The New York Doll (17 page)

- No! Really? But where is it all coming from? – Mikky seemed to be as shocked as I was. – We’re pretty far from the ocean!

- I don’t know… From Emmons?

- From that little canal? Can’t be!

- But it’s coming, more and more! Look, people are getting out of that building, it’s up to their knees!

- They probably lived in a basement. But where are they going to go now? I’d rather stay in the building, I would just go up.

- How much water should Emmons have if it’s so flooded over here? – I still didn’t seem to understand the whole gravity of the situation, it all looked like one of those movies about the end of the world, but this time we were the actors.

- I don’t know… - Mikky checked her incoming text. – My friend Nicolas, who lives next to Petco, says they have water over there too.

- But it’s higher than us, don’t you think? – fighting with the wind, I tried to stick my head out of the window to see what’s going on to the right of our building, where Nicolas’s building was supposed to be. – Oh my God, Mikky! Look!! There’s water coming from that side too!

- Are you kidding me?!

In a matter of half an hour, maybe forty minutes, the water reached the entrance of our building. The cars couldn’t go through and their owners were getting out, just leaving them out there, and we saw the water reaching up to their hips. The wind was so strong, it was ripping off parts of the roofing from the houses across the street. We closed the window, as we were afraid that some parts flying out could easily get us. The electricity went off and all we heard was sirens, people screaming outside and our neighbors talking in the hall. Pretty soon the water left as fast as it came, and we went to sleep still sure that tomorrow we’ll get our power back and everything will be back to normal. Little did we know then.

Chapter 24

The next morning we ate everything that would have gone bad without the fridge, as the power was still off; we tried calling our families in Russia, but there was not even a little signal, so we put on our Uggs and decided to go outside to see the damages Sandy made.

It was not too bad on our street, just a lot of dirt everywhere. The super of our building was freaking out at the underground parking garage, as it got all flooded and they were trying to get to the insurance company to file the complaints for the cars. Owners of small businesses on the ground floors were all busy cleaning out the water and sand from their stores. Piles of garbage outside started growing bigger and bigger, as sanitation trucks were all busy helping out the streets that were hit the hardest.

We started noticing more and more destruction as we crossed the little bridge leading closer to Emmons Ave. We saw cars with broken windows, flooded inside; glass building hall doors broken; sand and dirt everywhere. But the worst picture was at Emmons itself, and only then we realized the consequences of the destructive force that hit the city a day ago. The wrecked cars were standing in the middle of the street and government services were trying to move some of them in order for the traffic to move again. No traffic lights were working, all windows on the ground and sometimes first floors were broken, fallen trees here and there, some of them crashed right on the cars parked nearby. We could see sailboats tops in the canal; the boats themselves were completely under water. And the canal itself, always so pretty and full of gorgeous swans and ducks, looked more like a huge dumpster filled with water.

As we walked further, we got more and more shocked by what we saw. All the cute little basement restaurants and cafes, the landmark of the Emmons avenue, were filled with ocean water up to their ceilings. Cars now, hit by the arriving fast water, were flipped over, some of them ended up on bushes, some just piled up with other cars, but all of them were destroyed and just left there by their owners, waiting for the insurance companies to come and mark them.

People were saying that before the power went down last night, several houses caught fire because of it. We didn’t see the houses, but we saw the burnt out electric shields at the pierce, right next to the big boats that survived the storm, but were damaged as well.

I asked Mikky to go further to Brighton to check out what the Oceana area looked like, and also because my landlady called me and asked me to see if the apartment was ok. Sneaky bitch was hiding from the storm upstate. Oceana didn’t look any better. The entrance canopy of the building, which I was supposed to move in to, was torn apart and laying on the side. The windows on the ground floor, however, weren’t broken and when we entered inside, it didn’t look too bad: they must have already cleaned up. We had to walk seven floors in the pitch black darkness, helping ourselves only with our cell phone lights. The dark hall on our floor looked really creepy and immediately reminded me the scene from the movie “I am legend”: I was expecting to see ugly, flesh-eating zombies any minute now, and so was Mikky.

Finally, we opened the door to our apartment, and there was light. Relieved that we haven’t been eaten by zombies, we locked the door behind and looked around. Of course, nothing happened to the apartment since it was on the seventh floor, only a flipped chair on a balcony and unpleasant view from the window. It looked like the whole Brighton got wiped out and now all that was left was dirt, tree branches and seaweed everywhere… A very, very sad picture.

I called my landlady and told her that the apartment was ok. She asked me to pick up her mail as she was only going to come back in a couple of weeks to finalize her court issues, but it was never destined for me to move into that apartment though.

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After two days of no electricity and no hot water, when our phones almost died, we had no other choice but to go to Mikky’s friend Nicolas, who had the power in his building. As soon as we plugged in our phones, I texted R. to ask him how he was doing in Staten Island. Luckily, in his area they weren’t hit too badly, and he was just finishing some cleaning up in his back yard.

Nicolas ordered a pizza and three of us were enjoying the little part of civilization left, such as TV, home delivery and opportunity to wash our hands in hot water. It’s funny how we don’t appreciate how good it is to have hot water or be able to turn the lights on when it gets dark outside, and how helpless we feel when it all suddenly disappears. I felt like a cave woman; a couple more weeks with no fridge would probably make me hunt for raccoons with a butcher knife.

