Sleepers (5 page)

“You know them?” John asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

The four of us walked through the restaurant doors and approached the wrestlers’ table. The wrestlers were deep in conversation, empty plates and glasses the only remnants of their meal. They turned their heads when they saw us.

“You boys lost?” Haystack Calhoun asked. His hair and beard were shaggy and long and he was wearing bib overalls large enough to cover a banquet table. The wrestling magazine stories I had read about him put his weight at 620 pounds and I was amazed that anyone that big could slide into a booth.

“No,” I said.

“Then what do you want?” Klondike Bill asked. His hair and beard were darker and thicker than Calhoun’s and he was half his weight, which made him the second biggest man I’d ever seen.

“I’ve watched you guys wrestle a lot,” I said. I pointed a finger to the three behind me. “We all have.”

“You root for us to win?” Bo Bo Brazil asked. He was more muscular than his cohorts, and looked like sculpted stone leaning against the window, his shaved black head gleaming, his eyes clear and bright. Bo Bo’s one noted move, the head-crushing co-co-butt, was said to be a weapon harsh enough to leave an opponent paralyzed.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” Calhoun demanded.

“You usually fight the good guys,” I said, my palms starting to sweat.

Haystack Calhoun lifted one large hand from the table and placed it on my shoulder and around my neck. Its weight alone made my legs quiver. He was breathing through his mouth, air coming out in thick gulps. “Your friends feel the same way?”

“Yes,” I said, not giving them a chance to respond. “We all root against you.”

Haystack Calhoun let out a loud laugh, the fat of his body shaking in spasms, his free hand slapping at the tabletop. Klondike Bill and Bo Bo Brazil were quick to join in.

“Get some chairs, boys,” Calhoun said, grabbing a glass of water to wash down his laugh. “Sit with us.”

We spent more than an hour in their company, crowded around the booth, treated to four pieces of cherry pie, four chocolate shakes, and tales of the wrestling world. We didn’t get the impression that they made a lot of money and, judging by their scarred faces and cauliflower ears, we knew it wasn’t an easy life. But the stories they told were filled with exuberance and the thrill of working the circuit in arenas around the country, where people paid money to jeer and cheer every night. To our young ears, being a wrestler sounded far better than running away to join the circus.

“You boys got tickets for tonight?” Haystack asked, signaling to a waitress.

“No, sir,” John said, scraping up the last crumbs of his pie.

“Get yourself over to the box office at seven,” Calhoun said, slowly squeezing out of his side of the booth. “You’ll be sittin’ ringside by seven-thirty.”

We shook hands, each of ours disappearing into the expanse of theirs and thanked them, looking up in awe as they smiled and rubbed the top of our heads.

“Don’t disappoint us now,” Klondike Bill warned on his way out. “We wanna hear you boo loud and clear tonight.”

“We won’t let you down,” Tommy said.

“We’ll throw things if you want,” John said.

We stood by the booth and watched as they walked out of the inn and onto Tenth Avenue, three large men
taking small steps, heading toward Madison Square Garden and the white lights of a packed arena.

I
WAS THE
youngest of my friends by three years, and yet they treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. A sure sign of their acceptance was when, less than a week after we met, they gave me a nickname. They called me Shakespeare, because I was never without a book.

We were each the only child of a troubled marriage.

My father, Mario, worked as a butcher, a trade he learned in prison while serving six years of a five-to-fifteen-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter. The victim was his first wife. The battles my father fought with my mother, Raffaela, a silent, angry woman who hid herself in prayer, were neighborhood legend. My father was a con man who gambled what little he earned and managed to spend what he never had. Yet he always had time and money to buy me and my Mends ice cream cones or sodas whenever he saw us on the street. He was a man who seemed more comfortable in the company of children than in a world of adults. Growing up, for reasons I could never put into words, I was always afraid my father would disappear. That one day he would leave and not return. It was a fear fed by his separations from my mother, when I would not hear from him for weeks.

Michael, twelve, was the eldest of my Mends. His father, construction worker Devlin Sullivan, had fought in Korea and, for his trouble, earned a steel plate in his head. Always angry, Mr. Sullivan had a foul mouth and great thirst. Tall and strapping, muscular from the work, he kept his wife at a distance, living for weeks with an
assortment of mistresses who soaked his money and then sent him packing. Michael’s mother, Anna, always took him back and forgave him all trespasses. Michael never spoke about his father, not in the way I always did about mine, and seemed uncomfortable the rare times I saw them together.

His parents’ marriage fed in Michael a distrust about the strong neighborhood traditions of marriage, family, and religion. He was the realist among us, suspicious of others’ intentions, never trusting the words of those he didn’t know. It was Michael who kept us grounded.

His stem exterior, though, was balanced by a strong sense of honor. He would never do anything that would embarrass us and demanded the same in return. He never played practical jokes on those he perceived as weaker and he always rose to defend anyone he believed unable to defend himself. That rigid code was reflected in the books he read and the shows he watched. The only time I ever saw him on the verge of tears was near the end of a Broadway production of
Camelot
, affected by Lancelot’s betrayal. His favorite of the Three Musketeers was the more troubled Aramis, and when we played games based on TV shows or movies, Michael always sought out the role of leader, whether it was Vic Morrow’s character on
Combat
or Eliot Ness in
The Untouchables.

