Mick (3 page)

“Whatdya mean, ya don’t know? Ya don’t
know
if you’re goin’ to the parade? Where’s ya goddamn pride, man? Y’know, this is the day, our day, every year when they bring the damn TV cameras down and we get to look into ’em and say yo and we get to see ourselves later on the news sayin’ ya, that’s right, we’re still here, and this is who we are and the rest a ya can just chomp on my inky dinky pink thing. It’s a important muthuh of a day.”

“I guess so,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what Augie said. Augie, with his thick curly hair like black scrambled eggs falling over his low forehead, his acne-torn face, and his medication that kept him under control and that sometimes he didn’t take, Augie was kind of frightening even though he was no bigger than me. So I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what he was saying, it was just that, well, I didn’t care about what he was saying.

“You
guess
so?” he snapped. “You
guess
? You know, you young dudes just don’t know, do you? Youse guys got no idea what’s important. You got no sense a nothin’ and that’s what’s goin’ wrong wit’ this no-balls chickenshit town.”

I was so unhappy to be where I was, doing what I was doing. Everybody else seemed to be having such a great time. Terry was beating the video basketball game and talking trash to it. Fatter and Danny were pumping coins into the hockey game and saying the filthiest things to each other they could think of. One of Terry’s other boys, the second round and ruddy blond Cormac brother, sat on a stool directly below the TV mounted high on the wall, staring straight up at the Neighborhood Network News.

But I couldn’t find a comfort zone. I was feeling too nasty to have any fun, but I wasn’t quite gone enough to float above Augie’s talking. Beers kept coming at me from I don’t know where, and even though I already knew what a mistake it was, I kept accepting delivery.

“No sense a who you are,” Augie said. “That’s what you punks don’t got today, Mick. Am I right, Terry?”

“Punk,” Terry said robotically. “Punk. No sense a who he is.”

“Who are you?” Augie demanded, very serious, taking Terry’s support as a mandate to root me out.

I thought about the question, but I didn’t think about it much.

“I don’t know, Augie,” I said. “Who are
you
?”

Was this all just a setup? Was he waiting for somebody to ask him and that’s why he talked the way he talked? He lunged at me, tearing open his shirt, the pearly green buttons popping off and flying all over the place. “This is who I am, boy,” he said, tapping himself on the chest. There, under the pointing finger, covering nearly his entire left pectoral muscle, was a tattoo. It looked just like the circular stamp of the Department of Agriculture, faded blue block letters okaying food. It read
USDA CERTIFIED PRIME 100% WHITE MEAT
.

Augie leered at me. Nobody else reacted, having undoubtedly seen this all before.

“That’s nice, Augie,” I said. “In case you’re in a car accident and they need to know what color you are.”

“Ay,” he said.

“Ay,” I said.

“C’mere, check this out,” Terry called, all excited.

Augie and I parked on either side of my brother’s shoulders so that he could show us something he’d just discovered about Nintendo basketball after playing it a thousand times. “Watch what happens here,” he said, pointing at a tiny black player in a green uniform. “See, when I press this button here what’s supposed to happen is, the guy closest to the ball becomes the player with the brain, y’know, the one I control. But watch this.” Terry pressed the button and as soon as the power switched to that player, to the one closest to the ball, the one with the black face, black arms and black legs, he turned white.

“Whoo-hee,” Terry laughed as he and Augie rejoiced with high fives. “See that. Just when ya think everything’s blowin’ all to hell, somethin’ comes along to restore your faith. See, even the slants at Nintendo understand that the black boys can play some ball, but it’s the white guys that gotta make the decisions for ’em.”

Terry was thrilled, like he’d discovered a great truth, a cure for something, found some key to the secrets of creation inside Nintendo’s Double Dribble. He played harder, pressing his face almost against the screen, firing up three pointers, running up the score. Augie got all caught up in it too, rooting him on as rabidly as they all usually did for real sports events, which was
quite
rabidly. Augie bought three shots of Paddy. Terry clinked glasses with Augie and threw back his shot. Augie clinked glasses with me, even though my glass was just sitting there in the flat of my open palm as I stared blankly at it. “Gimme that,” Terry said, and snatched the glass out of my hand, swallowing the contents down all in one motion. “You can’t have that, you’re just a kid.”

