American Boy
By James McSherry
Pelham Bay Park. Photo by Dennis Harper (via Flickr).
Superman has nothing on my older brother when he’s high on crack. Muscles tensed, jaw clenched, underwear drenched in piss, standing in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up, years before her death and still more before Tommy winds up beaten down in a half-way house for Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA) patients, as if being schizophrenic is not enough, too run-of-the-mill, so my brother takes every pill, toke, huff, sniff, dope, soap on a rope if it was shaved off to look like coke or any powder that made one choke or breathe as if breath were the only thing stalling death. But there are lots of people still breathing, who might as well turn blue, dead, cold, forget about dreaming of turning old. So, my brother stands almost naked in the hallway of my mother’s walk-up on Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx, and I’m trying to figure out a way of getting him to the hospital before he kills me, or my mother or himself or burns the whole building down. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood.
He’s in his Charles Manson/Jesus Christ “I-don’t-know-if-I-want-to-kill-you-or-bless-you” pose, arms outstretched when he spots me and smiles, and I nod back, and like a pitcher shaking off the signs from his catcher, he runs inside and locks the door. It’s not going to be as easy as I thought it would be. It never is.
I have my brother-in-law waiting at the bottom landing to call the cops on my cue. He’s nervous when I appear downstairs and asks me to go over the instructions again. “Listen, closely. That’s all,” I say. “When you hear one of us scream or yell, dial 911.”
“What do I tell them?” He needs reassurance.
“Tell him there’s an EDP, threatening to kill, probably high on crack.”
“What’s an EDP?” he asks.
“Emotionally Disturbed Person.” And he looks at me as if I am one.
A few years later, my brother-in-law, the same one who is helping me now, who has fixed my cars, who once jumped through the window of my moving Cadillac as a prank, will get drunk and hit my sister, and I will leave my job bartending while being shadowed by Felix the bouncer who jumps in my Cadillac without even asking where we’re going. And when we get there, my brother-in-law and his drunken friend will get beat down. As I bang my brother-in-law’s head against the curb, the upstairs neighbor yells out the window, “You’re going to kill him!”
“You’re worried about him?” I yell back. “Call an ambulance.”
And I’m the least violent brother. When Felix takes his size eleven boot and kicks my sister’s husband in the face one last time, I wince, even though I know he deserves it for hitting my sister. Alcohol, violence, and mental illness form the Unholy Trinity of my family. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and I’m about to sin again.
“Listen, if you tell them EDP, they come faster. I don’t want to get killed waiting for the cops to get here, okay?”
He nods yes.
“Now, go to the car and get that carton of cigarettes for me.”
“Now?” He looks confused again.
“Yes,” I say. “Tommy’s locked himself inside, and this is the only shot I got.”
* * *
“Go ahead, Tommy!” our mother yells. “Get him out now!”
Tommy takes a deep breath, lifts his leg off the pitching mound, and rips a fastball for a strike, ending the game. The team mobs my brother.
My mother jumps up.
“Tom Terrific!” she screams. “Fuck Tom Seaver, we got our own Tom Terrific.” The Throggs Neck Little League sits right across the street from St. Frances de Chantal, but that doesn’t stop my mother from cursing.
“Can you fucking believe it, James? It’s a fucking miracle,” my mother says. “We beat the best team in the league.”
My grandmother leans back in her lawn chair, puffing on a Pall Mall cigarette. “He must be a good pitcher,” she says.
“You’re goddamned right!” my mother says. “He’s the best!”
Tommy loses his cap in the celebration, his long hair spilling out, and he spots my mother jumping up and down but ignores her frantic waves.
She turns toward me and pretends this all matters, it will stop time, bring my murdered father back from the dead and prevent us from growing up, leaving her behind. “Aren’t you glad you came?” she smiles.
The lights from the Little League shine like a beacon, illuminating the green lawn of summer, spread out like a blanket.
“It was a great game, ma,” I say. “Tommy killed them.”
* * *
“Open the door, Tommy, I got your cigarettes,” I say, waving the carton near the peephole so he can see I’m not lying.
“Leave them by the door,” he says. “I’m not coming out!”
I picture my mother smoking in bed as Tommy sits on the dirty floor scratching his head.
