Billy Bathgate

SEVEN

The train to the Bronx was empty at that hour of the morning, I was alone in the car staring into people’s windows as we went by. I caught glimpses of people’s rooms as if I was taking snapshots, a white enamel bed against a wall, a round oak table with an open bottle of milk and a plate, a standing lamp with a pleated shade protected with cellophane with the bulb still on in the morning over a stuffed green chair. People leaned with their arms on their windowsill and stared at the train going by as if they didn’t see them every five or ten minutes. What was it like with the sound filling those rooms and shaking the plaster off the walls? These crazy women hung their family laundry on clotheslines between the windows, and their drawers flapped as the train went by. It had never occurred to me before how everything in New York was stacked, one thing on top of another, even the railroads had to be put over the street, like apartments over other apartments, and there were train tracks under the streets too. Everything in New York was on levels, the whole city was rock and you could do anything with rock, build skyscrapers into it, scallop it out for subway tunnels, poke steel beams into it and run railroads in the air right through people’s apartments.
I sat with my hands in my pants pockets. I had distributed my money half and half and held on to it with both hands. For some reason it was a long trip back to the Bronx. How long had I been away? I had no idea, I felt I was coming home on a furlough, like a doughboy who’d been in France for a year. Everything looked strange to me. I got off a stop early and walked a block west to Bathgate Avenue. This was the market street, everyone did their shopping here. I walked along on the crowded sidewalks between the pushcarts on the curb and the open stalls in the tenements, every one of the merchants competing with the same oranges and apples and tangerines and peaches and plums for the same prices, eight cents a pound, ten cents a pound, a nickel each, three for a dime. They wrote their prices on paper bags which they hung like flags on wooden slats behind each crate of fruit or vegetables. But that wasn’t enough. They shouted out their prices. They called Missus, look, I got the best, feel this grapefruit, fresh Georgia peaches just in. They talked they cajoled and the women shopping talked back. I felt a little better now in all this innocent, urgent, only slightly larcenous life. There was chatter and in the street the horns of trucks blowing and kids darting from one side to another and overhead from the fire escapes men who were out of work sat in their pants and ribbed undershirts and read the papers. The aristocracy of the business had the real stores where you walked in and bought your chickens still in their feathers, or your fresh fish, or your flank steak, or milk and butter and cheese, or lox and smoked whitefish and pickles. In front of the army-navy stores suits hung on hangers from the awning bars or dresses hung from racks wheeled out the front doors, and clothes were bargains too on Bathgate, where for five dollars or seven dollars or twelve dollars you got two pairs of pants with the jacket. I was fifteen years old and I had a hundred dollars in my pockets. I knew without question that in that precise moment of the daily life of subsistence I was the richest person on Bathgate Avenue.
There was a florist on the corner and I went in and I bought my mother a potted geranium because it was the only flower whose name I knew. It didn’t have much of a smell, it smelled more like earth or a vegetable than a flower, but it was the kind of plant she herself bought and then forgot to water until it withered on the fire escape outside the kitchen window. The leaves were full and green and there were small red blossoms that hadn’t opened. I knew that a geranium was not a proportionate gift but it was sincerely from me and not from Abbadabba Berman speaking for the Schultz gang. I felt somewhat shaky now walking home to my street. But when I turned the corner by the candy store there before my eyes were the Max and Dora Diamond kids running around in their underwear under the sprinkler attached to the fire hydrant. The street was closed off, it was maybe ten in the morning, and they were all running around in wet underwear, the little ones, screeching, with their shiny little bodies so beautifully fast and quick. Of course the few older children wore real woolen bathing suits, dark blue trunks and connected tops with shoulder straps for both boys and girls, the uniform orphan-blue wool, and not a few suits had holes where the flesh peeked through. And there were regular kids from the tenements all mixed in with their individual colors and their mothers watching and wishing they could run under the water too except for their dignity. The water made a rainbow umbrella over the shining black street. I looked for my witchy friend Becky but I knew she wouldn’t be there, I knew she wouldn’t be caught dead running under a sprinkler any more than any of the other incorrigibles, it was not what they could allow themselves to do no matter how hot it might be, it was their dignity no less than the parents’ to make distinctions, in fact so it was with all of us, not excepting me, I the most rigid of all, passing into the dark courtyard of my house, stepping out of the light, climbing through the dark halls of chipped octagonal tile to the apartments where I had grown into my life.
