The Narrator

words

2012-01-27T13:11:00.001-05:00

The last of the sun lit the valley in ways that made all thebest myths of my childhood seem possible, golden rays falling on green so deepand on a cloudbank the greatest painters of the world could not capture and,yes, on her skin and on her hair, and splashing off the blue of her eyes. Welay next to each other on the warm bonnet of the borrowed Rover, our fingersintertwined, and I said, "thanks for coming with me today," and shesaid, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world." I wanted to say somuch more, but sometimes when I need them most, words elude me.

Fourth Avenue

2012-01-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

The rain was whipping up Fourth Avenue, and the air was brittle with salt and impending cold. But here on this third floor it was crazy hot as the radiators sizzled. Everybody was awake, the kind of wound up anticipation to be expected. I was too, certainly, but I was working on staying in character, so I was pretending to sleep, lying face down on one of the beds, wearing nothing but Irish flag colored bikini underwear, my arms stretched out above my head, as I breathed the smell of my own sweat.

When I had found my way here an hour ago after the run through the chill wet streets from the Smith-Ninth Street Station, unexpected routes on both trains and streets, slipping through the narrow alley alongside the Bodega around the corner, climbing the fence and then through the stair window of this place, I'd been soaked to the skin. As I took in the team that would cover me tonight, and make all the collars, I peeled my jeans, my jacket, my shirts, my socks off, spreading them out on the old porcelain topped kitchen table stuck next to one of the overheated radiators. There was nothing I was wearing, nothing I was carrying, which would, I sure hoped, suggest to anyone that I might be a cop. The others were dressed for other purposes.

I'd stripped, to try to get warm and dry, spent about fifteen minutes talking in whispers to my Lieutenant and the Sergeant who was leading the sniper team while those here who did not know me wandered who the fuck this weird deep cover guy was. "I don't get these kids," one older cop said, "I mean, what's with the Italian flag panties? Is he a fag or what?" "Irish flag you color blind moron," I heard Jimmy say behind me, "and he might be a fag or he might not but don't think he's gonna fuck someone who looks like you." Jimmy was good people. You have to know, when you have a job like this, who the few people are you can trust absolutely. Jimmy was one of those. Frankie was another. Sergeant Keneally, especially when he had me covered with his rifle, was a third. The rest of the room really didn't matter to me. And I wasn't going to put wet shit back on to make them feel better about me. So I decided that I needed to slip away, and faked my pass out on the bed, separating my brain from the room.

Twenty minutes passed, occasional bits of talk bouncing through my attempts to shutter my head. "Look at that mook," I heard an unfamiliar voice say, "sound fucking asleep, dreaming of getting fucked in his little bikini ass." "Probably what he's dreaming," Frankie answered, "but he ain't asleep. You asleep Mook?"

"Shut the fuck up," I mumbled to the guy I knew always shadowed me, the guy who kept me alive day in, day out, and went back to convincing myself that I was actually sleeping. I tried to tell myself that I was dreaming of an icy day in a pub atop the Dublin Mountains, Johnnie Foxx's, with snow squalls spinning past the windows. The picture of solitude, of silence, was what I was trying to hold on to, but I couldn't. I shifted, it was hot enough in here. I saw myself lying on a beach, maybe Rockaway, sweat and salt and baby oil mixing in the air, the sky above such pure blue. Maybe...

I wasn't scheduled to head out, to start the game, for another six hours. I needed to be here, of course, but I needed to be anyplace but here as well. It was one of those things. It was a sense of nowhere to hide that had taken over, eyes closed fantasy being the one escape, but it remained an incredibly dangerous escape.

The rain was hitting the roof, mixing in a chaotic sound wall with the conversations, the television, the feet on the floor, the opened cigarette packs, the cheap lighters flaring, the citywide radio channel burbling with Emergency Services calls. As it rolled in, in my head, the beach on the Atlantic morphed into the crowded soundscape of a summer night along a salt water marsh. Just a step further in from the sea, as Jamaica Bay breathed peacefully. I took that and let it hold me.

The salt marsh was a safer place than the mountain snow, at least if the sounds swirling would not go away. There were a few moments, maybe ten minutes, not sure, when the surrounding noise, whatever I was turning it into, was mixing with the voices and faces of this case. There were lots of faces, I'd been in this character for two months now, and, yeah, I knew these "targets" - targets were what they were and had always been - I knew these "targets," I might have even trusted these "targets" better than most of the people surrounding me now, but that's the way the brain works.

And then, then I did fall asleep.

The dreams left the fears behind for right now. They left the lies behind. And the guilt. They left that clock ticking in the ears, eyes, and hearts of all the others in this odd hide out, and probably with the rest of the cast of characters, all those out on the streets between here and the canal who were prepping for that false play I had given them. All around the clocks ticked toward 10:30.

But I lay outside those gears of time for as long as I could.

copyright 2012 by Ira David Socol

Finding Ends (11/19/2001)

2011-09-08T06:57:00.002-04:00

Fresh Kills, from the Wellcome Collection on Dirt,
2011 Exhibition, London

If I wasn't wrapped in this Tyvek spacesuit and struggling inside the breathing apparatus I'm sure I would be getting cold. The sun is brilliant but the November wind is rolling off the Jersey highlands and there's nothing at all to block it up here at the top of the pile except the remnants of the fire trucks.

We stand out here literally between sunrise and sunset. In the morning the slight glow out across the open Atlantic finds us dressing. An eternity later the last light fades behind the mountains of northern New Jersey and we wash ourselves off. We fill that stretch of time sifting through the untold tons of rubble and dust that were once the World Trade Center in this oddest of places, the special re-opening of the world's largest garbage dump. One hundred and eighty feet above the tidal marshes that centuries ago gave this place a Dutch name for clean waters, Fresh Kills, we work the crime scene of the worst single-day event in North American history.

I've been here a little more than a month now. Since they looked into my eyes and told me Ground Zero wasn't for me anymore. That was true. Twenty-three straight days in the smoking rubble and home only three times, but that wasn't rare. Most of us who could, stayed. What else would we do?

The search here is unlike the search there. There we could, at least in that first week, hold onto the vague thought that this was a rescue mission. Here, where nine thousand tons of, well everything, arrive daily, those illusions have never stood. Here where the stink of methane leaking from below mixes with the stench of human death and the salt air of the ocean. Here where we follow the gulls as they dive for the remnants of human life, then chase the birds with fireworks and gunshots so we can have first pick. Here where we keep our separate boxes for ID cards, and jewelry, and clothing, and shoes, and bone, and tissue. Here where crushed emergency vehicles mix with shattered office furniture, millions of office documents, and, in one day's discovery, a pile of tiny brass Trade Center figurines that probably came from that tourist spot just off PATH Square. Here where we hunt for evidence while desperately trying to give something back to everyone left behind.

This week I've found seven rings and four fingers, a laptop computer, two wallets-one more or less intact, part of a foot, a singed copy of Steppenwolf with a name and email address from nyu.edu written inside, the kind of badge-holder cops and firemen wear around their neck when off duty, six pairs of jeans from The Gap with price tags still attached, the top half of a human femur, someone's tax return, two earrings, a piece of white-painted aluminum I'll guess came from a plane, a phone message slip telling someone to "call home. 8:32 am, 9/11."

This week, as every week, people have come to the gates below us. Mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives. There is nothing we can do for them here but they come. They come looking for answers we'll never be able to offer. They come hoping to salve unsalveable wounds. Or they come to say "thank you" and to say that they appreciate what we are doing. That is the hardest. It would be easier if they were angry.

I have worked for this department for more than twenty-one years. I have seen way too much. I have lived through way too much. Eight years ago when I worked the case of the first Trade Center bombing I realized my head was beyond full. I retreated into meaningless office work, became a researcher who happened to carry a gun. I started telling people simply, "I work for the city." I moved to the woods of outer Staten Island and pretended I was someone else. Then, on that incredibly clear day in September, drifting up Church Street, coffee in hand and late as usual, I stared up at my favorite buildings and watched a huge airliner plow into the north tower. When I pulled that shield, "Detective-Field Services Specialist, New York City Police Department, 1476" out from inside my shirt and ran across the street my carefully constructed dream world vanished. For 69 days I have been a cop again, in all the best ways, and, of course, all the worst.

It is important to know when to stop. That moment isn't now, but it is coming. I will keep driving here every day, and pulling on all this gear, and walking up to this, the world's tallest tomb since the great pyramids, and sifting the dust with gloved fingers, until we are all sure there is nothing left to find. When that is done, I will be too. I will take off the spacesuit. I will take off the badge. I will throw the gun into the harbor. I will go away to the smallest, calmest place where I can buy good coffee and sit in a good library and stare into open waters. And I will look again for peace.

Execution

2011-07-25T09:39:00.000-04:00

On those hot nights when there just was nothing to do but be away from everyone and everything I'd walk in a slow drift down to the park at the water. There were no lights at all except for one in the parking lot just off the road and the glow of the 7-up machine by the padlocked restrooms and thick lines of trees blocked any infiltration from the lamps of the beach clubs that lay east and west. So in pure darkness I'd cross the enormous lawn, flowing down the hill, to the rock shore and strip off my clothes and being relatively careful of position as far as underwater rocks were concerned, would dive into the cold silence of Long Island Sound. If I needed dreams I'd swim to the abandoned fort and climb out and walk the ancient streets. If I needed hope I'd head for a little island with nothing but trees and warm myself in the glow of the stars. If I needed simply to be gone I'd crawl all the way to the lighthouse at Execution Rocks, cutting across the shipping channel with strokes at an absolutely consistent pace and breaths taken only at the point of absolute necessity. In that eternal salt water my thoughts would cease as I forced my body to fight for survival. And when I finally pulled myself up under the tower, the foghorn deafening, the strobe splitting the sky, I'd remember nothing but the swim itself.

© Ira David Socol 2006

Electric Avenue

2011-04-14T12:54:00.002-04:00

93 degrees. 92% humidity. Radio Car 1352. 2232 hours. 47 Precinct, Sector Eddie, which is not ours. Division 9 radio crackling, "holding 83 in the Four-Seven, anyone available?"

The Police are on the radio. "Every Breath You Take." MTV is the thing you have cable for right now. Limelight, in that old church downtown, is the hottest club, and Liam and I know a few of the bartenders, so we get in. Imus in the morning on WNBC - "Hear the new excitement from Rockefeller Center, Sixty-Six, W-N-B-C" - and Howard Stern in the afternoon keep the day shift laughing but now we're flipping through FM, the volume loud, as if it could drown out the dispatcher.

I tell the guy I'm refusing to fight with to get lost. The sweat is pouring down my chest and back under the vest. we have no time for the kind of bullshit this moron and his buddies are trying to pull in the parking lot of the shopping center by Laconia and 2-3-3.

We climb back into the Gran Fury. Air conditioning is cranked to “max” as Chrysler describes it. The cold rushes across our faces, through our wet hair, we both shiver. Liam picks up his radio, but…

A fat beeping tone blasts through the speaker, “Any available in Four-Seven, shots fired, White Plains Road and 2-2-9, multiple calls.” “Seven Adam is going,” Liam responds, “We’re clear from 2-3-3 and Laconia.” “Any disposition?” “Uhhh, unfounded.” “OK Adam, anyone else in the Four-Seven going?” “Seven Sergeant will go Central, but we’re a long way.”

I’m speeding across 2-3-3, lights but no sirens. Never go to shootings with sirens, bad shit happens if they know you’re coming. The real radio begins to play “Electric Avenue,” our precinct’s theme song, and as I squeeze through traffic and spin left under the El a train heads south, sparks lighting up the scene in video game blue. “Down in the street there is violence. And a lots of work to be done. No place to hang out our washing. And I can't blame all on the sun, oh no.”

Between 231^st and 229^th there is no shooting but plenty of broken glass. Car windows, store windows. Two guys in Rasta hats and dreads lie on the east side sidewalk in a flow of blood, one face up, one face down. There are footprints leading away, someone has already snatched the guns from their hands. “Slow it down at White Plains Road,” I tell the dispatcher, “but we need the boss, and the squad, and the coroner.” And now we hear wailing. In the street an old Chevy sits crashed into an El pillar, windows open. My eyes go to the passenger door, one huge bullet hole ripped into it. Then through the window we both see the top of a kid's car seat.

Liam pushes the button on the radio, tells dispatch we need an ambulance fast. We run to the car, but we already know.

(copyright 2011 by Ira David Socol)

Deep Green

2011-03-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

St. Patrick's Day was a Sunday that year, and we awoke late, our bodies waiting for the overnight rain to disappear before coming to life. But even that was slow, we breathed in the stew of smells, sheets dried outside on the line, the sweat of our bodies, the peat from the fire in the next room, the salt slipping in on the westerly breeze.

"When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses."

I did not read her poetry, but watched her as she stood naked, silhouetted against the dull blue sky. "You haven't written a thing in three days," she said. Not a question, so I stayed silent.

She turned.

"Today?" "Not today, we need to be outside today. Tomorrow, tomorrow is Monday."

We gathered things to eat from the kitchen - brown bread and black pudding, yoghurt and bangers, cheese and bottles of beer - and walked from the house down the hill. We could hear the Atlantic breathing. We could smell the live wool of the sheep. We felt the winds of the world grazing our faces.

At the shore we lay on a blanket. There was just enough sun to allow us to keep ourselves warm.

(copyright 2011 by Ira David Socol)

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 by Seamus Heaney

March Seventeenth

2011-03-16T21:59:00.001-04:00

Eric Ascalon (c)

I said I wasn't putting a uniform on and I wasn't working the parade and while I wanted the day off that wasn't a huge deal because even if I didn't get the day off and, it's not like I'm not sensitive to the staffing reports that he needs to send in to One Police Plaza everyday, I'll pretty much be here when I'm here but that'll be between him and me. The lieutenant said, "Whatever, but what do we have on these guys in New Jersey?" And I ask, "That the Feds haven't leaked to CBS yet?" He groans. I just say, "I'm going in today. I won't go tomorrow. Thursday I'll look at the reports. I'll tell you something Friday." He says, "Friday?" I say, "Yeah," and I turn around, spilling a little of the now cold coffee from my mug onto his carpet, mumble "sorry" and leave. Then I spend the next six hours wandering through the ruins of the Trade Center garage, surprisingly hot under the hard hat though it's cold down there, but we're not finding anything important anymore, that's just the truth.

