“I suppose it’s possible.”
“So I don’t get over to Eleventh Avenue much,” he said. “They ain’t got nothing I need.”
His Percodan story had put me in mind of Jan’s decision to pass up painkillers rather than compromise her sobriety. My mind tracked that thought and I almost missed the implications of what Barry was saying.
Then my brain geared down and I said, “DeWitt Clinton Park. There’s a little park a block or two below the corner where Holtzmann was shot. The west side of Eleventh. Is that the park you’re talking about?”
“Uh-huh. Clinton Park. You ever go there, don’t buy nothing off a white boy with mirror shades. Be wasting your money.”
“That’s a little out of my range,” I said. “I didn’t even know the name of the park. They sell a lot of drugs there?”
“Sell a lot of shit,” Barry said. “Pill’d have to do more’n that for me before I’d call it a drug. There’s always dealers there, if that’s your question. This here’s about the only park I know that don’t have dealers in it, and that’s on account of how small it is. No grass, no trees, just slabs for benches and tables. Call it a park, but it’s just a wide part of the sidewalk. A genuine park, you sure to have drug dealers.”
“They can’t get much business over there.”
“You selling what the people want, they come an’ find you.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“An’ at night you get the girls. You know the girls I mean. They just hang around in case somebody in a car or a truck calls them over to ask directions.”
“That’s further downtown, isn’t it? It used to be just north of the Lincoln Tunnel that the girls would work the traffic.”
“Don’t know about that,” he said. “Girls I know about is right here on Eleventh Avenue, strutting their stuff in the blond wigs and the hot pants. ’cept they ain’t girls, if you take my meaning.”
“You mean they’re transsexuals.”
“Transvestites, transsexuals. There’s a difference, but I disremember which is which. Boys looking to be girls, and I must say there’s some of ’em look mighty fine. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, I’m too old for that,” I said.
He cackled happily. “You younger’n I am, and I ain’t too old for it. The girls on Eleventh Avenue, though, they got an eye for the dollar. An’ a lot of ’em sick nowadays, you go with ’em and you catch your death. No, when I get the old feeling, I’m better off with my schoolteacher.”
“Who’s that?”
“Lady I know, lives up near Lincoln Center. Teaches the fourth grade up in Washington Heights. Likes that white wine, whatchacall Chardonnay. I believe that’s how you say it. Always has beer in the icebox for me, though. And I can always have a hot bath there, and while I’m soaking in the tub she’ll be down in the basement running my clothes through the washing machine. I can stay there on a cold night, an’ she’ll cook me breakfast in the morning, if she don’t have too bad of a wine hangover.” He uncapped the OE bottle and looked down into it. “She’ll gen’ly come up with five or ten dollars, too, but I don’t like to take money from her.” He looked at me. “But sometimes I do,” he said.
Chapter 10
Dewitt Clinton Park covers two city blocks, extending from Fifty-second Street to Fifty-fourth Street and from Eleventh Avenue to Twelfth Avenue. A baseball field ringed by a twelve-foot cyclone fence takes up more than half the space, and most of what remains is given over to a playground for children, also fenced. The baseball field was deserted when I got there, but the playground was in use, with kids playing on the swings and slides and monkey bars, and clambering with abandon on the great outcropping of rock that had been allowed to remain for that purpose.
At the southeast corner of the park stood a World War I memorial, a larger-than-life statue of a Doughboy green with verdigris, a rifle on his shoulder. These six lines were engraved upon the small plinth on which he stood:
I remembered the poem from high school English. The author was one of the War Poets, but I couldn’t recall which one, Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen or someone else. The plinth offered no clues; as far as it was concerned, the lines might have been the work of the Unknown Soldier.
To the Doughboy’s right, two men many years younger than I stood close together, deep in conversation. One was black and wore a Chicago Bulls warm-up jacket, the other an Hispanic in acid-washed denim. Perhaps they were debating the authorship of the poem, but somehow I didn’t think so. The poppies that interested them didn’t grow on Flanders fields.
On my earlier visits to Eleventh Avenue I hadn’t noticed any drug dealers, but then I’d barely taken notice of the park, deserted at that hour. Now, in the late afternoon, it was still a long way from being a drug supermarket like Bryant Park or Washington Square. There were young men scattered about, singly or in pairs, sitting on benches or leaning against the fence, perhaps eight of them in all. Two more sat behind home plate in the otherwise empty grandstand. Most of them eyed me, warily or in entrepreneurial anticipation, as I made my rounds. A few whispered enticements: “Smoke, good smoke.”
At the park’s western edge I looked across Twelfth Avenue and viewed the traffic, already beginning to thicken with commuters heading for the bridge and the northern suburbs. Beyond the stream of cars stood the Hudson piers. I tried to picture George Sadecki in his ratty army coat, dodging traffic so that he could heave his gun off one of those piers. But of course he’d have run that particular fool’s errand in the middle of the night. There would have been less traffic to dodge.
I turned to watch a couple of fellows my age giving each other a workout on the handball court. They had piled their jackets and sweatpants at courtside and were down to shorts and shoes and terrycloth sweatbands, and they powered the ball as if determined to drive it through the wall, playing with the singleminded devotion of the middle-aged male. A few years ago Jan Keane and I had come upon a similar display, a pickup basketball game in the Village, and she had made a show of sniffing the air. “Testosterone,” she announced. “I can smell the testosterone.”
Bring me a gun, she’d said. I pictured her holding it in her hands, sniffing the oiled steel. I imagined the shot, heard her disembodied voice over its reverberation. Cordite, she’d be saying. I can smell the cordite.
I left the park at its northwest corner, and the first pay phone I came to was right there at Twelfth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. I listened to the dial tone but held on to my quarter because someone had removed the label that gave the phone’s number. You could call out from the unit but no one could call you back.
There was a phone with its number intact at Fifty-fourth and Eleventh, but it wouldn’t take a quarter from me. I tried four different coins and it found something unacceptable about each of them, spewing them all back to me. I retrieved them in turn and walked a block north, and the phone I wound up calling from was the one Glenn Holtzmann used for the last call he ever made. It had its number posted, it provided a dial tone, and it took my quarter. As long as nobody shot me I was in good shape.