He was a cool cat with no time for the boys on the block. They were out for stick ball and manhunter, dodging between hydrants and ducking into back alleys. Their mothers would call for them from 3rd and 4th story windows between laundry lines tied across rusty fire escapes. And the boys would whine for one hour more and in turn they were scolded that they had until their fathers came home, big burly men who lugged toolboxes and brown bag lunches day in and day out.
No, he was always on the Concourse, leaning up against one thing or another, be it the shiniest lamp post on the block, outside a 1st floor window drifting a salsa tune, or even, a 1955 Cadillac Eldorado. He would eventually own one, long before the 331 cubic inch overhead valve V8 became a dinosaur, and hang on it long after it became extinct. He wore zoot suits that he was too young to be properly tailored for, and one of them hats that earned him scorn from the local flat foot on the beat. The fuzz always pulled him aside for a word or too about the straight and narrow, and he would grin his grin, shrug his shoulders and slyly twist out from under his glare. “Easy Jack,” he would say, “the threads, they might be from Persia, but they don’t stand up too well to heat.”
While the other boys on the block chased each other between the folds of their mother’s skirts, he was trying to get under them. He was smacked around a lot at his advances, but he didn’t mind, it wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to. But there was a mother or two who returned his sly smile with something more alluring and he found himself, in the beginning, way over his head. But this is how it started and as the summers rolled by, he got better to the point where he didn’t to hang out on the Concourse at all anymore, slouching from one corner to another. He literally went from door to door, and a couple of times, particularly in the early morning or late evening, winding down his “route” , he even tipped his hat passing by the husband right in on stoop, or nudged by him in the stairway on his way up.
It was all well and good until he started hitting the clubs, that’s when it started getting expensive. For money, he could scrunch some change to get by, nicking from an unattended purse or even putting on the water works about his dying mother right there between the sheets and shamelessly right after they had done the deed. But his mother could only be dying for so long until he would have to admit she was already dead. He never used his father in any story as his father apparently had no use for him. His only memory of the man was that he held his saxophone more often and with more grace than he ever did his wife and child, but his father had never played them a tune. And now, no matter his disdain for his estranged father and the horn that man carried, he felt himself compelled to all sorts of music, and jazz in particular, although he would never admitted it until he was near dead himself.
One summer he found himself with a Maria, which wasn’t her name, but all Spanish women were Maria to him because of that movie West Side Story, and he would steal lines from it, which made the Marias in his life coo. “Boy, boy, crazy boy,” they would say, as he slid one hand up a skirt and another down a blouse, “be cool boy..” Unlike the other dames on his route, this Maria had a husband that worked the night shift, which made her want the sort of night life glamour the other women in the neighborhood would die to have. The only problem of course was that he was often penniless, all of his loot going to keeping his suits clean, his shoes polished and a bit of starch for his brim. He saved up here and there the first time, thinking that he had enough to paint the town red for her, until he reached his first stop and blew three fourths of his wad just on the price of admission. It ended up being the most expensive lay of his life and he wasn’t quite ready to stop dancing the tango with this broad.
He teamed up with a younger kid he once knew on the block named Lucky. Lucky had actually caught him with his mother once but Lucky, and Lucky being not all that lucky or all too bright, believed him to be his real father (or else why did he do that thing that made babies more often than his alleged “father” did?). Lucky fell into the trade at the time, the only one from the neighborhood to do so, while everyone else got hooked onto it instead. And the two of them started to really clean up. He caught his 1955 Eldorado and more money than he could spend on his ever increasing cadre of women. Lucky was like a pig in shit, never when any skills for the ladies, he found now that he didn’t have to say much at all, just from hanging out with “Daddio” (and he insisted on that instead of having Lucky following him around calling him “Dad…”), he got plenty of affection.
Upon reflection, Daddio wonders how things would have been different if Lucky hadn’t confused him for his father. Would he have done what he had did, would either one of them have something to say to the other today? But that was long ago and he felt he had put enough miles and clubs and women and cheap motels between them so he could finally sleep at night, until he realized, that he would never be far away enough from his past. Even worse, he knew he wasn’t ashamed of it at all, not for one bit of it. He damn well enjoyed every minute, punch and drop of it. And if his old bones weren’t so brittle, he would be out there now, spitting on the sidewalk, watching the mutts swing broomsticks for bats, tipping his hat at the newlywed he had last night or flipping the bird to the man stuck on patrol. Yeah, if only these wires weren’t holding down and this pump and these doctors. If only they’d let him breathe on his own, one last time and let him whistle that tune he never heard his father play.