“What?” I squawked, genuinely surprised. It was the week of Thanksgiving. We were meant to be discussing favorite trimmings alongside the turkey, not armed robbery. “So you've lost everything. Keys, wallet, phone, etc?”

“No, he just took the phone. He said give me your phone or I'll shoot you.”

In his mind the story ended here, but for me it fell short of so much. “Tell me every detail. It’s the most exciting thing you've said in weeks!” Realizing my voyeuristic delight had unsubtly revealed itself, I added: “Exciting in a bad way, obviously.”

He obliged me. “I was listening to music. I opened my gate, went to the mailbox, heard it close again, looked up, the guy goes "give me your phone I'll shoot you." I said "pardon". I was stunned so he said it again. I'm like "fine" and took it out and he kind of ripped it from me. Then he was gone.”

I was amazed. I had never felt unsafe in his neighborhood or in its surrounding areas. He lives in Bed-Stuy. His nearest subway stop is Nostrand Avenue where the food choices are a fried chicken lover’s delight and the vibe is jostling and purposeful. There’s nothing particularly endearing about this strip of fried food joints, the Laundromat, the tired-looking liquor store and the stream of pedestrians and traffic, but I was fond of the streets further north where his apartment is snugly nestled. Stray in that direction and you’ll find the mood changes; it grows sedate, relaxed and more salubrious. The streets are broad and exquisitely sleepy. The neighborhood is gloriously settled and at ease with itself. Somehow it feels less gimmicky than Manhattan. Even the trees ooze age and wisdom. In the past I had wanted to perch on a step, sip my coffee and become a part of the scenery, although perhaps that wasn’t so wise hearing his story.

“I don't think he ran away fast,” my ex was saying.

“Thank god he didn’t want your wallet too,” I was trying to console him, but he was still stuck on pace.

“He must have walked fast.”

“Where’s the mailbox?” I was trying to picture the scene with limited success. I lived more centrally and I didn’t own two cats that liked to jump on people while they were sleeping, so we had almost always stayed at mine while we dated.

“Right in front of the apartment.”

“Did he walk up the steps?”

“No, it's before the steps.” He explained the set-up. “The landlord used to have a slot for everyone by the top of the steps, but now there are separate slots for all three of us at the bottom.”

“So did you have any mail?”

“No, if I hadn’t gone to the mailbox this wouldn’t have happened.” He paused for a moment before adding:
“You're the first person to ask me that question, it's a good one.”

“Well it adds a whole new layer of pathos to your story.”

It was too bleak a thought to linger over so we discussed whether he should move neighborhoods and if so, where? We drifted on to more random topics. We were flitting all over the place, discussing work, weather, whether it’s ever acceptable to wear socks during sex. And because he was no longer talking about it, not wanting to dwell on it, I was certain that he would move.
 

Our paths intersect just west of the median. My cellphone is glued to my right ear, and I continue chattering because if I pretend not to notice Tim Gunn, perhaps I will actually be invisible to one of the world’s best-known authorities on fashion and possibly Heidi Klum’s BFF. But I can’t resist; I look up. Our eyes meet. I see his glance flicker to my flip flops and my sincerely unmanicured, unwinterized toes. His examination is similar to that of one who involuntary swivels to check out a roadside accident when the traffic slows and you see the flashing lights of the highway police at the scene - but quickly checks himself. For a second -- do I really see it? -- a scintilla of a shadow of a moue crosses his elegant face, and then it’s gone. I almost expect him to tell me that I’m so deliciously low, so horribly dirty; would that he were the Higgins to my Eliza.

I should have known; looking that unkempt, I was bound to cross paths with Tim Gunn. Ever since he moved to the Upper West Side maybe a year ago, he’s classed up the place just by being here, but I seem to never see him when I look good. I actually spoke to him the first time I saw him; it seemed so unlikely that I would ever see him in person again, having never seen him around before, that I thought it would be ok to gush a bit. He was shlepping a massive laundry bag, which proved to me that (1) despite his godlike looks, he’s human and (2) he looks godlike even shlepping a massive laundry bag. As I confessed my admiration, I remember a voice in my head saying, “Let. Him. Do. His. Laundry.” When I finally, reluctantly, tore myself away, Leo, seven at the time, asked me who the man was. I giggled, “I know who he is because he’s on TV but he doesn’t know who I am.”

“So he’s a stranger?”

“Yes. He’s a stranger. I was talking to a stranger. You still can’t.”

It’s not like I haven’t been cautioned since I was at my mother’s knee to look good when I left the house. The first iteration of the rule was rather obvious: you never knew who would see you outside, which, when I came of marriageable age, emphatically included possible suitors who might somehow apparate onto Main Street, Harry-Potter like, just in time to check me out. That morphed into the more sinister, if slightly unlikely rule that if you left the house looking bad, you would of necessity encounter someone important, like the aforementioned phantom suitor or one of my mother’s friends. This latter rule seemed akin to the one that leaving the house without an umbrella would guarantee rain. I never completely understood the causal relationship at work here, but apparently, leaving the house bare-faced caused the planets to subtly realign so that when the shifting slowed to a stop, there was Mrs. Englehoffer, staring at me disapprovingly.

These thoughts were in part prompted by reports of a recently released study which found that a woman who wears makeup is perceived as more likable, competent and provided she doesn’t overdo it, more trustworthy. Researchers at Harvard were among those who designed the study, which was paid for by Proctor and Gamble, makers of among a billion other things, makeup. Their sponsorship of the study leads me to wonder, perhaps uncharitably, whether the study would have seen the light of day had it concluded that makeup makes no difference in the perception of one’s abilities. But the findings shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Certainly, the idea that makeup can make you look better isn’t new (that’s why you buy it), and studies have found that more attractive people get better jobs and earn higher lifetime salaries (see, for example, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by the economist Daniel Hamermesh). This study just connects the dots: if (1) makeup makes one more attractive, and (2) attractive people are considered more employable and, implicitly, more competent, then (3) a bit of artful shading and contouring should cause you to be perceived as more competent. I confess that the fact that you can paint on a face and be thought of as actually better than one who doesn't, is kind of mind-spinning to me. I’ve never been completely comfortable wearing makeup. But maybe that’s just a vestige of the child in me who was distinctly unhappy with her looks and believed that brains could combat plainness (as Jane Austen might have called it) and were therefore, somehow incompatible with beauty.

The P&G study does make me wonder if I’m short-changing myself when I walk out of the house without so much as a smear of lipstick. One day last week, on impulse, I tried on some cheapie drugstore makeup I'd recently bought. Then, of course, since a made-up face demands commensurate accoutrements, I put on my black leather jacket and heels, fluffed my hair and walked out of the house. I felt great, if a bit conspicuous. I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Karen, who looked me over quizzically as she walked toward me. Finally she carefully told me that I looked good. Knowing her, I’m pretty sure she tread lightly because to squeal “You’re wearing makeup! You look great!” is to imply, “You know, when you don’t wear makeup you look sooooo awful.” But as we spoke about the usual stuff, in her eyes was the unasked question: Why? And in my own mind, I’m still not sure if the answer is that I’m selling out or being smart enough to accept reality. Maybe I’m just doing my part to spruce up the neighborhood for Tim.

Sharon Silver is a wife, mother, lapsed lawyer and aspiring writer.

I went to the open house and found a long line of girls waiting to see the space. There was no “sleeping loft.” What I was shown instead was a dark, windowless cubicle along one wall that was the shape and size of a low-ceilinged closet. The bed was a cot and there was just enough room for a small end table. There was no bureau – I was expected to keep my clothing neatly folded in plastic bins under the cot. There were three other cubicles, all already rented to other girls. It was in a giant room that was very clean and completely free of furniture and had the shiny floors you would expect in a yoga studio.

The owner of the studio was a wiry, little man named Avi who also owned a fresh juice shop in the neighborhood. I was the only one in a suit (I had an interview later that day at a law firm) and this is, I believe, why he offered the cubicle to me. Avi liked that I was looking for a “serious” job and was thinking about law school. When he asked why I wanted to go to law school, I told him I had studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy as an undergrad and now wanted to understand the world from a different perspective.

“You want to understand power.” His eyes glittered. He told me he had served in the Israeli military and so it was something he was interested in also.

