Blog

Lo! Yet another mucky wave of 1970s New York nostalgia is quick approaching, ready to dump its scummy self upon our stolidly sleek shores. The next few months will see the advent of Baz Luhrmann’s Empire prequel detailing the birth of hip-hop, along with the release of Garth Risk Hallberg’s 1,000-page, ‘70s-inspired novel, City on Fire. These celebrations of sleazological cool are cyclical, like the coming of winter and the banging of the pipes in my old apartment on St. Marks Place. Maybe it is perverse to yearn for the days when Daniel Rakowitz chopped up his Swiss girlfriend and made her into a stew that, like a demented Florence Nightingale, he fed to the homeless people camped out in Tompkins Square Park. But it makes for a better read than a half-dozen food blogs. The mean-street memory of the 1970s adheres to the collective big-city conscious like Proustian poo wedged in the waffle soles of your Chuck Taylors when they were still $19 at Vim’s; you didn’t even actually have to be present to be haunted by the time. And yet the nostalgists, even those of us who lived through it, have a habit of getting the decade wrong.

The ‘70s are a Jekyll-and-Hyde of New York eras. On one hand we fear the terrors of the time, the junkies on the fire escape scheming to steal a $50 rabbit-ear TV, the return of jazz fusion. After the 2008 crash there were cries that the Bad Old Days were coming around again, as if the malfeasance of Wall Street ganefs would instantly cause armies of crum bums selling counterfeit Tuinals and Valiums — “Ts and Vs” was the hawker cry — to rise from the manicured shrubbery of Union Square Park. The onset of De Blasio Time has rewound the harbinger chorus. As the bullets fly in Staten Island, the mayor stays in his Park Slope gym squat-thrusting, the tabs scream. It is only a matter of time before Manhattan again falls off the edge of the earth at 96th Street (for white people, anyway) and Gerald Ford tells the city to drop dead.

On the other hand, few times in recent New York history have been so longed for, so endlessly discussed. (“Blah Blah Blah New York in the Seventies” went a recent headline on the Awl.) The building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the bright lights of Broadway, Bird and Monk on 52nd Street — how could any of that dry-bone history hold a candle to the moment Afrika Bambaataa started those turntables spinning in the schoolyards of the burning Bronx? Was genius ever so accessible as when Dee Dee Ramone vomited on your pant leg on the Bowery sidewalk in front of CBGB? Sure, you could get killed on the LL, the EE, the RR, or some other mystery train, but at least the last thing you’d see would be a museum-quality Futura 2000 full-car graffiti, so where’s the bitch in that? The 1970s!  That was New York when it was real, when rents were cheap, the cabbies were white, and you didn’t really have to know how to play to be a star, or so the plotline goes. 

Back in that particular day, punk friends made fun of hippies, hair down to their butts well into their 20s. That wouldn’t happen to them, the next generation of cool kids declared. Raised on ten hours of TV a day, they were hard-bitten realists from the “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” school; they would not live long enough to engage in phony nostalgia for the scruffiness of their youth. Yet here they are, nearly 40 years later, still in their leather jackets and pointy little boots, no different than doo-wop singers stuffed into iridescent jumpsuits doing that one number that makes everyone remember who they once were.

A few weeks ago the Times ran a feature that rounded up a fair smattering of the official ‘70s suspects — Philip Glass, Lucas Samaras, David Johansen, DJ Kool Herc, Fran Lebowitz, etc. — for a waxworks group shot. “They Made New York” was the headline. Guess Nicky Barnes, David Berkowitz, Meade Esposito, and the rest canceled at the last moment. The piece ran in the fashion supplement T, which was more on the money. “Blank Generation” is a great song, but even back in 1975 the general consensus was Richard Hell’s nom de icon was a tad on the nose.

This is not to say that no one who didn’t spear a rat with the business end of a police lock pole can really claim to have experienced New York in the 1970s. But the standard history leaves out a lot. The underground disco movement during the early part of the decade, vast hidden parties in the wasteland sections of town where blacks, whites, gays, and straights came together to dance to the magical segues of David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, and the rest, is consistently written out of ‘70s mythmaking (though the moneyed glamour of Studio 54 makes it in). In retrospect, that sort of hothouse integrationism didn’t have a chance in hell against the steamrolling macho identity politics of the “disco sucks” white punkers, the hardening edge of rap, or wholly necessary feminism.

Everyone chooses to remember what they want to remember. At this stage, however, attempts to crush New York in the 1970s into a few however-heroic art and politic tropes pretty much boils down to reductionist product-mongering. The picture is far bigger than that. The fact is what usually falls under the rubric of New York–in-the-1970s was really a multi-decade project that began in earnest during the 1964 Harlem riots, which put white flight into high gear. The period lasted until the Crown Heights riots in 1991, which led to the election of Rudolph Giuliani in 1993. In Roman centurion mode, Caesar Rudy sent his cop legions to vanquish the dark-hued Visigoths and reclaim territory for the throne. His success set the stage for the Bloomberg imperium, during which the magic of capital would extend the investment-safe realm to deep Brooklyn and even uncharted Queens, thereby creating the New York we find ourselves living in today. 

Change is the genius of the city, what has always made New York what it is. But the whiplash rezoning of more than 40 percent of the five boroughs during Bloomberg’s tenure has produced a generational-based moral crisis. Longtime residents no longer feel the joy of the ever-altering landscape, the rapid clip of cosmopolitan turnover that creates continuity. They walk about gaslighted, as if suddenly set down in a drug dealer’s apartment, with everything new and shiny, bought at the same time.  

I remember one time, back in the late 1970s, when I went to interview Carl Weisbrod, now chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and a key player in every mayoral administration back to John Lindsay. At the time Weisbrod was head of a committee to revamp Times Square, which, with its array of porn stores and sticky-floored movie houses, could rightly be called the capital of the New York 1970s. Weisbrod had an office in the Art Deco McGraw-Hill Building, then the tallest (and newest) in the area. As we stood looking out the 30th-story window, Weisbrod told me that no new structure had been built west of Sixth Avenue in decades. In the city of skyscrapers this was a shocking fact. “We will change that,” the future head of the Planning Commission told me. In 1979, for anyone walking past the Port Authority Bus Station it was impossible to imagine the extent to which Weisbrod would be right about that, and how fast it would happen once it began.

In this, I am far from blameless. I’m not pulling rank when I say I lived on St. Marks Place from 1974 to 1992 (roughly the entire ‘70s) in a fifth-floor walk-up with no sink in the bathroom, which works out to 19 years of teeth-brushing in the kitchen sink. What could you expect for $168 a month? When it was time to go, we went. Someone else could brush their teeth in the kitchen sink. I had no idea the house I bought in Park Slope would increase in value several times over in the two and half decades I have owned it. It is one more double-edged sword; as our real-estate values go up, the neighborhood gets duller in direct proportion. 

Therein lies the problem, the dilemma of the accidental gentry. It was comforting to know that my 5-year-old daughter would likely never again find a loaded .38 pistol in the bushes at Tompkins Square like she did while attending day care at Tenth Street Tots. By moving out of the neighborhood we were following a time-honored immigrant path, under the impression we were doing the right thing for our family. Now that same daughter, in her late 20s, resides in Chicago. She can’t afford to live a normal life in the city of her birth. My son moved to Denver for many of the same reasons. They like these places, the lake, the mountains, the legal pot, but they miss the city like we miss them.

My kids are far from alone in this situation, of course. All the time you hear that same old saw — that New York is dead, that the last good times have been sucked out of the place by people like me. Me, Donald Trump, and who knows how many globalist rich people willing to plunk down $90 million for a pad they will never live in.

It is said that in times of discontent, a society yearns for the last era of perceived sanity. ISIS desires the seventh century; New Yorkers dream of the ‘70s. My heart goes out to those who think they missed the last good time to be young in the place of their dreams. It is hard to begrudge longing for rent stabilization. But what are you going to do? If you want to see the Talking Heads at CBGB with four people in the audience (rather than at some suburban shed like you did) or get your car broken into while attending a Cold Crush show at Harlem World in 1981, that ship has sailed. Maybe Baz Luhrmann will successfully channel those evenings for the born-too-late, just as Clint Eastwood once got Forest Whitaker to impersonate Charlie Parker for those of us who missed sitting at the bar at the Three Deuces. But I doubt it. During the real 1970s the dumbest thing any would-be cool kid could do was sit around Kettle of Fish hoping some long-toothed beatnik like Kerouac and William Burroughs would stumble through the door to be venerated. No matter what it says in the New York Times, the chances of you imbibing the egalitarian synergy of high and low culture with Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club were pretty slim to begin with. Plus, believe me, you didn’t really want to be walking down Pitt Street when that guy took the knife off his belt.   

