South by South Bronx (2 page)

3.

The sunlight was a real slap. The wood floor glimmered like a lake face. It was hard to stop squinting.

The first place she went was to the window.

The streets looked bare. A milk truck pulled up to a bodega. A woman with a heart-shaped purse waited at the bus stop. A young guy with an Afro pushed up a clattery riot gate. The big-ass donut shop looked drowsy with its foggy windows. No people sitting at its long winding counter. The round empty stools, the clunky window booths. It was an Edward Hopper postcard from a shop on West 4th Street, but Edward Hopper never came to this small town. The postcard views did not prepare her. She couldn't read the calm South Bronx street.

She wasn't from here.

To wander those streets—the thought depressed her. This room. It was sanctuary. Her breath, fogged the window. Helped hide her.

Inside was safe.

The street was the danger.

To hide was divine.

The apartment was like a museum. Blue walls, empty space. The few objects stood like exhibits. A pair of tatamis, a TV, an old armchair. No curtains on the windows. The group of plastic crates contained a minimal amount of stuff. Either something had been taken away or there had never been anything there. The masses of empty bottles in the kitchen. The two closets full of shoe boxes.

She checked the view through each and every window. Got a feel for the shape of the place. Played with the locks to see how they worked. (A rhythm for the locks can be crucial in a moment of mad-dash escape.) Another look out the bedroom window—an assurance that nothing had changed.

She took her things into the bathroom. Shut the door in case he came back. There were no shower curtains. The meager spray made enough noise to hopefully get him to knock first—“Ma'am, are you okay?”—the words of the bus driver, his oblong black face melting in the rearview mirror. Shooting her glances.

The bus had been a sudden inspiration. There were only three other passengers. They stared as she mounted, barefoot and wet, clutching her strapless Blahniks. She had to RUN to CATCH THE BUS, get it?

“I just need 149th Street,” she said. Did she hear him say this wasn't the right bus?

“Stay on until the last stop,” he said. The rain poured dark streets blacker. She sat in the back, more leg room. To wipe her bloody ankles, to put her shoes back on. Ever run down a fire escape, barefoot? She tried to stop trembling. It had just started to rain and she'd caught the first mad outburst all the way to the bus. It poured down sheets. Bus engine sound muffled under the patter blasts. She was trying to breathe, but images came in sharp flashes. It seemed outside every bodega sat a cop car, lights glimmering hello. A line of cars followed the bus as it crawled along under the el. Heart throb heart quake. She couldn't stay on the bus. Not to the last stop. (She could see his face in the rearview mirror.) The driver would call the cops.

“Stop the bus,” she said, banging on the back doors. “I wanna get off!”

The bus stopped.

She was under another big elevated train station, at the spot where Longwood intersects with Prospect. There were small shops, an electronics store—everything riotgate shut except for superettes and those candy stores that sold nothing but potato chips, Lemonheads, and beer. A train roared by above, flashing light against tenement windows. 149th Street? The guy she asked gave her a funny look. Couldn't talk, but he pointed. Must not be so normal on South Bronx streets to see a wet white woman in a minidress, clacking along fast in those stiletto sandals—she calls them her
Jackie O
's—there was no way she wanted to wander those South Bronx streets in that dress again. She could still wring water from it. The back was ripped, maybe snagged on a fire escape ladder. Was that blood, there amidst the loopy colored flowers? She walked it over to the small bathroom window that glowed bright with sun. She thought she could smell blood. There was some kind of smell on her.

She scrubbed the dress under the warm shower water, then hung it to dry on the curtain rod. Same for the bra, the G-string panties. She was in a strange bathroom doing her laundry. It made her laugh, not laugh, some sort of spasm. Like choking. She squeezed her burning eyes shut. The wave of nausea almost keeled her over. She heard shattering glass, the thud of bullets. Bent over the toilet, the sick coming out of her in throbbing blasts. She flushed. She flushed. She flushed and the water would not move. The tank was filling slow. The handle made a hollow clank sound. She fought off the images that hit her like electric shocks.

