August and Then Some (3 page)

“NO.” I slapped his hand away.

He slapped mine back.

I grabbed him in a headlock.

We both fell to the ground.

I wanted him to fight back so the talking would be over, but he wasn't throwing any punches cause he knew I wasn't really fighting him. And we both knew if it was a real fight his punches would have been the first and hardest to land. He let me roll him onto his stomach and hold him down. “Just get the fuck out,” I yelled.

“It's not your fuckin river. Get off me.”

“No.”

“Let me up.”

“Will you leave if I let you up?”

“No.”

“Then forget it.”

“You gonna keep me here till you get hungry, idiot?”

“Till you leave.”

“JT, let me up and tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Fuck that. I tell you something and it's like telling everyone we know, you bucket of shit spud brain.”

For that, he bit my hand.

I let go of his neck and squeezed my right hand with my left.

“Oww you motherfucker.” I shook out my fingers. “Did you
just fuckin bite me?” I looked at my right knuckles that now had red teeth marks. “You
bit
me.”

“If you really want me to, I will fuck you up.”

“I want you to stop asking me questions.”

Noke walked up to me real slow, his arms up in the peace position, showing me his huge palms. “Did I break the skin?”

“No.”

“Talk to me. Now.”

If there was a way to get out of it then I didn't see it. He would have been on my ass for months. And I supposed I did owe him an answer for why I threw a choke hold on him. “Noke, you have to make me a deal.”

“Done.”

“You cannot open your mouth to a single soul.”

“I won't.”

Even though he sounded sincere I said, “How do I know that?”

“Because it's me.”

From Tompkins Square, I walk back to my apartment, lay on a futon mattress that takes up a quarter chunk of the floor. From the fifth floor all the lovers' quarrels, music, bed moaning, garbage and food smells—everything people let escape—pass through me on their way out the roof of the building. I'm the conduit for everything coming out of this building, a lightning rod in reverse. But not tonight. Tonight it's quiet. And definitely not the same quiet as laying on a riverbed in Yonkers with Nokey, taking a slow ride on the Earth, moving on the same rhythm as all the other passengers. This is a throbbing quiet, like an ear infection. I see that woman in the coffee shop. My sister's face under another girl's skin. My sister standing on the footbridge over the river. Nokey looking at her. Noticing her. My heart starts tripping. And I'd put cash on the Dalai Lama not being able to slow that shit down.

Fuck. Here comes the panic. It shoots up the back of my neck, dries out my mouth and paralyzes my tongue. My heart flaps around my chest like a fish on a line. Every fucking night, the constant ringing and thinking will not stop—yelling at me that I should start drinking heavily close to the edge of a rooftop.
I try to laugh it all off until the early signs of blue light start to seep in the windows, that's usually when I get my hour and a half of sleep. I heard that resting is just as good as sleeping, which doesn't help me, because I can't stay still enough to rest. I clasp my hands under the back of my head. I can feel my hair growing back in. I've kept shaving it since I left the park. Don't know why. I find all kinds of twisted positions to lie in, but eventually I stand up. Look out the window, open the refrigerator and see if anything has changed since last I looked. I pee. I grab a pretzel out of a bag from the counter. I drink some water. I try jerking off, and I can barely feel anything—I haven't done the one-gun salute in months. I'm numb in a lot of places and it terrifies me, OK? It terrifies me like sleeping, like my own thoughts, like money, like death, like listening to my heartbeat, like thinking about my breathing, like feeling like this forever, like being alone, like being with someone, like jail. My eyes spin around this apartment looking for the right woman's face, the cure, the quietest thing, but I find brick, wood, paint. A book. I scan a page in this Gabriel García Márquez book that I'm supposed to be reading for a GED class and can't follow for shit. Tomorrow at work I'll fight to stay awake while hauling a thirty-pound bag of rocks in each hand—when sleep isn't safe. Or possible. No one is looking for me. See, this is what I don't fucking want—a quiet building. I want kids running across wood floors, I want muffled music or domestic squabbles shaking the walls. I throw the sheet off, stand up. Look out the window, come back to the mattress, put my back to the wall and tap my right knuckles into my left palm for noise. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap … Faster, faster, faster. Louder. Keep going. Keep a rhythm. Go, go, go, go, go. All right, I gotta stop that shit. Now my hand hurts. Great. No way man, I can't have the buzz in my ears be the only thing to listen to. I pace. Somebody give me a little neighborly help goddamn it, I need to hear some
noise. OK stop. Breathe deep. This night will be over just like the rest of them. Breathe again. Why do they tell you to do that, it just makes it worse. This is like free-falling upward. SON OF A BITCH. I rock back and forth on my feet. Please. Everything is OK here. It's way too early to touch that notebook, let it stay on the table. OK, sing Bob Marley:
Everything's gonna be all right. Everything's gonna be all right.
I need a stereo in here. “Danielle.”
Everything's gonna be all right.
Yeah, right. “Table. Rocks. Patio.” Sometimes I say words out loud to drown the silence. “Neighbor, neighbor.” Sometimes it works. “Patio. Table. Hey. Hey-yo. Hey. Shit. Stephanie. Ste-phan-ie.”

