“Okay,” I said, stepping closer to the map. “So . . .”
“How do we get there?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“The green line,” he said, tracing it with his finger.
“To the L train!” I said, seeing where the lines crossed at Union Square.
“Good!” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder and held on. “We transfer there. You’re practically a New Yorker already.”
He let me lead us. I got us to the right platform; I got us on the right train. Saturday night and the car was packed, dressed up men and women, drunk kids, and people on drugs. Someone played an accordion. I felt inches away from drowning. Happiness oozed out of him, and I clung to it, wrapped myself up in it. Let it anchor me.
“Here,” I said, discreetly inserting the bottle under his arm.
“Matt!” he said, laughing. “You’re my new favorite.” He drank from it shamelessly, openly.
“Be careful with that!” I hissed.
“Don’t be a narc, Matt.”
Someone sitting down laughed. We stood together, alone among millions. He handed me back the bottle and I put it to my mouth, lips pressed tightly shut as I tilted it back so I didn’t swallow a drop.
By Bedford Avenue the booze had begun to kick in for him. We had a ways to walk, and I could see Tariq wobbling a little already. I sniffed. Three people had puked on the sidewalk in the past hour, just within a four-block radius of where we stood. Three stories up, in a squalid weed-stinking apartment, I heard two men grappling and punching in a firestorm of hate and anger.
This city would destroy me.
“This place is the best to see shows,” he said. “But they just lost their lease. It’s the last night. Gonna be a great show. All the good spots in the city are gone, seems like.”
“My sister had a crush on you,” I said, more out of desperation than Evil Genius Expert Timing.
Tariq stopped walking. “Your sister is awesome,” he said after weighing his words for a while. “I was so sorry when I heard about what had happened to her.”
We kept walking. The booze was making him less careful, less skilled at hiding his thoughts and feelings. Precisely as I had planned. “What did you hear?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You know. Stuff. I heard she ran away.”
“But you said I heard about what happened to her. That’s not the same thing as running away.”
“People run away for a reason, don’t they?”
I decided not to press the point. I had to be patient. Let him do the work for me.
I felt him start and stop a dozen times, trying to say something. “I wanted to ask how she was doing, but I figured you wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“If it was me, I wouldn’t want to talk about it. But you’re not me. I shouldn’t assume other people think like me.”
“No,” I said, my voice icy. “You shouldn’t.”
“Sorry I brought it up,” he said.
“You didn’t. I did.”
He laughed. “Then I’m sorry you brought it up.”
I stopped walking. I couldn’t risk driving him off, losing all the work I’d put into bonding with him. So I started to laugh.
“I’m messing with you, man,” I said, just like that. Man, like I was one of the guys, like this language came naturally to me.
“Consider me messed.”
That’s how I made it to the club. Faking it. Focusing on my mission. On Tariq. Being what he wanted me to be. Being the smart friend he was so hungry for.
Tariq tried to pay our ten-dollar door fee, but I pulled out my poker winnings and paid for both of us myself. We were whisked down a flight of stairs to a low-ceilinged, basement-smelling, overcrowded room, walls covered in decades of densely layered graffiti, where angry guitars galloped alongside frantic drums, and a wandering bassline struggled to keep up.
“What do you think?” he said, his eyes shining in the dim light, alcohol glee already making him grin like a tiger.
“This is amazing,” I said.
It was amazing. It was also terrifying. It was anarchy; it was liberation. Dancing in a frenzy, all fists and elbows, screaming out songs of rage. Every few minutes a subway rumbled through an underground tunnel beside our basement, and we felt it in our bones.
They are angry at the same world I am angry at, I thought. They accept me. I am one of them. All I have to do is step forward and claim it—
Five or six times I tried to enter the mosh pit. Fear got the better of me, the first two times—made me stop, made me turn back. After that it was simple clumsiness, the inept stumblings of a boy bad at gym class and afraid of all physical activity. Again and again I got pummeled, and barely made it out.
The basement helped; the thick stone walls and the echo of all that music shielded me somewhat from the city. But I still felt raw, naked, open to the suffering of the world. I still felt sick, alone, lost.
And suddenly, hungry. So hungry. What was wrong with me? Right then, I could feel there was something wrong with me. I shut my eyes and tried to focus on something safe, and all I could think about was my mother.
“Mommy,” I whispered without wanting to. It was the helpless cry of a child having nightmares. And somehow, as it had when I was tiny, just saying it made me feel better.
My cell phone said 11:04 p.m. How much longer would this thrashing go on?
“Come on, Matt!” Tariq called, periodically, whenever the surge and ebb of the pit brought him close to me.
“In a minute!” I said.
I really was content to sit back and watch. I was one of them, even from the sidelines. I watched them punch the air, pound the floor, smash into each other in a haze of testosterone. Sweaty limbs wrapped around sweaty torsos.
One of them caught me staring. And stared back. And smiled. A handsome mess of floppy black hair and pale acne’d skin, his smile said, We are the same. His smile started a tingly feeling, so warm and good I knew not to trust it. He took a step in my direction, and I panicked, leaped back into the fray.
Panic made my mind back off, and my body took the reins. I moved with the crowd, a leaf in the wind, effortlessly swinging in a profane, sacred circle. Like a pagan ritual, breathing in and breathing out, feeling life energy course through me, rolling with the crowd of flailing arms and kicking legs.
A hard, ugly truth: Sometimes you have to let the body take the lead.
After the show, walking back toward the subway, I knew that nothing would overwhelm me now. The body was the key: making peace with it, letting it find its way. Letting it separate the avalanche of useless information from what I truly needed.
We passed a huge tenement building. Hundreds of apartments. A couple argued out front—her rage singed my nostrils—two floors down an old woman was pouring hot water over a tea bag she’d already used three times—
And I breathed in. Focused on my breathing. Turned my metaphorical back on all those stimuli. Focused on the one I needed. The one I was here for.
“Hold up a second,” I said.
Tariq stopped.
“Cigarette?” I asked.
He lit one for me. And one for himself.