by Rich Cohen
Part Three
There were blue afternoons and muggy summer nights, a band playing in the back of a bar, air steaming up from the grates, sidewalks filled with sweet young girls, each the prettiest from her hometown—or else riding a subway down to the East Village, standing in the front car, watching the track unwind out of the dark, screeching into the station—those are my first memories of New York. I had taken a job as a messenger at The New Yorker. I had been offered more substantial jobs at lesser magazines but my father, who grew up under the spell of J. D. Salinger and E. B. White, said, “Better to Xerox your ass at The New Yorker than write a column for the Daily News.” When I told him I intended to work at Regardie’s, a magazine in Washington, D.C., he said, “How did I raise a schmuck for a son?”
The New Yorker offices were then on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. In those halls it was still the old martini-fueled New York, writers sleeping it off on daybeds. I would deliver mail and packages around the city or lounge around in the messenger room, which was as forlorn as a train station out in the sticks. The messenger department was run by a wispy guy who protected his boys, most just out of college. We argued, competed, complained. Between errands, I ducked into the magazine’s library, where I tried to give myself the education I had not gotten at college.
The most revered figure at the magazine was Joseph Mitchell, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote his mystical stories about the lost characters of New York, legendary books of reporting on rats and shad fishermen and eel pots. Joe Mitchell published his last story in 1963, and his books had since gone out of print. You had to hunt for them in secondhand bookstores; there was a kind of underground traffic in his work. By the time I reached the magazine he had become a sainted figure, an elegant man with white hair, often in seersucker, who seemed to reflect a distant world. He came into the office each morning and worked at his typewriter all day and produced nothing. To ask after his writing was considered bad form, so I admired him from afar, his comings and goings, past and present. I knew he had grown up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, that he began his career during the Depression as a reporter for one of the now defunct New York dailies. I had been in search of the real world beyond the theme park which has taken the place, or so it seems to me, of every city and town in America. In Joseph Mitchell, I at last found proof of this other world—of the authenticity that Jamie too was after. His writing was modern and exotic, a guide to a city that had ceased to exist, a Constantinople lost under decades of advertising and noise.
One afternoon, though I had been told Joseph Mitchell was a recluse and the last thing he wanted was to be bothered by someone like me, I said, “To hell with it,” and went to his office. I was nervous, of course—about the possibility of an icy reception and how the real man might shatter the image. But when I knocked, the door flew open and Mitchell leaned back in his chair and said, “Come in, come in,” as if he had been waiting for me. He wore a rumpled suit, the sleeves rolled up, his eyes the same soft blue as the fabric. I explained my admiration for his writing, and he asked about my hometown and told me about his. He got excited as he talked and rubbed his palm along his bald head and stammered, as if the right words eluded him. When he could not explain just what he wanted to say, he showed me photographs of old New York, pier sheds and town houses. Pointing to a sign high on a brick wall, he said, “That is a ghost sign. It advertised a store that had already been gone for eighty years. To me such signs have always been strange and scary.”
I told Joe Mitchell my biggest fear—that I had reached the city too late and that the world itself had become a kind of counterfeit. “I felt just the same when I got to New York,” he said. “I was too late. I said it to myself again and again: ‘Too late. Too late. Too late.’ And then one day, in these offices, way up on the wall, I noticed those same words, ‘Too late.’ And I began seeing those words everywhere: ‘Too late. Too late. Too late.’ I found out it was James Thurber, from a world far older than mine, who had been writing them. So you see, even Thurber thought he had come to the city too late. And the people before Thurber? Well, they thought they had come too late too! That’s the human condition. Wherever you go, you are by definition too late. You missed the whole show. Which, if you think about it, means that wherever you go, you cannot help but be right on time.”
Before I came to New York, I thought I wanted to be a writer, though I was not sure what kind. A fiction writer, I supposed, because it seemed to me that fiction writers get to tell the best stories. The writing of Joseph Mitchell convinced me, however, that there is a shape to the real world and real life that is just as beautiful and strange as anything in the imagination. So I went from delivering packages to delivering packages and looking for places and people that I myself might write about: a suite in the Penta Hotel where New Jersey railroad workers, dozens and dozens of them, sleep away the afternoon in a single room; Eli Ganias, who, having caught a foul ball at a Mets game, found his life utterly changed; a mostly forgotten stone crypt in the middle of the city, traffic speeding all around, with the remains of a legendary Civil War general.
It was a great way to see the city, rambling block to block, searching for experiences that could be converted into stories. Or, as a good friend of mine said, “Into writing of some kind!” But really it was the city itself that interested me. Manhattan, squeezed between its two rivers, seamed with avenues and streets, as prickly and mysterious as one of those stalactite caves. I liked the fire escapes and how they looked against the brick walls, how exotic debris collected in the gutters, how Park Avenue wound through the Pan Am building, and Chinatown was another country at night, and the sun looked so good going down between the buildings. At night, I went to the Brigadoon Bar, so called because it appeared only rarely, when I was incredibly fucked up, out of the mists of the East Village. Stepping through the door, seeing again, as if they had never left, that same old cast of characters, I always felt a strange rush of assurance and said to myself, “So here I am again,” meaning not just the bar but a peculiar mental state that fused this moment with the last such moment, though it might have been months before, obliterating all the moments between.
