Dead I Well May Be (30 page)

The train disgorged them at midtown and by 125th they were all long gone. I was relieved; I’d felt I was having an attack.

It was my stop, so I got up and walked the platform to the exit. Through the turnstile. That walk again, up the subway steps and past the Nation of Islam men in shirts and bow ties. Light rain now, the black Israelites in front of the Record Republic. Normally, they’d yell at the white devil, but there was something about my look. They chose not to see me.

Here’s a white man who is going to kill other white men. Yes.

Up the hill. Empty plastic five-dollar crack bags littered everywhere. Men and women gathered around the fake grocery store. The 99 Cents Store. The lamp store. Children wrapped in bear jackets playing with a basketball. PS 125, armor-plated against riot and revolution.

123rd. The street still the same. Danny the Drunk, predictable and living yet. Vinny, drunk with him, both of them sitting on the stoop and leering at the black Catholic schoolgirls. I stood there and looked out at the great city and breathed the autumn air. I was starting to get back my strength for the task in hand. My body had to be strong, but my mind, at least, was already there. I know there are people who triumph over the need for vengeance, who say that loving your enemies hurts them more; that breaking the cycle of violence is the way to happiness. But this was not about being spiritually advanced. This was not about being happy. No.

I spat. The door was broken. I pushed it in and went down.

Ratko’s wife was big and white and stuffed food down our mouths to shut us up. She didn’t speak any English and was suspicious of what Ratko was telling me. Perhaps he was talking about her, or about a mistress he had in the building next door, or about plans to tip off the INS about her status. One way to get rid of her, send her back to war-torn Yugoslavia.

She fed us sausage so undercooked and bloody that I was sure it was a chastisement. Ratko ate it heartily, though, so it might just have been some Serbian thing. More familiar were overboiled potatoes and slow-baked kidney pies. For pudding she constructed on different days bread puddings and sponges and slab-thick chocolate cake that weakened you and made you drunk before you’d finished it. Ratko fed me vodka and all the time he hinted that tonight would have to be my last and that really, all things considered, I couldn’t stay here. I slept in the box room, for the spare room had become the dog’s and the dog bullied the family and began howling when I first broached the possibility of sharing space with it. Generally, I have a good relationship with dogs, but your mind needs to be clear and relaxed for it to work, so I let it have the room. The box room was tiny and airless and I slept so well there it was like I was some advanced Zen master in his monastery cell.

When we first talked, Ratko had some good news, some bad news, and some very interesting information. The information was that Sunshine had come by a week after we’d left for Mexico and paid Ratko off and told him that Darkey wouldn’t need the flat anymore. Ratko liked me and he was a close old file and so casually he asked Sunshine where I was and Sunshine said that I’d gone back to Ireland, for good. All this only a week after we’d left. One week. The bad news was that Sunshine came with a curly-haired blond guy who departed with my bloody TV and radio and a rucksack full of miscellaneous items. Ratko went in later and sold the rest of my gear for twenty bucks to the tenant across the hall. The good news was that he had saved from the garbage my driving license, social security card, and ATM card in the hope that I might write and claim them one day. The ATM card got me access to about a hundred dollars and I give it to Ratko for board….

We’re at breakfast.

Toast, sausage, egg, fried black bread, vodka, and coffee.

Ratko’s wife asks Ratko to ask me what happened to my foot, what happened to me, but I give him a look. We talk sports from the paper and about the Kosovars and Tito and why Zagreb is beautiful but Belgrade isn’t (the answer, apparently, is because of collaboration).

Yeah, and we talk football. Northern Ireland has no chance of qualifying for the World Cup, but I live a little on the glory days of ’82 and ’86. What will happen to the Yugoslavian team is anyone’s guess.

Once mighty Balkan superpower will split into six, maybe eight teams, Ratko says, sadly. We chew our toast and drink our coffee.

And my friend, Michael, how do you feel? he asks me after a dish of what I take to be a type of black pudding.

