Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Page 3

  “My father’s right,” said Dinky. “There’s nothing he can do for the guy. The guy’s been shooting smack since he was thirteen. He’s a recidivist in capital letters!”

  “Is shooting smack taking heroin?” Tucker said.

  “It’s not just taking heroin,” Dinky said, “it’s wallowing in it. That guy lives to shoot up. He’d kill his grandmother for a ten-dollar bag. He’d hammer you to death for half the price of a snort.”

  “I like things out of season,” Natalia changed the subject. “That’s why I like coming here in late November.”

  “That guy has track marks on his ankles,” Dinky said. “He’s got acne everywhere, including the insides of his ears, just from being a smack-head.”

  “Does heroin give you pimples?” Tucker asked.

  “All junk does. Junkies love sweets,” Dinky said authoritatively. “I never met a junkie who didn’t verge on bulbous acne.”

  “How can you eat and talk about bulbous acne?” Tucker said.

  “I’m not finicky,” Dinky answered.

  She finished her sandwich and they walked from the Overlook down to the Cherry Esplanade, and across to the Oriental Garden. They talked about dope addicts, and the man Dinky was doing the book report about who had the big cauliflower sacs on his head and no hands; and they talked about dwarfs and pinheads and a woman Dinky had read about whose ears were attached to her shoulders. Dinky did most of the talking. They sat around the lake near the Oriental Garden staring up at the fir trees and ginkgoes, the mountain ashes and locusts, and Dinky passed around a 45¢-size box of Milk Duds.

  “One of the strangest things I ever heard,” said Dinky, “was the story of this doctor my mother knew. He specialized in hydrocephalics.”

  “What are they?” Tucker said.

  “They’re people with water on the brain. They have oversized heads. Their heads are so big they can hardly carry them on their shoulders. They don’t live long.”

  “I’ve seen one of those,” Natalia said.

  Dinky said, “This doctor never treated anyone but hydrocephalics. They were all children whose parents brought them to him, to see if there was anything he could do. He had three normal children of his own. How he got interested in hydrocephalics is anyone’s guess. That was just his thing.”

  “That’s not so strange,” Natalia said. “He just had a specialty.”

  “Fermay la bush and let me finish,” Dinky said. “The strange part of the whole story was that his fourth child turned out to be a hydrocephalic.”

  “Oh wow,” said Natalia.

  “His wife turned into a drunk,” Dinky said. “Even though it’s a scientific fact you can’t catch hydrocephalus, or even carry it in your genes, his wife believed that somehow his whole interest in the subject was responsible.”

  “That’s quite a story,” Tucker agreed.

  “What’s the strangest thing you ever heard, Tucker?” Natalia asked.

  Tucker remembered one of the confession stories for Stirring Romances his mother had been working on some weeks ago. It wasn’t a true story, none of the confession stories in those magazines ever were true. It was supposed to be this nurse’s confession of something she had done years ago. The photograph accompanying the story showed a nurse in her white cap, sitting on a high stool, weeping, with her face buried in her hands.

  Tucker said, “The strangest thing I ever heard was the story of this nurse my mother knew. She’d worked in this hospital for about twenty years, in the small town where she lived. She was very bitter because she was from a poor family, and besides that she couldn’t have children of her own.”

  “Why couldn’t she?” Dinky said.

  “She just couldn’t,” said Tucker. “Some women can’t.”

  “What happened?” Natalia said.

  “She confessed one day that for twenty years she’d been switching newborn babies around. She’d been changing their name tags. She’d take a rich man’s new baby and switch name tags with a poor man’s new baby. No one in the town had the right baby. No one knew who their real brothers and sisters were, or who their real mothers and fathers were, after she made her confession twenty years later.”

  Dinky whistled and hit her forehead with her palm.

  The title of that Stirring Romance story had been “I Made Their Lives a Mockery.”

  Natalia said, “Didn’t she keep track of whose baby she was giving to who?”

  “No,” Tucker said. “She kept no records. She just made their lives a mockery.”

