Hipster Death Rattle Page 12

  And now her boss was in that space—her married boss—Luis De Moscoso, dressed in slacks and shoes but no shirt, as he jumped off the couch and walked back and forth.

  She loved her job. She didn’t know how she felt about Luis, but she did know the situation was stupid and that Luis was not what her friends would call a “catch.” She would have left El Flamboyan, but she knew she was doing something important for people who had been forgotten, not just someone missing like Rosa Irizzary, but all the Latinos and Latinas who still lived in Williamsburg while the neighborhood violently transformed all around them. It was just very complicated. Ai, she needed a drink.

  The floor was bare wood, last varnished decades ago, and his feet made slapping sounds as he paced. He walked into the bedroom, into the storage/law library/office/second bedroom and then back out to the living room—there wasn’t any more space to walk unless he wanted to walk into the bathroom, but there was only enough room to take a single step in there. Naked and cold without his warmth next to her, Magaly slouched on the couch, a hand-me-down from her aunt.

  Magaly asked him what was wrong. “¿Que te pasa, hombre?”

  “I can’t. I just can’t tonight,” he said.

  She could tell he was warming up for a speech. So much for a quiet night, she thought. He had been acting more and more unpredictable lately, and not in a good way.

  His chest, shaved as smooth as his head, was red and heaving, as she worried he would hyperventilate.

  “Is this about Jocelyn’s closing?” she said. “Because I’m not surprised. I don’t know how they were able to stay in business the last few years without any customers.”

  They had a tradition where he would always bring her a bag of alcapurria, rellenos de papa, and morcilla, all very greasy yet ecstatically delicious deep-fried food, from Jocelyn’s, one of the last cuchifrito joints in the neighborhood. He came in tonight empty-handed, saying the store was closed and was now a pop-up shop called Mown that featured clothes made of grass.

  “You know, that food will kill you anyway,” she said. “It’s full of the bad cholesterol, not the good cholesterol—” She stopped herself when she realized she was sounding like Chino.

  “Jesus! It’s not about Jocelyn’s!” Luis said.

  Speeches and lectures. What was up with the men in her life? What was that about?

  “¡Carajo!” she said, losing her patience. “Then what is it?”

  Magaly watched him pace and sadly realized how much he reminded her of her father. Not just the pacing and the ranting, but also the shirtlessness. She realized—for the first time, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before—that her father wore his goatee the same way Luis did. Holy Mother of Sigmund Freud. Here was a whole new series of sessions with her therapist.

  “Those slashings, the killing,” he said. “Did you see the news?”

  “I saw the news, Luis. I read the news every day.”

  “It’s not just white people now. All the other victims were these hipsters and yuppies, and now it’s one of us. Not a Puerto Rican. He’s a Guatemalan, but he’s a Latino.”

  “So? Do we get a free pass?” she said. “Where do you get them? Because I would like one.”

  “No, Mami. You don’t understand. It was an accident.”

  “An accident? Wait, how do you know?”

  “Ai, because this is the Latin gangs. I know what they’re doing. They are trying to clean the yuppies and the hipsters out of the neighborhood, not us. They must have thought it was a white guy.”

  “I don’t know, Luis. I think it was only a matter of time before they started killing Latinos. Not that there aren’t plenty of white people to slash. But I wouldn’t think the gangs were discriminatory.”

  “No, no, no, you don’t understand, they’re like us, like me. They want the neighborhood to go back to what it was.”

  Magaly’s face scrunched up in disbelief. “So, wait, their plan is to wipe out the white people so we’re all back in 1979? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense. This neighborhood, my old neighborhood. You see what’s been happening. These white people, they think they can come in and change everything.”

  Here we go again, she thought. You get Luis lost on a highway, but he would always find his way home to his favorite subject.

  “I know, Luis. I don’t like it either,” she said. “But the mayor only cares about the yuppies and the tourists. Most of all, he cares about the real estate developers.”

  “Mami, we can’t just do nothing while they expect us to go away or die off, so that they can take our homes and our businesses. What we need to do is kick them out and change it back, change it all back.”

