Egghead Payne            

Egghead and me

My family came to Newark, New Jersey on the Portuguese Mayflower in 1925. On paper, we were one of the first families of Newark’s Little Portugal, the Ironbound section, but somehow through a series of mishaps, scandals, tragedies and just plain stupidity, we were always broke and just this side of the law. The Ironbound was Newark’s other side of the tracks, its Lower East Side. Locals referred to it as Down Neck because of its location at the neck of the foaming Passaic River. It was where the character of Tony Soprano was born and raised and if you saw War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, the street where the church gets destroyed is Ferry Street, our main street and that church was, and still is St. Stephan’s.

For a time my best friend was Egghead Payne.  We were in Mr. Blonsky’s class in 7th and 8th grade at Lafayette Street School but didn’t talk to each other until one day in the playground. I was throwing my Spaldeen high bouncer against the wall and it got away from me. Egghead was walking by, handed it to me and presto—Best Friends.  

Egghead’s hair was buzzed short and his head was perfectly round like a melon but Melon Head Payne was just too much trouble to think of and say and Egghead just seemed to go with Eugene. He had brown skin, the color an old football, sad brown eyes and even features so symmetrical that he looked like a cartoon character: The Adventures of Egghead. His pleasant lips were always slightly parted, somewhere between a sneer and a smile so that you always saw his small, bright, even teeth. He never laughed out loud but if he thought something was funny he hissed through his pretty teeth and released a little puff of steam.  I never called him Egghead-- that would have been mean.  Our friendship ended in a big ugly, public way with a resounding slap on the steps of our Lady of Fatima, June 1961.

 The Ironbound was ethnically and racially blended then in a way that didn’t cause any heavy breathing—yet. Being on the wrong side of the tracks was the grease that made it all seem to work on our narrow streets but the tribes never occupied the same building. Though it was built on a grand scale Newark was now just a tired old city trying to make it through the 20th century in one piece in its work clothes. The trains screeched along the tracks, the factories pounded out their essential widgets and flanges, belched their smoke. There was a layer of grime on everything and on some humid summer days an easterly breeze sent the fumes from the nearby slaughterhouse our way. To me and Egghead, it was paradise.

 After school we often went to a dusty pocket park near Penn Station to play stickball or read comic books. On weekends we played hide and seek in the Art Deco limestone beauty of Penn Station’s echoing chambers. We pretended to be waiting for trains and looked impatiently at the imaginary watches on our bare, bony wrists. I tapped him on the shoulder as if he were a stranger.

“Excuse me, sir. When is the next train to, um, Chattanooga?”

“Chattanooga Choo Choo! Chattanooga! Chattanooooga!” Egghead loved saying it.

I found a copy of Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human on top of one of the garbage cans on the platform and this magical find, with its lonely heroes and their super powers showed me there might be another dimension beyond the train tracks.

Sometimes we ventured uptown, where the big department stores and big movie theaters beckoned. We went to the movies every week. I had a paper route so I always had a little money and Egghead never had any so I treated him, which was OK with me. He was like my little brother, though he was a year older than me.  When we saw North by Northwest at the Paramount,  I was amazed that Cary Grant wore the same glorious blue/grey Saville Row suit for three days straight, something I would attempt with less success when I grew up.  Coming home from the World War II comedy The Imitation General, starring Glenn Ford, we passed the construction site for the new Prudential Building and stared into its crater.

“Did the Germans bomb Newark?” Egghead asked.

“Yes. But only uptown, I think.” I answered, because I thought it might be true.

My Tribe

Our Lady of Fatima, our first Portuguese church, was completed in 1958 and despite my parents’ objections, I was one of its first altar boys, a job I took very seriously. The first born, I was a golden-haired baby then a dirty blond boy, blue-eyed and tall. The church started a Boy Scout troop and I had to lobby my parents to join that too.  I had three pretty sisters, Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.

I didn’t look like the typical Portuguese boy or like anybody else in my family. I had the long, sad face, moist eyes and coloring of a bodega Jesus painting and was voted most pious-looking two years in a row. I was often pulled out of school to work funerals where my sad Jesus face got me good tips from grateful undertakers.

