Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

The first dirty leaves were falling off Central Park’s trees, windswept and sadly incongruous with the stone and concrete, reminding us that summer was over. It was starting to get chilly at night, so I added an oxblood v-neck sweater under my dark gray three button suit – a vintage suit I’d grabbed from my grandfather’s closet and had tailored. The Dominican tailor on Ludlow Street took the sides in, made an extra back vent and pegged the trousers, all for five bucks. It fit well, and had just enough give in the arms so that it would be no problem, even with the sweater on, dancing later at the Mudd Club or Danceteria. My polo shirt was baby blue with navy piping, and my white socks winked out from between my black loafers and the hem of my trousers in a flash of impudence that was just right. It all made sense, and grimacing at myself with a burst of amphetamine spirit, I made a few anxious dance steps and took a swig of my Budweiser quart, admiring myself smugly in the cracked bathroom mirror of my Godmother’s claustrophobic studio apartment on York Avenue.
Outside in the breezy night I drained the last foamy dregs of my quart as I stepped into the corner deli for a new one. I was okay because I had recently been at my grandparents and was starting the new semester at City University. So I had cash. But I knew my Godmother had an account at the deli so I told the Turk behind the counter to put it on her bill. The black eyes in his swarthy, pock marked face looked me up and down: stingy brim rude boy hat, tonic suit with 2 Tone and Mod badges on the lapels, hoop earring in my left ear; the expression of a truant. He wasn’t sure, but he had seen me with my Godmother a few times, and I even took him money once to pay her bill, so he grunted and put the quart in a brown paper bag, pushing it towards me. Seeing he was beaten, I added a pack of Trident gum and a small Nemo’s carrot cake. I hadn’t eaten a thing since a slice of pizza that afternoon.
The late September wind pushed me along 79th Street toward the Lexington line, and a straight shot down to Astor Place. As I sauntered along the blinking, humming street I barely noticed the young couples huddled conspiratorially, or elderly people emptying cars in front of their brownstones; I didn’t clock the Upper East Side at all. It didn’t really exist to me. I was only staying at my Godmother’s place until I could move back downtown. At the corner of 79th and Lex a fat walrus cop was standing outside of the subway entrance fidgeting with his night stick, so I crossed over to enter on the other side of the street, skipping down the steps with my quart half gone now and me half drunk, flying on nerves and anticipation. I looked across the station at the token booth; the torpor of the clerk, the neon insanity of his life. I waited until I heard the rumbling of rolling thunder, and then as the train pulled in I walked out and jumped over the turnstile and ran onto the Lexington Avenue Express as I heard the bored, distorted echo behind me, ‘Pay ya fare’.
On the train I walked up through the clattering, screeching cars, past the tipsy businessmen, anxious secretaries, bums and other assorted inner city flotsam, to the first car. I drained my beer and dropped the bottle on the ground with the rest of the day’s abandoned newspapers and wrappers, letting it roll back and forth down the carriage, bumping into the shoes of the indifferent passengers. Looking out through the smudged glass I could see the stanchions and lights of the tunnel flying by me as the train shrieked back and forth, plunging downtown through a subterranean carnival of lights. Stopping at 42nd Street a crew of Puerto Rican kids with a boom box got on, all of them dressed in sheepskin coats with tight Lee chinos and sneakers with big tongues and low fat laces. A few of them had on Cazal frame glasses, and one kid had ski goggles up on his wool cap. The radio was blasting some Electro tune I’d heard before but didn’t know the name of. They were B Boys and they looked fresh, but in my mind they were cartoon characters. They eyed me up and down but there was nothing there; I was like them - young, broke and looking for fun.
Finally the train pulled into 14th Street and I got out to switch to the local when I heard the music behind me, turned lower now, and the kid with the box said ‘Yo Punkrock, what up yo?’ I looked at him and smiled, but I was ready. ‘What up?’ I said, ‘Where’s the party at?’ They all started laughing and pointing at my gear, and the kid with the ski goggles said, ‘Oh shit, but the high waters are killin’ it!’ And I laughed too, because I could imagine it from their perspective – I looked like a guy off one of their parents old Salsa records. Then one of them said, ‘Yo but the hat is kinda fresh though’ and then the train started pulling into the station, but I didn’t want to get on with them. There were five of them and I had no chance. The train stopped and a few people got off, and they looked like they were just going to sit on the bench, so I waited until the doors were just about to close and I jumped onto the car. They had gotten off the Express train just to fuck with me, but since I didn’t respond they left it alone. As the car pulled out I looked right at the kid with the goggles and winked, lifted my hat up and gave him the finger.
As the train pulled into Astor Place I started to uncoil. Sitting across from me were two art school types with shabby vintage clothes and jagged haircuts they could have only done by themselves. They probably went to Cooper Union, I thought; rich kids from Connecticut who listened to the Talking Heads and Television and smoked clove cigarettes. We looked each other up and down but there wasn’t enough interest on either side, just the recognition of something new that we both acknowledged. I got up and sneered at them insolently, moving through the car doors and quickly up the steps and out into the kaleidoscope of Eighth Street.
The first stop was the deli on the corner of St. Mark’s and Third, where I bought another quart, and stepping back onto the sidewalk I felt the icy rush of the cold beer biting at the back of my throat. I took a few long chugs and looked out at this crossroads of culture; students, bums, punks, homeboys, rockabilly time warp weirdos… and all of it was mine. The black beauty I had taken earlier was kicking in, and the hair under my hat was standing on end, sending electric jolts quivering down into my brain and causing me to laugh out loud and shake my head a few times. I was a king; I had twenty dollars in my pocket and a full quart of beer.
By the time I reached First Avenue I was bubbling and fizzing, riding a poor man’s speedball and filled with high hopes for the young night. The regular meeting place was the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, with its cranky Ukrainian bartenders, faded 1950’s decor and cheap drinks. But we rarely spent our money inside the Holiday, being generally too broke to afford even its ninety cent drinks, especially when thirty two ounces of beer could be had at the deli for a buck ten. It was a matter of economics.
The first stoop before the bar was usually taken by some Psychobilly kids who always had a radio and all looked like the Stray Cats on acid: huge shellacked quiffs, big suspenders, lots of neon everywhere (including the hair) and tattoo sleeves. They were ok, and I knew some of them, but I couldn’t get down with the sounds at all. They took all the church and soul out of the Rockabilly and sped it up into a loud, screaming ball of white anger. The next stoop past the ripped awning of the Holiday was the domain of the Hardcore kids; post Punks in black leather, jackboots, shaved heads or spiky hair, and led by a big Russian named Ruby. We got along pretty well with the Hardcore kids because, like us they were out to get high and dance. In addition to this they also loved Reggae, which was part of our daily Rude Boy bread. Walking by I exchanged nods with a big kid named Frenchy, who was a doorman at a couple after hours places and had the Canadian maple leaf tattooed onto the side of his head. I gave a pound to Vinnie Dogma, who was the singer of one of the bigger Hardcore bands.
It was still early and there were only a few Mod looking girls hanging out on our stoop. I wasn’t sure who they were, but the word had gotten around that this was where the Rude Boys hung out, so kids that were into Ska or Mod music would come down all the time. My speed high had leveled off and I was almost done with the quart, so I walked by the stoop, making sure not to look at the girls, turned and drained the beer with exaggerated swagger and threw the bottle down into an abandoned doorway. Wiping my lips on the sleeve of my suit I finally looked up at them and asked them if they wanted some beer. The girl closest to me looked about sixteen, and she looked at her friends and said ‘Sure, you wanna go inside?’ But I was sure Walter the bouncer wouldn’t let them in because they were all in High School. I told them as much and said I would go buy a few quarts if they had money. The smallest one, who was wearing a bright orange mini-dress and white donkey jacket and matching hair band, produced a fiver out of her white patent leather purse and handed it to me. ‘I want change back’ she said, cracking her gum as I smirked and strutted off to the deli across First Avenue.
I could tell these chicks were from Manhattan because they had the look down and were confident. If they had been from Brooklyn or the Suburbs there would be some aspect of the style all wrong, like a Mod mini skirt and fishnet stockings or a bouffant hairdo. Plus there was always the accent. You could tell a Brooklyn girl a mile away. These girls probably go to Music and Art or Stuyvesant, I was thinking as I walked back over to the stoop, and they can’t be older than seventeen. I handed them a quart and I kept one for myself. Then I asked them where they went to school, and they said Music and Art, which was good. I liked arty girls. They were always good to go, and often fun to hang out with the next day. They usually lived in nice apartments in the Village, and would often throw parties when their parents were away.
The girl with the orange dress asked me for the change and I handed her back a dollar. She gave me a look but wasn’t sure of the price and let it slide. I had just gained another quart for later. Just then I saw the loose, gangly shadow of Leo coming around the corner of First Avenue, by Stromboli Pizza, followed by a more squat shadow with a quick gait behind him. This was Renzo, a film student who hung out with us part-time, did well with chicks, and always had beer money. He was a quick, shifty-eyed kid who knew how to find drugs and was ruthless about who he included in the party. For this reason he was both liked and disliked; it all depended on if you were included or not. But St. Mark’s Place was our world, and if he was hanging out with Leo it was a good sign. His presence usually meant a twist in the normal routine.
