Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

“I’m just listening.”

“Totally vertical. Feet first. Squeeze your feet together tight. And your butt cheeks.”

“Butt cheeks?”

“If you don’t squeeze your cheeks, water’s gonna rush in. Screw up your insides. Internal damage and such like.”

“Rush in where?” What fun, to watch a big strong man squirm. I knew where he was talking about, that it embarrassed him to talk about it. I knew that things could go inside that place just as things could come out of that place. “Rush in where?”

“Into your insides. Your tummy. And you’ll get one helluva stomachache. Always make sure to cover your privacy real tight.” Outside his boxers, he cupped his hands around his parts, like I was some guy at a row of urinals.

“Why? Why should I? Why should I cover my privacy?”

“You just have to.” I wanted to watch him wriggle out of this one. I remembered how one winter, when we’d gone to see the human polar bears go swimming at Brighton Beach, I’d asked him why men had nipples. He’d blushed and changed the subject to his favorite: ironwork. And a few years earlier, I’d asked him where babies came from. Flustered, pink-faced, without a trace of levity or irony, he said, in a voice possessed of an untainted, artless sincerity never heard out of grown-ups’ mouths, “Ummmmm, you should ask your mother.” My question was sufficiently stress-provoking to make him forget that I didn’t have much of a mother to ask, and that if I did ask the mother I came from, he and I wouldn’t have been having this conversation. This situation.

“Just do what I tell you and remember to protect your privacy.”

The thick yellow sky pushed down on my skull and brain. “First you said I couldn’t think or see straight. Then you said to remember to cover my privacy. How’m I gonna remember if I can’t think?”

“Trust me.” To trust someone who kept checking behind his back did not come easy.

“Explain why you did that.” I pointed, accusing his shorts of something. The idea of his parts poked out; the idea of his sheltering hands obscured the idea of the bulge. “Izzat fair? You said you’d explain it however many times, then you don’t explain it, not even a tiny bit?” He looked around frantically. “Dad, we’re alone, but it doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause everything’s all wrong.”

“Wrong? What’s wrong? I’m steering you wrong?”

My talking-out-loud voice said, “No,” but my thinking-inside-myself voice bawled, You already did. This was supposed to be something else. You’re pulling a change-up on me and you don’t even say you’re sorry. I started crying, then I stopped myself.

“I know it’s scary, Butterfly,” he cooed, all kissy-face-buddy-buddy. “I’ll demonstrate. Better to learn by example.” He plopped onto the concrete and lay flat, flat everywhere except for the forcefully un-flat, trace afterimage of the ghost in his shorts. “Another thing to know. Remember how we make snow-angels?”

“That’s winter. In the snow. It’s summer now. Everything’s different.”

“Pretend with me. As practice.” He spread his arms and legs apart, wide. His pectorals and deltoids emerged, tautening, hardening, and his boxers gapped, puffed, and puckered in places I thought would’ve worried him if he hadn’t been busy trying to get in good with me — after he’d rooked me, no less. His arms and legs described arcs on the concrete. “While you’re falling, making snow-angels in the air generates resistance and slows down your plunge.” He flapped his limbs like a dying bug, too stunned to flip from his back onto twitchy, kicky legs.

I was done. No more pretending. No more practicing. I wasn’t lying down on hot concrete, no way no how, to make fake snow-angels in the summer. I was done bench-pressing, too, because falling lessons, and all the practicing building up to it, had always held zero promise. For me. I said, “This is C-R-A-P crappola.”

“I don’t like that word.”

“Well, tough titties. I don’t like this. I don’t even think I like you. I’m going home.” As if it would work this time, I said it again — I’m going home — as if I had any say at all in the matter. He appeared embarrassingly eager to scuttle like a caught cockroach off the Pier, but if he hadn’t been ready to leave, if he’d wanted something else, somewhere else, or something more, I would’ve been stuck. I had no keys. I wondered whether it was accurate to call it our house if only one of us had keys.

Chicky Testaverde came by a couple of times that summer to have grief-drinks with Dad after he’d already been at the bar, talking ironwork, having several after-work drinks with the guys. He never confessed to suffering days so stricken it took five after-work drinks to calm his once-nervy nerves. He never confessed to icing over with bone-seizing fear while on bridges now, unable to move in any direction, sometimes hugging a girder or a beam, eyes crushed closed for five minutes. But he spoke like a man indicting himself for murder, which implicated us as coconspirators, when he wept, “I shoulda known to keep my kid off the bridge.”

Later during the summer of the Pier business, the three of us — Dad, awkwardness, and I — got in the car, tooled around, listened to AM radio and the wind roaring through the open windows. The drives were probably his uncomplicated method of getting through the hours. His directions and destinations were always questionable and unquestioned. One night he’d gotten lost, maybe missed an exit if he’d had one in mind, near the Belt Parkway’s labyrinthine, accident-prone Ocean Parkway intersection, a snaky Mobius-mess of ramps, exits, merges, under- and overpasses. Traffic was slow.

He drove the Olds below an overpass on whose brick someone had spray-painted in darkest black, Hi Scummy.

We noticed it, read it, and looked at each other. Hi Scummy jetted us into laughter so belly-felt it was unbearable, like being too-tickled. Our hysterics were a relief, too, the discharging of something that needed letting out. Laughter was going to kill us, because Dad was losing control of the wheel, swerving like an alkie. He pulled off at the nearest exit and parked. We genuinely could not stop laughing. We were having An Episode. I was scared I might wet my pants, but I also didn’t care if I did.

When he could talk again, Dad asked, “You think the guy who wrote Hi Scummy was pissed off at somebody who drives under that overpass-thing every day? To make sure the other guy really gets the message?”

“How would Scummy know the guy’s handwriting? And would Scummy know to look up there for a message?”

“Hmm. Smart one. Good point. Also, how would Scummy know that he was the exact Scummy that the Hi was meant for? ’Cause for sure there’s more than one person who takes this route and fits that description.” He paused, changed tone, adding a grim voice to his voice. “That’s if we used words like that, Beth. And we don’t. Those words aren’t allowed, so we don’t use them.”

“Oh,” I said, earnestly. “What about words like Dummy-fuck-o?”

“Beth! Brat! Enough! You know the rules about words.”

“Rules schmules!” I waved away his admonition. Laughter was lots better. “What about this? Maybe the person who wrote… that thing… that Hi… is mad at the drivers.”

“All of ’em? In every single car?”

“Well, not mad, exactly, he just thinks they’re, you know, that they’re scummy!”

“What did you just say?”

“Scummy!” I hooted. I hollered. I spat a few spit-bubbles out my mouth, not on purpose, but a couple hit him, which was nice. “I can say that! You can’t stop me! I’m Scummy! You’re Scummy! Everybody’s so Scummy, Scummy, Scummy!”