Sleepers

  I ran as fast as burnt lungs and tired legs would permit and reached my three friends as they went past a poster announcing the much-heralded rematch between World Wrestling Federation champion Bruno Sammartino and challenger Gorilla Monsoon.

  “You’re only supposed to take the hot dogs,” I said when I got to them, my hands holding a side of the cart. “Not the wagon.”

  “Now you tell us,” John said.

  “Just leave it here,” I panted. “You guys are lookin’ to push somethin’, push me. I can’t take another step.”

  “No, not here,” Michael said, pointing to our right. “Up there. Over by the subway station.”

  “The guy’s comin’ fast, Mikey,” John said. “I don’t think we got time to make it to the subway.”

  “I got a plan,” Michael said.

  I turned around and saw the vendor gaining on us by the second. “I’m sure he’s got one too,” I said, helping to lift the cart onto the sidewalk, toward the top step of the IRT subway station.

  “I don’t even like hot dogs,” John said.

  The plan, as it turned out, was as simple and as dumb as anything we had ever done. We were to hold the cart on the top edge of the stairwell, leaning it downward, and wait for the vendor. We were to let go the second he grabbed the handles and leave the scene as he struggled to ease the cart back onto the sidewalk.

  To this day, I don’t know why we did it. But we would all pay a price. Everyone. All it took was a minute, but in that minute everything changed.

  People who’ve been shot always recall the incident as if it happened to them in slow motion, and that’s how I’ll always remember those final seconds with the hot dog cart. The action around me moved at quarter speed and the background was nothing but haze—quick hands, fleeing legs, scattered bodies, all shaped in dark, nasty blurs.

  The moment arrived for me and my friends on a day and time when Mickey Mantle was crossing the plate with a home run we would have all been proud to witness.

  Michael held the cart the longest, his arms bulging at the strength needed to keep it from falling down the steps. John had slipped on his side, his back against the station’s wooden banister, both hands sliced by the wooden handles. Tommy fell to his knees, desperately grabbing at one of the wheels, his knees scraping concrete. I held both my hands to the base of the umbrella stand, grip tight, splashes of hot water showering my arms and face.

  The vendor was a few feet behind us, on his knees, his hands spread out across his face, his eyes visible.

  “It’s not gonna hold!” Tommy said, the wheel slipping from his grip.

  “Let it go,” Michael said.

  “Don’t stop now!” I said. “We can’t stop now!”

  “Let it go, Shakes,” Michael urged, his voice a surrender to the inevitable. “Let it go.”

  Watching the cart tumble down the stairs was as painful as trying to keep it from going down. The noise was loud, numbing, and eerie, two cars colliding on an empty street Hot dogs, onions, sodas, ice, napkins, and sauerkraut jumped out in unison, splattering against the sides of the stairwell, bouncing and smacking the front of a Florida vacation poster. One of the rear wheels flew off halfway down the landing. The umbrella stand split against the base of the stair wall.

  Then came the loudest noise, one that rocked the entire subway station. It was a sound no one expected to hear.

  A crunching sound of wood against bone.

  It is a sound I have heard every day of my life since.

  JAMES CALDWELL WAS a sixty-seven-year-old retired printer. He had been married to the same woman for thirty-six years, had three grown children, all daughters, and four grandchildren, three of them boys. He had spent his morning in Lower Manhattan, visiting with one of those daughters, Alice, newly wed to a junior executive working for a midtown accounting firm. He had stopped in a bakery in Little Italy to buy his wife a box of her favorite pastries, which he carried in his left hand. On doctor’s orders, Caldwell had turned his back on a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit less than a week earlier. He refused to give up his Scotch, however, a drink he liked straight up, ice water on the side, a bowl of pretzels at the ready.

  He was chewing two pieces of Juicy Fruit gum and was digging into his front pants pocket for enough loose change to buy the late edition of the Daily News when the cart landed on him, barreling in at chest level. His hands reached out to grab the sides of the wagon in a futile attempt to ward off its runaway power.

