by Danzy Senna
MY LIFE, on the other hand, was taking a turn for the better. One day in December, I found myself at the edge of the beach in Coney Island with Ivers Greene. Was it a date? I couldn’t be sure. I’d called him after the article came out. He’d had little to say about what I’d written except, “It didn’t sound like you.” Before I could feel hurt, he’d invited me out here, to Coney Island. He’d sworn that it would be fun—“like a Mountain Dew commercial” were the words he used—and as I’d gone off to meet him I had imagined us on a roller coaster together, shrieking, me clutching to my chest the big red teddy bear he’d won me.
But we’d both forgotten it was winter. Everything was shut down, and what lay before us was as sore as a hangover: burned-out neon lights, an empty video arcade, abandoned gift shops hidden behind metal grates. The stagnant Ferris wheel was covered with frost, and the roller coaster appeared to be under construction.
We stood forlorn before the DO NOT ENTER sign. A teenager with bright red acne spots and stringy black hair sat on the curb smoking a cigarette. His jacket was open, and I could see the words “Guns N’ Roses” across his T-shirt.
“Some kid died there last summer.” He nodded his head in the direction of the roller coaster. “Flew off and broke his friggin’ neck,” he said, squinting off into the distance, as if he were watching the accident happen all over again. “That ride won’t be up and running for a long, long time.”
We thanked him for the explanation and started away, but he called after us. “You lookin’ for kicks?”
We both turned, then nodded in unison. Yes, that was why we were here. For kicks. The kid pointed in the direction of a tent a little ways down the boardwalk. “Sideshow’s open this time of year. It kind of sucks. Two-headed baby looks like goddamn Kitty Karry-All. But if you’re looking for kicks, it’s still open—”
We thanked him for the tip and shelled out two dollars apiece to a shriveled old man with a harelip. It was a rip-off. The old man led us over to the only two attractions that were up and running: a glass case containing the two-headed baby in formaldehyde, which did look a bit like Kitty Karry-All, and a caged hut in the back of the tent holding what the man claimed was “the biggest rat in the world.” After he said it, he stuck a long metal rod into the cage and poked around in the hut. After a moment, a squat, gray, beady-eyed creature the size of a bulldog came waddling out. It had patches of gray fur missing, and red sores on its hindquarters. It stared at Ivers for a moment as if it knew him from somewhere, then scuttled back into its house.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “What is that thing?”
“A rat,” the old man said.
“Nah,” Ivers said, shaking his head, dubious. “That’s no rat. That’s a hedgehog or something.”
The old man pursed his lips, indignant, then prodded with his stick until the creature came out again. We all stared at it in silence. It didn’t look like a hedgehog, and it didn’t look like a rat. It was something else—nameless and pathetic. Ivers knew it, too, and we both turned our eyes away, feeling complicit in the creature’s suffering.
Afterward, with nothing else to do, we bought cups of coffee and went to sit on the beach, at the top edge of the sand, near the road, in the cleanest spot we could find, holding our cups for warmth. Evidence of fun gone wrong lay all around us: a crumpled beer can, a dried-up condom that looked like a dead sea urchin, and the top half of a Russian nesting doll, her inner bodies nowhere in sight.
Down near the water, a father and son played a game of catch. Both overweight, stout, with short arms, matching crew cuts. When the son missed the ball, the father would berate him with insults.
In the other direction a figure was dressed in bright purple overalls, a baseball cap, and heart-shaped sunglasses, though the light on the beach was dim. He was holding a metal detector walking in slow zigzags up and down the sand.
Maybe it was the purple, but I thought of Greta. I’d gone to the ladies’ room the day before at work and, based on the sneakers, realized that it was she in the stall next to me. Her feet were facing the toilet, with one foot raised. I got the feeling she was putting in a tampon. I was too nervous to pee and left.
“What are you thinking about?”
I didn’t know how to explain. “See, well, I used to have this friend—”
“What’s his name?”
