He lay there in the dark listening to his mother and father fucking. It wasn't love-making like the middle-class people in Stuyvesant Town understood love-making. His father was tearing into her—each thrust made her scream. The shabby couch they lay on squeaked and scraped against the living room wall.
"Charlie, aren't you finished yet?" his mother cried out.
Charlie didn't reply. Rage raged through his body. Lying next to her he could smell the layers of dirt on her unwashed feet. He, Charlie, who used to drive with Uncle John and his cousins to Philadelphia from Port Jefferson to see the Army-Navy Game in the 1930s was stuck with this woman. Shanty-Irish from Brooklyn. He had met her on a bread line during the Depression after his uncle had thrown him out for forging checks.
Uncle John was a shrewd Lithuanian from Vilnius who had parlayed a trolley car conductor's job into a dry goods store into some orange groves in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Then, the government bought the groves to make Cape Canaveral.
All Charlie had to do was sit on his hands and count the money. But he forged checks and his uncle banished him.
Charlie finished with Mary. He had other women before in Florida. Better women. Cleaner women. But now he had four kids in two rooms on East 13th Street.
Charlie hated it. "Guineas, Jews, Spics and Niggers"—not a German in sight except up on 86th Street.
Mary didn't move or say anything. She just fell off to sleep. He felt for her underwear. She always pinned money there. He found the purse and took out the faded dollar bills. He would buy wine as soon as the liquor store opened on Avenue B. He lay there thinking about the beach in Florida.
Eddie breathed a sigh of relief that it was over. His body trembled. He had a hard-on, but he knew he shouldn't have a hard-on. Especially since he was sleeping next to his sister. She was a year older and had great tits and an ass. But her looks made it hard for him. Everybody on the block wanted to fuck her. She was tall and blonde—a lot like Grace Kelly. She would walk down the sweltering street in the middle of August in white shorts and the greasers would almost jump off their fire escapes to get at her. So Eddie had to keep the whole world at bay and himself, too.
"Why couldn't she be just a little bit ugly like those guinea girls, the Tamas on the corner?" he thought to himself. Now, everyone was coming up to him and asking, "Eddie, can't you fix me up with your sister?" Even the niggers at the Boys' Club wanted a piece of her.
"Why couldn't she have epilepsy like Charlie?" he thought. All that contorting and shaking and throwing-up wouldn't make her so attractive. He was tired of being her protector—and protecting her from himself.
"Jesus, I still got this hard-on." It brushed against her pajamas. He felt her eyes flip open. She felt his dick against her and slapped him hard in the face.
"What's that for?" he cried out.
She slapped him again.
"And that's for listening to Mommy and Daddy do it," she said. She covered herself with the sheets and pulled her body as far away from Eddie as she could. Every rustle of her body intoxicated him—intoxicated everybody. Even that Jew boy from the Village she was hanging around with. Beatniks. And them faggot folk singers they all listened to. God, he hated that fuckin' music. But he could still smell her body. It was fresh and sweet.
Eddie thought about tomorrow. It was the Boys' Club ping-pong finals. Winner gets a dinner at Toffenetti's on Times Square and a show at Radio City. Loser gets pissed on. He had been practicing for nine months. The right racket, the right sneakers, the right stance. He had even cozied up to that Jew boy, Eddie Kraemar for more pointers. Kraemar was the city's ping-pong champ. Ping-pong was kind of a faggot's game, like miniature tennis, but it was all he was good at at the Club.
"Goddamn niggers have boxing sewed-up," he thought. Although, in reality, the black boxers refused to fight Eddie because he kicked, bit and generally mauled anybody in the ring.
But he couldn't lose tomorrow. His hard-on had gone down now. His sister had fallen back to sleep. She still smelled like honey. He wondered what was in store for his younger brother and sister. Now for sure she would get in Immaculate Conception Grammar School starting from kindergarten. Not like him. He had transferred halfway through the sixth grade. From P.S. 61. The kids in his Catholic school class hated him. Hated him because he wore his father's white shirts to school. Hated him because his clothes smelled of DDT to keep the roaches and bedbugs away from the apartment. Hated him because he didn't live in Stuyvesant Town—he was from the tenements that surrounded and preyed on Stuyvesant Town on all sides.
