Two youths met for the first time at a pizzeria. They were clones: Brown unibrows, mahogany manes, cinnamon ‘staches, brown beards, lanky limbs, gargantuan glasses, seashell shirts, sandy shorts, socks and sandals.
Both suffered from crippling social autism: They were silently buried in their phones.
They were truly twins separated at birth.
Four other women (fraternal twins) discussed their favorite yoga poses: Savasana before or savasana after a lesson? Five younger girls (sister orphans) were ecstatic about selfies and grey tank tops. A dozen flies killed themselves in the salad bar rather than suffer the banality. Two older brothers discussed a love of GMILFS and french toast.
The pizzeria staff moved at the glacial, unreflective pace only true wooks and burnouts were capable of without restlessness. There would be no pizza for another half hour.
One single table held one lone occupant with one single sadness: Onelingness.
Ricardo Diaz was adopted, as were all the people in this room. He also had a sibling, like everyone in this room. His sibling was not here, hence the melancholy.
He’d been to this meeting before. It was the the Biennial Brinner of the Bronx Brothers. It was originally a coincidental meeting between adopted triplets in 1883 that continued to this day.
The three had met at the Gorland Pickle factory, which came as quite a shock to the three. It was a major local news article for the first week and then the year anniversary. The three invited similar serendipitous siblings to meet together at the restaurant that was built there when the Bronx Brine bought out and closed the factory.
Now it was an adoption agency arranged event. The “clutches” of adopted children from the borough were all invited. No-sibling adoptees had a different event. Ricardo felt he belonged there.
He was pleased by the Libertado’s Dominican offerings. And a minute without his parents. And the oppurtunity to eavesdrop.
His father was an artist, his mother was an artist.
“Ricardo! Tu pintura es fluido! No es seco! Tiene paciencia!”
He could hear either of them being critical.
Ricardo decided to be alone for a while (no mean feat in the city). He climbed to the top of his tenement and sat at the ledge. He wasn’t supposed to have a key to the River Park’s roof. He’d blackmailed custodian Marvin Davis for a key. Ricardo pulled some Ludwig Prinn from his backpack to satisfy his curiosity for the forbidden and seated on his familiar ledge.
The curiosity he never could satisfy was who his parents were. Sometimes he dreamed they were normal, boring people.
“This painting is made of my menses. It represents the beauty of nature while at the same time suggesting its dark, hidden reality which is concealed by a sterile popular culture,” on a an urban landscape painting.
“I will be drinking two liters of my own semen to represent the masturbatory, dialectic relationship between productivity and the means of production,” during performance art astride the Wall Street Bull during Occupy.
Thanks, Papa. Thanks, Mama. There were times that he would have preferred his parents be drooling idiots rather than artists. Even abusive parents preferred. He’d never had any friends. Most New Yorkers shied away from avant garde, shock artists.
Shitty artists. Shartists.
“Mixed media was an unappreciated medium,” comments on pom poms and colored sand representing the transience of life.
“I think money is a sign of corruption. Too much money is bad for the soul. Would you please pass the grey poupon?” unironically while eating chicken kiev.
“I always prefer to underwrite the marginalized, so as to give them a voice,” former chief of police.
Most of their customers were old people with no taste, too much money, and life of privileged conservatism they paid to deny; gatherings as fake, toxic, and maudlin as aspartame.
His parents’ peers rarely had children. The avant garde were known more for libidity than fecundity. They were like sterile, beautiful butterflies.
The Muslim and Coptic parents next door refused to allow their children to mingle with the offspring of deviant infidels. The Catholics crossed themselves when he approached.
St. Augustine and Diogenes dreamed of the social isolation Ricardo suffered daily.
Old Ludwig, or Stephen King, or al-Hazred kept Ricardo company most of the time. Anything mysterious. He was always looking for a mystery.
He’d already poked into his parents’ adoption files. They knew as little as he did about his biological lineage. They kept so much buttoned up tight: Their ancestry, their past, their everything.
“Te siento, pero yo no puedo hablar en el pasado.”
“Yo no voy a decirte de universidad.”
He would never get anything out of them, so he had to search the apartment.
They were out this evening at a cocktail party for their latest excrement. The adoption agency’s event was the excuse for his abcense.
