Say That To My Face

“It is nothing.”

“Even so, even if that’s so, there’ll still be somethin’ else, won’t there? Won’t there, Ray? You’ll have to leave the country or go to jail—”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t know that. And what will happen to us? Tell me the truth right now. What will happen to us? Will anyone be able to protect us?”

“Whaddaya want me to say? That I’m sure about how the rest of my life is gonna work out? Nobody can say that. Nobody really knows what’ll happen to them. And forgive me for makin’ this example, but didn’t you think you were gonna be married to that guy forever?”

“Go on.”

“Maybe we don’t know nothin’ for sure about what’s gonna happen to us. All I can tell you is that I know how I feel and I know what I wanna do. Don’t you see what I can give you?”

“Raymond, look at me and tell me that if you made a mistake it wouldn’t come down on all of us. Tell me that right now.”

He took a long time to answer. “I can’t.”

“Then neither can I. I can’t do it.”

There was silence. Then the soles of Ray’s shoes moved against the slate stairs and my mother said, “Raymond, don’t.”

A little more silence.

“I love them so much, Ray. I love them so fucking much I can’t stand it sometimes.”

“I know the feeling.”

Last thing Catherine and I heard before we ran up the stairs was Ray’s car door slam.

THE NEXT DAY, Catherine and I were in our room with our mom, packing up clothes to bring to our father’s for the weekend. I just blurted it out: “Mom, are you and Ray gonna get married?”

Catherine looked at me as if I were going to get in trouble for asking that. Our mother sat on my bed and said, “Me and Ray are not getting married.” We were silent. We knew there was more. “Also, I don’t think Ray is gonna be comin’ over to the house anymore.”

Catherine said, “He’s not?”

“No, he’s not, Catherine.”

Then I asked the question that our mother was dreading. “Why?”

She couldn’t explain it to us. She couldn’t explain to us why Ray wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t explain to us why there had been a divorce. She couldn’t explain what brought people together, then led them apart. In that moment—sitting on a bed in her parents’ converted attic, at twenty-five years old, with her two children—she had no idea why. She grabbed my arm. “Oh, sweetie”—her eyes got still, she seemed to be looking inside herself for more words—“I didn’t want him to.” Then her head dropped and her face distorted into extreme sadness. It happened as fast as you could tilt a hologram and see a different picture. Her head landed in her hands. My sister and I had that stunned silence that kids get when they see their parents fall apart. We might as well have just watched a car crash. We stood there not even blinking, in awe of a crying mother. Then we heard the beep of a horn. She took a deep breath, wiped her nose on her forearm and said, “There’s your father. Don’t keep him waiting.” I climbed up on the bed and gave her a kiss goodbye, then Catherine did the same. Our mother picked up our bag and followed Catherine and me down the stairs. From behind the screen door she watched her children get into her ex-husband’s car and drive away.

THAT NIGHT WE slept at our father’s girlfriend’s house. I asked Catherine where she thought Ray was. She didn’t know. We were trying to figure out a few things: why we had come so close and now had nothing to show for it but two television sets, and what was going to happen now. Sometime during the conversation I started to cry. Catherine tried to get me to think of my Big Wheel, but I just cried harder. Our father heard me and came into the room. He was puzzled and looked at my sister.

“What’s the matter with your brother?”

“He can’t sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

Then he asked me, “Joey, what’s the matter?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

My sister chimed in, “Tell him to think of his Big Wheel.” She was trying to help him help me. She was smart.

“Your Big Wheel? What about your Big Wheel?”

I didn’t answer.

My sister said, “He likes to think about his Big Wheel. It helps him sleep.”

Realizing Catherine knew more about this than he did, our father said, “You wanna think of your Big Wheel?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how does your Big Wheel go? What does it sound like?”

I said, “It sounds like … I don’t know.”

My father started to make car sounds. Honking horns and everything. My sister rolled her eyes. She knew this wasn’t going very well.

“Come on, Joey, how does a Big Wheel go? Does it go like this: brrruuummm. Or, vruuummm. Or like, beep-beep.”

