Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Liz Mathews

On a recent Saturday afternoon I and my friends Pete and Harlan were seeking a bench in Tompkins Square Park. Pickings were pretty slim—it was a nice day—but then we came to the middle of the park, where a stretch of empty benches existed on both sides of the walkway.

Of course, the reason that everyone else in the park was not sitting on these benches was likely due to the crowd of 20-to-40-somethings and their pit bulls a little ways in, clothed in dingy black and brown attire, hair askew and taking naps or stumbling about in mid-afternoon dazes. Also, because it may be relevant, there were at least five pairs of shoes dangling from the branches overhead.

Still, we sat. We chatted. The group of gutter punks did their own thing and the pit bull puppies acted cute but dangerous.

Gradually members of the group edged closer to us.

“Got any good advice, young man?” an equally young man with a maroon mohawk asked Pete in passing.

“Sunscreen,” Pete replied.

Mohawk stopped. “That’s a good one,” he said.

Next, a woman approached with a summarized version of her life story. “I’m going home to Providence this afternoon,” she told us at the end of it. “I had to cry to my dad to get him to pay for it, but he broke down and when I get there I’m going to see my kids,” she said.

That’s great, we agreed. Thank goodness for your dad, and your ability to turn on the waterworks, we said without saying exactly that.

“I like to give out hugs,” she told us. My two friends stood up, hugged her.

“That’s my junkie husband,” she pointed to the man sitting next to Harlan. “Been with him for six goddamn years. My dad hates him. I guess this is love.”

While she was telling us this, her junkie husband was preparing a syringe of blue liquid. “That’s the stuff,” he said, turning to Harlan and flicking the cylinder. “Don’t you kids ever try this… because you’ll fall in love with it,” he said and jammed it into his arm.

Next thing we knew, the junkie husband was off the bench and standing in front of us. “Yup, I’m high,” he said, turning to me. “You have the most amazing eyes. What’s your name?”

I squeaked it out and the junkie husband held out his hand and I shook it, a little freaked out that he was still holding the syringe.

“My turn,” his wife said, and he got busy preparing drugs for her.

We took this as our cue to head out—plus I had an ice cream date to get to. But such a legitimate reason for leaving did not ease the consciences of the gutter punks.

“Look what you did, you asshole,” the wife yelled at her husband, “You scared off the nice people!”

He, in turn, stopped trying to shoot her up behind her ear. “Don’t go!” he cried. “We’re sorry! Don’t leave because of us!”

No, no, we tried to assure them. We have to get somewhere—it’s not you! we said with the hope we were being convincing. Have a safe trip! we encouraged, with regard to both the drugs and also their travels to Rhode Island.

And we left. And we felt genuinely bad for making the drug addicts feel like they made us feel uncomfortable. And it was a while before I could wash my hands.

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by caitlin macrae

He shows up in my hallway out of mostly nowhere—the last I knew, he was in West Virginia, fighting Massey Energy with a camera and the kind of commitment to things you only see in people raised by extremely good or extremely bad families. Growing up, Jordan’s place always smelled sort of like patchouli, the things in his house the dim worn colors of a lived-in home, never the spotlessness of the kind of houses where people don’t really like one another, always the damp warmth of cooking food. The last time I saw him was at a funeral, on a boat.

He doesn’t ask me about much, mostly just plugs in his computer and talks about himself, which is fine. It’s been a long five years, and there are a lot of stories on his end; anyway, he’s already done the living-in-Brooklyn thing. He’s fighting a war, even slings around terms like PTSD. In another mouth these things would ring hollow, puffed-up little boy fronts, but with him it’s really kind of true. He lives in a different world now; he’s eaten bear.

Watching him smoke his Winstons, now, after a few beers and some shitty pizza, it is impossible not to remember him on his back patio; we were maybe fifteen or sixteen, I was probably younger. While the rest of us were sucking down Djarums and Camels and Marlboro Reds, Jordan would stand in the grass, arms and legs quivering and flailing while his face contorted, mirroring the effects of out stupid habit on our developing lungs. It’s probably as weird for him to see me shrugging off a cigarette as it is for me to watch him, and I can’t resist the urge, in the middle of the road on a Wednesday night. We pause there, on Franklin Street, twitch our bodies around on the pavement and make awful faces while his Winston burns out.

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by J.B. Staniforth

I was visiting friends in Oakland in the late summer of 2001, and we found ourselves most nights at the Ruby Room, a small bar near Lake Merritt which may or may not still exist. It had a great jukebox and DJs that played music that I could enjoy, rather than just tolerate. And it had a single pool table, which one signed up for by writing one’s name on a chalk board by the cues.