I found an apartment in Greenwich Village on one of those narrow streets I had imagined in high school, when Jamie looked at my brother’s photos and said, “New York, how can you beat that!” It was a fifth-floor walk-up on Grove Street with a skylight and a glancing view of Sheridan Square. In the winter, when it snowed, the tall buildings were hidden and the streets so quiet the city seemed to fall back into the nineteenth century. My friend Jim Albrecht hired a cabdriver to drag him (rope, skis) down the desolate storm-bound avenues. In spring, when the snow melted, the runoff seeped through the skylight and flooded my apartment. I got a bucket to catch the water. The super finally showed up. He looked at the ceiling and said, “I think you need a bigger bucket.”
When I was not at work, or killing the day, I would sit at my computer, listening to Little Walter and writing about Glencoe. With my eyes closed, I could see the waters of the lake, the bonfires along the beach, the sidewalks freckled with leaf shadows. I wrote about Sloppy Ed’s—the glory, the fall. I wrote about Jamie, road trips, double dates. On the page these memories became stories. In this way, they were preserved and destroyed, taken from my mind and fixed in place. Never again would they haunt me in quite the same way.
One of these stories was called “Always Be Closing.” It was about Ronnie, who, after graduating from the University of Miami, moved to the Panhandle and took a job selling used cars. The idea of Ronnie Flowers, the most trusting kid I knew, assuming the totemic role of used car salesman was mind boggling. Ronnie described his job to me over the phone. He told me about his training and how he had studied from a manual called “Always Be Closing”; about spotting a mark the moment he or she steps through the door; about the high jinks of the financing shed; about Rodeo Days, during which Ronnie sold used cars (EVERYTHING MUST GO!) dressed as a cowboy, in
a hat and chaps. My favorite stories were about the idol of the scene, the slickest stud on the lot, who had written a book of poems to chronicle his exploits:
I track him like a fly ball, drifting
back,
and now I have him,
fat with money, and
hopes in the
highway, so he leaves with a
Le-
Baron and
without his
cash,
sucker!
Ronnie worked the job for two years. The week he quit, he came to see me in New York, sleeping on my couch and filling my life with statistics and lot talk. Each night, before we went out, he took a long shower, clouding the mirrors, his beauty products scattered across the shelves. He wore a thigh-length leather coat and a silver watch. Now and then, he jiggled his wrist to adjust the watch. Or twisted his gold class ring. Or banged the ring on the table—thunk, thunk, thunk. He was screening a new image. After a few drinks, he would throw an arm across my back and say something he picked up at the dealership: “So where do you see yourself in three years? Do you have a five-year plan, or are you drifting?” In his voice, there was a corporate seriousness, an executive branch responsibility. Everything about him seemed to scream I am in control! In control of my once-runaway body; of my pores, which for years were filled with pus; of my image, which each afternoon, before the bell and after, had been dragged across the playgrounds of Glencoe.
I would stare at Ronnie, searching for the kid who, standing in the foyer of my house, believed my father when he said, “Ronnie, this is the Lord thy God.” I could not find that kid anywhere, and it spooked me. I thought to myself, Where is my friend? Can a person vanish so cleanly into adult life? And: If this is not Ronnie, who is it? And: If this is Ronnie, who is Ronnie? In remaking the present, had Ronnie remade the past? Had Ronnie ever been Ronnie? And what about me? Have I also lost my childhood self? If so, where? When? Does that mean I am now an adult? And what about Tom Pistone? And what about Rink Anderson? And what about Tyler White? And what about Drew-licious?
Part Four
Jamie was at the University of Kansas for six years. Between semesters, to earn money for tuition, he painted houses or worked construction. When he graduated, his friends were gone. He packed a bag and went traveling. He passed through bus stations, small cities, and early morning landscapes. He returned to Glencoe in the fall of 1992. The trees were bare, the roads strewn with leaves. He moved in with his mother and grandmother. He went for walks—a soldier home from the wars. He had grown into a kind of hard elegance that never goes out of style; he was gifted. He recognized the joke even in sad stories. He was never fooled by hype. He carried a heightened sense of the real world. His presence alone changed a situation. In a sense, though no one was around to see it, he had fulfilled his promise. On Friday nights he got drunk downtown and went home with college girls. To them he was older, experienced, on the edge of a meaningful existence. He took a job with a road crew. In the evenings, he could be seen in town in work clothes. There were no cars on the streets; the stores were empty. His friends had gone off to law school, to girlfriends, to jobs in the city. He felt left behind, forgotten—a sketch of his former self, an outline, detail and color drained away.
Years went by. Young couples moved to town to raise young families. Old couples, having sent their children out into the world, moved away. My parents took their bow-out, my father making a final inspection of his garden, the vines and flower beds, the trees he had planted. As the house had yet to find a buyer, my parents asked Jamie to move in as caretaker. “You will at least get out of your mother’s house and have a place to think,” said my father. In the winter of 1995, with my parents settled in Washington, D.C., Jamie moved into my house, starting first in the attic and then making a steady progression from bed to bed until he unpacked in the master bedroom and started his new life, giving out the address and phone number that had once identified me as surely as my name or hair color.
