Darling Days

by iO Tillett Wright

  There are restaurants on the boardwalk, Volna, Moskva, and others, where the gangsters hang out, where we stop to get bowls of delicious borscht, a beet soup that’s native to these guys, and kvass, a weird malt drink that Ma says is the closest thing to beer or Coca-Cola I’ll be allowed to touch for years.

  Sometimes, after all the swimming, sand in my butt, belly full of beets, we’ll walk the two miles down the boardwalk to Coney Island, looping around the very bottom of New York, where all the carnival rides are scattered like neon whiskers on the city’s chin.

  Where the melancholy sparkling September sun sets, the skyline bursts into spinning lights and flashing ice cream cones. They sell pastel-colored cotton candy in bundles bigger than my whole head (including my hair), long sausages in big, pasty buns, with huge vats of ketchup and mustard that fat kids squirt all over the place and sodas so big I’d have to pee six times. But I’m not allowed meat or sugar.

  As the darkness descends, a long chain of tiny lights approaches through the black sky from the east; all the planes with new visitors to New York, advancing slowly in single file, like a string of UFOs, headed to Kennedy airport somewhere up the coast behind us.

  We don’t do many of the rides because we usually only have money for one, but our favorite is the bumper cars. If we make the trek down to Coney we beeline it straight for the car track, with its blasting rap music and ballistic disco lights. There’s a guy in the ticket booth who gets on the mic and yells obscene stuff at ladies walking by to try and get them to come in. It works. They’re always laughing and lining up, so it’s always a wait to get in.

  Ma stands on the side and watches me as I tear around the track. I usually get a blue car. These things really bring out my competitive streak, so I rarely get smacked, but I do a lot of smashing and speeding around.

  By the time we’re done, I’m completely zonked, and we go across the street to the F train for the hour-long ride home, during which I sleep on Ma’s lap. When I wake up we’re back on the Bowery, getting Indian food from the gas station on the corner before I hit the pillow once and for all.

  Ma has taken to waking up early this year, at seven, before I do, to brush through my hair and get all the tangles out. She loves my hair so much, with its reddish-golden color, and she hums and sings different songs while she does it, brushing all the way through, down to the bottom at my butt. When she’s done, she braids it tenderly down my back. These trips to the beach have been making it hard for her to get the brush through my hair.

  WE’RE BOTH IN ONE OF YANIK’S CRAZY THEATER PIECES, and it’s performing in London. By the time we get on the plane my hair is just one big tangle at the back of my head because we’ve been at the beach so much.

  I’ve never been to London, but I’m pretty excited about the bobbies and I definitely want to meet the queen.

  My head is in my ma’s lap in her airplane seat, and she’s trying to brush my hair again. She looked down at me a minute ago and said, “Wow. Your little fox-colored head . . . your little fox-colored hair has a red, electric, like a neon red glass highlight. It’s like, wow, extraterrestrial. You look like a little fluorescent bag lady, all matted up.”

  She starts making strange noises when the brush gets stuck. She isn’t getting anywhere with getting the knot out, and I think it’s breaking her heart. The knots are at the roots.

  By the time we get to our hotel in London, a slender building on Gower Street, it’s late. Our room is at the very top under the roof. Ma asks Yanik to come up and says, “Yanik . . .”

  I see her take his arm, turn her head, and in a grave tone, say, “Cut her hair.”

  I can almost see her heart fall out of her chest, like when you’re on a roller coaster and you go over a big hill and it goes through your feet. It hurts her to say that, or even think it.

  But Yanik does it.

  Right then he sits me in front of a mirror and cuts my hair off with a big pair of scissors.

  The sound of the first snip is invigorating. It makes me sit upright in my chair and stop kicking my feet. Snip. He angles the big metal blades to get under the knots, and my hair falls around my shoulders in big clumps. Ma tells him to cut from the top so we can make the long strands into a wig.

  It occurs to me that Yanik is bald, and therefore a weird choice of barber. But I’m into it. I lean toward him, and he cuts and cuts. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip.

