The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  The driver inside, a small dark-skinned man with a pert mustache, looked petrified.

  Three or four more men surrounded the car and began to rock it side to side. Several uniformed cops, including a silver-haired boss guy in a white collared shirt, trotted over to intervene. He had a hand on his billy club.

  I didn’t stick around to learn what was going to happen. Making myself as small as I could, I ducked under the sea of shoulders, darting into every opening I could find, forcing my way off the bridge. Down Park Row, around the bottom of the park, and west across Broadway.

  The crowd thinned as I passed the Woolworth Building, then all but vanished by the time I reached West Broadway. I doubled back past a warehouse block that smelled of smoked cheese and made my way up to Dad’s block. I needn’t have bothered. The buzzers weren’t even there anymore. Someone had yanked the robot-girl’s nipple right off, leaving two exposed wires and nobody home. Alone on this block of working warehouses, each one’s streetfront heaped high with uncollected trash bags and reeking food crates, the curb outside Dad’s place was pristine.

  36

  DANI ONLY CAME TO THE CITY for one July afternoon that summer, and during even those few hours she seemed to be doing her best to avoid me. She was leaving for sleepaway camp the next morning, and the only way I got to see her at all was by agreeing to meet her at the Scandinavian Ski Shop on Fifty-Seventh Street, where I tagged along like a barely tolerated puppy while she bought last-minute camping supplies. I’d been hoping to talk to her about my missing father—the subject was pretty much avoided in our home, and I had trouble talking about real things with my guy friends—but she just seemed too far away for me to even bring it up. Instead, I tried to rekindle her old interest in exploring Manhattan with me, all the places Dad had told me about that I was pretty sure we could sneak into if we tried: the abandoned penthouse ballroom of the Pierre, now used as a giant attic to store old hotel furniture; the train tunnels under Riverside Park, gaudily graffitied by spray-can-wielding Invisible Men; the vaulted subterranean chamber just south of the reservoir, where you could walk the Loch Ness Monster–y iron back of a huge water main before it plunged into the earth and headed down Fifth Avenue.

  But Dani was done exploring, done even trying to enjoy New York.

  “I hate it here,” she told me. “All being in the city does is make me miss it.”

  “Miss you,” I wished she’d said.

  —

  When I got home, feeling bruised and bewildered, Mom was busy in the dining room with her lawyer. I didn’t much like the look of him. He was a little guy, with a sparse failure of a ginger mustache and a briefcase scarred with cat scratches. He looked worried all the time. Every few weeks that summer and fall he came and snapped open the briefcase, took out a fat accordion-sided file, and talked to my mother in low, milquetoasty murmurs.

  Mom didn’t like to give me much detail about money matters, but it was understood we were losing the brownstone. All her lawyer and his sad little almost-mustache could do was delay. Make a mortgage payment here and there, hold off the bank a little longer, persuade a loan officer or a judge to give us more time. Delay.

  My mother’s SoHo job seemed to have stabilized things a bit. It turned out she was pretty good at explaining to rich people why a photorealist painting of a ketchup bottle or a horse trailer was just the thing they needed to make their classic-eight apartments on Fifth or Park stand out. And I overheard enough grumbling from Monsieur Claude and Mathis to know that she had managed to get them to come up with most of their back rent. But none of this was enough to stop the flow of those certified letters from Chase Manhattan. It was all about delay. A week, a month, another month. Buy Mom time to meet with the folks at the housing department again, fill out the paperwork, climb the waiting lists. Delay.

  For all this uncertainty in our home, though, the city’s finances were, if anything, in even rougher shape than ours. Wherever you went that fall, all any of the grown-ups talked about was default. It meant the city was going bankrupt. One day soon, someone was going to present a gigantic bill we couldn’t pay and the city would go belly-up.

  It was late October, the day President Ford was supposed to give his big speech. The one announcing whether he was going to bail us out. Everything depended on it, and Mathis was going crazy waiting for the answer. He was terrified the picture on our RCA Victor would pull its usual trick and become a shimmying wall of static just as Ford started speaking.

