“You were late,” she said. “I had a drink before you came.”
“Ah . . . good,” I said.
“I saw a friend. He had a drink, too.”
“Whatever.”
I left thirty dollars. She looked to see what I’d put down and when she saw I’d left a good tip she softened a little. We walked out together. We were on Avenue A. She lived a few blocks from there. I carried her bag. When we got to her stoop I set the bag on the ground, and she said, “I live right here, on the first floor.” I waited while she unlocked the front door, and I was surprised when she held the door for me. We walked down the hallway silently. She opened her apartment door. We went inside. It was a small one-bedroom. She had two stuffed animals on the couch, a poster of Italy, another of a tiger, a framed photograph of a group of girls all smiling and holding plastic cups. I set the bag down inside the doorway and she pushed the door shut but did not close it all the way. I said it was nice meeting her, so she wouldn’t get scared or think I misunderstood her. Then she faced me, head tilted up. I didn’t hesitate. I kissed her. She kept her head up. I tried to kiss her again and I thought she wanted me to but at the last moment she pulled away and put a hand over her mouth and stepped to a mirror, looking in it closely, as if I’d hurt her. She rubbed a finger on her upper lip.
“I think I have a pimple starting,” she said.
I apologized about being late. She studied her lip in the mirror. I said good-bye, then walked down the hallway slowly, thinking maybe she’d open the door and say good-bye or give me a call or something like that. She didn’t. I paused at the stairs, then went down to the street. The entire date had taken about forty minutes. I walked into Tompkins Square. It had rained earlier and the benches were wet. Beads of water reflecting streetlights. I tried to wipe one of the benches off with my hand but it didn’t work. I just sat in the water. A while later I lay with my feet up and the dark branches overhead, the sound of horns, car wheels on wet pavement. A homeless guy with a grocery bag sat on a bench nearby and put his head in his hands. He began shaking. He looked like he could have been laughing or talking to himself but I knew he wasn’t. I got up and walked past him slowly, thinking maybe I’d take a photograph of him. He didn’t even look up. I took a shot from down the sidewalk and went on toward my apartment.
10
Broken plasterboard, old tiles, and long, fragile, fluorescent lights lay in a heap near the Dumpsters behind the hospital. Burnett drew one of the glass tubes from the trash and flung it carelessly against the brick wall. It was after work and we were all a little drunk. Down 136th Street, near the doctors’ parking lot, I saw Norman. He had a distinctive walk—an energetic, bobbing strut, arms out to the side—and he always wore these snakeskin cowboy boots that he’d gotten in Laredo. It was embarrassing, really, the way he wore them all the time. I stepped behind the Dumpsters and bent on one knee, tying my boot. I undid one lace and tied it up slowly. As I was doing the other boot I heard Hock say, “Hey, Doc.”
“Hey.”
“Where’s Frank?” Burnett said.
“Haven’t seen’m,” Norman said. He went on to the hospital.
I finished with my laces and walked back around the piled trash. Burnett was holding a glass tube. Hock stood with his thumbs hooked in the waist of his jeans.
“Hey, Frank. Your brother came by,” he said, and Burnett and Hock looked at each other, laughing.
“What’s the deal with the boots?” Burnett said.
“He’s going to save the town,” I said. “He’s the hero.”
Hock made a shooting motion with his finger. Burnett mimicked his walk, and then held out the fluorescent light. Cool, smooth, fragile glass in my palm. Burnett nodded to the wall.
11
Four bullet holes in the wire-mesh glass, the lobby’s long, high window filled with blue light, and a circular plate in the ceiling where there’d once been a chandelier. All of it abandoned, boarded-up, the marble tiled floor rough with plaster grit. A few mattresses against the wall on the east side, and everywhere old bottles, cigarette butts, paper garbage, discarded lighters, needles, pipes. The air hot, stifling, and the muffled roar from a fire. We could hear soft cracks and moans overhead.
