Читать книгу Cold Type - Harvey Araton - Страница 15

Chapter Nine

Jamie stepped away from the marching strikers as they neared the Trib building and the wooden blue barricades that were set up by police. Keeping his distance from the picket line, he hid across the street behind a parked van.

His cousin, along with Carla Delgado, had taken over organization of the line. Steven, he conceded, was a natural leader. He always had been. When they were kids, in school or at summer camp in the Catskills, there was even a modicum of status in it for Jamie when others discovered that Steven was his cousin.

While Steven hung a picket sign from a low branch of a small tree, Carla stepped into the street and yelled, “Listen up.”

The assembled staff once again gave her its full attention.

“Unless you sign up at headquarters, you will not be eligible for union strike benefits. You can get a hundred bucks a week, two-hundred if you are the only working member of your family and have at least two kids.”

His ex-wife would be thrilled with this jackpot news, Jamie thought. The notion of midnight patrol on the deserted waterfront already fatigued him. The afternoon sun had faded behind the clouds and taken with it the last vestige of autumnal comfort. Jamie almost started to walk toward the picket line but held back. Steven didn’t seem to be looking for him. He had more than enough people to organize for the war that he insisted would bring Brady down.

Jamie decided to leave, shielding himself from view behind parked cars. He headed for the subway, thinking Steven won’t even notice I’m gone. Just the same, the train back to Brooklyn Heights couldn’t come fast enough.

With no destination in mind, he walked the narrow streets lined with handsome brownstones and brick-faced apartment buildings. He had fallen hard for them and the entire neighborhood from the night he nearly emptied his gas tank in search of a parking spot and was forty-five minutes late for his first date with Karyn.

They met in the spring of 1990 at a mixer for Hunter College graduates. Karyn failed to mention that she had transferred to Hunter from Princeton after two years. Having fared so poorly in the Columbia pickup scene, Jamie might have wished her well and gone on his way had she told him. Instead, he and Karyn topic-hopped from his business—newspapers—to hers—book publishing—until finding more mutual territory: a love of Jackson Browne, every Seinfeld episode from the show’s inception in 1989 and the NBA playoffs.

Jamie was for Magic Johnson and the Lakers because they were, beyond Showtime, the essence of unselfish team play. She was for the Pistons and Isiah Thomas because he had “the cutest ass and an irresistible smile.”

Given that standard, Jamie decided not to elaborate on how much of a basketball junkie he really was—and how much of his adolescence he had devoted to the game.

He looked more like a wrestler than a basketball player. A shade over 5' 8" without the verticality of his hair, Jamie was on the stocky side, a body replica of his father. The curvature of his back made his shoulders look stooped. Nor was he the most graceful or fluid of athletes. But he had spent hours as a kid launching weathered balls at backboards and rims in schoolyards and in cramped neighborhood backyards. From the time he played his first games of three-on-three, he loved basketball’s freewheeling nature and simplicity, the ease with which it was organized, controlled, without parental supervision or intrusion.

By late middle school he was the proud owner of a magnetic dribble with a surprising quickness for the proverbial stout white boy. For Jamie, the beauty of playing his position, of being the point guard, was that he was in control of making things happen for others. The process of creating off the dribble and finding the open man was instinctive. You had to make an immediate decision and live with it. There was no time for second guessing—a Jamie specialty—because the next play was coming up fast.

He made his high school freshman team and became friends with several black kids who lived in the housing projects a few blocks away. In the 70s, Farragut Houses was no isolated fortress of poverty and despair like other developments around the city. Blacks and whites, European immigrants and those from the Caribbean co-existed. But there was never a proprietary question around the basketball courts that were smack dab in the middle of the cluster of buildings. The black kids reigned. And Jamie had an open invitation to get chosen in.

They called him J—so what if he bore no resemblance to the gravity defying Julius Erving, Dr. J? At least his curly hair, worn stylishly long, could from a distance pass for a reasonable imitation of Erving’s trademark fro.

The courts were quiet on Sunday afternoons when Erving’s Philadelphia 76ers played on national television. Jamie often watched from the crowded apartment of the boy he liked best. Ronald Allen was a gangly six feet tall—gap-toothed and so skinny that the other boys called him Bones. His favorite Knick was Earl Monroe, though his attempts to mimic Monroe’s classic spin moves were comical. His bank shot, however, was money.

“Man, we should go to your house and watch the game,” he said to Jamie one Sunday when Dr. J and the 76ers were playing the Knicks—his favorite team but only a shell of the early 70s championship teams. “Bet your family’s got a nice color TV, better than this old piece of shit.”

