Home Boy Read online

  For Aliya

  Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come from the outside—the ones you remember and blame things on … don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be a good man again.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Crack-Up

  I ask my vagrant heart: “Where is there to go now?”

  No one belongs to anyone at this hour. Forget it.

  No one will receive you at this hour. Let it go.

  Where can you possibly go now?

  —FAIZ AHMED FAIZ, “The Hour of Faithlessness”

  This is how it should be done /

  This style is identical to none.

  —ERIC B. & RAKIM, “I Know You Got Soul”

  1.

  We’d become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren’t before. We fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men, AC, Jimbo, and me. We were mostly self-invented and self-made and certain we had our fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic. We surveyed the Times and the Post and other treatises of mainstream discourse on a daily basis, consulted the Voice weekly, and often leafed through other publications with more discriminating audiences such as Tight or Big Butt. Save Jimbo, who wasn’t a big reader, we had read the Russians, the postcolonial canon, but had been taken by the brash, boisterous voices of contemporary American fiction; we watched nature documentaries when we watched TV, and variety shows on Telemundo, and generally did not follow sports except when Pakistan played India in cricket or the Knicks made a playoff run; we listened to Nusrat and the new generation of native rockers, as well as old-school gangsta rap, so much so that we were known to spontaneously break into Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube / From a gang called Niggaz With Attitude but were underwhelmed by hip-hop’s hegemony (though Jimbo was known to defend Eminem’s trimetric compositions and drew comparisons between hip-hop’s internal rhythms and the beat of Kurdish marching bands). And we slummed in secret cantons of Central Park, avoided the meatpacking district, often dined in Jackson Heights; weren’t rich but weren’t poor (possessing, for instance, extravagant footwear but no real estate); weren’t frum but avoided pork—me on principle and Jimbo because of habit—though AC’s vigorous atheism allowed him extensive culinary latitude; and drank everywhere, some more than others, celebrating ourselves with vodka on the rocks or Wild Turkey with water (and I’d discovered beer in June) among the company of women, black, Oriental, and denizens of the Caucasian nation alike.

  Though we shared a common denominator and were told half-jokingly Oh, all you Pakistanis are alike, we weren’t the same, AC, Jimbo, and me. AC—a cryptonym, short in part for Ali Chaudhry—was a charming rogue, an intellectual dandy, a man of theatrical presence. Striding into a room sporting his signature pencil-thin mustache, one-button velour smoking jacket, and ankle-high rattlesnake-skins, he demanded attention, an audience. He’d comb his brilliantined mane back and flatten it with wide palms. He’d raise his arm, reveal a nicotine-stained grin, and roar, “Let the revelry commence!” then march up to you, meaty palm extended, declaiming, “There you are, chum! We need to talk immediately!” Of us three, he was the only immigrant. While he lived day to day in a rent-stabilized railway apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and moonlighted as a sub at a Bronx middle school, his elder sister had emigrated in ’81—at the tail end of the first wave of Pakistani immigrants—and enjoyed spectacular success. A decade later she sponsored AC’s green card. A small, no-bullshit lady, Mini Auntie worked at the pediatric ward at Beth Israel on East 87th, lived in a brownstone around the corner, and financed AC’s on-and-off-again doctorate and studied debauchery.

  Jamshed Khan, known universally as Jimbo, was a different cat altogether, a gentle, moon-faced man-mountain with kinky dreadlocks and a Semitic nose which, according to AC, affirmed anthropological speculation that Pathans are the Lost Tribe of Israel. Not that such grand themes moved or motivated Jimbo. Propped against a wall like a benign, overstuffed scarecrow, he’d keep to himself, but at a late juncture he would grab you by the arm to articulate the conversation he’d been having in his head. Jimbo was known to converse in nonmalapropisms and portmanteaus, his deliberate locutions characterized by irregular inflexion of voice, by rhyme if not rationale. On the face of it, he was a space cadet, but we knew he knew what was what. Unlike AC or me, he had a steady girlfriend and, as a DJ slash producer, a vocation with certain cachet. If his career trajectory opened doors in the city, it estranged him from his septuagenarian father, a retired foreman settled in Jersey City for a quarter of a century. In that time he’d raised a son and a daughter and several notable edifices on either side of the Hudson. Born and bred in Jersey, Jimbo was a bonafide American.