This doesn’t mean all is lost, that the current-era would-be New Yorker is consigned to a life of 12 hours of nonunion work in a cubicle and cramming into a $2,700 three-bedroom in a shit section of Bushwick with the M train right outside the window. There’s plenty of New York out there, even if someone doesn’t give you a $2 million advance to write City on Fire. The city is actually more interesting than ever out at the margins. 

The other day I was in an old Italian social club on Stillwell Avenue waiting for my front end to be aligned by Louie at Hilna Tires. A woman from Tbilisi, Georgia, was instructing another employee, a lady from Tajikistan, how to make steamed milk the way the octogenarian Sicilians in the place like it. A Caribbean character in a rimmed-out Jeep was stopped in front, blasting some unknown dance-hall tune. The old guys covered their ears, but the women liked it and started dancing. When the light changed everything returned to normal. The people in the coffee shop, alerted to the scenario, shrugged. It was New York in 2015, nothing more or less. If you like that sort of thing, there’s plenty of it still around.

My brother is over, as always after his Tuesday night AA. I open my apartment door as soon as he buzzes, turn back to the salmon I’m poaching in a cheap saucepan on the stove. My brother doesn’t love salmon. He loves ice cream. We joke about this. “I smell salmon,” he says when he shuffles in the door, blue eyes smiling, backward Whole Foods baseball cap on his head. “Are you practicing your co-dependence on me again?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m trying to fix you until you’re a copy of me! Speaking of me, how does my…?”

“It looks fine,” he says.

“…hair look?” I finish.

“But you’re too skinny. I bought us some ice cream.” He pulls the tub out of the Key Food bag, a generic Vanilla Chocolate Chip, which I know he bought us with his food stamps.

“Just try the yogurt lemon sauce,” I say when we are seated on my Ikea sofa, facing my little TV. My brother and I have three TV shows every Tuesday, Law and Order, CSI and Lost, my brother’s favorite. After Lost, he has to rush to the subway to make his curfew at the three-quarter house in Flatbush. On Thursdays, we have The Office, and My Name is Earl.

My brother obediently dips his fork into the sauce on his plate, flakes off a sliver of salmon. “Mm!” he says with surprise, and eats, even though I know he is mostly waiting for ice cream.

“Look at these ingredients!” I say, peering at the carton when it’s time for dessert. “Guar gum! What’s guar gum?”

I feel ashamed when he blushes. “At least it’s not vodka,” he points out.

My brother has been in New York for seven years. I sent him a plane ticket when I could no longer understand a word he said, usually sobbing, over the pay phone outside the SRO where he was living then, in the same city as our father. When he wove toward me down the airport corridor from the airplane, led by his distended belly, I knew my brother was a hero. He had boarded the plane. From the airport, almost dead, it was to the hospital for emergency detox for a week, then to the fold-out couch I had waiting in my apartment, two days sober, the bar, three weeks sober, the bar, one month sober, the bar, rehab!, six weeks sober, the bar, another rehab, eight months sober!, the bar, kicked him out of my apartment on advice that letting him stay longer could enable him to drink but stayed his best friend, a half way house, three months sober, relapse and kicked out of half-way house, sleeping under the BQE for weeks, almost dead again, I took the subway to Brooklyn and said to him in a diner “tomorrow is still always a new day,” then nothing for weeks until I got his letter from a longer rehab, and now, here in my apartment, on his twice weekly pass from the three-quarter house in Flatbush, eating salmon on my sofa, just back from his favorite East Village AA.

“This is for you,” my brother had said to me, the week before. And he’d handed me his “two year chip,” for that long sober in AA.

“No,” I had said, dutifully remembering my AlAnon. “You earned it. It’s yours, not mine.”

He looked hurt. “I can get another one when I announce it at my other meeting. I want you to have it.”

“Well, okay then,” I said. And my eyes filled as I squeezed the smooth wood disk in my palm.

Tonight I can’t stop my rant about guar gum, until finally I Google “guar gum,” to prove how bad it is. It turns out, though, according to numerous websites, that guar gum is a wholesome, non-harmful ingredient.

“See?” is all my brother says. “See? Mm!” He eats another spoonful of ice cream while I blush.

“Dad loves ice cream too,” my brother says. He fingers his mustache, an exact replica of our father’s, and I rotate my ankle in irritation.

“See the new pictures I put up?” I wave my hand at my wall, the photos of me and my brother, as kids, tots, teenagers, some at our mom’s in California, some at our dad’s in the midwest, some as adults in New York.

“Nice,” my brother says. “I’m a star!”

“Do you ever think about it?” I ask. “How we would visit Dad and take all those pictures of all of them with my little Kodak Instamatic, and then the next visit none of the pictures of you or me would be on their wall, only the ones we took of them without us?”

“Yeah,” my brother says. “I think about it. Just not as much as you do.” He scoops another bite of ice cream. “Dad loves us. It’s just that she…”

“I know,” I say. I do. Our dad always cried, tears sliding into his mustache, when we hugged goodbye after our visits, which our mother always insisted be as short as possible.

I used to think the missing pictures meant my brother and I had no place we belonged, no power. It took years to understand that it was the opposite. Our place had been first; it was that that she couldn’t stand.

Our father is a writer who went to the famous writing school in Iowa. We lived together there as a family.  Then he had an affair with the wife of another writer. This wife-swapping was so common, almost mandatory, among the writers, that it was the subject of a well known short story by one of the father-writers of the era, about how the fathers didn’t live there anymore. After my mother divorced him, our father married the wife of his writer-friend, and when we visited, we found our father surrounded by a chorus of older children, calling him “Dad,” and two toddler girls. Once in a while a photo of us would pop up on their wall, but it rarely stayed there long, no matter how many pictures of ourselves my brother and I presented.

There was an exception, the high school years when my brother and I had both moved there from our mom’s. Then our faces nested cozily in the frames with the others. Until some fight over my brother’s college tuition, when I sided with my mother, who, after all, did not live on a trust like our father. It was then that our photos disappeared again, never to return to their walls. It’s not that I want my brother to blame our father, exactly, since our stepmother controlled the home decorating as well as the finances. I just want him to stop idolizing our father quite so much, which I suspect annoys even our father, like a roving spotlight he can’t dodge.

“It’s in the past,” my brother says. “We don’t live there anymore. We live here now.”

He shuffles to the fridge, pauses at a photo under a magnet on the door, our half-sister’s daughters, two blond nieces, the card without a note she sends every Christmas.  “How is she?” he asks.

“Who knows,” I say. “She never returns my calls. I always think we’re not in her life, then I get the annual card.”

“Now now,” he says. “No need for a thesis.” He opens the freezer. “Ah,” he says. “More guar gum?”

 

“How’s Whole Foods?” I ask my brother while we walk toward the subway he needs to catch to make his curfew.

“This one guy is mean to me,” he confesses. “He keeps saying I’m not cleaning enough. And he’s not even in Prepared Foods! He’s in the Meats Department!”

“Maybe you should mention it to the supervisor?”

“No!” my brother barks. “That would make it worse.”

“Aren’t they promoting you anyway?”

“I’m not sure I want that.”

“But…” I force myself to stop talking. This is a conversation for his sponsor, not me. My brother will only feel ashamed if I talk, the big sister with the multiple full-ride-scholarshipped ivy league degrees.

“Sorry!” My brother waves a waft of his cigarette smoke away as we wait for the light. He always tries to walk downwind from me so I don’t breathe it. But sometimes the breeze shifts.

I try not to sound rushed when we reach the Delancey station and my brother lingers. “Remember how Dad used to say ‘Later’ instead of Goodbye?” he asks.

“Don’t miss your curfew,” I say, then I try not to, but I look away as slight hurt tugs downward on the corners of my brother’s eyes. He grins, imitation of our father, lifts his eyebrows, and attempts to meet my darting gaze.

“Later!” I shout at the back of his baseball cap, sinking slowly down the station stairs. Then, though I tell myself I have it all in perspective as sport, I half-run home, to see if my latest spark, this ridiculous Boy, has emailed.