In general?

In general.

Well, sometimes I hallucinate about the armies of the dead marching over the Triborough Bridge, but most of the time I’m ok.

He winks at me.

Your sense of humor, he says, and he’s inwardly glad his wife has no English.

I finish breakfast, get up, get my stick, go out for a walk, come back …

At dinner that night the wife was mumbling loud over the cabbage.
It was getting clear that it was time to go. He broached the subject delicately over vodka, and it was like water off my back.

Really, Michael, I am not kidding. It is perhaps soon that you look for somewhere else to stay. I love you, you stay forever, but Irina, you know.

I know, I said, cheerfully, and continued eating.

For the next few days this theme of my departure was Ratko’s relentless leitmotif. But I wasn’t taking hints, there was nowhere for me to go. Ratko was being got at from three sides: Slavic hospitality, duty to a friend, and a suspicious caricature of a wife who wanted me out before whatever doom pursued me found me here. And there was doom, the dog had stopped eating and wouldn’t let anyone near it, an unheard-of thing until I showed up.

Ben Franklin famously put the limit of fish and houseguests at three days, and his mates were mostly Quakers and gentlemen. I’d been there nearly two weeks. Ratko wouldn’t throw me out and he liked having me around but finally the missus was too much: nagging him all night and all day and eventually the poor love cracked, got off his fat ass, packed sandwiches, went hunting, came back blitzed and singing and saying that he’d found me a place.

Ratko knew a Russian guy who happened to be pals with a Jamaican guy who happened to be the super of a building they were doing over on Lenox and 125th. They wanted people in there to keep crack addicts and other miscreants out during the makeover and I could probably live rent-free for a month or two till I got my bearings.

Ratko filled me with food, drove me over at paramedic speed in his Hyundai, talked like mad so I wouldn’t notice all the black people, helped me up the stairs, gave me the key, my hundred dollars back, a hearty handshake, and ran away before I could refuse….

I looked around. The place was abominable, but I was only there two or three weeks. That’s how long it took for Ramón to find me. But you get the picture: vermin, roaches, and a hole in the bathroom that allowed you to see into two floors beneath you. No electricity, but by some miracle there was cold-water plumbing. The building had six stories, and they had a person in an apartment on each floor. Their job was to keep the homeless out of there while renovations were taking
place, and it wasn’t too hard a task. The guy prowling the second floor was a huge Jamaican bruiser from some particularly evil part of Kingston who scared the bejesus out of most mortals. He had a shotgun and he’d plugged someone already and the word had gotten round. Harlem had plenty of derelict buildings, so it made sense to go to an easier place.

Nowadays, Lenox Avenue looks like an ok sort of street and it might be hard to believe it ever was the way I say it was. But back then, I promise you, it was a murder picture. Every other building was a burnt-out graffitied shell. Garbage all over the streets, and people made campfires within the buildings to keep warm. Every floor smelled terrible and, just like in the days of Elizabethan London, you threw your shit out the open hole that should have been a window. The windows weren’t boarded up, because people had ripped down the plywood for furniture and the more shortsighted or desperate simply burned it.

I’m sure it wasn’t always thus. I might have been living on the same street as the late Langston Hughes or Duke Ellington and for all I bloody knew Ralph Ellison could have been that old, sophisticated-looking guy at the bodega, but it seemed unlikely. The street sanitation was a disgrace, the architecture of the buildings postapocalyptic. It was Belfast, circa 1973, except here there was no civil war as an excuse for the calamity.

There wasn’t much to do, either. No safe bars, no movie theaters. In fact, around here the most important landmark was the Apollo Theatre, but you’d be the brave white boy up there on a Saturday night in the autumn of 1992.

