Worn-Out Welcome Mats (Chapter One)

Suvy felt his brain swollen against the walls of his skull like an icy pipe about to burst. He forced himself out of the strange bed and searched the floor of the messy room for his clothes. He hoped to leave before the girl awoke and found a chance to start a conversation with him, or, worse, attempted to venture somewhere outside with him to hang out. But first he had to have a look around her place to see what he could steal.

Rummaging quietly through some clothes that lay tangled on the floor, Suvy pulled a pack of cigarettes from the girl's pants pocket and slipped it into a pocket of his own jacket, which lay nearby. He slid into his T-shirt, darkened from its former white to the moldy green-and-brown cheese pallor it had since taken on, having also grown somewhat rigid and sticky to the touch.

He unbunched his grubby socks and stretched them onto his feet, then slung his denim jacket over one shoulder and scooped up two tall glasses—a pair of strong rum-and-Cokes that he found resting on the dresser, leftover from last night. With both drinks clutched in one hand, he carefully twisted the doorknob with the other. The door creaked on its hinges as it opened, and its latch clicked back into place as he closed it.

The hallway was dark. The floor was sticky. It groaned under the weight of each of Suvy's tremulous step. Both of his big toes stuck out from the holes worn through his thinning socks, and as he shuffled down the dim corridor, the blue flicker from a distant television set convulsing against the walls, he tried to imagine the last time he'd watched TV, but he couldn't remember. Certainly he'd passed by a screen in a storefront window at some point somewhere in the city, but that couldn't possibly count.

Though he hadn't made any commitments, he'd been sort of seeing a girl—not the near-stranger lying in the bedroom, who was little more to him than a partial naked ass he'd left peering out from under her dirty bedsheets. It was a different girl he'd met two months earlier at the opening of her gallery in a small student space in SoHo—a free, open bar event where she'd found Suvy fixed by the cooler stuffing sweaty beer cans into his big canvas rucksack.

He was surprised to be thinking of her now, and even more shocked at the tinge of guilt that flashed through him for having woken up in this other girl's bed, but he quickly stamped it down.

Sour fumes emanated from the cat box as he shimmied past it, grains of litter poking into his socks and his soles where the skin showed through. If he ever got an apartment of his own, he reasoned, he'd never let it turn into a dump like this one. This place was almost on a par with some of the squats he'd lived in over the past three years, since running away from home. Although it was only an hour on the Q train back to Brighton Beach, not once during that time had he gone back to see his despicable family. But at least they'd had the sense to clean their apartment.

He cleared a space to set down one of his drinks on the countertop beside the sink, which brimmed with dishes and food remnants, piled up right to the mouth of the spigot so that it rested in a pool of food-murked water which had gathered in the basin of a dinner plate. He tipped one of his drinks up to his lips and sucked it down with two quick gulps.

His friend, Marlón, already awake and dressed, sat in a folding chair at a table no bigger than a manhole lid, crammed into the corner of the kitchenette and hoisted up on thin metal legs. He fondled a half-empty pint bottle of rotgut whiskey, his stomach showing through a hole in his T-shirt between the flaps of his leather jacket.

"You seen my pants around?" Suvy asked, self-conscious of his wiry legs and the bone-bag knees that knobbed forward from them.

Marlón waved an arm vaguely toward the living room behind him, a continuation of the kitchenette, a windowless cavity glowing sickly blue from the small TV in the corner. Suvy straggled into the room and, after scanning the floor, hunched himself down into a pocket of darkness under the television stand to fish out his black pants and combat boots from a pile of clothes, most of which belonged to the girl. He checked the pockets of her clothes but found nothing of any value.

"Does this chick have roommates?" Suvy asked, letting his boots drop to the floor in front of the couch and plopping himself down onto the cushion, pleased to find that his long john bottoms had remained inside his pants when he'd wriggled out of them last night.

"I don't know, I guess not."

"Where do you figure that door goes to, then?" Suvy said. He was already thinking about the other drink in the kitchen, but knew he had to wait to let his stomach settle before he could take it, lest it go to waste in the toilet.

"What door?" Marlón swerved his head as if to inspect.

"The fucking—what door do you think? That one, right there." Suvy swung a flustered hand up to his shoulder, thumb pointed toward a pair of french doors, a blanket draped over the other side of the glass panes, keeping the sun from spreading into the living room except for a strip of light that gleamed through an opening at the bottom.

"How should I know where it goes." The cheap plastic pint hovered by Marlón's mouth. "She didn't say anything about any roommates last night, as far as I remember." He took a slug from the bottle. "What's it matter for anyway?"

