At Chuy’s Hideaway behind a modest storefront, they find a deep lounge, bright, loud, violent, that seems to run all the way through to the next block. Girls in very high spike heels and shorts shorter than a doper’s memory are gliding around with low-buttoned young men in gold chains and narrowbrim hats. Weedsmoke inflects the air. Folks are drinking rum and Cokes, Presidente beer, Brugal Papa Dobles. Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin/bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat.
March is in a loose red dress and eyelashes longer than Maxine recalls, a sort of Irish Celia Cruz, with her hair all the way down. They know her at the door. Maxine inhales deeply, relaxes into sidekick mode.
The floor is crowded, and March without hesitating disappears onto it. Some possibly underaged cupcake who says his name is Pingo appears from nowhere, grabs Maxine in a courtly way, and dances off with her. At first she tries to fake it with what she can remember from the old Paradise Garage, but soon enough moves begin to drift back as she is taken into the beat…
Partners come and go in amiable rotation. Every now and then in the ladies’ room, Maxine will find March regarding herself in the mirror with less than dismay. “Who sez Anglo chicks can’t shake it?”
“Trick question, right?”
Sid shows up late, holding a Presidente longneck, avuncular, one of those bristling military haircuts, far from Maxine’s admittedly warped image of a drug runner.
“Don’t keep me waiting or anything,” March beaming vexedly.
“Thought you’d need the extra time to score, angel.”
“I don’t notice Sequin anyplace. At the library or something, working on a book report?”
The group on the stand is playing “Cuando Volverás.” Sid pulls Maxine to her feet and starts in with a bachata modified for reduced floor space, quietly singing the hook. “And when I lift your outside hand, it means we’re gonna twirl, just remember go all the way around so you end up facing me.”
“On this floor? twirls, you’ll need a permit. Oh, Sid,” she inquires politely a couple-three bars later, “are you by any chance hitting on me?”
“Who wouldn’t?” Sid gallantly, “though you shouldn’t rule out trying to piss off the ex.”
Sid is a veteran of Studio 54, worked as a toilet attendant, got out on the floor during breaks, at shift’s end gathered up $100 bills forgotten by patrons who’d been rolling them up all night to snort cocaine through, as many as he could get to before the rest of the staff, though he himself preferred to use the recessed filter on a Parliament cigarette as a sort of disposable spoon.
They don’t quite close the joint up, but it’s pretty late by the time they get out on Dyckman and down to the little Tubby Hook marina. Sid leads March and Maxine out to a low, 28-foot runabout with a triple cockpit, Art Deco sleek and all wood in different shades. “Maybe it’s sexist,” sez Maxine, “but I really have to wolf-whistle here.”
Sid introduces them. “It’s a 1937 Gar Wood, 200 horses, shakedown cruises on Lake George, honorable history of outrunning pursuit at every level…”
March hands over Igor’s money, Sid produces an authentically distressed teenage backpack from the bilges.
“Can I drop you ladies anyplace?”
“Seventy-ninth Street marina,” sez March, “and step on it.”
They cast off silently. Thirty feet from shore, Sid angles an ear upriver. “Shit.”
“Not again, Sid.”
“Twin V-8s, Cats most likely. This time of night, it has to be the goldurn DEA. Jeez, what am I, Pappy Mason here?” He starts the engine, and off they go barrelassing into the night, roostertailing down the Hudson through a moderate chop, slapping against the water in a good solid rhythm. Maxine watches the 79th Street boat basin pass swiftly by on the port side. “Hey, that was my stop. Where we going now?”
“With this joker,” March mutters, “it’s probably out to sea.”
The thought did enter Sid’s mind, as he admits later, but that would have brought the Coast Guard into this too, so instead, gambling on DEA caution and hardware limitations, with the World Trade Center leaning, looming brilliantly curtained in light gigantically off their port quarter, and someplace farther out in the darkness a vast unforgiving ocean, Sid keeps hugging the right side of the channel, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past the Bayonne Marine Terminal, till he sees the Robbins Reef Light ahead, makes like he’s going to pass it too, then at the last minute hooks a steep right, nimbly and not always according to the rules of the road proceeding then to dodge anchored vessels towering in out of nowhere and oil tankers under way in the dark, sliding into Constable Hook Reach and on down the Kill Van Kull. Passing Port Richmond, “Hey, Denino’s somewhere off the port beam here, anybody feel like grabbing a pizza?” Rhetorical, it seems.
Under the high-arching openwork of the Bayonne Bridge. Oil-storage tanks, tanker traffic forever unsleeping. Addiction to oil gradually converging with the other national bad habit, inability to deal with refuse. Maxine has been smelling garbage for a while, and now it intensifies as they approach a lofty mountain range of waste. Neglected little creeks, strangely luminous canyon walls of garbage, smells of methane, death and decay, chemicals unpronounceable as the names of God, the heaps of landfill bigger than Maxine imagines they’d be, reaching close to 200 feet overhead according to Sid, higher than a typical residential building on the Yupper West Side.
Sid kills the running lights and the motor, and they settle in behind Island of Meadows, at the intersection of Fresh and Arthur Kills, toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal, everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be itself, and here unexpectedly at the heart of it is this 100 acres of untouched marshland, directly underneath the North Atlantic flyway, sequestered by law from development and dumping, marsh birds sleeping in safety. Which, given the real-estate imperatives running this town, is really, if you want to know, fucking depressing, because how long can it last? How long can any of these innocent critters depend on finding safety around here? It’s exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer’s heart sing—typically, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land.”
Every Fairway bag full of potato peels, coffee grounds, uneaten Chinese food, used tissues and tampons and paper napkins and disposable diapers, fruit gone bad, yogurt past its sell-by date that Maxine has ever thrown away is up in there someplace, multiplied by everybody in the city she knows, multiplied by everybody she doesn’t know, since 1948, before she was even born, and what she thought was lost and out of her life has only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything—suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero.
This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.
A long, eerie wait to see if they’ve shaken the feds or whoever they are. Invisibly up yonder, moving around somewhere close, heavy machinery, much too deep into these early-morning hours. “I thought this wasn’t an active dump anymore,” Maxine sez.