Some might think it strange that, having lived all my life in Manhattan, I have no real friends here.  I could bs and tell you how little I have in common with outsiders who’ve taken over the city and unthinkingly spend millions on a condo that’s not quite the size of my closet.  But while the contempt I feel for these people is real enough, it’s not the only thing that keeps me from their company.  The truth has more to do with the person I am.  If I’m alone it’s because I’ve wanted, as long as I can remember, to live as an outsider, the hooded figure who passes in the night and stares through restaurant windows at happy couples drinking and eating fancy foods.  And then to move on, hungry and lonely.  I remember Harry Haller’s steppenwolf, sitting alone on the boarding house stairs, looking in at the bourgeois world to which he could never rightfully belong. 

The only New Yorkers I do regularly come into contact with are those on the fringe.  They’re mostly street people – drug dealers, escorts, numbers runners, lap dancers – all of them slowly being forced out of the city by rising real estate prices, the same way that years ago the mom & pop stores had to make way for the large chains that planted a Starbucks and a Barnes & Noble on every block. 

They know better than others how hard it can be to survive in a city of immeasurable wealth.  “New York is two cities,” said Simone, an undocumented Brazilian who worked twelve hours a day washing other people’s clothes at a West End Avenue laundromat.  “There’s one city for the rich that’s all expensive stores, and another for poor people who have to save for a Metro card just to ride the subways.”   “You’re still here,” I reminded her.  Simone’s eyes flashed.  “Not for long,” she said.  And she was right because I never saw her again after that.  She vanished like so many other illegal immigrants, deported in the dead of night without ever having had a chance to say goodbye.  One day she was at work and the next she was gone.

There are only two other photographers – Marlowe and Echi – with whom I keep in touch.  But they’re as far out of the mainstream as I am myself; they’re loners in their own right.  No glitzy studios in Soho, no print models arriving fashionably late to pose in couture and asking if we’re able to photoshop their cocaine eyes.  Nor have we any use for the art directors, stylists, makeup artists and hangers-on that crowd commercial shoots.  Instead, in silent defiance, we pull the city’s cloak of anonymity tighter about us and let no one else in while we work. 

If there’s a symbol for our pariah status, it’s our adherence to film in an era gone digital.  But neither they nor I have time to consider what anachronisms that’s made us; we’re too busy creating our images still using the cameras and processes we’ve worked with for decades.  

And if we do take breaks from our work to meet, most often, as tonight, at Marlowe’s place on Columbus Avenue it’s only to advise one another what film or enlarging paper has been discontinued since we last saw one another, what supplier of traditional materials has gone bankrupt now.  A major camera manufacturer may have just announced that it’s discontinuing its line of manual focus lenses along with the film cameras that had made it famous.

Tonight, as on most other evening, after we’d done talking, Marlowe, Echi and I smoked grass, a ritual passing of joints from one to the next while The Doors’ Strange Days played loudly on the Pioneer SX-626 that Marlowe had bought on sale in 1972 at Alexanders on Grand Concourse.  And we kept up, as usual, the desultory conversation whose empty words were meant to hide from even ourselves that we really shared nothing but our art.  That, and our solitude.  Not one of us talked of the present.  Like all those who feel they have no future, we kept our conversation grounded in the past.

Maybe the grass was better than usual – Marlowe always told us he got it direct from Dominicans in Inwood – or perhaps my mood was a bit more critical, but tonight I saw us for the first time as the never-beens we truly were, three middle aged men waiting die without ever having seen our work receive any recognition at all. 

Of the three, I was, at 38, by far the youngest.  And I was also the only of us three to have actually been born in New York where my great-great-grandfather, also Jim McKane, had come one hundred sixty years before to escape the famine that ravaged Ireland.  Bull necked and fair skinned, I was a character straight from the pages of Asbury’s The Gangs of New York.   On nights when I passed the door of McSorley’s on East 7^th, I might as well have been my own ghost emerging from the taproom.

I was also the least solvent of our group.  My own fine arts prints, the black & white photos of Asian models, had been a failure.  No one bought them on ebay and I hadn’t been able to get a gallery show for them anywhere in the city.  They sat forlorn on my website.  I had no way of knowing how many viewers had seen them there.  I never got any email regarding them. 

Occasionally, I made a few dollars repairing an antique print in my darkroom, once a Frederick Evans platinum print, Sea of Steps.  For the most part, though, there was little work for a darkroom technician whose greatest skill had been making black & white prints.  It was the irony of my life that my one talent had become so totally passé it had no more significance than a quaint parlor trick.  One day, developing-out printing might be rediscovered as a lost art, but by then I’d be long dead.  Don’t blame me too much for thinking that sucks.

