Chuff and wheeze, first faltering steps, a dream of wounded warriors.
by Joel Deutsch
this is what It must be like to be dead, Nick remembered thinking, except that your head wouldn’t stick out of the coffin. And there wouldn’t be this giant hand squeezing your thorax and relaxing its grip, over and over, nor the chuff and wheeze of the compressor repeatedly clasping and unclasping the hand, as one of the nurses explained it to him. A machine of loving grace, he would think years later, when he saw the book of poems with that phrase in it, a book some college kid had left behind alongside his plate with its abandoned crescent of gnawed, hardening crust from the half sausage half anchovy he and his girlfriend had shared. Limping over in his stained apron to bus the kid’s table after the pizzeria had closed for the night, they having been the last two customers, he had skimmed through the book just out of curiosity. Computers like flowers with spinning petals? The kid probably thought that was really brilliant. Probably wrote an English paper about it for college, for some class where you could look out the window and see below you the ocean, the surfers, the sailboats. Nick supposed they had classrooms like that, in buildings at the edge of the mesa. He’d never set foot onto the campus. Maybe that was the poem the kid had read aloud to her while she, cute, absorbed, nodding, munched on a slice of the anchovy side, he had noticed from behind the counter. But that didn’t make sense. He’d seen the computer in the data processing room of the Bank of America branch where his father kept the family’s accounts, the same branch whose front window that girl had hurled a rock through at the anti Vietnam demonstration, the photograph printed as posters and silk-screened onto t-shirts you still saw around, now and then, here and there. The room was climate controlled and chilly, like a reverse greenhouse. Sure, the reels of tape spun. But they were arrayed in rows across the faces of panels stacked one atop another in floor-to-ceiling racks, not propped up on metal poles like microphone stands or something. Obviously, the writer had just made it up. He skimmed another couple of poems, then tossed the paperback volume into the garbage bin at the front end of the conveyor belt that ran the dirty crockery and flatware into the steaming open mouth of the dishwasher.
After the recess period where he and a few of the other boys had challenged each other to do a lot of show-offy things on the monkey bars, grappling and swinging forward and backward, hand over hand, as fast as they could go, he had felt sore, deeply sore, something besides just the usual burning shoulder muscles and blistered palms. And the next day, waking with fever, had been unable to sit up and get himself out of his bed. “Try to touch your chin to your chest,” Dr. Geraci had directed when he came to the apartment over their little trattoria on Vallejo Street, and he couldn’t.
That had been in June, just as the fog started pouring off the Bay up Columbus Avenue to blanket the neighborhood every morning. The rest of the summer, and months beyond, after the ride in the doctor’s own car over to children’s Hospital for the spinal tap, his father’s Ford being in the shop for repairs that day, he spent living in the polio ward there. thank god his breathing started working on its own again after a couple of weeks, because he couldn’t imagine being trapped inside the iron lung any longer than that, feeling the steady cresting and receding pulse of the pressure, watching the room behind him through a mirror attached to the rim of the enclosure above the airtight collar. It reminded him of the tom Mix comic book issue where Tom gets tied up by bad guys who knock his cowboy hat off his head, take his horse and his six-gun and shove him inside a hollow log and set it on fire, and it looks like he’s not going to be able to save himself even though of course he does, managing to bend his knees just enough to smash his way out with his bootheels. Nick had had nightmares about being Tom Mix and being trapped inside the log, unable to move, and had woken up so scared a few times that he’d braved his feeling of mortification to go into his parent’s room and ask to sleep with them until the morning came. And then there were the little kids on the ward screaming all around the clock except when one of the nurses was with them, talking, cooing, ministering as best she could to their comfort and maintenance. Sometimes he let himself cry at night, but as quietly as he could and always reluctantly, because who would wipe away his tears for him or help him blow his nose?
There were the hot compresses, which sometimes scorched his stiffened leg but took away the pain of the rolling cramps, too, and the whirlpool bath and the physical therapists working his atrophying muscles to the point of screaming agony.
And then the splints, and the leg brace, and the walking practice between the parallel bars, and then the metal crutches that clamped onto his forearms so he wouldn’t drop them. And finally he was able to take a few steps without the crutches, although the walking would never be easy again or look normal.
He was lucky, he knew. People had died. Children, teenagers, grownups too. His mother had told him about a family in St. Anne’s parish, out in the Sunset, where the disease had taken both the father and his five-year-old daughter, two months apart. It was the very next summer when they had everybody line up in the same gym, on the basketball court to get their sugar cubes dosed with the Salk vaccine, but he didn’t go then because Dr. Geraci had told his parents not to let him take the vaccine this first time but to wait for the second administration, instead.