  Dinky said, “Probably something like that happened when I was born. That’s probably why I have a gland problem and no one else in the family does. I’m probably some circus fat lady’s illegitimate child.”

  Dinky got thirsty and the trio made their way toward Flatbush Avenue where Dinky remembered there were street vendors selling orange drinks. For a while they discussed nothing but the awful possibilities which could have resulted from the nurse’s actions, and finally Tucker became aware that he and Dinky had been hogging the conversation.

  “What’s the strangest thing you ever heard?” he asked Natalia.

  She had this funny little faraway smile, and she just shrugged and replied, “I know a lot of strange things.”

  Dinky said, “One strange thing is the fact they don’t sell food or refreshments of any kind in this place. They do in Central Park, in Manhattan. You can buy a whole hot meal at the cafeteria by the zoo.”

  “Let Natalia answer,” Tucker said.

  “She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,” Dinky said.

  “That’s all right,” Natalia said.

  Tucker looked from one to the other. It suddenly occurred to him that Dinky had purposely butted in every time he asked Natalia a question about herself. It suddenly dawned on him that Dinky was actually protecting Natalia in some way, and this was a side of Dinky which Tucker had never seen.

  Tucker mulled it over as they walked down past the Rock Garden toward Flatbush Avenue, and he didn’t say anything; no one did for a while.

  Then Natalia said, “There was a boy at our school who always wore his clothes backward. He insisted on it. The teachers would make him change them around, but the minute he was out of their sight, he’d put them on backward again.”

  Tucker didn’t ask why and neither did Dinky. There was something building up, and Tucker could feel it. Tucker’s Creative Writing teacher, Mr. Baird, would have described the feeling as “far-out vibes,” meaning there were certain peculiar vibrations in the air, with no real logical reason for their being there.

  Then Natalia continued, “You see, until he came to our school, he was in a lot of other schools. His parents and a lot of psychologists had always thought he was a slow learner.”

  “Shrinks are all crazy,” Dinky said. “I had to see a shrink once because of my glandular problem, and he said I ate too much because I had anger bottled up in me.”

  “Some shrinks are all right,” Natalia said.

  Tucker remained silent.

  “I don’t have any anger bottled up in me,” Dinky said. “If anything, I lean the other way. Who else would take in some alley cat advertised for adoption on a tree?”

  Natalia said, “This boy’s name was Tony. Before he came to our school they thought he was retarded. He was going to schools where all the others were really retarded. He stopped talking and he wouldn’t do anything but sit in a chair with his clothes on backward, staring at the wall. His mother was this mean woman who took out all her anger on him. She really did have anger bottled up in her, and she used to beat him black and blue when he was a baby …. Then one day he heard her say he was ‘backward.’ That’s when he began wearing all his clothes backward.”

  Dinky said, “The shrinks should pay more attention to stupid mothers like that, and leave normal people with gland problems alone.”

  “He’s okay now, though,” Natalia said. “He’s not even in our school anymore. He’s in regular school.”

  “So are you now,” Dinky said.

  “I hope so,” Natalia said.

  Tucker said, “Where is this street vendor located on Flatbush Avenue?” His heart was beating very fast, and he had been unable to think of anything else to say. Then he hated himself for butting in with something about a street vendor, when obviously whatever was going on was more important than Dinky getting a cardboard carton of orange sugar water.

  “I don’t care if Tucker knows,” Natalia said.

  “I’m warning you, I’ve only known him about a month,” Dinky said, as though Tucker wasn’t there. “I only know him because Nader gave his father asthma. It’s about all we have in common.”

  “For Pete’s sake!” Tucker said.

  “For Pete’s sake what?” said Dinky. “I don’t know you.”

  “That’s great!” Tucker said furiously.

  “I trust Tucker,” Natalia said. “I don’t think it’ll make any difference to him that I’ve been in a special school.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference at all,” Tucker said.

  “It’s called Renaissance,” Natalia said. “That means ‘a new emergence.’ That’s where I went for Thanksgiving. Everybody at Renaissance has problems.”

  “You’re all over yours,” Dinky said.

  “Mental problems,” Natalia said.

