Felix and I were walking along West Street early one morning, before the sun was up, before Fish had even locked up the bar. Felix let his key ring spin around his finger as he walked, and said, “We should get more people.”
I glanced at him through a squint as some smoke came out of my nose and floated up my face. “For what?”
“The band,” he said. “We should get a bass. Keys, horns … hell, a goddamn orchestra.” He stopped and looked down Quay at the warehouse and over the river. “French horns.”
“You’re Brian Wilson.”
He laughed a little. “Why not? He had the right idea. Bigger and higher and greatness. Way past the horizon.”
We walked down Quay, through the open gate in the tall chain-link fence, and across the weedy old parking lot, all the way to the retaining wall of broke-down cement slabs. We sat down and each lit a new cigarette.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “About the band, I mean. I kind of thought you didn’t much care.”
“Of course I care,” Felix said. “It’s all I care about.”
I looked out over the river. “You never say anything about it. You just play. You never even say, you know, ‘That was good,’ or anything.”
Felix took a deep drag and let it out, then shook with a chill as the wind came up off the river. “I think we’ve gotten good, you and me. And I think if we take it one step further, one level higher…”
“One step beyond!” I said, smiling, glad for Felix’s positive mood, but suddenly his voice dropped away and he closed his eyes.
“I can’t stay here, Kid.”
I dropped my cigarette and stepped it out. “I know.”
We stood together, and I wanted to put my arms around his spare frame, hold his head against my chest. But instead I said, “You’re leaving Brooklyn, Felix?”
He blew gently through pursed lips, in a long, thin sigh. “It’s not Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn. But yeah, I guess I am.”
I’d never heard Felix say so much, and I struggled for words to reply, but he went on. “I also hate it. Three stories, one lot, a square block, rows upon rows of square blocks, rows upon rows of three-story buildings—just brick walls around fenced-off gardens, tiny hidden sanctuaries, filled with little patio sets and self-standing hammocks and hipsters with ironic beers.”
I nodded. “Where you gonna go?”
He might have shrugged, very softly. “Where can I go? A different city? A different country?”
“You could.” We could.
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. When I reached into my pocket for another cigarette, I bumped Felix with my elbow, and he suddenly smiled, snapped from his reverie. “Let’s make flyers, Kid. Let’s get more players. Let’s really do something.”
His excitement was so contagious, so rare. I hopped on my toes a little. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Right now.”
“Yeah, right now! Fish has a copier in her office upstairs.”
Felix threw an arm around my shoulders and I leaned my head against his, and together, in that half hug, we walked back up Quay to Fish’s place.
…
Nights and days at Fish’s blurred together as that summer tumbled to its end. Jonny would get me alcohol, at his place or from his pocket or at the bar down the street. And sometimes, when Fish was in a good mood, a sly wink from Jonny would land me a nice vodka and cranberry juice, just like Jonny’s, and the two of us would huddle in our back booth, where we could easily sneak out for a cigarette by the back fence, or just sit and watch Felix on the stage. Fish was giving him more and more sets, just him and his guitar and voice. Not with me, of course. She wouldn’t let a fifteen-year-old punk like me near the stage: an underage customer on display for the world? Nuh-uh.
When I was full of drink and watching Felix, my eyes would glaze over, and I’d think about how beautiful he was—his heart and his face and his music—and Jonny would let me lean on his shoulder.
“You’re smashed for this boy, huh?”
I nodded against him and let myself smile. It didn’t happen a lot. Not then.
Jonny shook his head slowly and picked up his drink. It was sweating.
The bar was nearly empty, and Felix’s voice floated softly between the cracked linoleum of the floor and the punched tin on the ceiling. When the last song was over, he sat quietly on his chair, like always, lost. Fish strode up to me and Jonny and started in, wiping the table right under my nose.
“Let me just get this drool,” she said. I kicked her in the shin. “Ow.”
Jonny smiled and nudged my shoulder so I’d get up. “Smoke.”
The three of us went outside. Fish glanced at the bar. Two regulars sat there, drinks well topped off. The barback, Gino, leaned against the rack, with no empties to collect and no stock to replace. It was very slow.
Jonny lit our cigarettes and then his own. “You should be careful, Kid.”
I looked at him, hard. I was very drunk, since his nod-and-wink routine was working like a charm on Fish that night, and I’d had quite a few drinks.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s not like I have far to go.”
The two of them looked at me. What the fuck was this?
“You gave me the drinks!” I snapped. “I’ve been drinking all summer, since you knew me. It’s always you, Jonny. You’re the one helping me get fucked up, helping me to forget that it’s really just summer and I’m really just lost.”
Fish sighed. “Sweetie…”
“It’s true,” I said, softly now. “I don’t want to remember that summers end, that I won’t be going home, back to normal—that I’m really … just a street kid.”
Jonny put an arm around me and I went on after a breath. “I’m safe with Felix, anyway. Everyone loves Felix.”
“Everyone does,” Fish admitted. “You do more than most, sweetie.”
My head spun. What was this about? Drinking—or Felix?
“Just don’t get too close, Kid,” Jonny said.
