I don’t remember calling my mother, risking their lives by exposing my parents to this crazy man, but honestly, it wasn’t the first time I’d brought real live crazy into their lives.
She remembers being absolutely frantic, racing in from Long Island, running every red light in the hopes of getting stopped by the police, in the hopes the police could fix it all, make the crazy man stop beating her little girl. I picture my dad, knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel, silent, stone faced and focused; my mother, small fireworks of nervous energy exploding in the seat next to him, pressing her foot to the floor as if there were a second gas pedal on the passenger side and she could make the car go even faster.
It hadn’t occurred to me to call the police, but somehow by the time we all got back to the apartment on 7th Street, they were there.
He’s still asleep when I come back an hour later with my mother, father and two large uniformed police officers. That’s how I like my cops, bigger than me & on my side. I wait in the living room, prying a dead cockroach out of the blue shag rug with my toe, while they go into the bedroom to wake him. Their voices are muffled by the walls & the city noises that slip in through the cracked windows. His voice is muffled by the blue serge of their uniforms & the thickness of their bodies as they hustle him past me, past the holes he punched in the wall when he missed my face, past the bathroom where he flushed my money down the toilet. But his voice echoes off the cold tile & dirty marble of the hallway where the dump him confused, naked & very angry. The smaller of the two large blue men, huge in his own right, grabs a pair of jeans from the back of a chair.
“His?”
I nod & hand him Wolf’s black Chinese slippers as well. The cop tosses them into the hall, smiling as he watches Red Wolf climb into the jeans. Yelling, cursing in Spanish, then begging and threatening in English, Wolf leaves the building, bare-chested and broke. The cops stay while I gather the rest of his clothes & the offending Bible, everything he brought with him. Everything except the rug and the tv. I’m keeping those. Wolf stands across the street watching, shooting me the evil eye as they dump everything he owns on the stoop and start to leave.
“Hey, wait up,” catching up to them at the front door, “I’m going with you to file charges. I want the son-of a bitch locked up.” Two blank Irishy cop faces stare down at me. “What? I want him locked up. He tried to kill me.”
The smaller one is staring down at his shoe now. The other one focuses somewhere over my shoulder.
“You’re not bruised, not enough,” he says to his highly polished black lace up, “It’s a waste of time to do the paperwork.” He looks up, not directly at me, but sideways.
“A waste of fuckin’ time? Not enough bruises? Are you fucking kidding me? Do I hafta wait until he breaks my fucking arm? Or my neck? Would you find the time to do the paperwork if he had killed me? I mean, come on here…god-dammit.”
“She’s upset,” my mother apologizes to the short cop, to both of them. Touching my arm to calm me down, “He’s gone. You’ll stay at the house, in your old room. I’ll make stuffed cabbage.”
Stuffed Cabbage. Chicken Soup. Brisket. Chocolate Pudding. It’s the way she says ‘I love you’. But my old room is my father’s office now. Some parents keep their kids rooms like museum exhibits the last day they lived there. Mine got turned over the minute I left. She doesn’t like me cursing at the police, it’s not the way I was raised. But then my life isn’t going exactly the way she had planned, not even a little bit. I’d completely forgotten they were there.
“There’d have to be more bruises than you got,” the big cop one says. “Sorry, but it’d be thrown right out. No witnesses, nothing broken, no case. Sorry, but I’d get the locks changed if I was you.” He glances across the street, but Wolf is gone.
I watch them walk out of the building and think I know where not to go next time I need help.
“Come, we’ll pack a few things and…,” my mother steps up next to me, so close I can feel the warmth of her body and get a little whiff of Jean Nate. Her everyday summer scent. I smell her sweat too, a little bitter, tangy even. Nervous sweat.
The cops couldn’t look at me.
I can’t look at my father. I know she blames him for a lot of my mess, him and his wild stories.
I can’t look at my mother. I can’t handle her fear.
I can barely manage my own.
It’s not right, what I do, dragging them into the mess of my life.
“I gotta go to work, Ma.” I don’t tell them he took all my money. I don’t tell them we had sex last night. I don’t tell them I miss him even though I’m scared.
I tell them to go home.
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Posted September 3, 2009 at 6:37 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, family, Guys & Dolls, lonliness, love. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