Wednesday I make token attempts. I wear an old Michigan State sweatshirt because it's green. I get to work by about 8:15 more or less, and since my day technically starts at 7:30, that's not bad, for me. I've taken the slow train in. This might mean I've spent too much time thinking. Yes. It does. I've thought about how tired I am. The last three weeks, Jesus. I've thought about how I've slept probably thirty hours since the attack in February, so, of course I'm tired. I've thought about how that's not true: that's not why I'm tired. I'm tired because I'm going nuts as a single dad and I'm tired because not only haven't I gotten laid in a really long time I can't even imagine that a woman might look at me like that anytime soon if ever again and I'm tired because I came downtown eighteen months ago because they thought I was a burnout or I thought I was a burnout and because I have no idea if I want to be a cop anymore and because I've been that tired and then, bam, some motherfucker tries to knock over the towers and then, bam, because my bosses mistake eccentricities for intelligence, I'm totally a cop again, and I wasn't ready for that. And I've thought, well, we pretty much know what's happened and we've pretty much identified the assholes involved and we're not going to get any credit for this anyway because the FBI is running a 24/7 publicity machine for themselves and besides, at some point the CIA and the DIA are gonna take over, right? Then, if all that's true why can't I just dump this task force and go back to crime trend data analysis or whatever the fuck my job is supposed to be, or better yet, just leave this city behind before… well, before whatever's next.

On the train there are lots of cops, of course. Tons of cops and fireman all in uniform all heading down to be in the parade or to work at the parade. I've done that. Not marched but worked it. I did it as a rookie, all rookies do it even ones assigned to weird deep cover stuff. And last year because they said that kind of crap was more or less the price of the detective's shield, or surely the price of getting quickly bumped from Detective Third Class to Detective Second Class when you're getting that kind of pay raise without capturing Son of Sam or something. So I've worked the parade. It's not bad, I just never liked being in uniform in Manhattan where they expect you to wear hats and have shiny shoes and stuff. If I'd done it today though, I'd meet people, and I don't want to meet people or answer questions about how I am, and so I ride downtown, hidden in a corner, the old college baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, and I make it through the pre-parade crowd un-noticed.

I make it through the day mostly un-noticed. I get in late. I drink coffee. I walk a wide lap around the Trade Center. I sit by the water. I sit in the churchyard at Trinity. I walk another lap. I have three beers and a corned beef sandwich at a bar that ought to be better on the edge of Tribeca. On the way back from the bar a fat guy seems to be having a heart attack in front of a Burger King and I drop into public servant mode and do what I can for him until the ambulance gets there. Stuck to the light pole next to where the fat guy lies on the sidewalk is a hand-lettered poster asking, "Is America Safe?" A block later I meet Ahmad who's a waiter up in Windows on the World. He walked down 106 floors 19 days ago, and he's been out of work, of course, but he seems good. He laughs cause I'm wearing green, "You guys really aren't all Irish."

At home this night I'll have a Guinness or two, but I'm not going to find a babysitter in my neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day night. Tomorrow I will spread this mountain of paperwork all over the conference room and try to see things in ways I have not before. I'll be wearing jeans and a shirt and tie and none of it will be green. Friday I'll tell the lieutenant something, but I doubt that anything I can say will make any difference.

(copyright 2004-2011 by Ira David Socol)

Finding Patrick

2011-03-12T09:25:00.000-05:00

The sun has dropped behind the hills to the west and I have stood in the field as the sky has tumbled from a royal to a navy to an ink blue that is almost black and now the moon has risen to straight above, surrounded by an immense ring which fills almost half the heavens.

At my feet the grass turns from dry to damp and the chill settles around me, and, though it has now been more than a year since my last cigarette I pull a fresh pack from my pocket, tear off the plastic, open it, the tobacco adding to the smells of the night, and slip the Camel between my lips.

Then I pause. I do not want to strike the match. I do not want to, even for a moment, add light into this dark. Terrestrial light seems an insult to that moon and the stars which themselves wait on the edges of the ring, Orion impatient on the southwest.

Patrick is not really my saint. Patrick brings the light to Ireland, which surely, is good. But to St. David the lights in the night are harbingers of death - ignis fatuus - and are to be carried with care. So I wait as well, the silence so deep that I hear the blood coursing through the capillaries of my ear drums, a faint yet ancient beat.

(copyright 2011 by Ira David Socol)

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-09T08:05:00.001-05:00

photo: Flickr by ionizdat

We stop at Saint Dominic’s off Gun Hill Road right after loading the guy with the heart attack on Edenwald into an ambulance. “Please guys,” we beg the paramedics, “sure he’s dead but if he’s dead here it’ll take us over an hour to get this taken care of, and you can just dump him on the E/R.” We kneel before the priest and take communion and are blessed with the ashes. Then, still deeply hungover from Fat Tuesday alcohol consumption, we run to the “shots fired” call where Edson ends at Strang, and find the kid dead in the tall brown grass of what was supposed to be a park.

The kid is maybe ten, well later we’ll know he wasn’t even, but at that moment, at the point where Colin says, “oh fuck” and I come over and see the thin body with the blood leaking from a temple, we think “ten,” not knowing that he was tall for his age.

A minute later I realize there’s a gun in the grass as well, a silver .22 automatic, and I reach into my pocket and pull out gloves and hand one pair to Colin who takes them without moving his eyes from the boy’s frozen face and I pull them on, silently because I fully believe that noise will rob this place of the desperately needed sanctity and I kneel down and and am about to lift this weapon into my hands when its location and position scream to me and I leap to my feet and start backing away, muttering, “holy fucking shit, no.”

There are no parents. No one knows where any father might be. Mom’s in jail. When we finally ask enough questions we find the place Grandma lives, a basement apartment a block away, and she is dead in her bed. It seems natural, she clearly went in her sleep.

“I guess he couldn’t take it no more,” another third grader tells us. “He was gettin’ picked on a lot at school. The teacher didn’t like him neither.” “Oh,” I say, “did he like his Grandma?” “Loved her,” the kid says, “she dead?” “I guess she must of died in her sleep,” I say without thinking about who I’m talking to. “Then that’s why, he must’a found her and give up.”

“You ok?” I ask him. “Yo, po-leece,” he says, “I’m jus’ fine.”

I look around. The cold winter sky. The low brick rowhouses. The projects towering over there. The abandoned, burnt cars near the edge of the park. I walk back to where the body still rests, touch the ashes on my face, bend down once again, this time making a tiny cross on that cold forehead.

(copyright 2005-2011 by Ira David Socol)

Timing the Night

2011-02-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

I have no idea how many steps lead up to this place from Myrtle Avenue and that old Cathedral, but I've been told that the stone column that towers above me is one hundred and forty-eight feet high, the world's tallest Doric column for those into obscure records.

Circling around me, slightly filtered by the haze of July evening humidity, the skyline of New York rises as I struggle to regain my breath. Downtown to my left, accented by the lighted spans and cables of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Midtown to my right, with the Williamsburgh Bridge in the foreground the odd lumpy shape of the 59^th Street Bridge way out there. I am anchored here, after running these massive granite stairs a dozen times down and a dozen times up, at this odd spot where the river bends and New York lies directly north of Brooklyn across the East River.

I know my history. I come to this park to rehab the knee that I now feel swelling beneath the huge steel brace, but things that are gone fascinate me. I see dead people in my nightmares but even in the waking day I see long vanished buildings and places. And this park, well, long before it was a tomb for eleven thousand Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors killed in prisons by their British guards, it was a fort that Washington had tried to defend. And a hundred and fifty years before that losing battle I know that in the bay out there, in the bay beyond the fucking Farragut Houses, beyond the ancient brick Navy Yard wall, beyond all the old buildings and pierhouses and cranes where once a whole fleet of ships were launched to win the World War, beyond all that there were marshes thick with fish and oyster reefs and migrating ducks and pushing through a narrow channel a Dutch sailing ship arrived on a barely comprehended continent and dumped hired Flemish immigrants, Walloons they called them, to populate a new outpost in southern New Netherland.

If I work on it, especially in the settling dusk, I can see the woods and the deep green prairie that stretches to the tide line. And if I wait and let consciousness slip, sparks will start to fly from mud chimneys in the tiny cluster that will begin Breuckelen. Somehow, I know it is still out there.

I get up and begin to limp around, and though the Trade Center illuminates the night over there and the off-duty gun presses against my side under the big loose shirt and I am circling a Monument not built until 1908 in a park created in the 1860s I can find the seventeenth century. I watch those first Europeans pushing along the old Lenni Lenapi trade routes and creating tiny villages, Boswyk, Midwout, Nieuw Amersfort, Nieuw Utrecht, and Gravesend. Stumpy square-rigged ships drift through the harbor mixing with giant dugout canoes. The moon rises over an empire of trees.

A gunshot echoes from somewhere in the projects below, followed almost instantly by the wail of sirens, and the late twentieth century pours back. In a single breath settlements turn to villages, villages to towns, towns to America's largest cities, those cities meld into the capital of the world. Wars scorch the earth and demand industrial force. The trees lose their place in the skyline and the water runs gray. And then I am here, a knight of these streets, a victim of these streets, a child of these streets.

I turn and walk south along a winding path most white guys would think dangerous in this now dark place. But behind me eleven thousand martyrs of the Revolution guard my back, and as the sirens fade behind the receding hill, I can start to let myself float in time again, and my street becomes new in the moonlight. As I cross DeKalb Avenue and step onto the wide slate sidewalk I find 1845 and this new suburb up the long grade from Brooklyn. Just before I begin to limp up my stoop I'm sure I hear the rattle of the horse-drawn trolley coming from the ferry.

"Where've you been?" Katie asks, looking at me with the expected mix of concern and anger, "I've been worrying." "Sorry," I say, "I guess I got a little lost."

copyright 2005-2011 by Ira David Socol

Omaha

2011-02-11T18:57:00.000-05:00

For reasons not completely clear even all these years later I rush from somewhere in the far west via Greyhound Bus (yes, Greyhound Bus) toward Chicago where I will meet my father but seventy miles short of Omaha a blizzard begins and an hour later this bus is stuck in the snow on Interstate 80 next to a Coca-Cola truck whose driver offloads huge quantities of his product to us as gifts just before the bottles and even cans start to explode in the vacuum of Midwestern winter cold, we fall into darkness and maybe even sleep wrapped in white flakes rushing past the faint odor of diesel exhaust and the soft pops of thousands of carbonated beverage packagings failing. In the morning a National Guard tank pulls us to a cleared spot on the highway and we proceed in slow parade to the Omaha Bus Station the grimy art deco space we should all have expected which is filled with refugees from the precipitation which is at least four feet deep there is not much to do there but food seems plentiful and prices through midwestern politeness have remained in check and I have enough cigarettes and probably enough joints and meet a woman who claims to be from Walla-Walla though this may be a verbal disguise who criticizes my cigarette choices, suspects me of being a junkie, drinks some of the Coke I have stockpiled and has sex with me three times in a small office the door of which I "credit card" (actually my driver's license) before the road is declared open and I begin moving east again. In Chicago I am sure my dad has pneumonia and he is sure this is not true but I make him drink much cough syrup with decongestant as I drive his car straight through to New York in one shot so he will be home, arriving at the George Washington Bridge at sunrise on a forgotten morning when I was still a kid.

Cold as hell

2010-12-27T10:48:00.000-05:00

It’s a very cold Sunday morning and he shivers as he waits for his car to warm up enough to throw hot air on the windshield and melt the ice. He could scrape it off, sure, but the wind is howling and he’s tired and though he should be in a rush he’s not really, so he sits there instead, thinking about how maybe windshields should have those little ice-melting wires like back windows do though he knows that might not be great for seeing.

The radio is playing old Chili Peppers and he turns and digs through the junk on the back seat and finds the gloves he thought he lost, but when he tries to put them on the insides are like ice and he pulls his hands back into his sleeves and curses the winter.

He revs the engine as small wet spots appear before him. He pulls on the washer switch and shoots the ice melt mixture onto the glass. The wipers create small portholes forward; in the mirror the rear defroster has carved slightly open blinds. He backs out of the driveway.

The street is a skating rink and his tires slide as he brakes at the corner. He considers this. Thinks about the half hour ride to church that starts in twenty minutes. Then turns right instead of left and heads to the IHOP. He beats the after church rush and settles in with a newspaper, the endless hot coffee, and a month’s worth of fat and cholesterol.

He wraps his still cold hands around the warm ceramic mug. “God is everywhere,” he tells himself.

Beechmont

2010-12-20T08:34:00.001-05:00

He'd skate backwards and we'd chase.

Ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty - eight, nine, and ten-year-olds boys, sometimes leaning on their sticks for extra stability as we tired, following my father around the lake as sisters and mothers played at figure skating in the center and the teenagers played real games along the south shore.

The snow clouds had blown away, the sun spread light but not warmth, the air held a mix of ice and salt and the smell of wool soaked with sweat.

(copyright 2010) by Ira David Socol

Between Dreams

2010-10-16T10:31:00.001-04:00

The day had turned stunningly cold, and the salt was rising into the air from Long Island Sound, announcing a coming storm, but we had said Greasy Nick's so I sat there outside, picking a table with a bit of the shelter of the building, and waited.

She would come, as she always did, in sadness. I never saw her in happiness. Only between lovers, between jobs, between houses, between dreams. Today, I already knew. A mutual friend, a hospital nurse, had whispered "cancer" to me at Dudley's last night, as we sat on the deck over the water and drank to the Equinox.

I watched spots of rain start to spread across the road, coming from the shore. I thought back to our first meeting. In the park. In the rain. Both of us bruised and battered by the fists of men we worshipped. I had held her then. I had promised that it would all get better. Maybe it had. Though not together, as I had desperately wanted in that first moment.

Now the rain exploded, waves of water merging sea and sky. The other few customers fled inside. But I sat there, cold in a now wet t-shirt. And I waited.

(copyright 2010) by Ira David Socol

Orion at 3.40

2010-10-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

The window of the bedroom looked east. Toward the DART tracks and the Strand of Joyce's imagination and the sea and far beyond that to the chaotic Welsh coast. If I had to I could see the whole way in the moments before sleep.

But tonight sleep would not come, though Orion slept above. Resting on his left, the celestial archer framed by the thin panels of the upper sash. The glass slumped by age differently in each, creating a quintych - would that be a word? - with a strong sense of doubt about the nature of heaven.

Glass, like pain, is unstable. A super-cooled liquid which always flows. Gentle, despite its fragility.

The pain which haunts my nights shifts in form as well, though direction is less defined.

The woman beside me breathes in soft swells. The beagle snores. The cat watches the great hunter from the window ledge. His tail slicing through the thick of the dark.

(c) 2010 by Ira David Socol

descent

2010-09-12T14:09:00.001-04:00

The fog rose from the Irish Sea and crawled ashore, chasing me from the Strand. I walked St. John's Road then turned north along Park Avenue and, no longer moving west, was engulfed in the salt mist.

(c) Steve Conway - Fog on Dublin Bay

The senses shift in the night. And I followed the smells, turf fire on the grate by turf fire on the grate, as I moved toward Sandymount Green. And I followed the vaguest of sounds, an infant's cry, an apology too loud, the sound of water draining through the pipes. All held close to me by the vapours which now soaked my hair and jumper.