My mother was at work as I knew she would be. I could look into all the rooms in the world, there was no house like my house. There had been a fire in the kitchen, the enamel on the table was burned in a big egg shape and around the edges the paint was blistered. Nevertheless the candles were lit and lined up in their tumblers. Sometimes in cold weather, when the wind came through the cracks around the windows and under the door and up through the dumbwaiter shaft, they leaned one way and then the other and swayed and shifted dissynchronously as in a kind of dance. Now they burned evenly although there seemed to be more than I remembered, the effect on me was of looking into a chandelier, that although I was upright I might just as well be lying on the floor and looking up into a grand imperial firmament. There was something majestic about my mother. She was a tall woman, she was taller than I was. She had been taller than my father as I reminded myself now looking at the wedding photo on the bureau in the sitting room which served also as her bedroom when she made up the couch. She had years ago run a crayon over the glass in a big X across his figure. This was after she had scraped away the face. She did things like that. When I was little I thought all rugs were in the shape of men’s suits and trousers. She had nailed his suit to the floor as if it was the fur of some game animal, a bearskin, a tigerskin. The house had always smelled of burning wax, of candles gone out, of the smoke of wicks.
A water closet was off the kitchen, a dark cubicle with just a toilet, whereas the bathtub was in the kitchen, covered with a heavy wooden hinged lid. I put the geranium here so that she would see it.
In the little bedroom where I slept I found something new, a battered but once-elegant brown wicker baby carriage. It seemed to take up the whole room. The wheel rims were dented so that it wobbled as I pushed it back and forth. But the tires had been washed until they were white. And the top was up, that hinged part that can be put up against the weather and snapped into place with decorative stanchions on the sides. And a series of splintered holes ran diagonally down through it, so that the light from the bedroom window lit them up. An old rag doll lay askew in the carriage; perhaps she had found them together in the street, or bought them from Arnold Garbage separately and put them together herself, the carriage and the doll, and pulled them up the stairs and into the apartment and into my room for me to find when I came home.
She didn’t ask too many questions and seemed happy enough to see me. My arrival split her attention, if the lights were a phone it would have been as if she maintained two conversations simultaneously, she half listened to me, half turned to the lights. We ate our dinner as always sitting beside the bathtub lid and my flowers made a kind of centerpiece and seemed more than anything to give her to understand that I had gotten a job. I told her I was working as a busboy with duties also as a kind of night watchman. I told her it was good work because there were lots of tips. That’s what I told her and that’s what she appeared to believe. “But just for the summer, of course, because you have to go back to school in September” is what she said, rising to adjust the position of one of the lights. I agreed. But I told her I had to dress properly for the job or I couldn’t keep it, so on Saturday afternoon when she got home from work we rode the Webster Avenue trolley up to Fordham Road and went shopping for my suit at I. Cohen’s, which was her choice, it was where, she said, my father had found good value in the old days, and she had good taste, she was suddenly an efficient and capable mother in the outside world, and I was very relieved on several grounds, just one of them being that I didn’t know how to buy clothes for myself. But she looked reasonably normal too, she wore her best dress of large violet flowers on a white background and combed her hair up under her hat so that it did not show itself as long. One of the things that bothered me about my mother was that she never cut her hair. The fashion was for short hair but hers was long and in the morning, when she was preparing to leave for her job with the industrial laundry, she plaited it in one long braid which she coiled up on the top of her head and then stuck a lot of long pins in. She had a sour-cream jar of these long decorative pins on her