by Rob Hart
“She got it for your birthday. You told me that once.”
“You have a good memory.”
“Helps in this business. It’s a nice hat, too.”
“Thanks. How are the niños?”
She pulls a photo out of her pocket and shows me an apple-cheeked baby with a big smile and a pink bow in her wispy hair. “My new granddaughter.”
“How old is she?”
“Three months. Her name is Isabelle.”
“She’s beautiful. This is your third?”
“Fourth. You would know that if you ever came around to see me.”
“Either way, congrats.” I toss my cigarette into the street. “I’m going to turn in.”
“Remember, don’t tell anyone I said anything.”
I smile at her. “Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don’t trust me?”
She doesn’t smile back. “I don’t trust anyone.”
Nellie Bly. I don’t know who that is. I should have paid more attention in school. I should upgrade and get a smartphone, but I like my flip phone. I break cheap plastic phones often enough—a big glass fancy phone isn’t going to last long. Plus, I like that the receiver is in front of my mouth when I speak into it, even if it means I can’t Google shit. I like to sit on my fire escape and look out at the city and not at a screen. I like to drink whiskey and I should stop in a bar to get some.
I need to go home. I need some real sleep. I can’t do this if I’m exhausted. I’m going to make mistakes.
My stomach rumbles. It’s lacking food. I haven’t eaten in hours. There’s a noodle shop on the way home. It stays open late for the drunks. I can get some noodles.
I try to calculate how much sleep I should have gotten versus how much sleep I’ve actually gotten but math doesn’t work right now so I just walk, my head down, dodging people who stumble and weave into my path.
The door of the shop doesn’t budge. I push it again before I realize the lights are off. I press my face up against the window and see the place is gutted like a turkey at the end of Thanksgiving. Even the fixtures are ripped out of the walls.
I can’t remember the name of the place. The owner sort of recognized me and sometimes threw a free order of edamame in the bag.
On the door is a sign that says it’ll be a bank.
Figures. I get in bed and my head is too full up, and I can’t sleep.
I throw off the covers and pace, trying to order my thoughts. I consider pants but the apartment is too hot for that. I need a downer. A downer wouldn’t violate my no-drug policy. Prescription pills aren’t bad for you. They give them to kids.
I toss my drawers looking for a Vicodin or a Klonopin or an Oxy or a Xanax. My pill supply is in serious need of replenishing. I’m glad I don’t have guests, or else I’d be embarrassed.
The vial of coke is on the counter, standing upright, beckoning me. As much as it hurts, I open it in the sink and wash it out, watch the murky water disappear down the drain. Immediately I regret it, but know I made the right decision.
I pace until I get an idea. Something to focus on.
My kitchen is an odd shape, like a hexagon that’s being crushed on one side. There’s a big bare rectangle of wall between the window to the alley and the living room. Flat and white like a canvas.
Need some music first. I plug my iPod into the speakers in the living room, dig through it for Billie Holiday. She sings a couple of bars of “Long Gone Blues,” but it doesn’t sit right. Too romantic. I switch to Nina Simone.
Over the music I can just hear the static of the scanner. “10-31, south side, Washington Square Park.” Assist civilian with a non-medical emergency.
In the very middle of the wall, I write Chell’s name. Then at various points around that:
Ginny
Nellie Bly
Steve the bouncer
Man with bag on head
Other guy with Chell
I draw a question mark for the killer, then I draw a line connecting them to Chell’s name. Then I make a list of all the places I know she went:
Snow White
Work
Alphabet City
Jamaica
I don’t know what to do after that, but it feels good to see it all in front of me. I sit on my kitchen chair and stare at the wall for a long time. Wish the words would scatter and reform themselves into something that makes a little more sense, but it doesn’t happen.
It would be nice to know about Nellie Bly. I could call Bombay and ask him to look it up, but he’ll be sleeping. He has a grown-up job.
No matter how hard I try to look at the names on the wall, my eyes keep drifting back to the question mark.
How could someone hurt a person like that?
My dad drilled it into me early: Men don’t hit women. More than that, you’ve got to stick up for people. The bad guys win only if the good guys let them. Those lessons are as simple to me as breathing.
Is it as simple as the right kind of upbringing? Kids who get abused grow up to abuse. To them the pain and the hate and the fear are a part of them. But if you’ve been hurt, knowing that pain, why would you want to inflict it on someone else?
Does it go deeper than that? Like bad wiring, one neuron is infected and over a lifetime it branches out like cancer?
There are 8.2 million people in this city.
How many people right now are dead?
Dying?
In the process?
Worse, how many are infected?
I stare at the map on the wall, like those questions aren’t naïve. Like they actually have some kind of reasonable answer. But I think about them anyway, because otherwise, my mind wanders to an image I don’t want to see: Chell’s face, twisted in pain.
Nina Simone sings “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” her voice like the bottom of the ocean. I pick up my cell. There’s a message from my mom. I consider it. Instead I call Chell’s phone. It goes to voicemail.
“I’m sorry, you dialed the wrong number.”
Beep.
I play it again on speakerphone, close my eyes.
