Can't Get There from Here

  But then another man started to come around and I didn’t see much of my mom. And then I had a little sister. And that was the way it went. There’d be a man around for a while, and then there’d be a new baby. And there were no more baths. Only trailers with showers sometimes. And always tons of laundry to do. Heaps of baby clothes and sheets and towels and blankets that smelled of pee and poo. And dishes to wash and baby bottles to clean and bathrooms to scrub.

  At night Mom would stumble in slurring her words and smelling like smoke, saying I was worthless and stupid and ugly and she wished she never had me. And then there’d be the stinging slap of a leather belt against the backs of my legs, or a pinch so hard it drew blood, and once, a burning-hot iron.

  Even then I stayed, like Tears, not knowing what else to do. But then, about a week after the iron, she hit me with a lamp and opened up my head. She told the nurse at the hospital that I fell down, but they took me to another room and asked if that was true and I said no. I told them what really happened, and after they stitched my head they put me in a home with other kids, and the next time I saw my mom she said she hated me and never wanted to see me again.

  Now, sitting in the bathtub, I cupped my hands together and raised some water over my head. But the water was only lukewarm and it made me shudder when it ran down my arms and back. I got out of the tub and realized that there were no towels. So I just stood there waiting and trembling a little, but nothing like the way I felt outside in the frigid cold. And when I was only damp I pulled on my new party clothes again and went back into the kitchen.

  I was sitting at the table when the fat guy came in. He was wearing a black jacket and slacks and a white T-shirt underneath. “You still here?” He seemed surprised. I had a feeling he forgot about me. He looked in the bathroom. “Hey, nice job. Thanks. Why don’t you come back again next week?”

  “I can’t stay?” I asked.

  “You kidding?” he said. “It’s bad enough I’m running an after-hours club. The cops come in and find a minor here, I’ll go to jail.”

  “But you said if I cleaned up I could stay as long as I wanted.”

  “You musta heard me wrong, kid. I said you could stay as long as you worked. No work, no stay. Like I said, come back in a week. I’ll have more for you to do by then.”

  He was lying. Another grown-up who used kids to get what they wanted. But there was nothing I could do, so I left and went outside. It was daylight. Morning. People carried paper cups of coffee and newspapers on their way to work. Their coats were partly unbuttoned, their scarves hung loose, and their gloves stuck out of pockets. It was warmer again.

  After those days and nights inside, I felt like walking. Didn’t know where I was going. Just got to a corner and went the way that felt best. Or if I’d been to that corner already, I went the other way. Then I stopped at a corner and didn’t go anywhere. People gave me looks. Maggot called them robots because they all got up in the morning and ate the same things for breakfast, then went off and did the same work all day, then came home and ate the same things for dinner and went to sleep. But they must have known that, too. Why didn’t it bother them? Or maybe the question was, why did it bother us?

  I was walking along the sidewalk when I saw Jewel sitting at a table by the window in a coffee shop, his chin propped in his hand. He was wearing a bulky olive-colored coat and his hair was in cornrows. He was staring down at the little table like he was all partied out forever.

  I tapped on the window. He raised his head and looked at me. The blank expression didn’t change. He put both hands on the table and pushed slowly, like he needed all his strength to get up.

  He came out of the coffee shop carrying his pink wig and other clothes in a wrinkled brown Macy’s paper bag. His eyes were still made up, but they were also red. His skin had a greenish tint, his jaw was lined with dark stubble. Looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “What’s okay?” he said.

  “I’m going back,” I said. “You want to come?”

  “Why not?” he said like he didn’t care.

  We went to a bus stop. A lot of people were waiting to take the bus to work. They were wearing clean clothes and had freshly washed faces and neat hair. Some carried canvas or leather shoulder bags or briefcases.

  A bus came. Jewel and I snuck on through the back doors where people usually got off. Inside, I looked toward the front. The driver was watching us in the rearview mirror. A second later the engine roared and the bus pulled away from the curb. The seats were all taken, so Jewel and me had to stand and hold onto a silver pole.

