“That tickles!”
“This was your brilliant idea,” I said. “Shove over.”
She did, and I kneeled on the bed beside her with the needle in my right hand, carefully pressing the wooden Scrabble tile against the back of her earlobe with my left. This was such a terrible idea. There was no way this was going to end well.
“Stop giggling!” I said. “Your ear is jiggling all around.”
“Then clearly, Doctor,” Dani replied, “you need a better angle,” and she pulled me on top of her.
“Careful!” I cried—it was all I could do to hang on to the needle without stabbing her in the face with it—“I could really hurt you.”
I was now straddling her at the waist, her hip bones digging into the insides of my thighs. I felt the first tinglings of a stiffy pressing against her flat stomach. I wondered which would be more embarrassing, if I popped wood right then or if I didn’t. It was very confusing.
“Well?” she said. She took the Scrabble tile from my hand and held it tight against the back of her own earlobe. “What’re you waiting for?”
It was a big sharp needle. The thought of jabbing it into her flesh was pretty horrifying. She told me I needed to get it all the way through in one push, “otherwise it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”
I took the Scrabble tile from her fingers, and she turned her head to offer me her ear. Her neck looked extraordinarily fragile, the branching veins slender and blue beneath her thin skin. The Visible Woman.
I wanted to touch her. I put the needle down on the tray and reached out my hand until my middle and index fingers found the delicate bones edging her throat. There was a little hollow there, a private place as perfect and smooth as a sake cup. I pressed my fingertips into her flesh in that spot, just lightly, just enough to feel less outside of her, then moved them up one of the two slender tendons that extended upward in a V from her collarbone.
My fingers stopped at the rise of her neck gland. It was so exposed, that little bump, such a measure of trust that she would offer it to me. I surprised myself by leaning forward and touching it with my lips. It felt lumpy and odd, but terrifically real, too, so different from the cloying perfection of a marble goddess or a grinny cigarette-ad model (Newport, Alive with pleasure!).
I got a little embarrassed then, and got back to business. I held the Scrabble tile firmly against the back of her earlobe, which was surprisingly rubbery but also kind of beautiful. I picked up the needle and held it above her neck. For all her bravado, I could see her eyes getting all slitty in anticipation of pain, her cheek flushing marbly red. It bothered me that she was scared. I didn’t want to be someone who scared her.
I brought the point of the needle toward her earlobe, gritted my teeth, and took a deep breath. But my hand did nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to jab her with it.
“What’s the matter?” She opened her blue eyes wide and looked up at me. “You afraid of needles?”
“No,” I said. “I’m really not.”
“Then what is it?”
I looked down at her body under my body. Fierce and fragile in her T-shirt and cutoff jeans.
“My ear,” I said.
“What?”
“My ear. I think you should pierce my ear.”
The idea caught her by surprise, but she liked it. A lot. She propped herself up on her elbows and gave me a sneaky smile. “Why do you want your ear pierced?”
I shrugged and rolled off her. I didn’t want my ear pierced, actually. But with the memory still fresh in my mind of my father pinning my mother down, the thought of making Dani bleed sickened me. And I figured the only way she was ever really going to trust me after I’d tricked her into tearing her tongue was if I gave her a chance to hurt me back and trusted her not to.
Dani pounced. Before I had a chance to change my mind, she’d pushed my shoulders down into the bed and climbed on top of me.
“Here.” She grabbed her mom’s hand mirror from the bedside table and held it above my face, which looked flushed and not unanxious. “Which ear?”
I pointed at my left one, and she gave me the Popsicle to press against it.
“No way am I wearing any piratey gold hoop, though,” I said. “Just so you know.”
She took the Popsicle. “Of course not. We’ll get you a cool little stud or something.” She dabbed alcohol on my ear, tossed the clumped wet napkin on the floor. She looked down at me with a little grin. “Ready?”
