One morning as I was walking up First Avenue, a dog ran past me with a dollar bill in its mouth. A few seconds later a fat man came puffing by in hot pursuit.
*
Preparing to go do laundry, I accidentally knocked a box of laundry detergent off the windowsill. I dashed downstairs to retrieve it, but by the time I got to the sidewalk it had already vanished.
*
For years I bought my produce at a place on First Avenue called The Poor People’s Friend.
*
My friends J and P worked at an agency located in the basement of the Empire Hotel, across from Lincoln Center, that assisted foreign students traveling in America. They often had to come to the aid of travelers who had spent all their money and lacked carfare to the airport. Frequently students would barter small items for bus tickets; one day somebody traded them a car. It was a tiny car, maybe Japanese (I don’t recall the make), and clearly on its last legs. It was ugly in an unobtrusive way, its body freckled with rust spots. The argument against possessing a car in New York City has mostly to do with parking problems, but this car was immune. We merrily parked it on corners, at crosswalks, in front of churches and fire hydrants, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be towed, let alone stolen. Tow truck operators would take one look and realize that nobody would be paying ransom. We kept the car for almost a month, until, probably, some dutiful cop couldn’t stand it any longer.
*
Second Avenue, south of 14th Street, was at that time deserted after sundown. One of the few sources of illumination, apart from streetlights, was the row of spotlights shining down on the sidewalk from the East River Savings Bank branch between 6th and 7th Streets. One night J and I were walking along when we saw, carefully lined up in the glow of the spots, the complete works of Wilhelm Reich, in chronological order of publication. We each took two books, feeling a bit guilty about it, since they seemed intended for some purpose. We joked that they were meant to greet visiting flying saucers.
*
One day, walking my dog on 13th Street between First and A, I noticed that among the sidewalk habitués every man, woman, and child was wearing identical Kenny Rogers T-shirts. Few of them would have figured among the singer’s target audience. The shirts had perhaps, as they say, fallen off a truck.
*
Among the many curious enterprises on Elizabeth Street was a grocery store that only opened at night, approximately between midnight and dawn, and only stocked a handful of items, chiefly canned garbanzo beans. The store was run by an old woman dressed in black. We never managed to catch her eye, and never heard her speak.
*
There was a shoe store on First Avenue that you couldn’t enter. It was down a short flight of steps in what is known as a French basement, and you couldn’t enter because it was crammed to the ceiling with shoeboxes in a sea of dust. Only the owner could negotiate the narrow alleys between the towers. He would bring out the shoes and you tried them on and transacted business on the stoop. It was in effect a vintage shoe store, but it had not originally been one; the stock had been acquired new and then, for some reason, been left to sit there for a few decades. I still have the store’s business card, which is not only illustrated with an engraved depiction of a man’s lace-up boot, circa 1914, but also lists the telephone number (GRamercy 7-5885) and address (New York 3, NY) in ways that suggest it was printed no later than 1962.
*
I sometimes bought shoes from a man named Jerry, from whom I sometimes bought drugs, too, mostly pills. Those were his twin enterprises. When I arrived at his apartment, he would invariably be wearing a sleeveless undershirt and pegged trousers, and just as invariably he would be ironing something on a board identical to my mother’s.
*
If you sat in the right bar long enough, sooner or later someone would offer to sell you something–a tape recorder, say, or a supply of disposable diapers. The vendor would move from table to table with exaggerated stealth, opening the brown paper bag under his arm just enough to permit a glimpse of the item’s packaging. Once I scored a portable hairdryer at the Gold Rail on 111th Street and Broadway and presented it to my mother on Christmas. A few years later, my friend D. gave me, for my birthday, an 8-mm movie camera and tripod, as well as a film cutter that was, however, meant for Super-8 stock. I knew instantly that he had purchased those items in the men’s room at Tin Pan Alley, a bar we favored on 49th Street.
*
Everybody envied M his job. Once a month he traveled to Kennedy airport, where, at a set time, he would receive a call on a particular pay phone. A voice would read him a list of numbers, which he would note down. Moving on to an adjacent telephone, he would call another number and read the list to whoever answered. A few days later a courier would bring him an envelope full of cash.
