Brooklyn Crime Novel E-Book

Jonathan Lethem

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 570

Beschreibung

1978 and two 14-year-old white boys are creating dubious art by using a hacksaw to cut multiple quarters into pieces. A child who's just bought ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck witnesses a daylight sidewalk shooting in 1979. At another time, a couple of blocks over, a kid gets caught trying to shoplift an adult magazine from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall. A Black teenager and his white friends square up to a rival Italian gang over the right to play hockey in the street. In 1977 a white kid craters a baseball right in the centre of a Cuban guy's windscreen. And so it goes. On the streets of Brooklyn, the faces of the children change but the patterns remain the same: sex; boredom; friendship; violence; a million daily crimes committed, some small, some unimaginably big. But the real action is away from the streets, played out behind closed doors by parents; cops; renovators; landlords; gentrifiers; those who write the headlines, the histories, and the laws; those who award this neighbourhood its name and control its shifting demographics. Across the decades, buildings are developed and homes are razed; communities come in and muscle other communities out; the past haunts the present and perspectives change, so that perpetrators sometimes become victims, and victims sometimes become the worst criminals of all... Written with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, Brooklyn Crime Novel is a breathtaking tour de force of a quarter of a city and the humanity it contains, and an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we've made

Leseprobe

Also by Jonathan Lethem

NOVELS

The Arrest

The Feral Detective

Gun, with Occasional MusicAmnesia Moon

As She Climbed Across the TableGirl in Landscape

Motherless Brooklyn

The Fortress of Solitude

You Don’t Love Me Yet

Chronic City

Dissident GardensA Gambler’s Anatomy

NOVELLAS

This Shape We’re In

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the EyeKafka Americana (with Carter Scholz)Men and Cartoons

How We Got Insipid

Lucky Alan and Other Stories

NONFICTION

The Disappointment ArtistThe Ecstasy of InfluenceFear of Music

They Live

More Alive and Less Lonely

FOR LYNN NOTTAGE

________________________

First published in the United States of America in 2023 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Lethem, 2023

The moral right of Jonathan Lethem to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 040 4

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 220 4

EBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 222 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

I. Everybody Gets Robbed

II. The Case Against Boerum

III. Locked-Out Memories

IV. The Dance

V. Brooklyn Crime Novel

VI. No Music

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

I.

Everybody Gets Robbed

“IT WOULD BE FOOLISH TO SAY that all renovation areas are safe or that once renovation begins an area is magically transformed into a crime-free haven . . . If you are concerned about crime in an area, don’t just take one person’s word about it. Go over to the precinct house and see what the police have to say about your block and the surrounding area. Ask people on the block who are living there now. Former residents usually give the least reliable information.

It can almost categorically be said that neighborhoods that have a lot of renovation activity do become safer, either through private patrols or through pressure upon policemen or just because more people are on the streets. The pioneer in an emerging area like Crown Heights will find bargain prices for a number of reasons, and a higher crime rate is a key one.”

—JOY AND PAUL WILKES,You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Own a Brownstone

WHEN WE announced our production plans for “THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN” . . . the startling expose of cop-bookie corruption . . . we expected gangsters, hoodlums, and merchants of violence to give it the lead-pipe treatment. We expected threats and worse from the gunmen of Gowanus.

But we never expected reasonable citizens to challenge the free screen. We never dreamed that important citizens of Brooklyn would have “ordered” us not to show this picture in the Borough of Brooklyn. But we have been told to stay out . . . or else!

We think the citizens of Brooklyn want to learn the truth. We think that you will side with “THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN”.

—ADVERTISEMENT,The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 6, 1958

“MANHATTAN KEEPS on makin it/Brooklyn keeps on takin it”

—BOOGIE DOWN PRODUCTIONS,“The Bridge Is Over”

1.

Quarters, Part 1

(1978)

A first story. The start of our inquiry.

Two white boys, in a second-floor apartment above a storefront on Court Street, between Schermerhorn and Livingston streets.

The boys, both fourteen, gleefully labor at something captured in the teeth of a small, table-mounted vise. They labor at this thing with a hacksaw. The tool, the vise, the whole tabletop workshop, belongs to the divorced father of one of the boys, a man who lives alone in this apartment except during those days when his son visits. The father works as a therapist but aspires to make jewelry. Hence the vise, the hacksaw. The father is absent this morning.

THE STOREFRONT BELOW the apartment features an Italian restaurant called The Queen. A small dining room with red plush curtains, eight or ten tables crowded together. This place has a reputation among some as a throwback, a place for “fine dining” of a sort cherished only by probable mobsters, or by nostalgists for a version of Brooklyn that is already, by this point, quaint. Though hardly vanished.

Mobsters may also be nostalgists. Probably so, in many cases.

The restaurant’s proprietors own the building. It’s to them the father pays his rent. The Queen also has a twin, The Queen Pizzeria. A thriving slice joint, two addresses away. Wedged between the two, the tablecloth Queen and the pizza-counter Queen, is a mid-sized pornographic movie theater. The proprietors of the pornographic movie theater pay rent to the owners of the storefronts on either side of it, the pizzeria and the tablecloth restaurant. Two of these businesses, the porn movies, the slice joint, are required to keep the third—the tablecloth restaurant—afloat.

A slice of pizza costs fifty cents.

A subway token costs fifty cents.

Hmmm. Is this some golden law of affiliation? The city an oblique, untranslatable system? Or might the sole religion here be the price of things?

Let’s return to the boys. What’s the thing in the vise?

The vise holds a coin. A U.S. twenty-five cent piece, a Washington Quarter dated 1968, from the Denver mint. The therapist-jeweler’s son wields the hacksaw. He runs it diligently in its groove, until the quarter is cut in half. The boys grin, sharing a nerve-wired, chortling delight. The vise is loosened, just long enough to turn the half-quarter in its grip, then tightened again. The hacksaw is applied anew. The slim blade rips through, halving the half-coin. The other boy seizes up the result for scrutiny. All that’s left is Washington’s proud forehead and nose and the letters LIB. The boys have made a quarter-quarter.

The two fresh quarter-quarters are moved to the table, where we see them now added to the results of this afternoon’s industry: a pile of ruined coins. Nearly all twenty-five cent pieces, some halved, some quartered. A couple of nickels, too, have been sawn in half. Dimes? Too small. Pennies, not worth the trouble. The room is sharp with the scent of hot metal, of microscopic shreds of coin.

