Part Three:

APOLLO

Gisela Reiz

My eviction was a diaspora. James returned to his landlord/lover, Denise began sleeping in a hallway on Perry and Otis vanished to parts unspecified. I was free of the family I had invented, loved and cursed. It crossed my mind, like an afterthought, that now I could be free of crack, too. It was not too late to escape my escape. But crack is diabolical; it provokes not withdrawal, but a longing harder to withstand than physical need. Still, for a few days I tried. People, places, things. All three of my stickiest circumstances were changed and I could change, too, I thought.

My more immediate problem was where to sleep. It was my first day of living without keys. I had always had my own address since leaving my parents’ house at fifteen. Hallways, doorways looked different to me, places from which I was now excluded or unwelcome. The people I knew as a smoker were not sleepers, not least because most of them, like me, had no fixed abode. And crackheads are only as kind as the next hit you can buy them. Suddenly I felt acutely the difference between what recovery people called “associates” and friends, and knew that in the Bronx I had nothing but the former. In my old life in Manhattan I had had people to stay with if need be, but those people no longer wanted to be my friends. I had to think of a person outside my infernal circle, and I did.

We called him Gold Card but his name was Apollo. He was a diminutive Ecuadoran who lived with his brother, Prometheo, in a large light apartment on the top floor of a tall, dimly elegant Art Deco building on the dead end of Two-Fourth overlooking French Charlie’s park and the Metro North tracks. Both men were in their sixties. Apollo was a painter suffering from lead poisoning, and a political exile. The brothers lived in penury in the apartment once occupied by their father, also a painter, who had lived into advanced old age. His paintings hung on every wall and they were fascinating--psychedelic allegories of Catholicism and politics—crucifixions, flaming banners, supplicants. The only other art I ever saw in the Bronx was prints of stags in forests or leopards in jungles.

Apollo was the neighborhood innocent. He was five foot two and stout, with dark thinning hair and unruly eyebrows. He was always smiling and sweating. His was a beautiful soul in a troll’s body. He was in New York without a green card or funds, except what little he shared with Prometheo, who was legal and received SSI and food stamps. Prometheo was tall and shambling and suffered from an unspecified psychiatric illness. Their common abode was interesting and dirty and flyblown, with heavy laundry soaking for days in the bathtub, pots of black beans and rice sitting for days on the stove. They installed me on a plastic mattress on the living room floor, where Prometheo occupied a narrow bed in the corner. In addition to the father’s paintings there was a huge gilt-framed still life of a dead pheasant and waxy white grapes. A tall metal and glass floor lamp with three swooping branches shed light over the whole array, which included a glass-fronted bookcase filled with medical texts. The décor spoke of a Hispanic life gentle, cultured and disciplined, a world different from the empty interiors equipped by Rent-A-Center I’d seen throughout the Bronx.

Instead of cherishing these strangers who acted as true friends, I was cavalier, coming and going at all hours and even bringing my cat, Stella, to stay without permission. It did not occur to me to clean up the apartment. I imagined a new, borrowed life as lodger in Apollo’s establishment, surrounded by beautiful paintings and flies. Sober, I added to myself, unconvinced. I could not yet pronounce the word “homeless” to myself. I held fast in my mind to the image, or rather the feeling, of the plastic mattress in the living room and Stella sleeping my arms. I had narrowed down what I need to exist, perhaps even to prosper: a bed, a cat.

I nurtured this vision for five comforting days, then my host told me his landlord, a sour Albanian, had recognized me from the street and said I had to go.

“Can you care for Stella till I find someplace for her and me?” I asked, abashed but not surprised.

“Of course,” smiled Apollo sadly. “I don’t know why nobody trusts you,” he added, embarrassed for us both.

I packed nothing, just left my clothes in an unfolded heap on Prometheo’s sofa.

“I’ll pay you to take care of the cat and I’ll buy cat food and litter,” I said shamefacedly as I left.

It was the second week of September. The sun was still hot, the shade suddenly cold. I walked to the sitting park and sat there on a long green bench considering my circumstances. Less than three blocks away was the apartment building which had been my citadel and now I was shut out by its unlocked wrought iron door, shut out from other refuges, too because of what I’d chosen to do indoors and out. I could think of nowhere to stay except for Denise’s friend Christine, who lived with her unmanageable five year old son and her sister in a one bedroom apartment on Rochambeau, in a huge building managed by a drug program. It was a hive of smokers. Christine would let me stay the night, I reckoned. I hated being around people with kids and knew that there my nerves, which so far had been holding up, would be shattered. I depended on my calm to see me through.

I was struck, for what felt like the first time in my life, by the difference--and the distance—between inside and out. I was a completely urban woman, unimpressed by nature except as a garnish for streets, and my love of cities had as a condition my uninterrupted access to apartments, almost always my own. I was identified with rooms, regardless of their view. The important events of my life were the ones that took place behind closed. doors. Now my own door had closed on me, stamped shut with the marshal’s red notice of eviction The glare of the sun in the sitting park reminded me how I’d loved the sun shadowed by my bedroom curtains. The unmediated elements, even ones I was used to and loved—sunlight, streets— needed the screen of a home, and now I had none but my own thin skin.