Buried on Avenue B (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 18

O'HARA PARKS ON
Neptune and follows the croak of the boardwalk talker until she stands on the last corner of the steaming metropolis—Twelfth Street and Surf Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Across the street is Sideshows by the Seashore, which, according to the ballyhoo, is the last permanently situated ten-in-one freak show still ripping tickets in America. O'Hara hands $3 to a tattooed cashier and steps into a dark box. Despite its name, there's no sea breeze here, just stale sweat, a raw plywood stage and steel bleachers. Beside the stage is a dressing room, and from the edge of the door light leaks onto an aquarium containing a plastic model of a reptile with a human head. Scrawled above it on the wall is the question “What is it?” as if perhaps it is something other than a piece of plastic. At 11:20 p.m. on a Sunday, the hipsters and tourists have long since fled the boardwalk, and the audience skews heavily Puerto Rican, and many seem caught in the late weekend purgatory between drunk and hungover. The show runs nonstop in a lethargic loop, and the first act O'Hara catches is the third on the bill. He is Koko, advertised as a three-foot-seven-inch dwarf, and as he struts onstage, O'Hara thinks of the upward-trajectory bullet that killed the boy. For what must be the thirtieth time that day, Koko whips himself into a frenzy. With vigorous thrusts of his pelvis and forearm, he recounts the night he caught his wife Evangeline in the arms of another man and stabbed them both.

Frank Hartman, aka the Human Blockhead, takes the stage next. He drops an awl down one nostril, then swallows a sixteen-inch sword—“down the hatch without a scratch.” According to the flyer, Miller, working under the name Xenobia, is on deck, but instead a very familiar-looking dwarf returns to the proscenium. Now dressed in the harlequin suit of a court jester, he introduces himself as “Roland the Crappy Juggler.” Dwarfs shouldn't wear patterns, thinks O'Hara. It makes them look short.

The crowd, already hot and restless, turns cranky. Having dropped $3, they were counting on something genuinely freaky, and Roland ain't getting any shorter. They greet him with boos and balled-up programs turned into projectiles. “Hey, Koko,” someone yells. “I fucked your wife too.” And when the dwarf pirouettes, drops his pantaloons, and invites the heckler to kiss his ass, O'Hara takes it as her cue to end her evening at the theater.

Outside, leaning rakishly against the rail of the boardwalk, is a thin young man. He wears a straw boater and jeans rolled up to expose a couple inches of skin above his ankles. He must be the impresario because he is pitching the rewards of his stage to a sexy double amputee.

“The sideshow,” he tells the girl, straight-faced, “will help you find a new narrative and at the same time help you get in touch with the roots of the iconography you're already being viewed in relation to.”

“Pardon the interruption,” says O'Hara, “but what happened to Xenobia?”

“I fired her.”

“Why the hell you do that?”

“She had an attitude problem.”

“Or maybe she found a new narrative,” says O'Hara.

“Can I help you with something?” Before O'Hara leaves, she extracts Miller's address from the postmodern pimp, and on her way to her car, she gets a call from Jandorek.

“A couple tidbits on Malmströmer,” he says. “The older daughter Inga, who would now be twenty-eight, has never been arrested. So how much trouble could she have gotten into? And, he didn't report her missing until '99, which according to the report was more than three years after she ran away.”

“What are you saying?”

“Not sure. But it's weird. He's so obsessed with one daughter he won't let her out of his sight, and another daughter he doesn't report missing until she's an adult. It doesn't add up.”

O'Hara hasn't spent much time in South Williamsburg. Twenty minutes and a couple wrong turns later, she pulls onto South Kent, a street so treeless, she shudders at the thought of Bruno scouring the vista in vain for something worth pissing on. She finds the building and rides a service elevator floored with wooden planks that look like they were ripped from the submerged portion of a wharf. O'Hara considers her privileged access to fringe New York one of the perks of her job, and has never had a boring conversation with a drag queen or trannie. But O'Hara has never encountered anyone like the figure who meets her at the elevator in a black slip, holding a bowl of Cheerios. O'Hara thinks of the question—
What is it?
—scribbled on the wall in Coney Island, but only for an instant, because the person in front of her has the unmistakably soft features and smile of a woman. Despite the full black beard and arms and legs as hirsute as a Hobbit, Miller is a fem. She's a girly girl.