I just stared at him. How, as a four-year-old, could I say, It sounds like the merciful palm of the Lord, soothing all my unspeakable childhood angst and misery. Can you make that sound, Dad?

“How does it go, Joey?”

“It just goes.”

I was dismissive enough about it that my father knew he had to change gears.

“Hey,” he said. The timbre in his voice changed. He pushed my sister and me closer together. “You guys know Credence Clearwater Revival?”

“No. What’s that?”

“It’s a rock and roll band and they have a song about Big Wheels.”

He had my interest. I said, “They do?”

“Yeah, they do. I’m not kiddin’ you.”

“How does it go?” I asked.

“Here. It goes like this.”

With his head hovering over mine, he started to sing, a soft ballad rendition of “Proud Mary.” He didn’t quite hit all the notes, but he knew every word. He sang about how I shouldn’t lose sleep worrying about how things might turn out. And about how there was a river somewhere with people who knew how to live. They all rode big wheels. If you went there, it didn’t matter if you were poor or sad or alone because these river people were happy to give. And there was a fiery woman there named Proud Mary. The chorus of the song played like a mantra in my head and faded me out to sleep. Big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’ … big wheels keep on turnin’.

THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Catherine and I came back to Verona Avenue with a firm agenda. “Mom,” Catherine said. “We want to sleep at Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie’s tonight.”

“Listen, I wanted to talk to you kids about that.”

That sentence was death. There was a certain tone our mother used when she was about to spring bad news on us. As soon as we heard it, we tried to cover our ears with our shoulders.

“Catherine is going to be starting kindergarten in a few weeks …”

And there was the other tone. The everything-is-going-to-be-all-right tone that not even our mother believed. This was bad. “… and that means that she has to be in school in the morning. And Uncle Ernie has to go to work and Aunt Marie can’t drive all the way up from the Bronx and take you to school, sweetie. So you kids can’t sleep over there anymore.”

I said, “Can’t they sleep over here?”

“No, they can’t, Joey.”

This was really friggin’ bad. In three days, we lost a potential stepfather, a swimming pool and four immediate family members. Not to mention two houses—the dream home Raymond was going to give us, and the one Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie already had given us.

That night, before dinner, I took my Big Wheel out for a ride. I spun out a few times along the side of the house, but that wasn’t helping me out of the state I was in. I rode to the front of the house and sat there on my low-rider plastic tricycle. I stared at the street. My eyes defocused on the asphalt. For a moment, my mind became empty, until a green car came down the hill of Verona Avenue and broke my stillness. I watched it the whole time it idled at the intersection. When the light changed, it took a left on Central Park Avenue and I followed it with my eyes until it was out of my sight. I looked up the hill it had come from, looked back at my grandparents’ house, stood up and carried my Big Wheel four house-lengths up the hill.

As soon as I got on the seat, I started to roll down the hill. I wasn’t ready for that. I tried to stop the front tire from turning by jamming my feet on the pedals. And I did stop it. But the decline was so steep, I started to skid down the hill anyway. This, I couldn’t stop. I looked to the bottom of the hill and saw the cars going by on the avenue. Holy shit. I started to pedal in order to stop the skid, but soon I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the wheel. I took my feet off the pedals and that’s when I understood the power of gravity. The wind got loud in my ears. I looked down. The pavement was a gray and black blur and the pedals were rotating as fast as pistons in a car engine. My eyes were tearing. From the wind, I think. And when I crossed the last driveway before the intersection I pulled that brake harder than I’d pulled anything in the past four years and sent myself into a spin of more than two complete revolutions before I stopped.

In my dizziness, I could see my mother running at me. The traffic light behind her turned red, and made her hair look like it was in flames. I thought the ride I just took was scary, but I didn’t know the true meaning of fear until I looked into her face. The only questions she had for me pertained directly to my sanity. “Are you crazy? You almost got yourself killed!” With one hand she held the Big Wheel off the ground and with the other hand hit me on my ass. The slaps came in conjunction with the words she emphasized. “HOW could you DO such a STUPID THING?” She dragged me into the backyard. “That’s it! You’re not riding this friggin’ thing ever again! You hear me? EVER!”