  I couldn’t stand all the anticipation. I wandered out to the backyard, where I heard the urgent hubbub of a bunch of other TVs tuned to the same speech. When I rejoined Mathis, Ford was standing at a podium on TV, all big-lipped and bald and irritated.

  “The message is clear,” the president was saying, looking out at us with barely concealed contempt. “Responsibility for New York City’s financial problems is being left on the front doorstep of the federal government—unwanted and abandoned by its real parents.”

  I went out into the hall. It was chilly. To save money, my mother had been cheating the thermostat down to sixty lately, sometimes fifty-eight. I padded downstairs to her floor in my socks and poked my head in her door. She didn’t notice me. She was lying on her bed in dungarees and a bunchy sweater, reading what looked like an Agatha Christie. I could see a black bowler on the cover, two swoops of a black mustache. Mom wasn’t interested in President Ford. She wasn’t interested in Dad, either. Not anymore. She didn’t care if he came back or not: she wasn’t letting him into her life again, and that was that.

  For a time that had been good enough for me, too. Until it wasn’t. You can choose your husband, which I suppose means you can unchoose him. But you can’t choose your dad. Whether you like it or not, whether you like him or not, you are fused together. Like that time when I was four and dozing on his shoulder at daybreak as he carried me through the majestic ruins of New York’s old Penn Station, the felled granite columns strewn like giant pick-up sticks across the marshy junkyard of New Jersey’s Meadowlands. I was part of him, my small body lifting and subsiding with his every breath.

  37

  THE CRUMBLING BRICK TENEMENT at 155 East 104th was even more of a shithole than I would’ve guessed. Darkened with filth from a century of neglect and the elevated train down the street on Park. A deformed cherub’s-head keystone hung above the entrance, its weather-worn face repaired grotesquely by some forgotten handyman with a bucket of plaster and a trowel.

  Two old black guys chatting on the cracked steps next door abruptly stopped talking when they saw me coming. I tried not to look directly into their distrustful eyes. This was the first time I’d ever been above Ninety-Sixth Street on foot, and even the air felt different here: chillier, more charged.

  The vestibule smelled like piss, but the mailboxes told me which apartment I wanted, through the front door with the busted lock and up three flights of creaky linoleum steps. I’d heard about drug dealers working out of Harlem tenements like these, and I’d certainly seen plenty of yellow-tape crime footage of these kinds of dim rabbit-warren hallways on the news. I hoped maybe I could stay safe if I just kept moving and acted like I knew where I was going.

  Curtis answered his door himself, lots of little brown heads taking turns poking out from behind the thick trunk of his body. He looked at me impassively. Not unfriendly, just tired.

  “Well, look who we got here! Can’t say as I was waitin’ on a visit from the son a the Cast-Iron King.” He chuckled drily, his prunish lips pulling back for an instant to reveal the tumult of teeth behind them. “How’d you know I got out, anyhow?”

  “The paper. Same place I got your address. Said they let you out, but Furman had another four months to go.”

  Curtis nodded. Hand on hip.

  “Look,” I told him, “I’m totally sorry about what happened to you guys.” To avoid meeting his eyes, I stared at the triangle of light in the space between his bent arm and torso. “It wasn’t fair.”

  Curti
s shifted his weight in the doorway. “Well, gettin’ arrested sure don’t make it easier to find work, I’ll tell you that. But at least I got sprung early ’cause a what I done for ’em. Did your paper tell you how I helped the city get some a them panels back from the junkman before they was all tore up?”

  “Yeah. It said the D.A. asked the judge to go easy on you and stuff, that thanks to you they still had a third of them left.”

  Curtis waved his hand dismissively. “Yeah, only I don’t know why they gone to all that trouble gettin’ them panels back and pilin’ ’em all up with the ones we didn’t get a chance to take if they was only goin’ to go store it all in another dumb place anyhow.”

  “How do you know it’s in a dumb place? I thought where they moved it was this big secret.”

