Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge

“You coulda come to my house,” she said. “We had the cops there once a week. My husband and I would drink and fight, and some neighbor’d call the cops, and they’d come. The same cop showed up three times running, and the next thing you knew I was having an affair with him, and before you knew it him and I had a fight, and somebody called the cops. People were always calling the cops on me, even when I was with a cop to start with.”

At nine-thirty we said the Lord’s Prayer and closed the meeting. A few people came over to shake hands and thank me for leading the meeting. Most of the others hurried out of the building so they could light their cigarettes.

Outside, the night was crisp with early autumn. Summer had been brutal, and the cool nights now were a relief. I walked half a block west, and a man stepped out of a doorway and asked me if I could spare any change. He was wearing mismatched pants and suit jacket and he had wornout tennis sneakers on his feet, and no socks. He looked thirty-five but he was probably younger than that. The street ages you.

He needed a bath and a shave and a haircut. He needed a whole lot more than I could give him. What I did give him was a dollar, fishing a single out of my pants pocket and pressing it into his palm. He thanked me and asked God to bless me. I started walking, and I was almost at the corner of Broadway when I heard someone call my name.

I turned and recognized a fellow named Eddie. He’d been at the meeting, and I’d seen him around now and then at other meetings. Now he was hurrying to catch up with me.

“Hey, Matt,” he said. “You want to get some coffee?”

“I had three cups at the meeting. I think I’ll just head for home.”

“You going uptown? I’ll walk you.”

We took Broadway to Forty-seventh, walked over to Eighth Avenue, turned right and continued uptown. Of the five people who asked us for money en route, I shook off two of them and gave the others a dollar each and was thanked and blessed in return. After the third one took her dollar and extended her blessing, Eddie said, “Jesus, you gotta be the softest touch on the whole West Side. What are you, Matt, just a boy who can’t say no?”

“Sometimes I turn them down.”

“But mostly you don’t.”

“Mostly I don’t.”

“I saw the mayor on TV the other day. He says we shouldn’t give money to people on the street. He says half the time they’re addicts, they’re just gonna spend the money on crack.”

“Right, and the other half’ll squander it on food and shelter.”

“He says there’s beds and hot meals available free of charge to anybody in the city who needs it.”

“I know. It makes you wonder why so many people sleep in the streets and eat out of garbage cans.”

“He wants to crack down on the window washers, too. You know, guys wipe your windshield whether it needs it or not, then hit you for a handout? He says he doesn’t like the way it looks, guys working the street like that.”

“He’s right,” I said. “They’re able-bodied guys, too. They ought to be out mugging people or knocking over liquor stores, something that’s out of the public eye.”

“I guess you’re not a big fan of the mayor’s.”

“I suppose he’s all right,” I said. “I think he’s got a heart the size of a raisin, but maybe that’s a requirement, part of the job description. I try not to pay too much attention to who the mayor is or what he says. I give away a few bucks every day, that’s all. It doesn’t hurt me and it doesn’t help anybody very much. It’s just what I do these days.”

“There’s enough of them out there asking for it.”

And indeed there were. You saw them all over the city, sleeping in the parks, in the subway tunnels, in the bus- and train-station lobbies. Some of them were mental cases and some were crack addicts, and some of them were just people who had lost a step in the great race and had no place to live. It’s hard to get a job when you don’t have a residence, hard to keep yourself presentable enough to get hired. But some of them had jobs. Apartments are hard to find in New York, and harder to afford; with rent and security and broker’s commission to pay, you might need upwards of two thousand dollars to get in the door of an apartment. Even if you could hold a job, how could you save up that kind of money?

“Thank God I got a place,” Eddie said. “It’s the apartment I grew up in, if you can believe it. A block up and two blocks over, near Tenth. Not the first place I lived in. That’s gone now, the building came down, it’s where they built the new high school. We moved out of there when I was, I don’t know, nine years old? Musta been, because I was in the third grade. You know I done time?”

“Not in the third grade.”

He laughed. “No, it was a little later than that. Thing is, the old man died while I was up in Green Haven, and when I got out I didn’t have a place to stay, so I moved in with my ma. I wasn’t home much, it was just a place to keep my clothes and stuff, but then when she got sick I started staying there with her, and after she died I kept the place. Three little rooms up on the fourth floor, but, you know, it’s rent-controlled, Matt. $122.75 a month. A hotel you’d be willing to step into, in this town, shit, you’d pay that for one night.”

And, amazingly enough, the neighborhood itself was on its way up. Hell’s Kitchen had been a tough, hard-bitten neighborhood for a hundred years, and now the realtors had people calling it Clinton and turning tenement flats into condos and getting six-figure prices for them. I could never figure out where the poor people went, or where the rich people came from.

He said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it? Of course before we know it we’ll be griping that it’s too cold. One day you’re dying of the heat and the next minute you’re wondering where the summer went. Always the way, huh?”

“That’s what they say.”

He was in his late thirties, five-eight or — nine and slender, with pale skin and washed-out blue eyes. His hair was light brown and he was losing it, and the receding hairline combined with an overbite to give him a slightly rabbity appearance.

If I hadn’t known he’d done time I would probably have guessed as much, although I couldn’t tell you why beyond saying that he looked like a crook. A combination, perhaps, of bravado and furtiveness, an attitude that manifested physically in the set of the shoulders and the shiftiness of the eyes. I wouldn’t say that it stood out all over him, but the first time I noticed him at a meeting I had the thought that here was a guy who’d been dirty, a guy who had most likely gone away for it.

He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head. He selected one for himself and scratched a match to light it, cupping his hands against the wind. He blew out smoke, then held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it. “I ought to quit these little fuckers,” he said. “Sober up and die of cancer, where’s the percentage in that?”

“How long are you sober now, Eddie?”

“Coming up on seven months.”

“That’s great.”

“I been coming around the program for close to a year, but it took me a while to put down the drink.”

“I didn’t catch on right away, either.”

“No? Well, I slipped around for a month or two. And then I thought I could still smoke dope, because what the hell, marijuana wasn’t my problem, alcohol was my problem. But I guess what I heard at the meetings finally soaked in, and I put down the grass, too, and now I’ve been completely clean and dry for close to seven months.”

“That’s terrific.”

“I guess.”