  The cart was a destructive missile, taking with it all in its wake. That wake now included the body of James Caldwell, who had no bigger plans for the rest of his day than reading the sports pages.

  Together, both cart and man came to rest as one, slamming against a white tile subway wall. The cart crumpled, wheels rolling off in opposite directions, handles splintered, boiling water and pieces of ice crashing on top of Caldwell’s bloody head, looking no bigger than a hairless tan ball, lodged against the sharpest edge of the wagon.

  The silence after the crash was as numbing as the noise during it.

  We held our positions, feet cemented in place. No one spoke, and the three of us choked back tears. We heard the wail of sirens and prayed they were headed our way. I looked down at the wreckage and saw the lower half of Caldwell’s legs twitching under the weight. Thin lines of blood mixed with dirty hot dog water to form a puddle in one corner.

  The smell of excrement filtered through the air.

  Michael turned to me and, for the first time since I’d known him, I saw fear on his face.

  John and Tommy didn’t move, their bodies trembling, faces ashen, both unnerved enough to pass out. The four of us felt much older than we had less than an hour earlier, the ticking of our personal clocks accelerating with the speed of the unfolding incident.

  To our left, a thin, middle-aged woman in a checkered housedress and white apron, strands of long, dark hair hiding the anger fanning her eyes, crossed the street in a run and stood at the top stair of the subway station. Hands on her hips, shoulders hunched in a tight pattern, she stared down at the scene.

  “My sweet Jesus,” she shouted, turning her gaze toward us, her voice a sharp, loud, high pitch. “What have you boys done? What in God’s name have you boys done? Tell me, now, what have you done?”

  “I think we just killed a man,” Michael said.

  15

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE police issued an order of immediate custody, a juvenile arrest warrant, against the four of us. We were charged with a series of crimes: reckless endangerment; assault in the first; possession of a dangerous instrument; assault with intent; misdemeanor assault; petty theft. We were each assigned PINS status, branding us persons in need of supervision. We were also tagged as youthful offenders, Y.O. on the streets. The label came with the luxury of keeping our records sealed and the knowledge that Y.O.’s were seldom dealt adult-length sentences, even by the harshest family court judge.

  While James Caldwell lay in critical condition in the intensive care unit of St. Clare’s Hospital, clinging to life on a respirator, we were remanded into our parents’ custody. The shock of the day still had not worn away as we moved with great speed and little care through the system of arrest and booking, our eyes and ears closed to the sobs and screams surrounding us. We were in another world. Above the action. Our parents cried and cursed, the cops were stone-faced, Caldwell’s family wanted us dead, and the whole neighborhood, it seemed, was waiting for us outside the station house. We’d always been on the other side looking in at the guys getting busted. Now it was us. We were the ones they pointed at. The ones they talked about. We were the guilty ones now.

  MY FATHER HAD just slapped me, hard, across my face. I stared at him; he was slumped on a chair next to the kitchen table, wearing only briefs and a T-shirt. His face was red, his hands were twitching, his eyes welled with tears. My mother was in a back room, facedown on her bed, crying.

  My parents had always granted me free reign, confident in my ability to stee
r clear of street jams, believing I was not the type to bring trouble knocking at the front door. This freedom also served to keep me out of view of their daily physical and verbal battles.

  I lost that freedom the instant the hot dog cart crashed against the body of James Caldwell.

  “I’m sorry, Dad” was all I could manage to say.

  “Sorry ain’t gonna do you much good now, kid,” my father said, softening. “You gotta face up to what you did. The four of you.”

  “What’s going to happen to us?” I asked, my voice breaking, tears falling down my cheeks.

  “The old man lives, you might catch a break,” my father said. “Do a few months in a juvenile home.”

  I could barely ask the question. “And if he doesn’t?”

  My father couldn’t answer. He reached out his arms and held me, both of us crying, both of us afraid.