  The result is drastic, somewhere between a bowl and a helmet. Clearly, the person who wielded the shears is formerly Communist. You can tell by the severity of it. Ma makes Yanik put all my hair in a black plastic trash bag, and he puts it in the corner of the room under the slanted roof.

  The next day is my birthday, so they set up a little party for me. Yanik is there with his daughter, Mira, and some of the other actors in the play. I’m grinning and eating cake.

  I know Ma’s upset, but I’m thrilled with my new cut. It’s chin length, and chopped. Not like a boy’s, completely, but short enough. I feel free, like I can tear around the way I want to and I won’t be hampered by this pretty bouncing braid all the time.

  That night I take out my journal and write, “I have now become a boy.”

  I race up and down narrow cobblestone streets, imitating people’s accents in pubs. Ma and I go on seed-gathering adventures in the parks and back alleys, picking flowers and filling bags with a special dirt she wants to take home. We get tea in tiny, ornate green cups at cafés full of Middle Eastern men, and Ma even lets me eat a baklava in Brixton. I feel like a real world traveler when we see Big Ben, and Ma takes a million photos.

  A few days into the trip, Poppa and Rita show up with my little brother. He’s so small, and he’s dressed like a little Beatle, with perfect bangs, a London street cap, and a checkered suit. His mom sure keeps him looking sharp.

  He’s pretty eagle-eyed, too. He can spot a Ninja Turtle doll from one black-masked eye poking over the dashboard behind the windshield of a car two blocks down Carnaby Street.

  I want to play with him, but Rita is in a permanent fury and throwing fits. The walls are bulging out of the hotel with the sounds of her shouting and screaming, making a scene, so I leave them alone. Ma says Rita has baby ego problems that make her need to steal attention any way she can.

  Ma and I go to the queen’s palace and I inquire about visiting her. The guy in the fuzzy hat outside tells me that she isn’t in.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “She’s in her castle in Scotland at the moment, but I can give you an address for her lady-in-waiting if you’d like to send a letter.”

  I take the address, and I know that the lady-in-waiting and I will become pen pals, but the guy in the fuzzy hat can’t possibly know that.

  When we get back to the hotel, Ma flips out and starts cursing. The bag filled with my hair is gone. She tears the room apart looking for it and then drags Yanik up to explain. He says he forgotten what it was and threw it out with the trash. She almost decks him.

  Crushed, tears start rolling down her face. I go over and hug her leg and tell her it isn’t a big deal, that I will grow more in no time. But to her we have lost a harvest of a crop I have been growing for years, an actual piece of me, now out in the cold world, where someone can use it for some macumba spell.

  Later that night she pets my head as I’m falling asleep and murmurs, “It’s like something being robbed from your most intimate . . .”

  I’m already used to the short hair now. I can put my pencil behind my ear, my goggles fit better, and hats are a whole new universe. Ma’s fingers keep pulling at the ends of my hair and she moans occasionally, sadly.

  “It’s okay, Ma. Don’t worry. It’ll grow back. Everything will be the same again.”

  Chapter 7

  The Invasion

  Third Street, fall 1991

  THE WAY MA DESCRIBES IT, IT’S LIKE THEY RODE IN FROM Fourth Street on horseback. One day we are minding our own business in the asshole of the universe, and the next d
ay these squares are galloping in, handing out bribes or slaughter as they go. Either you’re with them, or you’re gonna lose your apartment. It’s like the German warriors in Alexander Nevsky with their flaming pits, but this is real life.

  In the center of the petri dish that is our neighborhood, our building is a shining castle of community that the rest of the block has no concept of. The neighbors have each other’s backs and we keep shit running smoothly. We don’t need any bureaucracy or government input, we pay $125 a month, straight to the City of New York, they give us the keys to the boiler, and we handle the rest. There’s heat when it’s cold, and the roof door stays open when it’s hot. Period.

  Our building repels “normal” people. They’d have to love cockroaches, scalding radiators, and thin walls to want to live here, and then they would have to establish their own niche in the zoo and defend it. Everyone’s door is a slab of featureless metal punctured by multiple police locks, because there is a high likelihood that some crackhead or starving vagrant is going to try to lift what little shit you have while you’re out or sleeping.

