Upper East Side #10

by Ashley Valentine

  Yikes.

  “The thing is, Kaliq,” Babs went on, idly tracing the handlebars of a rusted bike that was hanging from the ceiling, “I need a hand. Do me a little favor, will you?”

  “Of course.” He nodded. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Well, this particular favor might be outside of your regular job description,” she admitted. “But if you’d be so kind as to help me out, maybe I won’t mention anything about the fact that my attic smells like a Wiz Khalifa concert. What do you say?”

  What can you say to blackmail?

  “I’m...I’m sorry,” Kaliq stumbled. “It won’t happen again.”

  Babs laughed. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that.” She smiled, pushing past the upside-down bike toward Kaliq, who was still hunched by the window. “But never mind. I need a hand, and you’ve got two.” She took his now-callused hands in hers, examining them. “Two very capable, strong hands.”

  Kaliq wondered if he shouldn’t warn Coach that his kids might not look like him for a reason. Babs had probably bagged every grocery boy who’d bagged her groceries!

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, trying to sound cheerfully polite, although he heard his voice warble in pure stoned terror.

  Babs dropped his hands and undid the top button on her pink cotton shirt. “I decided to get a little surprise for the coach.” She undid another button.

  “I see,” Kaliq replied evenly. And he did see: some very impressive cleavage, nary a tan line, thanks to her afternoon regimen of topless sunbathing.

  Nice.

  “I decided to get a little tattoo.” She giggled, undoing the last button on her shirt and letting it slide off her shoulders and onto the floor. “Just a little something for the coach to discover when he gets home.”

  “Great.” He nodded. Eye contact, eye contact, eye contact.

  “But I’ve got to take special care of it,” she whispered huskily, turning her back to Kaliq to reveal a tiny tattoo of a butterfly, its green wings spread across her lower back. “But I just can’t seem to reach it,” she continued. “My tattoo artist, Matty? He said I have to rub this ointment on it every couple of hours.”

  Kaliq studied the tattoo, trying desperately to clear his head. What was he supposed to do in this situation? Babs was okay, but up close her skin looked kind of like a beat-up old baseball glove, and her perfume smelled like the soap in a gas station bathroom.

  No wonder Coach Michaels needed that Viagra.

  Speaking of him, he’d kick Kaliq’s ass, and not just figuratively, if he knew that his wife had taken her top off in Kaliq’s presence. On the other hand, if he didn’t rub Babs with ointment she’d tell Coach Michaels he’d been smoking weed on the job. The coach probably wouldn’t give Kaliq his diploma at the end of the summer, which would mean no more Yale, and basically his whole entire life would be fucked up.

  His choices were slightly limited.

  “Where’s the ointment?” he asked Babs, closing his eyes as he dabbed it on. He searched his high brain for something nonsexual to talk about. “Um, after this I gotta get that mower out of the sun, otherwise she might blow. I don’t want to start any fires.”

  Too late, honey. Too late.

  3

  “Ouch, shit,” muttered Mekhi Hargrove, burning his tongue on his tap-water-and-Folgers-crystals excuse for a cup of coffee.

  Ever heard of Starbucks, dude?

  Mekhi stuck a slightly bent Newport in his mouth and tried to simultaneously take a drag from it while blowing to cool his coffee, which was totally impossible. Coffee splashed out of the lumpy ceramic mug his mother had made years ago, before she’d moved to Hungary or the Czech Republic or wherever the hell she lived, and onto the dusty linoleum floor. He was definitely not a morning person.

  Mekhi deposited the sad cup on a semi-cluttered part of the old kitchen counter and padded over to the refrigerator, hoping against hope that he could scrounge up something edible to eat on his way downtown in the subway. He only had twenty minutes to get to his job—a dream gig at the Strand, the sprawling used bookstore in Greenwich Village—and if he didn’t eat now, by the time his lunch break rolled around, he’d be half-dead from malnourishment.

  Holding his breath to avoid exposure to any unfortunate smells, he wedged his head inside the large, rumbling appliance and surveyed the scene: an ancient coffee pot filled with some concoction covered with fuzzy green mold, a white ceramic bowl overflowing with unidentifiable vegetable remains, a clear plastic case containing hard-boiled eggs that his sister, Bree, had drawn little faces on before she left for Europe more than a month ago. It wasn’t pretty.

