Say That To My Face. David Prete
car drove down Central Park Avenue. It was summertime and it was quiet. The patio smelled of dampness. The pictures of my family were still appearing in me. I felt the plastic seat of my Big Wheel under my head. I kept my eyes closed, but knew exactly where I was.
The theory is this: The way in which we tried to get the attention of the first person we ever had a crush on is the way we continue to do it for the rest of our lives. However creative, desperate, blunt or devious our young tactics were, we don’t give them up.
My tactic? Pretended I was a superhero. Pretended I had enough superpowers to rescue people from the ordinary world, that I came from a place better than earth, where superhuman things are a way of life. A faraway place, where magical powers are realized and saviors are born. Who wouldn’t fall in love with someone from that world?
So, that’s what I tried to convince the first girl I had a crush on—that I was different than the rest. That I had powers no one she knew would ever have.
When I was twenty-six I told my girlfriend about this theory—that as adults we still try to win lovers with our childhood tactics—and what my tactics were. “Yeah,” she said, “that is what you do, isn’t it?”
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the year I was in the second grade. The year there were regular kickball games up the block and a crazy guy going around New York killing people. I want to talk about the first girl who let me be a superhero.
EVERY NIGHT IN front of the Gallaghers’ house, a kickball game would start up. A group of neighborhood kids gathered there after dinner and, in place of doing homework, played ball. The kickball season began in early spring and ended when we started having to run the bases with our hands in our pockets. My sister Catherine and I walked the five doors down to the Gallaghers’ and played until dusk, when our mother would call us home.
Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t run the kind of house in which the neighborhood kids were invited inside all the time. We didn’t even know what the inside of their house looked like—never got closer than the curb. Mr. Gallagher would only pop his head out the front door every so often to tell us to keep it down because his wife wasn’t feeling well and she was trying to sleep. I don’t ever remember actually seeing Mrs. Gallagher. But the manhole cover in front of their driveway was the best natural home plate on the block.
Rory Gallagher had long brown hair. Of the five Gallagher kids, she was second youngest. She stood with hands on her waist and her bony hip kicked out to one side. She also had a habit—which she didn’t pick up from her older brothers—of spitting. With a low growl she would collect the saliva in her throat, then hock it onto the street, two feet from where you were standing. It got so we didn’t mind. The only time Rory ever caught grief for this was when she spit on the street during the kickball games. If someone fielded a ball that had rolled over one of Rory’s saliva patches, they wouldn’t try to get the runner out; they would run after her and try to wipe the ball on her.
I once got my nerve up enough to ask her why she spit all the time. She claimed she only spit after she ate chicken cutlets for dinner, because she hated the aftertaste.
It was Rory’s attention I was trying to get.
BATMAN WAS A superhero who was also human. When he was a little kid, Batman’s parents were murdered. To avenge their murder and fight crime of all kinds, Batman developed all the strength and skill of his mind and body beyond traditional limits. He didn’t get an overdose of gamma radiation or get bit by a spider in a lab experiment, nor could he breathe underwater, turn invisible or assume different miraculous forms. Yeah, he could scale walls and kick bad-guy ass like the rest of the superheroes, but ultimately, he was just an ordinary man making the best of what he had, fighting for his cause.
Every so often during the kickball games I would have to run back home when I heard the Batphone ring. A call from the police commissioner saying there was a problem the cops couldn’t handle without me. I’d run back to the game and announce that I had to get to an undisclosed location immediately to fight crime. I’d apologize to Rory for having to leave, but demonstrate a superhero’s generosity by leaving my own kickball behind so the game could continue without me. In that case my sister would bring the ball home and I wouldn’t catch hell from Mom for losing it. And it wasn’t easy to part with my ball. I was six. It was my ball.
There were times when I was able to handle the crime situation over the phone. In which case I would walk back up the street, assure everyone that everything was going to be all right, and I’d finish out the game.
When it was time to go home, our mother belted out our names from the front stoop like an ocean liner’s horn wailing during a launch. And if you missed the boat, you were in trouble. If you missed it during that particular kickball season, which started March of 1977, you were in an extraordinary amount of trouble.
YOUNG GIRLS WITH shoulder-length brown hair. That’s who we were told he went after.
“Under no circumstances do you kids go out when it’s dark out. Do you hear me?”
“How about if the ice cream man comes?”
“No. There’s ice cream in the refrigerator.”
The first murder happened in July of the previous year. Initially it was just another homicide, a story that took up a tiny space in the newspaper. But March 8, 1977, marked the fifth attack. By then he had gone after nine people. Then it drew a lot of attention. Sketches of him were on TV, in the paper, posted in Laundromats and on telephone poles everywhere. He looked as plain as anyone’s father. Except he scared the shit out of us.
“Mom, does he only go after people in the city?”
“They don’t know. He goes after people in the Bronx, where we used to live, and that’s only ten minutes away from where we live now. I want you to listen to me. If you see a yellow or a cream-colored car with a man in it, I want you to run away from it. You run home and you tell me. Do you understand?”
They were shot in parked cars, on their front porches or walking home from school. The cops knew it was the same guy because they were able to confirm all the bullets came from the same kind of gun—a .44-caliber revolver. That’s how he got his first name, which all the kids in my neighborhood called him: the .44-Caliber Killer.
“They said he hates women. And you know how the cops know he’s gonna do it again?”
“How?”
“Because his gun holds five bullets and he only shoots four of them. He keeps one for the next time.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what my dad said.”
“No, he keeps one bullet in his gun in case someone tries to run after him and catch him, then he can shoot them, too.”
He started to leave notes for the cops, poems about pouring lead on girls’ heads until they were dead, cats mating and birds singing. He also left drawings with circles and arrows and crosses that looked like the insignia of demonic worship. He called himself “the monster” and signed the notes with his second name: Son of Sam.
My sister once walked around the house with yellow guck in her hair and a cellophane bag over it for about an hour. Then my mother leaned her backward over the kitchen sink and washed the guck out. When my sister lifted her head up, her brown hair was now blond.
My mother was very excited. “Oh, look how pretty. Come look at yourself.”
I followed them into the bathroom. Mom sat Catherine up on the sink in front of the mirror for a second opinion.
“Catherine, it’s so pretty. You look like a movie star.”
Catherine touched her hair the way a kid fumbles with a new toy, not sure