"You understand," my Ma had told me when I was very young, "that the pattern of the jumper is our family's. It is how we recognized the bodies of the fishermen when they washed ashore." It took me decades for the intricate cabling to not cause nightmares, and for me to ask Ma to knit one more.

My mobile told me it was 3.45 when I saw the Green, soft yellow lights glowing in a black night. A hundred years vanished under the weight of this cloud come to earth. I lit another cigarette. Wondered why sleep never came anymore.

Turned left, and fished in my pocket for the keys.

copyright 2010 by Ira David Socol

September 11, 2001: in moments

2010-09-11T11:23:00.003-04:00

a story crafted from the accounts of friends in New York on that day...

(1) I am looking up. No particular reason. I have long ago discarded the conceit that natives don't stare in wonder at our own tall buildings. I'd no more not take every opportunity to see the Trade Towers, the Chrysler, the Empire State, Citicorp, Woolworth, then a Colorado resident would keep the Rocky Mountains out of his vision.

I'm pretty close to work for this time in the morning. Coffee in hand and drifting down Church Street past the Century 21 Store which must have been a bank when it was built. I'm supposed to be at work in those borrowed offices on the 17th Floor of One Liberty Plaza at 8:00 but obviously I'm not. I'm never there on time. I refer to it as a theoretical eight hour day and because of a lot of things assumed about me by my superiors, good and bad, true and not, this is accepted.

So my vision is vertical, and I hear the plane before I see it, too loud and too unusual and I let my eyes start to expand taking in this enormous blue morning sky. I might be the only one on this block staring into that scene right then, I have no way of knowing. In the way we do when something we see makes no sense at all I just stand, frozen, watching.

And then I run. The coffee I suppose falling, one hand pulling the shield which hangs around my neck out from inside my shirt. A cab comes close to killing me as I step off the curb. A radio car almost gets me too but doesn't and I spin briefly one hand holding up my detective's shield the other pointed skyward but I don't know if they get it.

I feel like the only one moving. Half the people on the street are still in normal patterns, the other half now staring up, and I run among them as if in a video game heading for Tower One.

Before I can pass between the low buildings that frame the plaza screaming sirens are already filling the morning. As I start across I find myself joined by other cops, cops in uniforms, Port Authority cops I guess, all racing from different compass points.

(2) Fifteen minutes later there is orderly evacuation. We have been through this before and the cops who were there that day eight years ago know this is better if only because the lights seem to be staying on. On the plaza level of the lobby we debate coordination though and someone has just actually brought coffee from the little place in the concourse just outside the tower doors. I wander away, not being a commander of any kind, trying to find my boss because I'm not sure we understand what's happening here and that's supposed to be my little group's job. Firemen are flowing through the scene in their heavy black and yellow coats, pushing through the stairwell doors, A, B, C, as everyone else pushes their way out. In this corner there's no one else so I start pointing people out towards the bridge to the World Financial Center.

Then the world shakes again. I do not see plane two. I only almost hear it. But I feel it and turn around and see a snowstorm of debris falling onto a plaza I now see is already covered with papers and dust. I hadn't noticed before.

(3) We are supposed to be gathered into a crime scene unit. Somebody has brought me a radio. I have never heard this many sirens or seen this many firemen. People have been jumping from both towers and no one wants to be looking at the plaza anymore. A Detective-lieutenant looks at the roll of yellow "Police Line" tape he has been holding at least since I first met him a half hour ago and finally says, "I don't think this is long enough." Two World Trade Center makes a strange sound, the top starts to tilt. For the second time today I watch something inconceivable. And then the building simply falls.

(4) On the other side of Building Five, I am back on Church Street. Someone has told me that I'm bleeding and I press a borrowed handkerchief against part of my face but I'm more concerned with whatever it is I'm now coughing up and how my back hurts because I know I got bounced off something from that blast of air. Our gathering has become meaningless except that we have joined those helping people find their way out of the exits from the concourse and subways. "Just go that way," I say two hundred times, pointing toward Broadway. I am saying this to a woman with three kids when I hear one cop say "motherfucker." As I turn around all I can see of Tower One is the TV antenna. I see that it is moving down. For the first time this day my instincts work. I grab two of the kids, the mother grabs the other, I push her in front of me and we run.

© 2004 by Ira Socol__________________________________________

depth

2010-06-30T16:12:00.000-04:00

haimléise

The platform was cold. Not freezing. Not winter or anything. But all I had on was a T-shirt and jeans - the day had been one of those autumn days when summer had rushed back in on a Gulf Stream wind but as the evening had set the wind had circled - and a chill night air was dropping from the streets down into the tunnels, and I was shivering, waiting for the train to come.

I was working, but, it was hard to really understand that. I wasn't carrying a gun or a shield or even an ID card. I didn't have a bullet-proof vest on. I sure wasn't wearing a uniform. I hadn't been in a police building in almost two weeks. I was young and very thin and dirty and jumpy. There were no displays of confidence dressed with mirrored sunglasses. Just small wads of cash spread here and there among my clothes and six cigarettes and four joints in the Camel box jammed into my left front pocket. If I might have been professionally identified at all it was by a small code stamped on the back of a driver's license that had a name that wasn't mine anyway. But no one outside a very few would know that. If a cop busted me, and ran either that name or my name through the system though - they'd assured me of this - they'd be told to call a special number. "What happens after they call?" I'd asked. "Well, that depends," they'd answered.

Today I'd sat near Tompkins Square. Getting high, drinking awful beer from a paper bag, and just listening. Trying to find the right group to slip into. No, not that fast. Trying to find the right group to target, so I could think about slipping in. I was new to this depth of disguise. And scared. and cautious. "Where you been sleepin?" Short-Leg Johnny had asked that afternoon. We'd shared smokes three of the last four days. I figured he'd lost a chunk of his leg in Vietnam? Maybe, but you couldn't really know. "Just on the trains for now," I'd said. "That's bad shit," he told me, "You decide you need something better you talk to me." I'd wondered if I should. Johnny was no target, but Johnny had a rep that would give me a rep, and that might help with the guys over there by the corner of Tenth and B. Guys that probably were the targets. But I had to wonder, if I did that, could I get Johnny killed? I already knew he wasn't gonna outrun them.

When Johnny went to the church for dinner, I slid the other way. He knew I didn't much like being inside. He told me he'd seen that in my eyes "right away." You know, you try to hide everything when your act is in play, but you just can't. Trying to think, I'd just started walking: south on Avenue A, across Houston, right on Stanton. I walked along the crumbling buildings of Eldridge Street down to Delancey. Everything was grim and grey and clouded over with confusion. Even the occasional neon lights just bounced off that fog spinning in my head, and pointed to nothing. At the Bowery I'd climbed down the stairs and jumped the turnstile on the run, sticking to character. It got me out of the wind, but not the cold.

I knew that I really could go home from here. Get clean. Sleep in a safe bed. Eat like a real person. But I just didn't think I should this night. So I got on the train. I guess going uptown. The doors closed. And I just rode along.

copyright 2007-2010 by Ira Socol

walls

2010-06-17T07:35:00.001-04:00

for Arizona, Israel, and all the other wall builders...

The street is as filthy as it is abandoned. The clouds foretell rain. And the wind bristles, sending shivers along my spine.

If you walk the "peace walls" of Belfast you can smell the failure. The failure of community, of leadership, of religion, of humanity. It is all written beneath the grubby graffiti on the cold concrete that long ago replaced the simpler fences, and then began to climb higher. Because once you build a wall, you quickly discover that it cannot truly be high enough.

I have many times walked the seventeenth century's attempt to separate Catholics and Protestants along Protestantism's frontier on the River Foyle. Those walls are massive. Carved stone. Incredibly thick. Powerfully armed. You can walk along the top of these walls today, Europe's last truly walled city, and look down on what was once a Catholic ghetto and what was once a battlefield where the native soldiers of Ireland almost drove the English into the sea, but not quite.

These twentieth century dividers in Belfast are less picturesque, and when, someday, they are gone, they will be no more mourned than the Berlin Wall, but like that structure, perhaps we should preserve big sections so that future generations will know.

Walls do not work. Walls are proof only of the fact that you have run out of ideas. It does not matter if the intent is to keep people in (Berlin), keep people out (the US/Mexico Border), or keep people apart (the north of Ireland or Palestine). Behind every wall anger and frustration build and resentment festers and dangerous myths grow. Humans do not like boxes unless they are free to go in and out. Of this there is no doubt. And humans separated by walls simply will not learn to get along. This is also true.

The street is as filthy as it is abandoned. And now the clouds have started spitting cold water. I have walked from one rusting "peace gate" toward another, sticking to the Catholic side, since walls force that type of decision. Over there is grim poverty. Over here is the same.

Paths

2010-06-05T20:16:00.002-04:00

The Library had been a parking garage. Really. I sort of remembered this. The old Lawton Street with the dark stone courthouse that was right there, and the ancient Western Union office that leaned against the back of the First National Bank for a century before anyone outside of England had heard of Barclay's Bank that now operated the massive arch-windowed brick building at the corner of Main, the Te-Amo Cigar Store that sat across from it and, the length of the block away the crumbling stone ruin that contained both the elegant stairway where we'd first tried shooting up and the Post Road mile marker "17 miles to N. York" that described a very much smaller big city from centuries ago. I was a small child held by my dad when Bobby Kennedy came to town one winter and held a rally right below this very window. It was a cold winter night and I sat on his shoulders and looked around and, yes, a dirty concrete parking garage towered above me covered with incomprehensible lettering.

I'd been away from home, off guarding the North Atlantic from foreign threats, when they'd ripped down the courthouse, remade the concrete hulk, and moved the library from the elegant Carnegie building with the marble staircase at the far end of Main Street. I didn't miss the old place. I'd always been terrified of it and all who worked there behind giant counters. At best I'd run in and point to Mike Mulligan or The Little Red Lighthouse or The Cat in the Hat and ask one of my siblings to take it out for me. I'd never had a library card. They wanted you to write your name and address to get a library card, and by the time I could do that, I was no longer interested.

But I was back now and as a not-so-gentle mid-fall rain streaked the third floor windows I looked out on an urban area transformed though I wasn't sure if for better or worse. The library was nice, the plaza below me looked pleasant enough, a couple of restored old buildings sat along the street, but it lacked the urban weight I'd come to know, and the tightness of the alleys I'd sprinted through day and night as I'd grown up.

In a couple of months, assuming nothing went wrong, I'd be in the New York City Police Academy, and already that was separating me from my past and the world I knew. My friends had understood the join the Navy decision, they weren't too blind to know I needed to get the hell out of here. They felt even better about that when I'd come back for visits and describe all the places I'd gotten high; from Amsterdam to Istanbul. But this cop thing was different. Every day I was barraged with "why you want to be a narc?" questions and "so you're gonna be a storm trooper" statements and the inevitable "you know they're gonna expect you to bust people for all the shit you've done your whole life."

So I'd chosen to hide. I'd taken the paramedic certification I'd gotten in the Navy and picked up a job on the ambulances that worked out of the New Rochelle Hospital ER. And if I was working at night, like I was tonight, I'd kill the day in places my friends would never find me, like here, hidden among the obscurity of the local history collection. Dougie, who somehow had a job here and who, though he called me "The Pig in Waiting," seemed vaguely sympathetic, had tapped into my curiosity by piling old maps of the city and the sound on this table and asking if I'd sort them for him by category and time period. Empty day after empty day I kept coming back and pouring over these ancient documents as summer became autumn and autumn marched toward winter.

In the earliest maps the coastline was a bizarre mix of wrongly assumed shapes and all the words were in French and what was now North Avenue was simply called "La Ligne Moyenne." The Middle Line, separating this Huguenot farmer's fields from that Huguenot farmer's fields. I'd inhale the slightly damp scent of long-stored paper and watch progress intrude. The road from New York to Boston, the clearly defined harbors with accurate depth soundings and a clear understanding of the tides, the properties being sub-divided and subdivided again. Then the railroad clattering east on maps now wholly English, and lots devoted to schools and more and more streets spreading from where the station sat close by the original church. For a hundred years farms vanished steadily on revision after revision, replaced by blocks and blocks of houses, and even "municipal improvements," parks, more schools, rail yards, reservoirs. One giant drawing on engineer's vellum still satiny to the touch showed in dazzling detail the tracks where steam engines from Boston were swapped for electrics bound for Grand Central in 1908.

By now I had reached the first maps to bear the logos of gasoline companies and grocery chains. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine trolleys clanging up the Franklin Avenue hill, the gentlest slope that was still the bus route down to the waterfront. I considered a community so linked to walking that the A&P map showed six stores across the three miles of Main Street. It was long ago but no longer incomprehensible. Most of the buildings from these maps, even some of the blue-stone sidewalks and granite curbs, were still out there on this rainy morning. The tiny rural settlement of odd foreigners had already changed over its first quarter millennia into a crowded suburb barely distinguishable from the vast city that had spread to its doorstep.

A gust of wind splashed a rainburst on the glass and I began counting the days til the January third swear-in. In a little over two months I'd be transformed too. It had already been eight weeks since my last joint. I hadn't smoked a cigarette in a month and was back up to swimming two hours almost every day over at the high school pool. For a dozen weeks I'd been a dependable medical professional. I traced what I guessed the path of I-95 would be on a 1927 Socony-Mobilgas map, looking at all the streets lost to 1960s progress, and thought of why I was doing all this.

Yes, I was switching sides, I supposed, but I wasn't seeing it that way. I wasn't a thug joining the FBI, everything was grayer than that. I thought of New York cops as heroes people liked to have around. I thought of myself as a wandering survivor, not a juvenile delinquent. If the cops could forgive the juvenile record why couldn't the friends understand the adult target? To me I was simply choosing to keep playing in the streets, as I always had, but finding a way to get paid for it and to do it without risking ending up in jail.

Dougie appeared next to me holding out coffee and donuts. He sat down and I tossed the map and the vanished streets north of the railroad tracks onto my 1920s pile. "Thanks," I said. "I figured I'd help get you onto the pig diet," he answered. I laughed. He smiled.

copyright Ira David Socol, 2005-2010

damaged

2010-06-03T16:41:00.000-04:00

I heard about it, of course, before I knew who was involved, and when you hear something like that you immediately do what everybody does: You blame the guy.

"I wouldn't make that mistake." "I wouldn't of been in that position at all." "I'm smarter than that." "My vision is better." "I would've waited."

Because if you don't blame the guy, it means it could happen to you.

Denny was the kind of guy you just didn't expect in the academy. He'd been working as a nurse at Sloan-Kettering. He had two little kids. He was really, really smart. And pretty quiet. Sometimes he and I would stand at the edge of the parade deck during meal and watch the city below and talk about complicated things. We were never close pals or anything, but he was a friend.

