IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT
novella
She was a girl on a swing in a small park, barely a park, a patch of urban green off a busy Bronx street, with five wooden benches around it that faced a view of traffic and the curtains and shades and window frames and red bricks of the apartment buildings across the street. The benches, on the perimeter of the patch, enclosed the swing set, three swings together hanging from a steel pole, all held up by inverted V poles at each end of the structure. .The only other edifice on the lot was the parkie’s -- park attendant’s--- office, a small brick building at one end of the lot, which was closed now at night. Tires scuffed on tar, and from several blocks away he heard the arhythmic clacking of metal on metal as train wheels met the rails of the Jerome Avenue El.
He lived on Decatur, a few blocks away, and he was over here because Vincy lived there now, only a block from where he’d lived before, but in a six story elevator. building where mostly dentists and accountants and other such professionals lived. Everybody else lived in five story walk-ups. It was, by any standard, a nice blue collar Bronx neighborhood., and the “rich” lived in the elevator buildings. Vincy’s father got a promotion on the docks from longshoreman to supervisor, so the family moved, and Denny went to see their new lay-out.
He saw them before he cut through the patch. He wasn’t going to short cut through diagonally until he saw her, and then he did .She was about his age, about 16, a small “dirty blonde” with a pretty face, and he went directly from the corner of the patch where the parkie’s shack was toward the swings in the center, toward her, though he was terrified. She wore a jacket that was in vogue now, just started seeing them this year, 1956, and he thought it would feel slick and smooth, like leather, and all the girls wore them, they were shocking colors. Hers was purple, reached past her waist, and she wore dungarees. Before so many girls started wearing guys’ denim pants, he thought the ones who did were huers. Not the formal word, somebody who sold it, just easy---huers..
He could tell she was afraid of him too, not afraid of him because he might hurt her, just afraid of him because he was a boy. So maybe not a huer. A bit disappointing. He’d had hopes. He never really knew any huers, just some girls a guy had given that reputation to, then every guy thought she should give it to all of them, but in his experience, none of them ever did that, seemed unaware of that rumor and expectation of them.
They didn’t need those jackets. The May evening was warm, in the fifties. He was wearing a white T-shirt and black chinos with black dress shoes, was actually a little cold. He had a D.A.with sideburns, his hair brownish blond like hers, his sheened back with Brylcreem. “A little dab will do you.” What if you used two? He was skinny, didn’t look good in a T-shirt, but it was what all his friends wore at Gillespie Park, three blocks from Swing Patch, Gillespie Park really a playground with a circular entrance and red flagstones on the ground, benches forming the circle, trees behind them, behind the trees wrought iron fences, though no gate to the circle, always open, only the playground itself was locked at night, though that kept nobody out.
In the center of the circle was a flagpole and a commemorative plaque to Donald Gillespie, who’d live in the neighborhood and perished in World War II. Denny hung around the circle with his friends, all wearing white T-shirts and black chinos, shoe type---sneakers, dress shoes---optional Some of them held up the chinos with thick, wide leather garrison belts with mean buckles, weapons for street combat if needed, and he knew a few of them sharpened those buckles .Somebody from far away might think what they wore was a kind of uniform, the consistency of the clothes giving a suggestion of organization or security, or speaking at least to a conformity, a belonging.
Being a blond, he figured she’d probably be Irish like himself, and the other girl, who had dark hair, she could be Italian, good looking too, a bit taller, longer hair and more build, a young Gina Lollabrigida with a bosom pushing against her jacket. Hers was tangerine. He thought the small blond was more sensitive and sensual. She faced toward her friend and he realized they had a portable radio playing under the conversation, talking about school, not about education, but about school, Sister Armada it sounded like as far as he could tell blended with Clyde Mcfadder singing “The Treasure Of Love.” They were a couple of Catholic school girls, BICs his friends called them, Bronx Irish Catholics, even though most of his friends were precisely that. By BIC, they meant they didn’t. Didn’t…you know. It was an inside joke. Even Italian girls in the neighborhood were BICs, though he couldn’t say he’d ever heard the term “Bronx Italian Catholics.” Honorary BIC’s. Hang around with a BIC, you are a BIC. Didn’t matter if you were Polish, French-Canadian. Italian, Lithuanian. Show me your company and I’ll tell you who you are, as the nuns liked to say.
He found the courage even though they were ignoring his existence, still talking to each other and listening to the radio, to say, too loud and cheerfully, ”Hi!”
She stopped talking, the little blond haired one did, and looked at him, and he saw for just a moment all her dread of boys, the mystery of them, their roughness with each other, their aggression, her fear at the prospect and possibility of rejection---confronted in her face in that blink of an instant all the fear he knew was on his own. They were, for an immeasurably short twinkling of time, and for all infinity, mirrors reflecting the other gender.
With all that betrayed in her expression, she still managed “Hi”, and smiled for no longer than half a second, then sat rigid, almost catatonic, and gazed straight ahead, no more looking at him or her friend. Her eyes were fixed, but if focused on anything, it could only be a garbage can at the curb or the cars passing indifferently beyond. it.
He sat in the third swing, the empty one to her left, and that put him close enough to touch her. It required an awkward movement. He had to stand again, forcing the swing to the right, bending the steel seat diagonally across his backside, then let go of the chain he’d been gripping with his right hand. He reached across and put his arm around her, hand on her right shoulder socket, half expecting she’d jump up and run or slap his hand off..
Instead she sat rigid, and…waited…anticipating…something. What? She didn’t know what. He didn’t know. That part he hadn’t thought through to---what to say or do after this. And something else. The jacket wasn’t smooth. It felt funny, had an uncomfortable cheesy texture. It was vinyl. And her shoulder, under his hand? It was bony. She was skinny. She wasn’t what he expected. She’d summoned him with the color, the purple. That was what he wanted.
He had touched breasts twice in his life, both times by accident, both times with red faced apologies. The first time, it felt like foam, and he fantasized about that encounter, imagined breasts felt like that, melting in your hand .The second time, he
brushed an actual breast, a small one that was soft but firm, the flesh resilient, not
yielding like the foam he’d remembered and imagined was the real tactility of a breast.
The other one, with the tangerine jacket---her long hair hung over the jacket. Her jacket would feel the same, but she probably didn’t have a bony shoulder. It was too late for that, though. He’d chosen. Anyway, the dark haired one was scowling. He’d interrupted their conversation. (And he hadn’t shown any interest in her.)
Their was no indication from the blond girl that his arm wouldn’t be allowed to stay where it was, just the What’s next…?, but he didn’t know what was next, and not knowing what to say or do, he moved his arm away without being asked to.
As he did, he mumbled, “Sorry.” Why did he say that? Sorry? For what? There was nothing to be sorry…Ah, YES. Yes, there was. What she had been most terrified of was what he’d been most terrified of. She’d accepted him and he was rejecting her.
Anybody who’d want him didn’t entirely understand the situation, or couldn’t have very good taste. Sorry was indeed a sorry word.
Gina Lollabrigida, who couldn’t be any older than either of them, suddenly spoke, and authoritatively, as if she was two years older, or a teacher.
