New Haven Noir

by Amy Bloom

  Stale University will probably wanna take some credit for cleaning up the area, though no bona fide New Havenite would agree with them. Stale, for example, recently took over St. Rafael’s Hospital, where yours truly slithered out into this world, and now the snotty Stale crest—a shield with the words Light and Truth—has been ironically stamped onto the placard in front of the place. My neighbor, who has a tough little beagle with a missing leg, is a nurse at St. Raf’s; she tells me that things have gone from dawn to dusk since the coming of Stale—that the university has no respect for its employees or their wisdom. You see, we are all really sick of our tax-exempt imperialist overlords here in New Haven. But when they get wind of our words, what do they say? They say, Quiet down, plebs of New Haven; the gold in our East India Company coffers is what keeps you from becoming Bridgeport. And if you’re batting above double digits in the IQ department, you’ll have to admit that the Stale folks have a point.

  Back in the day, when we got up to no good down in Dwight, things were much worse. It was on the corner of Gilbert and Greenwood that I saw my first real-life prostitute. It was a total shock to me that she looked nothing like Julia Roberts. It was down by the delis on Dwight, where we’d stop to buy Snapples or rolling papers after scoring, that I learned that food stamps looked nothing like actual postage—that those fake flowers—the ones that come in little glass vases—they’re not for decoration, they’re crack pipes.

  The first time we go to buy drugs down on Gilbert, my hands get cold and clammy as I steer the Civic across Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, which marks the unofficial end of suburbia. I know this is all wrong. I know we’re gonna get busted and I can imagine my stern-eyed immigrant father picking me up at the police station in one of his dust mite–infested tweed jackets, one with patches on the elbows. Josh tells us we got nothing to worry about though. He says they only bust dealers. I say, Yeah, Josh, but don’t we sell drugs? Little James chimes in here, says, Kid, we’re not real dealers. I’m outnumbered, I have no choice but to keep on driving. I pull up to a corner where a bunch of black kids are standing—some are older than us, but a few haven’t even hit puberty yet. This is all sad and troubling, but I don’t do much thinking about social ills at this point in my life. No, racist little me is waiting for a gun to be pointed at my face. For sirens to start wailing. Josh rolls down his window, and one of the older black kids approaches. He says, I got dimes and nickels, what do you want? Josh hands him two tens rolled up in a tight cylinder. I turn to my left, and a twerpy little black kid is standing there looking at me with a no-nonsense face. I think, This is it. This is when they rob us. The dealer on Josh’s side says, Yo, white boy, roll down your window. It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking to me, but then I roll down my window a few inches, and the little hopper outside throws two tiny bags onto my lap. The bags are blue and stuffed fat with schwag. The older guy, the main dealer, says, We all good then?

  Josh says, I got a question for you, homey.

  Oh yeah, homey, says the dealer. And what’s that?

  I’m not thinking about Josh’s inappropriate use of the word, about how the dealer called him out on it. All I can think about is how cool and great Josh is. I’m like, How can he be so natural right now? Where did he learn how to do this? My fear fades, and I’m just proud—proud that Josh Kagan has agreed to let me be a part of his life. It feels like being friends with a movie star.

  Josh says, I’m wondering, brother, can you get us some weight?

  The dealer says, Kid, next time you’re down here, come straight to me. Ask for Ink, that’s what they call me. We don’t do weight, but I’ll take good care of you.

  We got to know Ink well that summer. Or maybe that’s not accurate. I never did learn anything about his parents, if he had any brothers and sisters or anything. But I did find out that he was eighteen years old, because on his eighteenth birthday—July 4—he gave us an extra nickel bag of something special, free of charge. After a while, whenever we showed up on Gilbert, the hoppers would start yelling, Go get Ink! or, Ink’s white boys are here! before we’d even rolled down our windows.

  Doug E. Fresh high-top fades were still popular among black men back then, but Ink’s head was totally shaved. He had a quarter-sized blotch of a birthmark on one of his cheeks, I can’t remember which one, but I’m assuming that’s where he got his nickname from, though I never had the balls to ask. He wore two pieces of jewelry around his neck: a ropelike silver chain and a black leather string with a few beads on it, beads that had something to do with Rastafari, I think. Ink was a bit overweight, and he always had a smile for us. We’d sell his five-dollar nickels of schwag—which Josh said got you fucked up because they were dipped in something funky, maybe formaldehyde—for twenty bucks to the kids in the burbs. Which meant we were on easy street again, smoking and drinking for free, with plenty of money to spend on Sally’s pie or Paulie’s burgers.

