Long Island Noir (28 page)
When I was nine, we still lived in that same small four-room shack on the Turnpike. One evening May’s new boyfriend, who had been drinking, decided to fix the stove in the kitchen. In a matter of minutes the place we called home went up in flames. None of us was hurt but all we had left was on our backs. Thanks to the local kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Thomason, who put together a collection of clothes and even toys, my family began to heal. The woman infused us with a little hope.
After a few months of living in a neighbor’s basement, we moved into a two-bedroom house that had a beauty parlor in the front. The beauty parlor had gone out of business so Mrs. Ella, the owner, rented the back portion out to my mother, and that’s how we ended up living next door to Jabo’s, where my father had died.
Anyone living outside of Sag Harbor Turnpike did not know what was truly happening at Jabo’s, the gambling and the drinking and the poor souls who were held hostage in the basement because of their inability to do better for themselves, or were just down on their luck like my daddy. What bothered me the most was that Mrs. Ella would take their welfare checks in exchange for boarding and alcohol. Those men were always going to be stuck living each day drinking away their future.
Often I would climb on top of my brother’s bunk bed, crouch on my knees, and softly sing “Summertime,” a song I occasionally heard my mother singing as she washed the morning dishes. The window looked right out on Jabo’s basement next door.
“Little May, is that you, is that you singing?” a raspy voice would call from outside. The voice came from Red, one of the local vagrants who lived in Mrs. Ella’s basement. He was a tall, light-skinned man with black curly hair who called me Little May because I looked so much like my mother.
I would pretend that I could not hear Red calling. Though he seemed nice enough I was afraid of him and the other men who lived in Mrs. Ella’s basement. There was CJ, a skinny, wiry, dark-skinned man with thick matted hair that never looked like he combed it. I can’t ever remember seeing CJ sober. Earnie, on the other hand, was neat and clean; the difference between Earnie and the other men was that he had family who looked after him even though he had lost his way. I didn’t like Earnie because whenever no one was looking he would expose himself. One day May’s boyfriend caught Earnie exposing himself to me in our living room. My mother’s boyfriend slapped Earnie, cursed him out, and told him if he ever saw him around me again he would kill him.
Then there was Red, who got his name because of his complexion. In those days, light-skinned blacks were called
red-bone
. Red stood about 6’4”, and always wore jean overalls and dirty work boots. His caramel skin was oily and prone to acne. Red only drank when he wasn’t working.
At nightfall the loud music and cussing would start over at Jabo’s. The women would all be wearing pencil dresses that looked so tight I wondered how they could breathe. They smelled of loud perfume and had painted-up faces, ready to enjoy the night. The music would be blaring but not loud enough to drown out the loud cackles spewing from the mouths of the women who’d had too much to drink. Once the serious drinking started, the cursing and arguments escalated, almost always turning into a fight. Then someone—usually Red—would pull out a knife and May would call us back into the house, but we would sneak out again and watch. CJ was the first person I ever saw get cut. I smelled blood for the first time, and sweat mixed with moonshine, in the heat of the night, and it made me sick inside. Most of the time these outbursts would end with Mrs. Ella sending somebody down to the basement to sleep it off.
We got to know Red best because he was the only one our mother trusted to stay with us when she went to have a drink next door. He would talk about his childhood in South Carolina, and how scared he was of the Ku Klux Klan.
Later that year CJ had the DT’s so bad he lost touch with reality and one morning Red found him under his favorite tree; he had died there in the dead of winter. What a lonely and fruitless life Red and CJ led and how cheated God must have felt.
The summer I was twelve, I learned how to do my own hair and I learned how to sew. Even though we only saw our mother late in the afternoon, we didn’t miss her, because her being there was like she wasn’t there at all. She came home from work, poured a vodka and orange juice, and sat at the kitchen table, smoking until she got tired, and then she would sleep on the couch, and by the time she woke up we would be in bed. My brothers and I knew how hard our mother’s life was because she would never let us forget.
I spent a lot of time in my usual place, on the top bunk in my brothers’ room, looking out at Jabo’s basement, rocking back and forth, and singing “Summertime.”
