Grief Street

I thought I was doing all right by earning my gold shield early on, with assignment to an elite plainclothes squad that does not actually sound all that elite: the SCUM patrol, for Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan. But somewhere during those years I fell deep into the black well of being a cop boozer. If it was oblivion I was after in those self-pitying days, I might have reached my objective quicker by eating my gun.

    It was an overly warm Thursday afternoon in April, the day before Good Friday, when I was walking along thinking about the neighborhood and ghosts and hardships and drinking, and some other things, too—including the luck of Ruby coming into my life, including our incipient bundle of joy. My reverie was interrupted by a guy in a black fedora tearing down Seventh Avenue on foot after a taxicab, which he finally nailed at the Forty-second Street light. I stopped to watch the guy attack the taxi with his feet and fists, smashing out a window.
    The driver was wearing a turban and he hollered a lot of Punjabi threats through the broken window before roaring off. After which, the guy in the fedora ducked down into a subway hole and was gone himself. Case closed, I figured.
    This incident occurred about halfway into the rush hour when I was crossing from the east side of the avenue and innocently walking along the remarkable street where I live. Since it was my day off, technically speaking, I classified what had happened right in front of my cop face as a low-priority case of tit for tat.
    Meanwhile, Ruby was back at the apartment—three floors up over West Forty-third at Tenth Avenue—reading the script of a way-off-Broadway play that somebody had sent her in a plain brown wrapper.
    On account of her needing peace and quiet from me, as my wife the actress expressed it, I had to go find something to occupy myself for a while. As I obliged her by walking out the door around noon, she shot me one of those looks I still get, even though I am no longer on speaking terms with Mr. Johnnie Walker. One of those And-don’t-be-going-to-the-bar-across-the-way looks.
    I had spent the early part of the afternoon in an air-conditioned cinema in Times Square that specializes in movies the way I like them: old, and full of grown-up words instead of car crashes and teenage twaddle. The Royal Bijou was running a double feature: The Illustrated Man, with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, and The Hairy Ape, with William Bendix. How could I resist?
    By the way, about my remarkable street:
    At the epicenter of Forty-third is an ugly gray slab twenty-five storeys high, which since 1975 has been called One Times Square. This building—where the lighted apple drops every New Years’s Eve, incidentally—is situated at the so-called Crossroads of the World, otherwise known as the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. East of this are a number of polite attractions, including the rarefied offices of the New Yorker magazine, Grand Central Station, and the United Nations Assembly Building. I keep mostly to the West Side.

    THOMAS ADCOCK
    The slab at Number One is girdled by the world-renowned neon news zipper that has given decades of no-nonsense crawling headlines such as hitler dead! and rosenbergs fried! and NixoN dumped! A very long time ago, the New York Times was housed here, in what was then called the Times Tower—which was then a very fine Italianate stone building. In 1964 a gang of architectural morons skinned Times Tower down to its steel skeleton and globbed dull marble panels all over it and christened it the Allied Chemical Tower. These morons pronounced the resultant handiwork “sleek.” Sleek like a Soviet high-rise. Years before this crime, sometime back in the 1930s, I believe, the Times itself had moved catty-corner to the block between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, into a nondescript building with bad ventilation and a lot of rodents.
    When I passed by the mousy Times building at 229 West Forty-third that particular afternoon, a legless loon was holding forth across the street in the doorway of an old haunt of mine called Gough’s. This used to be a pressmen’s watering hole before computers stole away all the typesetting jobs, and also a snug for cops from the Midtown South station house. Reporters and editors wearing suits would sometimes drink at Gough’s. If the suits sported the pressmen to some rounds, they were taught how to fold newsprint into square caps—toppers that protect hair from flying