A Song for Mary (46 page)
“Any trouble finding the bag?”
“No,” I say, “no trouble at all.”
I am laughing to myself as we walk, thinking that the consequence of a bad experience can be beneficial beyond understanding or explanation. Maybe I had to go in there with the water bugs, but nowhere does it say that I have to give him the satisfaction of knowing I almost pissed in my pants.
I am now driving a cab, stopped at a light at the corner of 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Most cabdrivers pass blacks by if they are trying to hail a cab, even in the rain and snow, but I don’t think that is right.
I remember something Billy said to me when we were both boys. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. We were walking down to a game we had planned at the basketball courts just below the United Nations building, and a bum came up to me with a ditched cigarette in his hand. The guy had not bathed in months, was a little drunk, and had an open sore over his eye.
“Gimme a light,” the bum said, stopping us in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the General Assembly Building.
“Get lost,” I said, and I continued walking around him.
But my brother stopped.
“Dennis,” he said, “do you have matches in your pocket?”
He knew I had matches in my pocket because I just started smoking in front of him and I had a butt going down First Avenue.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Give the guy a light,” Billy demanded.
I shrugged my shoulders and lit the bum’s ditcher.
My brother was silent then, for the next two blocks, until we got to the basketball court. He dribbled the ball twice before he spoke.
“You have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” he said, “if you don’t know any more than you see.”
I never said anything to my brother in return then, but I think of that now when I see people like these two guys in the back of my cab. It is my last fare of the night. I picked them up down on 14th Street, and they have taken me way up here in the heart of Harlem. They look pretty tough, but for all I know they could be scientists working on the cure for cancer.
Not likely, but I don’t know any more than I see.
I hear the back door opening and I turn around.
“Wait here,” one of the men says, “ ‘cause we have to be in this place to get us some money, some cab fare.”
They don’t stop to look back as I watch them go into a crowded bar on the avenue. I have the meter running, and it is already almost ten dollars. I wait, and I wait, and it is now almost twelve dollars. I will only make a dollar of this twelve dollars, but the cab company is going to want the whole twelve first.
They won’t care if I get beat for the fare.
“It’s your problem, pally,” the dispatcher will say. “You should have got a cop.”
I stop the meter and press one finger on top of the other to concentrate. This is a lot of money to lose. I lock the cab and walk into the bar.
Jazzy music is playing loud and people are yelling at one another to be heard above the noise. People turn to look at me as I go down the aisle past the bar, looking for my fares. I don’t care what anyone says or does, because I know that I cannot afford to lose a night’s wage like this. I have to make a stab at trying to get my money, even if, I am thinking, somebody makes a stab at me.
I see my fare, deep in conversation with another man. I don’t see the other guy who was also in the cab.
But a scone on the dish, as my mother used to say, is always better than one in the oven.
“I’m sorry,” I say, interrupting the man in his conversation, “but I guess you forgot about me.”
“What you want?” the man says.
“What you want?” the other man says.
“I want my cab fare,” I answer, trying hard to keep my chin up. “Twelve bucks.”
“Man,” the one I don’t know says to my fare, “you owe this man for a taxi ride?”
“I don’t know,” my fare says, “maybe Horace owes him.”
“Man, Horace is gone, and now you pay this man his money, hear.”
My fare now looks at me, up and down.
“How much?” he asks.
“Twelve.”
He takes twelve dollars from the bar and hands it to me.
I shove the money in my pocket and skip out of the bar like I had a winning sweeps ticket.
Then, back in the cab, driving down Lenox Avenue with my off-duty light on, I had a thought.
You should’ve, I scolded myself, asked for a tip.
I am now in the street watching Donald Doran fold the moving blankets. He is sweating heavily, and I am feeling guilty that I am so cool and collected. All the furniture is in and up, including the big Magnavox TV that Uncle Andy gave us when Aunt Kitty got him to buy her a new one. It’s the third TV Uncle Andy has given us. It’s as big as a jukebox, but the screen is just ten inches across. Not that it matters, for I watch TV even less than my mother, and I have never seen Billy watch anything other than a game, any kind of game.
