19 Purchase Street (7 page)

Each month, on that night, the seven-year-old Gainer roamed the streets on the lookout for anything usable. From Fifth Avenue over to Lexington in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties was the high yield district, where better quality unwanted things might be found. Gainer would make his way back and forth from block to block appraising the heaps of discards. Whenever he could manage alone, he lugged something home and then returned to continue looking where he'd left off.

It got so Gainer could imagine people according to what they threw away. Books, for example. No one would throw out good books unless the books had belonged to someone no longer liked. The same went for nice souvenirs of places and perfume bottles that still contained more than just a little. Normally, when there were a lot of men's shoes in a pile, there were also a lot of neckties and maybe eyeglasses and a hairbrush. Some man had died. A lot of women's shoes didn't mean that, nor did any amount of cosmetics. But a bunch of women's hats could. From such hats Gainer collected unusual pretty feathers that he used as bookmarks.

Whenever he came across something worthwhile that he couldn't manage alone he'd meet Norma when she got through work at the bakery and they'd heft it home together. Often by the time they got back to where he'd spotted something, it was gone. They weren't the only ones around after street stuff.

They lost out on a lacquered table that was only slightly chipped and an armchair that was only very wobbly. But they didn't lose a wicker love seat with its seat broken through and a desk with one fractured leg that needed a wall to stand against.

Mirrors with their backs scratched, lamps wanting shades or shades wanting lamps, clocks that refused to run until Gainer vigorously shook a tick into them. Stacks and stacks of magazines and all kinds of professional journals. After Gainer went through them he carried them down to the street on that particular night of the month and left them to be picked up by the sanitation department. Pieces of furniture also went to the curb as Gainer and Norma upgraded their finds. As the cycle would have it, many of the things they discarded were wanted and taken away by someone before a city truck could get to them.

After two years of such a life Gainer had learned more than if he had gone to school. He was supposed to be in the fourth grade but Norma didn't enroll him. She feared trouble from the Bureau of Child Welfare. Those people would put Gainer back in a place like Mount Loretto, which would be a waste of everyone's energy, because first opportunity Norma would steal him out. Still, Norma felt school was the best thing for him.

She mentioned the problem to Vicky, who by then no longer had a regular job but was somehow living in a new highrise. Vicky thought she might have an answer. One of her boyfriends, whom she knew only as Arnie, had boasted that he could come up with any kind of document. Vicky called him on that. What did she want, Arnie asked, a diploma from UCLA or maybe a British passport?

How about some school records from a small town? Vicky asked.

A week later Arnie delivered.

Andrew Gainer had attended the Pearson School in Winsted, Connecticut, for the last three years. He'd earned mostly Bs, but a few As, but never an F. A letter from the school principal on doubtless letterhead stationery commended Andrew's learning ability and deportment. There was even a properly imprinted manila envelope to contain it all.

Norma put on her much older look.

Gainer dressed in his best and combed his hair a bit more forward for the part.

Norma was Aunt Norma. She affected a tighter mouth that hardly moved as she spoke to the school's admission clerk.

Gainer blew his nose not to laugh.

The story was his parents were divorced. His mother was not well, suddenly. An uncertain diagnosis. She was in Arizona for treatment.

Gainer met the admission's clerk's eyes with the right measure of innocent despair.

He was in.

Eventually twelve New York City schools would try more or less to educate Gainer. Twelve because of the moves he and Norma made. From Yorkville, better known as Germantown, to Morningside Park, where Columbia University integrated with Harlem, from the fringe of Chinatown and Little Italy to Woodside, not far from LaGuardia Airport, where Irish cops and their families were the neighbors above and below.

Gainer didn't seem to be the worse for so many changes. As far as he was concerned another school was only another school, a place where he had to spend time and appear attentive. Early on he developed a way of assuming an interested expression, fixing his gaze on the teacher while his mind turned over extraneous, usually more complex subjects. His acute mental reflexes allowed him to get away with it. When asked a question, he could snap his thinking back to the classroom and give a reasonable answer.

