The Boy Detective (6 page)

Today, only the Con Ed building remains unchanged among business enterprises geared for the upper crust. The buildings are much bigger, taller, the renovated street merely a broad aisle for merchandise. On the south side, a P.C. Richard & Son is flanked by two NYU buildings. On the street level of the NYU building closer to Third is a Trader Joe's and a separate Trader Joe's Wine Shop. On the street level of Con Ed is a Raymour & Flanagan furniture store, and across Irving Place from Con Ed, a two-towered apartment house offering a Chipotle restaurant, a Subway sandwich shop, a UPS store, and a Food Emporium, opposite a Walgreens. Brand names of modern America. One may furnish one's apartment in a tower, acquire a Sub-Zero in which to stock food, load up on good wine, get enough Advil and antidepressants to survive the day, seek higher education at night, and never leave Fourteenth Street.

In 1854, on the site of the Con Ed building, the four-thousand-seat Academy of Music opera house was erected, flourishing there till it was taken down in 1926. In 1927, the Academy of Music movie theater was put up across the street, where Trader Joe's is now. It had three thousand seats and tiers of balconies and royal boxes. When the kids of our neighborhood were not heading up to the Loew's Lexington on Fifty-first or west to Eighth Avenue and the RKO on Twenty-third, we came here. My parents took me to Marx Brothers revivals at the Academy of Music when I was five and six. When I was older, I would go by myself. I saw
House of Wax,
the first 3D movie, with Vincent Price. It included a sort of juggler-barker who stood outside the wax museum and promoted it by hitting a rubber ball attached to a paddle by an elastic band. The ball shot straight at the audience. Everyone ducked. The movie was okay as a thriller, but not much of a mystery.

Where the P.C. Richard & Son appliances gleam under fierce lights these days, stood Luchow's, the famous German restaurant, with its sauced-up meats and Oompa Band and big, glorious
tannenbaum
at Christmas. In the 1890s Diamond Jim Brady proposed to Lillian Russell in Luchow's, offering the musical theater star one million dollars if she'd marry him. He brought the money in a suitcase. Russell turned him down. My father said that Luchow's had been a “Nazi hangout” during the war. I tried to picture that—Nazis in uniform lounging around the restaurant, elbows on the bar, just hanging out.

Meanwhile, tonight, the ones who work for a living stoop and lift at a loading ramp at Trader Joe's, hauling cartons on rollers as if they were hauling carts of coal in Pennsylvania or gold in Brazil. They deposit their shadows at the side of the ramp. They are muscular, black, biblical. I have no strength left in my arms. But they could haul a house, a pyramid if they had to. What wouldn't I give, I think as I edge past them on the sidewalk, and they apologize for being in my way. I shrug to indicate that I am in theirs. And then—and such things happen in New York—the tallest one, with a tattoo of lightning on his neck, unbidden in the quickening cold, begins to sing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” in a bass so earthy, it seems to rise from the roots of a nearby oak. I stop in my tracks, and listen to the song until the end, when I reach for an imaginary glass and raise it to toast the man.

 

A
ND NOW TO
Irving Place, which runs six blocks between Fourteenth and Gramercy Park and is changed much less from when I was a kid. This street, too, was created by Samuel Ruggles when he created Gramercy Park. He gave it its name because he liked Washington Irving. He also named Lexington Avenue, to the north of the park, after the Battle of Lexington, which, I suppose, he also liked.

Different stores here now, but located in the same old buildings. A cheese shop where the Sleepy Hollow Book Shop once was, and where my mother bought me children's books. A Japanese restaurant. The Washington Irving High School is here still, a massive place nearly filling the square block between Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Irving Place and Third. At the northeast corner of the building, a big bronze bust of Washington Irving looking wan. The school was all girls when I was a kid, and had a rough reputation. Walking home from school one spring day, I passed a crowd in front of the building, pointing and murmuring. Police kept them back. A teacher, a young man, had jumped or been pushed from the roof, nine stories up. He lay like a slain deer on the pikes of the iron gate around the school, streaks of blood on his brown tweed sports jacket. I had no urge to solve that case.

