West Four Thousand and Something Street

by AN Block
 
Dad looked me in the eye, coughed twice and stuck a folded up bill in my hand.
 
“Stash it in that hidden compartment of the leather wallet we got you. In case of emergency,” he said, winking. “Keep it out of sight so you’re not tempted.”
 
“Wow!” It was the first twenty I’d ever had. Holding it made me woozy.
 
“Got everything?” he asked, gesturing to the closed trunk as I stuffed the bill in my shirt pocket.
           
Mom kept fussing in the living room, straightening things around the coffee table, the magazine rack, humming. Then she steadied herself back up against the wall, looked at me and sighed so loud trying to catch her breath that it made me shudder.
           
“Give me one more minute.”
           
I passed through the kitchen to survey my 8 by 10 bedroom wondering at how strangely tidy everything appeared and would likely remain without me around to mess it up anymore. Kneeling on my bed I raised the window screen and ducked my head out, inhaled the familiar mix of salt air, boiled cabbage and incinerator soot, felt the swirling breeze brush my cheeks and tried to freeze it all in my mind. I turned right to the elevated tracks, left towards the ocean and Boardwalk in the distance, I looked four stories down to the block long concrete and iron tangle of what everyone here called “The Backyard,” scene of my earliest triumphs and humiliations, straight ahead eighteen feet to the discolored tawny-red bricks and drawn shades of 3110 Brighton 7th Street, fourth floor, rear apartment, the ornate wrought iron deco bars over its windows, above and below to the riot of laundry flapping on clothes lines like flags in the wind, to all the oblivious pigeons clucking nervously on their maroon painted fire escape perches, and I had to swallow hard. This little world, this place I could never fit. That apartment across the way that faced me every day of my life, the one whose walls must’ve rattled exactly when mine did, who inhabited it? Once in a while you’d hear yelling. A train clattered into the station heading towards the unfathomable slums of Coney Island. I had no idea. None.
           
“You have everything?” Dad called out again, half question, half statement.
           
Hastily I pulled the bottom drawer of my dresser open and for one last time touched the confident smoky-eyed face of Jackie Robinson gazing up from beneath a rubber band on my stack of old baseball cards. Then, wobbling back through the kitchen, I heard the creak of linoleum underfoot, I grabbed and let go the tarnished handle of the Kelvinator, our refrigerator Dad still referred to as the icebox, I trailed my shaky fingers alongside the wallpaper past our bathroom to the foyer and wiped my runny nose on my sleeve.
           
“Think so,” I answered.
           
Dad double locked the door and I lugged the heavy trunk down to the elevator. Mom pressed her lips together, her eyes darted to the floor and she patted my hand twice. She nodded and laughed to herself without speaking. Something private. Downstairs I hefted the trunk into the station wagon Dad borrowed from my brother, then the three of us headed north, out of The City, across bridges onto tree lined parkways, over hill and nauseating dale, whizzing past more trees and greenery than I’d ever seen outside of Central Park, the cramped streets fading into shapes, noise and memory, with their cluttered scents of Chinese food and hot knishes, the road twisting past one desolate farmhouse and dilapidated barn after another, past tractors groaning under bales of sweet smelling hay, through the dusty impoverished open heart of what I would soon hear described as Shitkicker Country. Not much conversation beyond Mom asking if we were making good time and Dad grumbling about the crap on the radio nowadays.
           
Toothpaste U. It killed me how everyone who said it paused, waiting for the joke to sink in, how they must’ve thought that they were highly original wits of some kind for thinking it up. All I knew, I had to get out, had to find some place the exact opposite of everything. Why there? The progression went: pick a New York State school so you can use your Regents Scholarship, wade through the catalogues in the library, try to decode the words, the numbers, the stilted pictures of well-groomed earnest students, fill out the loan forms, apply for financial aid and wait. Wait, wonder, hope. Even once the letters began flying back and forth, the stamps got licked, the envelopes sealed and dropped in the mailbox it still all seemed improbable. Even after the countdown began (week before Labor Day, next month, one more week, just three days) I kept breathing the hollow air of unreality. Time crossed off a calendar. Abstract. I’d just drank an ice cold glass of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic to celebrate my seventeenth birthday and this was well before anyone had ever offered me the sage advice: Be careful what you wish for. Colgate.
           
Dad and I carried the trunk upstairs to the third floor, Mom trailing behind. There were flies buzzing everywhere, the stinging smell of ammonia.
           
“Oh, bunk beds,” she said, patting the lower mattress, testing how much give it had. “When Russell arrives you’ll have to discuss with him who gets which bunk. I hope you’ll be friends.”
           
