He didn’t know why he followed her, exactly. It was just a gut feeling.
Havier had never done this before. She walked perhaps 50 feet ahead of him, swaying her ass in tight trendy stone-washed jeans, her purse over her shoulder. They moved east along 57th Street, pushing slowly further away from Columbus Circle. It was a bright, crisp April morning. He didn’t have to work until noon; he was a waiter at a hipster restaurant down in Chelsea. The only way he was able to live in Manhattan was by living rent-free with his older brother, Carlos, up in deep Spanish Harlem at 145th and Amsterdam.
The woman—she was white, early twenties, wearing a silver tight top, sporting low black heels, the clack of which he heard even from so far behind—turned left onto 7th Avenue and, cautiously, he followed. Blocks passed by. He felt slightly anxious. But he also enjoyed this. He liked white girls. He was Mexican, five years younger than Carlos. Twenty-nine. Almost thirty. Born and raised in Queens, he and Carlos and their little sister Anita.
He lived for a while in Newark, in Jersey, but he hated it. He tried community college but it just bored him. He’d never been into education. He’d dropped out of high school senior year. He was the opposite of Carlos: Thirty-four, a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, his older brother had started his own clothing store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Every night Havier and Carlos sat on the couch together in their little brownstone in West Harlem, smoked too much pot, and Carlos asked his little brother what his future plans were.
“You can’t wait tables forever,” Carlos would say, lighting up the bowl in the little marble pipe, the pot burning cherry red exhuming a luscious, tasty stench of skunk. Best shit in Harlem.
Havier would laugh and shrug and say, “I don’t know. Life’s a mystery.”
After a heavy pull off the pipe, aggressively blowing smoke into his little brother’s face, Carlos would say, “Dude. You gotta do something with your life, man. Go to school again. Find a trade. Get a girlfriend. A car. Anything. Something. Don’t you want what I have?”
Then Havier would scrunch his eyes and gaze at his brother across the smooth, cool cream leather couch and say, “What you have? You mean divorced, in debt up to your neck, working 24/7?”
“It ain’t that bad,” Carlos would say, and they’d smoke the rest in silence.
~
The woman stopped in front of a building at 7th Ave and West 51st, a place called Winter Garden Theatre according to the massive neon flashing sign. He stood back and watched her cross the street and then she knocked on the big double black metal doors of the theatre and a moment later a gigantic Black dude opened the door and she slid inside the place.
Havier waited. Across 51st Street on the north side. Leaning against an iron gate he extracted his Pall Malls and snagged one, placing it between his thin lips. He lit the thing with his silver heavy Zippo, clanking the lid back harshly and sucking the tobacco deep into his lungs. He tried to look casual. He watched the people crisscrossing every which way. Manhattan. He never wanted to leave. He hated West Harlem, but free rent was free rent. He wanted to live in Midtown, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, the Bowery, essentially anywhere other than Harlem, with the sketchy gangbangers always dogging his steps and the Puerto Rican whores and the jaded Middle Eastern men who ran the bodegas and the fucked-up little welfare kids running around like they lived in a third-world country.
What was he doing here? He’d nearly forgotten. Right. The woman. This random woman. What was he going to do? Nothing, of course. He’d never followed anyone in his life, man or woman. He had no plan. He had just felt…the urge. A compulsion. A drive. A need, almost. But why her? She wasn’t really his type: He generally liked his own kind, dark-skinned Mexican chicas. And he liked them thick. This woman was skinny, white and seemed like she had money, or both. Did she work at the theatre? He wanted for some odd reason to know about her life: Her name, her career, where she was originally from, whether she had a boyfriend (or girlfriend?) or not, where she’d gone to college, everything. Maybe that was it: He followed her because she seemed far out of his reach, figuratively and literally.
Then she suddenly emerged again from the big black metal double doors and it was like a white flame was being vomited back up from the black darkness of hell. Or so Havier imagined.
She walked west on 51st, passing 8th Ave, 9th Ave, 10th Ave, and then when she hit 11th Ave she took a right heading north. Across the street from DeWitt-Clinton Park, on the south side of 52nd Street she walked slowly towards a tall 10-story apartment building, the building dark gray and phallic like some sort of demented concrete cock rising from the city floor.
At last she stopped at a building—600 West 52nd Street—and he slowed and stayed back in the shadows of an awning at a café. He watched her standing in front of the door’s brown building fumbling in her purse. She found her keys and jammed a key into the lock and finally opened the apartment building door and entered.
Havier waited, smoked another Pall Mall, gazed around him, shrugged, and walked off.
