Capeman by Jacqueline Chou

Capeman by Jacqueline Chou

I am the Capeman of Matthews-Palmer Playground. 

60 years ago, another Capeman was in this park.  Back then, Hell’s Kitchen was a slum–roughly constructed walk-up tenements, overcrowded with the poor and working class immigrants.  Clotheslines were strung between the windows of buildings and on rooftops, all those drying garments so many flags of surrender to inescapable poverty.

Back then, this playground was just a bare stretch of asphalt, with an odd bench here and there, and it was all surrounded by chain-link fence.  It was not so much a playground as a encapsulation of destitution.

On August 29, 1959, the Puerto Rican gang, the Vampires, came to the park with a mission of vengeance:  some members of the Irish gang, the Norseman, had beaten up a member of the Vampires, and it was time for payback.  Two white teenagers, non-gang members, made the mortally unfortunate decision to  hang out in the park that night.  Mistaking them for Norsemen, Vampire member Salvador Agron stabbed them both.  Both teenagers died, and Salvador was arrested for murder.  At the time of the murder, he was wearing a black satin cape with red lining.  Ever ready to coin a moniker for a catchy headline, the reporters dubbed him, “The Capeman.”

My cape is different.  Black like Agron’s, but it is a felt blanket that I wrap around my head and body, for anonymity as much as for warmth.  Hell’s Kitchen has been gentrified over the decades, and the park re-done.  The asphalt is new and smooth.  Basketball courts are on the right.  Ground sprinklers command the center of the park.  In the summer, children run through the jets that shoot upward, their laughter and shrieks counterpointing the splashes of water hitting their bodies and the concrete beneath their feet.  Sunlight glints in the water streams, rainbows sometimes shimmering through. 

The sprinklers are inactive now.

Low, wrought iron rails delimit the sparse trees and shrubbery that run the perimeter of the park.  It is autumn twilight, and I sit on the bench that overlooks the jungle gym and swings.  Rust- and gold-colored leaves are scattered all over the pavement, and on the rubber padding that cushions the ground of the play areas.  The air is crisp, but the bite of the cold does not yet bother me, as my blanket covers my hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants.  It is not yet so cold that the bareness of my feet is a concern.  When winter comes, I will move to the subway station and hibernate there.

I watch the children play.  A boy wearing a bicycle helmet is standing on a horizontal tire swing.  His hands grasp the chains, and his knees are slightly bent, as  he  intently at his feet as he moves his hips, trying to sway the tire in a circle.  Several children are milling about the jungle gym.

I thought I saw you out of the corner of my eye.  That happens quite often.

I turn my head away.  I don’t want you to see my blanket, its black color not disguising the filth caked into it.  My dirt-encrusted sweatshirt and pants, and my feet with the long toenails, gray-streaked with unidentifiable grime.  I don’t want you to see the red and white beach bags I use to hold my extra blanket, and shirts and pants.

You wouldn’t recognize me, anyway.  It’s been so long–9 years, I think.  My hair is long now, and thinning.  I have facial hair, straggly and unkempt.

You wouldn’t even look at my face, really.  No one looks a vagrant in the face, even when they’re depositing money into their stained paper coffee cup, or whatever it is they’re using to collect money.  When someone is filthy and smells bad, people don’t come too close.

The smell is pungent and foul.  It’s the smell of desolation.

People think desolation doesn’t have a smell.  It does, though.  It’s the stench of rotting teeth, on top of piss, on top of shit, on top of semen, on top of sweat, with the natural oils that our skin and scalps emanate mixed in.  Take that smell, and layer another week of that smell on top of it, and then another, until it’s months and years of it.  Desolation is the palimpsest of layered stench that never got clean and washed away, when it should have been washed away a long, long time ago, and it’s mixed with the smell of something barely alive and human underneath. 

Even those who are moved to pity don’t come too close.  They tiptoe over to me, with their money in hand.  If it’s a bill, they hold it by the very edge of the corner, to make sure they don’t come in contact with my hand as they deposit the charity into my cup.  They drop the money as quickly as they can, and rush away, in case I might be one of those crazy homeless people.

