The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (2 page)

Their game started back up and I didn’t like being there ’cause it was sad and depressing so I got Mercedes and we left and went back to our place. And that was it. For a long time. Six or nine months or something. Alberto played video games with Ben. I’d see him around. In his uniform if it was day, drunk if it was night, sometimes in the hall in his underwear while he was waiting for a pizza. I turned eighteen. Went out with some of my girlfriends from around the project and some girlfriends from when I was in school. They was all around my age, almost all of ’em in a situation similar to mine:
no diploma, a kid or two and a couple had three, boyfriend still around but not really there, no way to get out or move up. Just ways to make it through the day or the week or the month. One of the girls was wearing nice clothes and a nice watch and smelled good like expensive perfume and she started saying she was working as a dancer and making plenty of money. Said you had to be eighteen, but could make three, four hundred, maybe five hundred bucks a night dancing in clubs. We started saying she was hooking but she said no, she danced naked on a stage and gave men lap dances in a private room and they gave her cash. That it was easy. Men from Manhattan would come up, tell their wives they had meetings or was working late, or they’d come over after baseball games at Yankee Stadium. They was stupid and it was easy to make ’em think they was getting some ass and the more you could make ’em think it the more they would pay you. She said it wasn’t a churchgoing job, rubbing her ass and tits all over white men, but none of us was churchgoing girls, and a good shower at the end of the night and she was fine with it, especially ’cause she was making so much money. She said maybe she was gonna leave the neighborhood. Find her a place where her kids would be able to go to a good school. Because even though almost all of us was dropouts, we knew the only way out for real was an education. Just none of us could do it.

Next day I called the girl. She took me to the club. I met the manager. Fat white man from Westchester.
He made me strip down to my panties and bra and show him how I danced. Made me rub my ass on his crotch and rub my titties down his chest and whisper shit his wife wouldn’t say to him in his ear. His hands started wandering and I asked him what he was doing and he said he test drove all the girls before he let ’em out on the track. Made me sick. But we needed the money. Momma wasn’t working and who the fuck knew what Alberto did. Made me sick. But I let him. I let him do anything and everything. Took me for a test drive. Made me fucking sick.

Started working a few days later. It wasn’t hard but I had to close up part of my heart, part of my soul. I had been with three men before. One when I was twelve. Mercedes’ father, who I was with from when I was fourteen until he left when I was seventeen. The manager. Except for that manager, I’d waited. Tried to make sure they loved me. I know I loved them. Would have done anything for them. Killed for them or died for them. Hit the cross for them. I thought they felt the same, loved the same. But love is different for every person. For some it’s hate, for some it’s joy, for some it’s fear, for some it’s jealousy, for some it’s torture, for some it’s peace. For some it’s everything. For me. Everything. And to let a man touch me like that, or to touch a man like that, I had always had to love. So I shut it down. Closed it. Buried it somewhere. And I danced and touched and whispered and got them hard and took them as far as I could and took them for
as much as I could. They didn’t know but they took more from me. A shower at the end of the night wasn’t enough. Not even close. Didn’t clean nothing.

Three nights a week I worked, sometimes four. Started saving up. Got Mercedes some clothes that hadn’t been worn before, some of her own shoes, brand new. Got my momma a sweater, and new magazines every week. Didn’t put none of the money in a bank ’cause I know what happens with white people and their banks. I put it away. Where Alberto wouldn’t never look. Where nobody would look. A couple months, a couple more. Making money but hurting. And changing. Keeping myself closed and hard all the time started taking it out of me. One of the girls gave me some shit to smoke and it helped. So I did more of it. And it helped. More than a shower or anything else. But when it wore away it started hurting more so I was taking more. Sleeping and working and getting high. Starting to do things I would have never done before because I didn’t care, because I was hurting so much that more of the hurt wasn’t nothing. And it brought more money. One night I was working and Ben came in and one of the girls smiled and said look who’s here. And I asked her what about him and she said he was an easy mark. Would come in with his paycheck and get drunk and give the whole damn thing away. I told her he was living in my building and that he was mine. She got in my face about it for a minute till I told her how far I’d go. I was dipping into my
money too much and I needed more. Momma was getting sick and Mercedes was getting sick and I needed them to get to a doctor and I didn’t have no insurance. And I needed more.