She stepped into the shower. The water fell weakly into her mouth, lukewarm on her face. (There was a smell.) The water felt prickly like a cat's tongue. She rinsed her bloody ankles, cuts and scrapes that stung. She held the moist bulb of soap to her nose, the scent cleansing her of stink, some stink. It was inside of her. No way to scrub that out. In her nose, her pores. She rubbed soap everywhere, desperately. Still, a smell. She soaped her hair, rinsed fast.

She turned the shower off, listened for steps. A steady drip faded to nothing. She dried off with the only towel hanging there, then emptied out her purse. It was long and brown with a detachable strap. She spilled its contents on the blurry furry foot mat.

The shoes came out first, the thin clattery Jackie O's looking no worse for wear. She would place them by the bed as if they had been there all along.

The lipsticks, compact, other makeup items. Checkbook, passport. A CD slipcase. Daffy Duck plushy. All into a pile.

The cellular phone. She put aside.

The cassette tape. She put aside.

The Smith & Wesson .22 pistol with spare clip. She put aside.

The yellow envelope had writing on it. A signature, some numbers: an address. David had always said she had a real head for numbers, the way she could remember them just by hearing them once or quickly scanning them off a page. “You have a head like a master spy,” he said. Forget ever playing memory games with her. Could recite whole sheets of figures, pages of random prose after a glance. Whole Anne Sexton poems committed to memory like scripture. Names dates facts—she never needed a phone book. The perfect world of numbers fascinated her. Random integers battling it out to absolute conclusions. Irrefutable, perfectly provable. How he relied on her logical mind. A bitter sting a bad taste, those flashes of last moments. She shut her eyes, cleared the slate.

Inside the envelope was a card, a letter, and a key.

The card was proof she had permission.

The letter was permission.

The small silver key. She rubbed it with her fingers. Shiny, metallic, real. Logic and mathematical precision had plenty to say about the key. It was nothing she wanted to hear.

There was no way to give it back.

There was no way to pass it on.

There was no way to get rid of it.

A sound. A rush, a whoosh of air. A door banging against the wall. The running steps, coming closer. She had pushed and pulled him. They threw words at each other frantic, each one believing it was the other's turn to listen.

“David, please! We have to run.”

“No,” he said. “I'll talk to them.”

“David, he's not coming to talk!”

“Just promise me you won't let him get it.”

(A sound. A rush, a whoosh of air.)

She opened the bathroom door. Gun drawn. Listening. Still alone.

The cassette, cellular phone. The lipsticks, compact, house keys, checkbook, passport, other makeup items, CD slipcase. Daffy Duck. Scooped back into purse.

The key she hid in a place that was always with her.

The six-shot clip went into a zippered pocket of her purse. The pistol made nice, reassuring clicks. Chamber perfect and round ready. She took her purse, Jackie O's, and pistol back into the bedroom. There, the strange unease mingled with an acceptance that whatever happened in this room could not. Ever be as bad as what might be waiting outside. She stood by the fire escape window, naked and shivery, thinking of running and what that would mean if she gave up the four walls. To be inside was to be safe. She could not step out into sunlight. Her limbs ached sluggish. Her head felt dizzy, maybe still slushy from the drugs Alan had pumped into her to make her tell, to make her tell what? Something she didn't know. Something she didn't want to know. She felt she was half-dreaming and couldn't shake off that bit of stupor. It was like an overwhelming urge to crawl into sleep, to make it all go black.

She tucked the pistol under the mattress. Placed the shoes and purse right beside. Another look out the window: The sleepy South Bronx street calmed her. Nothing had changed.

She checked the pistol again. (All those reassuring clicks.) Snug in a place she could reach easy. One swift move. (She rehearsed the draw.) The urge to run. The urge to sleep. The wallet on top of the crate, a scrunch of dollars, a few silver rings he had not bothered to put on. She flipped through the billfold. His work ID:
Henderson's Department Store. Shoe Department
. The picture made her laugh: The sleeping man still looked sleepy.

“So he sells shoes,” she said.

The voices that said
Run!
quieted down. She lay back instead and closed her eyes. At first, a twitchy bothersome energy that made her go fetal and small. Then came a thick blanket that fell like a sudden paralysis.

It was easy to be this tired.

4.

