Hunting in Harlem (8 page)
"I'm sorry. You don't be sorry, I am. Just, what were you thinking, little man? Were you going to try and kill me?"
"I didn't know it was you. Honest."
"Who the hell else is going to put a key in the door and come in here? Huh?" Snowden could hear the anger start to build again
in his voice, tried to extinguish it by talking slowly enough to give himself the chance to control the emotion in each word.
'You give my keys to anybody to make copies?"
"No. I don't do like that. I'm a man."
"You're a man. Great. Then who the hell else was I supposed to be, then?"
"I don't know. Maybe you the Chupacabra or something," Jifar admitted.
"The Chupacabra. That monster." Snowden looked at the boy and could see who that monster was. The one with the gray mustache
stained brown at the bottom from smoking Dominican cigars, the one with the endless supply of novelty T-shirts, like the one
that said JUST SAY NO TO CRACK with the illustration of a woman's anatomically impossible cartoon ass swallowing a helpless
man. That monster. Snowden could see the monster's claw marks on Jifar, in a line along his biceps at the same place on both
arms; they were the ones you get from being shaken really hard. Jifar's skin was the light brown of fall leaves, the dotted
bruises a dull green. They looked like tattoos of olives.
"The Chupacabra," Snowden confirmed. Jifar stared up at him for a few moments to decide if he was being believed or taunted,
decided he didn't care and started nodding vigorously in the affirmative.
"I thought your boy said he only went after people in Washington Heights. He's coming down below 145th Street now?"
"Mannie Ortiz says he started all the way up Inwood, like 220th Street or something."
"So he's working his way down."
"Yup. Mannie Ortiz says Harlem's just lunch. He's going to have dinner on the Upper West Side."
"Why not the Upper East Side? They're richer."
"He's following Broadway. Mannie says he sleeps along the tunnel of the one and nine trains during daylight."
"Little man, can I tell you something? Mannie's your friend, but he's full of chocolate. You shouldn't believe everything
Mannie Ortiz has to say about the world. There's no such thing as a Chupacabra. It's a story, a myth. It's like . . ." Snowden
was going to say Santa Claus but caught himself, unsure where Jifar stood with that phenomenon. "Like Spider-Man. It's just
made up." The look Jifar gave him, the in credulousness, the pity, made Snowden fear it was a reflection of his own face moments
before.
"No, lots of people talking about it. Lots of people thinks it's the Chupacabra, not just Mannie Ortiz. Adult people. His
big brother Vernon, he's in the eighth grade, and a boy in his class saw it running around 135th Street station. They shot
at it."
"But they didn't hit it, did they?"
Jifar shrugged a no.
"
'Cause it ain't real.
Don't worry about monsters, or anything else. You want to be safe in life? Just stay happy, try not to stay poor when you
grow up, and watch your step, and you'll have nothing to worry about. It's that easy," Snowden told himself as well.
"I WROTE PIPER a poem," he said.
It had been three months since they'd moved her in. The weeks after were peppered with Bobby's territorial talk about his apologetic
calls to her answering machine, laments that he was never home to receive her call in case she was shy about leaving a message
on his, and then mention of the woman ceased. Snowden knew from this that Piper Goines had never called Bobby back; the thin
man was not the type for quiet victory. So then two months went by and Bobby started up again and Snowden realized he hadn't
conquered his obsession, just his need to talk about it.
"It's totally her poem, too. It's her; I used her actual voice for it."
"Where you get her voice?"
"Off the phone."
"So you've been calling her."
"Oh yes, I told you she gave me her number." By this it should be noted that Bobby meant that he'd taken it off the back of
the Horizon receipt form she'd signed. Snowden had given it to Bobby on his request, as well as a pen and his own back as
a writing surface. Snowden was impressed with the intensity of Bobby's fixation, that not only could he ignore that fact,
he could also ignore that Snowden knew the truth as well.
"Damn, boy. Congratulations. You finally got to talk to that woman."
