Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

“Please,” I said. “Start there.” And I nodded to the floor, to my feet. “They’ve been covered up all day long. Nobody could see them.”

He wanted to. I could tell. But he was hesitating. “Down,” I said.

And he went down, onto his knees, and he bent to me and he began to kiss my toes and I thank my gypsy cab driver for teaching me how pleasurable all that can be and my hand was on the meteor and I picked it up and it was very heavy, very heavy indeed, and its heaviness sent a thrill through me, a sweet wet thrill, and I looked down at the straight white part in his hair, the very place where this meteor was about to strike, and I thought how sexy. How truly sexy is the secret shape of a man’s brain.

This guy Ivan over at the Black Sea Social Club on Sixth and Avenue A says that when he went shopping as a little boy with his mama in Moscow he’d go to the one big department store in town and he’d stand in line and sometimes it’d be for hours and they didn’t even know what it was they was waiting to buy. Then it’d turn out to be some shit like socks or suspenders or a rubber bowl. A Russian Tupperware party, he says, is four hours in a line with strangers to buy a rubber bowl. But they had so little, you just got what you could. That’s why he does the things he does now in America, because it’s the land of opportunity. And it’s never too early to get in on the action, he says, cause you never had to wait to suffer in Russia. There are no children in Russia, he says.

I like it when Ivan tells me that. Up to this morning. When I’m feeling bad about myself, I say to him, I maybe ain’t no child but I’m little, and he tells me it don’t make no difference. It gives you an edge, he says to me. I know what he means, but I’m always thinking I want my hands to be bigger. I want that right now. I like the Makarov nine millimeter okay and most of Ivan’s buddies at the social club use it, but it’s just a pound and a half and not even six and a half inches long. Just right for me, but that pisses me off. Like being a Yankees fan. It’s right there, up the subway line, but it’s not what you really want. Besides, Ivan and those guys aren’t real Americans yet, and I am, and the one thing I got off my long-gone daddy was his daddy’s Colt.45 pistol. The Model 1911A1. They started making this baby way back in 1911, that’s why they gave it that model number. And nobody’s done any better. My daddy told me that. I stole it from him a long time ago, long before I did these things for Ivan. It was when my daddy was too drunk to see and I got lucky because the next day he walked out and my mama and me never heard from him again and he didn’t even have his daddy’s gun. I did. And it’s like if Babe Ruth was still playing for the Yankees today and he was in his prime. Because this 1911 can still hit. I just can’t quite hold it yet to do the job. My goddamn hands aren’t big enough.

Last night I was sitting at our kitchen table and Mama was fussing around making it look like warming up Spaghetti Os was about a ten-step gourmet thing. She was still in her terry cloth dressing gown, my mama. She hasn’t got a man hanging around her these days. Hasn’t had for a while. And I was just looking at my little hands lying there on the table.

“Wally,” she says to me. “Why you’re always sitting around the kitchen in your undershirt.”

“I’m waiting for you to give me a beer,” I say.

She waves the can opener she’s been struggling with for five minutes. “What are you saying? I never gave you no beer.”

“I can wait.”

“You’re a little boy,” she says.

“Mama, you don’t know nothing about it.”

She goes a little crazy at this, since we’ve had this conversation a few times before and she thinks she knows something about me. “I got eyes,” she says. “I know you. I been around you for only nine years and at the start of that you was about twenty inches long. You don’t think I know what a little boy looks like?”

So now she’s got me looking at my hands, like two goddamn little bath toys sitting on the table, and I’m getting some feelings I don’t want to think about. “Shut up now, Mama,” I say.

She does. I should like that, but I don’t, exactly. Then she says, real low, “So what will happen if I don’t shut up?”

I don’t have an answer for that. It’s a stupid question.

She says, “Where do you go, Wally? When you’re supposed to be in school. When you go out at night. I can’t watch you all the time. What is it you’re doing?”

I look at her and she kind of backs up a little bit, the can opener wobbling around in the air in front of her. I say, “Don’t talk crazy. You’re my mama.” My voice — I can hear it like it belongs to somebody else — is as tiny as my hands, a piping cute-ass little voice.

“What kind of answer is that?” she asks me.

“What are you talking about?” My head is full of static now, like a radio that’s off the station.

So I do both of us a favor. I get up and go out. There’s a couple of guys jittering around at the corner and I know they just see me as some kid they can cut up easy and I left my heat back in my room, so I go the other way. And I walk around thinking about my dad. He was a big talker. He was always saying, I’m going to make this score, I’m going to make that score. I didn’t know what he was talking about back then. I was just a lad. Four or five. Something like that. I was still playing on the raggedy-ass swings and shit at Tompkins Square Park. I’d swing up and down and the chains would scream like I was killing them and when I was way up high all I could see, all around, was funky homeless people living in cardboard boxes or sleeping under newspapers on the benches, guys that would grab at you when you went by, some of them, guys that would do anything to a little kid. Those guys were everywhere in the place I was a kid, and so were the old Russian guys sitting around playing chess.

Is my daddy going to end up like that, wherever he is? Not like the Russians. He don’t play no games, as far as I know. Like the homeless people. Is he going to end up living in a refrigerator box with a stack of old Sunday Times? I don’t know. All I know is I got his gun. And I figure he was full of shit about all the big stuff he was going to do. To tell the truth, though, I’d like to meet up with him someday and see how he come out. I was thinking about that walking around last night. And I was getting pissed. I was thinking, I got a score to settle with him. I do. I wish I didn’t. I wish it was simple, about him. But what am I going to do? I’ve learned how things have to be.

The first time Ivan sent me to do this thing for him, I was pretty nervous about it. Sure. That was almost a year ago. I’ve got a birthday next week. I’ll be ten, if I live that long. When I just turned nine, Ivan called me in from the dark open door of the social club. I was just passing time in the neighborhood. Kicking a flat Coke can around, trying to make it stop on the sidewalk cracks. Telling other kids who passed by that I was going to kill them. Stuff like that. So this voice from the darkness says, “Hey, little man. Come on in to this place.”

I know the streets, and these guys were pretty new, but I could figure out this social club. It wasn’t a place of perverts. It was a place of business. So I go in. This is when I met Ivan. “You want beer, little man?” he says.

“No,” I say to him, though I like it that he asks me. Now I would’ve said yes, but the first time he asked me, I was straight from punk stuff like kicking Coke cans and I wasn’t ready to say yes.

“You know how to get to Brighton Beach on subway?” he says to me.