Hunting in Harlem (5 page)
Snowden felt weird being in the dead guy's apartment, guilty for thinking of him as just that, "the dead guy." These are the
dead guy's condoms on the coffee table, note the deceased's optimism. This is the dead guy's remote control, its batteries
would outlive their owner. This thing they were both sitting on, this was the dead guy's couch.
"The deal is, a lot of people die in Harlem." Lester removed his Cigarillos tin from inside his breast pocket, lit one. His
cigarillos lasted longer than regular cigarettes, stunk worse than regular cigars. "A lot of people die everywhere - everyone
dies, to be truthful - but when they die in Harlem, in a Horizon property, we have to clean up afterwards. We got a license
with the City of New York Sanitation Department, a special-use permit for the industrial cleaners you can't get over the counter."
"Is the dead guy in the apartment? Is that what you're going to tell me?" Snowden felt weak, not for what he just asked but
for the way Lester laughed at him.
"Relax, this is an easy one just to get you started. He didn't die in here. It's just, this is your special project with Horizon.
You'll be paid bonus money for these hours, since Tuesday's your day off. There's a lot of older folks in Harlem, a lot of
people living risky lives, we get jobs like this pretty regularly."
"I can handle it." Snowden nailed the point home with nods.
"Good. Thing is, this has also got to be low profile. We have all these people coming back to Harlem now, real estate market
booming, vibrant, but it's fragile, see? A lot of it's PR, public perception. Death, that's not something people want to hear
about. Especially people looking for a place to live during a housing crunch. Who wants to know they're moving into the home
of someone that just kicked it?"
"No one. So I'll keep it quiet."
"Exactly. The other two, your coworkers, don't even tell them. The point is, Snowden, to protect the client, the neighborhood.
People are always looking for bad things to say about Harlem, let's not even give them an excuse."
When you die, it shouldn't be like this, a stranger and a brightly dressed man breaking the silence of your abandoned home
to go through your things and throw most of them in the trash. Lester leaned a chair against the splintered front door to
keep it shut, started giving out his orders. They were so specific, so mundane. Clear a room at a time, you start from the
back, I'll start from the front. Place all electronics and small appliances in the center of the living room, all books in
the bathtub, all photos and official documents in white kitchen bags, clothes in the green trash bags, the rest in the black
lawn bags to be thrown out. Glasses, dishes, silverware: trash. Double-bag them.
It was a two-bedroom. In the back was the kitchen, behind that a small room being used for storage. It was amazing how fast
it was possible to clear away someone's life when you threw it in the trash. A couple of full arm sweeps into open bags and
the kitchen was nearly barren. Snowden was even more impressed with how much was obvious from the trash he was dumping. The
dead guy was Carlton Simmons (cable and electric bills stuck to the freezer door identified). Mr. Simmons had family in Buffalo:
Rena Simmons, whom he called for brief minutes during the week, longer on holidays and weekends (Verizon). If Mr. Simmons
cooked, it was fast and simple: spaghetti or an occasional burger. Of all the pastas available to him on the grocery shelf,
the only one he'd bought was angel hair, probably because it cooked fast and he was impatient. The frozen burgers were bought
in prepackaged bulk, the meat mechanically shaped into CD-thin wafers. Carlton Simmons must have liked the idea of health
because there were greens in the crisper, but he wasn't completely invested in it, because each individually bagged bundle
was completely untouched and rotting. What this brother really liked was Chinese food. Evidence lined every shelf in the refrigerator
as proof of a daily habit. Fried and breaded pieces of dark meat glazed red or brown on beds of yellow rice. Imported bottles
of blistering hot sauce in the cabinet a nod to some West Indian or African ancestry.
Snowden the detective, Snowden the archaeologist on a dig into the permafrost lining the freezer, searching for artifacts.
The more mundane the job, the more his imagination took over, the more fun it became.
In the back bedroom, Snowden lost himself between his janitor motions and his detective dream. The clues were endless, heavy,
the garbage much the same. Carlton Simmons ate fatty foods and dreamed of the skinny days he'd long deserted. Nearly all the
worn pants were forty-two waist, disregarding a few scarred and veteran forties, and then on the top shelf of the closet Snowden
found a stack of pants size thirty-six waist. They were different colors but all the same brand, all new with their retail
folds undisturbed and starchy, a purchase for a waistline that would never return until the fat decomposed off of him, and
then he wouldn't need pants anyway.
