Besides, he had picked it specifically for its violation of the canons of taste. In the broad and average middle of broad and average Long Island, 1976 had been the year of après-ski. The idea was to look like you’d tackled a slalom course on the way to school: acrylic sweaters and knit caps and quilted down jackets with lift-passes clipped to the zippers. These passes, gone a poignant off-season yellow, were the only way Charlie knew the names of the resorts; his tribe, as a rule, did not ski. And Grandpa’s hat … well, he might as well have gone around in a powdered wig. But that was the point of punk, Sam had taught him. To rebel. To overturn. Memories of their illicit summer, those dozen-plus trips to the City before Mom had ruined the whole thing, stirred deliciously inside him, as they had last week when he’d picked up the phone to find Sam on the other end. But how quickly pleasure sank back into the customary slurry of feelings: the mix of nerviness and regret, like something he both was and wasn’t ready to let go of was about to be taken from him.
He flipped to side two, in case there was a riff he’d somehow missed or some nuance of phrasing he’d failed to memorize. Brass Tactics, the record was called. It was Sam’s favorite; she’d been gaga over the singer, the small guy in the leather jacket and Mohawk flashing the middle finger from the sleeve. Now it was Charlie’s favorite, too. This fall he’d listened to it over and over again, assenting to it as he’d assented to nothing since Ziggy Stardust. Yes, he too was lonely. Yes, he too had known pain. Yes, he had lain on his side on the attic floor the afternoon of Dad’s funeral and listened to the hot wind in the trees outside and Yes, he had heard the leaves turning brown and had wondered, really, if there was any point to anything at all. Yes, he had sat that year with one leg out the attic window and watched his skull burst like a waterballoon on the cracked concrete of the drive, but, Yes, he’d held himself back for a reason, and maybe this was the reason. He’d discovered Ex Post Facto too late to see them play live, but now the band had reconstituted itself for a New Year’s show, with some guy Sam knew replacing Billy Three-Sticks on vocals, she’d said, and some kind of pyrotechnics planned for the finale. This “some guy” rankled, but hadn’t she just admitted to needing him—meaning Charlie?
Snow was collecting on the windowsill as he made a last pass through his dresser. Shivering was unmanly, and he was determined not to be cold. On the other hand, his long johns made him look sexless, and when Sam unzipped his pants tonight—when they found themselves alone in the moonlit room of his imaginings (the same eventuality for which he’d pocketed an aging Trojan, sized magnum)—he didn’t want to blow it. He decided, as a compromise, to wear pajama bottoms under his jeans. They’d make the jeans look tighter, like he was the fifth Ramone. He took a long pull on his inhaler, turned off the stereo, and shouldered the bag.
Upstairs, his mother was scrubbing dishes. The twins sat on the curling linoleum near her feet, shuttling a toy back and forth. A Matchbox car, Charlie saw, with an action figure rubber-banded like luggage to the roof. “He sick,” Izzy volunteered. Abe made a “Woo, woo” ambulance sound. Charlie scowled. Mom had now been alerted to his presence, and he couldn’t imagine deceit wouldn’t be written all over him when she turned around. Then he noticed the coil of wire stretching from her head to the wall-mounted phone. “Is that you, honey?” she said. And, into the phone: “He’s just come in.” He would have asked who she was talking to, except he already knew.
“Yeah, I’m off,” he said carefully.
She had pinned the receiver between shoulder and chin. Her arms kept up their ablutions over the sink’s steaming water. “Did you need a ride?”
“It’s just Mickey’s house. It’s walkable.”
“This snow’s supposed to get worse before it gets better.”
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“Guess we’ll see you next year, then.”
The joke baffled him for a moment, as it did annually, like the first girl to pinch him on St. Patrick’s Day. Even after he got it, a bitter liquid seemed to have flooded his throat. What he really wanted was precisely for her to turn and look and try to stop him. But why? He was just sneaking off for the night, and would be back by dawn, and nothing was going to change, because nothing ever changed.
