Crazy Read Online Free PDF

stubborn as ever besides. Now, listen, Joey, one more thing. It’s important.”
    “ What’s important?”
    “That it’s okay to love me. But don’t be in love with me. Okay? And be good to your father. He loves you so much.” And with that she turned around and started quickly walking south while calling out to me, “ Trust, Joey! The magic word is trust! ”
    Oh, yeah sure, I was thinking: Trust. I mean, who could you possibly believe about anything? The wiring in my brain was still shooting off sparks from that time near the end of third grade when Baloqui approached me, his eyes wide and his face an off-white, which was the best it could do whenever drained of blood, and grimly whispered in a horrified tone, “Oh, my God, Joey!”
    “What?!”
    “Oh, my God! I just found out what it is you have to do when you get married!”
    “Yeah?”
    “You have to put your weeney inside your wife’s heine!”
    I took a couple of steps backward, half yelling, half gasping at him, “ What? Are you out of your mind, Baloqui? Get away from me! No! No, don’t touch me! You disgust me! Where in hell’d you hear a crazy thing like that? ”
    “From a guy in fifth grade!”
    I went numb. A fifth-grader! This was authoritative!
    “Then I’m never getting married!” I gritted.
    “Me too!”
    We hugged tightly. I thought I heard a whimper.
    The next month Baloqui’s parents invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, which his family held the day after ours, and all through the meal I’d see Baloqui’s dead stare go from his father to his mother and then back, and then he’d lower his head and mutely shake it.
    I saw Jane take a right on a path that would lead her to Avenue A and then on to her Holy Thursday churches on a Friday. What a mystery she was: plucky as short, fat Tony Galento getting hammered in the ring by Joe Louis, and jumpy as fleas who’ve just gotten great news; dropping the F-bomb and then teaching me to pray; making sense, then being totally wingy. There was also this aura about her, something spiritual; ethereal, really. And then I remembered some stuff that she’d said to me, things like, “You’re as stubborn as ever.”
    As ever? What did that mean?

5
     
    Pop and I lived in this dingy little third-floor walkup at the corner of 31st Street and Second Avenue across from a raunchy new bar called the Health Club, where after my homework and my favorite radio shows, Captain Midnight and The Shadow , were done, I could tune in some local and terrifically live free entertainment by leaning out the window to watch the nightly bar fights spilling out into the street, almost always involving a couple of old geezers in their thirties or forties—sometimes even lots older—and after they’d bloodied each other as much as their flabby, drunken swings ever could while their girlfriends or wives stood aside and kept moving their lips, saying, “Somebody stop this, would you? Stop them!” in a murmur so low even I couldn’t hear it, and then the combatants would wind up with their arms around each other’s shoulders and go back into the bar to buy each other a drink, the sound of music from a jukebox blasting out into the street as they opened the door, almost always Bing Crosby and “The Rose of Tralee” or “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” and if Pop was standing anyplace where he could hear it he’d yell, “Joey, shutting window!” inasmuch as he was tired of the same old songs, but even probably more so, I’d have to suppose, because he’d come here as a child from Peru and had about much interest in “Galway Bay” as in hearing a duet of “I’m an Indian, Too,” by Sitting Bull and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The songs might also have made Pop sad, as they probably made him think of my mom. Her name was Eileen. She was Irish. I’d never seen her. She died giving birth to me. Pop met her at Bingo Night in the basement of St. Rose of Lima Church when both of them lived in the Bronx. Pop had