Chapter Three #2
Christian leaned in, like he was genuinely curious, like Danny was somehow the peculiar one at this table.
“On the North Shore?” Danny said, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of having to justify his presence on the island of Manhattan twice in one day.
Christian leaned in closer, his elbow sliding across the paper place mat.
“Of Staten Island?” Danny said.
“Oh my gaaaaaawd!” Christian squealed in a high, shrill voice that made Danny’s teeth tingle. “Did you take the ferry here?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“That’s adorable. Waitwaitwait: Staten Island Ferry,” Christian said slowly, playing with the words like a Rubik’s Cube. “Staten Island Fairy,” he said, laughing more to himself than to Danny, fluttering his fingers in the air to make the homonym clearer. “That’s a good Club Kid persona.”
Danny’s eyebrows furrowed.
“You know, the Club Kids? Michael Alig? Jenny Talia? Amanda Lepore?” Christian took Danny’s apparent confusion as his cue to immediately launch into an explanation.
“The Club Kids! They own nightlife. Every night, they roll in with the most insane outfits and turn whatever place they’ve crashed into a complete scene.”
Danny, intrigued in spite of himself, leaned closer.
“You know that missing Angel kid who’s all over the news?” Christian asked.
“Oh,” Danny piped up, looking over to the man at the counter reading the newspaper. “Yeah.”
“Well, he’s one of ’em,” Christian continued.
“He’s their drug dealer or wingman or something.
I actually know him—well, I’ve met him,” he corrected himself, “at the Limelight once. Although he was rolling so hard, he probably wouldn’t remember me, so actually, yeah, don’t mention that you know me. He’ll just be confused.”
Rather than ask for a full diagram of that sentence, Danny decided it was best to feign understanding.
“Sure.” Danny nodded, looking over to the door, suddenly nervous that at any moment his dad was going to burst in and find him skipping school, eating lunch with this bowl of Froot Loops.
“So you go to school on Staten Island, which is basically the moon,” Christian said, squinting, and drumming his fingers on the table. “What are you doing here?”
The million-dollar question.
“Oh,” Danny said, tracing a D in the dew on his soda can. “Well, I had an audition. For the performing arts high school.”
“SNAP!” Christian yipped, pointing his finger in the air as if to silence Danny. “That’s where I go!”
“LaGuardia?” Danny asked, surprised. “No friggin’ way!”
Danny felt a quick rush of excitement, followed just as quickly by a rush of worry—he needed some sissy hanger-on like he needed a kick in the ribs. Still, this kid was a step up from the assholes at St. Pete’s.
“Wait.” Danny paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”
His Caddyshack monologue may have been DOA, but this line absolutely killed. Christian exploded with studio-audience laughter.
“Yeah, probably,” Christian wheezed, dramatically wiping fake tears from his eyes. “But it’s audition day, which means everyone’s checked out, so I just had someone sign me in to geometry. You think Twyla Tharp cares if I know jack shit about the Pythagorean theorem?”
Danny knew perhaps one of those words.
“Which department?” Christian said, scooching his chair forward.
“Drama,” Danny replied, surprised at how proud he felt saying that word.
“Oh, per chance,” Christian purred. “A regular Laurence Olivier, I’m sure. I’m in the dance department, obviously.”
“Why obviously?” Danny asked.
Christian gasped.
“Look at this port de bras!” he said, draping his arms in the air in a way that even Danny could admit was kinda pretty, as arm positions went. “You think I’m gonna waste all this majesty on the damn French horn?”
Danny looked back to the counter. Where the hell were his fries?
“Oh, I’m so rude,” Christian swatted. “Come on! Dump out your purse! Tell me how your audition went.”
“Oh, um,” stammered Danny, honestly unsure of his answer or what it meant to dump out his purse. “All right, I guess. I thought I did a good job with the monologue, but…” The python’s nonplussed stare flashed in Danny’s head.
“My song was good, but everyone seemed to be freakin’ out because I didn’t bring sheet music or something.”
