The Midnight Ride of Danny McNabb

EVERY NOW AND THEN I get it into my head to make a list of certain things I've done in my life. There's a sense of satisfaction to be gained by stacking up a bunch of items that are normally scattered out over a lifetime, then sitting back and giving them a good long look. Some of them invariably get you thinking, and the patterns that emerge can even give you a new insight or two. Could be anything, like all the cars I've ever owned, or all the houses I've lived in, or maybe all the girls I've slept with. Some of them turn out to be pretty long lists.










My latest is a review of all the close calls I've had; those adrenaline-soaked moments when I've come within a cat's whisker of dying. Considering how I've lived my life, I suspected there might be quite a few of them, and, truth be told, I wanted to see if I was getting close to number nine. While pondering that list, a long ago memory of one of those moments came back with a rush, buried all these years. Suddenly I recalled someone who had been my best friend for all of six months in my freshman year in high school. The mysterious Danny McNabb.

He claimed to be Scotch-Irish and Protestant, but his parents didn't mind if he went to a Catholic school. Apparently he didn't mind either. The first time I saw him was when he strolled into my class at Cathedral Academy in the middle of a school day, and sat down with a sly smile on his face as Sister Marie Frances explained to the rest of us that his family had just moved here from California. You could see right away he was not your average Catholic schoolboy; he was cocky, worldly, brazen; like there was nothing that could faze him. Here he was, a stranger dropped into a strange land, and he seemed to find the whole thing vaguely amusing.

The nuns must've thought they could win him over, bring him into the fold, so to speak; but it was clear from that first day it would never happen. His mind was elsewhere; he was merely tolerating his current situation and was not about to get with the program. What sealed the deal was, when he learned I held the title of Mister Detention for having set a record in that particular department, he began to join me there on a more or less regular basis. We were a bad influence on each other, Father Benson said.

His family was renting a big house on the opposite rim of that great big bowl of green known as Lincoln Park, and I soon got used to making my way over there at all times of the day and night. His parents, who were never home, seemed to be some kind of rich nomads. There was all this stuff just laying around: diamond-studded jewelry, fur coats, leather furniture, you name it. They had more things in that house than I had ever seen in my life, and Danny had the run of the place. He claimed to have lived in every state in the union. There were pictures of him with Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, things like that. The best part about that house, though, was that we seemed to always have it to ourselves. We threw a few wild parties now and then and drank whatever we wanted from the bar in the dining room. It was at one of these jamborees that we made local history.

I was feeling a little drunk, souldancing in the kitchen to the silky sound of The Five Satins with my girlfriend, when I heard a voice behind me, shouting, Get 'em up, Brady, reach for the sky! I turned to see old Danny boy himself, swaying on his feet, a rifle aimed somewhere in the vicinity of my head.

Put the gun down, you asshole.

No, no, put your hands up, Brady, c’mon.

I'm not kidding Danny. Put the gun down.

Put down the fuckin' gun before you fuckin' kill somebody, someone shouted. He lowered the gun.

Hey, I was only fooling, it's not really loaded. Besides, the safety's on, see?

BLAM!!! A circle of smoke rolled through the kitchen, followed by a stunned silence. The bullet passed through the trash can and lodged itself in the floor below. In the sti-i-i-ll... o-o-o-f... the ni-i-ight, ending in the background. I lunged at Danny, pushing him up against the wall.

You stupid sonofabitch! You could have blown my fuckin' head off! Are you crazy?

He just laughed in my face. Like I said, nothing fazed him.

Hey, take it easy, man. it wasn't your time to go.

I let go of his shirt, walked out the door and headed back across the park, suddenly sober as a judge and shakin' like a leaf. A couple of days later I went back over there and rang the bell for what seemed like an hour. Finally, a neighbor came out on the porch and yelled over at me that the whole lot of them had moved out in the middle of the night, and no one knew where they went. The very next day, she said, a couple of Federal Marshalls were in the neighborhood looking for them.

