145th Street (7 page)

“Yo, here he come now!” A girl pointed toward the uptown side of the park “Who he got with him?”

I turned and I saw Monkeyman coming down the street. He had a man and a woman with him. The man looked old. Monkeyman brought them right over to where we were and I recognized his grandfather. I didn’t know the woman.

“Hey, this is my grandfather,” Monkeyman said. “His name is Mr. Nesbitt. And this is my godmother, Sister Smith.”

“What you bring them for?” Clean said, edging closer to Monkeyman.

“They came to see you mess me up!” Monkeyman said.

He took off his jacket as if he meant to fight Clean. For a moment I thought maybe it would be a fair fight. But then Monkeyman took off his shirt and just stood there in his bare skin and held his hands out and his head to one side.

Clean didn’t know what was happening. He looked around.

“Kick his butt!” one of the Tigros called out. “Waste him!”

Clean took his hands out of his pockets and started circling Monkeyman, but Monkeyman didn’t move. Clean hit him in the back of his head and he didn’t say nothing.

“Please don’t do that, boy,” Monkeyman’s grandfather said. “He made us promise not to help him, but please don’t do that.”

“We’ll kick your butt, too,” a girl said.

Everybody turned and looked at her and she held out her chin like she didn’t even care. But she didn’t say anything else.

Monkeyman’s godmother was praying.

It was dark but there was a moon out and the park lights were on. More people came into the park to see what was going on. What they saw was Monkeyman standing with his arms outstretched and Clean hitting him. He hit him in the face a couple of times and an old man asked, “What’s going on?”

“That’s the Tigros gang,” Fee said. “They’re beating up Monkeyman because he stopped one of their girls from slashing somebody in the face.”

“I ought to kill you!” Clean shouted.

“They just waiting for the police to come,” another Tigros guy said.

It grew quiet. There had to be fifty people watching now, watching Clean standing in front of Monkeyman, not knowing what to do, watching the rest of the gang not knowing where to take it, watching Monkeyman with his arms still out from his sides, his nose bleeding, his body quivering from the pain and from the growing cold. The high streetlamps outside the park cast a pale glare on Monkeyman’s dark skin. The shadow on the ground, of Monkeyman’s body being offered up for a beating, was long and thin and disappeared into the shifting knot of people watching.

“That’s what’s wrong with the neighborhood now,” a man said. “We got it hard enough without this kind of thing.”

“He ain’t nothing but a punk” A short, squat guy stepped out from the Tigros group. “If he don’t fight he a punk!”

“I ain’t even going to waste my time on him,” Clean said. “If I was back in the Crips I wouldn’t even waste my time on no punk.”

The Tigros were outnumbered now, and began drifting off. When they got down to the last five or so someone yelled that the cops were coming and they all ran.

Monkeyman put on his shirt. His grandfather put his arm around him and they started out of the park The wind picked up a little and I began to shiver. Around me others were slowly starting to move and I pulled my jacket shut and started home.

I saw Monkeyman two days later.

“You were wrong,” I said. “You took a chance and you could have been killed.”

“I was hurt,” Monkeyman said. “I was hurt but they were wrong, not me.”

“What if they had killed you?” I said.

He just looked at me. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

He said it with a sadness that just got all into me. He had been looking down but now Monkeyman looked up, right into my eyes, as if he expected me to say something that was right for the moment. I couldn’t think of anything.

“Yo, Monkeyman, what did you think was going to happen that night?” I asked.

“I just thought that some people were going to show wrong, and some others were going to show right,” he said. “No matter what happened to me, everybody was going to know the difference.”

I couldn’t see it. I wouldn’t have let them beat on me like that. What I would have done I don’t know.

It didn’t end there. Three weeks later another guy in the Tigros stabbed Monkeyman in the back. Monkeyman was in the hospital for three weeks, hanging on between life and death, but finally he made it.

The guy who stabbed Monkeyman had been arrested before for possession of drugs and was on parole. They gave him ten to fifteen years for attempted murder. So Monkeyman got hurt and the guy that hurt him would be in jail until he wasn’t a kid anymore.

It was all so scary. All so sad.

I went to visit Monkeyman in the hospital. We talked about what was going on in school, and what was going on around the ’hood.

“Man, I can’t wait to go to college,” I said. “I need to put some serious distance between me and 145th Street. How about you?”

“I got accepted at an art school in Pittsburgh,” he said. “When I get finished I’ll probably come back and open a studio or something. How about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “When I get to be a doctor maybe I’ll come back and take care of guys like you.”

Monkeyman grinned.

When I left I looked back over everything that had happened. What he did in the park wasn’t smart. As a matter of fact it was dumb. Maybe. But as Peaches always said, when you have a friend like Monkeyman, somebody has to watch his back. I thought about what had happened in the park for months afterward. That night in the park Monkeyman had seemed so small, but now, in my mind and in my heart, he has grown. Yeah, Monkeyman.