  We’d be so baked by the time we got to Paulie’s that Donny, the owner’s son, would say, You clowns, in the back right now, pointing toward a dimly lit room reserved for parties and VIPs. It’s not that we were important; he just wanted to keep us away from the cops who frequented his business. We’d go back there and pound the cans of Guinness we’d smuggled in, smiling and laughing at nothing whatsoever. We felt so alive, that we knew so much more than everyone else about the world—more than the people on the news, our teachers, our parents. They were all living on the surface; we were down deep in the fucking marrow.

  Ink would always have a word for us about that music that was playing in my car. He once said, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts. Now there’s something I can dig.

  I remember being surprised that a young black guy listened to the Beatles. I remember being surprised that he even knew who the Beatles were. I’m not proud of my gerbil-brained perspectives. But you develop strange and distorted notions of black people when you grow up in a whiter-than-snow world. Especially when you’re the only brown kid there. Ink didn’t like the Grateful Dead. He called them a bunch of thieves. But he was impressed when I once had a Miles Davis CD playing on my portable Panasonic Discman.

  The next time we came down, just two days later, he dropped a cassette on my lap with the words Bitches Brew on the label in neat, bubbly handwriting. He said, You fucking white boys gonna bust a nut for this shit. His gift made me smile, but what really had me pumped was that he kept on calling me white boy. I was so pleased that he couldn’t smell the curry wafting from my pores. That to him I was just another white kid from suburbia.

  * * *

  It’s been six whole days since I’ve written a single word. Thanks to Jenny. Fucking Jenny. She read my notebook, a gift she had supposedly given to me so that I could have a place to dispose of my most private and perturbed thoughts. What did I expect? Privacy is the purple unicorn of the land of long-term relationships. I walked into the kitchen, and there she was, gawking at my prose. I said, What the fuck are you doing? Nothing, she said. I knew her brain was going wild with opinions and criticism, so I told her to just come out and spill it. She said, Things seem to stop working when I say what I really think. And don’t swear at me. She was giving me that squinty-eyed glare to let me know I’d fucked up, and all I could think was: You read my private shit, and I’m supposed to be sorry?

  She sighed, then told me she was proud that I’d picked up my pen. Relieved that I was finally opening up about the miscarriage. She said, If you want this marriage to last, you’re gonna have to start dealing with that. I slapped my hand against my forehead. Marriage? Miscarriage? Jenny, I said, I wrote something about James and Jimmy and how they’re a bunch of assholes.

  For the next part of her speech, she switched into cold, condescending professor mode. She was impressed, she told me. Impressed that I was finally willing to take an honest look at my childhood. Impressed that I was—and here’s some classic Jenny bullshit—willing to finally look at the way being an immigrant exacerbated my feelings of teenage marginaliz
ation. And you did that with a nice touch of subtlety, she said. Her praise stopped there though. Surprise, surprise, she had big problems with Ink. She said, New Haven is filled with middle-class black families going about their business, trying to make ends meet. Why’d you choose to make your black character a drug dealer? Why do you have to perpetuate that stereotype? And there was more. Why did Ink have to be into music? Why did Ink have to teach you something about music? Can’t you see how you’re exoticizing him? Haven’t you ever heard of the magical Negro trope?

  What the fuck?

  I wanted to tell Jenny that this wasn’t a piece of fiction—it was the goddamned truth. Ink was real, so how could I change him? And if Ink being a drug dealer is a problem, it’s not my problem. It’s society’s problem. It’s a big bummer that the only way three well-heeled seventeen-year-olds from the suburbs can interact with a black kid from New Haven is through a financial transaction involving drugs. But at least the three of us—Josh, James, and me—we were pushing past our boundaries. Do you think the captain of our football team had anything to do with black kids from New Haven? Do you think our school’s honor society had any black members? We were integrating, I’d like to think. We were experiencing a form of multiculturalism that some pole-up-her-ass lit professor could only dream of.

