Onion Street (4 page)

Some days it just ain’t worth opening your eyes and no matter how fast you shut them again, it’s too late. So it was for me … way too late. Last night’s slush was gone. Now my head was filled with wool, my mouth with cotton. Apparently someone had shoved a harpoon through my right shoulder while I slept. Other than that, I was ready for action.
Put me in, Coach. I’m your boy
. Fuck that! I was nobody’s boy. I forced my eyes open again and time-traveled into the present. The air no longer smelled of beer breath or fake pine trees, but of Woolite linens and burnt coffee. The comforting clank and rumble, the
ka
-
ching
,
ka
-
ching
of subway wheels on rails, had replaced the slapping of wiper blades as the backbeat to my life. I was still in my clothes, my Chuck Taylors still on my feet. Not that I remembered how, but I’d managed to get from Bobby’s front seat into my bed. And there was something else. Unclenching my left fist, I found five one-hundred-dollar bills folded neatly in my palm — the bail money.

When I sat up, Ahab stuck the harpoon in a little deeper.
The white whale tasks me
. That those were the words that came to mind only proved I was screwed. See, that was the thing about Bobby and my brother: they knew where they were going. I didn’t know anything, or how to do anything except quote dead writers and shoot a fifteen-foot fadeaway jumper. Not much of a job market for the former, nor for the latter when the shooter is a six-foot-tall, slow-footed white boy. There were days I wished I woke up with a hunger for adding machines and ledger books. I wanted to know where I was going, or even where I wasn’t. I guess that’s completely understandable when you’re on the verge of choosing a major and minor subject from the mootsville trinity of English, philosophy, and psychology. I hobbled to the bathroom as if on a wooden leg, and thought I was very badly in need of my own white whale. I needed to chase something in my life other than Mindy’s ass.

Christ, I looked like shit, but at least no one was home to see but me. When I peeled back my shirt, I got weak at the sight of my shoulder. I was black, blue, yellow, brown, and orange from my right nipple across my chest, around my back, and halfway down my arm. My skin looked like a box of melted crayons. Though puffed and swollen, I could just about raise my arm without losing consciousness. No bones seemed to be broken or sticking out where they didn’t belong. I figured I’d live. I swallowed way too many aspirins, finished undressing, showered, and brushed my teeth. It improved my aroma, if not my appearance.

I called Mindy’s number and got no answer. That was odd. I knew she was probably at school, but her mom was almost always home. For some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I got a sick feeling in my gut. Maybe it was the paranoid afterglow of whatever narcotic Bobby had given me. Yeah, I thought, that was it. Because of my shoulder pain and the drug hangover, getting dressed went about as smoothly as a thumbless man tying his shoes. Still, I managed to do it in less than a week. Of course, the aspirin didn’t kick in until I was done. There was the newspaper and a note for me on the kitchen table. I was confident the note was from Aaron, probably lambasting me for coming home drunk, for being a lazy, aimless piece of shit with no ambition and no future. I was getting a little tired of his notes and lectures, so I didn’t look at the note until I’d fortified myself with some of my mom’s coffee. Fortified being the key word, because if you could survive the over-percolated and burnt black goo that passed for coffee in the Prager household, you could survive almost anything.

I looked at the back page of the paper, the sports section calling to me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Aaron’s damned note. I figured I’d read it just to be done with it. The note was from Aaron. That much I’d gotten right. Everything else I’d gotten wrong, as wrong as getting could get. I was out of the apartment almost before I finished reading the note.

• • •

What’s in a name? Sometimes everything. Kings Highway Hospital was small and privately owned, not one of the bloated gas giants run by the city like Kings County or Bellevue, and it was where Aaron’s note said the ambulance had brought Mindy.

Mindy’s mom was a heavyset woman who, with a
babushka
around her head and some gold teeth in her mouth, would not have looked out of place in the Ukrainian
shtetl
from which her grandparents or parents had no doubt come. Her large, doe-brown eyes were moist and bloodshot, her voice choked with tears and barely contained panic. She lit up when I came running toward her down the hall. Mindy’s father — his burden unlightened by my arrival — was there too: pacing, twitchy, blank-faced. He was a gaunt man, now a scarecrow. Her mother locked me in her embrace, my right shoulder burning in pain. I toughed it out. These people didn’t need to hear about my relatively minor woes. Mr. Weinstock gave me a ghost-like pat on the back.