bureau. But after she took her bath in the kitchen at night and prepared for bed, sometimes I couldn’t help seeing all that straight long grayblack hair combed out on the couch pillow, some of it even falling off the side and touching the floor, some of it getting caught in the pages of her Bible. Her shoes bothered me too, she had bad feet from standing all day at her job, and her solution was to wear men’s shoes, white ones which she put white polish on every night, summer or winter, claiming they were nurse’s shoes if I happened to be in a bad enough mood to mention them. When we argued my criticism made her smile. It drove her further into herself. She never criticized me, however, being too distracted, only asking an occasional question whose anxiety was dispelled by her own wandering attention almost before she came to the end of the sentence. But on this Saturday afternoon when we went up to Fordham Road she looked very fine and acted almost all the time as if she was in the day together with me. She picked out a light gray single-breasted summer suit with two pairs of trousers and an Arrow shirt with little tabs sewn into the tips of the collar so that it would not curl up, and a red knit tie with a square bottom. We were a long time at I. Cohen’s and the old gentleman who took care of us pretended not to see how poor we were, the condition of my sneakers, my mother’s white men’s shoes, taking us on faith, this little plump man with a tapemeasure hanging around his neck like a prayer shawl perhaps he had reason to know of the pride of poor people. But when my mother opened her purse and displayed the cash I had given her I thought I did detect a look of relief on his face, if not curiosity for this handsome tall woman who brought in this kid in rags and bought him an eighteen-dollar suit and accompaniments like it was nothing. Perhaps he thought she was a wealthy eccentric who had picked me out of the street as a charity case. I knew that night he would tell his wife that his job made a philosopher out of him because every day he saw that human nature was full of surprises and all you could say about life was that it was past understanding.
I Cohen’s did the alterations and put up the cuffs of the trousers while you waited, but we said we’d be back and I walked with my mother up the winding hill toward the Grand Concourse. I found an Adler shoe store and bought a new pair of black sneakers with nice thick soles and then I chose shoes, black wing-tips with secretly heightening leather heels of the style I had seen on the feet of Dixie Davis, Mr. Schultz’s lawyer. All of this set us back another nine dollars. I carried the shoes in a box and wore the new sneakers and we continued our way up Fordham until we found a Schrafft’s. And there we joined for their afternoon tea all the fine people of the Bronx. We ordered little chicken-salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off the bread, actual tea for my mother and a chocolate ice-cream soda for me, all of it set down on paper place mats in open lace patterns and served by waitresses in black uniforms with white lace aprons that matched the place mats. I was very happy to be doing something like this with my mother. I wanted her to be having a good time. I enjoyed the ceramic clatter of the restaurant, the fussy self-important waitresses balancing their trays, the afternoon sun coming through the front window and shining on the red carpet. I liked the big-bladed silent ceiling fans turning slowly as befitted the dignity of the diners. I had told my mother that I had money in my pocket to buy her some new clothes too, lots of them, and new shoes too that were better for her feet, and that we could go right now two minutes up the street to the Alexander’s Department Store if she wanted, right at Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, the main intersection of the Bronx. But she had become interested in the paper lace of the place mat and was tracing the design with her fingers, feeling the embossing with her fingertips and then closing her eyes as if she was blind and was reading it in Braille. And then she said something I wasn’t sure I heard properly but was afraid to ask her to repeat. “I hope he knows what he’s doing” were the words she said. It was as if someone else was at the table, the voice was not quite hers. I didn’t know whether she had said it speaking for herself or had read it off the dots of the embossed place mat.
