The elevator moves. I back into the space. I don’t want to be here. There must be a stairway down. No. No escape. I have to work, but I don’t have to stand in the hallway like a fool. I go inside.
The loft is L-shaped. One wall, almost fifty feet long with seven-foot-tall windows, runs south along the Greene Street side. The south wall has more, which overlook Broome. It’s dark outside. The rain makes me remember that I’m wet. I look at the radiators. They’re too small for the space. The ceilings are twelve feet high and broken up by sprinkler runs and ductwork. Even in the dim light I can tell most of the work here has been finished. In the corner are paint cans, a couple of ladders, tarps. The elevator doors open. I walk out of its sight line, around the L, into the kitchen. The cabinets are done.
“Motherfuckin’ dark as shit.”
It’s Chris. After all this time I can tell his voice — deep, but not truly resonant. Articulate with a bit of a Bed-Stuy edge. He turns on the lights. He’s with other people. They walk heavily, slowly. It’s eight now, but they don’t seem to be in much of a rush to punch the clock. They all have paper bags full of deli breakfast. There’s no one running this job. They’re going to take their time. Breakfast is on Nancyboy, which of course gets passed on to the client.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” says Chris when he sees me — deadpan — to belie his surprise. “What’s up?” He throws a short wave and turns before I can respond. He goes to the corner sill and studies his breakfast from outside the bag. He reaches in, arranging the coffee and the buttered bun within. Then he takes the items out and arranges them on the sill. The other two, whom I don’t recognize, follow suit on their own sills. They eat quietly. Young men slouched in preparation for becoming old.
“Well, well.”
KC’s at the door. KC and Bing Bing. The others don’t greet them, and they disappear behind a soffit and reappear again. By 8:30 everyone’s ready to go.
“You’re with us, professor.” KC beckons me to the paint supply. There’s not much I hate more than painting — not so much the actual rolling, but the prep, the cleanup. He points at the Baker, sucks his teeth, then points vaguely at the first few windows.
“We have to set this thing up,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else. Because it’s not a direct order, Bing Bing ignores it. He goes to the middle window and leans against it. He looks across at the other building — the apartments above the jeans store. Some of them are being renovated, as well, but they aren’t nearly the size of this one. A squat white man with a thick mustache and a very young black man work on a countertop.
“What you doin’, man?” KC barks. Bing Bing turns slowly and shrugs.
“Wa d’you won?”
“Set up the ting, mon!”
Bing Bing sucks his teeth, though not nearly as loud as KC, and waves me to him.
“C’mon, mon.” I go. We circle the broken-down scaffold and then stop. We both reach for the same side at the same time and both pull back. I let him pick it up. I’m not sure how he wants to go about putting it together — and a Baker isn’t complicated at all. You can look at one and intuit how it should work: two vertical steel sides, like ladders, with slots in them; two horizontal lengths with ends that pocket into the slots; a metal-edged sheet of plywood to fit as the platform. It’s the hesitation that gets us, the uneasy hierarchy that keeps us both staring at the section he’s holding.
“Get dat a won.” So it’s been decided. Bing Bing’s lord of this particular fiefdom. And because we have a leader, things move smoothly. We put the Baker together and wheel it over to the first window by the front. Bing Bing starts back to the supply pile. I try to follow, but he raises his hand to me like he’s a crossing guard. He doesn’t pick up his feet, and his boots are only laced to the ankle. The tops fan out and his jeans are stuffed into them. They remind me of Eskimo boots, or what I’ve imagined Eskimo boots, if there are such things, to look like — hides and pelts wrapped tightly but seeming to be loose around feet and ankles. He shuffles back atop the sawdust and gypsum-coated floor with a box of sandpaper. KC meets us beneath the window.
“She likes these, you know. Yeah, she likes them like this.” He waves up at the window. “Yeah, don’t touch anything — she says.” He sucks his teeth again. The window frames are metal — old stainless or tin — it’s hard to tell because they’re so worn, gummed up and over with dirt and soot and grease and little chips of old lead paint.