Those first few days back, it was as if I were an astronaut exploring a city on the planet Mars. The people were not human. They were alien creatures sniffing the cold air and muttering and, in sinister fashion, disappearing down into the earth beneath me to catch clattering, spark-spewing electric cars. Shopping, talking, hauling little versions of themselves to school. I watched from shadows, hoping they wouldn’t see that I was a stranger, a being from another world. And I was afraid at any moment that one of them would cry out the usual words: Uitlander, Teague, Jude, Leper. Or no, it would be something that they would understand and I would not, for now even their language puzzled me. Their manner, not hostility exactly, but indifference. The people moving with their long arms and their straight backs, and fast, since for them the outside was merely a place between work and home. These weren’t all the populace, of course. There were others who lived there in the parks and streets; you could see them all the way from Mount Morris to Morningside and Riverside, shuffling, aware of me, hiding too, rag people. We would pass and exchange signs in secret; they could see that I also was adrift, apart. We conspired in silence and walked between greens and churches from 125th Street all the way up to the Cathedral of Saint John. Most of the time, I kept it together and I walked, came back to Ratko’s, ate and slept.
But some days it was all too much and I expected horrors. I heard weird noises and lights and the trees would be alive; or I’d catch a panorama of wounded birds and jungle animals, or I’d see monsters in parade coming in from Queens and with them giants and the undead and marching bands, elephants, painted floats, and children dressed as rats and crocodiles. Me alone cognizant. Only I could bear witness. Only I was attuned. The other citizens of Harlem were blissfully ignorant of all this noisy caravan coming over the Triborough Bridge. They couldn’t see it, but then they couldn’t see anything. They were blind, perpetually blind, dazed, like survivors of a great ship intercepted unexpectedly by the shore.
One morning when the sun was out, I took the Queens-bound A train to look at the Atlantic Ocean. Rockaway was cold and the journey by crutch from the subway stop to the beach took me forever. The water was gray and incredible, tangled, bristling. Whitecaps and a howling wind. The sand freezing on my arse. There were half a dozen surfers making attempts on the slow breakers. I watched them for an hour, watched them wait in their black suits for the perfect wave and take it, cutting and gliding and falling in. Maybe I could have done that once, but not now. Fury. I walked farther up the shore where the sea was empty. I sat there and looked and begged the Atlantic to uncover itself. I waited for revelation, for meaning. But the ocean doesn’t give you anything, it doesn’t contribute, it’s a repository, a mirror of yourself, and when I looked I had no reflection at all. I decided to take the train back to Harlem, having learned nothing.
The A train is the airport train and at JFK dozens of people got on, bringing color and difference to the subway car. For them it was the end of a journey; they were tired and relieved. Their talk was excited and loud. It marked them out. And as they got more animated I got less so and dissolved into the plastic of my seat. They were too much, these Homo sapiens, these people. So close, how can they stand to be so bloody close?
The train disgorged them at midtown and by 125th they were all long gone. I was relieved; I’d felt I was having an attack.
It was my stop, so I got up and walked the platform to the exit. Through the turnstile. That walk again, up the subway steps and past the Nation of Islam men in shirts and bow ties. Light rain now, the black Israelites in front of the Record Republic. Normally, they’d yell at the white devil, but there was something about my look. They chose not to see me.
Here’s a white man who is going to kill other white men. Yes.
Up the hill. Empty plastic five-dollar crack bags littered everywhere. Men and women gathered around the fake grocery store. The 99 Cents Store. The lamp store. Children wrapped in bear jackets playing with a basketball. PS 125, armor-plated against riot and revolution.
123rd. The street still the same. Danny the Drunk, predictable and living yet. Vinny, drunk with him, both of them sitting on the stoop and leering at the black Catholic schoolgirls. I stood there and looked out at the great city and breathed the autumn air. I was starting to get back my strength for the task in hand. My body had to be strong, but my mind, at least, was already there. I know there are people who triumph over the need for vengeance, who say that loving your enemies hurts them more; that breaking the cycle of violence is the way to happiness. But this was not about being spiritually advanced. This was not about being happy. No.
I spat. The door was broken. I pushed it in and went down.
Ratko’s wife was big and white and stuffed food down our mouths to shut us up. She didn’t speak any English and was suspicious of what Ratko was telling me. Perhaps he was talking about her, or about a mistress he had in the building next door, or about plans to tip off the INS about her status. One way to get rid of her, send her back to war-torn Yugoslavia.
She fed us sausage so undercooked and bloody that I was sure it was a chastisement. Ratko ate it heartily, though, so it might just have been some Serbian thing. More familiar were overboiled potatoes and slow-baked kidney pies. For pudding she constructed on different days bread puddings and sponges and slab-thick chocolate cake that weakened you and made you drunk before you’d finished it. Ratko fed me vodka and all the time he hinted that tonight would have to be my last and that really, all things considered, I couldn’t stay here. I slept in the box room, for the spare room had become the dog’s and the dog bullied the family and began howling when I first broached the possibility of sharing space with it. Generally, I have a good relationship with dogs, but your mind needs to be clear and relaxed for it to work, so I let it have the room. The box room was tiny and airless and I slept so well there it was like I was some advanced Zen master in his monastery cell.
