Authors: Richard Bowes
Traffic was at a standstill. People beeped “Here comes the bride,” leaned out their windows, applauded and cheered, all of us relieved to find this ordinary, normal thing taking place.
Then I saw her on the other side of Sixth Avenue. Mags was tramping along, staring straight ahead, a poster with a black and white photo hanging from a string around her neck. The crowd in front of the church parted for her. Mourners were sacred at that moment.
I yelled her name and started to cross the street. But the tie-up had eased, traffic started to flow. I tried to keep pace with her on my side of the street. I wanted to invite her to the party. The hosts knew her from way back. But the sidewalks on both sides were crowded. When I did get across Sixth, she was gone.
Aftermath
That night I came home from the party and found the place completely cleaned up with a thank you note on the fridge signed by all three kids. And I felt relieved but also lost.
The Survivor party was on the Lower East Side. On my way back, I had gone by the East Village, walked up to Tenth Street between B and C. People were out and about. Bars were doing business. But there was still almost no vehicle traffic and the block was very quiet.
The building where we three had lived in increasing squalor and tension thirty-five years before was refinished, gentrified. I stood across the street looking. Maybe I willed his appearance.
Geoff was there in the corner of my eye, his face dead white, staring up, unblinking, at the light in what had been our windows. I turned toward him and he disappeared. I looked aside and he was there again, so lost and alone, the arms of his jacket soaked in blood.
And I remembered us sitting around with the syringes and all of us making a pledge in blood to stick together as long as we lived. To which Geoff added, “And even after.” And I remembered how I had looked at him staring at Mags and knew she was looking at me. Three sides of a triangle.
The next day, Sunday, I went down to Mags’ building, wanting very badly to talk to her. I rang the bell again and again. There was no response. I rang the super’s apartment.
She was a neighborhood lady, a lesbian around my age. I asked her about Mags.
“She disappeared. Last time anybody saw her was Sunday 9/9. People in the building checked to make sure everyone was OK. No sign of her. I put a tape across her keyhole Wednesday. It’s still there.”
“I saw her just yesterday.”
“Yeah?” She looked skeptical. “Well there’s a World Trade Center list of potentially missing persons and her name’s on it. You need to talk to them.”
This sounded to me like the landlord trying to get rid of her. For the next week, I called Mags a couple of times a day. At some point the answering machine stopped coming on. I checked out her building regularly. No sign of her. I asked Angelina if she remembered the two of us having dinner in her place on Wednesday 9/12.
“I was too busy, staying busy so I wouldn’t scream. I remember you and I guess you were with somebody. But no, honey, I don’t remember.”
Then I asked Marco if he remembered the phone call. And he did but was much too involved by then with Terry and Eloise to be really interested.
Around that time, I saw the couple who had wanted to take their kids down to Ground Zero. They were walking up Sixth Avenue, the kids cranky and tired, the parents looking disappointed. Like the amusement park had turned out to be a rip-off.
Life closed in around me. A short story collection of mine was being published at that very inopportune moment and I needed to do some publicity work. I began seeing an old lover who’d come back to New York as a consultant for a company that had lost its offices and a big chunk of its staff when the north tower fell.
Mrs. Pirelli did not come home from the hospital, but went to live with her son in Connecticut. I made it a point to go by each of the Arab shops and listen to the owners say how awful they felt about what had happened and smile when they showed me pictures of their kids in Yankee caps and shirts.
It was the next weekend that I saw Mags again. The University had gotten permission for the students to go back to the downtown dorms and get their stuff out. Marco, Terry and Eloise came by the library and asked me to go with them. So I volunteered.
Around noon on Sunday 9/23 a couple of dozen kids and I piled into a University bus driven by Roger, a Jamaican guy who has worked for the University for as long as I have.
“The day before 9/11 these kids didn’t much want old farts keeping them company,” Roger had said to me. “Then they all wanted their daddy.” He led a convoy of jitneys and vans down the FDR drive, then through quiet Sunday streets and then past trucks and construction vehicles.
We stopped at a police checkpoint. A cop looked inside and waved us through.
At the dorm, another cop told the kids they had an hour to get what they could and get out. “Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice if we tell you to,” he said.
Roger and I as the senior members stayed with the vehicles. The air was filthy. Our eyes watered. A few hundred feet up the street, a cloud of smoke still hovered over the ruins of the World Trade Center. Piles of rubble smoldered. Between the pit and us, was a line of fire trucks and police cars with cherry tops flashing. Behind us the kids hurried out of the dorm carrying boxes. I made them write their names on their boxes and noted in which van the boxes got stowed. I was surprised, touched even, at the number of stuffed animals that were being rescued.
