City on Fire (68 page)

His forehead is slick with sweat, and he’s already moving toward the edge of the scaffolding when Charlie grabs his arm. Holds out the photograph. “Do you want to tell me what this is?”

For a split-second, Nicky winces. “It’s time to drop the dumb act, Prophet. It doesn’t suit you.” Then, in a blink, he’s snatched the stack of photos and shoved it into his own pocket. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

A rustle draws Charlie’s eye back to the apartment’s open window. The thing he’s been smelling, he realizes, is smoke. “Is something burning?”

“We don’t have time for this, Charles. Either what we’re after’s in there, or it’s not, and now it won’t matter either way.”

Charlie kneels by the sill. There’s a sad-looking lily in a pot, and, touchingly, a workout book on the coffeetable. A yapping can be heard from behind the door. “Hey, Nicky? There’s a dog in here.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs.”

Come on, wake up. But to what? To the fact that instead of some kind of heroes, they are just punks. He thinks of Sam in that bed. Of Sam training her lens on that sidewalk, as if to send him a signal. In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it’s easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he’s lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that’s never abandoned him. He says, “You were lying, weren’t you.”

“What?”

“All this time, you haven’t given two shits about consequences. You never cared who got hurt.”

When he turns, Nicky has one leg over the side of the plywood. “Charlie, I swear to God, if you go in there, I’ll leave you.” But Nicky’s already done that, hasn’t he? Left him out here tied to that rock. A breeze gusts the curtains, feeds the fire; Charlie’s face is a pillow, hot on one side. Nicky’s eyes are hard black briquettes. His handyman disguise makes him look like the stranger he in point of fact is. “I’m going to count to three. One.”

The dog is barking its head off now, someone is going to hear, and the flames are sweeping from the mound of papers in the kitchen sink toward the window.

“Two.”

Why doesn’t the smoke alarm start beeping? he wonders. Because Nicky has disabled it, obviously. The fumes make his eyes water. “You know why you’re going to end up in hell, Nicky? There’s no love in your heart.” And before Nicky can answer—because he doesn’t need to answer—Charlie is diving headfirst through the window-frame, following a dog’s voice into the hungrier heart of the fire.

[click here to view a facsimile from the print edition]

A NOTE FROM YR EDITOR1

high school, irving place, 1976 … graduation’s still 73 days away, but college acceptance letters have already started to appear.2 the headmaster sez no one’s supposed to bring them to school, but you can see kids at their lockers letting fat envelopes fall to the floor. dartmouth, smith, williams - oops, did i drop that? still, the truth is, if you want to name the vibe turning the laughter brittle between periods, it’s fear. here we are in this paradise for conformity-seeking youth, with its hierarchies and pieties, + the thought of losing it is causing this huge reactionary spasm. i’ve been keeping my nose-ring3 in lately, e.g., instead of taking it out on the train, ’cause frankly i just don’t care anymore, but so then i’m doing my conscientious-objector bit at gym yesterday + this senior girl comes up to me, “hey, samantha, you’ve got something hanging out of your nose” + i’m like, good luck at princeton next year with the frat boys or field-hockey or whatever it is you do to distract yourself from your pathetic life. See, reader, amerikan high school is above all about safety:::::the safety you get when you renounce freedom. irony being that yr correspondent, who is no-shit desperate to get out, has so far only gotten 2 envelopes, both skinny, both thanks but no thanks. my dad’s big dream was that I’d get in somewhere out of state + escape the ancestral folkways of the cicciaros (not to mention of my mom). but to be honest i didn’t exactly bend over backward trying to impress the admissions committees in boston, because seriously … boston? so these days after school instead of bumming around with sg i find myself racing back to lawn guyland to see if in my mailbox waits the envelope that makes it official - the one from columbia or at least nyu (which apparently admits everyone). it doesn’t happen + doesn’t happen, but i tell myself it will. i’ll be living at last for real in this city i see when my eyes shut at night. Around me now in calc goony girls are trying to get mrs. boswell to turn from the board + catch me drafting this instead of crunching antiderivatives. it may be true i’m only half paying attention, but this much has sunk in: from any point, line, or curve, it is possible to move up one order of abstraction. like, say i am a point. time is a line. the rate at which the passage of time changes is a curve. The antiderivative of that curve would be, what? the rate at which the acceleration of the future toward the present accelerates. and so i am a changed change whose change is changing, + what follows will be a document. + if you can’t keep up with me, kiddies, well, too tough for you.

