Dead I Well May Be (32 page)

Apollo came up earlier in connection with the future and, you know, a wise thing Apollo urged at Delphi was to Know Yourself, and that’s what I had done. Looked within. I wasn’t impatient about my plans. However long it took, it would take that long. You’re the lucky man whose aim becomes true. Once you are resolved, all other anxieties melt away into nothingness.

The first thing was that I needed money, and I was never much in the thieving line so, obviously, I had to get a job. How? I sat for a while
and I considered various options, put my foot on, and went back down into the apartment again.

The next morning I walked to a bar called the Blue Moon near the Metro North stop on 125th. Once a glamorous place, now fallen on hard times, with a large staging area at the back where bands had played and people had danced in the thirties. Like the rest of 125th Street it had seen many changes since then, most for the bad. It didn’t have many customers but the ones it did have were older guys and no trouble. Crack cocaine was the vice du jour around here and alcohol a benign and peaceful influence on character in comparison. I’d worked here for one week, nine months ago. It had been called Carl’s then. In that period, which is exactly the gestation cycle of a human being, I too had been born again into a different, harder, more venerable person. Carl’s also had transformed. It had undergone a change of name and a change of ownership. The Blue Moon had been what it was called about five years ago and was what it had been in its heyday. The record emporium next door to it had become a lottery store. The African craft store had closed. Everything in Harlem is always in a state of flux, but the early 1990s was perhaps the low point in the great neighborhood’s fall from grace.

I’d gotten a job at Carl’s through Freddie, our mailman, while I was waiting for an interview with the famous Sunshine and Darkey White. Scotchy had found me a place but had let me starve on the street until Sunshine had finally said that I was Darkey White material. Freddie had said that I’d be quite the star at Carl’s as the one white busboy within ten blocks.

I went over there at lunchtime hoping that I wouldn’t stand out in the bigger crowd.

Crowd. Two guys in separate booths, a barman, and a girl drunk at a stool next to a jukebox. It was a dark place, no width to it at all, just a long bar and a few tables opposite and at the back the closed-down stage, some booths, and a bathroom. No bathroom for women, no decorations except for a few mirrors and a fight poster.

I’d like a beer, I said, and the barman said that if I was a tourist I’d better get out of here and if I wasn’t a tourist and I was looking for trouble, he carried, with police approval, a sawed-off shotgun within reach of where he was standing right now.

I said that I wasn’t a tourist and I didn’t want trouble, just a beer. He took a look at me and poured me a Budweiser, almost all head, and asked for five dollars.

I must have been slightly cut that day because I said to him that I’d give him the five dollars but I wanted a proper beer for my money. We eyed each other. He was an old black guy who looked a lot like Miles Davis, though a little paunchier. After a long minute, he grinned at me and poured me a beer and said that the charge was two bucks. We chatted about American football (of which I know nothing) and when he said would I like another, I came to it.

Listen, Jim, I said (for such was his name), I know times are tough but I need a job. I worked bar many times in New York and I’ve worked bar in Ireland for years and years. I’m a good worker and honest and I’ll take any shift you want. I was here at the beginning of the year when this place was still Carl’s.

Jim laughed.

Yeah, man, we need a lot of staff right now to cope with the big rush.

I laughed too. But even though it was almost noon, the daughters of Nyx were still in my corner. I gave him my address and sure enough, as luck would have it, that very day his relief barman quit because he’d just gotten the lucrative understudy job for Macavity the Mystery Cat in a touring version of the show.

Jim came by my place and the Jamaican guy on two nearly shot him, and I ran down and almost brained the Jamaican and but for the fact that he was new in the mainland Americas and still unsure of our ways, he surely would have fucking killed the pair of us. Rather, we solved the situation with rum in his apartment, which was a lot nicer than mine, and Jim gave me the job.

It sure would be a novelty having a white boy keeping bar, and I seemed like I was sincere and trustworthy. He asked if I had any dependency issues and I said that I took too much Tylenol for pains in my leg, and he laughed and said that I might be ok; he did add if I ever tried to rip him off he’d hunt me down and castrate me. The job was Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights and two dollars an hour, plus tips.

