Steven Gould - Jumper

The next day I saw that Mom had a bruise on her right cheekbone and she walked funny—not limping on any particular side, but like it hurt to move either leg.

Two days after we got back from New York, I came home from school and Mom was gone.

Anyway, I really liked New York. It seemed a good place to start over—a good place to hide.

“I’d like a room.”

The place was a dive, a transients’ hotel in Brooklyn, ten blocks from the nearest subway stop. I’d picked it with the help of the Pakistani cabdriver who drove me from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He’d stayed there himself.

The clerk was an older man, maybe my dad’s age, reading a Len Deighton novel through half-glasses. He lowered the book and tilted his head forward to look at me over the

“Too young,” he said. “You’re a runaway, I’ll bet.”

I put a hundred down on the counter, my hand still on it, like Philip Marlowe.

He laughed and put his hand on it. I lifted my hand away.

He looked at it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. Then he handed me a registration card and said, “Forty-eight a night, five-buck key deposit, bathroom’s down the hall, payment in advance.”

I gave him enough money for a week. He looked at the other hundreds for a moment, then gave me the room key and said, “Don’t deal here. I don’t care what you do away from the hotel, but if I see anything that looks like a deal, Ι’ll turn you myself.”

My jaw dropped open and I stared at him. “You mean drugs?”

“No—candy.” He looked at me again. “Okay. Maybe you don’t. But if I see anything like that at all, you’re history.”

My face was red and I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I hadn’t. “I don’t do stuff like that,” I said, stammering.

I hated feeling like that.

He just shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m just warning you. And don’t bring any tricks here either.”

A memory of rough hands grabbing me and pulling down my pants made me cringe. “I don’t do that either!” I could feel a knot in my throat and tears were dangerously close to the surface.

He just shrugged again.

I carried my suitcase up six flights of stairs to the room and sat on the narrow bed. The room was ratty, with peeling wallpaper and the stench of old cigarette smoke, but the door and the door frame were steel and the lock seemed new.

The window looked out on an alley, a sooty brick wall five feet across the gap. I opened it and the smell of something rotting drifted in. I stuck my head out and saw bagged garbage below, half of it torn open and strewn about the alley. When I turned my head to the right I could see a thin slice of the street in front of the hotel.

I thought about what the clerk had said and I got mad again, feeling small, diminished. Why’d he have to make me feel like that? I was happy, excited about being in New York, and he jerked me around like that. Why did people have do that sort of shit?

Wouldn’t anything ever work out right?

“I don’t care how talented, smart, bright, hardworking, or perfect you are. You don’t have a high school diploma or a GED and we can’t hire you. Next!”

“Sure we hire high school kids. You seem pretty bright to me. Just let me have your social security number for the W2 and we’ll be all set. You don’t have a social security number? Where you from, Mars? You come back with a social security number and I’ll give you a try. Next!”

“This is the application for a social security number. Fill it out and let me see your birth certificate. You don’t have your birth certificate? Get it and come back. No exceptions. Next!”

“I’m sorry, but in this state, if you’re under eighteen, you must have parental permission to take the GED. If you’re under seventeen it takes a court order. You come back with your mother or father, and a birth certificate or New York driver’s license, and you can take it. Next!”

There is a point where you have to give up, at least for a while, and all you want to do is shut down. I rode the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walked numbly in the direction of my hotel.

It was late afternoon, heavily overcast, and the dingy, gray street seemed entirely appropriate to my mood.

God damn them! Why did they have to make me feel so little? With every interview, every rejection, I’d felt guiltier and guiltier. Ashamed of something but I didn’t know what. I kicked out at a piece of trash in the gutter and stubbed my toe on the curb. I blinked rapidly, my eyes blurring, the breath harsh in my throat. I wanted to just crawl into bed and hide.

I took a small cross street to get over to the avenue the hotel was on. The street was narrow, making it even darker, and there were plastic bags of garbage piled on the sidewalks, up against the stoops of old brownstone buildings. I didn’t know why they called these row houses brownstones; most of them were painted green or red or yellow. The garbage was piled so high before one building I had to step out into the street to pass. When I stepped back on the sidewalk, a man stepped out from a doorway and came toward me.

“You got a subway token to spare? Any change?”

I’d seen lots of panhandlers that day, mostly around the subway stations. They made me nervous, but those hungry days hitching away from Dad were still fresh in my memory. I remembered people walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I dug into my pocket for the sixth time that day while I said, “Sure.”

My hand was coming out of the pocket when I heard a noise behind me. I started to look around and my head exploded.

There was something sticky between my cheek and the cold, gritty surface I was lying on. My right knee hurt and there was something about the way I was lying that didn’t seem right, like I’d been especially careless in going to bed. I tried to open my eyes but my left one seemed stuck shut. The right one looked at a rough concrete surface.

A sidewalk.

Memory and pain returned at the same time. I groaned.

There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and I thought about the muggers. I jerked heavily up onto all fours, my head throbbing like the dickens, my sore knee becoming even more so as I put weight on it. The sticky stuff on the sidewalk was blood.

Standing seemed impossible so I turned over and sat, my back to a row of garbage cans. I looked up and saw a woman carrying two grocery bags slowing down as she walked around the giant pile of garbage bags and saw me.

“My gawd ! Are you okay? What happened to you?”

I blinked my open eye and put my head in my hands. The effort of sitting up made a sharp, throbbing pain stab at the back of my head.

“I think I was hit from behind.” I felt for my front pocket, where I’d been carrying my money. “And robbed.”

I pulled the lids of my left eye apart with my fingers. My eye was okay, just stuck shut with blood. I carefully touched the back of my head. There was a large lump there, wet. My fingers came away red.

Great. I was in a strange city with no money, no job, no family, and no prospects. That stabbing pain at the back of my head didn’t compare with the hurt of somehow feeling I deserved this.

If I’d only been better as a kid. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have gone, Dad wouldn’t drink so much….

“My apartment is just two doors down. I’ll call nine-one-one.” The woman didn’t wait for a response. I watched her hurry past, a container of Mace in her hand, connected to her key chain. As she walked down the sidewalk, she stayed away from the buildings, checking the doorways as she went by.

Smart. Much smarter than me.

911. That meant police. I’m a minor and a runaway. I have no ID and I don’t want my parents notified .