I sat on the walkway crying, as my mother went into the house and then returned with a rope. In pure horror, I watched her tie my Big Wheel to the fence that separated the houses. “And you’re never goin’ in the street, either. OK? Now get off the floor, clean yourself up and get in here and eat dinner!” Then she slammed the door.

My sister, who had been watching this whole scene from the patio, decided it was better to say nothing and slowly went in the house and sat at the kitchen table. I couldn’t stop crying. I looked over to my favorite toy. Not only had she tied it up, but she left it lying on its side. It looked like an injured animal about to die in captivity.

That night, we sat through the quietest dinner in our family’s history. There was no yelling about how much room the neighbors’ cars were taking up on the street or about how we needed to finish chewing before we spoke. Or about clogged gutters. There was no talk about how good the food was or if we wanted more. And there was no back-scratching afterward. When we finished, Catherine and I watched TV on the patio until our mother came outside and said, “It’s time to go to sleep.”

I lay in my bed for a long time listening to the adults coursing through the end of their night. Catherine knew I was still awake.

“I’m sorry I have to go to kindergarten,” she said.

“It’s OK.”

“I don’t wanna go.”

“You’ll have fun.”

“I don’t know.”

A LITTLE WHILE later, I woke up and saw a king flipping a gold coin in the air. He caught it and slapped it on his wrist like he was calling heads or tails. He pointed to the window. I went to it and looked down. There was Ray standing on the back patio holding a puppy. I turned back and caught the last moment of the king’s robe as he left the room and started down the stairs. My mother was asleep in her bed. I grabbed my blanket and went down the staircase. At the bottom, I turned left toward my grandparents’ room. Through their doorframe, they looked like a Dr. Seuss illustration—stick legs and two bulging stomachs under a cover. In the hall was a pair of shoes with nothing in them. In the kitchen, dinner dishes were on a drying rack, looking like they were about to move by themselves. The only background noise was the hum of the refrigerator.

I walked out the back door, onto the patio. There was no Ray, no king, no puppy. Just my Big Wheel still on its side. I went over and stood it upright. I lay down next to it, put my head on the seat and pulled my blanket over me. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. But I wanted something more. What I really wanted was an all-inclusive sleepover party. And when I shut my eyes, I saw everyone I wanted to invite. A picture came to me of my dad singing to me. My mother was giving me a bath and my grandfather was carving a turkey. My grandmother was dumping pasta in a colander. I saw my Cousin Dina on a swing and Vicky was trying to tie her shoe. Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie were at their dinner table and Ray was driving in his Cadillac. Catherine was sleeping right beside me. Also, there was a swimming pool.

I don’t know how long I had been asleep. My body jumped when I woke up. I didn’t open my eyes. I could tell it was still dark. An occasional car drove down Central Park Avenue. It was summertime and it was quiet. The patio smelled of dampness. The pictures of my family were still appearing in me. I felt the plastic seat of my Big Wheel under my head. I kept my eyes closed, but knew exactly where I was.

NOT BECAUSE I’M THIRSTY

The theory is this: The way in which we tried to get the attention of the first person we ever had a crush on is the way we continue to do it for the rest of our lives. However creative, desperate, blunt or devious our young tactics were, we don’t give them up.

My tactic? Pretended I was a superhero. Pretended I had enough superpowers to rescue people from the ordinary world, that I came from a place better than earth, where superhuman things are a way of life. A faraway place, where magical powers are realized and saviors are born. Who wouldn’t fall in love with someone from that world?

So, that’s what I tried to convince the first girl I had a crush on—that I was different than the rest. That I had powers no one she knew would ever have.

When I was twenty-six I told my girlfriend about this theory—that as adults we still try to win lovers with our childhood tactics—and what my tactics were. “Yeah,” she said, “that is what you do, isn’t it?”

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the year I was in the second grade. The year there were regular kickball games up the block and a crazy guy going around New York killing people. I want to talk about the first girl who let me be a superhero.

