Brooklyn, Burning

by Steve Brezenoff

  “Did you start the fire at the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse on the morning of May second of this year?”

  I looked at the microphone, and then at the tape recorder itself. I didn’t say anything.

  “Would you like me to repeat the question?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have to answer, right?”

  “Sweetie…,” my mother whispered at me. My father didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the cop said, repeating from the list of rights he’d given me earlier.

  I nodded and sat back in my chair. No one moved for a minute, no one spoke. Finally my father stood up.

  “We’re finished?” he said.

  A cop sighed and I waited. He looked at me. “We’ve got nothing to hold you on, but we’ll want to talk to you again. You’re advised not to leave town.” He handed me a business card. It said he was Detective Tye Blank. “I’d also advise you to stay with your parents for a while. I don’t want to involve social services.”

  My mother and I stood and followed my father from the room and down the hall. We went past the front desk and out the big double doors, down the front stone steps, past ten cops in uniform, smoking, and turned east to walk along Meserole, across McGuinness, to our home. Dad opened the door to our building, and then the door to our apartment. My mother and I followed him in. When the door closed with a thud and click, he said, “Did you start that fire?”

  I looked at him, then hitched my bag higher onto my shoulder and walked into the bathroom and locked the door. A shower would be nice.

  …

  I got dressed in my room, then repacked my bag with some clean clothes and went through the living room. I couldn’t stay in the apartment, not when I knew Fish was closed down, that Jonny was finally back, that you were out there too, maybe with no place to stay. I went for the door, but my father moved quickly to block it.

  “Not yet,” he said. “First, answer my question. Did you start that fire?”

  “What difference does it make?” I said. “Who cares about that stupid warehouse? Even if I did burn it down, I’d have been doing the neighborhood a favor. It was a blight. It was disgusting. It had no value. It needed to come down.”

  “You’re not leaving this apartment, not tonight,” my father said. He looked over my shoulder at my mother. She was sitting on the couch in the living room. The TV was on, the volume up enough to drown us out. She didn’t look at me or my father; she just looked at the TV.

  “Dad, you kicked me out of this apartment, remember?” I said.

  “And you went and became an urchin and burned down the warehouse. So now you’re staying put.”

  “So now I’m not allowed to leave? Make up your mind!”

  My father crossed his arms and leaned against the door. “As soon as you make up your mind, we’ll make up ours.”

  I squinted at him, working it through. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think you know.”

  “Move.”

  “Did you burn down the warehouse?”

  I hitched up my bag and stepped toward him. “Yes. Move.”

  He stepped to one side, opening the door for me as he did.

  My mother got up from the couch, but she didn’t say anything and she didn’t make a move to stop me, so I went through, out of the apartment.

  BY ORDER OF THE NYPD

  It’s a long walk back to the river, and it was already after ten. I don’t know what I hoped to find there; with Fish’s place closed, Jonny wouldn’t be around, and you … I had no idea what you’d be up to. I probably should have found Konny. Instead I headed west.

  The first full day of summer was nearly over. During morning rush hour and evening rush hour, you’d never know summer had begun. But at this time of night, there was an obvious shift. The streets were filled with people, like always, but these people were different. These were high schoolers, out late, buzzing with freedom as much as anything else. These were people like you; people who took their freedom a little farther, and found Brooklyn. People like Jonny, who appeared every June and vanished every September, and no one asked why.

  There were college kids too, renting for the summer while they interned three hours a week at some publisher or nonprofit. Maybe they nannied on the Upper East Side. When they moved in groups up and down Bedford, I could quickly size them up and make a good guess: Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Barnard? Purchase, NYU, Oberlin? Each was like a species of bird, and if you knew which had a crown of red feathers or a green streak along its back or a belly of speckled gold, you knew them through and through.

