When we finished the juice he took us downstairs into the basement. Plush carpet led us into his personal Disneyland; there was a Ping-Pong table, a wall of toys, bikes, Nerf guns, and, most mind-blowing of all, two bean bags plunked in front of a big TV with a Super Nintendo setup and a huge pile of the latest games.
Jealousy shoved me from the back. Jeremy was parading around, showing off all the shit his parents had bought for him and his brother, and he didn’t even seem like he cared. I could tell he did because he wouldn’t be showing it off otherwise, but I wanted to see that he cherished it all, like I would. We have never had a TV, much less a gaming setup, and I have never been allowed to play video games. At all. Ever.
We played Ping-Pong for a while, the four of us, me and Eli crushing Jeremy and Sam, then his mom called us up for dinner. She said to get changed into our PJs first. I pulled her aside and let her know I only had the sweatpants I was wearing and she said not to worry at all, Jeremy had tons of stuff he’d be happy to lend me.
Upstairs, in Jeremy’s bedroom, he was being super nice, going through his drawers of clothes to find me some basketball shorts that I liked. He said, “Hey, you guys wanna see something cool?”
“Yeah.”
“Look at this . . .”
He pulled a wad of cash out of his drawer of tube socks.
“I just got it for my bar mitzvah.”
He smiled, showing off the wad with the same blasé shtick he was doing in the basement. We all just sort of cooed and wowed and then went downstairs for what they called dinner in this fantasy castle.
It was nuts. His mom made us mac and cheese and fries and didn’t even force us to eat any carrots or broccoli or squash. She didn’t use any soy sauce or garlic, and it all actually tasted delicious. After we ate, she said it was movie time and put us in front of the TV with bowls of ice cream. That blew my mind.
We watched Mrs. Doubtfire, which made me almost pee my pants it was so funny. Robin Williams plays a man living as a woman, making it even funnier, because these kids had no idea I was a Mr. Doubtfire right next to them on that plush cream couch.
We all slept in real beds because they had a guest room with bunks and his brother wasn’t there, so we each got our own space. I didn’t have any trouble going to the bathroom because the guest room had its own and I could lock the door.
In the morning, I went back into Jeremy’s room to change out of his basketball shorts. Being in there alone was too much temptation for me to handle, and I pulled open the sock drawer. Was he really gonna miss it? What did this kid even need a wad of cash for? He had everything he could ever dream of! I put the wad at the bottom of my backpack, folded up the shorts, and went downstairs.
I left it in my bag when I went to school the next day, just because I had no idea where to stash such a thing that my ma wouldn’t find it. I planned to figure it out that night. But when we got home, there was a message on the machine from Jeremy’s mom asking Ma to call her back urgently. I sat on the bed straining to hear what was being said, but it sounded like my ma was apologetic and upset. There was the sound of a zipper as she opened my yellow backpack, which was hanging on a coat hook right behind her.
I stopped listening. I got under the blanket and put a pillow over my head. I had a deep desire to vanish, to evaporate into the walls, to float out the window through the glass and just go away somewhere else.
Ma came in and stood at the foot of the bed. To be fair, she didn’t attack, she kind of gave me the benefit of the doubt. She could have flipped out on me, but she didn’t. She asked where the wad of cash in my backpack came from.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where did you get the three hundred dollars that was rolled up under your notebook?”
“Willy gave it to me . . . to hold on to for him . . .”
“Willy? Who’s Willy?”
“Willy Hart, from my class.”
“Willy Hart . . . Willy Hart gave you . . . Why did Willy Hart give you three hundred dollars to hold onto for him? Why does he have three hundred dollars?”
“I don’t know . . . from his mom, I think . . .”
My mind was spinning, trying to keep up with and invent my lie as it spilled out of my mouth. The embarrassment I felt was like being dunked in something gross, everywhere on my body and completely engulfing. The urgent desire to disappear leaned into a zone of hysteria. My face was burning with the guilt of lying, but the shame I felt about having stolen some nice kid’s money who welcomed me into his house and having gotten so easily busted made me want to be someone else so bad I was pushing the edges of anger. All of this under a pillow while trying to act natural.