 

M
URDER
. N
OTHING LIKE
it. All other crimes step aside when the word is spoken.
Murder.
In
Green for Danger
(1946), a nifty mystery movie, a parish nurse interrupts a dance party of doctors and nurses by stopping the phonograph music and announcing from a little balcony above the crowd that a patient's recent death was not due to natural causes, as had been assumed. “It was murder,” she says, giving the word all the weight it can bear.
Muurrderr
. She holds the
u
and rolls the
r
's.

Alfred Hitchcock used it as the title of an early film. Agatha Christie used it all the time—
Murder on the Orient Express, Murder at a Gallop, Murder Most Foul.
I have no idea how it became the collective noun for crows, but think of the image, that cloud of blackness. No word in English has its heart-freezing effect. Speak it, and one does not merely see death, but also the act of killing, and the killer, the weapon, the body, the blood. The better detective writers use it sparingly because of its dreaded power, because murder is the center of human evil, the worst someone can do to someone else.

In
Green for Danger,
Alstair Sim plays the crafty and methodical police inspector, called in on the case after the nurse who pronounced the word at the dance party is murdered herself. Knowing who the murderer is, she runs from the party to the operating theater, to collect the evidence. She hears a noise. The doors to the operating room are flapping on their hinges. She looks up and sees in the limpid light a figure in a white operating gown and mask and cap, covering the face. The figure holds a gleaming knife.

 

B
LOOD
. B
LOOD IN
S
YRIA,
South Africa, in shopping malls. Blood on college greens. Green blood.
Bang bang bang bang bang.
When I stand at the epicenter of the century's madness (this century or the last), I try not to be deceived by my own sanity. After all, what profiteth a man to be sane in a madhouse? On the other hand, why go crazy with the rest? I can always make it through by speaking of money, because money's where the action is, here at the epicenter. Instead I'd rather listen to you tell me a tale of heroic peoples who did not underestimate their enemies, but understood that shame is real and can stink up a refrigerator, even a Sub-Zero, for a lifetime. On my walk, on anybody's walk, lies the epicenter of the century's madness. Epicenters are quiet places, though they represent the tumultuous.

Thirty years ago, when I was writing for
Time
magazine, I flew over Hiroshima's epicenter in a helicopter I had hired because I wanted to go where the
Enola Gay
had gone after it dropped the Bomb, at the same cruising altitude. A reckless notion. It taught me nothing. And the wind that morning was crazy, the chopper shaking up me and the pilot like a bird in a dog's jaws. This was all in the interests of a cover I was writing on the forty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, which
Time
called “My God, What Have We Done.” The conventional question, or exclamation, or whatever. They might have called it “The Case of the Disappeared City,” though there wasn't much mystery as to who done it.

The difference between that epicenter and the one I tread right now? I'm not sure. Hiroshima's was real, this one's theoretical. But both are both. If you want to get ahead in this world, said my dad, first you have to know what it is you want. We wanted to bomb the shit out of the Japanese and we want to be rich. I ask you, pal: What's so complicated about that?

 

I
N ANY CASE,
epicenters are uncomfortable. If I had to choose one place to make my stand, it would not be an epicenter of anything. It would not be a place at all, but rather the midway point between poetry and prose. That is where the best moments of our minds occur, between poetry and prose, our truest selves. Isn't that so? The sweet, solid territory between the two main forms of writing allows for thoughts and feelings not available to each alone. A man may travel to the moon, and at the same time lie curled in his lover's bed. So, at the midway point, we tell a tale of high adventure, and we sing it, too.

By the world we are appalled, and we also sympathize with it. With the world we sympathize, and we also are appalled by it. When we are appalled, we write prose. When we sympathize, we write poetry. But when we wish to get at the truth of the matter, when we want to be honest with ourselves, and with others, we write both.

Archimedes bragged that he could move the world if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand on, with one foot in poetry and the other in prose. Or something like that. Perhaps it's best to write in the ellipses, when there are no words. I should like to live on those three islands, the Ellipses. Ulysses sailed to the Ellipses, I believe.

