Peter at my side, I walk up Columbus Avenue, where I walked as a child -- only then, what was it but a grubby street of bars and walkups with black iron fire escapes over their facades, deli on one side (smell of brine of the pickle-barrel) and, across the street, huge seedy residential hotel everyone knew was seeded with whores and dope fiends. Close my eyes, I can see Columbus the old way, bleak but exciting, two-way traffic those days, my father holding my arm to steer me past the drunks. I remember a man flung out horizontal from a saloon. He flew slow-motion high through the air like some anti-Superman and ended in the gutter, blood turning his face into a mask, as if all the skin were stripped away. I even remember his giant nose -- well, I'd seen him before, poor bastard, the nose swollen, deeply pocked, and my mother, I remember I was walking with my mother, she nudged but didn't point and whispered, "You see? That's syphilis. You wouldn't understand. Godforbid you should end like that." I don't tell any of this to Peter, my seventeen-year old. Both of us in casual slacks and good sweaters, an adult victory -- he's usually in torn jeans and rock-band tee shirts. As far as his mother knows, we're in New York to look at colleges -- and we have been to Columbia, my alma mater. But in fact, I'm walking down this new Columbus with him because he asked to see where I grew up. I tell him that these stores and restaurants are all new, but I don't tell him how much the street has changed. How dark it was. How dirty and exciting. I don't tell him of the Irish kids who beat up the Jewish kids from the big apartment buildings. I walked wary. . . .
The rest of the story is at
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