Read Crazy for Free Online

he always reacted, and most times, like the average self-centered teenage jerk, I’d repay him by giving him the “silent treatment.” This night, though, was different.
    I didn’t know why.
    At least not then.
    “Yeah, I’m hungry,” I lied. “What have we got?” And then, wonder of wonders, I said, “Sorry for what I said to you, Pop. I didn’t mean it.”
    “I knowing.”
    I had a restless night, doubtless due to the disorienting sense of strangeness that followed whenever I did something good, plus for the first time I was feeling kind of guilty, I guess, about getting the bedroom while my poor old Pop who’d been pushing that cart all day had to sleep on the living room sofa. Though at least he’s always ringside, I tried to console myself, for the one-to-two- A.M. fights . I also had the blues because I wouldn’t see Jane again until Monday. I had no idea where she lived. Sometime after midnight I could hear the dim strains of “My Wild Irish Rose” on the Health Club jukebox for three or four seconds as their front door opened, then closed, and I worried even more about Pop; but then the drunken taunts and cursing started up in reassurance that there was regular order in the world and that no planets would come tumbling from the sky that night to strike us, so at last I fell asleep with not a smirk but with the ghost of a smile on my face as the last thought I had was the sudden realization there was someone in this world that I could totally trust: Pop.

     
    The next morning I trudged to my usual Saturday freelance “job” where for three or four hours I’d be standing on the sidewalk in front of the A&P supermarket on Third between 31st and 32nd, asking little old ladies if I could help them carry their groceries home, which would have made me St. Christopher of the Bags, I suppose, except I did it “for a price, Ugardi, for a price,” and meantime hoping that somewhere along the way I might catch a glimpse of Jane, which I didn’t, although I did make forty-seven cents in tips. Pretty good. Afterward, I did what I usually do, which was go to the public library and just to sit there in the dustless quiet where the air had this pleasant, friendly smell of damppaper and warm, dry thoughts and I’d read comic novels by P. G. Wodehouse and anything fantastic and out of this world, which I was getting an inkling was the place to be. But on that day I had this daydream that roaming through the stacks I’d reach up for a book and through the narrow open space where it had been I’d see Jane on the other side, which didn’t happen, I’m more than sorry to tell you, because in fact what I saw was Baloqui.
    “What are you doing here?” I hissed in disappointment.
    Baloqui hissed back at me hoarsely, “Homework! I’m going to do my composition about Edgar Allan Poe!”
    “They stack the books by the last name,” I said, “not the first.”
    “Why do you trouble me, El Bueno?”
    “Tough.”
    A librarian loudly shushed us, so we went outside where we could talk and Baloqui could puff on one of his “loosie” cigarettes you could buy for a penny apiece or, if you were loaded, six for a nickel.
    “Have you seen this pretty girl around?” I asked. “Jane Bent. Irish face with lots of freckles. Pigtails. Reddish hair. Eighth grade.”
    “Yeah, I might have,” he said as he took a deep drag and looked off in pained thought as if agonizing over whether it was moral to throw his next bullfight in exchange for gang money he could use to send his epileptic brother to the healing waters at Lourdes in France. His lips curled inward in an O, he blew out an almost perfect smoke ring that he kept on staring at with pride as if he’d just built the freaking Eiffel Tower and was about to put the finishing touches on it. “I might have seen her at the movies,” he finally allowed in this cryptic tone of voice.
    I said, “You might have?”
    He held up a hand. “Hold a second.”
    He waited for the