It was harder to make Michael laugh than the others. He was big brother and as such had to maintain a degree of maturity. He was the first among us to have a steady girlfriend, Carol Martinez, a half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl from 49th Street, and the last in our crew to learn to ride a bike. He was called Spots when he was younger because of the dozens of freckles that dotted his face and hands, but not often since he hated the name and the freckles had begun to fade the closer he got to puberty.

It was Michael who kept the older, explosive boys of the neighborhood at bay, often with nothing more than
a look or movement That ability reinforced his position as our leader, a title he accepted but never acknowledged. It was simply his role, his place.

In the years we spent together as children, Tommy Marcano’s father was away in Attica in upstate New York, serving a seven-year sentence for an armed robbery conviction. Billy Marcano was a career criminal who kept his wife, Marie, out of his business affairs. Like most of the neighborhood mothers, Marie was devoutly religious, spending her free time helping the parish priests and nuns. During the years her husband was in prison, she remained a devoted wife, working a steady job as a telephone receptionist for an illegal betting parlor.

Tommy missed his father, writing him a letter every night before he went to bed. He carried a crumpled picture of the two of them together in his back pocket and looked at it several times a day. If Michael was the brains behind the group, Tommy was its soul. His was a gentle goodness, and he would share anything he had, never jealous of another’s gift or good fortune. His street name was Butter, because he spread it across everything he ate and he seemed happiest when he had a fresh roll in one hand and a hot cup of chocolate in the other. He was shy and shunned any chance for attention, yet he played the dozens, a street game where the key is to out-insult your opponent.

I can never think of Tommy without a smile on his face, his eyes eager to share in the laugh, even if it came at his expense. The only time I saw a hint of sadness to him was when I was with my father, so I made an effort to include him in whatever we were planning to do together. My father, who liked to eat as much as Tommy did, usually obliged. When that happened, the smile was quick to return.

While Michael seemed older than his years, Tommy seemed far younger than eleven. He had a little boy’s
affability and eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback, and never forgot a joke. His pranks were tinged with innocence. Tommy would never want to be leader of the group, never would have been comfortable with the burden. It was more in keeping with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen, and, always, to laugh.

He also had a natural ability to build things, working away on a discarded piece of wood or an old length of pipe from which would emerge a wooden train or a makeshift flute. He never kept his creations and never took money for his work. Many of the pieces he made were mailed to his father in prison. He was never told if his father received them and he never asked.

John Reilly was raised by his mother, an attractive woman with little time to devote to anything other than church, her work as a Broadway theater usher, and her boyfriends. John’s father was a petty hood shot and killed in a foiled armored truck heist in New Jersey less than a week after his son was born. John knew nothing of the man. “There were no photos,” he once told me. “No wedding picture, no shots of him in the navy. Nobody talked about him or mentioned his name. It was as if he never existed.”

John earned his discipline from the hands of his mother’s various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a boy. He seldom spoke about the beatings, but we all knew they took place.

Even though he was only four months younger than Michael, John was the smallest of the group and was nicknamed the Count, due to his fascination with
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which was also my favorite book. John was brash and had the sharpest sense of humor of any of us. He loved comedy and would spend hours debating whether the Three Stooges were gifted comedians or just jerks who beat each other up.

He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile and a wink to extricate himself from trouble. He loved to draw, sketching sailboats and cruise ships onto thin strips of fine paper with a dark pencil. He would spend afternoons down by the piers feeding pigeons, watching waves lap against the dock, and drawing colorful pictures of the ocean liners in port, filling their decks with the familiar faces of the neighborhood.

He was a born mimic, ordering slices of pizza as John Wayne, asking for a library book like James Cagney, and talking to a girl in the school yard sounding like Humphrey Bogart. Each situation brought about its intended smile, allowing John to walk away content, his mission accomplished. He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind a shield of jokes. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his own everyday moments. John, more than any one of us, was always in need of someone else’s smile.

Together, the four of us found in one another the solace and security we could not find anywhere else. We trusted each other and knew there would never be an act of betrayal among us. We had nothing else—no money, no bikes, no summer camps, no vacations. Nothing, except one another.

To us, that was all that mattered.

3

T
HE
C
ATHOLIC
C
HURCH
played a large part in our lives. Sacred Heart was the center of the neighborhood, serving as a neutral meeting ground, a peaceful sanctuary where problems could be discussed and emotions calmed. The priests and nuns of the area were a visible presence and commanded our attention, if not always our respect.

My friends and I attended Sacred Heart Grammar School on West 50th Street, a large redbrick building directly across from P.S. 111. Our parents paid a $2 a month tuition fee and sent us out each morning dressed in the mandatory uniform of maroon pants for boys and skirts for girls, white shirts, and clip-on red ties.

The school was rife with problems, lack of supplies being the least of them. Most of us were products of violent homes, and therefore prone to violence ourselves, making playground fights daily occurrences. The fights were often in response to a perceived slight or a violation of an unwritten code of conduct. All students were divided into cliques, most based on ethnic backgrounds, which only added tension to an already tight situation.

In addition to the volatile ethnic groupings, teachers were faced with the barriers of language and the difficulties of overcrowded classrooms. After third grade, students were divided by sex, with the nuns teaching the girls and priests and brothers working with the boys. Each teacher faced an average class size of thirty-two
students, more than half of whom spoke no English at home. To help support their families, many of the children worked jobs after school, reducing the hours they were free to concentrate on homework.