It was a rainy night in November, 2011 when I was shot three times in front of my Crown Heights apartment house. In the usually quiet neighborhood of family residences, churches and a massive synagogue, the gunfire was loud as thunder. The shooter, who I later discovered was actually there to kill my landlady’s boyfriend, fled quickly and concerned neighbors were soon on their steps wondering what happened. My next door friend Richard, a retired policeman, cared for me in his foyer as I lay sprawled on the marble-tiled floor awaiting the ambulance; soon I was in their vehicle racing towards Kings County Hospital.
Fifteen minutes later, inside the medical center, doctors and nurses franticly worked on me. An IV of morphine was inserted into my arm as the team yelled back and forth to one another. One of the nurses was a handsome young Latino male nurse who held me firmly as a doctor sliced open my left side to insert a breathing tube, because a lung had collapsed.
Though I was doped-up, I clearly recall the man talking to me gently. “Just relax; you’re going to be OK.” While I was in tremendous pain his soothing voice was convincing. “What’s your name?” I whispered as my eyes focused on his face and the white lights above his head.
“I’m Raymond,” he replied.
“Really? That was my best friend’s name in grammar school.” I didn’t mention that it was also my Confirmation name. Raymond smiled as he continued to hold me down, both physically and mentally. Thankfully, everything went well and a few hours later I was rolled into a room in the ICU.
Come morning, I was awakened by a West Indian nurse who came for blood. As she inserted the needle into my right arm I asked about the male ER nurse Raymond. “I don’t know him, but I’ll ask when I go back downstairs,” she assured me. However, after a few more inquiries, I was finally told that no one named Raymond worked in the emergency room.
Though baffled, I didn’t dwell on it. The afternoon and evening was filled with a hostile police interview (they wanted to believe that I was a drug dealer) and a parade of guests that included my many play sisters, homeboys and concerned colleagues.
The next day the nurse returned. In her lilting accent, she talked as she worked. “How many times were you shot?”
“Three,” I mumbled.
She smiled brightly. “And you’re still here? You must have angels around you.”
Though I chuckled along with her, when I was alone staring out of the large window watching pigeons soar, I reflected on the many times in my life when the presence of angels saved me from dire situations that could’ve led to real harm or death. There was time when I was a 5th grade altar boy at St. Catherine of Genoa who stupidly tilted a towering candle after a summer Saturday afternoon mass in an attempt to blow it out and instead got a left eye full of wax.
For a few frightened minutes, I thought I was going to be blinded. Thankfully the church custodian Mr. Cafiero rushed me to the rectory and somehow removed a chunk of wax from my eye before washing it out. In the 50-years since, other than wearing regular eyeglasses, I’ve never had problems with my vision. After that harrowing day, for as long as I could remember, every few years the angels reappeared.
There was the time I crashed my bike on a steep hill in Pittsburgh, smashing the five-speed into the back of a parked car. Though it could’ve been worse, I escaped with a few bruises. Twelve months later I was mugged one morning on a Harlem street corner by a robbing duo as I headed to my summer job. The thieves got $10.00, but seconds later one of the guys was sympathetic and told his partner, “Yo, give him back his money.”
“What?” the second guy screamed, looking at dude with disbelief.
“Come on man, he’s a homeboy. We shouldn’t be out here robbing homeboys.” When he handed me back the wrinkled bill, I screamed “thank you” and jetted down St. Nicolas Avenue.
Lying in that hospital bed decades later I flipped through memories as though they were flashcards conjuring images of the numerous other angels that had swooped in and saved me from harm, be it scary streetwise incidents or after midnight subway frights that could’ve been deadly. However, until the appearance of Nurse Raymond, none of those guardians had ever manifested in human form.
***
Raised Catholic I’d always believed in angels, but I’ve also thought ghosts existed. Growing-up blocks away from Trinity Cemetery, spread across two city blocks (153rd to 155th on Broadway and Amsterdam) in uptown Manhattan, many believed that spirits drifted throughout the neighborhood, haunting the old buildings and making their presence felt in our everyday lives.
The graveyard faced my school, which, like the church I mentioned earlier, was also named St. Catherine of Genoa. I sometimes visited Trinity Cemetery with my monster movie loving mother and younger brother after mass. Not that we knew anyone buried there, but mom took us strolling amongst the headstones after church to feed the squirrels. It was never scary, except for the morning we ran out of peanuts and the squirrels literally chased us out. The graveyard has been featured in numerous movies and television shows including Black Caesar and The Penguin.
Nevertheless, I still remember the day in 1972 when a schoolmate was found hanging from one of the many trees. Years later that brutal incident became the basis of my short story “The King of Broadway,” published by Rock and a Hard Place. 1972 was also the same year I was the new kid in Sister Kieran’s 4th grade class and was soon befriended by Raymond Torres.
Though most of the class had known one another since first grade, I’d just transferred from a bougie private academy and was a very shy, chubby child which made me perfect fodder for the resident class bully Tom Lowe. A short, brown skinned boy with a short Afro and lots of attitude, he made my life miserable. For the first two weeks he and his crony William threatened me with balled fist gestures in class, passed me booger filled notes and once jumped me during lunch period.
One day they chased me and I ran into the rectory foyer that was between the school and church. Though I slammed the metal door behind me, I could still hear their taunting voices. Finally over the screams of those scoundrels demanding that I come out a louder voice yelled, “Why don’t you guys leave him alone?”
