“Okay, well, first you gotta know that before all this, Hurricane Thomaston flooded everything from Perth Amboy to the Oradell Reservoir. Bayonne, Jersey City, all under water. The Staten Island highlands are now islands—the Staten Island Islands—and from Manhattan it’s four miles across the Newark Sea to the blinking lights of Newark City.”
I jutted my chin west down Horatio Street, toward the setting sun. “They still have power on over there, and nobody’s bombing them. That’s because the Newark Mayor and governor of New Jersey jumped in line to declare themselves Americans, by which they mean anti-black, anti-brown, anti-immigrant, anti-women, and anti-Native American, which makes the least sense of all of it if you think about it.
But that’s fucking Joisey. I mean, those guys cheer for the Red Sox just to spite us.
By us, I mean the New Yorkers.
So yeah. What else is gone. The west end of Long Island, under water from Breezy Point to Jamaica Bay. I mean, that had been coming on for years. Jamaica Bay kept washing over Northern State Parkway and Roosevelt Field’s been four feet under for, what, ten years now. Popular windsurfing site, those parking lots and airstrips like a giant saltwater lake.”
“Yeah I knew that part,” Ken said, shifting his cross-body bag strap. “I went to SUNY Stony Brook back in the day.”
“Back in the day? You look like what, twenty-five?”
“Thirty five.”
“Oh.” Ouch. He looked like a pup. I look like someone who’s been living in hell. Which I have. “Same age,” I said. “Different lives, I guess.”
I shifted my feet. The arch support was gone from my trusty black Converse high-tops, and they did nothing to block the sidewalk’s heat. “Before this, lots of people came to Manhattan for work, but barely a million and a half people actually lived here. That swelled to two and a half million with the refugees from Staten Island, Queens and the low-lying parts of Brooklyn who didn’t have the sense to head to the highlands of the Bronx, or Wyoming, or New Hampshire, or back wherever the hell they came from. Hey, Bernie Sanders is up there, right? Isn’t he your guy? Socialist?”
“He’s in Vermont.”
“Yeah.” I jabbed a ragged nail into Ken’s white shirt pocket. It left a mark. “But he was born in Brooklyn. Anyways, if those people had escaped to other places instead of here, they wouldn’t be in Manhattan getting shot at right now.
Okay, so all this started when they put that asshole back in the White House. All those highly intelligent voters from Arkansas and Oklahoma and Texas. Gotta love a democracy of idiots who never tasted a Crispy Creme donut and wouldn’t know how to read a subway map. No, wait.”
Ken stopped scribbling and looked up from his notebook.
“You shouldn’t write that part,” I said. “About them being idiots. I mean, it’s true, but I was rude. I don’t want the last thing I’m remembered for as being rude.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about being rude. I mean, your own government is bombing you.”
We left it at that. “So the Asshole-In-Chief starts sending federal troops to yank immigrants. Federal immigration guys with machine guns and masks over their faces and no IDs, getting into unmarked armored Teslas with dull black anti-graffiti paint and no license plates. They yank dog walkers, nannies, taxi drivers, plumbers. They yank the fucking grounds crew at Shea Stadium for chrissakes. The guys who mow the turf. Shea Stadium is like a church. A shrine.
New Yorkers don’t like that sort of shit. It had long been an unwritten rule that NYPD didn’t ask for immigration status or IDs for witnesses and victims. Some lady comes in and says her boyfriend is beating on her, whaddya gonna do, seriously, deport her? No. You’ll take her statement, ask her date of birth, and then go have a serious conversation with her dickhead partner in the back of a cruiser, and if he does it again he goes to Riker’s and the woman can just go on with life without her nose getting broken. Nationality doesn’t figure into it.
