Pete Hamill - Piecework

You can maintain some distance by looking at another Secret City: that of the mendicants, the poor and homeless, that squalid Calcutta of the New York heart. This is most certainly not entertainment; these people are not mere performers. Most are trapped in a permanent indigence, steady reminders that there is nothing ennobling about poverty. It is a simple matter to look away from them, to ignore their desperate marginality. But to do so is to live an illusion, to invent a New York that doesn’t exist. These people, along with the almost 900,000 men, women, and children on welfare, are part of a city that doesn’t read the New York Times, doesn’t think about takeover bids, the hot new restaurants, the bond market, the next Democratic candidate, nuclear war, or nuclear disarmament. They are not waiting for tickets to Les Misérables. They have more elemental concerns: food, drink, shelter, survival.

Such people give us perspective about our own lives, serving as heartbreaking reminders that living in this city can be precarious at best but that even our most fruitless encounters and dispiriting defeats are as nothing compared to the life of the man living each night in a cardboard box on the street. Our relative freedom from want should encourage mobility, propel us into small adventures. In New York, we don’t have to go far. On almost any given day, we can face grotesqueries; the next day might be riddled with ambiguity; and even for those of us trapped in offices, stamping away at a million documents like the man in Kurosawa’s Ikiru, there is the possibility of surprise.

You walk down an avenue in Chelsea and hollow-eyed men in filthy coats implore you to grant them alms; two blocks later, every other woman is beautiful, with dark, flirting eyes; at the next corner, a religious lunatic pursues you, flaying you for your sins, preaching your doom in capital letters. At lunch, a friend’s wife starts blabbing on about channeling and past-life experiences and the joys of life in dear old Atlantis; the waiter tells you that the Mets have scored two runs in the bottom of the second; word arrives that a guy you knew has died of AIDS.In a little over an hour, you have experienced pity, lust, anger, incomprehension, elation, loss. At last you leave, and at the corner, a group of hustlers, peddling crack, fake Rolexes, used books, sees you and is suddenly tense, poised for action, like an orchestra awaiting a downbeat.

And all around you lies the Secret City. Forgotten alleys, houses with lost histories, streets turbulent with the emanations of power. Places so new the odor of paint stains the air; others so old that they are to a neophyte explorer incredibly new and surprising. There are places only a few know about; others that are so commonplace we forget they exist. All are there to be savored, enjoyed, rejected. Some of my own favorites are those monuments to the great swaggering days of nineteenth-century capitalism, whispering to us across the decades. The shades of old brigands seem to be looking on in judgment from these places, mocking the arrogant ziggurats of the Trumps, sneering at the assorted felonies of their successors on the Street. But surely if they could look down from the ramparts of those old fortresses, they would also be comforted. Certainly the rampaging ferocity of the present crop of the newly rich makes the old robber barons look nearly austere. You see the new crowd all over the city now, feverishly spending, talking ceaselessly about money, being cruel to waiters and rude to their neighbors. They are citizens of that Secret City whose only fulcrum is greed.

But it’s still possible to move around New York without being appalled by either hollow grandeur or unspeakable degradation. There are other places, too, along with the unpredictable people who make them possible. Most often, they don’t have a line of stretch limousines double-parked outside. They are on streets where the sky is not yet blocked by the extravagant dwellings of coke dealers and Euro-trash. They permit intimacy. They adhere to the emotional codes of the parish. They are not retailed in the shrill treble of the huckster. They certainly can’t be found by staying home.

But they are there, they are there.…It’s still possible, whether you are native or stranger, equipped with a guidebook or only the senses, to go forth on a glorious New York morning, turn a sudden corner and discover with astonishment that you are capable of surprise. On such days, you can then surrender to the most romantic and tragic emotion of all: You want to live forever.

NEW YORK,

May 4, 1987

This was at two in the morning on Columbus Avenue, with a cold wind blowing from the river. I came out of an all-night deli with some coffee and the papers. On the corner, a black man in a filthy down jacket was poking around in a garbage can. There was a large brown plastic bag beside him on the sidewalk. He found a piece of uneaten bagel and four empty Diet Pepsi cans. He slipped the bagel in his jacket pocket. The cans went in the plastic bag. He glared, his yellow eyes peering at me from above a mask of thick wiry beard. Then he spit toward me. At last, I was home.

“Choo lookin’ at, man?” he said. “Never seen no homeless person before?” He glanced at the window of a boutique. “Miss Ethel sprayed the sink,” he said, lifting his bag, rattling the cans. “They all down by the creek, where the ballfield be.” Then he was off, talking to himself as he loped toward Broadway, carrying a bag of cans whose redemption would be easier than ours.

I was back in the New York of the ’80s. And, of course, that hostile man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn’t alone, wasn’t some municipal oddity. If you have been away for a while, as I have been, such people are the first you see: without jobs or families or shelter. This defeated army of mendicants seems made up of winos and junkies and the quite literally insane, but many of its unwilling recruits have simply run out of luck.

There are other signs of barbarism here too: the scarred lumpy streets (the great civic monument of the Koch administration might be the steel plate covering the hole in the street); the need for the stupefaction of drugs among all social classes; fear and tension in the subways; and the continuing scandal of housing. Shelter is one of the most elemental human needs but in New York now it is largely beyond the means of many people. Some end up homeless. Others must settle for less than they need. God help the man or woman grown old in this city, heavy with books, records, the valued accumulations of a lifetime, and forced suddenly to move. There is nowhere to go.

What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn’t risen in outrage. A major reason for this passivity in the face of torment is the deepening cynicism and fatalism of most New Yorkers. Again, this is most clear if you have been away awhile. The administration of poor Ed Koch has been the most corrupt since Jimmy Walker, but not a single figure has risen from the general muck to challenge him, as La Guardia rose from the Seabury investigations. For the last decade, our politicians cheated, lied, plundered the town; now a few of them are on the way to the pen. But who would turn to another politician for aid against the corrupt flood? Not a New Yorker.

But for a returned pilgrim, the worst single change in the last year is the racism — black and white — unleashed since a black man was chased to his death by a young white mob in Howard Beach. In subways, on buses, in casual encounters on the street, I’ve seen more antiwhite hostility than at any time since the months following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Many young blacks seem to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back is understandable; but the level of racism isn’t lowered by such collisions. This form of the black response is itself racism; nobody wants to be beaten or killed because of the color of their skin. It’s disgusting when whites do it to blanks; it is equally disgusting when blacks do it to whites, and to recite the history of slavery and oppression in America to justify it is itself a condescending form of racism.