That was true, but Jamie made up an excuse that his family was having relatives over. For one thing, he was suspicious of how welcoming his father would be. He hated it when Morris and Uncle Lou used that word—schvartzer. Their attitudes convinced Jamie to make sure that what happened in the projects stayed in the projects.

Beyond basketball, there were other adolescent adventures going on there. He smoked his first joint in a chilly, dark stairwell. He copped his first feel.

Sarah Tompkins’ breasts were fleshy and Milky Way brown. In the half-dozen times they slipped away from the crowd, she confidently guided him under her sweater, never bothering to complicate matters with a bra.

Morris had no clue that his son’s incursions into the projects were producing such interracial indulgences. He still hated that Jamie spent time in a place that his generation believed symbolized failure. They had worked so hard to escape from it.

“I just go there to play ball,” Jamie told him. But Morris learned otherwise one hazy summer afternoon between Jamie’s freshman and sophomore years. Jamie’s team had lost a game and stepped off the court for the boys who called next. Jamie wandered outside the fence where the girls watched and flirted. Sarah Tompkins and a friend were among them.

The friend sidled up to Jamie and said, “You’re not bad for a white boy.” Sarah promptly elbowed her aside.

“Don’t be getting ideas,” she said. “Jamie and I got a little thing going. We have our secret meeting place.”

Jamie blushed, uncomfortable with the public display. Just the same he was aroused by Sarah’s seductive playfulness. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap top with tight shorts that highlighted the tautness of her thighs.

She winked at Jamie and said, “Maybe we’ll meet up soon if you promise to take me on a date.”

“Like where?” Jamie said.

“You know, like a movie.”

The thought of being with Sarah outside the projects terrified Jamie. He played along though, asking her what she wanted to see.

“Something sexy,” she said, rubbing a shoulder against his. This led to a game of pretend fighting and a round of kissy face. Jamie was feeling his fifteen-year-old oats until he felt a hard tap on the shoulder.

He turned to face his father.

“What are you doing here?” he stammered.

“I need you to come home now,” Morris said, red-faced and in no mood to argue.

“Why?” Jamie said. He sensed the others were watching.

“Because your grandmother had a heart attack and is in critical condition. We’re all going to the hospital.”

Morris turned and walked off. Jamie looked at Sarah, who had overheard them. She shrugged her shoulders. Jamie left without saying a word. One of the mouthier boys yelled out, “Don’t worry, Big Daddy. J’s cool. We weren’t taking his money—only his motherfucking Cons.”

It was a reference Morris wouldn’t get—Jamie had bought a new pair of black Converse sneakers that were the envy of the playground.

He got why his father had to come looking for him and why he had to follow him home, lame as it looked to the others. But only the gravity of his mother’s health had eclipsed the shock of what Morris had stumbled upon—his son in the arms of a black girl. He didn’t say a word about it to Jamie, but Jamie read the disapproval in his eyes.

Jamie told his mother, “Every time I pick up my basketball and walk toward the door, he looks at me like I’m going out to join the NAACP.”

“Talk to him about it,” Molly said.

“Yeah, right,” Jamie said.

He knew it was pointless to explain—and why the hell should he? Morris would never understand what his social acceptance in those outdoor courts meant. Even Jamie was incapable of fully getting it until years later when he explained it to his brother-in-law Mickey, who liked basketball. “Going into the projects helped me play all four years in high school. I sat the bench on varsity as a senior because I didn’t have the speed the other kids did. That didn’t matter. I was on the team. I was accepted as a player. Not that it mattered to anyone at home.”

“Your dad didn’t go the games?” Mickey asked.

“Not one.”

“Why not?”

“They were played weekdays, late in the afternoon,” Jamie said. “He’d already left for work. But he had some days off. He just didn’t like, you know, the element. His greatest fear was that I was going to date black girls.”

Jamie, in fact, could still picture the relief on Morris’ face when, years later, he brought Karyn home to meet his parents—the first time he’d brought any woman home. A few bites into dinner, he announced they had decided to get married. Molly cried. Morris hugged Karyn tight. She had him at the mention of her last name—Kleinman.

Jamie had called her a few days after they met. He took her on a dinner date in Brooklyn Heights.

“I thought you would be here at 7, 7:15,” she said when she answered the door. Her one-bedroom, second-floor apartment was in a corner building two blocks from the famous Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

“Your neighborhood has lots of personality but no parking,” he said.

Her building was run down, its hallways musty and dark. But Karyn’s apartment was well-furnished and spotless, painted in light, cheerful colors. Framed posters decorated the walls. The pillows on the couch were set perfectly in the corners. Magazines were carefully laid out on the coffee table as if it were a dentist’s office.