*
For many years there were numerous commercial establishments that sold marijuana. Some were candy stores, some social clubs, some bodegas. What they had in common was a slot in a rear wall into which you would push your money, generally $10, and from which you would collect your little manila envelope. The most famous were probably the Black Door and the Blue Door, which glared at one another from opposite sides of 10th Street. One was an empty room; the other featured a pool table. One marked its bags with a Maltese-cross stamp, the other didn’t.
*
By the late 1970s, the fabled Fourth Avenue district of used bookstores had dwindled to fewer than half a dozen, most of them no longer even located on Fourth Avenue. One of the most venerable, Dauber & Pine, had moved to University Place, where it was selling off its remaining stock and no longer acquiring anything new. One day the store suffered a fire, which was quickly contained but left residual smoke damage. The damage was heaviest in the foreign-language department. The store owners tackled the problem by filling shopping bags with afflicted French books, each bag priced at $2. The books, however, not only were varyingly charred and smelling of smoke, but they had been in poor condition to begin with. Furthermore, they were almost uniformly nineteenth-century yellow-backed boudoir trash, the works of Paul de Kock and Xavier de Montépin–Madame Bovary’s reading material. Nobody ever bought the bags, as far as I could tell, though they constituted merchandise so ineffably conceptual they could have commanded thousands in a gallery setting a few blocks to the south.
*
One day I was sitting in the pastry shop, in a booth. I could hear every word being spoken by the large party at the table in the center. They were reminiscing about racetrack scams of the past. A small man with a raspy voice deplored modern telecommunications. At one time, he recalled, he and his brothers had rented a house overlooking the finish line at Pimlico, or maybe it was Hialeah. One of them hung out the window with binoculars. The instant the winner came across, he flashed a hand signal to another brother on the phone. Their man in New York would then signal to a confederate standing in line at the pari-mutuel office, who would bet large, since the official results would take another two minutes to be posted.
*
Until the 1990s I never paid more than $180 a month in rent. Still, given the condition of my crumbling building–of all the buildings I inhabited over the years–I felt that anything over $100 was high. I knew that R kept an apartment (he seldom visited it, spending his time in other beds) on 3rd Street, in the Men’s Shelter block, which because of that street’s annoyances and perceived dangers was only $50 a month. My colleague H, for that matter, had inherited her lease from a dead aunt; her 7th Street apartment was a mere $38. And I once met an old-timer who paid $30, but he was bitter about the annual increases imposed by the landlord lobby–when he had originally moved into his 2nd Street tenement in 1960, the rent had been $10. We agreed that ten bucks approximated the value we derived from the neighborhood and its housing stock.
*
Once, while visiting my parents in New Jersey, I ran into a high-school classmate I hadn’t seen in years. When he found out where I lived, he told me he visited the neighborhood sometimes in his capacity as a freight agent for a large-scale marijuana importer. The outfit rented an apartment a few blocks from mine that was employed as a depot for goods being moved from one distant city to another. Years later N, a friend who was a musician and a carpenter, told me he had spent the previous three months refitting a nearby apartment for a pot dealer. The circumstances were different, though. Prices had increased significantly and so, correspondingly, had apprehension. This dealer, a wholesaler for local traffic, had engaged my friend to put in numerous false walls and invisible compartments and sliding panels, as well as a booth by the door for the guard, with a hole through which he could poke the muzzle of his piece.
*
For years there was a general store, of the most traditional sort, on 9th and Second. I did my photocopying there, bought aspirin, string, drywall screws, mayonnaise, and greeting cards on various occasions. You could not imagine that they could possibly carry the exact spice or piece of hardware or style of envelope you needed, since the place was not enormous, but invariably an employee would disappear into some warren and reemerge with your item in hand. In my memory I am always going there during blizzards. Another sort of general store stood on the corner of 14th and Third. It may have had another name, but its sign read “Optimo.” It was cool and dark inside, with racks of pipes and porn novels and shelves of cigar boxes and candy. Of its two display windows on 14th Street, one featured scales, glassine envelopes, and bricks of Mannitol–the Italian baby laxative favored by dealers in powder for stretching their merchandise. The other held shields, badges, and handcuffs. I often wished that Bertolt Brecht had been alive to admire those windows.
*
Once after leaving the World, a club on 2nd Street, I was riding in a taxi with J and R. Rounding a corner, we saw a mutual acquaintance, using a coat hanger, breaking into a parked car. We knew he did things like that, but none of us had ever seen him in action. It was like watching a nature documentary — or better: It was exactly like looking out the window and seeing an egret building its nest.
