by Tim Murphy
“Jared took him to the hospital. I think he’s okay. It just looked like a little cut.”
“What hospital? Beth Israel?”
Ardit nodded. Milly put the pizzas down on a handsome, high-backed wooden bench in the lobby, pulled out her cell phone, and called Jared. Her heart was pounding.
“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Ardit just told me what happened.”
“He’s fine,” Jared said. “He got, like, two stitches and he’s waiting for a rabies shot. We should be home soon.”
“Is he doing okay?” Milly asked. “Can I talk to him?”
“Sure, he’s right here.”
“Hi, Mommy,” Mateo said.
“You’re okay, sweetheart?”
“I’m okay. I gotta get a shot.”
“What happened, Mateo?”
“I was running down the hall and Sonya came out the door and chased me and bit me until Hector grabbed her and took her back inside.”
“Oh, sweetheart! I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“He’s okay.” It was Jared, back on the line. “We came back in from the park and he wanted to run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, so I let him. And I guess at some point he decided to run down the hall on Hector’s floor and Hector’s door was ajar and the dog came out.”
“Oh my goodness.” Milly kept glancing up at Ardit, who was shaking his head balefully. “Did Hector say anything?”
“I didn’t wait. Mateo was crying when he got to the apartment so I took him right to the hospital. But I already took pictures of the bite and called a lawyer. Milly, we have to do something about getting Hector out of the building.”
That felt like jumping a step ahead, she thought. The dog, maybe. But Hector himself? “You think so?” she asked weakly.
“He’s becoming a menace. The drugs, the sleazy guys in and out of the apartment at all hours, the negligence with that crazy dog. Some folks think he’s dealing drugs out of there. He’s going to burn down the building one night.”
“Maybe I could ask my mother to talk to him,” she said. “Reconnect and see what he needs.”
Jared harrumphed lightly over the phone, as though he thought it was far too late for that, and slightly as though he was annoyed by Milly’s softness. “Anyway, we’ll be home soon. Don’t worry about Mateo, he’s okay.”
“I have pizza here,” she remembered to add.
After she put away her phone and stood up, a bit dazed from the swift unfolding of events, Ardit said, “That Hector, he’s bad news.”
“Do you think he’s dealing drugs out of the apartment?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Guys in and out of here all night.”
“He’s deteriorating,” Milly said. “He once was very prominent.”
Ardit shrugged, seemingly unimpressed by this news. “He’s got a problem now,” he said.
Milly made her mmm sound again before thanking Ardit and getting into the elevator. Then she did something strange. Instead of pressing “6,” she pressed “9,” Hector’s floor. Stepping out there, she walked down the hall. Even before coming to his door, she could hear the thump of the dance music emanating from his apartment. She stood before his door and pressed her ear to it, able to hear nothing but the music. Should she knock or ring the bell and try to say something to him? Then she thought about Jared calling the lawyer and how he might not like that because it might interfere in some legal proceeding.
Suddenly, she heard the sound of the dog barking its way toward the door, as if it sensed her presence. Panicked, she ran down the hallway with the pizza and slipped into the stairwell, fast enough that she never knew if Hector came to the door. She caught her breath and collected herself before taking the three flights down to their apartment, where she called her mother, who was still at Judith House, not very many blocks away.
“You’re not going to believe what happened,” she told her mother. “Hector’s dog bit Mateo and Jared had to take him to the hospital for stitches and a rabies shot. And Jared wants to sue Hector and get him out of the building.”
“Oh my God,” said Ava slowly. “Is Mateo okay?”
“Jared says he’s okay. But—should I say something to Hector? Should we? Would you? I feel terrible. Apparently he has a huge drug problem now. And he’s not taking care of that dog.”
Ava sighed. “Everyone he’s ever worked with has tried to do something for him. He doesn’t want anyone’s help. He stopped returning my calls three, four years ago.”
“Really?”
“I think he did actually go to rehab a few years ago, but it didn’t stick, apparently.”
“People are worried he’s going to start a fire or an explosion or something in the building one night.”