They are doing this superbly pointless thing off the back end of a sleepover. It’s ten in the morning. The two boys are caught like flies in the web of the summer between eighth and ninth grades, the shift to high school, a great confusion of dispersal from these particular streets into the city at large.

Everything will be nothing like it was ever again.

They scoop the ruined coins into their palms, and pour them into their pants pockets, until the pockets bulge. The energy between the boys is high and delighted. Yet this is a delight in something craven. They’re sly with self-regard. Sure, they’re vandals—this is established fact. They’ve been known to write graffiti on the city’s surfaces. On trains, when they’re courageous. More often brick walls, metal doors, commercial vehicles. They’ve egged the Court Street bus at night, from the windows of this same apartment (divorced dad being not much for tallying his egg supply). What are they hoping to prove by destroying the coins?

The boys move through the apartment door, which is triple locked, including by a bar lock that braces at an angle to the floor, and down the back stairwell, heading for the street.

CHAPTER 17 of the U.S. Legal Code covers “Mutilation, diminution, and falsification of coins. 332. Debasement of coins; alteration of official scales, or embezzlement of metals.”

The boys are committing a crime, then.

Are they likely to be arrested for it?

Not too likely.

In the world of these white boys, television cops are more present than the real thing. Dragnet, Adam-12, Kojak, cornpone fucking McCloud.

No television cops are going to screech up in a black-and-white and bust them for mutilation of currency.

The boys cross Atlantic, along Court Street, in the direction of the Italian neighborhood, their old school, the projects, Cobble Hill Park. All we know for certain is that though several dollars’ worth of quarters jangle between their two loaded pockets, these may no longer be offered for purchase of a subway token or a slice of pizza. They ruined their money! What gives?

2.

Nobody Knows

(forever)

This is a story about what nobody knows.

It’s set in a place nobody doesn’t think they know. Yet nobody knows anything about this place, and they never did.

Maybe I exaggerate.

Still, not many can be bothered to know. Not, for instance that Malcolm X’s family was hidden, in the hours and days immediately following his assassination, in a safe house on the corner of Dean and Nevins streets. Nobody knows this. Or they forgot.

Equally, they forgot that Willie Sutton was apprehended on the corner of Pacific and Third. He’s the one who when asked “Why do you rob banks?” replied “Because that’s where the money is.”

Nobody knows this anymore if they ever did.

Nobody knows that Isaac Asimov lived in 213 Dean Street for a year in the 1940s. To care, you’d have to be a nerd. Even then, how would you find this out? Guy wrote four hundred books; you read fifty of them. You’d walk right past.

Nobody knows H. P. Lovecraft, the paranoid racist, lived at 169 Clinton, corner of State Street. Lived there in abject misery, cowering within his terror of the Other. “The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.”

Geddouddahere, you!

We don’t need your type around here.

And five minutes after he goes, Brooklyn wipes its hands of him.

This is that kind of place. A babel of sound and filth, but it’s our babel of sound and filth, and the rubble of what’s in front of you today is too much to sort through, never mind what weirdness just packed up and went.

Example: a row house at 246 Dean collapsed. This was one of four anomalous wood-frames on that block, likely not a good idea to squeeze them into the sequence of brownstones. Rain squeezed between, at the roof line, at the splice. The brick of the brownstone didn’t care; it grew moss. The wooden structure secretly absorbed the moisture. It sagged and rotted, and by the time they noticed, there was nothing they could do about it.

Once it fell, it was cheaper to bury the ruin in the earth of its own footprint, and the backyard. So, when the eventual hippie renovators acquire the lot, along with the brownstone beside it, the one with the mossy brickwork, they’re astounded to find a mountain of lathe and plaster and shattered bathroom tile and marble mantelpiece just mingled in the soil there. They’ve intended to plant a garden, but good luck. It’s like the earth just opened and chewed up and half swallowed the house. It’s like a bombsite.

Why, in these blocks of brick and stone, the strange four wooden A-frames jammed into the sequence? Who lived there? Why did it fall? How was the decision made to entomb it in place? Nobody knows, nobody cares. Around here we call that off-street parking.

Nobody knows what was here five minutes ago, just before they got here, let alone a hundred years.

Nobody cares that nobody knows.

In this place that used to be, in a time the city was synonymous with crime, nobody ever got arrested for forgetting.

3.

No Name White Boys

(generally)

Why don’t the white boys with the ruined coins have names?

They don’t need names.

On these streets, in this Brooklyn Crime Novel, there’s simply too many of these white boys. Some will reappear, and some won’t. It doesn’t matter. In this inquiry, we’re taking a wider view.

Here’s a tip: among the white boys, keep an eye on the spoiled boy and the millionaire’s son, when they come along.

Also the younger brother, who’ll appear in the next story.

And that Black boy too, here, coming along the street just now:

4.

Hockey Warriors

(1976)

A Black boy and three white boys walk carrying hockey sticks down Dean Street, westward, across Smith Street. Then, at Court Street, as Dean jogs and changes its name to Amity, they move into Cobble Hill. From there they turn south, down Clinton Street, toward Carroll Gardens, the Italian neighborhood.

Two of the three white boys are thirteen. The third, an eleven-year-old, another white boy, is a younger brother.

The younger brother is, frankly, a compromise recruit. They need him to flesh out a team of four. They’ve got a date for a game of street hockey, with an established all-Italian group who await them on Henry Street.

The younger brother needed some persuading, because—hockey? Street hockey?

But his older brother rarely rounds him up for anything anymore. He likes that it can still happen. His older brother and his friends, they said they needed him.

So, street hockey. Sure.

None of these three white boys is Italian. With the Black boy, they all live on Dean Street.

If they’re non-Italian, are they something else? Sure, a muddle. Indistinct fallen WASP, half Jew, hippie, whatever. None with an identification to rival that of the Italians.

They’re Brownstoner boys.

The Black kid is ten months older, one grade of public school, and a million significances ahead of even the oldest of the three white kids, those he now leads into the strange turf of Carroll Gardens for this ostensible street hockey throwdown.

Do any of these four boys know how to play hockey—even street hockey, in sneakers? Barely.

The Black kid is their best hope, on account of confidence, kineticism, his excellence at street games generally.

The younger brother, on the other hand, is likely to be useless. He’ll need continuous buoying even to carry on competing, as he needs continuous buoying on this journey into the unfamiliar neighborhood. This younger brother, he might even be worse than dead weight. But to show up with fewer than four players is to default the challenge.

In any case, this is a quixotic group. The Italian boys are going to kick their asses. There’s a kind of glory in knowing and not-knowing what they’ve gotten themselves into. It’s somewhat incredible they even managed to find four hockey sticks—blades splintered, bound everywhere with electrical tape—with which to represent their hopeless cause.

