THE SIGN IN JIMMY BRESLIN’S FRONT YARD
Jimmy Breslin
The wife of a new neighbor from up on the corner came down and walked up to my wife and started acting nice, which must have exhausted her.
This woman is one of the people I have to live with. Four years ago, in the true style of an amateur, I "moved out a bit." I moved onto a block with a lot of other people who live side by side in houses. Now, people are all right. Get them alone and they’re pretty good. But put five of them together and they start conforming and after that all they are is trouble. Put sixteen families on the same block, the way it is on mine, and they become unbelievable. They are not people any more. They are enemies. On my block they sweep the lawn and have the waxer polish the front walk and all of them ring doorbells about kid fights and if everything isn’t the same, and everybody doesn’t worry about things that show, they bother you as an occupation. Anybody who has his own mind and moves out of a beautiful, anonymous Manhattan apartment and goes to a house on a block is crazy.
For four years now, so many of the neighbors have come to the door, or had their kids run up like stool pigeons to report some crime my kids committed, that now I sit at the front window and watch one of them come down the block and as he walks I dream of a big black car pulling up and three guys in big hats jumping out and breaking both my neighbor’s legs.
It is this bad to live with these people, and this woman could get first on the whole block.
"I haven’t gotten a chance to see you since the baby," the new one said. "How nice. This is, uh, your . . . ?"
She knew the number, she knows everything. She knew my
take-home pay by the end of the first week she was on the block.
"Fifth," my wife said.
"How wonderful," she said. "And did you plan this one?"
"Oh, yes," my wife said sweetly. "Why, everybody I know plans their fifth baby."
The woman got mad and walked away. Which was great. And I was going to say something to her that she could tell her husband for me, but I didn’t have the time. I had to stay on Walter, from the Dazzle Sign Painting Company, who was on my lawn and acting like a coward.
"Put it up, Walter," I told him.
"Not in the daylight," Walter said.
Walter had two big wooden posts and a lot of tools in his arms. "An argument is an argument, but if you do this it lets everybody know that you’re crazy," my wife says.
"Put it up, Walter," I said. "I want these people to read my sign
right now."
Walter shook his head. Then he dropped everything and began jamming one of the posts into the lawn. My wife ran inside the house. She is the former Rosemary Dattolico and she is very Italian. She likes knives on black nights, not big posters in broad daylight.
"Let’s go, Walter," I said, and Walter, from the Dazzle Sign Painting Company, put in both the stakes and tacked the sign on, and when he was finished, right there on the lawn was the most beautiful sign you ever saw.
It was about three feet high and five feet wide and it was in
three bright colors and it read real good. On the top, in two lines
of big red upper-case letters, the sign said:
SORRY TO MAKE YOU LOOK AT THIS BECAUSE I KNOW HOW TIRED YOU PEOPLE GET MOVING YOUR LIPS WHEN YOU READ
Underneath this, in smaller, but still real big blue letters, was a line which said: PEOPLE I’M NOT TALKING TO THIS YEAR.
The line was centered. Right under it, in neat columns, like a service honor roll, was the name of everybody who lives on my block. Everybody. All the couples, all the mothers-in-law, and all the kids. Every single person alive on my block had his name printed on that sign by Walter, from the Dazzle Sign Painting Company. And at the end of the list of names, I had Walter put "Dugan" for the bread man and "Stylon" for the dry-cleaning guy and "Borden’s" for the fat milkman I don’t like.
The best was at the bottom. In clear orange italics, the little passage said: "I also am announcing a special service for people who ring my bell to tell me what my children did. This service includes a man who answers the doorbell. Why don’t you come and ring my bell and see what happens to you?"
Walter and I stepped back to look at the sign. The white pasteboard looked nice in the sunlight. It was the greatest sign I ever saw.
"Nobody ever had a sign like this," Walter said. "Nobody. I paint 'Fire Sale’ and 'Prices Slashed’ and for gin mills I do 'Under New Management’ or 'Sunday Cocktail Hour,’ but I never in my life done a sign like this."