She said, “Hey, you crazy mixed up kid.” She said that sarcastically, imitating how “understanding” older people sometimes referred to teenagers. “When you get married, on your wedding night, if you see your wife for the first time then, you’re going to think you got cheated. Tricked.”
He somehow knew she was right, but how could she know all that?
She continued, “You’ll wish you married Franny Fanny, who married Bobby Baloney, and Bobby Baloney will want someone else, and so will Franny. You put your arm around her, now talk to her. Her name’s Annie. She goes to St. Agnes, like me, and you’re never going to do better in your life than with a girl like her.”
He was dumbstruck. He said, reversing the St. Francis prayer from “Better to understand”… to …”: “I’m just..shy…okay?”
“What do you think she is? Dagmar?. I’ll help you. You and Annie trade swings.”
That would put him between the two girls. “I’m okay here.”
“Then say something to her.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rita, but so what?
“I asked her.”
“You were looking at me. And you already know her name. I told you. Ask her something you don’t know.”
“I… don’t know… what to say.”
“Do you want me to change seats with her? Then I’ll be between you.”
“You already are.”
Annie wasn’t tense anymore. She was laughing good at all of this.
Rita said, “If I hadn’t a butted in, you’d be all the way over on the street and halfway home.”
“Okay, okay, look, my name is Denny.”
“Tell HER. I don’t care.”
Rita got up for the musical swings, but Annie asked, “Can you push me, Denny?”
Like a little kid, he thought.
“You can’t…?” Sure she could.
“She wants you to get her going,” Rita said. “I guess she’s satisfied with the seating arrangements.”
Swinging her meant---well, it meant pushing the steel swing seat, but then pushing the person too to get any momentum, first putting hands on her back, and when that wasn’t getting enough motion, on hips, and hips meant touching that area near where the buttocks start. As he did, he realized a bony shoulder didn’t necessarily mean all of her was bony.
She did know how to swing, and once moving, put her legs straight out to ride forward, then pushed her weight back on the return .He was beginning to understand the dungarees. Maybe she wouldn’t want to do that wearing a dress. When she was arcing pretty good, getting even more confidence and enthusiasm, knowing she didn’t have to be afraid of him because Rita has shown her that, she said,
“You too, Denny. We can talk while we ride.”
Rita said, “Jerome Avenue.”
“What?”
“You’d be all the way over at Jerome Avenue”
“I live this side of the Concourse.”
“Turning the TV on.”
He managed, “Thanks.”
“What are friends for?”
When he was swinging too, but at a different pace it worked out---as he was going up, Annie was coming back---they shouted question and answers as the passed each other. Rita sat quietly on her swing, showing by her silence a kind of chaperonal approval.
Annie asked, “Do you know Mary Marino from St. Agnes?”
He did.
“Do you know Vincy Quigley?”
“Yeah. Do you know Denise Schumaker?”
He nodded. She knew Vincy. Good. His best friend. A plan was formulating: He and Annie, Vincy and Rita.
By playing the Bronx game Do you know…? They were establishing how well they already knew each other by proxy. Yet another version of Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.
The idea of bringing Vincy Quigley as a surprise blind date was, If somebody could distract Rita, maybe Annie would let him kiss her. If he tried now with the swings moving, one of them might lose a tooth.
Rita was playing her radio louder. “Story Untold” by the Nutmegs: ”Here in my heart, Is a story untold…” He related to that part. The rest of it was about a girl who left him (them) standing, standing in the cold. He didn’t care for that. All popular songs were either about being in love or having a broken heart, mostly the latter. Rock and roll or Sinatra.”It’s a quarter to three, There’s no one in the place except you and me…” So stick ‘em up, Joe. Johnny Ace was at least supposed to be with the girl he sang “Pledging My Love” to, though in the real world Johnny Ace had shot himself in the head, some said accidentally, fooling with a gun, not knowing there was still a round in the chamber, the bigger rumor was he died playing Russian roulette. However it had happened, he was now and forever The Late Great Johnny Ace. The Penguins “Earth Angel” was another ode to love, theirs at least to someone they were petitioning to be with, not someone who’d ditched them, but those were the exceptions to the broken heart songs. A lot of masochism in the American Top 40.
They rode and established who they knew mutually for ten more minutes, then Rita said, “She has to go now.” It was like she was a nanny.
Annie explained, “I have to study. A history test Wednesday.”
“Its Monday.”
“If I study tonight, I won’t have to worry tomorrow.”
They let the swings slow down and got off. He asked, “You come to the Patch much?”
“Most nights. Sometimes there are other people on the swings, and we sit on the benches.”
“Looking at the cars?”
“You can turn them around.”
“Why don’t you leave then like that?”
“We do .The parkie puts them back so the daytime pensioners don’t have to look across at the daytime winos.”
“Where do the winos go at night?”
“They’re here.”
“I didn’t notice them.”
Rita said, “They prefer reclining with a bottle in reach, so you can’t see them through the backs of the benches.”
He asked Annie, “Will you be here tomorrow?”
“Probably.”
“I’ll look for you. Same time?”
“Sounds right.”
Allen Freid was pitching his introduction for Chuck Berry’s “Maybeline” as they left. Denny stood and watched their departure. When they reached the benches, they were giggling, their conversation animated, sounding bawdy, and he just knew it was all about him.
He caught up with Quigley at lunch in the Rendezvous Luncheonette. .No chinos and T-shirts at school. They wore slacks, dress shirt and tie, sports jackets (jacket unbuttoned), walked with a strut, and had a cool way of carrying the books in one hand, just above the hip. The girls had uniforms. He told Vincy about his adventure, the two girls, and how the one he was fixing him up with looked like Gina Lollabrigida, to which Quigley said, “Fuck you, Scanlon. She has to be a dog.” That was cover. Vincy Quigley would have intercourse with a snake if it didn’t use its only opening to bite. ”If this girl looks like I’m imagining, like King Kong, you’re gonna be in trouble.”
“Okay, you know what? Never mind.”
On the other side of Denny at the counter was Freddie Lester, who couldn’t get his hair to do anything but stick up like tufts of yellow weed, and had such a case of adolescent acne he should apply for a Guiness record before he outgrew it, and never again did anything notable. Denny turned to him.
“Freddie, you have anything planned for tonight?”
“The novena.”
“”Shit!” It was Quigley, poking an index finger into Denny’s back. ”What time?”
“Meet me at Gillespie Park at eight o’clock. We want to arrive at Swing Patch together.”
“I know this is bullshit.”
“You’re just a beneficiary because I can’t concentrate on one of them with two of them there. I need you to distract the other one.”
“These girls huers?”
“I wouldn’t count on it. BICs from St. Agnes.”
“Shit.”
“Can I have your phone number, Freddy, in case he doesn’t show.”
“The novena.”
“I forgot. Who’s the novena to, St. Teresa?”
“St. Jude.”
Jude. Jude was the patron of lost causes. “Better keep that date, Freddy.”
Because Vincy was late of course, they met at 8:10 and got to the Patch at 8:20. There were no girls. Several winos were visible, their scraggly heads lolled against the bench backs, and some little kids were on the swings.
Denny said, “Maybe they left already.”
“They stood you up, Scanlon. If they exist. May is a little late for an April Fool joke.”
