“I am a New York character,” I said. “The only reason I’m not famous is that I’m anonymous.”
“You don’t get your picture in the New York Times for staying sober against death-defying odds.”
“Or a million hits on YouTube.”
A pedicab passed us, its driver’s muscular legs pumping away. He grinned over his shoulder at his passengers, a honeymoon couple by the look of them.
“That’s the Dakota,” he said, “where John Lennon lived. He got shot on the sidewalk right outside. Do you want to see his memorial at Strawberry Fields? You can take pictures of the Imagine sign and listen to the music. I’ll let you out here and meet you on the other side.”
“That’s all the Dakota means to them,” Barbara said. “I’ve got nothing against the Beatles, but what about real history? Like when they put the building up in eighteen eighty-four, it was so far from civilization that it might as well have been in Dakota, which was still Indian territory back then.”
“Aw, now you’re just channeling Jimmy,” I said.
Jimmy, currently home watching the baby, was the history buff among us.
“Speaking of Jimmy, let me call home. Sunshine is due for a feed, and I’m beginning to leak.”
“Thank you for sharing.”
“Oh, Bruce, get over it. You don’t think Cindy’s going to want kids someday?”
“One day at a time,” I said. Cindy and I were barely up to the L word yet, and she was on the brink of making detective. “Let’s cut through Strawberry Fields. You can grab a cab on Central Park West.”
I was glad Barbara chose the left-hand path, not quite as steep as the right-hand path. I didn’t want to do any heavy climbing until I’d racked up ninety days off cigarettes. We pushed through the worshipers kneeling to lay flowers on the round gray stone mosaic and jogged past the Beatles wannabes strumming their acoustic guitars and warbling “Yesterday” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
“You’d think John and Yoko were the first famous people who ever lived in the Dakota,” Barbara said. “What about Judy Garland and Boris Karloff and Rudolf Nureyev and Leonard Bernstein? What about Lauren Bacall?”
She wasn’t even breathing through her mouth between sentences, damn her, and she was just getting back into shape after having a baby. We passed a regular whose singing voice sounded a lot like Dylan’s — not a compliment. He would have stuck to Dylan songs all day except that every time he sang one, the crowd clamored for more Beatles. We passed the Dollar a Joke Man, whose sign says he makes up all his jokes himself and offers you a refund if they don’t make you laugh.
“Have you ever—” I stopped short as a shower of mellow guitar notes fell into the air, spreading a hush around them like raindrops spreading ripples on a pond. A woman’s voice, smooth and dark as molasses and aching with loneliness, sang the first lines of “Eleanor Rigby.” A sweet tenor came in, winding harmony around her melody. The other performers, the hucksters, even the tourists shut up.
“I’ve got to hear this,” Barbara said.
She jogged in place, her arms wrapped around her breasts as if to stop the milk from overflowing onto the Imagine sign. The tourists held up their iPhones and started snapping pictures. You could see the singers didn’t like being photographed, though they were theatrically dressed in medieval minstrels’ garb. They kind of turned their shoulders to the crowd, and when they finished “Eleanor Rigby,” they didn’t start another.
“Who are they?” a guy in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt asked us.
“They’re New York characters,” I said, with a wink at Barbara.
“Everyone calls them the Homeless Troubadour and Lady Lost,” Barbara said.
“But they’re good,” the guy said. “Where do they perform? Where do they live?”
“Here,” Barbara said. “Nowhere.”
“They’re homeless,” I said. “And lost. Sorry, gotta go.”
I grabbed Barbara’s elbow and steered her up the path, past the Lennon Button Man, and through a clot of Europeans off a tour bus blocking traffic as they lined up for chicken and rice at a halal cart at the curb.
“Come on, Barb. Taxi!”
“I could have run longer,” she said. “Come out with me early tomorrow morning?”
“How early?”
“Five-thirty. Please say yes.”
“In the morning? Barb, you’re killing me.”
“Are you seeing Cindy tonight?”
“No, she’s on duty.”
“So come home with me. If you stay over, Sunshine will wake us all up, and you’ll be ready to go when I am. Jimmy can watch her before he goes to work.”
It’s a good thing AA has taught me that sometimes you have no choice but to surrender.
Okay, it was hard to complain about being kissed awake by a soft pink goddaughter with starfish hands clutching my ears and only a little drool on her rosebud lips.
“Good morning, Sunshine.”
“Vav-vav-vav,” she said.
Wasn’t that “father” in Klingon? The kid was precocious, if a little confused about who her daddy was.
It was even almost bearable to run down Central Park West in the pale light of an early morning with very little traffic to spoil the mood. Two triple espresso grande lattes from the Starbucks on Jimmy and Barbara’s corner helped.
“Let’s cut into the park at the Women’s Gate,” Barbara said. “Strawberry Fields is always so packed with tourists, you never get an unobstructed view.”
“Why do you think it’s such a big deal?” I asked. “It’s just a gray circle so small you couldn’t use it as a parking space for a circus-clown car. And most of the people who come weren’t even born when John Lennon died. But they lay down their roses and go away satisfied.”
“For me it’s not Lennon,” she said. “It’s imagining peace. The more people who get teary over that, the better.”
“I’m all for peace,” I said, “but I don’t get teary over it. And Beatles songs are okay, but some of those singers make me want to cry. The Dylan wannabe, for one. I think most of them are singing for free for a reason.”
“Not the Homeless Troubadour and Lady Lost,” Barbara said as we hung a left and jogged east. “They’re amazing singers. I bet they didn’t always play for free and sleep on a park bench. I wonder what their story is.”
The path looked naked with the Lennon Button Man’s stand missing from its usual station.
“For once, we’ll have Imagine to ourselves,” Barbara said.
But we didn’t.
“Oh! Oh no! Oh, my God!”
She stopped so abruptly that I tripped on her heels. I grabbed at her shoulders for balance and nearly toppled both of us. A woman in a purple velvet gown with flowing sleeves and dark blue satin slashings lay facedown across the Imagine mosaic. Her long brown hair fanned out in tangles down her back and shoulders, screening her face.
“I don’t think she’s having a sleep-out, Barb, do you?” The flowers scattered over her body kind of gave it away.
“We have to check anyway,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Don’t touch her with your bare hands.”
“So this is the end of the story for Lady Lost,” she said. “Poor thing.”
We both took out clean bandannas and our cell phones, neither of which a runner in Manhattan should ever be without. Barbara took a few quick pictures on her phone while I used my bandanna to hold her hair away from her face and get in close. There were flowers under her too, but that didn’t make her a pretty sight.
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” Barbara said. “Be careful!”
“I’m just getting close enough to make double sure she’s past helping,” I said. “It looks like she was strangled with some kind of wire. There’s an ugly ridge around her neck.”