“Um. Invasion alarm,” I said awkwardly to Silkie.
He was standing in my loft looking at my sketches, which were stuffed into an old shoe box. He had them in stacks like he was organizing them by style.
“How did you get in here?” I asked, shuffling through the door with two bags of groceries.
“Lock’s busted,” he said without looking.
I dropped my groceries when I saw the door, almost breaking my eggs.
“Shit.” I grabbed the round hole where the handle should’ve been. “Not again.”
My landlord was renovating our building, including the flooring around the stairs, which had necessitated taking my very old door off its hinges. When they put it back, the lock was busted. My landlord demanded the flooring people fix it. They blew him off, and a phone war ensued. Eventually, they did come back to fix it. Only now it had apparently fallen apart.
I picked up part of the lock and tried to fit it back into the hole.
“You don’t use the door anyway,” he said.
He nodded to one of the back two windows. One was blocked by a bulky AC unit that only blew cool air for about two hours before needing a break. The other opened onto the fire escape. Since there were only two keys to my very old door, and I had lost mine, most days I came and went through the fire escape using my Duane Reade point card, which was made of thin, flexible plastic. By sliding it between the window and the frame, I could latch and unlatch the window from the outside. Silkie’s comment suggested he knew that despite that I hadn’t told anyone.
That day, I had left the door open because my point card had been in the pocket of my favorite pair of jeans, which were lost at the club, and nothing else I had was thin enough to slide through the narrow gap.
“Have you been in here before without my permission?” I asked.
“What’s this one?” he asked, holding up a sketch from the Keds box.
It was a charcoal drawing of the dearest and oldest man I knew.
“That’s my Uncle Wen. I mean, he’s not really my uncle. That’s just what we called him.”
“Who’s we?”
“You know. Everyone,” I lied. “He was like the neighborhood grandpa.”
“He’s even got the Fu Manchu beard and everything.”
“Um, racist much?”
“Is that smoke swirling around his head?”
“Or incense, maybe,” I said, glancing fondly at the image. “Or steam from a tea pot. His shop was a feast of scents: old teak and dried flowers and pipe tobacco.”
I noticed someone had cleaned my kitchen. That happened more than I liked to admit. I was pretty sure it was my landlord’s wife, but she denied it. Despite weeks of trying, I hadn’t been able to catch her. For all I knew, it could’ve been elves.
Silkie lifted the single sketch he had set to the side. “And this is your mom and dad, right?”
They were round and beaming.
“Look nice enough,” he said, as if he expected otherwise.
I didn’t recall, but it was possible I had said some less-than-flattering things about them.
“They can be,” I told him. “When they’re not worrying about everything.”
“They’re parents,” he said, as if that both explained and excused it.
He rifled through the box and pulled out the exact sketch I didn’t want him to see.
“And who’s this?”
It was drawn in a different style than the others. It was in color, for one. I didn’t like to use my nice colored pencils very often. I couldn’t afford replacements.
On the page, a young man looked to the side of the viewer and smiled a boyish, crooked smile.
“Looks sorta like Chinese Elvis,” he said. “’Cept with better hair.”
I snatched it from him.
“He’s got eyes like yours,” Silkie said.
One of my eyes was slightly tilted and lower than the other.
“Yeah, and we also have the same birthday,” I said, annoyed. “Is this a social call, or did you find something?”
“You were born on the same day? He like a twin or sumthin?”
I made bug eyes at him. “Did you find anything or not?”
“Nada. Nobody’s heard of a bloke like that.”
“And you checked the blues clubs and stuff?”
“I’m tellin you, nobody knows a Chinese-speaking black dude with alligator shoes. Or a skull cane. He don’t exist.”
I paced in a circle around the middle of my loft. There were only two enclosed spaces: a storage closet and the bathroom. A half-height wall made the pseudo-kitchen. Silkie had spread my drawings neatly over the top. The rest of my art, along with most of my clothes, were scattered about. Normally, I would apologize for the mess. As it stood, my guest smelled of turpentine.
