Adrian McKinty: Dead I Well May Be

Later. The phone, the TV. The heat. Fag after fag until the ashtray is full. The fridge works and brings me vodka with ice. Small mercies but mercies nonetheless. I lean back on the sofa and contemplate my surroundings.

And let me describe the beautiful haven Scotchy and Darkey have picked out for me. Not that I’m ungrateful. Took me in, gave me a place. But it’s not as if I haven’t earned my keep. Only one with two brain cells to rub together. Anyway. They, of course, live in the nice part of the Bronx at the end of the 1 line. But it was full up there, see? Scotchy’s claim, anyway. More fool me to believe him. This place apparently is five hundred a month, which comes out of my pay. As did the furniture, which Scotchy admitted later he got all for sweet FA in the street. It’s a one bedroom. A toilet whose stink greets you when you come in. Next to it, a bath on little feet and under the bath there are more flora and fauna than David Attenborough could handle with the entire resources of the BBC behind him.

Corridor and kitchen. Forget about swinging a cat, a cat couldn’t swing a mouse in here. Gas stove whose pilot light is perpetually going out. Years, perhaps decades, of grease everywhere. Holes in the walls and skirting.

Living room: TV, free cable, a big wooly yellow disgusting sofa.

Bedroom: futon on the floor, cupboard, table, chair.

There is no natural light anywhere. The living room’s gray windows overlook a tiny courtyard, the bedroom peers onto the backs of the buildings on 122nd. If you go out onto the fire escape (which I often do) and you set up a chair and look up, now and again, through the skunk trees, you can see a plane or a bit of sky. The fire escape is rusted and rickety and will kill us all when the fire comes, but even so it’s the nicest place in the apartment.

The roaches are the big problem. I’ve been here since last December and I’ve been fighting a guerrilla war with them ever since. I haven’t grown used to their existence. I haven’t reached Zenlike tranquillity that allows me and them to share the same territorial and metaphysical space. In Ireland there are no roaches. No creatures of any kind like this. Occasionally, a field mouse would come in the house. Or perhaps a bee or some benign beetle or ladybug. No, nothing like these things.

I respect them now, though. I hate them, but I respect them. I have beheaded them, poisoned them, scalded them, burned them, poisoned them again and somehow they seem to survive. I dropped a liter bottle of Coke once on one big water bug and it lived. I poured a half pound of boric acid on another and put a pot on it that I covered with a brick. I left it there for a week while we all went to Florida for a wake and a funeral for Mr. Duffy’s brother. Got back, removed the brick, bastard cleans its antennae and crawls off into the wall. This was about kill two hundred and I had to go and scratch out the table and make it one kill less. The lesson was chastening. Like the RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain, you only report your kill when you see the plane hit the ground.

Anyway, they’re everywhere. They crawl on you at night. You hear them in walls. You feed them in the traps. Occasionally they fly. You tell Ratko and he laughs and he shows you his place in the basement. Which if anything is worse.

Still…

The fire escape.

Another fag. Sirens. Dogs barking. People yelling. Smoke, sit there and draw it in and hold it. Hold it. Let it go. Let it all go.

I live on 123rd and Amsterdam. A block away is the edge of the Columbia University security zone and there they call the neighborhood Morningside Heights so that concerned parents don’t freak out, which they would if they had to send mail to bloody Harlem. But this is Harlem. There are projects one block to the north, not particularly bad projects but projects nonetheless, and to the east it’s the real nightmare. The buildings are derelict and most of them seem to be inhabited by crack cocaine addicts. Morningside Park is pretty hairy after dark and all the way up to 125th Street is no picnic. I stick out, too. I have learned some Spanish and have told myself that thus equipped I can pass as a Dominican. However, my paper white Mick skin is not entirely convincing.

I have no air-conditioning and the fan only moves hot air around the room.

I toss the fag and climb back in through the window. I go to the kitchen and get a beer. Milwaukee Great Gold. It’s the worst beer I’ve ever had-they brew it with corn, if you can believe it. But it’s cheap, and if you put the fridge up enough and it gets freezing cold you don’t really taste it anyway.

I go back out on the fire escape and watch a few squirrels and way up in the blue the odd ascending vapor trail. The beer goes down and it’s almost nice now. The day seems to be getting a little cooler.

The phone rings.

I hardly remember reconnecting it but I must have. Duty, responsibility, that’s me.

I let it bleat. It goes on and on and it wears me down. I finish the last of my drink and hurl the can off the side of the rail trying to hit Ratko’s pit bull, but I don’t and the dog looks up at me and starts barking. I climb in through the fire-escape window and tramp across the bedroom and into the hall. I turn off Nevermind on the cassette player. I pick up the phone.

It’s Scotchy. I can tell by that nasally intake of breath before he speaks. He’s excited.

Hey, Bruce, something’s come up.

Name’s not Bruce, I say wearily. Scotchy’s perpetual little joke.

Bruce, gotta get uptown. Andy got a hiding. You know Darkey’s away, right?

I don’t answer him.

Bruce, are you there?

Must have the wrong number mate, no Bruce here. No Bruce, no spider, no cave, no salvation for Bonnie Scotland.

Stop fucking around, Bruce, you dickless wonder, this is serious.

I choose again the path of silent resistance. There is a good fifteen seconds of dead air on the phone. Scotchy starts mumbling and then in a bit of an exponential panic he says:

Hello, hello, hello, oh Jesus, Mike, are you still there?

I’m here, I say with just enough lassitude to irritate the hell out of him.

Well, what the fuck? Christ. Jesus man, I’m holding the fucking ship, you know. Look, Andy got a hiding and Sunshine and Darkey are out of the picture, so I’m the boss, right?

You’re the boss? I say, hoping to convey as skeptical a tone as if he’s just told me that he is, in fact, Anastasia, lost daughter of Tsar Nicholas the Second.

Aye, he says, my clever intonation going over his head.

Is that how the chain of command goes? I ask in a more neutral voice.

Aye, it does.

Fergal’s been with Darkey a wee bit longer than you, hasn’t he? I ask mischievously.

Fergal’s an idiot, Scotchy says.

Pot calling the kettle black? I suggest.

Bruce, I swear to God, I’ll fucking come down there, he says, right on the verge.

Line of succession bumps you up is what you’re claiming, I say.

Yes. De factso, I’m in charge, he says, a bit hesitant with the Latin.

De facto, surely, Scotchy, I say condescendingly, to really take the piss.

He’s angry now.

Look, I’m in charge and I’m giving the fucking orders, so get the fuck up here, you bastard, he says.

Keep going, Scotchy. I have to admit you’ve almost convinced me with your earthy machismo.

Jesus Christ, were you put on this planet to fucking give me a stroke? Fuck me. Will you stop acting the fucking eejit, stop wanking off down there and get up here, Scotchy barks out in frustration.

Is he all right, is he in the hospital? I ask with belated concern about our Andy.

No, he isn’t, he’s over here. Bridget’s looking after him. We’re maybe taking him to the hospital. He’ll be ok, though. Shovel, you know. That lamebrain Fergal thought it was the fucking Mopes but it was fucking Shovel. I know it. I mean big Andy. Shovel must have been half tore. Andy was unconscious, in the street, in the street, Bruce, hasn’t come round yet, I mean he…