Chapter 20
Rai arrived at The Place late in the morning; she’d spent hours sitting on one park bench after another, watching cops to see if they recognized her. They didn’t seem to, so she decided it would be safe to walk by Officer Safran, the beat cop who patrolled 46th at the bat cave. Generally he was cool and quite un-cop-ish, and today was no different. He waved to her as she passed, and she returned a sheepish smile.
The shower room was empty. All of the kids who needed to clean up must have finished already, so Juan sat in front of the television, watching a baseball game. “Excuse me,” Rai asked nervously. “Can I talk to you a second?”
“Yeah, ‘course.” Juan flicked off the TV with the remote controller. “Whassup?”
“Um… how’s the clothes situation?”
“In your size? Not much. You lookin’ for a new outfit? You wouldn’t be Rai without that black skirt.”
“Exactly.”
Juan looked confused, but invited her into the back room, then began searching through piles of donated clothes. “Whatchu want?”
“Anything inconspicuous. I dunno. Jeans, a t-shirt.”
Juan nodded slowly. “I’m not even gonna ask who you’s runnin’ from.” He found a small pair of jeans and a green polo shirt. “Try these.” He walked out, then closed the door to give her some privacy. Once she found that they fit, she tucked a donated baseball cap into her bag and threw the old clothes away. After her shower, Juan feigned that he didn’t recognize her, which she took as a good sign.
As she sat in the common room reading, trying not to feel awkward in her new clothes, she noticed a strange sort of quiet among the kids. Without the loud shouts that generally punctuated chess games or the busy chatter of gossip, rap, and insult, the room felt surreal, almost haunted. The atmosphere felt so strange that Rai could not even read Anna. Finally, she turned to the girl sitting next to her, a thin waif she had seen many times at meals but never spoken to, and asked what was going on.
“You didn’t hear?”
“No. Somebody’s dog die?” Even before she had spoken, Rai felt her foot in her mouth.
The other girl winced. “No. Exxxstasis.”
“The fat girl?”
“Boy.”
“Oh…”
“On the stroll last night.” Though offended by Rai’s blunt questions, the girl seemed to find consolation in telling the story. Exxxstasis, she explained patiently, was not a girl like Rai had through. She had been born a boy, grown up in the Bronx, and then, at fourteen, couldn’t handle the pressure any more. She told her father she didn’t feel like a boy. She wanted to wear dresses and makeup.
In the South Bronx, this was not an option. After her father tried to beat the feminity out of her with a baseball bat, she ran away and found herself at 14th Street. With the help of back-alley estrogen, the advice of the girls on the stroll, lots of makeup, and the money her pimp allowed her from the four tricks she turned a night, she slowly transformed herself from José to Exxxstasis. Though she had not been a pretty girl, she had learned to pass so well that she hoped he might be able to find a job outside the skin trade.
“So she was just trying to get enough money for an apartment, y’know? Said she was gonna turn tricks just this month, then start to look for a real job. And she woulda got one too. Smart girl. Fucking smart. And funny. But last night she goes with some john at three in the morning and she doesn’t come back. Coupla hours later the pimp goes to the spot and she’s in three pieces. Body, head, dick. Clean slices.” The girl nodded slowly, sadly, like someone who had seen everything before.
“Shit.”
“Same as always. You know the story.”
“What story?”
“John comes, thinks he’s got a nice piece of ass, takes ‘er back to the room, fucks ‘er, then suddenly pretends he don’t know she got a dick. ‘Course that’s what he wanted in the first place. Ya don’t go to the 14th Street Stroll if’n ya don’t wanna chick with a dick. But he pretends its some kinda surprise. Rage, guilt, all that shit, and he kills her. That’s the story he’ll tell at the trial. If’n they ever catch ‘im. Jury’ll go ‘ick’ ‘n’ let ‘im off with a slap on the wrist. Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Rai didn’t know what more to say. Further words of consolation seemed pointless, for she hadn’t known Exxxtasis and didn’t know the girl she was talking to. At the same time, she felt the oppressed sadness of the room; it wormed through her new clothes and onto her skin. Though she had never wanted it, the culture of the Place had suddenly caught up with her. She had shared a defining moment. Next, would she become one of them?