Lafayette Street School was two blocks away from my grandmother’s house where we sometimes lived, depending on our finances. Whenever the Newark Evening News, New Jersey’s best newspaper, wanted to do a story about the city’s cultural diversity, they would send a photographer to our school because we had an exotic mix that included Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Blacks, Galician Spaniards (Gallegos) and the last survivors of Newark’s once lively Chinatown, the Eng cousins. Immigration laws had just been eased and more Portuguese poured into the neighborhood. We were called Pork Chops. Those who resented the Portuguese invasion called us “Zekes.” We could refer to ourselves as Pork Chops but we never, ever used the Z word.

My tiny, iron-willed grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage as a teenager and had to flee Portugal with the husband she hated to escape his gambling debts. He looked like a monkey, beat her and four daughters later, she divorced his sorry ass when she was 27. This left her a dangerous, fallen woman, often whispered about by the genteel fishwives of the neighborhood. Whenever she went to church, she wore a wide brim charcoal hat and with her head held defiantly high, jaws clenched and nostrils flaring, sailed majestically down the aisle like the Queen Mary of Fuck You. When she was tired of a subject, she would imperiously snap, “Ponto Final!” (Period. The End.) And that was that!

With her daughters to raise she worked at a suitcase handle factory, did embroidery and took whatever piece work she could get. She eventually bought the biggest house on the block, formerly the mansion of a family known for their hot dogs. It was three stories tall and built on a grand scale, with spacious rooms and high ceilings. The blooming garden was filled with roses of every color, all kinds of vegetables, fig trees and a grape arbor. Ever enterprising, my grandmother turned the two upper floors into a rooming house for single immigrant men who filled the factories and ditches of the neighborhood. My handsome father, fresh from Portugal and the Merchant Marine, was one of them and that proximity resulted in my parents’ turbulent marriage.

My father wasn’t modest about his looks and his swordsmanship was legendary. My grandmother told me that he was once stabbed in the left buttock as he tried to climb out a bedroom window by a husband who came home too soon. He worked in a leather tanning factory days and was a bartender at night. He sometimes didn’t come home for a few days at a time. In the evening he often went out in Italian suits from The Swank Shop on Ferry Street and it was my job to polish his selection size 10 Florsheims.  With his baby face and big brown eyes he was charming and popular out in the world, but he had a violent, unpredictable temper. He once pounded the kitchen table so hard that a full soup tureen flew into the air and hit the ceiling. I was afraid of him and tried to avoid him the little bit of time he was home.  When he wasn’t around, I was the man of the house.

My mother was a compact, wiry bundle with sparkling, lively brown eyes and the long expressive face of a great comedienne. She read classic novels and loved British films, anything with Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard. She had the willful temperament of a Bronte heroine and my father was her Heathcliff, her reach for the stars of passion. She was hooked on his bad boy sizzle and he on her unconditional love. Though her body was often confined to shabby, small second floor apartments with four kids, her adventurous heart was running along the misty moors, chasing her Heathcliff with her wooly wild hair cascading behind her.  Her sharp tongue and love of language united one sweltering Fourth of July when non-stop firecrackers turned our beloved dog into a whimpering, quivering mess. My mother ran to the window and shouted to anyone within earshot: “Why don’t you take those firecrackers and shove them up your mother’s ass!”

Despite all the troublesome elements, a palpable current ran between my parents and they made each other laugh. It was only when I saw La Dolce Vita as an adult that I understood my father’s short, hectic life. He wanted to be Marcello Mastroianni splashing with Anita Ekberg in the Baths of Caracarlla, not work in a factory and be saddled with four kids he barely knew.

Egghead envied me for having a father on hand, no matter how scandalous and inattentive. His father was in North Carolina with a whole new family. His mother lived uptown in the Stella Wright Homes, the Projects. She had nothing to do with him. Egghead was sentenced to living with the smoldering, short-tempered Miss Irma, who was nicer to me than she was to him. And she wasn’t very nice. Egghead called her Auntie. After the second time I met her, he confessed that she was his grandmother but she didn’t want that known.