“Five at-bats,” Brian says as we lift bags of rocks off the pile. “Did I say that already?
Five at-bats
and I couldn't get a hit. I mean this is the playoffs, pal. This is when I shine. Down by two, I got runners on the corners and I fly to fucking center.”

Brian's got this kind of muscular wisdom passed down from his Irish ancestors who survived the potato famine and cursed a lot. Now combine that with a witty ability to sneak attack you with an Oscar Wilde quote, a smile that can sell dirt, and—this may be the most devastating of all—a charm that could let him fuck six different women a week and not make it seem cheap. He wears his smarts like a pair of jeans faded and frayed in all the right places to fit only him. I've felt off balance around him since day one. He's so cool it pisses me off.

“You think I would've cut down my swing and popped one over the shortstop's head. No I fly deep to center. End of inning, end of game.” Unlike me, Brian is never tired.

We're on East 82nd Street. In front of us are thirty-pound bags of gravel piled five feet high on wooden flats. Our job for the moment is to move every bag from the street, through the brownstone behind us, and into its backyard. Each sack is
cinched with a metal clip at the opening, so we grab them by the few inches of excess bag on top, like brown bag lunches. With one bag in each hand, me and Brian walk from the sidewalk through a side gate that lets us into the bottom floor of the brownstone. Oak and leather furniture, wood-framed paintings, and stained-glass lamps are weatherproofed against dirt and dust with plastic tarps. We go through this room, up eight more stairs, and into the courtyard where we lay the sacks on a cleared quarter acre of dirt that in a few months will be a new patio. We stand the bags upright in rows that remind me of the candles we lined the sidewalks of my old neighborhood with on Christmas Eve—spidering out from the church, lighting paths to God's house.

The last ten days were demolition. We got rid of all the old slate and concrete except for the piece I carried home. Most of our next few weeks will be spent carrying the layers of this new patio bag by bag. The layers go like this: Gravel to level the land. Black tarp to stop plants from using the sunlight to eat, grow. Sand to level and cushion the slate. Concrete to fill the cracks between the new pieces of slate.

We go down the stairs and into the bottom floor of the brownstone. “I sat on the bench literally hiding my face,” Brian says. “I haven't lost it on the field like that since I was young enough to crap my jock. I'm such a pansy. And I give you shit about how much moving rocks hurts.”

“Balls don't fall where they should. It's all so unjust.”

He looks at me with a twisted face. We climb eight stairs and into the backyard, drop off the bags. “That was pretty non-sequiturial of you, Wedgie.” (A nickname I hate.) “But since you brought it up, yeah, you're damn right it is. For as long as anyone can remember this whole life is unjust.”

First week on this job together we broke for lunch at a deli on Lexington. At the counter, I ordered a turkey wedge, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and Brian said, “You from Westchester?”

Soon as I heard that word I felt like a porcupine folded inside out. I said, “What?” to stall for time. And he said, “That's what they call heroes up there. I got cousins in Yonkers. In the City we call em heroes, up there they say wedge.”

It was all kinds of wrong. Yonkers was never a word he was supposed to say, let alone know someone from. I breathed into a closing throat, knowing I needed to work out an alternate past immediately. Before Brian mentioned Yonkers he had been helping me wipe away my grease spot of an adolescence. Our system was that we saw each other Monday through Friday and didn't have to know anything more than what was on the daily schedule. “No, I'm from Staten Island. I told you that.”

