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Bluff | May 10 2003

It’s 1982, summer, and you’re standing at the corner of 11th Street and Avenue D, across the street from your apartment building, and you’re talking on a payphone and straddling your bike, when you suddenly feel a tap on your shoulder and twist around and see that two young guys are standing there and one is holding a baseball bat which he’s sort of leaning against his shoulder, and though neither of these guys are that big, one of them, as mentioned, is holding a baseball bat and twirling it slowly in his hands, and then the other says, “Give us your money,” looking right at you. “Hold on a sec,” you say to the person on the phone, who as it turns out is a woman you are falling in love with and who you will later follow to Michigan, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend whose erection you will be confronted with one night when you knock on her dorm room door for some forgotten reason and her boyfriend in his underwear answers and he’s got this erection which is rather dramatically stretching his underwear and which he doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed about it. Holding one hand over the phone, you say, “Money? What the fuck would I be doing here if I had any money?” By here you mean New York’s Alphabet City, which at that time, 1982, is a giant sprawling heroin superstore, and in fact a dealer deals right out of the apartment below yours; on Friday and Saturday nights there’s a line of junkies that goes down two flights of stairs, the junkies slouched against the stairwell wall, and there’s also a big guy who stands right behind the front door and who if he doesn’t know you or remember you, always demands to see tracks, which is to say, holes in your arms from shooting heroin, and since you don’t have any tracks, never having shot heroin, you have to act tough and say, “Man I fucking live here, just ask your boss,” and then usually you get escorted up the stairs, past all the junkies, many of whom look just like you, young twenty-something white kids, only these kids have tracks in their arms, and then you get to the apartment where the dealer is dealing and he sees you and says to the guy who escorted you, “He’s cool,” and then to you, “Sorry, man,” and he winks and it’s clear that he has no idea that he’s going to get his head blown off by another dealer less three months after you finish your phone call, because after all he’s just a kid just like you, not even twenty, good-looking, charismatic, probably from the Bronx, the son of a mother who’s about to lose her son, his head blown to pieces on the sidewalk in front of your building. The truth, though, is that you have plenty of money, more than two hundred dollars, and it’s all wadded up in your left-front pocket, because you are a fruit vendor, you sell fruit on the street, and the woman you are talking to on the phone is the person who gives your money to the guy who supplies you with fruit, this is how you know her, she vends fruit just like you, in fact she works for your supplier, who no doubt hired her because of how beautiful she is, and personable, and warm, and a painter to boot, you’ve always had a thing for painters, although probably the supplier doesn’t care about her painting ability. “We’re fucking serious,” says the guy with the baseball bat, so you say, “No joke, man. I’ve got some change, that’s all I have. You want change?” and you make as though to put your hand in your pocket to get change for them, only right then, exactly as you had hoped, the baseball bat guy says, “Fucking keep it,” and they turn and start to walk off, so after a few seconds you put the phone to your mouth again but don’t actually say anything for a while, because in truth you’re shaking inside and would definitely start crying if you were alone in your apartment, or better yet, in the arms of the woman on the phone, who regrettably will never consent to that sort of relationship with you, though she will by some quirk of fate appear outside a now defunct Co-op supermarket in Berkley, California, in 1993, where she will quickly reveal what an incredible new-age nutcase she has become, spouting all kinds of embarrassing nonsense about earth-visitors and soul-retrieval, which for better or worse will put an immediate end to your lingering low-level obsession with her, or rather with who she had been in 1982, when you were talking with her on the phone just across the street from your apartment building.