Though I wasn’t sure who it was, when I creaked open the door I saw Raymond yelling in Tom’s face. A Puerto Rican pretty boy, Raymond looked like a Latino teen idol that a decade later might’ve been in Menudo. With hair that rivaled The Fonz, he was as handsome as he was nice. Later I met his parents and younger sister Cindy; the entire family was attractive. They could’ve been visual examples for customers considering photographic portraits at Sears.
Still, unlike me, he wasn’t scared of them punks. Slowly I opened the door and Raymond said, “Come on out, Mike, those guys aren’t going to bother you anymore.” At that moment Raymond had not only saved me from bullies, but, without knowing it, he also became my new best friend.
After that day we hung out constantly. I sometimes rolled with him to his grandmother’s house during lunch period. Living on the first floor of Halidon Court, a building on 153rd and Broadway that I later learned was the childhood home of J.D. Salinger, his Grandma spoke no English, but she always had a big smile and an easy laugh while feeding us heaping plates of food as Spanish soap operas blared from the black and white television set in the living-room.
On other days we ate in the noisy school cafeteria and then chilled in his daddy’s Mustang. A burgundy hued car with an STP sticker on the back window, the ride was always washed and waxed. Mr. Torres, who was also our Boy Scout leader, was an air conditioner/refrigerator repair man who always parked on the school block. Raymond had the keys and we’d go in the car and listen to pop music on WABC until Sister Mary Whoever rang the tarnished bell that indicated lunch period was over.
Raymond loved cars and often told me stories of his father taking him to the drag races at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, where he saw legends like funny car driver Jungle Jim and dragster dude Big Daddy Don Garlits. “One day I want to race cars there too,” he said. “I think that would be so cool.”
“I can see that, man, you’ll just zooming down that track. Maybe they’ll call you Hot Rod Ray.” I’d wanted to be a sci-fi writer since I was 8, but I thought it sounded corny compared to racing cars and kept it to myself. “Maybe then I can finally get out there.”
Though the Raceway Park radio commercial played often on WABC, I was never able to talk mom into taking me there. Instead I began buying various hot rod magazines that featured full-color pictures and posters of the cars and drivers. I also enjoyed seeing movies that had great car chases with southern bootleggers (White Lightning, Big Bad Mama), cops (The French Connection, The Seven Ups) or random speed demons (Aloha, Bobby and Rose, Greased Lighting) on screen.
While I had my own hobbies that included reading comics, writing stories and going to see movies at the local grindhouse the Tapia (later the Nova) with the crew from my apartment building, that didn’t stop me from adopting a few of Raymond’s pastimes too. On some Saturday afternoons I watched drag races on ABC Wide World of Sports, where the agony of defeat might include a crashing or exploding car.
Sometimes I could combine interests which included buying CARtoons magazine featuring race car themed comics illustrated by Alex Toth, Robert Williams, William Stout and others. In addition, I started buying boxes of Revell models that came in many pieces that were supposed to be glued together by the buyer. My completed cars usually looked more like demolition derby wrecks than the pristine pictures on the boxes.
While Raymond was obviously too young for a driver’s license, one day he decided to move his dad’s car to another parking spot across the street and someone called the police on us. When the cops came I almost pissed myself, but Raymond was iceberg cool.
“It’s my father’s car officer,” he explained, showing them the keys. They could’ve cared less and ordered us out of the auto. To this day I don’t know why they didn’t rat us out to our principal Sister Mary Riley, but he let us go with an Irish accented warning. “Don’t let us catch you in that car anymore.”
***
For the next few years, though classroom hours, lunch periods, Boy Scout meetings and altar boy duties, Raymond and I remained close. However, one day in 7th grade I got a wake-up call that signaled that I’d never be as cool as my friend when Raymond was invited to a spin the bottle party after school and I tagged along. We entered a building on 152nd and Broadway. After buzzing the intercom, we pushed open the inner door and rode the slow moving elevator to the 5th floor. Yet, from the moment we walked through the door the girls, who were our classmates, stared at me as though my name was Quasimodo.
I’d never felt so unwelcome in my life. Minutes later, before the bottle was spun, I nervously tapped Raymond on the shoulder. “I’m going to leave,” I whispered. He looked sympathetic, but didn’t try to stop me. “I’ll see you tomorrow, man,” he said. Closing the apartment door behind me, I swore I heard a collective sigh of relieve from the girls who feared that their lips might’ve had to touch mine.
Though I might be romanticizing the dusty memory, it was at that moment that I decided it was time to step out of Raymond’s shadow and fully embrace my nerdy comic book loving, Beatles listening to, science fiction writing self. We stayed friends through 8th grade, but I finally stopped following him around like a wounded puppy.
During that time the Torres family moved to Englewood, New Jersey and the week after our Class of 1977 graduation Raymond had a pool party. Wearing a t-shirt with a Rat Fink funny car decal ironed on the front (art by Ed Roth), blue jeans and Pro-Keds, that sunshiny day was the last time I saw or spoke to most of my school friends including Raymond. Like most of my classmates from St. Catherine, we went to different high schools or moved to other states and simply lost touch with one another.
Still, over the years I’ve thought about him often, of that day he rescued me from those bullies and the years of friendship that grew out of that horrid day.
***
Thirty-four years later, still in ICU, I sat up in the hospital bed and thought about the time that had passed since the last time I saw or spoke to Raymond Torres. Did he become a race car driver who perhaps perished in a fiery crash, I wondered? That might explain his ghostly appearance in the emergency room once again comforting me during a harrowing experience. Hopefully he was alive and well and that phantom was just a figment of my overworked imagination. Whatever might be the explanation, in my mind Hot Rod Ray races on forever.
