My favorite place to hang out, however, while slipping away from my desk, was the art department, where ads would be knocked off for the smaller mom-and-pop businesses in the city, like Zaro’s kosher breads up on Lexington, or Gene Barry’s Photo Lab on Forty-second, in-house production a part of the deal. The fiftyish art director, who always seemed to be reading the New York Times obituaries page, happened to be a nephew of Max Fleischer, pioneering animator of the 1930s and creator of the Popeye cartoons, and aside from sitting me down in an area cluttered with artist materials to show me how he’d prepare typeset copy, with its different fonts, for the printers, or how he’d adjust color proofs — to get just the right tones — trace drawings off a light box, and any number of innumerable techniques that have long since been forgotten, he’d regale me with stories about the New York he had lived in as a kid, in the 1940s. I’d listen to him as he sat over a light box, tracing images onto a piece of translucent paper. He’d freelanced for some of the legendary comic book studios; worked in animation sweatshops, the sort to provide those Harry and Bud Piels ads for television; and, in general, with a nostalgic look in his eyes that my pop would have instantly recognized, championed — just like so many of the guys from my former neighborhood did — the notion that things were simply better in the good old days.
Now, I’m mature enough to know that he was probably confusing the wonderfulness of being young with the mundane realities he had actually experienced, but back then, I thought he might have had a point. After all, I looked into my own past as often as I did the future, and even I had to admit that there was something — perhaps a lot of things — that had been beautiful about my childhood. Still, there was something about life in New York in the 1940s that spoke especially to me — why, I didn’t know. As for Mr. Fleischer, there is not much else to say, though I often listened to his stories about growing up in Brooklyn with the kind of interest and respect that made the younger secretaries, among them our scrumptious Puerto Rican receptionist, Myra Lopez, regard me as a bit of a weirdo. Looking back on that period now, I think I used my fascination with other people’s stories as a way of keeping my writing, which I hardly touched in those days, alive. Still, at twenty-five, married all of five months or so, I seemed to have, in some ways, a mind-set more appropriate to a man many years older than what I happened to be.
Which brings me back around, at the expense of mentioning so many of the other wonderful folks I worked with, to that wintry day when I turned up at the office despite the fact that I could barely take a breath without having a coughing fit. Bad as I looked, no one said a word to me about going home. It wasn’t unusual for the employees at TDI to keep on working through an illness — as some of the higher-ups, pricks at heart, frowned, to use that corporate euphemism, on excessive absences — in fact, I probably caught that flu in the office, where it had been going around. But because of my flu, I was given light duty (mainly answering phones with my rasping voice) and even allowed to take a long nap in the midafternoon, on a couch kept way in the back for the King Perceval production staff, who often worked late hours. Somehow, dosed on cough medicines and blood-pressure-raising syrups from the Duane Reade down the street, I managed to get through the day. (Thank God, it was a Friday.) Finally, heading home, however, I made the error of allowing myself to be swayed from my course by the company photographer Sid, a black dude, who, catching me in the hall and pleading a conflict, begged me to wait out in front with a package that he wanted me to give to a woman. We had no concierge in the lobby — and he hadn’t the time to wait for her himself.
“Swear to God, bro,” he told me, crossing his heart. “She’ll come by no later than quarter after five.”
“All right,” I told him, even if I felt like death.
So he called her up: “You’ll see the dude — a serious-looking white guy — a little mopey maybe, with glasses. He’ll have that thing for you, all right, sweetheart?” And he gave her the details of how I was dressed: a dark blue coat with a hood, and a dark red scarf. Then he reached into his coat pocket and handed me a brown paper bag inside of which there was a box about the size of a package of cigarettes, but wrapped tightly in white paper. He took off, rapping my back.
“See you Monday, man; feel better, huh?”
For more than half an hour, I waited in the lobby for her to show up, and then, feeling worse and worse, as I was about to head back upstairs to stash that bag away in a drawer (I never found out just what it might have contained) this fine-looking black woman in a Red Riding Hood outfit came up to me, asking, “Are you Sid’s friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, do you have that thing for me?”
“Sure.”
When I handed the bag over, she made happy noises like “Uh, umm” and said, “Yessiree,” feeling it through her gloves. Then, as if she hadn’t another moment in the world, she took off. “You have a nice Christmas,” she called out, turning back to look at me, going to wherever she happened to be going.
The weather had gotten even more bleakly cold in the meantime, a frigid sleet falling, the curbs flowing with sludge, and on such a moonless night the “canyon” of that famous neighborhood — the Empire State Building was just a ten-minute walk away — went floating in an ethereal India-ink black and blue darkness that seemed to both stretch into every direction and at the same time cut right into you to the bones; it was the kind of evening when even the Christmas lights that you saw blinking in store and barroom windows began to bleed tears through the gathering frost on the panes, when not even the sidewalk Santas on the corners of Sixth Avenue, ringing their bells merrily, could work their magic on you.
Somehow, in the same way I had dragged myself to the office that morning, I dragged myself uptown. Climbing out the subway station, at Seventy-ninth, into a Manhattan night when most people resembled shadows, the Edward Hopper yellow-lit windows of the Guys and Dolls Pool Hall seeming to float in midair above Broadway, I couldn’t wait to change into warm clothes, eat some hot something, and collapse into bed to watch TV, while my wife, as was her habit, sat on the floor in a negligee, playing solitaire. We lived on the fifth floor (apartment 5I), and as soon as the elevator doors opened, I experienced the strangest intuition that something had changed. Coughing, sweating up a storm, I rang the bell, expecting her to answer — in the old days, she’d quickly welcome me inside — but this time I opened the door to complete darkness. Putting the lights on and taking a quick look around, I could see that just about everything had been cleared out of the apartment, save a futon on the floor, a few blankets and pillows, a small black-and-white TV, and two lamps, as well as some of my things, piled carefully in a corner: typewriter, books, guitar. Shreds of paper and pieces of nylon rope lay scattered here and there on the floors, as well as some old issues of Backstage and Variety newspapers; plastic garbage bags, filled with her random castaways, lay in the corner; in the kitchen, all the wedding-present cutlery and plates were gone, even a wall clock, but at least some food remained in the refrigerator. A note, addressed to me, apologizing for the way things had played out, had been left on a windowsill.
Oddly enough, suddenly freed up, after an increasingly fallow period of writing, and without much of anything better to do with myself, and after hearing for so long the opinion that the last thing in the world I could ever be was a writer, I started finding my feet in that regard again.