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FEAST

by Joseph O'Leary

This story starts with me drunk and poor, because that’s how it was then. I was still technically living with Lou but Lou had been at his girlfriend’s for the better part of a week and probably wouldn’t be back. He’d called me and assured me everything was cool, but I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t attached, like he was, to it all. For me, my million years and issues were like a comet’s tail burning off; in time, and piece by piece, yet still trailing and part of me.

This was pretty close to the end.

This story starts around four-thirty in the afternoon towards the end of a long summer. I’ll tell you about the mess I came home to in a minute. But this was just about a half hour later. I was on the roof, slowly wrenching the meaty second third from a 40 of malt liquor that I’d bought instead of cigarettes. In my pocket, sore, chewed fingertips at the edge of clammy hands ran along the change: seventy-five cents, three quarters, my last. We were begging for a cigarette. I obliged, choosing the fattest of the three I’d just rolled. I saw the clouds puffing up over the island like thick arms appearing over a cliff and knew it was almost on.

Rumor around was that it was a going to be big bright orange sticker on the door, like the ones they put on cars left on the wrong side of the street. Then you had thirty days to work something out in the courts or you were out. In other words, I’d been operating under the assumption that I had time. When I got back and found the door open, the lock broken, the kitchen torn apart and water everywhere it came down real hard that they’d either said fuck you, or thought we were already gone. We’d been putting shit in the hallway over the course of the last month or so, slowly. First it was just the stuff we knew we wouldn’t want, then we said fuck it and just started putting everything out there. Broken computer monitors, broken vacuums, broken this, and broken that. We felt bad and put signs saying BROKEN on everything and people would take it anyway. What it must have looked like.

Everything was in motion. I could no longer wait for the fifty dollar check Mom said was coming. The apartment, already two-thirds empty, was now gone. I quickly surveyed the scene for what I did have.

I had front door keys. And mailbox keys, for probably another week or so. I had three dollars. I had a Metrocard for another two days. I filled two duffel bags with clothes and papers and books and decided to leave them on the roof. Thankfully the door at the top of the escape stairs had been left a slice open. It was pretty reliable in this way.

When I came back down I stepped around puddles and looked in cushions one last time for change, and left the building. As I stepped outside the wind hit me from the west and stank of the storm behind it. I was shaking and nervous and thinking in several different directions at once, but walked coolly in the direction of the bodega, where I now knew I would get a forty and not a pack of cigarettes with my last three because cigarettes could be bummed easier than beer, and I had a thing I did when it got this bad and I did it now, stealthily picking up every cigarette butt showing more than a quarter inch of paper. These digs were full of greed and humiliation and the excitement of a hunt, and since I’d only done it before storms I associated this hunger with their smell. I did it because I needed to and because I wouldn’t have been able to do it once it rained. Nothing makes you do a thing like knowing for sure you can’t do it later. This particular day I got a few pretty choice ones. It was the best catch in the last half dozen digs. Ten all together, and two were an inch or longer, almost good enough to smoke by themselves. You could get a decent amount of tobacco breaking them up. Tasted like shit, especially without a filter but it meant more nicotine, more black smoke, coating. For when you think you deserve to feel dirty and sick.

Then you roll them, grab your forty and hit the roof. Which is where I was.

One of the cool things about the roof was that if you went up there in early evening, and it was clear, you could see planes lined up in the sky to the south for what seemed like miles. On the approach to LaGuardia, I mean. You’d see a plane coming in, and then behind it in the sky, back and up, another plane descending. Then the lights of another plane even farther back, and up. Some crazy curve that went up and up into the sky. The most I ever saw at once was four, but it felt like they went on forever. I was watching that night, but dispassionately. I remember seeing one fly past every now and again, dragging behind it a slow, sharp howl. I remember thinking I should remember it but then there seemed to be too much too remember. In the airshaft, it was quiet and all the sound traveled up. An alarm had been going off for ten minutes, then ended suddenly. Now it was going to rain.

