Onion Street

CHAPTER SIX

I found Lids where I knew I’d find him, selling loose joints and whatever else outside the gates on the other side of campus. Cops walked their beats. Lids walked his. I also knew Lids by his real name, Larry Lester. He was two years younger than me, but had been a year ahead of me at school. He had been Lincoln High School’s fair-haired boy, destined for a vastly different trajectory than the arc he was now traveling. Larry was supposed to be at MIT or Princeton or Cornell, doing book-length equations on the relationships between quarks and quasars and how they proved or disproved the existence of God. Larry Lester — Ocean Parkway’s answer to Descartes and Einstein — had lasted exactly one and a half terms at MIT before he went flip city. He never got around to smashing atoms. Instead, they smashed him. At least he cracked and wound up in a rubber room before they found him hanging in his closet by his belt. And now here he was, selling joints and getting by in the shadows of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues.

“Feed your head,” was his whispered refrain to familiar passersby.

“Yo, Larry, got a minute?” I said, looping my arm through his. It wasn’t a question and he knew it.

“It’s Lids. It’s Lids out here, man,” he repeated, as I swept him along. “I’ve got a rep to keep.”

“Okay, Lids, you look hungry. Eggs? My treat.”

“Sure, Moe. Eggs are good.”

“Eggs it is.”

We turned up Campus Road toward the diner next to the off-campus bookstore. We sat at a tiny table in the corner. The place smelled of fried onions and grilling bacon. That was almost enough to lift me out of the darkness. Almost. Athena, the toothy, horse-faced waitress, took our orders and poured us coffee without looking. She never looked. She never spilled a drop. Athena was half the reason I ate here. I loved to watch her move, how, even built stocky and low to the ground as she was, she flowed like water through the crowd, in and out and around the tightly packed chairs and tables, avoiding book bags and busboys. That day I paid her movements no mind. I could not escape the idea of Mindy in a hospital bed, never waking up.

“What’s the buzz?” Larry wanted to know.

“That’s what I was hoping you could help me with.”

His red, sleepy eyes regarded me with deep suspicion. “You want some of my wares? I didn’t think that was your bag, Moe.”

I shook my head. “No, no, no. I don’t want anything like that.”

His eyes turned from suspicion to confusion. “Then I’m even more lost than I was a second ago, and I’ve been lost since 1965.”

“Mindy’s in a coma.”

“Your old lady?”

“Yeah. She was mugged and beaten. They found her in the snow on Glenwood Road and East 17th.”

“Fuck, man. That’s heavy, but what do you want from — ”

“Two eggs over easy, home fries, bacon, rye toast.” Athena slid the plate down in front of Lids. “A toasted corn muffin, butter.” She was nearly as suspicious of me as Larry. “You always order eggs,” she said in her Greek-inflected English, “scrambled, french fries, whole wheat toast. What’s with you today, darling, no appetite?”

“Not much of one, no,” I confessed.

She winked at me. “Girl troubles?”

“In a way.”

“Don’t worry, honey.” She tapped her nose with her index finger. “Everything will work out. Athena knows these things.”

I hoped so.

Showing me a mouth full of yellow egg yolk and potatoes, Lids asked, “Like I was saying, what do you want from me?” I slid a hundred-dollar bill across the table to him. There was that confusion in his eyes again. “I thought you — ”

“It’s not for dope. It’s for information. I want you to spread it around, and don’t tell me you don’t know what that means.”

The bill stayed on the table, untouched. “What do you need to know?”

“Two nights ago, Mindy was someplace between six and eight o’clock. I need to know where. Also, the cops say the guy who did this to her was a light-skinned black dude, young, with pink blotches on his skin. Anything you — ”

“Vitiligo,” Larry said.

“What?”

“Those pink blotches, it’s vitiligo, a skin pigmentation disease.”

“Whatever you say, Larry. But anything you can find out about where she was the other night or the guy that did this to her … you know, whatever.”

“What you gonna do, Moe?”

“I don’t know, but I gotta do something or I’ll go fucking crazy. Her parents are wrecks. They’re scared. I’m scared. I gotta do something.”

Now Lids leaned across the table and whispered, “Listen, Moe, you were always nice to me. In school, you always watched out for guys like me and Spider Thomas. You never asked for anything in return, but I know I owe you. So keep your money.” He slid the bill back across the table to me. “If I need to spread bread around, I’ll use my own gelt. But I probably won’t have to. People get stoned and they get stupid. People who want to get stoned can also get pretty desperate. Either way, they’ll talk to me.”

“I trust you.” I took the C-note back. But if I thought Lids was going to leave it at that, I was wrong.

He leaned forward and said, “And whatever you feel you gotta do, don’t do it yourself, man. I’m pretty close to people who, you know …”

“What kind of people, Larry? Who we talking about, here?”

“I owe you, Moe, but not that much. I know who I know. Leave it at that. You want something done, come to me and it will get done, but you won’t know who did it.”

“Okay, Larry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful and I’m sorry for being so nosy. I’m just so mad about what happened to Mindy, I feel like I’m gonna explode.” I stood up, threw a five on the table, and patted him on the shoulder.

He grabbed my wrist. “I don’t know what I’ll hear or if it will help, but whatever I find out … you still at the same number?”

“Yeah. If you can’t get me there, you can get me at Burgundy House.” I wrote that number down for him.

He grabbed my wrist again. “Something’s bugging me, Moe.” He started doing that twitchy face thing he did when he got overly excited. “Something’s bugging me.”

“What is?”

“They found Mindy on Glenwood and East 17th, right? That’s right near the subway station.”

“Glenwood and East 17th, that’s what her dad told me, yeah.”

“It doesn’t make sense. She lives in Canarsie. That’s in the opposite direction. What was she doing over there?”

“I don’t know. When she comes out of the coma, I’ll ask her. It’s not important right now.”

“If it’s not important, then why do you want me to find out where she was the other night?”

“That’s different.”

He was ticcing like crazy now. “No, it’s the same.”

“Look, wherever she was when she got mugged, it was the wrong place. Like I said, it’s not important.”

“But it is important. Where a person is when an event occurs is as important as where particles are when they collide. If they are not in that place, there is no collision. Without that collision, the universe is a different place, subtly different, maybe, but different nonetheless. Don’t you understand? It’s the key to everything: knowing where things are, or were, or where they will be.”

I left him there, mumbling to himself about particles and uncertainty, his tics calmed, his eyes turned inward. I think maybe for the first time, I got a sense of how he’d come undone. I hoped Athena could rescue him from where he had gone to. I couldn’t. Even if Athena couldn’t do the trick, I had faith Larry would come out of it. He always did, always had. He had to. I needed him.

As bad as I felt for Larry, my internal pressure had eased a bit. If nothing came of our encounter, at least I’d let off some steam. And who knew? Larry was good at finding out all sorts of stuff. People get stoned and they get stupid, that’s what he’d said. Yet another reason why I shied away from drugs. I didn’t need any help in getting stupid. Just ask my brother Aaron.