“He’s a mess.” Fish took a hard last drag and dropped her cigarette, then stomped it out. “I love him, and I’ve known him a few years, but he’s not sticking around. Something’s going to take him from you.”
Jonny’s smile slipped, just for a second, and he looked at Fish. “She means he wanders, Kid,” Jonny said. He squeezed my shoulders harder, affectionately. “It’s the kind of soul he’s got.” I felt him shrug. “Fish and me, you can count on us to be here, whenever you need us—me in the summer, anyway. That’s why, you know, a drinkie drink now and then is not a big deal. But in a month or a week, in a minute, Felix could be gone.”
“He’s not a mess,” I said, looking squarely into Fish’s green eyes. “Is this just about the heroin?”
“‘Just’?” Fish said. She laughed and went back inside.
“Sorry, Kid,” Jonny said. “We worry about you, you know that. We worry about Felix too, but, well…”
“‘Well’ what? He’s beyond help?”
Jonny shrugged again, and I flung my cigarette butt at the back fence, then went down to the cellar. Felix was already there, laid out on the couch. His guitar leaned on an amp, crackling gently. I switched it off.
“Why’d you do that?” Felix muttered.
“I thought you were asleep.” He shook his head, and I walked over to the couch. “You want it back on?”
He shook his head again, so I sat on the arm and ran my hand across his head, front to back, then again, and he reached up and took my hand. I leaned down and found his mouth with mine, gently, our lips barely meeting because we were not close enough. I had to strain a little, to get closer, and he pulled me down, so our mouths pressed together. I turned and slid down off the arm so I was next to him, and he wrapped himself around me.
And then I knew Fish and Jonny were right. I was smashed for this boy, but it was too late.
WE GO UP
I slept on edge, with you on my floor and my parents a door away, so I was awa
ke at dawn. I leaned across to the blinds and pulled them apart to see the sickly orange of a Greenpoint sunrise, so gorgeous at its source but made grotesque by the air between Brooklyn and the end of the island.
It was Monday morning, I realized, and I could smell the coffee and hear the gurgling of Mom’s ancient percolator. They’d be getting ready for work: my dad packing fish at the factory a couple of blocks away, and my mother working as a nurse at Maimonides, the hospital in Boro Park. Getting out of the house would be tougher than getting in. I swung my legs off the bed and found my jeans. Then I kicked your foot.
“Wake up.”
You rolled onto your side and pulled up your knees for a moment. I heard you suck in a deep breath, and then you stretched your long legs down, pointed your toes and nearly purred like a cat in the sun. With your eyes still closed, you smiled then twisted onto your back. You faced me as your eyes opened and I caught my breath.
“Hi.”
“My parents are awake. We’ll have to be quiet and go out the window.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“I heard something about a fire, but…”
“Another time.” I smiled at you and found your jeans. “Get your pants on.” I tossed them over your face.
…
The fire escape off my bedroom is over the back garden. With your gig bag on your shoulder, you stood next to me and leaned against the wrought-iron railing, looked out over the backyards of my Greenpoint block. Like most of Brooklyn, our collective backyards were more like the central courtyard of some medieval fortress: no alley to reach them, no entrance of any kind without going through someone’s house.
Every little yard, barely twenty feet wide, was closed in with a ten-foot-high fence. Ours was typical: mostly cement, with a sad attempt at landscaping along the fence. A collection of old paving stones was piled in the corner, where our back fence met our side fence. At the house behind ours, they’d built a little patio and installed a hot tub. To the right of us, they’d let it go wild. They didn’t go back there, not ever. My dad used to smoke in our backyard, but he quit smoking when I was a baby.
“We can’t get out that way,” I said, putting a hand on your arm. “Obviously.”
You looked out still, then around you.
“We go up,” I said, and it was clear you weren’t from the city.
The chipping old paint of the narrow-runged ladder up to the third floor stuck into my palms and fingers as I climbed. My shoulder bag, heavy with some fresh clothes and more art supplies, tried to pull me off the ladder. At my upstairs neighbor’s fire escape, quiet, I stopped a moment to look back for you, then I went on, up the funny straight ladder to the roof, that U-turned at the top, bent over the ledge. I stopped at the top and looked down after you, then out at the sunrise.
“Too bad we can’t linger a little,” you said, coming up next to me. “It’s pretty.”
I shrugged. “I heard once that Greenpoint has the most colorful sunsets and sunrises in the city,’cause of all that pollution. The chemicals in the air make for better colors.”
“Really?” you said, looking at me sideways. “That’s depressing.”
“I guess.”
We lingered after all, just for a minute.
“I like the sunrises back home,” you said, more quietly now, like our moment of silence had set the precedent and your voice might disturb us.
“Where’s home?” I should have asked.
“Never mind,” you said, and you took my wrist. “We’re going down the front, right?”
Then you let me go and turned away, strutted across the cooled tar roof toward the black pool ladder at the front.
“Be careful, okay?” I called after, then I followed.
We’d been walking in silence for a block or two when you spoke up. “Can you hang out today?”
I slipped my hands into my pockets and pushed them down till my elbows were straight and my jeans gathered a little at the ankles. “Sure. If you want to.”
