Into the Dangerous World Page 6

  “Jackson-Pryor?” I asked.

  “Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor. Heard of them? Celebrities on fire,” he said. A slight smile glimmered in his eyes. “My triptych’s gonna trip you out.”

  “That would be a diptych,” I said. “A triptych is a series of three paintings, not two, genius.”

  “Well, thank you, Professor. You look like your head was on fire,” he said, leaning in to me, the smile gone. “Maybe you be the third painting.”

  “Ho, snap,” Kevin said.

  “Maybe I’ll take you with me next time I burn shit up,” I said to Trey.

  He pulled off the sunglasses and stared at me with his bloodshot eye, like another contest, like who would look away first.

  His girlfriend threw her Big Mac on the table and stood up. “Caramba, enough of this,” she said. “Let’s go.” The boys stood up with her, but Trey didn’t.

  “Nessa,” Trey started, but she sucked her teeth and took off. Trey pointed to Kevin, who headed out after her. Reuben slid back in, next to me. Trey threw down the sunglasses, staring at me while he chewed. That look, I couldn’t take it, accusing and cocky all at the same time. I opened my sketchpad to avoid it. She knew, Nessa, what I was feeling. I’d seen it before, the lime-green ooze of jealousy. It’s totally physical, the way a regular old girl turns into a vicious, man-eating girl when her boyfriend’s at stake. First, she’s Dr. Jekyll. Then she’s Mrs. Hyde.

  “What’s that?” Trey asked.

  “Just a drawing,” I said.

  “Let’s see what else you got in that book,” he said.

  I flipped through and showed him the one of his eyes I did in class. “Don’t worry, they’re all of you, Trey. Just like you can’t stop drawing me.”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t kick your ass for going over my piece and stealing my shit, Ror.”

  I kept my voice low. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  He stared into me until I looked down. “Took me all night to do that.”

  “Yo, I didn’t know,” I said.

  Reuben said, “Let’s get outta here, man.”

  Trey said, “Don’t let it happen again.”

  He pushed his tray across the table at me. On it was his uneaten bag of fries. As I watched him walk away, I stuffed a whole handful into my hungry mouth.

  18

  I WOULD NEVER be a Norm. I just didn’t know how to act. I was a girl raised by fucking hyenas, an uncivilized creature who didn’t know how to talk to real people. I saw it now—TV taught you how to get along, showed you what to wear and how to do your hair. It taught you what you should look like. With TV, you didn’t need to think. You knew which lines to laugh at. I’d missed years of watching. Now it was too late for me. I was just a primitive. A mute. A primate.

  At school, I heard them talking about the painting of me on the door. Reuben sat behind me in English class, bragging to someone how he and Trey did it right in the middle of the school day. Kevin passed me in the halls with a girl and pointed me out to her. I looked the other way. Trey lived upstairs; why couldn’t I knock on his door? Ask him—what?—to show me how to spray-paint? But life wasn’t a half-hour TV show, and it wasn’t so easy to get in with them.

  Marilyn had the opposite problem; boys followed her like clouds of mayflies. Since she was a senior at the end of the year and her hand had healed, she got an after-school job at the Carvel on 72nd. She put money away for college, bought our groceries and subway tokens, paid our bills, and at night, she took her new friends out to listen to bands downtown. I didn’t want to work at any ice-cream joint. I didn’t know what I wanted, but not that. Not slaving for the man in some dumbass job. There had to be another way to make money.

  I spent time in the library on Amsterdam Avenue looking for copies of the books I lost in the fire. It was hard to concentrate with this smelly guy picking his bare toes in the art section, this lady breast-feeding her baby on the floor. I checked out an armful on Surrealism and Dada and Pop, and couldn’t wait to get home to read about Lichtenstein, the artist who painted comic book characters on ten-foot canvases.

  Turning the key to our door, I heard a moaning sound and found Ma at the table, sniffling like she was sick. I put down the books. She was crying. Ma didn’t cry, not usually, not ever. What happened with Dado made her disappear inside herself, not cry.

