Authors: Sarah Schulman
I saw Dino three times a week. I wasn't some girl he could impress at a party. I saw how boring and hard his job was and how little he got paid. I saw him stumble out tired and frustrated, hanging around late sometimes like he had no other place to go.
“This is the meeting that I like the best,” he said. “It's not near my house, but it's worth the extra trip.”
The church basement in Chelsea was full. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people there and it wasn't even dinnertime yet. Many of them were black men.
“That's why I like this one,” he said.
There was every kind of black man you could imagine. There were quiet gay men with skinny bodies, young turks with wild hair, old sophisticated intellectual types, businessmen paunchy in their suits, younger artists trying to get straight, and a whole contingent of street guys, smoking heavily around the coffee machine and asking each other for cigarettes. There was also a handful of Buppies in their dry-cleaned blah, and dudes like Dino.
Someone was talking. When he finished, there was a collective sigh and then a lot of people raised their hands.
“My name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict,” said one good-looking young man, with an actor's composure and booming vocal tones.
Then everyone else said, “Hi, Tom,” in a monotone unison, and then he said, “Hi.”
Tom started to talk about how much he had wanted to cop that morning and how easy it would have been. When he finished, everyone raised their hands again and another guy started to talk.
“My name is Jeff and I'm an alcoholic.”
Jeff was a bloated, nerdy-looking guy with thick glasses and food stains on his shirt, a typical egghead.
“Hi, Jeff.”
“Hi.”
Jeff talked about what his wife said to him the day before that made him want to drink and how much pressure there was at his job. It all went like that, being lonely or under too much pressure or not having a place to sleep or a bad memory. Whatever it was, they were all saying it and saying their names and everyone said “Hi” and each one had a reason why they wanted to get wasted and why they did or didn't let it happen. But after I realized how the whole operation functioned, I also realized what was different between them and me. They wanted to stop and I didn't. That got me off the hook real quick. So I stopped paying attention to the specificities of what each one of them was saying and got more into observing the atmosphere, like how each person talked as long as they needed to talk. Even if they started to ramble, nobody stopped them. Sometimes it got really boring but no one looked bored. I kept shifting my eyes back and forth between the yuppies and the street people. I couldn't help feeling that the businessmen were part of the derelicts' problems. But there was no hostility between them. Everyone was concerned with their own personal thing. There they were, sitting in the same room talking about the same topic, except that the employed brought their coffee in little deli cups and the street people drank the coffee provided by the AA.
I was leaning back, relaxing into the voices, when a white guy behind me started to speak. I wasn't paying attention at first but I could tell from his voice that he was white. It was in his pronunciation and the little sounds he made between the words. He got more nervous as he talked, clearing his throat too much and mumbling. Then he must have leaned forward on his chair because his hard breathing was suddenly on the back of my neck and it felt wrong. Something in his voice made my stomach get tight before I could realize why. I think my stomach heard him before my head did.
He's been having problems with his woman, he said in between coughing and other distortions. She didn't want to see him anymore so she cut out with no note, nothing. He knows where she's staying, though, and keeps trying to get in touch.
“I just want her to talk to me,” he said. “Just talk to me.”
It was the way he repeated the “talk to me” part that made my spine pull away from my back. He repeated it at AA exactly the way he had repeated it on the answering machine tape on my living room floor.
A kind of unfamiliar stillness came over me, the kind you read about in books when people reach the tops of mountains or hide from the soldiers or watch their lover leave forever. Sitting behind me was the same man who had put his hands around my Punkette's neck and broken it. It was the man who had carried her limp, light body through the projects and heard it splash into the slimy, shiny surface off the East River Drive. It was the man whose voice sat on a spool of cassette tape in a box in my apartment.
In my head was the sound of a waterfall that hit the rocks like a drum solo or a forty machine-gun salute. That's when I turned around and saw his long hair and David Crosby mustache, and his leather jacket with the worn-out fringes. It was the next-door neighbor from Charlotte's building. The cab driver with the electric shock on his door to keep the junkies away. It was the same man.
I WENT OVER
to the coffee machine to get a better view. The killer had no neck. He was overdeveloped and sloppy. When he turned his head, I could see that his mustache was red and filled with spit. Then I gave him a general once-over with a degree of disbelief because my search for this man had taken me much too far.
I poured a cup of coffee. It was bitter. I added two spoonfuls of nondairy creamer and three sugars. Some guy was hanging out by the coffee machine being quietly but distinctly out of it. He kept talking in low tones with no encouragement from me.
“I've smoked some reefer and I got a headache,” he said. “I've had a bad one since Saturday. I guess I'm out five dollars. A five-dollar headache.”
I could see Dino checking me out from his seat. He flashed me a big smile, convinced he had done his duty by turning me on to a really good thing.
“I've been smoking since 1964 and I ain't ever had no headache. It's them Trinidadians messing with the marijuana, putting in birdseed.”
Dino waved at me. I smiled and waved back. David Crosby looked at the clock. His eyes were blue. He was a blue-eyed little boy.
“Used to be when it was in the hands of brothers, everywhere you'd go in Harlem the smoke was the same. No wacky bags then. No headaches.”
Crosby was getting ready to go. He ran his large hands over his greasy hair and was out the door. I was right after him. I didn't say goodbye to Dino or anything.
Outside the sky was the kind of blue that only comes out when the sun goes down in early summer. There are days, now and then, when you're standing outside from the moment it starts until hours of beer and summertime conversation have moved the evening into night and that color into a midnight blue. Midnight blue has to be paid attention to softly if you want to see the blue. If you don't really look, it will seem black.