"Yeah, right? Well, not in person, I left a message. Then I got recordings of her voice off her answering machine, she changes
the message all the time. I just mixed the words together on my computer."
Bobby's contention was that showing up unannounced at her office at the
New Holland Herald
the next day was not stalking, it was just being practical. He had several reasons for this, the most creative was that if
she received an unsolicited package with a tape inside it, as a reporter she might think it was a lead on a kidnapping, and
he didn't want to disappoint her. By coincidence - one of those amazing coincidences the universe doles out to keep its inhabitants
on their toes — Snowden had been instructed by Lester just the day before to place two ads at this very same paper. This was
less of coincidence when you considered that Bobby had overheard Lester's instructions and apparently planned to tag along
for moral support.
The ads, handwritten in Lester's small linear script along with font instructions, sat in Snowden's breast pocket with the
message:
Folk of Harlem!
Are you considering moving away from the area? Retiring? Going back
down south or to the Caribbean? Whether you're a home owner or a
renter, contact Horizon Property Management to assist your transition.
Cash bonuses for all referrals.
and
Folk of New York!
Coming back to the dream of old Harlem? "Let Horizon Property
Management help you make it a reality. Buyers or renters, call now.
Rereading them, Snowden wondered if a white person would get the meaning of "folk" and realize they were being excluded. On
further thought, Snowden wondered when was the last time any white person had gone to a newsstand and bought the
New Holland Herald.
There was no reason for them to read it. With blacks writing at the top newspapers in the country, with endless glossies devoted
to African-American interests and life, there didn't seem too much reason for black folks to read it either. That's why Snowden
never felt embarrassed by how bad it was, or guilty at taking pleasure reading it aloud. Snowden felt confident in the assumption
that no one else was listening.
The walk to the
New Holland Herald
' became eventful once the two came in sight of the new Disney Store on 125th and Frederick Douglass. The state of righteousness
Bobby'd been stuck in for weeks, Snowden knew it would set him off, but since the paper's office was on the other corner,
it was unavoidable. In preparation, Snowden had attempted to ensnare Bobby into the more nuanced debate about the corruption
allegations involving the Apollo, the other landmark they were passing, but the smaller man would have none of it.
"Fucking bloodsuckers. Fucking mind-numbing smiley-faced Jim Jones Kool-Aid bloodsuckers up here to siphon what little money
we have with their poison blankets shaped like plush corporate logos," Bobby started chanting. Snowden found the worst part
of talking to Bobby when he got like this was that Bobby would take Snowden's own opinions but become so froth-mouthed fanatical
that Snowden felt forced to claim the opposition for the sake of keeping the discussion in the realm of sanity.
"Well, they've provided some jobs up here, and it looks good for the one-two-five, as far as attracting investment," Snowden
said and immediately resented Bobby for this, for making him defend the mouse.
"Right, like six jobs at eight dollars an hour. Up, you mighty race!" It was amazing how he could do that, hyperventilate
and talk at the same time. Several women paused with their bags in front of Lane Bryant and McDonald's Express to take in
the licorice blur vibrating past them, his voice modulating with each word between stage whisper and scream. Snowden was waiting
for somebody to offer a wallet to stick in Bobby's mouth so he didn't bite his tongue off, "Goddamn leeches, riding up in
their Trojan horse to suck the green right of the place, then they'll go back to Anaheim and do a
Pocahontas
on Sally Hemings, turn that into a love story too."
"It will attract people to Harlem. That's the point of what we're doing, right?"
"It attracts white people to Harlem. That's the point of it. It says, 'Look, no broken windows, the canary's alive and well.'
Then they take over the last bit of the island that they're not in the majority. That's the plan. We'll all get pushed to
Newark and they'll get this back again, and to them it will just be a loaded name and a bunch of cool brownstones. They'll
even open some jazz theme clubs to remember us by, like they do with fake villages on the lands they got from the Indians."