So the feds start deporting all these guys. Except they ain’t actually deporting them which, so far as I ever knew, means sending someone back to where they come from, and when they walk out the plane on the other end, they’re free as a bird. But no, they aren’t doing that. The federal troops are sending these guys to gulags. There’s no other word for it. Ship ‘em out of the country and throw ‘em in prison for life, no trial, no parole, in some third world shithole, and apparently our tax dollars pay room and board for the rest of their lives, which at least gives the third world shitholes some reason to keep these folks alive, but I don’t even want to think about what ‘alive’ might look like in those places. I mean the guy who mowed those beautiful diamonds into the infield at Shea Stadium, an artist like that sitting in some gulag somewhere. It ain’t right.
But with the missiles ripping up Manhattan now, we got a lotta things not right, ya know what I mean? Internet and electricity cuttin’ out. Food about gone, we’re in a race with the rats for what’s left. We’re drinkin’ rainwater. So, yeah. Maybe Russia will come save us. That would be a pisser. Or Canada. Or one of those big cruise ship companies.”
“That’s why we need to get your story out,” Ken said.
I gave him a cold stare. “Get our story out? Like you’re tellin’ me the entire world does not know that the U.S. Government’s bombing Manhattan and starving us to death? C’mon Ken, your shittin’ me.”
His clean little pink cheeks turned a shade pinker. “Well, it’s on corporate media, sure, but that’s not really your story...”
“It’s all over the news, it’s all over the internet, it’s just nobody gives a shit. But I guess that’s where you come in, right? You got your ass here somehow, and now you’re going to... How did you get your ass here, anyway?”
He dismissed the question with a tiny wave of his scrubbed, straight-clipped fingernails. “Let’s get back to it,” he said.
“Okay, so next. How the whole missile thing got started. So the Mayor announces Manhattan is a sanctuary city, which is basically saying out loud on television the way things had been workin’ here forever anyway. And the Mayor gets all kinds of cheers and likes on social media and roses sent to her office and everything because she’s saying things everyone wants to hear. And the good citizens of Manhattan are, like, egging her on to do more. ‘Yeah, yeah, keep going, don’t let those feds push us around, are we New Yorkers or what’, that sort of thing.”
I paused and leaned heavily against my truck. My heart raced from the exertion of talking. I tugged up my jeans. First time in my life since I was twelve that I fit into size twos, and they were falling off, even with a rope tied through the waistband. The air was quiet.
I could hear the water lapping a few blocks away. I could sense, rather than hear, people moving in the yellow-brick apartment blocks on the other side of Horatio Street. And rats moving in the storm drain.
“So she goes and does it,” I continued after a couple of breaths. “Tells the police commissioner, who happens to be like her best friend from law school, whatever, she tells the police commissioner to protect the rights of New Yorkers, even against these federal guys. She gets the City Council to pass a bill that no law enforcement officer in the City of New York can wear a mask or obscure their nameplate on their badge while on duty, which all these federal guys do. Makes that a felony. Tells the police commissioner to enforce the law.
So we have NYPD lining up against federal law enforcement, blocking them from entering stores and factories to do their raids, and obviously this gets a bit tense because, like, no one knew how it was all going to go down. And of course some guys switched sides, a few NYPD guys whose brother-in-law or something was a federal agent, refused to follow orders, quit, got a job at airport security, took early retirement. But fewer than you might think. They are mostly all chest-bumping, psyched up about this in their manly, thin-blue-polyester-shirt kind of way.
And for a hot minute everything seems copacetic. The feds pull back across the bridges and it’s real quiet for a week or two. And everybody in Manhattan is like, ‘Hell yeah, show you to mess with New York, dat’s what I’m talkin’ about’.
So then that Clown in Washington calls out the National Guard to escort the federal agents back to their raiding grounds. And you wanna talk about tense. Holy shit, like, seriously. Tanks are rolling on the bridges, and NYPD is sweatin’ bullets. Hell, the fire departments even all come out and stand with our cops, and they don’t even argue with each other. And people like me are calling them ‘our cops’, as if I ever woulda done that in the before times. That tells you exactly how dire the situation was.”
“So you didn’t like the cops before that?”
I guess people like cops in Ken’s world. Of course, cops are dues paying union members. “My grandmother complained all the time about the cops being corrupt. That’s going way back, like in the Serpico days.”
