In the Nick of Time (39 page)

“I don’t know how to begin.”

“Just start somewhere that makes sense. Look me in my eye and tell me the things that matter to you
most
. The stuff that hurt you and built you up…just talk to me…”

He offered a sad smile. “Whatever you do, don’t interrupt me, Taryn. If you interrupt me, I’ll get off track. I’ll chicken out, too.” His eyes appeared wary, almost as if some great wrongdoing or travesty of injustice awaited on the horizon. “I want to run out of here.” He pointed towards the door. “I
really
don’t want to do this so please, don’t give me an excuse. I’m looking for an out… Don’t let me escape this thing.”

She smiled in understanding, and then he picked up the letter once more and scanned it. He clasped his hands together, and he started over…

Just talk, Nick… just say the words. Confess… now is the time… now is YOUR time…

“There was a
fight in front of the grocery store on the corner of Rockaway Avenue.” He paused, rolled his tongue around a bit in his mouth, tracing the after-flavor of salty fries and gooey, grilled cheese. Everything proved a fast distraction as he tried to find half of a nerve to finish the rest of the sentence. If he could pep talk himself into each revolting revelation, before he knew it, he’d be strong enough to finish a thought, then another, and relay them just the way he saw them after retrieving the damn things from his memory bank.

That shit had been shoved under a mossy rock, bolted shut, and he’d tossed the key into the malodorous sewer, never feeling the desire to open the internal cage of rage again. Once he entered treatment, however, he put on his hiking boots and grubby outdoors clothes, headed underground amongst the stinking piss, piled high shit, myth-tales of big-toothed toilet dwelling alligators and troll people, and soon faced the very real cat-sized rats that harbored incurable ailments. He dug and crawled and screamed and cursed, found the crucial component and released the cellmates, prisoners and convicts, the dirty, nasty shit from his past that he swore was his and his alone to do with as he wished. But…that simply wasn’t true. He hated the process, and sometimes himself, too, but when he began to stare it all in the face, wipe away the grime and grittiness, he was surprised to discover a ‘welcome home’ party, in his honor…

“Nick…don’t mean to interrupt, but…”

“Yeah, I know, I’m not talking, not saying anything. It’s cool…” He cleared his throat, moved past his self-imposed stop signs and jumped into the damn thing, finally accepting his fate. “Anyway, I stood there watching it… the fight. I remember the grainy texture of the Cheetos against my fingertips, and the bright, traffic cone orange way they’d glowed. I’d just eaten handfuls of the snack, and the artificial cheese flavor coated my tongue, made it a bit thicker, prickly. Across the way I saw a kid from the neighborhood named Tony. He was a big Dominican guy.

“Tony had his green bandana on; that meant he was doing business. In this instance, he was refereeing the shit as Little Mike, one of the few white kids in the neighborhood, hammered on Duke. I didn’t know what started the fight, but Little Mike was hell bent on ending it. The little guy had heart, that’s for damn sure. I stood there on the sidelines, calm as could be, drinking my stolen can of Pabst beer from a wrinkled brown paper bag, watching like it was some spectator sport. In many respects, it was. I enjoyed myself all right.” He grinned, a bit ashamed, unsure how to relax himself as he delved a bit deeper into one of his earliest memories of drinking out in public.

“I kept it hidden, you know? Real discreet in its brown bag, a crumpled paper dress…my date for the evening. I’d lifted it from that same store earlier in the day; the very one I stood across the way from, thinking nothing of it. I had balls big of steel back then…could look a son of a bitch in the eye and tell a bold faced lie and
dare
him not to believe me. The only person that knew my ways was my mother, and sometimes even
she
didn’t want to acknowledge how out of control I was.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Jonathan and I met up later that night at the old scrapyard looking for shit to try and sell like bike chains and car parts.

