the fuck is going on back there?”
Pinky must have returned home while Stone was emptying the boxes. He fell silent, neither shamed nor embarrassed, just irritated he had been interrupted.
Pinky was at the bathroom door, smelling of cheap cologne, his gelled hair brushed forward on his head to form a severe widow’s peak. “I’m telling you, it’s not good for you to be alone right now. I’m buying you a drink.”
“I’m not thirsty,” Stone said.
“My house, my rules. You’re going to drink with me.”
IT WAS A cool September evening, with a soft breeze off the river. Stone’s high was fading fast, his misery rolling back in like a black tide. Somehow he knew leaving the apartment, leaving the books and photographs behind, would lead to his premature destruction. He would be run down by an errant driver, shot by a stickup man, mugged by a neighborhood kid for the lint in his pockets. Nothing good could come of this. They walked in silence past the tangle of graffiti tags on the wall of Pinky’s apartment building. Pinky’s shadow bounced jauntily ahead of Stone’s, his head blackening the paint-scrawled words YOU LIFE IS NOT SO GREAT. Three young black men hung out in front of the Tip-Top Deli and Grocery, crowding the pay phone, waiting for it to ring. They passed a vacant lot and then a small storefront Brotherhood Ministries church where one of the Reverend Randall Roebling Nation’s preachers shouted from a basement pulpit, “Jesus gonna bring ya on home . . .”
Stone could still hear the parishioners clapping their hands and stamping their feet when he and Pinky reached the overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway two blocks away. A livery cab drove past honking its horn, a Puerto Rican flag waving from its antenna.
The whole world was full of static, chaos, random vibrations of noise filling the air to the point of rupturing the invisible seams of the universe. “I need to go home,” Stone said, feeling dizzy. “Before something happens.”
“Nothing is going to happen,” Pinky said. “It’s the weed got you paranoid. Nothing a couple drinks can’t fix.”
“No, listen,” Stone said, “I need to go home. Now.”
Pinky grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and said, “You don’t have a home without me. Remember? A couple drinks, that’s all.”
Under the damp belly of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they walked with the flow of traffic along the length of a rusted chain-link fence. They turned left at Washington and stepped out from underneath the BQE onto a one-way street that dead-ended a few hundred feet away at the Navy Yard, sleepless Manhattan lit up beyond. This tiny stretch of urban decay looked like the last battlefield of the Industrial Revolution. Forklifts were parked in a crazy array on the sidewalks, some with their silver prongs still raised. Twisted metal lay hunched in piles against the old graffiti-covered warehouses. An oil drum burned on the corner. Despite the late hour, an ice cream truck played a mournful children’s song somewhere in the distance.
For some reason, some presentiment itching at the back of his skull, Stone turned toward the overpass, where he saw, through the glow of the oil drum fire, three figures moving out from under the shadow of the expressway, dressed in black, their hats propped on their heads like smokestacks. He heard garbled mutters of Yiddish. Jesus Christ, he thought, remembering the man who had torn his suit at his father’s funeral. He couldn’t get away from them. Walking through the blighted streets of Pinky’s neighborhood, it was easy to think this was another planet, of graffiti, dice games, institutionalized poverty, and urban decay, but it was still Brooklyn, and Stone realized the farther he got from Midwood, the closer he got to the ultra-Orthodox of Williamsburg.
“Well, this is it,” Pinky said, gesturing like the emcee of some third-rate road show.
A small stairway lit by a single bare bulb led to the basement of a boarded-up redbrick building, remnants of smashed windows shining on the top floors. A stenciled sign on the door read, HIT SIGN. WIN SUIT. Music played from behind a battered steel door.
“How did you find this place?”
“I found it is how I found it,” Pinky said. “After you.”
The Catbird Seat was little more than a repurposed fallout shelter in the basement of an abandoned bottling plant, torched by arsonists in the seventies. The brick walls had been painted in vivid purple and gold and hung with garish abstract paintings bracketed by candelabra fashioned from parts of industrial machinery. They entered the low tin-ceilinged room, blue with cigarette smoke. A group of students, wan artist types, sat laughing around a long table beneath an antique billboard that read, ASTRAL OIL: “SAFE AND BEST.” One of the students had thick sideburns shaped like the state of California. Another wore an army jacket with the word CRASS scrawled in black marker on the back. A girl with blonde pigtails and glitter on her cheeks laughed. The room was lit only by candlelight. Stone took a seat at a small table nearby and noticed in the flickering yellow light the drawn faces of the students. A GREAT INDUSTRIAL CITY, another vintage sign read, and Stone imagined they were the great industrial workers worn down by coal dust, asbestos, ashes, and gas.
“I’ll get you a double from the well,” Pinky said, lighting a cigarette.
This was not a good idea, Stone thought. These people looked like the walking dead themselves. Dry-mouthed, he wished only for a glass of water. Pinky lingered at the bar, leaning close to the red-haired bartender, whispering something that would have been drowned out by the music.
As he sat alone at the table, Stone’s thoughts drifted back to his father, to the funeral, to the horrible sound of the dirt clots rattling against the coffin lid. It was past one in the morning, and the Judge would still be there in the ground, all night long and all the next day, and all winter long, and all year long, and there he would remain, or, at least, his remains would remain, until he was completely forgotten, mourned by no one. The thought was almost too much to bear, and Stone gasped for air. He wanted to go home, but Pinky was already making his way over to the table, a crooked smile on his face.
He slid a glass of clear liquid across the table and raised his own. “L’chaim. To life!” he said, and emptied the glass in a single gulp.
Stone did the same, but whatever rotgut Pinky had brought him rushed back up his throat. He swallowed it again, eyes watering, empty stomach burning. “What the hell is this?”
“Vodka, my man,” Pinky said. “Not the top-shelf stuff, but it does the trick.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Stone said.
“You really are a pussy.” Pinky laughed, but Stone didn’t think there was anything funny in Pinky’s words. “Put on your man pants and take it.” When Stone managed to regain his composure, Pinky ruffled Stone’s hair and said, “Straight up, no chaser. That’s the way to do it, my friend.” Pinky was no friend but Stone, hit hard by the double shot of vodka, felt maudlin, the urge to talk overwhelming his desire to leave Pinky and rush back to the relative comfort of his bare mattress.
“Have you ever imagined what happens to you when you die? Really thought deep on it?”
“Honestly?” Pinky said. “No.” He fiddled with his thick gold chain, tucking and untucking it from his New York Jets shirt.
“I was there when he died,” Stone said. “He was there, and then he was not. Something and then nothing. I was with him, and then I was alone. It is almost impossible to understand how one can be and then not be. Do you know
