Bleeding Edge

15

Around 11:30 in the morning, Maxine spots a substantial black vehicle which reminds her of a vintage Packard only longer, parked near her office, disregarding the signs that say no parking for an hour and a half on that side to allow for street sweeping. Usual practice is for everybody to double-park on the other side and wait for the sweeper to come through, then move back in in its wake and park legally again. Maxine notices that nobody is waiting anywhere near the mystery limo and that, even more curiously, parking enforcement, usually found in this neighborhood like cheetahs at the fringes of antelope herds, is mysteriously absent. Here, in fact, even as she watches, comes the sweeper, wheezing noisily around the corner, then, catching sight of the limo, pausing as if to consider its options. Procedure would be for the sweeper to pull up behind the offending vehicle and wait for it to move. Instead, creeping nervously on up the block, it swerves apologetically around the lengthy ride and hastens to the corner.

Maxine notices a Cyrillic bumper sticker, which as she is shortly to learn reads MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH, for this vehicle here turns out, actually, to be a ZiL-41047, brought over piece by piece from Russia, reassembled in Brooklyn, and belonging to Igor Dashkov. Maxine, peering through the tinted glass, is interested to find March Kelleher inside, deep in confabulation with Igor. The window cranks down, and Igor puts his head out, along with a Fairway bag which appears to be stuffed with money.

“Maxi, kagdila. Madoff Securities advice was excellent! Just in time! My associates are so happy! Over moon! They took steps, assets are safe, and this is for you.”

Maxine recoils, only partly out of the classic accountant’s allergy to real folding money. “You fuckin insane?”

“Amount you saved them was considerable.”

“I can’t accept this.”

“Suppose we call it retainer.”

“And who’d be hiring me exactly?”

Shrug, smile, nothing more specific.

“March, what’s with this guy? And what are you doing in there?”

“Hop in.” As she does so, Maxine notices that March is sitting there counting a lapful of greenbacks of her own. “No and I’m not the GF either.”

“Let’s see, that leaves what… dope dealer?”

“Shh-shh!” grabbing her arm. For as it turns out, March’s ex-husband Sid has in fact been running substances in and out of the little marina up at Tubby Hook, at the river end of Dyckman Street, and Igor here it seems is one of his clients. “I emphasize ‘running,’ March explains. “Sid, whatever the package might be, he’s just the deliveryperson, never likes to look inside.”

“Because inside this package he doesn’t look in…?”

Well, for Igor it’s methcathinone, also known as bathtub speed, “The bathtub in this case being, my guess is it’s over in Jersey.”

“Sid always has good product,” Igor nods, “not this cheap kitchen-stove Latvian shnyaga which is pink from permanganate they don’t get rid of, before long you are deeply fucked up, like you don’t walk right, you shake? Latvian dzhef, do me a favor, Maxine! don’t go near it, it ain’t dzhef! it’s govno!”

“I’ll try and remember.”

“You had breakfast? We got ice cream here, what kind you like?”

Maxine notices a sizable freezer under the bar. “Thanks, little early in the day.”

“No, no, it’s real ice cream,” Igor explains. “Russian ice cream. Not this Euromarket food-police shit.”

“High butterfat content,” March translates. “Soviet-era nostalgia, basically.”

“Fucking Nestlé,” Igor rooting through the freezer. “Fucking unsaturated vegetable oils. Hippie shit. Corrupting entire generation. I have arrangements, fly this in once a month on refrigerator plane to Kennedy. OK, so we got Ice-Fili here, Ramzai, also Inmarko, from Novosibirsk, very awesome morozhenoye, Metelitsa, Talosto… today, for you, on special, hazelnut, chocolate chips, vishnya, which is sour cherry…”

“Can I maybe just take some for later?”

She ends up with a number of half-kilo Family Packs in an assortment of flavors.

“Thanks, Igor, this all seems to be here,” March stashing the currency in her purse. She’s planning to go uptown tonight to meet Sid and pick up his delivery for Igor. “You ought to come along, Maxi. Just a simple pickup, come on, it’ll be fun.”

“My grasp of the drug laws is a little shaky, March, but last time I checked, this is Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance.”

“Yes, but it’s also Sid. A complex situation.”

“A B felony. You and your ex—I gather you’re still… close?”

“Don’t leer, Maxi, it causes wrinkles,” climbing out of the ZiL, waiting for Maxine. “Remember to count what’s in your Fairway bag, there.”

