The drums come back—the drums and KC.
“That’s looking good, man.”
I nod a thanks, abbreviated somewhat because I really don’t want to take credit for it. KC and I used to get along well—trade off buying coffee and such. I wonder if he still has the nail gun he borrowed. I don’t care. It has been a while, which makes me think that there would be, even between two fairly stoic men, some nod to friendship. And true, we hadn’t kept in touch since that time, but aren’t friendships like that? KC seems to be feeling me out all over again, as though I’d hurt him before. Maybe he’s high. I thought he wasn’t into that—at least not on the job. “Hey, man, what’s up?” as though I’d just seen him the day before. Maybe he had recognized the past—things were still cool and seeing me was no big deal. “Take it easy,” he says as he backs away, wiping at the frame. He looks down at his shoes and I think I catch it coming off him—shame. KC feels sorry for me. I turn back to the window, back to the rasping, the polyrhythm, with the drums. More screaming wood on the saw. I look beyond the stops—outside. They’ve got the countertop on. The white man runs his fingertips along the top. I follow the exterior wall down. Two women moving in the street catch my eye. They disappear into the jeans joint. Because of the double-height storefront, I can see over the first racks of pants and shirts, which bear the company logo. Beyond them are racks with belts and shelves with sweaters—all monochrome but rich hued. They look, on this gray day, juxtaposed to my still-damp clothes, to be warm and comfortable. Claire would like these things. I wonder what she’d say if I were to show up with a pair of Lucky Jeans and a monochrome sweater. “How did you do that?” But she wouldn’t be angry. She wouldn’t be suspicious. I think she would be happy. She needs new clothes—nice casual clothes. And a guy, even a broke one, needs to be able to buy his girl a nice little something every once in a while. It’s good for the both of them. Young girls shouldn’t get weary. Tenderness would be expressed in the fact that somehow, someway, you came up with the dough. You went through whatever it was you went through to get it, and in the end you were still thinking about her. I find it somewhat amazing, ridiculous, that I’ve never thought of a present as a symbol. Love manifested in the material, or better yet, the thought behind the material: These jeans mean I’m thinking of you, baby.
I have one small patch left to clean and I realize that I don’t know what I’m being paid—if I’m being paid at all. How many passes over engraved dirty daisies equals one pair of designer jeans. Finally, the jackass on the saw stops ruining wood.
Everyone begins drifting—shifting around their stations.
“Break,” says KC, sneaking up from behind. He clangs his putty knife against one of the Baker’s verticals. I drop my piece of sandpaper.
I climb down. Now everyone is mulling and going into their pockets for money. Chris waves me over. Now that the first stage of morning gruntiness is over, he seems a bit warmer. I join the gathering. Chris beckons me closer with a head nod.
“Yo, man, what’s up?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Got a pencil?”
I produce one and he passes me a small piece of cardboard. I take it and try to decipher it. I’m puzzled—lost for a moment in its blankness.
“Regular coffee. Buttered roll. Thanks.” He says it all without looking at me, only at the cardboard, waiting for me to do something. I don’t know what.
“You get that?” He gives me an eyeball—quick and lewd—like he’s an impatient flasher and his eyelids are overcoats. I connect the blank slate with the pencil: Write. I write. I’m taking orders. I do it somehow: coffee, tea, biscuits, cigarettes. I do it. Somehow. Then I pretend to segregate the money they give me—discreet folds, mental notes. They each come in turn, Magi-like in their solemnity, as though each is making an offering. “Banana, too . . . ,” sings the Dubliner. He’s not a bad chap, I suppose, but now, of course, I despise him. He slips me his prefolded dollars. “Thank you,” he says. Now Bing Bing. “J’wan caffee—b’yan butta, na de toata—a’heet?” And there’s apology in his voice, too, but what he should be sorry for is the brutality of the sameness and disparity between Kingston and Dublin. Shake’s maternal grandfather was an Anglo-Irish missionary to Antigua. He found a wife there and then brought her to Jamaica. They had a daughter, who living on that island of “rough people” with all her island haughtiness married herself a rough Jamaican countryman. Shake was fucked from jump—split in two at least—but he tried to create some bastard language that pointed at where he’d been, where he liked to think he was going. These two bastards refused to even be American—to assimilate.
