No Lease on Life Read online

  The hooker was probably from the next corner. It was before AIDS hit big-time. There were a lot more hookers on the next block. They all had habits and most of them were gone now, dead. The serial murderer Joel Rilkin killed at least one of them. The mother of one of the murdered hookers said in the Times, “Think of her as a girl, my daughter, not just as a whore.” There were always ripe, new working girls. They faded fast.

  It was pretty late the night Elizabeth and Ernest left the cute guy’s hideous hole. But that night, and it was the only one, Ernest and Elizabeth went for a serious cup of coffee in a nearby cafe. Elizabeth’s regular, the Pick Me Up.

  Even though it was late and cold, the crusties—that’s what Roy called them—weren’t far away. They were never far away. They were lying on the street near the Pick Me Up with their dogs and their dogs’ puppies. Elizabeth liked the puppies. They would be raised to be vicious. The crusties were probably already training them to go for people’s throats when they didn’t give them money. The crusties thought of themselves as road warriors, except they never moved, they sat or lay on the sidewalk, and then in a group they’d move off, they never walked alone, they were terrified kids who talked shit to everyone in the neighborhood, they looked miserable, they smelled terrible, they didn’t shower even in the summer, so their piercings became infected. Except for a few of the females who retained surprisingly old-fashioned feminine wiles, all the others smelled of things no one wanted to get near.

  The crusties spit at people who walked on the sidewalk near them. You went out to get a newspaper in the morning, and even if you didn’t look at them, which Elizabeth didn’t, she never looked at them if she could help it, they made nasty comments and spit. She was walking behind a guy in shorts. He passed the crusties, and one said to the other, Let’s kill him. The guy stumbled, completely weirded out. The crusties weren’t liked on the block or in the neighborhood, not even by other so-called outlaws. They spit at people in the morning before they were barely awake. They said things like, Let’s kill him, for no reason. They pretended to be squatters. They were nothing, and there was nothing to them. If you open your eyes, get dressed, walk outside to get a cup of coffee, and someone spits at you for no reason, first thing, the spitter is nothing, doesn’t deserve to live. Not everyone does. Elizabeth wouldn’t even talk about it.

  Elizabeth never gave the crusties money. She gave other people money. Tyrone who hung around the building, a nameless woman with a nameless dog, Earl who was up from the south, permanently jobless, and the Hispanic guy with a patch over his eye, those two alternated duty at the post office, manned the door with cups in hand. But she never gave the crusties money. Even though they had dogs. It was a gimmick, an affront. She considered carrying a machete the way Ricardo did on Halloween. She would wave it in the air when any of them spit at her.

  Ricardo lived below her, with Frankie and his grandmother, who was Ricardo’s mother, and the other kids, in the crowded Lopez apartment. There were many children. The children had children. Elizabeth came to appreciate the continuity. She saw life going on, stunted and obstructed as it usually was, but she could understand generations because of the Lopezes. They were people who would survive almost anything.

  Ricardo had been away a long time, since before Elizabeth and Roy’s time, that’s what Frankie told her, Ricardo was away, until Frankie told her that Ricardo had been in jail, for drugs. Now he was back, on the block. He carried a machete on Halloween. He stood in front of the laundromat, across the street, holding the machete down the side of his leg. His mother stood next to him, and inside the laundromat Frankie was helping people with their wash. Ricardo was a Puerto Rican nationalist. The Puerto Rican flag hung from their fire escape all year long.

  Elizabeth saw the machete. Ricardo held it tight against the side of his body. It shimmered along the leg of his black sweatpants. He had sweat on his forehead. Ricardo explained that gangs were going up and down the streets, with razors, slashing people. For no reason. He was going to get them if they tried anything here. He glared and looked up the block. She knew he wouldn’t kill her, he’d protect her. She lived in his building, she was in his territory, and he liked her. She’d let him patronize her, be macho for her as much as he wanted. She’d like to see him slice off one of the crusties’ heads.

