Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  ■

  As she traveled toward date number two on the bus up Michigan Avenue, still trying to admit to herself that she’d decided to go to That Maurice’s birthday party at all, she looked down to her left and into the sun. Where once lay strewn and tangled abandoned railroad tracks, she saw new, sapling-studded rows of townhouses and signs: 2 Bdrms of Brilliant Light Starting from the Low-400s. She thought to herself, “Botox and a nose job, and what the fuck does low-400s mean?” In the end, she couldn’t file the altered landscape under anything resembling “change” in her thoughts. She knew ripples would pour out of the money changing between the same hands and shift the gravity of things. Maybe that is change?

  Everyone else would be forced to react. At the same time, she wasn’t inspired by the, in her ears, delusional howling about gentrification either. “Who the hell got to keep their neighborhoods?” she thought, with a force that made her look around to see if she’d actually said it out loud. If she had said it out loud, no one on the bus cared. She hadn’t invested in either position. She’d opted out or tried to. So she figured her thoughts didn’t really count and that’s exactly the way she’d wanted it. For a minute, she even thought about giving brothers like Maurice Thomas a break. Maybe she would. She thought, “Who knows, maybe this party would be OK.”

  Maybe it was all the maybes. She thought of Arturo again. She’d gone home with him and she’d seen the gentrification wars up close and impersonal in New York City in the summer of 1991. Art had told her about growing up in Alphabet City and it had sounded like Mister Rogers. Of course, it wasn’t that way at all but you couldn’t tell him that. She remembered the banners and fliers from that summer: Save Tompkins Square Park. The first time she saw one of the placards, she’d asked Arturo, “Where is Tompkins Square Park?” He pointed across Avenue A into a tangle of weeds and bent iron fencing behind which she’d seen all manner of makeshift dwellings and the rhythms of the homeless men and the thin-boned, addicted white girls who, from what she could tell, lived in there. “Save that? Too late, baby,” she’d said. Art shook his head: “They just want to clean up the place, Ndiya, are you mad at that?” And she: “Yeah, and clean you right up and out of here along with it.” But she didn’t mean what he thought she meant. As always with Art, she meant, “Maybe I am.” She’d walked through the park with him several times already. She’d certainly never had the impression that it was a place to be saved.

  She’d recognized the people living in that park. Mostly they were dangers to themselves. Most of the men were vets and other fugitives cured when Reagan cut the funding and “liberated” them from the VA or whatever other kind of care they’d been getting. The girls and their paramours were all, she suspected, from Milwaukee and they couldn’t seem to tell if they were being saved by dope or punished by life in New York. “Saved or punished,” she thought, “it beat Milwaukee.” By Milwaukee, Ndiya didn’t mean the town itself. She’d never been there, after all. She thought of it, instead, as the paradigm town of Happy Days white amnesia and numbness that silently, somehow, seemed to work like quarantine for the however many hundred thousand black people who lived there. That could be any number of American cities. In Milwaukee, as in Chicago, as elsewhere, it all happened under the banner of the stolen American Indian name and that clinched the cynical deal and made most of what she saw burn down her arms from her young and half–numb struck flamethrower of a brain.

  Riding the bus to Maurice’s party, she could see that she and Art both had had it all wrong back then. The placards and petitions and protests weren’t meant to save or clean up the park. They were meant to prevent the police from occupying it in order to clean it up. The white girls she saw who’d left Milwaukee to grow mats on their heads and convince themselves that “life” meant forgetting to change your T-shirt, they didn’t want the park cleaned up. They wanted it preserved so that the twisted thicket could remain just like it was. All this was far beyond Ndiya at the time. In retrospect, she was happy to have misjudged it like she did. In a way, by then, her own private pain and the numbness she guarded it with had made her conservative. If it hadn’t, she might have really hurt somebody. Likely, she’d have hurt Art, even worse than she did. Art who ordered and gathered his own thoughts by disagreeing—albeit always in the most agreeable terms—with whatever Ndiya said. Art said he wanted a “good life for himself.” Somehow this meant he’d convert all memory and things he saw in the present into models of such a good life to be replicated.

