Brooklyn Noir Read online

  From a distance in the dark bar I would have said that Frank Sanchez hadn’t changed much over the years, but I was close to him now, and I’d seen him only last night in the unforgiving fluorescent lighting of the funeral home. He’d been thin and handsome when I was a kid, with blue-black hair combed straight back, and the features and complexion of a Hollywood Indian in a John Wayne picture. He’d thickened in the middle over the years, though he still wasn’t fat. His reddish brown cheeks were illuminated by the roadmap of broken capillaries that seemed an entrance requirement for “regular” status at Olsen’s. His hair was still shockingly dark, but now with a fake Jerry Lewis sheen and plenty of scalp showing through in the back. He was a retired homicide detective. His had been one of the first Hispanic families in this neighborhood. I knew he’d moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey long ago, though my father said that he was still in Olsen’s every day.

  Frank picked up the picture and looked at it again, then looked over it at the two sloppy rows of bottles along the back bar. The gaps for the speed rack looked like missing teeth.

  “We’re the same,” he said. “Me and you.”

  “The same, how?”

  “We’re on the outside, and we’re always looking to be let in.”

  “I never gave a damn about being on the inside here, Frank.”

  He handed me the photo. “You do now.”

  He stood then, and walked stiffly back to the men’s room. A couple of minutes later Marty appeared at my elbow, topped off my shot, and replaced Frank’s.

  “It’s a funny thing about Francis,” Marty said. “He’s a spic who’s always hated the spics. So he moves from a spic neighborhood to an all-white one, then has to watch as it turns spic. So now he’s got to get in his car every day and drive back to his old all-spic neighborhood, just so he can drink with white men. It’s made the man bitter. And,” he nodded toward the glasses, “he’s in his cups tonight. Don’t take the man too seriously.”

  Marty stopped talking and moved down the bar when Frank returned.

  “What’d Darby O’Gill say to you?” he asked.

  “He told me you were drunk,” I said, “and that you didn’t like spics.”

  Frank widened his eyes. “Coming out with revelations like that, is he? Hey, Martin,” he yelled, “next time I piss tell him JFK’s been shot!” He drained his whiskey, took a sip of beer, and turned his attention back to me. “Listen. Early on, when I first started on the job—years back, I’m talking—there was almost no spades in the department; even less spics. I was the only spic in my precinct, only one I knew of in Brooklyn. I worked in the seven-one, Crown Heights. Did five years there, but this must’ve been my first year or so.

  “I was sitting upstairs in the squad room typing attendance reports. Manual typewriters back then. I was good too, fifty or sixty words a minute—don’t forget, English ain’t my first language. See, I learned the forms. The key is knowin’ the forms, where to plug in the fucking numbers. You could type two hundred words a minute, but you don’t know the forms, all them goddamn boxes, you’re sitting there all day.

  “So I’m typing these reports—only uniform in a room full of bulls, only spic in a room full of harps—when they bring in the drunk.”

  Frank paused to order another shot, and Marty brought one for me too. I was hungry and really needed to step outside for some air, but I wanted to hear Frank’s story. I did want to know how he thought we were similar, and I hoped he would talk about the photo. He turned his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth like a child catching rain, and he poured the booze smoothly down his throat.

  “You gotta remember,” he continued, “Crown Heights was still mostly white back then, white civilians, white skells. The drunk is just another mick with a skinfull. But what an obnoxious cocksucker. And loud.

  “Man who brought him in is another uniform, almost new as me. He throws him in the cage and takes the desk next to mine to type his report. Only this guy can’t type, you can see he’s gonna be there all day. Takes him ten minutes to get the paper straight in the damn machine. And all this time the goddamn drunk is yelling at the top of his lungs down the length of the squad room. You can see the bulls are gettin’ annoyed. Everybody tells him to shut up, but he keeps on, mostly just abusing the poor fuck that brought him in, who’s still struggling with the report, his fingers all smudged with ink from the ribbons.

  “On and on he goes: ‘Your mother blows sailors … Your wife fucks dogs … You’re all queers, every one of you.’ Like that. But I mean, really, it don’t end, it’s like he never gets tired.