“Hey, look’t this,” Burnett shouted, holding something up. We were rifling through debris in the lobby. “A bayonet.”
“A what?”
“A knife, a bayonet.” He waved it around, then wedged it, blade-down, on his right side, beneath the belt. “We just find that rifle we’ll be in business.”
He was kicking through some soiled blankets, using a flashlight to turn them over so he did not have to touch them. Suddenly he stopped and was quiet.
“What?”
“Shh . . .”
And then I heard it, too.
“Help, help!” a voice cried above us, and Burnett turned to me, smiling.
“Gimme a fuckin break,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
We found him on the third-floor hallway. He was a sixty-year-old black guy who’d fallen through the rotten floorboards and broken his ankle. He was trapped. The split planks bowed inward so it squeezed when he tried to pull out. The sound from the fire was much louder up there, the heat was incredible, and the paint overhead was beginning to bubble and flake off like a time-lapse movie.
“Take a picture, Frank.”
Burnett bent to the guy and put two hands lightly on his lower leg, and I took a picture. I took a close-up of the deformed part of the leg, and then I lay on the floor with the guy to the side in the foreground, the glow from the fire and the bubbled ceiling overhead.
“Not to tell you your business, but this ain’t the time for snapshots,” the guy said.
“This ain’t the time for snapshots,” Burnett said. “You hear that?” Then, impatiently, “Documentation. It’s for documentation.”
A moment later Burnett lifted the guy beneath the arms, and while he was supporting him, I reached my hand in the hole, broke the pieces of wood off, and his leg came free. He didn’t cry out, but only caught his breath a few times, and let out a sigh of relief as Burnett set him into our folding chair. Burnett nodded up to the fourth floor, and said, “Go on, Frank. Why not?”
In the stairway I could feel the heat reflecting off the walls. The air shimmered. The fourth floor came into view and it was suddenly even hotter, flames all up and down the walls, buckling and cracking the floorboards, and the sound deafening, like a train. I got an angle shot of the hallway, and afterward, for a moment, I just stood there, practically surrounded by flames. Then I came running down. My clothes were steaming.
“I think you’re on fire,” Burnett said.
He’d already taken a blanket and tape and wrapped the guy’s leg up in a makeshift splint. I took a shot of that, and a minute later we were carrying him out the front door. We’d heard the fire trucks arrive. The firemen were tearing out the plywood from the buildings on either side, hacking into walls with sledgehammers and axes. The people from the block came out and watched offhandedly, as if it were a completely normal and ordinary thing. And it was, really. In the late eighties Harlem lost a third of its population— whole neighborhoods where absentee landlords defaulted on their taxes and turned the property over to the city, or lit a match and collected on the insurance. That sort of thing happened every day.
“This used to be a nice block,” the old guy said as we lifted him into the ambulance. “Wouldn’t know it now, but it was a nice block.”
“What’re you complaining about?” Burnett said. “Downtown looks nice, don’t it? And it’s gonna trickle down.”
Burnett walked up front. We could hear him laughing to himself as he got into the driver’s seat. Twenty minutes later, as we were leaving the ER, an EMS lieutenant walked toward us. I turned away and bent for the drinking fountain. It was against protocol for us to go into burning buildings. It was practically the first thing they taught us. I thought he’d stick it to us, but lieutenants, in general, were pretty slack. Th
e city was falling apart. We were at ground zero in the worst wave of violence of the century. As long as we didn’t fuck up completely we were pretty much left alone.
“What the hell is that?” I heard the lieutenant say, and turned to see him pulling the bayonet from Burnett’s belt, winging it around in the ER. Burnett snatched it from him, and gave the lieutenant a contemptuous look. “Necessary implement for access and egress. Gimme a break.”
Back in the ambulance, Burnett tossed the wide, beveled blade on the dashboard.
“Whatta you think? It’s gotta be worth somethin, right?”
