David Prete - August and then some

Datta: What have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

T. S. Eliot

Vengeance and hate, well, they’re both very bad emotions.

Kurt Vonnegut

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

June 28

Rain

June 28

July 5

July 6

Purple dress, red painting

Frostbite

July 12

Wherever they stood

July 13

An offering disguised

July 20

August 1

After the sound

August 8

Nothing left to do

August 8

The move

August 8

The plan

August 9

The buyer

August 9

Called it a game

August 9

The job

August 9

The job

August 10

The job

August 10

The job

August 15

The job

August 16

September 1

About the Author

Other Books by David Prete

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Jake Terri Savage is awkward, I know. Mostly they call me JT—skips off the tongue right. No one calls me Terri. That was my grandmother. But right now an old lady’s name fits me because I’m hurtin like one. Even with this dolly there’s no easy way to lug an eighty-pound slab of slate down seventy blocks. I feel like a father lifting his deadweight kid out of bed, and with every step the kid’s insistence to sleep gets heavier. I got a system though. I hold the slate between my palms, balance it on the dolly, and take short steps until it starts falling to one side and the dolly kicks out. Then I stop, straighten it out, and start from scratch. That’s it—that’s the whole system. But hey, it’s getting me through the rush hour hoard of Upper East Side commuter motherfuckers. And even though this thing has the weight of an unearthed tombstone, I should make it to the East Village before dusk.

But this summer heat, man. After eight hours of working outside I’m glazed in the kind of New York summer sweat an air-conditioned store would turn to rock candy. I’ve been on a demolition job the past month breaking up an old lady’s Upper East Side patio. They would have hauled this piece away with the rest of the broken slate and concrete, but I swiped it for free furniture. Chipped edges aside, all four feet by four feet of it held up under construction. I got milk crates (whose misuse can lead to my prosecution) waiting on the floor of my studio. I’ll lay this on top and voilà: table. What my fine home decor lacks in price it makes up for in weight. I’m not gonna say this for the entire seventy blocks, but this thing is a pain in the dick to maneuver.

At 68th and Lex near Hunter College, summer students line up at a smoking halal meat truck for curried shish kebab. Flies zigzag around the garbage next to them casing grease-stained paper plates. Across the street, suits, slackers, and in-betweens file down the stairs of 6 Train entrance. They squint at the five-thirty something sun until they dip below the sun line into the station’s darkness, and their faces relax. Nobody, not even a fly, notices the gloveless guy rolling a huge chunk of slate down the street. But hey, invisible works for this cat. Shit—I can’t clench my hands. My fingers feel sculpted to this slate. I guess I could make it down those stairs without this stone slipping away from me and landing on an innocent New Yorker. But fuck it. I’m walking. For possibly twisted reasons, wheeling this thing home is now a quest.

What sucks about the city are things like this neon sign on 64th Street blinking about shoe repair. They come at me too fast to defend, and instead of ‘gum up your sole’ my head sees the dashboard in Nokey’s ’91 Volkswagen GTI—the burnt red glow of his dashboard. My sister in the back seat. I whiplash my head away from the neon sign to find a nice ass or something better.

Lex and 42nd, Grand Central. My shoulders and back burn, and thousands of people loop from their suburban homes, to their city jobs, from their city jobs to their suburban homes, a daily cycle that equals some of their life. I wonder what ordinary feels like. Or if it’s real.

In a coffee shop on 23rd and 2nd a woman looks out the window. I stop. Balance my slate on the dolly. She lifts a cup to her expressionless face, too deep in her head to notice me or the passing crowd, and stares through us like we’re water. Seems she’s picking through thoughts she’s yet to share over a table of friends and martinis. Thoughts she’s afraid will make her sound desperate or just weird. My sister Danielle’s face imposes itself over hers. Slit-like eyes seemingly impossible to see out of, pouty lips, and a potent sadness pinning down her smile. But these moments have the life expectancy of a flame in a bottle. Someone bumps this woman’s chair and startles her out of her head. She smiles at their apology then turns away. Now she sneaks a look around to see if anyone noticed the haze she was in. No. She’s safe. She fondles the button on her cuff, checks her watch, and takes another sip.

In Tompkins Square Park guys in billowy white clothes and dreads to their waists sit under the shade of trees in a drum circle, their bongos and djembes echoing through the whole park. You can’t help but feel like your legs are moving to their rhythm when you walk by. Next to them some guys practice Capoeira and make it look more like a dance than martial art. In a fenced-off area dogs headlock each other, and skid out on pee-soaked wood chips. A few NYU or FIT students sit on the ground balancing sketchpads on their knees trying to do the trees justice with charcoal and newsprint. On the north side guys play street hockey. In the playground little kids with sagging bathing suits run around under sprinklers. The last mustard sun rays of the day give everything more meaning and take away my ability to grasp it.

Me and my slate leave the park on Avenue B and turn down 9th Street. The only lot without a building is the community garden next to my apartment, which looks as woefully out of place as a shiny piano in a junkyard. I get a few doors down from my stoop and hear, “Don’t be calling me bitch. You think you my father?”

“How could I be your father, my shit ain’t in jail?”

These two. The lonely looking girl and the hybrid geek/thug boyfriend. I’ve seen them around the building, sitting on the stoop, her hands between his knees, smoking on the fire escape, his hand up the back of her shirt.

He goes, “You actin like I’m trying to make bank off you. I’m askin for like a couple dollars. Damn.” He lowers his voice. “You know your uncle got it.”

“No he don’t.”

He wears a tank under a Sammy Sosa Cubs jersey open so you can see the thick chains around his neck. “Ah-ight, forget it then. I ain’t asking you for nothin no more, ah-ight?”

“See why you gotta be actin like I don’t do shit for you?” she says.

“You don’t.”

“I sleep at your place when you want me to and I don’t when you don’t want me to.” He shrugs with no retort. “I got no money. You hearin me? No cuartos, papi.”

One time I saw her throw her sneaker off the third-floor fire escape and nail him right in the chest. He picked it up and started walking off. She climbed back in her window and a few seconds later busted through the front door and chased him down the block—not like he was running. She yanked the back of his sweatshirt then he flipped around and lifted all of maybe ninety pounds of her by her waist onto the hood of a parked car. She pounded on his shoulders with half-clenched fists until he grabbed them. Then she stared into him like the only thing that would calm her down was locked in his mouth, and he opened it for her.