by Nadia Bozak
Shook my head, looked away. “Give me a smoke,” I said.
“Only if you look.”
“Fuck.” So I did what Dave wanted. Got out the goddamn ticket and with him watching close, crouched there across from me. Had seen a bus ticket before, so I just glanced at it. Unfolded it. Not as long as Dave’s was—this was for a shorter trip. Saw it said New York City, but for a destination it said something other than LA.
“Ottawa?”
Dave stood up. “With you a goddamn basket case like this, there’s no point in coming out to LA.”
“Ottawa?” I said again, shaking my head.
“Leave the doom and gloom behind you. Cure yourself of it.” Dave tossed me a Lucky. It landed in my lap. A book of matches were next, from a bar someplace there in New York.
He unpacked a paper bag. For supper were cartons of hot soup and thick meat sandwiches, all store-bought. “Still some rum to drink?” he asked.
Poured us each a tin cup full. Lifted mine and said to Dave, “Fuck New York.”
“And Metallica too,” said Dave.
We drained our cups. Poured them full again. Lit Luckies, and smoked while we ate. Me, I dug in too, eating more than Dave did. Soup, sandwiches, and also some chocolate chip cookies. Needed strength for what was coming up—the future, finally.
Said to Dave how we should clear on out of there and be at the bus station at dawn.
“Let’s not go to sleep tonight,” I said.
“Guess you must have had your fill now,” Dave said “And I can sleep on the bus.”
* * *
So we’d gone away from Central Park. Spring of 1989. Fucked our packs, gear, tarps, and trash, just leaving that junk to rot. Left that dark heart, that glistening damp, straying out into the flesh and blood and body of New York. Out on the street again, and again there was the roundabout with the statue in the middle, beyond which stretched out muscled corridors of avenues that were lit with beating neon and swarming with buses and cars and taxis. Stopped to wait for the light to change, I looked behind me. The sun was just then setting down, and I saw the park was like it was on Pickles’s postcard. Maybe it was on account of my eyes, still a little sore, but the place was blurry and washed out, ragged at the edges, and with no people inside that I could see. Except for those like me and Dave, those who shouldn’t have been there at all, and so were invisible, disappeared, somehow a little bit free.
We walked way south, then cut east, all the while that night city was getting shitty and sometimes scary and worse. Little Italy was OK, smelled good, different from the rest of the neighbourhoods we’d come through. Liked it too as we fought through the stinking scuffle of Chinatown before coming to the diamond shops, all barred up and metal-shielded. Then it was industrial, built up with dead warehouses and factories and sheds, and that meant we were getting closer to the water now. And way down at the end of a street called Canal, we found the stone grey building where Henry Brock lived. Dave wanted to get rid of the tapes, but the guy didn’t answer the door. Rang the bell a million goddamn times. Sat on the front step. An hour we waited.
“You can come back here tomorrow,” Dave told me. “Sell these, plus there’s cash Henry owes me.”
“Really?”
“Yes, kid. Promise me. Because you need cash to get out to LA. Right?”
“OK,” I said, I promised him.
“Then catch the night bus. It’s the faster one anyway.”
No packs on our backs for a goddamn change, so we went far that night. Dave showed me all the places he’d been without me. He knew the city pretty OK after just those couple of days. Wanted to take a subway train too, but they cost money. So we walked, smoked, talked about what was coming up for us, what was in the future.
Near where there were all the theatres and shows, we stopped at an all-night market and spent the last of the money on a Budweiser six-pack and a pack each of Luckies. Some chocolate bars and juice and sandwiches for Dave to take with him on the Greyhound.
Dave tucked a Kit Kat bar into my jacket pocket. “You stock up after meeting Henry,” he said.
Was late. But there were people out on the sidewalks. Busy where we were wandering, glittery with cinemas and theatres and shining cabs, and it made us feel safe somehow because no one could see us, or wanted to, so we could just take it in. New York City was grinning and wincing with electric light, and that was no kind of light at all. Maybe it was better because it meant there was more for people to do than just go to sleep, dream. No moon or stars, but only because we could not see the sky, and then that plugged-in night ceiling above us, it opened up and squeezed out a shower of rain. That’s when we ducked into an alleyway, huddling up in the bit of shelter we found there.
