“And what were the primary goals, the agenda, going into 1993, ’94?” the interviewer asked.
Mateo listens through the rest of the interview, but Ysabel Mendes isn’t mentioned again. Then, for the umpteenth time, he searches “Hector Villanueva” and “AIDS” and “drugs,” and all the usual old links and stories come up.
But the links on Hector Villanueva seem to drop off after the early to mid-2000s. No mentions of his arrest in L.A. in 2012. Mateo goes back to the link of the interview with the Cheling guy and sees that it’s dated only two years ago. Still alive and actually very active with ShelterHelps, the Cheling guy had said. Mateo searches for “Hector Villanueva” and “ShelterHelps” and finds a pdf of a newsletter from this ShelterHelps, which seems to be some kind of nonprofit housing group for AIDS people or homeless people — he can’t quite tell if it’s either or both — and, pulled up from the newsletter, he reads: “. . included Trayvon Spratt, Hector Villanueva, Eduardo Salazar, and Melvin Robinson, residents of SH’s newly opened Brownsville home. Heading up Christmas tree duties. .”
The newsletter dates back only four months.
Mateo looks up from his tablet at the sheets of rain pounding the Lower East Side. Oh, shit, he thinks. You’ve really gone down a wormhole now. He knows he should call Gary, his sponsor, or at least ping him a message: I’ve gone down the wormhole again.
But he doesn’t. Zombielike, he looks up the address for this ShelterHelps Brownsville residence, and before he can even let himself think about it too much, he’s grabbing his keys and an umbrella. He’s down on the street holding the umbrella in front of him like a shield, fending off the rain, until he’s inside a half-flooded subway station, fingering the digital map on the wall to figure out the best way to Brownsville.
Once he’s on the 3 train, he has nothing to do but sit there in a car with about six or seven other rain-bedraggled passengers, various dirty puddles of water on the train floor, and think about what a fool thing he’s doing, walking like a, yes, well, a zombie, right back into the belly of the beast. Fucking Brownsville? Where the fuck are you going? he thinks.
When he steps out onto the elevated platform at the Rockaway Avenue station, the rain is still driving down hard. He pushes open the umbrella and makes his way through what, even amid the torrent, he can see is maybe the last ungentrified neighborhood in New York City — a warren of behemoth brick towers that make the projects of the Lower East Side look positively quaint. He pushes his way along, adrenaline charging through his whole body like before a drug rush, getting soaked by the diagonal sheets of rain, his umbrella offering little protection. Finally he finds the house, walks up its sad three-step brick stoop, and rings the bell, flattening himself out under the door’s narrow ledge to beat the rain.
A skinny, short bald man, probably in his late forties and of Latin background, opens the door, wearing a Yankees cap and a faded Lady Gaga concert T-shirt from 2014. “This is a private residence!” he says.
“I know, I know,” Mateo says. “Um, I’m here to see a resident. Hector Villanueva.”
The guy’s face brightens, amused. “You here to see Hector?” He cackles. “He never gets visitors!”
That stabs Mateo’s pounding heart a little. “Well,” he says. “I’m one.”
The guy ushers Mateo inside to a little sitting room with black-and-white political demonstration photos on the wall and about three other guys, two chubby black men and a skinny queeny-looking old white dude, watching one of last year’s intergalactic blockbuster movies on the big, family-room-size tablet affixed to the wall, a keyboard and console beneath it.
“Sit down,” the short Dominican guy says. “You want coffee?”
Mateo declines, shaking rain from his head.
“I’ll go up and tell him you’re here,” the guy says. “What’s your name?”
“Mateo,” he says. “Mateo Mendes.”
He trudges up the stairs. Sitting there half soaked, Mateo notices that the other three guys keep glancing at him. Finally, one of them, the chunkier of the two chunky black guys, says, “You Hector’s nephew or something?”
“Hunh?” Mateo asks. “Unh, no. A friend. An old friend.”
“You look like him!” the white guy exclaims.
“Oh, really?”
The less chunky black guy points a finger at the white guy. “You think all brown people look the same.”
“That’s offensive,” the white guy counters.
Then everyone settles back into awkward silence. Mateo sits there and stares dumbly at the cosmic shoot-’em-up unfolding on the tablet screen. He thinks about Dani, Char, Ruby, and the project, all back in Manhattan, which suddenly seems so very, very far away, as though he may never get back. It’s not too late for him to ping Gary, he thinks. He begins to pull out his tablet to do so, but then the short guy hurries back down the stairs.
“What’s your name again?” he asks Mateo. “I forgot.”
This sends the other three guys into cackles. “You don’t got AIDS no more but you still got AIDS dementia!” the chunkier black guy crows.
“Shut up, queens,” the short guy says, unfazed. He turns back to Mateo.
“Mateo,” he says clearly. “Mendes. I haven’t seen Hector in, like, ten years. I grew up in his building in the East Village.”
The chunky black guy points at the little Dominican guy. “She can’t remember all that!”
“I’ma cut you in your sleep tonight,” the little guy says. Then back to Mateo: “Hold on.”
Mateo and the three guys settle back into their mute watching of the movie. Finally, the less chunky black guy turns to Mateo with what looks like a newfound suspicion. “Are you here to sell Hector pills or drugs?”
“What?” Mateo says, startled. “No! Of course not.”
“You better not be,” the guy says. “We are so damn sick of her little binges and her little crashes and all the tiptoe, tiptoe we have to do, bringing food to her room and all that.”
The chunkier one turns from the screen. “Yeah, but she’s been pretty steady lately.”
“She finally found marijuana maintenance, thank goddess,” the white one says.
This last bit of news brings Mateo an internal heave of profound relief. In fact, now he notes that the whole house smells faintly of marijuana. Not that that’s any big deal — it’s pretty much legal everywhere. He wouldn’t be surprised if the house grows its own supply. Everybody else does.
The short guy comes down again. “He says come on up,” he announces, plopping next to the white guy on the couch. “Second floor at the end of the hall. The door’s open.”