It did not matter so much, the issue of where Breslin wrote. What mattered was where his feet took him. In his biography of Runyon, it is already clear by here in the hardcover edition that you are reading a biography of Breslin. Runyon, drinking a whiskey known as North Platte with the popular sportswriter Charles Van Loan after he had obtained a job at the Denver Post explained it this way, Breslin said: “All poetry gets written before you take up a pencil.”
Slap. Slap. Slap. The footsteps shaped the poetry.
“All of anything gets written before you write,” Van Loan said.
“But you still have to write it.”
He later brought Runyon from Denver to New York to replace him as a newspaper sportswriter when he went on to editing at a magazine.
And the bard who was Breslin, who described himself when he won the Pulitzer as unable to tolerate either criticism or compliment, was now avoiding on a regular basis a city room that could hold both. He was writing his poetry at home.
“He never talked to Don [Forst] again,” said Robert Johnson, the publisher of New York Newsday. “It was just an awful moment. But we really needed to suspend him, didn’t we? I mean, there was no choice in that. No, unfortunately there wasn’t. It was just wrong. She was naive as hell, but you know, she was like the newest kid in the world. You can’t go and call people names like that.”
But he was reporting solidly and his writing often was poetry. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of columns for New York Newsday—there would be, by his own count, 1,034 before the last one appeared on December 25, 1995.
Here is one week in 1991:
Sunday, August 18—Poetry, from the column “Trumpeting Best City Has to Offer”
When it never looked worse, when the place seemed to have lost its footing, New York, just like some old champion, simply got up and threw a couple of those big rounds at you. And once more, the joint made the rest of the country look like Topeka. First, we had 750,000 people sitting on the grass at Central Park as Paul Simon sang his music. The only time the other people in this country can get a crowd this large together is for a war.
And then, on the next night, on Friday, New York came right back at you, this time to demonstrate that it is the keeper of culture for the country. Here was Sam Koza, sandy haired and with gray eyes, in his white dinner jacket, warming up his cornet on the bandstand at Damrosch Park, in Lincoln Center. Sam comes out of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and he started his music at 13 and he has done it all with a trumpet. Now, at 73, with the wife gone and the children out in the world, he helps protect one of those things that have ceased to exist in the rest of the country. Sam and 50 others formed the Goldman Memorial Band, which plays American music, marches mostly, at free outdoor concerts on summer nights, which once was an American tradition. . . .
“In the summer, you can’t beat a band,” Sam Koza was saying. “A big living I’ve never made. But what a life I’ve had.” He has done it all with a trumpet. He was in the pit on the opening night of “South Pacific,” playing for Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. Here on the bandstand, he was talking about the excitement of it. . . . Because a musician does exactly what he must do to eat and pay rent, Sam gladly took a job playing “First Call” before each Thoroughbred race in New York. For 25 years, Sam Koza, once in the pit at “South Pacific,” walked onto Aqueduct racetrack in a black riding hat and red velvet hunt jacket, brandishing a long Aida trumpet. He then played “First Call” twice before each race. He did that 18 times a day, six days a week. His dressing room was next door to the jockeys’ room. “For the Lord’s sake, don’t bet horses,” trainer Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons told him.
You may remember him from Sunny Jim, the first book Breslin wrote more than thirty years earlier.
“Oh, I would never think of it,” Sam Koza said.
One day, all the jockeys were chattering about a horse trained by Hirsch Jacobs. Sam was unmoved. Then he heard one of them call out the horse’s name: Chosen People. This was positively intoxicating for Sam Koza of Brighton Beach. He bet the horse, which paid $88. As he collected the first winning bet of his life, Sam Koza decided that he could do this forever. . . .
And soon, on a cold day at the end of fall, among things for which Sam Koza had no funds, was a topcoat. . . .
