Getting Closure on 103rd Street

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Jacob Chinnick, bundled up against an early autumn chill in a tattered overcoat, trudged slowly up the hill from Riverside Drive towards West End Avenue. Every day, it was more and more difficult getting downstairs, then walking up to Broadway just to buy a paper.

In the middle of the block, he paused and leaned against a rusted sign post. He coughed several times to clear his throat and then spat a wad of greenish-yellow phlegm onto the sidewalk. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed. At an open window on the first floor, a woman sat watching him. She was propped up on a pillow, her elbows under her, as she leaned out the window. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth.

“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doin’?” she called down to him.

He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. She watched with a sneer as he continued on his way.

She turned inside and shouted out, “Hey Herbie. It’s gettin’ late. Whatcha doin’ in there?”

“Leave me alone, Ma. I’m just toastin’ a bagel.”

“You’re gonna be late to school. You better hurry up.”

“For chrissakes, already. Can’t I grab a bite to eat?”

That’s exactly how his father used to talk, she thought. Before the bastard took off. As she took another drag, cigarette ash dropped off onto the discolored linoleum. The apple doesn’t fall far from the goddam tree. She turned her head and exhaled a cloud of smoke out of the window.

So she wouldn’t get more pissed off, he shouted, “Don’t worry. I’m leavin’ soon. I don’t want to be late.” He had his mother convinced that his overcrowded high school was on a split session and his first class was fifth period, which started around noon, so she wouldn’t annoy him and wake him up. Much of the time he never bothered to show up for classes anyway.

“Didja do your homework?”

“Yeah, Ma.” What a pain in the ass, he thought. Always asking the same stupid question. As if she really gave a damn. “I already did it … in study hall.”

A burning odor came from the kitchen. “Hey, what’s that smell?”

“Damn it. The bagel got all burnt up,” he shouted back. “It got stuck in the fuckin’ toaster again.”

“Hey watch your math! I’m your mother.”

She heard him fumbling in the kitchen. “You ain’t got no more bagels?” he shouted.

“Just what’s in there.”

He walked by her perch with disdain. Damn, his mother was looking old. Her skin was mottled and wrinkled and her remaining teeth were yellowed and crooked. She was dressed in a housecoat covered with stains and burn holes. A scarf tied over her uncombed hair did not conceal at all the tell-tale gray roots that were growing back out. She looks like a stinkin’ bag woman.

She looked back and gave him an accusatory look.

“What?” he asked, spitting out the “t” sound.

“Nothin’. Not a damn thing.” Unlike the other kids who had passed by earlier, he wasn’t burdened down with a backpack filled with textbooks and notebooks and completed assignments. Oversized earphones already covered his ears as he fiddled with his MP3 player.

“See ya later, Ma.” He hurried out the door before she could ask him for a kiss – “Com’ere, Herbie. Just a quick peck on the cheek for your Mom.” Along with the hovering cloud of stale smoke and aspirated alcohol that emanated from her, that needy request, so devoid of real warmth, never failed to turn his stomach.

Up ahead, he saw Jacob Chinnick doubled over and leaning against a car. The old man was coughing deeply, trying to clear his throat and catch his breath. As he approached, Herbie called out, “Hey! You all right?”

“Go on, already. Leave me alone.” The old man barely sputtered out the words.

“I was only trying to help ya.”

“I don’t need your help. Get the hell away from me.”

“Well, fuck you too, you old bastard,” Herbie said, and continued on his way.

A block and a half further, Herbie turned onto Broadway and headed towards the green-awninged Korean deli located in the middle of the block between a dry cleaner and a nail salon. A young Asian man in a white apron, wearing a Mets baseball cap, stood outside sorting cut flowers and culling the damaged ones. He watched Herbie with undisguised contempt as he walked into the store. Herbie went directly to the refrigerated unit in the back of the store, where the beer and soda were kept. Herbie noticed his reflection in a convex-shaped mirror attached to the ceiling and realized he was being followed. When he bent over and reached in for a 40-ounce bottle of Colt 45, the young Asian man, standing behind him, asked, “You buy?”

“Yeah, what’s it to you?

“You not old ’nuf. You not twenty-one.”

“I got proof.”

“No. It fake. You still go to school. I know.”

