Part 1: Chapter 1
OLD:
Let the Boogie Woogie Roll
(Rock My Blues Away)
— Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters
Allie, 1986
The borough of Manhattan was Icelandic cold, and although Allie was standing on the curb, shivering, her eyes kept closing. There is a point where one’s body just takes sleep, even if its owner is too stupid to lie down. The bars closed an hour ago, and there was no one on the street, but because Allie was so tired, walking the ten yards to the bustling Third Avenue to hail a cab was out of the question.
Despite her hypnagogic stupor, she spotted a distant taxicab with its “available” light on. Allie shot her hand into the air and the cab headed towards her. When it got closer, she was pleased to see it was a Checker cab, one of those fabulous rolling relics with spacious back seats. Allie opened the oversized back door, pushed her black carry-on and her shopping bag full of wrapped presents to the far side of the cab, and climbed in.
“Good morning,” the driver said, and looked her over in the mirror. “Or are we still on ‘Good evening’?”
“Kind of both,” she said. “La Guardia, please.”
The driver nodded and turned on his meter. “You got it. And am I driving crazy, or normal?”
Allie smiled. The guy was a veteran New Yorker. He looked and sounded like he should be taking bets at the OTB, or standing in the middle of Times Square hawking the latest edition of the Daily News. In any case, he would know where LaGuardia was.
“Normal. My flight’s at 7:00.”
She was asleep in the back seat before her eyes were completely shut.
A procession of little winged Macintosh computers floated by, each one with the black and white “Hello” greeting on its screen. They seemed friendly, but they had her surrounded, and Allie wasn’t falling for it. She didn’t have to be back at work until after Christmas, and they knew it.
Her head bounced gently against the window, and she woke to see that her taxi had turned in to the terminal.
At this hour, there was no guy standing on the curb offering to help with her bags, and no attendant at the Information Desk. Her airline’s counter was manned, but there was no line there, or at any other counter that she could see.
Allie handed the counter guy her ticket and New York State ID, and in return, she got the fisheye.
“Everything okay?” she said.
“Allegra Squerciati. . . .”
He looked her up and down, and not so subtly shook his head. Maybe he was confused because her purple spiked hair didn’t match her ID photo. Maybe he didn’t like her studded leather jacket, or her “Je Ne Regret Rien” t-shirt. He was a thirty-something blue-collar soul in an airline uniform, and it seemed he wasn’t too keen on the whole rock-’n-roll-chic thing. To be fair, Allie’s young-adult life didn’t take her north of 14th Street very often. Her world was even smaller than she assumed his was.
To the counter guy’s dismay, Allie’s ID appeared to be real, and with no bags to check, Allie soon had her boarding pass in hand and was negotiating the terminal’s linoleum maze to get to her gate.
And this is where all the people were: Allie’s gate. She found a free spot in the far corner, put her carry-on bag on the floor beside her and her shopping bag under the seat. From out of the carry-on she extracted a pair of sunglasses, which she put on her head, and a recent issue of Spy Magazine, which she opened to the cover article, “The Spy 100: The Worst People, Places and Things of 1986.” Drawing the oversized sunglasses down from her forehead, she closed her eyes and pretended to be reading.
“Excuse me?”
She flipped up her shades. A pleasant-voiced older man was addressing her. He was beige, everything from his down jacket, to his khaki trousers to his Nubuck boots.
“Would you mind watching my bag?” he said.
“Not at all,” Allie said with a grin. “What’s it gonna do?”
A question mark appeared over the man’s head.
“Nothing,” he said. “I thought maybe you could look after it a minute so no one takes it.”
She bit her lips. “Sure,” she said. “No problem.”
Oh, boy.
She looked around. Chubby, blushing, cheery faces, pastel-colored, freshly pressed, casual clothes, clean, unmussed hair, everyone perky and easygoing and engaged in lively conversation.
Tourists. Probably all came in to see The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.
Okay, there was nothing really wrong with the Radio City Christmas Show, other than the constant, cloying television commercials, and nothing wrong with tourists either, as long as they were the kind who knew how to walk on a sidewalk without getting in everybody’s way. There might not even be anything wrong with being awake this early, unless a person had just worked the late shift, as Allie had.
Since she was not going to be able to sleep amid the gaiety of these merry, chirping travelers, when the bag’s owner returned, she gave up her seat and wandered over to the overpriced breakfast place to drink a large cup of coffee, sulk, and curse her parents for moving to Ohio.
Allie had requested, and was granted, a window seat. With the help of a much taller stranger, she got her bags loaded into an overhead compartment, and nestled into her seat.
