Of course I am with her in Rockland. Move over, Carl Solomon, we’ve got fries to finish, toast to butter and chomp. Next stop: south of Houston Street, which sounds just so fucking cool we clink our mugs together in the back booth of a crappy little Parkway diner and feel like we’re making history.
In the car, back on the road, we listen to The Breeders and The Lemonheads and Matthew Sweet, the exit signs waving arrivederci as we motor toward the city. We’ve known each other since kindergarten—there I am, standing on the playground, alone, terrified, unprepared for twenty other kids screaming tag, swings, monkey bars, you’re it—I’m the boy who lives in the back of the pizza shop, and while yes, I can already chop garlic and grate mozzarella, I’m the boy raised by a Vietnam vet who knows nothing about play dates and pre-school and the social and developmental needs of ages two through five; my only friends are Ernie and Bert, Felix and Oscar, Richie and the Fonz; they’re on TV or inside my head or names and faces that pop in and out of The Jaybird, but they’re not like me, they’re adults, local characters, and I never played with another kid my age until I started school, and on that first day playground time I’m in my head haven’t said a word, my invisible friend Butchie beside me can we just go back inside teacher, please?
And then I see her on the swing, pink jeans and Keds, a white T-shirt with a big yellow smiley face emblazoned across the front, her dark curls flying crazy as she swings back and forth with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen and Butchie that good old invisible pal says, “you should be friends with her,” and maybe Butchie says something to her because when the bell rings and we all line up quiet by the door she stands behind me and pokes me in the back and says, “My dad and I really like your pizza. Do you live there or something?”
I am too shy to speak, but the next day on the playground she grabs my hand and says, “Wanna swing? It’s fun! I’ll show you how,” and in that moment maybe my future is written, and does she already know that someday we’ll be in love? For the first time that day I speak, “okay,” only two syllables but for me the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address and the next day I am beside her on the swings, and away we go, a long unbroken trail into the rest of our lives.
. . . . .
In Central Park we buy big salty pretzels from a Chinese guy in sunglasses and a turban; his dog, a red Pomeranian chained to the cart, paces in circles, yipping at our heels as we bite into the thick, warm sweaty dough. When Amy tries to pet the dog he lunges at her fingertips, and the Chinese guy pulls out a gun, a little snub-nosed .38, the handle spray-painted orange. Aiming the gun at the dog, the Chinese guy starts yelling, “I fucking warn you … I fucking warn you” until the dog backs off, lifts it leg, and pees on the wheel of the cart. We don’t stick around after that, and the pretzels, their Board of Health seal of approval suddenly in doubt, wind up in a garbage can swarming with flies.
“He’d better not shoot that dog,” Amy says. “That gun wasn’t loaded, right? If he shoots that dog, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have tried to pet him.”
I double back to make sure the dog is okay, and find the Chinese guy sitting on the sidewalk, the Pomeranian curled in his lap licking the pretzel salt from the guy’s outstretched thumb.
We settle on a park bench holding hands, watching the young mothers in their Lycra shorts and baseball caps stroller-jog their babies, their legs throwing shadows like angry snakes marching along the asphalt path.
“Too bad we didn’t bring Sarah,” Amy says. “We should do that someday, definitely. Isn’t there a zoo somewhere in this park? We’ll bring Sarah and visit the zoo and the planetarium and find the best fucking ice cream cones in the Big Apple. Maybe next year when she turns four; four seems perfect for New York. We’ll do it, right?”
“Of course,” I say, although in less than a year, Sarah will be gone. The clock is ticking but we don’t hear it; at seventeen we don’t even know clocks exist.
Amy leans back and studies the penthouses looming over the tree line of Central Park West. “Someday…” she says, squeezing my hand, her foot tapping my shin. As if to prove that our destiny lies elsewhere, that already the world has embraced us and set us on our golden path, we hop the subway to the theater district and climb the concrete steps out into the Great White Way. We walk beneath the marquees and touch the playbills, pretending that my name is in lights, my name on every poster beneath of a string of starred reviews. I fall into the spell of Amy’s imagination, her absolutely-no-fucking-doubt-about-it vision that this is my destiny, as if I’m not some average-looking kid from a no-name town who falls asleep all the time, who spends most afternoons with pizza dough and specks of garlic and oregano lodged beneath his fingernails. If Amy is the sun around which my life revolves, her belief in me is the gravitational pull that keeps me on my axis. Amy believes. It’s my fuel, my protein, the amino acids that build my DNA. Without her I am nothing.
On 45th Street, in front of The Booth Theater, I pull her toward me and we kiss, the hustling hordes of New York streaming past us, the steam rising through a sewer grate ten yards ahead, angry
