Seventh Avenue (46 page)

“
Couldn’t we
scare
them without the knife?”

The girls were giggling stupidly as they approached, now only a
few yards away. Neal’s eyes began to
tear,
and his knees shook uncontrollably.

“
Why am I doing this?” he asked himself, but before he could answer, his sleeve was tugged, and he and Moony jumped in front of
the girls who stood
stock still,
staring at the masked figures.

“
Gimme the bags!” Moony demanded in a high falsetto.

“
Whatcha doin’?” one of the girls asked.

“
I’ll stick this into your tits,” he said harshly, moving up against
the short dumpy one whose eyes opened wide with shock. The knife
made a loud noise in the quiet darkness as it flicked open, and the
girl pressed her hand against her mouth.

“
You scream, and I’ll kill her. Now gimme the bags.”

The tall girl was just as frightened as her
friend,
but she maintained a show of composure and said:

“
Give
‘im
what he wants, Shirley.”

Shirley handed over her bag and started to cry.

“
My mother gave me a ten-dollar bill for the movies. I gotta bring
change .
. .”

Moony
threw
one bag over to Neal and then started to run into
the bushes.

“
C’mon, go, go.”

Neal ran as fast as he could. The two ran out of the park,
cut down
the long hill and slowed up when they reached Montgomery Street,
two blocks from Neal’s home. They went into the basement of an
apartment house and caught their breath by the boiler room.

“
I
ohways
come here. Nobody bothers
yer
.”

Moony rifled open his bag and found
a lipstick
, two jacks, a packet
of rubber bands, a wallet
that
contained no paper money but innumerable
school
cards,
and thirty-seven cents. He pulled Neal’s bag away and
tore it open, breaking the lock in his excitement and there as the
girl said was nine dollars and change. He crumpled the money greedily in his fist, then he flattened out the bills and began to count.

“
Four seventy
apiece
,” he said, thrusting Neal’s share on him.

“
I don’t
want .
. .”

“
Shit, you don’t.”

“
I’ve got enough.”

“
You take your share.”

“
But why?”

“
Why?
Because we’re Indian Braves and we share and share alike.
You did it with
me,
and whatever
happens,
we gotta stick together.”

Moony
picked up both handbags and thrust them into the boiler.

“
The super
shoves
some coal in and the bags burn
wid
it, and they
can’t prove nuttin’. Now I got my own dough. After we finish at the
clubroom,
we go out and have ourselves some pizza. I know a place
where the waiter lets you drink beer
wid
it, so we’ll get ourselves
stinko.”

The clubroom was the basement of a two-family house on President
Street,
and it belonged to a boy called Rudy Feld whom Neal
vaguely knew from the schoolyard where all the boys played baseball. Feld was fourteen and the captain of his club team, and his
mother had allowed the boys to use the basement for meetings.
Most of the faces were familiar to him, but none of them were Neal’s
friends or were in any of his classes.

Feld was standing at the door like a ticket-taker and when Neal
entered said:

“
Wall, wall,
lookit
who we got here! You ain’t a member.”

“
Aw let
‘im
in, Rudy,” Moony pleaded. “He’s okay.”

“
Yeah, why?”

“
You let me in, an’ I’m not in the club.”

“
I like you, but I don’t know this creep. How do I know he won’t
go home and tell his momma that he gets fucked in my clubroom?”

“
Because I won’t,” Neal said sharply, “I never speak to my
mother.”

“
You know Neal Blackman. His mother and father are divorced.”

“
Oh, yeah? Is your father the guy with three Cadil
l
acs?”

“
No, one,” Neal said.

“
Money dripping from his asshole like dingleberries. Well, maybe
I’ll give you a trial tonight. But ‘cause you’re not a member, the price
is a buck fifty. Take it or leave it. We draw to see what order we fuck
her in.”

Neal paid his money and walked into the large basement room
where eight boys stood talking loudly and drinking Cokes.

“
Hey, Neal, hello,” a boy called Patsy said. “Your momma know
you’re out so late?”

“
She doesn’t give a shit,” Neal said sharply, hoping to silence the
others.

“
Have a Coke,” Patsy said. “Unless you want some wine.”

“
I’ll have wine,” Moony said.

“
You sure? It’s the Sneaky Pete poison for the whores. They’ll
drink piss.”

“
Nuttin’ wrong
wid
it, it’s just strong.”

“
At sixty cents a bottle it must be lighter fluid.”

