The Street Sweeper (2 page)

The driver could feel the man’s breath on his skin. Lamont imagined how that must have felt. He knew exactly how it felt. He too had been in positions in which the heated breeze from another man’s mouth had fanned his own sense of powerlessness. It was bad enough just to be in this position but so much worse when other people saw it. You lived it in three ways when other people saw it: once through your skin, a second time through the eyes of the witnesses and thirdly, at a slight remove, when you remembered it in a cold sweat in bed at night or at any other time you found yourself suddenly again prey to an almost unconscious and visceral terror. Sometimes the sweat came first to tell you what you were about to remember.

There was only one remedy for this. The man who felt the breath on him had to strike back, no matter how futile the effort, no matter how much of a beating he was going to take when his resistance had been overcome. It was a chance to save your dignity even if at a violent price. Perhaps, after it was all over, you would still consider it had been worth it. But how can you know in advance? Wherever you end up afterwards, there will always be a face in the mirror. Would it be the face of the man who fought back or the face of the man who felt the stinking hot breath of another man and took it, swallowed it? So you sit there with the exhalation of another man gusting on to you. You’re sizing up the options, trying to decide. No doubt you’re discounting the pain you’ll feel and its duration. So just when you need all your resources, a second front opens – your body against your mind. You can’t save them both. You’ll need all your anger, clarity of purpose and perfect resolve to get up and do something quickly, but there’s always a part of you begging to be heard, telling you it’s not worth it. Lamont sat half the bus away from the bus driver and the man in the suit, but he too could feel the man’s breath on his skin.

‘You gonna give me your number?’ the Hispanic man shouted. Lamont was the only other man on the bus. Could he take this angry man in a suit? He wondered whether he was capable of overpowering him. There’d be no surprising him. Lamont winced at even the thought of trying. The old driver might not even be capable of assisting in his
own rescue. Why did the man in the suit have to choose
this
time to snap? Why couldn’t there be any other male passengers on the bus?

‘I want his number,’ the suited man continued, now addressing the frightened passengers. ‘You gonna give me your number, motherfucker? … I’m talking to you!
Maricón
. I want your number and I want to know why the fuck … why the
fuck
you were just sitting there for twenty fucking minutes. I have a job. I gotta go to work. Some people work, you know.’ He continued, turning intermittently to address the other passengers, ‘I gotta go to work’; he offered it in his own defence.

‘We
all
gotta go to work,’ an older black woman suddenly spoke up. Lamont slumped down in his chair. No good could come of this.

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ the Hispanic man in the suit continued, as though the older woman had merely bolstered his argument. ‘
We
people, some people have
real
jobs, but … you know it’s been this way ever since the MTA took over. Since they took over this route –’

‘Let him drive,’ the older black woman called out bravely. The bus had still not begun to move. The bus driver continued to stare straight ahead. ‘Now
you’re
making us late,’ a younger black woman added. Lamont was feeling the pressure of being the only other male passenger on the bus. Did they know he was the only other male passenger? Of course they knew. If he’d registered the shape of the young woman’s earrings, the scent of her perfume, if he knew what colour bra this young woman was wearing, then she knew and all the other women knew he was the only other man on the bus. But still he hoped he wasn’t going to be called upon to do something. What kind of man sits there and lets this happen? A man on parole. But what kind of man lets innocent women sit in fear on a public bus without doing a thing? ‘The trick is not to hate yourself,’ they’d told him in prison. No, the trick was to be born the person that gets to tell you this. Lamont had a daughter. How would he teach his daughter to regard a man who would sit on this bus and do nothing? The trick was to stay calm and to avoid or outlast the problem, to survive long enough to have the luxury of hating yourself.

‘He can drive,’ the Hispanic man called out from the front of the bus. ‘I just want him … I’m just
asking
him to give me … I gotta right to have his fucking number. Your number,
pendejo!’
There was no
sound between his various shouted demands other than the hum of the engine as though promising progress. Lamont felt tiny beads of moisture forming on his forehead.

‘Sit down!’ another woman called all of a sudden.