  “Don’t bother,” muttered a voice behind him. “I looked last night. There’s nothing even remotely close to edible in there.”

  He closed the refrigerator and smiled weakly at Yasmine Richards, whose status had evolved from best friend to girlfriend to roommate. After many ups and downs—all of which involved Mekhi’s horny wandering eye—they’d decided they were better off as friends who slept in separate beds, in separate rooms. It just so happened that those rooms were in the same apartment, because Yasmine had been rendered homeless by her newly-boyfriended totally selfish bitchface of a sister.

  “Yeah, this sucks.” Mekhi dropped his cigarette into the sink, where it went out with a hiss. “I’m so hungry.”

  “Mmmm,” Yasmine grunted, microwaving some water in a Pyrex measuring cup, the only clean vessel she could find. She spilled Folgers on the floor while trying to spoon it into the cup. She wasn’t much of a morning person either.

  A match made in heaven.

  She hoisted herself onto the cluttered kitchen counter, her prickly legs sticking out from a pair of Mekhi’s tattered boxers. It was bizarre to see her still wearing something of his, something so intimately his, when they weren’t together anymore. It made him...sad.

  Every night for the last week, Mekhi had lain awake in bed, wondering what Yasmine was doing in the next room. He’d hear her get up to go to the bathroom, and think about accidentally bumping into her in the dark familiar hall of the apartment. They’d fall into each other’s arms, furiously kissing all the way back to Mekhi’s bed. He’d rub her shaven head, loving the feel of the familiar soft stubble on his chest, the way her ears were always so hot when she got excited—

  Mekhi suddenly started shaking his head as if his fantasy was water stuck in his ears.

  “You okay?” Yasmine asked, eyeing him suspiciously. She shifted from side to side on the countertop, settling beside the microwave.

  “Um, yeah,” Mekhi practically yelled, his pinkies now lodged in his ears. “I guess I better hit the road. Gotta get to work. Make the donuts. You know how it is!”

  “Why are you screaming?” she asked quietly, her eyebrows knitted in question.

  “Oh, sorry.” Mekhi laughed. He downed his coffee in one quick gulp, ignoring the burning sensation in his throat, and reached past Yasmine to grab his folded-up copy of the New York Review of Books to read on the subway. “So. Bye. Have a good day,” he added, resisting the urge to kiss her.

  “Bye,” she called after him.

  But hello, awkward?!

  The rolled-up Review tucked safely in his damp armpit, Mekhi bounded down the musty granite stairs toward the legendarily filthy employee lounge at the Strand. The dark stairwell smelled like moldy books, which should have been nasty but was actually one of Mekhi’s favorite smells.

  He had thirty seconds to stash his paper, grab his name tag out of his locker, and report to the floor for duty. None of the bookstore’s managers had any sense of humor about things like tardiness. They were crusty liberal academics who resented young summer job kids like Mekhi, who they all just called “the new kid” or “hey, you,” despite the fact that he’d been working there full time for almost a month and wore a name tag everyday, just like they did.

  How glamorous.

  Mekhi burst into the tiny lounge, accidentally banging the do
or against the wall, startling a skinny Puerto Rican kid with horn-rimmed glasses too big for his square, wide-eyed face.

  “Sorry,” Mekhi muttered, dashing over to his designated locker—a tiny one-foot-square cubby just inches above the cigarette-butt-littered concrete floor. He entered his nerdy combination—8/28/49, the birthday of Goethe, the author of his all-time favorite book, The Sorrows of Young Werther—tossed his paper inside, and grabbed his plastic name tag.

  “New York Review of Books, huh?” asked the guy.

  “What? Yeah.” Mekhi pinned the cheap red tag to his faded black T-shirt, eyeing the stranger suspiciously. Mekhi hadn’t noticed him around before. Was it his first day? Was it possible that Mekhi was no longer technically “the new kid”?

  “I’m Gabriel.” The stranger smiled. “It’s my first day.”

  Fresh meat in moldy-book land. Sounds like a freaking party.

  “Cool. Welcome to hell,” Mekhi barked, secretly thrilled that he now had seniority over someone.

  “Actually, I can’t believe I’m here,” Gabriel continued eagerly, glancing around the room as if it were the Sistine Chapel instead of a dirty, windowless room in a rat-infested basement. He was wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt and cutoff khaki pants that reminded Mekhi of Yasmine. The other afternoon when the A/C had blown out in the living room, she’d spontaneously cut the legs off her favorite black cargos to make shorts. God, he missed her.