~
That night after work—he didn’t get home until after midnight—he walked into the apartment and immediately heard Jay-Z playing low volume through the speakers in the living room and smelled the rank, delightful scent of marijuana. Havier smiled, dropped his backpack onto the counter, stepped into the living room, and, seeing Carlos sitting lazily on one end of the cream leather couch, he nodded in acknowledgment and plopped down with a crash on his end of the couch.
“Long day?” Carlos said, handing him the pipe; smoke billowed out of his older brother’s nostrils and mouth as if he were some kind of evil cartoon dragon after having recently spitted fire.
Havier sighed, leaning back against the comfy couch. He took the pipe, placed the end to his lips, and inhaled, holding the pot inside for as long as he could, the green burning, until he coughed and exhaled. God it felt good.
“Yeah,” Havier said. “These fucking white hipsters, man. Such privileged, spoiled little faggots.”
Carlos laughed, inhaling from the pipe again. They casually passed it back and forth. The song ended and now it was 50 Cent singing Many Men.
“How was your day?” Havier asked, not really caring.
Carlos shrugged, leaning back against the couch, his dark slacks loose and his collared white shirt unbuttoned, his loafers sitting on the floor.
“Usual bullshit,” Carlos said. Convincing Fuck-Tard corporations to buy our shit in bulk. Selling clothes to rich white kids in Crown Heights. Orders to be filled.” He shook his head. “Fucking Cathy has been up my ass again, man. Money. All she ever fucking talks about is money. As if Esmerelda struggles at all.”
Cathy was Carlos’s ex-wife, a white woman three years older than his brother. They had a four-year-old daughter, Esmerelda, who pretty much passed for white which, Havier knew, would be a blessing in her life.
“That’s what you get for marrying a white woman,” Havier said, knowing this was a sore spot for his brother.
“You always fuckin say that shit.”
Taking the pipe Havier shrugged. “Fuckin true ain’t it?”
There was a silence and then both men laughed. Shaking his head again Carlos said, “I guess you’re right. Shoulda stuck with the Latinas. Safer.”
“I dunno. The ‘Latinas’ are fuckin crazy, too. They’re all crazy, Hermano. Chicas. Mujeres.”
Carlos looked over at him. They were both high. The pipe was empty. Havier set the pipe on the coffee table. The brothers held each other’s gaze for a long time. Finally, Havier said, “I did something today.”
“What do you mean did something?”
Feeling a little awkward and insecure, waffling as to whether he should say anything, Havier at last said, “A girl. A woman. A white woman. I followed her.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Yeah,” Havier said, high as fuck now, smiling for no apparent reason. “I was walking around along 57th Street and I saw this woman and I just…followed her.”
Carlos’ eyes scrunched. “Why? For how long? Where to?”
Havier shrugged. “I don’t know why. I just did. Maybe, like, 45 minutes total? I know where she lives now.”
Carlos sat up a little, erect. “Dude that’s kinda creepy, bro. You can’t just follow random women around. Especially white women. What’s wrong with you?”
Havier took in a lot of air, silently, and slowly blew it out. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
~
The next day on his hour-long lunch break he walked to her apartment building at 600 52nd. He waited for her to potentially emerge. It was 2pm. Another bright and lovely spring day. There was a comedy club near her building, a Subway sandwich shop, a café and several restaurants. He waited an hour across the street, smoking Pall Mall after Pall Mall, leaning against the wall, probably looking either like a John waiting for men to pick him up or else a shady drug dealer. But he wasn’t either, and he wasn’t holding, so he shrugged the lazy fear off and waited. Fifteen minutes.
Finally he said Fuck It and walked west on 52nd until he reached the piers on the Hudson River, which was wide and ravaging and shit-brown colored. North of Hudson River Park; the 495 Freeway Mario Cuomo bridge which stretched across the shit brown water to Jersey, Weehawken and Union City and Hoboken. North Rivers Pier; Pier 90. All that shit. Havier stood watching the river and the bridge and the cars going across and he remembered living in Newark for a year. Terrible fucking place. Rats. Sketchiness. Crime. Worse, even, than Spanish Harlem.
It had been after high school when he lived in Newark. He’d saved a little money from his shitty busboy restaurant job in Harlem north of 116th by Columbia University (talk about a different universe). So he found a tiny studio in Newark and commuted to the job and tried to scrounge a little to save. A few months after moving in he landed the waiter job in Chelsea at the fancy restaurant. He was less qualified than others who applied but he had the feeling—he couldn’t be sure but it was a gut thought—he might have been one of those “DEI hires.” You know, all those rich white guilt-ridden progressives trying to make up for racism. Fuckin fools, far as he was concerned. But whatever: A job was a job.