Though Exxxstasis’ death and the heavy atmosphere in The Place had taken her mind off Z and the cops, impatience forced Rai out of the street after lunch. As she wandered the streets, her mind landed on the strange feel of wearing jeans. Her skin felt confined, she worried that people could see the shape of her legs, and the denim rubbed against her thighs uncomfortably. Except for when she donned a pair of sweats to clean her skirt, she couldn’t remember having worn pants since she’d left home.
People looked at her differently. She had become used to the stares and even whistles her carefully developed look had inspired. Now men passed her without a glance and teenagers did not scoff at her fashion sense. As much as she had hated those gazes, she almost missed them. With her jeans and baseball cap, she had become just a girl, and not the sight she had been. Maybe not even a girl, she thought with a shock. With short hair, sharp features, and no breasts to speak of, her skirt had always marked her gender clearly. The terrible thought sent her to Sephora, where several layers of makeup left no doubt. She failed to notice that the cosmetics had also obscured her beauty, an exchange she might not have been willing to make for anonymity.
However strange her new look seemed to her, she did not regret throwing her more dramatic outfit into the trash. During the rest of the day, she walked by dozens of cops. None of them looked twice at her; eventually, her heart did not even race at the sight of dark blue. Once, hiding from a brief rainstorm, she sat for ten minutes with a cop in a public atrium at 61st and Broadway. From time to time, the cop glanced up from his coffee at her, but no recognition registered on his face.
That afternoon, Rai only waited by the softball fields for an hour. She wanted to see Mike, but she feared another hungry night more, so she rushed to The Place in time for dinner. Toker and Z, still shocked at the way she’d dissed Z the night before, offered to let her stay in the abandoned warehouse where they squatted, but she had been burned by new male friends before. They accepted her unconvincing excuse. Everyone had something they were running from, after all, and both of them admitted that sex was not the least of the motives for their kindness. Even if she looked like shit in that new outfit.
Rain began in the middle of the night in the little island of trees near the duck pond where Rai set up camp, and it lasted well into the morning. For some time after light slithered through the leaves, Rai huddled in the tarp, hoping that the rain would end and she could walk to The Place without getting soaked, but the storm showed no sign of abating. She got up, sloshed around in the mud, folded the tarp and stuffed it into a plastic bag sliding it into her pack. Moving every night was becoming inconvenient. She needed to find a place to leave the stuff so it could dry.
Readjusting the things in her pack to make sure that the tarp didn’t crush her books, she felt a folded piece of paper she didn’t recognize. Torn newsprint, she realized, folded into… was it supposed to be a car? What a bad job of oragami. She was about to toss it away, not even curious how it had made its way into her bag, when she noticed ink running in the rain. Not the ink of the news, but red bleeding through the paper.
Quickly, tearing the wet paper, she unfolded the crude oragami. Blotchy red letters filled the page, almost illegible:
“Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion.”
-Kierkegaard
Z’s writing. She remembered the quote, which he had pointed out to her as he was struggling through one of his few forays into non-Marxist philosophy.
The quote didn’t fit with the other graffiti he had posted. No hints of revolution, no desperate self-justification. What did it mean?
“Infinity” had a bit of a religious air about it, reminiscent of the Göthe and St. John quotes. “Passion” could be a euphemism for his campaign of terrorism, which certainly required suspension of his intellectual facilities. But if that was what he was trying to say, it was just another tired defense of what he’d already done. Z’s arguments were often repetitive, but this was just boring. If he’d gone to the effort to sneak it into her bag, it had to be something important.
