Teen Angel (5 page)

Sonny ran past them into the bathroom and locked the door. She would not cry. No. Her stomach ached. She bit her lip, trying to hold back the tears that would destroy her eyeliner.
No!
Her father was still screaming.

“What’s the meanest animal in the world?
”

“A tigergator
.”

“A tigergator? Who’s he?
”

“He’s got a tiger’s head on one end and an alligator’s head on the other end
–”

“But how does he take a shit?
”

“THAT’S WHAT MAKES HIM SO MEAN!
”

She patted her hairdo, teasing several hairs into place. Then she snuck out of the bathroom and quietly entered her parents’ bedroom. Her father’s grey wool jacket hung over a chair. She put her hand into the right pocket where he kept his change and came
up with a quarter and two dimes, which she transferred into the pocket of her own jacket.

“Drop dead,” she whispered as she walked down the length of the hallway. “Drop dead.” Her parents were still screaming at each other but not as loudly. Sonny slammed the door behind her. The elevator was on number six so she raced down the four flights, jumping three steps every landing.

161st Street seemed like heaven even if Tommy Ligorry was playing skullies in front of her building. Sonny walked right by him like she was Zsa Zsa Gabor and he was dog’s doo splattered on the ground.
And he died of a broken heart. Tommy could not continue living without her. It was his own fault. Shitface!
She crossed Fort Washington Avenue where all the spies hung out. Even in winter, they stood around tossing cards or pennies, depending on the wind, to see who could land one closest to the wall of the building. They drank beer, blared transistor radios, and danced with each other to keep warm.
Mira! Puta! Cha! Cha! Cha!

“Hey, balloonhead,” one of them called to her. “You wanna pump?”

Sonny touched her hair. “You’re a pinhead, so shaddup!” She yelled back, quickening her pace to the end of the block where Dot lived.

Welcome to beautiful, historic Washington Heights. We have the
American Indian Museum on 155th Street. There’s Fort Tryon Park with the Cloisters. No, Harlem is south
… The brightest thing on these streets of six-story grey buildings was P.R. clothing. They wore chartreuse, turquoise, lavender winter coats with white rabbit collars over shirts with polka dots the size of pancakes and striped pants. Those were the men. The women usually dressed like they were going to the Easter parade with Del Monte fruit cocktail hats and yellow patent leather spike heels. And they had mustaches and the lady who ran the laundromat had whiskers that were two inches long.

But it was Sonny’s neighborhood. She had spent ten years on its streets, two-thirds of her life, playing ringolevio, hiding between parked cars and in alleyways, jumping double dutch with the black girls and when she tripped someone always sang, “I see London, I see France, I see Sonny’s underpants.” Or when she was caught talking to a boy, they chimed, “Sonny and her boyfriend sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, there’s Sonny wheeling a baby carriage!” Most of her days though were spent in front of her building, bouncing a pink Spaulding with her name and S.W.A.K., which stood for Sealed With A Kiss, written on it. “A my name is Alice and my husband’s name is Allen, we come from Alabama and we sell apples.”
Were there really girls named Alice who came from Alabama?
She bounced the ball, turning her leg over each letter of the alphabet. “V my name is Vera and my husband’s name is Vernon, we come from Virginia and we sell vaginas …” She could go through without stopping except when she got to Q and X. Then she made up names and places. “X my name is Xeria and my husband’s name is Xeon, we come from Xeland and we sell X-rays.”

Sonny rang the bell in Dot’s lobby. “Sonny?” Dot’s mother called over the p.a.

“Yeah.”

“Dorothy can’t find her keys. Just a minute. Well, I don’t know
where you put them. If for once you’d pay attention! She just can’t do anything right. I’m at my wit’s end. STUPID! Did you look in your pocketbook? Oh, you found them. Thank our father above for miracles. Sonny, she’s coming down.”

Dot owned every 45 from the last three years, which she catalogued according to their order in the top 100 of the year. So she was a major asset as far as parties went. And she wasn’t half bad for a flunky. You could tell her a joke that didn’t have a punchline like “What did one elephant say to another when he asked him to pass the soap in the bathtub. ‘No soap, radio.’ Ha ha! Isn’t that a scream!” and if you laughed, she yuck-yucked like it was the funniest thing she ever heard.

