The Sea Beach Line (16 page)

“What's that?”

“What do you think of the Islanders' chances this year?”

“I . . . I don't know. I don't really follow sports.”

“Oh, okay.” He glanced at my Yankees cap and shrugged. I had failed to relate. He turned back to his friends. I leaned back in the booth and watched the four men joke and jostle each other. They had an easy banter between them, and I had trouble catching the rhythm of it. These guys were the group I was expected to be part of, but had never been able to fit into. My high school on Long Island had been full of guys like this. For years, I'd felt out of step, felt a burn of exclusion. I didn't know if it was their fault or mine. Maybe it was no one's fault, and I was just in the wrong place.

Now something was beginning to change in me, and I felt relief at not being one of the guys. Generations of struggle and study had resulted in what? More bankers, lawyers, and landlords? What did you get for all that effort and work? A gold watch? I finished my drink. More had appeared on the table. Andrew might become my brother, but I would not become like these guys. I would become something from an older time, when Jews were fiercer, gangsters like Benya Krik. Tough guys like Alojzy. If there was devouring to be done, I would devour myself. I was getting pretty drunk—the Jägermeister had hit me hard—but I knew my perspective was not merely alcohol induced. I didn't want to get a position at a firm of any stripe but to find my own way, in the streets.

“Hey,” DC announced. “This place is kind of dead. Let's head downtown and find some action.” Allan had to get home to his fiancée, but the rest of us piled into a cab. I let myself be swept along into the car.

DC knew a spot on the Bowery. In the old novels I read, the Bowery was bleak, full of the down and out. It had changed since then, but not as completely as I expected. Dark silhouettes milled about as we
passed the illuminated windows of the Bowery Mission. We got out of the cab near a group of bundled-up men sleeping on cardboard on the sidewalk. A man in a filthy army jacket and knit cap approached DC, who still held his wallet after paying the cabbie.

“Hey, my man? Can you spare a couple bucks so as I could get something to eat?”

“Get lost, you damn bum,” DC said, shoving his wallet into his pocket. “I work for this money.” Andrew grinned. I wasn't sure if it was out of awkwardness, or if he was entertained by DC's cruelty. I was embarrassed by the situation, but I didn't say anything, and followed DC, Andrew, and Jason in through the door.

Inside the club, everything was new and shiny. Everyone was young, good-looking, and well dressed. I suddenly understood the phrase, “You look like a million bucks.” Colored lights flashed. Bass thumped from the speakers. Laughter echoed off the walls. A drink appeared in my hand, and I stood in a corner and sipped it.

A woman in a sleeveless green dress danced up next to me. Her hair didn't move as she shook.

“Hey,” she said. “You're Andrew and Jason's friend?” She gestured back to them at the bar.

“Hey. Yeah. You know them?”

“Sure do. I went to b-school with Jason. Stern.” I knew that Stern was NYU's business school; their building faced West Fourth Street. “Are you in finance too?”

“No.” She looked me up and down.

“Still in school?

“No.” I hesitated, then said, “I'm a street vendor.”

“Okay. Neat.” She looked at me like I was about forty bucks, and danced away.

I decided I needed to leave. This was the wrong place for me to be. I didn't have any animosity toward Andrew and his friends, except maybe DC, but that wasn't the issue. I was figuring out where I needed to go, what I needed to do. Following Alojzy's path, not these guys' paths. There was no point in hanging around and pretending just to placate Andrew and Becca, or my own conditioned sense of obligation.
Following that track, out of fear, had caused me to fail Alojzy when I was sixteen.

I put my empty glass on the bar. DC was busy flirting with a girl from Wisconsin, telling her he could help her find an apartment in the city.

“Harlem is totally safe now,” he told her. “There's lots of great renovations up there.” She looked skeptical.

Andrew and Jason were arguing about something at the bar. I was surprised at the intensity of the exchange, but I figured they were never not working, even when they were hanging out. I couldn't tell what the issue was because their discussion consisted of more numbers than words. At one point, I heard Jason shout, “The numbers don't add up, Andrew. They just don't add up.”

“Hey man,” I said, putting my hand on Andrew's arm. “I have to cut out. Thanks for the drinks. This was fun.”

“Huh?” he shouted, overcompensating for the din of the room. “Where you headed? Aren't you coming back uptown with me?”

“No,” I said. “I have to be somewhere else. I'll talk to you later.”

Becca had told me I needed a job or structure to stay at her apartment. That was fair enough. But I didn't need to stay at her apartment. I belonged in my father's house. We were pretty far downtown. It would only be about a half-hour walk across town to the storage space. I could use the walk, and the fresh air, to sober me up.

After making sure I still had the key ring, I walked across Chinatown, stopping to buy a wax paper bag of greasy vegetable egg rolls from a late-night stand. A couple people were hanging around in the parking lot outside the storage facility, but no one was in the facility's hallways.

Entering Alojzy's unit, I locked the door behind me and lay down on the mattress. I thought about my evening with Andrew and DC, who were probably still drinking at the same club, or at yet another bar. I was supposed to be here, in the cold room with the mattress on the floor, alone with the books.

BOOK 2

Knickerbocker Avenue

9

THE NEXT DAY I
left a voice mail for Becca, telling her that I was going to be working downtown full-time and crashing at an apartment in the back of the bookstore. It was essentially the truth, and I didn't want her or my mother to worry. Sleeping in the storage unit felt right. The simple living arrangement helped me feel ordered and undistracted. I had found Alojzy's world, even if I hadn't found him yet.

It was useful to wake up in the storage space on days when I was selling Alojzy's books. There wasn't really any money to be made in the morning hours, but it was necessary to get out early and get set up in your spot, so you'd be positioned for later in the day. My second day of selling Alojzy's books went as smoothly as the first. I stayed out for a good ten hours, packing up when Mendy did in the evening. The third day went the same way.