Herbie put the bottle back and got up to leave. “You no come back!” the Asian man warned him. Herbie spewed curses at both him and then the owner, who had been quietly standing behind the cash register reading a Korean-language newspaper. On his rush out of the store, Herbie bumped into the old man, who gave him a dirty look, even when Herbie turned to apologize.

“Hello, Chang,” Jacob muttered to the owner, who had been watching Herbie walk out. A few moments later, the young Asian man ran out after him. The owner shouted profanities at his back as the door closed. The old man didn’t need to know their language to sense Chang’s anger.

After he calmed down, the owner said, “Hello, Mister Chinnick.”

Jacob remembered how it had been, years before, when this store, now much-too-brightly lit by banks of flourescent bulbs, was a dingy candy store owned by a Jewish man and employing all of the members of his extended family. Newspapers – including the now defunct Herald Tribune, the Mirror, the World Telegram and assorted Yiddish publications – were stacked outside on a flimsy wooden stand and weighted down by iron bars and rocks to keep them from blowing. The owner stood at a small open window and made change when necessary. Otherwise, a dime, then later a quarter, was flicked into a small glass tray kept on the windowsill to pay for a paper. It was all on the honor system.

Jacob would walk into the store only if he wanted to take his time to pick out some candy or to leaf through a magazine. On a rare occasion, he would sit at the counter, slowly drinking a chocolate egg cream made with real seltzer, served in a paper cone pushed into a metal holder. Now, a candy bar cost a dollar, iced tea came in fancy glass bottles that cost a buck seventy-five and The New York Times cost two-fifty. The Times was one of the few luxuries the old man would still allow himself.

Jacob slowly walked around the store and then carried a small can of tomato soup, a quart of milk and a loaf of white bread back to the counter in a red plastic basket. He knew that the cost of almost everything in this store was higher than Gristedes, but he didn’t have the energy to walk the extra four blocks just to save a couple of pennies. His pension had never been able to keep up with inflation; hard-won annual cost-of-living increases, though glorified by his union, were only a cruel joke, and he was continually forced to withdraw cash from his dwindling savings just to make ends meet. He shook his head with tired resignation when Chang totaled up the items.

Jacob left the store with his groceries and the newspaper in a plastic bag with a red and black I ♥ N Y logo printed on it. As he walked back down the hill to his apartment, he heard grunting and cursing coming from an alley between two buildings. When he looked in, he saw two boys fighting. As they grappled, he saw that one of them was the Asian boy who worked in Chang’s store and the other was the one who had passed him as he walked in – the one who wanted to help him earlier. He watched as they wrestled and pummeled each other. Then he saw a glint of steel. The Asian boy, in one horrible motion, buried a knife into the other boy’s belly, and then stabbed him again, and again, and yet again until he crumpled to the ground. He looked around with frantic eyes, pulled out the knife, ran out of the alley, and threw the knife across the street. The other boy slowly got to his feet and staggered out of the alley, holding his stomach. Blood spurted out between his fingers. “Help me, please,” he pleaded, as he reached out to grab the old man with a hand dripping blood. Jacob stepped back with revulsion and the boy dropped to the ground with a thud.

The boy lay convulsing and gulping for air with shallow, arrhythmic breaths. His eyes were wide with terror. Jacob had no cell phone nor enough strength to call out for help. He felt as helpless as the boy who was lying on the sidewalk inside a steadily spreading puddle of blood. He got down on one knee and held the boy’s hand until his imploring eyes, staring up at him, and then staring through him, were no longer in focus.

Time passed in minuscule disjointed fragments for the bewildered old man who did not know how to respond. He held onto the boy’s still-warm but lifeless hand and the only idea that came to him was to mumble the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, a prayer he knew all too well because he had to recite it so often in the past. First his mother and father, then his wife. It took her a long time to go; her incurable cancer tenaciously lingered over both of them. Though she was the one who suffered more, his suffering was no less real.

Then it was his older son, who was killed by a drunk driver as he hurried across Queens Boulevard against the light. And then his younger one, a year later, who one minute was standing in front of his third period class, explaining the Pythagorean Theorem to a bunch of ninth graders, and the next was sprawled on his back on the floor, dying from a brain aneurysm. Both were young fathers, and even though Jacob had made an effort to see his grandchildren, he eventually lost touch with his daughters-in-law who had since remarried and moved away. As they made new lives for themselves, Jacob was left to grow old and crumble all by himself, in a crummy walk-up in a nondescript building. One of Jacob’s direst fears was that no one would be there with him when it was his time to go.

