With a yank of folding doors, the gleam in the booth blinked out; the other stepped out like a lank, starved animal from his lair into the lapping torchlight of the steel drum. Ira began discreetly moving away, stole another glance over his shoulder as he increased the intervening distance. Obvious, the meaning of the other’s importunate crouch, the other’s panhandler’s glimmering palm extended to the two men. All too obvious his rebuff: the blunt jab of thumb, the jeering injunction: “Scram, rummy.” To Ira’s consternation, the man suddenly broke away from the others and dashed after him. Ira’s impulse was to run. Nuts! Just walk away as fast as he could. It didn’t do any good. He was caught up within a dozen strides.
“Listen, bud, I’m flat broke. What d’ye say? A thin dime. I ain’t kiddin’. I’m broker’n the Ten Commandments. I been ridin’ freights since yesterday morning. All the way from Aroostook, from Maine, ya know. I ain’t a rummy. Honest, I was pickin’ pertaters, I ain’t no rummy. I’m just goddamn hungry. I’m starvin’. I got rolled an’ I lost my dough.” The battered, bony face pleaded, blood-stippled, unnerving. Beef-red nostrils twitched. Was that a new gap in his front teeth as he spoke? Jesus, to be confronted with this apparition in dire need in the night, face-to-face with dire need, unyielding need on dark, vacant Park Avenue, wide, ugly Park Avenue, between the unlit storefronts, penurious hall lights, stodgy brick walls — and the railroad viaduct planted on its immobile legs. Not even an auto passed, nor were headlights to be seen. Were the others at the corner watching, where flames fluttered from the drum like an Indian warbonnet? What the hell had he stopped for?
“I haven’t got any money.” Ira tried to repel his accoster with surliness.
“A nickel. Anything. I can walk into a beanery with a nickel. Some of ’em’ll give you som’n stale with a cuppa java. Waddaye say, pal?” He lifted forefinger to nostrils, brought the hand away trembling: “The fuckin’ railroad bull caught me ridin’ in the blinds. Between the Pullman trains. Sonofabitch saw me at 125th Street station. He sapped me silly, knocked the shit outta me. I swear I’m tellin’ you the truth.”
“I haven’t got a nickel.”
“Pennies. Please! Maybe I can get a roll. A slice o’ bread. I’m like to pass out.”
Sucker, Ira assailed himself. But who could deny that pleading, bashed, blood-speckled visage? He felt among the coins in his pocket. Two: a big half dollar and a quarter, big enough too, too big — and a condom tin. Oh, Jesus, why hadn’t he asked that druggist to break that quarter? A quarter! That was his total allowance from Mom for a day at CCNY. But he had five bucks, Edith’s bounty, poor woman. Boy, the way the mind wavered, flickered: screwed his kid cousin. Escaped by the skin of his teeth — and with his notebook. Give alms for Zaida not to guess, give alms the little shrimp wasn’t Jonas. Nuts. Superstition. But that was the way the mind spun its web: here was a tramp begging: mendicant redressing some kind of arrant imbalance. “Yeah,” Ira’s voice was much louder than he intended, strident and bold in hollow gloom: “You better wipe your face.” Strange, how hostility seemed harbinger of relenting.
“That’s right. I must look like a fuckin’ mess.” At a loss, as if he had given up hope of further comfort, the other turned his face dully. “An’ my ear. See that? The fuckin’ bull done that too.” He began licking his fingertips, scouring cheeks at random. “That’s why I didn’t wanna hit up 125th Street. Some cop ketch me panhandlin’, he’d get my ass throwed in the slammer just to make a pinch.”
“I got a quarter. That’s all I got.” Ira drew out the coin.
“What de ye mean? Ye givin’ it t’ me?”
“Not unless you can change it.” His own sarcasm riled him, it was so devoid of efficacy. “Here, take it.”
“Jesus, yer a prince! A whole two bits! God bless ye! God bless ye!”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“I’ll be prayin’ fer ye, honest to God, I’ll pray for ye. You’re white. I mean it. Maybe you’re a Jew. But you’re a Christian. You’re a gent.” He tipped the crumpled hat.
Ira cooked his hand in sign of curt disparagement, curt disengagement. “Go find yourself someplace to eat, will you?” He stepped to the curb. A Christian, my ass, his thoughts echoed.
“Thanks. God bless ye. I’m gittin’ some coffee-an’, right away. Two bits.”
“Yeah.” Broad shadow of the trestle stirred by curling flame of a fire a block away: God bless you. Ira crossed to the north corner of 114th Street. Jesus, Mamie should know what he’d gotten out of her dollar: a well-fucked daughter, right under her mother’s snoring nose, a hell of a scare — what a scare! — a rubber condom pale in the gutter for some dumb kid to find tomorrow, and blow up into a balloon, another one in his pocket. And all of two bits’ worth of blessings from a tramp with a crumpled hat who’d got his lumps. Boy, that was a bargain, wasn’t it? If he could only tell it to somebody: the delirious contrasts in just one night, one day, wild whoosh, pathos, bathos. But that was the difference between himself and Larry. Larry could relate his adventures; they slipped easily through regular channels. His didn’t, his were deformed, fitted no channel, could never be told.
You got to think, Ira continued morosely on his way uptown: you got to think before you did, think, think, think. That was the trouble: you didn’t think. Try to think. Oh, think, your ass, he suddenly raged at himself: he wasn’t meant to think. He had stood on a flat, a diving rock by the Hudson and told himself that. He was meant to feel and to believe. He was made to suffer and to imagine. He wasn’t smart. Everybody knew that. But when would he begin? To think, to try to think: the practical things, the prosaic, the consequences, the way other people did, grown-up people, appraising and calculating. Even young people. Like those Columbia goodies in the drugstore. Oh, you had to, you had to. That was the way the world was: what did Gabe earn in that storehouse he owned, how much rent did he pay, how much rent did he charge each pushcart, how much did he pay the watchman, how much profit did he make on a crate of oranges or tomatoes? That was what should concern him. Not feel and suffer and imagine: what that old wop would say to himself, after the truck left him alone in Gabe’s warehouse, looking out of the little window in the door at the fire in the steel drum. How he remembered, maybe, his dead wife — who knows, he said he was alone: how maybe she picked up horseshit in the gutter like the other Italian women wearing black on 119th Street, horseshit to put on the geraniums in the wooden window boxes. Maybe he had a coal and ice cellar once, like the wop across the street. Maybe he once whistled “Chimes of Italy” when he jabbed his icepick into an ice cake on the sidewalk on a summer morning. That wasn’t what he was supposed to think about. He was a freak.
Up the hill rising to the closed brick comfort station under the trestle at 116th Street. The trolley tracks. The streetlights east and west. Rolls of linoleum standing like mummies wrapped in brown paper in the corner store show window. And downhill again to the muted rumble of a train passing overhead. And where was that bum going, that hobo-panhandler? South? After he got his coffee-an’ in some beanery someplace. Put his quarter on the counter — to show he had it — ordered a mug of coffee, got his change, and headed for the washroom to wash off his bloodstains. Headed for the West Side, to the Hudson River where the freight trains ran. He was a kid once too. Did he grab his father’s hand when the old man came home from work in the evening? Hey, Dad, what about a nickel? Come on, Dad, give us a jitney. Did that rusty bastard in the porkpie hat do that too. . once? How could you escape feeling, suffering, imagining; how could you extricate yourself at least to some degree? And yet, he would have to. . someday. When?