Londongrad

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A girl I knew slightly was coming out of the building with her dog, a dachshund, and we exchanged views on the noise in the street the night before and cracked some jokes about the tourists. She was going up on the roof one night and shoot at them with a beebee gun, she said, and I laughed. We agreed to get coffee some day and I felt better. Coming home here to my place off Broadway where I’d lived for fifteen years made everything okay. I was home.

Upstairs in my loft, I switched on the news and got scores from the game last night-the Yankees were so lousy this summer only a faithful dog of a fan like me would care. I was thinking of switching to the Dodgers. At least they had Joe Torre.

Already there was a report on the girl on the swing. Speculation had begun on Masha Panchuk. It was a holiday weekend and the news cycle was hungry and everybody had an opinion: it was drug-related; the work of some nutjob seeking attention; a crazed terrorist. There was even an item about a Brooklyn artist who made human forms out of duct tape he had purchased after 9/11 when the city bought the stuff in bulk so we could all tape up our windows against some future nuke attack. I turned the TV off.

With Clifford Brown on my stereo, and listening to the incredible “Joy Spring” solo, I got into the shower, let it pour hot and hard over me, then switched to ice cold. When I got out I looked in the mirror.

I was looking okay. I’d been sleeping, I had quit smoking for the most part, I lost a few pounds.

Clean clothes on, I fixed some espresso. My place was looking good. I’d bought it cheap years earlier when nobody wanted a place down here, and I had scraped down the old wood floors myself until they shone. Got some nice mid-50s furniture. Put up shelves.

On the walls were framed photographs of the musicians I love-Stan Getz, Ella, Duke, Lester Young, Dizzy, Miles. Maybe I’d retire and take lessons. My father had loved the music. Even in Moscow, he had loved it.

I checked my messages. Tolya had called twice, reminding me I was due at his club to sample new wines. Another friend wanted to know if I’d go fishing the following day. It was okay. Everything was fine. I was okay.

On that night when I drove over to Tolya’s place, Manhattan felt like a cruise ship, an overcrowded pleasure boat, getting ready to sink, but full of people having a ball as it sailed through the lit-up streets. Any minute, though, it would hit bedrock and start to go down, too loaded up with ambition, real estate, money, talent, sex, drugs booze, work, and always money. It was ready. It was ripe. Something had to explode.

In the summer, New York lived in the streets. Restaurants and bars spilled their customers out onto the streets, along the big avenues, on the grid of streets running river to river, and in the winding alleys downtown.

The streets were jammed with tourists gorging on the city, the dollar cheap. Everywhere you heard foreign voices, Japanese, French, Brit, all of them frenzied, rushing the bars, restaurants, even stores that were open late to service them, to sell them stuff, any stuff, sneakers, computers, sheets, like they were expecting disaster, their last best chance, as if they, too, somehow knew a crash was coming. The streets seemed to shudder from so many pounding feet, I felt I could feel them move, judder, throb, under my own feet.

Every transaction took place over food, booze, coffee, drugs as people hurried, hurry, hurry, to get some whatever it was while the stock market went up four hundred points, then down four hundred points. Oil skyrocketed, money was made out of smoke and mirrors and fraud, and there were more homeless out on the streets than I had seen for years.

Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.

A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.

In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.

I only half listened. I didn’t have any money anyway.

The West Village had changed since I first got to New York when, for a while, I lived in a crummy walk-up on Horatio Street and hung around the Village Vanguard to hear the music. Bums pissed on my front steps, but writers still went to the White Horse Tavern, and gay men haunted the Hudson piers where you could take some sun and smell the stink of pollution in the river.

All gone.

Brownstones on tree-lined streets housed movie stars, limos idled at the curb outside pubs where painters used to go back in the day, and nobody, not the writers or artists or jazz guys, gave a rat’s ass for money. Manhattan’s Old Bohemia had disappeared.

My head felt thick. I couldn’t stop thinking about Masha, the duct tape, the way she died. I parked in front of Pravda2, and went in, and then I knew what had been bothering me, making my head thick, making me edgy, unnerved by the noise and the night.