Snowden said, "Healthy canaries are a good thing. They send the message that the air's all safe to breathe," but nothing more.
Snowden took the talk of race as a sign to shut up and just keep walking. Snowden always took the talk of race as a sign to
shut up and keep walking because he'd never figured out how to discuss the subject without stating the obvious, sounding bitter,
or like a sellout, doomed however he approached it. Talking about race was like trying to have a serious argument about the
existence of the Easter Bunny: No matter what position you took, you always ended up sounding either thick or mildly insane.
By the time they reached the office of the
New Holland Herald,
Bobby was so worked up that he was forced to lean against the wall of the abandoned building next to it in order to regain
his composure.
"I should burn that bastard down," Bobby wheezed. "It would probably take out most of Harlem USA with it but, you know, 'by
any means necessary.'" He tried to light a cigarette but was breathing too hard and ended up in a coughing fit, limply cursing
the class warfare of the tobacco companies as he put it out against his foot, pocketing the filter so as not to litter. Inside,
the two men parted when Bobby was directed to the offices upstairs and Snowden to the classified desk on the first floor.
Bobby parted with, "Don't wait up for me," managing a wink before succumbing to another fit of coughing, pausing on the long
wooden stairway as others quickly went around him.
The clerk behind the counter seemed ecstatic to see Snowden, looked so relieved to have a break in the monotony of the otherwise
empty room, its dust, its faded furniture. The guy didn't even take his money, he held it for a moment, yes, but then when
he read the copy he smiled and nodded as if he'd been the target of a harmless joke and handed it back. Piper Goines stood
in the room behind him, looking good like that. Snowden smiled, she smiled back, remembered him and came over.
"Excuse me," she said. "Does that guy Robert M. Finley still work with you? Because I've been getting these calls on my phone
from Robert M. Finley ever since I moved in, he doesn't even leave messages anymore, he just keeps calling and then hanging
up on my machine."
Bobby was upstairs leaving Ms. Goines a surprise. Snowden was downstairs, trying to convince Ms. Goines to associate the word
persistent
with the name "Bobby Finley" instead of the word
psychopath,
not making any headway with his argument until Piper realized that Bobby was the one who looked like a human snow crab and
not the creepy one with a head like a rottweiler.
"Bobby's a really smart guy, funny. It's just that we're not from here, we work a lot, he was just trying to reach out. We're
from out of town, don't really know anybody in the area, you know how it is. He's good people. He gave you his book, right?"
"That's right, that's right. Actually, I tried to read that thing but couldn't get past the first page. It didn't seem to
make any sense, like there'd been misprints or something. I probably just didn't read it close enough," Piper was the one
making the guilty face now. Snowden nodded at this like a mistake had indeed been made, staring at her, trying to think of
a way to tell her that the man they were talking about was at this moment at her desk. Piper watched as Snowden struggled
to say something and got tired of waiting.
"So you don't know anyone. You kind of know me," Piper told him. "You've already been to my place, you might as well come
back over and we can have dinner sometime. I'm on my way to Ephesus to cover the protest meeting about the Mumia Abu-Jamal
Memorial Halfway House, the one the state's trying to open by Mount Morris Park, but there's tomorrow."
"Memorial House? Mumia Abu-Jamal hasn't even been executed yet."
"I know! Sick bastards."
In moral law, there was definitely an edict about dating your friend's obsession.
"If you're worried about your buddy, I'm sure he's a nice guy, but I'm never going out with him. That just ain't happening."
Snowden appreciated Piper's plucky initiative, her persistence. It meant that every time he felt a pang of guilt for accepting
her invitation he could tell himself he'd been forced into doing so, take some of the bite out of it.
