Act Two
It was a long drive to New York and especially stressful as I'd never driven in snow like that before. My fingers ached from the cold and gripping the wheel so hard. Why anyone would choose to live in the North East was beyond me. By the time I got to the George Washington Bridge, I was barely keeping my eyes open. I had only stopped a few times.
"She says, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side/ Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side/ And the colored girls go,/ do do do …. "
Christ. I turned off the radio. New York in the early seventies was the closest thing to hell I'd ever seen. The building next to Pony's was literally burnt down to a pile of rubble. Everything smelled like cold piss and garbage. I went inside to see the place that Pony'd rather live than with me, after I parked behind a car sat on top of cinder blocks. No one better take my fucking tires. I walked inside, ignoring the shouts from the people I passed.
It was harder to find the courage to knock when I stood in front of Apartment 4F, than it was when I played it out in my head on the drive. There was a cat compressed along the bottom of the door. I didn't think Pony had a cat, so I kicked the door above it, hoping it'd move.
"Hey!" a small voice shouted. I looked around, then down. It was a little girl - about four or eight years old - on a tricycle, in the middle of a hallway right by six flights of stairs. I wondered if I should do something. I didn't like little kids. Their voices were too high, their hands were always sticky, and I couldn't be goofy enough to entertain them. Both my kid brothers were better at that sort of thing than me. "You lookin' for Ponyboy?"
"Uh, yeah. Is this his place?"
She got off the tricycle and picked up the cat.
"Yeah, but I ain't seen him in a while." - that was kinda worrisome - "You see him, you tell him he owes me Razzles. I'm Sheila. Tell him he owes Sheila Razzles."
"You got parents or somethin'?"
"You don't scare me," she said, which did not answer my question. I didn't want to scare her anyway. She turned, cat still in her arms, and got back on the tricycle and peddled away down the long hall, around the corner. Honestly, the whole exchange gave me the creeps.
I stared at the door for a second. The anger I had felt not an hour ago was replaced with dread.
What if he got mugged or something? Or he had hurt himself? One of Dad's brother's had shot himself in the head before I was born. Pony could be real moody ...
Bracing myself, I knocked, then tried the door. It was unlocked. Didn't he ever think?
"Ponyboy?" I called, no one answered.
I slipped off my shoes, and draped my coat on the back of a nearby rocking chair, which was filled with books, and yanked the chain of the bare lightbulb swinging in the center of the apartment.
I had never been there before. It was one large, rundown room. I stepped over his clutter and peaked around. There was a wall that ran halfway through his apartment with a large window frame without glass in the center, housing another stack of books, a bottle of expensive looking whiskey, an old soup can turned ashtray, and two prescription pill bottles (one without a cap). I examined the bottles and wrote down the names of the pills (Diazepam and Seconal) on a scrap of paper, then slipped it in my billfold. Under that indoor window on the other of that wall was Pony's bed. The sheets were pulled off one corner, blankets twisted at the foot. He'd always been a restless sleeper. I made his bed.
How did he live like this?
I wasn't tired anymore, and the only thing I had to do was wait. I kept cleaning, going through his stuff as I did. I used to go through his stuff all the time when he was a teenager to make sure he wasn't on drugs or something. I found the cap to the pill bottle under the bed, next to - for some unfathomable reason - a greasy can of Crisco, which I put in the cupboard by the stove and wiped my hands on my blue jeans.
I didn't know how long he'd lived here. For most of his time at Columbia, he had rented a room from a professor near campus. I was relieved he was away from the grittier parts of New York and within proximity to an adult. Someone who might notice if he didn't come home at night. But he was alone now. I had never really lived alone, but Pony'd always been less social, so it wasn't hard to picture him here, flittering from one thing to the next like a goddamn hummingbird. Smoking on the bed, smoking leaning against the counter, smoking as he looked out the window threw through the pink curtains at the plows down below clearing paths in the snow.