“Over the years we’ve done some weird things to earn our pensions,” I said to Roger.
“Like volunteering to come to the gates of hell?”
As he said that flames sprouted from the rubble. Police and firefighters shouted and began to fall back. A fire department chemical tanker turned around and the crew began unwinding hoses.
Among the uniforms, I saw a civilian, a middle-aged woman in a sweater and jeans and carrying a sign. Mags walked towards the flames. I wanted to run to her. I wanted to shout, “Stop her.” Then I realized that none of the cops and firefighters seemed aware of her even as she walked right past them.
As she did, I saw another figure, thin, pale, in a suede jacket and bell bottom pants. He held out his bloody hands and together they walked through the smoke and flames into the hole in the city.
“Was that them?” Marco had been standing beside me.
I turned to him. Terry was back by the bus watching Marco’s every move. Eloise was gazing at Terry.
“Be smarter than we were,” I said.
And Marco said, “Sure,” with all the confidence in the world.
When I was very young my parents and all their friends were theater people, actors. I spent the best parts of my great, misspent college career hanging around the drama department. I liked the slippery ways actors found their way into a part, saw kids who found a role that was a perfect fit and never quite got free of it. I was fascinated by the love/hate of the typecast actors for the parts that engulfed them.
Now I live on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets and many a morning I’ve come out my door to find a film being shot. The best moments are the ones when it’s supposed to be 1950 or 1930 and the last six or eight decades have been papered over. New York IS theater. The stage, the screen are just manifestations.
By the time I was invited to contribute to Ellen Datlow’s Urban Fantasy anthology
Naked City
, I had been typecast: in my case as a slithery, noir type, and “On the Slide” was a natural vehicle.
ON THE SLIDE
S
ean Quinlan caught the 6:30 wake up call almost before his cell phone began its first ring. He murmured, “Thanks,” glanced at Adrianne La Farice who wore only a soft, lovely smile and barely stirred in her sleep, thrust the phone aside, slipped from the bed in the pearly morning light, and padded quietly out of the room.
He wasn’t awake so much as in a place where the line between work and dreams had been erased. In the ample living room he flicked on the DVD player, keeping the sound way down. In the kitchen he started the coffee. Back in the living room he sat in his shorts on the arm of the couch and watched the opening scene in an episode of the old
Naked City
TV show.
Grainy black and white detectives in suits and hats chased a gunman over the roofs of early 1960’s New York. Sun through the apartment windows made the gray figures look like ghosts, and Quinlan liked that effect.
The gunman turned to fire and the detectives ducked behind a chimney. An actor playing a uniformed cop fell, shot. The fugitive fled down a fire escape with the two detectives firing after him.
Quinlan turned up the sound half a notch to catch the voice of the old character actor who played the hard-bitten police lieutenant in the series. “Wounded in the hunt, with the law on his trail, the fugitive returns to his final lair, his first home, the old neighborhood.” The trumpets playing the city-at-dawn theme music which mixed nicely with early rush hour street noise from Downtown Manhattan fifty years later.
The episode was set in a neighborhood of five story tenements that Quinlan didn’t quite recognize. It had probably been torn down and turned into high-rises. When coffee smells spread, he stood and discovered Adrianne in a floor length robe, with her eyes barely open, leaning in the doorway and watching him. Her smile was gone.
“More detectives,” she mumbled. “You never stop working, do you, Sean.”
“My granddad and his friends used to make fun of what they called ‘24 hour a day cops’—guys who were always on duty,” he said. “Now it’s like I’ve become one. Can I offer you some of your own coffee?”
“Yes please.” She made her way to the bathroom saying, “When we were kids, I remember guys backing off from confronting you because they just
knew
you were the law.”
Adrianne La Farice had been Adie Jacobson when they were in their early twenties and she waited tables while he took care of the door at Club Red Light over in the Meat Packing District back in the now legendary early-nineties.
She returned saying, “I don’t need to be up this early. I don’t need to be up at all. With business the way it is, I could spend the day in bed and I think I will.” She uttered some variation on that every morning and never followed through.
His divorce had left him broke. Adie’s divorce from Henry La Farice, the designer, was much more successful, leaving her with this renovated condo and a partnership in a prosperous real estate business. Sadly, like everything else in New York, that was now in the tank.
Over the last several years they’d made it their pleasant habit to get together like this each time he’d been in New York on a job. And it was in Quinlan’s mind to see if they could turn this into something more permanent.
When he brought Adie the coffee and half a bialy, she was sitting up in bed reading email on her laptop. “No apartment in Manhattan’s going to be sold today. Everybody who owns one remembers when it was worth two million dollars. Anyone who wants one will offer a quarter of that and then either can’t get financing or can’t explain where they got the cash.”
