Piecework Read online

  But we also saw a lot of games at Ebbets Field. The Police Athletic League gave away Knothole Club tickets, and so — reluctantly, fearful of the taint of betrayal — we would go into the 72nd Precinct each spring and sign up for the PAL so we could get Dodger tickets. They were almost always in the bleachers, when the worst teams (and poorest draws) were in town against the Dodgers, but we didn’t care. There was Dixie Walker, over in right field, and Pete Reiser, playing out the shattered autumn of his career, his brilliant talent broken against the walls of the great ballpark. And on different days in different summers, Reese, Snider, Billy Cox, Stanky, Furillo, Hodges, and the rest, HIT SIGN WIN SUIT, said Abe Stark’s sign under the Scoreboard in center; the sign was three feet off the ground, and it would have required three simultaneous outfield coronaries for any batter to bounce a baseball off that sign, but it was a crucial part of the furnishings. And there, jittery and wonderful, dancing off third base, ready to steal home, rattling the pitchers, was Jackie Robinson. That was part of being a Dodger fan then: You were forced to take a moral position. To be a Dodger fan in those days was to endorse the idea that a black man had a right to steal home in the major leagues.

  Ebbets Field became our second home. We knew how to scale the fence if there were no PAL tickets; we knew where we could rob programs and scorecards. We developed a variety of techniques for getting in; we had one crippled kid in the neighborhood whom we carried out like a prop, telling the guards he had three days to live, or had been hit by a car driven by a Giant fan, or had been caught in Europe during the war and bombed by the Nazis. The guards always let us in. We knew where to wait for the ballplayers when they came out, and which one signed autographs and which didn’t. Tell me I’m fourteen and I’ll tell you I just saw Cookie Lavagetto.

  We collected baseball picture cards, which came with bubble gum, and there was an elaborate system of games and trading that revolved around the cards. We hated the Yankees so much that we despised the entire league that housed them, so there was no value at all to most players from the American League. If a National League player wasn’t a Dodger, he had to be good to be valued; if he was good, we feared him, and that meant we saved Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Sal Maglie, Johnny Mize, and, later, Willie Mays.

  Because there was no television, we came early to newspapers. They would lie under their two-by-four on Pop Sanew’s newsstand: the News, Mirror, Times, Herald Tribune, Journal-American, World-Telegram, Post, PM, Brooklyn Eagle, and Brooklyn Times-Union. In that neighborhood, we thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin, just as other neighborhoods thought that the Daily News was edited by Francisco Franco. But we didn’t care about any of that. Somehow, with deposits from milk and soda bottles, we bought papers: to read Jimmy Cannon in the Post, Frank Graham in the Journal, Dan Parker in the Mirror, and, most important of all, Dick Young in the News. Young was the greatest writer in history, we felt, better than Tommy Holmes or Harold C. Burr in the Eagle (which I delivered after school, and had other people deliver when I went to ball games), better than anyone we were forced to read at school. He was always going after the bosses, after Branch Rickey and then after the infamous Walter O’Malley. The dream job was to grow up and be Dick Young.

  We would read the papers sitting in doorways on the avenues, memorizing statistics, knowing each minor fluctuation in averages, at bats, strikeouts, or walks. In those days, ERA stood for earned-run average; for some of us it still does. And when we had finished with the sports pages, we would turn to the comics: “Dick Tracy,” Milton Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates,” and, later, “Steve Canyon,” and some of us would cut them out, pasting entire runs of the strips into scrapbooks, making our own comic books. I was probably the only reader of PM in that neighborhood, because it carried Crockett Johnson’s great comic strip “Barnaby,” about a young boy with a fairy godfather named O’Malley who smoked cigars and was a Dodger fan.

  Reading the papers, before or after a game, was usually accompanied by eating or drinking Yankee Doodles and Devil Dogs, iced Pepsi, Mission Bell grape, Frank’s orange. It seems to me I spent hundreds of hours with seven or eight other guys sucking the air out of empty soda bottles and letting them dangle from my lips. Slowly, gravity would pull the bottles away from our lips, air would leak in, the bottles would disconnect and fall. If you were the last man left, you won the deposit money.

