"No message, just tell you he called." I flick on the vid. "I went down the housing office today, the nearest available housing is upstate Pennsylvania. And it doesn't have running water. I got a prospectus for you." Now I have to think of an excuse for an errand so I can get out of here and Peter can call this flier person.
I develop the habit of walking the boardwalk. The air smells salty these days. It doesn't have that burnt smell anymore, the project to clean up the harbor must be working. Reassuring to know that something is working. But I miss the smell, for me it's exciting. Sexual. Not that I'm cruising these days. Hell, even if I wanted to, where would I take them, back to Peter's couch? And I'm too old to climb under the boardwalk and let some kid do me in the sand.
I remember kneeling in the sand, shivering, with the light coming down between the cracks in the boardwalk. Going to school in the day, pretending to be like everybody else, feeling like I had some secret knowledge, some understanding of the real world that the people I went to school with didn't have. Gooseflesh and the smell of ash. Some chickenhawk with his fingers locked in my hair.
I walk every night from eight until almost nine, regular as clockwork. The first couple of nights it's all right, but Friday night it's altogether too hot, and the boardwalk is crowded with people. Couples, girls in cheap flashy clothes, bright flimsey things. The young girls are shaving high up the backs of their necks, up even with their earlobes, and just leaving a tail of braided hair hang down.
"Ever had a hotdog?"
I'm leaning up against the railing, watching the kids go by. He's older than most of the kids, but only by a few years.
"Si," I say, "Yo habito aqui." 'I live here.'
For a moment he looks confused. He looks hispanic, but that doesn't mean he speaks spanish. That will teach me to try and be clever.
Then he grins. "Donde?"
"Coney Island," I say.
He shakes his head. "For a moment I didn't realize what you were saying, you know, I just didn't expect you to speak spanish. Chinese clothes and all."
"I grew up on Utica Avenue," I say. He's handsome. Dresses cheap, short matador jacket (no shirt) and tights. He has a tattoo of a tear at the corner of his left eye, it hangs on the edge of a sharp cheekbone. He's darker than I am. "So you were going to poison a foreign guest with a local hotdog."
He shrugs, "I just thought, here's this foreigner, all by himself on the boardwalk. Somebody ought to give him a taste of the ethnic cuisine."
We walk a bit. He struts, gestures as he talks. The boys seemed spaced along the walk at regular intervals. They lean against posts and watch us. Coneys. The couples become static, white noise. The salient features of the landscape are the boys, and this amazing young man walking with me who talks about growing up out here on the edge, in the part of Brooklyn some people call Bangladesh.
"See," he explains, "there's always going to be a group of people who aren't ideologically sound. There's always going to be a bad element fringe. So the Party doesn't mess with Bangladesh. We're a safety valve surrounding Coney Island. So out here we can be free."
"What about all the communes being established?" I ask. The girls dress in bright colors, the coneys dress dark. A coney in dark pants, dark sleeveless shirt watches us from the corner of his eye. He rests one muscled arm on a post.
"They won't stay," he says, airily. "Out here it never really changes. They pretend to clean it up, but they just pick up a few deviants and everybody else hides and two hours later the meat market is back in business."
Hot night for a meat market. I've seen it change. Used to be there wasn't anything out here, no couples, no hotdogs, just boarded up stands, the coneys and the chickenhawks and the squatters. The squatters are mostly gone and the whole place is now free marketeers and the people who want housing in the city bad enough to stick it out. They clean up the two hundred year old buildings, then make the neighborhood domestic.
He's so fresh and young. Is he waiting for me to make a move? I would if I could. "I have to get back," I say, regretfully.
"Good talking to you," he says.
"I come out here and walk pretty often," I say. "What's your name?"
"Invierno," he says. In Spanish that means winter. What kind of name is Invierno? Obviously not his real name. Not giving one's real name or number is a time-honored tradition out here on the boardwalk.
"I'm Rafael," I say. "Like the angel."
He grins and makes the sign of benediction, standing at the top of the steps.
When I glance back a second time he has already turned and stalks back down the boardwalk, prowling.
Back at Peter's building two women are carting boxes out the front door and piling them on the sidewalk. They watch me, flat, hostile faces. Their belongings make the usual pitiful pile on the sidewalk. I step over bluegreen pillows like the kind Peter has tossed on the floor, palm the door.
The hallway and the elevator are hot and airless, in China even the hallways were kept cool. I wonder how much money it would cost to keep the halls heated and cooled. There are old ducts, at one time the halls of this building were temperature controlled. In an old building like this it would help the tenants keep their own costs a little lower.
"Hey," I say, "someone is moving out of the building."
Peter is flicking through vid programs. "Who was it?"
"Two girls. No one I know." Peter must be as frustrated as I am. I leave coneys on the boardwalk, he talks to his flier. "Maybe I could rent their place."
"Don't rent, save your money until you get a job," Peter says.
"You need your own place back," I say.
"You're no problem, and you pay half the rent."
"How's what's his name, the flier." I say pointedly. How's your love life? I've got this roommate and he's driving me crazy.
Peter glances up at me, back at the vid. "Cinnabar's just a friend. He's not a flier, he's retired." He sits stiff and defensive. I shouldn't have said it.
"I need a place of my own," I say and sit down next to him.
"You don't get a job," he says, "you'll start borrowing money from me. Pretty soon they'll kick both of us out."
"Hey," I say, "I'll rent for a few months and then we'll move to Pennsylvania together."
Then I get him a beer and rub his shoulders.
"A regular Florence Nightingale," he says.
The room has ghosts.
So I become a tenant. I move to the fifth floor, griping about having to take the psychopathic elevator to the top of the building. Moving is not difficult; as Peter remarks, for a man with a truly astounding wardrobe, I seem painfully short of possessions. (Not that my wardrobe is really much, it's just Chinese.) The flat is two rooms, not counting the tiny kitchen and bathroom, both about the same size.
I live in a dump. "The floor has to go," I say. Someone painted the walls aqua, the floor is bluegreen slip, it's like living under water on a bad film set. Cheap. But this building was built before the second depression, when they built to last, and underneath that garbage is a solid floor, underneath the walls is good solid wood frame. I wonder what would happen if I knocked the wall out between the two big rooms. The little front room, which is supposed to be the main room, has no window. The back room is barely big enough for a bed. Together they would make one decent room.
But it's my own. Once moved in I decide I have to take my life in hand. I've been home for two weeks and haven't done anything but sleep on Peter's couch and walk the boardwalk.