  As for me, they called me Chuck and it stuck. I was growing up but thought I was grown-up, was and remain not so tall, lean, angular, like my late father, have brown hair, tin-tinted eyes, and a sharp nose, “like an eaglet,” my mother liked to say. I’d arrived in New York from Karachi four years earlier to attend college, which I completed swimmingly in three, and, though I was the only expatriate among us, liked to believe I’d since claimed the city and the city had claimed me.

  The turn of the century had been epic, and we were easy then, and on every other Monday night you’d see us at Tja!, this bar-restaurant-and-lounge populated by the local Scandinavian scenesters and sundry expatriates as well as socialites, arrivistes, homosexuals, metrosexuals, and a smattering of has-been and wannabe models. Located on the periphery of Tribeca, Tja! seldom drew passersby or hoi polloi, perhaps because there were no gilded ropes circumscribing the entrance, no bouncers or surly transvestites maintaining vigil outside. It was hush-hush, invitation by wink and word of mouth. We got word that summer when my gay friend Lawrence né Larry introduced us to a pair of lesbian party promoters who called themselves Blond and Blonder, and ever since the beau monde included a Pakistani contingent comprising Jimbo, AC, and me.

  Soon Jimbo a.k.a. DJ Jumbolaya was spinning there, and when I’d arrive, he’d already be in the booth, svelte in a very Kung Fu Fighting tracksuit, swaying from side to side, hand cupped around ear, pudgy fingertips smoothing vinyl like it was chapati. Starting down-tempo with, say, a track from a cooing Portuguese lounge singer, he’d then kick it with some thumping Senegalese pop, seamlessly, effortlessly, as if the latter were an organic extension of the former. DJ Jumbolaya distilled the post-disco-proto-house-neo-soul canon in his compositions. His credo was: Is All Good.

  When I’d slide next to him and pay respect—high five, chest bump, that kind of thing—he’d say something like “Dude, you’ve come to sip martinis and look pretty ’cause you’re a preena, a lova, a prophet, a dreama,” and when I’d ask what he was having, he’d say whatever, so I’d order a couple of cocktails from Jon the bartender, who would have his shirt unbuttoned to his navel and make drinks for us on the house. He told me he’d served in the French Foreign Legion as a chef and, recognizing me as a man of the world, would relate news (“you hear about the latest Mai-Mai offensive?”), dispense proprietary advice (“it’s best to run hot water over a razor before shaving as the metal expands”), and discuss matters of aesthetics (“that one, yeah, the one that’s looking at me, she’s got what’s called a callipygian rump”). Leaning on the bar, drink in hand, I’d suck it all in.

  Friends would show up in ones and twos, characters we knew from Tja! and here and there. There was Roger, a towering sommelier originally from Castle Hill, who’d taken classes in conversational Urdu because, he’d say, “I dig your women.” Once he asked, �
��You think they’d make with a brother? What do I gotta do, man? Like, recite Faiz?” And Ari, a curator at a Chelsea art gallery who cultivated a late Elvis bouffant, had this great story about his first day at P.S. 247 when he found himself in Dodgeball Alley at lunch: “So the black and white kids separated into teams, like it was 1951 or something, and there was this pencil-neck Chink and a bunch of sorry-looking Spics, and me, the Jewboy We didn’t know which side to join, and like nobody wanted us, so we banded together like the Last of the Mo’s. And sure, we got our asses kicked pretty bad the first day, but man, after a couple of weeks, they were black and blue …” By and by and arm in arm, Blond and Blonder circulated, making small talk and grand gestures—“Like those shoes!” “Canapé for everyone!” Sometimes Jimbo’s girlfriend made an appearance. A natty, masculine woman with a belly and waddle, she hailed from East Coast aristocracy, sipped berry Bellinis, no cassis, and moved with a hipster crowd—what’s called an urban tribe—comprising acolytes. We all loved her and called her the Duck.

