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When Remus got outside, it was raining. It was one of those nights on the Bowery when it could have been a hundred years ago. It was harrowing how bad New York usually smelled in the summer, except if it was raining. It was like god had meticulously untangled the hose from behind the shed and wound out as far as it would go so that it might reach even this forsaken place, and set about cleaning all the puke off the sidewalk. Even the heat felt clean out here. Inside the club, and on the subway, and in the squat where he lived in those days over on Avenue C where the AC had long since conked out and fallen out the window into the dingy, vacant concrete “courtyard,” and even here, on this very street, this very day, before the heavy, white-hot sky had seen fit to rain, it had been that filthy New York heat, where you felt slimed all over if it touched you, like having been run over by a slug. It wouldn’t last long, Remus knew, from extensive experience, having grown up here, in the Bronx before Manhattan, so it would have to be relished while it lasted. As good as the relief of the rain was the alone-ness. It was an immeasurable blessing in this city if you were ever alone.
To wit, somebody was running up the street from the subway, holding a newspaper over his head. It was some longhair, probably from Westchester. “Is this the Leaky,” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the cover?”
Remus thought about telling him $20 and just pocketing the cash. In reality, the bouncer had disappeared, probably to shoot up or fuck somebody in the disgusting single stall bathroom, so there was currently no cover at all. “Just go ahead,” he said.
“For real?”
“Yeah.”
This kid ducked in under the awning and rolled up the sodden newspaper, which he tossed into the alley. It clearly hadn’t done much good, because he looked like a wet dog. At least he’d worn good enough waterproof eyeliner. His hair, which was very dark, was sticking in ropy strands all over his face, which he set about carefully corralling behind his ear, watching himself in the reflection in the window. “Are you coming in,” he asked Remus.
“No.”
“Why?”
Remus shrugged. You know how it was easier to tell the truth to people you didn’t know, who you might never see again? “My ex’s band,” he said.
“Ah,” said the kid. The tourist, Remus was thinking of him. Even if he was a New Yorker, which he could very well have been, from whichever Upper Side was ritzier these days, he was a tourist. New York being as it was a city of infinite states. “So you’re single.”
“Ha ha.”
“Are you?”
It struck Remus that the tourist had thought he was being hit on with the invitation to come in for free. “I’m not the bouncer,” he said.
“I know that,” said the tourist. “You don’t look like you could bounce anybody.”
Remus cocked an eyebrow. The last person who’d thought he’d be useless in a fight had, allegedly, because Remus didn’t associate with this person or his crowd anymore and hadn’t in years, since the Event, permanently lost 50% of the vision in his left eye.
“Maybe you do,” said the tourist. “Jeez.”
“The band’s gonna go on soon,” Remus told him. “You better go inside.”
“Are they any good?”
“Yes,” Remus said, begrudgingly. The band was really good. He’d played guitar for a while, but it had come to a grinding halt when he’d broken up with Dearborn, for no reason really, it wasn’t like Dearborn was boring (he’d done too much DMT to ever be boring), and the sex was fine, even good, sometimes, depending on how angry they were at each other, but Remus had broken up with him anyway, probably just for something to do. Then it didn’t make sense to play in the band anymore. He’d noticed, almost happily, that they had gotten way better after he’d left. Lily was a far superior guitar player anyway and it was better that there was a girl in the band. Nobody else in the scene had a girl in the band unless her name was Patti Smith.
“Which one’s your ex?” asked the tourist.
“The bassist.”
“Should I heckle — ”
The tourist paused, nervously seeking Remus’s intervention on the appropriate pronoun. He knew how these things were done. You learned the code pretty quick. “He’s single too,” Remus said.
“What if I liked you better?”
“I’d say you hadn’t seen him.”
The tourist cocked the eyebrow which said, challenge accepted. “Come on inside and let me buy you a drink,” he said. “You can plug your ears.”
Having grown up in the Bronx and living now these days in a squat in Alphabet City, Remus was not about to pass up anything free. And it wasn’t raining anymore, anyway. He turned heel to go in through the heavy door and the tourist followed him. Inside the club, it felt like the sauna at the Russian baths where you went if you really needed to make $10 for drugs by giving some old Polish guy a handjob. It was giving Remus kind of a horny and fixing and regretful sense memory, which was part of why he had gone outside. He squared up in the customary dark corner away from the bar where nobody could see him. When he turned, the tourist was at his quarter, having unbuttoned a few of the top buttons on his shirt. Remus looked at his six scraggly chest hairs with a consternation that was probably too obvious.
“What do you want to drink,” said the tourist.
“I’ll have whatever you’re having. Just make it a double.”
While the tourist was gone Remus busied himself by trying to get a count of how many people in this room he had fucked, beaten up, gotten beat up by, whose boyfriends he had fucked, who he had offered to start a band with and then backed out, who he had started a band with and even wrote songs with but when it came around to thinking about playing shows or recording an album or touring he had backed out, et cetera. In short, how many people in this room he had alienated by virtue of simply being… like this. He wasn’t really trying to make the count higher and higher every time, it just happened. Marlene, who was standing in the opposite corner snapping her gum by the merch booth, had recently told him, in one hundred percent seriousness, “Instead of a heart, I think you have some kind of supermassive black hole.”
