AT THE END of the street, or the beginning actually, if it is entered from the south where the numbers, if there are any, run upward, the buildings are unoccupied.
Uninhabitable is a better word.
The doors are gone; the windows long ago shattered and smashed.
The roofs expose jagged patches of blue, and most of each floor has been eaten away, leaving only a vast crosspatch of beams and two-by-fours spliced with the knuckled slime of broken and crumbling plumbing, so blackened they look charred.
Occasional kids play in and out if the smell is tolerable—faint enough to wrinkle a nose in quick disgust and forget it.
More often the stench is unbearable.
Bums and drunkards and wandering derelicts stumble in to piss or bend down and shit in the shadowed corners.
Starving cats, sometimes a dog or two drag in carrion to munch on, slit-eyed and growling in the dark, while an army of rats, often crazed with hunger and disease, fight among themselves, eat their dead, leaving what remains to rot until the stink is so strong it would gag you as easily as if it were being fogged out into your face from a canister of teargas.
Time, decay, neglect, indifference; lack of feeling and of love: these create a bomb as deadly as the atom, and indeed, ruins that are far more beautiful.
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, or on the fringes of Black or Spanish Harlem, block after block, sometimes mile after ragged mile of these hideous buildings, viewed from a distance, say on a clear and moonlit night, have all the ghastly, ghostly beauty of Berlin, or Dresden after the holocaust.
Farther on up the street, there are doors on the buildings, and even glass in most of the windows; or if not glass, plastic or plywood or even cardboard—any makeshift barrier to keep out the rain.
That’s because people have begun to live here —fractional humans first, half alive, half dead, or two-thirds into another world: the absolute loonies, the elusive, dangerous heads mixing, as the social hierarchy improves, with the harmless alcoholics and spaced-out junkies, merging finally into the teeming thousands of lesser deviate and destitute humans that finally constitute the heart and center of the street.
Oddly, plumbing makes the difference. If a toilet flushes, or if you can fill a glass or tub with water, however rank and rusty, you’ve got a home. At least a place to die in.
On the crumbling steps of the first occupied brownstone, marked 69 2, the third numeral having vanished in decay, sit two black fairies.
One, the immensley tall, knobby-boned, falsely eyelashed somnambulist of twenty-two, is Fenister Octavius Brown.
The other, the short, fleshy, handsome nineteen-year-old with the frosted blue-black Afro, was christened Star-Glory Joshua Jones by his coke-high mother. The name, however, is seldom used, except on welfare checks where it is required, and verbally by Fenister, who enjoys it; “Nohung” being preferred, the nickname acquired because the boy has no testicles. One remained undescended during infancy, and the other was so crushed in an accident when he fell from a bicycle over a fire hydrant at the age of twelve, that it had to be surgically removed.
Awash in sweat, giddy from the heat and the insufferable boredom of the afternoon, Fenister is busy lacquering Star-Glory’s nails an unearthly violet-tinged rose. He pauses, pink tongue between moistened black lips to appraise his work and glance up the block where the wide mouth of an open fire hydrant has been ingeniously wired with wood to throw a two-story fountain of foaming water over tens of dancing, shrieking children. Now he turns, velvet-eyed, to speak to his neighbor, the fat woman in the faded flower wrapper nursing her baby on the stoop of the brownstone next door. Once 6900, the double “o” has long ago fallen away, leaving only something of an occasional passing joke.
Fenister can speak flawless English but enjoys affecting an exaggerated southern drawl and commensurate manners, as if he were a permanent Blanche in an eternal performance of A Streetcar Named Desire.
“Y’ole liike this heah color. Miz’ Johnson?”—exhibiting Nohung’s glittering fingers.
Mrs. Johnson is so glistening and finely wet from the heat, she appears thoroughly oiled. The over-90 temperature doesn’t bother her much, but it has covered her baby’s body with a prickly rash which she dabs at constantly with a soaked rag from a saucer of calomine, painting the tiny torso a pinkish-powdery white. She is actually bone-dry of milk and nurses the infant only because a pacifier is five flights up.
Grateful for a diverting moment to take her eyes from her worry, she smiles back at Fenister, admiring the color extravagantly, but mistakenly calling it purple.
“Purple! Why Miz’ Johnson—” Fenister’s thickly mascaraed, nearsighted eyes squint inches from the bottle. “Ah’ll have yew know that this heah is Fatal . . . Mauve.”