Tommy plays possum better than a possum and I need the patience of a saint, so I make believe I leave, stomp my feet as I go halfway down the stairs, then inch my way back to my mother’s door, like a burglar, breathing slightly, poised to punch my brother in the jaw when he opens the door a crack and leans down to pick up the cigarette carton, and after a while he does open the door a crack and I do punch him in the jaw, blocking the door as he runs down the hall in his underwear banging on neighbors’ doors, dabbing the blood coming from his mouth and I know I have to corner him now before it’s too late. My brother Joe told me once that Tommy doesn’t like the sight of blood, that it stops him dead in his tracks, so I creep closer, while he bangs and bangs and bangs, until one door opens and a neighbor sees my brother’s bloody mouth and me creeping toward him. He is about to ask what is going on when I yell, “Mind your fucking business!” And he slams the door shut, and I hit Tommy one more time with a straight right, my Columbia University ring digging into his face, more blood, and like a trapped rat, Tommy lurches for me, knocking me on my back and scrambling inside the apartment before I can even roll over onto my knees and stand up. I’m fucked.
My brother-in-law must have heard me yell “Mind your fucking business” because I hear police radios crackling and an army of boots pounding up the stairs, and before I can blink, the SWAT team is there. One cop, out of breath, corners me.
“You the one who called?”
“Yes,” I lie, understanding what Sister Mary Stanislaus would never attest to: there are good lies and there are bad lies.
“Which apartment?” he asks, wiping his sweaty brow. He spots the carton of cigarettes on the floor.
“These yours?”
I nod yes.
“You mind?” he asks.
“Help yourself.”
And he takes a whole pack from the carton and rips it open. I thought he’d take one or two cigarettes.
A few more cops appear, holding a battering ram. Shit, that thing is big, I think to myself. “Are you breaking down the door?” I ask.
“Why?” another cop shoots back.
“My mother’s in there,” I say. “Might scare her.”
Nothing would scare my mother. She lives with my crazy brother, raised the five of us by herself, fought more people than Muhammad Ali. I just don’t want to have to pay for the door.
“Well, I’ll try to talk him out first. What’s his name?”
“Tommy,” I say, feeling like a rat for the first time.
I would never tell the cops my brother’s name when we were kids. Never.
“Okay,” the sweaty cop says. “You stay over here.”
He kneels down by the apartment door as if he’s in church. He’s already on his third cigarette. Christ, he smokes more than my mother. I should hide the carton now. He starts yelling at the crack under the door, as if he expects my brother to appear out of there like Jerry, the mouse from Tom and Jerry, just squeezing out of the crack with a white flag. But Jerry never surrendered.
“Tommy, Tommy,” the sweaty cop yells at the closed door, “This is Sergeant Fisk, Tommy. I need to talk to you.”
Silence.
Fisk lights another cigarette. He is sweating profusely. Looks like he needs a valium. He motions to the cops with the battering ram who are just milling around, waiting for their cue. They get ready.
They probably have done this a thousand times and want to go home.
Just then Tommy speaks.
“Is my brother out there?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Fisk says. “Want to talk to him?”
“I don’t ever want to see that motherfucker again,” Tommy yells.
“Okay, Tommy,” the Sergeant says. “We’ll get rid of him, but you have to open the door.”
“Fuck you!”
“C’mon Tommy. Nobody is going to hurt you. Is your mother okay?”
“Yes.”
“Let me talk to her,” Fisk says.
“She’s asleep,” Tommy says. “She’s on medication.”
“What’s wrong with her Tommy?” Fisk lights another cigarette.
“Nothing,” Tommy says. “All she needs is fresh air.”
“Well, open the door,” Fisk says, “We’ll get her fresh air. C’mon Tommy, you want a cigarette?”
“Are you going to arrest me?”
“No, we just want to make sure you and your mother are alright. Okay?”
“I want you to hear my side of the story,” Tommy says.
“Okay, open the door and tell us your side of the story. Okay, Tommy? Tell us your side of the story.”
The cops inch closer, like I was inching a short while ago. My brother’s done, I think to myself.
“He broke my mother’s wrist,” I blurt out to a big cop nearby. “And he smokes crack.”
“Okay,” the big cop mutters, “That’s why we’re here.” He rolls his eyes as if I’m nuts. I feel like I’m on trial, but nobody knows the real truth except Tommy and he’s the crazy one.
