All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  “Stephen?” Kath asked.

  “Kath?”

  “Why didn’t you protect me tonight, baby?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why didn’t you protect me from Jupiter? Every time I looked up you were nowhere. You should have been by my side.”

  “That was between you and Jupiter.”

  “I need you by my side, Stephen.”

  I told her I would keep it in mind.

  “You can’t keep disappointing me, Stephen. It’s not nice.”

  Biting my tongue, I walked her home. Ali and Hassan and Hussein and Soncha walked crestfallen a half block ahead of us. Like a girl-fronted indie band. Kath hooked her arm inside mine and rested her head on my shoulder. She kissed my cheek while I looked at the ground and told me she wanted to be alone with her friends, that she thought Soncha needed her. I told her I understood.

  “You’re still coming with me to Benjamin’s birthday party?”

  I had forgotten about this as well, the last thing I wanted after tonight. I hedged.

  “You promised,” she said.

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “No,” she replied. “I’ll text you in the morning.”

  I entered my apartment and turned on the light and poured myself a double vodka and lay on the couch. The lit cigarette and the household electronics communicated their positions to each other. Modem. Stereo. Cable box. Cigarette. Bluetooth. Cable box. Stereo. Modem. I felt spent. My phone double vibrated a message from Kath, telling me she caught the late train to Philadelphia. That she needed to get out of her apartment. That she and Soncha argued and that Soncha blamed her for ruining the night. And after all that Soncha had done for her and after Soncha had put so much work into it.

  “She said it was my fault.”

  “Baby, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I feel like it was.”

  “Soncha’s not being fair. Why didn’t you come over here?”

  “I’m trying to give you some space.”

  “You could have come over. I’m here.”

  “I really need you to come to Benjamin’s tomorrow. We’ll have a good time. Don’t be scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Come.”

  “OK.”

  26

  I DESCENDED INTO PENN Station and bought a seventy-five-dollar ticket from another goo-coated computer kiosk for the one-hour-and-ten-minute ride to Philadelphia. A banner strung across the retro architectural warren of escalators and stairways thanked the terrorists. I read it again. Thank you, tourists. Some kind of Freudian American slip there. If they could read my mind I’d be sent to Guantanamo, permanently bivouacked in an open pen under twenty-four-hour guard. Chained to the wall of a black site prison in Slovakia, strapped down with a towel draped over my face and a pitcher of water coursing down my throat, forcing open my epiglottis. Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” piped through the staticky foam speakers above. A peon to a much simpler time. When there was only Russia and AIDS to worry about.

  The buttery pretzels and donuts and bagels and tubs of cold beer and shiny pizza offered no defense against the physical discomfort of Penn Station. Pretty black girls looked me in the eye, reciprocated my gaze. We are all little monsters of desire. I queued to board the train.

  “Don’t tell me there’s nothing in your pocket,” an Amtrak cop scolded a jaundiced African, the cop’s big-tongued New York accent like hot pastrami on rye. “I can feel it right here.”

  The train cop waived me around the African and I descended the steps into the electric-diesel labyrinth, freshly scrubbed with bittersweet disinfectant. I stared out the train window lost in a labyrinth of meaningless, meandering thought.

  The train slowed and entered the warehouse flatlands of North Philadelphia. Every city has its colors, and here the city was brick red with aquamarine elevated trestles, neon graffiti airbrushed color guards, bare lightbulbs and broken windows and corrugated tin. Abandoned egg factories and pediatric hospitals. I expected a rock to shatter the train window as it curled through Frankford. Kath texted me the address of her brother’s house and I exited the train at 30th Street Station. Pushed through the heavy, brass, and broken automated doors. The city smelled of automobile air freshener, relaxer, weed. I hailed a taxi.

