Chapter 4
In Manhattan, there are several drop in centers for homeless kids — places to get food, a shower, and laundry, but also to talk with a therapist or a psychiatrist or to find a shelter, a job, or a welfare account. Rai and Z had no interest in most of those services, but they needed food and a shower as much as anyone else, so they came to the Place, a narrow old building next to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 46th Street near Times Square. Z liked to come in from the 6th Avenue side so they wouldn’t have to walk past the church, because Rai inevitably spat on the steps and cursed Torquemada or Fernando el Católico or any number of Christian anti-semites Z had never heard of.
They rushed through the door, but the receptionist stopped them before they could run up the stairs. “Have you signed in yet today?” she asked with a smile.
Z stalked back down the stairs, a bit angry that her tone was so kind that he didn’t have an excuse to get really furious. “Why the fuck do you staff always make us sign shit? You know who I am.”
“Please, Z. You know the state gives us money based on your signature. It’s a small price to pay for a meal and a place to hang.”
“My privacy? A small price?” He took the pen from her and scribbled “Leon Trotsky” on the sheet. The man was dead; he didn’t need his name any more. Sometimes Z was stunned how stupid people could be — how could they not have recognized the name as an alias? Rai signed “Helen Miller” in neat print on the next line.
“Breakfast is almost ready. You’d better hurry.” The problem with the Place, Z thought, was that staff were too nice. Some of them, at least. It almost made him feel guilty for the writing and art supplies he stole. Rai, on the other hand, actually liked having people smile at her. Not that she would admit it, of course, but kindness didn’t happen very often in her life.
Close to forty kids were hanging out in the common room with only one harried staff member, but Z decided not to take advantage of the situation beyond throwing out his chest and talking loudly to show he was “the baddest motherfucker in The Place.” He pulled out a mat, threw it on the floor, and crashed down on it. “I’m gonna skip breakfast,” he said more quietly to Rai. “I’m beat. Your tossing kept me up all last night. Just sign me up for a shower, huh?” He closed his eyes and was almost instantly asleep. Rai nodded to him and walked slowly over to the lone adult to ask her to put their names down.
Rai caught herself yawning, checked the state of her mind and her throat, then paused behind an intense chess game. A white kid with long hair and slow, languid movement leaned over the board, trying to work a way to extricate himself from a nasty knight fork.
“You’re fucked, Petey, just accept it. Lose the queen and move on,” his opponent taunted. He was a wiry Hispanic boy wearing a leather jacket painted with the words “Cannibal Corpse” and the picture of one skeleton performing cunniligus on another. His movements were as quick and nervous as his friend’s were slow. Petey reluctantly slid his king into the C file, allowing the other boy to pounce on the queen. “Yeah baby! Power is shifting in the Place! Petey is no longer number one!”
Petey moved his rook across the back row, threatening the knight. “Just play, Toker.” Then, with an evil grin, “Watch da board.”
Toker pulled his knight out of danger and threatened the other rook. “Mate in two. It’s all over!” His eyes gleamed proudly.
Petey slammed his rook across the board, trapping Toker’s queen behind his defensive pawns. “Mate! Fuck you, Toker!” He stood up and walked across the room to the air conditioner, not needing to look to see how Toker’s face would fall. He turned the fan up.
Rai tapped Toker on the shoulder. “You should step out your rook’s pawn when you castle on that side.”
“Yeah, obviously. Shit. I thought I had him.” He started to rearrange the pieces on the board. “Hey Petey. Who called next?”
“It’s breakfast time, man.”
Toker turned to Rai. “Wanna play?”
“Nah. Not enough time. I play slow.” She gestured to the clock, which said breakfast was about to be called. “Next time I’m here.” She yawned.
“Dude.” He nodded. “I’m Toker. Don’t see many chicks around here who can play the game. Where’d you learn?”
“Rikers.” This was patently untrue, but it was easier and less embarrassing than explaining that she’d sat in Barnes and Noble with half a dozen chess books in front of her. Saying she’d learned in jail also gave her the street credibility she knew she was lacking.
“Yo, so maybe we can hang out sometime. Y’know, smoke a blunt, go to the park…”
She rolled her eyes and looked at him with what she hoped was a dismissive glance. “Watch the board, Toker.”