He’d put it in her bag. The thought ran through her mind again. He knew where she was. He’d found her in the middle of the night in a place where she’d never gone before. Though she wanted to find innocuous, even benevolent explanations, it scared her. If he could find her like that, what could he do to her? Passion and infinity: those were sexual words, handed over in the middle of the night. A threat? A confession of long hidden lust?
She looked around herself, relieved to see only dripping trees, but also frightened. Where was he? Where would he find her next?
“Fuck,” she said aloud, trying to damp down the fear that had risen in her gut.
As her thoughts ground down into confusion, Rai realized that she stood in the pouring rain, getting colder and colder regardless of the intensity of her thoughts. She turned away and walked quickly into Midtown.
By the time she reached The Place, Rai was shivering bitterly. It was well past nine, putting her name low on the list for showers. She slogged upstairs, water dripping from her clothes, and collapsed on a couch.
As Rai shivered in the common room of The Place, Yazmín had attempted to catch her attention several times. Finally, when Rai looked up, she saw her new friend standing not more than two feet away, looking down her nose with disbelief. “It’s like you go into some other world sometimes, girl!” she said in a tone halfway between a joke and authentic anger.
“Oh. Yeah. I’m trying to work some shit out.”
“Work shit out on the pot, not when I’m waitin’ to talk to you.” She laughed, and Rai joined her, though with less energy. “You didn’t even hear ‘em call your name for the shower, did you?”
Rai had to admit that she hadn’t heard a word. She was glad that someone was awake enough to listen.
“I’ll wait for you here. Go warm up!”
The warm shower did wonders for Rai, as did new, dry clothes. As she had brushed her teeth, unwilling to don her wet jeans and t-shirt, another girl had let her in on a secret. “Donate the old shit,” she whispered. “Then get new. They clean the old shirt and you can just take it again next week.”
Though uncertain of the ethics involved, Rai knew she needed dry clothes, so she threw the wet rags in the donations bin, walked to the back, and found a new outfit: too-tight cords and a sweatshirt.
Back in the common room, Yazmín hid a snort with her hand. “God, girl, you been on the street two years and you never learned how to dress?” One of the most important differences between street kids and homeless adults, Rai knew, was that you couldn’t distinguish a street kid from a cool kid. Street kids just knew how to do it cheaper: theft, knock-offs, the iron downstairs. “That skirt you had, that was bad. But now you look like a bag lady!” She took Rai’s hand and led her back downstairs, then, with a wink at Juan, passed into the back room. Rai was amazed at how passively she accepted Yazmín’s authority.
“So. Yeah.” She gave Rai a look, then began to rummage through the clothes as Rai wondered why she was taking fashion advice from… well, from someone like Yazmín. She pulled out lots of black: underwear, tights, short jeans, jean jacket. “Undress.” Rai did, unsure, again, why she didn’t tell Yazmín to fuck off. But even Yazmín’s admiring whistle when Rai pulled off her pants didn’t inspire the expected rebellion. It just made her blush, then hurry to pull on the tights.
Within half an hour, Rai looked like a different person, somewhere between a street punk and a french existentialist poseur. Undeniably hot, but also unapproachable. She rather liked it: the outfit made her walk with a straight back and a mean look in her eye. No way she would have let Yazmín strip this off her, she thought.
After a game of spades in the common room — Rai hated spades, thought it was a gangsta game (not to mention that she always lost), but she did it to make Yazmín happy — everyone filed upstairs for lunch. The Place was crowed that day, as always when kids wanted to escape the rain.
Though Rai was not pleased with the hamburgers and fries Kwame had decided to cook for lunch, she still ate three servings. After a quiet day of informal mourning for Exxxstasis, The Place had returned to its usual level of volume and repressed violence. Looking around, Rai began wonder who would be the next kid murdered; who would OD’d on dope or crank; who would freeze that winter. Since she’d come to The Place, four kids had died.