“Why, when I don’t even know how much it’s supposed to be to begin with, see what I’m saying.”

There’s a cart with coffee and bagels on the corner. It’s warm today, they find a stoop to sit on and take a coffee break.

“Igor says you saved them a shitload of money.”

“You think that ‘them’ includes Igor himself?”

“He’d be too embarrassed to tell anybody. What was going on?”

“Some kind of pyramid racket.”

“Oh. Something a little different.”

“You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—”

“No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”

“Too heavy-duty for me, even the scale Igor’s on makes me nervous. I’m more comfortable with people who hang around at ATMs, that level.”

“So later for the gritty street drama, come on uptown for some high fantasy, these Dominican guys, you know?”

“Hmmm. I could manage some old-school merengue maybe.”

MARCH IS MEETING SID at Chuy’s Hideaway, a dance club near Vermilyea. The minute they step off the subway, which up here runs elevated high over the neighborhood, they can hear music. They go sashaying more than schlepping downstairs to the street, where salsa pulses deeply from the stereo systems of double-parked Caprices and Escalades, from bars, from shoulder-mounted boom boxes. Teenagers knock each other around good-naturedly. Sidewalks are busy, fruit stands open, arrays of mangoes and star fruit, ice-cream carts on the corners doing late business.

At Chuy’s Hideaway behind a modest storefront, they find a deep lounge, bright, loud, violent, that seems to run all the way through to the next block. Girls in very high spike heels and shorts shorter than a doper’s memory are gliding around with low-buttoned young men in gold chains and narrowbrim hats. Weedsmoke inflects the air. Folks are drinking rum and Cokes, Presidente beer, Brugal Papa Dobles. Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin/bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat.

March is in a loose red dress and eyelashes longer than Maxine recalls, a sort of Irish Celia Cruz, with her hair all the way down. They know her at the door. Maxine inhales deeply, relaxes into sidekick mode.

The floor is crowded, and March without hesitating disappears onto it. Some possibly underaged cupcake who says his name is Pingo appears from nowhere, grabs Maxine in a courtly way, and dances off with her. At first she tries to fake it with what she can remember from the old Paradise Garage, but soon enough moves begin to drift back as she is taken into the beat…

Partners come and go in amiable rotation. Every now and then in the ladies’ room, Maxine will find March regarding herself in the mirror with less than dismay. “Who sez Anglo chicks can’t shake it?”

“Trick question, right?”

Sid shows up late, holding a Presidente longneck, avuncular, one of those bristling military haircuts, far from Maxine’s admittedly warped image of a drug runner.

“Don’t keep me waiting or anything,” March beaming vexedly.

“Thought you’d need the extra time to score, angel.”

“I don’t notice Sequin anyplace. At the library or something, working on a book report?”

The group on the stand is playing “Cuando Volverás.” Sid pulls Maxine to her feet and starts in with a bachata modified for reduced floor space, quietly singing the hook. “And when I lift your outside hand, it means we’re gonna twirl, just remember go all the way around so you end up facing me.”

“On this floor? twirls, you’ll need a permit. Oh, Sid,” she inquires politely a couple-three bars later, “are you by any chance hitting on me?”

“Who wouldn’t?” Sid gallantly, “though you shouldn’t rule out trying to piss off the ex.”

Sid is a veteran of Studio 54, worked as a toilet attendant, got out on the floor during breaks, at shift’s end gathered up $100 bills forgotten by patrons who’d been rolling them up all night to snort cocaine through, as many as he could get to before the rest of the staff, though he himself preferred to use the recessed filter on a Parliament cigarette as a sort of disposable spoon.

They don’t quite close the joint up, but it’s pretty late by the time they get out on Dyckman and down to the little Tubby Hook marina. Sid leads March and Maxine out to a low, 28-foot runabout with a triple cockpit, Art Deco sleek and all wood in different shades. “Maybe it’s sexist,” sez Maxine, “but I really have to wolf-whistle here.”

Sid introduces them. “It’s a 1937 Gar Wood, 200 horses, shakedown cruises on Lake George, honorable history of outrunning pursuit at every level…”

March hands over Igor’s money, Sid produces an authentically distressed teenage backpack from the bilges.

“Can I drop you ladies anyplace?”

“Seventy-ninth Street marina,” sez March, “and step on it.”

They cast off silently. Thirty feet from shore, Sid angles an ear upriver. “Shit.”

“Not again, Sid.”