“Serpico?”
“Some hero detective back in the ‘70s that took down corrupt cops, got himself shot or killed or something for it. Had a famous dog. And my mother complained all the time about cops being racist. Those no-warrant searches in Harlem in the late 1990s, cops shooting black kids in the early 2000s. People were saying defund the police. Then they pull this stunt, standing up to the federal thugs like their a league of super heros, everybody loves them. For a bit. But now...”.
I looked off into the orange sky. The side of my truck was relatively cool, having been in the shade most of the day. It had stopped running months ago, I just came out here to stand by it from time to time. I’d been baking cookies in my basement and selling them off this truck for fifteen years. Standing around my truck is my one bad habit.
“And now?” Ken prodded.
“Look around,” I said. “They’re gone. Soon as the missiles started coming in, you didn’t see another police or fire uniform on the street. More than they signed up for, I guess. Crack dealer spitting at you, sure. Army firing missiles at you, not so much.”
“And the National Guard?”
“Army came up and knocked out their equipment in days. Hit their ammo trucks with RPGs. Disable the tanks and big guns remotely, with some sort of computer code. Like reprogramming the password on your phone. I mean, the National Guard got a few shots in, and you can bet those guys’ careers were over, but the whole fighting-back part was done in less than a week. So this thing corporate news is reporting as ‘war’, it’s not a war. It’s just murder. The massacre of Manhattan.”
“But people are still shooting back, right? Pockets of resistance?” I could tell Ken wanted to use that phrase in his story. He’d be disappointed.
“Hah. Some people shot down a drone here and there, some kid with a slingshot took one down, that was amazing. Some security types had patrols going for a while, like the Guardian Angels out in LA, remember those? Or more like the Hell’s Angels, walking back and forth in front of the bridges lookin’ tough with their guns. But those missles make mincemeat of anything, even Harley-Davidsons, so no, Ken, there aren’t any more pockets of resistance.
But that was later, let me take it in order. So the plan was for the National Guard troops to cross the bridges first, clear the path for the federal jackboots in their black uniforms and ninja masks. And the streets are packed with people staring, and every bar, people dead silent, staring at the tv screen. Like you could hear a pin, know what I mean?
And the National Guard gets across the bridges, and wheels those tanks around 180 degrees and points their guns back at the feds. And all anyone can say for about ten minutes is, “Holy Shit. Holy Fucking Shit. Now what.” Then everyone starts screaming and cheering and throwing hats in the air like it’s New Years’ Eve. I’m swearing they can hear the noise in LA, free beers everywhere, total strangers hugging one another, teenagers in gang colors mooning the feds, Puerto Rican flags everywhere, Mexican flags everywhere, Irish flags everywhere, fireworks, it is one big New York style celebration with felafel and pizza and spanakopita and pretzels and Guinness. You Irish, Ken?”
“What? Oh. No. English I guess.”
“English. No one ever goes out for English food, right? I don’t think there was a single English restaurant in New York. So anyways, about two days later, the feds blow the bridges. Blow holes right in the middle of them. The Verrazano. The 59th Street Bridge. The George Washington. The Brooklyn Bridge, and let me tell you, that hurt. One of the tower things on it, you know those upright parts, collapses. I dunno if they meant to do that, I think they just meant to blast a hole in the car deck, but we all watch it fall, and there are a lot of tears. A lot a lot of tears. I mean, people are terrified. People telling stories about the olden days and 9-11 and all that. But this isn’t a couple crazy Arabs who were insulted because the CIA stopped funding some sand war, this is our own fuckin’ government for chrissakes. This is the U.S. of A.
At least my great-grandfather and his buddies hadn’t lived to see this, because I can just hear them bickering, “I didn’t fight the big one to see these libtards commit treason against our own country,” and “Well I didn’t fight the big one to see a dictator in the Oval Office sending pregnant women to gulags,” and on and on.