“You didn’t bring sheet music?” Christian asked, dropping his voice.
“Uh,” Danny proceeded cautiously, “…no?”
“Well, nice knowin’ ya.” Christian sighed and leaned back in his seat, scanning his nail beds for dirt. “See you in twenty years at jury duty or whatever.”
“Wait, why?” Danny pleaded. “Is that so bad?”
“Well, it’s not so good, that’s for damn sure,” Christian said. “Drama’s really cutthroat. LaGuardia’s a serious place. They’re looking for professional students. People who take this business really, really seriously.”
“I take it seriously,” Danny said, straightening his back.
“No, I mean…” Christian frowned, clearly trying to find the right way to tell Danny that he’d completely bombed.
“Like, you gotta be prepared and really think things through. Okay, yeah, I’m dippin’ out of geometry or whatever, but when it comes to electives, you better believe I am at the barre early, warmed up and ready to do this shit for real.
I mean, I’m sorry, but you really have to want this. ”
“I do want this!” Danny snapped. “I really want this! It took me a bus, a ferry, and a subway to get here. I mean, do you have any idea how much shit I’m gonna catch for skipping school?
” Danny paused. “Well, clearly you don’t, since the only math you’re doing right now is figuring out how many Dr. Brown’s a ten-spot can get you.
I had to memorize a whole scene from Caddyshack!
And I almost got stabbed by a lady who told me to have sex with a pig!
Trust me, I’m taking this really frickin’ seriously! ”
Danny could tell from the tightness in his throat that he was shouting, that he was starting to sound like his father.
“Well, you’ve got the ‘drama’ part down,” Christian mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, eyebrow cocked.
“Order up!” the tired man behind the counter called out behind the speak-thru’s bulletproof glass.
Danny scraped back his chair and stamped up to the counter, where a steaming pile of french fries sat in a white Styrofoam take-out box, ribbons of ketchup already slashed across it like a crime scene. He carried it back to the table, not bothering to sit before digging in.
“So I guess we’re not sayin’ grace,” Christian deadpanned.
Danny kept eating.
“Look, I’m sorry.” Christian rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you were a sensation.”
Danny chewed, then swallowed. Chewed, then swallowed.
“Who knows? I’ll probably be seeing your skinny ass in ballet come September and you’ll end up being even fiercer than me.”
Danny didn’t answer. He just shoveled more fistfuls of soggy fries into his mouth.
He would eat a few more bites, then get back on the ? train to South Ferry and make it back in time to catch the three o’clock bus back home.
But just as Danny was wiping up the last blot of ketchup, Christian’s voice wailed out like a fire alarm.
“Come on!”
Christian sprang from his seat.
“Let’s go!”
“What?” Danny blurted. “I haven’t even finished—”
“Come ON! Leave it. I’ve got an idea.”
Before Danny could even take his last bite, Christian was already dashing through the doors. He burst out into the afternoon sun like a cheerleader at a pep rally cartwheeling—literally—down Amsterdam Avenue.
“Wait! Where are we going?” Danny called, scrambling to keep from tripping, but his question vanished like a drugstore receipt in the wind.
Christian leapt off of curbs and stamped through puddles and scattered flocks of pigeons and high-fived doormen while Danny chased behind him, breathless, trying not to scuff his shoes.
He finally caught up to Christian on a block where the sidewalk crashed into a forbidding stone wall abutting a blockade of trees.
“It’s just in here,” Christian said, his breath not even heaving in the slightest. “Ever been to Sheep Meadow?”
“Wait. Stop!” Danny barked, looking around at the trees and the wall and the cobblestones, which all at once began to look nightmarishly familiar. “You mean, we’re going into Central Park?”
Christian peered at Danny, clearly waiting for a punch line.
“Uhh…yeah?”
“Okay, okay, gimme a sec.” Danny wiped his forehead.
Lunch with this kid was a stretch. So was a parade down Sixty-Sixth, but going into Central Park was where Danny drew the line.