EVERY NIGHT IN front of the Gallaghers’ house, a kickball game would start up. A group of neighborhood kids gathered there after dinner and, in place of doing homework, played ball. The kickball season began in early spring and ended when we started having to run the bases with our hands in our pockets. My sister Catherine and I walked the five doors down to the Gallaghers’ and played until dusk, when our mother would call us home.

Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t run the kind of house in which the neighborhood kids were invited inside all the time. We didn’t even know what the inside of their house looked like—never got closer than the curb. Mr. Gallagher would only pop his head out the front door every so often to tell us to keep it down because his wife wasn’t feeling well and she was trying to sleep. I don’t ever remember actually seeing Mrs. Gallagher. But the manhole cover in front of their driveway was the best natural home plate on the block.

Rory Gallagher had long brown hair. Of the five Gallagher kids, she was second youngest. She stood with hands on her waist and her bony hip kicked out to one side. She also had a habit—which she didn’t pick up from her older brothers—of spitting. With a low growl she would collect the saliva in her throat, then hock it onto the street, two feet from where you were standing. It got so we didn’t mind. The only time Rory ever caught grief for this was when she spit on the street during the kickball games. If someone fielded a ball that had rolled over one of Rory’s saliva patches, they wouldn’t try to get the runner out; they would run after her and try to wipe the ball on her.

I once got my nerve up enough to ask her why she spit all the time. She claimed she only spit after she ate chicken cutlets for dinner, because she hated the aftertaste.

It was Rory’s attention I was trying to get.

BATMAN WAS A superhero who was also human. When he was a little kid, Batman’s parents were murdered. To avenge their murder and fight crime of all kinds, Batman developed all the strength and skill of his mind and body beyond traditional limits. He didn’t get an overdose of gamma radiation or get bit by a spider in a lab experiment, nor could he breathe underwater, turn invisible or assume different miraculous forms. Yeah, he could scale walls and kick bad-guy ass like the rest of the superheroes, but ultimately, he was just an ordinary man making the best of what he had, fighting for his cause.

Every so often during the kickball games I would have to run back home when I heard the Batphone ring. A call from the police commissioner saying there was a problem the cops couldn’t handle without me. I’d run back to the game and announce that I had to get to an undisclosed location immediately to fight crime. I’d apologize to Rory for having to leave, but demonstrate a superhero’s generosity by leaving my own kickball behind so the game could continue without me. In that case my sister would bring the ball home and I wouldn’t catch hell from Mom for losing it. And it wasn’t easy to part with my ball. I was six. It was my ball.

There were times when I was able to handle the crime situation over the phone. In which case I would walk back up the street, assure everyone that everything was going to be all right, and I’d finish out the game.

When it was time to go home, our mother belted out our names from the front stoop like an ocean liner’s horn wailing during a launch. And if you missed the boat, you were in trouble. If you missed it during that particular kickball season, which started March of 1977, you were in an extraordinary amount of trouble.

YOUNG GIRLS WITH shoulder-length brown hair. That’s who we were told he went after.

“Under no circumstances do you kids go out when it’s dark out. Do you hear me?”

“How about if the ice cream man comes?”

“No. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator.”

The first murder happened in July of the previous year. Initially it was just another homicide, a story that took up a tiny space in the newspaper. But March 8, 1977, marked the fifth attack. By then he had gone after nine people. Then it drew a lot of attention. Sketches of him were on TV, in the paper, posted in Laundromats and on telephone poles everywhere. He looked as plain as anyone’s father. Except he scared the shit out of us.

“Mom, does he only go after people in the city?”

“They don’t know. He goes after people in the Bronx, where we used to live, and that’s only ten minutes away from where we live now. I want you to listen to me. If you see a yellow or a cream-colored car with a man in it, I want you to run away from it. You run home and you tell me. Do you understand?”

They were shot in parked cars, on their front porches or walking home from school. The cops knew it was the same guy because they were able to confirm all the bullets came from the same kind of gun—a .44-caliber revolver. That’s how he got his first name, which all the kids in my neighborhood called him: the .44-Caliber Killer.