  There are three people—a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer—standing outside a school. It’s on fire, burning down. Children at the window screaming, crying. The Rabbi goes, Oh my God, oh my god… The children, the poor children. The lawyer says, Oh, fuck the children. The priest says, You think we can?

  That night when Ernest and Elizabeth walked to the Pick Me Up the crusties were lying on the sidewalk. One of them spit. His spit didn’t hit her. That was lucky. Elizabeth was ready to hit him. She wanted to ask the most disgusting crustie, Do you have sex together? How? But she and Ernest had to talk about the tenant situation and their letter.

  Ernest hadn’t gotten any roles lately. He read a lot of the books in the bookstore where he worked. They discussed, with an intensity that astonished Elizabeth, the letter to the landlord. Elizabeth didn’t want the letter to be too meek or too hawkish. She wanted the right tone. When you demand to be treated fairly, you must appear to be just, right but not righteous, and, especially, Elizabeth knew, you must appear to be above suspicion mentally. The last thing she wanted the City to think was that she and Ernest were irrational, that they didn’t have a reasonable leg to stand on.

  The very next night Ernest came over. He sat next to her on a chair. She sat at her desk, at her laptop. Roy sat in the kitchen, reading. She typed the letter. They considered everything in it, every detail.

  To the City,

  xxx and xxy are TWO SEPARATE buildings…[they both wanted capital letters]. No hallway renovation was done in our building; in fact there is NO downstairs hallway at all [a surprising turn; good to be entertaining]… Tenants of our building do not benefit from the hallway work done on the building next door—they are ENTIRELY separate buildings [making the point another way]… Landlord has been belligerent with tenant, who complained of inadequate hall maintenance. [The tenant was Elizabeth. Ernest urged, Go on, put that in. Elizabeth happily typed it in.]… Entry to xxx can be made without key, merely by pushing door open. (Tenant complains of strange man sleeping in hallway 4/93.) [Ernest was on the top floor. Homeless people slept and shit at his door.]… Tenants feel it is unfair for building to have been neglected for so long and then landlord receives increase for fixing it. [Absolutely, they said in unison.]

  Elizabeth was especially content with the summary.

  The landlord has misrepresented its claims on both xxx and xxy… hallway repairs ACTUALLY done were feeble. [Feeble? Elizabeth asked Ernest. That’s good, he said. His brow furrowed. He repeated the word. FEEBLE. Perfect, be said.] Number of rooms in xxx and xxy is exaggerated. [The use of exaggerated was a convincing understatement.] Cleanliness of xxx in particular is poor. The building is not SAFE. Landlord has received MANY complaints.

  Late at night, beyond sleep, she read over and corrected the words she’d typed. She grew more outraged at the landlord’s bold-faced lies. Her aggravated blood made her face and body blush. Indignation charged through her. The letter was a romance novel to her. Roy told her not to believe everything she read. He reminded her that she wasn’t going to do anything about the landlord’s letter until Ernest came along. Elizabeth hung her head in shame. Then she laughed until she cried.

  Ernest mailed the fourteen-page, thoroughly documented letter to the appropriate City agency. With the Polaroids, with maps, with drawings of windows, with measurements, with tenant letters and testimonies, with the valuable petition. Ernest had done his work, Elizabeth had done hers too. Ernest and Elizabeth nailed the landlord in a scandal of lies. They also mailed a letter to the landlord, telling the landlord they had filed with the City. The landlord was on notice.

  Then Elizabeth and Ernest rested their case. They waited. They waited for m
onths.

  A man went to his psychiatrist and said, Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam. The psychiatrist said, Relax, you’re two tents.

  The landlord backed down. The landlord was forced to back down. Each tenant received a letter saying that the increase wouldn’t go into effect. The landlord didn’t say why, the landlord didn’t admit to having been challenged by the tenants. The landlord in fact pretended it was out of concern, some human tenderness on its part, that it had decided to rescind the rent hike. For the time being.

