Staten Island Noir (15 page)

Eddie went out the back door and surveyed like he always did before he opened for business. The bar's sign was white script letters painted on dark blue glass-paneled siding. The plate glass windows that ran on the Manor Road side were so dark he saw only a reflection of himself when he passed.

The last month or so, especially now with the garbage problem and the soda gun guys, he realized he was getting too old for this. He thought he saw Sully's face, the big cigar in his mouth, never lit and soaked at the end like a soggy dipstick, instead of his own reflection. Sully was laughing at him, giving him his classic nod that he gave to the parade of the misguided who sat on the swivel stools waiting for the bartender's verdict:
Now you did it, you went too far
.

"Everybody thinks owning a bar is easy, but it's a rock in your shoe, and a revolving hand in your pocket," Sully had told him.

It had been a dive, the Sunnyside, and would remain as such as long as Eddie could manage to keep its "character." But he was starting to understand how Sully one day said yes, and took Eddie's bag of cash, signing over his license. Red-faced Sully, with his permanent six-months-pregnant beer belly, never did make it to Florida like he planned, and died during a bypass in the hospital. No sunshine for Sully, and the curse of the Sunnyside got Eddie too, just as Sully predicted.

Eddie had been famous when he was a kid. Everyone knew the story of how the legendary gentleman bank robber, Willie Sutton, a.k.a. Willie the Actor, stole his name. There was a yellow newspaper clipping framed and hanging near the register to prove it. "You'll add a splash of character to the joint," Sully had said.

Continuing his daily outside survey, Eddie turned the corner onto Victory Boulevard. The street was empty, not a car up or down, like it was four a.m. Sunday, but the sun was out. Eddie stopped. There was a body on the sidewalk. A chubby guy, looking to be maybe twenty, dressed in a 1950s suit and overcoat. He was sprawled in that odd way only the dead can land, one leg out, one hand turned sideways. His fedora resting neatly two feet away, while a pool of blood slowly ran from the crotch of his trousers. His eye sockets were pockets of red, filled to the brim and dribbling down the sides of the head. Eddie knew it was the kid who'd spotted Willie Sutton on a bus in Brooklyn and then went and told the cops. It was the classic snitch shooting, with the first bullet dropping him to his knees and the eyes telling you to keep what you see to yourself. Eddie backed away and hurried along the Manor Road side and into the rear door of the bar.

"What the . . . ?"

The man with the rose pushed his rock glass forward and tapped the side. Eddie reached for the bottle and poured more by reflex, though he wondered what the hell was happening to his mind. He had seen that sprawled body a hundred times in his dreams, but never while he was working. Why were there no cars?

"You," the man knocked back the drink in one gulp and pushed the glass forward for another. "You're the owner, right?" He took the rose from the water glass and smelled it.

Eddie put on his reading glasses and looked for the numbers of services the bar used, and found the one for garbage pickup taped to the side of the ice machine. He'd call the trashmen and agree to pay most of the rate hike if they'd come and empty the dumpster today. It was the stress, he knew, and before he called, Eddie broke his own rule by pouring himself a scotch, which he never—almost never—took until after midnight. "You got to keep an eye in the back of your head," Sully had warned, "or they'll steal the shoes off your feet while you're walking."

"Sutton broke out of a Philadelphia prison. He tunneled, didn't he, like in a movie, in 1947," the man said as he put his rose back in the glass. "Another." He pushed the rock glass forward again, but left the wine untouched.

The trash number was a busy signal. "Listen, pal, I'm not even opened yet," Eddie said. "Drink, relax. I see your hundred there on the bar, so you can drink until you tell me to call you a cab. But—" Eddie dialed again and it was still busy, "I got business."

The man took out a pouch of tobacco and began to hand roll a cigarette.

"No smoking. You know the laws."

"You ain't open,
pal,
" the man said, mimicking Eddie. He reached into his suit jacket pocket and pulled out a wad of cash in a bank wrapper, placing it on the bar. "That's ten thousand dollars, unmarked. I'm gonna smoke and you're gonna stay closed until I tell you."

