Dead I Well May Be (34 page)

No one seemed to have any moral qualms about selling crack to addicts who would prostitute themselves or steal or go to the lengths of robbing their own family and pawning their kid’s possessions to pay for
the stuff. Ramón never seemed to give any lectures about not selling to kids or waifs or madmen, but then I don’t speak Spanish, so maybe he did.

Ramón owned a Mercedes, but he drove it himself, and there were very few extraneous expenses.

Ten days had gone by, and every afternoon I had reported for work and hung out doing nothing until evening and then gone home. I’d done bugger-all to earn anything, but I consoled myself with the thought that I had over a thousand dollars now saved, and because of all the plantains and rice and beans, I had gained about ten pounds and was getting stronger.

The time would come when I’d have to say goodbye to this purgatorial existence, when I’d have to do what I’d come to New York to do, but I figured I could build myself up for a wee while yet. Ramón had not revealed why he really wanted me around, and I was beginning to think that he really was just a whimsical eejit who had taken a shine to me.

I made my own routine, and I usually went over there at around one or two in the
P.M
. The mornings were my own, and sometimes I’d haunt the old places where I used to live in the city. I had a job to do, but I had to wait, not for a sign exactly, or an alignment in the heavens, but I had to know that the moment was right.

My favorite place in the late morning was 125th Street. None of Darkey’s boys would ever be down there, and for me it was old and familiar and I felt like a tourist now that I was living on 181st. 125th, badland and desperateland but almost a home. Sometimes I’d walk by Mr. Han’s Chinky, but I wouldn’t go in, and now and again I paid Jim a visit in the Blue Moon.

When I was feeling particularly good I would set myself projects. I’d try and do five parks in a day, or go from river to river. Or try to find the highest spot in Manhattan. One day I walked the entire length of Fifth Avenue for no reason at all. I was so late I had to call Ramón and tell him I wasn’t coming (Ramón, of course, didn’t seem the least concerned or interested). Fifth Avenue starts in abject poverty and dislocation in Harlem, but by the time you hit Central Park, you’re in the territory of millionaires and that stays with you all the way down to the
Village. I didn’t stop in anywhere; I brought a water bottle and a hat and just walked. The canyons opening up and the people getting fancier and more white. Cats and stray dogs and rats disappearing and being replaced by pigeons only. Schoolkids at first in jeans and big jackets and then in blazers and ties. The soundtrack growing steadily all the while: crying radios and jackhammers and people and cars. I’d walked the whole length on a fake foot.

Impressed by this success, I did the walk of Broadway, too, but I had to do it over two days, and I only walked the Broadway that’s in Manhattan, for, of course, it goes up into the Bronx (and on to Westchester), but up there is too near the Four P., which was risky. Broadway isn’t so linear an ascent from chaos to civilization. It has its ups and downs, poverty rising and falling like a sine curve. It begins in water, and you can see animals and boats. And then south through park and project, black and Spanish and then black and then Spanish again. A crazy cinema. Bodegas. The Audubon Ballroom. A funeral swelling out from a Mormon church, sorrow seeping through the walls and out the windows. Then, below 120th it gentrifies as Columbia University breathes her love and influence into the surrounding streets, and then there’s life for a few blocks and below 99th it becomes the Upper West Side. All the way down Broadway through the theaters, brick stacks, construction sites, porno shows, shops, holes in the ground with the whiff of sulfur.

Yeah, those were three good days, and I was almost happy.

I saw Ramón the night after Broadway and asked him if there was anything he wanted me to do.

Nothing, he said.

I wasn’t satisfied with this. I was ready for something. Trouble, heavying, even a minor cutting-out expedition. But Ramón was all patience. Annoyingly so.

Get yourself strong. Relax, I’ll tell you when I need you, he said. Walk, move.

I did as I was bid.

I went everywhere. From river to river, from island to mainland and back. The PATH and the subway and the M4 bus.