Even more than I, Marlowe was a case.  Still dressed like a hippie in a Grateful Dead t-shirt and torn Levis, he’d lived for the past thirty-five years in the same rent stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side.  He had a great deal – a one-bedroom with a working fireplace that he’d moved into back when the neighborhood was still violent as hell and some blocks could boast a murder every night. 

Marlowe loved to tell stories of the West Side when the Endicott was the biggest SRO in the city and Carlos kept an M14 under the counter of his Cuban bodega.  “There was a dealer who lived down the hall with my neighbor, an actress named Shirley,” Marlowe would begin with relish.  “He came from Guyana and had a leather handbag store on the other side of Columbus that he used for a front to sell grass and coke.  One night, his Venezuelan wife, who was sick of him making it with the actress, sent her pimple-faced nephew after him.  The kid waited on the landing above, then came down when he heard the dealer opening his door.  The kid shot three times and got the dealer once in the crotch and twice in the chest.  After the shooting stopped and the medics had come and gone, the cops knocked on my door and politely asked me into the hallway to identify the body.  They’d dragged it by then to the center of the floor, under the fluorescent lights, and I could see where the stiff’s balls had left a gory red trail where he’d been pulled along the carpet.”

Other times Marlowe talked of the whores who worked the bar at Stryker’s, a long defunct jazz club on 86th Street, or of the after hours pimps-only club on Columbus that had had a crazy cubist painting on the wooden panels covering the metal detectors in front. 

But if his neighborhood had changed, Marlowe himself had not, at least not to hear him tell it.  He still taught periodically as a substitute English instructor at a half dozen NYC high schools.  Not that he cared any longer if the kids knew who Faulkner was, let alone read his books, or even if they could write an intelligible sentence. 

The teaching gig paid the rent. But Marlowe made a few more dollars telling fortunes.  I know that sounds crazy and calls up images of fat gypsy women with warts on their noses, but he was actually pretty good at conning the rubes, good as only one who believes can be.  He didn’t use a crystal ball or a Tarot deck to see what was coming; instead, he tossed coins and read future changes in I Ching hexagrams.  “I was always interested in The Book of Changes,” he told me once.  “After I came back from my tour in Nam, I set out to master it.

“That was in the late 60’s when I was still living downtown.  I was spending my time going to Allman Brothers concerts at the Fillmore East and tripping on acid while I was working behind the counter at Intergalactic. 

“There were these microdots of sunshine that came around in green and red barrels,” confided Marlowe, pretty stoned that moment too.  “I remember we called it ‘Christmas Tree Acid’ because of the pretty colors.  After I’d scored a few times, my dealer Marvin asked the obvious question: ‘Is one color any more powerful a trip than the other?’  ‘I don’t know, man’ I answered, ‘I always pop a hit of each together, so I couldn’t tell you what either’s like by itself.  Together though, they’re groovy.’”

I was always skeptical of Marlowe’s war experiences and of his life as a bona fide hippie.  I would listen to the old guy, well over 60 now, telling tales of Buddhist temples lost in the jungle or of meeting Hendrix on Second Avenue and I’d wonder how much of it was total b.s.  Maybe all of it, I finally concluded.  There was something about the guy – the nearsighted eyes, the sagging gut, the tarnished silver beard and spiky thinning grey hair held back beneath a stained red bandana – that made me think he had never been any closer to combat than a failed draft physical on Whitehall Street.  And no closer to the counterculture than what he’d read in Rolling Stone.

Tonight, as I toked deeply on the third joint to go around, I decided I’d had enough of his posturing. 

Marlowe had, for our benefit, just repeated one of his favorite quotes aloud.  “In an old book I found in translation in a Tokyo bookshop, an author from the 1920’s named Bujutsu Sosho wrote:

In the well not dug,

In the water not filling it,

A shadow is reflected;

And a man with no form, no shadow,

Is drawing water from the well.

“It’s a good metaphor for what photographers do with film, isn’t it?”  asked Marlowe.  “It takes us into another dimension of reality.”

 “Another dimension, my ass.  It’s like your I Ching,” I said, “All smoke and mirrors.”  I hadn’t meant to bring up the book – I'd known to many people who'd had strange experiences using it for it not to have some power – but since I had and was already in an argumentative mood, I pushed on.  “I don’t care what you say about a mathematical structure.  Reality can‘t be reduced to only sixty-four possibilities.”  

“You’re young and you think there are infinite chances for redemption in the universe, Marlowe answered.  He tried to make himself less condescending by smiling as he said this.  “But there aren’t.  Someone – and I’m not saying it’s me – who’s mastered the I Ching can look at a hexagram and in its arrangement of lines see parallels to the physical world.  Even among multiverses, here are only a finite number of paths, a limited number of exits.”

