Hells Kitchen

name’s Ramirez? What’s your first name?”
    The man paused and held a muscular finger to his lips, silencing him, then pointed it at Pellam’s face. “You tell them.” His eyes sank down to Pellam’s boots then rose again as if he were memorizing him. Then he walked slowly out of the shadow of the ruined building into the crisp hot sunlight.
    *   *   *
    But Jimmy Corcoran was a ghost.
    No one had heard of him, no one knew any Corcorans.
    Pellam had wandered around the neighborhood,stopping in Puerto Rican bodegas, Korean vegetable stands, Italian pork stores. Nobody knew Corcoran but everybody had a funny lilt in their voices when they said they didn’t—their denials seemed desperate.
    He tried a bodega. “He hangs out around here someplace,” Pellam encouraged.
    The ancient Mexican clerk, with an immensely wrinkled face, stared at his fly-blown tray of lardy pastry, smoked his cigarette and nodded silently. He offered nothing.
    Pellam bought a coconut drink and stepped outside. He ambled up to a cluster of T-shirted men lounging around a Y-stand sprinkler hookup and asked them. Two of them quickly said they’d never heard of Jimmy Corcoran. The other three forgot whatever English they knew.
    He decided to try further west, closer to the river. He was walking past the parochial school on Eleventh when he heard, “Yo.”
    “Yo yourself,” Pellam said.
    The boy stood in a tall, battered Dumpster and looked down, hands on scrawny hips. He wore baggy jeans and, despite the heat, a red, green and yellow windbreaker. Pellam thought the mosaic haircut was pretty well done. The razor notch mimicked the grin that was etched deep into his dark face.
    “Whassup?”
    “Tell you what. . . . Come on down here.”
    “Why?”
    “I want to talk to you. Don’t jump, climb around the back. No—”
    He jumped. The boy landed on the ground, unhurt. “You don’t ’member me.”
    “Sure I do. Your mother’s Sibbie.”
    “Straight up! You be CNN. The man with the camera.”
    On the playground behind him four baseball diamonds stood empty. Two basketball courts too. The gates were chained. Easily a hundred cans of paint had been sacrificed to decorate the yard.
    “Where’s your mother and sister?”
    “Be at the shelter.”
    “Why aren’t you in school?”
    “Ain’t no school, be summer.”
    Pellam had forgotten. Despite heat or snow, cities are virtually seasonless. He had trouble imagining what summer vacation in Hell’s Kitchen might be like. Pellam’s Augusts had been filled with sneaking into movies and trading comics and occasional softball games. He remembered many summer mornings bicycling like a demon, zipping over smooth concrete marked by the slick paths of confused snails and slugs.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Ismail. Yo, what’s yours?”
    “I’m John Pellam.”
    “Yo, homes, I ain’t like John. Slob nigger I know called John. He ain’t down to do nothing, you know what I’m saying? I’ma call you Pellam.”
    Wasn’t Mr. an option?
    “How’s the shelter?”
    His smile faded. “This nigger don’t like the peoples there. Slanging all the time. Cluckheads all over the place.”
    Drugs, the boy was saying. A cluckhead was a crack addict. Pellam had worked on several films in South Central L.A. He knew some gangspeak.
    “It’s only for a little while,” Pellam said. But the reassurancesounded leaden; he had no idea how the boy took it.
    Ismail’s eyes suddenly flashed happily. “Yo, you like basketball? I like Patrick Ewing. He the best, you know what I’m saying? I like Michael Jordan too. Yo, ever see the Bulls play?”
    “I live in L.A.”
    “Lakers! Yeah! Magic, he be fine. I like Mr. B. The Barkley. He the man to have at yo’ back ina fight.” He sparred against an unseen adversary. “Yo, yo, you like basketball, cuz?”
    Pellam had been to a few Lakers games though he gave that up when he found that a good percentage of the spectators were in the Industry and bought season passes just to see or be seen. As Jack Nicholson does, so shall you do. “Not really,” he confessed.
    “And Shaq too. Man be ten feet tall. I wanna be that nigger.”
    Ismail danced around on the sidewalk and performed a mini slam dunk.
    Pellam glanced at the boy’s tattered high-tops and dropped to his knees to retie a dangling lace. This made the boy uncomfortable; he stepped back and clumsily tied it himself. Pellam rose slowly. “You started to tell me something the other day.