  The people on the bus stared at us. Jewel and I traded glances, like trying to tell each other that they were the strange ones, not us. But I looked in the bus window and saw our reflections. Two ragged, scrawny kids and a wrinkled brown paper bag with a bright pink wig sticking partway out of it.

  Who really were the strange ones?

  The bus stopped and some people got up from their seats. Jewel and I sat down. I heard a sob. Jewel was pressing his face into his hands. The people sitting across from us were watching him.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  Jewel shook and choked a little. He moaned sorrowfully, then coughed and sniffed and sobbed again as if a bolt of new agony had just surged through him. But it was not, I thought, physical pain that he felt. It was a pain from inside. The pain of this cold, hungry, dirty life where nobody cared whether you lived or died. Where you were not even a name. Not even a number. Just some flesh clinging to some bones. Waiting to eat or not eat. To sleep or not sleep. To live or not live.

  “What’s wrong, Jewel?” I asked again.

  “They don’t want me anymore,” Jewel sobbed.

  “Who?”

  He raised his head from his hands. His eyes were red and his cheeks were streaked with tears. “The ones who pay for everything. They say I’m too old. Once you start to shave, once you get some hair on your chest, they don’t want you anymore. What am I going to do?”

  “Go home.”

  Jewel blinked and fresh tears ran out of his eyes and down his cheeks. “Real home? I can’t. My father hates me. My mother says she loves me but that I’m sick and I need help. I don’t need help. I just need someone who’ll love and take care of me.”

  Dream on, I thought.

  “Where’s 2Moro?” I asked.

  “Who knows? She’s a pretty girl. There’ll always be men who’ll want her.” Jewel wiped his eyes with the sleeve of the olive coat, smearing the mascara. The bus stopped. We got off and walked along the sidewalk, past the Good Life and Piss Alley to the empty building. The black metal front door was open and construction workers wearing yellow hardhats were up on the scaffolding. Two workers came through the front door with the bedbug mattress and threw it into the Dumpster. On the second floor a woman wearing a blue hardhat came to the window and tipped a white plastic bucket into a wooden chute. Candles and makeup and clothes slid down the shoot and into the Dumpster.

  We weren’t living there anymore.

  We walked to the park. The trees were dark and the branches bare except for shreds of plastic bags here and there. The gray squirrels wore thick winter coats. Maggot was sitting at one of the concrete tables playing chess with an old man with a white beard. He and the old man were bundled up in coats and hats and gloves.

  “Maggot?” I said.

  “Hold on,” he said and stared at the chess pieces for a long time. Jewel and me and the old man waited. Maggot moved a piece. The old man frowned and swore under his breath. Maggot turned to Jewel and me.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Where’d everyone go?” Jewel asked.

  “Under the bridge,” Maggot said.

  Jewel and me left the park. In the distance we could see the Brooklyn Bridge, rising up from the streets below. Gray icicles hung from the sides, and the bridge got taller and taller until it was as high as a building. We could hear the roar o
f the cars racing above. The smell of exhaust was everywhere.

  We got to the corner. A few blocks away, down where the bridge started to go over the river, a dull blue tarp was tied to the bridge wall. We kept walking until we got to a chain-link fence. The blue tarp was on the other side. Jewel found a hole in the fence and we went through. A dog began to bark and OG pulled a corner of the tarp back and looked out at us.

  “Lovely digs, OG,” Jewel said.

  Without a word, OG let the corner of the tarp fall. I bent down and crawled inside. It was like being in a tent. Somewhere OG found a small cooking stove. He had some plastic milk containers filled with water, some ramen noodle packages, and some candles. Pest lay on his tummy and gnawed on a bone. Someone was curled up in a dirty, orange sleeping bag. I looked closer and saw strands of blond hair over the collar of a black leather jacket. It was Rainbow!

  Jewel crawled in and looked around with a sour expression. “Well, at least it’s out of the rain and snow,” he said.

