Sleepers (11 page)

In Hell’s Kitchen, the fast way was the preferred way.

We were standing in front of Fat Mancho’s candy store, waiting to turn on the johnny pump. I had the heavy wrench hidden halfway down the back of my pants; my T-shirt hung out, covering what the jeans could not. John was next to me, an empty can of Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee in his hand, both ends cut out. Behind us, two Puerto Rican rummies were giving Fat Mancho heat over the price of a can of Colt .45 malt liquor.

While it could safely be said that Fat Mancho hated most everyone he met, for some reason he tolerated us. To him, we were harmless street rats out for nothing more than a good time. He liked to joke with us, poke fun at everything we did, and insult us whenever he felt the urge. We had known him all our lives and felt that he trusted us. We would never steal from him or try to deceive him in any way. We never asked for money and never caused trouble in front of his store. He liked our company, liked it when we gave back as good as we got from him, his eyes gleaming on the rare occasions we bested his taunts. We always felt that Fat Mancho had a good heart and that he liked kids. He just never wanted anybody to know that.

“What is that shit anyway?” John wanted to know, pointing to the Colt .45s.

“Beer mixed with piss,” Tommy told him, one foot resting on the fire hydrant in front of the store.

“Then the drunks are right,” John said. “Mancho
is
chargin’ them too much.”

“When you gonna open up the pump?” Tommy asked.

“Cops are due for one more pass around,” Michael said, standing behind him. “After that.”

“Hey, Mancho,” John yelled into the back of the store.

“What?” Fat Man said.”

Can I use your bathroom?” John asked.

“Fuck you, punk,” Fat Mancho said, laughing. This was his idea of major fun. “Wet your pants.”

“That a no?” John asked me.

“I think so.” I shrugged.

“Hey, Mancho,” Tommy said. “Give the guy a break. He’s really got to go.”

“Blow me,” Fat Mancho said, having a great time.

“That’s it,” Tommy said. “We’re never gonna buy from your store again.”

“Kill yourself,” Fat Mancho said.

“C’mon,” I said to John. “You can go at my place. I gotta pick something up anyway.”

“You sure?”

“It’s either there or the back of Fat Mancho’s car,” I said.

“Where’s he parked?” John said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

A
PARTMENT DOORS IN
Hell’s Kitchen were never locked during the day and ours was no exception. John and I took the two flights at full throttle, chasing Mrs. Aletti’s black alley cat up the stairs ahead of us. We scooted past the large potted plant outside Mrs. Blake’s and rushed to my door. I turned the handle and walked into the kitchen, John right behind me. The bathroom was on the left, next to the kitchen table, a Padre Pio calendar tacked to the wooden door which, for reasons known only to the previous tenant, locked from the outside. I could hear my mother whistling an Italian pop song from one of the back rooms. A fresh pot of espresso was on the stove, and two cups and a sugar bowl were on the table.

“Didn’t think I was gonna make it,” John said, reaching for the bathroom door.

“Hurry,” I said. “Before you pee on the floor.”

The door swung open and both John and I stood as still as ice sculptures.

There, on the bowl, in full white habit, sat Sister Carolyn Saunders, my second-grade teacher and one of my mother’s best friends. She stared back, as motionless as we were.

She had a wad of toilet paper bunched up in one hand.

“Holy shit!” John said.

“Oh my God!” said Sister Carolyn.

We were back on the street in seconds, John nearly tripping down the final steps in his rush to get out of the building. Michael and Tommy were pitching pennies against a brick wall.

“That was quick,” Michael said. “What’d you do, start in the hallway?”

“I’m dead,” I said. “Dead and buried.”

Tommy looked confused. “Because John took a piss in your house?”

“We saw a nun.” John was bent over, hands to knees, trying to catch his breath.

“Where?” Michael asked. “In the hall?”

“On the bowl!” John said. “She was sittin’ on Shakes’s toilet! Takin’ a piss!”

“No shit,” Tommy said. “You never think of nuns doin’ stuff like that.”

“Which nun?” Michael asked.

“Sister Carolyn,” I said, still shaking from the memory.

“Good choice,” Tommy said. “She’s really cute.”

“Did you see her snatch?” Michael asked.

“A nun’s snatch!” John said. “We’re gonna burn like twigs for this, Shakes!”

“Relax,” Michael said. “Nothin’s gonna happen.”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“She’s a nun, right? So she’s not gonna tell. If people find out, it’s more trouble for her than it is for you.”

“Maybe,” John wailed. “But we still shouldn’t’ve seen what we saw.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tommy said. “It don’t get better than nun snatch.”

“I only saw skin,” John said. “I swear it. White clothes and white skin. Nothin’ else.”

“She say anything?” Tommy asked.

“Ask her yourself,” Michael said, looking over John’s shoulder. “She’s coming this way.”

“My heart just stopped,” John said, his face pale, his voice cracking.

“She’s coming for us,” I said, turning my head in Sister Carolyn’s direction, watching her walk down the steps of my apartment building, check for traffic, and make her way to where we were standing.

“What the fuck’s that nun want?” Fat Mancho said, slurping a Yoo-Hoo and scratching at his three-day growth.

“Stay quiet, Fat Man,” Michael said.

“Eat my pole,” Fat Mancho said, walking back behind the bodega counter.

“Hello, boys,” Sister Carolyn said, her manner calm, her voice soft.

She was young, her face clear and unlined. She was Boston big-city bred and had spent three years in Latin America working with the poor before a transfer brought her to Sacred Heart. Sister Carolyn was popular with her students and respected by their parents and, unlike some of the other nuns of the parish, seemed at ease among the people of Hell’s Kitchen. Though she spoke no Italian and my mother hardly a word of English, they had formed a solid friendship, with Sister Carolyn visiting her an average of three times a week. She knew the type of marriage my mother was in and
was always quick to check in on her after my father had administered yet another beating.