Denny was truly let down, suddenly realized his attachment to this skinny girl he didn’t even know, and Quigley’s carping wasn’t helping at all.
Quigley said. “Wasted my whole fuckin’ evening.”
“What would you be doing instead, jerking off?”
“Hey!”
He needed to release that grief he was feeling that Annie hadn’t met him.
“Just shut the fuck up.”
“Come on.”
Quigley put his dukes up and asked, “Boxing or wrestling?”
Wrestle with Vincy Quigley. He was thirty five pounds heavier, and five inches taller. The only reason he didn’t play football was that the school didn’t have a team. He did play basketball.
“Boxing.”
Quigley started jumping up and down like he was in a corner before a fight, not in the fight. Denny had had another fight with Vincy one night in front of Keller’s bar on Valentine Avenue. The drinking age in New York was 18, but you could get in the bars underage with Selective Service draft cards, obtainable on the streets. They had left the bar about 1:00 AM on a Friday night, though it would still be open another three hours, because Denny worked Saturday delivering groceries and Vincy had run out of money.
That night, for no other reason than that he felt like it, Vincy took a swing at Denny. Denny ducked, and the punch went over his head. He popped up and hit Vincy under the chin, then retreated by actually turning around, his back to Vincy, and running out of range.
Vincy came after him, two fist swinging, and Denny ducked again. His jack-in-the-box punch, turn and flee, strategy worked again. He wasn’t going to win, unless on points, but Vincy hadn’t touched him. They did it a third time.
Faces were pressed to the plate glass window inside Keller’s bar. This was one strange fight. There were rules of honor from when they were in grade school. Box or wrestle. No dirty fighting. Denny knew the bigger guys had made those rules up to keep their advantage. Once they were losing, they always got dirty.
Vincy, frustrated, was planning to kick him in the balls. He knew because it was in slow motion, he was so tall. Here’s the wind-up, he’s bending his knee, now he’s extending his leg, wait to react, don’t let him know what you’ve planned, and here’s the pitch, or kick. Denny caught his foot in his hands, and twisted it the way a foot doesn’t want to go. As Vincy tipped forward, trying to balance on one foot, he got civil again and wanted to talk. He agreed to desist, and Denny let the foot go. He hadn’t wanted to fight in the first place. The next time he went to Keller’s, the bartender asked him “What were you fighting with Vincy about?”. Blaming him.
Teddy the bartender, a big guy himself, siding with the other big guy, Vincy. A conspiracy. It’s the little guy’s fault. Safer that way. Denny had said, “You’d have to ask Vincy about that.”
So now he wanted to “box” again. While has still doing his jumping up and down psych, Denny faked a kick at his nuts. As expected, Quigley tried to block it, leaning forward, his long torso placing his face at height with Denny’s shoulder .Denny nailed him with a right on the nose.
“You’re a dirty fighter,” Quigley said, sounding like he had a bad cold.
“I didn’t kick you. It was just a fake.”
“Same thing.”
“You tried to do that to me last time.”
As Denny anticipated, Quigley now tried to kick him, and as like last encounter, with more slow motion leg bending and extending, and again Denny he had to hold back, waiting to block the kick. Then, while Quigley’s leg was in the air and his crotch unprotected, Denny kicked and made some kind of contact.. Quigley kicked once more, Denny blocked again. Quigely’s face was back exposed at Denny’s shoulder as he prepared to block another kick from Denny. Instead, Denny threw another right a bit awkwardly, but punched him on the jaw.
Quigley said, “I can’t box with a dirty fighter. Let’s wrestle.”
The blood from his nose was trickling like catsup onto his white T-shirt, and suddenly he focused behind Denny. Denny was sure it was a ruse, get him to look behind him so he could attack, so he kept his eyes on him, but then he heard a familiar sultry voice say “Hey.”
It was Rita, now standing beside Denny, saying, as if nothing unusual was going on, “Now she has to study for an Algebra test tomorrow. She told me to tell you she’ll meet you tomorrow night.”
“Let’s WRESTLE,” Quigley roared, his hands bloody too from trying to stop the flow from his nose.
Rita said, “Wasn’t this boxing? I didn’t hear anybody say ‘I give’ yet. Its over? You surrender?”
Sounding like he was speaking while having an orgasm, whether from congestion in his nose or pain in the genitals, Quigley told Rita,
“He’s a dirty fighter.”
“I saw you try to kick him.”
“He tried to kick me first.”
“Faked it.”
He tried to ignore her. “Let’s wrestle, Scanlon.”
She said, “You want to wrestle with me?”
“I don’t fight with girls.”
“Hey, Vincy, this is your date.”
“His DATE”
“I just thought, you know, I’d bring a friend.”
“He told me you looked like Gina Lollabrigida.”
“Well, I do, don’t I? Come on, you want to wrestle with somebody, wrestle with me.”
“It might be cuddly, Vincy.”
“I can’t wrestle with a girl.”
“You bet you can’t. I get you in my headlock, I’ll break your neck.”
Denny thought, Vincy Quigley is not looking good. I, Skinny Dinny, just punched him out (yeah, and kicked him), and he can’t fight with a girl because he can’t win. Beat her up and lose, get beaten by her and lose worse.
Vincy pleaded, ”My nose is bleeding.”
Rita said, “No shit?”
Denny said, trying to sound like he cared a little, “Yeah, you should go home and take care of that, Vincy. You’re losing a lot of blood.”
Rita said, “At least an ounce.”
Vincy growled, “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there. Here now.”
Quigley suddenly lunged at Denny. Denny saw it coming, stepped aside as he stumbled by, and Rita stuck her foot out and tripped him He fell into the scrabbly, untended dogshit tufts of Swing Patch grass.
Quigley lived in one direction, and Denny the other, the same way Rita had just come from. As if by unspoken signal, he and Rita began walking their way, leaving Quigley in the company of the little kids on the swings and the winos on the benches Behind them, they could hear him gargling and mumbling in rage, as one of the little kids asked “Are you okay, Mister?”
As they walked on the street, Rita asked him, “Do you have a portable radio?”
He did. His mother had given it to him for his birthday. Mostly he listened to the Yankees games, and of course to rock and roll.
”Yeah,” he said.
“Bring it tomorrow. She likes radios. You have good batteries?”
“I think so.”
“Make sure. Mine are getting low. I don’t know if I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“Okay, I’ll bring mine.”
He saw Quigley the next day at the Rendezvous Luncheonette on the Concourse. Quigley was waiting outside for him, so he didn’t know how this was going to go. He was lucky last night. Quigley was big, and he knew Denny’s moves now.
But Quigley was surprisingly conciliatory. He said, “I took care of my nose. Just laid back for a few minutes. You pack a light punch.”
Denny wondered if his laying back had done been on the nasty turf of the Patch.
“The cahungas are okay too. You just got my thigh.”
Maybe he did kick his thigh. Vincy wasn’t hitting the high notes. Didn’t miss his jaw, though.
Unbelievably, so soon, Vincy said, “Hey, I hope we’re still friends.”
Were they ever? Was a friend somebody you hung around with who might turn on you in a second, try to kick you in the balls?
“As always.” That was probably true.
