The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  This sidewalk served him as meetinghouse, newsdesk, street disco. Three, four times a week, he’d slope up Broadway after work. Benny and MoRitz, his homeboys, bussed tables at a nearby saloon, and he used its men’s room to change coveralls, get right. ‘Lock the door, turn off the light, just sit in the dark, in the stall, breathing deep,’ said Rashan. ‘I don’t move till I see myself glow.’

  The bathroom was sprayed with pine essence. At squat in the blackness, Rashan liked to think himself lost in a deep dark forest with no way out. It was a game his mother had taught him. When he was seven, they’d used to hide together from Mr D, his father at that time. They’d be cooped up in a closet under the stairs, twelve hours, twenty-four at a stretch. That closet had smelled of pine essence, too. And his mother whispered stories, she’d tell him, Be still, keep hush, they wolves out there. They wild animals, they killers, be still, keep hush. So he’d freeze, not make a sound, just crouch and hug in the pine-scented dark, till Mr D sobered up or got tired of hunting.

  When D went away, he’d leave the hall light still burning. It hung right outside the closet door, but at first it was invisible. Then it started gleaming, just dimly, through the cracks. Rashan didn’t know what it was. The North Star, his mother told him. So they followed it.

  He laughed at that now, something so womanly and weak. Slop, he called it. But the habit was ingrained. One whiff of pine essence, and it was as if something outside his knowing mind took him over, made him repeat the same child’s game. Beyond the bathroom door, the saloon was filled with wolves and gorillas, birds of prey. So Rashan was still, kept hush. See they eyes glowing red, feel they breath all stinking and hot, whiskey-mean, his mother had said, and he did see, he could still feel. A crack of light showed under the door. It widened and grew brighter, till the blackness broke apart. When he could see his hands, Rashan rose up. When he saw his own face, he walked out.

  He was ready then. He wore the dark’s imprint like armor, the same way that Sasha Zim wore duck soup, strong to ward off evil. In the cluster outside McDonald’s, he stood a little apart, aloof. The coveralls and the spotted cravat gave him a harlequin look, a smack of the street performer, and he kept a performer’s distance. ‘Nobody know this man. I mean, this is the man nobody know,’ said Benny. He was a Stiff-Stuff Fade, built like a middle linebacker. ‘The Invisible Man. The Alien,’ he said.

  ‘Stretcho,’ said MoRitz. ‘The man that ain’t.’

  Their voices were taunting. But that didn’t mean they lied. They were Rashan’s partners. They cruised the clubs with him; they ate with him and danced with him; they even mopped up his women after he got through. Still somehow he escaped them. ‘When he’s gone, he gone,’ Benny said. ‘When he’s not, he still gone.’

  Rashan himself didn’t know what they meant, did not much care. Under questioning, he simply shrugged and fell back on his mother’s pet motto, picked up out of Shakespeare: ‘To be is not to be,’ he said. ‘Only moreso.’

  It was the first thing she’d taught him, the one thing he never forgot. As an infant, he’d been a freak, all head and neck, no body. His blood father took one look and joined the merchant marines. Even his mother moved house. Her born name was Edwina Elizabeth, and her family lived in a Mount Vernon brownstone; they owned their own pharmacy. She herself had trained to teach school. But when she gave birth out of season, she took two rooms in Morrisania, the South Bronx, and she called herself Lizbeth.

  Rashan was Arabic for ‘warrior.’ Lizbeth had wanted to name him Jadda, the root-word for Mujaddid, ‘the one who makes anew.’ But Mujaddids were not long on survival, not in the South Bronx. Rashan seemed a safer bet.

  Even then, he hadn’t survived by much. At age three, he could not walk, could not say one word. All his movements were uncontrolled, limbs flopping every whichway. His Adam’s apple filled his throat, a buried hand grenade, and no hair grew on his skull. Then some infection caused his eyelids to droop at half-mast. He looked, Mr D would say, like a goddamn turkey buzzard.

  In Morrisania, his home was the last tenement still occupied in a block of gutted shells. The walls were so rotted that you could look clear through. There were holes like open wounds, straight out into the weather. Rats sat in them, polishing their whiskers: ‘Ate up my food and all my clothes, stole my toys. Traps didn’t bother them none, but they love to watch TV. The weather, news and sports, the Saturday morning cartoons,’ Rashan said. ‘First I fear them, but then I got used. They bit my momma, all my sisters, but they never mess with me. Word got out, I guess – Don’t fuck with the freak.’

