Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  Each day, the citizens of these hidden worlds pass one another in the street and almost never connect. Here we are on West 47th Street on a Tuesday afternoon plump with spring. Out on the sidewalks are the grandees and supplicants of the world of diamonds, gold, precious stones; they deal, trade, bargain with one another; they decode fresh news from Antwerp and the Urals. And moving among them is a professor of Romance languages, now turning, abruptly adjusting his stride, then angling through traffic toward the Gotham Book Mart. He sidesteps the elated young accountant from Forest Hills who is carrying on his shoulder a brand-new VCR from 47th Street Photo.

  As he enters the splendid old bookstore, he is brushed by the messenger from the commercial-art studio, rushing to pick up photostats. He doesn’t even see the professional wrestler who is going to consult his back doctor. All inhabit separate worlds, different cities. And if it’s impossible even to know 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth, how could anyone ever hope to know the great sprawling anarchic city itself?

  One can’t. Sometimes I wander the city without plan or destination, cooling out after a prolonged bout of work. And if I’m now too old to be surprised, I can be intrigued. More than once, I’ve found myself on West End Avenue, staring up at the old pre-war buildings. They are like vertical neighborhoods, the most obvious symbols of the vertical city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. And I try to imagine the lives lived within their walls.

  Who is the man with the white hair and the grave manner standing at that sixth-floor window? His hands are behind his back. He looks down into the avenue, but occasionally his mouth moves, he glances behind him. I imagine the air thick with Freudian orthodoxies, and some troubled human being supine upon a couch, while lacerated murmurs beg for peace.

  Two floors above, there are four windows so filthy that the glass resembles membrane. I conjure an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointment, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers, like the Collyer brothers when I was young. On such days, I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

  Those apartments are part of the Secret City, a place that is a part of New York, and therefore dense and layered and always plural. But that very density is always changing, those layers shifting, new elements being added to the pluralism. As soon as you think you have figured out New York, have located its poles and its center of gravity, the city’s axis shifts again. A disco or restaurant is suddenly hot; a year later, it’s in Chapter n. You read learned treatises about white flight, the triumph of the suburbs, the end of middle-class New York; within months, white families are contending with black families for the same run-down real estate and, hey, where did all those Koreans come from? The place is simply too large, too dynamic, too infinitely various and mysterious. Almost all of us live with what Alvin Toffler might have more properly called present shock.

  That might be why there has never been a great novel about New York. The best New York novels have been fragments, pieces about the garment district, Wall Street, the lives of the rich, the agony of the slums, the treacheries of the theater or the Mob or the magazine business. They are often as brilliant as tesserae, and as incomplete. The New Yorks described by Scott Fitzgerald and Jerome Weidman, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow and William Styron, Jimmy Breslin and Henry James, Jay Mclnerney and John Cheever, Edith Wharton and John O’Hara, John Dos Passos and Daniel Fuchs and Mario Puzo (to name only a few), simply have nothing in common with one another. Forget literary mastery, craft, the sense of place. It’s the vision of each writer that is completely different. Each sees a certain New York and reveals it to the rest of us. But it’s usually not our New York. We can go to London and still see Dickens. Balzac’s ghost prowls Paris. Raymond Chandler seems to have invented Los Angeles. But we never see one writer when we look at New York. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.

  There are, of course, a number of forces that sometimes unify the city we know and the Secret City: weather, sports, television. But when you see the children of the rich prancing like Lippizaner stallions through the Upper East Side, you do not need a degree in anthropology to realize that they are different from the people on the corner of 5th Street and Avenue C. Not better or worse. Simply different. Separated by money, history, and unearned privilege from their fellow citizens. The woman in Crown Heights, her husband gone, struggling to keep off welfare and send her children each morning to school, inhabits a universe different from that of those women with predatory faces that you see in Bendel’s. I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; I know Brooklynites who have never been to Radio City Music Hall. Class separates us. And rank, identity, esteem, and prestige.