He worked hard, six, sometimes even seven days a week for months at a stretch. He saved. He was hardly ever home. At last after nine months on the job—and a year in his apartment in Jersey—he left and moved in with his older brother who’d recently gotten a little one-bedroom in Spanish Harlem after moving from Queens, where they grew up. Now he worked and saved and lived rent free and hung out with his bro and just lived his life. Thirty. At least he wasn’t living at home still, with their parents. Their father who’d been born in Oaxaca City and had worked his ass off doing random manual labor jobs to get enough to apply for a visa to the United States and had come in his early twenties, becoming a citizen and marrying their mother who had come after him from Tijuana.
Havier and Carlos were “first-generation” American kids. From a working-class home. Queens, filled with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Mexicans and Cubans. They’d grown up hearing a dozen different languages and dialects with a rich, sizzling culture of plantains and tacos and differing varieties of Spanish spoken everywhere. Carlos had put his head down and worked hard and got out. But Havier had struggled. He was more sensitive, less disciplined, more lazy, less motivated. He’d been their parents favorite which was unusual since he was the middle child between Carlos and their little sister Anita. He’d never understood why. They just doted on him. But he’d felt suffocated and had needed to flee the nest. So he had. To Newark.
~
Two days later he had the day off.
He took the subway down to 59th Street/Columbus Circle on the 2-3 train, sitting on the cold metal orange seat and avoiding anyone’s eyes, as everyone else did, too, everyone like jaded urban zombies trying to exist in their own universes devoid of human life except their own. That was the nature of any metropolis, but especially Manhattan.
He walked slowly towards her place but by a different route, walking south along 11th Street. As he paralleled DeWitt-Clinton Park he watched the sprinting, hyperactive dogs in the dog-run and saw the women and men gathered around yapping with each other as their maniacal, explosive dogs ran as if their lives depended on it. Sometimes Havier felt like he wanted to be a dog: Running, taken care of by someone, carefree. A life of privileged, protected ease. You didn’t have to work for your food or to pay your rent. You didn’t have to worry about being racially profiled by the NYPD. (How many times had he been stopped by white cops asking him, in the late hours, what he was “doing” there in Chelsea?) No dating apps or any of that bullshit: When you were horny you just fucked. Gay men, he thought, were lucky in the end: Fucking on date one was normal.
But for straight men it was a whole different game. Especially now, in the era of #MeToo and radical feminism. The Latinas didn’t give a fuck about all that white Woke nonsense (most of them, anyway) but the white women, Asians, and some Black girls did. He hated it. He hadn’t had sex since Latisha six months ago, a thick Black hottie he’d been screwing for a while. Inevitably, she’d become emotionally attached and had wanted “something more.” So he broke up with her, like he did every time this happened. He’d seen the strain of his parents’ marriage; the anger, the fighting, the denial and shoving shit under the rug, the resentment. And he’d watched Carlos’ marriage crumble before his eyes. Only two years Carlos had been married. Two years! And it had all blown up in his face. She took nearly everything from him. Life could be cruel. Women could be cruel.
His timing was impeccable: At last he saw the woman again. She was just walking out of her apartment building. This time he saw her from closer up. She wore a loose yellow dress which ended a few inches above her knees. Her skin was fairly tan. She had lipstick on but that clear glossy kind. Her hair was blond and thick and curly. Blue eyes which he was pulled into like a laser beam from an alien spacecraft.
She was walking right towards him.
As they passed he smiled slightly at her and she saw him and she smiled.
After he passed her he waited a moment and then turned around. She was moving away from him, her ass bouncing behind the yellow dress.
Now what?
~
Havier sort of forgot about the woman. She faded in his mind. Work was busy. What was the point in following a random woman? Like Carlos said it was creepy, but more than anything it was just pointless. Then again, he thought: Everything is pointless, isn’t it? My life is pointless. He wanted a girlfriend but wasn’t willing to become vulnerable and let himself become emotionally attached. He wanted a better-paying job but he was comfortable and lazy. He wanted to get his own apartment but he couldn’t’ realistically afford it, at least not anywhere he actually wanted to be.
His life felt “stable,” in a non-motivated, purposeless kind of way. Work, pot, Carlos, repeat. Day after day, week after week, month after month. Once a month he had dinner with his parents out in Queens. They always asked him the same questions: Met a woman? How’s work? What are you going to do with your life? Why don’t you take some free community college classes, better yourself, get an education? What do you need? How can we help you? He loathed their deep love and affection. He just wanted to be alone.