When we first talked, Ratko had some good news, some bad news, and some very interesting information. The information was that Sunshine had come by a week after we’d left for Mexico and paid Ratko off and told him that Darkey wouldn’t need the flat anymore. Ratko liked me and he was a close old file and so casually he asked Sunshine where I was and Sunshine said that I’d gone back to Ireland, for good. All this only a week after we’d left. One week. The bad news was that Sunshine came with a curly-haired blond guy who departed with my bloody TV and radio and a rucksack full of miscellaneous items. Ratko went in later and sold the rest of my gear for twenty bucks to the tenant across the hall. The good news was that he had saved from the garbage my driving license, social security card, and ATM card in the hope that I might write and claim them one day. The ATM card got me access to about a hundred dollars and I give it to Ratko for board…
We’re at breakfast.
Toast, sausage, egg, fried black bread, vodka, and coffee.
Ratko’s wife asks Ratko to ask me what happened to my foot, what happened to me, but I give him a look. We talk sports from the paper and about the Kosovars and Tito and why Zagreb is beautiful but Belgrade isn’t (the answer, apparently, is because of collaboration).
Yeah, and we talk football. Northern Ireland has no chance of qualifying for the World Cup, but I live a little on the glory days of ’82 and ’86. What will happen to the Yugoslavian team is anyone’s guess.
Once mighty Balkan superpower will split into six, maybe eight teams, Ratko says, sadly. We chew our toast and drink our coffee.
And my friend, Michael, how do you feel? he asks me after a dish of what I take to be a type of black pudding.
In general?
In general.
Well, sometimes I hallucinate about the armies of the dead marching over the Triborough Bridge, but most of the time I’m ok.
He winks at me.
Your sense of humor, he says, and he’s inwardly glad his wife has no English.
I finish breakfast, get up, get my stick, go out for a walk, come back…
At dinner that night the wife was mumbling loud over the cabbage. It was getting clear that it was time to go. He broached the subject delicately over vodka, and it was like water off my back.
Really, Michael, I am not kidding. It is perhaps soon that you look for somewhere else to stay. I love you, you stay forever, but Irina, you know.
I know, I said, cheerfully, and continued eating.
For the next few days this theme of my departure was Ratko’s relentless leitmotif. But I wasn’t taking hints, there was nowhere for me to go. Ratko was being got at from three sides: Slavic hospitality, duty to a friend, and a suspicious caricature of a wife who wanted me out before whatever doom pursued me found me here. And there was doom, the dog had stopped eating and wouldn’t let anyone near it, an unheard-of thing until I showed up.
Ben Franklin famously put the limit of fish and houseguests at three days, and his mates were mostly Quakers and gentlemen. I’d been there nearly two weeks. Ratko wouldn’t throw me out and he liked having me around but finally the missus was too much: nagging him all night and all day and eventually the poor love cracked, got off his fat ass, packed sandwiches, went hunting, came back blitzed and singing and saying that he’d found me a place.
Ratko knew a Russian guy who happened to be pals with a Jamaican guy who happened to be the super of a building they were doing over on Lenox and 125th. They wanted people in there to keep crack addicts and other miscreants out during the makeover and I could probably live rent-free for a month or two till I got my bearings.
Ratko filled me with food, drove me over at paramedic speed in his Hyundai, talked like mad so I wouldn’t notice all the black people, helped me up the stairs, gave me the key, my hundred dollars back, a hearty handshake, and ran away before I could refuse…
I looked around. The place was abominable, but I was only there two or three weeks. That’s how long it took for Ramón to find me. But you get the picture: vermin, roaches, and a hole in the bathroom that allowed you to see into two floors beneath you. No electricity, but by some miracle there was cold-water plumbing. The building had six stories, and they had a person in an apartment on each floor. Their job was to keep the homeless out of there while renovations were taking place, and it wasn’t too hard a task. The guy prowling the second floor was a huge Jamaican bruiser from some particularly evil part of Kingston who scared the bejesus out of most mortals. He had a shotgun and he’d plugged someone already and the word had gotten round. Harlem had plenty of derelict buildings, so it made sense to go to an easier place.
Nowadays, Lenox Avenue looks like an ok sort of street and it might be hard to believe it ever was the way I say it was. But back then, I promise you, it was a murder picture. Every other building was a burnt-out graffitied shell. Garbage all over the streets, and people made campfires within the buildings to keep warm. Every floor smelled terrible and, just like in the days of Elizabethan London, you threw your shit out the open hole that should have been a window. The windows weren’t boarded up, because people had ripped down the plywood for furniture and the more shortsighted or desperate simply burned it.
I’m sure it wasn’t always thus. I might have been living on the same street as the late Langston Hughes or Duke Ellington and for all I bloody knew Ralph Ellison could have been that old, sophisticated-looking guy at the bodega, but it seemed unlikely. The street sanitation was a disgrace, the architecture of the buildings postapocalyptic. It was Belfast, circa 1973, except here there was no civil war as an excuse for the calamity.
There wasn’t much to do, either. No safe bars, no movie theaters. In fact, around here the most important landmark was the Apollo Theatre, but you’d be the brave white boy up there on a Saturday night in the autumn of 1992.
And speaking of Apollo, patron of the Muses, true, but also guardian of prophecy and the future, I knew what was going to happen. What was inevitable the minute I stepped off the GWB. I could see it in my mind’s eye, I could see it, I could feel it, but I knew I had to bide my time. I had to lie low. Ratko could know that I was back in New York City, but he was to be the only one. Ratko could keep his mouth shut. Did others know I’d escaped from Mexico? I doubted it. The guards saw me fall into the swamp and not come out. So if Sunshine ever checked, he’d believe the guards, and even if rumors reached him and Darkey that I was somehow alive, why give credence to these paranoid reports? No, they didn’t know anything. They were snug, safe in their beds. Eejit safe in their eejit beds.