  It was an empty victory. No one but her, Ernest, Roy, and Herbert, the deaf guy, noticed. No one mentioned it or seemed to care. Everyone went on living their own little lives. The rent for the apartments they lived in, however miserably, hadn’t been raised. She didn’t know why it mattered, why she and Ernest had even bothered.

  After their blank victory, Ernest and Elizabeth rarely saw each other. Sometimes she heard him upstairs, walking around or exercising.

  Now Elizabeth thought she saw Jeanine go into a doorway several buildings down the block. Elizabeth had to turn her head severely to the right to see that far down the block.

  It was Jeanine.

  Jeanine prostituted for drugs sometimes, for rent other times. She was a runner for a dealer on the corner. She and Elizabeth had known each other a while. Jeanine came over to her, on the corner, when it was cool, when the corner wasn’t busy, and they’d talk. The dealers and runners were a stable crew, and though they were busted in sweeps once in a while they always came back, and were part of the neighborhood. They knew Elizabeth and she knew them, and they didn’t hassle each other. When a fight erupted over turf, she made sure not to be there.

  It was Jeanine.

  Jeanine had been the girlfriend of one of the Lopezes, Jorge. She was the mother of their three children. Elizabeth bought the first baby a present. Jeanine said it was the only one the baby received.

  Jorge and Jeanine sat on the stoop in front of the building holding the infant, and then they didn’t because it was taken away by the City. Jeanine explained that they had to go to the agency to see it. The agency controlled chunks of Jeanine’s and Jorge’s lives, because they’d had a child and they themselves were legally children and on drugs. Jeanine said she was trying to stay straight.

  Jeanine became pregnant again. Then this child was taken away from her, and Jorge and she started getting high again. Then Jorge got deeper into shit, and into more trouble, and they both went down, down the well together, and the third baby was taken away. All the kids were placed in foster care. Then Jeanine went to prison. The Lopezes said Jorge was in Puerto Rico. Jorge was in jail. He and Jeanine were over.

  If Jeanine wasn’t on the street, dealing, if she wasn’t in jail upstate, she lived at her mother’s.

  Looking out the window, Elizabeth remembered the afternoon Jeanine came over and slept on her bed. She remembered it as if it were yesterday. Roy was at work. Jeanine’d been up all night. Her mother wouldn’t let her into their apartment.

  —Until I was about five, we all lived together. It was, like, happy. My mother had four girls and four boys. My mother separated from my father, she became a drunk, started using drugs, heroin, and when they got back together, he molested me, and he ended up molesting my little brother and sister. I think he molested my other brother too, but I’m not sure. They don’t speak on it. It caused problems between my mother and me. She blamed me for it. She was in denial for a long time. It happened to my little brother and sister when I went to jail the first time. My father was a really messed-up guy. He used to be a numbers man. He took money and disappeared. Then she had another boyfriend, but she’s always insecure about me and her men, like maybe they want me, or I want them. I’m like, please, these old men, get out of my face.

  Elizabeth was thinking about how she’d do in jail.

  —It’s all how the mind handles it, if they break your spirit. I guess it’s tough because people tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to shit. And they do any little thing to provoke you to get into trouble to lock you in solitary, make it hard for you to get out. ’Cause if you’re in the city, you can do up to a year, and you have a day to go home; but if you’re upstate, they can keep you from going home, they can hold you there. You’re dead. You hear from the outside world, but their life goes on without you, so it’s like you don’t exist. I didn’t have a hard time. That’s probably why I don’t fear going back. But I don’t want to go back. Some people go in with this attitude, they try to be too tough, and people beat them up. A lot of people from this neighborhood go. A lot of people have been in jail before—the more times you go, the more people you know. It’s like you’re a fixture. It would be very hard for middle-class people, people like you. My mother’d been incarcerated before I was ever born.

  Jeanine slept for a while. Then she woke up and they had coffee at the rectangular table in the kitchen.