“Good morning!”
A forty-ish woman and her pre-teen daughter were taking the seats next to her. Allie forced a smile. It wasn’t this woman’s fault that Allie had had only two hours of sleep or that she was, as a rule, suspicious of people who exuded too much happiness. The woman pulled a book out of her bag, and for a moment Allie thought this might be a conversation-free flight.
“Okay, so where were we?” the woman asked her daughter.
Her daughter reached over and opened the book to a happy pink bookmark.
“This was the last one we read.”
“Okay. Next: ‘Two ropes walk into a bar. They sit down, and the bartender says . . .’”
Allie rolled her eyes, and turned her attention to the safety of the window.
It had been a few years since Allie had been on a plane, the last time having been a post-college-graduation trip to Jamaica with some friends. A Rastafarian who called himself Charlie turned them on to the most exquisite marijuana, and later took Allie on a tour of the local record stores. Allie scored a couple dozen locally produced reggae 45s, and her friends came home with three pounds of locally grown weed, carefully hidden in a hollowed-out, wooden, Rastafarian mask. Allie later took ownership of the mask, and hung it in her kitchen, hoping it would annoy her roommate.
If she was remembering correctly now, planes leaving La Guardia flew the length of Manhattan, and if one were on the correct side of the plane. . .
Yes.
Allie pressed her face against the glass, always exhilarated by a view of her City’s skyline.
Except for one intrusion, when her seat neighbor took her life into her hands to wake Allie and tell her breakfast was being served, Allie did manage to sleep through the flight, actual deep REM sleep. This made her reluctant to leave when the plane landed. Her sticky eyes watched the other passengers advancing to the exit, and it occurred to her that, in her black leather jacket, black jeans and black t-shirt, she was the only person on the plane who was wearing anything remotely dark in color, and certainly the only person sporting purple spiked hair.
Were people staring at her?
She deplaned and headed into the main area of the airport. Unlike the institutional decor and confusing corridors, staircases and escalators that made up LaGuardia, she found herself in a vibrant, friendly mall. She was about to enter a Dunkin’ Donuts to get another coffee, when a mild panic came over her: She had forgotten to change her New York money.
Reality hit her seconds later, and she laughed.
How did that go? Something about not being in Kansas anymore?
The bubbly girl behind the counter at the Dunkin’ Donuts had no problem accepting Allie’s New York money in exchange for a large coffee.
In the center of the apartment, right off the kitchen, there was a closet. This was considered somewhat of a luxury by Manhattan standards. Towering and cavernous, it stored all of Allie’s clothing, and as she stood in front of its deep, imposing maw, she realized there were probably things buried in there that she hadn’t seen since the 80s. Someday she’d go through it. Tonight, she just needed something to wear.
Allie hadn’t heard from Jim, so it was pretty clear she was going to this dinner thing by herself. Which was fine, except for the part where she didn’t really know for sure she shouldn’t be waiting for him. Jim did have a penchant for surprises. Could he say “I’ll call you if I’m going to come” and then not call and show up anyway? Yes, he definitely could.
She decided not to call him, though. He didn’t even have an answering machine (hello, it’s 1995 already, get with the program). Truth was, she was a little tired of having to track him down all the time. Allie was much older than Jim, and more often than not, she found herself acting more like his mother than his girlfriend. This was not going to happen today. Jim wanted to surprise her? Let him pick up the phone and tell her his plans. That would be a major surprise.
She spotted a shirt she liked, and as she climbed her stepladder to reach for it, and the phone rang.
“Really? He’s calling?”
She grabbed her shirt, and got down to answer the phone.
“Hi.”
“Hi, Allie, it’s Rianna.”
Okay, so not Jim.
“The restaurant wants us to come earlier, because there’s so many of us. Is 7:30 okay with you?”
That gave her an hour. “Sure. See you then.”
Crap. Now, did she call Jim to tell him the time changed, or not? Seriously, he wasn’t coming.
She got dressed, gathered her leather jacket and keys, and headed out.
It requires a certain amount of indefatigability to navigate an adventure to Chinatown, especially on a Saturday night, when all seven million inhabitants of Manhattan Island, with every one of their bridge and tunnel friends, converge at the intersection of Canal and Broadway, with and without their vehicles, to look for restaurants. Allie exited the subway, walked past the vendors selling their knock-off handbags, past the loitering delinquent youths, past the genuine neighborhood residents, and joined the succession of hungry people heading to Mott Street.