*
Usable objects not worth selling could be disposed of easily. You just put them out on the street and they would disappear, within minutes, as if they had been thrown into a river. Depending on the building, a similar result might be obtained by putting the stuff in the lobby or a stairwell. When I finally threw out my old green couch, though, nobody would touch it. I felt personally insulted. It was admittedly a little ragged, but its springs were all present and intact, and it was long enough to serve as a comfortable spare bed. The cushions, of course, were nabbed immediately, but the rest of it lingered on the sidewalk until someone stuffed it awkwardly through the back door of an abandoned car and set it on fire.
*
Bodegas sold mysterious little bags of dime-sized cookies decorated with pastel florets of frosting. The bags cost a quarter, and every time I went to a birthday party I would buy one and tape it to my present. As far as I know, nobody ate even one, and no wonder: while they looked soft, they had all the resilience of marble.
*
For years the local bookie occupied an actual hole in the wall: a storefront only as wide as its door and maybe ten feet deep. He didn’t hang out a shingle reading “Bookie,” but then he didn’t need to. For some reason he abandoned this space in the early ’80s and relocated to a back table in the pizza parlor.
*
When I felt that prices in Manhattan were getting too high, I would cross the river to Hoboken, where you could still find $1 shirts and $5 suits long after those items had risen tenfold in price at home. One day I passed the window of a residence on the main drag in which two or three old paperbacks were displayed along with scrawled sign saying “For Sale Inside.” I knocked and was admitted. In addition to a couple of revolving racks of fantastically gaudy crime novels from the 1940s and ’50s, the room also contained three generations of a family, apparently Southern, from a babe in arms to a grandmother sprawled hacking and gagging on a couch, with a sheet twisted around her middle. Something was cooking on a hot plate. No one spoke. At least five pairs of eyes regarded me hollowly. I browsed in record time, paid, and fled, feeling like a census taker.
*
Down the street from me was a store called Coffee and Dolls, run by two blond brothers in their forties to whom we referred as “Jimmy Carter” and “Billy Carter.” The store’s name was accurate, apparently–the window displayed dolls and sacks of coffee beans. No one was ever seen buying either item, however. The fact that the storefront provided a thin cover for the permanent ongoing poker game held in the basement could not have escaped the attention of many people, perhaps not even the police.
*
When I walked my dog around the block we would sometimes meet a German shepherd and his walker on 13th Street. The dogs liked each other and would play, not a small matter since my chow did not like many other dogs. The owner of the shepherd was a thin guy with a mustache, about my age. I don’t remember much conversation, although he was pleasant enough. One day I found myself on Fifth Avenue, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Up ahead I spotted a mendicant in a wheelchair, with a blanket covering his lower extremities, his neck and torso contorted by cerebral palsy or something similar. When I got close enough to see his face I was thunderstruck–it was the owner of the German shepherd! I thought I must be mistaken, that there was really no more than a general resemblance, but when I walked past him–carefully keeping a line of pedestrians between us so he wouldn’t see me–I was sure. It was definitely the same guy. Had he been in a terrible accident and lost his livelihood? As it happened, I had just been reading about the “cripple factories” of the early twentieth century, where able-bodied men and women were taught to fake blindness and other handicaps to increase their take as beggars. The very fact that I had been reading about such things convinced me that I couldn’t possibly be witnessing a present-day equivalent. I felt guilty for not reaching out to him or giving him money, although I couldn’t persuade myself to go back. A few days later, however, when I walked my dog around the corner to 13th Street, there was the shepherd–and there was his master, as hale and cheerful as ever.
*
Z had come from Germany to make his way as musician, and after a few years his career was progressing rapidly. He played in three or four bands, all of them admired, some measurably in advance of what the other outfits on the scene were doing. He had also, over the years, become a heroin addict. As addicts will, he was driven to ever greater exigencies to raise money to support his habit. His musical employment gave him little financial advantage; as far as I know, none of his bands was ever recorded. He therefore became a burglar. One night he set out to rob the apartment of a former girlfriend. She lived on the top floor of a tenement, her bedroom window–which Z knew to be unlocked–located on the rear, about four feet from the fire escape. Grasping the railing of the fire escape, Z swung his legs over to the window ledge. He inserted the tip of his right sneaker beneath the top of the frame of the lower sash and pushed upward. The window, as he hoped, slid gently open. When he had raised it as far as he could, he dangled his feet inside and gave a mighty push, hoping that momentum and gravity would propel him in. He had fatally miscalculated, however, and dropped five stories to the concrete surface of the back court. A day or two later, the Daily News covered the story in an inch-length column filler. “Romeo Falls To Death,” it was headed. It told the poignant story of a young émigré musician who was such a romantic that he contrived to slip into the bedroom of his beloved as she slept. Sadly, he had met with misadventure.