Leo was my ace homeboy, a tall, dark, savagely handsome kid from Brooklyn via Haiti. He still had a thick Haitian accent that only added to his mystique and pulling power - often drifting into mock Jamaican patois to impress girls who didn’t care or know the difference. His tall, athletic frame was wiry and explosive, and clothes hung well on him. He was my main partner for early morning bleary eyed dancing sessions, when the DJ’s would spin Ska and Reggae for us at the end of the night. As much as I loved to dance, Leo’s manic, blurry limbed skanking style was unrivalled, and he was famous for it.
We exchanged an elaborate set of handshakes, finishing off with our index fingers aimed at each other; each saying ‘Guns for hire!’ Everything we did, every gesture and nuance was colored by our Rude Boy style and mentality. We lived it religiously, even as we made it up going along; cobbled together from British Mod and Ska bands, Reggae, Quadrophenia, The Face magazine, 2 Tone and our own Downtown street sensibilities.
‘Who’r the bundles?’ Asked Leo, as he grabbed my quart and took a sumptuous pull from it, slyly eyeing the three girls on the stoop. His impossibly long eyelashes and deep set brown eyes, in combination with thick black eyebrows created a fierce quality to his gaze, but at the last moment it was softened by a god-given twinkle that made him seem vulnerable.
‘I don’t know’ I answered, ‘but they bought the brews’. I winked at him as he handed me back the cannibalized quart. ‘They go to Music and Art’ I informed him, ‘the short one’s not bad. You can have the big one’.
He quickly ogled the girls, and we both noticed that Renzo was already chatting up the short one with the orange mini – intuitively knowing which one had cash. We smiled at each other and started talking about who was out. I hadn’t seen any of the boys so far, I told him. I was feeling jumpy from the speed, and needed another beer, so I went back to the same girl and asked her what her name was. She said it was Deena, and I started to introduce myself, but just then Leo said ‘Fifteena!’ And neither Renzo or myself could hold in our laughter. The poor girl just sat there looking confused as we cracked up, but one of her pals, a thin girl with a large, tell-tale nose and paper white skin said ‘She’s not fifteen…we’re all eighteen!’
‘Yeah hello!’ I said, and we all started cracking up again. Leo raised his considerable eyebrows in mock surprise, to convey an exaggerated innocence that didn’t exist. The girls now started to get up from the stoop, and the short one said ‘We’re going inside if you guys wanna come’. Even in their humiliation they were determined to find out what was going on. These were definitely Manhattan girls. As they got up we all noticed that they weren’t bad at all, and Renzo made a move to follow them inside the Holiday, but Leo and I wanted to hang outside and gas, so we let him go in alone. Leo lit a cigarette and we sat down on the stoop on pieces of cardboard so as not to mess up our suits.
Leo wanted to catch up with me so he went around the corner to another Polish hole in the wall to find Dmitri, a Ukranian kid who sold decent black beauties for two bucks a pill. I sat there with a newly replenished quart looking out onto the street, thinking how many girls had suddenly gotten names like Deena, Sheena, Neena - as if New York girls didn’t have exotic enough names as it was. But it had been in vogue ever since The Ramones did Sheena is a Punk Rocker, and there was no turning back now.
Inside the Holiday the three girls, Renzo and two more of our boys were all crammed into a small red and white booth. In the center was a red Formica table littered with bottles, glasses and smoldering ash trays. Everything was dingy and cracking, but it was a design job that had come back around into retro vogue. A drab nicotine patina created by decades of smoke left a chiaroscuro effect on everything in the Holiday, and no amount of daily bleach could get through it. The air was so dense that I decided to have a cigarette so I wouldn’t be bothered by it. The girls had just bought a round and we were too late, so I pushed my way through the bottle blondes in push up dresses, the quiffed rockers with their thick soled shoes and dangling key chains, and the black sweater and sunglasses art refugees - until I finally made it to the bar. Every seat at the bar was occupied by Ukranian old-timers. This was their neighborhood bar after all, and most of them looked like they had been there all day. They knew that by ten o’clock the bar would be overrun by this youthful freak show, but by then they didn’t care. Silently befuddled from potato vodka and beer chasers, it was amusing to them, and Stefan the owner was making good money from us.
I decided to get an Irish whiskey, as it was the same price as a beer, and I knew Stefan well enough to give him a cheeky wink and he would hold the bottle an extra second over the glass, pouring me a solid drink. I was a regular by now. One thing about the Polish and Ukranians in the East Village; they liked to drink and were not stingy inn keepers. From the bar I perused the hazy, fluorescent room. There was a guy with an enormous jet black pompadour who was trying to put quarters in the juke box, but Leo was harassing him to play something else when I walked over and handed him his whiskey. ‘Dude…Penguin head…just play the Higsons song dude, please!’ Leo said with his loopy accent. The guy looked confused. Leo had said please but his whole demeanor was arrogant and comical. Leo was smiling at him and seemed to be winking, cajoling him to join us. He was in fact reacting to the Dexedrine synapses popping off on the inside of his skull. Then the pompadour started going on about how it was his money so he would choose, and we could put our own money in later. ‘C’mon Pengweee’ I implored, ‘don’t be stingy my brother, hook us up with one song yo!’ And he seemed to consider it for a second before Leo involuntarily spewed the contents of his mouth out onto the guy’s shirt and the juke box glass, laughing. The pompadour took his handful of quarters and turned away, hissing, ‘Assholes!’
The second black beauty I had eaten was just starting to rumble around behind my eye sockets, and I wanted to get outside, out of the brown brume of smoke. We were just polishing off our whiskies when Renzo walked over with a cunning glint in his eye. He leaned in conspiratorially and said, ‘Yo, I know of a new bar opening tonight, it’s open bar and lots of honeys…but just us, OK?’ He waited until the full effect of the news sunk in, and then said with a smirk, ‘Lets beat this pop stand!’ And we barged out the door, drunk and bugging out on speed…I started running ahead, singing a favorite Rude Boy anthem, ‘Stop you’re messing around, better think of your future, time you straighten right out, creating problems in town!’ Then Leo and Renzo ran after me trying to catch up and at the corner of Second Avenue I kicked over a garbage can as hard as I could, sending trash flying out into the street. ‘You dick!’ Leo yelled as he caught up and grabbed my hat off my head, and then he kicked over the next can. We were laughing and pushing each other, fighting over my hat, while Renzo just stood there laughing.
The bar was upstairs on the second floor somewhere on Ninth Street near Third Avenue, and it was called Lucky Strikes. I never really knew where it was and I never went back there again. It was a typical poser bar, the kind that were starting to pop up more and more recently with the gentrification of the East Village. The crowd was kind of post-New Wave downtown hipsters, slightly arty. I didn’t really feel comfortable but we were down for the free drinks, and besides with Leo and Renzo there it was sure to be a laugh. Immediately Leo appeared with six cold, dripping beers; three in each hand. We had just caught the tail end of the open bar so he got as much as he could hold. I went over to do the same, and was given a shitty look from the jaded bartender who I didn’t tip. We got some real estate at a standing table and started drinking and sizing up the scene. It was the usual film students, artists, gallery owners, musicians and other assorted scenesters who dressed in black and looked like middle class junkies. I saw Joey Ramone in the corner holding court with some people who looked like Andy Warhol but weren’t; so the place was officially anointed. The DJ was playing some electro-pop dance music from the UK, and the prerequisite girls with flouncy dyed wedge cuts and lots of mascara were bucking and vaulting across the small dance floor. I didn’t see anything special, and was quite content to drink and enjoy the pulsing eroticism of the chemical and alcohol mashup romping through my body.
Leo, who could never keep still, ventured out on the floor and instantly was rubbing up salaciously against a large blonde girl in white overalls and a French sailor’s shirt with the neck cut out enough to expose one shoulder and most of her black brassiere. Initially lured by his athletic algebra; a combination of gyrations and jerky head faints, she soon realized that she couldn’t keep up. What’s more, he was circling her faster than she could turn, and when he would get behind her he would envelop her in his saurian arms and move in for a hit and run dry hump. I was cracking up and enjoying the show when I realized that Renzo was no where to be seen. I was loath to leave the drinks unguarded, but my sixth sense told me that he would be found near the bathrooms doing something that I wanted in on, whatever it was. Just then Leo came back to the table, drenched from the dancing and dragging the big girl with him. Winking at him absurdly, I cracked open a beer and said I had to hit the head.
The bathrooms were up a few steps and into a small side room where there was a jittery, urgent vibe and a whole different crowd of people hanging around. Everyone was talking animatedly, and the feeling was darker and intense. Just as I figured out where the unisex toilets were I saw Renzo slipping into one of them with what looked to be a very attractive woman. I got to the door and knocked, but only heard a muffled ‘busy’ from the other side. ‘Dude, it’s me’ I said, knocking again a bit more insistently this time. Then the door opened a crack and he looked at me like I owed him money (I probably did, but that was beside the point). I just got my loafer wedged in the door as he said, ‘Dude, I’ll be right out…just gimme a few minutes.’ But it was too late, I saw the woman behind him who saw me and smiled. ‘Is this one of your friends you mentioned?’ She asked. And he was forced to open the door and let me in.
