This box contains all the visual evidence that the love of her life was a living, breathing man. Billy Balls stomped this earth, and the only proof outside of people’s hearts is in that box. Now, the box is upturned and emptied out onto the floor amid the filthy rubble.
I know my ma. I know she loves every single little treasure in this place, every garment in every trash bag on the floor, every minuscule drawing of mine that she’s kept since I was tiny; my belly button is in a drawer over there in the corner. She cherishes the soup pot, my little table, and the prince shoes I wore to Aunt Alice’s wedding, but nothing, no matter what, is more important than that box of photos, besides our own lives.
Her eyes go from shock, to horror, to blazing furious murder as she stares at its flung carcass. She bends, slowly, from the waist, straight down to the floor, and stands it upright. She curses quietly and begins talking to herself.
She delicately brushes each photo off as she puts it back in the box. I crouch down to help her, terrified and curious as to what she’s gonna do about this violation. After we have collected them, we realize that some are missing. She stands, eyes wide open, and lopes into the corridor. I follow her, down the stairs, through the hall, and out the front door.
She strikes the stance of a general, staking out a battleground on the stoop, searching back and forth. She spots a man, a few paces away, showing some photos to another dude. Eyes blazing, she lopes down the steps, two at a time, toward him.
He’s a Mexican guy, a good foot and a half shorter than my Ma. I watch from the steps as she charges directly for him, while he laughs and makes an obscene gesture, oblivious to the tornado headed his way.
She snatches the photographs from his fingers and gets right up close to his face. He tries to save his dignity by puffing out his chest and saying something to her, but there isn’t a whisker of doubt as to who is in charge. He hands over all the photos he has, and she spits, square between his eyes. I think I make out a “motherfucker” before she walks away, but it’s hard to be sure.
NOW OUR BATHTUB is rolling down the street.
Pop’s enforcer friend Hammerhead and two of his Puerto Rican boys hoisted it onto a dolly and they’re struggling it toward the Bowery. A plumber chick we found is carrying the brass pipes from the tub and sink. Ma has her hands loaded with plastic bags, clothes, and cigar boxes full of treasures. I’m a few paces behind, with an overflowing backpack.
The move is real. We are dismantling our castle piece by piece, inch by inch. Once she got the photographs, we went straight to the corner and called my pop. He called Hammerhead, and an hour later there were three guys and this butch chick in our apartment, taking apart everything that Ma said to.
One of them stood watch at the door, in case anyone from management tried to tell us we didn’t have the right to take the sink, or that the molding wasn’t supposed to come off the walls. Fuck that. We ripped out everything we wanted. I was tasked with stuffing my things into any random bags I could find and collecting my books.
When it came to the tub, Ma explained to Hammerhead that I was practically born in that tub. I had taken every bath of my life in it, and it was my birthright. He didn’t argue. The Rasta Bitch did, though. She showed up halfway through and they got into a screaming match about it. Finally, she understood that the only way Ma was gonna agree to go was with the claw-foot tub and the old basin sink, and the powder-pink toilet seat, too, so she turned around and left, cursing, waving her clipboard, and smacking her gum against her gold tooth.
All the windows were open but the outlets didn’t work, so we couldn’t turn a fan on, and it’s hotter than hell outside today. Literally. I can’t imagine there is a place where human souls exist that is hotter than our block at this moment. Watching the men struggle the bathtub down the stairs made me want to cry for them.
All of Fourth Street is creepy, but our new building is from another planet. The door is shitty black steel, and there are fluorescent lights in the hallway. As we push through the foyer a couple of kids stop playing to size us up. They look like juvenile delinquents.
It makes a helluva racket when Hammerhead’s boys start wresting the cast-iron tub up six flights, so the neighbors start filtering out to the hallway to see what’s up, and we get a good eyeful of our new surroundings. They look like awful people. Sour, mean-faced spirits, holding bottles of cheap liquor, skin ravaged by cheap drugs.
