Rat Bohemia Read Free

Jackson Heights. But mostly, when I was a kid, rats were something that bit babies in a mythical faraway ghetto. You never saw them hanging out in the middle-class sections of Queens.
    An average rat litter is twenty-two little ones and they can reproduce at the rate of six litters a year. Sometime in the 1980s I started to see them scampering regularly in the playgrounds of Central Park. Reagan had just become president and I held him directly responsible. Rat infestation felt like something the U.S. government should really have been able to handle. That’s when I started thinking about getting a gun and shooting each one of them on sight. Picking them off the way hillbillies shoot squirrels.
    That guy, last Sunday, who was throwing bottles? All he cared about was himself. His personal expression was more important to him than other people’s eyes. That’s the kind of attitude that makes this town a dangerous place to live. You never know when it can hit. The shooting in front of The Unique was more reasonable. It was just a bunch of friends killing each other. Don’t have friends like that and it won’t happen to you.

Chapter Two
    Every morning I go over to the old Veterans’ Administration building on West Twenty-fifth Street and wait on line to go through the metal detectors. The crowd moves slowly so all of us look around at the lobby walls. They’re covered with old World War II murals of white soldiers getting fitted for artificial legs by white nurses in starched caps. The women lift up the veterans’ new legs and demonstrate how to use them.
    Once I make it past the security guards, I have to ride up in the elevators with all the whacked-out veterans scratching and getting into fights. Mostly black and Puerto Rican with a sprinkling of white trash. They usually get off first, and then I ride up alone to the seventeenth floor where there is the Food and Hunger Hotline office. I walk through them to my office and then sign in at Pest Control, wasting about half the day unless I get sent out on a job.
    When I am sitting in Pest Control, hanging out, waiting, I pay close attention to the goings on at Food and Hunger. I want to see everything I can. Everything. I want to be a witness to my own time because I’ve had a sneaking suspicion lately that I’m gonna live a lot longer than most of the people I meet. If I’m gonna be the only one still around to say what happened, I’d better pay close attention now.
    Killer usually stops by the office at ten for coffee and peanut butter sandwiches. Then she checks in at a couple of restaurants to see if they need any prep cooks. I know for a fact that they’re only hiring Mexicans and Israelis. Everyone knows Americans aren’t good for restaurant work. They want to talk on the pay phone and give their friends free meals.

    In the meantime she’s living on forty dollars a week from watering plants for a couple of offices and boutiques. The rest gets paid by the Bed and Breakfast guests she hustles at those four-dollar cappuccino places. Mostly Swiss people or Germans. They think it’s quaint. She gives them a bed and then tells them to make their own breakfast. Then she comes to the office to eat some of mine. We’ve been living this schedule for a long time already. It is one big fat habit.
    You know one thing I don’t like about homeless people? They ask you for a light and then hold on to your lighter for forty-five minutes blabbing on and on about some misfortune. The whole thing is designed to make it seem like they don’t realize that they’ve got your lighter. But the fact is, they know they’ve got it.
    My father always raised me to be extremely polite to black people. To say “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” and to feel sorry for the hardships they’d endured. Black and white never socialized together where I grew up—or any place I’ve ever heard of, for