Before My Life Began (12 page)

“It's okay,” I said. “You don't have to answer me. I was just wondering, is all.”

“You got a right to know these things, Davey. Only let me ask you a question. Did you get a look at that fat Italian with the
shvoogie
behind him? And the
shvoogie
with a knife or a razor in his pocket probably? Sure.” He pointed his cigarette at me. “That's the kind of stuff they use, those types. Rough stuff is all they know. What's so terrible if people make a few bets? Who gets hurt? When the state of New York gyps people at the track, that's legal, but when a hardworking fellow like Abe, who risked his life for his country, gives people honest odds, that's illegal. Why? You answer me that, sonny boy, and you're a genius. And Abe ain't no loan shark either, like he could be if he wanted, do you hear me?”

I told him I heard. I could tell he was pleased now, to have me for an audience, and he kept talking about Abe and how Abe let people have credit when they owed him money and found jobs for them when they couldn't make ends meet. I wondered if the fat Italian was related to Tony's family. I imagined myself asleep, the windows open, a breeze coming through, the sheet to my chin. I reminded myself to put my baseball bat under my bed and I imagined what I would do if somebody tried to crawl into my room from the fire escape. Would I lie still until he was past me, and then attack? What if he had a gun or a knife? What if there was more than one person?

“They won't let you live,” my father was saying. “Sure. I don't remember what the Black Hand did, the way Momma and Poppa were frightened so they would hardly leave the house? I don't remember the way those
momzers
used to walk around the neighborhood like they owned us? So what's Abe's big crime—that he saved us from being lamp shades so that now their bums should tell him where he can and can't live?”

“What's the Black Hand?”

“Murderers,” he said. “Gangsters. When I was your age, if you got a note in your mailbox with a black hand on it, it meant you were dead.”

“Did anyone you know ever get a note?”

“Sure. The Italians and the Jews, we lived near each other then, first on the Lower East Side, then when we came to Brooklyn, in East New York. Like now.”

“Did anyone you know get killed?”

“Stop with the questions. Always the questions, this one. You just listen to what I'm saying, do you hear me? People like that with no education, they don't value life the way we do.” He tapped the side of his head. “That's why they're so scared of Abe and Mr. Rothenberg. They know Abe don't gotta use rough stuff the way they do. If all you got is muscles and guns, see, then as soon as somebody gets more muscles and guns than you, you're dead. So why did God give us brains?”

My father didn't answer his own question. He walked from one side of the room to the other, as if he didn't know where he was, and when he looked at me again after a while, he seemed surprised to find me there. He bent down, kissed me on the forehead.

“It's late. You should get some sleep. We'll talk more in the morning if you want. Only you don't ever tell your mother about what happened tonight, all right? You just let that be something between the two of us.”

My mother came home from California during the last week of August, and from the moment she walked through the door all she could talk about was how wonderful California was. In California she had picked lemons and oranges right off the trees; in California the air was clean and there were no winters; in California Abe had found a job for my father that would enable us to move there and buy a home of our own.

We were in the middle of a broiling heat wave and the air hung on our bodies, so damp and heavy that I felt as if it was falling through my skin and muscles, softening my bones. My mother moved around the bedroom in slow motion, unpacking, putting things away in drawers. She had on nothing but a brassiere and panties—her skin was brown and shiny, glistening with sweat—and each time she passed the open window my father yelled at her that she was giving the neighbors a free show. She yelled that she didn't care, that she couldn't wait to get out of this stinking city, that she couldn't wait to get to California where a human being could breathe. Her lips were tingling already—she hadn't had a herpes once during the six weeks in California, she said—and she began rubbing them with ice cubes and crushed aspirin. I thought of the jars our science teacher kept at school, alcohol and chicken bones in them, and of how soft the bones would get, so that you could bend them.