Renzo introduced me to Patricia like I was his third cousin from Staten Island, but she was cool and gave me a big, crooked smile. She had a wide, lavish mouth and faultless white teeth that her slender lips couldn’t quite contain. She was carefully groomed, tanned and shone like money. She was clearly slumming it, but her whole look – a New Wave Lauren Hutton – was working, even as it gave her away. Renzo then produced a small brown vial of coke and shot me a defeated look that said this wasn’t meant for you. This I understood implicitly, but I also knew he couldn’t appear to be stingy with his boy right now in front of this hot older woman with a killer rack and a crazy smile. I was sure he had already represented himself as some kind of downtown player and that would kill it. So I was in, and he put a big spoonful of the powder on the V of my hand between thumb and index finger. I looked at it, steadying it under my right nostril and sniffed it up into my head, feeling its sting. I immediately held out my fist again, ‘Don’t make my left side jealous’. I said, giving him a bullying nod. ‘Right, no left’ he answered, Abbott to my Costello. But he dutifully placed another, slightly smaller spoonful on my hand and sighed, smiling at me like the weight of the world. We did a couple more blows each before people outside started banging on the door, wanting it themselves for their reasons.
Now I was soaring…the alcohol, the speed and the coke all coming together in a cosmic dropkick that enveloped my whole body, working its way down to my brogue loafers and back up to the very ends of my electric buzz cut. We got back to the table and I grabbed a beer and sucked it down greedily, until I spewed it onto my sweater and the table. I was high voltage and I needed to move, but the feeling was so good I just rocked back and forth in place. I heard myself saying to Patricia, ‘Yo, that’s how we do it downtown baby…strictly Rude Boy stylee!’ If she had asked me any question before that I had no idea. I was grinding and gnashing; talking to make sure it was me feeling this good. Then the music changed, and ‘Rock the Casbah’ by the Clash came crashing through the system and I looked over and saw Leo pointing at the DJ so I jumped up and yelled, ‘This is my shit!’ I grabbed Patricia by the wrist and pulled her out onto the dance floor, skating and shimmying around her spastically with my arms moving in sync to the beat, but my legs going sideways, shuffling in and out, feeling the rhythm teeming deep down inside my soul. The DJ, now intimidated by us dancing up to the booth and gurning at him menacingly, ended up playing a tight set of Pop Reggae and then destroyed it with ‘One Step Beyond’ by Madness which drove us over the top, forming a skanking circle that Renzo smashed in on and we basically cleared the floor with our nutty, synchronized palpitations.
It was still early, not even one a.m. and I was already soaked through to my sweater. Leo’s entire suit jacket was visibly drenched, and perspiration was dripping off his brow and nose. We were laughing at something, feeling better after bugging out like that. My head started to level a bit and I looked down and saw I had another whiskey in my hand. Raising my eyes I saw that Patricia had bought a round of drinks, and she had actually gotten somebody to bring them over to the table. This chick has class, I thought to myself stupidly, as if I would have known. Leo was chatting up the big blonde in the overalls and leering over at me with big, lurid winks – not knowing or caring if she saw. He was in anyway, something he was doing on the dance floor – some primal rubbing and bumping – had worked, and now she was part of our party. I was vaguely wondering whether Patricia was going to end up with Renzo or me.
The club was rammed now, and people were surging in and out in waves. I didn’t know what time it was or where we were going, but my belly started to nag, and I wanted more blow. The speed high was a constant low hum; a jet engine on a runway, but I wanted to take off and fly again. I was also drunk, and things were getting a little wobbly. I reached for a beer and miscalculated, and suddenly was surrounded by an aggrieved, bitchy group of gay goblins in skinny ties and plaid trousers. I had a long chat with the bouncer, who I knew. The bartender was shooting me angry looks. I staggered over to the bathroom again wondering where Renzo and Patricia were. I knocked until some gap-toothed Rockabilly brother with a high flat top and a sharkskin suit opened the door violently and asked me what the fuck I wanted. Where was Renzo? Just then I saw him come out of the other bathroom with Patricia, and he looked at me cautiously and took me to the side. ‘Yo, Patricia wants to buy some blow and she has cash…you know anyone here holding?’ My mind started swirling around at the thought of this, one of my favorite scenarios. We lived for people coming into the city looking for drugs; it was easy to get it, easy to overcharge, and easy to cut if you had enough time. Renzo knew me well enough to know that if she gave me cash I would come back with something at least, and that’s all he cared about right now. He wasn’t full time like Leo and I were, so he didn’t really know where to get street drugs. We walked over to where Patricia was standing and I said I knew where to get it and she gave me that crazy lizard smile as she pressed two new hundred dollar bills in my hand. ‘I want two grams, ok?’
The action focused me now, and filled me with a hungry energy. I knew where to go and my mind was a chess match in fast forward. Promising I’d be right back I left them clutching their beers and Leo clutching his girl - bounding down the stairs towards the Colombians on Eleventh Street. They had recently muscled in and were doing crazy deals to spread the word. If I could find my people I could get an eight ball for one fifty, and that would leave me with fifty bucks profit and an extra gram and a half. I had done this before, hanging around the bathroom at the Holiday waiting for bridge and tunnel kids who looked hungry. I ambled down the block full of false confidence, knowing that the neighborhood had eyes. I walked by a few buildings that I knew were hot, and the invisible lookouts were yelling ‘bajando’ and ‘tanto bien!’ But I didn’t see my guys out on their stoop. There were two Spanish mamis there instead, so I kept walking but I slowed when they called out to me. I turned and asked, ‘Where’s Pablito at?’ They said they were with him, and what did I need? I looked at the bigger one and sneered, like I was some junkie instead of a punk kid copping blow. She was heavy set, with curly ringlets that shone like wet bronze under the streetlight. Her dangling earrings were cheap gold and the size of onion rings, rattling as she moved her head. Her light grey eyes just smiled at me and asked me what I needed again. I thought: well if she says she has to go somewhere to get it I’ll walk. So I asked if an eight was still one fifty and she said, ‘You know the price ain’t changed Papi’. So I said, ‘Where’s it at?’ And she jerked her head back slightly over her shoulder, jangling the earrings once more. I handed her the two crisp bills and said, ‘Hurry up yo, I can’t be hanging around here all night’.
Crouching in the tiny vestibule of an East Village cold water flat, I was wide awake now; triumphant as I excitedly transferred almost half the contents of a small pink plastic bag onto a folded dollar bill. I had the blow and the cash, and I hadn’t been gone even fifteen minutes. Sometimes life was just too good to you. In a flash of largesse I poured a little back into the plastic bag, ruminating on my success. I didn’t want to be greedy, because who knew where this night was heading. I took out my apartment keys and shoveled two large mounds up into my nose and snorted it back, tasting it in the back of my throat. I licked the key and walked out into the blurry night. My soul was twanging, alive with a pulsating confidence that rendered me fearsome, invincible and above the law. Walking quickly, hardly able to contain my spirit, I broke into a jog and ran up behind a dreary Goth couple and turned around in their faces, yelling, ‘What’s up Drac!’ As they jerked away, startled and annoyed I laughed and did a few air punches. I ran all the way back the club feeling no fear and no pain.
Back in the club I was exulting in Patricia’s glow. Having scored for her she now focused all her attention on me – I was the man now. But I was too high and crazy to dwell on it. I wanted to play the big man and get high, so I took Leo into the bathroom to gloat on my windfall and wake him up with some lines. We were sniffing and laughing hysterically as I told him the details; and I was filled with a magnetic happiness that was contagious. I took out a wide tipped marker and started tagging Fiend 1 on the bathroom door. It was a new club and nobody had gotten up in the bathroom yet. As I was focusing my attention on the fresh new surface, Leo was holding the bill and helping himself liberally, when he suddenly stopped and disapprovingly said, ‘You douche’ with his novelty accent and we both broke into charged laughter.
Outside the place was overcrowded with every type of Downtown flotsam imaginable; all falling over each other, drinking, smoking, sniffing, popping and dancing. Leo and I were back on the dance floor, juiced up and kinetic, and soon I had soaked through my suit. A girl with half her head shaved and the other half dyed blonde in a perfect little bob came over to me and mouthed something to me with full, pouty pink lips, and I stopped dancing. ‘What?’ I asked her. She pushed her lips together again, blew me an air kiss and moved towards the bar, and I followed her. Remembering I had money in my pocket I bought us each a beer, and the next moment we were wildly making out at the bar. I had my tongue deep down in her mouth and she was pressing her burning hard body up against me, gyrating and squirming like a slinky new wave ferret. Her mini dress was made of plastic and I was so hot and sweaty I kept slipping as I tried to feel her compact curves. People were bumping into us from every angle, and I felt lost and hot and alive with this girl slipping her warm tongue in my ear and down my neck.
At some point Renzo appeared in front of me and said ‘Dude, let’s flip flop…Patricia wants to go somewhere else’. I looked around me and the ferret had vanished. I had an empty glass in my hand, and I was smoking a cigarette. Renzo was insistent, as if this night depended on his next move, but I was dazed and looking for the little half blonde girl. I asked him if he’d noticed her, but from the intent sparkle in his eyes I could tell he’d been sequestered in the bathrooms helping Patricia get acquainted with the downtown scene. He shook his head gravely again and said, ‘If we leave now we can go back to her hotel and party’. We were moved along in the current towards the door, pushing against an oncoming flow of bodies trying to get in before last call; nobody knew if this place would turn into after hours or not. I suddenly realized that Leo wasn’t with us and was looking for him as I instinctively felt in my pockets for my money and coke. It all seemed to be there, but then I remembered handing something to the ferret. Then I saw Leo’s angular brown face and pork pie hat bobbing above the smoke and heads, a cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth. He squinted at me exaggeratedly and yelled, ‘You dick!’ and I reached out and grabbed him. I wasn’t sure whether Renzo wanted him along or not, but he was coming.