Karyn wore a short black skirt, turtleneck sweater and earrings that fell even with her neck-length light brown hair. She appeared taller than five-foot-four, thanks to a slender frame and the heels on her black Frye boots. She wore granny glasses that slid down her nose just enough to cover a slight bump. On both wrists were bangle bracelets, different colors all—her trademark wardrobe accoutrements. She had on a lemon-scented perfume that Jamie found too pungent but would never have the audacity to complain about.

They ate sushi, which he labored to feign a taste for, on Montague Street. They bought ice cream cones at a Baskin-Robbins next door to the newsstand. Eight months later they were married in the neighborhood in a brownstone synagogue and celebrated modestly with a small delegation of family and friends in a private room at Junior’s restaurant on Flatbush. Jamie moved into her one-bedroom apartment. He quickly grew to love the irregularly shaped neighborhood on the promontory of Long Island—about eight blocks wide and fourteen long at its principal range—that took form as New York’s so-called first suburb after the establishment of a steam ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1814.

It all seemed so long ago now. So much had since gone wrong. So much had changed. Baskin-Robbins had turned into a florist. Jamie and Karyn had left what had been her neighborhood together and Jamie had come back to it, alone.

He walked along Montague, picked up a Times from the newsstand and settled in at a Greek restaurant where they had occasionally eaten. Jamie set the paper on the table and scanned the front page. The lead story on the mid-term elections headlined: Clinton Strategists See Gloom for Next Two Years. The middle of the page featured an investigative look into security advancements that had apparently been proposed at the World Trade Center following the car bombing of an underground garage in February 1993.

Jamie had played a small role in the Trib’s reporting of that story, manning the phones and recording information from reporters in the field. He was grateful for the mention he received in the box identifying the many who had contributed to the coverage.

Below the fold, near the page index, was a small headline over a single tease paragraph: Shutdown at Trib, Metro, Page 3. He pulled the Metro section from inside, folded over the front. He found himself staring at a familiar sight—burning stacks of Tribs alongside the hobbled delivery truck.

The strike news seemed dated because, after all, this was a story he was living. By the time Jamie’s dinner of lamb and potatoes arrived, he had downed his Coke and wasn’t much hungry. He picked at the meat and called for the check. He resumed his wandering of the streets and strolled onto the Promenade. There he could stare at the twilight majesty of downtown Manhattan. He could watch the boats drift by, framed against the backdrop of office buildings, dwarfed by the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Jamie loved the view though he always seemed to be admiring it in passing or when jogging or braving the potholes on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Darkness came. The bulb on a nearby lamppost flickered. A tugboat foghorn bellowed, momentarily drowning out the rumbling of the highway traffic below. Jamie felt no urgency to go home. He was content to stretch out his legs and to dwell on his predicament without having to do anything about it. An hour passed, then another. He closed his eyes, napped intermittently until distracted by high school boys in droopy sweats woofing on each other, bouncing basketballs that echoed in the evening chill.

Jamie glanced at his watch: ten after eight.

He trudged wearily up the exit ramp, past a young couple embracing against the fence of the toddler playground. Jamie swung around to Hicks Street, where he had taken refuge after his divorce from Karyn in a red brick, four-story building. All he could afford was a three-hundred-fifty square-foot studio, sublet to him by an unemployed attorney relocated to Philadelphia to live with a girlfriend. The rent was marked up from a subsidized $199 a month to $300, still a bargain and less than the cost per night at most Manhattan hotels unfrequented by cockroaches and crack heads.

Jamie posed as the attorney’s cousin and endured the three-floor walkup and occasional act of sabotage on the part of the Israeli landlord. Once a month on cold winter nights, the jerk would sneak into the basement and cut the heat in an attempt to chase out the tenants. Then he could renovate the apartments and sell them as marked-up co-ops. Considering the portion of his earnings that were owed to his ex-wife and son in Westchester, Jamie invested in a space heater.

He bounded up the stairs, two at a time, pushed his way into the cramped room and saw that there were two messages on his answering machine.

Molly: “We’re having dinner tomorrow night. Your father wants you to come.”

Sure he does. Jamie fast-forwarded to the next call.

Karyn: “Call me,” she said. “Want to know what’s going on.”

He dialed Karyn.

“It’s me,” he said when she picked up.

“Well,” she said, “what’s the latest?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how long before this strike is over?”

“It just started.”

“Do you at least have a choice of whether you work?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not with anyone’s blessing in the union—and definitely not my father’s.”

“I heard on the news they’re saying they’ll start replacing anyone who doesn’t report to work.”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“What if they do?”

“I don’t know, I really can’t say.”

“Well, I actually have something to say…”

“OK…”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this,” Karyn said. “And now with this strike, I may as well let you know I have a job offer.”

