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Thick As Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives
Thick As Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives
Thick As Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives
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Thick As Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives

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A memoir about two siblings who loved each other (sometimes); the thrill of the shoplift, the power of the written word, the agony of addiction, and the joy of someone who understands you and still stays true

Steve Geng—thief, addict, committed member of Manhattan's criminal semi-elite—was a rhapsody in blue, all on his own. Women had a tendency to crack his head open. His sister? Also unusual: Veronica Geng wrote brilliantly eccentric pieces for The New Yorker, hung with rock stars and Pulitzer Prize winners, threw the occasional typewriter, fled intimacy. They were parallel universes, but when they converged, it was . . . memorable.

Spanning decades of unresolved personal drama and rebellion, Steve Geng's memoir, Thick as Thieves, is the story of their lives, the bond between them, and all the things they shared. Raw, real, and funny, Geng follows his unique family history from Philadelphia to Paris, Greenwich Village to Riker's Island. We meet lovable, often treacherous characters (B.J. the Queen of Crime, Tina Brown). We hear the rants of the Geng's father, the Colonel; the malicious invective of publishing; the patter of hardened criminals. This is a memoir that will lift your spirit, kick you in the shins, and help you remember the person who understood you the most. Geng has made a lot of mistakes in his life. Thick as Thieves may just make up for them.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 1, 2007
ISBN9781429928045
Thick As Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives
Author

Steve Geng

Steve Geng grew up an army brat in Philadelphia with his sister, the late Veronica Geng, who wrote and edited for The New Yorker and died in 1997. He attended high schools in Heidelberg, Germany, and Orléans, France. He has been a thief, a saloon keeper, and an actor, and is an active member of Manhattan’s recovery community. Thick as Thieves is his first book.

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    Thick As Thieves - Steve Geng

    Prologue

    The Big Rift

      One of these days that kid’s gonna get his tit in a wringer. It was the voice of an old, familiar ghost, and it spoke to me as I stumbled through waist-high drifts in the blizzard of ’96. According to newscasters, this was the worst snowstorm to hit New York in decades. Parked cars on Tenth Avenue were visible only as little bumps on the white, silent landscape. And still it came down, big wind-whipped flakes that nipped my cheeks and scrambled my senses. I wasn’t exactly homeless, but some instinct had been driving me through the streets, hunched into the storm. There was little refuge back where I’d come from.

    Kid’s gonna get his tit in a wringer.

    The ghost, of course, was my father. He’d loved that expression, and I could still picture the baleful look in his eye as he snapped it at my mother whenever I pissed him off. Dad had been a career army guy with a hard-knocks take on life and a sideways rap on everybody, especially his kids. My sister and I rarely took anything he said seriously. I’d even enjoyed his rants, anticipating him like I did the guy on The Honeymooners with his zoom-right-to-the-moon routine.

    Suddenly a sign loomed up out of the whiteness: EMERGENCY ROOM. Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it weeks ago. I stepped into St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, glad for a timely reprieve.

    In the warm ER waiting room I found a place to sit down and a dog-eared copy of yesterday’s Daily News. The pain in my thawing hands suggested frostbite and my wheezing was probably a bad case of pneumonia. There was an unexplained gash on my forehead and my face was cross-hatched with shaving nicks that refused to heal. I looked like I’d been in a street brawl. Booze and drugs, once my greatest comforts, had been sending me into seizures, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a meal.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the type to sit around and boohoo. It was a damned good run I’d had at life on the edge. I’d savored my legit days as an actor with the same relish I’d got from a good score, or singing in a jailhouse doo-wop group. But as the bookies say, I’d lost my good looks. Lady Luck had jumped ship many moons ago.

    After an hour or so (I was in no hurry) a nurse came by with a clipboard and asked me what the trouble was. The butts in the ashtray were just starting to look good when she came back and told me I was getting admitted. They put me in a ninth-floor room with a view of the snow-laden ramparts of John Jay College. Laid out on a bed of crispy-fresh linen were clean pajamas and one of those little robes that go on ass-backward. In the bathroom were brand-new toilet articles wrapped in sterile plastic. Food was delivered right to my bedside! I mumbled my thanks to Jesus, Mary, and Rudy Giuliani and passed out.

