New York, winter 1994
The newsroom and subway always seemed a lot alike to me. Both of them seemed barely under control, both rumbling, clattering, powerful things that people depended on to take them someplace. I sat at my desk in that crowded, busy place, and willed the words to come. I stabbed hard on a single letter on my computer keyboard, once, twice, again, harder. Nothing. It was broken, again. You can make it to the big time, make it all the way to the New York Times, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have a Q when you need one.
I walked home that evening to my little company apartment on 50th Street, through the cold of a Yankee winter, through the lights that people write songs about. It was after nine o’clock, but a river of yellow taxi cabs still ebbed and flowed down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, merging with a chorus of curses shouted in a dozen languages, unheard behind the tightly closed windows. The sidewalks still teemed, even at that hour, and I thought to myself, “Don’t any of these damn people ever go home?” Some of them, the ragged ones who clutched at wrinkled garbage bags full of treasure and used plastic forks, were home already.
I walked past high art and low art, past the theaters where famous people played to packed houses, past theaters where anonymous people played with themselves. I passed up the delis with their eleven-dollar chicken salad sandwiches and stopped instead at the Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits, where you could eat enough to kill yourself for five dollars and change. It is the warmest place in Times Square. On a cold night, you can feel the glow from the deep fryer all the way across the counter. I got myself some chicken to go.
It might have been snowing before I stepped inside but I noticed it for the first time when I came out, little specks of white, murdered by the warmth of the sidewalk. A few blocks from home, a thin, unhealthy-looking woman with yellow hair and a pink plastic jacket stood beside a pay phone outside a dirty movie theater, not talking, just holding it, pretending, waiting for the police car to roll on by. She never solicited out loud, she just stared at you, hard, and smiled, slick and hard, like lipstick on the bathroom mirror, until you shook your head, no.
At 49th Street a beggar asked me for a little help, and I gave him a quarter, maybe two, because I had not been there long enough not to give a damn. The beggars could tell I was new, like horses can tell when you are afraid. They chased me for whole blocks sometimes, pleading. I was lucky this time. I got a Born Again, a man who did not blame God for leaving him on a freezing and dirty sidewalk. He only blessed me.
The doorman opened the door to my apartment building, and, as always, I felt funny about that. “How can you eat that stuff?” the doorman said. I told him my stomach was impervious to cayenne pepper and most forms of grease, and he smiled at my accent, like he did every night. He must have thought Gomer was loose in the Big City. He always told me everything twice, I guess so I would understand. I didn’t mind that, either. He was a nice man.
I ate my chicken and biscuit out of the sack, on the couch, half-listening to the television that I had turned on for company, glancing out the window to the top of the Winter Garden, over to Broadway, to a string of headlights that stretched to the end of the world or at least to 110th Street. I had just finished a story about living and dying in New York, and I looked at the front page, trying to keep grease and crumbs off the words.
Somewhere between one more killing in the inner city and the obscurity of the grave, is a wall in Brooklyn.
Khem Hubbard recorded her brother’s name there last week, in big silver letters. Now Kyle Raseim Hubbard, 19, shot to death on Jan. 6, 1990, will be remembered in a New York neighborhood where the dead disappear in the crowd.
The memorial wall at the corner of Crown Street and Bedford Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn is like the ones in the South Bronx, the ones in Harlem. They hold the names of dead children, innocent bystanders, stone-cold killers, untrue lovers and fallen angels.
They are remembered with elaborate murals that plead for a stop to the senseless killing, or just a few thin lines scrawled by a friend with a felt tip pen and a broken heart. They tell us that Papa rests in peace, that Kiki has found God.
No one is sure how many walls there are in New York, or how many inner-city victims have taken their place on the lists of the dead that decorate the sides of dry cleaners, clinics and corner stores. People who live beside the walls guess that there are hundreds scattered around the city, embroidered with thousands of names.
The dead have been carried off to cemeteries outside the inner city, but people here like to believe their spirit is still in the neighborhood, and that is where the shrine should be. People leave flowers in Dr Pepper cans. They touch the names and pray for souls. The murals, some with hundreds of names, are almost never desecrated. The respect Kiki and Papa, Rasheim and others couldn’t find in death is now theirs.
“I don’t have the power to save them,” said Richard Greene, a community organizer in Crown Heights and a caretaker of the Brooklyn Walls. “But I can keep their spirit close.
“I had a friend who died in Vietnam. I couldn’t go to his funeral. Later, I went to The Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial, and saw his name. That name, there was still power in it.”
I read it to the end, and found a dozen things I wished I had written differently, like I always do. But there is no way to make that gigantic press run backwards once they turn the key, once the siren sounds, once it begins to tumble over and over and over again. Like time. Sometimes the warm newspaper in your hands reads clumsy and sometimes it doesn’t even read right, but there it is. There you are. And it is much, much too late for the rewrite man.
I remember that night in New York, because it was every night in New York. I could have called my momma, could have whined to her about how awful it was for me here, the biscuit head, so far from home. But that would have been a lie.