That night, I heard Zoya shouting at her girls in the corridor, and came out of my space to give her the envelope. It was still sealed; I hadn't looked inside it. Some messages were meant for me, and some weren't. I would have discipline. It had occurred to me that the note
could actually be about me, asking Zoya to confirm that I had delivered an envelope as promised and unopened.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Ms. Zoya?”

“
Shto
? What? What do you want?” I held up the envelope.

“This is from Timur.”

“Okay. Very good.” She snatched the envelope from me, and didn't say anything else. She went back to supervising her girls sorting their T-shirts, but I was confident she would report back to Timur that I'd done as asked.

After that, the Russian girls looked at me with recognition, and were slightly less rude when I passed them in the corridor. I don't know if Zoya said anything about me, or if they just treated anyone who dealt with their boss with some measure of respect. Of course, she also could have told them to keep an eye on me, so she could report back to Timur about my behavior. Until I found out what happened to Alojzy, I couldn't trust anyone.

I went out every day, to establish myself on West Fourth Street. Soon I wasn't counting the days. It was like road hypnosis: I'd wake up, take out the cart, set up my table, and sell all day long, following the ebb and flow of foot traffic. Before I knew it, I was waking up the next morning, getting ready for another day.

I got to know the other booksellers on the street. There was Asher, who I'd met the first day, and his silent friend, Milton. They set up next to Roberto, who liked to play psychedelic rock on a tape deck and smoke weed out of a one-hitter under his table. There was Steve Lesser, a proud Vietnam vet. Milton was a vet too, a Marine apparently, because Steve Lesser referred to him as “that stupid jarhead.” There was the other Steve, who drove in from Jersey. All of the booksellers knew my father and treated me with respect, not like I was some green college chump, or an interloper in the trade. Most of these men appeared in Alojzy's sketchbooks, and as I met them, it felt like the books were coming to life.

I asked each of the booksellers about Alojzy. They all had stories about him, generally of the type that Mendy had told me. He sounded tough in all of them, even like a hero in some. Once, he saved a woman
from a purse snatcher. Another time, he found a fifty-dollar bill inside a book he'd bought for fifty cents from a homeless man; unable to find the man to pay him back, he bought two cases of beer for all the homeless guys and street vendors. In other stories, he sounded like a bully. He'd apparently once roughed up Asher for setting up in his spot. The booksellers all called Alojzy “Al,” and I started to think of him that way too.

None of them knew anything about where he'd gone. This wasn't to say they didn't have ideas.

“He went to California,” Steve Lesser said. This made sense; Alojzy had sent postcards from out there, and often spoke of going “west.”

“Florida. I'm sure it was Florida,” the other Steve said. “But he got hurt down there. Maybe he died down there.”

Hafid just said, “He went away.”

“Poof,” Roberto agreed, “Al was gone without a word. I don't know where. Did you talk to Mendy?”

I got to know some of the other park fixtures as well. The hot dog vendors, the pot dealers, the homeless people. Some of the homeless people, like a sweet middle-aged woman name Sonya who had once been a chef, were cool, but just had substance issues that kept them on the street. Others were so crazy they couldn't string a full sentence together. They all knew us though, and we knew all of them. They'd pause in the middle of their rants to nod hello.

The area was heavily policed. There were beat cops all over the place, and even some undercover cops, running around playing their spy games. Mendy said they had to justify all the Homeland Security money they'd received. There were guys who acted more like undercover cops than the undercover cops, but were actually only plain-clothes NYU security guards. Even though NYU was in the middle of the city, not in the middle of nowhere like Oberlin, the administration wanted to form a bubble of safety for the students.

A rotating cast of musicians, acrobats, and dancers performed in the park for tips from tourists. One lean old man played a tenor saxophone in the northeast corner of the park, Broadway tunes over a prerecorded string backing. He reminded me of my father's friend
Kurban Vileshchay, who used to play on the Q and N trains. Kurban had been on my mind recently because he appeared in one of Alojzy's sketchbooks.

The first time I met Kurban was when he pushed his way from the previous subway car into the one where my father and I were sitting. Back then, people passed between cars all the time; it wasn't a big deal. The police had only just started to give out tickets for stuff like that. With one hand, Kurban pulled a luggage cart behind him, which held a Casio keyboard blasting an auto beat and chord progression. With his other hand, he held a large wooden flute to his lips. The music was already playing when Kurban came through the doors; there must have been a moment when he was playing in the space between cars, for nobody except the tunnels to hear.

When Kurban saw my father, he nodded in recognition, but he kept playing, and didn't come greet us until the song was finished and he had collected his hat-full of dollar bills and coins.

My father introduced me proudly to Kurban as his son.

“What kind of instrument is that, Mr. Vileshchay?” I asked.

“This, my young friend, is a balaban. I carved it myself from a single piece of mulberry wood.”

“I know mulberry,” I said. “There is a big mulberry tree on Kings Highway.” The branches were too high for me to reach, but my father had lifted me up on his shoulders, and I had eaten until I was sick.

“Yes,” said Kurban, “I know that tree well. It has white berries.”

“Yeah!”

“The white berries are much more delicious than the red ones. Well, gentlemen, I bid you a safe journey.” The little man tipped his cap, and crossed through the door into the next car. Through the windows, we could see Kurban playing his song, but we couldn't hear him. Then he moved forward and we couldn't see him anymore either.

I wanted to hear Kurban's balaban again. I wanted to taste mulberries, especially the sweet white ones. Mulberries would be in season in a couple months, sometime in May. I hoped I would find Al by then.