Every Good Boy Does Fine, Part 1

Every Good Boy Does Fine

a novel

by

W.D. Haverstock

Legal Notice:

Transcribed by Gregory L. Green, Attorney at Law, New York from the original cassette tape recordings made by George O’Reilly,

Feb. 2, 3, 4, and 5, 1996

Chapter One

I don’t think I’m no different from anybody else.  We all have our ups and downs.  It’s just that some go up higher and some go down lower.  Some finish on the up, some on the down, but that’s something you never can predict.  The point is we all live in the same world and anything can happen to anybody.  We just like to think it can’t.

            For a long time I thought I was different.  I thought I was better than everyone else.  I mean, I wasn’t smug or arrogant like a lot of people I’ve run into.  They say they’re no better than you but they look at you like you’re some kind of animal.  They straighten their bow ties and smile like you’re just one of the boys.  They don’t know that everybody thinks that way.  Everybody thinks they’re better than everybody else.  Thinking you’re better only makes you the same.

            I was just like them anyway.  I thought I was better and acted that way.  I knew I was better.  I mean, I guess anybody who starts out where I did and then accumulates the kind of wealth that I have would be tempted.  I found myself unable to resist this particular temptation and it wasn’t the first time I ever gave in.

            When you’re in the position I’m in, you think about these things.  You don’t think about them when you have your whole life in front of you and you think you’re free to do anything you want with it.  You think it’s going to go on forever and if you’re ever going to have to pay for anything you do, it’s too far off to be of any concern.  But when the time comes to pay for what you did, you start to think about such things.

            We’re surrounded by temptation.  I’ve learned this.  I don’t know who puts it there but it’s there and I see now that it has to be there.  You see, if it wasn’t there, then we’d have nothing to be proud of.  It’s no big deal to do good if that’s the only choice you got.  I know that philosophers and intellectuals have already figured this out but it came as a surprise to me.  In fact, it brought me to where I am today.

            I do know that I wasn’t no different from a lot of other kids living off 149th Street in the Bronx in the early 70’s.  I was Irish and they were Italian mostly or Puerto Rican but we were all the same.  We all thought we were better than everybody else and we all knew we weren’t going nowhere in life.  We all knew there were a lot of temptations out there and nothing was fair right from the start.

            My family lived on Morris Avenue above a t.v. repair shop and there was still a few Irish families within walking distance when I was a kid.  There were Italians, too, but most of them got out when the first Puerto Ricans came in.  The Irish hung on a little longer and maybe it was because we were more scattered around than the Italians.  We never stayed as close as the Italian families stayed because we fit in better.  Too many Italian kids had kinky hair.

            Or maybe it was because of the Irish bar on the corner of Morris and 149th Street.  I still drive through neighborhoods where you don’t see nothing but bodegas and discount boutiques but there’s always an Irish bar.  Most of them ain’t Irish no more and some of them never was but it’s no wonder the Irish have the reputation we do.  I mean, they’re still supplying liquor to most of the neighborhoods in New York.

            I was sixteen years old in 1975 and I didn’t mind seeing the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood.  I thought some of the Puerto Rican girls were just as beautiful as the few Irish girls I knew.  The Irish girls disappeared like money in a candy jar.  If you had a son, maybe you stuck around a little longer, but any Irish guy with a daughter got out of there as fast as he could and so what I had was mostly memories of Irish girls from back in the 60’s when we were all just kids and it didn’t matter anyhow.  By the time I was sixteen, the only Irish girl left was my sister.

            Maybe that was one of the things that did my old man in finally.  Maybe he couldn’t stand the fact that there weren’t any Irish girls around for me anymore.  Or maybe it was because there weren’t any good Irish boys around for my sister.  Then again, maybe it was because he liked to see those Puerto Rican girls as much as I did.  I don’t know.  I don’t know what he did or where he went when he wasn’t at home with my mother.  I never did know much about him beyond his belt.

            We used to run over to the hospital when we heard the sirens and didn’t have nothing better to do.  That was most of the time.  We never had anything to do after school and there were always sirens once the hospital opened up.  Those EMS trucks ran through that light at Morris and 149th Street like they were looking to get more patients.  They were almost as bad as the tow truck drivers.  Those tow trucks mowed down people like they was cuttin‘ grass.  Those guys would listen in on the police radio and when they heard of a car accident over on the Deegan or up on the Concourse, they’d take off like bats out of hell.

            I saw a little old lady once get knocked up against the picture window of the Chinese-Cuban restaurant across Morris Avenue from us.  I was just sitting upstairs watching from our living room.  That truck hit that little old lady in the middle of the street and I don’t even think he tried to miss her.  She hit that window without touching the ground and I could hear it even over the salsa music the guy upstairs used to play all day and night.  I heard the sickening thud when the truck hit her and I heard it when she hit the window.  There must have been something metal in her purse or something because there was some kind of clicking sound when she slid back down to the sidewalk.  She was dead before that truck was a block away and he never looked back.  I’d be surprised if they ever caught that guy and more surprised if he lost a night’s sleep over that.  Those guys didn’t care.

            I saw a lot of people that didn’t care about nobody or nothin’.  Even my friends didn’t care.  If you were going to fit in, you couldn’t care.  Anybody who cared about anybody else had to be careful to hide it.  Otherwise people would get the wrong idea about them.  People would think they cared.

            We’d run over to the emergency entrance and watch them unload the patients.  We’d try to guess what had happened to them.  Sometimes there wouldn’t seem to be nothing wrong with them and we were disappointed about that.  Sometimes they’d be grimacing in pain but we couldn’t see nothing and so we’d guess that they were having a heart attack or maybe they couldn’t take the food at the cuchifritos joint that moved in up the street.  It wasn’t funny but we laughed about that one.  We laughed about a lot of things that weren’t funny.

            But sometimes we’d get lucky and there would be blood all over the place.  We liked it when the clothes and sheets were covered with blood and the person was squirming like a worm.  Sometimes the sheets would be so messed up we could see the gunshot wounds.  There were a lot of gunshot wounds, especially at night and on the weekends.  Every year it seemed like there was more and more of them.  It was always amazing how much blood would come out of those little holes.

