“It’s so fucking crazy,” said Asa Heath, Jared’s best and oldest friend, whose hair was as glossily straight and floppy as Jared’s was curly. “What do they want? It’s supposed to be a park — it’s not a homeless camp.”
Jared’s stoned eyes flashed with righteous indignation. “It’s public land, dude, it’s public space!” he cried. He had read A People’s History of the United States just that spring in his final semester of high school, and he was getting hip to much of the passionate populist rhetoric that had animated his father for so many years, often to the indulgent boredom of the rest of the dinner table. “If people want to live there—”
“Dude, you think they want to live there?” interjected Charlie Leung.
“Need, I mean,” continued Jared. “If people need to live there, if that’s the best use of public land in this neighborhood, what right does the state have to intervene?”
“Yeah but it’s a park,” Asa plowed forward, notching his voice higher than Jared’s. “It’s supposed to be nice, like, for kids. Would you want to take your kids in there with, like, dirty AIDS needles all over the ground and stuff?”
Jared paused on that for a moment; he loved Asa like the brother he didn’t have, but he’d always thought he was a bit dumb, which was probably why he’d ended up at a safety school in Vermont where skiing was the primary passion. “I like the park the way it is because that’s what it is,” he finally said. “My dad and I walk through there together. It’s what it needs to be and my dad knew what he was getting into when he bought down here.”
This earned affectionate jeers from his friends. “You and your dad are the fucking problem, man!” Asa bellowed. “You’re the reason they’re all fucking down there!”
Jared thought this was ridiculous. “We didn’t kick anyone out to move in here. This building was fucking municipal offices before we moved in. This building is, like, half artists and professors like my dad and, like”—he gestured down at the teeming streets below—“community activists! We’re the ones trying to keep the neighborhood real.”
“Real!” howled Charlie. “You are so real.”
And Jared cracked a ridiculous grin, because even he knew, amid his very pleasurable pot haze, how ludicrous he was starting to sound.
Somewhere around three A.M., they all passed out on the couches, but a din directly beneath the still-open windows woke them. Jared stumbled to the window, then his eyes widened. A big chunk of the crowd had somehow made its way across the police-sealed park and were massing in front of the Christodora, their eyes trained on the building’s front facade, flashing with animus. What were they chanting? “Die yuppie scum! Die yuppie scum!” And approximately half the crowd was skinny, messy-haired young white men like himself. They looked absolutely enraged, stark raving mad. “Come out, you fucking Christodora scum!” A queasiness bloomed in Jared’s gut. “Oh my fucking God,” he whispered to himself, fingers to his parted lips, standing back half a step from the window, suddenly terrified of being spotted. He watched with increasing horror as a dozen of the guys in the crowd picked up a wooden, blue-painted police barricade and charged it toward the building’s glass-paned front doors like a battering ram. He heard glass shatter amid an eruption of cheers.
Then he felt a light hand on his shoulder. Asa had joined him at the window. “My fucking God, man,” Jared said. “They are breaking into my fucking building!” The two young men heard another crash. Now the protesters were throwing bottles and bricks at the facade.
“We better step back,” Asa whispered. So the two men did, just as Charlie was coming to on the couch, rubbing his eyes.
“They’re breaking into the fucking building,” Asa told him. “Is the apartment door locked?”
But Jared suddenly felt revulsion at the idea of cowering in the apartment while mobs marauded the hallways. “This is fucking ridiculous,” he finally said, looking around for his Nikes. “I’m gonna go down and talk to them and tell them we are not the problem.”
Asa looked terrified. “You are fucking not! They’ll kill you!”
But Jared was messily tying his laces. “Be pussies then,” he said.
Asa and Charlie traded flummoxed looks. “Okay,” Asa said. “We’ll come.”
They took the stairs, which gave onto the back right corner of the lobby — where, Jared saw, much to his relief, cops were already pushing people back out onto the sidewalk. Someone had upended one of the lobby’s large planters, leaving a mess of ficus branches, black soil, and terra-cotta shards. A light fixture also hung, broken, from the wall. Ardit, the square-headed Albanian doorman, spied the three young men and hurried to them.
“Go back upstairs!” he ordered. “All residents stay in their apartments. It’s under control. The police are here.”
“But why the fuck are they doing this?” demanded Jared, who was loath to simply retreat. And at that moment, he caught the eye of one of the messy-haired young white men who looked so much like himself — a young man who was being steadily but forcefully pushed back out onto the sidewalk by a burly cop.
“Shame on you! Shame on you!” the young man screamed directly at Jared, jabbing a finger over the cop’s shoulder toward him. “Get out of the neighborhood!”
This brought Jared to a new level of rage. “You’re fucking crazy!” he screamed back, advancing into the lobby, which earned Ardit’s hand on his elbow, aiming to pull him back. “I support the homeless in the park! We are not the fucking problem!”
The young man’s face lit up with a kind of malevolent amusement. “You are the fucking problem. You! Yes, you, you fucking idiot!”
Jared wanted to charge at him. But he felt paralyzed by something. It was the fact that the guy was laughing at him so frankly. That, and because the guy looked so much like him.
“You!” the guy continued to cackle, looking straight at Jared, as the cops pushed him and his compatriots farther and farther back. “You, you, you!”
“Fuck you!” Jared called back, once, for good measure. But he suddenly felt a little halfhearted about it.
“Come on, guys, go back upstairs,” Ardit said again.
And as he and Asa and Charlie climbed the six flights to the apartment, Jared entertained a monologue in his head, which basically went: Okay so fine, they think we’re the fucking problem. Which is pretty ridiculous because half this building went to the meetings and spoke out against the curfew. But I guess if we’re up in this tower and we bought apartments in here, then they’re going to see us as the problem, and what can we do about it? Just that we’re not. And just that it’s so sad that they think we are. I mean, if we’re the problem, good luck with the fucking real problem!
“You know,” he turned and said to Asa, “if we’re the fucking problem, then good luck with the fucking real problem, right?”