    It might’ve been hours or days later, as I drifted in and out of consciousness, when a doctor in a white coat and necktie came in followed by two female backups. His eyes were riveted on a clipboard.

    So what’s the skinny, Doc?

    "Mr. Gang?"

    Geng, as in Genghis Khan.

    Chinese?

    Alsatian.

    The two backups started fidgeting and the doctor scribbled something on his clipboard: responses vague, evasive. I couldn’t actually see what he was writing, but a certain number of institutional interviews will sensitize your radar.

    According to the tests, Mr. Geng, you’ve developed thrombocytopenia. What that means is that you have practically no platelets.

    Christ, what the hell are those?

    Platelets, he said, are cells that make your blood clot. Your body’s inability to produce them explains why those cuts on your face won’t heal. You also have chronic pneumonia, are severely dehydrated and malnourished, so you’ll have to remain here until we . . .

    He rambled on, but I stopped listening after I heard you’ll have to remain here. Fine with me—anything to put off the rumble with Jack Frost. Just before the doctor and his flunkies filed out he asked, Do you have any family that you’d like me to notify?

    Mom and Dad were long gone, and Ronnie had been having her own troubles since losing her job at the New Yorker. She was always supportive whenever I cleaned up and went legit, but seeing me once again in dubious condition was the last thing she needed. I got a sister. I’ll call her myself, later.

    Give me her name and number anyway. Standard procedure.

    After they were gone I lay there for hours, staring out at snow flurries blowing off rooftops. Finally I made the call, got my sister’s answering machine, and left a message about being in the hospital with some kind of a thrombo thing. Feeling suddenly expansive, I placed another call to my main gazain Smitty, told him to bring me some smokes and a little taste on the down low.

    Next day they arrived almost simultaneously, Veronica hard on the heels of Smitty, who wasn’t the sort you want to introduce your sister to. Smitty had done a bid in Sing Sing for a homicide when he was still in his teens, or as he put it, he’d gone upstate with a body. He and I had blundered into the middle of a gang fight once and I saw him shank a guy—stuck homeboy in the chest and strolled off cool as you please. Smitty had a little sailor’s roll when he walked, and when he blew into my room that day in an army field jacket and his perpetual jailhouse fade, I was delighted to see him.

    Smitty.

    Hey, cuz.

    You straight?

    He patted the cargo pocket on his field jacket, sat down, and immediately began helping himself to my lunch.

    Before I had a chance to see what Smitty had brought I looked up and there was my sister, wearing an old tweed topcoat I gave her once when I was flush. She was standing in the doorway, her brown hair limp from the snow, reluctant to cross the threshold. I looked for that jaunty smile of hers, but her delicate features were etched with deep worry lines, and her chin was tucked into the turned-up coat collar.

    Ron’s reaction to sickness and tragedy had always been unpredictable, so bedside manner was not her strong point. Still, she was my big sis, and though her literary life was mostly a mystery to me, I’d always found in her eyes the same girl who’d watched over me since the cradle. Her face never seemed to age at all; beneath the surface there was a tug-of-war going on, ever since we were kids, that gave her features an air of gleeful devilishness. At that moment, though, she looked more frail and downhearted than I’d ever seen her. Her face was drawn with exhaustion, and her expression hardened as she took in Smitty.

    Ronnie, jeez. My friend here showed up two minutes before you did.

    Smitty had commandeered the only chair, but with something strangely approaching chivalry he stood up, cheeks bulging with my macaroni and cheese, and offered the seat to my sister.

    Veronica nodded icily, waving off the chair. Thanks, she said, but I really can’t stay. I just popped by to see if you’re alright. There was a terrible weariness in her voice.

