Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

COUSIN POOR LESLEY AND THE LOUSY PEOPLE

I went home to see my mother and to visit with the lousy people.

My mother showed me a photograph. It was of myself, my cousin Lesley and Lesley’s sister, taken when we were kids. I hadn’t seen Lesley for years but I had no trouble recognizing him. There he was, in the picture, inevitably its center, looking directly into the camera, staring at it — as he stared at everything — as though perhaps he did not understand what he was looking at, as though the camera were some strange object which could be stared into comprehension. His eyes wide, the expression vaguely blank, troubled, the thick dry lips of the mouth breather slightly parted, his face suggested that there was danger an unspecified number of feet in front of it. The big body, not heavy but giving the impression of bloat, was at an awkward, stiff attention, and his arm, partially extended like a patrol boy’s at an intersection, shielded his huge-breasted sister — perhaps from the forgotten photographer. He looked like someone standing at the edge of a jungle clearing staring into brush which had suddenly moved. The picture had been taken years before when we had visited Lesley’s family in Chicago.

“Poor Lesley,” I said.

“A good boy,” my mother said.

“I heard his sister is engaged.”

“Maybe engaged. Maybe not engaged,” my mother said.

Of course I did not see them often — they lived in Chicago, too far from The Bronx — but there had been a time when I saw Lesley’s sister a lot. We went to the same Midwestern university. Her brother had been at the university before her and she was there, I think, because he had been there. She took a room in a place next to Lesley’s old boarding house, and this proximity, and the knowledge that there were still people at the school who had known Lesley, must have been a comfort to her, like the arm in the photograph.

She used to come over to talk about her brother. She would sit on the couch across the room from me, her posture stiff, uncompromising, and tell me, trusting mistakenly in my interest, of Lesley’s life. Always in the purse which she held primly in her lap was some long letter of Lesley’s from which she could quote endless passages of brotherly sententiae. He called her Sister and advised her in clinically sensuous terms of the baseness in men’s hearts. The letters were absolutely pornographic.

Less embarrassing, but duller, were our talks when Lesley’s sister returned to school after a vacation at home. She had total recall about her brother and she would come, her mind brimming with anecdotes of Lesley, to tell me of some new suit he’d bought, of what humorless thing he had said to the clerk when they went together to shop for it. She spoke of Lesley’s disappointment in the advertising agency he’d taken a job with after graduation, of vague plans he had to return to school to study law, of his new girl friend who was always, in his sister’s description of her, not beautiful, but sensible. Sometimes she would offer a picture of an anonymous, almost featureless girl in health shoes. Invariably the girls looked feckless, tired.

What bothered me most in all this was the picture I got of Lesley’s horribly distorted picture of himself. I knew him to be completely without humor, massively stolid, as though the imagination were a finite organ which he, somehow, had been born without. Yet his view of himself as revealed to me through his sister was romantic — there is no other word for it — cavalier. Advertising. Law. In his letters to his sister, Lord Chesterfield.

Then, in her last year at the university, his sister came to tell me that Lesley had joined the Marines. I was astonished. Our family, not even counting Lesley, is not what you could call a United States Marine family. Ours is more a Certified Public Accountant family. We seem to have been born between wars. For Lesley deliberately to seek out the Marines struck me as an incredible gesture, almost heroic, a declaration that though it would cost him dearly, he must assert ultimately and irrevocably what he had long and mistakenly felt himself to be. For the Marines to accept him was no less impressive. It seemed crazily reciprocal, and in the instant that his sister told me about it I had a senseless vision of two forces — expansive, drunkenly generous.

After this, Lesley’s sister came to me even oftener, but the tone of the visits and of her manner changed.

Before, she had been enthusiastic, quickened with optimism at her brother’s impossible plans for himself. Now she was clearly not so sure, saddened, and though she still carried Lesley’s letters in the clumsy pocketbook which self-consciously she held, guarding herself, against her foolishly large breasts (once I said to her, “What have you got there anyway?”), she no longer quoted directly from the letters, but instead gave long rambling resumes of what he had written. I got the impression that he must have been very lonely. Once she showed me a picture of Lesley in his Marine uniform. He looked startled, bewildered, like someone who had gotten lost while swimming.