  I walked along McGuinness as long as I could. I didn’t want to see any people, but cars I didn’t mind so much. They flew down the boulevard, mostly north, into Queens, probably to the 59th Street Bridge, to Manhattan. A few streamed over the Pulaski toward me as I walked. Finally I hit Greenpoint Avenue and turned left, down toward the river. There were pedestrians immediately, walking three or four wide down the sidewalk. I stepped into the street and walked between parked cars and traffic. I crossed Manhattan and descended to Franklin.

  “Kid!” It was Jonny, sitting at an outdoor table at the Pencil Factory, the bar on the corner. The table was full of empty glasses of various sizes, and I knew he was the last remaining at what must have been a full table. I wondered when the next shift of Jonny admirers would arrive, and decided maybe that it was me.

  Jonny got up, finally smiling, and opened his arms to me, so I fell into them. I’d missed his hugs, so I let it go a little longer than I knew I would next time. He ran a hand up and down my back, in that way he does that makes me wonder where the line between lust and love is, between appropriate and not, and I pulled away and sat down in the empty seat across from him. I smiled up at him.

  “Hi, Jonny,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “I’ll get you a drink. Sit tight.” He went off to the bar and I watched him weave through the heavy wooden tables inside, to the people standing at the bar. He leaned over them, pushed into them, always smiling, and being smiled at. It didn’t take long for him to get the drinks. Both must have been buybacks, since he never paid for them. Soon he was back at the table. He put a tall skinny glass, a vodka cranberry with a slice of lime, in front of me. I slipped my lips over the red stirrer and took a long pull on it. It was cold, and I shuddered, but I liked it.

  Jonny looked at me. I ran a hand through my hair and then a finger up the side of my glass. “Jonny,” I said. “This summer is fucked.”

  He laughed and nodded. “Not what I expected first day back. I hadn’t even heard about the fire.” He leaned forward. “Was it you?”

  I lifted my eyebrows and took another long sip of my drink. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m just worried about Fish. Do you think they’ll keep her closed?”

  Jonny shrugged and lifted his glass. “I doubt it, not for more than a couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks?” I said, sagging. That’s an eternity on summer time. I pushed the stirrer aside and took another sip. An ice cube slid up and tapped the tip of my nose. “Do you know what happened to Scout?”

  “Scout?” Jonny said. “I don’t—Is that the new guitarist you were dragging around today?”

  I nodded.

  “Cute,” Jonny said, leering a little.

  “All right, cool off,” I said, smiling. I blushed a little.

  “Anyway, I have no idea,” Jonny said. “What about you? Do you have anywhere to stay?”

  “I guess I’m back home,” I said. I finished my drink, and then used the stirrer to suck up the last watery sip. “I mean, for now. The cops threatened to put me in foster care, pretty much.”

  “Ooh, ouch,” Jonny said. “Social workers.”

  I laughed in spite of myself and stirred the ice in my empty glass, then pulled out the stirrer and started chewing it. My soft pack was in my back pocket, so I reached for it, but when I stuck my finger in and groped to the
corners, I found it was empty.

  A big man came up to our table. He was head-to-toe in denim. His round, chinless face was well bearded. He was wearing John Lennon glasses and holding a pipe. He smiled at Jonny, who got up from the table, and I got up too with a few of Jonny’s cigarettes and lit one, then slid the rest into my own pack. “Bye, Jonny. I’ll be around.”

  Jonny smiled at me and waved before he threw his arms into a new, extra-large hug for the next visitor, and I walked away feeling lonely. I’d meant to go home after that drink, but the last place I wanted to head was home, lonely as I was.

  Instead I headed two blocks out of my way, to Fish’s place. I just wanted to see the door, to see if they’d posted one of those notices from the NYPD. They had, and I stood there like an idiot reading this stupid six-word notice on its caution-orange paper, glued crooked and wrinkled right on the heavy metal outer door, behind the dropped gate: “Closed by Order of the NYPD.”

  You came up next to me and read it too. I didn’t even turn, not at first. The truth is I wanted to turn to you, so close to me, shoulder to shoulder as we were, and put my arms around your neck. “I thought I’d never see you again,” I wanted to say, panting at your ear, but I didn’t.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here,” I said instead.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw you shrug. “I’ve been wandering around here since you … left,” you said. You shuffled a little and pushed back your bangs. “I was looking at that mural. It’s really good.”

