When No One Is Watching(7)
Asia Martin: sigh I’m sorry. I know you, Jamel, and Preston were out there protesting every week. The drug research center is nice, but I wish we could have had something like that instead of getting locked up and having our babies taken away.
Candace Tompkins: Speak on it.
Jamel Jones: Don’t get me started. Apart from that, mad shady shit went down at the community board meetings. One rep basically told us “fuck yo community.” The wildest part is the city is paying THEM to come here! To “revitalize” the area. Meanwhile, they been ignoring us for years.
Candace Tompkins: Revitalize their pockets more like . . . eminent domain soon come.
Kim DeVries: We should all be happy that this drug crisis is being responded to with kindness and compassion. It will be great for the neighborhood, too. Look at how much nicer downtown Brooklyn has become since the Ratner deal.
Drea Wilson:
Candace Tompkins:
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Chapter 2
Theo
THERE’S AN EMPTY BEER CAN POKING INTO MY RIB CAGE when I wake up and a photo album laid flat open across my chest. A warm wet spot under my armpit reveals the beer can hadn’t been empty when I passed out last night. When I shift, there’s the crunch of chips breaking and a bag crumpling, and shards of Cool Ranch Doritos stab into my back.
Really living the dream here, bud.
My body hurts as I stretch, the ache of too much booze, too much salt, and the crushing stress of my life falling apart. The beer can tumbles to the floor, but I hold the photo album to my chest protectively. After a few seconds of letting the bleariness fade, I lean it back to see what page it’s open to—a picture of “the grandparents,” an elderly couple with dark skin. He’s bald, and her hair is silver-white and close-cropped. In this photo, developed on heavy stock paper and with a white frame around it, they’re dressed in their Sunday finest outside a big church that looks like the one a few streets over.
The pictures are mostly from this neighborhood. My neighborhood, I guess—mine and Kim’s—even though I mostly feel the way I do with this photo album: like a creep looking in at other people’s lives from the outside.
The pictures are old—most spanning the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. The people are Black, like most of my neighbors, and they wear neatly hemmed dresses and stylish suits, with their hair flat and shiny in some photos and puffed out in Afros in the later pages. A wedding photo showing the grandparents before they were grandparents. Young grandpa going off to war. Laughing with young grandma upon his return. Babies upon babies. Friends and family. Beach trips.
It’s kind of weird, how often I flip through this album of other people’s memories I found atop a pile of trash while walking the streets in the middle of the night, but the people in these photos look perfect, happy, and full of love. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to any of those things in a long time, maybe ever, but it was so unremarkable to someone on this street that they left it out on garbage night.
The hammering that awakened me starts up again—absurdly relentless, as if a Looney Tunes character broke in and is banging a mallet against a wall for the chaotic joy of it. It’s a homing beacon giving the location of the person I once thought would bring me perfection, happiness, and love. I press my palms against my ears, trying to drown out what’s become my millennial version of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—“The Renovation-Crazed Girlfriend.”
Or ex-girlfriend?
It’s complicated.
The idea that Kim and I once thought we liked each other enough to buy a home together makes me cringe. The fact that I thought she’d never figure out I was the kind of item to be left out on garbage night, something no one should pick up, bands shame across my shoulder blades.
I climb out of bed and take a few heavy steps over to the window. One good thing about being stuck in this shitty apartment? It gives me a great view of half the street—the whole street if I shove my head out. I can see who comes and goes, what patterns people fall into without realizing it, and when I’m really bored, what my neighbors do in the privacy of their own homes.
Mr. Perkins, the nice old guy from across the street, shuffles past a window in his living room. He’s one of my favorite people on the street to watch: he’s out there every day, reliable and friendly. Consistent. It’s around the dog’s feeding time, and in a few minutes Mr. Perkins will take him out for the first of many walks. I admire his ability to stick to a strict schedule while also seeming to be puttering around at his leisure. He always chats when our paths cross, even inviting me to local events that I never attend because it would be awkward to go without Kim.
My gaze drops down to the whir of motion I’ve been saving for last—she’s sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house. The woman from the brownstone tour. The Interrupter.
Until a few weeks ago, she’d leave her house in business casual every morning, and then return in the afternoon. Now she has a cup of coffee on her stoop before heading to the community garden down the street with gardening supplies—maybe she’s out of a job, too. Because her curtains are so sheer when she turns on her lights that they’re basically useless, I know she often enjoys a glass of wine and, sometimes, twerking in front of the mirror in her living room.
After a few glasses of wine, the twerking sometimes dissolves into tears. I avert my gaze more often than not when that happens, but I’ve raised my beer bottle in silent solidarity, too.