When she spoke of her brother now she always prefaced his name with the adjective “poor.” “In Chicago I saw a movie with my parents,” she’d say. “Poor Lesley would have liked it. One thing about the service though, poor Lesley says they get all the latest pictures. Even before downtown.” Or, “Poor Lesley’s in Tokyo now. He says there’s a place he can get kosher food whenever he wants. He says there are lots of Japanese Jewish people who eat lox and rolls and they’ve got this delicatessen on the Ginza Strip. Poor Lesley says you have to take your shoes off when you go inside.” I got the idea that she used the word superstitiously, as though by openly insisting on Lesley’s helplessness nothing would come of it.

I even had a theory about the origin of that word. I think that sometime, on one of her holidays in Chicago, she and her mother and her father and her grandfather who lived with them must have sat down to dinner. The maid must have brought in the main dish. I like to think it was chicken. On its steaming platter, set down at the center of the table, the golden chicken, snug in its brown-potatoed insularity, luxurious as old gold against the thick white cloth, glowed like a household god in the awed silence. Someone, perhaps the grandfather, must have said, “Such chicken! Poor Lesley would have liked such chicken.”

I was reminded, on my visit home, when my mother showed me the photograph, of my feelings as a boy in high school when I learned that Lesley and his family were coming to The Bronx for a visit.

I remember my fears of introducing Lesley to my friends — the lousy people. They would kill him, I thought. They would take my cousin, that stiff-necked wonder, and destroy him.

What I have to say is very hard. My crowd — and I don’t mean that old gang of mine, kids with holes in their gym shoes — my friends had a thing. I don’t know if I had it too. All I had, I think, was a feeling for this thing. But they had it, whatever it terribly was — an esprit de corps beyond rationality, or a sense of neighborhood run riot, or merely a kind of fatal intuition — and it made them wild. I’m not talking about delinquency. They didn’t steal. There was nothing to steal. There was no one to steal it from. What they already had was all they needed. What they had was — there’s no real name for it—personality, out-sized, grotesque, collective. Look, they didn’t have jobs with a future; they didn’t date girls; they didn’t apply themselves; they didn’t know anybody’s line-up, and they didn’t care. They weren’t rooters. In all that crowd there wasn’t one flat, half-hearted cheer between them. But anything could break them up. There was this little girl who’d come into the candy store at exactly the same time every afternoon and say to Fein, the owner, “Mr. Fein, my mother please wants a package of Chesterfield cigarettes and that you should put away a late edition of a World-Telegram which my brother will pick it up later,” and one of my friends would start laughing. And pretty soon they’d all be laughing, myself too. I don’t know why it was funny. It was, though.

But they were wild, and even dangerous, flashing out with sudden viciousness at passing, solemn strangers or at each other. I don’t know, it was as though they sensed something terrible about the world.

When Lesley came I introduced him around.

“How come you’re so fat?” Danny Lubell asked him.

Lesley answered as though this were a perfectly normal question, one asked him frequently. “I’m not fat,” he said. “I’m big-boned.”

“You’re monstrous-boned,” Danny said, “but you’re fat too.”

Lesley looked at him without smiling or even seeming to realize that he had been insulted. Often something would happen to Lesley — in college he might fail a course; a girl would rebuff him — and you thought, now, now he will question himself, now he’s going to realize what he is. But he never did.

We were in front of the candy store and just then a stray cat, looking ill at ease in the street, as though it had drunkenly wandered from its alley home, and now, sober, could not find it, sulked by.

“Hey, Lesley, there’s my cat. Did you ever see my pussy cat?” Danny said.”

“Is that really your cat?” Lesley asked, mildly put off by its unkemptness.

“Sure it’s my cat. Whose cat do you suppose it is? You see the special scientific color of the fur? That’s years of careful breeding. The cat books call that ‘Scientific Colored Pussy-Cat Fur.’ That’s some cat, ain’t it, Belgium?” He had turned to Joey Stowka, a refugee kid Danny called Belgium.

Joey blushed and did not answer.

Danny reached down suddenly and grabbed the cat, catching it skillfully around its belly. Its claws burst from the furred paws, its face contorted in rage. Danny made a feint with the cat, as if he were going to throw it at Lesley. Lesley stood stolidly, not even throwing up his hands in reflex.