  Eight years he sat in that place. At the start, social workers came by. They tried all sorts of tricks to make him respond, but Rashan kept silent, never made a sound. So then they tried to send him to remedial school, but his mother would not agree. She said he was fine, just dandy. To prove it, she carried him to day school. The kids there parceled him in feathers, tarpaper, dogshit, and sent him back home, COD. After that, he stayed sitting in his room.

  Fathers came, fathers went. For remembrance, they left him sisters. Violetta, Latisha, Mylene, Lenore – four girls in five years, and all of them walking, all of them talking nonstop. From a whole room, Rashan was reduced to a corner.

  He was not unhappy there. As best as he could recall, he’d lived quite content. The others all clustered round the tube, learning English, like Sasha, from One Life to Live, but he stayed by himself; he still did not make one sound.

  At age five, he suddenly started growing. Having taken so long to begin, he could not stop. His arms and legs shot up like tangleweeds, it seemed overnight. They grew so fast and straggling, his trunk could not support them. His mother propped him up with cushions, tried to wedge him between two chairs, but he kept overbalancing. He’d topple on his face, and then he couldn’t move.

  ‘Felt good. Felt just grandiose,’ he said. When nobody was looking, he’d lay his cheekbone flat against the linoleum, enjoy the dirt and the grit on his skin, soak up every last spot of grease. Hog-wallowing, he’d breathe in the soapy water and lemon wax his mother used to clean, the cloudy sweetness of escaped gas. Faraway, he could hear the TV burble, his sisters flip, flop, and fly. ‘Then guess what? I got satisfied,’ he said. And one day he shouted out loud.

  According to his mother, the sound he made was not human. Lizbeth, at that given moment in time, was on the toilet down the hall. Suddenly she heard a stuck pig crossed with an exploding gas-main. Her first thought was, somebody shot the TV. But when she came rushing in, her flimsies all awry and her wighair in her hand, she found only her mute son, face down in a mess of cookie crumbs, serenading the roaches.

  How to describe it? It was as if, all his life, he had sucked up every sound and tremor, every bang, siren, whisper, whistle, slither, screech, and stored them away, made them his. He wasn’t even conscious of hearing them; seemed to take them in automatically, through his skin, his nerve-ends. Sometimes he saw them as objects, solid as a fist; other times they were tastes, smells, aches, or they tickled, way deep in the back of his throat. They goosed him, rode him, made him shiver. Or else they made him fat. First his head would swell, then his belly. The day he shouted out loud, he guessed now, he’d simply been so stuffed and bulging, big with sound, that he couldn’t hold it in one minute more: ‘I didn’t speak. I burst,’ Rashan said.

  The din brought back the social workers. A Miss Tweedle – the name was not easily forgotten – desired to have him committed, shut up. So did Mr D. Even his mother was tempted.

  In her darkness and confusion, she sought guidance from Rashan himself. When Mr D left for the bar, she crouched down in front of the roaring boy, tried to cut through the sheets of sound. Though they seemed like random ranting, she thought they might be a secret code. So she started to mark down cadences, the shifting beats. She prayed to jump in his skin, ride shotgun behind his eyes. ‘Bil’lisaani. Bilqualbi,’ she said. ‘With my tongue. With my heart.’ When Rashan barked, she barked back. When he screamed, s
o did she. ‘Aamantu. I have faith,’ she said.

  Teetotum-style, he rocked himself on his base, back and forth, back and forth, his cries growing louder, more frantic, till he wet himself. His piss made a golden lake on the linoleum, and this sight seemed to calm him. Then his mother rose up smiling; she dusted off her hands, case closed. ‘It’s just his song,’ she decided.

  She bought him a Horner electric keyboard on sale; he attacked it like a box of chocolate eclairs. He would not sit to make music but crouched. The keyboard was laid flat, its cheek against the lino, and Rashan hovered above, teetered with flapping arms, turkey buzzard on a highwire.

  For nine years, he had breathed in sounds. Now he poured them back out. ‘Slamming doors,’ he said. ‘Sirens in the street, rat whispers in the dark. Squeaking shoes, toilets flushing, TV jingles, rain, frying fat.’ He played in the hallway, not to bother Mr D. He replayed all existence, percussioning in rhythm, with his fingers stiff as drumsticks. ‘Mostly, I just played weather. Played clouds, thunderbursts, sunshowers, hailstorms. And lulls, I played a lot of lulls. Then I played dinner, then I played ice cream and Jell-O, cherry soda, meat-loaf. Then I played kisses. Then I played sleep.’