Outside, free from the complex binding charms of the house, his movements came easier. He retrieved his bike from the side of the garage and hid the overnight bag behind the heating unit. It held a decoy wad of dirty laundry harvested from his bedroom floor. The snow was coming thicker now and had begun to stick to the pavement, a textureless sheet of waxed paper. His tires slicked great black arcs behind him. When he passed under a streetlamp, a monster swelled on the earth ahead: spindly at the bottom, huge of shoulder and mane (his lumpy jacket, his furry hat). He rode on, narrowing his eyes against the daggers of snow.
Downtown Flower Hill, despite the Village Council’s best efforts, couldn’t quite outrun what it was. By day, it counterfeited a down-at-heel urbanity—there was a florist, a bridal parlor, a not-very-good record shop—but at night, the lit-up storefronts blazed the coordinates of the town’s real urgencies. Massage. Tattoos. Gun and Pawn. Outside an empty deli, an animatronic Santa pivoted stiffly in time with “Jingle Bells,” its legs chained to a fence. Charlie, unable to feel his hands anymore, stopped and went in to bolt some coffee. It was just hitting him ten minutes later, when he stowed his bike under some bushes at the station. He would really have to remember to get a lock.
He found Sam waiting in a cone of light at the far end of the platform. It had been half a year since he’d seen her, but he could tell from the way she gnawed the thumbnail of her cigarette hand that something was eating her. (Or anyway, he should’ve been able to tell, via their telepathic connection. How many nights since his grounding had he stayed awake talking with her in his head? But when you got right down to it, telepathy, gnosis, and all the other superpowers he’d at various times imagined himself to have did not exist. No one in real life could see through walls. No one (he would think later, after what happened happened) would be able to reverse time’s arrow.) Amazingly, she didn’t see him slip on the snow as he hurried over. Even when he was practically on top of her, she continued to stare up at the lunar face of the station clock and the white flakes vanishing there. He wanted to put an arm around her, but the angle of their bodies being off, he settled for punching her shoulder—which came out weak, not at all the sign of affection it would have been from hands more practiced than his own, so he turned it into a little dance, punching the air, pretending to have only accidentally hit her. ’Ey! ’O! Let’s go! And finally, she turned to him the face that had been withheld for so long: the burning dark eyes, the upturned nose with its hoop of silver, and the mouth made for the movies, slightly too wide, from which her smoke-coarsened voice—her best thing—now came. “Long time no see.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve been keeping busy.”
“I thought you were grounded, Charlie.”
“That, too.”
She reached for the fur hat. Charlie’s cheeks burned as she inspected the self-inflicted hair trauma that had led indirectly to his exile. You look like a mental patient, his mother had said. It had grown back, mostly. Meantime, Sam had done a thing to her own hair, chopping it boyishly short and dyeing it from amber to black. She was almost as tall as Charlie, and with a dark blazer hiding her curves, she looked like Patti Smith on the cover of Horses—their second-favorite album. Though who knew what she listened to now that she’d gone off to college in the City. Asked about dorm life, she said it was a drag. He offered the hat. “You wanna wear it? It’s warm.”
“It’s only been fifteen minutes.”
“The road’s pretty slick. And I had to stop for coffee. Sorry no car.” He never mentioned how terrible her chain-smoking was for his asthma, and she, reciprocally, now pretended not to notice him suck down a chemical lungful from the dorky inhaler. “My mom thinks I’m staying at Mickey Sullivan’s, which tells you what planet she’s on.” But Sam had al
ready turned to where the track curved into darkness. A light glided toward them like a cool white slider homing in on the plate. The 8:33 to Penn Station. In a few hours the ball would drop over Times Square and men and women all over New York would turn to whoever was nearest for an innocent kiss, or a not-so-innocent. He pretended the tightness in his chest as they boarded was just caffeine. “Like I care what Mickey thinks anyway. That jerk won’t even like nod at me in the lunchroom anymore.” The three of them—Mickey, Charlie, and Samantha—should have been in the same class at the high school. But Sam’s terrifying dad, the fireworks genius, had sent her to the nuns for elementary, and then to private school in New York proper. It must have worked; Sam was only six months older, but had been smart enough to skip sixth grade, and was now at NYU. Whereas he and Mickey were C students, and no longer friends. Maybe he should have found someone more willing to serve as tonight’s alibi, actually, because if Mom called the Sullivans in the a.m. to thank them (not that she would remember, but if), he’d be in big trouble, a ripe steaming mound of it. And what if she found out where he’d gotten the money to cover two round-trips into the City? He’d be locked in his room till like 1980. “You got the tickets?”