            But for blood you couldn’t beat knife wounds.  Anybody who uses a knife likes the sight of blood.  I saw this right away back then and maybe it was something that started me thinking.  I mean, you don’t right off assume that somebody would like the sight of blood, but when you see enough of them like that, you got to admit the obvious.  Only later did I realize that a lot of people can’t admit the obvious.  A lot of people can’t see what’s right in front of their noses.

            That was obvious as the look on a girl’s face who’s out to find out how much money you got in your pocket.  If you use a gun, you mean business.  If you use a knife, all you’re interested in is seeing blood.  This may sound incredible but it’s a fact, too, that these guys who use knives are never content just to stab you.  They stab you and then they stab you again and again.  They might stab you forty or fifty times before they get too tired to do any more and I don’t think they stop for any other reason.  They don’t care if you’re dead or alive.  In fact, they’d like you to stay alive so they can keep on stabbing you but eventually they get too tired or you run out of blood.

            Then they try to act like nothing happened.  They want you to think it was just a coincidence that their girlfriend got murdered the night they happened to catch her out with their best friend.  They want you to think that they could never do nothing like that even though it’s as obvious as the nose on their face that somebody did it and if it wasn’t them, it wasn’t nobody.

            I mean, you may look like a decent guy.  You may go to work every day and pay the rent and buy clothes for the kids but somebody did it and it wasn’t no stranger who just walked in off the street and picked out a kitchen knife.  They think it’s easier for you to believe that somebody you don’t know could do something like that and, to tell the truth, it is.  It’s a lot easier to believe that somebody else did it and I’ve used this fact quite a few times in my career.

            If you say you didn’t do it and say it with a straight face like that football player a couple of years ago and say it often enough, it’s hard for anybody to believe you did.  If you’re good, you can even get the guy you stabbed to believe that somebody else did it, even though he was staring you right in the face and you’re still holding the knife in your hand.  It’s amazing how hard people try to believe that evil is somewhere else besides right there with them.  I’ve found out why that is, too.  It’s tough to go on living if you know what the guy beside you is really thinking.

            But I didn’t laugh as much as my friends laughed and that was one of the things that started me thinking that I was different.  I hadn’t made no money yet.  It wasn’t because of that.  In fact, I thought I never would make no money at that time.  How was I ever going to make any money?  I didn’t know nobody.  Nobody that I knew knew anybody.  My old man didn’t know anybody.  He worked for the Department of Sanitation and he always told me that if I was smart, I’d do the same, if I couldn’t get in with the Transit Authority.  Now that I think of it, that was his dream.  He always talked about working on the trains and maybe it was some kind of romantic thing with him.  I don’t know but I can see his face now when he was talking about it and it’s not too often that I see his face.  I never thought about it before one way or the other.

            We thought about making money only because we knew that we never would.  Everybody was always talking about how much money they were going to make.  They’d say this at the same time they said they never had a chance because they didn’t know nobody.  You got to know somebody, they all said, and we all knew that none of us knew anybody worth knowing.  None of us was worth knowing.  Nobody worth knowing lived in our neighborhood.  Nobody worth knowing ever came to our neighborhood.  But they talked anyway.  They were just dreaming.

            I thought about it, too, but I didn’t talk about it like they did and I guess that was something else that made me think I was different.  I didn’t think of it like that then, but now I can see that it was.  I liked to imagine getting rich as much as they did but I didn’t talk about it.  I didn’t think it was worth talking about.  If it’s not going to happen, why waste your time talking about it?  That’s how I felt at the time and maybe that did make me different from them.  I only know that things turned out different for me.  I got what they only talked about.

            Not that I could see it coming.  I didn’t actually even think I was different yet, even if I was.  I didn’t actually start to say to myself that I was different until that night in the park and that didn’t happen for another couple of years.  Back then I’d just listen to them talk about money and cars and girls and big houses in the suburbs and I’d think about this girl that I used to see at church.  I used to think about her as much as they thought about making money.

            “I’m gettin’ out of here first chance I get,” Gary used to say.  He lived on the next block up and he was another one of the last to go.  There were only four of us left.  Johnny was the only other Irish kid and he always agreed.  He’d agree with anything anybody said.

            “Yeah, and I’m gonna be next,” Johnny’d say.

            “Just so I’m first,” Gary said.

            Then there was Marvin.  He was Spanish but you couldn’t tell.  He was Venezuelan and looked whiter than I did.  He even had that same reddish complexion that I had but if you looked real close, you could see that there was something that wasn’t right about him.  His nose was a little too wide or something and his mouth wasn’t straight across enough.  Maybe it was because he spoke so much Spanish.  He didn’t speak it around us but he could speak it just like any of the Puerto Ricans and I always thought it was funny when he did.

            “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Marvin would say.  “You can say anything you want to but none of you is goin’ nowhere.  We’re stuck here and you better get used to it.”

            “Speak for yourself,” Gary said.

            “If you could leave, you’d be gone by now,” Marvin said.  “Anybody who could leave already did.  You might as well stop thinking about it and figure out what you’re going to do with yourself right here.  Ain’t that right, George?”

            I’d say that it was.

            “Do like George’s old man and get yourself a good paying city job,” Marvin would always say.  He seemed to think my old man was some kind of entrepreneur.  “Man, those guys make eight, ten, twelve bucks an hour without doing shit.  They sit on their ass all day long and work maybe two, three hours and get all that money for free almost.  And after twenty years, they put in a little over time the last year and they can retire to Florida.  If you start now, you can be in Florida by the time you’re forty.  That’s what I’m going to do.”

            I don’t know how many times Marvin said this but he laughed at this as much as Gary and Johnny laughed at the EMS trucks and at the idea of moving to the suburbs.

            “I’m going to have me a place on Park Avenue,” Gary would say to this, knowing what Johnny would say back.

            “That’s right.  Park and 138th.  High class.”

            I didn’t talk as much and I didn’t laugh as much.  I’d see them pull that stretcher out of the back of that truck with somebody on it that looked more dead than alive.  I’d see the blood on the sheets and the way those EMS guys would try to hurry to get into the hospital and the young doctors that came rushing out to try to help.  These doctors were always young.  I guess they were just putting in their time until they could start making some real money and get out of there like everybody else.

