Streets of Gold (22 page)

“Please, I want to go to my Aunt Bianca’s.”

They were all around me now. They were poking me. Somebody reached for my cane. Somebody else yanked at the sleeve of my jacket, and I pulled my arm away. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and giggled and danced away when I whirled on him.

“Please,” I said. “I’m blind.”

“Please,” someone mimicked, “He blind.”

I felt someone tugging at the potted plant, heard a tearing sound, realized a leaf had been pulled from the aspidistra, and then felt it striking my face. I backed away and collided with someone who pushed me forward against someone else. They began shoving me back and forth then, spinning me around in, the circle they had formed, tossing me from one to the other as I flailed at them with my father’s bamboo cane, the cane whistling on the air and never striking home. Neighing like horses, they snatched leaves from the plant as I spun dizzily in the circle, tossed the leaves into my face, laughed as I tried to protect the plant, the cane always moving but never connecting, until someone snatched it from my hands, and I heard a sudden loud cracking sound, and realized it had been snapped in two. I held the potted aspidistra in two hands, using it as a weapon, swinging it back and forth in front of me, but someone knocked it to the pavement, and I heard the pot smashing into a hundred pieces, and then someone tore at my right sleeve, loosening my grandfather’s careful stitches, and then ripped it all the way, pulling it free of the shoulder, and someone ripped the other sleeve loose, and someone else tore the jacket up the back. One of them shoved at me from behind, and I fell to the sidewalk, trying to cushion the blow with my hands, and my hands hit some of the broken pieces from the aspidistra pot, and I pulled them back in pain and hoped they were not bleeding. On my knees, I crouched on the sidewalk, and somebody laughed, and then they all laughed, and then they left.

I don’t know how long I crouched on that sidewalk, listening for sounds, turning my head sharply from right to left, uncertain whether they were really gone or were silently preparing another attack. No one came to my assistance. (Many years later, when I asked Biff Anderson why no one had come to my assistance, he laughed heartily and said, “Man, you was
white
. This whole fuck-up didn’t just happen yesterday, you know.”) I got to my feet. I did not know where I was. My cane was gone. Flailing the air with both hands, I groped for a building that would define the inner limits of the sidewalk. Instead, I fell off the curb, and scrambled back onto the sidewalk, and got to my feet again, rushing forward in panic, hands outstretched, palms open, and slammed into a solid brick wall. Hand over hand, I felt my way along the side of the building, and came at last to the corner. If I had made a right turn when stumbling into this street, then I would have to make a left turn to get back home.

My grandfather found me wandering along First Avenue. He must have been dressed in his own Easter finery, black suit, white shirt, black tie, a straw boater on his head. He was carrying a white cardboard carton of pastries in his hand, I later learned. He was not out looking for me, he had merely gone to the
pasticceria
on the corner to buy some pastry for the holiday, and was undoubtedly walking back to the apartment with a jaunty spring in his step on this beautiful clear bright sunny Easter morning, and had seen his grandson in tears and in tatters, and perhaps even then did not rush to me at once, but approached me slowly and cautiously, as though unwilling to believe his own eyes.

“Ignazio!” he shouted, and I rushed to him, rushed to his voice, rushed sightlessly into his outstretched arms, and he clutched me to his chest, and said, “
Madonna mia! Ma, che successe? Oh, Madonna, Ignazio, Ignazio, chi ha fatto questo?”
and stroked my face with his hands, brushing at the tears, and said, “
No, no, non piangere, caro, caro, non piangere,”
and then angrily shouted, perhaps to the heavens, “What kind of place is this, what kind of country?” and hugged me to him again, and said, “
No, no, carissimo, non ti preoccupare,”
and then said, “What happened? Tell Grandpa.”

Sobbing, I said, “They didn’t like my...” and then stopped short of saying the word “jacket” because my grandfather had made the jacket for me, and I did not want to hurt him. “My haircut,” I said.

“Your haircut?” he said, puzzled. “What’s the matter with your haircut? Oh,
Madonna
, look what they did, your jacket is ruined. Who did this?”

“Some boys,” I said. “Five or six boys.”

“Were they Irish?” he asked immediately and suspiciously.

“No.”

“Then what? Colored?”

I nodded.

“Bastardi,”
he said.

“Grandpa?” I said, and began to weep again.

“Yes, yes. Ignazio. Come now, no more tears.”

