No Lease on Life Page 4

  The crackheads didn’t leave blood in the vestibule. They left plastic vials and sometimes plastic cups of water. They were bloody, though, erratic and hostile. One of them said, when Elizabeth insisted they get off the floor and leave the vestibule, so she could open the door and get inside, one of them said, with deep sarcasm:

  —You’re some human being.

  Elizabeth wanted to strangle the peroxided, stringy-haired creature, with her disastrously thin legs and arms, and a face that betrayed every bad night she’d ever had. Elizabeth wanted to knock her senseless, not that she had any. The peroxided creature might one night come to her senses, she might look in a car’s mirror, twist it to see her ravaged face. Elizabeth couldn’t see what she’d see. People make the best of a bad situation.

  Elizabeth preferred heroin users to crackheads. Everyone did. Crackheads were erratic. Her preference was irrelevant. She would’ve preferred never to work.

  The poor scrambled, adapted, and metamorphosed into their poverty. They grew ugly. The rich grew ugly too. Repellent. They were complacent. Elizabeth hated that complacent, unearned well-being. Complacency was the rich glow on their faces. They believed in their right to their wealth. The glow made them ugly. Poor people never glowed. Ugliness is more than skin deep. They ate up their poverty, the way the rich ate up their plenty. The poor digested meagerness and cramped quarters, and even if some of them were Catholic and preached to about God’s loving the poor more than the rich, they were living in the U.S.A. People lived the lives they deserved.

  Now one of the morons stood up and vomited. He vomited all over the sidewalk. He made gut-wrenching noises to roars of moronic approval. Elizabeth lost her appetite. One of the other morons threw some food at a store window. The drug store windows all displayed Tide and Ajax, which signaled they didn’t sell anything but drugs. Idiots or gringos went in and asked for milk.

  The morons bellowed again and held some kind of vomit-and-garbage-throwing ceremony. Glass broke. Stones and bottles were tossed. They screamed happily, unimportantly. Her mother would say like banshees. Elizabeth wondered what a banshee sounded like.

  The taste of vomit was in her mouth. Vomit was putrid longing backing up.

  She wanted to be able to stop the morons. She couldn’t do everything she wanted.

  He vomited again. He probably liked to vomit.

  She’d been able to stop some girls. She persuaded them to stop blasting music from their car. It was parked under her window. They were doing their laundry across the street. It was a dope Jeep. Elizabeth dressed and walked downstairs. Roy told her not to. She knocked on the Jeep’s half-open window. The driver didn’t hear anything. Elizabeth had to touch her on the shoulder. The driver turned to her.

  —Could you please turn down? My baby can’t sleep, Elizabeth said.

  The girl did instantly, out of a traditional respect for babies and motherhood. Elizabeth walked away, aware of the girls in the Jeep studying her and doubting that she was a mother. They didn’t turn up again.

  How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

  None of your fucking business.

  How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

  I don’t know. I left early.

  She could easily pretend to be a mother. She couldn’t see herself going into Paragon Sporting Goods, asking to look at crossbows and arrows. Before she did anything, Elizabeth saw herself doing it. If she was going to walk down the stairs, she saw herself walking down the stairs. She saw herself taking the first step. She prepared herself. Her heel might catch in the hem of her pants, and she’d hurtle forward and crash, land on her head. She could decide to jump, lunge, leap, or fly over the stairs. She thought she could fly over a flight of stairs. It looked easy. She didn’t want to train for years to be able to do it. That was crazy.

  She wouldn’t murder the morons in cold blood or in a moment of passion. When she murdered, it would be in self-defense. She’d be attacked. A large man or a small man would come at her. From behind. She’d move quickly, swing around. She’d gouge out his eyes or jab her fingers into his gut. She wanted to be able to sever someone’s jugular vein or hit someone over the head with the baseball bat Roy kept near the door. She’d bash the aggressor to death without blinking an eye. Then she’d toss the bloody bat onto the floor and phone the precinct.

  I just murdered a man with a bat. Right, a bat. He’s bleeding, but he’s dead. Don’t send an ambulance. Dead. A bat. A baseball bat.