            But Gary would be laughing and Marvin and Johnny laughed and, to tell the truth, I laughed, too.  It’s hard not to laugh when everyone else is laughing but inside I was saying a prayer.  One thing I had always done was to go to church and I still believed in all of that.  I still believed that it was all as simple as that.  There was a devil somewhere, everywhere, and he was always tempting us to do bad and we needed God to help us to be good.  I believed that that was all there was to it.

            I mean, it was easy to believe.  There was plenty of temptation around.  There was plenty of it right there in the church when the priest was standing in front of us and those girls were standing behind him in those long, white robes.  That priest looked like some kind of guardian angel protecting them from the rest of us.  He made us think that he was the only thing standing between us and temptation.  I thought he was.

            I hadn’t yet gave in to temptation except to do a little shoplifting when I didn’t have enough change in my pocket or sometimes when I did.  I’d taken money out of my father’s wallet but most of the time there wasn’t enough there to bother with.  I’d stolen some money out of a cash register once at a discount store when the cashier dropped something on the floor.  It must have been her first day on the job.

            But I had never gave in to nothing big.  I hadn’t stole no cars and I knew people who had.  I didn’t carry any weapons and I knew people who did that, too, and who said that they used them.  Most of all, I hadn’t taken none of the girls I knew into the project that was going up across from the hospital.

            There was a big construction site between Park Avenue and Morris where they were putting up a housing project.  This went on for a couple of years and there were plenty of isolated spots where you could go at night or after everyone went home for the day.  There were plenty of girls that wanted to go with you, too.  Most of them figured that if they could get you to marry them, their futures would be secure.  Some of them just liked to do it but these were the ones you had to stay away from more than the others.

            It’s funny how these things are.  The better they seem, the worse they are.  If it’s something that you want to do really bad, like take Louisa into the projects or shoot dope or blow up some hoodlum’s car, it’s something you better not do.  The only things you can do are the things you don’t want to do.  The only things you want to do bad enough to change your whole life for, like take Dorothy the choir girl somewhere a little better than the project site or win the lottery or fall in love, are the things you absolutely cannot do.

            “Louisa wants you,” Marvin used to say to me.

            “I thought she was your girl,” I’d say.

            “I’m just using her, man.  She’s all right.  You ought to try her some time.  You got to get started sometime.”

            I was sixteen years old at the time.  Even though we all bragged about it every time we got together hanging out on the street, we all knew that Marvin was the only one who knew what he was talking about.  That’s because he was a couple of years older and had been out of school for a while already.  He didn’t even make it to the ninth grade but he knew what he was talking about when he talked about Louisa.  That’s too bad because it made it look like he knew what he was talking about all the time when the rest of the time he didn’t know any more than we did.

            We knew that Marvin wasn’t lying because he would take us with him.  The first time I ever saw a girl was thanks to Marvin and I was grateful to him for that for a long time.  That’s the kind of thing that cements a friendship for a lifetime.  It wasn’t Louisa.  This was some Spanish girl that he took into the project site and he invited us along to watch.  We hid in the dirt behind a new cinder block wall and watched through a hole where a window was going to go.  He brought her right up to the hole so we could all see her and if she didn’t know we were there, she was as dumb as she looked.  She was good enough looking, though, for the rest of us to wish that we were in Marvin’s shoes and he kept them on even though he made her take everything off.

            It wasn’t long before Johnny and Gary were in Marvin’s shoes but I didn’t give in, not just yet.

            “Louisa wants you, man,” Marvin kept telling me and I liked the way Louisa looked even with her clothes on. She had this empty look in her eyes that made her look like she couldn’t put two and two together but it also made her look like the girl of your dreams.  It was vacant but dreamy.

            “Louisa’s your girl,” is what I usually said.

            “Mine and Johnny’s and Gary’s and everybody else’s, man.  You should give it a try.  I know you like her.  She’s worth it.”

            I’d nod my head because I did agree.  I just couldn’t get Dorothy the choir girl out of my mind most of the time.  This was just before the plague when all you had to worry about was whether or not you were ready to abandon a baby that might have a claim on you.  I was ready to do that but I could still see the priest standing up there between the choir and the rest of us.

            “Louisa looks too smart, man,” I’d say if I had to, if Marvin wouldn’t let up.  “I’m saving myself for somebody dumber.  I want the dumbest bitch there is, so dumb she won’t even remember my name.”

            Marvin always laughed at this and laughed at me because he thought I was afraid but then Marvin laughed at almost anything.  He laughed when the tow trucks raced through the intersection and when he heard somebody screaming from an apartment window.  The louder they screamed, the harder he laughed.

            One time we heard a fight coming from a window in the Melrose project below the hospital.  There was a woman screaming for help and a man who sounded like he was going to kill somebody.  The woman came to the window and started hollering for somebody to come up and help her and when the man reached out and grabbed her by the neck, that’s when Marvin laughed the loudest.

            “She thinks somebody’s going to go up there and save her,” he said between fits of laughter.  “She thinks somebody’s going to go up there who don’t even know her and take care of that guy once and for all.”  He was buckled over, laughing so hard.  Gary was laughing, too, but I could see in his face that he knew it wasn’t funny.  Maybe that’s why me and Gary were closer with each other than we were with the others.  Maybe we had something like this in common.

            But Gary laughed as much as the others when those patients were wheeled into the emergency room.  I mean, we must of been in the way sometimes but they were too busy to tell us to get lost.  They had some security guards around but those guys never did nothing.  They didn’t even help out.  It wasn’t their job, I guess, but sometimes you could see that they were short-handed and could have used some help.  Those security guys wouldn’t lift a finger.  They weren’t laughing but they weren't’ doing nothing to help either.  Most of the time they just stood there and watched with a cup of coffee in their hand.

            Once I followed the stretcher into the waiting room.  That was as far as you could go.  Usually we just stood outside.  There was some kind of unspoken rule that said it wasn’t the thing to do to go inside.  We were supposed to stay on the outside and watch everything pass us by.

            But there was something about the look on that woman’s face that made me want to know what was wrong with her.  There was no blood and she wasn’t moving.  Her eyes were open and she even said something to one of the attendants.  I couldn’t hear what it was but it didn’t sound like she was in any pain.  At the same time you could see that there was something wrong with her.  Maybe she was dying.  I don’t know.  I never found out.

