Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  It wasn’t the final cut, it was only the two-fourteen.

  But it was a work of art of a high order.

  That’s what I thought.

  But don’t trust me. I’m only the writer.

  1987

  The Homeless:

  Do They Have Souls?*

  Lead up to the topic question gradually. First ask, Do people who own their own homes have souls?

  Yes.

  How about people who pay rent?

  Not too many of these have souls.

  What about people who live in cars?

  Very few of them have one.

  And those who live in cardboard boxes?

  Only if they live entirely inside the box do they stand a chance of having a soul. People who live with their legs outside the box are lost, for the soul dissolves when it rains. One man who slept in his box for two years woke in a torrential storm to find himself floating and his soul gliding into the sewer at flood level.

  What do you remember about being homeless?

  Nothing. I have always had, a home. I have always had a suit and a proper necktie.

  What of your father?

  He always owned a suit.

  Your grandfather?

  He had a home but lived in a room with ashes.

  Your great-grandfather?

  He lived in a ditch.

  Your great-great etc. grandfathers?

  They lived in the muck: “fingers sink the toes sink in the slime these are my holds … the tongue gets clogged with mud that can happen too only one remedy then pull it in and suck it swallow the mud or spit it out it’s one or the other and question is it nourishing,” said Beckett.

  How many kinds of homeless are there?

  Twelve.

  Name them.

  Men, women, children, animals, and eight others.

  Do burglars get Christmas presents?

  Yes.

  How about prostitutes?

  Yes, if they are good.

  Do you remember Hell’s Kitchen?

  Like it was yesterday. Nothing was more wicked, with its three-cent whiskey. They arrested 82,000 in New York in 1889, and ten thousand were under twenty.

  Well yes, but it’s not that bad today.

  Maybe not, but over in Hell’s Kitchen Park right now you could pick up maybe seventy-five people smoking crack, or dealing it, or selling their bodies to buy it. Nowhere to go, said the park’s twenty-one-year-old crack whore who needs $300 a day to stay tuned. And the same theme pervades Joyce Kilmer Park over in the Bronx: crack was made for fools like me, but only God can smoke a tree.

  Now that you’ve gotten around to God, let me ask another question: is Ronald Reagan homeless?

  Yes.

  Does he have a soul?

  No.

  Will he be remembered for the war on drugs, or the budget deficit, or fraternizing with Gorbachev?

  No, he will be remembered for his remark that people who sleep on heating grates in the street are there by choice.

  Why do people hate the homeless?

  People hate the homeless because they are there. If they were elsewhere people would love them.

  Are you your brother’s keeper?

  I would like to be, but the last time I saw him I didn’t get to see him, because he was wrapped in plastic.

  Why didn’t you unwrap him?

  Because the plastic was keeping him warm.

  Would you lend your grocery cart to a homeless woman?

  Certainly not. She would fill it with cans and bottles.

  But that’s how the homeless make their living, by turning in empty cans and bottles to redemption centers.

  There is no redemption.

  Why is that?

  Because God is on vacation.

  If they do not get caught in the rain, at what point do homeless people lose their souls?

  “Deterioration of the sense of humour fewer tears too that too they are failing too and there another image yet another a boy sitting on a bed in the dark or a small old man I can’t see with his head be it young or be it old his head in his hands I appropriate that heart,” said Beckett.

  In what way may someone cease to be homeless?

  Sleep under snow. Stay away from heating grates. Eat garbage and die. Step to one side when you see a body falling out the window and check immediately with the landlord for vacancies.

  Is there any way to make the homeless into human beings?

  No.

  This is terrible. Isn’t there anything we can do to change this situation?

  Not unless you want to deteriorate into a leper licker. However, prosperity is just around the corner, and job applications are being taken by all Pentagon contractors.

  Will we ever stamp out crack?

  No.

  Will there always be homeless people on the street?

  Yes, thank God, as long as there are heating grates.

  Have you ever met a homeless person with a soul?

