Demolition 16

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“We met in Barcelona,” she told a fellow actor backstage.

​

“In the Gaudí house, amid the tourist rush, I closed my eyes, made a wish, and there Roxanne appeared,” I added, sincerely.

​

Alternate versions of our origin story included drinking mini bottles of Jägermeister side-by-side at the Berlin Zoo while commenting in unison on how filthy the pandas looked. Locking eyes at the Carville leper colony in Louisiana while reading The Star, a weekly newsletter for the afflicted. Then there was me slipping on black ice in Montreal and waking to a stranger’s face asking if I was okay and me whispering, comment pourrais-je ne pas l'être ? Je viens de rencontrer l'amour de ma vie.

​

We carried on like this for months playing pranks on the unsuspecting, bending backstories into performance art.

​

Once, Roxanne slid her dead grandmother’s wedding ring into my coat pocket before we went out for drinks.

​

“Improv,” she said as we left her apartment.

​

Later, when I fake-proposed at the BRE Bar and she screamed YES! YES! YES!, the

whole place erupted, and we drank free Negronis all night.

​

Back then, I wrote stories for a living and Roxanne lived them aloud on stage. I reported crime for a newspaper while she performed songs on Broadway. Our desire to tell a better story is what brought us together.  

​

***

 

As a newly divorced 36-year-old man, I didn’t know how to date anymore. My most frequent communication with the opposite sex had become the daily guilting of my Blue Heeler, Maven, who always found herself licking bagel crumbs from the counter every morning.

 

As a reporter, I documented the dead but connecting with the living proved harder, perhaps because of my profession. Speaking with grieving families, contending with disgruntled NYPD liaisons at One Police Plaza, and writing stories for a public who largely hated you was not great for the human spirit. It paid rent, but it didn’t feed other parts that needed nourishing. But at my age and with my skill set – or lack thereof – there was no room to pivot which made the loneliness grow.

​

It was a photographer at a Bronx double-homicide who told me I looked blue one morning. That was the word he used: blue. He suggested one of the apps while we waited outside the 44th Precinct for the perp walk which was marred by the typical delays. Though the photographer was late into his fifties and south of handsome, with a crooked nose and fully retreated hairline, he found an implausible hot streak through online dating, leading to his engagement to a Ukrainian babysitter.

​

“If I could do it, you could do it,” he said. “Unless you’re crazy or something.”

​

Out of boredom or despair, I downloaded the app while waiting for the killer to be perp walked. I started the search by crawling through faces, names, and bios. There were countless women clutching drinks in foreign countries. Some held up trophy fish. Too many quoted the movie Tommy Boy. All seemed concerned with height.

​

When Roxanne first appeared on my screen, I almost kept swiping. Aviator sunglasses covered her hazel eyes. A baseball cap buried her cherry-smoked hair. Aside from her cheekbones, she was hard to see. I looked down and checked the basics:

​

Occupation: singer

Height: 5’7

Favorite quote: Everything will kill you. Make it something fun

​

I accidentally swiped while fumbling to put my phone down as the perp screamed, “Y’all got the wrong guy! I ain’t do shit!” while he was hauled past us in a Tyvek suit. I scribbled the quotes in my notepad, copied details and color, and called my Desk.

​

A few days later, my phone dinged.

​

I was buried in follow-up coverage of the killer’s ongoing case. The PCP-fueled rampage in Sheepshead Bay claimed four victims who were all slashed in broad daylight. Piecing together witness accounts with his mostly Russian neighbors, failing to get an interview at Riker’s, where he was being held, and gunning through court documents all day left me in the gavel-to-gavel coverage zone.

​

Buckets of popcorn and Rex Goliath filled out my nights.  Walking Maven in the mornings with my coffee began my days. Work completed the rest.

​

I didn’t open her message until Saturday.

​

“What’s your real name BTW?” she asked.

​

“What do you mean?” I typed.

​

“Chase Storm? What are you? A weatherman?”

