The Outlaw Within

If you knew me then, in 1965, you’d know how unlikely it was that Joey DeMarco and I would become best friends those last two months of the school year. I was a straight A student: an associate editor of the Heights, the school newspaper; a member of the debate society; and a stalwart on the track team. My sights were set on an Ivy League college, after which I hoped to attend law school. Joey, on the other hand, had barely passing grades and absolutely no plans for college. He wasn’t a member of any school club or organization. He was, in short, an outcast and a loner, or, in the less generous consensus of both students and teachers, a loser.

What drew us together was that we’d both been singled out that term as victims of the Shamrocks, the school’s nastiest gang. Me, because of my grades and favored status among the faculty, and Joey—well, I don’t really know why. They just didn’t like him. Whenever the priests weren’t looking, one or the other of us would get jumped and roughed up.

In history class, we sat on opposite sides of the room. For the most part, I kept my eyes on Father Mac; Joey—who was repeating the class—rarely did. That afternoon, as usual, his head was turned toward the window, where thin golden light made him look surprisingly saint-like.

The aerial blitz began almost immediately. First came a piece of chalk. Moments later, a pencil. Soon thereafter, a board eraser. All thrown with full force, overhand, from Father Mac’s perch on the edge of his desk. Although he’d been a minor league pitcher, Class A Albany, his aim had deteriorated over the years. His missiles occasionally hit their targets—nearly always Joey—but more often than not, they struck somewhere on the wall behind or on the window glass itself, ricocheting crazily back into the nearest aisle.

This assault was successful in getting Joey’s attention but not in keeping it. The window lured him back with its ever-changing infinity of wonders, and soon thereafter, another missile—this time a scotch tape dispenser—was launched, barely nicking Joey’s desk before plummeting to the floor. Eight air strikes in total that day, two more than the previous class record.

Later in the basement detention room—I was the student council monitor whenever Father Mac, who doubled as the dean of discipline, was called away—Joey maintained his defiantly indifferent classroom demeanor. The notion of punishment meant nothing to him. He told me once that guilt was a form of enslavement he wouldn’t buy into. Not once during detention did he crack a book. I, on the other hand, at my monitor’s desk at the front of the room, got all my homework done for that night.

When the bridge came into view on our walk home, I was relieved to see that none of the Shamrocks were visible above the stone railing. Still, to be safe, I suggested we take the long way home, avoid the bridge altogether.

“What, and walk an extra mile out of our way because of those morons? You kidding?” Joey had a plain, unremarkable face, except for his nervous eyes and a single lock of brown hair that hung in a ragged curl dead center on his forehead. He moved alongside me in an odd, loping way, his body turned slightly to the side. It was the same way he looked at you: not directly, but rather with his face downcast and turned at a slight angle, his eyes—which seemed almost black—glancing off yours as if they’d already moved on to some new thought, some new area of interest.

He led me down the riverbank—a new shortcut, he said—through tall grass and muck and the usual junkyard detritus (tread-less tires, rotting lumber, broken appliances) until we stood under the bridge. There, from its hiding place in a clump of bushes, he dragged out a crudely made raft: boards of uneven length and width nailed together, four inner tubes strapped to its underside.

He pulled a long pole from the weeds, and he pushed us off, using the pole as a rudder to keep the raft directly under the center of the bridge so that we couldn’t be seen from above.

With him standing at the back of the raft dipping the pole, and me, frail-thin and bespectacled, kneeling on the boards and holding my book bag in my arms to keep it dry— it was something out of Huckleberry Finn. Except, this wasn’t the Mighty Mississippi; it was Eastchester Creek in the Bronx, and what awaited us was an endless panorama of tenements and two-family houses, not the forests of the Midwest—a discrepancy Joey was quick to point out.

He was taller and so much broader than I was: a strong, noble-looking figure for those moments, his face in shadowed profile directed at the approaching shore. Around the raft, the black industrial water swirled its way toward Long Island Sound; in less than two minutes, we were on the other side of the creek.

“See?” he said. “The dumbbells didn’t even notice.” Then he surprised me by inviting me to his house. “My parents aren’t home. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”

I had no homework to do, so I said yes.

He lived only two blocks from me. Same kind of brick, two-story, single-family house, but that’s where the similarities ended. Inside my house, there was no such thing as clutter. Everything was in its proper place. You couldn’t even leave your hat or gloves for two minutes on the banister of the stairs. Inside Joey’s house, clothes lay strewn over the sofa, unfinished plates of food and empty pizza boxes filled the end tables. The kitchen was the worst, though. Vibrant red smears on the walls and ceiling and floor. It looked like a crime scene.