But I’m not crazy.  You know that, Jonny, right?  Not like Uncle Lou, at least.  What we knew of him, I mean.  He couldn’t hold down a job, was incapacitated for months at a time, couldn’t leave his apartment, yet somehow managed to have 3 kids with two different women.

I’m not like that.

Did you know that every single time I see a young businessman in the park, I think it might be you?  Businessmen do come into the park.  Sometimes they’re just passing through, the shortest distance between their point A and their point B.  Other times they come to meet their wife and kid, and take a turn pushing their cutie pie on the swing.

When a young businessman stoops to put some change or a bill in my cup, I avert my gaze, in case it’s you.  Mom I could take seeing me like this, even though she would bawl at the sight of me.  Dad, too, if he were still alive.  Jeannie, too.  Damn, I don’t even know if I’d recognize Jeannie if I saw her as an adult, to be honest.

But you—I’m sure that I would recognize you.

Second grade, you got the assignment, “The Person I Admire Most.”  You didn’t write about Santa Claus.  You didn’t write about Jesus, much to Mom’s disappointment.  You didn’t even write about Dad, much to Dad’s disappointment.

You wrote about yours truly.

“My big brother Rob is the smartest, coolest guy on the planet.  He can do everything.  His high score on Mortal Kombat is 19,402,000!  He runs really fast, and is really good at basketball and swimming.  He taught me how to swim.

He almost never treats me like I’m a pain.”

Mom and Dad had a good laugh over the “almost.”

Mom cried over that essay, do you remember?

“It’s so sweet,” she said, sniffing, dabbing the corners of her eyes with the opposite pinkies of each of her perfectly French-manicured hands.  The least germ-ridden finger, she used to tell us.  If you have to touch your face, use your pinkies.  Where she got that idea, I’m sure I don’t know.

I know I wasn’t perfect.  As your big brother, giving you a hard time at least once in a while was de rigueur.

Remember that time you asked me what “bellaboar” meant?

“What?”

“Bellaboar,” you repeated.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I was perplexed.

And you handed me that book, “Words of the Champions.”  You had won the middle school spelling bee, you smart kid.  Only in the 6th grade, and you beat the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.  I was proud of you, Jonny-Boy.  You always said I was smarter.  Maybe I was.

But you were pretty damn smart, too.

So there you were, preparing for the district spelling bee, with the “Words of the Champions” book.  And you brought the book to me, and pointed to one of the words on the list:  “belabor.”

I snickered to myself, and then with a straight face I told you “bellaboar” meant a big, beautiful pig.  You believed it for a while, too, until one night at dinner, Dad was on Mom’s case about bugging Jeannie about her weight again, and he said, “You don’t have to  belabor the point —“

I still remember.  You had a forkful of Mom’s penne a la vodka halfway to your mouth, a lock of your brown hair spilling over your right eye.  The realization hit you:

“It’s not bellaboar!”

I saw that look on your face, and I busted out laughing.  You were so mad.  You flung that forkful of penne at me.  And then Mom started yelling, her face getting all red.

Mom made great penne, with the peas.  Does she still make it?

Is Mom still alive?  I miss her.

Are you still in that apartment on 48th street?  Probably not.  You got that 4-flight walk-up because you were fresh out of law school and had student loans to pay.  You are probably a partner somewhere now.  Maybe married, with a kid or two.  Maybe a house in the suburbs.

It was a cute place, that apartment.  Great apartment for a guy just starting out.  Fresh out of law school, starting his first job in Corporate America.  Great bachelor pad.  That was what it was meant to be, but you took me in when I got out of prison.  Let me sleep on your sofa “until I got on my feet.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like that.  It wasn’t supposed to end up that way.  I was a lawyer, too.  Ivy League, just like you.  Top firm, just like you.

I know now that they were all just moments, you know?  Back then, I understood it differently.  I thought events meant something.  I thought each event was a signifier, each one a step in a path, a progression toward something good.  Something that was meant to be.  When I graduated salutatorian of high school.  When I got accepted to U Penn.  When I got accepted to Cornell Law.  When I got the offer from Sullivan.

But they weren’t steps in a path.  They were just moments. They were like the garments hanging from a clothesline.  A shirt drying next to another shirt on the clothesline–the two have nothing to do with one another, and they don’t lead to some logical outcome.  They both just happen to be there.

