“We’ll be at your apartment instead of in your car.” I work my neck from side to side, thinking of what will be there. A couch. A bed. Hours and hours of us alone.
“What do you suggest? Writing songs at Starbucks?”
“Fine. Let’s take your car.”
“Don’t you need to go by your apartment for some things?” she asks. “And why can’t we ever drive your car? Do you know how many miles I’ve put on mine in the last few months?”
Notebook in hand, I head for the door. “I keep clothes at my mom’s, and we take your car because mine’s a piece of shit.” It’s true, but that’s not why I don’t want her in it.
“Mine’s not much better.”
“Can we just go? We have a lot of work to do.”
“Okay, but we’re going halfsies on gas.”
“I’ll pay for the damn gas.”
She jingles her keys. “You’ll get no argument from me.”
~ ~ ~
We ride in silence to the city. I stare out the window and she drives, glancing at me when she’s not looking at the road.
“Giving me the silent treatment isn’t helping,” she says.
“What do you want me to say? We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
“Whatever,” she says, turning up the radio.
I flip through my notebook, making no progress at all in the seventy minutes it takes to reach our destination.
A card from her visor gets us into a parking garage. None of the other cars are much nicer than hers. It’s a bargain garage for sure. Half the security lights either don’t work or flicker. I look in the corners to see if they have cameras. They do. We walk down three flights of stairs and pass the security booth. Bria knocks on the window, waking up the old man who’s sleeping on the job. She waves, and he salutes her.
We cover eight or nine blocks in silence. “Could you have picked a garage any farther away? How much longer?”
She stops and her stare all but pins me to the wall. “You try living in New York City on what we’ve been making. I’m lucky to have a car and a place to park it. Most people don’t.”
“But you were the backup singer for White Poison. Surely you made enough to upgrade your parking accommodations.”
She laughs. “Oh, I can’t wait to see what you have to say about my apartment. I was only their backup singer for one tour. Three months. I couldn’t exactly change my standard of living on that. Plus I have a lot of debt.”
Across the street a kid runs out of a store, followed by a yelling man carrying a gun.
“Jesus, Bria.”
“That’s the city for you.”
I expect her to be scared or upset, but she’s not affected at all. Some kid not fifty feet away robbed a store, and she’s acting like it’s no big deal.
Our surroundings say it all. Broken windows line some abandoned storefronts. Homeless people lie in the alleys. I’m certain we’ve seen more than a few people making drug deals. “How can you live here?”
“Not everyone grows up with a silver spoon up their ass.”
Like Bria, most people assume if you’re from Stamford, you’re wealthy. For the most part, it’s true. I’m one of the exceptions.
We turn a corner.
“My place is over there.” She points at a vape shop.
We approach a door adjacent to the shop, she unlocks it, and we go up a stairway into a hall with four apartments. There are more stairs leading to higher floors. Maybe I watch too much TV, but this looks like a damn crack house—water stains on the wall, peeling plaster, and what on earth is that smell? She lives here?
Bria sees my expression. “Before you say anything, I know it looks bad, but my brother had the building checked out. He’s a firefighter in Brooklyn. It’s far from being condemned.”
I try not to cringe as we come to her door. “Well, I guess there’s that.”
Part of me wants to go inside, pack up her things, and take her back to Stamford. I may not live in the Taj Mahal, but my apartment is the goddamn Ritz compared to this shithole.
I come to the city often. So do the guys. We’ve been playing gigs here for years. Have I just ignored the fact that people live like this? Or maybe I’ve just never been to this part of the city.
“Your brother lets you live here?”
“I’m a big girl, Crew. He doesn’t let me live here. I choose