Kockroach (4 page)

All right,
I hears you. Enough with Mite’s weepy childhood. Let’s bring on the big guy, let’s bring on the Boss.

I was in the city when first I spied him, this city, the Apple, handing out leaflets with a coupon for a buck off some second-floor peep show sporting a pack of girls what all needed a bath. And all the while I was keeping a wary eye out for Big Johnny Callas and his mauling fists, what personage I’d been told was looking for me hard and was frankly cheesed.

My moms by this time was dead, done in by the affliction what overtook her ever more frequently until her dying it was a gift. Hubert, which maybe started as something the size of an acorn, grew in her until at the end it was all that was left. I stayed with her to the last, and covered her with my tears, but in those final hours it wasn’t my momma lying there no more, it was Hubert hisself, begging me to give him a new home.

“Mickey,” he said to me in an empty voice no louder than a whisper. “Mickey, I’ll take care of you. Don’t let me die. Mickey.”

And even after they wheeled her away, it was like that son of a bitch was still whispering in my ear.

I stuck it out a little while longer in Philly, but when the rent came due that was it for me. I dug into the cookie jar, her
precious collection of bills and coins meticulously hoarded over the years from her work at Klein’s and the odd bits of sewing she took in, and what should have been hundreds was nothing, not a thing, gone. But still I found a way, a cocktail of blood and tears and betrayal, to get me and my goods, pack, shack, and stack, on the bus away from Philly, away from Hubert, a bus to New York and my future in the Square.

I’m talking now of Times Square, in the heart of the Fifties, my Times Square, shimmying in all its gaudy glory, where first I made my mark on this world. The Times Square of pinball palaces and shady dance clubs, of the grand old Sheraton-Astor and the fleabag junkie haunts what surrounded it, of the Broadway theaters where never I set foot and the Roxy Burlesque, with its second-rate strippers playing to a third-rate crowd, where certainly I did. I’m talking of knife fights over college girls at the White Rose, of hot dogs at Nedick’s, of high-stakes pool at Ames Billiards, of the neon marketplace with its counterfeit suits and chest expanders, its little brown bottles of Spanish Fly. High heels and low brims, angry taunts and pearl-handled switchblades, jazz fiends looking for green, Benzedrine addicts looking for God, humped yellow taxis and Motogram headlines and politicians strutting and whores strumpeting and Satchmo trumpeting. Fleas pulling chariots, three-headed cows, rubberneckers and pickpockets, street-corner preachers, married suburban men looking for orgies and finding them, oh yes, with bad boys in tight tight jeans. Charlie Parker is blowing wild and incomprehensible at Birdland, Dizzy is blowing up them cheeks at the Onyx. The Criterion is showing
The Desperate Hours,
the
Lyric is showing
Killer’s Kiss
. The Pepsi-Cola sign, the Canadian Club sign, the Admiral television sign, the Hit Parade cigarette sign with its slogan: “The Tobacco, the Tip, and the Taste!” Is that a blow job or what? Call for Philip Morris. The Warner is showing
Search for Paradise,
and missy, let me tell you, I emerged from that tunnel motherless and broke, with nothing to go back to but loss and nothing to go forward to but a forlorn hope, and I found my paradise, right there, in Times Square.

It was in the middle of that whole damn circus, beneath the Camel cigarette sign just off Forty-fourth Street, whilst I was handing out my leaflets with the sketch of a stripper looking oh so come-hither, that first I spots the Boss.

He wasn’t the Boss then, just a Joe on the street, but there was something about him that caught my eye from the start. Maybe it was the way his brown suit twisted in strange ways around his torso, maybe it was the way he wore his dark glasses even in the thick of the night, maybe it was the clawlike fingernails or the smile plastered onto his bearded face, as if his lips was stapled into place. Or maybe it was the way he stared into the night sky as if scanning the very face of God.

I won’t say I had the inkling even then of what he would be, my instincts are good, but not that good. First off I figure him for nothing more noble than a dope fiend looking to score. So even as I kept passing out them leaflets, I sidled up to the bizarre man in the brown suit, lifted the brim of my hat, looked away, and whispered my standard offer out the side of my mouth.

“Boy, bush, jam-a-lam-a-lam?”