The best part about Chinatown was going to those little hole-under-the-street places, where the food was cheap and tasty, the hours were very early to very, very late, and the ambiance bordered on abuse. Allie was not going to one of those places. If you had a part of more than four, possibly five, people, there would be no room for you there.
No, they were meeting at the Royal Imperial Hunan Dragon, upstairs on the corner of Mott and some street she’d never heard of. A huge, red, seething, dragon’s-head sculpture loomed over the street, its body painted on the building, covering most of the wall. A swarm of beautiful Chinese lanterns hung in the upstairs windows and lined the outdoor staircase leading to the entrance. It occurred to Allie that she had never been to an upscale restaurant in Chinatown, not once in her 35 years as a resident of the planet and of New York City.
The menu had so many pages it was broken into chapters, and as the discussion turned to what everyone would or would not eat, Allie started to feel nervous and guilty. Maybe she should have called Jim. Was he sitting on her stoop right now, waiting to surprise her? Or buzzing her apartment, wondering why she hadn’t waited for him? By not calling him, did she stand him up?
“Excuse me guys. I gotta make a call.”
The phone booth was an enormous Chinese lantern, a large version of the ones hanging in the windows. Two dragons were guarding it. Allie took a seat inside and dialed.
Ringing.
Be home, Jim.
Still ringing.
If he had a stupid answering machine, she could leave a message. At least he would know she had called.
Ring, ring, ring. . .
That was already a dozen rings.
She hung up and sighed. Maybe he was off having fun somewhere else. And not, as she imagined, sitting on her stoop, waiting for her.
And somewhere in the distance, a phone was still ringing.
Ringing, ringing.
Was that really a phone, or was it coming from the neighbor’s stereo? Allie thought about pounding on the wall, but then, that would require her to wake up.
Actually, that really was the phone, not part of her dream. Her real phone.
Allie struggled to wake up. She tried lifting an arm, then a foot. Sleep was pressing down on her limbs, but she had to answer that phone; it could be Jim. With much effort, she shook herself awake.
Still ringing.
Allie nudged her cat, Tuna, off of her legs and got up to get the phone.
“So where are you?”
A pause. Then, a low, gravelly voice said, “Hello, is this Allie?”
Okay, why on earth would Harvey Fierstein be calling her?
“This is Jim’s mother.”
Really? Holy crap. “Mrs. Stein. Hello.”
“Jim was going to call me when he was leaving. Is he still there?”
Allie caught her breath. “Still here? He never was here. I didn’t see him last night.”
“That’s odd.” Allie could hear Jim’s mother take a draw off a cigarette. “He borrowed money from me yesterday so he could go to dinner with you.”
“He did? He never told me he was coming.”
“Well, I guess he wanted to surprise you.”
“Yeah. I hate that.”
Jim’s mother grunted a laugh, punctuated with some coughing. “So you didn’t see him last night.”
“No, but I ended up leaving earlier than I had planned, so I guess I missed him.”
“Well, we had plans today. Maybe he’s already on his way.”
“That’s probably it.”
Damn it. She did stand him up.
It was 9:29 in Astor Place.
It had been 9:29 in Astor Place for years, and would continue to be 9:29 for at least a dozen more. The clock on the Carl Fischer Building had stopped working sometime in the 80s, and although it had been painted and restored, it continued to be lifeless.
Allie knew this, but couldn’t help looking up at it for information every time she passed. Right. Of course. 9:29.
The usual ragtag group of musicians was set up in front of the uptown subway stairwell. They were there most days, even now that the weather was cold. Today they were playing something that resembled swing, although with the tuba, washtub bass and child’s piano, it wasn’t obvious exactly what they were going for. When Allie was a kid, she used to think how magical it was that the City streets were dotted with musicians and other street artists, there just to entertain her. When she got older, this perception changed, and she realized the more practical implications of people playing music on the street.
Allie gave them a quarter as she passed by.
Everywhere else in the City, it was closer to three o’clock in the afternoon, and, anyway, Allie really had no reason to be looking at a clock. Late or early never mattered at this time of year. When Goldfish Graphics was in the middle of a major project, it would not be unusual for the second shift to get in at 4 p.m. and leave well after sunrise, often seven days a week. With everyone working around the clock, shifts were approximate. A freelancer’s dream, for the money; a nightmare, for the lack of sleep and sanity.
Allie was too hyped up to go down into the subway, and since Goldfish wasn’t that far away, she decided to walk. Jim still hadn’t called, and his mother had assured her she’d tell him to. He was probably mad that Allie ruined his surprise on Saturday by not waiting for him. It wasn’t as if she could read his mind, now, was it? But they’d been together almost two years, and he was always trying to surprise her; she should have anticipated it.
