2 Grand Delusion (2 page)

2

I walked away from Dave's backyard shaking my head. I mean, this wasn't the crime-ridden Brooklyn neighborhood where Andrea and I used to live; this was beautiful, small-town Saratoga Springs. And ours was not a block where you'd expect to find crack dealers. In addition to Dave the cop, we had a retired blacksmith, a bookkeeper, a social worker . . . "good people," as the old West Siders would say.

I should explain about the West Side. Here in Saratoga, tourist town supreme, all the blue-blooded heiresses, polo-playing princes, and high-tech zillionaires have their summer homes on the
East
Side of Broadway. During the August horse races or the July ballet season, the East Side is the Saratoga place to be.

And the
West
Side? Well, when the West Side gets mentioned in the
Daily Saratogian
, it's not usually in the society pages. It's in the police roundup.

But hey, so what? We West Siders think the West Side is the best side. We're a tad touchy about it.

If you live on the wrong side of the tracks in your city, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you live on the right side, it's like this: Except for the occasional pesky drug dealer, we're solid, middle-class folks. Maybe our places aren't as fancy as all of those East Side Victorians, but we mow our lawns, plant daffodils and tulips, and even paint our houses, when we get the money or the time.

The West Side got a bad reputation in the 70s and 80s, when absentee landlords began subdividing a lot of the old homes into shoebox-size apartments. When I say "absentee landlords," some of these creeps actually lived in Saratoga (on the East Side, of course), but they still didn't give a wet goose fart about keeping up their properties. So economics being what they are, the old-timers—the Italians, Irish, and blacks who've lived on the West Side for over a century—watched their nice friendly neighborhood start rotting away.

But amazingly enough, this story has a happy ending. Five years ago, the old-timers decided to do more than just watch. Yes, these grizzled old men and feisty old ladies got organized. They formed the Save Our West Side Association (affectionately nicknamed Save Our Side, or S.O.S.) and held monthly meetings at the Orian Cillarnian Sons of Ireland Hall. Soon a hundred West Siders would show up at an average meeting, and soon every politician in town started showing up, too.

Suddenly, abracadabra, the city began replacing our missing street signs, putting flower barrels on our corners, and smoothing out the rutted, bad-hop infields at the West Side Rec. Meanwhile the local Donald Trumps got hauled into court for violations that had been ignored forever, like broken beer bottles on the sidewalks and abandoned pickup trucks rusting away on front lawns. Best of all, we even got a beat cop to patrol Lower Beekman Street, the seedy neighborhood near the cemetery where most of our five or six drug dealers lurked.

Yes, the West Side was coming back. And as for myself, I enjoyed being part of the neighborhood renaissance, even though I'm kind of an odd bird to be living on the West Side. The thing is—well, let's see, how do I put this . . . I'm rich.

Since I feel a little funny about it, let me hasten to add that I haven't
always
been rich. I used to be a perpetually struggling writer with two young children and a family income that consisted mainly of my wife's modest salary as a community college professor. When Andrea and I bought our house we had no trouble at all qualifying for a SONYMA, a cheap New York State mortgage for first-time home buyers who haven't got a pot to piss in.

But then about eleven months ago, I struck it rich (that word again). What happened was, after fifteen years of laboring away at avant-garde plays that got performed off-off-Broadway for audiences of about four people, I took it into my head to write a hack screenplay called
The Gas that Ate San Francisco
. It wasn't very good, it took five weeks to write, and it made me a million dollars.

Even after taxes, and after agents, managers, lawyers, producers, and other bloodsucking parasites ate their fill, I still ended up with 300K, free and clear.

We could have taken the dough and bought a new house on the East Side. But the thing is, we
liked
our house, an attractive old Colonial with a big backyard. We liked the local elementary school.

And we
loved
the idea of saving that 300K and socking it away in mutual funds. As long as the stock market held up, we could live a comfortable life off the interest whether I ever wrote another hit or not. It would be our "fuck you money," to use Hollywood-speak. That means, if someone offers you big bucks to write a movie you don't want to write (like, say, an action-adventure about Uzi-toting Micronesian terrorists scheming to set loose a thousand cloned grizzly bears in New York City), you can just lean back, smile, and say fuck you.

That felt great because, truth to tell, I wasn't really into writing these days. At the age of forty, after years of agonizing over every syllable, I was taking a well-deserved sabbatical from fictional characters, plot twists, and other writerly cares. I played handball and chess, taught Creative Writing at the local state prison to satisfy my do-gooder urges, and fell asleep peacefully at night instead of lying awake wondering how the mortgage was going to get paid.

Andrea was enjoying these halcyon days, too. Liberated from the long-suffering-spouse-of-a-starving-artist role, she had actually gone months (instead of hours) without having to reassure me that I was a truly great writer who would one day be discovered.

Yes, even a cynic like myself had to admit: life on Elm Street was good.

Except for those dagnab neighbors.

It was absurd. It was outrageous. I'm an American, by God. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—" doesn't that include the right to a good night's sleep?

So when I left Dave's backyard that morning, I didn't just go home and sulk. I did the Jimmy Stewart thing and marched off to fight City Hall.

Having lived in big cities most of my life, I expected to face thick layers of municipal bureaucracy. But as it turned out, all I had to face was one red-cheeked, gray-haired lady in the city clerk's office. As a West Sider herself (I recognized her from the S.O.S. meetings), she was more than happy to help me. She found the file for Elm Street in record time. Obviously she was the person who actually
ran
the city, while the East Side politicians shook hands and took each other out to lunch.

I quickly located the zoning status document for 107 Elm, the offending house. "Excellent," I said out loud as I read it. The house was supposed to be a one-family—not a three-family, the way Pop had been renting it out for years. I'd always suspected Pop was skating on thin legal ice, and now I had proof.

