The Seeker (2 page)

Max stopped outside the revolving glass doors of his apartment building. Inside, the uniformed doorman was putting flowers in an antique vase on a gold-plated ledge next to the lobby mirror. Behind him, the wall-length painting of a Japanese rice farm glinted in the light from the chandelier. A wave of revulsion swept through Max. Just who had he become? A few steps away, his mother lay dying in a hospital bed, a man slept on the steps of a church and another flipped pitas half naked in the snow. Max turned around before the doorman could see him. He walked along 63
^rd
Street toward Central Park. The freezing wind dried the drops of blood falling from his nose as soon as they hit the air. The homeless man’s blow had shaken him awake. He’d finally complete the errand he hadn’t gotten to since his mother had been confined to a bed in his apartment three weeks ago.

Max walked across bright, empty 59
^th
Street and stopped at the Capital One ATM on Park Avenue. He withdrew $2000 and distributed the bills on his body—in his back pockets, inside his underwear, in his socks, in the sleeve of his shirt, inside his coat pockets—leaving only $40 in his wallet. At 4 a.m. he caught the 6 Train on Lexington Avenue to Pelham Bay Park. The preppy drunks in his car got off at the 77
^th
and 86
^th
Street stations and the fedora-wearing hipsters in Harlem. By the time the train reached the Bronx, the compartment looked much like it had in Max’s childhood: a woman high on crack scratching her deathly pale face leaving thin red lines on it, a homeless man slumped on his seat muttering to himself, and three boys wearing baseball caps and imitation Air Jordans drinking from brown bags and slobbering over pizza slices. The boys stared at him. Max gave them a cool, blank look and glanced away. Lingering longer was intimidation, not meeting eyes was fear, either could leave him bruised and bloody on the subway station and without his $2000. He’d deserve it too. A white guy in a Boss overcoat in the South Bronx late at night was begging to be messed with. The boys whispered among themselves and laughed. Max got off at the Brook Avenue station. The boys followed him outside the train and up the stairs.

“Where you going, whitey?” they said behind him.

Max didn’t turn around. He walked along dark, unlit Brook Avenue with an exaggerated swagger, pumping his chest forward, swinging his arms loosely, chewing the non-existent gum in his mouth, the pimp roll he had perfected in his childhood.

“You need a hit?” they said.

He turned on East 139
^th
Street. A drunk was rummaging through a trash can in front of a closed pawn shop. Another man in a tattered coat leaned against the glass door of a check cashing store. The boys picked up speed behind him.

“Whoa, wait, GQ.”

Max took a quick left on St Ann’s Avenue. The boys’ footsteps died out immediately. Just as Max expected: they wouldn’t follow him into gang territory. Two men, one bent over a shining white cane, the other sporting an Afro, stood talking under the streetlight in front of a park next to the St Ann’s Episcopal Church. Max’s heartbeat returned to normal.

“J,” he said.

The Afro turned around, his hands reaching inside his overcoat, likely for his pistol.

“It’s Max. Jerome knows me.”

The man with the white cane turned. He was twenty-nine-years old like Max but looked twenty years older. Since middle school when Max and he had studied together at PS 65 Mother Hale Academy on Cypress Avenue, Jerome had been shot by rival drug dealers in both his knees and his right hip and arm. His face was a tangle of knife scars, his hair prematurely gray, and his skin cracked from a lifetime of drug use.

“Da Max,” said Jerome, giving Max a high-five. His hands were shaking and his voice was hoarser than a year ago when Max had last run into him. “What you in the ghetto for? I thought you’d gone all uppity.”

“Not uppity man, just busy with shit,” said Max. “I have to see Andre.”

“Bitch’s going to finish school, I hear,” he said.

Max nodded. “You should go too.”

Jerome laughed. “And your uncle will raise them little ’uns?” he said.

A car blasting Latin music came down the street. Jerome pressed the cane firmly against the ground and pulled a ziplock bag with rose gray powder from his coat. “You want some H, da Max? On the house.”

Max shook his head. “Gonna head to Andre’s. Some punks were following me so I turned around.”

“Want me to come with?”

“I’m good now,” said Max, shaking Jerome’s rough, jittery hands.

The car pulled over. The Afro bent over the car window.

“Be safe,” said Jerome and hobbled over to the car.