            “Hey, where you going?” Johnny said when I started in.

            “I want to see where they take her,” I said.

            “Don’t go in there, man.  They won’t  tell you nothin’.”

            I knew it was true but I went in anyway.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow behind the desk in the waiting room but I watched them push her through those swinging doors into the emergency room and I was praying for her.  I was just praying that she wouldn’t die and I don’t know why to this day.

            It couldn’t have been more than five minutes but when I got back outside, the others were gone.  It was late and there wasn’t no one around except two security guards.  One of them grabbed me by the arm before I saw them.

            “Come on,” he said but it wasn’t like I had a choice.

            They took me across Park Avenue toward the train tracks.

            “What are you doing?” I said but I knew they weren’t going to tell me.  I could see it in their faces.  Now they were laughing.

            There was a hole cut in the wire fence and they dragged me right down to the tracks.

            “How do you like this?”  one of them said and he took out a piece of rope.  I don’t know if they had thought of this before or if they were just looking for some way to pass the time but he took out a piece of rope like he knew there was going to be some use for it.  They tied my hands behind my back and my feet and dropped me onto the tracks.

            “I wonder when the next train is going to come by,” one of them said.

            “I don’t know.  They come by every few minutes, though.  It shouldn’t take long.”

            I could have screamed or begged them or something but I didn’t say a word.  I didn’t think they were actually going to kill me.  I knew they were just having some fun but they waited as long as they could.  I could feel the vibrations in the rails and see the headlight but I couldn’t tell how far away it was.  I looked close as soon as I saw it.

            They picked me up and held me out toward the train while it passed.  The wind was so strong I thought they were going to lose their balance and we were all going to fall under the wheels.  It didn’t take more than a few seconds but it seemed like time was standing still.  Then they threw me down in the weeds and started kicking me.  They were laughing again now.  They kicked the shit out of me and then walked back up the hill like they had just went out for a cup of coffee.

            It took me an hour to get loose and by then I don’ t know how many more trains had passed.  When I did, I walked up the tracks under 149th Street before I came out.  I didn’t want to see those guys again.

            I remember dreaming about that sometime later but lately I’ve been having another dream.  I’ve had it a couple of times the last few months and I think I saw it in a movie when I was a kid.  I know I never really saw it.

            There’s a guy on a ship.  They’re at sea and there’s a big storm.  The wind is blowing so hard that this guy is stretched out over the edge of the ship.  He’s trying to hold on but the rain is pounding and the wind never lets up.  Finally his hands slip and he disappears into the water.  That’s all but it wakes me up and I know I never seen nothing like this.   It wakes me up and I’m glad it’s just a dream.

Every Good Boy Does Fine, Part 2

Chapter Eleven

            A couple of months went by and the cops never came around so I didn’t have to use the lies I had come up with.  The cops know that if they are going to get you at all, they have to get you fast.  Otherwise, evidence disappears, memories become cloudy and you have time to make up a relatively foolproof alibi.

            I had decided not to involve Luis.  I could have just asked him to say that I left when he did.  That would have taken care of the whole problem because they would have believed him.  Since Luis had a reputation as an honest guy, they would have believed anything he said and he would only have to lie once to say that we left together.  It would have worked and Luis would have done it for me.  I had already covered for him a few times.  Not that he did any fooling around.

            Luis was one of the best family men I ever ran across.  He loved his wife and he would not have cheated on her and I know this because I saw him turn down several opportunities that most men could not have turned down.  There are plenty of girls between 138th Street and Fordham who see a guy with a job and right away they get ideas.  They think their futures are secure.  Luis wasn’t the best looking guy in the world and he was Spanish but he had his pick up there.

            What he liked to do was play dominoes.   Sometimes after work he’d stop off at this little place around Westchester and Prospect to drink some beer, play dominoes, listen to Super KQ and generally watch what was happening.  All I had to do was call up his wife and tell her that we had a couple of late deliveries to make and that he would be home as soon as he could.  That’s all there was to it and she liked to talk to me because I would try to speak Spanish with her.  Her English was as good as mine but she liked to hear a gringo trying to speak Spanish.  It was partly because she could see that I really liked the language and she knew that I liked Luis.  Maybe this was unusual to her.  It was also partly because she could do something that I couldn’t do and that always makes people feel good.

            Luis was a hard working, honest man.  That’s why he was still delivering furniture after eight years.  He would still be delivering furniture if I hadn’t came along.  Since I knew he was honest and I knew there weren’t too many like him, I moved him up the first chance I got.  I even helped him get out of the Bronx but most guys like him never run into nobody like me.  Luis got lucky.

            I didn’t involve him because I knew that if anything happened, it could be serious.  It was more serious than beating up a drunk even if the drunk was a cop’s brother-in-law.  They might consider what I did rape and they might take the woman’s word over mine because I knew she could afford a better lawyer than me.  If push came to shove and I ended up in court with her, I liked her chances better than mine.

            I considered using everyone else I knew as an alibi but I knew it was almost impossible for two people to tell the same lie.  It’s hard enough for one person to lie well enough to get away with it.  I even considered using Iris.  I figured she’d do it for me but then I’d be obligated to spend a few months with her and it didn’t seem worth it.

            So I just decided to say I stayed for some lemonade and then left after five minutes.  I knew that this was as good as an admission of guilt but it would have been her word against mine and they would have had no evidence to take me to court because I never hurt her.  I was still hoping she liked it enough to keep quiet about it.

            About three months later the cops showed up.  I don’t know why it took them so long but I got the impression somewhere along the line that they were trying to link me to some other crimes.  The cops like to close as many cases as they can when they think they got somebody.  Or maybe the woman started having bad dreams.

            Barry took them into his office in the back where they checked whatever delivery records Barry kept.  I guess they found out that me and Luis made a delivery there on the day in question.  They talked to Luis first and they must have figured they would get his story before I had a chance to nail down the details with him.  But if I had wanted to do that, there had already been plenty of time.  Maybe they waited so long figuring that if anybody made up any stories, they’d forget them.  Maybe the woman just decided to get even because of something else altogether.  I never found out nothin’ about that.

            Barry let them use his office to talk to me.  Two detectives spoke to me and two uniformed officers stood at the door.  I had never seen none of them before and I was glad of that.  I was glad they weren’t from the precinct the ones who had come to the bar were from.  They might have been more inclined to do whatever it took to bring me down.