It was a robbery in progress call. That's a bad one. You know there are weapons and you know you've got innocents involved and you know there isn't a lot of time. The first car went to the front of the Liquor Store down on 183rd. Denny and his partner went around back. A guy came out a door pointing a .357. They said "drop it." He didn't. Denny took him out with two shots.

They teach you all these things about pointing your gun. "Never" they tell you, "point your gun at someone unless the next thing you're going to do is shoot them. Because if you point your gun and tell the person to do something and they don't… what'cha gonna do?" So there are all these steps. Put your hand on the gun. Break it from the holster lock. Take it out, pointed down. Move your finger to the trigger guard. Intermediate positions that allow you to keep upping the ante. But that all goes out the window when someone comes at you with a gun. In that case it's all about self-preservation.

Yeah, it's the wrong guy. The store owner. The robber already having booked. And the moment it happens. The very moment. Denny knows. Of course he knows. People in the neighborhood wail. They scream about "killer cops." It is the whole front page of the next day's New York Post. "Cop Mistake Kills Robbery Victim." Big letters. Long bio. The crying wife. The crying kids. The angry merchants of the street. "They're never here when things happen, except this time, then they kill the wrong guy."

Six months later Denny's wife Rebecca told me about how he'd been so desperate to get away from nursing cancer patients. No one ever lived, she said. He'd see them come back every six months, just getting worse. He wanted to get out into the air. She said he'd said, "At least as a cop they'll die quick if they die."

It is a "clean shoot" even though it is horribly wrong. No one in authority is ever going to say they'd do anything differently in that situation. Even the neighborhood witnesses admit he yelled "Stop, Police" and even that he yelled "Drop it now." There's no grand jury, no big long term investigation. He gets the requisite week off. And during that week one department chaplain talks to him once. And during that week six of us who knew him in the academy call even though we haven't seen him in the year since but we don't push Rebecca to make him talk to us. And during that week one guy from his precinct stops by his house but when there's no answer he just goes away. And during that week Denny stops sleeping at all.

Four months later I see him downtown in the Property Clerk's Office. It takes a while for him to know who I am. Then he says, "hey, how ya doing?" and disappears. I wonder whether his eyes are like that because of meds or just... Another two months go by before I find Rebecca. By that time Denny is on psych sick leave. He sits in his bedroom watching game shows. He doesn't leave the house except for the necessary doctor's appointments. By the time I've gotten there Denny is gone and isn't coming back.

(c) copyright 2006 - 2010 by Ira Socol

The Transit of Venus (five very, very short stories)

2010-05-15T15:53:00.001-04:00

Celestial happenings simply didn't interest him. As a schoolboy he had even been unable to locate Orion's Belt in the night. This made him stand out in undesirable ways. So he ignored the event and drove towards work, his visor pulled down against the glare.

He tried to watch the transit of Venus. Seven-thirty a.m. with a welding helmet on his head he stood on a table in his back yard trying to get closer to the sky. A cloud blocked his view for a moment and he gave up, went inside, put on his pants and ate Rice Krispies in front of the Today show. With a banana and two percent milk.

At seven-twenty-three she rolled over, kissed him, and said, "get up you moron, Venus is crossing." He laughed, pulled her on top of him. They missed the show and were late for work.

She parked her car at the "scenic overlook" by the Delaware Water Gap. Pulled the homemade contraption out of her trunk. Her father had made it for an eclipse of the sun twenty-six years before. She hadn't yet gotten over his death three years ago. Nor the death of her lover just four months ago. How to resolve the suicide of one you'd had sex with just fourteen hours earlier? The tiny movement of the black speck calmed her. The radio was playing "Tommy can you hear me?"

Ten minutes afterward he walked into the coffee place that pretended it sat on a far more sophisticated street in a far more sophisticated town than reality indicates. "I'm tired of living here," he mumbled to himself. "What?" asked Dan behind the counter. "Hey," she said, "how was it?" "A big Nicaraguan," he said, "like a little dot, but it was kind of cool."

copyright (c)2007-2010 by Ira Socol

luas

2010-05-12T23:18:00.001-04:00

timing

His watch didn't work. Well, it worked, but randomly, and offered him facts meaningless, useless, and, in this moment, reassuring. At 10:30 in the morning on the second of August, Irish Daylight Time he might say to be specific, because, he could be that specific if he put in the effort, his watch could say that it was 6:12, either a.m. or p.m. on the seventh of that month, or perhaps another, for the date was represented as only an analog number - 1 through 31 inclusive.

"Why do you wear it?" she asked. He considered the standard answers; that people expected someone like him to wear a watch, that he liked the jewelry aspect of it – it's thick, clunky, cheap Soviet style, that it reminded him of which hand not to write with, but he didn't want to lie. "With this," he tapped the crystal, "time can be wherever I want it to be." And she smiled the way she did when he said things like that.

addiction

She had two cigarettes in her hand by the time her first foot landed on the platform and he had a lighter out of his pocket just as quickly and though an overprotective mom with two very young kids looked angrily at them they were inhaling nicotine charged smoke and exhaling it's second hand variety before the crowd leaving the train could disperse at all.

"I'm sick of anti-smokers," he offered, "I'm tired of the looks." "She's got kids, she's new at this, she probably doesn't even let them eat off the floor yet."

"Everybody's got problems," he thought, but took an intensely long, deep drag instead of talking, banged his left hand on the guard separating him from electrocution via the wires of the transit power system as they walked up the ramp, looked at her and smiled in a slightly sad way. "But you just need the drugs," she told him.

"You too," he said defensively. "Yeah, me too."

memory

What had they been waiting for? It wasn't a train. There just were not trains around back when he was kid. It must have been a bus. But they were waiting and then, yeah, they'd started yelling at each other, they did that, and then, he'd done something because, well, was it because he always did something?

Was it because it was how he hoped to change the scene? They'd been waiting, kind of like he was waiting with her except it was the bus not this train and there were all these kids, of course, and the weights of their lives piled on them and they fought and then that kid, yeah, that kid did... that doesn't matter, does it, and he'd hit the other kid, hit him that hard, sent him sprawling into the edge of... Don't remember, the kerb probably, that's what always did the damage, the kerbstones. Remember the blood, the screaming that followed. Not much more. Maybe getting hit. Maybe the edge of a building... yet nothing that looks like anything here. They were waiting, is that the only connection?

He shook, violently, as if a frigid wind had just blown along his naked spine. She looked at him just a little nervously. And he wished he could explain all the things that made him afraid.

callings: dunluce

2010-05-08T02:14:00.000-04:00

It was out of season and the gates were locked but we pulled the car off the road and climbed the fence, letting the night's fog envelop us, and the world vanish, and the pain disappear along with a thousand years.

There are places you return too. Not the scenes of crimes, if you're smart. Not the scenes of triumphs either, for what would that be but a pale reflection, guaranteed to disappoint? But the places of sanctuary - where escape was made even momentarily real - those are timeless.

Below us the waves read the insistent poetry of history. Above us a Bealtaine moon struggled to tint the sky orange. Briefly the wind rustled the grass, telling us to be quiet, to rest, to be at peace.

(c) copyright 2010 by Ira Socol

peat

2010-05-06T15:45:00.000-04:00

In exile in the North American Midwest I am robbed of the essential smells that gave me shelter as a child. Surely there are memories made up of images and memories made up of songs and memories made up of stories remembered as you lay in bed on the cusp of sleep. There are memories that flood the brain from tastes and those that rise out of textures that have soothed or scratched. So the right kind of mashed potatoes can make me feel truly warmed on a cold night, and black pudding is all about my father, and there is a certain spin of wool, that which matches the Hudson's Bay Blankets that kept the night air off our child bodies, that instantly makes me tired. But I can not find the smells.

Lake Michigan is beautiful and wondrous, but it does not smell like big water to me. There is no salt in that breeze to fill the nostrils. There is no gently rotting mix of seaweed and fish either. The scent of the truly far away does not hang there, in any version, not the slightly sour scent of the Foyle, or the cold briskness of the Donegal beaches, or the sharp notes of the salt-water marshes that define the archipelago that is New York City.

And the smell of wood burning in iron stoves is great on a cold afternoon. That is redolent of the pioneers carving their paths through the vast continental forests and of the kind of nineteenth century Americana so often depicted on Christmas cards. But it is not my odor. More than anything I miss the clinging aroma of peat burning on the grate. What could define an impoverished history more than the need to burn what is really just the earth itself? Peat doesn't truly burn anyway. It smolders and smokes and the scent covers you and wraps you. And when I smell it now, on that first night back each trip, in the pub or as I walk down a residential street, a brief reverie built on a thin trail of smoke, it ignites precious corners of my brain. The house on St. Patrick Street springs into ethereal life, with ma, the aunts, the uncles, my cousins and me running in and out, the sisters laughing, my brother learning to be the adult he would barely get to be. I can touch the hard stone of the streets climbing the hills, and the old wallpaper and the cold wood floor, and the deeply worn polish of the handrail on the stair, and the rough strength of my father's hand.

chase

2010-05-05T21:02:00.000-04:00

I go first, sprinting from the car to the door of the project. Colin follows, but races across the width of the doorframe to put himself on the other side. Then I kick the door open, it is not locked, I already know that, we have watched them run inside, but I need the door to explode open, I need it to make a lot of noise, and I burst through and flatten myself up against the wall and the mailboxes, the stairway providing cover. I duck around and look up, gun in hand, and see no one. Using those old WWII hand gestures I let Colin know. He bounds past me and up to the first landing.

We'd been drinking coffee, and eating doughnuts. And Colin was complaining about editorials in The New York Times, "it's just the government paper," he said, as usual. We were, I suppose, hidden by the El pillar, and the early morning newspaper trucks, but not so hidden that we couldn't see the drive-by hit, six or seven shots, sounding like a nine, blowing up the windows of two stores across the street and leaving two people lying in blood on the street.

Colin called it in, asked for a bus,* asked for someone to check out the bodies, asked for back up. I spun the car away from the curb, pulled a wild four lane u-turn, and chased the Beemer with the dark windows. Six blocks later we have ended up here.

As I do the next run, to the second floor, the radio crackles that the two on the street are D.O.A. Then a round rushes past me, and I hit the floor, hugging the antique railing, hoping its old oak posts will stop bullets. Colin is calling "shots fired, shots fired" and sirens are whining from two or three directions and I hear footsteps heading up, so I go, and now tactics have been lost to anger and Colin is right behind me. The hall lights up here are out, we can only see by the footlights of the floors below, rising in the slot between the stairs.

Now both of us hear a metallic click, and now, knowing someone is reloading, we pounce. Colin's tackle hits his hand sending the gun and the clips flying. I hit him in the gut, slamming him against the wall, but in this moment we both know we have blown it. This is one. where's the other?

He is standing in the corner. In almost total darkness. Just feet away from us. Holding a Mac-10.

But it has jammed. And he looks at us, while we look at him, then he throws it at me and runs. Colin says, "got him?" and is off. I hear the take down one more flight up, perhaps by the stairs to the roof. The I hear a skull being smacked into a wall, repeatedly, then I hear Colin say, very calmly into the radio, "Seven-Adam Central, we got two under, we need a bus here too."

I handcuff the guy I have. And sit on the floor. And light a cigarette. And now six more cops come running up toward us.

(c) copyright 2007 - 2010 by Ira Socol

The Giants' Causeway

2010-05-04T01:44:00.000-04:00

"It is not closed because it is closed," the old man says, "it is just closed for your safety because of the rockslide." And so we, and everyone else, climb over or around the woodworks sealing off that path up the cliff and go, trekking up the equivalent of a ten-story building as we rise from mid-way above the Giants' Causeway to the top. There we breath more heavily than we should, and I light a cigarette, and we look down to this most incredible scene below us as the North Atlantic surges out of a breathtaking blue and then we look that way as mother sheep chase their new lambs across fields so green you know they have been painted by gods. "Ma'ahahahahah," the sheep bleats. "shusssshhh" the sea replies. We look back. From here you can see the Dunluce Castle and the White Rocks Beach and Portrush, and all the way beyond to the Donegal Highlands and Inishowen. Here the first Celts came as the last Ice Age ended, crossing from the gray of ancient Alba to the white cliffs and green pastures of Eirann. There the people fled by steamer to America over a century, trading poverty and degradation for hope and possibility. But that is not the story. "When those ancient giants walked ashore," I say, "carrying St. Patrick and the sheep, and, of course, the pigs for the Irish Breakfast, they threw the snakes out, then rested right here, forming these gentle soft flat-lands." Her smile is brilliant, and her laugh, though derisive, is so sweet. "You all just keep telling your stories, whatever they may be. You sure can talk your way through anything." The North Coast sun illuminates us and warms us. "You can only tell the stories," I whisper to her, "if you truly believe in them."

the razor's edge

2010-05-03T00:32:00.000-04:00

We considered the possibilities as the rain exploded in tropical storm ferocity and the streets turned into exquisite mirrors. There are points in our lives of perfect balance and points of ferocious balance when no choice looks as bad as standing exactly where you find yourself.

"Didn't Janis Joplin sing, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose?"' I asked. "She did." "I heard her sing that in Madison Square Garden," I said. "And then we went back home and then she died. Everybody dies." "Don't get weird on me." "I'll try."

There is a long silence as traffic whooshes through the water piling on the street. The Seagram's Building, modern perfection, casts a warm glow into the puddles that creep under Lever House where we sit, staying dry. Somewhere over there a really bad trumpet player plays. Behind us a tourist struggles with a hot dog stand that is both "Kosher" and "Halal." He wants ketchup, but this being New York, they do not seem to have it. It's like asking for tartar sauce for your fish and chips at Leo Burdock's.

"Well, I'll do one or the other," I whisper, "or not." "Just pick one," she says, the touch of anger flashing from her eyes as they reflect the traffic signal changing from green to red, "it doesn't matter, you just need, we just need, a plan."

"I want French onion soup," I announce. "Real french soup and like I'm an airline pilot in 1965." "What?" "We're going to the Brasserie across the street." "Isn't that really expensive?" "Sure, but I'm gonna do something, and whatever, they'll pay me." "I suppose they will." "See, all it takes is faith." "Sure."

We run across Park Avenue amidst the rain, forcing cabs to brake and honk, splashing in the gutters.

(c) copyright 2007 - 2010 by Ira Socol

Taxi Service

2010-05-01T23:13:00.000-04:00

The radio asked us to "ten-one the house," so we stopped at the diner and I used the phone to call in. It was hot but not crazy, summer and very busy, but workable, just after dark on a Tuesday. I listened to the lieutenant, hung up, and called central. "Seven-Adam's going to be out on a job from the house," I said, "we'll advise."