Hammerhead starts laying into my mom about her needing to get some boxes, that they’re not gonna do this whole fucking move in plastic bags in a thousand trips. She says fuck boxes, why the fuck would she spend money on those. The butch girl, impatient with the bullshit, interjects to ask where we want the tub, and starts soldering the beautiful brass pipes together. Finally, Ma agrees that we’ll go across to the food co-op and see if they have any boxes they’ll give us for free because she’s not gonna spend money on them. Hammerhead says he’ll take what he can get and goes out to smoke a cigarette.
We do nine trips back and forth, each time taking an armful of stuff. Hammerhead splits after the fourth run. He says he can’t keep his boys there carrying teddy bears around the block, so they take all the records and books and furniture, and leave us to do the little stuff.
Ma and Fritz, alone, the last of the Mohicans, dismantle every piece of molding they can find in the old building, and she scoops up wooden doors from the construction trash. She holds one piece out to me and says, “See, Kitty? It’s got the original horsehairs in it from the 1880s.”
The tenderness with which she caresses the hand-hewn beams, chopped with an ax, the glass, the plaster, the banister. This strikes me. I understand. This building is a part of us. I was born here, it’s all I know. We love our apartment so viscerally that when the time comes to stand in the doorway and actually look at it for the last time, we both feel sick.
Holding hands, we watch the sunlight fall onto the beautiful hardwood floors I learned to walk on, naked now, scraped where the bed was and where my crib once stood, littered with scattered, random remnants of our haphazard, bohemian existence. The dwelling of a gatherer and a little dreamer, we kiss it in our minds and take a mental snapshot, forever held in our hearts. We don’t say good-bye, we say “sooner” rather than “later.” The idea of not returning is unfathomable.
BY THE TIME IT’S ALL DONE I’m so tired I can’t stand up. Our bed is in the center of a huge pile of stuff, under the front window of our new apartment, and I flop down onto it on my face. The only light in the room is an awful overhead bulb, so Ma plugs in a clip lamp and sets it on the floor. She stretches over me and opens the window. Our tall mirror leans against a wall next to me, and I watch her in it. She turns on the radio, letting Count Basie and his boys create some familiarity in the room.
Futzing around the piles of clutter in the purple dusk light, Ma starts to cry softly. She doesn’t want to be here, or stay in for the night. I know her. She wants to go out and start walking. She wants to go to the edge of the Hudson River and scream out into New Jersey. She wants to kill every single one of the tenants that turned their back on our family of outcasts and cashed in on an idea of gentrified, whitewashed garbage, but she won’t, because I’m here and she wouldn’t leave me alone. Her kitty needs to rest.
She looks around at the flat, empty white walls, barren of all of our gathered treasure, and pain swims across her face. She reminds me of a puppy in a crate that has been separated from its mother too soon. I watch her with one eye, worried if she’s okay. I lay there, thinking about how I can help, until my one eye closes and I fall into a displaced sleep.
Chapter 16
He’s Got Nuts
Public School 3, West Village, fall 1994
EVERYTHING IN THE AUDITORIUM IS BEIGE. THE FLOOR IS amber wood, the lights glow yellowish-white, and the walls are an easy cream. The hardwood slants upward from an elevated stage in the center of the room, sloping up to three sets of doors at the back. We don’t usually play ball in here—this
is the kingdom of the thespians, poets, and tap dancers among us—but the gym is being renovated today, so they threw some Hula-Hoops and balls in here and set the throng loose.
I am at the top of the slope, with a dodgeball in my hand.
I’ve been told for years that I have a good arm, and it’s something I work on. My ma and I go to the park and I’ll drill pitches at her until my shoulder feels like it’s tearing out, which we’ve been doing a lot of since we moved into the nasty new building. I recognize that natural talents crop up in strange places, and it’s our job to nourish them. Ball sports are mine, along with acting, and I feel incredibly blessed. It could have been sewing, or cooking, or some other thing I find to be insufferably “girly,” but ball sports really work in my favor.
