All this over a fake rose. I swear to Christ. Funniest thing was that the cops were out in force because Ludacris was playing the Roseland and they wanted to get their quota. I have the misfortune of being born white. Therefore, I got no surveillance. Comma. Dammit.All I wanted to do was go home. I hadn't eaten a damn thing since lunch. I have an interesting borderline form of diabetes known as hypoglycemia. When I'm in the shop, the older carpenters joke that I'm all right to work with as long as I get fed every half an hour.
That night, the post-shift glucose emergency was so bad that every half-full Coke bottle I saw in the gutter made me curse leaving the house with no money to hit a pop machine for a quick fix.
So I was walking back over the Hawthorne Bridge just after the bars started to close down. My foot kicked something, sounded like something fell out of my pocket.
I am stone blind without my glasses, I gotta tell you. The solder point on the left temple cracked when I was cutting a strip of patina copper up at Allied Cabinets on 199th that day. My other home. I punched out and got a pair of loaner frames, but they looked so god-awful Elton John I put a tinted safety shield in front of them and just did without after work.
Anyway, so I bent down to see what the sound was, and it was this rose, right? Cut off at the base, made out of silk or something. Had the fake water droplets and the whole bit. It was so funny looking I stuck it in the pocket of my work shirt offhandedly, not paying attention, and forgot about it.
Right away off the bridge I heard the yells down around Santorini's and that other little bar where all the big steroid freaks with gold chains and loot falling out of their Tommy Hilfiger assholes like to hang out on the corner after last call and make everybody else as miserable as they are.
At the time I thought nothing of it. I was dressed close enough to them, black slip-on boots and khakis and a nice gray work shirt I got from the off-rack at Mervyn's. Usually it's flannels and jeans for me, and Kurt Co-bang jokes every time someone is feeling their comic talent bubbling up.
Heh. I had changed in the back room and punched out, left my shop clothes there, and went out and did the same thing those fools were doing now, but at the Triple Nickel and slightly higher on the food chain.
But I walked right through the center of that swilled-up throng. Then this gigantic thing with pasty skin, a tiny little mustache that looked like he glued Daddy's shaving scum to his upper lip and called it good, mackin' the Fubu gear (and Italian, at that), said something loud to one of his boys. All of them laughed like the Uruk-hai in those Lord of the Rings movies.
Mustache Boy had a close-cropped high-and-tight haircut that made him look even more like an ape, if that was possible. I couldn't make head or tail of anything those goombah trolls said, thinking only of settling down to a frozen pizza hot out of the oven and maybe a beer or two over "The Re-Run of the King".
Mustache Boy hollered: "FAGGOT" as I was walking away. I looked down at the rose sticking out of my pocket like a boutonniere. I looked him in the eyes, threw it in the gutter and kept going.
Sound carries funny, downtown. Their voices got louder. One of them, off in the side-scenes, was making some proclamation in a very loud, screamy voice.
Mustache Boy rolled to his feet. They were mumbling back and forth together with that kind of half-speech, half-flock telepathy that told me they were all sheets to the wind. I started to get scared.
I can fight (if you count broken pool cues and cheap shots), but I'm not that big. And there were five of them. I hugged the wall of the parking garage, looking for a quick kitty-corner to dodge and slip across to ditch the whole setup.
I wasn't going out like that. Not me. Too much to do tomorrow. I scooted under the overhang of the parking garage and doubled back around. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I fished in my pocket for a Marlboro, pushing aside a folded AUTOCAD printout for some lesbian doctor's kitchen setup in Irvington. Solid Vermont marble, I thought madly. My fingers were sticky with birch stain. My vision was starting to get blurry.
I was trying to find my lighter when my knuckles locked. A tree-trunk arm was dragging me back into the shadows of Level One parking, towards the corner, around and to the other side of the elevator shaft. I felt the honed point of something cold against my neck.
