Tours of the Black Clock

35

NOW IT’S THE SPRING of 1934. And one day one of those things happens, one of those small things that when it happens no one could possibly know will be important. I’m standing around a newsstand up at 49th and Broadway, a number of us are there trying to bum cigarettes off the customers who just bought some. The man who runs the stand is Jerry. He isn’t happy about us being around and he’ll come out sometimes and shoo us like cats, and the boys just stand there with their hands in their pockets. I’m less interested in the cigarettes than the newspapers and magazines, but if I so much as touch one, Jerry goes berserk. So I stand reading the front page of the papers in the racks, actually I only get to read the top halves and am left to wonder at the bottom. The magazines I can only stare at, with these black and red and blue covers, amazing women in shredded clothes and gangsters whose faces are always shadowed with someone else’s dying. I sometimes actually consider the luxury of buying one of these magazines for a dime or fifteen cents or whatever it’s going for. But I never do. I just stand around with the others watching life there on the corner of 49th and Broadway, and most of it is life that’s not so unlike me, but sometimes it’s the life of theater people going by in taxis, actresses on their way to rehearsals in the day and patrons on their way to the shows at night, and financiers and office workers and men in suits in black cars.

The small thing that happens is one day someone comes running up to Jerry with news that his wife has had a stroke and been taken to the hospital. Jerry’s frantic. “I’ll watch things for you if you want, Jerry,” I say, and maybe if he’d been thinking straight he’d have just closed up the stand and I’d have just wandered off to another corner, and the rest of my life would have been different, and the world and the Twentieth Century would have been different. But he isn’t thinking straight and these are times when closing up work just for a day constitutes a sacrifice, and so my proposal that seemed nuts ten seconds ago is quickly evolving into a hopeful longshot. He breathes deeply and runs back into the stand and collects most of the money, leaves me some change and gives me a nod. Then he just runs off to his wife in the hospital without a word about when he’ll be back or what to do if he doesn’t come back. Maybe he’s thinking it doesn’t matter, the odds are I’m going to steal him blind anyway, and if he comes back later and anything of his life is still salvageable at all, he’ll be lucky. As it happens he’ll be luckier than even that. His wife will pull through and I don’t have any plans at all to steal him blind, I don’t even care much what he pays me, I just want to read one of those magazines and anything behind the top half of the first page of a newspaper, like this Philly paper I’m reading that has this story back around page eleven about how in Pennsylvania they’re looking for this crazed kid who killed one brother, crippled the other, paralyzed the father, terrorized the mother and burned down the house. He sounds like one insane son of a bitch to me. Then I get to the part where they say his name and it’s only then it occurs to me who they’re talking about.