“Jonathan was a friend of mine, my best friend actually. We’d been friends since forever… Our mothers had been neighbors a long time; they’d help each other out. We’d play games together, went to kindergarten ’nd shit. He’d even play hide and seek with me long after we were way too old… I liked hunting people, so he’d humor me. My brother died, and two months later, he was there… like God knew I needed a replacement, someone to fill that spot.”

Somebody to help me not go off the deep end… and soon after Jonathan died, Frederic came… Somebody has been looking out for me for a long ass time.

“Anyway, on the day of this fight, I told him about Little Mike turning Duke inside out, how entertaining and incredible it was. That white boy fucked him up nice and good. He’d won fair and square. But then Jonathan let me know that Duke’s whole fucking family went and dragged Little Mike out of his apartment soon after that brawl, and beat him so bad, he was unconscious, barely clinging to life.

“Come to find out, Duke had done some real disrespectful shit to Little Mike, but no one cared about any of that. It was an embarrassment, a disgrace, to get whipped on by a white boy, you see? Especially Little Mike, cause he was short and real skinny with blond hair. He wasn’t even Jewish or Italian; hell, they probably would have even accepted Irish. He was just a regular ol’ white boy, ancestors probably from England, and there was no honor in that in our dumb ass minds. Somehow, he and his mother and two sisters had landed in Brooklyn, in a part of the borough that didn’t acknowledge or feel anything for anyone, especially an outsider.”

An outsider… I was an outsider, too… I just didn’t know it.

“That was the strange thing about B-Ville, Taryn. No one made a big deal about the few white kids, poor as they were, until some shit like that happened. It was one of the few times in my life I was happy to only be
half
Italian. I went through a stage in my life where I seemed a bit defiant about it all. I played with it, refused to really think about my place in the world, in regard to race, you know… things like that.” He grimaced and swallowed the painful shit down. It burned his throat as he delved deeper, daring to stare at Nicky, the boy that struggled and bled within him, seeing if he could look the little chump in the face.

“When it suited me, like the few times I was uptown, I’d not speak Spanish. That way, I wouldn’t get followed in the stores as much. Sometimes I’d slip up, see someone I knew and start up, and then I’d get the looks.” He put his hands in quotation marks to emphasize his point. “Some of the old people, especially old Jews, would look at me as if I’d lied to them, told them I was a nice little white kid who meant them no harm. You could see their faces change, Taryn, morph into an expression of pure disgust. I wasn’t some innocent white kid anymore, no… not in their eyes. I became my mother’s child, and my mother’s
only
. I was a dirty Puerto Rican bastard according to them… up to no good. Nothing good would come of my life, and I was good for
nothing
… They used the word ‘good’ a lot… but never because they meant well. That ‘Puerto Rican bastard’? Yeah… that’s a direct quote.”

…He missed the taste of wine at that moment…

“Anyway, when I hung out with my boys, it was assumed I was Latino, ’cause most of them were black, Dominican, and Puerto Rican. It’s like I became more ethnic by association and I soon found out that I could pass for either shit if need be. I got better and better at it, used it to my advantage to fool people, gain their trust. Oddly enough, it seemed like the black kids
knew
I wasn’t all white, but the white kids thought I was one of them. They never questioned it like my black friends did. Most of them, upon first meeting me, would look me up and down and say, ‘What are you mixed with?’ And you know what, Taryn?” He smirked, “I kinda liked that. I wanted it both ways I guess.

“But I liked that they could see me completely, the entire package. I enjoyed being biracial. I felt like it made me special, made me a little unique.” He stuck out his chest proudly, a silly grin on his face. “I had a different look about me, could see things from different angles, overheard shit that people wouldn’t say in front of a black or Puerto Rican kid. I liked being undercover like that, so to speak—until I’d get the looks; then it made me feel like it was something I might want to reconsider and take home as a scarlet letter, feel the hurt, before peeling it away and pretending the shit never happened.”

The worn memories continued to flood him so fast and hard, he choked on the damn things, couldn’t catch any air in his lungs. His eyes clamped shut, he braced himself, forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths, then continued.