One large box remained at the back of the closet floor when all the clothes had been evacuated. Inside, obscured underneath
a pile of video game magazines, was a beige metal safe the size of a dictionary and a paper grocery bag. Snowden pulled at
the safe, played at cracking its combination for a bit before growing bored, and took the bag. Pictures, loose and organized
in books. Snowden decided it was time for his break, took a seat on one of the fully packed bags of clothes.
Carlton Simmons, his face in repetition. They were the same age, Snowden and the dead guy, had shared the same era of childhood.
Snowden recognized the clothes, the hair, fell into the past and saw the other there as if he had known him. Carl had been
to Atlantic City, there was a picture of him leaning back on a bench with the Sands behind him. Carl had been to the Washington
Monument. Carl had a daughter. Her pictures, from newborn to infant, joined his own.
Trying to pile the loose photos together, Snowden noticed a white envelope lying at the bottom. It held a key inside, one
he soon found out worked on the beige safe. The safe had no money in it, just another, older envelope inside.
In the span of time it had taken Snowden to clear out most of the kitchen and what amounted to a large closet, Lester had
cleared out the living room, the bathroom, and was sweeping up the debris from his assault on the master bedroom. Along the
far walls of each room were stacked layers of blank brown boxes, topped by trash bags, plush and shiny and full. It was the
precision of repetition, of muscle memory of countless other jobs like this one. For Lester, this duty seemed to have the
meditative value of pulling a rake through a Japanese rock garden. The only thing that brought him out of the action of moving
the straw broom across the wooden floor was the way Snowden sounded at the door.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Before him Snowden held out the white envelope like someone had just hit him with it.
The thing was so worn, the paper so dirty, uneven and stiff in his hand, it was like it had been left out in the rain for
an entire season. Lester removed the plum kerchief from his jacket's breast pocket and held the envelope with that by its
corners. When Lester took it from him, Snowden looked relieved to not hold it anymore. Inside, Lester found Polaroids with
their stiff white borders, took them in a stack and let their packaging drop to the floor with the rest of the trash.
The first picture was of a woman naked, leaning back on the couch of the room he'd just cleaned. Even if Lester was attracted
to women, he doubted this one could excite him. You could see the dark brown blotches on her legs, the even darker flesh under
eyes as wide and dead as deviled eggs. Around her skull a legion of hair had reverted to chaos, rioting in neglect. On her
breastbone was the wrinkled line of a pulled-up shirt, at her calves matching crumpled pants, both articles ready to be pulled
back into position as soon as the flash had dimmed. Lester looked at the track marks on the arm, tried to locate the fresh
one. The second photo was of a mother and her infant child, whom she held on her side as she leaned forward to fellate the
cameraman. The third was of a little girl, dressed only in her colorful braids. It took a moment for Lester to recognize her
as the one who'd just peeked out at them from down the hall, the one Snowden had been talking to. What Lester noticed the
most about this photo, as opposed to the ones of her that followed, was that you could clearly see the dollars in her hand,
gripped fiercely in discomfort.
There were at least a dozen more photos, but Lester reached for the dirty envelope on the floor, stuck the contents back inside,
took a roll of packing tape off the bed to seal it up thoroughly before reopening a trash bag along the wall and sticking
it deeply inside.
"Is that all we're going to do?" There was indignation in Snowden's voice, but there was relief too.
"There's nothing else that needs to be done. He's dead now."
"How did he die?"
"He had an accident." Lester picked up his broom and started sweeping again. Snowden needed to sit down. He walked over to
the bare mattress, became nauseous at the sight of it and opted for a bare wall and floor.
"Someone like that, someone like that deserves worse than that."
"I don't know. Apparently, his brakes went out on him on the FDR. From what I hear, it was pretty gruesome. Couldn't stop,
knew he couldn't stop. Speeding to begin with. A lot of sharp turns on that thing, heavy, fast traffic. Very narrow lanes.
Must have made for some pretty scary minutes." Lester's tone was casual, calming. It was like none of the facts present were
new to him.
"You knew about this?"
"What?" The way Lester said it, Snowden immediately regretted the question, was about to apologize when Lester continued.
"I knew he was a registered sex offender. We found that out after we bought the property. Specifics? Of course not. But there's
only one cure for people like that, isn't there?"
Lester stopped sweeping, looked over at Snowden for him to take over the exercise, then took his seat against the wall.
"Well that's the thing, am I right?" Lester continued. "You take almost any block in Harlem, almost any apartment building,
and out of every hundred people, ninety are basically decent, hardworking folk just trying to take care of their own. But
that ten, the drug dealers, the thugs, thieves, and rapists, those that abuse their children directly and through neglect,
the ones who have no respect for others, civilization, society, all of these parasites set the tone that everybody else has
to live by. 'The Terrible Tenth,' I like to call them, that keeps everybody else down."