The door opens slightly, and just as Tommy appears, the cops pounce on him.
I hear Tommy scream in pain.
“I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything! I’m innocent!”
Five cops are holding him down. It takes a few minutes before they get him handcuffed. My mother appears in the doorway.
She has on a dirty terry cloth robe with holes in it.
“Leave him alone,” she says. “He’s sick. He’s a sick boy.”
Tommy’s thirty-three years old, Christ’s age when he was crucified, I think to myself. The cops ignore my mother and Tommy.
Sweaty cop, Sergeant Fisk, turns to me, “You tell me what happened.”
All eyes are on me: the neighbor who I yelled at, the Big Cop, my mother and Tommy. Tommy is watching me, closely, a near smile waiting to appear, like the truth in a confessional. It’s as if I hold the key to the handcuffs. I am Houdini. And I am going to make those shackles disappear with my words and a wave of my hand. Presto. “He attacked me,” I say.
Tommy looks at me in shock, his eyes turn red, and he lets out a scream. Even the cops are startled as he bends down like the Hulk and stands up again, throwing off the two cops who had him by either arm before charging at me like a bull at Pamplona.
“He attacked me!” Tommy yells, putting his head down, hands cuffed behind his back, rushing toward me and almost goring me with his head when a sea of blue covers the white, freckled speck. All I can hear are Tommy’s muffled pleas. “He attacked me, he attacked me!”
My mother yells, too, “Help your brother!”
I don’t move.
It takes a while for the cops to subdue Tommy as his breath becomes shallow and syllables slurred.
When they lift him to his feet finally, red welts cover his skin, and there are imprints of knees and elbows, scratches and sweat and varicose veins, and purplish bruises forming on his forehead, near the temples, as if they, too, were yelling, “He attacked me!”
There are good lies and there are bad lies.
Tommy looks at me, defeated.
“How could you do this to me?” he asks. “I’m your brother.”
* * *
“There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep…
I haven’t quite let him die…”
* * *
Tommy found love in the Beacon of Hope with Big Mama. Thorazine, Haldol, and schizophrenia held hands and were witnesses, or even partners, to the budding romance. Big Mama was Tommy’s nickname for Renee, his fiancé at “The Beacon,” a residence on the grounds of the Bronx Psychiatric Hospital, known as Bronx State and not to be confused with Rockland State, from Ginsberg’s famous poem, “Howl,” though Tommy had been there, too, but no one had written an epic poem about it. Not even a limerick.
Imagine these two getting an apartment off the Grand Concourse in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, co-dependents: a mentally unstable, white man in his forties and his fiancé, a few years younger than he, African American, suffering from mental illness and obesity—these two, yearning for love as a true beacon, failing to recognize the chemical imbalance that dictates their fate and beginning to decompensate, in a delusional state, arguing themselves into a self-imposed police state, visited by the NYPD on more than a few occasions, while ranting and panting about love and hate and the President of the United States.
If you imagined that Big Mama would argue with Tommy one last time before climbing the stairs to the roof, screaming his name, and jumping off, you’d be right.
“I could hardly look at her,” Tommy said. “She had no head; it was flat like a deflated tire, oozing blood. I wanted to look at her. I did try, but her eye was not there. It was on the sidewalk, apart from her, just staring at me.”
When the coroner vans the body off, I imagine the eye being left behind, washed away with the rain, a witness to its own dissolution, unblinking and unfathomable, coursing on its last journey through the sewers of the Bronx, even farther out to the East River and beyond, dissolving at last into the current.
“I loved her,” Tommy said, staring up at the sky the following summer, contemplating gravity. “Renee always took good care of me.”
The cops questioned Tommy anyway, to be sure he didn’t push her off the roof. Tommy kept talking about the eye, and after a few hours, and more than a few cups of coffee and countless cigarettes, they let him go.
He walked back to the apartment off the Grand Concourse in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, alone.
I thought, someone should write a poem about that, somebody like Bukowski. He wouldn’t pull any punches. He’d drop that eye into your cup of coffee and stir it with his dirty finger and laugh, all the while drinking and cursing and writing about how fucked up life can be, especially for the people who are never immortalized in poems but walk home alone to their shitty apartments to take their meds and dream about better times at the Beacon of Hope. Earlier times. Resounding. Full of good lies and bad lies.