"Find something good?" the gray-haired lady asked.

"You bet," I said, and explained my plan. "I'll get Pop cited for zoning violations. Then he'll be forced to tear down the cardboard walls that split the place into three peanut-sized apartments. And once that house goes back to being a moderate-sized one-family, like it should be, we'll have good people"—jeez, I was talking like a native—"moving in, instead of crack dealers."

Grayhair got up and stepped over to a file cabinet. "This is 107 Elm you're talking about? Are you going to the hearing tonight?"

I stared at her. "What hearing?"

She handed me an official notice. "The zoning hearing. Pop is selling the house, and he applied to get it officially rezoned as a three-family so he can get more money for it."

My jaw dropped. "Shit—excuse my language. If they rezone it so it's permanently three-family, I'll be stuck with scumbag neighbors forever!"

"I'm surprised you didn't know. The Zoning Board is supposed to notify all neighbors in a hundred-yard radius."

"I didn't get notification, and neither did anyone else on the block. They'd have told me."

She gave a tight, ironic smile. "Maybe the post office lost it."

"Yeah, sure. I guess Pop has connections on the Zoning Board."

"How about you?" Grayhair asked. "Got any connections?"

Connections.

Well, all right, I'd make some darn connections.

Back in my teens, I was a political activist of sorts. We played hookey from high school to protest the Vietnam War, beat up any kids we caught eating non-union grapes in the cafeteria, and even made the local news once marching against a nuclear bomb test up in the Aleutian Islands somewhere.

So I went home and wrote up an angry petition on my computer, featuring buzzwords like "Late-night noise . . . drugs . . . doesn't fit in with the family character of the neighborhood..." Then I headed outside to knock on doors and fill my page with signatures.

But the neighborhood was virtually empty. All the kids were off at school, day care, or other child detention centers, and most of the adults were off at work. The two women I came across at the corner of Elm and Beekman were steering stolen shopping carts filled with babies and packages, and they turned their faces away as I approached them. I heard a teenage couple screaming at each other through an open window.

The West Side, usually so neighborly, felt uncomfortably hostile today. Eager for my first ally, I headed across the street to see my old friend Dennis O'Keefe. Dennis is a large, big-hearted man with a serious beer belly, which doesn't seem quite fair since he gave up beer a decade ago. He also gave up his other major vices—heroin, tobacco, and real estate work—and devoted himself to working with troubled kids, trying to save them from the addictions and other foolishnesses that had almost wrecked his own life.

Five years ago he helped some Saratoga post-post-Generation Xers form a group they named Arcturus, after a star that was shining brightly in the sky on the night when they had their first meeting. By hook and by crook (and by a government grant or two), they scraped together enough cash to buy a decrepit foreclosed house at the corner of Elm and Beekman. They fixed it up, sort of, and now they had an African drumming group on Mondays, a "young women's consciousness-raising group" on Tuesdays, a theatre improv/folk music coffeehouse on Thursdays, and "hanging out night" on Fridays.

Shades of the 60s.

They also ran a skateboarding shop there, and the streets outside the building were often taken over by teenagers whizzing around recklessly. But despite their creating a serious local driving hazard, I had a soft spot in my heart for Arcturus. When I walked in that afternoon, Dennis and three green-haired boys were performing a kazoo rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" in the background. It sounded great. I felt spiritually at home, like I always did at Arcturus.

After they finished playing, and the teenagers went outside to risk death on their skateboards, I showed Dennis my petition. His blue Irish eyes lit up when he heard the word "petition"—he's always ready to take on a new political battle—but when he actually sat down and read what it was about, he frowned. "I can't sign this," he declared, shooting me an accusing look.

"Why not?"

He tossed the petition at me. "What is this nimby gentrification horseshit, Jacob? You turning Republican on me?"

Ouch!
Dennis was verbalizing my deepest fears. By getting rid of the relatively low-rent apartments next door, I'd be robbing poor people of places to live. Was I betraying the socialist politics of my youth?

But on the other hand, Andrea and I needed our sleep. "Look, you try living next door to a bunch of drug dealers, see how you like it."

"If they're dealing drugs, then call the police—"

"I did!"

"—but that's no reason the house shouldn't be three apartments. We need affordable small apartments in this town."

I was so pissed off at Dennis's holier-than-thou attitude, and my suspicion that he really might be holier than I, that I started shouting. "Hey, I've been inside those places. What Pop did there is criminal, he ought to be shot! There's old paint flaking off the walls that has got to be lead, there's asbestos crumbling from the ceiling, there's scalding hot, exposed water pipes—"

"Jacob—"

"And the apartments aren't just small, they're pathetic—one minuscule, claustrophobic room with a kitchenette you couldn't fit a bathtub in—"

"Hey, I've got kids coming in here all the time, eighteen, nineteen years old, no money, whacked out parents, desperate for a place to stay. You wouldn't believe some of the stories I hear—"

But I was in no mood for his stories. Dennis was a loud opinionated guy, which made him a good advocate for troubled youth, but also made him a royal pain in the ass. "So I take it you're not with me on this," I interrupted.

Dennis blinked, taken aback at being cut off in mid-harangue. Then he gave me a small tentative smile, strangely at odds with his previous demeanor, and said, "Sorry, Jacob."

"No sweat. Always good to have a sixties retro around to keep us yuppie scum on our toes."

I headed out the door, with Dennis calling after me, "Man, the sixties are coming back! You oughta listen to these kids!"

I did listen as I walked up the street, but all I heard was a discussion of skateboarding techniques. I wondered, would the 60s ever really come back . . . and if they did, would an old fart like me be truly happy about it?