I go to the elevator and think about the elevator woman, elevator girl. What should I call her? I look at her door. What is she doing in there? Had she left for the day? Her elevator jerks up and then starts down—clanking. I sniff for her, but only for a second, then I’m ashamed—disgusted. I get out and go outside. It’s stopped raining. The air doesn’t feel like August. It’s more like October—cool and sharp in the nostrils. A leaf falls from somewhere onto my shoulder. Summer’s gone. It blew right through here, and I seem unable to recollect what happened. I don’t remember heat. I don’t remember long days or soft evenings. Soon the mornings will all be dark.
Across the street the jeans joint is jumping. People need pants, I suppose. I’d like to go in, but I don’t. I have a job to do, and as I walk west on Broome, I wonder if it’s more honorable to be a good lackey or a bad one. If anything can be claimed—any victory at all—in the fact that you’ve failed. Would a genius fail an errand for a fool? I have money. I have a list. But I have nowhere to go. I haven’t spent time in this neighborhood in years. Something tells me to walk away from SoHo and the absurdly priced muffin shops. I’d like for the elevator lady to appear, but what would I ask her: Excuse me, do you know where I could find an inexpensive muffin? There’s no reason it should, but the question sounds ridiculous in my head, and I push on. There must be a deli somewhere. It is after all New York City, where there seems to be one for every resident.
I turn south on West Broadway and stop at Canal. Nothing. I turn to face the east. The street is full of vendors and shoppers—carnival-like—the neon of the stereo stores, foam rubber stores, barkers with counterfeit Gucci and Prada and Chanel. The sidewalks are thick with people and carts, and the street is full of honking and lurching vehicles in perpetual and eternal gridlock. Potholes, sinkholes, tar patches, steel plates, and a traffic cop who stands just off the sidewalk at the corner of Church—white gloved, futile, full of bad faith. Nothing good can be had down that way.
I keep heading west—outpacing the tunnel-bound traffic. Every car seems to be honking. Traffic jams have always made me nervous, whether I’m in a car or not. I’m troubled by the origin of the stoppage or slow down. There’s a blockage somewhere, an accident perhaps, because of which, someone is dead or near death. And there are the obvious associations that come with blockage and death and the too close proximity of people and cars and carbon monoxide. My heart is about to explode. At the same time—and perhaps less reasonable—everything is too heavy. There’s too much weight. You can see it—the potholes, the sinkholes. Manhole covers under which there are tunnels, tubes, grooves for pipe and wire, sewers, and of course, subways. You can hear it in the hollow boom of the steel plates covering the faults. And this isn’t a strident judgment—not some puritanical metaphor. The city is, and I say it without humor, hollow at its core. There aren’t any insides. I count the cars, the trucks, the squat and the tall stone and steel buildings; it’s a wonder that it all doesn’t implode.
Get coffee! I scan west. There can’t be anything that way on Canal. I cross West Broadway and decide to look north up Hudson—nothing there, either. I stop and re-collect my thoughts—not that I’ve really been thinking about anything other than the tarmac folding in on itself and everyone and everything tumbling into the void. Not an apocalyptic vision, only an exercise in layman engineering.
A garbage truck
bellows, and then I smell it—the stink—rotten chicken and ass. It goes right to my stomach and I gag, almost lose it right there. I hear a voice in my head say, “Claire, oh, Claire.” But she’d actually puked. She’d waded into traffic like she always did, and I, as always, had asked in the accusing and arrogant way appropriate for a rhetorical question, “What are you doing?” She’d stepped back onto the curb, made eye contact with the driver, and then retched into the gutter—shameless—like an old drunk. People watching had sidestepped her breakfast in disgust and the driver had looked down from his cab with the straight-faced Anglican disdain and horror reserved for use by her people. She apologized to me, but I was used to the puke of drunks and she was my wife. Within fifteen minutes we were home watching the dark blue line appear on the pregnancy test. She shrieked like someone who’d just seen a ghost or a rat and then realized that the haunt, the vermin would be back soon. And this was someone who’d believed she wanted children—an oddity, really, for her generation—her one ambition, becoming a comfortable housewife. And I don’t think that it was in reaction to her mother, who was of course, ambitious. Who at the time of her husband’s death, although already wealthy, started, then grew and sold her own business. She hadn’t been a bad mother. Claire had never accused her mother of not loving her. But she wasn’t, as Claire puts it, the nurturing kind.