"At least, with this bastard's death, it's down to 'The Terrible Nine Point Nine Nine Percent' now," Snowden said, immediately
regretting the callousness of the statement. Lester just smiled though, sat there puffing on his cigarillo, watching his smoke
rise around them.
The night ended with beer, two forties held one in each of Snowden's arms like he was headed for a party. Walking up his building's
steps, Jifar was in his path. The boy was laid out on his dirty landing with paper and crayons. It was one o'clock in the
morning.
"What are you doing?" Snowden asked him.
"What's it look like I'm doing? I'm drawing."
"Drawing what?"
"I'm drawing the Chupacabra." The paper had been cut from the side of a brown paper bag, on it was the image of a green fanged
thing with too many arms.
"You got school tomorrow, you need to be in bed. What's a Chupacabra?"
"It's the monster eating people in Washington Heights. Mannie Ortiz knows someone who saw it. If I do this good, we're going
to give it to the police so they can catch him."
"Why aren't you in bed, little man?"
"I'm locked out, and I left your key in my room, in my hiding space," Jifar admitted.
There was music vibrating the door of Jifar's apartment. After a while, Snowden gave up on knocking, just started kicking
it until the sound stopped and the peephole darkened.
"Come get your boy," Snowden said into it. The door began unlocking.
"Nigger, you woke me up." Baron Anderson in his gray WELCOME TO NEW YORK, NOW GET OUT T-shirt and wrinkled Y-fronts. Snowden
attempted to continue the discussion but Anderson walked out in the hall in his bare feet yelling, "Get the fuck in here,"
grabbing his boy by his arm and disappearing again, the door slamming in back of them.
The final sound sent other doors along the floors slowly unlocking, other heads leaning out doorways to stare at Snowden as
if he was the villain. Snowden ignored them, reached down and rolled up the picture, forcefully shoved each crayon back in
the box, imagining he was cramming them up the father's nose instead.
AFTER CLASS SNOWDEN would go over to Bobby's house and they would get drunk. The game was to go to a new bodega each time
and get 160 ounces of the cheapest beer they could find. They called it a game because to acknowledge that it was all they
could afford was depressing. Then they would spend seventy-five cents on the
New Holland Herald
and Bobby would read the misprints and more egregious grammatical errors out loud. At first, Snowden didn't know what the
big deal was, at least the paper was trying, but some of these bloopers were just too ridiculous and after a while they were
both laughing until they just couldn't anymore because it hurt too much. This would usually be followed by a discussion on
the future of black people, hopeful or pessimistic. Both had majored in African-American studies during their college careers,
one of many similarities they were discovering. If you added the amount of undergraduate credits they had together it was
enough for one bachelor's degree, which gave them a bit of confidence in putting their heads together, even though they were
pretty drunk heads by the time they really got into it.
Once they had been peeing clear for hours, when simple things like balancing a bowl of cereal in their hands became nearly
impossible, the conversation often reverted to simple primal confessions. This is when Bobby slurred that he'd burned down
his mother's boyfriend's house after the man raped her, that the man was alive but probably wished he wasn't. This was when
Snowden talked about all the foster homes, told the funny stories he could about the quirks of each one, how he had been returned
to his father in ninth grade, how even he was surprised at the way his father's nose disappeared into his face when he punched
it. How he couldn't even remember the last thing the man had said to him that had pissed him off so much, but would never
forget the smell of the adrenaline-rich blood that filled his own nose, the orgasmic bliss of momentarily giving his anger
free reign.
Bobby's place was smaller than Snowden's, made even more so by the books in milk crates that lined the walls. Aside from the
ones on the shelves in the bathroom, every single book in Bobby Finley's
house was a hardcover first edition of
The Great Work, a
novel by Robert M. Finley, all signed and numbered by the author himself. He had so many that he used them for furniture,
laying a wooden plank and cushions over crates for his couch and bed. Bobby started this collection four months after the
publication of
The Great Work,
three years before, picking up the first editions at near 85 percent discount on the remainder shelves of large bookstore
chains. They seemed so forlorn sitting there, each his dream incarnate, rejected, abandoned. That was how the collection began.
The Great Work
received only two reviews, both by publishing magazines pretty much obligated to review anything with pages and a spine. Both
were dismissive, seemed confused and not a little hostile, as if the text that had been given to them was not printed on paper
but instead tattooed on the shaved flesh of a large and bemused grizzly bear. After reading them, it took two weeks for Bobby
Finley to stop fixating on burning the buildings that housed the critics, the magazines, and the distributors, in that order.