*
Sooner or later everybody I knew tried to buy something from the deli on Spring Street, and everyone had the same experience. Usually it was a hot day, and the store hove into view just when the need for a can of soda presented itself. So you’d enter, go to the cooler, pick out a cold one, and take it to the counter.
“Five dollars.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
Some people left meekly; some tried arguing, to no avail. If the owner didn’t know your family, he didn’t want your business, and that was that.
*
The Late Show was one of several $3 clothing stores that flourished in the neighborhood in the mid-1970s. Everything in the store cost $3, whether it was a T-shirt or a three-piece suit in cut velvet. The place was run by Frenchy and Angel, surviving holdouts from the methamphetamine culture that had ravaged the area half a decade later and driven out the hippies. Frenchy had once been wardrobe manager for the New York Dolls; he walked with a cane and moved as if he was fifty years older than his actual age. Angel was so thin she could have hidden behind a telephone pole. She wore ordinary dark glasses that looked outlandishly oversized on her. One day I took my ditsy friend F, visiting from out of town, for a shopping trip there. Since she had arrived unprepared for the weather, I had lent her my brown leather bomber jacket. She carelessly threw it in a corner and went to work, stepping up to the counter hours later with an enormous haul. After she paid we looked for my jacket and couldn’t find it. It turned out that, while our attention was elsewhere, someone had come in, tried it on, and bought it.
*
Among the peddlers on Astor Place, the same set of the works of Khrushchev (Foreign Languages Press, Moscow) circulated from hand to hand for at least a year. Nobody ever bought it, but every day it would appear in someone else’s stock.
*
Inflation. On August 6, 1979, I hit the street clutching a $10 bill. With that sum ($9.98, to be precise) I bought three slices of pizza, a can of Welch’s strawberry soda, a pack of Viceroys, six joints, two quarts of orange juice, two containers of yogurt, and a pint of milk. For some reason I was moved to enter those details in my notebook. I often revisited the entry. On May 29, 1981, I noted that the shopping list would cost around $12 at current prices. On March 24, 1983, the sum had risen to $13.50, and a year later to $15. On August 2, 1986, I calculated the cost as $39.35–loose joints were rare on the street, and by then a dime bag of marijuana yielded about two joints. On December 1, 1990, the cost had reached $72–$12 minus the pot. On March 28, 1993, I figured it had attained $92.75, or $22.75 for everything but the marijuana.
*
One day when L went to buy heroin on 3rd Street, as he often did, he was hijacked. That was not unusual either, but this time the thieves maneuvered him into an abandoned building and took not just his money but also every shred of his clothing. He was forced to make his way home naked. Fortunately he only lived about ten blocks away.
*
The last time I saw W, he was selling records on the sidewalk on St. Mark’s Place. He told me he was disposing of his property to raise funds for a trip to Asia. I don’t remember buying anything from him–his tastes tended toward the impressive-looking but unlistenable–but unless I was broke I must have thrown some dollars his way. His travel plans sounded so grand–months apiece in Kashmir, Thailand, Bali, etc.–that I wondered whether he would ever realize them. A few weeks later I got word that he had committed suicide, in his apartment.
*
“My dream,” V told me more than once, “is to come upon a parked truck transporting Kodak film. Think about it: Film is small, light, untraceable, easy to dispose of, and proportionately expensive. A find like that could set you up for years to come.” I lost track of V, so I don’t know whether he ever fulfilled his dream.
*
When S inherited his father’s estate, although it was not a major sum, he promptly retired. That is, he quit his job, moved into a room in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street, and took his meals at the donut shop on the corner. He read, wrote, strolled, napped. It was the life of Riley. He might have continued in this fashion indefinitely had he not made the acquaintance of cocaine.