  The doors are high and dark, with old transom windows. Every edge is kind of soft-focused due to centuries of thick paint layers that suffocate the original details. When a piece cracks off you can count the richly colored rings, like a petrified tree.

  Our building has a broad chest of red brick, festooned with fire escapes, four windows across. There are two windows to each apartment and four apartments on each floor, two at the front and two at the back.

  There is a cluster of trash cans to the left of the entrance, and a metal cage to the right where the maintenance men keep their cleaning shit. In the center are five concrete steps, flanked by a pair of ovals like a robust pair of women’s thighs, caked in beige stucco.

  My poppa says Greek plays always happen in front of the palace, not inside, and I can see why. If it’s not old people talking to themselves, misfits forcing conversation on innocent women, or teenagers yelping and lighting fireworks, the stoop is also home to every intimate freak-out, marital spat, and parental screaming match that should play out in the privacy of people’s homes. Only an absolute masochist would take the apartment with a bedroom window directly overlooking this chaotic mess. A masochist like Joey Charles.

  Joey is known for waving his .44 Magnum out his window and yelling in the middle of the night, which probably means he has more distressing things going on behind his blackout curtains than the noise from the stoop. Ma says he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and that’s why she likes him. She’s drawn to men with such a disposition, unfortunately. They are a special species, oddballs with too much juice and a violent streak. Sometimes Joey gets taken away to “rest” for a few months, and we keep track of his mail.

  Joey is of the breed of thick-skinned, sandpaperlike personalities that are drawn to the life down here, each of them marked by their personal measure of poverty, illness, bad luck, or addiction. Unemployable misfits, worn down by life at the outermost edges of society.

  This area is home to a lot of fidgeters and pacers shouting at the sky, people with fuses permanently lit.

  Some of them come to slum it on a dare, looking to score cheap. In no time they are snatching at the lowest rungs of the substance ladder to quiet the clanging in their minds.

  Some of them are people who have nothing, so they scour the streets and make palaces out of windowless boxes filled with the resurrected spirit of other men’s garbage. And then there are the psychos . . .

  One day shortly after I was born, a blond Texan kid with a long beard tried to talk his way into our apartment for the night with some Christian gibberish, but my dad shifted me into the crook of his arm farthest from the creepy kid, and told him no way. Later the guy killed a German ballerina and fed her to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, stewed with onions.

  The first memory I have of Joey is when my ma and I were trying to wrangle a stolen three-foot metal street sign that said BROADWAY into the entranceway, and the hall being blocked by his hairy, rotund mass. Stuffed into a beige trench coat with the collar popped up, sweating profusely, he was pounding a brass police lock into its latch. Joey had drilled countless locks onto his apartment door and he was struggling to shut the last one, cursing to himself.

  He and Ma exchanged greetings, and unsurprisingly, Joey took a shine to her. He came up a few days later to sit around the kitchen and regale her with stories. They became fast friends.

  But back to our building.

  When you enter, you are walking into a living organism. Either Joey’s screaming accosts your eardrums from the right, or the first door on your left creaks open until the chain snaps taut. A pale, red-bearded face peers out and inspects you as you pass. This belongs to Fritz, an emaciated recluse who locks himself in his apartment for days on end, tinkering with pianos he’s hauled in from the street. Fritz only wears one set of black clothes, and he has long bushy hair the color of Tropicana orange juice, which gives him the stretched-out look of a Goth leprechaun. He smokes pot incessantly, and his skin is translucent from never leaving the house.

  Over several years of trick-or-treating and kid manipulation, I’ve managed to get an eyeful of the inside of his cluttered apartment. He has six upright pianos crammed in there, and he’s built a loft for his bed above the kitchen. There are plastic bags filled with his stuff all around, hanging from nails banged into two-by-fours that he’s painted gloss black. His kitchen is lit by one exposed bulb over a sink piled up with vinyl records and unspooled cassettes.

