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Night Speed* “Louis!” my father
called. His phlegmy voice cut
into the bedroom like a draft of chill air from beyond the curtained window
and made me shudder. I knew that it could only be one thing when he called me
at that hour of the night, yanking me out of my dumb child world, with its
simple gratifications, and fetching me onto his adult terrain of gloomy and
confusing seriousness. “Louis!” I did not answer. He was downstairs in
the completely darkened livingroom watching the Friday Night Fights on the
second-hand television an uncle had given us, sprawled out on the sofa as
though knocked down by the dingy light. Or he sat at the kitchen table
playing gin rummy against himself, smoking cigarettes, his expression behind
the smokey haze somewhere between anger and despair. He would be doing
nothing else on an evening in which he stayed in the house; nothing beyond
cards or tv would occur to him, though occasionally we would discover him
with one of our library or school books in his lap and his one eye and great
nose pointed downward at the pages. Later, often months later, he would
surprise us with talk about brontosauruses, Ulysses S. Grant, molecules,
whatever else had been in the books, and with a knowledge about the subject
far more complete than any of us possessed. “Louis!” I could detect no
annoyance in his voice yet and so still pretended not to hear. Upstairs on the
linoleum floor of the bedroom, I was engaged in an intense battle with my
brothers. Carlo and I sat on one side of the room at the foot of our bed and
Joe and Salvi occupied the other at the foot of theirs; our miniature armies
of plastic men, tanks, and various other artillery were arranged between us.
Joe and Salvi, my older brothers, had mixed up a half dozen brown Indians on
horseback with their dark green soldiers, but Carlo and I had in our ranks a
handful of white cowboys, so both sides were even. We had been playing for
about a half hour, inflicting casualties by tossing checkers or dominoes as
explosives, when my father called. “Louis!” he called
again, but I continued to play, unwilling just yet to have these pleasant
moments interrupted. “Louis, Dad’s calling
you,” Theresa said from the adjoining bedroom. She and Mary were playing with
their dolls, even though Theresa’s Barbie no longer had hair, or anything
that resembled hair, because Joe had set it on fire at the gas range the
other day for no other reason than simple meanness or pleasure. I had
watched, not quite believing that he would do it, as Joe thrust the doll’s
head into the blue flame. Joe was a tough kid and to ask him to stop would
risk a fight or something of my own getting destroyed in the worst, and
sometimes the most inventive, manner. So I did not try to stop him. I didn’t
even think to stop him. I had, I realize now, as much cruelty in my child
heart as my brother, though Joe’s manifested itself more. The doll’s hair went
up in a bright flash and the smoke stung our nostrils. Theresa shrieked and
cried when she saw the doll, but it was not in her nature to become
hysterical or to allow something like the incinerated hair of her favorite
doll to become a psychological bruise—that was more like Mary—or to go
unrevenged. While Joe played outside that same day, Theresa doused his model
of Godzilla with lighter fluid, put a match to it, and dropped it out the
second floor window. The model’s head and left leg separated from the body
when it struck the pavement but the main body melted and gave off black smoke
as it burned. Theresa also jumped up and down on Joe’s model of a ‘57 Chevy,
the one with the actual rubber wheels. Joe came home and
found the charred pieces of Godzilla in a shoebox on his dresser and the
shattered pieces of his Chevy on the floor in front of it. My brother yelled
and cursed, and we all wondered what he would do now, whether attack the
remaining dolls, vandalize Theresa’s paint-by-numbers, or flush her fish and
turtles down the toilet. He was capable of anything. But before he could act
my mother caught wind of the squabble and intervened, warning Joe that if he
did anything to Theresa’s dolls or to her other possessions she would do the
same to him, including yanking off his arms. That abruptly ended the fight. She was in the
bedroom now, reading a thick romance novel with a sexy cover depicting a man
clutching a voluptuous woman with an expression on her face, baffling to me
then, of both fear and desire. As she read, my mother munched on walnuts I
had earlier cracked open for her unasked with a ballpeen hammer and put in a
cereal bowl. The radio was softly playing and the baby was sleeping in the
second drawer of my mother’s dresser, utterly unaware of the common terrors
of everyday life that awaited him. “Louis!” my father
called again, but exasperation in his voice now. “Yes?” I finally
answered, as I always did, as I always would, and without arguing or
suggesting to my father that he send Joe and Salvi, who, after all, were
