“I know, girl, don’t even say it,” she told me. “He came back. It’s cool.”
“Sam,” I said, stepping in front of her. “We need to be careful.” I looked over to make sure Carlos was still preoccupied. “We need to start looking into apartments. We need to find a place. After that we can look into jobs and then maybe check out high schools for next year, only after we get settled.”
“I know,” she said. “I would love to get that place.”
“Yeah, well, we should get on top of it before anything. You never know. This whole thing feels shaky.”
Carlos stepped into the room and swiped the snow off his head, pushing air out through his lips while bulging out his eyes like a cartoon character.
“Brrrr, I was freezing my nipples off out there,” he said, shaking his arms clean of snow. We were too quiet to seem amused.
“Waz up, ladies?” he asked, looking around the room in exaggerated confusion. “You look like someone stole your best friend’s cat.” For a moment I worried that I might have been taking things too seriously, but I spoke up anyway.
“It’s nothing. . . . It’s just that, now that you have your inheritance, we need to work out the apartment stuff, right? You kind of disappeared for a while, and that was a surprise. We can’t really afford any more surprises.”
He paused to gather himself in a way that implied restraint. It made me feel I’d overstepped some boundary.
“Like I said, Shamrock, I needed to clear my head. It was wild to pick up Dad’s money, so I did it alone. Ain’t no way I wasn’t coming back. A’ight?”
“Yeah, Carlos, we knew,” I lied, too nervous to defy the edge of confrontation in his voice. Plus, I was feeling myself falling into the category of people that just didn’t understand him. I was afraid questions about where he’d been, or whether all that money was really an inheritance, would cause me to lose him.
“Well, if you believe me, then act like it and gimme some credit,” he snapped.
I didn’t move or speak. Sam looked at me as though she were waiting for instruction. Carlos looked from me to Sam and then back again, squinted his eyes, and smiled mischievously. He lifted a pillow off the bed in slow motion and let out a whistle to the theme of an old Western showdown, shifting the mood. Sam smiled and began playfully inching away from him, simultaneously abandoning me in my seriousness. Carlos arched his eyebrows and swung the pillow above his head like a lasso. I took a step backward and chuckled in spite of my frustration. How could I not? He looked ridiculous.
“Hey, we’ll get an apartment,” he said, whacking my shoulder with the pillow, then quickly dragging Sam clear across the bed by her ankle, swatting her, too. “Stupids,” he called out in a pouting child’s voice as he halfheartedly swiped the pillow back and forth between us. “Bums. You don’t believe me.” Sam clawed the mattress for a grip, screaming wildly. I gave in and grabbed a pillow, hitting him on the back using all my force, feeling both the futility of the impact against his strong body, like a mobile boulder, and my own anger come alive with each hit. We fumbled over one another until we became a mass of limbs, sweat, and laughter, collapsed on the smelly motel carpet. Carlos got up first. Gasping for air, Sam and I watched him straighten his shirt and walk to the dresser, where he rolled open the largest drawer.
“Here,” he said. “Take a look for yourself.”
Wiping sweat off his brow, he tossed a thick newspaper to me. It was The New York Post, opened to the classifieds.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Domino’s Pizza, ground beef and double pepperoni,” he said. “It’s the classifieds, Shamrock. What else? I was checking out places for us to get started.”
I held the paper up to my eyes and saw the title of the real estate section underlined in black pen. Next to it, there were a couple of phone numbers printed in Carlos’s handwriting; one of them was circled.
I was flooded with regret for not believing in him. I saw myself through his eyes and sensed how selfish I must seem. It was his dead father’s money, and I gave him grief about it because I was so needy that I couldn’t manage without him. I was immediately sorry and determined to make it up to him.
“Carlos,” I started, lifting myself up off the ground. But he held a hand up to stop me.
“Listen,” he said, smiling, looking from Sam to me, “tonight is . . . tonight is the night. We’re gonna paint the town magenta. Forget this. Tonight guys, get on your best T-shirts and jeans, I am taking you out.”