Nicolas had some weed, and it was just what we needed in our new “post-apocalyptic-no-hot-water-no-electricity-raccoon-hunting” world. I have to say, drugs don’t really have an effect on me, except making me hungry and sleepy, that’s why after trying it once, I never abused them. This time was the same; I ate three huge slices of pizza, felt sleepy, and soon took Mikky home, after thanking Nicolas for his hospitality and outlets. It was pitch black outside and the only light that we had was a cheap Chinese flashlight worth a dollar, which we had to buy for ten. I don’t know why, but weed made Mikky paranoid about our surroundings, and to her bad luck, two older men followed us to our building. They were talking Russian to each other, discussing something completely irrelevant, but Mikky somehow got an idea that they were some serial rapists who were after us, and so she rushed to the seventh floor in the complete darkness. I was walking behind at my normal pace, laughing my ass off. The two men, who disappeared on the second floor in one of the apartments, turned out to be our neighbors, and Mikky turned out to have a total drug incompatibility. The next day, when she came back to her normal self, we laughed at this little episode pretty hard.

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Since we had nothing else to do at home and nowhere to go outside due to the complete disaster still reminding us of Sandy throughout our whole neighborhood, Mikky and I decided to try to go to work. Since the area where “Velvet” was didn’t really get too much of a storm, we thought that we could make pretty good money, since the other girls were still staying home and trying to file their claims or just to clean up. But we didn’t know about the next big problem that several states in a row had to face: the gas shortage. We started noticing weird lines at the gas stations while our van was making its way to the club.

- What’s with all the lines? – I asked the driver when we couldn’t come up with a suitable explanation ourselves.

- Oh, haven’t you heard? Because of Sandy a lot of ships that were transporting gas and oil were prohibited to enter the harbor and now everyone’s panicking that for several days they will be left with no gas.

- Is it just in New Jersey? – Mikky asked.

- New York City had more gas to begin with. I haven’t noticed any problems while filling up my tank. But who knows how long it’s going to take to bring the new supplies to the stations…

I shrugged. It was the 21st century for God’s sake, gas shortage in New York, one of the biggest and the most developed cities in the world seemed as real to me as flying unicorns. But it was one of the most discussed topics among the customers though. In the Champagne room, one of my regulars, a very nice 60-something year old veterinarian was telling me a story of how he found his clinic partially flooded and what he had to do now to get the insurance money.

Nobody was happy with how their insurance companies handled their claims. And the biggest problem was that everybody who had flood insurance didn’t know that it only covered them if heavy rain caused the flooding; however, if the water came from the ocean and flooded the basement or the whole first floor, it wasn’t eligible for the compensation. Men were getting mad and wanted to get drunk. And we, the perfect therapists, the sympathetic wives, were right there to listen, to comfort and to make them forget all their problems for a couple of hours. Our prognosis was right: almost no girls from New Jersey showed up and we were making good money from our poor clientele.

I didn’t get them: they just lost a shitload of money, found out that their insurance wasn’t good and wouldn’t do anything for them, and they still went to the club to spend their last several hundred dollars. For what? I didn’t know, I didn’t really care; if they want to give me their money, I’m always there to take it. I was becoming more and more cynical and didn’t like it. Drinking my martini, I was thinking that I probably worked for too long in this weird environment and started to become someone I didn’t like. I didn’t feel bad for them anymore, I didn’t care. I started hating all men just because almost every day I only saw the bad ones. I wanted to go back home and be good again, I wanted to be good for my R. After all, he was the only reason why I still didn’t lose all the faith in humanity.

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“What do you mean, you can’t get gas?!” – my fingers were flying on my Blackberry keyboard with the speed of light. Today I had to warm cold water on the gas stove to fill up the bathtub to wash my hair and myself; I was tired of eating soup noodles since all the stores in our area were still closed; I couldn’t do the laundry as the laundry room got flooded and our super hasn’t fixed it yet… And now Coconut, my biggest profit, was texting me that the gas station ran out of gas at five cars in front of him.

“Go to another one, pump it yourself from underground, go to frigging Iraq, but get your stupid ass here!!! I could have stayed home, but came in tonite just to see you, to make sure that you are alright after that stupid storm, I came all the way from New York for you, and you can’t find a way to see me?!”

I read the message out loud to Mikky and we both start laughing.

- You’re such a phony bitch! – Mikky said.

I was. Of course I didn’t care how he was doing after the storm, as a matter of fact I wasn’t even going to text him tonight as he annoyed the crap out of me, and I was hoping to make money without his help. But unfortunately the gas shortage got even worse within these two days and it was dead in “Velvet”. So I put all my acting together and took the situation under control.

“If your ass is not here within an hour, don’t even bother to come back at all. If you can’t find a way to see the girl who you claim you love so much and want to marry, it only means you’re not serious at all”.

I’m showing it to Mikky again and she laughs.

- Why don’t I have a customer like this?

- Because they don’t make idiots like this anymore!

“I’ll be right there, my honey, I promise, even if I have to walk!” – a minute later my Blackberry beeped.

- Told you. – I smile at Mikky. – No more idiot manufacturing. They discontinued them.

That night Coconut proved me so right about his mental abilities that it wasn’t even funny anymore.

- So I found that guy, here in New Jersey, through a friend of mine who was here with me once, you remember?

- Mm, - I nod and take a big sip out of my martini glass, trying not to concentrate on Coconut’s talking too much, otherwise my brain would soon overheat and explode.

- So that guy, he’s a big mafia guy, he’s Italian I think, wants to sell his restaurant. So I’m thinking to buy it, just to have a business on the side, you know?

Palm face.

- You are going to buy a restaurant. You. You are going to handle a business?

A smart guy would have realized that he said something stupid and would have stopped talking. But Coconut wasn’t too bright.

- Yes. But I’m not going to actually run it, I’ll have a manager who’s gonna run it for me. And I’ll just be getting money from the business while still doing my accountant job.

- Where are you going to find a right guy to run it for you? And if you don’t even know anything about the business, how can you be sure that he won’t be stealing from you? Restaurant business is not that easy, honey, you have to be there 24/7 at the beginning at least. Do you know somebody honest and loyal, and at the same time experienced in this sphere, who can be your manager?