II

Floating along under the amorphous, pre-dawn street lights, the grey haired cabbie was immune to our shenanigans. Leo was in the front seat talking to him in a mangled coke monologue: ‘My brother, you from Brooklyn and I’m also from Flatbush…’ Looking at him from the back seat I could see steam rising off his suit jacket. I was helping myself to a spoonful of Patricia’s blow while she slouched between Renzo and me with a hand on each of our legs. I looked over and he was licking her neck and trying to grope her tits while she giggled and elbowed him away playfully. It had never occurred to me that it was going to be this kind of party, and I suddenly felt flushed, and wasn’t sure what to do. I lamely put my hand on hers and she laughed and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I was soaked through my suit and the hair at the base of my neck was just starting to dry. All I could think of was getting to where we were going and doing some more coke. We stopped somewhere on Central Park West, and Patricia gave me ten bucks and told me to go in the deli and buy beer. The first omen of dawn was emerging, purple and blue through the mist as I looked north and realized that we weren’t far from 110th street and the top of the park.
Upstairs the apartment – her friend’s she said – looked unlived in, and was basically a hotel style studio with a high king sized bed, kitchenette and a bathroom. It was like the set of The Odd Couple, Seventies grandeur, and there were no colors in the room; the heavy floor to ceiling curtains were a dingy brown. I pulled them back to look outside at the ghostly silhouettes of the trees taking shape in the park below. I wondered what street we were on. Leo was in the kitchenette slurping a Budweiser tall boy and smoking a cigarette that had coke in it, and I could taste the sweet chemicals in the air. I went over and took a big drag and held it in as long as I could. My eyes bulged and my chest billowed, as the drug went through my lungs, blood and into my head. I opened a beer and whispered to Leo ‘Are we all gonna throw down with this chick or what?’ His eyes widened and he flashed his crack tooth smile and flicked his thick eyebrow at me, but he didn’t know either.
We were standing in the kitchen, filled with adrenaline and uncertainty, sipping our beers now, while Renzo had slipped into the bathroom with Patricia. I walked over to the bathroom door and tried to listen, half expecting to hear animal grunts and perfume bottles toppling over in hasty lust. Instead I heard low murmuring and then I knocked on the door and there was silence. ‘What’s up dude?’ I asked. Then there was some whispering and Patricia said, ‘Be right out baby, don’t worry.’ I looked over to Leo and he gave me a quizzical look. Then the door opened and Renzo came out and said, ‘OK who wants to get down first?’ I looked at him and he had his shirt sleeve rolled up and a proud look on his face where his smirk usually was. I asked what was up, since I saw no sign of sex at all. He looked at me and said in a low tone, ‘Patricia likes to bang it’, and pointed to his arm. I didn’t get it at first, my mind still stuck in a porn theatre on 42nd Street somewhere. Then I saw the thin rivulet of blood at the crease of his elbow as he theatrically clenched and unclenched his fist. ‘C’mon baby’, Patricia said to me, as I tried to understand. I moved toward the bathroom without a question, not knowing what I was doing. Once inside the dimly lit room I saw her shake the pink bag I had gotten from the Columbians another lifetime ago, and pour the white powder into the spoon and stir it around in water she slowly sprayed from a clear syringe with a blue tip. The water became glassy as the coke dissolved into it, and she then sucked it all back up into the needle and gave me her serpentine look. ‘Give me your arm baby’, she said, and I stood and slowly took my suit jacket off and hung it neatly on the peg of the door. I pushed my sweater up to my bicep and surrendered. ‘You never banged it before did you?’ She asked.
She pressed my thick vein with her slender, well manicured finger and I noticed the sleek, silvery pink of her nail polish. It was an adult shade, and it looked experienced. She pulled her finger away and my vein jumped out, throbbing from the pressure. Patricia poised the needle over my arm and I was mesmerized by a single drop hanging off the tip. I looked up at her face, full of concentration and purpose, and then felt the tiny flash as the surgical steel entered my skin and found the main line. A cold, sucking feeling tickled my throat and I felt a moment of queasiness, but I just stared ahead as she drew a little of my inky red blood back into the syringe and then with deft little movement pushed the mixture back into my arm. Then it was all warm, and I felt the back of my throat quiver as the drug raced towards my heart and brain. She slid the needle out of my arm and quickly started cleaning it out by filling it and re-filling it from tap water in a small hotel glass. She asked me how I felt, and I was speechless. I wanted to savor it and remember it, but it was elusive by nature and I knew that. I finally opened my eyes as she was preparing another shot for herself. I watched her go through the ritual again, and again I was impressed by her intensity and skill. Her face had changed; she was engrossed now, and the corners of her mouth hardened with concentration and purpose. I noticed little cracks at the corners of her eyes, caked with expensive, night old foundation, and the eyeliner she wore was smudged below her left eye. As she pushed back the multiple black bracelets and bangles of her hairless arm and prepared the shot I understood she was not a young woman.
Leo was afraid and didn’t shoot any, but Renzo and I each went again and finally it was the four of us all smoking and chatting in the tiny kitchenette as the day pushed through the heavy curtains. Swarming dust swirled in the laser rays of early dawn light as I pulled them to one side to peek out before I went down again for beer and now it was bright morning, but I was afraid to look at it and I just scurried back upstairs like a rat with the six pack and cigarettes. I half expected to find them all fooling around on that big high bed, but they were right where I left them. We drank more beer and smoked cigarettes and then the coke started to wear off and it became uncomfortable, since nobody seemed to know what to do next. Patricia was standing against the kitchen counter and looking at me with that viperous look again. I leered at her stupidly; we were all waiting to see if she had any more drugs to keep the party going. Many nights ended this way, in a Mexican standoff between the people holding and the freeloaders. But she wasn’t saying anything except blah, blah, blah New York clubs are so much cooler than L.A. clubs…and that she knew Belinda Carlisle, and partied with the Go-Go’s. The sun was fighting its way through the cracks around the air conditioner, and creeping behind the glowing drapes.
‘OK guys, it’s time to go’, Patricia suddenly announced. ‘I need my beauty sleep and I have to catch a flight back to the coast tonight’. Almost relieved, we all just looked at each other and shrugged. Then she turned to me and said, ‘Except you’. I was too wasted to react so I just smiled and nodded at Leo and Renzo – especially Renzo. My brain was trying to confirm what she just said, but my body knew. It was abstract, spiritual. I couldn’t comprehend this crazy science any better than they could. Renzo looked at me like I had just won the lottery with his ticket. Leo said ‘Oh really?’ and shook his head in comic disbelief. It happened quickly, and then Patricia was hustling them into their coats and walking them out the door to the elevator. Not knowing what to do, I took off my jacket, kicked my loafers off and sat on the bed trying to look rico suave. The moment was delicious, and I wanted to keep it forever.
The door opened and Patricia looked at me sitting on the bed like a naughty schoolboy. I had taken my hat off and my freshly buzzed suedehead made me look even younger. I suddenly had the urge to put it back on. She looked me up and down and then started to snicker, realizing what I was thinking. ‘C’mon baby, put your shoes back on’, she said. I was confused now, and patted the bed next to me and smiled at her grotesquely. Surely this isn’t going to end here, I thought. She laughed out loud now, and said, ‘I know you’re a cute baby, and maybe we can try something later if you’re good…but right now I need you to get us some more stuff’. My mind rewound to the word ‘Baby’ and tried to make sense of what was happening by focusing on that. Then I found the word ‘Cute’ and I put them together, trying to understand this scene and its two actors. I looked at her imploringly for a clue, but she was going into her purse counting tens and twenties. ‘Can we get an eightball baby?’ She said. I looked at my watch and noticed a few spots of moisture inside the crystal. It was 9:45 a.m. What day is it today? I wondered. ‘You really want me to put my shoes back on? I asked, incredulous now. And she was serious as cancer, her face continuing its decline into cracks and creases – the face of a junkie.
I realized I wouldn’t go all the way downtown now, my heart wasn’t in it. I felt the harsh sun outside the window and knew I had to face it; to get across the park to my Godmother’s place. I told her I didn’t know anyone to call now, and she was not pleased, but I didn’t care. As I stood up to slip back into my loafers she hissed at me, ‘I fucked up…I thought you had the connection!’ Her dirty blonde hair fell in clumpy faded curls across her face and I saw the alligator skin of her tanned neck. She handed me my jacket and then went into her black leather purse and produced a business card. She handed it to me and said, ‘In case you change your mind. I’m really not leaving until Sunday’. It read L.A. ANGELS ‘For the Discerning Gentleman’ with L.A. and N.Y. numbers, but I wouldn’t understand that until later. I slipped it into my breast pocket and said, ‘Sure’. But I knew I would never see her again.

III

Outside in the dazzling sun I crossed Central Park West and headed toward the reservoir. I realized I was near the apartment I lived in as a kid, and I knew these benches and walkways well. The trees were shedding huge brown and yellow leaves, and I watched them floating down in the hazy morning air, crunching an acorn under my shoe. I was still buzzing from everything and walking erratically, and it occurred to me that it was perfect football weather. A few joggers passed me when I got to the track around the reservoir, giving me quick guarded New York looks. I laughed out loud so they could hear, thinking how ridiculous they were. I felt tired, and wondered if my Godmother would be home when I got back.

To Be Un-Fab in a Fabulous City

I am not a fabulous person. In fact there is nothing ‘fab’ about me at all. I don’t smoke or drink, I don’t do drugs and I don’t even hang out in bars and night clubs. I’m so un-fab that I may even be lame by now, or corny, or even worse…old. To be fair, I may have been fab once (or even twice), but that was a long time ago when being fab would have meant much more.
I live in Hong Kong these days, a city of scandalous Canto-Popstars, Maserati millionaires and hot tip traders who all like to pay to play. They coalesce around the fab haunts found halfway up a steep hill in Central Hong Kong; a place called Lan Kwai Fong. On any weekend night you can see a glittering galaxy of international beauties in tight cocktail dresses and spiky heels, and constellations of shooting star short sellers and financial fireballs; spending, sipping, gulping, sniffing, slipping and staggering around like there’s no 2012. Yes, LKF (as it’s cleverly called) is the place to see and be seen if you’re fab in Hong Kong.
But as I mentioned I am decidedly un-fab. A few years ago when I was a DJ and still fab-ish, I was invited to Hong Kong (I lived in Bangkok at the time) to play music on a Friday night at a club in LKF. Pretty fab you’re thinking…right? I have two unfading memories of that night. The first is two English guys in vomit smattered business suits at around midnight, silk neckties wrapped around their foreheads (Samurai yuppie!), insultingly but evidently hilariously, karate chopping random people in the crowded street while they did bad Bruce Lee voiceovers: What can I do for you Mr. Braithwaite? Chop! Whaaaaaaaaaaa! Chop Chop! The second was a girl of indiscriminate nationality (possibly Australian, but hard to tell from the slurring and hiccupping) who had it in her muddled mind that since I was the DJ I was either holding cocaine or knew where to get it. The first time she asked I laughed out loud, since I have been drug free for a long time now (which, come to think of it, could definitely be contributing to my un-fabability). I calmly informed her that I wasn’t from Hong Kong and had no idea where to find blow. Now it’s quite possible that she forgot she had harangued me for drugs previously - such was her ardent state – but back she came at least five times during the course of my set, each time leaning in conspiratorially and saying things like, C’mon I know you must have some shit…you’re a DJ! I’ll let you in on a little secret: DJ’s often have no idea where to get drugs at all, despite the folklore. Some don’t even do drugs. How un-fab is that?
Another hotspot for the city’s movers and shakers is the seedier, less fab (but more functional) round the clock red light zone, Wanchai. Admittedly this place is a bit nearer and dearer to my heart, but mainly because it is more shall we say, down to earth. It’s hard to be haughty when you’re chatting up a five foot Filipina bar girl wearing saran wrap and stilettos. Yes in the realm of Men prostitution is the great equalizer, and the price is the same for taxi driver and CEO alike. This Wanchai is a democratic land of blinking neon and horrible music, where earnest English teachers, pencil pushing clerks, and power boating playboys alike can stand outside of a loud bar blaring Hotel California or atonal techno (who cares?) and feel superior. It’s good that way. Happy hour on Lockhart Road is where you can find everyone from budget backpackers to financial kingpins enjoying a quiet baker’s dozen of pints – all bonding over a heady combination of football, bargirls, beer and brio.
My favorite Thai restaurant is on Lockhart Road; a little arctic-chilled hole in the wall, with a sliding front door called Thai Farmer. But it’s good and it’s real; the owners are from Isaan Province in Thailand, and so is the clientele – mainly the savvy girls who come over on month-long tourist visas to work the bars of Wanchai. It’s a cozy, cheery little spot (how could it be otherwise when run by Thai people?) with exceptional crab curry and mango and sticky rice dessert. But is it in any way fab? Absolutely not.
My other favorite place on Lockhart Road is the Sunny Paradise sauna. Sunny P (as my friends and I like to call it) is at least thirty years old, and to be frank has seen better days. But what it lacks in sparkle and snap, it makes up for in slightly threadbare charm, and fawning yet familiar old school Hong Kong style service. The staff is friendly and nonchalant; the towel guys are hilariously churlish, fluent in Pidgin English, and used to a worldly consortium of customers, most over the age of forty. For this reason we also call it the ‘old man sauna’. The whole vibe in Sunny Paradise is pre-handover, as it should be since the place was definitely built well before 1997. Until recently smoking was keenly encouraged in the resting (i.e. sleeping) room, with its enveloping easy chairs, crumpled local newspapers and tinny televisions showing news and soap operas. Between each chair were great canisters of loose cigarettes and complimentary lighters, along with the Q tips and toothpicks. Now they have signs up that read No Smoking, but try telling that to the local businessmen and retirees puffing away between pork noodles and glasses of strong tea. I once saw an old codger riding the stationary bike in the antique fitness room (think medicine balls and jump ropes) huffing and wheezing away, a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. Now that’s old school, and very un-fab.
Recently a friend who’s fairly fab invited me to go to the beach with him here in Hong Kong. It was a shimmering Sunday morning and I had just had my iced coffee and local gai mei bao coconut bun. It would have been more fab to go up the hill to Pacific Coffee on Bonham Road, but it was feverous outside and I couldn’t be bothered. I had never been to the beach in Hong Kong, but I have flown over the archipelago enough times to realize that there is serious uncut nature everywhere, and that includes some post card sandy beaches. He proposed going to Big Wave Bay, in the breathtaking but kooky sounding district called Shek-O. I wasn’t sure…it was already past eleven, and going to the beach seemed like something we should have planned much earlier. But my friend assured me that the subway would take us half an hour and then another ten minutes on the minibus, and chop-chop, we’d be at the beach. Eyebrow cocked I jumped in the shower, and as much to prove him wrong than anything else I was soon out the door and on my way to Sheung Wan station.
Almost exactly thirty minutes later we emerged from the bustling, urban hoopla of Shau Kei Wan station, out into blinking sunlight, exhaust and traffic. But literally ten steps away was a local minibus waiting to take people to Shek-O Beach, and the smaller, less popular Big Wave Bay. The driver was a madman naturally (all Hong Kong minibus drivers are psychos) and soon we were careening around rock-walled hairpin turns, tires pealing at fifty miles per hour, barely missing his equally maniacal counterparts coming from the other direction. But the views! As we climbed up into the verdant jungle, with its acacias, banyans and bauhinias crowding the narrow road, the air became clear, and cooler by a few degrees. Looking over to one side (a sheer drop off that made my heart flutter) I saw an undulating vista of exotic emerald; dark shadows and hills, a drastic and inscrutable landscape that had long ago gained the nickname Dragon’s Back.
Walking down the shady lane to the beach, un-intense merchants offered everything from swim trunks to sunscreen and inflatable rafts. The rustic little huts had an easy, well-worn charm, and nobody was hawking – like so many other things in Hong Kong it just worked, and everybody accepted the logic and pace of it. We rented wooden beach chairs, and soon came around a final bend to an idyllic sandy beach between two overgrown cliffs of granite. There were quite a few people there (it was Sunday) but it still felt agreeable, with an unexpected indolence. We decided to set up shop down close to the water, and as we passed through groups of slender tattooed teenagers under large umbrellas, I noticed they were drinking beer and playing current U.S. hip hop and RnB from radios – but not loudly, and nobody was being territorial. I saw a sign that said no smoking on the beach, and from what I saw nobody was. That’s another thing about Hong Kong; people here generally follow the rules.
I don’t know whether Big Wave Bay is fab or not. I suspect it’s not. There are bigger, more crowded beaches in Hong Kong, with hotter people to look at and more of a scene. But the water at Big Wave Bay was nice, and refreshingly cool once you got out past the wooing waders and splashing rafters. I liked the families and large groups of school friends playing their endless varieties of beach games. As I swam further out I gained a view of the whole bay, and noticed another cove off to one side that I went to explore later, as the sun dipped behind one of the dragon’s humps. I didn’t see any waves to speak of at Big Wave Bay, but evidently they appear during typhoons. I don’t surf anyway, so what do I care? Surfing is definitely fab.