Max turned around and walked beside the fenced park toward 139
^th
Street. Much had changed since his childhood. Then the park had been a barren sandy lot filled with hypodermic needles and blue crack caps. A lone tree had stood in the center of the gravel, its dry branches covered with dolls—some intact, some with missing limbs—eerie, makeshift memorials made by parents who couldn’t afford any better for children who died of gang shootings and drug overdoses.

I . . . I don’t wanna g . . . get up there.

Sophia’s stutter would worsen every time they passed the park on their way from the train station to home. Max would hold her hand and promise her they wouldn’t end up as dolls on the tree if she stuck close to him. Now, the tree had been replaced with seesaws and slides. The ground was clear of debris, the gravel raked smooth, all signs of progress except for the addicts themselves. Years ago, Jerome’s father had dealt crack in front of the park. Now his son, with the same fading ghost-like face and hacking cough, was dealing heroin. Jerome’s kids would break the cycle perhaps, thought Max without much hope.

A prostitute in a tight yellow skirt with haunted eyes and chattering teeth paced outside the brown brick building on 139
^th
Street where Andre, Max’s childhood friend, lived. Max punched the security code on the console and entered the building’s cold tunnel-like lobby. A bottle crashed on the floor. Max stepped around the broken glass, urine, and other beer bottles next to the doorway and knocked on Andre’s door.

No response.

He knocked again and called Andre on his cellphone. The phone buzzed inside the apartment. Andre picked up after four rings.

“Max.” His voice was thick with sleep. “Is Ma okay?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“It’s just cold outside,” said Max.

“What?”

“I’m freezing outside your apartment,” said Max and knocked again.

“Shit.”

A thump. Wheels rolling on the floor. The door opened. Andre sat in his wheelchair in a white sleeveless shirt and underwear, dreadlocks disheveled, drool slipping down the corners of his mouth. Max stepped in. The house was heated like a furnace. Ammonia and bleach fumes seeped into Max’s skin, making his throat itch. A bottle of E&J, naked light-bulbs, a cardboard box with greasy pizza crusts, broken lighters, razor blades and residue of white powder lay on the kitchen counter—the aftermath of a crack binge.

“Jesus fuck did you call those Bloods motherfuckers over again?” asked Max. “You’re gonna get killed, man, you fucking wait and see.”

Andre rubbed his eyes. “Quit being a bitch, Ace,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep. “Ain’t nothin’ to it. You work in a bank. I work here. The kids gotta know me to trust me.”

Max walked across the floor littered with beer cans and empty glass vials. He poured the E&J into a dirty glass on the kitchen counter and gulped it down. Andre’s eyes followed him.

“What happened? Is Sophia okay?” he said.

Max took out the cash from his wallet, socks, shoes, and underwear, tightened it in a roll, and put it on the kitchen counter. “I just came to give you this,” he said. “So you can keep digging your grave studying useless ass criminal behavior at college.”

Andre stared at the cash. “At 5 a.m.? Motherfucker be crazy?”

“Doesn’t your semester start next week?” asked Max. “I won’t have time for a bit. Mom is about to go down.”

“Naw, hell, Ace,” he said, his eyes dropping. “I figured it’d be soon.”

Andre rolled his wheelchair up to the counter and poured the last of the E&J into a clean glass for Max. They went from the box-like living room to the even smaller bedroom, Andre’s wheelchair knocking down more empty beer cans with its wheels. Max sat down on the spring bed and downed the yellow-brown liquid in one swig. The window behind the bed was barricaded with thick steel railings to block stray bullets from gang shootings outside the apartment. They looked like prison bars.

“Shit, man, go counsel kids in Manhattan gangs. Enough trouble to stick your nose into there,” said Max. “Here, you’re just gonna get banged one day.”

“How ’bout we don’t talk about me?” said Andre. “You want a smoke?”

Max shook his head.

“I ain’t using no more but fuck it today,” said Andre. He wheeled out of the bedroom. Max’s head felt heavy from the drink. He leaned against the headboard. His eyes began to shut.

“ . . . I tell . . .”

Max opened his eyes. Andre sat opposite him sucking from a plastic Coca Cola bottle bong with a suction hole at its center. His eyes were glassy, his face vacant.

“Sorry, I dozed,” said Max. “What?”

