Boys Keep Swinging

by Jake Shears

  I don’t remember ever taking a trick back to Crown Heights, but I must have at some point, because I have a memory of riding the red line in the wee hours of the morning with some guy. There were two deaf men signing across from us and the guy I was with must have been staring at them, because one of the deaf guys turned to us and signed, “What’s your problem? What the fuck are you looking at?”

  “Sorry,” I responded. “He’s an idiot. I just met him an hour ago. My name is Jason. I apologize for his insensitivity. But I don’t really know him.” This was another one of the few times I used my year and a half of American Sign Language instruction in the real world. This exchange made it all worth it.

  MY CLASSES CONSISTED OF SITTING around a long table with fellow students and an accomplished writer of some kind. I didn’t really connect with many other students. But our conversations were intelligent enough, and the classes were constructive if you paid attention. One of my fiction workshops was taught by Chuck Wachtel, a funny, dry novelist and poet whose books focused on blue-collar families from his home state of New Jersey. He plied us with writers like Isaac Babel and Raymond Carver.

  The workshops were organized into weekly critiques. All the students handed in their stories at once, making enough copies for everyone to read and return the following week with their notes. The pieces we wrote were competent, but there was a lot of lofty postmodern meta-prose the class churned out. I just wanted to write nasty horror stories, which I did with aplomb: genre tales full of unlikely twists and disease. I was happy to be mean to my characters, letting grim fates befall them in their innocent lives. Wachtel liked what I was writing, said it was New Gothic. He was rumpled but had a welcoming, nurturing presence and cared enough to inspire me. I wanted to impress him; in turn, he introduced me to one of my favorite writers, Patrick McGrath.

  My own writing was clunky, but I prided myself on its casual fun. I got a lot of ideas from vivid dreams that jolted me out of sleep. They terrified me, and still do, but I’ve always found meaning in the scares, the details feeding my waking imagination. When I wrote my stories, they felt like an extension of these sessions in my sleep. Writing was a way I could still play with toys. But while the narratives got more complex, my characters remained plastic. Their development never transcended basic pulp. Still, it was thrilling to me that I was being allowed to do something in school that I actually had fun doing anyway.

  Sometimes I read the pieces aloud to a willing friend, making them come alive with my voice. There was one story that became a favorite of mine, about an eccentric rich woman who decides little by little to begin amputating parts of her body, until she’s moving around on all fours, being held up by self-engineered appendages. I’d get to the end and wonder what the fuck was wrong with me.

  One blustery weeknight I arrived back in my neighborhood after dark. As I walked toward Park Place, I found myself in step with a pretty black woman in a camel trench coat. I turned to her and asked her if she generally felt safe in this neighborhood. She looked at me sideways with a half smile, took a few more steps, and said, “This neighborhood has been very good to me.” I suddenly felt embarrassed to have asked.

  I walked into the broken vestibule of my building feeling like I was hanging over two sides of a fence. I couldn’t tell if the fear that I felt in Crown Heights was an instinctual, valuable feeling, or if it was racism bubbling up that I’d been unaware of, a residual side effect of growing up on a very white island. I entered the apartment, and I was alone. After making some canned lentil soup, I taped up a Modest Mouse poster and thumbtacked a swath of red fabric over the doorway. I stood back and was admiring my job when I heard the screams.

  A child’s shrill cry rose through the shaft, to the window that I still hadn’t been able to close all the way since I’d first opened it. Then came the unintelligible angry sound of a woman hollering, things being thrown. The child’s scream got louder, then was followed by the sound of something larger hitting a wall. Sudden silence. Like a siren, the child’s wail started again, crescendoed even louder than before. I stood unmoving, frightened.

  Downstairs became quiet, and in couple of hours Gavin, with his big brow and bell-bottoms, arrived home. We split a bottle of questionable red wine. He talked about how much he loved the neighborhood and our new place. I didn’t mention the child abuse I’d just overheard. I was trying to stay positive, but my gut was telling me that this wasn’t a very safe spot. The front door of our building had been kicked in, for God’s sake.

  Also, I thought we had rats. Any time I brought home groceries, I’d wake up the next morning and on the counter, cereal boxes would have been ripped open and dug into, wrappers chewed, cans overturned. Given the damage each day, I knew the size of the things must have been huge. Whatever had that much power to invade my meager food stash was not something I actually wanted to see in action.

  But finally one day, I got a load of the creature in all its glory when I walked out of the bathroom, wet from having just taken a shower. The thing wasn’t a rat at all, but a large, very disheveled squirrel. Whipping its head out of a loaf of bread, it jumped and stared, caught. After giving me a shady, imperceptible once-over, it dropped into an attack crouch and leaped out the open window backward. I stood dripping, shocked, and couldn’t help but laugh. I could live with a squirrel.

  Squirrel or not, I lasted only another couple weeks in the Crown Heights apartment. I finally got the guts to tell Gavin that it wasn’t working for me and he bristled. I told him I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. Living in the hallway was a bitch. I was also sketched out being gay around there. People stared. It was scary coming home after dark.

