The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “Dad,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. “It’s an outhouse!”

  Oh, did that piss him off. His face flushed, and he stepped forward and shackled my wrist in his big hand again. This time he didn’t raise his voice or stomp around. He just eyed me with a ferocious blend of hurt and contempt. When he spoke, it was with a measured calm far more menacing than any of his yelling.

  “I don’t know how this happened to you,” he said. “But you, son, are going to learn to look up. You are not going to be another one of those blinkered goddamn New Yorkers who walk around town staring at their shoes, or worse, have their eyes so fixed on whatever goal they’re hurrying toward that they never see the city around them. You are not going to join that complacent army of blind men who went and let a civic cathedral like Penn Station get smashed to pieces right under our noses.”

  I had no clue what he was going on about. Penn Station was alive and well, and it was no cathedral. It was a chaotic, subterranean, fluorescent hellhole where bums peed in Rheingold cans and throngs of tacky Long Islanders waited beneath an enormous clickety board, watching its colorful horizontal stripes endlessly shuffle exotic names like Patchogue and Ronkonkoma. The clicking was as relentless as the passage of time, each town migrating jerkily up the board until it tumbled off the top and vanished like the Indian tribe that had named it.

  “I want you at my downtown studio at three o’clock this afternoon,” Dad said. “You’re going to do a little work for a change. See if we can’t teach you a little respect for old things.”

  “But I don’t even know how to get there,” I blurted. “And Mom wanted me to go to Finast after school to get her some coffee.”

  “Forget the coffee.” He took a fat construction pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled an address on the back of a receipt, which he shoved into my hands. “Three o’clock,” he said. “Take your bike. Get to know your own city a little on the way down.”

  The conversation was over. He turned and strode out of the brownstone in what seemed like just two or three outsize strides, the wrinkled tail of his red flannel shirt riding the air behind him. Nestled under his left arm, I noticed for the first time, was the case of surgical saws. The sight of it almost made me gag, as if I were smelling that putrid meat stench from the cooler all over again. What was he up to?

  I listened to the sudden silence. Upstairs, my mother slept on, all tucked into herself. The boarders, meanwhile, had apparently all slunk away when Dad appeared on the scene. But as I trudged upstairs to get ready for school, I came across Monsieur Claude, lounging in the paisley chair on the second-floor landing with my now empty Hamburglar plate on his lap.

  “Your father. He is wrong, of course,” Monsieur Claude said with a sniff. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was lazily squeegeeing the last traces of scrambled egg from the plate with his index finger, which he carefully cleaned off between his pale lips.

  Only then, when there was no evidence that any eggs had ever existed, did he look up.

  “That building which you have killed,” he told me. “It is valuable only now. Before that? A grand nothing.”

  A question began to form on my lips, but Monsieur Claude waved me off.

  “It is always this way,” he said. “Always. The only city worth saving is the city we have lost.”

  3

  EVERYONE KNEW THAT NEW YORK was the most crime-ridden, unruly, and graffiti-blasted place in America. A lot of us were even a little proud of that distinction. But there was still an awful lot about my hometown that was obscure to me at the time. For starters, I had no idea that New York was going broke, that mayor after mayor had made outlandish commitments he couldn’t possibly pay for, that every spring the city had to borrow vast sums just to keep the lights on and the cops in uniform. People don’t tell you this sort of thing when you’re a kid.

  I had never heard the word that just a year later would be on everyone’s lips: default. I didn’t know what a municipal bond was, or a wildcat strike. It didn’t occur to me that the city could be forced to fire tens of thousands of workers in a single day, or that when it did the streets could fill with thousands of irate policemen and tons of uncollected garbage.

  But I picked up the tremors nonetheless. To me it was obvious the city was loosish. Not to be trusted.

  The evidence was everywhere. Streets shuddered from tenement demolitions. A hansom cab horse, a huge beast with a wet brown marble of an eye, had been electrocuted right across from FAO Schwarz by a stray current in a manhole cover. Over on Third Avenue in the lower Nineties, where three monstrous redbrick towers were rising on the site of the old Ruppert Brewery, a workman’s lunch box fell nineteen stories and just missed braining a delivery boy.