I followed him for three blocks before I noticed that at night I listen more and I also hear more as a result. During the day, the eyes take priority over the ears for me. Only when it's dark does the music come through. He walked with his head down. I walked with my ears. We heard a carpet of machine roar, plush in horns. On top were the voices, and in between were radios. Then he got into the driver's seat of his cab. I walked into the street and flagged down one of my own.
“Excuse me. Do you see that cab in front? Could you follow him wherever he goes? Thank you.”
“Okay,” said the Israeli behind the wheel. He had a Playboy decal on the windshield.
The thing about a cab is that you sit back in the leather like a movie star and instead of being part of the street and the life of the city, you only watch it. You don't come into contact. The only sounds are the sirens and the shrill whistles that bike riders blow when you're in their way. Then David Crosby parked in front of his and Charlotte and Beatriz and Daniel's building and walked into the hall.
What had begun inside me as a private disaster had played itself out so thoroughly that everything around me was also in ruins. Confusion and violence defined the world in which I was living, as well as the world that was living inside of me.
I took the pearl-handed gun out of my pocket and squeezed it between my hands. I pressed it against my heart and over my breasts, hard until my nipple was squashed flat against the bone. I passed it between my legs and in my mouth, in every secret part of me. I rubbed it over my face, pushing its nose into my cheeks, cleaning the trigger with my tongue. Then I was ready. Up the broken stairs, slowly at first, and then fast with no fear, stomping, tripping, flying down the stinking hallway. I slammed against the door with my fists first, with my right hand already gone from Sunshine's face, then kicking until my feet gave way too. So I threw my entire body against it over and over because I was the only person in this twisted city who wanted justice and was determined to get it.
I was fermenting in my own sweat. I was dancing in my own blood. I was panting, exhausted, looking for a solution in the limitations of my own body, when I saw his blue eye look out at me through the peephole. It was bloodshot and frightened, like he had been crying all the way home from AA. It was one eye with no context and no purpose. I put the nozzle of Priscilla Presley's pistol up through the eyepiece and then I fired. There was a nauseating whine, like a pig being slaughtered. Then the door began to shake. It began to tremble and I began to tremble from the shots of electric current. I was holding on to the gun. I couldn't let go. Electricity whipped through it and throughout my body, conquering me, making me part of the gun, part of the door, part of that rotting tenement building. The gun stuck in the door as I rattled and whined like the useless carcass of antiquated machinery. Like junk. That's when Beatriz came up behind me, pulled me away from the door, and pried my hands off the gun, which clattered, like me, to the floor. I experienced a physical manifestation of who I had spiritually been for the past four months. It started with that snowy night in March when I got a weapon from a girl in drag, and degenerated into this hot vomit called late July when everything is putrid in New York City. It was the numbest pain. It was a dull wound caused by some foreign power stronger than myself, which could dominate me whenever it pleased. I looked at Beatriz but she was watching the first drops of his bloody slime seeping slowly out of the gash in the door and sliding past my face onto the floor.
“I got him,” I said to Beatriz. But I didn't move form the floor. I was completely exhausted. His blood was on the collar of my shirt. “I got the guy who killed Punkette. I made everything right. I suffered but I never gave up and now I have a victory, do you hear me? I have a goddamn victory. I won.”
“What are you talking about?” Beatriz said. “You weren't going through all of this to find some man. You are just a lonely person who had absolutely nothing better to do. Don't fool yourself.”
“Don't fool myself? You should talk.” Then I remembered what was really important. “Where's Charlotte?”
“Sleeping.” “Well, Charlotte is a goddamn liar, talking about fooling yourself. Everything she told me about you wasn't true.”
“She did the right thing,” Beatriz said. “Why should she tell you anything about us? That's private. Why should I tell you anything? I don't even know you.”
I snapped my head back like she had kicked me in the face and cracked my head against the bloody base of the door.
“Are you all right?” Beatriz said without thinking.
I didn't say a thing. I wasn't even there. I was a floating sensation. A sea.
“Forget it,” Beatriz said, disgusted by her own show of tenderness. “I'm not going to take care of you. Now get out of here before the cops come and it will all be forgotten eventually.” And she went back into her apartment.
I LET MYSELF
sleep for three days. During that time no policeman came to my door to take me to prison. I had no bad dreams. No person called my house to ask me questions. There were no repercussions of any kind. A man went further than the legitimate boundaries of human behavior and to the extent that anything can be avenged, his crime was now neutralized in the scheme of things because I had killed him. This solved one questionâthe death of Punkette. There were many, many questions that remained and which I had no energy or ability to continue to try and solve. I could only ignore them. I was not a satisfied woman. I was only quiet. And so, having gotten away with everything for the time being, I sat up on the fourth day and telephoned Herbie to ask for my waitressing job back. There didn't seem to be any alternative. By that time, it was first thing Monday morning and he said to call him back Tuesday afternoon for the final answer. So I walked to the park to wait.
As soon as I got there, I saw Coco looking around. I had the feeling she was looking for me. So I just stood there, not avoiding her, not running into her, until we ended up standing together staring at the graffiti on the bandshell, and the homeless guys who lived in front of it.
“Did you see the paper?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Did the Yankees win yet?”
“No,” she said. “They lost again.”
“Figures,” I said.
“Some guy on Third Street got shot in the face. His face got blown off.”