  After Mr D, hungover, threw the Horner against the bathroom wall, Lizbeth kept it locked away. By day she worked odd jobs, sweeping up, checking out. Rashan sat home by himself, propped on his cushion, and did not cease to howl till she got back, released his music.

  Outside their tenement, Morrisania was in flames. The city had abandoned it, left it to burn. Rather than make repairs, landlords burned their buildings for the insurance payouts. Most every night, through the holes in the walls, Lizbeth watched the fires across the wastelands. Her own landlord wanted her gone, she wanted it herself, but there was no place to go. At first the landlord sweetmouthed her, then he threatened. The lower floors were stocked with angel-dust junkies, the damned. Mr D moved out and was not replaced, Miss Tweedle stopped calling, raw garbage was heaped in the stairwells, and the Seven Immortals used the cellar for gang rapes. Still Lizbeth clung on. In the end, the landlord tossed a match.

  Rashan remembered waking up choking, his sisters screaming. Afterwards, in a hospital hallway, aged nine years and seven months, he spoke one word. His mother heard it as bilaahi, In Allah. His sisters heard baloney.

  Homeless now, the family was shunted from department to association, shelter to welfare hotel. Sometimes they were kept together, more often cut apart. Only Rashan and his mother always counted as one. The Horner keyboard made two.

  Rashan played fire, played burning. He played heat and cold, angry priests, plastic plates, burlap blankets. When the Horner gave out, he howled instead. To hush him, the Sisters of Mercy let him use a stand-up piano. It stood out back of a soup kitchen, overlooking the back alley. He played garbage cans; he played stench; he played scavengers. What he liked best, he played birds.

  At last, after four years’ drifting, he and all his family washed up at the Hotel Carter on Forty-second Street, the Deuce, half a block from Times Square.

  It was the middle eighties. President Reagan had decreed, and Mayor Koch confirmed, that having nowhere to live was not a misfortune but, like dissent in Stalinist Russia, a disease. ‘Primarily, homelessness is a mental health problem,’ the Federal Task Force believed.

  In the Hotel Carter, there were maybe sixty families, 250 kids, no more than a dozen grown men. The Perrys had Room 417; it measured fourteen feet by nine.

  Rashan slept in the closet, under piles of his sisters’ coats. He could talk now, and walk at the same time. Still neither seemed natural. His body, too long atrophied, shot up at hazard, groped like a creeper towards the light. He grew eighteen inches in three years. Arms and legs filled the closet, festooned the clothes racks. So weak he was from sprouting, he kept tripping over himself, entangled in his own parts. But at least he did not look like a buzzard: ‘More like an ostrich with the bends,’ his sister Violetta said.

  The Carter was a subsidized snakepit. In a previous incarnation, as the Dixie, it had offered sanctuary to writers and ecdysiasts, all manner of magicians. Delmore Schwartz had lived here; and Belle Liberty, star of 99 Tricks with a Banana; and even Colonel Stingo, the idol of A. J. Liebling. Now the denizens had renamed it RTC, the Rahway Training Center after the New Jersey State Penitentiary. The hallways were full of moonrock, of crack pipes and used condoms. The bloods called Rashan a geek and beat him up daily, twice on Sundays. ‘To be is not to be. Only moreso,’ Lizbeth said.

  She had reverted to the Reverend Calvin Butts and his Abyssinian Baptist Church, West 138th Street. In Rashan’s closet, right next to his picture of Magic Johnson, she tacked up another poem, hand-printed. ‘Pain that cannot forget,’ it read, ‘Falls drop by drop upon the heart / Until in our despair comes wisdom / Through the awful grace of God.’

  But the pain failed to register. ‘I never was wired for hurt,’ he said. Somewhere beyond his memory, he had been equipped with an unbreachable shell. Time and turmoil had only thickened it. So now he could walk through battlefields, with deadfalls and landmines at every step, and never blink. Night after night, the Deuce was full of gunsong and sirens. Inside the Carter, right down the hall, a pregnant woman was cut into strips with a blunt penknife. ‘Is that a fact?’ Rashan said. ‘I was not aware.’

  Only afterwards, when the noises died away, he played them back, pitch-perfect. His sisters were all in school; his mother hung out with friends. Left alone in Room 417, Rashan played just one person: ‘Rashan Ray Perry,’ he said. ‘I and I.’

  At sixteen, he had stopped growing on the outside, was ready to start on internals. He was dyslexic, but his mother had taught him school talk, his sisters had taught him streets. After dark, when the TV went on, he took to voyaging.

