Читать книгу The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory - Stacy Wakefield - Страница 6

II

One summer I’d worked for a company that cleaned houses after someone died in them. I thought about that in the hardware store in Brooklyn the next day, deciding what I needed to get started on that first floor. Bleach, garbage bags, work gloves. That blew twenty dollars right there. Shit. Luckily, I was working for Donny on Sunday. He paid me forty dollars for the afternoon. All summer I’d managed to live off that.

The guy who opened the door at the squat wasn’t Mitch or Skip but a clean-cut Latino with short hair and a thin mustache. He was wearing a wifebeater and eating a piece of celery.

“I’m Sid,” I introduced myself. “Your housemate said—”

“I gotta say,” his voice was higher than I expected, “I did not believe it.” He leaned against the door frame. “That’s something. A girl in a place like this!” He laughed like that was a great joke. “Eddie.” He reached out a hand. “Steady Eddie, six months clean and counting.”

Oh, great. AA. I knew too much about that from my mom.

“So you and your man gonna have a go at this first floor, huh?” He gestured at a black maw on the far side of the foyer. There was no door but the sunlight didn’t penetrate far inside. “I never even been in there.”

The building had once been a commercial bakery and the ovens had been down here. I stepped into the dark. There had been a fire and the space was destroyed. My eyes adjusted slowly and I saw a tiny window in back. One window. Through the piles of junk, rubble, old burnt wooden beams, trash, crap.

“Shit, I don’t know.” Eddie let out a whistle, holding his nose. “This is, like, toxic and shit. You got kids?”

“Kids?” Jesus, how old did he think I was? “No!”

“That’s cool,” he nodded at me with big sincere eyes, “I hear your man saved Mitch from some rabid dog, right?”

I started to tell him Lorenzo and I were just friends, but he put up his hands in defense, like I’d told him to mind his own business. “Oh shit, you don’t got to tell me!” He went back upstairs.

* * *

I had my whole box of garbage bags used up in a couple hours. The rubble and metal pieces were so heavy I could only put a few things in each bag, but I had to start somewhere. I looked up when a shadow blocked the light from the door. I recognized the powerful shoulders even before I could see his face.

“Hey, Mitch!” I rubbed my face, smearing black soot around.

He was holding one of the garbage bags I’d put outside and he dropped it with a thud. “You put this stuff on the curb?” I couldn’t see his face in the shadow. “You think the city picks up our garbage?” I hadn’t noticed how strong his Boston accent was last night.

“Sorry.” I jumped up. “What should I do with it?”

Mitch was already heading up the stairs, one arm resting on the beam just over his head, one red-and-black high-top Air Jordan tapping on the next step. “I don’t know, go to the dump or whatever.”

“Dump? Where’s the—”

“You know what?” He continued up, shaking the brown bag in his hand at me. “I just got off work. I got a date with a pastrami sandwich.”

I stood in the doorway, listening to the floorboards creak on the second floor as he walked over my head. Then up the next stairway, then silence. I looked out at the curb at my pile of heavy bags. I brought them all back in, and then sat on a milk crate outside the door trying to cool off, totally defeated, hoping Lorenzo would show up already. Maybe he was practicing with his new band today. That’s what he had come to New York for, not to muck around in this filth. Who could blame him.

I was starving, out of water. But I couldn’t leave. I didn’t have a key, someone had to lock the door behind me. I lingered a little longer, hoping Mitch would come back down. Maybe he’d apologize for being so brusque, help me figure out what to do.

Finally, I tiptoed upstairs feeling like a kid going to the principal’s office. I crossed the second floor where the lamp we’d turned on last night still sat by the wall. There was another staircase and I climbed up higher. The third floor was even nicer than the second. It was a huge open space with a high ceiling and columns and tall windows that let a breeze through. Way in the back was a doorway, and I heard a radio playing Pearl Jam.

I called, “Mitch?” but there was no answer. I made myself march to the open doorway. Mitch was lying on his bed with his shirt off and his eyes closed, one arm wrapped around a pillow behind his head. The skin of his chest was so pale it was almost translucent. When I knocked on the doorframe he opened his eyes slowly, unsurprised, like he knew I was there.

“Can you lock me out? I gotta . . . uh . . . go out . . .” The tremor in my voice was pathetic.

* * *

I went to ABC No Rio and saw that Lorenzo’s sleeping bag and backpack were gone. I went through my stuff and found two novels I’d borrowed from Raven, a girl I’d met at Food Not Bombs. I figured I’d go return them; I loved talking to Raven, she’d cheer me up. No matter what came up, she had a position on it. When I got blisters from wearing Chuck Taylors with no socks, she said I should pee on my foot every morning to stave off infection. That cracked me up.

