he’d want to celebrate my good fortune, how he’d pour drinks for us both and tell me I was going to have a swell life, not like his. He’d laugh and say we should wait until the morning to tell my mother, that she needed her beauty sleep. But if we woke my mother I knew she’d laugh more than both of us put together, that she’d kiss me and hug me and tell me that this was wonderful, having a dream come true—that this was always the best joke of all.

  Connorsville, Virginia

  SHERIFF JACKSON, he a good friend to the colored people. We got a small town without no mayor, so he acts for both, always comes to the funerals of colored folks and asks if he can help. I know it for a fact, if you ain’t got enough to do it right, he gets it for you from the town money, you don’t ask no questions.