Even walking, Allie got to the office ahead of her theoretical start time. Her desk chair had a stack of work on it.
“Allie. Good. You’re here.”
Allie could smell Sal’s cologne from the other end of the corridor. He entered the production area and stood beside her desk with his coat half on, his face involuntarily twitching.
“There’s a stack of photos on your chair. They’re due in the morning.”
Yes. She could see them. “No problem,” Allie said.
He went back into the corridor, put his other arm in its sleeve, and then came back.
“If you could get those done, that would be great. Really great. We need them in the morning.” Sweat was building up on his forehead and around his neck.
Allie strained a smile. “Okay, Sal.”
He tried to put on his gloves, but when that failed, he put them in his pocket. “Ask Rianna to find someone to help you if you need it. They’re due in the morning.”
“Got it.”
He fumbled with the buttons of his coat. Sweat was building up on his forehead and around his neck.
“I’m heading out.”
Thus, the coat.
One more quick circle around himself, and he was gone.
“Allie, get to work. Those photos are due in the morning.” Mark, fellow freelancer, had the desk next to hers.
“God, he’s really tweaked today,” Allie said.
“He’s been snorting blow all morning. And yelling at everyone.”
Sal was a large, angry bear when he was high, which was most of the time. Allie usually managed to stay under his radar.
“So . . . heard anything about our checks?”
Mark shook his head.
“Great,” Allie said.
“I’m sure my landlord will be very understanding.”
“Mine too. He actually likes getting the rent late.”
Mark smiled. “Well, get to work. Those photos are due in the morning.”
Allie smirked at him in response. “Shut up.”
Models in pantsuits. Models in sun dresses. Why had the photographer cut off their feet in every shot? Allie wasn’t opposed to a little Frankensteining, but every photo? The problem with mind-numbingly dull work is that it really does just the opposite. Allie’s unsettled mind was taking a long walk, first wandering past some CDs she wanted to buy at Tower Records, a pretty safe place for it to go. Then it turned left and headed to the Laundrobot where she had a bag of laundry to rescue. There, it did an abrupt U-turn, skipped past the Kiev where some cheese blintzes were calling out to her, and landed right back at Saturday’s Chinatown dinner, with Allie wondering, how mad was Jim, and when would he call?
Allie stood up. “You need coffee?”
“You going out?” Mark asked.
“No I’m going to the kitchen.”
“Then no thanks.”
“Coffee snob.”
“You know it.”
After pouring herself some coffee, Allie sat down in an empty office and picked up the phone.
“Ephram. It’s Allie.” She figured the first place to look for Jim was his best friend.
“Hey. What’s doing? Uh, no, I haven’t spoken to Jim. Not in weeks.”
“What? How did you —”
“His mom called me. He stood her up yesterday.”
“Really? That’s weird.” Allie knew Jim didn’t usually stand up his mother. The fallout wasn’t worth it.
“Well, I know why he hasn’t called me me,” Ephram said. “I pissed him off. But he hasn’t called you either?”
“We talked Thursday. We sort of had plans for Saturday, but nothing concrete. I may have inadvertently stood him up.”
“Inadvertently, huh?” Ephram said. “You know, he probably went drinking with Chris and Mike. You know how they get. They may still be hung over someplace, trying to figure out what day it is.”
“And he’ll have to deal with his mom, and he sure isn’t looking forward to doing that.”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Allie put down the phone, and put her head in her hands. If Jim stood up his mother because he was out drinking, it might take some time for him to resurface. He would be hiding out a while, but she would hear from him soon.
She picked up her coffee and shut out the light before she left the room.
Allie finished the photos around midnight, a lot earlier than she had been leaving lately, early enough to walk home. Wrapped in a personal, protective envelope of darkness, her path illuminated by silvery streetlights, Allie walked unnoticed through this movie set, taxis barreling by, people huddled in conversation, stores closed and bars open. Walking in her City at night always managed to quiet her most unsettling thoughts.
Allie was feeling tall.
There was no reason for this phenomenon. She wasn’t wearing high heels or standing next to anyone shorter than she was. In fact, she wasn’t standing at all, but was lying on her bed in her apartment, flipping through a new issue of the kinder, gentler — and less funny — resurrection of Spy Magazine. It was something about the way she was stretched out there — one knee slightly bent, her jeans hugging her thighs and then belling out below the knees, ending just shy of the base of her sneakered feet — that was giving her an idea of what it might be like to be tall. Not altitudinous, but certainly more elongated than usual. She hadn’t achieved the state of calm she had been looking for, but had somehow instead achieved the pretense of height. This illusion vanished when she scrambled off the bed to answer the phone.