  In the two weeks since this last mishap, I hadn’t once left the house without wearing my scuffed blue Mets batting helmet for protection. It had an awkward adjustable plastic ring inside that dug into the tops of my ears, but wearing it made me feel just safe enough to stand up to the city’s urge to harm me. That morning, for instance, I was pedaling up Ninetieth Street to school on my ten-speed, practically daring incoming lunch pails to target my plastic-encased noggin.

  It was a relief to get out of that brownstone, let me tell you. My mind always wandered away from my problems when I got on that bike, which was why I loved it so much. It was a metallic-blue Panasonic my dad had given me after he moved out, and it had shiny toe clips I could tell Kyle was jealous of. I had even used the flat edge of my Kryptonite key to personalize my vehicle on one side of its diagonal tube, scraping off several of the block letters in the word PANASONIC so that I was now the proud owner of the only ten-speed ANAS in all of New York City.

  Just in case anyone was watching as I approached school, I suavely dismounted by swooping my right leg over the bike seat and back wheel, gliding up to the entrance in that effortless way it had taken me so much effort to master in Carl Schurz Park one Saturday. Because I was late, though, no one was near the school’s bike rack to witness this slick maneuver. So I hurried in to first-period algebra after locking my bike beside Dani Gardner’s lipstick-red Raleigh—the one with the Pink Floyd stickers partly obscuring the remnants of Wacky Packages she’d scraped off the previous spring after finishing middle school.

  —

  Biking downtown to learn what kind of punishing work my father had in mind for me was about the last thing I wanted to do that afternoon, so after slipping out of fencing class early at two o’clock, Kyle and I just headed out into the streets as usual. We wandered up Madison together, scuffing the pavement with our sneakers, making fart noises with our armpits, angling the mirrors of parked cars in the hope that drivers would see their own eyeballs during crisis moments in Midtown traffic. At the twin phone booths outside Taso’s Pizza, I had the idea to make a collect call from one pay phone to the other, inches away.

  Kyle was magnificent. He let it ring twice before answering, and he didn’t crack up when the operator told him that a “Mr. Julius Rosenberg wishes to reverse the charges.”

  “Why, yes, operator,” Kyle said graciously, thrusting his chin against his down-jacket collar to try to deepen his prepubescent voice, “I’d be more than happy to pay for a call from my dear old dad. I’ve really been missing his electric personality.”

  We jabbered awhile on the phone company’s dime, grinning at each other and saying unclever things like “Long time no see!” Talking this way was at once both intimate and remote enough that it felt almost possible to say something to Kyle about the rotting meat lumps and other creepy stuff I’d found in my dad’s toolshed. But I didn’t want to put my father at risk in case the operator was still listening in.

  When nobody came along the street and got annoyed at us for tying up both phones, Kyle and I left the receivers dangling in their booths and went around the corner to Jolly Chan’s, where I had a repellently greasy egg roll and Kyle chugged half a bottle of soy sauce just because.

&
nbsp; On our way out, we ran into Lamar Schloss—the kid with the jumbo-size cranium who most of us called Fathead—shlumping along Madison in that Eeyorey way of his. You could tell by the hopeful look on his face that he’d been following us. He was always following us.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “Is it okay if I hang out with you?” He was moving his hand around in the pocket of his big pea jacket, and I thought he was actually going to show us that stupid Liberty Head dollar of his again. His mother had given it to him not long before dying in an apartment fire the summer after sixth grade, and he was always taking the thing out and trying to get people to admire it.

  “Sure, you can hang out with us,” I now found myself telling him. It hadn’t felt like Kyle and I’d been doing much of anything, but now it did.

  “Can I get an egg roll first?” Lamar asked.

  “Go ahead,” Kyle told him. “We’ll wait out here.”

  “Cool.” He went into Jolly Chan’s, the blinds clacking against the glass door behind him.