William is a lanky kid, a tower of bones in loose jeans and a plain T-shirt. A slick of jet-black hair parts in the center of his head, and he wears copper-wire-rimmed glasses. He lives in a gigantic, curved housing complex on Canal Street, overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. I went there once, just because we both lived on the East Side—friendship is a casual act of happenstance when you’re nine. William got real quiet when we entered the apartment. It was dark and smelled like broth. His parents were old and traditional, and only spoke to him in Chinese. I kept my backpack on, turned around, and scooted my little butt back out the door.
Now William is across the invisible line that separates victors from victims of my pitching practice. The ball I’m squeezing is squishy red rubber. The pockmark grip pattern makes it look like it has cystic acne. It has less air than a basketball so that when it hits you, it doesn’t hurt. I toe the center line, eyeing everyone on the other side. They don’t see me and my hidden ball yet. William is flailing around, taunting people, and I hone in on him. As he moves toward the line to my right, I rear back, one arm outstretched, almost pointing at him, and fire the ball like a cannon, straight at his ribs.
The force knocks him back a few steps, and he drops the ball he’s holding. He yelps and clutches his side. My team goes wild. I’m smiling. William is not. He yells something at me in Chinese and stares at me intently, as though he’s trying to understand something.
THAT AFTERNOON, we’re in the stairwell between the second and third floors. I’m hugging the wall, walking down to art class. William comes around the landing below me and looks up. With all the cockiness of the teenager that he isn’t yet, he bounds up the steps and plants himself in front of me. His gangly arm snaps out and he grabs my throat before I have a chance to move.
Vaguely, somewhere in the canals of my mind, I am conscious of the fact that this is probably retaliation for defeating him at dodgeball. He squeezes. Then his hand moves downward and he grabs my crotch.
Chip, our resident cool kid and basketball star, is behind him on the landing now. William turns and yells to him, victoriously: “See! I told you, son! He’s a boy. He’s got an Adam’s apple and nuts!”
Chapter 17
Fourth Street
January through October 1995
I’M SITTING IN THE FRONT WINDOW LOOKING OUT INTO THE winter night. We’re six floors up, so the snow-muffled sounds of the street feel very far away. I can see over the buildings across from us and into the darkness where I imagine our old house is now. I’d rather see it like this, from afar, than in real life, because this way I can put the neighbors in it, turn the lights on, and feel the warm sun on the floor.
I’ve been getting a new feeling lately, in my gut. It’s kind of a lonely, disorienting feeling, like the world has shrunk. My body is getting bigger but the world around it isn’t, and I’m hitting my head on the ceiling, like some kind of organism that’s different from the others. I’ve started to get these weird pangs. It’s a feeling like fear, but there’s nothing scaring me. People on the street just look like they’re in a different world, as if they’re walking behind glass. I’ve begun to wonder if they can see me. I know that sounds crazy, so I keep it to myself.
Our new building is narrow, like the inside of a steeple. It has water-stained walls and radiators that can burn the hair off your arm. A black cast-iron fire escape ricochets down the façade. I like to drag a pillow out there and read. Sometimes I’ll drop water balloons on taxis, but mostly I just look at the sky and talk to myself in accents. I’m a parrot, like my poppa and my little brother. If we hear it we can say it like we heard it. My brother can re-sound anything, including machines, beeps, dings, and buzzers. I’ve heard him do it on the phone and he’s only five.
For the first part of the year, my ma’s anxieties were mine, too. Whatever she thought was outrageous and corrupt would get me spitting and mad. One palm flat on the stucco, she would stand at the front of the new apartment and argue into the telephone, telling people it was unacceptable to expect a woman and her child to move into a dark cave lit with crappy poisonous fluorescent rings whose vibrations could give you epilepsy, and I would stand atop a chair in the living room and stamp my feet and yell in agreement.
What the housing association told her, that she didn’t repeat to me, was that they were due to start renovating our new building within a month of us moving in, and they would start whether or not we were still there, again. They’d just given us the top-floor place to get us to move. It started as a bluff because they wanted her to just shut up and take whatever they gave us, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with. Three months later, we were using flashlights to dodge piles of rubble on the pitch-black staircase.
