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.