“No you didn't.”

“Why wouldn't I have?”

“Fuck should I know? Then why'd you call it a wedge?”

“That's not allowed?”

“Hey, I mean no personal disparagement about how you choose to order your lunch, but you sound like you're from Westchester. That's all, Wedgie boy.”

The guy behind the counter said, “Six seventy-five,” so I reached into my pocket with my dirty hand and the semantics argument was over.

But the nickname stuck.

We go back down eight stairs, into the brownstone. “Not to break your stones too hard, Wedgie, but discovering life is unjust is not an original find.”

“It's senseless too. I mean, we've spent the last month hauling bags of rocks down the stairs, up the stairs, and out the back of this woman's house, so we can build her a deck. She's in a wheelchair, she can't even walk on it. And by the time we finish it she'll probably be dead. So why even build the damn thing?”

“To get a paycheck, friend.” Up eight stairs, onto the street,
pick up more sacks. “Think of it like this, even if she dies before we finish—and I'm not saying she won't, the sweet rich old bag—the broad left you part of her fortune. If you wanna know why, go ahead, figure it out. Whether you get your answer or not you're still gonna be hungry the next day. Better question is what you're gonna do while you're being fed.”

Down eight stairs, into the brownstone. Up eight stairs, into the backyard, drop the bags. “You get where I'm coming from?” Brian wants to know. Down eight stairs, into the brownstone.

“Maybe,” I tell him, trying to shrug off the subject. Up eight stairs, onto the sidewalk.

A woman hot enough to make men nosedive in the street walks by us. Brian says, “Hello ma'am.” And she smiles at him. “If you're feeling as pretty as you look the world must seem right today.” She keeps walking and smiling.

“Dude, where do you get this stuff?”

We lean against the pile of rocks. “Same place we all do. It starts here,” he points to his crotch, “and if you've got half a brain it goes to here,” he points to his mouth. “When you been rejected as much as I have you start to use it more freely. It's counter-intuitive, I know, but I'm living proof.” We pick up our next round of bags. “Ninety-eight out of a hundred women on the street think I'm repulsive. The other two are willing to look through the repulsion right to the charm. Respect the odds, play the odds.”

Down eight stairs into the brownstone. “When I first got this job,” Brian says, “my father told me, ‘At least you're not in a mine where you can get black lung, or a factory in Mexico where someone will cut your throat for forty-five cents.' You can argue with the guy, or you can get comfortable on your side of the scale.” Up eight stairs into the backyard. “Me? I got no problem taking this rich broad's money. It's clean. Better than wearin a tie for some real estate company.” He motions
to an empty section that has no bags. “Let's fill that gap.” We drop the bags.

“How's it better?”

“Cause real estate is inherently an ass-fuck business. Everyone knows it. And I'd rather not fuck people in the ass for a living.” He stands still, pulls his gloves off and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “My family's owned two houses in Jackson Heights for seventy years. My grandfather and his brother built them. We don't pay rent to no one.
That's
justice.”

“You all live there together?”

“Yeah.”

“How is that possible?”

“We have four bedrooms.”

“That's not what I mean, but go ahead.”

“We'd rather not be landlords. Landlords are legally allowed to turn tricks for money. I'd rather steal someone's money on the street at gunpoint than draw blood from their neck with a pen. It's more out in the open that way.” He slaps me in the shoulder with his gloves. “See now you got me on tangents. I hate tangents.” He puts his gloves on. “You spend way too much time in your head and you got me going there. The bottom line is you build this thing, you get to eat. That's the justice you get, Wedgie.”

“I wish you'd stop calling me that.”

“I know. Let's keep moving.”

Down eight stairs, into the brownstone. Brian lowers his voice. “Listen, do I think it's fucked that there's a fifty-thousand-dollar vase sitting in some highfalutin jerk off's living room when it can feed some people I know for ten years? Yes. Is it mind boggling and unjust? Yes. Can I do anything about it? No.”

“Why not?”

“Cause even if I go home tonight and figure out a way to tip the scales, I'd still have to come here tomorrow and carry rocks.
It don't change nothin. What's the expression? ‘Fair is fair and foul is foul'?”