  You needed money for soda, spaldeens, comics, and newspapers, but you didn’t need money for a lot of other things. You knew that sneakers had to last an entire summer, no matter how worn and disgusting they became, so you learned to bandage them with tape. You would have one pair of roller skates for the season, and one skate key. The skates were the kind that clamped on shoes and had metal wheels. When the wheels began to wear out (developing “skellies”), we took the skates apart, nailed them to two-by-fours, nailed milk boxes to the top of the two-by-fours, and scooter season had begun.

  Street games were constant: ringolevio, giant steps, buck buck (how many horns are up?), a bizarre wartime game called concentration camp (Nazis were one team, rounding up the rest of us, and torturing us). Off-the-point and single-double-triple-home-run required spaldeens and were played off stoops; boxball was another variation, as restrained as cricket. Clearly, the spaldeen was at the heart of most of the games, and near the end of the day we would prowl the rooftops looking for balls that had been caught in drains, wedged behind pigeon coops, stuck under slats or behind chimneys. We would boil them to make them clean and to give them more bounce. One day, my brother Tommy boiled a half dozen such balls in a big pot, and they came out pink and glistening. Later on, my mother came home from work, and he made her a cup of tea. She gagged. Tommy hadn’t changed the water, and the lovely amber-colored tea tasted of pure spaldeens. The rest of us would have loved the brew.

  We played touch football with rolled and taped newspapers. Because of the cost, I didn’t hold a real football in my hands until I was sixteen, and I never had a bike. I didn’t feel at all deprived. Hockey was played with a puck made of crumpled tin cans, and basketball was a Bronx game. We had no backyard because the house was on an avenue, so there were no pools or hoses to cool us off; we opened the fire hydrants with a wrench and made a spray by holding a wooden slat against the cascading water. There was room to run barefoot in the streets then, because there were almost no cars. Later, when the war was over and the cars came, they ended the hydrants and ruined the stickball courts and stained the fresh morning air. But we didn’t know that would happen. We lived with nouns: marbles, comics, lots, roofs, factories, balls, newspapers, scores. But we were verbs. Verbs to be, and verbs that were active. We didn’t know that the nouns contained their own cemeteries.

  Coney Island was the great adventure. We went there by trolley car, on a long clacking journey that took us through the last New York farms, with tomato plants ripening on either side of us; figs and dates growing in yards, farmers scratching at spinach fields. I was there the day Luna Park burned down, the giant plumes of smoke billowing into the sky and women crying. And when that old amusement park was gone, we were left with Steeplechase the Funny Place, 31 rides for half a dollar — that and Nathan’s, when hot dogs were a dime and never ever tasted better again anywhere in America. We camped in Bay 12, near Nathan’s, and later moved down to the bay in front of Scoville’s, a great Irish summer saloon with umbrellas in the back, where the women sat in summer dresses, and the men bought beer by the pitcher, and the bar smelled of pretzels and suntan oil; and we finished at Bay 22, in front of a place called Oceantide, near Sea Gate.

  In memory, we never saw the sand. Every inch was covered with blankets and bodies: glistening young bodies, swollen older bodies of women waddling into the surf, the inaccessible bodies of girls. I would plunge into the unruly sea, thinking of white whales, harpoons, Ahab; of my grandfather Devlin, who had seen Rangoon before his death on the Brooklyn docks, far from his Irish home; -of strange continents, exotic cities, women with hot, dark eyes. In C
oney Island, I drank my first beer, touched my first female breast, received a wounding kiss from my first great love. Alas and farewell. In my mind, there is always a day when I am under the boardwalk, with the beach suddenly clearing, blankets snatched, books swooped up, as the sky darkens and I am alone, leaning against a coarse concrete pillar, in the rumbling fugue of a summer storm. July is gone. August has almost burnt itself out. And September lies ahead, like a prison sentence.

