Rivers of Gold Read online

  One good thing, the train’s just arriving at the platform as I swipe my Metrocard and get pole position behind one of the support girders (the rule is, stay out of the slipstream and out of the line of sight; minimize your friction and you minimize your chances of confrontation). I keep to myself behind my titanium polarized wraparound Bedroom Eyes. I’m itching to check my messages, but you don’t pull out your iPhone below ground if you want to keep it (and keep your blood inside your body). It’s only one stop south to Ninety-sixth, not quite long enough for anything to happen. I’ve taken subways all my life, I don’t intend to stop because the city’s in a tough spot; but if I can, I’ll take a cab. However, duty—Reza—commands.

  Changing up at Ninety-sixth for the northbound Number 2 train I feel the tingling onset of the anxiety of Borough Crossing. Manhattan is the innermost of The Five, it’s the most modern, the most built-up, the richest, the most stylish. Anyone moving to NYC does so with the idea of at least spending time in Manhattan; most could not possibly afford to live there. It’s the city’s gravitational center, recent difficulties notwithstanding. It’s also the best-protected borough. During the riots, the police simply cordoned off Harlem. Nothing happened to the rest of Manhattan—not the important parts, anyway. Nothing. Brooklyn and the Bronx and fucking Queens, you could see them smoldering from miles away. I was on a photo shoot in Ireland at the time, but I remember seeing the residual smoke as we came in to land three days later, and how many police cars there were on the tarmac. My building on 104th was inside the police cordon, close to Columbia and Morningside Heights. Don’t get me wrong, I would never live on Park Avenue or the Upper East Side or some other sterilized honeycomb; if you’re going to live in New York City you’ve got to be where you can feel it. The trick is not to be where the human waves can wash you and your home away.

  So to the Bronx. One good thing about the subway system is that as long as you’re on it you don’t usually notice the areas you’re passing through. I mean, who really wants to go hoofing around East 149th Street in the Grand Concourse? Here, riders are subdued, they know where they are, they’re keeping as low a profile as possible. Of course, once I switch to the southbound Number 5, I have to steel myself for what comes next.

  East 138th Street, Point of No Return. Abandoned gas stations—unless it’s a big oil company, there are no independent stations anymore, and even the franchises are fewer and farther between. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Shell or Hess logo around. What happened to them? Bodegas. Hybrid maintenance shops. Claptrap storefronts selling repackaged nickel hydride and lithium ion batteries and cheap Chinese-made solar laptops. It’s really not that much different from Canal Street back in Chinatown, only here it’s so much more spread out, wider roads, less hope, more decay. What I really hate about this is that it’s so fucking familiar. I might as well be back in Jackson Heights, but without even the South Asian flavor. I hate the Bronx. Why would anyone live here?

  So here I am at the corner of East 138th and Alexander Avenue in the South Bronx waiting for Reza’s man, standing in the shadow of some disgusting strip joint near the Third Avenue Bridge called Felicity. I feel like I’m in a Lou Reed song. No, actually I feel like I’m standing in somebody’s crosshairs. I fire up a Davidoff and pull on it furiously.

  Which reminds me to check my messages. I’d turned my iPhone off for the underground journey, but if anyone’s going to try for it out here, at least I can see them coming from far enough away to call the cops. I’ve already got an emergency phone app called Red Flag I can use to instantly notify Reza to abort the drop if that happens, probably invented by the same enterprising soul that wrote iHook. When I’ve got service I’m stunned to find a string of calls with no messages left from Prince William. But before I can call him back, a battered Nissan Hereford pulls up before me and I see Arun gesturing frantically from the driver’s seat.

  About Arun. Basically the black sheep of a respectable Indian merchant family, Arun felt himself not cut out for the family business. He’ll spin you some yarn about driving a cab while attending a Jain religious school to prepare himself to take his vows, renounce the world, and become a mendicant monk in search of Enlightenment. This is pure bullshit. Whether he dropped out or was kicked out of school, Arun is obviously a fuckup whose family has cut him off. It’s not really surprising that he came to drive a cab (although he’s usually flying on premium smoke—how does Arun beat the Taxi and Limo Control drug checks?). No such cannabinoid calmness for the Jain wonder boy today, though. He’s all amped up about something. I climb in the back and he pulls away, careful to signal and not squeal his tires. (This is a bad sign. He’s not usually this cautious.)