“You know that’s such shit,” I said, not trying to be polite.  I was incredibly pissed by his assumption that he knew so much more than the rest of us.

 “So let me tell you a story then,” said Marlowe.    

“More crap?”

Marlowe began, “Years ago, I was seeing a really attractive Chinese woman named Lin.  She was an MBA student at Baruch and lived so close to Gramercy Park she had a key to get in there to walk her Shih Tzu. 

“I took her once to a fake French colonial restaurant on 57^th Street, one of those places that serve bad fusion food and give you your choice of chopsticks or a knife and fork.  It was still a very trendy place then and the bar on the second floor was filled with brokers sipping Mai Tais. 

While Lin and I were at our table eating crabcakes, I told her how many years I’d been questioning The Book of Changes and studying its answers. 

“Lin looked thoughtful when I said that.  ‘There’s a professor back in Hong Kong who’s studied the I Ching so long that he can see not only into the future, but into the past as well.  He knows what’s hidden there.’

“I leaned close to Lin.  ‘I asked the I Ching about you before I came here this evening.’

“Lin looked at me closely and then her eyes opened wide.  ‘You did ask it about me, didn’t you?’

“’Do you know what hexagram came up?’ I asked.  I leaned still closer so that I could whisper in her ear.  Then I told Lin the number and name of the hexagram and she turned dead white.”

“So, what happened then?”  I asked Marlowe.

“Lin just looked at me,” Marlowe said, “with this really frightened expression in her eyes.

“Then she stood up.  ‘I can never see you again,’ Lin said.  I thought she was joking but she walked through the restaurant door, and I never did see her again.  How strange is that?”

I wasn't buying it.  "You expect me to believe that?  Why are you telling me this anyway?"

 “You were supposed to ask the name and number of the hexagram Marlowe whispered in the girl's ear.  He meant it as your own fortune,” Echi commented.  It was the first time he’s spoken that evening.  “Whether or not Marlowe’s story is true, it doesn’t surprise me.  In Asia, there are many things that can’t be explained rationally.  In America, though, such things are dismissed as superstitions.”

Echi, a once famous director of pinku eiga, the Japanese softcore termed “pink film,” was the third member of our group.  He’d moved to New York when Nikkatsu had finally stopped making the violent sexploitation films that had been his trademark.  Now he made S&M films that went straight to dvd and were sold in the porn shops on Eighth Avenue near Port Authority.

If Marlowe was old, then Echi was ancient.  Nearing 80, he could remember as a boy having heard the news on Tokyo radio of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  He told us he’d been scheduled to visit Hiroshima the day the atom bomb had been dropped, but who knew if that were true or not?  What could be verified from his brief Wikipedia article on his life was that he’d worked during the occupation as a newspaper photographer, at first, and later drifted from there to work at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest and once biggest movie studio.  In the postwar years Nikkatsu had come to specialize in “violent pink,” the subgenre of pink film notorious for its graphic scenes of rape and torture of women.  It had turned out that Echi had had an instinct for this.  His films had been filled with floggings, enemas, wooden horse torture and the classic form of bondage called chibari.  Women had writhed in agony on the set as brutish yakuza types had ripped away their clothing and slapped their tits mercilessly.  They had stood screaming with their hands bound above them as thugs had flossed their pussies with rough knotted hemp.  Real blood had spilled on soundproof sets during harsh beatings with bamboo canes.  Echi’s only concern through all this had been to mask the actors’ genitals so as not to violate Japan’s taboo against showing even a strand of pubic hair.

Like Marlowe, Echi had his stories to tell as well.  But his were always of Japanese actresses he’d worked with and then later had had sex with.  “Even when I’d become old he said,” I still had young women who wanted to sleep with me.  As I felt their young fresh breasts press against my wrinkled skin, I felt a perverse desire build up within me and I was still able to get hard despite my age.  And if I finished too soon, I’d take a rough wooden stick and work it in and out of their pussies.  It amused me to hear those young women cry out as its splinters ripped the flesh of their inner thighs.”

Though I found Echi repulsive, I couldn’t help being fascinated by his obsession with sex.  To him, a woman’s skin was as soft and fragrant as the flesh of a rare orchid.  Decadent, it contained within itself intimations of disease and death.

It was daylight outside when, weary and stoned, I finally left Marlowe’s.  Snow was falling gently over Central Park.  In a few hours the trees and paths would look like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card, and all the ugliness would be hid beneath a mantle of white.  But it would grey over soon enough and turn to nothing more than piles of frozen slush.