  Even her revenge fantasies were silly. They ended without conviction. She clenched her hands into fists. She watched Roy sleeping. He was sleeping the sleep of the just and unjust and the innocent and the guilty.

  She followed the band of morons with tired eyes. They sauntered toward the park. They turned over another garbage can in a blasé way. Threw one at a car. They’d had a lot of experience throwing and overturning garbage cans. They turned over the last one casually, even gracefully, with a little wrist action. They could be tennis players or garbage collectors. There was garbage everywhere. It wouldn’t be picked up.

  On her block, the garbage collectors left as much garbage on the streets as they picked up. They threw the garbage cans all over the sidewalks. It was a display of real disgust, gutter hatred of the poor. Elizabeth caught them doing it.

  On another night she couldn’t sleep, she went downstairs at six A.M., carrying newspapers to be recycled. The garbagemen were throwing garbage and garbage cans. The street was an ordinary disaster, strewn with evidence of rampaging dogs or mad people. She wished she had her camera. But the garbagemen could argue about the photographs. They’d get lawyers, they’d interpret it their way. Her block wasn’t covered in garbage, it was her point of view, how she saw things, she had a distorted view of the world, of the block, they’d say. She did.

  They’d say the garbage collectors couldn’t have done it, because they were on their coffee break. Some hooligans must’ve done it, they fled before anyone saw them. Elizabeth could spend her life in court defending herself, her story. She’d present her story, and one of the garbagemen would say, That’s not the way it was. He’d shake his head adamantly or sadly, as if the thought of his doing something like that was beyond him. I would never do something like that, he’d insist dramatically. Maybe he’d cry. The jury would side with the men in uniform. Elizabeth would be branded a fanatic, an urban malcontent. She remembered the garbagemen down the street in their uniforms. She remembered their faces. She remembered thinking, I pay taxes to the City for them to take away garbage.

  It was pathetic. she watched as they flung the last cans onto the sidewalk. She surveyed the devastation and then glared at the men. She memorized their truck’s number. She was overwhelmed by despair. She noticed the acerbic super down the other end of the block. His face was inflamed, scarlet. Sometimes his face looked tanned and healthy, sometimes like an old shoe. She walked over to him, he always knew everything, who was in jail, who was about to go to jail and why, when there was going to be a bust. Elizabeth announced that she was going to report the garbage collectors.

  —What’d they look like? A tall black guy and a short Italian guy? The regular guys are OK. These aren’t the regular guys. The regular guys are good guys. They wouldn’t do this.

  He gestured to the street. They both looked at it.

  —Are they rogue garbage collectors? Elizabeth asked.

  The acerbic super and Elizabeth laughed in the morbid morning air. Morning is for mourning, Elizabeth thought. Another garbage truck rolled along and disgorged the regular guys. They were doing the other side of the street. Elizabeth walked over to the short Italian one.

  —Take a look at our block. It looks worse than it did last night. Look at the garbage everywhere, look at the cans all over the sidewalk. How can they do this and call themselves garbage collectors?

  The regular garbage collector surveyed the sidewalk. He saw the randomness, the mayhem, the sidewalk littered haphazardly wit
h black plastic and aluminum cans. He saw the Chinese food, milk cartons, dog shit, cat food cans, and diapers scattered contemptuously on the ground. The regular guy hurried. He raced to make things right, to turn the cans right side up. He shouted, as he ran, that he’d take care of it. He didn’t want her to report them. He didn’t want trouble. She didn’t report all the wrong things she saw. It was depressing and time-consuming.

  Elizabeth opened the window wide. She didn’t care who saw. The morons were crossing Avenue A. They were dancing. A speeding cop car or an ambulance racing to save someone could hit them. They might be killed or they could all be murdered in the park by a crackhead. Her mother said, Where there’s life, there’s hope. She didn’t want to die, she told Elizabeth, because there’s no future in death.