Do I have that right? In the heart of winter, the old men's season, I listen to Ulysses speaking calmly and judiciously about Scylla and Charybdis, and the Sirens, and the Cyclops, as if they were people of business who simply provided a moment of difficulty for him, a temporary impediment, rather than raising anything life-threatening. To understand him, it may help to remember that it was he who had the brainstorm of a wooden horse, so that the Achaeans could capture Troy. Anyone who can dream up an idea like that needs no help being creative. He might have made it all up—the rocks, the girls, the one-eyed Jack. Of course, there is always the distinct possibility that I may not know my ass from my elbow about any of this. About Ulysses, New York, my work, or you. Or even if I can tell my ass and my elbow apart, I tend toward creative drift myself. Just like Penelope, I lose my thread.

 

B
ONG
. B
ONG
. B
ONG.
Bong. Bong.
Bong. Bong.
Atop Met Life is a bell tower, inspired by the freestanding St. Mark's Campanile in Venice, with clock faces on each of the tower's four sides. The Westminster chimes sound over Gramercy Park. I learned what fifteen minutes meant when I heard the chimes as a child. Also a sense of completeness and incompleteness, as one would wait for all four sets of chimes before hearing the ringing of the new hour. So slow the bells for the new hour.
Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.

 

A
ND IN CASE
you were wondering—because
I
certainly was wondering—this may be as good a place as any to talk about Wallace Stevens's “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Not that you ever mentioned the poem. And not that I am at all sure I have the meaning down cold myself. But in spite of all the ellipses in that poem (four-dotters, if there were such a thing), it seems clear that the poem is about the created self. And a boy detective knows something about the created self.

So the idea, I think, is that we live with real people and real events, yet we feel like fictions traveling among them. This is because, while the externalities of our lives remain stable, even adamant, we function in a continual state of self-creation, malleable, fluent. When the Hoon poem states at the end, “I was the world in which I walked,” it means that the poet influences the conscious life about him by making an imaginative construction of himself. And that this self, the detective or the writer, though he moves about in “the loneliest air,” is hardly lonely. Indeed, he celebrates (privately), because he finds himself, as a result of his illimitable walks, “more truly and more strange.”

Yet this is where the detective's and the writer's view of things becomes a bit tricky, because the world the detective observes, while not imagined, has all the thrills of an imagined construct. Holmes means it in “A Case of Identity,” when he tells Watson that “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” And just when we find ourselves agreeing with Holmes, and rooting for nonfiction over fiction, it comes to us that Holmes is himself a fictional creation. So Conan Doyle is playing us here, but also making a point. Holmes, not real, instructs Watson, not real, in the wonders of reality. The wonder is Holmes himself, the fictional detective in pursuit of a fictional crime that he creates the fiction of solving. Truth is, nothing ever is solved in a Sherlock Holmes story because it never happened. If life is “infinitely stranger” than fiction, how could one ever solve its mysteries?

In any case—and frankly, you can get a fine old headache trying to work out “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the very title of which suggests that Stevens intended to give us a headache—the poem is happy. I was the world in which
I
walked. And though I moved through the loneliest air, hardly was I lonely. Not less was I myself. I was more myself. My boy detective. My self-created self. Happy. Fairly happy. In case you were wondering.

 

I
LIKE LIVING
my life without telling anyone, as if whatever I did during the course of a day—get the car an oil change, shop for coconut ice cream, sit in Starbucks with my grande bold coffee and yellow legal pad—was between me and me and no one else. I would not say that what I do is none of your business. That's not what I mean. Everybody's business is everybody's business once in a while. What I mean is that doing things like taking a walk in the city at night without telling anyone makes the thing being done a modest gift to myself. We live most of our lives this way, do we not? Unnoticed and unannounced. And who would I tell anyway? Do you really care if I buy coconut ice cream, or if one winter evening I leave my classroom and roam about New York in search of my inconsequential life? Would you love me more or less if I told you?