The rain stopped, but Dave and me had stayed put, tight in a corner, leaning back against a dumpster.
“Here’s to it. LA.” He held up his big old can and I held up mine, and we drank to where we’d meet again.
Sat there and watched as the traffic thinned and the bodies became fewer, sirens getting farther and farther away. Slept a bit, waking up with the first fractures of dawn. Dave and me, we took turns pissing behind the dumpster and then we walked to the bus.
Dave led the way to Port Authority. Stopped and picked doughnuts and pretzels out of the garbage. Dave found most of an Egg McMuffin, but he let me have that. “You haven’t eaten much lately,” he said. “Take one of those pills first.”
Ate as we walked. When we got to the windowless goddamn beast that was the station, we stopped on the sidewalk in front of its great glass doors and had a smoke.
The bus was going at 7:30 a.m. Saw from a clock across the street that it was already 7.
“Should get in line,” I said. “Get a window seat.”
“Think anyone will sit next to me?” When Dave smiled, so did the pink scar on his right cheek.
“No way,” I said. “Unless it’s a fuck-up too.”
“Like you maybe?”
“Sure. I’d sit beside you, Dave. Sat behind you all the goddamn way here. And that was a thousand times worse.”
“And I was a prick.”
“But I knew you were better than that. Still do.”
Without any steps or lawn or frontage, the sidewalk in front of the station was pretty crowded with people and luggage and the rest. City was up now and the noise was coming on full-blast.
“Let me know you’re OK,” said Dave.
“How?” I wanted to know.
Dave shrugged. “Send me a postcard.”
And I promised I would. Dropping them off, one at a time, as I made my way across the states, no address back or forth, just a direction in the straight ahead, toward the next glossy snapshot. And each time I mailed one, I’d erase a little more of the way I’d come, just so I could not go back there anymore or ever again.
“And when I get there, how do I find you?”
“You found me once before. You’ll do it again.”
Thought about that until I believed it. “Yeah. OK.”
“You go now,” he said to me. “Don’t need to see me off.”
“You’re getting on that bus? Right, Dave? No funny tricks?”
He shook his head, held up his open hands. “Can hardly fucking wait to go.”
We stood there looking at each other. Dave passed me the fucked-up, souped-up customized suitcase he’d trucked across Ontario and Quebec and New York state.
“Don’t forget about Brock’s. There’s a map in here. You won’t remember where it is. It’s fifty for the case. Fifty he owes me. And don’t stick around and talk to him.”
“How come?”
“Just don’t. You got that knife, right?”
Nodded that I did.
“You should go, Dave.”
“OK,” he said. But he stayed standing. “You got your ticke
t? And don’t forget to finish that whole bottle of pills.”
“Fuck, Dave. I’m OK now. I’ll be OK.”
He reached out and patted my head. “If you’re not out in a week or two, I’m coming up there to get you.”
“I’ll see you in California, Dave.”
Spikes on shoulders, the sun going blood in his black hair. Bashed-up-Boat said to me, “So do you want me to kiss you goodbye like these other retards are doing?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“It’s not what we got, is it, kid?”
“We got something else than them.”
“Something better.”
“And it’s something worse.”
Had to tell Dave one more time he was going to miss the goddamn bus. Then he tossed away his smoke, turned away, and disappeared through the doors of the station.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ghosts of the valley. Indian ruins at Walnut Canyon, Arizona.
ARE YOU STILL THERE? WE ALMOST ARE. ME, THE KID, AND Kim’s got a Demics tape in her bag. Says how she’s from the same town, London, Ontario, Canada, and how “New York City” is the soundtrack of her life.
“Then how come you’re not going east?” the stranger wants to know.
Kim shrugs. “Because in California it’s warm. And I’m sick of winter, dirty roads.”