  “What’s the matter, Ma?”

  “Oh, Ror, they’re saying it was a suicide.”

  A flutter of panic rose up in me, like extra heartbeats. “Who said that?” I asked. I slipped into the chair beside her. I handed her a napkin, and she dried off her tears, her staccato breaths slowing in gulps until she stopped.

  “Your father’s life insurance, from Dow Chemical,” she said.

  “What, why does it matter?” All this time, we’d never talked about Dado. Never. What life insurance?

  Ma sighed, pinching the napkin to the bridge of her nose. “The lawyer said they won’t pay out on a suicide.” I noticed for the first time gray hairs nestled among her black curls.

  I shook my head. “What lawyer?”

  “Marilyn thought we should fight it. I thought she was right. We’ve been fighting to get the insurance money, Ror. A hundred thousand.”

  What was going on?

  Ma smacked the table. “This is why we left the city in the first place,” she said. “He was right all along about these companies. They’re bloodsucking, controlled by greed, the lot of them.”

  He was right all along? That’s what she thought?

  She pressed her palms to her cheeks. “I didn’t see it coming, not this, not what we’ve fallen into. Welfare. Food stamps. I thought we could do it all ourselves.”

  Her skin had puffed from all the junk she used to fuel herself—Days of Our Lives, Pepsi, crullers from Dunkin’ Donuts. But she still wore the same lucky earrings: wire hearts Dado had made her from found electrical copper.

  “Ma, can I ask you a question?”

  Her eyes were red from crying.

  I forced out the words: “Why didn’t you do something?”

  She looked down at her chapped hands and shook her head slowly. “I couldn’t help him, Ror. Nobody could. His sickness was like that. I couldn’t stop him, and then it got too bad. I never thought he would . . . I never thought it would come to this.” She reached out and caressed my arm. “I’m sorry, Rora. I know you miss him most.”

  My eyes prickled with little needles. I shook off her hand. “We don’t need their money,” I said fast. “We’ll find a way.” Dado—how could he have left us with nothing? I’m going to save you, girl. How? We must fight for what we want and win. We will build it ourselves. Each step must have a purpose.

  We won’t trust anyone. We won’t need anyone.

  Ma said, “It’s all we’ve got, Ror. That insurance is ours, and I’m going to fight for it.”

  I felt like I was at the bottom of a well, drowning, clutching for air, something going on so far above me, I couldn’t do anything about it.

  Suddenly, I let go.

  Like I plummeted, like another consciousness dawned on me, separated from me, leaving a shell of me behind. Like Aldous Huxley, like William Blake, like Carlos Castaneda wrote, like the doors to perception were wide open and I was seeing my doppelgänger, my body double, only she wasn’t there, it was.

  That portrait of me painted right on the school door. My alter ego.

  Follow your purpose.

  At fourteen, the Age of Reason, I had declared it at a family meeting.

  I wanted him to know: I was an artist.

  I wanted to tell my father what I felt deep down—that when I saw what Trey did, I had a vision of how being an artist might work. When I picked up that can of spray and marked the wall, for the first time in my life I felt it was right. I didn’t feel trapped by what came b
efore me, or what would come after. I didn’t feel contained by the paper, the charcoal, the pen. I felt, for the first time, I had enough space. I was free.

  I had to find a way to show that to Trey.

  19

  AS WE WALKED to the subway, I was thinking how I might hear it on a talk show: Here’s some advice for depressed and possibly psycho-visual, hyper-creative, overly individualistic parents: Don’t commit suicide. It’s messy, and you leave behind the saddest family on earth.

  Ma and Marilyn led the way. I wasn’t looking forward to getting into that sardine can, but we had to sign some papers at the lawyer’s office. Since Dow insurance didn’t want to pay out—they’d found gasoline on the premises, evidence it was used on the dome, evidence of a suicide—Lawyer Jones was going to try to prove we spent fifteen years building the homestead. We’d file for squatter’s rights, adverse possession of the four acres of the King Kennedys land, then Ma could sell it, then we could get some money.