And in the finale, so full and thrilling, out of the trumpet section coming the best of Sam Koza, and that is very good music, with the percussionists quickening the heartbeat, the Goldman band finished with “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the audience rose and cheered and clapped wildly on a soft night with stars seeming to cover the sky and the trees lining the sides of the park rustling softly in a breeze. I imagine it was hot and boring in Topeka and it was beautiful and exciting in New York. When it was over, Sam Koza went for a couple of beers with the younger musicians. Afterward, he took the E train home to the Van Wyck stop in Queens. He went straight to his apartment and went to sleep. He had earned a gross of $83 for his night’s work. Of course there was no more money than this. He may not have much under the mattress, but surely you don’t believe that an artist such as Sam Koza was playing marches in Damrosch Park for money.
Tuesday, August 20—Politics, from the column “The Fall of Gorbachev”
You need be no historian or foreign relations prophet to comprehend the magnitude of the mistake that George Bush and his conservative Republicans made by not assisting Mikhail Gorbachev over the past months. When Bush was one of those helping supply the contras in Nicaragua, he broke the law of this nation as if it were some country club rule about extra weekend guests. If Gorbachev ever had received any of the fanatical devotion we gave to the contras in Nicaragua, perhaps we wouldn’t be wondering where we are today.
Use your own common sense. Gorbachev took the atom bombs off our heads. Then he begged us for help and we treated him like a suspect.
Thursday August 22—Fury, from “CONFLICT IN CROWN HEIGHTS: Stripped and Beaten in My Furious City”
The incident that set off four days of uncontrolled rioting was the killing and severely injuring of Black children by a car driven by an ultra-Orthodox Jew.
Shortly after sunset on Monday, August 19, at about 8:20 P.M., the car, a Mercury Grand Marquis, according to published reports, driven by Yosef Lifsh ran a light, hit another car, jumped a curb, struck a several hundred-pound pillar which fell and pinned down two Black children: Gavin Cato, 7, who died and his cousin, Angela, 7, whose injuries were grievous.
The rumors were easy to believe if you knew New York and that neighborhood: an Orthodox ambulance service did not stop to give aid. Nothing was further from the truth. But like the violence, the rumors started virtually immediately.
Rumors, violence, and police responses were all out of control by Wednesday when Breslin had hailed his cab and asked the driver to take him to an address in this neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he might listen to a mayor, David Dinkins—who was Black, a first in New York, and ineffectual, not a first—to give a talk that might calm things down. It did not.
We were going straight up Utica Avenue. We went past the 77th Precinct station house and then past blocks that were serene in the soft early evening. Now, the cab went up a couple of more blocks and suddenly on the left, at Sterling Place and Utica Avenue, here was this crowd of young people coming along Sterling Place and then dancing onto Utica Avenue, looking up toward Eastern Parkway, trying to see if police were coming.
The cab driver stopped the cab.
“I’m not going up there,” he said.
We had two blocks to go to Eastern Parkway, where my original intention had been to hear the mayor address a meeting at a grammar school.
“Back up, then, and we’ll try another way,” I said.
He started to back the cab up Utica Avenue.
On the corner, somebody looked at the cab and called out, “White man.” “White man,” somebody else called.
“Where?”
“In the back.”
I then strongly urged the cab driver to increase his speed in reverse. Now from the left came a young man in a tan shirt and running as fast as any car in Brooklyn. He was grabbing for the door. The cab driver made a short stand, trying to push the young man off. At this point, for the purposes of the story, it must be said that the cab driver was Black. The passenger in the back seat was, as reported on the street, white.
Now, the kid in the tan shirt was at the rear door, leaning in the window, holding out his hand. “Money, money, money.”
A couple of faces looked through the open window on the other side. “Gimme it. Gimme it. Gimme it.”
Now, there were young people running from every direction. In an instant, there was a crowd of over 50, at least. Both doors were yanked open and fists flew in, though not as strong as you would expect.
Breslin’s friend Michael Daly recalled turning on the television that day and seeing a yellow cab in flames and thinking, “Who would take a yellow cab to a riot?” And answering his own thought with a smile: “Breslin.” The scene from a riot he saw on TV that day came from a furious event known already as “The Crown Heights Riot,” for the neighborhood in which it occurred.
