Drop (13 page)
5,000 feet. Falling, I touched ground at City Hall, bouncing off the metal hat of William Penn and shooting further west, leaving him nodding in my wake, a colossal novelty doll. Skinned a knee clearing the lightning pole of Liberty One,
swish swish swish
, its point shaking like a car antenna after my impact. Flying west, past office windows as people with jobs glanced up and then continued working. Falling down, meteor boy, returning.
Smack. On the ground. Ripping a body-wide groove in the middle of Spruce Street, right along the yellow lines. Heavy chunks of concrete cracked and flaked as I smashed through them, a finger stroke through a pan of brownies. Face forward, arms at my sides, I would have been screaming if the asphalt wasn’t filling my mouth, a solid stream threatening to push back teeth from gums, giving me Dizzy cheeks as it forced its way down. Hard spaghetti spirals pressing their way into my nostrils, spinning pigtails to my brain. Black road digging under my fingernails as if they, too, were entries, trying to leave my palms heavy with its indigestible burden. The sound of an army of drums being broken, beaten until their canvases became the battered victims of percussion. Even through my road-stuffed ears I could hear that, hear the echoes of it as skidded from 49th to 52nd Streets.
Landing ended, I rose from my hole, my clothes raining dust. In West Philly, life kept moving. As I stood between them, men drove cars both ways down the road. Nobody even honked at me, not even glancing in their rearview mirrors as they sped by. On the pavement, old ladies still walked slow and scared, hobbling from one leg to the other like windup soldiers with gray wigs on, pacing a triangle between the supermarket, the check-cashing place, and home. Drug dealers still sat on corners, waiting for their business to come to them. Nobody to notice me but the rats who paused from their hunt to stand on hind legs and bob their noses in my direction, the cockroaches and the yam-skinned man. Smiling at me from the curb as I stood in the traffic wanting to climb back into the hole I had made there.
How long had he been waiting? Sitting with his ass stuck in the metal mesh of a garbage can, his legs hanging over the edge and kicking loosely like a child in a shopping cart. How long had he been waiting, staring skyward, hoping for the streak in the sky that would be me, tumbling down, back into his jurisdiction? Oh, and wasn’t he laughing now? You never heard a joke that funny, the way he was carrying on. Whiplashing his head as he filled the street with his joy. I could smell the rot of his breath between the passing cars. A smile of randomly missing teeth made even more horrific by the fact that his face was actually handsome, that beauty could be wasted on an existence like his. Pointing at me, the fallen, with both dirty hands. Ha-ha, ha-ha, Philly boy come home. He would feed for weeks on this moment, smiling at me from his putrid garbage throne. Letting his cackles bark me down the road and blocks beyond, keeping rhythm even as I banged on Alex’s door. Silencing only after I collapsed into her unexpecting arms and lost awareness there.
‘So what the hell happened?’ Alex asked me the next morning. I’d woken up to the sounds of her getting dressed, of cabinets being opened and closed. Her apartment was so small she’d banged the couch nearly as many times as she passed it.
‘It broke.’ The couch was narrow, too, and not long. My feet had been hanging over the edge the whole night and now they were bloodless and numb.
‘I didn’t even get my chance to visit. Was it any good?’ Alex’s hair was a bit shorter, her banana peel skin almost brown. It was October, but the summer clung to her flesh as always, giving her a moment of negritude before returning her to her octoroon pale.
‘No, it was perfect. It was absolutely perfect,’ I told her.
‘Then why are you here? Why didn’t it last?’
‘Shit, it was better than this place.’
‘ “Philadelphia Freedom”,’ a women with a voice that cursed learns to sing lightly. ‘“I luv-uv-uv-you. Yes, I do!” ’ Alex screeched.
‘I should smother you. Nobody knows I’m home. You ain’t got no windows, monkey-love. I could get away with it.’ Alex hit me on the head and walked into the bathroom, leaving the door open as she stared at herself. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To work. To earn some money.’
‘You have a shoot?’
‘No. I got a part-time job.’
‘What, you prop styling? You doing some assisting for another photographer?’
‘Green’s Nursing Home. The one up Germantown, on Schoolhouse.’ Alex rolled her eyes when I let out a sigh.
‘You got a gift,’ I reminded her.
