Chapter 19 ~ In Plain Sight
April 27, 2010
At Port Authority, I changed into my costume, my hip-hop cloak of invisibility. I didn’t skulk in the corner or find a quiet sidewalk, I got changed in amongst the throngs of passengers coming and going along the ground floor concourse, timing my changes to the beat patterns of the cops.
The way I’d always figured it, I was safe in the one over-riding quality of the big city, the commonality of “if I ignore it it’ll go away”. These were people who could walk past someone getting mugged, someone screaming rape, someone shooting up in a main-street doorway and later say that they hadn’t seen anything.
Gee, officer, I didn’t even hear him speak to me… Wow… That really happened while I was… Wow…
Over in the corner there was a young lad sitting on a back-pack. He was wearing combats and a blue shirt, short-sleeved, paisley whorls all over the material; back against the wall at the side of a small news-stand, the other wall at his left side, leaving only his right flank open to the public. When I’d first glanced, I thought he might be rolling a joint, or checking the stuff he’d picked from someone’s pocket but as I watched him, I realised that his being wedged into the corner was more an act of protection. It was in the way he looked about himself, his eyes a little wild, checking every person who came within fifteen feet of his makeshift island.
A little while earlier when NYPD’s finest walked past, the boy had looked up with the most amazing smile of thanks on his face.
Definitely a tourist; this young teenage boy away from home for the first time, scared shitless by the seething mass of humanity that was Port Authority at rush hour. He needed some help, some support.
I could have walked over there, bent down to speak to him, shown my empty palms to reassure him I was no threat, finding out whether he was lost, whether he was waiting for someone, or if it was just a case of a gypsy cab driver picking him up at the airport and ripping him off for all the money he had.
I could have done that.
But I had my own craving to fix and my bus was scheduled to leave in ten minutes. I had to become my black alter ego and get to the gate. I began to change there on the concourse; a couple of minutes until the cop came back around again.
The boy watched me. Every so often, I glanced in his direction and found him staring at me, eyes ever wider.
I could read the thoughts driving the expression on this face.
That guy is getting changed here and now in front of me and nobody fucking well seems to care! None of them!
Here was this terrified boy, alone in the madness, silent in the crowd, staring at a skinny white guy pulling on a bag-load of hip hop gear, topping it off with a woollen cap even though for most of the day the city had roasted in the high eighties. A terrified boy that I didn’t have time nor inclination to care about.
I had a bus to catch; a bus to my one remaining high, adrenalin. I started towards the gates.
A woman walked up to the boy.
He stared at her knees for what felt like an age, not wanting to meet her eyes, hoping she would go away, leave him alone to his burgeoning panic. But she was going nowhere. She crouched, said something, and his head snapped up to look at her. Recognition flared, shattering his fear, smearing relief across every curve of his smiling face. He lunged forward, grabbed her around the neck and hugged her tight.
Which made me think of Ivvy in the park that time, the one time she’d kissed me, when I acted like an asshole and destroyed most of the trust we’d built up over that whole long year of joints and smack and speed and acid and every other chemical we’d forced upon our quaking physiology.
I carried on past the boy and his rescuer, ever more eager to be on that bus, heading to Jersey, to the one thing that now gave my life any purpose.
* * *
As the bus pulled out of Port Authority, heading down the ramp and into the network of slipways that enter the Lincoln Tunnel, I was thinking of my parents.
Off in Europe, their departing message that terse, unfeeling note from my Father. I knew better than to try to read something more into it than what it said.
My father didn’t care for me very much more than my cold, cold mother. Even then, that caring was little more than a way to make his life run as smoothly as possible.
For many years, he’d chosen to lose himself in work, an easy task given the headiness of the eighties, the down of the early nineties, the resurgence of the dot-com bubble. My father surfed those waves with a vigour that was inversely proportional to his desire to spend any time with me.
My parents, as foreign to me as Outer Mongolia.
Over in Europe now, doing the family thing, burying a grandfather I hardly knew.
I didn’t wish them well in their travels.
All I cared about was that, for a little while, the apartment was mine. And given the way things had been between Ivvy and I, that wasn’t such a bad thing.
The bus rumbled into the maw of the Lincoln tunnel, its roar amplified by reflection from the tunnel’s tarnished tiles, all cacophony and sonics; harmonics and sub-bass.
I leaned my head on the window to feel the thrum of the bus, feeling the vibration, something akin to life.
I woke up as soon as the bus pulled to its first stop amidst the pseudo-Manhattan that had grown on the other side of the Hudson.
Wide awake.
Adrenalised. Ready for the chase.
Ready for the takedown.
