Caveman and Jimmy

I've known Caveman for a long time.

I remember when we were in seventh grade and thought we were hard, so we broke into the candy shop on tenth street. It was the first time we'd really done anything bad, and I was a little tentative about the plan. Caveman looked stoic as I'd ever seen, though. Before we left his place, which was empty, as his mom worked the graveyard shift, he grabbed my shoulders and said, "James Grimaldi, tonight you and I are gonna make a name for ourselves."

And even though you'd expect a kid like that to be hyper or funny about this kind of thing, his pupils were calm and steady. When he let go of my shoulders, it was like that moment when the movie's over, and the credits start to roll and you snap back to reality, back to the concrete wasteland of nine to five, eleven to seven, beaters lining the streets, romance just sex and action just violence, heroes just chickens and villains just weirdos with daddy issues. 

We did it without finesse, to put it nicely. When we got onto tenth, Caveman worked a piece of rubbish out from the pile, and with impressive form, launched it through the window of the store, which had a sign out front saying "Sugary Sweets and All Good Eats." I had been in the store three of four times before, and had met the manager. 

Contrary to expectations, or perhaps just adjacent to them, he wasn't a jolly man. The store manager had a lisp and glasses that didn't sit so tight on his head and sad eyes, the kind of eyes you see on a dog that's chained outside a house it's whole life, not the barking kind, but perhaps the internally braying kind.

No alarm sounded when the storefront shattered, this was the Big Apple of the 60s, before security became more of a normality than a snipe. Still, the streets were quiet in this neighborhood, a sign that it was Protected by some guys not too much older than us, and we had to be in and out before the seventy year old donnas woke up, crept to the windows and started shaking their canes.

I jumped through the window, followed closely by Caveman. I looked around, a little bewildered that I got this far, and Caveman casually punched me in the shoulder and started scooping candy into a burlap sack. I hadn't brought a sack, so I pulled chocolates and gumballs from the jars into my torso and quickly brought my shirt-tail to my chin, exposing a too-thin stomach and creating crunchy and delicious female breasts above it.

And as I was grabbing some unwrapped rock candy from a shelf, I unexpectedly became stiff. For a moment, I was sure, I was just sure that when I looked behind me, my mother would be there, with that disappointed look set across her beautiful face, the same face I saw the time I skipped school to play rock tag in Hasmunster Park. I was sure that I had let her down again.

I took a deep breath, which was the whole note to four of Caveman's quick movements, and peeked around my shoulder. The woman was definitely not my mother. Probably thirty years or more older, with a dark complexion, wearing the same puke green medical garb that donnas have worn since the beginning of time. Shorter, too. Rounder, too.

She was just stepping out onto her balcony, hand over her brow, despite the lack of a sun, squinting at the two burglars across the street. 

"Caveman," was all I said, and that was enough. He looked back, saw what I saw, and was off, the sack swinging wildly behind him. He impressively vaulted out the window, hiding his face with one hand from the woman as he sped perpendicularly on. I was close behind, but not close enough.

No one was following us, but I was so scared that I let my shirt go to run faster and all the candy spilled behind me in a short trail of breadcrumbs that would do little to help Hansel and Gretel but to know that they'd trodden this mistaken path once before and would probably do so again.

The distance between Caveman and I grew wider and wider, and before I knew it, I lost him. This wasn't a big deal. We knew these streets, and I knew Caveman. He was on his way back home, and I was on my way to mine.

Caveman was always faster than me, more athletic than me. From the moment we pushed through the doors of the secondary school on Jefferson Ave, our lives began to take different routes. He joined in with a group of guys that looked more like him. Big, muscular, calm. He sat at the lunch table with the football players, ran track, and went out with more than his share of the babes of the borough. 

I hung out with the skinny kids, who wore glasses and collared shirts to school every day. I sat at the lunch table that in my four high school years never felt the soft butt of a female. 

I wanted to be jealous of Caveman, but it was impossible. We grew up together. He was the only one I ever told that my dad lived in Oregon because he was living with another man, not because he was away on business. I was the only one who he ever told that the only way his mom was able to avoid eviction was to sleep with the fat landlord every Friday. I knew him too well to be jealous, and besides, he never forgot about me.

He always invited me to the jock table, whenever I entered the lunch room. I would always smile and silently shake my head, without having to look at the other mesomorphs to know I would always be unwelcome there, and trudge along to my sanctuary of Popsicle-stick men. 

And of course, I'll always be in debt to Caveman because he was the one that got me laid for the first time. Caveman knew some yuppie kids in the Upper East Side through his football friend and dragged me along to a party they were throwing in a top-story flat during our sophomore year.

There was the drinking of expensive beer, and the smoking certain drugs that I thought were reserved for people who dressed in tie-dye and protested the Vietnam War, but I guessed could also be accessed by the college preppers. Caveman and I were the darkest guineas in the room, maybe the only ones, and I felt a little out of place in my worn-out jeans and greased-back hair. 

Caveman was comfortable as usual, and oddly, more happy looking than I had ever seen. When I looked closely, though - and let me tell you: it's hard to look closely after five beers when you're not a mick or a Pollack - I could see that his face was a stony facade, that his eyes were still those calm, steady eyes, that you could tell had a story behind them but also that you would never get that story.

The facade seemed to be working on the lady he was talking to though. They were very passionate and interested in their conversation about the commute through Manhattan. 

As I was staring down, I accidentally started spilling some beer all over my jeans. I felt a hand steady mine, and I slowly - or perhaps I just perceived it as slowly - I turned around to find a girl smiling at me, still standing, but bent in towards me. She had on an immaculate sweater, and I don't remember much else about her appearance or whatever we must have talked about before she led me into a bedroom to get changed out of my beer-stained pants and I managed to hold on for seven seconds and twenty or so pumps before my excitement got the better of me.

Caveman held me up in the subway all the way back to the Points, and he wouldn't stop laughing.

He dropped out of school later that year and started working construction. He fell off a scaffold three days before my graduation. I spent my penultimate day of high school dressed in a black suit and my ultimate one in a blue robe. 

As I sat, waiting to receive my diploma, not paying attention to our principal's speech, I thought about how much the neighborhood had changed. There were more and more bulldozers, more and more white young men and women who wore berets and talked without accent, who dressed in clothes especially tailored to look normal.

I thought about how half the banks we had were now apartment buildings, and half the apartment buildings were being torn down to build new banks. DiMaggio's Deli was now owned by someone named Carson and operated by someone named Rojas. Felici's was now a Dunkin' Donuts, where I often stopped in the morning to get some shitty coffee. Sugary Sweets and All Good Eats had closed down years before, when the owner, unable to keep paying his rent, shot himself in the head, leaving behind thirty pounds of candy and three young kids.

I thought about Caveman, how one time he told a girl that he got his nickname because he was built like a neanderthal just so that she would blow him, and how he neglected to tell her about how the childhood moniker stuck so resolutely to him, the remains of a playground taunt, about how his mother had locked him in a closet, and how he missed school the next day, and how he told his teacher that he had been trapped in a cave, and how everyone had laughed, and how the name stuck.

I thought about Caveman, about how about a week after our famous theft, he showed up to school in a cast. "Mom found the candy under my bed," he sulked. I thought about how he said this with such disappointment, but how his eyes never changed, never flickered, how he stared life down like he knew that if he lost concentration for just one second, it would disappear, and he'd soon be falling, falling

falling