One night, I was in line to play. The guy who had just won the game was an older fellow named John, and sported long dreadlocks and a faint Caribbean accent. He asked me where I was from and what I did—I told him “Canada,” and “a writer.” I asked him the same, and he said he lived in Oakland and that he’d gotten out of prison that afternoon, where he’d spent two months for being caught with some marijuana. I explained that in Canada you had to try hard to go to prison for marijuana, and that we didn’t use those stupid laws much anymore. John laughed ruefully and said that things were different in the States. I told him he should move up to Canada, that things were saner up there; John said he was happy enough just to be out of prison, but he’d think about it. Then he suggested we get to playing pool.

I won the coin toss and sank a solid off the break, but missed a second shot. He sank a stripe, then missed his next shot. Then, to my own surprise, I ran the table—sinking each of my remaining balls one by one, as though I had a plan. John didn’t mind—every time I sank a ball he laughed and said, “You’re killing me!” I was left with a table full of stripes and the eight-ball.

When it comes to angles in pool, I’m capable but not great. The eight-ball was resting against the bumper, half-way between the side and the corner pocket, while the cue-ball was right across the table from it. It was a hard shot to make either way, and I thought a long time about whether I should try to hit it from the side to scoot it into the corner on its left, or bounce it off the bumper and put it in the opposite corner.

“How you going to play it?” asked John. We were calling our shots. Finally I figured it’d be easiest to try and bounce the eight into the opposite corner, so I called it. “Alright, whenever you’re ready,” John said with a defeated smile.

I worked out the angles, lined the shot up carefully, wound up, and let go. The cue-ball fired across the table, hit the eight, and shot it like a bullet into the closest side-pocket. It went in with a sound like a cleaver hitting a cutting board. I closed my eyes, then opened them and looked up at John.

His eyes were huge and his mouth was open in a giant grin.

“You lost!” he said, bewildered.

“I guess I did,” I said.

“Ha! I can’t believe it!”

“Me neither.”

“You were so good!” said John. “But you lost!”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And I won!” he said, his grin widening as he surveyed the table full of stripes.

“You got it,” I said, starting to smile.

“I should just give it to you.” He paused. “But I won’t! Because you lost!”

I was laughing now too. “Congratulations.”

“No, I have to congratulate you!” he said, putting down his beer and vigorously shaking my hand. “What a great game you lost! You’re a really great loser! You should play against me all the time.”

by J. B. Staniforth

He looked like Dennis Miller from the Weekend Update days, only his hair was stringier, and he generally had a few days’ stubble on his cheeks. In his early thirties, he appeared faintly Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, and he spoke with a wry voice made gravelly by constant smoking. He was almost always standing somewhere along the three-block stretch of St. Laurent that had the most traffic, usually asking, “Can you spare some change or a metro ticket?” Depending on how desperate he was, he’d be very easy-going about it, or else very brusque, sometimes rushing past you before you had a chance to finish turning him down. Also, he was at times half-conscious, his eyelids tugging their way down his face, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth.

But usually he was remarkably cheery. He’d ask for change or a metro ticket, then throw in a joke, or comment on your wardrobe, or offer to help you carry something. I always had the feeling he was bored and willing to find company wherever he could.

The metro tickets were where the money was: they sold for $2.50 at the station, but were less than $2 if you bought them in packs, and people were likelier to give them to panhandlers because they seemed less easily converted into food or booze. The Friendliest Junkie, however, just walked four blocks to the metro station and stood outside selling them for $2 each to people who were about to pay $2.50. In doing so he made money faster than most of the other neighborhood panhandlers. And he spent it on heroin.

I know this because one night I was walking home up a side-street at about two in the morning and happened upon him sitting on someone’s front step, thoughtfully and carefully shooting dope into a vein between the fingers of his left hand, for once completely indifferent to what was going on around him. I also know because one time, he hit up my friend Chloe for change along his usual strip of St. Laurent. When she said she didn’t have any, he said, “Mind if I walk up the street a bit with you?” She said okay, and as they walked, he told her about how much he liked heroin.

“I could get off it, I guess,” he said, “And maybe I will one day, except the thing is, it’s awesome. I love getting high. It’s the best feeling. There’s nothing in life I like as much as that. And I don’t really feel like I’m hurting myself too badly right now. Especially when I feel as good as I do after I take a shot. Maybe later on, but not right now. Right now I just love heroin.”

Above all, though, he was more friendly than any other junkie or panhandler in the neighbourhood.