“I thought you were buying,” she said.
“I mean for Ex Post Facto.”
She pulled a crumpled flier from her pocket. “It’s Ex Nihilo now. Different frontman, different name.” For a moment, her mood seemed to darken. “But anyway, this isn’t the opera. It’s not like a ticketed event.”
He followed her down the aisle, under fluttery lights, waiting as long as possible before reminding her that he couldn’t sit backward, on account of his stomach. Again, her face grew pinched; he worried for a second he’d already jinxed their (he couldn’t help thinking) date. But she’d pushed the door open and was leading him toward the next car.
The LIRR belonged to kids that night. Even the grown-ups were kids. There were few enough of them that each little band of revelers could leave several rows of Bicentennial red-and-blue seats on each side as a buffer. They talked much louder than adults would have, and you could tell it was meant to be overheard, as a means of preemption, a way of saying, I am not afraid of you. Charlie wondered how many Nassau County moms tonight had no idea where their kids were—how many mothers had simply granted them their freedom. As soon as the conductor had passed through, beers began to circulate. Someone had a transistor radio, but the speaker was cruddy, and at that volume all you could hear was a voice moaning hornily. Probably Led Zeppelin, whose Tolkienish noodlings had been the soundtrack of the carwash where Charlie had worked freshman year, but which he’d renounced last summer after Sam dismissed Robert Plant as a crypto-misogynist show pony. She could be like that, sharp and full of fire, and her silence now wrongfooted him. When a kid a few rows away pump-faked tossing a beercan their way, Charlie reached for it, like a jerk. The kid’s friends laughed. “Preps,” Charlie muttered in what he felt was a withering tone, only not loud enough to be heard, and sank back into the noisy pleather of his forward-facing seat. Sam had turned away again to gaze at the settlements of Queens glimmering beyond the window, or at her fogged breath turning them to ghosts. “Hey, is everything okay?” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s a holiday, you know. You seem like you’re not, like, real festive. Plus shouldn’t you be documenting this stuff for your magazine thingy?” For the last year, she’d been publishing a mimeographed fanzine about the downtown punk scene. It was a big part of who she was, or had been. “Where’s your camera?”
She sighed. “I don’t know, Charlie. I guess I left it somewhere. But I did bring you this.” From the army-surplus bag on her lap came a gummy brown labelless bottle. “It was all I could find in the liquor cabinet. Everything else is water at this point.”
He sniffed at the cap. Peach schnapps. He brought it to his lips, hoping there were no germs. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Did you know you’re the only person who ever asks me that?” Her head came to rest on his shoulder. He still couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but the medicinal heat of the booze had reached his innards, and kissing her—making her, R. Plant would have put it—again seemed within the realm of possibility. For the rest of the ride, he had to picture the wobble of President Ford’s jowls in order not to pop a full-blown bone.
But at Penn Station, Sam’s restlessness returned. She hustled through the hot-dog-smelling crowds, faces moving too fast for the eye to distinguish. Charlie, by now well-lubricated, had the impression of a great light beaming from somewhere behind him, setting fire to every dyed-black hair on the back of her head, her several earrings, the funny flattened elfin bits at the top of her ears—as if a film crew was following, lighting her up. Of light not reflecting off things but coming from inside them. Inside her.