His mother was already gonna strangle him for cutting school and crossing Jersey Street and taking the subway and auditioning without her permission for a hippie-, homo-, and drug-infested school for circus freaks.
But if she found out he’d gone into Central Park without so much as a baseball bat for protection?
Oh, he was so un-friggin’-believably dead.
“Is it safe?” Danny asked finally, his voice a childlike hush.
If cutting class was a laugh riot, this was George Carlin at Carnegie Hall.
“Are you for real?” Christian choked, almost collapsing on the sidewalk. “We’re not going in at night. What do you think this is, 1992? You are killin’ me, Staten Island. Sure you’re not from Topeka or something?”
“I was born here,” Danny bristled defensively.
“And you’ve never been to Central Park before?”
Before he’d even said it, he already regretted it.
“I’ve never been to Manhattan before.”
Christian’s eyeballs practically popped out of his head and rolled like golf balls across the sidewalk, past an Almond Joy wrapper, his shoes, and a mound of dried white dog shit, before bouncing off the curb and into a storm drain.
“Wait…” Christian proceeded carefully. “You’ve never been to Manhattan?”
Danny let out a sigh.
“No. I’ve never been to Manhattan.”
“Your parents never took you here?”
“No.”
“You never came here on a field trip?”
“No!”
“You never accidentally took a wrong turn on the Verrazano and—”
“NO!”
Christian shook his head. “But why?”
“I don’t know!” Danny shouted. “I don’t know. We never needed to. We’ve got everything we need. You do know Staten Island’s bigger than Manhattan, right?”
“I meeeaaan…” Christian’s mouth pursed.
“Well, have you ever been to Staten Island?!” Danny jabbed back.
Christian shrugged.
“See! There ya go. Maybe you should try it sometime!”
Danny stuffed his hands into the pockets of his khakis and looked down at his stupid mud-scuffed shoes. Christian took a step closer to Danny.
“Maybe I should,” he offered weakly. “You know? Visit Staten Island. Hey, I’m from Queens, which might as well be Kentucky for most kids at LaGuardia.” He laughed. “No one ever visits me, so I get it, tough guy. Really, I do.”
Danny dug his nails into his palms.
“So, this Staten Island,” Christian said, making it sound like Danny had perhaps made up his hometown. “You like it, though, right? It’s nice?”
Danny looked away. It’s nice there? Jesus.
Yeah, real nice. Nice, like his front door on Port Richmond with the spray paint tags and missing address numbers.
Nice, like a discount mall or a barren parking lot.
Nice, like his dad’s car parked in front of a nail salon his mom didn’t go to.
Nice, like a dead uncle. Nice, like a busted lip. Nice, like a loser son.
“Hey, you okay?” Christian asked, reaching over and placing a hand on Danny’s elbow.
The worms rushed to the surface of Danny’s skin.
He jerked away and nearly tripped backward on a crack in the pavement behind him, his body not his own.
He stumbled to regain his footing, but the sidewalk had turned into quicksand, his vision choppy, the park and the boy flashing like cut-up filmstrips—hands and chair legs and cold kitchen floor tiles.
And just as suddenly, it was back to normal, his vision focused and his Keds planted firmly on the ground. Normal, except for the boy gawking at him, frozen, like Danny’d just crashed his mom’s Pontiac into the Empire State Building.
“Sorry,” Danny mumbled. “Sorry, I—”
For the first time that day, Danny was genuinely scared.
Scared that if he didn’t move, that if he spent even one more second on the street corner with this kid with his baggy clothes and his cool name and his dumb jokes and his ridiculous voice and his smug questions, Danny was gonna do something stupid like start a fight, or start to cry.
“I gotta go,” Danny said, and he turned and bolted back to the subway, back to the ferry, back to his normal food and normal school and normal asshole classmates, back to his Ma and missing father, back to where no one wanted to know him, or talk to him, or touch him.
Where everything hurt, but at least made sense.
Where he could be alone. Where he could walk through walls.