Phil gave me that crooked, deceptively candid grin he’s had since we were five years old. “I’m a good artist. I’m really good. But I ain’t that good.”
We sat in silence for a while, while the leaves blew and tumbled past us, and a few sharp, tiny raindrops stung our faces. By and by Phil spoke again, quietly enough that I had to lean closer to hear him. “But we were magic too, in our way. You rounding up every single map between here and Yonkers, and me … ” He hunched over, arms folded on his knees, the way he still does without realizing it. “Me at that damn easel, brush in one hand, gas-station map in the other, trying to make art out of the New Jersey Turnpike. Trying to make all those highways and freeways and Interstates and Tennessee and Georgia come alive for a family of mythological, nonexistent … hour after goddam miserable, backbreaking, cockamamie hour, and that San Juan candle dropping wax everywhere … ”
His voice trailed off into the familiar disgusted mumble. “I don’t know how I did it. Beagle. Don’t ask me. All I knew for sure was, you can’t let centaurs wander around lost in the Bronx—you can’t, it’s all wrong—and there I was.”
“It’ll get them to Mexico,” I said. “I know it will.”
“Yeah, well.” The grin became a slow, rueful smile, less usual. “The weird thing, it’s made me … I don’t know better, but just different, some way. I’m never going to have to do anything like that again, thank God—and I bet I couldn’t. But there’s other stuff, things I never thought about trying before, and now it’s all I’m doing in my head, right now—my head’s full of stuff I have to do, even if I can’t ever get it right. Even though.” The smile faded, and he shrugged and looked away. “That’s them. They did that.”
I turned my coat collar up around my face. I said, “I read a story about a boy who draws cats so well that they come to life and fight off demons for him.”
“Japanese,” Phil said. “Good story. Listen, don’t tell anybody, not even Jake and Marty. It gets out, they’ll want me to do all kinds of stuff, all the time. And magic’s not an all-the-time thing, you’re not ever entitled to magic—not ever, no matter how good you are. Best you can do—all you can do—is make sure you’re ready when it happens. If.”
His voice had grown somber again, his eyes distant, focusing on nothing that I could recognize. Then he brightened abruptly, saying, “Still got the brushes, anyway. There’s that. Whatever comes next, there’s the brushes.”
Weston offers customized insider tours of New York, but he never wants to take the tourists down to the unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, abandoned spaces—underneath the city he loves.
WESTON WALKS
KIT REED
When your life gets kicked out from under you like a chair you thought you were standing on, you start to plan. You swear: Never again. After the funeral Lawrence Weston sat in a velvet chair that was way too big for him while the lawyer read his parents’ will out loud. He didn’t care about how much he was getting; he only knew what he had lost and that he would do anything to keep it from happening again.
He was four.
Like a prince in the plague years, he pulled up the drawbridge and locked his heart against intruders. Nobody gets into Weston’s tight, carefully furnished life, and nobody gets close enough to mess up his heart.
Now look.
When your money makes money you don’t have to do anything— so nothing is what Weston ordinarily does, except on Saturdays, when he comes out to show the city to you. It isn’t the money—don’t ask how much he has—he just needs to hear the sound of a human voice. He lives alone because he likes it, but at the end of the day that’s exactly what he is. Alone.
It’s why he started Weston Walks.
He could afford an LED display in Times Square but he sticks to three lines in The Village Voice: “New York: an intimate view. Walk the city tourists never see.”
He’ll show you things you’ll never find spawning upstream at Broadway and Forty-second Street or padding along Fifth Avenue in your puffy coats. This is the insider’s walking tour.
Nobody wants to be an outsider, so you make the call. It’s not like he will pick up. His phone goes on ringing in some place you can’t envision, coming as you do from out of town. You hang on the phone, humming “pick up, pick up, pick up.” When his machine takes your message, you’re pathetically grateful. Excited, too. You are hooked by Weston’s promise: Tailored to your desires.
What these are, he determines on the basis of a preliminary interview conducted over coffee at Balthazar, on him—or at Starbucks, on you— depending on how you are dressed, and whether he likes you well enough to spend the day with you, in which case he’ll let you pay. He is deciding whether to take you on. No matter how stylish your outfit—or how tacky—if he doesn’t like what he hears, he will slap a hundred or a twenty on the table at Balthazar or Starbucks, depending, and leave you there. It’s not his fault he went to schools where you learn by osmosis what to do and what not to wear. It’s not your fault that you come from some big town or small city where Weston would rather die than have to be. Whatever you want to see, Weston can find, and if you don’t know what that is and he decides for you, consider yourself lucky. This is an insider tour!
You’re itching to begin your Weston Walk, but you must wait until the tour is filled, and that takes time. Weston is very particular. At last! You meet on the designated street corner. You’re the ones with the fanny packs, cameras, monster foam fingers, Deely Bobbers, Statue of Liberty crowns on the kids—unless you’re the overdressed Southerner or one of those razor-thin foreigners in understated black and high-end boots. Weston’s the guy in black jeans and laid-back sweater, holding the neatly lettered sign.
He is surprisingly young. Quieter than you’d hoped. Reserved, but in a good way. Nothing like the flacks leafleting in Times Square or bellowing from tour buses on Fifth Avenue or hawking buggy rides through Central Park. He will show you things that you’ve never seen before, from discos and downtown mud baths nobody knows about to the park where your favorite stars rollerblade to the exclusive precincts of the Academy of Arts and Letters—in the nosebleed district, it’s so far uptown—to the marble grand staircase in the Metropolitan Club, which J. P. Morgan built after all the best clubs in the city turned him down.
Notice that at the end Weston says good-bye in Grand Central, at Ground Zero, or the northeast corner of Columbus Circle—some public place where he can shake hands and fade into the crowd. You may want to hug him, but you can’t, which is just as well because he hates being touched. By the time you turn to ask one last question and sneak in a thank-you slap on the shoulder, he’s gone.