The rumor had flowed through the department an hour ago, the way it always does when a cop gets shot. A rookie in Manhattan was all we knew, but as we always tried to do, we'd all stopped and called home. The "I'm ok," call because the rumors spread through cop families too.

I was home one night, sitting watching TV with Carolyn, and at 9:45 during a commercial break the news guy came on with his teaser. "Cop shot in The Bronx, details at Eleven." I looked at Carolyn and she looked at me and I understood something I simply hadn't before.

I told Colin what was going on and we headed north toward the edge of the city. We'd only gotten a couple of blocks when Sergeant Hobart called us on the radio and said to meet him at 223rd Street. He immediately started yelling. "We're holding twenty jobs and you guys are putting yourselves out on bullshit?" "Hey Boss," I looked at him, "C'mon, who are you talking to? We've got to go grab some super radiologist out of Eastchester and bring him down to New York Hospital for that kid who got shot." The Sergeant's face went from red to white instantly. "Shit," he stumbled, "I'm sorry guys, get the fuck out of here."

We drove on. We crossed from the gray of The Bronx to the verdant green of Pelham Manor, back into the dull colors of the dirt-poor suburb of Mount Vernon, then back into the Republican-wealth of Eastchester. The passage through these zones of economic success and failure grimly dramatic on this night. The radiologist climbed in and we sped south, lights flashing, down the Bronx River Parkway, winding onto the Bruckner Expressway, blowing through the tollbooths on the Triborough Bridge, and rolling down the FDR Drive. There was small talk. Meaningless chatter filling vast empty places.

One of the tricks to being a rookie is the belief that you are safe, that nothing will happen to you. You are, as they say, too smart, too good, too young, too important, to fall victim. It doesn't even cross your mind. Then, one night, it happens to a friend, or in a precinct near you, or in a place that looks just like where you work, or in a situation you're in ten times a day, or, you find yourself on a wet sidewalk trying to push the brains of a friend back into a torn skull. And then you start to get afraid.

The radiologist asks us to come up with him, so we climb into an elevator that rises fast and opens into a corridor with a huge window looking into the operating room. A kid is on that table, his chest cut open, a machine doing his breathing. The medical team moves just slightly too quickly and nervously. Near the window a line stands: pregnant wife, father and mother, squad members, sergeant, lieutenant. Faces blank. No words. Our passenger leaves us and we stand there as well, and because we are new, the line of mourners turns and looks at us.

It was his first month out of the academy. He was on a quality of life patrol in the north of Central Park by the lake called the Harlem Meer. Lots of New Yorkers know the park from the reservoir south, many fewer north of there, especially back then. His rookie squad had been told about a bicycle theft, and this guy, the new cop, the new husband, the soon to be father, walked up to a fourteen-year-old boy and asked a question. The boy pulled out a nine-millimeter and shot.

We've handled lots of things. We've seen lots of things. But we cannot handle this. If we knew him we might be part of it. But we don't. If it was five days from now. If he dies and there's a funeral then we'll be welcome. But now we are simply intruders. We have stepped into a private grief too deep. Our eyes flash from the operating table and across the faces of those now watching us. Then we hear the "bing" of the elevator and we step backwards, and out of this event.

The night is cloudless and there is no breeze. The East River lies perfectly flat reflecting a moon just past full, the city's lights drifting along the water's surface. Three times on the way back Colin turns to me to say something, but there are no words until we call the dispatcher and say we're available again.

Stopping

2010-04-02T11:58:00.000-04:00

I got off the Q train at Avenue U for reasons not really understood. The goal had been Brighton Beach when I got aboard at Dekalb Avenue, but I'd already - ah the MetroCard all day thing - hopped off and back on at Prospect Park, Beverly Road, and Newkirk Avenue. Well, at Newkirk I retraced old steps and walked through Midwood Park, down East 17th Street, crossing under the tracks at Avenue H, and then across the old footbridge on 15th Street and down to Avenue J for great if incredibly overpriced pizza. But that's one of my "old neighborhoods." And when I'd gotten back on at the Avenue J station, I'd planned to next get off at the ocean.

But hitting the sidewalk at Avenue U was confusing. I either didn't remember this at all, or maybe it had all changed. Was this a Chinese community twenty years ago? Is this Chinese? I mean, is it "mainland" Chinese or the more traditional Taiwanese Chinese? Or am I confusing Asian cultures. I wondered if I should know better.

The doughnut shop sign was in English so I went in. There was something "once Greek" about the faded colors of the interior but the staff was not from there at this moment. The coffee was overcooked sludge, the doughnuts themselves lacked, hmmm, whatever makes doughnuts great. A Daily News, left on the counter, offered a few minutes of entertainment.

And then I knew that there was a bank on the corner on the other side of the tracks. What bank it had been "back then" escaped me, but I remembered the chase from the cash machine mugging that had interrupted something else, something "far more important," I'm sure. And I remembered the violence. And I remembered how young he was, how there'd been a smear of chocolate on his hands, that rapidly got covered in his own blood.

So I got up, wiped off my own hands, left a small tip, went outside, got back on the train. And then I was at the beach, and the salt air blew across my face.

Advent

2010-01-12T10:15:00.006-05:00

This was written in 2006 for an early version of my fiction blog. It came back to mind last night after I watched a House episode centered on a deep cover cop...

I really, really want to live to get to my kid's first Christmas which is all I can think of right now. Five in the morning on December 22 and way too cold and the whole case I've been creating for six fucking weeks now, the whole thing, all the drug buys, all this time spent undercover when I just want to get off on being a new dad and on being young in New York at Christmas, all blown up cause the number two mark has gone nuts and killed five people and the A.D.A. announced "take him today," so I've got to do it. That means I might never get the main guy. It means that instead of piling up three or four more strings of evidence and drifting away while others make the busts I'm in the lead banging on this door cause I'm the only voice that might get us in. It means all the guys in the huge shock-plate equipped bulletproof vests, all the guys with the bulletproof shields and the big guns, all those guys are behind me, flat against the house front or hidden below the stoop, out of sight and, I know, the line of immediate fire. I'm in both, shivering in a borrowed little vest and a denim jacket desperately trying to keep my nine millimeter stable enough that I don't look that scared.

I knock. I knock again. I hear stirring. My mind runs. There's a white aluminum tree in there, lit with purple lights. There's Chilly. He's moving toward the door now, I'm certain, Pistons shorts and that monster .45 in his hand. There's that fucking dog too. "Yo," I yell, "yo, open up. I got to talk to you." The best street performance I can pull at the moment.

"White boy," I hear, "whatch'you doing here now?" "Let'me in," I answer, "let'me in, I need shit right now." Locks start to click. There's a deep rumbling instead of words from Chilly's throat, but he trusts me, I've worked hard at that, really hard, and what I hear is more frustration than anger. I'm on the right side of the door, the side that opens, the gun's in my left hand, down and hidden and now I swing it up as the door cracks.

It's so quick. I see Chilly's eyes. He's stunned as he sees the gun, my only advantage. Still, before I can react, or simply because I cannot react that way first, he brings the .45 up and then... then his chest explodes. I see that before I hear the rifle shot from behind me, even before I feel that round blow past me. It happens as he's in the middle of pulling his trigger and the huge automatic roars as a round passes my head going the other direction.

Everybody rushes past, on their way to Dingo in the back bedroom.

I don't go in. I stand there instead, looking at Chilly's body spilled on the green carpeting, at the tree, at the spacesuit looking silver stockings hung by an electric fire. I've spent a lot of time in here. Getting high, buying dope, talking about real feelings even if they came from a fake personality. The dead guy on the floor was the muscle behind a heroin dealer. That didn't make him a bad guy.

I slip the nine into the holster at my back. I pull the Velcro straps and toss off the vest. I think of going home but that doesn't seem possible. Instead I walk the six blocks over to the Five train and ride silently downtown. When dawn arrives it finds me in the Channel Gardens of Rockefeller Center. The giant tree rising above me. A golden Prometheus telling me of man's aspirations. The Christmas angels whispering of a savior come for my sins.

(c) 2006-2010 by Ira David Socol - all rights reserved

at Harold's grave

2009-04-10T09:28:00.005-04:00

The sun was out when we woke up and we had this hired Volkswagen Eos and so we dropped the top and headed out of Islington, out of London.

At the Tesco near Tottenham we loaded up on cheese and yogurt and bread to tear apart, and a white chocolate Easter cow, and kept going. Dylan on the mp3 player. Laughing and eating. "Look out kid Don't matter what you did Walk on your tip toes Don't try "No Doz" Better stay away from those That carry around a fire hose Keep a clean nose Watch the plain clothes You don't need a weather man To know which way the wind blows."

In Essex we found ourselves in Waltham Abbey. King Harold started building this church in 1060. Wasn't king yet, of course. Short reign for the last Saxon to rule, though the current royal family is quite German. Redux. rebirth. By the time we find a spot in the tiny carpark it is raining. This is England.

We go inside. Holding hands. There is intimacy within these ancient walls. There is the warmth of human touch which fights off the chill of a thousand years. On the wall of the guild chapelis a 12th Century Doom Painting. We stare. I think, sitting here in this empty space, that we could snog like teenagers in the back of a theatre, but it seems inappropriate.

Outside we stand by Harold's grave, between the base of the pillars of a part of the church lost long ago to Henry VIII's semi-Protestantism. It has turned cold and the rain stings, but histories hold me here for a moment. The first coronation in Westminster Abbey on the Ephiphany, 1066. Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Effort and loss. My father was Harold. Effort and loss. The sky is a thick and twisting grey.

Across the churchyard there is a pub. We share the world's best chips, massive and sizzling hot, and a pot of tea. We are warmed.

copyright 2009 by Ira Socol

toward Cockfosters

2009-04-06T09:20:00.007-04:00

Charlie lived on Gillespie Road just past Plimsoll Road, so I walked from Trafalger Square where she and I had gone separate ways, leaning heavily on my cane, and made my way, indirectly, in the direction of the tube stop at Leicester Square.

Portuguese university students struggled to film the traffic. A frustrated man chased late leavers from the portico of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and loudly clanged the gates shut and locked them with chains. A gaggle of Irish women, Newry if my accent-tracker was working, rushed past gushing about Judi Dench in the play they had just seen. Outside the Coliseum two French twenty-somethings appeared on the verge of orgasm even if they remained mostly clothed.

Near New Row I paused, exhausted, pain spreading from my leg through my body, and I stumbled toward the door of The Angel and Crown, while reaching with my free hand for the small box of meds in my pocket. A barman held the door for me. "Need a pint?" "And perhaps food." "Can you make it upstairs?" "Slowly." We went through to the back and up the narrow stair. I sat between two groups of French students, the pint in front of me, the West End Saturday night playing out beyond the window I turned toward. It began to rain.

She appeared in the doorway with wet hair. "That was just dumb," she announced to the room. "Buy me dinner?" I nodded toward the chair next to me. She sat down. "You know I'd rather sleep on Charlie's couch with you than in Alex's guest suite alone." "I'd love that." "You just piss me off sometimes." "Sometimes?" "Sometimes."

Later, I limped down the stairs toward the Piccadilly Line. She guarded my back from the flow of people. The train toward Cockfosters was crowded as expected. Two young men gave us their seats. I closed my eyes. Her head fell on my shoulder. "You can make the walk from the station?" she asked. "Oh yeah," I told her.

copyright 2009 by Ira David Socol

on the way home from normal

2008-10-27T15:31:00.005-04:00

I followed Jesus's Camaro on the way home from Normal last night. It bled into view as the rain came down somewhere north of the Michigan state line. A 1990s version, spoilers and with huge tires. "JC" in ornate type on the back of the trunk lid. His long dark hair falling over the headrest as the dim sunset illuminated the passenger cabin. What (else) would Jesus drive?

I crossed America on the way home from Normal last night. The remnants of the tall corn crop pressing in on the highways. Barns pulled from Hopper's palette the only skyline (save the silos and roadside McDonald's signs). The malls of the south Chicago suburbs rising along Interstate 80, the nation's main street. The colors of the autumn framing the Great Lake shore.

I let my mind drift on the way home from Normal last night. Cut free from unmasked moorings, held only by tidal pulls (rarely understood this far from the salt water seas), chilled by the water below and heated by the fading sun. The cruise control set just below "pull-over speed" - the clouds running too fast for me to catch up.

(c) 2008 by Ira Socol

A River Runs Through It

2008-05-06T11:55:00.000-04:00

I stand in the Winter Garden looking down. My back toward the grand stairs and the vast room and the palm trees and the mirror-like polish on the floor and the Hudson River just beyond. It is the 12th of September, four years after, and I stare into the vast site that once held the World Trade Center - now just an odd-shaped concrete tub with trains sliding through a loop inside. Between that place and I West Street buzzes with traffic and this glass wall, so consciously engineered, stands. When this was first created it looked directly into the gap between Tower One and the hotel. A taught skin wrapping an urban panorama. Now it seems more a hastily erected barrier. Crime scene tape rendered in the architecture of our post-industrial age.

It is almost four centuries since Henry Hudson first sailed past this spot on a vast, wide salt-flavoured river that seemed as if it must connect sea to sea. In fact, he might have sailed on this spot, for it was river then. Looking into the Trade Center foundation you can see, quite clearly, where the edge of the island was in 1609. They filled that space in. Then two hundred years later they dug it back out to build the world's tallest buildings. And they took the same dirt and moved it over here. The land is valuable but the river is relentless. Beneath the towers of this World Financial Center pumps hum constantly. And everything being built right now in the empty pit before me relates directly to shoring up those concrete walls that continue to keep the river from re-seizing what was once its bed.

I used to work over there, in that ugly black building. It was a fantastic place to be. We were stunningly lucky. The department had somehow picked up a cheap sublease on these extraordinary offices that had belonged to some bank, and let us move in. The bank had signed a 20-year-deal and merged out of existence the very next year, so were settled in to our dazzling views of the Trade Center plaza for the long haul. But old-timers hated that building. It was built on the site of - the same phrase was always used - "the tallest building ever demolished" - the incredibly beautiful 1908 Singer Building by the wonderfully named Ernest Flagg. The Singer Building didn't ever make it to see the Trade Towers complete, not even to see the steel topped out. It, and its unprofitably small floors in that gorgeous slender tower, fell to the wreckers less than sixty years after completion. It's a fast-paced city you know. There's hardly a moment to be sentimental about the loss of something brilliant in the skyline.

The World Trade Center didn't last sixty years either. Didn't last thirty. Whether capitalism was also the cause of its demise can still be debated. Will still be debated. But it was beautiful as well. Beauty comes in many forms. Hudson saw a beautiful island from the Half-Moon, swathed in massive trees and running with clean rivers, in a bay teaming with fish and oysters. Alexander Hamilton went to what's now Columbia University just to the left of here, on a small rise in the beginning of Tribeca, and he wrote of long walks in the beautiful countryside. It was a beautiful city that welcomed the 20th Century, filled with its new white towers, and a beautiful city that pushed the skyline in the years before World War I - the Woolworth Building, the Singer Building, the Equitable Building. It was a beautiful city that embraced the thin gothic arches of the Trade Center in the 1970s, arches that stretched 107 floors and reflected every mood of the sky.