One morning a few weeks before this, I woke up, and there was nothing. I lay catatonic with hunger on the couch for a good hour before I did this, don’t tell anyone: I stole an egg from the supermarket, fried it dry, and ate it on a moldy piece of bread end that was on the top of the trash. It was awesome, and absolute. The rest of the day I watched soap operas and scraped Lou’s pipe, smoked and jerked off and was filled. At dusk I went to the roof and met two kids up there who were in town from Utah, visiting their sister, who lived in the building. I didn’t know who they were talking about, but they smoked me out, made me laugh, and we got to talking. I told them about the airplanes and we watched them for a good two three hours in remarkably heavy traffic. When they had to leave they gave me a pack of cigarettes and ten bucks, and I barely gave them any reason to. I fell asleep on the roof and woke, much later, to Lou and his girlfriend having their animal sex in the bedroom below me. It was loud. Everyone must have known. I listened, flat on my back, looking at the sky.

When Brazil lost to France in the World Cup that year, I heard people sobbing on the second floor. Oh, what those two must have sounded like in the dead Astoria night.

Things were pretty quiet, around. I could hear a bike wheel squeak from the street, and every now and then, a kid shout something unintelligible. I was hungry. The storms generally came in from the west and filled the sky with charcoal before you knew it, and this one had a particularly quick and violent look about it. As I smoked the fat handrolled, I considered just staying there, letting everything just rain and rain, and wait it all out. The shock hadn’t worn off, and my mind was racing. I stared out, and thought of everything. And savored the moment, so it would end.

Don’t tell anyone this, either: A few weeks before we moved, Lou bought a baby iguana at a pet store in Albany that I knew had a reputation for selling shitty animals. The iguana, young and sick and neglected, died was left dead in his room for four days. He told me he threw it in the river but then said much later that he didn’t want to get busted for littering in the river so instead he threw the body, wrapped in a linen facecloth, in the trash bins in the alley. Really, the whole inhospitable, retarded universe is to blame, but I was pissed at him for a long time about it. In the end though, nobody is immune, and I really believed I would have to understand that if I was going to forgive what I saw as my own failings.

See, I didn’t really have nothing. I had a bus ticket that Anna had sent me three weeks ago. That was in the blue duffel bag. Lou and John had already made arrangements for me to stay at the Brooklyn pad, where John was living with Shannon and Lou’s girlfriend. Where Lou’d been. I told Lou, when I talked to him, that if I came I would be there by the end of the week, which was still a few days away. They said I could stay as long as I needed, and figure things out, so I had options. I could cash in the bus ticket and stay with them for a bit. Worse came to worse, I could go back home and stay with Mom and drink. I might’ve even been able to go to you for as long as you could stand.

Where we lived in Astoria was one building in a row of connected five story buildings, nineteen blocks from the river, surrounded with rows of three story buildings. It was a long roof and you could see everything, the World Trade Center, seven bridges, downtown Brooklyn, trees from Central Park, the glow from Yankee Stadium. I walked over to the edge of the building looking for one last striking visual to take with me. The lights on the Empire State Building were plain old boring white, but I remember it. Once I saw lightning hit it. Honest.

I threw the last of the cigarette over the side and turned to grab my bags. I wanted to stay and see the storm. I was being sentimental, because nobody ever appreciates anything while it’s there. But I had to go. I dropped my bags one at a time over the side to the fire escape landing and stepped gingerly onto the ladder.

As I lowered myself I could hear the water fizzing out of the pipe, slamming into the metal cabinet door beneath the sink. What a riot!

Inside, everything smelled. The front door sat ajar. I went into the kitchen for one last time to see if there was anything I missed. There was about a half inch of water covering the kitchen floor by this point. I got a plastic bodega bag and just started throwing shit in it. Old mail, scraps of paper with phone numbers on them, playing cards. Anything I thought would help. The fridge was empty and unplugged. There was a half a jar of peanut butter and some bread in the cabinet, but there were also some dead roaches in the corners. I let them be.

