team. But since I always hung out with guys, I could shoot hoops and play pool and I wasn’t half bad at hacky sack. I lined up the shot, squinting to see the hoop in the dusk. I threw from deep in my shoulder. The ball hit the backboard, bounced on the rim, and dropped through the net. I raised my arms over my head in victory and felt the first cool breeze of the evening drifting over the BQE.
III
“Lorenzo came by earlier,” Skip whispered. It was trash night and we were sneaking the bags I’d filled out of the Bakery.
“He did?” I asked, startled to hear the name in my thoughts spoken aloud.
“I told him you were sleeping up on the second floor for now. He put his stuff up there too.”
“I guess that means he’ll be back sometime.” I was totally disappointed. I’d barely left the house in three days. If I hadn’t gone out for food earlier, I could have seen him, asked what was going on.
Skip glanced at me. “You guys aren’t a couple, are you?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
“Good?”
Skip heaved his bag on top of a neighbor’s broken dresser. He had said that if we added a couple of bags to the piles in front of each building, no one would notice. I shoved mine into the same pile and put a bundle of magazines on top of it and looked up at the building. No movement. We headed back to the house for more.
“Oh yeah, couples are really bad for a group house,” Skip said. “Everyone is equal and friends until there’s a couple. They just agree on everything together.”
“And everyone else is left out.” I thought of my Dad and Angela, how I’d suddenly become a third wheel when they met.
“Exactly. They just want to spend all their time together!”
He sounded perplexed by the thought. I had wondered if he was gay, but now I reconsidered. “You into straight edge?” I asked. I heaved a bag over my shoulder so it rested on my back and we headed up Rodney to Hope Street, where Skip said he’d seen a dumpster.
“Straight what?” He held his own bag awkwardly in front of him so it hit his shins.
“Straight edge? Youth of Today? Minor Threat?”
“I don’t . . . What’s that?”
“Bands, hardcore, you know . . .”
The dumpster was in front of a building under construction. I swung my bag over the edge and we both flinched when it landed, but no lights came on in the dark block. Skip had trouble heaving his in. I got my hands under it and helped push it over. I had at least fifty pounds on wiry little Skip.
“You never heard of Black Flag?” A squatter who didn’t know anything about punk was a surprise to me. “Agnostic Front?”
“Sorry, I’m not hip, I guess. Why did you think I was into that?”
“Oh . . . well . . .” Good question. How had we gotten into this? “What you said about couples, I guess . . . I thought of straight edge. Some straight edge kids are celibate.”
“Celibate?”
“You know . . .” I felt awkward; I was glad Rodney Street was so dark. “Mostly they just don’t drink or do drugs. The idea is being clean so you can, like, think straight. I just thought when you were down on relationships, maybe . . .”
“Are you straight edge?” Skip looked at me as he unlocked the front door.
“No, I don’t call myself that. I don’t eat meat, but . . . I’m not into Krishna or anything.” I shrugged. I had been celibate all summer, but it wasn’t by choice. I pulled more bags out of the first floor and gave the lighter one to Skip. It was so cool he was helping with this gross sweaty work.
I started to thank him as we headed across South 1st but he interrupted, “Hare Krishna? Like the orange robe guys?”
“That scene is totally weird,” I said. I dropped my bag in front of the house directly across the street. We were getting tired, and their pile wasn’t too big. “I don’t get why punk kids would get into Krishna. I think all organized religion is messed up, you know?”
“Exactly! That’s just what I think!” Skip put his bag next to mine and smiled up at the house behind it with his open, defenseless face. “Wow, Sid, it’s really great to have an intellectual around.”
* * *
I decided the second floor needed a mural. The east wall was an expanse of white plaster, empty and inviting. A mural would make the house feel more like a squat. I sat on my sleeping bag and doodled ideas in my sketchbook. If downstairs was where the bakery ovens had once been, this floor must have been used for packaging, with the walls of windows for natural light. There were two small offices at the back with frosted glass doors. Skip lived in one and Eddie in the other. Eddie’s door was open, his radio a drone of baseball. He was lifting weights and every time I looked in his direction, he was grinning at me with his red strained face. I wanted to move my sleeping bag so I was out of his line of sight, but I was worried that would seem rude.
When I had a drawing I liked, I took the lamp over to the plaster wall. I had painted a mural at my high school in Connecticut. The theme was Alice in Wonderland. My friends and I thought the adults wouldn’t get the drug references. We thought we were smarter than everyone else, listening to the Velvet Underground and passing a joint while we painted giant mushrooms and drink-me bottles. That was before I started going to all-ages punk shows. For my friends at school, the Velvet Underground turned into the Doors, then the Grateful Dead. Pot started looking like a gateway drug to shitty music. The hardcore kids I met at shows didn’t care much about drugs either way, they just wanted to save their money for demo tapes and band T-shirts and vegan burritos.
I used a crayon to start sketching on the wall. Eddie came meandering out of his room holding dumbbells to see what I was doing. He hunched on a milk crate doing curls in the dark. Drawing on the white wall with the light on me, it was like I was on stage.
“Who’s winning the game?” I asked to make conversation.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” I drew a huge egg shape in the center of the wall and then a horizon line. I was sore from working downstairs all week; stretching my arms over my head felt good. The front door creaked open downstairs and I held my breath, listening to the bolt click back in place. I hoped it was Lorenzo, though it didn’t seem likely he had a key yet, and the bouncing steps on the stairs didn’t sound like him, he was more of a trudger.
A lanky boy with Manic Panic red hair burst into the room behind a pizza box. I hadn’t met him yet, but I knew right away it was Jimmy. The ladies’ man, the fashion punk from Ohio, the kind of skate punk with bangs and a Dead Kennedy’s shirt who all the cheerleaders wanted to date in high school. He was hardly ever here at the squat, he spent most nights at the apartments of girlfriends and buddies, wherever there was a PlayStation and food to mooch.
Jimmy cocked his head at me and pulled off his headphones. He gestured