  “I’ve always wanted to work here, you know?” Gabriel went on.

  “Job’s a job,” replied Mekhi, disinterestedly. Of course he knew exactly what Gabriel was talking about, but he was kind of enjoying mimicking the attitude copped by the rest of the senior Strand employees. It made him feel tough, like he might put out his next cigarette on the back of Gabriel’s hand. “I saw a whole cart of old literary journals upstairs by the elevator. Guess that’s what you’ll be dealing with till lunchtime.”

  “Sounds great to me!” gushed Gabriel. “Am I supposed to just wait down here, though? This guy Clark told me to come down here and that he’d be with me soon, but that was, like, fifteen minutes—”

  “Well, Clark knows what he’s doing,” Mekhi interrupted. “I’ve got to get upstairs, but I’m sure I’ll see you around, Gabe.”

  “It’s Gabriel,” the guy corrected him. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like that guy from the Raves, Mekhi Something?”

  Mekhi froze in midstep. “Hargrove. His name’s Mekhi Hargrove,” Mekhi informed him. “Well, actually my name’s Mekhi Hargrove.” His career with downtown rockers the Raves had lasted for exactly one gig at Funktion on the Lower East Side. He couldn’t believe anyone remembered that night. He certainly didn’t.

  An entire bottle of Stoli can do that to you.

  “Oh man, are you serious?” Gabriel crossed the small room and extended his hand. “You’re Mekhi Hargrove? You’re the Mekhi Hargove, the poet? I can’t believe I’m meeting you! Of course, it makes total sense—you would work at the Strand.” He pushed his geeky glasses up on his nose. “It’s perfect. I can’t believe it. I loved your poetry, man. Got any new stuff I can read?”

  Mekhi felt himself blushing. Before his unlikely stint as a rock star, he’d published a poem called “Sluts” in The New Yorker. He’d been the buzz of the literary world for exactly five minutes, and though his memories of that time were warm and fuzzy, he couldn’t believe there was someone besides his dad who remembered his brush with poetic fame.

  “Well, poets have to keep working,” Mekhi lied energetically. “I’m putting together some ideas for a novella. That’s why I’ve been laying kind of low lately.”

  “Dude, this is such an honor, I almost can’t believe it. I’m meeting a New Yorker poet. This is incredible.”

  “It’s really not such a big deal.” Mekhi waved his hand like he was batting away the praise.

  Mister Modesty.

  “This is perfect,” Gabriel continued, shoving his hands in the pockets of his just-below-the-knee cutoffs. “Look, I can’t believe I’m going to ask you this, but I’ve been trying to get a salon going, you know, kind of an informal thing, lots of people who care about books, getting together every so often to just shoot the shit, talk about literature and poetry and films and music. And blogs. But only sometimes. I’m sure you’re probably really busy, but maybe you’d like to join up? Or I mean, if you’re too busy it’s cool, but—”

  “A salon,” Mekhi interrupted Gabriel’s rambling. It actually sounded kind of...awesome. He’d come to work at the Strand expecting lots of stimulating breakroom discussions about the classics and foreign films, but so far the most in-depth conversation he’d participated in had involved two coworkers asking to bum cigarettes. “That sounds cool.”

  “Oh man, that’s great!” Gabriel cried excitedly, his voice cracking. “I’m still working on all the details, you know, drafting a mission statement, thinking about how to recruit members.”

  “A mission statement.” Mekhi nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe I could help you out with that.”

  “Really?” Gabriel asked. “Fucking fantastic.” He pulled a rainbow swirly pen out of his breast pocket and grabbed Mekhi’s hand. “I’ll give you my e-mail.” He scrawled his address across Mekhi’s palm. “Just send me any random ideas and I’ll plug them in. Also, we need a name. I was thinking we could mix up the names of some dead poets, like Wadsworth Whitman or Emerson Thoreau. They wouldn’t mind.”

  No, but they’ll be rolling in their graves.

  “Cool.” Mekhi pulled his hand out of Gabriel’s grasp and glanced at the address he’d written there. “I’ll be in touch,” he added, trying not to sound too eager, even though he definitely was. He needed some new friends now that Yasmine was rightfully tired of him.