“Rita, you know…we were…maybe under better circumstances…” Getting now to motivation? “We just got off to a bad start, right? She does remind me of Gina.. If we talked it over…”
It occurred to Denny that Quigley had never had a date (any more than Denny had.)
“I’ll inquire for you, but…you know…I don’t think you’re her type.”
“What if I go with you tonight?”
“That probably wouldn’t be a good idea yet until I talk to her first.”
“But you’ll ask?”
“I’ll try. Why didn’t you wrestle her?”
The fury was back in Quigley’s scarlet face. Denny knew he’d like to mutilate him. It was only desperation and the remotest of possibilities that he might salvage something with a girl who looked like Gina Lollabrigida and had threatened to break his neck that kept him from becoming belligerent now. Denny tried to get it back like it used to be, rag him a little bit, but for fun.
“I’ll tell her about the time you sang ‘The Irish Soldier Boy’ in front of the dance at St. Brendan’s, then threw up the gallon of beer you’d just ingested all over your Flagg Brothers’ shoes.”
“Fuck you, Scanlon.” But now he was giving the Fuck you, Scanlon when he knew Scanlon was joking, getting back to where they’d been before, which as Denny now saw it, had always been nowhere.
“It was a great rendition of that song, if you just hadn’t puked for an encore.”
The people outside that night for a smoke ---couldn’t do that inside a Catholic school auditorium---had actually begun applauding for him, though the heaving kind of transformed that into laughter.
“I’ll tell her about your singing voice.”
“Isn’t she Italian?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear ‘The Irish Soldier Boy.’”
“Sing something else. Do you know ‘Volare’?”
“I never know what the words mean, so I can’t remember it.”
“How’s your moondog?”
“I can do Fats Domino.”
“She might like that. I’ll tell her you want to sing to her. Like Romeo.”
“Come on, Scanlon. Just see if she’ll meet me again.”
Denny had no intention whatsoever of alienating his matchmaker by mentioning Vincy Quigley to her ever again, but he also wanted to go into the luncheonette and eat without getting into another fight.
“Okay, but don’t get your hopes up too much.”
So, he had a date, or at least an appointment, with Annie. Thinking that, he realized he didn’t even know her last name. Tonight he could find that out. Do you know…Harry Hagel? Do you know… Suzie McDermott? Do you know ME?
That evening, he showed up with his Motorola portable radio. Annie, Rita and another girl, Carolyn were there. Three really were a crowd. The swings were occupied by older boys that couldn’t be told their time was up, so they found an unoccupied bench, wine bottles left as litter on the street side. As they began together to drag it around, one of the older guys shouted over to them, “Ah no. We’re going. The park is for you kids. We were just talking.”
Denny thought, that’s tolerant of you, but we’re no more kids than you, I drink in bars…but they were letting them have the swings. Except, three girls. Three swings.
On the way to the swings they passed by the boys leaving, and one asked Denny, “What’s your secret?”
He wanted to say Brylcreem, but older guys didn’t like anything from younger ones that could be interpreted as a smart remark
Rita answered, “He’s not a phony.”
Implying they were? Another nunism came to mind, from the 8th Grade nun who’d told a class, after hearing students saying others were phonies, ”Don’t worry about the phonies. Phonies grow up to be the real thing.”
“And we are?” the same guy asked.
Rita was a bit provoking, and Denny was the only guy in the group. Maybe comprehending his dilemma, she said, “I don’t know you. I’m just speaking for him. He’s not a phony.”
“Yeah, okay. He’s doing something right.”
Another said, “Must be good with the tongue.”
And another, “Talking?”
And the one who’d said that: “Yeah, right.”
The guy who first inquired if she meant they were phonies said, “He’s suave,” and then they left, to the accompaniment of their own laughter.
The seating arrangements: Carolyn, whose jacket was pink, on one end, then Rita on the middle swing, with a swing at the other end, which he and Annie tried awkwardly to share. It just wasn’t wide enough. Neither of them could sit. He’d like her on his lap, but it seemed too soon for that, not to mention that even her slim weight would squash his thighs against the edge of the swing .They half sat, but couldn’t move enough to even gesture, so he got off the swing and stood beside her.
She said, “Maybe we should go back to one of the benches.”
She glanced at Rita for---confirmation? Permission?
Rita said, “We can get by here.” She did have her radio with her, and the batteries sounded just fine.
Denny and Annie together. Alone. What was he going to say without Coach?
The bench was already halfway turned from their first effort, but stuck in a crack, and they soon found they couldn’t drag it any further to face the swings without picking it up. Annie didn’t have the weight to lift it, and he soon realized he could only drag it so it would face the street again.
OR: “Any reason we can’t sit on it like this?”
She said, “Half and half? Why not?”
Half privacy from the street, half from the swings. Couldn’t get real privacy anyway. Not in a Bronx grass patch.
The way they sat, he was on the side toward the cars and the buildings across the street, and she was on the swing side. It meant, looking at him, she couldn’t see Rita and Carolyn, but he could. Her view, behind him, was da Bronx.
As soon as they sat, she asked, “Can I hold your radio?”
He remembered now, the night he met her, she was holding a radio. Rita’s radio. He handed it to her, and she held it like a sacred object, caressing its plastic frame.
They sat there then and said nothing to each other, she focused on touching and looking at the radio.
He needed a primer on How To Talk To A Girl. Why didn’t his school have a class on that?
He asked, “How did you do on that Algebra test you studied for?”
“What? History. I did okay.”
“Didn’t you have an Algebra test today?”
“We have an Algebra quiz every day”
“Didn’t you study for it last night?”
“A little bit before I went out.”
“Ahhh….So, what did you do last night?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“I’d rather you did. Gives us something to talk about.”
“I went to the Paradise.”
The Paradise movie theatre on the Concourse, with a blue ceiling that looked like sky and had white clouds moving along it. When he was small, he really thought it had no roof.
“What did you see?”
“Shane. They showed it again.”
“Saw it too. Great, huh?”
“I really like the Jack Palance character. As soon as he rides in, everybody hisses.”
“Can I ask you?....Did you go with ..a guy?”
“I went with Rita. I asked her to tell you.”
“Ahh.”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“A little bit, yes.” She did study for the Algebra test. Rita didn’t LIE. “Just not…everything.”
“I told her to tell you.”
This issue apparently dispatched with as far as Annie was concerned, she asked,
“Can I play the radio?”
He supposed that’s what they were for. He hadn’t turned it on yet.
He said, “The Yankees are playing the Red Sox tonight.”
“Don’t you like r and b?”
“Yeah, but the Yankees game…”
“The Red Sox always lose.”
“They win some games.”
“Against the Yankees?”
“Sometimes. The Yankees are only one game ahead on the season.”
“How about we do both? Listen to some songs, and the game? Half and half.”
“I can’t promise if something is happening in the game I’ll go back to rock and roll right away.”
“I wish I had a radio.”
“You don’t have a radio?”
“Of course I have a radio. I meant a portable. I have a big Philco at home. Who wants to stay home?”
“You can invite friends.”
“Did that all winter. Its spring now.”