It was true that light fell in and didn’t come out. It was like a magnet or something pulling all the wreckage into its murderous orbit. He could have chalked it up to parental neglect and heroin, but that felt like a cop-out, and besides, he had been clean for months now and it was still like this.
The tourist returned with two fucking Long Island Iced Teas. Dear god. So maybe he was from Sands Point or something. Did they actually drink these things on Long Island? One would have to be constantly shitfaced to emotionally blind oneself to the real-world impact of one’s wealth hoarding, Remus figured, unless one didn’t care. Unless that was the point. Anyway, the tourist said, “I’m serious.”
“Serious about what?”
“That’s my name,” said the tourist. “Sirius.”
Remus blinked. “Okay,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
“This is where you tell me your name,” said Sirius.
Remus quaffed half the Long Island and told him while it was still chemically scorching his throat.
“Remus as in Romulus and?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Are your parents classics professors or something?”
Remus’s mother was an Italian Jew and his father was a Lithuanian communist interested in mythology. They had gotten liberated from the camps, moved to the Bronx, fucked the single necessary time to bring about a child, and spent the rest of their waking hours either in a state of catatonic post-traumatic depression or raging against empire while the grainy TV blared increasingly dire news. They had instilled in their son their nihilism, self-sufficiency, and radical politics. But none of this was the kind of thing you told somebody you wanted to sleep with, and there was quite simply no way Sirius would understand. So Remus just said, “No.”
“Do you live around here, Remus?”
“Not far.”
Sirius had disappeared his Long Island and he set the empty glass on the floor in the corner behind Remus, where a small shrine of pint glasses, cigarette butts, used needles, condom wrappers, and a pair of lacy underwear had accumulated probably over the few weeks since anybody who worked here had bothered to clean the place up.
“Do you come here often?” Sirius asked.
“Can you ask me an interesting question?”
Sirius’s face lit up with a kind of smirking surprise. He liked to be challenged: Remus mentally jotted that down. “Fine,” he said. “What’s the best band in the city these days?”
“That’s easy,” Remus said. “Television.”
“I know,” said Sirius. “I saw them last weekend at CBGB’s.”
Remus had been there too, but he’d gotten to the club late and they hadn’t let him in the door. He had waited outside for a while and listened to some of the set, reflecting on what the fucking clubs on the fucking Bowery enforcing fire codes might mean about where the scene and the city were going, and he had gotten so depressed that he had thought about going around Greyback’s place, where you could always get junk, even if you didn’t have anything, because he could always think of something you could trade for it. In a show of extreme fortitude and restraint, of which he would not have believed himself capable not three months previous, he had gone home, had a beer, jerked off, and fallen asleep.
“Marquee Moon is like our generation’s version of The Waste Land,” Sirius continued. “I mean, T.S. Eliot.”
“I know who wrote the fucking Waste Land,” said Remus.
“Well, jeez,” said Sirius. “I don’t like to assume.”
“You don’t have to brag that you went to private school,” Remus said. “I can already tell.”
“I went to PS 198,” said Sirius, “then I went to Stuyvesant. What about you.”
“Bronx Science.”
“Maybe we ran track against each other.”
“We sure as hell did not. Do I look like a track athlete?”
“Actually, you kind of do!”
Laughing felt so good that he almost forgot he shouldn’t be doing it. It felt like tearing down the unfathomable wall behind which was all the very delicate and dangerous nuclear machinery that required precise calibration and handling lest catastrophe strike. Sirius was laughing too. They were laughing together like they had known each other for a long time.
“You said you live around here,” said Sirius.
“We just got here,” Remus reminded him. “Are you that desperate to not go back to the Upper West Side?”
“East Side,” Sirius corrected, “but yes.”
“I live in a death trap.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Remus was no stranger to this game. It wasn’t falling for it if you knew going in that they were using you to feel something exhilarating with regard to their own class guilt. Maybe Remus himself got something just as psychologically fulfilling out of cajoling rich boys from uptown into licking his asshole, but this was something to reflect upon another day. “Alright,” he said.
They went back out into the cool night. It was raining again, and the Long Island Iced Tea had gone straight to Remus’s bloodstream, because he had only had a single egg roll for dinner, so he said, “I love the rain.”
Sirius looked like a wet dog again. He looked at Remus with a piteous skepticism.
“Get over yourself and appreciate it,” Remus instructed, gesturing at the gold smear of the streetlight on the wet asphalt. Something had thrown a handful of glitter all over everything with a vivid festivity suggesting the city itself was glad for this momentary respite from the heat. The sky a blood-deep, roiling oxygenated red, like a dying rose. Being as New York was a city of infinite states awarded to different echelons of humanity by arbitrary means, perhaps Sirius had seen better, but Remus hadn’t. It had imbued him with a precise understanding of this place, a kind of magic, a kind of melody, in that he understood exactly what Tom Verlaine meant when he sang I was listening to the rain, I was hearing something else…
Nights like this, he sometimes wondered, how could he envy anybody? Anything? He had the secret. After all, that was why Sirius was following him.
They walked on alone together into the silence.