Later, Bobby managed to douse those desires with the knowledge that both critics had been white and unfortunately had proved
themselves unable to separate themselves from their preconceived notion of what to expect from an author of African descent,
and therefore had blinded themselves to the genius
The Great Work
really was. This perspective was reinforced by the fact that both reviewers had made major factual errors when describing
the plot, errors that coincided with a misprint in the summary on the dusk jacket, leading Bobby to determine that at best
they'd given it a sloppy, rushed read or, as he suspected, hadn't read the whole book at all.
Unfortunately,
The Great Work's
reviews proved a harbinger for the reaction of the few readers it managed to attract. Though no readings were ever actually
conducted for
The Great Work
(several were arranged, but no one showed up; even the bookstore clerks called in sick), Bobby Finley was still able to determine
this by months of long hours of searching newsgroups on the Internet. Bobby Finley took no solace from the fact that all three
people who mentioned
The Great Work
lacked the imagination to use any descriptor other than a conjugation of the verb
to suck.
The purpose of the author's own collection of
The Great Work
changed dramatically after his first and only signing. A clerk at the black bookstore in the New Carrellton Mall put an accidental
zero on the order form and after seven months local author Bobby Finley was called in an effort to move the twenty copies.
In an attempt to assist him in this endeavor, the owner had booked Bobby Finley, author of
The Great Work,
to appear on the same day, at the same time as Bo Shareef, best-selling author of
Datz What I'm Talking*
'Bout.
The two sat at opposite ends of one long fold-out, a fortress of
Datz What Im Talkin' 'Bout
piled across the table, floor, and back wall on one side, twenty copies of
The Great Work
in two neat piles on the other. Shareef's publisher had outfitted him with blown-up images of the book and the author big
enough to shame Mussolini. In the brief moment Bobby had a chance to speak with Mr. Shareef, he did find him friendly and
charismatic, but it was the last chance they would have to talk as Bo Shareef was quickly swallowed by a mob of women Bobby
had previously assumed to be the assembling of a large gospel choir.
Three hours. It seemed as if every black woman in the DC Metro area had been bused in for the occasion. Shocked by the display,
Bobby Finley faked a cough, reached back to his bag for his water and then leaned over and vicked a copy of
Datz What I'm Talkin'
'Bout.
A far cry from
The Great Work's
dignified all-white cover with the tide in black twelve-point Courier font, the cover of
Datz What
I'm Talkin' 'Bout
looked like a panel from a self-published children's book. Upon inspecting the first sentence, first paragraph, first page,
and first chapter, Bobby found prose with the originality, sophistication, and poetry of the instructions that came with Happy
Meal toys. Yet the crowd kept coming. "You are the greatest, Mr. Shareef," they said. "Oh my God, I can't wait for your next
one," they told him.
Bobby read
Datz What I'm Talkin' 'Bout in
its entirety, right there at the table, too numb to be embarrassed. Of the handful of people that did stop by Bobby's side
after the long wait for Bo Shareef's signature, few refrained from making a face when Bobby explained the plot of
The Great Work.
One said, "Alaska? There ain't no black people in Alaska." Those who didn't tried to get him to give them copies for free.
One brother with what looked like a queen-sized bedsheet wrapped around his head demanded to know what his "thesis" was.
Years had gone into crafting
The Great Work.
Years had gone into crafting single sentences within it. Authors' entire life works were reread just to inspire certain paragraphs.
Bobby felt like a chef who had dedicated his life to the study of the greatest culinary techniques, practiced for years to
perfect them before presenting his finest dish to the public, only to be outdone by a guy who walked in off the street, shit
in a tortilla, and deep-fried it.
Reeling from the public's failure to recognize the genius of
The
Great Work,
Bobby Finley resolved to determine the reason. That's when he decided that the readers were dung beetles. That they didn't
just consume crap, they liked it. That the critics, of course, were much less than that. That there was no one worth writing
for.
Snowden, who'd already made a point of admitting he thought Bo Shareef was "the bomb" before Bobby's story unfolded, could
take no more. "Dude, did you ever even ask yourself if it ain't the other way around? Like, oh, I don't know, maybe every
other human being in the world is right and you're the one that's wrong. Maybe
The Great
Work
just sucks. You ever think of that?"
"Yeah, I thought about that for a minute. But then I reread it. It's brilliant, they're dung beetles, trust me on this one."
