All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (6 page)

That afternoon he showed me around his home in suburban Virginia. Each room contained a different collection of some object: African masks in the living room, Russian nesting dolls in the dining room, and so on, dozens and dozens of each particular thing. In its museumlike tidiness, it looked like the kind of place a fastidious serial killer might call home. I couldn’t stop myself from picturing a collection of severed body parts somewhere in the attic—thumbs, ears.

Are you a collector of anything? he asked.

About to say no, I thought of the commonplace book I’d been keeping. If I’d wanted to disturb him even more than he’d disturbed me, I could have quoted some of the entries. Pavese:
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
Jong:
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. . . . It was harder to do nothing.
Freud:
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Nietzsche:
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: with the help of it, one has got through many a bad night.
Pliny the Elder:
Amid the miseries of our life on earth, suicide is God’s gift to man.
Artaud:
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
And so on. I assumed that counted as collecting, but it wasn’t the sort of collection you shared with anyone.

Baseball cards, I told him. As a kid.

In my spare time at work I continued reporting. I called Holden’s boss at the data-imaging company, who told me that he did his best to accommodate Peter Holden’s urge to go out of his way on his business travels and collect the McDonald’s experience.

If you can handle his mysterious routes from point A to point B, he said, he’s the best employee you could have.

I called Holden’s ex-girlfriend. She told me that at first she couldn’t understand why Holden stopped so often for snacks on their vacations, always at McDonald’s. After about a year, she said, I finally confronted him. Why stop at McDonald’s six times a day? Why not Burger King? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, so I’d sit in the car. I’d see him inside taking notes. I’m a psychotherapist, and I could never figure him out.

She went on record that McDonald’s played no role in their eventual breakup.

I called officials at McDonald’s corporate headquarters, who declined to comment. I called a woman at McClip, the barbershop inside the McDonald’s headquarters building, where Holden told me he’d had his hair cut several times. The stylist remembered him immediately. She said Holden was enamored of the fact of getting his hair cut in the same chair where the McDonald’s CEO got his trim. In fact, once every six or eight weeks for nearly two years in the early 1990s, Peter Holden had made the 725-mile trip from his home in Virginia to Oak Brook, Illinois, to get a twelve-dollar haircut.

Thus did I come to write my first story for the
Wall Street Journal
, a front-pager, an A-hed, a humorous and lighthearted tale of one man’s obsession that would turn out to represent the crowning achievement of my career in journalism, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. The headline read:

Not All McDonald’s Are Carbon Copies, a Collector Attests:

Peter Holden Eats at 10,893 and, Like a Wine Lover, Enjoys Subtle Differences

That day the recipients of my fax deliveries, some of whom had yet to acknowledge my existence, dared to make eye contact. Some even whispered words of encouragement. It felt like my coming-out party, minus most of the things that make a party a party. Just before lunch, my telephone rang. It was a literary agent. He asked if I’d considered turning my story into a book. I told him I was flattered by the idea but I thought it wouldn’t make much of a book. There were some details I wished I could have added if I’d had more space, but not many.

The agent said I was probably right. Maybe the thing to do, he said, is find ten other obsessed people and write stories about them and package them in a book of short pieces.

Maybe, I said.

The week after my story about Holden appeared, an assistant managing editor stopped by my desk and told me that he hoped to see more of my byline in the paper. Since my phone wasn’t ringing with more good tips, I became the guy to whom editors turned when they needed someone to write a small item on deadline. I wrote one, for instance, about a medical study on the dangers of cigar smoking. The headline read: “Cigar Smokers Face Increased Risk of Cancer, Study Says.” I thought this was pretty obvious, but the medical editor assured me it was breaking news.

After my first few months on the job, Francine Schwadel called me into her office and gave me a performance review. She said I did a very fine job of handing out faxes and was proving myself to be a diligent reporter. If I showed patience, I would one day be promoted and could move on to something more important than handing out faxes.

For a moment I was taken with the thought of someone bringing faxes to me.

I finished the term of my sublet, rented a moving van, and moved what little I owned in one trip to Bed-Stuy. To celebrate, I went for a few beers and a burger at McHale’s, my farewell visit as a resident of the neighborhood, though I knew I’d always return, no matter where I lived in the city. Three hours later, feeling a little queasy, I decided to splurge on a taxi home.

Where to? the driver said.

When I told him the address, he said, Where’s that?

Bed-Stuy.

He looked at me in the mirror.

I think I can find it.

I hope so, I said. I’ve only been there twice.

He scribbled on his clipboard, reset the meter. A few moments later, stopped at a red light, he looked at me in the mirror again.

You know someone there?

I don’t know anyone there. I just moved there this afternoon.

What for? The price?

Two bedrooms for eight hundred bucks.

Sweet deal, he said. But you’re aware that ain’t your neighborhood.

He was one of the few white-ethnic cabbies I’d seen in the city—Irish, apparently, from the name on the license on the back of his seat—but even so the sternness of his tone surprised me.

Yeah, haven’t seen too many pale faces in the neighborhood, I said.

You’re not going to, he said.

We drove in silence over the East River, the diorama of the city skyline receding behind us. He found the address without trouble.

Remember this, he said, turning to face me. When you need a lift, tell your driver to use the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s the quickest and easiest way. You come onto Broadway and look for Woodhull. Right after the hospital hang a right and you’re on Marcus Garvey. Five minutes and you’re home.

Thanks, appreciate that, I said.

Let me tell you something else, he said. A lot of drivers won’t want to come out here. It’s a no-man’s-land for getting a fare back to the city. Watch how many taxis you see in the street. I’m telling you there won’t be many. Easiest way to shirk a fare is to say, I don’t know how to get there. So you’d better know for them.