The books he was required to read were so dry he had to splash his eyes with water to get through them. And what the hell use was it ever going to be for him to know, line for line, the map of Europe before World War II?

The subject he enjoyed was mathematics. That was spoiled for him later on when it became trigonometry and calculus. At that point he branched out on his own into the area of mathematical probability and chance.

He went to school only because that was what Norma expected. He went as seldom as he could. His absence record was flagrant, would have been unacceptable had he not done so well on examinations and deserved his high grades. Whenever called to account for his truancy, he never offered an excuse. Told how much better he'd do if he tried, he doubted it.

Norma wasn't unaware of his attitude toward school. Her talks with him about it reassured her that he was doing fine even if he wasn't staying in line as everyone wanted him to. As time passed, the more Norma learned of what Gainer did when he wasn't in school, the less she worried about him.

“What did you do today?”

He wouldn't lie, not to her. “I was at the Pierre Hotel.”

“Doing what?”

“Watching.”

He'd sit in one of the plush silk chairs in the lobby of the Pierre as though he had every reason to be there. For hours. Comparing those who checked in or out, overhearing, remembering. Other times it was the Regency or the Saint Regis.

On a sixth grade school day he might go for a swim at the East Twenty-third Street municipal pool or be somewhere midtown observing a monte game or some other scam. He was even more likely to be at Dunhill's or Cartier's, roaming around, keeping his hands off the glass display cases.

“May I help you?” Meaning, he knew, what the hell are you doing here.

“I'm waiting for my mother. She's coming in to buy something.”

He had a way of getting into special places, all the way in. For that purpose, his air was detachment, as if being there was the last thing he wanted. He'd enter the most direct way and just keep going. Being alone helped. Being alone he was taken for the kid of someone, perhaps someone important.

It got him into a closed rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic. The conductor, Gainer noticed, scratched himself with the baton several times, his back and bottom, and swore at the various instruments categorically, as though musicians weren't playing them.

It got him into the upper corridor of a fast-trick hotel off Times Square. Watching the comings and goings, not altogether innocent about it.

Into the executive offices of Universal Pictures on Park Avenue, through a reception area and down the hall past offices where practically everyone he saw was on the phone. He wound up sitting softly in the projection room to see a movie that wasn't yet finished, but already, from what he heard, had too many mistakes in it.

Another time, into a leather chair in the reading room of the Harvard Club, only because it was raining for a couple of hours. And, same day, a hard city chair at the Nineteenth Precinct police station in view of the holding pen that had in it a man who had killed two people just that morning. The man seemed more relaxed than anyone there, including the policemen.

It also got him into the kitchen of “21,” the cellar of the Metropolitan Museum, a better dresses try-on room at Lord and Taylor, where he was made to feel invisible. Yankee Stadium and Shea and Madison Square Garden were all regular easy places to slip into without a ticket.

So were Broadway shows.

Gainer, with any old rolled up
Playbill
in hand, would simply step into the thick of those out of the theater at intermission for the air or a smoke. When intermission was over he'd flow back into the theater with them. Nearly always there was an unclaimed or vacated seat for him, but if not, he'd stand in the back with a lost look and watch from there. Seeing only the final act of plays and musicals had its drawbacks, but he enjoyed them.

The city.

He used it to prepare himself for it.

“Hey kid.”

A man with a horse face. Wearing a suit that couldn't be wrinkled.

“You live around here? I always see you around here.”

Gainer didn't say anything.

Horse Face told him: “You can make money today.”

All Gainer had to do was go uptown to the Seagram's Building and pick up an envelope. A sturdy five by eleven envelope, surely sealed, that Gainer put inside his shirt and buttoned from sight because he thought he knew what was in it. For doing the errand Horse Face gave him ten dollars.