  Once. A woman with two grocery carts and two dogs. She was weak and could not push and pull all her belongings at the same time. She pushed a little, stopped, came back and pulled the second cart, to which the dogs were attached.

  How can you be sure she had a soul?

  She was taking care of the dogs, which were not herself.

  What did you do for that woman?

  I gave her twenty dollars, all I had in my pocket.

  What did she say?

  Nothing. She tried to smile.

  Did the gift assuage your guilt over the homeless?

  Yes. I felt like a saint.

  Was this a lesson to you?

  Indeed, for if we all give money to the homeless we will cease to feel guilty and the homeless will then disappear from the corner of our eye.

  Are there any images you would like to leave with us?

  Yes, I recall two alcoholics with only three legs between them, and a very drunken Rumanian going blotto under a piece of carpet next to a steam pipe, and a homeless couple smiling and sharing a cigarette, or maybe it was a joint, and a homeless man celebrating his condition with wine, beer and coffee, and a homeless woman wearing three coats, at least, and a homeless man with a white Jesus beard eating a crust of bread, and in these faces there is desolation, anticipation of the void, and sometimes a grimace of defiance, or, to conclude from that as Beckett did, “to conclude from that that no one will ever come again and shine his light on me and nothing ever again of other days other nights no …”

  Amen.

  1988

  * This was my response to a request from a Newsday Magazine editor that I peruse some photos of the homeless and then write something. The excellent photos, some of them excruciating to look at, were by a veteran photojournalist named Andrew Holbrooke.

  PART SIX

  Albany Resurgent: More Reports from the Native

  O Albany!:

  Remarks to the Publication Party

  There is a great deal of goodwill in the air these days, especially, it seems, toward me and my books, notably the book at hand, O Albany! So many good things have happened to me this year that my life has become improbable, something that even I wouldn’t write in a novel. Readers say my life is far-fetched; but they never say that about what I write, do they? Maybe the chapter on the South Mall in O Albany! (where the state paid for everything three times) is far-fetched. Maybe the whole billion-dollar South Mall is as far-fetched as the chapter on Dan O’Connell, Albany’s political boss, controlling the city for fifty-six years. But is that any farther-fetched than the Erastus Corning chapter—one man elected mayor eleven consecutive times, forty-two consecutive years, a national record? Maybe it’s Albany that’s farfetched—an improbable city.

  It is probably legitimate to call me a chauvinist, though I’ll deny it. Lavishing this much attention on a place is bound to draw this accusation; but I submit that O Albany! is not an uncritical document. Some said the tone of it was not condemnatory, and this is probably true.
I’m more enlightened and amused by our political history and our scarlet record as a city of sin than I am outraged by it. I think one line in the book gives retrospective shape to the creed that has guided our political trajectory for the better part of a century—Charlie Torche’s brilliant perception that “honesty is no substitute for experience.”

  The point of being a bemused cheerleader of Albany life stems in part from my long-smoldering resentment of the denigration of the city by transients. The negative image is often reinforced by journalists who come to town to cover the legislature and never see much more of the city than the inside of the two or three saloons that serve Capitol Hill. I recall one such transient wrote a supremely hasty commentary on the city and The New York Times published it in its travel pages. I was angered to the point of structuring a rebuttal, but when my agent spoke to a Times editor, the piece was cut off before it was written. “We always get that kind of response when we print a critical piece,” said the editor. And so that particular criticism was never rebutted, but it is rebutted now through this book. Now we have our innings.

  We all here know what a special place this city is. I don’t have to convince you. It has its flaws, but whatever they are they are more than compensated for by the city’s piquancy, its pizazz. Maybe this isn’t the chateaubriand, or the filet mignon, of American cities, but it certainly is one hell of a corned-beef sandwich.

  The mention of food reminds me of drink, and suggests another of my favorite lines from the book. This is from one of my drinking uncles who was asked one day would he like a drink. He answered, “The last time I refused a drink I didn’t understand the question.” And so with that, let’s have a drink and get on with the conversation.

