The Sea Beach Line. Ben Nadler
did not want him to let go. I was proud to be walking down the street in Brooklyn with him. Of course he had come.
We didn’t talk too much on the train. He asked me how I was doing, how my sister and mother were doing. They were fine, I told him. I was struggling hard to remember that he was my father, the same man who had once lived with us, danced with my mother to the radio in the kitchen, and taken us all to Greenpoint on Sundays to eat cheese dumplings and potato pancakes.
He wasn’t part of a Middle Eastern fantasy. He was a real man, with strong arms and a little potbelly. He tucked in to the Daily News, and I pulled a schoolbook from my backpack.
We picked up a pepperoni pizza and a two-liter bottle of Coke on the way to his apartment from the train station. Alojzy placed the pizza on the coffee table, the only table in his one-bedroom apartment, and we ate straight from the box. We washed our pizza down with mugs of Coke. Alojzy poured arak into his, and the sweet licorice smell filled the room as we ate. Above the couch was a large black poster, bearing the coat of arms–like logo of the rock band Queen. The only other decorations on the wall were a plastic Israeli flag and an old snapshot of the four of us in Central Park, when I was about six and my sister maybe ten. Like the flag, the photo was held on the wall by bits of black electrical tape. When I went into the bathroom to pee, I saw a faded pink bra hanging on the shower curtain rod.
The apartment felt very small at first. It was not really much smaller than our old two-bedroom in Manhattan, but living on Long Island had already warped my sense of scale. There was hardly any furniture besides the coffee table and couch in the main room, and the bed in his bedroom. The rest of the space was packed full of cardboard boxes and stacks of books. They were mostly large hardcovers, in piles so dense and tall I thought of them as integral structures, not stacks of individual objects. I asked Alojzy if these were all books that he had read.
“No, no,” he said. “In my life I’ve left behind two entire libraries. I wouldn’t risk another. I read a book and let it go.”
“So what’s all this?”
“Merchandise. Got to make money, kiddo. You’ll learn that sometime. Hey, take a look at this.” He pulled out an old leather-bound atlas from the middle of a stack and showed me the various places he had lived. I could locate Israel by myself, but wasn’t quite sure where Poland was. It turned out it was tucked in the shadow of the USSR.
My father had a small TV, which sat on one of the stacks of books, and we watched the TGIF lineup of sitcoms on ABC. I followed the plots, while my father made comments about the teenage actresses.
“Your girlfriend look anything like that?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“A good-looking guy like you? Not even one girlfriend? I find that very hard to believe. You got your papa’s charm. You must drive the girls crazy.” After a few shows, and a few more araks for my father, he turned off the TV.
“Look, I know I ain’t been around lately, buddy.”
“Okay.” I wished the TV was still on.
“No, it’s not okay. It’s gonna change. Because I’m your papa. But listen: It’s never been that I don’t love. I’m father, of course I love. It’s just, I’ve had my life. You see, I am the wandering Jew of Europe.” He saw my confusion. “It’s an old story about a curse. But it’s a true story, about the life I’ve had to lead.” I didn’t say anything. I was only eleven and didn’t know how to respond to a whole life. “Izzy, buddy,” he said. “We’re friends?”
“Sure we’re friends.” I didn’t want him to doubt me.
“Becca couldn’t come with you?”
“No,” I said, worried he would see through the lie. “She wanted to. She had a school thing she couldn’t miss.”
“Oh. Well. Tell her what I tell you.”
“Sure.” I knew I wouldn’t, but I wanted to please him.
“But you and me, fella, we’re friends.”
“Yes.” We were. He knew it and I knew it. He clicked the TV back on.
“I was thinking,” he said a few minutes later, “in the morning we could go crabbing?”
“What’s crabbing?”
“Like fishing. You know. But for crabs instead.”
“Okay. Sure.” I still didn’t exactly understand what we’d be doing, but other boys’ fathers took them fishing. “That sounds fun.”
Leaving the bay now, I headed up Shore Parkway, passing a sushi restaurant that had not been there before and an Irish pub that had always been there. Just under the exit ramp from Shore Parkway was a small side street, also called Shore Parkway. This was where my father had lived, all those years ago. I had spent a lot of time here. Becca didn’t come with me very often. It had been an obligation for her, but for me it had been a refuge.
The street I turned down did not match my memories. Everything looked different. Had I forgotten which block Alojzy lived on? No, this was the right address, and the exit ramp was in the right position in relation to where I stood. Alojzy’s building was gone. In its place was a new building, a box coated in lumpy plaster, with blue trim and shiny railings on the narrow balconies that faced the ramp.
I stared at the new building, half hoping that time would run backward if I waited long enough. That the new building would be torn down, my father’s old building rebuilt with a wrecking ball. I pictured the boards falling off the third-floor window and the light flicking on and off, then Alojzy pushing open the front door and inviting me in.
I remembered waking up in my father’s apartment that first morning, after I fell asleep watching TV with him, how normal it had felt. Waking up on my father’s couch in Brooklyn felt far more natural than waking up in my own bed out on Long Island.
For breakfast, my father put out slices of black bread. This bread was far denser than the bread I was used to eating, and though it seemed a little stale, he didn’t offer to toast it. I vaguely remembered eating bread like this when I was younger, but I’d grown used to eating fluffy grocery store wheat bread. I smeared on lots of butter—at home we were only allowed margarine—and used all the muscles in my throat to choke the morsels down.
When we were ready to go, Alojzy hoisted an army surplus pack full of gear onto his back, and handed me an empty cooler to carry.
“What about the rods?” I asked.
“Rods?”
“We’re going, like, fishing. Right?”
“No rods, fella. For crabs you use traps.” He tapped his pack.
We walked down the Coney Island boardwalk. I’d been there a few times with my family, but only in the afternoon. Families didn’t hang around Coney after dark back then. Now, in the early morning, it was pretty much deserted, aside from a few old Russian women who looked like they were rushing even though they were strolling, a shirtless man drinking a tall can of beer, and some homeless people who’d crawled out from under the boardwalk, squinting at the sunlight.
We turned off the boardwalk and up the T-shaped fishing pier that stretched much farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than I could swim. A pile of break rocks extended out from the shore, parallel to the pier, and we stopped just across from where they ended.
“Here,” said Al, kneeling down to reach into his backpack. He pulled out two hooped wire baskets and a greasy brown paper bag.
“What’s in there?”
“Chicken necks.” He showed me the yellow-gray mottled lump before he began fastening it to the bottom