let me up and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Fuck that. I tell you something and it’s like telling everyone we know, you bucket of shit spud brain.”
For that, he bit my hand.
I let go of his neck and squeezed my right hand with my left.
“Oww you motherfucker.” I shook out my fingers. “Did you just fuckin bite me?” I looked at my right knuckles that now had red teeth marks. “You bit me.”
“If you really want me to, I will fuck you up.”
“I want you to stop asking me questions.”
Noke walked up to me real slow, his arms up in the peace position, showing me his huge palms. “Did I break the skin?”
“No.”
“Talk to me. Now.”
If there was a way to get out of it then I didn’t see it. He would have been on my ass for months. And I supposed I did owe him an answer for why I threw a choke hold on him. “Noke, you have to make me a deal.”
“Done.”
“You cannot open your mouth to a single soul.”
“I won’t.”
Even though he sounded sincere I said, “How do I know that?”
“Because it’s me.”
June 28
From Tompkins Square, I walk back to my apartment, lay on a futon mattress that takes up a quarter chunk of the floor. From the fifth floor all the lovers’ quarrels, music, bed moaning, garbage and food smells—everything people let escape—pass through me on their way out the roof of the building. I’m the conduit for everything coming out of this building, a lightning rod in reverse. But not tonight. Tonight it’s quiet. And definitely not the same quiet as laying on a riverbed in Yonkers with Nokey, taking a slow ride on the Earth, moving on the same rhythm as all the other passengers. This is a throbbing quiet, like an ear infection. I see that woman in the coffee shop. My sister’s face under another girl’s skin. My sister standing on the footbridge over the river. Nokey looking at her. Noticing her. My heart starts tripping. And I’d put cash on the Dalai Lama not being able to slow that shit down.
Fuck. Here comes the panic. It shoots up the back of my neck, dries out my mouth and paralyzes my tongue. My heart flaps around my chest like a fish on a line. Every fucking night, the constant ringing and thinking will not stop—yelling at me that I should start drinking heavily close to the edge of a rooftop. I try to laugh it all off until the early signs of blue light start to seep in the windows, that’s usually when I get my hour and a half of sleep. I heard that resting is just as good as sleeping, which doesn’t help me, because I can’t stay still enough to rest. I clasp my hands under the back of my head. I can feel my hair growing back in. I’ve kept shaving it since I left the park. Don’t know why. I find all kinds of twisted positions to lie in, but eventually I stand up. Look out the window, open the refrigerator and see if anything has changed since last I looked. I pee. I grab a pretzel out of a bag from the counter. I drink some water. I try jerking off, and I can barely feel anything—I haven’t done the one-gun salute in months. I’m numb in a lot of places and it terrifies me, OK? It terrifies me like sleeping, like my own thoughts, like money, like death, like listening to my heartbeat, like thinking about my breathing, like feeling like this forever, like being alone, like being with someone, like jail. My eyes spin around this apartment looking for the right woman’s face, the cure, the quietest thing, but I find brick, wood, paint. A book. I scan a page in this Gabriel García Márquez book that I’m supposed to be reading for a GED class and can’t follow for shit. Tomorrow at work I’ll fight to stay awake while hauling a thirty-pound bag of rocks in each hand—when sleep isn’t safe. Or possible. No one is looking for me. See, this is what I don’t fucking want—a quiet building. I want kids running across wood floors, I want muffled music or domestic squabbles shaking the walls. I throw the sheet off, stand up. Look out the window, come back to the mattress, put my back to the wall and tap my right knuckles into my left palm for noise. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap … Faster, faster, faster. Louder. Keep going. Keep a rhythm. Go, go, go, go, go. All right, I gotta stop that shit. Now my hand hurts. Great. No way man, I can’t have the buzz in my ears be the only thing to listen to. I pace. Somebody give me a little neighborly help goddamn it, I need to hear some noise. OK stop. Breathe deep. This night will be over just like the rest of them. Breathe again. Why do they tell you to do that, it just makes it worse. This is like free-falling upward. SON OF A BITCH. I rock back and forth on my feet. Please. Everything is OK here. It’s way too early to touch that notebook, let it stay on the table. OK, sing Bob Marley: Everything’s gonna be all right. Everything’s gonna be all right. I need a stereo in here. “Danielle.” Everything’s gonna be all right. Yeah, right. “Table. Rocks. Patio.” Sometimes I say words out loud to drown the silence. “Neighbor, neighbor.” Sometimes it works. “Patio. Table. Hey. Hey-yo. Hey. Shit. Stephanie. Ste-phan-ie.”
July 5
“Five at-bats,” Brian says as we lift bags of rocks off the pile. “Did I say that already? Five at-bats and I couldn’t get a hit. I mean this is the playoffs, pal. This is when I shine. Down by two, I got runners on the corners and I fly to fucking center.”
Brian’s got this kind of muscular wisdom passed down from his Irish ancestors who survived the potato famine and cursed a lot. Now combine that with a witty ability to sneak attack you with an Oscar Wilde quote, a smile that can sell dirt, and—this may be the most devastating of all—a charm that could let him fuck six different women a week and not make it seem cheap. He wears his smarts like a pair of jeans faded and frayed in all the right places to fit only him. I’ve felt off balance around him since day one. He’s so cool it pisses me off.
“You think I would’ve cut down my swing and popped one over the shortstop’s head. No I fly deep to center. End of inning, end of game.” Unlike me, Brian is never tired.
We’re on East 82nd Street. In front of us are thirty-pound bags of gravel piled five feet high on wooden flats. Our job for the moment is to move every bag from the street, through the brownstone behind us, and into its backyard. Each sack is cinched with a metal clip at the opening, so we grab them by the few inches of excess bag on top, like brown bag lunches. With one bag in each hand, me and Brian walk from the sidewalk through a side gate that lets us into the bottom floor of the brownstone. Oak and leather furniture, wood-framed paintings, and stained-glass lamps are weatherproofed against dirt and dust with plastic tarps. We go through this room, up eight more stairs, and into the courtyard where we lay the sacks on a cleared quarter acre of dirt that in a few months will be a new patio. We stand the bags upright in rows that remind me of the candles we lined the sidewalks of my old neighborhood with on Christmas Eve—spidering out from the church, lighting paths to God’s house.
The last ten days were demolition. We got rid of all the old slate and concrete except for the piece I carried home. Most of our next few weeks will be spent carrying the layers of this new patio bag by bag. The layers go like this: Gravel to level the land. Black tarp to stop plants from using the sunlight to eat, grow. Sand to level and cushion the slate. Concrete to fill the cracks between the new pieces of slate.
We go down the stairs and into the bottom floor of the brownstone. “I sat on the bench literally hiding my face,” Brian says. “I haven’t lost it on the field like that since I was young enough to crap my jock. I’m such a pansy. And I give you shit about how much moving rocks hurts.”
“Balls