  —Renny, mahn, Eyad’s dead.

  —What the fuck are you talking about?

  —I just goht the text message from central, mahn, eet says police found a body the other night and just got DNA identeefeecation. They gave Eyad’s name and license numbah. They say eet looks like there was torture involved, Arun says, rolling his r’s Hindi-style.

  Oh shit.

  —Renny, yaar, what you theenkeeing? Arun asks, his wide eyes on me in the rearview. He’s nervous, his hands are strangling the wheel, he’ll need to self-medicate soon or he’ll start jumping curbs.

  Think, Renny, think. You’ve planned for contingencies. Get what you came for, then get out of sight.

  —Drive me to Queens, I say in my steadiest voice (Christ, I could almost believe myself).

  —Where you want to go, mahn?

  —Jackson Heights. Thirty-seventh Avenue by the G line stop.

  He nods, still scared but relieved to be moving toward familiar turf. I don’t know if he lives there, but if you’re Indian and you drive a cab, Jackson Heights is one neighborhood you know.

  —Where’s the package?

  —The usual place, yaar.

  I hunch down in the backseat, cursing under my breath, trying to get my fingers under the GPS panel without having to put my knees on the floor of the cab. In ’08, when GPS systems in taxicabs became mandatory, a lot of drivers started bitching about the heat coming through the driver’s seat from the monitor built into the partition showing ads and offering touch-screen maps and news feeds for tourists. Since by law the fleet’s supposed to be all-hybrid, lots of owners have been buying hybrids with offset monitors retrofitted in existing partitions to save money. A few observant souls like Arun noticed that this adjustment permitted a small, unnoticeable, and fucking-hard-to-reach space inside the partition manifold. A space just about big enough for a standard-size Blu-ray case. Or a similar-size case holding two concentric rings of pharmaceutical-grade Ecstasy tablets in perfect birth-control-pill formation. Two hundred doses at two hundred bucks each is a Fast Forty, which is what should be brought back to Reza. You do that, you get paid. You don’t, well, I don’t want to even think about it. It’s a smart system with powerful incentives coming and going.

  This system is what brought Arun to work for Reza, and me to work with Arun. Reza likes things to work well, and people in his organization generally do.

  Eyad’s death is an aberration. I don’t know who’s behind it. If it was just some random thing, maybe some Arab blood feud, Reza will let it slide. If there’s a crew jacking cabs in the network, though, they’d better get the hell out of town, fast. Reza doesn’t like interference, and he’s got people who can straighten things like this out, fast.

  Come to think of it …

  Nah. Just nerves.

  For the long ride home I pull out my iPhone and wireless stereo headset and thumb up a playlist file titled UNDER THE COVERS. In tribute to Eyad’s memory, I select all my covers for the Cure’s “Killing an Arab,” the first one by Rickets, their version of Dinosaur Jr.’s cover of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” off the Tad Kubler Burn Unit fundraiser:

  I can turn

  And walk away

  Or I can fire the gun

  Staring at the sky

  Staring at the s
un

  Whichever I choose

  It amounts to the same

  Absolutely nothing

  Too bland, everyone said so. I thumb up last year’s Smallpox cover of the Rickets version, muscled up with more feedback and distortion:

  I feel the steel butt jump

  Smooth in my hand

  Staring at the sea

  Staring at the sand

  Staring at myself

  Reflected in the eyes

  Of the dead man on the beach

  The dead man on the beach

  Not enough. I thumb up the best from the Craig Finn Liver Transplant Foundation compilation. Blood Clot’s interpretation of the Smallpox version of the Rickets cover destroys them all. For sheer sonic monstrosity, nothing beats Blood Clot (electric kettle drums, three bass guitars, and oboe):

  I’m alive

  I’m dead

  I’m the stranger

  Killing an Arab.

