“Never mind that, man. I want money. Don’t start makin’ conversation with me.” For the first time he looked me right in the eye. This was not a good sign. My heart started to pound.
I took a step back. “I just remembered I have to meet a friend. So please excuse me. Next time I’ll have some money for you,” I mumbled.
His hands had been in his pockets all this time. Now he took his right hand out of his pocket and showed me a long-handled switchblade knife. He flicked his wrist and a shiny blade sprang into view. He held it up so I could see the blade as it glinted in the streetlight.
“I didn’t want to do this, man,” he said. “I thought you was going to cooperate. You shoulda cooperated so I didn’t have to do this. I don’t like to do it.”
“Certainly. Certainly. I will certainly cooperate with you. I don’t like to do it, either.” God, how I hated knives. It was becoming difficult for me to breathe. My knees were shaking badly. The only thought that came to me was how unlucky it was for me to have been here in this very place and time. But this was my home, wasn’t it? Where else would I have been? I placed the palm of my hand against the brick wall to steady myself. The bricks were cold and rough to my touch.
“Let me give you my money,” I said. My voice cracked under the strain. “Can I put my hand in my pocket?” I didn’t want to make any sudden moves or do anything that would disconcert him.
He grunted. “Oh, no, man. We goin’ inside.”
“What?”
He moved the knife a little closer to my face. “We gonna check out your place. See what goodies you got.”
This was all new to me. I always thought a robber made his move quickly and left the crime scene as soon as he could, so as to avoid detection and capture. The whole idea of spending time with a criminal and having him rummaging through my few possessions seemed bizarre. But he was the one holding the ace in the hole, so to speak.
“All right,” I said. “Whatever you say. What should I do?” I looked to him for instructions on exactly how we were going to carry out this hold-up. He must have had experience in his profession, while I was just a novice. Perhaps he had even gone through an apprenticeship program.
He pointed at my door with the knife. “Open it up. We goin’ in.”
“OK. Sure thing,” I said. I reached slowly into my pocket and took out my key. But my hand was shaking so much I couldn’t put the key into the keyhole.
The night was so quiet and the street was so deserted.
He saw my hand tremble. “Take it easy, man,” he said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you if you good.”
I tried to breathe. “I’ll be good, all right. You can count on it.” I placed my left hand over my right to steady it and managed to insert the key. Then I hesitated.
“Open it up man, ” he repeated. “We goin’ in.”
I nodded. Then a strange thought occurred to me. I could take him. He was smaller and lighter than me. If he didn’t have the knife, I probably could have beaten him in a fight. All he had was the element of surprise when I first saw him. I hadn’t been expecting the threat. So all he had was the element of surprise and the knife. And now he didn’t have the element of surprise any longer, just the knife.
I exhaled slowly. My hand was no longer shaking.
There were two sides to this argument. What would Ethan, the incomparable existentialist, have said? You could fight him and win or lose. If you win, you don’t get hurt and you keep your money. That’s the best possible outcome. You are no worse off than before this encounter started. On the other hand, you could lose. You could be cut, perhaps badly. You might have to go to the hospital. They would ask for identification. You might be found out. Or you might be killed and your grand scheme of finding perfect freedom would come to an end.
Even if you won, you might hurt or kill the young man. The police would come around and question you. They might find out who you really are. And then your grand scheme of finding perfect freedom would also end, although in a different way.
The alternative choices were singularly unattractive. Ethan would look me in the eye and say in his booming voice, take the least unattractive choice.
I turned the key in the lock.
The door opened. I stepped inside and flicked on the light. The young man followed me in and shut the door behind him.
He surveyed my kingdom. “This place look like shit,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” I said, rather defensively. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.” There was a certain degree of embarrassment in having a robber inform you that your decorating didn’t meet his standards. It was true the room was somewhat of a mess. I didn’t often make the bed. The dishes from an earlier meal were still on the folding table that also served as my desk. And books were stacked in piles on the floor, like little islands of enlightenment, because I had no bookcase.
“This is it?” he asked. I could sense a note of disappointment in his tone. “Where’s the bedroom?” He knew it was an unnecessary question. He glanced around the room and then looked at me. There was an uncertain expression in his eyes, as if he knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it came to him. “Where’s the TV?”
“I don’t have a TV,” I told him proudly.
“Everybody got a TV.” He shook his head. “Even poor people got a TV. They got no food, but they got a TV.”
“I’m not like everyone else. I have no need for a TV.”
He squinted at me. “You weird.” His gaze lighted on my CD player. “At least, you like music. I take your boombox.”
He unplugged the CD player and wrapped the cord around it. “I take you CD’s, man.”
“Help yourself,” I said. “I hope you enjoy them.” It seemed to me there was no use in trying to dissuade him from stealing whatever he wanted.
He knelt and sorted through the meager stack of compact disks. An unhappy look came over his face. “Where’s the good CD’s?” he asked, plaintively.
I permitted myself a small smile. “Those are the good CD’s. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Those are the best CD’s there are.”
“That’s all you got?”