"Figures." Suvy sat down on the couch, crossed one foot up onto his knee and dragged a palm across the sole of his sock, wiping away the cat litter and letting it scatter to the floor. "These yuppie broads always have their own apartments, but none of them have a job." He rubbed his hand down his pant leg, bunching the cat fur that clung to it into little balls that he picked off and wedged in between the couch cushions.

"What do you know about work, or yuppies, for that matter?" asked Marlón. "You think toothpaste is for yuppies."

Suvy sighed. "Think about it. Who can afford their own place in New York? You remember what she said, right? About what she does for a living?" He grabbed one of his black paratrooper boots by the tongue and yanked it up onto his foot.

"No, what does she do?"

"Says she's an actress."

"Yeah? Maybe she is, then. So what? What's the big deal?"

Suvy laughed. "Maybe she is." He wiped away a thin trail of snot from his upper lip. "But I've never seen her in any movies or nothing, so what do you think the odds are that her parents don't pay for this dump?"

Marlón stood up and grabbed the glass from the countertop. "What's this, rum?" He raised it to his nose.

"That's my wake-up," Suvy said. "Put it down. You've got your own."

"Yeah, I did, but I finished it."

"Still more than I've had. Just put it down, okay?"

Suvy laced up his boots and then got down on his belly to peer through the crack and into the room. All he could see was light bouncing off the glossy hardwood that stretched out to the baseboards at the far wall. It must have been coming in from a big bay window, guessing by the shape of the nook and how much light the room got. Probably overlooked the street. Yuppies loved that kind of stuff, bay windows and steep views. Not that there was much of a view in this part of the city.

He tried to recall how high up off the street they were. He remembered bits of his trip with Marlón and the girl up the building's main stairwell the night before—up to the third or fourth floor, maybe. It was one of those old, narrow, pre-war tenement buildings with only a few residences, an odd place where people left their coats hanging in the hallway and their shoes lying beside their corny welcome mats. Real bourgeois stuff that girls like her were big on, probably a co-op building, everything fair-trade organic and a soft tissue for every sneeze. Too bad this bitch couldn't even live up to her own lame standards.

She had brought the boys back to her place after meeting them in Tompkins Square Park. She'd lost her ID and asked them if they knew a club she could get into without it. There wasn't one, as far as they knew. (But what did they know? They liked to drink on the Williamsburg Bridge or in the parks.) They had a few regular liquor and beer spots, places where the cashiers didn't bother to check their IDs because the boys looked old enough to buy and because they and their friends brought in steady business. She asked their ages. Marlón lied and said he was twenty-two. Suvy answered nineteen, and she smiled at him and said he was so cute. Then she asked Marlón where he liked to party. He flashed her a liter bottle he'd been cradling inside his jacket and said he partied wherever he felt like. She looked around, as if to see whether anyone might be watching her, then sat down on the bench between them and asked where they lived. Connecticut, Marlón lied. Suvy didn't answer, just stared off in a different direction, taking the bottle when it was passed to him. By the time the bottle was finished they'd already grabbed another one from the store—this one bigger than the first. It'd been her treat, of course. Hours later, after they'd finished the half-gallon, the girl said she had more liquor at her place. So they walked there as the sun came up, and she took both of them to bed.

Suvy couldn't picture her being an actress. Not a real one, anyhow. She didn't have enough personality, for starters.

He brushed a piece of litter off his face, pressed his cheek back down to the floor, and squinted through the crack. He saw the legs of a tripod, maybe for an easel, probably holding some allegedly profound painting or a photo of something stupid like a tree. These hipster broads were always painters or photographers, or whatever. Maybe he could jimmy the lock with a butter knife or a credit card. Of course, if he found a credit card maybe he wouldn't bother searching for anything else; he could just take the card and go on a spree at the Sony store in Times Square for electronics that he could sell later. Every Joe Six-Pack in town wanted cheap goodies for the Holidays. Suvy could make a fortune off that dumb broad's parents' credit line. Maybe he'd even keep a Game Boy for himself.

He paced back to the kitchen, intent on finding a knife. He pulled out the sliding drawers but there were no utensils inside. He turned and stared gloomily at the mess in the sink as he pondered the disgusting prospect of sifting through plates that lay sodden with dried-on condiments and wet, half-eaten sandwiches. He picked up the remaining drink from the countertop and forced it down his gullet.

He heard a thud come from the bedroom. Then shuffling footsteps. His eyes darted to Marlón, then over to the door. He pulled his heavy backpack onto his shoulders. Maybe he didn't have to mention any of this to the girl he'd been seeing. Then there'd be nothing to explain.