            One of these guys was even Irish and I could see right away that when he saw me, he wasn’t taking it as serious as he might have.  That might have been because he knew it was a long shot.  Even if I was guilty as sin and everybody knew it, a case like this usually didn’t pay off from their point of view.  It was like a family argument.  They knew that half the time the woman was lying and half the time the man was lying and the one who was telling the truth was usually covering something up, too.  Either way the cops’ chances of getting anywhere weren’t so good and nine times out of ten, after everybody has a chance to let off a little steam, they’ll kiss and make up before they’ll put each other in jail.  It was like free marriage counseling.

            It wasn’t like that in my family but I saw it all over the place.  Johnny’s brother got into arguments so many times with his woman the cops probably learned to recognize her voice over the phone.  They’d go over there just so she could curse Johnny’s brother out in front of somebody and by the time she was finished, they were apologizing to the cops and telling them it wasn’t going to happen again and saying that what really happened was she knocked her face against the refrigerator door.  I mean, there was evidence all over the place and the cops never did nothin’.

            In this case there wasn’t no evidence at all.  The Irish cop knew it.  I could tell by the look on his face and the tone of his voice.  The other detective was Italian and didn’t seem to care one way or another about the case.  I guess he’d seen too many complaints about rape that just turned out to be somebody getting back at their boyfriend.  Or maybe what he heard just sounded like the way he treated his own women.  I’ve seen that plenty of times, too, and not just up in the Bronx or among the Italians.  There’s plenty right here on the upper east side where everyone is supposed to be civilized.

            “You George O’Reilly?” the Irish cop said.  He did all the talking.

            “Yeah.”

            “We got a complaint against you from a woman up in Kingsbridge.  Do you have any idea who this might be?”

            “No, detective, this is the first I heard of it.”

            “We’ve already checked the delivery schedule and so we know you were up there with a fellow named Luis Arguello.  You delivered a bedroom to the individual who is making the complaint.”

            They showed me the schedule and then I told them I remembered it but not very well.  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said.  “What’s the complaint?”

            “The woman says you forcibly had sexual intercourse with her.”

            “What!”  I looked him in the eye.

            “Can you just tell us everything you remember about that particular delivery, Mr. O’Reilly.”

            “Am I under arrest, detective?” I asked.

            “No, sir, you are not under arrest.  You are not even a suspect because we’re just trying to determine if any misconduct has taken place or not.  All we’re trying to do is gather the facts of the case.  That’s all.”

            I could sense from the tone of his voice that he was on my side and so I knew the best thing I could do was cooperate.  I could have raised a fuss and told them to tell me my rights and called somebody who I would have said was my lawyer but I could see that the law was on my side because the cop was on my side.  This was one of my first lessons in working with the law.

            I learned later that there are a lot of ways to break the law without breaking it.  In fact, the law is set up for people who know how to break it.  It’s set up by people who know how to break it.  It’s only the honest, hard working people who try to obey it.  The people who set it up never imagine that it’s something that would apply to them.  Figuring this out was as important as realizing that success and hard work don’t mix or learning to lie to somebody’s face.  I didn’t know it at the time but I was taking a big step toward success that day and it wasn’t something they taught you at City College.

            “Well, we made a delivery up to this place,” I said, “and it was just like any other delivery.”

            “What time of day did you make this delivery?”

            “I think it must have been about six o’clock.”

            “In the evening?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What did you deliver?”

            “A bedroom.”

            “How long did that take?”

            “An hour.”

            “Did the individual you were delivering to ask you to do anything for her?”

            “She had us move the furniture around a couple of times.”

            “You mean rearrange it?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What happened then?”

            I wasn’t going to tell them any more than necessary but I wanted to look like I was cooperating and I knew that they had already talked to Luis.  I figured he had told them he left first because as far as he knew, nothing happened.  He didn’t know nothing about it and would have told the truth.  If the cops believed him, they were probably going to believe me.  It would of been hard for them to believe that I did it and then didn’t tell nobody about it.  Experience would have taught them that human nature wasn’t like that but then I wasn’t like your everyday rapist.  I was different.

            A lot of guys would have bragged.  A lot of guys would have bragged whether it happened or not.  In fact, they would have bragged loudest if nothing happened, but most guys would have let their partners in on something like this.  They couldn’t have kept their mouths shut.

            I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it.  It’s just stupid to go around talking about something like this when it could come back to get you one day.  I hadn’t said nothing to nobody about it and so I knew that Luis had told the truth.  I also knew that the only way they could have found out about it was from the woman herself, unless there was somebody hiding in the closet that I never saw or heard and that was unlikely.  If somebody had been watching, they wouldn’t have let me get away with it.  Either they would have stepped in right there or they would have been a witness and would have went to the cops right away.  Since I kept my mouth shut, I knew there wasn’t nobody else involved but her and me.

            “She invited me to stay for some lemonade.”

            I thought I’d leave Luis out of it altogether and make it look exactly like it was as much as possible.  I hadn’t really done nothing wrong.  It was me she had been looking at the whole time and the only reason she invited us to stay was so I would.

            This was the truth but the cops must have been surprised by my story.  I mean, if I was lying when I said I didn’t do it, why wouldn’t I lie about staying for the lemonade?  It would have been just as easy to say I didn’t drink no lemonade or touch her as to say I drank lemonade but then I didn’t touch her.  It would have been easier and more believable but it was another snap decision and it came out good for me.  I was always lucky like that.

            “She invited you?”

            “That’s right.”

            “She didn’t invite Arguello?”

            “No.”

            “What did you do, Mr. O’Reilly?”  There was a smirk on his face when he said this and on the one hand I knew that it meant he understood.  But I also knew that he would only understand as long as I didn’t give them nothing to go on.  If I gave them something to go on, he would have been forced to do his job, which was to take me in and get me off the street.  I wasn’t no threat to nobody but that was how he would have been forced to view it.

            “I stayed for some lemonade.”  I said this as humorlessly as possible and it’s easy to be humorless with the cops.  It sounds kind of funny now when I play that back and listen to it and I know that if Marvin could hear it, he’d be laughing out loud but there wasn’t nothin’ funny about it.  A lot of guys laugh at this stuff and that’s why a lot of them are dead or at Rikers.  They thought this kind of stuff was funny.

