“I’ll walk you guys down,” Mateo says.
“You have a crit in three days,” Milly says. “You should hit your room.”
“I’ll be right back!” Mateo whines.
Down on the street, he walks Keiko and Fenimore to the subway. Fenimore thoughtfully walks ahead a few paces while he and Keiko make out for a second on the way. “I love your mother,” Keiko says.
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
Mateo watches them disappear down the subway stairs. Such a warm night! The East Village is vibrating with warmth, everyone’s out. He lights a cigarette, takes a roundabout route back to the apartment. He thinks about what’s in his wallet and his stomach twists deliciously, his skin flushes.
And then, when Mateo’s walking past a row of tenements on Second Street, he sees him: Hector. The crazy gay guy whose dog, Sonya, bit him in the Christodora when he was a little kid, right before 9/11. It had been a horrible situation, with Jared-dad wanting to sue Hector but then Millimom’s mom, his bubbe Ava, imploring Jared not to, saying that Hector had fallen on hard times after the death of a lover. Instead, Jared had a lawyer send a letter to Hector saying that if Hector got rid of the dog, which was a menace to the entire Christodora, then Jared wouldn’t press charges over the bite. Jared had received no reply to the letter and was infuriated a week later to see Hector in the lobby with the dog, who seemed as keyed up as ever.
“Now I’m pressing charges,” Jared had said to Milly moments later.
“Well, you might want to wait,” Milly said. “Because Ardit just told me that Hector’s sold his unit and he’s moving out. He’s broke apparently; he hasn’t worked in two years now, and he can’t make the mortgage payments.”
Some of the angry color drained from Jared’s face. “Are you sure?” he asked Milly.
“Ardit told me today that Hector told him yesterday he’d closed on a sale.”
Jared was silent for a moment. “He and that dog can’t be out of here soon enough,” he finally said.
Everyone in the Christodora had known about Hector, once so famous and important in the AIDS movement but now a total meth addict. To the great relief of everyone in the building, he and the dog finally vacated and moved into a rent-stabilized basement dump a few blocks away. There, it was reported through the Christodora grapevine, he continued to smoke away, on a glass pipe, the money he’d made on the apartment sale. Through the first decade of the 2000s, he unraveled before the neighborhood’s eyes, from a handsome, muscular man in his early forties to a mumbling mess in his early to midfifties, screaming in the street at the dog he cooped up in that tiny basement apartment. Everyone on the block knew what went on there, who came and went.
And now Mateo is standing right in front of Hector as Hector yells at a new dog, another shepherd-pit mix, this one tan with black and white markings, straining on her leash to go into the street.
“Get the fuck back, animal,” Hector shouts. Mateo stands back and observes; people approaching Hector and the dog on the sidewalk abruptly cross the street, startled. Hector is bald and overtanned, with a three-day growth of black beard flecked with gray; a cigarette in one mouth; a dingy wifebeater over a shaven, sunken chest; cutoff denims too short for even the East Village; flip-flops with a rainbow-stripe thong; and a thick leather band around his wrist. He looks like a holy gay mess, thinks Mateo, some cracked-out Alphabet City version of Big Gay Al from South Park.
But Mateo can’t bring himself to cross the street to avoid him. He just keeps watching the spectacle with the big dog, mesmerized.
“Hector, right?” Mateo finally ventures from a safe dozen feet away.
Hector turns to him. “Brisa, sit the fuck down!” he yells at the dog, who ignores him, straining into the street, howling miserably. “What’s up, negro?” he asks Mateo.
“I’m Mateo. From the Christodora. You remember us, the Traums on the sixth floor?”
“Oh, shit!” Hector exclaims, breaking into a smile revealing a lost tooth on the far upper right. “Shit, you got big, man! I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“I know, it’s true,” Mateo acknowledges. He wonders if Hector has any recollection of the biting incident nine years ago with the prior dog. Gingerly, Mateo tries to pet this new dog, who strains away from him toward the street, as though she wants to gallop around the block a few times to release pent-up energy. “This is your new dog, right?”
“You got a light, negro?” he says, ignoring Mateo’s question.
“Huh?”
“You got a light? My cigarette went out.”
Oh, Mateo notes, it has. It’s just sitting there dead in his mouth.
“Yeah,” Mateo says, pulling out his lighter. “Sure.” He steps toward Hector to relight his cigarette, smelling what he once smelled when he went into a leather bar on Christopher Street for five minutes with friends in high school as a joke — it’s like BO, cigarettes, stale beer on the floor. “Fagfunk,” they called it upon leaving the bar, knowing they shouldn’t say that but cracking themselves up nonetheless.
“Gracias, negro,” Hector says. Mateo wonders if Hector knows he doesn’t speak Spanish — well, not very much. He thinks about his crit — he should get back to the Christodora, he tells himself. But he can’t pull himself away for some reason. Hector, though, appears indifferent to the encounter, contentedly puffing on his relit cigarette.
“That’s your new dog?” Mateo asks again.
“New?” Hector laughs. “Brisa’s not new. She’s a fucking middle-aged bitch.”
“But I mean — not the one you had in the old apartment, right?”
“In the—” He looks confused. “Oh, you mean the Christodora, right? No, no, yeah, that was Sonya. That poor bitch died a few years ago.”
He laughs, and Mateo laughs awkwardly with him. “Yeah, I remember Sonya,” Mateo says. “She was crazy.”
Hector smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “I loved that bitch.” He drags on his cigarette again. “Hey, wait a second,” Hector says. “You’re the little guy she fucking bit, right, and your white daddy wanted to sue me, right?”
Mateo feels himself flush in discomfort. “That was me,” he says. “The weekend right before 9/11.”
“Shit, negro!” Hector exclaims. “And now here you are. All grown up.” He cracks another grin.
“Here I am,” says Mateo. “I survived the dog bite!”
They both laugh now. Hector flicks his cigarette into the street. Mateo follows it into the gutter with his eyes, acutely aware that he should be getting on home but unable to pull himself away.
He points down toward the basement apartment. “You like your new place here?” he asks, fumbling to prolong the conversation.
“It’s a cave,” Hector says. “But it’s fine except for winter, when I go live in Palm Springs. In another cave.” Hector laughs jaggedly. “At least people leave me alone here and mind their own business.” Unceremoniously, he turns to go back inside. “Come on, baby,” he says to the dog, yanking the leash. “Está bien, negro,” he says to Mateo.
“Can I see it?” Mateo asks. Did I just ask that? he then asks himself.
Hector turns, looks at Mateo curiously, then shrugs. “Sure, come on in.”