  The driver swung his wheel behind the art museum ringed with massive buttonwoods, past the straight backs and ribbed gills of athletic women in all-weather running gear. A buttonwood trapped inside the manmade falls that dammed the Schuylkill River. We spun off the boulevard, up a hill, through a park, heavy and dark with shadows. The driver spoke but I couldn’t hear him above the angry alto tenor playing in the speakers behind my headrest.

  Here the city was old and white, with recently painted brick facades and Spirit of ’76 flags and Union Jacks and the occasional French tricolor. Fresh copper domes and verdigris gutters and gargoyles atop the dormers. We passed a Belgian café with a padlocked door and a vandal’s tag etched into its glass with a stick of hydrofluoric acid. Demarcating the northern boundary of the city’s gentrification. The driver headed north ten more blocks, pressed the brakes, pulled to the curb, and pointed to the green street signs to confirm this was indeed where I told him to bring me.

  Spanish kids watched me from the sidewalk. They wore puffa jackets and long white shirts that looked like hospital gowns and jeans belted across their hamstrings. I paid the driver through the slit in the plexiglass barrier and exited the car and pulled my bag tight against my shoulder and walked north on Seventeenth Street. The Spanish kids communicated up and down the street with clicks and whistles. To communicate I was either a customer or not interested and not a cop. Bushy ponytails and fitted baseball caps and plastic diamond ear studs. I wanted to ask who among them was Senor Anhel Dust. Up the street, one of the Spanish kids cupped his hand to his face and made a wolf-bird sound and the kids standing on the corner kicked over a milk crate and a basketball appeared. The basketball bounced. A police car rolled through the intersection.

  I stood before the high concrete steps of Benjamin’s four-story brick Victorian flaking gray paint, a panopticon of red-iris security cameras trained on his stoop, up the street, on his vehicle garaged behind his gate, a yellow International Harvester. I pressed the doorbell and the lock buzzed and I pushed my way into Benjamin’s old, big house.

  The floor was uneven and sloped toward the back of the house. At some point he would have to jack up the foundation and joists. The hallway’s brittle lathe was snapped into erratic cubbyholes. Behind spackled drywall, dogs wrestled and growled, yanking one another’s chains. The lock shook inside the strike bolt as Benjamin opened the door, cigarette crushed between his stained teeth, wearing black jeans and a torn flannel shirt and BluBlockers. Since I’d last seen him, he’d grown thick blond burnsides. They looked both ridiculous and imposing. I thought better not to comment on them. Because the last thing you need or want from a newly arrived guest is a pithy comment about your changed appearance. He shook my hand.

  “Yeah, man,” he said. “I remember you. Good to see you again.”

  He kicked away the dogs and I shielded my crotch from their roving snouts. Innumerable tattoos of indecipherable designs and patterns covered his large, calloused hands. Also ripe for Qommentary, I thought, and I suspected he had either gotten his strange hands around Soncha before or would do so one day. Because they were similar beasts she would choose to have him. He noticed me staring at his hands as he tossed me a beer but there was nothing for us to say. They were noticed, they were noticeable, that was all. I caught the beer in the basket of my hands, told him the trip was fine. Kath entered the kitchen from the basement stairs, her denim thighs and semi-wide hips covered with sawdust.

  “You made it,” she said.

  She kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. If Benjamin wasn’t standing there she would have called me baby. The empty word floated there f
or an invisible moment.

  “I did.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Benjamin asked.

  “I almost didn’t make it,” Kath said. “We were almost killed last night.”

  “No one almost gets killed in New York anymore,” he said. “They almost get killed here.”