“Twin V-8s, Cats most likely. This time of night, it has to be the goldurn DEA. Jeez, what am I, Pappy Mason here?” He starts the engine, and off they go barrelassing into the night, roostertailing down the Hudson through a moderate chop, slapping against the water in a good solid rhythm. Maxine watches the 79th Street boat basin pass swiftly by on the port side. “Hey, that was my stop. Where we going now?”

“With this joker,” March mutters, “it’s probably out to sea.”

The thought did enter Sid’s mind, as he admits later, but that would have brought the Coast Guard into this too, so instead, gambling on DEA caution and hardware limitations, with the World Trade Center leaning, looming brilliantly curtained in light gigantically off their port quarter, and someplace farther out in the darkness a vast unforgiving ocean, Sid keeps hugging the right side of the channel, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past the Bayonne Marine Terminal, till he sees the Robbins Reef Light ahead, makes like he’s going to pass it too, then at the last minute hooks a steep right, nimbly and not always according to the rules of the road proceeding then to dodge anchored vessels towering in out of nowhere and oil tankers under way in the dark, sliding into Constable Hook Reach and on down the Kill Van Kull. Passing Port Richmond, “Hey, Denino’s somewhere off the port beam here, anybody feel like grabbing a pizza?” Rhetorical, it seems.

Under the high-arching openwork of the Bayonne Bridge. Oil-storage tanks, tanker traffic forever unsleeping. Addiction to oil gradually converging with the other national bad habit, inability to deal with refuse. Maxine has been smelling garbage for a while, and now it intensifies as they approach a lofty mountain range of waste. Neglected little creeks, strangely luminous canyon walls of garbage, smells of methane, death and decay, chemicals unpronounceable as the names of God, the heaps of landfill bigger than Maxine imagines they’d be, reaching close to 200 feet overhead according to Sid, higher than a typical residential building on the Yupper West Side.

Sid kills the running lights and the motor, and they settle in behind Island of Meadows, at the intersection of Fresh and Arthur Kills, toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal, everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be itself, and here unexpectedly at the heart of it is this 100 acres of untouched marshland, directly underneath the North Atlantic flyway, sequestered by law from development and dumping, marsh birds sleeping in safety. Which, given the real-estate imperatives running this town, is really, if you want to know, fucking depressing, because how long can it last? How long can any of these innocent critters depend on finding safety around here? It’s exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer’s heart sing—typically, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land.”

Every Fairway bag full of potato peels, coffee grounds, uneaten Chinese food, used tissues and tampons and paper napkins and disposable diapers, fruit gone bad, yogurt past its sell-by date that Maxine has ever thrown away is up in there someplace, multiplied by everybody in the city she knows, multiplied by everybody she doesn’t know, since 1948, before she was even born, and what she thought was lost and out of her life has only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything—suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero.

This little island reminds her of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.

A long, eerie wait to see if they’ve shaken the feds or whoever they are. Invisibly up yonder, moving around somewhere close, heavy machinery, much too deep into these early-morning hours. “I thought this wasn’t an active dump anymore,” Maxine sez.

“Officially the last barge came and went back around the end of the first quarter,” Sid recalls. “But they’re still busy. Grading it, capping it, sealing and covering it all up and turning it into a park, another family-friendly yup resource, Giuliani the tree hugger.”

Presently March and Sid are into one of those low-volume elliptical discussions parents have about their children, in this case Tallis mostly. Who may, like her brothers, be a grown adult but somehow demands inflexible disbursements of time and worry, as if she were still a troubled teenager snorting Sharpie pen solvents back at the Convent of the Holy Ghost.

“Strange,” Sid reflective, “to see the way Ice the kid morphed into what he is today. In college he was just this amiable geek. She brought him home, we figured, OK, horny kid, way too much screen time, socially ept as they ever get, but March thought she saw good-provider potential there.”

“Sid having his little joke—hey, live forever, sexist pig. The idea was always for Tallis to know how to take care of herself.”

“Pretty soon we were seeing them less and less, they had all this money, enough for a nice li’l crib down in SoHo.”

“They were renting?”

“Bought it,” March a little abrupt. “Paid cash.”

“By then Ice had profiles in Wired, in Red Herring, then hashslingrz made the Silicon Alley Reporter’s ‘12 to Watch’ list…”

“You were following his career.”

