Grief Street

with an obliging bargain, “Hear, see, and say nothin’—eat, drink, and pay nothin.’ ”
    That is but one side of my two-faced neighborhood. Sometimes people have to leave the Kitchen to appreciate a place that is at once criminal and tender. On returning, we may then see how courage and misery pave the streets, as surely as concrete and cobblestone. When we have truly come home again, we feel this in our feet with every step.
    There are wonderful old smokes hanging about the neighborhood to this day, the same as a generation ago: men and women who have become odd socks in a dusty drawer, pensioners sitting on stoops all day telling wide-eyed kids the amazing tall tales of their lives. They tell Kitchen kids the terrible and beautiful things that have happened in their streets: acts of brutality and heroism and nobility alike. And all these things are evident in the faces of our old smokes, each crease and wrinkle a page in the story of Hell’s Kitchen.
    An odd sock taught me long ago, “Teach yourself and test yourself, that’s the way.” I have forgotten his name but not his advice, which has brought me comfort, and which is not nearly as dangerous as shaving. Everybody should be educated the same, for fear of one day becoming the victim of an ill-guided razor.
    It was on the stoops and in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen where I learned as much as I ever learned in a classroom. For instance, I learned to value charity. Now today—after the dream-creeping crimes—I know this to be the most powerful of all my lessons.
    Even in these vicious nowadays there are simple acts of mercy in my neighborhood, committed by people who do not care if anybody ever knows their names. I especially remember an unsung hero who collected woolen gloves and mittens all year long until Christmastime, when he roamed the streets giving warmth to people who had somehow lost their way. Nobody knew him by any name but Mitten Man. A few years ago, he died.
    Certain other things are different about today’s Kitchen. Uzis and TEC-9s have replaced the zip guns and switchblades of quainter years. Also, we are currently graced by a whole new class of immigrants: the type who walk Akita dogs, yap on cellular phones, and buy plastic bottles of Evian, which I recently learned is designer water from France. I like to think that Evian spelled backward is the French designer’s joke on his American clientele.
    In my boyhood, practically everybody in the neighborhood lived on the margins, much like Mother and me— taking in laundry, rolling up pennies, steering clear of the hard guys, mopping the hallway linoleum for a break in the rent. Everybody dreamed of leaving. We wanted to put the Kitchen and its ghosts behind us—the nagging ghosts of the potato famine. We wanted to forget, if not forgive. How I envied those who managed the great escape.
    Back about midway through Ike, the big mustard yellow Cirker moving vans would come around nearly every weekend and cart off the belongings of the upwardly mobile for the relative calm of the Bronx. In my sleep, I imagined some perfect Saturday morning in October when the Cirker van would pull up right in front of our own tenement. With all my heart I wanted to be like those lucky Kitchen kids, the ones on their way out: sitting in the cab next to the driver as the van pulled away forever, big grins on their faces, thinking crayon-picture thoughts of leafy Bronx neighborhoods like Riverdale or Woodlawn or Parkchester, waving at us suckers left behind.
    I was eighteen when I temporarily escaped the neighborhood for the first time. This was a two-year hitch in Vietnam, a country I never heard of until Sam sent me over to kill commies. After that came a year of City College up in Harlem until I washed out.
    Then I joined the department. Imagine: another Irish cop in the Emerald City. At this same time I married a Kitchen girl after she herself washed out as a novitiate—Judy McKel-vey, aka Sister Maria of the Franciscan Order of Perpetual Adoration. I served a six-year stretch of domestic unbliss with the ex-nun. We lived in a cute little house over in Ridgewood until a Queens Civil Court judge awarded the place to her and otherwise instructed me in the meaning of divorce: from the Greek divorcicus, to pull one’s testicles through one’s wallet.
    With experiences like that, who needs escape? So I returned to my briar patch for good.
    Actually, for a number of years the homecoming was not so good.