So it is what it is. Things get real when those bridges go. Now Manhattan really is an island, and it doesn’t take long to realize that, as an island, it’s short on a few amenities, like oil and gas, and places to put garbage, sources of fresh water, stuff like that.
By the time we feel the rumble when they blow the tunnels, everyone had sobered up, rolled their sleeves up and gotten down to work. The hospitals and doctors’ offices are taking inventory of medicine, anesthesia. Restaurants are taking stock of what’s in their freezers and turning into community kitchens, asking everyone to bring in whatever food they have, and they’ll cook it up and hand out free meals to all comers—not quite rations, but made definitely let’s-not-waste-this and use-the-perishables-first. We start with lettuce and work our way up the food chain.
And us food truck people, like an unspoken agreement, we join in and start serving small portions of everything, limit one per customer per day until it’s gone. We hand it out for free, but people tip us like more than we ever charged, because everyone is feeling good about themselves and their neighbors. Half a hotdog, with a little mustard. New York slice of pizza cut into three ordinary pieces of pizza. I start making my cookies smaller. Silver-dollar size instead of plate size.”
Mariana’s empanadas with smoky onions. That Dominican family selling samosas. Richie and Dalil with their hummus and felafel, so incredibly good, pita light as air and a touch sweet, like the tzatziki had whipped cream mixed in it. Lining up at the end of Washington Square Park every weekend. All gone now.
Ken was looking at me, pen poised. I continued.
“Now you gotta know, stuff was still getting in by boat back then. I’d meet a guy at the dock by Fulton’s fishmarket and get a vanload of flour, case of baking soda, couple hundred pounds of sugar. Right away, butter was harder to get though. And eggs. If some Joe from Suffolk County or New Jersey is going to take the time and effort to smuggle a boatload of goods to Manhattan, they are going to bring something less crushable, with more profit than eggs and butter. Like whiskey and vodka. So there’s a lot of drunk people in the streets in those days. I mean, more than there had been before.
But I find a guy who knows a guy who shows up in, I kid you not, an Oyster 495Z – that’s a English boat for yah, Ken, a classic 50’ sailing yacht – rigged with black sails like a pirate at midnight, loaded with butter and eggs for me. And that wipes out my savings to the last dime, along with every piece of jewelry I had, even my mother’s pearls. So I pay the guy, we shake hands, and he heads out into what had been the East River—we’re calling it the Brooklyn Sea. His theory is they can’t see or hear a black boat with no motor at night. I listen to the beautiful crackle of the sails snap to, and watch until they disappear in the darkness, at which point there is a ripping sound and a fireball, and the yacht and the guy and my life’s savings and my mother’s pearls sink, in tiny pieces, to the bottom of the Brooklyn Sea.
Curvy’s van is still running—Curvy is a friend of mine-- and he manages to get me and my perishables across town here, to the West Village, and we waste no time unloading everything into the commercial refrigerators in the bakery in my basement, which are still cold because I have generators, and a couple old heating-oil tanks filled with gasoline to run them on.
‘Thanks, Curvy,’ I says.
He musta heard my voice shaking. I gotta admit, seeing that sailboat blow up kinda shook me. He wraps his long skinny tattooed arms around me. ‘Bring it on in, girl,’ he says. I bury my face in his scraggly red beard. If you haven’t figured it out, Curvy was nickname born of irony.”
Ken raised a skeptical eyebrow.
I knew what that meant, and it pissed me off. “What, so now you don’t fuckin’ believe me? The world is turned upside down but you don’t think a 35-year-old mousy white woman with a cookie truck can own a townhouse in the West Village? I’ll just say it then: My grandfather was a hedge fund guy back in the day, and he’s gone, and my parents are gone, but I still have the townhouse and all its antique furniture and trendy 1960s artwork and all that. It’s hardly luxury now that about 180 people are living in it.
Air conditioning’s busted. I mentioned the garbage situation already. Some guys cobbed together carts on bicycle wheels, and walked the garbage bags out to the Newark Sea, and dump them off a pier. But they don’t really come around so much anymore. I guess it lost its charm. Good news is that since we’re running out of stuff, and getting more creative at using everything to within an inch of its life, we’re making less garbage. But it still stinks.”