    I’m fine, Ron. Really. They got great doctors. Suddenly I wanted to cheer her up. I should be outta here in a couple days. But it’s great to see you. Nobody ever comes to visit in here.

    Ronnie raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to indicate Smitty, standing over my lunch tray, reeking of booze and examining a plastic bowl of Jell-O with unfeigned interest. Our eyes met for a moment and her expression seemed to say, Well, you chose your life so don’t blame me. And then her gaze drifted away.

    I’d seen that faraway look a million times—a wry half smile with her eyes focused on some remote, inner landscape. It was her knee-jerk reaction to pointless anecdotes, belligerent fathers, and the harebrained dilemmas of her younger brother. That distant, dreamy look of hers brought uncomfortable discussions to screeching halts, signaling her retreat into a private place where it was safe, and probably lonely too.

    I fumbled for my robe on the back of the chair and knocked over the IV drip. When I finally got it straightened out I looked back up and Ronnie was gone.

    That’s a cryin’ shame, said Smitty, wagging his head philosophically. Sis just rounded on you like a jailhouse con. By the way, cuz, you want this Jell-O or what?

    I should’ve told Smitty to scram when Ronnie showed up. Maybe there was something she was hiding that she might have confided if he hadn’t been there. Later, that scene kept looping through my head. I couldn’t believe I’d sat there and let her walk out on me, my sister, perhaps the only person in the universe I really cared about.

    You have to understand: Ronnie and I had survived growing up together as army brats, with friends and schools left in the lurch each time we moved to a new locale. Mundane questions like, Where are you from? tripped us up, sent our minds reeling back through army bases and foreign cities glimpsed only briefly as our father’s military career shuttled us about the globe like gypsies. It was a blessing and a curse growing up that way, but it forged a bond between us that I’d always deemed unbreakable, no matter how divergent our lives became.

    She was my hero, full of endearing contradictions—so fragile that she seemed to go through life teetering on the brink of tears, yet she remained the most resourceful and self-reliant person I’d ever known. I watched her go from playing fag hag at The Hip Bagel and the Bleecker St. Tavern, to writing stories for every rag from Ms. and Cosmo to the New Republic, until she finally found a home in the fiction department of the New Yorker. I saw her get her heart broken in one ill-advised romance after another, then recycle them into funny stories and become one of the best humorists and editors of her day.

    She, in turn, saw me get flattened by an endless string of calamities, starting with my first broken arm (at age seven) right up through the time some girlfriend slipped a Mickey into my coffee and torched me with lighter fluid. I had such a penchant for trouble that at one point my parents told me I wasn’t welcome in their home anymore. But my sister remained a steady beacon, showing me where the real world was whenever I drifted too far astray. All our lives we drove each other into fits of laughter with our takes on people and the universe around us.

    But after all those years of Ron and me against the world, I’d begun to take her for granted. When push came to shove, for the umpteenth time, I turned my head for an instant and bam—she rounded on me. It’s not like I’d meant to betray her. It’s just the way the deal went down. Shortly after that visit to St. Luke’s, she cut off all communication with me.

    From the hospital I moved into a residence in Chelsea that provided subsidized housing for people on disability. Six months went by and no Ronnie. She wouldn’t answer my calls, letters, or pick up the phone.

    One day I went over and rang her doorbell for five minutes. When nobody answered I sat on the stoop next door for hours hoping to catch sight of her. Probably a good thing I missed her, though. I looked like hell and was still holding on to the booze and drugs. Lurking outside those elegant brownstones on the Upper East Side I felt like an alien. The neighbors were giving me nervous looks, and when a cop strolled up I decided it was time to split.

    She must be alright, I told myself, or I would’ve heard something.

