What Makes Sammy Run? (33 page)

Papa Glick finally gave up any hope of resuming his trade again. He was too old. America was a land for young men. Finally he got himself a pushcart like all the others. He sold shirts, neckties and socks, nothing over twenty-five cents. But there were too many pushcarts and not enough customers. So Sammy started peddling papers. He was three feet, four inches high. He wanted to play. He couldn’t see why Israel shouldn’t do it instead. But soon Israel was going to be
bar mitzvah.
After school let out at three o’clock he studied in the
cheder
until suppertime. Papa was so proud of him. The
melamed
had told him Israel had the makings of a real Talmudic scholar. And it was well known that the
melamed
was a man who never had a good word to say for anyone but God. “God has blessed my son with the heart and brains of a rabbi,” Papa boasted
.

Sammy lugged his papers up and down Fourteenth Street yelling about a war in Europe. He used to come home with a hoarse throat
and thirty or forty cents in pennies. He would count the money and say, “God dammit, I’m yellin’ my brains out for nuttin.”

Papa Glick would look up from his prayer book. “Please, in this house we do not bring such language.”

“Look who’s talkin’,” Sammy said. “Know what Foxy Four Eyes toi’ me—he says I wouldn’ hafta peddle papers if you wasn’t such a dope and quit your job. He says his ol’ man tol’ him.”

“Silence,” said Papa Glick
.

“He says that strike screwed us up good,” said Sammy
.

Papa Glick’s hand clapped against Sammy’s cheek. It left a red imprint on his white skin but he made no sound. By the time he was six he had learned how to be sullen
.

“Papa, please,” Mrs. Glickstein pleaded. “He’s so small, how should he know what he’s saying—he hears it on the street.”

“That’s so he should forget what he hears,” said Papa
.

Several weeks later Sammy came in with a dollar seventy-eight. Papa, Momma and Israel danced around him
.

“Sammy, you sold out all the papers?” said Papa in amazement
.

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “There’s a guy on the opposite corner doin’ pretty good ’cause he’s yellin’ ‘U.S. may enter war.’ So I asks a customer if there’s anything in the paper about that. So when he says no, I figure I can pull a fast one too. So I starts hollerin ’ ‘U.S. enters war,’ and jeez you shoulda seen the rush!”

“But that was a lie,” Papa Glick said. “To sell papers like that is no better than stealing.”

“All the guys make up headlines,” Sammy said. “Why don’t you wise up?”

Sammy worked a year before he entered school
.

That first day at P.S. 15, Sheik kept staring at him. He wanted to listen to what Miss Carr was saying, but he couldn’t concentrate very well because the Sheik’s small black eyes kept boring into him. Everybody knew the Sheik. His old lady was Italian and his old man was Irish and the neighbors would always hear them fighting at night over who was the better Catholic. The Sheik was older than anybody else in the class because he had been left back a couple of times. The kids didn’t call him the Sheik because he was handsome
,
but because it was whispered around that he already knew what to do with little girls. There was even a story that he had knocked one up already, but this was probably circulated by Sheik himself who was a notorious boaster and had a habit of appropriating all his big brother’s achievements
.

The Sheik sat there all through the hour actively hating Sammy. Sammy had taken his seat, the seat he had had for the past two years. He had told Sammy, but Sammy had refused to budge
.

“O.K., yuh dirty kike,” Sheik whispered harshly through his teeth. “See yuh afta class.”

It was lunch hour. Some of the kids were getting up a game of ball. Sammy wanted to play. After school there was
cheder.
And then papers to sell. Sammy was going to be a ballplayer when he grew up. He had a good eye and he was fast. But now he had to fight Sheik. Sheik was two years older, half a head taller. Sammy appraised him. He would probably get the bejesus kicked out of him. But he wasn’t scared. Just sorry he couldn’t get into that ball game. He followed Sheik into a vacant lot across the street, all boarded up and full of old tin cans and whatever anybody had ever felt like throwing there
.