  On those days, careening home on the trolley cars, I would go down to the public library on 9th Street and Sixth Avenue and vanish into books. Or I would walk another block to the RKO Prospect, where my mother was a cashier, and go into the chilly darkness with my brother Tommy. Books made us think; the movies let us dream. One tempered or enriched the other. And both were free. So were the streets. So were we.

  That city still exists for me. I live in its ruins. In the mornings of July, I sometimes remember that morning long ago, after a gang member named Giacomo had been killed by a shot from one of the South Brooklyn Boys, and dawn spilled across the park like blood. I remember the rooftops, pigeons circling against the lucid sky, and the blind semaphore of laundry flapping in the breeze. I’m certain that if I turn on the radio, Red Barber will tell me that Reese is on second, with Furillo batting and Snider in the on-deck circle. If I go out and walk to 13th Street, I can ring the bell and Vito will come down and we’ll go up to the Parkside and McAlevey and Horan and Timmy and Duke and Billy and the others will be around, and then we can head for Coney. Or we can walk across the park to Ebbets Field and see the Cardinals. Or we can lie on the fresh cut grass and tell lies about women. I can still do such things. Don’t tell me the bells no longer ring. Don’t tell me those buildings are no longer there. Don’t tell me that I have no right to remember. I only remember life. I will have no memory of dying.

  NEW YORK,

  July 7-14, 1980

  CITY OF THE DAMNED

  For me, all hope for New York died on the day I read about the arrest of a young man out in the borough of Queens. A special kind of murder, DAD HELD IN KILLING, said the page-three headline in the Daily News. Another neat summary of a familiar New York story, reported in the matter-of-fact tone of an aging war correspondent. You know: the cops say this, the neighbors say that, and, uh, pass the jam, will ya, honey?

  Familiar. Except for the details …those flat details told us that this particular father, who had only recently arrived in New York from the American Midwest, had grown angry when his six-day-old son urinated on him. The man threw the infant to the floor (naturally, the child had to be punished for such effrontery). According to the police, the father then chopped up the infant and threw him to the German shepherd. When the cops arrived, there was nothing left of the boy except the blood on the floor. But even those terrible details weren’t sufficient to cause a loss of faith in an entire city. It was the reaction of New Yorkers that settled a swampy chill in my old bones and confirmed a deepening belief that we were doomed. There was no reaction at all. No angry protests. No masses offered in the churches. No memorials planned. Nothing. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin once wrote, “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this: that there is no horror!”

  In the barbarized city of New York, there is no horror these days. We no longer seem capable of that basic human emotion, which is why so many of us have begun to lose all hope for a more decent future. The cause of this municipal numbness is simple: We have seen too many atrocities. On the day the story broke about the baby who was fed to the dog, exactly two people mentioned it to me. By the following day, this tale of horror had vanished from the newspapers and from our collective consciousness, with an assist from Saddam Hussein. In the next week, various journalistic generals rallied for war in hysterical defense of the noble democrats of Kuwait, while George Bush was sending troops, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and crates of thirty-screen sun block to Saudi Arabia, at a cost of billions of dollars, to protect Our Way of Life. It was much easier to locate the world’s beasts in Baghdad than to mourn the brief life of an American child fed to a dog by an American father, in a city that claimed to be the center of American civilization.

  In the month before Bush rose to defend Our Way of Life in the wadis of the Arabian desert, five children were shot dead in the streets of New York, and another six were wounded. All were indirect casualties of the drug wars in this brutalized city, where two million illegal guns are brandished by the citizens as symbols of faith in the creed of the National Rifle Association. Each death was noted in the newspapers, of course, and briefly smothered in the wormy sentimentalities of local television news. Each was then almost instantly superseded by a fresh outrage and instantly forgotten.

  And of course, there was no horror.

  The desperate truth is that millions of New Yorkers have been as emotionally immobilized as anyone who lives too long in the presence of violence and death: emergency-room doctors, soldiers, Mafia hit men. And at the heart of this grand refusal to feel lies something else: They have come to believe that New York itself is dying.

