Blowout

Lower East Side Boyfriend

35 Lower east side Boyfriend When I came home from work, I saw a package for him, so I took it up to the sixth floor where he lived. I was panting a bit since I wasn’t used to the climb. I lived on the second floor of the same building with busted mailboxes and marble steps, worn thin toward the side nearer the banister from all those years of people ascending and descending—the immigrants first, then the working poor, and now drug addicts and artists. There was no doorman, and in place of our buzzer, just a few dangling red wires. The mailman dumped packages and magazines onto the floor of our phone booth–sized foyer. The second metal door had a square of mesh over the glass window because someone had smashed it in. Everything was painted a spooky gray, and the halls smelled like must and mold. Most of the blue and cream tiles that I imagined were once beautiful were broken or missing. The maintenance man my roommate called “a junkie with a hammer” had put some pink putty that looked like old bubblegum in places where the tile was completely gone. I was curious about the man who subscribed to Art Forum and Spy and Time, all of which I had been stepping over in the foyer. His FedEx box was heavy in my arms as I climbed those eroded warped stairs, which were hard to negotiate, like walking on a beach, one foot in the water, the other on an incline in wet sand. There was an occasional crack vial on a landing 36 that I’d kick into a corner. When he opened the door he was just like the neighborhood, tragic and ravished and exquisite. He was holding his arm in a bunch of bloody paper towels. He’d just put his fist through a glass coffee table at his girlfriend’s place—she lived a few blocks north and west. They’d had a fight, and he was picking out translucent slivers from his arm. I wondered if he’d also smashed the glass on the metal security door. When I knocked, he probably thought I was the girlfriend, begging to take him back. I looked over his shoulder at the mattress on the floor, the tiny refrigerator like college kids have in dorms. As he told me his troubles, they seemed to drift into the past, and I knew that I’d be his next girlfriend. He was forty and I was twenty-eight, a little out of breath from the stairs, a little beyond grad school, but not much. A poet, I said. A painter, he said. I’ve lived here two years, I said. Eighteen years for me. He had the old kind of apartment that was not yet renovated, a toilet in the hall that he shared with two other bachelors on his floor. A filthy bowl that no one bothered to clean, a dusty lightbulb with a chain, a defunct lock that looked as though, at one point, it might have been accessed by a skeleton key. I went into his apartment and sat on his mattress, as there were no chairs or couch. He said, You want a drink? His walls were blank. I contemplated asking where all his paintings were, but instead I took the tweezers from his shaking hand and began to pull out the shards from his palm. ...