Yeah, it was, and it held promise, even if tonight, and every night, were going to be a little of Alan Freid giving out The Penguins, Johnny Ace, The Platters, Elvis, Georgia Gibbs, Clyde McFadder (nothing wrong with any of that) and a little of Mel Allen broadcasting Yankee baseball (“That ball is going, going, it is gone..”)
With Denny’s vantage toward Rita and Carolyn, he could see them in what seemed confidential conversation, heads close together, listening, he knew, to music on the same radio station, WINS, and while the Five Satins were remembering that night in May, when the stars were bright above, in the still of the night, in Swing Patch under a three quarter moon, lit by the dim spill of a of a street corner lamppost, Rita and Carolyn’s lips brushed unmistakably for just a moment.
Annie hadn’t seen that, but it gave Denny encouragement, if only because he could now contemplate such a thing as not only being an actual possibility, but a likelihood if attempted.
He thought about putting his arm around her two nights ago, and not knowing what to do next. What did he think was next? It was as logical as algebra. He didn’t put his arm around her this time. His mentor didn’t have her arm around Carolyn, she just seemed to touch her lips with hers as they were talking, as if it were the most natural thing two people having a conversation would do. And in certain situations, wasn’t it?
Like at Swing Patch on a balmy spring evening, the girls wearing their sexy colored jackets, open now, knowing soon they wouldn’t be able to wear them at all, the weather would be too hot.
So he didn’t need to put his arm around her first and seem like he was sneaking up on her to do something she wanted him to do, and this time he asked, “Okay to put my arm around you again?”
“Sure.”
She definitely wasn’t afraid of him any more. Rita had made him…human, he hoped, not funny. Same shoulder underneath the same vinyl. Odd how bony wasn’t so bad now. With her jacket zipper open, he couldn’t tell if Annie had breasts or those lumps under her blouse were because she’d put a bra on to encourage a couple to grow, but he knew some things already from experience. If they were real, that was great, and if they were just foam padding, that was what he had been wanting for a long time, since his first encounter with a breast substitute. The way she faced him in response to his arm around her, face tilted at kind of a forty five degree anticipatory angle, told him he didn’t have to ask to kiss her, that would be dumb, so he just did it.
The Five Satins rooted, “Sho dodin sho be doe / Sho do din shoh be wha…”
He just touched his lips to hers, then stopped, but looked into her brown eyes. He knew there was more that could be done than that, soul kissing, but he also sensed, not yet. He was still afraid she’d reject him.
But what to say?. Lacking any skills there, he brushed her lips again, and this time she pushed out a little bit of tongue that was barely there between upper an lower plates, and he of course reciprocated, though she’d set a barrier. They stopped again, but kept the visual contact, in fact hadn’t closed their eyes at all.
She said, “That was nice.”
“Have you ever been kissed before?”
How To Talk To A Girl, Beginners 1. Better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. But she blushed at that question, and didn’t answer. He guessed that was to be expected, and if the answer was yes, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know who with .He just wasn’t generating conversation by asking a question she didn’t answer, and he still couldn’t think of anything to say, so he kissed her again. This time they kissed longer, though no deeper. It seemed to give both of them cover. She probably wasn’t so adept at this forced talking either, and they wouldn’t be expected to talk with their mouths full.
When they stopped this time, he thought, maybe a little humor, and at the same time show some appreciation for her form. He said, with what he thought was an obvious attempt at levity,
“How would you like to go steady?”
She said, “Okay.”
“That was a joke.”
“It was?”
Shit! He did it again. She said yes, and he was rejecting her. And there was Rita going to hear about this.
“I was just joking when I said I was joking.”
“You shouldn’t joke like that.”
“You’re right.”
“Can you ask me again so I know you mean it?”
“Look…Annie…I don’t have a school ring…”
“I don’t want a ring.”
“I’m just explaining. I lost my eight grade graduation ring. It was too big for me…” SCAN-lon!
“I don’t care. I mean, I’m sorry you lost your ring…” He had her doing it. “But I don’t care if you give me a ring..”
“You’re my girlfriend?”
“I was going to make you ask me again to be sure, but I don’t think I have to.”
“We’re going steady?”
“Yeah.”
They sat some more in silence, but not so uncomfortably now, until finally she said, “I love your radio.”
“I can’t give you that”
“I just want to hold it.”
Hold it? Like a pawn shop? Like the police? Like…?
She explained, “You know, when we’re together. Like now.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad at all, Annie. I’d let you hold the radio, you know, like a ring, but---my mother wouldn’t--- let me.”
“I understand.”
“She bought it for my birthday.”
“I didn’t think you bought it, Denny.”
Beyond Annie, he saw Rita and Carolyn sitting intimately, talking, and was beginning to suspect an ulterior motive for Rita’s affinity for him. Annie had loved Rita’s radio too. Maybe Rita had had to come to terms with that and was moving on. Skinny Dinny conveniently came out of nowhere two nights ago and put his arm around Annie. Well, so what? It all seemed to be working out just fine for everybody.
That was how he got his first girlfriend. In the beginning, they met every night at Swing Patch. Sometimes Rita and Carolyn were there, sometimes not. There was a separation now between Annie and Rita, and after a while Annie started going with him to the Gillespie Park circle, where he usually hung around, to meet his friends.
It was idyllic, and even if it was just holding his radio she loved, he’d accept that.
Life was okay. It was good. So good, something had to happen.
Annie lived with her grandmother. She wouldn’t tell him what happened to her parents, and neither would Rita. There was no rumor, because he didn’t really know her friends. Of the ones he’d answered “yes” to of the question “Do you know…”, he didn’t so much know them as know who they were. And Annie, with her blond hair and brown eyes, wasn’t of Irish ancestry, she was Polish and Italian. When she told him that, he’d asked “How did that happen?”, and she replied “The Bronx”. All he knew of them was that they were native New Yorkers, not immigrants. Annie brought him one night to meet her old country Polish grandmother, who was supporting both of them on her retirement money. What he noticed most about their sparsely furnished but spotless living room was that there was no TV. Everybody had one by then. There was the old console radio Annie had mentioned, though it was muffled and staticy.
Vincy Quigley would never have impressed Rita with “Volare”---she was Romanian. It was, you know, as Annie said, the Bronx. In 1956, even as they listened to black music, about the only thing any of them might think of to do correct politically could be to advise their parents to vote for Eisenhower He’d campaigned once in the Bronx, on the Concourse, and Denny saw the great man in the flesh, America’s wise and kind grandfather.
PART 2
Late one Sunday night, after school was out for the summer, about eleven o’clock, after he’d walked Annie home and come back, and most of the other girls were gone, there were still a lot of guys in the park circle, .the circle lined by benches and trees and a wrought iron fence, but no gate. The gate to the playground that the circle fronted was locked for the night, though that never stopped anybody from entering
They’d pooled their cash from part time jobs and bought beer, they were getting a little loud, those standing were grinding cigarettes into the red brown flagstone tiles, others sat on the bench backs with their feet on the benches, a basketball bounced with slaps as it got passed between the benches, they razzed, they cut up, they laughed raucously..
