“I worked yesterday.” Marco leaves, allowing me to lie about his message. “I didn’t know you called until late.”
“Of course I called.” More breaths; these are more frustrated, hurt—which means that somewhere in them is a hope. It makes them worse for me to hear than the lonely ones. “You went out?” Which is an accusation of me spending money.
“Marco took me out to dinner. I met him in the city.”
“I had everyone by the phone. Everyone wanted to sing to you. They were so disappointed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Like a fool, I believe her—that it is okay, that she has hope that things will turn out okay. I can’t imagine her remarrying, but I can’t imagine her alone, but like last night I cannot see the face of the man who would replace me, and I wonder if I’ve damaged her too much for her to ever love or trust again.
“Did you find anything for today?” It’s a simple enough question, but it sounds ridiculous coming from her—Claire as the hardscrabble wife of a day laborer.
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing?”
“Something for Johnny—I don’t know.”
“Ick. That guy gets jobs?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe you can start getting your own jobs?”
“Maybe.”
“You talk to Marta?”
“Today.”
“Great. School?”
“After work.”
“Will anyone be there?”
“I get out at four.”
“Oh, okay. I’m sorry.” She wants to stop asking these sorts of questions, but she can’t help herself. “What about apartments?”
“Tomorrow.”
“We don’t have much time.”
“I know.”
She brightens. “What about Pincus?”
“What about Pincus?”
“I saw his new book. It got great reviews.”
“Did it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I keep bugging you. I’m putting it all on you.”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Things’ll work out.”
“Yeah.”
She sighs. “I feel better. I’m sorry.”
“Shh.”
“Are you coming this weekend? The kids miss you. I miss you.”
“I’ll try.” It doesn’t sound genuine to me.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She seems to wait on the line as though she’s expecting me to say more, but she hangs up before I can disappoint.
The stink and dread of the subway when you are going to work isn’t like the stink and dread of the subway when you’re going out to the movies or lunch. It’s not the funk, or the idea that you’ll be trapped underground, it’s the stink of your dreams rotting somewhere along the rails. It’s the dread of knowing that you’re being carted off—complicitly—to the slaughter. Two hundred and fifty dollars a day in New York City will never get me out from under. Next stop—Satan’s lair. It’s seven thirty in the morning and I’m on the F-train, SoHo bound.
I try to account for every dollar I’ve spent in an attempt to figure out how it all came to this. I made money. And for a while, at least, we were operating at a surplus. Claire’s cousin Linus started a dot-com and hired me to write their copy. It was the first time in my life, since being a stock clerk during high school, that I’d brought home a regular check. It made our rent seem trivial, our monthly nut seem like nothing. We saved. I had an office and someone to direct my incoming calls. I didn’t have to do much, either. Linus used to come visit me and ask why I didn’t move his cousin out of that crawlspace we were in. He’d sit on my desk, sipping a coffee. He did the same thing when he presented me with my stock in the company. He did the same, only with a cigar, when his shares made him a millionaire. He also did it when he asked me not to sell. But not when all I had left were penny stocks, a little cash in the bank, and an odd entry on my résumé.
When I come back above ground on Houston, it’s pouring. I should’ve taken the A. I wander down Greene and stop at the address. I look up. There doesn’t seem to be anything happening on the third floor. I press the bell and wait—nothing. I wait under the cornice until I figure out that the runoff from it is denser than the rain itself.