Not very many people lived at ABC No Rio, and those who did were older and almost normal-looking. But you could tell Rot-Squat was a punk house from a block away. A narrow-eyed guy in a spiked vest and newsboy cap was on the stoop drinking from a grimy Gatorade bottle. I knew him, his name was Stumps. He was like a doorman, with keys and dog tags around his neck. He let me pass and I climbed up the crooked stairs that looked like they’d been built by the Little Rascals.

Raven wasn’t in her room on the second floor so I kept going. Her crew hung out upstairs a lot. When I knocked on Lee and Jessica’s open door, it was Raven’s head—shaved except for three long dreadlocks sprouting from her crown—that appeared around the corner.

“Hey, girl!” she cried, and waved me in. She was sitting on the floor. At least three people and one dog were sprawled in a pile on the bed. The room was done in classic squat style: crudely sheetrocked walls, no joint tape or paint, drooping plastic over pink insulation on the ceiling, clothes and books scattered on the plywood floor. There was a loud fan in the window, pulling in more hot air.

“I forgot all about these!” Raven said when I handed her the books.

I eased down next to her on the floor, stiff and awkward. My body didn’t fold up all supple like Raven’s. She had her legs stretched out in front of her like a dancer and I remembered her telling some square girls carrying mats on St. Mark’s that it was fucked up for Westerners to do yoga, it was like culture stealing.

“These shitheads took all the QFT that was left.” Raven gestured at the bed, clicking her tongue piercing against the rings in her lip.

“Q what?”

“Horse tranquilizers.” Raven looked at the bed longingly. “That was good shit.”

“What’re you working on?”

She looked down at the pile of jeans on her lap. “Abby gave me this patch.” She held it up: Eat the Rich. “But I keep sewing the legs together.”

“Give it here.” I wiped my sweaty hands on my T-shirt, then cut her thread with my Leatherman so I could start over. “Have you heard of this squat called the Bakery in Williamsburg?”

I slipped one of her paperbacks into the jeans to keep the needle from going through the leg.

“You’re a fucking genius!” Raven said. “Brooklyn? Yeah, wait . . .” She nudged the bed with a very dirty, very tan bare foot. “That kid Jimmy lives there, right?”

A dark-haired girl murmured without opening her eyes, “Jimmy Hey?”

“No, punker Jimmy with the hair.” Raven waved a hand around her forehead. “Didn’t he move out there?” To me she added, “He was staying here last year in Gibby’s space.”

“Oh, right,” Lee, a big guy with long dreads, chuckled, “the laaaadies’ man.”

“I didn’t meet Jimmy.” I made quick stitches around the patch.

Raven watched over my shoulder. “Jimmy’s a total fashion punk, and he’s always got girls all over him. Everyone thought he was with Abby and then he brought this chick back here one night, the bartender from Sophie’s, you know that, like, biker-looking girl? And Abby kicked up a shit-fit and wouldn’t let them in the house, and the whole block was outside and the cops came and everything. It was nuts. Abby got him kicked out.”

“Oh, great.”

“Why?”

“I guess me and this kid Lorenzo are moving in there. To the Bakery squat.”

“Oh rad, you got a house!” She leaned back to give me a high five. “Lorenzo from Disguerro?”

“Yeah.” I smiled at the patch, liking how that sounded.

“No shit, I saw him earlier.”

“You did?”

“He was with that girl from Dos Blocos . . . what’s her name, with the little dog? Did she and Brian break up?”

“I wouldn’t know.” I pulled the thread into a knot and handed her the jeans.

“Kick ass!” Raven jumped up and pulled her shorts off. She wasn’t wearing underwear. Somehow, being so lithe and sun-browned, she made being naked look innocent and childlike. She shimmied into the jeans and twisted around to look at the new patch, blending in with all the others.

A pretty girl with white-blond hair and tiny dots tattooed up her sides leaned in the doorway. Abby. I’d met her before but she didn’t look at me. There were other people with her. “You coming, Raven?”

Raven dropped down to give me a hug. “Sid, thanks, babe, I gotta go!”

I heard her voice float down the stairs, her footsteps mingling with those of people I didn’t know. I stuck Raven’s sewing needle carefully into her spool of thread and looked for someplace safe to put it.