  Mostly he traveled Times Square, five blocks up, five back. Raffy, a Dominican from Room 407, mapped out the turf, which hustles went where, whose sex fitted what. But he was not shaped to run with crowds. What he most enjoyed was to squat on the steps of George M. Cohan’s statue, cast away on the Forty-sixth Street traffic island. From there, safely distanced, he studied riot in peace.

  He had a great gift for this. ‘How to be alone in hordes,’ he called it. In his eye, it was the whole art and secret of streetlife. To sit apart at the heart of Broadway, to see and not be seen: ‘Conservative style,’ he said. ‘When the sickness hits, you not home.’

  Upstairs in the Carter, his sister Mylene was best friends with a girl named Xanthia. She came from El Salvador, and she was fourteen; she had green eyes any fool could get drowned in.

  Her brother Isidro was Rashan’s prime tormentor. He had a withered arm – the bloods called him Crip. In the whole hotel, only Rashan was worse enfeebled. So Isidro took to hiding in stairwells, pouncing in the dark. Late at night, when Rashan strolled by dreaming, a twisted hand came snaking out of shadow and grabbed him by his throat, sprayed his eyes with Mace.

  Rashan thought it was acid. Clawing at his ruined face, he went bouncing off the walls, plunging blindly down the hallways, scattering the little girls playing Double Dutch and their mothers gossiping, the crackheads and the dicemen and the baby carriages, till he hit an open doorway and fell through it, smack into Xanthia’s lap.

  She sat curled up in an armchair painting her toenails tangerine. It was a steam-heat night in August; she was wearing short shorts and a halter top. Rashan’s head seemed shooting flame. Plunged between her thighs, it felt like a firebrand dipped into running water. ‘I heard the sizzle. I smelled the scorch,’ he said. But he did not make noise, he couldn’t; the burning gutted his cries. ‘I was still. I kept hush,’ he said.

  Xanthia bathed his eyes, first with a wetted rag, then with her fingertips. As the scalding ebbed, his sight crept back. Still his eyes felt swollen, peeled raw. So he hid deeper in her cooling flesh. She was not wearing shorts anymore. She was not wearing anything. So then she sighed, lifted up his freak’s head. Her green cat’s eyes looked down into his, and sh
e giggled, kind of shy. ‘Pretty boy,’ she said.

  Remembering now, Rashan giggled too. ‘Tangerine toenails,’ he said. But it had not seemed foolish then. When he was swimming upstream through Xanthia, half-blind and burning up, it had not seemed foolish whatever. ‘Felt just grandiose,’ said Rashan, ‘To bury the geek and get gone.’

  In his room, he played Reeboks and Nikes, he played Jerri Curls. Come fall, when his mother was moved on again, he didn’t move with her but stepped out by himself. He had a young lady in Loisaida, her name was Lashuan. Then a young lady in East New York, her name was Tonya Laverne. After her, the stuff he played, no Horner could contain.

  He needed a scratchboard, a minimum synth, a drum machine. There was a young lady on East 118th, her name was Esther and her brother was Hilario, he worked in a music store. For fifty dollars cash and 20 percent forever, Hilario provided a sound studio, a tincan storage shed behind the Kanawha Political Club. There Rashan could play out all creation: ‘The history of the universe,’ he said, ‘in the uncut version.’

  The music that he made was not rap, not hip-hop or house. It used elements of all three, but its key was Rashan’s own beat, a lurching rhythm that pumped like a bloodpulse, then dangled, a skipped heartbeat.

  ‘I sing the body electric,’ Walt Whitman wrote. Rashan sang it too, but this body was out of sync, riddled with arrhythmia. Every time it seemed in stride, it broke apart, its flow snapped short and twisted: ‘Like Johnny Staccato got a bum ticker,’ Rashan thought. So he called it Stack Attack.

  He wrote lyrics, made tapes. When he played them to deejays, they complained of chest pains. But setbacks did not faze him. He understood that cardiac arrest was not automatically dancer friendly. To break big, it would need to become a habit, second nature: ‘Like breathing,’ he said, ‘or not.’ Meantime, he hefted dog food in TriBeCa, had a room in Alphabet City.

  On Broadway, outside McDonald’s, he was a rusted color, bronze and ocher mixed, like oak leaves late in fall. Above the Rube Goldberg body, his head rose like an Amharic carving, long-necked, austere, with high scimitar cheekbones and high forehead, a high hawk’s nose.