older and bigger than me. My father wouldn’t listen anyway. He called me and
not the others because I was the fastest runner of his children. I was faster
than my friends, the fastest kid on our block, faster than the black boys in
the neighborhood where we lived, a few steps from the poverty line. “Put on your
sneakers,” my father called. I knocked out one
final tank with a domino before getting up from the floor. “They’re already on,”
I called. We lived then, in the
autumn of 1959, in the Tasker Homes Housing Project in Philadelphia, close
enough to the oil refineries along the Schuylkill River to smell and to hear
the gas flares roar when they burned in the night. The Projects, a sprawling
collection of two and three story brown brick row homes, were bordered on one
side by the Schuylkill Expressway and on the other by Morris Street, where
the bus ran. Groups of Project houses were broken up into “drives,” which
radiated from central courtyards, where four basketball backboards stood. The
courtyards were big enough for softball games and touch football, and when we
played you had to stay wary of the poles holding up the backboards. Edward
Montgomery, a friend of mine, had recently run into a pole during a football
game while trying to catch up to a pass thrown by my brother Joe. He knocked
himself out with a loud thwonk and
lay unmoving on the macadam while I ran for his mother. Together, we hurried
back to the courtyard, Miss Montgomery lumbering and huffing in her slippers
and house dress as I ran ahead. Edward was still unconscious when we arrived,
a lump on his forehead so large it looked applied. His mother parted the
crowd of kids with her bulk, shoved the kid aside busily slapping Edward and,
seeing her son out cold on the ground, screamed with an intensity that sent
the pigeons flying from the roof tops. Edward wound up at Children’s
Hospital, into which nearly all my brothers and sisters and I would be
admitted at one time or another for the various emergencies and illnesses
that marked our childhoods. We lived in the
Project because we were poor, because we were on Welfare, because my father,
though trained as a plumber, could not seem to hold a steady job. He was a
gambler, too, a cardplayer, a horse better, a numbers player, and sometimes
needed money so desperately, to feed us or to make a bet, he pawned items of
ours, like our first television. Other things disappeared: my mother’s mixer,
lamps, the radio, once toys we had received from the Salvation Army. I think
it must have been desperation, too, and not a criminal strain, that caused
him to receive stolen merchandise, which he then sold to friends and
neighbors for a profit. I once came upon him in the basement as he stacked
several dozen toasters; when through, he dusted off his hands and did a
little dervish jig before the appliances, smiling, his eye merry and bright. He
tried to sell the “surplus food” we received from the government, the bags of
rice, blocks of bland cheese, the cans of ground meat that had the
consistency and nearly the smell of dog food, but no one was interested. The door closed
behind me. I glimpsed the joyless constellations and a sliver of moon beyond
the roof lines of the plain row homes before leaping off the front step into
the chill autumn night. I began to run as soon as I hit the concrete,
sprinting at full speed. When I ran, everyone
else seemed to be weighted down, and I felt certain that if I could run just
a little faster, I’d be able to run across water and not sink. Someone had
nicknamed me Flash, and I had a pair of sneakers on which Carlo had painted
tiny yellow wings. Somewhere, I felt secret pride that my father called only
me, but that emotion lay buried beneath the apprehension caused from having
to run through the night. During the day, I ran exhilarated over my abnormal
speed, but in the empty night, I ran full-tilt out of fear, my speed merely a
tool then to shorten the time spent in the dark and nothing more. I feared the dark—the
madmen it hid, the wild dogs, the thugs. I expected to see monsters too, like
the ones from the crowded matinee horror movies I had watched at the nearby
Earl Theater, from which I emerged always momentarily surprised, as I blinked
back the painful sunlight, that the world was absolutely unchanged from when
I entered. I never ran into any monsters, of course, but I had actually seen
a wild dog once, a huge, hairy, wolf-like creature eating out of a garbage
can and making scary snorting noises. I took a wide path around the animal,
praying that it would not chase me, and felt blessed when it did not. The street punks were
real, too. Salvi had recently been stopped by a group of them, roughed up,
and robbed of twenty-eight cents, his jacket, and his scapular that one of
the gang had spotted through Salvi’s undershirt. The loss of the scapular
upset Salvi the most. The pictures of Saint Michael had rested for a year
against the skin of Salvi’s slight chest and between his shoulder blades, and