“Something like that.” Up eight stairs, onto the sidewalk.

“Point is … I don't know what that means. Look, I don't know why you're so bent to figure out what's just—not my business—but put it this way: on a softball field you got a white line that separates fair from foul, and out here there's no lines. None. We don't have line one. And if we did we'd all be moving it for our own good. Now stop asking me about this shit, you're making my day longer. What can I tell you? Life's disappointing. Get a hooker.” We pick up more rocks.

 

Me and Brian high-five each other after making it through the eight hours.

“Why you work half days on Friday again?” he asks me.

“Because I'm special?”

He laughs. “Mr Mystery. I'll see you tomorrow.”

I walk through Central Park on my way home, which makes me feel like I'm missing out on owning a dog, having a picnic, a girl, a pair of shorts and a bike. I like poets' row though. All these statues of these guys, most I never heard of, under an arc of elms. They sit permanently carved in their best moment. Not in their mediocrity when they had broccoli in their teeth or got drunk and accidentally pissed on the cat. And good for them. I lie on my back on a bench, looking up through the twisted branches, waiting for the blue background to turn black.

 

In the East Village I buy a six-pack at the deli and bring it up the stairs of my building. On the sixth floor I see someone has propped open the roof door with a brick. This is supposed to
be an emergency exit only, and a red warning sticker on the door says an alarm will sound if opened, but I seriously doubt this alarm has ever worked. From the roof I see strips of orange and red fading at the horizon; the summer tar smell stings my nose. I take a few steps and hear a slow slapping noise and out-of-breath breathing coming from the front of the building. I walk toward it and under the water tower Stephanie and her boyfriend are going at it. He's behind her with his shirt draped over her ass and pants halfway down his thighs, one hand grabbing a chunk of her hip, the other holding a fistful of her ponytail. Stephanie's jeans are attached only to her right ankle, a light blue pair of underwear tangled in them. She's kneeling on her shirt to protect her knees from the roof's baked-in heat. Now that I see more of her skin I realize how dark it is. And she's skinny. I'm maybe twenty feet away and can count her ribs. She's humming in between breaths. “Um hum. Um hum.” I backpedal quietly and leave them to it.

I walk to the other side of the building with my six-pack of Corona, sit on the short brick wall at the back of the roof, and look at downtown Manhattan and drink.

Three beers into it I hear the roof door slam behind me and tiny pieces of rubble get crushed under someone's feet. I turn around; Stephanie is walking to the edge of this roof about ten feet to my left. Her arms folded over her chest. She stops at the edge and we catch each other's eyes for a second.

I say, “What's up.”

“What's up.”

I look behind her for the boyfriend. No sign. I look back to her and she shrugs like she don't care he's gone. She sits down, takes the elastic out of her ponytail, puts it in her mouth, reaches back, re-gathers her hair, then ties it back again. She sniffles, wipes her finger under her nose then on her jeans, folds her arms over her stomach, leans her chest close to her knees. She's got
a nervous twitch, more like a twist—the ball of her right foot twists on the top of the roof like she's repeatedly grinding out a cigarette.

We sit for a good few minutes, her twisting foot making the only sound.

Without eye contact she says, “I saw you see us.”

My jaw freezes. What do you say to someone who calls you on watching them get fucked from behind? “Sorry. I didn't know anyone was up here.” I take a long swig.

She shrugs, looks at me, her foot stops. “It's OK.” It feels weird and comfortable staring at her. She turns her face away and her foot goes back to doing its thing.

We both look at the skyline against its now black background. The city breaks itself down from neighborhoods to blocks to buildings to rooms—millions of tiny pieces—and offers nothing for keeps; it just doles out the same-sized impermanence to everyone. Beautiful selfish city. It makes us eat, sleep, and fuck right on top of one another, makes us breathe the backwash of each other's breath, daring us to survive a lonely life lived so close to so many people.

The sun's leftover heat still seeps out of the black roof. Stephanie's foot keeps twisting out the perpetual fire beneath it. We sit under the arc of airplanes taking off and landing in Queens as two virtual strangers this city has thrown together for the night, wondering if this place might sometime feel like a home.