a good guy? Aren’t I a good guy?”
“Listen, maybe it’s better you don’t hang out here for a while. Let’s say we split the river for a while? I mean we work together, we gotta spend every day?”
“We were getting laid at her age and now you don’t want her to because why? She’s a girl? Does the term ‘psycho brother’ mean anything to you?”
“It ain’t that.”
“Oh, come off it. You haven’t been able to bullshit me since kindergarten, so stop it. Your stubborn wop’s starting to show.”
“It ain’t that.”
“Then it’s your stubborn mick.”
I looked back to see if we were out of shouting distance from the rest of them yet. Not quite, so I lowered my voice and picked up the pace. “She’s thirteen.”
“Thirteen’s not a disease.”
“You’re seventeen, that doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it?”
It’s hard to reason with ignorance. “I don’t like guys messing with her,” I said.
“Look, she gave me the brush off. So I consider myself brushed. I’m off the case. But here’s some news tough guy, I’m not the only one who’s gonna try to wet my luck with her so get used to it.”
“I don’t want guys messing with her.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“I don’t want it,” I repeated. Every smart piece of me said to keep it all to myself, because this guy could bad judge a situation to death and the last person I was gonna let him do that with was my sister. But another part of me wanted to tell him everything, and that’s why I kept repeating myself, hoping he would read my whole mind, and finally everything would be out without me actually having to say it. If we didn’t know each other so well, he probably would have thought I was autistic, but he caught on that there was something else I was getting at. His voice got real deep, like it does when he’s getting serious with you.
“JT, what the fuck?”
“I don’t like it.” I picked up my pace even more and looked over my shoulder.
“You’re freakin me out, man.”
“I just don’t like it.”
He stepped in front of me, put one of his heavy hands right under my throat and stopped me from walking. I could have cut off his hand and ate it. “Quit saying that. Stand the fuck still and tell me what you’re talking about?” I was trying to speak but I couldn’t. “Come on, it’s me for Christ’s sake. Tell me.”
“NO.” I slapped his hand away.
He slapped mine back.
I grabbed him in a headlock.
We both fell to the ground.
I wanted him to fight back so the talking would be over, but he wasn’t throwing any punches cause he knew I wasn’t really fighting him. And we both knew if it was a real fight his punches would have been the first and hardest to land. He let me roll him onto his stomach and hold him down. “Just get the fuck out,” I yelled.
“It’s not your fuckin river. Get off me.”
“No.”
“Let me up.”
“Will you leave if I let you up?”
“No.”
“Then forget it.”
“You gonna keep me here till you get hungry, idiot?”
“Till you leave.”
“JT, let me up and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Fuck that. I tell you something and it’s like telling everyone we know, you bucket of shit spud brain.”
For that, he bit my hand.
I let go of his neck and squeezed my right hand with my left.
“Oww you motherfucker.” I shook out my fingers. “Did you just fuckin bite me?” I looked at my right knuckles that now had red teeth marks. “You bit me.”
“If you really want me to, I will fuck you up.”
“I want you to stop asking me questions.”
Noke walked up to me real slow, his arms up in the peace position, showing me his huge palms. “Did I break the skin?”
“No.”
“Talk to me. Now.”
If there was a way to get out of it then I didn’t see it. He would have been on my ass for months. And I supposed I did owe him an answer for why I threw a choke hold on him. “Noke, you have to make me a deal.”
“Done.”
“You cannot open your mouth to a single soul.”
“I won’t.”
Even though he sounded sincere I said, “How do I know that?”
“Because it’s me.”
June 28
From Tompkins Square, I walk back to my apartment, lay on a futon mattress that takes up a quarter chunk of the floor. From the fifth floor all the lovers’ quarrels, music, bed moaning, garbage and food smells—everything people let escape—pass through me on their way out the roof of the building. I’m the conduit for everything coming out of this building, a lightning rod in reverse. But not tonight. Tonight it’s quiet. And definitely not the same quiet as laying on a riverbed in Yonkers with Nokey, taking a slow ride on the Earth, moving on the same rhythm as all the other passengers. This is a throbbing quiet, like an ear infection. I see that woman in the coffee shop. My sister’s face under another girl’s skin. My sister standing on the footbridge over the river. Nokey looking at her. Noticing her. My heart starts tripping. And I’d put cash on the Dalai Lama not being able to slow that shit down.
Fuck. Here comes the panic. It shoots up the back of my neck, dries out my mouth and paralyzes my tongue. My heart flaps around my chest like a fish on a line. Every fucking night, the constant ringing and thinking will not stop—yelling at me that I should start drinking heavily close to the edge of a rooftop. I try to laugh it all off until the early signs of blue light start to seep in the windows, that’s usually when I get my hour and a half of sleep. I heard that resting is just as good as sleeping, which doesn’t help me, because I can’t stay still enough to rest. I clasp my hands under the back of my head. I can feel my hair growing back in. I’ve kept shaving it since I left the park. Don’t know why. I find all kinds of twisted positions to lie in, but eventually I stand up. Look out the window, open the refrigerator and see if anything has changed since last I looked. I pee. I grab a pretzel out of a bag from the counter. I drink some water. I try jerking off, and I can barely feel anything—I haven’t done the one-gun salute in months. I’m numb in a lot of places and it terrifies me, OK? It terrifies me like sleeping, like my own thoughts, like money, like death, like listening to my heartbeat, like thinking about my breathing, like feeling like this forever, like being alone, like being with someone, like jail. My eyes spin around this apartment looking for the right woman’s face, the cure, the quietest thing, but I find brick, wood, paint. A book. I scan a page in this Gabriel García Márquez book that I’m supposed to be reading for a GED class and can’t follow for shit. Tomorrow at work I’ll fight to stay awake while hauling a thirty-pound bag of rocks in each hand—when sleep isn’t safe. Or possible. No one is looking for me. See, this is what I don’t fucking want—a quiet building. I want kids running across wood floors, I want muffled music or domestic squabbles shaking the walls. I throw the sheet off, stand up. Look out the window, come back to the mattress, put my back to the wall and tap my right knuckles into my left palm for noise. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap