Brooklyn Noir (11 page)

If sedentary living made clams and other shellfish susceptible to accumulations of high concentrations of human-made poisons—bacterial coliforms from sewage, polychlorinated biphenyls from industry—the Bay’s fish traveled for food, in mobile homes of skin and scale, to mixed and open Atlantic waters, so fish weren’t as vulnerable to dire accumulations of pollutants. In warm weather, crag-faced, gravel-voiced old-timers would cast long for eel and fluke or snag butterfish or samplings of Jamaica Bay’s increasing population of Canarsie White Fish—floating used condoms—right off the Pier’s decaying edges. Word on the Pier, from above, state and federal environmental officials, and from below, locals, people like us, was: “You can fish, but you can’t clam.”

Canarsie Beach Park was part of Gateway National Recreation Area—not a
National Park
, as if a park was too much to wish for; we needed to maintain realistically low greenery expectations—but a
Recreation Area
Still, the place was Federal enough to have behatted, uniformed rangers. And rules. The Department of Health had officially and consistently declared Jamaica Bay unswimmable for fifty years: No primary-contact recreation—activities in which bodies made direct contact with raw water, especially total bodily submersion—allowed. Secondary contact recreation, like fishing or boating, where skin contact with water was minimal and ingestion improbable, was permitted. Clamming, I guessed, was ultra-forbidden because it required getting the whole body into the water to dig.

Practicing here, jumping off Canarsie Pier into Jamaica Bay, to simulate the worst potential payout of our gamble with gravity—falling together off a bridge into deep water, which he risked every day, just not while toting me along—required forbidden primary contact recreation. Immersion in Jamaica Bay “violated Federal rules,” Dad warned, voice somber, conspiratorially soft, “As in,
the Feds
You get it?”

“I got it.”

“Good.”

Bench-pressing hadn’t been practicing; it was pre-training, basic conditioning, a barely callisthenic, chicken-feed beginner’s warm-up leading us to this. To Canarsie Pier. For the
for-real practicing
—if those particular words, strung together and placed next to each other, made sense. Which they didn’t.

Dad started when he was fourteen. Until his death at forty-five, every workday of his life, he was scared. Two kinds of work were obtainable in the world: the safe and the dangerous. Experience and practice never made Dad unafraid. Silently, without fanfare, he tolerated extreme fear-states and accepted the probability of grave injury or death as standard workaday inevitabilities, like lunch with the gang or alone up on a scaffold, like fatigue, like fumes. His morning routine: get into whites, shave, shower, shit, like a military man, brush teeth, drink pot of coffee, slap on boots and cap, drive to site, start working, get crushingly, heart-stoppingly,
fittingly
panicked about dying in the coming hours. Dad did frightening things that other people didn’t want to do; other people didn’t have to do them, because people like Dad did. Blood poisoning did him in after twenty-four years of exposure to industrial chemicals, mostly paints containing an odorless, oily, poisonous benzene derivative, absorbed through skin:
aniline blue. Aniline blue
sounded like a song title or poem, the name of a daughter or lover. Lyrical, sing-song
aniline blue
killed him, but before that happened, I’d planned on his dying in a bridge fall.

There were laws against it.

Child protection laws with tucked-in bylaws that defined bringing children to dangerous workplaces as criminal offenses. Take Our Daughters to Work Day wasn’t designed for the daughters of pile driver, jack hammer, or forklift operators. Taking kids to perilous worksites violated child endangerment laws, laws ratified and upheld—lackadaisically, since the continuance of selected human genera wasn’t a big deal, even when specimens were found in bulk—for protection I didn’t want.

The laws against it didn’t stop us. Did laws ever stop anyone who wanted to do something really bad from doing something really bad? A failure of nerve stopped us.
His
All his. He, the adroit, well-built, well-practiced man, who did it daily, for real, chickened out. I, who hadn’t yet mastered long division or my dread surrounding it, was ready to jump right in.

Upon starting work at a new job, Dad would half-promise and half-threaten to cart me along to the worksite, fix me in place around his tough neck, my legs parted, one leg dangling off each of his shoulders, and lug me around the job all day, up and down the tiers of the bridge, everywhere work required him to be while he painted. A regular workday, but with a Beth on his back. He’d try not to let me fall. He’d do the best he could. His six feet and three inches—a tall Jew!—guaranteed me an even better view than his of water, sky, skyline, land, of the whole place that Mark LaPlace, a mixed-blood Mohawk, who, along with many Indian ironworkers, drove in every week from the Caughnawaga reservation near Montreal, called the City of Man-Made Mountains.

