Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  “Yeah, he’s very popular with women.”

  “I didn’t mean cute cute, I meant cute.” Alison had forgotten that she was talking to another guy. “I like him and all, but he’s not really my type.”

  “Really. What is your type?”

  “Why do you ask?” Her voice regained the more viscous quality it had before Ed Kranepool had killed the mood with his home run.

  “Just idle curiosity. Women are so mysterious.”

  Alison arched an eyebrow.

  “Maybe that’s not the right word. All I mean is…uh…you know…what do you look for in a guy?”

  “Well,” she said quietly. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. You know how women always talk about men’s eyes, going on and on about them?” She leaned forward a bit more. “That’s not exactly right, at least not for me. It’s actually the space around the eyes.” She said the word “around” beautifully. “Take you for example. You don’t have many lines on your face. But a couple here, right near your eyes, and they go up and down, instead of across.”

  She reached over and traced a line near his eye. “Not that long, but deep. It’s where you carry your past. And that frames your eyes.”

  She took his hand and looked at his eyes before kissing him, about four minutes ahead of when he had planned to kiss her. Her kisses quickly became passionate and it took Jason a moment to catch up. She was uninhibited and uncalculating, but he had the fleeting thought that if they ever went ballroom dancing, she would insist on leading. And maybe she should—as they were, she seemed a step ahead of him at every thought. Not that he was complaining, but it was an unfamiliar experience and with that part of his mind not lost in the moment he started to calculate his next move, and whether they were better off where they were or if he should risk trying to move to another room.

  His hand was on her right hip when she sat up. “Listen, I have to go.”

  Jason was taken aback, and very confused. Had he been too slow? Had he been too fast? Did he make a mistake?

  “Really? Go? You have to?” He decided to wait until he could compose complete sentences. “I mean, I thought, you know, we would, you could…I mean, did I do something—”

  Alison kissed him again. It was a robust, reassuring kiss, not with the same fire as before, but it got her point across.

  “Tomorrow is my first class. I need to get a good night’s sleep. I had a wonderful time.”

  They walked along the streets back to Alison’s apartment building. Jason had put himself back together and was starting to assess the evening in a very positive light. It had been an uncharacteristically long time since he’d been with a woman, especially one that he was interested in. Technically, he hadn’t really “been with” Alison, but it felt a little like he had.

  “I can’t believe that your family ate out once a week. We ate out exactly once a year—my mother’s birthday.”

  They took the main streets this time, because Jason knew she wanted to get back. He listened to the rhythm of her walk while she reminisced—a skill he was quickly refining. Alison’s walk changed depending on the context, like a mood ring. This was a good walk. “We’d make her breakfast in bed—my brother and I—and clean the house. There was never school, as we always observed this occasion on the first Saturday after her birthday—our own version of a federal holiday. There would be gifts and treats, of course, and at the end of the day we’d dress up and drive into town…and then—what’s wrong?”

  They were barely touching, just shoulder to shoulder, but Alison could feel his entire body tighten.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” He said it casually, but kind of steered them towards the edge of the sidewalk, closer to the street.

  Alison looked ahead and saw two figures slowly approaching. She had a momentary panic that Jason’s city smarts were anticipating trouble, but it was just two foot patrolmen walking down the block. They walked in silence as the cops got closer, and Jason stared straight ahead the whole time. Not at them, not at her, not at anything, apparently, but the horizon, though Alison speculated that he was focused on monitoring their progress. She tilted her head subtly as they passed, but the cops weren’t looking for any eye contact either. They walked about twenty more paces before Jason spoke.

  “Listen. Adam’s a little paranoid about reporters. He thinks everybody’s out to scoop him. But if he told you not to talk to the cops, he wasn’t just kidding around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cops are like anyone else. Just people trying to make ends meet, maybe do the best they can along the way. In some cases, maybe not. But either way, they work for the City.”

  She looked at him, not sure of the point.

  “Adam thinks he’s in the cage-rattling business. Okay, that’s his choice. But the cops are dogs guarding those cages. Who do you think writes their checks?”

  It was quiet again, and in a few more blocks they reached the steps of Alison’s building. She still seemed a little unsettled.

  “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” she said. “About the police, I mean. More than just Adam talking.”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged, like a kid refusing to confess but unwilling to lie. “But it’s enough for now. Just steer clear of ’em, that’s all. Don’t worry—nothing’s going to happen.”

  He reached out and pushed the hair back from her face. “Hey,” he smiled, “big day tomorrow. What time is class?”

  “Ten-ten.”

  “I’ll call you after.”

  She kissed him again, walked up the steps, and disappeared into the building.

  12

  It was close to three-thirty in the morning, and Adam was alone in his office, and stuck three times over. It had been about two hours since he finally hit the wall with the big investigation, so he decided to try to work on his new book for a while. Adam didn’t believe in stopping, just in changing lanes. But he couldn’t move with the new book—in fact it was a disaster—he couldn’t even bear to look at it, so he switched over to the Dylan essay he was supposed to write for Rolling Stone, which was due in just a few days. That wasn’t going anywhere either.