The day had been, for Breslin, prior to his cab ride, one that included watching the continuing television coverage of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union: an attempted coup that found Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and things like perestroika and glasnost in about the same shape as they now were to be found in Crown Heights, New York.
The kid on the hood swung the baseball bat with as much speed as you could want and with a look on his face that told you all you ever want to know about life in New York at this time. This was no loss of reasoning or momentary blindness to the world, this was one angry young man . . . On his third swing, the entire windshield shattered and the glass fell into the cab. . . . There was no way for him to get at me, for there were so many piled into the back seat, throwing punches, holding me, ripping at my clothes for the only thing they wanted, the money. . . . Somehow, I got out of the cab on the right side. . . . There was a restaurant on the corner and a man and woman were in the doorway, and I figured they would be glad to let the working press in. But as I reached the storefront a metal gate came rolling down electronically. I now am what you might term cornered. I have no clothes on me, save for a pair of shorts and somehow by primeval instinct, I still have a green working press card.
“Cab driver?” somebody yelled.
“No, I’m a reporter,” I say, thankful that I had the chance. The answer was a right-hand punch from one side and a left hand from the other. . . . I then was hit with the best punch of the evening, and I went down . . . and I knew I had best get on my feet.
As I did, the guy with the baseball bat took one swing for my head that would have been memorable if I hadn’t ducked the least bit. The bat went over my head and with that, some guy pushed through the crowd and grabbed my arm.
“Leave him alone,” he said.
Another guy came through with a knife in his hand, a big one too, and he told everybody to get back. The crowd did not like being asked to leave but the two were adamant. They then started walking me down Utica Avenue toward the police precinct.
One of them said to me, “Do you know me? My name is Joe Williams.” I told him I did, which was the truth. I couldn’t place him for a moment but I believe I once met him in a bookstore on Fifth Avenue, where he was working at the checkout counter. If this is true, then the omen presented here might have been worth the entire night.
The other guy said his name was George Valentine. He was 35 and he lived on Herkimer Street. He is a slim guy who seemed sad about what had happened. He has no job and washes cars for anybody in Bedford-Stuyvesant with any money.
“They were mad,” he said.
“What have they been doing all summer?” I asked him.
“Hanging around somewhere, just waiting for a time like this to let off some steam. They got a lot of steam to let off. It isn’t just you. They don’t like white people. They sure don’t like white cops.”
By now, we were on the corner by the 77th Precinct. A group of cops stood outside and looked at me. I had the usual few scratches and I also happened to be not wearing any clothes.
“Nice people,” one of the policemen said.
“How do you like them?” another police officer said.
Which is what helps to keep things going.
And then George Valentine put me into a gypsy cab driven by John Juin, who is 35 and married and has three kids, and he drove me home. And that is the end of my story for today.
It is the end of the story as he filed it, which he did on the evening it happened. He filed it to Ellis Henican, a gifted columnist in his own right, and Ellis made sure that it was undiluted Jimmy that appeared in the New York Newsday.
But, as ever, reporters and writers make decisions on what they will put in, and what they will leave out. Here is what Breslin did not file to Ellis:
The cop who said “nice people” with his dangling helmet and his utility belt, was walking to a precinct that had already been made infamous by a corruption scandal that came out in 1986 and that showed how this precinct had been running an extortion racket of the most invidious kind: they shook down drug dealers and sometimes took their drugs too, and then they resold the drugs in the same neighborhood they were paid to police.
What the cop actually said was, “How do you like your n— friends now?” according to one of Breslin’s closest confidants.
✶✶✶
The next riot took place in 1992. Looking back now at the start of this decade, the 1990s, we are twenty-five years away from Selma. We are nineteen years from Barack Obama sitting in the White House. We are thirty-one years away from January 6—a date, like 9/11, that seems to need no year. And that cop’s ugly sentiment is again on display.