Behind me a string quartet has started to warm up in a corner of this vast space. The sounds echo richly off the curving roof, off the stone stairs. The instruments touch briefly on great pieces of music, and then three go silent, leaving just the Bach Cello Suite No.1 filling the scene with passion.

And that is too much. So I turn, and walk down the stairs clumsily, and burst through the doors onto the broad plaza by the river. The river flows down from Lake Tear in the Clouds, 4,293 feet above the sea in the Adirondack Mountains. It carves its way through the strongest of stones along the way. It is slightly narrowed, yes, but it remains relentless.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

meeting family

2008-04-29T16:58:00.005-04:00

The present I brought, a two-DVD set of bootlegged copies of The Aristocats and The Aristocrats wrapped in a custom designed collaged cover promising “entertainment for the whole family,” made only half the people laugh, and they really didn’t appreciate the Belgian beer I’d spent a fortune on. “Belgian?” I realized that they neither knew where Belgium was nor knew anything about monks brewing beer nor what a Trappist was nor had they seen – or heard of – the funnier of the two movies. After all, we’d been the only two people in the theatre the night we saw it in town, and it only played three nights.

The sun was out and it looked like spring and I sat in the room wanting to be outside, but the wind was wicked and it was really just a degree or two above freezing, and so I snuck out on each half hour for a cigarette, and went to the bathroom a lot, and nursed the great beer because an already uncomfortable event can become a disaster mighty easily if you speed the drinking to ease the pain.

“Wanna get out of here?” she finally said. “Uh, huh.” “I think we’ve put in enough time.” “Uh, huh.” She circled the room, saying goodbye. I offered small waves and smiles and perhaps two, “it was nice to meet you”s.

As we reached the driveway I handed her a DVD so I could light the cigarette. “You stole the movie you gave them?” I found the keys and unlocked the car. “Thought it might be best.” “Might not have been the best idea in the first place.” “Maybe not.”

We drove home from that small city to this. “You really don’t have to like my cousins, we’ll only see them once or twice a year.” “No problem,” I said, “next time I’ll bring cheaper beer.” I turned a corner, there was clanking from the back seat. “You stole the beer back too?” “Uh, huh.”

Editor

2008-04-26T17:47:00.000-04:00

eagarthóir

"You should meet me at the Apple Store on 59th, right now." I can tell this is about to become a really stupid conversation. "I'm in City Hall Park, why don't you carry your damn new Macbook Pro down here. It's hot, I don't want to get on the subway." "No, no, no..." he stutters this, "I've got this video I shot last night on two of the big cinema displays, it's gorgeous, you've got to see it." "But I am a long, long way away from you right now." "I can wait." "I bet you can."

I've just walked from Brooklyn, over the bridge. It is ninety-something, and I fried out there above the East River, even succumbing to buying a dollar bottle of water by the New York tower. Now I sit in the park, in the shade, and the breeze is blowing mist from the fountain over me. I have kicked my shoes off. I have even pulled an ancient paperback of The Great Gatsby, just purchased from the used bookstore on Montague Street for twenty-five cents, out of my pack, and am flipping through looking for the greatest lines. My own literary YouTube. I really do not want to go anywhere. But.

The phone rings again. The Persuasions, "I Just Want to Sing with My Friends." Him.

"You on the train yet?" "No." "You're not still sitting on some park bench drooling like some old man?" "That is exactly what I'm doing." "Fuck man, c'mon, I can't be waiting for you forever."

"Fuck, fuck." I shout this. Now I really am the crazy old man. I close the book, drop it in my backpack. Pull my shoes back on. Stand up. Pull the pack onto my still sweat-soaked body. I walk over to the fountain, lean in, scoop up water, and dump it on my neck. I consider direction. My first thought is to walk over to the 6 train, but that's old memory, going the other way, catching the R, will get me right there.

It's only fair, I suppose. I have called him up at four in the morning, his time, often. Telling him to get up, check his email, read a paragraph or a story, and tell me how to fix it. I have stumbled into his homes at many bizarre hours, drunk and depressed. He has done the same to me. The drunk and depressed. When he wants me to see things they are always visual. Photographs, films, videos. It goes way back to him as a film student at NYU when he dragged me through abandoned ancient Lower East Side synagogues as he shot his senior thesis. He filmed. A huge old 16mmm camera lugged on his shoulder. I scared him by pulling out my gun and shooting at rats the size of fat house cats.

And there was the joint venture in illegal Irish immigration filmed on the streets of Belfast and The Bronx. And there were those early moments, when I showed him my initial attempts at cop stories. And then, later on, those first tries at the childhood stories.

The subway station is damp but cool. The train is mostly empty and crisply air-conditioned. I sit with my pack between my legs, watching the tunnel lights flash by, and the stations roll into view, one by one. The R reaches from 95th Street in Bay Ridge out by the Verrazano Bridge and goes all the way to Forest Hills near the leafy parts of Queens. It used to go to Astoria, terminating among a sea of Greek diners, but then Mayor Bloomberg decided to confuse everyone , and switched the way the N and the R go on the Queens ends. Either way, I'm sticking with Manhattan right now, so I'm wasting thoughts.

I get off at 59th and Fifth, and climb out into the sun. The Apple Store looms ahead of me. The great glass cube with the Charley and the Chocolate Factory glass elevator (the book or the Gene Wilder movie - not the Johnny Depp one). I cross the street. Enter. And glide down.

He is waiting. He has been connecting and conniving as well. As I approach his video of one night at Nathan's Famous explodes across twenty huge screens. It is him at his visual best. The camera sweeps and lurches, the colours explode, the people's essences burst through. He has even edited it pretty well already. And thirteen minutes later it concludes to loud applause.

He bows dramatically.

"Four hours last night, barely left the place at all," he says. "Wanted to do the beach on a night this hot, but I got sidetracked." We spend the next three hours re-editing. I help - I suspect. In little bits. In saying, "no, that one," when he might have picked something more for just him. We show it big four more times. People like it again and again, even those who have been here, working on whatever, the whole time.

Then he says, "got anything?" I pull a jump drive off from around my neck, and plug it in. The lanyard lies on the table, still wet from sweat and fountain water. "I'm struggling with this, been fighting this chapter for a week."

'"You've never looked at a city the way I have," I told her, as I took in the entirety of the street, the entirety of the moment, in a way most people never learn to do but which is the key to survival if you find yourself chased. "Thank God for that," she said, "you know, you may be getting a bit scary." We were right there. At the spot. The rain polishing the footwalk's pavement. If I saw ghosts and Caitlin did not, what of everyone passing by in the rain this afternoon? If I saw ghosts here could I walk the eight or ten blocks over to Donegall Street and make it through that? "I am more than a bit scared," I said in surprising confession. "I do not like this city at all, and I want it to stop raining. I want fewer reflections." "We should find you a pint," she said, "we should find pints for both of us. And maybe you need to tell me a story I have yet to hear." '

It appears on the screen, this paragraph filling the pixels.

He grabs the keyboard. Changes some things. Hands it to me. I change some more. He takes it back, a touch violently, and types for thirty seconds.

'"You've never looked at a city the way I do," I told her, grabbing the entirety of the street in my eyes, the entirety of the moment, in a way people never learn to do unless they know what it is like to be chased. "Thank God for that," she said, "you know, you may be getting a bit scary." We were right there. At the spot. The rain polishing the footwalk's pavement. If I saw ghosts but Caitlin did not, what of everyone passing by in this rain this afternoon? If I see ghosts here can I walk the eight or ten blocks over to Donegall Street and survive there? "I'd be a bit scared," I said in surprising confession. "I do not like this city, and I want it to stop raining. I want fewer reflections." "We should find you a pint," she said, "we should find pints for both of us. And maybe you need to tell me a story I have yet to hear." '

"That is better," I say honestly. "It is," a woman nearby says, and now I realise that my words are illuminated across an entire wall, "but either way it's beautiful writing, really, a book?" "Shut up," he says sharply, "this is private." I look at her, past him, and mouth, "Thank you, and sorry he's an asshole." She smiles - she may be older but she is very beautiful - and goes back to her email.

"You're a fucking eijit," I say. Pushing a few keys, shrinking my words back to just this display. "Yeah, he says, "but people ought to be paying to read your shit."

"We should all be rich," I tell him. "Then it wouldn't matter." "And we could do this shit all day?" "Yeah, and we could do this shit all day."

copyright 2007-2008 by Ira Socol

Nicotine

2008-04-23T11:23:00.001-04:00

(an old favorite in honor of all those grading papers these weeks)Exhausted with their lives they find themselves sharing seven minutes of intimacy smoking in a cold rain outside a coffee house neither of them want to be at. He grading papers for high school history classes that just don't seem to care. She bored with everything in this stupid little town she's been dragged to, staying away from her house and seeking past acquaintances on-line through the only wi-fi connection around.

Water falls on her dark hair and his artificially tan face and on the thin white t-shirt that shows beneath her jacket and on the tops of his beat up Reeboks. He tans because he hates the winter here and needs sunlight. He goes to the worst place in town with the dullest bulbs in the oldest beds because they let him lie in that warm Plexiglas coffin for a half hour at a time. She wears shirts that let her equally thin bra and in this weather she knows nipples as well show through because it gets her husband mad and at this point she'll take any attention she can get. Even the kind of attention that would have made her feel like kicking a guy's ass maybe just two years ago.

He stares at her but somehow it is not obvious. He stares with the edge of his sight as he looks past her shoulder at the steel gray sky and the Burger King end of a faded downtown. The old "Standard" gas station sign with the torch is now a "bp" sign with green leaf shapes. The only change apparent. She looks at the ground, mostly, but manages, with each drag, to pick up details of his face, his hands, the un-ironed nature of his shirt, the way the blue is worn away at the knees and fly of his jeans.

He knows there's a bar across the street. He wants to say, "fuck the papers." There's not one kid who'd give a shit if he threw them all away. As long as he gave out As. Most even if he didn't. Maybe one kid. Alright, maybe four. Does that matter? He'll give out As anyway. Who cares. He wants to dump the papers in the bin with the remnant disposable plates and napkins and plastic forks and take her to the bar and drink with her and talk with her and take her home and have sex. He doesn't know who she is. He noticed her a half hour ago and thinks she is equally lonely. He imagines that. He likes the way her hand curls around a coffee mug, the length of her fingers, the way she pushes the hair from her face. He doesn't care. He wants conversation with an adult outside a teachers' lounge. He wants to be drunk. He wants to be touched.

She thinks there's a place in the next town. She's driven past it. It looks old, kind of Chicago neighborhood Italian and she wants this guy to take her there and drink real espresso with Sambuca, not this semi-Starbucks crap, and deep red wine and eat extravagant pasta and she wants him to reach over and touch her hand and talk to her and say the kinds of things she used to hear but doesn't now. She's been watching him for almost two hours from across a room full of small-town pretenders. She's making assumptions based on a vaguely familiar look, on the hurt in his eyes, on the way he sighs with frustration, on the fact that she thinks teaching is a noble thing. What she imagines is diligence, empathy, and care. She's not sure how much she wants to get back at her husband. Has no plans for an affair, really. She just imagines that getting "picked up" that way might restore her knowledge of her sexuality. And fill her time tonight.

He drops the butt of his Camel into a puddle and it makes a tiny sizzle. He shakes the rain off his hair. She flicks the remnant of a Newport into the street. He turns toward the door, his features highlighted by the typical red and blue neon "open" sign. She turns toward the door. He opens it and holds it for her. She walks back in to cold coffee and two messages from friends 1,700 miles away. He sits down and picks up "World War I and Woodrow Wilson," sighs. Writes an A in red at the top, picks up the next.

the weight

2008-04-21T02:35:00.000-04:00

an meáchan

Taj said he'd meet me in the Sheep Meadow at four, but I was there by two, feeling kind of loopy from the too early summer heat that was saturating the city, and I pulled off my shirt and lay on it on the grass with a bottle of Gatorade and the Daily News and a book of Gregory Corso's poems that had been jammed in my back pocket.

Over there a father kicked a soccer ball to his two sons, maybe two and four. Over here a baby climbed from mom to dad. In the distance three preppie types, no doubt from private schools in New Jersey or Connecticut, tossed a ball back and forth with their expensive lacrosse sticks - posing with every catch. Beyond them four Koreans practised a slow-motion Asian exercise routine.

"I stand in the dark light in the dark street / and look up at my window, I was born there. / The lights are on; other people are moving about. / I am with raincoat; cigarette in mouth, / hat over eye, hand on gat. / I cross the street and enter the building. / The garbage cans haven't stopped smelling. / I walk up the first flight; Dirty Ears / aims a knife at me... / I pump him full of lost watches." and I fall asleep, the smell of just cut grass fueling the softest of dreams.

In a wide glen an hour west of the old stone city my Da played football with us in the thick clover. He was teaching us how to get air under the ball, how to pass over the midfield, but really, we were just playing catch in the sun. And over there Ma sat and read in the quiet of having all four children occupied by things other than herself. She smiles to herself - it is the most vivid of memories - as if all the cares had been lifted.

I woke up with a shadow thrown across my face. "You're probably claiming you're on the clock right now, aren't you?" All I could see was a looming figure against the sun. I closed my eyes and re-established which grass I lay in. "Some job you've got." "It's tough, ya know, but someone's gotta do it." He threw a thick pile, held together with rubber bands, down next to me. "Check out the pics of Hunt's Point," Taj said, still looming. I pulled the package apart, opened the string closure on a department reuse envelope that was stiff to bend. Photo paper. "When were these taken?" "Wednesday night into Thursday, maybe twenty-three hundred to oh-two-thirty." "You ran all the plates?" "Yeah, that's in there too." I followed along by pulling out the print outs.

I got to my feet. Pulled the shirt back over my head. Taj continued to loom. He's got a foot, maybe more, on me. "Mighty tall for undercover," I've said, but he could be a Bronx goon, so he's not out of place prowling the terminal market in the off hours. "Where you off to now?" "I'm supposed to try and crash a birthday party in Long Island City. You know, work, I hear you used to do some of that." "Not really." "Yeah." "Yeah, well, I guess I should go downtown and see how this adds up." "Gonna let us know?" "We always do." "No, you don't." "Well, we've got funny rules," I told him this, but nobody really understands what the Intelligence Division does. "Yeah," he said, and walked casually off toward Fifth Avenue.