I went to dour Saint Pat’s and I went to Riverside Church and the
great Saint John the Divine, surely the holiest place in the city outside of Monument Park in Yankee Stadium. (For even a Mick who’s never seen a baseball game in his life has heard of Gehrig and Ruth and Mantle and DiMaggio.)

I went south, and I had a scare in the Upper East Side when I saw a boy I knew called Roddy McGee coming out of a bar on Third Avenue, so after that I avoided the Mick zones and the neutral zones and kept mostly to greater Harlem. But that was ok. I liked it there. I absorbed Harlem, I took it in and became part of it. I went all the way from the West Side Highway to the Triborough Bridge, from Sugar Hill to Manhattanville, from Washington Heights to Inwood Park.

The walking was making me stronger, but Ramón noticed how I moved and gave me a telephone number. He didn’t say anything.

I called the number, and it was a doctor who specialized in the rehabilitation of amputees.

I went to see him, and he was an old guy in a nice building off 48th Street, which I supposed meant that his practice did very well.

He was a Vietnam vet, and although he had not seen combat, he had worked in navy hospitals in Saigon for two stints, in 1966–67 and 1969–70.

We had a consultation and X rays and he put me on a treadmill. After it was done, he recommended that I have corrective surgery to shorten my stump to make it more balanced and comfortable, with a cleaner tuck at the end.

I absolutely refused. The thought of cutting off more of my fucking leg was utterly absurd.

But Dr. Havercamp was not to be browbeaten by a civilian patient a third his age, so he sat me down and explained everything in detail.

A minor operation. One night in the hospital, a week of rehabilitation. Weekly visits for the next few months. I’d be running the New York marathon this time next year.

He convinced me and bullied me a little, and I saw the sense of it.

I told Ramón I’d need a week, and Ramón said take all the time in the world, and although I hadn’t told him why, the night before my operation he showed up with a dozen books and magazines and chocolate and a massive jar of vitamin pills from the GNC.

Take these every day, he said, pointing at the pills.

I will, I said.

He asked Cuba to step outside for a moment and when he had, Ramón said confidentially:

Things will be easier now, you’ll see.

And as was the case with most things, Ramón, of course, was right.

Out of the surgery. Morphine dreams. An old trope, the drowned world, New York devoid of people and absorbed like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat into the jungle. Forest stealing up on buildings, sending seeds here or a root over there or a sapling through there and the whole becoming one organic mass of vines and creepers and glass and concrete. Flamingos in Jamaica Bay, eyries in the Chrysler Building. Seas of orchids on the railway stop at 125th. Dandelions and flowering plants on the fire escapes of tenements. Mahogany and teak and spreading elms. Marshes in the East River and every tunnel a river and every railway a path for animals. The Hudson freezes and over come deer and coyotes and bear. I can see blue-tongued iguanas and lizards, snakes. Piranha and alligators in the reservoir in Central Park. Vultures in Times Square. Jaguars surveying the horizon from the fastness of the roof on PS 125.

Yes, it’s an old trope and a common one in New York. A place of escape. Either in the primordial past or apocalyptic future, and you have to be careful about this kind of thinking. Raphael (according to Ramón’s copy) in
Paradise Lost
warns Adam about these kinds of thoughts. Think, Raphael says, only what concerns thee and thy being. Dream not of other worlds.

These flights of fancy, though, were helping me cope. An alternative New York was a better place to be, sometimes, than my own head.

A couple of days later, I was on my feet. Visits to the doc. Back up to Ramón. Out again.

I was walking and dreaming and killing time, but I wasn’t avoiding the issue. No, I’d seen the future and I was aware that I was in it. Aye. I was dandering and dreaming, but I wasn’t mitching my responsibility.

Strong again. A hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a long walk every morning. I would eat a big breakfast of eggs and plantains, yellow
rice, black beans, and then in the second part of the day I would go over to Ramón’s and hang out and get my money.