            “How long did you stay?”

            “Five minutes.”

            “Where were you during this five minutes?”

            “In the kitchen.”

            “You were in the kitchen alone with the woman?”

            “Yeah.”

            “For five minutes drinking lemonade?”

            “That’s right.”

            “Then what happened?”

            “I finished the lemonade and left.”

            “What time was this?”

            “About a quarter after seven.”

            “Did you say anything to her before you left?”

            “No.”

            “You just drank the lemonade and left?”

            “That’s right.”  I was looking him in the eye the whole time.

            “How did you leave, Mr. O’Reilly?”

            “I went down the elevator.”

            “Did you see anyone at that time, when you were leaving?”

            “No.”

            “No one in the lobby on your way out?”

            “No.”  He was just giving me an opportunity to trip myself up.  Anything I could have said here would have got me in trouble.  When he saw the way I was answering, he knew I knew what he was doing.

            “Then what did you do once you were outside the building?”

            “I walked over to Jerome Avenue to get on the train.”  I knew the Kingsbridge stop well enough so that they couldn’t have tripped me up on nothin’ about that.  They didn’t even try.  I had been up and down the Woodlawn line so many times I could have told them any number of believable things.  Like the time I was sitting on the 4 train when a guy sits down beside me with a big snake around his waist, a boa constrictor and that was right there at Kingsbridge or Mosholu.  They knew that was a dead end and didn’t pursue it.

            “You didn’t go back there?”

            “No.”

            “Have you ever been back to that apartment?”

            “No.”

            Now he looked at me with a straight face.  “Just one more thing, Mr. O’Reilly.  Did you ever touch that woman?”

            I never blinked.  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

            He closed his notebook.  “All right.  That’s all for now.  If you’re telling the truth, Mr. O’Reilly, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

            They left as business-like as they came.  The truth is that the cops are just a branch of the business community.  Most businesses have security guards around and the business community has the police around making sure nobody tries to upset things.  Most people don’t ask who they serve and protect because they think they know but it’s just another case of things being the opposite of how they seem and it ain’t no coincidence.

            Once you get into the business community, you realize that the laws are made for you and the police are there to enforce those laws so that you can go on conducting business as usual, whether that’s dumping an automobile stock before a big recall, investing in foreign companies with government guarantees, which is a scam almost on a scale with the insurance business, or dealing cocaine in certain areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.  It’s all business as usual.

            You can divide all laws into two groups - those that deal with money and those that don’t.  Most people think that the important laws are the ones that don’t have nothing to do with money.  These are laws about murder, rape, burglary, larceny, grand theft, personal injury, libel, slander, abortions, praying in public schools, smoking in restaurants and so on.  These laws are set up to keep honest, hard working people behaving in a more or less civilized way.

            Businessmen and politicians know that the only laws that matter are the money laws.  A businessman is someone who has figured out that it’s the money laws that matter.  All the other laws about doing right and wrong don’t have nothing to do with business.

            Money laws are set up so that the people in the business community can do whatever they want.  They say that business has to come first because without business nobody would have no job and there is some truth to that except in places like the Bronx where thirty or forty percent of the people don’t have no job anyway and most of them would be honest and hard working if they could be.  What they don’t tell you is that the whole thing is just another insurance scam.

            All businesses operate the same.  They figure how much it’s going to cost to make their product or provide their service.  Then they calculate a nice profit - four or five hundred percent and sometimes more - and sell at a price that will give them that profit.  Profits never drop for the owners of the companies.  If revenue dips, they start cutting corners.  They lay off people or they cut salaries or take away benefits but profits never drop and the reason they can get away with this is because money laws are set up so that they can do whatever they have to do to keep the profits up.  Even if they have to move to Brazil and put a hundred people out on the street, that’s what they’ll do and that’s what the law will help them do.

            What is stealing to an honest, hard working man is good business to a businessman or politician because the two sets of laws don’t have nothing to do with each other.  That’s why a politician can fly to Hawaii any time he wants to and nobody calls him a crook.  Businessmen do the same thing except that instead of getting the money from your taxes, they get it by charging you even more for what they’re selling you.

            One of the questions they won’t let you ask is: just exactly where do these profits come from?  This isn’t something that’s talked about at City College either and that’s because they know where it comes from.  If it takes ten dollars to produce something that is sold for twenty dollars, where does that extra ten dollars come from?  Who can afford to pay twice what something is worth?  How do you get your hands on enough money to be able to pay twice what something is worth?  When we were sitting around with nothing to do, asking these questions, we thought there were answers.  We thought there was a good reason why most things cost more money than we had.  Most people still think so and most people can’t afford much.

            I learned all of this from watching Barry and it was the reason I had decided to go back to City College and take some more math and economics and business classes.  I could already see how it was done but I thought a little instruction in the details of the operation wouldn’t hurt.  Barry was a more hands-on owner than the old Jew who owned the Irish bar and I admired him for that.  I figured it was best to keep a close eye on your business and on the people you had working for you.  That’s as important as keeping your mouth shut.

            But Barry was waiting for me the next morning and the way he slammed the door, I could see he wasn’t too happy.

            “You son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

            “What?”

            “I told you not to fool around with the customers, didn’t I?”

            “Yeah.  So?”

            “So you’re through, O’Reilly.  I don’t know if the cops are going to get you or not but you’re through here.  If I can help them, I will because it’ll get you out of my hair once and for all.”

            He was screaming without making too much noise because Luis was drinking coffee out front but I stayed calm.  “Barry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I didn’t do nothing.”

            “You mean the cops came here for nothing.”

            “I don’t know why they came here but I didn’t do nothing.  I thought you knew me better than that.”  Of course, he didn’t know nothing about me or anybody else that worked for him, even if he liked to pretend he did.  I figured it might make him feel better if I reminded him of something he liked to think about himself.

            “You didn’t rape that woman?”

            “No!  Are you crazy?  Why would I do something like that, Barry?  Why would I go and risk my job and everything else?  That would be stupid.”

            “I know Luis left you there and I know the cops wouldn’t come here unless they had some good reason.  The last thing I need is for cops to be coming around here and I told you that O’Reilly.  I told you that a hundred times.”