  Curtis scoffed. “Everybody know. All the scrap dudes, anyhow. City got it hid away in Hell Kitchen over by Tenth Avenue, in some old building the Urban Renewal folks got there. Only thing is, anytime anything happen with the Urban Renewal folks, every scrap yard in town know about it in like five minutes. ’Cause if you think about it, them urban renewals is what give ’em they best business, you know? It’s like a—a whaddayacallit, a pipeline.”

  A little girl with tight black pigtails appeared at Curtis’s side, hugging his leg. He rested a fond palm on her head and she squirmed away.

  “But I’m thinkin’ you ain’t here just ’cause you missed my good looks,” Curtis said to me. “There’s somethin’ you want.”

  I felt myself redden. “Yeah,” I said.

  “So what is it?”

  I ground an imaginary bug into the ground with my sneaker. “Well, my dad’s gone. Maybe you heard that?”

  Curtis nodded. “Sorry ’bout that. I never gave him up, you know.”

  “I know that. At least I figured. But I’ve been thinking about something you said one time, one morning at the lot on West Street.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t think I could hear you, ’cause I was in the truck, but you were complaining to Furman about how Dad said he left your pay envelope at his country house.”

  “Uh-huh. I sure remember that.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t have a country house. So I figured he was just lying to get out of paying you. But now I’m not so sure. Did he ever say where this country house was?”

  Curtis shook his head. “Never told us. Just used to say that was where he been anytime he been gone awhile. I got the idea maybe there was a—hope you don’t mind my sayin’—a woman, maybe.”

  This surprised me, though I don’t know why. “And he never said anything else about where it was? Just that it was his country place?”

  “Well, that’s just it. A couple times he told us he was goin’ to his country place, but then later, like the same day, I hear him tell Zev he was goin’ to his Men-hatin’ place.”

  “His Manhattan place?”

  “I guess. Only he said it funny, with a kinda accent: ‘Men-hatin’.”

  This only confused me further. “Was there any, like, pattern to when he went there? Could they be two different places?”

  Curtis gave a long sigh. “Lookit. I never understood much about white people and all they houses anyhow.” He shook his head. “The crazy ways them houses make ’em act, too, when they either gettin’ ’em, or losin’ ’em, or gettin’ ready to get ’em or lose ’em.”

  The girl was back, tugging at his pant leg. He let her pull him inside a step.

  “Mebbe it was all a lie,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t know.” And now a little boy in a Buster Brown T-shirt was shoving the door closed. “But you take care a yourself, you hear, Griffin? Nobody else goin’ to.”

  38

  “FOR CHRISSAKES, takes you people long enough to answer the phone, dontcha think?” The voice on the other end of the line was gravelly, unfamiliar. A less slurry version of the old guy hawking Fudgie the Whale cakes in those Carvel ads. “Is Nick Watts around?”

  “He stepped out for a moment,” I said.

  “We’re talking about irritatingly handsome antiques-nut Nick Watts, with all the old frames and shit, right? That Nick Watts?”

  “Yeah, he’s my dad.”

  “Well, tell him Larry said he better get his ass down here quick. Washing-machine-sculpture Larry, from Annie’s building. Tell him they’re putting all his shit out on the street.”

  —

  I found Mathis sitting opposite Monsieur Claude at the dining room table, hunched over a map in the Times with all kinds of bands and arrows on it. Mathis allowed as how he was “a bit light of pocket” this week and couldn’t possibly give me cab fare, notwithstanding the $67.25 in new backgammon debts he’d racked up with me since summer.

  “I regret the circumstances,” he said, turning back to his paper. “But there it is.”

  I tried to reengage him. “What’s that map?”

  Mathis looked up, his round glasses glinting. “Oh, it’s the weather. This here is the projected path of that tropical storm that just hammered Jamaica. You hear of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Emma, they’re calling her. They’re not sure if she’ll build into a hurricane before coming ashore.” He stroked his chin collection. “Why do you suppose they always name storms after women, anyways? Someone oughta get Gloria Steinem on the case.”

  “Is it coming here?”

  “Unlikely. It’s tracking the East Coast right there, see, then it’s supposed to swing in and make landfall somewhere between Hatteras and Atlantic City. We’ll probly just get some bad rainstorms.”

  He went back to reading the article that accompanied the map.