So I had a place, I was incognito, and I figured if you couldn’t speak Serbo-Croat and weren’t part of a gossipy little Upper Manhattan Slavic circle, you didn’t know I was here. I was getting my shit together, making plans, but before I could do anything big I really had to do something about my leg. I wasn’t having nightmares. No phantom limb itches or anything like that, but I was walking too slowly with my crutch, and going up a flight of stairs was like Scott’s return from the Pole.
Now, lucky for me I wasn’t a million miles away from somewhere I could get help. For if you keep walking on 125th Street you’ll eventually get to the Triborough Bridge and the East River, but before that, if you make a right wheel, conveniently enough there’s a foot hospital. The New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The hospital will give you an artificial foot to stick over your stump and the physical therapists will show you how to walk with that foot, through weeks, sometimes months, of training. They’ll give you drugs, advice, support, and an optimistic glossy brochure with smiling Special Olympians. All this, of course, if you have insurance. If you don’t have insurance and your dancer-tragic-accident letter to Gene Kelly got no reply, you are not completely banjaxed, for as I discovered, there is another way:
You show up; you’re not an emergency case, so you have to wait. It can be a while, so bring a newspaper. It’s a presidential election year, so there’s plenty of reading, but you’re not an expert and it’s hard to tell the difference between the candidates-both would be Tories back home-so instead you read the sports section. There’s American football and real football and bizarre things like hockey on ice. The World Series is also coming up, but the New York teams aren’t in it. You read and read and you’re almost thinking of giving up, but finally a nurse takes your temperature and she’s so tired that she falls asleep while doing it. They give you a clipboard to which is attached a pink form. You fill in the details of an imaginary person and give his address and name and social security number. The nurse has already willfully suspended disbelief and leads you along a corridor to another man who might be a doctor. The doctor takes a look at your foot and shakes his head and says things like antibiotics and poor workmanship and where did they stitch you and you make a few things up in reply. The only accurate thing on your form is your blood type and he asks your blood type and you tell him and he asks if you’ve ever had any of a following list of complaints to which you reply no. He asks you to come back the following week and see some guy, but you hint that by next week you might not be at the address on your form. All this is part of a charade, for soon another man comes (an orderly, a nurse?) and leads you to a room that is brightly lit like a shoe store and packed with shoe boxes that contain feet. The feet are on little hinges and attach to your limb. Feet of every shape and size and skin color, but mostly black. Baby feet, size 15 feet, feet that stink of plastic and grease. He tries on several and gives you the best fit, which is an off-white. He says that really you should learn all about “stump management.” He tells you the line about the weeks of physical therapy, knowing full well that neither of you will see the other again. You put the foot in a plastic bag and carry it home. You practice in your apartment for hours until you’re chafed, bleeding, crying.
You practice going up and down stairs and you fall a dozen times. You look at your stump and the straps on the artificial foot and you just can’t believe it. The horror of it takes your breath away.
But you can’t live in that moment and you restrap yourself over the sores and the cuts, the skin-colored plastic of the foot going up over your stump, your hinged foot hanging there alien and ridiculous, until in jeans and socks and shoes it looks ok.
Sometimes, for a brief moment, you can even forget what’s happened and think that you’re whole again.
It’s physical and mental anguish but within the week you’re limping on it, but walking nonetheless, and if you didn’t know you were an amputee, you wouldn’t know, and besides, so many men in Harlem limp already you fit right in.
When finally I felt strong in mind and body, I hopped an uptown train and went to spy on Bridget. I’d been waiting, I’d been patient. I could wait no more. I had a bushy beard by then and my hair was long and matted under a wool knit hat. I had sea boots and a lengthy black coat, and I could easily have passed for someone who had spent his formative years on a vodka-soaked fishing smack home-ported out of Murmansk or Archangel or some other similarly charming place. Perhaps I had fled the collapse of the Soviet Union and was looking for a ship, though why I thought I could find one in the landlocked part of the Bronx was something I hadn’t worked out yet.
I took the IRT and got off a stop early and, before I knew what was going on, I was walking to Shovel’s house. By now, Shovel was long out of the old meat shop and up there concocting domestic bliss and sweetness and light with his loving and amenable missus. He didn’t know it, but Shovel more than had his revenge on me. I hung around for twenty minutes and then walked north to the Four Provinces.
When I got there, I realized quickly that there were no convenient places to hide up, and the lay of the land was very bad. The whole thing was extremely foolish, and I was pretty sure that if any of a dozen people came by, I would be immediately blown despite my outfit.
Apartment buildings, cars, a few town houses, white people, waste ground about fifty yards up the street, where the kids sometimes played basketball. School was in, so there were no weans, but still it wasn’t an ideal observation post at all. The only spot that might remotely work was on the far side of the waste ground, where you could slip into the alley between two apartment blocks. You could maybe sit there in the shadows, looking out across the waste ground towards the street and then farther down to the Four Provinces. I walked over and checked it out, and it was not ideal. If she came out and turned left I’d never see her at all; if she came out and turned right I’d have a chance of spotting her, but it was so far away I’d really have to be looking. And I couldn’t squat in the alley indefinitely; sooner or later, someone would lean out his bathroom window and say something or tell someone. Broken bottles, condoms, a smashed TV, a stench from a brown box. Still, as shitty OPs went, it could have been worse and if I could disappear into the shadows it would be ok.
I wasn’t exactly an old hand, but I wasn’t exactly clueless, either.
In the short time I was in the British Army, I got a whisper from a Jock sergeant, at basic training, that they were grooming me for officer training or the specials, because as the sergeant said: I was a vile, underhanded, sneaky, wee, idle fuck.