  Outside Tompkins Square Park and down the block were huge, would-be empty lots full of fragments from broken bricks and pieces of broken window frames. Arturo explained that the buildings had been abandoned and then demolished and the bricks had been mined for use in suburban housefronts all over the country. Not always in that order, either. Often bricks were mined while the buildings stood. He said white men used to come to the neighborhood and offer a dollar for every hundred bricks the kids could load on their pickup trucks and flatbeds. A penny a brick. Arturo and his friends had worked many summer nights until dawn loading down those trucks with bootlegged bricks. The buildings leaned, floors bowed, the walls in the hallways curved. Slats under the busted plaster protruded like ribs of an animal left for vultures on some Sunday afternoon wildlife show. In the basements, the whole structures of shifting, diminishing weight made low moans and sharp coughs. Art said he knew two boys and their sister who were killed when a floor and ceiling collapsed after too many bricks were mined from weight-bearing walls in the basement. At dawn, after those nights, their hands were hot and raw, forearms scraped from carrying bricks stacked in each arm. When the light came up, the trucks drove away up First Avenue loaded down so that the front wheels looked like they barely met the pavement.

  Ndiya was always amazed that Art could relate stories such as these and retain a sense of optimistic detachment, as if the moral of all of these stories was that everything happened for the best. At school she’d admired this in him, and she had thought it was a radical kind of focus; at home it seemed much more like a determined blindness.

  In these lots cleared by Arturo and them, Ndiya saw where hundreds of people had built shelters. Families lived there. She could see the World Trade Center in the background, and in the foreground lived a shantytown. There was another down the block and there was another around the corner from there. She identified with these people somehow. She’d prayed for the buildings she grew up in to be vacated and destroyed. On a bad day she just prayed for them to be destroyed. She felt something familiar in the dissembled misery she witnessed in these lots. She saw kids playing much like she’d played, getting pain and fun and joy and bitterness and togetherness and betrayal all tangled up with each other in their bodies until, she thought, no one could get them untangled. Anyone who suggested that they could be untangled was an enemy. They’d grow up like she had, until she hadn’t. They’d be afraid of all the people they loved until they didn’t know if they were in love with fear or afraid of love itself.

  Remembering all of this on the bus to Maurice’s party made her feel it all again. Most powerful of all those feelings was the truly strange rain of realization that happened when she began to learn that this inseparable tangle wasn’t true for everyone. Or that’s what they said.

  Some people she saw on her walks through Art’s neighborhood were addicted already. She recognized them because they were the only ones who walked like they knew where they were going in the morning. Others soon would be. One or two of those kids in the shanties would move though it all just like she had and come out without any visible scars. They’d bear their experience, mostly a series of things that should have but didn’t happen to them, like an unintelligible alphabet written in kerosene on their skin. Their lives would swerve between lighted matches that would touch off sketches of flame on their skin and furnaces would roar in chests, fire in their veins. Then, if they were lucky, they’d scramble around lighted matches and call it life. All her life, Ndiya had found sh
e could recognize these people no matter where she saw them. She’d never been able to make up her mind what, in fact, distinguished them from the crowd. She could feel these people recognize her as well. Their eyes would catch and fall open. There’d be a quick nod and then they’d turn and be off.

  That’s what she had thought in her twenties. None of it was true. And most of her sudden flashes of anger were really about the numb wall she’d put between herself and her actual past. In a way that was even less memorable to her than it was visible to other people, she wasn’t one of the spared, to whom things hadn’t happened that the odds said should have happened. In fact, as if in a twisted symmetry, things that should never have happened to anyone had happened to her. In just that way, by changes almost as simple as grammar in a sentence, she’d invented a story to stand beside her. This twin person could negate what had happened to her in that abandoned elevator when she was twelve.