“You were hoping for something a little more modern? Maybe Tchaikovsky or Wagner?”
He grimaced. “Shit, man,” he said. “You got terrible CD’s. You ain’t got nothin’ good.”
“If I knew you were coming I would’ve gotten something more to your taste.”
He hesitated. “Never mind that. Just empty out you pockets and put it on the table here.” He used the knife to push the dirty dishes to the other side of the table.
I did as he said. All I had were some coins, my handkerchief, a comb and my wallet. He grabbed the wallet and counted the bills. There was sixty-one dollars. He was about to stuff the wallet into the front pocket of his jeans, when I held up my hand.
“Wait,” I said. “There’s nothing in that wallet that’s of any value to you. Why not just take the money and leave the wallet?” There’s no need to tell you I was thinking, of course, of my New York State driver’s license which had cost me so much in the way of educational expenses.
His eyes narrowed. “What you got in that wallet so important to you?”
I shrugged. “Nothing special. Just nothing you can use.”
He opened the wallet and examined the contents. There really was nothing of value to him. Aside from the driver’s license, there was a card from a local sandwich shop that gave you a free sandwich after you had purchased ten, the stub of a movie ticket, and two business cards – one from Julian’s bookstore and the other from the car service where Ethan worked and on which I had written his home phone number.
“Pretty pathetic,” the young man said. “Where the credit cards?”
“I don’t have any credit cards. My feeling is that they foster an addiction to easy spending.” That was about as evasive an answer as he was going to get from me.
He cast a sideways glance at me. “You really a w
hacko, you know, man?”
“That may be,” I said. “But can I please have my wallet?”
He tossed it back to me. “Ain’t nothin’ I can use. You can keep it.”
I breathed a sigh of thanks that I hoped he didn’t notice.
“Now where’s you money?” he said.
“I told you I didn’t have any.”
He stared at me for a long time. “You jivin’ me. Let’s take a look see.” He walked around my small room, poking here and there in a haphazard fashion for about ten minutes. Then he said, “Come over here.” He pointed to the kitchen.
I followed him into the tiny kitchen and almost let out a sob. I’d forgotten that I had left an envelope for my landlady on top of the little counter next to the sink. It contained the thousand dollars I was going to try to offer her for the next month’s rent. There it sat like a refillable unlimited gift certificate to the Mustang Ranch, promising all manner of earthly delights.
He reached for it instinctively and ripped it open. His eyes gleamed as he fanned the ten crisp hundred dollar bills. “Now you talkin’, man. This more like it. What else you got?”
I exhaled. “That’s the last of my money. I was going to pay my rent with it. Now I’ll be evicted because I can’t pay the rent.” I tried to elicit his sympathy. “Can’t you give me a break? You don’t want to see me wandering the street, do you?”
He stared at me. “I don’t care shit for you, man. Life is tough. Why you think I do this? You think I do this ‘cause it’s fun? I could get caught. Then where I be? I be in the big house. Ain’t no party there.” He shoved the bills in his pocket. “This my money now. Mean more to me than to you.”
“That’s open to debate,” I said. But I didn’t feel like continuing the discussion. A heavy sense of fatigue had come over me.
He opened the half-refrigerator and inspected the contents with a decided lack of interest. “Where the rest of you money?” he asked.
“That’s all of it. There’s no more.”
He shut the refrigerator and moved me at knifepoint back into the room. “Let’s take a look. Never know what you find when you search for somethin’,” he said. He waved the knife around. “What else you got here?”
“Nothing but books. You can look for yourself.”
He started a methodical search around the place. He told me to stand next to the closet while he rummaged inside, then he slid the drawers out of my dresser and turned them upside down without accomplishing anything except making my clothes dirty. Each time he came up empty he would stamp his feet in growing frustration.
“I know you got more cash,” he said. “Where you keepin’ it?”
He picked up a few of the books on the floor and paged through them.
“That’s all I have. I told you.”
He shook his head rapidly. “Sonofabitch bastard.” You could see he was uncomfortable handling books. He’d probably never read one, except maybe for Run Spot Run.
I got a weak feeling in my knees when he picked up The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. But then he put it down without flipping through it. Praise be to Providence. Because that was where, in a hollowed-out section, I kept the rest of my money. Nobody I knew had ever read The House of the Seven Gables outside of school of his own free will or had the desire to do so and therefore I reckoned it was the safest place to keep my treasure.
Then the young black man seemed to come to some sort of decision. He waved me closer to him with the knifepoint and inclined his head toward me. He spoke in a low voice as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear. “Listen, man. I got to pee.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why don’t you just go home and pee?” I assumed he had a home, however wretched.
He shook his head. “I got to go now.”
“Well, then, go and pee on the street.”
“Man, I ain’t gonna pee on the street. They arrest you for that.”
“That’s certainly no concern of mine.” I hoped his urgent bodily need would be the spur to make him leave my apartment. “You should have gone to the bathroom before you started this robbery,” I offered in the way of helpful advice.
He looked like he wanted to cry. “I ain’t gonna leave ‘til I get the cash.”
