After almost a year of meet-ups and noir movies and bull sessions, John ended his court-ordered term as my protégé on June 3, 1998. He was officially free again on the day he graduated from H.S. 615, the Chelsea High School. I was in the audience, and I stood up and whistled with two fingers as he sauntered across the stage for his diploma. You’d think he was valedictorian for all the noise his mother and I made.
John invited me to his mother’s place for a small dinner party after the graduation ceremony concluded. As I’ve mentioned before, he and Mina lived in a city housing project that offered a great place to witness drug shootings or a late-night stairwell assault. I did not immediately accept the invitation. John at once began to insist that the Houses were quieter and safer than you’d think. You could tell that his pride had been nicked.
“Don’t be a pansy,” he said.
To be honest, I hesitated because John’s mother had never liked me, and I did my best to return the sentiment. Mina referred to herself as an ex-junkie, a woman with a past that she’d beaten; but she only stayed clean because John got up at dawn twice a week to shepherd her over to the methadone clinic on Twenty-Second Street, where she’d perch on the front stoop and smoke cigarettes and scowl at the people with real jobs walking to and from the subway station on their way to work.
Hers was a tenuous cure; if she missed a dose, she could be counted on to disappear on a binge within two day’s time. Yet whenever I was around her, she treated me like the one with questionable side habits. She didn’t think it quite normal for a man in his thirties to pal around with someone the age of her son. Philanthropic deeds, or humanistic acts, were just shadow play to her. I don’t trust anybody bearing gifts, she always said.
Mina’s distrust extended to all parts of her life. She suspected that doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and electric-meter readers were all conspiring against her. Her distrust was steepest when reading newspapers or magazines. The only print material she trusted were the celebrity gossip sheets that she piled on her kitchen table and stowed in her closets.
In the rare moments when Mina let her guard down, she wore her naivete well; you had at once a sense of her original girlish nature. You could almost imagine how she had looked in the Seventies when she braided her hair and wore cut-off jeans, when she was someone whom you’d want to see at a party because she was sweet and kind and always willing to have a good time. And maybe that was her undoing, as time passed, and she slept with the wrong guys and did the wrong drugs and ended up with nothing to keep for herself except a bad habit and a kid to raise all on her own.
During the party, Mina overheard me mention to one of her guests that I could relate to John in part because my Uncle Horace, who had been like a father to me, had died in a car accident when I was in college. After this I noticed how she would watch me when she thought I wasn’t looking. At the party’s end, Mina insisted that I bring home a tinfoil-covered dome of baked ziti. She also walked with me to the elevator on the pretense of making sure I didn’t get mugged—she may or may not have been serious. As we waited in the hall she told me she still expected to see me around.
“I’ll be around if John wants me to be around,” I said.
“You better come by anyway,” she said.
She retained a strong maternal sense of protection for her son, despite his age and her total inability to actually protect him from anything at all. “I’d give him anything, Ace,” she said. “But all I’ve got to give is the same old shit that I’ve given him all his life. He needs someone like you.”
You know, of course, where this is going; in a few months, her words proved all too prophetic. John hated the junior college in Queens where he’d enrolled. The curriculum bored him, the other students asked insipid questions the professor couldn’t answer, and nothing seemed to relate to the real world. Or at least not to the world as John saw it.
***
As a kid John lived in the Fulton Houses, a housing project in the wilds of West Chelsea. He wandered the neighborhood with freedom that might have bordered on neglect. His mother, Mina, didn’t care what he did as long as she never heard about what he was doing—don’t be stupid and don’t get caught, that was all she asked.
Together with friends he indulged in the city-kid world of street baseball, hood ornament theft, cops-and-killers in deserted building lots. Most of his friends didn’t live in the Fulton Houses: they were kids of blue collar stevedores, delivery men, and factory joes. In the Eighties the housing projects were not such an abrupt cut out from the rest of the neighborhood. If five people stepped into the Chelsea Barber on Seventh Avenue and asked for a haircut, you’d be hard pressed to guess who came from where.
