The crackheads didn’t leave blood in the vestibule. They left plastic vials and sometimes plastic cups of water. They were bloody, though, erratic and hostile. One of them said, when Elizabeth insisted they get off the floor and leave the vestibule, so she could open the door and get inside, one of them said, with deep sarcasm:
— You’re some human being.
Elizabeth wanted to strangle the peroxided, stringy-haired creature, with her disastrously thin legs and arms, and a face that betrayed every bad night she’d ever had. Elizabeth wanted to knock her senseless, not that she had any. The peroxided creature might one night come to her senses, she might look in a car’s mirror, twist it to see her ravaged face. Elizabeth couldn’t see what she’d see. People make the best of a bad situation.
Elizabeth preferred heroin users to crackheads. Everyone did. Crackheads were erratic. Her preference was irrelevant. She would’ve preferred never to work.
The poor scrambled, adapted, and metamorphosed into their poverty. They grew ugly. The rich grew ugly too. Repellent. They were complacent. Elizabeth hated that complacent, unearned well-being. Complacency was the rich glow on their faces. They believed in their right to their wealth. The glow made them ugly. Poor people never glowed. Ugliness is more than skin deep. They ate up their poverty, the way the rich ate up their plenty. The poor digested meagerness and cramped quarters, and even if some of them were Catholic and preached to about God’s loving the poor more than the rich, they were living in the U.S.A. People lived the lives they deserved.
Now one of the morons stood up and vomited. He vomited all over the sidewalk. He made gut-wrenching noises to roars of moronic approval. Elizabeth lost her appetite. One of the other morons threw some food at a store window. The drug store windows all displayed Tide and Ajax, which signaled they didn’t sell anything but drugs. Idiots or gringos went in and asked for milk.
The morons bellowed again and held some kind of vomit-and-garbage-throwing ceremony. Glass broke. Stones and bottles were tossed. They screamed happily, unimportantly. Her mother would say like banshees. Elizabeth wondered what a banshee sounded like.
The taste of vomit was in her mouth. Vomit was putrid longing backing up.
She wanted to be able to stop the morons. She couldn’t do everything she wanted.
He vomited again. He probably liked to vomit.
She’d been able to stop some girls. She persuaded them to stop blasting music from their car. It was parked under her window. They were doing their laundry across the street. It was a dope Jeep. Elizabeth dressed and walked downstairs. Roy told her not to. She knocked on the Jeep’s half-open window. The driver didn’t hear anything. Elizabeth had to touch her on the shoulder. The driver turned to her.
— Could you please turn down? My baby can’t sleep, Elizabeth said.
The girl did instantly, out of a traditional respect for babies and motherhood. Elizabeth walked away, aware of the girls in the Jeep studying her and doubting that she was a mother. They didn’t turn up again.
How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
None of your fucking business.
How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I don’t know. I left early.
She could easily pretend to be a mother. She couldn’t see herself going into Paragon Sporting Goods, asking to look at crossbows and arrows. Before she did anything, Elizabeth saw herself doing it. If she was going to walk down the stairs, she saw herself walking down the stairs. She saw herself taking the first step. She prepared herself. Her heel might catch in the hem of her pants, and she’d hurtle forward and crash, land on her head. She could decide to jump, lunge, leap, or fly over the stairs. She thought she could fly over a flight of stairs. It looked easy. She didn’t want to train for years to be able to do it. That was crazy.
She wouldn’t murder the morons in cold blood or in a moment of passion. When she murdered, it would be in self-defense. She’d be attacked. A large man or a small man would come at her. From behind. She’d move quickly, swing around. She’d gouge out his eyes or jab her fingers into his gut. She wanted to be able to sever someone’s jugular vein or hit someone over the head with the baseball bat Roy kept near the door. She’d bash the aggressor to death without blinking an eye. Then she’d toss the bloody bat onto the floor and phone the precinct.
I just murdered a man with a bat. Right, a bat. He’s bleeding, but he’s dead. Don’t send an ambulance. Dead. A bat. A baseball bat.
Even her revenge fantasies were silly. They ended without conviction. She clenched her hands into fists. She watched Roy sleeping. He was sleeping the sleep of the just and unjust and the innocent and the guilty.
She followed the band of morons with tired eyes. They sauntered toward the park. They turned over another garbage can in a blasé way. Threw one at a car. They’d had a lot of experience throwing and overturning garbage cans. They turned over the last one casually, even gracefully, with a little wrist action. They could be tennis players or garbage collectors. There was garbage everywhere. It wouldn’t be picked up.
On her block, the garbage collectors left as much garbage on the streets as they picked up. They threw the garbage cans all over the sidewalks. It was a display of real disgust, gutter hatred of the poor. Elizabeth caught them doing it.
On another night she couldn’t sleep, she went downstairs at six A.M., carrying newspapers to be recycled. The garbagemen were throwing garbage and garbage cans. The street was an ordinary disaster, strewn with evidence of rampaging dogs or mad people. She wished she had her camera. But the garbagemen could argue about the photographs. They’d get lawyers, they’d interpret it their way. Her block wasn’t covered in garbage, it was her point of view, how she saw things, she had a distorted view of the world, of the block, they’d say. She did.
They’d say the garbage collectors couldn’t have done it, because they were on their coffee break. Some hooligans must’ve done it, they fled before anyone saw them. Elizabeth could spend her life in court defending herself, her story. She’d present her story, and one of the garbagemen would say, That’s not the way it was. He’d shake his head adamantly or sadly, as if the thought of his doing something like that was beyond him. I would never do something like that, he’d insist dramatically. Maybe he’d cry. The jury would side with the men in uniform. Elizabeth would be branded a fanatic, an urban malcontent. She remembered the garbagemen down the street in their uniforms. She remembered their faces. She remembered thinking, I pay taxes to the City for them to take away garbage.
It was pathetic. she watched as they flung the last cans onto the sidewalk. She surveyed the devastation and then glared at the men. She memorized their truck’s number. She was overwhelmed by despair. She noticed the acerbic super down the other end of the block. His face was inflamed, scarlet. Sometimes his face looked tanned and healthy, sometimes like an old shoe. She walked over to him, he always knew everything, who was in jail, who was about to go to jail and why, when there was going to be a bust. Elizabeth announced that she was going to report the garbage collectors.
— What’d they look like? A tall black guy and a short Italian guy? The regular guys are OK. These aren’t the regular guys. The regular guys are good guys. They wouldn’t do this.