12
Three brothers played along the iron fence in a subsidized-housing project in Chelsea. The two older boys tried to slip their heads through the fence, but the bars were too narrowly spaced. The youngest brother crammed his head between the bars. The older boys tried to get him to go all the way through, but he jerked his head back and they all laughed. Their grandmother sat on a bench, smoking cigarettes, holding a rottweiler on a leash that she’d looped to the back of the bench. Overweight, jaundiced, sullen, smoking the whole time, she dropped the butts between the wooden planks. I wanted a photograph of her but it seemed unnatural always to fixate on that sort of thing. I took a few shots of the kids playing at the fence and then I took a shot of the three of them in a line with the fence stretching away at an angle in the background. Then of each individually. In every photograph the kids were happy, smiling. Just as I was leaving I took a furtive shot of the grandmother, then went on to my apartment and developed the film into a contact sheet. I looked at the images through the developing fluid and afterward held them up to the safelight. I went out and bought some beer and drank one of them on the way back. I went into the darkroom and looked at the prints of the children again. I opened another beer and set it on top of the contact sheet. A while later I reached over and tossed the sheet in the garbage and went on drinking.
13
We found Rolly reclined on sloped concrete rubble in the courtyard of an abandoned building. His legs out, ankles as thick as his thighs, his hand fished for a bottle wedged between two bricks.
“I wanna go to hospital oh-seven,” he said. “I’m sick.”
He wasn’t sick. Rolly called every day. He got drunk every day, needed a place to stay, so he called us to take him to the hospital, where he slept on a stretcher that they’d wheel out into a hallway near the lobby.
I set the drug bag in the dirt. Burnett found a red milk crate, brushed dust from the top, sat, and tapped Rolly’s bottle with the antenna of his radio.
“What’re you drinking?”
“Thunderbird.”
“How much was it?”
“Two oh nine.”
Burnett turned, smiling.
“Two oh nine. He knows it exactly. That with or without tax?”
“With tax. Dollar ninety-four without.”
“Jesus.”
“Dollar ninety-four warm. Dollar ninety-nine cold.”
Burnett gave me a look.
“Guy’s a whiz with numbers. How much’s Night Train?”
“Dollar eighty-seven with tax. Dollar seventy-five without.”
“And warm?”
“I already told you. Nickel less. Dollar seventy.”
“Whattaya buy it? Warm or cold?”
Rolly rolled his shoulders.
“Don’t matter to me. Warm or cold. I won’t lie to you. I just wanna drink.” He looked over as if he recognized me for the first time. “Take a picture,” he said.
“He remembers you take pictures.”
“I don’t need a picture,” I said. “I got ten of you sitting right there. Do something new and I’ll take a picture of that. Like if you were sober. That’d be a picture.”
“Aw.”
“What?”
“You’re mad,” he said. “You in a bad mood today.”
Burnett placed two fingers on Rolly’s knee.
“You ever had a job?”
“Sure I had a job.”
“What?”
“I boxed.”
“You boxed?”
“Look at his hands,” I said.
Burnett rolled a concrete lump the size of a baseball in his fingers. He looked at Rolly critically.
“So where’d you box?”
“All over. Vegas. Wherever.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why didn’t you stay in the boxing business?”
“I guess I had enough.”
“You started drinking. That’s what happened,” Burnett said.
“I was sent to prison is what happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“All right.”
“What for?”
“Killing someone.”
“Bullshit,” Burnett said again. He cleared his throat and spit past Rolly’s foot. “You listenin to this?” he said to me.
“What else would I be doing?”
“Guy was messing with me,” Rolly said. “Messing with my woman.”
“Uh-huh,” Burnett said. “What’d you use to kill him? Gun?”
“I didn’t use anything,” he said. “I used myself.”
“Look at his hands,” I said again.
Rolly had enormous, knobby, arthritic hands. Old boxer’s hands. He could not close them all the way.
“So how long’d you do?”
“Six years eight months. Parole for two.”
“And where’d you do it?”
“Couple places.”