At home she was a big scowling woman in a grimy robe and a head rag watching very loud television, eating Ritz Crackers with margarine and Nilla Wafers. She never cooked and sometimes shared a Swanson TV dinner with Egghead. No wonder he was always hungry. She noticed me looking at her and said. “What you buggin’ at, Bright Eyes?” Like my grandmother, she liked to say disparaging things about his parents to anyone who would listen.

“Damn your Mama and her goofballs. She left me holding the bag,” she would mutter and let hang in the air.

Sometimes in the evening, I saw Miss Irma on Ferry Street, stuffed into a shiny dress with her ample cleavage overflowing, heading to a bar in her spiky heels. She topped off the whole ensemble with a glorious and elaborate copper-colored wig—Oh, Miss Irma! Did she go to the bar where my father worked? Did he fuck her too? That would make this a spicier story and I wouldn’t put it past either one of them.

Egghead didn’t like coming to Hayes Pool with me. But what else would he do? Hayes was a public pool at the far end of the Ironbound near the entrance to the Pulaski Skyway, a long walk from home. It was usually dirty and jammed with screaming kids and you learned to negotiate the big, jagged cracks at its turquoise bottom. I never really learned to swim but loved being in the water and always jumped into the middle of the pool where I spent a lot of time underwater, pretending I was deep sea diver.  Egghead never wanted to get wet and sat on the side, staring into space. I noticed that his bathing suit said Fruit of the Loom on it and was really just a pair of black boxer shorts.

One noisy afternoon while I was resurfacing, I looked at him sitting at the edge of the pool with his worried face. What the hell we he thinking about? He looked like a boy trapped in a well 50 feet deep, his soul struggling to reach the surface with nothing to hold on to. While I was looking at him, some roughhousing kids accidently knocked him into the pool. He splashed frantically and blindly in every direction, eyes bulging with terror. His flailing arms pummeled me, fingers tore at me before I could walk him to the steps. Did I push him into the pool with my powerful mind like a character in a Theodore Sturgeon story just because…because he was sitting there moping in his sad underpants bathing suit? What was the word for that power? Right, telekinesis. It was the first time I saw real terror and I’m reminded of it whenever I see a doomed wildebeest trapped in a crocodile’s jaws on Nat Geo Wild.

Egghead looked like a doomed wildebeest in school too whenever Mr. Blonsky scanned the back of the classroom. I was one of Mr. Blonsky’s favorite students and Egghead was almost invisible to him. Blonsky looked like a soft-hearted Stalin with his short gray hair, crinkly eyes and forest of nose hair. He was a dedicated teacher and if you showed any promise whatsoever he pushed you to do better. Otherwise, you collected dust in the back of the class, like Egghead did--and wondered what everybody was talking about.

One day we had a substitute teacher, a round thirty-ish black woman, Mrs. Bryant. She must have been a devout church-goer who longed to take the pulpit because she preached fractured Bible stories to us all day long.

“Jonah was afraid to preach to the people of Nineveh but I am not afraid to talk to you, predominantly.” She liked the word predominantly. I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, I think she was using it incorrectly.

 “When I look at your faces, I can tell that you are good children, predominantly”.

 “Wasn’t that teacher stupid?” I said to Egghead as we walked to gym class.  He said yeah, which was his response to just about everything. When we got back to our classroom, Egghead, for the first time ever, raised his hand.

Mrs. Bryant looked at her seating chart and said, “Yes, Eugene?”

Egghead stood up and pointed at me.

“Teacher, that boy said you was stupid.” He smiled, hissed and sat down. 

“Thank you, Eugene,” Mrs. Bryant said. “You see, children, it’s just like I said. People are predominantly good but you don’t know how stupid somebody is until they open up their mouth and tell you, like that boy done.” She pointed at me. The Revenge of Egghead.

After school, I walked away from Egghead in a huff. He caught up with me.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Do what? I didn’t do nothing.”

“Just go away,” I said. He didn’t go away but got in step with me.

“Predominantly,” he hissed. “I like that word.  “Predominantly!”

Coming home from Hayes Pool with Egghead one summer afternoon we came across my father’s new Corvair, parked on a busy street. He was passionately kissing a very pretty, young Latina. When he saw us, he ducked down and covered himself and his date with his Swank Shop trench coat. To me, that was more shameful than anything else.