  Well, Jenny, there was this one time when we did try to take our relationship with Ink beyond the realm of commerce. One Friday that August, we drove down to Gilbert as usual, and it was nasty out. Humid, hazy air hanging over the asphalt, you couldn’t imagine that snow would coat these roads in just a few months. A couple of hydrants had been opened up, and all the city kids were jumping in and out of the spraying water. We’d only seen that in the movies, even though we lived six miles away; people cooled down in their pools out where we lived. Ink was at the corner with his hands on his wide hips and wearing a Red Sox cap. It was as if he was waiting for us, and he probably was—he definitely enjoyed the chitchat, and we were his best customers.

  Once the day’s transaction was over, Ink said, So, ladies, any big plans this weekend? Josh said, Actually, there’s a party going on tonight, right here in New Haven. Ink said, A party? With actual people? I thought you guys just sat around getting high. Josh said, Yo, why don’t you join us, Ink? I’ll get you a little piece of blond pussy. As I write this, I remember being mortified by Josh’s statement—no, Jenny, not the fact that he had spoken about females in that despicable manner. But that he had so openly alluded to the race thing.

  Later that night, we headed back to New Haven, to the East Rock section, an apartheid neighborhood mainly filled with Stalies. Close to a million bucks for a Victorian these days, and twenty thousand in taxes. Pay attention, Donald Trump: You don’t need real walls in postindustrial America. The economics of it all puts up perfectly suitable metaphoric ones. I should be honest though: I may mock those ponce East Rock phonies, but the second Jenny gets her tenure, I’m gonna use her raise to get us into a sweet two-family on the right side of Orange Street.

  So this kid Fran—Greg Franford—was having a party, because his Stale professor parents were away for the weekend. Fran went to Snobkins, an ancient and prissy New Haven private school, and Josh knew him from Jewish camp. His dad was a real hotshot in the history department, and I actually read one of his books a couple of years ago—your basic justification for the righteousness of Euro-American rape, plunder, and pillaging, which is no surprise; that’s how academics earned their keep in the eighties. These days it’s the total opposite. You get promoted by talking about the undeniable awfulness of white people. Two sides of an elite and simplistic coin. I’m finding it harder and harder to fathom how Jenny can dedicate her life to all that drivel. Maybe that’s the problem. She still has faith in me, in what I do and who I can be. But I look at her and her colleagues and I see them for what they are—a bunch of conniving, careerist drones. They don’t care about art. About knowledge. They just care about grant money. About keeping their jobs and fertilizing their CVs.

  So about twenty, twenty-five kids are smoking up and drinking down in Fran’s father’s mahogany-laden, enormous third-floor library, which has ornately framed paintings of dead white men on the walls. There’s also a painting of some natives near a bunch of huts, and someone tells me it’s a million-dollar painting by some guy named Gauguin. I don’t give a shit about art. I’m just worried that someone’s gonna see the link between my curried ass and those natives in the painting. Some cool dub music is playing, stuff that Fran probably picked up on a fancy teen tour in Paris or Amsterdam, stuff that me and my crew wouldn’t get our hands on for another decade or so. I’m sitting on an ancient Persian rug, rather awestruck by all these good-looking, cool, and precocious kids—boys and girls. Josh, James, and I have two friends who are girls—Caron and Olivia. They’re pretty, but total alcoholic waste products. Olivia, for example, thought she was pregnant in ninth grade—perhaps with Josh’s baby—so she drank an entire case of Natural Light to force a miscarriage. These girls here are different. They’re talking about French movies and punk concerts at underground clubs in New York City. James is next to me, packing bong hits for them, and they’re willing to talk to us so that they can ingest our free weed and learn how to work James’s TobaccoMaster. And then Josh walks in with Ink and a friend of Ink’s who I’ve never seen before.

  I’d like to tell you that our attempts at socializing together went well. Maybe some literary journal would publish this story if I lied and said that we got together for a hike and found a sliver of something in common despite being from different sides of the tracks. But that’s not the way life works. That’s not the way it happened.

