Robert Tanenbaum: Outrage

He opened the coin purse of the wallet. Seventy-three cents and a ring with a small diamond. Less than a half carat, he thought. Maybe worth a few hundred brand-new. He looked at the inscription on the inside of the ring: Always, Al. The sentiment could stay, but he’d file the “Al” out of it. I might get thirty bucks, if I can find the right loser.

The thief found a buyer two hours later, standing with a dozen others in Mullayly Park near 166th Street and Jerome Avenue. He’d seen the Puerto Rican teenager around the neighborhood but had never talked to him. Skinny and awkward, with long, wavy dark hair and soulful brown eyes, which looked even larger behind the thick glasses he wore, the young man wasn’t like the others who hung out at that particular part of the park.

Mostly loud punks and their slutty girlfriends, the thief thought. His target was shy to the point where he couldn’t look anyone in the eye for more than a second, even if the conversation was friendly. And he constantly shifted from foot to foot when nervous, as if he wanted to run away.

I think somethin’s wrong with his brain, the thief thought, but he had to admit that the young man did seem to have one talent that got him tolerated by the others: he could repeat word-for-word seemingly every hip-hop recording ever made. Except for a slight Puerto Rican accent, he even sounded like the originals, although he had none of the attitude or hand gestures. I think his name is Felix, the thief thought as he watched the young man finish his improv rap and fall silent.

“Felix, my man, you look like an hombre who needs a ring for his girl,” he said, sidling up to his target. “I got just the thing.” The thief produced the ring. “It’s worth four hundred, but since we’re compadres, I’ll let you have it for a hundred.”

“I… I… I don’t have that much money,” Felix stammered, surprised that the acne-scarred man had spoken to him at all.

“Hell, Felix ain’t got no money, and he ain’t got no girlfriend,” said a large black youth standing close enough to hear the exchange, guffawing.

“I… I… I have a girlfriend,” Felix replied, looking down at his feet.

“Hell yeah, Raymond, haven’t you heard, Felix is the dude that knocked up your cousin Cherise,” a short Hispanic girl with too much makeup said. “Ain’t that right, Felix? You the daddy?” She laughed. The locals hanging out at the park teased Felix, an easy target, every chance they got.

“No… no no,” Felix replied, shaking his head swiftly from side to side and turning red as he shifted faster from one foot to the other.

The large black youth, Raymond, scowled. “That right, Felix? You im-preg-nate Cherise?” He moved over so that he was only a few inches away from Felix and towering over him, then turned his head to the side and winked at the Hispanic girl. It was obvious: there was no Cherise, pregnant or otherwise.

But Felix didn’t know that. He was beginning to look desperate. “No! It wasn’t me!”

“You sure?” Raymond growled. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the others were watching and grinned. “Now, tell me the truth, is you the one who diddled Cherise?” he asked belligerently, turning back to Felix, his face set as if he was about to fly into a rage.

Suddenly, Felix nodded so vigorously he had to push his glasses back up his nose. “Yeah, sure… okay. I… I… I diddled Cherise. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”

“You didn’t mean to?” the big youth roared. “What did you think you was doing with that little pecker?”

As the other youths laughed at the joke, Felix looked behind him as if he’d heard somebody call his name from a distance. “I… I… I got to go,” he stuttered.

“You… you… you better,” Raymond said, mimicking Felix. “Cherise is trying to figure out which one of you peckerwoods forgot to use pro-tec-shun. Now that I know, she’ll be comin’ after your ass.”

Felix looked like he might cry, then he turned on his heel and began to walk quickly away.

The purse snatcher, who’d been laughing along with the others, saw his opportunity leaving and hurried after him. “Yo, Felix, wait up,” he said. “That was just plain wrong back there. You didn’t really get Cherise pregnant, did you?”

Felix shook his head again as he continued to walk at a fast clip. “No. I don’t even know her.”

“Then why’d you say you did?”

Felix shrugged his shoulders and slowed down. “That’s what they wanted me to say.”

“Well, it was wrong of them, dude,” the thief said sympathetically. “So, tell ya what I’m going to do. I know you got a girlfriend stashed away from those jokers, and she ain’t no whore like Cherise. Fine-looking young man like you-and by the way, I like the mustache you’re trying to grow there, brother, makes you look older, classy. Tell you what, I’ll sell you that ring for fifty bucks… and that’s a steal, bro.”

Felix stopped walking. His face twisted with doubt. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills and coins. He counted what he had and shook his head. “I only got twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents.”

“Oh man, you trying to rob me?” the thief said, rolling his eyes. He paused before adding, as though reluctant, “Well, ’cause I don’t like what those pendejos was doing to you, I’ll take it.” He held out his hand and accepted the cash, and then handed over the ring. “You gonna make some bitch happy, she gonna take care of you reeeaaaal good.”

Felix smiled shyly as he inspected the ring, then frowned. “It says, ‘Always, Al.’ Who’s Al?”

The thief thought fast. “Why, I am. Al Guerrero. My bitch decided to dump me and I got the ring back. That’s how come I knew it was a five-hundred-dollar ring.”

“You said it was worth four hundred.”

“Whatever, now it’s yours,” the thief replied. “All you got to do is get a little file and take off my name and you’re set with your lady friend. Now I got to go.”

Felix felt a pang of guilt as he watched the man trot quickly in the opposite direction. He knew that his parents wouldn’t approve of what he’d just done. Especially his dad, who never approved of anything he did.

His mother was always worried that others would take advantage of him and get him into trouble. It was true that they sometimes liked to play jokes on him-like committing some minor offense and then saying he did it, knowing he’d confess under pressure. Like the time at school when Raymond flushed firecrackers down the toilet, wrecking the pipes. Or when the police were called in to investigate when some other kids broke the front window of the Korean market on Anderson Avenue. Confronted, Felix had admitted he was the culprit in both instances even though he’d been nowhere near either scene.

Felix didn’t know why he confessed to things he didn’t do. He was, his mom always said, “a people pleaser,” but more than that, he didn’t like it when people were angry with him, especially the people in charge, like his dad, teachers, and the police. He’d discovered at an early age that it was easier if he just went along and did and said what other people wanted him to. In the case of his dad, if Felix denied some transgression and waited for the old man to really get worked up, the beating was much more severe than if he confessed quickly and just got slapped around a little bit.

Plus, as in the cases of the school prank and the Korean grocer, the authorities had quickly determined that he wasn’t involved. So other than a mild strapping with a belt from his dad “for lying,” which wasn’t out of the ordinary, nothing had ever come of his confessions.

Felix reasoned now that he’d paid the owner for the ring and got a good deal, and that there was nothing wrong with that. Still, his parents would never believe that it was an honest transaction, so he was just going to have to keep it a secret.