I nodded, and a maniacal electric bee descended from nowhere and—“Yaaggh!” I hollered—rammed its pitiless stinger through my poor earlobe. Dani gave a happy cackle and pulled the needle out.
“There,” she said. “Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I nodded. Remarkably, the psychotic bee had vanished in seconds, leaving only a minor pulsing discomfort in the bottom of my ear.
I started to mutter something I hoped might sound clever, but Dani shut me up with a kiss, our tongues swimming together like dolphins wrestling. Her mouth, the flavor of Fernet-Branca and Cheerios, was a private hungry place she welcomed me into, and until that moment I didn’t know you could feel so magnificently lost and at home at the same time. I dove into that feeling, warm and woozy and not worried about anything for a change, and as we rolled onto our sides she took my hand and guided it under her T-shirt, up her flat stomach and over the cage of her ribs, to the soft warm Dani-ness that rose and fell and rose over her fifteen-year-old heart.
—
I awoke sometime later from a deep Fernet-Branca snooze to find Dani curled up beside me, pushing something pointy and cold through the new hole in my ear.
“Just a sec,” she said. She placed a flat something against the other side of my lobe and pressed it firmly. It felt pinchy but not painful. “There. Go take a look.” She smiled at me. “I found something way better than a stud. I think you’ll like it.”
In her parents’ bathroom mirror, I saw affixed to my ear a small tarnished disc that looked exactly like a subway token, only much smaller. It was like a Shrinky Dink after you put it in the oven to reduce it to a miniature of itself.
“Is this a real token? From before they made them big?”
She laughed. “Yep. My dad hoarded a bunch before they raised the fare ’cause he’s cheap and thought they were bluffing about changing the token. When he got stuck with them, he had this one made into a tie pin. But I thought it’d look better on you.”
I looked at the new me in the mirror, the sophisticated, nearly ninth-grade me who had Frenched a girl and felt that girl’s left boob and then Frenched her again. I had to admit, the antique mini subway token did look pretty cool. I closed my eyes and touched it, to see if I could differentiate the angular cutout letters with my index finger: N…Y…C.
“Holy shit!” I hollered. “Holy shit! Oh no!”
“What? What is it?”
“It’s the gay ear! You pierced my gay ear! The right one’s the gay one, right?”
She turned my shoulders so I was facing her and studied me a moment. Then she exploded in laughter. “I’m so sorry!” She covered her mouth with her hand, but the laughs kept rippling out between her fingers. “I didn’t realize, I really didn’t! That’s the one you told me to pierce!”
“Yeah, but I was looking in the mirror. The left was the right. You should’ve corrected me!”
She was still laughing. “But I was facing you! Your right was my left, too!”
“You made me gay!”
Another little giggle escaped her. “I swear I didn’t do it on purpose. But it doesn’t matter, anyway. I mean, nobody believes all that stuff about left and right, do they?”
“I guess not.”
I was leaning on the sink, my palms flat on its porcelain. I could feel Dani’s warmth pressing against my back. She put her arms around me from behind, looping them across my chest like a scarf.
But then, in the mirror, I saw her shake her head. Something was bothering her, something serious.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, hesitating. “It’s just that…”
“What? Tell me.”
She looked at me very earnestly for what seemed a long time, her face growing more and more distressed. She didn’t blink. Then, shaking her head in wonder, a fond, gamine smile creeping across her lips, she said: “I can’t believe my boyfriend’s a homo!”
—
Best. Day. Ever.
35
FALL FELL. Still no sign of my father, which was forcing some pretty big changes in our house. With the spigot of alimony checks turned off, paying for private school was an impossibility. This had caused me enormous anxiety through most of the summer—it’s tough enough to have your dad vanish without also being separated from your friends—until my mother finally went and had a big meeting with Dr. Townsend, our principal. The upshot was that the school agreed to come up with the financial aid to let me stay; though I was sometimes disruptive and a real headache for my teachers, he told her, I was still one of their stronger English students. But he wouldn’t offer the same support for Quigley, who hated school and often cut class to smoke clove cigarettes or pot on the bridle path by the reservoir. She was sent to Julia Richman, a horribly overcrowded public school on Sixty-Seventh and Second, which she clearly considered my fault, though in the end I don’t think she disliked her new school any more than her old one. She just wasn’t much of a school person.