  All of this, guarded by a sentry, sat behind a wall no one, certainly not Arturo Almeida, was going to get behind. In a way that was standing right next to her before she’d seen it approach, and in a way her sentry was incapable of dealing with at all, Shame’s reactions to things had awoken something, put something in motion. From the start, part of knowing Shame took place behind this wall in her life story, took place in a part of her life that wasn’t in the story. She could feel he was trouble. Nonetheless, she went along with the string of accidental inevitables that happened after they’d met. She didn’t know why. With Shame, in exactly that unforeseen way she’d armed herself against, she felt alive close up; trouble, for once, felt like distant thunder.

  In New York that summer with Art, some of the adults she saw headed and raised families in these thrown-together shanties often comprised of materials stolen from construction sites, two-by-fours and sheets of blue plastic, with portions of abandoned cars and delivery vans. She couldn’t tell how many families lived in a sky-blue US Air Force school bus that had been turned on its side in one of the lots. She’d pass by in the morning as the addicts stalked their singular purposes and the employed adults in the shanties tried to wipe wrinkles from their loose pants and tight jackets. Some stood in line to brush their teeth at the steady trickle from a long-spent fire hydrant near the corner. She appreciated their struggle for dignity, and their misery echoed the wordless and violent melody of her worldview in a way that made her sweat feel like it ran down someone else’s skin.

  She remembered the protests and the way the NYPD surrounded the park. She remembered no one seemed to care about the families in the shanties all around or the other families, like Arturo’s, who lived in the projects that loomed over Alphabet City from Avenue D. It was all about that disaster of a park. She didn’t ever see any of the people from the projects or the shanties—too busy dodging matches—at the protests about the park. The protesters were the only ones she didn’t recognize. But, she thought, she knew them all. For all she knew, every one of them had individually passed her in the crowded but utterly empty hallways and pathways of the college she’d attended. Instead of looking at her, they all intently studied the fucking wall or became instantly obsessed by trees in the distance. The scary thing she didn’t learn at college, as she’d find out later, to her horror, was that they basically treated each other and most of all themselves the same way.

  And she suspected the difference between the police and the protesters was a matter of competing dialects in the same language. For the people in the shanties and for Art’s mama, and for his little sister, the police and the protests, finally, meant the same thing. The police were getting paid to do what they got paid to do. They looked the part. Most of the protesters looked like, and even more, sounded like, the whitecaps Ndiya had abstracted into “weather blue” in order to survive college. Most of them had the same ratty T-shirts and jeans on and hadn’t rubbed quite enough grime over their suburban accents to cover up their SAT scores. She used to taunt Art mercilessly about this. He’d take her to some newly opened restaurant full of whitecaps and she’d ask him, “How does it feel to be the grime these people rub on their tongues?” His eyes would do the abandoned-well thing and she’d scrape her lip with her teeth.

  Neither one of them knew the half of it then. They didn’t know that these hopelessly clean people under their precisely wrinkled clothes were protesting desperately to save the catastrophe in the park. The park wasn’t the point, much less the people. It was the catastrophe that mattered. It was the catastrophe they thought could bleed for them and help them walk on the water of their wants to the other shore of what they needed. Transcendent catastrophe, the dark matter, as ever, of self-reliance. When flashes of all this dawned upon her, Ndiya felt possessed by a violence at once very far off and as near to her as the metal taste of anger in her mouth; Art would shake his head at the ground: “You’re selling them short, Ndiya.” And she: “Yeah?” Her top lip scraped twice on her teeth and then back in the cool air. “Maybe I am.”

  ■

  Ndiya paused in the street. She also paused recounting date number two with Shame so she could focus on the end of the “maybe I am” days knowing Arturo. Split between the scene in the street and her memory, she felt something, maybe sundown, warming her back. Or maybe it was the memory-sun through the window on the bus up to Maurice’s party? It hadn’t come to her in years, and then, just then, there it was.