“All right, all right,” Danny said to the cat, calming it. He turned to Lesley. “Want to stroke its special pussy-cat fur?”

“What’s special about it? It’s ordinary cat fur,” Lesley said.

“Why’s it special, Belgium? Tell him.”

“Because,” Belgium said shyly.

“Go ahead. Tell Lesley why,” Danny said gently.

“Because,” he said again.

“Because it feels like the hair…” Danny said, inciting Belgium’s imagination.

“Because it feels like the hair…”

“On…” Danny said softly.

“On…” Belgium repeated.

“On…”

“On my mother,” Belgium shouted.

Danny dropped the cat and hugged Belgium. “Creep,” he roared, hugging him, kissing him. “Creep. Foreigner. Creep.”

Danny Lubell was not so much our leader as he was a polarity about whom we gathered. He had a job in a gas station which paid him only enough to keep him in egg creams. These, as far as I could see, sustained him. The job also kept him in stolen gasoline for his long black 1933 Packard. What ventures we made beyond the horizons of the neighborhood were made in Danny’s car, which Ox Hersh, another member of our group, drove because Danny didn’t know how. These trips, rare because somehow we were uncomfortable in other sections of the city, were expeditions really, halting and tentative as steps into cold, deep water. Once Ox, sent to another borough on some special mission for Danny, told us on coming back, unfeigned sadness in his face, “There’s nothing out there. There’s really nothing out there.”

I have said that Danny was a polarity, but this is inexact, at least incomplete. He was our taste-maker. There are night clubs — sometimes we went to them in the Village to insult the queers — where they cater to the demented, where for money they tap the private lusts of the diseased and crippled. In a way, Danny was like the owners of these clubs. He could never, as they were, have been in it for the money, however; he encouraged aberration for its own sake. He drew it out of you. Whatever secrets you kept — awful things — you could not keep, could not hide from him. He pulled them out of you, and then he’d laugh at them, making them such a good joke that you were almost glad you were the way you were.

But all of them — pervert Belgium; Ox Hersh; Rabbi Old Guy, a crazy Yeshiva kid who told us he liked to spit in the shul because he was mad at God for Hitler; Shelly Malkin; all of the — had this private thing which turned into a public thing around Danny Lubell. This is the point. I had no thing, and Danny left me alone. I mean, I had no thing except the thing I had for my friends. For a year after I graduated from high school I didn’t go to college. I just wanted to be around the boys, wanted to stay in the neighborhood to see what was going to happen to them. I mean, you’ve got to see how they must have been to make me want to do that. Fun’s fun, but who delays his life just so he can hang around with his pals?

Sometimes we’d go out with girls. Not with them, but where they were. Shelly Malkin, who went to C.C.N.Y. night school, was our social chairman. The girls were always ugly. After one of his parties he’d apologize. “Gee, I’m sorry,” he’d say. “It’s a night school. They never turn on the lights.” We didn’t care what they looked like. We liked to sit around and tell them filthy stories.

Or we liked to listen to Ox Hersh talk to a girl. Ox was a giant. He shouldered out of his small suits in a way that gave you the impression you were actually watching him grow. His voice disturbed the peace. Listening to him used to break us up. He was wonderful with girls. We could hear him across the room. He’d be sitting on this couch and you could see he was straining not to put all his weight down on it — he had a way of sitting on tiptoe — and he’d let his huge head hang down, or roll it around on his chest or stick it in the girl’s lap as though it were the trunk of some curious elephant. He would talk very slowly, drawing out each word as though there were a danger that the girl did not understand English.

“Oh, you go to col-lege? You are a col-lege girl? Education is a beauti-ful thing. I have a cousin who lives in Brooklyn who is planning on going to college. Maybe you will…meet…him there…one day. What do you study at your col-lege, miss? Do you study so-ci-ol-o-gy? I am sure that must be terribly difficult. Is it not, miss?”

“You get used to it,” she’d say, clearing her throat.