There was a large canvas covered in shadowy figures, leaned up against the wall and a couple of other paintings on the wall that I didn't think were his. I don't know why. They just didn't seem like him.
His typewriter was on a coffee table, opposite a tiny velvet couch. On the ground there were all these pages crumpled up. It was a fucking fire hazard, and once the fire got going, he'd never make it out alive.
I gathered the wads of paper and matchbooks from bars and receipts with lines scribbled hastily.
One read:
Where were you that night
my lonesomeness succumbed
to your longing? I was waiting
in the respite of the gap
between your teeth
Ready to be whatever it takes to
take anything, please.
Another:
What is romance, if not the intersection of friendship and desire, motherfucker?
And so on.
I filled two trash bags with obvious trash, like a Pepsi bottle filled with cigarette butts and ashes. I straightened out the things I wasn't sure about and stacked them, like a flyer for some event at the Metropolitan Community Church of New York. It said "Pride = Power." It didn't sound Episcopalian. I hoped it wasn't a cult.
On the kitchen counter there was a record player and tubes of paint. I made sure the caps were on tight (they weren't). I saw a galley proof of what must be his next book by his records. It was wire bound with plain black lettering across the white cover: FRANTIC MOMENTS by P.M. Curtis. I think it was the only thing I didn't move in his apartment. I didn't want to touch it. I stacked the records alphabetically, pausing when I came across Mom's Tom Lehrer albums. They were some of the few things Pony took with him after we sold the house.
I kept cleaning. I put a small harp-thing near the guitar and the hand drum, in the corner, and moved to the kitchen sink, where a pile of dirty dishes were soaking with paint brushes in sickly brown water. I started doing the dishes with cold water and the near-empty bottle of SunLight detergent.
I wished Pony could just pick one thing and really devote himself entirely to it. He was always so scattered. He must have been doing alright, if he could write a check that big, but think of how successful he could be if he had more direction.
He had a lot of magazines too, from The Paris Review to some funny little magazine called Come Out! I neatened them and placed them on the coffee table next to the typewriter.
I spent hours putting things right, before I laid on top of the bed and looked out the window. Where was he? It was nearly eleven o'clock. The curtain was sheer and kept nothing out. I could hear voices of men shouting at each other in the distance. I made a list of things I'd fix tomorrow in my head: the leaky showerhead, the space between the exterior window and it's frame where a draft was coming in, the stuck drawer by the sink, a few holes in the wall ...
I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to a knock on the door. It opened before I reached it, revealing some man who wasn't my brother.
"Fuck. You've got to be kidding me." He stretched his neck to look over my shoulder, searching. He had strange blue eyes, so strange I stared. I ain't never seen a black guy with blue eyes before. I'd have to mention it to Yvonne. "Pony!" he called.
"He ain't here. Who are you?" I asked, still groggy from sleep.
"Who am I ?"
"That's what I asked."
"You know what? I feel bad for you, so take this as a warning."
"A warning?" I stood up straight, crossed my arms over my chest and flexed. People didn't fuck with me. Not even in New York.
"Ponyboy - he's mesmerizing. He's got all this beauty and sweetness and - and pathos." The guy looked up at the cracked ceiling and shook his head. "He's the most fucked up person I've ever known." He dropped his head and leveled me with a cool stare. "So, enjoy it while it lasts."
He left me bewildered. I didn't get it at all. This whole city was crazy. No wonder Pony liked it here, I reckoned he'd fit right in.
It was after two am, when Pony finally did show up.
"Darry? What the -" His wild eyes danced around his now clean apartment.
"Where the hell have you been?" I asked.
"Out. I didn't know I was having company. What are you doing here? Is everything okay?"
"Okay? Is it okay that you're running around New York City at all hours of the night doing God knows what? I would have called the cops -"
"-To turn yourself in for breaking into my apartment?"
"- but you ain't got a damn phone. And it ain't breaking in if you leave the door unlocked."
"We never locked the door growing up." I could see his brain trying to catch up to the situation. He looked so confused. It'd be funny, if he hadn't always looked so damn confused when I talked to him.