I went over to him. He was already drunk. He smiled and said
hi
and I said hey baby, nice seeing you here. And I didn’t even ask him. Took his hand. Led him to the room where we did the dances. And I went at him, giving him what all them men wanted and whispering in his ear about what we could do back at home now that I knew what kind of boy he was. I told him I wanted to suck his cock and I wanted him to fuck me, that I would ride his ass all day and all night, that I was getting all wet thinking about it. And I kept ordering drinks and feeding him. Just kept it going. And he took it. And was wanting more. And after an hour he was gone. His mind was gone and his money was gone. And I felt bad ’cause I knew what he was and I knew he wasn’t bad. Just sad. And alone. Man without anything or anyone, alone in that apartment where no one else would live, with his
TV
and his games and his pizza boxes and soup cans and his garbage and his sad mattress and his dirty bathroom. That’s all he was. He passed out. Right in the chair with my ass between his legs. The bouncers came and took him out. He didn’t have no
ID
or driver’s license or credit card. Nothing with his name or address or nothing. I told them he was my neighbor and I knew where he was living. They was gonna throw him on the street, in the gutter. Leave him there.
Let whatever was gonna happen, happen. He’d been there before, I know. And shit had happened to him, I know that for sure. I told them I could at least get him back to the building. I had just taken everything he had and I was figuring I could do that much. We got a cab and put him sleeping in the backseat. I sat next to him. He was snoring like a baby. And when we got to the projects the driver helped me get him out of the cab. And I got him into the building and into the elevator. Got him into the hallway front of his door. And I left him there. And I went back out and got high. Spent some of his money on what I needed. And when I came home later he was still there.

Next time I saw him was like two days later. He was coming home in his uniform and I was going to work. We didn’t say nothing to each other. I don’t even know if he remembered. Just looked sad and nervous like he always did. And the next time I saw him after that was a long time. And he wasn’t the same no more. He had changed. Changed and become someone else. He had become something I couldn’t even believe. And then I did. I believed. I believed.

I felt sorry for him when I met him. He had come in to apply for a security position at my job site. We ran two guys at a time, on twelve-hour shifts. There were weekday guys and weekend guys. Pay was minimum wage. No benefits. It was a shitty job. You walked the perimeter of the site, stood around for hours at a time. We didn’t have a security shack. You bring one in and the guards end up never leaving. They buy little
TVS
and drink coffee all day. Take naps. This was a sensitive site. We were putting up forty stories in a neighborhood where the tallest building was twelve. There had been community opposition. A couple protests, and a big petition. I needed guys who were willing to work. To make sure that the site was secure. It’s harder than you think finding them. Most people want something for nothing. They want everything to be easy. When a job is hard, they demand more money, more time off, they complain to their union reps and try to renegotiate terms. That’s not the way it works. Life is hard, deal with it. Working sucks, deal with it. I’d love to sit home and collect a check every two weeks for watching baseball games and spending time with my kids. Doesn’t happen that way. You gotta work for everything in this world. Scratch and claw and fight for every little thing. And it never gets easier. Never. And it doesn’t end until you die. And then it doesn’t matter.
Learn to deal with that. It’s the way of the world. You fight and struggle and work your ass off and then you die. Deal with that.