On the corner of Kane Street, they divert one block farther west, walking past the quiet schoolyard of P.S. 29, to reach Henry Street. It’s a Saturday afternoon in early May. Now fall back, let these boys veer into the honeyed light that leans now over the rooftops and seeps through the canopy of leaves, that ripples itself across ornate brownstone cornices. Let them be out of sight for an instant, let them go unescorted into this day’s fate. It’s the truer truth. Nobody sees them, not just yet.

A check against lyricism. Keep the light, let alone the honeyed light, from your eyes. Just the facts, man—no painterly effects. We’re here to enumerate crimes. Or perhaps, to distinguish not-crimes, the exception, from against an overall criminal background. We’re not out collecting light on faces, or light through leaves on cornices. The city’s a grid of schematics. Let’s try to put some pins in the map. No need to pin butterflies. No butterflies, no buttery light.

We’ll follow the boys’ lead in this: Tend your secrets, tuck away your secret excesses. If, say, there’s any special allure or romance between any two of these four Dean Street boys, it’s at present strictly maintained behind this afternoon’s martial façade. Four bodies marching, sticks on shoulders. A sight, so far unseen.

AT THE CORNER of Henry and President, the four are met by four others. A day of fours. These aren’t their designated opponents, those presumably waiting another six blocks farther down the street. These are four other Italian guys, sitting on street-corner chairs, outside an unmarked social club, a tiny storefront with windows painted black. We’re speaking here, of course, of local recognitions, these aren’t Italians in the national sense, maybe none have ever been to Italy, maybe one has a Puerto Rican mom shamefully unmentioned, but come on, yougoddabekidding, weknowwhatwemeanhere, this is an Italian neighborhood and there’s a self-concept, a clarity here that might nearly be a relief in contrast to the weird muddle of the four boys with sticks. The Italians range in age from fourteen, the same age as the Black kid, to one who might be a twenty-year-old trying to pass, in his bomber jacket and penny loafers. He’s certainly got a pencil moustache formed of something much harder than peach fuzz. At the sight of the Dean Street boys, the four rise and stand, beaming slouchy insolent astonishment at what’s arrayed itself before them.

“You got to be kidding me.”

“What?”

“What kind of thing is this walking down the street? What am I looking at here?”

“We’ve got a game.”

“You’re going nowhere like that with sticks. Now turn around and don’t make me articulate it twice.”

“We got a game, c’mon.”

“A game he says. I’ll make a game out of you. You’ll be gaming on your ass and crying for your ma and she’ll be saying what’s the matter and you’ll be saying I don’t know what happened I accidentally fell on my ass in a game.”

“He’ll game your mother.” A second voice, to clarify what’s been explained.

The youngest Italian reaches out and latches his fingers on the stick of one of the Dean Street boys, who doesn’t let go so easily. There’s a moment of tug of war, then the oldest and tallest Italian, the pencil moustache, slaps the younger Italian’s hand away.

“We’re doing you a favor.”

“We’re meeting Vinnie,” says the Black kid. “They’re waiting for us.”

“Where? Who?”

The game’s set for the quietest block in Carroll Gardens, Summit Street, behind the parish of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary & St. Stephen, none of which would bear mentioning even if it were on the tip of the tongue, which it isn’t. “Vincent.”

“Who?”

“Vincent, Vinnie.”

For any signs the Italians show, Vinnie might be someone’s younger brother, might be someone’s worst enemy or a dog from Mars.

“What are you doing hanging out with these guys?” Pencil moustache addresses this to the Black kid. “What are you trying to accomplish? This don’t make sense.”

“Street hockey.”

“What even is this?” The questions widen to some implicit ontological ground, to fundamental matters of being. “What am I looking at? Someone say because I don’t understand.”

“Just let us pass.”

“What even are you? You, tell me. Are you Jewish? Does anyone even know what I’m looking at?”

Another echo of clarification: “Does your mother know?”

“C’mon.”

“He says c’mon. You’re lucky we don’t break all those sticks across our knees. Where’d you even get those? Triangles? McCrory’s? They shouldn’t be selling that to you, it’s irresponsible in a case like yours. What is that, doctor’s tape? You got your stick in a sling?”

“Duck tape.”

“If I know one thing, that ain’t duck tape.”

For no clear reason, this is a laugh line for the Italians, a bust-up. The mood is so suddenly bright and infectious that the Dean Street boys smile too, and chuckle in confused relief. Then, as if laughter is a signal that the exchange has obtained its result, the pencil moustache says, “No seriously get out of here. You ain’t crossing this street. Go home before we kill you with your duck tape sticks you agglomeration of nothing.”

The other Italians chime in:

“Mother nothing.”

“We’ll fuck her with the stick.”

“Go. Now. Get out of my eyes.”

The Dean Street boys know when they’re routed. They retreat up Henry, jostled in confusion. At Kane the Black boy says, “This way! We’ll go down on Columbia Heights and cut around. Kane Street cuts through!”

One white boy agrees eagerly, another doesn’t. “Forget it, you saw those guys, they’ll kill us.” The younger brother is wide-eyed, maybe traumatized by the encounter on the corner.

“We can’t forfeit. Vinnie and his boys are waiting.”

“It’s too late.” Time does seem to be ticking away, the sun a blobby bomb arcing to hide itself in rooftops.

“Let’s go, my brothers, let’s go!” The Black kid’s leadership is irrepressible. They move west, a nervous pod, but acting as one. That is, until coming to the neighborhood’s deforming limit, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. In this place, rather than lancing overhead, the Expressway is carved as a savage moat into the natural grid of the Brooklyn streets. A roaring trench of cars and gray pollution so chunky you feel it catch in your teeth.

The little brother balks, not wanting to cross the highway. Abandoning the cover of the tree-lined streets had been more than he’d bargained for. This, now, feels like falling off the earth’s edge. “Let’s go back.”

The older brother turns on him. “Back? We’re right here! We have to make the game!”

The Black kid’s more consoling. “They can’t see us, man, don’t worry.” He gestures with his stick, full of animation. “Listen, we’ll stay on Hicks but cut down the other side of the highway, they won’t see us. It cuts right back across the BQE at Sackett and Union, there’s no way, they can’t cover both streets, too lazy anyway to get off their motherfucking milk crates minute after we was gone.”