“Hey, ain’t that your father?” Egghead asked. I walked away quickly looking at everything but the car. I was embarrassed that Egghead had witnessed the scene.

When my father came home later he sought me out, for a change. He stared at me with his big brown eyes, silently pleading: you won’t say anything, right?

He never really looked at me before. There was a bad boy twinkle dancing behind his eyes, on hold until absolutely necessary.  Is that what all the ladies were so crazy about?  I didn’t get it. I was standing next to a window. I didn’t say anything. I liked being in control. I tapped at the window at the empty garden below. Finally, I nodded, just nodded--and a marriage was saved without a word being said. I was ten years old and realized that I was on my own; my parents had never raised me, were not going to raise me nor be much help going forward.

 A few weeks later we were at Haven Beach in Point Pleasant.  My mother and sisters were on the Boardwalk and I was coming out of the rough surf. My father was on a blanket, tanning his beautiful machine so he could share his bronze god-ness with his fan club when he got back to Newark. He looked at my long, scrawny frame.

“You have to devil up your body and devil up your muscles,” he said. I just nodded and thought, Devil Up? It’s DEVELOP! Speak English, you stupid spic. You’re already on thin ice with me.

Enter Carlos Castillo

Mr. Blonsky loved The New York Herald Tribune. We read it every day and dissected its stories:  Most of the stories were about Cuba. One day a handsome blond boy magically appeared in the class doorway and everyone gasped, including Mr. Blonsky. This boy had green eyes, freckles and wore a remarkable fringed buckskin jacket that a cowboy might wear at a rodeo. He was Carlos Castillo, our first Cuban refugee. The arrival of this exotic visitor began a Cuban invasion that rocked our neighborhood in every conceivable way. Though they were refugees who left everything behind, the Cubans seemed smarter and better-dressed than the rest of us, bringing a new sizzle and spicy music to Down Neck. They bristled with confidence and something I didn’t understand, couldn’t name yet-- sex.

A few days later, Egghead and I were walking down Lafayette Street on our way to the pool. Two blocks from my grandmother’s house we passed Carlos, the Cuban boy, sitting on the steps of his building, eating a sandwich of pale yellow Cuban bread and thick red guava jelly. He looked up.

“Where are you fellows going?” Carlos had only a slight accent.

“Hayes Pool,” I said and held up my rolled up towel.

“There’s a pool. Oh boy! Can I come too?” 

We waited for him to run upstairs and get his bathing suit. He came back down in an instant. Egghead had that-boy-in-a-well look on his face. Carlos was hopping with excitement as we walked, eager to get to water.

“Hey, let me ask you fellows something. Did either one of you fellows ever try to suck your own dick?” 

I wasn’t even sure what that combination of words meant but Egghead nodded. Carlos said he tried for a long time and finally got the hang of it. There was cow on his family’s farm in Cuba who did it like it was a lollipop but the best thing was when a girl did it to you. My little brain was skipping along, trying to catch up.

When we got to the pool, Carlos was briefly horrified by the noise, grime and cracked bottom but that didn’t stop him from cannonballing into the middle with a celebratory scream. He grew up in Manzanillo, with the Caribbean as his backyard so water and air were of equal value to him. He left us behind in the kids’ pool and went to the smaller deeper adult pool, 16 feet deep with a diving board. He spent the rest of the afternoon showing off, doing a combination of perfect and goofy dives accompanied by sound effects and faces. Half the pool just stopped and watched him and if their attention flagged, he nudged it with: Look at this! Look at this! Even Egghead looked up from time to time and looked impressed.

Since Carlos lived a couple of blocks from me, he started to meet me on the way to school and we walked home together too. Carlos’ father had been a dentist in Manzanillo now worked as an assistant for a Cuban dentist in Union City. Carlos mother, who had been a teacher, was the cleaning lady at that office. Carlos was a latch key kid and when we went to his apartment we ate those guava sandwiches on Cuban bread. Egghead tagged along for a while but somewhere along the way we lost him.

I delivered the Newark Star Ledger every morning and was done by 7:30 am.  My route was Jefferson and Madison Streets, just below Ferry Street where, just past the train tracks they devolved into shabby or empty buildings and weedy lots filled with liquor bottles and syringes. Egghead and Miss Irma lived in one of those shabby buildings.  