“Grandpa . .. why do I have to be blind?”

“Ah, ah,” he said, and hugged me and rocked me. “Ah, Ignazio, dear baby, dear child, I would give you my own eyes if that would make you see. Come, you must not cry. Here, here,” drying my eyes and my cheeks with his handkerchief, and then abruptly and surprisingly saying, “Do you want a
cannolo
? See? Here’s the pastry box. Do you feel the string? Give me your hand. Here. Do you see the string?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“Ooooo, I can’t break the string,” he said. “It’s too strong for me. Help me break the string, Ignazio.”

“You can break the string, Grandpa.”

“No, I can’t, I can’t. Look! Do you see? I can’t do it. Oh, what a strong piece of string. Help me, Ignazio.”

I felt along the string with both hands, and took it in my fingers, and broke it. Then, sobbing, I threw myself into my grandfather’s arms again.

“Don’t you want a
cannolo
?” he said gently. “Tch. No more crying, please. We’ll go to the tailor shop and wash your face before your mother sees you. Do you know what Grandma made for us? Rigatoni! That’s your favorite, no? And antipasto, and meatballs, and roast beef, and potatoes, and salad, and nuts, and I’ll slice a peach in wine and let you have some of that. We’ll get you drunk, eh, Ignazio, we’ll make a regular
ubriacone
out of you, eh? Tch, look at your jacket. Never mind, I’ll make a new one for you. Come. Take my hand.”

He was standing opposite me. I knew he was holding out his hand, but he did not reach for my own hand. He simply stood there, waiting.

And I reached. I touched air. I groped.

And finally, I found his hand and took it in my own.

“Well, there are good and bad in every kind.”

My mother used to repeat this maxim on the average of twice weekly. I don’t think she meant it to apply to black people; it didn’t apply to them that Easter morning. It occurs to me that she repeated those identical words to me years later, when I told her I was going to marry a Jewish girl. “Well, there are good and bad in every kind.” Then she went to stick her head in the oven. (Just a joke, Mom, full of little jokes.) Actually, she was very tolerant about the entire matter, which was more than could be said for Rebecca’s father, the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

In 1934, though, when my mother viewed her demolished little boy, she was not quite so tolerant. Immediately, she challenged the manhood of all the assembled wops in my grandfather’s apartment and demanded a Sicilian vendetta in the grand old style of the one that had been visited upon poor Charlie Shoe way back there during the Perils of Pauline. It was my father who reasoned that we would never be able to find a half-dozen anonymous niggers on Park Avenue, and even if we
did
find them, what were we supposed to do? Beat them up? In their own territory? The “in their own territory” was an afterthought. My father had no stomach for violence, even if his own darling little blind bastard had just been the victim of violence. In that respect, my father was distinctly anti-American. He managed to convince the others that discretion was the better part of valor, and we all sat down to enjoy my grandmother’s rigatoni.

I kept thinking about those kids who’d beat me up.

I kept wondering why they’d done it.

I don’t wish to nag a theme the way I would a note in a blues chorus, but when I first began playing jazz, there were no factions, no divisions, you either knew how to blow or you didn’t. Jazz was the true melting pot, the full realization of the American myth I’d learned as a kid. I can honestly say I never got any draft about being a white man playing black music until 1950. I’d been married to Rebecca for almost two years by then. We had one child and another on the way, and times were not precisely rosy. I was still playing here and there in some of New York City’s lesser-known toilets, and when I got a shot at cutting a record with some fairly well-known musicians, I thought success was just around the corner. I met the leader of the band and his trumpet player in front of the Brill Building. Both men were black. The leader, a bassist named Rex Butler, took one look at me and (just as my mother had said, “Mama, it’s the Jew,” in the presence of the dry-goods salesman) said to his trumpet player, “This white cat won’t swing, man.” The worst thing you can say about any jazz musician is that he doesn’t “swing.” He can have great chops, he can be inventive as hell, but if he doesn’t swing, forget him. The trumpet player remained silent. I didn’t know whether he was nodding his head in agreement or picking his nose noncommittally. “Sorry, man,” Butler said, and that was that; they cut the record with a black piano player.

That was in 1950.