I was not some poor Southern boy in run-down penny loafers and fashionably frayed khaki pants whining to his family about how much he missed the whisper of the river and the breeze on the veranda. I had been much further away from home than this, in places where they would kill you for your shoes. I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year by year. From the first time I tried to hunt and peck on that old Underwood typewriter, sitting behind that scarred desk in that little newspaper office that smelled of ink and cigarettes, I had been searching for this, or something very much like it.
It was not even picturesque. I lived in Midtown, for God’s sake. You have to live in the Village or SoHo to be picturesque, or Spanish Harlem if you have the guts and an angel on your shoulder. I was not a suffering writer, searching for inspiration. I worked in a city so rich in stories that I had to step over ten to get to the one I wanted, like stepping over the sleeping beggars to get to the subway. I was not eating canned soup and crackers, waiting for money from my rich daddy as I penned poetry no one would read until I was deader than Aunt Minnie’s house cat. I worked for wages. Millions read the words.
I was not sure that this meant success, this New York, but I was pretty sure it didn’t mean failure. For a minute I thought of Rudy Abbott, the baseball coach at Jacksonville State University, who had won two college world series. I had always respected Rudy, I suppose because he had started in the smokeneck section of West Anniston, in the shadows of the mills, and climbed out of it. He gave me some advice once, or maybe it was more of a warning.
“People like you and me,” he said, “we can’t fail.”
No, I was doing fine.
It is true that there is something about the enormity of this city that forces you to be reflective, as if you have to constantly peek inside yourself to make sure your character has not somehow slipped away from you in the onrush of strangers. With so many rats in the box, you want to make sure that your rat is still unique, so you sit and think back to any place but here, any time but here. You find yourself in there somewhere, in that memory, and it comforts you. I do not know what native New Yorkers do. Maybe the New York in their memory is greatly different. I hear it was. Maybe they just make something up, and go there.
The only real regret I had, one I felt most acutely then and there, was that I had not been able to talk with my momma about what I did for a living, not for years and years. It was not because I was ashamed—I was proud of the work—but because it was what it was. I remember a young American soldier in Haiti, a boy from Mississippi who baked inside his bullet-resistant vest and wrote letters to his girlfriend and momma. He told his girlfriend the truth, mainly, of the filth and hate and cruelty without bounds, but he lied to his momma in those letters. “You only write your momma the good stuff,” he said, and he didn’t have to explain.
I wanted her to believe that everything I did was warm and safe and clean, just sitting around telling tales, waiting for room service. How could I tell her that I had spent the past two weeks, even the past ten years, searching out the homeless, the hopeless, the eternally damned? How could I tell her that her scrapbook was hopelessly out of date, that, just a few days ago, a streetwise photographer named Michelle Agins had told me to get my happy ass back in the van on a particularly vicious corner, not just because I might get myself killed, but get her killed, get everyone with us killed. How could I describe to her the look in the eyes of inner-city boys who paid for their funerals in advance, because they did not expect to live beyond their teens, who killed because someone stepped on their sneakers or looked at them hard. How do you go to a woman who lives at the foot of a mountain of sadness and shovel more around her ankles, the sadnesses of strangers? No. I left the phone on its hook.
I would call her Sunday, and tell her I went up to Harlem to eat turkey wings and cornbread at a place called Sylvia’s, that New York was just one Big Rock Candy Mountain where the people talked slow so that I could understand, that they ran everything I wrote on the front page, both of them. That, I thought, was all she needed to know. When I wrote a happy story, I would send it to her with a hundred-dollar bill taped to the inside, and she would show the newspaper around and put the hundred under her mattress. She had three. Country people never throw away a mattress. They just stack ’em up on the bed, higher and higher, the new one on top. If you die in your sleep, you are that much closer to heaven, from Jump Street.
It was past ten o’clock by then, and she would have been asleep an hour, anyway. If it was this cold here it would be pretty cold down there, too. She would have let the dogs into the house, and left the water trickling in the sink, so that those patched-together pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst again.
She would get up at five to put wood in the heater, which would have nothing but coals left by then. She would think about making biscuits and she might even get the lard can and the flour out, but she would put them back, because there is no need to fix a big breakfast to sit and eat by yourself. Sometimes she lets the fire go completely out, and has to start up again with a few slivers of pine and wadded up pages of the only newspaper she has ever taken, the Jacksonville News. It is a fine newspaper, she tells everyone, and good kindling. My son used to work there, she tells them. Maybe you remember him? He wrote about the ball games. He works in New York now, but I ain’t real sure what he does. They don’t sell it here. And he don’t say.
I watched the news at eleven, and the window for a while after that. I knew that across town, near the United Nations, the homeless would be spreading their blankets over the hot steam from the sewer grates, retiring for the evening. On Madison Avenue they would pull cardboard into the recessed foyers of the stores, and lie down just inches from the wealth that glinted on the other side of the glass. Down in the Meat Packing District, transvestite hookers would prance from car to car, nearly naked, their skin turning bone white in the cold.
I picked up the phone and called my girlfriend in Florida. I asked her to tell me that, where she was, it was warm. She said no, it was cold down there, too. They were afraid the orange trees would freeze.