Before I tell you what I did next, I should tell you about the roaches.

It starts when you find one in the tub. One of those big ones with the twitchy heads. You figure it came through the drain and kill it. Then you come home after spending the night at a girl’s place and fine one by the toaster. So… one roach is a fluke, nothing. Two roaches is a pattern, a problem. In Astoria the roaches were there at the beginning. When Lou and I looked at the apartment, he was checking out the walls and the windows. I was looking in the corners and under shit to check for exactly this kind of thing. I saw two dead ones, but we didn’t have time or selection enough to be too picky. After we moved in it was quiet for awhile, and then the sightings started.

Roach spray is a scam; it does nothing in the big picture. It’s like trying to bald a field one blade of grass at a time. We killed the ones we saw, even made sport of it, but behind the walls their numbers were growing. Over the weeks they became defiant. They came out from under the cabinets and boldly walked across the walls, with all of the lights on, the radio and TV on, and both of us sitting right there. When you kill seven roaches in one trip into the bathroom, you don’t feel like you’re winning. You feel a prehistoric awe, and real horror, in the face of whatever force it is behind the walls.

We kept killing, but after a while it seemed as if it were only reinforcing their survival instincts. The roach baits seemed logical and worked for a bit, largely blunting their ostentation, but it was just too late. There were simply too many of them. We always seemed to miss the exterminator when he did his rounds. We rarely had a zero balance on the rent and were always getting noise complaints so the landlord never gave a shit when we finally said something.

When we gave up they backed off. You do get tired of killing them, believe it or not. You might even get used to living with them. Imagine that.

I turned to leave and saw someone standing in the open doorway out of the corner of my eye. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place him. He was just kind of standing there agape, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts and Birkenstocks. He looked nervous. I walked around the living room, pretending to get shit together, leaving wet footprints all over the floor. I waited.

He finally spoke up: “What the hell is going on in here?” I saw him peeking in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

He put his hand on his chest. “Sorry,” he said. “My name is Derrick, we live downstairs.”

Right. This way the guy whose woman’s periodic bitching about noise drove us up the wall. Me anyway. This is another thing about Lou that I shook off. He left most of the apartment maintenance to me, since he wasn’t around most of the time. It was by default that the landlord got to know me as the guy, because I was the one who always picked up the phone. I was home a lot that summer. I got all the visits from the downstairs neighbors. Lou worked late and I was always up, so when Lou got home we would watch TV and laugh and get drunk and smoke pot till the wee hours. Then Lou would go to work in the morning and be out most of the day. We never thought we were that loud but I guess the walls (and floors) were thin. What was it that this guy’s girlfriend had said to me once? We hear your conversations.

“What do you want?” This wasn’t fair to him. Poor guy. I saw him still looking in the kitchen. “We don’t live here anymore, apparently. They decided to do some remodeling this morning. Guess like they forgot to shut the water off.”

He hadn’t known about it. You could tell. He’d had something quick prepared and got distracted. I couldn’t think what it was, since Lou had been gone for a week or so and I mostly sat in the dark and smoked pot and played tapes as the power had been off for three days. By the path his eyes took over my shoulder I could tell he was checking out all the candles. I’d been planning on leaving them so the person that had to throw them out could know. I didn’t know what to make of Derrick. I didn’t see glee, just wonder.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

We kind of looked at each other for a moment. He asked if I needed anything, and I said no. I was watching a roach out of the corner of my eye crawl along the wall, which seemed natural. The end was even closer now. I kind of turned my back and started to make like I was looking for my shoes. I could still feel his eyes. I couldn’t imagine the thing it was that he was looking at, what was going through his head. I was working on something, but it didn’t hit me until after I saw the roach for a little bit. And all the other ones, coming out smiling. By then he was long gone.