Eddie rubbed his ribs. They hurt. They ached.
"Roll over, Beethoven. I need a shot of rhythm and blues."
"I need a shot of heroin," thought Eddie to make the pain go away. But heroin would be losing. Eddie had sworn he would not wind up an alcoholic epileptic like his father. He winced again. It felt like his ribs were tiny pieces of glass cutting into his heart. Maybe it was good his mother and father distracted him with their fucking. Or his sister's body.
"Bet you can even force a hard-on if you're dead," he thought to himself.
But how was he going to play ping-pong in this condition? What happened earlier in the day in the schoolyard at Immaculate Conception? He got into a shoving match with one of those Stuyvesant Town faggots—he slid hard into second base and the faggot went flying up in the air. He landed six inches from Eddie's head and tried to kick Eddie in the face. Eddie grabbed the faggot's balls and twisted hard. The faggot groaned and fell on his knees. Eddie placed one hand under the faggot's chin to line-up his punch so that when it landed it would take out some of the faggot's teeth and shatter some of the bone in his nose.
But then the weirdest thing happened. Before Eddie could finish off the faggot, the girls in the schoolyard started to scream and yell at Eddie and hit him with their fists. Stuyvesant Town girls. All screaming and yelling and cursing at him:
"Home Relief Beggar!"
"Home Relief Beggar!"
It was a chant. Now, everyone in the schoolyard was yelling it:
"Home Relief Beggar!"
"Home Relief Beggar!"
Eddie's head started to swim. The faggot tripped Eddie and then kicked Eddie hard in the chest, once, twice, six times as the girls cheered.
"Shit, those girls are all in my own class and they want this guy to kick the shit out of me," Eddie thought.
Then, he heard something pop in his chest and it made a whizzing sound like the air going out of a tire. The faggot heard it and ran away. So did the girls. He lay there listening to the sound of the air leaving him.
"Don't do anything. Don't rat anybody out," he told himself. "Otherwise, they won't take your younger sister into kindergarten if you embarrass their Stuyvesant-Town darlings with some kind of school investigation.
An old maintenance worker helped Eddie to his feet and Eddie staggered home. Eddie was 13 years old and the only friend he had in the world was this tired old maintenance worker.
"How am I going to win? I might even start spitting up blood," he thought.
The ping-pong team arrived at the Boys' Club in Queens, somewhere near Queens Boulevard. The Club was co-ed, unlike Eddie's club in Manhattan. Girls in dungarees and "Woodside H.S." jackets. A lot of make up. A lot of hair. A lot of gum. Firm-looking tits. Eddie felt himself starting to get a hard-on.
"Steinhauer," yelled the referee. Eddie took his position at the table. His opponent was Stashu Kwiatkowski, a toothpick-chewing polock. Eddie crouched down and felt the glass splinters in his chest. Eddie had beating this guy in exhibition matches, but this game was for the city championship. The polock chewed down on his toothpick. Sweat poured off Eddie's hands and his legs trembled. And then the polock won two games straight, 21-14 and 21-9. Eddie was out of the tournament.
Everyone else on Eddie's team was a winner. They let Eddie carry the team trophy home on the subway back to Manhattan to make him feel good.
"How could you lose to that scivoso?" Joe Dovi asked. "There's something wrong with him chewing on them toothpicks all the time."
"He's got palsy or leprosy or something," added Syl Mallardi. "Epilepsy! That's what he got, Eddie! Eplilepsy!"
Eddie couldn't hear anymore. The splinters of glass in his chest forced him to close his eyes, and just for a moment Eddie let himself slip away to that cool, quiet place under the Coney Island boardwalk where no one could get him.
Ron Spurga grew up during the anti-war movement of the 1960's and worked as a community organizer on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. He subsequently founded L.E.S.C.I.A., a political satire theatre company which is producing his latest play about the aftermath of 9/11, "Alphabet City." His poems have been published in France and in the Netherlands.