I never did make officer selection, because the next week I stole a Land Rover and drove from Aldershot to Cambridge to see a girl. Typical, and like some Mick curse, strong drink was behind most of this little adventure. I returned the vehicle undamaged, but my file had increased in size threefold and I was never to be out of the army’s bad books again. I didn’t do time for that, which showed how much they liked me, and the Jock sergeant and the captain hurt me more with their disappointment than any punishment. I worked a wee bit harder after that and though I was only in a year they let me take a corporal’s course (which I failed), but even being asked showed that I still had some promise. I think they thought if I could get through the first year or two, I might be a useful wee character in and around West Tyrone or the badlands of South Armagh. After twelve months, I was sent to Saint Helena on a recon course and taught to scout and do legwork and OPs, and I enjoyed it and might have made a go of things had I not been woefully immature. I was not seventeen when I joined and far too young to respect authority, never mind the fucking British Army, and a bar fight during the recon course (when I nearly killed a local sheep farmer or fisherman or whatever it is they do out there) was the final straw for Her Majesty and they kicked me out after a spell in the pokey.
But although my experience working for HM Forces had been brief, it had been fruitful. They’d taught me to harden my body, to harden my mind, they’d shown me how to shoot and (more pertinent here) how to do observation layups and how to wait. The corporal’s course was to be useful a few weeks later when I was being tailed, but the recon came in useful right now. It was taught by a Geordie SAS staff sergeant who knew his business but could barely speak intelligible English. If you paid attention, though, he came off with some good stuff. He told us how to stay awake, he told us how to kip, he told us that Saint Helena herself was British and that the stories about Napoleon’s dick were not true. And among those diverse georgics that he taught us up on the windy cliffs of east Saint H. he told us not to believe in cop shows where you see peelers sitting with mugs of coffee and doughnuts on a stakeout. Never, he said, take diuretics on a layup, especially if you’re on your own. If you forget everything else, remember to be careful about peeing. That was it, really, all the rest was about finding a good spot and waiting.
So thanks, Sarge. I had a long pee down the alley, found a good spot, and then waited. I was extremely patient, extremely still. I wasn’t smoking anymore and this was better. Easier. All you could do was breathe and look. I squatted in the shadow near a wall for an hour and then I changed my position so that I was sitting cross-legged and then after a time I stood. The movements between each pose were seamless and slow and my eyes never left the street.
I was still quite poised and alert five hours later when Bridget appeared in a camel hair coat, black jeans, black DMs, her hair tied back, a handbag over her right shoulder. She was listening to a Walkman, which would make things simpler. I let her stroll the length of the street and turn right at the corner. I crossed the waste ground; I didn’t run, but I walked fast. She was halfway along the road, turning right. She wasn’t going to the subway, so I tried to think where she was going. What was down that street? I tried to remember. Another bar, an Irish food store, a butcher’s, a paper shop, a bakery, what else? I couldn’t remember. Van Cortlandt Park and the IRT were way down the hill but if she was going to the park or the subway she’d have turned left at the Four P. and saved herself the journey of an extra few blocks. A man appeared on the corner in front of me just as I was about to cross from the waste ground. He was a big man in his late fifties or sixties, an old bruiser, black coat, plus fours; he looked like fucking Boris Karloff out for a dander. He was walking at a brisk pace, and if I slipped in behind him and she did look back, she’d notice him only and not me. The big guy turned the corner; I slid over and in behind the bastard.
He made it to the next corner and then I did. Bridget was nowhere to be seen. Unless she’d run she couldn’t have gotten to the end of the block and turned again. She’d had to have gone in somewhere. There were a dozen shops on both sides of the street. Maybe the bakery; maybe it was her mum’s birthday or something. The big guy went down to the butcher’s and stepped inside. I waited at the corner looking nonchalant-which is absolutely the hardest part of tailing someone. It was about five minutes, a lifetime exposed out there in the broad.
She stepped out of the dry cleaner’s with a plastic bag over a dress. Small, one of hers, spangly. An event dress, a we’ll-fuck-tonight dress. She was heading back the way she’d come. Walking brisk. Swinging her hips. Excited. I eased out of her field of view and slipped down the basement steps of the apartment building on the corner. She’d stay on my side of the street and go past above me about six feet away. I’d see her face, but she wouldn’t see mine down here in the shadow. I backed against the wall and waited. All the time there was the possibility that when she went by I’d say something. I’d call her name. Bridget, down here, ssshhhh, don’t be afraid, Mouse, it’s me, my Mouse girl, it’s me, I’m alive, don’t cry out, pretend you’ve dropped something.
She’d be astonished, maybe she’d faint, yell, she’d start to cry: They told me you were dead, I thought you were dead. Oh, my God. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Sweet Jesus.