But anyway I put forty dollars in her pocketbook that night, which left me with a little over twenty-five. I found I was getting used to these big sums, handling these bills as if I was to the manner born. It is true that you get accustomed to money very quickly, that the miraculousness of the idea of it wears away and it becomes unremarkable. Yet my mother’s salary at the laundry was twelve dollars a week and that money remained miraculous in my mind, which is to say valuable in the old way, as my own earnings by their profligacy were not. It was an Abbadabba Berman idea. I hoped the dollars I put in her purse would take on the quality of the dollars in her pay envelope. Around the neighborhood it became clear that I had money. I bought whole packs of Wings cigarettes and not only smoked them continually but was generous with them. In the pawnshop on Third Avenue where I went for the glasses I found a reversible satin team jacket, black on one side, and then you could turn everything inside out and presto it was a white jacket, and I bought that and strutted in the evenings in it. The team name was The Shadows, not a name I recognized as local, and it was stitched in fancy white script on the black side and in black on the white side. So I was wearing that and with my cigarettes and new sneakers and I suppose my attitude, which I might not be able to discern in myself but which must have been quite clear to others, I represented another kind of arithmetic to everyone on my street, not just the kids but the grown-ups too, and it was peculiar because I wanted everyone to know what they figured out easily enough, that it was just not given to a punk to find easy money except one way, but at the same time I didn’t want them to know, I didn’t want to be changed from what I was, which was a boy alive in the suspension of judgment of childhood, that I was the wild kid of a well-known crazy woman, but there was something in me that might earn out, that might grow into the lineaments of honor, so that a discerning teacher or some other act of God, might turn up the voltage of this one brain to a power of future life that everyone in the Bronx could be proud of. I mean that to the more discerning adult, the man I didn’t know and didn’t know ever noticed me who might live in my building or see me in the candy store, or in the schoolyard, I would be one of the possibilities of redemption, that there was some wit in the way I moved, some lovely intelligence in an unconscious gesture of the game, that would give him this objective sense of hope for a moment, quite unattached to any loyalty of his own, that there was always a chance, that as bad as things were, America was a big juggling act and that we could all be kept up in the air somehow, and go around not from hand to hand, but from light to dark, from night to day, in the universe of God after all.
But anyway it was a palpable change, no matter what I wished, you do feel special and there are numerous discreet kinds of recognition granted to you on the street, as if you had entered a seminary or something like that, small registrations in the eyes of people, where now they see you and are sure they don’t want to have anything to do with you, or they see you and give you a moment of their serious attention, depending on what their own ideas of the religious life might be, or perhaps political life, but in any event they see you and wonder how you can hurt them or be of use to them, and now and henceforth, you’re another name in the system.
At the same time nobody knew anything, you understand, who I was with and where I worked, all of this was secondary to the mythological change of my station, except of course to those who were in the business, who for their part, as a matter of principle, would not show the least interest because these things come out in due course, first of all, and because I was to the professional eye so clearly still a punk, second of all. So this was a very subtle spirit event of my street that I speak of, and except in the public life of summer might hardly have found the currency it did; I mean never in my self-consciousness of my return did I have the illusion that anyone knew the magnitude of what had happened to me, how I had been living in the very pulsebeat of the tabloids, distributed in printer’s ink and hidden like the fox in the tree leaves on the puzzle page except that I was right in the middle of the centrally important news of our time.
But one night I was sitting on the orphans’ stoop in the white side of my Shadows jacket with my two friends Rebecca the Witch and Arnold Garbage and we had it mostly to ourselves, the younger kids having been herded inside because it was their curfew, and it was that moment of summer night when it is still light blue in the sky but lamppost dark in the street and it was noisy enough with everyone’s window open and the radios playing and the arguments going, and there came around the corner the green-and-white prowl car of the local precinct house and when it reached us it stopped at the curb and the motor ran quietly there and I stared at the cop in the car and he looked up the steps at me, and the appraisal was keen and measured, and it seemed to me everything grew immediately quiet, although of course this was not so, and I felt my white jacket glowing in the last light coming down from the sky, I felt levitated by that light and the cop car too seemed to float away, from its dark green bottom to its upper half in white suspension over the tires, and then the head in the window turned away and said something to the cop I couldn’t see, the driver, and they laughed and the headlights went on like gunshots in the street and they drove away.
This was the moment of my awareness, in this strange light, of that first anger Mr. Schultz had told me about, how it comes to you as a benefit, as an endowment. I felt the defining criminal rage, I recognized it, except that it had come to me as I sat in contentment with other strange half-children there on the steps of the Max and Dora Diamond Home. Clearly what I had sought and didn’t want at the same time, that peculiar notoriety of a kid’s dreams, was now official, I was another kind of citizen, there was no longer any question. I was angry because I still thought it was up to me to decide what I was, not f*cking cops. I was angry because nothing in this world is provisional. I was angry because Mr. Berman had sent me home with money in my pocket for no other reason than to teach me what money costs and I hadn’t realized it.