  Dado’s body was never found. Teeth, bones, turquoise fucking jewelry, all of it gone. Incinerated. Down the steps, I was thinking: How are we ever going to bury him? Through the turnstile, I was thinking: How can I forgive him? On the platform, I was thinking: If I could just see him, I could, possibly, understand.

  And then there he was, right over a bench. I blinked and stopped walking. Marilyn and Ma sat down, not even seeing it. I stared until it became clear that I wasn’t just imagining what I saw on the wall of the platform right behind them, big as life. The painting of Dado with his head on fire. And beside him, me—me with my head on fire.

  It was a message. In code. From Trey. Only I didn’t know what it meant.

  Marilyn said, “Ror, you all right?”

  I tore my eyes away, and met her confused look. Wind blew into the station, whipping up loose trash, and the train roared in. I took a last look before I followed them on, and stuck close to the door so I could get off quickly if I had to. It creeped me out, this hurtling through space.

  The car was decorated everywhere you looked. It calmed me. Felt like Trey was trying to reach me. I traced some of the letters on the door with my finger.

  When Marilyn saw what I was doing, she said, “Blech, don’t touch that graffiti! Will they ever clean up these walls?”

  Graffiti.

  Ma shook her head. “That wasn’t here when I was a kid. They kept the subways clean.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  Ma’s eyebrows went up. “Not bad? I thought you had more taste, Ror. Look at this mess.”

  “Yeah, well, look at that one.” Behind a row of heads blossomed round purple and blue and black letters that spelled out MIRAGE. “You can’t say that’s ugly,” I went on. “I mean, it’s alive like, I don’t know, punk rock. It’s better than some Budweiser ad.”

  “It’s awful,” Ma said. “There’s nothing good in it.”

  Marilyn shook her head like she was starting to put something together: The paint can, the graffiti on the school. Had she recognized me? “It’s a waste of talent,” she said.

  I kept my mouth shut. The only one who would understand was Trey.

  20

  AS SOON AS we got home from the lawyer’s, I went back to the abandoned building. I brought my drumbeat brown pen that colored a page antique sepia, and my sketchbook. I went to the top floor, sat across from Trey’s painting, and, looking away from the black mark I’d left, started to draw.

  I let my hand follow his lines, the strange shapes they made, trying to decipher his code. I found myself diving and swooping along with his curves, falling into the inside of his mind. That’s what I loved about art—you could see the inside of someone’s mind made manifest. There on the wall, Trey was chaotic and straight, surprising and predictable.

  I drew until the sun drained out of the room, until I couldn’t see anymore. I drew in the dark, with only the amber streetlight outside illuminating.

  Then I heard someone shout, “Police! Put your hands up!”

  “Oh, God!” I scrambled to my feet as someone stomped in with a huge flashlight.

  Behind it, he started laughing. Trey. He set down a duffel bag. “You scream like a baby girl,” he said. I held in my fast breaths and dropped back down on the floor. He shined the light at me, at my book. “I knew I’d find you here,” he said.

  “And I knew you’d come.” I tried to control my crazy heartbeat.

  “Yo, Ror, you know what bothers me about you? You act like you the only one in the world with troubles.”

  “You started this competition, not me.”

  “Then you ain’t got no idea how you look at people,” he said. “You with that glare all the time.”

  “You painted my Fire Pop on the platform!”

  He came over and kneeled down where I was sitting. With the light, he matched my drawing with his painting on the wall. He took hold of my chin and said, “What you did wasn’t right.” I thought he was going to punch me; I’d punch him right back. Then I thought he might kiss me deep and hard on the lips, and I was scared I’d latch on to him for dear life and never let him go.

  “Don’t touch me,” I forced myself to say. But I didn’t move his hand away.

  “You want to be better than me, but you ain’t.” He shook my head once, then relaxed his grip and let go.

  “Aren’t. You aren’t any better than me, either,” I said.