Before sun, there was gray sky. Reluctance of sun to break through gloom and brighten. The sound of trucks garbage cans air brakes. The shrill beeping of those
camiones dando pa'tras.

The cranky bursts of rain did not restrain him. It was anytime better than being inside. The big windows, paintsmeared walls, the lack of a story line. Nothing to hear but that clock clock tick tick. There was no point staying inside, waiting for brainstorms. It was ritual it was almost duty: Monk might bring a bottle, Mink would provide the smokes. They would pick a nice crib somewhere and talk the sunrise up over the Bruckner Expressway. It could be rooftop, empty lot, a stop on a stoop. It always led back to Mink's rooftop nightcap, that would last until sunlight. Traditions, etched in steel.

This morning there was no Monk.

Mink had been on medium simmer ever since Monk had stormed out all door-slam. Wasn't even midnight. Mink thought fuck it, let it go, he'll come back, probably with some beers. But the hours went by with a loud clock clock tick tick, and there was no Monk coming back.

Mink's impulse was to storm Monk's building. Pound on his door and ask what the fuck was up with that? but he did not storm Monk's building because he knew if he did, he would only be doing what Monk wanted. Screw that. Wouldn't play that game. Mink instead sat at the long winding counter at the Greek's.

The Greek's was open all night. Cops went there. They sat in glum rows with their cups of steaming java, dreaming of a starring role in a major moment that would matter to someone somewhere in their dreary world. Mink thought often of painting them: three cops in a row, faces shapes geometric—sharp and brittle like glass. He could imagine painting a lot of things, but every time he was on the verge of inspiration, something would crop up, some disturbance emotional dismal, some ANYTHING that would block the road like a boulder across a mountain pass.

This time the problem was Monk.

“If I go up there,” he told the Greek, “I'm just playing his game.”

The Greek was a pudgy bearded man of few words. He gave every face regardless of race that same squinty-eyed appraisal. For fifteen years he had been there, running that big donut shop—luncheonette. He talked a lot these days of getting his white ass out of the South Bronx and opening a new place in Astoria, where he lived.

“Play his game, what do you care, don't be so proud,” the Greek said. “People are here today, gone tomorrow.”

Mink stared through storefront glass. Across the street, to the right of Monk's building, were Mink's big picture windows. One floor up, they stood out on that little building face like shiny gold teeth. The dark calm of the windows reminded him of the scary silence in his apartment, the murmur of a big empty space.

The landlord said he could have it, and have it cheap, provided Mink fixed it up himself. Low rent, long lease. The small building next to the big one housed a printing factory. The place was upstairs, slated to become a storage space, but some last-minute dispute led the factory to back out of the deal. Mink came along at just the right moment. He put in plumbing, a bathroom and kitchen. Wood floors. Knocked down some walls. Added those three big picture windows facing Prospect Avenue. They were a lot like the kind on those bone-white houses perched on hills in San Francisco. A skylight, central heating and air-conditioning … When the landlord signed the cheap five-year lease he had no idea Mink was that artist bastard who appeared on OPRAH all those years ago. The landlord looked up the pieces in TIME and NEWSWEEK and there was that NEW ARTIST OF THE YEAR thing and all that stuff on the Internet … The landlord felt scalped, especially after seeing that color spread in PEOPLE magazine. Couldn't look the other landlords in the face after that, the court action just a face-saving gesture at best. Two years later and Mink was paying five hundred bucks for a space the Hilton would classify as a presidential suite.

In 1993, Mink Ravel Presario Melendez was the hottest young Puerto Rican painter to come out of the Bronx, south or south of no north, didn't matter which. He was borough-wide, city and state. His canvases of blocks and cubes spread like a virus. “
It defines the rise of LATINO ART and its importance to the new American tradition,
” the
new York Times
stated. “
It is the death of LATINO ART,
” cried HISPANIC, “
that of all the truly representative LATINO ART out there, the hungry gullible American public latches onto this
.” There was Kurt Cobain, screaming from the pain in his flaming guts while wearing a furry blocks and cubes T-shirt. There was that Björk moment when she jumps into an ocean full of fishy blocks and cubes. There were naked blocks and cubes and fuzzy blocks and cubes and rows of dancers spinning in front of spray-painted blocks and cubes. There was a famous sociologist who said that blocks and cubes were starting to define a generation; a dance club, a soft drink; and just when it looked like Coca-Cola might redesign its cans for South Bronx consumption, this young Dominican kid comes out with globes and spheres, globes and spheres. “
A new movement in LATINO ART,
” the
new York Times
stated.