Now I remembered what he had said, that I should just take it easy and when they wanted me they would find me. I was standing at the foot of the stairs to the El. I hadn’t really heard him, why don’t we hear the things said to us? A minute later I had bounded up the stairs and dropped my nickel in the turnstile with its thick magnifying glass showing you under light how big an American buffalo is.
So that night I did something I had never done before, I threw a party. It seemed to me properly defiant. I found a bar on Third Avenue that sold beer to minors for the right price and bought a pony and rented the tapping equipment to go with it and Garbage wheeled it all covered up in one of his carriages and we bumped it down the steps to his cellar and that’s where I threw the party. The big work was clearing enough of his storehouse of shit out of the way so that we had something like an old couch or two to sit on and some floor space to dance on. On the other hand it was Garbage who supplied the tall dusty glasses we drank the beer from and the old Victor Talking Machine with the sound horn curled like a seashell and the pack of steel needles and the box of race records that gave us our dance music. I told him I would pay rent for everything he supplied. I was determined that night to pay everybody for everything, even God for the air I breathed. And I threw the party for the incorrigibles of the Max and Dora Diamond Home after everyone else including the floor wardens and the custodial supervisor had gone to sleep. Eventually there were maybe ten or twelve kids altogether including my friend Rebecca, who arrived like some of the other girls in a nightgown, but she had earrings on too and some lipstick. All the girls wore lipstick, all the same color all obviously from the same tube. And there we were making a big deal over this beer that must have come from Mr. Schultz’s drop because it was really piss water but because it was beer gave us the requisite taste of adult corruption. Someone had raided the house kitchen and come away with three salamis and several loaves of white bread in wax paper and Garbage poked around in one of his bins till he found a kitchen knife and a broken coffee table, and sandwiches were made and beer was poured and I had cigarettes for those who wanted them, and in the dry and ashen air of the basement, with suspensions of coal dust lit in the yellow light of an old standing lamp, we smoked Wings and drank our foamless beer and ate and danced to the old black voices of the 1920s singing their slow songs of doubled lines of love and bitter one-line resolutions, of pig’s feet and jelly rolls and buggy rides and papas who did wrong and mamas who did wrong and people who were waiting for trains that had already gone, and though none of us knew how to dance except the square dancing they taught upstairs, the music taught us how. Garbage sat by the Victrola and cranked it up and took a record out of its blank paper jacket and put it on, he sat cross-legged on a table with a pillow under him and did this, neither dancing himself nor talking to anyone for that matter but giving by his assent to everything going on in his basement the best measure of impassive sociability of which he was capable, neither drinking beer nor smoking but only eating and engrossing himself with the endless supply of scratchy music, the cornets and clarinets and tubas and pianos and drums of sorrowful passion, and the girls danced with each other and then pulled the boys in to dance with them, and it was a very solemn party we were having, white Bronx kids holding on to each other in the sweet black music, full of the intent to live life as it should be lived, there in the orphans’ home. But little by little it began to look different because some of the girls found collections of clothing in big cardboard boxes in the recesses of Arnold Garbage’s bins, and he didn’t seem to mind, so they dressed themselves in this and that over their nightclothes, trying and choosing different hats and dresses and high-heeled shoes of bygone times, till everyone was satisfied, and my little Rebecca wore a kind of Spanish black lace affair down to her ankles, and a gauzy shawl of rose with great looping tears in it, but continued to dance with me in her bare feet, and some of the boys had found suit jackets whose shoulders were like football pads on them, and pointed patent-leather shoes, and big wide ties they looped around their bare throats, and so by and by in the smoke and jazz we were all just the way we wanted to be, dancing in the dust of the Embassy Club of our futures, in the costumes of shy children’s love, and learning as only the fortunate do that God is not only the instruction of the mind but of the hips in their found rolling rhythm.
Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her nightgown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink—I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-f*cked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party-giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances—oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for christsake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly—all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, like a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every f*cking kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.
So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was passive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her buttocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her ass, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an a*shole and as she raised her hips I touched it, and as she lowered her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard buttocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herselfit fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn’t remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my cock the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the a*shole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my cock and I couldn’t stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead body-weight as vehemently as if I were on top pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.