Grief Street

to make the wobbles go away.
    When I managed to settle myself, I rose and started toward it—semiblindly, for all I could see were its vaporous outline and sulfurous eyes. As I moved, I patted my waist, where the nine-millimeter automatic should have been strapped to my belt, and under my arm, where my big piece should have been holstered. Here in the valley of the shadow of death—part of my beat—what was the sense of a mere policeman’s bullets?
    Closer and closer now in the dark gray light, and its face grew clearer. I allowed myself a heartbeat of surprise, though I was unsurprised. Then I began keening the prayer of Irish forebears, a prayer that blows away all horrors.
    “God to enfold me, God to surround me, God in my speaking, God in my thinking... God in my sleeping, God in my waking, God in my watching, God in my hoping... God in my life, God in my lips, God in my soul, God in my heart—”
    “Shut up, shut up!” Its voice rose again to bellowing. “You think I’m impressed by your mumbling the English from the Carmina Gaedelica? Oh my, yes—and I know the proper name of the bloody old Paddy’s supplication. Ha! You thought perhaps I didn’t speak Irish? I’m really quite erudite, and near dead tongues give me particular pleasure. Do think twice of me, Detective Hockaday.”
    “God in my sufficing—”
    “Shut up, I tell you! Shut up and think! Did your priests never learn you I’m only that which Holy God allows me to be? That I’ve no powers but those that Holy God gave to me, including the jurisdiction of life and death—including, in this very instant, your life and death?”
    “God in my slumber—”
    “Shut up! Shut up!”
    “God in mine ever-living soul—”
    "Fook God!” With the blasphemy, spittle flew from its scabby lips.
    It stood, flapping its great rat-catcher arms, swooping them down toward the crawling vermin. Then it raised up a swollen-bellied rat overhead, stretching the she-creature until it shrieked from the pain to her womb.
    Fook your God—and fook your saints! The holy fookers all be damned!”
    Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt...

One

    S omeday in the near future, the little bundle of joy en route to Ruby and me will take notice of the neighborhood and ask, “Pop, what in God’s name is this place?”
    As I have been asking this same question most of my life, it naturally follows that my baby should be likewise curious. So what answer will Pop provide?
    How do I give meaning beyond the usual wicked, two-word label by which the neighborhood is known? And in light of the crimes of the past several days—which surely will creep my dreams for years to come—who am to say the wicked name does not fit? For that matter, who is God himself to say?
    In fostering my earliest notions of neighborhood, the nuns, priests, and brothers of my youth—God’s mortal faculty of Holy Cross School—were the same as teachers anywhere else in America. They filled my schoolboy head with a lovely lie: order and brightness imposed by crayons on paper is an acceptable reality of life in the streets where I live.
    But pretty blue Crayolas do not dependably portray the color of my sky. Nor of the viscous Hudson River, final resting place for hundreds of unlamented gangsters—not to mention a drainage ditch for thousands upon thousands of gallons of blood from the old West Side slaughterhouse days. Trees are rare here, and for most of the year look like skinny old ladies losing their hair; the sidewalks are not pleasantly dappled by sunshine and shade. The light that falls in my streets is thick with soot and is purely hot, like ashes from the sun.
    Just the same, and for better or for worse, Ruby and I will raise our child here. Here, where all the goodness and all the evil of the world dwell; where the only impossible experience is complacency.
    Our child will be a Kitchen kid, the same as me. I mean Kitchen as in Hell’s Kitchen—my briar patch, my haven, the place that carved my soul, my home.
    When I was a kid, the classrooms of Holy Cross were hardly the only places of learning. All the Kitchen was a school—a tuition-free college that taught us about poverty, booze, needle panic, switchblade fights, immigrant struggles, hoodlums, clay-footed priests, weary whores, politicians and their brethren pimps. Also it was a neighborhood with at least a hundred Irish pubs like the one where my mother worked herself to death; where the owner welcomed crooked cops