What I remember about working at construction consultants Merritt & Harris, Inc. is that I sat at a desk across from a man nearing retirement wearing a 20-year-old suit -- a nice guy, a fellow proofreader -- who asked my advice about a home roof repair project he was struggling with. I had told him that I had worked on some roofing jobs, which I had, but as a laborer clearing off the old composition tile and humping the new tile up a ladder. He had questions about flashing, about how to attach it. I pretended like I knew what I was talking about when I had not a clue. It must have been apparent. But as I said, he was a nice guy; he didn't let on that I was full of bullshit. Why do young people pretend to know more than they do?
The description of the gunshot victim on 42nd Street is from a time when crack-related violent crime was on the rise in the city; it would continue to grow. I'll have plenty of crack stories in the forthcoming Shit Stinks, a spontaneous prose document composed during the early '90s Upper Manhattan crack infestation.
Spring 1989
Wow! You did it man. And it wasn't so bad, was it? In fact, whip out another, another one with some more of that hippie funerals in Bolinas shit, and Stacey running in Golden Gate Park, and brick-tossing riots on Berkeley's Bancroft.
I'm working as a copy editor/proofreader at an engineering firm located across the street from Grand Central Station and down the road from the Chrysler Building. Mercury sits atop Grand Central (something which I never noticed until today) and he's wearing his old familiar winged WWI doughboy helmet; he's in between two bearded Greek gents with pillowcases fluttering about their loins. Yeah, well, the job is plenty boring. My fellow proofreaders are old, the youngest being somewhere around 50. But I keep the nose to the page and dutifully do the work until it's done. The problem with this is that they're very slow -- my co-workers -- and always telling me to "take it easy." I'm not trying to show them up or anything, it's just that there's nothing else to do. The desks are out in the open under long florescent lights. You can't sneak a quick read or snooze; shit, you can't even scratch a few notes or talk for any stretch of time longer than 30 seconds. To make matters worse, the word-processing/secretary/proofreader supervisor is one of those manic, thyroid types. Subsequently, I have but one option -- besides beating around the bush and dogging it to the coffee maker and the shitter -- and that is to read and correct the awkward and jargon-filled writing of wealthy engineers and to do it seven and one half hours a day.
The one bright spot in the day is my lunchtime walk to New York Public Library for a cup of coffee with steamed milk and a teaspoon of sugar (at an artsy-fartsy gazebo-type cafe that sits to one side of the library's grand marble steps).
Strolling westward on 42nd Street, past Park, past Madison, I look at as many women as I can sink my eyes into. A lot of women work in offices in the 5th Avenue and 42nd Street area. And while they're not breathtaking, they're enough, just enough -- assuming that a cup of java is coming -- to take you away from the complete ignobility of being a temporary proofreader in a midtown office building. But when they're stinky (droopy, pockmarked, bulbous), my eyes ricochet off and search for finer game. At times they'll bounce along for half a block before they rest on some tasty maid fresh from Lexington Avenue shuffles. She might not be pretty, but she's attractive; her brow is knit in inner dialogue -- "What should I have for lunch -- McDonald's? Pizza Hut?" Her breasts are spilling and dancing as she clacks down the sidewalk cement. All of a sudden she stops in front of a big storefront window. It's a deli. Sitting on the sill burning in the sun are 2-gallon glass jars of kosher pickles and sweet red peppers. They looked tired and beaten.
She doesn't know whether she should go in . . . . I walk by, and I say to myself, "Yeah!"
Today, after I finished work and was on my way to the subway station, I saw a guy belly shot and bleeding -- dying -- right there on the sidewalk. He was a black, a junkie, lying on his back on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the dirtiest, sleaziest and most crack-ridden block of 42nd Street. On his face was this expression, an expression like he had slipped, fallen backwards and all of a sudden didn't care, like in a dream when you fall off a building and then realize it's no big deal and so get comfortable with it and finally almost learn to enjoy it.
Two big white policemen stand a foot away, putting on airs of coolness and disinterestedness, like two big macho watchdogs of death, all the while this poor lost soul is trying to dam the hole in his belly with a balled-up t-shirt; blood runs down the curve of his belly and disappears into his bluejeans, giving them the look of wet red clay in a dry creek bottom . . . . The white tourist with a brightly colored clean shirt and well-groomed beard points his head and twists his mouth dramatically, as if for cameras and Klieg lights . . . . Junkie whores running from Eighth Avenue smokes to the sepulchral position beneath the faded marquee, running with the serious eager anticipatory faces of children who hear mom shouting that dinner is ready and come trotting home in the dust of dusk . . . . A gyrating prankster junkie, shirt off and hands fumbling down sweatpants, is moving in and out of the crowd; he's high as a fucking kite and bitching about something to himself until the police ask ask him who pulled the trigger; so he stands still, but proffers no reply; they yell at him, tell him to take his hands out of his pants . . . . And I'm seeing all of this ten yards ahead and knowing exactly what it is I cut right through the half moon that has formed around the dying junkie. I have an old polyester sports coat in my hand, and I look at his face. And he, with the very equanimity in strength of purpose that made man who made God who made man, he looks right back. I walk past and hit the subway, bruising my leg on the turnstile because I forget to put deposit a token.
So I'm drinking a little wine this evening, a little ROBERT MONDAVI WHITE, and getting ready to get on the 'A' train pretty soon, and tumble down to 42nd Street and see all the smoking junkies waddling crashed and horrified and happy on the corner of Eighth Avenue. As I always preach and have actually done at many a week night drunken gathering: "Better to drink now and go to bed drunk and wake up feeling poisoned than give your employer anything approaching staid energetic and sober productivity." Amen.
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