  Kyle glanced at Lamar through the open slats of the blinds, then at me. He didn’t have to say anything: the second the Chinese guy started taking Lamar’s order, the two of us went tear-assing up the block, choking on our laughter and looking over our shoulders. When we got to Fifth, we hung a left around the corner and rested our butts against an apartment building, panting for breath with our hands on our knees. A graffiti-tagged green bus lumbered past, trailing a dirty pennant of smoke. A second bus followed immediately behind—they always traveled in convoys—this one with a grinning gaggle of black kids clinging to its back, their splayed sneakers balanced precariously on its rear bumper.

  Kyle had to go home for a drum lesson, so I headed back toward school on my own. I was trying to figure out how else I could delay going to my father’s studio, which was way downtown in a barren loft-and-warehouse district Dad said some people were starting to call TriBeCa, for “Triangle Below Canal.”

  I had no idea you could do tricks on a bike that didn’t have a banana seat, so when a gangly Puerto Rican kid with a pubey mustache came tooling up Ninetieth Street toward the park popping a big old wheelie on a ten-speed, it brightened my mood quite a bit. The kid’s eyes and mouth were wide-open in such childlike self-delight it was impossible not to share his euphoria, as if this were not just any old wheelie but a Universal Wheelie—a splendid gift intended by this beneficent stranger to enliven, for at least one exhilarating moment, the drab, wheelieless world the rest of us lived in.

  The bike, I noticed as it sped past me, was a metallic-blue Panasonic like mine, made especially vivid by its unusual lipstick-red front wheel.

  Things became even more vivid a moment later, when Dani Gardner saw me coming toward school. Her sweaty copper hair was back in a ponytail and her face was flushed, presumably from fencing class. She was seething in a way that made me glad she’d left her foil inside.

  “What kind of a bonehead locks his bike by the quick-release front wheel instead of the frame, anyway?” she asked me. “What kind of a boneheaded buffoon?”

  Holding her fingers together like a tomahawk blade, she hacked at the air in the direction of the school’s bike rack, where my poor front wheel, now absent the rest of my bike, was locked beside her bike, absent its front wheel.

  My boneheadedness was the complement of her own. That morning, apparently, she had slipped her U-shaped black Kryptonite lock through her bike frame and secured it to the rack the way you’re supposed to. But she had neglected to take off her quick-release front wheel and lock it to the frame. The lucky thief had simply slipped her front wheel off her locked bike with a flip of his index finger, slipped my bike off its locked quick-release wheel in the same manner, mated the two to create a complete new bicycle, and pedaled off in wheelie-popping glee that the private-school world had produced two such well-matched dolts.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said sadly. “I can’t believe someone stole my ANAS.”

  I was in deep trouble. That bike had cost my dad two hundred bucks, and now all I had left was a lousy front wheel. I turned to Dani.

  “Hey, mind if I borrow your bike?” I asked. “I mean, since you can’t exactly ride it home now or anything?”

  The look of withering disgust she turned on me was pretty impressive for a fourteen-year-old. It really was.

  “You are seriously disinvited from my party next Saturday,” she said, turning on her heel to head inside. “It’s at seven.”

  4

  IT WAS ALREADY TWENTY TO THREE, way too late for me to get to Dad’s studio on time, and it was now looking pretty idiotic of me to have blown my last dollar on that horrendous egg roll. I needed cab fare fast.

  I found Quigley where I knew she’d be, on the bridle path in the park, near the big gold bust of that old New York mayor who looked like Commissioner Gordon on Batman. She was smoking clove cigarettes with Valerie, the alligator-shirt-and-Tretorns girl she was always hanging out with. I hid in the bushes awhile and watched them.

  Quig was wearing her rainbow-leather newsboy cap, along with a shiny silver jacket and her favorite denim bell-bottoms, the used ones from Canal Jeans that she’d embroidered along the hem with stars and comets. Beneath all that applied pizzazz, though, she was an ordinary-looking teenager with a round, freckled face and frizzy orange hair—something like a girl Danny Partridge with prettier eyes. She was wearing tangerine lipstick; she always applied it the moment she left school, where makeup wasn’t allowed, because she hated the way her freckles encroached on her lips.