now some hood wore them. “He didn’t even know what it was,” my brother said
near tears. Such a theft, my mother assured him, was a sacrilege and it would
not go unpunished, either in this world or the next. My father had this world
in mind. He went with Salvi through the neighborhood and its fringes looking
for the punks who had robbed his son, his jaws clamped tight against his
familiar rage. I had no doubt, seeing my father’s face empty now of
everything but fury, that he would have hurt and possibly killed someone that
day if he and Salvi had found any members of the gang. They did not find any
of the boys, but months later, while Joe, Salvi and I were returning from the
playground on 30th Street, Salvi spotted the kid who had taken his scapular
walking toward us on the other side of the street. Salvi had wanted to ignore
the boy and continue home, but Joe insisted we stop him, said he would stop
with or without us, and started across the street. The kid was a head taller
than Joe but that didn’t matter. When Salvi and I came up, Joe and the thief
were raising their fists. It was over quickly, with the taller kid bleeding
from the nose and ear after Joe threw himself at him and punched, gouged,
kicked and maybe even bit him before the kid could throw one punch. He ended
up on the ground with Joe’s knee on his chest. He no longer had the scapular,
but Salvi didn’t want it anyway after the kid had worn it. Before letting him
go, Joe invited us to kick the dazed kid while he pinned him on the ground.
Salvi declined but, as if it were the most natural thing in the world,
especially to a thief who had robbed my brother, I gave the kid two swift
kicks in the side. I was smaller than him even more than Joe, and so the
kicks barely registered on his face. Almost immediately, I regretted what I
had done, not because I felt sorry for him or guilty, but because I was
afraid I might run into him alone some day and he’d beat me up more seriously
than Joe had him. Thinking about the
kid, I turned right after leaving the house and soon crossed the lightless
courtyard at the center of Pierce Drive, our section of the Project. Last
January, a group of boys went through the neighborhood gathering all the
discarded Christmas trees that could be found; my brothers and I helped to
pile them at the center of the courtyard, where a kid named Crazy Lester set
them on fire. The trees, with tinsel still caught among the pine needles,
burned swiftly, and the flames rose higher than the two story Project houses.
Sparks drifted much higher. The fire lit up the courtyard bright enough to
read by and reflected golden yellow in the windowpanes of the surrounding
houses. Adults stood on their front steps watching, some shaking their heads,
while we boys whooped and danced around the blaze. You could feel the heat
ten yards back. The fire continued for hours as more trees were gathered.
When the trees ran out, we fetched bags of trash, lumber, furniture, anything
else that would burn, and tossed it into the flames. Aerosol cans from the
trash exploded; unknown things hissed, burning gorgeous blues and greens
against the background of yellow. Crazy Lester tried to throw a stray cat
into the fire but it clung to his wrists as he tried to hurl it; it scratched
him deeply, and only fell at the rim of the fire, then streaked into the
night as Lester howled about his wounded arms. Everybody laughed. After a time, we
settled and stood around the fire watching it diminish, sandwiched between
the heat full on our faces and the winter cold at our backs. When the fire
had shrunk to little more than embers, my brothers and I went home. We
entered the house smelling strongly of smoke, with our faces bright red from
the flames. “Savages,” my mother
called us. “I raised savages,” and then she lined us all up outside the
bathroom and made us take baths and wash our hair. Afterwards, she yelled at
our father for allowing us to frolic around the bonfire. “You probably wanted
to join them,” she said. He only smiled slightly at that. In the morning,
charred bottles, tin cans, and a nest of springs from a sofa sat in the ash
among the black trunks and brittle branches that had survived the blaze. The
women of the neighborhood, my mother included, cleaned up the remaining
debris as though it were their task in a traditional ritual. The smudge from
the ash still remained on the courtyard ground almost a year later, the
concrete permanently scorched, a reminder of how we kids, all of us poor,
most of us receiving Welfare, government surplus food, hand-outs from the
Salvation Army, had so giddily annihilated the very symbol of Christmas joy. I flew out of the
courtyard and ran along the row of houses at right angles to the row I lived
in. With my eyes tearing from the cold, I ran so fast and petrified of being
grabbed, kidnapped, or murdered that I ran just at the edge of hysteria, a
scream about to jump from my throat. The Projects were deserted, and even
though I passed houses whose occupants I knew—the DeCorns, the Norrises, Mr.