The intercom sounded: “Attention all program members and available staff. Breakfast is now being served.” The room drained except for the dozen or so kids who needed sleep more than food.
“See ya, then. Maybe we can play after we eat.” Toker gave Rai a wink and ran to breakfast.
Rai looked at Z, who was fast asleep on the floor. She thought about joining him; she was exhausted, and she knew that she needed sleep if her brain was going to return to its normal pace, but she decided against it. She wasn’t thrilled about leaving him to go and eat alone, but she was hungry, so she trudged up the stairs.
When Rai came to The Place — or any of the other places where street kids hung out — she had no real interest in talking to anyone besides Z. In honest, self-critical moments, she admitted this snobbery depended on two rather shameful personality traits. First, there was her need to feel superior to everyone else. She sometimes explained that in her sophomore year of high school, her English teacher had been so frustrated with her too-quick completion of her reading assignments that he started to throw books at her almost at random, just to keep her busy. She had become fixated on Ibsen. For a year, she had posted her favorite quote from Enemy of the People in her locker: “The majority is always wrong.” For a girl in Vanillaville who often thought that the world was against her, it was a comforting idea; on the street it was dangerously elitist.
Rai would also confess to a second reason: simple fear. She also illustrated it with a story.
The first week she’d been in New York — maybe a month after she’d met Z, late spring of the year before — Z had gone off with a one night stand. Claiming the demands of his libido, he often searched for women to seduce, but Rai had seen quickly that these liaisons depended on the weather forecast he read on the front page of the Times. On a cold or rainy night, he wanted a bed.
Rai had been hanging out alone in the common room of The Place before dinner. Lightning cracked outside; torrents of rain cascaded down the dirty windows. She’d come in a couple of times that week and gotten to know a couple of kids. None were really that smart — by her standards, though staff at The Place would have begged to differ — but at least a couple were interesting and not too painful to talk to.
“Where you gonna sleep tonight?” she had asked a thin, pretty black girl with dyed hair who had offered her a chocolate bar the day before.
“You don’t want that, girlfriend. I’m walking down to 34th Street to see who wants to gimme a roof tonight.”
“You lookin’ for a place to sleep?” A muscled Hispanic boy on the other side of the girl spoke. “Me and my doggs just got a crib. I mean, it’s uptown and nothing great, but there’s no rain, huh? Whassup? That big boy of yours dump ya?”
“He’s not mine, and he had other plans.” Her voice seemed hopelessly prim, and her defensive tone grated against her ears. She felt so pretentious, but she didn’t want to insult anyone. She was still insecure about life on the street. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t want to put you out…”
“Fuck, no biggie. When I was on the street, folks did it for me. Just paying back the karmic balance, y’know?” He smiled sweetly and shifted his voice into a less gangsterish tone. The smile lit up his face and almost erased the tear tattooed under his left eye.
“But your friends…”
He gestured across the room to three boys and two girls, then beckoned them over. They walked around the big table where a bunch of kids and staff were playing chess and cards, then pulled up a couple of chairs. “Yo, this is Helen.” They all nodded slowly, sizing her up. And finding her very small. The big latino pointed them out one by one: “D, Flaz, Adonis, Mouse, and Tracy.” The last two were the girls. One white, one black. The men were black, except for D, who had no color at all. Almost albino. “And I’m Big.” He capitalized the word to show that it was a name, not just an adjective.
Mouse spoke up. “It ain’t big, and we can’t keep ya forever unless ‘n ya pay rent, but come tonight, yeah?” She pointed to the torrential rains out the window.
“Ya ain’t been here long, and ya don’t wanna get sick,” Adonis added. He was not quite as handsome as his name, but almost. And he knew it.
Rai felt very alone. Half a dozen emotions collided inside her head. She was afraid of the rain and of sleeping alone in a new city. She knew that everyone else at The Place had concluded that she and Z were snobs; this looked like a chance to show that she could be part of the culture. She sort of wanted to be liked — she’d only left home about six weeks before, and her large array of defense mechanisms were unformed.
On the other hand, she knew exactly how dangerous it was to go home with six people she’d just met. Two of them were girls, she told herself. It couldn’t be that bad.
A lightning bolt struck nearby and thunder followed a second later, making up Rai’s mind for her. “Yeah. After dinner?”