 

I met The Boy in my Twelve Step Group, AlAnon, for people with alcoholics in their lives. When he slunk into our Sunday meeting wearing a hoody over a visor, a feather earring, and more tattoos than clothes, I recognized him from the East Village dance clubs, since I love to dance. He smiled sideways, and after the meeting asked for my number. Despite, or maybe because of, the red flags all over him, I found myself texting him. As is no doubt not surprising from the cagey outfit, there were immediate issues with The Boy. His denying the flirtation when I called him on it, then texting me all night long, in blatant contradiction of his own denial. There was the confession I made to him when we met for coffee (I arrived first and bought my own), that it was hard to let men buy me things, something to do with my father, only slipping family dollars to my brother or me behind my stepmother’s back. And how, despite this heartfelt confession, in our meeting the next Sunday, The Boy raised his hand and launched into a recital of seeing a beautiful seventeen year old at a diner, and taking the check for her lentil soup.

“Please,” my funniest friend had said, over our usual coffee in the Ukranian diner after the meeting. “Lentil soup? Big spender! And seventeen? What’s he gonna do, take her to the prom?”

The Boy started chatting me up after meetings, mentioned his gig last night at a nearby club. I danced near the stage while The Boy belted out suggestive lyrics I pretended not to hear were off-key, and took off his shirt to reveal a tattoo-covered chest for the crowd. After his set, while I was still dancing to the DJ, The Boy tapped me on the shoulder and invited me home.

 Although “invited” is too strong a word. The Boy told me he had to drive instruments somewhere, so he’d meet me at his place.  As I walked alone up Clinton toward The Boy’s apartment, came the first snow of winter, the soft white gauze spreading over the concrete, ironically warming the air. I unzipped my long down coat, turned on Third Street and passed my own apartment building, where I knew my brother would be the next night, as always after his Tuesday night AA.

When I arrived at The Boy’s door, after a cursory, “How are you? Take your coat?” The Boy barked a command, “Get in there!” I had to force myself not to laugh. In our flirtations, I had confessed fantasies to The Boy, which apparently he was taking quite literally.

I could hear the strain in The Boy’s voice, trying to force his tone low, because he thought I would like it, because, of course, The Boy was not as suave as I had pretended to believe, and as the plethora of tattoos advertised. “Get on the bed!” he yelled. I dived onto the mattress and he clumsily yanked up my skirt and started awkwardly, non-rhythmically, spanking me.

Quickly it became clear that The Boy was afraid to show affection, to incorporate the fantasy into foreplay, letting just the hint of it enter, say by a barely whispered ambiguous command at the right moment. Apparently The Boy was not so gender-non-biased as his androgynous rock-star outfit promised, and he took the fantasy so literally, that he thought I did not, in fact, need normal affection. I tried to hide my lack of arousal. The Boy picked up on this and decided this meant he should whack me harder. “Let’s get rid of this skirt!” he barked, the loud bravado over the hesitation in his voice reminiscent of the visor usually obscuring his face.

And recalling the scene did, bizarrely, arouse me the next day. I knew the Boy was a boy, but I just wanted it, the game, the temporary forgetting. So after leaving my brother at the Delancey station, I raced through the crowd on First Avenue, on my way home to see if the Boy had emailed.

 

“Boys just like the conquest,” my brother says, during one of The Boy’s frequent breaks from me. He finishes the last of his ice cream (“mm…”), puts down his spoon, and leans back in my sofa.  My Name is Earl has ended, and we are waiting for The Office to begin. “Then they’re over it.  Why don’t you play with children your own age? Like my sponsor, for example…” My brother shoots me a sideways look, then sighs when I glance at my cell phone, to see if The Boy has sent a text.

“He isn’t even a real musician,” my brother mumbles, trying to regain my attention while I scan my phone. “Just a poser.” My brother went to music college where he played guitar, real guitar, the notes so soulful people had to look away. He doesn’t have money for a guitar anymore right now. But he hopes to start again, when he can.

“It’s like you’re in graduate school and The Boy is in nursery school,” says my savviest friend, over after-meeting coffee. “But you know that. Why do you act like you forget? Publish those stories, the ones about your brother, and find an equal.” There is a pause and she looks right at me. “WHY do you forget?” she says again. “Why?”

“What I want to know,” says my funniest friend, clanking her cup down on the saucer. “Is when he is going to buy you some lentil soup.”

 

The snow hides everything, then melts. And my brother is chewing a lot of minty gum. I try not to smell his breath underneath it when he shuffles through my door, try not to remember what he himself told me once, “People relapse months before they relapse.” He starts coming earlier on Tuesdays, saying he would have missed most of his meeting anyway, they made him stay late at Whole Foods.

“And how is Whole Foods?” I finally ask, trying to keep the worry from my voice.

“That big guy always comes into the cooler when I’m in there alone. He says I should clean better, why can’t I learn.”

“But he’s not your boss!” My brother is five foot four inches. I’m trying not to yell. “Anyway,” I lower my voice. “That will be better when you’re promoted. When’s that review thing happening?”

“I postponed it again,” he says. “I’m not ready yet. I don’t know if I want it, telling other people what to do. People hate people with power.”

“But…”

“Lost is starting,” he says. “And this is a really important episode.” He sits back on my sofa.

 

My brother walks more slowly than usual to the subway that night, pauses outside the convenience store on my corner to light a cigarette, cups his hand around the plastic lighter to block the wind. Click click click until it catches and lights.

He takes a long drag, then strokes his mustache, before he starts slowly shuffling down the sidewalk again.

“Curfew get extended?” I ask, as casually as possible, when we approach the wide intersection at Houston.

“The funding got cut and they let in these ex-cons. Some of them use there. One guy, Charlie, deals out the window at night. So no one’s really watching my curfew anymore.”

My legs turn to spaghetti strands and my rain boot starts to slide on a patch of slush. My brother catches my arm. “You need to eat more,” he says. “I worry about you, you know.”

 

When my brother doesn’t show up for TV that Thursday, and his cell phone goes to voicemail, and the next day Whole Foods says he’s not there, he called in sick, the person I call with my hysterics is The Boy. It’s not that I don’t remember nursery school verses graduate school, not that I don’t remember that I’ve had fifteen years of meetings to The Boy’s barely one. But I want to forget about graduate school right now, all those crisp-shirted people who didn’t know how to dance casting dirty looks in the library at the slightest giggle or cell phone peep.

“I hope it’s okay I’m calling,” I say, overly demure, when The Boy answers.

There’s a pause. “Of course,” he says. You’ve talked in the meetings about how it’s easier for you to do the Steps than ask for help.”

I tell him how it’s always been just my brother and me, and how his skin is so thin I’ve always been able to see right through it to his trembling heart.

The Boy says some supportive, although not particularly astute things, like, “that’s just an illusion, of course he has skin!”

I pretend not to notice. The comfort I feel is not about The Boy’s words.

 

That Monday, as I’m coming home from editing work at the library, approaching my corner, my brother’s backward baseball hat and mustache zoom into focus, and there he is, reeling. I stop.

“What happened?” I say.

“There’s no hope,” he spews. “I hab no place to go!” He catches his balance on the arm of the wooden bench outside the convenience store.

“There are always options.” I force myself to remember the AlAnon advice not to take him in, since that could help him drink. “Your sponsor knows better than me. Here’s his number and a quarter. I love you. I have faith.”

I walk quickly away before he can slur out an argument. Back in my apartment alone, I call The Boy. The sound of his bravado fills the empty space.

 

That Sunday, I raise my hand and report on my brother and how terrified I am. Gasps vibrate through the room. Some of them go to both kinds of meetings and know my brother from AA, others know him from seeing us walking around the East Village together while my brother holds his cigarette downwind, and the rest have heard so much about my brother for years, it’s as if they know him too. “It’s hard for me, but I’m having to use the phone and call people. Especially one person.”

Across the circle from me, The Boy’s tattooed chest inflates.

 

All summer my brother is on the corner almost every time I walk by. He is sitting on the bench outside the convenience store in his backward baseball hat, holding a can in a paper bag. He is reeling near the garbage can. He is curled up on his side, just as he slept as a child, except now he is asleep in the lobby of my block’s Citibank ATM.

“How do you still have money to drink?” I ask him.

“Dad wires me. Hesshh only tryin to help.”

