Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  And finally:

  Hexr Sep 8, 2014 at 9:25 am

  DO OR DIE MOTHER FUCKERSS!!!!!!!!

  Amelia, with Simon screaming downstairs, quit Firefox.

  It was already time for his first nap. Antoinette would handle that. Amelia locked herself out of the Internet for an hour and focused on Jonah Hill. He’d been boring in person.

  She changed her lead: “Jonah Hill is boring in person.”

  She liked that. Esquire might like that.

  “Jonah Hill has a distinct outside, white gaze . . .” Esquire would not like that.

  “Jonah Hill ordered the dressing on the side. He was trying to keep the weight off . . .”

  Chapter 10

  Daniel looked out the window. He was supposed to be preparing for his class at Pratt, but he could wing it. His students were artists, or pretended to be artists. They wouldn’t care. The morning rush to work was starting to slow. The second morning rush. The first was for the real workers, the laborers—the house cleaners and men in boots, all African American. That was at around 6 a.m. Daniel didn’t sleep, so that first morning rush was his first event of the day, and when Thela was away he took his coffee to the front window and savored it.

  He and Thela had moved here because it was a large apartment for a relatively small price. It was far from where Thela gave lessons in Manhattan; there was no supermarket or chain drugstore nearby; they didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood; and Thela’s—albeit short—walk home from the subway at night after gigs scared them. But they loved that they had room for a piano in the apartment; they loved that they could barbecue in the garden; they loved the original woodwork and stained-glass windows; and they loved that they’d never run into anyone they knew.

  At least Daniel loved that part of it. Daniel had become a loner over the past decade. He didn’t like to waste his time with people he didn’t know. They were nothing to him. He was too old to care what they thought. What did he need them for? He was done catering to strangers. They could go fuck themselves. So he taught his courses, listened to podcasts, and read at home. He went on long walks and listened to podcasts. He read at home and listened to podcasts and taught his courses. He cleaned his guns. The guns were both legal. He only cleaned them as much as you’re supposed to clean guns. He wasn’t a lunatic about guns or anything like that. The guns were because of his brother, who had been in the Marines. It was difficult to talk to him about things sometimes, so the free therapist at Pratt suggested Daniel ask his brother something that related to the war but was not about the war itself, because the brothers had such differences of opinions about war. So when they got together once a week, Daniel asked about tactical geography and how to lead men and what it was like organizing and physically moving and feeding men. Those conversations were interesting to Daniel, especially considering his current academic interests concerning how cloud storage and the mobile classroom enabled smoother logistics in rural settings, but discussion died off quickly because Daniel’s brother rarely asked Daniel questions about his life.

  Although that wasn’t strictly true. Daniel’s brother asked Daniel a single question such as, “How’s teaching?” or “How’s Thela?” but he never asked the follow-up question, so conversations at that point a year or so ago regularly went:

  “How’s Thela?”

  “Doing better, actually. She’s starting to get regular gigs at this one-percenter’s weekly party, and the Brooklyn Phil is interested in bringing her in as this new kind of jazz resident, so she’s feeling pretty good professionally, like things are moving in the right direction.”

  “Good to hear.”

  Then they’d both take big sips of their beers.

  It would be the same about the classes Daniel taught at Pratt and Hunter, and the academic papers he was thinking about writing. This was okay, especially at first, because Daniel wanted to know everything about his brother’s life after obsessing about him through three tours to Afghanistan—talking about him incessantly to Thela, to all their mutual friends, to all their former teachers, their family members, strangers who were interested in politics, his therapist at Pratt. Daniel became more social at first, because of his brother, and then less as people stopped wanting to hear Daniel talk about the war.