I stood there and gaped. “What happened?”

“They haven’t cleaned it up yet.”

“Blood?”

“Sauce. Happens every time my mother cooks Italian. They get into a fight and start throwing things.”

“They throw sauce at each other?”

“Meatballs, sausage, chuck steak. Whatever’s in the pot.”

His room, at least, had no sauce on the walls, but there were piles of dirty clothes in the corner. More striking, though, were the stacks of books that rose from the floor, the bed, the dresser, and the windowsill. Hundreds of them. Westerns, primarily.

“This is what I wanted to show you.” He flung open his closet door. Behind the rack of clothes were tall towers of boxes and containers, all neatly arranged, rising from the floor. Pens and chalk and crayons; jars of ink; staplers; paper clips; reams of loose-leaf paper; black binders; black and white composition notebooks; all manner of art supplies—construction paper, colored pencils, rulers, compasses.

It took me a moment. “From school?”

“Been collecting since freshman year,” he said proudly behind me.

“You stole all this stuff?”

“Nah. Just borrowed it. Gonna bring it back one of these days, before I graduate.”

I cleared some books away on the bed and sat there contemplating his stash—enough, I thought, to fill the shelves of a small stationery store. “Why?”

He shrugged and stood there staring at his collection, his lips crossed in that funny way. “Never showed anyone before.” He was nodding his head in satisfaction. “Pretty neat, huh?” Then, as if suddenly remembering something, he said, “Got to use the can. Be back in a minute.”

I was sitting there, my eyes flicking between the closet and the stacks of books, wondering which was stranger—that he’d taken all that stuff or that he’d read so many books—when I heard someone in the hall.

His sister, Rosalie, her curls wet and black and pressed close to her head, stood in the doorway holding a towel. Before this, the closest I’d ever gotten to her was seeing her at school across the asphalt yard that served as what Joey called “a demilitarized zone” between the girls’ building and the boys’. Even amid a crowd of her taller classmates, she stood out with her curly head and her I’m-my-own-woman strut across the cracked and creviced pavement. I’d stand there moonstruck and watch her until one of the border guards—the nuns on one side, the priests on the other—warned me to move on.

She stared at me curiously. “Who are you?”

“Guy.” My real name was Gaetano but only my mother called me that. “Guy Rossetti.”

“You a friend of Joey’s?”

“Yeah, well, sort of. I guess.”

She had a smirk on her face. It made her look even cuter. “Sort of, huh?”

“Yes,” I said, sounding bolder, thinking this would advance my cause. “We are. Friends.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Good luck.” Then she was gone.

* * *

The next day, Friday, Joey asked me after history class if I wanted to join him that night on a mission to free the slaves.

“What slaves?”

“You. Me. All of us.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The rest is top secret,” he said with that cryptic twitch of his lips.

I was intrigued enough to say I’d think it over.

“You’ll have to sleep at my house,” he added. “We can’t execute till midnight.”

Since it was Friday and I was on top of my homework, and since he lived only two blocks over and had, according to my dad, a fine Italian surname, my parents gave me the go-ahead. Hoping to see Rosalie, I arrived at his house early, but she was out. His parents (as usual, apparently) were also out somewhere. So, we killed time in his room, sitting on his bed, while he read me some of his favorite passages from the books he loved. They all involved cowboys or outlaws or newly arrived easterners riding across the open range, wind blowing in their hair, blue sky overhead, endless vistas of mountains or prairies ahead of them. Frontier life, he believed, was the crowning period in American history. Before government came in with its laws and ruined everything. “If only I could’ve lived back then,” he said more than once. “If only—”

“But it was chaos out there,” I said. “Folks were murdered and raped. Theft was rampant.”

“You sound like Macaluso,” he scoffed.

“Father Mac is a scholar. He’s got a master’s degree from Columbia.”

“Listen.” Joey leaned toward me, tapping the book against the mattress. “People see what they want to see. Just because some bad things happened, that doesn’t invalidate the beauty and wonder of it. You could do anything, build anything, be whatever you wanted to be. Think of that. There was unbroken forest from the East Coast to the Mississippi, and beyond that, it was wide open country all the way to the Rockies. Think of the potential. Think of the dreams, the possibilities. And what do we have now?” He waved his arm in the general direction of the window. “The Bronx. That’s what we have. If the original settlers could have imagined this would be the consequence of their efforts, they would have turned around and gotten back on the boat.”