My father sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over. Gray hairs curled around the nipples of his breasts. Sweat slid down his face and neck, ran along the folds of his stomach. My mother explained to me how easy the job would be, how all my father would have to do would be to stand in a booth all day and give out keys to cars. He would be a parking lot attendant in downtown Los Angeles. In hot weather the booth would be air-conditioned.

“But do I got a brain or do I got a brain?” my father asked. He said that to spend the rest of his life in a booth giving out keys would be like moving into a coffin.

My mother laughed, said we were living in hell already, so what was the difference.

“If it's so wonderful out there, let Abe go first,” my father said. “Sure. And if he loses his connections and we get stranded out there, who's gonna get me another job? You answer me that. Your big-shot brother fills your head up with his lousy dreams, but I'm the one who gets left to pay for them.”

“And what about the boy? What kind of life is there for him if we stay here? Can you answer that?” My mother turned to me. “You wanna be like him, Davey? Come on and answer me. You wanna grow up to be a nothing like your father, then you just go on and take lessons from him. If Abe didn't take care of him, he wouldn't have a pot to piss in and you wouldn't have clothes on your back, him and all his talk about brains. Where'd his brain ever get us?”

“You're hot and bothered,” my father said. “You should of waited to come home until after the heat wave, is what I think. But I'll tell you what—how about a nice movie, where it's air-conditioned, all three of us together? They got a good double feature at the Granada and maybe by the time it's out things'll be cooled off and we'll all feel better.”

He stood and tried to put his arms around her. She pushed him away, pulled a stack of postcards from her suitcase, and came toward me.

“Let Momma show you how beautiful it is, Davey! Let Momma show you, so you'll see the new life you can have, with new friends and fresh fruit and palm trees and beaches…”

“I gotta go,” I said. “I promised the guys I'd meet them downstairs.”

“Hey—don't you be walking away from your mother like that!” my father shouted at me. “You get back in here.”

“Leave him be, Sol.”

“Leave him be? Is that fresh or is that fresh, to walk out on you when you're in the middle of talking to him?”

Downstairs people were sitting on chairs, listening to radios, cooling themselves with paper fans. Rosie sat on a wooden stool, her skirt up over her knees, her feet in a bucket of ice.

On Rogers Avenue the older kids were leaning against cars. I saw Sheila necking with a guy. She wore red shorts and a green halter, and I couldn't understand how she could let a guy's body press against hers in such sticky weather. I turned right on Linden Boulevard, ducked down the alleyway between the first two apartment houses, thinking I might find some of my friends out back in the courtyard. It was usually I cooler there at night, where there had been grass and shadows all day long.

“Hey Davey. C'mere a minute—that's you, right?”

Avie Gornik was standing in the doorway to the cellar, holding a bowl.

“You wanna suck on some ice chips? I got plenty.”

I reached into the bowl and took some chips.

“Your uncle got back today, yeah?”

“Yes. But I haven't seen him yet.”

“Yeah. Me neither. He got lots on his mind these days. Things got out of hand some while he was gone, but you know all about that, right?”

“No.”

“I thought you did. I mean, you and the Cremona kid being such buddies. He didn't tell you that we lost two trucks?” He laughed. “I mean, if you think about it, it ain't easy, to lose a truck. You got no idea where we could find what was in the truck?”

“No.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “You're okay, Davey. I mean, you're like Abe—you got so much ice water in your veins you don't need old Avie's chips. Only you should be careful who your friends are, get what I mean? You wouldn't want your uncle to get mad on you—to know things you do when he ain't here. You get my drift?”

“No.”

Avie leaned toward me and I could make out his features now. He looked as old as his mother—big-nosed and thick-lipped and pasty-skinned, with small, mean eyes set too close together. He wore a sleeveless undershirt like the kind my father used.

“So tell me—where you going down here at night?”

“Nowhere. Just looking for my friends.”

“They ain't here, but listen. I been hoping to meet you sometime, you know what I mean? Not because of the trouble we got, which ain't your fault—just some of our boys seem to trust some of their boys when they should know better—but because I been hearing a lot about you from your friends.”