We cabbed it downtown, to a mysterious location Carlos said we’d have to see to believe. I had never witnessed anyone pay for a thirty-dollar cab ride before. Carlos sat up front, joking in Spanish with the driver, flipping the radio stations between rock and hip-hop. When he stopped the dial, Foxy Brown’s “Gotta Get You Home” blasted. Carlos scratched records on an invisible DJ turntable up front. Sam and I bounced up and down in our seats to the thumping bass of the music, windows down, wind whipping our hair. We laughed, wild with joy. Outside, the sky darkened to a deep blue-purple. I leaned out my window a little and inhaled the cold, late-autumn smell, that fresh moisture that charges the air just before a storm. Families shot by us in their Volvos, babies strapped into their child-safety seats, cars filled with normal teenagers. Their ordinary lives highlighted our own total lack of order.
We were a band of misfits, wild young people carving out our own alternative version of life, together. The adventure struck me as terrifying but thrilling, too, the difference hinging solely on where Carlos was going with all of this, and whether he would keep his promise.
The mysterious location was a small, run-down dim sum restaurant on Mott Street, in Chinatown. Carlos requested that the waitress, with whom he was on a first-name basis, clear a particular booth for us, in the very front. Under his instruction, she brought out no menus; Carlos ordered for the whole table, knowing the list of dishes by heart. He winked rather than explain himself. We laughed rather than ask.
Sitting there, I became enamored with him all over again. The whole night was wonderfully surreal—the way he could walk into a place and change it, make the crazy Chinatown lights brighter; how they shimmered on the wet asphalt outside. The ridiculousness of Carlos going into the kitchen and returning alongside the waitress, helping to serve our food. How he made a beautiful paper rose for me out of a napkin. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, his vibrance, his handsome face; every so often we’d exchange a glance so intimate I was forced to look away.
Sam was smiling wider than I’d ever seen her smile before—she looked completely happy. I was happy, too. The whole night had a dreamlike quality, and I told myself that life should always feel like this, filled with simple happiness. And just maybe, with Carlos around, it could.
Later, at the motel, Carlos stood in front of me, reasoning with the jammed soda machine for the return of his dollars. The glow of its light against his face turned his freckles auburn and illuminated his eyes. His voice seemed to match the machine’s hum. This was the moment I decided to sleep with him; I had finally worked up the courage. He had been persisting for nearly three months, the entire time we’d been together; now I knew that I could go through with it. I told myself that it would show him what he meant to me, and would seal a bond between us that lately had seemed shaky. The sodas clunked down after Carlos gently shook the machine. He made that happen, too.
The cans settled into a bucket of melting ice beside the bed. Sam had disappeared to visit Oscar; it was just the two of us all night, for hours, in this room. I was sure that he sensed my decision, because I started laughing too hard at things, waving my hands around when I talked, like two loose birds. I couldn’t initiate it—I didn’t have to; I didn’t have to move. There was no pain involved, only the weight of his heavy body, the strong smell of latex and of his hot breath. To my surprise, my first thought was that being with him was emptier that I’d expected, more function than joy.
I became distracted by how removed I fel
t, divided between the physical part of me that I shared with him, and my mind, which drifted. But he didn’t notice; he only moved and moved on top of me. For a moment, I resented him for it. In an effort to reverse the bad feeling, I decided to search his eyes, but they were closed. That’s when I realized that sex was not necessarily a shared thing. Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other. It didn’t necessarily bring you closer. In fact, it could highlight the parts of you that feel most separate. Sex could reveal to you your own isolation. Sam had told me that this act added up to love, but I did not feel loved by Carlos then, nor, in that moment, could I feel my love for him.
When he was done, he rolled off me and cracked open a can of Pepsi. I asked him to pass me the other one and I drank it, letting the icy burn trickle down my throat while my attention sought a focal point in the room—anywhere but him, or us. There was no “tingly weakness” the way Sam had promised.