I haven’t seen him in years, but the last time our paths crossed, my girlfriend and I were in the Quatre Frères 24-hour grocery store in the center of his stretch of St. Laurent. We’d just rented a movie and had stopped in to get snacks on the way home, but had gotten stumped deciding whether we wanted jujubes or jelly beans. I was arguing for jujubes when the Friendliest Junkie materialized from around the corner of the candy aisle and said, “I’m going to have to go with the lady on this one. Definitely jelly beans.”

“Huh,” I said, suddenly outnumbered.

“You know why?” he continued. “Because they’ve got two textures: kind of hard on the outside, but jelly on the inside. Jujubes are just straight-up jelly. They’re a one-trick pony.”

“You’ve got a point,” I admitted.

“But they don’t cost very much, anyway,” he said. “Why don’t you just get them both? That way everybody’s happy.”

My easily-tempted girlfriend shrugged. “Maybe we should do that,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “You deserve it.”

“What the hell,” I said.

“Excellent,” said the Friendliest Junkie. “Hey, by the way, you guys wouldn’t happen to be able to spare some change or a metro ticket, would you? Or maybe some of those jelly beans?”

We could.

by Liz Mathews

Of course they’d have been perfect for our film, and of course we passed them by. It was as if God had handed them to us, this group of young ladies, and we behaved as though His gift was a dime-store trinket we found in a shoe box under the bed to wonder about later.

It was the end of May and we’d just received our details for participating in a 48-hour film race. Such events were old hat to us by now, nation-wide winners that we were, but as we walked down the street toward the vehicle that would rush us to the edge of Brooklyn and our waiting team, Adam and I were panicking. It wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, the next 48 hours, and much of that had to do with the theme we’d been given. Having balked at the idea of doing a Musical/Western, Adam had chosen the wild card option. The wild card option could only be chosen once.

Thus we were left with a Martial Arts/Stoner film.

So there we were, trudging down 11th Street to where Adam had parked, him making phone calls to the team already waiting in Bay Ridge, me cringing at the thought of shooting seven minutes of our friends sitting on a couch, eating microwave popcorn, and saying “dude” a lot. Maybe while throwing karate chops.

And there they were, hunched in a group on the steps of a typical stone building, one girl on her mobile phone and the others leaning in with rapt attention.

“Oh my God!” phone girl said. “Lisa just got suspended!”

A murmur went through the group.

“We have to get high!” phone girl said. “I have twenty dollars!”

I paused, thinking, eavesdropping. Adam ushered me on.

“Kids these days,” he said, and I nodded. “We could probably get seven minutes right there,” he said. I looked over my shoulder at the girls on the stoop, phone girl still talking on her phone, the others still slump-shouldered and huddled around her.

“We could ask them if they want to be part of a documentary,” I said as Adam’s car came into sight. “Help them forget their woes. Save us from five hours of brainstorming.”

But we didn’t. Instead we headed for Bay Ridge. We ate pizza and drank beer and tossed out ideas. We mentioned the group of girls to our team members and chuckled about how perfect the timing had been. And then we acquired a samurai sword and bought cotton candy at Coney Island. We used fake blood that tasted like corn syrup, and blow-dried oatmeal to a bald man’s head.

And maybe those girls got high. I wonder about them, still.

by Alex Littlefield

They were walking down Ninth Avenue, sharing a spliff, when the cruiser pulled up alongside them.

A sergeant stepped out of the passenger door and came slowly around the hood, sizing them up: Sid the Magician in his street clothes and Matthew the Metal Head in a Pantera shirt and frayed jeans. Both were more than their share of stoned, which may have been why Matthew’s first thought went not to the joint, but to the idea that he was the victim of some sort of post-racial profiling. The sergeant’s look said, I’ve got you, you lank-haired goon.

Then Matthew’s synapses crackled back to the joint, the contingency smoldering somewhere below his line of vision. He tried to see whether Sid had palmed it, but could only smell the thing.

The second cop cracked his door and stepped onto the curb, thumbing his belt. The sergeant spoke first. “What you boys got there?” It struck Matthew as a little too casual, given the starchiness of the man’s uniform and his Eisenhower haircut.

“Nothing, sir,” said Sid. The sergeant craned his neck, scoping out the pair’s hands, which they held out palms-up. Even the smell had vanished. After another minute of head-scratching, the cops swung back into the squad car and pulled away from the curb.

Had this been a W.C. Fields movie, Sid would now have coughed up the joint in a geyser of smoke. But instead it reappeared in his fingers as if it had been there all along. He blew on it to revive the waning ember, hit it, and passed it to Matthew, who took the joint without a word. He knew not to ask.