Quinlan took a jacket and slacks out of the corner of the closet that he’d been assigned, got socks and underwear from the rolling suitcase in which he’d brought them.
In the bathroom he stared through the steam at the serviceable face he was shaving, the short hair with almost no gray. “The family face, anonymous and perfect for stakeout work,” his grandfather “Black Jack” Quinlan had said. Jack Quinlan had made detective lieutenant on the job. He’d died almost thirty years back when Sean was barely thirteen. He thought about the old man almost every day.
Sean looked in the mirror and smiled just a bit. Lately he’d had occasion to notice that the Quinlan face was also perfect for a man on the run. He put on a jacket and shirt but no tie because suddenly there wasn’t time. On the way to the bedroom he picked up the brown snap brim that he’d been wearing for practice and put it on his head with just enough tilt.
When he kissed her Adie said, “Brazil! I’ve got a Brazilian with money interested in a penthouse and with that trade agreement he doesn’t even have to explain where he got the cash.”
Then she looked up and said, “You are beyond retro, Mister. You disappear and I’ll start believing in Sliders.”
“People talk about Sliders. Have you ever known one?”
“It’s escapism not reality. I think they took the name from some old TV show nobody watched. I know a woman who described her teenage son as a perfect 1969 hippie. He had the clothes and the hair; his room was papered with old posters and he hardly ever left it. One morning he disappeared and she thinks he slid back there, claims she found notes from him written on old yellow paper and telling her he was okay. Of course she’s also delusional enough to think the Dow will hit 16,000 some fine day.”
Turning to go he said, “Remember the Peggy Hughes party tonight.”
Adie nodded and pointed to a set of handcuffs attached to one of the brass rods on the headboard. “Can you hide those before you go? The cleaning lady’s coming today.”
Outside on Rivington Street, it was still early enough that Quinlan got a cab with no problem. This Lower East Side drug pit of his youth had gotten gentrified and hip beyond measure. But times like this, on mornings with bright, merciless sun shining on empty shop windows, it had started to look a bit shabby again.
As the cab rolled across Houston Street into the East Village, he noticed people setting up folding tables on the widened sidewalks, opening for business in the big informal flea market that had grown up there.
Portable dressing rooms lined Avenue B. On Tenth Street police barricades blocked traffic onto that side street. Miss Rheingold posters and ads for Pall Malls covered over the Mexican restaurant and reflexology parlor signs. Extras were ready to stand on the corner in greaser haircuts or lean out of first floor windows in housecoats and hairnets. Down the block, lights brighter than the sun illuminated a tenement.
Getting out of the cab Quinlan was spotted by a couple of the film crew. “Morning officer,” one said and they all laughed.
For their amusement and his own he did an imitation of the old cop he’d heard on TV. “This is my once and future city. My life consists of long periods of waiting and brief, flashes of action and violence. My name’s Sean Quinlan. And when I can get the work, I’m an actor.”
Big parts of Quinlan’s life were in a condition he didn’t want to think about. But he had a good part in a medium-sized film. Nothing else would matter for the next few hours.
At 9:22 one day in the spring of 1960, New York Police Detective Pete McDevitt climbs out of an unmarked Buick, flicks his half smoked cigarette away, and steps into East Tenth Street. His suit is gray and his shirt is blue to match his eyes. His tie is blood red and his hat is tilted back a tad to give full value to his face. Detective Pat Roark exits from the driver’s side wearing brown with a white shirt and blue tie as befits a steady back up man and faithful partner.
McDevitt was played by Zach Terry, star of
Like ’60
, a Hollywood production currently shooting exteriors on the streets of NYC. Detective Roark was Sean Quinlan’s role. As a featured player it was his duty to exit on the far side of the car and step smoothly into his proper place one pace behind and two feet to the left of the star.
Pete McDevitt keeps his eyes fastened on an upper floor of the tenement opposite. But Pat Roark gives a quick scan over his shoulder, to see if anyone is watching them
.
Quinlan planted that gesture in rehearsal and put it in each of the takes, wanting it there to emphasize that his character was the competent by-the-book cop. No one has commented one way or the other.
What he kept in his mind was a street full of guys and women setting out dressed for work, kids going to school on a spring day over fifty years before. He blocked out what he actually saw, the trucks, the crew, the commissary table, the lights and the crowd of gawkers.
