Samaritan (5 page)

“And to be honest, Jackie might
not
have been his. His mother, my great-aunt, I don’t know, she was kind of there, not there,
did
have boyfriends, eventually flew the coop, so . . .”

Ray checked on Bondo, who seemed to be holding herself off.

“In any event, by the time Jackie was your age, younger even, he was a severely abused child, you know, psychologically.

“And, my grandmother, Jackie’s mother’s sister, her name was Ceil, she told me that when Jackie was little she’d hear him down in the street calling up, ‘Aunt Ceil, Aunt Ceil,’ you know, down there by himself, this was on Tonawanda Avenue back in the early fifties, my whole family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, they all lived in three, four different walk-ups on Tonawanda . . . Anyways, my grandmother, later on she’d tell me, ‘Ray, I’m ashamed of myself to the day I die but whenever I’d hear Jackie down there calling up to me, I’d never go to the window, I’d never invite him to come up because I was afraid of Stubby.’”

“Guy’s like five-three?” Rashaad reared back in disdain.

“I know, but sometimes rage has a way of blowing people up.”

“Five-three.” Rashaad shot a quick glance at Felicia.

“Anyways, Jackie, by the time he was thirteen, was pretty much an alley cat, a street kid, and by the time he was fifteen? He was shooting heroin.”

Mrs. Bondo shifted like a mountain, exhaled heavily through her nose, and Ray froze: what the hell he was doing, telling this story—trying to establish his down credentials? Get over as an honorary hard-knock homie? But he was hip-deep in it, and thinking it would be pointless to stop right now, he forged on.

“To tell you the truth, I never really knew my cousin Jackie, there was too much of an age difference, but what I
think
I remember, was a very sweet guy, very friendly, kind of gabby, and big.
Huge.
I’m talking six-four, well over two hundred pounds, plus he was a weight lifter. I mean, from what I was told, if you didn’t know that he was a drug addict, you could never have guessed it.”

Ray faltered again, trying to figure out how to race through the rest; couldn’t, and decided to continue at the pace he needed despite his fear of getting panned or reproached.

“Anyways, by the time Jackie was in his mid-twenties, he’d been struggling with his addiction close to ten years. His mom had split when he was sixteen, so it was just him, his brother Benny and Stubby. And, he’d be out there in the street running with the wolves—ripping people off, getting high, arrested, going to jail, ripping people off, getting high, arrested, going to jail . . . And, the closest thing he had to a guardian angel, a friend, a father figure back then was this guy who lived down the street, Jack Zullo, who was a highly decorated and highly connected Dempsy detective. And unlike everybody in my hear-no-evil, see-no-evil family, Jack Zullo had seen and heard it all, every type of grief and human misery out there, and he always felt sorry for Jackie, hated Stubby and did what he could to help my cousin out, which pretty much boiled down to fixing it so that he would skate now and then when he came before a judge. Now, you have to remember that this was the early 1960s, and at that time, rehab, therapy, any kind of positive-oriented drug treatment was pretty much unheard of in this city. Basically drug addicts were seen as evil degenerate criminals.”

“They are,” Rashaad said imperiously, some of the other kids sucking wind, checking out Ray to see if he’d take that as an affront; but he was too busy racing the anxiety clock.

“Anyways, this cop did what he could until he ran into some trouble himself, legal trouble.” Ray edited out the nine consecutive life sentences for contract murders on behalf of various New Jersey crime families.

“Nonetheless, by the time Jackie was twenty-five, he had been supposedly drug-free for over a year, he was engaged, had even reconciled with Stubby. In fact, Stubby had got him an apprentice card with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which meant very good money and solid job security back then. Still does, in fact . . .

“But the night before Jackie’s wedding, April 23, 1965, a tragic mystery came about which at this point in time I can safely say will never be solved.” Ray was back to enjoying himself.

“April twenty-third, three a.m. Jackie’s brother Benny rings our doorbell, we were living in Hopewell by then, wakes up my parents.

“Apparently earlier in the day, Jackie had had an argument with Stubby, stormed out of the house and vanished.

