The Sea Beach Line (17 page)

During the first week or so of selling, I gave in when people would ask for discounts. My patience was soon expended. I asked myself if Al would let these people take money from his pocket, and the answer was hell no. If they were going to waste my time, and tear me away from my reading, the least they could do was pay full price. By the beginning of my second week on the street, I was done providing discounts. They could take my price or leave it.

Over this time, I gradually adapted to spending my days out on the street. I was like an abandoned house cat learning to hunt and feed himself. It was a different way of interacting with the world, to claim part of the curb and sidewalk as your personal space, rather than just passing through it. When Becca and I moved to Long Island, the suburban kids made fun of our city kid habit of referring to the ground as “the floor.” I never really lost the habit, and it made even more sense here, where the cement ground was the floor of my business, the place where I set my table. The buildings felt like flat walls. I was very conscious of the fact that customers were stepping onto my patch of the earth. I'd had a few jobs in high school and college—retail or library work—but in those situations I'd been standing in someone else's space, and hadn't claimed ownership of or responsibility for the work environment.

I not only became more conscious of the ground, but of the sky and air as well. When it would be light and when it would get dark. How gray the clouds had to be before I should worry. It was a pleasure to sit on the curb for an hour at a time, during the afternoon lull, and watch the clouds above the tops of the buildings. It wasn't like I was in the countryside, though. The exhaust from cars and trucks clogged the street. It was warm on my face and thick in my lungs. After a while, I began to think I could see the plumes of exhaust swirling off the blacktop.

Though I wasn't making any immediate progress in finding Al, I was on the right track. Not everything came quickly. Akiva didn't make it to
Pardes
until very late in his life's journey. He spent his younger life as a shepherd, before going away to study for twenty-four years. I was studying, in a way. I was gaining an understanding of how
Al experienced the world. I was sticking to the path he'd cut. I was maintaining his presence on the street. Maybe these were my shepherd days. Either way, it felt right.

Sometimes I felt more like Akiva's wife, Rachel. I could often see myself on both sides of the same story. Rachel had given up luxury and class position to marry Akiva, because she believed in him when no one else did. The whole time he was studying, she waited for him to come down the road. When he finally came home after twelve years, because he missed her, he overheard her telling a neighbor she wouldn't mind if he spent another twelve years studying, if that's what he needed to do. Akiva turned right back around, and studied for twelve more years. I imagined that Al might visit West Fourth Street, but not be able to show himself. Maybe he already had. It was important that he see me holding our position on the street, even if I didn't see him.

Still, I found myself looking longingly down the street for a familiar face. I put off calling Becca, but half hoped she would wander by one day and find me working. She would see me differently, out on the street. A girl I'd gone to high school with stopped and bought a book from me one day. Something by Ayn Rand, I think. The girl, who was going to college in the city, looked at me like she thought she knew me, then shook her head. Context clouded her recognition. Every day, I began to recognize more and more of the people coming down the street. Regular customers, regular browsers, regular passersby. Other street vendors and street people. But I was still watching and waiting.

I tried to make sense of when and how Al had gotten involved with selling books. He had been selling out here consistently for a while. West Fourth Street appeared in all but one of the sketchbooks. That one featured the dead soldier, the docks, and many scenes of war.

It was hard to get a clear account from the other booksellers of when Al had come down to the street, but he was there before Hafid, who had been selling for about three years. Mendy had known Al for at least six or seven years, possibly more, but he had met him when
he was selling art books with Goldov. They primarily sold down in SoHo, so Mendy wasn't sure when Al had actually started selling on West Fourth Street. And of course, Al came and went at different times. All I knew for sure was that he had sold art books with Goldov for a while, then gradually ended up selling his own paperbacks on West Fourth Street. He must have dabbled with bookselling long before that, though, because I remembered the boxes of hardcovers in his Sheepshead Bay apartment. Was he already in business with Goldov then? I didn't think I'd ever met the man as a kid.

Al's Sheepshead Bay apartment had been filled with boxes of other things besides books. Cigarette cartons. Knicks jerseys that were clearly counterfeit, even to my inexperienced eye. A crate of etrogs one autumn, each one carefully wrapped in newspaper. Whenever I asked what something was, the answer was “merchandise.” One time, he had a plastic postal crate filled halfway to the top with subway tokens. This was during the interstitial time, when MetroCards existed but turnstiles still took tokens. They were gold, with five-sided holes cut out of the middle. There must have been a thousand tokens in the crate. It was like a treasure chest.