​

I snapped a picture of my press pass and sent it.

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“PROOF ENOUGH?”

​

From there, the puns, anecdotes, and well-time one-liners flowed. We exchanged numbers and went off the app. We mocked the grapefruit-skinned presidential candidate, shared travel stories, discussed our shared preoccupation with jazz, and named a film we could watch on repeat ad infinitum (The Hustler, for me, West Side Story, for her).

​

I didn’t tell her “Chase Storm” was a pen name born from a recent comeback after my second rehab stint.

​

After a week of this type of banter, she suggested we grab coffee in Washington Square Park.

​

***

 

Roxanne told me she landed her first screen credit as a baby in a hospital. The role in the show Miami Vice from 1985 still offered royalty checks that averaged about eight cents every month through syndication. This was the verbal resume and past lovers phase of our banter.

​

Her last boyfriend, she said, was an apocalypse prepper who spent $15,000 on “equipment” for the end of the world. Before that, she dated a journalist with facial hair too “clean-cut” and a jawline so effortlessly round that it made her ill to look at.

​

“Pierogi-face syndrome,” I offered.

​

She squinted.

​

“My mom’s term for my uncles in Connecticut and their round Polish faces,” I clarified.

​

She chuckled.

​

“Something like that.”

​

She told me about her last fling with a Jersey City guy who wouldn’t commit.

​

“A jabroni,” I offered.

​

She cackled at that then turned somber.

​

“Dating in New York is a nightmare,” she said, sipping her iced almond milk latte. “What about you?”

​

I told her – in my workwise verbal resume – that I started out as a teenage columnist at a Queens weekly, breaking stories about garbage pickup and excessive dog waste in the streets. I never saw even eight cents for anything I wrote back then.

​

I told her about the divorce and how undramatic it was. How there was no plate-smashing or drawn-out court scenes. No Netflix docuseries potential.

​

Over a butter chicken special in the East Village, after another argument about the same thing we always argued about, she put down her fork.

​

 “What do we do now?”

​

“Divorce,” I said. “These things don’t change.”

​

Four months later, it was legally over. I gave enough cash for a first-month and deposit, helped move her into a Park Slope one-bedroom, and took the dog. The apartment was one pets could not inhabit.

​

“Well, good for you,” Roxanne said. “Sounds like a dead-end, and you cut your losses.”

​

“It was,” I said, flicking a caterpillar off my motorcycle boot.

​

“You ride?” she asked, looking at the leather footwear.

​

I told her about the Harley Sportster I inherited from my old man. I detailed the rebuilt engine, the sidecar, and how I took solo trips to Montauk. After Labor Day, when the crowds cleared, and Ditch Plains was empty, and the Fishermen bars quieted down, I walked around aimlessly to find a sense of peace.

​

She lit up. Her grandfather, she said, had been a Hollywood character actor with a passion for motorcycles. On weekends he wasn’t working, he’d tear through LA tracks with Dennis Hopper.

​

“That’s where I got my stage name,” she said of her grandfather. “Kyle Quinn.”

​

Before Broadway, there were singing waitress gigs and off-off Broadway plays. When one of the leads in Funny Girl, a musical about Broadway star Fanny Brice, got cancer, and Roxanne stepped in, that was her major break.

​

Her childhood, she said, was mostly spent in the Hollywood Hills. She called herself a “Valley Girl,” several times. Her father – a doctor – left for town in Park City and a younger woman when she was a toddler. Her mother, who worked in production, briefly dated Phil Spector but remained single ever since.

​

“He was shorter than he looked in all the documentaries. He loved wearing wigs and shooting guns,” she said unsurprisingly.

​

Her mother told her: that woman he killed could have been me then begged her to find a nice Jewish doctor in Manhattan.

​

“Dating in New York is a nightmare,” she repeated, then frowned.

​

The June heat didn’t let up. As we sat on the green bench, I watched sweat trail down her pastel neck. Humidity clung to us like a layer. My shirt was damp, and I had to check several times to make sure I didn’t reek of onion sweat or bad weather.