“Great, congratulations,” Jamie said. He thought, Well, at least that’s good news.

“It’s in publishing. Well, not exactly publishing. You remember the guy I knew from my two years at Princeton? Jeffrey? We ran into him one night in the city, coming out of the movie theater on Twenty-Third Street?”

“The guy who dated your roommate, but you thought might have been more interested in you?”

“Not the point,” Karyn said. “He’s got this business idea, and he remembered from our conversation that night that I was working with Harper. He called there looking for me, and they gave him my number up here. He’s got an idea for a startup company, selling books.”

“Wasn’t he a Wall Street guy?” Jamie said.

“Wall Street guys make money and invest it in other things,” Karyn said. “He’s apparently done pretty well and wants to go into the book-selling business, except he wants to sell them electronically.”

“How do you do that?”

“On this internet thing everyone in the business world is so excited about. They’re saying that a huge segment of goods and services are going to become available through the computer.”

Jamie stifled a chuckle and rolled his eyes, but decided if he knew what was good for him he had better be positive.

“So, that’s good,” he said. “Will it pay more than the real bookstore in Chappaqua?”

“Yes, it will. Plus benefits. Plus…moving costs.”

“Moving? To where?”

“Seattle.”

“You’re kidding,”

“No, actually I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

Silence convinced Jamie she wasn’t.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Just wait. Are you saying that you’re going to pick up Aaron and move him all the way across the country without talking to me about it?”

“I am talking to you about it.”

“Yes, I hear. I’m on strike from my job for one day and already you’re telling me you’re moving three thousand miles. And if this—pardon me—bookstore is supposed to be in a computer, why would you have to move to Seattle to work for it?”

“Look, I told you. This guy…Jeffrey…we had lunch and he said he is launching the company out there and that there would be a good position for me if I was willing to make the move, take a chance. He called the next day and offered me the job. I told him I needed some time to think about it, given the circumstances.”

“I don’t get it,” Jamie said. “Why would you even do the interview?”

“Excuse me, aren’t you the critic who’s always complaining about how little I make? You’re the one who was so pissed when I quit Harper to have Aaron to begin with. Remember? How many times have you accused me of making fourteen cents an hour?”

“I didn’t suggest you could make more money in fucking Seattle.”

“Jamie, for one thing, fucking Seattle is a lot closer to Los Angeles, where my father lives, than New York. Aaron and I see him—what—once a year? And when I heard about the strike at the Trib this morning, it got me to thinking that you were right about how I can’t put off my career forever. I owe that to Aaron. I’ve been home all day with him pretty much for two years, working nights just to get out of the house and make a few bucks. What I make basically pays for sitters while I’m working. It was a long shot that I would move when I did the interview, but when I heard today you were on strike, it made me think, what if something really goes wrong with your job? Then what would I do? How would I pay for this house? His clothes? His future?”

“Karyn, I’m on strike one day. That doesn’t mean I’m unemployed.”

“Jamie, the real issue here is me, not you. You have nothing to do with this…”

“Aaron is also my son, no?”

“That’s not what I mean. I’ve got to resume my own career. And if that means I have to move, then I’ll have to move, and we’ll have to deal with it.”

“You mean I’ll have to deal with it.”

“I never said I didn’t want Aaron to have his father…you…in his life. But what about his future? What about college? It’s not like either of us is ever going to inherit any real money. You pay the mortgage, the bills, but you don’t have a cent in the bank, and neither do I.”

“Karyn, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but the last time we went out it was over in a couple of days. Most of these things don’t last. Don’t take this job because of the strike.”

“I told you, this is about me. I need to give Jeffrey an answer by the end of the week.”

Jamie paused, working hard to hold back his agitation. “Give it a few days, we’ll see what happens,” he said. “Maybe you could look for a job in New York.”

“I’ve been looking for six months.”

Jamie had no response for that. The inevitable suspicion of whether Karyn had developed a romantic interest in her old college friend—and vice versa—crossed his mind. He knew better than to broach that subject or she’d hang up on him and somehow manage to not be home for his next visit—her standard tactic when her custodial mood turned sour.

“Just don’t do anything for a day or two,” he pleaded. “Seattle—how in the world would I ever see…?”

“The other line’s beeping,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

Jamie hung up, pulled the receiver up again and froze in mid-slam.

He walked over to the bed, sat down and looked up at the inoperative ceiling fan. He realized that in the shock and confusion of Karyn’s thunderbolt, he hadn’t asked to speak with Aaron. He thought about calling back. But his mood, not exactly sunny to begin with, was as gray as the sky over Seattle—or so he had heard.