Dani moved to the Philadelphia suburbs over Christmas vacation. Her father had taken the UPenn job. He was going to teach grad students all about the built environment and the fraying urban fabric and how New York was dying. I was pretty upset about Dani’s leaving, but we smooched a bunch in her still-unpainted back hallway, and she assured me that we were still going out; her father was keeping a small, rent-controlled apartment in Morningside Heights, and she’d be back to see me on vacations. Whenever I missed her over the coming months, I took the homemade foam sword she’d left me as a souvenir, and I made myself feel better by biffing Quigley with it for no reason.
Dani did come back for a few days in March, brimming with horror stories about the soul-deadening sameness of the suburbs. For the brief time she was in town, she wanted to explore it with me as much as possible. We snuck into the south gatehouse of the Central Park Reservoir, the one where the torture scene in Marathon Man would later be filmed, and fooled around in there while the joggers did their laps around the path outside.
Kyle told me I was a pussy for getting hung up on one girlfriend who didn’t even live in the city anymore. He, meanwhile, was always disappearing into closets with girls at parties so he could tell us all later how far he’d gotten with them. I chatted up a few girls that ninth-grade year, too, but none of them were really Dani-like enough to tempt me. So much of the time you could see they were saying what they thought you wanted them to say, which I hated. Kyle didn’t care much what they said, as long as he could get his hand down their pants. Part of me was jealous of his success, but I was also put off. He seemed to exult in casting off his girlfriends, and one time he even tape-recorded himself dumping a Town School girl who wore too much eyeliner.
We drifted apart during the year, and I found myself hanging out with Rafferty more. We both liked to make awful puns and write silly stories, and we were competitive with each other about it. Most of our best work was contained in The Punishment Book, a giant volume kept by my favorite teacher, Ms. France, the head of the upper school. She was more interested in language than in discipline, so in lieu of detention she offered miscreants the opportunity to write a shaggy-dog story in that big book. As a result, Rafferty and I were always contriving ways to get into trouble so we would be allowed to pen another entry. I wrote mine in pencil, returning often to erase and rewrite, erase and rewrite. For me, nothing was ever finished.
The city continued its deterioration just fine without my father. There was no money to fix or clean anything. Sometimes the subway cars were so defaced with graffiti you couldn’t even see out the window. Cables had snapped on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the West Side Highway was still a ghost road two years after its collapse had forced its shutdown. David Schapiro, a friend of Rafferty’s who lived in Chelsea, went roller-skating on it all the time, until he sprained his ankle jumping over a pothole. His skates were sneaker-skates, and while he was limping home, three kids from the projects jumped him and yanked them right off his feet.
New York had become world-famous as a hellhole of street crime, arson, and general mayhem. And just in case we were tempted to stop seeing ourselves that way, Hollywood was good enough to keep reminding us. The year my parents broke up, Martin Scorsese, himself a New Yorker, had given us Mean Streets. Then came Death Wish and that subway-hijacking epic Dad took me to, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This next cycle of the calendar would bring us Dog Day Afternoon, with Taxi Driver close on its heels, followed by The Warriors.
The TV was full of decay and desperation, too. Mayor Abe Beame, who seemed about as feckless as the mayor in Pelham One Two Three, got in front of the microphones and pretty much begged everyone to lend the city money by buying some kind of “notes.” But no one wanted to take the risk.
