LATER, Sewer Girl will appear alone at the head of the attic stairs. Her bikini top is already off, is what makes him feel like he’s dreaming. In the moonlight through the ceiling’s trapdoor, her tits look like soft blue balloons. The nipples are bigger than he imagined. Even her bellybutton screams sex—an inny, a shadowy ellipse. Before he can ask what she’s doing, she has crossed the room, and is reaching for his beltbuckle. He’s afraid if she sees him without his clothes on, she might not want to. But she already has his jeans around his ankles, and one hand is foraging matter-of-factly in his briefs, as though reaching into a bowl for a goldfish. With her free hand, she moves his hands to those tits and shakes her hair to one side, and then her mouth is on his and they are falling back onto the mattress.
How often and in what infinite varieties has he imagined this moment? But something is off. “Wait,” he says, gasping, and gropes among clothes for his inhaler. Takes a big hit.
S.G. looks at him with an expression he can’t quite see, her own breath coming steady. “What is it?”
“I can’t do this.”
“Why? Don’t you like me, Charlie?”
“Of course I like you. But …” He’s sitting up now, peering into the dark, the blanket of his moldy bedroll covering his exposed lower half. “But it’s loyalty, you know?”
She stares at him for a minute. Then she starts laughing. “Oh, Charlie, is this about me and Sol?”
“I thought you were with Nicky now.”
“Who do you think sent me up here?”
“Nicky sent you? Well, that’s just great. I thought you liked me.”
“No, that didn’t come out right.” Her voice softens. “Listen, that stuff you said earlier, Charlie, the reproach and the shame … You were right. I could just feel it shifting even as you talked. Like something being lifted. I wanted to find a way to say thank you, and Nicky said this would be cool. Said he hopes you see now you’re tougher than you think.” She runs her fingers through his hair like a mom, and he can feel himself recoiling, irritated.
“What about Sol? Your boyfriend? Does he know about this?”
“Well, does Sam? Or is she not your one and only anymore?”
“Who do you think I’m being loyal to?”
“Charlie …” She reaches under the covers for his crotch, but he rolls away to face the wall, burning like a furnace in the night. Sewer Girl lies behind him, not touching him, and will stay like that for a long time. She’s not all bad. Her slave name, she told him once, was Jain, with an i. But when the morning comes, she’ll be gone from his side, as everyone always is, which seems to suggest that it’s not so much insecurity that plagues him as foresight.
HE MUST NOT BE TOTALLY RESOLVED, though, because when a week passes without anything further happening, he both is and isn’t disappointed. Mostly, he feels on his own again. The twelfth of July’s supposed to be when Sam’s film is ready for pickup, and that morning he goes over to the camera store. In exchange for his last worldly dollars and some pocket-change, they hand him a red cardboard sleeve of single prints, three-and-a-half by five, the cheapest. For some reason, though, he can’t bring himself to open it. If the pictures are Sam’s, they’re all he has left of her, and once he looks at them, consumes them, she really will be gone.
He returns to the Phalanstery to find Nicky waiting. There’s one last job needs doing, he says, a two-man action; he wants to know if Charlie’s up to it. Charlie slips the photo sleeve into a pocket, hoping Nicky won’t ask about it, and half out of guilt says, Why wouldn’t I be up to it? How much damage can two people do, after all?
Soon they are barreling uptown with the windows down and the radio up full blast, the empty rear compartment thunking every time they hit one of Sixth Avenue’s savage potholes, a legal-sized mailer sliding from side to side on the dash. He’s riding shotgun again, for the first time in months. Not Sol, not D. Tremens, but him, Charlie Weisbarger. Or McCoy, if you’re going by the name on his uniform. Perhaps, he thinks, this could even be the time to ask Nicky about Operation Demon Brother. But when he does, Nicky just touches the envelope and smiles. “We’ll post the invitation on our way back.”
They narrowly miss the meter they park at. Charlie plugs a nickel in and Nicky checks the diver’s watch he sometimes wears, now that the van has no clock. Then he hands Charlie an army-surplus backpack that feels like it’s full of groceries. “What’s in here?”