* * *

“Is this a bad time?” I asked Veronica from the pay phone on her corner a couple blocks south of Rot-Squat. No, it was perfect, she just needed half a dozen things from the deli. Of course I could get them for her, what else did I have to do? Her explanation of which deli to go to and which deli not to go to took so long it cost me another quarter. And then I stood in front of 9th Street Squat waiting for what felt like forever, too cheap to waste another quarter. I wasn’t going to yell up to the fourth floor either; this building intimidated me too much. I just stood there sweating until Veronica leaned out her window.

“I couldn’t get off the phone!” She tossed down the key in a sock with an easy shrug.

I let myself in and climbed the wide stairs. I had been here to a workday earlier in the summer, naive enough to think I could ease into a space that way. It was totally out of my league. Over the years the squatters had rebuilt this whole building—floors, walls, plumbing, electricity—all to code. It looked like a real apartment building inside, every space had a locked door and its own bathroom. The condescending guy who “orientated” all of us for the workday said the building was looking for a family of color with young children for the next open apartment, to improve diversity. But we could put in some hours anyway. It would be noted. It would have been a total waste of time if I hadn’t met Veronica. She was all into it that I was a single woman who was tough and wanted to squat. She was so cool, with her huge necklaces and hair wrapped in a big scarf and cordless drill on a holster on her hip. Instead of acting like a guy, she made working with power tools look femme.

I sipped herbal iced tea at her table while Veronica worked in her kitchen. “Brooklyn!” She waved her whisk in the air, “Of course! I knew that was the place for you.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean, forget the city unless you were here years ago. Seriously. You’re going to love Brooklyn.”

I looked at her skeptically while she poured batter into a pan. Brooklyn wasn’t a prize. We both knew that. She was surprised I’d found anything at all.

She slammed the oven door and settled across from me at the table, fanning her face. “It’s too hot to be baking, I don’t know why I said I’d make a cobbler. It’s Jessie’s birthday. You know Jessie? No? Anyways, that happened fast, huh? What’s their process, are you a full house member?”

“Oh, well . . .” I thought of my long silent walk down two flights of stairs with Mitch and wondered how I’d even dare go back there again.

“Find out. Seriously. It’d suck if you put a lot of work in and then you find out you’ve been on trial or something.”

“I don’t think it’s like . . . that formal . . .”

“What are they, consensus? Majority?” She leaned forward on her arms, looking at me through her little cat-eye glasses. “Will you have say in adding new house members or are they, like, going to offer a room to any Joe who wanders in?”

I bit my lip. “That’s a good question.”

She lifted her dreads off the back of her neck, twisting them into a tighter knot on top of her head. Her armpits were unshaven. “The city must own the building, right? Since it’s been squatted a few months already? I mean, it’s got to be like on the Lower East Side, right, or is it different out there, can you squat privately owned stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t—”

When Veronica’s timer dinged I felt like a relieved kid at the final bell. She put her cake pan in a basket and we walked down the well-lit stairs together. She was heading east to Avenue D, and assuming I was going to the L train, she asked me to post a letter on 14th Street. I wasn’t headed that way but I didn’t tell her. It was easier just to do it.

When I got back to ABC No Rio and climbed up to the roof, I was exhausted and it wasn’t even dark yet. I flopped down on top of my sleeping bag. Looking south I could see the Williamsburg Bridge, steel and lights, rising up above the buildings. I had to go for it. This was the only chance that had come my way after three months in the city. I had to make it work, no matter how awkward or hard it might be. With Lorenzo or without. What was the alternative? Staying here on the roof, sweating my ass off, waking up at dawn with the sun, waiting for winter to come? I rolled up my sleeping bag and walked to the J train.

* * *

On Rodney Street I heard my name. Skip waved from the basketball court next to the highway, still in his dress shoes, with a sweatband around his stringy hair. Mitch dribbled a ball. He was wearing green nylon shorts with his Air Jordans. He jumped to make a shot, his knees together.

“You play horse?” Skip cupped his hands around his mouth so I could hear him over the traffic.

I dropped my backpack by the edge of the chain-link fence and pushed my armbands and bracelets up my wrists. Mitch tossed the ball and it landed in my hands with a satisfying thump. I bounced it a few times to get the feel. Mitch was so tall, of course basketball was his game. I liked volleyball better. In junior high I’d been on my school’s team. But since I always hung out with guys, I could shoot hoops and play pool and I wasn’t half bad at hacky sack. I lined up the shot, squinting to see the hoop in the dusk. I threw from deep in my shoulder. The ball hit the backboard, bounced on the rim, and dropped through the net. I raised my arms over my head in victory and felt the first cool breeze of the evening drifting over the BQE.