Gainer ran that same errand again for Horse Face and from then on, it became a weekly way to make ten. Horse Face asked offhand if Gainer knew what the envelope contained. Gainer made sure the way he said no also said he didn't care. One week the envelope wasn't well sealed and Gainer saw it contained hundred dollar bills, about a quarter inch of them. That time, when he handed over the envelope he had to go with Horse Face into the men's room of a coffee shop and wait while Horse Face was in the toilet booth with the door closed. He didn't blame Horse Face for counting the money.

That ten a week was the first money he could almost depend on. He also earned when he could by posting, upon any possible surface, posters for politicians and Village plays. Sometimes he helped wash cars at the Rolls and Bentley dealer's on Third Avenue.

For quite a while he was a shill for a tattoo artist. He'd roam around midtown on the lookout for servicemen, long-haired guys and motorcycle types. Aside, in a low voice, Gainer would ask: “Want to get a tattoo?” It was against New York law for anyone to tattoo, so Gainer would lead the customer to an apartment on West Forty-sixth, where the artist and his needles waited. Guys who got that far seldom balked, but at the first sign of misgiving Gainer would bare his chest or shoulder to show his tattoo. An elaborate eagle with a bolt of lightning in his talons, or a pair of doves in flight with a furbelow displaying the word MOTHER. Having LET ME in blue on the tip of his tongue was always good for a laugh. That a thirteen-year-old had the nerve was enough to shame any grown man into submitting. Gainer's tattoos, of course, were done with watercolor brushes and inks that only required some hard scrubbing.

Shortly before Christmas of that year a guy Gainer had seen around put it to him that the going price for a set of license plates was five dollars. Gainer gave it about a week's thought and then borrowed the screwdrivers, a regular and a Phillips. He went out at two in the morning. Keeping low between parked cars he worked systematically, removed the front plate of one car, merely turned around and removed the rear plate of the next. All the way down an entire sleeping block of East Seventieth Street.

Twenty sets of plates.

A hundred dollars.

It had been so easy Gainer almost wanted to go for more.

He spent twelve of the hundred on a wallet for himself at Dunhil's. The rest went for presents for Norma. He had a great time buying a wool hat, a new hairdryer, and a number of other nice things for her. He wrapped and tied them individually and wrote some serious and some funny inscriptions on the tags.

Norma was overwhelmed, truly, and she didn't spoil it by asking where he'd gotten the money. He knew, of course, she wondered about it, and he wanted to tell her, but they both put it off and kept putting it off until it took an unessential place in the past.

Gainer was so much in and around the city he could easily have chosen to fall into trouble, but the opposites in his character gave him a sort of balance, like the weights on the tips of a tightrope walker's pole.

Trouble.

Inevitably, it did fall on him.

“Help me.”

The plaintive voice came from behind Gainer. It was not a plea that always got total immediate attention in the city where those two words were commonplace. So, Gainer kept walking, merely glanced back. He saw a boy near his own age, skulking in a doorway.

Gainer stopped, turned.

The boy rushed to him. He was taller than Gainer and better dressed, had on a navy blazer with a school crest sewn on its breast pocket. A packsack of school books was strapped to him. “I'll give you a dollar if you walk me home.” he said.

They were on Central Park West at half past three in the afternoon, the lull time before work let out. There was scarcely anyone along the street, no one within a block on either direction.

“Please walk home with me.”

The boy's voice, elevated by hysteria, was more like a girl's.

Gainer noticed four toughs standing across the way at the edge of the park. He asked where the boy lived. It was only a block out of Gainer's way.

The boy walked beside Gainer with a short sort of tiptoe step, as though even with his longer legs it was an effort to keep up. He was so relieved to get home he forgot the promised dollar. Gainer told himself he probably wouldn't have accepted it anyway. He crossed over at Seventy-eighth to cut through the park.

The toughs came at him.

No chance for Gainer. Because they were four and older, heavier boys. He couldn't fight in every direction. When he went down they held him up to hit him and when they let him stay down they kicked him.