“Little May, is that you, is that you singing?” I pretended not to hear Red’s raspy voice. I didn’t want anyone to know I sang. I knew after a while he would stagger away. I hated my life, and I hated myself; the only comfort I had now was that school was out for the summer, and I wouldn’t have the daily stress of the other kids picking on me.
May worked so much, she wasn’t aware of what it was like for a girl child among all these men. I felt bad so I closed my eyes and remembered sitting on the beach with Daddy, smiling as the runoff from the crashing waves pulled the sand from beneath my feet.
* * *
When you hear of eastern Long Island or the Hamptons you are reminded of the super rich, the famous, the fine homes, beautiful beaches, but poverty stared us straight in the face. We had Mrs. Hattie’s shack across the street, shadowed by a huge honeysuckle bush. Mrs. Hattie still used oil lamps for light and a wood-burning stove for heat and cooking. Though by community standards we were all poor, we always had food, clothes, and a roof over our heads, and at the time that had to be enough.
Most of the people living down on Sag Harbor Turnpike, including our mother, brought along with them from the South the heavy baggage of their self-hatred and bitterness. If my brothers and I did something wrong, like playing around in the house or our grades were bad, we got beat severely, especially my younger brother Mark.
Sometimes she would be at the table helping him learn to read, and every time he missed a word she would hit him. The doctor told her to stop beating him but it was already too late. I would occasionally catch Mark looking at our mother with undisguised hatred. My younger brother was full of rage, and I was scared of him. My twin brother Eugene was the oldest but he seemed to suffer even deeper than Mark and me. Eugene was small in body and always teased about being weak, especially by Mark, who was eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier.
Eugene had to prove that he could protect anyone, even if he could not protect himself. Mark and I got the worst of it because unlike Eugene, we wore our anger and frustration like dirty clothes, and because we stopped caring, we did not fear as much. The harder May would hit Mark, the less he would cry, until he did not cry at all anymore. Because Eugene was so frail, he could not allow himself to be in a position where he would get beat, so he worked on being more agreeable to our mother, until she thought he could do no wrong. Eugene did everything he could to make her happy. We always ended up forgiving May for the things she did because she never had a mother herself, making it very hard for her to know how to be a mom. She would tell us stories of how she was beaten as a child, just as her grandmother told her about her own brutal childhood. All this seemed perfectly normal because that’s how it was.
But my brothers and I found ourselves alone and on our own most of the time. We all shared the same desire to stay away from our mother, so we would make up adventures that would lead us into the forest for hours, and in our minds we returned victorious and strong. Nothing could hurt or break us, not even our mother. We were a team; we were our own family.
One day that summer we were playing when Eugene punched me in the back and I started to howl. Mom ran down the hall with the electric cord. We were all about to be beat. Something inside of me broke. I knew that I couldn’t take another beating so in one instant I decided to run away. I ran out the front door and down the street. My mother went next door and told Mrs. Ella that I had run away and could she help bring me back. I did not get far; just as I was about to cross the railroad tracks near Narrow Lane, Mrs. Ella’s long, black Cadillac pulled up behind me. My mother hurried out of the car, grabbed me by the arm, and shoved me into the backseat. They brought me back.
My mother made me go into my brothers’ room and get undressed. She tied my hands and feet to the top of the bed and gagged my mouth. Each strike with the electric cord felt like a hot knife cutting into my back and legs. The gag came off my mouth and I screamed and begged her to stop, but she just hit harder. For the first time I thought she was going to kill me. I probably would have died if Red hadn’t run in from next door and made her stop.
When I got dressed and returned to the room where my brothers were sitting, the expressions in their eyes made me feel that hope was gone. Eugene looked like he would be scared for the rest of his life, and Mark would just continue to hate from the inside out. The cocoa butter took away the physical scars, but Mark grew up so filled with rage that he always drinks and thinks about suicide to contain it.
Our parents came up to Bridgehampton on a watermelon truck seeking a better life, but because of their many overwhelming personal struggles, life was not what they had hoped for on Sag Harbor Turnpike.