  One wrong afternoon Arturo had to physically prevent her from attacking a staccato-syllabled, open-faced young white woman on the street. Looking at it now, Ndiya thinks the woman had done her best to impersonate the appearance of the addicted girls she’d seen in the park. Somehow she had stepped out of nowhere, directly in front of Ndiya’s next stride. She pushed a squatter’s rights petition into Ndiya’s face. Maybe it had nothing to do with the park, the catastrophe, or the vacant lots, maybe it was just how the woman ended what she said with her tone of voice pointed up in the air like one person riding a seesaw? Maybe the provocation was simply the collision between the dingy clothes, the militant white-straightness of the girl’s teeth and the fashionable angularity of her eyeglasses? Or maybe it was that voice she’d just bought from the Gap? It didn’t matter.

  The slashing phrases that erupted from Ndiya’s mouth echoed in her memory. The scratch-the-surface-and-look-what-you-get look on the struck-open young woman’s suddenly old and closed face scared Ndiya all over again for the fresh waves of hatred it inspired when it came to mind. Ndiya prided herself and depended upon her ability to see these people long before they saw her. She’d missed this one and so Ndiya heard herself saying, “You better get your motherfucking hand out my chest, bit—”

  Art grabbed her from behind, pulled her back toward the corner hissing, “Hey, hey, hey now, hey now,” into her ear through the siren pulsing in her head. On the bus, Ndiya absently bit through the skin on her knuckle thinking about it.

  When they got to the apartment Ndiya went straight to the bathroom and double-locked the door. She took Art’s mother’s hidden cigarettes out from behind the radiator and smoked one and then another, blowing smoke out the small window that stayed open over the chipped tile in the shower stall. Art, bless him, somehow knew better than to bother her with his sapper’s kit of mitigating questions and accommodating disagreements.

  She sat, frozen, timing her pulse against the duet of drips from the shower and sink. Her eyes followed the joints in the wall between the cinder blocks north, south, east, and west. That summer, Art’s little sister, Sonja, had created a mural of lower Manhattan using the tile joints on the bathroom wall as the major streets; she’d begun to color in and label storefronts, vacant lots, schools, and churches. All her friends’ apartments were labeled. Sonja had listed the names of the people in them, who worked, and who did what. Ndiya traced lines between these buildings and a key to the map comprised of hearts and stars and frowning faces. A week ago Sonja had proudly told Ndiya that young Latino brothers from Washington, DC, called it a Youth Map and they paid her a
hundred dollars per week to do it. Several of her friends were doing their own Youth Maps as well. At the end of the summer, they’d receive a final payment after submitting their finished maps and a written report describing what they’d learned making them.

  “Recon,” Ndiya thought. The little girl was a doubleagent and she didn’t even know it. Who would pay how much for the information these kids come up with? What would it be used to do? Despite all that, the love in Sonja’s mural had calmed Ndiya before. This time, as the pieces fell together, it felt like the eye, the camel, the needle, and the last straw. Then her face folded into itself and splintered when she smashed her hand into the mirror as she spit out, “Squatter’s rights? It doesn’t age well, you know.” Then her body broke into convulsive sobs and a sound filled the room that had no room in it for anyone’s maybes. She pictured the woman with the petition, “I’d pay to see her petition for her own family’s rights to squat in an abandoned building while kids mine the walls for bricks. Her family probably lives in a house, in Connecticut no doubt, made of the damned bricks themselves. Of course they do, it’s perfect. I wonder why she won’t squat in that house?”

  An hour later, she came out of the bathroom feeling clean and elegant as brushed steel and sharp and mean as the ivory-handled knife her father had used to cut her slices from his apple. He told her it was a gift from his father. At once, in a clear sweat, Ndiya understood that gift. “Maybe I am” was slashed and lay dead on the tiny, white, nicotine-tinted octagonal tiles of Art’s mama’s bathroom floor. He knew better. But Art asked anyway. And she: “It was about, Arturo, what kind of people could imagine what other kind of people, families, kids, Art, kids, deserve squatter’s rights.” Then she lost it and screamed, “And it’s about having clue-the-fucking-first and, so, not jumping up in my face with no white-ass-uptilted-seesaw voice, period. Ever!” Even then she could feel that this was about much more than that but she defended herself by blaming that feeling on Art.