“You might have to look into some legal recourse,” Ava said. In the background, Milly could hear the laughter and conversation of the women who lived in the AIDS residence her mother ran. “That’s very sad to think.”
“That’s what Jared says, too.”
“You’re still coming for dinner tomorrow night?”
“Of course.”
The pizzas had gotten cold. Milly put them in the oven and leafed through the sections of the Sunday Times that had already come to the house, in advance of the parts that came Sunday morning. Thirty minutes later, Jared and Mateo were back.
“Look!” said Mateo. He showed off the three stitches in his left calf, where the dog had sunk her teeth in.
Milly held him close. “I’m just glad you’re okay. It must have been scary.”
“I was really scared.”
“We’re going to talk to Hector about his dog,” Milly said. “She won’t hurt you again.”
Later, after they’d finished the pizza and Mateo was absorbed in TV cartoons and his drawing, Jared told her, in a low voice, “Me and a few others are going to see a lawyer this week about Hector. I wanna try to get him out of here.”
Milly shook her head. “It’s so sad,” she said. “I told my mother what happened. She said people have tried to help him the past few years, but nothing changes.”
“I don’t really give a shit about him,” Jared said flatly. “I care about the building.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just saying he wasn’t always like that. It’s sad how someone can just go downhill.”
Jared shrugged. “Nobody’s making him be a tragedy. It’s his choice.”
“Well, he did lose a lover.”
“A lot of people did.”
Milly said no more about Hector. There was clearly no point, she realized. “Funny, what a perfect day this was up until this,” she said.
Jared took her hand across the table, played with it finger by finger. “Did you get some good work done?”
“A bit.” She paused. “It’s strange . . . I was in the studio looking out the window and I had a moment where a—like, a dark rush came over me, like something was wrong. It had to be Mateo and the dog.”
“You have a sense,” Jared said gravely.
“I wonder—” she began. Then she caught the glint in his eyes. “You’re mocking me!”
He laughed. “You’re always having those dark rushes,” he said tenderly.
She flushed. “I know. But this one was so . . . vivid. Staring out at that clear blue sky.”
They curled up as a trio in front of the TV and watched their new DVD of Dinosaur. Mateo was enthralled. Dinosaurs had been a favorite drawing subject of his since he was four or five, when they’d first met him in the group home in Brooklyn, and the movie had barely begun before he’d run for his pad and crayons and was trying to capture the baby dinosaur, Aladar. Milly absently ran her fingers through his curls while he drew. Their living room was dark, save for the alternating shades of blue flickering on the walls from the TV. Through the open windows, the so
unds of Saturday night East Village revels floated up to them from the street, the whoops and shouts and scraps of music from cars and bars. In turn, Milly and Jared napped on each other’s shoulders, under the afghan, while Mateo remained rapt before the screen. In the moments that Milly came half to, she had the drowsy, soothing sense of being nested between her husband and her son, grounded, in no fear of flying away.
TWO
A Mad Sick Nigga
(2009)
He’s the coolest; he’s got swagger, but he’s also sensitive and open. He’s a hip-hop hipster; he lives art-school thug life. He’s walking down the halls at Art and Design High School in midtown with Lupe Fiasco on his iPod, his massive hair pulled back in one of those comb-type headbands for boys, a long white T-shirt coming down over skintight Levi’s, which scrunch into high-top Airs. Sometimes he pulls up the T-shirt to show the tat on the left lower back that he designed, his tag—the grinning tiger with the mob cap slouched down over one eye, with M-DREEM 92 in stitching on the cap. That’s him, M-Dreem 92, the star of his high school, graduating three days from now and then going on to Pratt.
He loves this Lupe song, “Superstar”; he’s been listening to it for over a year and he mouths along with it. And then Ms. Courtney, one of his design teachers, twenty-eight and from Williamsburg and so sick cool with her retro bangs and her miniskirt and combat boots, flags him in the hall, so he pulls out his earbuds. She and some of the kids from Honors Design are meeting in July, after school’s out, to catch the opening of the Emory Douglas retrospective at the New Museum, all that fucking amazing graphic design for the Black Panthers, and does he want to come? Yeah, sure, he says, I’m down. He’s working at Utrecht, the art supply store, that summer, but he’ll request that afternoon off, so he’ll be there, yeah, sure.