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
“Lotsa Chinese immigrants in this neighborhood. He’s prolly just some old pervert trolling the night train for drunk girls.”
“He was not—” I sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Just gimme my phone back.”
Silkie made an annoyed face and pulled my phone out of the pocket of his track suit. “I wasn’t gonna keep it.”
The screen wasn’t working. I tried the button, but nothing happened.
“Dead,” he said. “Just ax me this,” he added, leaning against the brick ledge between the two front windows. “Why you risk all that for a dog? Not even your dog.”
“You’ve never had a dog, have you?”
“Wuzzat mean?”
“If you had, you would know you don’t just shrug when someone takes it.”
“That from experience?” he asked.
“Maybe. Besides, somebody needed to teach that brat a lesson.”
“Ah, there we go.”
“There who goes?”
“That’s the Cerise I know.”
“What happened to the door?” my landlord bellowed. He was staring at it from the short hall that connected the stairs from the street with the stairs to the third floor.
“Abdul,” I said, surprised. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about Silkie in the flat.
But he didn’t even notice. He bent to look at the pieces, as I had.
“I’ll catch you later,” Silkie said, stepping to the fire escape.
Abdul was on his knees. “There’s no screws,” he said. “What happened to all the screws?”
“Umm . . .” I shrugged.
🤣
Abdul Suleiman was not only my landlord; he was also my boss. We both lived above his small halal market, where I helped at peak hours in lieu of rent, a situation that suited us both nicely. Some months back, I had found Abdul’s son, Samir, who had recently moved in with a girl from school. Abdul and Daria, his wife, showed up at the dorms one day, frantic. Someone had broken the glass at the shop and they wanted him to come home, only they’d had a falling out and didn’t know where the couple had gone. I lied my way into the registrar’s office and found the girlfriend’s forwarding address. I didn’t think it was any big deal. As it happened, I was in the process of getting expelled and didn’t at all mind kicking the college in the shins like that. When I said as much, if only to get them to stop showering me with praise, they turned to each other. Abdul offered me the loft on the spot.
It was supposed to be temporary. “Until you find a place,” he said. “Or Samir comes home.”
Abdul and Daria lived in the top flat of the building. They were saving the second flat for Samir, who they hoped would marry and move underneath them. I expected they were going to be disappointed. Samir was not only a total player, he also drank alcohol, smoked weed, and ate bacon. (American pork, he claimed, didn’t count.) Moving under his parents’ apartment, way out in Queens, would’ve required a lifestyle change of epic proportions. But Abdul and Daria were ever hopeful.
However unexpectedly it came about, the situation was good for everyone. I needed a place to crash, for a while at least, preferably without having to complete any documentation that might give away my location to the US government, and Abdul needed help at the store, preferably without having to pay wages or rental tax. And all he had to give up was a room he wasn’t using anyway. I think it mattered to them that I was an immigrant, too, and that they were just as lonely as me. We reorganized the shop based on some design advice from me—I’d learned a few things in school—and once or twice a week we would eat together. On slow nights, I would close the shop for a little extra cash. I think it was the only time they had to themselves. They both worked hard, rising before the sun and not going to bed until well after it set. They never spoke about their homeland, or why they had left, but I suspected it had something to so with their marriage. Abdul was Syrian Muslim—I think. He never said. But Daria I knew was a blue-eyed Israeli.
I was working in the shop a few days later when Shanna walked in with her retinue in train. In her left arm, she cradled a newly bathed Frankie, who had tiny pink ribbons in his ears and who positively wriggled in excitement at the sight of me.
“Eeeeeeeee!” Shanna squealed, shuffling forward with one arm raised to give me a hug.
I received it as graciously as I could.
“You did it! You did it! You did it!”
She bent to press her dyed-red hair to my hijab and rocked me back and forth. I was not Muslim. I just considered it respectful to wear one.