Across the street is a store—Lucky Jeans. The gates are down. Claire has mentioned this place. I didn’t think jeans could be lucky unless they were some old ratty pair that had seen you through some days, enough days to prove that it really is luck you’ve experienced with them, rather than coincidence. The shop, even though I can’t see in, seems too high-end to be pushing used truck. It’s the entire corner, two stories of glass and logo. And how would they get the lucky jeans away from the original owner? Perhaps someone who was down on their luck. Pawn shop or other, it seems wrong. When we were kids, Gavin probably would have chucked a rock through one of the big windows and then stood around as if he hadn’t done anything. I miss my friend. I wonder how he’s doing. His last slip, what had it been? Not that it mattered. I miss Gavin. I haven’t been a good friend to him lately. I haven’t really been a friend at all. “I don’t know,” he used to say. “My people, when they don’t like something, they just blow it up.” Then he’d look at me, have a smoke or something, and then speak with that highbrow tone, opening his hand to me. “Your people wouldn’t think that right of you talented tenth. They should teach you how to make bombs or something.” Gavin was the best fighter in town. He could provoke better than anyone. People would look at his skinny body, his freckle puss, the expression in his impish eyes—shy intelligence bordering on outrageous arrogance. He would never throw a punch, only take them. I once saw someone smash a beer bottle over his skull. He went down and bounced right back up. That was Gavin—taking hits, going down, getting back up, going down again. It used to scare me horribly—to watch his father beat him, his so-called friends, the police. And the times when I’d step in, when I thought he’d be killed, he’d say no. I guess I got used to it. But now, wishing him here, I wonder how many bounce-backs he has left, or if one really does bounce back—my only real friend left on earth, whom I have let fall.
The door opens and I jump into the street to face it. A woman is in the doorway. She’s not startled. Her head’s down, as though she hasn’t seen me or doesn’t care. She opens her umbrella and looks up. She knew I was there all along. She starts out but goes only so far as to still be able to hold the door open—for me. She nods back at the opening, almost imperceptibly. I don’t move.
“Do you want to wait inside?”
I keep still—still looking. Her umbrella and raincoat are both transparent. Her hair is long, dark, and loopy. She looks as though she meticulously threw something on and then rushed out.
“Are you working upstairs? You can wait inside.” It goes against my programming to have a strange white woman, alone on a deserted street, show me trust—not that it hadn’t happened before, strange that it had happened many times. What is even more ridiculous is that I’m still in the street refusing shelter and it makes sense—to me and to her.
“Have a good day.” She lets the door close. She doesn’t wave. She doesn’t give me another look. She goes away, south on Greene, around the corner, west on Broome, and is gone.
I find a Sharpie in my bag and a scrap of sandpaper. I hunch over to protect it from the rain, and on the back I begin another list: Call Gavin. Real estate broker on Atlantic. Security deposit. Change guitar strings. They had seemed muddy this morning, as though one of the kids had been strumming them with syrupy hands. I remember a demo tape of songs I wrote. I guess I made it some time ago and I want to hear them. I remember them, the performance, too, as being quite good. I started playing on a whim, listening to Dylan, strumming along, then realizing he wasn’t just strumming. I had realized e
arlier that I wasn’t going to be able to plead like Marvin, demand like Otis, or croon like Johnny Hartman. My voice is odd—low and nasal, pinched at times. I always liked listening to him search for the tune, bending notes the other way, up out of blue. “What’s your angle?” Shake asked me once after a set. “I’m going to be the first big black man to sing like a skinny white guy.” I wonder if any of my old tapes are still around. I sweep Marco’s basement to figure out which box they’re in, but the picture doesn’t come. I try and focus harder, but all that comes up is a random cassette case stuffed under some papers. My voice has changed since then. I should make another.
She’s back. She’s carrying a bag. She doesn’t look at me. She opens the door and holds it in place with her back.
“Go in.”
I don’t.
“This is just silly. You’re going to catch your death out here.” She nods her head in the direction of the entrance, this time in a very deliberate way while making a strange sucking sound with her mouth. “All right then, go on.”
I go in. She lets the heavy metal door slam shut. Then without putting her bag down she opens the gate of the freight elevator, then the up-and-down doors. She moves powerfully, gracefully. She’s long, tall. There’s no hesitation or awkwardness to her.
“Go ahead,” she says. I shake my head. “They work on the third floor. You can go in.” I shake again, but she leans toward the opening and that seems to pull me in. We ride up, jerkily thankfully, because it gives me something other than her to consider.
“I think it’s illegal,” she says as we stop with a boom. She goes for the door. “It’s not at all to code, but does anyone really inspect elevators?” She opens the gate. “We’re here.” She steps out. I follow. She closes the gate and starts to a door. I follow.
