I move through the darkness toward the dining table. I can make out three plates, with leftovers on them. Pork chops, mostly annihilated, but with a little meat on the bones, and piles of white rice. I love Aidan’s rice—it’s soft and fluffy and buttery. I’m not allowed to eat butter with my ma, so I scarf this first.
Leaving my coat and backpack on, I sit there and quickly clean the plates, shoveling food into my mouth, gnawing little bits of meat off the chops.
Aidan doesn’t say a word. He knows to leave me his leftovers. This is our drill. I eat the scraps and leave. This is why he’s family; I owe him the weight on my bones. I pick up the plates and put them in the sink when I’m done, give him a quick pound, and head out.
The window in Aidan’s shower is tiny, just barely big enough for a body. I toss my backpack and then go out feet first, lowering myself down until my sneakers touch the first ledge. It is an inch of beige brick sticking out from the flat face of the wall three stories up. I would at least break my legs if I fell from here, so I’m careful. My fingers grip the thin black metal of his window frame and I ease myself to the left.
My hand gropes sideways until it touches the window guard of Aidan Jr.’s room. I grip it with one hand and let go of the shower window with the other, bringing my fingers to the sill in front of me. Both hands on it now, I stretch my right foot out diagonally beneath me, groping in thin air for the top of the next window.
Looking down, I can see my backpack on the concrete below. Wind burns my cheeks. I think about what my skull would feel like smashing into the pavement. That’s always an option if I get sick of this.
My foot finds the window top, and I transfer my weight, but I’ve miscalculated. My toe slips off the edge of the brick and flies out underneath me. I yelp as my left arm is yanked taut with the weight of my frame.
Hanging there, three flights above oblivion, my mind exits my body and I see myself from above, as if I were a camera in the sky. Skinny, twelve years old, dark blue baggy jeans, yellow coat. Bones in a bag of flesh, hanging off the side of a tenement building.
I regain my balance and lower myself onto the downstairs neighbor’s window guard. If she were to open her curtains she would probably scream. Maybe she would push me off, maybe she would shoot me. Knowing this neighborhood, she would probably hit me in the face with a frying pan.
Inch by inch I move down another flight until I reach a landing. Picking up my backpack, which is empty except for my trusty journal, I walk ten paces to a vertical metal ladder and swing out over an alley that connects the backs of seven or eight buildings behind mine. The carcass of a rat, empty cigarette packs, and used condoms are littered around my sneakers. It’s like an urban minefield.
My toes search thin air for the rusted bucket of paint I know is there. It has gathered a puddle in its lid since yesterday.
I make my way across a piss-stained walkway and up the back steps of my building. One foot vaults me onto a pair of metal railings around the basement entrance and fingers stretch, reaching for the bottom rung of the fire escape ladder. I have shown off my pull-up skills many times in school. I’m the only kid that can do six. For a split second I am grateful as I hoist my body up the eight rungs and onto the first landing.
At the second landing, I can hear a television, so I wait. Making it into an espionage mission, I risk a glance with one eye. My downstairs neighbor, Mr. Nuñez, or one of his seven kids, is watching something in full view of my path. It’s too risky, so I reach up for the metal bar between their windows. This way is much more dangerous because I’m essentially dangling over empty space, and if I slip, I’ll slam into the railing on my way down, but if he tells my ma he saw me climbing the fire escape in the middle of the day it’ll be far worse.
Between the Nuñezes’ two windows, I lift my body up onto the handrail, hoisting myself halfway up the next flight of stairs, still out of his view. Something below me moves. I see a head of black hair approaching the window. I scramble up and over the landing and press myself against a wall. My asshole tightens and I pray that whichever Nuñez it is has bad eyesight. I hear the window open, and a cigarette butt flies out. It slams shut. I start to breathe again.
The window to my ma’s bedroom looks like it’s closed, but I’ve devised a way to keep it cracked just slightly, so it can be opened from the outside. I press my palms flat against the glass and push straight up. It makes a squeaking noise as it rises. There is a plastic fish tank the size of a shoebox on the windowsill, and in it, a tiny turtle swims frantically toward a rock. The water is muddy with green and brown spots from his shit.
I’m careful not to step on the sill and leave a footprint, so I stretch my right leg out onto the wood floor, bending my body down and in behind me. I listen for any sounds, but the house is quiet. I close the window.
I go straight into my room, just in case, leaving the door open a tiny crack so that if I hear Ma coming I can hide. I’m too nervous to pee, so I hold it.
In my room, I drop my coat and backpack to the floor. I kick off my sneakers and lie down on the army cot. I am out before my face touches the pillow.
Chapter 25
A Whole New World
Baruch Middle School, Manhattan, fall 1997
MY NEW SCHOOL IS A PRISON. THEY’RE STRICT AS HELL and they don’t care what your excuse is. If you show up two minutes past eight A.M. you have to line up against a wall in the entrance and give them your coat. You can only get it back after you serve detention.
Fuck that. I show up late almost every day and I’m not gonna waste my time in detention. I figured out where they stash the coats, so most days I grab mine, cross myself off the sign-in sheet, and bolt out the side door by noon.