His savvy and expressiveness, the flow of street names, the relentless invocation of the word cut and cuts. All are for the moment irresistible, even to the younger kid whose eyeballs are not-secretly swimming in tears. Nobody corrects their leader to say it was chairs on the sidewalk slate, not milk crates. They cross the highway and creep southward along Hicks.

But the Italian squad, against all hope and likelihood, have located a pointless motivation in the dead of the afternoon. They’re up off their chairs. They too know the BQE street bridges at Sackett and Union, which are after all only a single block apart. They wait, then jump and point and sock fist in palm as if expecting a fly ball.

“Run!”

The Dean Street boys flee toward the waterfront, down Sackett, and reach Columbia Heights. After an instant—one in which the group is in peril of disintegration, two heading north, two south—they fall in again, helplessly really, behind the Black kid. Improbably, he’s emboldened, moving south, deeper into the strange turf, still adamant they won’t blow this game.

YOUNGER BROTHER’S CRYING now. Is this Red Hook? He doesn’t know. He didn’t ever wish to go to Red Hook, let alone on this day, with no guide except the crazily fearless Black kid. The name Red Hook was always disturbing to him. Suggestive, as with other unvisited place names, of a journey into an unwelcome past. As if Red Hook ought to have been severed from Brooklyn’s mainland by now, amputated, to float off to sea.

And to journey there carrying sticks? Couldn’t they at least abandon them?

The younger brother is isolated within the group by his role as younger brother. He’s bracketed on the sidewalk, kept in a protective cordon as if under quarantine. Perhaps his tears, his irrational copious weeping, might be infectious. Perhaps he cries on all their behalves, the secret everybody knows.

It is only two months before the worst thing that will happen to the younger brother.

Maybe he’s crying because he feels it coming. That worst day, in June, he won’t cry as he did this day, just crossing the BQE, into the unknown territory of Red Hook. He won’t cry at all.

You can’t always make sense of these things. You can’t always predict when you’ll cry.

SO, THEY WANDER. Is there an appointment still for keeping? Any chance in hell that Vincent’s team of four haven’t thrown up their hands, gone off into other activities? Claimed victory, if they’d even troubled to remember the challenge?

The Dean Street contingent are far from home. Perhaps they always were. How long will they persist? Will they engage the older Italian four again, or perhaps even some other unforeseen thing, as they inch and edge their way along the blocks, probing back in the direction of a street hockey rendezvous, one diminishingly likely to occur?

Tune in again to this same sad channel.

5.

C., Part 1

(a snapshot)

What is it that this Black kid sees in them, his white friends?

Or is it something he wants from them?

Or wants them to see in, or want from, him?

What is it that drives him to offer his leadership to the white boys of Dean Street—in hockey, of all things—or to teach them to properly throw a Spaldeen off a stoop, or flick a skully cap across the pavement, or boost a soda from the rear of a bodega? He even feels he needs to teach them to walk down the street properly, not to be craning their necks around backward every five steps telegraphing susceptibility for all to see. He teaches them every trick in the book—every trick in the book of his body.

Years before magical negro was a notion you could only deplore and deride, certainly nothing ever to admit you’d consented to resemble, this one Black kid from Dean Street had found himself cast in the part, for every taker in a five-block radius.

WHAT DOES IT take to get a name around here anyway? Call him C.

Now restate the question. What is it that C. sees in them?

The answer may not be about something he sees in them, the white boys, at all. Sure, he sees them. But he feels their parents. Their parents, and his mom. C., he’s a parental tuning fork. He didn’t ask for this power. Like most powers, it’s a curse as much as a gift.

C. hears the parents when they speak, and when they don’t. But his awareness of the white parents comes later. First, inescapably, comes his attunement to his own mother.

His mother, unlike his father, is from the islands. Haitian. She works as a nurse at Brooklyn Hospital, in Fort Greene Park, and brings home stories of horror from the emergency room. Specifically, the filthy condition of the white children’s underwear when they appear with broken limbs from the playgrounds. The private school children from Brooklyn Heights, most of all. The richer, the filthier.

“You treat them like anyone else,” she says, about the white people, practically before he can know what she is talking about. “They hardly know any better.”

(C.’s father, who is from Bushwick, keeps it much simpler. “Don’t let them get you in trouble. Don’t let them get you mixed up with the cops. Because be assured the cops will be bringing you in, not them white boys.”)

His mother’s philosophy comes at him from all sides. It blurts from nowhere. She’d be cooking him eggs. Teaching him to knot his bowtie for church, a thing he never did get exactly right. Her thoughts floated out like banners:

“You have to teach them who you are. Don’t figure they already know.”

She will begin with some assertion plainly dubious to him, but never mind. For her, it is gospel: “It’s your neighborhood. You treat them like a guest in your house.”

Or: “Introduce yourself, look in their eyes. You call the parents Mister or Missus so-and-so.”

Or: “You see the dirt under the fingernails on that boy? Don’t those people even know how to wash a child?”

Or: “You walk that boy to school, and you walk him back to the block after, I don’t care if you never speak one word the whole way.”

Among the many things his instincts commanded he protect the white children from, C. will think ruefully, so many years later, is the ferocious judgment of his mother.

She glances at him, as they step out on their way to church, sees his eyeballs sliding sideways to inventory the morning street and says: “They don’t even know how to play right.”

It’s like she knows before he knows what he’ll be doing later that afternoon. The bowtie tossed aside—somewhere, he’s still got a cigar-box of the things—to run outside and cajole some misshapen clump of white boys of different ages and capacities into a fair facsimile of a stickball game. Based on—what? What did he know that they didn’t? C. based it all on some black-and-white footage of Willie Mays in a Harlem street, marking distances with the manholes, picking who’s up first by every kid grabbing the stick until someone lands on top.

To hell with eeny meeny miny moe, you’d be deaf not to hear the echo lurking in that shit.

Like his mother knows what he’ll be doing before he knows, or maybe like she’s making it happen.

Maybe the answer is that simple, to the question of C.’s tenure as the white boys’ champion and protector: his mother made him do it.

6.

Screamer

(1975–82)

Hoyt Street, between Dean and Pacific, in an eyesore house with a crumbling face, its ineptly painted brick flaking, through a third-story window, she appears routinely: the Screamer. Some kind of nightmare Rapunzel, white girl, crazy, banished upstairs. She looks out at the street and she screams. Indecipherable, unpredictable, and fucking loud!

Who at?

Anyone passing.

Sometimes no one, just exhortations of crazy right into the blue sky, the Catholic hospital’s mute windows.

Increasingly, at the boys who come to egg her on.