“I know,” Sid shaking his head, “it’s pathetic ain’t it, but what were we supposed to do? They cut us out. It was like they actively went seeking it, this life they have now, this faraway, virtual life, leaving the rest of us stuck back here in meatspace, blinking at images on a screen.”

“Best-case scenario,” March sez, “Ice was an innocent geek corrupted by the dotcom boom. Dream on. The kid was bent from the jump, under obligation to forces which do not advertise publicly. What did they see in him? Easy. Stupidity. A stupidity of great promise.”

“And these forces—maybe alienating you guys was really part of their program, not Tallis’s idea?”

Both of them shrug. March maybe a little more bitterly. “Nice thought, Maxi. But Tallis collaborated. Whatever it was, she bought in. She didn’t have to.”

The industrial racket from back in the marshland behind the giant cliffs of ruin has grown continuous. Now and then workers, in long-standing Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming exchanges. “Strange shift to be working,” it seems to Maxine.

“Yeah. Nice overtime for somebody. Almost like they’re up to something they don’t want anybody to know about.”

“When did anybody ever want to know?” March lapsing for a moment into the bag-lady character in her commencement speech at Kugelblitz, the one person dedicated to salvaging everything the city wants to deny. “Either they’re playing catch-up or they’re getting it ready to open for dump business again.”

A presidential visit? Somebody’s making a movie? Who knows.

Early seagulls show up from somewhere, begin inspecting the menu. The sky takes on a brushed-aluminum underglow. A night heron with breakfast in its beak ascends from its long watch at the edge of the Island of Meadows.

Sid starts up the motor finally, heads back up Arthur Kill and into Newark Bay, at Kearny Point bears right into the forsaken and abused Passaic River. “Let you two off when I can, then I’m gonna return to my secret undisclosed base.”

Around Point No Point, under the black arching trusswork of the Pulaski Skyway. The light, inexorable as iron, growing in the sky… Tall brick stacks, railyards… Dawn over Nutley. Well, technically dawn over Secaucus. Sid pulls up to a boat dock belonging to the Nutley High rowing team, removes an imaginary yachting cap, and gestures his passengers ashore. “Welcome to Deep Jersey.”

“Captain Stubing here,” March yawns.

“Oh and you won’t forget Igor’s backpack, will you my Tomato Surprise.”

Maxine’s hair is a mess, she’s been out all night for the first time since the 1980s, her ex and their children are somewhere out in the U.S. sure to be having a nice time without her, and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free—at least at the edge of possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and unmourned acts of waste.

From Nutley there’s a New Jersey Transit bus to the Port of Authority by way of Newark. They grab a couple minutes of sleep. Maxine has one of those transit dreams. Women in shawls, a sinister light. Everybody speaking Spanish. A somehow desperate flight by antiquated bus through jungles to escape a threat, a volcano possibly. At the same time, this is also a tour bus full of Upper West Side Anglos, and the tour director is Windust, lecturing in that wise-ass radio voice, something about the nature of volcanoes. The volcano behind them, which hasn’t gone away, grows more ominous. Maxine wakes up out of this someplace on the Lincoln Tunnel approach. In the terminal, March suggests, “Let’s go out the other way, avoid Disney Hell and go find some breakfast.”

They find a Latino breakfast joint on Ninth and dig in.

“Something on your mind, Maxine.”

“Been meaning to ask you this for a while, what was going on in Guatemala back in 1982?”

“Same as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ronald Reagan and his people, Schachtmanite goons like Elliott Abrams, turning Central America into a slaughterhouse all to play out their little anti-Communist fantasies. Guatemala by then had fallen under the control of a mass murderer and particular buddy of Reagan named Ríos Montt, who as usual wiped off his bloody hands on the baby Jesus like so many of these charmers do. Government death squads funded by the U.S., army sweeps through the western highlands, officially targeting the EGP or Guerrilla Army of the Poor but in practice exterminating any native populations they came across. There was at least one death camp, on the Pacific coast, where the emphasis may’ve been political, but up in the hills it was on-site genocide, not even mass burial, just bodies left for the jungle to take care of, which certainly must have saved the government a lot on cleanup costs.”

Maxine is somehow not as hungry as she thought. “And any Americans who were there…”

“Either humanitarian kids, naïve and borderline idiotic, or ‘advisers’ sharing their extensive expertise at butchering nonwhites. Though by then, most of that was being outsourced to U.S. client states with the necessary technical chops. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

“Yeah. When you’re ready, tell me. I’m really Dr. Ruth Westheimer, nothing shocks me.”