Ma hadn’t told Jeremy’s mom that I had the money; she wanted to talk to me first, which I appreciated.
“Willy Hart gave it to you to hold on to, huh . . . Well, Jeremy’s ma just called, and said he is missing three hundred dollars of his bar mitzvah money that was in his sock drawer. She said he showed it to you and the other kids when you were sleeping over there.”
Something snapped into place for me, a decision that I was going to stick with this lie, under no circumstances could I tell her the embarrassing truth, partially because it would hurt her that I felt like I needed to steal money to eat. I realized that I had to treat this untruth like anything but. I ripped the pillow off my face, looked her straight in the eyes and shrieked, “Well, why would he accuse me? Because I’m the poor kid? What about Eli and Sam? Did they ask them?! I didn’t take his stupid bar mitzvah money, that money is from Willy Hart. He gave it to me and I have to give it back!”
I’m on month two of sticking to this lie now. It’s created a great rift between my ma and me. I can tell she feels betrayed, confused about who I am. But I can’t let go. I’ve dug myself so deep into this hole, it would upend everything to confess. The cash is in a cigar box in the closet, next to the box of Billy photos. She’s talked to my pop about it on the phone, and he tried to point out to me how ridiculous a coincidence it is that on the very day I visit a kid who loses three hundred bucks, I show up with three hundred bucks in my bag swearing it’s from somebody they didn’t even know I knew. But I insist, playing to his sympathies. They’re both confused. They don’t know me to be a liar and don’t want to see me that way.
I’m lucky because Ma’s kind of distracted. Our new building is practically abandoned now. I don’t understand what happened, since I thought this building was a respite from the other soon-to-be-abandoned building, but now they’ve ripped the mailboxes off the wall here, too. The electricity is spotty and they’ve pulled the gas main out, so we’ve been cooking on a camping stove and using candles to see.
I think Ma feels bad about the house. She says everything they’re doing is super fucking illegal, but all her attempts to hold management accountable fall flat. She let me get a pet lizard from Canal Street to try and distract me from the misery of it all, but the second he got out of his cage he buried himself in a pile of rugs and probably won’t surface until spring. I don’t blame him. I’d camouflage myself into a warm spot and disappear if I could, too.
One day there’s a knock and it’s one of the last holdouts, Nick, one of the two Aleut Indian brothers who are still downstairs. He says to my ma, “Hey, Rhonna, do you smell gas?”
“Oh shit . . .”
They exchange a few words and she goes straight to the phone and calls Con Edison. They send an inspector down and he says, “You have live gas pipes hanging outside your window.”
My ma starts yelling about how we live on the sixth floor of a walk-up, and that it’s not acceptable for them to gas us, but he tells her it’s the landlord’s responsibility and leaves. That’s when the phone calls start.
Every night when we get home she goes to the little stand in the hall by the door and gets on the phone, calling councilmen, housing aid organizations, pro bono lawyers, trying to rally up some support for us. I hear her telling them that we were abandoned, tricked by a greedy, f
raudulent management organization.
ACROSS THE STREET NOW, I can see the junkies who are squatting the top floor of another abandoned building, lighting candles on their mantel. They’ve been adding to what has become a mountain of wax atop the fireplace all winter. They’re night people. No matter what time I wake up, I crane my neck to check on them and the mantel is lit up, dripping onto itself and down to the floor.
There has been a huge snowstorm the last few days, and homeless guys are sleeping in our stairwell. One of the windows is broken and snow is blowing into the pale yellow light in the hall over them as Ma and I come down the stairs. She stops to film it because it is so beautiful.
She’s been working with a gay Puerto Rican lawyer dude who has an office on Fourteenth Street. We go up there at all hours for Ma to write letters and make phone calls and try to change the situation, but nothing seems to be working. Sometimes he gives me cookies or jelly beans while I’m waiting on the front couch. I spend hours and hours there, reading. I found a book in the library on being a survivalist. It teaches you how to spear a fish with a sharpened stick, how to cook it over an open fire, how to shelter yourself in a storm, and how to build a debris hut out of sticks and leaves.