A telemarketer, wanting to know if she would like an estimate on carpet cleaning. She groaned and hung up.
Allie’s hopes of achieving placidity were dashed. She was kidding herself with that, anyway. Forget relaxing; what she needed was a diversion.
Maybe making a mix tape.
She surveyed her crates of albums and CDs. Allie liked to make tapes that had a theme, even if the theme was only apparent to her. She had made plenty of tapes: happy tapes, sad tapes, party mixes, tapes from every decade, but she had no particular reason to be making this tape. Calling it a “Something Else to Focus On” tape seemed stupid.
Old, new, borrowed, blue. She hadn’t created one of this genre in a while, as it tended to be rather labor-intensive. “Old” was easy, of course. “Borrowed” was any cover, which was only tricky because Allie tended to prefer originals. “Blue” could be a lot of things, actual blues or R ’n B, or anything sad, or anything with blue in the title or, in a pinch, in the band name. But “new.” That was a short, transient list.
She stopped a moment and had the thought she had been trying to avoid:
Where was Jim? It was now almost a week.
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Jim disappearing for a day or two was one thing, but this was more than a little worrisome.
She forced herself to concentrate. She scanned her collection for CDs that had come out in the past couple of years. Nirvana? Luscious Jackson? Hmm, yes, and yes. Beck? Maybe something off Mellow Gold. Bonnie Raitt? Too mainstream. Insane Clown Posse? Too disturbing. Green Day? Too. . . something.
Just as she admitted to herself that her heart wasn’t entirely in this project, the phone rang.
“Allie?” That now familiar growl with the Darth Vader breathing technique could only be one person.
“Still no word, Allie, and I’ve been calling everyone.” Mrs. Stein inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke. Then the pitch of her voice sunk somehow lower. “This is strange now.”
Allie sat at her kitchen table. She was getting a nagging feeling.
“You know, Mrs. Stein, at this point I don’t know whether we should be mad or worried.”
The nagging feeling turned into a voice, an internal voice, and it sounded a lot like Jim’s voice, whispering urgently in her ear, “Not mad. Please don’t be mad.” It was not quite real enough to make her think she was having a psychotic episode, but it did make her uneasy.
“Allie, Dear, do you have keys to his apartment?”
“I can’t find them. I think I might have left them there.”
“That’s okay. I do.” The tobacco-damaged voice on the other end of the phone perked up a bit. “This is what we will do. I have to come into the City tomorrow for an early appointment. I will go to the apartment and see if he’s there. Either way, you and I will get some lunch. It’s time we finally meet.”
Allie hung up the phone. She sat staring at it for a minute, and when it told her nothing and didn’t ring again, she picked it back up.
“Hi, Ephram.”
“Hi, Allie. Still no Jim?”
“No. Hey you know those two losers he thinks are his friends?”
“Mike and Chris?”
“Ha. No. The two lowlifes that have been hanging around my building.”
“Oh, right. He does find them fascinating. All they do is get high and get pierced.”
“Well, you don’t think . . . I mean, he’s been clean for four years.
“From coke. They weren’t offering him coke. When I told him he was being stupid, he got really mad.”
“He got mad because you said snorting dope was stupid?”
“He said he just wanted to try it once. Maybe that’s what he did. And you can bet he’d be unwilling to materialize if that’s what he’s been doing.”
Armed with this new insight, Allie grabbed a coat, and headed out.
Fleshtopia, the piercing shop, was on the second floor of her building, and Scott, the head piercer, was on the stoop, smoking a cigarette. His face and much of his body were covered in tattoos and piercings. His earlobes were stretched to fit two palm-sized disks, and his dreadlocks were almost as long as he was tall. Allie would have found him kind of handsome if he didn’t have all that ridiculous body ornamentation.
There was plenty of downtime at the shop, and Scott spent most of it sitting in that exact spot on the top of the stairs. It made him a great source of neighborhood gossip, the East Village equivalent of those Italian matriarchs who hung out of windows in Little Italy.
“Hey, Scott.”
He looked up. “What’s going on, Allie?” He shifted over so she could sit.
“Listen, you know that couple who’ve been hanging around here lately? You pierced the woman’s tongue a couple of weeks ago.”
“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
Right. “The guy’s got a Prince Albert. His girlfriend’s got something, uh, similar, and they have a chain that links them together. They’ve been practically living on this stoop.”