I’d whisper instructions to her, we’d meet that night in the park, she’d tell her ma she needed a walk after dinner. That wasn’t so unusual; sometimes she went for a walk before starting her shift in the bar. We’d meet in the park and I’d tell her everything. Christ, Bridget, you’re not going to believe it. Take a breath. I’ve been through the mangle a bit, but I am alive. We’ll have to be quick. Smart. It isn’t safe for me here. If Sunshine found out, if Darkey found out, they’d have to kill me, they’d have to. No choice. They know me. No, no, don’t call him, it’ll all be lies. Lies. Didn’t they say that I was dead? No, Sunshine, too, he’s worse, if anything. I promise you it’s all true. Don’t cry, be tough. They’ll notice if you’ve been crying. Listen, I’ve it all worked out. We’ll go away; you’ll book tickets for both of us for this weekend. I can rustle up some documents by then. It’ll cost me, but I can do it. I’ll get the cash somehow. Don’t pack or fucking look at atlases or anything like that. Don’t get your hair cut. Change nothing. Saturday morning get up. Say you’re going shopping in midtown. Take the train. No extra bags. We’ll meet at the 181st Street stop and take the A train to JFK and then fly to: where? anywhere? Australia, there’s a second cousin of mine in Queensland. England, I know a couple of people in London, Coventry. Ireland, dozens who could hide us out. A cottage in Donegal. Oh, Bridget, it’s so beautiful there: the Blue Mountains, the hills, the loughs, the Atlantic thundering up on empty beaches. You’d love it. I’d get a job in Derry, maybe you, too, we’d raise kids, get a wee fishing boat, a wee rower, teach them to fish, there’s surfing there now too, it’s not behind the times. We’d use aliases, they’d never find us, never. I know Darkey can pull strings and Mr. Duffy has connections, but we’d be clever. Clever, Bridget, and happy, so happy…
I hear her steps on the sidewalk. It’s a sharp day. She has a purposeful walk. She gets close.
It was you, Bridget. Please believe me when I tell you that you’re the one that kept me going. I thought of you. I was half-mad out there. Christ, the things that happened to us. Only I made it. It wasn’t luck, it was all you, Bridget, can’t you see that? I’m sure of it. Yeah, I know, I know, I’m a pochle, a liar, there are other girls. I know, you don’t have to tell me, but that’s behind me. I don’t remember them. All that time it was you. I swear it. You.
She’s even closer, ten paces till she reaches the corner. She’s humming along. Happy. Her boots squeal and she turns the corner. I see her face. Lightly powdered. Radiant. Her hair is darker than I’ve seen it, tied back. The music on her Walkman is U2, she’s singing with it, one of the upbeat ones. She’s smiling as she sings. Aye, the dress under the plastic is a fancy cocktail outfit; Darkey must be taking her to some do. Something special, no trip to the pictures this night, it’s the Met, or some fund-raiser, or a restaurant in Tribeca or on Central Park South. She’s parallel with me for a moment, frozen there, and then she’s past. I hear her steps recede down the sidewalk. Fainter and fainter. She turns at the corner. I’m about to come up the steps when, lo and behold, old Boris Karloff appears behind her. Practically skipping now, rushing to keep up, not sure if the whole trip to the dry cleaner’s was a blind or not. Well, well, so this is as far as Darkey’s trust goes. Even now. God help some boy she meets by accident, what’ll happen to him? Maybe he’ll win a trip to Cancún through the mail, or is that track too beaten for Sunshine now? Maybe it’ll just be a wee hiding behind the bike sheds, a fist punctuating every word: Stay-the-fuck-away-from-her.
Boris turns the corner and I come up the steps. I wait there for a while. In the movie version of the story, I’d pull out a cigarette and smoke it and stand there looking dazed and insensible. But I’ve given up, I need the extra lung capacity to compensate for other physical concerns. There is no point following her back to the Four Provinces, but it might be interesting to see where Boris goes. I walk to the corner and am just in time to see him get into a blue Ford. I get a read on the number plate and try to compare it with the blue Ford that was on 123rd Street eons ago, but my memory has erased that number and put in its place a series of horrible events. I stare for a while and then pull my hat low and take a long and deserted way back to the subway stop.
I was fucking broke, freezing, living on cold baked beans. The place on Lenox had no gas or heat and, like the people I’d once mocked, I considered burning wood on the bare floor. I’d tried to befriend the Jamaican guy on the second floor, but he was having none of it. I wasn’t that welcome at Ratko’s place, but sometimes I had to go over to get a square meal.
I wasn’t disheartened, though. Quite the reverse. I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t just sitting there faffing about. I was mentally steeling myself for what was to come.
One night, to confirm everything, I spent some time in contemplation on the roof of my building. I’d never been able to do the lotus position before, but when you can take your foot off it becomes a bit easier. It was the middle of October and the crisp air was disturbed only by the odd gypsy cab on 125th and a howling crank addict at the subway stop and then, later, gunshots up in the 130s. But you zone it out. My brain was ticking and working fine. It told me things. Patience. Things were going well, but I shouldn’t jump just yet. I needed time. I had to be fit. I had to be able to run on a foot I could barely limp upon. I had to be strong and brilliant.
Apollo came up earlier in connection with the future and, you know, a wise thing Apollo urged at Delphi was to Know Yourself, and that’s what I had done. Looked within. I wasn’t impatient about my plans. However long it took, it would take that long. You’re the lucky man whose aim becomes true. Once you are resolved, all other anxieties melt away into nothingness.
The first thing was that I needed money, and I was never much in the thieving line so, obviously, I had to get a job. How? I sat for a while and I considered various options, put my foot on, and went back down into the apartment again.
The next morning I walked to a bar called the Blue Moon near the Metro North stop on 125th. Once a glamorous place, now fallen on hard times, with a large staging area at the back where bands had played and people had danced in the thirties. Like the rest of 125th Street it had seen many changes since then, most for the bad. It didn’t have many customers but the ones it did have were older guys and no trouble. Crack cocaine was the vice du jour around here and alcohol a benign and peaceful influence on character in comparison. I’d worked here for one week, nine months ago. It had been called Carl’s then. In that period, which is exactly the gestation cycle of a human being, I too had been born again into a different, harder, more venerable person. Carl’s also had transformed. It had undergone a change of name and a change of ownership. The Blue Moon had been what it was called about five years ago and was what it had been in its heyday. The record emporium next door to it had become a lottery store. The African craft store had closed. Everything in Harlem is always in a state of flux, but the early 1990s was perhaps the low point in the great neighborhood’s fall from grace.