Three days later, I moved in and met the other girls that night. All of us were in our early 20s. One was a yoga instructor and had the ropey, veiny body and serene expression that comes from years of self-deprivation, another was a graduate student in social work and the third was an aspiring photographer. She was six-feet tall and big-boned and lived in the cubicle directly above me. We took an instant dislike to each other. It began because of my dot-matrix printer – she hated the ticky-tacky sounds it made. I was still looking for a job and so had my laptop and printer with me and had been printing out resumes and cover letters by the dozen. I began only using the printer when she wasn’t around but, for whatever reason, this did not assuage her. She began to look for other reasons to be pissed off.

“What the fuck? Claudette, can you clean up all that toilet paper you left on the floor in the bathroom?”

“It wasn’t me. I haven’t used the bathroom today.”

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me.”

A few weeks into my stay, I still did not have a job but I had developed an interest in collecting things from the various flea markets around the city for the new apartment I planned to get when I found my job. It was an escape, a way to aspire. The first things I bought were four beautiful little magnets for my future refrigerator, clothespins carved to look like men and women in Victorian dress.

The next thing I brought home was a many-colored globe made from blown glass. I had meant to give it to my mother as a gift but, when I hung it from a slat on my bunk, it became a sort of pet, a round comfort like a ripe fruit (one that would not rot) or a fat child (one that would not require anything of me).

I brought home other things – some antique, painted tiles from Florence that I planned to use as coasters, a complete set of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu,” a set of painted Russian nesting dolls, a carved lace mahogany box I planned to use for paper clips and pens.

I really shouldn’t have been using my precious savings to buy things but I couldn’t stop. I grew bolder in my choices. A colorful rug woven by Turkish nomads. A three-legged table with panther feet. One day, on my way home from yet another job interview, I stopped at an antique store down the street. There, in the window, were two giant wrought-iron candelabras, one that came to my shoulders, the other that just cleared my head. I don’t know what came over me. I suppose I must have imagined a future apartment with high ceilings, and maybe a baby grand piano, marble floors and a vampire crypt in the basement. I bought the candelabras and carried them back to my bunk, first the small one, then went back for the bigger one.

I arranged the candelabras at the foot of my cot. I lamented that I did not yet have candles to try them out. The other girls came into my bunk to admire them, except for the photographer who had, by then, for whatever reason, stopped talking to me completely. One night, when I was home sitting on my cot, printing out more resumes and cover letters, I heard a key in the front door lock. It was the photographer. Instead of closing up my computer, as I usually did when she came home, I kept printing. When she came toward me, I looked straight at her. She avoided my look and climbed the five-wrung ladder to her bunk. I kept printing for another hour. I could hear her for awhile typing away on her own computer but then she shut out the light and I heard nothing more that night but the ticky-tacky sounds of my longed-for escape.

Claudette Bakhtiar is a writer and part-time attorney living in Manhattan with her husband and two children. She holds a MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts and her writing has appeared in The L Magazine, Gigantic, Literary New York and Time Out NY.
 

I was soon to discover the Café Espresso was not in business to attract customers. It was a strictly private gathering place, catering exclusively to a tightly knit circle of regulars; very much like the local Italian social clubs that dot the neighboring Mulberry and Prince Streets. The social clubs, however, are usually named after a saint, and a statue of that saint is featured prominently in the window of the club.

The Café Espresso did not feature anything prominently, except Nick and Carmine, who sat out front the Café, on straightback wooden chairs, every weekday from 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Being the friendly type, I introduced myself to Nick and Carmine during my first week in the neighborhood. Nick, a shrunken specimen somewhere in his seventies sucked back a can of Budweiser while giving me the once over with his beady bloodshot eyes. His eyes darted out from behind oversized glasses that continually slid down his long, pointed nose. A few straw wisps of thin white hair hugged the lower lobe of his suntanned head, and though it was a mild autumn day, Nick was wearing a Herringbone overcoat.

While Nick spit and slurred his way through our introduction, Carmine, a younger, sleepy-eyed character, sat with his chair turned backward, in a kind of urban cowboy style, his large pulpy hands hanging casually over the back of the chair. A man of a few words, he favored the grunt and mumble style of communication, replying, “Uh-huh” to my greeting, while scouting out the local streetlife in a shiny brown silk suit, no tie. His white sportshirt was open at the neck, revealing a mass of salt and pepper chest hair in a tangle of gold chains. When I told Carmine that he reminded me of Henny
Youngman, only with more hair, he turned to me with the slow witted expression of a fighter that had taken too many punches to the head, scratched his chin, and returned his gaze to the street.

My daily encounters with Nick and Carmine developed into quite a chummy friendship. I had a lot of time on my hands while I was detoxing from drugs, so I often carried my wicker chair outside and sat in front of the café with the boys, shooting the shit and eyeballing the street, smoking ciggies and guzzling joe. Carmine really started to loosen up when he realized I was an expert in the area of early T.V. sitcom trivia. We’d try to stump each other with questions like, “Who played Lumpy Rutherford’s father on Leave it to Beaver?” or “Who was the actor Peter Graves brother, and what show does he star in?” Stuff like that. There was one subject I never discussed with the boys, and it was about what went on inside the Café Espresso when the regulars arrived.

Every afternoon at 4:30, a steady stream of big, black luxury cars came cruising down cobblestoned Mott Street and pulled up in front of the Café Espresso. Judging from the glimpses I got of these guys as they emerged from behind the tinted windows of the Lincolns and Caddys, they could have been straight out of mob central casting. These guys all wore shades, expensive slacks with jackets that often fit rather snugly around the waist, gobs of gold chains and bejewelled pinkie rings. The regulars hugged and kissed on the street before ducking inside the café. Not a soul ever reappeared outside the café until 7 p.m.

While the inside activity of the café remained a mystery, I did learn that the regulars favored Boar’s Head lunch meat. Carmine, who with Nick, always went inside the café when the regulars arrived, began to present me with the regular’s leftover salami, liverwurst and baloney. I usually picked up leftovers from the day before in front of the café around two in the afternoon, along with the current copy of the Daily News. Quite a nice little arrangement. But this one particular afternoon, I didn’t arrive at the café until 4:45, and by this time, everyone was inside the café. I didn’t think the boys would mind if I popped in to pick up my Boar’s Head and paper, so I opened the door to the Café Espresso. Upon opening the door, I was struck with a blast of activity so fierce, I can only compare it to the heavy trading on the stock market floor. The café was stocked with small
wooden tables, with four chairs to a table. There were one or two phones on every table, and every table was jammed with the regulars. They were talking on the phone, jotting down info, shouting, some laughter, the air thick with cigar and cigarette smoke, and more phones ringing. The moment they noticed a stranger in their midst, everything stopped. Complete silence.

The silence was broken by the sound of Carmine yelling at me, “What the hell you doing in here? Get the hell outta here! Don’t you ever come in here when that door is closed!” and he starts with the strong arm stuff, shoving me out the door. God! I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to warrant such an angry reaction, and tried explaining to Carmine as he turned to go back inside, “Hey Carmine, I was just….” But he didn’t listen, just slammed the door and went back inside.

I hot footed it back to my apartment and sat with the shades drawn, nervously wondering just exactly how much hot water I was in. The fact that I was in my first few weeks of detoxing didn’t help my mind set. “You’re dead meat,” I thought, “You’re never supposed to see anything or know anything about what goes on in this neighborhood..You fucked up but good this time…..” My only hope was that the goodwill that had grown between Nick, Carmine and myself would count for something, and maybe the worst that would happen is I’d have to start buying my own Boar’s Head and newspaper.

That night, as I tossed and turned on my captain’s bed, I recalled the words of my friend Dale, who had recently moved out of Little Italy. She said, “Whatever you see or hear down here, always pretend you didn’t see or hear anything.” When I decided to pretend like nothing had happened at the Café Espresso, I let out a huge yawn, and fell into a deep and restful sleep.

The following morning I awoke at ten, showered, dressed and hit the street. I ran into Nick and Carmine at Johnny’s Donut Shop on the corner of Mott and Prince. They were sitting at a table with Johnny’s Uncle Sonny, who I happened to also be friendly with. I took a deep breath, waved and said, “Good morning.” Surprisingly, they returned my greeting with big smiles and Carmine called me over and offered to buy me breakfast. I hesitated, still a bit shaken from the previous afternoon, but figured this was a peacemaking gesture, so I pulled up a chair.