  Until then it had been a very productive night. He’d been on a roll, integrating all the NYU material in with the various fragments he’d previously accumulated. He worked on it for four solid hours without a break, and everything seemed to be falling into place, like it was a giant paint-by-numbers scheme and he’d just gotten a bunch of new colors. After he worked his way through the new stuff he stopped, had some Chinese food, then crashed on the couch for a couple of hours. But when he woke up around one-thirty he didn’t have it anymore, and the last couple of hours had been frustrating. He started to panic, wondering if he’d confused motion for progress. Maybe integrating all those documents was just so much busy-work. Maybe there wasn’t anything to find. Maybe…no. He cut those ideas off with the discipline of a surgeon, and forced himself to focus on productive thoughts. He had learned a lot, he reminded himself, but it was all about what wasn’t happening, and maybe that’s the way this one had to go, more a war of attrition than a treasure hunt. He was now convinced, for example, that there was nothing to be found in the school system. Class sizes were creeping up and minority test scores were falling, but that was nothing new. The whole garbage situation was a little more puzzling—not because they were spending more, but because they were leaving money on the table. Switching from three- to two-man trucks would have saved a bundle—they could cut 3,000 uniforms from the sanitation department and still haul the same twenty-five thousand tons of trash a day. It seemed like an obvious move for a city teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but he was in the market for corruption, not stupidity, so he let it go.

  “Follow the money,” he said out loud, admonishing himself. It worked for Woodward and Bernstein and he knew that the money had to be even more important here. It wasn’t the loose thread that would lead to the devil’s lair, it was the entire ta
pestry—the money was the story. He closed his eyes and tried to envision how public funds circulated through the City, like blood through a body, but gave up and went for something more concrete—and arranged the piles of papers in the form of a map of the New York area: Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, Long Island, Westchester, Southern Connecticut, North Jersey. There wasn’t a stack for Staten Island, but it didn’t seem to matter. He climbed around the office, looking for different perspectives on the flows of dollars and people. There was something going on with cops and crime. Crime was, in general, way up, but unevenly so and in a noticeable geographic pattern. And the overall problem looked to be more from falling revenues than rising spending, though spending was up, apparently. Apparently—that was the word that was killing him—there seemed to be more money spent than could be accounted for. Staring at the paper model of the City, Adam hoped the answer would come to him. It didn’t.

  He decided to take another crack at the book, his third. He made his reputation on the first, six years ago, with This Machine Kills Fascists. It was one of the first books published on rock-and-roll, and it was damn good, he reminded himself, trying to psych himself up into writing mode. Initially the publishers just asked him to put together a bunch of his columns, with an intro and a conclusion, but Jason told him if he did that he’d be a “fucking whore, selling second-hand columns like they were used cars,” and at the time, it was hard to argue with him.

  Besides, he did that with his second book, Come Together: Why Rock and Roll Can Still Change the World,” which was quickly published eighteen months later, to take advantage of the paperback release of This Machine. It had been a while since he’d tried to write a real book, and he was remembering why. But he knew what he wanted to say, and had the title set: This is the End: Why Rock and Roll Will Never See 30. It started from a bar rap he’d developed years ago about dead rock stars (chicks love talking about dead rock stars—there’s nothing sexier than being young, talented, troubled, and dead) and why they all seemed to die when they were twenty-seven years old: Jimi, Janis, and Jim.

  He’d come up with this theory that rock stars faced a crisis when they hit twenty-five. It’s possible that he was initially inspired by the calculation that his target audience had just reached that age, but over the years he started to buy into his own logic. When you’re twenty-five, you’re an adult, there’s just no way around it. If you got arrested for robbing a bank, when it was shown on TV they’d say “a twenty-five-year-old man was arrested today.” Not a boy or a youth or even a young man; they’d just call you a man. But rock is about being young. So when rockers hit twenty-five, they freak out. After two years of freaking out, they either die or come out the other side.

  About a year ago Adam started thinking that this was true not just for individual rockers but for rock-and-roll in general. Rock was growing up, and that presented it with an identity crisis, a struggle for the very essence of its soul. It was born in 1955, the year Chuck Berry invented the sound, Little Richard gave it a voice, and Elvis made it white. The first cycle ended with Elvis in the Army, Little Richard in Bible school, and Chuck Berry hounded by The Man, and the Mann Act. But it was like the bomb—you could try to ban it, but you couldn’t un-invent it. And the next seven years, pretty much tracking with the Beatles’ recording career, 1962 to 1969, showed what rock could do—it did change the world. Since then, the third generation has had a tough time living up. If the pattern holds, 1976 would be the end of another seven-year cycle; rock would be twenty-one, and staring adulthood in the face. Worse, it wasn’t just old, but had become a business, Big Business; and the phrase Rock and Roll business was an oxymoron—something would have to give. A few years ago, maybe he would have bet on rock, but now Adam was putting his money on business.