Ricardo stared over the river and into the sunset. He thought of all the good, quiet, wonderful evenings he’d spent up here. His legs hung over the ledge in the air; it felt like a roller coaster dropping out from under him all the time.
Ricardo checked his watch, folded his book up, headed to the apartment, and decided to try something familiar. He saw Marvin on the landing.
Marvin, critical, “Enjoying the view, Ramirez?”
Ricardo, head bobbing shoulder to shoulder, “Enjoying omerta, Don Giovanni?”
Marvin gave an ugly look, daggering with his eyes. He stomped towards his mistress’ apartment. Marvin was upset at losing his monopoly on skulking.
Ricardo scurried away. He would poke the bear, but only defensively.
He got home, dumped his backpack on the couch, and began an inspired search. His guardians would not be back until very late. He unscrewed the outlet plates, lifted picture frames, checked the potted plants (both under and in), the tops of the doors: All possible hiding places.
Ricardo kept a search matrix hidden in the seam of his Bible’s cover.
“Lo encubierto del SEÑOR nuestro Dios es descubierto a nosotros y a nuestros hijos para siempre, para que hagamos todas las palabras de esta ley.” Deuteronomio 29:29
His favorite verse meant much to him. Secrets thrilled. He lamented that there were none to find here an retires to his hammock.
His parents got home. He could hear them chattering excitedly. They were drunk enough to talk in English. They had made a big sale. (?) They met the dean of Yale’s psychology department. (?) There was an immense amount of wine. (?) Something about Ricardo. (?!)
Now he couldn’t sleep. He rolled out of his hammock and headed to the kitchen, creeping. His parents were sufficiently wasted to speak in English. Ricardo hoped to whittle some info. He felt skulking in person disrespectful.
They were talking about him. He sat down on a stool at the kitchen island. They didn’t notice him right there.
“...he’ll be getting the full ride. After all this time-- and wine!” his father.
“It’s only taken seventeen years! Not… counting… gestation…”, his mother finished a pinot noir.
His father noticed him, became alarmed, “How-- Ricardo!”, alarm washed away in a hug that scooped him off his chair. His mother helped pin him up. They covered him in kisses.
Gasping, “What’s. The. Good. News?”
His mother and father, excitedly, “You’ll We talked be to an old receiving associate a full he made an ride to Yale if you choose offer psychology or of study. sociology.”
Full ride to Yale. Conditional? “How’d you wring that out?”
Father, direct but cryptic, “Family favor, old promise.”
Mother, “But you can go wherever you want! No pressure!”
He’d be the only kid in the Bronx going to Yale this year, he was sure… Why? Idea. Opportunity.
Ricardo, real excitement, “That’s excellent news!” Strafing left slowly. “I should leave you to bed, or should we pour more... champagne...?”
His parents beat him there and greased his plan unknowingly. They poured, drank, sent him to bed, and retired themselves.
Ricardo knew his parents weren’t sloppy, but he knew liquors were. Ricardo’d stashed his mother’s purse (and by extension his father’s) in a cabinet, where they’d forgotten it. He generally did not root through their purse, but today he felt itchy.
His itch rewarded him with a mystery: Progestin.
There were other banal items in the purse, but only this one stood out. A brief internet search at the public library the next day provided him the shock: Birth control.
He was… pretty sure his parents were sterile. Which is why they adopted. So why the birth control?
It was perplexing. He sat at his ledge, pontificating on the subject.
Ricardo decided to take matters into a realm he preferred to avoid, both revealing a secret and working directly.
There was one Mr. Olin on the 14th floor who was a pimp. Literally a pimp. With hos and a limp and everything.
There was a Kevin MacQueen who lived just below him.
Ricardo knew that Kevin was an informant because he had heard him talking about his plea deal with his mother on the phone. He went into great detail.
So Ricardo decided to trade some information for a favor. He printed out the case details from court records at the library to prove the point.
Ricardo caught Olin out working under the subway the next day.
Olin, recognizing, “Good morning, young master. What services may I procure for you? Perhaps a Sunday morning blowjob? A gerbiling audience? Which of the one thousand whispers of pleasure can help you worship this sabbath?”
Ricardo, businesslike, “Mr. Olin, I would like to ask a favor, but it is not a normal one.”
