Grief Street

irritating little guy had got on the train at Tremont station, pulled out a plastic saxophone-piano thing and started playing for handouts, right next to hung-over Harry Darcy. Darcy had considered killing him—he had an off-duty revolver concealed in a belt clip, after all—but thought better of it. Instead, he had said to Little Guy, “Shut up, you runt fuck, I don’t want to deal with that shit noise.” Little Guy was terrified. With a squeak, he stopped playing and said, hopefully, “I know some other tunes.” Harry Darcy had leaned his back against the door of the subway car, closed his eyes, sighed deeply.
    Now again, Darcy sighed a deep sigh. He wondered if anybody in the world felt lousier than he felt. And further, for what grim reason had he freely chosen a seat right next to King Kong Kowalski? To invite increased discomfort on himself, in the theory that agony would have its way with him all the more swiftly? Even in the worst of times at Rikers—when rioting mentals were flinging their feces all over the place—Harry Darcy had not in many years thought so perversely. For perversity, there was the nostalgia of Holy Cross School back in Hell’s Kitchen, which he had escaped so many years back...
    ... Now today sat Corrections Officer Darcy, in charm school, his rabid ears filled with the scraw of a long-ago nun: There was once a wicked little boy in the grip of the devil. When he went to Communion, he did not swallow the Host, but deliberately concealed it in the corner of his mouth. He went to his hideout with his gang, put the Host on the ground and hammered a nail through it. The Host spurted blood.
    Darcy closed his throbbing eyes and smacked himself on the forehead. Maybe that would blast away the sudden awfulness of a Hell’s Kitchen remembrance. Religion class, a nun’s exemplum vérité as prelude to the lesson of the day from old Father Gerald Morrison—a treatise on one of only two subjects of interest to him: agony and memory. “Creepy” Morrison, he and his classmates called the priest.
    He opened his eyes and forced himself to divert his attention to the rabid cop from Manhattan Sex Crimes sitting next to him who had been all on about the night before over in Newark. Only not now. King Kong Kowalski tipped back his head and poured straggling crumbs and custard globs from the cruller bag into his open maw.
    Darcy asked, manfully, “So in this ultimate fighting deal— what, anything goes?”
    “Gouge the eyes. Bite the neck...” A puff of crumbs from Kowalski’s lips, then he went on. “Elbows. Whatever.”
    “Knees? Butt heads?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “Kick a guy in the nuts?” Darcy decided, Yes—a boot in the groin, that would feel lousier than Pm feeling.
    “Whatever,” Kowalski affirmed. “Last night, for example, I seen this one guy beef-jerky another guy’s lips.”
    “Beef-jerky?”
    “Means he bit the guy’s lips right off his freaking face.” Definitely—that would feel lousier.
    Kowalski belched, crumpled his empty bag, dropped it to a file floor as bubbled and beige as vomit. Darcy felt two things: a case of the whirlies coming on, and an equally powerful need to get away from the sight and sound of Kowalski. He cast his eyes around the room for a vacant chair. Too late. It was nine o’clock now, and the place was filled to capacity. A hundred sullen men, some as whirly in the head as Darcy himself, waited for the headmaster of school to show up.
    Darcy turned from Kowalski and pretended to be absorbed in something from a back page of The Chief newspaper he was still carrying around. He reread an advertisement his warden had circled for him in red grease pencil:

Diagnostic & Counseling Services
851 W. 13th St.NYC 10011
phone 212.904-9202 or 516.765-5922

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    “Listen,” Kowalski said, butting Darcy’s ribs with a pillowy elbow, “I heard this great freaking joke at ringside.”
    “I bet you did. I bet you’re going to repeat it.”
    “What goes ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-THUMP?”
    “I don’t