It was as if Jamie was the last inhabitant of a lost city. He would wander from room to room, looking into drawers and closets. He stared at the clothes my father had left behind, signature garments, the shirts and suits of his younger days. To Jamie, these clothes represented a lost legacy, what his own life was missing, the lush smell of a father. Jamie ran his fingers over these clothes and tried them on for the mirror, shirts and ties, boots and loafers. As my father was heavier than Jamie, the shoulders of the shirts sagged. Jamie rolled the sleeves and cuffed the pants. He wore the clothes to town, a ragged ghost, a reflection. So good as a kid, he did not have the patience or stamina to be an adult. His mad energy had dwindled. He was twenty-seven.
Jamie bought a 1974 Plymouth Road Runner, which he drove to the beach. It had a blue velvet interior. He had become an infamous figure in town. Cruising the streets, brimming with desperation, he would share sultry looks with the sweet young mothers of suburbia and bring them back to the house and take them to my parents’ bed. Afterward, he lay in the dark, hoping his life would take shape. He prayed for a catastrophe—an earthquake, a war, anything that might shake the world free and put his life back in play. I would get calls from friends: “Have you heard about Jamie? It’s all my mother talks about. He’s being passed around by the women of the village.” When I asked Jamie, he sighed and said, “Well, little brother, there is just no one else here to play with.”
In 1996, my father at last closed a deal on the house, which had been on the market for over four years. On occasion, my father had used Jamie as a negotiating ploy, dismissing an unacceptable offer by saying, “Sell? For that price? Why should I sell? Why should I make a homeless man of Jamie?” Of course, that is just what the sale did do to Jamie—the loss of a home, the end of an idyll. The prospect of moving back in with his mother and grandmother was ominous. It seemed like a failure. For some time, Jamie had been aware of his symbolic place in my life and in the life of kids up and down the shore. His every hesitation, his every misstep registered, to us, as a generational failure—another lesson delivered. In the house on the Bluffs, he had been able to escape such expectations and vanish into a parallel existence. On the phone, he told me, “I have been living the life of old Glencoe, as one of the chosen, and now I must go back into the world. But I have nothing to give the world. And so what will the world make of me?”
I told him I would be home to box up my possessions. We would have a few days in the house before my parents flew in to ship the furniture. He picked me up at the airport, and we went bouncing off down the highway. Jamie was wearing a silk shirt covered with birds. He was the same as ever, smiling, slapping at the wheel, looking at the green fields fattening with summer. And still, there had been a change—some hardening of his features. When you are a kid and you make a face, your mother says, “Your face will freeze like that.” Of course, this is only to scare you, but that really is what happens—your face does freeze like that! Depending on luck and experience, in your twenties or thirties or forties, your face settles into a distillation of all the faces you ever made.
We drove into Glencoe. There were trendy stores and tremendous new houses that filled the modest lots property line to property line. The town looked as if it had been torn down and redrawn from memory, refashioned for a new race of men, which, I suppose, it had. “And now,” said Jamie. “I will take you to the saddest place I know.”
In the center of town, on the former site of Sloppy Ed’s, there was a food court, a collection of restaurants with phony, regionless, market-tested names: Godfather’s Pizza, because mobsters are Italian and Italians love pizza; Wall Street Deli, because Wall Street is in New York and New Yorkers love deli; Wok & Roll—Oh, those punny Chinese!—Einstein’s Bagels, because bagels are Jewish, and who is the smartest Jew the world has ever known? As we ordered, women at the tables, surrounded by families, watched Jamie, some smiling, some frowning. Jamie told me he came here several times a week—because he hated it, because he wanted to remember
what he lost, because he was teaching himself there is beauty even here. “It’s like a brand-new kitchen table made to look a hundred years old,” he explained. “Or like people in the city writing in cafés, or like the McRib sandwich at McDonald’s. It’s fake as hell but it’s all we got, and it tastes pretty good, so eat up!”
For the next several days, Jamie and I went through the house, running up and down stairs, digging through drawers, packing up, throwing out. On a closet in my parents’ room Jamie taped a note that read Everything inside here belongs to Jamie. One afternoon, when he was in town getting us lunch, I opened the door. Jamie’s clothes were lined in neat rows, linen pants and silk shirts I remembered from high school, but also clothes that belonged to my father—suits, shoes, jackets. Seeing those things, I felt a rush of anger in every way disproportionate to the crime. It was as if, by claiming my father’s clothes, Jamie was taking something from me. By the time he got back with the food, I had weeded out my father’s clothes and thrown them across the bed.
When Jamie saw the clothes, he flushed. “Why are you going through my things?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “These are not your things. I want to know why they were in your closet.”
“Those things were left behind,” said Jamie. “I was here and no one was wearing them, and so I took care of them and now they are my things.”
I was as angry at Jamie as I have ever been at anyone. I had my fists at my sides.