Olin raised his eyebrows and tipped down his shutter shades to get a better look at Ricardo. He bobbed and nodded.
“...So you see here that your downstairs neighbor is definitely a snitch who you should be aware of. There are a number of ways to use this information: You could feed him your enemies. You could have someone stomp around in your apartment as a fake alibi. You could just avoid Kevin.”
Olin, impressed and twirling a cane, “That is a particularly valuable bit of information commodity. How do you propose forcing me to keep my end of the deal?”
“Because you don’t even know what it is yet?”
Olin, licking the inside of his gums, nods and raises his eyebrows
“I really have no idea how to break into and rob a place, but I would like to know how.”
“Is it Morgan Stanley or Kramer’s hardware?”
“Neither, but more on the scale of Kramer’s hardware.”
Olin nodded, “Alright, I have pimping to do. Come up to my apartment tomorrow morning for breakfast.”
“Should I bring a dish?”
“No, what kind of Chinese do you like?”
Olin and Ricardo talked about the finer points of robbery the next morning. Olin seemed amused to have an audience, Ricardo allowed any tangents out of snoopiness.
A hundred dozen pigeons flew overhead. The Spuyten Suyvil Creek flowed as Olin’s orange Cadillac rolled around the Hart to Hart adoption agency.
Olin, pointing, “See those windows? Easiest way to get in. A window will be unlocked. Just statistics. Wear gloves. Wear a mask. You can jog, right? Climb up the fire escape. You can call in a bomb threat at any pay phone. Now, what is the most important rule?”
Ricardo, in the passenger seat, “‘Don’t get caught.’”
Olin, “Exactly. Exactly correct. Remember to steal something you don’t want to throw them off a little. What is it you do want?”
Ricardo smiled, smirking, “That’s my secret.”
“Fine, whatever.”
Ricardo stopped by Kramer’s on the way home and picked up gloves and a mask in the middle of August. Mr. Kramer was less than thrilled at the likelihood of another kid going to jail. The Chinaman in Manhattan was unconcerned at the purpose of a sale of fireworks and fuse which, though legal in communist China, were illegal in this hell-hole of devil-slave Americans.
Ricardo lit the fireworks with an extended fuse and hid them in a trashcan. Oscar would have reason to be a grouch soon.
He immediately ran to the adoption office (what a nice word for “Baby Store”) and began scaling the fire escape. The fireworks then exploded, fragging six generations rodents, the dumpster held, but car alarms and burglar alarms were tripped all over the block.
Just like Olin suggested, a window was open. However, the file cabinets were not. Ricardo kicked door stops under them and lifted the latching bar one at a time.
Eventually, he found his file. Which came as a slightly welcome shock. He took double pictures of each of the twenty odd pages, replaced the folder, cabinet, window, and escaped.
The pages fell like bricks. Half of them were the usual tracking of an adoptee forms. The rest were a revelation of plan twenty years in the making.
Ricardo’s parents were his parents. His biological parents. This was startling only in the shade of the partial lie of adoption.
All the paperwork was real: He was technically adopted. He was given up and re-adopted. His mother had him under her maiden name (Suarez). His father adopted the child. Then his mother married his father.
They had met at Yale. His mother was an arts major with no aptitude. His father studied sociology, specifically the augmented creativity of adopted children. Her father was the head of Yale’s sociology department. As an experiment, Ricardo was told he was adopted. Because they wanted a creative child.
Ricardo pondered alll this on the edge of his roof. He stepped into the darkness, the edge suddenly felt too close.
Secrets thrilled Ricardo, but this one made his stomach churn: He was an experiment. He was a lab rat. He was a little child in a Skinner box.
He walked down the stairs, his world spinning. And then there was oblivious Marvin cleaning up puke on the stairs.
He backed up the stairs, past the 13th floor with the snitch, the 14th floor with the pimp, the 18th floor with his cell. His life in sudden perspective.
A full ride to Yale was preferable to being a custodian, slinking through the bowels of a human storage unit.
Better than being a snitch, a government bitch.
Better than being a pimp, a flesh peddler.
He returned to the roof, sat cross-legged on the ledge, and looked out at the sunrise. Perhaps Ricardo would pick up another major besides sociology. Perhaps he would pick up creative writing.