I’d gotten a job at Carl’s through Freddie, our mailman, while I was waiting for an interview with the famous Sunshine and Darkey White. Scotchy had found me a place but had let me starve on the street until Sunshine had finally said that I was Darkey White material. Freddie had said that I’d be quite the star at Carl’s as the one white busboy within ten blocks.
I went over there at lunchtime hoping that I wouldn’t stand out in the bigger crowd.
Crowd. Two guys in separate booths, a barman, and a girl drunk at a stool next to a jukebox. It was a dark place, no width to it at all, just a long bar and a few tables opposite and at the back the closed-down stage, some booths, and a bathroom. No bathroom for women, no decorations except for a few mirrors and a fight poster.
I’d like a beer, I said, and the barman said that if I was a tourist I’d better get out of here and if I wasn’t a tourist and I was looking for trouble, he carried, with police approval, a sawed-off shotgun within reach of where he was standing right now.
I said that I wasn’t a tourist and I didn’t want trouble, just a beer. He took a look at me and poured me a Budweiser, almost all head, and asked for five dollars.
I must have been slightly cut that day because I said to him that I’d give him the five dollars but I wanted a proper beer for my money. We eyed each other. He was an old black guy who looked a lot like Miles Davis, though a little paunchier. After a long minute, he grinned at me and poured me a beer and said that the charge was two bucks. We chatted about American football (of which I know nothing) and when he said would I like another, I came to it.
Listen, Jim, I said (for such was his name), I know times are tough but I need a job. I worked bar many times in New York and I’ve worked bar in Ireland for years and years. I’m a good worker and honest and I’ll take any shift you want. I was here at the beginning of the year when this place was still Carl’s.
Jim laughed.
Yeah, man, we need a lot of staff right now to cope with the big rush.
I laughed too. But even though it was almost noon, the daughters of Nyx were still in my corner. I gave him my address and sure enough, as luck would have it, that very day his relief barman quit because he’d just gotten the lucrative understudy job for Macavity the Mystery Cat in a touring version of the show.
Jim came by my place and the Jamaican guy on two nearly shot him, and I ran down and almost brained the Jamaican and but for the fact that he was new in the mainland Americas and still unsure of our ways, he surely would have fucking killed the pair of us. Rather, we solved the situation with rum in his apartment, which was a lot nicer than mine, and Jim gave me the job.
It sure would be a novelty having a white boy keeping bar, and I seemed like I was sincere and trustworthy. He asked if I had any dependency issues and I said that I took too much Tylenol for pains in my leg, and he laughed and said that I might be ok; he did add if I ever tried to rip him off he’d hunt me down and castrate me. The job was Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights and two dollars an hour, plus tips.
The place didn’t exactly fill up at the weekends, but the Apollo crowd brought some business and with tips I was bringing in forty dollars a night, which wasn’t bad at all. I took a ribbing and much shite the first night, but by the third I was old news and the abuse was perfunctory and dull. On my very first shift, Jim and I threw out a crack addict who ran in with a bread knife in a pathetic attempt at a holdup.
I was a good barman and Jim liked having me around but, like I say, I wasn’t there long since my stint effectively ended when I was offered a more lucrative position in Ramón’s organization. It happened like this:
I was in the bar one night when a group of Dominican boys came in. There were six of them. If you were Dominican you only came into this bar in numbers. Definitely a crew: watchful eyes, polo shirts, Miami Vice pastel jackets, cashmere coats that dragged on the ground. Mr. T would have envied the gold chains about their necks. They were all packing, and two of them had big muscle jobs that everyone realized could spray havoc and death with gay abandon if that proved necessary, which it wouldn’t when you considered that the average age of our clientele was about sixty-five.
They ordered Mexican beers and took a table at the back. They were smart boys and weren’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t to know then, but Jim had started paying off to them. They were trying to expand their territory from Washington Heights down into Harlem, along Broadway and Amsterdam. Jim had heard bad things about them, but they kept the cost low enough so a dodgy business like Jim’s could pay off without too much hurt.
The boss was a little man called Ramón Borges Hernández. Five six, olive skin, handsome, bald, poised, heavy. He looked forty but was younger.
I learned later that Ramón grew up in Santo Domingo and had come to New York about five years earlier. He had many cousins in Washington Heights and within days of his arrival they’d set him up as part of a crew. He was arrested three times and with the third they threw something at him that stuck and he spent some time in Rikers Island. Rikers then wasn’t like Rikers now. Even among the Dominican inmates there were daily fights, stabbings, and shit-kicking sessions. And across ethnic and gang lines: rapes, castrations, shank murders. You got an education, and if you survived, you got a reputation and made connections.
Ramón got out of Rikers and was deported to the Dominican Republic under some crazy new get-tough policy, but it didn’t take him long to get himself a new passport and a new look, and he was about to head back to America when he got in some unspecified bother and went to prison in, of all places, Haiti. I assume he was smuggling something, but neither Ramón nor anyone else ever spoke about that time. Probably my little portion of Mexican hell was as nothing compared to Ramón’s fourteen months in Port-au-Prince.
Still, sometimes, suffering builds character (though not in my case) and when Ramón did come back to Manhattan he was newly invigorated and determined to make the upper city his. He joined a crew working east of St. Nicholas Park and was doing ok for himself until he was arrested and ended up again in Rikers Island. This time, though, he’d been lifted under a lucky star.
