Grief Street

ink. Gough’s is dead now, due halfway to employment attrition thanks to the thieving computers and halfway to the fact that so many of us former clients are currently on the wagon.

    But the house loon of Gough’s, bless his crazed heart, is still at his post in the trash-strewn doorway.
    There he was now: perched on a slab of plywood with skate wheels bolted to the bottom, his means of transport. His greasy pants were hiked up over thigh stumps, to encourage the sympathies of passers-by.
    He looked up at me sternly. For some reason he said, “God’s really pissed off at you!”
    He shook a paper cup that had a couple of suggestive quarters rattling inside. A thin woman bustling by in clicky high heels dimed him. I thought the tiny gift might agitate the loon, but instead it changed his tone from stern to singsong plaintive. He sang out something I do not believe has been routinely heard since the days of Charles Dickens prowling the tubercular streets of London: “Alms for the poor... alms for the poor...”
    So I gave the loon all the change I had in my pocket, two quarters, two dimes, and a nickel. I kept back a subway token, though. He stared back and forth between his cup and my face. I asked, “Got enough to make it tonight, friend?”
    “Shot of this golden stuff and I’ll make it through whatever fate’s in store,” said Gough’s loon. He took a flat-bottled pint of Duggan’s Dew from his belt and nipped at it. “Me and God Almighty—him being in charge of fate and all—we’re drinking buddies.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Don’t you expect God takes himself a snootful now and again?”
    A fair answer, I thought, and deserving of the token I had held back. I forked it over, as a sort of tip. The loon smiled calmly. I moved on.
    The Times Square Hotel, twelve storeys of stout brick, ’ stands at the corner of Eighth Avenue, which is the westerly edge of my own Hell’s Kitchen. A few years ago the city * rescued the place from disintegration by making it over as second-chance housing for the formerly hopeless. Ben & Jerry’s leased part of the ground level and hired the tenants to run one of their ice cream parlors—at very decent wages, j Washington politicians ignore a project like this because they get much better whoops from the money crowd by talking about how they want to get government off our backs.
    Across the way from the Ben & Jerry’s, I noticed a commotion going on between a pair of bearded merchants in I yarmulkes and black coats over tallith fringes and a wired up skell in a dirty tan windbreaker. Surrounding them was a small mob of Japanese tourists snapping pictures. “You can’t redeem for this!” one of the yarmulkes shouted, over I and over. He was holding a bouquet of Yankees pennants in one hand and some sort of store coupon in the other. “I swear to God,” the skell responded each time. “I paid, I swear to God.”
    I crossed the street, and one of the Japanese turned to I ask me, “Excuse, sir, please—what happening here?”
    “A religious dispute,” I said, trying to be entertaining. This seemed to make the Japanese guy’s day. He gleefully translated for his countrymen, who became likewise pleased. I crossed Eighth Avenue.
    There is a battleship gray tenement on the north side of the next block, number 309, where a Kitchen kid called Alphonse Capone was born in the year 1899. His family escaped to Chicago, where young Alphonse earned the street name of Scarface and eventually distinguished himself in the beverage industry. Next door to Capone’s birthplace is now a Christian bookshop. And next door to that is a squatty warehouse belonging to Charles Scribner & Sons, a publisher of less consecrated works. One of Scribner’s authors, Ernest Hemingway, was allowed to stash crates of ammunition for his famous African safaris in an upper floor of the warehouse. One crate remains up there. Nobody has seen fit to disturb this bit of Papa’s estate.

    Across the way from Scribner’s is my alma mater: Holy Cross School, with its west entry arch for boys, east for girls. Inside, in the basement dining hall, there is to this day something called the dead table.
    I thought of my mother, Mairead, in heaven, and how years ago the two of us would shop the dead table on the second Wednesday of each month. Mother with her dollar bills, wet and greasy from the pub and held tight in a thick rubber band, me lugging a cloth bag of rolled pennies. This was how people