I’m about to yell, but I stop. “That counselor from Whole Foods called,” I say. “You can have your job back after treatment if you call soon. Your house called. They’re saving your stuff in the basement in case you come back. Your sponsor called. He’ll go with you to detox, whenever you’re ready.”

His pupils expand like lakes of blue fear at the words, “Whole Foods,” “your house,” “detox.”

“I have faith in you,” I say, convincingly. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he always says, his voice rising at the end like a warning.

I walk right home and email my father. I know he can’t help sending the money, anymore than my brother can help drinking with it. My brother’s drinking eases my father’s guilt, even as it increases it. Now the spotlight is on what my brother does, not what my father doesn’t. But more guilt from me would only add to the spiral.

“Please Stop Sending My Brother Cash While He’s On The Street!” is all I say, capitalizing each word.

 

It’s mid-August, humidity weighing on our heads like a drenched sponge, and my brother is no longer on the corner. I approach and see someone slumped on the bench, but as I near the slump it turns into a teenager in a different kind of hat, not my brother.

A week, then another, passes, and no one hears from my brother or knows where he is.

An AA guy from the neighborhood smiles at me sadly, with a closed mouth, when I pass him on Second Street.

Another week.

Guys glance up at me from their tables, then back down, like they think it’s their fault, when I pass the AA coffee hang-out on First and Third.

 

I go to the gym to try to not think. As I leave, light-headed with endorphins, my cell phone vibrates, a new, unrecognized number. I push out of the air conditioning and stop on the sidewalk to answer.

“I did it,” says my brother, his voice crisp and sober in my ear. “I got out of detox yesterday. I had to sit in the waiting room two days until they had a bed. But I did it and now I’m out! I just have to sleep in the chairs at all-night meetings until I get a spot in a shelter.”

“Wow,” is all I can say. “Wow.”

 

And now my brother is famous not only to me. He sleeps in chairs. He gets himself into a sober shelter in Williamsburg, lost his job at Whole Foods and has no money but volunteers to make coffee for AA. Even in my non-AA meeting people mention him. “If someone can almost die, then get sober and stay sober sleeping in a fuckin’ metal folding chair, then who am I to whine that my Nikes got splashed with rain water?”

Now the leaves are falling, crisp and fun and easily crunched under sandals that make way for boots. My calls and texts to The Boy are joyous. “He was elected Chair of the biggest East Village AA!” I brag. “He just texted me that his old halfway house stole all his stuff…but he didn’t drink.”

“Great news!” the Boy texts. “Tell me more when you call tonight.”

The Boy goes to a wedding in L.A. He calls me when he lands. He calls me from the reception. He calls me when he gets back to New York.

Then, I’m not sure who starts it, possibly me, because sometimes I can’t think of pretend things to need, and I don’t call for a few days, and The Boy and I are on another break.

 

“Maybe he thinks I’m mad and I should send him an email about it and ask to have a talk,” I say to my brother.

“No!” says my brother. “Believe me. Boys do not ever, I repeat ever, want to have A Talk.”

My brother stands, stretches, slowly walks to my TV, and puts in the DVD he borrowed from his shelter. “These new antidepressants make me tired,” he says. Then he sits back on the sofa. My brother and I don’t watch TV twice a week anymore, since he has more meetings now and I don’t want to tempt him away from them, since I’m afraid he’ll relapse again, plus afraid I’ll be the big sister nagging, which certainly won’t help him not drink.

But my brother is over tonight, and we still talk all the time.

“You’re going to love this movie,” my brother says. “I knew as soon as they showed it, that I had to borrow it for you.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I’m so glad you got a late pass.”

“Yeah,” my brother says. “Me too.”

 

The Boy has another gig, I dance in the crowd pretending not to look, and it all starts up again as before.

 

Winter is thawing and I ask my father if he can please help with my brother’s monthly cell phone bill, twenty five dollars a month, so he can call his sponsor and hunt for a job.

“No,” my father writes back. “Not unless we put it on your credit card. It wouldn’t wash with your stepmother if she sees it.”

This infuriates me. I take the opportunity, my upset feeling and the girlish need it evokes, to call The Boy. “Is it okay to call?” I ask, so demure it annoys even me. I brace myself for a brush off.

“You can always call me,” says The Boy. I can almost hear his tatooed chest puff out.

 

The very next week, my father surprises me by buying my brother a guitar. My brother’s music is not “poser” music like The Boy’s. My brother’s music bursts with notes full of near-forgotten scenes so vivid, I can hardly look at him while he sits on my sofa, strumming. I try not to, but I look away. “Isn’t it time for the subway now?” I say, checking my phone for a text from The Boy. My brother puts his hand over the guitar bridge, silencing it. Now I look. Hurt I will see forever flashes in my brother’s eyes.

 

It’s my birthday. I have lunch at our diner with savviest friend and funniest friend and then go home to take a nap, so I’ll be fresh for dancing that night. As I lie down, I think about calling my brother. The last time we spoke was a week before, when he canceled an appointment to work on his resume on my laptop. He had sounded anxious. “I’m too anxious,” he had said.

I almost said, “Why?” and “Are you sure you don’t want help today?” But I stopped myself, remembering how bad things got before, how he relapsed even though we were watching TV twice a week, and then how much better he seemed afterward when I didn’t meddle, and, I am ashamed to admit, because I thought maybe The Boy would be calling that night.

“Okay,” is all I said. “Let me know when you want to reschedule. I love you.”

“I love you too,” my brother said, and hung up.

On this day, my birthday, as I lie down, I realize that it’s been a week since my brother phoned and didn’t want to work on his resume. I think about calling him. And then I think no, I’ll do it when I wake up. I put my head on the pillow and the phone rings and it’s a Brooklyn number I don’t recognize. I hesitate, then pick up, and it’s the police.

They tell me my brother is dead.

 

Savviest Friend prints the flyer at her work. Photos of my brother and me appear all over the East Village, announcing the memorial.

Funniest Friend comes over and sleeps on my sofa, for three days.

I call The Boy and say, in my shock, something that, nevertheless, is true: “I’m lucky my brother died sober. I’m lucky it was always him and me.”

The Boy says, “Don’t give me that stupid phony gratitude shit,” then hangs up quickly, as if frightened by his own words.

My parents are in New York, my mother from LA, my father from his vacation home in Mexico, then my twin half-sisters and one of the stepsisters, the siblings in the pictures on the wall, all pulling me into restaurants, telling me that my brother would want me to eat. No sign of alcohol, the police had said, maybe his liver and antidepressants. My mother repeats this several times but all I hear is my brother, canceling our date to work on his resume, and my silence back. I follow them reluctantly, squint suspiciously at the strange sisters, dart away down side streets to cry. They hadn’t spoken to my brother in ten years. Our photos weren’t on the family wall. I wonder who they think they remember.

My brother’s sponsor has arranged for the memorial to be in my brother’s favorite East Village meeting room, the one where he was elected Chair. I stand in front of the room, with my brother’s journal in my hand, and AA guys and shelter guys and my meeting friends, and my dancing/writing non-meeting friends, two hundred people, look at me, waiting.

I read my favorite part of my brother’s journal, “Continue to love and respect my sister,” he orders himself. “Having realized she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about a lot of the time.”

Everyone laughs and cheers.

“We’re the ones in the pictures now,” I say to my brother when I’m through. I’m shocked to see one of my half-sisters start crying then.

But nothing matters. The memorial has failed to bring back my brother.

 

I trail behind from restaurant to restaurant where everyone fails to make me eat. My mother cries, then keeps stopping to comfort me, telling me that will be her job now. My father blabbers, tries to say unkind things about my brother, but fails, and cries too.

The half-sister who cried at the memorial keeps repeating something to me, about visiting her and her wife and my nieces in San Francisco. My father leaves when my stepmother calls and insists. My mother leaves a few days later. And everyone is gone.

I pick up my brother’s ashes at the mortuary. I go to his shelter. My brother had earned his way up the shelter sober program to his own closet-sized room, even worked his breakfast shift the day he died, serving eggs and jokes. As I approach his room, big scruffy guys line up along the hall, shuffling feet and looking down. The shelter director hands me my brother’s life belongings, a single green trash bag.

 

I find it on the inside cover of my brother’s journal. The words, “addiction,” “surrender,” “end this insanity,” and “decision,” are in same writing he always had, still talking to me, while I close my eyes and look away.  

