5
Rockaway.
So here I am, in my Rockaway apartment, listening to the kids on the third floor. They have no toys, so for them, fun consists of running room to room, slamming doors, flooding the bathtub with water until it seeps through the ceiling.
First, there is knocking on my apartment door. Then pounding.
The voice calling from the building hallway tells me I can’t avoid the real world forever. I have to come back to the real world sometime.
I finally unlatch the bolts and chains on my door.
Ely Noble stands there, with a basketball on his hip.
His round figure and fat body is a welcome sight. His black face brightens for a smile. Then he pumps the ball at me, pretending to aim for my face. This causes me to wince and duck like an idiot.
Outside, we don’t talk much, yet, because that hot new Brazilian girl, Esmeralda, walks the sidewalk just ahead of us. The seductive stride of her hips has us both mesmerized, until she turns to buzz entry into the next building.
Finally, I say, “Did you hear about the plane crash?”
“Yeah, yeah, we all know how right you are.”
So I say, “But you still don’t care?”
“Yo, that shit happened far away,” he says, bouncing the ball.
“The wings clipped the roof of Building 6,” I say.
“Come on, let’s go hoop it up. Or you scared I might dunk all over your shit?”
So I reply, “Bitch, you can’t get up, you can’t jump.”
Noble pumps the ball, pretending to pass it really hard at my head, but this time I strip him of it, start bouncing it myself.
We both walk on, finally meeting Agusto Rodrigo.
Agusto stands by a dumpster, his back turned. We sneak up on him, attack him from behind. Agusto spins out of our grasp, swinging, until he knows it’s just us, his friends. He smiles his gap tooth smile.
Then, at random, an empty soda can hits me on the back of the head. It came from inside the dumpster. I look over the edge of the dumpster lid to see Pablo Rodrigo picking through some smelly trash bags. Flies swarm around his face but he doesn’t care to swat them away. Next to the dumpster I notice a bag of soda cans the Rodrigos have collected to return for beer money.
We all walk together down the main complex street.
And Pablo is saying, “My uncle Hector, his arm look nasty, mang. He got scars, so many scars. From the metal plates in his arm. From when he stuck his arm in the press machine at work, and it got all crushed and shit.”
Pablo points to his forearm, to show where is uncle needed surgery.
“They make my uncle Hector go to the settlement for the check. For months and months, they make him go. For years. But they never give us no check, yet.”
Then his brother, Agusto, adds, “We even call lawyers from the TV. Slip and fall, yo.”
Pablo tells me his uncle injured his arm on purpose, so he could file a lawsuit, for the entire family to move back to Puerto Rico, in style. Pablo makes it very clear that his uncle is the hero in their family.
I want to know what kind of job his uncle had, so I say, “What did you uncle do?”
And Pablo says, “He just bleed on the factory floor.”
I don’t correct what I meant by my original question.
We walk on.
Then it starts, the hazing.
“Whiteboy got on shoes from the bowling alley,” Noble says, about me. “Blue and red. “Half cracker ass, half corny-as-hell.”
The Rodrigos make sounds that take the insult to a higher level, and Noble carries on: “Belt buckle so damn big, bitch look like a pilgrim.”
So I say, “What tribe did you come from, with those two nostrils always flaring wide open when you chew, huh, fat boy?”
The Rodrigos holler out: “Ohhhhh Shit!”
As the one white person living here, the one minority, I’m expected to take lowest position on the race totem pole. I’m expected to laugh it off and say nothing. But I’m also expected to defend myself, or get booted from the group, no respect. It’s a line I sometimes have to cross. But I can’t complain. After all, these friends of mine, they get crushed by the white majority when they leave Rockaway. I’m the just whipping boy when they come home. I know this. So I’m required to let Ely have the last word.
“Honky motherfucka, your nose so narrow, sound like a dog whistle.”
Everyone, including me, laughs.
So Noble continues, “Whiteboy be whistling out the thang, call every dog on the block. Toot. Toot.”
Still more laughter.
Then his puts a tight arm around me to smile and say, “You know I’m just playing, whiteboy.”
“Let go,” I say, with a straight face. “I’m whistling to a pack of hounds right now. You squeeze me too tight, dogs won’t come, make me sound like a flute.”
But the conversation ends quick. The front door to Building 10 swings open so hard it nearly breaks off its hinges. Standing there, with a wet pony tail and a grizzly beard, is Max, the squat Columbian. His fist has a baseball bat. The boxing gloves that tie around his neck hang at chest level. And, somewhere in his pockets, Max is sure to carry a switchblade.
We huddle on the steps until the Rockaway squad car pulls to the curb. The security guard tells us not to “congregate” in front of buildings.
Max stares the guard down. Max, who just moved to Rockaway, hails from inner city projects of New York. Rockaway is just a small version of that, suburban projects, but he can’t shake his former hostility. Max wants to test the guard, because he plans to form a gang here, lead it.
The guard finally peels off.
Then Max tells us, “Nobody say to me shit. Come on, we go to the park.”
Together, moving as a pack, we enter the park.
Many already there play a game of basketball: Latino, Black, Asian, young versus old, shirt versus skin.
Next to the main office, near the pool, Rick Van Pelt is outside with his wife, Marla, who yells at a team of landscapers, screaming not to mow the lawn or trim the bushes. Instead, she shouts for them to pick up pieces of trash, broken beer bottles, wet condoms, and hypodermic needles.
Max has us all sit down at a picnic table.
He eyes me with suspicion, because I’m white.
He says, “I never see you.”
Pablo talks for me, to vouch for me. “He’s cool.”
