Sunset Park (5 page)

“Good description, Mr. Butler,” Nunzio drawled. “Would you like to butcher anything else from my land?”

I tried to twist out of David’s fussy hands, but he clung to my shirt and redid the buttons. “Well, how would you describe it?” David rolled his eyes. “A baby calzone?”

“Yes.” Nunzio nodded. “Exactly.”

I smiled. If the only thing they’d found to bicker over was Italian bread, the day was going all right.

“So where’s this apartment?”

Finished sanitizing my appearance, David pulled away with a casual slide of his finger down my jaw and neck. I’d given myself a clean shave, and I was sure he was admiring the results.

“It’s on Fifth Avenue, but never mind that for now.” Nunzio moved to the table he and David had been sitting at before my arrival. Coffee cups and an empty, crumb-laden plate were already strewn on the table. “How did the interview go?”

“Waste of time. What did you think was going to happen?”

“Don’t be so negative,” David chastised. “Just tell us everything.”

“I’ve been telling you everything for the past few weeks, and no one has called me back.”

The sizzle of meat hitting a grill crackled through the café, followed closely by the aromas of olive oil and warm, freshly baked bread. My stomach rumbled, and I pressed a hand over my abdomen.

“You have to expect this.” Nunzio picked up one of the coffee cups and took a careful sip. “It’s not going to be one-two-three for you. You don’t have experience in the jobs you’re applying for, and you don’t have some impressive education to back you up either. The best thing you can do is rock the interview and pray that Rolly gives you a good reference.”

“Zio, I haven’t even made it to the reference part on any of these interviews. You’re dreaming.”

“And you’re making excuses,” Nunzio set down his cup with a thump. “Don’t start trying to regress back to your usual bullshit, Ray. I’m going to help you as much as I can, but you have to keep your eye on the goal and stop quitting when things get hard. I told you I would cosign for you, and I also told you I’d pay your half of the rent until you’re set up.”

David’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

“Of course.” Nunzio’s tone sharpened. He looked at David, took in the guileless doe eyes, and tempered himself. “Michael and I are the ones shoving him into this position and doing it in a big hurry. We’ll help for the first couple of months, but by the holidays, he needs to have his shit together.”

David looked like he wanted to ask more questions, but the food came before Nunzio could blab any more about how I needed long-distance babysitters. I’d planned to keep living on my savings, but they seemed to think I needed a safety net for my safety net. Maybe their optimism about my job search didn’t reek so much of naive wishful thinking after all.

DAVID HAD
scheduled us to see four apartments, three of which were within five blocks of each other. He wanted to stay as close to his job as possible, but he also wanted to keep me near actual parking and access to the train. His strategy made sense, but I wasn’t in the mood to be impressed by his logic. I couldn’t stop dwelling on my job interview.

Working the mailroom at a translation company in downtown Manhattan—not exactly thrilling shit, but any idiot could do it, which should have guaranteed me the spot. Even so, I had my doubts.

Two other people had interviewed for the job, and they’d both looked like David—polished, shiny, and college-educated, even though the job basically only required that you know how to fucking read. For years I’d heard people worrying about the economy and the plummeting job market for college graduates, but I had never thought twice about the implications. Now it was affecting my life. College grads with their fancy degrees were now after the handful of jobs I was qualified to do. And those jobs weren’t paying very much.

At nearly a full grand less per month than what I’d been making as a casual dockworker, the job was still offering the highest pay of everywhere I had interviewed so far, but it was only just enough to make half the bills and rent for a craptastic apartment.

“You look quite unenthused, considering we’re looking for your first apartment,” Nunzio commented after lunch. We were trailing behind the landlord in a walk-up on 37th Street. The building looked nice from the outside, but the staircase was so narrow that I didn’t have high hopes for the size of the apartment. “Aren’t you excited at all?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Nunzio pitched his voice lower so he wouldn’t be heard over David’s incessant chatter with the man who owned the joint. The landlord was a middle-aged guy wearing a yarmulke, and judging from his general apathy, he’d already showed the space to a number of people. “Is it because I mentioned the money thing?”

