The Sea Beach Line (31 page)

“Yes,” I said, “I wasn't prepared for battling the elements today myself.” I sat down next to him on the edge of the loading dock.

“I'll say.” He examined my face. “You do look a little—forgive me for saying so—thrown. Everything's all right?”

“Yeah. No. Everything is actually fine, I think. I was asleep . . . sometimes when I wake up, it feels like it takes me a long time, maybe all day long, to figure out which parts were the dream and which parts were real life. If that makes sense.”

“I know exactly what you're saying. Only, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that this part is the real life, and the other one is the dream.”

“Ha.”

“Well, it could be wishful thinking on my part. You know, I often hope that there's something I'm missing. That things are better than how I experience them. Listen: last night, I thought about killing this guy, I really did.” He stopped talking, his face clenched up on the line between sadness and rage.

“Nu?”

“See, I was walking around, maybe ten o'clock, which is unusual for me, so late. But I was walking around, and I wanted to buy a cream soda. So I walked into that little store up there, on the corner of Bleecker. And there was this group of guys standing in front of the cooler talking, so I had to ask them to move. But they just stopped there. I thought they didn't hear me, but then one of them said, ‘Why do you need to go inside there? So you can steal something?' I knew I heard that, but I thought maybe I heard wrong. I said, ‘Excuse me, what did you say?'

“And he went, ‘Oh, I think you heard me.'”

“That's messed up. What kind of guys were they?”

“NYU-type guys. Clean-cut. Maybe a little older than college . . . the NYU law school is right there, probably they were law school guys. That would figure.”

“I can picture them,” I said. It was easy. I thought about the night less than two months earlier, when I'd gone out with Andrew and DC and the others, how DC had been rude, even cruel, to the beggar. In my silence, I'd supported DC. Now I saw myself in the crowd that had mocked Mendy and felt guilt. But then I imagined myself growing old and becoming like Mendy, being mocked by guys like Andrew and DC, and felt ashamed.

“It hurts me,” Mendy said. “I've lived in the Village over thirty years, and the neighborhood has changed around me. And I don't belong there. I'm not welcome. Where else could I go, though? The old Italian men are dead, their kids are in the suburbs. The old bohemians, the old queers, the old freaks . . . my old friends: they drank themselves to death, or they killed themselves, or they died of AIDS. Their apartments went market rate, and these assholes moved in.

“All I wanted was a cream soda. I know how I look, and I had my little cart.” He patted the luggage cart's handle like it was a dog's head. “But what the hell gives them the right to do that to me? Or anyone? Huh? Why would they do that?” It seemed like he really wanted an answer. For a minute I felt like he'd seen through me, that he knew I could have easily been part of that group, if I'd made a different turn.

“I don't know, Mendy. I really don't know why people do what they do. But you said something about almost killing someone?”

“I was pissed. I went . . . they use this expression, ‘saw red.' That's literally how I was. I was almost blind, and just seeing the color red. The way your father used to get.” I noticed the past tense. Mendy was convinced my father was gone. To him, Al was just another dead friend, one more body on the heap. I was the only one that maintained faith. “I was gonna fight this guy. He said, ‘Bring it on, old man.' Oh, I was gonna bring it on, that's for damn sure.” I could see the switch coming over Mendy, as he relived the moment. That beautiful old anger. That pure street violence that no amount of gentrification could do away with.

“But his friend was just a little bit smarter than him. He took a look at me, saw the fucking plain murder in my face, and he said, ‘It's not worth it, Bobby, he's got less to lose than you do.' Which is true, though he said it in this dismissive kind of tone, so they could save face. I would've liked to shove his face in too. So they dragged him outside. And I was so mad, I forgot to even get my cream soda.”

“Damn,” I said.

“It reminds me of when I used to live on the Lower East Side, in the '60s. There was a group of tough guys, real hoodlum types, that hung out in what we used to call a candy store. I know it's different
now, but back then, around Rivington Street, it was real rough, a real drug kind of neighborhood. But this group of guys, they'd mess with me every time I came down the street, to the building where I lived. I don't know if it was because I was white, or more the way I looked, in terms of long hair and dirty clothes and all. Or maybe they were just bullies. But one day, I just had enough. I was walking down the street and before they could come fuck with me, I walked into the candy store and said, ‘Listen. Next time you guys wanna start with me, you're gonna have to kill me. 'Cause otherwise, I'm gonna kill every fucking one of you.'”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I walked out. They never messed with me again.”

“They didn't call your bluff?”

“Who was bluffing?” Mendy shrugged. He was standing up now, his shoulders were loose, ready to swing.

“You would have killed them?”

“Then, the way I felt then, yeah, I was ready to kill them.”

“They could have killed you.”

“Sure.” He nodded. “Sure they could have. Absolutely. I'm a little surprised they didn't, thinking back on it. But, you know, there aren't as many killers out there as they'd have you believe. Most people, they talk a certain way, but I don't think they'd necessarily cross that line. It's easier now, with the guns. But still. Back then, they probably would have had to stab me. Which they might have done. But most people don't really want to stab a person to death.” I wondered if Mendy would stab someone to death himself, or if it was just anger talking. He was tough, though; he'd survived out in the streets a long time. Probably he could stab someone to death, if he felt threatened or disrespected enough. I didn't have to wonder if Al could stab someone to death, only if he had.

