Nora came for Parents’ Weekend, as they called her yearly visits to New York. This visit disrupted Yurik’s plans for acquiring new experiences. One week after his stint at the moving company, instead of the new experiences he desired, he was refreshing his old ones: he was walking through the city with Nora, showing her his favorite back streets and alleys. Nora was walking next to a completely grown-up man, handsome and tall, but not at all like the young people, students and actors, with whom she interacted at home. How was he different? In his absolute casualness, his lack of inhibition, his disarming childishness, and a kind of relaxed freedom.
No, Nora thought, trying to reason with herself. It’s just that our life together has ended, and he is going his own way. His own way. I can’t get him back. Why should I want to? And who am I to talk? I went off on my own at fifteen.
Nora had spent the evening before that with Martha and Vitya. The women understood that Yurik was having a hard time; Vitya nodded absently. They made the decision to encourage Yurik to study somewhere, study something. Nora didn’t know whether she had any influence over him anymore; she didn’t know what was happening to him. Was this just the way he was growing up, or was he becoming American?
In January, Nora had called him from Moscow to wish him a happy birthday. After a short pause, he said, “Mama, I’ll never be a teenager anymore. It’s sad.”
They talked and walked, walked and talked. They were walking through Chelsea, perhaps the most stable and enduring part of town, the area most impervious to the ravages of time. The old mansions of the English inhabitants, symmetrical buildings with drop-down fire escapes, shabby walls, broken sidewalks.
“Here is an old Irish bar where they sell Guinness. Here’s the hotel where everyone who was anyone stayed—Jimi Hendrix lived here, and all the major American writers, who were every bit as good as Dickens,” Yurik said proudly, as though he himself were the owner of the hotel. Nora glanced into the entrance to the yard, where a single desiccated tree was standing. An old bench. It seemed as though the old man from the story “The Last Leaf” could have lived here, and in that apartment on the upper floor Jim and Della Dillingham, the main characters of the story “The Gift of the Magi,” might have lived. Nora had so loved these stories as a child that she immediately recognized settings from O. Henry’s stories. Nora stopped. Hell’s Kitchen, the Garment District, the Meatpacking District—it was all here somewhere.
They stopped in front of a house where Yurik’s teacher and friend Mickey lived, or, rather, was dying, of AIDS. He was quite a famous musician, a singer, who experimented in all kinds of ways with his voice. He had performed with all the jazz greats, but his name was connected for the most part with a marginal, noncommercial musical current—a driving mélange of funk and heavy metal. Now and then, one of the jazz masters, someone so great that Yurik had never seen him up close, would invite Mickey to cut a record.
Yurik spent a lot of time at Mickey’s, and brought him the drugs he needed to survive. Now Yurik wondered whether he should tell Nora about this extraordinary fellow, about the tragic history of the gay man who had been banished from home at the age of thirteen; who, from being a homeless street kid, had become the owner of an apartment in one of the most famous buildings in Chelsea, which had been mortgaged, and remortgaged … At one time it had been luxurious, but it had fallen into disrepair and become a shelter for homeless cats and his down-and-out friends. No, it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell her.
They continued walking west and ran into the Hudson. An old pier. Heavy, slow-moving water, boardwalks, abandoned coastal lands, boats lying askew on the shore, seagulls, some warehouses, abandoned factories … Silence. No one else in sight.
“What’s over there?” Nora pointed to the opposite shore.
“That’s Hoboken. It’s in another state. I’ve never been there. They say it’s cool.”
Nora was wondering whether it was time to tell Yurik about the family decision, which was more like an ultimatum, that he needed to study something. When he heard it, he agreed without a second thought—though he did say that what he needed more than anything else was practice, and everything else would follow. They discussed the various possibilities. It ended with an explanation that the point in studying would be to allow him to earn his living not as a furniture mover, but as something for which he needed professional qualifications. Under pressure from the family, he agreed to enter the Sam Ash Music Institute, to train as a sound engineer.
Nora returned home, leaving Martha with money for the first semester’s tuition.
After his mother left, Yurik actually did undertake to change his life. He quit the furniture movers, but he didn’t go far. Using his music connections, he got a job with a music producer, an unsuccessful guitarist of about forty, and started transporting equipment, fine-tuning it, and doing repairs on it. In the fall, he did enroll in the sound-engineering institute, which turned out to be a rather sketchy establishment that prepared its graduates to be, at most, salesclerks in music stores. This is what Yurik reported to Nora, when he quit after a month of “studying.” At the same time, he left the employ of the producer.
Meanwhile, Mickey’s health had taken a turn for the worse. His last partner, a very femme young man from Malaysia with an everlasting smile, with whom Mickey had lived for five years, ran off, but not before withdrawing every last penny from Mickey’s bank account. That was when Mickey asked Yurik to move in with him: “Not forever, Yurik; I won’t be around for much longer.”
Yurik gathered his belongings together and stuffed them into a large plastic garbage bag, grabbed his two guitars, and left his little room behind. He settled down into the dilapidated splendor of Mickey’s house.
Mickey asked him to play, and he did, but on occasion Mickey would stir his gnarly, peeling fingers and repeat: “If you make a mistake, just keep playing until you get it right. Don’t try to fix the mistake, just wait until your mistakes turn into something interesting.” Sometimes he berated Yurik: “Why do you always say ‘I’m going to, I’m trying to, I want to’? It’s a way of doing nothing. Just do it.”
Yurik kept thinking that something like this had happened to him before, music and death entwined, but he couldn’t remember when or where. A captivating tremulousness surrounded Mickey like a cloud. With Mickey, Yurik got pretty well hooked on junk; sometimes he couldn’t tell night from day, and sleep abandoned him altogether.
Throughout the dark, dank winter days, Yurik sat next to the slowly dying man. He dressed his festering feet, fed him, and got hold of the drugs without which Mickey couldn’t have lasted another day. Yurik met with people who had been in debt to Mickey for a long time and pumped them for the money that Mickey was in the habit of lending freely. He became acquainted with dozens of dealers, and rushed around the city to score Mickey’s heroin. The city took care of its sick, and gave away painkillers and sedatives for free, but this didn’t suffice. They suggested that Mickey be admitted to the hospital and then into hospice care, but he refused: he wanted to die in his home. Yurik knew that he’d stay with him till the end. But it didn’t work out that way.
On the first day of spring, when the air was saturated with moisture and the sun couldn’t penetrate the heavy curtain of mist, Yurik was in the so-called Shooting Gallery, where a charming, jovial dealer named Spike had agreed to meet him. The Shooting Gallery was a place where drug addicts could get a fix inconspicuously, off the streets, without getting busted.
He had agreed to meet Spike at two, but it was already four and Spike hadn’t turned up. Yurik started to get anxious. The landlady of the apartment, who was a very young girl, was pallid as death; people paid her for the use of this shelter for drugs. She hadn’t left the house for a long time; she couldn’t even eat anymore. A guy lying on a mattress handed her an ampoule—containing not what she needed, but something similar. Everything unfolded like a slow-motion movie. She spent a long time trying to puncture her arm with her shaking hand, sobbing and gasping, and finally ended up shooting up in a vein in her hand—there were hardly any others left to choose from. A minute later, she slumped over, her eyes rolling back in her head slowly. She had overdosed.