“I just think this is going to crash and burn. But thanks for embarrassing me.”

“Come on, Ray…. David doesn’t care about that.”

“I don’t give a fuck if he cares. I care.” I jutted my thumb at my chest. “He doesn’t need to know the full extent of my scrub status, aiight?”

Nunzio clapped me on the back in his overly touchy Italian way. I shrugged him off.

“You think that kid considers you a scrub? Please. He’s so sweet on you, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just scheming to get you to live in the same house as him.”

“That’s not—”

“Here we are,” the landlord announced. Fumbling with a massive key ring, he practically had to pry the door open because it was stuck in the frame. “I haven’t had time to clean up after the previous tenants, but the move-in date isn’t for a month, so I can have it repainted.”

I shouldered Nunzio, giving the we’re-gonna-finish-that-convo-later message, and walked into the apartment. It looked more like a studio with two attached closets rather than a two-bedroom unit, but it was nicer than I’d expected. I’d assumed that everything outside of Manhattan or a wealthy neighborhood would be damp, dreary, and infested with roaches.

“Not bad,” I said.

“Not
bad
?” David speared me with an incredulous look from his station by the window. “This is the
only
window in this room. It’s like a dungeon.”

The landlord raised an eyebrow and looked at Nunzio—all, like, “control your kid.” I snorted out a laugh.

“It’s not that dark.” Now that it had been brought to my attention, I realized the rooms were just as dark as my own back at the house in Queens, but playing devil’s advocate was fun if David was going to spaz out about natural light. “That’s what lamps are for.”

“Lamps.” David stomped around, poking his head in each bedroom. “And those rooms won’t even fit a chest of drawers and a king-sized bed.
I’d
be fine, but you’re the one who is titan-sized. Good luck with that.”

“I sleep curled up, anyways.”

“I would too if I lived here. It’s basically my nightmare.” David stared down his nose at the landlord and went into the bathroom to find more things to complain about. An exclamation followed shortly after.

“Jesus Christ, David.” Nunzio glanced at the landlord, returning the
kids today
sentiment without words. “Don’t you have another apartment available by the cemetery? A bigger one?”

Geez, how many buildings did this guy own? I needed to get in on the real estate biz. Buy a bunch of crappy places and sell them triple the price to idealistic out-of-towners who thought $2,000 for a two bedroom in Sunset Park was normal.

“The rent is higher, but it’s bigger.”

“How many squa—”

“How much higher?” I cut Nunzio off. “Forget the square footage. I’m on a budget.”

The landlord nodded in understanding. “It’s seventeen hundred a month.”

I whistled and cast another look around the living room.

“It’s competitive for this neighborhood,” the landlord said without much conviction. He probably didn’t give a damn if we took it or not. “We can have a look and see how you feel.”

“I dunno….”

“We’re going,” David announced after stepping out of the bathroom. “The only thing good about this place is the claw-foot tub. No offense, Mr. Green.”

“None taken. The other apartment also has a claw-foot tub.”

David hustled me out the door so fast I almost died tripping down the stairs. He was disproportionately stressed, considering this was the first apartment we’d visited. That was the problem with people who expected things to go their way from jump. I kept the comment to myself because he looked so flustered, and I let him hold my hand for two blocks before he realized what he was doing and pulled away.

Mr. Green didn’t seem to care one way or the other. He was neck-deep in conversation with Nunzio, both of them rattling on about everything from the midterm elections to the best way to make espresso until they reached the topic of gentrification. The landlord denied that the neighborhood was changing as rapidly as people thought, but Nunzio countered the claim by mentioning warehouses in Industry City being transformed into overpriced vegan and organic havens.

I looked for more damning signs of culture clash but kept being distracted by David’s pout.

The next building had two open units on different floors, and the landlord showed us both. The first was on the ground level with access to a tiny backyard, but David still wasn’t impressed by the layout. He kept examining the closets and muttering to himself. I suggested we see the third place before David shit himself over having to live within his salary range. Nunzio commented that he could get a bomb-ass apartment with killer closets in East New York, and David promptly shut up. He’d only been in New York for a couple of years but already knew about some of the city’s roughest neighborhoods.