Ghost Season

The acrid smell of burning paper stung my nose immediately as I exited my building in Sai Ying Pun. Directly in front of me were my neighbors – people I pass daily with a polite nod – bent down, and fishing around in a large plastic bag for what looked like gold bars and throwing them onto a small street fire. They lit them from a row of slim red candles that resembled bottle rockets, or votive candles in a church. Into the flames went more gold bars, and what looked like a paper Louis Vuitton handbag and paper money; lots of money.
The middle of July heralds the beginning of ghost season in Chinese culture I would later find out, and sure enough, as I walked around the neighborhood that night every building was busy solemnly burning their material offerings to the dead. For reasons left largely unexplained, this time of year brings out lost souls wandering around in Hong Kong’s version of purgatory, and they roam the streets at night looking for warm bodies to enter – most unwelcome news for a night owl like myself. As I walked down the hill towards the earthier districts below Queen’s Road West, the fires got bigger and the offerings gaudier. Outside of a cheap home furnishings shop on Center Street an old couple had a real bonfire going, and I’m sure I saw a ‘Mercedes Benz’ and a cardboard McMansion get tossed into the blaze along with all the counterfeit cash. Turning up her nose at such a display (the admiration engraved on her face), a woman who owns the bake shop next door pulled down the iron gates to close early for the night, or maybe just to block out the smoke.
Later, after finishing off a voluptuous mound of ‘duck ricey’ (pidgin English for barbeque duck with sour plum sauce, rice and a side of dark green choy sum) at a favorite local restaurant, I washed it all down with a tall iced lemon tea. No place in the world does either of these things better than Hong Kong. Sated, I decided to take an evening constitutional around the neighborhood as I am wont to do. I was amazed at the fires burning simply everywhere. It’s not uncommon to see people burning paper money at any hour of the day in Hong Kong for a variety of reasons, but this was unprecedented. There were people queuing up outside buildings, waiting to make their ersatz material offerings - to keep their ancestors happy, and on that side of the material world. As a result the air was thick with smoke, and security guards were standing by, intently looking on with buckets and squeeze bottles of water. The look of spiritual fervor on people’s faces reminded me that this was only part superstition.
By ten o’clock I found myself walking through King George V Park under its august Banyan trees, with their sinewy arms and overhanging rainforest boughs. As a New Yorker I appreciate the nocturnal habits of Hong Kongers, and usually the park would still be bustling at that time, but the usual soccer match wasn’t happening, and the last of the joggers and chatty walkers had left already. I was suddenly alone with a ragtag pride of street cats that often follows me on my walks, looking to mooch a meal. I sometimes bring them treats from one of the many pet shops in the area, amused by their motley patchwork of inbred patterns and colors. As I exited the park on Eastern Street I noticed that indeed, almost everyone was off the streets. There was one group of people still burning a large pile of paper tithes on High Street and I walked over to them and watched the silent ceremony. Nobody seemed to notice me as I pulled out my phone and surreptitiously snapped a few blurry shots of the flames, as high as the people now, flickering into the Hong Kong sky. I wanted to ask someone a few questions about it all, but the intensity on their faces rendered me suddenly shy; an intruder in their ritual.
Walking home along the quiet, hilly streets I started thinking about all the ghosts from my own past; relatives, friends, classmates...people who were, and no longer were. In the West we never think of having a real connection to them once they’re gone, and they are called memories; it would never occur to us to try and appease them or make them happier in their next life. We visit the graves occasionally and place flowers there, maybe. We certainly wouldn’t worry about being seized on the street during a certain season of the year, with all of its attendant horror film connotations. But I do remember hearing ‘ghost stories’ at summer camp, and even dressing up as a ghost for my first Halloween night, all in good fun though, and not really scary. As a kid camping with my father and uncles, the truly scary story was the one about an escaped murderer from the local penitentiary who was at large in the area – as they jerked around and whispered ‘What’s that!’ every time there was a noise in the woods, and then laughed as the kids all shrieked and jumped out of our skins. I couldn’t sleep at all that night and every noise in the forest was the maniac coming to kill us. But it was real people we were afraid of in our world, not ghosts.
Creeping down the steep slope of Center Street towards Victoria Harbor, I was once again struck by the similarities between Hong Kong and New York; half the street was torn up from road work, and on the other side was construction where they are building a new subway station. This provides a daily urban cacophony that I am somehow conditioned to accept and ignore. Just beyond the future subway entrance stands a row of derelict Chinese shop houses that sit back on an old disused lane. They were slated for demolition ages ago but have been hanging on, housing some of the construction gear now. A few weeks earlier I had tried to get up there for a closer look into the lane, but was blocked by the site manager.
I was surprised the first time I noticed them sitting there, halfway up the hill between two roads, with high rises on every side – they are a moldy, rotting piece of old Hong Kong. The sides are lumpy whitewashed plaster, with exposed wooden beam studs jutting out in a few places; they look like they will fall in at any moment. There are small trees and moss growing out from every opportunity: the cracks in the wall, the crooked window frames, and from beneath the buckling old-style Chinese tile roof. Some of the houses in the row once had small balconies in front, with weather beaten doors and windows in warped, twisted traditional patterns – most of the glass long since gone. Some have been torn off altogether over the years, replaced with more functional iron grates and other makeshift improvements like bricked up windows and fiberglass awnings. The house in the middle even has a small rooftop widows walk, adding a bit of dilapidated dash to the place.
Now as I passed the row houses’ weedy, toothed silhouette I noticed a small entryway along the side of the construction site that I hadn’t noticed before. I cautiously ventured up the steps into the narrow alleyway, and to my surprise I saw that it ran all the way back behind a high rise apartment to the old houses. I crept along in the shadows, past clothes lines and discarded easy chairs; behind one house was a tiny patio of chipped tiles and cracked cement with a faded mahjong table in its center. All the lights were out on the ground floor, but light came filtering down from apartments above. I looked up at the shadowy shop houses and was filled with a strange melancholy. Who had lived there, I wondered? Were they poor, hard working people who lived in cramped conditions, or were these once the homes of proud Cantonese people who had money, as the misplaced widows walk would suggest? I wanted to take a photo now that I was up close, but somehow the idea of the flash seemed obscene. Maybe subconsciously I didn’t want to upset the spirits that surely had resided here for so long. Then I smiled as I realized I was looking at a haunted house during ghost season.