Ox would think about this for a while in silence, his big head shaking up and down. “I think you are being modest, miss,” he’d say finally. “I think you must be very brilliant in col-lege.” He’d pause and start the business with the head again, rolling it around as though it had to be wound up every time he wanted to say something. “I think your pro-fess-ors must be very proud to have such a…brilliant girl in their col-lege…What is so-ci-ol-o-gy?” he would ask her suddenly. By now her own head would be unconsciously tracing the splendid arcs made by Ox’s and he would take it in his big hands and steady it. “Better get your head fixed, miss,” he would say.

Maybe afterward we’d be feeling so good we’d go out to a cafeteria on the Grand Concourse, where each of us would do his imitation of Ox and the girl. We might arrive just when the movies were letting out, and Ox would storm into the place and start throwing people out of the line. We’d be right behind him. “Excuse me,” Ox told them, “ain’t ate today yet,” and little Belgium, stepping on his heels, ferociously pumping his tiny legs to keep up with the Ox’s long strides, would shout his favorite joke in his piping voice, “Excuse us, excuse us, got to feed an Ox. Out of the way please. Got an Ox here to feed.” It’s funny the way people relinquished their rights in the line. They always thought somebody was going to hit them. Not violent themselves, they thought they lived in a world of violence. People get hurt only by accident, but they don’t know that.

Only Belgium and the Ox seemed to have a kind of extra-group relationship. The rest of us were each other’s friends and seemed to be able to let it go at that, but with Belgium and the Ox it was different. I don’t know if it was affection or hate Belgium felt for the Ox. Sometimes he’d whine to Danny, “Come on, Danny. Let’s get in your car and leave the big fat Ox. I drive it for you, Danny. Ox too fat to drive, Danny. Come on. I have to sit next to him and he’s so fat he squeezes me. Let’s leave the bastard.” But whenever all of us were together Belgium wouldn’t let the Ox out of his sight. In the cafeteria he’d run up behind the Ox, who was beginning to pile things on his tray, and he’d yell at him, “How come you always first in line and not me? How come? Why I’m always second? Why is that?”

Ox would turn around to him, and not bothering to modulate his dangerous voice, tell him, “Cause you’re a midget, that’s why. You’re a little midget, you midget.”

We were a tight-knit group, but no closed corporation. Eventually we got to know almost every nut in The Bronx.

There was one guy named Eugene Lepransky. Eugene was much older than the rest of us, about twenty, I guess, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the turning point in Eugene’s life. He was huge, bigger even than the Ox. Something was wrong with Eugene, of course, which was why we took such delight in him, but what it was, even a psychiatrist couldn’t have told you. Except for us he was an insulated individual. He lived with his mother, and she never let him out of the neighborhood. He couldn’t cross streets, so he never had a job. When you asked him he said he was “self-employed.” This was true in a unique way. He got ten dollars a week for walking his mother’s dog, and-this was more than enough for Eugene to buy one copy of each comic book and flashy crime magazine in Fein’s candy store.

But Eugene took Pearl Harbor as a personal insult and for weeks raged against “the day of infamy.” Soon afterward he told us he was going into the “services.” From that day until V-J Day none of us saw Eugene again, and we thought, fantastically, that perhaps some branch of service had accepted him. I think it was 1943 before we found out that he had simply hidden himself in his apartment.

Eugene lived in an apartment on the second floor, and sure enough, not long after he went upstairs a flag with a blue star on it was popped into the window by his mother. After we learned what it meant we used to stand below that window with the blue star and look up at it, prouder of Eugene’s blue star than of any on the block. On V-J Day he came downstairs for the first time in four years.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four but he looked much older. The war had aged him.

“Hello, Eugene,” Danny said to him.

“Hello, fellows,” Eugene said, and he told us of an experience we soon knew by heart. In all the long war he had killed, he said, only one German. Eugene variously described the circumstances which led up to it. Sometimes Eugene was a soldier, sometimes a naval officer on loan to the army for a special mission — one gathered, to kill this German — and sometimes a pilot forced to land in enemy territory, but the final act, the killing, was always the same. Eugene had been forced to kill him at close range with his M-1. “He was so young,” Eugene would say. “But I had to do it. Him or me. You know how it is in a war. He asked for a cigarette when he was dying, and I didn’t even have one to give him. I would have given him, but I didn’t even have one.” Then he’d add sadly, “He was young. Just a kid.”