  He picked up the microphone from his tape recorder and started talking. “Twenty-five is bad news for a rocker—that’s how old Dylan was when he flipped over the handlebars of his motorcycle and disappeared. John Lennon was the same age when the Beatles quit touring for good; Brian Jones met the same challenge with three emergency hospitalizations, the start of a downhill slide from the top of the world that ended with him kicked out of his band and then dead at the bottom of a swimming pool. Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones—the Mount Rushmore of Rock shook when it hit the quarter-century mark—what chance do mortals have?”

  Well, that sucked. He rewound the tape, erasing it. He got up and tiptoed through the stacks of the paper city without disturbing them. Where was the money coming from? Saying it out loud three times didn’t help, so Adam picked up the Nerf basketball that had been sitting on his desk, and shot it at the basket across the room. “Yes!” he cried, and continued talking out loud, retrieving the ball and roaming around the room. He started to sink one basket after another, deftly cutting through the accumulated clutter. “Clyde’s got it, top of the circle, he looks left, moves right, head fake, puts it up.… Yes, and it counts!” Adam called it out in his best Marv Albert voice. Man, he was good. If there was a pro Nerf basketball league, he’d be the white Walt Frazier. He wouldn’t just be great, he’d make his teammates great. And he’d look good doing it.

  After twenty minutes of shooting around it was time to get back to business, and Adam went to the newsroom to put up another pot of coffee. With only a couple of hours left until people started to show up at the station, he needed to make the best of them. He slipped down the hall to use the bathroom while the coffee was brewing—feats accomplished without turning on the lights—a little game he’d invented that had only once led to disaster. But it was essential survivalist training: you never knew when you were going to have to use the bathroom without being seen.

  He was walking back down the dark hallway when he thought he heard something. He stopped and listened. There was definitely something going on, back near the main office. Backing up, Adam circled around to his office in the darkness and retrieved his trusty stick-ball bat, the closest thing he had to a weapon. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it; it was probably the only thing he’d saved from his childhood.

  Adam crept back towards the coffee machine, flexing his hands on the soft black tape that he’d wrapped around the bottom of the bat twenty years ago. He was able to make out two figures in the darkness—or maybe it was one figure and a plant. Crouching behind a row of desks, he slid along the floor until he was just near enough. He waited for the right moment, flipped on the lights suddenly and swung with all his might.

  “Take it easy man, I’m just the janitor,” Sammy said, good and loud, but without shouting.

  Adam recognized him, and pulled the bat up at the last moment, taking out an overhead light in the process.

  “Sammy, what hell are you doing?” Adam shouted while covering his head with his arms from the raining debris. His heart was pounding.

  “Gettin’ some of this coffee,” Sammy said, with more than a hint of irritation. “What the hell did you think I was doing?”

  Adam didn’t really have a good answer for that. “What were you talking about? You’re not the janitor.”

  “I know I’m not the janitor, but anybody who knows me, they ain’t gonna shoot me. And anybody who doesn’t know me, they won’t know I ain’t the janitor. And ain’t nobody going to shoot the janitor, wouldn’t waste their time.”

  Adam thought about it for a second, and it made sense. He got down on his hands and knees and started to collect the broken bits of the light fixture. Sammy got down next to him.

  “Hey, I busted it, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t mind. I kind of wanted to talk to you, anyway.”

  “How did you know I’d be here?” Adam asked casually, never more than two steps away from a conspiracy.

  “I didn’t. Sometimes I come in a few hours early. It’s nice at night. Quiet, good TVs if you want to watch, but usually I’ll sit on the roof and read a bit—sometimes just by the lights of the City, maybe a candle or two. Of course, not so much in the
winter.”

  “Huh.” Adam barely knew Sammy, but he could see why Jason took him so seriously. There seemed to be a lot going on under the surface of his words, if you were looking for it.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “How much you know about these suits your buddy Jay’s been making time with?”

  “You’ve seen them?” Adam asked, surprised that Sammy had used the plural.

  “Course I have. They want to use the copter, they have to talk to me, at least a little.”

  “Not much. I can’t imagine it could happen if Morgan didn’t want it to happen,” Adam indicated cautiously, “and guys like him want what they want. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know, some of these people, I don’t know about them,” Sammy said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “I see things people like you don’t see,” Sammy said, picking up a piece of glass near Adam’s knee.

  Adam didn’t like the sound of that, and shot Sammy a quick look.

  “It’s not ’cause of you, it’s ’cause of them,” Sammy continued. “They don’t change who they are just ’cause I’m there, like they would for you. And some of these people, well, I’m not so sure about them.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Adam said, “Times are different. At the end of the day, Morgan’s a businessman. Just ’cause a guy breaks the law, doesn’t make him a crook.”

  “Just ’cause a guy follows the rules, doesn’t make him honest,” Sammy countered.

  Adam surveyed the ceiling, wondering what needed to be fixed and what wouldn’t get noticed.

  “You listen to an old man for a second,” Sammy said quietly, forcing Adam’s eyes back in his direction. “Laws change. People don’t. Ain’t no right or wrong in the law. It’s just the law. People are good or bad. Well, parts of both, really, but more one than the other, and that’s what matters. Don’t be telling me about the law. Tell me about the man.”