  Staring out at the South Bronx heading for Queens is like looking at old photos of the city back in the day. Because of course nothing ever changes here. Gentrification is supposed to be the great engine of change in NYC, but the fact is that there are whole swaths of the city that remain untouched by progress (I should know, I’m from one). Every time the economy goes up people in the outer boroughs count on their neighborhood being the next TriBeCa (rolled eyes, complaints of rising rents and Starbucks infestations). Then, when the economy tanks, people wonder why they’re still living in squalor. It all comes down to money, and the money’s in Manhattan. Period. Full stop. You don’t think it’s out here, amid the abandoned factories, crumbling tenements, and festering projects, do you? No no no. Out here, it’s FLATS FIXED signs and roadside fruit vendors and carjackers. Out here, it’s Going Nowhere Slow.

  I’m making myself jumpy as hell, and I’d kill for a Davidoff. I’ve heard all the stories, of course. Reza, the Russian mob’s Manhattan Man. Reza the one-man criminal empire. Money-laundering Reza. Mack Daddy Reza. Reza, King of the Speaks.

  But this is the first time I’ve actually heard of a death—a violent death—connected with Reza’s network. Even if it was only Eyad (there probably won’t even be a police investigation, nobody cares about cabdrivers), it’s still nerve-racking when terminal violence comes to someone you know. And why Eyad? It couldn’t have been Reza, that doesn’t make any sense. Even if Eyad skimmed a whole Fast Forty, Reza could probably make that back in less than a week. Why go to the trouble? It must’ve been something else, but who or what that is, I have no idea.

  Jackson Heights in June smells like cardamom and diesel exhaust. Arun drops me exactly where I told him, doesn’t even come to a full stop, just keeps rolling, on familiar ground now, off for some relaxing smoke and sex (probably both courtesy of Reza).

  I’m home.

  Trudging wearily past all the DO NOT BRING ROTI IN STORE! signs, I head down the old familiar stand of brown brick apartment houses stacked like so much cardboard. No architectural flair, no small green patch of vitality, just lumps of brick and mortar, anthills for the masses.

  Trudging up the stairs of my mother’s building to apartment 3A, I remember the need to signal confirmation. I send Prince William a photo of a baseball squarely in the pocket of a catcher’s mitt. Subtext: Package Received. Then I unlock my mother’s door.

  Can one describe a smell as empty? There’s been no life here for years, only a sense of slow entropy that makes the flue on my arms crawl and inexpressible sensations fight one another in my stomach. My mother’s house is always neat and tidy, nothing out of place. Look closer, though, and you’ll see the dust built up behind easily accessible areas, discoloration of the wallpaper high up near the air vents, cobwebs round the radiator pipes. My mother sits, as she always does, in the same kitchen chair she dragged over to the window overlooking the street on the day my father died. She’s added to it over the years, made a little station for herself, a small table, a pad with a pencil, her needles and yarn. But her main activity is staring at the street, the Sentinel of Thirty-seventh Avenue, as though expecting my father’s truck to come rumbling up under the window, him jumping off the back rail by the levers, just in time for dinner. I don’t think my mother’s cooked a meal since I left for college.

  —I’m home, Ma, I say to the ghost in the chair.

  She turns her head slowly, not so much moving her head as altering her horizon. The movement is mechanical, devoid of organic fluidity. She stares without seeing, slowly raising one hand toward me in a way that makes my throat constrict. I know I’m supposed to give her a hug and a kiss, and I will like the dutiful son that I am, but honestly, it’s all just too sad. My mother is hunched, wizened, existing somehow in a mental fog. As I approach her to do my filial duty I am hit by that awful medicinal stench of decay, not like The Scent of the homeless but the vinegary stink of medically slowed putrefaction. Age.

  —How are you, Ma? I say, taking her hand and kissing her on the forehead.

