Grief Street

your mouth, Hockaday... Maybe your back, too"), fatherhood looming, an old man in a stifling room napping like a corpse, a midget sleeping in a park, a murderous shadow—I had this on my mind, too: the Good Friday communion mass at Holy Cross Church, and whether I was in the mood for a stroll down the memory lane of crucifixion, and looking in on Ruby before I headed back to the station house, where who knows but another sweet wreath awaited me.
    I stopped in front of the church. I just stood there on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs for a while, staring. Set into the round window over the big blue entrance doors was the crucifix I have known throughout my life, all the way from short pants to police blues.
    Yet here was I now, looking at that glass cross as if I had never seen it before. And struggling with the deepest mystery I know as a Catholic, half fallen-away though I may be: how are ultimate mercy and ultimate vengeance known by this single sign?
    The mystic Shabbatai Sevi, three hundred years ago—had not he been crazed by a matter very nearly the same? How had Marv put it...?
    How strangely do we remember the small things of a dead friend.
    Again I pictured the day Marv told me the Sevi legend: Lunch in his office at Temple Ezrath Israel. Chinese takeout. Marv opens his fortune cookie, reads the slip of paper inside, shrugs, drops it to his desk...
    Marv explaining, There is nobody more powerful than God, but there is something equal to his power. As I listen to him, I glance at a strange message wrapped in a cookie: THE INFLICTION OF CRUELTY WITH A GOOD CONSCIENCE IS A DELIGHT TO MORALISTS.
    I turned away from the glass cross.
    I glanced to the other side of Forty-second Street:
    A swirl of orange neon letters in a smoky window, spelling out some old favorite pastimes. A gray steel door I promised myself and God and Father Declan—and Ruby, and our baby inside her—that I shall not enter again.
    One day at a time. Tomorrow would be another day, another time...
    ... Time was when I and my colleagues relaxed on the other side of that gray door over there. And sometimes the relaxing had a way of erupting into a large general fistfight. A colleague clubbed me over the head one night with a shoe, and called me a dumb mick. I saw myself again, roaring around the place like an angry bear until I found him, knocked him down, thinking how I sure did show him I was no dumb mick.
    God help me, I needed a drink.
    I made my way, weaving and staggering, through a ruckus of horns and shouting and fists shaking at me from car windows—toward the doorway of my fondly recollected oblivion from agitating thought.

Ten

    “ T his one, you got to love…“
    “Somehow I doubt it.”
    “Come on now—-ain’t I trying to be nice?”
    “Goodness, yes, it’s practically the mountain come to Mohammed. You in this little old Hell’s Kitchen dive for gentlemen of a certain persuasion—well, it’s hardly your mise-en-scène now, is it?”
    “Cut it. Alls I’m saying is...! Oh, goddammit! You could listen at least!”
    “Don’t raise your voice. It’s embarrassing.”
    “Embarrassing? You want to talk freaking embarrassing—?”
    “Just go ahead and tell the joke.”
    “Okay, there’s—”
    “No, wait. I have to take care of my regular.”
    “Regular my ass!”
    “Hush, sweety.”
    “Don’t be calling me that!”
    The bartender—young and blond and blue-eyed, with earrings, sleeveless black T-shirt, black Speedo swim trunks, and construction boots; skin tan as toast, muscles taut enough to bounce coins—glided off to attend to a well-tailored, middle-aged gent perched on the end stool. The two men kissed. The bartender pulled up a draught of beer and set it down for his friend the regular customer. A quiet laugh was shared. After which the bartender returned to the fat man in the bad suit with his hand grazing through a wooden bowl of trail mix.
    “You really must stop eating like that, sweety. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. You’re opposed to sin, aren’t you?”
    “Quit busting my chops.”
    “What then? You’ll see me to paradise? As Jesus did for Dismas?”
    “What in the...?”
    “Dismas, the penitent thief in Luke, chapter twenty-three? There were two thieves crucified along with Jesus on Good Friday—Dismas, and Gemas. Dismas was the one who did not mock Christ, but accepted him. And for this, Jesus promised him everlasting life in heaven.”
    “Forget about it. You, I