  “So the guy who locked him up gets him outa the cage and walks him across the room. Over in the corner they got one of these steam pipes, just a vertical pipe, no radiator or nothing. Hot as a motherfucker. So he cuffs the drunk’s hands around the pipe, so now the drunk’s gotta stand like this”—Frank formed a huge circle with his arms, as if he were hugging an invisible fat woman—“or else he gets burned. And just bein’ that close to the heat, I mean, it’s fuckin’ awful. So the uniform walks away, figuring that’ll shut the scumbag up, but it gets worse.

  “Now, the bulls are all pissed at the uniform for not beatin’ the drunk senseless before he brought him in, like any guy with a year on the street would know to do. The poor fuck is still typing the paperwork at about a word an hour, and the asshole is still at it, ‘Your daughter fucks niggers. When I get out I’ll look your wife up—again.’ Then he looks straight at the uniform, and the uniform looks up. Their eyes lock for a minute. And the drunk says this: ‘What’s it feel like to know that every man in this room thinks you’re an asshole?’ Then the drunk is quiet and he smiles.”

  Marty returned then, and though I felt I was barely hanging on, I didn’t dare speak to refuse the drink. Frank sat silently while Marty poured, and when he was done Frank stared at him until he walked away.

  “After that,” he continued in a low voice, “it was like slow motion. Like everything was happening underwater. The uniform stands up, takes his gun out, and points it at the drunk. The drunk never stops smiling. And then the uniform pulls the trigger, shoots him right in the face. The drunk’s head like explodes, and he spins around the steam pipe—all the way—once, before he drops.

  “For a second everything stops. It’s just the echo and the smoke and blood on the wall and back window. Then, time speeds up again. The sergeant of detectives, a little leprechaun from the other side—must’ve bribed his way past the height requirement—jumps over his desk and grabs up a billy club. He lands next to the uniform, who’s still holding the gun straight out, and he clubs him five or six times on the forearm, hard and fast, whap-whap-whap. The gun drops with the first hit but the leprechaun don’t stop till the bone breaks. We all hear it snap.

  “The uniform pulls his arm in and howls, and the sergeant throws the billy club down and screams at him: ‘The next time … the next time, it’ll be your head that he breaks before you were able to shoot him. Now get him off the pipe before there’s burns on his body.’ And he storms out of the room.”

  Frank drank the shot in front of him and finished his beer. I didn’t move. He looked at me and smiled. “The whole squad room,” he said, “jumped into action. Some guys uncuffed the drunk; I helped the uniform out. Got him to a hospital. Coupla guys got rags and a pail and started cleaning up.

  “Now, think about that,” Frank said, leaning in toward me and lowering his voice yet again. “I’m the only spic there. The only other uniform. There had to be ten bulls. But the sergeant, he didn’t have to tell anybody what the plan was, or to keep their mouth shut, or any fucking thing. And there was no moment where anybody worried about me seeing it, being a spic. We all knew that coulda been any one of us. That’s the most on-the-inside I ever felt. Department now, it’s a fucking joke. Affirmative action, cultural-diversity training. And what’ve you got? Nobody trusts anybody. Guys afraid to trust their own partners.” He was whispering, and starting to slur his words.


  I began to feel nauseated. It’s a joke, I thought. A cop’s made-up war story. “Frank, did the guy die?”

  “Who?”

  “The drunk. The man that got shot.”

  Frank looked confused, and a bit annoyed. “Of course he died.”

  “Did he die right away?”

  “How the fuck should I know? They dragged him outa the room in like a minute.”

  “To a hospital?”

  “Was a better world’s all I’m saying. A better world. And you always gotta stay on the inside, don’t drift, Danny. If you drift, nobody’ll stick up for you.”

  Jesus, did he have a brogue? He certainly had picked up that lilt to his voice that my father’s generation possessed. That half-accent that the children of immigrants acquire in a ghetto. I had to get out of there. A few more minutes and I feared I’d start sounding like one of these tura-lura-lura motherfuckers myself.

  I stood, probably too quickly, and took hold of the bar to steady myself. “What about the picture, Frank?”