​

We talked until dusk while joggers, dealers, chess players, NYU students, and old Beats drifted past. The air was thick with weed, body heat, and summer voltage. Somehow it felt romantic as time evaporated.

​

As a wedding party walked past us, she checked her phone.

​

“I’ve got a show tonight,” she said. “I have to go.”

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We stood up and walked to the arch near the edge of the park.

​

“This was fun though,” she said as we hugged. “And thanks for not trying to kiss me.”

​

I watched her disappear down Fifth Avenue, then wandered down to West 8th and caught the A train home, still sweating even in the AC.

​

***

 

Two months after our first date, we were in bed when an audible boom cracked through the evening sky.

​

“What was that?” Roxanne asked, sitting upright, her knees still astride my hips. Her eyes flashed. “Did a bomb just drop on the town?”

​

I wrapped a towel around my waist and headed for the ladder.

​

Years ago, after my father died, I’d cut a hatch through the second-floor ceiling to watch the sun rise over Jamaica Bay up on the roof. I’d climb up there with coffee or bourbon, depending on the day, and feel suspended between sky and sea.

​

After the heart attack, when I inherited the house, I started rebuilding it with each freelance paycheck. Mold had bloomed in the walls since Hurricane Sandy when I took over the deed. Buckets still collected rainwater in three rooms. The central heat hadn’t worked since the Obama years. A belly stove blackened the first-floor ceiling. The water heater was dead. It was a husk with a view, a home in quotation marks, but a project nonetheless that I kept working on.

​

I hadn’t planned on bringing Roxanne here. It was not because of the distance from her Upper West Side studio or the home’s condition, but because Broad Channel was exactly who I was. Raw, wrecked, salty-boned, and laden with a secret history. I didn’t want her to see how far below the surface of normal I still lived, how much of myself I still concealed.

​

But she wanted to see where I came from, and I tried playing it cool.

​

Now, naked, we stood side by side on the roof, smoke rising from the vista point, cheers

echoing under moon light.
 

“It’s Demolition,” I said. “They brough it back after Trump.”

​

Her head tilted.

​

“What’s Demolition?”

​

“A Channel tradition,” I said. “It started in 88.’ They burn things they want to forget. Photos. Furniture. Old clothes. All of it inside an old burning car.”

​

“Therapy by fire?”

​

“Right.”

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Another explosion burst, followed by cheering.

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Roxanne’s eyes widened.

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“Let’s go.”

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“It’s probably wrapping up.”

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She turned to me, still radiating with sweat, distant firelight tracing her collarbone.

​

“Come on. I’ve never seen anything like that. It’ll be original.”

​

“But you need something to throw in. That’s the point.”

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She grinned. “I’ve got something.”

​

As we ducked back inside, and climbed down the ladder, I wondered if I was part of a character sketch. I wondered if Roxanne was playing the ingénue researching a play about redneck heartbreak. Perhaps I was just a prop.

​

Still, I grabbed an old photo album from under the bed.

​

Maven whined as we left. Her sidecar spot was being usurped. I told her we’d be back soon.

​

Roxanne laughed.

​

“Sorry, sweet girl,” as we shut the door.

​

She strapped on my extra helmet, goggles perched high, spinning once like a budding floret. I mounted the Harley. The engine bellyached to life, and we rolled down Cross Bay Boulevard.

​

We passed by the volunteer fire department and turned toward the Passion Pits, the old sandlot now turned into ritual grounds. A Mazda sedan burned at the center as we approached. Crime tape stretched from a birch tree to the firetruck’s bumper. I handed a couple of tens to the guards. Two Channelers I’d known since middle school. They nodded us through.

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***

 

Demolition was already in full strike by the time we arrived. The Mazda was almost unrecognizable. Its engine howling in pain, paint curling in oily whorls, flames licking the roof like an infection.

​

Ash sifted down on us like confetti. Roxanne gripped my hand.