THE THING THAT really pissed Piper off about living in the apartment above her sister and brother-in-law was that she had
to walk through three floors of their home to get to hers, and even though she loved them they were materially driven intentional
archetypes of the bourgeoisie, something Piper once even said to their faces months before their wedding only to have them
high-five gleefully in response, dancing circles together in their boutique clothes as they waved their status symbol watches
in the air in victory. Their home was a museum of all the class accoutrements they'd collected in just seven years working
as a tag team: rich woods, fabrics, and leathers placed on rugs so expensive that having them on the floor was indulgent insolence.
Piper kept redecorating but it didn't matter, by the time she reached the top floor her home seemed a slave quarters in comparison.
They were like twins, her sister and her mate, one identical mindset compensating for the fact that they looked nothing like
each other. As obnoxious as they could be in tandem, Piper had produced more tears at their wedding than the collective attendants.
It was the natural order of it that got to her, that maybe there was somebody out there to perfectly match each individual.
That maybe there really was one person out there perfect for her.
Piper's sister and brother-in-law were arrogant about their relationship too, but equally arrogant, so it took nothing away
from the symmetry. If they were the type, they would have used the term "soul mates," but they weren't so called themselves
"power couple." Since moving in, Piper came to call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass. In response, Dumbass, or Brian as
he was known to the others in his life, usually referred to Piper as Assata Shake'n'Bake, Rosa Park Avenue, or Sister Soul
Food, depending on how the spirit moved him. Dee, known to all as just that, preferred to call her sister Audre Lorde Have
Mercy. It wasn't that they hadn't read the books, they just didn't feel them like that.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber. Dee born in New Haven, Brian in Providence. Dee the vice
president of Jack and Jill's Connecticut chapter, Brian the treasurer of the Rhode Island contingent. Brian and Dee trading
locations so one could be a Bulldog and one be brown at Brown. Two memberships to organizations named with three Greek letters,
both with two
A's
bookending them. Three years apart, but how many early encounters until the First Friday where fate connected them? A shared
hotel, Virginia Beach, spring break weekend? A shared ferry from Hyannis Port? Piper wondered. Piper wondered if the narrowness
of Shark Bar hadn't made their world even smaller, how long those uneventful encounters would have continued. Piper stopped
wondering if her own counterpart was entering her life, repeatedly and unnoticed: It was too painful.
Piper: impeached as Basilius from the NAACP Youth Group after calling former leader Walter White a "bleached coon" during
the introductory address at the Teen Summit in Niagara Falls, a painful event compensated by years of bragging rights. Earlham
College, class of '92,
Fight, Fight, Inner Light, Kill Quakers, Kill.
The best editor B.L.A.C.'s newsletter would ever claim. Greek affiliation: once sucker-punched by a Kappa Sweetheart at a
Ball State step show. Ten years later and single, some false alarms but no children, no furniture that cost more than a day's
salary. A job she loved and was good at. Hope. In painting, an art freed from ambition. A refusal to ever buy a cat as a companion,
or let herself get to the point where she'd be tempted to.
Dee, Dumbass; hers an artistic and slightly cool career that didn't really pay for her lifestyle, his a dull career playing
with money that paid for them both. For fun they bought things and went to foreign resorts that called themselves "spas,"
hung out with other finance men and their creative wives. At night they planned to breed others just like them. For fun Piper
went downtown, paced bright openings and got just drunk enough that her work looked better than theirs, took a cab home and
hoped secretly that the driver would complain that her destination was Harlem so she could fight a little injustice on the
way. If they were away, Piper would simply come in the front door and go to sleep in their living room, look around at how
beautiful and comfortable it was and admit that she was as jealous of their lifestyle as she was disgusted by it. They never
got too sad because they were sure about life, and as bankrupt as their value system was, it would never force them to accept
its insolvency. It was impossible to own everything, and as long as there was more to acquire they would have faith that further
acquisition was the key to happiness.