“Where was the first?”
“Attica.”
“What’d you do there?”
“Worked in the kitchen. Did that two years.”
“What cell block?”
“Eight.”
“You were in cell block eight?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“And after that?”
“I was down in four.”
“What’d you do there?”
“Still in the kitchen.”
“And how long for that?”
“Nine months. Then I was upstate. Sing Sing. In two north. I made street signs.”
The three other buildings that formed the courtyard were all abandoned and boarded, here and there a window showing black where the plywood had fallen or been pried off for some other use. Pigeons sat on concrete window ledges.
“What’d you do when you got out?” Burnett asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“You didn’t go back into the boxing business?”
“No.”
“And the woman?”
Rolly just looked away and didn’t answer. Burnett tossed his lump of concrete aside and stood.
“Get up, Rolly.”
Rolly reached for his green bottle. Burnett pushed his hand away.
“Nah. You’re not drinking anymore. Get up.”
Burnett held Rolly at arm’s length.
“You boxed?”
“I don’t anymore,” Rolly said.
“Of course you don’t. You’re an alcoholic. You’re forty-two and can hardly walk. Your ankles’re like a fucking elephant’s. And every day you’re calling. Bugging us. Forget that we could be helping someone else. I could be eating my lunch.”
Burnett held him by the shoulder. I noticed a kid watching from around the corner of the building.
“Jack,” I said.
Burnett saw the kid, and glowered. The kid ducked away. I stepped over to check the slot between the two buildings. The kid had stopped halfway. When he saw me he kept on running and tailed off onto the sidewalk, out of sight. Burnett turned back.
“Show me how you used to box, Rolly.”
“I don’t do it no more,” he said in a meek voice.
“Show me how you used to.”
Rolly raised his hands to his chest and Burnett punched him in the jaw, grabbing Rolly’s collar to keep him from falling. Burnett punched him again so I heard the clacking
sound as Rolly’s teeth knocked against each other. I started forward as if I was going to stop him. Then I turned as if to wait between the buildings. I could hear Burnett grunting behind me, the sound of flesh on flesh. I turned again. I brought my camera out and took a shot of Burnett hitting. Burnett smacking with his open hand. Burnett pushing him back when Rolly tried to protect himself. Burnett smiling with his arm around Rolly’s neck. Burnett prodding him on with one stiff arm between the shoulderblades.
“I gotta wear gloves. He almost fucking bled on me.”
14
The ambulance was parked twenty yards down the block to the left. To our right was a concrete stoop. The boy I’d seen before stood on the other side of the stoop, and was talking to a man and woman through the bars of the railing. When we came out from between the two buildings they all looked up and the boy walked away quickly, glancing over his shoulder several times. The woman, tall, skinny, with bony knees and elbows, yelled out, “You all right, Rolly?”
“Yeah, I’m all right,” he yelled back.
“You’re bleeding!” she shrieked. She stood abruptly. She was five foot nine, with big feet, and big hands, and an inch of matted hair. She was about forty years old. She tapped the man sitting beside her. “He’s bleeding!”
“I’m all right,” Rolly said over his shoulder.
A raised edge to the sidewalk, and as Rolly looked back his foot caught the edge. Burnett supported him with one hand under his left arm. Rolly leaned on Burnett, then slumped and sat on the pavement. Burnett stood over him, smiling.
“Get up, Rolly,” Burnett said.
“He’s bleeding!” the woman down the block shrieked again. “Look’t’m! Look’t his face! He’s bleeding! They hurt him!”
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Burnett muttered. Then yelling to the woman, “He fell down. He’s drunk.”
“His mouth’s bleeding! I see it! Blood!”
The woman stood. The man stood, too, reluctantly. He was a trim-looking guy wearing khakis, a white button-down shirt, and a gold chain with a gold cross around his neck. Fifty years old. Some church guy. The two walked over, the scrawny lady striding quickly, waving an arm, and the short, well-dressed man following behind.
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