  On occasion, when I’d find a girl perched on a distant barstool, legs crossed, hair wafting the scent of apple shampoo, I’d say, “Ciao ciao, baby.” It wasn’t a pickup line, just something I muttered when drunk. The last time we’d been at Tja!, a girl with mermaid eyes and a pronounced Latin lisp had actually responded to my tender advance with a staccato laugh. “Next week,” she’d said before being tugged away, “jou ’n me tan-go!” There was, I believed, great promise in the phrase, in what AC would have dubbed the proverbial tango.

  Typically, however, I’d await AC’s advent, his heavy hand on my shoulder. All bang, no whimper, he’d chat, chant, dance burlesquely flirt amiably, and I’d stand beside him, nodding, grinning, reveling in the sense of spectacle. Once he burst in with bloodshot eyes, bellowing,

  I rise at eleven,

  I dine about two,

  I get drunk before sev’n;

  And the next thing I do,

  I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,

  I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap!

  Conversations paused, a glass or two dropped, and everybody looked at each other—Jimbo at me, Blond at Blonder—like gobsmacked kids at a magic show. Then there was spontaneous and resounding applause. Bowing impressively, AC went about playing the part of the said poet, spewing, spending, and all. With him, the night always promised picaresque momentum. Jimbo joined us after he was done serving up curried riddims, and we’d palaver and drink some more, then close the place down, only to return the week after, or the week after next.

  At the time we didn’t think that there was more to it than the mere sense of spectacle. We were content in celebrating ourselves and our city with libation. It was later that we realized that we’d been on common ground then, on terra firma. Later we also realized that we hadn’t been putting on some sort of show for others, for somebody else. No, we were protagonists in a narrative that required coherence for our own selfish motivations and exigencies.

  Two, maybe three weeks later we decided to assemble at Tja! because we were anxious and low and getting cabin fever watching CNN 24-7. Moreover, we believed that there was something heroic in persisting, carrying on, in returning to routine, to revelry.

  Hailing a cab, I cruised down the West Side Highway with the window half open, taking in the night. The air was warm and fishy, and the moon, brilliant and low, was torn to shreds by the jagged waves of the Hudson. Downtown seemed festive, lit up with floodlights, but the buildings obscured the mayhem, the mountains of rubble behind them. Three months earlier I’d worked on the forty-first floor of 7 WTC, the third building that went down. My colleagues escaped with cuts and bruises but brushed against the spectacle that would scar their lives.

  The smell of burning wafted through the night, and in the distance police lights shone like disco balls. It was time to forget, time to be happy. There was a blur of movement inside and bursts of laughter over the music that were at once vulgar and cathartic. Blond emerged, dancing up to me in slow motion, churning her arms like bicycle wheels. She was tall, bony, and walked like a man. We embraced desperately, like reunited lovers, and said nothing of the postponed festivity. “Where’ve you been, my prince!” she began. “People have been asking after you. Think I saw Lawrence, and d’you know Hogart?”

  Glancing at the booths, tables, heads, bodies arranged around the enormous bamboo bar, I didn’t recognize anybody: not Roger, Ari, not the mermaid who promised to tango. And I didn’t know no Hogart. “Go on,” Blond was saying, “get yourself a drink. You look like you need one. We all do.”

  When I ordered the usual, the bartender said you got it, buddy, like we went back a long time, but I didn’t know him from Adam. I would have liked to ask after my old friend legionnaire Jon, but he was too quick or I was too slow, and the guy next to me was carrying on bombastically: “When I moved here, I knew I’d have to make a shitload of money, like my main man, Montana. He says, ‘In this country you gotta make the money first.’ So what do I do? I play the market—it was a goddamn gold rush, I tell you—and I raked it in like a mofo: got me a nice car, nice digs, a yacht, a girl that was in the glossies, and then boom—”

  Pausing, the Bombaster turned to me, probably because I’d been watching him as if he were a street performer ingesting a saber. “What’s your story?” he asked. Offering a dubious shrug and lopsided smile, I sidled away. What do you say?

