and washed all the dishes.
Some coffee, a little more wine and laughter in the living room, then Lola and he had come in here for a long, slow bout of lovemaking. They began, but the spark wasn’t there. His hands had felt like lead.
It started, it stopped. It fizzled out.
“You seem distant,” he said after they gave it up for good.
“Not distant,” she said. “Just thoughtful.”
“Okay. Thoughtful.”
Now, Lola’s warm and sleeping form pushed up against his. Her arm was around his waist. Across the room, the digital clock read 2:35. There was no sound anywhere. That was the thing about this city – when night came, the sidewalks rolled up and it was almost as if no one lived there.
Her voice came, quiet and thick with sleep. “Smoke?”
“Yeah, babe.”
“Do you love me?”
“You know I do.”
“That’s good, Smoke. Real good.”
A few moments passed, and her breathing deepened and became rhythmic. She was gone again and he was here, awake and on the case. Her protector.
He was going to have to tell her something soon. He just didn’t know what that something would be.
CHAPTER THREE
Cruz slumped in the back of the black Mercedes S-500, sunk deep into the plush leather, his eyes closed behind reflector sunglasses. The earphones of his Sony Discman hung slightly askew, just enough that he could hear everything being said up front, but not so much as to arouse suspicion. At the same time, he could listen to his music. The compact disc was DANCE PARTY HITS OF THE 70’S, the soundtrack of his youth.
The song was Le Freak, by something called Chic.
He remembered it. He saw himself at a Manhattan dance club, brooding, holding up the bar, watching the young girls flaunt themselves out on the dance floor as the lights strobed crazily, streaks of technicolor electricity flying through the air. Again, he felt the rage, the yearning and the frustration. Nearly 30 years had passed since those days, and in all that time he had only managed to slap a few thin coats of whitewash over the real Cruz. His personality was like a slice of linoleum pasted over a dark abyss – if you dropped through, there was no bottom.
He had done this kind of work since the age of eighteen. That year, he had been cut loose from the youth home with two hundred dollars, plus cab fare to his aunt’s house in Corona, Queens, and an appointment to see a job counselor out there a week later. They had let him go with a kiss on the cheek and a kick in the ass.
He never made it to Queens.
His aunt didn’t want him, and why should she? He had lived with her at the age of ten, then again at fourteen. He was bad news, the product of her sister the drug addict’s wasted life. His face carried a deep knife scar from one of her sister’s many boyfriends, a maniac who one night decided to cut the little boy’s eyes out. Luckily, the maniac had been too drunk to see what he was doing or hold onto the boy for long – Cruz – who ran screaming out of the squalid apartment. But the scar on his face was only an emblem of the deeper scars he carried. Cruz was trouble, and he knew it. No, his aunt would not have him, and on some level, he didn’t blame her. She wasn’t yet thirty years old herself, struggling with three young kids of her own. Cruz was enough to sink them all.
She had called him the day before he was set to leave the home. He stood at the pay phone in the concrete stairwell. A couple of younger kids were talking and laughing down at the other end of the narrow hall.
He looked at them. Gradually, they sensed his stare. Then they left.
“Chuco, do me a favor, ah?” his aunt said.
“Yeah,” he said, already knowing what was coming.
“Don’t come over here. I got enough to worry about with the kids and the rent and all the rest. You know? I like you, Chuco. You was good when you was a kid. But now… you know? It’ll be bad having you here. I don’t got the room. I don’t want the cops coming here. You understand, right?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“You’ll do good, Chuco. You’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah.”
“Just don’t come here. You come here, I can’t let you in. I’ll call the cops myself, okay? I’ll tell ‘em you stole my money.”
Cruz hung up.
He rode the cab into Manhattan, stopped at a check-cashing place, cashed the two hundred, stuffed most of it in his sock, and checked into a twenty dollar a week room at a Single Room Occupancy hotel on the west side, not far from the river. He paid for a week up front. Then he sat upstairs and cried for an hour. Cried for everything. He gave himself one hour to get the cry in, no more. He even timed it on the Timex watch one of the teachers at the youth home had given him. At the end of an hour, he stopped and looked around. The room was about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. There was a narrow bed and a sink. There was a cheap wooden dresser with a sticky blotter pasted on top of it. There was a closet with a couple of coat hangers. The old white paint was peeling crazily, showing a nasty green behind it – the walls, the ceiling, everywhere. A window looked out onto the fire escape. The street was three stories below. The bathroom was down the hall.
He’d never been here before, but instinctively he knew the game. There would be predators in the bathroom. They’d be looking for an easy mark on the shitter, an easy mark in the shower. People would break into his room while he wasn’t home, looking for money. Junkies would drop dead from ODs. He’d be lucky if some junkie didn’t burn the place down in the middle of the night with a cigarette or a hot plate left on. The management wouldn’t do shit about any of it.
Anyway, it was a start.
He went out. If there was an answer to his problems, he wasn’t going to find it staring at the four walls of his room. The answer was out there, on the streets. He resolved that he would find that answer, whether that meant he had to go to prison, or whether he died with his blood running in the gutter. The thought appealed to him. He would live, and thrive, and make it big, or he would die. No compromise.
He went to Times Square.
1976. The Bicentennial. 200 years of flag waving and good times. Rocky. Jaws. And in a lighter vein, 18 amp; Horny and Guess Who’s Coming. Just outside the Theatre District, the Broadway of A Chorus Line and The Wiz, Times Square lay spread like the blighted whore she was. The lights dazzled Cruz. The pimps and hookers and drug dealers hanging out with beer cans in paper bags, the streams of runaway kids, the junkies, the scumbags, the pickpockets, the johns, the freaks who wanted to fuck children – a circle of lost souls. The blood banks, the liquor stores, the X-rated movie houses, the massage parlors, the greasy spoon diners with deals going down in every booth – there was barely a legitimate business in the whole neighborhood. Times Square was an open sewer. In 1976, for someone with the right kind of eyes, it was also a glittering promise.
Cruz loved it.
He went to a live peep show and watched a big black guy tool a tiny oriental girl on a table. He bought a dollar in booth tokens, and every time the screen went down on this little act, he pumped in another token.
Then he went and bought himself two hot dogs, fries and a Coke at Nedick’s. He stayed there a long time, watching the action out on the street. The sex, the freedom, the crazy sparkling madness of the place – it was a revelation.
“Hey kid,” a fat little bald man said one night a week later. “I seen you hanging around here a lot. Wanna make some money?”
“What do I have to do?”
“You look like a sharp kid. Ever hurt anybody before?”
Cruz smiled. “Sure.”