“They said he hates women. And you know how the cops know he’s gonna do it again?”

“How?”

“Because his gun holds five bullets and he only shoots four of them. He keeps one for the next time.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s what my dad said.”

“No, he keeps one bullet in his gun in case someone tries to run after him and catch him, then he can shoot them, too.”

He started to leave notes for the cops, poems about pouring lead on girls’ heads until they were dead, cats mating and birds singing. He also left drawings with circles and arrows and crosses that looked like the insignia of demonic worship. He called himself “the monster” and signed the notes with his second name: Son of Sam.

My sister once walked around the house with yellow guck in her hair and a cellophane bag over it for about an hour. Then my mother leaned her backward over the kitchen sink and washed the guck out. When my sister lifted her head up, her brown hair was now blond.

My mother was very excited. “Oh, look how pretty. Come look at yourself.”

I followed them into the bathroom. Mom sat Catherine up on the sink in front of the mirror for a second opinion.

“Catherine, it’s so pretty. You look like a movie star.”

Catherine touched her hair the way a kid fumbles with a new toy, not sure how it works.

“Do you like it, sweetie?”

My sister smiled. “Yeah. I like it a lot.”

WHEN I ASKED my mother how Mrs. Gallagher died, she told me she was sick with cancer. I was in the second grade; Rory was in the fifth. It happened in April, only a month after the fifth Son of Sam attack.

After the funeral, family, friends and people from the neighborhood went over to the Gallaghers’ house. It was the only time I ever saw it from the inside. For us kids, having to sit quietly in their strange house with a group of adults, in our nice clothes, with no game going on outside was the most disorienting part of the whole day. What I really wanted to do was poke around in their kitchen and bathroom and definitely get a look at Rory’s room.

I think I was the only one who noticed Rory walk up the stairs. I followed her. All the doors that lined the long hallway were closed; the daylight couldn’t get in. Rory opened the last door on the right and went in. I knew I was in a place I probably shouldn’t have been, but curiosity coupled with my crush kept me going. The power to turn invisible would have come in handy. I peeked in after her. The room had a huge canopy bed and two layers of curtains on the windows. Against the wall was a vanity covered with makeup cases and bottles of perfume like my mother had in her room. Also, there were bottles just like the ones my stepfather kept his asthma medicine in.

Rory opened a dresser drawer and was kneeling in front of it, her hands kneading through the clothes. She looked confused. She searched through the drawer as if what she wanted was there last time she checked. She took a green sweater out and held it up by the sleeves, but still wasn’t satisfied with what she found. Maybe Rory believed that she couldn’t have been brought to a scary place such as this earth only to be left unattended, and was convinced that folded up in that sweater she would find a perfect explanation for all this. She examined the whole thing, then reached inside and carefully read the label.

I forgot I was trying to be unnoticed and said, “What’s it say?”

My voice or my presence didn’t startle her. She seemed to know I was there the whole time. She turned her head to me; the sweater was draped over her lap.

“It says you can’t wash it.”

BETWEEN THE FIVE children in mourning and parents who were afraid to let their children out of the house, our kickball games really slowed down. A few of us would still gather in front of the Gallaghers’ house but felt we didn’t have the right to the playing field unless one of the Gallagher kids joined us. When they didn’t come out, we just stood around, bounced the ball around for a while, then reluctantly went back home way before the sun went down. And when one of them did come out to start the game, it was never Rory. She stopped playing altogether, and without her around there wasn’t much crime for me to fight.

From the street I would look up, trying to figure out which window was hers. I had visions of flying into their house, swooping down, grabbing Rory off her bed and taking her to a safe distance above all the lunacy. If I really was a superhero I could’ve gotten Rory out of the house, caught the Son of Sam and somehow saved Mrs. Gallagher’s life. I didn’t even know what a .44-caliber revolver or a cancer cell looked like, but they were the same—two invisible monsters that snuck up on people and killed them. Surely Batman must have had some kind of weapon that could beat both of them. But, pretend as I did, I couldn’t stop either one of them.