If you are the type of person who believes in synchronicity or the power of coincidence or chaos theory or Jungian collective unconscious or other bollocks like that, it might be instructive to learn just how Ramón’s luck changed and the small but important role I played in reversing Fortune’s wheel. Vanna White wouldn’t be in it, I tell you. I didn’t realize it then, but Ramón’s and my path had crossed inadvertently twice before. Once when Ramón gave encouragement to Dermot Finoukin’s foolishness and once with Mr. Peter Berenson, the Eastern European gentleman with Santa trouble. I think I said earlier that all this might be seen as a bit flukey, but if Ramón were still alive I’d have said no, it wasn’t a fluke, it was some Ramónian magical cadence that meant he knew me before he knew me. But, actually, poor Ramón was no magician, at least not magician enough to stop Moreno Felipe Cortez from shooting him nineteen times (that means more than one clip) the year after I left New York. Anyway, that was all still to come, and for the moment, it’s diverting to see how Ramón made that jump from Triple-A into the Major Leagues.
Ramón was sent to Rikers and he got to know a black Colombian guy from the Bronx called Bill. Blacks and Dominicans didn’t pal around much, but Ramón was a charmer and had a knack for spotting talent. Bill, it turned out, was an important middleman meeting mules at JFK and holding the product while deals were done. He had several things going at once, including babying a large quantity of cocaine for a Colombian terror group’s drug arm. All he had to do was hold it and keep his mouth shut. Simple. But Bill was also a bit of a fuckup and had somehow punched a cop at (of all heaven’s holy fucking places) the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Bill was on a warrant and went to jail and through that he lost his apartment in Riverdale. They wanted Bill out of the building because he was black and Colombian, but heavying him out would look bad at landlord-and-tenant court. Fortunately for them, Bill was now in prison and couldn’t (or forgot to) pay his rent (he had a few places), so they kicked him out and put in Mr. Peter Berenson, who had wanted to move from the ground floor to the fourth floor to get a view of Van Cortlandt Park.
I don’t know what Bill’s troubles were, but clearly he had a lot on his plate and didn’t get round to sending someone to look for his stash of coke until December, by which time the apartment was inhabited by someone else-our pal Pete. The Christmas burglar had found nothing, and Bill decided that he would investigate the whole thing when he got out of the clink in the summer.
You might recall that the night Shovel supposedly beat the crap out of Big Andy, as I was coming up the steps from the subway stop Mr. Berenson said that he’d had an intruder break into his place but not take anything. This was Bill out of jail and looking for his cache of cocaine, which was safely embedded in the floorboard. He didn’t find it or was too high to get it the first time, which was unlucky for him, because very soon after, Ramón saw him on the street and remembered his tall prison tales and took him to a place where all the pertinent information was extracted. Shortly after that, Ramón or an associate went to Mr. Berenson’s apartment, killed Mr. Berenson, and took a sports bag full of cocaine out of the apartment. I sometimes like to beat myself up with the thought that if I’d taken the old Nazi a wee bit more seriously that night perhaps I’d have gone over there myself and camped out and found the cocaine before Ramón did. With a bag full of cocaine to deliver to Darkey, I might have been forgiven all my sins and at the very least there would have been no reason to send all of us down to Mexico. Maybe they’d have gotten to me, but the boys would all still have been alive.
In any case, his little worker bees got going on the stash and with all this free money Ramón transformed himself from a small-time player into a bigger-time player. Ramón flooded his own wee part of the market, undercut the competition, and in no time at all was the cat’s pajamas.
It maybe wasn’t just chance then that the two areas I’d come across Ramón’s baleful influence were in the Bronx and Washington Heights. Both places Dominicans were moving into, Micks moving out of. Places where one could expect that Darkey White’s power would be on the wane and that of thoughtful young hoods from Hispaniola would be on the wax. Yes, in this part of town, Ramón and the Dominicans were the future, Darkey White and the Irish were the past. It wouldn’t last, but then again, what does?
Ramón was in the group of six that night, and I didn’t know it, but he’d come to see me.
You think you can be anonymous in this city, but you can’t. Things slip out, people chitter. Everyone’s a bigmouth. You can’t keep a fucking secret in America. The Irish aren’t much good at secrets either, but they’re better than Yanks. If a UFO really did crash at Roswell, there’d be a bloody Roswell World there by now.
Someone had blabbed and Ramón had heard about me and sought me out. At that time, I considered this my unluckiest break since coming back to New York. From my position, I was doing ok. I had a job, I had a place, and I was lying low and doing prep work. The last thing I needed was a major player taking an interest in me. But it is possible that nothing at all would have worked out but for my connection with Ramón. Without Ramón, it might have taken me years to find out where anybody lived and without Ramón, Sunshine might have got to me before I got to him.
Ramón was cool and had a lot of bottle. His boys were sitting in the booth drinking Coronas when he came up to the bar alone and sat opposite me.
Ramón’s big thing was telling you who the best prospects were in Dominican baseball circles. Largely, he was proved right and I have vague recollections of predictions of greatness for Pedro Martínez, Manny Ramírez, and Sammy Sosa, though doubtless there were others who didn’t work out.
Anyway, that’s how he started out with me. Baseball, Dominicans. On extremely limited knowledge I kept the chat going, hoping for a fat tip. We talked, and he got another round in. His English was great for having spent so short a time here, but apparently it was because of his uncle, who had gone back to the island after thirty years on 171st Street. He’d been raised by this uncle, who, in his retirement, became a minor and almost famous Dominican poet. After the death of his mother, Ramón was raised by the uncle and a succession of women, none of whom, it seemed, he had much affection for. He told me all this when baseball was exhausted.
Yeah, yeah, very interesting, I kept saying.
