On the night of July twenty-second, Charles Goodnight Loving—brother of the famous victim, survivor of the ruined town, failing writer—was a slender body leaning into a fast walk under the anemic Brooklyn streetlights.
At the corner of Seventeenth Street, Charlie steeled his nerve to take a quick glance over his shoulder, perceiving some illusory threat behind him. Charlie was that July an excitable kid, his own archetype of the young man come to New York from the provinces to pursue his visions, but after more than a year in Brooklyn, he was haunted by chronic worry that liked to manifest in mirages of doom. A month before, he had felt the nodule of an ingrown hair in his groin and convinced himself it was cancer until, probing the thing, he’d popped it. When Charlie turned now, he saw no one there behind him on Fourth Avenue, but that did not put an end to his catastrophizing. At each intersection, he searched the shadows for the potato shape of a man named Jimmy Giordano.
And as Charlie looked for the bright cherry of one of Jimmy’s cigarettes in the darkness beneath the sycamores, he was patting the cell phone in his pocket, another kind of tumor, the many unplayed voice mails his mother had left that day spreading their deadly metastases into his blood. Why wouldn’t she stop calling? Charlie clutched his fists and made swift progress along the dim, gum-spangled sidewalk. Down in the subway station, a train roared to a stop, made its electronic bing. Charlie sealed his eyes, offered a kind of faithless prayer to himself, and stepped aboard.
*
A couple of weeks before, when Jimmy Giordano—Charlie’s gregarious, outer-borough-accented landlord—had knocked on Charlie’s door to remind him that he was already three months behind on rent, Charlie had begged Jimmy for a little more flexibility. Jimmy, the sort of guy who usually filled every silence with low laughter, had not laughed. “At four months,” he had said, “we can begin the eviction proceedings.”
“Eviction?”
“But that’s the least of your worries.”
“The least?”
“Even if we kick you out, there’s still the matter of all that back rent. We’re talking about, what, five thousand now. Five thousand, it ain’t chump change.”
Charlie had been the one to laugh then, the way these words, thickened with Jimmy’s Brooklyn brogue, sounded sampled from some gangster movie. Such an insinuating threat seemed like a joke in Charlie’s neighborhood, a place where Jimmy’s beige, vinyl-sided, four-floor tenement was a little blight on the street of terraced gardens and brownstones, where the young professionals ate at locavore cafés and spoke with round-eyed optimism of their careers in media and NGOs. Jimmy Giordano, however, now looked quite humorless.
“I’m sure I can come up with something,” Charlie said, and his landlord told him that he had until the first.
“Five thousand you will give me,” Jimmy said, in that oddly Yoda-like construction. “On the first of the month.”
“Right,” Charlie said. And when Jimmy had then mused in his jocularly menacing way about “any further delays or difficulties,” he mentioned his “collections guy, who helps me out with tough cases like yours.”
Five thousand: that appalling figure, with its three zeroes, rolled like dropped coins through Charlie’s mind as Jimmy waddled away. Several months before, Charlie had run out of the money he’d saved working as a bar back during his college years, and he had also spent the decent amount his granny Nunu had set aside for him in her will. But Charlie was still a little too delighted by his life in New York not to find some charm in the scene. Things had gotten so desperate, he really did write in his Moleskine that afternoon, that at the start of my second summer in New York my landlord threatened my life.
And yet, the next morning, when Charlie had transcribed this sentence into his computer, it did not engender the magic it had seemed to promise. Charlie had not worked a real job since his arrival in New York. Miraculously, he had gotten a little contract with an actual, if very modest, book publisher called Icarus. He received half the meager advance on signing, the other half to be deposited in his account when he delivered a manuscript. How his mother had replied when he had called her, months ago, with the news of his book deal: “Oh, Charlie, what have you done now?”
No fallbacks! Charlie had written, like a rebuttal to Ma, on a Post-it that he fixed just above the kitchen table where he supposedly worked. Your JOB is to WRITE! And yet, once more, Charlie was decidedly not writing; no following sentence came the next morning or the next. Charlie employed his father’s old strategy for dealing with difficulties; paralyzed by dread, he tried to forget his troubles in a self-prescribed course of chemical amnesia. Charlie spent much of the following weeks in a pot-perfumed torpor with a so-called digital artist named Terrance, with whom he lit soggy joints and burned through lazy days on the batik quilt in the guy’s East Village bedroom, Charlie’s pug Edwina producing watery snores between them.