“Beatrice, Beatrice,” her husband said, putting his twig arm across her shoulders. “Mindy will be all right. You know how stubborn a girl she is. If anyone will be good, it will be our Mindy.”

I wanted to make a joke, to tell them that she had survived my mom’s coffee many times, so of course Mindy would be okay. But this was no time for jokes and smiles.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. Aaron’s note had been sketchy on details.

Her mom answered through her tears. “She’s … she’s in … a
… coma.”

“A coma! What happened?” I asked.

“They found her on the street last night in the snow, unconscious with a big gash across her forehead,” her father said. “The cops think it was a botched mugging.”

I didn’t understand. “Botched?”

“Yeah, the detective said they found her watch and wallet on her. She must have put up some fight, boy.” His sunken chest swelled with pride. He turned to his wife. “She’s such a fighter. That’s why I know she will be fine.”

“Where did they find her?” I asked. “When?”

“In the snow, like I — ”

“No, Herbie,” Mrs. Weinstock interrupted, impatient. “Moe means where, on what street?”

I nodded. “Right.”

“Sorry, Moe. They found her on East 17th and Glenwood Road in front of a house. An old woman looking through her window told the police she saw her struggling with a young, light-skinned colored — black man,” he was quick to correct himself. “The old woman said the black man had pink blotches on his hands and face.”

“Pink blotches, huh? That should make him easier to find,” I said.

“I suppose you’re right. Meanwhile, the old woman said that he dropped Mindy to the sidewalk and limped away. Mindy must have given him such a kick or something to make him let go.”

There was that sick feeling in my gut again, only this time it was worse, much worse. I was trying to figure out a delicate way to ask the next question, but couldn’t find the words. I just asked it raw.

“Were there other injuries?”

Her father shook his head. “You mean … was he trying to rape her?”

I didn’t, but said yes anyway.

“No, they don’t think so,” he said, thankful for something. “She was bruised up all over, though, so he must have beat her up pretty bad.”

My head was spinning. Suddenly this relationship, which I had been willing to dismiss as mostly about sex, didn’t feel that way. I was torn, and torn apart inside. I wanted to fall to pieces and to rip someone to shreds.

“Can I see her?”

“The doctors are in with her now, and they said it will be a while,” her mom answered. “Go, do what you have to do. Go to school. We’ll call you if she — ”

“
When
she wakes up,” her dad shouted. “When!”

“Okay, Herbie. Okay, when. Moe, we’ll call you when she wakes up or if there’s any change.”

I hugged them both and drifted back down the hall, down the stairs, and out onto Kings Highway. I just stood there, lost, staring at nothing in particular. Then I heard someone, a woman, say, “Look, Jim, there’s Daddy. No,
there
, up on the second floor. See, he’s in the window, waving.”

I looked up and there in a second floor window was a man, the silhouette of a man, really, in a robe. He was waving down. His wave was weak and unenthusiastic. I turned to look at Jim. He was a boy of six or seven, overdressed against the cold. His face was full of many things: fear, longing, anger, maybe even love. Mostly, he seemed confused.

Jim
, I thought,
that makes two of us
.

I walked to school from the hospital through the slush and compacted piles of filthy snow. Doesn’t take long for hearts and snow to blacken in Brooklyn. Snow in my world only looks white when it’s falling, but it’s already tainted before touching down. Nothing stays uncorrupted. Nothing. I think I knew that before I could walk. That kid at the hospital, he knew it too. Sometimes I think that was the worst part of having to stay home and go to Brooklyn College. There was no fooling myself that the world could be any different. I thought about the few friends I had who’d been lucky enough to escape to magical places like Ann Arbor or Palo Alto, or even Buffalo. Maybe it’s true that you can’t run away from your troubles, but fuck me if I didn’t want to find out for myself.