  Valerie was supposed to be her new best friend this year, but Quig kept scratching the psoriasis on her elbows through that silver jacket, something she mostly did when she was nervous. From the scraps of conversation I could catch, it sounded like the girls were talking about acting. Quig was constantly running around town to auditions, but she’d only ever gotten one part: grinning dorkily while picking up trash from the curb on a “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” public service announcement. Valerie, on the other hand, almost never went on auditions. She didn’t need to. Her father, who was some kind of big cheese at Grey Advertising, had gotten her a couple of Sunday-circular modeling gigs, one wearing white denim shorts for JCPenney. The rumor was that she’d even gotten a callback for ZOOM, that striped-rugby-shirt PBS show that everyone liked. Though she hadn’t gotten the part, Valerie was a celebrity in our school just for getting close. When she parted her bee-stung lips to speak Ubbi Dubbi, ZOOM’s secret language, boys would swoon.

  “Why should I?” Quig asked me, showing off for Valerie, when I approached and begged her to lend me her mug money for cab fare to Dad’s studio. In those days, every New York kid with any sense carried mug money, the three or four bucks you kept in your pocket for muggers so they wouldn’t beat the hell out of you.

  “I’ll get your next cuppa for you,” I promised. “Your next two cuppas.” Cuppa was Mom’s annoyingly cutesy shorthand for the cup of instant coffee she asked us to go get her pretty much every time we passed her bedroom—as in, “Could you make me a cuppa, Griffin?”

  “Fine,” Quig said grudgingly, after waiting just long enough to make me sweat. “But you better pay me back!”

  —

  The farthest downtown I’d ever been by myself was FAO Schwarz on the south side of Fifty-Eighth Street, a bit past where the pigeons liked to crap on the tarnished head of General Sherman. So when the park dropped away on my right, I got to feeling pretty uncomfortable, and by the time we shot off the edge of the known world—the grid system—I was downright anxious.

  To calm myself, I began to think up ways I might get my revenge on Dani for chewing me out about the stolen bike parts. The best plan, I decided, was to master the Malaysian Pincer Grip, a nifty martial arts technique that Kyle had read about in one of his ninja magazines. Known to initiates (or at least to Kyle and me) as the Beak of Doom, the exercise involved picking up a juice jug about a million times using just your fingertips. You’d start with the jug empty a
nd then add a little bit of sand every day (I would substitute kitty litter) until eventually your fingers became so very mighty that just by beaking your five fingertips together you could rip out chunks of people’s skin at will.

  That sounded pretty damn cool to me. Because it was awfully hard to imagine Dani, or any girl for that matter, giving me a hard time when they knew that at any moment the Beak of Doom might flutter out from my fingertips and extract chunks of smirking freckles from their cheeks. It was only because of my masterful falconry, my secret of holding back the savage fowl that quivered within my fingers, that their skin remained intact. They would know this, and respect me for it.

  My cabbie was clearly lost, the downtown street names rushing past us as foreign to him as the nearly vowel-less last name on his hack license was to me. The meter clicked up toward three dollars, ten cents at a time, and just as I became absolutely certain we’d never find the studio, I caught a glimpse down a potholed side street of a figure as familiar to me as my own reflection.

  “Stop!” I yelled at the cabbie.

  The driver disgorged me midblock with my orphaned bike wheel and fled back uptown as fast as he could, leaving me to pick my way on foot past the piles of splintered crates and leaky trash bags that lined the curb outside the sealed-up warehouses. At the corner, I peered around the edge of a building and saw my father standing alone in a street called Worth, squinting up at a fifth-floor window through binoculars.

  There was more than a whiff of disrepute about whatever he was up to, although I suppose that might just have been the mingled stench of trash juice and chemical disinfectant given off by the liquid stagnating in the cobble cracks.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what had so captured Dad’s attention. The big window he was scoping out across the street had a graceful arc at the top, giving it the shape of one of those little stairwell niches Italian families stuck their saints in. Every so often a woman in a white T-shirt would appear in profile within its frame, holding something that might have been a paintbrush. It was too far away to be sure with the naked eye, but it seemed like she had some fairly significant knockers going on under that shirt.