The Swing Voter of Staten Island (18 page)

“Why are you here, pal? Trying to dredge up the dirt, is that it?”

“I’m stuck here,” Uli replied. “I’m just trying to do a little good.”

“Give me the film or you’ll regret it.”

“Give me a break.”

Deer Flare turned and walked away, sternly snapping her high heels against the hard tile floor. Uli returned to his little room and found that someone had gone through his meager belongings. The little stash of money that he had hidden under the fold of his carpet was sitting on top of his chest of drawers. He was actually glad they’d searched his room. He didn’t have anything to hide.

Uli was about to lay down, but thought he heard something in the distance once again. He looked out the window at the long building on the pier that Ernestina had said was about to be converted into a church. Although he didn’t see anyone enter or exit, a lone person passed by one of the darkened windows.

He found himself thinking about the macabre fantasy or vision he’d had about the tragic Armenian woman and her children, and wondered if it could have been real. Then he thought about Mallory and Oric’s painful deaths and soon felt wide awake. He headed downstairs and tried to exit the building. The guard on duty asked him where he thought he was going.

“Just hoping to catch some air.”

“Doors close after 10 p.m.,” said the older man.

Uli thanked the guard and figured there had to be at least one unmanned exit in this four-block complex. Heading down to the basement cafeteria, he saw two workers silently piling a mountain of black plastic garbage bags into the back of a pickup truck in an adjacent garage. When the workers walked off, Uli casually grabbed two of the bags and carried them out. After loading them in the rear of the pickup, he continued down the empty street along the old brick wall. He headed to the abandoned warehouse—a two-story structure on the water.

P.P. had torn down all the other buildings in the immediate area. Uli figured they could easily erect yet another connecting overpass to this one. Reaching the doorway, he found it cinder-blocked shut. The windows on the ground floor were covered by worn sheets of plywood, but he was able to easily slip one board aside and climb in. Within the dark, cavernous warehouse, he felt a chilly wind.

The ground floor was alive with the sounds of scampering and flapping. Small desert animals and birds had taken shelter in the empty structure. Above, he could hear footsteps. Uli proceeded up the stairs to the second floor, where the windows allowed moonlight to pass through. To his surprise, he came to a long corridor filled with silent people, like a party of spirits, buzzing to or from one of three massive rooms. Inside the first large area, Uli made out sweaty and interlocked forms in tight and repetitive motion.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw that though most of the copulators simply lowered their garments, some were completely naked. He recognized one woman, a fellow neophyte, who was orally enveloping a much older man. Despite the fact that some of the couples appeared to be of the same gender, they were all having muted sex. No sooner did he realize this than a lean, bald man dropped to his knees before him.

Uli jumped back in shock. Until that moment, he had felt as though he were invisible. He quickly retreated to the last room of the warehouse. Roughly ten couples were engaged in heated states of intimacy. Near one corner, he spotted her. Ernestina Eric was gratifying two men simultaneously. Uli walked over as one of the men shot his ample emission onto the floor, then stumbled away. A moment later, the second man also disengaged from her and ejaculated.

“Ernestina,” he whispered, acutely aware that he hadn’t heard anyone speak. “I knew I saw you.”

Without responding, she reached up and started unclasping his belt.

“Wait,” he whispered. Lowering his face to hers, he asked, “What are you doing?”

She wore a lusty smile, an expression uncharacteristic of the cautious person he had briefly come to know. Her eyes appeared glossy as though she were in some far off place. At that moment another man, skinny with an alarmingly large erection, walked right up and simply entered her without making a peep.

“Hey!” Uli said.

The guy didn’t respond. As the newcomer had feverish sex with Ernestina, Uli stared at the man’s face. He was a member of the same outreach group—Lionel. Though they all acted as if they were sleepwalking, Uli guessed that the men were actually faking it.

After watching Ernestina have intercourse with three more males, he saw her silently rise, fix her blouse, and leave the building. The smile never left her face.

Uli followed her down the steps and across the street. She headed to a service door in the rear of Building 2 that had no knob. With the tips of her fingers, she was able to pry it open. Uli caught the door before it closed and trailed her up the steps. She walked across an overpass, finally turning off at the women’s dorm.

Uli continued on to Building 4 and his own room, where he laid on his bed and stared upward. As the darkness was gradually replaced by the morning light, he tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Finally, without sleep, he rose, dressed, skipped breakfast, and went back to the bus stop out front—a new work day had begun.

11/2/80

W
hen Ernestina joined the group outside, she looked thoroughly rested. Uli asked her how she had slept. She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Fine, how about you?”

“I had a weird dream.”

“What kind of dream?” she asked politely.

“That a lot of people were in a large warehouse silently making love to each other.”