Below the Jersey Central tracks was an urban lover’s lane, where early morning couples steamed up the windows of their cars and shady characters lurked, smoking in the shadows day and night. I had to pass them to get to one of my customers and one morning, a man whistled at me.

“Hey little boy. I wanna pork you in the butt,” he called and made a juicy, kissing sound.

 After that, to avoid the tracks, I walked around the whole block to wind up on the other side. I collected from my customers in the afternoon and always tried to be done before dark. After I got home one night, a teenage boy delivering pizza was stabbed to death for fifty cents, just a few blocks from my route. This senseless crime rattled the already shaky neighborhood.

 “They’ll take your money and kill you anyway!” my mother called out after that as I left to do my collections. I didn’t blink. Danger was always part of the atmosphere, like Carbon Monoxide. Inhale, exhale, walk, run for your life.

“Bye, Mom!” I waved at her.

My paper route manager, Mr. Narkowitz, was an angry, ugly man. He looked like bad Stalin with coke bottle glasses, a gray crew cut like a spiky oven brush; his face sprayed with Perma-Scowl. Narkowitz! His name still feels like a curse. He followed me in his car most mornings as I made my deliveries.  Why? Didn’t he have grown stuff to do? Attendance was mandatory at his weekly meetings with all the carriers at his grimy, smoke-filled office.  All he did was shout at us to get more subscribers. He often pulled me aside for special nagging with his harsh, hissing voice because I smiled too much according to him.

“Smiley, you think the world owes you a living!” he snarled.

My life was not a great adventure story and my family had its problems, but I was just a boy, filled with goofy boy joy juice and that was no crime. I thought about what he said. Did I think the world owes me a living? I wasn’t sure what it meant and I didn’t think it was true.

“I don’t think so,” I said. He threw a lit cigarette at me and told me to get the fuck out of his office.

The Biggest Lie Ever Told

“Hey, Smiley, get your ass over here.” Narkowitz honked his horn at me one morning as I delivered my papers. He got out of his smelly black Rambler and grabbed my elbow. He pointed down Jefferson Street. “There’s at least a couple of hundred people living here. Why can’t you squeeze some new subscribers out of all this?” He waved his arm as if it were a magic wand with a cigarette at the end of it. “The paper’s having a promotion. Get 20 new customers and you could win a Schwinn Bicycle, the Continental 10 speed.”

That was exactly the bike I wanted! I saw it up at Bamberger’s Department Store and I was hoping to save enough to buy it someday. I had a clunky, rusted girl’s bike that my father bought second hand from a guy at the factory. I scraped off the rust, painted it silver and called it Nellybelle, just like the jeep on The Roy Rogers Show. I rode Nellybelle all over town. I loved its homely, dependable charms but I got teased about it. “Hey Dale Evans, nice horse!”

I wanted that Continental 10 Speed so I hustled and got some new subscribers but I was still five short. Time was running out. Egghead and Miss Irma’s building was within the scope of Narkowitz arm wave. I got a brilliant and terrible idea: what if put Miss Irma down as a new subscriber but gave her the paper for free?  

I still hung out with Egghead sometimes but he and Carlos didn’t like each other and, well, Carlos was more fun. I sometimes saw Egghead tagging along behind Tyrone Pendleberry, who was tall lean and tough. He smoked cigarettes and shoplifted from the Food Fair. He had a bouncing tough guy walk that Egghead tried to copy.

I took Egghead to see The Absent Minded Professor. I bought him two hot dogs and a big bucket of popcorn. On the way home I asked Egghead to talk to Miss Irma about the subscription while he practiced his new tough guy walk.

“No way. You do it,” he hissed.

“I’m afraid of her.”

“Me too,” he said.

“Do it with me.” I nudged him.

“No. Why should I?”

“When I get the new bike, I will give you my old one.”

He disappeared before my eyes. His body was still there but his eyes were blank. His soul went down to the well to check with the others trapped there. Then he popped back.

“Give me five dollars.”

“Five?” I asked, the new tough Egghead.

“Give me five dollars.” I could tell he really liked saying that. “And the bike.”

I had five dollars and I handed it to him. I liked doing that.

