Richard tried to teach Jason to play baseball. To Richard, there was nothing better than a game of baseball at Prospect Park—a place where every twenty feet there’d be a different tribe of people, eating their traditional foods, dancing to their traditional songs, and everyone throwing down their various utensils to get on base. Yet when stationed at home plate, his son did nothing but brush mosquitoes off his arms.
“Man up!” Richard bellowed from across the field.
Foon Wah begged Richard to go easy on their son. It seemed to Richard that between her, his father, and his three daughters, Jason would be pampered into softness. A soft boy wouldn’t survive in a world like this one.
One day, Richard came home from the restaurant and found Jason standing on the front porch, dressed up by his sisters in a purple lace dress and Julie’s clip-on earrings.
“Ni so ga?!” Richard cried, yanking the earrings off Jason’s lobes.
Koon Lai looked amused. “He’ll be less trouble than you.”
Richard could never get what he wanted without losing something else. He’d had a son, but the Dodgers had quit New York, Ebbets Field smashed to smithereens.
And though he couldn’t always explain what, something was happening in Brownsville. Like those mornings when he looked out the bedroom window and saw a car pull up to the curb and a bak gui driver push a hak gui onto the sidewalk, the way you’d fling an overgrown goldfish into the Prospect Park Lake. Usually a nice car.
“We’ll pick you up at the next corner,” the bak gui driver would yell from the front seat.
It was always the same routine. The hak gui wore a soiled suit and clutched a bottle of liquor. He would stumble up the block,mumbling to himself, and throw the bottle in someone’s yard, the glass shattering against the stoop. Richard saw the same thing so many times, he had a bad case of déjà vu.
Always, the expensive car depositing the soiled hak gui. Always, a few hours after, a real estate agent proceeding door to door, warning those who remained: sell now, before it’s too late.
By Jason’s fourth birthday, there were hardly any bak gui left on the block. Hak gui children raced up and down the street on wooden scooters. It was the same, Richard heard, in the government projects. No more “fifty percent Negro, fifty percent European,” as Alan had once told him.
At first, the Jews came back on Saturdays for synagogue and stopped for Chinese food after. Then the police killed a Black boy in Harlem, and sirens blared for six nights straight. By the time it was all over, hak gui had emptied out the cigar store down the block, smashed the windows of the bicycle shop, and burglarized Mathenial Hats. Richard installed gates downstairs and a double lock on the door to the restaurant, but the Jews did not come back.
Richard checked out homes in Marine Park but could not afford them. He looked at a home in Bay Ridge, but it sold during the fifteen-minute drive to see it.
One evening after closing, Richard went to the handball court at Betsy Head Park and, finding no one there, threw the ball against the wall by himself. Half an hour later, he noticed Alan walking down Livonia in his Esquire suit. When he reached the court, Alan unrolled the newspaper beneath his elbow and handed it to Richard.
“Robert Moses.” Alan shook his head with disgust. “He’s the one siting a million housing projects all in Brownsville. A good idea gone bad. We said we needed better housing for struggling families. We didn’t say every single poor New Yorker should live in one square mile. Can you believe it, Richard? They’re planning to build another fifteen hundred government poor houses right here!”
Richard shrugged and walked off, bounced the ball against the wall.
Alan sighed, loosened his tie, and cleared his throat.
“It’s good we ran into each other. I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
Richard hit the ball.
“We got a house. A house out in Riverhead, Long Island. A nice three-bedroom with a big yard. And an office space in the town—I’ll be opening up my own practice out there.”
Richard served the ball against the wall.
“Rich, you’re not gonna miss me?”
Richard grinned. Laughed. Kept his eyes on the ball. “So much for loving the coloreds.”
“It’s not a color problem. The city doesn’t give a damn!”
Richard caught the ball, took a seat on the bench, lit a cigarette.
“We’ve been working for years to get that vocational facility here at Betsy Head Park,” Alan continued, pacing on the concrete. “And what does the Parks Department tell us? They take over the Brownsville Boys Club, fire Levine and Adelman, steal our building, and call it the Brownsville Recreation Center. Between you and me, it went down like this because of those bigots on the BBC board.
“And the schools!” Alan went on. “I don’t know how my sister makes it through the day teaching at that junior high school! J.H.S. 271? There’s a whole line of classrooms they can’t even use because the ceiling caved in.”
Letting his friend rave, Richard remained silent. A clever man could sometimes win an argument by letting the other talk himself into contradictions. And Richard felt he deserved to win, as a consolation prize. His friend was finally leaving him, and his kids’ school was filled with hoodlums and falling ceilings.
Richard and Foon Wah laid off most of the restaurant staff and worked harder. Foon Wah stir-fried, Richard hosted, and Koon Lai washed dishes until his fingers turned to raisins. Yet with fewer hands, they were increasingly exhausted. A strand of hair appeared in someone’swonton soup. A mouse nested in the cupboard. The appliances malfunctioned; to get the burners to light, Richard had to hit the stove with a baseball bat.