1. actually, who am i kidding? it’s just me here, editor, writer, designer, so send me some stuff - reviews, essays, poems, whatever. okay? okay.

2. just goes to show what kind of sadists are running the education system in this country.

3. See issue 2.

THE POSITIVELY TRUE ACCOUNT OF ONE GIRL’S ADVENTURES IN THE GHETTO WITH A NIKKORMAT, A HOLE IN ONE SHOE, AND HEAVY CONCEPTS LIKE SOLIDARITY

We were somewhere east of Bowery when the drugs began to take hold … the drugs, in my case, being a couple clove cigarettes, the Bayer headache powder I was using to fight off last night’s hangover, and a pinner SG had found in one of the pockets of her coat. Tame, perhaps, but I wanted my head on straight. Despite talking a good game whenever my dad grumbled about the Welfare State, I had never actually been in a housing project before and was a little nervous, plus I secretly hoped I might get something out of that afternoon’s exploits I could use for my senior Art project. Still, what SG was smoking must have been uncharacteristically good stuff, ’cause against the dead sky further east where the numbers start to turn to letters the cabs rolling past were suddenly an exquisite yellow. Headlights like drops of milk in the weak tea of the day. Cabs all aimed our way. In flight.

SG had actually been waiting for me even before school let out - I’d seen her out the classroom window a half-hour before the last bell, leaning up against the metal fence of the building across the street in that mangy fake-fur of hers, and in the second before I steeled myself and became punk again her eagerness had almost embarrassed me. (Then again, maybe it wasn’t eagerness but boredom. Her classes at NYU must not ask too much of her, because she never seems to be in them.)

In any case, I went to the bathroom and unhooked the crank from the window sash. Put back in my nose-ring. Climbed on the radiator and lowered my legs through the window and dropped six feet to the frozen flowerbeds out front. Some moms waiting to pick up their middle-schoolers looked at me like I might apologize or something, but I just put on my big sunglasses and blew past them like butter wouldn’t melt, and we were on our way. SG’s boyfriend Sol was coming from a paying gig at a building in midtown and was going to meet us on the L.E.S., where they had something they wanted to show me. Make sure you bring your camera, they said.

I now think the housing project was in fact his. Sol’s, I mean. I knew already he’d grown up poor (there had been a big splat of jealousy underneath all the grief he gave me when he’d found out I was from Flower Hill, to which I would have said, it’s nothing to be jealous of) and whenever I hinted around about needing a place to crash, he and SG were both so vague about where they went at night after shows that I’d come to suspect they were sleeping part-time in that van of his. At the very least, Sol moved through the project plaza like someone who belonged. To me, it was a little intimidating. I want to think I’m open-minded, but there were all these black and Puerto Rican guys sitting on their different benches out front, staring or pointedly not staring at us, at the white girls, but Sol just walked right by and no one said anything. I guess the two SGs look pretty heavy together. I guess that’s part of the point of the razored hair & safety pins. And I felt proud of my friends, and then of myself, too. This wasn’t private-school America, suburb America. This was real.

The elevator inside was out of order. The stairwells smelled like pee and went on forever. Up on the roof was a couple making out on an old mattress, but we just pretended not to see them and vice versa. Then we came around the side of the monster air-conditioning unit and there it was on the brick, in white, yellow, & blue (which you’d see in these photos if I could reproduce in color):

POSTHUMANS LIVE!

SG knew I was into graffiti, I guess, because ever since we’d been hanging out she’d seen me snapping pictures of it. We’d be trolling the bins at Seor Wax and I’d see a panel truck rattle by with a great big burner on the side, bright as an elicit sun, and I’d be out the door to take the picture. Tags on postboxes, throw-ups on phone-booths, bombs on buses, plus the whole amazing front of the Vault on Bowery. Back in the fall, when I began to really notice the spraypaint spreading all over everything, I kept having this fear for some reason it was going to disappear just as quickly, like a Polaroid in reverse, and so I wanted a document, some proof that for a hot minute life and art had come close enough to touch. Now it occurs to me that this can be partly a way of turning yourself into a bystander. But then again if I had a tag it would have to be like SAM HEMPSTEAD PIKE or something, and I don’t trust my body not to fuck up anything bigger than Sharpie-ing the stalls at school.