Ma wants an apartment flooded with daylight, skylights preferably, an entire upper floor at best, but that’s not how low-income housing works. It’s by system; there’s an equation dividing how many occupants you have and how old they are by a mystery denominator to determine how many rooms you get. You don’t have the choice of what floor you’re on, and skylights are a pipe dream. This is not what Ma wants to hear, so the fight drags on.
Ma has been doing her best to hold it all together, even though she’s real sad and angry about being in this shitty building. She works a million odd jobs to try to keep our money up enough to eat, but it means we’re constantly tearing around from one thing to the next. School is stressful because I’m always on the offensive, waiting for a hand to grope me again or a comment to set off a chain of teasing, so I’ve started to make myself invisible.
Ma mostly tries to keep us busy outside the house. We spend lots of nights at other people’s places and she’s signed me up for more dance classes than ever. She got me into a carpentry class once a week, and we’ve started to go see movies. We get to see whichever ones are nominated for the Oscars because we’re members of the Screen Actors Guild. That’s a nice change. We’ve even started sneaking into the second half of a couple of Broadway shows. It’s easy. You just wait until intermission and walk back in with the crowd, linger around the lobby until the lights are almost down, and then slide into whatever empty seat you see.
I’m also in a play. It’s funny, we’re doing an off-off-off-Broadway production of Oliver! in a dingy church basement. The actors are plumbers and mattress salesmen who have dreams of Hollywood, and the director sucks. Ma has the lighting guy check my teeth because he said he went to dental school once upon a time. I’m in the chorus. The rest of the kid actors are all these middle-class bunnies with moms who send them to rehearsals with teddy bears and dinner. Hunger is a big theme of the play. I’ve made some friends there, and one kid, Jeremy, invited me out to his house in New Jersey. We’ll see.
Ma said his family stinks of money, so it’d probably be safe for me to go have a sleepover there. I don’t like sleepovers much, mostly because I don’t know how to act because I’ve only ever had a few. Also, there are holes in my mismatched socks, and I don’t want them to find out somehow that I’m a girl. It’s actually a very stressful process, but one of the kids told me Jeremy has a playroom, so I have to go check it out.
HIS MOM WAS WAITING in a big black SUV after rehearsal one Saturday, the heat cranked and steam pourin
g from the exhaust pipe. She was wearing a thick sweater and the car smelled good. It wasn’t just me going to their house; two other friends of Jeremy’s were coming, too, Eli and Sam.
I sat way in the back, watching as we drove through the tunnel to Jersey under the icy river, past the streams of cars and out into the quiet suburbs. I fought the feelings of panic that surged in my throat when thoughts of how to hide the truth from these kids overnight would surface. I didn’t feel scared about being so far from home with strangers; in fact, I looked at Jeremy’s mom’s cropped highlights and wondered if she’d consider adopting me.
I had never seen such a massive house. We pulled up into a driveway behind another gleaming car and piled out onto the lawn in front. The house was like an obese person whose rolls keep spilling out over their waistband, more and more rooms unfolding from the center. More and more windows with curtains behind them. The paint job was perfect.
This was my dream. A real house. Jeremy didn’t even stop to look at it when he jumped from the front seat. He just grabbed his backpack, sauntered up to the door, and led us inside. He’s used to this, I realized.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, and Jeremy’s mom told us to take off our shoes when we walked in. I was embarrassed and had a momentary crisis about whether to leave my holey socks on or run around barefoot, but I decided to try and keep the toe tucked under my foot so no one could see it.
I sat on one of two giant couches while Jeremy and his mom poured us all glasses of juice that they pulled out of a massive refrigerator with an ice maker on the front of it. That was one of the fanciest things I’d ever seen and I tried not to stare. It was a lot to take in. I couldn’t believe that Jeremy was so unaffected. He didn’t even seem to notice how crazy his life was.
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