The conversation centered around Johnny’s new cappucino/expresso machine and the upcoming, ten day San Genarro Feast. I mostly listened to the boys chat, while slowly eating my eggs over easy with jelly donut special. I was amazed at how well things were going! I was cool. I knew they knew I was cool. I didn’t feel cool. Matter of fact, I was scared shitless, but playing it cool was the name of the game.

When I finally excused myself, I thanked Carmine for the breakfast and said bye to the boys. As I pushed my chair back, Carmine got up with me. He pulled me aside and asked, “So, you stopping by for your stuff this afternoon?” “Sure Carmine, I replied, “why not?” Carmine patted me on the back, “That’s good.”

Phew. I did it. I passed the test. I’m not dead. And from that day to this, not a word was ever said about that fateful day I blew into the Café Espresso, stopping the regular’s business on a dime.

The building, one of those depressing residential hotels, housed a variety of colorful wayward denizens, including destitute students (like myself), drug addicts, alcoholics, and the elderly. There was one communal bathroom per floor. I shared my bathroom with an oddball cast of characters. One of them was a forty year old Male-To-Female pre-op transexual named Crystal.

“Are you getting off on sixteen?” A deep James Earl Jones-like voice reverberated from Crystal’s thin-lipped mouth like a bassoon. The elevator doors could never open up quick enough for me.

I always felt bad for Crystal because she was not attractive as a man and it was pretty obvious that she wouldn’t be any more fetching as a woman. Crystal was infamous for wearing loose fitting hospital pajama bottoms accompanied by a sheer yellow bathrobe that clung tightly to her gangly body. The robe’s billowy, faux-fur sleeves added an appropriate element of femininity to Crystal’s otherwise manly persona. Donning thin, drawn-in, eyebrows and just a hint of pink lipstick, Crystal took appearances very seriously and, despite the deep baritone voice and thinning spindly hair, Crystal made a concerted effort to always appear ladylike.

Crystal’s body language and flirtatious vibe made me feel ill-at-ease, but that didn’t stop me from admiring her. “How brave,” I always thought to myself after encounters with her. She was undergoing a major life transformation in front of all the building’s residents and staff. This was a gutsy thing to do. I thought so anyway.

One summer evening after an exhausting day of classes, I was on my way to use the communal facilities. I needed to take a shower and get ready for work (an evening shift of scooping ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s). Crystal suddenly approached me in the hall ...

“Don’t bother. It’s locked from the inside. He’s been in there for hours. I think he’s shooting up again.” It was common knowledge that the Russian residing in room #1605 had a penchant for heroin and other hard street drugs.

“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I said.

Defeated, I turned around and sheepishly walked down the hall towards my crackerbox-sized room, my toothbrush, washcloth and towel all in hand. My shift was to begin in less than an hour. What was I going to do? I was a complete wreck. I was dripping with sweat (not to mention the smell) due to the challenging tap dancing class that had just ended moments before.

“Now what?” I muttered under my breath. I was just about to reach for my room key when I heard Crystal’s voice again ...“Don’t go. I want to show you something. Come here.” Like a mystical sea nymph, Crystal waved me on. She wanted me to come inside her room.

Call me crazy, or just plain naive, but something told me it was safe to follow Crystal into her apartment that evening. There was something so genuine about her overture and, I have to admit, I was a bit curious.

Crystal’s room was a pathetic little chamber facing the north side of West 75th St. The space was packed to the gills with women’s shoes, scarves, and stacks of hospital pajama bottoms. Plastic Rubbermaid containers on the floor housed dozens of prescription pill vials. But what I saw in the corner of this 100 square foot space took my breath away. Inside Crystal’s humble little boudoir was a fully operational sink!

“You can clean up in here,” she said. “I’ll stand outside, in the hallway, and give you some privacy. I don’t mind. I need to make a phone call anyway.” She shut the door and sashayed herself down to the rotary pay phone located at the end of the corridor of the sixteenth floor.

Crystal had saved the day.

As I turned the faucet knobs of Crystal’s modest wall sink an overwhelming sensation suddenly came over me. The feeling was so huge I had to turn the faucets back off and collect myself. I almost began to cry. With one genuine random act of kindness Crystal had rescued me from the embarrassment and humiliation, of showing up at my job looking and smelling disgusting. But it wasn’t just that. It was something deeper. In that moment, at Crystal’s humble, avocado-green sink, I felt a sense of appreciation and gratitude that I had never experienced before in all of my nineteen years. It was like something right out of Buddha’s teachings. The strangest thing about it all was my epiphany was not occurring under a tree, or by quiet stream in the woods. It was at a transsexual’s sink on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I embraced the experience. I lowered my head into Crystal’s chipped porcelain sink and allowed the water to douse my hair and alleviate my worries. I had reached my personal nirvana. “Maybe tomorrow I can go to the building manager and request a room with a sink in it, too,” I thought to myself as I gave my entire body a much-needed washing. I took liberty in using some of Crystal’s sweet scented soaps. I didn’t think she’d mind.

While drying off, something occurred to me. This was the first time since moving to New York City that I felt things were finally beginning to look up for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to stick it out and survive after all. I wiped up the remaining water and exited Crystal’s apartment.

On my way back to my room I mouthed the words “thank you” to Crystal. She was still on the phone.

“Anytime handsome. Anytime. Now don’t you work too hard!” she said.

“I won’t.” I replied back.

“Hey! You wanna know something? You clean up pretty good! Too bad I like older men.”

“Me too!” I replied.

Crystal let out a schoolgirl laugh and played with the pay phone’s long spiral cord in a coquettish manner and then blew me a big kiss from down the hall.

She was right. I felt like a million bucks.

Jackob G. Hofmann has lived and worked in Manhattan
since 1988. He is a theatrical director, produced playwright,
and essayist. www.JackobHofmann.com

In Bay Ridge, I studied the diplomas that hung in a home office. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, I thumbed a young couple’s bedside reading. In Sunset Park, I cracked open the refrigerator and looked at last night’s leftovers.

I’m on the prowl for a new place to live, a job that takes me deep into Brooklyn for open houses across the borough. Veteran house hunters know the routine: the signing of a guest list, the pitch about original floors and century-old moldings, and the questions about the boiler, the windows, and the taxes. Lines of people march through the house, looking to buy property while someone else is still using it. We’re expected to picture the place empty, to imagine what it might be like if we lived there—where our sofa would go, how the space might fit a growing family—and to ignore the current arrangement of armchairs or the mold on the shower curtain.

It’s a tough job, difficult not to see what’s right in front of us. We’re there to study the layout and condition of the house, and yet I can’t avoid noticing how its owners live within it—the mismatched furniture, the acrid smell of cat litter, the vintage exercise bike in the basement. While the real estate agents yammer on about the house’s “good bones,” I excavate clues about its owners and their lives.

At one place, I lingered over the family photos in a hallway, the shots of dated perms and feathered bangs stealing more of my attention than the stained-glass skylight that illuminated them. At another, I noticed stacks of cards for several different businesses and knew we were in the home of a graphic designer. Two weekends ago, I stood in the bedroom of a teenage boy, gaping at the topless girl in the poster thumb-tacked above his dresser. “My mother would not have approved of this decoration,” I told the guy next to me, a man who came to this open house wearing a tool belt. He ignored the poster and me, shuffling off to inspect the copper wiring and the pitch of the waste pipes, I’m sure.

After twelve open houses, I felt like a voyeur. Then, last weekend in Dyker Heights, I spotted a comrade. Three couples meandered around a townhouse, shaking banisters and counting electrical outlets. Wandering a bit, I found myself in the large master bedroom with a stranger, a woman who seemed every bit as curious about the sellers as she did about their house.

While I pretended to inspect the new windows, I watched her glance at a young child’s drawings framed on the dresser, fan the magazines on a stool in the bedroom’s corner, and wipe dust from the wooden headboard—exactly the kind of things I’d done at previous open houses. I continued watching her as she knelt to smell the flowers on the nightstand and made her way to the walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom. She opened the couple’s closet door, admired its sizable dimensions, and paused for perhaps a second too long at the sight of the clothes inside. Then, with no evident self-consciousness, she reached for one of the shirts—the shirt of a total stranger—and rubbed its fabric between her thumb and forefinger, a gesture usually reserved for racks at department stores or thrift shops. I smiled at the boldness of this woman’s act, admiring her impropriety. Here we were, attending an open house, and she was examining clothes she’d never wear.

