Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Then he sees a taxi with its roof light on, steps into the street and hails it. As he slides in, he gives the address, explaining it’s in SoHo. The driver says nothing, and starts moving. Briscoe feels a dull ache in his lower back. Not pain. An ache. He looks at the driver’s name in the plastic slot.

— You from Pakistan, driver? he says.

— Brooklyn, he says curtly.

— Originally Pakistan?

— Eh.

That could lead to more talk, maybe, but Briscoe thinks, Ah, hell, just get me home. The driver makes an abrupt turn off the highway, as if closing the conversation. Briscoe accepts his dismissal, leans back, aching now for the cabbies of his youth, and their soliloquies on life and death, men and women and baseball. Gone forever. Maybe that’s causing the ache in his back too. The ache of losing too many things. And people. Then thinks: Stop . That’s like nostalgia for the clap. He watches a knot of drunken kids lurching from a club with an unreadable sign. Up the block, three very young women are also tottering toward Sixth Avenue on high spiked shoes. To be up this late on a Thursday night, none of them must have day jobs. Or they’re college kids spending their fathers’ dwindling money. Which is the same thing. Do they know how to sign up for unemployment? How many of them? Gotta tell a reporter…

At the corner of West Broadway and Spring, he overtips the surly driver, because he always overtips cabbies, steps out, and walks east toward Greene Street. Two blocks. A counterfeit of exercise. Cold air for the aging brain. He sees more stragglers from the saloons. In twos or threes. He glances up Wooster Street and is sure he sees a man in a poncho glistening with rain. Maybe even a combat poncho. Seated in a wheelchair. A glance. A freeze frame. Then the man is gone. What the fuck? And thinks: Another member of the VFW. The Veterans of Foreign Woes. Or Foreign Whores. Roaming around SoHo like it was the Ia Drang Valley. Or maybe just coming from a costume party. If he has a gun, someone might be in trouble.

Briscoe crosses Wooster and remembers walking here one spring night long ago with Cynthia Harding, the two of them joined by anticipation. She would stay the night. Or maybe a week. Everything seemed possible. Until later, when she turned to him.

— What do you want, Sam? What do you want out of this life?

— Nothing, he said.

She took this remark as a dismissal and a month later she married her second husband and moved to Switzerland for two years. Married the old guy with all the money. Cynthia thought Briscoe meant he didn’t want her either. And maybe she was right. He felt then, and feels now, that he has no talent for marriage. For the compromises and little lies that made shared lives work. He had tried it once, and that was enough. He had no talent for the mutual invasions of privacy. Laughter was never enough. At least not then. And maybe not now. After that night when they crossed Wooster Street, he didn’t see Cynthia until after her second husband’s funeral.

By then he knew that Cynthia was the one woman he could not live without. Life, he had learned, was a series of mistakes, delusions, and stupid losses. Not just for him. For most people. It’s fourth and two and you don’t score. Down by three runs, you pop up with two out in the ninth and the bases loaded. He said out loud: Stop with the fucking sports metaphors. And thought: If the Fonseca kid ever said such things, I’d cut them off his tongue. But one thing is sure: All true wounds are self-inflicted. Aside from his daughter, Nicole, Cynthia was now the only woman in his life. Yes, their lives were separate and private. But who said the sentence that has been moving in his head? You are who you are when you’re alone. Even when he was alone, he was with Cynthia.

He stops at his building, glances warily around the wet cobblestoned street, then opens the outside door into the bright small lobby. He checks the mailbox. Grabs some envelopes, most of them junk mail, 50 % OFF! TWO SUITS FOR PRICE OF ONE. The same as the signs now in all SoHo windows. Except for the signs saying TO LET. A few bills. He turns the key in the elevator slot for his floor, pushes the button, starts rising. Uses another key for his own door. On the third floor. Only one above him.

On the wall of the vestibule is a framed poster from the Picasso retrospective at MoMA more than twenty years ago. He saw it twice with Cynthia Harding. He unlocks the door to his loft, flicks on the light switch, locks the door behind him. And sees the framed photograph of Willie Mays playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in 1951. The picture always makes him smile. Welcome home, it says. Say hey. Joy lives.

On the street end of the loft, a desk lamp glows upon his large computer table, which is littered with folders and paper. To the side, a stack of old newspapers rises two feet off the polished plank floor. A computer rests on its own small table, and beyond it is an HP color printer. Small green lights blink in welcome. Not tonight, boys. Gotta get some sleep.

He removes hat, coat, jacket, tie as he walks deeper into the loft, dropping each upon the couches and chairs of the living area, and goes into the bathroom. He thinks: Been here so many years now. Since they were just starting to use the word “SoHo.” Wasn’t even legal to live here. His loft had been an old metalworking shop and the bare polished wood floors were gouged where machinery had been torn out, probably for shipment to South America. They all laugh at him now, his few living friends from those years. Briscoe had combined the luck of the Irish and the chutzpah of the Jews. They know he bought the loft in 1974 for fifteen thousand dollars borrowed from a bank, where he knew the vice president from the Lion’s Head, then wrote a fast thriller under another name to pay off the mortgage and do the work the place needed, and now it’s worth almost four million. Or was. Before the Fall. He thinks: I gotta fucking laugh. Four million, and I never even considered selling. Even after Joyce died. My only wife. Even after I went to Europe. He rented the place to a director friend from the Public Theater who was getting divorced. A friend who wouldn’t steal the books. He’s dead too.

In the bathroom, Briscoe turns on the taps of the tub, testing the heat of the water with his left hand. He dons a robe from the 1957 Golden Gloves tournament, where his friend José won the middleweight championship. He pulls on slippers and goes out to the wider loft, looking for something to read in the tub, walking past the tall bookshelves that fill one long wall from floor to ceiling. They are organized like tenements. The French tenement. The Mexican tenement. The Irish tenement. The Jewish tenement. The three tenements of New York histories and old guidebooks, novels and diaries that tried to define the city, and always failed. Each of the tenements were about places he had lived, and people he knew, and they defined him too. His mother was Irish, his father Jewish, both immigrants who met here in New York, and their own past seeped densely from the leathery New York tenement, whispering to him as he walked by. And the Jewish tenement. And the Irish tenement. Not tonight, Momma. Not tonight, Dad.

He stops in front of the Italian tenement. Should he listen to Calvino in the tub? Or Barzini? Should he take some sentences of Eco to bed with him, or Manzoni, or Moravia, or Pavese? Ah: Machiavelli. The argument for a republic. Perchè no? But then he would be up for hours of dispute and agreement with a man who has been dead for five centuries, and was smarter in death than Briscoe has ever been in life. He lifts down Pavese’s diaries, opens at random. Many pages brightened with a yellow marker. Thinks: No.

Nobody.

Alone.