“You got the cash,” I told him. “That’s all there is. You don’t want to waste your time looking high and low for nothing when you have to pee in the worst way.” I wanted to keep repeating the word so as to reinforce his need to urinate. “Just go somewhere else and pee.”
A dim light shone from behind his eyes. “Wait, man. I’m gonna go here.” He pointed at the small bathroom with the knife. “You come in there with me.”
“But why?” This process was becoming a little too intimate for me.
“I don’t want you makin’ no phone calls.”
I grinned. “If you’d been observant, you would’ve seen there is no phone.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You ain’t got no phone?” He scanned the room for the hundredth time. “Then you got a cell phone, right?”
I shook my head. “Nope. No cell phone. Take a look for yourself before you go to pee. I don’t have a cell phone either. There’s nobody I have a need to communicate with.”
It was clear he didn’t believe me, but the pressure on his bladder must have overcome his natural caution. He motioned toward the bathroom and waved me in. “You go inside,” he said.
I stepped into the bathroom and stood next to the shower stall. He followed me in. The space was really cramped. There was maybe a foot separating me from him. I’d never been so close to a man before in such an intimate setting. He must have also sensed the awkwardness of the situation, because he said, “Don’t go getting’ no ideas about nothin’. This don’t mean nothin’, man. I just got to pee.”
“You don’t have to be so poetic about it. It’s a normal bodily function.”
He misunderstood me. “What you sayin’? I ain’t no faggot. Don’t go thinkin’ I’m gonna fuck you. Even if you want me to.”
I blinked. So he thought I was a homosexual. This was amusing. No one had ever accused me of that before. Perhaps I could use his homophobia to hasten his exit. “Do you want me to watch while you pee?” I asked. My diction had become a little more fricative.
He drew back a fraction of an inch. “Hell, no, man. You turn around and look at the wall. Don’t you go lookin’ at me.”
I turned and stood with my face against the wall. I could hear his stream hitting the water in the toilet. It sounded like a rude deluge, insolent and never-ending. The noise went on for a long time. And all I could think of were my father’s words. A gentleman makes no unnecessary noise. When I was a little boy, my father had counseled me to direct my stream quietly against the side of the bowl so as not to give offense. Never give offense to those around you.
The young man zipped up his pants and tapped me on the shoulder. “You can turn around now, man.”
“What about washing your hands?”
He stared at me for a while, as if he didn’t know what to say. Then he shook his head. “This ain’t no goddam restaurant. I don’t have to wash my hands.”
“That’s very unsanitary,” I said. “You could get sick and you could spread germs to other people. You don’t want to do that, do you?” It was at this very moment that I had a most unusual feeling, as if I were speaking to my son. Oh, my sweet little baby boy. My baby boy. Absalom, Absalom, my son. This young man was about the same age as my son. He didn’t look like him, of course, and he didn’t sound like him, but their generation had an indefinable feel to it, a certain ‘I don’t give a damn, so don’t tell me’ attitude.
I started to feel a great sense of distance from my son, and also a great sense of loss. An ineffable sadness. Would I ever, in this lifetime, see my boy again? The emotion almost made me want to touch the young man in front of me, in spite of the unlawful nature of his errand.
Maybe it was the sudden urge that caused me to lose my
balance, or maybe it was his turn to the door, or maybe it was because we both started to move at the same time. I may have tripped over him or he may have tripped over me, but we both stumbled. In the effort to regain his balance, he brought his hands up. The knife in his hand sliced through my cheek. It was a clean cut, soft and sweet.
“Jesus,” I screamed out. I put my hand to my face.
His eyes widened in fear. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you, man.”
“You almost took my eye out.”
“I’m sorry, man. Really. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You have to be more careful,” I said. “That’s a sharp blade.” I stepped in front of the mirror and inspected my face. It was a small wound, but it was bleeding profusely. I reached down and tore off a couple of pieces of toilet paper and dabbed at the cut. Then I took some more toilet paper and wadded it up and pressed the cut to try to stop the bleeding.
The young man watched me intently. “Listen, man. I didn’t mean to cut you. I didn’t mean you no harm.” He made a big show of folding up the knife and putting it back in his pocket.
I looked at the deep gash on my face. So this was my red badge of courage. I had paid my dues and been initiated into the society.
“I hope you’ve learned a lesson from all this.” I said, although I had no idea what lesson he’d learned or, for that matter, what lesson I’d learned. If I was an inept victim, then he was also an inept robber. We’d carried out an inept charade without resolution.
I pointed at the door. “That’s it. It’s time for you to go.”
He looked down and nodded. “I’m sorry, man. You be OK.”
I didn’t know if he meant I would be OK or if he wished me well. The nuances of his speech may have been clear to his peers but, to me, they were a little ambiguous.
“Yes, I’ll be OK,” I said. It was probably unnecessary to add, don’t worry about me.
He turned and walked to the front door. When he reached it, he looked back at me. His earlier expression of uneasiness had gone. His face was unreadable. “You take care,” he said.
“Sure, I’ll take care,” I said. “And please don’t forget to give the doorman a generous tip on your way out.”
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