  So now that his brother had been back for two years and was making big money at Morgan Stanley working in mergers and acquisitions, and living in the same city as Daniel, it was difficult not reaping any reward for all his patience and anxiety and emotional investment. Daniel admitted the likelihood that the transition back to civilian life must be trying for his brother, but he wanted some recompense for all those nights, all that worry. His brother was safe and back in New York. Daniel was living all the way out in Bed-Stuy. He was getting paid four grand per semester per course times four classes per semester times two semesters, which—at thirty-two thousand dollars a year minus taxes—was more like twenty six, so those nights out with his brother really had to be the highlight of his week. It wasn’t entirely about the money. He just wanted it to be fun. To feel close to him again.

  And when Daniel began asking his brother about guns, that closeness seemed more within reach. His brother opened up. He said he’d carried a standard Beretta M9. He said some marines liked to bitch about its magazine or its stopping power, but the M9 was the pistol he’d learned on, and if he aimed right, he would stop what he was aiming at. Stop it dead in its fucking tracks. Over those half dozen beers he told Daniel more about officers training; about why he told people he joined up in college (as a philosophy major he strongly believed it was unfair to let what was essentially an economic draft contribute to mercenary armed services fighting wars for our entrenched elites); and why he really joined (fucking leading men! the blood and life of it! the experience of real experience! the guns! and, somewhat, his belief that it was unfair to let an economic draft contribute to an armed service fighting wars for elites); and Daniel hadn’t felt that close to his brother since they’d been boys. Daniel didn’t say, even after all those beers, what he wanted to, which was that it had been fucking inconsiderate to put Daniel through hell just for the fun and the guns, because they were finally getting on so well and maybe one man shouldn’t slow the rush of his life because another man—even if it is his brother—suffers back home. Also, Daniel never felt physically more slight and tender than when in his brother’s company.

  But his brother got drunk that night and promised to get the process rolling for Daniel to register a weapon, and since then they’d been meeting at the range and firing until a few months back when, for Daniel’s fortieth birthday, his brother bought him a CZ Over/Under twenty-gauge shotgun, and when the weather was nice and Thela had an out-of-town gig, the brothers went up to the Adirondacks, or upstate farther out toward Albany, and shot skeet and trap, and talked about why neither had kids, and about Thela, and Daniel’s brother’s wife, and bad dreams, and their own aging parents, and all the stuff that can be difficult to talk about when you’re face to face across a table drinking beer.

  So things were getting better. Daniel still didn’t like seeing people other than Thela and his students and, now, when they were shooting, his brother. And he still spent too much time cleaning this CZ O/U. He liked the smell of the oil, was the truth. And he knew Thela worried about him. But the people at the new café down on Marcus Garvey and Decatur seemed to like seeing him on the mornings he went in to buy a scone. And he’d gotten a new Rate My Professor review that was four out of five stars: Unorothox and a nice guy! Attendance is probably the most important part of your grade. And he was making progress on his written work.

  Daniel had had to tell Thela about the guns because even though the apartment was big for the two of them, it wasn’t big enough to hide a pistol and a shotgun. Also, sometimes the place smelled like gun stock finish or oil. Thela said she didn’t mind, and sometimes Daniel thought she was lying, and sometimes he thought she liked it, and sometimes he thought she actually did want kids befo
re it was too late, and sometimes he thought she was going to leave him, especially when what she’d said was going to be a one-night trip to perform in Connecticut or Boston or Montreal or somewhere like that ended up lasting three or four days.