So Claire in all her horror was pregnant with our first. And even though I couldn’t show it, I was horrified, as well—another in the line of Ham, the line of Brown. For some obnoxious reason I wished that, and then was convinced that, C was a girl. I joked, or pretended to be joking when I said, “I don’t know what to do with a boy.” Claire went along with that pretense, but of course we weren’t ready for him or her. We were still in the netherworld of postadolescence. I was just happy to be alive, and she was still dreaming like a child. She had plans for herself, plans for me: some amorphous blend of art and love and sex and race where money needn’t be discussed or considered; where the limitations of her inexperience would finally be realized, considered, felt; where the limitations of my experience . . . I’d already considered my experience and already understood on some basic level that things weren’t going to work out, that I was, in every sense of the phrase, born to lose, that the day when people like me, whatever and whomever they may be, win wouldn’t be a good day for others. “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Dinner parties, cocktails. “What’s he singing about mommy?” I think it was the brownlike-poop kid who’d asked. His mother explained, quite well, I thought, what the song meant. But she couldn’t explain that when the revolution did come, it was coming for her and hers and everything she thought she knew and loved.
And Claire. We watched her belly grow—snapshots, narrated videos, sonograms, heartbeats, little feet kicking. I watched her change into a woman. I would spy on her talking to her baby. She’d wake me up every morning before dawn to put my hand on her tummy to feel him kick and stretch. And even in the dark I knew that on her long mouth was that crooked smile. “She’s perfect,” she’d whisper.
In another time or place C and Claire would’ve died. Her blood pressure began to creep up in the last three weeks of her pregnancy—140 over 85, 150 over 90. Then it jumped: 160 over 95, 165 over 100. Her womb began to calcify. C was slowly suffocating, slowly starving. Perfect to good to satisfactory to poor to the hospital—an emergency. Pitocin, blood pressure cuff, fetal heart monitor. The newly grave face of our midwife. The unfamiliar doctor. Every fifteen minutes the cuff would fill. There was the clicking, buzzing, the hiss of air and the velcro peel. Then the readout, always worsening. C’s heart rate dropping, leveling, rising, dropping. And since there had been no explanation for this condition, there needn’t be any explanation for anything else happening. She’d wanted to have him “naturally,” but there wasn’t anything natural about this: beeping, hissing machines; wires; strange technicians; institutional paint colors, the cold gurney rail; trying to hold her hand among the tubes and wires; trying to block her view of the monitors, which, had she been able to see would have read, “You are dying.” Our child was killing her; and my selfish indulgence—knowing what it meant to be born to lose.
They had to cut him out. I had to keep a straight face—a happy one, even—for her. I was all she had to look at. So at the same time, I saw her eyes and her ovaries, her restless, questioning lips, and her blood. Then my boy—his perfect, unsqueezed head. They handed him to me—balls first. I must have waited an instant too long to take the bloody, mucousy thing. “It’s okay. Hold him. He’s yours.” But I wasn’t afraid of that. In fact, I felt that I should be the only one, in that room full of white people, to hold that dusky purple boy. And that made me of two minds: one was waiting for something to go horribly wrong; the other scanned time, scrolling forward to the future when everything would go wrong. I was premourning him and premourning his loss of me. And then, as best I could, I banished those thoughts from those minds and then banished those minds. They gave him to Claire. She got it. It was simple. That was her boy. She loved him. He was beautiful. The only significance—the umbilical cord, which the doctor, scissors in hand, asked if I wanted to cut.
They tried to take him to the nursery to allegedly weigh and test and measure him all over again. I tried to insist that I go with them. Claire had muttered something like “. . . no bottle. Nipple confusion . . . ,” but I waited with her until they got her into a room and had the morphine pumping. Then I went up. The nurse was changing his diaper, handling him like a frying chicken. I pressed up to the glass. She put him down, almost naked, in the warming bin. His eyes were closed. I watched him startle, grabbing at imaginary things, spasming in fear. The nurse came in with a bottle and roughly jammed it into his mouth. I knocked on the glass. She came outside.