  As I palliated my anxieties in a corner with a very dry, very dirty martini, the girl from last time materialized in a fragrant nimbus of face cream and lavender, swaying and swinging to the bass, and though I had rehearsed the moment for a fortnight in my head, my nerve failed spectacularly. She brushed past and vanished like a vision. It was early but already turning out to be that kind of night, slightly out of frame, slightly off-kilter. My first drink went down easy but hit me hard. Suddenly, mercifully, Lawrence né Larry appeared, defiantly summery in a gray seersucker draped over a daffodil yellow Lacoste. He had a deep voice, a soft laugh, and the mien of James Stewart. We embraced then examined each other from head to toe to check if the other was whole.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked, pinching my cheek. “You don’t look like yourself. Lemme guess: you haven’t seen the dust bunny yet!” Flashing a sympathetic grin, he shoved his hand into his jacket pocket and produced a tiny blue packet that he pressed into my palm. “Come find me,” he said, gliding away.

  Negotiating the bamboo alleys with the stem of the second martini glass pinched between my fingers, I passed a clique of waifs kissing each other on the cheek and a claque of swarming rakes on the way to the restrooms in the back. As usual there was a line, and as usual I waited, arms folded, back against the wall watching the doors open intermittently. Couples and threesomes emerged now and then, laughing and stroking their swollen nebs with their thumbs. Typical bathroom banter circulated: somebody said something about powdering her nose; somebody else said, “You say queue. That’s so cool!” When my turn came, I entered tout seul, securing the door behind me.

  Setting the glass down on the rim of the sink, I pulled the packet from my pocket and straddled the WC like a pro. I tapped powdered clumps onto the porcelain top, cut two slugs with the serrated edge of an expired MasterCard, and rolling up a fiver, inhaled through either nostril. There is solace in ritual and routine. Closing my eyes, I inhaled, exhaled, and nodded to the heavens as if in prayer. The smell of soap and liquor and sandalwood pervaded. Before leaving, I observed myself in the mirror: my hair was rakishly mussed, my nostrils dilated, and my eyes, pink and veiny around the edges. I had on a vintage black leather jacket, and suddenly it made sense to turn up its collar.

  Outside I lit a Rothman, took a long satisfactory drag. I gulped down the second martini, savoring the salutary aspirin aftertaste in the pit of my throat. Suddenly, I was a party, an animal. As anybody at Tja! could have told you, Charlie stirs the inner lycanthrope, the primal imperative. Raising my glass to a girl standing on a nearby table
, teetering on heels, candle-smooth legs astride, the primal imperative hardened. I wanted to lick her shaved armpits, taste her immaculate toes; I wanted her, wanted every woman, Swede, Oriental alike. Cheers of “Skål!” rose from the booths as if to corroborate my sentiment. It was time to find the Girl from Ipanema. But before I could make meaningful progress, I spied Jimbo by the turntables, like in the old days—two-tone track jacket, dreads up in a bun above his head—except that his hands were jammed into his pockets, causing him to slouch like the new kid hovering on the periphery of the playground. It so happened that between now and then he had been replaced by another deejay, the son or brother of a celebrity whose tribal ragga shtick had become au courant. Hugging me with his heft, Jimbo mumbled, “Mimsy were the hommies, dude.”

  Although one could not be entirely certain what Jimbo meant at any given time—conversing with him required hermeneutic feats—I suspected he was alluding to another recent tragedy: the plaster and drywall and some of the wood slats in the ceiling of his junior studio off Liberty Street had come loose, then collapsed in the last ten days, compelling him to seek refuge. He was supposed to stay with me, but AC insisted on hosting him because AC, as usual, was on some kind of trip. The arrangement was probably not easy—nothing about AC was easy—but when I inquired why he couldn’t stay with the Duck, Jimbo waved his hand as if halfheartedly swatting a fly. “AC’s lookin for you, dude,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Kept sayin somethin’ ’bout civilized human beings. Know anythin’ ’bout it?”

  Shrugging, I wondered why I had not come across AC yet—he was not one to go quietly into the night—then Jimbo pointed him out at the far end of the bar. Clad in his trademark one-button velour jacket, his hair pulled back with Brylcreem, AC stood over the Bombaster, in medias res, delivering some sort of disquisition, reifying two heavy, misshapen balls in his hairy, gesticulating hands. Leaving Jimbo to ruminate for a moment, I squeezed and pushed and excuse-me’d to the other side.