  “I get it,” Tucker said softly.

  “I hope I’m okay now,” Natalia said.

  “Now that you know about it,” Dinky said to Tucker, “don’t blab it all over Brooklyn Heights.”

  Tucker didn’t even answer her.

  “I’m not ashamed of it, if that’s what you think,” Natalia said. “But sometimes it’s harder when everyone’s looking at you for signs of something.”

  “Another thing,” Dinky said. “When she rhymes, she’s nervous. I just found that out myself, last night.”

  “That’s true, all right,” Natalia said. “True all right, crew all right, you all right, through all right—”

  “Moo all night,” Dinky broke in, “drew all right—”

  They were both laughing.

  “It really does make you feel better,” Dinky said.

  Tucker said, “Chew all right, shoe all right, stew all night—”

  “Whew! All right !”Natalia ended it.

  “One thing still puzzles me,” Dinky said when they’d stopped laughing and were almost to Flatbush Avenue.

  “What’s that?” said Natalia.

  “How did he go to the John?”

  “Who?”

  “Tony. How did he go to the John with his pants on backward?”

  Tucker actually blushed while the girls collapsed with laughter again.

  When Tucker got back to the town house, Jingle had poster boards and poster paint spread out on the living-room floor. He was making signs for the walls of Help Yourself, chain smoking, and listening to a recording of Carmina Burana.

  “Your mother and father are walking across Brooklyn Bridge for some exercise,” Jingle told Tucker. “Sit down and listen to the music. You ought to listen to more good music. Your rock music can make you deaf, did you know that? In fact, I’m going to do a sign about that.”

  Several finished posters were drying across the coffee table:

  BONE MEAL CAN RELIEVE ANXIETY

  EACH PUFF OF A CIGARETTE COSTS 45 SECONDS OF LIFE

  YOUR NERVES NEED CHOLINE.

  B12 FOR BETTER EYESIGHT

  Tucker got a Coke in the kitchen and brought in a clean ashtray to replace the overflowing one at Jingle’s elbow. By Jingle’s own calculation, Tucker figured Jingle had used up 900 seconds of his life that afternoon alone.

  “Listen to this record carefully,” Jingle said. “Monks sang these songs in the 13th century, only they’re not religious songs so don’t look like you’re going to toss your cookies, Tucker.”

  “It isn’t the songs,” Tucker said. “It’s the stale smoke.”

  “Listen!” Jingle said, and then Jingle translated the words after the chorus sang them. “‘Pretty is thy face/the look of thine eyes/the braids of thy hair; o how beautiful thou art!’”

  Tucker was just beginning to get interested when Jingle added, “For a young man in love, you have no soul, Tucker. Now this is a love song. This has poetry, Tucker.”

  “Who said I was in love?” Tucker said. “I don’t happen to be.”

  His tone of voice, like Jingle’s posters, didn’t carry a lot of conviction.

  On the other hand, his pulse was normal, he slept well most nights, and he didn’t think of her all the time.

  He had some of the symptoms, he allowed … but not the actual disease.

  FOUR

  THE FIRST DAY OF December, all over Tucker’s school, mimeographed notices announced:

  LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE FIFTIES!

  DRESS UP, DANCE, AND DO IT LIKE

  THEY DID IN THE 1950s.

  SONGS FROM THE FIFTIES—LIVE!

  REFRESHMENTS!

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, IN THE RICHTER SCHOOL GYM; 8 O’CLOCK AT NIGHT.

  $1.00 SINGLE; $1.50 WITH DATE.

  Tucker took down one of the notices and wrote across the bottom: Natalia, want to go to this with me? T.

  The next afternoon while Dinky, Natalia, and Tucker were watching the 4:30 movie over at the Hockers’, Tucker passed her the note when Dinky wasn’t looking. Natalia took it into the bathroom to read, and Tucker tried to exercise Nader by throwing a balled-up empty pack of Kent cigarettes for her to retrieve. Dinky’s eyes were glued to I Died a Thousand Times, starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters. She was working her way through a box of Hydrox cookies.

  When Natalia returned, she had written something under Tucker’s invitation.

