whole park. You can’t help but feel like your legs are moving to their rhythm when you walk by. Next to them some guys practice Capoeira and make it look more like a dance than martial art. In a fenced-off area dogs headlock each other, and skid out on pee-soaked wood chips. A few NYU or FIT students sit on the ground balancing sketchpads on their knees trying to do the trees justice with charcoal and newsprint. On the north side guys play street hockey. In the playground little kids with sagging bathing suits run around under sprinklers. The last mustard sun rays of the day give everything more meaning and take away my ability to grasp it.
Me and my slate leave the park on Avenue B and turn down 9th Street. The only lot without a building is the community garden next to my apartment, which looks as woefully out of place as a shiny piano in a junkyard. I get a few doors down from my stoop and hear, “Don’t be calling me bitch. You think you my father?”
“How could I be your father, my shit ain’t in jail?”
These two. The lonely looking girl and the hybrid geek/thug boyfriend. I’ve seen them around the building, sitting on the stoop, her hands between his knees, smoking on the fire escape, his hand up the back of her shirt.
He goes, “You actin like I’m trying to make bank off you. I’m askin for like a couple dollars. Damn.” He lowers his voice. “You know your uncle got it.”
“No he don’t.”
He wears a tank under a Sammy Sosa Cubs jersey open so you can see the thick chains around his neck. “Ah-ight, forget it then. I ain’t asking you for nothin no more, ah-ight?”
“See why you gotta be actin like I don’t do shit for you?” she says.
“You don’t.”
“I sleep at your place when you want me to and I don’t when you don’t want me to.” He shrugs with no retort. “I got no money. You hearin me? No cuartos, papi.”
One time I saw her throw her sneaker off the third-floor fire escape and nail him right in the chest. He picked it up and started walking off. She climbed back in her window and a few seconds later busted through the front door and chased him down the block—not like he was running. She yanked the back of his sweatshirt then he flipped around and lifted all of maybe ninety pounds of her by her waist onto the hood of a parked car. She pounded on his shoulders with half-clenched fists until he grabbed them. Then she stared into him like the only thing that would calm her down was locked in his mouth, and he opened it for her.
Now he says, “I’m outta here. Like that I’m outta here.” He spreads his arms, raises his shoulders and backpedals. “You watching me go? Cause I’m going.”
She’s like, “Uh huh, uh huh.”
“Ah-ight,” he says as a final warning. “I’m out.”
He passes by me. “Fuck you lookin at?”
“I live here.”
“Then go live.” He keeps walking.
She yells, “It’s like that?” as more a threat than a question. “It’s like that?” He doesn’t stop. “Ah-ight go head. Go head.” And with every go head she seems to be asking him to come back. Until he’s around the corner and she stops yelling for him.
Now it’s just me, her, and my table. She sits on the steps to our apartment trying to shrink away from the scene she just caused: head almost between her legs, arms crossed at her stomach. I stand on the sidewalk making like I didn’t really hear anything and when it feels time I push my table over to the stoop, and lift it off the dolly that I kick near the garbage cans. I heave the slate up a stair at a time. She doesn’t move. When I get close enough I feel a sadness coming off her like heat. It’s wrapped its hands around her neck and pulls her whole body down toward the stoop. I ask her if she’s OK.
She takes her time deciding to answer me. Without lifting her head or eyes, she says, “You ever get tired?” I would not have put money on hearing that line.
I say, “It’s pretty much how I go through life.”
“That’s how I am. Fuckin tired.” She’s dropping most of the tough girl act she laid on her boyfriend; her melancholy now seeps through the cracks in her voice.
I lean the slate against the door, wipe a chalky hand on the thigh of my pants, then once across my chest. I hold it out above her head. She sees it coming out the corner of her eye and doesn’t flinch, so I lower it the rest of the way. Her hair is slicked back in an off-center part that breaks her head into two uneven sections. The surface is shiny black, and hard like plastic. When I touch her her eyelids beat fast time for a second then close. She drops her head further, tightens her arms around her stomach, and presses her knees together like she’s trying to suffocate something. I run my palm back to her ponytail then let go. I grab my table again and ask if she’ll be all right.
She makes a hissing sound through the corner of her lips telling me I’m stupid for thinking she’ll be otherwise.
I tell her I’ll see her around and lift my slate.
“What you doin with that thing?” she says, still looking down at the stoop.
At risk of cutting our strange connection short I say, “Long story.”
“Ah-ight,” she tells me, accepting that as the entire answer.
“I’m JT.”
“Wus up.”
That’s all we offer each other.
She keeps looking at the steps, I keep looking at the top of her head.
“Who are you?”
“Stephanie.”
I nod. “By the way, the Cubs suck.”
She forces a laugh through her nose.
I lift the keys from my pocket, balance the slab with one hand, and unlock the door with the other. I slide into the lobby as the door slams behind me and wipes out the last moment of this scrunched-up girl.
Now I got five flights above me. This might be the hard part. First floor I go step by step: eighty pounds, eighty pounds, and eighty pounds to the top. In the second floor hall I hear a woman in her apartment talking to her dogs like they can hold a conversation in perfect English. “No, Jasper. I don’t know why he hung up on her. Why can’t you let the show happen in its own time? Look at your sister, she’s not making a racket. I’m not trying to compare you to her, but she knows how to behave.” I wonder if her dogs understand the concept of borderline personalities.
I look up the third-floor staircase, testosterone myself up, lift the slate maybe a foot off the ground, and run up about ten, twelve stairs without stopping. I crash it on the top step and my momentum tips it over. It smacks against the wall and echoes through the entire building. I should probably go back to the one-step-at-a-time method.
Ralphie, the super—and the guy Stephanie lives with who I’m pretty sure is her uncle—opens his door to see what’s up. “What you do?”
“Sorry Ralphie, I’m just getting this to my apartment.”
“Whas