I had always wondered where they got all their money; Danny said that his father worked for some big company, which also seemed to explain their nomadic life. The jewelry and the furs and the pocketfuls of cash took on a whole new meaning, though, as I began to think back over the last few months. In the end, I concluded that they must have been a family of gypsies, forever on the run, one step ahead of the law; though I'll probably never know for sure. It does seem to be the most logical explanation, though, the more I think about it. They just seemed to disappear right off the face of the earth, and last I heard, criminals aren't eligible for the rapture. If they did make it up there, though, you can bet your bottom dollar they sure as hell would have cleared out of heaven a long, long time ago.

The Island

It was just about the time when That's Alright, Mama and Rock Around the Clock were hitting the airwaves with sonic dynamite; Mick and I were nouveau-poor city boys and brand-new teens, a tough combination. The cool older guys with Luckies or Camels in their rolled-up t-shirt sleeves had suicide knobs with bathing-beauty pictures in them on the steering wheels of their souped-up late 40's Fords, Chevies and Mercs; the world was a cool place and getting cooler, thanks to all of us. We were ready for anything, and of course it came along.

Being city boys, on city summer nights we'd just hang out on a stoop or a corner, now and then wander the streets looking for city girls, the world's best pizza and whatever else new youth looked for on a balmy night back in those days. But when in one of those souped-up cars we headed out of the city and followed route 9J down along the Hudson River on visits to our cousins' riverside house, we were happily out of our element; country kids do different things in their country nights.

So when one evening a bunch of us just ambled from our cousins' house on down toward the river shore to where one of the country guys said he'd left a rowboat he'd 'found,' we had no idea what we were gladly getting into; we were just heading for the river at sunset, no particular reason, look at a boat, row around, something, anything is great fun at that age except school, and sure enough there was a real rowboat there, quite a big rowboat, and right where no rowboats ever were, which didn’t seem the least bit suspicious to me, anyway a hot rowboat is nothing like a hot car.

Besides, for me all such considerations were erased by the power of the moment: the river scene was like those sepia photos from Civil War days with the mist and the silver light, the calm of the water, and out there across that sheet of silver was the brown-black sliver of the southern end of the island looking like a hundred years ago or so, backed with the crazy-orange of sunset like the fading edge of a dream, the island I'd gazed at so many times as a kid growing up in summers here on this side of the river. I'd always wondered what was over there.

The four or five of us got in the boat and rowed out on the calm water for a while of splashy hijinx until, the island being the only tempting destination within miles, we pulled onto its shore at the very edge of darkness, got out as quietly as any band of night marauders, pushed through the undergrowth that edged the water and found ourselves on the edge of miles of the biggest cornfield this city boy had ever seen, all the more surreal for the starkly diminishing golden light. Absolutely silent. No one around. No one lived there. The workers had all gone home. What's more, the rows and rows of rows were dotted here and there at regular intervals with quadruple-sized burlap bags of just-harvested corn where the big harvester combine had left them, dropped right there before us, as if from heaven, in the unattended silence. Giant bags full of fresh-picked corn all along the hundreds, thousands of corn rows...

You recall how it is in any diminishing light, when the ember of temptation emerges in a group of teenagers, moreso for new teenagers and especially guys, double-especially on their own - like we were on this mysterious, corn-rich island - how that ember ignites out of nowhere, flares up and wavers, then sometimes dies, but more often blooms into a solid flame that lights up the nights of early adolescence? Well in a matter of moments we were as dedicated as any well-paid laborers you ever saw, each shouldering one of those big bags of sweet-smelling corn to the boat, then going back for more until the water was up to the gunnels, but it was calm water, we were skinny; we could make it back across the placid river.

And so we did, quicker and quieter than we'd come. When we reached the home shore our fellow island raiders lugged their big bags off into the dark and home; we lugged ours back to the car trunk and back into the city, where we took what we could eat, then sold the rest to the happy-to-have-really-fresh-corn owner of the Busy Bee supermarket across the street from us on the corner of Hudson Avenue and South Swan Street, where the concrete western edge of Rocky's Folly stands now. We had some food, we had some money, we made some history out of what we had, like memories out of sweet golden nights...