“Hey, Sister,” Michael said casually. “What’s goin’ on?”

Sister Carolyn smiled and put one hand on top of John’s shoulder. Nothing but fear was keeping John in his place.

“The bathroom’s free now if you still need to use it,” she said to him softly.

“Thank you,” John mumbled.

“We’re very sorry,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Forget it happened. I already have.”

“Thank you, Sister,” I said.

“I’ll see all you boys in church,” she said, turning to leave.

“Bet on it,” Tommy said.

“What a peach,” John said, watching her as she walked up the street back to the convent on 51st, her long white skirt swaying at her feet.

“And not a bad-lookin’ ass either,” Michael said, winking at me.

“Fuck do any o’ you know about ass,” Fat Mancho said from behind his counter.

“I’m gonna go pee,” John said, running back across the street. “Can’t hold it in anymore.”

“Watch now,” Tommy said to me. “This time he walks in on your mother coppin’ a squat.”

“That happens,” Michael said. “He might as well just throw himself out a window.”

“He should throw himself out a window anyway,” Fat Mancho said. “Useless fuck.”

“Go wash your mouth out with shit, Fat Man,” Tommy said.

“Set yourself on fire,” Fat Mancho said. “All of you. Burn till you die.”

We all looked over at Fat Mancho and laughed, walking
away from his store, toward the fire hydrant and a dose of wet relief from the heat of the day.

9

F
ATHER
R
OBERT
C
ARILLO
was a longshoreman’s son who was as comfortable sitting on a barstool in a back-alley saloon as he was standing at the altar during high mass. Raised in Hell’s Kitchen, he toyed with a life of petty crime before finding his religious calling. Carillo left for a midwestern seminary three weeks before his sixteenth birthday. When he returned ten years later, he asked to be assigned to the Sacred Heart parish.

As far as we were concerned, he wasn’t like a priest at all. He would spring for pizza after an afternoon pickup game or twist a few neighborhood arms and raise money for new sports equipment for the gym. He was a friend. A friend who just happened to be a priest.

Like us, Father Bobby had an extensive comic book and baseball card collection, was an avid boxing fan, and favored James Cagney over any other actor. He had a small office near the back of the church, lined with books and old blues albums. At its center was a huge framed picture of Jack London standing on a snowbank. If I was ever tempted to steal something from Father Bobby’s office, it was that picture.

Despite the criminal bent of the neighborhood, the church exerted considerable influence and its leaders were visible members of the community. Priests openly recruited boys for the priesthood, presenting the clerical life as a way out of Hell’s Kitchen. Nuns often took
girls aside to talk to them in frank terms about sex and violence.

The priests, nuns, and brothers of the neighborhood knew they served a violent clientele and they were there to tend to our physical and psychological wounds. They listened to battered wives who came to them for solace and gave words of comfort to frightened children. They helped when and where they could, careful not to stray outside the established framework of the neighborhood and always aware that there were a number of situations over which they held no control.

The clergy knew the rules of Hell’s Kitchen. They knew some people had to break the law in order to feed their families. They knew the clothes many of us wore were bootlegged and the meat most of us ate came from stolen trucks. And they knew not to butt heads with someone like King Benny. But in the ways they could, they helped us. If nothing else, they offered a quiet room, some hot coffee, and a place to talk when you needed it. Few people in the neighborhood would have asked more from any religion.

Father Bobby cared for us in a significant way, and as much as we were capable of loving an outsider, we loved him for that care.

He knew the problems my mother and father were having, of the beatings she was handed and the debts he incurred. He tried to balance that by talking to me about books and baseball and verbally guiding me away from the fast money and easy times offered by King Benny and his crew.

He understood Michael’s instinctive resistance to any outsider, even one from the neighborhood. He saw in Michael a boy who was given very little reason to trust. He sensed the loneliness behind his tough talk and the fear hidden by his swagger. Father Bobby knew that Michael was a boy who merely longed for a father who did more than lash out at his only son. He gave Michael distance, leaving a book he would like at his desk rather
than handing it to him after school. He fed his streak of independence instead of fighting it.

He joked with John, keying in on a sense of humor built around insults and fast comebacks. He traded comic books with him, giving up valued
Flash
editions for mediocre
Fantastic Four
exploits, ignoring the sucker snickers after the deals were completed. On John’s tenth birthday, he gave him a
Classics Illustrated
edition of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, a gift that moved John to tears.

He encouraged John’s quiet desires to be an artist, sneaking him an endless supply of pencils and paper. In return, John would give Father Bobby original illustrations from a comic book series he was working on. John was also his favorite altar boy and Father Bobby made it a point to work as many masses with him as possible, even if it meant pulling him out of an early class.

“John would have made a good priest,” Father Bobby told me years later. “He was filled with goodness. He cared about people. But he had a knack, like all you boys did, of being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. A lot of people have that knack and seem to survive. John couldn’t.”

But of all of us, Father Bobby was closest to Tommy.

Butter never adjusted to having a father away in prison and, while he never talked about it, we knew it gnawed at his otherwise happy nature. Father Bobby tried to fill the paternal void, playing one-on-one basketball with him on spring evenings, taking him to James Bond movies on winter nights, helping him manage the pigeon coop Tommy kept on the roof of his building. He made sure Tommy was never alone on Father’s Day.

Father Bobby had the soul of a priest but the instincts of a first-grade detective. He was a vigilant neighborhood presence, the first to take our class on outings and
the first to question our outside involvements. He knew my friends and I did work for King Benny and was not pleased by that fact. But he understood the need for table money. In his time, Father Bobby had helped augment his own family’s income by running errands for “Lucky” Jack and the Anastasia family.