  I coughed and let a finger slip into my pocket to play with my cigarettes. “Thanks.”

  “Who’s the boy?” you asked.

  “That’s the boy on your flyer,” I said. “That’s Felix, off into the sunset.”

  You didn’t say anything, and a car thumped along Franklin behind us, its speakers booming Dominican beats.

  “I guess you still need somewhere to stay, huh?” I said.

  “Seems like maybe you do too,” you replied.

  I let myself turn to face you, and took a step back. Your eyes were right there with me, not shooting off on some interplanetary voyage. “I’m going home,” I said. “It’s late. You can come, sneak in. They won’t even know we were there.”

  “Who?”

  “My parents,” I said. “Come on.” And I took your hand, just for an instant, to turn you around to follow me. When I let your hand fall again, as we started walking, you used it to hitch up your gig bag, and I slid mine into my pocket for my lighter.

  (THE FIRST TIME I HEARD FELIX)

  Are you ready to hear about Felix? I contrived to meet him on the first day of summer break that year, 2005. I was meandering in Greenpoint, kicking around with Konny like we did—before Konny was working down at the comic shop.

  “What should we do?” Konny said.

  It was hot. The air was thick with the smell of roasting garbage sitting in black bags on the edges of the sidewalks. We were stopped at the little ice cream window on Greenpoint Avenue, and Konny was working on her cone. I didn’t feel like ice cream, but I was considering dropping a couple of bucks on street meat: something on a wooden skewer with a hunk of bread, but the man at the corner of Manhattan Avenue wasn’t in his usual spot.

  I kicked at the iron rail Konny was leaning on, then grabbed it and leaned way over, till the sharp little accents running along its top, like spearheads but shaped like tiny pineapples, poked me in the belly. “Anything,” I said. “Anything we want for three months.”

  “It stinks,” Konny said. “Let’s beat feet out of here, anyway.”

  “Yup.” We headed down Greenpoint toward the water. As we crossed Manhattan, we heard a strum on a thick-toned guitar. “Is that a Telecaster?”

  Konny shrugged. “Might be an SG. It’s muddy as hell.” Konny was the only guitarist I knew then. We played around a lot, mostly down at the high school so I could use the school’s kit in the music room. We weren’t a band exactly; Konny wasn’t interested in getting good or playing anything beautiful. Not like Felix, and not like you. She just liked to play loud and she’d often turn to me while we played and spit on me, then laugh. This was the year she took my clippers to the back of her head. “Boy in the back, girl in the front,” she’d said.

  “Let’s go see.” We rounded Franklin and stood at the corner for a minute, trying to pinpoint the source. Konny thought straight, closer to the warehouses down on the water, where every cool kid with a black-and-white film camera shot nearly every picture in their senior portfolio for art class. I’m not a photographer, though. I’m a painter.

  “I think it’s down here,” I said, thumbing north.

  The right answer came from an unfamiliar voice. “It’s under Fish’s bar.” A youngish—but old enough to drink at noon, I guess—skinny guy with white-blond hair was sitting at a table outside the Pencil Factory, the bar on the corner where we were standing. Konny and I turned and faced him, Konny all sneers and squints, me all apprehension and longing. He was drinking a tall red drink, nearly empty, with about ten chunks of lime squashed in it. Across from him was an empty short glass with a cigarette butt in it. Oddly, he was smiling, sitting there alone, watching us. It was Jonny, of course—Jonny who smiled at me from our very first moment.

  “Where’s Fish’s bar?” Konny asked. Jonny pointed over our heads, and Konny turned to look. I kept my eyes on Jonny, though. “I don’t see any bar.” Konny turned back, sneering more deeply.

