Sealed Up
What comes back to me first is how Lalo used to call huddles. Any decision, even the most sinister, required a huddle to get everyone on the same page. Rip off Balducci’s for a crate of oranges to sell? First we all had to commit. Leave a few on the fire escape of the old lady who turned a blind eye? All of us had to agree. Up to the porn theatre on 14th to hassle the pop-eyed Popeyes getting ready to jerk each other off? We’d all have to be in the right mood. In the huddle we would humm and Lalo would massage our heads to encourage thought.
Lalo cared. Or he didn’t — I couldn’t fully tell. He would scamper across the street to walk backwards before groups of older girls in their Catholic school skirts, crooning an Al Green song and trying to conduct them, leaving me feeling like an oaf.
Last week, after getting off of work renovating a brownstone, I passed through the old neighborhood for the first time in years. That was when I saw him, posed and motionless in the window of a first floor apartment. It was such a jolt, I just kept walking.
The D train was packed, like it always is going up to the Bronx at rush hour. To avoid the crush of bodies I rode the platform between cars, roar and flaring lights all around me; people inside pressed up to the thick plastic like zombies. I could have taken a quick dive beneath the screeching wheels and they wouldn’t have batted an eye.
The train came up from beneath the Harlem River and pulled into 149th. I don’t know what it was — sudden claustrophobia, about being on the train, about going back to my walk-up — but I jumped off the train and onto a roomy D headed back downtown, bought a sixpack at a bodega and stopped to summon my energy as soon as Lalo’s vibrant building came into view.
On the third floor, an Indian woman was busy wrapping her daughter’s hair in a yellow turban. Below them was a Chinese family, the mother standing in the background with a pot of soup. In the window next to Lalo’s, a big Irish-looking guy in an orange uniform, maybe Con Edison Power, stood grinning, having placed his safety helmet on the head of his young son. Lalo was one of the few people alone in a window.
I walked up, noticed too late that I was holding the beers outstretched like a waiter, like an offering. I let my hands down and, like we were regular buddies just passing any old day, popped the cap on one of the Schmidt’s and placed it right up on Lalo’s ledge.
As I’d seen — Lalo’s face was a lot more angular than when we were kids, his long hair slicked back to disappear behind his head and then the pony tail coming back to sash over the front of his shoulder. His eyes were dark and alluring. I was almost surprised I’d recognized him so quickly, but maybe it was the familiar, dramatic gaze.
“Our first beer together, Lalo… Salud.”
I drained mine then walked back over to replace it. There were quite a few people in the street. Leaners off of the methadone clinic a few doors away. An old black bum dragging on past with a couple ripping garbage bags.
“Hey, Lalo,” I said, loosening up a little more, “how come you let them knock down my building? I could’a been right over there. We could have talked on walkie-talkies or some shit. I’m haulin’ my ass an hour up to Fordham Road. All the scarred folk — ever notice that? — hack doctors, must be.” I knew I was rambling and polished off the next beer to slow myself down. “What, Lalo, no words of wisdom? Don’t even drink my beer?”
The old black dude, with his dingy yellow raincoat and unlaced boots, his rheumy eyes and edemic moon face, had pulled up right in my path to stare.
“But brother…they’s only pictures,” he confided, flicking an old calloused hand at the plaque beneath Lalo’s window.
Locals artists, using City grant money and a wide range of models emblematic of NYC’s diversity, paint the portraits on aluminum sheets which also function to stabilize abandoned structures. Project Seal-Up safeguards people and preserves value for prospective buyers while it invests old neighborhoods with new life.
I walked by him and hopped up on the hood of the car. “Yeah, no kidding.” I shook my head.
“Ah don’t know why Ah’m talking for,” he softened, “there’s a gal up on the third floor Ah wouldn’t mind talking to. Wouldn’t mind talking to her fo’ awhile. …Ah’d dream about that woman up on that third floor mah eyes could only make her out better.”
