Women and Men (152 page)

Meanwhile dozens of barrels of flour were rolled into the street and the heads broken open and a kid named James was throwing barrels of flour out into the street from an upper story calling, "Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel," which was what it should have been selling at perhaps, and the constabulary could do nothing with the anger of the mob which was organized from its inception north of City Hall at the present site and it was the first riot in "your history," the lady told us, where the poor ripped off the property of the rich and a New York paper called it the beginning of the French Revolution, did anyone know what the French Revolution was—no one in this junior high class did, and one of the drivers asked who the George Washington Bridge had been named after and a black kid said, Martha’s man. Anyway here was the Flour Riot of 1837, never forgot it, Jim, so what if the building had changed, and it was inflation panic, Ruth said, did we know what inflation was? the voice held us, not the words which is often the case with colloid communication, prices going up, what do you do when the landlord hits you for twice what your pad is worth like me, said Ruth M. Heard, because you see, rent went right up with flour in 1836-37, right? (Right!) and why was that (why the bakers, a man’s voice called, owned all the real estate) and as Ruth called out these questions, three older ladies with small hats came out at the door of a restaurant to smile, and I said, We got rent control now. Ruth called, Well what about the poor landlord, you watch, the City ups his property taxes and you and your family go on paying peanuts for your apartment; I said You’re taking both sides—her voice came at you deepened, like harsh pellets whipping through the sunlight. I reached for Miriam’s hand, she was over by a vendor with Gonzales buying a hot dog, the cost of flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel. Ruth asked what was a monopoly, one of our drivers as stocky as a snatch-and-press fanatic here on the farm cut in and gave a teacher-type answer that sounded English to me until she told him compassion was death and he could shut up now and the point was the flour people had made flour and wheat scarce by hiding them in the warehouse till the price went up: see the flour in the streets, our substitute called, and our twofold divided group on the sidewalk had been joined by slow-moving late-lunchtime people and messengers one with an enlarged head, one not, and anybody you want to think of was looking up at James’s windows. And as the flour and sacks of wheat came down, rent went up, now how do you figure that, think of what the street looked like! Think of life outside.

But we were back in the vans now—Jim, I’ve been over every square foot of that trip in here, I have the map, I have the pictures of old New York—and we were headed to the fish market to see historic Coenties Slip with the little houses that looked like they might fall down, which was where the rioters wound up smashing windows and doors and ten more barrels emptied. But at this point, Jim, our substitute reintroduced one of her wealthy Americans, the strong one, as the man who was going to buy us hamburgers with the works at three o’clock and I don’t know how many hamburgers and sodas went down, this is 1958, 1959, but I was the only one who could tell without counting hamburgers and sodas that little Gonzales and Miriam had been missing since the last stop and I figured Gonzalez knew what he was doing if Miriam didn’t, for this was only junior high and Gonzalez went everywhere with his father and often alone to do with his father’s lamp business. It was irresponsible of me and of Ruth Heard not to, respectively, do something and know about the two absentees, but when we arrived back at the school in our vans there was High Kool making his moves and dunking a few, and the roughest girl in the class, Louise, laughed at something Ruth said and looked over her shoulder and caught me looking at her and I gave her the grin, and a thought came in one eye and out the other—and no Gonzalez though there was an explanation, little G. had had a business appointment several blocks uptown and Miriam accompanied him, an errand for his father. Ruth M. Heard kept me or I her talking by the playground fence and she was telling how she had heard about the brain drain from Britain and had decided to come over in case any rubbed off on her, and how she was Jewish and so was New York which I was ready to believe though not that this small blue-eyed rambunctious woman with
her
accent could be Jewish. She said, You’re ahead of the others, I suspect way ahead—but how
old
are you? What’s going to happen to you? Two teachers, two men, had come down the steps with a cop, it was late, they seemed to be approaching but this was the time of day and really they were waiting, and Ruth M. Heard said, Here comes trouble, I could walk her home another time, but I had said nothing about walking her home, Jim.

"You were thinking it," you reply, picking up what I would have said had I not known you would pick it up.

Yes, and there I stood at the playground fence, it had begun to rain and High Kool stopped short with the ball hanging from one hand and looked upward. I felt the city, this block and the few other blocks I knew well, south going down to Fourteenth and east to the river, you know the area I know, and while my parents’ building and others like it still stand, now being occupied by, as my father used to say, "off-islanders" (Hispanics) but I happen to know also by gypsies from New Jersey via Rumania, and rocked by bongo drops (suddenly a drum is ther^, two drums, and guys have cut out to play them) and opened here and there by dust-choking construction sites like everywhere else in the city where kids play and imagine shortcuts through to other Arab- and Australian-financed construction sites leading mayhap to a brand-new disaster area where their own building was this morning, which may be what happened to Juan’s little brother like Efrafn who passed into the very heart of pickpocket land where you get the opposite, ungraphable, unpredictable, and anti-pickpocket warp where instead of your pocket being picked, valuable stuff comes
into
your pocket.

