Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Carajo, how can I tell poor Raymundo? How do I say I lost my job? Wake him up? Take him out to the hall when he wakes up in the dark? So the kids don’t hear?

No, he’ll be sick.

I’m sick.

Right now.

My stomach is turning over.

My heart beating.

The N train pulls out. One more stop, and then a final stop on the local. The familiar stations of the R pass in a blur of black poles and flashing lights. Union Street. Fourth Avenue, Prospect Avenue, 25th Street. She sees the signs before she sees the stations, some trick in her head. The stations changing the way their luck is changing. But she knows from Mexico that you can’t trust in luck. You will not kneel before Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the next day win the lotería nacional. You will not be told you have cancer and then pray and pray and pray and find that you are clean again. You make your luck. You work for your luck. You work and work and work and work.

Then at 36th Street, she rises to change to the R. The Chinese man gets up and yawns. The woman who looks Mexican grabs a pole and angles to the door. The angry-looking gringo stays there, his fingers laced, his knuckles white, staring at nothing. Consuelo thinks: Who can I go to? Who will help me find a job? Who can save us? The Diet Pepsi bottle rolls across the floor. Consuelo follows it with her eyes. Looks up. Sees a sign:

SI VES ALGO,

DI ALGO!

If you see something, say something. The bilingual train stops. The doors open. Here is the R. She boards it, notices the usual people. Latinas and Chinese, a few gringos . Like most of them, she remains standing, until the train reaches 45th Street. She leaves the train and moves quickly along the platform to the revolving door that leads to the stairs and the street. The dented metal bars on the door need painting. She moves quickly with the other women, Chinese women, Mexican women, some Dominicans too, por seguro, some from Ecuador. Up the stairs. Into the rain.

She sees the familiar signs. El Reencuentro restaurant. Mega Car Service. The Sprint Payment Service. The Tlaxcala Estila barbershop. They all start up the hill, the Chinese heading for distant Eighth Avenue, Consuelo and most of the other Latinas one long hilly block to La Quinta. This street is safe, with people here most of the time, even in the rain. You can see a police car every twenty minutes, maybe, just cruising along. Some other streets are not so safe. She reaches Fifth Avenue, and knows where everything is, even when the stores are closed and the metal shutters rolled down tight. Zapatería México. Tacos Matamoros. Cancún Fashion. The travel agency with a sign that says ENVíA DINERO A MEXICO AQUí. They haven’t sent money back home since little Timoteo was born. Now four years old. And the middle one, Marcela, is ten. The boy loves her. Always giggling when she tickles him. Following her everywhere in the house. What will happen to them?

She turns right, heading south, hugging the wall to avoid the rain. Her bare hand clutches the key chain in her pocket. She sees the sign on the corner of her street: School Daze. Where everybody buys clothes for kids, the boys downstairs, the girls right inside the door. Beside it and on top of it, the apartment house called Roma rises five stories, the shades drawn in every apartment, no lights burning.

Abruptly, from a shadowy doorway, a black man appears, his back against the door. She gasps, says Oh. He wears a thick black beard. His eyes are as surprised as hers must be. His skin is wet.

— Don’t worry, he says. Just keep going.

She moves out toward the avenue and hurries along, not too fast, so she won’t show fear. But she’s afraid. Where is the police car? Where is anybody? At the corner, in front of the Toda Moda shoe shop, she sees the lights of the Korean store a block away, burning as always through the night, and thinks she can run to its safety. They know her there. In the daytime, after school, her oldest son, Eduardo, works there, delivering orders, sweeping. The customers call him Eddie. The first American child. Fourteen now. Almost as tall as his father. And we were here only a year when he was born. Eddie is one reason Consuelo likes the Korean store. When she doesn’t have time to go to the cheaper store on 42nd Street down by Second Avenue, she buys serrano chilies there and nopales and tortillas.

She turns and looks back.

The black man is gone.

She moves quickly into her street, stops before the shuttered unisex barber, looks for slow-moving car headlights, sees none, looks for the bearded black man, sees no one, and dashes across the wet street to her house. She jams the key into the downstairs gate. Turns it. Goes in, flicks the small lever that locks the door, and slams shut the iron bolt that Raymundo always leaves open for her. Goes through the second door, locks that behind her, stands there for a long moment, breathing hard. Home. Safe.

She hangs her hat on a wallpeg, shakes her hair, unbuttons her jacket and pulls off her scarf and hangs them on a separate peg. Raymundo’s padded tan jacket is on the third peg. She slides off her wet shoes, and places them on the floor beneath the pegs. She walks in socks past the stairs into the kitchen. A coffee cup and saucer are in the sink, on top of dinner plates. That is part of their deal. She will do the dishes. Over the years, Raymundo had washed so many dishes, before becoming a cook, that he told her once his only wish was that he never wash another dish. She smiled and hugged him, and said, Okay. He said, No, no, it’s only a joke, un chiste, mi vida, but she said, No, I do the dishes from now on.

She turns on the hot water, letting it run, squirting some liquid cleanser over the dishes. Four dishes, one each for Raymundo and Eddie, Marcela, and Timmie. The water warms her cold hands. She glances at the refrigerator, where photos of the kids are attached to the door with magnets. On the table is a copy of Diario de México, the new paper with all the terrible news from the old country.

EJECUTAN

A TRECE

Thirteen more killed in the drug war. Usually along la frontera. This time in Mazatlán, to the south. It’s as if Raymundo is sending a message: We can’t ever go back to that country. Our lost country.

She thinks: Oh, how will I tell him?

She thinks: And what will we do?

She tries to remember Mexico. To forget their two floors in this house, the kitchen and the room with the TV and the garden on the first floor, the bedrooms up one flight. To forget Sunset Park. Writing the rent checks. Addition and subtraction. Clothes for the boys. New shoes for Marcela. Instead, she pictures birds in the morning in the house in Cuernavaca. She is seventeen again, working up north in Cuernavaca, and sending money home every two weeks to Mama in Oaxaca. She sees the stone house in Cuernavaca, with light streaming into the rooms while she mops, and the pool blue and glassy and the birds singing. Señor Lewis said one time that birds were the first musicians. He was right. And on the second floor, Señor Lewis is in his studio, sipping coffee, painting in shorts and T-shirt. She sees the narrow bed against the studio wall. The bed where—

Señor Lewis.

Perhaps he can help.

She has his address in New York, from fifteen years ago. She has never gone to see him. Not once. Not after—

Señor Lewis.

His kindness. His heart.

She thinks: I don’t even know if he’s alive.

I must try to find out.

2:28 a.m. Malik Shahid, aka Malik Watson. Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Rain and rain and rain. Malik moves with caution, his kufi behind him in a sewer, his shoes soaked. Here nothing grows. Paradise is a garden, says al-Quran, but this is not Paradise. Here is only concrete and slate and asphalt, skeletons of trees, dead cars whose floppy airless tires caress stone curbs. He thinks: I am alone in rain and night. I hear the tearing sound of cars above me on the expressway but can’t see their lights. A few taxis, roof lights saying “Off Duty,” move south to their garages.