“So around midnight Benny had been sent out to track his brother down, which basically meant hitting all the old dope spots, hunting down all of Jackie’s allegedly ex-running buddies, and checking out all the emergency rooms. No Jackie anywhere. Finally he had called the county morgue at Dempsy Medical, described his brother over the phone, blond, six-four, two-thirty, the morgue said, ‘Yeah, we got someone like that, come on down and make an ID.’

“And so Benny had come to our house, I couldn’t have been more than five, six years old at the time, to ask, to beg my parents to go with him to the morgue because he just couldn’t bear to see . . .

“Well, they all went, and yes, it was Jackie on the slab; an overdose.

“And then Benny turned to my parents again. ‘I have to go home and tell my father. Could you please come with me.’

“So somewheres around sunrise they all go to Stubby’s house to break the news. They walk in and the first thing they see is that all the hallway mirrors are covered with sheets. And when they come upon Stubby in the living room? He was barefoot and sitting on a wooden crate, had a skullcap on his head, a yarmulke. He was sitting shivah, which is what Jews do when they’re in mourning for a family member.

“They had come by to
break
the news, but Stubby was already set up. He looks at them, says, ‘He’s dead, right?’ He just knew.

“Stubby lived another twenty years, but to the day he died he never told anyone what he and Jackie had argued about that made him so sure that this kid was going to go out and basically kill himself right before his wedding.”

The class seemed drawn in, just one girl scowling at her nails.

Mrs. Bondo’s face was an arrangement of downward-pointing arrowheads, looking as if she was having an incredibly difficult time keeping her mouth shut.

“And so, for me, if I was in this class? What I would probably try to play around with, would be to imagine the conversation that took place . . .” And here Ray faltered, sensing in the pit of his gut how wildly inappropriate this “example” was, the whole saga so complex, lurid and melodramatic. “The, the conversation that took place between this mean little bastard . . .” The class flinched at his language, but Ray was too wretchedly embarrassed to care. He couldn’t believe that Bondo hadn’t shut him down halfway through this mess. “The conversation between this psychological child abuser, who after years and years of being hurtful and hateful to this poor overgrown kid growing up under his roof, was now finally, finally trying to do the right thing by him . . . and the kid himself, an emotionally screwed-up, con-man junkie jailbird hustler. What went wrong? Who said what to who that would make my cousin go and fall off the earth like that right before his wedding?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to get married,” Altagracia, the girl studying her nails, said.

Myra, the smart quiet one, raised her hand. “Well what do we write about if no one in our families has a drug problem?” Saying it with just the right balance of innocence and dryness to zing it right in there.

“It’s just my family tree,” he said lamely. “You know, one of the shakier branches.”

Mrs. Bondo fleetingly smiled down at her folders and that minute, almost secretive smile gave him some insight into her discomfited restraint; she had made the difficult decision to let the students deal with him and his sprawling drug drama on their own, trusting that at least one of the kids would rise to the occasion and set him right.

He felt chastened but also fascinated; he couldn’t imagine being in possession of such restraint himself.

Nonetheless he wanted a second shot at getting it right;
had
to get it right.

“OK, what do we have, ten minutes? Forget that story. It’s too, it’s too everything. Real quick—here’s a snapshot from Hopewell back in the day, a real bite-size quickie, no beginning, no end.

“Growing up, there was a guy in my building, a black guy named Eddie Paris. Eddie was a motorman on the PATH train, and he had two girls, I forget their names, and two sons, Winston and Terrance, who everybody called Dub and Prince, don’t ask me why. Prince, the oldest kid, was really something else. He went to Incarnation, the Catholic high school on Hurley Street, number one in his class, Honor Society, captain of the track team, which came in second in the state one year, captain of the fencing team, you know, competitive dueling, and on top of everything else? He could sing. And I mean sing—not hip-hop not head-banger not rock and roll but
sing
 . . .” Drawing blanks.