We almost marched into the apartment.

Miss Irma was watching The Guiding Light with the sound way up. She was eating a Ritz cracker smothered in margarine.

Egghead cleared his throat. She didn’t hear him or look at us.

“Um…Auntie?

There was a commercial. She noticed us and glared.

“What!!!?” Her mouth was full.

I stepped forward.

“Ma’m, would you like to get the Star Ledger for free?”

 “Ain’t nothing for free. What do I have to do for it?” she asked.

 “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” I gave her my most pious altar boy look and squeezed out a shy smile. Is this how my father started?

“You best not be shitting me, Bright Eyes.” She pointed a manicured finger at me.

Egghead walked down the stairs with me.

“When do I get that bike?”

“When I get mine.”  I said.

It felt like we weren’t friends anymore, just two shady little con artists pulling a scam.

I signed Miss Irma up for the phantom subscription.

The whole idea was wrong. I was an Altar Boy and a Boy Scout. The Scout Oath was my compass in the Ironbound’s rusty jungle, the slippery olive-oiled morality of my world. I tried to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent every day, for my own sake.

I didn’t lie. To survive I learned not to share everything I knew but I never told a boldfaced lie—and this was one. I thought about my lie every day.  I felt a stain spread across me, something that anyone could see. Is that what guilt is? I wanted Narkowitz off my back and I wanted that bike. So I did what I did and that’s that! Is this the way adults felt most of the time? I had no respect for them and now I was just like them. Did everybody notice the stain? I’m sure Narkowitz did. He was all stain, all the time.

I spent most of my time with Carlos now. He was an explorer discovering Newark’s exotic jungle and I was his native guide. He was much more fun than Egghead and I struggled to keep up with him.  His enthusiasm added a gleam to the old, grimy buildings and narrow streets—and beyond. Carlos got a used bike and I still had Nellybelle (until that new Schwinn!) and we rode out to the ghost city of Port Newark with its wide empty streets and bulging container ships. The ride to the airport included a dangerous stretch of highway but being so close to the planes and the important looking travelers made it worthwhile. It was exciting seeing my familiar world through Carlos’ green eyes. On the way home from the airport, a car on the highway almost clipped me. The angry driver pulled over and yelled at me.

 “You fucking moron. You almost got killed. I wish I could drag you home to your parents and tell them what you did!”

I wished he could too.

Carlos wanted to see a dirty movie at The Little Theater uptown. He told the burly woman in the box office window that we had to get in there and look for our father because our mother was having a baby. He was so persuasive and insistent that I almost believed him. So that’s what good lying looks like!  I imagined my father inside, all dressed up in a Swank suit. The burly woman didn’t buy it and I was relieved. I was 11 and he was 12 years old. 

One Saturday morning we got on a train at Penn Station and went to Monmouth Race Track. Carlos had horses in Cuba, followed racing in the paper, had some hunches and wanted to place bets. I learned the drill in a couple of minutes and we went up to the window and placed money bets.  I expected someone to stop us but nobody blinked. I bet on Brief Encounter in the second race because my mother loved that movie. She placed. Carlos won with Stylish Abby in the third. We stuck around for the fourth and left with close to fifty dollars in our pockets. We got back to Newark by five. When we got off the train, Egghead was on the platform, by himself, looking at the imaginary watch on his bare wrist. My heart fell to the platform. Oh, my poor Egghead. He looked up from his imaginary watch and saw me and Carlos. A sorrowful cloud passed over his little face and wafted off the platform, taking Egghead with it down the stairs.

Hurricane Carlos swept me up and further away from Egghead. I saw him from within the eye of the storm, way down there, that sad expectant face waiting for my magic wand to tap him on his round head and drag him on some adventure. He needed my smart boy sizzle and I needed his unconditional love. I needed Carlos’ bad boy sizzle and he needed my unconditional love.

One morning I delivered my papers, including my complementary one for Miss Irma and Narkowitz didn’t trail me as usual. I went home, changed for school and walked to Carlos’ building where he waited in front for me. When I got there, I heard a car horn honk. There was the dusty black Rambler and the glint of coke bottle glasses.

“Hey, Smiley, get in the car,” Narkowitz said.