The world didn't deserve
The Great Work,
at least not in this century. So with renewed effort, Bobby spent what little money he had reacquiring every one of its three
thousand copies. Besides Harlem and Horizon, Bobby's favorite thing about New York City was its used bookstores, the Strand
and Gotham Book Mart, where he spent his money and free time. Also, that there were several Ikea furniture stores in the area,
as
The Great Work
could often be found being used as a bookshelf prop in their faux living room sets. The books weren't for sale, but that was
OK because those he stole on principle.
Snowden, having been unimpressed with the three pages he'd managed to plow through of
The Great Work,
didn't care if it remained Robert M. Finley's only published novel. What annoyed Snowden, particularly since they'd decided
to become drinking partners, was that once he got his blood alcohol level up, Bobby Finley never stopped talking about the
world he'd abandoned, particularly his theory on the way it worked. Since his mall-front "awakening," Bobby had determined
that there were only two roads to success for a male writer of African descent, such as he was. The first was to write a romance
novel with an illustration of three or fewer attractive black people on the cover, preferably done in a comic book style so
as not to scare off the illiterate. One written in flat descriptions of every action so that the prose was completely subservient
to the plot, even though that plot was invariably predictable, as close to the readers' expectations as possible so as not
to scare them. This type of book was basically for a readership looking for melaninized, low-tech versions of their afternoon
soaps.
"If I wanted to, if I just gave up on humanity completely and wanted to sell out, I could make a million, no problem. I'd
just excrete some story about a guy dating four women, but then they find out and get even with him, maybe he ends up married
to one, some dumb shit like that. I'd give it a clichéd tide spelled with a bunch of useless Ebonic abbreviations. I could
write it in a weekend."
Even more insidious, Bobby liked to declare, was the path toward black male literature. At some point it had been decided
that the role of a black male writer was to create a work in the vein of Richard Wright or the great Ralph Ellison, not in
the sense that the works be original and energetic, but that they focus on inner-city strife and racism. Whites, who made
up the majority of sales in the literary category, felt their own writers could handle the other issues in the universe just
fine, they just wanted the black guys to clarify the Negro stuff. The author would do best to deal with those issues in a
predictable, derivative manner, as these readers were looking for confirmations of their viewpoints, not new ones. Bobby insisted
that works were reviewed, awarded, and hailed based on this principle.
"Snowden, believe me when I say this, if I wanted to, I could produce a critical hit, full-page rave in the
Times,
TV interviews, no problem. I would just pump out another thing about this poor black person struggling to overcome white racism,
inner-city violence, or poverty or, even better, all three. Are you kidding? That's a whole cottage industry. Dung beetles
love that stuff. I'll even throw some hip-hop references on top,
'cause you know dey want it all authentic
V
topical 'n'shit.
Nobody ever went broke giving people what they think they want."
This obsession infected every part of Bobby, even his bowels. The man insisted on calling his toilet Irving Howe, after a
critic he particularly loathed, just so he could take pleasure in shitting on it daily.
"Look, the problem is you're writing the wrong things." Snowden enjoyed baiting him. Rarely was something so easy, so rewarding.
"People don't want books, man. They want movies. Even the bad ones get hundreds of thousands in the seats."
"Bullshit! They only want movies because the film industry spends a couple million dollars on each one to tell them to! If
I had a couple million dollars, I could get a hundred thousand people to read anything, but books don't get that. The only
way I could get people to read
The Great Work
would be to do something huge and crazy, create some spectacle for free publicity."
All this was not to say that Robert M. Finley had stopped writing. Bobby's newest work,
The Tome,
was just not meant for public consumption. With no readers, Bobby had intentionally started writing for no one. The only other
person who got close to the 478 pages of
The Tome
was Snowden, who liked to use its pile to rest his beer on.
The Tome
was the first example of the principles of the "Robert M. Finley Emulsion Literary Theory," a theory that Bobby himself had
invented. To any he could engage in a discussion upon the concept, Bobby often remarked that he was nearly twenty pages into
its treatise, but that he would not reveal it until it was completely ready, and then as a mass E-mail. At its simplest (and
despite hours of detailed explanation, the simplest version was more than Snowden could comprehend), it was about not actually
writing, but showing, highlighting, and amplifying the poetry of the universe around us. Something about humans being imperfect,
so avoiding themselves as a source. From what Snowden had heard of
The Tome
during impromptu drunken readings, it seemed to be collections of random conversations, stream-of-consciousness, and chapter-long
descriptions of street noise. His second forty ounce near gone, Bobby would talk about the line between genius and insanity,
the importance of walking close to it. Snowden just wished he would walk on the other side. Bobby swore, though, that with
the right drugs opening your mind, you could dance to it.