replace. Living here, it's very easy to find yourself seeing the decline as a one-way street, a road with no turning.
But that's only half of it. If the city dies a little every day, so is it ever being reborn. You can see the signs everywhere. There's the subway station at Broadway and Eighty-sixth, its tile walls bright with the paintings of schoolchildren. There's the wedge-shaped garden in Sheridan Square, the pocket parks blooming all over town.
And there are the trees. When I was a kid you had to go to Central Park if you wanted to stand under a tree. Now half the streets in town are lined with them. The city plants some and property owners and block associations plant the rest. Trees don't have an easy time of it here. It's like raising kids in the Middle Ages, you have to plant half a dozen trees to raise one. They die for lack of water, or get snapped off at the base by careless truckers, or choke to death in the polluted air. Not all of them, though. Some of them survive.
It was a treat to sit on a bench in that little bandbox of a park and think that maybe my town wasn't such a bad place after all. I've never been too good at looking on the bright side. Mostly I tend to notice the rot, the collapse, the urban entropy. It's my nature, I guess. Some of us see the glass half full. I see it three-fourths empty, and some days it's all I can do to keep my hands off it.
I went back to the library after lunch and put in another three hours, and that was my routine for the rest of the week, long sessions looking up old newspaper stories interrupted by lunches in the park. At first I concentrated on those members who had unquestionably been murdered, Boyd Shipton, Carl Uhl, Alan Watson, and Tom Cloonan. Then I went looking for any sort of coverage of the thirteen others who had died, and then I started in on the living.
I took the weekend off. Saturday afternoon I spelled Elaine while she scouted out thrift shops in Chelsea and a flea market in a school yard on Greenwich Avenue. I made a couple of small sales, and in the middle of the afternoon Ray Galindez dropped by with two containers of coffee, and we sat and talked for a while. He's a police artist with an uncanny ability to depict people he's never seen, and Elaine has some of his sketches hanging, along with a notice of his availability for portraits from memory. He had done a remarkable drawing of Elaine's father, working with her over several sessions; that had been my gift to her one Christmas, and it was not on view at the gallery, but stood in a gilt frame on top of her dresser.
Saturday night we saw a play at one of the little houses way west on Forty-second Street. Sunday afternoon I watched three baseball games at once, flipping from channel to channel, working the remote like a kid playing a video game, and to about as much purpose. Sunday night I had my usual Chinese meal with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor. Afterward we went to the Big Book meeting at St. Clare's Hospital. During the sharing, one fellow said, "I'll tell you what it means to be an alcoholic. If I went into a bar and there was a sign that said, 'All You Can Drink- One Dollar,' I'd say, 'Great- give me two dollars' worth.' "
Monday I was back at the library.
Monday night I stopped by my hotel and picked up a message from Wally at Reliable, the agency that has some work for me now and then. I called in the next morning. They wanted me to give them a couple of days, scouting out witnesses in a product-liability case. I said I'd do it. The job I was doing for Hildebrand wasn't that urgent that I couldn't fit in other assignments along the way.
The plaintiff in the product-liability case contended that his deck chair had collapsed, with painful results and dire long-term consequences. We were working for the company that had manufactured the chair. "The chair's a piece of crap," Wally told me, "but that don't mean the guy's on the up-and-up. An' he's got this personal-injury lawyer, Anthony
But that's only half of it. If the city dies a little every day, so is it ever being reborn. You can see the signs everywhere. There's the subway station at Broadway and Eighty-sixth, its tile walls bright with the paintings of schoolchildren. There's the wedge-shaped garden in Sheridan Square, the pocket parks blooming all over town.
And there are the trees. When I was a kid you had to go to Central Park if you wanted to stand under a tree. Now half the streets in town are lined with them. The city plants some and property owners and block associations plant the rest. Trees don't have an easy time of it here. It's like raising kids in the Middle Ages, you have to plant half a dozen trees to raise one. They die for lack of water, or get snapped off at the base by careless truckers, or choke to death in the polluted air. Not all of them, though. Some of them survive.
It was a treat to sit on a bench in that little bandbox of a park and think that maybe my town wasn't such a bad place after all. I've never been too good at looking on the bright side. Mostly I tend to notice the rot, the collapse, the urban entropy. It's my nature, I guess. Some of us see the glass half full. I see it three-fourths empty, and some days it's all I can do to keep my hands off it.
I went back to the library after lunch and put in another three hours, and that was my routine for the rest of the week, long sessions looking up old newspaper stories interrupted by lunches in the park. At first I concentrated on those members who had unquestionably been murdered, Boyd Shipton, Carl Uhl, Alan Watson, and Tom Cloonan. Then I went looking for any sort of coverage of the thirteen others who had died, and then I started in on the living.
I took the weekend off. Saturday afternoon I spelled Elaine while she scouted out thrift shops in Chelsea and a flea market in a school yard on Greenwich Avenue. I made a couple of small sales, and in the middle of the afternoon Ray Galindez dropped by with two containers of coffee, and we sat and talked for a while. He's a police artist with an uncanny ability to depict people he's never seen, and Elaine has some of his sketches hanging, along with a notice of his availability for portraits from memory. He had done a remarkable drawing of Elaine's father, working with her over several sessions; that had been my gift to her one Christmas, and it was not on view at the gallery, but stood in a gilt frame on top of her dresser.
Saturday night we saw a play at one of the little houses way west on Forty-second Street. Sunday afternoon I watched three baseball games at once, flipping from channel to channel, working the remote like a kid playing a video game, and to about as much purpose. Sunday night I had my usual Chinese meal with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor. Afterward we went to the Big Book meeting at St. Clare's Hospital. During the sharing, one fellow said, "I'll tell you what it means to be an alcoholic. If I went into a bar and there was a sign that said, 'All You Can Drink- One Dollar,' I'd say, 'Great- give me two dollars' worth.' "
Monday I was back at the library.
Monday night I stopped by my hotel and picked up a message from Wally at Reliable, the agency that has some work for me now and then. I called in the next morning. They wanted me to give them a couple of days, scouting out witnesses in a product-liability case. I said I'd do it. The job I was doing for Hildebrand wasn't that urgent that I couldn't fit in other assignments along the way.
The plaintiff in the product-liability case contended that his deck chair had collapsed, with painful results and dire long-term consequences. We were working for the company that had manufactured the chair. "The chair's a piece of crap," Wally told me, "but that don't mean the guy's on the up-and-up. An' he's got this personal-injury lawyer, Anthony
Similar Books