  Once you’ve made it past Joey and Fritz, the gray-green stairwell starts halfway down the hall. This is a godsend, because beyond that it reeks of cat piss to the point of nausea. The left rear apartment is inhabited by Susan, a diminutive middle-aged woman with unfortunate helmetlike hair and a pinched, perpetually pissed-off face. We call her the Cat Lady because she’s got seventeen cats in there that she’s “rescued,” turning her tiny studio apartment into a feline outhouse.

  On the other side of the wall from us is Henri, a pompous French filmmaker with a blond buzz cut and tight suits. When my parents were subletting his apartment, I was conceived on his kitchen floor and nearly born in the living room. We can hear him clomping around in there with his heavy footsteps, yelling into the phone in an exaggerated accent like he’s an avant-garde film mogul.

  MY FATHER ACTUALLY STOLE OUR APARTMENT. After I was born and he realized subletting Henri’s wouldn’t last, he kept his eyes peeled for a chance to crack the impenetrable waiting list for this building. One day he spotted our young junkie neighbor wobbling out her door at midnight with a huge overstuffed suitcase. She couldn’t make the rent. Three months later Poppa broke in through the fire escape window and stole the place. In New York City a rent-controlled apartment is gold, and he wanted to leave my ma something. It took him a year to con a receptionist at the city to accept a rent check from him, but as soon as she did, they had to give him a lease.

  Below us is Peruvian Miriam, who I call the Purple Woman for no apparent reason, and her husband, Miguel. Once, Miguel came up in his pajamas and told us, in his tired, unhysterical way, that there was shit oozing through his ceiling, and could we please make it stop. Our bathroom is the size of a British phone booth, only painted bright green. It’s just off the kitchen, and when we opened the door we saw that the toilet had backed up and flooded the room.

  Two floors above Fritz is Kevin. He’s a sweet Vietnam vet. An Italian biker kind of dude, who likes army pants and fixing things. If we are ever in trouble, Ma yells “Keeeeevinnnnnn!” into the air shaft between the buildings, and he comes running down with a two-by-four studded with nails.

  Kevin is best friends with Benny, who is the unofficial mayor of the building. Together they take care of shit as it comes up. If the boiler is giving us problems, we call them. If a pipe is leaking, they take care of it. If somebody is selling drugs out of their apartment, Kevin and Benny knock on their door. Kevin and Benny came in to sort out
the shit flood, grumbling and cranky, but they handled it for us.

  Benny is nearing sixty. He favors khaki shorts and white tennis sneakers, with tube socks pulled up to his calves. He has a receding hairline of clipped dark curls, and I like to watch his skinny muscles ripple when he moves around. He’s not much taller than me, but he cares about his body and he keeps weights on his living room floor. He reminds me of a retired tennis pro. He is actually a retired porn star.

  His girlfriend and ex-costar, Stephanie, could be Asian, Native American, Latina, who knows, but she’s very beautiful, petite, and sugar sweet.

  Ma told me how she used to see Stephanie on posters for the peep show spots on Forty-second Street. She was a legitimate star, who went by the stage name of Cynthia Fox. She did the live strip show circuit for a while and made hundreds of films before retiring. She had a drinking problem back then, but not anymore. Not a drop. She told my Ma, “Once you’re a pickle, you’re a pickle. You never be a cucumber ever again.”

  Benny and Stephanie’s reign over the top floor makes Benny the watchdog of the roof. The roof is our sanctuary. It’s our playhouse, our reading room, our rehearsal space, our sun lounge. We live anywhere and everywhere but within our apartment, which is the place where we keep our shit and sleep.

  When I got chicken pox last year and was quarantined, barred from school, we spent a week up there, every day, hanging out in the sun, just Ma and I. She covered me in so much SPF 70 that I looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost. We played ball, made up stories, she read me books, and we hung out on our Chinese bamboo mats and stared at the sky.

  You can see the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, parts of Brooklyn, a bridge, and a good portion of Midtown. There’s the clock in the Cooper Union building on Eighth Street. Our view is a stellar one, and it feels expensive. Every day when we get restless in the apartment, no matter if it’s high summer and the roof is soft and stinking of tar, or if it’s deep winter and there are lakes of ice and slush on the buckled asphalt, we make our way up there for an homage to the open sky.