For two months now, our goddess had lain in charred bits and pieces in a lonely grave somewhere in her hometown in Pennsylvania. So yeah, I was surprised Bobby was smiling, and maybe more than a little bit disappointed in him. I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t my place to judge other people’s grief. Besides, Bobby looked in bad shape. Although his face was bruised and scratched up from getting bounced along the pavement at twenty miles per hour, most of the damage was below his neckline. His clothes were filthy; the elbows of his sweatshirt and the knees of his jeans in tatters. The skin beneath his shredded clothes hadn’t yet scabbed over, and some of the cuts were still angry, red, and raw.
“You look like shit, man,” I said.
He tousled my hair. “Hey, I got dragged behind a police paddy wagon. What’s your excuse?” Joking, deflecting, that was quintessential Bobby.
“C’mon, I’ll get you home so you can get those cuts washed up and bandaged. Maybe with your fresh battle scars, your mom and dad will finally welcome you into their club.”
“Nah. I could shove a Molotov cocktail up McNamara’s ass and they would still be ashamed of me. I smell of money, don’t ya know? How did the rest of the demonstration go?”
“It didn’t,” I said. “After the arrests and tear gas, it kinda broke up.”
He grabbed my arm and turned me to face him. Finally, that perpetual smile ran away from his face. When it vanished, my disappointment in him went with it. “You know the pigs are full of shit, right? They’re lying about Sam and Marty. Samantha believed in fighting for the cause, but she wasn’t a bomb thrower. That wasn’t her style.”
“I know, Bobby. I know. And Marty Lavitz … come on! He was about as radical as my Uncle Lenny’s Edsel.”
“Even if nobody else believes that, it’s important that you believe, Moe. Sam wouldn’t have done it. You gotta believe me.”
“I do, man. You know I do.”
Bobby’s smile returned and somehow the world felt all right again. When we stepped outside the Tombs, I swear I could feel the heat of the sun on my face, although it was twenty-five degrees and night had fallen over Brooklyn.
CHAPTER TWO
We didn’t have fraternities at Brooklyn College. I suppose the powers that be didn’t think we merited them because going to BC was more like a four-year extension of high school than a serious university experience. You took a bus or subway to school in the morning, came home at night to the same apartment you grew up in, slept in the same bed, in the same room, and took the same crap from your parents you had as a kid. But now the crap was worse because not only weren’t you a kid, you weren’t a man, either. Friends who went away to school in far-flung places like Buffalo and Oneonta might’ve been expanding their horizons, but not you.
At BC we had these things called house plans, which were a cross between glorified clubhouses and fraternities with training wheels. They were rented apartments in private homes near campus, sans fancified Greek letters. Bobby and I belonged to Burgundy House and we did some of the same stuff as frats did — hazing, beer parties, sports teams — only the stakes were smaller, much smaller. No older house brother was going to help land you a position at a white shoe Wall Street firm after you graduated. You’d be lucky if they helped you land a job shining shoes. Mainly, house plans were places where guys could get away from their parents, hang out, get high, listen to music, and ball their girlfriends.
And now that I had bailed Bobby out, balling my girlfriend was exactly what I had in mind when I showed up in front of Burgundy House. This year Burgundy House was a basement apartment in a weird, rundown Victorian on East 26th Street near the corner of Avenue I. I’d been led to believe that Mindy Weinstock and I shared common cause. During a phone conversation I’d had with her not five minutes before I went to fetch Bobby from the Tombs, Mindy had given me every indication that getting laid was of paramount importance to her. Now, as I reached the end of the driveway and turned toward the back entrance of the Victorian, I wasn’t so sure.
Mindy was smoking the guts out of a cigarette and coughing up a lung, which, if she normally smoked, might not have shocked me quite so much. As it was, the shock of her smoking was mitigated by the fact that she was holding a half-empty pint bottle of Four Roses in her other hand. Mindy drank, but stuff like Miller High Life or Mateus Rose, not bourbon, for goodness sakes. That was the kind of shit our dads drank.
“Hey, you,” I whispered, checking my watch. “I see you started the party without me.”
She tilted her head at me like a confused puppy. “Party?” Then she stared at the cigarette in her right hand and the bottle in her left. “This is no party, Moe. Don’t you know a wake when you see one?”
Truth be told, I didn’t. Maybe half of my friends were Catholic, but I’d never been to a wake and my guess was neither had Mindy.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“Samantha,” she said, eyes looking anywhere but at me.
“It’s been months, Mindy.”
“So what?” she shouted, raising her arms up over her head so that the bourbon spilled onto her coat. A light popped on in the house next door.
I pushed Mindy’s arms down. “C’mon, keep quiet. The neighbors are already giving our landlord crap for renting to us. Let’s get inside.”
I dug my keys out of my pocket with one hand and urged Mindy forward with the other. As confused as I was by Mindy’s smoking and drinking, I was now doubly confused, because Mindy never much cared for Samantha Hope. Well, no, that’s an understatement. She hated Sam’s guts. For one thing, she thought Sam was a poseur who saw politics as fashion: wearing what was in because it was in, and not because she felt strongly about it one way or the other. Mindy was no poseur. She was plugged into every left-leaning political group on the BC campus. She took it seriously. Another thing was that Mindy wasn’t stupid. She knew how smitten I’d been by Sam. I had been in Mindy’s shoes myself a few times — somebody’s Plan B. No one enjoys being someone’s fallback position. None of this is to say that Mindy didn’t have her charms. She did, in spades, but hers were local charms, dime-a-dozen Brooklyn charms: wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, plush curves.
Given her politics, it was no wonder that Bobby had introduced me to Mindy. They’d known each other since they were little kids, having met at a socialist sleep-away camp upstate. Seems Mindy’s folks were old-school lefties just like the Friedmans, though Mindy’s parents had in recent years laid down their hammer and sickle for a slice of apple pie. Mindy’s dad and I talked about Tom Seaver, not Leon Trotsky. Her mom cooked chicken soup in her kitchen, not revolution. As Bobby’s parents were disappointed in him, so too were Mindy’s parents with her, but for opposite reasons. Mindy’s political indoctrination had stuck, her radicalism untainted by money. I think one of the things her parents liked most about me was that I wasn’t political. It was no secret that the only things I believed in fiercely were sports and avoiding the draft. My presence in their daughter’s life gave them hope. And in spite of her playing at being my girlfriend, we were mostly about the sex. We were never going to be Romeo and Juliet, and I sometimes couldn’t help but feel I was a convenient buffer between Mindy’s politics and her folks’ concerns.
The basement smelled vaguely of old beer and pot smoke. Only vaguely, because the dank odor of mildew fairly overwhelmed everything else. The décor was strictly Salvation Army chic, and the cheaply paneled walls were covered in posters of the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, Raquel Welch, and Joe Namath. We had ones of Che and Malcolm X just to keep Bobby happy. Most of the guys in the house were like me: jocks who were into girls and rock and roll, and who couldn’t’ve cared less about Chairman Mao or Ho Chi Minh. We didn’t want to be our fathers, but we didn’t necessarily want to turn the world on its ear, either.