Jim had enthusiastically described to Allie how his friends could chain their genitals together. It took days for Allie to get that image out of her head.
“Oh. Yeah. Chaz and Lainie.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Not since the weekend. Why?”
“Jim seems to be missing. Thought he might be with them.”
Scott’s usual expression of boredom and distain turned to concern.
“You guys have a fight?”
“No, nothing like that,” Allie said. “But he’s been hanging with those two a bit lately, and we’re kind of running out of people to ask.”
Scott took a long drag that finished off his cigarette, and flicked the butt to the street, barely missing a passerby.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll turn up.”
“Yeah,” she said, not convinced. “He eventually does.”
They fell silent and stared at the sidewalk traffic. Allie would have liked nothing better than to stay on the stoop and people watch, but she was too unnerved. Allie said goodbye to Scott and bounded down the stairs.
Okay, so she was worried.
“Damn it, Jim, where the hell are you?” she said aloud. This elicited a startled look from a group of passers-by. Clearly, they were not from the City; City people talk to themselves.
Though it was November and quite cold, Allie walked all 20 blocks to Jim’s apartment building in the denim jacket she had arbitrarily grabbed on her way out. When she got there, she stood across the street and stared at the entrance of his building.
Now what?
If she buzzed the apartment and there was no answer, that would be it; there wasn’t anything else she could do without keys. Maybe he would come home while she was standing there.
After some time, she noticed she was freezing. She climbed the stoop and rang the bell. She didn’t really expect an answer.
Not a sound from the street outside. No giggling revelers staggering home from the bars, no speeding taxis trying to make the light, no fire trucks, no distant rush of traffic from the FDR drive. Quiet, cool, early morning blackness, the calm before the cacophony.
A streetlight shone on Tuna’s attentive face. If anything was awake out there, she would know about it. Allie watched Tuna on the lookout, and it kept her mesmerized for a full minute. Not being able to sleep was torturous, but the silence was so unusual Allie was temporarily absorbed.
Allie waited for the sun to rise before she got up and got dressed. Then she was pacing around her apartment, making herself miserable with her own thoughts. Mrs. Stein wouldn’t be calling for a while. She couldn’t keep walking back and forth, talking to herself, until the phone rang.
Or, in truth, she could.
She went to the closet and got out her leather jacket. Her Pentax camera was hanging on a hook inside as well, and she grabbed that, too. The case was a bit dusty, but she threw the strap over her shoulder just as it was. She closed her apartment door behind her, locked the three Fichée locks, and headed east.
For three blocks, East 8th Street is called St. Marks Place, starting at 3rd Avenue, where Allie’s apartment was, and ending at Tompkins Square Park. Allie loved Tompkins’ beautiful landscaping, its cobblestone paths and century-old trees. She crossed over to the basketball courts on the Avenue B side, across from the notorious Christadora apartment complex. The first luxury condo building in the neighborhood, it had been renovated for that purpose in 1986. At the time, Allie and her neighbors had thought it ridiculous that someone would invest in that decrepit, monstrous building on Avenue B, an area populated by crack and heroin addicts, low-rent prostitutes, and various other conmen and conwomen. Then a few years later, the City discovered it had some money and decided it could no longer tolerate chemically altered people having their run of things on the Lower East Side. So one day the park’s old band shell was taken down, the cardboard refrigerator boxes that housed a community of homeless people disappeared, and Tompkins Square was closed for renovation. When it reopened, developers were buying up property in the area, and upper-upper-class folks began wanting apartments there. A renovated Christadora was no longer that laughable.
Allie sat on a bench with her back to the high-end building and put a roll of film in her camera. The only other person in sight was shooting hoops at the far end of the court. Her plan was to spend some time, just her and her camera. She needed a few moments devoid of disquieting thoughts. If she could figure out how to do it, she would spend the time having no thoughts at all.
When she got home, she found her answering machine flashing with a message. Mrs. Stein’s raspy voice was full of distress.
“I found Jim in the apartment. He has been murdered.”
Allie froze. She almost replayed the message, but that wouldn’t change anything. Not ready to allow this reality in just yet, she picked up the phone and made various S.O.S calls to her friends before finally finding the courage to call back Mrs. Stein.
“Allie, there’s blood everywhere. I’ll call you back after the police are finished.”
It wasn’t long before someone was buzzing Allie’s apartment. This was good; Allie couldn’t stand to be alone for much longer. She looked outside, dropped the keys down to her friend Natia, and slumped back over her kitchen table.
Natia knocked lightly and eased into the apartment. “Heard anything else?”