He laughs, appreciating the absurdity of it, and somehow, beneath the hidden pain, the absurdity of the situation: himself, and Star-Glory, and the whitewashed infant busy sucking at an empty breast that appears as round and ripe and full as a melon, while a bunch of skinny, mostly naked kids leap like idiots through a geyser of water spitting from a black snoot of metal sticking out of the pavement below.
He must lean closer to read the fine print, his long lashes virtually brushing the label.
“Super-vibrant fluorescent color: it glows in the dark.” Another laugh; strengthening his voice to ride above the shrill babble of sounds from the street—“Yew heah?—Star-Glory. Y’ole goin’ t’ glow in the dark t’night! Yo’ mammy sho’ named you raight!”
He blows his breath on Nohung’s nails, his heavy eyes once more lifting to the burning street The long sweep of it, disappearing into a haze of smog in the distance, seems more filled with plant life than human; sea-grown, with flesh of all colors crowding each window, lining the doors, spreading itself over every step and stoop, like coral and ocean weed over a sunken city.
His eyes return to the fountain, the nexus of all life at the moment. Besides the kids, a few adults, unable to resist, have stripped half nude, and are exposing themselves to the stinging, cooling thrash of the water.
Fenister nudges Nohung, and— “Look, Miz’ Johnson”— pointing to the Riveras, an old couple, all skin and bones, dressed in what appear to be white nightgowns plastered wetly to their bodies, standing eyes closed, holding hands, pushing their grinning, almost toothless faces into the lacey edge of the fountain.
On the other side, Graciela Ruiz, a tiny crippled girl in a battered oversize wheelchair, is delirious with joy, screaming her pleasure, as she is pushed in and out of the spray by Juan, her brother.
Farther on, beyond the reach of the water, a cluster of small wet children, each with a nickle in a grimy fist, crowd around the orange-and-white-striped umbrella cart of a street vendor who scrapes finely shaved ice into a paper cup, sprinkling and soaking it to the rim with flavored, dye-colored sugar water.
Their cries—“I’m nex’!” “I wuz heah afore yew!” “Gimmie the strawbarry!”—reach Fenister’s ears. Sadly, he remembers himself as one of these same skinny kids, a nickel clutched in his hand, waiting his turn, hungering for the taste of that sweet, icy water that stained his tongue so happily green, glowing red, or darkly yellow.
A white-and-blue police car turns a corner and begins to nose its way down the street, moving slowly, a white officer at the wheel, his companion black.
One by one, in pairs, by groups, the people in the street become aware of the car and fall silent. Some move off, others become still and watch. Soon all is a tableau except for the faint wail of a baby and the sporadic bark of a dog. And, of course, the splatter and hiss of the water, rivers of it at each cluttered curb. If there are sewer openings, they’re so choked with trash and debris that half the street is now a shallow lake, against and over which the hydrant fans out water as heavy as tropical rain.
The car moves into and through the cloudburst, coming out clean and glistening, the windshields humming.
The officers seem slow and weary, thoroughly bored, as if they had done what they are doing a thousand times that day.
The black cop comes over to the hydrant, twists the water off, then loosens the bite of the great black wrench on the bolt that had opened the flood.
“Whose is this?”—holding up the tool for the crowd to see.
Silence. Someone coughs. Dripping kids sniffle. Subdued laughter. The wail of the baby. The dog.
“—Your’s, Julio?”—seeing a small dark man fidget, half lost in the crowd. And in Spanish: “It looks like a plumber’s wrench.”
Julio tosses a shock of ink-black hair from his furrowed forehead only to have it fall back again immediately. His Picasso-bright eyes peer out like a small animal’s from the underbrush.
“No.” Laboriously shaping, forming, saying the words in English—“Some—kid’s. He brought it. I saw him.”
Vigorous nods, hushed murmurs of agreement from the crowd.
The officer smiles dubiously.
“Yeah. Some kid . . . some kid about fifty years old.” He turns to his companion officer. “You heard? You could make it out? He says it belongs to some kid.”
The white officer shrugs. “Looks like it belongs to a plumber.”
The dark cop nods. “That’s what I told him; it’s his all right.” He turns back to Julio. And in Spanish: “Well, since it isn’t yours, you won’t mind if we keep it.”
The little man steps forward, stammering words impossible to say in English: “But— I promised to give it back. I think it belongs—to the kid’s father. Maybe he’s a plumber.”
The officer ignores him, throwing the wrench through the car’s back window.
He faces the crowd. His voice is strong, but it’s tone weary.