As soon as they got inside the Sheik let one go. It cracked against Sammy’s nose, and blood spurted. Sammy’s nose felt bigger than his whole face and he couldn’t see, but he moved in swinging. Sheik caught him on the nose again. Sammy went down with Sheik on top of him, kicking and swinging, spitting into the bloody face under him, his whole body quivering in a frenzy of hate, shrieking until it became a chant, “You killed Christ. You killed Christ
”

When Sammy finally stopped fighting back, Sheik left him there and went to eat his lunch. Sammy tried to stay there until he stopped bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop, so he had to walk back to the schoolyard that way. Miss Can ran over and dragged him into the ladies’ room. While she washed off the blood he stood there terribly white and terribly silent. No tears. Just his mouth set hard and his eyes ugly
.

“I think your nose is broken,” she said
.

“It don’t hurt much,” said Sammy
.

“You’d better come into the office and lie down.”

“Jeez, look where I am! The guys better not see me in the girls’ can.”

She didn’t know how to treat him. She was new here and she had never seen kids like this before. If he would only cry she could comfort him like an injured child. But he would not let her
.

“Hey, what the hell’s the matter with that guy sayin I killed Christ? The dirty bastard.”

“You must not talk like that,” said Miss Carr. “Christ died so that everyone should forgive each other and live in brotherly love.”

“Yeah?” said Sammy. “How about Sheik? Don’t he believe in Christ?”

“Well, yes,” said Miss Carr, “but…
”

“I gotta sit down,” said Sammy, “my head’s spinnin.”

Miss Carr tried to put her arms around him but he drew away. He was like a little injured animal snarling at the hand that is trying to help it
.

“You won’t have to worry from now on,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with Sheik. And I think I’ll ask some of the bigger boys to look after you.”

His voice made her sympathy sound patronizing. “Who ast ya to? I’m no sissy. I c’n take care-a myself.”

Sheik felt called upon to avenge Christ every day. Sammy accepted his beatings as part of the school routine. He never tried to avoid them, to sneak off after school. He just absorbed it with the terrible calm of a sparring partner. He would come home every night with his eyes swollen or his lip cut and his mother would hold him in her arms and cry, Sammele, Sammele, but he never cried with her, only held himself stiff in her arms, a stranger to her
.

After a while, there was no satisfaction left in it for Sheik any more. It had become manual labor, slaughterhouse work. Sheik began to look around for more responsive victims. It even left Sheik with a strange kind of fear for Sammy. Somewhere along the line it had become the victim’s triumph. Sammy would talk back to Sheik any time he liked. There was nothing Sheik could do but beat him up again. All the suffering that Sammy had swallowed instead
of crying out had formed a hard cold ball of novocaine in the pit of his stomach that deadened all his nerves
.

Life moved faster for Sammy. He was learning. The Glicksteins’ poverty possessed him, but in a different way from Israel. He was always on the lookout to make a dollar. The way the little Christians put on Jewish hats and mingled with the Jewish boys to get free hand-outs in the synagogue on the holy days gave him an idea. On Saturday he went down to the Missions on the Bowery and let the Christ-spouters convert him. At two bits a conversion. He came home rich with seventy-five cents jingling in his pockets. His father, struggling to maintain his last shred of authority, the patriarchy of his own home, demanded to know why he was not at
cheder.
Sammy hated
cheder.
Three hours a day in a stinking back room with a sour-faced old Reb who taught you a lot of crap about the Mosaic laws. You don’t go to jail if you break the laws of Moses. Only if you got no money and get caught stealing, or don’t pay your rent
.

“I hadda chance to make a dollar,” Sammy said
.

“Sammy!” his father bellowed. “Touching money on the Sabbath! God should strike you dead!”

The old man snatched the money and flung it down the stairs
.

Sammy glared at his father the way he had at Sheik, the way he was beginning to glare at the world
.

“You big dope!” Sammy screamed at him, his voice shrill with rage. “You lazy son-of-a-bitch.”

