Godfrey's Guide

thoughts that led up to a christmas morning breakfast with a man who had a split-screen in his head and loved strawberry shortcake:


THIS  ALL BEGAN AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON CHRISTMAS EVE...
WITH A COLD WIND BLOWING FROM THE RIVER.  I WAS COMING OUT OF an all-night deli near  Hell's Kitchen with some coffee and a copy of The Daily News.  On the corner an older white man in a grimy down jacket was poking around in a garbage can.  There was a large brown plastic bag beside him on the sidewalk.  He found a piece of bagel and an empty Diet Pepsi can.  He slipped the bagel into  the pocket of his jacket.  The can went in the plastic bag.  He peered at me from above a mask of thick wiry beard.  Then he spit at me.  Whatcha lookin' at? he said.  Never seen no homeless person before? Then he was off, talking to himself as he loped toward the Hudson River; carrying a bag of cans and a half-eaten bagel.  A hostile man with a split-screen in his head.  


  In those days, there were other signs of barbarism along the streets of New York too: scared lumpy streets that might have a steel plate covering it, fear and tension in the subways; and the continuing scandal of housing.  Shelter is one of the most elemental human needs but in New York, now largely beyond the means of many people.  Some ended up homeless.  Others settled for less than they needed.  What was extraordinary was that the general population hadn't risen in outrage.


  It was December of 1987 and a closeted gay man by the name of Ed Koch had been the Mayor of New York since 1978.  He was very popular with the citizens of New York, but the administration of poor Ed had become the most corrupt since Jimmy Walker, but not a single figure had risen from the general political muck to challenge him.  For the last decade, our politicians in the city had cheated, lied, and plundered the town; and now a few of them were on the way to the pen. 


  The most hostile environment within the city itself was on the West Side in a place known as Hell's Kitchen, an area into which I moved in 1992, after it had been cleaned-up and given a new name: Clinton Place.  Back then, many young blacks and whites seemed to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back was understandable; but the racism was then between the black and the Irish over  criminal territory, with certain politicians taking a piece-of-the-action; not the racism that we know today.  The virus of confrontation had come about when Irish gangs lost power to the influx into the area of black gangs.  They began by hurling a catalogue of insults and injuries, which quickly  escalated into gunfire and execution.  


  Squalor  and killing was, of course, not only a part of Hell's Kitchen.  It had eased its way uptown to the great museums and theaters as the social disparity grew.  Women were on the prowl along Madison Avenue, or 57th Street, for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates.  Down on Wall Street several high-rollers seemed high, either on cocaine or the platinum roar of the stock market.   In the evenings in Manhattan, you could often pass people who looked like drawings of George Grotsz, who once drew caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920's: suddenly ferociously rich, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies , neighborhoods.  They were all appetite and no mind.  The city had now become one of the rich versus the poor.  And the poor were losing at a rather rapid rate.


  Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft was obliterated from New York, to be replaced by brutally functional or the commercially coarse.  Vandalism grew.  Morons with spray cans chose brainless signatures in order to mar the loveliest old carved stone.  There were corporate scandals, too, political saboteurs, and vandals with elaborate aesthetic theories.  They never rested, and when they did strike, their energy was  ferocious.  And yet, beauty persisted - scattered across the city, the beauty of nature, and of things made by men and women.  There was a beauty above as people hurried through city streets.  Now there was the Landmark Preservation Commission, the Municipal Art Society, and other groups did splendid work to preserve what remained of the past, but already lost, and everywhere there were valuable and beautiful creations under threat.


  It was on Christmas Day morning when I spotted the man with the split-screen in his head again.  In the bitter cold of that winter's day, the collar of his grimy brown jacket was pulled up over his neck to protect him against the wind, he peered into a garbage can, hunting for food, talked to himself, and rubbed his bare hands together in order to give them some warmth.  Every other person who scurried by in the falling snow seemed not to notice him, or were avoiding him on purpose.  I wandered around for a moment-or-two,  then decided to approach him.  I asked him if I could buy him breakfast.  He glared at me in silence.  I repeated the question.  Without a word, he gave an affirmative nod.  In one of the eateries along Tenth Avenue, we went inside and he ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and sourdough toast, along with a side-order of french fries and a cup of black coffee.  When he had finished downing the food as rapidly as he could put his fork up to his mouth, I asked him if he would like anything else. 


  You think they got any strawberry shortcake? he replied. My momma used ta' make me an' my sister strawberry shortcake when I was a kid.  They didn't have none o' that stuff when I wus in the nuthouse. Used ta' be a prizefighter, ya'  know.  Welterweight. He gave a small shake of his head, Got too many hits on th' ol' noggin' an' that's when I got bats-in-th'-belfry an' sent to th' nuthouse.  They kicked me out 'cause it was overcrowded, an' th' State said I wasn't nutty enough to stay, he said, with a small grin.  But when  I asked him how he became homeless, the grin turned to a sneer.  Nobody wants nobody like me hangin' around 'em an' there ain't nothin' I can do about that, 'cause I got no other place ta' go..." 


  I watched in silence as he ate his strawberry shortcake, and when we returned to the street, he thanked me, then loped up to the corner and disappeared from view, and I somehow knew that I would never see him again...


  ...But for all of that sadness and sense of loss it was good to know that I had given him a brief moment of warmth in the otherwise very cold world of the streets of New York,and my only wish was that I could have done it again.