“Oh my Godddddd . . .” She said. “You are amazing. Ah-mazing. I’ve been telling everyone. Haven’t I?” She turned to her retinue for confirmation but didn’t wait for it. “It’s amazing. Just-amazing.”
“You said that, Shan.”
She squee’d and squeezed me again. Frankie barked.
“Oh yes, of course,” she said, thrusting her dog to my face. “Frankie wants to thank you, too. Don’t you, sweetie?”
A tiny tongue licked my cheek. I stopped him when he got to my lips.
“Okay, okay. You’re welcome.”
Shanna Dupree was 6’2”—6’6” in heels—and the most gorgeous trans woman you’ll ever see.
“We’re having a party,” she said, taking my arm. “In your honor. And it’s taking place tonight, right here in your apartment!”
Everybody laughed.
“Are you serious? Shan, I can’t have—”
“I already told everyone. It’s gonna be fantastic.”
“Shan, I really appreciate—”
“Oh, no you don’t! You have done me the absolute bestest, most amazing favor of my entire lyfe. Don’t you dare refuse me the honor of returning it. Honey, I am bringing the meat to this place!”
Everyone laughed again. It was a joke, given we were all standing in a halal market.
“So many gorgeous men are gonna descend on your apartment, you’re bound to find one. Or two. Or three. Hell, I don’t care. You won’t even have to take the train to pull one.”
“Shan . . . Let me explain—”
“We’ll be over around ten,” she said as the retinue filed out. “You don’t have to do nuthin, sweetie. Just leave it to momma.” She kissed her fingers and blew it to me.
I sighed.
Whatever she was planning, it was probably true about the guys. Something about Shanna brought them to the yard, and it wasn’t just her finely sculpted artificial breasts. That was how the whole thing with the dog had started, in fact. Angry at being “trapped”—how he missed Shanna’s Adam’s apple is beyond me—the jerk Jay had his homies steal Frankie while Shanna was on stage, knowing full well what he meant to her. Shanna was bipolar and believed, rightly or wrongly, that little Frankie, whom she’d discovered as a stray, had literally saved her life. She adored him. She named him after Frank Sinatra, who’s music she sung and who was apparently from her hometown in Jersey. The day after he went missing, she fell into a catastrophic cycle and wound up taking some pills. They didn’t kill her, but she went to the hospital, where I got the whole sordid story. I doubted the brat Jay had ever suffered a consequence in his life. To him, punching down like that was entirely justified. He only did it to hurt her. Everyone kept telling Shanna that she’d get Frankie back, but I knew better. Once the anger wore off, he’d realize there was no way for him to return the dog without proving he was the one that stole it. Frankie would disappear.
I accosted Jay at his expensive home, which he invited me to search, smirking the whole time. He was an idiot, but he was smart enough not to keep the dog there. Instead, he hid Frankie at his father’s super-secret private club while he went out to prove he was “still a man.” That he wound up back there suggested he’d struck out with any woman who wasn’t being paid to tolerate him.
Bringing Frankie back was bringing Shanna back. In true form, she rebounded immediately and was now riding a manic high. I didn’t want to bring her down in front of everyone. That would’ve only hurt her feelings. I decided I’d call her later, after my shift, and make my excuses. The movable masculine feast would have to descend elsewhere.
It wasn’t until then that I remembered that Silkie had killed my phone.
The party was as lit, as promised. When my place got full, people started congregating on the stairs, which were open to the street. My loft had been a small indie record store until sometime around the turn of the century. In the process of remodeling, Abdul had torn the wall coverings over the stairs, only to reveal layer upon layer underneath, including quite a few old concert announcements that were now ripped and partially exposed. The whole wall looked like a piece of modern art, with the defaced advertisements—many of which were colorfully illustrated—laying bare the commercial contradiction of disestablishmentarian music. That wall was part of the reason I had fallen in love with the place, and as I climbed back to my apartment after a volunteer beer run, I squeezed past several people leaning in to read the names of old bands.