I can’t finish a whole banana. Then, even though I know I shouldn’t, I call The Boy.

The Boy’s phone goes to voicemail. I tell him the memorial was wonderful, it’s fine that he missed it, and ask if maybe he could spend the night.

I skip a day, call again. “Can we, um, maybe have a quick cup of tea?” I cringe as I hang up. I’m no longer in control of how demure I sound. The quest for distraction is no longer about entertainment. The Boy doesn’t call back.

 

Everyone stops talking when I walk into the room that Sunday. Meeting starts, and then, in the middle of her share, someone stops, and gestures to me. “This is ridiculous. We are all thinking about her brother. Let’s just let her talk.”

I talk. People cry, even some who already cried at the memorial.

Then, after a few others, who all talk about my brother and me, The Boy raises his hand. He’ll say he’s sorry, I think, which will be good for him and for me.

“Hi everyone,” The Boy says when it’s his turn. “I have to learn to not be such a doormat.”

Savviest friend is trying hard to catch my eye across the room.

 

After meeting, people line up to hug me. When I finally go outside, The Boy is walking away up the street with a young girl, who wears a sleeveless hoody and visor exactly like The Boy’s. I call his name. He stops and turns. “Oh, uh, hi.” He looks to the side of me. His unzipped hoody exposes his stomach and tattooed chest. His cut-offs barely cover his crotch, the empty white pockets ballooning below the frayed edges. 

“Did you get my message?” I say.

The girl hovers behind him. She can’t be older than seventeen.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “I couldn’t call back.”

My friends behind me whisper a campaign to make me drink a milkshake.

“Okay. Should I just not call you anymore?” I hear myself say.

“That would be better,” The Boy says. “I’m not your source of support.”

“Okay,” I say. But I have to drink the milkshake. Guar gum and all, that is what my brother would want for me. And for that I need at least a benign ending, so The Boy can linger in my mind like a TV rerun that drowns out everything else. So I offer the fitting cliche. “Thanks for letting me know,” I say. “Of course it isn’t me.”

Now I can go with my meeting friends and drink the milkshake like I should.

But The Boy doesn’t like this ending. “You know what?” he says. “It is you!” He stabs his finger at the air. “There’s nothing here!” He sweeps his hand across the space between us, empty like the hollow in my gut. The very space that I need to be filled with anything but my brother.

 

“Did you see what he was wearing?” says my savviest friend, when we’re seated at the diner. “That should help, right? Just hold onto the image of that outfit. Can you do that for me?”

“Maybe if he comes back to the meeting,” says my funniest friend. “We can pass the hat a second time…for some clothes.”

My milkshake arrives. My friends nod encouragingly while I suck the thick cold cream up the straw. But when the liquid hits my tongue I hear my brother say “mm,” about my yoghurt lemon sauce when he sliced into the warm salmon.

I push back my chair.

 

When I get home, the hole in my stomach where the milkshake was supposed to go has hardened into a rock of anger. I write an email to The Boy about how fake he is, and how my brother, now there was someone real, and how dare The Boy ignore not so much me, but the sister of that brother. I rewrite the email so many times, taking things out, then putting them back, that by the time I push “send” I’ve lost track of what I’ve said.

 

Summer is about to end, and I call my father. I tell him that I can’t eat in New York, and the doctor suggests I go away.  My mother is in LA, and my half-sister in San Francisco says she wants to see me too.

I tell my father exactly how much I’ll need to get through this time, which I know is too much to hide from my stepmother. I tell him that asking for this is because I love him, and that my brother always insisted he loved us both.

I brace myself for a no.

“No,” my father says. Then he sobs. “Yes.”

 

I go to California. My father texts me daily, sends me the money I need, and, as if going back to redo some of my childhood with me, he is my Facebook friend, as are many of the other divorced father-writers from my childhood. There are Facebook chats about a story I post about my brother, whom the fathers had forgotten, but now suddenly remember, from back when we all lived together in Iowa.

The Boy lies low on Facebook, and though I try to remember not to, I can’t stop my imaginings. The Boy looks sad in photos; he must be sorry! The Boy is going to call! This is a long break but we are still in the game! Then one day in March The Boy loads a gigantic photo of himself in his visor and hoody and bare tattooed chest, sticking his tongue into the mouth of a young girl.

I slam down the laptop screen and race to tell my mother.

“Please, honey,” my mother says. “Not that ridiculous Boy again. Not Facebook. Is this what your ivy league degrees are for? You always knew he was a little boy. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh yeah,” I say. I remember.  

And then forget.

 

That weekend, I fly to San Francisco to visit my half-sister. The day after the memorial, this sister had taken me out to breakfast. She looked down and grimaced when the plates of sunny bright eggs landed between us. “My grief isn’t so much for him,” she explained. “It’s for you. You lost your life partner.” She pierced a yolk and pushed back her plate. She said she wanted to help me through this time.

So I’ve flown up from my mother’s in LA to visit my half-sister’s family in San Francisco every month that winter. I sit next to her in the SUV while she takes her daughters to school and play-dates. The California sun almost eclipses my nostalgia for grey New York snow, the whistle and whine of radiator steam, the metallic scent of trash cans on the sidewalk. And my friends. My sister buys me coffee and sandwiches and fattening muffins while I cry.

On my first visit I gave my sister a copy of the flyer, the photo of my brother and me in East River Park. “I know he’d be so happy I’m here with you,” I said. She said she’d put it up. Gratefully, I confided how hard it was when my brother and I used to see no pictures of ourselves on our dad and stepmom’s wall. She looked puzzled, as if she didn’t remember that we’d lived there, or understand why I should be hurt, or maybe both. But then, a little guiltily, she admitted she might have an old photo of all of us, when my brother and I lived there in high school, and she said she’d put that up too. On her wall, like on our parents’, there were only pictures of the rest of them.

During a later visit, I asked where the flyer and photo were, careful to sound casual and pretend to examine an organic peanut butter jar as I spoke.

“I just have to rearrange some things,” she said.

 Another time I started crying in her SUV, said I couldn’t help wondering if our brother’s progression would have been altered if my stepmom (her mom) hadn’t forbidden our dad from helping with his college, and if our brother hadn’t believed it, that he was worthless.

“But you guys had your mother,” she said. “You know it hurts me when you say bad things about my family!”

I missed my brother more than ever then. But he was gone.

And I visited my half-sister again the next month.

On that weekend, I show my sister and her wife the Facebook picture of The Boy Frenching the young girl. “I’m so angry!” I say. “I’m going to write that stupid Boy an email!”

One of the children yells “Mommy!” and she runs upstairs.

My sister-in-law squints at the picture of The Boy. “You’ve probably heard this before,” she says. “But he’s a child in a Halloween costume. What about yourself, your dancing, your writing, your advanced degrees?!”

I say good night and take my laptop down to the guest room.

I try to concentrate on what my sister-in-law has said, my dancing, my writing. But when I do that, I flash on the terrified ghost in a disguise that The Boy really is, and then what happens is what is happening now, as I move the mouse away, and accidentally click on your resume, which we never did get to finish. I smell you, the smoke, the gum. I hear your voice, “I worry about you, you know.” Quickly I close your resume.

It’s time to write The Boy a letter that will end his childish behavior once and for all! I write and write. I write an email so perfect, that even the stupid Boy will understand. Satisfied at last, I go to my outbox to find The Boy’s address and there it is, the email I wrote to The Boy, months ago. And, almost word for word, it is the same angry email I wrote to The Boy tonight. 

I delete it.  And I let myself know.

The Boy can’t look at me, because he let his moment pass. He stayed a poser, when it was time to be a star. It is not in the forgetting that we live on.

Ian. Ian Moulding. Ian Stuart Moulding. We are sitting in your room looking at pictures of Dad’s. We are walking down the street in LA to take the best shots into the drugstore for reprints. We are going to make them the perfect collage. This time they’ll put it up and it will be there when we come. But they don’t. And you are weaving your way down the airport corridor to me, to where we live now, where we always have and where I know now, we always will.