This really happened: five thousand roaches swarmed at my back as my feet clapped down the stairs. I rang Derrick’s doorbell and the bitch answered, and immediately launched into some shit about, What the fuck is going on? Now I hear my kitchen’s going to flood what kind of fuckup what do you want anyway. Fucking screaming, and my head hurt, and doors opened in the hallway. She didn’t see the roaches stretch out for years behind me, crawling out from under my clothes, spilling up the stairs, and scuttle excitedly over the walls. Their manic hissing swelled until I realized it was the same sound as the water shooting out of the pipe.

“I need to borrow Derrick for a few minutes,” I said over the din, a little too loudly perhaps, or just matching her. I stretched my arms above my head and roaches jumped off of them on to her. She was screaming something about You can’t be gone quick enough, I can’t believe this shit every time – not at me or anybody, not even as my roaches crawled in her hair, over her tweed welcome mat, over her doorframe. The bitch flailed around and left my sight, revealing an apartment that was manicured and serene. Derrick emerged inside of it.

He walked up to the door, whispered something to her behind it, and walked past me out into the hallway. He closed the door gently behind him. I winced a little when I heard the crack and popping of the roaches caught in the frame. He turned and walked up the stairs without really looking at me and I followed him. Roaches crunched and screeched and mourned underneath his feet. Under my feet too I suppose. Most had stayed on the stairway but the ones who followed me down and survived the door were now doubling back after me.

At my door he turned around and waited for me to say something. I pointed inside and said, “I want you to help me bring that armchair up to the roof. Up the stairs, right there.” I thumbed behind me with my other hand to the two short flights that led to the roof. The roaches were avoiding it. They had mostly stayed on the stairs between my floor and his. But they were thinning. He asked if the alarm would go off. “No,” I said, “Most days it’s open. It is today too.” He wasn’t asking what I expected him to ask. Maybe everything wasn’t dead. Maybe I was wrong.

So we did it. It seemed like nothing. When we got it up there it smelled like the ocean. “So someone can sit in it,” he said. “I get it.” He looked at the sky too. “This isn’t going to hold. After a few rains, it’ll be nasty.”

I nodded. He went inside and down the stairs and I never saw him again. I gave it a minute. Then everything happened at once.

On the roof, the sky was copper and about to blow. I jogged against the wind and grabbed my bags and ducked around the door. I got out another handrolled and smoked, and smoked, until it was over. I threw myself into the stairwell. I can still now, on the way down, see my hand weeks before this grab the rosary that was tacked to the dead woman’s door. I can see biting that same hand in horror and agony and love. Years later. I can see, if I try hard enough, the night I tried to walk home from the train station with my eyes closed. I can feel matchbooks as they scrape beneath my feet. I can see all the cops as they haul me against the wall for not leaving the train after accusing me of drinking a beer. I can see Lou and my girlfriend not knowing what to do. I can smell their faces, see their freshly shaved hairs trying to poke out of their cheeks. I smell their moustaches and it smells like my father, but I never had a father.

It rained. I walked to the park. I walked for hours and days. I got on the train and fell asleep. When I woke up I was on the L heading in from Canarsie, pulling in at Livonia Avenue. There were some hoodlums on the train, and they asked me for five dollars. I told them everything I have is in these two bags, they turned up smiling, and as the doors opened one of them punched me in the face so hard I could see blood. I heard shouting from within. I raced. The doors closed. It was still raining.

This story ends with me drunk with the white hot love of the world. I left the train at Union Square and I walked a hundred miles up the river to Kingston and used wet quarters to call Anna and let her rescue me. I stayed in bed for weeks and even at the end of it wasn’t close to well. But things kept happening, people kept doing the things they did around me, and after enough time I did too. But the things I ended up doing around you were enormous and they all came out of nowhere. I had nothing and then everybody had everything.