I didn’t stay to see if she checked the size of the shirt or held it up to her torso in the mirror. Not wanting to interrupt, I left the woman alone in the bedroom and went downstairs to inspect the wiring and ask about the waste pipes.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

“You speak English?” Rob asked, forgoing the translation.

“Un poco.” One answered.

“He speaks a little.” Rob told me unnecessarily. Across the street several other workers started to make their way towards the van to make a bid. One bearded guy was crouched in a position like a child playing jacks. He rose slowly and raised his hand as he walked over. At first he looked a bit menacing but as he got closer he seemed to shrink a little. His clothes were oversized and billowed with the wind and gave a false declaration of size. The polo shirt he wore hung down to mid thigh like a hand-me-down worn by a kid.

“We need someone who speaks English.” Rob and I continued to instruct in alternating turns. The different men all took shots at convincing us of their fluency but most could not do more than point to themselves and offer ‘I speak.’ The bearded guy pushed his way through the crowd with an urgent and fearful disregard like a child who’d lost his mother in a grocery store and he was met with little resistance. When he reached the van his arm was still raised and his facial expression was one of terror. His eyes bulged wide from their sockets and his exposed upper teeth gnawed at his surrendering jaw. His raised hand dove finger first to his chest.

“I’m speaking English.” He said.

“Yeah.” I agreed, tired of the interview process.

“Yeah.” He continued while his eyes darted around. “I speak Eng…” He trailed off. The other men had resigned now to patting the bearded guy’s back in congratulation. Some of the other men rubbed his shoulders like a boxing coach would do in the hopes of psyching up a fighter for battle. But the guy still looked uneasy, like he had been trapped by his good fortune.

“Hop in.” Rob and I overlapped. The sliding door opened and some supplies rolled out as the guy scrambled in laboriously.

“Let’s go.” His ‘t’ silent. “I can smoke in here?” He dug into a pouch of tobacco before anyone answered.

“What’s your name?”

“Honres.” He mumbled, his tongue involved with a rolling paper.

“Henry?”

“Amdes.” He corrected

“Am-dez?” I slowed the vehicle to turn around in my chair.

“Eh.”

“Andre?” Rob guessed correctly.

“Yeah.” Andre answered and lit up his rolled cigarette.

“Where are you from?” I asked without thinking. I regretted asking the question. I knew that I’d initiated a second strained conversation for an answer that I didn’t really need. We stumbled back and forth with Andre’s answer a couple of times before Rob heard Puerto Rico. I pulled to a stop in front of Rob’s building and he got out.

“Good luck, let me know how it goes, tell the judge that it wasn’t public urination, you were passing a kidney stone.” I said and then wondered if Rob knew that kidney stones pass out of the same route as piss. He smiled and left.

“C’mon up front.” I told Andre and he crawled over the rear of the passenger seat, his small khaki covered legs kicking around in the air. Now with just the two of us I felt that the void was too great to not fill with talk.

“So.” I began. “How long you stand out there…for work?” His answer was mumbled and I couldn’t understand it at all. I continued to ask small-talk types of questions and got answers that I could only respond to by nodding. Andre chain rolled cigarette after cigarette and never stopped smoking and I assumed it was his method to avoid talking. At a red light I rolled a smoke from my own pouch of tobacco and attempted to bridge the language gap.

“Fuego?”

“Tha lighter.” Andre handed me his lighter and started on another cigarette himself. His watch featured a giant plastic diamond mounted over the numbers.

“I like your watch.” I was truthful.

“Mywrendgimewhasz.” He told me. We rode in silence for a while on the way to the job.

The streets of Midwood swarmed with Hasidic Jews celebrating the holiday. We arrived at the home of a couple that was waiting for their table in order to entertain guests.

“Oh, here it is at last.” The woman answered the door as though the table had arrived on its own.

“You’re a beast!” I told Andre after we had set down the massive piece. He smiled in bewilderment.

“This is as big as it gets?” The woman asked her husband twice before he relayed the question to me. I told him that it extended further out with the help of table leaves. They waited unhappily for the table to extend itself. I offered that I could extend the tabletop and the wife’s glance told the husband to tell me that that would be best. When the furniture was at last placed to their satisfaction I announced that the transaction had come to an end and the time of payment was upon us. The woman wrote a check from a small table by the front door. As usual I stood to a side and feigned interest in some piece of household ornament as though I were oblivious to what I was about to receive. Apart from the check the woman also plucked a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and held it out. I smiled and moved toward her and the money and the door. At the last minute it seemed to dawn on her that the bill might have acted as a conductor for my filthy commonality and she swatted it down to the surface of the table.

“Thank you.” I said.

“Oh, it’s not even our house.” The words sprinted from her with clumsy uncertainty.

“It’s very nice.” I responded without processing her statement, I’d heard the word house. We both grinned awkwardly. I assumed that we realized at once our mutual disinterest in what the other had said, and then realized that the other had also come to this conclusion.

“Let’s go Andre.” I said. He’d been as still as a cigar store Indian propped in the corner but when I said his name he reanimated. Swathed in moving quilts that flowed from his shoulders to the ground and covered most of his head, he looked like a mummified prince awakened for the sake of fulfilling a curse. He strode between the woman and me and then down the steps.

“Thanks again.” I gave as I stepped out the door. Her mouth seemed to start to form into the origins of a word but the door closed between us before any sound could escape.

Before our next job I stopped at a bodega to get some water. I asked Andre if he would like something to drink.

“Water, juice, soda…?”

“Coca-Cola.” He answered.

“Coke?”

“The can of.” He held his hands several inches apart from one another to signify the size of a can and I nodded. The store carried only twenty ounce bottles of soft drink and when I returned to Andre with more Coke than he had expected he smiled like I had just called him a beast again. He was smoking a rolled cigarette and I rolled another of my own to keep up.

“You got the lighter?” I asked when I was ready to light up. He reached in his pocket and handed the lighter to me without looking over.

At the next job a young lady was waiting for us at the foot of her apartment steps.

“Come on up.” She was friendly. “I’m sorry, there’s…no smoking.”
I turned to match her gaze and saw Andre coming up the steps with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

“Andre.” I immediately felt embarrassed by my parental tone but I had to finish what I’d started. “You can’t smoke that inside.” I ended with a more employer-ish type of inflection. Andre looked a bit betrayed, like I had switched sides.

“I finish the smoking.” He pinched through his dusty teeth. Upstairs we were shown what was to be moved and then left to our own devices. The apartment was on the third floor and I could see that Andre’s legs were growing tired inside of his baggy pants. With each trip his look of fear became more amplified and he started to mutter curses under his shortened breath. I would ask him if he was okay and he would look to me and say something undecipherable and start laughing in a strained rhythm. Sometimes I would join in the laughter so he would think I was savvy to the joke, sometimes I would pat his back for added confirmation. After a while we took a water break. He removed his cap for the first time to wipe his brow. I’d been wondering if he was bald under the hat but in fact he had an admirable, sweat soaked mane. At that moment I recalled something that Rob had said to me at some time earlier, ‘Mexicans don’t really lose a lot of hair, sometimes you see old ones with big, beautiful heads of hair.’ I started to laugh; Andre smoked and laughed along nervously.

“More working?” Andre asked after lunch and I said yes. I’d gotten a text message about a third job and we headed deeper into Brooklyn. We arrived at an apartment shared by two young guys.

“Hans.” The first guy introduced himself. The second little guy only nodded at us.

“I’m Granger, this is Andre.” I turned to point at a bare wall. I kept my gaze and my finger trained on the spot where I’d gestured toward so as not to look foolish. We all stared at the wall for a moment before Andre trudged inside and filled his rightful place. Hans and friend had only Ikea furniture and Andre and I carried it easily. In the lobby an old woman had taken a perch by the front vestibule.

“You must remove.” She spoke with an Eastern European accent and pointed at a stack of phonebooks that I had propped the door open with. After a moment's thought she smiled and qualified her statement. “When you are done.” One of her slippers had dropped to the tile floor and her naked toes wiggled feverishly. I laughed and said that I would remove the books.

