Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (10 page)
“They were syrupy crap,” I said.
“What did Molly think?” she asked. “Then?”
I hesitated. She always wrote me back, in black ink on pink stationery, paper that she bought just for me. Pages numbered, little hearts drawn around the numerals. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought of those letters. It seemed like forever ago. But as I drove, I could feel the fiber in the paper underneath my fingers. I could smell the scent of her skin, of her hands, rising to me as I unfolded the pages, soft, sweet, clean. Vanilla. Strawberries. Did she still smell like that? I hadn’t noticed.
I could feel Julia’s eyes on me. I knew my face had betrayed me, broadcast every thought. She thought she had me. I waited. I knew what was coming, knew Julia couldn’t resist.
“So what’s going on with you two now?” she asked.
I glanced at her across the car. “A fling.”
“Liar,” she said. “You have flings with the waitresses at work whose last names you can’t remember. This is Molly Francis, your first real girlfriend. Your first love.” She poked my ribs with her finger. “Give.”
I lit a cigarette and rolled the window the rest of the way down. We were getting close. I could smell the Dump. “Nope, no way,” I said. “The first rule of Molly and John is we don’t talk about Molly and John. Not with each other, not to anybody else.”
“My therapist would have a field day with this,” Julia said.
“So you are back in therapy,” I said, making a break for a change of topic. Quid pro quo, sis. I know where to poke, too. “Same woman? I remember you liked her.”
“Yeah, I’m back in therapy,” Julia said, sighing, dragging out the confession like a smoker admitting to lighting up again. She scrunched down in her seat. “I went back after Cindy left me again. Different therapist. Dr. Evans moved to Colorado. Something about her husband’s job. It still helps, though. Like it did the last time.”
“I didn’t know Cindy’s leaving fucked you up that bad,” I said. We sat at the intersection of Richmond Avenue and Arthur Kill Road, waiting for the light to change.
“You’d know these things if . . .”
“If I called you more often, yeah, I know that.”
“I want to hear from you more often,” Julia said. “Is that so bad?”
I glared at her across the car as we crossed the intersection and she agreed to drop the subject. I knew I hadn’t heard the end of it.
“I didn’t think it got to me that bad, either,” she said. “At the beginning, I was so pissed she was leaving again, and I guess I thought she’d come back like she had the other times. But then she told me about moving to California. I guess I never really believed it was over until she packed her car. For a week, I could barely get out of bed.”
“I can barely get out of bed every day of my life,” I said.
“I wasn’t drunk every night,” she said. Ouch. Apparently, my stab at levity had been ill timed.
“The next two weeks weren’t much better,” she said. “I missed classes, started smoking again. When one of my classmates offered some pills, some cheap speed, I really thought about taking them. So that’s how I knew it was time to find a doctor.”
I pulled on my cigarette. When someone offered me pills, I thought about taking them, too. And usually, I did. But I didn’t think about running after some shrink over it. I got depressed, too. Who doesn’t ? My sister amazed me. The whole ‘I’m broken, maybe someone can help fix me’ mentality was lost on me. I knew mixing Jameson, speed, and cigarettes probably wasn’t a superior alternative, but at least I wasn’t paying the note on some geek’s Benz.
“I never knew what you saw in that bit—woman,” I said, as we waited at another red light for the opportunity to crawl beside a thousand other cars a thousand feet to the next red light. “Cindy was good-looking, and she must’ve had some brains and talent to be in that school.”
“You’re answering your own question,” Julia teased.
“Yeah, but she’d already cheated on you once when you asked her to move in,” I said. “Then she left you twice while you were living together. The second time she wouldn’t even tell you where she’d been.”
“I know these things, Junior. I was there,” Julia snapped. “But I loved her.”
She was there, all right, no matter what that crazy bitch did to her. I couldn’t blame her for getting pissy. She didn’t need me counting her mistakes back to her. She had a therapist for that.
“She wasn’t good enough for you,” I said. “She treated you like shit.”
“At times, yeah, she did. But you never really know what goes on behind closed doors.”
The light changed and we ebbed forward.
“She kept beating up on you and you kept taking her back. Why?”
“Love.”
My eyebrows jumped up my forehead. “Fuck love, then.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme, Junior?”
“It’s an attitude that’s served me well, thank you. Mom and Dad were in love. You and Cindy were in love. Virginia and I were in love. Yeah, love is grand.”
Julia pouted, crossing her arms across her chest.
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” I continued. “I just want to understand how someone like you could get so broken up over being ditched by a fucking loser.”
“There’s your answer,” she said. “Cindy’s such a loser, what does that say about me?”
The lightbulb flickered and I nodded. “So you’re off that love shit now, right?” I asked.
“Junior, we all need love.”
I slid the car deftly across two lanes of traffic, toward the entrance to the Mall. “Not me. I don’t need shit.”
FIVE
DIRECTLY ACROSS RICHMOND AVENUE FROM THE MALL SQUATS Staten Island’s other great contribution to modern American society, the Fresh Kills Landfill. It covers more than twenty thousand acres, taking up over ten percent of Staten Island’s total area. For nearly fifty years, all the household waste from all five boroughs of New York City was deposited at Fresh Kills. Back when I was in high school that was three hundred thousand tons a day. It’s the largest garbage dump on the planet, and one of only three man-made objects, along with the Egyptian Pyramids and the Great Wall of China, visible from outer space.
