“Refugees from what. The city?”
“From some city or other. New York, Philadelphia, or wherever. We’re all pretty much in the same boat, down here hosting or managing something, no drifters, killers in the rain, or whatever . . . So, I’m thinking, if this Filthy McNasty’s, CBGB, BCGB thing doesn’t work out, maybe we can all get a sitcom out of it or a reality show or something.”
“You were with Ike that night?” Eric catching himself by surprise with his own question.
“Yeah,” she said carefully.
“What was that like.”
“Excuse me?”
“Who died with me. Who was I with.”
“Honestly?” she said. “I didn’t even know his name until the cops came and talked to me.”
Eric waited.
“I don’t know . . . I was stoned, but . . . He was pretty enthusiastic, you know? Like a big puppy. But very sweet. And very flattering.”
“Huh,” wanting more.
“So, that bedroom, do you want it?”
Eric looked out on the water. How the hell could a major ocean, one of the biggest we have, he thought, look like it needed a garbage pickup; look like a flooded back alley off East Broadway.
“Going once . . .”
“Flattering,” Eric said. “What did you mean when you said he was very flattering.”
“Ike? Like, like he couldn’t believe he was actually making it with me. Like it was the luckiest night of his life.”
“Oh.” Eric exhaled.
“Going twice . . .”
“Hold it. Jesus, just . . .”
“Going . . .”
“OK, OK.” He took a last drag then flicked his butt into the sand beneath the boardwalk. “I’m in.”
He hated Port Authority; fifteen years ago, when he was a uniform assigned to Midtown North, its gliding predator/prey vibration had always made him feel like he was underwater.
But before that, for the three semesters that he lasted in college, he was in and out of this place a dozen times a year, back and forth between his home in the Bronx and SUNY Cortland upstate.
Getting off the bus back then meant holiday, meant reunion, meant family; the younger Matty too full of his own sensations to see the place as it was; to see himself in it through the eyes of the carnivores around him.
And as he sat here now, waiting for the bus to arrive from Lake George, he wondered if the Other One would experience this place in that same way, coming in here, that surge in the chest triggered by the hydraulic hiss of bus doors released, that wide-open readiness for whatever was to happen next.
As the kid’s bus, originating in Montreal, rolled into its bay, Matty stood with a few others directly inside the receiving doors, his eyes on the silhouettes of the disembarking passengers backlit by the subterranean garage lighting.
No Eddie.
His first thought was that the kid hopped off somewhere in between Lake George and New York, a little escape artist, scam artist. Drug boy.
He didn’t have the kid’s cell number so he called his ex and got a recording. “Where is he, Lindsay? I’m standing here like an asshole at an empty bus. Call me.”
In a ballooning rage he began to pace the floor, saw a girl roughly Eddie’s age, doughy, not too bright-looking, but with the vacant wariness of the runaway in her eyes, then saw, or imagined he saw, the hunters, quiet, alert, solo, moving cautiously, patiently, and he decided that something had happened to his son.
“Lindsay, it’s me again. Call me. Please.”
She rang back twenty minutes later.
“Where is he?”
“You were waiting for the four-fifteen? He missed that bus.”
“Where is he, do you know where he is?”
“Yeah, he got on the next one. Should be getting into New York in about three hours.”
“And you couldn’t bother to call and tell me this?”
“He said he would.”
“Well, he fucking didn’t and I’m standing here like a maniac.”
“He said he’d call. What can I tell you?”
Matty seething, I don’t need this, I don’t want this.
“What is wrong with this kid?”
“I don’t know, Matty, maybe his phone’s dead, maybe he spaced out, I don’t live in his head.”
“Give me his number.” Taking it down on his steno pad in the same hurried chicken scratch of a million vital stats for a hundred thousand crimes on ten thousand nights. “What time’s his bus get in?”
“Seven-thirty about,” Lindsay said, then, “Enjoy,” signing off in that gallingly unnecessary singsong.
Matty sat on a bench next to the runaway girl, possible runaway girl, thought about saying something to her, decided against it. From across the hall a middle-aged man began to approach, giving Matty a long, wary look all the way, Matty feigning obliviousness but primed. Before this character reached the bench, however, the girl rose to greet him, throwing her arms around his neck, the guy saying into her hair, “Mom’s on pins and needles,” then raising his head to give Matty one last good eyeballing.
Embarrassed, Matty briefly looked away, then turned back to watch them as they negotiated the crowd, as they evaporated into sunlight.
He remembered Minette telling him the other day how hard it had been for Billy to leave his first wife and son for her and her daughter; as for himself, however, the toughest thing about splitting from Lindsay and the kids was how nauseatingly easy it had been.
He stared at the phone in his hands, then started to dial the Other One’s cell, ready to rip this kid a new one, lay down the law, but wound up killing the call before it could ring through.
Seven-thirty: three hours from now. He decided to sit there and wait, do it face-to-face.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Irma Rivera, Kenny Roe, Keith McNally, Dean Jankolowitz, Josh
Goodman
Bob Perl, Arthur Miller and the POMC, Steven Long and the staff of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Henry Chang, Geoff Grey
Rafiyq Abdellah, Randy Price, the Seventh Precinct
Judy Hudson, Annie and Gen Hudson-Price, just for being around
My editor, Lorin Stein
And John McCormack—my good friend and tutor
Lush Life Page 46