From

Black was the underbelly

a novella, 2014

XVI

A party in the Bowery Hotel. On the floor above a richly furnished lobby choked with tapestries in which staggeringly over-priced drinks were sold, there was a vast expanse of a room where a DJ was set up as usual on an altar, an amber coated bar to her side, the walls behind run with mirrors which doubled the backs of quickly moving, suited up bartenders. People moved in crowds, came inside to dance, to roam the vast halls, but the outside was preferred―a huge stone balcony where there were couches and a railing thick enough to sit upon.

            I was outside, leaning against the railing beside Piper, smoking one of her cigarettes, watching the people. Nate came up to us and stood for a while, smoked, and then drifted when his group came around, boys he’d known since grade school, street-styled, their parents holding properties around Washington Square, and money coming to them through early investments in bright, outsourced clothing, branded t-shirts. There were always young New York City women with them. They dressed in the shadow of hip-hop's golden age, thick gold hoops in their ears, high-waisted jeans, flat-bottomed converse, smoking heavily, weed, cigarettes. Then the LA set, also drawing from hip-hop’s bottomed out, now hopelessly exploited trope, dressed in the precarious, passing fancy of their own t-shirts, with wild hair or shaved heads, something cruel in their mouths, sensual about all their lower lips, roaming around, talking up the right people. And then James. His casual monumental figure, walking beside the lithe, half Asian, bronze-skinned boy. He was a young man who had his hair cropped closely to his skull, a t-shirt on, arms back, a smile of quiet resistance to all who might approach him. He moved skillfully, dated only the rich, those who had keys to the doors of his perceived stairway which mounted success, money, hierarchy. He took a careful combination of drugs, some of which James had, though he only sniffed his heroin. The people around him kissed him and fanned themselves looking upon his artwork, which embodied in a vague sense the perpetually sinking reality of a New York City life, his interpretation being slightly more inhibited than other artists, and minimalist. He must be noted here as the one who became the most famous among us.

            “Azael,” I said.

            “Hey,” Azael said, slumping beside me against the railing. “It’s all so fucking boring here.”

            “Then why are you here?”

            “Where else can I go?”

            “How’s the loft? How’s painting?”

            “Can’t get anything done with everyone comin' in and out all the time.”

            “But you love that.”

            His eyes focused on me and yet slid past. He smiled as if he had a hollowed out secret that must be kept but gave him no pleasure anymore.

            “Hey man,” Azael said as his boys approached, two young brothers, the taller with hair dripping down as if from the rain, and the other with ruminating eyes of a liquid black color, having grown up in one of those LA mansions, now taken to First and Second Avenue to go to school, to infuse the empty warehouse, vacant lot art scene with their parents’ money and their youthful abandon, which drew women, too, women of all kinds.

            “What’s good, son?” said the taller one.

            “I’m over this. High school party,” Azael sighed, even his smiling mouth on the verge of collapse from ennui.

“Dead ass, everyone I’ve ever met in the Lower is here.”

The shorter one was quiet, surveying the crowd.

A tall woman, long faced, with dark eyes and meditative, thin lips came up to Azael and kissed him on the cheek and said to him, loudly enough so I could hear, “check under your pillow when you get home.”

Azael laughed like a little child as she sauntered away. “We slept together yesterday. Now she’s leaving me notes.”

“She likes you.”

“She likes herself,” he said. “We’re gonna skip out. You wanna come?”

            “Okay,” I said. “Let me grab Piper.”

            We walked down Bowery’s central vein where Cheetah of the Dead Boys had wandered off bleeding from a major artery one night after playing at CBGBs, which was next door to the Bowery Hotel, and in its very last open days, only the scrawled up, pissed on, blood-stained bathroom to be preserved by the new tenant, a bloatedly rich fashion house. We walked up the grey altar of steps which carried the homeless into dreams and through the whistling dark of Chrystie park, underneath the shade of its very tall trees. He lived in Chinatown, too; he knew the night sound of the day's spent oil and melting ice pooling down the gutter into the sewers.

            We climbed a steep, concrete stairway to the loft. It was a huge space decorated with Azael's abstract paintings, a screen pulled down to watch movies, and a sea of discarded, empty beer cans. There were couches crowding the screen and a young couple sitting there when we entered who begrudgingly, in their pajamas, returned to one of the rooms.