  “Yeah, I can talk whitey. You think you smart, but there’s a lot more shit to learn on these streets than on any fuckin’ horse farm on Staten Island.”

  “Trey,” I said, taking a breath to let the insult go, “you’re wrong. I don’t think I’m better or smarter than you,” I said. “The truth is, I respect you. Except when you act like a jerk.”

  He sat back on his heels and stood the flashlight up between us. “The way you draw me,” he said softly, “I can’t figure out what the fuck’s goin’ on with you.”

  “You’re not so easy yourself,” I said.

  The hardness in his eyes left then, and I could see inside, fathoms. “That first day you came to class,” he said, “you smelled like fire.”

  “It stays on you,” I said. “My dado burned our house down.” It didn’t come out easy. “He died. In the fire. That’s what the drawing is. Was. Fire Pop.”

  Trey was paying attention now.

  “My pops left us.” He coughed as if something stuck inside him was coming loose.

  “Where’d he go?” I asked.

  Trey stared into the flashlight. Then, he said, “How the hell should I know?”

  “That how you ended up at the roach hotel, too?”

  He met my eyes. “Me and my moms and James, we wouldn’t be in this messed-up situation, hadn’t been for him.”

  I said, “At least he’s alive. Maybe one day you’ll find him and give him hell.”

  Trey gave me an awful look. He stood up, stretched out his legs, pointed the flashlight at the painting.

  “Maybe not,” I muttered.

  “Your pops teach you to draw?” Trey asked.

  “He taught me everything.” I stared at the painting on the wall. “Who taught you?”

  Trey shrugged. “I got my mentors.”

  Mentors.

  “Hey, listen,” I said quickly, “I’m sorry. I’ve been wanting to say that since I did this. I’m sorry for stealing, I’m sorry for crossing out your painting—I didn’t mean to.” His back was to me; made it easier to talk to him. “I love it, Trey.”

  He turned, and I saw his face. How my words affected him.

  I saw my chance to ask what I wanted. “Will you take me with you, next time you go?”

  He knelt beside me again. “What? You saying you wanna come?” he asked. “You one crazy white girl.”

  “You one crazy black boy.”

  He laughed.


  “Is it scary to paint where anybody can see you?” I asked.

  His eyes turned pure. “You don’t get no freer than painting where everybody’s gonna see it,” he said.

  “Take me.”

  “No, there is one thing better, Ror. Their faces. Nothin’ like seeing the people dig on a fresh painting. Colors in their eyes.”

  “I want to go.”

  “You don’t know what you asking for,” he said, throwing a piece of glass. He had something I wanted so bad, and he knew it. “It’s dangerous, specially for a girl. You can’t act stupid. Can’t let the cops catch you.”

  “I’m not afraid of the pigs,” I said. I thought of how I screamed when he pretended to be police—it was surprise, not fear. Dado trained us to avoid the pigs like hell. All those times scavenging, we never got caught.

  Trey tore at a ragged hole in his jeans. “I can’t decide alone, anyways.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to be part of the crew, you gotta ask the crew. Noise Inkorporated. We been together three years. I’m the president, but it’s a democracy. We take a vote. Reuben’s the vice president, Kevin’s the treasurer, Nessa’s the whole fuckin’ senate. We all gotta have a powwow to decide on new members.”

  Sounded familiar. Trey being president meant he was in charge. “Listen,” I said, “I just want to try it one time.”

  He dug into the floor with some glass. “You don’t just come for the ride. This ain’t no cruise—it’s a crew. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

  “Please? I won’t tell anybody. I swear I’m not a quitter.”

  “Shit,” he said. He laughed. “You ain’t even got no paint.”

  “I’ll owe you, I’ll pay you back.” I talked fast. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  He stood, pushed back his cap. “Aight, aight, girl. You want paint, I’ll give you paint.” He walked to the duffel and pulled out a paint can. But it was a one-gallon can of white wall paint. He got a roller from the bag and held it and the can out to me. “You want in, you do over this wall you fucked up. Whitewash it, and then I’ll think about giving you spray.”