It was drugs, actually. I hooked some kids up with some acid and when one of them got in trouble he turned me in.” I was a little surprised to find myself being so open about all this, but Mendy had been honest with me about Al, and I felt I should be honest with him in return.
“Life’s rough like that,” Mendy said. “You try to be a nice guy, and help another guy out. And then that’s what you get in return.”
“That’s what you get, all right.”
“Still, you’re lucky you’re a free man. A friend of mine got in some trouble like that once . . . they gave him ten years for two sheets of blotter acid. This was back in the ’70s. It was the ’80s by the time they let him out.” Mendy was quiet for a minute. “He was real different then.”
“Well, this wasn’t that much. Just a few tabs. I was just trying to help some guys out, you know? I wasn’t a drug dealer or anything. But I was tripping daily, so I kept a good supply, and people knew I was always sure to have something on hand. Or at least could always get something.”
I hadn’t been on any one thing in particular. I wasn’t a dope fiend or an addict, just a seeker. Most of the things I was into aren’t even addictive. But I always had to have something to put me in the dream world: acid, mushrooms, morning-glory-seed oil, whatever. At least some Adderall or Benzedrine to elevate things. Some good bud to help me ease away from the physical world’s illusions. It was better to buy in bulk than to run dry, and the only way I could afford to do that was by selling off half of every bulk purchase. People started coming to me, and the bulk purchases got bigger and bigger.
“Still, just for hooking the guy up, I was scared there was going to be some serious police problems. My stepfather got involved and smoothed things over as best he could. I agreed to withdraw from the school voluntarily, to save everyone the headache.”
The story was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the gist. There had been a couple minor incidents, then the one serious situation where the kid took some stuff he couldn’t handle and freaked out. He had to go to a mental asylum for a couple weeks, where they pumped him full of Risperdal. His father and his father’s lawyers got involved, and made the kid out to be a victim. He gave me up as the “campus source,” even though I was only buying from another guy on campus, who had connections up in Cleveland.
Campus security searched my dorm room and threatened me, but I wasn’t going to drag anyone else down with me. Besides, all they found were a few pills and residue-covered bags. I was lucky that they didn’t come earlier or later. When I broke the kid off, I had had a whole sheet of blotter acid, but in the interim it had all been sold off or consumed. I’d been making arrangements to buy a vial of liquid LSD the week after the search. One hundred doses for four hundred bucks was a good deal. If the school had found that, they would have called the police. Possession of more than fifty doses is considered a third-degree felony in Ohio; I would not have come away with anything less than nine months of jail time, and I would have done my time rather than snitch on my source.
The circumstantial evidence wasn’t really enough to get the police involved. It was just the other kid’s story against mine. But the school interviewed a bunch of other students, and then it was all of their stories against mine. I had thought some of them were my friends. Apparently not. I was failing out anyway, and it was clear to everyone that I was out of my mind on drugs. When they interrogated me, my answers didn’t make any sense. They didn’t even pertain to the issue at hand. The school just wanted me to go away, and Bernie and my mother came to a quiet agreement with them. My mother was still pretty mad about the whole situation.
“When I left school,” I told Mendy, “I went and stayed with my parents in New Mexico, where they live now, to get my head straight.”
“Your parents?” Mendy was confused; the only parent of mine he knew was Alojzy.
“My mother and my stepfather. They sort of retired down there, I guess.” Bernie was a few years older than my mother. “The climate’s good for my stepfather’s asthma. I mean, he still works, but from there. There wasn’t really any reason for me to be there. I’m staying with my sister here in the city now.”
“I see.”
“It’s where I’m from originally. I guess I feel more at home here.”
“Me too. I’m the same way.” I took a look at Mendy. I really couldn’t see him existing anywhere else except a New York City street.
“Hey, why did you guess it was fighting they kicked me out for?”
“I thought maybe you had that part of your father in you.” It made me happy that he thought that.
“He got in a lot of fights out here?”
“Well, look: he was always a nice guy to me, and everyone else who treated him nice, but if someone crossed him, oh boy, it was on.” Mendy finished his last bite of yogurt, and put the empty container down on the curb. “His face, the shape of his face, could physically change. It was terrifying. He had a thing about respect. If you were respectful to him, fine. But if he felt disrespected . . .
“This one time, he forgot his heavy jacket out on the street by mistake, his own mistake, after he’d packed up for the night. He comes back the next day, and asks Eye—a guy, a street guy, who hangs out around here—if he’s seen the jacket. Eye says yeah, right after Al left, this guy who passes by here walking a little white dog every morning and every evening, he came by and picked up the jacket.
“So Al, he waits until the guy comes by on his morning walk and approaches him. He says, ‘Excuse me, did you pick up a jacket from here yesterday night?’ The guy says, ‘No. I didn’t.’ And Al says, ‘Oh really, that surprises me, because you know, my long-term acquaintance Eye, who’s never steered me wrong on any factual matters, says you picked up my jacket that I forgot.’ The guy says, ‘Fine, so what if I did, what I find is mine. It’s none of your business what I pick up off the street.’ Al, I could tell he’s on the verge, he says, ‘Maybe you didn’t realize it was my jacket. But it is, and I’d like it back.’ The guy says, ‘No, fuck you, it’s my jacket now.’
“Al looks at him calmly. So calmly the guy thought maybe he’d won, but the thing is, your father at his calmest was your father at his most frightening. So he looks at the guy and says—his tone just as friendly as could be—he says, ‘That’s fine. I just want you to understand, though, that after I finish beating the shit out of you, I’m going to beat the shit out of your dog.’
“The guy went right on home and got the jacket and brought it back.
“Later, I said to him, ‘Damn, Al, that was something.’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Al, I mean, you were really going to beat up a little doggy?’ He says, ‘Look, Mendy, I knew by the fact he’s every day taking this little dog for walks in the fresh air, that he really loves that animal. If people cross you, then you have to hurt what they love.’” I liked hearing this story. Alojzy was strong, unyielding. People showed him respect.
“But at the same time,” Mendy said, “Al wasn’t petty. I’m not saying that your father was going to hurt the little dog because he was petty about the fucking jacket. You asked him for a fucking jacket, he’d give it to you. Matter of fact, this sweater I’m wearing right now . . .” Mendy tugged on the green fabric hanging loosely from his frame . . . “he gave it to me.”
As the last rush was dying off, we started packing up. The sun was long gone, the moon barely a sliver, but there were enough electric lights for us to see. Mendy had a whole system worked out. The books came off the table in order, row by row, and went into specific, numbered boxes. His handcart folded out into a long four-wheeled cart, and each of the boxes, folded tables, pieces of wood, and plastic bags had their own set places. We were tying the whole rig up with rope when a man built like a scarecrow sidled up to us.
“Mendy. Mendy, my man.”
“Oh, how you doing, Eye.” Eye was tall and lanky, though his oversized sweatshirt obscured the exact shape