Reed Coleman - Onion Street

No, I really didn’t. The only places I knew to find him were in his room and just off campus, walking his drug corner. Beyond those two places, his life was a mystery to me. I thanked his mom and asked her to have him call me.

As I walked home, I realized I could have called Lids from any one of ten pay phones I had passed on the way and saved myself the long run to his house, but I hadn’t been thinking clearly. It was hard to think clearly when you’d sort of just witnessed a murder. It was one thing to walk in on a body that had been dead for days. It was something else to find the body of someone who’d stood a foot away from you thirty minutes ago. It struck me, too, that a call to Lids wasn’t the only call I hadn’t made. Two bodies in two nights, and neither time did I call the cops. If I was like Bobby, raised to hate the police, or like Lids, a pusher, not calling the cops would have been consistent with who I was. But that’s not who I was. I wasn’t raised to hate the cops or to love them. I was raised to avoid them. The preceding two thousand years of Jewish history had taught us to love and respect the law, but to be wary of those who enforced it. I hadn’t called the cops because I wanted to protect Bobby and Lids.

So, yeah, I was wound up, my mind so muddled by the time I got home that I was sure there was no way I’d sleep again. Except like with most things I was sure about, I was wrong, dead wrong. Because when the phone rang, waking me from sleep, the sun was in my eyes. I was on top of the covers, still fully dressed, pea coat and all. At first I was startled at the feel of grit on the covers. Sand? How did sand get in my bed? Then I remembered how it had gotten there. At least Aaron wasn’t home to chide me. He had slept over at his girlfriend’s house. Thank heavens for small favors. Then the phone stopped ringing.

“Moses! It’s Bobby on the phone,” Miriam called to me.

When I got out to the kitchen, Miriam and my folks were seated at the dining room table. I hadn’t looked in the mirror, but I didn’t have to. Their faces told me everything about my appearance I needed to know. It was also about then I realized I still hadn’t taken my coat off. I smiled in spite of myself. Miriam did too. My parents, on the other hand, had that worried look in their eyes. Is he on drugs? Is he turning into a hippie? I saw a little something extra in my mom’s eyes, the satisfaction of pessimism fulfilled. See, I knew it. I knew it .

I tousled my little sister’s hair. “Thanks, kiddo,” I said, grabbing the phone. “Hey, Bobby. What’s up?” I stepped into the kitchen. It didn’t afford me much more privacy than if I’d stayed put in the dining room, but with apartment living the illusion of privacy is nearly as important as the real thing. “What’s happening?”

“Wanna keep me company? I got another airport run. We can go visit Mindy first. How is she, anyway?”

I filled him in on my brief Saturday visit and how she had opened her eyes.

“That’s a good thing, right?” he asked.

“Who the hell knows? Her doctor pretty much dismissed it.”

“That guy’s an ass. He’s got all the charm of Lurch.”

“I’m shocked. Your parents used to let you watch The Addams Family ?”

“Of course. They think it is a perfect representation of bourgeois decadence and how unbridled wealth feeds eccentricity at the expense of the masses.”

“I guess they have a point. And what, they think The Munsters show how the working class is repressed and scorned by the capitalist lackeys?”

He ignored that. “Moe, you coming with me or not?”

“Sure, but I need to shower and shave.” I peeked into the dining room after I said that and saw the palpable relief on my parents’ faces. “Give me an hour.”

“You got it.”

I hung up and walked back into the dining room. I sat down, poured myself some of my mom’s death coffee and buttered a seeded roll.

“What did the Knicks do last night?” I asked my dad, as if I wasn’t sitting there in my dirty pea coat, sandy Chuck Taylors, and filthy jeans.

Even he had to smile about that. “They won. Beat St. Louis by two. Zelmo Beaty and Lenny Wilkens each scored twenty for the Hawks.”

My mom just shook her head. “How did you get all full of sand in the middle of winter?”

“I wore my white trousers rolled and walked along the beach.”

“Oy, gevalt !” she looked up at the ceiling, arms raised. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”

• • •

Bobby picked me up downstairs. I’d agreed to go with him because I thought the time had come to find out from him as much as I could about what was going on. But I didn’t get in the car and start with the third degree. Besides, he seemed to be in a melancholy frame of mind. I’m not sure I had ever seen him that way in all the years I’d known him. I mean, he was pretty distraught when that thing with Samantha happened. It nearly wrecked him. That was more than melancholy, though. That was hurt, grief, disbelief. This was different. He just seemed sad.

“I miss her,” he said.

I knew who “her” was without asking. “Yeah, Sam was great.”

“She was all that, Moe. I don’t think I’ll ever meet anybody like her again.”

“Maybe not, but you’ll meet somebody who’s great but differently great.”

“I like that — differently great.” He was smiling now, not his old smile. Like his expression when I got in the car, it was one I’d never seen before. “You should’ve kept writing poetry. You have a way with words.”

Sometimes I forgot about my one literary accomplishment: a poem that had been published in our high school literary magazine. Bobby hadn’t forgotten. There wasn’t much that escaped him. “Thanks, Bobby, but I just couldn’t do it anymore after the fire when Andrea Cotter and the other girls died. Besides, there’s about as much money in poetry as there is in blacksmithing.”

“Since when did you care about money?”

“I never said I didn’t care about it. I just have no idea how to make it or much desire to try.”

“Maybe I could help you with that someday,” he said, without any guile in his voice.

I took that as my cue to get back to the subject at hand. “I know you don’t like talking about it, but do you have any idea of what happened with Sam that night?”

“My girlfriend and poor, stupid Marty Lavitz got blown into little bite-size pieces. That’s what happened!” he snapped at me.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“I also know you were into her and that you would’ve done anything to have her.”

“Bullshit!” I lied. “I had Mindy. Sam was your girl. I never did anything to — ”

“Of course you didn’t, Moe. Disloyalty isn’t in your genes, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t want to, and it doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I know all the guys were into her. Who wouldn’t be? Half the guys in Burgundy House tried to pick her up when I wasn’t around. You think I didn’t know that?”

I opened my mouth to argue with him, then shut it. He almost had me, almost got me going, but I wasn’t stupid either. This was classic Bobby Friedman. When we played stickball and softball, Bobby, a left-handed batter — was there any doubt he’d be a lefty? — always hit to the opposite field. He was a classic opposite-field hitter, and a very good one at that. Deflection was his game, catching people off balance and keeping them that way. Although I’d caught him at it, what did it matter? He wasn’t going to answer my questions, at least not yet.

There was something inherently depressing about hospitals that all the yellow and orange paint in the world couldn’t change. I wondered what it must’ve been like before hospitals were available to most people, when you were born, got sick, recovered, and eventually died in your own bed. I wondered how much better off we were as a race for having invented institutions where we could hide away unpleasant aspects of life: hospitals for the sick, sanitariums for the mentally ill, nursing homes for the aged, funeral homes for the dead. And there was something else about hospitals that got to me — their smell. They used pine-scented disinfectant in the same way they used yellow and orange paint — to mask unpleasantness. But like too much sweet perfume on very old women, it only made it worse. You couldn’t mask the smell of death and dying with perfume or pine. Death had a particular scent of its own. I knew that now, and I would never forget it.