… On late night cable, just as when, decades ago, The Late, Late Show flickered across black and white television screens, The Naked City still plays during hours when most New Yorkers sleep.  It’s a crime drama from the 1940’s, but different from others; it was shot on location in Manhattan rather than in a Hollywood studio.  In it, Barry Fitzgerald, the dogged police detective, leads a chase that stretches through a good part of the island – from the murder of a "bad girl" on West 83^rd Street to a final standoff on the Williamsburg Bridge.      

That dangerous sense of a crime-filled city no longer stalks New York.  The chill finger on the spine is gone.  In place of ghettos, where kids played in summer in front of open hydrants while druggies scored in shadowed entrance halls, there are doorman high-rises whose multi-million dollar units are flipped daily. 

No one kills any longer on streets that once, even in daylight, were too dangerous to walk alone. Times Square itself, the venerable perv heaven , has weirdly morphed into Disneyworld on the Hudson.  Its shabby 25-cent peep shows, where badly lit 8mm loops played twenty-four hours, have all disappeared.  Even the junkies on Eighth Avenue have been obliging enough to find somewhere else to shoot up and die.

But the noir sensibility hasn't disappeared altogether. In Gray’s Papaya on 72^nd Street, a homeless man buys his 95-cent hot dog at 3 in the morning and chews it carefully while pulling his tattered plaid jacket closer about his shoulders.  Further up on Amsterdam, a black man in du-rag and XXXL sizes is pushed face forward against a brick wall.  The squad car’s red lights flash on the bricks above his head and on spectators’ faces behind him. The man’s already been handcuffed.  Even if he'd first been shot and killed, the cops would have still cuffed his lifeless body.  That’s what the Patrol Guide says to do; it’s police procedure ...

… After midnight, it was cold in the subway.  Jim’s breath escaped in  steamy vapor as he crouched down to photograph homeless, huddled figures, not much more than broken bundles wrapped in newspaper, trying to keep from freezing as they caught a few minutes’ sleep on the platform’s scarred wooden benches.  Many of them were young, just teenagers, all bad skin and ragged hair.  Jim moved warily among them, just as afraid as they were of being rousted by the cops.

He stopped in front of a tiny drooling old man perched on a wheelchair that allowed him to display the stumps where his legs both ended at the knee.

“Can I take your picture?” Jim asked.

The old man nodded and kept nodding all the while Jim photographed him.  He was a freak from a Diane Arbus reality.

“Obliged,” said Jim as the old man, Jim’s pen held shakily in his left hand, signed a model release.  “What are you doing here tonight?”

“Waiting for the train,” the old man replied.

“Which train?”

“The one as never stopped here before.”

“I hear you there,” said Jim, and handed the old man a ten for signing.  It was as much as he had to spare.

Everywhere in NYC, on the streets and on the subways were the videocams.  Jim had a peripheral awareness of them all about him – in storefronts and in building lobbies – their unblinking lenses recording his every move.  Their motors’ persistent whir droned in the back of his mind.

The transit cop who suddenly barred Jim’s way was in his mid-thirties, about the same age as Jim.  But while Jim looked wolfish in black leather and silver skull belt buckle, his skull shaved clean and steel rings on his fingers, the cop looked as though he’d graduated from John Jay the week before.  His blue uniform was immaculate, not a coffee stain on it, and as neatly pressed as though he'd just taken it off its hanger. 

 “It’s at two in the morning,” Jim said.   “Don’t you wish you home in a warm bed with your pretty wife instead of freezing your ass off at a downtown subway station?”

“Smartass,” said the cop, but left his hands at his side.

Jim didn’t say anything back.  He looked below the cop's eye level.  He memorized the badge number, all the while shifting on his feet and judging the cop’s attitude.  

“Put the camera away,” the cop finally ordered. He stifled a yawn.  “You know you can’t take pictures of the trains or tracks.”

Jim stood where he was.  “The law says I can take photographs where I want.  Do I look like a terrorist to you, man?”

The cop laughed without moving his lips.  “You know who a terrorist is?”  He paused for effect.  “Anybody, that’s who.” 

It was a tired line, and the cop must have realized it himself.  “Listen, me, I won’t give you trouble.  But if you keep taking pictures, there are some other guys out here who’ll just take you downstairs and write you out a ticket.  The trip would be worth it to them just to be in a warm room for a couple of minutes.”

Jim bit back the nasty answer that was already halfway out his mouth.  He knew most police didn't care if he had a right to photograph; if they decided to bring him in, they weren’t going to stop to talk to him about it.  This guy was just trying to warn him.

Jim put the Contax T2 back in his jacket pocket.  For the first time that night, the cold pierced into his lungs and he coughed as he pulled his scarf tighter.  “Good night, officer,” he said.  “No hard feelings – I know you’re just doing your job.” 

The cop smiled back at him warily.

At 5 a.m. and not yet dawn, Jim rode the A train up Eighth Avenue.  He was going to have a drink and bullshit with a couple of other film photographers before he went back downtown and to bed. 

In the early morning, everyone seemed still asleep.  It was in the late hours, though, that death came most often.

In the corner of the car, a shapeless, shapeshifting figure with a sheet pulled over its head snored loudly and slept as soundly as it could in the bouncing car.  A drunk with iron grey hair and checked blue flannel shirt boarded at 23^rd Street and paced back and forth muttering, “no se puede…“  Still distracted and gesticulating madly, he wandered off at 50^th Street.  At Columbus Circle, while a yellow painted garbage train pulled through on the center track, crews of workers put new tile on the station walls.  Waiting to get off at 81^st, Jim stood in the front of train and looked forward along the tracks.  Who lurked in these black tunnels where the rats ran from the subway car’s headlights?  Maybe only ghosts. 

Click here to read Chapter One

Mermaid Parade

This is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

All photos and text, except where otherwise attributed, copyright (c) 2007 - 2008 by Frank McAdam.  All rights reserved.