The place didn’t exactly fill up at the weekends, but the Apollo
crowd brought some business and with tips I was bringing in forty dollars a night, which wasn’t bad at all. I took a ribbing and much shite the first night, but by the third I was old news and the abuse was perfunctory and dull. On my very first shift, Jim and I threw out a crack addict who ran in with a bread knife in a pathetic attempt at a holdup.

I was a good barman and Jim liked having me around but, like I say, I wasn’t there long since my stint effectively ended when I was offered a more lucrative position in Ramón’s organization. It happened like this:

I was in the bar one night when a group of Dominican boys came in. There were six of them. If you were Dominican you only came into this bar in numbers. Definitely a crew: watchful eyes, polo shirts,
Miami Vice
pastel jackets, cashmere coats that dragged on the ground. Mr. T would have envied the gold chains about their necks. They were all packing, and two of them had big muscle jobs that everyone realized could spray havoc and death with gay abandon if that proved necessary, which it wouldn’t when you considered that the average age of our clientele was about sixty-five.

They ordered Mexican beers and took a table at the back. They were smart boys and weren’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t to know then, but Jim had started paying off to them. They were trying to expand their territory from Washington Heights down into Harlem, along Broadway and Amsterdam. Jim had heard bad things about them, but they kept the cost low enough so a dodgy business like Jim’s could pay off without too much hurt.

The boss was a little man called Ramón Borges Hernández. Five six, olive skin, handsome, bald, poised, heavy. He looked forty but was younger.

I learned later that Ramón grew up in Santo Domingo and had come to New York about five years earlier. He had many cousins in Washington Heights and within days of his arrival they’d set him up as part of a crew. He was arrested three times and with the third they threw something at him that stuck and he spent some time in Rikers Island. Rikers then wasn’t like Rikers now. Even among the Dominican inmates there were daily fights, stabbings, and shit-kicking sessions. And across ethnic and gang lines: rapes, castrations, shank murders. You got an education, and if you survived, you got a reputation and made connections.

Ramón got out of Rikers and was deported to the Dominican Republic under some crazy new get-tough policy, but it didn’t take him long to get himself a new passport and a new look, and he was about to head back to America when he got in some unspecified bother and went to prison in, of all places, Haiti. I assume he was smuggling something, but neither Ramón nor anyone else ever spoke about that time. Probably my little portion of Mexican hell was as nothing compared to Ramón’s fourteen months in Port-au-Prince.

Still, sometimes, suffering builds character (though not in my case) and when Ramón did come back to Manhattan he was newly invigorated and determined to make the upper city his. He joined a crew working east of St. Nicholas Park and was doing ok for himself until he was arrested and ended up again in Rikers Island. This time, though, he’d been lifted under a lucky star.

If you are the type of person who believes in synchronicity or the power of coincidence or chaos theory or Jungian collective unconscious or other bollocks like that, it might be instructive to learn just how Ramón’s luck changed and the small but important role I played in reversing Fortune’s wheel. Vanna White wouldn’t be in it, I tell you. I didn’t realize it then, but Ramón’s and my path had crossed inadvertently twice before. Once when Ramón gave encouragement to Dermot Finoukin’s foolishness and once with Mr. Peter Berenson, the Eastern European gentleman with Santa trouble. I think I said earlier that all this might be seen as a bit flukey, but if Ramón were still alive I’d have said no, it wasn’t a fluke, it was some Ramónian magical cadence that meant he knew me before he knew me. But, actually, poor Ramón was no magician, at least not magician enough to stop Moreno Felipe Cortez from shooting him nineteen times (that means more than one clip) the year after I left New York. Anyway, that was all still to come, and for the moment, it’s diverting to see how Ramón made that jump from Triple-A into the Major Leagues.

Ramón was sent to Rikers and he got to know a black Colombian guy from the Bronx called Bill. Blacks and Dominicans didn’t pal around much, but Ramón was a charmer and had a knack for spotting talent. Bill, it turned out, was an important middleman meeting mules at JFK and holding the product while deals were done. He had several things going at once, including babying a large quantity of cocaine for
a Colombian terror group’s drug arm. All he had to do was hold it and keep his mouth shut. Simple. But Bill was also a bit of a fuckup and had somehow punched a cop at (of all heaven’s holy fucking places) the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Bill was on a warrant and went to jail and through that he lost his apartment in Riverdale. They wanted Bill out of the building because he was black and Colombian, but heavying him out would look bad at landlord-and-tenant court. Fortunately for them, Bill was now in prison and couldn’t (or forgot to) pay his rent (he had a few places), so they kicked him out and put in Mr. Peter Berenson, who had wanted to move from the ground floor to the fourth floor to get a view of Van Cortlandt Park.