“Here it is, here it is, here it is,” Fatt Cormac called, bringing everybody to the news on TV. It was a feature on tomorrow’s parade, but the screen was showing scenes from other parades, in San Francisco, in New York’s Chinatown, from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and from rights marches in D.C.

“What the hell is this?” Danny shouted, only to be shushed down.

The reporter on TV came on to interview first a member of the Cambodian Merchants Association, then the Gay Community News editor, and each discussed his group’s excitement at marching in the parade.

“I thought they wasn’t comin’!” Terry screamed.

Peanuts pinged off the television screen from every direction. The room filled with boos. A hot dog sailed like a missile, leaving a slash of mustard and ketchup on the glass. Someone threw a bottle that missed and lodged in the tight space between the TV and the ceiling.

“Cut the shit,” Brendan the bartender yelled twice, first at the bottle thrower, then at the newswoman who came on to detail the court decision that had been passed down opening up the St. Patrick’s Day parade to any group interested in participating.

Terry went berserk, standing on a bar stool and going nose to nose with the TV image. “Who the hell do you think you are, bitch, bustin’ our time? This is
our
parade, muthuh. Who invited you all? Why don’t you just go and have your own pissy little yellow faggot-ass parades and leave us alone!”

The place erupted with bottles, glasses, fists, and a few hard foreheads being banged on tables, chants of “Ter-ry, Ter-ry,” and “Hell no, we won’t go!”

“Oh, yes we will!” Terry yelled, turning to address the crowd from up on his perch. “Betchur Irish ass we’re gonna be there, right, boys?”

My ears were ringing before all this started. They were screaming now, as everybody made as much noise as possible, including, I was surprised to realize, myself. I didn’t know what anyone else was yelling, I didn’t remember one single image from the news report that had just concluded, but my heart pumped and I watched my brother’s power rising up there in the thick cigarette smoke near the ceiling.

Suddenly I was listening to myself whoo-whoo-whooping as loud as I could, as loud as anyone, yelling like cavemen must’ve yelled when they didn’t know any words but needed to make noise just because everyone else was making noise.

THINGS TEND TO HAPPEN
to me.

“What happened to you?” Sully was standing at the foot of my bed, wearing his navy pea coat and a Bruins cap. He was sipping a Coke.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars for that,” I said.

He handed me the Coke. “Doesn’t smell too good in here, Mick.”

“Doesn’t feel too good in here, either.” I pointed at the spot between my eyeballs.

“Out playing with the big boys last night, were ya? Not good for your health, man.”

“
Tell
me about it.” I sat up slowly and drank the Coke. “And why are you dressed that way?” He had high black rubber boots on, the buckles all jangling loose.

“What d’ya mean? It’s for the snow, fool. You don’t know it snowed all night?”

“Sully, when I say ‘Tell me about it,’ I
mean
tell me about it. Last night? What’s last night? I remember being slung over Terry’s shoulder like a sack of damn potatoes and all the way home looking at nothing but Terry’s butt. I had a nightmare about it that lasted all night, so, thanks for waking me up.”

Sully smiled and saluted.

“Well, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“The parade, of course. Ain’t we goin’ to the parade?”

I finished the Coke, making the loudest possible gurgling noises as I tried desperately to get more fluid out of the bottom of the cup. Then I collapsed back on the bed. “Maybe we’ll just skip the parade this year. What’re we gonna miss, a few pink-faced vets and fifty fools running for mayor?”

“Uh-uh, not this time. I hear there’s some big stuff goin’ on this year.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“What planet do you live on, anyway, Mick? I was just listenin’ over at the Li’l Peach and everybody’s talkin’ about what you guys were stirrin’ up last night at the Bloody. You were
there
, remember?”

I tried, to remember. I remembered excitement, enthusiasm. I remembered a lot of rah-rah stuff and people slapping each other’s hands and hugging and pumping fists and I remembered Terry as some sort of charismatic leader and me getting a little bit of overflow glory from that, people buying me drinks, shaking my hand, me shaking back and hooting about it, the whole thing weaving together and blurring like a great barfly version love-in. What I did not remember was content. I hadn’t a clue what anybody actually said, even though I seconded everything. Content, it seemed, wasn’t the point anyway. It was the fire, was the thing.