“I'm Darlene O'Hara, NYPD. You must be Jennifer Miller.”

“How'd you guess?”

O'Hara follows Miller into a loft whose rawness is of a piece with the elevator. The decor is early millennium circus. Paper masks of lions and bears share space with stilts and unicycles, a tuba and an accordion. Overhead is a tightrope, and against one wall is the yellow-green bike O'Hara saw bolted to the gate that first night. In the middle of the room, enough equipment has been pushed aside to create a sitting area, and O'Hara accepts the offer of a stuffed chair.

“I'm working on a missing person case related to the community garden at Sixth and B. Casey Fagerland said Circus Amok has performed there many times. She also thought that she had given you a key.”

“I returned it.” Miller slurps her Cheerios and studies O'Hara with the most watchful eyes O'Hara has ever seen. They are barely less riveting than her other striking feature.

“Interesting,” says O'Hara.

“Why?”

“A couple nights ago I saw that bike outside the gate. I'm pretty sure I saw you sitting inside.”

“You're right,” says Miller, holding up a fat key chain. “I still have it. For me, a place where I can sit outside and be left alone is a big deal.” Miller's eyes fill with sadness. “Does Casey want the key back?”

“She didn't say that. She did say that Circus Amok is great.”

“We practice hard.”

“She mentioned a treasure hunt for foreign coins.”

“Loose change my friends bring back from mysterious distant lands. Nothing worth more than half a cent. I'm too poor to give away real money.”

“How do kids react to you?”

“You mean, how do they react to my beard?”

“Yeah.”

“They gawk. They ask questions. They're curious. They want to touch it. But unlike adults, it doesn't make them want to beat me up.”

“I went to Coney Island tonight to see your show. That line above the aquarium—‘What is it?' Do you know who wrote that?”

“I don't know who scribbled it on the wall. Probably the asshole who runs the place. But P. T. Barnum wrote it originally.”

“The guy who said a sucker is born every day?”

“He's known for that, although it's not clear he ever said it. Either way, he was a genius.”

On a corner table is a framed picture of a man with Miller's eyes and beard. “Your father?”

“No, that's my mother. Just kidding. He died a couple years ago. He was head of the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke.”

“No shit.”

“My mother,” says Miller, pointing at another picture, “died even younger. She taught at Teachers College. A couple brainiac do-gooders.”

Clearly Miller is smart too and O'Hara is perplexed. Why grow and keep a beard, when getting rid of it would have been so easy and keeping it turned her into a sideshow freak? Although she's not angry at her, like those adults Miller describes, she feels the frustration of a parent dealing with a stubborn kid. Why did you do this with your life? But then again, why does anyone do anything foolhardy or brave? Why did Axl drop out of school and form a band?

“If a kid comes to your show and says he wants to run away to the circus, what do you say?”

“Whaddaya got for me, kid? Can you juggle? Eat fire? Ride a unicycle? Make people laugh? What's your act?”

“So why'd you do it?” asks O'Hara.

“I didn't. I had nothing to do with whatever happened in the garden.”

“I know,” says O'Hara. “I mean, why'd you grow the beard?”

“Here's the short version, and pretty much true. When that first hair sprouted, and in the beginning there was only one, I was a teenager, and just coming out as a lesbian. I was going to pluck it, I came this close, but I didn't want to bow down. A second hair appeared, then a third. I didn't pluck those either, and I saw, from how disturbed people were getting, that I'd stumbled on something important. Since then, I've thought of shaving it a thousand times, but by now my beard and me are so intertwined, I'm not sure who I'd be without it.”

“You'd be Jennifer.”

“What if that's not enough anymore?”

 

CHAPTER 19

THE CUP HOLDER
of the '94 Jetta is no match for a large '07 Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee. O'Hara holds her doughnut in one hand, the thermos-size iced coffee in the other, and when her ringtone intrudes, she stuffs the doughnut in her face and flips open the phone. It's Grimitz in narcotics.