            Azael taking off his coat and throwing it to the couch disappeared briefly into his room and emerged with a folded sheet of paper.

            “Azael, finally,” he read and began to laugh, hoarsely and lightly.

            The night was dying away, all its suicidal promise dissolving in the clear, opaque light of morning. We drifted to the stained pillows of the couches, my head ending up beside Azael’s shoe as I began to sleep, or feigned to sleep, hoping to absorb his blasé timidity, which was a coursing, infiltrating kind of power. Azael drew people to him unconsciously; he had the ridiculous nature to form out of nothingness a future world, and was at the age of nineteen simply experiencing himself as a fluid agent of death. Not yet wanting to concentrate himself or hold his power accountable, he faced a yawning abyss in which the horror of everything offered to him had massed into a complete and total darkness. I did not have this kind of looming ego-fulfillment, as I could be splintered by someone else, and this exempted me. Azael preserved himself methodically and was not very much affected by others. He was careful, unlike James, to tiptoe around his rims of fire, and not bring the needle to his vein, but sniff it like a child mocking his parents, about to throw everything away, and then at the last second don a suit, claim his crown, while James still drowning in pleasure would see him turning his heel, the prominent one to rise early and sell everything he had made before even leaving college. He almost never had anything to say though his quiet, black eyes dimly expressed the tones of an imminent, isolating glory. I do not know what he would say my eyes reflected, if he had ever taken the time to notice, but I am afraid my life may have held no real allure for him, yearning as I was to leave all this behind after staying long enough to detect what, if anything, lay beneath all this.

XVII

The heat of summer was coming, climbing down the black-streaked walls of the subway under earth so that the city tipped on the air conditioners in the trains and it was cool as I shuttled uptown towards the Bronx.

            I got out at Grand Concourse and went down an avenue past an Hispanic coffee shop, a hairdresser’s, a botanical with Mary de Guadalupe candles in the windows, towards the projects along the highway. A crowd of young men blocked the doors, hanging out and smoking. They mutely moved away for me to enter their corn chip dusted, microwave scented building where no air could mitigate the stench of tired, hopeless anger that stained the walls and chipped away at the tiles. In the elevator someone’s school papers had been tossed everywhere, strewn about after the kid had been jumped, presumably. On the sixth floor there was a big white-streaked window looking out over the silver-grey hills of the Grand Concourse park and its surrounding red brick buildings.

            I knocked at a door in the corner. A minute or two of shuffling and a clamor of footsteps, and a girl answered. She was wearing a bandanna over her head and had a sarcastic, impish look to her; her lower lip stuck out.

            “Hello, you my tutor?”

            “Yes, I’m Una,” I said and offered my hand.

            She shook it. “Come in.” I stepped in to a little hallway where a small boy with dark pressed-in under eyes as if in the early clay period of his life he had been forced to shut his eyes was standing and he ran away down the hall. “My little brother,” the girl said. I followed her to a table in the kitchen. She had been eating Fruit Loops in a bowl with her hands. Dirty dishes were stacked high at the sink and there was a window that looked out upon the snaked over rows of highways crossing, and beyond, far beyond a glimpse of the turgid East River shifting in midday light.

            “Natima right?” I said, sitting down.

            “Yeah, didn’t you know that?”

            “Well, yes. I saw two other kids today, too, just wanted to make sure.”

            “Oh. None worse than me though. I’m repeating the fifth grade twice.”

            “Why?”

            “Ain’t got no feelin' for math or readin.’ And I don’t care, I guess.”

            “Well, I’m here to help you. You at least should try to get out of elementary school. I think you’d like sixth grade.”

            “Yeah. There’s a boy I like this year.” She smiled, looking out the window. “I wanna go with him into the next year.”

            “Okay, so I will help but you have to try and listen.”

            “All right.”

            I brought out a notebook from my bag and asked her to show me her homework. Then, perusing it, I wrote down some problems for her to solve on the paper. It became apparent she couldn’t multiply correctly.

            “So you’ve missed some fundamental steps here. That might be why you’re frustrated. I’m going to make a multiplication table for you and you’ll have to study it before we meet next time.”