“Awesome,” she says, with that hint of irony he loves about her, and he moseys on, noting that Ms. Courtney didn’t tell him to put the iPod away—which, technically, she should have, because it’s against school policy to use them in the facility—but then again, it’s the last day of school, there’s a loosey-goosey atmosphere along with the humidity, and, also, he suspects Ms. Courtney has a secret crush on him. She can play it cool and appropriate, but by now he knows how to pick it up in inflections. And he knows what he projects, how to turn it on and off, all the dials—the artist, the homeboy, the gifted child and all his drama.
So, his last day of high school. He’s alone in the hallway and he feels so good. He shows up late to Advanced Illustration, but it doesn’t really matter because half the class is absent for different reasons—all sorts of administrative loose ends to tie up today with transcripts, graduation rehearsals—and everyone’s just sitting around doing a crit on one another’s final projects, with cool Mr. Adeyemo and his massive locks tilted halfway back in his teacher’s seat, presiding over it all sleepily. Dude’s even wearing Birkenstocks today and damn those feet are ashy and need a cocoa butter rub.
He sits down next to Zoya, with her half-Egyptian, half-Boricua indie fierceness, her Amy Winehouse eyeliner, and rests his leg against hers. She rolls her eyes but doesn’t move her leg. He remembers when she spooked him back in March. They had been dating for all of two weeks, but it was complicated because there was that shortie, Vanessa, from Professional Children’s School whom he’d met at a rave in Greenpoint about the same time. He was at Zoya’s place in the East River Houses, overlooking the water and the condos going up in Billyburg, smoking herb, listening to Portishead, and feeling retro. A cold March night and they were wrapped in her Care Bears blanket from when she was little, giggling about stupid shit. And then that herb kicked in good and there was this period where the two of them just stared flat into each other’s eyes during “Roads,” and that line that hit him: I got nobody on my side. And surely that ain’t right. And surely that ain’t right.
“That’s me,” he told Zoya, and she spooked him because she said, “I know. I can see that about you so obviously.”
He tried to giggle off her penetrating stare. “What do you mean?”
“You said it yourself,” she answered. Then she burrowed into his concave chest, making this kind of mewing sound that was half cute, half annoying, and she left him to himself and his stoned brooding.
But they stayed friends—hey, it’s senior year, everybody’s friends by now—and now they’re leg-to-leg on the last day of school. And she’s like, “You going to Oscar’s tonight, right?” And he’s like, “I wouldn’t miss that shit.” And finally the crit comes up on his final project, After L.B., which was this intricate illustration of spiders using forced perspective. He called it After L.B. because earlier that year he got really into Louise Bourgeois, especially her big spider sculpture that he saw at the Dia center upstate, and he wanted to pay an homage to that cute old French lady with her sick, scary, genius art.
“So what do we think about Mr. M-Dreem’s study?” asks Mr. Adeyemo in his faint Nigerian accent, which M-Dreem loves. He adores Mr. Adeyemo, partly wants to be him. “What’s working and what’s lacking?” That’s a favorite catchphrase of Mr. Adeyemo’s.
The class is lethargic today, drunk on dreams of flight. “Good use of values,” says Horatio Cordero, sweet faced, bespectacled. “Good lines. Organic.”
“There’s good movement from top left to bottom right,” drawls Zoya. She says it in as bored a way as possible without looking at M-Dreem, then finally glances his way. He grins at her. She rolls her eyes and looks away, but it’s nice, he thinks, how their legs have been pressed together still this whole time.
M-Dreem finally speaks up on his own behalf. “I wanted the spiders to, like, make their own web. Not a spiderweb, but a web of actual spiders.”
Oooh, goes Zoya and another shortie, Alexa. “You’re so deep,” says Alexa.
Everybody laughs, including M-Dreem. “You just can’t handle all my levels,” he flips off.