"You scream 'n we'll fuckin' kill ya, bitch."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa—"
WHACK. Mustache Boy's buddy was larger, with a shaven head and a red goatee, wearing a black SECURITY shirt from some pub or another. The bouncer was all up in my face as Mustache Boy frog-marched me towards the elevator.
I could smell garlic, booze, and meat on his breath, all blended together in a fine spray. One of his incisors had a gold front. There were red laces in his sneakers.
I realized I was trying to remember all this to tell the cops. That pretty much said it all.
"You guys like it this way. Why you gotta be a little bitch about it? You like it rough? Huh?" WHAP.
I've had bongs that hit harder than him, but they'd gotten me by surprise in the lowest trough of a sugar-crash. I shouldn't have even been outside. Every drop of blood from my split lip hit the pavement in front of me as slowly and perfectly as a Roy Edgerton stroboscopic drop of milk.
"HSST—" Mustache Boy looked around.
Beyond the shadows, some homeless guy cruised a shopping cart by as loud as a parade.
"Never mind."
The bouncer cranked me full in the face. That time it definitely hurt. I saw a blue-white flash and felt hard pressure in the forepart of my sinuses.
They began dragging me further into the shadows. They were muttering back and forth. I don't think even they knew what they wanted. Then––
Nothing. Just a cold gust of wind.
Thump. There I was sitting on the concrete, brushing myself off.
I knew a kid, Ryan Jones, in grade school, who had petit mal epilepsy. When he had a seizure, he'd just come completely unwrapped, and sit there staring into space. The teachers knew he'd come out of it in a minute, or if he didn't, they'd get the School Nurse down there to look him over a bit.
I stood up and shook it out, wondering if Ryan and I had something in common.
Bouncer and Mustache Boy, you see, were gone, daddy, gone. I finally remembered I had my Leatherman and cracked Velcro with the blade up. A defeated, angry sound came out of me. I turned to––
To about forty-five degrees. And then I turned to ice.
The elevator behind me had been standing open the whole time. Leading to it were scuffmarks. They could have been from anything. But they weren't.
The elevator in that parking garage is faced in brick on the back, and a good job too. A lot of them are glass now, but I always liked the columnar look of the older ones, the way—
The way she looked no more than eighteen. If that. All black clothes and whiteface, wrapped in a shiny vinyl trench coat bigger than she was, with an Eddie Munster collar. The coat swept out behind her on the floor where she knelt at her work.
She turned around, kneeling there in the elevator, and wrinkled up her nose at me. Her eyes were the purest liquid blue, blue as the streaks in her bangs that hung in that china-oval face done over with some kind of white cover-up that had begun to streak off. The streaks in her makeup showed what looked like clear albino skin beneath, full of black veins.
A babybat. A kindergoth. But even from where I stood, I saw the ancient knowledge in her eyes, the terrible strength in her tiny frame. And Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the hunger on that face.
The bouncer had been brought down at a dead run. His head lay at an angle any carpenter could tell you was a clean break. A red-laced Fila sneaker lay sideways in the elevator. Everything perpendicular to her on the floor a torn mass of clothes and what looked like hamburger.
Her head was cocked. Her visage was bright with exertion, but in a different way, like a nova. She was so beautiful, even when her jaw dislocated and her lips pulled back. Yeah, even then. Some kind of mucous silk was working its way out of her hands. It had covered most of Mustache Boy. He wasn't going anywhere.
I saw her throat constricting and contracting, and knew that she could drink me under the table. Her small, delicate nostrils twitched like a coonhound's when she got full wind of me. Just before the elevator door closed, she stuck out her tongue and pronounced, "Yuck."
When I'm old and gray and full of sleep, I will still hear that one word as I'm drifting off for the last time, in her broken-wind chime voice glutted with the fresh kill. I must have started to say something.
"Shhhh." One black-nailed finger kissed her stained blue lips. There was no polish on the nail. It was just black, thick and peeling, hooked like an alley cat's claw.
DING
I knew that I'd never be able to go to therapy for this. But every time I get light-headed and cranky and have to eat something, I thank God for being born with bad blood.