And then Denny saw THEM. He knew right away who they were, about six of them, black DAs with sideburns, hair sheened back, no chinos or white T-shirts, they wore blue denim bell bottoms and flashy sports shirts or T-shirts of different colors and patterns, the shoes pointy. The clothing gave less suggestion of a team than the Gillespie’s crowd, it was selectively individual, yet they appeared organized, and they were different.
They were Blades, and were just outside the entry to Gillespie circle. He hoped, please everybody, just leave them alone, let them go through their motions, do their performance, and they’ll leave and never come back. They’d have to have walked a long way to get into this neighborhood. They wouldn’t come back unless given a reason.
One of them, the one most intruding from the street, now crossed the line---there was a line, a crack between tiles and sidewalk pavement---and was in the circle, combing his hair. It was nothing but a challenge Vincy Quigley had a lot of beer in him, and he was the closest of the circle regulars to the guy with the comb. No, Vincy. Vincy said to the guy, “Nice hair.”, then tousled it with his left hand. As the guy tried to smack his hand away, Vincy swung from the hip, not with a fist, but with a quart beer bottle palmed in his hand. He struck the hair comber’s face with the broadside of the bottle, and Denny heard the crunch of glass breaking inside a brown paper bag.
He suddenly felt very lucky to come out of his altercations with Vincy so clean. Vincy screamed, “Shit! I cut my fuckin’ hand.”
The Blades were in retreat. What Denny knew of them was that they didn’t stay if outnumbered, and there were a lot on Vincy’s side. The guy who got hit didn’t seem able to see, and one was holding his hand to guide him as they ran.
They’d be back, though. Probably not tonight. It was too late already, but they’d be back. The summer of ’56 was just beginning, and already he almost wished it was over. Yeah, he seemed to have Annie, but he had no reason now to believe he could experience anything resembling love on a blue lagoon.
The Blades came back the following night early, still daylight, 7:30, when there were only a few guys yet out at the circle, Denny and four of his friends, and three older guys who’d just finished a basketball game and were still around talking. Everybody among Denny’s friends was expecting something would happen tonight, but later, when they’d be ready, and their numbers alone would mean the Blades would have a battle .The guys from the basketball game knew nothing of anything.
But at 7:30 they seemed to come from nowhere, or more precisely, came from behind parked cars, it seemed a hundred of them. How could they have come so far, sneaking along in the street, without the police seeing them? Denny would learn an answer to that later, but right then, they were there. They all had rocks and sticks. They separated the eight Gillespie guys from each other. Nobody resisted at first. See what this is, what’s going to happen, maybe it’ll be talk. But then, as if on signal, probably on signal, they all began hitting the Gillespies on the head with the rocks and sticks. The four Blades around Denny just seemed like any other kids, but looked scared, as scared as he was, and when they delivered, they seemed to be doing it so no one could say they hadn’t. They didn’t hurt him, they may as well have hit him with balsa the blows were so light Most of the others with him weren’t so lucky. Heads were bleeding, and the Gillespies fought back. It was a melee, the outnumbered fighting for survival, forcing back the attackers by attacking wildly
Denny was beside a full garbage can, and, though he wasn’t sure he could, he picked it up over his head. He had only one motivation, STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, as he flung the can, scattering everybody near him, and almost hitting some of friends. At his feet he found an umbrella some woman must have left as she fled the circle, and he picked that up and swung it in an arc in front of himself. While he was driven by self preservation, somewhere on a back burner he also beginning to think, I can’t be looking too bad doing this. Move Skinny Dinny up a couple of notches in neighborhood esteem.
It was over as abruptly as it began. The Blades knew to arrive early, and they knew when to disengage, like just before the police would arrive. They didn’t want to get arrested either, As suddenly as they were they, they were gone, invisiible again.
The 1950’s was a decade of gang warfare in New York City that saw sensational headlines, with the columnist Walter Winchell waltzing into courtrooms during sentencings to demand long prison terms.. The Blades were careful to build their rep, but also to not get caught, avoid Winchell..
They thought they were fighting a gang called Gillespie“s Galleons.. The gang was non-existent. Within the park circle itself, there was Ron Galleoni, the biggest and toughest of the group. He hung ar/und with three other stand up ass kickers, Tommy Deutsch, Bobby Anderson, and Billy Hara, and together that quartet was dubbed The Galleons, but only by the park regulars .Somehow disinformation had found its way to the Blades, and as with the everything passed word of mouth,
the rumor warped along the way, and to the Blades everybody at the circle was a Gillespie’s Galleon. Poor Donald Gillespie, a neighborhood Army sergeant who lost his life in World War II, and had his name attributed to a gang that didn’t exist at a park named after him.
What they were called didn’t really matter to the Blades. A bunch of guys wearing the same black and white attire seemed to be some king of organization, and there was revenge to be had. The irony was that none of the actual four Galleons, nor Vincy Quigley, whom the Blades wanted though they didn’t seem to know his name yet, were there at 7:30 The previous night, when Vincy hit the guy, Ron Galleoni and the other three were present, but way inside the circle at the gate to the park, the farthest point from where it happened, and by the time they’d figured it out, the Blades had fled.
Denny Scanlon wasn’t without parental supervision. There were seven terrifying words no Irish American kid ever wanted to hear: Your father wants to talk to you.
In a time when corporal punishment was routine, yes, when the people who hit you loved you, that often meant the belt, though Joe Scanlon, a construction foreman, was more sophisticated with guidance than to resort to the physical. Joe Sr, Denny’s grandfather, had been a strike activist in the 1930’s, partook in picketing that saw brutal beatings by Pinkertons and other private police goons, demonstrations that turned into riots blamed on the workers.
To Denny, that explained his father’s description of what happened a couple of nights ago.
“I understand there was a riot at the playground.”
Jesus! Adults! Not a riot, Dad. A gang war .And not our doing. Or not the doing of all of us. Not me Hard to explain nuances like that to parents who want you to stay out of trouble so if you don’t go to college you’ll be clean for the cops or fire department or some other kind of civil service. And Denny could see, considering the strikes of the 30’s, how people getting hit over the head with sticks by others could be construed as a riot.
And then he heard, “With those black chinos and white T-shirts you look like the hired thugs that used to beat up your grandfather.” He couldn’t talk back, but: We didn’t have the sticks and rocks, Dad.
“No more fake uniforms on you, and no more of that playground circle this summer. Understood?”
Yeah, Dad. No argument.
“And Johnny wants a few works with you too.”
Johnny, 17, almost 18. Joe Scanlon was a man who tempered discipline with compassion .Johnny Scanlon wasn’t a man yet, he was an older brother, and older brothers hadn’t grown into philosophical concepts like wisdom and compassion.
He’d met his father in the living room, and now went to the kitchen, to where Johnny waited, as Dad went out, leaving them alone in the apartment.
Johnny got right to the point.
“Why are you hanging around with them.”
He’d TRIED hanging around with Johnny’s friends, but Johnny got jealous and ordered him not to.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re shmucks, that’s what’s wrong with them.”
They’re my age. I go to school with them.” .
“Find somebod else.”
“There isn’t anybody ulse.”
“You have that girlfriend now…” More street intelligence. “Sit with her at Swing Patch.” .
“The Blades can find me there too.”
“Maybe they won’t know to get you if you’re not advertising with your colors.”