  Ink is wearing an untucked polo shirt and a sun visor, the kind of thing someone would wear playing golf. His friend is tall and skinny, wearing a Malcolm X T-shirt and surprisingly tight-fitting jeans. I watch Josh introduce these kids to our host, Fran, who greets them with smiles and half-hug handshakes. Ink takes out a fat blunt, sparks it up, and passes it to Fran. Ink’s Malcolm X friend leaves the library. I’m wondering where he’s gone. Fran, Ink, and Josh are passing the blunt back and forth without talking, and slowly, the chatter of the party dies down. Everyone’s staring at them or trying really hard not to. I have to help be a host, I think. Josh has the balls to make Ink feel at home, so I should too. I get up, slap him five. I don’t know what to say away from Gilbert Street, so I’m like, Ink, mad kids here wanna buy bud; you’re gonna make some serious cash tonight. He raises one of his eyebrows and gives me a glance that I can’t really read, then places a hand on my shoulder. He says, Ray, no business tonight. Tonight’s about having fun.

  And then everyone loosens up for a while, and it looks like, for a bit at least, tonight’s gonna be okay. A group of boys and girls start dancing in a corner of the library, and I wish I could join them. But I just stand beside Ink and keep on smoking. Some white girls go up to Ink and his friend and flirt with them. Josh has his arm dangling over Ink’s shoulder at one point. But then I see something weird out of the corner of my eye. Fran is whispering in Josh’s ear all seriously. Fran’s blue eyes are sharp and angry. Josh is listening intently, and he keeps brushing his brown locks behind his ear. That’s what he does when he’s nervous, which isn’t often, at least that’s what I used to think at the time.

  Josh comes over to us and says, Look, Ink, Fran knows about the car. Ink says, What car? Some dumb-ass model car, Josh tells him, then pauses. I can tell he’s trying to choose his words wisely. Josh says, Some dumb-ass model car that’s gone missing. Ink says, Oh, a model car’s missing. What’s it gotta do with me?

  My cotton mouth goes from New Mexico to the Sahara desert. I’m waiting for Ink to get belligerent; if Josh were in his position, he would definitely get belligerent. But Ink shouts, in a loud but calm voice, Hey, Franfuck!

  Everyone stops talking and stares at Ink. I look over at little James, who’s still on the floor with the TobaccoMaster between the legs of his corduroys, which h
ave been stitched up with paisley hippie patches. We exchange a commiserating glance. I think, James and I, we feel the same thing right now. We’re both afraid of Ink, but we both feel bad for him too. In that moment, I feel closer to James than I have ever felt before.

  Ink says, Franfuck—that’s your name, right? You got something to say to me? Fran says, Why don’t we take this outside? Outside? says Ink. You wanna fight me? Fran tells him that he doesn’t want to fight. He just wants to talk. In private. Ink says, I got nothing to talk about with you. Fran looks down, grasps his neck, looks back up. Fran says, Yo, you can’t be disrespecting people like that in their own homes. Says, I know people, people you don’t wanna be messing with.

  I’m wondering what the hell Fran is talking about. The toughest kid that this Snobkins son-of-a-Stalie knows is Josh Kagan. Ink looks dead serious. I can practically see the smoke coming out of his ears. I’m sure he’s gonna do something. Charge at Fran. Pull out a knife. A gun. But he just lets out a disgruntled scoff. Shakes his head, takes off his cap. And leaves without saying a word. His tall skinny friend follows behind him. After they leave, I find out Fran’s famous father collects die-cast model cars, and his favorite one, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, has disappeared.

  The vibes are horrible at the party now, so me and my posse decide to leave. We get in my Civic, and since we’re in New Haven, we head toward Paulie’s for a couple of quick cheeseburgers to lift our spirits. As we’re driving, Josh, who’s in the backseat, says he feels rough, that he needs a quick bowl to chill out. He grabs James’s Jansport, but James starts bugging out. Says, Yo, pass me my bag, I’ll pack it up for you. But James can’t stop Josh, who’s digging around the bag looking for a lighter. But Josh doesn’t find a lighter. Instead he pulls out a model car, Fran’s father’s pint-size Rolls-Royce. Josh says, Are you fucking kidding me, James? You little fucking rat. James says, Fran’s a fucking prick; he deserved it.