He was right. I didn’t know much about business, and didn’t want to. I don’t know whether I was just born this way or if it was that my dad hadn’t set a very good example. He wasn’t skilled at making money or at business in general. His only talent was for bad investments and failure. As it was, money never much mattered to me. I wasn’t stupid. I knew money would be nice to have, but other things just mattered more to me. Love, family, girls, sex, books, sports — they were always more important to me than money. Maybe my outlook would have been different if I’d had any money to begin with. Maybe if I could have experienced what having money was like and then losing it, then I might have invested more of my being into getting more of it or getting it back. I’d tried, I’d really tried to will myself ambitious, to be more like Bobby and Aaron. I’d tried to trick myself into putting money at the top of my pyramid. No luck. And Bobby needn’t have bothered to comfort me that he’d be all right even if the airport runs never paid off. Bobby Friedman was golden, bulletproof. Somehow you just knew he would always land on his feet.
As crazy and twisted as his airport runs were, I was glad for the distraction, glad to be invited along, glad to have someone making small talk. For the moment, I conveniently ignored Mindy’s dire warning about keeping away from Bobby. My frustration over what had happened to her, my need to do something about it, and my impotence in the face of that need were eating me up. My guts were on fire. We picked up Mrs. Cohen — Stevie Cohen’s grandma; he was one of our Burgundy House brothers — at her apartment building on Ralph Avenue, settled her comfortably in the big back seat of Bobby’s Olds, and headed off to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nothing had changed, nothing but everything. I just didn’t know it yet.
Bobby and I had gone to visit Mindy on the way back from the airport. Only Beatrice Weinstock was there when we arrived. She lit up again at the sight of us. I guess that made me feel a little less useless, but not a whole lot less. She’d sent her husband out to get something for them to eat — “He was making me completely meshugge with his pacing.” She said the doctors had good news, that her daughter’s vital signs had stabilized and that there was brain function. This was all good, according to Bea Weinstock. It was good too, that none of Mindy’s other injuries proved to be life threatening. It’s funny how when things are really bad, good comes to mean anything less than catastrophic.
Bobby and I took turns comforting Mrs. Weinstock and sitting with Mindy. When I was there with Mindy, I held her hand. I suppose I would have kissed her on the mouth if there wasn’t a tube stuck down her throat. I cried some too, for me, I think, as much as for her. You grow up in Brooklyn, you like to think you’re tough, that your skin is thick and concrete hard and that you come out of the womb all grown up and prepared for anything life can throw at you. Bullshit! I wasn’t any tougher or any more prepared for the darts life throws at you than a Kansas farm boy. The tears? Growing up … I think that’s why I was crying. I’d had some bad things to deal with before this — my dad losing his business, my zaydeh dying, stuff like that — but this thing with Mindy was different. Up to now, my life had been pretty much cake, a nearly twenty-one-year childhood consisting of stickball, the Cyclone, textbooks, stuff served to me on a plate. Real tragedy was always one step removed. With Mindy in a coma, one she might never come out of, I knew the bell had rung. Ding! Childhood was officially over.
That was yesterday. When I opened my eyes to the sound of the subway rumbling, I wasn’t in a much better frame of mind than when I shut them. At least I opened my eyes. I had a choice about that. I was there, alive, conscious. My first thoughts were of Mindy, of where she was, of wherever one goes in a coma. The motherfucker who did that to her would be wherever he was, doing whatever he was doing. Was he scared? Did he hear footsteps coming up behind him? Did he even give a shit? I brushed my teeth, wondering about where you go in a coma. Was it like a movie? Was it like dropping acid? Was it like a bad trip? Was it Alice through the looking glass? That was the thing, speculating wasn’t working for me. Suddenly, taking a philosophical point of view felt like more bullshit, like I was cheating somehow, distancing myself. No, I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to protect myself from this. I thought about going to school for about a millisecond, and knew that wasn’t going to happen.
The phone rang, and it shook me out of that bad and lonely place. I suppose I should have been grateful. I wasn’t. There was a whispering voice on the other end of the line. “This isn’t the man, is it? Are you the man?”
“What? Who is this?” I asked, annoyed.
“Are you the man? The pigs?”
“No,” I said, like it would matter. If I was the cops, would I say so? “Who is this?”
“Never mind who this is.”
“Then fuck you. I’m not in the mood for — ”
“Lids, man. Lids gave me your number.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry.” I stopped there and waited for him to say something else, but he needed a prompt. “Lids told you to call me and …”
“You got something to write with?”
I grabbed a pencil and the newspaper off the kitchen table. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“1055 Coney Island Avenue,” he said and stopped.
“What about 1055 Coney Island Avenue?”
“Listen, man, Lids asked me to do him a solid. That’s what I’m doing. He said you needed an address. Well, now you got one. He didn’t say nothing about giving you more than that. Don’t forget to tell him you got a call.”
“From who?”
“He’ll know.”
“You one of Lids’s customers?”
“I thought you said you weren’t the — ”
“I’m not. Forget I asked. Thanks.”
A click and dial tone were the last things I heard from him. It took me a second to collect my thoughts. I didn’t have a car. I had a license, just no car. With bus and subway stops basically out front of our building, it’s not like I needed one. When I went out on dates I borrowed my dad’s car, or, in a dire emergency, Aaron’s. I hated borrowing Aaron’s car. I loved my big brother, but I always felt judged by him. I always felt like he was waiting for me to screw up. I always felt like he was waiting to say, “See, I was right. I knew it.” Besides, borrowing his car involved a longer prejourney checklist than a Gemini mission. And the next morning he would debrief me, check the mileage on the odometer, and see if I refilled the tank.
I started dialing Bobby’s number, but snapped the phone receiver down before the dial completed its seventh spin. I remembered the timing of Mindy’s warning about staying clear of Bobby, and the things that had happened since. I rubbed my still sore shoulder, thinking that someone had already tried to run Bobby down and that Mindy had been savagely beaten. Coincidences? I thought back to the night I’d bailed Bobby out of jail, about how Mindy’s whole attitude had changed over the course of two hours. I stared at the address I’d written on the back of the paper and realized that maybe it would be better for both Bobby and me if I left him out of it. If not better, then at least safer.
• • •
Other than its name, Coney Island Avenue didn’t have much to recommend it. Four potholed lanes that ran in a straight line from the knee bend at Brighton Beach Avenue to the tip of Prospect Park, Coney Island Avenue was a startlingly ugly thoroughfare. It was an endlessly repeating stream of funeral homes, mom and pop groceries, car dealerships, pizzerias, luncheonettes, kosher butcher shops, pork stores, and grubby little storefronts with rental apartments above. Even when the sun shone through a cloudless blue sky, Coney Island Avenue was darker than the neighborhoods through which it ran — louder too. And the soot and stink of diesel fumes from trucks and city buses seemed to stick to the sidewalks and buildings like a layer of rotting skin.