The block that John inhabited also included a hobby shop for model train and radio-controlled car enthusiasts—and with a section devoted to comic books. On rain-clattering afternoons, John would billet for hours in the humid back room of the shop to flip through four-color pages and get lost in illustrated places that existed nowhere on the planet.
Using money he borrowed or stole from classmates at school, John began to amass a huge collection of comics. He bought with care, never just for the story in the pages; he paid attention to what his friends liked, what comics they already owned, and he shrewdly purchased issues he knew they would want. And so he traded up, he’d buy a title like Power Man & Iron Fist and trade it to someone else who loved Iron Fist and was willing to part with a limited-series mag like Secret Wars.
John treated his comics with the utmost care – he collected plastic Ziploc bags from the trash, washed out the residue inside, and cut and shaped them to fit the comics. He read somewhere that the comics kept their color best if they were at a lower temperature, and he stored his most valued issues in the freezer of their neighbor, Will Harrington. There wasn’t room in their freezer, he told Harrington.
Will Harrington was a die-cast setter who kept taking the exam to join the NYPD, but hadn’t passed yet. He would later tell me that back then he liked having John hang out at his place; he liked that the kid kept his nose clean by lording over his comic books. Harrington never complained about losing the door shelves in his freezer, never asked questions, but he was no tireless saint: there was one afternoon when John interrupted him four times in two hours – all because, as he told Harrington, “my mom filled up the fridge again.” Harrington waited till John was done re-stacking the comics in the freezer door, then he asked if John would take him next door, saying he had to have a talk with Mina.
But once inside, Harrington breezed into the kitchen and threw open the freezer doors. The freezer had been turned up high, to almost the same temperature as the fridge, and laid in there were all the small brown vials Mina had brought home from the hospital in her purse. She was a nurse in the burn ward at Saint Vincent’s and was in the habit of secretly bringing home her work; she had her own sufferings, her own burns and hurts that needed salving, and the morphine did just the trick.
Harrington studied the vials, read their labels, his frown gathering size with each vial. “Those are for my mom’s work,” John said. Ignoring him, Harrington gathered the vials all up in his arms. Mina emerged from the bedroom just as he was opening the window to the fire escape. In a clattering rain of plastic, he released the morphine vials out window with one arm while using the other to fend off Mina. She screamed, clawed, and tried to take Harrington’s face off. He never raised his voice; just kept repeating, quietly:
“You want John to see this? You really want John to see?”
The stand-off ended, John told me later, when Mina ran outside and down the stairs to collect the vials. He and Harrington went to the window and watched as Mina burst into the back alley, racing from place to place and gathering up the vials and clutching them to her chest. Neither Harrington nor John spoke; they were too ashamed, each of them, of what they were a part of.
I have wondered, in retrospect, if there was a sexual relationship between Harrington and Mina. Certainly he, a tall and robust bachelor, would have been appealing to her; and she, in her day, with her long hair and her large dark eyes, was not a woman without charms. If it did happen, sex between them, then I’m certain that it was almost entirely transactional, an act of survival rather than an act of love, as the two of them slogged forward in their lives.
The day after Harrington threw out the morphine, John sold his entire comics collection to the hobby store on his block. He did not want to keep them in Harrington’s freezer any longer, did not want to elicit that man’s attention to the fact that Mina had simply re-stocked their refrigerator with all the vials. For his sale, he gained a total of eight-seven dollars.
He hid the money from his mother, secreting it inside a broken slat in his headboard. He considered it the first part of the fund he’d use to get out of there someday. He knew it was possible to get out of the Fulton Houses – after all, he’d heard all his life about how his father had escaped long before John was even born.
John’s father, according to Mina, was either a deadbeat or a dead man – she never kept the story straight. The only time she ever talked about him was after she’d been drinking. But even then all she really offered were vagaries about some shadowy man who’d worked as the doorman in the Carter Building. “He had this uniform,” she told him, “he looked so good in it, like a guy marching in a parade.”