“It’s not so bad here by the park,” Ken said. “But I did notice the smell on my way in.”
“Mostly that’s the bodies. How did you get in, Ken?”
He glanced at his watch—a Tag Heuer which isn’t what you’d expect a socialist to wear--and back down Horatio Street at the sinking sun. “No time for my story,” he said. “We gotta finish yours.”
“Okay. Well, since we’re eating less, we’re shitting less, too, which is good, given that power is rarely on at the fourteen sewage treatment plants around Manhattan, which had not been working all that well anyways since the water rose. Thank god for the plumbers and sewage treatment plant operators and IBEW and the Steamfitters, that’s all I can say...”
Ken’s face brightened at the mention of unions, and he scribbled more furiously in his notebook. “What role did labor play?”
“What role did labor play?” What role did anybody play in this? We held a war, and I baked cookies. “They waded in and opened up the systems so everything just flows out into the water instead of being treated. Though without the pumps going, and with all these people crammed into buildings like mine built over a hundred years ago and not meant to have this many inhabitants, well, the toilets still clog up. The fact that we’re out of toilet paper has helped minimize the clogs down, but it’s done nothing in terms of personal hygiene. I mean, I dunno about roles. We all do what we gotta do.”
“You know what they’re saying,” Ken interrupted. I just looked at him. “They are saying you New Yorkers have always been fighting one another, shooting one another for, like, hundreds of years, so this is just more of the same.”
“You are shittin’ me.” He looked back at me as if he was not shittin’ me. “That is the stupidest-ass thing I have ever heard in my entire life.”
“I think they mean the high crime rate.”
“Let me get this straight. So some coked-up kid robs a store at gunpoint, and that justifies killing 2.2 million people who happen to live within ten miles? This is what comes from too many video games. You wanna hear this, or not?”
He nods.
“Okay. So there I am peering out through the curtain of Curvy’s beard toward my storage shelves. ‘This is it,’ I says to him. ‘This is the last we’re gonna see of baking supplies.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ Curvy says. ‘This isn’t gonna last forever. It’s nearly over, right? I mean seriously, how long can they keep doin’ this shit?’
Good ol’ Curvy. Keeping spirits up.
He unfurls his arms and reaches out a hand. I take it, because that’s what people do these days, hold hands. It isn’t much, but it’s something. Together we start up the stairs. I take one look back down at my bakery mini-warehouse as he pulls off the fiberglass so we could get to the doorway. I didn’t mention that, we got layers of pink insulation in the walls and ceiling of the bakery and blocking the stairs, to hide the ovens from their thermal detectors.
‘If only I had some chocolate chips,’ I says to Curly.
‘What? Where’d that come from?’ he says.
‘They are everyone’s favorite. I got maybe, I dunno, enough flour and stuff for like two hundred dozen cookies left. Eggs in the fridge. I’m short on vanilla but I can stretch it. Got a few walnuts and pecans, I can mix those together and chop them up so they’ll go farther. But people like chocolate chips. It’d be nice to have them, just one last...’.
‘Don’t say it.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Don’t think it.’
‘Too late.’
I follow him up into the living room. The noise and smell hit me all at once. Little kids running around shrieking in five languages. Cara’s 93-year-old grandmother wreaking of piss, sitting in the blue chair. A pack of 12-year-old boys jammed in the corner, playing some game they made up with – get this – pencils and paper. I know, crazy shit, right? It’s like some big family reunion back in the day, except these are all desperate people whose homes had been destroyed by their own government, and there aren’t any chips with ranch dip.
“Native!” Cara yells and she hugs me. Her arms used to be meaty. Now they hang like empty pillowcases flapping on the laundry line. They call me Native because my family’s been here three generations. Four actually; that hedge-fund grandfather arrived in New York as a babe in arms, straight from Poland, already betrothed to my grandmother, the infant daughter of his parents’ best friends. Since that was about two generations more than anyone else in the building, they started calling me “Native”.