“Darlene, we got the results on the cannabis. It's the strongest we've ever tested. Hydroponic. Grown in custom greenhouses by stoner PhDs, and very pricey. Not the stinkweed you associate with kids. . . . Darlene, you there?”

“Yeah. . . .  How about the initials—‘GMS'—ever come across them?”

“No. NYPD doesn't devote a lot of narcotic dollars on designer weed maybe because the people involved rarely kill each other. But it reminds me of something. Last summer, a teenage kid rolls into the ER at Beth Israel on his skateboard. A nurse, who I was dating at the time, asks what's wrong. He tells her he's flipping out. She asks on what, he says weed. Over the next two days five other kids wander into the ER with the same story, and according to the nurse, who I'm no longer dating because she turned out to be a pain-med junkie herself, they all know each other from Tompkins Square, again not the type you associate with fifteen-hundred-dollar-an-ounce pot. I guess they're not used to it either, which is why they ended up in the ER. I never thought about it till now, but it could be GMS.”

Instead of heading to the precinct, O'Hara texts Jandorek and drives to the East Village, where she parks on C and enters the park at Ninth. Although another scorcher is forecast, the park still retains a bit of its overnight freshness. A couple old-timers are getting in their handball game early, a young kid practices foul shots, and the local muscleheads have turned the jungle gym into something between a prison yard and an Equinox. But the real jocks are in the dog run. As O'Hara walks by, a German shorthaired pointer, all chest, hindquarters, and lolling tongue, bounds back and forth over the five-foot fence as if on a pogo stick, his owner barely looking up from his
Times
to toss the slobbery ball.

The skateboarders have been allotted the northwest corner of the park, a generous-sized chunk that looks out on the small-scale commerce of Avenue A and the elegant town houses on East Tenth Street. In this quadrant, everything in sight is scuffed—the cement, the wooden benches, the garbage cans, even the bark of the trees. As O'Hara takes a seat on a scarred bench in the corner, she hopes she's not going to have to pull a sliver out of her ass. Half a dozen skaters, who have risen early to beat the heat, work the grinding pole in the center of the playground. Some kids pull off their tricks with practiced nonchalance. The less athletic labor at them. Either way, there is something heartrending about how earnestly they apply themselves to perfecting the same small bag of tricks.

The sounds and movements unfold with a hypnotic rhythm. First the push and glide, and then, after a quick tug at the back of the baggy jeans, the crouch and jump. Miraculously, the board levitates with the sneakers and slides along the top of the pole, the skilled ones carrying enough speed so that when they drop off the far end, there is enough momentum to complete a turn back to the starting point. A tall, skinny skater stands out for his speed and lift and stripped-down style, his every gesture pared to the nub. When he takes a break, the others crowd around him in the shade, and O'Hara edges closer. After a couple minutes, an aromatic cloud wafts her way. O'Hara glances at her watch—8:03 a.m.—and she can't help but notice it's the time of her last two drinks at Milano's.

“Smells good,” says O'Hara.

“Tastes good too,” says the tall skater. He has thick greasy hair and acne and looks even more emaciated off his board. Beside him sits a short, handsome kid with a clean white T-shirt and a beard. He looks likes Springsteen on the cover of
Born to Run
.

“It's not by any chance that hydro I heard about last year?”

“Out of our price range,” says the tall kid. “Besides, that shit's almost too strong.”

“I've been looking for some forever. Want to surprise my boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” says the skater, with an electric grin that eclipses his acne. “What a way to start a conversation.”

“Did I say boyfriend?” asks O'Hara. “I meant my cousin Stanley. My mentally and physically challenged cousin Stanley.”

“Should you be giving hydro to a retard?”

“Probably not,” concedes O'Hara.

“Don't mean to interrupt,” says Springsteen, “but who the fuck are you? And how do we know you're not a cop?”

