Blood Lovers by Gerald Coleman

At the haggard edges of New York City, the Fourth Avenue Local of the RR Line started or ended, depending upon your intentions, at Ninety-Fifth Street on the far ass-end of Brooklyn, where the city skyline was but an aspiration. You could barely see the Statue of Liberty if you were on a rooftop and knew where to look.

Rosemarie Zuccarelli and I wedged against the front window of the first car to watch the rails expand in parallel fury into our reflections in the glass at the horizon of a place or thing without explanation. You could forget where you were going, forget your name, forget what you meant.

On Wednesday of Easter Week 1964, eight of us from the neighborhood took the subway into Manhattan to catch a matinee the girls really, really wanted to see—a semi-religious movie about early Christians. Previews featured Saint Peter crucified upside down, played by a melancholic, terraced-faced actor looking up through a pasted-on white beard defying gravity. Weeping supporters craned to capture the drift of his remarks. It was a corny, academy award moment with comic appeal, so we headed for The City.

After too long at the window, we staggered to the nearest pole to let a bunch of little kids press their fates into the magic mirror. When space opened near our friends, we floundered over and flopped ourselves down on extruded green plastic bench seats running up both sides of the train. Simple. Functional. Always adjacent to the direction we were going, we were incidental to the movement, a package to be transported sideways like a carton of eggs. Sometimes a train full of passengers would roll by from an adjacent world in the opposite direction, at double each other’s relative speed. I caught sight of two people I imagined were us, oscillating in black and white on the other train before speeding away. I grabbed Rosie’s hand to keep her in my peripheral view.

When a sleepy unconsciousness descended, our heads bobbled like rocked in the dancing bounce of our mothers’ arms. Time was on a free pass, when we were stunned by sunlight flying out of the tunnel into the mile-high sky on the Manhattan Bridge over the East River. Every sense was electrocuted by splintered strobes cast by daylight through bridge cables and stanchions, rattling at 48 m.p.h. into Broadway Station, New York, New York.

The guys jerked around all afternoon. The movie stunk, even when Peter was crucified on his head in 3D to symphony music

“Did you like the movie, Mickey?” Rosie asked on her toes

She spent a lot of time up on her toes.

Avoiding the browns of her eyes, hoping to preserve her goodwill with an amiable lie. It wouldn’t be the last. “Sure,” I said.

There was uncommon purity between us, but the world of desire was magnified by possibility. Rosie and I were truly nice to each other, unlike typical teenage boys always after something, or girls hurt no matter what boys did or didn’t do. Ever since we were ten, we deferred to each other, yearned behind Venetian blinds, and shared soda bottles like proxy kisses.

We were the best distance runners on the block, great for street games. Better when the whine of a police car responding to a burning stack of Christmas trees set the local kids and teenage toughs scattering through the streets. Rosie and I, captured by the crackling flames like early hominids amid popping sap and flying sparks, would bolt, weaving around each other like foals. Our hearts strained out of the neighborhood, to walk lazily home, comfortable not to always talk. I kicked cans and stones along the streets and our hands perhaps touched and fingers hooked—our secret—one shared by the dogs in the street and every kid and parent on the block.

Through the winter months, sewer gas rose from each intersection dusk to dawn—four furnaces of steaming gas, not quite sulfurous, but opaque, drawn pale white from the depths into the darkening air by the physics of hot sewer and cold air. It gave the neighborhood a miasmic quality. Sometimes I’d disappear into the sweep of a sewer cloud, trusting blind intuition to jump onto the curb or forget myself in the rush of the rising steam to linger, to be assailed by beasts and whirlwinds I overcame with wit and wizardry. When I emerged, she would be halfway up the block and I had to catch up with an excuse or another. “I dropped my change” or “I got talking to the Devil and got dizzy.”

It was a weakness I needed to work on.

That year my stepmother Margaret got her hands on a book from the parish called “Listen, Son” by some priest about sex and adolescence, and handed it over. I was desperate for a crust of insight or anything to do with carnal love. I read it in a day, parsed each euphemism, sifted each Latinate term and ecclesiastical evasion for clues to desire and carnal love.

Nothing doing.

The only good thing about being in love at thirteen was nothing was expected. This had to do with Brooklyn, the times, and my particular family. But authentic “birds and bees” talks in the average mid-twentieth century American home was rare.

My first hope for clarity came when Vinnie Di Paulo got “the talk” from his father. Italians were more advanced in these matters. He planned to tell the guys all about it as a civic and humanitarian duty. Movies and T.V. stuffed teenage boys’ dreams with adorable Haleys and Annettes, but we would be clueless if we encountered one.

Kevin Dolan, Eddie Costa, and I, and three or four others sprouted around Vinnie to receive physical love’s secrets in a remote corner of the broken glass and weed pervaded lot behind the candy store.