            “So you’re gonna come back?” Natima rose. “Jeremy, get out of here!”

            I turned and the little boy with the pressed-in eyes scampered away.

            “He can come in. What’s the difference?”

            “No, he’ll just mess things up.”

            Another boy walked into the kitchen, taller and older, and grabbed something from the refrigerator.

            “Hi, I’m Una.”           

            “That’s Vinny. He doesn’t speak,” Natima said. “Neither does Jeremy really, but he’s younger.” 

            Vinny nodded, however, and left the room.

            “So you speak for everyone?”

            “Yeah, hey, so you like to do math?”

            “Not really, but I can do basic math,” I said, drawing out the tables on a piece of paper.

            “What do you like?”

            “Drawing. Writing.”

            “What do you draw?”

            “Faces and landscapes.” Looking up at Natima, I saw her round eyes focused on mine. “When I’m done with this, I’ll draw you if you want.”

            She brought her hands to her face and squealed. “You know, you look like Katy Perry!”

            “Well, we’re both white women with dark hair.”

            Natima took the bandanna off so I could see her cornrows. “I got em done today across the street where mama works.”

            “At the salon?”

            “Yeah.”

            The door opened and a man came in, filling the width of the room with his shoulders. His dark eyes, askance, rolled over Natima and I, and with a guttural greeting he passed on towards the bedroom.

            “That’s my stepfather,” Natima said.

            “Oh. You get along with him?”

            “No. Not at all.”

            “Well, stay still. I’m gonna draw you now.”

            “Okay.” Natima straightened out her little shoulders and her lower lip stuck out defensively. I began with her eyes, dark eyes with heavy eyelids and short lashes, and carved out from there her sloping down nose, the stuck out lower lip, her high cheekbones, her pulled back cornrows.

            When I was nearly done she snatched it from me and cried, “Ah!” and pressed it to her chest. “You’re gonna be my friend?”

            “I suppose I am. But you have to promise to study this.”

            “I will. I will. I will. Vinny!” Natima jumped up and scampered into the other room. Vinny came back with her, looking over the drawing and looking at me.

            “He’s impressed,” Natima said.

            “All right, I’m going to get going. I’ll see you soon.”

            “Please, please come back soon.”

            “Next week Natima.”

            In a week I walked again through the park towards the projects along the highway. There were people sitting on benches and walking their dogs and the park with its thin grey paths stretched out of sight, towards where the sun was dashing across the windshields of cars.

            Vinny answered the door this time and directed me to the table. Natima was slumped there with Jeremy beside her, her face in her hands. When she saw me enter, she smiled and jumped up from her chair.

            “Hey, how are you?” I said, setting my bag on the floor.

            “Lousy, I got suspended today.”

            “Why?”

            “Fighting. Fighting for that boy I like. I punched someone. Not him, but he was there.”

            “That’s not good, Natima. You need to graduate.”

            “Yeah, well, it don’t matter. Mama wants me to go on but I hate her so much, it’s better this way.”

            “Listen, if you don’t like her, you need to succeed so you can leave this place. If you fail so as to spite her you’re not going to win in the end.”

            Natima’s eyes floated to the window where Jeremy was approaching with a paper airplane. The little boy took a lighter from the table and set the paper on fire and sailed it out the window.

            “Woah,” I said.

            “It’s cool, we do it all the time.”       

            Vinny came in and sat down at the table.

            “Vinny wants you to draw him.”

            “All right, but then we have to do some work, Natima.”

            “Okay, but draw Vinny.”

            As I was drawing the older boy, a woman came in of misshapen crests, a sunken face, a bandanna over her cornrows, a heavy-jawed mouth.

            “Hey, who are you?” she asked, her voice landing with a thud at the kitchen table.

            “I’m Una. From the state tutoring company. I’m here to help your daughter.”

            “I can’t pay nobody.”

            “It’s free for you, don’t worry.”

            “Oh.” The woman backed up. “Okay,” she said and plodded into the other room. We heard the door close.

            “She’s gonna stay in there all night long,” Natima said, leaning against the wall. “Then her hubby's gonna come back and get all mad again.”