It was the only day Billy could organize the move, and I had a final examination at New York University. I felt I was letting my brother down, but he understood. He is turning out to be a professional student himself, and no one knows the importance of a final examination better than Billy. If you fail a course, the loss will put you in the hole for almost a hundred and fifty bucks. You could get a moving company to move a palace for that kind of money.
But now a neighborhood moving job like this one costs just a case of beer and a half dozen heroes from Rossi’s. All you have to do is round up the guys on their downtime.
Billy, I knew, wasn’t going to rearrange it because of my final exam schedule. He already had Mike Harris, Vinny Gaezo, and Tommy Henderson rounded up, and Donald Doran was bringing his father’s truck.
We have moved just two blocks away, to 54th Street off Second Avenue. It is still up three flights. I was hoping my mother would find something on a lower floor, but she told me it was a good deal, “a classy apartment” for fifty-six dollars a month, and rent-controlled ‘til death do you part.
My mother is under the sink as I enter the apartment for the first time. She is scrubbing away as Billy and the others are moving the furniture around to make everything fit. It’s another railroad apartment, and a little smaller than apartment 26 on 56th Street. I am wandering around, looking to see what happened to the bunk beds, so at least I will have somewhere to throw my books.
“Not a roach in the place,” my mother says, popping out from under the sink, “and if you look out the back window, you will see a tree, green leaves and all.”
Sure enough, out the kitchen window there is a tall backyard tree.
I know a sagebrush from a cactus, but I am uncertain as to what this tree is. It could be a sycamore or an oak for all I know, but in New York they are called backyard trees, which is easy to remember, and this one is full and waving slightly in a breeze. It adds something bright and fresh to the apartment, and I can almost smell its fragrance. My mother is smiling from ear to ear. She is drying her hands with the bottom of her apron.
“How,” she asks, “did you do on the test?”
“A hundred.”
“You got a hundred?”
“No,” I laugh, “that’s how many questions there were.”
“C’mon,” she says, “how did you do?”
“Flying colors, Mom, is all I know.” I raised a finger and continued, “The professor asked the one question with which I was thoroughly acquainted.”
“What’s that, big shot?” Billy breaks in.
“ ‘What is the difference between truth and beauty?’ the professor asked, and you know what I wrote?”
“What did you write?” my mother asks.
“I wrote that the truth is I don’t know any of the answers, and the beauty is I don’t give a damn.”
“You didn’t?” my mother says.
I laugh. It’s always so easy to pull my mother into a joke.
“I didn’t, Mom,” I say. “It was all Greek to me, but I knew about the wine-dark sea and poor Mrs. Oedipus, so I guess I got a B.”
“Oh, I am so proud of you,” my mother says. “But I’d be prouder if there was an A.”
“Well,” Billy says, “it’s okay to get out of a moving job for a B, I guess.”
These are salad days for me, even though I got caught in the layoff by the railroad and have to drive a cab when I can get one in the shape-up, or work as a chauffeur for the limousine company if they have a job when I call them.
I am not making a decent salary by a long shot, but I am reading everything in and about literature I can get my hands on, and sensing that I am changing with every page I read.
It is now a September morning, and I have read that the City of New York is accepting filings to take the police and the fire depatment examinations. I am in the middle of breakfast, and I have an early morning class, but the news sparks an enthusiasm inside me that I have hardly known. I am going to the department of personnel first thing today. I dress fast, and then I do something I haven’t been doing much lately. I grab my mother around her slender shoulders and give her a kiss on the cheek.
“Mom,” I say, “the Irish are really going to get up in the world this time.”
She gives me a welt on the rear end as I head out the door, and says, “Good luck to you now, Dennis.”