I dreaded what Vinnie might say. I saw a photo in a book where sperms swarmed like tadpoles around a large orb; another showed a wing shaped, headless harpy holding an egg in each outstretched hand rising from the well of a woman’s stomach. What these objects had to do with each other or me was a grave concern.

Rain from a recent downpour dripped from the milkweeds and thistles in the undergrowth and trash. Low thunder growled in the east over Canarsie through the Rockaways as Vinnie spoke. He spoke well, using his hands and sneakers to emphasize key points. The idea that came across was the penis and the vagina were involved, but the actual topography and instructions were as murky as ever. He said there were passageways and folds inside a girl’s vagina that could be negotiated by a penis if there was a hard-on.

“Next, you’ll have a wet dream,” he said, “even though you weren’t asleep

We looked at each other. There were no questions. I was a confident kid, but to slip through the drawn curtain of the vagina seemed unlikely.

After Vinnie’s speech, Eddie, Billy Olsen, Kevin, and I hung around a remote part of the lot under a dead elm tree. Our mood was solemn. I had a penknife. We did not discuss what Vinnie said. We took turns bouncing the knife off the tree. Twice Eddie got it to stick. He had Cerebral Palsy, which gave him the requisite randomness of athleticism.

Then we became blood brothers.

We saw it done in a movie. Although the implications were vague, we knew it called for the mingling of blood. We knew it was secretive and an unbreakable bond—Brothers Forever. No one remembered the blood brother words, nor whether there were words, but our belief was that the event was sufficient to enact the bond. A dry run proved index fingers optimal for interpenetration of blood for four. Poking not slicing. Kevin stabbed the point into his finger without expectations and fell thrashing on his back in the dirt. Twice I tried to push the tip in. I held my finger sideways, closed my eyes, and jammed the knife home into my fingernail.           

“Mother of Christ!”

Hot darts of pain shot up my arm. Rather than sacrificial, brotherly blood, a red-black hematoma radiated under my nail from the cuticle like a sore, bleak sunrise.

I sank next to Kevin in the grass. I passed the thing to Billy Olsen. He knew there was no way, so he made the quick decision—he told me years later—to shield the operation in the crook of his midsection turned to the elm tree. Even Olsen knew he was a pussy. Screaming, he stuck the knife into his belt buckle. The three of us were now whining like dogs on our knees. We knew immediately. We should have made Eddie go first.

Even at thirteen, Eddie Costa was fearless. Except when it came to himself. He could kick you into the harbor off a pier, stick a rat down your pants, or goose your sister, but his mother had to sedate him to give him a bath.

He started whimpering with the knife in his hand. There was no discussion whether the ritual had to be voluntarily entered—like marriage or suicide—so Billy Olsen knelt on his arm while I cut Eddie’s fingertip with a twisting stab. We pulled him up, and with blood pounding out of at least two of us, intertwined our fingers to spread the gore. There was enough blood for a dozen blood brothers. It was meant for life.

Word spread through the neighborhood what we had done. Mrs. Costa was furious. My dad adjudicated harsh punishment to keep him on the good side of my stepmother, who was hearing it from the neighbors about “the poor spastic boy.” No dessert for a week, extra duties, and cancelled privileges. We negotiated terms sitting on my bed. I got the impression I was to put on the dog face around the family, take out the garbage for a week, and dry the dishes. No shooting hockey pucks at the Johnny-pump after dark.

The first night, I sat solemnly at the table looking at four translucent bricks of green gelatin, the most unlikely of human foods, while everyone but me ate. My father and I exchanged meaningful glances. My sister Maureen lifted a surgical spoon tipped with Reddi-Wip. She said, “Yummy,” which set the Jell-O quivering.

A few weeks later after dinner, while I decided what homework I could put off until morning, my dad in unaccustomed nonchalance hung around the table fussing his hand through his hair.

“Mickey. Ah. How’s the book we got you coming? Wanna talk about it?”

I knew very well my father had nothing to do with the book.

“Nah, I read it. I’m good.”

Together, we watched my stepmother’s abandoned cigarette by the sink circulate smoke spirals in dissolving, helical patterns. A forensically perfect band of red lipstick on the filter left imprinted the cliffs and crevices of her lips. My father, still fretting with his head, was the first to summon himself. He was disturbed I swallowed the book in one gulp instead of stopping at the early-teen section, a workup to the “self-abuse” masturbation section, then on to the late-teen chapters on dating and marriage, concluding with a glossed-over, secret reproductive act referred to as an “embrace,” and a never-ending march of infants into the octopus-arms of the church.

“I’m a little concerned,” he said. I was concerned about everything, the book’s lack of factual “how-to” detail and its disregard of the humiliating questions unanswered.

A year previously, I awoke to hear my stepmother and dad coming out of the bathroom trying not to make noise, laughing, saying things I didn’t understand. I thought now was the time to push him.

“Dad? . . . Never mind.” We knew my stepmother was hovering within earshot. Everywhere in our apartment was in earshot. We perceived the smoldering cigarette to be my stepmother Margaret herself.