“You thinkin’ about Exxx, huh?” Yazmín asked, with a completely different tone from that she had used all morning.
“Wondering who’s the next to go. Hoping it’s not me. Or you.”
“You’s too smart to bite it like that.”
“I don’t even know most of these kids. I mean, I wanna feel sad for Exxxstasis, but how’m I gonna do that if she’s just a face to me? I didn’t even know she was a boy.”
“You wanna know the rest so you can cry, right?” Again, a real understanding that Rai had never heard before.
“Not for that. I don’t think so. But… I dunno. Without Z, it’s kinda like I wanna know other people. Or know about ‘em, at least.”
“It’s a start.” Rai felt the tone of superiority that she preferred to use than hear, but Yazmín talked on quickly. “So check it out. You know Toker, right? Guitar genius, pretty decent chess player. Parents threw him out when he was twelve. Never figured out why. Smokes a lotta pot. I think he’s kinda cute, but…”
“But what?”
“No street boys for me. Not anymore.” She pointed to the girl next to Toker, an emaciated blonde in a black leather jacket. “Slick. Whatta name for a girl, huh? From Jersey. Rich family, they say. Mom was a dope fiend, got Slick hooked on it when she was ten. She started hookin’ to buy the dope, then on the street. She’s workin’ at Wendy’s now, but the money don’t pay for rent, so I think she’s shacked up with some guy.”
Rai had expected a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from Yazmín’s description of the kids in the lunchroom, but she had not expected these feelings for people she had dismissed and disdained for the last eighteen months. It almost felt like compassion, or pity. Yazmín pointed out a Lebanese girl who came home one afternoon to find her parents deported. The suburban boys who ran to the city on a lark and could never get back. She detailed more forms of abuse than Rai had ever imagined, from teenagers locked in closets for days to a pornographic film cult where children were raped on video. Then drugs and prostitution and jail.
By the time Yazmín had reached her fifteenth story, they had left the lunchroom and walked onto the street, where the sun had burned last night’s rain into a sticky haze. As they walked through the bat cave and Yazmín pointed out two or three of the Crips who always hung out there, Rai demanded she stop. “I can’t handle any more of this.” She felt close to crying. All of the barriers she had created to keep tragedy and other people out seemed to be crumbling. Even the new hardass outfit was no shield. “Please, don’t tell me any more. I guess there’s a reason I never wanted to know these people.”
“Yeah. After a while they’re all stories though. I dunno. I don’t really feel it anymore. I just kinda listen to what everybody tells me, and I nod, and then… I go home, I guess.” They walked quietly up Sixth. “Well, not really home. You know what I mean.”
After fifteen minutes of sad silence, as they walked past break dancers on the corner of 53rd, Rai wanted to speak again, except she didn’t know how to frame the question. “Look, Yazmín. It’s like… I wanted to know why these kids are on the street, and you told me. But there’s two kinds of ‘why.’ I think. Like the empirical why and the metaphysical why–” She noticed that Yazmín didn’t understand. “Um… it’s like you told me what put them in this shit, like ‘why’ it happened, but not, like, what it’s for. That kinda why.”
“Por qué y para qué.” Yazmín said.
“Huh?”
“There’s two words in Spanish for ‘why.’ Kinda like ‘from what’ and ‘for what.’ Something like that.”
“Yeah.” Rai nodded. “That’s what I wanna know. For what. For what are these kids in the street? There’s gotta be some reason.”
“’Cause their parents beat the shit outta them. Pretty simple.”
“That’s from what. I wanna know the purpose of their lives. Or what they’re gonna do for the world–”
“What good’s gonna come outta this? Why God lets kids suffer like this?” Rai couldn’t understand Yazmín’s voice, which sounded almost sarcastic, almost, “you don’t really know shit, do you?”
“Yeah. Exactly.” She slid her own sarcasm into the words, hiding their importance behind irony.
“’Cause God’s a fuck. Either cruel or really, really bad at His job.”
