Crazy (10 page)

“Sometimes they’d scream,” he’d told me happily.

And now he was here.

“What should I tell them?” Bloor asked.

I said, “Nothing.”

She studied my face, and then turned and started walking away. “Yeah, that’s probably best,” she said. “See you at the Christmas party.”

In the meantime, let’s get this straight: I am
not
in some kind of “Happydale.” Okay? Sure, it’s Bellevue, but I’m not in their psycho ward. That would make things so easy to explain, now, wouldn’t it? The time jumps. Jane. The whole deal. But this isn’t your standard laughing academy, it’s a halfway house between death and Don Rickles, and the facts of my story, if you’d really like to know, are even more complicated than trying to take dental X-rays of a cobra. You
will
understand, though.

Finally.

Wait!

For the rest of that day at Coney Island I gave Vera Virago as much of the time of her life as a buck and a half and patience could buy. She wasn’t a homely kid, just forbidding. Tall and broad shouldered, very husky, she had a round, ballooning Eskimo face that immediately made you think of blubber, and a long fall of coppery, curly hair framing closeset, beady black eyes that never looked or even stared, they
pierced,
so that the first time you met her you’d figure that some pretty strong Jesuit missionary had just brought her back from the Amazon following a memorable struggle at dockside there for possession of two of her personal effects:
“No
, Vera!
No!
U.S. Customs not allow! Blow gun
bad,
Vera!
No!
Machete
bad!”
There had also been a somewhat disquieting moment on that visit to the Museum of Natural History. While all of the rest of our class had moved on, Virago stood glued with these wide staring eyes looking in at an exhibit about Amazon pygmy headhunters and we had to go back and physically tear her away. She had a heart made of caramel custard, though, but even this could be unnerving to the point of irritation. As I’d mentioned, she was so deeply and neurotically insecure that whatever you did for her, like handing her a Kleenex to wipe catsup off her sneakers, or buying her a nickel paper bag of fries, she’d be totally all scraping and bowing, instantly becoming a Japanese geisha and saying, “Thank you! Oh, thank you so much! You are so kind! You are so very very very very very…!” until you wanted to slap her around a few times, or even push half a grapefruit into her face like Jimmy Cagney does to Mae Clarke in
Public Enemy;
but then always, by a monumental effort of will, I would see this Kurt Vonnegut guy Jane had mentioned sitting high up in a chair on a golden dais a few feet above me with a wooden leg and made up as Sam Jaffe playing Father Perrault in the movie
Lost Horizon
saying gently, “Be kind, my son,” although sometimes it wouldn’t be Vonnegut, it would be “Cuddles” Sakall, or even once Humphrey Bogart, though he didn’t say “Be kind” or anything else, he just kept twitching his facial muscles sympathetically.

That day I got home from Coney Island late, but Pop had saved dinner and warmed it up for me and then sat at the table to watch me eat. He said nothing, sort of studying me, as usual, and puffing on his pipe and blowing smoke to the side.

“You have very good time today, Joey?”

“Yeah, I did, Pop.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I see it in you face.”

Another puff, another blowing out of smoke.

“I think maybe today you make pray with your heart.”

I’d been lifting my fork but stopped to look at him now with little question marks in my eyes. “Yeah, Pop?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Should I tell him about Jane? I wondered.

But the question marks turned into exclamation points:
No! He’ll worry and take me to doctors!

I lowered my head and finished dinner.

Late that night I was sitting on the edge of my bed with an elbow on my knee and the side of my head propped against my fist. I was thinking thoughts. You know: Stuff. What Pop said at dinner. Jane. Me finding the nickel and dime on the sidewalk and excitedly running across the street to Woolworth’s, dodging oncoming cars and coming close to getting hit. And then the look on Virago’s face on the subway ride coming back from Coney Island when I gritted my entire body and mind and put my arm around her shoulder for a second and gave it a pat and then a friendly squeeze. “Had a real nice time,” I half yelled in her ear above the roar of the train, and because of the softness of Virago’s voice and the apparently bottomless mercy of God, I didn’t hear even one of her seventy-six emotional thank-yous.

But I saw her incredibly happy smile.

And the glow that it gave me and is giving me now.

I got up and knelt down by the side of the bed.

“Now I lay me down to sleep…”

The next day I had my hands around Paulie Farragher’s throat and was squeezing so hard that his face had turned blue, but not blue enough yet to satisfy me. I’d surprised him alone in the office of Joseph Andrews Mortuary, which was right across the street from the St. Stephen’s church rear entrance on 33rd and where he worked a few hours a week and therefore wouldn’t be wearing that moth-eaten oversized coat so he couldn’t do his his weirdo “Dutch Defense.”

“You miserable potato-eating cretin!” I snarled.

I like to think of it as praying with my heart.

