at the sound of Jimmy’s voice.
“Skippy, my man.” Jimmy held up the pizza box. “Check this out! Dudes were closing for the night and gave me all this!” He plopped down on the floor in front of the wall facing me, his long legs spread wide around the pizza box.
Skip padded up in his sports socks, feet turned out like a duck, and introduced me in his formal way. “Sid and her friend Lorenzo are going to be living on the first floor.” I was hungry. I left the circle of light that made the plaster wall look like a stage set and crouched by the pizza box. I picked the pepperoni off a slice.
“Whoa, downstairs!” Jimmy raised his eyebrows, “Total shithole, right?”
“I know you,” I told Jimmy. “I work Donny’s table at ABC.” I’d seen him around but I’d never have pegged him as a squatter. He was too clean and his look was more Sex Pistols than Crass.
Jimmy picked up my discarded pepperoni and ate them while he studied me. But he didn’t recognize me. When you’re fat, you’re invisible. “So, where’s your buddy then?” he asked.
“Um . . . band practice.”
“Ha!” Jimmy snickered. “Leaving the dirty work to you, huh?”
Dirty, you could say that again. We didn’t have running water in the house or a mirror. I’d washed up using my gallon jug of drinking water from the deli, but I didn’t want to waste any. It cost money and I’d just get filthy again tomorrow.
“This drawing is great!” Skip was studying my sketch on the wall. “Wow, you really know how to draw.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” Jimmy asked.
“Giuliani.” I pointed to the egg shape. “See, he’s Humpty Dumpty, sitting on the brick wall. Headed for a fall.”
“What, over there?”
“No, in the middle. His men are the cops over here. They’re going to give that punk in the corner a ticket for drinking beer on the street.”
“It’s looking like a squat in here!” Jimmy laughed. He had finished his slice and now he aimed his crust at Humpty Dumpty’s face. “Take that, Rudy!”
“Jimmy,” Skip said, licking his fingers, “Sid was telling me about how the squats in the city have workdays where everyone works together on house projects.”
Jimmy ripped a piece of crust off another slice and, squinting one eye, aimed for the cops. “Fuck the po-lice!” he chanted like Ice-T.
“Maybe Sunday?” Skip suggested. “What do you think?”
Jimmy looked between him and me like he was trying to think of something funny to say. “What did Mitch say?”
Skip stared at the wall in silence. For some reason the mention of Mitch ended the conversation. I went back to sketching on the wall. Jimmy finished another slice and threw his crust half-heartedly at the cops. It landed on the floor.
Downstairs the door slammed again and we listened to feet coming up the stairs. Mitch, in his basketball sneakers and jeans, rounded the corner and the light caught him dramatically. He and I were spotlit on stage together and no one else spoke, so I waved my crayon and said, “Hiya!”
Mitch’s eyes scanned the wall as he crossed the floor. I felt suddenly silly, like decorating the house, when there was so much real work to do, was frivolous. Mitch’s sneaker hit Jimmy’s pizza crust and he paused a moment to look down.
“You’re gonna get rats in here,” he said. Then he disappeared up the next flight of stairs.
Eddie sighed in his sleep, still stretched out on the floor with his ankles crossed, and we all turned to look at him.
Jimmy unfurled, stretching his arms up to the ceiling. “Hittin’ the hay, comrades!”
Skip said goodnight too, carefully shutting his door. I picked up the box and collected the leftover crusts in it. I took it downstairs before I went to bed.
* * *
In the morning it looked like a moose had ravaged the pizza box. The crusts were gone and the wax paper was shredded into a soft ball of fluff. I shoved the whole mess into a garbage bag and wiped my hands on my shorts. I should have been more grossed out, but I was getting used to it down here.
Mitch appeared in the doorway in a Patriots T-shirt, the messenger bag he took to work slung over his shoulder.
I had all the junk sorted enough that you could walk through the space now, and he followed the path I’d made toward the back wall.
“I’m putting in a woodstove upstairs,” he said, “so save me any wood scraps you got.” He navigated through the room to a closet and moved a rotten piece of plywood. “Bingo! I knew there was a toilet down here!”
I’d built a sort of barricade around the old toilet with tall wood and pieces of metal. We didn’t have running water and it was crusty and gross. Mitch put his bag on the floor and started moving everything.
“You can bucket flush,” he said. “Clean it up and find a bucket. I’ll show you how to get water at the hydrant. You’re gonna be in business.”
I stood back, sure I’d get in his way if I tried to help. “Hey, so Skip and I were talking last night. We want to get a house workday going, you know, maybe work on some projects in communal spaces in the building . . .”
Mitch snorted. He lifted a rusty piece of iron, his arms straining. “I live here ’cause I like to be independent, this isn’t some hippie commune.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Everybody should know enough to take care of what needs to get done. If they don’t, they don’t belong here.”
“I just thought it’d be, like . . . cool . . . I mean, being new here . . .”
“So we should sit in a circle and hold hands? Tell our life stories?” He strode out the door swinging his bag over his shoulder. It was easy to end up talking to Mitch’s back. Like I even wanted to hear his stupid life story.
* * *
The door to the laundromat opened and Lorenzo ducked in out of the rain. I dropped the tattered People I was flipping through. Even in the fluorescent-lit tan and orange laundromat the guy managed to look cool. He was wearing a filthy Amebix T-shirt and army pants and leather bands on his wrist. If my T-shirt got that dirty the Latino girls on the street scowled and veered their baby carriages away from me, but on him it looked tough.
“Hey, stranger,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. My heart pounded. “Skip tell you I was here?”
“Yeah.” He sat down a few seats away. “Dude’s all agitated.”
“There was a workday yesterday. At the house.”
“Crap,” Lorenzo said. “Everyone was there?”
“No.” The workday thing was my idea so I was duty-bound to be there and to drink with Skip at the end of the day, since he’d gotten beer and ice to make it festive. I was paying for my forced