Eddie looked closer at the man and he seemed familiar, but Eddie couldn't place him. He paused, then picked up the bundle of cash and fanned through the bills. "Never take their money," Sully had said, "or then they will really own you." Eddie poured the man another drink and put the money next to the rose.

"This is for?"

"So I can smoke. No strings. Take it." The man looked around the bar. "The floor is filthy. You haven't mopped and the tables are filled with bottles and glasses. You're a long way from opening, anyway."

Eddie always cleaned the bar after last call, turned on the bright lights, switched the setting on the back of the juke and played whatever while he got rid of the bulk of the night's mess. He never liked to close the doors and deal with it the next day, when the stench of yesterday's drinking was even too much for him. Eddie couldn't remember why he didn't clean up last night.

"You were, what, ten?" the man said. "And the story goes that Willie Sutton bought a newspaper from you and asked you what your name was."

Eddie was going to pull down the framed article, like he'd done a thousand times, to show new customers the history he had, describing how the bank robber used Eddie Lynch as his alias while laying low in Staten Island. But the garbage line was busy, and there were no cars on Victory. He never left bottles on the table from the night before.

"Sutton worked in the Farm Colony for almost three years." The man lit his rolled-up cigarette. "It was an old folks' home, near Seaview Hospital. He worked as a janitor, with everybody calling him Eddie Lynch."

Eddie put down the phone and looked at the man closer. "You. Who are you?"

"Sutton's time at the Farm Colony was the best, where he took care of the old ladies." The man closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead like something pained him.

"He lived a few blocks from here on Kimball Avenue, while he was hiding out on Staten Island. I know all about Sutton," Eddie said.

"No you don't. It really broke his heart, the way they sat there in their wheelchairs with nothing but memories, waiting for their kids who never came. Or when they did visit—what do you think they brought their mothers who wiped their tears and bandaged their cuts? A bag a candy or a five-cent comb. Like that was enough, all that was needed for the payback."

"I might take that money," Eddie said. "I should get out of this business. Do something different. You want to buy this place?"

The man rolled another cigarette. "We waste so much time, don't we? Everybody does. There's no way around it. Robbed banks for thirty years, bagging more than two million, when a million was something. But half of the time in the joint, for what? For the money, I guess, but—" The man let out a deep breath. "It don't matter now."

Eddie poured the guy another drink and another for himself. He picked up the bundle of cash. He peered closer at the man's face. "You look like . . ."

"You still didn't figure it out yet, did you?"

"The body on the sidewalk. No cars."

"Take the cash, if it makes you feel better. You don't need it anymore, but take it. It took me some time to understand how it all works too," the man said, "why I wasn't going."

"Going where?"

"I don't know exactly. But where we all go. Where Sully went. Where the poor guy on the sidewalk outside went. Where you'll go. You got to clear the slate, pay off everything before you go. This I finally got."

"Willie."

"That's why I'm here with the dough, kid. I caused you a lot of bad dreams. Who knew dreams had a price? They do, though, so try to remember who you give bad dreams to and you'll go faster." The man stood, glanced at the wine, but didn't drink it. "That was for my landlady Mary, over there on Kimball. And the rose is for when I see her. She's gone; I know she is, since I never saw her waiting around like us."

"I'm not going anywhere," Eddie said. "I'm not waiting."

"Kid, you already are." The man took the rose from the water glass. "Now we're square, ain't we, Eddie?" He left the bar.

 

* * *

 

When the health department citations piled up and no more could fit stuck in the front door, that's when they found Eddie. The Sunnyside hadn't opened for a week and the regulars banged on the door, tried to peer through the thick plate glass, could see the bottles on the dirty tables. They figured Eddie had just closed and run off like he always said he would. That's when they broke open the locks and found him on the floor behind the bar. The cops covered their mouths with handkerchiefs.

"One in the back of the head," a cop said. "And shot in both hands."

"That's it," the other cop said. "He owed somebody."

"Yeah," the older cop said. "Garbage or soda. Look at the tickets from HD. He was stingy, not paying up, or he just got tired of playing by the rules."