  The third-floor man was still in his window across the street. Even with his lights off, his dark shape filled the window. Elizabeth saw something. It could’ve been his dog. Roy was still sleeping peacefully, and she hated and loved him for it. He was missing the night’s frantic errors. Strident, bizarre noises didn’t wake him.

  The third-floor man’s lack of acknowledgment creeped her out. But she didn’t want to wave to him. That demanded a leap across a great chasm, her acknowledging his looking at her. She felt little, belittled. She shrank back.

  A series of high-pitched yelps or squeals started. They seemed to come from someplace close. It sounded like someone was being tortured. Roy didn’t move. He was a smooth stone on the bed. He didn’t look alive. Elizabeth couldn’t figure out if the torture noises came from human beings, dogs, or cats. People tortured their animals. They tortured their children. Children tortured animals. Everyone’s a monster, given the opportunity.

  She was sure the man was watching her from his window. It was obvious. He was pretending he wasn’t. She didn’t want to hide. She was covered, decent, whatever. He wasn’t hiding. But she wasn’t watching him. He could think she was. It was a dilemma. She wanted to watch the street, not him, but she couldn’t watch the street without the possibility that he would think she was watching him. Even her freedom or opportunity—her liberty to look out a window—was controlled by others. She didn’t want to give in and leave the window.

  Acknowledgment could disarm the situation, him, but it could also trigger harm, attack.

  He was probably the kind of man who made sucking noises when he ate and slept, when he fucked. He smacked his lips when he chewed and food drool poured from the corners of his thin lips. He opened his mouth wide, and you could see the food inside and the spittle dribbling out of his mouth, and he had a grin on his face like an idiot, but jesus he loved to eat.

  She wouldn’t acknowledge him.

  Maybe he knew he was a creep. Maybe creeps know they’re condemned for life. Maybe he was the kind of man who shaves close, nicks his skin and wears cheap, cloying aftershave lotion, who slaps it on and thinks it covers his sins. Maybe he hated himself.

  Some people who hate themselves wear perfume. Elizabeth liked certain perfumes and others made her sick. She didn’t hate herself all the time. She hated herself less when she liked her own smell. But she didn’t want it to be overpowering. It was hard enough to visit people in their apartments or ride in a taxi driven by a maniac who didn’t know his way around. Some people burned incense day and night or wore sickeningly sweet perfume. Some taxi drivers hung furry green-and-white odor-eaters from rearview mirrors. Elizabeth often became nauseated.

  —You smell good, she told Roy yesterday.

  —That’ll change, he said.

  The morons were gone. The block was a moron-free zone. She was free. Elizabeth liked her block. She felt possessive about it. She liked her apartment.

  A horse goes into a bar and sits down.

  The bartender asks, Why the long face?

  When the landlord was about to raise the rent, Elizabeth received a letter. All the tenants did. The landlord stated that because they’d given the tenants new windows, which weren’t put in right, they’d measured wrong, because they’d replaced the old mailbox, which had been broken since she’d moved in, and because they’d put in a light in the front hallway, which was required by law, the landlord regretfully was raising the rent a certain amount per room for every tenant. The landlord assessed the number of rooms at two more than Elizabeth thought she had.

  Elizabeth shoved the letter under a stack of junk mail. She ignored it for a day. Then she took it out. She did the figuring. She added up her rooms and multiplied to find what it would cost monthly. It wasn’t astronomical. She could live with it or die with it. She might do both. She wasn’t going to fight it. Fight the increase. The phrase appealed to her—fight the increase. It was what she should do. But she wasn’t going to, not after Gloria had insulted her. Six dollars more per room for the rest of her life, even for rooms she didn’t have, was better than standing in a poorly ventilated room next to Gloria.

  Being reasonable with the Big G was murder.

  Roy read the letter. He thought they should do something. He glanced at Elizabeth and shoved the paper over to her side of the table.

  —I can’t rouse myself to action, she said.

  —Rouse yourself to inaction, he said.

  —No.

  —Answer the letter. Do something.

  —I can’t. You do it. Do something yourself.

  —I don’t do that kind of thing.

  —Why not?

  —It’s beneath me.

  —I don’t do floors, either.