The white boys and the Black boys and the Puerto Ricans (some of whom we should note are Dominicans, but the white boys don’t grasp this distinction). The Screamer’s block forms a kind of haven, a neutral zone. The situation’s a kind of universal solvent, an ingredient that galvanizes anyone who’s been hailed by her zany bolts from the clouds.

For the boys, it begins to seem a sexual thing, though no one wants to think about that. The joke about the Polish stripper: put it all on! Go ahead, try it, bellow your stand-up routine up at her. Like trying to roof a Spaldeen, harder than it looks. All wit is lost on the Screamer. She’ll outlast you.

Hoyt Street, passage to the A train, out of the Gowanus Houses projects, gauntlet of uneasy new commuters, path of eerie hospital run by resident nuns in row houses worth future zillions. But the Screamer owns this one block, by dint of the total law of aggression.

This is a time of sirens, the firehouse on State Street roaring the southward streets, Nevins and Hoyt, deep into Gowanus to confront the burning third-floor walk-ups, the Wyckoff Gardens incinerator fires, the god-only-knows Mafia-incinerated warehouses and funeral homes, sometimes perhaps to extinguish the burning chemical slick floating atop the Canal.

Time of outcries ignored, shrieks through upper windows generally, moaning of all-night bodies sleeping it off on Atlantic Avenue sidewalks or in boarded storefront doorways.

Copious musics pour through open parlor windows, interlacing on the street with what blares from car windows, merengue and Jackson 5, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, maybe scraps of Funkadelic or Pink Floyd.

Money, it’s a hit!

But this is a realm of dead spots too, weird gulfs and valleys in the sonic sphere, often not a single car sludges past on a given afternoon between the passing of two Dean Street buses half an hour apart.

In any case there’s nothing like the Screamer, an avant-gardist like John Cage or La Monte Young. She’s pre-punk!

Either nobody or a hundred people have ever called the cops on the Screamer, each possibility equally plausible and pointless. What are the cops going to do, tell her family to tell her to quit? You think they haven’t tried that?

Decades later, it’s a test, are you really of the precinct and vintage you claim? Yeah? You know Dean Street, Pacific, Bond? You remember Buggy’s grocery, corner of Bond Street? Sure. Or maybe. Remind me. You remember the Local Level? Didn’t think so, because it was a place that made no sense. You remember Ziad’s? Good sandwiches there.

But do you remember the Screamer?

Those who do are like Masons, sharing the secret sign. In a divided land, there was one clarion, the horn of the huntress. The boys knew it, unmistakable.

Maybe the crime is to remember?

The Screamer screams still.

7.

Speaking of the Police

(1971–82)

On a sweltering summer day in 1971, a seven-year-old white boy from Dean Street is bitten by a stray dog on the west side of Nevins Street, near the fish market. What’s the seven-year-old doing wandering around that corner? Who knows. These are free-range city kids. Nobody’s told him not to approach a stray dog. He likes dogs.

The dog draws blood, the kid outcries. The dog—a cringing, tail-tucked, pitiable thing—trots across Nevins and shelters in an open garage. The kid—a cringing, hand-cradling, pitiable thing—scurries around the corner to home. Parent appears, concerned to identify the dog. Does it have an owner? Is it foaming at the mouth?

Police are summoned by phone, by two different neighbors. Police from two precincts, the 78th and 77th, appear. The two pairs of cops arrive more or less at the same time, which is not particularly quickly on this tar-melted afternoon in this unpromising sector. For a rabid dog? It’s a miracle they’ve come at all, let alone in duplicate. Yet once here, faced with the prospect of fishing the growling mutt from the back of the garage, then to deliver it to some pound or veterinarian for inspection as the parents are demanding, then to be faced with the resultant paperwork, both sets of cops consider their options.

Exactly where was the kid bitten? Here in front of the fish shop? This side of Nevins? That’s the 77th Precinct. Where is the dog holed? Across the street? That’s the 78th. While parents and neighbors stand incredulous, the two sets of cops begin squabbling over whose jurisdiction is in play here—site of incident, or the fugitive mutt’s garage? Each wanting to foist the effort onto the other.

That’s one celebrated police story. It’s like a local version of O. Henry or a Norman Rockwell painting, except with more blood, a possibly rabid dog, a turpentine-rag stinking garage that seems ready to burst into black smoking flames at any instant, and, since this is Nevins Street, thruway to the Wyckoff Gardens houses, a whole lot of people walking past shaking their heads saying “Who the fuck called the fuzz?” and “Look at they stupid-ass police all afraid of some dirty old dog.”

Other tales might be more private, in circulation among small orbits of the kids of the neighborhood.

That one day a black-and-white pulled up on Bergen without warning or explanation in broad daylight and snapped two Black kids’ homemade skateboards, nothing but roller skates stuck on a board, in two over their knees. Snapped them in half for no reason and tossed them in the gutter, then drove off, not even troubling to laugh.

That on those blistering afternoons when someone—older brother or uncle with a wrench?—wrestled open a fire hydrant valve to let the street’s kids cavort in the gush of water, and to direct it at themselves and through the open windows of unsuspecting cars with a tin can open at both ends, the cops would eventually pull up and scatter the activity and tighten the valve. But this was an action as natural as a crocodile scattering flamingos at a watering hole in a Disney nature film. Nothing personal in it, and funny enough to see the cops roll up sleeves and get their shoes soaked in the gutter’s flood that it was almost worth it just for that.

Or that once a cop car was seen parked on the time-lost block of 5th Street off 2nd Ave., that microcosmic industrial wasteland trapped between two forks of the Gowanus Canal, the backs of the heads of two cops visible through its rear window, the blue-and-white Plymouth Fury gently rocking up and down on its chassis. The story originates with an older brother though all the Dean Street boys brandish it as their own. The story’s a prematurely jaded one, yet as is frequently the case with the boys also features a demure omission, such that some younger kids don’t even know the exact point of the story while telling it themselves.

Twin hooker blow jobs? There’s no room in the back of the police car.

Jacking off?

Jacking each other off? Let speculation cease.

More than anything, though, the spirit of the police dwells in the city metal scrap reclamation yard under the Brooklyn Bridge, a place easily broken into through curled cyclone fencing for any boyish vultures wishing to pick over the remains. Here’s a kit for making a city, the infrastructure of undead authority: dented decrepit file cabinets, junked street signs, uprooted parking meters, all stacked like Lego or Lincoln Logs or that dumb erector set in the basement your dad gave up trying to spur interest in. Why play with miniatures when the real shit’s stacked up, free if you have the will to drag it away? Here, miraculously, are whole crapped-out chunks of police cars, the bumpers, the cages dividing front seats from back. The actual doors of old black-and-whites, with the antique emblem. Shortwave radio rigs unbolted from dashboards.