  “You sure you can’t lend me five bucks? Please?”

  Mathis shrugged. “Afraid not. Your mother just cleaned me out for rent. Even made me pay her back for that camera my nephew stole when he was staying here.”

  I looked over at Monsieur Claude, whose bored face was wreathed in Gauloise smoke. He had one leg crossed loosely over the other, a yellow espadrille with a hole in the big toe dangling from his left foot.

  “How about you?” I asked him. “I swear I’ll pay you back.”

  Monsieur Claude sniffed absently. “I had a lover from Hatteras once, a Fulbright scholar,” he said. “She taught English to Arabs in Lille, at an execrable little école.” He exhaled a weary plume of smoke. “A soft girl, and grateful for my company. She cried when I left.”

  —

  Another brouhaha was in full swing when I emerged from the City Hall subway station. The crowd was even bigger than the mob of laid-off cops from last time, but the atmosphere felt less dangerous. The protesters were more defiant than enraged, and they looked less like hooligans and more like regular people.

  The villain, as far as I could tell, was Jerry Ford. No longer the harmless stumblebum of Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live imitations, the president had been transformed into New Yorkers’ Public Enemy No. 1. Everywhere you looked, people were jabbing the air with giant blow-ups of the recent Daily News front page: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. Vows He’ll Veto Any Bail-Out.”

  I’d had more than enough of crowds. I skirted this one by hurrying west on Chambers.

  —

  The foul-mouthed sculptor guy on the phone had been right: someone was putting all Dad’s shit out on the street. As I came jogging up the block, two thick-necked men were grunting a rolltop desk through the front door and out to the curb.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “Eviction,” the one with the bulgier cheeks said. “Nonpayment of rent, I’m guessing. There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “Who sent you guys?”

  “Mr. DeCarlo, who else?”

  “Tony DeCarlo?” I asked. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Everything. He owns the building. Now, if you don’t mind getting out of the way, kid, we’ve got a lot more junk to bring down.”

  “Some decent stuff here mixed in with the cra
pola, too, though,” the other thick-neck added, already heading back in for the next load. “Help yourself. It’s all gonna get soaked to hell when that storm gets up here, anyway.”

  It was surreal seeing the inside outside. As odd a place to live as it may have been, that warehouse was Dad’s home. And now here was his four-poster bed, the one I shared with him whenever I slept over, slanting off the sidewalk onto the asphalt-patched cobbles; someone had already made off with one of its carved-pineapple finials. Right next to it, tucked close like a bedside table, was his little cube-shaped bachelor’s fridge with the fake-wood door. Nearby, a claw-foot bathtub leaned against a lamppost, filled with a jumble of household items and antiques: Dad’s disemboweled percolator, a framed black-and-white photo of Ebbets Field, and an old-fashioned scale painted with the words TOLEDO HONEST WEIGHT.

  The banished contents of Dad’s warehouse extended all the way down the block to West Broadway. Piles of antique picture frames. Coffee tables lying in the gutter all legs-up and rigor mortis–y.

  I cast my gaze down the street, the long line of jetsam washed up on its curb. I didn’t want any of this stuff, not really. But wasn’t I responsible for it? I mean, wouldn’t Dad be furious if he came back and found I’d just abandoned it all here on…

  But what a bozo you’re being, I realized. What a rockhead. He isn’t coming back.

  Isn’t. Coming. Back.

  Someone had dumped a big pile of Dad’s vintage postcards in a porcelain chamber pot by the curb. Every one of them depicted a scene of lost Manhattan, a few from this very area. One picture—shot, it said on the back, from the former A. T. Stewart dry goods store on Chambers Street looking downtown—showed City Hall Park and lower Broadway in 1905. No Woolworth Building yet, but the lower end of the park was occupied by an ornate post office with a zillion rounded mansard roofs billowing forth like sails with their bellies full of wind. The next postcard, bearing a 1909 postmark no doubt stamped in that very post office, showed the exact same view, with the prominent addition of a slopey-topped skyscraper in the background, a slender beauty labeled “Singer Building, highest in the world.” I’d never seen it or heard of it. It was as gone as Dad.