  This seemed a strange thing to get cocky about, but Philadelphians, I had learned, were preternaturally inclined to boast about strange things. Like crime rates. She punched Benjamin’s arm, to defend her urban pride, and her knuckles rapped his bicep. As they grunted and wrestled, with an outstretched finger perpendicular to my beer can I inquired whether I could explore the house and Benjamin nodded his consent. Kath jumped on his back and applied a headlock to her brother and Benjamin tossed her over his shoulder, now gripping her hamstrings. I struggled to avoid the hyperactive dogs as they banged around beneath a glass table and stepped outside into the hollowed-out core of a square block that Benjamin had demolished, expanding his freehold with a backhoe. Mounds of honeycomb plaster, cracked porcelain, lead pipes, a haycock of rotten joists and ancient lumber impregnated by termites. Their wrestling match done, Benjamin stepped outside and rocked and pivoted two large speakers onto the patio. He waved me over to help him and we picked up the speakers and set them atop tripods. He nodded his thanks and returned inside and I sat on a broken beach chair missing half its vinyl straps and rolled a cigarette and stared at the pinkish-blue sunset of impending spring.

  A tribe of urban homesteaders arrived. They congregated in the kitchen and the backyard, couples and dogs, the men in canvas workpants with slits for slide rulers and hammers and marijuana cigarettes and the women in blue jeans and work boots. Rehabilitationistas of vintage bars and coffee shops with dropped tin ceilings and bronze light fixtures scavenged from abandoned, crack-destroyed row homes. They were sentries of gentrification. Unique. Original. Capable of doing things with their hands, like replacing boilers and wiring fuse boxes. They stood in the corners of Benjamin’s kitchen discussing the process of infusing homemade liquor with homegrown herbs and how to access the city’s water mains. I stood among them, alone, leaning against the sink, nothing much to add and no one interested in what I could. Kath had disappeared.

  Benjamin entered the kitchen, freshly showered, tying his wet hair into a ponytail. He removed a bottle of Wild Turkey from the dusty liquor cabinet and smiling at the women and slapping the backs of the men he poured everyone shots of bourbon in red plastic cups.

  “Here you go, Stephen,” he said, handing me a cup but not looking at me. He looked around the room. “Everyone meet Stephen?”

  The guests grumbled that they did or they would and someone said not yet and I downed the bourbon and fought to keep it there. It struggled against me.

  “Refreshing.” Benjamin smiled.

  Together the men stepped outside, following Benjamin to survey the houses he had demolished and to discuss renting a backhoe for big jobs as I stood alone in the kitchen with the women in jeans preparing the food they had brought with them in reusable grocery bags.

  “So you’re just down for tonight?” one of them asked while cutting carrots into slices, pulling her hair behind her head, revealing armpits of superfine grit. She wore a tight Stones T-shirt that accented her ample, strong curves. All tongue and lips. I offered my hand and introduced myself and she wiped her hands on her thick, soccer thighs.

  “Rebecca,” she said.

  Finished with the carrots, she commenced slicing bumpy cucumbers and then dried salty meats and a loaf of rustic bread, and arranged the presentation on a wooden cutting board. I nodded to one of the other women that she too could toss me a beer and again it landed in the basket of my hands. They didn’t know why I was here or who I was, and Kath, it seemed, had done little to segue my welcome by this unfamiliar tribe. Just some dude who happened to be here. I thought of the pleasures of the train ride home.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Me and my husband live a couple blocks north of here.”

  She pointed with her knife and emphasized the word husband.

  “We just bought an old factory that we’re converting into live-work space.”

  “Sounds cool,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “Rebecca, stop boasting,” another woman said while slicing limes. She too wore tight jeans and a tight shirt, along with a pair of heavy, brown climbing boots with red laces. They were the strong women of the strong men. “Stephen,” I introduced myself.

  “Sam,” she said, nodding. The tiny papillon tattoo on her right breast fluttered as she pestled avocado, onions, and tomatoes inside a stone molcajete. Her husband, she explained, was Benjamin’s business partner.

  Introductions made, we were a bit more comfortable with one another now. Under certain circumstances I gravitated toward the women in a group and this was one of those occasions. At least it felt that way. I instructed myself not to ask too many questions and sipped my beer in silence as the women set the food on the counters and the men walked the property with Benjamin, all of them with their hands behind their backs.

