Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

“But Daddy, when you die will you be died forever?” Aniline blue. Dyed forever.

“That’s what dying is, kiddo. But I’m not planning on doing that. Not for many years. Not for the foreseeable future.” Later. A little old. Soon. A little young. A lot old. Too soon. Not too young. Much later. Any time soon. Forever. Many years How many years made many years? And foreseeable future? A foreseeable future wasn’t possible. Unforeseeable was the future’s crux. Unforeseeability made the future the future.

All this shape-shifting, fake-out doubletalk. Time couldn’t be told. There was no reason even to bother trying to tell time. Time did not listen.

“Aw, Baby Beth, don’t cry. You’re killing me. Seeing you miserable? That’s what’ll be the death of me.” I wiped my face with the quicker-picker-upper I’d used as a napkin, did the usual little-kid shit, whimpered, sniffled.

I really didn’t want him ever to die. And I didn’t mean to kill him.

“Not for nothing, don’t’cha think it’s kind of hard to be so serious and sad when you got stripes of tomato sauce going down your schnozz?” I slid my index finger down my already sizable nose, and it came back greasily orange. Still inconsolable, I reached my index finger across the table, and striped his nose with my sauce. He stuck three of his fingers into my maze and war-painted my cheeks, which my face’s controlled ache told me were dimpin — the gerund form of a verb he invented just for me, its infinitive form, to dimp , referring to the sudden appearances of my dimples while eating or sup-pressing a smile. I poked a finger into my plate, stirred until my finger was slick with sauce, traced creepy-smiley-clown lipstick around his mouth’s perimeter. He stood, opened the fridge, handed me a can of orange soda. “This’ll make you feel better.” I drank some, cheered up a little, then a lot. Then all better.

I was so saturated with relief and unruly joy that my lips and tongue could almost taste the blood connecting me and my father. I was a balloon-skin about to burst into bits with the force of detonating affection and hope, hope, hope. I barreled toward him, bounded up into his arms, beaming, bobbing my cocksure head, shouting with unadulterated confidence: “You’re right! You’re not going to die any time soon. I just know it!” I spilled out of his arms. I wanted him to see how happy I was, now that I’d figured it out. “Nope!” I jigged a hippy-hoppy succession of leap and skips that he’d called, since I’d been a baby, Beth’s Dance of Sudden Elation. “I was being crazy, all wrong, before. Now for sure I know that you’re going to live at least another two weeks!”

Guilty as charged.

The good news, when we buried him, was that for the first time in twenty-four years, as his dead body dropped lower and lower, groundward, down, down, down, he had no fear at all. Burying him was the opposite of going up to work. Supine in his coffin, the cheapest my mother’s boyfriend’s money could buy, he descended, disappearing toward the world’s bottom, groundward, instead of climbing to its top, rising up and above, skyward. Sharper, closer to the surface of feeling even than grief, were the bones of my rib cage, truly a cage now, except the heart it was constructed to incarcerate, mine, had turned to nothing. The cage’s new inmate was Zero, the nothing that most definitely was something, an absence more present than my hands in front of me.

After the burial I packed my knapsack with my few things and moved into my mother’s house. I wasn’t going anywhere. Even while primed in a permanent state of cat-like readiness, I was solidly placed. I was keeping vigil. I was staying; I was staying vigilant. I assumed the position, like a long-distance runner poised to bolt at the sound of a gunshot that wouldn’t fire a second too soon. Fast and forward. No promises would be made, fulfilled or not, at 617 Flatlands Avenue, where I’d live with the mother who’d let me go. Where I’d live with the simplest fact — no one was ever going to help me ever — and where I’d live with the impenetrable tangle, the un-unravellable knowledge-knot that my mother had never wanted me around, but there I was, living with her as she resigned herself to living with me in a house attached on both sides and jam-packed with no-Dad and no-cry and plastic-covered furniture, exponentially accelerating my development into the little waste of sperm that I was.

And am.

Crown Heights

Tap tap BOOM. Birds ain’t even got their warble on, and my shit’s shaking off the hinges. I didn’t even bother with the peephole. It had to be Abraham Lazarus, the Jewish Rasta, playing that dub bassline on my door.

BOOM I swung it open and Laz barged in like he was expecting to find the answer to life itself inside. A gust of Egyptian Musk oil and Nature’s Blessing dread-balm hit me two seconds after he flew by: Laz stayed haloed in that shit like it was some kind of armor. He did a U-turn around my couch, ran his palm across his forehead, wiped the sweat onto his jeans, and came back to the hall.

“I just got fuckin’ robbed, bro.”

Funny how a dude can cruise the road from neighbor to acquaintance to homeboy without ever coming to a full stop at any of the intersections. Me and Laz, our relationship was like one of those late-night cab rides where the driver hits his rhythm and the green lights stretch forever. He came upstairs and introduced himself the day I moved into his building two years ago: got to know who you live with when you’re moving four, five pounds of Jamaican brown a week. He sized me up, decided I was cool, and told me his door was always open. I didn’t really have too much going on then — just a half-time shit job in an office mailroom and a baby daughter Uptown who I never got to see — so before long I was coming by on the regular to smoke. If Laz wasn’t already puffing one of those big-ass Bob Marley cone spliffs when I walked in, my entrance was always reason enough for him to sweep his locks over his shoulder, hunch down over his coffee table, and commence to building one.

I used to call his crib Little Kingston. All the old dreads from the block would be up in there every afternoon: watching soccer games on cable, chanting down Babylon, talkin’ ’bout how horse fat an’ cow dead, whatever the fuck those bobo yardie motherfuckers do. I never said much to any of them, just passed the dutchie on the left hand side. Jafakin-ass Lazarus got much love from the bredren, but a domestically grown, unaffiliated nigga like me stayed on the outskirts. Whatever. Later for all that I-n-I bullshit anyway.

I flipped the top lock quick. “What happened?”

“Motherfucker walked straight into my crib, bro, ski-masked up. Put a fuckin’ Glock 9 to my head while I was lying in bed. Ran me for all my herb.” His hand shook as he lifted a thumb-and-finger pistol to his temple. Fear or rage; I couldn’t tell.

“How many?” I asked. “Who?” In Laz’s business, you don’t get jacked by strangers. Strictly friends and well-wishers.

“Just one, and he knew where my shit was.”

“Even the secret shit?”

“Not the secret shit. I still got that. But the other ten are gone — I just re-upped yesterday. Son of a bitch filled a trashbag, duct-taped me up, and bounced.”

“Didn’t do a very good job with the tape, did he?”

Laz shook his head. “He was too petro. That was the scariest part, T. He was shitting his pants more than I was. And that’s when you get shot: when a cat doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”