The Quiet Parts Pt. 5
Leigh finally catches Jason on Friday night when he returns from Gilman. She is cooking stir fry when his smell, an oily musk that makes her think of some mammal fresh from hibernation, enters the kitchen three feet ahead of him. He is tall, broad, has dull blue eyes, red lips, a long nose, and a weak chin hidden beneath a ginger beard. Red hair hangs like dirty rags from his scalp. His too-small Crass shirt barely covers his budding gut and his legs are hairy like a faun’s from the frayed hems of his black shorts to his red Chuck Taylors. From the table she watches him microwave charred pancakes that resemble black Pangaeas, heap them on a plate, then drench them in an Exxon-Valdez of agave nectar. She follows him to the living room where she proposes they visit Williamsburg.
“No way,” Jason growls from the couch. Furiously he bangs a coin roll on the edge of the coffee table, payment from his teenaged clientele. “Are we in 2005? Brooklyn is done.”
“When was the last time we all hung out?” she persists with impatience, because his smell makes conversation a trial. “It’ll be like old times. Jo said she’d like to buy four grams.”
“Your college friend?” At last the roll explodes. He scowls at the coins scampering away. “She can make do with shitty New York weed. Nobody forced her to move.”
Behind her pleasing smile, Leigh wonders if it she made a mistake appealing to his nostalgia. Jason was conducting deals through the halls until a year ago, when he vowed never again following a trip to Williamsburg. “Puerto Ricans,” was all he’d say. “Fucking savages.”
Leigh switches strategies. “She says she’ll pay extra for the good shit. So think about it.”
“I just did,” he answers, scooping pennies off the table into his open palm.
Noon on Saturday, Leigh wakes to find herself on the living room floor. Phlegmatic snoring draws her attention to the person sharing her blanket—Sequoia covered in paint, like they went to that Hindu festival. They both are. Sluggish, Leigh fights for memory, recalls the rave, unable to recall what drugs they took. She manages to stand, at which point she has a sensation of her soul plummeting from her body to lay in a heap on the floor, attached to her by the ankle, leaving her no choice but to drag her existential essence from living room to shower to bedroom.
Around two she has ingested enough wake-up pills to consider her NYC wardrobe. She ends up dressing East Coast style in black yoga pants, witchy black boots with chunky heels, a red zippered hoodie and UCSC jacket. Sequoia, though standing, looks catatonic, their eyes drooped in a face pink-striped from the paint they scrubbed off. They wear the same cargo pants and hoodie that over the week have conformed to their body like melted wax.
Because of the three-hour time difference, the housemates are ready to leave at four, when Jason comes home and says, “I’m going.”
Irritated, Leigh waits an extra hour for him. Most girls she knows don’t take so long picking an ensemble. He returns downstairs in a black beanie, pea coat, jeans, red Reeboks, and a delightful cinnamon cologne on his freshly washed skin. Appropriately dressed like a hipster dealer. She offers to carry the four grams weed in her cheetah-print leather purse, and he agrees.
The gray-walled Williamsburg hallway is lit with unshaded bulbs spaced twenty feet apart. They walk for an hour, she supposes, since their phones get no reception.
At last the hall ends at the part she remembers with dread: a chute rising fifty feet high, six by six feet in circumference. Instead of a ladder, there are narrow wooden shelves nailed haphazardly to the walls. Wasting no time, Leigh removes her boots, ties the laces together, drapes them around her shoulder, and instructs her housemates to lift her. Once she gets her palms on the first ledge, she pushes herself up, grunts at them to lift her higher. Her agonized arms trembling like floppy disks, she at last gets her foot on the ledge and with sudden, victorious power rises to a standing position. Careful not to step on the rusty nail heads, she places her hands on either side of the chute to beam down on her crestfallen housemates.
“I’ll be honest,” she pants, sweating, “I kind of love this part. It feels like Harry Potter.”
“Everything’s Harry Potter with you,” Sequoia replies with a dry laugh.
“House Gryffindor for life, bitch!”
Reaching down, she takes Jason’s hand, then lifts him with help from Sequoia. The ginger man, who grunts and curses all the way up, gives Leigh no time before hoisting her by the waist as high as he can lift her, to the second shelf. She regrets the sweat on her cute ensemble.
After much cardio, profanity, and an impressively communistic level of cooperation they reach the cold cement at the top and sprawl, breathless, in synchronized agony. Even magical travel to New York requires struggle. (Though the most difficult hall to traverse will always be Over-the-Rhine. All that work for Cincinnati? Really?) Fifty feet away the hall ends in a red-brick wall wormed through with rot. Centered at the bottom is a dirty vent that reminds her of the orifice in a hemorrhoidal ass. Barely able to move, Leigh crawls to it, removes from her pocketbook a quarter she inserts in the vending slot adjacent to the vent, the metal slick with grease—New York demanding its tithe.
The vent opens to a white room decorated in faceless mannequins and long white sheets from ceiling to floor. Spooked by the low-budget horror vibe, they hurry through. Another vent, another quarter. A dilapidated blue-collar kitchen where copperhead snakes slither underfoot; then an oak-walled parlor beneath a high ceiling, warmed from the fire of a gargantuan mantel crowded with ornate 18th century timepieces; then a boudoir strewn with velvet pillows on a four-post bed across the room from French windows that clamor like the damned from the force of a keening storm, the room crowning a high cliff descending sheerly to a tempestuous sea.