Hatch, who cut our hair in his livingroom for a quarter—I still felt terror,
danger immediate and lethal. Monsters could materialize in an instant, thugs
could step suddenly from the darkness. If I could have thought past the
terror, I would have hated my father for sending me out in the night like
this, but I would also have thought that I didn’t want to disappoint him,
fail him, allow him to think that I was afraid. Sissies were afraid of the
dark, and my father would not want a sissy for a son. He already had two
girls. I dashed across the
drive that ringed the eight banks of row houses surrounding the courtyard,
then through the entrance of our drive between the end houses, and then out,
where I crossed 29th Street to the community center island on the other side.
I sprinted up the walkway between the plots of grass, bearing down on the
steps cut between the hedges, where in the summer we caught bees in peanut
butter jars. A single light burned in the rental office, but the recreation
building, where my parents met at a dance years before, was completely dark.
I leaped up the three steps without touching them and ran alongside the
rental office, turned left where it met the recreation building, sprinted
past its bank of green doors against which couples necked when the weather
allowed, then turned sharply right into an alley between the dark library and
a brick wall. Warm air from the
grates alongside the building blew upward against my churning legs and face
as I sprinted through the narrow space. Here, I imagined the worst
catastrophes for myself. Under such headlong speed and confined to such a
small space, I knew that I would run directly into whatever person or thing
appeared at the end of the alley. There would be no time to stop and I’d
collide smack into evil. We’d embrace. And then the horror would begin. I had
seen movies. I had heard stories. My mother read me the newspapers. Assaults,
mutilations, perversions, disappearances—they could happen. I could run into
a burly man reeking of cigar and onions, possessed of immense strength, who
would leer down at me clutched in his hands and then do the horrible things
my mother refused to describe. I slowed momentarily
as I reached the end of the alley, but only enough to change direction if
necessary, squirt to the side or stop entirely and reverse. Meeting nothing
at the alley’s end, I burst into the open, and felt relieved that I had made
it this far without trouble. I dashed across the back lot of the recreation center
and turned the corner into the bright glare coming through the plate glass of
the drugstore window, where large globes of colored liquid like magic elixir
sat ready to be tapped. Barely winded, I entered the uniform white
fluorescent light and the mingled smells of toiletries, medicine, and candy.
Big band music played in the background. The store was empty. “You ran again,
Louis?” Mr. Rubin, the druggist, asked. “Is it an emergency?” “I don’t know.” I
handed him the piece of paper my father had given me along with five dollars. The druggist read the
prescription through his bifocals. “Well, I’ll hurry anyway.” Mr. Rubin walked into
the back room while I held on to the edge of the counter, nervously thinking
about the frightening night and the run home. I tried to think about
something else. I looked at the display of comic books to my right and,
because my father had said to buy something for myself, I thought about
getting an issue of the Fantastic Four, but it seemed too extravagant a
purchase and I turned my eyes instead to the candy rack. Turkish Taffy, Juicy
Fruits, Mary Janes, Junior Mints, Pom Poms, Chuckles, Baby Ruth, Almond Joy,
Snickers, Milky Way, Hershey, Pez, Sweet Tarts, M & Ms, Goobers, SnoCaps,
Raisinets, Chunkies, Peanut Chews, Life Savers, Sugar Babies . . .