The sketchbook picture of the dead soldier flashed in my mind. What was Al sorry for? Had Al killed this man? But they were fellow soldiers. Friends, Roman said. Had Al failed, allowing him to be killed? But the man had made it to New York, if Roman met him, so he wasn't killed in the war. I wondered if I could kill someone, if
I could stab or shoot them, to save myself or someone else. I hoped I could, if I had to. “My father fought in a war,” I said. “Two wars, technically. I don't know if he killed anyone. Not everyone in a war does. But I think he did.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if that were so,” Mendy said. “You know, I didn't see eye to eye with Al about that military stuff. Because he was a conscripted soldier, and I was a draft dodger. I wasn't going to go kill people in Vietnam. They kept me locked up for sixteen months because of that.” So Mendy's political speeches weren't just talk.

“But I understood what it was, to be a soldier. Because I had some friends—I won't say me, but some friends—back then who believed it was okay to kill people if it meant you could save a lot of other people from being killed. One of them was a good friend named Diana . . . she died on West Eleventh Street.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was supposed to go see her there. But by the time I got there, the whole town house was gone. I'm not going to say anything more about any of that.” Mendy was talking about the famous Weather Underground explosion I'd read about at college. Two activists had been building a bomb, with the intention of attacking a dance at an army base in New Jersey. The movement had moved from peaceful protest, to sabotage, to attempted mass murder. The bomb exploded in the bomb makers' hands, killing both of them and another friend who was in the house. Mendy would have been the fourth victim. He had his secret war stories too.

“Well,” I told Mendy, “I'm glad you weren't there. I'm glad you're alive.” He could have been stabbed to death. He could have been blown up. It was dumb luck that he was here talking to me.

“Thank you. But am I?”

“Are you alive?”

“No. Am I glad I'm alive? Am I glad I lived another thirty-five years since then?”

“Oh. Aren't you?”

“I don't know.” He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged again. His boney shoulders stuck out from his wifebeater; the shrug was full and genuine. “I guess so. I mean, I don't think I want to die.
If I did, I could have thrown myself in the river by now. Or in front of a train. But I didn't give a fuck, that day in the candy store, or most of those days in prison. I still don't, really. I felt like that when I was a little kid. Someone would pick on me, or make a comment, and I'd lose it. And since that time . . . I don't know that anything's changed. I feel just about the same as I did when I was nine years old. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been gained. I don't understand other people or myself any more now than I did then.”

“You haven't gained any wisdom?” I asked.

“No, I don't think so. I don't know if I learned anything in all this time of being alive.”

He turned to face me again. “I understand, maybe, that you're asking for yourself as much as for me. Like you want me to tell you that you will grow wiser, that some of the dust will clear from your eyes. I hope it does, Izzy, for your sake. I do. But me, I got off on a wrong foot somewhere—before I can remember—and I never got on the right one. Since then, I've just lived the days.”

I said good-bye to Mendy, and went and treated myself to some pesto pasta salad at an artist café up on Spring Street. Artist cafés were cheap a long time ago, but now they're expensive, designed for kids who have their parents' credit cards and don't really understand how much money things cost. The two art students in front of me in line were talking about a pair of white jeans one had just bought for two hundred and fifty dollars. I stood behind them in my pants, which had once been a light gray but were now smeared with soot and tar from the street.

The pasta salad was good, though, and came with a chewy breadstick. It was seven dollars, but the fact of the matter was that the money in my pocket was my dad's too, and a year earlier I had been subsisting on a student meal plan Bernie paid for, so I wasn't different from the hip artists and students in the café, except that I smelled worse and none of them talked to me. I was somewhere between them and Mendy, but I didn't know exactly where.

Mendy's stories troubled me. Not the violence—I could accept violence—but that nothing came of any of it, that no one seemed to
become wiser, or less angry, or less afraid. I saw my world as a story moving forward, but for Mendy, the world was a collage, snippets pasted together with no sense of narrative or progression.

Back in the storage space, I sorted through the box from that morning. I puttered around for a bit, and got a few other things done. When I lay down for the night, Rayna still hadn't come back home. I was worried. She had been gone a long time.

Some time later, I woke up and saw Rayna sitting on a crate, staring at me. My eyes took a moment to focus, and at first Rayna appeared hazy. I rubbed my eyes, to make sure she was there, and I wasn't dreaming again. She was real. Her legs were crossed, and she leaned back against the wall, with her arms folded over her stomach. I was still getting used to her short hair.

Her eyes were puffy, like maybe she'd been crying.

“Rayna.” I sat up. “When did you come in?”

“A little while ago. I didn't want to wake you. I was sitting here thinking.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“The
Megilat Esther
. Do you know it?”

“Yes, I've heard the scroll read on Purim. I know the story.” When was Purim? It must have passed us just a few weeks earlier. It was a commandment to hear the whole scroll read. I remembered sitting in the Chabad house at school, half drunk in a clown costume, listening to the rabbi's voice go up and down.

“The scroll is not the whole story,” Rayna said. “What it says in there is true, about who Esther was and what she did, but there are other things that happened, that they didn't want to write down in the scroll.” What was Rayna trying to tell me? What things had happened?

“Can you tell me about them?” I asked. She nodded.

“Yes, I want to.” She came and sat down next to me on the mattress.

“Esther had heard what had happened to Queen Vashti when she refused King Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus made sure everyone in the kingdom knew. So when Esther was chosen to go live in the castle, she wasn't happy. It was scary for her. She was a slave, under the control
of a eunuch called ‘Hege, Keeper of Women.' She had to come when Ahasuerus demanded.” I recalled Rayna talking about her family wanting to marry her off to a man.

“Her uncle Mordechai said he was protecting her. He said he would protect his family. But he was just fighting with Haman. He didn't do anything to help Esther. In fact, he used her, like a chess piece. A well-positioned little queen carved out of stone.” Rayna's voice was growing stronger and more confident as the story went on.