  1983

  Jack and the Oyster

  You could say that the world is Jack’s oyster because the oyster is Jack’s world. You could say that Jack is the pearl in Albany’s oyster, as one headline writer already did. You could say that the oyster created Jack’s world, or that the oyster creates a world of jack. Somebody once called the oyster a succulent bivalve. An Albany columnist wrote frequently about the oyster and never forgot to mention that it was a succulent bivalve. Every once in a while he might have said that the oyster was the quintessence of bivalvent succulency, but no. Somebody else once said that the oyster was sexually ambivalent, that God told it to go fertilize itself and it did. The Albany columnist never wrote about that part of God’s handiwork. Ambivalent bivalvency he might have called it, but no.

  Jack, and this is true, has been shucking oysters for eighty-one years. No, you say. Well, that’s the way things happen in Albany. People go along doing things for eighty-one years and then the word gets around that they’ve been doing it and people say, No. What I say is, Go take your no and fertilize it. Jack has been shucking oysters for eighty-one years. When I saw Jack, he was recovering from pneumonia and was in a moment of hiatus (huître is French for “oyster”; hiatus is Latin for “gap” or “opening.” For example: “The hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chestnut”—Tristram Shandy. Hiatus, in a rare meaning, is also “a gaping chasm,” as in an oyster after Jack has finished shucking it).

  Jack also shucks clams. In 1984 it was estimated that he had shucked three million clams during his lifetime. Was that true?

  “Who could predict that for sure?” said Jack.

  Which did he open more of, clams or oysters?

  “Clams. They seemed to go for the clams. But I’d say it was close to even.”

  What of the method?

  “When you open the oyster you take it off the top shell and put it on the bottom shell and they come out a whole lot cleaner.”

  Do you always know the top from the bottom?

  “Oh, sure. The bottom is round, the top is flat.”

  And clams?

  “Only one way to open a clam. From the top.”

  Jack opened a clam for me one night in late 1984 in the kitchen of his restaurant at 42 State Street in Albany. His hair was pure white, he wore his horn-rimmed glasses and had his apron over his collar and tie as he picked up the clam knife, palmed the clam (Jack shucks righty), flicked the knife into the clam’s hiatus-to-be, beveled the doomed mollusk in palm, swung the knife this way with the first deft stroke, then entered the blade deeper into the violated chasm, rebeveled the now twained shell, raised the top half on its hinge, and revealed a clam—from the Old English clam or clamm, corresponding to the Middle High German klam, and to the German klamm, meaning “to cramp, fetter, constrict, or pinch,” which is certainly what life was doing to that clam before Jack freed it into eternity for me with his clam knife—and revealed, as I was about to say, the most magnificent clam I have ever seen. Jack could have searched through a sugar barrel full of clams and wouldn’t have found another with such a sunburst of pure clamency, untouched by the knife, a paragon of hemisected, unviolated abundancy, its liquor intact on the half shell, redolent, as one might expect, of the divine odor of clam juice.

  How had Jack opened, protected, framed the perfect clam?

  “Like everything else. Practice.”

  I did not eat the clam that Jack opened. I regret that. If I had, I could now say that I ate the most beautiful clam in North America, admittedly a clam claim difficult to prove. But let us here set that clam aside, as did Jack, and get back to Jack and the oyster.

  Jack is Jack Rosenstein, now ninety-one, born at 21 Broad Street in the South End of Albany on June 5, 1893, to Isaac and Rebecca Rosenstein, late of Russia. Isaac was a cigar maker (“Very good cigars, no brand. Them days you didn’t need a brand”). Jack went to work as a newsboy at age seven in 1900, working the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway in front of Keeler’s European Hotel, “225 rooms, 35 with bath, Gentlemen Only, Known From Coast to Coast.” Jack remembered Sunday mornings he’d be there calling out “New York or Albany paper” (the proper newsboy pronunciation is PAY-pee), and the drummers who had been up all night (Keeler’s never closed) carousing, after a week of selling their wares, would yell out at Jack: “Get away from there. We wanna sleep.” And Jack would nod and call out, “New York or Albany paypee.”

