The Sea Beach Line (9 page)

“Well, this wasn't that much. Just a few tabs. I was just trying to help some guys out, you know? I wasn't a drug dealer or anything. But I was tripping daily, so I kept a good supply, and people knew I was always sure to have something on hand. Or at least could always get something.”

I hadn't been on any one thing in particular. I wasn't a dope fiend or an addict, just a seeker. Most of the things I was into aren't even addictive. But I always had to have something to put me in the dream world: acid, mushrooms, morning-glory-seed oil, whatever. At least some Adderall or Benzedrine to elevate things. Some good bud to help me ease away from the physical world's illusions. It was better to buy in bulk than to run dry, and the only way I could afford to do that was by selling off half of every bulk purchase. People started coming to me, and the bulk purchases got bigger and bigger.

“Still, just for hooking the guy up, I was scared there was going to be some serious police problems. My stepfather got involved and smoothed things over as best he could. I agreed to withdraw from the school voluntarily, to save everyone the headache.”

The story was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the gist. There had been a couple minor incidents, then the one serious situation where the kid took some stuff he couldn't handle and freaked out. He had to go to a mental asylum for a couple weeks, where they pumped him full of Risperdal. His father and his father's lawyers got
involved, and made the kid out to be a victim. He gave me up as the “campus source,” even though I was only buying from another guy on campus, who had connections up in Cleveland.

Campus security searched my dorm room and threatened me, but I wasn't going to drag anyone else down with me. Besides, all they found were a few pills and residue-covered bags. I was lucky that they didn't come earlier or later. When I broke the kid off, I had had a whole sheet of blotter acid, but in the interim it had all been sold off or consumed. I'd been making arrangements to buy a vial of liquid LSD the week after the search. One hundred doses for four hundred bucks was a good deal. If the school had found that, they would have called the police. Possession of more than fifty doses is considered a third-degree felony in Ohio; I would not have come away with anything less than nine months of jail time, and I would have done my time rather than snitch on my source.

The circumstantial evidence wasn't really enough to get the police involved. It was just the other kid's story against mine. But the school interviewed a bunch of other students, and then it was all of their stories against mine. I had thought some of them were my friends. Apparently not. I was failing out anyway, and it was clear to everyone that I was out of my mind on drugs. When they interrogated me, my answers didn't make any sense. They didn't even pertain to the issue at hand. The school just wanted me to go away, and Bernie and my mother came to a quiet agreement with them. My mother was still pretty mad about the whole situation.

“When I left school,” I told Mendy, “I went and stayed with my parents in New Mexico, where they live now, to get my head straight.”

“Your parents?” Mendy was confused; the only parent of mine he knew was Alojzy.

“My mother and my stepfather. They sort of retired down there, I guess.” Bernie was a few years older than my mother. “The climate's good for my stepfather's asthma. I mean, he still works, but from there. There wasn't really any reason for me to be there. I'm staying with my sister here in the city now.”

“I see.”

“It's where I'm from originally. I guess I feel more at home here.”

“Me too. I'm the same way.” I took a look at Mendy. I really couldn't see him existing anywhere else except a New York City street.

“Hey, why did you guess it was fighting they kicked me out for?”

“I thought maybe you had that part of your father in you.” It made me happy that he thought that.

“He got in a lot of fights out here?”

“Well, look: he was always a nice guy to me, and everyone else who treated him nice, but if someone crossed him, oh boy, it was on.” Mendy finished his last bite of yogurt, and put the empty container down on the curb. “His face, the shape of his face, could physically change. It was terrifying. He had a thing about respect. If you were respectful to him, fine. But if he felt disrespected . . .

“This one time, he forgot his heavy jacket out on the street by mistake, his own mistake, after he'd packed up for the night. He comes back the next day, and asks Eye—a guy, a street guy, who hangs out around here—if he's seen the jacket. Eye says yeah, right after Al left, this guy who passes by here walking a little white dog every morning and every evening, he came by and picked up the jacket.

“So Al, he waits until the guy comes by on his morning walk and approaches him. He says, ‘Excuse me, did you pick up a jacket from here yesterday night?' The guy says, ‘No. I didn't.' And Al says, ‘Oh really, that surprises me, because you know, my long-term acquaintance Eye, who's never steered me wrong on any factual matters, says you picked up my jacket that I forgot.' The guy says, ‘Fine, so what if I did, what I find is mine. It's none of your business what I pick up off the street.' Al, I could tell he's on the verge, he says, ‘Maybe you didn't realize it was my jacket. But it is, and I'd like it back.' The guy says, ‘No, fuck you, it's my jacket now.'

“Al looks at him calmly. So calmly the guy thought maybe he'd won, but the thing is, your father at his calmest was your father at his most frightening. So he looks at the guy and says—his tone just as friendly as could be—he says, ‘That's fine. I just want you to understand, though, that after I finish beating the shit out of you, I'm going to beat the shit out of your dog.'

“The guy went right on home and got the jacket and brought it back.

“Later, I said to him, ‘Damn, Al, that was something.' He says, ‘What do you mean?' I said, ‘Al, I mean, you were really going to beat up a little doggy?' He says, ‘Look, Mendy, I knew by the fact he's every day taking this little dog for walks in the fresh air, that he really loves that animal. If people cross you, then you have to hurt what they love.'” I liked hearing this story. Alojzy was strong, unyielding. People showed him respect.

“But at the same time,” Mendy said, “Al wasn't petty. I'm not saying that your father was going to hurt the little dog because he was petty about the fucking jacket. You asked him for a fucking jacket, he'd give it to you. Matter of fact, this sweater I'm wearing right now . . .” Mendy tugged on the green fabric hanging loosely from his frame . . . “he gave it to me.”