“It’s not such a bad place,” I said. He looked at me like I was a crazy.

* * *

At night, the classroom buildings looked particularly threatening with their dark brick, their turrets, and their castle-like rooflines. As we passed through the back gate, I asked again about our mission. “Patience,” he said. “All in good time.” He let slip a crooked grin because we both understood the reference. It was one of Father Mac’s favorite expressions.

Ahead of us, both faculty residences were dark. The only light came from a blue-tinted streetlamp at the top of the hill and the red emergency light at the base of the fire stairs behind the boys’ building: our destination.

Our shoes made low scuffing noises on the metal steps. On the fifth floor landing, he turned the knob and pulled open the door, then bent to retrieve a wad of paper that had been wedged against the jamb. “They never check this door,” he said. “No one’s ever up here.”

Inside the pitch-black hallway, he took a flashlight from his knapsack. In its pale, trembling light, cobwebs hung in tangled wisps from the ceilings. The air smelled of dust and dampness. There were no classrooms here, only storage rooms filled with desks no longer serviceable, jagged sections of slate from old blackboards tilted against dusty walls, broken statues that had once been displayed in the lobby or on the grounds. Our footsteps seemed deafeningly loud; my heart beat hard with anticipation.

“Tonight’s mission,” he explained on the way down to the fourth floor, “is to dismantle Macaluso’s arsenal. In short, to annihilate the threat of his particular brand of punishment.”

In Father Mac’s classroom he set his knapsack on the desk and pulled out the desk drawers, emptying them one by one into the bag. Pens, pencils, chalk, erasers, clips—the usual classroom fare. Then he replaced the drawers in their proper slots. He left the books, the blotter and the pencil sharpener on the desktop as they were.

He took a step back to observe the deactivated desk, a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

I had watched the entire operation in a mild state of shock. Standing there in the silence of that room, in the silent building, the tingles of excitement I’d been feeling turned into full-blown shivers. Starlight drifted through the tall, arched windows, dimly exposing the neat, ordered rows of desks where we sat uniformed and conforming five days a week, ten months a year. I was a trespasser now. I’d stepped over a line. It was a new sensation, and something about it pleased me. “This guilt stuff you’re always talking about. If guilt is a form of slavery, who’s the master?”

“God, the Church, the clergy, teachers, cops, parents—they’re all in on it.”

“Your parents seem to give you a lot of freedom.”

“Yeah, right.” He said it as if that hardly compensated for the rest of the world’s attitude. He hoisted his knapsack over his shoulder and nodded toward the door. He said he had to pee, so we stopped in the Fourth Floor East bathroom, the one we used after history class. He was ranting about how much of an injustice it was that we could only pee between classes, and that the mere two minutes they gave us was an injustice, as well. “You know how long I have to hold it in sometimes because they won’t let us get out of our seats?”

He cut himself off mid-rant and flashed the light in my direction. “You want to know something about me? In four years, I’ve never once made the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“Why not?”

“No way in good conscience can I declare allegiance to what this country is becoming. What it could have been, in the old days, that’s a different story.” He made a humming, mumbling-type sound that seemed like words but made no sense. “That’s what I’ve been doing everyday since I got here.”

In the flashlight’s flimsy glow, he looked at me to see how I was taking it. “I know you want to be a lawyer someday, but you should think about what laws you’ll be defending, and why.”

He stood at the end urinal and relieved himself. When he finished, he stayed there, looking down. “You want to see my own private pledge of allegiance?” He trained the flashlight on his pants and began humming the national anthem. Head back, eyes closed, jaw clenched, and teeth gritted he gave himself, without benefit of digital manipulation, a full-fledged erection.

A part of me wanted to applaud, but that seemed foolish. “Cool,” I said.

Before we left, he urged me to touch one of the stall doors.

“What for?”

“Go ahead. Touch one.”

I pulled open the first of the doors and it shook flimsily in my hand. The hinges were loose.

“Try the next one.”

I did so, with the same result. “What?” I said.

When we were outside the gate, heading toward the river, he told me he was planning something big, really big. “Something for them to remember me by.”

“What is it?”

He put his finger to his lips.

“Then why bring me into this? Why show me your closet? Why bring me with you tonight?”

At the river’s edge he stopped and stared at the dark water. His face was dimly lit by the light of an oil storage tank on the far shore that belonged to the Esso refinery. His eyes suggested a longing I hadn’t seen before. “I wanted someone to know, that’s why. I’ll be graduating from that child labor camp in less than a month, and I wanted someone to know.”