    Six months turned into nine, then a year. Sometimes I called her number just to hear her voice on her answering machine, but I soon gave that up. Hearing her message over and over hurt too much. I searched my room for phone numbers of people she was close to, tried 411 but couldn’t remember last names or spellings and had ended up barking curses into the phone. Many of her friends were famous writers and critics. Not only was I baffled about how to get in touch with those people, but I dreaded the idea of approaching them. What would I say—that my sister wouldn’t return my calls? She’d worked at the New Yorker for almost twenty years. When she lost her job it seemed like she’d lost her family, her friends, and her only home. In the end I figured she was overwhelmed by her own problems and just couldn’t deal with mine anymore. I certainly had other distractions as my health continued to plummet.

    Before I knew it, it was Christmas Eve 1997, a year and several months after the hospital. I found myself slumped in an armchair in the common room of the residence, absentmindedly watching a rerun of a football game. Next to the television was an artificial tree with lights, tinsel, and Christmas balls sprayed with frosting. I had five bucks for cigarettes, and in five days my disability check would arrive. I was grateful for these amenities. Far as I knew, there weren’t any good retirement plans for thieves.

    The holidays always made me think of my family, and images of them flickered at the edge of my peripheral vision. . . . Dad in his favorite armchair, hair slicked back with Vitalis, complaining about the goddamned commies taking over the unions . . . Mom doggedly going about her household chores with a cigarette stuck in her jowly face. My sister once quipped that she looked like a Raymond Chandler character on the way to a homicide. A happy moment with Veronica came into focus. As the muted play-by-play from the football game faded into the background, my sister’s face and voice came to the fore.

    Hey, Steve, Ronnie said as I opened the door to her apartment. C’mon in. You came at just the right time.

    It must’ve been somewhere around 1991, during my thespian days, and we were very close. I flopped down on her studio couch and studied her. Ronnie was two years older than me, but she kept getting better looking with age. Her brown hair had a touch of gray that softened her intensity and a few enduring freckles fell across the bridge of her nose.

    Can I get you an orange juice or something? She knew I’d stopped drinking then and was totally supportive—the whole planet was supportive of that decision.

    Listen, she said, I need your help with a bit of dialogue for this story, okay?

    My sister had built a career for herself not only as a writer but also as a brilliant editor—guys like Philip Roth faithfully sought her advice—and I remembered how flattered I always felt when she asked for my help. Every bit of wall space in her apartment was covered with shelves crammed full of books, her coffee table stacked with magazines and journals, testaments to the one true passion in her life—writing. People didn’t always work out, but a sentence you could usually get straight.

    She came out of the kitchen, handed me a jelly glass full of orange juice, and made a beeline for a pack of True Blues next to her typewriter.

    Okay, she said, here’s the deal. This guy is conducting an orchestra, see, and I need an expression, just a sentence or something that somebody says that is totally inappropriate.

    Her face screwed up in concentration as she lit a cigarette, but the amusement in her eyes gave her away. Her proposal was typically illogical since she didn’t specify who makes the remark. But I knew her only too well. It was a MacGuffin, and she wanted an equally illogical response.

    Alright, I said. How ’bout this. Remember when Jake is the emcee in a sleazy strip club? It was our favorite movie, Raging Bull, with De Niro. He turns to the half-drunk, deadbeat hecklers in the audience and he goes, ‘Yez sound like a buncha junkies inna pay toilet.’

    Ronnie choked on her cigarette and almost fell out of her chair. God, I don’t believe it. That is absolutely divine.

    I remembered the rush of pleasure, hers and mine.

    The uncomfortable feeling of being scrutinized snapped me out of the daydream, and when I opened my eyes I noticed that a few other residents had drifted into the TV room—a guy in a Triple Fat Goose snorkel jacket and a famished-looking woman in a housecoat and bunny slippers. I wondered how long they’d been watching me, and I turned my head away when I realized that tears were running down my face.

    Hey, Steve, said Bunny Slippers. My carfare check got held up in the mail ’cause, you know, the holidays and all? Let me get two dollars till the mailman shows, okay poppy?

    What do I look like, Santa Claus over here?

    Yo, Steve, said Goose. These peoples got me stressed out up in here.

    I pulled a quarter out of my pocket and handed it to him.

    What’s this for?

