The buildings on my left fall away into Beach Street Park, a triangle of darkness gathered behind the ghostly column of a plane-tree trunk. Across the street, the AT&T Long Lines Building blacks out the eastern sky, interrupted by a sifting of lit windows: devoted souls tending the pulse in the wires that speed voices around the globe—the voice of Skip’s fare maybe among them, dealing with the shit going down in Tokyo. I quicken my pace until I’m among street lamps and shop windows again.
Oftentimes, what causes old people to become poor walkers is poor walking. One must bend one’s knees. One must lift one’s feet up. One must be unceasing. One mustn’t shuffle.
As I move ahead, I notice that my gait has taken on an uncharacteristic glide, and I realize that it’s trying to match the beat of the song I heard earlier tonight from the window of that Dodge in Murray Hill, a beat that’s been playing unobtrusively in my head ever since. A disco rhythm, I suppose. I never warmed to disco—which always struck me as crass yet flaccid, all buildup with no payoff—but rap I like. That’s because of the words, of course, which instead of being chained to some inane melody are freed to lead the rappers where they will, by way of their own intrinsic music. So it seems, at least, to my untrained ear. Much of it is utter nonsense, to be sure. As with the best nonsense, some of it seems as if it were made up on the spot, and also as if it could be a thousand years old.
It makes me happy, and also sad, to think that this is where playful language is cherished now, and where the verbosity that I and my clever friends prized in our youth has gone to reside: the slums. Words don’t cost a penny; during the Depression, they were all many of us had. I used them to make a fortune.
Later, people got richer, and they seemed to lose interest in what could be gotten for free. The way I spoke to them changed accordingly. I think back sometimes in near disbelief on my professional vocabulary of 1929, the ads of yesteryear that could never fly today. Our ads changed with the times, of course. Did the times change with our ads? Did the world change or did I change it?
The blocks around Washington Square Park are best avoided in the dark, and now’s a fine time to commence my westward drift: I have a quick stop I’d like to make for auld lang syne. Left on Greenwich, toward Seventh Avenue.
At this moment—the last hours of 1984, in a decaying city populated by bums and dope addicts and thuggish teenagers and the pistol-packing commuters who apparently shoot them for sport—it is difficult to believe that the residents of Manhattan ever did anything so refined as “call on” one another. It’s harder still to believe that the making of these social calls necessitated the ownership of cards—calling cards—that they would present in order to announce a visit, or to commemorate an attempt at one in instances where the resident was indisposed or not at home. Upon such cards, various ornaments—roses, perhaps, or doves—often occupied a spot below the bearer’s name. My Aunt Sadie Boxfish had forget-me-nots on hers. She always left me one on her rare visits to Washington, D.C., when I was a child, and I kept them all.
Aunt Sadie worked as a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital, right where I stand.
She went to the school of nursing here, in fact. This is where she was “capped,” as they called it, with her trim white hat, back in the days when horse-drawn ambulances still clattered over cobblestones.
In 1911 she had seen, but had not treated—they had been untreatable for being dead—the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Garment workers, she told me when she visited us the summer after that disaster, those were the victims. Trapped in a sweatshop, locked in by the owners, 146 people—123 of them women—alive and at work and then suddenly dead. Some weren’t much older than I was at the time: as young as fourteen. Most were under twenty-three. Most had burned to death. Some had kissed or held hands and then jumped from the windows and died that way.
The only time I saw my Aunt Sadie cry was when she told me that story. We were on a bench at the National Zoo, where we’d often go to talk outside of Mother’s disapproving earshot; my memories of her tales are all incongruously accompanied by the hoots and howls of jungle creatures that we rarely actually got around to seeing. Sadie felt it was important for a young person like me to hear accounts of the injustices she’d witnessed, which at any rate were never far from her mind. Mother, naturally, thought that people of good character ought to limit their consideration of such things to policies that might prevent them, and not to dwell on the indignity of their miserable particulars. I, naturally, was entirely with Sadie on this issue—but in my typical fashion, what I took from her stories was often not what she’d meant them to impart. When I finally left home, my aim was not to bring succor to the oppressed, but rather to find adventure in the wilds of Manhattan.
Sadie was at St. Vincent’s, too, when the Titanic sank, not much more than a year after the factory fire. A cold night for April, she said—the temperature probably about what it is tonight: a warm night for late December, but colder by the minute.