Onion Street (2 page)

Bobby was smiling that night I bailed him out of the Brooklyn House of Detention, or as it was more affectionately known in the County of Kings, the Brooklyn Tombs. He was smiling, but things were different. He had changed. I’d known him since I was six years old and he’d always been blessed with a thick layer of woe-proof skin and slippery shoulders off which trouble would run like rain-water. Just recently, though, his skin didn’t seem quite so thick nor his shoulders as slippery. Maybe it wasn’t Bobby who had changed, but the world had changed around him, and even he’d been powerless to resist its momentum. Listen to me, sounding like I know what I’m talking about. What did I know about the world, anyway? I was just an unambitious schmuck from Coney Island, bumming around Brooklyn College looking for a lifeline. Everything I knew about the world, really
knew
about the world, I had learned on a stickball or basketball court or on the sand beneath the boardwalk.

Bobby Friedman was a happy son of a bitch — quick to smile, slow to anger. The thing about him I could never figure out was how he turned out that way. He certainly didn’t get his take-life-as-it-comes attitude from his parents. Hard-boiled, old-school communists, his folks were about as warm and cuddly as a box of steel wool. His mom was a cold fish who’d spent her childhood on a kibbutz in British-occupied Palestine, but she was Blanche Dubois compared to Bobby’s dad, a tough monkey who’d fought in the Spanish Civil War as an eighteen-year-old and had been a union organizer for the last three decades. Bobby used to joke that his mom’s favorite lullaby was “The Internationale” and that “Free the Rosenbergs” had been his first full sentence. Needless to say, the guys in the neighborhood didn’t hang out much at Chateau Friedman. My pal Eddie Lane used to call their stuffy, oppressive little apartment in Brighton Beach “the gulag.” It was kind of hard to cozy up to people who used words like
liberal
and
progressive
as faint damns, and who held nothing but contempt for our parents. As off-putting as their condescension toward our parents’ bourgeois aspirations might have been, it was nothing compared to the contempt they had for their own son’s cheery and entrepreneurial nature.

Don’t misunderstand: Bobby could recite the ABCs of communism, and even believed a lot of what had been drummed into his head since he popped out of the womb. He had joined Students for a Democratic Society before it became fashionable, and was a top-notch recruiter for the cause. He was a charming alchemist, a guy who could organize a protest rally out of thin air. Bobby Friedman was also the poster boy for cognitive dissonance — even if he could tell you what kind of cigars Castro preferred or explain the minutiae of the Kremlin’s latest Five-Year Plan, Bobby would always be more Lenny Bruce than Lenin, more Groucho than Karl Marx. And there was something else: Bobby Friedman liked money. He liked it a lot. He liked to spend it. More than that, he liked making it.

He was a hustler. He always had an angle, even when we were kids. For instance, he was great at flipping baseball cards. Instead of hoarding them all, he’d sell the duplicates of the prized cards, like the Mickey Mantle rookie card, to the highest bidder. He understood long- and short-term investment before the rest of us understood that we didn’t come from the cabbage patch. Bobby seemed to know where he was going and what the world held in store for him. The future that stretched out before me like a vast desert was, to Bobby, an oasis. He was a man with a plan. I admired that about him.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at Bobby’s smile that night at the Tombs. I was, though, maybe for the first time since we’d sat next to each other in Mrs. Goldberg’s kindergarten class. I was surprised because not only had he chained himself to a police paddy wagon and been dragged along Bedford Avenue for a hundred yards, but because the demonstration was about, among other things, the vicious lies the press and police had spread about Samantha Hope. Bobby’d been dating Samantha Hope for almost a year before the explosion. He had seemed totally smitten by her from the moment they met. I’d been more than a little smitten myself. I suppose all of us guys were. Who wouldn’t have been? She was a Brooklyn Jewish boy’s wet dream: a golden blonde
shiksa
goddess with crystal blue eyes, creamy skin, chiseled cheekbones, and legs up to here. Forget that she was an older woman — by two years — worldly, at least compared to us, and savvy about all sorts of things, but especially politics, drugs, even sports.

