The Sea Beach Line (18 page)

I stopped by Becca's apartment to take care of a few things: picking up my belongings, showering, e-mailing my mother. Knowing I'd be gone before Becca returned in the early evening, I went in the late afternoon and left her a note telling her I stopped by and thanking her for letting me crash there. Even so, I felt like a burglar, moving through her empty, luxurious apartment. I didn't belong there, and I left quickly. From then on, I settled for washing up in the industrial sink at the storage facility, at night when no one was around.

As the days and weeks rolled on, I got deeper into my selling routine. It was best to leave the storage space at seven thirty a.m., because that got me through the streets just before rush hour, and gave me time to set up before the sidewalk got crowded with people heading to work and class. From the diagrams in Al's sketchbooks, I learned the best way to set up my table. These sketchbook details contained a lot of information. Al's arrangement was generally maintained in my setup, but I focused on fiction more heavily than he had. It was important to keep a box of duplicates and second-line stock open under the table, so I could fill gaps right after I made a sale. There was no value in empty table space. I determined how to make the most of the flow of the day; I knew when to straighten up and when to wait, when to make sure I had change, when I could take a bathroom break, and when there was money to be made.

I started to get a sense of the flow of the week as well, and discovered that Thursdays are the best weekdays to sell. They're the last full day of NYU classes, so the students are up and about and need schoolbooks, but it's the end of their week so they're more impulsive with their spending. Fridays are the worst; the students are hungover, and the weekend tourists and brunchers haven't rolled in yet. My selling days were often decided by the weather forecast, but if there was a chance to go out on a Thursday or on the weekend, I didn't miss it.

The longer I spent on the street, and the more I started learning how to make money out there, the more I began to see that buying was as
much a part of the game as selling was. You had to constantly replace the stock you sold with similar material, so you didn't lose sales due to a lack of inventory. If I wanted to succeed in this hustle—and I did, if only to show Al that I could—I needed to be working both ends. I wanted to contribute, so Al would find that his business had thrived, not been depleted in a closeout sale.

Over the course of two weeks, I looked through all of Al's boxes and took notes, so I had a pretty good idea of what he had in back stock. During this inventory, I found Al's cash stash, which was about sixteen hundred dollars. Wondering why he hadn't taken it with him when he fled, I initially took this as a troubling sign. But knowing Al, he probably had multiple cash stashes. I used the money to buy books from people who approached me on the street. These were just loans for working capital; as soon as I recouped the money, I paid it back to Al's shoebox bank. Pretty soon, I had my own small bank too.

The booksellers were generally pretty protective of their wholesale sources, and I didn't try to develop my own connection. I didn't have room to both bring in a whole big haul of books and keep living in the storage space. Besides, I didn't know how long I'd be doing this; hopefully Al would reappear, or I'd at least get a lead on him, soon enough. So I stuck with smaller street buys.

The first person I bought from was Eye. He approached me after I'd been selling for a couple weeks.

“Hey, Baby Edel,” he said, dropping a bag of books at my feet.

“What do you want, Eye?” I didn't appreciate his condescension.

“I got some stuff here I would normally sell Edel. Thought you might buy it instead.” He showed me a bag of books, all of which fit in the general “Philosophy/theory/religion” category.

I had no idea where he got them from, but most of them were titles I had been selling.

“I know who buys what,” Eye said, noting my surprise at the relevance and quality of the books. “And these here are Edel books.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want for them?”

“Your pops gives me two bucks apiece for these.”

“No he doesn't. Fifty cents apiece.” Some of the books would sell for as little as three or four dollars, and I doubted Al's markup was less than fifty percent. The sales had to be profitable enough to make up for all the time you worked, on the street and in storage, without making sales.

“Hey now,” Eye said. “Hey now.” We settled on a dollar per book.

Eye was a semiprofessional—books were one of his established hustles, along with helping unload newspapers for newsstands, selling MetroCard swipes at the West Fourth Street subway station, and a few other things—but other street people would come by with random books. A lot of them were junkies. They'd find books in the trash, boost them from Barnes and Noble, or sneak them off of coffee shop tables, and bring them by Fourth Street. The asking price was always based on the cost of a bag of dope in the projects on Avenue D—the dealers in Washington Square Park didn't really mess with heroin or crack—never the actual value of the book, so you could occasionally come away with a good deal. That being said, nine times out of ten it was a waste of time, because junkies are irrational and because they would usually only come around with three or four books at a time, sometimes only one or two.

A few days after I first bought books from Eye, a tall junkie in a formless blue polo shirt three sizes too big for him flipped out on me when I wouldn't give him twenty bucks for a shoebox full of Louis L'Amour books. I tried to explain that people didn't really read cowboy books in New York, so I didn't want them, and even if they were better titles I couldn't pay more than five dollars for a small box of mass-market paperbacks. I could only charge about two fifty for most mass-market crime and romance novels.

“Do you think I'm some kind of hick?” he asked. “I been in these streets for years. Years and years.” He started ripping handfuls of pages out of the Louis L'Amour books and throwing the pages in the air. I was disoriented by the paper fluttering back down, and afraid that after he was done tearing the books apart, he'd turn on me. In the end, he lost interest and tromped off in search of a fix.