The boys go to this pile to clamber and dream. Rarely drag anything away in the end, despite dreams of dead parking meter heads stuffed with dimes if only you could crack them open.

Too fucking heavy.

Reassembling these shards into a stable idea of “police” seems about as likely as making sense of the alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules everyone complains of. For that matter, the cops who pass along Dean Street in their cars might be about like those street-cleaning vehicles the parking dance is ostensibly to make room for: laughable bulky devices, dirty themselves, moving dirt around pointlessly, then passing by.

Police just an epiphenomenon of a city that’s written off this whole zone. The way the banks red-lined it, the way the EPA zoned it industrial despite the humans living there, the way you could pull the lever in a firebox on the corner and never know whether it threw a signal to the firehouse or whether they just had better things to do. The Screamer is the only mayor of where you live.

This writing off frees the white boys to write cops off in turn. These ’70s police, they’re hardly fear-strikers. Not militarized, at least none that any of the boys have yet laid eyes on. More like cultivators of silly sideburns and moustaches, lazy-looking men ill fit for their jobs. Baretta and Columbo have more to do with the boys’ day-to-day lives than these uniformed fools. Easy to dodge if you have white skin and even the slightest gift for deference. The cops drive off and then you can make jack off motions to their departing car.

Most, but not all, of the white kids can summon, when needed, the slightest deference.

Not one of the Black kids can summon, when needed, white skin.

So, do the Black boys of Dean Street carry a different sense? If so, it is a thing maintained, during collective street play, in silence within their bodies.

8.

Jews in Projects

(196?–198?)

There are Jewish families, at least two of them, living in Wyckoff Gardens. Why is it that this feels almost too intimate to speak of? They’re right there, hiding in plain sight, though it feels they shouldn’t be. Once gone, it will be as though they were never there.

One is a robust family of six, the two boys and two girls all with bright pink cheeks, which is to say, everything screams wrong here. They’ve moved what seems an entire suburban home, including a matching five-piece living room set, into one of the largest units, in Building 3, facing out on Wyckoff. So at least, when another white Dean Street boy visits, he doesn’t have to navigate the project’s inner courtyards. Nonetheless, the older brother walks the younger one’s friend home along Nevins to Dean on those occasions when he chances to visit. It’s just a courtesy, obvious and chagrining to all.

The youngest has at age twelve still never been to Manhattan. Not to his knowledge. Sheer astonishment to some of the kids he plays with since, as they point out, it’s a mere three subway stops away. Their friend shrugs, he’s not resistant to their suggestion. He very much hopes someday to go, but the occasion hasn’t arisen. His is a Brooklyn-facing family, cousins all scattered through Midwood and beyond. Relatives believing them, incidentally, insane to live where they do. Indeed, when they abandon the Wyckoff Gardens apartment it is to settle ten crucial stops along the F line, at Avenue N.

The other family? Parents and one girl. Younger family. These are Jewish hippies, with a more ideological footing in this place—the parents met in CORE, on a bus on the Newark to Arkansas freedom ride. They know Manhattan well, schlep to Chinatown frequently, and to Bleecker Street for jazz, still reenacting their life before the kid came along.

Relatives believing them, incidentally, insane to live where they do.

(Divorce will come for both these couples before the ’70s are through, but that’s hardly to do with the housing projects, nor being Jewish, more like a craze sweeping over this generation of young parents, leaving only exceptional survivors, outliers.)

What are we cataloging here? Are Jews in Wyckoff Gardens a mystery or merely anomalous, awkward to recall? Clues, or red herrings?

9.

Incompetent Shoplifter of Heavy Metal Magazine

(1977)

A white kid in a hole-in-the-wall Puerto Rican magazine-and-candy shop on Bergen off Smith Street, behind the F train stop, place the size of a closet.

He may well only have ducked in here to avoid some kind of trouble sensed on the street, real or imagined. Another kid he wished to avoid, one requiring more than just crossing the street in the middle of the block. Never should have stayed late at the after-school art class, what was he thinking? The floods of kids exiting the building are his only hiding place, he rides them to safer waters of Dean and Hoyt, beyond.

So, pretend to browse a minute or two, but now what’s this thing, a glossy comic with a crazy logo, some kind of international underground magazine with the weight and sheen of a copy of Playboy? What the hell? With airbrushed paintings of breasts?

Just one single copy, a mistaken delivery or an alternate-reality artifact plopped into this world from another.

The woman at the counter might be like one of those stony cafeteria presences, deadened to the boy’s presence by weariness. Maybe this is the day of his long-dreamed-of invisibility! Idiotic assumption, he’s the only body in the space. But with useless slyness, the boy pushes the outrageous magazine up under his shirt and ducks for the door. Only makes it one step across the jamb before she’s out behind him, pinching his arm in a claw-like hold. They’re the same height, which doesn’t make her big, but doesn’t make him un-small.

Boosting, lifting, stealing, it is the done thing. The boy’s been on the back end of this certainty long enough, coughing up pocket change, bus pass, a wristwatch, pride and morale on a regular basis. In this absconded zone, you take what you want, everyone knows this. Apparently, everyone short of this one incredulous Puerto Rican lady demanding not only the magazine back but as well petitioning of him some kind of explanation or apology with her look. The white boy shrugs.

She’s talking fast but in Puerto Rican which is, let’s admit it, plain lucky for him.

It means any chance that notice of his pathetic gambit will cross into the world of his parents or the other Dean Street boys is significantly shrunken. Plus, he’s granted an excuse, or he feels himself to be, for his wholly mute departure.

Even in the coils of his shame he’s slavering over the lost object. What chance he’ll ever lay eyes on a second copy of the outlandish thing? What’s going to happen to it?

Cheeks burning, the white boy slinks away on the sidewalk. Maybe he can send a worldlier friend back to try again. Or a team of two, in some ruse of diversion? The shop is awfully tiny. Two white boys in a scripted commotion would be like the Marx Brothers steerage routine in there. He never should have been so impulsive, the magazine was like a drug on his senses, a call from an impossible planet.

Send a friend to steal it for him, but how to hide it from the friend?

Or maybe buy it, but that means facing the lady. That magazine’s gonna go up in smoke.

He’s just no good at this at all.

In a world of crime, the failed criminal.

10.

Gentrification

(b. 1964)

The word exists but was not always there. When did they first hear it? Does it name anything certain?