For two months now, our goddess had lain in charred bits and pieces in a lonely grave somewhere in her hometown in Pennsylvania. So yeah, I was surprised Bobby was smiling, and maybe more than a little bit disappointed in him. I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t my place to judge other people’s grief. Besides, Bobby looked in bad shape. Although his face was bruised and scratched up from getting bounced along the pavement at twenty miles per hour, most of the damage was below his neckline. His clothes were filthy; the elbows of his sweatshirt and the knees of his jeans in tatters. The skin beneath his shredded clothes hadn’t yet scabbed over, and some of the cuts were still angry, red, and raw.

“You look like shit, man,” I said.

He tousled my hair. “Hey, I got dragged behind a police paddy wagon. What’s your excuse?” Joking, deflecting, that was quintessential Bobby.

“C’mon, I’ll get you home so you can get those cuts washed up and bandaged. Maybe with your fresh battle scars, your mom and dad will finally welcome you into their club.”

“Nah. I could shove a Molotov cocktail up McNamara’s ass and they would still be ashamed of me. I smell of money, don’t ya know? How did the rest of the demonstration go?”

“It didn’t,” I said. “After the arrests and tear gas, it kinda broke up.”

He grabbed my arm and turned me to face him. Finally, that perpetual smile ran away from his face. When it vanished, my disappointment in him went with it. “You know the pigs are full of shit, right? They’re lying about Sam and Marty. Samantha believed in fighting for the cause, but she wasn’t a bomb thrower. That wasn’t her style.”

“I know, Bobby. I know. And Marty Lavitz … come on! He was about as radical as my Uncle Lenny’s Edsel.”

“Even if nobody else believes that, it’s important that you believe, Moe. Sam wouldn’t have done it. You gotta believe me.”

“I do, man. You know I do.”

Bobby’s smile returned and somehow the world felt all right again. When we stepped outside the Tombs, I swear I could feel the heat of the sun on my face, although it was twenty-five degrees and night had fallen over Brooklyn.

We didn’t have fraternities at Brooklyn College. I suppose the powers that be didn’t think we merited them because going to BC was more like a four-year extension of high school than a serious university experience. You took a bus or subway to school in the morning, came home at night to the same apartment you grew up in, slept in the same bed, in the same room, and took the same crap from your parents you had as a kid. But now the crap was worse because not only weren’t you a kid, you weren’t a man, either. Friends who went away to school in far-flung places like Buffalo and Oneonta might’ve been expanding their horizons, but not you.

At BC we had these things called house plans, which were a cross between glorified clubhouses and fraternities with training wheels. They were rented apartments in private homes near campus,
sans
fancified Greek letters. Bobby and I belonged to Burgundy House and we did some of the same stuff as frats did — hazing, beer parties, sports teams — only the stakes were smaller, much smaller. No older house brother was going to help land you a position at a white shoe Wall Street firm after you graduated. You’d be lucky if they helped you land a job shining shoes. Mainly, house plans were places where guys could get away from their parents, hang out, get high, listen to music, and ball their girlfriends.

And now that I had bailed Bobby out, balling my girlfriend was exactly what I had in mind when I showed up in front of Burgundy House. This year Burgundy House was a basement apartment in a weird, rundown Victorian on East 26th Street near the corner of Avenue I. I’d been led to believe that Mindy Weinstock and I shared common cause. During a phone conversation I’d had with her not five minutes before I went to fetch Bobby from the Tombs, Mindy had given me every indication that getting laid was of paramount importance to her. Now, as I reached the end of the driveway and turned toward the back entrance of the Victorian, I wasn’t so sure.