On my next trip up to the apartment I found Hans’s little friend firmly rooted in an air guitar solo to a System Of A Down song. Hans stood nearby participating with what was either approving nods or stifled head banging. The little friend looked up at me and halted in embarrassment, thought and then continued. He probably figured that I’d seen a decent enough amount of his performance that to stop now would be a more damning indictment of his behavior. He finished the song strong but I can’t help but feel that his show was compromised at some level by self-consciousness. As the tune died I surveyed the room for what I would carry next and my eyes fell on an open box. There, resting atop the other loosely placed items was a large purple dildo. I looked up quickly so the others would not see what I’d discovered but Hans and his friend were performing showy but mitigated rock maneuvers. I figured Andre would be not far behind me so I lingered near the dildo. I wanted to point it out to Andre so he wouldn’t make the horrific discovery alone. I waited by the box and contents as long as I could for Andre but when Hans looked questioningly toward me I had to continue working.

“A lot?” The elderly woman asked of me as I walked through the lobby. I said that there was not much more and she looked comforted. While I loaded boxes into the van Hans’s little friend came downstairs to talk to me.

“So.” He began. “I have this other mattress that I need to go to Manhattan.” He looked around and shuffled his feet like a nervous kid asking for a date to the prom. I told him that I would take his mattress but it would cost him extra money. The prospect of more money dissuaded him but he slunk around while I worked like he thought his presence would change my mind. I imagined he thought that since I’d seen his vulnerability at his guitar mime act that there was a connection between us. After a few minutes Andre came down with a box and disrupted the stand-off, his face was in its normal posture of angst and I could only guess if he had seen the dildo.

On the final trip the woman in the lobby smiled and nodded at the stacked phonebooks. I nodded in return and moved the books from the door.

“I’m sorry.” She said. “I am old.”

Unable to deny her statement I presented her with a smile that was hers to interpret. “God bless you.” She followed up. Without thinking I mimicked her words.

“God bless you.” I sounded strange to my own ears. I don’t remember ever saying that to anyone before.

I got into the vehicle’s cab a moment before Andre and when he climbed in he had a weird little grin.

“Wha you think of those guys?” He asked as we readied for departure.

“I don’t know, they’re alright.” At my answer his face grew more grotesque, a mixture of delight and disgust. “Why? What do you think?”

“They are funny.”

I knew what he meant by ‘funny’ but I asked him what he meant anyway.

“They have ses.” He told me.

“Oh, you think they are gay?”

He shook his head up and down. I rolled up a smoke from my pouch to end the discussion. When I put the cigarette to my lips Andre held his lighter out to me without me asking. I put the van in gear and accelerated. The boxes I’d stacked in back shook and stumbled a bit, and then everything settled into its place as I drove away.

 Granger Greenbaum owns a moving company in Brooklyn, www.greenbaumexpertmoving.com. He doesn't have time to write anymore cause he's always lifting people's crappy ikea stuff.

My girlfriend Victoria and I live on the third floor of a pre-war, red brick building on 19th St. in South Park Slope. Our back windows afford a nice view of all the backyards on our block and those of the homes on the north side of 20th St, which abut ours- each a tiny Kingdom for it’s little Monarch – sometimes with a miniature Versailles, and children running around just as filthy and shoeless as serfs of yore. Each kingdom is separated from the next but by a fence of chain links or tall wood plank.

Some have been maintained, but not many. The once magnificent grounds have fallen to disrepair. Flagstones once used for a footpath to protect a lush green lawn or prizewinning rose garden from unwelcome footfall are now just barely bald-spots in an expanse of weeds growing unchecked and wild.  What mostly remains is hard-packed dirt and dog shit-covered Astroturf; reliquaries of rusted out barrows, barbeques, and the rubble of excess materials from construction projects, decades since passed.

And at the foot of all these yards standing proudly tall are the blind sentinels of each delinquent kingdom- the seemingly pointless ladders to nowhere, the clothesline towers.

When I moved to Brooklyn I had no idea what these were, as all I saw were not actually in use anymore. But then someone told me, “those are for clotheslines.”

JUST for clotheslines?” I thought. It seemed so strange. All that height – the metal and concrete, a towering eyesore, in a city where people's showers are put in kitchens and toilets are put in showers for an extra foot of space; a city where economy of space is a religion. A tower just for laundry? It just seems so improbable.

When my girlfriend and I moved in together, the size of our average load of laundry doubled. We live far from the Laundromat – at least what we consider to be far, which is two long blocks and one short block. For whatever reason, we immediately became incapable of doing laundry. New socks and underwear would be purchased. Travel bags on visits to my parents would become stuffed to capacity without benefit of folding. Occasional emergency wash runs would be made to Vic’s parents in Midwood. But a full load of laundry was apparently impossible. A large pile would sit in the corner of the bedroom, and be cherry-picked again and again for salvageable items until finally consisting of nothing but sheets and towels.

Exercising became problematic with no clean workout clothes. I would run on the track at the Y or in Prospect Park, stink-lines trailing behind me, people falling away like flies. To combat this problem I began taking gym clothes into the shower with me after my run and would vigorously rub Garnier Fructis conditioner into my shorts, adding a squirt of Kiehl’s for good measure. However, with no place to hang them other than on top of the shower, they would drip on the floor or onto the dry towels, staying damp for days, and in the end just smelling mildewy and stale, like a summer camp changing room.

I decided that the problem was NOT in fact insufficient cleaning methods, which eventually became tossing a capful of Ultra Gain into the shower, then stomping and squishing my gym shorts with my feet as I bathed myself, like some disgusting 18th-century vintner trying to achieve an earthier tannin,  while giving his grapes what-for. The problem was that I didn’t have anyplace to properly dry them. I needed a clothesline.

I assumed the installation involved climbing the tower as opposed to firing some kind of harpoon gun from our window, but wanted to make sure. I typed “installing a clothesline tower, Brooklyn.” My search yielded a youtube video entitled “Joseph installs a new clothesline, Brooklyn.”

It did not include Joseph falling to his death as I assumed it would, but it did confirm my assumptions about ascending the tower. I’m sure this was safe when the house and tower were built in 1910, but I questioned the structural integrity of the rusty quarter-inch metal bars at Centenarian age.

I measured the distance from the house to the tower. It was almost exactly 50 feet so I would need a bit more than 100 feet of rope. Of course the hardware store only carried 50 and 100-foot lengths of clothesline, so I begrudgingly purchased two hundred feet as it began to rain.

About a week later, there was a break in the rain and I decided it was time. I could finally wash my gym clothes and hang them out to dry! Victoria refused to be any part of it, not wanting to be witness to me falling to my death, so I had to be my own spotter.

I tied one end of the line to the pulley outside my kitchen window and tossed the coil down into the yard. I had promised Vic I would use a “safety harness” so I cut a length from the extra coil and strung it through the belt loops around my waist, then around the tower. With a good square knot, I leaned back and felt the rope tighten around my hips. As long as I remembered to keep my pants on, I wouldn’t fall away from the tower, but straight down and be able to quickly grab a rung.

Safely securing the end of the rope I had thrown down from the kitchen around my neck, up I went, hand over hand. I had to stop and clear myself of some old cut cable wires and dead ivy to get up. And some tree branches. And some live wires. But soon I was at the top, three stories up on a structure with rungs just wide enough to accommodate one foot. I was gripping tightly, pressing my body to the metal, trying to keep my weight centered to minimize the swaying which did have me a bit concerned. I untied the rope from around my neck, slipped it through the pulley above my head, and secured it to my belt. And down I came, hand under hand.

I released myself from the safety harness and feeling quite satisfied, began walking away with the line, preparing to hoist it up to my window. Then, looking up, I realized I would have to send the rope over the branches, adjacent to the second story of my building, in order for this to actually work. Fuck.

I secured the extra coil, which I would need for additional weight and length when throwing the rope over the branches, safely around my neck, my harness back around the tower, and the end of my future clothes-line to my belt.

Up I went hand over hand, over the old cable wire, dead climbing ivy, tree branches and live wires. I broke what branches I could (they were dead and it’s a neighbor’s tree) to facilitate the process of getting the rope over the tree. Clutching to the tower with the crook of one arm, I bunched up all the dangling rope with other and attached it to the coil tied around my neck. Finally removing the extra coil from my neck, I said a prayer and lobbed it in as high and long an arch as I could, over the branches and into the yard. Success!