​

All around the blaze, Broad Channel had come alive. They called folks here Channel Rats and they yowled, hooted and jeered as they hurled memories into the inferno. Gasoline-soaked regrets, tossed into a ceremonial furnace, aiming for forgiveness.

​

“Compliments to the chef,” someone called.

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I turned and saw Deon. He was a grade-school tormentor turned Port-O-John worker. He stood there in jorts, Jordans, a Mets jersey, and a red MAGA hat like it was part of a Queens Redneck kit.

​

“This is Roxanne,” I said.

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He gave her a once-over.

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“Welcome to the Channel,” he said. “We finally got Demolition back!”

​

He stumbled off, chasing the fumes and racket blasting.

​

“You said you had something to burn?” I asked.

​

Roxanne looked around. Her eyes grazed the crowd like a documentarian scoping a strange, half-extinct tribe. MAGA hats, jerseys, graphic tees, bedazzled hoodies. Photos of cheating spouses swirling in flame. Fake birds. Dog toys. A pair of snakes – possibly real – blackened and writhing in its sinister glare.

​

“They’re Tokens of Unappreciation,” I explained. “You throw in whatever you’re ready to be done with. The more symbolic, the better.”

​

She watched a guy in a puffy vest launch a TV remote into the car’s firestorms. Another tossed in a framed diploma. Someone else burned tax returns and a Teddy Ruxpin.

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“That one’s carrying some shit,” she said.

​

McCambridge, a former roller hockey star who lost his SUNY Plattsburgh scholarship to a feverish coke habit, hurled a brand-new pair of Timbs in.

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“It’s the final round!” bellowed a voice through a bullhorn.

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“Fuck yeah,” Roxanne said, eyes vivid. She stepped forward.

​

“You gonna wait in line?” I asked.

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“No,” she said.

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She strutted to the front, unbuttoning her denim jacket as she strutted, blue firelight encircling her hair.

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“My ex gave this to me!” she cried, holding it overhead. “And he’s a fucking Scientologist!”

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Laughter heaved through the crowd. Some clapped. A few booed, and an elderly woman holding a cowboy hat groaned about her cutting the line.

​

She launched the jacket into the sedan. The denim soon erupted into blues and golds, spinning upward like a boozy comet.

​

I followed, holding the photo album. It was my wedding full of fake smiles and false promises. I didn’t even waver. I tossed it and watched pages crackle and fold into each other, memories searing into residue.

​

“Demolition for life!” Roxanne shouted.

​

Cheers swelled around her.

​

“One more kick!” the bullhorn hollered.

​

The two guards came and hurled Molotovs into the car. The sedan detonated in a boom so loud it shook my chest. People screamed with joy with their fists raised in a flare. Some danced around.

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I stared into the smoldering mess, picturing my marriage as black powder lifting into the night sky. It felt like release.

​

When I turned back to Roxanne, her hands were on her throat – her face covered in soot, eyes wide and panicked.

​

***

 

It was our third date when we met for Negronis at the Algonquin bar, famous for its writerly souls – the bench-seated New York literati sect of a bygone era. I’d just finished covering the murder of a jogger in Howard Beach. She’d just played her hundredth performance in the Fanny Brice musical.

​

She arrived in a linen dress, cheeks still flushed from stage lights.

​

Over cocktails, we swapped stories. Mine revolving around the city’s latest murder victim, trial details, quarrels in the press pit. Hers traveled to new voiceover gigs, a movie script, and a shower-scene in her past that once tore her vocals.

​

“It gave me an identity crisis,” she said. “If I couldn’t sing, who was I?”

​

The voice returned, eventually. For six months, she said, it felt like a death.

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Now her dream was to win a Tony before escaping to the Pacific Northwest, where she’d live on a goat farm and do community theater when it rained.

​

“I know it’s gauche to say I want the award,” she added, smiling sadly. “But it would be validating to win something.”