    So’s you can call somebody who gives a shit.

    They both laughed. We were all bone tired and running on empty but felt lucky to be inside on a cold night. Bunny Slippers’s remark about the mailman reminded me that I hadn’t checked my box for days, maybe a week. Trouble always arrived via the postal system—bills, bounced checks, bench warrants, threats from collection agencies, letters from the hospital. But then, there might be a Christmas card or a letter from my sister, or a reply from one of her friends I’d written to for news about her—the Denbys, the Schjeldahls. But Ron wasn’t writing and her friends lived in another world. Looking for mail from them was a chump move.

    I forked over a couple of crumpled bills to the woman, knowing damn well what she needed it for but hoping to buy myself a little more privacy. Sure enough, she sent Goose out to the deli for a forty-ounce Bud and retreated to her room. I shut my eyes and tried to crawl back into the memory of my sister, longing to hear her voice, or to see her face light up when she spotted me on the street. But the connection was broken.

    Anger abruptly swept aside the wistfulness as I recalled her pal James Hamilton’s glib remarks when I’d called him several months before. No, I haven’t seen Veronica around for a while. I’m not sure what she’s up to, but, sure, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her if I see her.

    She never got in touch, nor did he. I admit, I was jealous of her friends and never liked Hamilton, a photographer for the Village Voice and her intermittent boyfriend for years. But what possible reason could he have for lying to me?

    Famished for details about her, I tried to remember the stories she’d written. A line from one of my favorites, My Mao, came to mind: The Chairman despised loose talk. Each time we parted, he would seal my lips together with spirit gum and whisper, "Mum for Mao." It was one of the pieces in her first book, Partners, and I smiled as I recalled the dedication page:

    To my brother, Steve.

    Ron never told me, when that book came out, that she’d dedicated it to me and I’d almost forgotten. But there it was, unshakable proof in black-and-white—she loved me. She hadn’t dedicated the book to her famous editor in chief, William Shawn, whom she’d adored, or to her editor, Roger Angell, or to any of her writer friends like Philip Roth or Ian Frazier. She’d dedicated it to me, her little brother. Knowing her disdain for sentiment, the fact that she hadn’t told me about it seemed to make it that much more personal and true.

    And so the night before Christmas slipped away, the lights winked unnoticed on the tree, and no one came by to bother me for hours, a lifetime when you got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

    Where did you go, Ron, with your dreamy little smile?

    part one

    philly

    chapter 1

      Winter in Philadelphia, 1946. I climbed out of bed, tiptoed across the bare wooden floor, and stood by the door to my sister’s room. I was three and she was six.

    Sssst. Hey, Ron.

    The inner door connecting our bedrooms was sealed shut, but moonlight exposed a knothole in the panel. I pressed my ear against it, tapped code with a knuckle—shave and a haircut—and waited for the two-bits response. No dice.

    Ronnie. You awake?

    The radiator hissed and clunked. I got down on my hands and knees and whispered under the crack at the bottom.

    Hey, Ron?

    Shhhh. Bedclothes rustled and footsteps padded lightly on the floorboards.

    I slipped on my Buster Browns, crept silently out of my room, and crouched by her door that opened onto the second-story hallway, right at the top of the stairs.

    It was a two-story row house in a neighborhood called Olney. We’d moved there from an army base in Virginia when Dad got himself transferred to the Navy Yard in South Philly. The house next door, occupied by a grim, elderly German couple named Eisman, smelled like beef gravy, pipe tobacco, and something unidentifiable that raised my hackles and made me shy away from their front door. When I once queried Ronnie about the odor, she’d sniffed, smiled, and said, Mustard gas.

    World War II had drawn to a dramatic close but nobody took the time to explain that to us. My sister and I continued on with our own patrols and missions.

    Veronica opened her door and stepped out into the hallway. Her freckled face was a mask of grave seriousness, her pigtails stuck out at right angles like antennae, and her eyes radiated wariness as she surveyed the terrain. She was two and half years older than me, but without my tenacity this mission wouldn’t get past the top step.