“Awful curious today, aren’t we, Charles?” Nicky takes from the backpack another pair of coveralls and pulls them on over his jeans. No one passing pays him any mind. Someone has scrubbed PUSSYWAGON from the side of the van, so that it once again looks like a window-washer’s, Charlie sees, and now Nicky, too, has the uniform to match, although it’s Sol’s old one, and consequently several sizes too large. Greenberg is stitched across the pocket. Wait a minute. Is Sol Jewish? To ask, though, would be to prove Nicky right.
He follows Nicky down to Twenty-Third Street, a broad confluent of traffic. The huge apartment house on the corner has a construction scaffold running around it between the first and second stories, a plywood catwalk with waist-high walls. Half the buildings in the city have these things, yet nothing ever seems to get finished. The shadows beneath are cool. “You first,” says Nicky, nodding at the metal struts. This seems to run counter to the incognito vibe; it’s rare to see workmen actually working on anything. But probably Charlie could start screaming he was being murdered, and no one would bother to pay attention.
He gets stuck four feet off the ground, clinging to the crossed X braces. It’s about as high as he can free-climb before his acrophobia kicks in. Nicky is looking tensely around. “Go on,” he hisses. “Pull yourself up.” Charlie reaches up, up, and grasps the edge of the plywood. Most likely, his arms will give out first, the same skinny chicken arms that were his undoing when it was time to climb the rope in gym class. At some point, though, fear of being caught overpowers his fear of heights, and maybe yields an adrenaline rush, for here he is wriggling over the lip and flopping onto the catwalk, one flight up, hidden from view.
In seconds, Nicky is beside him, on his back. They are staring up at a sky raveled with cumulus but otherwise a superheated blue. It seems to be not the clouds but the buildings that are moving, swooning, waiting to fall. Then Nicky is telling him to sit up a little, not to crush the backpack. From it, he draws a thin strip of metal. Charlie watches him work its silver length between the sashes of the nearest window. The meaning of a term that has never made sense snaps into focus: cat burglar. It has that kind of quickness. One moment, Nicky is here; the next, Charlie is alone.
There must be at least a hundred windows above and on the other side of the street. He says a little prayer, that none of the people who live or work behind them will look down to where he lies. Of course, if he could just act like he belonged here, no one would think twice, but Charlie Weisbarger has never, at least since his brothers were born, known what belonging felt like. Instead, he’s always afraid that this world that envelops him—the ordinary music of street life below, the oily burn of nuts roasting on a cart—will at any moment be snatched away. And that there will be no other. The truth is, when you get right down to it, the Prophet Charlie is a moist, gaping wuss. His fears are a rock so large God Himself couldn’t lift it. Which means, of course, that he is unworthy of mercy. He rolls so that he is stretched out along the foot-high lip of plywood and wedges himself as tightly as possible into what should be its shadow, were the sun not beating down like a spotlight from a prison wall. When he looks back to where he was lying, he notices the red envelope of photographs from his pocket. It has ripped open on a staple or something, and a stack of pictures has started to slide out.
They are of burnt buildings, glassless windows, scorch-marks on walls, he sees, but never, for some reason, of the PHP, or of the fires themselves. In one picture, an ambulance streaks past a sporting-goods store and a sidewalk blurred by smoke—unless it’s the frame itself that’
s blurred. The lens has been jostled. Flicking forward, he can hear Sam’s voice, bell-clear and hoarse, calling to him from somewhere as near as the back of his own head: Wake up, Charlie. The last shot is of a basement. Deep focus, early light. Sam naked on a rumpled mattress, startled, the sheets pulled off. This would seem to expose something about her and the person taking the picture, a tattooed action figure in the mirror, but who it really exposes is Charlie. Nicky was fucking her, too. What else has he refused to see? Wake up, she says again, as Nicky comes clambering back out the window. In his hand is one of those glow-in-the-dark alarm clocks. “Couldn’t find what I was looking for,” he says. “But you can’t have too many of these.”
His forehead is slick with sweat, and he’s already moving toward the edge of the scaffolding when Charlie grabs his arm. Holds out the photograph. “Do you want to tell me what this is?”