Black and white are shades, big brother. Better not to say it..
“And cut your hair.”
“Johnny!”
“A little. Shorten the sideburns. You can keep that DA if you modify it. I guess Annie likes it.”
Maybe Johnny was growing into something like Joe Scanlon after all. Denny knew he wasn’t his hair, but it spoke to a style. Would Annie love his radio if he had a crewcut? He dIdn’t want to explore such territory. Because she might. .That would be the most devastating, if it really was just his radio
Staying away from Gillespie Park meant missing all, his friends, but he was with Annie every night at the Patch Three swings are a crowd, and Rita and Carolyn were a couple, but in the Bronx of 1956, maybe even today, they couldn’t smooch publicly. (Annie got better at that, but would only go so far, like all the other girls. That was probably why there was a lot more public passion then than you’d see today. Some unmarried people may have been having sex in the 50’s, but Denny Scanlon wasn’t among them) The arrangement, when the swings were available, was that Rita and Carolyn got them, and when they weren’t free, they just took another bench.
There were more problems at Gillespie with the Blades, but they never showed up again in the numbers they had the first retaliation. Word was they had used enclosed trucks that night, owned by the cousin of one of them who had a delivery business, and they’d gotten dropped off to approach the park from four directions, each group a block or two away from the destination. The street buzz also said that the guy Vincy hit wasn’t hurt that badly, but his nose was broken. The bottle had broken towards Vincy’s hand, and he’d needed four stitches in his palm. Vincy Quigley had a broken nose of his own, from previous fighting. Denny Scanlon had a broken nose from sleigh riding, being the front rider on the front sled in a tally-ho-- a line of sleds tied together--- going down Snake Hill so fast on ice that they couldn’t navigate one of the S curves, and what he got was a sled in the face by a kid from the previous wipe out, running away in the dark with his sled held up behind him as shield.
So, broken noses were in that year. Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine. They learned the guy Vincy hit was called Joe Hero. The Blades had colorful names without explanations of, so Denny could only conjecture:. Joe Hero because he usually did better than in his encounter with Vincy, or because he made a mean hero, of because that was really his name? There was Joe Motorcycle (that couldn’t be his name). Because he had a motorcycle? Not many had back then. Because he pursued fleeing rumblers on one to catch up and waste them? Another was nicknamed Little Nicky Knife. He fortunately didn’t seem to have been in attendance the night they came with all those guys. He heard the guy who owned the luncheonette where they hung around was Eddie Egg Cream. (If you’re not a New Yorker, you might need Google for that one,)
They didn’t come back for any more big events, but they really knew how to fuck up a summer. They switched to late night ambushes, getting guys coming out the back door of the poolroom on a dark side street, or going home alone. Busting heads, breaking bones. One night after leaving Annie, on his own way home, Denny saw a bunch of guys, shadows under streetlights, that, even at a distance, he knew were not from the neighborhood. He turned the other way and they began chasing him. He ran three blocks to the precinct police station. The main room of the building was a cavernous chamber, with always a beefy uniformed officer sitting majestically at a huge marble desk, wrought iron around the edge, and his roaring voice would reverberate off the walls as he gave his standard greeting to any adolescent who crossed his threshold, such words unfailingly being,.
“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?”
He told him. The Blades chased me here. The desk cops always had a second question when you answered the first one.
“Whaddaya want me to do?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t go out there.”
He called to others, and they came. He repeated what Denny said, and they all laughed at him. They told him to go home. He said that’s what he’d been trying to do, he couldn’t. They told him to sit in a row of chairs along a wall, which he could see were leading to cells.
They left him alone for a long time. Then one came and asked, “You been booked yet?” He told him why he was there. He heard others laughing. After two hours or so, they had a shift change, and one, dressed like a regular human now, said, “Come on, asshole, I’ll drive you home. This aint a hotel.”
There was another night at Swing Patch, when he and Annie were there, but Rita arrived alone. She warned them that the Blades were on the block across from the patch, then left. Denny figured he’d be as conspicuous leaving as staying, and they probably wouldn’t mess with a guy making out with his girlfriend!
Wrong about that. As he was…occupied…he heard, from a voice that sounded a bit familiar, “He’s one of them.”
And another rougher voice, “Do you know Vincy Quigley?”
When he looked up, there were three guys there. That first voice had come from a guy he knew as Al, who’d hung around Gillespie for a while. Denny didn’t even know his last name, he never really got taken in, then started hanging around his own neighborhood again. The rumor was he wasn’t Blade material either, they wouldn’t let him call himself one, but it seemed they were letting him hang around with them tonight. .
Al didn’t say anything else. One of the two who looked liked they could be problems, who sounded to be the same one who asked first about Vincy, said again,
“Do you know Vincy Quigley?”
Denny had to catch his breath, undergo the emotional track switch from kissing his girl to feeling his adrenalin flowing, and the same time compute, They know Vincy’s name. Al just gave me up to them as “one of them”. A squealer. Al wasn’t there the night Joe Hero got hit, but did he have something to do with that information too?
In response to the question Denny replied,
“I know who he is, but I don’t hang around with him.”
Not a lie, though Al could immediately refute that what he said. Denny was prepared to add “anymore” if he did, but Al said nothing.
“Are you a Gillespie Galleon?”
It was getting to be too much. Looking for UFOs.
“They don’t exist.”
Exasperation was in the Blade’s voice.
“Everybody says that! How can there be so many of you if you don’t exist?”
Denny knew this was not a metaphysical question like, If an acorn falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? They did exist. They just hadn’t named themselves anything, It took the Blades to define who they were.
“When you see the rest of that gang tlat don’t exist, tell them we want to talk to three guys---V)ncy Quigley, the guy who threw the garbage can, and the guy with the umbrella. Tell them to meet us at 8:00 o’clock tomorrow night at Gillespie Park”
Was he playing a little joke, like the cops in the police station? Did he know Denny was two of the guys they wanted to meet? .
Then they left. Maybe seeing he was scared was enough for the time being. As they were leaving, the Blade who hadn’t spoken said, “Hey, we’re nice guys,” but in a tone that indicated they weren’t much inclined toward being nice guys.
Why didn’t the Gillespies retaliate, do the same in kind? For the reason Joe Scanlon had expressed. They were supposed to stay out of trouble. That was a neighborhood ethic, though a couple did repay the late night street visits. As to the bar drinking, if Denny’s parents knew, they pretended not to. He always left the taverns early enough that they might not suspect,, and Johnny, whom he often encountered coming home in the wee hours, drank enough himself on weekends not to detect it on anybody else
.
The Blades didn’t come back again to Swing Patch, except for Al, who came alone a week later. He had a black briefcase with him, nice and shiny and cheap, stood on the grass in front of their bench, smiled at Annie and said, “Hi, babe.”.
Denny knew this reject was irrelevant to anything. They didn’t send him back. He was on his own mission. He’d already heard the Blades had tagged him Inferior Specimen and thrown him out of the camp again. The nicknames they gave were usually affectionate or admiring, but not always, and they had even less respect for informers than anyone else, even when it was to their benefit. Denny knew his neighborhood’s new moniker for him, and used it now.
