Luster(21)
* * *
Some days later I snag an interview for a corporate gig in Long Island City, but when I get there, it is just a staffing firm and the woman I meet with tells me she has a client looking for a waste management associate. When I show up to the dump, the mid-August heat is so relentless that the creases I ironed into my pants melt away. By the time I arrive in the main office I’ve reverted to a liquid state, my interviewer asking me how much I can haul, to which I respond with an overestimation of about fifty pounds, the vibe in the room a little bit Ku Klux until I go to the bathroom and see that for the length of the interview my mascara has been running and there are big black tears still making their way down my cheeks. This is something I want to tell Eric, but because of our gaping economic disparity, I don’t know how to express myself without it seeming like I’m asking for help.
* * *
So I send my social security number to an email linked to an office in Silicon Valley where a popular in-app delivery system is based. In three days they send me a hat and a carrier bag with thermal insulation to keep the deliveries warm. They grant me access to a map that shows the areas of the city with the highest demand. Heavily populated areas show up dark red, and less populated areas tend to remain pink, until lunchtime, when demand is high even in the sleepy hamlets of Queens. I ride my bike to an address in Sunset Park and when the customer comes to the door, she snatches the bag of waffle fries and doesn’t tip. Most of the time, I stay in Brooklyn. I get the first orders of no-pulp orange juice and champagne out of the way. Make pit stops for vanilla Juul pods, small orders of LaCroix and Pampers. I make my home base Holy Cross Cemetery so I can hydrate in relative peace, and also because it’s smack-dab in the middle of Flatbush, the orders come in from all sides. Technically, I’m not allowed to transport anything that qualifies as a drug, but there are prep school kids who need bubble tea and Marlboros, dog walkers who need boxed wine and leave detailed instructions about where in Prospect to make the drop, pump-and-dumping mommies who emerge from the Grand Army market, desperate for gin. Everyone is excited to see me, and I am sort of excited to see them, the habitual Bensonhurst McFlurries, the Gen X brownstoners who, for some reason, use the app to order pizza, Coney Islanders looking to indulge in brunch from afar and are just happy you came out, the West Indian pockets of Eastern Parkway and their cash-only ackee and coco bread, beaucoup tips on the days I wear the company hat and beat the average time, though occasionally I take the bridge over and field requests by Canal, where I try to protect orders of squid from all that direct sun.
* * *
But for all the visits I make, they never go beyond hello. I try to segue from light observations about the weather, and in the few who are receptive, between my strict schedule of work and sleep, I find I don’t have the bandwidth to offer anything more. So I listen to NPR on my route to try to get some talking points. I find a segment about a journalist who received a string of violent emails in 2009. The journalist reads part of one email and laughs. He wrote to me on the first of every month, and he would say these things, like you <redacted> whore how do men find your <redacted>, and I felt like, it’s not even constructive. If you have an issue with my reporting, okay. Then they bring the man who sent the emails on air, and he says, I’m sorry, I was having a rough year.
* * *
If I go home, it is usually for the bathroom I know and love, though there is a mom-and-pop Thai joint in Gravesend with a sterling private restroom, and they are so grateful for how much geng kheaw wan gai I move that they let me use it for free. I try not to take any deliveries with a high probability of soup, and I try to obey traffic laws, though sometimes there is a wedding, a parade, or a murder that forces me to rush and leave my bike in an illegal place. With a new diet of pear baby food and Top Ramen, I make almost enough money to live, though some of that is due to my payout from the publisher. Then I receive news that my rent is going up. The news comes in a brown, grease-stained envelope, and because usually I only receive mail from student loan consolidation scams and instant-approval credit card companies that use old rap icons to target low-income blacks, I almost miss it. My roommate calls a meeting while I’m out falling from my bike into a customer’s cheesecake, and as soon as I climb the stairs she is there with a suitcase, saying she’s moving to a gut-renovated building in Harlem with her boyfriend as send me a picture of your pussy pings onto my screen.
* * *
As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life. But after a big haul of spices from Halal Food I go ahead and take a picture of it in the bathroom of an Au Bon Pain. Then I go back to my newly empty apartment, google utility-free SROs in the Bronx, and introduce some saline to my anal cavity. I watch Seinfeld, comb Jason Alexander’s IMDb, and head to Manhattan to make a little more cash. I bike the Queensboro Bridge, and mop my face and armpits in the bathroom of a Pret. I check the delivery map and uptown is already deep red, a swath of demand from Harlem to Fifty-Ninth and Lex for the matcha, mylk, and hemp offerings of corporate, quirky, or decidedly snide coffee giants, the bike lanes in Manhattan already terrifying at 11:00 a.m., filled with delivery boys and girls who jet into traffic with fried rice and no reason to live, along with the sentient abdominals who do this for fun, foreign pedestrians standing right in the way, taking selfies and checking their luggage for pigeon shit.