            I could see that he was serious.  He was firing me.  He didn’t care if I was guilty or not.  I might have been able to convince him I wasn’t but he just didn’t want to be involved with the cops any more than he had to and I understood that.

            But I saw that he was somebody who didn’t think and that explained something that I had been wondering about ever since I started working there.  That explained why he still had only one store on Third Avenue in the Bronx.  The first time I saw the kind of cash that was flowing through that place, I wondered what was going on.  All he had to do to double it was open up another store and there were plenty of places to do it but Barry didn’t think.

            For example, if he really thought I was a rapist, then he wouldn’t have been standing there screaming at me that way.  If I was a rapist, I would have been capable of taking the gun out of the drawer where I knew he kept it and shutting him up but Barry didn’t think of that.

            He was scared and that’s a mistake a lot of guys make.  That’s why Barry was destined to fail as a businessman.  He never thought about how things really work because he was scared.  He was too scared to open up another store.  He just wanted things to go on the way they always had.  He didn’t want to do nothing to upset the basket but he didn’t know another basic rule of business.  If you’re not getting bigger, you’re getting smaller.  Eventually you’ll disappear.

            “You think I like the cops coming around?” I said.

            “I guess you do but I’m not going to let you ruin my business.  You’re through here as soon as I can find another delivery man.”

            “You mean you’re firing me and you want me to keep on working until you find somebody else to take my job?”

            “I’m giving you fair notice.”

            He was stupider than I thought.  If you’re going to fire somebody, you better fire them and get it over with.  You don’t want somebody that unhappy involved with your business and you didn’t have to take no business class to figure that out.

            “Let me ask you something,” I said.  “How did a stupid son-of-a-bitch like you get his hands on a business like this in the first place?”

            That’s when he lost control and came at me with his bare hands.  I must have touched a nerve.  It was no different from when Marvin beat that paddle ball king or from looking at a jealous guy’s girl on the subway.  If you say the right thing, you can switch them onto automatic.

            I knew that his old man had started the business forty years before and had built it up.  I also knew that he had turned it over to Barry about the time that part of the Bronx was being turned over to the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and that Barry didn’t like it.  He was happy to make a living there but he didn’t like it.  He was just too dumb to figure out what to do.

            All it takes is a word and sometimes it don’t even take that.  You can make somebody lose control by saying the right thing easier than by punching him in the mouth.  In a lot of cases a look or a gesture will do more damage than a violent act.  Barry knew he was stupid and that was why he didn’t like hearing it from somebody like me.

            He was about my height and thirty pounds heavier but I pushed him back with no trouble.  He was twice my age and didn’t spend all day carrying furniture up and down stairs.

            “I’ll keep working for you, Barry,” I said, “but you’re going to have to pay me a hell of a lot more than you’re paying me right now.  Those deliveries got to be made and Luis can’t do it all by himself.”

            I was just joking around when I said this.  I had already decided to leave as soon as I got done telling Barry everything I had to tell him.  I couldn’t believe that he would think somebody would keep working for him after he fired them.

            I said the first figure that came to my head.  “How about a hundred dollars a day, Barry.  Those sofa-beds are heavy sons-of-bitches.  You can’t expect somebody to carry them around for nothing, especially after they been fired.”

            He got up and came at me again.  I threw him down onto the desk this time and put my hand on his throat.  I’d say that he didn’t expect this because it’s true but it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had expected it.  He was out of control.

            I didn’t mind losing the job but I was thinking about the money.  I had got used to being paid every week and I didn’t like the idea of not having any money, even if it was just for a while.  By this time I was paying half the rent at home and I didn’t want to give my old man any excuse to get on my case again.  He was real quiet as long as the money was coming in.  I was thinking of getting my own place anyway and I needed a steady income for that.

            “Well, Barry,” I said, “do you still want me to keep on working for you?”

            This was when I noticed the letter opener on the desk beside his ear.  I picked it up and touched the point right on the tip of his nose and that’s when I saw the fear come into his eyes.  Before there hadn’t been nothing in his eyes and this is usually how it is when a guys goes out of control.  There’s nothing there.  They’re like pit bulls when they got something between their jaws.  Now I could see he was scared and I liked it.

            He stopped struggling and just looked up at me with this terrified look on his face.  Maybe he realized then that if I was a rapist, I might be a murderer, too, and if I was, he shouldn’t have come on me the way he did but I don’t think he thought enough for that.  He just didn’t like the idea of having a letter opener pressed into his nose.  That’s all.

            “You want me to keep taking them bedroom sets up to those pretty little housewives who don’t have nothing to do all day long but wait for delivery boys?” I said just to keep that look in his eyes a little longer.  I wasn’t no rapist or murderer but he didn’t know that.  He didn’t know that for sure and he must have been having some doubts about it at that moment.  “Is that what you want?”

            I had said pretty much everything I had to say except one good, last good bye.  Barry was trying to say something but I couldn’t understand it so I let go of his throat and stood up with the letter opener in my hand.

            “George, wait,” he said.  “Don’t get so crazy.  Of course, I want you to keep working for me.”  He got up from the desk and backed away from me.

            “Too late, Barry,” I said.  “I quit.”

            “Wait, George, listen to me.  I didn’t mean most of what I said there.  I was just pissed off because the cops were snooping around.  That’s all.  I know you didn’t do nothing.”

            I had already decided that I didn’t need the job anymore but I was willing to reconsider because I needed the money.  So I listened to what he had to say.

            “You’re right, George,” he said.  “You should be making more money.  I can’t pay my delivery men any more than I’m already paying them but that’s not the problem.  You know as well as I do that I can find somebody who wants to make four-fifty an hour real easy.  That’s not what I’m talking about.”

            It don’t sound like nothing now but it was money to me at the time.  I was taking home a hundred twenty a week and I was worried about losing it.  If I had realized then how fast and easy it was going to be, I wouldn’t have worried about a thing.

            “What are you talking about, Barry?”

            “I want you to manage the store.”

            I looked into his eyes to try to see what was behind this but I couldn’t make anything out.  There wasn’t no store manager at the time.  That’s why Barry was there every day and maybe he was thinking of spending less time there himself.  That made sense but I couldn’t see at first why he would pick me to manage for him.  It took me a minute to figure out why he would do it just then.