So the missiles, I was getting to that. That starts right after the sailboat got blown up. Maybe a couple days later, but by that point, we are pretty much expecting it. After the sailboat, they are blowing up boats like crazy, and that was the end of anything getting smuggled in. Drones start showing up, over the water, then over the streets, hovering outside the windows.
The first missile takes out Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street. Why, I have no idea. Maybe they were trying to make a statement, but if so, the message got lost in translation. Then B&H Camera at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge is obliterated. That sucked. Couple dozen people killed in that one. Not to mention a shitload of inventory including their sweet high-end Leicas. People picking through the wreckage, thinking maybe a mirrorless Q9 might have survived –- I mean me – but everything was smashed to shit, and there were dead people, and that was awful, and got to smelling bad very quickly, and there were rats.”
I shuddered, crossed the sidewalk, and wrapped my hand around the wrought-iron gatepost. “They built Jackson Park in 1826—two hundred and one years ago,” I said. “People in this neighborhood weren’t running around shooting each other, they were doing this. Gardens. Fountain. Sculpture.
So yeah. They start in on the north end of the island. Taking out the Cloisters, Rockefeller’s collection of church ruins bombed in Europe, a pinnacle of irony on top of an ironic mountain. Whole tectonic plates worth of irony here.”
“They bombed the Cloisters? Fort Tryon Park?” Ken looked aghast.
“Yeah, why, your grandmother live there or somethin’?”
“No, I just... I went there on a field trip once, heard a concert in one of the chapels.”
“I went there on a field trip,” I mimicked. “Jesus Christ. Are you telling me you don’t actually know what these fuckers are doing? They started at the north end of Manhattan, and they are working their way south. They are leveling everything. That’s why there’s 180 people in my townhouse. Everyone’s being pushed in this direction.”
“So there’s nobody left on the north end of Manhattan?”
“They’ve gotten down into Harlem, close to Central Park. They flattened Columbia University, said it was a bastion of liberalism and inclusiveness.”
Ken looked pale. “They bombed Columbia?”
“Not bombs. Missiles,” I said.
“What’s the difference?” he asked.
“Bombs get dropped straight down. They blow out everything down to basement level or lower and make these huge craters, they might even blast into the subway. They did that a few times at first, like they were testing it out. Like at B&H Camera. But these guys don’t want craters. Missiles are like rockets shot parallel to the ground. Buildings fall, and make a lot of rubble, but the stuff underground mostly stays intact.”
“Why don’t they want craters?”
“Because the Asshole-In-Chief is a real estate developer. He’s planning on turning the north end of Manhattan into a giant seaside resort, now that it’s seaside. Golf courses. Luxury condos.”
Ken laughed. A dry, cynical laugh, like you hear at academic cocktail parties, the boringest category of social event on the planet.
“What, you don’t believe that either? Let me say this. I know it for a fact. He’s had the architectural engineering firm up there scoping it out already. He’s already got his tower and those condos on West Side Highway, it’s not much of a stretch.”
“You talked to them yourself, did you?”
“I....”. I closed my eyes. That was an ugly scene. “Some of your union friends found them. Teamsters, in fact, doing a sweep through Morningside Park...”
“A sweep?”
“They line up a few feet apart and walk through the park, looking for anything useful. Like food, water bottles, edible shit.”
“Like plants?”
“Yeah like plants. Jesus Christ.” I didn’t mention that we had eaten all the squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits months ago. It all kinda tastes like chicken. Not pigeon, though. Pigeon tastes pretty nasty. “Yes, plants. Purslane, nettles, dandelion, wild grapes, whatever. Things to eat. And they caught this survey team from Mr. President’s architectural engineering contractors, with blueprints and everything. The guys persuaded them to explain what they were up to. Teamsters can be persuasive.”
“And you saw this?”