The rest of us would look down, pretending to be embarrassed. Finally somebody would say, “Aw, you would have given him, Eugene. You would have given him the whole pack if you’d had it.”

Anyway, after the war Eugene gradually brightened. He had gotten an Ike jacket somewhere and like many people in those days that was all you ever saw on his back. “Got to get a job,” he’d say. “Got to make up for the years I lost. Got to get a job from one of those dirty-rat black marketeers who cleaned up during the war safe at home. Got to get an angle.”

He was never really one of us, you understand. He was older and crazier and seemed not at all amused by his idiosyncracies, as though he suffered because of them even though he didn’t know it. But we were all keen on him. When he came by — walking so fast that you didn’t think he saw you, not walking his mother’s dog but pulling it behind him, its feet locked stiff, the neck resisting, the paws grinding along the cement sidewalk, until suddenly he was abreast of you and he stopped and turned quickly and said what he had to say about the black marketeers and then started again, yanking the dog along — Danny Lubell would say, “I admire him. I respect him. One thing about Eugene. He don’t stand still. Most nuts, they bury themselves in the sand. But not Eugene. Eugene moves along with the times. There’s a war, Eugene fights it in his bedroom. Peacetime, he’s a regular veteran worrying to get an angle. You got to give it to a man like that. He don’t stand still. He moves right along with the times.”

One night when he came by, Danny called to him, “Hey, Eugene, Eugene, where you been?”

He walked up close to examine us. He was wearing torn slacks and a dirty T-shirt. “Found an angle,” he said mysteriously. “Busy now, can’t talk much. Tell you quick and get along. Lots of details, lots to do. Sitting in the Roxy watching the picture. Next to me’s this beautiful babe. I think maybe she’s a movie star.

“ ‘Ain’t you Eugene Lepransky from The Bronx?’ she says.

“ ‘It’s me,’ I says.

“ ‘After the picture we’ll go to my place up the Hudson, I got a few friends coming over, we’ll dance,’ she says. Well, I’m trying to figure out how to get there on the subway, but when the picture’s over this big limousine pulls up, it’s a block long. It’s ‘Miss’ this and ‘Miss’ that from the chauffeur and I can see this is a fancy dame. We get in the car. Drive to this place up the Hudson. A palace! We go in. Butler at the door. ‘Hello there,’ he says. ‘Hello there, miss.’ What a place!

“ ‘You wait here, Eugene,’ she says. ‘I got to change into my beautiful ball gown. Then we’ll dance.’ So I’m waitin’ for her and she comes down, she’s got on this beautiful ball gown and we go into this ballroom. Chandeliers. Guys in tuxedos. We walk in right away everybody stops dancing and she nods to the guys in the band and she nods to me and we start to dance in the center all these people.”

“In your T-shirt?” Danny asked him.

Eugene doesn’t pay any attention to him. “So we’re dancin’ along and I give her the nod. How long can a guy dance, you know? We go off in her car, me and her and this other couple. We’re in the back seat necking and up in front is the mayor and his girl. Just the four of us. Me and her and the mayor of the City of New York and his date. Necking.”

“Eugene, the mayor was there?” Danny asked.

“Sure. Very horny man, the mayor. So later on she tells the chauffeur to drive me home and that’s where I get the angle. Turns out the chauffeur is Black Matt.”

“Who?”

“Black Matt, the pirate. He fills me in on the angle. We’re going down the Amazon River on Black Matt’s boat to find the mysterious black pearls.”

“Eugene, Eugene,” Danny says, “you can’t cross streets.”

“Only Black Matt knows where they are. Dangerous. Very dangerous. We’ll be millionaires. Only thing, they got these jaguars that they jump on the boat they try to rip you up. Black Matt wants me to shoot the jaguars on account he heard how I’m a good shot from the War Department. I’m going to shoot the jaguars and the Pygmies that protect the black pearls on account they think they’re special holy eggs. Goddamn stupid Pygmies. Stupidest guy in the world is a stupid Pygmy. Lot of them in my outfit during the war. He’s got movies. Black Matt’s got movies. He showed me. Pearls as big as your fist. Black. You want to come along? I tell Black Matt you’re good shots he’ll probably take you. Need guys to lift the pearls. Heavy.”

“Would you do that for us, Eugene?” Danny asked him.