By spring, the city was flat broke. Literally couldn’t pay its bills. Who knew such a thing could happen? Beame warned of coming “horror cuts” to the city budget. He scheduled waves of layoffs: cops, garbagemen, hospital workers. Tens of thousands of protesters crowded into the skinny streets of the financial district to rail against some bank the city owed a buttload of money—apparently they were mad that the bankers had gone and said out loud what everybody already knew: that the city was at serious risk of going under.
One day Mathis brought home from the A.P. newsroom a scaremongering pamphlet that the city unions (police, firefighters, and others) were threatening to distribute to tourists if Beame went through with firing all those cops and firemen. WELCOME TO FEAR CITY, the cover said above a drawing of a skull. A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR VISITORS TO THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
Inside the little booklet, tourists were advised that the “incidence of crime and violence in New York City is shockingly high, and getting worse every day. During the four-month period ended Apr. 30, 1975, robberies were up 21%, aggravated assault was up 15%, larceny was up 22%, and burglary 19%.” If the mayor now laid off public safety officers, the pamphlet warned, “the best advice we can give you is this: Stay away from New York City if you possibly can.”
The guidelines offered to visitors who ignored this friendly advice were a bit over-the-top, but it was hard not to be unnerved by them anyway—after all, these were the cops themselves who were writing all this scary stuff: “Stay off the streets after 6 p.m.,” the pamphlet cautioned, helpfully adding this warning: “Do not walk: If you must leave your hotel, summon a taxi by telephone.” As for public transportation, “Subway crime is so high that the city recently had to close off the rear of each train in the evening so that the passengers could huddle together and be better protected. Accordingly, you should never ride the subway for any reason whatsoever.”
Beame went ahead with his cuts anyway, and the unions got ornery. When the mayor’s “crisis budget” took force in early summer, the garbagemen went out on strike, leaving tens of thousands of tons of stinky trash bags on curbs all over town. Just in time to bake during summer’s ninety-degree afternoons.
—
In the early months of this gathering crisis, I made a habit of going down to look at my father’s warehouse about once a week. It was always completely sealed, worn iron shutters and all. No sign of life. No answer when I buzzed the robot-girl’s nipple. For a good while I also phoned his studio regularly. No one ever picked up, and eventually I started getting that cheery phone-lady’s voice saying that the number I had dialed was no longer in service. (“Please check the number and dial again.”)
I tried to forget about him, as Mom was clearly trying to. And for a while I thought I’d succeeded. But she had mo
re distractions than I did, now that she was working six days a week at a friend’s gallery down in SoHo. She had bills to pay, bills and more bills. Not me. So in early July, with nothing to do now that school was out again, I decided to pay one last visit to Dad’s warehouse to see if maybe he’d come back for the summer.
I picked the wrong day. Even before I got out of the subway station at City Hall, I could hear that something aboveground was very, very wrong. Ladies were clicking hurriedly down the steps in their high heels to get away. A low murmur of inarticulate fury cascaded down the stairs.
Out on the streets, hundreds of beefy men, most of them white guys who hadn’t shaved, were milling about outside City Hall with a seething rage that seemed to be casting about for a target. Some held beer bottles, others handwritten signs.
BURN CITY BURN, one of the signs read. BEAME IS A DESERTER, A RAT, read another. HE LEFT THE CITY DEFENSELESS.
There were police all around, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop the chaos. One of them, way up on a horse with his nightstick and gun bulging out at his hips, actually looked like he was begging the angry men to calm down.
“What’s going on?” I asked a nervous-looking man in a business suit.
“Laid-off cops,” he told me.
All at once, the crowd found a direction. Swept up by its momentum, I was carried along against my will to the Brooklyn Bridge, where some of the angry men had blocked traffic with police barricades. Others were going around with keys, letting the air out of the stalled cars’ tires. The traffic had backed up as far toward Brooklyn as you could see, and a cacophony of car horns broke out. Drivers shouted at the unemployed cops, who shouted back. A few of them surrounded a car and pounded on its windows.
“Turn it over!” someone yelled. “Turn it over!”
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 26
