The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory. Stacy Wakefield
Skip breathed.
The guy clapped Skip’s shoulder and snapped his fingers over our heads at the bartender. “Drinks for these two,” he cried, spraying me with spit. The bartender served us without carding me.
In a little room in back where chairs circled a microphone, people seemed to know Skip. They held up their drinks or nodded but Skip didn’t introduce me to anyone. We found seats and I looked around. Adults with jobs in summer clothes. The kind of squares I wouldn’t normally notice. Skip seemed too nervous to talk to me. He sucked on his Corona and studied a piece of wrinkled paper from his pocket.
By the time it was Skip’s turn to read, his anxiety had rubbed off on me and I was stiff with embarrassment. He recited with his eyes squeezed shut, intense and weird. At least he didn’t rush. Actually, his voice was clear and confident and he knew how to pause for laughs. Laughs! I’d thought he had no sense of humor at all. I looked around and saw that everyone was listening and smiling. His poem was about selling books on the street. That’s what he did for work. The refrain was, “I’ve got books,” and at first it was funny, with all the characters passing by who don’t care or don’t speak English or are in a hurry. The narrator loves his books and calls out his refrain with defiance, but the day is cold, he gets hungry, lonely, bored, yelled at, and by the end, “I’ve got books” came out tragic—that’s all the guy’s got and it’s not enough. Skip’s shoulders dropped in relief when it was over and everyone hooted. He nodded around the room with stiff jerks of his neck and he gave me a shy smile.
* * *
A couple nights later it was Lorenzo’s turn to be on stage. Everyone I knew in New York was at his band’s first show, even though it was just an early spot at the Spiral. People were curious. Lorenzo’s old band from Mexico was notorious and the new singer had been in Five Knive, legendary New York punks. While Lorenzo had been practicing for this show, I had gotten our space together by myself, but watching him play I felt elated. I’d had a tiny role in making this come together and I was proud of it. It was raw, old-school, three-chord punk. They only had twelve songs so it was over in twenty ferocious minutes. Then everyone stood around with their ears ringing saying, “Holy shit!”
“They were awesome.”
Raven’s friends from Rot-Squat gathered in a pack of dreads and jewelry. Abby’s skimpy cut-off overalls displayed the row of tiny dots tattooed up her slender sides. A wild mess of white-blond hair hid her face. A girl with dark dreads pulled into a knot wore sports socks with pink pom-poms with her beat-up Adidas and miniskirt. I loved that, it was totally Mad Max tennis player. A girl named Jessica wore a dog collar with spikes around her neck.
Once the girls had joined me, Jimmy lost no time sauntering over. He pointed at me with disco fingers, singing, “Housemaaate! Where’re y’all going now?” I remembered that he’d had a thing with Abby that had ended badly, but it looked to me like he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
I waved over Jimmy’s shoulder to Veronica, who stalked toward us in clunky heels and striped knee socks. She gave me a hug, “Not bad for a first show!”
“How’s the new job?” I asked her.
Veronica was working construction. Getting jobs wasn’t the hard part, plenty of guys thought it was great to get a chick on their crew.
“I thought I’d learn about carpentry but I’ve just spent, like, two weeks sanding the stair rails,” she complained. “Seriously! I’m still on the third floor! The money these jerks spend on their balusters would build a whole house for regular people . . . How’s your place coming along?”
“Great! When are you coming to see it?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lorenzo leave the stage, sweat and excitement glowing on him, his dreads pushed behind his ears. Kids high-fived as he passed, threading toward me, like he felt the same magnetic pull I did. He winked at me and joy spiked into my brain.
Veronica dangled a key in front of my eyes to get my attention back. “I have my boss’s van! We can go now!”
“To Brooklyn?” I clapped my hands. “Jimmy! Lorenzo! Veronica’s driving us to Brooklyn!”
Raven cried, “Let’s all go!”
Lorenzo led the way out of the club like the Pied Piper. Stumps was out on Houston Street leaning against Veronica’s van. He was the guy I thought of as the doorman at Rot-Squat; always on the stoop keeping an eye on things. His housemates told him we were going to Brooklyn and he took charge, directing us all to buy beer at the deli next door because there might not be stores out in Brooklyn. I didn’t drink much, one beer would make me giddy, but everyone else grabbed armloads of forties like they were going to be trapped in the boroughs for a week.
I sat up front next to Veronica to give directions. Lorenzo leaned between us to talk about the show. I’d never seen him so hyped up. The guitarist had started the second song on the wrong chord, he said. Did we see that kid in front throwing beer around? Did we see the dude from Missing Foundation was there? Lorenzo’s euphoria was contagious. This was it, I thought, I’m really doing it. Living in the city, rattling home over the brightly-lit bridge with my friends.
* * *
When we pulled up in front of the Bakery, Veronica glanced into the back of the van and saw Stumps swigging from a bottle. “Did you guys open beers in the car? I could lose my license!”
Stumps laughed, spewing beer through his gold teeth.
“Sorry,” Raven apologized, but Veronica was out already, slamming her door.
Jimmy sang to Stumps, “Bitch alert!” and cackled, Beavis and Butthead style.
Inside, I ran to put on some lights while Veronica stood in the doorway. She squinted through her cat-eye glasses at the old braided rug next to my patchwork quilt–covered bed, the lamp on a stack of suitcases. I had made a little island of street-scored hominess adrift in the space. You didn’t want to get too near to the crumbling, damp walls. We still had to figure out how to seal them. Lorenzo and I had a line dividing our spaces. It was like The Brady Bunch, that episode where they put the masking tape down the middle of the room. But we didn’t have tape; just bags of garbage and metal scraps. Way in back, under the window, was Lorenzo’s bare mattress and sleeping bag, backpack of clothes, a folding chair.
Lorenzo squeezed past Veronica, followed by everyone else, and turned on his boom box.
Veronica asked to see the rest of the house. “Why don’t you have a phone here?” she asked.
“Mitch said he tried and they wanted some big deposit or something . . .”
“Who’d he call? They can’t refuse service just because it’s a squat.”
The stairs were dark and narrow, but when we emerged on the open second floor with streetlights filtering through the windows, we found Skip waiting for us. He looked worried. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing, we just brought some people over.” I ran my hand through my hair. “Lorenzo’s band played, so—”
“I didn’t know that. Was Jimmy there?”
Crap. Lorenzo had specifically told me not to tell Skip about the show. Lorenzo was all chummy and cool to Skip’s face, so Skip thought they were pals.
Veronica saved me by introducing herself. She told Skip she lived at 9th Street Squat, opening with her credentials, and watched his face to gauge his reaction. “When we moved in there, it looked a lot worse than this.”
“Did you see Sid’s mural?” Skip asked, and led her to the wall.
I’d been too busy cleaning out the first floor to work on it since the night I’d started it. You couldn’t even see what it was supposed to be, it was just a sketch, but Skip was always talking about it like it proved something about the building. He told Veronica about his vision for the second floor, how it should be an art space, where everyone in the house could work on art projects