We’d gone swimming at the 23rd Street pool—me, Jimmy Connelly, Farragher and Tommy Foley. Ignoring the warning voices in my head that were saying, “Go not to the pool today, Joey,” I went anyway, meeting up with the others at the pool and thinking maybe my hyperalertness against the chance they might again seek to “safety test” the operational limits of my lungs would serve to keep my thoughts away from Jane and the question of my sanity for a while. I stayed clear of the diving pool so nothing happened. It was on the way home that “The Great and Enduring Farragheronian Evil” occurred when the other guys decided on taking a trolley home, they being exhausted, I suppose, from the intense concentration required while targeting me with thought rays intended to lure me to the diving pool and ultimate immersion in the wetness of things, as I’d caught them all staring at me once so intensely that their eyes were almost popping out of their heads while they seemed to be arguing over something, Foley in particular heatedly insisting, “No, it’s got to be the
back
of his head, the
back!”
Anyway, I didn’t have the nickel fare and…Okay, okay, I had it but I didn’t want to spend it, so I hitched on the back of the trolley but then had to let go when Farragher decided, it being a nice day, to walk to the trolley’s open back window and shoot a glob of spittle straight into my eye, thus preparing me for future studies of the character Iago in Shakespeare’s
Othello
and the mystery of utterly unmotivated evil—though for maybe half a second before placing my hands around his throat, I did, in all fairness, weigh and find incredibly wanting his vociferous claim that he’d been aiming at a wasp on my forehead that was crawling toward my eye. I couldn’t decide which was worse: his stupid lie, or his wounded whimper that “No good deed ever goes unpunished,” a lament not entirely unexpected from the future Cardinal Hayes High School valedictorian who thought the names of the Three Musketeers were Orthos, Bathos and Aramis.

Leave off with that smiling. He had to be destroyed.

I’d marched steadily up Third Avenue with blood in my eyes, plus some phlegm, until I got to the mortuary, where I cupped my hands to my eyes and then pressed them against the darkly tinted glass façade and saw only Joe Andrews, the owner and chief mortician, sitting at his desk against a wall. No Farragher. His father was the superintendent of the building and they lived in the basement apartment, but I knew these were Farragher’s working hours. As I began to look away from Andrews, I saw him start kneading and clasping and unclasping his hands, which was what Farragher once told me he always did when surreptitiously breaking wind, meantime coughing or loudly clearing his throat to cover up any sound from his deadly malefactions whenever a client was sitting in the office, or against the possibility that someone might enter the room so quietly he might be unaware of their presence. I shifted my glance to a door that led to the place where morticians do their thing with the deceased and I wondered whether Andrews coughed and fiddled with his hands while he was farting in the presence of the dead. I suppose we’ll never know. Meantime, Andrews got up from his chair and headed for the door to the street, so I pretended to be reading his “Coming Attractions” sign in the window while he exited the mortuary and walked across the street to a tiny soda, cigarettes and candy store, perhaps to check on the progress of the Milky Way bar that he’d placed atop the block of ice in the soft drinks bin, so I jumped on my chance like a panther and entered the mortuary, where I found and tackled Farragher as he was exiting a viewing room, and after having fun strangling him for a while I had my fist upraised and ready to pound him into jelly, when all of a sudden I just froze with my fist in midair, thinking:

Wait a minute! What would Kurt Vonnegut do?

I’m not sure that’s why I stopped but I did. I mean, I didn’t look down and say, “I love and forgive you, brother Farragher and pray you will amend your evil ways very soon,” or any other lunatic stuff like that inasmuch as I still was steamed as hell. I just got up and started walking out of the place and when I’d reached the front office and opened the door to the street, I bumped into Andrews, who was coming back in. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked me and I vehemently blurted, “Jesus,
no!
” I walked around for a while, still wondering why I’d pulled my punch, and not getting too much of an answer. I just felt it was wrong, that’s all. It was wrong and it made me feel crummy.

I wandered down to the East River walkway. With the weather so nice and this being a Saturday, I couldn’t find an unoccupied bench, so I sat on a grassy patch for a while looking out across the river at Brooklyn and thinking of that movie that Jane and I had to suffer through just so we could get to
Gunga Din
, this leading me, of course, to more thoughts about the mystery of Jane. And the mystery of me. I was seeing and hearing things. Right?

Who was that person in the mirror?

Once again, I went to bed that night feeling oddly good; in fact,
extremely
oddly good. At peace, you might say. I slept well. I did get up one time to tiptoe into the living room and slide down a window to shut out the sounds of a Health Bar fight, as they were so loud they might awaken Pop. I turned and glanced fondly at him on the sofa. He was good and he slept well
every
night. Then I thought of something else: when I grew up I wanted to be like Pop. I went back into the bedroom and climbed into bed, and just before falling asleep I could swear I heard someone whispering, “Nice.”