so dizzying an array of flavors and textures that I could not decide, or
decide fast enough. Mr. Rubin returned
and handed me a small white bag. “There you are, Louis. Anything else?” “No.” I placed the
money on the counter, already thinking about the dark again, the candy
completely forgotten. “Be careful,” the
druggist said as he gave me the change. I nodded and hurried
from the bright store, the tiny bag clutched tightly in my hand. After the bright
fluorescence of the store, the dark seemed thicker, almost palpable against
my skin, but I plunged into it without hesitation and began my return
sprint—around the corner and through the frightful alley, past the library,
the recreation building and the adjoining rental office. I jumped off the
steps in a single leap as if trying for record distance or to fracture my
bones. I landed with my legs churning and with no break in my stride, and I
ran furiously over the walkway toward and then across 29th Street. I entered Pierce
Drive as though a cave, and soon dashed past the houses of my friends. Gray
light from a black and white television marked the rectangular window of
Steven Lott’s house. His parents were deaf, and their calls for Steve across
the courtyard sounded like the braying of animals. His attention caught,
Steve and his parents signed to each other, their hand motions frantic and
weird, their mouths forming silent words as they communicated. I’d watch
amazed, and thought Steve special, possessed as he was of arcane and indecipherable
language. But other kids laughed at Steve’s parents, and he often fought
because of it. Soon, I reached the
courtyard with the dark smudge at its center, dashed across its corner, and
rushed the last yards to my house. It was the several brief moments on the
steps as I flung open the stormdoor that I found most terrifying, as if the
monsters I told myself did not exist or the wild rabid dogs with their
dripping jaws and rank breath or the hoodlums so hungry to crack a head had
been in close pursuit after me, and needed only a second or two to catch up
and snatch me back into the darkness. So when I entered the house, the warm
air that met me smelling of that evening’s dinner of fried potatoes and eggs
done in my mother’s heavy black skillet, it was as though I threw myself into
the livingroom. My father still lay
on the sofa, the television flickering in the corner past his feet. As
always, he looked at his watch as I entered. “I think it’s a record,” he
said. “How long?” I gasped. “Four and a half
minutes.” “Four and a half?” It
seemed unreal that I could run that distance with the long hand of the clock
having moved such a small segment. “That’s what it
says.” I handed him the tiny
white bag. “It’s almost a whole minute shorter than the last time.” I felt a
little happy at that. “Joe takes his time
when I send him. Salvi, he’s just slow.” I nodded, hearing
this before. “You’re not afraid,
are you?” “I’m not afraid.” He
seemed to need to hear it, and I said it to convince myself that it was true.
“That’s good.” I wanted to get away
now and return upstairs to my game on the bedroom floor, if my brothers
hadn’t lost interest. But before I could get away, my father asked me to
bring him his tray. I had dreaded that, and my heart sank as I walked toward
the kitchen. The bottle of rubbing
alcohol, the syringes, and the small bottle of fluid sat on the stainless
steel tray in the refrigerator in the space reserved for it on the top shelf.
It was always there, as long as I could remember, but never quite lost itself
among the food. I put my tongue to the top of a bottle one dull afternoon and
my tongue recoiled at the taste like a yanked window shade. I removed the
tray delicately, as though handling something precious and rare. Back in the
livingroom, I handed my father the cool tray and stood beside him as he made
his preparations, wanting to leave again but knowing he’d want me to wait so
I could return the tray to the refrigerator. He jabbed the needle into the
bottle of insulin and drew the proper dosage into the glass syringe. After
squirting a thin jet of the drug from the needle, he swabbed his upper arm
with alcohol and paused to inject himself. I averted my eyes. Not because I
was squeamish or phobic about needles, but because watching my father take
these daily injections diminished him. With the alcohol, he rubbed on himself
the very stink of illness, the odor of hospital interiors, and this tended to
neutralize his usual aspect of power and invulnerability; he’d appear
momentarily frail, a weakling, dependant on the drug in the tiny bottle I ran
through the dark nights to get for him. I preferred to think of him swinging
his dangerous-looking plumber’s wrenches as he crossed the sidewalk, armed,
it seemed, for a Medieval battle where brute strength and a certain rudeness
of character counted more than anything. My father tossed the
needle into his arm, injected the insulin, and withdrew the syringe quickly,
as though aware too of what the injections did to me. He replaced the syringe
and the rubbing alcohol on the tray. “Watch the fight?” he
asked as he handed me the tray. “Who is it?” “Sugar Ray Robinson
and a nobody.” “I don’t know.
Maybe.” I returned the tray
to the refrigerator and placed it in its spot. Before closing the door, I
spotted on the second shelf a bowl of cherry Jello with disks of slightly
browned banana suspended near its surface. My insides quivered and I went to
the cabinet for a bowl. A minute later, I sat
in the chair across from my father and ate a huge dish of Jello and banana in
the gray light of the television while watching two men attempt to beat each
other to death. I felt safe, at least for the moment. |