One night John kept prodding her, kept refilling the chipped glass tumbler she drank from, but no great secrets were divulged before she passed out on the living room floor. John told me later that he felt a twinge of guilt, as he stared at her on the rug, arms sprawled, a large brown liquor stain on the white and blue nurse’s blouse she was still wearing. He slipped her arms over him, steered her to bed, and convinced her to undress – he looked the other way – so he could soak the blouse in sudsy water to make sure the stain didn’t set. Then he went to bed.
The next morning, he woke up to the sound of her cursing, trying to iron the wet out of her blouse. She asked if he’d put her shirt in the sink and he denied it, knowing in the end she’d stop asking. He lost the nerve to confront her about his father after that; he didn’t, however, shed the anger he’d felt when he slammed open the front door. Instead, he just found reasons to get out of the house, which proved harder the older he became, and which eventually resulted in him dealing drugs to his peers at high school, holier-than-thou college students in Washington Square, and, eventually, an undercover cop on the sidewalk outside the Fat Black Pussycat.
He was seventeen years old on the day when he sat on the bleachers in a gym and watched me pick through the crowd in search of him. I can only imagine his amusement as he watched me, a soft-fingered, fusty-dressing, bright-eyed corporate solider searching him out. What, he must have wondered, could this stuffed shirt teach me?
***
Now that he was nineteen years old and a high school graduate, John wasn’t my problem anymore, but Mina was right: I couldn’t just let John languish in the larger world. I invited him to dinner one evening and we ate cheap noodles in Chinatown. Before we had finished our first course he admitted that he had not been to class in a week. “That college is for dumb people, man,” he told me. “It’s like a cattle call.”
I tried to convince John that schoolwork, even when the subject was a lackluster bore, provided better mental preparation for the real world than anything else. “I mean, it’s certainly better prep for a career than selling drugs, right?” I thought this last point was self-evident, but instead John laughed so hard that he spilled his Coke on the tabletop.
“Chief,” he said as he sopped up the mess, “you really are a trip.”
Desperate for him to see the truth in what I was telling him, I told him vaguely that hard work and hard-core studying had helped me escape the small town life that was my birthright. If not for school, I’d be working on what remained of my family’s old farm. I could have ended up just another grunt in a big field trying to figure out how to deal with resurgent water rot. None of this convinced John: he just guffawed and said he couldn’t see me with my sleeves turned up and baking in the sun. My hands looked too soft to have ever endured real work, he said.
“Be honest, chief,” he said, “there was never a risk of you ending up like me.”
Until that night in our time together we spoke more often about John than about me. Something in his voice told me that if there were ever a time to drop guard, to present myself simply and honestly, then now was the time. Perhaps because our formal relationship had ended, I also felt that I could be more at ease with him, more open about my bad decisions in life and my present-day fears.
That evening was the first time that we really discussed how anxious I’d felt as a kid; or how my Uncle Horace encouraged me to escape the place where I’d been born, impelling me to New York – and how, in some ways, that idea had trapped me here, more than a decade later. Because the only way to succeed at escaping is to run away and never return.
Unlike so many other conversations, this one had no selling point; there was no deal that I was trying to close with John. I more or less admitted that I wasn’t sure what to make of who I had become at this stage in my life. I worked too hard, had made too few friends, had loved too little, and had longed too much. In fact, steering him through his mentorship program had given me the closest thing I’d ever had to an unqualified success.
I was embarrassed after this last admission. But I also felt good for having come clean. To fill up the silence that followed, I asked the waiter for our bill. After he left, John leaned his elbow on the table and rubbed his chin sheepishly and said, well, you know, there’s something that maybe I ought to tell you, Ace.
“I’m not selling pot anymore. That’s true. But I am selling Ecstasy.”