The time jumps went on for the next five years, and always coincided, it seemed, with critical moments of moral decision, like that time in early June of 1942 right after I’d graduated from St. Stephen’s. Pop had checked the cupboard that night after dinner and he gave me some money and a list of groceries to go buy. It could have waited until the next day but we’d run out of orange juice and Pop was anxious I should have it in the morning with my breakfast. He would have gone himself but he didn’t want to miss
Inner Sanctum
, his favorite radio show with that creepy creaking door at the beginning and then that shivery voice, “This is Raymond, your host…”

A new little grocery store had just opened in the nabe called
ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICES!
and as there wasn’t any
WHATYOUTINK
at the end of it, and even though Pop had said, “Go to A and P,” I thought I’d save him some money and I went there instead. I arrived as they were locking up for the night, but I put on my most adorably pleading Mickey Rooney checking-into-Boys’-Town wistful face and this older white-haired guy just shook his head and sighed and let me in. While they were pulling together Pop’s list, I was waiting at the counter when one of the grocery clerks eyed me and quipped to the white-haired guy, “Well, they’ll never get
him
in the draft,” at which the white-haired guy turned his head and looked at me sadly, then turned back and said softly, “Yeah, they will.” Someone in a hurry placed a bag with Pop’s order on the counter right next to another one that had been sitting there next to the store’s cash register when I’d first come into the shop and then he quickly moved on while another guy rang up the charge, took my money, and gave me the change. He said, “Here you go, sonny,” sliding and pushing a bag into my arms. “Tell your folks we appreciate their business.” Going home, as I turned the corner on 31st I tripped over something and I fell and skinned a knee. I still had a grip on the bag of groceries, but as I fell I heard this clinking sound, so when I got up I unfurled the top of the bag to see if anything had broken inside. Then my jaw dropped and my mouth did a Martha Raye:

The bag was full of coins and bills, the grocery’s take for the day!

I spent the next twenty seconds staggering around in a daze just like Edward G. Robinson at the end of
Brother Orchid
after taking six slugs to the chest, and I wound up sitting down on the bottom step of a brownstone with my arms tightly wrapped around the bag atop my legs as I tried calculating the height of a pyramid made out of World’s Fair hamburgers that the money in the bag would probably buy me! Are we getting the message that I wasn’t yet entirely St. Joey of New York? I knew very well what Kurt Vonnegut would do but I wanted a second opinion, and at the thought the Big Loser flew in from Winnetka and he whisked me to the top of the Chrysler Building, at first handing me some stupid apology that it wasn’t the Empire State Building, which was taller, because he’d “lost a Big Friend up there” who’d gotten killed by machine-gun fire from airplanes piloted by “basically decent but incredibly misinformed Christers,” and it made him “too sad anymore” to go up there, but the creep didn’t even get to make his pitch because I waved him off right away, which of course you think means I was resisting temptation, and that could certainly be true, I suppose, except actually it wasn’t, as all it meant was I didn’t want a partner, my Basic Wicked Mind having already formulated with astounding feral cunning a devious scheme for keeping the money whereby I would go to the A&P, buy all of the groceries on Pop’s list and then carry both the money and the groceries home. What was causing me a smidge of concern about the plan was the part where I would have to tell Pop that I’d taken so long because I’d stopped for a minute to pray at St. Stephen’s, where I was kneeling and alone in the church when out of nowhere—though it seemed like it was coming from a holy water font—I heard this voice saying, “Joey! Walk to the corner, turn right for exactly twenty paces to a doorway, open it and there on the ground of the entrance to the recently shuttered and partially destroyed Japanese Martial Arts Academy you will find a paper grocery bag. Take it! Take it and give it to your father!” As I sat there on the stoop and mentally polishing my first rough draft—I was thinking of adding to the end of it: “A plenary indulgence will be granted for compliance”—when I saw these two coins on the ground. I thought they must have spilled from the bag when I fell. I got up and went over and picked them up and as I stood looking down at them in my hand I felt my heart begin to thump very lightly, but also much quicker, and then came this glow in my chest and that very same feeling of excited anticipation as I relived myself running back from Woolworth’s with my cheapo little gifts for Pop and Lourdes.

I was looking at a nickel and a dime.

I went back to the grocer’s and tapped on the glass of the door and when they saw who it was and I was holding the bag, my God their faces lit up like rockets in a Fourth of July night sky! I saw joy! Joy and relief! The older white-haired man just stared at me, stunned, with his mouth in an
O
and his hands to his cheeks, and then he rushed to the door, pulled it open and hugged me, saying fervently, “
Thank
you!
Thank
you!” and seeming even happier than Lourdes the day I told her the Armenian
ABTINKWHATCHYOUTINK
tailor had moved to Arizona. Before leaving, I asked them to recount the money. The white-haired guy said, “No no no no, that’s not necessary,” but I asked him again and he counted it. I wanted to find out whether fifteen cents was missing. It wasn’t. Walking home both my steps and the bag full of Pop’s list of groceries felt lighter than a pocketful of four-leaf clovers.

“Joey, you take very long. I was worry.”

“Yeah, Pop, it did take me awhile. But I got there.”

Yes. I got there.