And then one night, about a month after the last time he’d seen the woman, around 11pm, when he was in the back parking lot at work dumping out the trash, about to leave for the evening, he saw her. The woman. In Chelsea. She was walking towards the restaurant. He stood back silently in the shadows and watched her. This time she wore a short black skirt and had ruby-red lipstick on. Her hair had been extra curled. Her breasts jutted out, C-cups, he thought, bulging against the thin green blouse she wore. She looked incredible. A surge of desire rushed through his body like a tidal wave after an earthquake.
He watched as she rounded the corner to enter the restaurant from the front entrance. His eyes followed her.
After he dumped the rest of the trash and recycling he walked back into the restaurant through the back entrance where employees came in and exited. He zigzagged through the hot, steaming back kitchen, cutting through and around the laughing, Spanish-speaking voices—almost everyone in the back of house was Latino—and out onto the floor. He scanned with his eyes and found her, at a table in the far corner across the room. She sat across from another woman at a small table. The other woman looked vaguely Indian. He watched them for a while. They were both drinking, taking shots. They laughed often. He wished he could just talk to her, even if only for one solitary second.
“Hey, what are you still doing here,” Juan, one of the young hotheaded cooks said, brushing past Havier. “You should have been gone fifteen minutes ago.”
He was right.
~
It was almost 1am—the restaurant stayed open until 3am—when the woman finally walked out of the front entrance. The Indian woman followed right behind her. They stood talking and laughing under the light from a street lamp. Havier was across the street hidden in the shadows again. They kept talking. At last, after what felt like forever but was probably twenty minutes, the two women hugged, waved, said goodnight, and started off in opposite directions.
Havier followed.
The restaurant was on West 16th and 9th Ave. He stayed back a ways. She did exactly what he assumed she’d do. He followed her cautiously down the stairs into the 14th Street subway station. He sat in the same car as her on the train but way down at the other end. Being 1:30am, only half a dozen people were in the train. The subway rumbled and rattled and the stops came and the announcer said, Keep clear of the closing doors, please. He almost fell asleep.
Then she got off at 57th. He followed, waiting until she was safely off the train. He realized by now that she was a little drunk. Not wasted, but tipsy.
Up the stairs, his heart pumping with both the struggle up the steep, piss-reeking concrete and his adrenaline—he noticed his hand was slightly trembling—he followed as she moved south to 52nd and then headed west towards her building. It was 2am now. The streets over here were quiet. Minus the light from streetlamps it was all very dark.
As they neared an alley, not half a block from her building, Havier hanging a good ways back and being very quiet and careful, she suddenly stopped. She rifled around in her purse, pulled her phone out, and started texting something.
About one minute into this out of nowhere Havier saw a shadowy figure emerge from the alleyway and before he could blink the white man had his elbow around the woman’s neck and had a knife at her throat and he was screaming at her to hand over the purse, and she screamed, a terror-inducing scream, and she struggled out of the purse, the man removing his arm for a moment, and he ripped it from her, spilling some things as he did.
“Please,” she said, “Spare my life. Just take the purse and let me go.”
Holding the knife, looking down at her the man, who was very big, said, “I want more than just the purse.”
She was beginning to cry and she said, “What do you want?”
“Your body.”
On impulse she ran, actually right towards Havier, leaning against the wall in the shadows. But the man gave chase and easily caught her; he wrapped his arms around her waist and she screamed and kicked and tried to escape but it was no use.
The man turned her around and pushed her to the wall maybe 25 feet down from where Havier was. He placed his palm around her mouth to silence her screams. He yanked her skirt up and roughly pulled her panties down and she wriggled once more and he had the knife at her throat and he screeched through bared teeth, “Move again and I’ll stab you through the heart, bitch.” Then she started shaking and murmuring in fear like a frightened child.
As the man was tugging down his pants Havier emerged from the shadows and said, “Get away from her.”
The man stopped, looking around frantically.
“Who are you?” the man said.
“Nevermind who I am, just leave her the fuck alone.”
The man, still clutching the woman, eyed Havier and said, “Fuckin spic. Get out of here before I send you back to your shithole country.”
“Come make me,” Havier said.
He was shaking he was so scared. This guy was older, bigger, and armed. Yet Havier had been in countless fights growing up in Queens. It had been normal. Puerto Rican kids, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, you name it. He usually won.
“What’d you say you fuckin immigrant piece of shit?”
“I’m not an immigrant,” Havier said. “I was born in this country. In this city. I am just as American as you are, chump.”
And suddenly the man charged him.