Allie mumbled a “No,” and lifted her head. “You know, I can just see Jim pissing somebody off and getting his clock cleaned.”
Jim had asked her not to be mad, but Allie found anger to be the most accessible emotion at the moment.
When Jim’s mother called back, it turned out it was not the result of foul play, but, more likely, a drug overdose. She had found Jim on the couch, shirt off, blood all over his chest and all over the cushions. What she hadn’t seen was the small glassine packet with remnants of white powder that was beside him. It would not take much effort to confirm what it was. Having been used to cocaine and having never tried heroin before, Jim had not known how much was too much. Whatever it was must have hit him fast, the cops told his mother, because there were no signs he even tried to reach for the phone.
Meanwhile Allie’s phone kept ringing, as if time had not stopped and the world was still turning. There was a wrong number, the Harris Poll, several of her friends returning her calls, and a telemarketer. Then came a call from Sal, wondering why she wasn’t coming in to work.
“Rianna said you needed the day off. Can’t you come in for part of your shift?”
“I don’t think . . . I can’t. . . .” She was trying not to say, “My boyfriend is dead.”
She paused to think this through. “I can’t do anything today. I’ve just gotten some very bad news.”
How stupid that sounded. For a moment she contemplated asking if tomorrow would suffice, but, instead of buckling to the pressure of Sal, she came to her senses.
“I’ll be in Monday.”
“Monday! You know we have a very tight schedule. You still have a computer at home, don’t you? How about we send a messenger over with some work?”
“I’m sorry.”
Natia took the phone out of her hand.
“That’s it. You’re not answering the phone anymore today.”
Ephram called Allie later that evening. Their conversation artfully skirted around the issue of guilt, even though all Allie could think about was how Jim must have come to her apartment, found she wasn’t there, and hooked up with those two deadbeats with the heroin. And Ephram, well, their last conversation was three weeks ago.
But Ephram was not choosing guilt this evening.
“Allie, you know Jim. When the rest of us sees a rabid dog, we say ‘Oh my God! A rabid dog! Run away!’ Jim would say, ‘Look! A rabid dog! Cool! Let me check that out!’”
This made her laugh for the first time in many hours.
The funeral was Sunday. Her friends Natia and Rianna had been accompanying Allie since Friday afternoon, and they were all in a car now, heading to a synagogue somewhere near Jim’s mother’s house in Queens. Jim’s friend Chris had picked them all up — as Jim would’ve said, he was a real mensch — and was now cursing and swerving in and out of the Friday morning traffic, with Natia and Rianna cringing quietly in the back seat. Allie, sitting shotgun, was staring blankly out of the window.
Her mother had tried to console her the night before, saying something like, “God will forgive Jim and he will eventually have a place in heaven.”
Allie had nothing to say to that, because, as far as she was concerned, Jim had nothing to be forgiven for, except stupidity, and everyone was guilty of that at one time or another. When Allie did not react, her mother tried something like, “You know, there’s a reason for everything that happens. God has a plan.”
God was not something that Allie believed in lately. To her, people who believed that everything happens for a reason were just denying the accidental nature of life, hanging on to the illusion that people had some kind of control over what happened to them, or worse, that there was a mysterious force watching out to make sure they didn’t fall down a manhole or something.
And then there was that afterlife thing. Why would everyone be so sad if dead didn’t mean dead, really dead, like gone, dead? But for days she had had the feeling that Jim was following her around, and as Chris turned his dad’s black Ford Escort into the parking lot, Allie could feel Jim holding her.
Black clothes, as far as the eye could see. Allie scanned the vista of sad faces, and tried to guess which ones were related to Jim. The male guests were wearing yarmulkes, and many of the women were wearing small round pieces of lace on their heads. Allie found she was suddenly as nervous as she was bereaved, an outsider clumsily invading someone else’s solemn ceremony.
She spotted Ephram, and she headed over. Ephram leaned down to the plump little woman standing beside him and said something, and when the woman turned to face Allie, she revealed her teary eyes and her broken heart. Jim’s mother was maybe half a foot shorter than Allie, and a lot older than a woman would normally be having a 23-year-old son. She was wearing one of those little circles of lace, attached to her hair with a few bobby pins.
“Allie. We finally meet.”
Allie was not much of a hugger, but she hugged Jim’s mom.
Everyone filed into the synagogue and was led into what looked like an office, except for the rows of folding chairs and the podium. Allie and her friends joined Ephram at the back of the room, and when Allie turned to face the front, she saw the casket.
She didn’t think she had reacted out loud, but Ephram put his hand on her shoulder, and she realized she must have.
