I was in the kitchen.
I nodded my head slowly, tiredly. Hysteria seethed beneath the surface, a rising bubble that threatened to undo me. I pushed it down and looked in the refrigerator.
Three six-packs of Schlitz, two cartons of cigarettes, half a pizza in the cardboard delivery box. I shut the door and thought about my room. I tried it with my eyes open un-focused, picturing the spot between my desk and the window.
I was there and the room reeled, my eyes and maybe my inner ear just not ready for the change. I put my hand on the wall and the room stopped moving.
I picked up the suitcase and closed my eyes. I opened them in the library, dark shadows alternating with silver pools of moonlight. I walked to the front door and looked out at the grass.
Last summer, before school, I'd come up to the library, check out a book or two, and then move outside, to the grass under the elms. The wind would ruffle the pages, tug my hair and clothes around, and I would go into the words, find the cracks between the sentences and the words would go away, leaving me in the story, the action, the head of other people. Twice I left it too late and got home after Dad did. He liked supper ready. Only twice, though. Twice was more than enough.
I closed my eyes and the wind pushed my hair and fluttered my tie. The suitcase was heavy and I had to switch hands several times as I walked the two blocks to the bus station.
There was a bus for points east at 5:30 A.M. I bought a ticket to New York City for one hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents. The clerk took the two hundreds without comment, gave me my change, and said I had three hours to wait.
They were the longest three hours I’ve ever spent. Every fifteen minutes I got up, dragged the suitcase to the bathroom, and splashed cold water in my face. Near the end of the wait the furniture was crawling across the floor, and every movement of the bushes outside the doors was my father, belt in hand, the buckle razor-edged and about the size of a hubcap.
The bus was five minutes late. The driver stowed my suitcase below, took the first part of my ticket, and ushered me aboard.
When we passed the tattered city-limits sign, I closed my eyes and slept for six hours.
When I was twelve, just before Mom left, we went to New York City for a week. It was a terrible and wonderful trip. Dad was there for his company, all his days spent in meetings and business lunches. Mom and I went to museums, Chinatown, Macy’s, Wall Street, and rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island.
At night they fought, over dinner, at the one play we went to, and in the hotel room. Dad wanted sex and Mom wouldn’t, even after I was asleep, because the company was footing the bill for one room only and I was on a rollaway in the corner. Three times during that week he made me get dressed and go down and wait in the lobby for thirty minutes while they did it. The third time, I don’t think they did, though, ’cause Mom was crying in the bathroom when I came back and Dad was drinking, something he never did in front of my mother. Not usually.
The next day I saw that Mom had a bruise on her right cheekbone and she walked funny—not limping on any particular side, but like it hurt to move either leg.
Two days after we got back from New York, I came home from school and Mom was gone.
Anyway, I really liked New York. It seemed a good place to start over—a good place to hide.
“I’d like a room.”
The place was a dive, a transients’ hotel in Brooklyn, ten blocks from the nearest subway stop. I’d picked it with the help of the Pakistani cabdriver who drove me from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He’d stayed there himself.
The clerk was an older man, maybe my dad’s age, reading a Len Deighton novel through half-glasses. He lowered the book and tilted his head forward to look at me over the
“Too young,” he said. “You’re a runaway, I’ll bet.”
I put a hundred down on the counter, my hand still on it, like Philip Marlowe.
He laughed and put his hand on it. I lifted my hand away.
He looked at it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. Then he handed me a registration card and said, “Forty-eight a night, five-buck key deposit, bathroom’s down the hall, payment in advance.”
I gave him enough money for a week. He looked at the other hundreds for a moment, then gave me the room key and said, “Don’t deal here. I don’t care what you do away from the hotel, but if I see anything that looks like a deal, Ι’ll turn you myself.”
My jaw dropped open and I stared at him. “You mean drugs?”
“No—candy.” He looked at me again. “Okay. Maybe you don’t. But if I see anything like that at all, you’re history.”
My face was red and I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I hadn’t. “I don’t do stuff like that,” I said, stammering.
I hated feeling like that.
He just shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m just warning you. And don’t bring any tricks here either.”
A memory of rough hands grabbing me and pulling down my pants made me cringe. “I don’t do that either!” I could feel a knot in my throat and tears were dangerously close to the surface.
He just shrugged again.
I carried my suitcase up six flights of stairs to the room and sat on the narrow bed. The room was ratty, with peeling wallpaper and the stench of old cigarette smoke, but the door and the door frame were steel and the lock seemed new.
The window looked out on an alley, a sooty brick wall five feet across the gap. I opened it and the smell of something rotting drifted in. I stuck my head out and saw bagged garbage below, half of it torn open and strewn about the alley. When I turned my head to the right I could see a thin slice of the street in front of the hotel.
I thought about what the clerk had said and I got mad again, feeling small, diminished. Why’d he have to make me feel like that? I was happy, excited about being in New York, and he jerked me around like that. Why did people have do that sort of shit?
Wouldn’t anything ever work out right?
“I don’t care how talented, smart, bright, hardworking, or perfect you are. You don’t have a high school diploma or a GED and we can’t hire you. Next!”
“Sure we hire high school kids. You seem pretty bright to me. Just let me have your social security number for the W2 and we’ll be all set. You don’t have a social security number? Where you from, Mars? You come back with a social security number and I’ll give you a try. Next!”
“This is the application for a social security number. Fill it out and let me see your birth certificate. You don’t have your birth certificate? Get it and come back. No exceptions. Next!”
“I’m sorry, but in this state, if you’re under eighteen, you must have parental permission to take the GED. If you’re under seventeen it takes a court order. You come back with your mother or father, and a birth certificate or New York driver’s license, and you can take it. Next!”
There is a point where you have to give up, at least for a while, and all you want to do is shut down. I rode the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walked numbly in the direction of my hotel.
It was late afternoon, heavily overcast, and the dingy, gray street seemed entirely appropriate to my mood.
God damn them! Why did they have to make me feel so little? With every interview, every rejection, I’d felt guiltier and guiltier. Ashamed of something but I didn’t know what. I kicked out at a piece of trash in the gutter and stubbed my toe on the curb.