"You're a world away from Tulsa."
"Darry, I'm in Manhattan. On 46th Street . It ain't that dangerous."
"They call it 'Hell's Kitchen,' for fuck's sake. Two different guys tried to sell me drugs before I walked into the building."
"There's plenty of drugs in Tulsa too, Darry. You don't got to do any. Just tell them 'no thank you' and keep walking. It's so mobbed up, nothing that bad ever happens here."
"Can you hear the words coming from your mouth? You're nuts."
"I'm nuts? You drove over a thousand miles to break into my apartment and rearranged my stuff."
"You can't live like that."
"Darry, I'll live however I like. You ain't in charge of me nomore. I've been on my own for five years." He walked further into the apartment, looking around. "What are you doing here?"
"You've been avoiding me for years, and I'm sick and tired of it. After everything I done for you. I kept a roof over your head, kept you on the straight-and-narrow, got you to fuckin' Columbia." It might be the first time I really held it over him so blatantly.
"I'm sorry, I was a kid when Mom and Dad died."
"That's not what I meant! Jesus!"
"Did you get my card? I'm trying to pay you back."
"I don't want your fucking money! You ain't been home in nearly four years, and now you're throwing money in my face."
"It hasn't been that long!"
"Don't try an' get into a fight about dates and times with me, kid. You won't win that one."
He deflated a little bit, because I was right. He looked down at the floor, while he said, "With the money, I didn't mean to offend you or anything."
Tired and heatless, I asked, "What'd you mean then?"
He shifted. "That was always the plan, right? You'd send me to college, I'd make good, and then I'd take care of you some."
"I can take care of myself."
"So can I."
"Seems that way."
"I just - I got to leave and go to college and you didn't. I don't know." He shrugged.
I wanted to say, 'I got to have a childhood and you didn't.' But there wasn't any way to make up that, and the admission would hurt too much. "That ain't your fault."
Despite my best efforts, Pony wasn't living the life I missed out on. This life was his own. If I'd have gone to college, it wouldn't have been an Ivy League school, but I would have majored in something reasonable, like accounting ... But that wasn't anything I'd thought about for a long time. It didn't matter now.
"Look, I just had a good year, and I thought it could help out your business or something." I hated how much it would help the business.
I was curious what "a good year" meant to him but didn't ask. We didn't grow up talking about money like this, mostly because we never had any.
"You could get a better place," I said.
"It's close to the studio." I thought he was gonna leave it at that, but he went on in a tentative voice. "And I'd feel out-of-place anywhere nicer."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I asked, "Why the hell would you have socks in a kitchen drawer?"
"It's right by the door. It's where I put my shoes on."
His incredulous face made my chest hurt. I've never been able to delight in Pony's spacy absurdity like the rest of my family did. It scared me. It really did.
He opened the drawer in question to be faced with cutlery, which was all dirty when I arrived, so who knows where he normally kept it. Then he looked up at me. "You really - I'm not gonna be able to find anything." I couldn't tell if he was mad.
"Just think about where it ought to be." I rubbed the back of my neck. Maybe I had overstepped …
"What are you doing here?" he asked again.
"I missed you," I was surprised that I said it. It hurt. My throat was tight.
He caught me by off guard when he threw his arms around me. I brought my arms around him too. He had grown since I'd last seen him. His forehead came up to my cheekbone. I kept growing well into my twenties, maybe he would too. He wasn't ever gonna be broad like me and Dad, but he wasn't not exactly small like Soda and Mom. He squeezed back nearly as hard as I did. He still smelled like home.
"S'good to see you, Darry."
Tight lipped, I kissed his temple and didn't let go until he did.
"You hungry?" he asked, as we broke apart. "There's a diner a few blocks down."
"Sounds good. All you got here is a can of Crisco and DingDongs."
He got red and scrubbed his hand over his face, before leading me out the door, which he left unlocked. He confessed to having lost the key several months ago.