I make Ma take me up to Central Park so I can gather piles of leaves and make myself a shelter to hide in. I love small spaces that have walls, even if they’re made of leaves, because I can go in and read and no one will bother me.
Six months go by. Everything descends into a hellscape in the building. All the last neighbors move out and they begin construction on some of the apartments. We’re literally the only ones left. They ripped up the floor in the entrance hall and put down planks of plywood to make a path. The daily feeling is one of bottomed-out, gut loneliness. Despair. None of the letters Ma wrote did anything. One of the guys who works for management seemed like he would help us, a collegiate redhead named Gabe, but one night Ma called him because our bathroom ceiling was flooding and he said, “Don’t call me after dark, Rhonna, I’m meditating.”
He hung up. That sent Ma into a shrieking fit of rage. I think it’s all getting to be too much for her to handle. We’re like refugees up here, just her and me, alone.
Over the summer Pop came to visit with his new girlfriend, Julia, a well-known choreographer who hired him to make everything to do with design for her new company—stages, lighting, posters. We all made a cowboy movie together. I’ve taken to wearing a Catholic school uniform daily, because I like the routine and how sharp it looks, so we wrote a movie where I was a kid escaping from his Catholic school who runs into some wooden Indians in a cigar shop. We used a storefront across the street to make the cigar shop and my ma and Julia both painted themselves completely brown with body paint and got dressed up as the Indians to costar.
Ma and Poppa got into an argument over the situation in the house and he gave her some extra money, but there’s not much he can do, I guess; how my ma spends it is out of his control. I felt super close to him until the money stealing came up again.
He took me out for lots of walks and tried to get me to just cop to it, but I refused. They started ganging up on me, telling me it wasn’t the end of the world, that it’s much better to be honest and get the guilt off my chest, and finally I relented.
We were at Chelsea Piers just before my birthday. He was picking me up from the batting cages for a sleepover uptown. They cornered me and started peppering me with questions and finally I just didn’t want to lie anymore. I blurted out what they wanted to hear and immediately burst into tears. Poppa was going to get me a bike for my tenth birthday, but as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t gonna happen anymore. Far worse, actually, was that my ma said now that I had confessed, I couldn’t have the sleepover. I had to go home to the hellhole and go to bed without dinner. They got in a yelling match about that, during which I sat on the ground and threw rocks into the Hudson River, but in the end she won like she always does. Poppa has been on tour out of the country since.
Ma made me call Jeremy and apologize. I had to go meet up with him and his mom and his brother and shake his hand and give him the cash back. That was mortifying. It took me two weeks to recover. In the meantime, I found some gauze and taped it over my face and told the kids at school that a dog had mauled out my eye.
By Halloween Ma had forgiven me, and we decided to throw a party in the building. There wasn’t another soul living there, and it was the creepiest place on earth. We got these cheap goblets in the shape of skulls and Pop told us to put dry ice in them. We lit a ton of candles in the foyer, laid the goblets around, and put on some music. But nobody showed up.
After that I made a sling and told the kids at school I’d broken my arm. They all signed it with hearts.
TODAY WE WAKE UP to a chain saw noise right next to our heads. It sounds like the Hulk is coming through the wall. Ma jumps out of bed and runs next door, only to find a construction crew literally tearing down the Sheetrock. She gets on the phone and starts screaming.
I put on my pants and we come down to the management office, where the Rasta Bitch says our time on Fourth Street is up. We need to move back to Third Street or hit the road.
Ma protests, saying they shafted us, lying to get us out, and now all they have left are apartments in the back of the building. The Rasta Bitch counters, saying that’s not true, there are apartments in the front, they’re just one-bedrooms, which she’s happy to give us. Ma waves an angry arm toward me and delivers a sermon on the inhumanity of forcing a single mother and a growing child into a space half the size of what they need.