I stood up in anger and practically exhaled jets of steam from my nostrils. I don’t know what I intended to do, but I had both fists balled up. John hissed at me to sit down; he told me not to overreact. He was not, he said, some cheap thug trolling Fulton Houses after dark. Nor was he one of those drifting sellers who headed down to Washington Square to harass the park walkers. To the contrary, John’s new turf was across the street from the park – in the basement of the N.Y.U. Library.
Apparently, in recent weeks John had purchased a university ID card from a student who’d dropped out. Laboring for days he doctored it with clear plastic tape, a black stencil, and a photo of himself. He bought a cheap collared polo shirt, chinos, and a canvas backpack; armed with this and his new card he became John Logan, Class of ’02 in the Stern School of Business. He seemed quite amused with himself and did not hide from me a certain familiar smugness: “You wanted me to stick with school, right, chief? Well, forget community college in Queens. I’ve finagled my way into one of the best schools in the city. That’s what you wanted, right?”
After using his ID to get past the library turnstiles, John would set up camp in a study carrel in the lower levels. There, his clientele found him: frat boys, ravers, goth chicks. And John could earn his daily bread while lazily flipping through books no one ever discussed in his classes in Queens. His system wasn’t without risk from security guards or bookworm narks, but for John the risk was worth it; when he was in the basement of the Bobst Library, he was like a king receiving courtiers.
The waiter brought the bill and I stared hard at the numbers on the bottom while John confessed all this. I couldn’t take my eyes off the price, the number circled at the bottom of the check. It all added up – the bill, that is. Simple arithmetic. No mess. No fuss. Simply what it is. I wished not for the first time that life could be similarly ordered.
I wasn’t John’s mentor anymore, and I wasn’t responsible for him. But I couldn’t listen to this and then pay for dinner and bid him goodnight. In a matter of months he’d be back where he started, selling drugs till he got caught offering them to the wrong person. He was older now than when I first met him and now he needed someone to take an even more dramatic chance on him.
“Come work for me,” I said abruptly.
“Work for you?”
“Unless you think it would be too hard.”
He didn’t even have to think about it before he accepted my challenge. I knew, even before I asked him, that he would go for it. He couldn’t help but accept the challenge for the same reason that he went to all the trouble to fake being an N.Y.U. student just to sell Ex in the bowels of Bobst. Everything that John ever did, everything that John ever said, all of it was meant to serve as prove that he was smarter, not just tougher, than everyone else. And “everyone else” included me, too.
He signed up for an internship, which meant 7:45 a.m. wake-up meetings, late-evening web postings, and enough proofing, editing, and collating to dry out his eyes. I didn’t think he would last a month. Yet the job did for him what nothing else could. He knew the names of all the right people in marketing review within a day; he revamped our research workflow procedure in a month; and after half a year no one could remember why we hadn’t always done things John’s way. I hired him full-time after Smoky, who usually lauded only market surges and rare matchbooks, began referring to John as the golden boy. He never got his college degree. No one seemed to care.
Over the course of the next six months, John methodically cast off all the trappings of his old life. He sheared off his ponytail, splurged on cap-toe dress shoes, and traded in his beat-up leather jacket for a new wool overcoat. I used to tease him, call him Dapper John, and ask if he had plans to get monogrammed shirts and opal cuff links. The truth is, I was sad to watch him grow out of the stunted kid who needed me. I was proud of him, but pride comes at a price. The teenaged drug dealer, Johnny, was gone; a new John had taken his place.
He continued to live with his mother – he used to tell people he liked saving the rent money – but the truth was that he worried Mina would relapse, or drink too much, or hurt herself without him around. I admired his loyalty. And I admired what he had done, how much he’d overcome.
Not everyone warmed up to John, mind you. He was too terse, too cutting for some. To appreciate John Marion, you had to understand where he came from, what he wanted to escape. John was not an easy person to know; he didn’t throw open the doors of his heart and invite everyone in for a view. You had to wait a long time before you really felt like you knew him, let alone understood him. And even then, there were times when he would surprise you.
