Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [65]
Tina rises at eleven each morning. Each day is like the one before, and she searches out her man, and hits him for a taste. The heroin is stabilizing, always, and her appetite builds. She then goes to Amillio’s Bodega for a breakfast of Pepsi-Cola and Drake’s Doodle-dogs, and back to her apartment where she watches the afternoon soap operas, and nods.
The apartment Tina lives in is in a building next to the abandoned building where the garbage is piled high in the vestibule, the one we have just come from. I was sitting on the fender of a derelict car, waiting for the order to take up, when I saw her walking slowly towards me. It had been years since I last saw her, but her face is unmistakable. Unmarred dark skin, and the delicate bones of a European aristocrat. Thin lips, graceful narrow nose, knowing eyes. But her eyes don’t sparkle as they used to; drugs make the lids droop. They used to radiate happiness, or at least pleasantness, but that is all lost. She is wearing a short white nylon skirt that clings to her thighs, and a thin red polo shirt that fits snugly around her breasts. In another time, another place, people would say she was developing into a smart, chic young woman. Her feet are bare and sandaled, and her calf muscles are strong and appealing. The only unbeautiful things about her are her eyes, and her pin-scarred arms.
“Denise, Denise,” she calls, her accent making my name sound like its female equivalent. “How are you?” Her voice is dull and drawled, but genuinely happy. “Man, eets good to see you.” She brushed her long black hair away from her face, and put her hand on my arm, with such simple, easy grace that a Vassar graduate would find the gesture in a style to be duplicated. How ironic that a five dollar trick from Fox Street would have the soft, natural class to make a Vassar girl envious.
We didn’t talk long, but she held her hand on my arm all the while she spoke. She told me she shared her apartment with two other girls, and four kids. One of the girls is on welfare, and the four kids are hers. Tina wants to go on welfare, but she just hasn’t gotten around to applying. Anyway, she really doesn’t need the money, because her man gives her enough of her earnings to make her happy. The apartment she shares has two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There hasn’t been any hot water since Tina has been living there, which has been five months, and a pot of water is always simmering on the stove. I asked her if there were many roaches, and she said, “Sure. And the mouses too.” She told me too that she has tried to kick the drugs, but it didn’t work. Maybe someday. And she talked of shooting up with a pathetic resignation that convinced me that she knew as well as I that the dope would kill her someday.
Benny and the others returned to the street, pulling the wet hose behind them. Tina took her hand from my arm and offered it to me to shake. I held it, as she said, “Well, good-bye Denise. I see you. O.K.?” I answered a positive, “O.K.,” and Tina walked slowly away, nodding slightly. I called to her, but she didn’t hear me, at least she didn’t acknowledge that she heard. I called, “Take care of yourself, Tina.”
And now as I lie here in the cool comfortable secure regimented confines of the firehouse bunkroom I think of how stupid that must have sounded to her. “Take care of yourself.” But that’s what she is doing. Tina is taking care of herself. She is surviving in the best way she knows.
When I first met her four years ago she was a shy, sensitive fourteen-year-old high school freshman. She lived on Home Street then, with her family. Her little brother liked fire engines, and one day she brought him into the firehouse. I was on house-watch duty, and I spoke kindly to her. I asked what school she attended, and if she liked her studies. I played with her brother Fillipo. After that, she and her brother came the short block from their apartment to the firehouse regularly. She would ask for “Denise,” and the guys