“Hi,” Dot said, closing the lobby door behind her. It never ceased to amaze Sonny how bad she looked. Nothing was right with her. Where was Dot when God gave out your basic equipment? Probably bent over, biting her toenails. Not that she was so terrific herself but Dot was a mess. She couldn’t tease her hair because it was stringy and greasy, her pimples looked like they were about to explode in your face, and she wore the ugliest orthopedic shoes in the world, not to mention her eyes which bobbed like blue balloons in the wind. And it did not help having a mother who always said how she took after her father, a mental case at Bellevue.

“So how’s it going, Sonny?”

“Not too bad. Your mother bugging you?”

“Yeah,” Dot said miserably.

“Don’t worry. That’s all they know how to do.”

Since Sonny became a Teen Angel, they walked to school together every morning, talking the jiviest bull they could think of, and when that ran out, they sang rock songs and conversed in pig latin. There was safety in numbers and they always looked straight ahead. What they didn’t see wouldn’t frighten them. As they crossed 162nd Street, they passed an oil slick on the street.

“You know,” Sonny said, mussing it with her foot, “I used to be so stupid that I actually thought dogs did those puddles.”

“Yeah? But how come they had all those colors?”

“Well, I figured some dog accidentally ate a box of crayons. So his piss was iridescent.”

Dot shook her head. “Are you really full of shit, the way the Gooch says you are?”

“Sure,” she said. “Look, my tongue is brown.”

Dot looked into her mouth. “No, it isn’t.”

Sonny had a route to school mapped out, based on the safest parts of streets with lots of zig-zagging between parked cars and crossing over and back. Broadway was neutral. The number five bus zipped back and forth, there was the bakery, the discount hosiery store, Paris Lingerie, and a giant supermarket that had once been the Kent Theater. It had shown all these movies that Sonny’s mother wouldn’t let her see like
And God Created Woman
with Brigitte Bardot. She had spent weeks trying to imagine what
The Third Sex
might be and all it turned out to be was a bunch of homos. Gerry saw it. The Kent later became the Shrine of Miracles where crutches hung from the stage and cripples were told they could walk, see, hear-if only they would believe.
“Christ, I can shit again. It’s a miracle!” “No, my son. Only Ex-Lax
.” Now the marquee advertised meat specials of the week.

“Hey, I got a brand new one for you,” Sonny said as they passed a scary-looking pool hall.

“Yeah?”

“How does it go again? Oh, yeah. This woman goes to the doctor. She wants to have a baby but nothing’s happening down there, if you know what I mean. So the doctor examines her and says, ‘Mrs. Schimmelpfeiffer, I’m sorry to tell you this but you have a deficiency of passion.’ ‘What?’ she screams. ‘Yes, Mrs. Schimmelpfeiffer, you have a deficiency of passion, and if you ever have a baby, it’ll be a miracle.’ That night when her husband comes
home, he asks her, ‘So vat did the doctor tell you?’ The doctor told me …’ she breaks down in tears. ‘Vat did the doctor tell you?’ She tries again, ‘The doctor told me …’ But again her tears interrupt the story and she just can’t go on. Finally she takes a deep breath and says, ‘The doctor told me that I have
a fish
in my
passage
and if I have a baby, it’ll be a mackerel.’”

Dot looked at Sonny expectantly.

“Don’t you get it? The woman misunderstood the doctor when he said she had a
deficiency of passion
and if she had a baby, it would be a
miracle
. So she thinks he said she has a
fish
in
her passage
and if she has a baby–”

“It’ll be a mackerel!” Dot cried out. “I get it.”

Sonny groaned. But to herself. Even if Dot wasn’t Speedy Gonzales when it came to brain power, she was okay in her book. Not as someone you could
really
talk to like D.B. about mature, private things. But then she wasn’t mean and nasty like the Gooch. Or catty like Mary Kelly. Anything you told her traveled faster than the speed of a flying fart. Crystal was hardly ever around, and Hansy and Marilyn were solid as a hard stool. They didn’t exactly keep things moving.

As long as they walked on the west side of Broadway, everything was okay. Even if it said FUCK YOU and PUSSY everywhere and the buildings were pissed in, the lobbies had stained-glass windows, mirror-covered walls, and marble staircases. There were old synagogues and the Heights Jewish Center, which had been transformed into a Church of Jehovah’s Witness by a simple plastering over of a star of David. And that stood empty now. On Shabbus, religious Jews still strolled down the Drive but it was no longer safe to walk alone. Yet the silver expanse of the George Washington Bridge stood unchanged, as did Palisades Amusement Park with its Cyclone across the Hudson.