“It’s a misdemeanor to turn on the water yourself. No one’s allowed. Every hydrant in the city would be on—day and night. It lowers the pressure. It’s bad. Understand? You want water, you call the department. They have special spray nozzles. You know that.” He repeats the whole speech in Spanish, then pauses. “Okay?”
Faintly, from somewhere in the crowd: “Go fuck yourself.” And in Spanish: “Eat shit.”
The officer suffers patiently, shaking his head sadly.
Watching, Star-Glory mutters underbreath: “Mother-fuckers !”
The police car moves on. Fenister improves the epithet.
“Father-fuckers!”
Nohung loves the innovation and instantly both are manic with laughter, giddily hugging and kissing, posturing absurdly, as if two brothers separated and lost for twenty years had suddenly found each other.
On the west side of the street, opposite them, the last of the day’s sun is trapped in a brief fire between two buildings. Sharp as a laser, it suddenly pierces the outerflung reaches of a cloud of fine mist left suspended in the air from the water, shattering into a vast instant arc of color, gone in the blink of an eye.
Over the shoulder of his friend, Nohung’s jaw hangs open in surprise.
“I just saw a rainbow !”
Fenister pulls back, glances around and up, his bored eyebrows arching, forgetting his accent.
“You just saw shit, honey. That’s what you saw.”
His languorous eyes sweep the street again, this time stopping short at the rusted black rail fronting 6913.
His interest is keen now, instantly focused, for there, separated from the thinning crowd, perched on a battered trash can, sits Julia Ortiz: small, too thin for her thirteen years, pale, but almost beautiful of face. Somewhere, way back, there must have been Oriental blood: the cheekbones are high, the dark, shadowed eyes lidded but oblique; fine, straight black hair hangs to her waist. She wears a T-shirt and faded boys’ Levi’s, a jagged hole in one knee, a red patch sewn near the crotch. Her feet are bare and dirty.
Fenister paws Star-Glory’s arm.
“There! I told you. The Ortiz girl. Right on time. And soon the others will follow; the moment the sun goes down; like a gathering of—” he couldn’t think what “—of bats! You’ll see!”
Even as he speaks, another of them (in Fenister’s use, the word usually bristles with queer emphasis) arrives: Angel Rodriguez, who was deaf and born with a tongue so malformed and twisted, he never learned to speak, but is so remarkably handsome at twelve years of age, so finely made of face and body, his color as light and warm as ground nutmeg, that Fenister would gladly kill him, or, short of that, himself.
The hatred has always been mutual. Whenever he happens to pass “that crazy black giant of a fairy” (the language would have to be sign) Angel spits vigorously on the ground, never quite looking directly, always pretending not to see.
He does so now though they are separated by a hundred feet or more, spitting not once but twice, and with a screwed-up expression, as if he had some vile and unbearably bitter taste in his mouth, or smelled something fantastically malodorous nearby. Watching him, Fenister feels the blood pound in his head, seeking a passage to erupt.
“I’ll get him; oh, one day I’ll get the little mother-fucker; then we’ll see who spits!
The few words he can manage are edged out between his teeth.
“That’s two.”
Star-Glory looks at them as directed; the first pair: Julia Oritz and Angel Rodriguez, and then the others as, indeed, they soon arrive: Jamie Santana, Kathy Whatshername?—Sanchez or Santos, and Maria . . . he can never remember how to pronounce the name though he can spell it out in his head . . . del Vallejo. But to him there is never really very much to see: just a few ordinary neighborhood kids: two Spanish, one black, one (possibly) white, and the other—godknows—all dressed, as always, in what he considers rags: faded jeans and T-shirts, the Santana boy in a loose-fitting tank top that must have come down from an older brother.
If they appeared at all, it was where they were now—in front of 6913, an empty, boarded-up building, and always, yes, at about dusk, sometimes later, so at least that much must have been prearranged. But why make anything of it?
Nohung had decided long ago, without interest, that they were probably part of a street gang, or some kids’ club: every child around seemed to belong to some stupid thing, like “The Blue Sharks” (why blue?—because the paint in their spray cans for subway graffiti was always in shades of blue!) or a new one he had heard of recently: “The Satanics.” The Satanics! Boy, some real dopey, juiced-up kid must have jacked that one off! Anyway—
Whoever, whatever they were, if anything beyond what he could plainly see, to him they were in a way “mysterious” or “sinister”—qualities his friend insisted they possessed.
“Mysterious!” “Sinister!”
Shit! That Fenister!