Bridge of Sighs

“You gotta know where you are. You gotta know
who
you are. Anyhow, it’s over. Forget it. And like I said, Cirillo’s all tease. You don’t believe me, ask Jerzy.”
    As if I would. “Why doesn’t he—”
    “Dump her ass? ’Cause he’s pussy-whipped, is why.” He shot me a sidelong glance. “You know what pussy-whipped is?”
    I’d heard the expression before, maybe at Ikey’s or the Cayoga Diner. It was the sort of thing a man would say if somebody said he had to go home or his wife would get mad. The sort of thing Uncle Dec might say about my father if he was in one of those mean, kidding moods. So I nodded. Yeah, sure, I knew what pussy-whipped meant.
    “Here’s something I bet you
don’t
know,” Perry continued, his voice still barely audible, though the theater had grown quiet now that the feature had started. “The girls that come across usually aren’t the ones you figure. I could tell you which ones put out, if you’re interested.” What did he have in mind? I wondered. To name them? Point them out in the dark theater below so I’d be able to recognize them by the backs of their heads? “It’s usually the tweenies,” he continued. “You know what I mean by tweenies?”
    Unlike “pussy-whipped,” I hadn’t any idea what a tweeny might be, but I said sure, I knew what he meant.
    Which elicited a lip fart. “The hell you do,” he said. “I made it up.”
    I told him I meant that I sort of knew.
    “Okay, tell me what a tweeny is.”
    I took a wild stab. “An in-between?”
    He looked at me in astonishment. “Right,” he admitted. “Not that pretty, not that ugly. An ugly girl? She just gives up, ’cause nobody wants to do it with her anyhow. If she’s real pretty like Nan, or she’s got tits like Karen, she doesn’t have to put out, ’cause guys are gonna drool anyway. Tweenies are the ones gotta give you something. Otherwise they might as well be ugly, am I right?” When I couldn’t fault his logic, he went on. “Something else you wouldn’t necessarily expect. East End tweenies put out the most, ’cause they’re tweenies twice. Not ugly, not pretty, not West End, not Borough. They don’t know what the fuck they are, so they gotta put out.”
    I could tell he was proud of his careful reasoning, and also glad to have an audience. What I couldn’t tell was whether Perry was just a theorist or if he was speaking from experience. His face was full of purple acne; Perry was not a handsome boy.
    “You live in the East End, right?” I said I did, and he nodded. “Hell, you could be getting laid all the time if you wanted,” he said. “Talk about crossing the line, do you believe that shit?” He leaned close so I could sight along his index finger.
    At first I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at, but then the movie went from a night to a day scene, and I saw he was pointing at a Negro boy. That in itself wasn’t so surprising. There were usually Negroes present at the Saturday matinee. They sat together in two rows down in front on the far left-hand side, where the angle at the screen was bad. Behind them a buffer zone of another couple rows was always left empty, the white kids not wanting to get too close. From the balcony those rows looked like a wide aisle, as if the seats themselves had been removed to allow for better access to the exit.
    The boy Perry indicated wasn’t sitting with the other Negroes, but rather on the opposite side of the theater, where the Borough kids usually congregated, and the girl sitting next to him looked white. Not surprisingly, they were the only two in that row. Another buffer zone, smaller than the one where the other black kids sat, had been created in deference to this one boy.
    Perry shook his head in a kind of weary, grudging admiration, or so it seemed to me. “Fucking Three. That boy’s always been crazy.”
    Three. Of course, I thought. Gabriel Mock the Third. Who’d told me, the only time we’d ever spoken, that he had no father. At the time this had struck me as something akin to blasphemy, and I remembered it now with a chill, because here was a boy who not only
had
a father but was also repeating his father’s mistake. I also recalled the words the boy’s grandfather had spoken when he dragged his son up my grandfather’s front porch steps to apologize. “All took care of,” he’d kept repeating. “All in the past.” What I had no way of knowing, of course, was whether
this
boy had any