  One word: sad. But also...slightly cute. In a seriously sad way.

  4

  “Okay.” Yasmine sighed, kneeling in the fifth-floor playroom of the James-Morgan Park Avenue townhouse. “Let’s just do one final bag check and then we are out of here. Ready?”

  “Ready!” Nils and Edgar screamed in unison. They were twins and so they did pretty much everything in unison, whether it was spilling cranberry juice on their mother’s antique armchairs or screeching at the top of their lungs (probably to remind their mother that they indeed existed). They were adorable in their own way, but that way was particularly hard to see when you were responsible for wiping their various body parts and making sure they got through the day with those body parts intact and unharmed. And that was exactly the position in which Yasmine found herself. She’d been fired from her first serious Hollywood gig as the cinematographer on Breakfast at Fred’s, and in a moment of personal and financial desperation, she’d signed on to be a nanny.

  Also, she’d been drunk at the time. Obviously.

  It was almost too depressing to consider that two weeks ago she’d been in private rehearsals in a major movie star’s suite in the Chelsea Hotel, doing what she loved best, and now she was in an attic nursery in Carnegie Hill with a grape jelly stain on her Levi’s and two snot-nosed boys somersaulting at her feet, while the movie’s stars were sunning themselves on the beach, only a few miles away, in the Hamptons. Not that she was much of a star-fucker, but still.

  Now she was practically trapped in her own circle of hell: living with her longtime love but not kissing him, and picking dried booger-globs off her black jeans while the hyperactive little boys she was babysitting burped the alphabet. And poor Mekhi...

  Well, maybe he didn't deserve too much pity, since he cheated on her with that flaky yoga girl, and now she was stuck in Mekhi’s little sister's pale-pink bedroom next door. Besides, he’s still had his “work” and a seemingly bottomless canister of Folgers crystals. Sometimes it seemed he liked bad coffee and bad poetry more than he liked girls.

  As if that's possible.

  “Here we go. Tissues?” Yasmine asked.

  “Yay!” cried the twins, brandishing two Kleenex bundles. T
hey flung them into the pink-and-green tote bag.

  “Snack bags?”

  “Yay!” They whipped in two little plastic baggies filled with cheddar cheese goldfish crackers.

  “Juice boxes?”

  “Yay!”

  “Don’t throw them!” Yasmine immediately recalled the pink stains she’d tried so hard to scrub out of the antique chairs.

  “Throw what?” Allison Morgan—also known as Ms.—strode purposefully up the narrow wooden stairs and into the sun-drenched playroom, her snakeskin Jimmy Choo stilettos clacking against the parquet floor.

  “Mommy!” The boys abandoned their day-trip bag and threw themselves face-first into her knee-length pencil skirt.

  “Packing up for an outing?” Ms. Morgan asked in an über-fake, high-pitched tone, backing away from the twins.

  Very perceptive, Mom.

  “Thought we’d head to the Central Park Zoo today,” Yasmine explained.

  “Oh dear,” clucked Allison. “Central Park? You remember what happened last time.”

  Of course Yasmine remembered. She’d never forget the sight of Mekhi in neon yellow kneepads and Rollerblades, hand in hand with another girl. A long-haired, spandex-clad, horrifically perky girl. It had been so hilariously bizarre and so completely heartbreaking. Smoking a cigarette, scruffy hair matted, dirty T-shirt, long-to-the-point-of-ridiculous corduroys—that was the Mekhi Hargrove she knew.

  And loved?

  But of course that’s not what Yasmine’s militant new boss was referring to. She meant that the twins had ruined their clothes eating Fudgsicles and stayed up half the night yelling, “Fudgie-poo!” because of the sugar.

  But Yasmine couldn’t stop thinking about Mekhi. Things were kind of back to normal now. Or almost normal. Maybe it was just from lack of sleep, or the fact that she was so relieved that he’d ditched the yoga-toned health-nut bombshell and the old Mekhi was back, but damn, that morning in the kitchen Yasmine had barely been able to resist kissing him. He just looked so sweet, gulping bad coffee from that lumpy mug, sleep crusties still stuck in his eyes. It almost felt...natural, the way she’d always pictured their life together. Except they weren’t together. They were just...friends. And she probably didn’t want to do anything to ruin that, like bury her nose in his warm, delicious, cigarette-smelling twists. No, she absolutely did not.