“This is the one I’d planned to show you.” Mr. Green unlocked a unit on the top floor. “But the other one is also available, so I thought I would show it to you too.”

To say the place was a vast improvement would be an understatement. It had hardwood floors instead of dingy carpet, and sunlight flooded the space from multiple windows in the living room and corridors. Both bedrooms were equally drenched with natural light and larger than the one I had at the house in Queens.

David shot me a desperate look, and I exhaled a long-suffering sigh.

“I’ll pay the difference,” he said.

“No. It’s fine.” He was still watching me expectantly, so I added, “I like it.”

David’s face lit up. I knew he would have tackled me with one of his signature overexcited hugs if we weren’t around other people.

“The closets are more spacious,” Mr. Green said. “And there’s a laundry room in the basement.”

I jerked my chin at David. “There’s how you can make up for the price difference.”

“I have no problem with that,” he said. “I’d do a lot more for a decent place.”

My mind translated that to mean “blowjob,” and supplied images of David looking up at me, his pretty brown eyes blown wide, saliva dripping down his smooth chin, my come smeared all over his face. Nunzio, the mind reader, not so subtly hid a smirk.

“Should they fill out the paperwork now?” he asked Mr. Green. “I’d like to lock it in as soon as possible before someone else snatches it up.”

“Yes, I’ll get the applications. Feel free to wait here while I walk back.”

Nunzio declined, made an obnoxious comment about me and David behaving ourselves, and left us alone in the apartment.

“Is there a reason Nunzio keeps making faces and giving me smug smiles?” David asked as soon as the door clicked shut.

“Yep.”

I followed the long, narrow corridor to the bedrooms and tried to decide which one I would claim. I didn’t have as much crap as David did, but my television and video games were a major priority. Now that this was half my place, I decided it was a good time to stake a claim in the living room. It was big enough for my entertainment center as well as the sofa set Michael and I had only recently purchased.

“Do you care to let me in on the joke?”

“Nope.” I stopped in the center of the smaller bedroom. “If we get the place, you can have the other room. It’s bigger.”

“Are you trying to sweet-talk me into forgetting about my question?”

“No, pendejo. I’m trying to be nice.”

I sat on the floor and extended my legs before giving in to laziness and stretching out on my back. The ceilings were high, and there was fancy crown molding around the top. Unlike our house, there were no water spots or cracks. It would be an improvement when I was smoking and zoning out. In fact the whole place was an improvement. As much as I had dragged my feet and moaned about Michael pushing me out of the only place I’d ever lived, a little niggle of excitement invaded my steadfast discontent.

No more guilt over packing away Mami’s belongings and taking down the Jesus pictures and crucifixes. No more cramped bedroom that was always slightly embarrassing if I brought home a date. Hopefully I would be able to leave behind the shitty water pressure and drafty rooms. I could also keep beer in the house without worrying about Michael being tempted to imbibe now that he’d gone straight edge.

“Maybe this won’t suck,” I said. “I’m still worried about the job thing, but it might be good to be on my own, you know?”

David stretched out on the floor beside me with his face propped against his hand. “It will be. Trust me. Things change when you have your own place. Besides, Michael and Nunzio baby you so much that it even overwhelms me. I can’t imagine dealing with that 24/7.”

“If you think Michael babies me, you should have seen how my mom was.”

“She just wanted you to be happy and feel loved.”

“I know.”

David kept looking at me, so I held his gaze, not shifting my eyes even when he walked his fingers down the front of my button-down. It occurred to me far too late that I was getting my fancy new clothes dirty.

“So?” David drew out the syllable. “What’s up with Nunzio?”

“He thinks we’re gonna fuck.”

David gave me another of his smart-assed, condescending looks, but kept toying with my shirt. “They both seem to think I’m trying to convert you. I don’t understand how two gay men can be sold on the gay by proximity nonsense. It’s infuriating.”