Havier moved barely in time and the man only clipped his side with the knife, just hardly grazing his skin. Nothing.
They faced each other.
The woman was in his peripherals. “Go get help if you can!” Havier yelled.
The woman didn’t move, though; she just stood there, watching, in shock. He heard her crying lightly. Her whole body was trembling.
The man sliced the air in front of him with the knife like a psychopath. “Come and get it you little Mexican punk.”
Havier dodged when the man went in again, and this time Havier got a hard punch to the back of the man’s head. Momentarily disoriented, the man backed off for a second before shaking his head and saying, “You’re dead meat, kid. Is one piece of ass really worth your life?”
“Fuck you,” Havier said, and spat.
They circled.
“Fight me like a man, no knife,” Havier said.
“Suck my dick, Chico.”
“You wish,” Havier said, laughing against his cold terror.
The man rushed him again and this time got Havier in a sort of football tackle grab kinda move. But the knife thankfully broke loose from his hand and clattered to the sidewalk. The man was stronger and bigger but Havier only needed one chance. Finally he wriggled free and got his thin, wiry body free and threw a punch hard to the man’s head, landing. The man staggered back. He lurched down to grab the knife but just in time Havier kicked it and it skidded along the sidewalk near to where the woman was. She watched on in horror.
“Get the knife!” Havier screamed and, out of his peripherals, he saw her take a few steps, bend down, and snatch the blade.
They tangled again but Havier got free once more and punched the man in the head three times in hard, fast succession. The man was dazed.
Havier took his chance. He ran to the woman, snatched her thin white wrist, and pulled her along with him. They ran towards her place. She held the knife in her free hand.
“Where are we going,” she yelled badly out of breath.
“Your place,” he yelled back.
He realized what he’d said.
She gazed at him in wonder and fear as they ran. They slowed at her block and then stopped at 600 West 52nd. Looking back they saw only the empty street.
“Do you want to come up?” she said. “I mean: That guy’s still out there.”
“Alright,” Havier said.
“But,” she said, fumbling with her purse for her keys, “How did you…know…I lived…I mean…” She paused, then glanced over at him. “Didn’t I see you once…like…a month or so ago.” Knowledge, the image, rose up in her eyes and she said, “Yes. I walked past you near my place maybe a month ago.”
Before he could think of what else to say he just let it drop. “I followed you.”
She opened the apartment building door. They entered into darkness. She shut the door behind them. They were safe. Off the streets.
“What?” she said. He couldn’t see her but he felt her strong presence.
“I saw you one day. On 7th Avenue and 57th. I had nothing to do. I followed you. You went to a theatre and then to your apartment. I noted the address. And I came back several times, one of which was when we passed each other. And then tonight you came into the restaurant where I work. So I followed you home.”
“But…why?” she said, into the enveloping darkness.
He swallowed. His heart thundered. His hands shook.
“I don’t know, truthfully. It was just, like, a feeling. A compulsion. I’d never done it before. I couldn’t stop myself.”
There was a long, syrupy silence in the darkness and then, shocked, Havier felt her cold hand on his cheek, gentle, and she said, “What’s your name?”
“Havier,” he said.
“I’m Jenna.”
More silence.
“Do you want me to leave?” Havier said.
“I want you to come up with me.”
She led him using her iPhone light to the elevator and they went up six floors. They entered her apartment and she flipped the light on and it seemed very bright. Out floor-to-ceiling windows he saw the majesty of Manhattan down below.
She used the bathroom and cleaned her hands and asked him if he wanted a drink. He said yes.
They sat near each other on the couch and sipped their Vodka Tonics, ice clinking.
“I’m not going to kiss you or sleep with you,” Jenna said.
“That’s ok,” he said.
“What do you want? I mean: Why did you follow me?”
He shrugged. “Like I said: I really don’t know.” He paused and sipped from his glass and then said, “I guess the truth is, I feel lost. Lost in my personal life. I feel alone. Like I live on my own planet. I saw you walking that morning and I just thought, Now there is somebody special. I can’t explain it. It was just this…urge.”
“Havier?”
“Yeah?”
She looked at him for a very long time without speaking. Then she set her glass down on the coffee table and she said, “I know what that feels like.”
“You do?” he said.
“I do.”
Silence again.
“Havier?” she said.
‘Yeah?”
“Thanks for saving my life.”
“Thanks for saving mine.”
She came closer to him on the couch. They lifted their glasses and clinked them together.
“Amen to that,” she said.
“Amen.”
I don’t know how to feel about this, but it kept me in the edge because this did not go where I thought it would. I need one of those whirls of dots that say “loading” while you process…