City Dark(55)

It was strange to think that he had never learned something so profound in his fifty years, half of that as an attorney. But with mixed feelings of guilt, stupidity, and acknowledgment of privilege, he was internalizing it. He had been a prosecutor for most of his career, an arbiter of punishment for codified gradations of evil. A professional finger-pointer. Now the pale finger of the law was pointed at him. That reality cracked him open like an egg, but it allowed in truths he had never been forced to contemplate. For all the legal help he could provide, and that the recipients seemed grateful for, the truth was that the inmates of Rikers were teaching Joe more than he could have possibly imagined or could ever repay. Among those things was the reality that a man—any man—inside this terrible place was more similar than different from any man outside it. This realization was painful but freeing, and he was beginning to embrace it.





CHAPTER 46


Wednesday, July 13, 1977

Broadway

Upper West Side, Manhattan

10:57 p.m.

Joe calmed himself by counting things.

He counted vintage Checker cabs as their headlights cut through the gloom. He counted triangular Marlboro signs atop the newer ones. Robbie had directed that they walk south on Broadway, on the west side of the avenue, so he counted the streets as they reached each corner. The signs were a pale yellow, grayed out in the darkness, but there were enough passing cars that he could make them out.

The streets were filled with trash and debris. People on the sidewalk, thankfully, paid the boys almost no mind. Old men stood smoking in doorways. Kids, many of them shirtless and in high striped tube socks and short shorts, congregated on front stoops down the side streets. Their laughter was mostly cheerful, not foreboding. Joe counted the types of storefronts also. Two coffee shops so far, one a Chock full o’Nuts and one with a Hot Bagels sign in the window. A candy store. A hardware store. In front of the hardware store, two men with undershirts and hairy backs stood outside and casually swung baseball bats.

Steel gates were down on most of the stores, many of them covered with graffiti. The boys had seen people on the street with merchandise, even pushing shopping carts full of items, but had encountered no looting since Seventy-Ninth Street. The term itself—“looting”—was not familiar, but now the men on the radio were using it regularly and talking about areas of the city where it was happening. Their echoed voices seemed to come from everywhere.

At the corner of Seventy-Fourth Street was a massive, beautifully carved building that seemed to disappear into darkness above them. Like most of the buildings they were passing, there was candlelight in many of the windows but little activity. On the street, though, was something like a block party. At first Joe thought it was another store being looted, but the mood of this crowd was very different. There was no shattering glass, no whooping or grunts, no pushing and shoving. It was a happy gathering of young men, most of them shirtless, arms flung over each other’s shoulders. They huddled in groups and passed around bottles and cigarettes.

“Queers,” Robbie said flatly as they passed the crowd. Disco music was playing from a big box radio on the sidewalk—“Boogie Nights,” a song Joe recognized because on the radio it began with a dreamlike harp-plucking sound. The men seemed to move in unison to the driving bass beat that followed the intro.

“How do you know?”

“You see a single woman over there?”

“So? They don’t want girls around.”

“Queers,” Robbie said. “Uncle Mike’s a queer, you know.”

“Is not.”

“Is too. Mom told me.”

“You don’t . . . you don’t even know.”

“No, you don’t know,” Robbie said. “You were, like, barely born. And guess what? If we can’t find Mom, we’ll have to live with him.”

“We’ll find Mom,” Joe said. The likelihood of that was slipping further and further behind them, though, like the counted street signs in this smelly city that felt more and more like a steaming graveyard. “We will, right?” The sense of dread and abandonment was bewildering, but Joe had no way of expressing it. The thumping music in his ears just made him feel colder inside.

“I don’t know,” Robbie grumbled. They walked another block in silence. They could see more traffic at Seventy-Second Street, a big intersection a couple of blocks ahead with a square or a little park in the middle. Across its expanse, people stood around in small crowds, lighting cigarettes and tilting up bottles.

“Is he nice, at least?” Joe asked when they reached Seventy-Third Street. “Uncle Mike, I mean?”

“For a queer, yeah,” Robbie said. This meant nothing to Joe, and he had a feeling it was little more than something for Robbie to say. He tried to picture his uncle Mike. He had seen a photo, a yellowing one in a drawer in the living room. Joe pictured Uncle Mike smiling, as he was in that long-ago photo with his sister, Joe’s mother, at Christmas and tried to pin some hope on that.

Then a plump, curvy woman in an apron called out to them.

“Where are you going, you two?” Her voice was high, delicate, and accented. She had one hand on her hip and a long, thin cigarette in her mouth. She stood in the open doorway of a small restaurant. There was a plate-glass window to her left with painted letters in a semicircle. La Quenelle. More candles than they had seen anywhere burned inside, and a small group of people sat at the bar fanning themselves.