He came in with a resume. It said his name was Ben Jones, that he was thirty years old. He was wearing a button-down with the logo of a security guard school on it. My first impression of him was that he was very eager, very excited, and very nervous. His hand was shaking when I shook it. His lips were quivering. Aside from his basic biographical information, and an eight-week course at the security school which made him officially qualified for the job, the resume was empty. I asked him where he was from and he said
Brooklyn
. I asked him if he went to college, he said
no
. I asked him when he left home and he said
at fourteen
. I told him that seemed young and he shrugged and I asked what he’d been doing for the past sixteen years and he changed, just a little, but he changed, and something in his eyes came out that was really sad and really lonely and extremely painful. It was only there for a second, and normally I wouldn’t notice anything like that, or pay attention to it, or give a shit, but it was very striking, and he looked down at his feet for a moment and then looked up and said
I’ve had hard times and I’m ready to work and I promise I’ll be the best worker you have, I promise
. And that was it. He didn’t offer anything else and I didn’t push it. I just thought to myself sixteen fucking years, what the fuck has this guy been doing. And I still think about it, all the time, what the fuck was he doing. And I imagined, and
still do, because of the flash of deep sadness and loneliness and pain that I saw, that whatever it was, and wherever it was, it had been truly truly awful.

So I gave him the job. He was very excited. Like a little kid at Christmas. A big smile, a huge smile. He said
thank you
about fifty times. And he kept shaking my hand. It was funny, and very endearing. It wasn’t like he’d won the fucking lotto. He got a minimum wage job walking around a construction site for twelve fucking hours a day.

I put him on the five-days-a-week day shift. Thought that would be best. That he’d be proud to have that position. And he was. It showed in how he did the job. He was always on time. His uniform was always clean. He never tried to extend his breaks or his lunch. He never complained. He seemed fascinated by the process of putting a building up: knocking in the pilings, setting the foundation, the construction of the skeleton frame. He’d ask different people questions about what they did, or why they did things a certain way. He’d listen very intently to their answers, like he was gonna be tested on it or something. He was generally the happiest guard I’d ever seen or had on a job, and he became sort of the site mascot. Everybody liked him and enjoyed having him around. He knew everyone’s name and would greet everyone in the morning and say goodbye at the end of the day. There were only two things that ever seemed off, and I dismissed them both because he did such a good job and seemed so happy. First
was right after he got his first paycheck. He came and switched the address in our files to an address in the Bronx. The previous one had been in Queens. I don’t know why but I was curious, so I looked up the address in Queens. It was a state-run transitional home, a place where they send men coming out of either prison, rehab, a homeless shelter, or a mental institution. I thought about looking into it more, but I had other things to worry about and Ben seemed fine. Second thing happened one day during lunch. I had a doctor’s appointment and had to leave the site. On my way to the subway, I saw Ben sitting on a bench a few blocks away. He was crying. It was the middle of the day, and he had seemed like his normal self when I had seen him earlier. I did a double take because I couldn’t believe it was him. But it was. He was sitting on a bench with his face in his hands and he was sobbing.

The day of the accident was a beautiful spring day. It was sunny, no clouds, slight breeze, in the mid-70s. A perfect New York day, not one I thought would fucking blow up. I had never had a major accident on one of my sites before, and it was a point of great pride for me. I believed there wasn’t a building on earth that was worth sacrificing a life for, and I still believe it. Safety matters more than speed. Safety matters more than anything. It was one of the reasons I had been hired. Because the job was a sensitive issue in the community, and so many people were against it, the developer couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong. Accidents are the best
weapon community activists have against developers. While it would be nice to think developers care about safety, they don’t. Like almost everyone else in America, developers are fucking greedy. They care about money, and activists with weapons cost them money. My job was to stay on budget, stay on schedule, and keep that site safe.

The skeleton was done. Forty stories of steel frame rising. We were putting in the windows, which were ten foot by ten foot mirrored panels. We had finished the first thirty-three stories without any problems, and we were installing on thirty-four. We’d lift seven panels at a time. Bundle them, secure them, rig them to a wire, bring them up with a crane. I’d done it literally thousands of times at job sites, and I had never had any problems.