This is an impasse. Rasta Bitch knows she’s won, because we can’t argue an apartment into existing. “Rhonna, you’ve had nine months to do this an easier way, but those walls are coming down today, so either you go back over to Third Street or we can’t help you.”
The fluorescent lights allow for no discretion. Every person in the office is openly gawking at the two women battling in the foyer. It crosses my mind how smart it was of them to put in a sheet of bulletproof plexiglass to shield the secretary. If they were fucking us over like this, how many other people wanted to go postal on them?
“You still have the option to choose which apartment you’d like, Rhonna. There are two two-bedrooms still available, but Mr. Nuñez is on his way over there as we speak to take the upper one for his family. If you’d like to have a say in the matter, I suggest you head over there right now.”
My ma is like a dragon. Her nostrils are wide and her eyes are burning fire again, for the fifty thousandth time this year. But she knows she’s being backed into a corner.
“I can delay the demolition by two weeks, Rhonna, to allow you time to relocate back to Third Street, but that is absolutely it. You have to come back here today to sign the paperwork on the new place, or the whole thing is off the table and we’ll have to serve you with eviction papers.”
My ma curses this woman in every way she can think of as the pretty Rasta Bitch ushers us toward the door.
“Okay, Rhonna, that’s real mature. Have a nice day.”
She slams the door behind us and I hear her throw the dead bolt. She’s lucky, that bitch: Ma could pull her apart like a piece of chicken.
OUR OLD BUILDING IS unrecognizable. Everything has been made over, cleaned up, genericized. Fritz is gone, and Joey too. The walls are sticky with fresh paint, divided into a horizon by two shades of colorless beige, and the banister has been painted over so chunks of wood don’t skewer your palms when you run down the stairs. The first floor doesn’t stink of Susan the Cat Lady anymore, because she and her furry friends have been relocated permanently. The front door has been replaced, the buzzers work, and the lights in the halls cast what my Ma calls a sterile flood.
The apartment smells clean and new when we walk in, and I notice for the first time that the floors are wood. The bathtub isn’t painted blue, it doesn’t have feet, and it is no longer in the kitchen. Light switches work, and I spend a long time contemplati
ng the clean toilet. Best of all, there are two bedrooms, one for my ma and one for me. Three Boy Scout books have already been scoured for every possible tip on how to build myself a bed, make a lamp, and construct a bookshelf for my collection. I jump up a little bit with every step I take and pull my ma’s hand. But she’s furious. The four windows at the back look out over the brick back wall of La Mama, the theater behind our building, and the ceilings are low. There is no color in the apartment. No air. No light. She is steaming, and suddenly I am no longer loyal to her notions of right and wrong.
Chapter 18
Pet Store Rafik
Fourth Street, October 1995
I AM LAID OUT ACROSS THE BACKSEAT OF A 1972 PONTIAC, with my face pressed against the sticky beige pleather. My head and toes nearly touch at both ends. The streetlamps are sparkling orange, and every minute or so a cab ambles by, revealing the ceiling in a roving six-inch shaft of light.
It’s chilly and dark out. I have a hoodie up over my ears. We are parked outside the Fourth Street building, but we’re not going in. We’ve got a week left there.
Ma is in the front seat, and Rafik is behind the wheel. Rafik runs the pet shop around the corner from my school. We started going in there to get food for my pet lizard, Bullet, but lately we’ve been going in for Ma to hang out with Rafik. He is Middle Eastern of some sort, maybe Egyptian. He has short black hair and wears a thin gold chain. He might be thirty or forty. Not a particularly smiley character, but he gives me doggy treats that I give to puppies in the park, so he’s okay in my book.
We’ve been dropping by later and later, waiting until he closes, and in the last few days he’s started driving us back across town to get home. This is the latest it’s ever gone.
Ma is wearing a black coat, brown hair to her shoulders. She put lipstick on, and I know what that means. Her long legs are bent up underneath her like a spider, and her seat is pushed all the way back. Just the fact that she is in a car tells me she must like this guy.
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