F
our years later I am twenty-five years old, and it is 1966. The war in Vietnam is beginning to boil over, there is something called Black Power that is taking over the civil rights movement, Muhammad Ali is beating everyone, and Bobby Hull has scored fifty-four goals for the Rangers.
My mother’s good-luck wish seems to have worked, because I got the fire department job.
This is the job that has saved my life.
I could go on from here and make a million dollars, but that wouldn’t be such a great leap. It wouldn’t mean half as much as having gotten through all the trouble of my young years on the East Side of New York, and still being able to take the oath of office for the New York City Fire Department.
I am now crossing the wide, dirt-strewn, cobblestoned surface of Intervale Avenue. I look up at the front entrance of Engine Company 82, at the high, red-painted doors. The red is so vibrant it makes me think that a flashbulb has gone off.
I look around the area.
The corner of Intervale Avenue and 169th Street is filled with action. There is loud Latin music blowing out of a loudspeaker in front of a bodega across the street from the firehouse. In the distance I can hear a couple of bongo drums coming from another block. There is such a different culture in this neighborhood from the one on East 56th Street. There is garbage at the curbs, and the buildings are stained with roughly painted initials and symbols of one kind or another. The street itself is cobblestoned, like from a bygone era. It is everything you expect to find in a neighborhood the newspapers refer to as a ghetto.
This is my first day here, and I am scheduled to work the night tour, from six in the evening to nine in the morning, fifteen hours straight. I am not a “johnny” firefighter anymore, but neither am I a seasoned vet. I’ve only been in a few fires these last three years, but up here in the South Bronx it’s a different fire-fighting story, and miles from the quiet firehouse in Queens where I have been working the last few years.
Here the firehouse is like an island surrounded by a sea of fire. Engine Company 82 responds to forty alarms a day, and there is nothing like this alarm rate anywhere else on the face of the earth.
I am feeling good, real good, because this is my firehouse now. I had gotten my feet wet in fire fighting out in Queens, but it just wasn’t active enough there for me.
Engine Company 82 is on the top of the list of the busiest fire companies in New York, and I asked a friend of mine who is driving a deputy mayor to put the fix in for me to get me transferred here. He is also the manager of the department bagpipe band, and since I started to play the bagpipes I have been introduced to people like him who are “heavy” in the politics of the department.
So here I am, just assigned to the busiest engine company in the city, in the world, and I have no idea of what to expect. I was only told that if there is anything easy in this company, it has been hidden away for years.
I remember the day I became a firefighter as clearly as any president remembers the day he was elected. It was a day of pride and exuberance. I passed a firehouse on the way to the subway that day, the one on 51st Street, ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the whining sirens and clanging bells. I felt both reverence and the excitement of a new beginning when I was finally presented the three-inch silver Maltese cross, which is the firefighter’s badge.
My wife, Pat, was there, and my mother, too, one prouder than the other that I had made it through the mental and the physical tests and the character investigation.
That badge to me was the shield of the diligent, for I was now in a job that was a fulfillment of a goal, a job that I loved in the same way patriots love America. There is so much good about it, particularly the way it makes me feel good about myself.
Maybe that comes with putting yourself on the line for other people.
This job will not make any of us rich, but I can’t help thinking, after three years of fire fighting, a fabulous wife, two kids, four years of college, and a healthy mother, it would be hard to be much richer than this.
Still, I am working to lay up the stores of tomorrow.
I have become what all in my neighborhood respect—a cop or a fireman.
If I could go off to war, or perform surgical miracles, or nurse the dying, or give out soup on the Bowery, or teach in a paint-worn classroom in the South Bronx, I would have a job that would let me look in the mirror and say that the people need me. I think that’s true for a fireman, too.
Not that I expect people to think of me in this way, or that anyone will be better off because of me. No. I just know that because of the nature of my work, I am needed, for fire is a thing that doesn’t happen just to the other guy.
And when the alarm gets pulled, I’ll do my best.
Fire fighting is a good job. I mean good, like in regular-paycheck, pay-the-rent-every-month, twenty-year-pension good.