  All such distinctions express themselves in a variety of ways, and many of them can seem alien. Young black kids in the Secret City of Bed-Stuy or Brownsville talk endlessly about “my image.” Not about the self. Nor about a true understanding of one’s strengths and limits. No: They preen and pose and brag about their elaborately constructed masks. They aren’t alone. The white kids downtown spend endless hours creating punk uniforms to trundle off to that week’s rock club. The rest of us stand off and watch, usually amused, almost always separated from any true contact because of the impenetrability of the masks. Look (we say): inhabitants of the Secret City. Sometimes we can marvel at their amazing labors and ferocious choices: They have decided to perform their lives instead of living them. But after the glance and the wisecrack, we move on. That’s their New York; it’s not ours. And, of course, they are making similar judgments about us.

  Sometimes the appearance of people from the Secret City can be disturbing. Most New Yorkers succumb easily to the instinct to make the world smaller and therefore more manageable. We construct our own parishes. Here are our friends. There are our restaurants and shops and the movie house. This is our favorite bar. There is the church or synagogue. Here, among these familiar streets and places, we are known. We are safe. We hope such places will last a lifetime. And, of course, they don’t. One morning the butcher dies and his children sell the place and move to Florida. The condominium racketeers show up and soon Mrs. Flanagan and Mrs. Moloff are no longer on the bench beside the park across the street and we’ve lost a piece of the intricate mesh of daily life. A nameless developer alights on the block and a few months later the earthmovers and cranes are pummeling away, and two bars vanish, and a bodega, and the barbershop where the bookmaker took bets.

  Now there are new people on the block. And new buildings. And the parish has permanently changed. Who are these people, asks the old New Yorker, and where did they all come from?

  They came from the Secret City. That is, they came from beyond the parish. Their vision of New York is not ours. And often the older New Yorker closes up, denies the new, retreats into those entombed cities of memory and loss. Many of the young can’t understand the almost permanent nostalgia of older New Yorkers.

  Why are the middle-aged always talking, at the risk of maudlin cliché, about the Old Neighborhood, about places gone and buried, about Ebbets Field and Birdland, the Cedar Tavern and the old Paramount? The reason is probably simple: In those places, they were happy. Sentimentality is almost always a form of resentment.

  But in a very important way, this is terribly sad. By retreating from the new or the foreign or the strange, the New Yorker cuts himself off from the throbbing engine of the city itself. The city’s fabled energy is the result of millions of small daily collisions: the push and shove followed by resistance or collapse. That remorseless process often affects individual lives; it alters entire neighborhoods; and without it, we would be dead.

  So the other New York, the Secret City, shouldn’t really be a blank on the maps, marked with the legend DRAGONS LURK HERE. Whether we accept it or not, the unknown, remote, and alien city is
there, all around us, relating to the city we know the way anti-matter relates to matter. There are zones of the Secret City that can provoke rage; you must enter them with a patient fatalism. In New York, there will never be an end to self-importance, malice, the iron heart, so you learn to cherish the latest exhibits.

  After a while, you smile in appreciation of the idiotic snobberies that so many people embrace as substitutes for thought. You await with enthusiasm this year’s Golden Couple — there is one every year, in every set — and watch them migrate as if they were the center of the population, serene, self-absorbed, supremely blessed. Then you wait for the line in the gossip columns announcing the final rupture. The details don’t really matter. For the time that the Golden Couple was everywhere in the hamlet of society, they offered delicious entertainment. That is the way to see them. Not with envy or spite or some nagging sense that you are missing something by not moving in their orbit. Such people exist in a New York of their own making; next year, their successors will unfurl their diaphanous flags.

  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

  ON THE STREET / I

  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 a
nd 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.

  In this city, racism is not an abstraction to be discussed in a sociology class; usually the virus comes from concrete experience. Many blacks can cite a catalogue of insults and injuries, from the refusal of a cab driver to stop on a rainy night to the white policeman using his baton as if he were judge, jury, and executioner. But this is also true of those who are victimized by blacks. The other day I saw four well-dressed black teenagers coming along Broadway. It was midafternoon. School was just out. They went past a Korean fruit and vegetable store, and then, all at once, darted back. Each stole something: an orange, a cantaloupe, an apple, some grapes. They began to run, and a Korean man in his forties ran after them in vain. But when he came back he was still seething with fury.