  He handed it to me. “Martin is right,” he said slowly, “let it lie. Why do you care who she was?”

  “Who she was? I asked who she is Is she dead, Frank? Is that what Marty meant by letting the dead rest?”

  “Martin … Marty meant …”

  “I’m right here, Francis,” Marty said, “and I can speak for myself.” He turned to me. “Francis has overindulged in a few jars,” he said. “He’ll nap in the back booth for a while and be right as rain for the ride home.”

  “Is that the way it happened, Frank? Exactly that way?”

  Frank was smiling at his drink, looking dreamily at his better world. “Who owns memory?” he said.

  “Goodnight, Daniel,” Marty said. “It was good of you to stop in.”

  I didn’t respond, just turned and slowly walked out. One or two guys gestured at me as I left, the rest seemed not to notice or care.

  I removed the picture from my pocket again when I was outside, an action that had taken on a ritualistic feel, like making the sign of the cross. I did not look at it this time, but began tearing it in strips, lengthwise. Then I walked, and bent down at street corners, depositing each strip in a separate sewer along Fourth Avenue.

  He’d told me that he’d broken his arm in a car accident, pursuing two black kids who had robbed a jewelry store.

  As I released the strips of paper through the sewer gratings, I thought of the hand in the subway tunnel, and my father’s assertion that there were many body parts undoubtedly littering the less frequently traveled parts of the city. Arms, legs, heads, torsos; and perhaps all these bits of photo would find their way into disembodied hands. A dozen or more hands, each gripping a strip of photograph down in the wet slime under the street. Regaining a history, a past, that they lost when they were dismembered, making a connection that I never would.

  PRACTICING

  BY ELLEN MILLER

  Canarsie

  When my father started to bench-press me, I figured he meant business. For real. Finally.

  By the time he started bench-pressing me, I’d already wisely given up hope that he’d ever make good on his promise. But the bench-pressing seemed an encouraging sign, enough of a reason to believe my father, so I suspended my doubt.

  I didn’t simply hope. I believed

  He’d been promising for two years—twenty-five percent of the time I’d spent being alive, being his daughter. Being alive and being his daughter were the same single thing. The only thing and everything. All I wanted from the world.

  The first time was supposed to be my sixth birthday present. I bugged him. I nagged him, like a wife. I irritated myself when my talking-out-loud voice would whine—like a child, which I insisted I wasn’t—But you promised, even though my thinking-inside-myself voice had long ago admitted defeat, told me the truth, convincingly and correctly maintaining, Nothing doing. Pretend he never said a word. Forget it. Then, out of the blue, he’d say, “Later, I promise,” and he’d give me a wink. Dad was the only man I’d ever meet who didn’t, upon winking, instantly become a calamitous schmuck. “We have plenty of time.”

  The promise itself was a present, a gift he offered not only to me, but also to time, to the future, stored in a box filled with mystery, tension, delay, buildup, all to be revealed later. If his promise had been packaged and wrapped, the gift-card’s envelope, taped seamlessly to the top, would have read, Do Not Open Me Until … but the calligraphy would have stopped short of naming the holiday. He kept me guessing and waiting, waiting, but since I couldn’t tell time, I couldn’t know for how long. Exactly what, at eight years old, did later mean? His words, spoken to the future, “We’ll go later, next month,” didn’t sound a helluva lot different from, “We’ll go later, in fifteen years.” One month. Fifteen years What was later? When did later bleed into too late? How much time was plenty of time? What sensations could be expected when plenty of time elapsed and disappeared? When did too late become never? Time, always warped and subjective, was especially so when I hadn’t been around long enough to develop and practice the rote, unoriginal, possibility-canceling, chance-choking, constricting—that is, adult—habits of experiencing time, living in time, doing time, apprehending in a felt way, without having to concentrate so hard my eye sockets pounded, how long fragments of time were supposed to last until they stopped being fragmentary and became durable, lasting. How long? Long enough. To last. Until. Lasting.

  Instead of bringing me up, the day I turned six he brought home a squat glow-in-the-dark clock. An alarm clock. I couldn’t read it; I couldn’t set it. I’d look at its various meaningless appendages—arms, hands, digits—then quickly turn from the pale, sickish, muffled green glow. When I couldn’t sleep, the tick contributed its two cents to my considerable, familiar insomnia and anxiety.