The world goes on. That’s the first thing I thought when I turned right off Bedford Avenue and stepped onto the quad. Between periods, the quad is a beehive. It looks like chaos from the outside, but not to the bees themselves. Somehow I couldn’t reconcile that Mindy had been beaten into a coma and people were laughing, smoking cigarettes. Mindy was in a coma, and people went to their classes. Mindy was in a coma, and people did what they did. The world went on, but how could it? Suddenly, I wanted no part of this place. BC had always been a good place for me to hide. School provided great camouflage for my lack of ambition, but Aaron was right: our kid sister had more of a plan for her life than I did. It was one thing to let myself be carried along with the tide, to be going no place in particular except where the tide took me. This was different. I’d always believed I would bide my time in college, that I would stumble into something or that something would stumble into me. Instead, I’d been steamrolled. I hadn’t seen this coming, this thing that happened to Mindy. Now, for the first time in my life, I had a purpose. I needed to find out what had happened to my girlfriend, and I knew where to start looking.

I found Lids where I knew I’d find him, selling loose joints and whatever else outside the gates on the other side of campus. Cops walked their beats. Lids walked his. I also knew Lids by his real name, Larry Lester. He was two years younger than me, but had been a year ahead of me at school. He had been Lincoln High School’s fair-haired boy, destined for a vastly different trajectory than the arc he was now traveling. Larry was supposed to be at MIT or Princeton or Cornell, doing book-length equations on the relationships between quarks and quasars and how they proved or disproved the existence of God. Larry Lester — Ocean Parkway’s answer to Descartes and Einstein — had lasted exactly one and a half terms at MIT before he went flip city. He never got around to smashing atoms. Instead, they smashed him. At least he cracked and wound up in a rubber room before they found him hanging in his closet by his belt. And now here he was, selling joints and getting by in the shadows of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues.

“Feed your head,” was his whispered refrain to familiar passersby.

“Yo, Larry, got a minute?” I said, looping my arm through his. It wasn’t a question and he knew it.

“It’s Lids. It’s Lids out here, man,” he repeated, as I swept him along. “I’ve got a rep to keep.”

“Okay, Lids, you look hungry. Eggs? My treat.”

“Sure, Moe. Eggs are good.”

“Eggs it is.”

We turned up Campus Road toward the diner next to the off-campus bookstore. We sat at a tiny table in the corner. The place smelled of fried onions and grilling bacon. That was almost enough to lift me out of the darkness. Almost. Athena, the toothy, horse-faced waitress, took our orders and poured us coffee without looking. She never looked. She never spilled a drop. Athena was half the reason I ate here. I loved to watch her move, how, even built stocky and low to the ground as she was, she flowed like water through the crowd, in and out and around the tightly packed chairs and tables, avoiding book bags and busboys. That day I paid her movements no mind. I could not escape the idea of Mindy in a hospital bed, never waking up.

“What’s the buzz?” Larry wanted to know.

“That’s what I was hoping you could help me with.”

His red, sleepy eyes regarded me with deep suspicion. “You want some of my wares? I didn’t think that was your bag, Moe.”

I shook my head. “No, no, no. I don’t want anything like that.”

His eyes turned from suspicion to confusion. “Then I’m even more lost than I was a second ago, and I’ve been lost since 1965.”

“Mindy’s in a coma.”

“Your old lady?”

“Yeah. She was mugged and beaten. They found her in the snow on Glenwood Road and East 17th.”

“Fuck, man. That’s heavy, but what do you want from — ”

“Two eggs over easy, home fries, bacon, rye toast.” Athena slid the plate down in front of Lids. “A toasted corn muffin, butter.” She was nearly as suspicious of me as Larry. “You always order eggs,” she said in her Greek-inflected English, “scrambled, french fries, whole wheat toast. What’s with you today, darling, no appetite?”

“Not much of one, no,” I confessed.

She winked at me. “Girl troubles?”

“In a way.”

“Don’t worry, honey.” She tapped her nose with her index finger. “Everything will work out. Athena knows these things.”