The Long Way Home

Christmas was very cold this year in my hometown. I had forgotten how quickly the wind could whip up off the lake and fill you with regret that you hadn’t worn a hat. Luckily for me I was only in town for Christmas Eve, and the next day would head back to New York, so we stayed inside most of the time. I hadn’t seen my old friend and his family for many years, and his brother’s kids I’d never even met. His parents had gotten smaller and greyer; tottering around the house searching for glasses, and scolding each other long after the other had left the room.
It was strange to be back in the town after so long. Driving through the main street it looked the same, but the names had all changed. The University was still there, a gothic silhouette frozen in time against the prism colors of the sunset. The old theatre was now a bank, and the Woolworth’s space must have changed hands five times since I last lived there. Driving past the Methodist church I remembered the Reverend hiring us to shovel snow after a big storm, and years later vandalizing it on mischief night and getting arrested by one of my coaches, who was also a cop.
Time moves slowly in these towns, and likewise we slowed to a crawl as we drove past the High School’s naked sycamores casting their twisted shadows on the ground; and the town square, a miniature version of itself to my prodigal eyes. Gone were the family names of proprietors who had served University students for generations. Gone were the family run taverns that quietly served underage students (and enterprising locals) for years. Some of those names had been around since my grandfather was a student there himself. And in their place I saw catalogue names and chains; a Starbucks version of a corner diner. Economic pressure and evolution had homogenized the old place.
But the stone tigers were still there, proud gatekeepers of tradition; the stoic sentinels of a history intertwined with that of the country itself. Rolling past, I wondered at the times I climbed and played on them as a kid. They loomed larger than any sphinx then, and represented something I could never quite grasp; a legacy that did not include me, for I was neither bearer nor heritor of this estate.
The warmth of my old friend’s house – the same one I’d met him in four decades ago – was a salve on the last of my scabby wounds. I found myself asking questions about phantoms from our past, amazed to hear that many of them still lived in the area. A former wise-cracking tormentor was now a solid citizen with four kids, two of them in college, and the beloved, civic-minded gym teacher - a man I deeply resented growing up - was still alive and active in the community. I suddenly laughed out loud, realizing how absurd it was to keep this resentment against a perfectly good man who just happened to represent the community. After all, had he ever given me a second thought after I left?
After dinner on Christmas Eve we drove out to see my second oldest friend at his condominium. I was surprised to see a well lived-in house, crowded with years full of music, books and family photos. A fire was dancing in the hearth. On the mantelpiece was an original figurine of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, cracked and discolored like my memories of that time so long ago, when we first met. A few more spirits of Christmas past stopped in unexpectedly and told me how good it was to see me after so long. We drank tea I’d brought from China and I smiled back at them. It was good to see them too, but as I laughed at dredged up memories I quietly wondered who they were. Later, as the night wore on I went into the bathroom; a small gallery of framed photographs, flyers and my friend’s artwork. Scanning the walls for any clues to my past I finally looked right in front of me, and there we were: sitting on a bench in front of the High School, and I recognized the conditional smile, a half-sneer I have often wondered at when I look at family photographs. My mother used to say I was unnatural in front of the camera. But it was definitely me, although I had to move a step closer to make sure. I recognized the watchband and the demeanor; a mixture of arrogance, self-confidence and abject fear.
Christmas day was a hurly-burly of eggs, chocolate smeared faces, hastily explored stockings, torn wrapping paper, wild excitement, frowns, pleading and a hysteria that only this day can produce in children. After all was said and done I produced a bag of goodies from the exotic Far East that largely failed to impress compared to the battery powered Heavy Metal guitar, skateboard, dolls, clothes and art sets. I looked at my friend and his brother, two middle aged men with their families, and identified equally with the kids. The grandparents seemed heroically tolerant to me, smiling as we were interrupted over and over again by the palpitating kids. I kept wondering when someone was going to tell them to shut up while the grownups were talking.
That afternoon we had a few hours to kill before I would catch my train back to the city. I wanted to walk up to the local park where we spent endless idle hours in our youth. I remembered it in oft-recalled dreams, and was impatient to match my mind’s eye with reality. Borrowing a warm hat, I walked out into the back yard and waited for my friend while he made explanations to his family on Christmas day. The yard seemed wrong-sized in the daylight, and the driveway too narrow; the rim had long since fallen off the rotted backboard where we used to shoot hoops. The garage where we once explored ourselves and made oaths of allegiance was now a rustic wooden shed. Breathing in the cold air I looked around again at this gnome’s world of overgrown shrubs and shabby trees and I knew it was my own.
As we entered the park I could see that much had changed. Gone were the wading pool and the sandboxes where we once drank beer and wrestled. Gone was the chain link backstop, and in fact the softball diamond seemed to be gone too, under the patchy snow. The basketball court was still there, but many of the towering pine trees had been cut down, and this filled me with an unreasonable melancholy. One thing I always loved about that park was how dark and cool it was under the pines on a hot summer’s day.
We had intended only a quick walk up to the park, but now coming out on the other end of it I found I wanted to walk the old streets, and begged my friend to keep going. There was once a transitional neighborhood there, solidly working class and proud of it; but everything now shone under a patina of upward mobility. Where my memory placed a broken down car or a rusted bike frame in a yard, now there was a soccer ball and a multi-colored flag that seemed frivolous. A shingled working garage had been converted into a studio apartment with a shiny red door and a brass plate letting you know who lived inside.
We made a left and headed down towards the lake, walking through progressively larger lawns and bigger homes; Tudors, Colonials, Georgians and an old Victorian corner house that filled me with dread as a kid. I looked at it and tried to recall the feeling, but it was too clean now with its new paint job and shiny shutters. We had breached the University’s realm, and found ourselves walking past professors’ housing. Bikes leaned against the sides of stucco and clapboard walls, and a precisely constructed tree fort rested in a giant elm tree in one front yard. Everything seemed so much more orderly now, and I began to doubt the sepia images of my mind.
Finally we crossed into the former community playing fields, and I realized we were not far from my old house, a place I had almost erased from memory. I knew then why we were walking this way, and I felt a force of history was pulling me towards the lake. Urging my friend on I quickened the pace, suddenly excited to claim ownership of this long banished dreamscape. Here was the field where I broke my finger sliding into second base; where I spent stolen hours playing hooky with my mother one spring day; where I flew my first kite. Now as we walked behind the field into a small copse of woods that hadn’t changed in all these years, I remembered the bountiful jungle it once seemed. Here was the trickle of a stream where I looked for turtles and swung on thick vines and talked my neighbor into showing me hers if I showed her mine. It was all still here. And I was drawn along, just as the water beneath me was drawn down to the lake below.
As we came out of the woods I saw the fields behind my old house where I set up a bicycle jump when I first moved in, mistakenly doing a flip that resulted in blood and stitches and the grudging admiration of the neighborhood kids. My friend reminded me of the time we found spray paint and wrote peace signs, Love and Bill Cosby on the neighbor’s wall and sports car. That got me spanked with my mother’s hairbrush, grounded, and cemented my reputation at school. Yes it was here on this same ground that I played, fought, cursed and laughed with an ardor and fury that went unrequited. It was here that I discovered the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5; here that I read my first books; here that I discovered the escape world of art. As much as I connived for so long to dismiss it, this was my story.
Coming up past my former neighbors’ back yard, the house looked eerily the same. I remembered the day we were moving out, and I was taking a last look at the woods and the baseball diamond we’d made. There was my neighbor’s father, a quiet man with red rimmed, watery eyes who never said much to us kids, sitting in a folding chair with a can of beer in his hand looking out into the distance. ‘We’re moving today’, I told him. He turned to me slowly, as if he hadn’t quite heard me, and I was just about to repeat myself when he said, ‘you’re gonna miss these fields’.

A Hong Kong Love Letter

New York City is the skyline of my past, and Hong Kong is the skyline of the present. But I live in Shanghai, which is the skyline of the very near future.



One night a few years ago I found myself hurtling through the soft Hong Kong night in a taxi, when I saw the bleary lights of the endless New Territories high-rises for the first time. I was on my way to Central from the airport, and as I hummed past these Cantonese corridors of humanity they came into focus, blinking and twinkling on either side of me. I cracked the window and was awestruck. Who lives there? I asked myself. What are they doing? I wanted to know.
I have never had that feeling about Shanghai. In fact I have often wondered, how can a city of twenty million souls have so little soul? And how can a small, overcrowded archipelago of concrete and jungly rocks have so much of it?
Having spent the best part of my formative years living on the jagged hemline between Chinatown and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I got to know the habits – the smells and sounds - of an extended Hong Kong. In those days you never heard Mandarin spoken downtown, only Cantonese. The first time I ever heard Mandarin was on cable TV, and I got into an argument with my brother, who said it was ‘Chinese’. But this shushing, fluttering of birds’ wings didn’t sound anything like the long vowels or comedic groaning we heard from Bruce Lee and Billy Chong every Saturday morning on Kung Fu Theater. Somebody had changed the channel.
The Chinatown of my youth was the Pearl River Market on Canal Street, an inscrutable emporium filled with silks, teak wood and porcelain, and the Rosemary theater on East Broadway, where it joins forces with the Bowery and pours over the Manhattan Bridge; a place where you could walk in and be alone sometimes in the afternoon, watching a Kung Fu dazzler or a whacky screwball comedy. And there were endless jingly, smoky little shops selling Double Happiness and Year of the Tiger posters, along with huge red marriage candles and temple incense; a million little tsotchkes that snake charmed me and fired the wanderlust of my imagination. It was a constantly evolving place, Chinatown, and even though I lived there for almost twenty years I never got bored of walking around its grimy, rat-trap streets. Every single day I saw something that I’d never noticed before.
My morning ritual always involved a stroll around the neighborhood; down to the news stand for the New York Post I would walk in my sweat pants and sandals, by the F train at East Broadway and Canal. They had Hong Kong Playboy and Penthouse magazines there, and as if that wasn’t exotic enough they also had an array of brightly colorful boxes containing wild elixirs and unknown potions behind the counter. Being a man of habits they knew me well in there, and one day when I went to pay for my paper the sharp eyed lady who ran the place saw I had a cut on my hand where my cat had scratched me. In a flash she produced a bottle of mysterious brown liquid and rubbed some on the wound, and it smelled strange, tangy and sweet. I don’t remember if it healed the cut any faster, but I searched all of that afternoon looking for the formula, and finally found it in a cramped traditional medicine shop on Pell Street. The psychedelic sixties poster of its label read: Wong To Yick Wood Lock Medicated Oil.
After buying the paper I would usually cross the street and enter the Wing Shing restaurant on the corner of Rutgers Street, where they had the best gai mei bao (coconut buns) in all of Chinatown. Once, I had bought a small green jadeite frog on a bright red string and was wearing it as a bracelet when the little round man behind the counter spied it and asked where I got it. His eyes were twinkling as told him, this is Chinatown, it’s easy to find these good luck charms everywhere. He laughed and said how could I be sure it was good luck, as he opened his little black marble eyes wide. Remembering the story the lady I bought it from told me, I said ‘Well the frog is good luck - for money jumping into your pocket’. He was a moon faced man and he had a habit of flicking his unreasonable salt and pepper hair back into place with little jerks of his head as he spoke. He now reared back and chuckled deeply, winking at me as he said ‘How you know the mo-nay not jumping out your pocket? Maybe is a bad luck for youuu!’
The first time I went to Hong Kong, many years later, it instantly felt like home. Walking along the busy streets I smelled the famous Five Flowers Tea brewing in giant brass cauldrons; there in the windows of the innumerable chemist’s shops was the same Wood Lock oil, plus a million other potions and lotions in their old school floral boxes. The lady at the coffee shop laughed and elbowed her friend when I asked her for gai mei bao on that first morning, visibly pleased that I knew the local way to say it. It was a dream, it was déjà vu; going to a place for the first time that you already knew intimately. It was a kung fu movie.
The first time I landed in Shanghai a few years later was also like a dream, a very different dream. A dream in which an un-hurried, tanned DJ who’d been living happily in Bangkok’s sunny ennui for three years steps out of an airport into freezing grey March air in a short sleeved shirt, and sees a hundred odd people jostling in line for the taxis. After finally getting in one (wow, they weren’t kidding…people really don’t speak any English) I spent the next ten minutes trying, with increasing depths of desperation to pronounce the address of my friend’s apartment. The driver: How can I describe the driver? Unhelpful seems to not do him justice, and honestly it wouldn’t be quite right. After the first five attempts, Ruijin Lu…Ray-Jin Lu…RAYJIN LU! He calmly invited me to get the hell out of his taxi. ‘Ting bu dong!’ he screamed at me (I would find out later he was only speaking at normal volume) ‘I don’t understand you!’ Miraculously the taxi queue attendant stepped in and translated (a veteran of atonal Laowai attempts at guidebook Chinese), as he understood the address - hardly an exotic one right in the center of town. Amazed and confused as I was (the flight, the fight, the bone-chilling air) I kept thinking, as we pulled out that I’d said it exactly the same way as the taxi queue man. I would learn quickly that with Mandarin it’s all in the tones.
As the taxi came careening and screeching out of the gate, jostling with all the other dirty, squeaking vehicles, I realized in one all-knowing instant that China would be nothing like anything I had ever known before. To begin with my driver (fiftyish, wild-haired, in a shabby, tea stained captains jacket with, ironically, filthy white gloves on) was smoking and had his window open. Through a combination of charades and semaphore signals I got him to roll it up. The view outside the taxi’s window leant itself to my growing sense of unease. The hopeless February sky was the color of a dirty dishrag, and some cruel celestial hand was wringing it out, producing sooty pellet-sized explosions of rain that hit the cab with velocity and vengeance – producing a sound not unlike a BB gun being shot at a tin can. Ting, Ping, Ping…Ting. At first I assumed it was just a foggy day, and that was the reason I couldn’t see any countryside or skyline. But I soon began to realize (the odiferous air, my stinging eyes) that it was smog that was obscuring my view, and a nasty dose of it at that. My excitement at finally being in The People’s Republic of China was quickly giving way to serious doubts, and a simmering sense of dread. Oh, and the driver was now smoking again, and motioning to me with a smile – did I want the window up or down?
Things got better once I’d settled into my friend’s old lane house apartment in the French Concession area. I gradually began to find the rhythm and flow of Shanghai life – often fast and uninviting, but also filled with moments of well-worn indolence. I discovered wonders like Fuxing Park, with it’s Qigong nutters walking backwards and banging their heads into tree trunks, or fifty-something fox-trotters dancing to everything from Big Band to Classical to Disco, and the shrewdly contested Chinese chess matches and card games, with their large attendant peanut galleries. Yes, there was much to this Shanghai – much that was new and (more interestingly) much that was old. The dilapidated Art Deco buildings around Ruijin Lu were a revelation – allowing me to imagine that I alone was discovering them, and eliciting great opium dreams of future purchase and rehabilitation. The locals were easily as neurotic as any New Yorkers I’ve ever known. In my first two weeks in Shanghai I saw: Two men in pajamas fighting on the sidewalk, each carrying a small dog in one hand, and shoving with the other; an elderly couple waiting for the light to change in matching electric blue pajamas holding a white rabbit; a heavily made-up woman coming out of a salon in proud clashing animal prints and knee-high orange leather go-go boots getting into her brand new BMW and then refusing to pay the hapless parking attendant his ten yuan and almost running him over as she peeled out. She evidently felt she had paid enough already at the dealership.
There is also a lot about Shanghai that I will probably never reconcile myself to, and to be honest, that I will never understand. It is a city with a long history of bandits, millionaires and con men, and that’s still what makes it tick today. It worships money in a way that makes all other forms of human endeavor seem shabby and useless – the arts, history, social programs, education – are all second class citizens in Shanghai. The Shanghainese understand this about their city and themselves, and are renowned throughout China for being ruthless business people. It’s a city of high trickery, great fortunes, humor, striving and sorrow…surely it has its own soul, but I find that it lacks soul, because that kind of soul and money almost never go hand in hand. It’s tell-tale that the company I own is in Hong Kong, but I live and work in Shanghai. Shanghai is where the money is now, but for me Hong Kong has all the soul.