“Got to ask Black Matt. His boat.”

“Would we meet him?”

“Sure. Take you tomorrow.”

The next day we were out in front again and Eugene came along pulling his mother’s dog.

Danny called him over. “Eugene,” he asked him, “when are we going to meet Black Matt?”

Eugene looked angrily at Danny, then at the rest of us. We didn’t often try to trap him. Ox Hersh moved up in case there was trouble.

“Deal’s off,” Eugene said. “Black Matt died.”

In 1949 Eugene went after his mother with a knife and they had to take him away. Shortly afterward — this was in the summer — I decided I’d better start school. I went around to the gas station and told Danny about it.

“Sure,” he said. “Do that.”

“Danny,” I said, “I have to go to school.”

“Sure,” he said. “Look, I’m busy. Write me a letter.”

After that I didn’t see much of Danny and in a few weeks I went away to school.

I turned to my mother, who was still holding the photograph.

“I guess I’ll go downstairs,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

“What was all that about Lesley’s sister? You said maybe she’s engaged, maybe she’s not engaged.”

“They got a telegram Lesley was killed on one of those games they play like it was war.”

“Maneuvers?”

“Yeah. Maneuvers. Your cousin Lesley was killed on them.”

We were never close; we didn’t see each other often. He was just a fat, humorless cousin I had I used to run across once in a while, but his death was a shock to me. After a while I thought, Poor Lesley, unconsciously eulogizing him with the gag name with which I had come to associate him. Poor Lesley, foolish Lesley, who should have died in bed, somebody’s fat and aged uncle, somebody’s loyal, uninspired employee in honor of whom maybe the office was closed a couple of hours the day of the funeral. And now he was dead who had this silly, lethal vision of himself, which was, ultimately, the correct vision, the true one, however ridiculous or inappropriate. Now my cousin was a dead Marine, killed in a war game which was no game, outmaneuvered. Poor Lesley, I thought. He played it straight. A straight man.

I went downstairs to the candy store. I wanted to cry. Fein was an old man, his candy was stale and hard, his egg creams without life. “My cousin died,” I told him.

“Condolences,” he said. I wondered if he remembered me.

“Where is everybody?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Where are the lousy people?” I asked him.

Some recognition came into his face.

“In a little while Belgium comes in to make his phone calls.”

“Belgium’s around? Good old Belgium. What phone calls, Mr. Fein?”

“He sells a policy. Between you and me, the policy is in drerd. You pay for sixty years, collect nothing. But he calls up people on the telephone. They buy from him sometime. Falls he sells football-parlay cards to school kids.”

I sat down on a stool to wait. It was getting dark. About seven-thirty Belgium came in. He gave Fein a dollar and Fein gave him a bunch of dimes. He went into the booth. I went up to the booth and hammered on it. Inside, he jumped as though he was very scared. “Just a minute,” he squeaked in his effeminate, pugnacious voice. Then he recognized me. He scooped up the dimes he had laid on the ledge and burst out of the phone booth. “Pal,” he shouted. “Pal, it’s you? No crap, it’s you?”

“Sure it’s me,” I said. “How’ve you been, Belgium?” I shook his little hand.

“Never better. Never better. You want to buy a policy? I sell policies. I’m in insurance. I’m an insurance man. You still go to school?”

“No more, Belgium. All through,” I said.

“Moving back? You moving back?”

“No,” I said. “Where are the lousy people?”

“No more lousy people,” he said. “Just me. All gone away. Want to buy some insurance? Fire? Comprehensive? Automobile? Accident? I got it. I got every kind of insurance. You need some? Shake hands. I show you fancy way I shake hands. In business world very important. Shake.” He pulled my hand toward him and began to pump it with ornate, mystical gestures. “In business world very important. Rockefeller. Vanderbilt. J. P. Morgan. Baruch. Those boys knew how to shake hands. Want to buy some insurance?”

“No. No insurance. I heard about your lousy insurance.” He looked hurt. “What do you mean all gone? Where’d they go?”

“Gone away,” he said impatiently.

“Old Guy?”

“Ain’t seen Old Guy three, four years. Upstate somewhere. Somewhere upstate,” he said, waving his hand vaguely.

“Shelly Malkin?”