I nodded. “I was with them. Look, I was looking for mint, alright? Mint. It grows in some of the parks. Not a real peppermint, but wild horsemint, it’s good enough. I still had a bit of baking chocolate on hand then, thought I’d make, mint cookies, like those Girl Scout things.”
“I don’t think anybody’s going to believe that. Not sure my editor will even let me put it in.”
“What, the part about the horsemint, or the part about the seaside golf resort?” I wondered what his editor would say about our squirrel stew. My mouth watered at the thought of it.
A crow cawed loudly, then another. They circled overhead, coming in to roost in the Jackson Park oaks. I watched them, relishing the noise, the sheer dark swirling life of it. Tilting my head back made me feel dizzy. “I gotta sit down,” I said, and walking through the gate, past the silent fountain toward a park bench.
“Don’t you need to lock...”
“What,” I said as he sat down next to me on the sagging boards. “You think someone’s going to steal my last few cookies? They are free for the taking. Whoever needs it most can have it.”
“You were saying they’ve run everyone out of Harlem.”
“Yeah. I was up there just a few days ago. It’s...”. It’s what. Surreal. Terrifying. A bad science fiction movie. “It’s bleak. I’ll just say that. It’s bleak.”
“What were you doing up there, if it’s deserted?”
I breathed the cool, wet, sour evening air. The crows were settling into their roost, their calls becoming more conversational. Intimate. The spinning in my head slowed down. I listened to my breath go in and out of my lungs. “I had told Curvy that I wished I had chocolate chips. I told you that already, I think.”
He nodded.
My voice flowed easier now that we were sitting down. “So I come in the house, and am talking to everybody, and there is a lot of noise, and people are sharing whatever anyone had dug up to eat that day, bags of potato chips, I think someone managed to find a vending machine in an office building basement, there were like little packages of those orange crackers with that bizarre peanut butter shit in the middle. We make sure the kids eat first.
So then Josen comes in, and he grabs my arm, and whispers, ‘I think I got something for you’, and I’m like, ‘What, man?’ but then everyone sees him and is like ‘Hey Josen, hey Josen is back, let me give you a hug Jozen’, so off he goes and I don’t get to talk to him until later that night. Josen’s a Teamster, by the way. Drives delivery trucks, or did, quite a while after all this started, he was still driving stuff from one end of the island to the other, dodging falling buildings and stuff. Crazy action movie shit. And if there was something to be found out there, he was the man to find it. And they’d usually give him some of it. Soda, pastries, he brought us a cheesecake once. Last of Junior’s Manhattan stash, the basement warehouse under their Times Square place.
So it gets quieter and the kids are going to bed, I find him sitting out on the fire escape and ask what he wanted to talk to me about.
‘I think I have what you wanted,’ he says. Josen was always very serious. Deadpan.
‘What did I want?’ I ask.
‘Chocolate chips,’ he says. I remember the way the sweat was running down his dark face, down his arms that were like iron. He was a big guy, solid muscle, broad shoulders. Handsome guy. Fifty maybe. Not a kid.
‘You’re shittin’ me,’ I says.
He shakes his head and licks sweat from his upper lip. ‘Uptown though. Harlem.’
‘Where?’
‘Frank-n-Frank’s.’
Frank-n-Franks was famous, right? This wild queer couple baking the most over-the-top concoctions. Like chocolate lava cro-donuts with unicorn sprinkles. They could’ve made a fortune with the LGBTQ tourists on Christopher Street, but they wanted to stay true to their Harlem roots. So they set up on 125th Street, right in the middle of Harlem Food Renaissance.
‘You were delivering to Frank-n-Frank’s? When?’
‘Three days ago.’
‘It’s a hundred and ten degrees out, Josen. If there are chocolate chips in Harlem, they are soup washing down the storm drain by now.’
He purses his lips, understated. ‘The refrigerator truck was still running when I left it.’
‘You left them in a truck?’
‘Those guys have money. Had. They still had a truck. And gas. And they knew a guy who knew a guy who had chocolate chips. So, they sent me to get them.’
I don’t ask him where, or from who. ‘What happened?’”
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