“I’d love to play again.”
“The bar’s closed. I don’t know for how long. We should probably stay out of the cellar too.”
“Right.”
I led you under the expressway, past the McDonald’s. I could smell sausage, between gasps of urine and exhaust, and it made me hungry. “We can find Konny. She’ll be opening in a little while.”
“Is Konny … are you two, you know, together?”
I rolled my eyes and sucked my teeth, but didn’t answer.
We walked quietly for a few blocks. I kept my eyes ahead and tried not to try to let my hand brush yours. When it did, you hitched your gig bag and looked around you, like Jon Voight in one of the movies you made me watch, on his first day in the city or something. My stomach growled and I grabbed it, but you couldn’t have heard it.
“I have a little money,” you said when we reached the strip along Metropolitan Avenue. “I’m hungry if you are. Anything cheap, and I’ll buy.”
There was a Korean deli open, so we went in and I ordered myself an egg sandwich.
“I’ll have the same thing,” you said. I watched you from the deli counter as you strode the wide aisles and picked things up from the refrigerated case: blue cheese; a green basket of fresh tofu, three chunks; Red Bull. You looked them each over, then put them back. Finally you chose a plum from the display in the center of the store and brought it to the counter. The wife of the man making our breakfast was standing there.
“Just a plum?”
“And the two sandwiches.”
She called to her husband, who was wrapping our sandwiches, and he called back. Then she punched the register and announced, “Six fifty.”
You whistled through a smile and pulled out a wallet. I could see into it, just a little, but there were papers and ticket stubs, sticking out here and there, a history in scraps, and for an instant I itched to know where you were from. The husband held out a paper bag and I took it.
…
We found a little park—tiny; part of the Green Streets initiative, maybe—and sat on a bench, took up the whole thing, with the deli bag between us and your gig bag leaning on the end. The sandwiches had cooled a bit by then, wrapped only in waxed paper and that brown paper bag. The cheese on the edges wasn’t oozing anymore, and before I even took a bite from the sandwich, I scraped with a fingernail at the congealed cheese on the paper.
“Thanks,” I said, with my fingertip in my teeth.
“Least I could do.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I know, I’m not supposed to ask. You don’t have to answer.”
You looked straight out into the street. The morning had really begun by then. Traffic was heavy and slow and the smell of Monday morning garbage in the summer was strong. Not the best place to eat breakfast, but at least we were still free.
“I just wanted to see what it was like, I guess.”
“Brooklyn?”
You shrugged. “Brooklyn, I guess. I’d never been here before, can you believe it? Manhattan, sure. Even Queens, when I was little and my dad used to slap a Mets hat on my head.” You laughed and took another, last bite of that sandwich. Then you wiped your mouth and pulled that plum from the paper bag between us. “But I think I wasn’t just looking for a place, you know?”
I finished my sandwich too and found a napkin in the bag. The sidewalks were full of commuters, all types of dress, from suits to sloppy. Most of their ears were covered or filled with headphones, and most of them carried a bag. I looked at my feet, at my beat-up backpack, torn and patched and discolored, and I wondered what these people needed to bring with them, every day, on that subway ride into Manhattan. And I thought I’d risk it, and said, “Looking for me?”
I laughed quickly to cover, but you didn’t.
“Maybe. So far I like it here.”
I let my smile fade and leaned back, and I wished that paper bag, full now of our empty wrappers
and sitting between us on our bench, would just blow away.
AFTER BEING IN A FIRE
“Will you tell me about the fire?” We were leaning on the gate at Zeph’s comic shop, waiting for Konny to wake up and open. She was still staying in the apartment in the back, the room that was supposed to be the Zeph’s office.
“There’s nothing really to tell,” I said, hugging my knees. “This old warehouse down on Water Street—right on the river, I mean—it burned for like three days, back in May. No one knows how it started. They’re sure it wasn’t an accident, though.”
“And the cops think you did it?”
I let go of my knees and drummed on my thighs, then dug around in my backpack, hoping I had a few of Jonny’s cigarettes left. I did, and I lit one.
“Were you there when it burned?” you asked, like on the edge of your seat.
“Yes. I was inside for some of it.”
“Did you start it? Are the cops right?” I didn’t answer right away. “I wouldn’t care if you said yes, you know. It doesn’t matter.”
I took a long drag and let it out. “You wouldn’t? Not even a little?” I hadn’t meant to make you feel stupid, but it came out bratty.
You got up and played with the links in the gate so it rattled and bumped my back. “I can’t believe you’d keep smoking,” you said, “after being in a fire,” and I let my head fall back into the gate so it rattled again.
I held the cigarette between my thumb and pointer and watched it burn. “I know. I only still smoke because Felix did, I think.”
“The guy who made the flyer?”
I dropped the cigarette between my knees and squashed it with the heel of my sneaker. “Yeah.” I got up. “Let’s go.”
“I thought we were waiting for Konny.”
I pulled on my bag and handed you your guitar. “Let’s go to Fish’s. We can play in the cellar. I have the key. She’ll never know.”
Brooklyn, Burning Page 6