It is September 16, and the police are rioting at City Hall. And here is Rudy Giuliani with a megaphone, looking more like the man we saw after January 6 than the man we thought we saw after 9/11.
David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York, is being attacked with his City Hall under siege because he has decided a Civilian Complaint Review Board is needed. Ten thousand mostly white cops have marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. Racist signs. Obscene signs. Violence.
They had beer and they wore guns and they all thought it was great to be young and drunk and ignorant. They were screaming that the Mayor, this Black mayor, wants a Civilian Complaint Review Board.
And they put it right out in the sun yesterday in front of City Hall. We have a police force that is openly racist and there is a question as to what good they possibly can be in a city that will be famous forever as existing grandly with every color there is between here and Mars. . . . this frightful rabble, this armed suburban trash, vicious and rebellious, broke through barricades and rushed up the 10 steps to the doors of City Hall.
They were urged on by the noxious words of Rudy Giuliani, who seems not to care if towns burn.
It is a column of power and beauty and significance, and it has been quoted extensively since the beginning of 2021. It is quoted again here.
They drained cans of beer and pushed and screamed and shook their fists in the air and shoved people and kicked them and threatened them. Some waved toilet plungers and others held up a sign saying, “Dump the Washroom Attendant.”
You saw calendar pages ripped off and torn into the air from Harlem to Selma to Dr. King, to Bobby, to Crown Heights, and land like litter under the feet of this horde.
. . . and some of them climbed along the front of the building and began to bang on the windows of a place they never could reach on their own abilities. . . .
They take home about $1,100 every two weeks. In today’s job picture, there is little to match it. And they get a month’s vacation and sick leave and chances at overtime. They work for only 20 years and then they can retire at half pay, and what that is all about, letting a guy go home with your money and he’s only 45 or so, is a mystery.
One threatened a female TV reporter: “Here, let me grab your ass.” Another “calling across the top of the beer can held to his mouth,” went after Breslin: “How did you like the n— beating you up in Crown Heights . . . Now you got a n— right inside City Hall. How do you like that . . .”
Other reports have them kicking a reporter in the stomach. Breslin reports a Black delivery person pushed into the street. He calls the rioters Hessians from faceless towns on Long Island. An occupying army.
He had committed one great bigoted act as his world was shifting, but in Crown Heights, and again on Sept 16, he is reporting as he always has on race hate, bigotry, and the ugliness of politicians like the one Giuliani has become.
BAM. SLAM, BANG, BANG. BANG. KABOOM. BANG, SLAM. . . . This is how Jimmy Breslin types. Denis Hamill wrote that in 1977, during the Son of Sam frenzy.
Breslin was in his late 40s. Now he is what has been called late middle aged; he is in his early 60s. And columns like this one, that stand up to history, can be the result.
His audience, strong in 1977, had by now peaked, and Queens Boulevard was changing. Klein the Lawyer’s alter ego had been indicted in federal court in Brooklyn in 1987, and by 1998 Pastrami King would move away from the state courthouse on Queens Boulevard. There would be other places to eat, and the boulevard would start to become unfamiliar looking.
Maybe, but you keep writing. A story he tells in his book on Runyon, and which he told Sam Roberts years earlier when Sam thought he might have a cold, sums up the ethic:
“My friend, you never leave white space, you always fill it,” Runyon said. It was 1925. He was talking to Wally Pipp, veteran first baseman for the Yankees. And he didn’t think Pipp understood. “I am owed many days off by the newspaper. I could just as well get out right here and walk home. But I would be leaving white space. This man here (sports editor Edward Frayne) has white space blocked out for me in tomorrow’s paper. If I do not fill it, he will get somebody to do it. Fella, the thought of that makes me uneasy. So I am now going all the way downtown to sit and write and most likely finish late. But I will finish. Don’t ever leave white space. . . . You will feel better in the morning.”
Pipp didn’t listen. Sam Roberts did.