As the last rush was dying off, we started packing up. The sun was long gone, the moon barely a sliver, but there were enough electric lights for us to see. Mendy had a whole system worked out. The books came off the table in order, row by row, and went into specific, numbered boxes. His handcart folded out into a long four-wheeled cart, and each of the boxes, folded tables, pieces of wood, and plastic bags had their own set places. We were tying the whole rig up with rope when a man built like a scarecrow sidled up to us.

“Mendy. Mendy, my man.”

“Oh, how you doing, Eye.” Eye was tall and lanky, though his oversized sweatshirt obscured the exact shape of his frame. The most noticeable thing about him was his thin, black, horseshoe mustache. His dark brown skin seemed like it had been weathered by centuries, but I guessed he was about Alojzy's age.

“You need some help with the cart tonight?” he asked Mendy.

“Nah. Thanks, but I already got this guy here. He's been helping me all day; I think I'll just let him see it through.”

“This squirt here? Who the hell is he?” Something was off about Eye's gaze; it seemed like he was eyeballing me, but only one eyeball
was actually fixed on me. Then I understood what it was: his left eye was glass.

“Oh, sorry. This is Izzy. Izzy, that's Eye.” I nodded at Eye. He blinked his good eye back at me.

“He's Al's son,” explained Mendy.

“Al? Al Edel? That Russian fuck?”

“Polish,” I said, as if there was some pride in the word for me.

“What the fuck I care what kind of Russian your daddy is, boy?”

“I'll talk to you later, Eye,” Mendy told him.

I pushed the cart from behind, while Mendy pulled from the front, steering with a little length of rope. Mendy had an established route that he followed. We walked down the middle of the street, out of necessity. I knew that the city streets sloped down on the sides for drainage, but I had never realized how extreme of an arch it was until I had to keep a moving cart from tipping over. We pissed off more than one cab driver, and hearing the honks and shouts right behind me made me nervous. Mendy didn't seem to notice them at all. He calmly snapped down the mirrors of parked cars threatening to clip us, and maneuvered us around potholes with hardly a glance at the ground. The cart was heavy on the uphill blocks. I wasn't used to this kind of work.

At the very end of the route we had to cross Varick Street. It was well past what I thought of as rush hour, but the street was still fully inhabited by the caravan of commuters trying to find their way back to suburban New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel. The idling cars spilled through the intersection. Mendy forced a way across for us, staring drivers down or banging on their hoods until they backed up enough to let us through.

We cut through a parking lot. Cars were parked four stories high on metal girders, and I couldn't make sense of the system that raised them up there. Mendy nodded at the parking attendant, who nodded back from his little booth, and we came to the back door of the New York Mini Storage, where two women were arguing in Russian. The only word I could make out was “
dengi
.” Money. The woman doing most of the shouting was older, about fifty, and had bleached blonde
hair. The other woman was about my age, and had black hair. She started to argue back against the older woman, waving her finger in her face, and the older woman slapped her twice, knocking the girl to her knees with the second blow. The older woman took a drag on her cigarette, making the ember at the end glow red, then flicked the cigarette at the girl's face.

I stopped pushing the cart, but Mendy shook his head.

“Not our business,” he said. “Besides, you don't want to mess with Zoya. Let's get inside.” He swiped a magnetic key fob against a panel to unlock the door, and guided the cart through.

It took us a few tries to get the cart into Mendy's storage space. There was just enough space between the boxes to fit it in, and we kept getting in at a bad angle, and having to pull back out and try again. When we finally got in, I let myself sink down to the ground. I sat there and sweated. I still hadn't caught my breath from the walk over.

Mendy counted out some money from his fanny pack and held it out to me.

“Here you go,” he said.

“What's this?”

“Sixty-four dollars. It's what I figure is fair, considering how long you worked, and what I made, and what I can pay.”

“I wasn't doing it to get paid . . .”

“Well, you earned it. If you weren't helping me, I would have had to get Eye to help me push the cart. He would have been doing it to get paid. I'm giving you the same rate I give him. It was most of your day. It made my day easier. Take it, or I won't feel right. I don't need one more thing to keep me up at night.” I took the money and put it in my pocket. It felt good to hold a wad of cash that I'd earned through an honest day's work.

“Now.” He snapped his fingers. “That other thing.” He extracted a shoebox from his cluttered storage space, and rummaged through it until he pulled out a key ring. He lifted his glasses and pulled the keys close to his eye. Satisfied he had the right ring, he tossed it to me.

“That's the key to your father's space. It makes more sense for you to have it than me. The number written on the keychain should be
Timur's . . . I was supposed to call it if your father got jammed up or something. I guess maybe he did. You can sort things out with Timur yourself. That little fob on the ring gets you into the building.

“Well, there it is,” he said, pointing to another unit down the same aisle. “Your family legacy. I'll say good night now, and leave you to it.”

5

WHEN I OPENED THE
metal door, I found a cart stacked high with water boxes. The rig was tied up with bungee cords, ready to hit the street. Alojzy had been planning on coming back here. Beyond the cart were stacks and stacks of water boxes, labeled in shaky Sharpie. “HC Mysteries.” “20th Cent. Art.” “Photog.” “Catchers in the Ryes.”

Based on the outer metal wall, the space extended quite a bit to the left, past the stacks of boxes. I climbed up over the cart and onto the stacks to see what was there. In the little light that filtered in from the fluorescent tubes on the corridor ceiling, I could make out a field of books, with a clearing in the middle. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the clearing was an inflatable camping mattress. This was my father's bedroom. I jumped down onto the mattress, the only place I could safely land. Luckily, it didn't pop. Next to it, a camping lantern sat on an upturned milk crate. I switched the lantern on. It was bright enough to give me a fairly full view of the space.