    Take your shoes off, she whispered. They’ll hear us.

    The floor’s cold.

    Shhhhh.

    That stairway was steep and treacherous, with white struts supporting a shaky mahogany banister on one side. I usually flew up two at a time to show off my agility, or trudged up sullenly under the lash of punishment: Go to your room! Veronica ascended and descended each and every time with the careful deliberation and poise of a Hollywood diva—eager or troubled, she could always climb the hell out of a flight of stairs.

    Night missions called for stealth, so we caterpillared down, butts inching slowly to catch up with feet on the next step. Leaning forward and peeking through the banister struts, we had a great view of the couch on the far side of the living room where our parents sat smoking, talking, or listening to the news or Jack Benny on the radio—Oh, Raaaaaachester! Yowza, Mistah Benny. Sounds of studio applause and canned laughter crackled like static.

    Charles Emil Geng, or Charlie as Mom always called him, sat at one end of the couch with his khaki shirt open, his belt unnotched, and the waistband on his gabardine army trousers unbuttoned for comfort. His nose, ears, and belly were slightly too big for the rest of him, and his dark gray hair was always slicked back with hair oil. As an officer he maintained an erect, military posture, but at five foot five he looked more like a tailor than a soldier.

    Mom, née Rosina Butter (pronounced Boo-ter after her Austrian father), sat at the other end of the couch with her feet propped up on a hassock, massaging her insteps through her stockings. Rosina had once been a looker. Her early portrait photos captured the dark, flashing eyes of a born romantic, but by the time we moved to Philly in 1946 her skin had lost some luster and she’d gotten a bit thick in the hips.

    My ideas of romance were hazy then, but there sure wasn’t anything sexy or even affectionate happening on that couch—just two middle-aged hooples rubbing their feet and airing out their paunches after dinner and a hard day’s work. Mom took out the comb that held her hair up and let the dark, auburn folds fall down the back of her housedress, signaling the end of another long day.

    Christ, Dad mumbled as he flipped through the bills, we’re all gonna end up in the poorhouse.

    He’d been in his midforties when Ronnie and I were born, a bit late to have kids, and when World War II started he’d been too old to ship out and leave his family. War babies by default, Ron arrived eleven months before Pearl Harbor and I showed up eleven months before D-day, just in time for wartime rationing, and thus marking the origin of Dad’s all-time favorite expression, Christ, I haven’t seen one of those since forty-three.

    As we hunkered on the stairs I nudged her with my elbow—So, now what? She flashed me the sign for silence.

    The radio said, Use Ajax, bum-bum, the foaming cleanser, bubba-bubba-bum-bum-bum . . .

    Ronnie eavesdropped with a wide-eyed, rabid intensity, her nose twitching with curiosity, but I just got antsy sitting there. Once the initial thrill of daring passed, spying on Mom and Dad was about as riveting as watching paint dry. But I loved mimicking the radio jingles. Wash the dirrrrrt right down the drain . . .

    Be quiet!

    . . . bubba-bubba-bubba-bum.

    Dad lurched up off the couch and glared at us. What the hell are you two doing up there? Christ, it’s the middle of the goddamned night. Now go to bed, the pair a yez!

    Sometimes I’d leave Ron sitting there, retreat to the top of the stairs, and hide in the hallway shadows. Then I’d spring out as she reached for the door to her little sanctuary. I had what my mother called a rubber face, and at times like this I twisted it into horrible contortions.

    Raaahhhgg!

    Ronnie would have an instant of terror, yank her door open, and slam it in my face—but not before she shot me a withering look of betrayal. I had no idea why I loved to devil her like that. She was my goombah, my ace boon coon, my main piece o’ change.

    Hey, Ron. You okay in there?

    Silence.

    C’mon, Ron. I was only kiddin’ around.

    Her silences were huge. She looked so fragile at times that it seemed like a harsh word would shatter her into pieces.