  Daniel didn’t tell Aaron and Amelia about the guns. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a landlord would approve of. Also, one wasn’t required to report legal firearms on the premises to a landlord. Also, Daniel thought Aaron was a douche bag. It was nothing Aaron said or did. Aaron was always nice, and whenever the place needed repairs Aaron called the handyman soon enough. It was something about Aaron’s bearing. There was something feral about him. Aaron was exactly the businessman type that Daniel had hoped to avoid in Bed-Stuy. There was something about the way he walked around the neighborhood like he was its king that made Daniel hate Aaron on behalf of the locals. Daniel knew “locals” wasn’t the word. They were all locals. They all lived there. But Daniel felt there was something shitty about making all this money and buying a house for two million dollars or whatever it was Aaron spent and then not only being the only white guy on the block but renting to the only other white guy. And, yes, Daniel was the other white guy. There was just something douchey about Aaron. Amelia was all over the place. Manic and probably not ready to have kids. Daniel was a couple of years older than Amelia and Aaron, and God knows he wasn’t ready to have kids. But he liked someone who was so obviously not really in control of her own life. That was something he understood and almost respected about Amelia. But Aaron was just a Wall Street asshole. So he wasn’t going to tell him about his guns. Fuck him, is what Daniel thought after having that bullshit conversation in the morning when they called each other “landlord” and “tenant.” Fuck that guy, and fuck his tiny ears and his teeny tiny earlobes like kernels of corn sticking out off the bottom of an egg. Fuck that motherfucking one percenter asshole. Fuck him. Fuck him.

  Chapter 11

  Aaron understood what had happened in the subway station. It happened two or three times a week. Kids jumped the turnstile, so police officers arrested them and their friends. Kids broke the law—minor as those laws may be—and they faced the consequences.

  It was a variation on Commissioner Bill Bratton’s “broken window” policy. If one window was broken, criminals were more likely to break more windows. Make the minor arrests—fix the broken windows—so the city stayed nice. Nobody messed with a pristine building.

  But then a month ago, two kids had been choked to death during routine ticketing for turnstile jumping, and another—this Jason, just a boy—was murdered Saturday night for who knew what reason, and neighbors, including Aaron himself, made the police officers’ jobs more difficult. So there were arguments.

  But today kids were getting arrested on purpose.

  It was in moments like those at the subway station when Aaron most wished he was still a rabbi. Not a Hassid, whom everybody would roll their eyes at and wonder if he ever showered and if he fucked his wife through a quilt of many colors, but a secular, friendly, well-dressed accentless rabbi who could talk to policemen and black people like human beings. The rabbi he used to be. He wouldn’t need to rush off to work. Except maybe today, on Rosh Hashanah. But normally, he could take his time and arbitrate their dispute. That girl who looked like a boy, who was yelling after him. He could sit and listen to both sides, and at the very least, the police officers and the kids from the neighborhood would feel as though they’d been heard.

  Over dinner the evening before, he and Amelia had fought. Simon had gone down at eight, and they were eating a dinner of bread and salad and cheese. Their New Year’s dinner. They were drinking red wine. Aaron always made a contribution over the Days of Awe, and this had been a good year financially for him. He had made $250,000 at Stifler & McDermott. He had essentially broken even with his bookie. Kept to small bets.

  “The point,” Aaron had said, “is that I’m going to donate twenty percent of two hundred fifty grand this year, which is fifty grand, a lot of money, and I wanted to talk about where you wanted it to go.”

  Amelia had frozen up. “To Simon,” she had said slowly. “I want it to go to Simon. And to us. Not to strangers. Why would you want to give our money to people you’ve never met?”

  The discussion had been primarily about Aaron—his faults and predilections—not about the money. They had talked about his faults as though they were outside him. He couldn’t bear discussing a “risk addiction” that didn’t exist, and he couldn’t admit to a gambling addiction that might. So he said, “Because that’s what good people do. Give to charity. I want to help people who are suffering. I want to help them in a way I couldn’t as a rabbi. I’m making enough money to actually help people now. And it’s not our money yet. When you accept my proposal it will become our money. For now, it’s my money, and I’ve had the best year financially—and personally—of my life. So I want to be generous. Otherwise, what the hell am I doing with my life?”

  He’d worked it all out, run the numbers, set the rules for himself. Not having the money was better than having it. If he gave away 20 percent, he’d have a better chance of betting zero. If he gave away nothing, he’d bet the 20 percent. Fifty grand was the right amount to bet. He had $130,000 in the bank. So: he could bet fifty and still have eighty to live off. But if he gave away fifty, he couldn’t bet another fifty and live off thirty. It wasn’t enough. He wouldn’t do that to his family. So the way not to bet was to give away fifty thousand dollars.