  I sat down near Rainbow and waited for her to wake up. Cars roared overhead. I could feel the vibrations through the bridge wall and listened to the endless whine of the engines and the horns and the occasional screech of tires. The smell of car exhaust was heavy in the air. The tarp was open on the side that faced the river, and seagulls swooped low over the greenish water. White waves broke against the bow of a tugboat with a tall red smokestack as it slowly pulled a barge.

  Rainbow stirred. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Hey.” She yawned.

  “Hey.” I felt a smile on my lips. I was so happy to see her.

  She stretched. The blue and white hospital tags were still on her wrists. “Where you been?”

  “Hangin’ out,” I said. “How about you?”

  She shrugged.

  “What happened with that guy at the club?” I asked.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “The one with the shaved head who said you belonged to him.”

  Rainbow shook her head slowly. “I left. What was he going to do? Tell me I couldn’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “I waited until he was asleep. Then, good-bye. It ain’t like he’ll ever find me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Angel Perez, AKA 2Moro, born in West New York, New Jersey. Mother died of AIDS, Angel age four. Father unknown. Lived with grandmother, later with aunt. Chronic sexual and physical abuse by aunt’s boyfriend. Age 8, diagnosed with HIV illness. Frequently absent from school. Age 11, diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. Sent to foster care family. Rejected by foster care program due to precocious sexual abuse of foster siblings. Remanded to juvenile correction facility. Age 12, released. Age 13-14, multiple arrests, loitering, prostitution, possession of narcotics, resisting arrest. Last known address, New York City. Dead at the age of 15. Cause of deaths strangulation.

  That night an icy wind blew the tarp down. OG put it back up, but a few minutes later it fell down again. We crawled close together and pulled the tarp over us like an extra blanket. Under it we lay on sheets of cardboard, in nests of rags and newspapers and plastic bags. I hid my face in the darkness of my cocoon to escape the bitter wind that blew dirt and newspapers in circles around us. Our faces and hands and hair were caked with soot and dirt.

  The wind slowed to a breeze in the morning. I poked my head out from under my covers. Sometime during the night Maggot showed up and was now sharing the orange sleeping bag with Rainbow. They lay with their backs to each other. He was reading a newspaper. Jewel was nestled in a large pile of plastic bags and newspapers and rags.

  I had my arms around Pest so that only his head stuck out. The little dog felt warm, and with his brown head so close, my nose was filled with his dog smell. Burning gurgles in my stomach reminded me that it was empty, but it was too cold to get up and go to the church for breakfast or beg for money.

  Pest barked. I saw OG hurrying across the road during a break in the traffic. In one hand he carried a dirty green plastic pail with a squeegee sticking out of it. Pest squirmed out of my arms and ran toward him. OG had tied a rope around Pest’s neck to keep him from running in front of the cars, but Pest was too young and dumb to understand. He ran until the rope got taut and snapped him back. Then he pulled at it, crying and barking.

  OG dropped the bucket. It tipped over and the squeegee fell out, followed by a small puddle of brownish slush. “Hey, Pest.” He picked up his puppy and gave him a hug. Pest happily licked OG’s dirty face, his tail wagging like crazy.

  Maggot looked up from the newspaper. “Get any money?”

  OG shook his head. “Water started to freeze.”

  “Anyone heard from 2Moro?” Jewel asked.

  “Probably hooked up with a sugar daddy,” Rainbow said with a yawn.

  “I heard a bunch of kids went down to Mardi Gras,” added OG. “Maybe she went, too.”

  “She would have told me,” Jewel said. He sat up in his jumble of rags and newspapers, his jaw covered with dark stubble, his cornrows loose and ratty, sprouting tufts of brown hair. He started to rock back and forth, staring at the greenish brown river. The rest of us stayed huddled in our nests.

  No one did much of anything except try to stay warm. Maggot flattened out the crumpled sheets of newspaper that made up our bedding and read through them. After a while he tore off a corner of the newspaper and nudged Rainbow. She read it.

  I heard Maggot whisper, “It’s her.”

  “What’s it say?” I asked softly.