Approaching sirens increasing in volume and suddenly silencing took him out of his reverie. Police officers and EMT’s surrounded them. The area was already being cordoned off with yellow tape as Jacob was helped to his feet. “Could you tell us what happened?” one of the officers asked him. Another demanded, “What’s your name?”

Jacob had never liked getting involved. Maybe it was an inborn response to generations decimated by pogroms and purges and no-longer-remembered family members hunted down by kapos and the gestapo. Or else it was a distrust and suspicion of authority and government. Whatever it was, when the two crazy families across the street were again screaming at each other in the middle of the night – only God knows why – and Jacob thought he heard gun shots and did see punches being thrown, and he knew people were being injured and maimed, instead of watching and listening and witnessing, he quietly shut his windows and pulled down the brittle, yellowing shades. He didn’t want to be like the others – meshugenahs all – who ran out onto the street when the police cars and ambulances drew up, excitedly wanting part of the action, eagerly willing to share their own varied versions of the sordid, frenzied events.

“Hey! I’m talking to you! What’s your name?”

“Chennick. Jacob Chennick.”

“Where do you live?”

“On the next block. Three sixteen.”

“What happened here?”

“Two boys were fighting,” and Jacob paused. “He stumbled out of the alley, bleeding all over the place. I was holding his hand when he died.”

That was the very thing he couldn’t do for his wife. Jacob had gotten a telephone call at two thirty in the morning from the big hospital on the other side of the park. They told him to come right away. “Why? What’s going on?” he asked, but he wasn’t told anything definite. Deep down, though, he knew.

“It’s about your wife. Just come. And make it quick.”

That time in the morning, it took him a while to find a cab. When he got to the hospital, his wife had already been taken away, and the night crew was cleaning up the room, preparing it for the next patient whose only way out would be zipped up in a body bag and rolled out on a gurney. He had always hoped that she could have stayed at home at the end, but they were too weak to insist, too impotent to fight the system. Even their boys, who claimed to always want the best for them, but who knew them seemingly the least, pressured them into having her stay in the hospital. “It’s for Mom’s own good,” they kept on insisting. So she died accompanied not by her husband’s whispered reassurances, but by the monotonic sound of the flattening line from the heart monitor. The boys’ deaths were one thing; they had died suddenly, unexpectedly. But Jacob could never get over losing his wife the way he had, unable to hold her hand, unable to tell her how much he loved her as she drifted off, all alone, at the end.

“Hey! Listen to me, Mr. Chinnick! Did you see who stabbed him?”

Yes or no? He had to make a decision. One person was already dead. Another boy’s life could be ruined. It could be Chang’s son, possibly a relative. Maybe the police would find out who did it anyway. Should I say anything? Should I tell them what they want to know? And why the hell should I?

“I don’t know for sure.” It didn’t take much effort for Jacob to make himself sound befuddled. “My eyes … I really didn’t get too good a look.”

By then, two detectives in rumpled suits joined the group of police officers surrounding Jacob. One of them gave the old man a strange look. “You sure you didn’t see anything?”

Jacob coughed and took his time answering. He said, slowly and deliberately, “It all happened so fast, and then he was lying there, on the sidewalk, bleeding.”

“But you didn’t see who did this?”

“What do you want from me? I told you everything I know.” The old man shriveled before their eyes, as most old people do in the eyes of the more virile. “It’s really horrible. I just want to go home.”

Jacob picked up his plastic I ♥ N Y bag, bent over to retrieve the can of soup that had rolled out, and continued down 103rd Street to his home, leaving all the hubbub behind.

As he walked, he felt tears rolling down his cheeks. Tears of relief. Tears of a lost love. Tears of loneliness. Tears of the unknown.

But inside, he no longer felt as empty.

Up to the beginning of the story

Rev 7 / February 26, 2004 .. Rev 9 / September 13, 2012

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Issue 25, November 2012

Copyright © 2012, Lloyd B. Abrams