His brother, Agusto, says, “He’s not like the other gringos.”
Max takes the switchblade from his pocket. He places his hand on the table top, then he starts to stab the spaces in between his fingers. Fast, then faster.
The Rodrigos ask about my job, since I work all the time, since we don’t party much anymore. They know I’m a security guard, but Max doesn’t, so I strain to say I smoke drugs on the job.
Max listens to us all talk, while he carves his name into the picnic table bench.
“It’s weird,” I explain. “I go there, work, and it’s all nice, then I come home, and I hear gunshots. It’s seems, I don’t know, fake happy there. But for a few hours at night, I get some peace and quiet.”
Max says, “Whatchu mean, fake?”
I try to compare the Clear Lake Condo Estate to the Rockaway Apartments. Like West Egg, a rich contrast to a poor Valley of the Ashes. That reference makes no sense to him, so I quickly say something about video games instead, how we lose track of time, then jolt back to reality.
Just as I mention video games, he says, “You know, in my country, I don’t have shit. Here, I have a video games.”
I start to snicker a little, thinking I’m making progress with him, but he tells me, if I want any part of his gang, I need to get jumped in. Boxing, he tells me, is the only way I can join.
Max brings us to the far end of the park, near the sand dunes, to stage a boxing match. He says it won’t be fair for him to box, since he’s a semi-professional fighter, so he’ll referee, instead.
Serving as a boxing ring, the golf putting turf is squared on each side by a fence that has started to rot—the golf hole is brimming with rainwater.
Max insists I fight everyone, three rounds each. He grabs me by the arms. Pablo puts the gloves on my hands, lacing them up. The other set of gloves goes to Agusto Rodrigo.
One of the basketball players calls a timeout, and they all come shuffling over from the court.
Before Agusto can remove the chain from his next neck, Max declares the ding ding, and I go at my opponent with my gloves laced tight.
I conjure up thoughts of the construction workers at my job. How much I hate them, it motivates me.
In true windmill fashion, I land punches against the scrawny Puerto Rican, so constantly quick, it looks like I’m taking practice on a speed bag.
In the back of my mind, I see the full grass around the Clear Lake Condos, full green. Then I see the weedy lots of Rockaway, all dirt. Then I see red, the color of fury.
Agusto gets a bloody nose early in the fight, but Max lets it pour down for three full rounds. We hammer each other, trading jabs at the noisy center of the mad mob. Agusto finally quits, walks away, admitting his vision is a blur.
I have to suck air. My eyes follow the passing gloves. I’m happy with the win, but the next guy is fresh to fight
Gloves on, Pablo Rodrigo looks juiced up to honor his brother.
“Ready to get your face broke?” he calls across to me.
I think of the pristine lake at work and the fake nice. I think of the polluted river here, and the gritty real. Now I can feel the heat of my lungs exit the surface of my chest.
I rush forward, applying the same speedy punch technique as before, striking the head and face. Pablo is much taller, has a longer reach, but his legwork comes from a clumsy stance. I have plans for an uppercut. Pablo reels back, in reverse, until the heel of his right foot gets wedged inside the golf hole. I swing at his chin. I connect with enough leverage to stop and watch as Pablo goes crashing through the wooden fence.
The crowd loves the slow motion stumble of it all. Their laughter puts an immediate end to the fight. Max waves it off.
And they start chanting for Ely Noble to fight next.
Noble says, “Bring that shit on, nigga.”
In the back of my tired mind, I see fresh paint on condo walls and the steam-clean carpets. Fury. I hear the constructions workers I hate in my ear. Fury. Then I smell Rockaway hallways, those piss yellow stains. Fury. I see flashing cop car lights outside my bedroom window. Cop car sirens. Fury.
In the first round with Noble, a hellish fatigue makes my arms go weak. I have to grit my teeth when hit on the head. I take a hooking roundhouse to the temple. Noble uses a solid hook so many times, I can feel the brain inside my skull shake, shake into this idea: the planes fly over my roof, they shake my mother’s knick-knack decorations off the wall.
Noble puts a heavy lean on my body, the rival body. Under the weight, desperate and afraid, I take aim at his gut. I deliver my right glove, a wicked shot. Max tries to step between us, as a shield, but Noble is still on the attack. He looks to pound away, trapping me in the corner, then lifting his knee into my groin.
A gasp from the crowd, then silence.
I let go a grunt, dropping and rolling to the turf.
At this very moment, I notice Jordan Shamshack, standing in the tennis court, seeing her sideways. She has a smile. I’m too dizzy with pain to care about the embarrassing way I cradle myself. Her sun-dress makes me curious, her satin under-slip. She straddles the sagging tennis court net, to beckon me.
Then, like a hologram, the girl I had loved throughout my youth, starts to fade out and flicker. Her image, gone.
I mumble, “How real is real?”
Then someone above me says, “As real as a motherfucka, that’s how real.”
Meanwhile, news spreads through the park that someone just robbed a liquor store. Police have chased the gunman into Rockaway, and now have weapons drawn.
This information has high entertainment value, so the crowd of onlookers and bystanders go running in the direction of the next spectacle, leaving me flat on my backside.
A plane swoops by low to the ground, about to land. The plane is close enough for me to see a male pilot wearing an eye patch. He’s flipping me the middle finger.
I don’t know if I’ve done enough to join the gang.
I stagger home.
My work shift starts in twenty minutes.
In the bathroom mirror, I button my security guard uniform, looking at my black eye and the cut above it.
Today, on purpose, I forget to put the badge on my breast pocket, leave it on the sink.