When he finally began dragging his withered left leg back and forth across Washington Square to and from Sts. Peter and Paul, a year later and a grade behind, the old men would look up from their copies of the Chronicle and L’Italia and their discussions about the fishing business or their war memories or whatever it was they talked about, and just stare at him, without shame, the way his mother said they looked at women. Some would cross themselves. Others, their eyes narrowed with fear and repugnance, would spit gobs of old man phlegm onto the cigarette butts at their feet and mumble prophylactic curses.
As soon as word got around what had happened to the Zanettis, business dropped off at the restaurant, and no one booked the back room anymore for wedding receptions and anniversary parties on the weekend nights. the teenage crowd who had been coming by to visit with Nick’s older sister Claire or take her along with them to a movie down on Market Street disappeared. At church, nobody wanted to sit in the same pew with Lou and Sylvia and Claire, and later, Nick, except for Franco Trombetta and his wife Angela. Franco and Angela were childless, and together they ran the stall at the Wharf where Lou came every morning for his calamari, shrimp, fish fillets, and sometimes abalone. But that was the exception. Even after Nick was out of the hospital and learning to lurch around on the crutches, obviously survived and obviously no longer contagious as everyone in the neighborhood with two good eyes could plainly see, the restaurant sat practically empty, and no one except the Trombettas ever had them over anymore or came by the apartment.
Nick would fasten the crutches around his forearms, stagger down the steep flight of steps to the street door like a big, clattering insect, and make a circuit around the long block he lived on. Powell over to Green, a right to Stockton, another right back to Vallejo, then another right to bring him home. As he got better at the walking, he would go an extra block one way or the other, sometimes. He did this until he had memorized every number on every apartment entrance and shop door, and knew the tall Negro mailman, Mr. Dorsey, by name. the postman said to call him Carl, but Nick kept forgetting, and Carl would laugh every time he heard himself addressed with such formality by the game kid with the crutches and the crippled leg.
there was an art gallery on one block, and he liked to stop and catch his breath in front of it and peer into the window. The place puzzled him. The paintings on the walls didn’t look like much;, there was nothing he could recognize as a real picture of anything. And there were always men, sometimes women, too, hanging around inside, passing bottles of red wine back and forth and talking up a storm. The sweet-smelling smoke that filtered out through the mail slot in the door along with what sounded like jazz records had been pot, of course, he understood later. Beatniks, his mother called them when he mentioned it to her, and told him to just walk on by and mind his own business., but he kept stopping, because there was something so different about the place. Besides, the gallery came at the perfect spot for a rest, which he really needed by that point along his route.
One afternoon, as Nick took his exercise walk just before suppertime and paused by the gallery as usual, a man inside noticed him looking through the window and came out to join him on the sidewalk. A grownup, but younger than his father. He was wearing the kind of navy blue suit businessmen wore, although without a tie, as if he had gone out for lunch from some office and then forgotten to go back to work. Although he didn’t look quite right for a businessman. The suit was rumpled, and both side pockets bulged with books that stuck out of them. The wavy dark hair was badly in need of a trim, and the white shirt had a spot on it. The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from an inside jacket pocket, shook one out and lit it with a match, looking at Nick the whole time.
He was a slight man, sallow-faced, slender in the soft-bodied way of the lay brothers at school, as if it wasn’t muscles that were holding his body together but the clothes, like packaging. Behind a pair of black-framed glasses, his eyes looked as if they had bright, dancing minds of their own. He looked a little bit like Dr. Levine, at Children’s Hospital, those terrible few weeks, and Dr. Levine had been very kind and very comforting, so that was a nice memory, a nice association for Nick, and so when the man smiled and said hello to him, Nick smiled and said hi back.
The man said his name was Solomon, and to just call him Sol. Nick said he was Nick. Sol asked him about his life with the kind of interest Nick could tell was sincere, not the way most grownups who didn’t know him talked to him, except for Father Timothy, which made him feel special and safe. So he told Sol about everything. church and school, the family and the restaurant, even the polio.
“You know something, Nick?” Sol said when Nick had run out of things to tell about, flipping his smoked-down butt into the gutter with a snap of practiced fingers. “Would you mind if I told you my impression of you?”
“I guess not,” said Nick. No grownup had ever asked his permission like that. It felt a little strange, but nice, too. Respectful.
“I think you’re a very intelligent boy, for one thing,” Sol said. “and a thoughtful boy, too. And then I take a good look at you, and I think to myself, ‘that’s a handsome boy, and in a couple of years he’s going to be one very handsome young man.’ And that’s a pretty winning combination, in anyone’s book. Do you like girls, yet, Nick?”