Sixteen years before that, I was still trying to reconcile what had happened to me on Park Avenue with what was happening everywhere around me. I was almost eight years old and beginning to make some value judgments of my own, and it seemed to me that whereas my grandfather’s concept of family was a limited one, including as it did only half the wops in Harlem, Fiormonte, and the suburbs of Naples, it nonetheless was not in conflict with the larger concept of family being developed in the American myth. I did not yet know it was a myth; that realization would come later, much later. For me, at eight, it was a glowing dream which had as its basis an impossible and unlikely collection of people from different nations who, united by a common ideal and a rapidly growing common tradition, and working together to achieve that ideal, could make this the strongest, most prosperous, most enlightened country on the face of the earth, with liberty and justice for all whether they were Irish, Italian, Negro, German, English, Czech, or double-check American.

In 1934, I thought I knew what being American meant, even though my concept seemed to clash violently with my mother’s. To her, Fiorello La Guardia, the goddamn
mayor
of New York, was “just another greaseball,” whereas Father Coughlin was an “American,” and she wouldn’t have missed his radio broadcast every Sunday night if you’d offered her “all the tea in China.” I
still
don’t understand that woman, and I’ve known her for forty-eight years. I was thirty-seven before I discovered she’d always hated fish and therefore cooked it in the most impossibly inedible manner every Friday night of my childhood merely because she considered herself a good Catholic. But she had quit going to confession when she was sixteen, and I don’t think she’s stepped inside a church since the day she got married, and I
know
she practiced birth control because when I was a kid I found a small box in the top drawer of the dresser, on the side belonging to my father, and my brother Tony said, “Iggie, those are nothing but scum bags.” I listened to my mother when I was young, but I couldn’t decipher what she meant by “I’m
American
, don’t forget,” because it didn’t jibe with the larger concept of the American family as it was being taught everywhere around me — and especially by Miss Goodbody.

Miss Goodbody told me that the proper descriptive term for a colored person was neither nigger nor boogie, but instead Negro. She told me that calling a Negro a nigger was tantamount to calling an Italian a wop. Since I hadn’t ever been called a wop except by the six niggers on Park Avenue, I wasn’t even aware that the term was derogatory. The only other place I’d heard the expression was in my own kitchen, from the lips of Stella the Ail-American Girl, who used it interchangeably with “greaseball,” “ginzo,” “guinea,” and sometimes “greenhorn” (though this last term of affection was usually reserved for the Irish). But I began thinking about it. And I decided I would be very careful about using the word “nigger” so casually, and that I would not refer to Jews as “Jews,” which somehow also sounded derogatory, but instead say “Jewish people.” Similarly, Miss Goodbody taught me to say Pole for Polack and Spanish for Spic — which I’d never said, anyway, since the massive Puerto Rican influx hadn’t yet begun in New York, and the slur was alien to us wops in the ghetto. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word was when Miss Good-body warned me against using it.

Well, once you’ve revised your vocabulary, you’ve come a long way toward revising your thinking. I find it ironic that after all those years of training myself to say “Negro,” I then had to learn to say “black,” which in my youth was only
half
a word, the unvoiced expletive “bastard” being clearly understood, as in the black expression “mother,” where the “fucker” is as silent as the X in “fish.” Do I sound bitter? The hell with you; Fm blind. And besides, I know something now that I did not know then, and there is almost as much exhilaration in recognizing the lie as there was in living it. It’s the
truth
that keeps eluding me; it’s the truth that’s so difficult to find. The lies are always there, you see, and just when you think you’ve cornered one with the broom, another one pops out of a tinned-up hole on the other side of the room, and you’ve got to start all over again. There are times, admittedly, when you think you’ll never be able to cope with this place that’s overrun with scampering lies, times when you wonder why in Christ’s name you bother searching for the truth at all; who the hell are you — Diogenes? Wouldn’t it be easier to just lie down and relax somewhere under a shade tree, with clouds drifting through an azure sky you’ve never seen and can never hope to see, and just allow the lies to run free over your body, to lick your face into final submission and pick the flesh from your bones, revealing at last the stark white truth of your skeleton? Or is there perhaps a sweeter form of surrender? Might you not put a bullet in your brain, or a knife in your heart, could you not slit your wrists in the bathtub, or jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, or onto the tracks of the subway your grandfather or mine built, and end it, shit, just
end
it? Yes, I suppose you could. But then you’d never have known, isn’t that so? And how can you hope to learn anything, sonny, if you don’t ask questions?