‘Don’t start bugging; I know what I got. I got bills. I can’t eat off photos right now, so that’s just the way it is. It’s not that bad. Some of the residents are cool. They have good stories. So, what’s your plan, Chris? You’re home.’
‘I get my shit together. I get out.’
‘So, you’re going to look for an ad gig. The Sunday paper’s in the trash at the bottom. Don’t make a mess pulling it out.’
‘I’m not getting into advertising around here. Two, three months tops, then I’m gone. I don’t exist here any more.’
‘So, you going to try to poke around and get some freelance work? I’ll look out for you, see what pops up. I know about one gig, should be coming around next six months or so, a buddy from Temple’s working at the Philly tourist board. They got grants, I know they’re going to be looking for stuff.’
Pumping up Philly to the ignorant. Not going to happen.
Alex’s apartment only had one room, and she barely fit in that one. She couldn’t manage me there and I knew she shouldn’t. Momentum I was having, I might rip a hole through her floor and drag her down with me. So I started making calls. The first agency I contacted let me see their place that afternoon. The listing said:
Sunny studio, 275
+. Cheap enough that I could take it and still pay off the lease when I was done. It was only a few blocks away. I met the landlord in front, a small man with too much hair on his body to be human. His clothes were dirty and so was the apartment; the hallway leading up was dark with grease, the living room windows streaked and crusted. In the kitchen, hollow brown cockroach shells lay on their backs across the counters and floor like beachcombers. ‘I been fumigating, y’know?’ the landlord told me. The place was shaped like a lollipop, the circle being the room and the stem the kitchen with the bathroom at the end. I could hold out my arms and reach from the wall behind the stove to the window on the other side, and did so, and then wiped the black grime from my knuckle. It was a hole I could climb into. The offer of a cash payment meant that by night it was mine.
I walked back from the realty place with a contract in my pocket and keys in my hand. At the bank my pounds were replaced with green play money, all the same size; everything could be obtained with just a few folds from my roll. I passed a yard sale that had a futon; a Penn student gave it to me for thirty bucks and smiled as if she was an humanitarian. Did I look that raggedy? Bobbing and swaying, I thanked her. I didn’t say, I went to college, too. That I was a man once that walked upright, clean shaven. Thirty bucks was a good deal, and she could think what she wanted. Huge as it was, I folded it over my head and I walked back home. It tried to swallow me with every bounce. I saw where I was going by staring at the ground, hating that I knew this place so well that the pavement was all I needed for orientation.
I got as far as Clark Park before I had to lay it down. It sat getting dirty on a public bench as I waited for my strength to return. I noticed the other men sitting around me, a parliament of the powerless.
‘Yo cuz, you hook me up?’
‘Brother, brother’ – shrug, shrug, hand held out – ‘got a little something you can spare?’
‘Give me some money, get some eats, cool?’
‘Yo nig, you want some smoke?’
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘I’m the man. How much you want?’ asked the dealer-bum, eyes skipping from Baltimore to Chester Avenue to see if anyone was coming, sitting down next to my futon on the unbroken end of the park bench. Connecting my thumbs and forefingers before me, I made the largest circle I could with two hands. ‘Like that,’ I told him, trading another green note for a green-filled sandwich bag.
I kept walking home, the futon on my head massive and white as a corpse, up the hill towards 46th and Baltimore, to my new house. Moving guilty, scoping for cops with the limited vision that the mattress offered. Trying to remember what an innocent man walked like so I could imitate him. Outside of my vision, I imagined my succubus Fionna and her parasitic cousins lining the streets and staring my way, laughing and pointing and feeding off my misery as they once did off my hospitality and ignorance.
In the crib, I flopped the futon down, dirt shooting out from underneath it in angry brown gusts. It took up most of the floor. I kicked it against the wall, made enough room to walk around on the kitchen side. It was a bloated carpet: no matter where you stood in the room, if you fell it would be there for you. If my head was stronger, I would have gotten more. Tied them to the walls with cable cord, nailed them to the ceiling and in the bathroom and kitchen, too. I would make a suit of futon, wrap it around my legs, arms and torso, sewing it down with fishing cord. Then I would feel good. I would be safe and happy once more. Outside, gunshot ghosts thundered off in the distance, reminding me again that storms got closer – that’s what they did you see. Eventually the
pop-pop
would catch up to me.