An insistent knock at the door wakes me up. Getting my head off the pillow is like moving a battleship. I check my phone and it indicates I’ve been out for four hours. If this is the cops again, I may punch one of them in the face.
I pull on jeans and a shirt, open the door a crack, and find Aziz. It’s hard to read his eyes behind the coke-bottle glasses, but his face is pointed firmly south.
He says, “You changed the locks.”
“I don’t think I did,” I tell him. “The key sticks sometimes.”
“The police were looking for you.”
“They’re old friends. We straightened all that out.”
Aziz leans around me to look into the apartment. “The woman downstairs says there’s water leaking into her apartment. I need to come in with a plumber and have a look.”
“Nothing in here is leaking. Sometimes I get water in the sink and the toilet, but I figure that’s normal, right?”
Aziz tries to move around me. I hold the door tight to my side and block him with my body. He asks, “Where’s Miss Hudson?”
“Bingo.”
“She’s always out at bingo. Why does the apartment look like such a mess?”
“She had a party last night.”
“You know if she doesn’t live here anymore, then I don’t have to honor your lease.”
“I am fully aware it is not an issue.”
He gives up trying to get around me and takes a step back into the hall. “Tell her she needs to come to my office. I have some paperwork she needs to sign.”
“Have a heart, Aziz. She’s an old lady. She’s not doing great.”
“Good enough to play bingo.”
“Well, you can’t expect her to sit around here all day. I’m not great company.”
He looks into the apartment one more time, then stalks off down the hall. “Tell her to come by later.”
Not an auspi
cious start to the day.
Rent-controlled apartments are like UFOs. You hear about them but you never actually see them. Lucky for me, I knew a guy who knew a guy. The first guy, the one I knew, owed me a favor.
There was a woman who lived here and she died. She probably moved in sometime around World War II and her rent was locked into place. The only good thing FDR ever did for me was sign the Emergency Price Control Act in the 1940s.
The guy I knew worked at a hospital, and the guy he knew worked in a morgue. They had a little system set up. If I wasn’t owed a favor, I would have paid a finder’s fee.
No one notified the landlord the woman died because it happened off-premises. So I moved in, up the fire escape and through the window in the middle of the night. For as much as Aziz knows, Miss Hudson does nothing but sleep and play bingo, and I’m her live-in caretaker.
The thing is, as soon as he finds out she’s not alive, he’ll junk her lease and charge market rate for the apartment. I can’t afford market rate. And even though it’s really tough to kick out tenants in New York City, what I’m doing is a lot less than legal.
Landlords will neglect repairs to force renters out. They keep champagne on ice so they’re ready to celebrate when rent-controlled tenants die off. Aziz is fixated on me. I don’t know how much longer I’ll last.
I’m sure there are people around here who notice Miss Hudson is gone, but the neighbors don’t give a damn, ultimately, and I don’t give a damn about them. You’d think sticking so many people into such a small place would make them interact more. It just makes them angrier and more territorial. People outside New York think New Yorkers are rude. We’re not. It’s just that personal space is in very short supply, so we treasure every little bit we can get.
The people who live upstairs sound like they’re always wearing high heels and the brick walls hold in the heat even during the winter so it’s always sweltering, and what looks like a broom closet in the kitchen is actually the shower. The purple and blue and pink floral wallpaper makes me nauseous when I take too many prescription drugs, and the toilet never really flushes all the way on the first try.
But it’s my apartment, and I love it and anything I could ever need is right outside my door.
There’s another knock. It’s quieter, and I scream, “What Aziz?” but when I open the door he’s not standing there. Instead, it’s a pretty girl about my age, wearing a purple sweater, her black hair pulled into a tight bun. She’s got the ragged look of someone who’s been traveling.
She says, “Your mom wants to know why you don’t answer your phone.”
I don’t know what to say to that. The girl looks familiar, but my brain is still foggy.
After a moment the girl shrugs. “C’mon cousin, are you going to invite me in or what?”
“Margo?”
“Correct.”
“Fuck.”
“I missed you, too.”
She gives me a hug and I stand aside for her. She comes into the apartment dragging a black roller suitcase behind her. I suddenly remember the conversation I had with my mom a few weeks ago. Margo is from Pennsylvania and looking at NYU. She wanted to visit the city to feel it out, and my mom asked if she could stay with me. That must be why she was calling.
Margo asks, “It’s still cool, right? Staying here?”
“Of course.”
“Did you forget?”
“Yes.”
Margo laughs. “You know, I can go get a hotel room or something if this is inconvenient.”
“No, it’s fine. Hotels around here are too fucking expensive.” I lead her into the living room and put her on the couch, sit on the floor on the other side of the coffee table. She shrugs. “So, how’ve you been?”
“Alive.” I reach for my cigarettes and pull one out, hold the pack up to her. She nods and I hand it to her. “So you might be coming here next year?”
“I hope so. I think I’ve got a really good chance of getting into Tisch.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m going to text my mom and let her know I’m with you. You should do the same. Your mom says she never hears from you.”
As Margo clicks away I send my mom a text: Margo here. Sorry. Then I turn off my phone. I take a long drag on my smoke. “Been a while, right?”