B
ob Foote backed his 1982 Monte Carlo into a space near Macy’s at the Smith Haven Mall. He was nibbling chocolates from a Whitman Sampler someone had left at the house on Christmas Eve—a regift: two of the chocolates were missing. From the backseat, his two little dogs, a poodle and a schnauzer, observed his motions, anticipating the opportunity to lick his sticky fingers. He nudged the bumper of the car behind him, pulled a few inches forward, and cut the engine. The dogs sat up, excited. “Not yet,” he told them. He split another chocolate in two and tossed a piece to each. He licked his own fingers this time, and got out of the car.
His desert boots sank into snow four inches deep. It was coming down over an inch an hour. The roads were hazardous, yet that hadn’t stopped the shoppers—the day after Christmas was the biggest sale day of the year. But Bob Foote hadn’t gone out in a blizzard for bargains. He went out to watch people be people—that is, phonies, hypocrites, con men, and petty thieves. They never let him down.
He popped the trunk and removed a box the size of a large suitcase, wrapped with festive holiday paper depicting ice skaters and snowmen alongside green trees covered with brightly colored ornaments. The paper fit on the box like paint, the ends taped down tight as hospital corners without a wrinkle on the entire surface. Bright red ribbon circled the box diagonally at either end, coming to a bow near the top, a silky red dahlia—practically a work of art. He closed the trunk. The dogs peered through the back window, but neither could see him. The poodle was near blind, and the window had fogged over. Both dogs began to whine.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bob Foote said, trying to convince himself that the dogs’ cries didn’t pierce his heart. The dogs
owned
him—he let them do just about whatever they wanted, and he couldn’t bear to deny them anything. Since his retirement six months earlier, his greatest joy was to put on a stack of Jerry Vale records, lie down on the living room floor, and have each dog fall asleep on his chest.
With the gift-wrapped box under his arm, he walked toward the Macy’s entrance, carefully placing his shoes into the steps others had left in the snow. Scores of shoppers bent into the snow and rushed past him as if they were in a race, as if a hundred people had arrived for a smorgasbord set for ninetynine, and they were going to make good and sure Bob Foote was the loser. Wait till they find out, he thought, smiling. Wait till one of them claims the booby prize in this box.
A
Leave It to Beaver
–type family approached, Mister and Missus, Junior, and Sis, their arms filled with bags and boxes.
“Merry Christmas,” Mister said to Bob Foote.
Junior corrected him. “Christmas is over, Dad.”
“So it is,” Mister agreed, winking at Bob Foote.
Sis said, “Happy New Year.”
“Yeah,” Bob Foote muttered. “Sure.”
Other shoppers passed—mothers shouting at kids, fathers shouting at mothers, kids shouting at nothing. The kids slid, packed snow in their hands, and threw it at parked cars and each other; they fell into the snow and made what might have been snow angels if anyone could see through the snowfall. Bob Foote was glad to be beyond it all—the kids, the gifts, Christmas. He hated all the holidays, but Christmas was the worst. The most phony, the most costly, the most disappointing. In his whole life, he couldn’t remember receiving a single gift he truly valued—even from his wife and his sons.
On the sidewalk outside Chess King, a group of teenagers loitered. They were all underdressed—unzipped denim vests, studded leather jackets, sneakers, and no gloves. They smoked cigarettes and shivered, pimples underneath their soft whiskers. Their hair looked like it had been hacked with hedge clippers, then slept on. Why, Bob Foote wondered, would anyone want to raise children today? At least when he’d had his kids, he had no idea that they’d turn into punks. They could, of course, and they did, but that hadn’t seemed a sure thing. Today, you were either a Kennedy, in which case your kids would wind up news anchors or congressmen or the leader of some charity in Africa, or you were a nobody, your kids, punks. These kids weren’t Kennedys.
The unmistakable smell of marijuana drifted his way. Bob Foote recalled a day fifteen, sixteen years earlier. He’d parked his car at Port Jefferson Harbor for a nap when he saw his fourteen-year-old son Cliff sucking a joint in the midst of a crowd like this. From his earlobe a shiny ring hung. Bob Foote shuddered—the kid had become the embodiment of a nightmare. He had slid down behind the steering wheel and driven slowly away. Maybe he shouldn’t have, maybe he could have helped … but it was painful just to look at Cliff’s dopey stoned puss.