LEAVING MAINE

Jimmy Pullen looked across the stern of the muscular boat, past the wild white plumes of sea spray created by the twin engines below, and discovered his brother’s face. Although only two years separated them, they looked quite different, apart from clan features. Mace’s had become a Maine face, seasoned and ruddy. Jimmy considered his own budding tan, his careful clothes and dark body hair. By comparison Mace, with his balding head, deep facial lines and chest full of white hair looked easily the older of the two.
The water was indigo, like an old glass bottle shimmering in the late August sun as the boat now lurched, and slowed to a trolling speed. Mechanically the two brothers began casting lines out in hopes of finding a school of horse mackerel, or possibly an errant striped bass. It had been an exceptionally wet summer and the water was still too cold. Nothing much had grown in people’s gardens all summer long. Nobody doing outdoor work like Mace had been busy much, and the cloudless day out on the water felt somehow like a wasted opportunity. Jimmy cast his line out into the craggy rusted iron colored rocks of Dyce’s Head and began the slow jerking motions with his rod tip. He looked at his brother again, happy, whistling an old do-wop tune, inscrutable.
Big Chief, the owner of the boat re-lit a joint he had been saving for just such a convergence as this: a stolen sunny day on cerulean seas, fishing lazily along the coast with his childhood friends, the reassuring sound of the Oakum Bay bell buoy gently bonging in the background. A huge man, he was as nimble as a barn cat, and despite his size displayed the easy motions of lifelong athleticism. He took a puff of the skunky smelling weed and pointed it at Mace as he tried to hold in the contents of his lungs. ‘Here ya go Macie boy’ he gasped. Mace shook him off with a quick look, and Jimmy noticed a little cloud of sadness cross his brother’s brow, supplanted in succession by, pride, shame, and finally relief. It was all so complex thought Jimmy. Why? The joints were never passed his way anymore, not for a long time. He wanted to say to Mace ‘Go ahead if you want to, I’m not my brother’s keeper’. This would have been said half in jest, but the weight of it would have been aimed right at Mace’s heart, and it would have been a cheap shot, so he let it go. There had been enough cheap shots already.
Finding himself smoking alone, the Chief looked initially sullen, and then considering the boon to himself, laughed and said ‘Ahhh, I remember the time when I wouldn’t have gotten this thing back if Jimmy got a hold of it’ and he erupted in deep laughter that shattered the mood, and then it was gone, with all three laughing and taking the easy way out. Jimmy looked out towards the looming shards of rock and the glittering waves crashing against them endlessly and eternally, thinking; nostalgia gets us into these situations and just as often it gets us out.
Suddenly, as the Chief was navigating the boat through a minefield of lobster pots, Jimmy felt a tug at his line. Assuming he had snagged one of the pots he released the drag and reeled backwards. But then the line jerked crazily and his pole bent down almost into the water and he knew he had a fish on. ‘Got one!’ he yelled, and quickly pulled back on the rod cautiously to set the hook. By the gravity he felt at the other end of his line he knew it was a striper, and he also knew it was big, at least a keeper. The excitement spread quickly; Chief slammed the boat into neutral, sending up a gurgling spew of smoke and fumes, while Mace quickly reeled in his own line. The three men had been doing this their whole lives, and reactions were ritual, automatic and unquestioned – everyone knew their part, and all other matters became irrelevant.
With the molten sun smiting his neck, Jimmy steadily let line out to the big fish until he saw the salty black of his spool through the last of his mono filament line. The fish was too big for his tackle, this they all understood by now. Chief began reversing the boat to buy time for Jimmy, who cautiously tried to pull back and gain some ground, but it was impossible and he was just holding even. If the fish decided to dive down he would lose it.
The initial excitement of hooking a big fish turned into workman-like reality for all three; Chief with the boat controls, Mace ready with the gaff, and Jimmy, who felt like he had a Volkswagen bus on the end of his line. After an initial series of runs the large fish was playing possum now, sitting thirty feet below the boat annoyed and disoriented. Any small movement at all sent electric currents up through the line and into Jimmy’s hands. Fifteen minutes had gone by and it was a stalemate.
Jimmy looked up at Mace, who smiled nervously but genuinely and kept up a constant stream of chatter, ‘Try to get some line back” he said, ‘See what he’s doing’. But they both knew that the fish was in control. Jimmy was using a medium action rod with eight pound test line. Then, just as Jimmy was starting to get annoyed with all the free advice, he thought he felt a little give and looked up to see if Chief was still reversing the boat. He wasn’t. Jimmy gave a cautionary pull on the rod and it gave back just enough to let him feel the fish’s weight on the other end. ‘Jesus’ he said, ‘this thing must weight fifty pounds at least’.
But the line was giving way, and he started to take it back slowly, pulling the rod up and then reeling in the reclaimed line. By now a half hour had gone by and Jimmy was getting tired, but the excitement overrode his fatigue. Mace came in closer and poised the gaff over the stern. Jimmy had reeled in at least twenty feet of line now. The big fish wasn’t fighting any more, but just being slowly pulled up through the varying hues of blue green. It was also tired of this game.
Worrying about all the things that could go wrong – was the line old, had he tied the knot well, would the small reel stand the pressure, would the hooks bend from the strain – Jimmy momentarily forgot how much line he had taken back, and just at that moment he and Mace looked down intuitively, and saw a great silvergreen flash in the water as the fish rolled over on its side. It was no more than ten feet below, and it was huge.
Once they saw the psychedelic reflection of it shimmering below, they both knew it was the biggest striped bass they’d ever seen in these waters. ‘Oh my god!’ whispered Mace, ‘Jesus, be careful Jim!’ The Chief came over to look, and the picture below them still wasn’t entirely clear - it could have been fifty pounds or a hundred. ‘That’s the biggest striper I’ve ever seen’ proclaimed the Chief in awe.
‘Maybe it’s not a striper’ offered Mace.
‘It’s a striper all right’ said the Chief. As the only true Mainer in the boat he would have the ultimate authority, and the two brothers deferred automatically.
Gaining line by increments of a few inches every few minutes, the fish was now almost within gaffing range, and Mace was hanging halfway off the stern with the Chief holding him by the waist. All three knew that their only chance of landing it was to get it through the gill and hang on. The fish was now only a few feet beneath the surface, breathing deeply and on its side. It was massive. It looked to be at least four feet long, and Mace was almost within reach of it with the gaff. In a moment of total clarity that Jimmy would remember the rest of his life, he looked down and saw his tiny Phoebe silver minnow gently, precariously hooked at the hinge of the great bass’ jaw. It was hardly even hooked.
Looking down into the glassy water Jimmy saw the aluminum shiver of the gaff as it moved down. He saw Mace lower it close to the bass’s black bullet head, its gills opening and closing with great laboring and movement of water. The gaff was below the fish now and it was a matter of catching the open gills just right and then pulling. The line was taught, and Jimmy kept wondering about how the lure looked on the fish’s mouth – he could see the whole lure perfectly…
Then a flash, a splash of boiling water, and the fish was gone. The gaff, already through the gills, jerked cleanly out of Mace’s hands, was flashing down, a flickering lazer sinking behind the phantom shadow into the depths: A fantastic rocket with one last power booster. Jimmy looked at his pole hoping for another answer and there was the snapped line flapping in the beautiful breeze.

II

The story still gets told every summer, as the greens of June and July morph into August’s deep blues, browns and tans. I hope I’ve stayed true to it - being the one with the pole in my hands, it might be easiest for me. Yes, it’s a fish story; the one that got away, and the one that three friends witnessed and lived and never will forget, the one that belittled all petty ideas for an hour one sunny, breezy afternoon in Maine.

