took a small cross street to get over to the avenue the hotel was on. The street was narrow, making it even darker, and there were plastic bags of garbage piled on the sidewalks, up against the stoops of old brownstone buildings. I didn’t know why they called these row houses brownstones; most of them were painted green or red or yellow. The garbage was piled so high before one building I had to step out into the street to pass. When I stepped back on the sidewalk, a man stepped out from a doorway and came toward me.
“You got a subway token to spare? Any change?”
I’d seen lots of panhandlers that day, mostly around the subway stations. They made me nervous, but those hungry days hitching away from Dad were still fresh in my memory. I remembered people walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I dug into my pocket for the sixth time that day while I said, “Sure.”
My hand was coming out of the pocket when I heard a noise behind me. I started to look around and my head exploded.
There was something sticky between my cheek and the cold, gritty surface I was lying on. My right knee hurt and there was something about the way I was lying that didn’t seem right, like I’d been especially careless in going to bed. I tried to open my eyes but my left one seemed stuck shut. The right one looked at a rough concrete surface.
A sidewalk.
Memory and pain returned at the same time. I groaned.
There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and I thought about the muggers. I jerked heavily up onto all fours, my head throbbing like the dickens, my sore knee becoming even more so as I put weight on it. The sticky stuff on the sidewalk was blood.
Standing seemed impossible so I turned over and sat, my back to a row of garbage cans. I looked up and saw a woman carrying two grocery bags slowing down as she walked around the giant pile of garbage bags and saw me.
“My gawd! Are you okay? What happened to you?”
I blinked my open eye and put my head in my hands. The effort of sitting up made a sharp, throbbing pain stab at the back of my head.
“I think I was hit from behind.” I felt for my front pocket, where I’d been carrying my money. “And robbed.”
I pulled the lids of my left eye apart with my fingers. My eye was okay, just stuck shut with blood. I carefully touched the back of my head. There was a large lump there, wet. My fingers came away red.
Great. I was in a strange city with no money, no job, no family, and no prospects. That stabbing pain at the back of my head didn’t compare with the hurt of somehow feeling I deserved this.
If I’d only been better as a kid. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have gone, Dad wouldn’t drink so much….
“My apartment is just two doors down. I’ll call nine-one-one.” The woman didn’t wait for a response. I watched her hurry past, a container of Mace in her hand, connected to her key chain. As she walked down the sidewalk, she stayed away from the buildings, checking the doorways as she went by.
Smart. Much smarter than me.
911. That meant police. I’m a minor and a runaway. I have no ID and I don’t want my parents notified.
I thought about my hotel room, still three blocks away. I didn’t even feel like standing, much less walking three more blocks. I knew I’d feel safer there. I thought about my arrival there, of the steel door with the good lock, of the torn wallpaper. It was even paid up for three more days.
I closed my eyes and jumped.
The hotel floor was warmer than the sidewalk and I felt much safer. I edged over to the bed and pulled myself up, slowly and carefully.
I got blood on the pillow but I didn’t care.
Around midnight I went down to the bathroom, walking carefully, like my Dad after a night of drinking. It was empty. I locked the door, then ran a bath while I peed.
In the mirror I looked like something out of a slasher movie. Blood had run across my hair from the scalp wound, matting it and making the light brown stuff black and nasty. The upper left side of my face had also lain in the blood where it pooled and it was patchy, flaking off and leaving the skin underneath discolored. I shuddered.
If I’d felt well enough to walk back to the hotel, I doubt I would have made it without the police being called every block.
I got into the tub, amazed that there was hot water. The last two days it had been tepid at best. I eased onto my back and lowered the back of my head into the water. There was a slight stinging but the heat felt good. I worked soap into the hair gently, and washed my face. When I sat up, the water in the tub was brownish red. I rinsed the soap and residual blood out of my hair with the tub’s faucet, and was drying off when someone tried the door.
“I’m almost done,” I said.
A voice from the other side of the door said loudly, “Well hurry it up, man. You got no right to be hogging the toilet all night.”
I scrubbed harder and decided to let the hair dry by itself.
There was a loud noise, like someone hit the door with the flat of their hand. “Come ooooonnnnn. Open the fucking door!”
“I’m getting dressed,” I said.
“Fuck. I don’t care about that—let me in, you little faggot, so I can pee.”
I got angry. “There are bathrooms on the other floors. Go use one of them!”
There was a brief pause.
“I’m not going to no other bathroom, shithead. And if you don’t let me in right now, I’m going to hurt you real bad.”
My jaws hurt and I realized I was grinding my teeth together. Why can‘t they leave me alone? “So,” I finally said. “You gonna wait there, with a full bladder, or you gonna go find someplace to pee?”
“I’m not going anywhere, little fucker, until I carve a piece of your ass.”
I heard a splashing sound and yellow liquid began running under the door. I picked up my clothes and, without dressing, jumped back to my hotel room.
My heart was pounding and I was still angry—“pissed off,” you might say. I opened my door a crack and looked down the hallway to the bathroom.
A tall Anglo, heavily muscled and wearing nothing but jeans, was zipping up his pants. Then he hit the door again and shook the doorknob.
From one of the other rooms, someone said, “Shut up already!”
The man at the bathroom said, “Come and fucking make me!” He continued to pound on the door while he reached into his back pocket for something. When he brought it out he flicked his wrist and something shiny flashed in the hall’s dim light.
Jesus Christ.
I still felt scared, but the more I looked down the hall, the angrier I got. I put my clothes on the bed and jumped back into the bathroom.
The pounding on the door was deafening. I flinched away from the force of it, then picked up the trash can from the floor and dumped its few paper towels out onto the floor. Next I filled it with bloody, soapy water from the tub and propped it above the doorway, on the arm of the spring-loaded mechanism that closed the door. I studied it critically, my heart still beating, my breath hard to catch. I shifted it slightly to the right.
Then, one hand on the lock catch, I turned off the light, unlocked the door, and jumped back to the hotel room.
I opened the door just in time to see him rattle the doorknob, find it was loose, and push forcefully into the room. There was a dull thud and water splashed out into the hall. In the middle of that he yelled and slipped on the floor, his head and shoulder coming into view as he slammed down on his back. He grabbed at his head with both hands in a manner I could identify with, if not sympathize. I didn’t see where the knife had gone,