Until then I hadn’t felt the tiniest tremor of fear about my move. To be afraid, I thought, would have been to admit to a streak of latent racism, and I didn’t believe I was racist. Nonetheless a veil of suspicion dropped between me and the neighborhood all of a sudden. Worried, I cast about for points in my favor, as if polishing my make-believe résumé of racial sensitivity. At the age of seventeen I’d read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and was so moved I went out and bought a T-shirt with his face silk-screened on the front. In Minneapolis, in 1992, I’d marched alongside some deodorant-averse white people to protest the verdict in the beating of Rodney King. In college I’d judged Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech the greatest of American orations. As a result of my liberal arts education, I’d gained some acquaintance with the works of Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, names unknown in the house where I’d grown up. I owned several dozen jazz albums, from King Oliver to Sonny Rollins. In the greatest NBA rivalry of my lifetime I’d been on the side of the Lakers over the Celtics—Magic trumping Bird, Showtime all the way. Maybe this collection of random facts would cohere into a signal of my harmlessness and emanate from my being on the streets, discernible via ESP on the lower frequencies. Surely my new neighbors would recognize a kindred soul, a fellow American acquainted with the deep meaning of the blues. Class kinship would trump racial difference, that old dream of the democratic socialists.

Then again, the way the cabbie spoke, with a note of warning in his voice—as if he’d sniffed the provinces on me and felt compelled to protect me from my ignorance—clued me in to the fact that my choice of neighborhood was unlikely to be viewed by its longtime residents as a compensatory counterweight to the fact of my employment at the flagship paper of Dow Jones & Company, unless I wore a sandwich board announcing my motives on my walks to and from the subway. My family and friends were bemused that someone of my political persuasion would end up working at the
Wall Street Journal
, and the few colleagues at the paper with whom I shared the news of my new residence were just as baffled that I would choose to live someplace where I so obviously did not belong. At the newspaper the mere mention of whose name evoked images of power, I had none; in a neighborhood that stood as a stark example of powerlessness, I had the look of a man with more power than anyone by far. Walking down Marcus Garvey Boulevard each morning to the train, wearing a suit and tie on my journey between these worlds, I felt myself traversing the righteous path of the outcast. It was a kind of performance, a daily tightrope walk across a yawning chasm, a journey both precarious and surreal, and I savored every delicious and delirious second of it.

Once I convinced myself I would be welcomed in Bed-Stuy, it was only a short leap to imagine myself
saved
in Bed-Stuy. By being called to the surface of things, by being forced to rise out of self-obsession and deal with the tangible world around me as something other than a bad joke, maybe I could begin the work of forgetting the phone calls I hadn’t made, the words I hadn’t said. Maybe, by some miraculous encounter in the streets, I’d be granted the forgiveness I couldn’t grant myself—or, failing that, endure my punishment and emerge reborn.

White Boy

M
onroe Street marked the northern edge of those stately brownstones that gave Bed-Stuy its architectural charm. Not just Monroe Street, but my
side
of Monroe Street. Across the street to the north most of the houses were wooden or vinyl-sided, and some had been abandoned, plywood nailed over their windows. A little farther north the Marcy Houses loomed, aesthetic monstrosities that always put me in mind of medium-security prison architecture, but taller. Jay Z had grown up there, but at the time I couldn’t have told you the first thing about Jay Z, even though “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” had been playing all over the city for a year.

There were three businesses on the corner of Monroe and Marcus Garvey: the Fried Chicken Palace, a Chinese takeout, and a tiny bodega. Up the avenue, just before the projects, was the only grocery store within walking distance. I shopped there twice, once in ignorance and a second time in desperation. The fruits and vegetables looked secondhand. A box of macaroni and cheese sold for about twice what it would’ve cost on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood, it turned out, was what sociologists called a food desert.

One night I went to the Chinese takeout. The kitchen was sealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass so opaque that only the smells of food and fryer oil gave away the fact that the men in back, barely visible as white blurs, were cooking and not stamping license plates. I ordered the chicken lo mein and stood back to wait. Loitering was not encouraged. There was no place to sit. If you wanted to eat on the premises you could set your food on a chest-high shelf along the wall.

A man said to me, Hey, I saw you the other day.

He was short—maybe five-five—and wore thick glasses. The skin on his face was mottled pink in places, as if he’d had a series of skin grafts that hadn’t quite worked out.

In the bodega across the street, I said.

What are you doing here?

Getting dinner.

No, I mean
here
, he said, waving his arm to take in the whole neighborhood.

I live here.

You buy a house?

I rent.

He stared at me with a look of profound confusion. He opened his mouth as if to speak but couldn’t find the words.

A friend of mine put me in touch with the landlord, I said. He wanted to rent to people he knew, or people his friends knew. And the price was right. My name’s Phil—I extended my hand—what’s yours?

He told me and said, I been in the neighborhood forty-six years. Born and raised.

I’m a short-timer by comparison.

What do you do?

There were five or six people standing around waiting for food, and they were all looking at me. I tried to think of something to say—other than the truth—but nothing clever came to mind.

I work at the
Wall Street Journal
, I said.

Shit, he said. Trading stocks and making stacks of cash.

No, I said—and here I did lie, for reasons that were inexplicable; the lie just came to my lips and escaped in an instant—I write about people who trade stocks.

A journalist? he said. A
journalist
? He squinted and turned up his nose. Throwing mud at people, he said. Draggin’ ’em through the dirt. Ruinin’ people’s right to make a living. A
journalist
. He turned and spat on the floor as if the word had dirtied his mouth.

I’d written five or six pieces in my time at the paper, most of them tiny spot-news fillers, things I could tap out at the margins of my days. I was still first and foremost a fax boy, earning barely twenty grand a year, but I was making myself sound like some kind of big shot. Still, I knew I couldn’t backtrack without looking like a fool.