And speaking of Apollo, patron of the Muses, true, but also guardian of prophecy and the future, I knew what was going to happen. What was inevitable the minute I stepped off the GWB. I could see it in my mind’s eye, I could see it, I could feel it, but I knew I had to bide my time. I had to lie low. Ratko could know that I was back in New York City, but he was to be the only one. Ratko could keep his mouth shut. Did others know I’d escaped from Mexico? I doubted it. The guards saw me fall into the swamp and not come out. So if Sunshine ever checked, he’d believe the guards, and even if rumors
reached him and Darkey that I was somehow alive, why give credence to these paranoid reports? No, they didn’t know anything. They were snug, safe in their beds. Eejit safe in their eejit beds.

So I had a place, I was incognito, and I figured if you couldn’t speak Serbo-Croat and weren’t part of a gossipy little Upper Manhattan Slavic circle, you didn’t know I was here. I was getting my shit together, making plans, but before I could do anything big I really had to do something about my leg. I wasn’t having nightmares. No phantom limb itches or anything like that, but I was walking too slowly with my crutch, and going up a flight of stairs was like Scott’s return from the Pole.

Now, lucky for me I wasn’t a million miles away from somewhere I could get help. For if you keep walking on 125th Street you’ll eventually get to the Triborough Bridge and the East River, but before that, if you make a right wheel, conveniently enough there’s a foot hospital. The New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The hospital will give you an artificial foot to stick over your stump and the physical therapists will show you how to walk with that foot, through weeks, sometimes months, of training. They’ll give you drugs, advice, support, and an optimistic glossy brochure with smiling Special Olympians. All this, of course, if you have insurance. If you don’t have insurance and your dancer-tragic-accident letter to Gene Kelly got no reply, you are not completely banjaxed, for as I discovered, there is another way:

You show up; you’re not an emergency case, so you have to wait. It can be a while, so bring a newspaper. It’s a presidential election year, so there’s plenty of reading, but you’re not an expert and it’s hard to tell the difference between the candidates—both would be Tories back home—so instead you read the sports section. There’s American football and real football and bizarre things like hockey on ice. The World Series is also coming up, but the New York teams aren’t in it. You read and read and you’re almost thinking of giving up, but finally a nurse takes your temperature and she’s so tired that she falls asleep while doing it. They give you a clipboard to which is attached a pink form. You fill in the details of an imaginary person and give his address and name and social security number. The nurse has already willfully suspended disbelief and leads you along a corridor to another man who might be a doctor. The doctor takes a look at your foot and shakes his
head and says things like antibiotics and poor workmanship and where did they stitch you and you make a few things up in reply. The only accurate thing on your form is your blood type and he asks your blood type and you tell him and he asks if you’ve ever had any of a following list of complaints to which you reply no. He asks you to come back the following week and see some guy, but you hint that by next week you might not be at the address on your form. All this is part of a charade, for soon another man comes (an orderly, a nurse?) and leads you to a room that is brightly lit like a shoe store and packed with shoe boxes that contain feet. The feet are on little hinges and attach to your limb. Feet of every shape and size and skin color, but mostly black. Baby feet, size 15 feet, feet that stink of plastic and grease. He tries on several and gives you the best fit, which is an off-white. He says that really you should learn all about “stump management.” He tells you the line about the weeks of physical therapy, knowing full well that neither of you will see the other again. You put the foot in a plastic bag and carry it home. You practice in your apartment for hours until you’re chafed, bleeding, crying.

You practice going up and down stairs and you fall a dozen times. You look at your stump and the straps on the artificial foot and you just can’t believe it. The horror of it takes your breath away.

But you can’t live in that moment and you restrap yourself over the sores and the cuts, the skin-colored plastic of the foot going up over your stump, your hinged foot hanging there alien and ridiculous, until in jeans and socks and shoes it looks ok.

Sometimes, for a brief moment, you can even forget what’s happened and think that you’re whole again.

It’s physical and mental anguish but within the week you’re limping on it, but walking nonetheless, and if you didn’t know you were an amputee, you wouldn’t know, and besides, so many men in Harlem limp already you fit right in.