I sucked on the chips, let the freezing water glide down the back of my tongue.

“You know what all your friends say? They say you got a real big cock—that you got the biggest cock of all the guys your age.”

“I gotta get going.”

“Let me ask you a question first.” He held my arm. “When you grow up, what are you gonna be—a big shot like your uncle or a little pipsqueak like your father?”

I turned to walk away—it was too hot for trouble—but he grabbed onto the back of my neck and forced me around. He laughed at me, his teeth yellow like old lamb bones.

“Ah, don't get mad on me, Davey. I didn't mean nothing. Your old man's okay. He don't bother nobody, I guess. Only c'mere a minute with me where nobody can see us, yeah?” I didn't move. “Hey—you ain't scared of me, are you?”

“No.”

“Sure. I mean, why should a big kid like you be scared of an old fart like me, works for your uncle? I mean, if I did anything bad to you, I'd be in big trouble, right?”

“I suppose.”

“I knew your uncle when he was in diapers, right? I knew his old man and his old lady.” He made a sucking noise with his lips. “Ah, the old lady was really a knockout. He ever tell you about her?”

“She died before I was born.”

“All the men had the hots for her. All them fancy clothes and fur coats.”

He pushed the cellar door open with his shoulder.

“C'mon in with me—it's real nice and cool in here. It's always cooler where it's been dark all day, so you come on inside, yeah?”

He kept pressure on the back of my neck with his thumb and forefinger. I could smell the damp coal dust, the garbage cans full of winter ashes.

“Now listen. If you don't trust old Avie, you just let me know, only I figured from what your friends told me that you got the most courage of them all, right?”

“I don't know.”

“This'll only take a couple of minutes, so if you don't want to do it, you say so now.”

“Do what?”

“All I want is to see if the guys are right, if your little fire engine is really bigger than theirs. They all showed me theirs—to brag, yeah?—but if you wanna be left out, that's okay by me. Only I figured a big kid like you ain't scared of much.” He was unbuttoning my fly. “I mean, anytime you want me to stop, all you gotta do is say the word.”

He let go of my neck, but I didn't move.

“Let me ask you something. You do it yourself yet?” He reached inside my shorts and touched my penis very lightly, as if to see if it was there. “Hey, that's nice—I mean, your friends all bragged to me that they do it to themselves already fifteen or sixteen times a day, only between you and me, Davey, they ain't big enough yet. They just wanna impress people, you know what I mean?”

He started stroking my penis and what surprised me was that the huskier his voice got, the more gently he touched me.

“Hey, I think your friends were right, did you know that? For a kid your age you got a terrific pecker, Davey. I mean, how old are you already? You're gonna make the ladies very happy someday, just like your uncle does. So how old did you say you were?”

“Twelve. I'll be thirteen in September, after school starts.”

“Oh yeah? Thirteen, huh? I would of figured fourteen or fifteen from your size. See how nice and hard it's getting? That feels good, don't it? I mean, if you don't trust old Avie, you just say the word and I'll stop, yeah? All you gotta do is say the word.”

The cellar was pitch black, no light leaking in, and in the blackness he kept rubbing me and talking to me, telling me that if I didn't beat my meat yet I should take a tip from him and not start, because once you started you had to do it all the time, every few hours. In my head I saw myself running away and I saw him falling on top of me before I could get the cellar door open. He was twisting my arms back behind me and spreading my fingers apart and breaking them, cracking them one at a time with his bare hands. I'd seen a photo of an artist once who had so much pain in his hands that he strapped them to boards so that he could keep painting. I thought of the men in my grandfather's home, lying on their beds, the lights out. I wondered if anybody had ever done this to Tony and what his brothers would do to him if they found out. I felt sick. I wanted to go home. Avie scooped up ice chips, moaned, and then started talking again.

“You really like your uncle, don't you, Davey? I mean, he's the big man, yeah? He's the really big man…the big man….”