“Who is us, and where is out?”
He rattled off a list of people from our recurring cast of friends, then said, “Cutter’s. Between nine and ten.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Oh. It’s been so long that I forgot. Maybe Cookie forgot, too.”
Cutter’s was a dive on the Lower East Side. It was owned and operated by a retired Marine named John Cutter. Everybody called him Cookie.
Even though Cutter’s was quite a distance from the Hell’s Kitchen apartment where I’d lived with my uncle, I started going there with my friend Blythe not long after I moved to New York. She’d once lived in the neighborhood, so she knew the bar. Blythe was over twenty-one, and although I was only seventeen at the time, I never drank, so it wasn’t a big deal. When I started drinking, it still wasn’t a big deal. Cookie could barely be bothered to wipe down the bar or keep the toilet working, so he wasn’t exactly conscientious about checking an ID. Since several of my friends were underage like me, it was a good place for us.
Most of Cutter’s patrons were rough around the edges. Vets. Aging policemen. Ironworkers. We didn’t mingle with them, and they didn’t pay attention to us. We weren’t spoiled college kids. We didn’t make a lot of noise. No one got drunk or rowdy. We didn’t act like we were slumming. We were grateful to stay at our long table in the corner and shoot the shit. The working men stuck together at the bar or around the pool tables. We maintained a peaceful coexistence.
Blythe was the only person I knew who moved comfortably between the two groups. Blythe was an artist—an actual working painter whose work got shown and made money for her. She was our bohemian fairy godmother. Sometimes people didn’t take her seriously because she was around five feet tall and probably weighed ninety pounds. That was a mistake. Blythe had a take-no-prisoners disposition, and you crossed her at your own risk.
Something about Blythe endeared her to Cutter’s burly clientele. They looked out for her, but she had a way of looking out for them, too. Like Dennis Fagan, who was part of the reason I’d been kicked out of Cutter’s a few weeks before.
“What does that mean?” Kendra asked later, after I told her about Fred’s invitation. “Are we going, or aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d feel better if Roberto was with us. He’s bigger than me. He commands respect from the blue collars.”
She shrugged and said, “I haven’t seen him today. He’s probably at his mother’s.” She slapped at my hand when I started chewing a hangnail. “What did you do? Get in a fight with this Dennis guy?”
“Um, no,” I said. “Do I look dead?”
“So why’d you get kicked out?”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“It never is.”
“Some guy was running his mouth about us. He was probably drunk. He made a couple comments that bothered me. I said something back. He called me a name, and Dennis clocked him.”
“Seems like the drunk guy and Dennis should have been the ones kicked out. Not you. I must be missing a lot of details.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I haven’t been back since. I don’t know if I’m banned for life.”
We stopped talking as Morgan walked through on her way to the kitchen. Roberto and I had gotten tired of our lack of privacy in Chez Snake Pit. While I’d been out, he’d finished installing walls made of sheets. Kendra had left me exposed by pulling back a sheet when she came in.
“Interesting portiere,” Morgan said, looking up at the aluminum poles that were suspended by chains from the ceiling. She fingered the sheets and said, “Not cheap. And not floral, thank the god of your choice. Are these from Drayden’s?”
When we were in school, Roberto’s financial contribution to the Mirones family had come from retail jobs—first at Lord & Taylor, then at Macy’s. His experience had helped him get his most recent job on the Visuals staff at Drayden’s, a newcomer to the department stores on Fifth Avenue.
“We can’t afford sheets from Drayden’s,” I said. “His mother got these from the hotel. And what’s a porter ray?”
“Portiere,” Morgan corrected. “It’s fancy talk for something hanging in a doorway. Roberto’s mother steals sheets from Four Seasons?”
Kendra said, “That sounds like she sells seashells at—”
“Of course she doesn’t,” I said. “They probably let the housekeeping staff buy old sheets or stuff that needs mending. I don’t know. Ask Roberto.”
“You should go out with us tonight,” Kendra said and gave Morgan one of her encouraging smiles. I imagined a force field of evil around Morgan that would deflect Kendra’s goodness and send it shrieking into the night, like a tranny prostitute with VD. “Nick was just telling me the story of steelworker Butch—”
“He’s an ironworker, and his name is Dennis.”
“—Cassidy and the Sunflower Kid,” Kendra finished. The expression on her face rattled me. Sometimes she seemed more passive-aggressive princess than dumb blonde. “C’mon. It’ll be fun!”
“Gosh, I don’t know,” Morgan said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “I’d go, but I don’t have anything to wear!” She pretended to flip back her hair with her hand and a toss of the head. Then she resumed her mask of Satan in human form and went into the kitchen.
“Do you think that means she’s not going?”
I looked at Kendra, trying to figure out if she was kidding. Although it was one of the most social exchanges I’d had with Morgan, there was no mistaking her message.
“Yeah. I think that’s what it means.”
“She can be such a buzz kill sometimes.” Kendra unfolded her legs and dramatically flung herself onto the futon. Then she started talking about her hair.
Even if we missed Roberto, we had to get out of there before Kendra turned my night into a slumber party.
It wasn’t really cold out, but Kendra and I were both dressed in heavier coats than most of the people we passed. I was trying to avoid a relapse, and Kendra said she needed a heavy coat to go with her outfit. Which made no sense. Nobody could see what she was wearing beneath it. And Cutter’s was always warm to the point of tropical, so she’d ditch it as soon as we were inside. Maybe she only had the one coat. Or maybe she felt the need to be buttoned up from head to toe.
“Do you get nervous walking through the barrio?” I asked.
“You make it sound like we live in a Santana video. No, of course I don’t get nervous,” she said with an anxious glance around. “You know it’s longer between buses on Sunday, right? I hate waiting for a bus.”
I decided to make a concession for the sake of her mental health. “If you’re that worried about it, we can take the subway. What’s the problem? Do you think you stand out because you’re so blond? So white? So walking like you’re spastic?”
“It’s the rats,” she said, doing another sidestep, although there wasn’t a rat in sight. “Anything above Ninety-fifth is rats, rats, rats.”
“Rats are everywhere. All you have to do is pay attention and don’t take stupid risks.”
“You’re being naive. We’re in Harlem. There’s gang graffiti—”
“Street art.”
“Trash on the streets—”
“Every street in the city has trash,” I protested.
“To be collected. Not to be blown down the sidewalks. Then again, I understand why people don’t use their trash cans. Yesterday I saw a chicken scratching around ours.”
I