Lucking Out - James Wolcott [26]
My new apartment and I were relatively well suited. An acceptable holding cell for the unchoosy bachelor/bachelorette, it was a studio shoe box slightly below street level, affording a window view of feet going by. Because the former tenant was an attractive young woman living solo, she occasionally drew peepers on balmy days when she raised the blinds and cracked open the window in futile hope of a breeze. (No air-conditioning.) Neighborhood men of varying ages and maturity levels who had watched her lug in groceries would sometimes pretend they were picking up a stray dime or quarter, craning their necks forty-five degrees in hopes of a floor show. Sometimes they wouldn’t even bother with the loose-change pantomime, simply bent over double and gawked. So for the first few weeks I had my share of prospective admirers who either hadn’t gotten the news that she had vacated the address or were hoping I was just a temporary sitter and were checking to see if she had returned. On the sunniest of days, the studio admitted barely enough light to imply the slim hope of redemption in a prison movie, and no bulbs seemed bright enough to keep the kitchen from looking depressed. The studio was also right next to the stairs, which reverberated like a bowling alley with each arrival and departure of lead boots and echoing laughter.
When the weather was warm enough for raised windows, I could sometimes hear the couple upstairs making love like a train chugging into the station, picking up speed as they reached the final whistle and ground to a halt. The male partner of this duo was the burly playwright John Ford Noonan, who would often be confused with the playwright and director Tom Noonan (whose eggplant head would loom so spookily in Michael Mann’s Manhunter and Heat). The Noonan upstairs had a knack for catchy titles—Heterosexual Temperature in West Hollywood, Raunchy Dame in the Chinese Raincoat—but the play that made his name was the widely produced A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking. Years later it was on one of our first dates that I took my future wife, Laura, to a play written by Noonan and performed with his daughter called Talking Things Over with Chekhov. (Before the play we had dinner at the Lion’s Head, whose glory years as a writer’s bar were now as faded as the book jackets on the walls, a too-neat analogy, but there it is, go bother somebody else.) And years after that I was crossing West Twenty-third Street when I spotted Noonan buffaloing toward me with undiminished life force. Though we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in decades, I recognized him, he recognized me, and without breaking stride, he spread his arms and shouted what we were both thinking, “Hey, we got older!” and kept on barreling.
The IRT stop closest to my Ninety-second Street apartment was a convenient four blocks north, but those four blocks often required nimble footwork and ninja awareness of impending action. So much of New York did. Most of the parks were safer walking around than through. (I was warned about venturing into Riverside Park, where, I got the impression, dead bodies were always being discovered after having rolled downhill the night before.) Entire neighborhoods were considered no-go areas where you never knew what the hell might fall from the fire escapes, and even sections of town that didn’t resemble standing rubble had stretches that you avoided, had you been properly briefed. Otherwise, you’d be walking down some leafy block, moderately carefree, turn the wrong corner, and find yourself staring down the barrel of a hostile street, forced to either retrace your steps or run for your freaky life like Cornel Wilde in The Naked Prey. It wasn’t just the criminality that kept you radar-alert, the muggings and subway-car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxysms that punctuated the city, the sense that much of the social contract had suffered a psychotic break. That strip of upper Broadway was the open-air stage for acting-out episodes from unstable