At last they crawl into a room the size of a broom closet. A breeze capers through chinks in the crudely hammered boards constituting walls, and Leigh, longing for adventure in misty alleys, squats to drop her quarter in the final slot. Mournfully, the vent swings open.
Heedless of the drop she knows awaits, she grips the slimy edges of the vent to push herself out, feet first. A fall. Her butt meets the hardwood floor. Dazed, breathing through the pain, she takes in her surroundings, the spacious hall of a loft apartment. Nailed to the wall above her is a sign for the Purple Lotus Chi Gong Studio, closed for the night.
Her housemates struggle through. Both land with a grunt. Some paces away, a radiator coughs asthmatically; above it, through the barred window, she can glimpse an icy half moon. Enchanted, she twirls down the hall. Her blood carries the spirit of Lena Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Cat Marnell and every small town girl who ever made it in the Big Apple.
Aboard a freight elevator, the doors start to close when a beefy hand reaches out to hold them. Enter a giant blond boy in a loud ‘90s tracksuit, followed by ten bouncy undergrads in similar neon. “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” roars from the boombox the boy carries on his shoulder. Crowded against the back wall, Leigh is pressed close to Jason, upon whose face congeals a look she remembers on the faces of adult commuters when UCSC kids took Amtrak to San Francisco for the annual Bay to Breakers run, all the youth drunk on crunk and 40s.
Jason scowls at her. “Done,” he mouths.
They Uber to Jo’s Bushwick apartment. The driver is an Ethiopian named Hanock. Silent, smiley Sequoia looks happy to get out the house. Jason keeps pointing out reasons why New York is a hellhole. Riding shotgun, Leigh listens to the J train rumble in the sky and absorbs that Williamsburg magic. If only she’d been old enough for its early aughts heyday.
Shortly they exit Hanock’s Isuzu into the kind of alley where people get executed in mafia flicks. Jo buzzes them into her building. Next thing Leigh knows, she is on the fifth floor, being met at the door by a slender, Mediterranean beauty in a white slip dress.
“Black Girl Leigh!” Jo embraces her, greeting her by her college nickname. Diplomatic with her affection, she hugs Jason and Sequoia, in turn. Jo lives in a soulless cubist IKEA showroom of a loft that she affords as a paralegal, though standup comedy is her passion. That night her apartment teems with Caucasians in their late twenties and early thirties. On the whole they come across like crass, narcissistic, tedious pessimists. Whether that signals them as lawyers or comedians, Leigh wonders.
Jason sells Jo four grams of Humboldt County grass. Then their hostess gathers the four of them around a glass coffee table with coke. “Three . . . two . . . one!” They take a communal snort. Leigh chases the blow with a glass of pinot that leaves a boogery aftertaste. After some chitchat, she asks Jo if she rents her halls, as if she does not know the answer.
“Heck yeah!” Jo exclaims. “And we make good money. That’s how I paid for my vacation to Nicaragua. Do you know our landlord has the audacity to charge us more because we have halls? And not even good ones. Who goes to Chicago anymore?”
“We should rent ours!” Leigh tells Jason.
“Do I look broke to you?” he grunts.
“But Chen’s gonna raise the rent again. How is renting the halls any different from Top/Bottom or your squat? That’s how we kept costs down,” she insists. When he says nothing, she pushes on. “We could put down a few mattresses. Lock the exit so nobody can get out. One person paying four hundred is a profit between the three of us.”
“We gotta charge more than that,” he scoffs.
Jo buffaloes into the discussion. “She’s got it planned! That’s why I love Black Girl Leigh. She’s like an Abbi with just enough Ilana to cause wacky hijinks. Do it! ‘Cause these landlords are crooked. In Park Avenue they’ve got halls that go straight to Toronto and Montreal. No passport, no customs.” She screams in his face. “Game the system!”
“It’s not gaming the system because it’s still capitalism,” he mansplains. “Squatting is gaming the system. Equating that to anything involving rent is problematic at best.”
She looks charmed at his righteousness. “I have missed you Bay people. All the time it’s like, ‘Jargon jargon jargon.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but human human human.’”
Regardless of Jo being Jo, Leigh notices his interest. Over the years he’s established his business through a loyal customer base and reputation for professionalism, on top of being born wealthy, but, despite his financial security, he suffers the malaise common to the Bay: hustling has made him miserable. Around the coronas of his tepid eyes shimmers a desire to step off the work-weed-booze-sleep treadmill and dwell on the Pacific as leisurely as a seagull.
To show off, Jo takes them in the kitchen, where she unlocks the window to reveal a tidy hallway containing several cozy-looking pieces of furniture, including a brass bed. At an oak desk sits a baldheaded man who looks around fifty.
“This is Stew,” Jo introduces him. “He’s a playwright. He’s shy.”
Blithely he waves hello and resumes clacking away on his prehistoric boulder of a Hewlett-Packard. He looks content.
And what a spacious hall, Leigh thinks. Jo is messing up. She could fit dozens of people in here if she wanted.
Later, Jo plays music. “Cheetah Tongue” by The Wombats. Jo and Leigh dance on the terrace. She can see Lady Liberty in the distance, waving her torch as if to say, You go, girl!
Leigh tells Jo, “I think Jason’s coming around to the hall idea.”
“Yeah!” Jo screams. “It’s like being a landlord with all the spiteful power over other humans’ safety and security but none of the property tax. That deserves a toast, bitch!”