"Beautiful," I said. I stood back and admired it. This was my message, my own personal message to everybody on the block. How could you find a better way to put it across? For a year now, my wife has been hissing at the neighbors, "He’s writing a novel about the block and you’re in it because he hid a tape recorder under your kitchen table." But this sign of mine beat any book. And even those Burma Shave signs"She went wild/When he went woolly" they never read as good as my personal sign.
"The sign costs $27.50," Walter said.
"Walter, it’s worth $100," I said. "Look at that." I grabbed his arm. "Look at that woman up the block, Walter. She just saw the sign. She’s dying to come up here and see it, I bet. Look at her, Walter. She’s dying. Wait’ll she comes up here and sees what it says. Can you imagine the face on her when she does that, Walter? Boy, this takes care of them. Why don’t you stay around so we can both look out the window and watch?"
"I think you’re sick," Walter said.
"No, I’m not, I just hate those people."
I hate them all. In the whole area where we live, I hate them all. Once I thought we got a break. A big gangster from Brooklyn moved out and tried to live quietly with his two Cadillacs parked in front of the house and his pearl-gray hat stuck on his head even when he came out for the milk. But the guy was in the neighborhood only three months and then he got arrested and he was all over the papers. People began detouring two blocks so they wouldn’t go near his house, and the fellow stayed holed up so much that you never could meet him. He finally moved, and left me with all the garbage. One thing you can bet, I wouldn’t have had Walter, from the Dazzle, put the gangster’s name on my sign.
After I had watched my sign for a while, and Walter left with his truck from the Dazzle, I went into the kitchen and had coffee and waited until this friend of mine called Bad Eddie showed up. Bad Eddie is called this because he doesn’t do anything nice, and I had things I wanted him to do to my neighbors that aren’t nice.
"There’s a lot of people out on the block," Bad Eddie said.
"That’s good, we’re going to get rid of them all," I said.
"Oh, dear Lord, look at this," my wife said. "They’re coming from the other block, too."
"They could get hurt, too, and I wouldn’t complain," I said.
Then I got down to business with Bad Eddie. "Now look," I said, "we’re going to do this big-time. We’ll get white mice and put them in someone’s house. That’ll fix them. Now, look out the window. See that guy up there in his back yard? Walking around the bushes? We don’t even mess with him. He goes."
"What do you mean, he goes?" Bad Eddie said.
"Any way you want to do it," I said. "But he goes. We’re going to do this right, just like Capone. We’ll use mice, threats, beatings, anything we want."
Bad Eddie did not look up from his coffee.
"Don’t that joint of his give him any vacation?" he asked my wife. "He needs a rest." Nobody answered.
"It’s going to be crowded out there," my wife said. "Almost like the day Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall were across the street."
That was the biggest day in the history of the block and the people did just what you’d expect them to do. They acted like jerks. They walked back and forth, then back and forth again, or they stood on the sidewalk and gaped at Mr. Robards and his wife. They were visiting their accountant, who lives across the street and doesn’t talk to me, but they should have charged admission for coming out in the front of the house.
When they left, the block went back to normal. Which means all that ever happens is some grown man, pushed out by his wife with an adolescent’s mind, comes up to the door and tells you, "Your Jimmy tried to strangle my son the other day." And you tell him, "I’m awfully sorry. I’m awfully sorry Jimmy messed up the job and didn’t kill your kid."
Now, for the rest of this day, I sat over coffee with Eddie and plotted doing things to people, and, outside, the people stopped to look at the sign and they stumbled through the reading and then went on. And in one day everybody got my personal message.
They never did get Bad Eddie’s message because he spent the whole day sitting at the kitchen table and shaking his head and when he left he only said one thing. "Get yourself a good rest," Bad Eddie said.
Since then the sign has come down, but it’s in the garage and it can go up any time, just like a flag. That is, if there is a garage left. As a precaution against a slow real-estate market when we find something in town and put the house up for sale, I had Marvin the Torch over one day. He is a man who burns down things for a living.
He went out in the front and dug a fingernail into the wood and looked around.
"Not too good," he said. "The wood is green. Too green. To do this sure, I might have to load it up, and that would mean taking out half the block."
"Don’t let that stand in your way," I told him. The new one was right up the block looking at us.
(sorry!)