“Oh wow,” one middle-aged hipster woman cried. “I was at that concert.”
Adbul and Daria didn’t say anything about the noise. I tried not to imagine what they were thinking. In my defense, I had until that very night been a model tenant. True, I didn’t pay rent, but I was exceptionally quiet and had never once had a boy over. Except Silkie. But he didn’t count.
Shanna showed up fashionably late, as usual. Apparently, after delegating the party plans to someone else, she went with her retinue to Coney Island to celebrate Frankie’s glorious return. She flirted with a bear of a carny and ended up bringing him along. She’d played baseball in high school and had won a gigantic stuffed rabbit at the softball throw. We called it Mr. Fluffers and decided he was a former cartoon star who now worked off-camera in the adult film industry getting the male performers ready for action. Several of the men in attendance demonstrated to much laughter.
Shanna told stories about my antics at art school, what she called my random acts of chaos. Her favorite was apparently the time my fellow design students and I invaded a retirement home. She told the story twice. I had seen posted advertisements in the neighborhood around campus for Sunrise Valley Active Senior Community’s annual Summer Social, and the afternoon of, some friends and I dressed the ladies in our latest custom fashions. Meanwhile, I had purchased the largest box of condoms I could find. The label said 100-count. It was certainly heavy. I left it in the senior center’s common room. Near the reception desk, there was a stack of brochures with a little plastic sign that said “Please Take One.” I swiped it and set it on the table next to the condoms. I’m told it was quite a party.
“Where’s the good stuff, baby?” Shanna called too loudly from across the room. “I know you have some. You haven’t grown up yet.”
She was half right. I had some, but I hadn’t touched it in months.
“Behind the radiator,” I said much softer. “There’s a loose panel.”
They found my little red pills and made a tray of Dragon Ball Specials: sangria, Red Bull, a shot of Patrón, and an illegal pharmaceutical. On ice. Shanna handed me one an hour later. The ice had almost totally melted. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the wall, watching the fun. Frankie was in my lap. I had gone looking for Silkie, who never showed, and found the quivering dog licking a sideways beer bottle.
I took the drink from Shanna and she dug a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. Then she plopped down next to me.
“Honey,” she said with a distinctly more masculine cadence to her voice, which always happened when she was drunk, “I know you like your privacy, but can I at least know what you’re doing for money these days? Your fridge has nothing but eggs and condiments. I worry.”
“I’m hooking,” I joked, taking a pull off her cig. “Downtown. Outcall.” I looked up at the ceiling and tried to contemplate what life would be like at the club. “Only the best. Make five grand a night.”
“Cool,” she said with a snort. “Spot me some cash?”
“You’d make more than me.”
“Are you kidding? I can’t compete with that tight ass of yours.”
“And no boobs?” I scoffed. “Please.”
She snuffed her cigarette in a dry cereal bowl I’d left on the floor. She wasn’t the first.
“Are you doing okay?” she asked. “Really?”
“More or less,” I said. “Why?”
“You’re a wall flower at your own party. Have you seen the smorgasbord I brought for you?” She motioned to the room.
She was right. There were lots of cute guys. A couple had even asked about my art.
“I’m fine,” I said.
She leaned forward to look me in the eye. “Don’t give me that. I know the real Cerise.”
“Do you?” I asked. The thought puzzled me. “I don’t.”
“Have you dated anyone since Wong Fook Hing Guy?”
That was her mildly offensive name for my last ex, Derek.
“Pfft. Yeah . . .” I told Shanna. “Tons. You know how it goes. Just givin’ the old vag a break.”
There was a commotion then. A short, bearded man in his middle 50s had arrived and everyone cheered. He had bags in his hands full of boxes of cheap cherry cordials into which Absinthe had been injected.
“You didn’t . . .” I said.
Shanna knew I had a sweet tooth.
She looped her arm under mine. “Who’s your friend?”