For a split-second, Nicky winces. “It’s time to drop the dumb act, Prophet. It doesn’t suit you.” Then, in a blink, he’s snatched the stack of photos and shoved it into his own pocket. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”
A rustle draws Charlie’s eye back to the apartment’s open window. The thing he’s been smelling, he realizes, is smoke. “Is something burning?”
“We don’t have time for this, Charles. Either what we’re after’s in there, or it’s not, and now it won’t matter either way.”
Charlie kneels by the sill. There’s a sad-looking lily in a pot, and, touchingly, a workout book on the coffeetable. A yapping can be heard from behind the door. “Hey, Nicky? There’s a dog in here.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs.”
Come on, wake up. But to what? To the fact that instead of some kind of heroes, they are just punks. He thinks of Sam in that bed. Of Sam training her lens on that sidewalk, as if to send him a signal. In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it’s easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he’s lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that’s never abandoned him. He says, “You were lying, weren’t you.”
“What?”
“All this time, you haven’t given two shits about consequences. You never cared who got hurt.”
When he turns, Nicky has one leg over the side of the plywood. “Charlie, I swear to God, if you go in there, I’ll leave you.” But Nicky’s already done that, hasn’t he? Left him out here tied to that rock. A breeze gusts the curtains, feeds the fire; Charlie’s face is a pillow, hot on one side. Nicky’s eyes are hard black briquettes. His handyman disguise makes him look like the stranger he in point of fact is. “I’m going to count to three. One.”
The dog is barking its head off now, someone is going to hear, and the flames are sweeping from the mound of papers in the kitchen sink toward the window.
“Two.”
Why doesn’t the smoke alarm start beeping? he wonders. Because Nicky has disabled it, obviously. The fumes make his eyes water. “You know why you’re going to end up in hell, Nicky? There’s no love in your heart.” And before Nicky can answer—because he doesn’t need to answer—Charlie is diving headfirst through the window-frame, following a dog’s voice into the hungrier heart of the fire.
[click here to view a facsimile from the print edition]
A NOTE FROM YR EDITOR1
high school, irving place, 1976 … graduation’s still 73 days away, but college acceptance letters have already started to appear.2 the headmaster sez no one’s supposed to bring them to school, but you can see kids at their lockers letting fat envelopes fall to the floor. dartmouth, smith, williams - oops, did i drop that? still, the truth is, if you want to name the vibe turning the laughter brittle between periods, it’s fear. here we are in this paradise for conformity-seeking youth, with its hierarchies and pieties, + the thought of losing it is causing this huge reactionary spasm. i’ve been keeping my nose-ring3 in lately, e.g., instead of taking it out on the train, ’cause frankly i just don’t care anymore, but so then i’m doing my conscientious-objector bit at gym yesterday + this senior girl comes up to me, “hey, samantha, you’ve got something hanging out of your nose” + i’m like, good luck at princeton next year with the frat boys or field-hockey or whatever it is you do to distract yourself from your pathetic life. See, reader, amerikan high school is above all about safety:::::the safety you get when you renounce freedom. irony being that yr correspondent, who is no-shit desperate to get out, has so far only gotten 2 envelopes, both skinny, both thanks but no thanks. my dad’s big dream was that I’d get in somewhere out of state + escape the ancestral folkways of the cicciaros (not to mention of my mom). but to be honest i didn’t exactly bend over backward trying to impress the admissions committees in boston, because seriously … boston? so these days after school instead of bumming around with sg i find myself racing back to lawn guyland to see if in my mailbox waits the envelope that makes it official - the one from columbia or at least nyu (which apparently admits everyone). it doesn’t happen + doesn’t happen, but i tell myself it will. i’ll be living at last for real in this city i see when my eyes shut at night. Around me now in calc goony girls are trying to get mrs. boswell to turn from the board + catch me drafting this instead of crunching antiderivatives. it may be true i’m only half paying attention, but this much has sunk in: from any point, line, or curve, it is possible to move up one order of abstraction. like, say i am a point. time is a line. the rate at which the passage of time changes is a curve. The antiderivative of that curve would be, what? the rate at which the acceleration of the future toward the present accelerates. and so i am a changed change whose change is changing, + what follows will be a document. + if you can’t keep up with me, kiddies, well, too tough for you.