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR LODGE

BY
B
INNIE
K
IRSHENBAUM

Grymes Hill

It was autumn. Late October. Evening, early evening, but the sky was midnight dark and the moon cast a silver glow; the air, crisp like a red apple, was redolent of autumns past: dried leaves, pumpkins, ghost stories, all manner of things Halloween-related. It was that kind of autumn evening. I buttoned my coat for the walk across the campus from Parker Hall to the Grymes Hill bus stop.

Parker Hall, neo-Gothic, lugubrious such as it was, inspired the whisperings of a dark history, but the story that it had once been a Dickensian orphanage where terrible things happened simply wasn't true. There are always stories. Another Wagner College legend, the one about Edward Albee, that he taught here in the early 1960s and that Wagner College was the setting for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
, that wasn't true either but, unlike the Parker Hall story, it was rooted in fact. In the early 1960s, Albee did participate in a summer literary conference at Wagner College that was organized by a friend of his who was a professor in the English Department. It was common knowledge that this mess of a professor and his spectacularly boozy wife were the inspiration for Albee's gin-soaked brawling love birds, but the setting for
Virginia Woolf
was Trinity College in Connecticut. Not Staten Island.

But just how Parker Hall
looked
as if it had been an orphanage, I'll say this: the Wagner campus looked spot-on right for the part in Albee's play.

There was definitely that bucolic New England-y small college thing about the place. It photographed well, like Williams or Bennington, it made for a nice brochure. The Main Hall was, as was Parker Hall, early-twentieth-century Gothic. Both buildings were ivy-covered and shrouded by trees. Evergreens mostly, and there were lots of squirrels around. Even a few of those all-black squirrels, which are rare. The lawn for playing frisbee was oval-shaped. Eponymous Cunard Hall was originally the Cunard family mansion and its guest cottages were once faculty housing, but now one of the cottages was the chapel; the other was the admissions office.

Never before had I been on campus in the evening. True, this was largely a commuter school, but that not one other person was out and around was curious, until I realized why I was, seemingly, all alone. The student union, the cafeteria, the dormitories, the library, all the buildings busy at this hour were the newer ones. Cement and plasterboard institutional-ugly, they were constructed out of view.

I was there late because I was with a student. It wasn't often that students wanted to meet with their professors, but this one was in the throes of discovering literature and he had that kind of enthusiasm going, the naïve kind, unaware that there were professors out there who couldn't wait to piss on his earnestness, to jade his sincerity, to mock his wearing white T-shirts with the cuffs of the short sleeves rolled up in homage to Jack Kerouac. But that wouldn't happen for years to come.

The previous spring, he took Comp and Lit with me. Last fall semester, I taught three sections of Composition without the Lit, the same as this fall. Required courses for freshmen. Students who had so much as a crumb of interest in literature were fewer in number than the black squirrels, which should not have come as a surprise to me. They were eighteen years old. A lot of the girls looked like beauty pageant contestants, and it seemed like all of them were majoring in Education with the intent to teach kindergarten or first grade until having families of their own. These girls appeared to me to be without rebellion, and they elicited not my anger exactly, but an impatience, a lack of generosity. I wanted to shake them and say,
There's a world out there!
The way I remember the boys, they were business majors, their intended careers were vague. The boys—party boys, fraternity boys, athletes. In the end, I felt sadder for the boys. They were not, as I saw them, young men of promise.

Although I am not generally inclined to indulge in psychobabble, at this point in time, as I am looking back, it occurs to me that my perceptions of the students, the
what
seemed like
s and the
as I remember
s
,
could well have been my projection. I might well have been reflecting my own fear of the future outward onto them. My fear that this was it. Not all, but some of my colleagues, once dreamed of grand places in academia. They saw themselves as professors at Harvard or Stanford, but that didn't happen. Their dreams denied caused them to turn bitter and mean and petty. Despite how their dreams were not my dreams and how this was only the start of my second year here, I feared getting stuck like a mastodon in a tar pit. I feared becoming one of them.