Grief Street

stop in front of this new shop full of tchotckkes, which stands on the very place I used to have my shoes shined and repaired; where there used to be a neighborly slogan in the window that made me smile: WE SHINE & SEAL & FIX THE HEELS, WE LACE THE HOLES & SAVE YOUR SOLES. Standing there now with Pauly Kerwin and his own not-so-neighborly slogan, I was unsmiling.
    “Why do you want to be out here with that sour thing around your neck, Pauly? For the love of God yourself— it’s Good Friday.”
    “No shit? I must not of checked my Filofax.”
    “You want to talk about anything in particular?”
    “I as’t you, how’s it hanging?”
    “Don’t worry about me. How about yourself, Pauly? Found a place to stay?”
    “Well, you know—Bob’s. If you call that a right place for sleeping.”
    Pauly was referring to an oasis down on Thirty-seventh Street off Eleventh Avenue: Bob’s Park, so-called in honor of a junkie-turned-social worker named Bob Smith. I know Smith only by reputation, as a neighborhood good guy, like Marv Paznik used to be. He had somehow straightened out under his own steam and was now working for a regular paycheck. He had chased his old gang of heroin shooters and crackheads out from the weedy vacant lot next to the tenement house where he lived; where he lives still, even though he draws enough salary in his reformed life to move someplace better, maybe even out of the Kitchen. After rousting the junkies, Smith had spent a bundle of his own money for the gate and equipment and landscaping necessary to create a quiet, decent retreat. Sometimes on weekends, he would personally hire a band so his neighbors could sing and dance; sometimes salsa, sometimes jazz, sometimes an Irish group that made the aging Hibernians in the block weep for green meadow memories of the other side.
    All this about Bob Smith was fresh in my mind from a big profile about him in last week’s New York magazine, which is a publication of no use to me unless I happen to see that a writer named Peter Benjaminson has something in it. Over the years, I have noticed that this particular writer shares my own regards, high and low, on civic matters. In the magazine profile that this Benjaminson wrote, Bob Smith had the good grace to credit the late, great Fiorello La Guardia as the inspiration for the park he gave to our neighborhood: “Every Fourth of July, Mayor La Guardia would get on the radio to remind everybody that Americans have the right to happiness—the right! He said we ought to look it up in the Declaration of Independence once a year, along with the parts about life and liberty. That’s why the Little Flower built parks and bandshells during the Great Depression. Because happiness was in short supply. Which is the case with Hell’s Kitchen today, which is why I spent my money like I did.”
    By day, Bob’s Park is full of children who would otherwise not be listening to their better angels. By night, Smith permits an informal encampment of harmless old ancient mariners with nowhere else to go—people such as Pauly Kerwin, a midget who lost his home in favor of madras pants and corporate shrimps with pricey smokes.
    “You’re safe there at least,” I said.
    “About as safe as Christ’d feel about now.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Today’s Good Friday, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “The anniversary of when they invented giving the shaft to a guy.”
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    “So—you think if Jesus Christ was to come back here today he’d actually want to see all the goddamn crosses you citizens are always putting up all over?”
    “I’m missing your point, Pauly.”
    “Naturally. You’re a man with a roof. What do I got? I don’t got my room anymore. Instead I got Bob’s Park where ^ got to do the lay-me-down-to-sleep-and-pray-the-Lord-my-s°ul-to-keep. You and me, Hock, we can’t help but see th>ngs different.”
    ‘‘I’m still missing.”
    “One guy’s cross is another guy’s shaft.”
    “I’ll think about that.”
    “Yeah, think about it tonight. In the bed you got, with the wifey all pretty and warm beside you.”
    “I have to be going, Pauly.”
    “And nobody’s even telling you. Must be nice.”
    Pauly said this to my back as I walked west through the sanitized Deuce toward the Kitchen, no less unsettled than I was from leaving old Glick behind. Besides all that was agitating inside me—the unfinished business of King Kong Kowalski, a cop threat ("You should watch