  Kath entered the kitchen from the basement, bright in the white dress that wrapped around the cello of her almost flat hips. An orchid amongst the scrubby, resilient Pachysandra. She looked at me as she entered the kitchen and detected that I needed her to touch me. She rested the tips of her fingertips on my shoulder, for a moment soothing my hum, and offered her hands to the strong, tough women, who spun her as she explained that she picked it up in SoHo.

  “How pretty,” Rebecca said.

  Failing to mention I had bought it for her. I worried some hidden splotch of epoxy would stain the dress and cracked open another beer. Done talking business, the men entered the kitchen and commented on Kath’s appearance, made loud, guttural noises and emphatic sounds of naughty pleasure and mock serendipity. Everyone enthralled by Kath except Benjamin. He brushed past her and opened the fridge and drank a can of Budweiser and tossed the empty can into a cardboard box and opened another can and walked outside, dogs circling his feet.

  The music became louder and more guests arrived. They were less carpenter and more carnal, the candy men who brought the candy. A tall man donning an LBJ entered the sawdust-covered living room and the women danced around him, ribbons between their teeth. Something primal, important, was now underway, which I could not dismiss because I didn’t know its source but knew enough to know that it mattered because it made me nervous. The women now feting and long-touching Kath, disrobing sides of her I had never before seen. Sides that were wholly unconcerned with anything I needed. The sweat from my fingers soaked through the thin rice paper as I struggled to roll a cigarette. It turned crooked and twisted, almost too tight to pull.

  Benjamin amped the music’s volume and speed. Without him noticing, I followed him outside to speak with him about how cool this all was and also to thank him for inviting me. He removed a Zippo from the pocket of his jeans and lit gasoline-soaked rags hanging inside the haycock of scavenged lathe. The thin, dry wood, cracked and brittle, quickly took to flame. As he worked the fire he ignored the crowd of guests gathering around him. A bearded carpenter removed a spliff from the pocket of his overalls and handed it to me. I pulled on it and the marijuana fishbowl descended over my head.

  “No more for me,” I said, handing it back to him.

  I sat next to the slat fence that circled the property, stoned, drunk, and alone.

  “You remember that young buck who used to come over here and sit with her all day long?” someone said on the other side of the fence. I didn’t see them and they didn’t see me.

  “Yeah.”

  “He got twenty-five to life.”

  “He did?”

  “Now that light-skinned nigger is coming to see her.”

  “Who, Webb?”

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “Let’s get some juice and kill this bottle.”

  “You know Nat?”

  “Of cours
e I know Nat.”

  “Who the fuck is that? Right there?”

  “Some dude on the other side of the fence.”

  “Fuck him.”

  I crawfished in my chair away from the fence.

  “Crocodile Dundee motherfucker,” one of them said and then spit over the fence. The glob arced and landed somewhere in the hard dirt lawn of Benjamin’s expansive property.

  I returned to the carpenter and his spliff. He was friendly and open and his ample cheeks glowed red. The flames reflected inside the black lochs of his big, round eyes. He handed me the joint.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said, exhaling.

  “In Center City?”

  “New York.”

  This elicited no response.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I’m a steeplejack.”

  I wanted to tell him of course he was a steeplejack. Why wouldn’t he be a steeplejack.

  “How long have you known Kath and Benjamin?” I asked.

  “Feels like forever.”

  A woman approached and cuddled the steeplejack. She told him he was so sweet for doing what he did and he nodded in my direction as they walked away from me. I worried they were pitying me, but pity wasn’t something to which they were accustomed, because they were unaccustomed to spending time with people they didn’t know. Their pity therefore risked descending rapidly into disgust. As that worry grew—that I was being pitied—I wanted more and more to leave. I reentered the kitchen and sat on a busted wicker chair as Benjamin tapped white powder from a small, glass vial onto an octagon-shaped glass table. Rebecca chopped and snorted a tiny line with a rolled-up five-dollar bill.