  —Do you hate your mother?

  —No, I love the old goat. She’s a pain in the ass. I want to hurt her sometimes. We’ve had fights.

  —If you don’t buy her drugs.

  —She has a fit. You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.

  Elizabeth nodded sympathetically.

  —Jorge used to beat me. First of all, he had an inferiority complex. I had to teach him how to read. The home setting was not happy. Very disturbed. He had the heroin habit. His sister died from AIDS, from shooting up.

  Emilia’s funeral. Jeanine couldn’t handle it, too heavy.

  —Jorge killed somebody during a robbery. They’re not too kind with you taking somebody’s life to deprive them of their property. If you kill somebody in a crime of passion or self-defense, it’s one thing; but if you kill someone to take their property from them, it’s worse. Jorge’s crazy. The heroin, man. When he was so sick he didn’t want to hear nothing, and he had attitude, and he wanted to beat everybody up, and blamed the world cause he was sick. When he was straight he didn’t want to be bothered; he wanted to enjoy his high. There was no in between. He became crazy shooting up towards the end. He didn’t cry for anything. He cried when my kids were taken. But this guy didn’t cry for nothing, except one day his fucking set of works got clogged, and he cried like a baby. That’s when I really started staying away from the house. It gets to the point where I’m like numb, I really am.

  Elizabeth wondered how Jeanine protected herself on the corner.

  —The customers are more dangerous, because you don’t know them. Though I got my leg broken out there, when the boss guy came out with a bat because somebody said someone was selling something besides his merchandise. We don’t harm customers, in fact, people in the neighborhood say they feel safer coming home because they know we’re standing there. I’ll walk down a drug block before I’ll walk down a deserted block. People are not likely to try and drop someone on a block where there’s drug dealers, because they’re afraid. I’m not afraid of my colleagues, I’m more afraid of my customers, because I’ve been raped by customers. One girl was chopped up in pieces, we don’t know who did it. You get some weird customers, they come out and like they’re mixing. These are people who don’t get high on a daily basis. Some do—they’re real cool. Some people that don’t, they’re mixing alcohol or coke, heroin and pills and everything all at one time. They’re not stable. Plus whatever problems drove them to get high. T
hey want to take you somewhere. It’s bad to get in a car, I used to, but I had an incident. Sometimes I have customers, when I see them really messed up I don’t want to sell to them. They’re more dangerous to us than anyone. Most of the regular cops don’t bother you. Sometimes they have nights when they want you off the corner, they come by, slow down and say, Take a walk. There’s this older black guy we call Batman. He beats up the guys. He just gets out of the car and beats them up. He won’t even take them to jail. Just beats the shit out of them.

  Batman the cartoon or because he uses a bat?

  —He’s a black man. I’m black myself, but this guy’s blacker than my shit. He’s even got this gold ring that has this Batman picture. His partner is six foot seven—they call him Robin. He’s terrible. They’re terrible. But they won’t beat up the girls. There aren’t that many girls out there, but they won’t really beat us up. Which makes them angry, they get more angry at us because they can’t really search us. But there are more female cops now, before you never saw them. This younger guy, he used to always want to talk to you, offer you help. If he arrested you, it would be because he felt like you needed a break. There used to be two sisters down the block. They were saving their money to go to school, so the cops wouldn’t arrest them.

  Jeanine ate a sandwich. Elizabeth told her about wanting to murder someone, anyone, when she couldn’t sleep. Jeanine laughed at her.

  —Some nights are really messed up. It gets bad out there. A lot of people are high. A lot of people learn to get for themselves. We’re middlemen, we’re going to purchase it from a certain place. They don’t want to commit a felony themselves. They might get beaten or they might get hurt, so they’re willing to pay us double the price to get it for them. But a lot of customers are getting bold and they’re going themselves. Some people got cleaned up. Once you could make a thousand dollars just out there a night; these days if it’s a hundred bucks you’re lucky. Coke’s played out.