I will wake up in the morning and there, on our half-sister’s refrigerator, looming into view as I climb the stairs from the basement guest room, is a photo, eight by ten, and I gasp with joy as I approach. But then I’m standing at the refrigerator and what I’m staring at is not the flyer of us, but a recent picture, taken here on the grass in the back yard, of the rest of the siblings, minus me, and minus you, of course, sent to our father and stepmother for their anniversary last week, and signed by them all. I stare and stare, and finally I see it the way it must look to our half-sister, captured here grinning a little too widely at the edge of the frame. If you and I were there, even I alone, how would she and the others fit? She wants me with her some weekends, and wanted me with you, but she does not see me, or you, in this family frame. She doesn’t even see us missing. For that, everything she thinks she knows would have to be rearranged.

I turn now and head back down to the guest room, my cell phone, already planning the itinerary in my head. My savviest friend, uncanny as always in her timing, texted me yesterday that even now, months later, they are still putting down daisies, old cassette tapes of music you liked, tattered cards with AA slogans, on the cracked cement of my building stoop, and that someone didn’t just tape up the photo of me and you, Ian, heads leaning together, smiling over our foodstamps picnic in East River Park, but wheat-pasted it so it’s still stuck there, on the outside wall of the corner deli, by that spot where you sat on the bench in your backwards hat, week after week, waiting for your sister to come home.

The Lumena Center didn’t do much for me ever, and on a Friday night especially, with all of its fluorescent lights illuminating the worst in the shoppers and supplement poppers and gamers and everyone moving within. Samsun was a habitué of the Center’s VR cage, where guys, mostly, would play games wearing headsets, each assigned to a different padded cubicle. This abutted a literal cage where people gamed together and one of the challenges was not running into one another. In the last cage, people threw axes at life-size outlines of bodies projected onto a wall.  This was justified as physical exercise, somehow, that helped sublimate aggressive tendencies or something like that. Samsun came here most Fridays, Celia had said. And we had vowed to help Celia avenge her sadness and what had become our mutual anger at his postfuck weirdness.

The Center had dispensaries at both ends with moving walkways spanning the distance between them. Between, there were kiosks for magnetic resonance and mental reset techniques and sign-ups for electrostimulation rooms. There were dosing hubs and recharge stations. People came on Friday evenings after school, after the factory’s second shift, though I never understood why so many people were drawn to come here at the same time, as if being in a crowd were an experience they desired.

I met Celia and Azzie on one end of the second-floor walkway. When together we became a we in a way that made us stronger, bolder, a blur. Celia had done her hair up in braids that circled her head. She wore plastic fangs and a billowy see-through dress. She wore all black and a fanny pack. She had this new hand tremor too. When I asked her about it she laughed, said the EMPTEZ had only made her cranky and shook her, literally. She’d been clawing walls ever since.

Azzie wore a bomber jacket and combat boots. I went for a more discreet, undercover look: black turtleneck and pants, augmented clear plastic framed glasses that could record my path of vision. Celia passed her antler around and we each took turns sniffing its Insta_Pleasure and licking our fingers for luck.

I queued the TrackHer®. It said Samsun was moving dynamically through the VR cage. We split up, turned our cameras to record, and took separate paths toward his location. I went zigzag between the walkways, checking the others’ locations frequently. Celia moved more fluidly from side to side almost as if in doing so she were delaying the inevitable encounter. Azzie beelined and found Samsun first. He was checking into the ax throwing side, waiting on gear. He stood captivated by his device and unaware of her encroachment, Azzie said.

“Oh wait, eye contact made,” she noted. I couldn’t see the feed of what was happening, but I heard his mumble of a greeting and Azzie starting to rant: “Don’t hi me like we’re friends. You’re too busy throwing axes to respond to texts?” I paused to look at Celia’s stream. It looked like she was detouring.

This wasn’t how we’d planned it, but I knew of no other way forward so I carried on. Azzie and Samsun were in a stalemate. Behind them was a desk and a behind that a man holding an axe. I saw Samsun’s confused face and Azzie up in it, looking like she was about to bite his head off.

“You know, it’s pretty shitty that you won’t return Celia’s messages,” I told Samsun.

He was like, “Chill guys, you definitely need to Re-set.”

Azzie started in again, “Don’t ‘guy’ me. You fuck with Celia, you fuck with us.” She threw her chest up against his and stared him down.

He took two steps back, threw up his arms, and was like, “What the fuck!?” And walked off.

I grabbed Azzie and pulled her back. She panted at me, that she was just about to launch into him. I told her she was lucky I’d stepped in as I gazed at the guys in the cage just beyond us, wandering blindly in a realm that made sense only to them. They had headsets covering their eyes, devices in hand, cords tethering them to the mainframe like umbilical cords.

“Abort, abort,” I shouted into my device. Where was Celia? She’d turned off her camera though she still had audio on. “Celia. Meet us in the second-floor women’s bathroom.”

We took a moment and headed across the way, and entered the powder room, where we sat on the floor.

“Azzie, I wouldn’t call that subtle…”

“You didn’t see the look he gave me.”

 “You deviated.”

“You think she’s pissed?”

 “I mean, she’s not responding.” I messaged Celia again: “Where are u? Not showing on the device. Come, come. A. says she’s sorry. “

 We decided to get on with the part deux. Next step was to hack into the local LED signage network and transmit Samsun’s Ihaznodick.gif across it. It wasn’t even a dick shot, just a series of images of him dressed head to foot in black, his slinky body fading into the dark corner, with a bright light above washing his sad, sad face. It made him look isolated. There might have been a tear in his eye.

“She can always say she wasn’t involved or some shit.”

“You think?”

“I was just trying to empower her.”

 “You could’ve let her lead, you know? Let her slap his face, pull his hair, have a physical confrontation.” I sensed Azzie was really the one who’d wanted this. It was the male chimp who would show aggression, not the female, not the bonobo. Azzie had some real dick-related anger of late. Like she wanted to be the dominant male. I couldn’t help but think of her father, still missing after so many years and the weight that had on her. She wouldn’t talk about him, ever. I knew from Judy that he just got in his truck one day and never showed up to pick up his haul, never returned to Lumena Hills. His truck was found abandoned at a rest stop. No trace of him. No sign of foul play. Azzie changed the subject if it ever came up. But perhaps if we regressed, she’d be able to claim some form of dominance and heal.

People came and went as we sat there in the powder room attempting to hack into the local network. We moved to two plush chairs with a table between, its smooth self-cleaning surface used for cutting powders, organizing doses. Some girls lingered, but most came and went, passing the mirror, pulling hair, licking teeth, applying rouge, sniffing vials, taking cases from their purses and placing pills in their cheeks.

The fluorescent lights made my head scream.

No word still from Celia. My attempt to hack the network wasn’t working. 

Azzie said to let her try. I handed my device to her.

I queued Celia’s camera feed. She’d turned it back on. It was static. All I saw were series of induction pots hanging.

“Something’s wrong,” I told Azzie. “Looks like she’s in kitchenware.”

“Sure, yeah this isn’t working. Let’s go find her.” Azzie dug her hand into her pack and pulled out a tiny plastic banana and split it in half. She tapped out a palmful of pink tablets, swallowed one, held her palm to me. “Edge Eraser?” she offered.

I took one too and then we left. We walked through a side door into the store showroom, past a series of screens and speakers and signal amplifiers, accessories like earpieces, headsets, glasses, helmets. We followed a maze to and through women’s samples — formal dresses with elaborate brocades, others cut in modern shapes, boxlike and awful. Like, who would even wear these? We went on to lingerie, panties, and peek-a-boo nighties, we pushed through silks, pulled them through our fingers and held them to our faces, then headed to kitchenware.

I looked again at the camera stream and Celia’s display. I saw two sets of legs, one from the feet up, and the other squatting, with knees pointed at the camera.

In front of us, there were two guards, one standing over a counter and the other crouching under. I saw Celia’s phone on the floor.

I asked the standing guard if he’d seen Celia. I described her black hair and blonde roots, her black billowy dress.

“Fangs?” he said.

“Yes.”

He nodded and pointed toward the display of knives. They were shiny and sharp and strapped down. The other guard pointed to the door. “She went that way.” He said he’d walked up as she was attempting to break a knife from the case. She had dropped the knife and run away.

“You just let her run?”

“Look, I tried to see if she was okay.”

I grabbed Celia’s phone from the floor and we took off, dodging perfume bots attempting sprays. The sky outside was dark with clouds and rain was pouring over the line of vehicles exiting

We decided to split up and canvass the parking lot.