            “Does he get mad at you?”

            “He’s gonna beat me for gettin’ kicked out of school.”

            “He hits you?”

            “Yeah. Didn’t your papa hit you?”

            “No.”

            Natima tensed at her eyebrows. “Weird.”     

            “You didn’t really get kicked out though. You can go back right?”

            “Yeah, after a while.”

            Natima took the paper away from me and whistled. “You real good,” she said.

            “Thank you. You like pictures?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Have you ever been to the Met?’

            “What’s that?”

            “It’s New York’s big art museum, you’ve never heard of it?”

            “No.”

            “It’s not that far from here really.”

            “Will you take me there?”

            “Well, if it’s all right with your mom.”

            “Yes.” Her eyes brightened. “Yes it will be!”

            Going down the stairs the smell of the building was concentrated. A man coming up smiled at me with gold-capped teeth and mumbled something as I flew down the steps. Back out in the inching sunlight of late spring I crossed the highway, passing the salon where black women were getting their hair teased and from which Natima's mother had just come, up stone steps that were carved into the side of a hill that had been formed by machines when the highway was dug out.

            The lanterns had come on, pools of artificial light making circles on the green grass of Concourse Park. I decided to sit at the basketball court upon a wooden bench and watch teenagers play and girls sitting along the sideline talking.

            A man passed by me with a grey pit at his side.

            “Hey,” he said.

            “Hi.”

            “You smoke?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Wanna smoke a blunt?”

            I looked up at him. His voice and eyes were steady.

            “Where?”

            “Just around the corner.”

            “Outside?”

            “We can’t smoke outside.”

            “But close?”

            “Yeah, over there—“ he said, and pointed.

            “Okay.”

            His dog with its low, heavy head as it moved was like a big cat, grey waves undulating along its shorn fur. The sun was setting in our step, slinking away lengths of light as we walked towards it, out of the park, and down a street of closely shoved houses, the man holding tight to the dog at his side. He pulled upon a short iron gate and went up steps to a front door that was unlocked, which he shoved open with his shoulder. He went in without looking behind and beckoned me with his hand.

            I came into a dark room of tiled floors where an obese woman was sitting in a little chair, her face fluorescent and terrifying, blue pointed light from a television waving over her face in succession. She flicked an eye to the man and I walking in and the one eye followed us up the creaking stairs.

            In a little bedroom he had me come in and he closed the door.

            The dog sat beside him as he pulled a chair up to a desk. Thick-fingered hands reached into his pocket and dragged out a vacuumed plastic bag of weed, which he shook out upon a dirt-colored blunt paper lying on the desk. I sat down on the edge of a bed that was encased in plastic.

            “What you doing up here, girl like you?”

            “Tutoring a little girl,” I said.

            “You gotta be careful who you talk to.”

            “Seems so.”

            “You make much money?”

            “No, hardly any money.”

            He encircled the blunt in flame and then sucked down from its tip and passed the wetted tip to me. I took it from him and inhaled.

            “If you come around to me, I’ll pay you very well. You just gotta do some things in return. That’s all. Everything has its price. You do some things for me, I’ll have your back. You can smoke all you want. We’ve got coke too, smack. Don’t know your fancy.”

            “I like everything,” I said.

            “Then I’ll take good care’you.”

            I took another drag of the blunt and handed it back to him. “Write down your number here,” I said, extracting a receipt from my jean pocket and putting it on his desk.

            He smiled and wrote down a number, encircling it with a heart. His face in the half-light of the room was squat and plain, his eyes flat.

            “Here,” he said.

            “Thank you. I’ll call you.”

            “Please do,” he said, and I opened the door, my heart leaping that it was not locked, and went down the stairs two at a time. Laughter was sounding from the television and three men were coming in, each of them whistling and reaching for me as I pummeled out the front door, past the iron gate, throwing my hood over my head and shoving my hands in my pockets. I hurried back to the main drag and doubled down the dirty steps into the subway like the path at which Minos stands hurling damned souls into the depths of the earth. I slipped into a stopping train and sat down on the blue plastic bench. For a long while I stared off with my face in my hands. A few more stops and I would be downtown where I was familiar, where, perhaps, I was less inclined to disappear.