“Why wouldn’t they be friends?” Dad said. “Of course they’ll be friends.”
           
“Well, yes,” she said. “I imagine everyone here will be nice.” Then she looked at me, held her arms out for a hug, motioned me forward wiggling her fingers, bit her lip and started sobbing.
           
I ushered them both further into the room and closed the door with my foot. Families were starting to arrive, I could hear their voices echoing on the staircases and in the hallways, and I didn’t want my new roommate, whoever this Russell was, to witness what I feared would be my own teary goodbye.
           
Dad put his arm around her shoulder. He said, “Come on, now, Birdie,” but she couldn’t stop crying.
           
“I’m all right,” Mom kept saying. “No, really. I’m all right.”
           
Dad gave her his handkerchief, he looked at me, hunched his shoulders, raised his rough raw looking palms and then, without fanfare, she stopped.
           
“Proud of you,” Dad said then, squeezing both my shoulders. “Knock em dead, son. We’ll sure miss you.”
           
“Miss you already, Papa.” Now it was my turn to look away, out the window to the pine forest up the hill.
           
“Better be off,” he said. “Need to get the car back to your brother’s before sundown, he and Elaine are going out on the town tonight. Well. If you need anything, you know where to find us.”
           
“Please write to us,” Mom said, clutching my arm. “Okay? Let us know how the food is. How you’re getting along.”
           
“I’ll write,” I said. “I’ll write every day.”
           
“Promise?”
           
“He’ll be busy with schoolwork,” Dad said, laughing. “He won’t have time to write every day.”
           
“Well, every other day then,” Mom said. “Thanksgiving is only a few months off.”
           
We walked downstairs, I kissed them both and they got in the car. There were three others parked in front of the dormitory, two with families unloading luggage. New Jersey plates, New Hampshire and Indiana.
           
“Let us know if you need anything,” Dad said through the rolled down window. “Anything at all.”
           
“I’ll be fine,” I told them, leaning my elbows on the window. “I’ll get used to it quick. You know me.”
           
“Atta boy. You’re going to love it here. Once you get used to it. And remember, your job is to study hard and learn as much as you can.”
           
“Right,” I said. I shook Dad’s hand. “I’ll work hard. Don’t worry.”
           
They backed up, turned and began pulling away.
           
“Be well, son. Keep in touch.”
           
I could hear Mom sobbing into her hands. I looked around to see if anyone noticed. And then, like that, they were gone.
           
I turned, stuck one hand in my pocket, took the twenty out of my shirt, put it into my wallet and trudged up the patchy lawn in front of Kendrick Hall. A bare chested boy wearing what looked like a reddish beachcomber’s cap was watching me from his second floor window. He was grinning, holding something I couldn’t make out in one of his hands. He touched it to the side of his tilted head.
           
Just as I was coming through the front door, a thin wiry beanpole of a fellow in madras shorts, a rugby shirt and mocassins was coming out. He was wearing a maroon beanie.
           
“Hello!” he said, extending his hand. “Bucky Potter. Ridgedale, New Jersey.”
           
“Hi,” I said, extending my hand.
           
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re supposed to say ‘Hello,’ not ‘Hi.’ Didn’t you read the orientation materials? And where’s your class beanie?”
           
“Just got here. Where do I get it from?”
           
“Should be in your room on the desk with the rest of the packet. That’s where mine was. Hey, don’t let one of the RA’s catch you without it this week.”
           
I nodded and headed up the staircase.
           
The smiling boy from the second floor window was walking down, holding a brown bottle in his hand. He had one of those hairy bobcat vests on, like the one Sonny from Sonny and Cher wore, and he was wearing the same maroon beanie that Potter kid had on his head, but tilted at an angle so you could see his blonde hair on one side.
           
“Hello,” I said.
           
He stopped, looked at me and broke into a heavy lidded smirk. He was a bull chested kid with a face full of acne. Instead of returning my hello, he took a drink from his bottle. Then all he said was, “You’re not a legacy too, are you?” He held onto the railing, he seemed to be swaying.
           
“What’s a legacy?”
           
“Hey, you’re that kid I just saw kissing his old man, right?” He laughed. “So, you up for a swig?” He held the bottle out to me.
           
I shrugged and went past him up to my floor.
           
I sat down at the desk and put on my beanie. It was too big.
           
I looked out the window. More cars were arriving.
           
So, I wondered, what would this be? Let’s see: there’s twenty blocks in a mile, we’re 200 miles away. Guess it’s somewhere around West Four Thousand and Something Street.