Ernestina looked away nervously and said, “I don’t want to sound like a prude, but I feel really uncomfortable hearing things like that.”

“I’m sorry, but you asked.”

“I won’t make that mistake again,” she replied, then boarded the bus. Slightly embarrassed, Uli got on last, pulling Patricia Itt in with him. Some of the men he’d seen having sex with Ernestina and one another were seated calmly in the back of the vehicle as it rolled out to south Brooklyn. Like the previous day, Uli and Patricia Itt were the last to be dropped off.

Arriving on the mini-boardwalk of Coney Island with the thick-headed Patricia, Uli immediately felt tired. If these people haven’t wised up while stuck in this awful Rescue City, he thought, a brochure filled with dumb cartoons and morbid statistics wasn’t going to do it.

He glumly watched Patricia as she moved excitedly from person to person like a hummingbird on amphetamines. She appeared truly happy. Slowly he distilled her secrets: Reject the big picture. Be lower-brained. Stay small and vibrant. Ernestina’s lessons weren’t bad either: Follow your base urges and simply deny.

“Hey Jehovah, want some rugelach?” It was the tall hairless Lazarus from the previous day, splayed out on the same bench, again eating a pastry out of a brown paper bag. Uli politely declined the man’s offer and told the guy he was busy.

Uli tried to purge his own cynicism as he occasionally flung flyers toward those walking past. After a few hours, and as people grew more scarce, he looked over and saw Patricia trying to hand a flyer to a stray mutt. The dog sniffed the piece of paper and dashed off.

When Uli sat down again, the old man muttered, “At my age, everybody is just five things.”

“What five things?”

“Five fingers on the hand,” the guy said, holding his large palm open. “Five appendages on the body. Five books of the Torah. Five boroughs of this city—”

“So what five things are you?” Uli cut him short.

“I used to be a father, a son, a husband, a brother, and an uncle.”

“Aren’t you still?”

“Now I’m a terrorist, a traitor, a coward, a monster, and a fraud.”

This is going to be a long day,
Uli told himself as the old man droned on. Just as before, Uli began dozing. He found himself thrust into a complex dream in which he was someone else, trapped in some dark subterranean system along with a filthy tribe of bewildered half-wits fighting for leadership and a way out.

He abruptly awoke with the hideous thought that the creepy Deer girl was somewhere nearby watching him. The old man was sleeping again as Uli stood back up and headed over toward the amusement park. He noticed Patricia staring at him.

“There are people down there,” Uli said to her, spotting a clump of youths who had just exited the park.

“I’ll come along,” she said.

“No, stay here.” He pointed to a dilapidated building nearby. “The seniors in that home are going to come out for an afternoon stroll. I saw them do it yesterday and we missed them.”

By the time he made it to the amusement park entrance, the youths had vanished. Between the evenly spaced slats of wood that made up the promenade, something red caught his eye—someone had dropped a string of tickets, still unripped on the sand below. He was about to return to Patricia, but he became transfixed by more youths getting spun around a ride as though in a huge blender. Another ride looked like a flying cup and saucer. Participants had to stand up against the inner rim of the giant cup as it whipped around at gravity-defying angles, the centrifugal force holding them in place. Uli watched a lone bumper car driver, a middle-aged man with a joyous expression, smashing into a group of vacant bumper cars over and over. Without thinking, Uli found himself smiling. Catching sight of the large roller coaster that had crashed into the river, he thought that in one sense the doomed ride must’ve been a godsend. After all, where these newer ones merely teased people with a spectacular body-hurdling thrill, that one had actually delivered.

Peering down the boardwalk, he saw Patricia standing alone, holding a flyer out to the empty space. She waved from the distance, and he wondered if her perkiness somehow fed off of his despair. He pointed angrily to the old age home. When a single lone figure exited the building, Patricia rushed over and Uli made his move. Scrambling underneath the boardwalk, he grabbed what turned out to be three unused tickets.

Sneaking inside so that Patricia wouldn’t see him, Uli first rode the Loop-the-Loop, then the bumper cars, and finally the mini—roller coaster.

Roughly twenty-five minutes later, feeling refreshed, he ran back out to the boardwalk, but there was no sign of of his coworker. In the old age home, he asked if anyone had seen a woman with a bad haircut—they hadn’t.

He spent the remaining three hours searching for her. He began to suspect that the despicable young woman with the prominent forehead was somehow behind this disappearance. Deer Flare thought he had taken blackmailing photos of her with Siftwelt and had probably sworn revenge. Would she actually kidnap his partner just to make him look bad?

At 6 o’clock there was still no sign of the Itt girl. In a slight panic, Uli took half of the remaining brochures and shoved them into a garbage can. Then he returned to their original spot to find his supervisor waiting for him.

