Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.

Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather — what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm) — whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.

The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.

Two blocks down and around the corner our dingy brick church with long, wide, slightly curving steps and the white-and-colored altar you can see if you stand across the street down from the black-and-blue awning of the undertaker and his double-doors down two — no, one step, brownstone.

Couple of pizza joints a block apart, one with the booths down one side where we sat and a wise kid who works there with big horn-rimmed glasses bigger than his face who’s giving us a lot of shit across the counter and the girls are threatening him; the other, a take-out with Sicilian and regular Guinea pizza, the Sicilian like cake. What color are the cop cars?

And it comes like particles in the wind, snowing me, pouring in and I’m the funnel, but you know that already some bull on the corner of Third Avenue is yelling to some bull two blocks away, "Hey Johnny," "Hey Eddie, " "Hey Marco," "Hey Eric" "Hey Sal," when a refrigerator truck stops for the light and blocks the view and the guy goes on yelling, under the truck, around the front, over the top, through the high cab where the driver with his arm on the rolled-down window ledge looks straight ahead, gunning the motor.

Six flights up, I’m old enough now, taking a can of beer out of the icebox, shaking it a few times, get a rise out of my mother—"it’s going to go all over the floor, Georgie"; my dad standing in the kitchen door, "At it again, fuckin’ freeloader."

Telling them when I’m in high school about Ruth Heard. Why do I? I know what they’ll say, do you understand, Jim? I know what they’re going to say but I still go ahead and tell them. Very smart lady, funny, went to college in London, England, fastest tongue in the East — dismissed, reappeared, dismissed, disappeared, rehired as substitute still talking, still doing it her way, calling New York schools so bad they might not be an instrument of the class system after all, commanding us to write down the best lies we could think up: "Eric can beat up Jeannette because boys are stronger than girls" (when the truth was that Eric had hypnotic powers and everyone knew it and in those days boys had more pockets than girls and Eric had some very bad things in his pockets, no mere switchblade knife but tricky electrical devices he said his father had taught him to miniaturize). (But, no no, said Ruth Heard, that lie’s just confusing, it’s not persuasive; get to what matters, what we live with.) "My father don’t go to church on Sundays because my mother takes care of that side." (But that’s no lie, that’s true, isn’t that true?) "Someone I know, her sister she’s getting married now not waiting till June because she wants to get out of the house she can’t stand it no more." (Getting out of the house? Ah yes, a substitute for the real reason, and a good substitute, and so a persuasive lie. Right.) "If you study hard you will get a good job." (Well look at me, I’m a product of the English school system, ruined my eyes, speak two languages, don’t read any more, only speak, intelligent, brave, and beautiful, and here I am, waiting to get started.) "America is the best country." (Of course it is, that’s why I came.) "This is where the money is — I wasn’t finished, Mrs. Heard." (Not "missus," thanks but no thanks, marriage is important, it’s one of the most interesting and dangerous ways of distinguishing between two people. Otherwise, religious cant.)

No one asked her what "cant" was; and so she asked us. Quite a person. I said there was no such word, and that got a laugh out of her.

"Sounds like a Communist," my sister says, getting ready to come out of her room. "She speaks the King’s English, I’ll give her that," says my mother in her rapid way that wasn’t only her relief at finding something sensible to say but also her secret protection against being found out to be a bright woman who didn’t want to be especially noticed — bearing a tall can of grated Parmesan cheese out of the kitchen. "What do you mean she speaks the King’s English," says my father, "you never met her. They all come over here. You can’t even be sure of the English immigrants any more. This is where the money is." He has enjoyed all four of his statements, each strong and taken together better than he could have even guessed from his chair, and they earn him the right to go on being clear of the rest of us as he hauls himself out of the easy chair and stumbles yawning and stretching to the head of the table. "Who knows why she’s here," I say; "but it ain’t the money and it isn’t the job." "Make up your mind, Georgie," says my father. "Yeah," says my sister, but I’m not looking back and forth between them. "She can speak Spanish," I reveal. "Well, that’ll help her in this fuckin’ city," says my father. I’m not looking back and forth between whatever and whatever, I can tell you; I’m seeing my mother’s plump knuckles mix up the shells and the meatball sauce in the big bowl she mixes her cake mixes in, and I say, before I know I knew it, "She talks about factory workers never being alone."

"Sounds like a Communist," retorts a voice yet why do I not recall whose? high or low, light or glum.

I know I go round and round, Jim, but not so fast. You see I could get through to her father, I decided. Miriam didn’t know what to say to me any more, for sure not a report of that colloidal message that came sliding out of her while she looked the other way even more beautiful at twenty, twenty-two, than at sixteen when we took over secret control of a temporarily vacant "flat" as Ruth Heard put it.

These garbage cans — I mean her father had a respect for them. They were vehicles he kept hosed down and he hammered out the dents more than once. He knew that if the ironing board lever sticks and you can’t fold the thing up, you don’t throw it like Miriam so it hits the TV and scares her aunt who blames it on Miriam’s old man for putting the screws to Miriam — when he himself saw mechanical devices as life we have brought into being to be treated kindly, kept in working trim, not mechanical brains to suck all the bones out of our heads like that mountain that’s making the rounds.