But I didn’t give in, even though, having been picked up while running along Morningside Drive, they were probably the guys who’d jumped me, and as they were released, they could not have been more smug — they certainly acted like they deserved to be in jail. The cops themselves were none too happy with me. As I sort of looked more a hippie than a good working-class smart-aleck, they treated me rather disrespectfully, letting me out through a station house side door into the darkness, one of them, however, pissily advising me as follows: “Good luck, Einstein; next time you’ll end up in the morgue.”
And on one of my more careless nights, when I’d somehow hooked up with a Columbia student who was into some awfully strong psychotropic drugs, I ended up at his place on 116th off Amsterdam, not far from where my mother used to clean the nursery school, stupidly dragging too deeply on a white cheroot that contained pot, tobacco, and a massive dose of angel dust. He was a kind of mad-hatter sort and, as a decent musician, seemed friendly enough, but I soon regretted going there. That angel dust distorts things: turns a twenty-foot hallway into the Khyber Pass, raises the walls into canyons, turns your limbs into rubber, your muscles into liquid, and scrambles the brain in such a way that it is hard to know what is going on. At one point, while I was sitting across from this fellow, whose long red hair spilling from his top hat fell upon his shoulders, he took out a brown paper bag and, asking me, “Guess what’s inside?” pulled from it a.38 revolver whose muzzle he put against my head. Then, twirling its cylinders, and with a smile, he cocked its hammer before pressing the trigger. It clicked, no bullet exploded, and he fell back laughing, while I, struggling with that Martian atmosphere, got the hell out of there, leaving the bleakness of the apartment for the even greater bleakness of the street — dark, lifeless, foreboding, autumnal.
Occasionally, my mother and I went downtown to Centre Street to apply for food stamps, for which we, on a limited income, were eligible. I hated going, for we’d have to wait hours the way we used to at public clinics, and for the most part, the clerks handling the cases were late-middle-aged women who’d been forced into taking those positions in lieu of being on welfare. From the start, they gave my mother a hard time, especially when it came to documentation — she had to bring a Social Security card, a birth certificate, a death certificate for Pascual, and, as well, proof that we were “needy,” by way of a recent 1040 form (she had none) or a bank book — she had, as I recall, all of two hundred and forty-seven dollars in her “life savings.” It would have actually helped if we’d been on welfare, but my mother, despite her grief and shock, remained snooty enough as to swear that, no matter how bad things might turn out, she’d never sink so low as to go on “relief.” Those employees who were on welfare, however, sniffing out her haughtiness, gave her a hard time for it: They picked on her Spanish, sent us back to our seats for hours at a time while they looked for some hopelessly “lost” document relating to our case, and only finally came through when my mother or I, eating humble pie, approached them at their desk, politely asking if they might yet approve a new round of thirty forty-dollar-a-month books of food stamps.
Much as I disliked that whole business, I had to go with her as an intermediary — my mother always feeling intimidated by any official documentation in English, as if asking even for food stamps in the wrong manner might get her in trouble. We went, I should add, about once every three months or so, as new rules and glitches were always around the corner, my mother and me riding downtown on the subway together, as she’d go on endlessly about the indignities of having to deal with colored women just to save a few dollars, while I, looking at the subway columns flashing by through the windows, daydreamed, wondering if my father, on his way home from work when he was alive, had done the same.
We also became recipients of government-issue surplus food, like peanut butter, jelly, tuna fish, chipped beef, and condensed milk, which I’d pick up at a distribution center on 125th Street. Packed into large white cans the size of paint gallons, the words NOT FOR SALE in giant letters written on their labels, and boasting of outlandish expiration dates: GOOD UNTIL APRIL 1992, it seemed the kind of stuff one imagined would be found in the storage closets of nuclear bomb shelters. Hardest was finding out just which stores accepted the food stamps: We had no problems at the local A&P and bodega, where they knew my mother, but once you walked into a shop in a different neighborhood, say, some place near Alexander’s near 149th Street and Third Avenue, where there sometimes might be incredible deals — like “5 lbs. of pig’s feet for a dollar! ”—she’d have to present her food stamp user ID, which somehow always offended her, especially if she’d marched up to the counter, having put on one of her superior airs.
Though she almost became accepting of her terrible loss, my mother seemed anxious in new ways. Still in her mid-fifties, she looked at least a decade and a half younger, men eyeing her on the street — perhaps it was her air of haughtiness or a kind of fleshly indifference that did them in — but in any case, like her sister Cheo, she had turned out to be the kind of Catholic to never remarry, preferring to be reunited with her husband in the afterlife. She never got lonely in that way, though at night, overhearing her speaking aloud and sighing, I’d wish to God that someone else would come along to take care of her.
In the meantime, my mother, without any real marketable skills and still struggling with her English, began to so worry about how we’d manage to survive that she ended up taking classes in typewriting in some kind of downtown agency. (We had gotten hold of an ancient Smith Corona that someone had left behind under a stairwell, and she’d practice on this, for hours at a time, her click-clacking, tentative and never quickening, sounding through the house: I actually found her attempts at mastering a new skill at her age — she’d always seemed old to me, more like an abuela than a mother — rather touching, but though she came home with a “typing certificate” from the agency, her attempts to find a job as a secretary or typist were doomed, I believe, from the start. She just didn’t have it in her, and after a few months of desperate searching, with a few tryouts in outlying offices in the Bronx and Queens, she simply gave up.
To save money, she became as frugal as possible. For several years, she hardly ever bought any cuts of meat that were not in fact mostly gristle and bones: frozen turkey legs at a dollar for two, as well as threepound bags of chicken entrails — livers and gizzards and necks — with which she made her own tamped-down versions of arroz con pollo, became our staples.
One of the college students I used to jam with on the steps of Low Library, Steve, a saxophone player who also happened to be a premed student at Columbia, came home with me one evening. After we’d finished playing, driving our patient neighbors crazy, my mother, in a good mood that night, invited him to stay for dinner. However, once he had taken his place at the table, in the seat where my pop had passed evenings (and where, I swear, his ghost still did), and my mother set down before him a plate of yellow rice nicely cooked with tomatoes and peppers, carrots and onions and some garlic, with those chicken necks and gizzards stirred in, he, picking at them as if they were worms, could not bring himself to take a single bite. It was then it first really hit me that, with the absence of my father, no matter what else he might have meant to us, our lives, at least when it came to food, had certainly taken a turn for the worse.