The Dump, we call it. That’s how we do on Staten Island. Staten Island Rapid Transit System? It’s the Train. The Staten Island Ferry? It’s the Boat. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge? You got it, the Bridge. Imaginative bunch, Staten Islanders. I’m just as guilty. I didn’t go to Monsignor Farrell Catholic High School for Boys. I went to Farrell. C’mon.
The rest of the boroughs? The Bronx has Yankee Stadium; Manhattan has Harlem, Wall Street, Central Park, and Madison Square Garden, among a thousand other things. Queens has Shea Stadium and two international airports. It hosted the World’s Fair. Brooklyn? It’s Brooklyn, that’s more than enough. Staten Island? We got the Mall and the Dump.
They try to hide it, wall it off with dirt mounds covered in scraggly greenery. They try to ignore it, running the West Shore Expressway right through the middle of it. They brag about herons and egrets nesting in the waterways behind it. They hunt the rats every night. But you can’t hide it. How can you hide millions upon millions of tons of fucking garbage? Because that’s what it is. Millions and millions of tons, acres upon acres, of fucking garbage.
Every day of the year, you can see thousands of gulls circling over it, hovering like a noxious cloud. A vermin halo staring down beady-eyed and ravenous for some guy’s month-old Chinese food from over in Bensonhurst. You can hear them fighting, screeching and squawking, clawing and snapping at dead dogs from the Upper East Side. In August, when the hot sun returns after a good, hard rain, and cooks up the Dump real good, there’s nowhere on the island you can’t smell it. It reeks to high heaven of waste, of all things thrown away and buried, things that have reached the end of the chain and no longer have a single use left to them. Things stuffed into black plastic bags and metal cans and hauled away by huge, rumbling, stinking trucks at the crack of dawn.
But on Staten Island? Those thrown-away things? They live here forever, baby. And they stink. It’s the stench of Eternal Life. Old diapers never die, they just move to Staten Island. All these thrown-away things, they come back, like a fat, farting, rancid ghost that sits its fat, dead self right on top of the island, and lingers long enough for all of us to breathe it in. And what do Staten Islanders do? They make some empty noise about how they’re not gonna take it anymore, and then they build a giant mall right across the street from it. And then they build subdivisions up against it. And then they buy them and move in. They exalt Saint Giuliani when he finally closes it, like it’s suddenly gonna go away then, suddenly stop rotting and seeping and polluting. Then they curse the Jersey smog that drifts over from Bayonne, and flip open the paper and read about how Staten Island has the highest per-capita cancer rate, more kinds more often, than any other place in the world. Then they remember they have to go to work tomorrow and they forget everything else. They close the window and turn on
The Sopranos
. Or they hop in the car and careen down Richmond Avenue to the Mall, dropping the trash in the can on their way to the car.
The Sopranos
. Or they hop in the car and careen down Richmond Avenue to the Mall, dropping the trash in the can on their way to the car.
Now here I was myself, I thought, as we cruised through the parking lot at the Mall. And I hadn’t even taken out the trash. You’d have thought they were giving away money, whiskey, and porn the way the parking lot was crowded. After one sweep past the main entrance, and one heart attack over a four-year-old nearly darting out in front of the car, I eased us into a spot out on the far edge of the parking lot.
“Sure we’re far enough away?” Julia asked as we walked.
“I want as much distance between me and these mall rats as possible.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, back at the car. “Parking back there? That’s not about convenience, that’s active disdain. I hate them, I hate this temple to the dollar, and I still can’t believe you talked me into this.”
“One thing I have to say on your behalf, Junior. The world
always
knows how you feel about it.”
always
knows how you feel about it.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “Fuckin’-A, right.”
A blast of climate-controlled air hit me as we walked through the doors. Immediately, I wanted to lie down on one of the benches near the entrance and take a nap. When I told Julia this, she grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me forward. I dragged my feet like a ten-year-old, like when my mother used to haul us out here for the few new school clothes my father would let her buy: Toughskins for me, Garanimals for my sister—the best Sears had to offer.
Sears. Staten Island middle-class common ground. Whenever Mom took us out there, I’d always spy at least one classmate through the racks. I’d try to sneak over and commiserate in shared misery. About the sixth grade. About how scratchy new Toughskins were. Unless it was a girl. In that case I’d simply try to will myself invisible, trying to hide from her without getting too close to my mother.
My mother always ran into someone she knew, too. Some other woman I never recognized, trailing two or three kids about the same age as Julia and me. There were never any fathers around. Just little kids and their moms. I always wondered how my mother had met these women, if there was some way women could meet on the phone. Because my mother was always on the phone, but it seemed to me she never left the house without the two of us in tow.
I bumped into Julia when she stopped us at a kiosk that offered color-coded maps of the Mall. “I need two dresses,” she said, studying the map. “And at least one new lipstick.”
I had a feeling she wouldn’t be getting them at Sears. I pulled out my wallet and counted my cash. Everything I’d made over the weekend was still there, minus the few dollars I’d dropped at Joyce’s. I handed her four fifties.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“For the dresses. Take it. I know you’re on a student’s budget.”
“Put it away,” she said.
“I can make it back no problem,” I said. “Take it.”
“I appreciate it,” she said, patting her purse, “but I’ve got plenty of plastic.”
We stared each other down. I pocketed the cash, deciding I’d just stick the money in her purse later that night when she wasn’t looking. She turned back to the map, pointing to the blue rectangle marking the food court.
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