The stranger nods. Kim’s an OK kid. A kid, though she’s likely older than the stranger. She’s taken to the baby, likes to hold it close, feed and change it. And she asks no questions, so no one has to lie.
They go on, fast and full time. The dry, the sky, the heat, the highway cutting straight on through so the road comes to be, like they call it, wide and open. Not like in the North.
“Out here the people are likely honest,” the stranger says. “For there is no place to hide under that big old sky.”
Nowhere to go to get away from the huge and heavy and hungry old sun. Not like the North, there where it’s all about bundling up and covering up and taking shelter, waiting for the world to get on and go away. In the North you can hide and lie and be always in disguise, and they always are, those people. And the colour here is all the opposite of North too, like the dust, the soft wind.
The stranger’s arms and face are getting to be brown, and the kid is getting colour too. At a gas station around Gallup they stop. The stranger uses the hood of the truck to write out a postcard. Kim wants to know who the stranger has to keep in touch with, but the stranger won’t say for certain.
“Just a pal. Kind of like a best friend.”
They get Cokes and milk, and the stranger buys sunglasses, ChapStick, a ball cap for the kid to keep the sun off its gentle face. Kim just uses her hand to shield her blueberry eyes. Is always licking her pink chapped lips.
If the boy pumping gas there in Gallup called the stranger “Miss,” it’s on account of the sun-shone face, the going around in shirt sleeves, the hair growing in a bit, and also spending all that time getting softened up by a baby. Kim gives the stranger the key to the ladies’ room when she’s done and the stranger takes it. In there the kid gets a fresh diaper and both get washed with soap and warm water. Then the stranger takes out the driver’s licence and compares the face it shows to the one in the mirror above the mangy sink. It’s not working anymore, the stranger thinks. Those blue-glass eyes set against the brown skin, and with the tight T-shirt showing off a certain shape of body that the heat won’t let the stranger hide away in layered clothes anymore.
“Less a boy than a girl now,” the stranger says. Even with the scars and the scrapes and the cut-off hair, and the skinniness besides.
At a rest stop with a lookout point, they pull off the road. Get out, stretch the legs. Stand at the edge of a canyon. It winds back into the horizon, striated walls are treed to its brutal depths. In their mouths is desert. In their eyes, all sky, sun, and shine. Leaning up against the stolen supply truck, they can’t imagine living on earth in the same way anymore, not after seeing this desert sprawl, its endless dust the colour of fine-spun rust. Fresh blue sky against parched red earth.
Kim thanks the stranger for taking her along. “When I saw you, though, I just knew you would.”
“Because we’re so much the same.”
There are every moment new freckles on Kim’s face. There is every moment a redder shade washing over her tangled brown hair. Dirty jean skirt and sneakered feet. T-shirt decorated with sweat and dirt and cola. “It was an omen. Ontario plates in Amarillo. Had to be you and me.”
Then Kim pulls herself up, kisses cracked and split-up lips. Her tongue as hot as the desert blacktop, as the top of her sun-shone head. The stranger kisses back, because doing so is human, because it is hot out and the mind is fried and life is hard and it goes by too fast. It lasts minutes—ten or fifteen—involves hands and hard hips, open, split, and spitty lips. When a car pulls up, they break away, look away, get back in the truck.
Coke and smokes, milk and miles, faces cracking abandoned smiles, they go on.
CHAPTER FORTY
Walked away from the station. Because I’d have to find my way back there, I took in the basic lay of the land, then I ducked down the first side street I came to, shutting out some of that busy crosstown, downtown, uptown goddamn traffic. Squatted under a low-hung fire escape, just near some trash bins, and I opened Dave’s suitcase. Stuck between two tapes were scraps of dark yellow paper. Waxy and thick, the kind used to wrap a parcel or some meat. They were folded in half and inside was Dave’s writing, neat block letters made in blue ballpoint.
On the first was Henry Brock’s address on Canal Street. Under it a rough map of New York, the bus station, and Brock’s marked out clearly.
The second was a note for Henry.