That afternoon, she had already taped up rip-out magazine posters of dingy rock stars above the other bed. And she had hand-washed and folded shirts and socks and put them in the dresser drawer. This was more stable than we’d been in weeks, and we were appreciative. The rain fell softly outside, collecting on the windowsill, reflecting in its puddle the neon lights of the motel sign. I was miles away from home.
Over the next two weeks in the motel, Carlos rented out three neighboring rooms along with the one we were already living in. He began to act differently, more authoritative. The money was changing him, and with the money, he transformed everything around us. He became good friends with Bobby, Diane, Jamie, Fief, and several other more distant members of the group, all of whom wanted to come over and join in the fun of escaping their parents to sleep in a strange place. Carlos provided it for them, and in doing so, he became their ringleader. Nightly, he called three cabs to collect the bunch of us and take everyone to diners in the Village, for pool on Eighty-sixth Street, or to the movies in Times Square. He tipped his favorite waitress in the West Fourth Street diner fifty dollars, but only after he got her to curtsy, tilt her head, and smile. This, and all of Carlos’s jokes lately, made everyone—nearly twelve of his new friends occupying three huge tables—laugh hysterically.
Carlos had become very private about everything. He and Fief or he and Jamie, or whichever other one of my friends was available, routinely took mysterious cab rides to undisclosed places. I was told the purpose was private, and I was asked to stay behind. His cell phone calls, all placed from the balcony outside our room, were extremely private—it was taboo to inquire about them, even when he was talking to my friends. I never knew the details of the calls, or the secret excursions, but they made me think of the way Jamie threw her head back to laugh when Carlos talked; how she, like the other girls, all friends or friends of friends floating in and out of our scene, felt free to enter Carlos’s personal space, to touch his arm or pinch his cheeks. “You have the cutest freckles,” Diane once said, sitting in his lap. With some of my friends, Carlos shared inside jokes that I didn’t get. Sam slipped up and made several censored mentions of private conversations between her and Carlos. This was my first experience in resenting her, and around this time, she and I stopped having our own private conversations. The wedge, at the time, felt permanent.
I couldn’t yet speak it out loud, I didn’t dare actually say it, but there were two roaring suspicions sitting in my mind. One was that the reason for Carlos’s secret trips with my friends was that he was dealing drugs. This occurred to me when I realized how similar he began to look to the drug dealers in my old neighborhood: baggy jeans good for hiding things; a beeper and a cell phone for suppliers and customers to reach him; his Latin King beads, which he sometimes wore even in the shower, linking him back to his gang.
The other fear was that he was cheating on me with someone, maybe even with Sam. That suspicion was something I didn’t have any evidence of; it was just a feeling that sat in my stomach like a stone.
I was a worrywart, the one who was no fun. I watched Carlos’s behavior, kept track of his spending, and reminded him of the hundreds of dollars he wasted every day. I brought up the apartment, told him food was cheaper if we split things, and pointed out, to everyone’s great disappointment, that we didn’t need cabs—the train was $1.25. He guarded his bank receipts like gold from the mint, and told me he would start saving soon. In the meantime, I should relax, live large—after all, didn’t we deserve to live it up after all we’d been through? Why was I so serious all of a sudden? His kisses were rough little pecks that made my skin crawl.
Once in a while, at night while Carlos entertained everyone, I called Brick’s from the pay phone downstairs. Sometimes Ma was home, and sometimes Lisa told me she had checked into the hospital, her voice sounding mechanical, resentful. One time when Ma was home, she answered the phone and asked me when I was coming to bring more pillows, and then went on to tell me that the road was wide open; it was only a matter of driving and painting all four walls. Her voice, like some confused child, made my throat feel as if it were splintered with razors. I tried not to cry, but I knew from research I’d done in the Forty-second Street library that dementia was one of the final stages of AIDS. Lisa grabbed the phone.
“Lizzy,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you might want to think of spending more time with Ma. You may think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t.” Her voice was furious, but there was no way to communicate my fear of seeing Ma so close to death. I got off the phone as quickly as I could.
