Bronx Noir

What other way is there to live? I wonder. This is all I know.

About a month into the program, I’m sitting in her office talking about the future. She’s telling me about a job she thinks I’d be good at—working with a team of researchers studying patterns of drug use in the city.

“They’re looking for people who have firsthand knowledge of crystal meth,” she says. “You’d be doing ethnography—studying a subculture…” She pauses to take a phone call. “It might be my daughter’s school,” she says.

I sit there thinking about the job. From what it sounds like, I’ll be great at it. I laugh to myself and think, I study patterns of drug use every day anyway—who’s got what, where, and for how much.

Suddenly I notice her usually unflappable demeanor shift. She looks like she’s been slapped and says only a few words during the ten-minute phone call. “Never, not at all, what should I do?” she finally exclaims.

She hangs up, looking stunned, and apologizes for the disruption. She tries hard to regain her composure.

“Is everything all right?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer at first, she just picks up the picture of her daughter. She stares into it as if trying to draw strength from its aura.

“I apologize, but I just received some devastating news,” she finally says. What she tells me next tears through me like a bullet. It was a credit bureau calling her, investigating “an unusual number of revolving credit accounts being opened and now in arrears.” Her savings account has nearly been drained—the account she built for her daughter’s education. Only pennies are left. Now the arduous process of repairing her credit and proving to the banks that it wasn’t her will begin. Sadness envelops me.

Images of Heidi’s apartment suddenly play like a slideshow in my mind. She had flashed that picture in my face that twisted night I found myself in her apartment. It was the ID with the pretty face Heidi was determined to duplicate. Billy’s tentacle prints are all over this scheme. Was this the “justice” he was talking about? The woman who now sits before me was our prey: chewed up and spit out like countless others. I was a part of a wicked machine that ruined lives and now I’m face-to-face with my evil. The problem is, without the drugs I have a conscience, and I’m devastated.

I sit there listening to her tell me the story I played an integral part in. I can actually feel her confusion, disenchantment, and anger, coupled with the urge to exact some sort of revenge or instant justice. If she only knew. Now here’s the question. Would she be more at ease if I were to disclose my connection to this wicked scheme? If anyone would understand, it would be Ms. Frey. She makes a living out of caring and being sympathetic, right?

Well, I never come clean with Ms. Frey. I quit the program after that day. I had a chance to make good and it disappeared as quickly as it revealed itself to me. I can’t bear to be around Ms. Frey at all. It’s true what they say: Secrets keep us sick. I’m still as sick and twisted as ever.

Months pass and I’ve got two days before I’m released. Soon I’ll be back in the abyss, and I’m sure this time it’ll be deeper and darker than ever. The game is funny that way—just when you think you’re on your way out, it pulls you back in. Rikers Island can’t change years of what life in the Bronx has bred. Who the fuck was I kidding?

LOOK WHAT LOVE IS DOING TO ME

BY MARLON JAMES

Williamsbridge

This is the year of the monkey. A Chinese john told me this after coming back from downtown to celebrate Chinese New Year. I was just shocked to see somebody Oriental cruising ass anywhere past Grand Concourse. I think he was rich too. But then they’re all rich, these johns who have wives and kids back home but then whisper to me that after feeling how tight an asshole is, could never truly love pussy. They tell me all sorts of stuff. Mostly they tell me to act like a girl, so I call them honeychile and flick my wrist like a faggot and that makes it easier, I guess.

Hey, white boy, watchu doin uptown? Lou Reed, the original signifying monkey. I’m older than I seem and younger than I look. Clever. Brains couldn’t save me last year when my dad kicked me out because I didn’t dig girls. I was like, Yo, Pops, I don’t eat pussy but I suck a mean dick. Not really. Not at all. After he got through with me, after my mom was more sick at the beating than what I was getting beat up for, she screamed and he stopped. Now I walk like Ratso and one day I’ll fuck him back up.

Right now it’s 11 in the night and I’m by Hammersley and Ely, right outside Haffen Park, watching cars go by. Cruising of a different flavor. Yeah, boyee, clever. I’m at Hammersley and Ely and I’m waiting for Gary to come shuff me off this mortal coil. Gary likes a good old mess so he’ll probably use that sawed-off of his. Or maybe his bowie knife. It’s weird waiting for somebody to kill you. Knowing that you’re going to die, knowing the end of the movie before the middle makes you do all kinds of shit. Wicked fly shit. It’s like knowing you have cancer so you can do that live-every-minute thing. So I went to McDonald’s and bought two fries. I shoplifted some Garnier Fructis from Rite Aid on Eastchester because I should at least smell good when they find me off Gun Hill Road somewhere.

A snapshot. We’re in the living room of my parents’ house on Gunther. We’re Jews, baby, the last of a dying breed in the Bronx. Gary is sprawled on the love seat, legs spread wide with boots on the chair arm. His vest is dirty as fuck and he’s wearing no shirt underneath. Baggy jeans, the brown ones I don’t like with speckles that look like dried blood. He really looks like shit, but it works. As I said, we’re in my parents’ house.

My mother is dead now. So too is my father. Both died this year. My sister Diane died several years before but just a few years after Dad stopped fucking her. Andre, he’s in jail with nothing but a conviction and no remorse. Ten months before they found him at the gate, trembling like they had dunked him in ice. Dude was still clutching the bloody hatchet and shaking like he got fits or something. The Post said they charged him for double murder and resisting arrest. My father had three hatchet wounds in his forehead, fingers chopped off, probably from trying to block the blows. My mom had to be buried with a closed casket. But enough about them. Gary is going to kill me.

Like just about everybody in the Bronx now, Gary is from Jamaica. I don’t know if he was doing guys given how Jamaicans, like, kill homos and shit, but I know he used to kill back there. Back in the ghetto and shit. See, I know, I represent. I miss him. I hate that. I sound like somebody old, and I have to be tough like him. I want to say I miss him, but I can’t. Maybe I’m just relieved. I don’t know. Some things you can’t unsay and some things you can’t undo. I’m at Hammersley and Ely and a car just slowed down. They used to kill people in this park almost every