one of the closet doors and Jerry or Jim or whoever the fuck would appear and introduce himself as my new father? I was scared of all the questions and even more scared of the answers.
I opened the refrigerator, expecting it to smell bad. It didn’t. I took that as an okay sign. There was nothing inside except an open can of Coke. I emptied it into the sink.
My mother asked me the same question again: “What do you think, Mitt?” She was the only person who called me that.
“It’s nice” was all I could manage to say.
She sat down Indian style in the middle of the living room and asked me to sit across from her. I did and then I noticed that she was still on the pills.
“I think we owe it to ourselves. No?”
She waited for me to reply but I didn’t.
“We had a rough year and I think a new beginning would do us both a world of good.”
Still no answer from me.
She stared at me and smiled. She did have a lovely smile. And if a drug was responsible for it, well . . . so be it. Pills or no pills, I think she was genuinely happy that day.
As for me, I can’t really say I was unhappy. Yes, I was afraid, but I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t going to miss anybody from my neighborhood. Maybe Willie a little bit. Maybe not. I wasn’t so attached to anyone except my Grandma Betty and my mother assured me we would be seeing her at least once a week. I mean, we were only fifteen minutes away from Jackson Heights by taxi or train. But psychologically it was another story. For me, the East River may as well have been the Atlantic Ocean.
“When do we move in?” It was my first real question about our new life. It would also be the only one I asked that day.
“The movers are coming Friday morning. We have a lot of work to do, Mitty.”
Friday. Wow. She was wasting no time.
We took the elevator back down to the lobby. A different doorman was on duty. He smiled at us as we walked toward him but his attention was immediately drawn to the entrance. A short, skinny guy dressed in all black with big dark sunglasses and very short bleached-blond hair stumbled his way inside. He had on a black leather jacket even though it was ninety degrees.
He smelled bad. Like cigarettes, booze, BO, cheap perfume, and something like kerosene or the gas from a stove with its pilot light out. I was sure the doorman was going to throw him right out. He looked like the junkies I would see hanging out by the Roosevelt Avenue subway station hustling change for a token or a shot.
But I was wrong.
The doorman motioned to my mother and me to wait a second as he graciously greeted the man in black. “Hello, sir.” He smiled as he said it.
“Hey, Arthur,” the guy mumbled in a low voice. No doubt he was fucked up on something. “I might be getting a package in a little bit. Send the kid right up.”
“Will do, sir.”
He may have been high but he certainly belonged there. The doorman actually tipped his hat as the skinny guy propelled himself through the lobby in jerky spurts. He came right toward us and my mother and I had to move quickly to get out of his way. I don’t think he even knew we were there.
As he passed us I saw that the hair on the back of his head had a cross shaved into it. Not the Jesus cross but the cross the German army wore as medals. The Iron Cross. I watched as he went into the elevator, pushed a button, and then sat down on the floor Indian style, just like we had done minutes ago. He slumped his head down like he was exhausted and disappeared behind the closing door.
“So we’ll see you Friday?” the doorman said to my mother.
“Yes, Friday.” Mother looked at her shoes.
“Anything I can do for you, please let us know.”
My mother thanked him.
“Welcome to 446 East 52nd Street!”
He held the door open and we walked out onto our new block.
six
I sat on the edge of my bed in apartment 6K. It was around dinnertime and still lots of daylight left. I could hear footsteps on the ceiling above me, voices and shouts from the sidewalk and the building across the way, helicopters chopping the sky, ambulances and police cars wailing through the street, and maybe worst of all the incessant elevator lurching through its shaft.
How could I possibly live this way? How would I find any peace? I couldn’t believe how much I could hear. I thought I was used to lots of noise. Jackson Heights wasn’t exactly Hicksville. It was a pretty busy place and we lived close to the main drag, but there was no comparison to East 52nd Street. I wanted to tell my mother that this couldn’t work, that it was too much for me to handle and I needed to go back to Queens.
I held my tongue and we went out for dinner. We walked to the Wellington Restaurant (a diner in actuality) a few blocks away. My mother told me that I would have an interview the next morning at what she hoped would be my new school. She said it was a private school which I took to mean a religious school. This was bad news. I was not happy at the thought of Catholic nuns and priests running my life.
But I said nothing. I kept to my strict policy of not asking questions about what was happening in our lives. The only thing I asked about was the soup of the day.
It was lentil. I ordered it and it was very good. They gave us loads of free breadsticks, little packs of crackers in cellophane, and foil-wrapped pats of butter. It seemed like an extraordinary amount of food to give away. We barely made a dent in the pile even though I gorged on it before, during, and after my soup. The waiter even gave us a paper bag and insisted we take the remainder home. Besides the doormen, he was the first friend we made in the city.
When we first walked into the diner I thought he’d be mean. Busing a table with great speed, he was curt and gruff when we entered.
“Two?” he said, and jerked his head toward a small table in the corner near the bathrooms.
My mother asked if we could have a booth.
He stopped his work, looked up at us, and scratched his shoulder. “Anywhere you like.” He smiled wide and made a grand, sweeping horizontal arc with his arm. The smile revealed a big gold incisor below his bushy black mustache. The tooth so big it reflected light off the overheard fluorescent, and beamed a thin blue ray right between my eyes.
He wasn’t nasty at all, just busy. In time I realized that was how most of the city’s people were. They seemed cold and unkind on the surface but it was simply the armor necessary to live tightly among millions. Beneath the shell you could usually find the goodness.
Right after we ordered our meals, I spotted the guy with the Iron Cross in his head. He was sitting in a booth next to a woman with long jet-black hair. She sat between him and the plate-glass window nibbling on a muffin and sipping tea. He was pressed tight against her.
He wore the exact same getup as before: black leather jacket, T-shirt, pants, and the big black sunglasses. She wore a matching pair. He had a full plate of food in front of him: a