“I think it says it. [It] just tells the story. [It is] 1977 with all the Son of Sam pages, with the blackout in Bushwick, with the Yankees, Dysfunctional Yankees, with George Willig, with the ’77 mayoral election and Bushwick, with every crazy thing that was going. I remember one day, telling Jimmy I was coming in at 5:30 in the morning—I lived across the street, which was too close. I said, I really don’t feel that great, I think I may come in later. I may even take the day off.
“‘I have two words for you.’
“‘What are they?’
“‘Wally Pipp.’
“And I said, ‘Who’s Wally Pipp,’ I really didn’t know and he said, look it up and I did and you know, Wally Pipp had a headache and he decided to take the day off and for the next 2,100 games, Lou Gehrig substituted for him. So I never missed a day of work after that.” And Sam kept a picture of Wally Pipp on his desk.
New York Newsday closed its doors in July 1995 and the city was the worse for it. Unlike the Trib, it was the owners who killed it, a paper that kept the other news outlets honest by the aggressive, interesting way it covered the news. It spoke truth to power.
There were hundreds and hundreds more columns for the Long Island Newsday before Breslin’s last regularly scheduled column in 2004 and his occasional ones after. Now, writing for a paper whose large readership lived almost completely in two suburban counties east of New York City, in a very real way he had left his audience behind. Yet the writing itself was in no way diminished, and many of those Long Island people, or their parents, had come from “the city.” So at least they could say, in that nasal, Long Island way, they were familiar with what he was writing about. In fact, these readers were the circulation list descendants of the readers of the Long Island Press—the newspaper on the southeastern edge of Queens where he had worked as a copyboy and on April 19, 1949, published his feature article on how a television hanging on the wall was changing the nature of a barroom.
One of those columns distills so much of Breslin’s soul into its few hundred words. It is one of eleven published in Newsday in 2001 between September 12 and September 30.
I stand on the street corner in the darkness and wait for her, but for another day she is not here.
I don’t remember the first time I saw her. I know the hour, between 5:45 and 6 A.M., because I already have finished swimming at this health club and she comes walking along on her way to the gym for her exercise. . . .
She was young and had short black hair and a face that was delicate and filled with energy. She had a fast stride. Quick-quick-quick.
This went on for a long time. One morning I was late or she was early and I was still on Columbus Avenue, almost at the corner of 68th Street, when she came around the corner with that fast walk. People who barely recognize each other and suddenly meet at a strange place exhibit warmth. She smiled a little and her lips said hello, but I did not hear her voice. I nodded.
From then on, when we would see each other on the familiar 68th Street, she would smile and I’d nod or smile back. But I still went to the other side of the street.
This went on through so many months of darkness and cold and morning rain, when we both walked with heads down, and then at times when the sky lightened and spring arrived and after it summer heat. Always, a nod and a smile and then I parted and she went on.
I never spoke to her, nor did she ever speak to me. I never got her name or where she was coming from at such an hour and what job she was going to for the rest of the day. She smiled, I nodded. Month after month.
I don’t know when I realized that I had not seen her. It was 10 days ago, a week ago, but suddenly in the morning I noticed that she was not walking on the street at about 6 A.M.
. . . I never knew where she came from. She just materialized on the street, walking so quickly. And now I did not see her all last week.
I found myself irritated. “Where is she?” I said aloud.
The days and nights of my working life had become one of hurt women asking in strained voices for lost men, and so many young men in tears standing in a hospital doorway and asking if the woman of their lives might possibly be inside.
And there was nobody. Not in the wreckage at the World Trade Center, nor at the hospitals. The morgue was empty. There were 6,453 listed as missing, all of them in the sky forever from the moment the building blew up.
And this young woman no longer passes me going the other way in the morning.
Not only do I not know her name, but I never saw her with anybody else. I have no one to ask.