I don’t know what Bill’s troubles were, but clearly he had a lot on his plate and didn’t get round to sending someone to look for his stash of coke until December, by which time the apartment was inhabited by someone else—our pal Pete. The Christmas burglar had found nothing, and Bill decided that he would investigate the whole thing when he got out of the clink in the summer.

You might recall that the night Shovel supposedly beat the crap out of Big Andy, as I was coming up the steps from the subway stop Mr. Berenson said that he’d had an intruder break into his place but not take anything. This was Bill out of jail and looking for his cache of cocaine, which was safely embedded in the floorboard. He didn’t find it or was too high to get it the first time, which was unlucky for him, because very soon after, Ramón saw him on the street and remembered his tall prison tales and took him to a place where all the pertinent information was extracted. Shortly after that, Ramón or an associate went to Mr. Berenson’s apartment, killed Mr. Berenson, and took a sports bag full of cocaine out of the apartment. I sometimes like to beat myself up with the thought that if I’d taken the old Nazi a wee bit more seriously that night perhaps I’d have gone over there myself and camped out and found the cocaine before Ramón did. With a bag full of cocaine to deliver to Darkey, I might have been forgiven all my sins and at the very least there would have been no reason to send all of us down to Mexico. Maybe they’d have gotten to me, but the boys would all still have been alive.

In any case, his little worker bees got going on the stash and with all this free money Ramón transformed himself from a small-time player
into a bigger-time player. Ramón flooded his own wee part of the market, undercut the competition, and in no time at all was the cat’s pajamas.

It maybe wasn’t just chance then that the two areas I’d come across Ramón’s baleful influence were in the Bronx and Washington Heights. Both places Dominicans were moving into, Micks moving out of. Places where one could expect that Darkey White’s power would be on the wane and that of thoughtful young hoods from Hispaniola would be on the wax. Yes, in this part of town, Ramón and the Dominicans were the future, Darkey White and the Irish were the past. It wouldn’t last, but then again, what does?

Ramón was in the group of six that night, and I didn’t know it, but he’d come to see me.

You think you can be anonymous in this city, but you can’t. Things slip out, people chitter. Everyone’s a bigmouth. You can’t keep a fucking secret in America. The Irish aren’t much good at secrets either, but they’re better than Yanks. If a UFO really did crash at Roswell, there’d be a bloody Roswell World there by now.

Someone had blabbed and Ramón had heard about me and sought me out. At that time, I considered this my unluckiest break since coming back to New York. From my position, I was doing ok. I had a job, I had a place, and I was lying low and doing prep work. The last thing I needed was a major player taking an interest in me. But it is possible that nothing at all would have worked out but for my connection with Ramón. Without Ramón, it might have taken me years to find out where anybody lived and without Ramón, Sunshine might have got to me before I got to him.

Ramón was cool and had a lot of bottle. His boys were sitting in the booth drinking Coronas when he came up to the bar alone and sat opposite me.

Ramón’s big thing was telling you who the best prospects were in Dominican baseball circles. Largely, he was proved right and I have vague recollections of predictions of greatness for Pedro Martínez, Manny Ramírez, and Sammy Sosa, though doubtless there were others who didn’t work out.

Anyway, that’s how he started out with me. Baseball, Dominicans. On extremely limited knowledge I kept the chat going, hoping for a fat
tip. We talked, and he got another round in. His English was great for having spent so short a time here, but apparently it was because of his uncle, who had gone back to the island after thirty years on 171st Street. He’d been raised by this uncle, who, in his retirement, became a minor and almost famous Dominican poet. After the death of his mother, Ramón was raised by the uncle and a succession of women, none of whom, it seemed, he had much affection for. He told me all this when baseball was exhausted.