“No, you’re over there.” She points to a doorless opening while getting her keys out—still one handed. She does it every weekday morning—puts on something just respectable enough, just after she’s shampooed—gotten her keys from the basket in the kitchen and gone to get her one coffee and whatever else was in the bag. But not on weekends. Weekends she stays in later? Doesn’t go out at all? Brews her own? “Why don’t you just make your own?” Claire would sometimes ask. I like to buy coffee in a shop that sells a good cup—just to check in, just to see if things aren’t too far gone. Claire doesn’t need that. Whether she likes them or not, Claire actually gets along with people. She’s able to walk among them, even those she dislikes. Their presence doesn’t vex her because she has the ability to make them feel good—when she smiles at them, gives them her approval with all that Anglican highness. And she looked down with all her Anglican highness and deemed it was okay. Not this one. She looks out in a secret way. She won’t tell what she’s thinking. Judgment isn’t reserved, but it is withheld. And now she isn’t even looking at me any longer. She’s through her door, having opened it just enough to slide through.
And then as if on time delay the picture of her appears in my head, not quite in memory, more like a flash at its gates, bidding them open. Her muscle, at least the mass in her calves, is beginning to change from fast to slow twitch—a light sagging beneath the skin that makes it ripple slightly. Older than Claire’s but younger than that waitress at the Ramada: Janet. She had that fully baggy skin—baggy cheeks and jowls. Baggy triceps. She used to smile at me when we came in. She’d ask me how I was doing, point over at Charlie behind the bar, and ask him if he remembered me. He’d answer very quietly, “Of course I do,” in a singsong kind of way. Then she’d bring me things as though I was some nomadic prince whose arrival she’d foreseen: soda, beer nuts, pretzels, more soda, and sometimes a whole jar of cherries—which I hated but dared to eat anyway to see how sick I could make my stomach feel while I watched my father booboopbeedoo his way from the bar to the jukebox to a corner table and sit with someone in the afternoon’s blind darkness. We’d have been outside playing catch and he’d have rubbed his shoulder or grabbed his elbow and walked to me, slowly exaggerating the throwing motion. And then later, me with the junk food and the sick gut and our two mitts and ball on the bar, I’d spin on the stool and he’d be gone. I’d feel a little panicky and scan the dark lounge for him. Baggy arms would’ve stopped talking to me, stopped giving me things, and Charlie would’ve moved himself to the other end of the bar—being busy. And I don’t know why I think about it in this particular way, this particular tense, because it may have happened only once, or it may not have happened at all. And the subjunctive narrative I’ve created may only be myth culled from knowing the neon red sign of the motel, and years later, knowing what dim lights and strange perfume signified. Perhaps I’d only smelled it on him once—the stink of the lounge queen’s sex on my father. Or heard it in my mother’s hiss—muttering to herself, three scotches down, banging the skillet around the kitchen. I wish her hiss had remained inscrutable. Whatever the case, the memory, the myth, the vision rips through me awkwardly like a jagged blade. So it happens again and again. So it happened again and again—the lounge queen standing beside me—dye job, white-woman perm, blue mascara. “Don’t make yourself sick, sweetie.” She’d rattle the bowl, the nuts or pretzels, smirk at me, and stare as though she had the power to hypnotize, not for my sake, not to help me forget, but for her own. Sometimes she would touch me—pat my head, caress my cheek with the same hand that had been pulling on my old man’s cock. “What a cute little boy,” she’d say. And Charlie would still be ashamed at the other end of the bar. And Janet’s eyes would signal that my father had returned. I could always smell him behind me, all the familiar smells, but also those that weren’t his—soap and her. He’d have his hand on my shoulder and hers would be on my face and it seemed as though I completed a circuit—him connected to the dark air of that skanky lounge, the air connected to her, then to me. I knew it should’ve made me jerk and wretch, but it didn’t. I’d sit there on the stool and Charlie would continue to ignore and Janet would look at me, not like I was a prince, but some pitiful waif, and then to him, almost as if to say, “I could take care of the boy if you’d fuck me like you fuck her.” And now, like then, things go black, and I’m left only with the feeling: them having connected me to whatever it is they want, whatever it is they do to get it, and the price of the ticket, which they, in all their wanting, are unwilling to pay.