“Meet us out front.”
Everyone had filed upstairs to eat, and Rai followed them. She felt even more solitary than when she’d been alone in Washington. It was much lonelier to be around people, she mused.
As promised, the apartment in the Bronx was small. One bedroom, one bed, some cardboard boxes spread on the floor as mattresses, and dirty clothes and jackets piled in the corner. Flaz opened the oven door and turned it on. “Cold as fuck in here!”
The only decorations in the place were a bong in the corner and a poster of Bob Marley. The stained walls showed gang tags in black and red.
Tracy went to the fridge. “Wachu want. Miller or vodka?” At the same time, D handed her a hand-rolled cigarette.
“I don’t smoke, but thanks.”
“Then drink.”
“I’d like water, please,” she shouted in to Tracy, desperately trying to project a happy tone. She backed away from D toward the wall. Unfortunately, away from the door. Big and Adonis walked over, much closer than her comfort allowed.
“Ya don’t fuckin’ smoke and ya don’t fuckin’ drink,” Big said.
“But do ya fuckin’ fuck?” The laughter that followed Adonis’s joke was not friendly.
Rai stood up to her full five foot two and mustered a few brave words. “May I just go? I don’t think this is going to work.”
“You use big words and you talk all yuppie and you think you’s better ‘n us, but you ain’t.” This from Mouse, in the kitchen.
“I don’t give a fuck if you’s some Arab princess. You gonna learn some respect. Proper fucking respect.” Big enunciated the last words carefully, like a cop or a judge.
“Don’t call me an Arab, you fuck. I’m Jewish.” Rai stood up even straighter. Big stood stock still, as if amazed that someone so small would stand up to him.
Adonis cut in. “Bloodsucking Jew. Well, let’s see how you suck something else…” He reached down to unzip his pants. Rai spit in his face.
Rai never discovered what they had been planning had she not resisted, but the spit guaranteed that she was going to suffer before she left the apartment.
In telling this story, Rai always skipped what happened next, saying only that she woke up on the D train as it pulled into Coney Island at three in the morning. Bruises were beginning to show on her face. The bites and scratches on her arms and shoulders were beginning to clot. She felt dried blood in her hair.
A half-sleeping nightmare filled the rest of the night as the train bounced back and forth between the Bronx and Brooklyn. Each time someone stepped into the car, she woke with a fit and curled herself into a ball in the corner. Then, as she would start to doze off, she dug her fingernails into her leg, harder and harder, even drawing blood. “That’s what you deserve for going with them. That’s what you deserve. Coward. Coward. Coward,” she chanted to herself until commuters began to fill the train at about 6. Finally, she moved the “coward” chant from her lips to her mind, afraid to draw attention to herself.
At 7:30, someone did notice her. A young woman got on at Broadway-Lafayette and the crowd pushed her into Rai’s corner. The woman could tell there was more to Rai’s balled up form than the typical street lunacy. She touched her very lightly on the shoulder. “Are you OK?”
Rai slapped her hand away. “No. Leave me alone.”
“Can I do–”
“No. Leave me alone.”
“I can–”
“Are you fucking listening? Leave me alone!” Rai curled into a ball again and closed her eyes. The woman stepped back.
At West 4th, she offered help again, but this time Rai told her to fuck off. When she finally got off at Penn Station, she was almost crying. Rai curled up in the corner again.
As the train headed into the Bronx, it emptied of commuters, and Rai could almost sleep again. No one bothered her for the next several hours.
By midmorning, she could no longer hold her bladder, so she scrambled off the train at 42nd Street and stumbled toward the Public Library. She took the elevator to the third floor and closed herself in the women’s bathroom, placing a mop in front of the door so no one else would come in. She peed, then washed herself carefully.
The cleanliness seemed to straighten her spine. She held her shoulders up, opened the door, moved the mop, and inched carefully down the marble staircase. Then to the Sephora in Times Square, where she doused herself in Christian Dior, put on enough base to hide the worst of the bruises and enough eyeliner to make the bags under her eyes look intentional, gothic. Slowly, she walked to Bryant Park, where she knew Z would show up eventually. The sun was hot and the grass had already dried from last night’s storm. She actually managed to sleep a little.