Arms shaking, but victorious none-the-less, down I came, hand under hand. After a struggle getting the line over the low-hanging lights and ivy structure the old landlords had by the back of the building, I ran upstairs with the extra coil, secured it to the fire escape and dropped it’s length down to the yard. I ran back downstairs into the yard and tied the two lines together, then ran back upstairs to pull the whole big motherfucking mess up. Finally I slid the rope through the pulley and tied it to itself. Huzzah!

Testing the pulleys however, I discovered that the rope had come off the pulley-wheel at the top of the tower and was pinched at the pin. Fuck.

Up I went, hand over hand, over dead cables and live wires and tree branches. Clinging for life, swaying in breeze, remove and reattach rope to pulley and come down, hand under hand. Finally. Back in my kitchen the tug the rope and hear the satisfying squeak of the pulley taking the line in and out of its grooved body. I can wash my clothes. Once I buy clothespins.

Connor Gaudet lives in Brooklyn and does freelance anything for a living. He writes whenever he isn't reading and is the current Managing Editor of mrbellersneighborhood.com.

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in May, a blank white truck pulled up curbside and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in New York opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in black jeans and a spotless white t-shirt. His hair was military short. His eyes were the color of wet peat moss and dark tattoos ran down the sides of his neck and snuck up his sleeves. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling a set of flawless teeth, straight and white, framed by lush lips. I’m such a sucker for polite, and for a good, strong handshake. I was immediately, completely undone.

My gaze traveled from our locked hands up his arms and across his chest—large but perfectly proportioned muscles, olive skin, a hint of Latino maybe. He smelled like fresh laundry.

“So?” Jason said.

“I’ll take you upstairs,” I said, snapping back to reality and turning toward the elevators.

In my tiny apartment, I showed Jason what had to go. I had separated the heavy things and the boxes full of books, along one wall, and I pointed these out, warning him about the weight.

“You like to read?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m a writer, or…trying to be.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like to read, too.” He asked me what I wrote and I told him I was working on a book about a cowboy.

“How can I get a copy?” he asked. I told him I’d have to finish it first. He said he’d watch for me. I decided not to tell him all about how I’d been working on the book for five years and was hoping to sell it soon, but how I was also too scared to put all my eggs in the precarious basket of being a writer and so would be starting a full-time, soul-sucking job the very next week for which I’d already bought a pair of black Kenneth Cole slingbacks, several conservative black suits and a professional handbag (black) to carry my office-issue Blackberry. He picked up a few of the book boxes and curled his arm around them, pausing in the doorway. I wanted to ask him what he liked to read, but I didn’t want him to have to answer my question while holding the boxes. Then again, I wanted him to stand there and hold the boxes for awhile, maybe all day. I was suddenly sorry the bed sheets were already packed. I desperately wished Dan would evaporate. The look on my face must have been confused.

“I know I look intimidating,” he said, unprompted. “But my friends say I’m a big pussy cat.”

All I could think to say was, “Okay.”

A half hour later, everything was loaded into the truck and the apartment was as empty as the day I’d moved in. Jason looked around, the way my mother does when she leaves a hotel room, making sure none of her things have blended inadvertently into the landscape of the space that is not hers.

“What’s this?” he said, picking up a stretched canvas propped against the corridor wall. It was a painting of two cowboys riding the range in black and white and shades of gray.

“Oh, that stays,” I said. “I’m throwing it away.”

“Why?”

“I never really finished it.”

“You painted this?” he said, his beautiful eyes wide. “You can’t throw this away. This is really good.” He held the painting at arm’s length and studied it the way people study paintings in museums. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“You want my painting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think you realize how good it is.”

I think I smiled. I think I raised my eyebrows and smirked a little. It might have looked like a come-on. It might have looked like I wanted to puke.

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it.” And with that I closed the door to the apartment and we turned into the stairwell, Jason carrying the painting carefully by the frame.

Downstairs, Dan was pacing up and down the sidewalk next to the truck. It was drizzling and the door to the truck was open. Jason asked us if we wanted a ride to Brooklyn with him and I said sure. The subway would take us an hour, and it was such a dreary day. I climbed into the cab and took the middle seat and Dan got in beside me, his knees pressing against the glove compartment that was held shut with a piece of duct tape.

I wasn’t really sure, but I suggested we cut across to the FDR and drop down and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Dan concurred. We wound up taking a wrong turn, and then somewhere along MLK everyone was honking. Jason looked in the side mirror and said, “Oh,” jerking the truck to the curb and jumping out. I looked back through the open window. Boxes were scattered down the street. “I’ll be right back,” Jason said. So Dan and I sat in the truck and waited. When Jason jumped back in the cab he said, “I got it all! Don’t worry!” And I trusted him completely.

A few minutes later, we were negotiating a series of one-way streets through Harlem when he spun around again, hit the brakes and wheeled the van around across traffic.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, leaving us idling on a sidewalk while he trotted into the open door of a junk store.

Dan looked at me, incredulous. “What the hell?” he said.

I shrugged.

Jason came back a few minutes later, got in the van and put the truck in gear.

“I just had to see about that juke box,” he explained without apology. “I collect ‘em. But the guy wanted eighty bucks, and that’s steep.” He pulled back into traffic, heading east, and I took the opportunity to look at his profile, his neck and hairline. “I watch Antiques Road Show,” he went on. “Do you know that show?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well I watch it a lot,” he said, “so I know what’s worth collecting. I really like slot machines and skulls and inkwells. You know what an inkwell is?”

“Uh huh,” I said. I didn’t look at Dan, but I was sure his eyes were rolling.

“I got this skull inkwell on lay away,” Jason went on. “Nine-hundred-dollar skull inkwell. You put the ink in the top of the skull. It’s crazy. I love it.”

By this time, I was sure we were heading in the wrong direction. In a moment, we hit Broadway.

“I think you can just turn left here,” I said.

“Okay, no problem,” Jason said. And for the first forty blocks or so the traffic moved at a decent clip. Just above Houston Street things got hung up and we sat for a long time watching the lights turn green, yellow, red. The rain was streaming down the windshield and Jason flicked the AC on.

“What’s your neck say?” I asked.

He reached a hand up and rubbed the ink embedded just above his collar.

“F.T.W.? It stands for Fuck The World,” he said. “I hate everyone, so this is my message.” He reached around the back of his neck, slipping his fingers beneath the collar, suggesting ink beyond the visible. His arm was as thick as my thigh. “I got a lot of these in jail,” he said.

I could feel Dan’s leg against mine, and it wanted to twitch.

“How long were you in jail?” I asked.

“Two years. On and off,” he said, and of course I was dying to know what for but was too afraid to ask. Luckily, he offered. “This last time,” he said, “I was in there for selling two hundred hits of X to an undercover cop. You know, Ecstasy. But the Tombs, that’s not an easy place to be. I recommend you don’t go there. It ain’t too cute.” Okay, good, I thought—drug-dealing. That’s safe. We’re safe. We’re not going to die between here and Brooklyn. We moved forward a block and a half.

“I just hang around with idiots,” he went on. “Like my friends, Mario and Carmine, they’re retarded. Mario comes up limping the other day, says Carmine stabbed him in the leg. But the next day they’re walking down the street holding hands like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And mostly I date strippers. I know I should date nicer girls, but that’s just the people I hang around with. I just broke up with this girl. It started off good, and then she got crazy. We used to go dancing at Copacabana. You been there? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, I love to dance,” I said. I hadn’t been in years.

“You guys should come,” he said. “Just don’t go on a Tuesday. Tuesdays is hoodie night. It ain’t too cute.”

I considered his offer. What would I wear? Could my tits compete with the stripper ex-girlfriend’s? Dan didn’t say a word, south along Broadway through Manhattan, over the bridge, through Brooklyn Heights, past Atlantic Street Center, up 4th Avenue to 3rd Street where we pulled up in front of my new place. It was still raining, but not as hard. We all grabbed something and went up to the second floor, a spacious one-bedroom, freshly painted.

“This is nice,” Jason said. “Really nice.” He looked up at the pressed tin ceilings, peered in at the newly-tiled kitchen, and I wondered where he lived, what it looked like there. He unloaded the truck in no time. And then we stood on the sidewalk, me with a wad of cash and him with an empty truck and my painting. Dan was upstairs and I could feel his eyes on us from the window.
I wondered if he was watching to protect me, or to see what I would do.

Jason held the painting out to me. “You should finish this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think painting is my thing.”