Suddenly it was 1996. The wave had passed.

“Let go,” Mink said, as Monk tried to scrape him off the sidewalk. Mink fell again, rolled a little. Puked up some more pasta.

“Come on,” Monk said, helping him up again. “I'm taking you home.”

“Nah, man, I'm fine. I just fell. Gravel's loose there, man.” Mink straightened his thin tie. Even from a block away, he could still hear the limos driving up. The chatter of people, the flash of cameras. Clacking high heels and the swish of costly dresses.

“You didn't have to come to this,” Monk said. “To be seen here with all these ass-kissing idiots.”

“It wouldn't have looked good if I didn't come.”

“You think this looks better, getting piss-fucked and puking on the sidewalk? You can't tell me you want to go back there. You can't.”

“I have to go back there. I just stepped out, right? I was dignity itself, bro. It was just the pasta.”

“All those people asking where you been, like you died or something. Mink, the living ghost. And fucking MISTER SANTO DOMINGO with his smug face telling you how much he respects THE OLD SCHOOL. Didn't you get that? He was calling you old, man.”

“He's moved on from globes and spheres,” Mink muttered, ducking behind a parked car to puke up the rest of the pasta.

Mink met Monk at a reading back in 1993. It was a LATINO ART EXPO at the Seattle Museum. Mink had just flamed with a new series of paintings, while Monk was promoting his first book,
Ashes to Ashes.
It was the first spick thing Mink had read about the South Bronx that didn't sound like it was written in 1869. They were the only two Puerto Ricans in a show that was mostly Mexicans doing stuff about crossing borders. Monk read to a standing room only crowd, with blocks and cubes as a backdrop. They bonded instantly, two crazy spicks exploring space needle city. Rolled blunts in a hippie house with dreadlock white kids in the U-district, walking that jug of wine down Broadway in glittery old Pill Hill. Mink saw Monk get three encores at Elliott Bay Books. He had those Mother Mary eyes from some old painting, that black ski cap it seemed he wore year round on his head. Mink was bowled over by his writing: The harsh reality of it made Mink think Monk was wide awake while he was still dreaming, tripping funny pictures all glide. They talked for days and nights about art reality nationalism colonialism identity and this weird feeling of having stumbled across another spick that can speak fluent Americana. A week later Monk flew to Portland to continue his tour and Mink returned to New York, but they stayed in touch. There was no doubt for either of them that they both represented a “scene,” a “new wave” or some wave of some sort. They kept firing each other up from a distance.

Monk's next book was the novel
Dust to Dust.
The stark reality of Monk's writing began infiltrating Mink's pieces. Gone was the whimsical tongue-in-cheek of his early pieces like CUCHI CUCHIFRITO, 6-TRAIN MOONFACE, and CAST YOUR VOTES BEFORE SWINE. Now came his famous BULLET-RIDDLED BLOCKS AND CUBES and his POSSE BOY BLOCKS AND CUBES. Mink and Monk—one was pictures, one was words. They became their own scene at just the right moment—when mainstream interest in things LATINO peaked simultaneously with the arrival of the crack trade to the inner city. Monk scored a two-book deal and a movie option, Mink sold paintings at six-figure sums. TV, newspapers, magazines. He joined Monk on another tour—in Los Angeles it was meetings with producers and film people. In D.C. a bitter fight with hotel staff after they were mistaken for vagrants and thrown out of the lobby. In Philly they were both arrested for tossing a TV set out a hotel window (it was a Keith Moon thing). Mink and Monk got stoned in thirteen states of the union.