Mindy was smoking the guts out of a cigarette and coughing up a lung, which, if she normally smoked, might not have shocked me quite so much. As it was, the shock of her smoking was mitigated by the fact that she was holding a half-empty pint bottle of Four Roses in her other hand. Mindy drank, but stuff like Miller High Life or Mateus Rose, not bourbon, for goodness sakes. That was the kind of shit our dads drank.

“Hey, you,” I whispered, checking my watch. “I see you started the party without me.”

She tilted her head at me like a confused puppy. “Party?” Then she stared at the cigarette in her right hand and the bottle in her left. “This is no party, Moe. Don’t you know a wake when you see one?”

Truth be told, I didn’t. Maybe half of my friends were Catholic, but I’d never been to a wake and my guess was neither had Mindy.

“What’s this about?” I asked.

“Samantha,” she said, eyes looking anywhere but at me.

“It’s been months, Mindy.”

“So what?” she shouted, raising her arms up over her head so that the bourbon spilled onto her coat. A light popped on in the house next door.

I pushed Mindy’s arms down. “C’mon, keep quiet. The neighbors are already giving our landlord crap for renting to us. Let’s get inside.”

I dug my keys out of my pocket with one hand and urged Mindy forward with the other. As confused as I was by Mindy’s smoking and drinking, I was now doubly confused, because Mindy never much cared for Samantha Hope. Well, no, that’s an understatement. She hated Sam’s guts. For one thing, she thought Sam was a poseur who saw politics as fashion: wearing what was in because it was in, and not because she felt strongly about it one way or the other. Mindy was no poseur. She was plugged into every left-leaning political group on the BC campus. She took it seriously. Another thing was that Mindy wasn’t stupid. She knew how smitten I’d been by Sam. I had been in Mindy’s shoes myself a few times — somebody’s Plan B. No one enjoys being someone’s fallback position. None of this is to say that Mindy didn’t have her charms. She did, in spades, but hers were local charms, dime-a-dozen Brooklyn charms: wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, plush curves.

Given her politics, it was no wonder that Bobby had introduced me to Mindy. They’d known each other since they were little kids, having met at a socialist sleep-away camp upstate. Seems Mindy’s folks were old-school lefties just like the Friedmans, though Mindy’s parents had in recent years laid down their hammer and sickle for a slice of apple pie. Mindy’s dad and I talked about Tom Seaver, not Leon Trotsky. Her mom cooked chicken soup in her kitchen, not revolution. As Bobby’s parents were disappointed in him, so too were Mindy’s parents with her, but for opposite reasons. Mindy’s political indoctrination had stuck, her radicalism untainted by money. I think one of the things her parents liked most about me was that I wasn’t political. It was no secret that the only things I believed in fiercely were sports and avoiding the draft. My presence in their daughter’s life gave them hope. And in spite of her playing at being my girlfriend, we were mostly about the sex. We were never going to be Romeo and Juliet, and I sometimes couldn’t help but feel I was a convenient buffer between Mindy’s politics and her folks’ concerns.

The basement smelled vaguely of old beer and pot smoke. Only vaguely, because the dank odor of mildew fairly overwhelmed everything else. The décor was strictly Salvation Army chic, and the cheaply paneled walls were covered in posters of the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, Raquel Welch, and Joe Namath. We had ones of Che and Malcolm X just to keep Bobby happy. Most of the guys in the house were like me: jocks who were into girls and rock and roll, and who couldn’t’ve cared less about Chairman Mao or Ho Chi Minh. We didn’t want to be our fathers, but we didn’t necessarily want to turn the world on its ear, either.

We weren’t inside for more than five seconds before Mindy had the bottle to her lips. Five seconds after that, she was undressing. I don’t mean prim and properly either. She was tearing at her clothes as if they were on fire. When she was done removing hers, she started at mine. I grabbed her hands, tried holding her wrists, but she was determined, much more determined to push ahead than I was to stop her.

“What’s going on, Min?” I asked as she unbuckled my belt. “What’s the matter?”

She said, “Just shut up and fuck me.”