“Where’s Patricia?”

“I don’t know. I went into the amusement park to hand out some flyers.” He held up the remaining stack. “When I came back, she was gone.”

“You’re supposed to look out for each other,” Ernestina said. “That’s why we have partners.”

“She was handing out flyers to the seniors at the home. I went away for just a moment and she was gone.”

“Did you check the home?”

“Yeah,” Uli responded absently. “Maybe she returned to P.P. alone.”

“I just hope she didn’t drown,” Ernestina said and sighed.

Uli thought she was kidding, but looking out at the narrow band of greenish water he realized she was serious. She said she’d have to notify the local Crapper gangcops as well as the City Council police.

“She probably went home early,” he said. “It was a pretty slow day.”

“Let’s hope.”

Together the two boarded the bus back to the compound, where they found that Patricia had not returned. No one had heard from her. Uli offered to go out tomorrow and hand out flyers alone.

“That’s not my primary concern right now,” Ernestina said, clearly agitated.

She reported Patricia Itt’s disappearance to Rolland Siftwelt, who checked in with the authorities.

To keep from worrying, Uli spent the evening in the P.P. library reviewing audio-visual and tape recordings of inspirational speeches by religious and secular leaders of the last forty years. In addition to stirring oratories by the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., he listened to George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Albert Shanker all rallying their labor forces.

After several hours, he started to feel a tingling in his conscience. He wasn’t sure if it was a result of the speeches or guilt for losing his partner. All he knew was that social change seemed possible. As he walked past the cafeteria, he spotted Ernestina talking to another outreach worker.

“Excuse me,” he said, “have you found out anything about Patricia’s disappearance?”

“I think the correct word is
recidivism
.”

“What do you mean?”

“Patricia was a recovering drug addict and prostitute. A healthy percentage of the P.P. labor force are former addicts. This is a rescue mission.”

“Patricia is a—”

“From the first day, her pimp started sniffing around, trying to win her back. She probably went back to him. It’s amazing that we even got her in the first place. She had only been sober for about two months.”

“She was really a prostitute?”

“And a drug addict. Many of us were,” Ernestina replied flatly.

“You too?” That might’ve explained her nocturnal conduct.

“Didn’t you have any problems with crime or addiction?” Ernestina asked earnestly.

Uli looked off sadly and nodded yes. But as far as he knew, he had never taken drugs or had a criminal record. Then again, large parts of his memory were missing, so maybe he had.

“Are you okay?”

“I just feel awful about all this,” Uli said. “I should’ve kept a closer eye on her.”

“Here at P.P. we’re great believers in forgiveness,” she replied gently, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Everyone screws up—frequently the hardest part is forgiving ourselves.”

Uli smiled weakly.

“I’m sorry for judging you earlier,” she said, “when you shared your strange dream.”

“I should probably keep certain things to myself.”

“No, you were right. It’s probably healthier to let it all out.” Looking down, she added, “All we really have is each other.”

Uli took her hand in his, gave it a soft shake, and returned to his room.

He lay on his bed feeling sad, until he heard something in the darkness, a kind of ecstatic bark. He got dressed and headed down the stairs to the kitchen door he had left through the night before. He walked across to the future house of worship and again climbed in through the ground floor window. Inside, he scurried up the steps to the last room in the front. A number of people were copulating, yet he was glad that he didn’t find Ernestina among them. Although he felt sexual stirrings, he kept reminding himself that he was in enemy territory. This could be some kind of trap, he thought, though it was intriguing to watch. As long as he didn’t participate, he couldn’t be accused of anything. He waited an hour, waving off a number of offers. He felt like a zoologist watching as more people came, copulated, and left.

Finally, to his thrilled disappointment, she arrived. He watched as one man made love to her, then a second man, then a third and fourth simultaneously. Before a fifth one could grab her, Uli put his arm around Ernestina’s slim back and led her to an isolated corner. Spinning her around against a wall, he made her spread her arms and legs apart as though he were about to search her. She offered no resistance. Reaching underneath her wet dress, he gently stroked along her curly hairs and moistened lips. Then he unzipped his pants, but stopped before he fully succumbed to his burgeoning desire.

Turning Ernestina back around so that she was facing him, he looked deep into her eyes. She smiled mindlessly. Her pupils didn’t seem focused. He could’ve been anyone. He kissed her hard on the lips, but she didn’t kiss back. Unbuttoning her shirt, he was surprised to find that she was wearing a bra. He unclasped it and suckled her until she started gently moaning. She whimpered softly as he left a deep crimson hickey on it. Then he did the same to her other breast, leaving a matching mark. She tried thrusting her hips into his, and though he was thoroughly aroused, he abruptly left the warehouse.