  Why, oh why did he have to call her “Mami?” It was a step up from “Baby,” which she had to train him not to use. In another circumstance, it might have been endearing. But now Luis calling her “Mami” sounded more than a little creepy.

  “Change it back?” she said. “C’mon, Luis, that’s impossible. And don’t you remember how it used to be? The catcalls, the harassment, the assault. I couldn’t walk the streets at night. I can’t tell you how many times I almost got raped, how many people I know got mugged or had their apartments broken into. It was insane!”

  “That was a different time. The economy is better now. But our people don’t get to enjoy it. We never get to rise above second-class citizenship.”

  She shook her head, her hair a moving cloud of curls, and got up and padded to the kitchen.

  “I don’t know, Luis,” she said from inside the refrigerator. “We have to work with them, not fight them. That’s what I want. I’m having that meeting with the Keap Street gallery. Maybe if we work together, I don’t know.”

  There was no beer, no more wine. Just an old bottle of coquito from last Christmas.

  “Work with them?” Luis said. “These stupid, entitled artsy-fartsies. They don’t care about art. All they care about is money. Only the rich have the security to pursue a life of art. It’s the people with the money who have always had the power.”

  “Wow. You should talk to Chino. You two could power all the electricity in the city.”

  “You mean your reporter friend?” he said. “I was meaning to ask you: What kind of friend is he? What’s the story there?”

  “Oh my god, I’m not going to justify that—”

  He grabbed her arm, knocking the coquito bottle out of her hand to smash on the floor.

  “Luis! You’re fucking hurting me,” she said. Great. Another reminder of her father. “Bastard! Go ahead. Treat me like you do your wife.”

  He raised a hand to smack her, but she was faster and grabbed the first thing in her reach. A metal spatula, two dollars at the ninety-nine-cent store.

  “Don’t. You. Dare,” she said, pointing the spatula at him. “My grandmother used to beat me with one of these until I would bleed, so I know how to use it. Don’t even think about touching me. Ever.”

  He stepped back and took a breath. His eyes weren’t seeing her. He didn’t see her standing there, naked, holding a spatula, feeling ridiculous.

  “I have to do something…” he said quietly, almost whispering, “…I have to help bring the Southside back to the way it used to be. All…all my childhood memories are being ruined by people that don’t belong here. They’re changing everything.”

  “Luis?” she said.

  “I have to work on articulating this concretely. No one loves the man who has to tell the truth. But my plan has to work. I know it’s gonna work,” he said. “And please, god, forgive me.”

  In seconds, he had put his shirt back on and had raced out of the apartment.

  Magaly plopped on the couch and realized she still had the spatula in her hand.

  “Men suck,” she said and threw it across the room, hitting her two-foot-high statue of Christ. “Oh god!”

  She got up to do something, anything, and then she stopped and plopped back down. What was she going to
do? Soothe the statue? Apologize to it? She rolled over, pushing her face into the couch. But then she mumbled a “Hail Mary,” just to be safe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ah, the summers in Brooklyn. Yogi Johnson loved them. Energy! Electricity! Passion! The people had it in spades. And it would all hit a peak on July 4, when things went bonkers on his block. All the guys and the little kids on Maujer Street would set off firecrackers, sizzling sparklers, bottle rockets, cherry bombs, morning, noon, night, for weeks before and culminating on the date. He liked to watch from his front window, but he felt a part of the people down there—distance avails not—part of Brooklyn, and on those days it was as if the whole street was on fire, absolutely lit up. And then the morning after July 4, Maujer Street stank of sulfur, and firecracker paper littered the whole block, covered the sidewalks, piled into dunes in every gutter. Fantastic!

  But a July 4 like that hadn’t happened for a few years now. Now there were a few pops and cracks here and there. Where had all the fireworks lovers gone? He watched the street, and it was clean. And quiet. Boring.

