The International Handball incident
Shawn Rubenfeld
It’s been three weeks since Jess told me to be patient, to give her space. But still I’m here again, outside her ground floor apartment on Waverly. It’s the last of a series of six brownstones, across from PS 11 and the square of handball and basketball courts called Greene Playground. Beyond the apartment the street is a series of long flat buildings separated by alleyways and metal fences. NO PARKING signs are posted on the front of everything—garages, trees, light poles. It’s Thursday so things are quiet. All I hear is the occasional car horn and the pop of a handball from the two Russians on the court. I reach my hand over the building’s metal gate and pull it open. I climb the steps and ring the doorbell. I’ve got the story down pretty good. I’m here to get the Season Three Seinfeld DVDs for my mother. That’s why I’m breaking our deal. Not that I need a story this time. I saw the Facebook posts—all that blatant back-and-forth about favorite colors and Earth Day, about missing trains and watching Tarantino movies. Jess. I know exactly where she is. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and turn to face the big, brick elementary school, where industrial-size metal fans and the occasional nine-year-old Rapunzel linger on the other side of window bars. There’s a security guard on a fold-out chair at the front steps, a regular sight for Clinton Hill, despite it being home to all the weird art kids from Pratt, which is where Jess studies interior design. All around are street murals the Pratt kids put up: Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, and a slew of upside-down rainbows, painted on almost every wall between here and Fort Greene. When she first moved to Waverly, Jess called it Mural Hill.
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RE: AL