It was ok.

If you could take the vibe, Ramón’s was all right. Awkward, dull, Ramón’s men always a little afraid of me. Ramón had obviously told them something that had upset them. It didn’t help that they already were a superstitious, suspicious, freaky, paranoid bunch. They hadn’t bullied me or kidded me; but they were still contemptuous. And they were afeared, jumpy. They kept their distance. Once Moreno tried to stare me down, but he broke first. Cuba was the only one who had much time for me. It was a shame, because from what I’d seen of Dominican culture, it reminded me of Ireland.

Cuba’s English was better than the others’, and occasionally, while I’d be sitting at the window thumbing through some book, he’d wander across and spend the afternoon with me. He was a kid and didn’t know what he wanted in life and spoke frequently of joining the marines. We’d talk about girls and films and sometimes politics. Cuba was a big guy, well over 220 pounds; he hated Castro, and one day, to bait him, I said I’d wear a Che T-shirt, and he gave me a long and impassioned argument about the evils of communism, Castroites and Che. Stuff he’d got from his dad, mostly garbled. He had a thing against Ricky Ricardo from the
Lucy
show, but he never articulated this objection clearly. Cuba had fled the island with his father and brother in 1984, and they’d gone first to Spain and then come to the United States. Apart from Castro, Cuba’s other main theme was the stupidity and shortsightedness of Dominicans. Dominicans robbed their children to buy crack, Dominicans had no musical culture, Dominicans had no literature, Dominicans thought they could play baseball, but everybody knew that Cubans were the stars of the baseball world. Dominicans would make nothing of themselves. In whispers he said that even Ramón couldn’t escape.

Sometimes we’d drag Hector over, and the three of us would play a retarded version of poker with four cards showing and a fifth blind in your hand. Cuba was very good at this, and though we were only playing for pennies, he would get excited when at the end of a session he’d be a dollar or seventy-five cents up over the pair of us. It took me a day or two to realize that the cards were marked, but I played anyway, for the company.

About this time in New York City, there were two hundred murders a month and most of those were drug-related, so occasionally you’d hear gunfire out in the street. Hector, Cuba, Ramón, and I would be around in the afternoon, Ramón in his study doing whatever it was he did and me and the boys playing cards and out there in the street would be the odd gunshot.

It was the lieutenants’ job in the daytime to protect their part of the street. Usually the lieutenant and a couple of the watchers would be armed. There were so many independent pushers back then that every once in a while one of them would get uppity and think they were the original Jesus Christ and try to muscle in on Ramón’s hard-won turf. The watchers or the lieutenants would shoot them. I’d hear about this, but I saw little of it. Back home, you’d kneecap them, but here they just killed them.

We weren’t involved. The bodyguards’ job was to protect Ramón, not to patrol the street. Moreno would tell Cuba, and Cuba would tell me—it disconcerted me. These people were out risking their lives, and what was I doing? What was my role in the scheme of things?

He didn’t tell me anything, but Ramón had been watching me, waiting for the time he thought I was ready. Whether the incident with Moreno forced his hand, I don’t know.

It came a day when Ramón, José, Hector, and Cuba had disappeared in the big yellow Mercedes. I was left completely alone in the house throughout the afternoon, and seeing it as a test of loyalty, I didn’t venture into any of the forbidden areas, such as the study or Ramón’s bedroom. I hung out on the balcony staring at the Hudson.

By six o’clock, the lieutenants started showing up with their day’s profits. Not that their street dealers didn’t work at night, but Ramón was always strict about having his accounting at the same time. Tonight, though, Ramón wasn’t there, and I was. The lieutenants eyed me suspiciously and got themselves beers from the fridge and sat on the sofa and the white leather chairs to wait.

The boys were drinking and doing an excellent job of not seeing me. After a while, they put the stereo on and started fucking around with Ramón’s stuff.

I went over and told them to cut it out.