1951
Fading Out
Monte the Count
His open Irish face had become coarsened and brutalized, and he frequently, now, forgot his name, his real name. He always answered to “Monte” or “Count.” A broken nose, reddened face with the ruptured capillaries speckling its surface. At times, through the alcoholic murk, the pain screwing his face up.
Let the pricks jus hit me one good shot on the toppa the head. Jus one, jus one. He would cry at times, racked with sobbing, holding himself together, one hand on his belly and the other on top of his head, squeezing the life back into himself. (Beeoo Gesty! Beeoo Gesty! Cantering down toward Pep.)
Hermes Pavolites, one of three brothers who shot pool in Sal’s, fair sticks, hit him a hard uppercut in the Melody Room one night, while Monte was looking at the bar in a daze, his head on his chest. Some bitter revenge taken at an opportune moment, for some old wrong done in the years just after the war. His two brothers stood near, in case Monte got up, but he simply sagged and oozed across the bar, spilling his beer and change into the rinse water. Everyone watched the Greeks walk out, laughing, then the place emptied.
Monte tried for months to find out who’d creamed him. Nobody had been there. Not me, Monte, I heard about the lousy fuckin thing, musta been some spicks come inna bar. To watch him walk the streets, asking questions, then finally stop, just look accusingly at everyone. One night he hit Frank Bull in Henry’s, and Frank simply tore the arms off his shirt, laughing at him.
A little while later, the cops broke his arm outside Papa Joe’s, one kneeling in the small of his back, holding his face down, pressed into the sidewalk, while the other casually whaled at his arms and legs with his nightstick. He broke Papa Joe’s front window with the cast when he got out of Raymond Street jail.
1951
Monte the Count
The Last Stand
After he smashed Papa Joe’s window with his cast, he stood for a moment, then, very wisely, walked rapidly down the block toward the bay. It would take a while for the cops to come, he’d sit in some driveway till morning, then just go down to the ferry and ride back and forth a while. It was almost five anyway. But he stopped in the middle of the block and started back, stood then on Papa Joe’s corner and watched the prowl car coming down Third Avenue, slow to a halt. The first cop got out, swinging his nightstick, grinning at him. Monte walked over slowly, humbly, then when he got to within a few feet of the cop, kicked him in the balls. He fell backward, and Monte smashed him across the skull with the cast. Then he ran around to the driver’s side as the cop was getting out there, the door just about a foot open, the cop’s foot grazing the street. Monte kicked at the door with all his strength, slamming the cop’s ankle between it and the car frame. He saw the cop’s face go white and he started to laugh. The cop drew his gun and leveled it at Monte, pushed the door all the way open, his nightstick high over his shoulder in his other hand. Monte drew the cast back to paste him and the cop put the stick across the side of his head and laid him out. He sat in the open door of the car, the gun still trained on him, thinking about firing.
About the contributors:
Lawrence Block is one of the acknowledged masters of the mystery genre, winning numerous accolades, including the Edgar, Maltese Falcon, Nero Wolfe, and Shamus awards. His column on fiction writing was a popular feature of Writer’s Digest magazine for many years, and his books for writers include the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. A longtime New Yorker, his books about Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, like his big New York novel Small Town, span the five boroughs. Block lived on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a year and a half in the early ’80s; these days he’s at home in Greenwich Villege.
Maggie Estep has published five books, most recently Gargantuan, the second in a series of crime novels involving horse racing. She is currently working on a third crime novel as well as a nonfiction book entitled Bangtails: Ten Dazzling Horses and the American Rogues Who Raced Them. Maggie lives in Brooklyn.
Pete Hamill was born in Brooklyn in 1935. He is for many the living embodiment of New York City. In his writing for the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New Yorker, and Newsday, he has brought the city to life for millions of readers. He is the author of many bestselling books, including the novels Forever and Snow in August, as well the memoir A Drinking Life. He currently divides his time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Salvatore La Puma was born in Brooklyn in 1929. A novelist and short story writer, La Puma received the 1987 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a 1988 American Book Award for his first story collection, The Boys of Bensonhurst. That book was followed in 1991 by A Time for Wedding Cake, a novel, and in 1992 by a second story collection, Teaching Angels to Fly. Most of La Puma’s fiction takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, his own neighborhood until 1959. He now lives in Santa Barbara, California.
H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction — three short novels and about sixty short stories — has exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn from 1924 to 1926, and he died in Providence in 1937.
Tim Mcloughlin was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he still resides. He is the author of Heart of the Old Country (Akashic, 2001), a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and winner of Italy’s Premio Penne Award. McLoughlin edited the first Brooklyn Noir anthology, to which he also contributed the story “When All This Was Bay Ridge.”
Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1928. He dropped out of school at age fifteen and joined the Merchant Marine. Physically disabled by tuberculosis, he lost a lung at the age of eighteen and was sent home, not expected to live long. For the next decade, Selby remained bedridden and frequently hospitalized with a variety of lungrelated ailments. Unable to make a living due to health concerns, Selby decided to become a writer. After the publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964, Selby became addicted to heroin, a problem that eventually landed him behind bars. After his release from prison, he moved to Los Angeles and kicked his habit. Selby was married three times and had four children. In recent years, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream have been adapted to film. He died in Los Angeles of chronic lung disease in April 2004.