Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

He tried to paste his I-am-stern-and-strict face onto his face. “Cut out the crap, Beth! What did I just—?” Mid-scold, he gulped, gagged, as he tried to swallow back laughter, quacking glottally at the precise moment he was trying to play the part of an I-know-what’s-best-for-you type Dad — “What did I just tell you?”

“You told me not to say scummy But you also said crap and before that you said scummy a million-zillion times, so you can’t be mad. Nuh-uh. The rule is phony baloney. Like you.” He gunned the engine again, and we went quiet, listening to the Olds’ hum, meandering on small streets toward wherever he and I were headed, that night, that summer.

Then, I Eureka! — ed. Out my mouth, before I knew it was coming, I shouted, “But maybe it might be a nice thing! Think about it. Maybe the person who wrote Hi to Scummy isn’t a mean Dummy-fuck-o. Like it’s the opposite. Maybe he and Scummy are bestest best friends, and Scummy doesn’t mind. It’s only a bad name if it hurts Scummy’s feelings, but Scummy likes him, so he likes it, he likes his name, so it’s nice to be Scummy.”

Dad shook his head hopelessly. “I’ve been around a lot longer than you, kiddo, and I’ve heard all sortsa nicknames, but I never heard anyone call a good buddy Scummy. Nice try. Close, but no cigar.”

My hands fluttered up dismissively, then flopped in my lap as I kept myself from sighing, “Some people just don’t ever get it.” I twisted, faced him head-on. “Dad, will ya use the noodle God gave you? This guy went to a helluva lotta trouble. He walked on those highways, with the cars and trucks zooming by. Look! There’s no road shoulder. He must of been scared.”

“You got that right. He was shit-scared.”

“But we don’t use words like that, do we?” I inquired, all innocent. He reddened. I let him sweat that one out a minute, then continued, “This guy climbed up the walls, and he had to tiptoe around those No Pedestrian Traffic signs just to hang upside down, like bats do, off that overpass. It’s high up there, especially to be upside down, and the bricks are crumbling. That’s scary.”

“Well taken,” he said. “Go on. Argue your point.” His gaze burned a dimple into the side of my face.

“I’m tellin’ you. All that tsuris? Why bother with it? To say hi to some scummy stranger-type of person who wasn’t his friend? It doesn’t make sense. Not unless he likes Scummy.”

He added, in his dropped-register, this-is-cautionary-so-pay-attention tone, “But Beth-Bug, a lotta times people like things that aren’t so good for them. Especially small people like you.”

“You call me Boll Weevil all the time. A lot of people think boll weevils are icky and gross, and they would say you’re being a big Dummy-fuck-o by calling me by a bug-name, but we know you mean it nice. Same with Scummy. Personally, I think Scummy and his best friend have these private names. Scummy likes being Scummy.”

Leaning in toward the windshield, my father peered at the sky through the streaky, dirty glass. Refusing to look at me, he smiled. Then he tried to quash the smile by contorting his face, cranking his jaw around to set his lips in their man-who-means-business-no-kidding-for-real arrangement. Then his whole face relaxed, forfeited its struggle against its own mouth, and he smiled like he was the man who’d invented the light bulb. He touched my cheek. “And you, Boll Weevil. In my book, I’d have to say that you are one terrific allrightnik.”

You

We stayed stopped at the Stop sign for longer than a Stop sign mandated legally. He was staring ahead of himself, into the middle distance. Then his face changed, dropped, and he stared at his lap. His smile faded, his eyed looked darker and more heavily lidded than they had moments before, and the car’s temperature seemed to fall fifteen degrees. He was thinking, I could tell, and it wasn’t about anything good. “What now?” I asked. “Am I in trouble?”

After an empty pause, he spoke absently. “Nah. It’s just… I just still think it’s not a very nice thing to call a friend.”

“Uh-duh-uh,” I muttered. “Guess what? Just because something’s not very nice doesn’t make it wrong.”

Some thirty years later, I was still alone and without plans to forgive myself for something I’d said in a conversation we’d had when I was six. After work and school, first grade — we both “knocked off,” as he put it, at 3 p.m. — I hung around him in the living room while he read the paper. Then he made dinner, such as it was. That unforgivable evening, he cooked up a vat of “Jewish Spaghetti.” I never knew what inherently Jewish characteristic was discernable in these pale, overcooked noodles — People Like Us called them noodles , not pasta — that he boiled and smeared with a sugary, gummy, aggressively orange sauce — as orange as laboratory signs indicating the presence of radioactive biohazards — spicelessly dotted with sticky, translucent tiles of onion.

Jewish Spaghetti was disgusting. Jewish Spaghetti was nearly inedible. I loved Jewish Spaghetti. I loved how one small bowl of Jewish Spaghetti became seventeen oil drums of Jewish Spaghetti in my gut. A gift that kept on giving.

As we chewed and chewed and chewed, I ruminated on my teacher’s introductory lesson — hurled at us first thing that morning, right after she took attendance — about the dizzying, fearsome procedures involved in telling time. The devices: sun dials, hourglasses, wristwatches, atomic clocks, mechanical clocks. The standards: Greenwich mean, Tidal, Atomic, Geologic, Standard, Coordinated universal, Ephemeris. The calendars: solar, lunar, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Muslim, Julian, Gregorian, Worldsday, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, Chinese. The Maya Great Circle.

Not even to mention the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

Topping it horrifically off, the Metric System and New Math were hurtling respectively across the Atlantic and through deep space toward Public School 276. I wasn’t smart or good enough to keep up with it or figure it out. Dad, who was unquestionably not when I got him, couldn’t help me. I could only try to tattoo facts on my memory, to remember without understanding.

Suspiciously, I asked him, “Are you old?”

“I’m a little old, but not too old. Like you’re a little young, but not too young.”

A suction grabbed at whatever lived between my ribs and started draining it out. “If you’re a little old now, then soon you’ll be a lot old. When you’re a lot old, you die, right? Isn’t that what happens?”

“Yeah, that’s how it goes. I won’t be a lot old too soon. That’s much later. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.” I coughed. With my fork and fingers, I shaped and reshaped orange spaghetti spirals, not piles of the pasta, but plain, wormy lines of it, flat on my plate. Then I worked on spirals within spirals, still two-dimensional. I gulped. I gulped hard.

“Lookit. C’mon now,” he cooed. From the spirals on my plate, I made and unmade a maze. He slapped his big hands on the table. “Look at me, Beth.” I couldn’t look at him. I concentrated. I complicated my noodle-maze. It looked maze-like. It was crap. Its twirls nauseated me. If I, who’d created this, couldn’t find a way — not one workable entry or exit point — to get myself into and out of the maze, then no one else could lead. Just going in circles and more circles. Round and round forever. Like clock-hands. Like fears. “I said, look at me. Listen good. We got Jewish Spaghetti to eat. Food to mess with. Bridges to climb. We got a lotta living to do before I do something stupid like that.” I ditched my fork, busied my orange fingers making braids, then helices.