We sat grievously at the table. She sat yards away out of sight on a second-hand, champagne colored sofa. We knew her disposition. Her shoes would be off, stockings draped over them like snake castings. An empty wooden dish for dainties, she called them, was on the coffee table with her feet. She lit a Kent and used the dish for an ashtray. She had a lump in her throat that wasn’t necessarily there. My real mother died when I was seven. My siblings and I were a little hard on my stepmother sometimes.

Everything in the room, including her, tilted toward us in the kitchen in the waning light slanting from the bay through the front window.

“I’m good,” I repeated and shut up, but I had a question. Hey Dad, if I wanted to do it, you know, with Rosie—like you and her in there—how would I?

I may have been ignorant, but I wasn’t stupid and was beginning to understand the answers to life’s essential questions were not to be found at home.A look came over my father, like he knew something was wrong between us.

“What’s troubling ya, son?”

I was about to cry, I think, although I would never.

“Oh, that,” he said like he should have known.

He took me by the shoulders over to the stove. He did not play it up.

“If it happens so in life, just present yourself. She will understand because it is her body after all. She’ll put you inside her and there you’ll be happy as a clam. Tight and safe and out of your mind in paradise. The female is the greatest creature created by God.”

We hugged a little and moved back to the table.

“Wanna egg cream?” he asked.

That night, I smiled myself to sleep—dreaming about Rosie putting me inside her.

remember when the turning came.

It was late August after two hot, blazing months in the streets. The poor squirrels were stuck half-lifeless to the telephone wires; their little chirpy mouths silent for the first time in their lives with their tails hanging limp. The gang sat on a stoop sniffing around for a shred of sophistication and we’d get trapped in an endless loop you’d need a German dictionary to have a sufficient word for

A squirrel came crashing dead in the stifling heat onto the street and that was all anyone could stand. Vinnie suggested ring-a-levio to break the cycling boredom of Brooklyn and the butt-dragging, hazy afternoon. And that called for girls.

It was not clear why ring-a-levio called for girls, but girls kept the two team’s “jails” filled and their screaming laughter carried subconscious sexual tensions we were only vaguely aware of. More fulfilling emotionally than the democratic spin-the-bottle; it was a run-and-tag game so simple, with defense flowing back and forth with captures and releases, and the only time constraint was dinner. Two front stoops served as jails where the captured were held.

Rosie and I were always on the same side and when she was captured—Ring-a-levio One, Two, Three—I would lead coordinated attacks on the enemy jail or lone suicide missions to free her. Despite her whippet speed, sometimes she got caught on purpose.

On that day in boiling August, during a brave game of ring-a-levio, I threw myself rolling under a black car near the enemy jail, which was Junior’s stoop. I smacked my head laughing on the asphalt street, pulled myself face-sideways through stones and grease and waited on my cheekbone for the jail to be loosely guarded. There was a lot to be learned about life from Ring-a-levio. Patience. Loyalty. The feint and the false stride. Self-sacrifice. Love. I crabbed behind the car to run around token interference, stomped on the stoop’s steps and grabbed Rosie’s arm, Hump Free-All!  The magic words to set us away together down Battery Avenue where we might linger until dusk.

She said nothing, grabbed my arm to slap me in one burning motion across my face. She may have punched me. Just as determined, she jumped, kissed me on the lips or thereabouts, and ran crying, clearly crazy, into the vestibule of a building she did not live in.

I sat on a step on Junior’s stoop-jail, intent upon the pigeon-guano cliffs of the three-story house across the street where Rosie lived with her parents, aunts, uncles, and half of a small Italian town.

Sitting there, the seat of cognition shifted to my thorax, where it remained on and off for most of my teenage years.

Over the next week, intelligence came in gossipy guarantees that there was trouble in the Zuccarelli household between Tony and Rosie’s mother Angelina. Squabbles and arguments were heard in Italian. She couldn’t take the way he looked at her, the way the neighbors looked at her. She was persecuted. I’d see a face in the Zuccarelli’s third-floor window. Like a face, something there and not there, singing into the pane. I couldn’t hear her song, but it was unbearably sad the way her neck trebled and held the notes, how she peeled back her head to the gray sky.

I spent afternoons on Junior’s stoop where Rosemarie metastasized into likenesses and lies, was diluted by adaptations and revisions I fabricated to fill the missing frames.

The afternoon before Rosie Zuccarelli left Brooklyn with her mother to live with relations somewhere unspoken, she joined me on the stoop. She asked to take her to the elm tree. She held out her thumb and said, “Please.”

Her thumb was pinkie small. I ran my penknife across my finger. I could not cut her. She could. We kissed whatever brand of kiss we had and pressed our thumbs together to form a strange that fluttering bird in pain before us.

In the morning, she was gone. We were thirteen.

Then we weren’t. 

Gerald Coleman

Image: A finger with drops of blood on the surface from Pixabay.com