Jillian Abbott's - Queens Noir

Shea Stadium is located in Flushing Meadows — Corona Park, site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. Joe Guglielmelli’s protagonist is seemingly just another subway passenger en route to a game, who falls into conversation with a Boston Red Sox fan. You never heard so much baseball talk in your life as in “Buckner’s Error”... until the final inning.

Ride the 7 for one more stop and it’s the end of the line at Roosevelt Avenue/Main Street. Main Street is packed all the way up to Kissena Boulevard with peddlers, fish markets, phone stores, fast-food shops — all the signs in Chinese characters. More Chinese live in Flushing than in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Author Victoria Eng, who knows the turf, takes us off-street to Bowne Park, a tiny oasis in a sea of commerce, for a coming-of-age story. A bad move in the park, however, and you might not get any older.

Bayside and College Point are middle- to upper-class neighborhoods in northeast Queens, off the Cross Island Parkway. In “Under the Throgs Neck Bridge,” Denis Hamill’s two jogging characters cover a lot of Bayside landscape. One, however, is unaware that it’s a race to the death.

College Point sits across Flushing Bay from LaGuardia Airport. You know you live in Queens if you are airplane-conscious: There’s always a flight path directly over your house. But that’s not police officer Jill Kelly’s problem; hers is an itchy trigger-finger. In “Crazy Jill Saves the Slinky,” Stephen Solomita spins an Irish domestic drama where family ties run deep — deep as a grave.

Take the Whitestone Expressway to the Grand Central Parkway south, exit at Queens Boulevard. You’re in Kew Gardens, the seat of political power in the borough. On your right is the Queens Criminal Courts building, which appears to have a piece of a flying saucer buried in its face, a silvery metallic canopy over the entrance, reminiscent of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not a surprise: Both the movie and the building are from the 1950s. Keep heading west on Queens Boulevard — a twelve-laner so hard to cross even with the light that it’s called the “Boulevard of Death” — to Forest Hills and Rego Park, high-income and alike as two peas in a pod. Typical of both these old communities is block after block of high-rise co-op and condo buildings lining both sides of the boulevard. Jews have predominated here for decades. Recent immigration has added Russian, Israeli, Middle Eastern, and Bukharan flavors. Alan Gordon opts for the traditional in “Bottom of the Sixth,” setting a tale of the Hasidim on a Little League baseball field in Rego Park. Batter up! Watch out for flying lead!

Megan Abbott returns to yesteryear, the 1970s, in “Hollywood Lanes,” set in a venerable bowling alley. The building still stands on Queens Boulevard and Sixty-Seventh Avenue — vacant like a haunted house harboring the violent passions that erupted therein on a summer’s night.

Take the Van Wyck Expressway south, exit at Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill. Before World War II, the Hill was middle-class comfortable, and its historic district is still intact with 1,000 Victorian homes. These days, the area is the center of the city’s Guyanese immigration, also home to Hindus, Sikhs, Pakistanis, and West Indians. Jillian Abbott keys us in to the emotional life and ultimate fate of a misfit al-Qaeda mole in “Jihad Sucks; or, The Conversion of the Jews.”

Take Atlantic Avenue east to the Jamaica neighborhood, with the largest African-American community in the city. It’s also the destination-of-choice of Filipinos. West Indians, Chinese, and Salvadorans also abound. Belinda Farley sets her story amidst a law-abiding Haitian family in their modest dwelling on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard and 108th Avenue in the heart of Jamaica. “The Investigation” has its roots in the “locked room” mystery.

Move south on Guy R. Brewer to Baisley Pond Park in South Jamaica, where playground basketball is king, where Glenville Lovell’s second-generation West Indian gangsta has an out-of-body experience.

Aqueduct Racetrack is due south. You can get there by the A train or drive along Rockaway Parkway. It’s 113 years old, though it has fallen on hard times; attendance is in the toilet. The real estate jackals are salivating while the governor sings that old song: Urban Renewal. But Maggie Estep (the smartest horsewoman on the planet) celebrates the breed in “Alice Fantastic,” a twisty tale of Fatal Attraction among the Usual Suspects in the clubhouse.

Head south on the Van Wyck to the end: John F. Kennedy Airport. It’s huge. Playing against the grain, Patricia King (a globe-trotter herself) takes us into the mind of an ordinary woman as she deplanes and makes her way through the terminal to collect her bags. The unexpected intervenes in “Baggage Claim,” and suddenly you’re in The Twilight Zone.

Last stop: the Rockaways, the southernmost point in Queens, a ten-mile peninsula flush against the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of beach. In 1993, a ship loaded with smuggled Chinese foundered off the coast here. A few made it to shore. “Golden Venture” is the story of one of them — well, not exactly. This is novelist Jill Eisenstadt’s comical riff on what might have happened later.

Queens! — this sprawling Babel — an ethnic stew best sampled by dipping into the stories up ahead. You can almost taste ’em...

Robert Knightly

Queens, New York City

November 2007

Aqueduct Racetrack

I’d been trying to get rid of the big oaf for seventeen weeks but he just kept coming around. He’d ring the bell and I’d look out the window and see him standing on the stoop looking like a kicked puppy. What I needed with another kicked puppy I couldn’t tell you, since I’d taken in a little white mutt with tan spots that my cousin Jeremy had found knocked up and wandering a trailer park in Kentucky. Cousin Jeremy couldn’t keep the dog so he called me up and somehow got me to take the animal in. After making the vet give her an abortion and a rabies shot, Jeremy found the dog a ride up from Kentucky with some freak friend of his who routinely drives between Kentucky and Queens transporting cheap cigarettes. The freak friend pulled his van up outside my house one night just before midnight and the dog came out of the van reeking of cigarettes and blinking up at me, completely confused and kicked- looking. Not that I think the freak friend of Cousin Jeremy’s actually kicked her. But the point is, I already had a kicked puppy. What did I need with a guy looking like one?

I didn’t need him. But he’d ring the bell and I’d let him in, and, even if I was wearing my dead father’s filthy bathrobe and I hadn’t showered in five days, he’d tell me, You look fantastic, Alice . I knew he actually meant it, that he saw something fantastic in my limp brown hair and puffy face and the zits I’d started getting suddenly at age thirty-six. It was embarrassing. The zits, the fact that I was letting this big oaf come over to nuzzle at my unbathed flesh, the little dog who’d sit at the edge of the bed watching as me and Clayton, the big oaf, went at it.

My life was a shambles. So I vowed to end it with Clayton. I vowed it on a Tuesday at 7 a.m. after waking up with an unusual sense of clarity. I opened my eyes to find thin winter sunlight sifting in the windows of the house my dead father left me. Candy, the trailer trash dog, was sitting at the edge of the bed, politely waiting for me to wake up because that’s the thing with strays, they’re so grateful to have been taken in that they defer to your schedule and needs. So, Candy was at the edge of the bed and sun was coming in the windows of my dead father’s place on 47th Road in the borough of Queens in New York City. And I felt clear-headed. Who knows why. I just did. And I felt I needed to get my act together. Shower more frequently. Stop smoking so much. Get back to yoga and kickboxing. Stop burning through my modest profits as a modest gambler. Revitalize myself. And the first order of business was to get rid of the big oaf, Clayton. Who ever heard of a guy named Clayton who isn’t ninety-seven years old, anyway?