  In many ways, I’ve begun to agree. Reluctantly. With a sense of grieving sadness; I’m a New Yorker, after all, born and bred. New York made my life possible. As a son of immigrants, I’ve subscribed to its tough, romantic myths and have spent a half century in thrall to its dazzling and infuriating ways. In the 1970s, when we were afflicted by a great fiscal crisis, there was much talk of doom and collapse; I scoffed then at such drastic predictions. New York, after all, is America’s city, the way that Paris is France’s city, and Tokyo is Japan’s city. It belongs to all Americans. New York couldn’t simply collapse into degradation and anarchy; the country wouldn’t allow it.

  But the fiscal crisis was one big crisis and therefore amenable to one big solution. The current crisis is a dearh of a thousand cuts. As in virtually every one of America’s drug-drowned cities, crime is the most obvious problem; but as residents of the largest city, New Yorkers are overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers. The steady grinding force of menace is a texture of daily life here now. When Time did its cover story on the collapsing city, some 59 percent of those polled said they would move somewhere else if they could. Nobody in New York was surprised. “I’m sick of looking over my shoulder,” one old friend said to me, explaining that he was moving to the Southwest. “I’ve done it year after year, every year worse than the one before. Just once more, before I get old, I want to walk down a street on a summer night without looking behind me.”

  That enervating sense of menace isn’t mere paranoia. New York is more dangerous now than at any time in its history. Last year, there were a record-breaking 1,905 murders in New York (compared with 305 in 1955); in the first six months of 1990, homicides were running 19 percent ahead of last year, without counting the 87 killed in the Happy Land Social Club fire. We are averaging five murders a day. It is no consolation to be told that, per capita, other American cities are even more dangerous. We live here, where the bullets are killing children. Sometimes the mayhem attracts wide public attention: A family of tourists from Utah is attacked in the subway by a pack of kids looking for disco money; one of the tourists is stabbed to death while defending his mother. “They didn’t know the city,” one of my friends said. “They just weren’t streetwise.” But a few days later, in the Bronx, an eighteen-year-old, a son of the city, streetwise and smart, is approached by a panhandler demanding a dollar. The young man refuses. The panhandler jams a knife in his heart and kills him. Headlines, as usual, scream for two days. But there is no horror.

  The rich, of course, live well-defended lives. But for millions of others, there is never any relief from the dailiness of menace. Every New Yorker knows one big thing: Nobody is safe. In a recent month, one of my friends was mugged at ten in the morning as he was walking into the building where he works; another was robbed at noon while packing luggage into his car for a summer vacation. Everybody I know has been touched in one way or another.
My own mother has been mugged four times; she came out of the last mugging with Parkinson’s disease, which has ruined the final years of her life. Nobody is safe. Nobody.

  The increasingly casual mayhem of the street has made all New Yorkers adjust. Older people who can’t afford retirement in Florida or Arizona have become prisoners of their apartments. It doesn’t matter to them that New York is host to such glories as the Metropolitan Museum and the Broadway theater; they can’t risk the journey to visit them because predators wait in subways and alleys or the lobbies of their apartment buildings. On Madison Avenue, shopkeepers keep their doors locked through the day, afraid of roaming gangs of teenagers, opening only for customers they feel can be trusted. Larger establishments are patrolled by platoons of private police. The security business is booming, as New Yorkers buy thousands of locks, metal screens, alarms, attack dogs, bulletproof vests. They go to karate classes. They apply for permission (almost always denied) to legally carry guns. And still nobody feels safe.

  The leading cause of job-related deaths in New York is now homicide. The victims are usually shopkeepers or taxi drivers (by mid-August this year, twenty-one taxi drivers had been killed, and cabbies were demanding the right to arm themselves). Every day’s paper brings fresh news of slaughter. A young Bronx district attorney stops near the courthouse to buy some doughnuts and he’s killed in a burst of automatic-weapon fire from a druggie who shot at the wrong group. A guy in Brooklyn is refused entrance to a social club; he comes back with an automatic weapon and shoots ten people. “You don’t have to come from Utah to get killed here,” a young man says to me in Brooklyn. “You just walk out the door and Bang! You’re dead.”