  It was time to go downstairs to check on Mr. McShane. After being rushed to the hospital, the old geezer had been diagnosed with a gallbladder infection. He’d spent three days in the hospital for tests. Yogi had visited him every day because he felt karmically involved.

  “Where are your kids? You got kids, right?” Yogi had asked him.

  “Gone.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “California.”

  “Same thing, then.”

  Somebody had to take care of the old man. There was a tube that emptied the contents of Mr. McShane’s gallbladder into a bag. Somebody had to help clean out the bag and clean the area where the tube entered the old man’s body. Mr. McShane had to watch what he ate, what he drank, how much he went to the john. A nurse came by only every three or four days. So Yogi stepped in, gladly taking on the burden. He checked on him a few times a day. He had taken a spare set of the old man’s keys and let himself into his apartment.

  “Mr. McShane,” he said as he came in.

  The old man lay on an extended recliner that looked like it belonged in a junkyard, in front of a console TV set topped with dozens of paperback westerns and with a screen layered in dust. Some baseball game was on, playing too loudly. Yogi lowered the volume.

  Mr. McShane looked at Yogi with tired eyes and said nothing. He moved his head toward a side table covered with ancient issues of TV Guide, Bill Cosby right there on the top.

  Barely audibly, the old man said, “Mail.”

  There was an envelope on the table with Yogi’s name on it. He’d look at it later.

  “Time to clean your tube, Mr. McShane.”

  Yogi raised the old man’s T-shirt and examined the bandages. Mr. McShane smelled like a homeless man, a combination of sweat and ass and feet-stink that could fill a subway car in seconds. The old guy needed a sponge bath badly, but brave as Yogi was, he wasn’t feeling up to that challenge. He’d leave that for the visiting nurse.

  After he finished cleaning the hole and changing the bandages, Yogi emptied the old man’s pitcher of urine and then microwaved a turkey dinner and set it out for the old man. Then he went back and microwaved a Salisbury steak dinner for himself. After what he’d done for Mr. McShane, he figured he was entitled to a cheap meal. Besides, there wasn’t anything in his refrigerator upstairs. It was meat, alas, but he didn’t feel like being a vegetarian this week.

  As he sat on the floor eating, he could feel the old man giving him the stinkeye. Yogi decided to create some goodwill, lighten the mood, try to reach across the Generation Gap. He and Mr. McShane hadn’t been on the best terms before, but the old man and he would have to get used to each other now. He saw a black and white picture on the wall, just above the TV set. In it, some farmer types stood in front of a series of horse sheds.

  “Where is this, upstate?” Yogi said, standing up in front of the TV set.

  “Devoe Street.” Old McShane spoke slowly and softly.

  “Devoe?” Yogi said. “That’s just over a few blocks from here.”

  “Used to be farms all around here. That’s my grand uncle’s farm. 1910. Those are all parking garages now. The owner makes a mint.”

  “The neighborhood sure has changed,” Yogi said. He was totally reaching the old man with his positive tone and selfless attitude. “I bet you’ve seen it all.”

  “Yeah.” The old man leaned over to one side of the recliner.

  Yogi settled cross-legged in front of the TV set. “I bet you think it’s changed for the worse.”

  “No. Well, for a while,” the old man said. He leaned over to the other side of the recliner, and Yogi saw him wince with what looked like pain. “It’s a much better neighborhood now,” McShane said. “Nicer people.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Yogi said. “I’d say the neighborhood was much better ten, twenty years ago, when it was really for artists.”

  “You’re talking about the hippie artists. I’m talking about the coloreds and the PRs. Used to be crawling with them. Now we got nicer people. Much nicer people.”

  “Oh.” Yogi sensed negativity and decided to change the subject. He said, “Oh, hey, let’s watch something we can both enjoy.”

  He took the remote control from where it sat by the old man. Yogi started changing channels. “I don’t have a TV set in my place,” he said. “I don’t even have Internet at the moment. I’m pretty cut off from the world.”

  Yogi stopped on the local news. He normally would never watch the news—it was all fear-mongering, crime, and product placement disguised as news. But he saw the headline behind the news reader: “Another Williamsburg Slashing.”