* * *

Over the next three weeks, I spent a lot of time with Joey and far less time on my homework, a lapse that didn’t escape the notice of my parents, who were sure this was the beginning of the end for me—that I was throwing away my future. My mother’s featured lament: “You want to end up like your cousin Sal?”

What’s more, I began to drift away from my friends on the debate team, industrious, scholarly types like myself destined for careers in the professions. But I knew this was temporary, that next year, Joey would be gone, and I’d be too busy keeping my grades high for college to allow for outside adventures like this.

It took us a total of four nights to haul the contents of his closet back to the boys’ building. He insisted on returning the supplies he’d “borrowed” to their original supply rooms—there was one on each of the four floors of the building. In his meticulous way, he remembered exactly what went where: pencils and erasers to the first floor, scotch tape dispensers and staplers to the second, and so on. Before leaving each supply room, he took extra time to straighten things up, so that the shelves were more neatly arranged and more orderly than the way we found them.

The highlight of those weeks—the good highlight, that is—occurred in history class, the afternoon Father Mac opened his desk drawer and found it empty. His rage at Joey’s blatant indifference to the lecture had been building for most of the period. For some reason, Joey was more fidgety than usual that day, not only staring out the window but shifting in his seat as well, leaning forward and backward, drumming his fingers on the desktop. When Father Mac couldn’t bear it one second longer, he turned to his arsenal, yanking open first the top drawer, then each of the smaller side drawers, his incredulous face darkening in color to a deep scarlet. With no weapon available but what he held in his hand, he hurled the 1,200-page American history text over Joey’s head, where it hit the back wall and fell—pages fluttering wildly, spine broken—in a mangled heap to the floor.

“That’s when you know you’ve beat them,” Joey told me after class, on his way to detention. “When they’re reduced to the sputtering, frustrated puppeteers they truly are.”

The bad highlight of those weeks happened a few days after that. We were on the river, rowing home after school, when all eight of the Shamrocks—four on one shore, four on the other—suddenly appeared alongside the bridge’s concrete buttresses, hurling rocks. We were struck at least a dozen times on the arms and legs. One sharp-edged missile left a gash on Joey’s face. At least twice the raft nearly capsized before Joey was able to pole us downriver, past a distribution plant for Knickerbocker Beer and a warehouse for the Bendix Corporation, where we finally collided with a rock that broke the boards apart.

Our wrecked vessel beside us, he seemed more wistful than usual as we sat on the bank, drying off and cursing the “Shams,” as he now called them. They were: herd-dependent cowards; intellectual midgets; culturally dispossessed, whiskey-swilling zombie boozehounds; pathetic, peat-beating potato eaters. When he ran out of insults, he stared across the river at our school sitting high on the hill. “Look at it,” he said, his voice coated with regret. “The feudal castle. And what are we? The damn serfs.”

Then, from out of the blue, it seemed, he said: “I could never have done the Wild West thing. Truth is, I can’t stand horses.” He looked at me as if he’d acknowledged his most serious failing. “I rode one once at the zoo. You know, you pay a quarter and they trot you around the ring for two minutes? I was sore for a week. And I can’t stand their smell, or the way they’re all the time crapping out those huge lumps. I’m just not cut out for that stuff.”

Quickly, though, his face brightened. He brushed back the curl on his forehead and leaned forward, arms on his knees. “The vagabond thing, however, that’s something else.” He told me the 1930s were his second favorite period in U.S. history. Before shopping malls, office parks, superhighways and “all this conformity.” When there was still something left of the “real” America. When a body could ride the rails for free. Traveling here, there, and everywhere. Not a care in the world.

Of course, I could have reminded him that the country was in the Great Depression, that people were hungry and homeless and without jobs; but he seemed so contented imagining those days I kept my mouth shut.

* * *

I guess I never knew, because he never spoke about it, how unhappy he was at home. On the nights I stayed over, I did get to meet his parents at breakfast. They seemed okay but we ate pretty much in silence, and thinking back on it, I realize they mostly ignored one another, as if eating together was a family obligation they simply had to endure.

Once, when I approached his house, I saw him come running out with his hands over his ears. From the street, I could hear doors slamming inside, voices raised in anger. “Meatball wars,” was all he said, and I walked with him to the playground, where I watched him play handball with himself, working up a heavy sweat over a solid twenty-five minutes of nonstop motion. He was quick and nimble on his feet, and he smacked the ball with an anger-fueled intensity and determination that impressed me. Despite his awkward gait, and his indifference to sports in general, he could have been a decent athlete. When I told him that, he simply shrugged.