“No flaking,” Azzie said.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

I walked past the loading docks on the backside. On the other side, I saw a tiny woman standing by the side entrance. With her tiny fingers she held a tiny kerchief over her head. She looked observant and very wet.

I asked if she’d maybe seen Celia: “Blonde braids, black dress, perhaps a bit discombobulated?”

She seemed to have trouble with her words. Her phrases came in spurts: “A particular…? I cannot tell…. Honestly …  you look,   nice girl …”

She was no help. I walked back toward the loading dock.

In the distance, I thought I made out Celia’s outline walking in the lot. She looked lost. Her hair was soaked. She was walking along a row of parked cars back toward the Center, toward me.      

She tripped and stumbled and all of a sudden her body launched into the air, she flew forward, and into the path of a sports utility vehicle.

The sports utility vehicle halted and I started running. I watched Celia fall so slowly–her shoulder hit its grill and then she crumpled, it seemed, into a heap the ground.  I ran over to her side and kneeled beside her. The sports utility vehicle’s lights made her look ghastly, her billow wilted, her pale skin damp. She looked like she was crying but it might’ve been the rain on her face.

“What’s going on Cici? Tell me you’re okay…?” 

This didn’t seem to register. She had a cut on her chin and her braids had fallen though that looked like the extent of her injuries.

The SUV driver was still in her car. Her shocked O of a mouth made her look like she was hyperventilating, with two screaming kids beside her. Finally she popped her door and ran over, and was like, “Are you trying to give me a heart attack or what?”

“Lady, look, I think she’s hurt.”

She was no help. She just freaked. “Oh god it’s not my fault. She hit us. We had no velocity and now just look at her.” She took a capsule from her pocket and put it under her tongue. I had no time for her hysterics, to wait for it to kick in. I grabbed Celia’s hand and tried to help her up but she was dead weight. The cars were lining up. I sent a location pin to Azzie and told her to get out here and quick.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” the SUV driver said.

“No, no don’t do that…” I turned to Celia, wanting her to agree, but she lay there, her eyes wide and without expression.

The woman was already talking to someone on her device. The children in the SUV started pressing their faces into the windshield, putting their mouths on the glass, and then turning the headlights on and off. The woman said paramedics were on their way, then went back to sedate her little monsters, or so I hoped. They were acting like little cretins whose behavior was so beyond. Judy would’ve had a field day with them.

Azzie came running just as the ambulance pulled up. She and I stood to the side as the EMTs asked Celia a long list of questions. They asked her to hold up one finger for yes, two for no. She could do this. They pressed their gloved hands over her body. I wondered what shape it would’ve made if they’d been wearing my gloves. They pulled her dress down to rub her chest. They needled and masked her and then lifted her onto a stretcher.

Azzie asked “What’s going on?”

The tall one said, “I can’t conjecture. Nothing apparent. No contusions, no lacerations, no pupil dilation.” They needed to run tests. She said it was standard procedure and lifted the back end of the stretcher into the ambulance. I attempted to climb in after them but she blocked me.

“Uh-uh! You can’t ride.”

“Just me?” I pleaded.

“No minors,” she barked. But she seemed to take pity. “Sorry, not my rules. We’re taking her to the Downtown Hospital. You can check on her there. Her guardians have been alerted.”

The ambulance drove off, its lights rotating, the sound blaring, and the traffic again started moving. Azzie and I stood there watching, the rain running down our faces.  

We walked back into the warm and dry of the Lumena Center feeling defeated. It was emptier near closing time, and we stood in the glare of its lights. I suggested we get a ride to the ER — though Azzie said it was pointless. They wouldn’t let us in without Celia’s mother’s permission. And besides, it takes so long for them to do anything there. She said Celia would be placed in a tiny room where she’d be poked and needled even more, and there’d be just enough room in that room for Celia and her mother. “I’ll call my mom,” she offered. “Ask her to keep an eye out for Celia, you know, keep us posted on what’s going on.”

The Med Rx dispensary’s counter was still packed. Its walls were so clean and bright, and between those walls were so many bodies. The bodies on the other side of the counter wore form-fitting suits and swept pills across plates with long, blunt knives. They used scales to measure powders, tapped powders into capsules. They mixed herbs and emollients with long butter knives.

The line was so long for made-to-order so we made a beeline for the machine. We tapped the screen for the round orange balls, SunKisses. Two grams of Insta_Pleasure, a focus enhancer, and a purple pellet relaxant.

We took the Delixir, too. What was left. Two tablets. It was enough for the night. 

 

Grandmother loved the Latin names of the flowers she’d raise in her greenhouse and in her garden. She believed you should know everything about the things you love.

She made the rounds in the afternoon from one area of the garden to the other: the rose patch, the dark ivy twisting around a metal arch leading to the left of the house, the white lotus flowers floating on the pond on the other side.

She told us never to lean over the pond, even if the frogs called to us or the goldfish swam near the surface. It was deceptively deep. She also told us to never walk on the edge of the terrace, where the wild violets wilted over the side, ready to drop to the garden below.

Her home was a castle surrounded by beds of flowers and grass with the Marmara Sea a few steps below.

***

Grandmother’s childhood home had a long decorative pool in the center of the foyer lined with marble columns.

Her father would place her between them for portraits in silk dresses and braided hair. She’d spend her days taking long walks with her nanny, along the coast or to her aunt’s house. She’d walk around the garden with the gardener or watch the laundress who would come once a week to wash the family’s clothing.

Grandmother’s house had use of natural gas, running water, heating, and drinkable tap water. Her father, Ali Raif Bilek, was a major civil engineer in Turkey. He’d travel often for work; six months at a time, so Grandmother rarely saw him when she was growing up.

In 1951, Ali Raif began construction on the Birecik Bridge which crossed the Euphrates River. It was completed in 1956. During that time, Ali Raif also purchased the first automatic washing machine available in Turkey. He was a man invested in the future.

One of his ancestors was Sultan Bayezid II’s subaşı, a post similar to chief of security. The  subaşı was also in charge of setting up the Sultan’s tent when he traveled.

Such men were described as hesabini bilen—“men who settled their accounts.”

***

Growing up, grandmother came to depend on her mother. Her mother fixed all the misunderstandings between father and children and kept harmony in the house. Her father was often irritable. He flung a plate across the dining room once because he was displeased with dinner.

He had softer sides, too, she said.

He would sing arias in his room when he thought no one was listening. He took his wife to clinics all over Europe to find a cure for her migraines. He sent Grandmother a surprise ticket to Geneva as a high school graduation present. He had his money and his gestures.

One night, Ali Raif invited a neighbor, Hüseyin, to dinner in return for fixing their new washing machine. Grandmother treated him with courtesy and served tea and coffee. After, Hüseyin begged his older brother to meet Grandmother and spoke of her with admiration.

The brother, named Asim, put a hand on Hüseyin’s shoulder.

He told him, Dear little brother, I can’t marry a rich girl. We’re just a modest family from Anatolia.

But the brother’s aunt and mother also knew of Grandmother and insisted he meet her.

They went to a waterfront cafe in Suadiye on the northern shore of the Marmara Sea. Then, to a pastry shop in Beyoglu and walked down Istiklal Avenue.

After that, they would meet secretly to talk and drink coffee together.

***

The day Asim went to Grandmother’s home to ask her father for her hand, Ali Raif said, This will not work.

A family friend had advised Ali Raif against allowing Grandmother to marry Asim.

He wouldn’t suit your family, the friend had said.

Around the same time, Grandmother’s sister, Tina, was going through a divorce. Ali Raif could not allow another doomed marriage among his daughters.

Devastated, Asim left the country on a business trip. Grandmother sent him a letter asking him to be patient. She wanted to marry him.

***

Asim was living with his brother Kerim and his mother in the seaside town of Yeşilköy. He decided to rent an apartment in a wealthier district for his soon-to-be wife and himself before their wedding.

Grandmother purchased the living room and bedroom furniture and Asim completed the dining room and kitchen. But he was worried. He was about to marry a girl who was used to more than he could offer.

A close friend reminded Asim that Grandmother’s family wealth provided her with a good education and etiquette. She had traveled more, and as a result, she had seen more.

Grandmother’s fluency in French and English would aid Asim during business trips and in deciphering manuals for machinery that would arrive for his factories from foreign companies.

After a year in their new apartment, Asim asked Grandmother if they could move back to Yeşilköy.

She said yes, and they moved into a two-floored house with Asim’s other brother, Kerim, and mother. They lived on separate floors but shared all their meals together.