Piper got happiness doing, not buying, which worked out well because her job gave her a lot to do but hardly any money to
buy anything with. If evenings were disheartening, it was in morning that she found her victory. Just waking up and being
happy about your life when you remembered it was a damn good thing, but actually being excited about the work in the day to
follow was the richest possible blessing. She loved her job and the moments it gave her: when she was typing and felt like
the mute were given the ability to scream through her to the page, later when it was on the newsstands and she could look
and see her own mark on the world. Seeing her name in print made her feel alive, made her feel immortal. She was connected
by a continuum of newspaper issues going back week by week to the time when this paper brought news of Jim Crow and lynchings,
called for boycotts of the whites-only-staffed department stores on 125th Street. No handmade Persian rug felt better underneath
you than a purpose.
While Piper liked to think that she rose an hour early just for the opportunity to whistled past Dumbass on the stairs as
he tried to numb himself for another dehumanizing day of numeric servitude, getting to the paper before her coworkers served
a more practical purpose. The
New Holland Herald,
the last great lion of the preintegration news media, was a paper of many distinctions. Unfortunately, its most current was
the fact that it had to be the only twenty-thousand-plus periodical in a major urban area to have only one computer in the
entire company. Copy was manually typed in the office by staff writers, submitted by fax or in person by freelancers. Corrections
were made on the page, or for the occasional major changes the writer was forced simply to rewrite the work. The publisher
Mr. Cole's recited response to requests for computers was, "If James Weldon Johnson didn't need one when he was writing in
this very room, then neither do you." On Wednesday all of the articles were taken to a printing service, where typists rewrote
the entire edition word for word and laid it out into a template that had been created years before. Often, the section tides
failed to match the copy below them as articles were arranged in random order. It was a standard sight to see an article on
poor nutrition in public schools under the header DINING OUT complete with the illustration of a man and a woman in formal
wear, martinis in hand. The edition was quickly copyedited because the whole thing had to be done by four-thirty P.M. or the
paper was forced to pay overtime, which was a sin worthy of dismissal. Since the typists were going so fast that they were
not even reading what they duplicated, it was impossible to catch every mistake. In the past this practice had led to several
rather dramatic copy errors, the greatest one of Piper's tenure being the obituary headline that read MR. GAVIN WYATT, 79,
LIES, which resulted in a two-week campaign of irate phone calls from his descendants, all of whom insisted he was an honest
man.
Mr. Cole was impossible to shame and that was his most impressive attribute; his claim to fame was that he had run 342 continuous
"Special Report" front-page editorials, 176 of which contained the exact same headline: IMPEACH GIULIANI. The columns were
always in a darker, bolted shade than the rest of the edition and sometimes covered nearly half the front page. The majority
of sentences ending in exclamation points gave the impression that Mr. Cole was constantly screaming at the reader with incredulity!
This was accurate! The column was the only thing he cared about. Piper had seen him in the office receiving the first printing
of the new issues and he rarely cracked it open unless his own editorial was continued inside. As long as his regularly occurring
"Special Report" was uncut and errorless, Mr. Cole was unmoved. Mr. Cole looked liked an aged orangutan, was old, belligerent,
and eccentric in equal measure. When Piper was hired she was pulled aside by several people and told that at times he acted
committable insane, and on such occasions she should just nod at everything he said and, if he got violent, go home.
So Piper arrived early with notes and wrote out and printed the articles she'd researched and outlined the day before, then
spent the rest of the day preparing articles for the following morning. It wasn't that anyone else would need to get on the
computer later, just that it was in the executive editor's office and, although he was pleasant, the space was simply not
big enough for two people. The executive editor shared Mr. Cole's name plus a Jr. to go with it, was hired for the position
for his inability to stand up to Mr. Cole Sr. and to provide a front to allow his father to say whatever the chemicals in
his head dictated and pass it off as a "letter to the editor" when the paper was inevitably sued for libel in response. Whole
days went by when the executive editor kept his door closed, which was appreciated by his staff because watching the graying
thirty-five-year-old Junior get yelled at was nearly as uncomfortable as when Mr. Cole chose one of them for belittlement.