“No, not that kind of friend. It’s a woman. From work. She got sort of—well, fixated on me.”
“A crush?”
Was that it? A romantic infatuation? No, not quite. I would have known how to respond to that.
“I don’t think so. It was something else. But she stopped. She backed off. It’s just—I, well, I feel bad for her sometimes. I worry about her, I guess.”
He nodded and looked out at the water so intently that I turned to look, too. I half expected to see Greta emerge from the water, but there was only the gray asphalt surf.
Ivers said, “I used to have a friend like that. A girl I met at a bar one night. This skinny little white chick. After I told her I didn’t want to see her again, she invaded me like a virus. She found her way into my apartment, my life. I’ve never experienced anything like it. Phone calls at all hours. A five-page letter every day. I’d leave to go to work at my studio and there she’d be, across the street from my apartment, just standing in the dark. Waiting. She always wore this fake fur jacket. And she would be standing there in her dirty white fur, wearing a miniskirt and cowboy boots, like some kind of crazy hooker. I’d get this sick feeling when I’d see that flash of blond hair, and I’d keep walking, pretend I didn’t see her. But she wouldn’t let up. She was, well, relentless.”
“And what happened?”
“In the end,” he said, “it got so bad I had to get a restraining order. I had to bring in the law. I never wanted to go there. But she went too far.”
He looked at me. “And you know what? It worked. The police only had to warn her once, and then she disappeared. Poof. Just like that.”
He picked up a fistful of sand and let it sift through his fingers. “The crazy thing is, I miss her. Not the good kind of missing. I mean, I’m glad she’s gone. She was a complete fucking nightmare. But when you have a friend like that, you’re never alone. It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, I don’t miss my friend,” I said. “Not one bit.”
He looked at me and smiled. “But she’s not really gone now, is she?”
A shout like an answer came from far away: “Chicken shit! I’m gonna kick your fat ass when we get home.”
We both looked to see the fat boy crying. The ball had been washed out to sea. His father hit him upside the head and he stumbled sideways.
Ivers sighed. Then said, “What do you think will happen to that kid?”
“He’s gonna end up like that,” I said, gesturing toward the other end of the beach, where the man with the metal detector sat on his hands and knees, digging. “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”
Ivers chuckled and reached over and ruffled my hair. I liked the feel of his hand on my head, but it didn’t stay there. He pulled it away. A shadow of darkness fell just then across the beach, and it began to rain, drops hitting the ocean like applause. Neither Ivers nor I moved. The garbage and the crappy boardwalk disappeared, and everything grew indistinct, like a commercial in soft focus. The boy and his father ran off, arms around each other, toward their car, as if all that cruelty had just been a performance.
I looked at Ivers.
“You’re shivering,” he said. “You’ll get sick. Come on.” He touched my cheek and his fingers were warm and oddly dry.
I stood up beside him and he buttoned up my coat, which was soggy now. We began to walk along the beach toward the street we’d come in on. When I glanced back, I saw the purple-overalls man was still there on his hands and knees, digging for loose change, oblivious to the pouring rain.
21
I SAW IVERS again a few nights later. We went walking along the East Rive
r during a snowstorm. The water was the color of gunmetal. Beside us, cars droned along the FDR Drive. Each snowflake was visible in the beams of headlights. I felt frighteningly happy. I had survived a rough beginning in the city, fallen in with the wrong people. But all that was over. Ivers was both weirdly familiar to me and at the same time a stranger. I was home and yet I was not home.
He told me a story of his life as we walked. He said he had been born in the Watts section of Los Angeles with scales all over his body, like a lizard. His mother was ashamed to show him to anybody. But when he turned two, the scales fell off and he grew into a chubby and cute little boy. For a while, everybody loved him. But then he kept growing wider, chubbier, way beyond cute.
“I was the fat kid. Morbidly obese.” He said it soberly, like a confession. “I was that rotund guy with the pinhead, leaning against the corner store, laughing so that nobody would hate me for taking up so much space.”