I hoped so.

Showing me a mouth full of yellow egg yolk and potatoes, Lids asked, “Like I was saying, what do you want from me?” I slid a hundred-dollar bill across the table to him. There was that confusion in his eyes again. “I thought you — ”

“It’s not for dope. It’s for information. I want you to spread it around, and don’t tell me you don’t know what that means.”

The bill stayed on the table, untouched. “What do you need to know?”

“Two nights ago, Mindy was someplace between six and eight o’clock. I need to know where. Also, the cops say the guy who did this to her was a light-skinned black dude, young, with pink blotches on his skin. Anything you — ”

“Vitiligo,” Larry said.

“What?”

“Those pink blotches, it’s vitiligo, a skin pigmentation disease.”

“Whatever you say, Larry. But anything you can find out about where she was the other night or the guy that did this to her … you know, whatever.”

“What you gonna do, Moe?”

“I don’t know, but I gotta do something or I’ll go fucking crazy. Her parents are wrecks. They’re scared. I’m scared. I gotta do something.”

Now Lids leaned across the table and whispered, “Listen, Moe, you were always nice to me. In school, you always watched out for guys like me and Spider Thomas. You never asked for anything in return, but I know I owe you. So keep your money.” He slid the bill back across the table to me. “If I need to spread bread around, I’ll use my own
gelt
. But I probably won’t have to. People get stoned and they get stupid. People who want to get stoned can also get pretty desperate. Either way, they’ll talk to me.”

“I trust you.” I took the C-note back. But if I thought Lids was going to leave it at that, I was wrong.

He leaned forward and said, “And whatever you feel you gotta do, don’t do it yourself, man. I’m pretty close to people who, you know …”

“What kind of people, Larry? Who we talking about, here?”

“I owe you, Moe, but not that much. I know who I know. Leave it at that. You want something done, come to me and it will get done, but you won’t know who did it.”

“Okay, Larry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful and I’m sorry for being so nosy. I’m just so mad about what happened to Mindy, I feel like I’m gonna explode.” I stood up, threw a five on the table, and patted him on the shoulder.

He grabbed my wrist. “I don’t know what I’ll hear or if it will help, but whatever I find out … you still at the same number?”

“Yeah. If you can’t get me there, you can get me at Burgundy House.” I wrote that number down for him.

He grabbed my wrist again. “Something’s bugging me, Moe.” He started doing that twitchy face thing he did when he got overly excited. “Something’s bugging me.”

“What is?”

“They found Mindy on Glenwood and East 17th, right? That’s right near the subway station.”

“Glenwood and East 17th, that’s what her dad told me, yeah.”

“It doesn’t make sense. She lives in Canarsie. That’s in the opposite direction. What was she doing over there?”

“I don’t know. When she comes out of the coma, I’ll ask her. It’s not important right now.”

“If it’s not important, then why do you want me to find out where she was the other night?”

“That’s different.”

He was ticcing like crazy now. “No, it’s the same.”

“Look, wherever she was when she got mugged, it was the wrong place. Like I said, it’s not important.”

“But it is important. Where a person is when an event occurs is as important as where particles are when they collide. If they are not in that place, there is no collision. Without that collision, the universe is a different place, subtly different, maybe, but different nonetheless. Don’t you understand? It’s the key to everything: knowing where things are, or were, or where they will be.”

I left him there, mumbling to himself about particles and uncertainty, his tics calmed, his eyes turned inward. I think maybe for the first time, I got a sense of how he’d come undone. I hoped Athena could rescue him from where he had gone to. I couldn’t. Even if Athena couldn’t do the trick, I had faith Larry would come out of it. He always did, always had. He had to. I needed him.

As bad as I felt for Larry, my internal pressure had eased a bit. If nothing came of our encounter, at least I’d let off some steam. And who knew? Larry was good at finding out all sorts of stuff. People get stoned and they get stupid, that’s what he’d said. Yet another reason why I shied away from drugs. I didn’t need any help in getting stupid. Just ask my brother Aaron.