“I can’t. I’m with my friend and we’re going to school now.”

“Get in. I’ll give yous both a ride.”

“It’s two blocks.”

“Get the fuck in the car. NOW!”

 Carlos and I got in the back seat of the smelly car, loaded with newspapers, cigarette butts, Slim Jim wrappers, torn potato chip bags and empty bottles of Ballantine Beer. Narkowitz drove two blocks and parked across the street from the school. He sat facing straight ahead, both hands gripping the steering wheel.

“Tell me about Mrs. Irma Payne.”

“What?” My body went cold.

“Irma Payne, Goddammit!”

“She’s at 155 Jefferson Street. Third floor.”

“I know. I paid her a visit.”

“Oh.” I felt a bead of cold sweat between my shoulder blades.

 “She don’t want the paper. She never did. You put her down just so you could get that bike!” He turned to face us, his ugly mug pulsing with rage. There was foam at the corners of his mouth and his glasses were fogged up.

“I….I……” The big fat bead of sweat wandered down my spine.

 “Shut the fuck up, you little piece of shit. You lied to me. YOU LIED TO ME!”

I watched him raise his flabby arm, watched his dirty hand with its chewed fingernails come swinging toward me. I smelled the nicotine, newsprint and grease from Bon Ton Potato Chips on his hairy fingers as they landed hard on my cheek.

Carlos screamed and jumped out of the car. I sat there for a moment, the sound still ringing in my ears, the sting burning my face. Narkowitz’ purple face was contorted in a mixture of horror, glee and something else that I just did not want to know about. I stumbled out of the car and stumbled through the rest of the day in shock. The next morning I didn’t want to deliver papers anymore. Narkowitz was waiting for me in the black Rambler; waiting to apologize--or kill me?

“You better get moving,” my mother said.

“I can’t. I don’t want to.”

 I was an A student who did the right thing. This was not like me.

 “Why?” Her eyes were wide.

Just four words. “He makes me nervous.”

 My mother picked up all the nuances in a heartbeat.

 “Stay here.” She ran to the kitchen, grabbed a broom and ran out onto the street.

“Get the hell out of here, you creep or I’ll beat your ugly face in!” she shouted, wielding the broom as if it were a sledgehammer.

I heard Narkowitz peel away and could almost smell the rubber. She decided not to tell my father because he would kill Narkowitz and we had enough trouble as it was. The end of Narkowitz. Ponto Final!

The Feast of Saint Anthony

As more Cubans came to the neighborhood, so did more Portuguese, some of them refugees from the colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola.  One of them was my shiftless Uncle Tito.

 “Great. Just what we need,” old Mr. Firpo, the barber said as I sat in his chair. “More Spics and Zekes.”  He pointed toward the street with his scissors as a blond man wearing a beret walked by. It was Tito.

He was my father’s older brother and with his blond hair and watery blue eyes and looked like a cad from a screwball comedy. The brothers never got along. After a few drinks, there were shouting matches and punches got thrown. They would patch it up for a bit but it didn’t last long. Tito chain smoked Du Mauriers and liked good brandy and flashy clothes. He’d been a desk clerk in Luanda in his Portuguese Army service but made it sound like he engaged in hand to hand combat with restless natives.  My father got Tito jobs that never worked out--until he became a security guard. He got fired and collected unemployment. That’s how he found his career track: the security guard/unemployment Ferris wheel that goes round and round but never up. Now I understood what Narkowitz meant: he thinks the world owes him a living!

 Our Lady of Fatima’s held its first Feast of Saint Anthony in 1959.  By 1961 it was a huge event that reverberated through the Ironbound. The church’s parking lot was set up with picnic tables and there were stands selling all the Portuguese favorites, their enticing fragrances filling the whole neighborhood. Even the Zeke Haters showed up because the food was so good.

My whole family went to the Feast of Saint Anthony. On the way in to the parking lot I thought I saw Egghead but I lost him in the crowd. My parents, sisters, grandmother and Tito shared a long picnic table and we took turns going up to the food stands. There were open grills where sardines and chourico sausages sizzled. There was a spit filled with carne de espeto, tender barbequed cubes of beef that melted in your mouth, and delicious pork cubes marinated in Madeira wine. There were bowls of Fava beans and tremôços, small yellow Portuguese beans served cold. Everything was accompanied by Portuguese rolls with a gentle crust and soft interior. People drank strong red wine from white porcelain bowls and everybody’s chins were covered in crumbs of bread, sardines and chourico.