“How did you lose the weight?” I shouted into the wind, glancing at his lanky form. He walked bent over, his head bowed against the cold.
“Staples. In my stomach.” He shrugged. “But I’ll always feel fat inside. No matter how skinny I look to you.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, turning to face him.
With two fingers, he stretched the skin on his cheek. “Feel this,” he said. “It’s all extra. I used to fill it out, but now it’s just hanging there.”
I pulled the skin on his cheek. It felt normal and snapped into place when I let go. I put my hands on my hips. “Seriously,” I said. “Can’t you just tell me who you are, seriously?”
He grabbed my hand and stared at it, turned it over in his hands, as if he were examining a piece of fruit for sale. He pulled me closer to him after a moment and my face went warm with anticipation. I closed my eyes, parted my lips, and waited.
But in the very next instant, the air was filled with apocalyptic sounds. The screeching of brakes. Horns honked furiously. I turned to see a black limousine spinning in circles on the FDR. It was really going wild, like a dog chasing its tail. I grabbed Ivers’s arm as the car pirouetted one last time, then landed face-first in a concrete divider.
Steam rose from the crumpled hood.
“Holy shit. Should we go help?”
“Not unless you want to die trying.”
He was right. Cars whipped past in brutal procession between us and the accident.
The door to the driver’s seat was opening.
A leg emerged first, then its owner: an obese white chauffeur wearing a tuxedo.
He wandered around his car in a slow circle, pausing at each tire to kick it. Afterward he just leaned against the car, staring out into the road. It seemed as if he was looking right at us where we stood on the other side, and I raised my hand, but he didn’t wave back. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one up, and stood there smoking, still watching us.
“Were you big like that?” I asked, though I still didn’t believe him.
“Just like that.”
After a few minutes, the man dropped his cigarette into the snow, climbed back into the battered limousine, and after a few failed revving attempts, miraculously started the engine up and screeched away with his hood smashed in like a broken nose.
“Want to come over?” Ivers pointed in the direction of a cluster of dreary buildings in Chinatown. “I have board games and soda pop.”
HE LIVED in an old factory loft with high tin ceilings and a concrete floor. The signs of life were minimal, hard-edged, utilitarian. The few objects that did suggest a human presence were crushed into a corner as if ashamed of themselves: A twin bed with a rumpled red wool blanket. A green-and-yellow-plaid couch. A chintzy white dresser, on which sat an Afro pick, a bottle of Jergens lotion, an asthma inhaler. A small card table on top of which was a hot plate, one cup, one fork, one knife, one plate, and one bowl. One can of pork and beans, a bag of Ruffles potato chips.
Beside his bed lay a giant medical book; it was open to a photograph of shingles.
The rest of the space was dominated by his work. Canvases stood tilted against the walls, a few even spread across the floor. Hospital X rays he’d vandalized—shiny gray slides he’d marred with streaks of color and words and symbols.
Money signs. Hello Kitty. A Star of David. The lyrics to old songs. The X rays were so cluttered you could barely make out the original image—the original injury.
He’d also taped some of the X rays up to the window—in place of shades or curtains. They fit perfectly into each of his loft’s square windowpanes.
“My friend Charlie works in a hospital. He pilfered them from the X-ray room. They’re for my show. The one you wanted to know so much about. I’m almost finished. Just one more to go.”
He looked around the room, appearing at once manic and exhausted as he took in the works that had so clearly taken over his living quarters, possibly his life. His expression teetered between pride and horror. He moved around the space, pointing at each piece, naming each one as if he were introducing me to a room full of friends.
“This one here is Spina Bifida. And this one, with the yellow lines, is Duodenal Ulcer. I just finished her last week. This is Fractured Femur. One of my early ones. And this is Lymphoma.”
“They’re—” I tried to think of a compliment. “Gruesome.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, they’re—grotesque. Sick.”