Earthbound, at home or school, the world was scary and too big as it was. High on a partially completed bridge, higher yet on Dad’s shoulders, the world would swell to unmanageable dimensions, awesome frights, sickening beauties. The anticipation of visual sublimity wasn’t what thrilled me at every promise-threat. I thrilled to Dad’s singular power to scare me, to his correspondingly exclusive power to soothe me. Dad could reassure me; I’d
believe
his reassurances, trust in them, because he knew, the cells that made him
him
understood how bad fear could get. Climbing together, he’d have his rope, hook, muscle-meat, and deeply treaded, break-a-leg boots, acting on behalf of his physical integrity and safety. All I’d have was a perfunctory pat on the head,
knock ’em dead, kiddo
, and his body. I’d be terrified and love it, love him for terrifying me, for his unique capacity to assuage terror he’d authored himself. If some evening, he’d casually, passingly mention taking me up—
maybe tomorrow… you never know, do you?
—the next morning, suited up in my dungaree overalls, prepared for action, I’d park my tush on his lunch pail, so he couldn’t leave without first reckoning with me, as a housecat might tuck her body within the lining of a suitcase her owner was packing for a journey, not-so-subtly notifying her master,
You’re not going anywhere unless you take me, too.
As if the cat, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.

Every day he left without taking me, until I was twelve and
God damn it to Hell
he died and stopped
no
taking me.

Before he pulled that stunt, he kept on pledging and daring me to go. I’d dare him back with a fiercely incautious,
You’d better believe it!
As if I, no matter how well-loved, had any say at all in the matter.

Every one of New York City’s children grew up in the shadows of bridges. A smaller subset grew up or died in the penumbrae of bridge deaths. Child endangerment was a Class A misdemeanor, as naughty as a misdemeanor could be before it graduated up a grade to felony. So it was one crime, child endangerment, if I hung around bridge bases when school was out so Dad could half-look after me—babysitters and summer camp didn’t exist in our economic cosmology, the unfeasibility of camp accounting for my never learning how to swim—and it was another crime, child neglect—which was often a felony, not to mention a big fat bore—if he left me alone at home.

An outlaw either way.

Even when school was in session, most of the guys in all the gangs brought their sons to work, where they received their real education. Bridge-building was existence itself, what their fathers before them had done, what their sons after them would probably do. Ironworkers formed multi-generational lines of risk-takers, cold-nerved men bonded together like the high steel it was a life’s assignment to connect. Those burly, balletic men—who took chances only circus acrobats, suicidal souls, Wallendas, or bridgemen would take, who pronounced me
cuter than a button
, who bear-hugged me
till the guacamole would come outa them ears
, who gave me quarters just because I was Lefty Tedesky’s girl—were criminals? Plain as day, it couldn’t have been a crime when Chicky Testaverde, who spun cable, brought his fourteen-year-old, Danny, to a job, and it couldn’t have been a crime when a tall ladder caught Danny’s curious eye, and the boy asked, “Can I climb that?”

Chicky replied, in a resigned, benumbed,
oh-no-here’s-where-it-all-begins
voice, “Awright, but don’t fall.” Could Chicky authoritatively have refused, without Danny laughing in his face as father and son stood right there on a bridge-construction site, where Chicky was now working iron, where both might have been remembering that Chicky’s father, Danny’s grandfather, had worked the Williamsburg Bridge, lifting steel beams with derricks pulled by horses?

Danny climbed that ladder higher and higher, until he stood alone on a slippery top beam—a beam much higher than Chicky had bargained for or would have allowed if Danny had asked—and looked around, taking in the world’s magnitude, and marveled at how extraordinarily far he could see from that height, and instantly decided that ironwork was what he’d someday do. Down at the base, Chicky went all-out ape. “Get down, Danny, you crazy fuck, damn you! You’ll kill yourself up there. And if you die, Danny boy? You know what’ll happen if you die?” Danny smiled down at everyone, smiled what the men called a
shit-eating grin.
I couldn’t see how eating shit was anything to grin about, but I figured adults knew things I was too young to understand. “If you die,” Chicky screamed at the sky, “I. Will. Fucking. Kill. You.”