The radio was turned
on,
and the boys listened to the final scores
of the night baseball games. Neal had a vision of Sports with his ear
glued to the speaker of a radio somewhere, writing furiously and totaling up his
winnings at
the end. It never occurred to him that Sports
might lose more than he won. He wanted to boast to the boys that the
man who was to be his new stepfather was a bookmaker and bet
thousands of dollars each day and that he knew all the important
mobsters and killers in New York. Sports could probably get all their
parents murdered if he decided to. That would give them all something to think about. Yes, his parents were divorced, and he was different from all of them. He couldn’t alter the legal status of his parents, but one day he’d show them what it had meant to be different.
He would
be
different because they had forced him to be different.

A dark-eyed girl with a nest of black hair piled high on her head
walked in. She sniggered silently to herself as she walked up to the
bar where Patsy, who played
bartender
, stood with silent, admiring
eyes. She opened the bottle of wine, seized a glass
that
had some Coke in it and spilled it on the floor. Then she proceeded to fill the glass up with
wine,
and she swigged half of it down in one gulp. Patsy took the bottle, filled the glass
again,
and she winked at him. The other boys muttered quietly to each other.

She polished off another glass of wine, then turned to a small sandy-haired boy, who kept adjusting his glasses as she moved towards him. He stepped back.

“
Wha’s
yer
name, huh?”

“
Irwin,” he said cautiously, conscious of all the eyes in the room on
him
.

“
Well, Irwin, you gonna volunteer. Huh? A nickel a
schtickel.”

Rudy Feld led the room in a hiccupy nervous laughter
that
grew to a hysterical crescendo, then stopped abruptly.

“
So, Irwin, I’m waitin’.”

“
What’s your name?” Irwin asked timidly.

“
Wha’s my name?” she said, playing to the older boys. “You tell him.”

“
Margie, Margie, Margie,” they
chanted
.

“
Hey, Marge, he ain’t first,” Feld interjected when the boys had come to order. “We draw lots.” He started counting heads around the room. “Eight.” He wrote numbers one to eight on small bits of brown paper, then tossed them in a baseball cap, mixed them up, and said with the studied air of a professional organizer. “Lowest number last, highest first.”

“
Fifty cents to watch,” Margie added.

“
Yeah, that’s right. If you
wanta
see anybody in
action,
it’s
an extra half a buck.”

The boys giggled nervously and went towards the hat, sticking out anxious, shaking, hairless hands, dreading the thought of going first.

A tall pimpled boy, destined to be a rabbinical scholar, with a scholarly stoop, and a large wine-colored carbuncle on the tip of his nose declared himself.

“
Me first.”

“
Sloppy seconds,” Patsy said, looking at his number.

Neal had drawn number five and Moony number eight.

“
Know what I do, Neal?” Moony said quietly. “I come two, three times without losing my hard-on and the broad never knows it.”

“
How old is she?”

“
About fourteen. She used to go to Lincoln Park until the principal caught her fucking the gym teacher in the locker room. Everybody heard about that. She got
expelled,
and he’s doing time. They
said he raped her, but how could he? The poor
schlemiel
just got
caught with his pants down. You can’t rape that girl, ‘cause she’d
be undressed before you could. Tough on him.”

Margie stood on top of the bar and Feld put the phonograph on.
The record was “Deep Purple” and Margie made a vague attempt
to strip to the music, but she had no sense of rhythm and she was
completely naked before the record was halfway through.

“
See what I mean? Anxious. Can’t get enough.”

“
You do it to her before?”

“
To her and
ten
like her. You nervous or
somethink
, Neal? Just
watch .
. . it’s simple.”

Margie had large pendulous breasts which
drooped
down to her
stomach, and a roll of fat around the abdomen
that
wobbled when
she moved. She was wide-hipped, and Neal’s blood boiled in his
veins. He had never been so excited by a female before. He longed
for
his turn to come. He had wondered if he were ready, but he knew
now that he was, and he counted silently as one boy after another
jumped onto the couch with her. The longest took five minutes:
Number four was with
her
and having difficulty.

At last, Neal’s turn
came,
and he approached Margie with dread
and desperation. She opened his trousers matter-of-factly without
moving from her position on the sofa, played with him and said softly:

“
Mount me,
little
boy. Like a pony.”

He felt himself
slide
into a
greasy,
wet
abyss,
and the girl said:

“
Pump me, c’mon. I ain’t got all night.”

He slipped in deeper and deeper and spots danced wildly across
his eyes. Margie blew some smoke into his
face,
and he began to
cough. He was blinded and choking. The semen oozed out of him,
and his member went soft with astonishing rapidity.

“
Okay, Junior. Do your buttons up walking. Next,” she called out.

Moony reluctantly acceded to Neal’s demand that they leave before
the colored girl arrived. It was well past midnight as they strolled
down the hill. The night air was heavy, humid and oppressive, and
Neal’s underwear stuck to him.