Ramón chatted on and on, and it looked like things were going ok, and I was just beginning to wonder if there was any kind of gay vibe here when quite suddenly he stopped talking, blinked, and said:
Listen, enough of this. I’ll come to the point, I know you.
You do?
Yes.
Ok, who am I? I said, laughing.
You are Michael Forsythe and you and your crew are the ones who killed Dermot Finoukin in a bar near the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights.
I don’t know what you’re talk-
I was there that day, I recognize you. I want to offer you a job. I’m starting a business in that part of town and I need reliable men who can handle a weapon.
Wrong guy, mate, sorry. Mistaken me for someone else, I said, concealing the fact that I was very close to panic.
Please, don’t play games, he said.
Jesus Christ, I was thinking. Ok, be calm. So I was rumbled. Bloody rumbled. Was he a peeler? No, not this side of the Great Divide. What was it that he’d said? Oh yeah, he wanted to offer me a job, because I was such a great fucking marksman.
Ok, pal, your whole crew over there are Dominicans. Now why would you want me? I don’t even speak Spanish, I said. No hablo español.
He smiled.
Michael, you’ll learn Spanish. I need good men, not hangers-on. It pays five hundred a week. Often much more. You do basic protection.
You talk like a cop. How come your English is so good? I asked suspiciously.
Listen to me, Michael, I’m no puta gangster smoking the product and blowing profits on cars and whores. My crew are the guys I could get, but I’m looking for quality and from what I’ve heard about you, you’ll fit right in.
What have you heard? From who? How did you know where I was?
Don’t worry, it is general information.
This, in fact, worried me a great deal, but my face was studied and blank. I tried to appear relaxed. I grinned and breathed.
Anyway, why would I want to work for you? I asked.
Apart from the money?
Yeah.
I’ll help you.
I looked at him. Ramón, a small man, but what presence, like a Dominican Rod Steiger. But even this doesn’t do him justice. Ramón took up a great deal of psychic space: he electrified the room and his prison eyes and wary stare brought up everyone else’s game, and we became hyperaware just as he was always cognizant of everyone and everything within a pistol shot.
Help me do what? I asked.
I’ll help you, he insisted.
I shook my head and tried to figure out what was going on. Was he a fucking mind reader? What did he know? Things didn’t seem quite right. Was this a trap of some kind? Had Darkey put him up to this?
Listen, mate, I don’t need a job, I already have one. I’m trying to keep a low profile, you know, I said.
I know, he said, and smiled a very irritating smile. I’ll help you with that, too.
I began to get a little scared now and measured the paces it would take me to get at the shotgun under the counter. Two steps, and it just pulls out. Neither of us spoke for a while, but I was first to crack:
I need to know how you found out about me, I said, slowly.
He nodded.
I understand, he said.
While he spoke, I tried to figure him out. The half-smile, Rolex watch, gold chain, expensive shirt, and yet it was all low key. This was the bare minimum he needed to impress his subordinates. Ramón wasn’t really the type for ostentation.
Two days ago, someone saw you in here, someone who also was there at the bar. And yet I’d heard that you were dead, he said.
From who?
It had been put around that you and your crew had been killed in Mexico, murdered for skimming cream off the top. It had been put around that if that’s what happened to friends think what would happen to enemies.
Oh, I said stupidly. If I’d been quicker, I’d have seen right there what the game was, but there was too much information for me to process at once. Something going on, but I couldn’t figure out what. If it were me, I would never in a million years hire someone who wasn’t a countryman or an old friend. You never go to strangers for this kind of deal. You can never know them well enough. Look at Mrs. Gandhi and her Sikh bodyguards, proof enough right there. The emperor Darius, another example. I had to think pretty quickly. First, was he threatening me? If I didn’t take the job, was he going to tell Darkey I was here? Second, what was the hidden agenda? What was it? Ok, thinking. The second part of it I wasn’t going to get tonight. Too smart for that. The first I might. I decided the best thing was just to come right out and ask him.
Listen, uh, mister, uh, Ramón.
Yes.
Listen, Ramón, are you threatening me? If I don’t take the job are you going to spread it around where I am?
He looked very serious. His lips narrowed, his eyes didn’t blink.
I assume you do not mean to be insulting. Please take my card and think it over. We can help each other. That’s all.
He handed me a card. It was white and had a phone number on it, nothing else. He turned round and his boys all got up at once. They all walked out without another word.
The door closed behind them, and I knew immediately I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted to stay in New York, I’d have to go with him. Even if Ramón wasn’t going to say anything, sooner or later it would come out. Darkey had more men and resources. Sunshine would see to it that Mr. Duffy knew there was a problem. Mr. Duffy had dozens of people whom he could call upon to dispose of an irritant like me. In half an hour, my world was somewhere in my fucking whips.
I had no choice. And I knew then. No more spying on Bridget, no more meditating on the roof. The honeymoon was over. I called the number an hour later.
Ramón, I-
He cut me off. He said to say nothing, that he liked to do important things in person and he would come back down. I hung up, both irritated and strangely pleased with this way of doing biz. He came back in just before two. The place was deserted. He came alone. No boys.
He sat opposite.
You’ve decided, he said.
I stuck out my hand.
Ramón, I said, where thy lodgest, I will lodge, and thy people will be my people and thy god, my god.
He smiled and shook my hand.
And that was that. I went home. Stripped, showered, went to bed. It was all done. Ramón was to be the facilitator. I lay there. Harlem out there in the night, alive and beautiful. I lay and listened.
Ramón is the conduit they’ve chosen, I said. The last piece.
I closed my eyes and put my hands behind my head. I rested in the long, cold arms of Nemesis and readied myself for the blows to come.