  OVER THE NEXT several days, Hell’s Kitchen, which, in the past, never failed to embrace its criminals, seemed a neighborhood in shock. It wasn’t the crime that had hands raised to the sky, but the fact that Michael, John, Tommy, and I had committed it.

  “You guys were different,” Fat Mancho told me years later. “Yeah, sure, you fooled around, busted balls, got into fights, shit like that. But you never went outta your way to hurt anybody. You were never punks. Until you did the job with the cart. That was an upstate number and that’s something nobody figured on.”

  By the day, two weeks later, when we stood before a family court judge, we knew that James Caldwell was going to make it out of the hospital alive. The news had been relayed to us by Father Bobby, who counseled all the families involved.

  During the time between our arrest and scheduled judgment, I was not allowed to associate with my friends, be seen in their company, or talk to them by phone. We were each kept under close family scrutiny, spending the bulk of our days buried inside pur apartments. Father Bobby visited each of us daily, bringing with him a handful of comics and a few words of encouragement He always left a little sadder than when he arrived.

  Our crime had not been terrible enough to make any of the papers, so our notoriety did not move further than the neighborhood. Still, we couldn’t help but feel like public enemies. There were whispers behind my mother’s back whenever she went out for groceries or headed off to church. John’s mother missed so many days of work she was close to losing her job. When Michael Was sent out on a fast errand, a beer bottle was tossed his way. Tommy was denied entry to a local movie theater.

  “Your kind ain’t welcome,” he was told. “Not here. Not in my place.”

  “I didn’t do anything to you,” Tommy said.

  “You got a problem with what I done?” the theater manager asked. “Call the cops.”

  During those two long, frightening, and tedious weeks, I left my apartment on just three occasions.

  The first two, I went to church with my mother.

  The third, I went to see King Benny.

  I POURED MYSELF an espresso from a two-cup pot, King Benny staring across the table. It was a late Sunday afternoon and a transistor radio resting against the window behind me was tuned in low to a Yankee game. Two men, wearing dark slacks and sleeveless T-shirts, sat outside the club on wooden chairs.

  I drank my coffee and listened to Phil Rizzuto call the game, taking it into the bottom half of the eighth inning, Yanks down by three runs. King Benny’s hands were spread flat on the table, his face a clean-shaven mask.

  “They suck this year,” he said, lifting a finger in the direction of the radio.

  “They sucked last year,” I said.

  “Gets to be a habit,” he said. “A bad habit. Like going to jail.”

  1 nodded and lowered my head, averting his gaze.

  “We didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” I said.

  “You didn’t mean it don’t make it not happen.”

  “We didn’t go out looking to hurt is what I meant,” I said.

  “Few do,” King Benny said.

  “How long do you think we’ll get?”

  “A year,” King Benny told me, and it made my knees go weak. “Maybe more. Depends on the mood the judge is in.”

  “I hear the one we got is tough,” I said. “Likes to set examples.”

  “They’re all tough,” King Benny said.

  I drank some more coffee and scanned the room, framing it in my mind, not wanting to forget its look, its stench, its feeling of safety. King Benny’s foul-smelling club was a second home to me and, like the library, had become a place to escape the harshness of the life I knew.

  It was an escape to the quiet company of the single most dangerous man in Hell’s Kitchen.

  “Your father tell you what to expect?” King Benny asked. “Tell you how to handle yourself?”

  “He hasn’t talked much,” I said. “He’s pretty upset. Most of the time, he and my mom just sit and cry. Or they fight. One or the other.”

  “I can’t help you up there,” King Benny said, leaning closer to me, his eyes tight on my face. “Or your friends. You’re gonna be on your own in that place. It won’t be easy, Shakes. It’s gonna be hard. The hardest thing you and your friends are ever gonna have to do.”

  “My father thinks that too,” I said. “That’s why he’s crying.”

  “Your father knows that,” King Benny said. “Only he don’t think you’re ready for it. Don’t think you can take it.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” King Benny said. “I don’t. There’s a part of you that’s a lot like me. A small part. That should be enough to bring you back alive.”