“Anyway, the white kids as I said never asked me any questions about it. Or maybe they were just
hoping
I was one of them, because I could fight, and I could steal, and I was fast and cool with everyone. We all fought, it’s just what we did, but we were friends again soon after. Hell, Jonathan and I even fought sometimes, over stupid shit like liking the same girl, or over a bike or a skateboard when we were a bit younger, things like that. It was a way to blow off steam, to feel better for a little while.” He was amazed at how quiet Taryn was being.

He was certain she’d say something, interject, unable to control herself. After all, she was the type to speak her mind, but she just let him do what he needed, how he needed to do it, and he fell in love with her a bit harder at that moment. “I tried to figure out where I fit in the world, tried to see what would make me important or special, and I knew that I could lift almost anything. My nickname, given to me by some of my boys was ‘
Dedos Pegajosos
’, which means, ‘Sticky Fingers.’ I was a non-confrontational, incognito stickup kid, so to speak.

“I was so smooth and my favorite place to ‘shop’ was on the subways. I could stand there and talk to some lady who thought me a charming little boy, a perfect little gentleman. These blue eyes bought me trust, and I used the fuck out of ’em.” He scratched his nose, raked a hand through his hair. “I’d wash my face real good and put on my best clothes before going out, like it was a full time job and…in a way, it was. I’d have my backpack on like I had someplace important to be, a highfalutin’ school for talented or exceptional kids or something like that. I’d slide next to her and if she eyeballed me, I’d tell her she was pretty, some shit like that, and she’d smile back thinking some little kid had a crush on her. I noticed as a little boy that women liked that sort of thing, women of all ages. I learned how to manipulate early on, and I enjoyed the reaction I got. While they were distracted, I’d make my move and they wouldn’t know a thing, didn’t know what hit them.

“They could go to work and make jokes about it. My game was a conversation piece…
I
became a conversation piece. At one point, I even believed I’d done them a favor,” he said, self-loathing taking a seat front and center in his mind. “I felt like me lifting their pocketbook out of their purse or coat was a small price to pay for giving them a smile that day…making them feel attractive. That’s one reason why I never tell women they are beautiful now, Taryn.” He turned to her, no doubt showing the hurt in his eyes. “Unless…I
really
mean it.”

The woman simply offered him a sympathetic nod. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Anyway, it was my gig, and I played the part to the max. I’d stand there looking real coy, my hair brushed back. I’d just stand there, run my hand over it, real smooth. By the time she was grinning, I had her wallet in the front of my jeans and was walking around looking like a thirteen-year-old with a king-sized dick. If I found more than fifty dollars when I got somewhere alone, I’d share it with my boys. We’d go get chips, soda, food, cigarettes, a little weed, and alcohol. I’d usually go get a shirt or two, some jeans. It would be an event. I liked giving some of the money away because it made me feel like I did something important, made a difference.

“I wanted to be wanted, Taryn, and to be respected, too. I’d pay for it if I had to. I wanted people to keep on liking me, you see? I saw it as an investment in myself, a way to stay alive, too, and I didn’t realize until I got older how afraid I was that people would stop wanting me around.” He paused, congested with consciousness, needing space to catch his breath. “I was afraid they’d leave me, that I’d be abandoned. I was afraid they’d run and hide, and just… just leave me there. I couldn’t take that, you know?

…Deserted again. Why didn’t anybody want me ’cept Ma?

“In my mind at the time, this was a matter of survival. I wanted to keep my status as the best thief in B-Ville. I could fight, but I wasn’t the best fighter in town. I could run real fast, but I wasn’t the fastest in my hood. I was a nice looking kid according to some of the girls around town, but I didn’t pull all the ladies. I had money sometimes, but never held heavy pockets on a consistent basis. I could fix things, but I wasn’t the handiest. I didn’t sell drugs, either. I wasn’t interested in any of that and rarely smoked, so in that way, I was useless.