Read No Lease on Life for Free Online

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A Jewish grandmother is walking along Jones Beach with her grandson. A big wave comes along and sweeps her grandson out to sea. The old woman gets down on her knees and prays to God. Please, God, give me back my grandson. I’ll do anything. Please give my boy back to me. She wails and moans and suddenly a big wave crests and at the top of it is her grandson. He lands at her feet. The grandmother looks up at the sky and says, He had a hat.
    She suffered fools, landlords, enemies, and junkies. She had to wait around for similar and dissimilar male and female junkies to get up from the vestibule floor, after they’d slumped there, after they’d shot up, she had to wait for them to get off the floor of the dark vestibule almost every night. They left blood on the floor, bright red dots of blood. Caught in the act, they lied to her. They weren’t shooting up. They were waiting for someone to come home.
    —We’re waiting for Cathy.
    —There’s no Cathy. You’re going to shoot up.
    They’d struggle to stuff their paraphernalia back in a bag and pull themselves up from the floor. They’d agree to leave. They’d walk past Elizabeth.
    —We’re just being nice, because there is a Cathy.
    Some cleaned up after themselves, not because they were neat. If they left no trace of their works and bloody business, they could return. Some attempted permanent invisibility. They were spectral characters. They were young and drained of life, they were alone, desperate, and hollow. Elizabeth didn’t want them there, she didn’t want to walk over them, and she hated seeing the blood on the floor and on their legs as they furtively rushed to cover the place where they’d just shot up.
    One of them was asleep. She was about sixteen, blond, cute. Elizabeth woke her. She was sprawled on the floor. Elizabeth couldn’t open the door and get inside her own building. The girl roused herself finally.
    —Don’t you have a home? Elizabeth asked.
    Elizabeth delivered the question like a guidance counselor or social worker. The girl was stunned. Someone didn’t think she had a home. The girl didn’t know how low she’d sunk in someone else’s eyes, how she looked to someone else. You need other people to feel humiliated. I have a home, she said truculently. She slunk away and moved dejectedly down the street like a wounded baby animal.
    A friend of Roy’s told him a story. The friend was a reformed or recovering addict. One night when he was still getting high, he was waiting on line in a drug store, a hole in the wall farther east. A woman behind him said, Isn’t it funny? The more I do, the more I want. Roy’s friend repeated the story to Roy. His friend said, she didn’t know she was a junkie. Roy wasn’t surprised by that. He thought people were stupid.
    Junkies in the vestibule every night or every other night and puddles of blood and tiny scraps of tissue with blood on them and round little bright red drops of blood on the stairs were part of her environment. Junkies liked the vestibule. It was cool. The door and vestibule situation was another fight Elizabeth had with the Big G.
    Elizabeth phoned at least five times, over any year, suggesting in a pleasant voice into the landlord’s answering machine—they never picked up—various ways to keep junkies out.
    —Hello, this is Elizabeth Hall. I’d like to discuss the junkies in the vestibule. If you would just give us a lock on the outer door, and place the intercom on the outside, or, and this would be less expensive, a glass door or a heavy plastic door, or even cheaper, as an alternative, cut out panels from the bottom of the existing door…
    No one phoned her back.
    Elizabeth noticed other front doors along her block. All of them were made of thick glass. That way junkies couldn’t hide and stick needles into old collapsed veins or new bouncy ones. They couldn’t slump on the floor and disappear. They weren’t the disappeared. They were visible behind