“Thanks. That means a lot to me.”
I was all of a sudden terribly hot. I suspected I smelled, too. “Could I take a shower?”
The bathroom was really just a shower stall with a toilet in it. The water sprayed directly into the toilet seat. But it did the trick. I felt my extremities come to life under the hot stream. I scrubbed myself clean with soap he had, an industrial bottle of antibacterial hospital soap.
I came out wrapped in a towel. Ivers was standing by the window. The lights were dimmer.
He’d made up a bed for me on the plaid couch. I asked him for pajamas.
He brought me a pair of pale green hospital scrubs with the words “New York Hospital” printed in faded red letters across the chest.
“Your buddy Charlie?”
“Yeah, he gives me a lot of free shit.”
He went to the far end of the room, stared out the window. “Go ahead. Change. I won’t look.”
When I was done, he shut off the light and changed his own clothes in the dark, before slipping into his bed across the room.
“YOU WERE WHIMPERING like a dog in your sleep.”
“Was I?”
I sat up. The dream was still with me. Fragments. Standing on the deck of a ship watching the shoreline grow thinner. A woman whispering a joke I didn’t think was funny in my ear. A group of children singing a round. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.
Ivers was just an outline in the dark, seated there on the edge of the couch. His hand rested on my foot.
“What were you dreaming about?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I shivered and stared around at the mad objects that filled his room.
“You want to sleep in my bed?”
Stiffly, I slept beside him. Barely touching.
I woke in the morning to see not the sunlight or the sky or even the November rain. The loft was shrouded in a murky gray light, thanks to the X rays on the glass. The night before they’d appeared black—but now, with the light streaming in, I could see a fractured hip bone, a shattered wrist, the inside world of somebody’s head, where a dark shadow hovered at the edge of the picture.
22
I SAW HER one day in January. I was standing in line at a bodega on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I glanced out the window and there she was, just beyond the glass doors. It looked like her, walked like her, dressed like her—but it seemed unlikely that it really, indeed, was her.
It was a Saturday, two weeks after Christmas. The whole city felt let down, disgruntled, as if nobody had received the toy they want
ed. I had spent the actual day with Ivers and his friends—an antiholiday of artists and itinerants in Harlem. I couldn’t help thinking, as I sat at the makeshift table holding the Chinese food and looking into the faces of the motley group Ivers called friends, that my parents would approve. We drank Campari and I found myself melting into their wilderness as if I’d never left home at all.
Now here was Greta. I slipped out of line, abandoning my basket of food. The bodega sat on the same block as a mosque, and at the moment I stepped out the door, the call to prayer filled the winter air, a shrill and haunting holy song that reminded me of my father.
She was halfway down the block now, holding a dog on a leash. She had never told me she had a dog. She paused now to let the beast do its business. She wore sweatpants and a dirty white parka I’d never seen before, and slapped an empty plastic bag against her leg while she waited. I watched as the dog scratched at the concrete as if to cover its mess; then Greta bent down to pick it up in her bag. She looked around for a trash can, but there was none, so she carried the shit for the next block, me trudging along behind her.
The dog kept trying to stop and sniff trash, and she kept yanking it, cursing it.
The rest of the way, I kept a safe ten-foot distance, slipping behind cars and telephone poles when the need arose. I followed her to a block where the white people ended and the Puerto Ricans began. Followed her to a single clapboard house with pale blue shingles on a street where nothing matched, a helter-skelter of businesses and dilapidated homes. A brown-stone here, a dentist’s office there, a bodega on the corner. And then this house.
I stood watching as she went through the gate, threw her cigarette stub behind her onto the sidewalk, went up the steps and into the left door.
I looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to me. Boys with pit bulls stood in an excited huddle. Old men played cards sitting on milk crates in front of the bodega. I walked up to her house and paused outside the gate. Pretended to be tying my shoe. Looked left. Looked right. Then I went through the gate.