  He’d told her about his problems after the first time they’d made love—“I owed a bookie money, I borrowed, stole from the synagogue to repay him. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” her naked chest on his—and she’d forgiven him with a smile that soured into a smirk.

  But she’d brought it up again on their following date, and again and again until she’d gone to therapy with him and his psychologist had helped him convince her he wasn’t an addict. A gambling addict, at least.

  But then he had been forced to start lying to Amelia.

  He believed he was giving the money away for her, too. This would pay off for her, too. The benefit of being part of the community. Of protecting himself and enriching the lives of others.

  He believed in most of what was he was saying. It wasn’t all a cover. Charity was good. Noble. Especially given what he was doing for a living. Betting on the right stocks to come in for his clients. He loved the game of it, but he suffered for the lack of . . . if not morality, then at least full-heartedness. There were no real people at work. No real problems. It was just money. Just games. Just the elation and descent of numbers. He wanted to give this money away. Even if he hadn’t needed to give away the money, he’d want to. It was the right thing to do. For them and the community.

  But no, Amelia had said. “Good people look after their own. It’s money that could go to Simon’s food and clothes and education. This is what we know happens to you. Seeing how much you can give away before things get dangerous. But life is different now. It is part of the responsibility of having a child. We’ve discussed this.”

  Aaron had told this psychologist, an eager-to-help, young PhD in jeans and a blazer, about the unprotected sex he’d had in high school. About speaking in front of crowds and even his serve-and-volley game. With this one Aaron had tried to make it about something other than gambling, so when Amelia had asked to meet him it had been perfect. Now “risk counseling group” was where he’d told Amelia he’d been the couple of times over the past year he’d succumbed and lost an evening to a Wall Street card game.

  “We can make more money for Simon,” he said. “Simon is just one person. We can feed so many.”

  “Education is fifty grand a year and Simon might be one person. But he is our child. I want to make sure Simon has what I didn’t.”

  “You had money growing up.”

  “Not money. Fucking normalcy. Love,” Amelia said. She softened, tears gathering in her eyes. “I’m here for you now. Life is stable. Thing
s are okay.”

  She thought his giving to charity was submitting to his urges, so she was being gentle with him. Her gentleness broke his resolve, made him want to tell her that she was right, he would donate nothing. He tried to open his mouth to say it, but his mouth wouldn’t open. He needed to follow his plan. He had set out his course, and he needed to follow it. Give fifty away, save eighty. Bet nothing. He desperately wanted to bet nothing. But still he wanted to tell her she was right. He was confused. Pressure mounted inside his chest and head. If he’d been alone he would have screamed.

  “We’ll get through it either way,” she said. He saw her swallow. “Have you already spent it?” she asked. “Have you lost it already?”

  “I’m not gambling anymore,” he said.

  “Is this part of some play you’re going to make?”

  He refused to acknowledge the accusation again; instead he tried to maintain a sense of high-spirited possibility: “Of course. Of course it’s all still there. That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he had said. “We can give it to whomever we want. We can give it to soup kitchens in the neighborhood if you want. Or schools. It’s actual good! It’s actual money that provides actual food for actual hungry people.”

  Her eyes closed, tried to close further, she was overpowered, and then they opened again. “Fine,” she relented, relieved that at least he might be telling the truth that he was under control. “Give it to soup kitchens in the neighborhood. But watch yourself. I’m worried about you. That all of this is just yielding to your worst instincts. I even worry lately,” she had said, “about the house. That it was just the most exciting place you could think of living. Maybe we should sell. Take a profit and move someplace healthier for you. For us.”

  “Really?” he had said. “I can donate to feed people?” He knew she loved the house too much to sell.