CENTRAL PARK ZOO

Recently I have started writing a few vignettes


It was a Sunday, and we had just been to the Zoo. When we came out it was suddenly dusk; what film directors call magic time. Alex was in charge of Mace and me for the afternoon, and we’d had hot dogs and ice cream earlier, but this didn’t stop me from lobbying for a soda when I saw the Sabrett’s cart. Mace wanted candy. We had eaten enough junk food said Alex, and he would be in big trouble with our mother if we’d ruined our appetites.
Just then two black kids who looked a few years older than me walked up and said to Alex, ‘Yo mister, can you spare a quarter?’ The kid who asked had a sneering smile on his face and a small afro, with a red and green pick sticking out of the back. His green T-shirt said Kung Fu Fighter in Olde English style lettering. His partner was wearing a brand new jean jacket, pressed khakis and a pair of maroon suede Pumas with black laces.
Alex brushed past them saying, ‘No, sorry guys’ and the kid with the Pumas said,‘What’s up with that?’ Then the kid with the afro pick said, ‘Yeah mister, what’s up with that?’ I turned to Alex shyly and said, ‘Why don’t you give them a quarter?’ But Alex just kept walking and tugging Mace along with him by the hood of his sweatshirt, so I had no choice but to follow. Looking back I saw the two kids make faces at us and then move on to some other people. I turned the phrase over in my mind a few times, ‘What’s up with that?’ It was like magic.
I couldn’t understand why Alex, a lawyer, couldn’t give them a quarter when they were clearly poorer than him.
‘You can’t just go around giving money to everybody who asks you for a quarter…nobody gets a free lunch’. He said.
We came up the steps in front of the Armory, and I was trying to understand the part about the free lunch when suddenly Alex became Alex again and said, ‘Let’s stage a fight, ok guys?’ I started to say that nobody had asked him for lunch, and it was only a lousy quarter they wanted, when he started the old routine again. ‘C’mon guys, you know what to do…Jimmy, you and Mace start fighting and I’ll break it up…wait until we get in front of that lady first…’
And it was funny. Mace ran ahead saying, ‘He’s bigger than me…lay off’ and I pushed him into the lady, and then we were both pushing and had each other by our sweatshirts, when Alex jumped in and said, ‘OK now boys, break it up! I’m sorry ma’am…I don’t know what to do with them, they’re like cats and dogs’. The lady had full red lips and was very pretty; she wore black sun glasses and little Chinese slippers. She put her hand on Mace’s head and said, ‘You boys are brothers aren’t you? You shouldn’t be fighting, now should you?’ She looked at Alex and smiled. I said, ‘Well he started it! ’And I gave Mace a shove, and then she said ‘Well you’re his big brother, so you should set the example’. Alex said ‘I’m sorry to bother you, I don’t know what to do with them anymore’ and then he started scolding us as we walked away.
Then we were running up Fifth Avenue along the park and laughing, and we didn’t stop until we got to the big steps in front of the Met. Alex said ‘C’mon now let’s get across the park before it gets dark’ and we started hustling our way across to his place on Central park West.

PADDY MAC

In my adolescent years my best friend was a tall, rangy kid named Patrick MacIntyre. He was a year younger, wore cloudy thick glasses and stood a good five inches taller than me, so people always assumed that we were in the same grade. But there were other differences too. Paddy Mac said ‘ain’t’ and ‘don’t’ instead of the longer versions that had been drilled into me, along with other terms that were part of folklore I didn’t fully understand. We knew each other through our fathers; Big Mac was a cop, while my own father was often busy exploring the other side of the law. But they had come up together in Irishtown, and on the rare occasions when my old man appeared in my life to take my brother and me for the weekend, we sometimes went to their house.
Pat and I were fast friends, as he had an affable way about him that appealed to me, and his humorous simplicity was a nice break from the chess match of my own mind. Simply put he was easy to get along with. His own mother had died of cancer a few years before, and I also identified with his sense of life being less than fair.
Spending time at his house, which I did more and more of as the years went by before High School, was like a vacation. Whereas my house was tainted by privations like powdered milk, government cheese and food stamps, the MacIntyre house was solidly middle class, and we would get things like scrambled eggs and bacon sandwiches for breakfast, and Tropicana orange juice. In my house we drank Tang, which was just another powdered drink, whether the astronauts drank it or not.
It was an Irish American home, and all the kids went to Catholic School, something I didn’t really understand, but which felt exotic. It was palpably different from the vaguely Presbyterian upbringing I had known, and my mother’s Scottish kilts and hymns. If I spent the night at Pat’s on a Friday we would usually be allowed to ‘sneak’ a beer or two from his old man’s well stocked refrigerator, something unimaginable in my house. So we would sip our golden Michelobs (‘the good stuff’) and talk about sports and girls while Big Mac silently drank his vodka in front of the flickering TV – even at that young age I could see he would never get over the loss of his young wife.
Another plus was his older brother Robbie and his gang, who were a constant source of new and provocative information. It was Robbie Mac who told me about a couple of St. Paul’s girls in my grade who were ‘easy’ and ‘gave it up’. If I could only meet them! I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but I was more than ready to find out, and the name Lizzie Myers had me in an almost yearlong trance. If they were there having a party down in the basement Pat and I were sure to be allowed a few beers, and one night I drank some Jack Daniels and got drunk, dancing to Kool and the Gang’s ‘Funky Stuff’ and J. Giels Band’s ‘You Got to Give it to Me’ with the older girls at the party. I had too much and threw up into the bushes off the front porch, and when I tried to get to sleep the bed was heaving and rolling and to this day my gut quakes at the smell of bourbon.
Pat and I used to peep through a small hole he’d carved in the bathroom door when his older sister Jody would take a long bath on Sunday. She was seventeen and in High School; her long, lissome body seemed invariably sun-kissed, her breasts like perfect upturned champagne glasses. Her anointment of lotions and sprays was the focus of much of my early masturbatory experimenting. She would sometimes give me special attention, calling me a ‘fox’ or ‘heartbreaker’, and it felt like heaven. I was warmly accepted by that clan, and it meant a lot to me – a hybrid from both sides of the tracks who didn’t know who to identify with yet in life.
My own house paled in comparison; small, untidy, cluttered with shelves full of dusty novels and well-worn furniture from my grandmother’s home - all miss matched. Even our old cotton sheets and pink wool blankets were from another era, and I often longed for a matching set of anything. My brother and I were forced to wear blue blazers and grey flannel slacks if we went to a family function, and eating with your mouth open, or with elbows on the table was cause to be sent to your room hungry.
On weekends my mother used to play opera records and sing along with them in her piping soprano. If Pat or any other friends were over I would die of shame, and eventually she only did it while vacuuming the house, so we wouldn’t hear (but I always could). She also had me reading novels by the time I was ten, and this was something I could never share with Pat. By the time I was thirteen I was living in the ether-world of fiction, and bubbling over with wonder and discovery one day I tried to explain that The Old Man and the Sea wasn’t only about a man and a fish to my bemused friends. Since nobody had read the book anyway it ended up devolving into a discussion about fishing, something we all loved anyway. I was writing poetry too, and when the teacher in sixth grade asked all the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up, and all the astronauts, doctors, housewives and future presidents finished and it was my turn, I said ‘writer’.

***

The last summer before High School we all hung out in the park daily, playing stickball, softball, caroms and horseshoes. We drank sodas by day, and sometimes beer by night under the tall pine trees; riding around on our bikes, spitting, cursing and anguishing over girls or the Mets. This was a time of great anticipation. It was clear that High School was going to change us, but we had no idea how. A lot of the Catholic school kids would be going to the High School, and this worried me because they freely used terms like ‘nigger’ and had in fact called me a ‘nigger lover’ on more than one occasion because I had black friends and loved the Jackson 5. This baffled me, and I couldn’t make peace with it. Were these the same friends who danced to Ohio Players and loved Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones?
As I prepared to take my annual vacation to my grandmother’s summer place in Maine, I began to sense how the social lines would be drawn, and why. Pat said ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ because his old man said ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ (so did mine for that matter). But I still had a stinging memory of the only time my mother ever washed my mouth out with soap, as a result of me innocently calling my brother a nigger when I was six years old. It was a lesson that stuck. I had friends who read books, and friends who didn’t; friends who thought about civil rights and world events, and friends who thought about cars and getting part time jobs (to pay for gas). Of course we all bonded over girls, the Mets or the Yankees and music, but I could see the sides being drawn up as easily as if we were starting a pick-up game.

***

In the winter of my Junior year I had just gotten my own first car, a canary yellow Plymouth Barracuda that had one blue door on the passenger side. Some of the brothers from Brown Town I got high with dubbed it the ‘Proper Bomb’. And it was a bomb. My mother had bought for me as a birthday present, from a graduate student at the University for two hundred bucks. I was unwisely driving it with a learner’s permit, from party to party on a Saturday night when I eventually found myself outside the house of an Italian kid named Moochie Mangone, who was a Senior and part of a crew that took classes that were inscrutable to me, like metal shop and mechanics. I was with my oldest friend Jake, who was part of the old gang and who had kept his ties with them, while I had not. He wanted to go inside, but I had my reservations. It looked like a big party though, and we were both feeling ‘nice’, so he convinced me pretty easily.
Just as we were walking up to the front door, who should come sliding out but Paddy Mac, and I was never so happy to see him. We had gone to the same school for three years, and even played sports together, but we rarely spoke much besides a cordial ‘hello’ when we passed in the hallways. But for some reason I was really glad to see him, and not just because I wanted him to ease us into the party. I was suddenly struck with nostalgia, and we ended up sitting down on the front steps and talking over a few cold Shaefer’s. We were both tipsy and feeling expansive, and eventually I proposed taking him for a spin in my new ‘Cuda’. He laughed, guessing how little I knew about cars, but off we went – leaving his girlfriend and Jake inside to negotiate the rest of the night on their own.
We ended up back at my house, where I had a joint saved for some late night headphone communing with The Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’. As we started to smoke, with the music wafting through our conversation, Pat became melancholy and I wondered if he was thinking of our lost friendship. I felt unsure of myself (as I often did when I was stoned) and didn’t dare ask, but mumbled something stupid that died in the air. Then he said, ‘You don’t know what it was like growing up with no mother!’ and his eyes were glassy with tears. I suddenly had a picture of his mom; a funny, vibrant woman standing next to their above ground pool with a drink in her hand, and in my grasping way found the words ‘She was a great lady’. He started to sob in low halting gasps, and it wasn’t pretty. Then I thought about my own mother and her long illness – feelings kept strictly under lock and key. But Pat knew it all, and had seen her have a couple bad seizures before, so there was no reason to act now. Then we both were crying, confidantes after all these years. I put my arm around him and told him I was always jealous of his home, mom or no mom. And then he surprised me and told me he had also been jealous of my ‘cool classy’ mother too – maybe simply because I’d had one. And in that moment I saw how lucky I was.