“Sure,” I said as Sully stood tapping his foot and looking at his watch, “I remember.”

“Of course you do. Put your pants on and drink some Scope. We’re outta here.”

We walked the few blocks to the parade in the snow. It was tapering off now, light tiny flakes taking their time corkscrewing down onto our shoulders and hats, but there was already five inches on the ground. We walked up my street, where every house had a reminder of what day it was. Half the places had wind socks with shamrocks on them. The O’Donnells had a huge flag that said
THE O’DONNELLS
hanging from one flagpole mounted on the second-floor porch next to another, the orange-white-green Irish flag. Costello, the old bastard who turns off his lights at six o’clock on Halloween, who puts sugar in your gas tank if you park in front of his house more than once, who was arrested last year for killing a neighbor’s dog by putting rat poison in his garbage—“proved the goddamn mutt was guilty though, didn’t it?”—Costello had a banner tacked over his door in twelve-inch green letters:
CEAD MILE FAILTE
(“a hundred thousand welcomes”).

“Top o’ the mornin’, boys,” big Mrs. Donellen said to us as she shoveled out her car while big
Mr.
Donellen slept it off inside.

Sully tipped his cap to her. “Top o’ the mornin’,” he answered.

“If this is the top,” I said when we’d turned the corner, “I’m in some deep shit.”

“Eat some snow,” Sully said.

“What?”

“Really. Eat some big mouthfuls of snow real fast. Your head freezes and you feel better.”

I scooped up two handfuls of snow and swallowed them down as quickly as I could. For ten seconds, miraculously, I felt better. For ten seconds.

Then my headache returned, with three of its friends. “Thanks, Sul,” I said through a Clint Eastwood squint.

“Don’t mention it,” he laughed, fully aware.

We turned onto Centre Street, walked on past Prince Edward Avenue and Labrador Terrace, streets just like mine. Then we hit Sycamore, a long street cutting through the neighborhood, that was at one time the heart of the neighborhood. These days, though, there were as many empty lots as there were triple-deckers, many houses boarded up, many others just empty.
FOR RENT
signs appeared in almost every first- and second-floor apartment window, and
FOR SALE
signs on nearly every lawn. There were a handful of old Irish families still living on Sycamore, but they tended to be the meanest, most defensive, most offensive people in the whole neighborhood. New families moved in on Sycamore all the time, but they didn’t look anything like the pale old families. Sully’s parents and grandparents started out on Sycamore, as did mine, but Sycamore Street today stood more as the dividing line after which the streets no longer look like my street.

Sully can be old-fashioned sometimes, like the old folks who look at Sycamore as sort of the Old Country. “Just look at it,” he said, shaking his head sadly as we passed. “It’s like they don’t even know it’s a holiday down there.”

I had to laugh at him. “
Holiday,
Sul? What, are people supposed to be partying in the street for
Evacuation Day
? So George Washington drove the Brits out of Boston. I mean, thanks, George, but let’s get over it already.”

He waved me off. “Evacuation Day is just the excuse, you know that. The day off is for St. Pat’s, and you’d think people would appreciate it. That friggin’ street used to
buzz
, boy.”

He was right about one thing, the street was quiet. A couple of people shoveling, a couple more underneath an old Toyota Corona jacked up with no wheels and Jesus face stencils on the headlights. The four legs sticking out from under the car, twisting and kicking with the effort of removing some twenty-year-old corroded brake lines, made angels in the snow, like we used to do when we were little.

I guess we were staring, me at my angels, Sully at his ancestors, because we started getting looks. The black man in the driveway of the house closest to us, the house Sully’s mother grew up in, stopped cleaning off his car, leaned on his broom, and glared. I nudged Sully and we left.

“See what I mean?” Sully said. “It’s just so hostile. Used to be that we could hang on that corner all day if we felt like it.”

“We were gawking,” I said. “We wouldn’t like it if he did it to us.”

“Bullshit. Used to be able to gawk the hell out of that street and nobody minded. If that guy wanted to come over to my street and gawk awhile, I wouldn’t mind at all. As long as he went home after he was through.”