The Lexicographer's Rules

Lacy is a college student, young, from Connecticut and from money. Nice girl, but with a tough jaw. She’s 19. The students are all back now from holiday and so I saw her on the street. She was carrying a 35-millimeter camera by its huge lens, a nylon camera bag over one arm. She squats next to Leroy, aka Roy, who is a Broadway fixture. There has been scaffolding on this particular block for more than four years and Roy has found this to be ideal to his outdoor lifestyle. A cardboard case box, the kind that hold 24 cans of beer or soda so that they can be stacked, sits out in front of him to collect funds. He sits on a milk crate. There are four Duane Reade bags, the ones with handles, next to him, against the wall. Their contents are inscrutable.  Lacy believes she will chronicle this outrage. A man sleeping and living on the streets, forced to live on coins from strangers. She sees him as homeless. One must be careful not to perpetuate the myth of the free-ranging homeless who by choice and temperament find a satisfying life out of doors. But one should also be aware that Roy, at least, embodies that myth. If Lacy wants to bring this man inside, out of the cold, she has picked the wrong target. She begins taking pictures. Roy grins like a fool. He straightens his shirt under his unfastened coat (one side of the zipper is missing from the coat) and realizes the buttons are fastened incorrectly, off by one. He unbuttons them all. For the camera, he sticks out his chest and pats his grey-speckled belly hair. With gloves on, it takes forever to re-button the shirt. Lacy is feverishly taking pictures. She thinks she might need more film. She gets everything. These are good. Very good. Now she is thinking to herself about buying the light meter she passed up when she bought the camera. The camera was $450. The lens was $625. The light meter is $140. The film was thrown in for free. I have seen this before. New students from around the country come to New York each year. New York University, Columbia University. They see a homeless person. They squat in front of the person, one foot flat on the concrete, a knee down on the other side. They often have cameras. They take photos. They ask questions. Some of these garden fresh kids take notes. This is what they’ve been reading about. This is the embarassment of the country. This is real. In Roy’s case, it’s a matter of choice. At least now, though not in the beginning. He moved to New York eighteen years ago to take a job an uncle had promised. The building burned, the uncle moved back to South Carolina with the insurance money, and Roy is still here. He began begging for something to do rather than for the money. Jobs have been fleeting and poorly paid and suspect. Roy says if he had all the paychecks he was owed he could put a down payment on an East Side condo. He sees himself above the can collectors who dig through the trash. He doesn’t ask for money. He just puts his box out. If people throw money in there, that’s their business. He can’t afford an apartment, of course. He’s been here so long that all of his friends are here. There’s nowhere else to go. There’s no reason to go. At least he can sleep on the streets, usually without being molested. In smaller towns it would never happen. Giuliani is only catching up to the other America: homelessness is vagrancy and vagrancy is against the law elsewhere. Roy has tried the shelters. Boring and somebody stole his things. Three good ink pens. A Metrocard with eight trips left on it. Roy spends hours each day at the subways stations, picking up discarded Metro cards and trying them each to see if they have a fare left on them. If he finds an unlimited card with time left, he goes to other stations all day collecting discarded cards to bring back and try at the 110th Street station. At the shelter, somebody took his good shirt, the one he wears to meetings. Roy has lots of meetings: meetings with social workers, meetings with police officers, meetings with various departments of the city, meetings with judges. Last summer, he had meetings in the hospital. Three boys from Riverdale had beaten him, leaving lumps like chestnuts on his head. Roy checked out of the hospital early. His bags were gone from the street, but Kim at the dry cleaning store and others had taken them until he recovered. They stank. Kim had to leave them on the fire escape. Kim gave Roy an unclaimed shirt from the rack. Roy thinks that’s funny: he could be wearing the 90-day unclaimed shirt of one of the very people that gives him money. Lacy leaves elated. These pictures surely are award-winners. She’ll be back, she tells Roy. “I’ll be here,“ he says.

One time, sitting and watching a three card monte game, a different older couple approached me. What with my shopping bags and dough-boy complexion, they judged me a tourist. I was their prey. The woman came to my left. She engaged me in conversation, kept peering around my head to catch my eyes and draw my view to her. The old man circled around to my right, the side I keep my wallet, the side I held my shopping bags. No way to prove it, of course, but I’m certain they were professional pickers. Clean-cut, non-faddish. Pastel color clothes more like the suburbs and the rest of America than the city. Sneakers. Maybe late fifties. White hair both. Again, no bags. Her conversation was solicitous and polite, the kinds of things you might say to a stranger while waiting in line for stamps. My attention veered to the right, where the three card monte game was played. Each time, she would stick her head into my line of sight and slowly draw it back to the left, away from her male companion. I said, These games always interest me. I watch to see what kinds of suckers take the bait. I like to judge the crowd. Who will go? Who will have a turn? How much will they lose? She said, “Oh, yes? How long have you been doing this?“ Seven years.
“Well, it was very nice to meet you.“ They left.