  I’ll go if Dinky has a date for it too.

  To Tucker’s mind, that was like Natalia saying she’d go if it snowed for three months straight in Biloxi, Mississippi, or if all the Republican members of Congress asked for asylum in Russia.

  Tucker Woolf had never had a date in his life, and besides feeling the unfairness of Natalia’s demand, he felt relief. He gave a shrug of his shoulders across the room in Natalia’s direction, as if to say, “Well, that’s the way the ball bounces, old girl.”

  Then the following day, P. John Knight got up in Creative Writing to read his poem called “Thanks to the United Nations.”

  P. John Knight was not a popular character at Richter School.

  The poem he stood up to read said a lot about P. John.

  Aren’t you glad the Chinese are in the U.N. now?

  Oh boy! And how!

  Who wants to live forever?

  Do you? Do I? Welcome, slant-eye.

  Aren’t you glad we’ll wake up in our beds,

  Someday taken over by the Reds?

  Who are also Yellow?

  Give a Chinese cheer: Chop!

  Give a cheer: Hip!

  Give a Chinese boo: Suey!

  Give a boo: Phooey!

  Give a two-timing U.N. cheer:

  Hip phooey! Chop suey! Yea!

  “Well,” said Mr. Baird, the instructor, when P. John sat down, “that’s more politics than poetry.”

  “All great poets mix politics with poetry,” P. John said. “Yevtushenko, Joel Oppenheimer, Pablo Neruda.”

  “Who’s Pablo Neruda?” Mr. Baird asked.

  P. John heaved an exasperated sigh. “He only won the Nobel Prize for 1971, Professor!”

  You had to hand it to P. John: he did know his facts.

  Mr. Baird said, “But your politics overwhelm your poetry.”

  “Nobody ever thinks so when a pinko puts anti-American sentiments into a poem,” said P. John. “My politics just aren’t your politics.”

  The truth was, P. John’s politics weren’t like anyone else’s at Richter School, and P. John himself wasn’t much like anyone in the school. He had a real old-fashioned haircut, nearly as short as a Marine boot’s, and he always wore double-breasted suits, old-style button-down shirts, and striped neckties. He was a year older than most of the students, but at sixteen he looked middle-aged.

  But it was not the way P. John dressed, and it was not P. John’s poem, which suddenly drew Tucker’s attention that afternoon in Creative Writing. It was something so basic about P. John that Tucker would have been inclined to ignore it altogether, if it hadn’t been for the Fifties dance.

  P. John Knight was a fat boy. He was nearly six feet, with red hair, freckles, and red-apple-cheeks, and he weighed around 220 pounds…

  “Wait up!” Tucker yelled at P. John after class.

  P. John looked around surprised, with a who, me? expression on his face. No one at Richter went out of his way to walk with P. John.

  “That was an interesting poem, P. John,” Tucker said.

  “How come you didn’t write one?”

  “I didn’t finish it,” Tucker said.

  “No one in this place is very diligent,” P. John said. “What was your unfinished poem about?”

  Tucker wasn’t sure how P. John would react to his giving thanks for the library in Brooklyn Heights, so he said, “It was about Brooklyn Heights. I just moved over there.”

  P. John said, “People who live in Brooklyn Heights never say they live in Brooklyn, do they? They always say Brooklyn Heights so nobody will think they’re commoners.” P. John laughed wisely and shook his head as though there was no end to the folly of the human race.

  “You know too much for your own good, P. John,” Tucker began buttering him up. “That’s why everyone envies you.”

  “‘Whoever envies another,’” P. John said, “‘secretly allows that person’s superiority.’ Horace Walpole wrote that, and it’s true.”

  “What does it mean?” Tucker said.

  “Well, for instance, everyone around here allows me to be superior, so I’ll take up all the class time reading my work. That way it’s never discovered that nobody else did his work.”

  “All work and no play makes Jack miss the fifties dance,” said Tucker.

  “Are you selling tickets?”

  “I’m just trying to locate a superior person to escort a friend of mine,” Tucker said.

  “Who are you escorting?”