The Dutch House(42)

Walking to the park, the six of us began to get the message. We kept our eyes open, and so saw the open eyes of everyone we passed—the kids lying out across the stoops and the men clustered on the corner and the women leaning out of open windows—everyone watching. The women and girls walking by suggested that we should go home and fuck ourselves. The trash bags piled up along the curbs split open and spilled into the streets. A man in a white sleeveless undershirt with a pick the size of a dinner plate tucked into the back of his afro leaned into the open window of a car and turned the radio up. A brownstone with its windows boarded over and its front door missing had a notice pasted to the brick: Tax foreclosure. For sale by public auction. I could see my father writing down the time and the date of the auction in the small spiral notebook he kept in his breast pocket.

“You see a sign like that,” he said to me once when I was a boy and we were standing in front of an apartment building in North Philadelphia, “it might as well say Come and get it.”

I told him I didn’t understand.

“The owners gave up, the bank gave up. The only people who haven’t given up work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue because they never give up. All you have to do to own the building is pay the taxes.”

“Conroy!” a kid from my chemistry class named Wallace called back to me. “Hustle up.” They were already down the block and now I was a white guy alone, holding a basketball.

“Conroy! Move your ass!” said one of the three boys sitting on the steps of the next building, and then another one yelled, “Conroy! Make me a sandwich!”

That was it, the moment of my spiritual awakening on 120th Street.

I pointed to the building with the auction notice. “Who lives there?” I asked the kid who thought I’d come to fix his lunch.

“How the fuck do I know?” he said in ten-year-old parlance.

“He’s a cop,” the second boy said.

“Cops don’t have balls,” the third boy said, and this sent all three of them into rolling hysterics.

My team had been waiting and now, moving a little faster, they circled back. “Time to go, man,” Ari said.

“He’s a cop,” the boy said again, then held out his finger like a gun. “All of you, cops.”

I threw a chest pass to the kid in the red T-shirt and he threw it straight back—one, two.

“Throw it here,” the next one said.

“Take these guys to the park,” I said to the boys. “I’m going to be one minute.” None of them seemed to think that this was a good idea, not my teammates and not the boys on the stoop, but I was already turning back to the liquor store on the corner to see if I could borrow a pen. Everything I needed to know could be written on the palm of my hand.

On my way to look for a pick-up game at Mount Morris I became the sole beneficiary to an inheritance greater than my father’s business or his house. My entire life snapped into sudden Technicolor clarity: I needed a building, specifically the one on 120th near Lenox, in order to be who I was meant to be. I would put the windows in and replace the door myself. I would patch the dry wall and sand the floors and someday I would collect the rent on Saturdays. Maeve believed that medical school was my destiny and Celeste believed that she was my destiny and both of them were wrong. On Monday I called Lawyer Gooch and explained my situation: my father had made provisions for my education, yes, but wouldn’t it be so much more in keeping with his wishes to use that money instead to buy a building and launch myself in the career he’d intended me to have? Looking past the violence and filth, the pockets of impenetrable wealth, Manhattan was an island, after all, and this part of the island was next to an ever-expanding university. Couldn’t he petition the trust on my behalf? Lawyer Gooch listened patiently before explaining that wishes and logic were not applicable to trusts. My father had made arrangements for my education, not my career in real estate. Two weeks later I attended the public auction of the building that was meant to change my life. It sold for $1,800. I had no plans to recover.

But as usual, it turned out I was wrong. There were a lot of buildings in the neighborhood I now haunted, and it wasn’t impossible to find another one that was burned out, full of squatters, and scheduled for auction. I spent so much time in Harlem I felt suspicious even to myself. A white person was someone who either had something to buy or to sell, or he had plans to disrupt the commerce of others. I was included in this, even though I meant to buy something bigger than a bag of weed, and I meant to stay. While most Columbia students had never been to Harlem, I could have given tours. I did labor intensive searches at the library and the records office to find the property taxes and price comps in a ten-block radius. I made appointments to see buildings that were for sale and tracked foreclosures in the paper. The only thing I neglected was chemistry, until I began to neglect Latin, physiology and European history as well.

My father had taught me how to check the joists beneath a porch for rot, how to talk an angry tenant down and how to ground an outlet, but I had never seen him buy anything bigger than a sandwich. I realized I had two narratives for his life: the one in which he lived in Brooklyn and was poor, and the one in which he owned and ran a substantial construction and real estate company and was rich. What I lacked was the bridge. I didn’t know how he’d gotten from one side to the other.

“Real estate,” Maeve said.