  My mother hasn’t herself yet received the sort of news that took my father from us, the succession of reports beginning with the three most terrible words in the English language (We found something) that confirmed the spots on his lungs and the disagreeable numbers of his blood chemistry. My mother keeps alive by the usual alchemy of takeout food, the occasional supplement from caring neighbors around holidays, and the ever-increasing pool of medicines foisted upon the elderly. But none of these really matters. The portion of my mother that gave her spark, fire, and glowing ember, that all died with my father. The remainder of my mother, who sees only the ghost of my father when she isn’t looking at the glowing box that tells her what the world is, is suffering from time. And there’s only one cure. I hate myself for saying that, for even thinking it, but it’s true. Dad, you fuck, why’d you have to die? Forget about me, don’t you see what you did to her?

  —My sweet boy, she says, holding one of my hands in both of hers, white shadows in veined vellum. Over her right shoulder I see The Photo, the one of my dad, healthy and smiling in his DSNY greens and fat orange garbage gloves, beaming out at a world preparing to consume him, reclaim and recycle him in the great landfill of Mother Earth. I want to get out of here.

  —Are you eating well, Renny? You look so thin, my mother says.

  —Just fine, Ma, never better. Big new job, another cover shoot. Roundup magazine.

  Here it comes.

  —Oh, Renny, that’s wonderful. Your father would be so proud.

  I know he would. Garbageman’s boy makes good. Bigshot fashion photographer, one of the youngest ever to make it like this. My own apartment in Manhattan. Beautiful women in the city on my arm and my cock, money in the bank and more off the books from Reza, surviving and thriving in a city with twenty percent real unemployment. Yes, Ma, I think Dad should be proud.

  And, as always, instead of venting what’s boiling in my head, I say:

  —Yes, Ma. Do you have everything you need? Any problems in the neighborhood?

  —No, no, everything’s fine, dear. I have everything I need right here. In fact, it’s more than I need.

  Here it comes again.

  —Here, take this.

  —Ma, come on.

  —Now, Renny, you listen to your mother. Take this and put it away. Your father wanted for you to have it, and you will. Don’t argue with me. Take this and put it in the bank. Save it for—for tomorrow.

  —Yes, Ma. Thanks, Ma.

  And, like always, I take it. Resistance is futile, this little ritual seems to make her feel just a little bit better. When my father found out he was sick, he set up an annuity for my mother, secured by his pension and what life insurance he could get through the department. Since he died so quickly, Ma wasn’t saddled with impossible medical bills. School didn’t cost her much, and the church helped out here and there. Dad had made sure Ma would be able to stay in the apartment as long as she lived, and she never spent anything on herself, just kept at me to keep my grades up so maybe
someday I’d be able to go to a good school and get a good job. The minute NYU said yes, I was gone.

  It’s not like I use it for myself anyway. Anything my mother gives me—plus a lot more from me—goes to settle her bills and fill in any gaps, like now when so many pension funds are on the ropes. She’s pretty much taken care of as the widow of a city worker back when pensions were guaranteed and there was money at the ready. This sort of thing has been up in the air since the crash, especially with both the city and the state broke, and no more federal money coming in for city agencies. I’m not alone in this—there are probably thousands of people in this kind of jam these days.

  I doubt too many of them have come up with my particular ways to make ends meet, though.

  As for my legal job, well, Mom has every issue featuring my work, and that’s good enough for her. They’re all kept neatly in my old room, which I usually stop into after taking Mom’s money and pretending to use the bathroom while I actually check on message traffic from Reza’s network. Ma keeps everything exactly the way it was. My old trundle bed; my old desk, with that ancient ink color photo printer. A bulletin board, a few posters from bands I shot that are long since gone. And my first cover, framed, with the early taxiscape technique that first turned heads.

  And my one remaining photograph of X, the one I took of her in the pagoda at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. There’s nothing stylized or put on about the shot—she’s just looking at me through the lens, very matter-of-factly, a warm look, but (I see it now) just the hint of reservation. I took this picture three years ago, just before the bottom fell out of the world.