Belgium shrugged.

“The Ox?Ox Hersh?”

“The Ox? The lousy Ox? Don’t speak to me about that mumser. Don’t say his name. He wrestles carnivals. Travels. Remember in the old days when I’d want to leave the bastard? Well, he left me. Travels all over the country, wrestles carnivals. Big bastard. I got a clipping from the paper where he broke a guy’s neck in Jersey. I got a clipping. You think they’d arrest the rat? No. Jersey’s crooked. You can break a guy’s neck in Jersey they don’t do a thing to you. How come he always gets away with it? How come? The Ox is married. Married a woman.”

“Belgium, where’s Danny? Where’s Danny Lubell?”

Belgium grinned. “You want to hear something about my pal Danny? Remember that car of his? Now you know well as me a thing like that got no right on the streets. I mean, it’s fun to play with, but it ain’t a car. It’s a toy. But I go up to him in all good faith after I become a businessman and I tell him, ‘Danny, for old times’ sake I get you coverage on the car.’ He looks at me like I’m nuts and says, ‘Look what happens. Look who all of a sudden is doing the protecting.’ That’s a hell of a thing to say to a pal, right? I try to tell him, ‘Danny, you got to provide, you got to provide,’ but you might as well talk to a wall. Well, the thing is, after the fat Ox started wrestling carnivals there was nobody to drive the car, so Danny takes it out himself. Well, don’t you think he smashed it up?” Belgium was grinning broadly now. “He smashed it up. It looked like a smashed can he got through with it. No insurance, nothing. He didn’t know how to provide.”

“Was he hurt?”

“Hurt? He was damn near killed. Hospital for a month.”

“He’s home now?”

“Yeah, he’s home. He’s home. He’s in a home, that’s where he is.”

I asked Belgium what he was talking about, but without Danny, or without the Ox, or maybe without even me there to watch him, Belgium had become just another self-centered nut. It was hard to get a straight answer out of him. He kept asking me if I wanted some of his insurance, and when I told him no, finally with real severity, he wanted to shake hands again. He kept saying that it was very important in the business world and that he was surprised I didn’t realize this and buy some insurance. Finally he told me that Danny had had what Belgium called a “nerve breakdown” and that he was a real nut now, and that this was all you could expect from a guy who didn’t know how to provide.

“You ever been up to visit him?” I asked Belgium.

“That nut?” Belgium asked with real outrage. “I ain’t got no time to be a fool. I give him good years. What I got to show? Ox breaking guys’ necks over in Jersey, Old Guy upstate somewheres, Danny in a home. I got a business to look after.”

I asked Belgium for the name of the place where Danny was. He told me he didn’t have it written down but that he thought it was on Long Island and that if he saw the name he might remember. Finally we got it from the operator. I told Belgium I was going to go out to see Danny and I asked him if he wanted to come with me. He said Sundays were his best days for making contacts and I didn’t press him. I saw that in a screwy way he was providing.

I said, “So long, Belgium,” and he looked at me shamefaced for a moment. I thought he was feeling guilty about Danny, but finally he said to me that he was in business now, and that if I could remember I should call him by his real name. “It looks better,” he said, “ you know what I mean?”

When I left the candy store I gave him my hand to shake, but he must have been thinking of something else. He merely took it and pumped it mechanically. There was no art.

On Sunday it rained but I went downtown and caught a train going out to Long Island.

There is something faintly disreputable and sad about people using public transportation on a Sunday. They are so obviously people on “outings,” desperately counted-on holidays complicated by train and bus schedules, or they are cautious visitors, stiffly carrying their inexpensive boxes of candy to luckier people than themselves. I had written down the name of Danny’s home on a slip of paper and beneath the name I had printed the address. On the train I showed this to a fellow passenger. Handing him the paper, I felt inexplicably sad and depressed, like a foreigner who does not know the language, or like an orphan shipped to relatives across the country with a tag pinned to his overcoat. It was as though I had no business going to Long Island by myself at all. I deliberately chose to ask directions of a well-dressed man, and as I handed him the slip I regretted having written down the name of what was so obviously an asylum. I almost told him it was a friend I intended to visit, just an old friend who had not taken care of himself.