Twice more, on Fridays when I could stay out late, I helped him carry things to the school: a toolbox and coils of rope one night, a drill and a blowtorch the other. We stayed only long enough to bring the items to the fifth floor, where he hid them in the room with the broken desks. “What the hell is going on?” I wanted to know.

The old finger-to-the-lips routine. “Mum’s the word.”

Toward the end of May, Father Mac took Joey aside to tell him he didn’t have a chance in hell of passing his course. Which meant he’d have to attend summer school, if he wanted to graduate. He told me this that same afternoon on the way home. He seemed neither surprised nor upset. When we reached his house, he offered me a wave of the hand and that strange twitch of his lips, what I had come to understand was his way of trying to smile. “See ya around.”

Twice over the Memorial Day weekend, I stopped by his house, but he wasn’t there. The second time, I had a chance to talk to Rosalie. She had no idea where he was. All she knew was that he’d been acting strange lately. Strange for him, she added. Which meant really strange. Which meant he didn’t even give his usual grunt when somebody in the family spoke to him, and he stayed out later and later every night.

We sat on their back porch while she painted her toenails. She was going to a dance that night. She listed all the dances she’d been to last month, then all the ones on her calendar so far for June. She had a rating system for each one, depending on how many guys she met, how cute they were. Then she talked about the upcoming summer vacation, how she was looking forward to spending more time going to the movies and listening to music. Did I think Shelley Fabares was sexy? Because somebody told her she looked a little like an Italian version of her. Paul was her favorite Beatle, by far. She knew the words to all the songs he sang lead on. Did I think Paul Newman was the sexiest man who ever…?

It was pretty clear we didn’t have much in common, so I said I had to go. 

Some things are so much better from a distance. “When Joey gets home,” I said, “tell him to call me. Okay?”

But by the time classes resumed—what with the long weekend and an extra day for some saint’s birthday, we’d been off four straight days—he was gone for good. First period, I was called out of class and sent to Father Mac’s office. He looked at me with genuine disappointment. “Come with me,” he said, and I followed his squared shoulders and military-taut frame up the main staircase to the fourth floor.

When he threw open the bathroom door, I gasped. The place had been gutted. The sinks were still there, but the faucets were missing, as were the mirrors on the wall and the paper towel dispensers. The urinals had been removed, as had the stall doors and the toilet bowls in each of the four stalls. The toilet tissue racks had been removed as well.

“Is this the work of the DeMarco boy?” His voice had an echo chamber quality in the hollow recesses of the room.

“I don’t know, Father.”

“You don’t know?” He scrutinized my face for signs of deceit. “Do you know where the boy is now?”

“No, Father.”

Hands on his hips, he turned to survey the eviscerated room. “What would he do with all this stuff?” he said, more in amazement than in anger.

“The fifth floor storage rooms, Father. Would be my guess.”

How he got the heavy bowls and urinals up there was more challenging to figure. But I had more than enough time for contemplation in the two weeks of detention that followed—for my part, “however tangential,” as Father Mac put it—in all this. Maybe Joey had rigged a pulley-like operation using the ropes and the marble pillars of the stairwell, or maybe through sheer determination and bravado, he was able to drag them upward on his own, step by laborious step.

One day in the schoolyard, when the border guards were distracted, Rosalie told me they had received three postcards from him. The first, a picture of Chicago’s Union Station on the front, said simply: Living the Dream. The second, from Kansas City, a close-up of the Southwest Chief streaming across the prairie, contained only his name, JOEY, printed in capital letters at the bottom of the space for messages. And the third, nothing but the card itself: a picture of a jazz band parading through a cemetery in New Orleans.

In the detention room, once I’d finished my homework, I was left to stare at the faded yellow walls and imagine the world outside—what Joey might be witnessing through the open door of a boxcar. The real America, as he liked to say: all that lay beyond the stultifying blandness and precision of shopping malls, beyond our regrettably ordinary and structured lives—the gritty underbelly of the cities he traveled through and those vast, open spaces beyond.

And sometimes, I was riding with him.

PHILIP CIOFFARI

Philip Cioffari is the author of six books of fiction, including the novels If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues; The Bronx Kill; Jesusville; Dark Road, Dead End; Catholic Boys; and the story collection A History of Things Lost or Broken. His website is www.philipcioffari.com.