A disaster area, an instability in somebody’s desires?

The word, destined later to be glued to these years as a painting is glued into a frame, is already in the air—if they listen. Was the word covered in shame and confusion from the beginning, like an accusing epithet painted on the doorstep of their days?

The Dean Street boys prefer to stick to what they can see and feel.

To the extent the boys grasp this word, it doesn’t split them in half. You can be anti-gentrification, sure. That’s if your parents explain it completely enough before you throw your cereal bowl in the sink and tie sneakers and get out the front door. But just because your family’s anti- doesn’t mean anyone would ever consent they’re playing on the other team. Likely you never met a racist or a Nazi or even someone who voted for Nixon either. We’re all good people here.

Another reason the whole gentrification thing seems a little foggy, a little theoretical, maybe, is take a glance around this sector with your own bare eyes.

11.

Working on a Building

(1981)

Two white boys, on the third floor of a half-gutted row house on Wyckoff Street, without ventilators or dust masks, protected only by thick canvas work gloves, otherwise in T-shirts and jeans, ripping lathe and plaster out of the ruined interior wall of a former rooming house. They’ve been hired by one of their dads, who bought the condemned house and the one next door to it, in equally ruinous condition, for a song.

No fathers working in banks, but maybe some traffic with bankers?

Subject for further investigation.

But this isn’t gentrification, no. This is a thing you do with your hands. Unless you can trick a couple of teenage boys to do it. Renovation, a material concern. Sweat equity and a hands-dirty summer job. A few bucks in your pocket, representing future LPs scored at Bleecker Bob’s. Camaraderie of two newly grown and fearless bodies ready to walk a street they’ve cowered down—fearless particularly today, in possession of a claw hammer and crowbar.

The smashed guts of buildings everywhere testify to this voracious process. Mountains of such plaster and lathe and elements of corroded plumbing, hauled down stoops in buckets to—if the block’s lucky—a hired dumpster. If not, someone’s shoving it into metal garbage cans and praying the city’s truck operators will haul it off. Window frames and shattered doors, edges jagged with teeth of cracked lead paint, all piled in empty lots, or used to make backyard divisions where no one wants to shell out for cyclone.

Rusted window–sash weights stacked in triangular piles like unexploded ordnance in some black-and-white battlefield photo.

Kids always think they might swordfight with those things until you lift one and it half drags your arm from its socket.

Italian maestros of the plaster ceiling and marble fireplace, brownstone-alchemists, called out of the crypts of the past, or maybe just a neighborhood three subway stops away, to perform artisanal miracles on buildings likely last maintained by their grandfathers.

One day, you see a row house that’s all cinder-block windows, flat-faced and bald of cornice, brownstone lintels long dissolved in the acid rain. Next day you look up, guys are standing on its roof with a pulley with a new cast-iron cornice dangling over the block’s daily traffic, it’s a miracle nobody’s killed.

They still make those things! Can I get the number of the guys who put yours on?

Try. If he picks up the phone, he’ll say he’s backed up a year and a half, he’ll put you on a list.

Gotta visit in person and slip him some twenties, that’s how it’s done out there.

But let’s bear down on those two lads laboring in the swirling motes of the shattered third story rooms in the shell of the house on Wyckoff. What a pit. It’s a miracle they didn’t plunge through the floorboards, or collapse the staircase, which is entirely missing its newel post, so the banister just sways free, no help in securing your ascent. Everything’s lathered in dust, white and gray, and that’s a mercy where it covers brown spots, evaporated pools of let’s hope it was coffee or a can of beans, not blood or shit. The premise that the rooming houses were to be rehabbed as a target for the next wave of Brownstoners seems thin. Could this building ever have been as grand as those on Dean Street, or Pacific, let alone the gold coasts of Clinton Street or Pierrepont? Where did all the marble and plaster go? Why aren’t the parlor windows ten feet tall like on Dean? The tin ceilings appear to have been here forever, even if the linoleum was slapped on in angry layers over the subsequent decades.

What if Brownstone Brooklyn is salted with fakes to begin with? False fronts, a Potemkin village?

Maybe the dad that hired them is off his gourd, thinking anyone wants to live here.

Maybe all the good ones are gone, and the whole proposition that this so-called gentrification can gain traction is like a Ponzi scheme or chain letter, one that’s collapsed from indifference. Its devisers left holding the debt or obligation, with no takers foolish enough to come on board behind them.

Someone else’s problem. These boys are dreaming on a shorter horizon, planning to rinse the plaster from their hair and meet a couple of Saint Ann’s girls on the Promenade, girls who’ve suggested they might be lured to the 8th Street Playhouse for a showing of Pink Flamingos, though there’s a party beforehand they half-already know will probably be too good to leave. West Village railroad apartment of another abdicated single parent, manifold rooms with doors for make-out hopes. Somebody said somebody’s bringing LSD, which they’ve yet to dare sample.

For now, they’re sure wishing they’d brought a transistor radio. One boy crowbars apart an interior wall, cracking lathe struts down to the floor. The muscle-y part of this work is fun at least— they’re destructors. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, they’re unleashed, licensed to assault the old realm for a change, instead of revering it, the rows of brass lamps at the antique shops on Atlantic, the dress-up shit.

Now, a discovery. Inside the wall, a cache of pulp magazines has been hidden, for however many years, bound in string. The walldestructor fishes out this glum treasure.

Four issues of Sexology. A digest-sized, all black-and-white cryptoscientific prurient “health” magazine from the early ’40s, the bundle thrills and horrifies the nervous systems of the two white boys on first contact, and second contact, and beyond—its power might be inexhaustible. An unwished but irresistible avenue into the murky fact of sexual lives preceding any they want to consider (that’s to say, their own). Sexology evokes sinister appetites predating the glossy full-color sensorium of Bob Guccione’s Vaseline-smeared lens. This might be grandad’s porn.

Every photo a Victorian postcard seen through X-ray specs. Every diagram like the moldiest science textbook illustration you’d ever defaced in grade school. Every advertised sexual device more or less resembling a hot-water bottle.

They’ve dropped hammer and crowbar and removed gloves, sitting legs crossed on the vile floor to better savor this dusty horror. One plays avid, the other averse. They could as easily swap roles—they just need a way to sort their interior poles of attraction and dismay.

“Holy fuck.”

“This is so great. Bedroom Tragedies. When Midgets Marry Normals. Trial Marriage Among Polynesians—Illustrated!”

“I need bleach for my eyes.”

“No, wait, Can Humans and Animals Crossbreed?”