            “Manage the store?” I said to give myself some time to consider the situation.  “Weren’t you firing me a minute ago?”

            “I told you.  I didn’t mean that.  Let’s forget about that.  It’s all over.  It’s all in the past now.  I know you didn’t do none of that.  If I thought you did, would I be promoting you now?”

            That was the question I was trying to consider.  The obvious answer was no, but I’ve noticed that in matters like this, the opposite of the obvious is usually the case.  It’s like thinking that we have laws for the good of the people.

            “I need somebody I can trust to manage this place for me, George.  I’ve spent every day of my life for the last twenty-five years in this store and I want to start spending some time with my family.  I don’t want to make the same mistake with Evelyn that I made with Holly.  I need somebody I can trust.”

            Holly was his second wife and the mother of two of his kids.  I guess he was trying to imply that if he had spent more time with them, they would never have been divorced.  From what Luis had told me, though, Holly would have been happy to never see him at all and Evelyn felt the same way.  What he was really talking about was spending more time with Rosie, his girlfriend up on 163rd Street.  He didn’t like to see the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood but Rosie was another story.

            What I was thinking about, though, was why he thought he could trust me all of a sudden.  I mean, why would you start telling somebody who had just threatened your life with a pointed instrument that you can trust them and you want them to manage your business?  That’s when I remembered the old Jew and things started to fall into place.

            I thought the old Jew had rewarded me for doing something good for the business.  Actually, there was no difference between what he had done and what Barry was doing right now.  They were both scared of me and fear is the one thing they respect.

            Actually, fear is respect to people who don’t think.  Respect is fear.  I realized right there that by putting that look of terror in Barry’s eyes, what I really did was teach him to respect me.  Maybe he decided there on the desk that I was a murderer and a rapist after all and that that was just the kind of person he needed to run his store.

            If that’s what he thought, he was right.  If you’re going to be successful in business, you better be prepared to rape and murder because that is what it takes and that is what they do every day.  It was like having sex.  If you're going to do it, you better be prepared to abandon the baby that might come out of it.  That’s just the way things are.

            “How much?” I said.

            “Sixty dollars a day.  That’s a lot of money, George, but you’ll have to work for it.”

            “A hundred.”  I thought sixty a day was good money.  It was good money but since a minute before I had resigned myself to unemployment for the immediate future, I had nothing to lose.

            “Now, George, let’s be reasonable.  I’ve got expenses.  It takes money to run a business.”

            I had already been thinking about that.  There were four full time delivery men, two trucks and a van that Barry used to go up to see Rosie because he didn’t want to drive his Mercedes up there.  There was the store rent, five full time salesmen and three part time, Gloria, who took care of the cash register and the credit card sales.

            Then there were two full time security guards, a part time kid to run messages and get coffee, insurance on the inventory and whatever capital he had invested in inventory.  The advertising expense was small - mostly printing up some fliers and getting a school kid or a drunk to hand them out on the street.  Once in a while he’d run something bigger in the Daily News.

            I thought I had it all figured out already but I hadn’t discussed this with nobody.  I was just trying to learn the operation on my own.  I had even made some friends with some of the furniture suppliers because I thought there might be a better job for me in there somewhere.  It never hurts to act friendly with businessmen.  That’s what they expect even if they know it don’t mean nothing.

            “I’ll give you seventy-five,” he said.

            “Eighty.”

            “That’s why I want you here, George,” he said.  “You drive a hard bargain.  All right, eighty dollars a day but you got to be here seven days a week.  I’m still going to be here every day but if things go smooth, I’ll be able to come in a little late in the morning once in a while.  See what I mean?”

            What he meant was that he would have more time to spend with Rosie and I figured that sooner or later this was going to get him into some kind of hot water, especially if he would go so far as to hire a store manager at eighty dollars a day just for her sake.  That was an eighty dollar a day expense he never had before and it told me something right there - about the business and about Rosie and about Barry.

            “Yeah,” I said.  “I see what you mean,” and I put down the letter opener and shook his hand.

            The first thing I did was go over the books.  The second thing I did was promote Gloria to book keeper.  She still did everything she was doing before but now she could help me with the book keeping.  I gave her a twenty cent an hour raise because I knew she already liked me and this way she would like me more.  She’d like me enough to do pretty much anything I asked her to do and that was exactly where I wanted her.

            I didn’t tell Barry about the raise.  I didn’t tell him about the promotion either and after a few weeks, when everything was running smooth, I didn’t have to tell him much of anything except that there was plenty of petty cash in the safe and his monthly parking was paid up.  As long as I showed him all the sales receipts and showed him that all the bills were paid, he was happy.

            I was happy because now I was paying the whole rent myself and giving my mother some money on the side.  My old man was happy because he had more money to keep to himself and my sister was happy because the rest of us were and she had a guy who said he wanted to marry her and move to Jersey City.  I started looking seriously for a place of my own.

            Everything was running smooth.  In fact, sales were up.  I hired Marvin part time to do some of the deliveries I used to do and he and Luis got along fine.  They’d even stop off to play dominoes together and I can imagine some of the stories Marvin would have told Luis’s wife.  By “part time” I mean that he worked full time most of the time but if he needed to take a few days or a couple of weeks, we worked something out and so it ended up being part time.  I also gave twenty cent raises to both security guards.  I didn’t know how long it would keep them happy but I knew it would keep them happy for a while.  They might even think I was doing better by them than Barry ever had and that was okay with me.

            I told Barry about this one and explained that there wasn't anything more important in that area than security.  That was true and he went along with it.  He had had plenty of problems with security guards giving their notice by hauling out furniture over night.  It wasn’t much different from severance pay.

            I spent every day at the store and learned every detail of the business in six months.  Barry spent more and more time with Rosie.  I started staying late with Gloria on Saturday nights.  She wasn’t as good looking as Iris but I liked her better.  I liked her enough that I probably would have spent time with her anyway.  What she did for me in the office after hours was just a bonus to being friends with her.

            It was a good time and I’d wish I could go back to it now but what would be the point?  It would still just lead me to where I am now.  Even if I was happy then, it still wouldn’t mean nothing.  It would just mean that I was still a few years away from here.