  “I better go,” I said, pushing the cup to one side. “I’m not allowed to stay out alone too long.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “I see the judge on Thursday,” I said, looking at the man I had grown to love as much as my own father. “That’s when we find out where we go and for how long.”

  “Your parents be with you?”

  “My father,” I said. “I don’t think my mother can handle it. You know how she gets.”

  “It’s better that way,” King Benny said. “She shouldn’t see you in a courtroom.”

  “Will you still be here when I get back?” I asked, my voice choked, my eyes focusing on the two men outside, trying not to let King Benny see me cry.

  “I’ll always be here,” he said. “Doing what I always do.”

  “What do you do here?” I asked, a smile at the center of my tears.

  King Benny pointed to the empty espresso pot.

  “I make coffee,” he said.

  16

  MY FRIENDS AND I stood behind a scarred oak table in the middle of a high-ceilinged, airless room, hands at our sides, staring straight ahead. We were dressed in the only good clothes we owned, the dark jackets, dark slacks, white shirts, and sky-gray ties standing out against the cream-colored courtroom walls of New York State’s Division of Family Justice.

  John and I were on the right side of the table, next to our lawyer, a short, doe-eyed man who had trouble breathing through his nose. His hair was slicked down with gel and the tail of his white shirt was popping out the back of his brown pants.

  Michael and Tommy stood to his left.

  None of us looked at him and none bothered to listen to a word he uttered.

  Our families were behind us, held apart by a wooden barrier and two court officers. My father sat in the first row of benches, directly behind me, his sad, angry presence like hot air on my neck. We had talked very little on the subway ride downtown. He assured me all would go well, that no one beyond the neighborhood would know where I was, and that maybe, just maybe, all this was for the good, that it was a lesson waiting to be learned.

  “Be like goin’ to camp,” my father said as the train careened toward Chambers Street. “Plenty of fresh air, lots of runnin’ around, decent food. And they’ll keep you in line. Maybe teach you and your friends some discipline. Do what I couldn’t do.”

  “I??
?m gonna miss you, Dad,” I said.

  “Save that shit,” my father said. “You can’t think like that. You gotta be like a stone. Can’t think about anybody. Can’t worry about anybody. Except yourself. It’s the only way, kid. Believe me, I know what I’m talkin’ about here.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence, wrapped in the noisy company of the rattling car.

  I was two months shy of my thirteenth birthday and about to leave home for the first time in my life.

  “HAVE THE DEFENDANTS been made aware of the charges against them?” the judge asked.

  “Yes, they have, your honor,” our lawyer responded, sounding as low-rent as he looked.

  “Do they understand those charges?”

  “Yes, they do, your honor.”

  In truth we didn’t understand. We were told the night before our appearance that the charges against us would be lumped together under the umbrella tag of assault one, which constituted reckless endangerment. The petty theft charge would be dropped in everyone’s case but mine, since my action was what precipitated all that followed.

  “It’s the best I could do,” our lawyer told us, sitting behind a cluttered desk in his one-room office. “You have to admit, it’s better than getting hit with attempted murder. Which is what the other side wanted.”

  “You’re a regular Perry Mason,” John told him seconds before his mother cuffed the side of his face.

  “What does it mean for the boys?” Father Bobby asked, ignoring the slap and the comment.

  “They’ll do a year,” the lawyer said. “Minimum. Lorenzo may get a few months more tacked on since he initiated the action. But then, he may get less time since he was last on the scene. That’s the only open question.”

  “It wasn’t his idea,” Michael said. “It was mine.”

  “The idea doesn’t matter as much as the act,” the lawyer said. “Anyway, I should be able to convince the judge not to tack on any extra time given how young Lorenzo is.”

  “They’re all young,” Father Bobby said.

  “And they’re all guilty,” the lawyer said, closing a yellow folder on his desk and reaching for a pack of cigarettes.