The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory. Stacy Wakefield
idea is being clean so you can, like, think straight. I just thought when you were down on relationships, maybe . . .”
“Are you straight edge?” Skip looked at me as he unlocked the front door.
“No, I don’t call myself that. I don’t eat meat, but . . . I’m not into Krishna or anything.” I shrugged. I had been celibate all summer, but it wasn’t by choice. I pulled more bags out of the first floor and gave the lighter one to Skip. It was so cool he was helping with this gross sweaty work.
I started to thank him as we headed across South 1st but he interrupted, “Hare Krishna? Like the orange robe guys?”
“That scene is totally weird,” I said. I dropped my bag in front of the house directly across the street. We were getting tired, and their pile wasn’t too big. “I don’t get why punk kids would get into Krishna. I think all organized religion is messed up, you know?”
“Exactly! That’s just what I think!” Skip put his bag next to mine and smiled up at the house behind it with his open, defenseless face. “Wow, Sid, it’s really great to have an intellectual around.”
* * *
I decided the second floor needed a mural. The east wall was an expanse of white plaster, empty and inviting. A mural would make the house feel more like a squat. I sat on my sleeping bag and doodled ideas in my sketchbook. If downstairs was where the bakery ovens had once been, this floor must have been used for packaging, with the walls of windows for natural light. There were two small offices at the back with frosted glass doors. Skip lived in one and Eddie in the other. Eddie’s door was open, his radio a drone of baseball. He was lifting weights and every time I looked in his direction, he was grinning at me with his red strained face. I wanted to move my sleeping bag so I was out of his line of sight, but I was worried that would seem rude.
When I had a drawing I liked, I took the lamp over to the plaster wall. I had painted a mural at my high school in Connecticut. The theme was Alice in Wonderland. My friends and I thought the adults wouldn’t get the drug references. We thought we were smarter than everyone else, listening to the Velvet Underground and passing a joint while we painted giant mushrooms and drink-me bottles. That was before I started going to all-ages punk shows. For my friends at school, the Velvet Underground turned into the Doors, then the Grateful Dead. Pot started looking like a gateway drug to shitty music. The hardcore kids I met at shows didn’t care much about drugs either way, they just wanted to save their money for demo tapes and band T-shirts and vegan burritos.
I used a crayon to start sketching on the wall. Eddie came meandering out of his room holding dumbbells to see what I was doing. He hunched on a milk crate doing curls in the dark. Drawing on the white wall with the light on me, it was like I was on stage.
“Who’s winning the game?” I asked to make conversation.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” I drew a huge egg shape in the center of the wall and then a horizon line. I was sore from working downstairs all week; stretching my arms over my head felt good. The front door creaked open downstairs and I held my breath, listening to the bolt click back in place. I hoped it was Lorenzo, though it didn’t seem likely he had a key yet, and the bouncing steps on the stairs didn’t sound like him, he was more of a trudger.
A lanky boy with Manic Panic red hair burst into the room behind a pizza box. I hadn’t met him yet, but I knew right away it was Jimmy. The ladies’ man, the fashion punk from Ohio, the kind of skate punk with bangs and a Dead Kennedy’s shirt who all the cheerleaders wanted to date in high school. He was hardly ever here at the squat, he spent most nights at the apartments of girlfriends and buddies, wherever there was a PlayStation and food to mooch.
Jimmy cocked his head at me and pulled off his headphones. He gestured at Eddie, who had finished working out and was stretched flat on the dirty floor, arms crossed on his stomach, asleep. “You slip him a mickey or what?”
Skip poked his head out of his room at the sound of Jimmy’s voice.
“Skippy, my man.” Jimmy held up the pizza box. “Check this out! Dudes were closing for the night and gave me all this!” He plopped down on the floor in front of the wall facing me, his long legs spread wide around the pizza box.
Skip padded up in his sports socks, feet turned out like a duck, and introduced me in his formal way. “Sid and her friend Lorenzo are going to be living on the first floor.” I was hungry. I left the circle of light that made the plaster wall look like a stage set and crouched by the pizza box. I picked the pepperoni off a slice.
“Whoa, downstairs!” Jimmy raised his eyebrows, “Total shithole, right?”
“I know you,” I told Jimmy. “I work Donny’s table at ABC.” I’d seen him around but I’d never have pegged him as a squatter. He was too clean and his look was more Sex Pistols than Crass.
Jimmy picked up my discarded pepperoni and ate them while he studied me. But he didn’t recognize me. When you’re fat, you’re invisible. “So, where’s your buddy then?” he asked.
“Um . . . band practice.”
“Ha!” Jimmy snickered. “Leaving the dirty work to you, huh?”
Dirty, you could say that again. We didn’t have running water in the house or a mirror. I’d washed up using my gallon jug of drinking water from the deli, but I didn’t want to waste any. It cost money and I’d just get filthy again tomorrow.
“This drawing is great!” Skip was studying my sketch on the wall. “Wow, you really know how to draw.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” Jimmy asked.
“Giuliani.” I pointed to the egg shape. “See, he’s Humpty Dumpty, sitting on the brick wall. Headed for a fall.”
“What, over there?”
“No, in the middle. His men are the cops over here. They’re going to give that punk in the corner a ticket for drinking beer on the street.”
“It’s looking like a squat in here!” Jimmy laughed. He had finished his slice and now he aimed his crust at Humpty Dumpty’s face. “Take that, Rudy!”
“Jimmy,” Skip said, licking his fingers, “Sid was telling me about how the squats in the city have workdays where everyone works together on house projects.”
Jimmy ripped a piece of crust off another slice and, squinting one eye, aimed for the cops. “Fuck the po-lice!” he chanted like Ice-T.
“Maybe Sunday?” Skip suggested. “What do you think?”
Jimmy looked between him and me like he was trying to think of something funny to say. “What did Mitch say?”
Skip stared at the wall in silence. For some reason the mention of Mitch ended the conversation. I went back to sketching on the wall. Jimmy finished another slice and threw his crust half-heartedly at the cops. It landed on the floor.
Downstairs the door slammed again and we listened to feet coming up the stairs. Mitch, in his basketball sneakers and jeans, rounded the corner and the light caught him dramatically. He and I were spotlit on stage together and no one else spoke, so I waved my crayon and said, “Hiya!”
Mitch’s eyes scanned the wall as he crossed the floor. I felt suddenly silly, like decorating the house, when there was so much real work to do, was frivolous. Mitch’s sneaker hit Jimmy’s pizza crust and he paused a moment to look down.
“You’re gonna get rats in here,” he said. Then he disappeared up the next flight of stairs.
Eddie sighed in his sleep, still stretched out on the floor with his ankles crossed, and we all turned to look at him.
Jimmy unfurled, stretching his arms up to the ceiling. “Hittin’ the hay, comrades!”
Skip said goodnight too, carefully shutting his door. I picked up the box and collected the leftover