In just a few weeks, I discovered that my apartment was not actually a space in itself, but rather a hole between the four other homes of my neighbors. Below, living behind the thrift shop on the first floor: the screaming one. Late night curses into the silence of the building. His favorite word:
niggers
. Two syllables that could be belched in anger or surprise or sometimes palpable awe,
niggers, niggers
. It was hours before dawn when the screaming came and I turned over on my stomach and sat up, my heart becoming a noticeable component beneath my shirt. A new unit of time was formed in the darkness, hijacked from dream, waiting for the next scream to come. In the isolation of my hole I dialed Alex.
‘What?’ she said picking up.
‘He’s doing it again.’
‘Chris, didn’t I fucking curse you out for this shit last time? Remember what I said and then hang up on yourself.’
‘I’m sorry, but the guy, he’s screaming again.’
‘It’s three-thirty in the morning.’
‘I know! And this guy, Alex, he’s yelling. It’s insane.’
‘Then go tell him to shut up.’
‘Hell no.’
‘Chris, do you even know what day it is?’ What day it was wasn’t important. I went back to sleep curled up with the butcher’s knife I borrowed from her two weeks before, dreaming of striped snakes biting the bones in my arms until I woke up and saw my elbows were gashed and painted in blood.
Right side: the guy who lived behind my toilet. In the morning, when his girlfriend stayed over, his metal bed frame slammed chunks of plaster from the wall, for weeks making me think it was a washing machine because I didn’t know anybody boned like that any more (no slight change in rhythm, no moan, sigh, or recrimination). The last three beats slamming with deliberate finality and then gone. After that, sitting on the toilet with my ear pressed against the wall, all I could hear was the sound of
Live with Regis and Kathie Lee
being turned on.
Left side: one damn song. Never the sound of a toilet flushing, of a door being shut, or even a cough. Just one damn song. Coming on about ten o’clock at night and going till midmorning. The same Hammond organ intro, giving rhythm to the melody, to the light rain of a snare drum. The same crying voice, too, begging to satisfy some need long forgotten. I could never make out the lyrics, or even identify the artist (besides the persistent suspicion that it was a Stax B-side). No one outside that room had heard that song in a long time. Sometimes it was so loud I could hear the record’s scratches. Torturing me with the hope that every time it reached its end that it would be the last time. A moment later, fingers on a Hammond started it up again.
Above me: a rarely present owner and his always present dog, heartbroken and crying just as I was, a high whimper that would go for a few minutes until transforming into a bark until, feeling sorry for itself, it would stop. Only to break down shortly later and begin again, running tiny circles above me, enjoying the circumference of the room. Hours of nails clipping into wood with pawpads thudding behind. Lying on my mattress, staring at my ceiling, I felt sorry for it. I wanted to comfort it. I wanted to take it somewhere pretty and shoot it in the back of its furry skull. I heard its owner taking it out for a walk one night, and as soon as they were downstairs I turned off the lights and poked out the bottom corner of my window. The dog was a beige dust mop. The guy being pulled by it was older, tall with hair unfashionably large. He wore a security guard’s uniform and tennis shoes. At least he had a job. It couldn’t have been his dog. Some woman had left it to him. Across the street the beast, stopping to leave its fecal mark, looked up towards me. I ducked before it could start barking me out to its owner, name me to this place, inciting a riot from the city I was hiding from. Pulling me from my world of sleep and smoke, where I dreamed of getting off the tube at Brixton station, going up the escalator to the street beyond, turning left and walking towards my true home. The dream didn’t come every day, but enough to keep me satiated. In the best ones David was still alive and Fionna still loved me. Alex was there too: we had all escaped this and everyone was safe and smiling. Happy and riding the Victoria Line tube into South London. Each time, I looked for signs that this new return was the real one, noticing the curve of the train’s inner walls, the speed of the escalator steps, searching for any clue of authenticity. When I awoke, Margaret’s number tempted my phone. But I resisted. I wouldn’t be dialing until the call when I told her I’d be coming home. Until then, all that was needed was to roll some spliff or order food so I could lie down again. Outside Philly rumbled by, hopefully forgetting my arrival.