‘You know it’s been this way ever since the MTA took over. You gotta fucking cushy union job and you don’t give a shit about people who really gotta work.
They
don’t gotta work. They strike. Anything they like.’ The Hispanic man was alternating between addressing the bus driver and the passengers. ‘Do we have to take this outside? You
have
to give me your number. I have witnesses. You have to give me your number or are we going to have to take it outside?’ The bus driver, still silent, checked the rear-view mirror and the side mirror and began to pull out, but this didn’t placate the Hispanic man. ‘You chicken or deaf? … Not man enough to take it outside.
Pendejo!’
he screamed at the bus driver.

The bus began to move. Lamont sneaked a look at the back of the bus driver’s head. Any normal person would respond to this man’s abuse sooner or later. He thought he could see the bus driver shaking slightly. If he had to shake, he ought to try to disguise it by doing it in time with the bus. Lamont thought the bus driver was finished if he let the man in the suit see any hint of a tremor. He had to concentrate on not looking afraid. He had to focus. He also had to drive the bus. It didn’t have to end badly. Lamont closed his eyes, just for a moment. The younger black woman whispered loudly to him, ‘You gonna do something?’ It was loud enough for the others to hear. Lamont didn’t answer. The Hispanic man in the suit wasn’t sitting down.

‘I said I want your number, motherfucker! If I’m gonna lose
my
job, you gonna lose
yours
too …’

Addressing Lamont again in a furious whisper, the younger black woman said, ‘You gonna just sit there?’

‘Well, I don’t –’ Lamont began. What did she want him to do?

‘He’ll just make it worse,’ the older woman interrupted quietly.

Surely the bus driver was going to break. Sooner or later he had to respond in some way. Lamont noticed a large truck gaining on the bus on the left side. Should he do something? What should he do? He had a whole plan for getting back on his feet. He had a job. He had a daughter.
That idiot might have a gun. The man was crazy. Lamont understood his own crazy, but this was Puerto Rican crazy. He’d seen Puerto Rican crazy in prison. It had to be respected. The bus driver might have a gun. ‘Call the company,’ the older woman said in an attempt to placate the man.

‘It’s the MTA. I need his ID number,’ he said in reply and then turning back to the driver, ‘Just give me your fucking number, bitch.’

‘Will you sit down, please? You’re causing a danger to my passengers.’ Finally the bus driver spoke. His voice was quiet, his accent Jamaican.

‘You
the fucking danger, pal! I want your number,
maricón!’

‘Will you please sit down, sir?’ the old bus driver repeated calmly.

‘You gonna make me? I want your fucking number before I sit down.’

‘Oye, el número está allá,’
an older Hispanic woman called out.

‘Where?’ the angry man asked her. The Hispanic woman pointed to the panel above where the man was standing.

‘Cálmate. Basta ya. Coge el número
, and sit down, OK?’

The man looked up and saw the identification number. It was there above him as she had said. He was running out of reasons not to sit down. He was thinking. All the passengers watched him thinking and he watched them knowing that whatever they were pretending to do, they were watching him. Why did they have to stare like that? The bus was moving and he now had the driver’s number. But he didn’t want to sit down yet. Not yet. That would let the driver off the hook much too easily. This bus driver had kept him waiting twenty minutes and was going to be the cause of his unemployment.
He
was going to lose his job while the bus driver got to sit down for union pay, driving only when he felt like it. What in hell was he going to do with the driver’s number? Everybody knows they all stick together. But he’d made such a show of asking for it and now he had it. The man looked at the number and pulled out a pen from his breast pocket before frisking himself with one hand. ‘Anyone got some paper?’ The bus driver handed him his copy of the
New York Post
. He took it, wrote the number on the bottom of the front page, tore off the scrap and handed the newspaper back to the bus driver, who accepted it without taking his eyes off the road. The man put the scrap of paper and the pen in his breast pocket and walked with embarrassment down the aisle of the bus. For the first time, he imagined
the way he must have looked to the other passengers on the bus. He sat down in the seat in front of Lamont. ‘I don’t usually curse at my elders,’ he said quietly to both the older and the younger black women.