And suddenly, retreating from me to face the music for the first of many times and she could care less, Ruth M. Heard left me at the fence dreaming of speaking, starting somewhere between ahead of myself and retarded— speaking of what then I did not know, thinking nonetheless of, well mostly bullshit, Jim, but also of Ruth M. Heard’s father, who I thought might have died, yes hit by a bullet while speaking his mind on some great current event, and there beside me was Miriam looking over her shoulder telling me our substitute was in a shouting match down there (her eyes slightly wall-eyed like some thought came back to me seeing me but . . . you know).

But I had not noticed what she reported; no at that moment I was speaking my mind with an eye on the fence, the mesh steel the action viewed through the diamond holes which went away when you looked at the guys through them stopped, gathered around High Kool, all looking into the sky, and like taking up position in advance
SQ
you’re the one who is fouled, not the guy who couldn’t check himself when you stopped and he ran into you, I can imagine basketball is the key to everything but these guys didn’t play with fouls, and I didn’t want to go home but looked at Miriam wondering when I’d get angry about her disappearing with little Gonzalez and saw that she hadn’t registered a word I’d said, because I was speaking
in
my mind, and I looked at Ruth tossing her head of thick heavy curls twice our age and shaking her finger at the men, and I thought I would like to speak on how the poor women gathered into their own bags the wastes of flour and wheat from the barrels and wheat sacks spewed by the rioters into the street and how maybe the rain—what month was it? I (didn’t know—came down and mixed in with the flour near the fishmarket until you had a block-long of dough and immigrant demonstrators heated in the oven of the City freely sprinkled with if not sugar as Mir’s Aunt Iris did, then by a free hydrant. But I knew that current events were of more use: a human newspaper I found myself, but talking mainly to Ruth Heard who believe me knew too much and
was
too much for the authorities to permit her to exist. And then I got angry at Mir’ and walked her home, and she said I was crazier than Miss Heard when I said, Here’s all this news coming in from Russia, from Algeria to see if General De Gaulle can end the war, from uptown and from Wall Street, and I’m not there, I’m here stuck in a neighborhood, know what I mean? "Vacuum-packed for burial in space" I wouldn’t have said then because it had not been said yet, though I don’t mind taking it from the journalist the Chilean met at the launch named Spence I think for he’ll take a thing or two from me like all the rest before we all get sick of ripping each other off.

Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.

Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather—what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm)—whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.

The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.

Two blocks down and around the corner our dingy brick church with long, wide, slightly curving steps and the white-and-colored altar you can see if you stand across the street down from the black-and-blue awning of the undertaker and his double-doors down two—no, one step, brownstone.

Couple of pizza joints a block apart, one with the booths down one side where we sat and a wise kid who works there with big horn-rimmed glasses bigger than his face who’s giving us a lot of shit across the counter and the girls are threatening him; the other, a take-out with Sicilian
and
regular Guinea pizza, the Sicilian like cake. What color
are
the cop cars?

And it comes like particles in the wind, snowing me, pouring in and I’m the funnel, but you know that already some bull on the corner of Third Avenue is yelling to some bull two blocks away, "Hey Johnny," "Hey
Eddie,
" "Hey Marco," "Hey
Eric"
"Hey Sal," when a refrigerator truck stops for the light and blocks the view and the guy goes on yelling, under the truck, around the front, over the top, through the high cab where the driver with his arm on the rolled-down window ledge looks straight ahead, gunning the motor.

Six flights up, I’m old enough now, taking a can of beer out of the icebox, shaking it a few times, get a rise out of my mother—"it’s going to go all over the floor, Georgie"; my dad standing in the kitchen door, "At it again, fuckin’ freeloader."

Telling them when I’m in high school about Ruth Heard. Why do I? I know what they’ll say, do you understand, Jim? I know what they’re going to say but I still go ahead and tell them. Very smart lady, funny, went to college in London, England, fastest tongue in the East—dismissed, reappeared, dismissed, disappeared, rehired as substitute still talking, still doing it her way, calling New York schools so bad they might not be an instrument of the class system after all, commanding us to write down the best lies we could think up: "Eric can beat up Jeannette because boys are stronger than girls" (when the truth was that Eric had hypnotic powers and everyone knew it and in those days boys had more pockets than girls and Eric had some very bad things in his pockets, no mere switchblade knife but tricky electrical devices he said his father had taught him to miniaturize). (But, no no, said Ruth Heard, that lie’s just confusing, it’s not persuasive; get to what matters, what we live with.) "My father don’t go to church on Sundays because my mother takes care of that side." (But that’s no lie, that’s true, isn’t that true?) "Someone I know, her sister she’s getting married now not waiting till June because she wants to get out of the house she can’t stand it no more." (Getting out of the house? Ah yes, a substitute for the real reason, and a good substitute, and so a persuasive lie. Right.) "If you study hard you will get a good job." (Well look at me, I’m a product of the English school system, ruined my eyes, speak two languages, don’t read any more, only speak, intelligent, brave, and beautiful, and here I am, waiting to get started.) "America is the best country." (Of course it is, that’s why I came.) "This is where the money is—I wasn’t finished, Mrs. Heard." (Not "missus," thanks but no thanks, marriage is important, it’s one of the most interesting and dangerous ways of distinguishing between two people. Otherwise, religious cant.)