Yesterday morning, on the 14th day since the catastrophe, I was around the corner on West 68th Street at the appointed hour. She was not there. She was not in the dimness on the other side of Broadway. When I reached the corner and looked uptown on Broadway, she was not one of those coming through the light of the outdoor newsstand on the corner of 69th.
She was not here in my morning.
I stood on the corner in front of the Food Emporium supermarket and looked for several minutes. Maybe she moved, I thought. Maybe she got married to some nice guy. Or maybe some nice guy she is already married to had a new job and they moved. Maybe she has a new job and her hours changed. Maybe she comes to exercise later in the morning. Maybe there is a pleasant reason for her not being here in the morning. Maybe she will simply be here tomorrow and not have the slightest idea why I am upset.
Right now, as I stand on the street corner in the early morning, this young woman, whose name I do not know, whose voice I have never heard, is part of the overwhelming anxiety of the days of my September in the city.
The butcher from the supermarket came out, holding a container of coffee.
“What are you looking for?” he said.
“Somebody.”
“They’ll come,” he said.
“I hope so,” I said.
There turns out to be more to this story of loss and betrayal and anger.
In 2002 Newsday and the Tribune Company published a book, American Lives, with an introduction by Jimmy Breslin. And it is there we find the rest of the story.
The mornings turned into days and weeks . . . I am turning onto Broadway at the same hour, five of six, and it is now 14 weeks since the catastrophe and I am about to go inside the supermarket and buy a paper and I happen to glance up Broadway.
Deep in the January darkness, moving along quickly. An arm swinging. I stand there and I watch as she comes closer. It is the left arm swinging. Here she is, walking quickly. Quick, quick.
Here coming out of the shadows is the face, smiling as she sees me. She comes right up to me.
“Where have you been?” I say to her.
For an instant she doesn’t understand.
“I thought you were gone,” I said.
Now she knows. Her face changes.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“What am I supposed to think? You disappeared like the others.”
“I’m so sorry. I just stopped coming. I had two friends who were missing and we went looking for them. We had pictures and everything. I just didn’t want to go anyplace else.”
She starts to leave with a smile.
“One thing.”
She stops.
“I’m glad you’re alive.”
She turns and walks off, quickly.
When I went upstairs, my wife looked at me and said, “What’s the matter?”
“I just saw a ghost,” I said.
And you felt so much of what every victim feels. And what everyone whose hopes are answered feels. For Jimmy: It is personal. Always.
On November 2, 2004, James Earle Breslin, 75 and sure that writing 840 words three times a week left room for nothing else, announced, in his Newsday column: “ . . . I quit. Beautiful.” He thanked his readers “for the use of the hall,” and closed the column.
His editors added a note informing them that Breslin would continue to write “from time to time.”
This would prove to be different from all the past times when he had quit newspapers. There would be still more columns for the paper in 2005, 2006, 2007, though the numbers would diminish. And he would be back in the Daily News from 2011 on, writing for the Sunday paper, but he would never again be a regular fixture, and the columns themselves became increasingly difficult to edit.
By any measure, he’d had a great, musical, run, already longer than The Fantasticks’ forty-two years. He summed it up himself when he wrote: “I had a column once . . . and started a great run, and continued it wonderfully well and for a long time, and sometimes when I think of this I am so delighted that I could sing a song. And you better do the same thing. For if you do not blow your own horn, then there is no music.”
And the one-time bugler summed up his method in an interview: “In newspapers? Work. That I did do, work—incessantly. And you don’t stop working until the job is truly finished. Then you can. At one time I would go for a drink. No more now. I just go home and get ready for the next [one]. And—that’s it. That’s the only way to feel good too.”
There would be, however, even as the number of grandchildren grew to seven, more heartbreak: Rosemary the wife, Rosemary the Younger, and now Kelly, the blonde daughter; she collapses in a restaurant and dies in April 2009. The writer himself develops diabetes. At least once he falls at home. Another time in public. Ronnie does her utmost to keep him on track. And somehow in his 80s now, becoming physically frail, he knows there is one more story he must own, and he must tell, to you, the reader.