Baruch Middle School takes up an entire city block. It’s a low cement cube between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets, stretching from First to Second Avenue.
My homeroom class is like a foreign country, I see it so rarely. The teacher gave up on trying to tell me off; now she’s switched tactics to being proud of me for ever making it at all.
Baruch has a program where you get to eat lunch out of school if you want, but you have to bring your own money. I asked Ma and she gave me a quarter. We can’t afford it, so she started sending me with boxes from home. That was mortifying. It was a little takeout container with some lettuce and balsamic and a couple of carrots.
The lunchroom is a screeching hell pit of torment, so I started spending the break with the school secretary, Cheryl. She’s a bossy blonde with a raspy voice and a thick New York accent. She likes me, so we sit and talk and I show her drawings and things I’ve been working on until it’s time to go out to play.
You get so hot running in the yard that you take your coat and sweater off and fuck around in just a T-shirt, even in the dead of winter.
All the black and Hispanic cool kids cluster by the basketball court. The mixed-race kids and the weirdos and the white kids run around in fantasy games, tripping out on their imaginations. Cool girls walk around clutching each other in pairs, with flashy nice new sneakers and warm-looking boots. Kids play tag with so much gusto they throw themselves into the walls. A stone drinking fountain is a legitimate danger.
Even boys’ voices are shrill at this age, and it’s a perpetual cacophony of battle cries and high-pitched alerts from all ends of the yard.
In my first week here they handed me a sheet with a list of classes on it with intimidating names like “algebra” and “biology” and other shit I’d never taken before. I was most excited about gym, because the basketball courts are huge.
On the first day I show up in my sweats, ready to play. The teacher, a stocky guy with black hair on the back of his neck, tells me to go down to the lockers and get changed without looking at me. I tell him I’m already changed but he says I have to go down anyway. I freeze, realizing that the locker rooms are gender segregated.
Dread holds me in place like an obelisk.
“I don’t want to go down there. I’m
already changed. Can I just wait here?”
“No, you need to go downstairs until we’re ready to start class.”
“Why?”
He is holding a clipboard when he finally looks up and takes me in, a skeleton in a sweatsuit, trembling underneath his volleyball net.
My center becomes swirled with agitation and I feel like a heat is building in my head that might pop my ears off. Under no circumstances am I going down into the girls’ room, where they will laugh and terrorize me, nor am I going down to the boys’ because I do not, after all, have a penis.
Hairy neck guy sends me to the principal’s office when the panic attack starts and I sit down at Cheryl’s desk, snotting and trying to hide my tears.
I guess I look kind of bad. Sleep doesn’t happen much in the house, what with the plays and things late at night, plus Ma is in a real bad way. It’s like she has a night personality and a day personality. At night she’s a menace, mean and screaming, and she does the thing where she stares through me. Then in the morning she’s sweeter and softer and pulls me out of bed with a touch of kindness, until I nudge the hive in some small way and she flies off the handle again.
Her hip is bad, so she has to walk slowly, and I don’t want to be seen with my mommy, so she only walks me to Fourteenth Street in the mornings. Half the time I cut back down the block and go home to sleep.
I know I look shitty. I must.
Cheryl sends me to the guidance counselor. She tells me that Mrs. Stockhammer is a friend of hers and a wonderful person and that I’ll really like her.
Down the two-tone hallway I go into a waiting room covered in illustrations and drawings kids did, made out to “Joanie.” She comes out of her office with a forceful stride and shakes my hand with a veiny fist. I’m an undernourished twelve-year-old and she’s in cowboy boots but we’re standing eye to eye.
She beckons me inside, sitting down with a toss of her blond ringlets, putting her feet up on her desk. What Joan lacks in stature, she makes up for in personality. As she reaches for one of several cups of coffee, I look around the room.
Her brash character, the state of her desk, and the sheer volume of shit crammed onto the walls conjures a distinctly Floridian, posthurricane type of vibe: chaos cut with comedy and caffeine.
She reaches for her purse, riffling through for several seconds, locates a pill bottle, puts two pills in her mouth, washes them down with coffee.
I’m sitting back on my blue metal chair, feeling a lot of things. I’m still stressed out from the incident in the gym, but something about this person is soothing. Familiar. She’s raw, real, and I can tell she feels the same thing about me.
“Did something happen in gym class you didn’t appreciate?”
She waits with raised eyebrows, sipping her coffee and picking at her finger. She’s jittery. She expects me to speak, so I do.
“Well, the gym teacher told me I had to go into the locker rooms . . .”
“Okay . . .”
“The girls’ locker rooms . . .”
Joan already knows. There’s no way she doesn’t. I turn around to see if the door is closed. She walks out from behind her desk, closes it, and sits back down.
“Okay. Talk to me about the girls’ locker room . . .”
“Well . . .”
A deep breath. I can’t look her in the face.
“I don’t belong in there . . . I can’t go in there.”
“Okay. Why not?”
“Because I’m a boy.”
She takes this information like someone offered her a plate of dog meat. She observes it, trying to figure out how to politely decline to ingest it. Coffee is sipped. The silence makes me squirm. She’s smart and I want her respect. I don’t want to do this dance with her.