‘It’s okay. I’m sure you don’t,’ the older woman said to him.

‘It’s not the way I was brought up, but … twenty minutes he just sat there, and
now
 … I mean, I could lose my job.’

‘I’m sure it will turn out fine,’ the older woman said, giving a small wink to the younger woman who turned away from the Hispanic man to face the front of the bus again. Lamont noticed the younger woman roll her eyes at him as she was turning to the front. What did that mean? Why had she done that? There was no trick in making her think well of him. He didn’t need her to think anything in particular. Fools thought that was the trick, fools and younger men. There was a woman like her on every bus and in every subway car. He had only one daughter. He had a job. This could all have been much worse.
He
wasn’t late for work. Not yet. It didn’t matter what this woman thought. Lamont watched the bus driver and saw him rub the back of one hand over his forehead.

‘Since the MTA … they … put the fare up to five dollars. I wouldn’t … I wasn’t brought up to curse at my elders … It’s just that it’s my
job,’
the Hispanic man said quietly to anyone who could hear him.

What did it mean, the way she had looked at him, Lamont wondered. The trick is not to hate yourself. It’s funny what you remember. He looked out the window and still couldn’t get the song out of his head.

Seneca,
the first frozen apple juice,
enriched with vitamin C
.

He had drunk that apple juice as a child. His grandmother had bought it for him then, and she was buying it for him again now. What good did vitamin C actually do? Does anyone really know, Lamont wondered. The Hispanic man was sitting quietly. The bus had almost reached midtown. Perhaps the worst was over. Lamont’s grandmother swore by vitamin C – vitamin C and Jesus. Do people still talk as much as they used to about vitamin C? Lamont didn’t think so. Jesus was still good, though. With
all the work they’re doing on cancer and stuff, you would think they would have finally found something vitamin C could cure. Probably not, judging by how quiet vitamin C had gone, compared to when he was a kid. His grandmother had left a glass of apple juice for him. This was how the song got fixed in his head. He had forgotten to drink it, forgotten all about it until he saw it on the kitchen table as he ran out the door not to be late for the bus. The traffic was crawling.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Lamont said under his breath when he saw the Hispanic man getting up at 59th Street, just as he was. As he headed for the door, Lamont waited for a moment. He couldn’t help himself, and turned in the direction of the young black woman who had been sitting near him. Was she aware he was getting off? Had she seen his eyes? Did she have a grandmother who poured her apple juice? She was younger but they probably grew up eating the same food, catching the same childhood diseases, seeing the same local doctor. Growing up in the neighbourhood, they’d been warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. Had she really rolled her eyes? Lamont stood up slowly. If she’d grown up where he had, she had to understand. Did she understand
anything?
He took one small step. The bus was slowing. This was as long as he could wait without missing his stop. She wouldn’t look at him. He saw the Hispanic man disappear in the crowd on 59th Street as he started to walk to 57th Street to catch the 31 all the way east to York Avenue. She wouldn’t look at him.

Lamont was the first candidate in a new outreach program deemed suitable for hiring by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The hospital had agreed to participate in a pilot scheme that would see non-violent offenders with exemplary prison records given an employment opportunity in an area that entailed a chance to, in the words of the program, ‘give something back to the community’. It was only by luck that Lamont had heard about it. On learning that Lamont was eligible for early release, a friend in prison had told him to go to a place in east Harlem where they might be able to help him find a job. That place turned out to be the Exodus Transitional Community. Lamont hadn’t remembered the name, but somehow he had remembered the address – 104th Street and Lexington. Cobbling together private donations, a
trickle of intermittent government funding and as much goodwill as it could find, Exodus Transitional Community had managed to secure the participation of Memorial Sloan-Kettering. But the agreement had not amounted to much because Exodus had not found any ex-prisoners who satisfied the hospital’s strict requirements. The successful ex-prisoner was required to have no history of violence or substance abuse, and a permanent domestic address. None of Exodus’ clients until Lamont Williams had been able to satisfy all of these conditions. The importance of his participation in the ‘trial’ was impressed upon him by both parties to the agreement.