The old man did not respond. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving. He looked as if he had had a stroke. He was praying
.

Sammy went down and searched for the money until he found it
.

His mother came down and sat on the stairs above him. She could never scold Sammy. She was sorry for Papa but she was sorry for Sammy too. She understood. Here in America life moves too fast for the Jews. There is not time enough to pray and survive. The old laws like not touching money or riding on the Sabbath—it was hard to make them work. Israel might try to live by them but never Sammy. Sammy frightened her. In the old country there may have
been Jews who were thieves or tightwads and rich Jews who would not talk to poor ones, but she had never seen one like Sammy. Sammy was not a real Jew any more. He was no different from the little wops and micks who cursed and fought and cheated. Sometimes she could not believe he grew out of her belly. He grew out of the belly of Rivington Street
.

When Papa Glick found out how Sammy made his seventy-five cents, he went to
shul
four times a day instead of twice. He cried for God to save Sammy
.

Sammy remained a virgin until he was eleven. But no storks ever nested in his childish fancy. When he was still in his cradle he could hear the creaking of bedsprings and his parents’ loud breathing in the same room. Cramped quarters forced sex into the open. When Sammy ran to find a place to hide from the Jew-hunting gangs with rock-filled stockings who roamed the streets on Hallowe’en, he bumped into a couple locked together in the shadow of the tunnel-like corridor behind the stairs. On sticky summer nights he used to trip over their legs as he raced across the roofs. The first day in the street he learned about the painted women who called out intimate names to men they didn’t know. When he was ten he used to turn out the light to watch the lady across the court get undressed. She was fat, and when she let her great flabby breasts ooze out of her brassiere they flopped down like hams as she bent over. Curiosity and then desire began to creep into Sammy’s wiry, undeveloped loins
.

He even went up to one of the women around the corner and offered her the quarter he had been given to buy groceries, but she just looked down at him, put her hands on her hips, and laughed
.

“Send your old man around, sonny, you’d fall in.”

A couple of days later Sammy was hanging around Foxy’s shop when Shirley Stebbins came in. Shirley was several years older than any of them, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She was tall and thin and only needed a little more flesh to have a voluptuous figure. People said her family was having a tough time because she was going to high school when she should be working. She wasn’t hard the way the other girls were hard, boisterous and suggestive. Everybody on
the block called her Sourpuss because her mouth was always set in a sullen expression of contempt. Foxy Four Eyes had advanced the theory that she was frigid. He said it happened when her father climbed into her bed one night when his wife was in the hospital
.

“Foxy, I’m in a jam,” she said. “I need ten dollars bad.”

“Bad, huh?” he said, managing to give it an off-color inflection as he put his hand on her. “A guy can do an awful lot with ten dollars.”

He winked at the kids as if he had said something witty. A guy called Eddie who was fifteen and knew his way around got it first
.

“I’ll get in for a buck,” he said
.

The expression on his face left no doubt about the pun. It had started as a gag, but Foxy egged them on until the nine of them had subscribed six dollars. Foxy’s cheeks burned with excitement and his cockeyes looked out at his proteges proudly
.

“All right, sister, I’ll be a sport, ” he said. “I’ll throw in the other four—just to see ya oblige the boys.”

She looked at all of them. They were jumping around her like frantic little gnomes. Sammy hardly reached her shoulder
.

“All right,” she said in a tired voice. “Let’s see the money, you cheap bastards.”

In the back room, when it came his turn Sammy was scared. He was sprawled across her, fidgeting foolishly. Foxy Four Eyes could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard. “Hey, fellers, lookit Sammy tryin’ to get his first nookey!”

Sammy could feel the blood flushing his head, and her silent contempt, and his panicky impotence
.

While he still clung to her ludicrously, she half-rose on her elbows and said, “Somebody pull this flea off me. I’m not going to make this my life’s work.”

Foxy and Eddie laughingly dragged him off, still struggling for her, like a little puppy pulled from its mother’s teats
.