Jubilee City by Joe Andoe

Author:Joe Andoe [Andoe, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-11T18:23:41+00:00

132 JUBILEE CITY

T H E R O S E B O W L

“My water broke!” she said.

I jerked up the two steps of our slightly elevated make-shift loft bathroom to find muddy water on the plywood bathroom fl oor.

Shit, I don’t have any cash, I say.

It’s not happening right this second so go to the ATM, is probably what she said.

I ran three blocks to the World Trade Center and the nearest ATM. I ran back and she was packed and we headed out to Church Street to hail a cab.

I remembered someone telling me that taxis don’t like to pick up pregnant women so I hid her in a phone booth.

Taxi came and we were off.

She went in for a C - section because she was only five feet tall and was carrying a huge baby.

C - section is definitely the way to go. Wham bam—they brought me out a ten - pound, nine - ounce baby boy, and the nurse said he was the prettiest baby she’d ever seen.

YES!

TOUCHDOWN!

Our half of the loft was precarious because we were there illegally and the landlords didn’t know we were living there.

The whole real estate scene was booming overnight, and what the year before had been a glut now was tight and prices had doubled.

The Rose Bowl •

Chapter title

Humpty Dumpty’s . . .

133

And we had no lease.

All we had was the key to the door and Randall’s knowl-edge that we paid to live there. Randall held the lease to this raw space that had been a printing press for almost one hundred years until it closed, like so many other old businesses in lower Manhattan, right before the artists came.

Randall had this power over us.

And like so many assholes who have leverage he loved to remind us of it. Any time we brought home something new, like this baby, he would say, You’d better hope the landlord doesn’t fi nd out that you live here.

I felt like a boat person.

H U M P T Y D U M P T Y ’ S T I P P I N G

P O I N T

Being a mother is tough going—I know, I done it.

It’s a whole lot tougher than it looks; it’s sort of like you are a goalie on a twenty - four - hour, seven - day - a - week soccer game that never ends and it’s really slow and the shots will come just when you think they will never come again, and no one ever sees your save.

That once a year score on you can cost you not only the game and a career but the Hall of Fame.

And because it doesn’t look like you’re doing shit, people treat you like you don’t work.

Even your spouse can come home and disregard the fact that you kept the kid from falling out of the window or running 134 JUBILEE CITY

into the busy street or eating rat poison at the park, or you stood in line with a fidgety baby and made that payment so that thing didn’t get turned off.

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