Despite writing a pair of scripts, the movie never got made, and the next novel somehow never got delivered.
Shadowtown, Featuring a Play on Words: The First Collection of Mink Ravel Presario Melendez, with Text by Monk Velasquez & Four new Short Stories Illustrated by Mink
was released in 1997 after a twoyear delay. Monk's last book to date. He wasn't making appearances or doing workshops. (Nobody was asking him to, either.) The people who once lauded him for his daring now criticized him for being limited. There was a sense he would keep repeating himself. “
The Puerto Rican Donald Goines,
” somebody wrote, sending him into a deep depression. He rebelled. No traveling, no planes, no trips abroad. He would stay home to write that next book, whatever it was. He grew his hair long like an Apache. He shaved his head like a Buddhist. He had a walking stick, not bejewelled like Balzac's but carved out of oak, topped by a lion's head. Prospect Avenue was his turf, the place where his dreams sprang from. He felt free of the outside world there. He didn't want anyone to know he was a writer, almost as if he was ashamed. He never talked about it, and would get quiet if anyone ever did. Most people in the area that knew he was a writer had never even seen his books, much less read them. He preferred it that way. He picked up his daily fruits at Sancho's bodega, his early edition of EL DIARIO at Hector's newsstand by the subway, that first cup of coffee at the Greek's. He could stay inside and not come out, but he was no recluse. People knew him, and he knew them. He knew every story all up and down Prospect Avenue better than a trio of gossiping housewives. Two or three days out of the week—depending on his mood and his need for people—he could be found at Manny's garage just off Union Avenue, where he liked to work on cars, get greasy, share cigarettes and stories. He could still tell stories, but write them? There were scribbles, starts, a page here a page there, but no one thing driving him to the finish. 2001 made it four years since his last appearance in print.

Mink fell down the same hole. Blocks and cubes had been very good to him, but now he was completely identified with them. He could not possibly keep doing the same thing over and over again. His soul was hankering for some new way to say it. He busied himself doing what he later called “window dressing,” living in Los Angeles for a year doing music videos. He spent another year in D.C. doing Beckett plays with a theater group, always in touch with Monk via phone, via letters, via e-mail. It was Monk that brought him back to 149th Street. Mink would never have ended up living down the block if it hadn't been for Monk telling him about that empty space over the printing plant. Things worked out grand—they drank away days watching Hitchcock films, playing Thelonious and Ravel. Late-night rantings always led to dawn. The quiet could come on his roof or a flat field overlooking the churning East River. To get a view of the South Bronx so moviola fresh. To discard the old, hang it like laundry from valleys of antenna wire. The South Bronx was the stuff of dreams to them, this big city this small town. They wanted to capture it to bring it back to the world in living kaleidoscope color. Maybe something slipped away while they slept. They vowed not to sleep again, so late nights always rolled into early morning. The parties got smaller, more intimate. “I'm getting a new agent, he's British.” Monk buying old typewriters, Mink peeling latex off girl asses with his teeth. (The brushes were not in a giving mood.) More drinking under tables and what about that sudden trip to Amsterdam last summer? (“I must see van Gogh,” Mink said, taking Monk and his friend Alex along. “He has something to say to me.”) They did copious amounts of smoke at a Jimi Hendrix coffee shop near Rembrandtplein. Van Gogh's stabbing swirls make each painting more of a relief map than a picture, textured brutal thick. Books do not capture it. Van Gogh is not flat, Mink said, inspired and chatty—but he still did not paint.

What was that fight about last night? Mink had said something about how the urge to paint was strongest when he was nowhere near a brush. He was painting in his mind, without hands. This was part of his process, he told Monk. The moment he'd said it, Monk got off the couch and started to pace. A runaway train careening down tracks, skipping stations.

“That's a crock and you know it. Painting in your mind—yeah, right! Of all the sick shit you've said about art and creation, this has to be the sickest. Do you have to find a way to justify doing nothing? Zilch!
¡Que mierda! ¡Es que no estás haciendo nada!
”

The outburst made Mink get up from the couch like he had been bitten in the ass. Another runaway train …

“You're way off base, man, way off! It's all going on in my mind, man. You're just upset because there isn't anything going on in yours. You're the one doing nothing! You're just talking about yourself.”

“At least I'm not sitting around making excuses.” Monk headed for the door. “I can say it to anyone's face: I'm not writing. But you take the cake, man. Even I can paint in my head! I think I'll go home and do just that. Lie in bed with my dick in my hand and paint twenty pictures!”