In addition to Piper, the
New Holland Herald
had three full-time employees, Segun Diop, Bill Sims, and Gil Manly, two other part-timers, Carleen Wilson and Shandy Gomes,
and a rotating legion of freelancers willing to pump out four-hundred to eight-hundred word stories for thirty-two dollars
a pop. Piper was the only staff writer under forty, the only one more accustomed to a monitor's windy hum than the insect
percussion of the manual typewriter. Carleen and Shandy spent their moments in the office slumped nearly level to their desks,
in turn harassing and being harassed by the writers who wrote their sections. Aside from Mr. Cole, the fact that the writers
were paid so little was enjoyed by no one. The writers, obviously, found this an annoyance, particularly when much of their
work was printed with far too many errors to be used as clips to entice other, better-paying publications. (The
New Holland Herald
was not a premiere African-American periodical, such as its fierce competitor the
Amsterdam News,
the
Philadelphia Tribune,
or Washington, D.C.'s renowned
News Dimensions)
For the editors it was extremely difficult as well, since the freelancers invariably tried to compensate for the low wage
by hacking out the fastest pieces they could manage. This technique the writers would employ with greater and greater desperation
until they were submitting paragraphs of disjointed gibberish. When asked to rewrite the piece and read it at least once before
handing it back, the freelancers would do so but then quit, refusing to invest any more time in their submissions in the future.
Charlie Awuyah and Gil Manly were two of the main reasons the entire paper wasn't trash. Charlie Awuyah ate red pistachios
all day and had been at the same desk for twenty-five years, before Mr. Cole even bought the place. In each issue he filled
the last three pages of the paper with some of the most intelligent sports writing done anywhere. Gil Manly was barely in
the office, was sixty, and dressed like reporters did when he was a boy, always kept a yellow pencil in his mouth in the building
and a cigarette in it outside. Gil got to cover every single news event that didn't involve a press release. Piper wanted
his job. She thought he was good, but each week the first thing she did was pore over his work and tell herself that she was
better, or at least she would be some day soon. That was what Piper would do: stare at his desk, calculate how long it would
be till he retired. Two years - there was no way he could hold out more than that; Piper'd caught him resting halfway up the
long straight stairs that went from the ground to the third floor. Then, really, how long would it be until Mr. Cole Sr. would
follow? His rage, his hatred, his obesity. If the man lived another five years it would be due only to his other bad habit,
his stubbornness.
In particularly optimistic moments Piper imagined one day taking the helm, gathering investors, maybe Dumbass and his friends,
restoring the paper to its former glory. Or maybe she would just follow the pattern and get a dumbass of her own for security,
be his artistic wife, a trophy to hold up, breed with, and eventually cheat on. Conquering conformity by complying with it
completely. Piper was surprised at her lack of discomfort with the notion, until she thought of the look of smug affirmation
etched in the wrinkles that had grown to accentuate her mother's expressions. Piper knew just the face she would make, too,
the one that always formed when some event unfolded as she had contradicted it would, positive or negative. It was such a
jarring image, her mother sitting in the front pew at some Episcopalian church in her wedding lace, the hat and everything,
that face that said, "See, I told you, is it so bad really?" and Piper would realize that it was, but it would be too late
not to say "I do."
The image was so clear, so alarming, that Piper left the copy room with it floating behind her, and when she happened to notice
the cute guy who'd helped her move into her place months before she went right up to him and asked him over for dinner. Her
boldness, which intoxicated her on the long ride to the ribbon cutting at the new CVS in BedStuy, started haunting her with
remembrances of sentences like "get to know you better," which seemed absurd without that guy before her, not quite looking
at her in the face like he was alternately threatened by and ignoring her, both of which made the attraction stronger. His
hands felt so thick with calluses that Piper was sure he could juggle live coals, the arms swollen and rounded from repeated
use, making her giggle aloud at the irrationality of her desire to be lifted by him. If they never kissed that would be fine,
but not if she never got to feel what it was like to be lifted from the earth in those hands, held in those arms from it.