“Not really,” said Nick. The question struck him as being a little silly. What boy his age was interested in girls? None, as far as he knew.
“Well,” said Sol, I suppose that’s natural. Although boys sometimes do have feelings about things like that, even then. It depends on the boy, I guess you could say. But I’ll bet you it won’t be long. How old are you, Nick?”
Sol looked him up and down, knitting his eyebrows thoughtfully. “Wait, let me guess. Eight. You’re eight, right?”
“Seven,” corrected Nick, flattered. “Seven and a half, actually.”
“then I guess it’ll be more than a couple of years,” said Sol, smiling. “but those years will go by very quickly. And I think you’ll have a lot of girls liking you. So you’d better get ready.”
Nick looked down at his crutches and his spindly left leg, which was more than an inch shorter than his right leg now. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be like that, probably.”
“Listen, Nick,” said Sol. Some men get by on perfect good looks and being athletic. Of course. If I denied that, I’d be lying and you’d know it. But a man with an injury or a deformation, you know, when something doesn’t look quite right, that kind of man can have almost a magical power over people and win their affection. You know who Franklin Roosevelt was? Have you studied any American history yet?”
“No,” said Nick. “I mean, we learned some history already but I never heard of him.”
“Well,” said Sol, “Mr. Roosevelt was a President of the United States. A great president. He did a lot of important things to help the people and many Americans, millions of people, looked up to him and loved him. And you know what?”
“What?”
Sol took off his glasses, wiped them with a rumpled handkerchief he produced out of his other inside jacket pocket, and put them back on. “He had polio,” he said. “That’s what. A pretty bad case of it. Maybe even worse than you.”
“Really,” asked Nick.
“really,” nodded Sol. So you just remember that, okay, Nick? Sometimes it’s the injured man, the damaged man, who turns out to be the biggest hero and gets to go on the most marvelous journeys and adventures.” Nick frowned. “it’s true,” said Sol. “I’ll swear to that on any holy book you want. The Old Testament. The New Testament. The Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, The Mahayana Sutras. The Sears, Roebuck Catalogue. Cross my heart and hope to die. Isn’t that how you say it?”
The door to the art gallery opened, releasing a blast of saxophone music and smoke. “Sol,” said a bearded man in Levis and sandals and a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. ”Roxanne just broke out a bag of her special brownies and we’re going to have us a nice little repast. You into that? You wanna partake?”
“Okay,” said Sol to the man. “I could use a little bit more of the sacrament about now. I’ll be right there.“ And then he turned back to Nick, “you remember what I said, promise?” but Nick was already several storefronts away, hobbling toward home, trying to absorb it all.
“What I’m gonna do, I have no idea, Sylvia,” Lou blurted out one night as he turned off the black and white TV after “I Love Lucy,” and just stood there looking at her on the couch as the TV picture shrunk to a small point of light and sizzled out like a doused flame. “Not one goddam idea.”
“Lou,” she said, softly. “Lou.”
“sorry,” he said. You know I don’t like to talk that way around you. But it just doesn’t get better. I keep waiting, but nothing changes. What I have to throw out in the garbage every night, leftovers and just plain uncooked, is enough food to feed an army. The veal, the chicken, the fish, the vegetables, the pasta old Mrs. Battaglia makes with her own hands in the morning. All wasted, everything but the wine. At this point, the way things are going, It’s a miracle I’m not drinking that up, myself.”
And then it turned out that Franco Trombetta had a second cousin by marriage, an older man, and that this cousin had a successful pizzeria in Isla Vista, right in the middle of the University of California Santa Barbara campus, and it was doing all right except his cousin was homesick for North Beach. Marco’s almost 70,” Franco explained, sitting at the Zanettis’ dinette table next to Angela after Mass one Sunday. “and he figured out he’s got enough to retire on, now. But not down there, he says. He wants to spend his old age in the old place, where he was a boy.”
Silvia served more strong coffee all around, sat back down next to Lou on their side of the table, and broke off a bite of one of the homemade chocolate almond biscotti Angela had brought with them. There were some other Italians there, said Franco, who had visited his cousin once. There were churches, maybe three or four of them not including the historic mission, Catholic schools if you wanted, everything.
“Pizza?” said Lou, disbelievingly, mashing out another of the Pall Malls he was chain smoking and expelling a great blue cloud, thinking of the fine dishes on the restaurant’s menu that were authentic enough to make a paisano, whether his roots were in Palermo or Naples or Rome, weep with joy, especially after a few glasses of the house Chianti.
“Pizza?” repeated Lou, reaching for the red Pall Mall pack on the table again although Sylvia put her hand over his to stop him. “You’re kidding me, right?”
To be continued…