My father and Tito drank a lot of wine and were kicking back shots of cachaça, sweet Portuguese firewater. Their voices were loud but still brotherly and friendly so far but my poor mother’s wide eyes indicated she heard the ticking of a time bomb.

I went to the front of the church on Jefferson Street where there were more traditional carnival stands: pizza, sausage, zeppoles, pretzels and the low rent rides like The Whip, and a 12 foot Ferris wheel with six tiny baskets, which I was too tall to fit into. Some kids were throwing firecrackers into the middle of the crowd.

I saw Egghead standing next to the pizza stand, looking at it wistfully and hungrily as if the guy behind the counter might read his mind, like I always did, and give him a free slice.

I went up to him, “Hey.”

He looked sad for a moment, where had I been? But then he smiled, the pretty teeth, the little puff of steam.

I figured he was hungry and we started walking to the parking lot where all the stands were. I knew my parents would spot us for some grub. As we got closer to the fragrant, sizzling stands, Egghead stopped. He saw that wall of white people, Portuguese people, heard the loud foreign voices and would not go further, no matter how hungry he was.

We turned back and sat on the church steps. We didn’t say anything, just sat side by side, looking at the crowd. It felt good to be next to Egghead again. From the back I could hear a woman yodeling a mournful Fado, in front of us the crowd lined up for the rides and everything was punctuated by the pop of firecrackers.

 Egghead was staring at the pizza stand. Oh right. That was my cue to march up there and buy two slices. I didn’t have a paper route anymore and I didn’t have any money. I had saved up 200 dollars but my parents borrowed it for some emergency.

I felt Egghead getting restless. He spit a big high gob into the crowd and jumped up.

“Where’s my bike?”

“I didn’t get the new one, so….”

“So what? You owe me. You owe me!”

“IF I get a new one, you can have Nellybelle.”

“When?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Give me some money.”

“I don’t have any.”

“You lie. You always got money” His voice had steel in it.

“No really.”

“How come?” He was right in my face.

 “I don’t deliver papers anymore.” (Thanks to your stupid grandmother.)

“You lie.”

“No. It’s true.”

 “Come on.” He pushed me a little too hard.

“No.” I pushed him back.

 “All I find I keep.” He started frisking me. His hands dug into my pockets. I got scared.

 A firecracker or M80 blew up at our feet. We jumped and I couldn’t hear anything. The force of it pulled Egghead high in the air and his shirt was over his head.

Behind him I saw my uncle Tito, his red face twisted with rage. He’d grabbed Egghead by his shirt and yanked him away from me. He turned Egghead around, slapped him across the face and threw him to the ground, shouting at him in Portuguese.

 “Stop! Stop! He’s my friend.” I got between them and got what may or may not have been an intentional whack from Tito.

Tito grabbed me by the shoulders. His red face was in mine and the cachaça wafted out of him.

 “You are OK? You are OK?”

“Yes. Yes.”

 Tito pushed me aside and stumbled down the steps, down Jefferson Street toward Ferry where the bars were. I imagined in his drunken mind this hero of the Portuguese Army had spotted an incipient native uprising and strategically, bravely squashed it. Or so the story would go at the bar.

I helped Egghead get up. His shirt was torn. He was rubbing his face and I knew what that sting felt like. His face was terrible to see, the same horror from when he fell in the pool but there was a new dark shadow behind it. Resentment. Hate. Rage, all sorting themselves out in front of me, trying to take over his worried little face.

“Let’s go,” I said and took his arm.  Where, I didn’t know yet.

He shook free. Shook his head.

 “Come on. Please.” I was going to ask my mother for money to buy him pizza.

He shook his head and walked down the steps and down Jefferson Street, back home to Miss Irma where he was now safer than being with me. I told a stupid lie for the sake of a bike that I didn’t get. I got slapped for it and then Egghead got slapped for it. I was going on to East Side High School. Egghead got left back. I never saw him again.

THE END