“Oh, shit, what’s a gonadectomy?”

“No, no, check this out, the Public Universal Friend, it’s a Quaker transvestite. The P.U.F.!”

“Don’t tell my dad.”

“Are you kidding? Don’t tell a soul. I’m going to collage the fuck out of these, make the greatest posters for Matthew’s band. Never tell anyone where it came from.”

“No way.”

The treasure’s salted away in a backpack.

The cache of pulps is a vortex of human meanings for them to contemplate, though mostly they’ll demur. It’s too much. Instead, they’ll scissor the pages to bits, make the aforementioned collage posters for their friends’ bands. Even so doing they’ll avoid the direst pages, favoring drawings over photos, mechanical-looking antiquated sex aid devices over the anthropological and medical imagery.

The fact of the magazines, and the location of their hiding place, also points in the direction of another mystery the two white boys are inclined to avoid: that of the men of the rooming houses. Their neighborhood’s immediate prehistory, which lies evident and unspoken, uncomprehended, all around them.

The men in grease-soiled fedoras and wearing suit pants and undershirts and with hotplates in their rooms, living six or ten to a row house, in one of these future restored brownstones, these Cinderella buildings. Men of bewildering races, histories and vices, ex-shipyard, ex-Marine, ex–sales-traveler, ex-gambler, ex-manager of undesirable vaudeville acts, reputed Sterno and formaldehyde drinker, fumbler-away of some small family concern, he who’d sworn to send money back to the old country and didn’t and fell silent, Italians, Polish, Portuguese, Dominican, Cubans, Black-from-South, Black-from-Islands, Africans, Mohawk—Mohawk?—and more, men like a converging point of dereliction, all distinction erased, men of no fates whatsoever.

12.

Smudge, Part 1

(1989)

Black man walks into a glasses shop on Atlantic Avenue.

Outside, rain falls. At the door a cardboard box waits for umbrellas.

Not so many people walk through this door. We remain in the long valley between the invention of this neighborhood and the acceptance of the proposition as a done deal. The triumphalist phase is decades away. Was this gentrification premature?

The white-coated opticians turn as the door chimes.

“You’re back.”

“Damn right I’m back.” The Black man wipes his feet, jogs forward. He wears a baseball cap, and his glasses.

The optician doesn’t move. “You don’t need to use language.” He sold him these glasses yesterday. One hundred dollars, cash, not out of a wallet.

The customer bounces from one foot to another. He pushes his chin forward, hands by his side. “Look. Same damn thing.”

The optician grunts and moves to look. “A smudge.”

“Scratched,” says the customer. “Same as the last pair. If you can’t fix the problem why’d you sell me the damn glasses?”

“A smudge. Clean it off. Here.”

The customer ducks. “Don’t fool with me. Can’t clean it off. They’re already messed up. Like the old ones.”

“Let me see.”

“Where’s the doctor? I want to talk to the doctor.”

“That’s my associate. He’s not a doctor. Let me see.”

“You’re not the doctor, man.” The customer dances away.

“We’re the same,” says the optician. “We make glasses.”

The second optician comes out of the back, and the customer grins. “There’s the man I want to see!”

The second takes it in. “Something wrong with the glasses?”

“Same as yesterday. Look.” He strips his glasses with his right hand and offers them to the second optician.

“First of all, remove with two hands, like I showed you.” The second optician pinches the glasses at the hinges, demonstrating. He raises them to his own face.

“You touched them. That’s the problem.”

“No.”

“That’s fingerprints.”

“Damn, doctor man. I’ll show you the old ones. You can’t even fix the problem.”

“The problem is you touched them. Here.” The second optician dips the glasses in a shallow bath of cleanser, dries them with a chamois cloth. The customer bobs forward, trying to see.

“What do you, scratch at your eyes all the time?” says the first optician, smiling now.

“Shut up.” The customer finger-points. “You’re not my doctor on this.”

“Nobody is,” said the first optician. “You don’t need a doctor. You need to keep your hands from your eyes.”

“Shut up.”

The second optician glares at the first. He hands the glasses over. “Let me see you put them on.”

The customer bends his head and lifts the glasses to his face.

“Wait a minute, I couldn’t see,” says the first optician. “The bill of your cap was in the way.”

“Put them on again,” says the second.

“Same thing.” The customer shakes his head. He pulls off the glasses, again with one hand. “Look. Still there. Little scratches.”

The first optician steps up close. “You smudged it again. When I couldn’t see. It’s how you put them on.”

“I call that a permanent smudge. I paid a hundred dollars. Might as well kept the old ones.” He thrusts the glasses at the first optician.

“They’re just dirty. Your hands are dirty.”

The customer raises his eyebrows. “That’s weak, doctor man. I come in here show you a pair of glasses with scratches, I’m looking for help. You tell me I need new glasses. Now these ones got a permanent smudge, you tell me I got dirty hands. These the glasses you sold me, my man.”

“Your old pair, you had them, what, ten years? The hinges were shot, the nosepiece was gone. The lens touched your cheek. The glasses I sold you are fine. You have to break some habits.”

“Habits!”

“He’s a clown. We should’ve thrown him out yesterday.”

“Instead, you took my money,” says the customer. “Good enough for you yesterday. You couldn’t see Black for all the green yesterday. Now I look Black to you. Now I’m a clown.”

“You think we need your hundred dollars?”

“We’ll make you right,” says the second, ignoring his partner. “Sit down, let me look at the fit.”

It’s a good optometrist-bad optometrist routine. Now the glasses, the proof, are in enemy hands.

“Shit, doctor man. What you know about my habits?”

“Okay.” The second optician’s voice is soothing. “I just want to see you put them on. Naturally, like you would. Don’t push them into your face. They won’t fall off.” He offers the glasses, then pulls them back. “Take off your hat.” The customer removes his hat. “Here you go. Nice and easy.”

The customer stuffs the hat in his ass pocket, then raises the glasses with two trembling hands.

WE DON’T ALL see things the same way, through the same lenses— yeah, sure, we get it. It’s a metaphor, if not an outright allegory.

But not for these three men! For them it’s a material issue, one hundred dollars and a matter of professional pride. They’ll solve it today, if it takes all day. It’s raining. They’ve got nothing better to do.

13.

Mr. Clean’s Windshield & Junkie Stadium, Part 1

(1977)

A white boy, thirteen, throws a ball in the street in front of a Dean Street rooming house. One of the last rooming houses on his block, or anywhere between Nevins Street and Court, where Dean Street dissolves into Amity Street.