“Okay . . . well, what about the boys’ room?”
“No. I can’t go in there, either.”
“And why is that?”
“Because . . . I’m not a boy . . .”
“Okay . . .”
Putting words to feelings is hard, but she’s looking at me with appreciation and curiosity, and not like a circus animal. Maybe she gets it. Maybe she finds me refreshing.
JOAN PULLS SOME STRINGS higher up and I start changing into my sweatpants in her office twice a week before I go to play basketball with the boys. This act of kindness solidifies a bond.
Then I miss six days in a row. When I get back, Joan seems genuinely worried about me.
“Where have you been??”
“I got sick.”
“What did you get?”
“A tonsil infection.”
“That bad? You were out for a week!”
“Yeah. It was pretty bad.”
“Did you see a doctor?”
“No.”
“No? How did you get rid of it?”
“I gargled with tea tree oil.”
“Tea tree oil? What the hell is that?”
I laugh. I like how abrasive she is. I see her outside smoking alone. Her fingertips are yellow from it.
“It’s an oil . . . from the health food store. It’s good for tonsil infections.”
“An oil, huh. Okay. Who told you to do that?”
“My ma.”
“Okay . . . did you take anything else for it?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t go to a doctor.”
“No.”
“You just stayed home and gargled with this tree oil?”
“Yeah. Mostly. I went to some auditions and two dance classes, too.”
“You went to dance class while you had a tonsil infection?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Okay.”
She takes a deep breath. Coffee. Nails. She cocks her head and flips her curls over with the back of her hand.
“You want to tell me about your home life?”
It’s like a car crash; one minute you’re driving along, singing to the radio, and the next minute your head is split open.
Just like that, there is the question I have been silently prodding her to ask.
This is the moment where I go from being trusted to being a rat; where I step out from the animal pact with my ma and enter the system. The establishment will turn me into yuppie scum and I’ll rot in a hole, it’s that big a betrayal. But it dawns on me I might have options.
I just want to live with my poppa. Just . . . please . . . woman with the curls and the coffee and the many nervous ticks . . . find a way to read my mind so that I don’t have to say it and betray her but you will still know how bad it’s gotten. As I telepathically communicate with Joan, it dawns on me how little I eat, how little we sleep, and how much we fight. I realize that I hate my world and I want to be with my dad.
My mind bats around the possible outcomes of telling Joan the truth.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes . . . I do.”
I’m in free fall. I’m a dead man, stepping though one of those movie doorways into the light. I’m stabbing my mother, my best friend, in the throat. I’m tearing up her greatest work of art. Have I become a horrible person? Or is it like the final scene in a tragedy when the hero drives off the cliff ’cause there is no other way out of his twisted, fucked-up life? Looking at Joan, a hornet of fear buzzes up and down my insides.
Something tingles at the back of my brain and tells me that I’m too young to feel all this shit. It’s not right. I want to play, I want to stick my hands in some fucking dirt somewhere and watch a cartoon. I’ve never seen Sesame Street and I don’t know why.
Then I am overcome by the loneliest feeling. I realize I have to cut myself loose from my own life, from everything familiar to me. Like an astronaut with no suit, drifting, spinning into a dark, soundless void.
In the few seconds before I speak, I age forty years. What I’m about to do is the worst and best move I will ever make. The deepest pain I will ever cause, and the only thing that will save my life. I am going to create a wound that might never heal
, but if I don’t, I realize I could die.
I’m swimming in apology to my sweet, angry, broken mother. I want to shield her from this, but I’m growing, I’m developing an instinct for my own preservation, and the two desires are pulling me in half.
We made a pact when I was tiny, to protect each other, when she was the wolf and I was the cub. She would raise me, feed me, keep me strong, and teach me to survive. She acknowledged me, sharpened my teeth, gave me eyes to see the real world, and she fed me out of her own mouth.
I think of her thin, vulnerable bones and I start to weep with such abruptness that I nearly throw up. I don’t expect this surge of emotion. Her hands, those sinewy fingers that have been stripped raw trying to earn enough to feed me. I’m bent over in my chair heaving up and down with sobs much bigger than my little body.
Joan runs around the desk to me, telling me it’s okay.
But it’s not. I am in the worst position I could ever be in, forced to choose between my protector and my greatest threat, my antagonist, the emotionally violent, unpredictable animal that shares her skin. The softest fur and the sharpest teeth.
Joan wraps her arms around me, whispering that it’s okay to let it out.
She hooks a finger under my chin and tilts my face up to look at her. She looks straight into my eyes with so much tenderness that I find some strength and manage to eke the words out, even though they make me feel sick with hating myself.
“It’s bad.”
Chapter 26
Renee
New York, winter and spring 1998
THINGS MOVE GLACIALLY.
Joan makes the call and nothing happens. Months go by and I figure my case isn’t severe enough for the Bureau of Child Welfare to pay attention, but Joan makes her own moves. She gets in touch with my pop and tells him I don’t have money to eat, so he sends some money to my aunt Olivia, Olivia gives it to Joan, and each day at lunch Joan gives five dollars to me.
Darling Days Page 16