“I haven’t seen you since the funeral. That was so long ago.” She reaches for something in her bag but stops. “I’m sorry I didn’t really get a chance to talk to you. There were so many people…”
“It got crowded.”
“I know I should have called. Or, I don’t know, been there. I’m so sorry about what happened to your dad.”
“Most people are.”
Margo looks away from me, her voice catching a little. “He was a hero. You know that, right?”
“Let’s not talk about this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. The first thing anyone ever wants to do when they come to New York is talk about 9/11. What is there to talk about? It happened. It sucks. Talking about it is not going to bring him back.”
She drops it there. Looks around my apartment, at the French Rococo walnut armoire in the corner, at the green painted Irish hutch. The plastic wrapped around the paisley-print couch creaks underneath her.
“You have an interesting taste in furniture,” she says.
“I’m a fan of the classics. I still listen to vinyl too.”
“Seriously, why does it look like an old lady lives here?”
“Well, that’s sort of the point.”
I explain my living arrangement and her eyes go wide when I tell her how much I pay in rent. She asks, “For this apartment?”
“Fact.”
“That’s insane. Student housing at NYU is nearly three grand a month, and that’s with a roommate.”
“Welcome to New York.”
“It’s a little weird though,” she says, scrunching up her face. “Living in a dead lady’s apartment?”
“New York real estate is a full contact sport. And it’s pretty vanilla, compared to some of the things I’ve done.” I finish off my cigarette and stamp it out in the overflowing ashtray. The scanner buzzes in the kitchen. “10-32, A and 3.” Defective oil burner a few blocks away.
Margo looks toward the kitchen. “What was that?”
“Scanner. Listen, make yourself comfortable. I need to clean up.”
I leave Margo on the couch, which is set back against the wall and behind a folding screen so I can use the shower when people are over without feeling like too much of an exhibitionist. She occupies herself while I manage a quick rinse. Just enough to make me feel human.
I pull on a shirt I feel confident was recently clean and head back to the living room. Margo has emptied the ashtray into the trash, and she’s smoking another one of my cigarettes. She looks up at me. “What now?”
“Fuck if I know. You showed up on my doorstep. Tell me what you want to do.”
“I don’t want to keep you from anything. And I can go, really. I’m sure I can find a place to stay.”
“No, you’re staying here. Let’s go get some food. I need eggs and coffee.”
“Perfect. I saw a Starbucks on the way here.”
“Starbucks?”
“They have breakfast sandwiches.”
This is going to require attention. I tell her, “If you’re going to live here, no Starbucks. The coffee tastes like crap and it’s a chain. Chains are stupid. There are much better food options.”
She arches her eyebrows and nods cautiously, like she thinks I might be scolding her. Maybe I am.
We hit the sidewalk and I stretch, breathe the crisp air. I turn in a circle, contemplate where we should go, and I catch Margo twisting a sterling ring off her right index finger. She places it in her purse.
I ask, “What are you doing?”
“I don’t want anyone to take it.”
And it’s right here that I laugh so hard I pull a muscle in my rib cage.
; Margo asks, “What?”
Here’s the thing about living in New York City: People from the outside are stuck on how things used to be in the seventies, when riding the subway meant you ran a 60/40 chance of getting stabbed.
The murder rate peaked in 1990 with twenty-two-hundred deaths. Last year, it was a drop over five hundred. We’re down in every major crime category, to the point where this is now the safest big city in America. We’ve gone from the urban hellscape of Death Wish to the whitewashed utopia of Friends.
And yet we just can’t shake our rep.
Everyone has their own theories about what made things change. Gentrification, the Clinton economy. And they were factors, sure. But the big catalyst was Mayor Giuliani, a supreme asshole of titanic proportions. A craven, selfish fuck who stomped on civil liberty and, contrary to popular belief, didn’t do jack shit after 9/11 besides trip over the first responders on his way to the television cameras.
Among his many “accomplishments” was appointing a commissioner for the NYPD who instituted a broken windows policy. The idea is that if you walk by an abandoned factory with broken windows, and there’s a pile of rocks at your feet, you may be tempted to break more windows. But if none of the windows are broken, you might not think to do it.
In this instance, the idea was that clearing out lesser crimes would reduce major crimes. The NYPD went after the little things, like public drinking, fare beating, squeegee men. And it helped, a little.
The problem is Giuliani also turned the NYPD into a military-style unit of enforcement that could stop and frisk you for no reason, other than they feel like it. There were arrest quotas to make and CompStat reports to fill out, which were supposed to be about tracking crime, but turned into goals. Haven’t written enough summonses this month? Then go out and snag someone for something. Doesn’t matter if they’re guilty of anything—as long as the numbers look good.
And crime did drop. The tourists flocked here in droves. Kids with stars in their eyes moved to once-uninhabitable neighborhoods like Bushwick and the Lower East Side. Park Slope and Tribeca became suburbs tucked away between tall buildings.
Today’s New York City is a luxury product to package and sell to tourists. In a hundred years, this entire city will be set behind glass and you’ll only be allowed to live here if you earn a salary in the high six figures. Everyone else will be turfed to Jersey.