“Al the Rat. What do you want, Al?”
“Nobody showed up for the meeting.”
“Of course not.. Neither did the Blades.”
“I was there.”
“You were going to take on Quigley?”
“I was in a car. Going to shoot the three of them.”
Could that even be a possibility? The Blades busted heads and broke bones, but they didn’t intentionally kill, didn’t assassinate from cars. Could Al be so deranged he might believe that if he got his bones, shot some Galleons, he’d be a made guy and become a Blade?
Al stepped back several paces in the grass, getting closer to the swings where Rita and Carolyn were tonight, opened his briefcase and took out a contraption he held in his right hand. Denny had only heard of zip guns, never seen any, but assumed this was one. Probably they all looked different, but this had to be one of the poorest of designs .It had a section of plumbing pipe for a barrel, the handle was a piece of wood from a crate, and it was held together with duct tape. It had no trigger or hammer. For ammunition, Al pushed an arrow shaped stone into the pipe from the front end, the way a mortar is loaded, then pointed the pipe more or less in Denny’s direction. If he tipped it too far forward, his ‘bullet” would fall out. He could have had firecrackers jammed into the pipe as a cap, and God know what he was using as propellant, maybe powder from firecrackers, or even lighter fluid, because for ignition he now had a Zippo lighter that was in his left hand. He’d planned to shoot people from a moving car with that?
Denny said, “You’re just going to burn your hands and face, Al. You’d do better with a slingshot.”
Al lit the lighter, and Denny prepared to dive on top of Annie if by any chance this piece of shit actually made a bang or a whoosh that could propel that pebble toward them. But Annie surprised him. She said, in a tone that seemed very admiring, seductive and quite unlike her, “A-al” She smiled at him. She surprised Al too. It distracted him. The lighter blew out and he smiled back. He’d impressed Denny’s steady.
She said, still as sweet as could be, what Denny had been about to say.
“Why don’t you get the fuck out of here.” Girls didn’t talk like that then, and it wasn’t a question.
Al began flicking the lighter again, but unsuccessfully, and asked, “Why can’t your boyfriend make me?”
Denny could charge him from the bench before he got his Zippo re-lit. .Al wouldn’t be much of a contest, And if hitting people on the head with rocks was stone age---not that he wanted the Bhades using deadly violence--- this device was no technological impprovement.
Denny lad a better idea. He shouted over to the swings, fifty feet away.
“Hey, Rita”
“What’s happening?”
“Have a problem.”
She stood up. Rita was through growing in height, but not in depth. She’d gotten wider this swmmer, had shoulders like a guy. Al saw her, and fiddled some more with his piece, while shaking the lighter. Forget fluid, Al? She advanced, and his maintenance effort caused him to move at the same pace away from her He was gradually disappearing like sky writing. When they looked again, he was gone..
Denny knew Al wouldn’t bring the wrath of the Blades on them. If they wanted to come back, they would, they wouldn’t need an excuse, but what was Al going to tell them? I went to shoot Denny Scanlon, but two Gillespie debs ganged up on me, and my zip gun malfunctioned?
The Blades were having real problems, with gangs from Harlem and the South Bronx, gangs that had given themselves names and wanted to engage, that kept them from continuing to bother much with a group of guys that didn’t want to gangfight. And probably they felt they’d gotten their revenge. They kept up the occasional late night incursions for a while, when they weren’t occupied elsewhere, but it began to settle down.
At the end of the summer, he was going to be a senior. He would graduate in a year. By September, the circle was becoming the realm of younger kids. Annie was moving after Labor Day to Woodlawn. Woodlawn is a Bronx neighborhood, but to most Bronxites, it was Woodlawn Cemetery. When she first told him at the Patch, he asked,
“Will you still keep hanging around here?”
She said, “I don’t know. A lot of people go up to Woodlawn and never come back.”
It took him a moment to get the joke.
“Then I’ll have to go up to see you.”
“Take your chances.”
And later, the same night, she said. “My cousins have a bungalow in Rockaway Beach for the summer. I’m going out there Labor Day weekend with my grandmother. You’re welcome to come if you don’t mind snoozing on a sofa.”
When he accepted on condition his parents let him, she said,
“When we go to the beach, you’ll see how skinny I really am.”
He said, “You don’t want to see me in a bathing suit.”
She gave that smile again that always led him to believe him there was more in this for her than just listening to his radio, and this time she said, “Don’t be so sure of that.”
Annie did move to Woodlawn in September. He thought, it was just a summer thing, the first time with a steady for both of us. We’ll move on. Different neighborhoods. Different friends. Whatever comes later, we’ll remember all of that summer. He wanted to give her a present. The radio. She was an orphan, for Christ’s sake. But there was his mother. She’d sacrificed to buy if for him. So, before he could do it, he’d have to ask her. When he did, she kissed him on the cheek.
After she moved and he was back in school, he hung around the Ascot luncheonette on the Concourse during the week, listening to the jukebox, or on weekends at a pizzeria restaurant and bar on Burnside Avenue.
For a while. He missed her so much, he went once to Woodlawn to take her on a date. Then he went again. Then he saw her every weekend. Sometimes during the week.
They all grew up. 1956 had been a summer of teen gang warfare in New York that saw l kids killed in various sections of the city, in incidents that became tabloid sensational, but Denny and his neighborhood were spared the worst of that.
Denny married Annie, and they had four skinny kids and seven grandchildren, some of whom are quite stout, spousal influence fattening up the gene pool. Denny became a real estate broker, no doubt influenced by his construction father, who knew about the value of buildings and the ownership of them. Annie was intermittently a school teacher and a co-broker with Denny, but mostly a mother.
Rita became an interstate big rig driver, is now retired, and enjoys ocean cruises with her long time significant other, who shared the cab and long hard hours of driving with her.
Vincy Scanlon was a cop for a while, but his disinclination to taking orders and frequent intoxication on duty got him thrown off the department. He lived on New York streets for a long time, and through that life, discovered crack, until he finally got himself clean and sober. As part of his recovery, he went one time to see Joe Hero, in an effort to make his program amends .He offered to let Joe hit him in the face with a bottle. An uncle of Joe’s, about a hundred years old, was there, and said, “Hit him.”
Vincy had a caveat planned in case Joe accepted, that the bottle break and Joe get four stitches in his hand. It didn’t become necessary to state that condition. Joe was in the same program, and accepted his amends.
They are now co-secretaries of a recovery meeting on Decatur Avenue, where Vincy is known as the Gentle Bear, and before each meeting The Bear and Joe Hero put the tips of their fingers to the ends of their noses, and press, so you can see the crooked nose bones. It has nothing to do with their program, and maybe everything, but also, just before every meeting, as they do that nose show, they play an old record.
Yes, it’s the Five Satins, and it begins:
“Sho-doe-din-sho-bee-doe / Shoe doe-din-sho-bee wha….”
And it ends…well…it doesn’t end.
(The story above is for Bobby---not many left who remember, but those who do know , and know this is mostly b.s.---ie, fiction---but based on the way things were. I'm willing to bet that not much will have changed by 2056, except maybe the weaponry and social mores. That may seem like a lot, but the more things changed the more they stay the same)