Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Nobody on this Third Avenue morning knows that such a world ever existed. Cynthia Harding knew. She knew because I walked these streets with her and told her all about it. More than once. Blathering away. Hoping I was not coating her with the treacherous paste of sentimentality. We went together often to the only surviving remnant: P. J. Clarke’s, another block uptown. Introduced her one night to Sinatra. And Danny Lavezzo, the owner. When we got back to her house, she said to me, with a hint of envy, You’re such a lucky man, Sam. You didn’t get that world secondhand. You didn’t take a course in it. You lived it. He thinks: I didn’t take a course in Cynthia Harding either. I lived it. We lived it.

Standing now, facing the Lipstick Building, Briscoe checks his watch. Ten minutes more before the meeting. And he remembers walking here with Cynthia one summer afternoon, telling her about walking the same street with his father, who was a cop again. After the war. They passed pawnshops and saloons, full of workers from the slaughterhouses down where the UN now stands. Some of the workers wore aprons covered with bloodstains, drying into darker colors, swatting at horseflies. In summer, the saloon doors were always open, for there was no air-conditioning then, and the joints all smelled of sour beer.

Briscoe described for Cynthia the brick facades of buildings permanently shadowed by the El, the boxy shadows on the cobblestones at high noon, hears the sound of screeching steel, almost painful when trains stopped at 53rd Street. Right there where the Lipstick Building is, his aunt Mary lived in one of the flats, his mother’s sister, her sailor husband dead in the Pacific war, his body never found, and when they went visiting Aunt Mary on Sunday afternoons, for dinner and song and company, Briscoe loved peering at the trains from the front windows of the flat, the faces of the people within, who never looked at him, or even at each other. He wanted to know who they were, and would spend a tabloid lifetime finding out.

Briscoe remembers the day the nickel fare ended in 1948 and how everyone complained bitterly about the increase when he and his father stopped to chat on Saturday mornings. He remembers listening to the radio every day, no television then. Music and serials and news. And baseball. He remembers Giant games playing from open windows, and how everyone hated the Yankees and the Dodgers. He remembers too the day the Briscoes packed up to leave, all they owned put in cartons, or wrapped in sheets of newspaper, then stacked in a truck that was leaving for Brooklyn, where his father had bought the house in Sunset Park. A house with a backyard and a tree and eventually a dog. Bought with a V.A. loan. A different world.

Enough. It’s all gone now.

He crosses Third Avenue, walking quickly. Part of his past is under his feet and the future is right in front of him. He moves into the Lipstick Building, taking his press card from his jacket pocket. Thinking: Now Cynthia is part of the past too.

8:20 a.m. Josh Thompson. The High Line, Manhattan.

He is in the street but he can’t see the sky. There is a man standing off to the side, with a wild gray beard, a heavy plaid shirt.

— Mornin’, soldier, he says.

— Morning, Josh Thompson says, his throat cloggy with phlegm. He grips the MAC-10 under the blanket and poncho.

— Go ahead and hawk up the lunger, soldier.

Josh calls up a wad from his throat, makes a pulpy ball on his tongue, spits it three feet to the side.

— Where is this? he asks, looking around him.

— The High Line. Used to be a railroad spur. Then it was dead for fifty years. Now they planted it with stuff and made a park out of it. Right up above your head.

— A park?

— Yeah, a park in the sky. The High Line, they call it. There’s an elevator down there, you wanna see it. Hey, you must need to piss.

— Yeah.

— Let the brake out and I’ll walk you.

He rolls Josh into a shadowed area, filled with packing crates.

From the darkness, he wonders where the Aladdin is from here. As he does every time he has to piss, he thinks of payback.

— You need a paper to read, soldier?

— Sure.

He takes the newspaper. Two women on the front page. One blonde. One black. The headline says:

THE LAST DINNER PARTY

Who are these people? Josh thinks. Why isn’t Iraq on the front page? Or Afghanistan? They just don’t give a rat’s ass, do they?

The bearded guy leaves him alone. Josh starts unzipping his jeans, unfastening his diaper.

8:35 a.m. Sandra Gordon. Lobby of Lipstick Building.

She walks across the crowded plaza, following others through the revolving doors. She is wearing high boots, a heavy coat, a warm wool hat. The New York Times is under her left arm, home-delivered but unread, and she grips a Mark Cross briefcase. She will open the paper when she reaches her desk. Not an electronic reader for the Times. The Times itself. To see if there is news about Myles Compton. And his co-conspirators. She wonders if Myles made his plane, if that’s what he was taking to wherever he will hide for the rest of his miserable life. The poor son of a bitch.

Then she glances at the newsstand, the newspapers blocked by two men buying nuts or gum or even newspapers. One of the men moves and heads to the elevator banks. Sandra’s eyes fall to the low shelf of newspapers.

She makes a sharp sound of pain, and falls to the polished stone floor.

8:40 a.m. Ali Watson. Office of Joint Terrorism Task Force, Manhattan.

He is still filled with the night, lying on a cot in the small dark back office. Nobody has tried to rouse him with knocks on the door. He knows they are out there in the office, absorbing information, thinking about chatter from many places. For now, they will get along without him. He’s better off here than alone at home. They will let him grieve.

His mind is jagged, alive with crude scribbles he saw from his Mazda, which Malachy parked in front of his house. His brain jangles with the graffiti on the wet walls of empty Brooklyn streets, marks without verbs, just names, the narcissism of vandals. I am, they snarl. I exist, they brag. All the names invented, pseudonyms without warnings or declarations of love. When Ali was young, and he saw the words “Bird Lives” on a subway wall, he knew the message was about Charlie Parker, and the words were saying that his music would live forever. And so it has. This is not like Bird. I want to buy a spray can and write Mary Lou Lives on all the unwashed walls of the city. State it. Shout it. Make the verb clear. Make it about her, not me. Refuse to join the legions of I. All those young fools declaring that they exist. Shouting: I am alone, as lonesome as God, and here is my mark. I exist, and fuck you.

Mary Lou lives, you assholes.

He sits up on the edge of the narrow bed, and remembers the drive at dawn to the mosque, where he spoke to the imam. He woke the man up, and was allowed inside. He said to the imam that if he heard from Malik, please tell him that his mother was dead. That he should call his father. The imam was gentle, trying to console Ali, but shrugged and said he had not seen Malik in a long time. Maybe years now. Ali said: What about Jamal? Yes, sometimes he comes, the imam said. Jamal is still a Muslim. He even made the haj . He has nothing to do now with jihad. Ali knew that, knew Jamal’s address too. He said nothing more to the imam about Malik, but did give him a card.

— Call me, if you hear from my son.

— Yes, sir.

— I’m sorry for waking you up.

— I wasn’t sleeping, the imam says. I was praying.