  Their upstairs neighbor was aroused. Ernest was an actor. He worked in a bookstore. Ernest shoved a letter under their door one night. It was addressed to her. He wanted to discuss the tenant situation, their position. Long sentences covered the unlined paper. He said he wanted Elizabeth’s help in fighting the rent increase. He used the compelling phrase. He followed his letter with a telephone message that took up five minutes on her answering machine. They’d never even talked or seen each other in the hallway. She hadn’t seen him. She’d heard him above her, she’d heard what she thought were his footsteps. He exercised.

  Then Ernest showed up, after the note and call. He was likable. He told her that when he read the landlord’s letter, he went berserk. He couldn’t sleep, he was infuriated by the injustice, the lies. He wanted to take the landlord on, with her assistance. He’d do the hard work, the field work, go to City Hall, search for the building plans, for the architectural drawings. He just wanted her assistance.

  The same letter that swamped her in lethargy was the key to an ignition switch in Ernest. Indignant, he enlisted Elizabeth. She was inert and apathetic. But he knew, somehow, that she of all the tenants would be open to his plea. He may have heard her walking late at night, heard in her gait some telltale sign of anxiety. Maybe he even discerned in it a desire for a better world, for justice. That was impossible, she supposed. It was probably because she was friendlier than most of the other tenants. Maybe he had seen her in the hallway and she’d smiled, unaware of who he was. Yes, OK, I will, she said finally. He was asking next to nothing of her.

  She would make a few phone calls, knock on tenant doors, get some names on their petition. She’d help write letters, do some minor evidence gathering, contact various City agencies only by phone if he asked her to. She’d use her proofreader’s expertise on the letters. The letters would spell doom, defeat, for the landlord’s illegal hopes. Elizabeth told Ernest that she’d make sure there weren’t any errors of fact or grammar in the letters, no typos. Elizabeth would see to their correctness. The landlord had applied for MCIs, Major Capital Improvements, Ernest explained. They were requesting more than they deserved. They wouldn’t get it, he said.

  They spent time together, side by side, strategizing. They had to determine how the landlord should be rebutted and combated and what information they needed. The landlord stated that their building and the one next door were one building. That way any repairs on the one next door counted as money spent on their building. Their buil
ding could be charged higher rents for work done on the other building. An evil-twin situation, Elizabeth thought. She’d once wanted to be a twin, but now it repulsed her. The two buildings’ separate registrations had to be found. The other building had double the number of tenants too, double the trouble.

  Ernest was relentless. He was on fire. He went downtown to a vast City building. He walked through room after room and floor after floor, through hundreds of rooms of file cabinets and computers and documents. He dealt with clerical people who ignored him. He waited on long lines and wasted his life. Elizabeth read that people waited on line at the post office five years of their lives. Waiting added up. Then Ernest would get to the head of the line and as part of a tradition or ritual he would be told he was on the wrong line and he should see another clerical person, somewhere else, on another floor or building, and that person would keep him waiting too, be rude, or tell him to see someone else and finally someone else would tell him he or she couldn’t help him, and he had to start all over, in another location, on another line. He did that. Elizabeth was impressed. He took action. He was a hero in a local way.

  Ernest even found a free tenant lawyer. He came back from the first meeting with pages of yellow paper; he’d taken detailed notes. He absorbed and learned acronyms for all the City agencies and departments, and he learned legal terms too. Elizabeth didn’t know exactly what the acronyms stood for. Since Ernest did, she didn’t need to. A PAR, he repeated patiently, was a Petition for Administrative Review.

  A man was going away and he asked his brother to look after his cat. Then he phoned home to ask how the cat was. The brother answered, Your cat is dead. The first brother asked, How can you tell me like that? Why didn’t you prepare me? You could’ve said, Your cat ran away. I’ll look for it. Call back in a day. Then when I called back, you could’ve said, The cat’s on the roof. And the next time I called, then you could’ve told me the cat was dead. You should’ve prepared me. His brother said he was sorry. Some years later, the man went away again. He called his brother. He asked, How’s Mom? His brother said, She’s on the roof.