The man was not positive, but he named a bus he thought I could take, and I did not check with any of the other passengers.

At my stop I got on the wrong bus. I should have asked the driver.

Waiting in the rain for a bus to take me back to where I had started, I thought for a moment that maybe the years with my friends had finally made me irresponsible too. Finally I got a cab and gave the driver the address. It cost me two dollars.

The home where Danny was seemed friendly enough, even in the rain. It was an old, sprawling, wooden building, but there were a lot of flowers, plenty of shade trees. It could have been a lot of places. I remember going to a funeral parlor not long ago. I had been apprehensive that the arrangements might be too stagey, but I was surprised to find I was really quite comfortable.

I told the volunteer I wanted to see Danny Lubell. She had to look up his name in her card file, and I guessed that not many people came to visit him. She called an attendant, who took me to the door of Danny’s room and then turned to leave.

“Shouldn’t you go in and tell him I’m here?”

“Don’t he know you?”

“I haven’t seen him in a long time. He doesn’t expect me.”

“It’ll be all right. He’s safe.”

I knocked softly, then with more force.

Danny opened the door. He was dressed in a suit. Except for the times we went to parties I couldn’t remember Danny in a suit.

“Hello, Danny,” I said.

“I’m nuts,” he said.

“You always were,” I said, and we went into the room.

He stood by the door. “You afraid for me to close this or anything?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” I said quickly.

“I don’t like people peering in at me. They visit their relatives and look into every damned room along the way.”

He seemed all right. The Sunday papers were sprawled out on the neatly made bed. Danny had probably been sitting in the chair by the window when I knocked.

“Back in town, hey?” he said.

“I’m visiting my mother.”

“Way it goes,” he said.

“Danny, you probably don’t remember, you only met him once. My cousin Lesley? He was killed.”

“The Marine?”

I nodded.

“Fat guy, shy around pussy-cat fur, joined the Marines. You told me about him. I remember. He was a beauty. The lousy people could have used a man like that. Yeah, I remember. Killed? Killed in the Marines?”

“He was on maneuvers.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

He went over and sat down on the bed on the papers. He looked at me for a long while.

“Bet you never thought you’d be seeing me in a place like this.”

“Belgium told me,” I said.

“That creep,” he said.

“Joey Stowka. He told me to call him Joey Stowka.”

“Joey Belgium Creep. Insurance Representative. Sometimes I think I’m pretty well off in here, but if people buy insurance from Insurance Representative Joey Belgium Creep I’m sort of sorry I’m not out there. There must be a whole new crop of beauties roaming around loose.”

I laughed. I started to laugh hard.

“Hey, cut it out, cut it out. They’ll think it’s me. They’ll come in and feel the bumps on my head.”

“Hey, Danny,” I said, “what’s it all about? I mean, you seem fine. How long — you know — will you have to be here?”

“I ain’t made my mind up,” he said.

“You can get out when you want?”

“You hear about Ox?” Danny said.

“From Belgium.”

“How’s your school? They taking care of you?”

“I’m through with school, Danny.”

“But they took care of you okay? They kept you busy?”

“What do you mean?”

“You never did nothing but look, you know that?”

“I was crazy about you people.”

“Sure, sure you were. But you never did nothing but look.”

“You look too.”

“I look harder. I strained my eyes I looked so hard. Not you.”

“That’s what I was there for,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

“I was supposed to look.”

“That’s right, chief.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. You tried to give us your jerky cousin Lesley. Poor Lesley, now he’s dead.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s dead too, your jerky cousin.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a pile of crap,” he said. “It’s no deal at all.”

“Oh, Danny,” I said, my heart tearing.

“It’s no damn deal at all. It’s a pile of crap.”

He didn’t say anything else. He sat there, on the bed, but wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to tell him I was sorry, but he didn’t answer me. After a while I stopped talking and we just sat there together. I sat with him half an hour, then I had to get out of “ there. “I’ve got to catch my bus,” I said.

“I’ve got to get started, Danny. Danny?” He looked up at me when I stood, but he didn’t say anything. I walked toward the door slowly, wanting him to say good-by. There was nothing but my own footsteps going to the door. I turned around to look at him for the last time.

Still he said nothing, but I did not miss the broad wink in the wild and knowing eye.