They hopped a lucky uncrowded Flatbush Avenue–bound number 2 express train, and as they racketed through a local station the train seemed to echo the conductor’s garbled syllables: Flat-bush, Flat-bush. Sam turned in her seat. Girders on the elongating platform strobed the light into pieces. Charlie noticed for the first time a small tattoo on the back of her neck. It was like a king’s crown rendered by a clumsy child, but he didn’t want to ask her about it and thus remind her of all the things about her he apparently no longer knew. He let go of the bar he’d been holding and shoved his hands in his pockets and stood trying to absorb the jolts—Flat-bush, Flat-bush. It was a game she’d taught him called “subway surfing.” First one to lose his footing lost. “Look,” he said. When she didn’t, he tried again. “Play you.”
“Not now.” Her voice had none of the maternal indulgence he was used to, and once again he felt the night faltering, like the light of the bypassed station.
“Best three out of five.”
“You are such a child sometimes, Charles.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
“Well, stop acting like a Charles, then.”
It shamed him, how loud she said it. Anyone who didn’t know better might have thought she didn’t even like him. So he threw himself down onto the opposite bench, as if he’d decided on his own that this was where he belonged. At Fourteenth Street, one of the doors jammed, leaving only the narrowest space to exit through. And of course, being a gentleman, he let her go first, not that there was any kind of thank-you. Then it was onto the local for one stop and up at Christopher Street. Before he’d gotten busted, they used to hang out here eating ice cream and ’ludes and drinking her dad’s whisky. Half-bombed in the afternoon, he’d goof on the homos passing into the sex shops, as away to the south, buildings rose like kingdoms. The sky that had stretched over them like a great throbbing orangeblue drumhead was now flaking off in little pieces and falling. And he was burning up in his double-layered pants. He told her he had to pee.
“We’re on kind of a schedule here, Charlie.”
But he ducked into a pizzeria toilet with a sign. With the door locked, he stripped off his pants and pajama bottoms, wadded the bottoms into his jacket pocket, and put the pants back on. The counter guy glared as he made his way back outside.
“You know, if you’re going to be like this …,” she started.
“Like what?”
“Like this. I can feel you like beaming anxiety at me. And would you pay attention? You’re blocking the sidewalk.”
As indeed, he saw, he was. The crosstown blocks, West Village to East, were jumping with tourists and freaks and other NYU kids. But when had she ever cared about courtesy? “Sam, I feel like you’re pissed off at me, and I didn’t even do anything.”
“What is it you want from me, Charlie?”
“I don’t want anything,” he said, dangerously close to whining. “You called me, remember? I just want to be buds again.”
She thought about this for a second. If there had been some sign he could have given her, one of the recondite handshakes of third graders, spitting in a palm, inscribing a cross, he would have done
it. “Okay,” she said, “but let’s just get where we’re going, can we?”
Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, its columned portico swimming with graffiti she would once have insisted on photographing. The line spilled out of a side door, and they took their place at the back, under an erratic streetlight. A safety pin winked at Charlie from the face of a tall guy a dozen spots ahead; he resembled an ogreish friend of Sam’s he’d met once, not far from here. Charlie became conscious of his hat. He wanted to take it off before the guy, if it was the guy, could spot them, but the light had cut out. When it buzzed back on, he nudged Sam. “Hey, don’t you know him?”
She looked around edgily. “Who?” But the safety pin had been swallowed by the building, and her gaze fell on another man, the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator, who opened and closed the steel fire door without appearing to see the people passing through it. “Oh, that’s just Bullet.” She seemed almost to collect these obscure connections with older men. This one was heavily tattooed—blades of black ink that extended from his neck all the way out onto his toffee-brown face, like warpaint—and dressed head to toe in leather, with an earring shaped like a shiv. “He’s the bouncer.”
“I don’t have an ID,” Charlie hissed.
“What do you need ID for? Just be cool. Follow my lead.”
He tugged the fur hat down over his eyes and forced himself to stop slouching. His efforts to look grown-up turned out not to matter; the bouncer was lifting Sam off the ground in a bear-hug, his face splitting into a broad, pink grin. “I thought we weren’t going to see you tonight, sugar.”
City on Fire Page 3