E
ddie McCormick was all-world and everybody knew it. While most of the guys on the block played basketball, Mack, which was what everybody called him, played baseball. He played left field for the Ralph Bunche Academy and when they played there would be more scouts in the stands than fans. He was big, a hundred and eighty pounds and six feet one. During the winter he ran track and the track coach thought he could make the Olympics if he stuck with sprinting. The coach kept him on the team even when he wasn’t running, just in case he might show up at a meet. But baseball was Mack’s joint and that was where he figured to be headed. He was eighteen and one newspaper article about him said that he could be in the major leagues by the time he was nineteen. That’s how good he was. Naturally the baseball coach loved him. That was the thing about Mack, the people who liked him usually liked him because he was a star. Mack had an attitude problem. He thought he could just show up and everybody was supposed
to fall down and go crazy or something.

He was pretty smart, too, but he made this big show of not caring about grades. He slid into his senior year with a C-minus average.

“If they gave him what he really deserved,” Dottie Lynch said, “he would be getting all P’s. That’s
P
as in
pitiful
.”

Well, Dottie had a big mouth but that’s what people thought about Mack. Some of the kids thought that Dottie was sweating Mack and was just mad because he didn’t give her a play. On the other hand everybody thought he was stuck on himself. But during the first week of his senior year everything changed. That’s when he met Kitty.

Kitty was the granddaughter of Duke Wilson, who owned the barbershop on 145th across from Grace Tabernacle Church. Now, anybody who knew Mr. Wilson would expect his granddaughter to be smart, but Kitty was outrageous. Just the way that Mack dealt with baseball and had all the scouts looking at him, Kitty could deal with the books. What’s more, everybody liked Kitty because she had one of those bubbling kind of personalities that soon as you met her you knew she was your flavor. Plus, the girl was fine. Not just kind of fine, not just take another look fine, but, like, take the batteries out of the smoke alarms when she came by fine. Yeah, that’s right. So she’s smart, she’s fine, she’s only sixteen and a senior.

Okay, the first week of school Mrs. Henry, our English teacher, said we had to write poems in the style of some famous poet. And you had to write the poem to a particular person.

“It can be someone you admire,” Mrs. Henry said. “Someone you’re in love with, or even someone to whom you just want to send a message.”

The boys all treated the assignment like it was a big goof and most of the girls weren’t too excited about it, either. On the day the poems were read in class it was mostly funny stuff or poems about how they loved their mothers. Three people wrote poems about Martin Luther King, Jr. Half the class just listened to the poems and hoped they wouldn’t be called on to read theirs out loud. But when it was time for Kitty to read her poem, she said, “I’m going to read my poem to Mack.”

Everybody paid attention.

Mack leaned back in his seat and got this look on his face like he was too cool to breathe. Okay, Kitty went and stood right in front of Mack and started reciting her poem real slow. She was just glancing at the paper it was written on but most of the time she was looking dead into Mack’s eyes.

“How do I love thee, you sweet black thing

Why do I love thee, is this some fling

That my wildly beating heart has chanced

Upon or has my light and joyous soul danced

With yours in some other life or taken wing

And flown with yours, you sweet black thing.”

The class was quiet and Mrs. Henry put her book down and sat behind her desk. Kitty went on with her poem.

“How do I love thee, my sweet black prince

For surely I have loved thee ever since

My eyes first met your fierce but tender gaze

And your gentle touch did expand my days

As poets’ songs fulfill the singing verse

And sweet love fulfills the universe.

“I haven’t finished it yet,” Kitty said. “It’s going to be a sonnet.”

She hadn’t finished the sonnet but she had finished Mack. From that minute on he was stupid in love. What she did was to flat-out change the brother. She had reached inside him and took out his attitude. Peewee put it best.

“What Mack was doing was dealing wrong but dealing so strong you couldn’t do nothing about it,” he said. “But how strong can you be when some girl can make you roll over and play dead any time she wants to? She can make that dude fetch like a cocker spaniel if she wanted.”

That was true, because Mack would be in the cafeteria or walking down the hallway and all of a sudden this silly grin would come over his face and either Kitty would be someplace near or he would be thinking about her. Mack was so much in love that it made people feel good just to be around him. He was talking about going right to the major leagues and playing pro ball while Kitty went to school.

They went out steady for a while and after a few weeks Kitty naturally wanted to know how Mack felt about her. She hinted around for a while, then she came right out and asked him.

“You’re okay,” he said.

“Don’t give me no okay,” Kitty said. “I want to know if you love me.”

“Something like that,” Mack said.

That’s what he said to Kitty, but to everybody else he was planning his whole life.

“It’ll take her six or seven years to get her law degree,” he said. “Then I’ll play ball for another eight or nine years and then we’ll open a little business.”

Kitty lived with her parents above her grandfather’s shop. That’s where Mack was coming from the day before Christmas. Kitty had been up at Brown University in Rhode Island on a visit to see if she wanted to go to that school and Mack had met her at the train station. It was a cold night and a light snow was falling. Down on the corner some guys were selling Christmas trees and had started a fire in a garbage can to keep warm.