  Jonny got up, leaving his drained drink and his invisible tablemate, and walked over to and past us. He crossed Greenpoint and got about ten steps farther down Franklin before stopping and dramatically turning to us, arms akimbo. “Coming?”

  I smiled and ran at him, then waved Konny to come along too. With a roll of her eyes, she did.

  “What are your names? Mine’s Jonny.”

  “I’m Konny with a ‘K,’ this is Kid.”

  “Also with a ‘K,’” I added.

  “Konny. I like that: you come right after me.” Jonny danced his eyebrows, then led us across Kent and Java streets. “And here’s Fish’s place. Easy to miss, huh?”

  Its front was just a door off the street and two big windows, one with a Pabst sign, switched off. The windows were too dirty, and the inside was too dark, to see anything at all. But there was no doubt: the gorgeous guitar was coming from the open cellar doors at our feet.

  “And down there is Felix.”

  Jonny went into Fish’s place, and Konny gave me a look: Should we go in? But I wasn’t interested, because that’s when Felix began to sing.

  I don’t remember what he sang about; I’m not sure I ever knew. It was his voice, gritty but gentle, like my father’s hands when I was too small to see past them, and the slow way his melody moved along its path, not in any hurry but enjoying every note for itself, rather than looking forward to the next note, and the next, until the song’s end. This song would have no end; it couldn’t possibly. This song was forever.

  That’s what I thought. And I knew right then, letting Konny take my hand and pull me into Fish’s place for the first time, that I’d meet the person with that voice.

  TAKE THE BED

  “I guess I thought you had run away,” you said as we walked along McGuinness. There was plenty of traffic on the boulevard still. The BQE, over and in front of us, was stopped dead, like usual, as it approached the Queens border.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I was evicted.”

  “Your parents kicked you out?”

  I nodded and glanced left and right quickly. You looked back and forth too—but nervously, with your lip tucked in and under your top teeth. When the traffic cleared enough, I muttered, “Come on,” and then jogged across the boulevard, knowing you’d follow my lead. You did.

  “Tonight my father wouldn’t let me leave, though,” I added when you reached me. “I’m trying to figure out how to get in without anyone knowing, especially how to get you in.” I laughed. “They’d love that, meeting you.”

 
; You looked at your sneakers so I shut up and quit laughing.

  “It’s on the next block.” Ahead, across from my building, an SUV was parked with its windows open and music blaring. All we could make out was a fast beat; the bass shook the whole car. If I hadn’t seen and heard this scene a hundred times before, I might have thought the back window would blow out. On and around the stoop of the building closest to the car, about ten guys hung out, screaming to each other and drinking beers.

  “We’re across from the party. They might be awake.” I let us into our building and led you up the two flights to our apartment door. “Let me check first. Don’t move.”

  I opened the door and stepped inside, leaving the entryway light off. The apartment was silent, so I stuck my head back out the door and grabbed your wrist, hissing at you: “Okay. Come on.”

  I couldn’t let your wrist go, not this time. I let my hand slide down a little, to your open palm, and felt it close over me. We went down the cracked linoleum floor of the hallway, hitting every creaking spot. I wasn’t worried; my parents usually sleep with the window open, but that night, with the party going on at the stoop across the street, I knew my father would have insisted on the window air conditioner being on in their bedroom. It would drown us out.

  My bedroom door stood open. My dirty, street-lived clothes lay in a pile on the carpet. I closed the door and locked it when you came in, finally letting go of your hand. I didn’t turn on the light.

  “You can have the bed,” I said, watching you in the dark. Enough light came in through my venetian blinds, dropped to the floor and sealed up tight, so I could make out your slim figure. I watched you look around and find a place your guitar might be safe. You leaned it in the corner and knocked my little trashcan over. It was empty.

  “Leave it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Just be quiet.”

  “Sorry,” you whispered back, moving toward me. “You take the bed. I don’t mind. You probably miss it.”

  “Okay.” I pulled one of the two pillows off my bed and dropped it on the floor, then followed it with a blanket. “If you need it. It’s pretty hot, I guess.”