“Yes, daddy?” she said sharply with a lispy accent. I think she was Korean. She stood in front of me as though we were about to each take our roles in the bizarre deli wars between her people and mine.
“My wife doesn’t want him to have a bottle, nipple confusion, you know.”
“He’s startling.” She slowed her speech as though she was considering something. “Sometimes a baby startles when the mother takes drugs.”
I walked past her, entered the nursery, and took my son. She protested and tried to block the exit, but when she saw that I wasn’t going to stop, she moved. I walked briskly down the hall. I didn’t know where I was going. They caught me waiting for the elevator.
“Daddy, you can’t do that.” She’d recruited three black women to do her dirty work. This nurse, thick bodied and smiling, cooed calmly. The other two nodded and smiled along with her. One of them had a cart. She gestured for me to put the boy inside.
“Hospital rules. Babies have to ride. You can take him, but he has to ride. Okay, daddy?”
Claire was whacked-out on morphine when I found the room. Nurses from other departments peeked their heads in to get a glimpse of the renegade father, and that kind of got me through the day. They made fun, but they were kind. But when night fell, they stopped coming. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I was fixed on his breathing. New-borns, ugh, it seems to be such a struggle for them—sometimes panting shallowly, sometimes taking one short breath and then waiting, then one brief exhalation, then waiting. I couldn’t stand it, so I spent the evening wheeling him around the hospital, skating under the fluorescents, atop the buffed bright floor. Skating the glowing, waxed hallways, the light so bright that it threatened to flash us into oblivion.
I got us out of there as soon as I could, got Gavin’s harsh jalopy and loaded them in. Me, my bride, and our boy, going home in a borrowed car—bad shocks—over and into potholes. Bang! Claire screaming again and again like she was being torn apart repeatedly. The three of us, some lost little tribe, descending, like it was the first time, into Brooklyn.
When the revolution comes, they might be coming for me, too. If they cut me open, they’d find that undigested prime steak in my stomach. I
find a deli tucked in the middle of the block, Broome between Hudson and West Broadway. I go in and start grabbing things in a rush, then I remember the list, which of course I can’t find. I replay each interaction: one black tea, four regular coffees, four buttered rolls, one toasted bagel. It all goes rather smoothly. I even get extra sugar and milk and such and get out without a hitch—back down Broome to Greene—when I realize I don’t have a key or a phone number or a phone to call with. There’s no buzzer, either. But of course, she’s there, this time with a yoga mat and water bottle. She’s also found her sunglasses.
“We meet again.” I don’t know why, but I expect more from her. I know, for some reason, that she has more to say. Then I think that maybe she does—just not to me. I don’t seem to make her nervous, and she probably figures she hasn’t any reason to fear or respect me. Basic politeness is enough. Any acknowledgment should be enough.
When I don’t answer, she wrinkles her brow and bends toward me slightly as though she’s peering into my consciousness.
“Bad day?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Break time?”
“Yes.”
My neutral accent betrays me—makes her straighten—reexamine me from a new point of view.
“How many breaks do you guys get?”
I pretend not to understand. She sees through this. I’ve equaled the stupidity of her opening line. We’re even.
“Who’s the general contractor?”
“John Leary.”
“Is he a smallish man who drives a fancy truck?”
“Yes.”
She feels better about my speech now, comfortable. The gopher bags and the voice—doesn’t seem to bother her, as though the disconnect hadn’t occurred to her at all.
“How is he? Is he good to work for?”
“I just started. I don’t really know.”
I’m only able to spot the worst dye jobs, so I can’t tell if her hair is natural. It’s streaked—red and blonde in a majority of long, auburn curls—but some of it is wavy and it makes her appear to have an elegant mess of carefully coiffed snarls. There’s a hint of sun on her head now, just one side. It makes the color of the darkened side rich, gives her hair a depth and volume that makes me want to touch it. Fortunately, she speaks.
Man Gone Down Page 22
