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Authors: Stephen Solomita
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jumpsuit and pulled it down to her waist. Then she unhooked her brassiere, allowing her breasts to fall into their natural set. Between her breasts, two raised weals, each the approximate diameter of a lit cigarette, leaped into focus, as glaring as headlights. “Ace in the hole, Sid,” she said. “Ace in the hole.”
Six
T HE RAIN HAD STOPPED by the time Julie and I got on the road the following morning, a Sunday, but the clouds still hung just above the tops of the tallest buildings, a solid gray mass echoing the concrete and stone below. The roads and sidewalks were almost deserted at eleven o’clock in the morning, typical of January in New York when the good citizens, after the Christmas-New Year frenzy, seem to draw back into their shells, adopting a puritanical work ethic punctuated by the occasional televised basketball game and the New York Times crossword puzzle.
We were heading for an interview with Thelma Barrow and her neighbor, Gennaro Cassadina, after a stop at Mount Hebron Cemetery to visit the graves of my parents. We drove out to Mount Hebron, Julie and I, at least once a month and I know Julie enjoyed these trips. With no positive family experience of her own, she accepted (and, to an extent, envied) the obvious bond. Me, I had my doubts. At times I entered that graveyard with my heart pounding in my chest. As if David and Magda Kaplan might rise up through the earth, point accusing skeletal fingers: “Where were you when we needed you?”
The literal answer—I was filling my nose with cocaine—was at least obvious. Not so obvious (to me, at least) was why I went to Mount Hebron in the first place. Maybe my visits were inspired by Magda’s search for her family, a case of the mother’s sin being visited upon the son. Maybe I was also destined to chase ghosts.
That was my favorite rationale. It had a poetic ring to it and at least a grain of truth. But the answer was probably much simpler. Like every out-of-control addict, I’d spent my life filling the empty spaces with drugs; like every sober addict, I needed to fill those spaces with something else. And I needed to recover the past as well.
The word repentance is too Christian for my taste. The guilt I felt was grasping and greedy. I knew there was a debt to be paid, knew also that I hadn’t even managed a down payment. I couldn’t, of course, make things right with my parents; they were dead and I’d missed my chance. But I hadn’t had any luck with my son either, despite the fumbling attempts I’d very self-consciously made to bridge the gap between us. That was because, unlike my partner Caleb, withdrawal from cocaine and alcohol hadn’t affected my basic personality. As competitive, opinionated, and generally unlikeable as ever, I was only at home in the company of survivors, like Caleb and Julie, who’d been so far down it required no more than a slight tilt of the mind to drop over the edge into oblivion. Who’d somehow decided to fight their way back to life, to resurrect themselves.
Mount Hebron Cemetery, in Flushing, is relatively small by New York City standards, and the graves are set close together. Bounded on the west by the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway, the relentless whine of rubber on asphalt overlays the headstones like an auditory shroud. Still, despite the lack of atmosphere, I never found it empty of mourners. Unlike many Jewish cemeteries, set in pockets of the city long deserted by the communities that built them, Mount Hebron lies on the western edge of a thriving, mostly orthodox, Jewish neighborhood.
My parents’ shared grave was set in the middle of the cemetery, and Julie and I walked to it without hesitation. The first thing I did was pick a small rock off the pathway and lay it on the footstone, an old Jewish custom the meaning of which I’d long ago forgotten. I remember Julie, as she came to stand alongside me, silhouetted against the gray sky in a hooded coat that fell almost
Six
T HE RAIN HAD STOPPED by the time Julie and I got on the road the following morning, a Sunday, but the clouds still hung just above the tops of the tallest buildings, a solid gray mass echoing the concrete and stone below. The roads and sidewalks were almost deserted at eleven o’clock in the morning, typical of January in New York when the good citizens, after the Christmas-New Year frenzy, seem to draw back into their shells, adopting a puritanical work ethic punctuated by the occasional televised basketball game and the New York Times crossword puzzle.
We were heading for an interview with Thelma Barrow and her neighbor, Gennaro Cassadina, after a stop at Mount Hebron Cemetery to visit the graves of my parents. We drove out to Mount Hebron, Julie and I, at least once a month and I know Julie enjoyed these trips. With no positive family experience of her own, she accepted (and, to an extent, envied) the obvious bond. Me, I had my doubts. At times I entered that graveyard with my heart pounding in my chest. As if David and Magda Kaplan might rise up through the earth, point accusing skeletal fingers: “Where were you when we needed you?”
The literal answer—I was filling my nose with cocaine—was at least obvious. Not so obvious (to me, at least) was why I went to Mount Hebron in the first place. Maybe my visits were inspired by Magda’s search for her family, a case of the mother’s sin being visited upon the son. Maybe I was also destined to chase ghosts.
That was my favorite rationale. It had a poetic ring to it and at least a grain of truth. But the answer was probably much simpler. Like every out-of-control addict, I’d spent my life filling the empty spaces with drugs; like every sober addict, I needed to fill those spaces with something else. And I needed to recover the past as well.
The word repentance is too Christian for my taste. The guilt I felt was grasping and greedy. I knew there was a debt to be paid, knew also that I hadn’t even managed a down payment. I couldn’t, of course, make things right with my parents; they were dead and I’d missed my chance. But I hadn’t had any luck with my son either, despite the fumbling attempts I’d very self-consciously made to bridge the gap between us. That was because, unlike my partner Caleb, withdrawal from cocaine and alcohol hadn’t affected my basic personality. As competitive, opinionated, and generally unlikeable as ever, I was only at home in the company of survivors, like Caleb and Julie, who’d been so far down it required no more than a slight tilt of the mind to drop over the edge into oblivion. Who’d somehow decided to fight their way back to life, to resurrect themselves.
Mount Hebron Cemetery, in Flushing, is relatively small by New York City standards, and the graves are set close together. Bounded on the west by the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway, the relentless whine of rubber on asphalt overlays the headstones like an auditory shroud. Still, despite the lack of atmosphere, I never found it empty of mourners. Unlike many Jewish cemeteries, set in pockets of the city long deserted by the communities that built them, Mount Hebron lies on the western edge of a thriving, mostly orthodox, Jewish neighborhood.
My parents’ shared grave was set in the middle of the cemetery, and Julie and I walked to it without hesitation. The first thing I did was pick a small rock off the pathway and lay it on the footstone, an old Jewish custom the meaning of which I’d long ago forgotten. I remember Julie, as she came to stand alongside me, silhouetted against the gray sky in a hooded coat that fell almost
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