The elevator moves. I back into the space. I don’t want to be here. There must be a stairway down. No. No escape. I have to work, but I don’t have to stand in the hallway like a fool. I go inside.
The loft is L-shaped. One wall, almost fifty feet long with seven-foot-tall windows, runs south along the Greene Street side. The south wall has more, which overlook Broome. It’s dark outside. The rain makes me remember that I’m wet. I look at the radiators. They’re too small for the space. The ceilings are twelve feet high and broken up by sprinkler runs and ductwork. Even in the dim light I can tell most of the work here has been finished. In the corner are paint cans, a couple of ladders, tarps. The elevator doors open. I walk out of its sight line, around the L, into the kitchen. The cabinets are done.
“Motherfuckin’ dark as shit.”
It’s Chris. After all this time I can tell his voice—deep, but not truly resonant. Articulate with a bit of a Bed-Stuy edge. He turns on the lights. He’s with other people. They walk heavily, slowly. It’s eight now, but they don’t seem to be in much of a rush to punch the clock. They all have paper bags full of deli breakfast. There’s no one running this job. They’re going to take their time. Breakfast is on Nancyboy, which of course gets passed on to the client.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” says Chris when he sees me—deadpan—to belie his surprise. “What’s up?” He throws a short wave and turns before I can respond. He goes to the corner sill and studies his breakfast from outside the bag. He reaches in, arranging the coffee and the buttered bun within. Then he takes the items out and arranges them on the sill. The other two, whom I don’t recognize, follow suit on their
own sills. They eat quietly. Young men slouched in preparation for becoming old.
“Well, well.”
KC’s at the door. KC and Bing Bing. The others don’t greet them, and they disappear behind a soffit and reappear again. By 8:30 everyone’s ready to go.
“You’re with us, professor.” KC beckons me to the paint supply. There’s not much I hate more than painting—not so much the actual rolling, but the prep, the cleanup. He points at the Baker, sucks his teeth, then points vaguely at the first few windows.
“We have to set this thing up,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else. Because it’s not a direct order, Bing Bing ignores it. He goes to the middle window and leans against it. He looks across at the other building—the apartments above the jeans store. Some of them are being renovated, as well, but they aren’t nearly the size of this one. A squat white man with a thick mustache and a very young black man work on a countertop.
“What you doin’, man?” KC barks. Bing Bing turns slowly and shrugs.
“Wa d’you won?”
“Set up the ting, mon!”
Bing Bing sucks his teeth, though not nearly as loud as KC, and waves me to him.
“C’mon, mon.” I go. We circle the broken-down scaffold and then stop. We both reach for the same side at the same time and both pull back. I let him pick it up. I’m not sure how he wants to go about putting it together—and a Baker isn’t complicated at all. You can look at one and intuit how it should work: two vertical steel sides, like ladders, with slots in them; two horizontal lengths with ends that pocket into the slots; a metal-edged sheet of plywood to fit as the platform. It’s the hesitation that gets us, the uneasy hierarchy that keeps us both staring at the section he’s holding.
“Get dat a won.” So it’s been decided. Bing Bing’s lord of this particular fiefdom. And because we have a leader, things move smoothly. We put the Baker together and wheel it over to the first window by the front. Bing Bing starts back to the supply pile. I try to follow, but he raises his hand to me like he’s a crossing guard. He doesn’t pick up his feet, and his boots are only laced to the ankle. The tops fan out and his jeans are stuffed into them. They remind me of Eskimo boots, or what I’ve imagined Eskimo boots, if there are such things, to look like—hides and pelts wrapped tightly but seeming to be loose around feet and ankles. He shuffles back atop the sawdust and gypsum-coated floor with a box of sandpaper. KC meets us beneath the window.
Man Gone Down Page 20