Took off for LA. This is Bozak. Settle up with her. Thanks. Dave
Read this twice, three times. Then four. Then I just stared at the writing. Christ, I missed him so much already.
Too early to go to Henry’s, plus I had until midnight to kill.
Gathered myself together and took a breath, then I cut east a few blocks, picked up Broadway and followed Dave’s map, heading south. Hungry again, found half a bagel in the trash. Toasted and with cream cheese and jam. Picked out two skinny Black ladies and followed them until they threw out their cups of coffee. Pretty full, one mucked with red lipstick, the other with pink. Crouched on the sidewalk, I drank them both, ate the bagel. Watched people walking.
Wished to go back to Central Park, find our crash, curl up in tarps and sleeping bag. And just wait. Safe and sound in the danger and murder of that dark heart, that park. Just wait until I up and died or midnight rolled around. Went on until I found something maybe as good, a park called Union Square. There was even another statue, a man on horseback. He was stern, mad about something, his arm raised, and he pointed me away, shooed me south, but still I stopped, sprawled out on the park’s entrance steps like others were doing. Stayed very still. Waiting for the day to die. Staring out at the city going past. My heartbeats kept pace with its noise. Lungs were strengthening against its thick ill. Once I’d had dirty dreams of living there, being a punk, and fitting in with other kinds of fuck-ups. That time was gone now, and I had missed it. Just like Slava said, punk was over. Saw some punks on the streets, but they were clean, housed, well fed, and their boots were shiny and new. And they were way older than me. But I wanted that too. Just to listen to punk because it was music that sounded good. Not because it was all I was, or who I wanted to become.
Opened up Dave’s suitcase again. Scanned the labels of his tapes. These were once his spirit and the world to him, and now I was going to sell them to some cheap dealer, the Walkman too. Shit. No, it was time to give up thinking punk was sacred. It had saved me, sure, from all the miserable shit of Black Dew Seat. Had Slava O’Right to thank for that, for saving my life. Dousing my soul with the parallel world
of punk rock music, making me believe I was not all alone. But now I wanted just to listen to it, not thrive on it. Wanted to love it, not survive by it. Do to punk what Dave had done with metal. Could toss that suitcase in the fucking bushes and Dave wouldn’t care, not anymore.
Opened up the Walkman. Thought I’d give the Misfits a listen, just to say goodbye to New York. Just to pass the time. Pressed eject. Door popped and something small fell out. It got stuck between Slave Hunter and Slayer. Pulled off my mitt and fished it out—Dave’s dad’s goddamn tooth. And the last piece of Dave Bashed-up-Boat. The final feather, a scale of skin, ready at long last, to shed. Maybe he had just forgotten it. Thought I’d pocket it, take it out to LA, but then I thought again and I put that bit of Dave back where I’d found it and I closed the case.
When the rain came, I was glad for it and decided to head for Henry’s. Most of the afternoon was long-gone by then anyway. New Yorkers were all running and pushing, eyes scrunched up, shoulders hunched, some had newspapers and briefcases held over their heads, others groped for umbrellas buried in their dumb bags. Cabs skidded around, picking up all those weak types who couldn’t stand to get a little bit wet. Except for the smooth neon shine reflecting back off wet streets and sidewalks, the city had gone a daytime dark. And there was thunder and lightening. The spray paint from my hair was dripping down my jacket and face, and when I tried to wipe it away, my mitts got stained.
Portaging through the streets, I had the case balanced on my head just like some of those businessman-types. Kept the rain off a bit, and also it was easier on my back to carry like that. People cleared the way when they saw me coming, a fucked-up orphan with smeared black face and a big bashed-up suitcase. Spurs on the boots, knife at the belt, Goddamns still stencilled proudly on the back.
Walked on. Straight south down Broadway so I would not get lost. The moist smell from my armpits and the cold fresh of rain sent the dread memory of northern bush ripping through me. Head bent, lids lowered, eyes peeled into the straight ahead. Streets were quiet on account of the cold and wet, especially so the further I got south.