  “This is how everywhere in New York used to be, Jason. People just lived with it.” He could smell my guilt over leaving him and my shame at not being able to hack it. “I wish I’d have known that you couldn’t swing this. Who am I supposed to get to live here now?” Who, indeed? I thought.

  I was letting him down. A noble resolution felt out of my reach, more than I was capable of dealing with. What was I supposed to bring to this neighborhood? Did I need to try and pass as straight? How much of it was my own racist bullshit and how much of it was grounded in reality? I wanted to give living in Crown Heights a chance. But it wasn’t a safe place at the time. For anyone, really. About three weeks after I moved out, a female college student was stabbed to death on the street, on our block.

  I was writing in the school’s common room one afternoon and spied a flyer with tear-off numbers on one of the bulletin boards. In black Sharpie it read, SPACIOUS LOFT SPACE IN WILLIAMSBURG.

  Two days later, at seven in the morning, my breath a steady stream of steam, I met up with a handsome Frenchman with a wide nose in a café by the Bedford L stop. He introduced himself as Enzo. We made small talk and took a long stroll to South First Street between Roebling and Havemeyer, where he led me into the vestibule of a red four-story industrial building.

  Now, I’ve always been an impressionable guy, and anyone with the right bedside manner and smoldering gaze can convince me to do or buy just about anything. It makes me a terrible shopper, a sucker for sexy salespeople. Enzo was one of those people. He touched my elbow when he spoke about how he’d found another place to live, closer to his work, but he wanted to pass this room on . . . to the right person (he looked me in the eyes).

  I was half listening but gazed at his sweet lips as he told me the building had until recently been an old cake factory. To say it was a converted loft space would be like saying, “I just made this baloney sandwich into a car.” In no way did it resemble a place a person might call home; aesthetically, it had more in common with a freeway underpass. Enzo gave me the walking tour.

  First we shuffled through a dismal entryway covered with the dramatic patina of what was most likely layers of old lead paint. We entered a rickety rusted elevator, the kind of cage that a serial killer would stick you in, after fattening you up with some fresh, factory-made cake. “You h
ave to make sure, no fingers,” he explained, speaking over the loud motor as we ascended, miming someone poking their hands through the bars and getting their digits cut off.

  We emerged from the Buffalo Bill Express into a cavernous, dusty expanse. In its center sat a decrepit couch and a coffee table covered with food debris and ash. There were two makeshift rooms on the side, made out of what looked like drywall, gaffer tape, and papier-mâché. Neither of these rooms had a door. We ambled past them without speaking. To our left were a kitchen and a bathroom—hard to tell, though, which was which. But there, I saw a toilet, a pedestal sink pushed up against the wall, and a spigot curled over a bathtub with a plastic tarp wrapped around it for a shower curtain. And here was the kitchen, a lopsided, avocado-green stove flanked by a crusty refrigerator. Just beyond the kitchen/bathroom combo was a civil, if also empty, back room. There were doorways leading to two sizable rectangular “bedrooms”—one of which could be mine for the foreseeable future.

  I smelled metal shavings, reminding me of my dad’s workshops with their big machines that bent and cut steel to be welded into something that would be useful: a dock for a dinghy or parts for a table. So maybe as I walked into what would be my room—nothing but an empty concrete cube, with a measly, smudged window on the end—I was able to see some kind of potential.

  Enzo had a mattress on the floor and some kind of sculpture made from rocks and glass resting against one wall. There were a few candles deliberately arranged and lit. He told me that the rent was seven hundred dollars a month, which seemed steep. “It’s a really special place,” he added, crinkling his brow, so sincere. “Lots of creative people around.” Catnip. I walked in a circle, nodding and pretending to inspect.

  “Oh—one thing!” he said, as if he’d forgotten. “There’s no heat back here, but I’ve been fine just using a few space heaters.” He waved his hands as if this were nothing. “Graham—the super. He’s been talking about putting some kind of heating thing in this next room.” He pointed to the common room outside where we were standing. “I think he said he was going to do it soon.” Now that he mentioned it, it was actually freezing in there. But as I stood in that cold, grimy box, I felt a tingle of possibility. Look at all this room You could shoot whole movies in here Just think of the parties. It was an absolute dump.

  But this dump could be mine.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, and shook Enzo’s hand.

  Within a week Andy, my punk friend from Seattle, helped me pack up whatever books and the couple suitcases I had in Crown Heights and we hauled it over in his car. He had been living in New York now for a couple of years, working as a nanny for a family in the Bronx. It was an overcast, rainy day, and as we pulled up to South First Street I once again questioned my decision making: The outside of my new building looked more derelict than I remembered. There was garbage strewn about and nobody really on the street.

  Andy was giving me the silent treatment and not responding to much of my running commentary, remaining expressionless as I yammered on, squinting his eyes and smoking out the car window. He’d been giving me the stink-eye since I arrived in Manhattan, having had enough of my wide-eyed exuberance, and was not going to be my tour guide. He didn’t approve of my situation. My family was paying for my education, and I was getting to live in New York on top of it. He thought I was taking it for granted, and at the same time taking him for granted for helping me move. I probably was.