  “…Echeverria is still in intensive care at Woodhull Hospital. This attack brings the count up to five so far…”

  Yogi said, “Wow. Really?”

  “…local gang members are being questioned in relation to the slashings. Police say they have no suspects at this time…”

  “Wow.” He turned to look at old McShane. Yogi said, “Well, the more the merrier, I always say.”

  After the news, and after two very bad sitcoms, Yogi got up nimbly and with purpose and emptied the old man’s pitcher of urine again. Then he filled a pitcher of water and set it next to the urine container.

  “Now, don’t get these two confused,” he said.

  As he went out the door, Yogi felt Mr. McShane giving him the stinkeye again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Right out of the elevator, Detective Hadid spotted a gorgeous Puerto Rican nurse by the nurses’ station. He left his partner, Detective Petrosino, behind, and slid up to her with his best Hollywood smile. In what he considered his decent Spanish, he said, <“Good afternoon, beautiful lady. Please, can I talk to me where Jesus Echeverria’s room am?”>

  The look on her face did not say, as he would have liked, “Hello, Papi.” Instead, it said, “I know how to make an enema unpleasant for you.” But what she actually did was point to a room across from the nurses’ station, where a uniformed cop stood. And toward which Petrosino was already walking without looking back.

  Inside the room were several Hispanic visitors, no doubt family relations, all in varying degrees of hysterical crying.

  On the bed, the victim looked awful. Jesus Echeverria’s left hand had been reattached and was heavily bandaged, his head swaddled in bandages.

  Using his decent Spanish, Hadid introduced himself and Petrosino. He told them they’d like to speak to Echeverria alone. The visitors moved out slowly, except for the victim’s wife. Hadid looked at Petrosino. He shrugged his approval.

  Hadid stood by the bed and leaned over. He got close to Echeverria’s face and hoped he could hear behind all the bandages, <“Mr. Echeverria. Can I tell me who hurt me?”>

  Echeverria looked confused, but then he answered slowly, in a whisper. <“He…came from…nowhere. Why did he do this to me?”>

  <“Did I see
the man?”>

  <“No. Too fast.”>

  <“Was you a white man? A black man?”>

  “Blanco,” Echeverria said.

  “White,” Hadid said to Petrosino.

  “I got that,” Petrosino said.

  <“I told the officers on the scene that the man ran on a bicycle. Can I describe the bicycle?”>

  <“No. It was just a bicycle,”> Echeverria said.

  <“Do I remember the color?”>

  Echeverria paused. Then he said, <“I think it was red. I think.”>

  Hadid took notes. He turned to Petrosino. “Want me to ask anything else?”

  “Ask him about the weapon.”

  Hadid did. Echeverria looked up at the ceiling. His eyes watered. <“It was a big machete. Two feet. Why did this man do this to me? I didn’t do anything.”>

  Petrosino said, “Right-o. That’s enough.”

  Hadid thanked Echeverria, and the detectives left the room. As soon as they did, all the visitors poured back in.

  Outside the hospital, Hadid watched Petrosino have a smoke.

  “You’re outside smoking here, and there are people inside with the cancer,” Hadid said. “Don’t you see the irony there?”

  “I hate irony,” Petrosino said. He flicked his ashes. Some of them landed on Hadid’s jacket. “So, I didn’t know you knew Spanish.”

  “Oh c’mon, man,” Hadid said, wiping off the ashes. Then he said, “Yeah, my wife’s people are from Ecuador, so…”

  “Is that so? Well, Mr. Echeverria here blows the young and white victim M.O.”

  “Well, I was thinking, if it’s gangs doing this, maybe there’s a chance Echeverria’s gang-connected somehow.”

  “Maybe. Although he seems a bit long in the tooth for it. Still, check him out. Did you look into that ‘hipster death’ thing we talked about?”

  “Yeah, Petro. Sorry, I got to it right away, soon as you asked me. I googled around. No link to any gang stuff, but I turned up something on Twitter.”