There are three ways a patrolman gets promoted to detective. The most dependable, of course, is nepotism, having a hook or rabbi, an uncle who's a captain, a father who's a lieutenant. Another is by earning a reputation as an active cop, which O'Hara did, fresh out of the academy, in an anticrime unit in Times Square. The third route goes through narcotics, doing buy-and-busts undercover, which is by far the most dangerous and colorful. O'Hara has heard all the stories, particular about Jerry Reinsdorf, a detective who now works with her in homicide. Reinsdorf was legendary for his ability to channel a strung-out junkie from Jersey. He'd lie in the middle of a puddle in Washington Square and start bawling like a toddler, or pull out his dick and examine it with scientific detachment, as if he'd never seen anything like it before. His shameless performances invariably led to a score and a collar and made the unmarked van, parked nearby, rock with laughter. The stories confirmed something O'Hara has long understood. Half of being a good cop is being a good cop. The second part is making other cops laugh. O'Hara has also heard about the less gifted, like Doris for example, who was so unconvincing that the guys said she couldn't get the blind Pakistani at the corner newsstand to sell her a
Post
. “Hey, Doris, while you're out there, could you pick me up a coffee? On second thought, don't bother—they probably won't sell it to you.”

So who is O'Hara going to be, she wonders, Jerry or Doris?

“Do I look like a cop?” asks O'Hara.

“Ah . . . as a matter of fact,” says the tall kid.

“Let's see,” says his watchful sidekick, as if working from a list. “Uncool jeans—check. Uncool hair—check. Uncool shoes—big, fat check.”

“That was harsh,” says O'Hara. “How about these sunglasses? Don't tell me they're not cool, 'cause I paid seven bucks for them. As for the shoes, I'm a bartender. I'm on my feet all day.”

“Then take a hit and prove us wrong,” says little Springsteen. “We all make mistakes.”

“I can't show up reeking of pot. It's like advertising for the other side.”

“Where do you work that opens this early?”

“Homicide.”

“Seriously.”

“Milano's on Houston.”

“Take a hit,” says the shorter one. “Or take a hike. This isn't a spectator sport.”

“Twist my arm,” says O'Hara and slides over. “Darlene,” she says. “Friends call me Dar.”

“Ben,” says the tall kid. “And this small bucket of filth is Jamie.” He treats himself to a lungful, then passes the pipe. She takes a long hit and collapses into violent coughing that lasts for minutes and provokes a fair amount of hilarity. Unlike firemen, cops are subject to random testing. When she finally stops coughing, the sky sparkles in a way it hasn't for fifteen years.

“So you want to know the way to Grandmother's house?” asks Ben.

“Grandma?”

“Grandma, as in hydro dealer. Remember, for Stanley? Your handicapped cousin.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Then follow me,” says Ben. He drops his board at his feet and stands on it. “It's around the corner.”

O'Hara follows him west past the boutiquey shops on Ninth Street—an antique store called Upper Rust, a vintage place called Magic Fingers, a couple hair salons and tiny bars. Every twenty feet or so, Ben busts an understated bit of skateboard suaveness that makes her smile.

“That was nice, Ben.”

“Thanks, Dar.” Covering ground on foot is a lot harder than on the board. Even in her telltale clodhoppers, O'Hara struggles to keep up. At Third, she runs into Duane Reade to withdraw $500 from an ATM and try to collect her thoughts.

“What took you so long?” asks Ben. “It's been like ten minutes.”

“No way.”

“Yes way.”

At Fourth Avenue, Ben turns north. A block and a half later he stops in front of a postwar building on the east side of the street. The lobby, which has a funky deco facade, is two steps down.

“I've always liked this building,” says O'Hara.

“You're about to like it more. There's a doorman. Tell him you're here to see Dr. Kurlander. When you get upstairs, just say you're a pal of Ben's. And good luck with Stanley.”

O'Hara glances in the direction of the lobby. When she turns back to thank her guide, he's halfway down the block, one hand raised in farewell. O'Hara retreats to the bodega on the south corner, and buys a Red Bull. When it's done, she deems herself straight enough to proceed.

“Dr. Kurlander,” O'Hara tells the doorman. At seven, the elevator opens on a frosted glass door. Etched in white letters is “East Village Women. Ob-Gyn Associates, LLP, Dr. Elizabeth Kurlander & Dr. Ellie Weisenberg.” Rather than hook her up, Ben has referred her to a gynecologist, which answers her question. O'Hara is Doris.