I bent down and picked everything up and slipped the papers into the middle of The News, somewhere between Dear Abby and the classifieds. I stuffed the book back into my pocket. I'll go back downtown, I figured. I'll walk down toward Rockefeller Center and find something to eat in an air conditioned restaurant and catch the train and go start adding this stuff into a database that might suggest the details we need on these particular dope dealers. And then I'll see if I can make some assumptions. They were paying me to make assumptions. But I knew that I wouldn't do that for a day or two. It was too hot, and I felt too lost in time. "Of course I tried to tell him," Corso wrote, "but he cranked his head / without an excuse. / I told him the sky chases / the sun / And he smiled and said: / 'What's the use.'" All around me I heard the sound of kids free on a summer day. I drained the Gatorade as I walked through the field, and tossed the bottle in a trash bin. It made a hollow "thunk" as it hit the rim. But the still air remained silent, and my footsteps on the lawn made no sound at all.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol
first poem is Birthplace Revisited by Gregory Corso from Gasoline.
second poem is Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway by Gregory Corso from The Happy Birthday of Death.

trinity

2008-04-19T20:20:00.000-04:00

one

In this night as the storms rage above and below and I climb the boxes and then the shelf in the closet and slip through the hatch into the attic, my own passage through the wardrobe I find myself believing, and push the blankets and pillow I have dragged up as far into the eaves as I can fit – I could not have been more than seven and so I needed very, very little space – then I know that the fear from downstairs might begin to soften.

two

Wrapped in this nest I absorb the rhythm of the wind-driven rain on slate roof shingles so ancient they have been thinned visibly by centuries of Atlantic precipitation. The air is sharp and cold but inside the blankets my body warms and relaxes. In the full-dark I fumble for my secret box, a tin that once held chocolates brought by a cousin from London but now holds votives secreted from the cathedral, matches from the pub, and all of the postcards received from cousin Michael in America. With blind dexterity born of too much experience I set out the candles, and strike the fire.

three

The trinity of flames create more shadow than light but I hold the postcards. There is New York, and the dome of the Capitol in Washington, and a fold-out set from Cape Kennedy, a boat on the Mississippi by New Orleans, even the Astrodome. But the one I always hold is just from a hotel in a place called "Arizona." The building is so new. Palm trees stand in front. The cars are like spaceships to a lad who knows no one who even owns one of the tiny boring cars people have here. And the sky. Oh the sky. It is bigger than any I have seen and a kind of blue I have never imagined.

ar maidin

That postcard is in my hand as I fall asleep. It is still clutched there when the first ray of dawn cuts under deep gray clouds and throws itself through the dusty attic window and for just one moment makes my world absolutely my own.

Morning Arrivals

2008-04-16T10:40:00.000-04:00

1:28 AM One World Trade Center, New York, New York, USA

The party was in that artist's space on the north side of the 67th floor and I'd walked through the late summer storm all the way from the Canal Street Station on the BMT because it hadn't been raining when we'd crossed the Manhattan Bridge and I hadn't considered that possibility. I was soaked: t-shirt and jeans stuck to my skin, water squishing out of my adidas. The elevator up to the 44th floor skylobby was cold, and I shivered. I noticed the trail of water I left on the polished floor as I changed to the 'local' for the rest of the climb.

The music shook the walls when I stepped out onto the floor. Flashing light leaked into the central corridor. There was a girl I desperately wanted to be with inside. And at least two guys I did not want to see at all.

5:23 AM Craigovan Bridge, Derry, Ireland

Behind the sky was just beginning to be touched with the sun now dawning over the Netherlands. Ahead it was a pure dark backdrop to the pinprick lights of the bridge and the city. I had left Belfast too late and too depressed and probably a bit too snoggered for my own good, but I'd kept the music roaring and my eyes open and the almost vacant A-6 hadn't thrown me anything I couldn't handle.

When I curved through the rotary just east of the Foyle I already felt like I was home, but I didn't want to show up just yet. So I crossed, drove through the Ferryquay Gate and up the hill. I parked at the Diamond, and sat on the car. The war memorial seemed reproachful, the streetlamps blocked the stars.

8:23 AM Dublin Airport, Dublin, Ireland

The flight from Chicago had crossed a cloudless night. I had watched the cities and forests of North America run beneath in the fading evening light, had noted the tiny spots of light that mark Canada's Atlantic coast. I thought I woke up at one point and saw a ship crossing the ocean, the smallest flare of illumination in a vast, deep universe. Or maybe I dreamed that. It doesn't matter.

Ireland glittered as morning struck the plane, the Shannon silver against the fabric of the land which held it. Only Donegal smothered itself under tufted grey. I knew she would be there at the airport. We'd said we'd meet them by the giant winged pig by the car park. I thought that suggested many things. The line for those with EU passports went this way. The line for others was over there.

11:41 AM Indian Trails Bus Station, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

I'd taken the first plane from LaGuardia to Metro. American Airlines. "Fly the American Way." Everyone else was wearing a suit and carrying briefcases. I had a backpack and a pillow and had checked a dufflebag. It was just about everything. The stewardess thought my nervousness was about flight and was very nice. At Detroit I claimed the duffle and found the bus going north and west. Not Greyhound or even Trailways, but 'Indian Trails.'

East Lansing emerged out of an empty landscape. The tops of the football stadium visible long before any other object save huge chimneys. It was the end of the summer and the air was hot and full of dust. I felt myself start to sweat as I lifted everything onto my shoulders. Around me others were being be greeted by old friends or family. And still others walked off as if they knew where they were going.

copyright 2008 by Ira Socol

violence

2008-04-15T00:46:00.000-04:00

foréigean

There had been so many chances to get killed this year, and last year, and the year before. I just thought about that. Not as a list or anything. Nothing specific. Just a vague sense of a life uncertain. A life lived just a few steps beyond the razor's edge. These things flashed through my head as the landscape of Brooklyn wheezed outside the windows of the F train as it drifted along the el above McDonald Avenue, heading south, toward the sea.

Night was just starting to fall. It was getting late, but not late enough. Still, I was going now. I didn't want to ride out here later, in an empty subway car, being one of just two or three getting off a train. The best way to be anonymous is always to be in a crowd. So I was on my way. I could surely kill five hours on Coney Island. Anyone could.

The meet wouldn't happen until two, over in the abandoned lots past the Thunderbolt. This was a scary buy. Anytime you're buying guns it's fucking scary. I mean, if you're buying guns there's no doubt that there'll be guns around, right? But these guys made me twitchy. They seemed less like people interested in getting money than like psychos. Maybe that was cultural. I might have been misreading Eastern European shit the wrong way. They might just be sane criminals. I'd keep repeating that to myself, hunting some shot at calm.

I got off at West Eighth Street and walked. I walked all the way to Nathan's. Grabbed two dogs and a beer and walked along the boardwalk, going back east. The sun had vanished, the neon was exploding. The night was hot and the crowd smelled of alcohol and sweat and baby oil and Coppertone. The boardwalk felt small, and I decided to get above it.

So I got in line for the Wonder Wheel, and climbed aboard with two twenty-something girls who said they liked my earrings, and rode up into the August sky.

We laughed. They rocked the car. They shared some toxic liqueur they were carrying. I pulled out a joint and shared that. The ocean breeze cooled us, quickly, in a way that heightened the moment of sexual tension. I looked down blurrily on the scene. Three and a half hours ahead I'd meet these guys. I'd be so scared sweat would be pouring down my body, but it would come off clean. I'd drop the evidence on two cops sitting in an old Ford Galaxie stopped at the boardwalk stairs west of the Parachute Jump. And then I'd walk away - on the empty streets - not even really knowing where I was until I found the Brighton Beach station and boarded a train back north. There were never any arrests. The three guys I bought from were found dead in Sheepshead Bay two days later - we were never sure why - or I was never told - or I never asked.

But now I was just looking down from our date on the neon-carpeted night. Girl Two had her hand on the inside of my thigh. Her little finger just brushing the denim that covered my balls. "Wanna come party with us tonight?" she asked. The way her hand was placed she knew I was ready to do something, and I knew she knew, but I just said, "Sorry sweetheart, I'm working tonight." "Working?!" Girl One laughed. "Working? You a cop or you clean up at Nathan's?" "A cop," I told her. "Yeah right," she said, as Girl Two removed her hand. "Think of me and whack yourself off when you're cleaning up the french fry machine."

We were back down at the bottom. "I'll do that," I said, grabbing my crotch as they climbed out of the ride. "I'll think only of you."

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol
images from The Bridge and Tunnel Club

Tea in Dublin

2008-04-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

Tae sa Baile Átha Cliath

She had the organic porridge with Drambuie and cream. I had the "famous" Irish breakfast. We're both coffee drinkers but on this morning we had a pot of tea. It seemed more proper. And if we were actually meeting again and actually spending the money for breakfast at Bewley's, it seemed important, or perhaps simply logical, to be proper.

"What about ya?" I asked. An unconscious fall into northern phrasing. Her laugh was just as I had left it seven years ago, a dangerous combination of lovely and vicious. "You'd think after all these years you'd have learned how to speak." "Ah," I answered, "you wouldn'a have changed at'all." She only looked at me then, her dark eyes slashing though they barely moved, and sipped her tea.

We'd been lovers. Briefly. Wildly. Cataclysmically. I had been in Dublin short term. She had assumed that meant a meaningless fling. I had deluded myself into believing something else. I had deluded myself into believing many things. I flew home shattered. What's that song, "I awoke with a broken heart and a ticket home?" Maybe, but, in retrospect, she was not truly the object of real love. It was my fantasy of conquering the high-powered Dublin woman, bringing her to love me. It was that which had likely mattered, and it was that which had ended up broken. So, in my memory I was not fair to her. It is always more reciprocal than we want to admit. Always.

There was much less conversation than I had imagined or prepared for. She looked much older, much more tired. I might have as well. She seemed less self-assured, less confident, and that made me sad. Her angry self-centeredness had made her attractive at the start - in that way that I often seek out the bad drama - and thus she was easy to hate in the aftermath. Now there seemed less of a point to all of the emotional energy that had been expended.

"There's a rumour," she said, "that you want to go to UU." "Nuh," I told her, "well, perhaps. I'd go back to Derry if something came up at Magee, and maybe to Coleraine, but I wouldn'a necessarily move to take something at Jordanstown." She wasn't really listening, it had just been her habit of repeating stories. So I asked about her new book, and she described that in detail. She likes her work. She's damn smart. And that was always attractive.

There were some other things exchanged. Her kids, mine, in surface description. Her research and mine, again, skimmed. A few places she'd been, places I still was.

And then, breakfast was done, and so was the second pot. And it was time. She hugged me momentarily at the door, I responded with one arm. She walked on up Grafton Street, back into her own world. I looked her way, then looked the other. It was nearing noon, and the street was aflood with shoppers and walkers and buskers and tourists. I walked back toward College Green, stopped for afternoon pub cash at the ATM at the Bank of Ireland. I said to myself, "I should go into this building more often - it is so beautiful." Then I crossed the street, and walked through the gates of Trinity. From the light of the day, to the dim of the ancient corridor, and back out into the light of the day.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

pizza on Tuesday

2008-04-10T07:59:00.000-04:00

Thirty-six hours into watching we are all going insane. We moved into this filthy space above an abandoned pizzeria on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Kevin at two or so, me at six, the others in between, and now it is a rainy Tuesday morning, colder than it should be, nothing is really happening, and the roof is leaking.

"You gonna do anything here?" Mario asks me, "Watch, maybe, or listen to the phone?" "Nah, you guys are all much better at this stuff than me." "Then could run go get more coffee and lunch, none of us fits into this neighborhood like you do." "I could," I say sighing, "You assholes all do look like cops." "Go get coffee and pizza and fuck yourself while you're at it," Kevin suggests smiling. "Ní dhéarna mé coir," I say, repeating the basic phrase we used with the RUC and Paras back in Northern Ireland years ago. They don't get it. I barely do. But as an adolescent lad it suggested both innocence and rebellion in the same short sentence, and I feel like proclaiming that status at this moment. Nik throws two twenties at me, "Get your potato eating ass in motion." I get up literally as slowly as possible. Climb the stairs to the roof, cross to the third building to the west, and head back down.

I emerge into the downpour in a trash filled alley and pull my Mets hat deep over my eyes. When I was small I had this old cap from my Uncle Eamon. It was way too big, and I could barely see when I wore it, but I always kept it on my head. Eamon was in prison in Long Kesh having done nothing wrong, and the cap was a connection to someone special to me and a quiet argument. But the adults in the city just thought I looked stupid.

I walk two blocks to what might be the best pizza place in New York City, which is saying something big. I order three pies and five coffees to go and one for here, carefully describing the required contents. "Two regular, Two no sugar, one black no sugar, and black no sugar for here." And I sit twisted and hidden in a booth by the window, looking out, both hands wrapped around the hot cup.

Minutes pass. Then a scene begins to play out. And even from underneath the hat brim I see it before it occurs. An elderly woman with an umbrella and a grocery bag and a purse on her arm, and a kid who wants quick cash. And suddenly I bolt. I yell, "Call 9-1-1 with a mugging and I'll be right back." I grab the shield out from inside my shirt and pull my gun from an ankle holster as I swing through the door and race down Neptune Avenue, my sneakers slapping the wet pavement. Just as the kid strikes I dive into a tackle and take him down. The woman screams. The kid starts to fight until I punch him in the face with everything I've got. Then he says, "Yo man, I didn't do nothing." Blood runs from his broken nose. I smile. He takes my memory for dangerous insanity and shuts up. A radio car bends around the far corner and rushes over. I let go of the kid with one hand to hold up the shield to I.D. myself before I get taken out.

I get up. My jeans are soaking wet. "Your collar," I say to the smaller of the two cops, "I gotta go." People are watching, and that, in my line of work, is bad. I back away into a gathering cluster of watchers, then turn and slouch back to the pizzeria. "Thanks," I tell Nunzio who waits behind the counter. "Nice work," he says. "You've never seen me," I say, and carry the pies and coffees back to my more observant partners.

alone

2008-04-07T11:30:00.000-04:00

He sat in the back of the classroom. Sometimes staring at the fluorescent lights flickering and humming above. Sometimes looking out the window toward the traffic flowing on the street beyond the playground. Sometimes following patterns invisible to others in the woodgrain of his desk or in the tiles of the floor or in the cotton of his jeans.

Beyond him he knew the teacher was usually talking. That other kids were reading or writing, passing notes or hitting each other, talking or rolling pencils off the desk so that they could bend down and pick them up. He knew that numbers and letters and words were being tossed around, but none of it could really touch his attention. He knew that he didn't need them anyway. He told his own stories as he watched his worlds, he added and divided his own sums as he let time wander, he found his own sciences as he watched the earth spin through its day. And he knew that the teacher knew that if she tried to force these things his way, he had very good ways to resist.