Wednesday of my third week on the street was spent preparing stock. I sorted the boxes—checking which categories were low and what common titles were missing, and replenishing them from books in storage—as well as newly purchased stock. After restocking the street boxes, I went ahead and loaded and tied up the cart, so when I woke up at seven on Thursday morning, all I had to do was hit the can and get dressed, and I was ready to go.

Mendy was already on the street when I arrived. After setting up my card table and asking Mendy to keep an eye on it, I ran over to a deli on Broadway and bought hot tea and a butter roll for breakfast, macaroni salad and a Diet Coke for lunch, and a cream soda for Mendy. He hadn't asked for the soda, but the sugar was about all that kept him going through the day, and it was the only nice thing I knew how to do for him.

When I returned, there was another table next to mine.

“Whose stuff is this?” I asked Mendy, handing him the can.

“Thanks. It's Asher's. NYU is having some sort of event out in front of Stern, and security kicked him out of his usual spot. He threw a fit about it, but he gave up and now he's shifting down here for the day.”

Asher soon came down the street with the rest of his boxes and set up, slamming his books on the table with fury.

“What's your name, kid?” he demanded. I didn't answer. Asher and I had spoken several times. It wasn't my problem that he was too far gone to remember me from one interaction to the next. His permanently dilated eyes made it clear that he'd done a lot more acid in his life than I had. He made me glad I was done with hallucinogens.

“That's Izzy, Asher,” Mendy said. “You know that. Al's kid.”

“Right. Right. Yeah. Listen, Izzy, I'm going to tell you just what I told Mendy: these NYU security forces, they have a three-month plan to drive all of us off the street. One by one. Inch by inch. You see how today, they drove me down here. Eventually, they'll drive us all into the river. Or lock us up on trumped-up charges. We lower the
property value. That drives down tuition, everything.” He was waving his arms. His voice was getting louder and louder. “They waited until I didn't have Milton with me, 'cause they know Milton was forward recon—a trained killer—and they're scared of him. He had to go to the VA hospital today. But now that we've ceded space, we'll never get it back. They have us over a barrel. Jackbooted bastards. They're gonna replace us all with vending machines.” Some of what Asher said made sense, and some of it seemed insane. It was difficult to sort through it.

Midmorning, Asher put a heavy arm around my shoulder and directed my attention to a police car parked on Washington Square East, halfway up to Washington Place.

“You see how they're watching me there?” The cops were facing away from us. I couldn't see the one on the passenger side from where we were standing, but the one in the driver's seat was eating a large sandwich.

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess they could be.” The morning had been pretty good so far. I made a few early sales, and an NYU student who'd just been expelled—he didn't say for what, but he reminded me of myself a few months earlier—sold me a whole crate of good books for twenty-five bucks. He didn't try to negotiate. They were mostly staples, Hegel and Locke and the like, and all in mint condition. You could tell he'd never opened any of them. I wished him luck.

“You're damn right they could be!” Asher shouted. “In fact, they are. They always got their eyes on me, those bastards. Like this one time I was walking right down here by Sheridan Square when this cop starts following me on his little scooter.

“I had a kitchen knife on my belt, in a sheath I made for it. The cop says, ‘What you got there?' I say, ‘You know what I got here. You don't protect me so I protect myself.' He starts grabbing at my knife and manages to pull it out. I say, ‘You got what you wanted, now why don't you leave me alone now?' But he did not. He grabbed me, slammed me against the wall, handcuffed me.”

“Damn,” I said. Asher ignored me and kept talking, his eyes focused on a larger, invisible audience.

“I seen him the other day when I stepped out of the hotel where I live. He says, ‘You got any more knives for me, Asher?' I say, ‘I'm watching you, you bastard. I know what you are doing, and I will burn your ass.'”

Asher started up again during the lunchtime rush, when an NYU security guard approached the table. It pissed me off, not just because it was annoying to me personally, but because I was afraid he would drive away customers. I wondered how Roberto and the Steves put up with this every day. Though, to be fair, Asher usually seemed more calm and coherent. Being displaced from his spot had disturbed him.

The guard that set him off, Chalbi, wasn't even a bad guy. A lot of the guards were assholes, wannabe cops, and got off on harassing homeless people and booksellers, but Chalbi wasn't like that. Mendy had introduced us a couple weeks back. He only worked as a security guard so he could take NYU classes for free, and when he came by it wasn't to bother us, just to check out what books we had.

“Lay off of Chalbi, Asher,” Mendy pleaded, “he's just looking at the books.”

“Yes, lay off me, please,” Chalbi said. “I'm not even on duty.”

“No, no, no.” Asher slammed his fists down on his table, knocking some books to the ground. The one person browsing at his table backed away. “They are all, always, on duty. ‘Off duty' is just a trick. They were on duty this morning, when they wanted to evict me from my spot. But when they come down to spy, suddenly they're ‘off duty.' Well, I'm always on duty. So they better not fuck with me again. One day, I will burn all their assess. All of them!”

Chalbi shook his head and walked off. I sold a customer a Chuck Palahniuk book. The guy had his shirt collar up over the collar of his blazer. He rolled his eyes toward Asher as I gave him his change, grinning at the nut. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to side with Asher's paranoid tirades, but I didn't want to enter into a secret alliance with a yuppie against another street vendor.