  When Jack was nine, somewhere in 1903, the owner of Keeler’s took meaningful notice of him and gave him a job running errands. Jack got to know the hotel, especially the kitchen, from which he would run orders of oyster fries and oyster stews to private homes. He sometimes, after eleven at night, delivered to the Tenderloin, when that Albany attraction was partially situated on Dallius Street, an old South End thoroughfare named for a seventeenth-century Dutch cleric.

  “There was two five-dollar houses in them days,” said Jack.

  “Davenport’s?”

  “Right. Davenport’s.”

  “Read’s?”

  “Lil Read’s was a two-dollar house. Stanley’s was a five-dollar house.”

  “Wasn’t there a Creole place on Dallius Street too?”

  “That was farther down.”

  The proprietresses would say, “Give fifteen, twenty cents to the boy,” and Jack saved that change, the beginning of his $400 fortune, about which more later. Then one night one of the oystermen at the hotel didn’t come to work, and Jack was put at the oyster and clam counter with the two other oyster openers.

  “I can see all the oysters piled up, and all you kept doing was opening them and opening them. The boss took a likin’ to me, and so they put me on the night shift, working oysters [clams also]. That’s where I got the practice. Oysters I was a little slow on, but I opened them very good.”

  Is it harder to open an oyster than a clam?

  “To some people it is.” But not to Jack. “My training there made the big difference.”

  There were three oystermen working during the meal hours, with chutes where they threw the empty shells. Some of the oystermen broke oysters, then clandestinely threw them out. The boss would go below after dinner, however, and inspect the baskets at the bottom of the chutes. “He never foun
d a broken one in my basket. But he did in theirs.”

  Jack had learned about oysters and clams from the very same boss, the hotel owner, William (Sheriff Bill) Keeler. “He used to put me in front of him. He’d say, ‘These are your hands, and I’ll teach you how to open them clams and open them good.’ He told others I was the cleanest clam opener he ever saw, but he didn’t mention it to me.”

  One day Bill Keeler called Jack in and asked him where he’d go on a week’s vacation. “Them days you didn’t know what a vacation was.” Coney Island, said Jack. “Okay,” said Bill, as Jack remembers it. “Your pay will go on. But say nothin’ to nobody.” Jack was getting five dollars a week. On Christmas Day, Bill gave him a five-dollar gold piece. “This is your Christmas,” said Bill. “Say nothin’ to nobody.” After a while Bill called Jack into the cashier’s office. Bill was big and stocky, had a large mustache, and wore a black skullcap, a unique garment in Albany. It had a hook above the center of the forehead to which Bill could raise and affix his spectacles when he so chose. In the office Bill asked Jack: “How much they payin’ you?” Jack mentioned the five dollars, and Bill said, “I’m raisin’ it two dollars, but I won’t put it in your envelope. I’ll pay you out of my own pocket.” Because grown men, the oystermen Bill had brought up from Crisfield, Maryland, where people really know how to shuck oysters, were only getting twelve dollars a week.

  Bill Keeler knew about oysters because at age thirteen in 1854 he went to work in the oyster and fish business. Then in 1864 he and his brother John opened an oyster house at 85 Green Street in Albany. Bankers, farmers, editors, bootblacks frequented Keeler’s, two hundred at a time, for the famous oysters—raw, stewed, fried. This was the advent of the oyster age in Albany, and it wrought significant change in the city’s way of life. Success on Green Street with fries and stews led the Keeler brothers to open, in 1884, at 56 State Street, the restaurant that would exist until 1969 and prevail as one of the great four-star restaurants of this country: Keeler’s State Street. It was an American-style restaurant, but it continued in the tradition established in 1838 by Delmonico’s, the pioneer French restaurant in America. That is to say, it offered a highly diverse and often exotic menu, well organized by subject, superbly cooked to gourmet taste, splendidly served in elegant surroundings, and with all gustatorial whims and perversions catered to in the extreme.