Caught Stealing - Charlie Huston [9]
As I do this, as the bag is settling onto my shoulder, I register something in the window of the pizza place next door. There is a counter that runs along the front window of the place and people sit there to eat their pizza and you can’t see their faces and they can’t see out unless they hunch a little because the front window is plastered with Italian movie posters down to about a foot above the counter. The owner of this place is a huge movie fan. I know this because I get all my pizza there and we talk movies sometimes. He’s a nice guy and I always tell him he should take those posters down so people can see out and in through that nice big front window. But right now I love those posters. I love those posters because of what I just barely glimpsed on the counter: four beautiful, small hands, dressed to the wrists in Nike tracksuits—two in black and two in white. I feel certain that the pizza those hands are clutching is being shoved into the mouths of two huge Russianic thugs with a fondness for light beer and foofy pink cocktails.
I drop my keys. I drop my keys in such a way that anyone sitting at the counter of the pizza place will be able to see me if I bend to pick them up. This is so fucked up. Careful to keep the laundry bag positioned in front of my head, I squat, bending at the knees, and pick up the keys. I have not moved the bag from my right shoulder since I caught my glimpse. I do not know what the hands are doing. Nor do I know for certain that they are the hands I think they are. But I am freaked out. I hurry to get the door open and drop the keys again. Fuck this. I squat again and this time I shift the bag just enough so I can peek up into the window of the pizza shop and see who exactly is at the counter and get this over with. It’s them. They don’t see me. I stand, work the key in the lock and am inside very quickly.
Weird shit happens in New York. I have run into people on the street here who I knew once in elementary school back in California. It is not impossible that these boys live around here and just happen to like Muzzarel’s Pizza. But I’m scared anyway because this is so fucked up. I am walking up the two flights to my floor and I am repeating a mantra to myself:
—This is so fucked up. This is so fucked up. This is so fucked up.
And that’s why I don’t really register the sounds coming from the hall just outside my apartment until I’m a few steps away.
The knocking I hear coming from my hall might just be the exterminator, or a friend, or Federal Express with the bag I lost at JFK three years ago. But the presence of the Russian goombahs downstairs makes me think otherwise. My feet are carrying me into view of whoever is there, and my sense of self-preservation makes an executive decision. I shift the laundry from my right shoulder to my left so that it will hide my head from anyone at my door. I ignore the pain this causes and step onto the landing. I do not stop. I turn and take the next flight up without ever looking at my door. All knocking and conversation has ceased and the only sounds are my steps and breathing and the ridiculous pounding of my heart. As I mount the stairs to the next floor and climb one, two, three, four, five steps, the noise behind me begins again. When I reach the top floor of the building, I stop. There are now three floors between me and whoever is down there.
My side is screaming. But what really sucks, is that for the first time in days my feet hurt.
The building I live in is no palace, but when I first moved in it was in really sorry fucking shape. A few years back, when the real estate boom finally reached Alphabet City, my landlord decided to spruce up a bit so he could jack up the rents on new tenants. For the purpose of making these improvements, he