  Maggot and Rainbow traded a look. Maggot shrugged. Rainbow motioned for me to crawl close to her. She put her lips right next to my ear and read in a whisper: “The headline says, Teenage Girl’s Body Found in Park. The body of an unidentified female teenager was found yesterday in a wooded area near the FDR Drive. A jogger reported the discovery to the police, who said the body was naked from the waist down and wearing a red-and-orange patchwork jacket.’”

  I twisted my head around until my eyes met Rainbow’s. She pressed a finger to her cracked lips and pointed at Jewel, who sat rocking nearby. Then she started to read again, “‘The cause of death could not be determined, although police said it appeared she had been strangled. The body was sent to the Medical Examiner. Police described the victim as Hispanic, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, medium height, slim, with short dyed red hair and a black tattoo around her neck.’”

  It had to be 2Moro. The jacket, the hair, the tattoo. I looked at Rainbow again. She nodded sadly like she agreed with what I was thinking. Maggot was already reading another page of newspaper. I looked at Jewel, rocking back and forth, muttering to himself.

  “Don’t say nothing,” Rainbow whispered in my ear. “It’s too late now.”

  The breeze blew a speck of grit into my eye, and I retreated into the darkness of my nest, blinking to make it go away. My stomach ached something awful. I thought about Tompkins Square Park and the little squirrel that kept climbing the trees, crying so mournfully. I needed to do something to get my mind off my stomach, so I started to tear the newspaper story about 2Moro into little pieces. Ripped off a little shred at a time and dropped it into a pile. Then the breeze came and swept the little pieces away. 2Moro blew away with the wind.

  Minutes passed. Or maybe they were hours. Maggot smoked the butt of a cigarette someone flicked out of a car. Rainbow got up and went away, then came back again. The shreds of 2Moro’s newspaper story scattered in the breeze. Some got pushed toward the river, where the wind made ripples across the muddy green water.

  Jewel pushed himself up. “I’m hungry. It’s freezing. This place is so horrid. The absolute pits. How can any of you live here?”

  No one answered. He was right. This was the worst place yet. Worse than the empty building. Worse than the park. Worse than a hard kitchen floor. I closed my eyes and pretended I wasn’t there. I was floating in the air like a particle of dust, invisible and unnoticed. Except when I passed through a bright shaft of light. Then I glowed before disappearing again.


  “Aren’t you hungry?” Jewel asked.

  Everyone probably was. But hunger was just one more sensation. Like shivering. And dizziness. And itching. And knowing you were nothing.

  “And no one has any money?” Jewel sounded disgusted.

  “Do you?” Maggot asked.

  “No, but I know where to get some.” Jewel bent his head down and started undoing the cornrows. He shook his brown hair out. It was kinky and ragged. “Rainbow, darling, would you make me up?”

  Rainbow crawled out of the sleeping bag and made Jewel up. Only it was so cold her hands shook and the makeup wouldn’t go on right. She tried to fix Jewel’s mascara, eye shadow, add blush to his cheeks, and paint his lips red. Everything got smeared. But there was no mirror, so Jewel couldn’t see. He rummaged through his wrinkled Macy’s bag, yanking out clothes, pulling on stockings and a red short skirt and a pair of women’s shoes with straps. Under the stockings and short skirt his legs were long and thin. The shoes had thick heels and he walked heavily in them, clomping around like a horse pulling a wagon. He pulled on a short brown-and-white jacket, a patchwork of fake leather and fake fur. Sliding his slender hands behind his neck, he flipped the hair out over the shoulders of the fur jacket. Then spun around on the toes of the shoes.

  “How do I look, Maybe?”

  The makeup was smudged and his clothes were wrinkled and frayed. Sometimes Jewel could look like a girl. But today he looked like a boy trying to be a girl. Or even worse, like a clown.

  “Very pretty,” I lied.

  Jewel smiled. He had red lipstick on his teeth. But it wouldn’t matter.

  “I’m on my way to a better life. Ta ta.” He gaily swung his little black bag and headed across the street.

  “Can’t get there from here,” OG muttered.

  Rainbow crawled back into the sleeping bag with Maggot. OG coughed and spit up something red. Seagulls circled in the air above the dirty green river. A siren passed on the bridge overhead.