Asim’s mother would set the table for breakfast and dinner. She would never place glasses for water. Grandmother had to remind herself that in the village where Asim and his family came from, they rarely drank water because if you wanted any, you had to get it yourself from the well.

Asim’s brother, Kerim, was paralyzed, having fallen from a tree in their garden when he was in seventh grade. He was climbing to the top in search of delicious figs. A thick branch broke his fall, but his hips caved in and he was left paralyzed from the lower chest down.

Grandmother showed me the same fig trees that stand outside our house walls. The figs fall, forming red and green fleshy graves for stray dogs and cats to stride over.

Grandmother played pinochle with Kerim and they gossiped about their neighbors.

One morning, Kerim threw a Quran into the furnace and Grandmother had to convince Asim that his brother needed professional help. They couldn’t live like this.

Asim took Kerim to various doctors in search of miracle cures. Kerim was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Vevey, Switzerland for a few years.

The nuns soon demanded Kerim be taken back home after he’d set himself on fire by pressing a lit cigarette onto his mattress.

Asim and Grandmother brought Kerim back home and he died a few years later.

Grandmother cried. She still cries whenever someone mentions Kerim’s name.

***

Grandmother had three children. She also became a board member of Asim’s company.

She visited the factories and offices. She posed for photographs at openings, ceremonies, and celebrations. She kept her home clean and beautiful. She picked fresh flowers from her garden every day.

During a check up, her doctor saw a shadow on her breastbone. Her doctor said if was cancer, he could remove the breast or just the cancerous portion.

Remove the whole thing, Grandmother said.

You did this to her, Asim told their three children.

The day after surgery, a nurse walked in and told Grandmother to get up and take a shower.

My Grandmother stared at the tubes coming out of her.

What will I do with these?

I’ll hold them, but you will wash yourself. She brought out shampoo and my grandmother offered her left hand, the side that still had a breast and lymph tissue, the side that from this point on, could not get infected or hurt.

No, the other hand, the nurse said. Don’t be afraid to use it.

Grandmother asked her doctors to lower the dosage of her painkillers because they made her tired.

Look at the flowers everyone sent, she said. She got out of bed and began to check the water levels in the vases. She moved some of the flowers closer to the window, especially the wild violets.

Wild violets are considered a weed by some, but she loved them. They adapted.

***

I woke up on a Sunday morning and checked my phone.

The women in the family have a group conversation that never stops. Grandmother reads the messages and saves the photos but never writes anything.

There was a single message from my mother. She and my aunt were at the hospital.

Grandmother fell from her terrace into the garden below as she was picking flowers. But her mind is sound. At this age, the body may break but the mind is important.

I call and the rest of the information is told in parts. My mother says the stray kitten that hangs out on the terrace tripped Grandmother. Maybe she just got dizzy and stepped one step too far.

I know every part of that terrace. The granite edge, the two columns on either end, covered in ivy, keeping the house up. The sun sets at a point blocked by the left column but sometimes jasmine will grow on it too, so the scent will make up for the view.

A large magnolia tree rises up near the center of the terrace from the garden below it. Right at the edge of the house, the ground slants down and a few marble steps lead to an indoor pool. The tree has been there since I can remember, larger than the magnolia tree that my own room’s walls press against.

Sometimes if a flower is close enough, I’ll reach out my window to snap a bloom off the tree and bring it down to my mother. I’ve slipped a few times and heaved myself back inside.

Grandmother couldn’t have held onto anything. She probably saw the little black and white kitten watching her as she fell. She broke her hip and tailbone.

But her mind is sound and she is aware, my mother and aunt repeat on the phone.

I think about the damage of lying on a bed for four months, of walking again after having hip surgery, of the pain she will still feel as the weather changes and the winds pick up outside her seaside home. I think about how this wasn’t her first fall but reading the words “she fell from her terrace into the garden,” in my bed in New York, miles away from home, creates a new kind of horror.

I want to go back home- to see her when she wakes up from surgery, but several relatives tell me there is nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do but sit and wait, wait for her old bones to heal.

Grandmother calls.

They’ve raised my hospital bed so I can look out the window. There are flowers by the lake.

You were the one who told us to stay away from the edge of that terrace, I say.

She laughs. She says, I know. I was just trying to pick flowers. 

Grandmother was trying to reach the wild violets.

Spring Cleaning

Now that you are not here, I don’t know what to do

with everything that was once yours. I start with the objects:

the photographs, the notebook, the book

that weighs just as much as you weighed

when you’d hang on my arm.

The clothes: your trousers,

the shirt that you gave me and is now the memory

of absence. I continue: the thoughts that build up

in the most remote corners of the body:

glop after glop after glop of desire,

nauseating like syrup.  

And the devotion that I learned to feel,

the offering from your palm to my lips: what should I do now

with the room in my gut dedicated to worship. Finally, the memories:

inside a box inside my head, within the doubt

inside the silence, within oblivion, in the tide

that moves you closer and away,

closer and away. I will find a spot where I’ll place you,

a spot where you’ll sleep ‘til I can

see your face without parting the seas and diving

into the buried soul. Memories are not memories

if they cannot be accessed.

I will get rid of you as a snake does:

shed my skin and forget it in the underbrush. And every

single thing that used to be yours will stay there, rotting in the leaves

of a neverending fall.

 

Today, walking along with Núria

Today, walking along with Núria,

we saw clouds with pink wombs,

pregnant with virtue. And I thought of you,

and your body, and myself.

I wonder if you know. If you know

that yesterday you opened up my pink womb and

spilt what I carried inside.

I wonder if you know that, when my body vibrated

and you trembled and panted,

you were slowly pulling out my desire from inside,

like a magic trick.

And I wanted my hands

to sink into your back, like roots;

and I wanted to make you wish you could melt.

I don’t know if you know you are first, but last night

we loved twice and each time our skins met

I hoped I’d be killed from the pleasure.

If the world had dissolved,

if the bed had flooded or someone

had come into the room, we would have kept going,

our bellies linked as if it was wrong to separate them,

pink flowing and staining the sheets.

I wonder if you know all of this,

or if you’d like to see me again.

 

Womb

My body is all I have: the only truth.

I don’t have thoughts, or feelings,

or wishes, or reasons: I just have my body

which is the earth where you can plant

your orchard. I am the literal body,

the weight of the organs inside of me,

under the skin. Ask me who I am and I’ll say:

if you were to open my side with a spear,

only blood would come out. The fruit of the earth

is my body, and the fruit of my body

is my surrender: bite

the apple – it’s sour

just like you like it.

Two Rushes

Near the shore,

savouring you: fruit

of dark skin, viscous.

Run your hand through my hair,

for I’m yours and I get rid of my spirit

to become just a body

glazed in saltpeter,

stuck to the burning

sand. Listen to the waves

crashing over me.

Just like two rushes from a nearby reed,

we bend our pleasure to the beat of our joy.

 

Variations on the Topic of Eros

To love you like the bird that grows from my groin:

to fall into your arms, intoxicated, wounded by the beak

and the feathers. Even better:

to bloom over you like a fire,

to turn into fruit, into seed; to tear up desire

and wear it as a cape.

I make your body my plentiful field,

and in the evenings I sit on the plot and I taste

its sweet fruit. You’re skilled on the land

and fertile in bed.

 

Post-coital

After making love I pick up a towel and wipe

your skin. You get my t-shirt

from under your back and hand it to me saying here you go

and I secretly think to myself:

oh, how I wish this was everything there was to life,

your giving me my clothes, extending your hand toward me

with a gentle gesture, corporeal and true,

and I could say again and again

gràcies, t’estimo and kiss your forehead.

Slowly, reality changes:

whatever was hidden suddenly returns from the depths

and stands in front of us, apparent like a mountain,

as if desire had eclipsed all of the objects,

the thoughts, the truths, and now they came

crawling back, became visible again.

And, maybe because you’re near, I think about destiny,

just like near death

even atheists think about God.

I think about how this moment,  

your soft sex so close,

weaves into tomorrow inexplicably,

a puzzle from nature which, with luck,

we won’t ever need to solve.

 

Revenge

This poem is my revenge:

a caricature of who you were

on top of the image of who you are. Like a kid who, about fire,

only remembers how painful the burn,

so shall I only remember you

by the sharp edges

of these lines on white paper.