Pete Hamill - Brooklyn Noir

“Yup, that’s it.”

“I’ll send my man by for the hardware,” I say on my way out. “And pencil me in for a shape-up tomorrow at 4.” Arsenal or not, Sam gives the best cuts in The Stuy.

“I miss jail,” Brownie tells me from the beanbag recliner by the window. He did six months in Otisville for intent-to-distribute before they gave him time served for rolling over on some whiteboys, one of whom, Brownie had discovered, was fucking his girl.

He is the clinical definition of a sociopath, a man who has raped and killed, six feet and 295 pounds of evil that just happens to deal the best weed in the neighborhood. Thus, I allow him into my home from time to time, for as long as the high lasts.

“What do you mean, you miss jail?” I ask, pulling on what that remains of the once-ample spliff. He is called Brownie because of his fudge-colored face. His real name can only be found on the lips of his elderly mother or on the rap sheet longer than my bedspread, or duvet, as Jenna describes it.

“A nigga like me needs some discipline,” he says. “I realize that now. In there they told me what to be and where to go. Kept me in a cage and made me follow the rules. Out here I just get into shit. Out here I’m a fuse ready to blow.”

Sam used to be married to Brownie’s older sister, but that was before she divorced him and moved back to Panama. Sam had apparently been tapping some high school girl. But Brownie and Sam are still like brothers. The local arsenal even had a chrome Desert Eagle with a filed serial number waiting for him the minute he got out of the clink.

“You sound like you’re itchin’ to get knocked,” I say, swigging bottled water to wash away the taste of smoke. “What you gonna do? Go out and fuck up on purpose?”

Instead of answering, he climbs to his feet and goes over to one of the windows to look down at the street.

“That’s the only thing I hate about the inside,” he grins. “You never get windows this big.”

“You don’t get to leave either. You don’t get to see your kids. You don’t—”

“Fuck my kids!” he explodes, turning to me. “Neither of them bitches won’t even let me see’em no how, unless I got some cash. Besides, it ain’t like I’m even close to bein’ a good daddy. I’m a street-nigga man. That’s the only shit I know.”

On any other day there might be a speech for me to offer, something about him not needing to go back to jail to find the happiness he seeks. It would be this existential rant about how what he does isn’t wrong, that he only does what God wants him to do. I would say it all with conviction just so he’d have that thirty-dollar bag for me every other Thursday. But I’m trying to cut down. And besides, I need him to play a part in my plan.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” he says.

“If you were gonna get yourself knocked, how would you do it?”

He turns to me with a pensive look, like a child trying to solve a Sajak puzzle.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I been thinkin’ about it though. Why? You got an idea or sumpin’?”

I connect four just as he ends the question.

“I might,” I say.

“Where you goin’ with all that food?” Miel Rodriguez asks me, her bedroom eyes narrowed to slits outside of the Splash and Suds on the corner of Nostrand and Halsey. I am carrying two large bags of food from Yummy’s carry-out, a half-gallon of shrimp fried rice, three small wanton soups, four egg rolls, and a six-pack of grape soda.

Miel would dig me if I was all about the Benjamins, or if I drove an Escalade with twenty-two-inch rims like the one she’s seated in, compliments of her man of the moment. But I’m a writer, and she doesn’t read. So we only flirt every now and again. I wouldn’t mind getting my lips on those D-cups of hers. But intuition tells me that Jenna could outfuck her any day of the week.

Miel is beautiful though, with those dark brown eyes and golden flesh, long Indian hair shiny with oil sheen. The man of the minute is a lucky one, if he can hold on to what he’s got.

“I got some people in town,” I tell her.

“From where?” she asks.

“Atlanta,” I say. “I went to school there.”

“Oh,” she replies, interested in nothing beyond the five boroughs. Twenty-three years old and she suffers from the worst ailment of them all, Hoodvision , that inability to see past the blocks where she was born.

Behind the front seats are two different shopping bags, each topped off with a folded knit sweater. Beneath one is her current man’s stash of product, the other, his take for the week, to be dropped off at an undisclosed location at the end of the day. Heroin has been in short supply since the DEA raid on Jefferson a few days ago. Her boy was suspiciously the only one to make it out before the siege.

It’s not that I don’t know his name. I just choose not to use it. He’s an X-factor in the day’s proceedings, perhaps a catalyst, perhaps a not-so-innocent bystander. We’ll know soon enough.

“How come you never try and talk to me?” she asks, offering a sexy smile, her slight overbite gleaming in the sunrays from above.

“I’m talking to you right now.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.

“What about your man?” I ask.

“His days are numbered,” she says.

“What’s he doing in the laundromat anyway?”

“Droppin’ off his clothes. We gotta come back and pick’em up at 5.”

I glance at the bags in the rear again and know that Miel is carrying. There’s no other way this guy would leave her alone in the ride for this long. I see him starting out of the building and know it’s my cue.

“Well, lemme get this food, home girl. I’ll see you around.” I start away, knowing she’ll do anything to have the last word.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she says, just as her boy hits the sidewalk.”

“I know,” I yell back, picking up the pace. It’s almost 3:00. I have to move quickly.

The Le Starving Artist Café has barely been built, but there are already rats living in the basement. Not the disease-carrying rodents that infest the city, but four motherfuckers who I have a score to settle with. They are two sets of brothers, Trevor and Neville of Gates Avenue by way of St. Kitts, and Steve and Stacy of Harlem by way of grandparents that moved there from the Carolinas in the 1940s.

Weeks ago they took a stab at looting my crib while I was away at a speaking gig. They jimmied the front doors and came right up the stairs to the cheap wood my landlord assumed would keep out thieves. He was wrong. They made off with some DVDs and my 100-disc changer, ignoring the original Basquiat and twin lamps from Tiffany’s.

Tesa Forsythe saw them from across the street and told me about it. Now the time has come to make things right.

They live in the basement beneath this café. Blankets and space heaters have kept them alive since the autumn chill began. Various hustles keep them fed and functioning. But what’s money worth when there’s no product close by? And the prices in Crown Heights are already through the roof.

“Good lookin’ out,” Stacy yells, draped in the same Pittsburgh jersey he’s been wearing since Monday. They’re all short on costumes since most of the dough vanishes into the good veins they have left.

Food won’t make their jonesing any easier. But it’ll give them more energy, which they’ll be needing shortly. They immediately tear into what I’ve offered.

“Anything I can do for my peoples,” I say. The “peoples” part is not fully untrue since we all used to play ball together in the summer, before they started sniffing and shooting, before the Internet crash that killed their entrepreneurial dreams. But that’s another story. Seems like everybody in The Stuy has a story.