* * *
Tommy saves lives. He saved our brother Joe from drowning when he crashed through the ice one winter while we were kids playing in the dumps.
He saved me once, too. I was about twelve, almost thirteen but not quite—a time when those numbers meant something bigger than they ever do later on in life. We were at Rice Stadium, and someone dared me to walk around the Greek statue of a male teenager. It was several stories high and stood atop a grandstand of concrete steps. The ledge was no more than two feet wide, and to navigate it, one had to inch one’s way around for what seemed like hours. The ledge was about twenty square yards long and at least four stories high.
There were tales of wasted kids who fell to their deaths or kids who died on a dare. I’m still not sure how much of it was true, but when I got halfway across and looked down, I froze. Paralyzed by fear and starting to get dizzy, I couldn’t move at all. Tommy yelled to me.
“C’mon, what the hell are you doing?”
“I can’t move,” I said.
“Yes, you can! Hurry up!”
I thought about my mother first and how mad she would be if I fell and then the cute girl in my class, who I never got to kiss, and all the dead saints I would finally meet, the ones I prayed to every Sunday at Mass. Maybe if I prayed now, I thought to myself, they would save me.
Tommy saw that I wasn’t moving, just staring out into space, and he inched his way out to me, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back slowly, inch by trembling inch. “Don’t look down!” he said, when I faltered. “You’ll kill us both, and I don’t want to die.” Years later, because of vandalism and accidents, they tore down the statue, and I vaguely remember seeing it lying in the grassy fields off Rodman's Neck on the way to Orchard Beach. It looked like a giant stone teenager taking a nap in the weeds of Pelham Bay Park. It was restored much later, the massive limestone structure erected this time by the running track. I had learned it was a commissioned piece of art meant to embody the ideal of “American Youth.” It had an inscription about the instincts of the young and freedom—or something like that, but more.
The statue was called “American Boy.”
* * *
When I think of Tommy’s life, I think of a parabola stuck at the vertex. I always hated math, almost as much as I hated what became of my older brother because of too many variables I will never understand. The obvious ones are mental illness, drug use, the death of my father, and a genetic predisposition to addiction. The other intangibles are endless and perhaps beyond quantifying. When I think about Tommy, I think of what Isaac Asimov said when contemplating the origins of the universe and its mathematical possibilities: “Where did the substance of the universe come from? . . . If zero equals (+1) + (-1), then something which is zero might just as well become +1 and -1. Perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness, globs of positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs are constantly forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs between nothing and nothing and wondering about it.”
Writing about my older brother, Tommy, vanishing, seems like being stuck between nothing and nothing and wondering about it. The end result: zero. I always hated math.
* * *
After Big Mama’s death, Tommy bounced around from residence to residence like an eight ball trying to find the corner pocket. Each time they removed him or relocated him or recommitted him, he’d have an explanation: “They were smoking crack in the bathroom. It wasn’t me. I got into a fight with one of the workers who punched me while I was sleeping. Look at my nose. They stole my food stamps. Listen to me, these people are crazy.”
I drive to 41 Lockwood now, my brother’s new home for the past several years. If there is a first circle of hell, this is it, limbo without hope. The worker behind the reception desk pages my brother, and after a few moments, barely looks up and points toward the stairs.
“You can go check for him yourself. If he’s not in his room, try the smoking room. You know where it is, right? Same floor.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I reply, and he ignores me just the same. I make my way upstairs and knock on Tommy’s door. No answer. I bang again. Maybe he’s asleep. Still no answer. Some residents are shuffling about at the end of the hall near a dirty, gray couch and a television suspended from the wall, adjacent to the smoking room. I make my way past a few MICA patients, who hold out their hands as though they’re ready to receive Holy Communion. I know what they want, and I turn off my Irish Catholic guilt and glide past them like a ballroom dancer. I make my way inside the smoking room.
The cramped space is engulfed in cigarette flames and smoke. No one even looks up as I scan the room, not even out of curiosity, or reflex or desire. Tommy is not there. There’s an industrial fan in the corner blowing the smoke back into the residents’ faces, mouths open, inhaling the secondhand smoke. A double dose of death, I think. I remember Tommy telling me about the time he blacked out in there and fell into the fan. His finger almost got sliced off, and there was blood shooting all over the faces of the residents.