At 176th Street, they crossed Broadway. This was the most frightening part of their walk. It was the country Sonny fled from
in nightmares, never knowing when the arm from the hallway of a transient hotel would pull her in. Bars flashed orange neon. LUCKY SEVEN. ROY’S BAR & GRILL. CLUB ROYALE. Dark-skinned men with scars across their cheeks and gold teeth that glistened made sucking, tongue-clicking sounds of sexual violation. Old women dropped their groceries and wept. Young girls, about Sonny’s age, made fists and punched their own pregnant stomachs while boys shot broken glass like marbles. Everywhere there was the odor of whiskey, urine, and uncollected garbage. This is where Sonny and Dot began to run. Down Amsterdam Avenue, St. Nicholas, until they stopped at a red light on Audubon Avenue. They could see Humboldt with its gothic spires, the highest one displaying an American flag. And the Teen Angels, who stood in their regular spot across the street from the school. Sonny unzipped her jacket.

“Hey, Dot,” she said, lighting up a Marlboro, courtesy of her father. “Did you ever hear of the Foo bird?”

“What’s that?” Dot started to cross the street.

“Hold on a see,” Sonny said, patting her beehive as she looked coolly ahead of her. “You see, this guy was on a safari in Africa and the Foo bird shit on his head. Well, he was about to wipe it but the natives warned him that it was bad luck. So he didn’t wipe the shit. Anyway, he was taking a shower and he washed the Foo bird’s shit off his head …” She paused. “And he died.”

“You’re kidding!” Dot exclaimed. “That’s awful.”

“The moral of this story is,” Sonny paused again, dramatically, “if the Foo shits, wear it.”

“Huh?”

“If the shoe fits, if the Foo shits … get it?”

“I guess so,” Dot said doubtfully. “You mean, he didn’t really die?”

“Anyway …” They crossed the street to where the Teen Angels stood leaning against a white Corvette.

Mary Kelly and the Gooch passed a Salem between their gloved hands. Hansy was whispering something in Marilyn’s ear which made her giggle. D.B. stood against the wall, watching the guys play Chinese handball.

“How’s it going?” Sonny asked, looking at the guys, especially Ruben Ortega, out of the corner of her eye. None of them, of course, would be so uncool as to look in her direction except for Steve, who didn’t count.

“Not too bad,” Mary said, giving Sonny the Teen Angel handshake.

“Hi, everybody!” Dot said.

“Could be worse,” the Gooch muttered as she exhaled smoke through her nose.

Sonny inhaled her cigarette and tried to make the smoke come out of her nose too but it went down into her throat and made her cough.

“Tho?” Mary said. “What’s happening with you all?”

“Shit,” Sonny said, continuing to cough.

“Yeah,” Dot added.

“Why don’t you give up?” the Gooch said, blowing a ribbon of smoke out her nose.

Sonny crushed her cigarette on the ground.

Every morning they hung out in front of Humboldt in the few minutes before the bell rang. It was the high point of Sonny’s day since she got to be with the Teen Angels and everyone knew she was one of them. They talked loudly about who got knocked up, arrested, and who was going to get his ass kicked, as all the faggots, eggheads, creeps, putzes, morons, and other non-Teen Angel lowlifes passed by. Red-nosed, breath steaming, they rubbed their hands, clenched their asses, and jived each other to stay warm. They never entered the building before they had to.

‘That’s a boss skirt,” Sonny said to the Gooch, just to be nice.

“Alexander’s. 145th Street,” she said. “I stole it Saturday.”

“Well, it’s nice anyway.” The Gooch stole all the time, not just when everybody else was doing it. So she had the best clothes.

D.B. joined them. “Hey, you wanna go to Crystal’s tomorrow?”

“When?”

“She said we could have a party at her house tomorrow afternoon. Her mother’s started working and her brother won’t be around so she said she’d give me the key.”

“Terrif.”

“Okay!”

“Hey Miguel,” D.B. called. “You think you can come?” He turned around and gave her such a look of total longing that it was pathetic. Miguel, known as T.D.H. because he was tall, dark, and handsome, was also 33 rpm slow. D.B. wore his I.D. bracelet, which meant they went steady. She jiggled it noisily.

“PLAY BALL!” Steve shouted. If he lost some weight, grew his hair, and kept his hand off his fly, he could almost be human. “We
can’t concentrate with all that goddamn flap!” He missed the ball and had to go to the Jack box, which meant he was low.