Wearing an
aw-shucks-I’m-caught-but-I’m-cute
mug, Danny climbed down. Everyone, high and low—physically, up on the bridge and down at the base, and professionally, at every station within high steel’s complex system of ranking its men—applauded and cheered. One after another, ironworkers thumped his back hard; sometimes truly to hurt him, because he’d done wrong, he’d gone against his father, and sometimes to congratulate him, as a display of respect, because he’d proven himself bridge-worthy. Danny had demonstrated his passion for and merit within his family’s legacy precisely by defying it in its current incarnation: Chicky. Mostly the men’s back-clapping extended both—contempt and admiration—through the infliction of pain. Just a little pain.

Or a lot. But a lot usually happened at home. Like what they did in public was practice for what they’d do at home. Like they saved
a lot
up during the day. For later.

Chicky played at grumbling and grousing but couldn’t persuasively beat down his smile—crooked-lipped, prominently lacking some teeth, but jam-packed with filial pride—when he submitted that Danny’s ascent had earned Danny his first beer. Chicky kept a cooler with sodas and beers in his Buick’s trunk on days when the walking bosses weren’t around. He called, “Little Tedesky!” I jumped to attention. “Couldja make yourself useful? Shake a leg? Get my boy here a beer?”

Chicky tossed me his car keys and threw me an approving nod when I caught them no problem. Keds crunching gravel, I ran toward the parking lot, delighted to have a task to fulfill for the men. Danny, overjoyed with his big day’s second distinct launch into masculine adulthood—his illicit, under-age drink, perhaps not his first, as Chicky chose to think—jogged close behind me.

“Today’s your day,” I said, palming the clutch of keys off to him. “You get to do the whole thing.” He unlocked and opened the Buick’s trunk, pried off the cooler’s squeaky Styrofoam lid, retrieved a Rheingold, took a long pull. He offered me a sip.

“Just don’t tell.” Immediately following the initial sip, my arms and legs felt heavy and achy, but they ached good. Another sip, and they ached real good. Another, and I became unsteady. I grabbed Danny’s arm so I wouldn’t skin my knees stumbling to the gravel.

I’d never seen so hairy an arm on someone so young. Up close. With my free hand, I touched the hair on the arm I held hostage, mussing the hair against the whorls of its natural growth configuration, then smoothing it back, as I’d done at home with the wall-to-wall shag. Back and forth, up and down his arm. I was simultaneously lost in and intensely concentrated on the beat, the rhythm of cyclically creating swirling arm-hair chaos and then returning it to tidy normalcy He didn’t stop me. His breath was raggedy. I continued stroking, ruining a pattern, restoring a pattern.

Distantly, Chicky hollered, “I said one beer, not the whole six-pack.” Danny neither responded nor registered hearing his father. Now he had gooseflesh, his soft, young, black arm-hairs standing straight up, a phenomenon I’d later learn was scientifically called
piloerection.
Chicky shouted, “You writin’ a book or somethin’?” Danny, who got to see his arms and their hair every day, was as transfixed as I was. His breathing steadied, slowed, deepened. Nearly but not quite rupturing my reverie, from afar Chicky yelled, angrily, “Danny? You deaf or just not listening to me today? If I have to come over there…” Wordlessly, Danny stared at my hand gliding along his arm’s shaft. Touching his arm-hair, and the arm-skin underneath, was awfully pleasant and vaguely disturbing, a brand new, unnamable inner commotion that started to spook me. I didn’t want to stop petting him, but I thought I should mention what I’d half-heard. “You’re dad’s mad. You’re in trouble.” Danny didn’t hear me. Chicky bellowed, “Hey, Lefty. People’s gonna think your girl’s the type who hangs around parking lots. See what’s doing over there, will ya?”

My father approached us, boots grinding gravel. Once the beer can came within his eyeshot, his face became a blade of disapproval, features finely sharpened and narrowed. And it cut. I’d done bad. I scrambled for a strategy to fix it.

Perhaps for the first and only blessed time, being a child spared me something. Still young enough to play innocuous tickle-wrestle games, without pulling my hand from Danny’s arm, I wiggled my fingers, ten desperate, panicked worms, deep into Danny’s belly, like I was tickling him, “Cootchie-cootchie-cooo.” Quick-footed, quick-witted Danny followed my lead, doubling over and laughing maniacally, then cootchie-cootchie-cooo-ing my armpits. I shrieked, too, with crazy-person laughter. Although Dad seemed relieved that all Danny was doing was tickling me—the man had no idea that
I
was doing all the doing, or thought as much—I knew right then that it was officially and indelibly safe to say that I really had a problem, that I was disgusting, that there was poison in my putrefied blood, that I’d been born bad.