“What was disgusting? The water? What?”
Gerry Grogan giggled, and Hansen gave her a look. Someone said the pool at Red Hook was better, and someone else said they’d rather be at Ocean Tide in Coney and eat sandwiches at Mary’s. But the argument over Sunset Pool and Red Hook went on for a while.
“They both stink,” Gerry Grogan said. “You gotta go in that locker room and take off all your clothes and—”
“I’ll go with you, Gerry,” Duke said.
“And then they have that key on that gray elastic band, with who knows what kind of diseases in it, and there’s too many people and all those jerks from down the Hill, they’re always throwing you in the water. Nah…”
Betty Gahan said, “He just wants to watch bathing suits come off, the slob.”
“I just want to see some new faces,” Duke said. “Every week it’s the same old faces.”
“You could get polio at Sunset Park, Duke,” Gerry Grogan said. “It spreads in the water. Even Roosevelt got it swimming.”
“In Sunset Pool?” Duke shouted.
Gerry punched Duke on the arm, and he backed away, laughing, and she said, “Duke, you get it in swimming pools. From all the degenerates like you that go there and swim.”
Then Hansen said, “You worry too much, Gerry. You always think something’s going to go wrong.”
She looked at him and laughed. “It usually does.”
Then Betty Gahan said, “Well, let’s talk about it down at the Caton.”
That’s how we decided to go to the Caton Inn. There were about fifteen of us, crowded together in the cigarette smoke at the far end of the horseshoe bar. We started a dollar pool. Everybody drank beer, except Harry Hansen. On TV, Joe Miceli was boxing a muscle-bound black guy while Don Dunphy sold Gillette Blue Blades. Tony Bennett was singing “I Won’t Cry Anymore” on the jukebox, and the place was filling up. That summer I was in love with a girl who didn’t love me back, so I was alone, and this made Gerry Grogan uneasy. She thought every girl should have a guy, and vice versa. She also thought that everybody should get married as soon as possible, and she was determined to be the first one in our crowd to do so. And Harry Hansen was the man. I asked her if he was going swimming with us the next day.
“I hate that Sunset Pool,” she said, and I agreed. “But that horny pervert Duke has everybody hot to go.”
“So go to Ocean Tide with Harry.”
She turned and watched Harry make his way through the crowd to the men’s room. “Let me ask you something: How come the guys don’t like Harry?”
“It’s not that the guys don’t like Harry,” I said. “I think it’s Harry don’t like the guys.”
“Jeez, I never thought of that.”
Harry came back and Gerry sipped her beer. Pérez Prado’s “Mambo No. 5” was blaring. Harry said, “You know I don’t dance.” And she turned to me. I looked at Harry, and he nodded okay, and Gerry and I pushed through the crowd to the dance floor in the back room. She danced furiously, amazingly, never losing the rhythm or the beat, but weaving a dozen complicated variations in and out of the basic steps. She made me feel as if I had a fire hydrant in each shoe.
Then the tune ended, and she laughed, and glanced out toward the bar, and then Tommy Edwards began to sing “It’s All in the Game.”
“Oh, I love this,” she said, and took my hand again, and we began to dance slowly, the floor filling with other dancers. “Why do you think he doesn’t like you guys?” she said. And I mumbled something about how hard it was to be an outsider around our crowd, how we had our own jokes and words and how we’d been together since grammar school. “Jeez, that could be trouble, couldn’t it?” she said. But I never answered. I saw Harry Hansen under the arch that separated the dance floor from the bar. He looked bitterly angry. Gerry saw him, too.
“I better go,” she said. “I’ll see you down Sunset.”
With that, she walked to Hansen, who said something I couldn’t hear, turned away, and started for the door with Gerry behind him. I went back to the crowd. Miceli had flattened his opponent in seven rounds. Left hook, of course. Vito wanted to know if I was trying to break up the Mutt and Jeff Bandit Team. Duke was complaining to Betty Gahan that all the Irish girls he knew were plainclothes nuns. Billy and Tim arrived from somewhere. The beer flowed. The smoke thickened. I danced with a dark-haired girl from Flatbush and went off with her into the night.
When I woke up, it was almost noon. I ate breakfast quickly and went up to the totes, but there was nobody around. I saw Colt, the cop, and asked him where everybody was. “The bums all went out to Sunset,” he said. “To swim with the other bums.” I went into the Sanders and sat in the cool Saturday afternoon darkness and watched
“She isn’t feeling too good,” Betty Gahan said.
“Sound like a bad case of Harry.”
“No,” Betty said. “She really doesn’t feel good.”