    Our house was a drafty affair with red clay roof tiles, creaky wooden floors, and a musty, spiderwebbed cellar full of Dad’s arcane military junk. After living on army bases in the south, it was the closest thing to a real home I’d known (and, as it turned out, would ever know). On holidays, when the place filled with noise, company, and smoke, my parents occasionally sequestered me in a playpen, out of the way of guests trudging from the front door to the kitchen, while my older sister was allowed to traipse around like a big shot. It seemed monstrously unfair, and I harbored vengeful fantasies as relatives and neighbors passed by, men in uniform smelling of Bay Rum and women with spiky brooches, goofy flapper hats, and glistening lipstick. Leaning over, they pinched my cheeks and blew boozy kisses while I studied the world through the wooden bars.

    As I got bolder I started prowling in our parents’ bedroom, stealing coins and rubbers out of Dad’s dresser. Sometimes I’d sneak Mom’s fur coat, rich with the aroma of perfume and mothballs, out of the closet to curl up on. But there was something sacrosanct about my sister’s room, and she lorded over it with protective secrecy. I’d knock on her door and peek inside.

    Hey, Ron. Can I come in?

    No. She started to shut the door but I stuck my foot in the jamb.

    I’m coming in there.

    Mom! Steve won’t let me close my door!

    Alright now. Leave your sister alone.

    What the hell was she doing in there? Piqued, I’d sneak in whenever the opportunity presented itself, and as time went by I saw the posters on her walls go from Brer Rabbit to characters like Elvis and James Dean. Later, back in my own room, I’d hear her whining. Mother, somebody’s been in my room messing with my things.

    I hunkered behind my door, snickering. She couldn’t prove jack. What did she expect Mom to do—dust for prints?

    In my room I had a window with an angled view of the rosebushes and wrought-iron fence that separated our backyard from that of the neighbors. A complicated electrical junction hung between the houses, right above my lookout, and I’d stare out enchanted as robins and crows perched there to rest, preening their feathers and defying the deadly voltage that coursed under their claws. A bird would catch me looking, cock its head, and glare back with a fierce eye, transfixing me like small prey.

    I spent hours scanning the alley that ran behind our house where huge holes in the concrete stayed filled with water after it rained and old men with pushcarts navigated around the muddy pools. One guy sold blocks of ice stacked under a canvas tarp. Another guy had a grinding wheel to sharpen our mother’s scissors and kitchen knives. It was a shady universe out there and it beckoned with the promise of adventure. Boys pitched pennies and puffed cigarettes in the shadows behind the drugstore. Stray dogs rooted in garbage cans. Across the alley a tall hedge hid the backyard of a boy who was crazy. Down the block the alleyway disappeared from sight, but I could still pick out the top branches of a weeping willow tree where Dickie Downs shot sparrows with his BB gun.

    At night the moon shone through my window, sometimes with a glare so near and bright I felt I could reach out and touch it, and at other times with a remote, milky face whose expression changed from dour to benevolent with distant, passing clouds. I loved the moon. My favorite childhood poem was The Owl and the Pussycat. When Mom read that to me I was overjoyed as they sailed off with a stash of money and plenty of honey and danced by the light of the moon, the moon . . .

    I had no idea what Ronnie thought about as she lay in her own bed and observed the same landscape. She had a bookshelf full of books, something our parents never thought to install in my quarters. Our rooms were lonely places and my imagination filled in the mystery of my sister’s private moments—maybe reading her favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, studying the encyclopedia, or shooting telepathic signals to Brer Rabbit and Elvis.

    On moonless nights, shut in my room in a house where nobody communicated much, misty, insubstantial things lurked in the gloom. Once I woke and saw a birdlike creature watching me from behind the radiator, standing dead still, its talons disappearing into the floorboards, sharp beaked and radiating menace in its every aspect. Thinking that a hawk or some other predatory bird had flown in through my open window, a thrill of delight ran up my spine, but when I got up and turned the light on there was nothing, not even a dust

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