Mr. Adeyemo leans forward, does that dramatic openmouthed thing where he’s going to speak and gets the class to shut up. “Let me tell you something, Mr. M-Dreem.” Another quiet round of ooohs goes up—everyone knows that when Mr. Adeyemo gets all enunciative, he’s about to get pronunciative, too. “We all know here you got mad skills.”
More laughs.
“We’ve all known that since day one you came in to Art and Design,” he continues. “You had good classes before you came.” Now this pricks M-Dreem a little bit and he frowns slightly at Mr. Adeyemo, hurt. Why’d he have to throw that in? “But it’s clear you had that thing.” Is Adeyemo trying to mollify him now? “And you’re just going to continue developing your skills and your technique next year at that fine school.”
“At Pratt, oooh,” goes Alexa.
M-Dreem shoots her a look. “Don’t make me,” he says.
“Double oooh,” she goes.
“But here’s my question for you going forward,” continues Mr. Adeyemo. “With all your form and skills, what’s M-Dreem trying to tell us? What’s up with the spiders?”
“What’s up with the spiders?” M-Dreem echoes defensively. “Nothing’s up with the spiders. I just think they’re cool. So did Louise Bourgeois. The work,” he says, pointing to his study, “it’s a pure expression of form.” He loves this term, which Ms. Courtney uses all the time, and he says it now maybe just a little haughtily. He and Mr. Adeyemo stare at each other for more than a natural moment, both of them with half-smiles on their faces, but there’s a strange, face-off vibe. There are some nervous titters. Zoya gives his leg a squeeze.
“I got two words for you going forward, my gifted M-Dreem,” Adeyemo finally says. “Be open.” He’s mad enunciating now. “Be open to it all, the form and the feeling.”
“That’s, like, twelve words,” Alexa remarks.
“You’re right, it is, Ms. Quiano,” Adeyemo says. “So let’s talk about your study now. Girls with Good Hair Jumping. What’s working and what’s lac
king?”
The class starts in on Alexa’s study, which is just what it sounds like: little girls with flowy long hair doing double Dutch, which M-Dreem thinks is kind of a mess technically, but he’s too distracted by Adeyemo’s strange injunction to him to really care. He’s glad the spotlight’s off him. Be open. I’m fucking open, he thinks, and he doesn’t even realize he’s sitting there slumped back, his leg off Zoya’s now, kind of brooding, until Mr. Adeyemo catches his eye amid the chatter and mouths to him, “It’s cool.”
M-Dreem sort of rolls his eyes and looks away, and he can’t really bring himself back to the here and now after that. He wishes he had a blunt. As he often does when he’s uncomfortable, he thinks about the snapshot with its date stamp: 04/14/1984. The short, pudgy, goofy-looking Dominicana thinking she’s fly with the Sheila E. asymmetrical haircut and the studded leather jacket, the lace leggings under the denim mini and the high heels, big dark eyes darting just to the left of the camera’s gaze, one arm up on the shoulder of that gay-looking moreno with the boom box on the ground under his left high-top. Damn. M-Dreem can’t believe there was ever a time in New York City called the 1980s; how could he have missed that shit, Basquiat and Haring and Fab 5 Freddy and all the rest? But miss it he did. He was born in 1992.
At least his grandma, his bubbe, told him about the woman in the picture, the woman who gave birth to him, Ysabel, who died of AIDS before he was old enough to have a memory of her. Bubbe fought for the AIDS people alongside Ysabel, and Bubbe took care of Ysabel at Bubbe’s special home for women with AIDS when Ysabel was pregnant with him, then after, right up to her death.
“Issy went from being a scared girl from Queens who didn’t want anybody to know she had AIDS,” Bubbe told him once, “to an amazing activist and fighter. And she had you! And I told her I’d make sure you were taken care of and loved.” Bubbe stroked back his hair. “Do you think I did an okay job?”
He smiled. “I think you did okay,” he told her. He loved his Bubbe, the loud, strong, pushy Ava, who got things done fast. Ava wasn’t all soft-spoken and mushy like her daugher. That is, his mother.