The first time I actually saw a pocket picking take place was on the downtown IRT, the 1 train. It’s not crowded in the car, but most of the seats are full. A tall white guy, harried, carelessly dressed in better than average clothes climbs aboard at 79th Street. He grabs the pole and we travel to the next stop, 72nd Street. An old couple boards. Now, it is spring. The weather is warm, though not hot, and most people are in short-sleeved shirts and a few are in shorts. So the old pair catch my eye because they’re still in winter clothes. That’s odd. Dark coats, moth-eaten, maybe smoke-stained. Gloves, knit hats, scarves. The clothes look like the clothes bums, beggars, transients wear, but they don’t smell like it. That’s odd, too. They don’t have bags: no handbags, shopping bags, paper bags, plastic bags, no bags at all. Odd. They’re matched like salt and pepper shakers. Very short, perhaps under five feet. No obvious maladies. Maybe in their late sixties. Odder still: They envelop the tall white guy, who is still grasping the vertical pole. They behave as if there is not enough room in the car, as if it is tightly packed, and they merge around him. There is plenty of room, however. They face him, one in the front and one at his back, and sidle to the only two empty seats in the car, full-body brushing him all the while. They are not talking. The white guy is tall. As they’re doing this, he lifts his hands above his head, a satchel hanging off one shoulder, in the same way you would raise your hands when wading a creek. He looks confused. He looks at the old people, now sitting, staring straight ahead. The tall white guy is befuddled. The old man gets up and stands away from the woman. I say to the white guy, You might check for your wallet. It’s gone, or rather, he doesn’t have it. It’s one of those moments: Did I forget it at home or did someone take it? Our man decides his wallet has been taken. “Do you have it? Where is it?“ to the old couple. They say nothing. The appear deaf. If anything, their wrinkles become more wrinkled and their postures become more hunched. White guy looks confused. His stop is coming up. We’re approaching 50th Street. What is he to do? Do they have it, or do they not? He begins frisking them. This, apparently, is unprecedented, and it proves the old couple guilty: they do nothing. As he checks their pockets and sleeves and coat linings, they say nothing, they do not resist. They are inanimate. They do not protest in any way, and they still stare straight ahead. Everybody else in the car watches with curiosity but no intention of interference. Until this point, I was worried. I didn’t know the man’s wallet had been taken. I was pleased, a little, to find out it had been.

Back again years later. Same place, physically. Different every other way wise. Lenny and I, we stand out of place. In that environment, where the exposed, scorched and shellacked oak beams thrust up the ceiling, in which success and youth and vigor thrum through the room, in that world, our unease is taken as aloofness, our silence as self-confidence. Expected cool from the geek boys in the information technology department, people guessed. Uncool people are not hired, therefore, they must not be uncool. Lenny and I pick out Camille and Alice, new media planners, young, fresh out of school, a contradictory-looking pair, one blond and petite, the other dark and curvy, matched like Bond girls. These two, we bring champagne: they still fight the battle against celebration cake, so decline, refuse the sweets. Ten minutes later Tony from Brooklyn, hairy like velcro, has them in a corner giggling. Lenny and I are technically on break and start in on the second case of champagne. Celebration of ten years, everyone says, though seems more like celebration of the first two creative, wacked years, and then eight years of inertia. When they would roll a martini cart around on Fridays, desk to desk. When they would plant mildly obscene tidbits about themselves in the gossip columns. When all the magazine covers lining the halls were shot. You may have heard about those times. The agency grew larger, it became less common to meet or socialize with Dick and Joe. In the old days, you might find yourself in bars, talking with them in the corner for hours, discussing all things. There was nothing to it. There was no ass-kissing involved, no real danger of having the conversation taken away from you. It was hard, in fact, for new employees to get a handle on this, that their working lives did not have to be consumed by endless rounds of self-promotion. Now, seemingly bored, resentful of success, Dick and Joe wander from person to person in a festive room, like ghosts, hunting. Hard from a day of handling phone calls—which amounts to putting off all of their attendant business until later—Joe hands drinks around like a highly-paid waiter, bestowing raised-eye smiles and drinks on surprised recipients, but no conversation. Dick glides from group to group, an assembly line of thought, hands clasped behind back, starting at one end of the room with a premise and ending up at the other with a conclusion. A broadcast email message is sure to follow.      The knack of advertising agencies to hire beautiful women and attractive women and at the same time competent and intimidating and with closets full of black and grey and clothed just about ten minutes newer than anything in the magazines women cannot be exaggerated. It’d be possible to file a class-action suit on behalf of ugly women everywhere claiming that only beautiful women (and also a fair number of tall, sharp-featured, slim men, like Tony) are hired in the business. Young, too, and stylish. Lenny said if everyone who wore a trim black leather jacket to work or had on black chunky boots were forced to leave the room, that’d leave him and me and the last case of champagne. His parents call him Lenny. His friends call him Lenny. Everyone here calls him Lenn. Two N’s, no Y. And it works both ways, the attraction: some of us in the department have fan clubs, groups of women who call only their particular man and want only his attention. In the department, seven guys and one female temp, there are idle spats over who gets to help certain desirables. It makes for office couples. On a certain day, in pursuit of certainty, Carl forwards all department phones to his line to guarantee a certain call would cross his desk. He answers 223 calls in three hours. Carl and Meliza start with a mail merge and end up on holiday together in Iceland. Come back married. They slip off that first night for mad sheet sessions and both arrive at work the next day looking flushed and clever. Two weeks later he’s broke and she’s getting physical therapy for dragging around a monstrous diamond. Or maybe from too much time in the bedroom, I don’t know, and it’s none of my business.

Recorded 8 January 2000 on 14th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, sunny. Broke a formality, again, of photographers: no hit and runs. Gotta stick around, get the story, get names, find out what’s happening. But I was late, and so snapped a few and took off. Obviously a photo shoot, but the subtext of a public performance. She, the queen, a slim, athletic man wearing nothing underneath the white fur but miniscule black briefs, razzed while I composed the shots. “Honey, your camera’s not working. There’s no flash. How do I look? Is this alright?“ She’s standing in front of a Mercedes with its hood up and a spare tire leaning against the bumper. Some of the attitude she was giving me was good, too good to pass up, so their photographer took shots. A woman, part of the crew, ran a video camera over the scene and settled on me, weaving back and forth so that an interposed light pole would, apparently, give me the effect on film of dodging, or maybe trying to get a peek without being seen. There will be a showing somewhere, and they’ll laugh.