“But if you get famous, this is gonna be worth something,” he said. “I’m no dummy. I seen it all the time on Antiques Roadshow. Somebody gets famous for one thing, like they write a book or something, and then everything they’ve ever done or owned is worth a ton of money. So you’re going to write a book and then this painting is gonna be worth some money. You gotta finish it. Will you finish it and send it to me? I’ll give you my address. You gotta pen?”

I looked him all over, searching for something I still can’t name. I couldn’t imagine how a boy this pretty had survived in the slammer for even a day. He was a mama’s boy, a curious boy. He did his research. He liked collecting things. His eyes were open for opportunity. His eyes were open.

I pulled a yellow legal pad from my bag and gave it to him. I knew I wouldn’t finish the painting, but I thought maybe I could write to him instead. Maybe we could go dancing. He handed the paper back to me with his name and address written in a neat, blue hand.

“You know,” I said, looking at the painting, “I want you to have this one. I really do. If you like it the way it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “But if you paint another one, in blue, you can send it to me. I think it would look good in blue.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll see.” We shook hands. And then he got in the truck and drove away.

Upstairs, Dan said, “What the hell was that?”

“He wanted me to finish that painting.”

“What painting?”

“Of the cowboys.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He liked it. He thought it was beautiful. And he thinks it’s going to be worth a million bucks on eBay if I become a famous writer.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Well,” I said. I ran my key along a seam of tape, opened a box and took some things out. There was no furniture in the place, nothing to sit on, so Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, asked if I wanted help unpacking and, when I declined, stood up and said he was going to go home.

I settled into my new place nicely, commuting every day to my job in Lower Manhattan and returning home to cook dinner for friends who would sit on the couch and balance plates on their laps, drink bottles and bottles of wine and make fun of my Barry-White-inspired bathroom, all black tile and gold fixtures. I worked 12 hours a day in my office with no windows and I got really good at running from one meeting to another in high heels. I had cocktails with the mayor at Gracie Mansion and rode around town in government-issued vehicles, with a driver who wore one of those curlicue wire devices behind his ear. I didn’t touch the draft of my book that sat on my desk for almost two years.

It would be a few months before Dan and I would break up, and years before I realized that at least one box of books and my favorite mug, stolen from the university student center in Reykjavik, were lost along that stretch of MLK in Harlem. Eventually I lost Jason’s address, too. For awhile I’d kept it, thinking I’d show up at Copacabana and try to find him, but of course I never did. I’m no dummy. Where Jason saw potential in my half-finished painting, in my half-formed self, I feared I would be disappointed in him. But who was I, in my suit and my slingbacks with my Blackberry, a nameless engine behind the powers that made the city go, go, go?

Much as I loved my new apartment, it was not who I wanted to be. I decided that after a year, I would move again. If I finished my book and became a famous writer, Jason could sell my painting on eBay and buy himself a cool new skull inkwell. I wondered if he would find the painting beautiful enough to hold onto until then.

Margot Kahn left New York City for Seattle where she hikes, bakes cakes and reads with her husband and son. Her book Horses That Buck, the biography of a Wyoming cowboy, was published in 2008. www.margotkahn.com

Crackheads are like seagulls: you feed one, and it comes back every day for the next year, staring at you with its flat, needful eyes, shifting from foot to foot, emitting an occasional squawk of impatience. It’s a particular kind of love, a pick-your-bones-before-your-body-cools kind of love. On Cape Cod, where I come from, only the tourists feed the gulls.

Now, I get it, I see the pieces sliding into place in your minds: white college girl from bourgie East Coast seaside town, moves to New York City, becomes “college poor” and ends up living in real poor neighborhood, naively takes condescending pity on desperate crack ho, and then can’t shake her. Cry you a fucking river, right?

Let me explain.

Tay Tay and I had more in common than you think, than I thought. And I’m not talking about our Puerto Rican fathers.

How about some more context? This was the year 2000, pre-9/11, pre-George Dubya, post-millenium. We had partied like it was 1999, and we were still partying, because the world had not ended, because we didn’t need a reason. It was the year I ripped my first CD, my junior year of college. It was the summer that Aaliyah’s last hit: “Try Again” was all over the radio. I loved that song, despite the fact that I had invested most of my music-loving years to semi-obscure indie-rock and the kind of underground rap music that only arty white college kids and the black intellectuals who hate them loved (remember Ded Prez? Cannibal Ox?). I was a New School student, after all.

It was not the first year that I smoked crack, but, it was the first time I could buy it at the corner store. Though, I didn’t know that when I first moved in.

I should never have given Tay Tay my money. It was only that one time. See, when we first moved in, our apartment building’s door was busted, which meant that after dark, the vestibule that housed our mailboxes was consistently fishbowled with crack smoke. Tay Tay would wait in the vestibule for a tenant to open the second door, leading into the building, wedge her flip-flopped foot in as it closed, and then lead her tricks up to the roof. She used protection, I’m happy to report, the evidence was all over our roof, as if a horde of snakes had slithered up there, and molted, en masse.

I wasn’t even looking for crack, that day. My heroin habit was much more pressing. But crack was the drug industry in Bed Stuy. She ripped me off, of course. I knew enough then that I shouldn’t let her out of my sight, but I wasn’t brave enough yet to insist that she take me with her to cop.

The next time I saw her, weaving down Gates Avenue, hair half braided, flip-flops flapping, one arm clutching a child-size pink raincoat closed over her skinny chest, the other raised high over her head, waving as she called out “Haaay-aaay!! Melinda!” I almost ducked behind a tree. I fiercely protected my double life, and only recently had my habits assumed the strain of desperation that threatened the compartmentalization of my ambitious college student identity and my street-savvy derelict. My literary heroes—those precious gold standards of junkiedom whom I referred to whenever the need to rationalize the obvious dangers of drug-use popped up—(William Burroughs lived into a ripe old age, nevermind that he shot his wife). Well, they had never written about what to do when your cover was blown in broad daylight by a crackhead in a pink raincoat. I gave her a dollar and scurried into my apartment as quickly as I could manage. Her hungry face disappeared behind the apartment door, but the gnawing fear in my chest hung around.

I never copped from her again, sticking instead with the dealers I quickly located around the block, who didn’t use their own product, and weren’t any eager to be seen in my company than I was in theirs. But Tay Tay persisted. “Girlfriend,” I’d hear her hollar from half a block away, on my way home from the Bedford Y—where I liked to lift weights in slow motion when I was high on dope.

Let me explain. My logic functioned on junkie arithmetic, which reasoned two bags of dope + one hour of exercise had an absolute value of zero; the two values neutralized one another. Throw in a shot of wheatgrass, and I was having a good day.

I tried to neutralize Tay Tay, by telling her I was on the wagon now. “White girl,” she’d say, sucking her teeth, “you. Are. Not.” She’d lean back to appraise me, squinting one eye theatrically.

“You on that good shit. Tay Tay can tell.” It took one to know one. Her brain might have been pudding from years on the pipe and the street, but a fiend always knows a fiend.

One time, I was standing on my stoop with my roommate, Emily, and our super, Walter, a giant, kind West Indian man who never fixed anything, but would bring us salves to cure athlete’s foot, and thick stalks of raw sugar cane. As we chit-chatted, I spotted Tay Tay coming down the block, and hurried to finish up our conversation. I relaxed as she turned down Franklin Ave, moving away from us.

“There goes a junky scramble,” I blurted out. I have often had the tourettish impulse to point out the objects of my anxiety, as if drawing attention to them will divert it from me.

“A junky scramble?” asked my roommate. “Like, a tofu scramble?”

I laughed. “No, like, a junky on the move.” I descended the stoop steps, and scrambled down the walkway. Walter hooted. It was an imitation of that motion recognizable to most people who’ve ever lived in a major city (well, the kind of people who live in not-nicest neighborhoods, or have a reason to notice this kind of thing): legs stiff but hustling, a hint of a limp, arms awkward but swinging, body’s frame rocking side to side. The junky scramble. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing; everybody knows where you’re going when you walk like that.

Eventually, my roommates, who drank and smoked like normal college students, started to feel uncomfortable, about my drug use, and my new BFF. No one said anything—I never gave them an opportunity, and I never used in front of them, but I recognized that thickness in the air of our mouse-infested home, the gravity of silence clotted with words unspoken.