He says nothing, instead he flinches for an instant afore looking down at me with those dark glasses. When I turns to meet his gaze I feel just then a shiver. I can’t see his eyes for the glasses, but it was like I could, like them dark oblong plates of glass was indeed his eyes, dark and piercing and absolutely cruel in their utter blankness, like the big empty, Hubert hisself, was staring back at me.

He raises his head and points two fingers up to the Camel cigarette sign, you know, the one with the cat blowing smoke out his piehole.

“Smoke?” I says. “Smoke is it?”

“Smoke,” he says. “Smoke is it. I’m hungry, Jerry. Jerry, you hungry?”

It wasn’t just the words what confused me. His voice was strangely high, almost twittering, but with a deep rumbling undertone. To hear him speak was to hear two men who disliked each other talking at once, one munchkin, one gargantuan, two separate voices harmonizing badly. I looked at him as he continued to stare upward and realized, quite suddenly, that he was either a total nutjob or maybe the coolest, hippest cat on the Square, dropping on me a boatload of jazzman jive I hadn’t yet cottoned to.

“Smoke it is,” I tells him, hoping for the latter of the two possibilities. “You got the spinach?”

He stares down at me again, that blank stare, Hubert. I reach into my pocket and pulls out the thin wad I affected—a fiver wrapped around six ones, which was all I had just then to my name—and swish it back and forth. He aims his blank stare at the bills in my hand as if he had never seen a buck before.
Then he reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a wallet thick with cash, and swishes it in a perfect imitation of me.

“All right,” I says, stuffing them leaflets into my pants. “Tag along and I’ll take you to your dreams, palsy. What’d you say your name was? Jerry?”

“I’m hungry, Jerry. Jerry, you hungry?” he says.

I shakes my head in confusion.

“Enough with the blatta-blatta-blatta,” he says.

“Blatta is it? Jerry Blatta?”

“Jerry Blatta?”

“Well, follow along then, Jerry Blatta, and I’ll hitch up the reindeers for you.”

“And don’t come back, you fresh bastard.”

I laugh, tap the brim of my hat over my eyes, and start off for Roscoe’s place, where I knows he could cop whatever it was he was looking to cop and where I had business of my own. I glanced back once, maybe, to be sure he was following, but as I led him north, up through the Square along Broadway, I couldn’t afford to be worrying about my new friend Jerry Blatta keeping up. Instead I had bigger concerns, like keeping my lamps peeled for Big Johnny Callas and those fists of his, thick enough it was like they had their own saps built in.

“Hey, Mite,” says Sylvie, one of the girls what hooked for Big Johnny on the Square. “My man, he’s looking for you.”

I smiled, or maybe it was more like a wince, and hurried on.

“Mite, you scrawny half-pint,” comes a voice, soft and mocking. It was a lean, leather-jacketed joint-swinger name of Tab. Tab was one of those Joes what strutted around like
he was all man, a girl’s best friend, like he could rub the bacon with the best of them, yet he still was always trying to slip my yard out my pants and a fiver out my wallet. “I got something just for you, sweetheart,” he says. “It won’t protect your skull from Big Johnny, but I promise you’ll enjoy it. Hey, stop running.”

Running? Who was Tab kidding? I wasn’t running, but damn if I wasn’t walking fast. See, just then I was in the middle of what you might call a situation.

Big Johnny Callas, with his big fists and blue-black pompadour, was the main man in the Square for that old geezer Abagados. The Abagados gang was a Greek crime outfit what covered the whole of midtown tight as a noose, and it was Big Johnny who did the squeezing on the Square. He was a sweet-dressing man-about-town, wearing flash suits, sawing steaks at Jack Dempsey’s, paling around with Joe D. at Toots’s place, pumping starlets in high-heeled pumps, and running a string what included Sylvie. He also booked numbers, booked bets, offered optional protection at a mandatory price, and lent out low amounts at a high vig, which was maybe where the trouble between him and me it began.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, taking the two Bens off Big Johnny to give to Pepe to get in on a load of porno magazines what were coming up from Louisiana to be resold at obscene profits. As Pepe told me with that droopy smile of his, the hottest porno came from New Orleans, what with all the Frenchies there. In them days I was surviving night to night by handing out my leaflets, or selling reefer to hollow-eyed jazzmen looking to buy their inspiration, or
sending businessmen with that hunger in their eyes over to one of Big Johnny’s sidewalk socialites for a short spurt of entertainment. My hustles was a step up from my first years in the Apple, when I racked balls for quarters and ran out on rainy nights to get some big dick a pack of cigs, but even so I was barely earning enough to keep me in feed and make the rent on my crappy flophouse bed with the toilet down the hall. I was heading nowheres, fast, and Hubert once again knew my name. He had tracked me to the Square, he was stalking me now like a panther stalks its prey. With my porno deal I thought I could rise to a level where he couldn’t reach out and swipe me with his paw, but I should have known never to trust a mope like Pepe. Old Dudley had taught me better than that.