“It was like The Exorcist,” Tommy laughed. “A real fucking horror movie.” Tommy got stitches that time, and when I went to visit him in the hospital, the doctors told him he had to quit smoking altogether because of emphysema and chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease. If he didn’t, one day he would just stop breathing, unable to catch a breath.
“I can’t do it, brother,” he said that time.
“Why don’t you try the patch?” I asked.
“I did,” he said. “Nothing works on me.”
I hold my breath and back out of the smoking room without anybody noticing. I imagine Tommy’s blood stuck to the fan there and on the walls and on the faces of the residents, too, and on the crooked painting trying futilely to right itself. Blood everywhere.
* * *
At this point, I’ve given up on trying to find my brother, get into my car, and start to drive away, but then I hear Tommy’s faint voice yelling, “Hey, over here!”
I put the car in park, and out of the darkness, Tommy appears at the car window. He doesn’t look well. He hasn’t for a while. He has a big growth on his neck, scabs on the bridge of his nose made even worse by picking at them, and a blind right eye, clouded over from a botched cataract surgery. In his prime, Tommy’s 6’2” frame was a healthy 200 pounds. Now, he looks really skinny. He sticks his unshaven face into the car window and smells of cigarettes and desperation. He’s out of breath.
“Listen, do you think I could sit in the car for a minute?” Tommy pleads. “I want to talk to you.”
My older brother, the one who used to smack me around, chase me, bully me, save my life, is asking permission to sit in my car. It’s been years since he lost Renee, and my mother is long gone.
“Of course you can,” I say. “You’re my brother.”
He slides in slowly.
“I know you’re in a hurry. I don’t want to make you late.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“I’m dying,” he says. “I can’t breathe.”
He swallows, coughs, and holds his hand to his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he says, wiping his hand on his sleeve.
“You know I weigh 167 pounds?”
“Why don’t you go to the doctor?”
“They made me an appointment, but I missed it,” he explains.
“Well, make another one, Tommy,” I say.
“Listen, can you give me money for cigarettes?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“If you give me money, I’ll go to the doctor’s,” he lies.
“What’s this, Let’s Make a Deal?”
“Mommy smoked until she died,” Tommy says.
“Yeah, of lung cancer.”
“I told my caseworker I wanted to go live in the Bronxwood Nursing Home because that’s the last place mommy was before she died. I wanted to be close to her.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I was already close to her. I pray to her every day. And to Daddy, Nanny, and Aunt Helen.”
I wish I could pray every day, I think to myself.
I want that feeling again of blind faith.
Tommy taps me on the arm, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“It’s not so bad, buddy. I’m happy here. Some of these people can’t even tie their own shoes.”
Tommy slides out of the car and taps the side door with his gray knuckles.
“And nobody comes to visit them,” he smiles. “Tell Iris and Paige I said ‘hi.’”
I think of my wife Iris and what she told me in Hurley’s bar that time just after we had first met.
She leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “You don’t belong in dive bars.”
And my thirteen year old daughter Paige who forgave me after another angry outburst I had with her mother. “I know you’re mad at me, kiddo. Just say it.”
She turned to me slowly and spoke thoughtfully, something I never did when I was angry. “I have too much respect for you, dad,” she said. “I know who you really are.”
As much as another human being can, I have faith in Iris and Paige.
I hand Tommy a ten-dollar bill through the window.
He grabs it and smiles.
“I’m gonna go to the doctor,” he says. “I promise.”
“Remember what Daddy said.”
“What?” Tommy asks.
“Don’t ever make promises,” I say.
Tommy thinks about it for a moment.
He starts coughing some more.
“Are you okay?” I ask, as he struggles to catch his breath.
“What’s life without promises?” Tommy gasps. “It’s not good, James.”
Imagine a middle-aged man in a MICA residence, delusional, decompensating, desperate. There is a bookmaker in Vegas laying down the line on his life expectancy. They’ll bet on anything in Vegas.
Imagine.
* * *
“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see
you.
I say, I know that you’re there, so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back, but he’s singing a
little
in there, I haven’t quite let him die.”
About the author
James McSherry is a graduate of Columbia University (MFA, 1989). His first book A Clean Street's a Happy Street is being taught in New York City public schools. "American Boy" is from his latest book, We Will Never Be Here Again. He teaches writing and film in the Bronx and is continually inspired by his students.