  Soon I appreciated the stunning appropriateness of the erm alarm clock

  Perhaps he intended to teach me early on—to route my thoughts along an acceptable, suitable course immediately, starting my expectations off right at age six—that clocks were meant to be punched.

  His promise, so handsomely packaged in that gift-box, contained nothing, so I’d done good to halt hope in its tracks. To stop hoping for Dad to make good on his word, or for much of anything else, seemed a wise idea, a useful policy to adopt more generally, to apply more globally, as an apotropaic A prophylactic against disappointment. Disappointment was dangerous.

  But he started again just before I turned eight. “We’ll have so much fun. Just you wait.” Repetition, and the slippage of much too much time—even I knew by then how long too long, how much was much too much—between the initial promise and its most recent nonfulfillment, emptied the promise-box of all the substance it probably had never had, so I gave him a piece of my mind. “You’re full of bull. You’re just all phony baloney.”

  “I’m what?” Mock horror. Mock indignation. Mock mockery.

  “I said, Dad, that you are all yak and no shack.” I didn’t know what I meant, but I liked how tough it sounded.

  “The things that come out of your mouth.” He snorted. “Where do you get them?” In mock fury, he commanded, “Get your tush over here. Right now, you little … you little … you little you.”

  He shook his head gravely, freighting the final pronoun, you with extra volume and vocal emphasis, so that the you by whom he meant me almost sounded like it referred to something special. Like some languages had one you for politely addressing outside-people and another you for informally addressing inside-people; other languages had one you for speaking to superiors and another you for speaking to subordinates; English—rather, my Dad’s peculiar delivery of English—conferred upon me a separate, specific second-person pronoun. It sounded and was spelled the same as other you’s, but Dad’s you as in, “you little … you,” referred just to My very own second-person pronoun! Now that was one tremendous gift if there ever was one.

  But even having my very own personal pronoun was risky, becaus
e it’s pretty tough to keep stopped-hope stopped up when you are getting all youed up, when someone you really like keeps promising you scary, fun, exciting stuff—and even tougher for the of that moment to remain securely devoid of hope, to make smart, self-denying decisions with Dad youing me—the long ooo of it broad and extended, like a hand.

  “Now,” he announced, rubbing his hands together—like a man who’s busted his ass all week, eaten crow at a job he hates, but it’s Friday, and his dinner at Abbracciamento on the Pier, a thick steak pizzaiolo, fatty, bloody meat sizzling, cheese bubbling, is being served by a hot-to-trot miniskirt, he’s salivating, thinking, this is gonna be yummy—“we start practicing.” Before I noticed his swift crouch and downward reach, he’d grabbed my ankles and flipped me, along with the rest of the visible world, upside down. Queasy with suddenness, I tried focusing hard, to keep everything from whirling too wildly, on the paint-splatters everywhere covering his stumble-proof, good-luck work boots. Together, we slid to the floor. I righted myself to sitting too fast; my subadequately upholstered tush—a bony butt without cushioning ocks—banged to the linoleum. “We gotta be prepared,” he declared. “I’m gonna need some big muscles if we’re gonna do this.”

  I was a weedy child at sixty pounds. My father was a bridgeman. A workingman. To work, in the true, original sense, meant to move heavy objects, to transfer energy from one system to another, causing an object, against its own resistance and stationary inertia, to move. Work called for muscle, math, multiplication. Work was the product of the force used to move something stubbornly heavy and the distance the object had successfully moved in the direction of that force. Dad had been working for a long time.

  His biceps were strip steaks, marbled not with fat, but lined with web-works of veins materializing from under his skin. “Put them back! Put them back inside!” I’d cry, when I was little—which, by the time I turned eight, I adamantly decreed I wasn’t, not anymore—while futilely pushing and pressing individual bulging veins back underneath his skin to keep him intact, to return his veins to their proper place inside, where all matters blood-related belonged. And Dad’s thighs and calves were sometimes hard to look at without contemplating mint jelly.