​

After drinks, we wandered Midtown, drenched in late-summer stickiness before taking the subway uptown to her studio.

​

“You want to come up for a glass?” she asked. “We’re not having sex.”

​

“Good,” I said. “I’m not that easy.”

​

She poured Chotes-du-Rhones into tumblers, lit a battery-powered candle, and set Coltrane on the speaker. The storm outside thump against the fire escape.

​

A black-and-white photo of her grandfather and Dennis Hopper hung on the fridge.  There was no couch or television. She had a mattress, a low desk, and a kitchen stocked with probiotics, Mitcher’s bourbon, and Manuka honey.

​

“Sorry about the sparseness,” she said. “I’m still moving in.”

​

“How long you been here?”

​

“Three years.”

​

We sat on the floor, cross-legged, like kids in a fort.

​

“Life is weird,” she said, staring out the window. “A few days ago, I didn’t know you existed. Now you’re in my apartment.”

​

“Hopefully you’re not a serial killer,” I said.

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“Hopefully.”

​

We talked about places we wanted to disappear to in the world. She said Patagonia was her number one spot.

​

“That was fast.”

​

“It’s in Argentina and Chile. You’ve never heard of it?”

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“No,” I admitted.

​

She asked me the same question.

​

“Socotra,” I said. “In Yemen. It’s an island with a 300-million-year-old species of tadpole shrimp. Living fossils. I want to see one.”

​

“You were waiting to tell someone that.”

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“I was.”

​

Later, when I stood to leave, I told her.

​

“Time to get awkward.”

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“I guess you’re going to kiss me now,” she said.

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Her lips were indulgent and unguarded. My fingers brushed her cheek, and she pulled back slowly.

 

“No one’s ever touched my face like that,” she sighed.

​

There was something unspoken as if we’d met years prior.

​

That night, back in Queens, I saw her text:

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Every heartache I’ve had is worth the promise you bring. And that scares me.

​

***
 

“I want to see where you’re from,” Roxanne said on our fourth date.

​

We were seated at a candlelit bar near her place uptown. She’d just told a neighboring couple we’d met at a hand-model audition in Sweden.

​

I must have winced. Not because of the lie – those now came easy – but because I didn’t want her to see Broad Channel.

​

The Channel wasn’t a neighborhood to me. It was a tainted history. A gravitational pull of bad choices lashed together on a low-lying spit of land that felt like its own crooked organism.

​

Half my sixth-grade class was dead or incarcerated. I had cigarette burn scars along my neck and shoulder. I was raised by a man who drank himself into heart failure, and a grandfather who drank himself into the ocean. The streets of the place reminded me.

​

But I smiled, staying unruffled.

​

“Sure,” I said.

​

In her apartment that night she asked why my energy was off.

​

“I’m fine,” I told her, undressing. She climbed onto me, and my anxieties slid out of reach for a while.

​

We made love in a kind of meditative trance. It was less like people falling and more like people trying to remember how to feel something again.

​

She dozed off in my arms while fake candlelight jittered across the ceiling.

​

***

 

Two nights later, Roxanne took the A train to Broad Channel. I met her at the Subway station, where marsh and sky met in muted gray. She stepped onto the platform in a sundress and ankle boots, eyes scanning the waterline.

​

“This is impossibly romantic,” she said.

​

I wasn’t sure if she meant the view or the isolation it provided.

​

I drove and we climbed out of my car and up to the house two stories overlooking the bay. She didn’t comment on the sagging porch or the buckets to catch leaking water. We went straight to the roof, where I set out homemade hummus and pita chips and a bottle of Malbec.

​

Roxanne talked about her show. Monday nights were always half-capacity, and the punchlines often fell flat due to all the foreign tourists not understanding the American references. She reenacted a few for me, throwing her hands beneath her chin like a starlet from a forgotten era when she finished. I laughed harder than necessary, nerves rattling.

​

She talked about her past lovers again. She called one an actor with an inflated ego disease and dead eyes. “It was all too performative. It was like he was dating himself,” she said.