Later that night, Carlos was hosting a reggae party, blasting his radio for the crowd and jumping on the bed—which got us kicked out. We moved to another motel, an ancient set of two-story buildings lined with balconies on a desolate road, crowned by a pink fluorescent light that read VAN CORTLANDT MOTEL. Our bathroom window faced the massive expanse of Van Cortlandt Park. Carlos commented that we could make all the noise we wanted to here. He brought the party with us, and I pleaded with him for an extra room so that I could sleep. When we separated, Fief’s cousin, a white girl named Denise who wore huge hoop earrings and snapped her gum at me, was holding on to Carlos’s arm. I carried some of Sam’s, Carlos’s, and my things into the next room.
I spotted the paper Carlos had written those real estate phone numbers on protruding from a bag of clothing. I requested an outside line from the front desk so that I could call the one he had circled.
“Hello?” a female voice answered. Her name was Katrina; she was a waitress at some pool hall and had no idea about any apartment for rent. Tears filled my eyes. I hung up on her as she asked again where I got her number.
“Shut up,” I said to the ceiling. “Just shut up!”
My sleep was dreamless that night, as I breathed in the stale cigarette smell of my very own empty room while my boyfriend, my best friends, and a bunch of strangers partied, drank, and smoked weed rooms away.
The next morning, Carlos and Sam stood at the foot of my bed. Carlos’s voice was what woke me.
“Hey shimmy Shamrock, you want to go get some breakfast?”
“Where is everyone?” I asked. By the bright sun, I could tell it was early morning, and I figured they couldn’t have slept yet.
“Gone,” he said. “Eighty-sixed about an hour ago.”
Sam rubbed her stomach and let out an exaggerated wail.
“Ugh, sooo hungry,” she said, casting her thin arm over her forehead. “Fooood.”
At that moment I had to make a choice. I could confront Carlos about the phone numbers and take the opportunity to address the way he’d been acting, or I could drop it and go with the moment. I looked at Carlos, and for a second he became as much a stranger as the day I first met him—mysterious, slippery. But when he smiled, he somehow reversed it and became familiar all over again. My perception of him could change between blinks. How did he truly feel about me? If only he could be wonderful all the time and not send me so deep inside my
self for answers that I didn’t have.
Sitting there, I decided to drop it. I ignored my anger and went with the flow. Anything else would have been pointless. What would the outcome of a confrontation be? If I got into a fight with Carlos, it’s not like I could go home to think about it. This was home; they were home. If I just acted like things were fine, maybe eventually they would be.
“Let’s go eat,” I said, shaking it all off.
Carlos pulled me up out of bed. I layered myself in three sweaters, pulled a knit cap over my head, borrowed a pair of Sam’s gloves that had the fingertips cut off, and followed them out. Downstairs, we discovered a tiny little café attached to the motel. It looked as if no one had mopped the floor or cleaned the windows in years, and certainly no one had painted the lime green walls in that long, but the grill shined like new and the air was flavored with the rich smell of bacon and eggs.
“Whatever you girls want,” Carlos said. “As usual.”
I ordered a toasted bagel with butter, and Sam did the same.
“Lots of butter,” she yelled at the grill guy, an ancient man with sparse whiskers. “I want a heart attack, serve it up,” she shouted in a deep voice, pounding on the counter. Several of the elderly people who populated the tables stopped their conversation to look her up and down. We took our food and exited. Carlos left a five on the counter and placed a cell phone call outside, standing with his light brown Timberland boots planted in the fresh foot of snow. Looking around, the area seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I thought I might have been in either the park or the café before. But when? How? As we walked back toward the stairs with our breakfast, I realized I was right.
“Duck,” Sam yelled. “Oh my God.” I looked around instead. Then I saw. Grandma, dressed in Ma’s old ankle-length bubble coat, clutching her tan purse in the crook of her arm, heading straight for the steps of the little café. Sam knew Grandma from her few visits to Brick’s apartment. She yanked me behind the corner of the motel building.