All of a sudden two guys come running down the street. They were hoofing heavy and looking back over their shoulders. When they ran across Powell Avenue they almost got hit by a gypsy cab. The cab swerved just in time and one brother was slipping on the snow and almost fell in the path of a delivery truck. He was so close to being hit that he steadied himself on the fender of the truck. The car that came across the intersection was an old Mustang painted black. The two guys were running on the uptown side of the street but the Mustang came over, facing the wrong way in traffic, and a dude leaned out the back window.

“Drive-by!” a kid screamed.

People were hitting the ground, or running, or ducking behind cars. Most of them didn’t know where the shooting was coming from. A window broke, sending glass across the sidewalk. People screamed. Tires squealed. The two guys they were shooting at turned the corner and ran up the avenue. The car sped away toward the bridge that leads to the Bronx. In a minute it was out of sight.

“That’s a shame!” an old West Indian woman was saying.

“Those gang people don’t care two cents for your life!” the woman with her said.

“The day before Christmas, too,” the first woman went on, shaking her head. “They don’t have a thing to do but to—is that somebody laying on the ground over there?”

It was Mack. A man called the police and in minutes the street was full of police cars and emergency vehicles.

“He’s moving,” a long-headed boy with a scarf around his face said. “He’s okay.”

They took Mack downtown to Harlem Hospital. Pookie, who came along after the shooting and saw that it was Mack, went and told his folks.

It was Christmas day when the news got back to the block Mack was going to live, but two bullets had torn into his right ankle and just about taken his foot off. Doctors had worked on his foot for seven hours, but finally they gave up. It had to be amputated.

When he came out of the hospital Mack was different. It wasn’t like he just acted a little strange; he was a different person. At first when some of the guys went around to see him they said he didn’t talk much, but then after a while he wouldn’t even come out of his room. Then Peewee found out that he hadn’t seen Kitty.

“She didn’t even go to the hospital?” Eddie, who was in Mack’s math class, asked.

“She went to the hospital,” Peewee said. “But since he’s been home he hasn’t seen her. He told his mother not to let her in and he won’t answer the phone.”

“You can’t turn your back on people like that,” Eddie answered.

But the truth was that Mack could turn his back on people, because he really had turned his back on himself. Kitty called him every day at the same time so he would know it was her, but he wouldn’t answer.

Mack’s father worked in a restaurant just down from Sylvia’s. It wasn’t as high-class a restaurant as Sylvia’s but it was nice. He went to work at one in the afternoon and Mack would keep his door closed, not even come out of his room, until after his father had left.

The next thing that Kitty did was to organize a little get-together with Peewee and some of the guys on the baseball team. Peewee told me about it and for the first time he didn’t make a lot of jokes about it.

“He was sitting on his bed and he had his leg out from under the cover,” Peewee said. “You know, we just sat there and tried not to look at his leg. Mack kept laughing at his leg and pointing to it. Man, it was terrible. Dottie was there and she held Kitty’s hand.”

“She was tore up,” Dottie said. “You loving somebody like she loves that fool and you hate to see them looking so pitiful.”

“Nobody else could get it up to say anything,” Peewee continued. “People started drifting out one by one. I know those guys aren’t going back there. That scene was too rough.”

No one saw Mack for a long time after that. There were reports that he had lost a lot of weight, and that maybe he was losing his mind. The worst time was when Mack’s father called the cops because he wouldn’t come down from the roof. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning in late January. A cold rain slanted down onto the tar paper and onto the lone figure sitting on the ledge overlooking the empty street below. A policeman tried to talk him away from the edge but Mack didn’t respond.

“Why, son, why?” his father pleaded with him. “You’re young and still got your whole thing going on in front of you. I know it’s not like it was but you’re still young.”

“Who?” Mack spoke without moving.

At first his father just looked at him, not knowing what his son was getting at. “What you mean who?” his father asked.

“Who are you talking to?”

“I’m talking to you, son,” his father said.

“I’m not your son,” Mack said. “Your son was a ballplayer, wasn’t he? He didn’t have no missing parts, did he?”

“You’re hurt, but . . .” His father’s voice trailed off. The pain sat between them even as the rain beat down harder, releasing the stench of dog urine from the cracks in the roof.

The policemen told Mack’s parents that they could either try to pull him down or leave and see if he could be talked down. Mack’s father said he’d stay with him and try to talk him down.

It was almost dawn when Mack, shaking with cold and the rage of frustration, finally got up and walked to the stairwell. Kitty was sitting on the stairs, a blanket around her shoulders. Mack stopped for a moment and Kitty took his hand. It was trembling as she put it against her face. Without speaking he pulled it away, and, leaning against the sagging banister, went down the stairs.

“He’s not going to last,” Kitty’s grandfather said later. “The boy has lost his will to live.”

The first week of February was as cold as it could be in the city without completely freezing over. There was a heavy snow on the weekend that blanketed the block in a crisp white silence. Neon signs that seemed good-humored and inviting during warm weather turned cool and distant.