After the funeral, everyone assembled over at Mrs. Stein’s house, where there was quite a feast laid out. Natia offered to make Allie a sandwich, but Jim’s sister, Julie, approached and took Allie aside.
“Allie! Oh, Allie! Oh, God! This is so terrible!” She was crying.
Allie had not yet resorted to crying. A bizarre guttural howl had come out of her when she heard Mrs. Stein’s message, but since then she was immersed in a murky fog. And now a woman she did not know was sobbing at her.
“I was so awful to Jim when we were growing up. I was terrible. Now he’s gone. Did he tell you I was an awful sister?”
What was Allie going to say, “Yes”? She put on her best I’m-sorry-for-your-loss face, and shook her head.
“Do you think he forgave me? Did he ever say anything about me?” Julie was staring at Allie with a hopeful, guilty look.
“My sister is such a disaster. ” That’s what she remembered. That and something about Julie locking Jim in a clothes trunk when he was four.
“Sure, he talked about you all the time.”
Julie was interrupted by her mother before she could ask anything else, and Allie was relieved, but not for long. Mrs. Stein led her into a bedroom and closed the door.
She sat on the bed, literally looking down at Allie, who had been shown to a chair much closer to the floor. This was the first time Allie had gotten a good look at her. Like Jim, her face was round, with high cheekbones, a straight, long, thin nose, and eyes that crinkled. It used to give Jim kind of an elfish look. It did not do the same for his mother.
Mrs. Stein lit a cigarette, drew on it hard, and savored the exhale. Allie would have liked nothing better than to jump out of her skin, but her body stubbornly refused to go.
“When I found Jim,” Mrs. Stein said finally, “he wasn’t wearing a shirt.”
Jim’s mother motioned toward the general vicinity of her breast. “He had a . . . a . . .”
Oh, crap. Jim’s stupid nipple ring.
“Piercing.” Allie finished the sentence for her. Mrs. Stein nodded.
“Do you know anything about this?”
I was having sex with your son. Of course I knew about this.
Great. Mrs. Stein thought this was Allie’s idea. Allie was not amused by the irony. It was, in fact, Lainie’s idea.
“That was his decision, not mine. I really hated that thing.”
Wow. Allie wouldn’t have believed herself with that explanation. Although there was still a distinct look of suspicion and disapproval on her face, Mrs. Stein nodded slowly. Allie let out what she hoped was an imperceptible sigh of relief.
And she could feel Jim laughing.
Saturday morning, Allie entered Tompkins Square, this time without her Pentax. She tried to walk on the cobblestones that encircled the fenced-in lawn of the park, until she realized how uneven they were and had to switch to the paved sidewalk. The trees were old and gnarly, and even without leaves, there was no unobstructed view of the sky. It gave the impression that, as long as the adjacent bench was unoccupied, a person could be alone with her thoughts.
Allie found a spot in front of an old willow that was growing out of the pavement. It leaned away from her, its bark split open with a gaping wound. The band shell used to sit across the way, but now that area was a wide, empty walkway leading to an exit. Allie looked around. She had this part of the park all to herself.
She had dreamt about Jim the night before. Rather, he had walked into another dream she was having, and dragged her out of it. And she did exactly what any book you’ll ever read on this subject tells you not to do: If someone who has died visits you in a dream, you are not supposed to say “Oh my god! I thought you were dead!”
Jim kept avoiding her questions, and then they had a laugh together over nothing, and then he had to leave. That was it. And all she had to say to him was “I thought you were dead. Oh my God. You’re not dead? You are, aren’t you?”
Several months ago they had talked about the inevitability of their separating one day. Jim wanted to go to grad school, most likely not in the City. He eventually wanted to get married and have a pack of children, not something Allie had any interest in doing. Allie was reluctant to ever share her living quarters again after her experiences with her last roommate, and kids had never been part of her life plan.
“You don’t want a family now, do you?” she had asked him.
“No, no, not until I finish school. I figure not until I’m at least thirty.”
“Well, then, we’re fine for now.”
And they would part friends, they both agreed.
Allie often wished that she was deeply in love. She kind of suspected that Jim might have been. Maybe not. But whether in love, deeply or not, she felt a lot like that willow, with a huge chunk of her now torn off.
She wasn’t feeling him around her any more. The dream was it. He came to visit one last time, said something funny to her that only her subconscious got to hear, then a goodbye, and now she was alone, sitting on a cold park bench, staring at a tree.
God has a reason for everything?
She shivered, and headed back to her apartment.