So I was hustling up Broadway, trying to avoid Big Johnny, when I caught a flash of pompadour coming the other way. I quickly ducks into a doorway and holds my breath until it passes on by. Strange thing is this guy, Jerry Blatta, he ducks in with me, faster than ever I could have imagined. I just looks at him, he looks back with them dark glasses.

“What are you doing?” I says.

“Looking for a date,” he says back.

I give him a once-over. “Keep your mitts off, palsy.”

Just then, down the street comes the pompadour, but not on Big Johnny Callas, instead on some silly snot-nosed stick from Jersey. I let out the breath I had been holding.

“Let’s go,” I says as I head back up Broadway.

“You got it, sweet pea.”

Oh man he was hip, was he ever. I had then the first in
kling that maybe this strange man in the brown drape and shades had things to teach me. I guess it was the jive patter he slapped on me, that and the way he walked, that bouncy stride, arms pumping, body moving side to side, split-fingered V’s rising and falling with each step. He was quite the sight, he was, following me up Broadway, and you couldn’t tell for certain whether he was the coolest cat on the Square, strutting like a jazz band throwing out a syncopated rhythm, or some physically disabled vet wounded terribly in the war. Except I had seen him duck into that alley after me quick and smooth as a snake.

Roscoe sold out of a crappy fifth-floor railroad flat on the West Side. We stepped over a junkie curled like a potato bug just inside the front door. The stairwell was dank and filthy, cockroaches scattered like councilmen at a cathouse raid as we climbed. At the right apartment, I knocks on the door. An eye appears in the peep, the door opens.

“Mite,” says Roscoe in his soft, slurry voice. “This is a surprise.”

Roscoe stands shirtless in the doorway, leaning carelessly on the right jamb, sweat glistening off the smooth flat plates of his chest. A lit cig dangles from his snarl. It was the era when every other Joe looked like they was ready to drop to theys knees and yell for Stella.

“I brought a customer,” I says.

Roscoe’s heavy-lidded eyes lift over my shoulder to take in the man in brown behind me. The edges of his mouth twitch. “What you having, friend?”

“Smoke,” says Blatta.

Roscoe takes a deep drag from his cigarette. “You’re in luck. Received myself a shipment of green just this week.”

“But first, Roscoe,” I says, “we needs to get square.”

Roscoe stares down at me through the smoke from his cig. “Take a bite of air, Mite,” he says finally. “The man and I are talking business.”

“I must have sent thirty tea-heads up here in the last two months. You owe me my cuts. We had a deal.”

“I’ve changed the arrangement. Go outside and play. We’ll talk later.”

“Roscoe, man. Man. I need it, the money. You know Big Johnny he’s breathing down my neck. I gots to give him something. I figure you owe me like a hundred. That was our deal. Big Johnny, he’ll crush me I don’t pay.”

“I’ve got two words for you, Mite: grey and hound.”

“Roscoe, you’re dicking me, man.”

“Yes, well.” He drags at his cig. “It happens, kid. It happens.” With his left hand he quickly grabs my nose and gives it a twist.

Just then Roscoe’s gaze, it falls to the floor. A fat cockroach was taking its main chance and sprinting across the threshold of his doorway. With his hand still grasping my nose, Roscoe reaches out the toe of his shoe and flicks the cockroach onto its back. The little bugger’s legs spun wildly in the air, like it was trying to ride a bike, afore Roscoe, he brings his shoe down and squashes it with a loud snapping crunch that pops out the pale insides.

I hears a strange gasp from behind me.

“Get the picture?” says Roscoe.

I does, absolutely. I had been bullied before, I would be bullied again, I knows the dance. I’m back on the schoolyard with them Thomasson twins, fat and fatter, passing me back and forth as they lay their blows. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I would have run, I would have, my nature demanded it, except it’s hard to make a getaway with your snoot in some Joe’s hand, so I am standing there, trembling, when it happens.