1. actually, who am i kidding? it’s just me here, editor, writer, designer, so send me some stuff - reviews, essays, poems, whatever. okay? okay.
2. just goes to show what kind of sadists are running the education system in this country.
3. See issue 2.
THE POSITIVELY TRUE ACCOUNT OF ONE GIRL’S ADVENTURES IN THE GHETTO WITH A NIKKORMAT, A HOLE IN ONE SHOE, AND HEAVY CONCEPTS LIKE SOLIDARITY
We were somewhere east of Bowery when the drugs began to take hold … the drugs, in my case, being a couple clove cigarettes, the Bayer headache powder I was using to fight off last night’s hangover, and a pinner SG had found in one of the pockets of her coat. Tame, perhaps, but I wanted my head on straight. Despite talking a good game whenever my dad grumbled about the Welfare State, I had never actually been in a housing project before and was a little nervous, plus I secretly hoped I might get something out of that afternoon’s exploits I could use for my senior Art project. Still, what SG was smoking must have been uncharacteristically good stuff, ’cause against the dead sky further east where the numbers start to turn to letters the cabs rolling past were suddenly an exquisite yellow. Headlights like drops of milk in the weak tea of the day. Cabs all aimed our way. In flight.
SG had actually been waiting for me even before school let out - I’d seen her out the classroom window a half-hour before the last bell, leaning up against the metal fence of the building across the street in that mangy fake-fur of hers, and in the second before I steeled myself and became punk again her eagerness had almost embarrassed me. (Then again, maybe it wasn’t eagerness but boredom. Her classes at NYU must not ask too much of her, because she never seems to be in them.)
In any case, I went to the bathroom and unhooked the crank from the window sash. Put back in my nose-ring. Climbed on the radiator and lowered my legs through the window and dropped six feet to the frozen flowerbeds out front. Some moms waiting to pick up their middle-schoolers looked at me like I might apologize or something, but I just put on my big sunglasses and blew past them like butter wouldn’t melt, and we were on our way. SG’s boyfriend Sol was coming from a paying gig at a building in midtown and was going to meet us on the L.E.S., where they had something they wanted to
show me. Make sure you bring your camera, they said.
I now think the housing project was in fact his. Sol’s, I mean. I knew already he’d grown up poor (there had been a big splat of jealousy underneath all the grief he gave me when he’d found out I was from Flower Hill, to which I would have said, it’s nothing to be jealous of) and whenever I hinted around about needing a place to crash, he and SG were both so vague about where they went at night after shows that I’d come to suspect they were sleeping part-time in that van of his. At the very least, Sol moved through the project plaza like someone who belonged. To me, it was a little intimidating. I want to think I’m open-minded, but there were all these black and Puerto Rican guys sitting on their different benches out front, staring or pointedly not staring at us, at the white girls, but Sol just walked right by and no one said anything. I guess the two SGs look pretty heavy together. I guess that’s part of the point of the razored hair & safety pins. And I felt proud of my friends, and then of myself, too. This wasn’t private-school America, suburb America. This was real.
The elevator inside was out of order. The stairwells smelled like pee and went on forever. Up on the roof was a couple making out on an old mattress, but we just pretended not to see them and vice versa. Then we came around the side of the monster air-conditioning unit and there it was on the brick, in white, yellow, & blue (which you’d see in these photos if I could reproduce in color):
POSTHUMANS LIVE!
SG knew I was into graffiti, I guess, because ever since we’d been hanging out she’d seen me snapping pictures of it. We’d be trolling the bins at Seor Wax and I’d see a panel truck rattle by with a great big burner on the side, bright as an elicit sun, and I’d be out the door to take the picture. Tags on postboxes, throw-ups on phone-booths, bombs on buses, plus the whole amazing front of the Vault on Bowery. Back in the fall, when I began to really notice the spraypaint spreading all over everything, I kept having this fear for some reason it was going to disappear just as quickly, like a Polaroid in reverse, and so I wanted a document, some proof that for a hot minute life and art had come close enough to touch. Now it occurs to me that this can be partly a way of turning yourself into a bystander. But then again if I had a tag it would have to be like SAM HEMPSTEAD PIKE or something, and I don’t trust my body not to fuck up anything bigger than Sharpie-ing the stalls at school.
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