  I acted entitled sometimes, to others’ attention and time. But where did you draw the line when you were trying to stay open to the possibility of what the city could give? I believed eventually I would get what I wanted, even if I didn’t know what that was yet. And it would be outside help that transformed my life into a thing of real substance. No one did it alone. But some gross part of me thought that I deserved it somehow, when I really hadn’t earned what was being handed to me. Nevertheless, when Andy let me off at my new place, it was the last time I would see him for a couple of years.

  Williamsburg was frayed, but compared to Crown Heights, it was like the Riviera. It could actually feel festive, lots of families, Hispanic and Ukrainian, hanging in the street. Distorted mariachi music blasted from boom boxes cranked up at every hour of the day. Outside my bedroom window the jams were played on what seemed like a loop on someone’s blown-out radio. On weekends, a man would drag a wagon up and down the block with a speaker that he would preach from in Spanish. There was a Hasidic neighborhood a few blocks away with the women wearing their bobbed wigs, strings of pearls, and polyester suit-dresses, pushing strollers. I thought they looked kind of chic.

  My window overlooked a decrepit lot, car frames and machinery, junk. There were men out there tinkering and fixing engines. It wasn’t a very pretty view but I enjoyed watching the chickens pecking around in the dirt. They seemed to have the run of the place. Every morning at sunup, a rooster crowed.

  There was a musty C-Town grocery store directly across the street, a step up from the strange delis in Crown Heights, but it still felt like it was from some other dimension. C-Town seemed to carry only sugary cereal and soda, orangish meat and strange canned brands I’d never heard of. I ventured over sometimes to get a box of pasta, a can of tuna, or a jar of peanut butter. The ladies at the checkout counter didn’t acknowledge me, as though some invisible ghost had just carried a box of floating oatmeal to the register.

  There weren’t many restaurants around: It was a pretty desolate scene for most of the walk to the Bedford stop. Then, right before you hit the subway, there was a two-block stretch just east of it that was hopping with new cafés and storefronts showing off handmade crafty purses and the like. There was quite a bit of graffiti. I saw a great stencil of Mayor Giuliani with Mickey Mouse ears and vampire teeth, and another where someone had made him look like a wild-eyed Hitler. Some wheat-pasted posters railed against the gentrification of the neighborhood: YUPPIE, GO HOME, they said. I saw a couple of response signs with a picture of a white girl in a cowboy hat and sunglasses: OH, YEAH, WE’RE THE HIPSTERS HERE TO INVADE. I passed the signs every day and wondered if I qualified as what they were talking about—another entitled white boy moving into someone else’s neighborhood.

  “This place is going to be just like SoHo,” Graham said. He was the landlord of the Cake Factory—a masculine, broad-shouldered metal sculptor with thick black glasses. I’d have let him throw it in me, he was fucking hot, but I could tell he was also kind of a dick. The kind of straight guy who acted cool with gays but saw them on the next rung down the ladder under women. He knew I’d be a good tenant because he could sense my discomfort with his dominance; I could be easily manipulated.

  My rent was due the first of every month and for some reason I was supposed to leave it in the freezer. But the entire floor was a freezer. The cold made a home in my bones, coming through the concrete floor and permeating even the furniture. There was a commercial-size heater in the very front of the loft, but the place was so big that none of the heat reached into the back space where I lived. I put my twin bed in the middle of the empty cement room and piled thick wool blankets on top of me as I slept. I surrounded myself with three searing-red space heaters that I placed strategically around the bed, and I turned them up full blast. It’s a miracle I didn’t burn myself alive. In the middle of the night, I woke up bathed in a fiery orange glow, a tiny pocket of warmth. When I got up to pee, my system was shocked as I plunged into the frigid air.

  I started decorating. On my front and back walls, I chose a royal-blue color, on the left side a shiny metallic silver. I painted the wall outside my room a kind of robin’s-egg blue with giant cheddar-orange polka dots that I made with a cardboard stencil. I hung my massage-parlor-red fabric over the window as a curtain. It looked like a sad fun house.

  Next on the list was a carpet. I wanted to put it wall-to-wall so that it would warm up the room and make it feel a little cozier. I found what I needed in a remnants section in the basement of a carpet store in Manhattan.
It was a stomach-churning clown-nose red.

  I somehow convinced some straight boys from school—in exchange for a few six-packs of beer and a pizza—to help me bring the thing home. Even though there were four of us, it felt as heavy as a car. We had to stop every two blocks or so to catch our breath. As we carried it down the stairs and through the turnstiles using subway tokens, the attendant in the booth saw us, and rather than tell us that it was too big to take on the train, he just pointed at us and laughed. At one point I wondered if we would have to abandon it on the sidewalk. When we finally made it, everyone was still happy enough to sit and drink beers in front of the space heaters.

  One of my new roommates, Leonard, was of Ukrainian descent, with a stocky build and a soft-featured face. He was cheerful but hard to read. The gigantic main room with big windows was his territory, no furnishings except a dilapidated couch and a dirty glass coffee table covered in cigarette butts, Styrofoam soda receptacles, and marijuana debris. Leonard didn’t seem to read books. There weren’t any on display or stacked on the cardboard-box nightstand next to his mattress on the floor.