Even when Al lived with us on the Upper East Side, he'd occasionally bring “merchandise” home to the house. He often had a straight, if temporary, job, and when he did he kept the hustles to a minimum. He was good with his hands, and worked on and off as a house painter, mover, and welder. I wondered if I should—or could—learn to weld. Reshaping metal at will seemed magical. It was also a good, solid way to make money. Al never got a steady welding job—he blamed it on the nepotism and cronyism of American unions, a view that also made him skeptical of the Solidarity movement in Poland—but he'd get on a project now and again. He worked on the subway tracks one year, though it was as an outside contractor, not an MTA employee.

Between jobs, Al would get up to his hustles, and bring things into the apartment. One time he brought home two bronze eagles. They were over a foot tall, perched with their wings half spread. They looked just like the eagle on the quarter. My mother flipped out when she saw them, screaming at him to get them out of the house.
In retrospect, Al—or someone he knew—had stolen them from a flagpole base in Central Park with a hacksaw. This was an egregious and stupid theft of city property. Then, I was only five or six, and was under the impression that the birds had flown away from the park and come to live with us. Becca and I bickered over what to name them, eventually settling on the compromise that we each got to name one. She named hers Joey, and I named mine Sinbad. Al warned us not to mention the birds to anyone, and after a few days they were gone. Becca told me they had flown south for the winter. Thinking back on it, I wondered if Al sold them for scrap, or to a collector who valued them for what they were.

Toward the end of the second week I was out selling, I bought a bag of weed off a Rasta in the park named Malachi. I knew enough by then to know that he was an actual pot dealer and not an undercover cop. Sonya and her boyfriend Lionel bought from him. They were mainly drunks, but they would get messed up on anything that didn't require a needle. When he wasn't selling drugs to NYU students and teenagers who came off the PATH train, Malachi would stand around and extoll the virtues of an all-raw diet. I hadn't gotten high since I'd been in New York. I didn't really have a desire to smoke, but getting high had been a central habit for a quarter of my life, and I felt weird not getting high for this long.

Because I was a recognized bookseller, Malachi offered me a twenty sack for fifteen, which sounded like a good deal. “The man in the street must look out for the man in the street,” he said, “no?” I gave the old dread my three fives, expecting him to hand me a baggie in return. Instead, he nodded at a kid on a bike, who took off toward Sixth Avenue. I asked what was up, but Malachi said, “Have patience now.” A few minutes later, the cyclist returned. “Ah,” said Malachi, “here is Merlin now.” I shook hands with Merlin, and he slipped the baggie into my hand.

I smoked some of the weed in the storage space that night, out of a Diet Coke can, after stuffing the gap under the door with rags. Expecting it to be shit weed, I smoked a couple bowls in quick succession. It wasn't bad weed at all, just slow and creeping, and twenty minutes after I smoked up, I was tweaking out and becoming very paranoid. The fear was physical. It constricted and twisted my skull. I deeply regretted the decision to smoke, and wished that the feelings would end. I felt like I was peaking higher than marijuana alone could account for. Maybe the acid thoughts that had been receding to the back of my mind had trailed out under the influence of the weed. The ditch weed I'd smoked in New Mexico hadn't affected me like this, but the combination of stronger, chemmy weed and being in the pressurized environment of New York City pushed things to another level.

I convinced myself that the facility staff had smelled the weed through the vent, and had called the cops to come get me. They would throw all Al's stuff in the street; when he came back, he would be angry that I had gotten all his property destroyed. It occurred to me that, as it was, when Al did come back, instead of being proud of me, he might be angry that I had taken over his business. Then I started thinking, out of nowhere, that some men my father had robbed would come looking for him, and kill me when they found me in his place. I stayed up all night, cowering in the corner of the storage space with Al's sawed-off rifle in my arms. After locating and oiling the stiff release latch, I managed to remove and load the magazine.

I finally came down and passed out around five a.m. When I woke up it was close to nine, which was much later than I went out selling. Rushing to get the rig together, I kept mixing up the boxes and tying the knots wrong. Finally, I gave up, and crawled back into bed. In the afternoon, I flushed the rest of the weed down the toilet. I was done with that shit. It hadn't been fun, and even if it had been, it couldn't cost me any more days of selling. Selling books was my job now. Al was no saint, not by a long shot, but his hustle didn't allow room for this kind of nonsense and wasted time. I needed to stop fucking around.