Sean Quinlan felt a bit dizzy, like he was about to fall or maybe fly and wondered if this was how the start of a Slide felt. He had created a background for his character. Roark and McDevitt were supposed to pick up Jimmy Nails, a two bit thug suspected of having ambitions above his station, for questioning. Roark was a ten year veteran of the force, a guy with a wife and two kids who was talking about moving to the suburbs. He would not be bouncing on his toes on an ordinary morning on a routine assignment.
A sound crew moved with them just out of camera range as the two cops continued a conversation that the audience would just have heard them have in the car. That scene got filmed in California a couple of weeks back.
“Definitely it’s spring, Pat my boy,” says McDevitt and comes to a halt. Roark’s expression is mildly amused, a bit bored until he follows the other’s gaze.
Without looking, Quinlan knew Terry was wearing the trademark same half bemused, half aroused little grin he had used at least once in every episode of
Angel House
.
Then Roark sees what McDevitt sees and his jaw drops just a bit. They hold the pose.
“Cut!” said Mitchell Graham, the director. “I think we may have it.” Crew members moved; traffic began to flow. Zach Terry looked Sean Quinlan up and down for a moment before the two of them stepped apart.
The actors had worked together once a couple of years before when Quinlan appeared in an episode of
Angel House
. That’s the HBO series featuring a law office whose partners are angels but not necessarily good ones—an amusing show Quinlan thought, once you accepted the premise. Terry was one of the stars.
Quinlan had played a quirky hit man who didn’t happen to be guilty of the killing with which he’d been charged. Their two scenes together had gone well and Quinlan hoped the look just then didn’t mean some kind of tension.
On the way back to his dressing room he passed a girl, maybe twenty, in peddle pushers, teased hair and pumps. She smiled and he turned to watch her walk away.
A production assistant saw him look and said, “That kid has all the moves. This location is a magnet for Sliders. They think if they dress in period and hang around sites like this they’ll wake up in 1960. One told me that the trick was NOT to think about Sliding back while you did all that.”
The kid had a nice ass but not nice enough to make his head spin like it did. In his dressing room Quinlan did relaxation exercises, sipped ice tea, sat silently for a few minutes, and finally listened to his calls. Arroyo, the lawyer was first.
“Sean. I assume everything you wanted to keep is already out of the condo. As of today it’s repossessed. Second, my colleague who’s handling your case up in San Bernardino says there’s no word from the DA’s office. We don’t know if an indictment is coming down. But as we discussed, an indictment is just their way of getting you to testify. I’m wondering if you got my bill.”
Quinlan had gotten the bill. The condo was one more casualty of his divorce and bankruptcy. When he could have sold, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he had to sell there were no buyers.
Everyone had consoled him about the divorce like he’d suffered a death in the family or been laid off from work. Monica Celeste had the better career, was a major presence on daytime cable. Quinlan told himself that if the situation had been reversed he wouldn’t have dumped her. But all that was in the past.
The San Bernardino matter was current. A runaway grand jury led by a self-righteous young DA was investigating collection agency practices. Some debtors apparently testified that a few years before Quinlan had led them to believe he was a cop. So far nothing had gotten out to the media.
That time just after the divorce was still a jumble in his mind. One thing he was sure of was that testifying meant implicating his former employers, which would be very unwise. Another thing about which he was positive was that lawyers had eaten up his
Like ’60
pay.
Adie was at the office and in full business mode when she left a message. “For the Peggy Hughes thing, we can meet at Ormolu at eight. I mentioned that to a prospective client and he knew all about it. So we may meet him there.”
The last call was a voice from deep in a disreputable past. Rollins said, “You asked around about me. Here I am. I know where to find you.” Quinlan was a bit amused.
When they knocked on his door to say he was due on the set, Quinlan thought about his character for a few moments. Roark had the usual problems trying to raise a family on a cop’s salary. His wife and he had disagreements. But she was a cop’s wife and understood what that meant. A steady guy was Roark, a good partner.
Detectives McDevitt and Roark hold the same poses as at the end of the previous scene. The audience has just watched a sequence shot two weeks before on a sound stage in California. It shows what the two cops are watching
—
a nude woman standing behind gauze curtains.
The viewers see a reverse strip as she hooks her bra, pulls up her panties, draws on nylons, wriggles into a slip, a blouse and a skirt. She bends slowly to put on her shoes.
Suddenly McDevitt shakes himself awake. “Decoy!” he says. “She’s letting him get away.” The pair of them run for the front door of the building.
Locations had found an untouched and ungentrified tenement. Props had filled the dented cans in front with in-period trash, a partly crushed Wheaties box, a broken coke bottle, a striped pillow leaking feathers.
A little old lady with a wheeled shopping cart gets in their way. The stoop is worn and paint is peeling on the railing. As they run up the steps the front door opens.