Andre burnt more weed in the makeshift bowl attached to the hollowed pen-tube wedged in the suction hole. He took a giant suck from the bottle’s mouth and inhaled deeply. “Do you know what I tell them young gangbangers about you?” said Andre, enunciating each word slowly. “I don’t say shit about you going to Harvard or working in Wall Street. Everyone in the projects knows that. I just tell them about St Patty’s Day years ago when a bunch of us went to the city. You remember?”

Max blinked away his sleep, trying to focus. Andre never spoke of their childhood. “I guess.”

“You don’t remember nothin’, bitch. It was before all the shit went down,” said Andre. He took another drag. “We were twelve then. Or thirteen. You sagged your pants low and rapped and drank on the 6 like all of us. Muscle or Pitbull or someone dared you to ride hangin’ outside the train when we got off at Canal. You did it for ten seconds, then fell off and bloodied your nose on the platform. Later that night, we smoked up and you stole a record from Bleecker Bob’s. Then we came back home and crashed.
We
crashed, that is. You came back and studied all night for some stupid math quiz. You recall?”

Max didn’t. There had been too many such days growing up. “I think, yes,” he said.

“That’s what I tell these kids. Do what you gotta do to survive in this hell but go back each night and get your shit together. Piece by piece, build your motherfuckin’ empire,” he said. He leaned forward on his wheelchair. “You gonna be okay, Ace. On the real. You’re always hustlin’, always okay. And Ma’s suffered enough. She’d want to be at peace.”

Max throttled the question that came to his lips. Is that what his mother was feeling? Andre would know, though he never talked about the day fifteen years ago when Max and he were caught in the crossfire between the Black Spades gang and some local toughs outside a bodega on Cypress Avenue. One moment, they were sucking ice pops. The next, three punks wearing gold chains with pistols in their hands stood in front of them. There’d been a blaze of yellow light and popping sounds. Max had dropped to the road, knocking out two front teeth. He was staring at bits of his bloody gum tissue splayed on the ground when Andre fell beside him, his cream shirt colored in red. “Pop, it hurts, pop,” he had shouted. The bullet had pierced his liver, tearing through his spleen, and lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.

A deep sadness rose up within Max.

“Some world this is where you’re better off dead than alive,” said Max.

Andre looked at him with soft, mellowed eyes. “Don’t hate, Ace. You always took my shit harder than me,” he said. He put the bong down and tossed Max a cushion. “Sleep for a bit?” His arms were thin as spindles and his body twisted from avoiding pressure sores from sitting in the wheelchair all day. Max’s stomach knotted in despair. He forced himself to get up.

“No, man, I gotta be with Mom,” he said. “I just wanted to drop off the Cs.”

“Can I see her today? I’ll get a ride into the city.”

Max nodded. “She’ll like that.”

Max walked out of the apartment. Instead of going to the subway station, he turned on Alexander Avenue. In the dim light of dawn, 141
^st
street looked like it had been bombed by a fighter jet. Overflowing trash cans, a vacant parking lot with heaps of tires, puddles of vomit outside a bar, thugs slumped against closed pawn shops with flashing neon lights. He stopped ahead of Willis Avenue and looked up at a blackened window in the corner-most building of the Mott Haven housing projects cluster. His mother, Sophia and he had spent most of their lives in an airless, one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of the building. The brown bricks hadn’t seen a single coat of paint in the ten years Max had been gone. With its furrows, cracks and chipped corners, the building looked like a body ravaged by cancer. Screams ripped intermittently through the quiet morning.

“You best walk away, bitch.”

“Maria, open the fuckin’ door.”

“Whatchu think of yourself?”

Sophia had hated these screams; the gunshots; the kids that called her names—“white bitch”, “snow bunny”, “nerd”, tore her overcoat, and messed up her hair when Max wasn’t around; and just about everything else about the projects. Max had swaggered and strutted, rapping, shooting hoops, shoplifting, getting into petty fights, anything it took to fit in. His mother had been different from both of them. She had developed a steely toughness, indifferent to the world crumbling around them. When the gangs started shooting at each other in the alley behind the building, she would clean their apartment vigorously. While Max and Sophia covered their ears and flattened themselves against the wall, she’d scrub the chipped legs of the ragged, brown sofa, wipe the cinder-block walls, mop the floors and move and rearrange the lone table and three chairs in the living room again and again. She’d stop when the shooting stopped and continue with her cooking or sewing as though nothing had happened.