Do you know what happened to the original Capeman, Salvador Agron? 

He was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death by electric chair.

16 years old. 

He was the youngest person in the history of New York City to receive the death penalty.  Did you know that, Jonny?  I don’t remember if you took any Criminal Law classes at U Penn.  I took some Criminal Law at Cornell.  I saw mug shots of Agron.  God, he looked so much like me.  Not just full face.  Profile, too.   It was crazy.  It was like me in a different time.

I’ve digressed.  Here’s the thing, Jonny.  Agron received the death penalty, but it wasn’t a signifier leading to the expected conclusion.  He didn’t get executed.  First Lady of our country, Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in. And so did one of the fathers of one of the kids that Salvador killed. They asked for leniency for Salvador.  6 days before Agron was to be executed by electric chair, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Do you see?  All those good things that happened to me—they were good, but they didn’t mean anything.  Just moments.  Garments on a clothesline.

And all those years, interspersed with the good moments, the black syrup was there. 

It didn’t come as frequently as it comes now, but it would peep its way in.

The black syrup would pour through me.  Through the top of my head, and through my brain, soaking it.  I could feel it pouring behind my eyes.  Then it would make its way downward, pouring through my heart.  It saturated my heart, Jonny, and continued through the rest of me.  And when the black syrup filled every cell of me, my entire being would ache.  It would hurt so bad, Jonny.  Waking up in the morning hurt, Jonny.  Being alive hurt.

And nothing looked right; nothing felt right. It was like everything I saw, everyone I talked to—it was all just a garish movie. It didn’t seem real. But everyone in the movie acted as if it all were all real, and that scared me. I had to pretend as best as I could.  Act as if  the movie were real, but all the while the black syrup just made everything hurt.

I’m not like Uncle Lou.  I’m not as bad off as him.  I was able to fight off the blackness for a long time.  Jonny, there was another photo of Agron I remember.  Before his incarceration, still just a kid.  He was beaming broadly, his gaze open and untroubled.  I guess there are photos of me like that as a kid, too.  But they don’t mean anything at all, you see?  Snapshots of when everything seemed okay.  Blinks of time.  Isolated quicksilver moments. 

The black syrup started coming more frequently.  It was getting bad even before the incident with the bicyclist.  I was already in a bad state by then. 

Vehicular manslaughter.  Driving while intoxicated.  Jonny, we were all intoxicated—Pete, Brandon and Sean.  Not just me.  Who doesn’t drink beer when they’re fishing?  That’s what guys do. 

Honestly, Jonny, the reason I was driving was that I was the least intoxicated of us. 

And then you took me in after I got out of prison.  I wanted to get back on my feet, I did.  I just was waiting for the right day, the right time.  I was waiting for blackness to lift, so I could start trying.

It was taking so long for it to dissipate.  And then when it did, it would come back so quickly again.

I saw the way you looked at me.  So many things in that look.  Annoyance, disgust, contempt, impatience, frustration.

Pity.

I just meant to just go for a walk.  It was a day not unlike today, with the leaves turning, and the air all brisk.  I walked along 8th Avenue, along Restaurant Row.  I walked through the Theater District, and then to Times Square.  I made it to the Mid Manhattan library, with the lions at the entrance.  I just sat on the steps and watched the pigeons, and the people milling about.  And then night started to fall, and I just curled up at a landing at the top of the steps, nestled into a corner and fell asleep.

It wasn’t a conscious, deliberate choice to never come back, Jonny.  I was just waiting to feel good, so I could come back and not have you look at me in that awful way.

Do you know what happened to the original Capeman? He spent 20 years in prison.  He was functionally illiterate when he was incarcerated.  During his time in prison, he learned how to read, and got his GED.  He wrote poems.  He was granted an early release, and when he was a free man, he worked as a youth counselor.

But it wasn’t the start of something wonderful.  It was just what happened at that particular time, because, if you notice, no one knows who Salvador Agron is anymore.

He died of pneumonia at the age of 42.

He’s just a story that happened a long time ago that no one remembers.

Jonny, I think that will happen to me, too.

I’ll just fade away.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Jacqueline Chou 2025