​

“Good thing you picked someone egoless,” I said, raising a glass.

​

We stayed on the roof for hours drinking, smoking, slipping into and out of our clothes. The atmosphere fell from twilight to a murky blue shade poked by glowing stars. She spoke about her vegetarianism, her disdain for privilege. How, in the right time and place, she’d kill and eat a goat. “I’m not morally superior,” she said. “I’m just removed from the process.”

​

I understood she needed to speak. She was building a trust bridge between us, plank by plank. I let her talk because I was afraid of what might happen if she turned her scrutiny on me or the past I couldn’t rewrite, or the present I was barely surviving.

​

That was the night Demolition called us from the firmament.

​

***

 

After the fire, Roxanne’s throat closed up. By the next morning, her voice was gone.

​

The ER doctor said the cause was smoke inhalation. It was nothing permanent, but she’d need rest for weeks, perhaps months, depending on the time it took her to fully regain strength in her vocal cords. She burst into tears when she heard the news.

​

I stayed with her at the hospital overnight, holding her hand while monitors blinked their observation. She couldn’t speak, so we wrote notes back and forth on a legal pad. Her out of need, me out of solidarity.  Her mother was flying in from Los Angeles.

​

She asked: Why did that whole event feel Biblical?

​

I didn’t answer.

​

Your mother will be here when you wake up, I wrote.

​

I fell asleep after she nodded off.

​

The next morning, I kissed her sleeping forehead and said I had to work. She squeezed my hand and nodded.

​

But I didn’t go to work.

​

***

 

I took the train back to Broad Channel and sat on the roof, drinking from a bottle of Mitcher’s bourbon I’d stolen from her kitchen. The exposed sky throbbed with summer haze, and the bay looked like melted crystal. I couldn’t stop thinking about the soot on her face. The way she’d gripped her neck. The part of me that had watched it all without moving. The sniffles, the heart ache.

​

I didn’t text. I didn’t call.

​

Instead, I drifted for days that blurred to weeks. When she contacted me, I told her I was covering a murder in Far Rockaway or Sheepshead Bay or Baltimore. The lies came easy again. It was easier than showing up or being decent.

​

The drinking worsened and so did my absences on assignments. My editor pulled me aside to try to get me help one day, but I ignored his warning and was soon fired.

​

Meanwhile, Roxanne tried. She texted me and eventually left voicemails when her voice returned.

​

“Just come over,” she said two months after Demolition. “I don’t care what state you’re in.”

​

I was afraid she’d see me for what I was again. Instead of a reinvention, I was just an old rerun.

​

Eventually, her texts and calls stopped.

​

***

 

It took me years to reach back out to Roxanne after finding her on Facebook.

​

She had moved to Portland. She was married with two kids and lived in a home with a wraparound porch and chickens in the yard. When her voice returned, she’d acted in three films with Meryl Streep. She never won a Tony, but she didn’t need to. She became who she was always going to be.

​

As part of Step Nine, I sent her the initial message. I didn’t expect or deserve a reply. I just had to tell her: I know it doesn’t matter now, and it was a long time ago but I’m sorry. I was sick. I was afraid. I ruined something good.

​

She wrote back a week later.

​

I’m glad you’re okay, she said. I often wondered.

​

We traded a few messages that moved with cordial, warm, and elliptical rhythm. She told me she missed performing sometimes. I told her I didn’t miss journalism, and PR was not as bad as I thought it would be. I left out the part about getting kicked out of journalism or all the relapses.

​

Suddenly, she asked: Why did you go missing when I needed you most?

​

I stared at the blinking cursor.

​

I wanted to write about the shame. The way I felt in the ER that night or the muck inside my chest that never went away. How terrified I was of loving her because she made me trust in a life I didn’t deserve.

 

I wanted to write something true.

​

Instead, I sat there, watching the screen, not typing anything at all.

 

​

​​​By Henrick Karoliszyn