I remember one rainy evening not long after John had begun to work full time for me at McGrath & Swinburne. We were headed for a birthday dinner uptown, and our taxi got caught up in standstill traffic near West Fourth. As we waited for the car to move, John wiped fog off his window. On the other side of the street there was a basketball court behind chain-link wire. In the shadows, out of the reach of the flashing signs and street lamps, two Latino kids were playing one-on-one in the rain, putting moves on each other, head fakes, the whole shebang.
“They must really love playing ball,” I said.
John snorted. “They probably just don’t want to go home,” he said.
Then, with no further prompting, John began to tell me how his home life was becoming unbearable. I knew without asking that his mother was the cause of the trouble. He’d call in sick every three weeks or so, always because of Mina, who was a reformed heroin addict. I use the word “reformed” here to mean that she claimed to be quit of it.
“You’ve got to move on,” I told him. “Make choices for yourself, John. Everyone has to do that eventually.”
His amused eyes reflected the hazy, wet lights outside. “You really believe that, chief? Would you really do that?”
The taxi started moving again up Sixth Avenue, and I said I wasn’t sure what he meant and John just shrugged. For a few blocks we stared out the windows. Traffic was slow and at one point the taxi braked so hard that I threw out a hand to catch myself.
“Let’s just walk,” John said.
The birthday party was at Luna Park, right on the northern edge of Union Square, and we were only a few blocks west. The rain was light and we had no umbrellas. We turned up the flaps of our collars – mine a camel wool coat from Barney’s, his a worn pea coat he’d picked up from a vintage shop – and with hands deep in pockets we pretended the steady drum of rain didn’t exist until the heavens opened up after we passed Fifth Avenue.
“We should take shelter,” I said. “It’ll quit soon.”
I followed John through a low dim doorway. In this part of town, he knew the routes better; despite having lived in New York for eight years, I was still not sure if Madison came before Lexington, or where to cut down Broadway to reduce our travel time. I spent too much time at work, and when I wasn’t at work, I was always hanging out in a bar or a café, listening to people talk about work. John had been born in New York, and he’d lived in Chelsea all his life, and so I deferred to him now.
Our shelter was a second-floor comics shop. “I used to come here as a kid,” John said. “After the hobby shop near my place shut down. Some of these comics have been here longer than I can remember.”
The whole room smelled of wet paper and plaster. A clerk at the front was leafing through the phone book and asking a clerk at the back of the store how to spell Sipowitz. I wandered down an aisle and searched for comic book titles that I recognized.
“I had that issue,” I said. I was pointing to a late-80s issue of Amazing Spider-Man, one of the last comics that I purchased before I set aside comics in my late teens – they were a childish talisman, like the funny papers or scratch-and-sniff stickers; and consequently, later in life, they had a tremendous nostalgic power.
John studied the cover. “I hated Spider-man,” he said. “Too whiny.”
“Peter Parker proposes to Mary Jane in that issue,” I said, as if it made a difference.
Bored, John slid the comic from its plastic sleeve and riffled the pages. The flickering pictures kindled my memory of a conflicted villain who appeared in the same issue – a kid named Rocket Racer, he’d turned to crime to pay the bills, may have even had a sick mother. No, that would be too neat, I thought, too perfectly pitched.
As we waited there out of the rain, John reminisced about his favorite comic book characters. Sandman, who lived in poverty till he gained his molecular powers. Or Electro, whose ten million volts of vengeance can’t make up for the injustice he feels. A pattern emerged: the criminal, the disenfranchised, the driven-to-madness: he knew their actions were wrong, but he admired their powerful refusal to take life as it was.
In contrast, the do-gooders were all caught up in status quo, protectors of stasis and the unfairness of life-as-we-know-it. I had never before quite noticed this fact but now I saw how stomach-turning all those bland and pure superheroes could seem. John didn’t want to be like that. John didn’t want the status quo. He wanted — he deserved — something a lot better than what he started with. And that, I think, was why everything that was so great about his new life was doomed to fall apart.
##
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