Z woke her at about noon. Scared, she automatically reached into her pocket, but found that her little knife was gone. Relieved to see it was just Z, she sat up and hugged him. Only then did she begin to cry.
For the next several months, Rai couldn’t imagine hanging with another street kid, even insisting they go to soup kitchens for adults, but Z’s exclusion from The Place was less voluntary. After convincing Rai to tell him what had happened, he went straight to find Big, Adonis, and their gang. They were hanging out in the common room as they always did.
Z stepped up to Big and spoke softly; soft is not a volume Big and his posse were used to, so they listened carefully. “You have no honor. You have no respect. You are worth less than the used douche of a leprous whore.” If he had shouted this, he might not have left the room alive, but they were confused by his soft voice. “I will take each of you, one by one. And each of you will feel what she felt. Do you understand? Come to Sheep’s Meadow at midnight.”
He pulled out his switchblade, flicked it out, and licked it. Then he turned his back and stalked away. As he walked out the door, he heard the verdict: The Place imposed its no weapons policy and expelled him for the next six months.
No one showed up at Sheep Meadow to challenge Z. He just sat in the middle of the field, cleaning his fingernails with the blade, a pose movies had taught him was intimidating. Rai watched proudly from the nearby woods.
A year later when they showed up at The Place, Big and his friends were gone. Rumor had it that Big was upstate on some drug charge, and the rest had disappeared. Even so, Rai was reluctant to hang out with other kids if she didn’t have her bodyguard.
That story floated around her head as she walked up the stairs, but Rai was hungry enough to plow through the line to get cereal, yogurt, and some fruit — she pinched an extra orange and slid it into her pocket for Z. She could feel that she was almost working on autopilot. Not enough sleep, she thought. She sat at an unoccupied table in the rear and put her back to everyone else; she hoped no one would join her, and she put her nose in her book just in case someone didn’t get the message.
With the book in her hands, she managed to forget the filth that coated her skin and the nightmares that had assaulted her as she slept on the ground the night before. As Grigory Pechorin slashed through the Russian Caucasus, life began to feel less boring. And a little less horrid.
Rai had not noticed, but as she had read, the dining room had emptied. She finally looked up at the sound of her name. “You Rai?” a staff member asked, the phone in one hand. Rai nodded. “Hustle down to the shower. Your turn.”
“Yeah, right.” She got up and tucked her book back into her bag. She rushed down the stairs, afraid someone might have taken her place in line. She smelled herself and didn’t like the result.
Of all the things Rai hated about life on the street, hygiene was the worst. She hated walking through Midtown with mud on her skirt. She hated the smell of her own rotten sweat. Before she had shaved her head, it had been impossible to keep her curly hair untangled.
She was glad that The Place had showers, but she wished they would allow a bit more modesty: the shower stalls were small and tough to change in, and there were always vain boys walking around naked except for their boxers. She also hated having to carry her underwear to Juan — the guy who staffed the basement shower room — and ask him to throw it in the laundry. Juan was a cool guy, but he was still a guy, and she didn’t trust guys with her bra.
Regardless, she put up with it. It was better than smelling like she did right now. She showered quickly, then hung around the basement in a borrowed, too-big sweatsuit while she waited for her clothes to get through the laundry. Kids kept passing through, but she ignored them, her nose in her book. She soon discovered that exhaustion kept her from enjoying Lermontov’s story of how Pechorin seduced Princess Mary, so she let her head drop back, and as she fell into a half-sleep.
When Z zipped downstairs, he woke her before climbing half-naked into the shower. He would take as long as Juan allowed, washing and primping and making himself pretty. Worse than any girl, Rai thought. She walked over to the dryer to get her clothes; she’d only slept about an hour, but she felt much better.
When Z finally emerged and dressed, they pushed their way upstairs through a group of kids in Crip colors who were talking in hushed voices. Rai hated gangstas, and thought it was rude of them to block the stairs, but she knew that they were not people she should have as enemies, so she excused herself primly as she walked by. She said goodbye to Tanya, the receptionist, as she passed by, but Z gave her a wink. “She’s hot!” he told Rai in a voice just loud enough for Tanya to overhear.
“Calm the libido, Z,” Rai lectured him as the front door closed behind them. “It’s time to go to work.”