Then one night, I woke to one of my roommates prodding, her furrowed face leaning over me.

“Wake up!”

“What?” I asked her, blearily rubbing my eyes.

“Listen.”

We stared at each other in silence for a moment, and just as I raised my arm in incredulity, I heard it.

BANG BANG BANG.

I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes again.

BANG BANG BANG.

“What the fuck?” I said.

My roommate gave me an exasperated glare, and then I heard her.

“Melisssssssaaaa! Yo!! Me-la-nie!”

I froze, frantically hoping that I would wake up a second time, to find that this had been just another anxiety dream.

BANG BANG BANG.

“The neighbors!” hissed my roommate, and I sprung out of bed, hurrying through the kitchen and down the long hallway that led to the apartment door, my feet sticking to the never-mopped floor.
I secured the chain-lock, and cracked open the door, just as she began to call my name again.

“MEL—”

“Ssshhh!” I hushed through the crack.

At first I didn’t see her. Then I lowered my gaze. Tay Tay sat on the landing outside our apartment, smiling up at me with her three teeth.

“Oh, hey girl! It’s just me.”

She was obviously high—but not as agitated as her banging had suggested. I closed the door, and unlatched the lock, opening it again, but just enough to stick my head out.

“Tay Tay, what are you doing?” I asked. But it was obvious. She had an oversized sweatshirt spread out beneath her for a makeshift blanket, and neatly arranged across it were a couple of sooty crack pipes, a small pile of crumpled heroin bags, a battered box of Newports, and an empty 24 oz coca cola bottle. A crackhead picnic.

Perhaps this was all arranged just so for her convenience, but I later suspected, as I still do, that it was more for my benefit—either to entice me, or to horrify me, I’m still not sure. Drug addicts’ powers of manipulation can never be overestimated.

“Tay Tay,” I said slowly. “You can’t be here right now. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh,” she said, tilting her head back. “You were sleepin’?”

“Yes,” I said. “And so were my roommates, and so were my neighbors.” I examined her to gauge comprehension. Or more accurately, to gauge cooperation. I silently prayed that she would go peacefully. I’d started talking to god more in those days than I ever had, being that I spent so much time in foxholes. “You have to leave, Tay Tay,” I said, not unkindly, but with what I hoped conveyed non-negotiability, and more confidence than I felt.

For a few moments, we didn’t say anything. She stared at me, then down at her picnic. I became aware of my goose-pimpled legs, my roommates breathing behind me, and the smoldering cigarette she had wedged in the cleft between her index and middle finger.

Finally, she gave a shrug.

“All right then. I’ll be on my way.”

I nearly collapsed with relief.

“But! You can at least do me this one favor.”

I didn’t know how I had ended up in her deficit, but I was willing to concede, if it meant that she’d pack up shop before my neighbors started poking their heads out from behind their peepholes. Bed Stuy’s sidewalks might have been scattered with crackheads, but its homes were mostly full of hardworking people, who just wanted a good night’s sleep.

“Okay, what?”

She cocked her head at me. “You gotta hair pic?”

“What? No. Wait, what?”

Tay Tay rolled her eyes. “A comb, you got a hair comb?”

“Ah, yeah, I guess. I mean, I think so.” I didn’t actually brush my hair often, but held up a finger to indicate that I would soon return. I pushed my way past my roommates, bare feet suctioning again to the sticky floors as I padded into the bathroom and slid open the medicine cabinet. On the top shelf, in a puddle of nail polish remover was a cheap black comb. I wiped it on the corner of a mildewy towel and scuttled back to the door, cracking it open once again.

“Here you go,” I sung, projecting an air of closure, as if it were now obvious to all that our business was finished.

“Mmm,” she grunted, and examined the comb. She dropped it onto the sweatshirt with her other goodies, and stared at it some more. A fresh spurt of anxiety chilled my chest. Tay Tay reached for the empty coke bottle and held it up to me.

“You got something to drink in there?”

I paused, “Yeah, yeah I can get something to drink.”

“What I’d really like is a shower. My head is itchiiin.’”

“Tay Tay…”

“I know! I’m only asking for a little something to drink. My mouth is dry.”

She coughed dryly to illustrate.

I rolled my eyes, but took the bottle. Closing the door softly again, I hurried back to the bathroom and filled her bottle with water, careful not to touch its mouth with my bare fingers.

When I handed it back to her, heavy and cool, and beaded with droplets, she stared at it, much as she’d stared at the comb. As if she had been expecting something better.

“You don’t have no coca-cola?”

“No, Tay Tay, I don’t drink Coca-Cola.” This was true.

She looked at me like I was crazy. I stared right back at her, and there followed another long stretch of silence, in whose liquid thickness I knew more than one potential floated. I could practically hear her brain gnawing on the options, and their possible outcomes.

Finally, she shrugged, and began packing up her picnic. This took longer than I need detail, but suffice to say, it was with no urgency that she closely inspected the insides of each empty baggie for any valuable residue before folding their tiny rectangles into tinier rectangles and laboriously wrapping them in the foil from her cigarette box. With a disgruntled air, she finally hoisted herself up, and into her blackened flip flops, and slow motion scrambled down the stairs.

And that, was pretty much the last interaction I had with her. Sure I saw her around the neighborhood, hustling across Franklin Ave like her life depended on it, which it did. Or passed out on the sofa underneath the C train overpass, which we referred to as “the living room.” Every couple weeks the city would drag away the loveseat, hobbled folding chairs, and milkcrates that had been collected there, and within another couple days, replacements would appear, with bodies sprawled across, or crouched over them.

I wish I could say that getting such a close-up view at what drugs did to human beings was what got me sober. I wish I could say that, at 20 years old, I realized that my middle-classness, my higher education, my wheatgrass shots, or theories of invincibility wouldn’t protect me from becoming someone else. None of that did. It was only the private revelation of my own suffering, and I had a few more years before that would get worse enough.

Once, on my walk to the subway, outside a bodega, I saw a man punch a woman in face three times. I had seen fights, but no one had ever punched me in the face. I didn’t hesitate before throwing myself between them like some kind of tiny white feminist superhero. Shooting rays of hubris from my knuckles. These two crackheads both looked at me like I was fucking crazy.
I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing today. But the shame I feel thinking about it has more to do with my silent presumption than my actions. That I knew anything about their lives, or their states of victimhood, or what of. I might have studied racial politics in my New School classrooms, waxed on about hegemonic class dynamics, gentrification, and paradigms of subjugation, but I didn’t have a fucking clue. At least not how to place myself in the context of any of that. I still thought that knowledge was an action. That self-knowledge induced change.

Though I stopped hearing Tay Tay call my name down the street, I did receive a call from my landlord. He was a mild man, who never minded if our rent was a few days late, and so I knew something was up.

The three of us showed up on the appointed afternoon, and were seated in his tiny Park Slope office.

The performance that followed I am loathe to describe to anyone, though I was proud of it at the time. As my roomates looked on, I explained to this man that the neighborhood was just full of these sad cases, and I had only been trying to help. I had tried giving her food, and then just enough money for a metrocard, or the 24hour buffet down on Fulton. I wept real tears, which is somewhat of a miracle, considering how emotionally numb I was—they must have been on reserve for whenever I got quiet enough to feel how completely terrified and miserable I was.

As I remember it, my roommates didn’t say much, and my landlord gently reminded me not to feed the crackheads. For years, I thought back on it, despite with growing chagrin, as my most immaculate performance. And I gave many.

After I got sober, left Bed Stuy, and was living the clean cut life of a professional dominatrix, my old roommate Emily and I had lunch in Williamsburg. The subject of Tay tay came up. I cringed.

“Do you remember that fucked up performance I gave david, after she showed up at four in the morning that time? I can’t believe I pulled that bullshit off.”

Emily stared at me in disbelief.

“What?” I said.

“Do you remember that day?” she asked.

“Of course I do!”

“You were so high,” she said, “you practically fell out of your chair.”

“What?” I said.

She just nodded, eyes widened.

I reeled. “But why would he just act like he believed me. Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

She stared at me for another moment. “What was the point?”

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, WHIP SMART. Her writing has been published in The Southeast Review, Redivider, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and Bitch Magazine, among many others, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the NY Post to NPR’s Fresh Air. She teaches at Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, and NYU, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. A resident of Brooklyn, she is currently at work on a novel.