I shut up and fucked her and continued doing so for another two hours. I wasn’t the most experienced lover in the world, but even I recognized the signs that the sex Mindy and I had that night wasn’t about sex at all. It was about hunger and anger and escape. Escape from what, I couldn’t say. It was mind blowing because it was both great and terrible, intimate and empty. Every one of her moans, her sighs, her orgasms was like an urgent prayer. But it really got trippy after the fact, when she curled herself up into my arms and cried. And this wasn’t gentle sobbing I’m talking about. At first, as the tears rolled onto my chest and down past my ribs onto the mattress of the foldout couch, I held her tight and stroked her hair. Mindy wasn’t generally given to tears. I’m not saying she was hard. She just wasn’t a crier.

“I know I’m not Don Juan, but I’ve never driven a girl to tears before.”

“You’re an idiot, Moe.”

“Is this about Samantha again?” I whispered.

“Sort of.”

“Huh?”

Then she choked out, “Bobby was my first. Did you know that?”

I felt more than a little pang of jealousy. I’d suspected there was a deeper connection between Bobby and Mindy than hand holding at sleep-away camp, though I never asked. I don’t think I really wanted to know. Bobby wasn’t the best-looking guy in Brooklyn, but girls loved him. I knew Mindy wasn’t a virgin and I never really cared about stuff like that. Besides, my experience as a virgin and being with them wasn’t very magical. It was always awkward. The only good thing about those moments was that they didn’t last very long. For some reason it really got under my skin about Mindy and Bobby, and it must have showed. Mindy could feel me clench.

As she wiped her tears with the back of her hands, she asked, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “I thought you were upset about Sam. Now all of a sudden you’re talking about screwing Bobby. What’s this got to do with Bobby?”

“Nothing. Nothing. That was stupid. I shouldn’t have said it. Forget it. I think I’m still a little drunk.”

She was out of my arms, off the couch, naked and tiptoeing across the cold, gritty linoleum to the bathroom. The light went on and I heard the shower running. I should have warned her to leave the light off. Bobby liked to joke that the place was so filthy, cockroaches would have wanted it fumigated before agreeing to infest.

I must have drifted off to sleep there for a bit because when I opened my eyes, Mindy was pulling her damp hair over the collar of her coat.

“Where you going, babe? I thought we could go get some pizza or something and — ”

“Not tonight,” she whispered. “I couldn’t, not tonight, not with …” Then she leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth, a desperate kind of kiss.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, pulling her down next to me. Her coat still reeked of bourbon. “You’re acting kinda freaked out.”

Her expression was pained, her lips pressed tightly together. She seemed to want to say something, needed to say something.

“Moe, I need you to do a favor for me.”

I wriggled my eyebrows. “Anything, babe. Gimme a second. I think I got another round in me.”

She slapped me lightly on the chin. “No, this is serious. I need you to listen to me carefully and do as I ask, but no questions. Say you’ll do it for me.”

I said, “Sure, whatever you want.”

“Promise me you won’t question me, and that you’ll keep your word.”

I sat up, my back against the rear cushions of the couch. “Now you’re freaking me out.”

“Promise me!”

“Okay, Min, sure. I promise. What is it?”

“Just stay away from Bobby for the next couple of days. Stay away from him, Moe. Far away.”

“Are you putting me on? You sound like that stupid robot on
Lost in Space
.” I pressed my elbows to my ribs and moved my forearms up and down. “Danger, Moe Prager! Danger! Stay far away from Bobby Friedman. What’s with that? It does not compute.”

Her face was deadly serious. “I’m not putting you on, lover. Keep away from Bobby.”

Before I could say another word, Mindy was out the door. I wasn’t exactly dressed to go chasing after her. Even if I had been, she wouldn’t have talked to me. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew my girlfriend well enough. It was a struggle for her to say what she had and she wasn’t going to say another word. Trouble was, I could be as curious as a litter of Siamese kittens. In the face of curiosity, promises be damned.