Piecework

In memory, we never saw the sand. Every inch was covered with blankets and bodies: glistening young bodies, swollen older bodies of women waddling into the surf, the inaccessible bodies of girls. I would plunge into the unruly sea, thinking of white whales, harpoons, Ahab; of my grandfather Devlin, who had seen Rangoon before his death on the Brooklyn docks, far from his Irish home; -of strange continents, exotic cities, women with hot, dark eyes. In Coney Island, I drank my first beer, touched my first female breast, received a wounding kiss from my first great love. Alas and farewell. In my mind, there is always a day when I am under the boardwalk, with the beach suddenly clearing, blankets snatched, books swooped up, as the sky darkens and I am alone, leaning against a coarse concrete pillar, in the rumbling fugue of a summer storm. July is gone. August has almost burnt itself out. And September lies ahead, like a prison sentence.

On those days, careening home on the trolley cars, I would go down to the public library on 9th Street and Sixth Avenue and vanish into books. Or I would walk another block to the RKO Prospect, where my mother was a cashier, and go into the chilly darkness with my brother Tommy. Books made us think; the movies let us dream. One tempered or enriched the other. And both were free. So were the streets. So were we.

That city still exists for me. I live in its ruins. In the mornings of July, I sometimes remember that morning long ago, after a gang member named Giacomo had been killed by a shot from one of the South Brooklyn Boys, and dawn spilled across the park like blood. I remember the rooftops, pigeons circling against the lucid sky, and the blind semaphore of laundry flapping in the breeze. I’m certain that if I turn on the radio, Red Barber will tell me that Reese is on second, with Furillo batting and Snider in the on-deck circle. If I go out and walk to 13th Street, I can ring the bell and Vito will come down and we’ll go up to the Parkside and McAlevey and Horan and Timmy and Duke and Billy and the others will be around, and then we can head for Coney. Or we can walk across the park to Ebbets Field and see the Cardinals. Or we can lie on the fresh cut grass and tell lies about women. I can still do such things. Don’t tell me the bells no longer ring. Don’t tell me those buildings are no longer there. Don’t tell me that I have no right to remember. I only remember life. I will have no memory of dying.

NEW YORK,

July 7-14, 1980

CITY OF THE DAMNED

For me, all hope for New York died on the day I read about the arrest of a young man out in the borough of Queens. A special kind of murder, DAD HELD IN KILLING, said the page-three headline in the Daily News. Another neat summary of a familiar New York story, reported in the matter-of-fact tone of an aging war correspondent. You know: the cops say this, the neighbors say that, and, uh, pass the jam, will ya, honey?

Familiar. Except for the details …those flat details told us that this particular father, who had only recently arrived in New York from the American Midwest, had grown angry when his six-day-old son urinated on him. The man threw the infant to the floor (naturally, the child had to be punished for such effrontery). According to the police, the father then chopped up the infant and threw him to the German shepherd. When the cops arrived, there was nothing left of the boy except the blood on the floor. But even those terrible details weren’t sufficient to cause a loss of faith in an entire city. It was the reaction of New Yorkers that settled a swampy chill in my old bones and confirmed a deepening belief that we were doomed. There was no reaction at all. No angry protests. No masses offered in the churches. No memorials planned. Nothing. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin once wrote, “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this: that there is no horror!”