“He would give concerts. Recitals. Anyways, a snapshot. 1976. I’m sixteen, high school junior right here at Paulus Hook. Prince is a senior at Incarnation. On this particular spring day I’m in my bedroom doing my homework, and I hear an argument down in the street. I look out my window and it’s Prince and his dad, Eddie Paris, down there, lots of hand waving, lots of shouting, and Prince, this great, great kid is . . . He’s got tears running down his face.

“And I hear Eddie shouting at him, ‘If I could I would, Terrance, but I have
four
children, not just you so I
can’t.
’

“At which point, Prince grabs his head, turns and, still crying, he just starts running blind up the Hopewell hill, this track star kid flying like a rocket, bawling his eyes out. And that’s it. Just that . . .” Making them come to him.

But shy, incurious or simply too spaced out from the first story, they didn’t take the bait, and it killed him.

“OK. Three minutes left. Your first assignment. Go home and find a photograph of someone in your family, Mom, Dad, Grandma, the cat, whoever. Except that the photo has to have been taken before you were born. And I want you to write me something involving that individual and what I want to know is, where did they go, what did they do right after the photographer said thank you. And don’t ask. Make it up. Use what you heard about them from back in the day. OK?

“Two minutes. I have some good news, I have some bad news.” And Ray brought up a number of paperbacks, spread them out across the table. “One to a customer, from me to you. That’s the good news. Bad news is that you have to read them. No book report, just read it.

“And let me just say something about these particular books. They’re mostly written by people who grew up without the advantages, some in cities, some rural—hard lives all around. And, the reason I chose them for you was because I feel that we read to learn new things, sure, absolutely, but more often than not, what we really get out of the good books we read is self-recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn’t
know
we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And this self-recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing and a little more connected to the larger world.”

There was a uniform glaze out there, and, worried about boring them, Ray picked up the pace.

“OK. So what we have here is James Baldwin,
Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Harlem poor churchy hellfire kind of adolescence. Richard Wright,
Uncle Tom’s Children.
Southern poor cracker-country racism, 1920s, ’30s. John Steinbeck,
Of Mice and Men.
Great story, great writer, but mainly in there because us white guys got to represent. Sandra Cisneros,
The House on Mango Street.
Growing up Hispanic in Chicago. Poets. Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight. Afro-American.
El Bronx Remembered.
Growing up Hispanic in some outer borough of New York, I can’t remember which, and last but not least,
Best Loved Horror Stories,
in there for whatever, OK? When I say three, everybody take a book. One, two . . .”

And on “three,” six students lunged for
Best Loved Horror Stories.

“Whoa.” He removed it from circulation. “Again. One, two . . .”

And six books were gone, both Hispanic books taken by black kids, the girl Altagracia holding the copy of
Uncle Tom’s Children
by the corner and glaring at Ray as if she had been unfairly bumped in the first round of musical chairs.

What was he supposed to do? Shrugging, he slid her the collection of horror stories.

Myra, the girl with the big glasses, was the only kid not to take a book.

“Aren’t you going to take any?”

“No thank you,” she said almost inaudibly, holding up a paperback copy of
Spoon River Anthology.
“I’m already reading something.”

“Good for you,” Ray said mildly, this kid most definitely The One.

Out in the hallway, Ray walked with Mrs. Bondo, her heavy purse and armload of manila folders.

“I hope you didn’t mind the Bondo-Bello crack. I just wanted to loosen everybody up.”

“No problem,” she said, looking straight ahead, navigating the hyped-up foot traffic coming in both directions.

“I’m sorry about that story with my cousin. I kind of got carried away.”

“It’s life.”

“So . . . Was that OK?” Ray going fishing.

“Was what OK.” She grabbed the back of some kid’s shirt who tried sprinting past them. “Slow down, Malik.”

“The class. Was the class OK . . .”

Mrs. Bondo took a long time answering. “So why was this Prince kid running up the hill?”

“God, I thought
no
body’d ask,” Ray said. “Terrance, Prince, he’d just gotten accepted to Dartmouth but they hadn’t offered him a scholarship and his father was telling him that he couldn’t afford the tuition, and that the poor kid would have to go to Rutgers-Dempsy and commute from home.”