Maybe this was why it surprised me that Sol could have done the big blow-up before us now. It wasn’t the most technically accomplished graffiti you’d see. If you paid attention, as I did in the darkroom, pulling the photos I’d taken from their chemical baths, you started to see there was actually a whole lovely graff esthetic, which this didn’t have, exactly. But what it lacked in style it made up for in size, and he had this grin on his face like a hunting dog who’d dropped a rabbit at my feet. “Posthumans,” I said. “Is that like ‘posthumous?’ ”

He said he’d got the word from a buddy of his. “It’s a thing he says about us punks. We’re postHuman.” It sounded so kind of atypically philosophical or something that I couldn’t not tease him. “The buddy SG keeps talking about, you mean. The mystery man who broke up Ex Post Facto and now can’t show his face at shows.”

But this is something I have to be careful about, this teasing reflex, because for a second Sol’s sour and safety-pinned visage kind of crumpled and I saw it meant something more or different to him than I’d been led to believe, and SG looked like she could have thrown me off the roof. Or one of us, anyway. It was the moment of maximum separation, like I was still stuck back in the suburbs of the heart with walls and windows and inhibitions and fears between me and the city. And I didn’t know what else to do so I backed up and crouched down and started snapping pictures. Already the piece was starting to look more impressive. It wasn’t meant, really, to be judged up close; from back near the fenced edge of the roof, I could see how you’d be able to see it from down below, where there was now traffic coming toward us, too, headlights crawling along the FDR toward Brooklyn. And here was Sol, this wage-slave punk kid, who had actually thought to do something. It was wicked cool, I said finally, realizing that was what he’d wanted all along.

After that we bought some 40s of malt liquor out of solidarity and sat on the benches out front for a while getting drunk and talking too loud, but people weren’t exactly understanding the gesture. DT had met up with us and brought ’ludes, so we ended up going to the handball court to get ’luded and watch Chinese kids play handball as it got dark. But just before it did - just before the lines between us dissolved and we melted into a puddle - I remember thinking how it was funny we still required chemicals to make this happen. In all those months since SG and I had discovered our NYU connection (her enrolled, me applying) and had started hanging out, I had never been quite sure whether I was trying to convince her and her friends I was tough enough to be one of them, or whether they were trying to prove to me they were worth the effort. Which just goes to show, I think, that the United States of Punk Rock is an ideal and not a birthright. We’re all still working to perfect it. Then the ’ludes hit, with the violent sky and the soft pock of handballs and the laughter bubbling in our blood and the city rising all around us, and that’s exactly what it felt like we were: perfect.

we dedicate this issue’s travel section to hangouts below 14th street, with gratitude for helping us survive senior year.

1. seor wax

is there an actual señor wax? if so i’ve never seen him. instead you’ve got the staff perpetually trying to hit on you. still, for the most up-to-the-minute in wrawk & roll, el señor is the establishment for you. + not just cuz it’s the only joint in town disreputable enough to stock this rag you’re now reading …

2. second ave salvation army

if you’re willing to brave fleas, you’d be amazed at the funky shit you can find for under a dollar. (caveat emptor: all pants appear to have been tailored for someone four feet tall + 325 lbs)

3. subway tunnels

mob up with yr droogs at one end of the platform. then have one or two of you slip past while the rest stay behind so the transit cops don’t notice. rats, third rail, layers of subway soot, + trains mean you have to be careful, but it’s like a museum of graff down there. thousands of years from now, future humans or posthumans will move in groups led by docents with little purple hats. here we have a genuine TAKI.

4. sex shops

by far the finest people-watching is to be done outside the sex shops west of 7th avenue, cuz you’d just be amazed who you see going in to buy dildos.

5. overlooked park at bleecker & sixth