Tower

Men aren’t supposed to say shit like this, but the fact is that I loved Nicky. Yeah, here’s the part where I’m supposed to say, I wasn’t in love with Nicky. Sorry to disappoint you. I was in love with him, not like lustfully in love with him. Didn’t want to have his babies or anything, not that I could differentiate in third grade. We don’t talk about it much in our culture, but there’s very little can hold a candle to the infatuation a young boy has for his first hero. For some boys, it’s their dads. My dad... yeah, right!

Nick, he hated his father for the way he’d smack him around. I was jealous. At least his dad gave a shit, if not for Nick, for something, anyway. And the rough treatment produced in Nick another quality I admired: rage. We all have anger. I have more than most, but Nick was different. He was a rage cheetah, zero to seventy in the beat of a heart. It wasn’t blind rage either, though he was sometimes blinded by it. He could focus it like a laser sight on the forehead of his next target.

What’s that blues song, “Born Under a Bad Sign”? If it wasn’t for bad luck, I think the lyrics go, I’d have no luck at all. If it wasn’t for rage, sometimes I think Nicky would have no feelings at all. Everything — friendship, grief, even love — seemed to be a permutation of his rage. Only later did I come to the realization that it wasn’t all his father’s doing. Nick had the rage in him like my mom had the sadness in her, on the molecular level.

Guess I should have seen it when we were kids. There was this one time we were playing stickball on the street and Vinny Podesta, the block bully, knocked me down to get to a ball. What an asshole Vinny was. I mean, we were on the same fucking team and he knocked me over just because he could. Nicky like exploded. He broke Vinny’s nose, climbed on top of him and just started smacking him with the back of his hand and I mean hard. Never seen anything like it. None of us kids had.

Yeah, we’d all had street fights. Came with the territory. You live in the rain forest, you get wet. So the thing about most street fights, especially among kids, is that they’re pretty ritualized. They have a form. It’s like when you see two rams butting heads. Before they get to it, there’s gesturing, threat behavior, each combatant giving the other a chance to back down. Watch the next time you see a bunch of boys in a schoolyard. There’s name calling, screaming, then a push. The push is the last chance for backing off. If there’s a push back, the fight’s coming. If the kid that gets pushed reverts to name calling, the fight’s been averted. That wasn’t Nick’s way.

You even looked at Nick the wrong way, he was coming for you. And it’s not like he started off easy and gave you a chance for retreat. No, it was all out from the first punch. Nicky didn’t lose many fights. That was the thing, he had rage. There was this other time, when we were older. We’d been smoking a few doobs and drinking in a trendy Park Slope hole. The bathroom was like the deli counter at Waldbaums: you needed to get a number. Went out to the alley to piss.

Found some mook trying to force himself on this girl, had her by the hair, face pressed to the brick wall, and was tearing at her panties from her lifted skirt. Kicked the ever living crap out of him. Pounded his face. Nicky, man, kicked at him like a mule. Wouldn’t stop. Kept swinging his boot, kicking and stomping. Even the chick we saved was freaked out.

“Whoa, whoa, Nicky,” I said, bear-hugging him and pulling him away. “You’ve got to rein it in, bro.”

“Why?” was all he said.

Things changed for us forever after that night. Even when Nick did his six months in Spofford, a place that would put the devil into a martyr, he was more in control. He really seemed on the edge. Of what, I couldn’t say, but it was nothing good.

The rest of my life changed in short order.

Been working at the airport for my Uncle Harry for a few years out of high school. Could have gone to college, should have, but I didn’t have the heart for more clueless teachers with advanced degrees in irrelevance. My mom was too self-absorbed to protest. I’m sure my dad was disappointed — hell, name me someone or something that didn’t disappoint him — but he wouldn’t have had the stones to say boo. Think maybe if he had said something, I would have gone for him. Of course, he didn’t. Why fuck up a perfect losing streak?

Uncle Harry was a fucking charmer, a real class act. Brought a smoking blonde half his age to my cousin Jay’s bar mitzvah. She knew Harry for the low rent asshole he was. Caught her sucking the drummer’s cock during a band break. Saw me watching. Stared at me. It was like a dare. Grow up in Brooklyn, you recognize a dare. “Go ahead, tell that fat fuck!” her eyes seemed to say. I didn’t say a word.