So there he sat. Holding an uneasy truce with his captors. Waiting for the best days, the rainy days, when water would streak across the window and the passing cars and trucks would toss spray in the air, and when he was finally paroled at the final bell he could walk slowly home, letting the water from the sky bathe him in its chill embrace.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

on Flatbush Avenue

2008-04-06T06:28:00.000-04:00

Nobody really gave a shit that Carlos sold smack from the corner table in the back of the cafeteria in the Sears on Flatbush Avenue, except that Carlos was getting his dope from a guy who was also selling discount assault weapons from Virginia to all sorts of bad guys around central and southern Brooklyn.

So I went there a few more than a dozen times I guess. Drinking the bad coffee, eating the just a bit too chewy to be real meat hamburgers, and after seven visits Carlos and I talked, and on visit nine I made my first buy.

After the third buy - the ADAs always wanted three - I showed up a day or two more just for cover's sake and then vanished. I was on another task, five weeks later, when they busted Carlos at his apartment on Church Avenue and dragged him to Brooklyn South's major case detectives and scared him to fucking death and got him to talk. He was nothing, of course, just a tool salesman with a bad habit and a need for a little extra cash on the side. That's just like all of us, right? He was no more selling heroin in a Brooklyn department store by choice than any of us were doing anything by choice. We'd all been sucked to this capital of the American Empire by forces so massive they were invisible. And we were all committing crimes and finding ways to collaborate as we tried to survive. It's the way it is.

The information from Carlos proved valuable. It led to a series of very good arrests. He got cut loose as carefully as they could - a faked "dismissal of the evidence" in court. Everybody tries. There are few real villains here.

Still, Carlos was dead twelve weeks after I last saw him in the cafeteria. Shot from a car as he walked past the Kenmore Theater on his way home on a dim and wet January night. Another murder never solved.

The next summer, buying a drillbit from under a disguising Mets cap, I overheard another Sears clerk say that his wife had fled back to Puerto Rico with the two kids. I felt sick. So I went up to the second floor, and found a corner table in the cafeteria. And drank two or four cups of the bad coffee. Around me the city swirled and pulsed, moving on, as it always does.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

Once

2008-04-01T10:02:00.002-04:00

Once, a generation ago, very drunk and very desperate about far too many things, we’d lain near this tree, by this gravestone, in this cemetery, and made love in a very dark night. Not just shagged. Not just. It was more than that. It was, I want to think for both of us, an act of dressing wounds, of offering sanctuary, of providing respite.

Today the sun is bright and it touches us with warmth and we are older, safer, surer. Fuchsia climbs wildly up the ancient marker. Birds serenade us.

“I am so glad that you rang me this time,” she says, her voice not having changed at all, “I’d’a begun to imagine you were avoiding me.” She laughs, a perfect laugh. “No, I’d much more than begun. But now, it is wonderful to see you, to hear you.” I look down into the not cut recently enough grass. “I was nervous about it, too nervous, you were my mate’s girl, even if he was away.” I wait. I listen to the silence of her breathing. “I thought we shouldn’a done it.”

She puts a finger to my lips. “Don’t,” she simply says. “The best friends give the gifts we need when we need them.”

In the sun, in this place, we sit beside one another and say nothing. Later, in other places, we will tell each other of the twenty years past. Not now though. Not in this sanctuary.

silent night

2008-01-27T10:35:00.000-05:00

From the windows that faced South Oxford Street I could see the clock at the top of the Williamsburgh Bank Building, grey in the daylight and glowing in the night. My lighthouse in the heart of Brooklyn. The apartment was always too hot, you couldn't shut the radiators off and they hissed and steamed and I sat there, wearing just underwear, staring at the tower against the fading December day, cassettes of a law book scattered around me but Joey Ramone screaming instead through mammoth JBL headphones plugged into a huge old Heathkit Amp I'd bought used on the street for way too little. It was filled with vacuum tubes and lit up the corner of the room like a mad scientist's laboratory while adding it's own great heat to the situation.

As I stared snow began to drop from the dark clouds and the tower's edges faded behind a white curtain until only the glow of the clock remained, a false red moon, and then, I had switched now to a tape of a friend's band, the snow came much faster and the landmark completely vanished. The street below slipped back into its own time. I leaned against the window, elbows on the center rails, looking down on cars and asphalt made invisible and streetlamps reduced to ancient wattages by the thickness of the crystals in the air.

I heard a knock at the door. An impatient, obviously second or third knock. That surprised me. You had to be let in downstairs here. No direct access and no buzzer system either. No one would just knock unless it was one of the guys who owned the brownstone and lived on the ground and first floors. But, they had become friends, so I dropped the headphones and opened the door. Katie stood there, wrapped in wool, covered with snow. "Oh," she said, "Mark told me you'd be naked and to just come on up. But I guess, not quite." "I can solve that really easily," I told her, waving her in, perhaps putting a finger to the waistband. "Put your pants on Ulster boy, don't be afraid of winter." She paused, let her eyes roll across me. "We're going out into the storm."

I put on clothes, and a sweater, and a jacket and scrounged around until I discovered a misplaced hat and gloves, and we went down the stairs and out the door. The stoop we stood on, and all the buildings left and right, were from the 1840s, and now, that was obvious. There were no sounds, the city had gone into hiding, leaving this path to the past to us alone.

We walked toward the park and climbed the hill. Manhattan, usually a backdrop so close you were sure you could touch it, was gone. I laughed, and kissed her. Then we went back down, walking toward Fulton Street, hardly speaking. The snow was so thick you couldn't see more than a half block in any direction, so buildings suddenly appeared, as if ghosts in a Dickens Christmas tale, and just as quickly receeded. It was perfect.

We walked all the way to the bridge, and out to the middle of the river, where the wind swirled the flakes into van Gogh-Starry Night streaks. "Let's go back and find hot coffee in the Heights," I whispered. "Sure," she said, "but hold onto me first, right here."
_________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - photograph is the Brooklyn Bridge in snow.

The Drool Room now available everywhere including Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
A Certain Place of Dreams now available everywhere including Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Bridge Work

2007-10-08T14:18:00.001-04:00

droichead

They gave me the gold shield cause I could develop great databases. I thought, "you've got to be fucking kidding?" but this was true. All the shit I went through for them - all the desperate nights undercover - all the risks - all the injuries - all the collars that I made or that couldn't have happened without me - that got me nothing. I could'a stayed a Patrolman for ever. But, sitting in a strange little office with a computer, stretching out the recovery of a shattered knee, I had mixed a healthy appetite for Flight Simulator with a few simple approaches to recording crime data, and - presto! - they told me to come downtown and be a "Detective."

Actually, no, they did not say that. They called on a Tuesday morning and said, "How do you know this stuff?" "What stuff?" "How to program computers." "I don't know how to program computers." "Those databases." "That's not programming - I'm just making columns." "How do you know how to do that?" "Make columns? Don't know - It's easy."

This is why I never succeed in business.

Whatever. They said, "Come downtown and work on this stuff at headquarters." And I said, "Why the fuck would I want to do that. It's expensive down there. It's a long commute."

We argued over the next few weeks. But I was right. I worked fifteen minutes from my house. I knew everyone. They liked me. Why switch for nothing?

"Make me a detective," I offered. "Can't do that." "Why not, you should have made me a detective years ago." "Why's that?" "Look me up in your personnel files."

And I suppose they did.

"We'll make you a "Field Services Specialist-Detective Third Class." "Wow," I said, "that's a hell of an honor." But I went. The title came with five thousand more bucks a year, a complete lack of supervision, and bizarre little office with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The work was boring, more or less, but I would spend an hour on task, and then sneak out and wander Chinatown, or Little Italy, or just, if my leg hurt that day, sit in City Hall Park, or, especially in the dark winter evenings, drift out onto the bridge, embraced by the ribbons of light, and breath in the vast salt smell of the Atlantic tide pushing up the harbor from the Narrows.

And then I'd wander back to that tiny office, and rifle through cases, looking for ways to assemble patterns, or discover patterns. I was probably catching criminals. I really was, but I didn't feel like a cop anymore. But when I stood out on the bridge, in the depth of the winds, I really didn't care.
___________________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

a thrice told tale...

2007-10-05T07:58:00.000-04:00

iomadúil

I wish I had gotten there just a bit earlier. Of course I do. First, I would have been ahead of the rain, once it began to fall heavily, and I would not have seen dripping wet after the run from the bus stop three streets over. And second, more importantly surely, I would have been there before Liam. He might not have said that to her if he had known I was in the room. And who knows? The party might have just gone along swimmingly.

I couldn't get there earlier. Not really. I suppose that I must say that at the start. Oh sure, I could have stopped checking email before I did, gotten into the shower, gotten myself dressed and all, and out the door and to the bus stop. The busses are supposed to be about twenty minutes apart that time of the day, but even if I had been twenty or even forty minutes ahead, you understand, this is Dublin and the Dublin Bus system and, when I did get to the stop, three busses were forming their own queue for the seven people waiting. A full hours worth of mass transport lined up into a single minute. I simply would have waited longer, probably become more frustrated myself. That, combined with being soaked to the skin by the downpour between the stop on Baggot Street and her home, might have made the over-reaction - if it was an over-reaction, because I'm not quite ready to admit that just yet - even greater. At least that's possible.

Yes, yes. I should not have hit him. Yes, not like that. Damn close to a sucker punch. He really never saw it coming, though he should have, and I caught him right on the side of the mouth, knocking him sideways off his feet, leaving blood pouring from a split lip. But holy fuck, ya know, he deserved it. You just don't pull shite like that. If you're gonna come already snockered to a party, you better arrive as a happy drunk, not a belligerant arsehole.

When I was in the shower, the hot water coursing across my body, I imagined that the night would go differently. Absolutely I did. But that's the nature of being naked in warm water, it creates optimism. The reality of the evening was built on other bodily sensations, the clinging to the skin of cold, wet cotton and wool. That forces the harshness of the universe right into your face. So, when I opened the door, dripped on the aged oak flooring, saw the tears and heard the anger, the romantic allusions had already drained away, and I was just a tosser blown in by the storm.

True. I shouldn't have hit him. I should have found words. Used words. But there were too many things in my head at that moment. And I only found the action that lay on top of that mental pile.

She was in tears, and she was shouting, "Get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out of my house." And everybody was just staring. I walked into this frozen scene, with only her in movement, and only her sounds. I moved into a circle of ice, and shivered as she looked at me, and then hardened as I saw him.

She was in tears. He had loudly announced that her ambition was the cause of her kid's problems. Which is something you do not say to a mother who has tried that hard, or to anyone in their home in front of guests, or if you've been invited to an ex's "Tenure Party" - since the very invitation is an act of grace that you should accept with silent thanks. But he is an arse. And he thinks he looks strong if he can make her cry.

Right. I should'na hit him. That's something else guests are not supposed to do.

Had I been there before him, as I said, I would have been near her, and he would have stayed away. He might have, drunk as he was he surely would have, made snarkey remarks to others. He might have even said something about what had happened. But he would not have said it loudly, or directly, and he would not have attacked her ability to parent that way. Liam's a coward. He's afraid of lots of people. And one of those people he's afraid of is me.

I hit him on an impulse. I did. It wasn't planned. He had insulted the woman who might have been on the way to becoming "my" woman. He had not just insulted her, but had suggested that her accomplishments, the very reason for this gathering, was some kind of crime.

I hit him because I wanted to sleep with her again. Yes. I wanted to be the knight in shining armour. Because I was raised on the belief that nothing was more romantic than defending the honour of your woman. King Arthur, of course, was a Celt.

I hit him because I'm an idiot. An impulsive idiot. I do shite and then, well, I fuck myself over all the time. I do. I'm a fuckin' ijiot. So I hit him. Looked around. People were shocked. He was bleeding. She didn't say anything. Not like in a movie where she'd rush to me and thank me. Of course not. I'm a juvenile moron for thinking that. So I turned around, mumbled something, and went back out into the rain.

I left. Furious at many things. Thumping down the stairs, treading heavily on the footwalk. The rain had turned into a soft mist. It was full dark and the streetlamps lit the water molecules around them. I went one block, then two.

I left. Sometimes I just disappoint myself. Sometimes? Often. Oh well. I'd walk to the bus, with, perhaps, a stop for a pint. Or two. Night had fully fallen but the rain had slackened, then faded further into a mist. My trainers squeaked on the damp stone of the footwalk. Couples walked past, some looking happy. I kept my head down, the lights of the lamps wavered in the puddles. Then my mobile started playing Norwegian Wood.

I could see Baggot Street at the end of the block. An old Jaguar was parked at the curb beside me and I had let my eyes follow its sinuous curves up from the footwalk. It was the first object I had really looked at since I left the house. My mobile rang. It was her. For reasons all too clear I had linked her to an ancient Beatles tune about love lost. I waited. But then pulled it from my pocket and opened it. The text read, "Come back you arse."

So I turned around, there on the footwalk, and I went back. I went back and was very quiet. I went back and stayed the night, and all the next day.
_________________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

Now Available: The Drool Room

2007-10-02T15:04:00.000-04:00

by Ira David Socol

"I ain't crazy," declares the narrator of this stunningly original novel-in-stories, "I'm not."

But sanity is always an elusive thing in this tale that carries the reader through a life torn apart by anger, frustration, and disappointment - but held together by an absolute refusal to "give up."

A first grader who can neither read nor sit still. An angry junior high student lashing out at those trying to help. A self-medicating high school athlete. All this leads us to an adult police officer on the streets of The Bronx at the most crime-wracked moment in New York City history.

The Drool Room may not make you love its complex protagonist, but it will force you to see life through the fascinating eyes of a remarkable character.

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Now Available: A Certain Place of Dreams

2007-10-02T14:58:00.001-04:00

by Ira David Socol

With more than four dozen pieces of microfiction set in and around the northern Irish city of Derry, Ira David Socol carries you to places of incredible beauty and vicious nightmare, times of absolute joy and moments of complete terror. In stories which tread a blurred line between poetry and prose, a never named and not-quite described narrator reveals a story both national and personal, played out upon a canvas filled with stunning landscapes and fascinating characters.

"When I need peace, I think to myself, I have always come to where the sea meets the land. Because it is at this most primal borderline that we can see in the most directions. Not just up to the heavens and down into the briny deep, not just endlessly north or west or east or south, but forward and backward along the timeline of creation."

US $15.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

labours

2007-09-21T08:09:00.000-04:00

The great hunter Orion slumbers at the south-eastern edge of a cerulean field, his great arm not, as usual, holding a bow, but now gently wrapped around his head, shielding shuttered eyes from the bright light of the sun the spills down from above in the reflection of a newly polished moon.

I have fallen asleep too early and now awoken too early and walk with the dog to the top of the small hill. The street curves below me, dropping down not steeply, but enough to add romance to the landscape, as the ground falls off toward the sluggish midwestern stream a half-mile that way.

In the house the woman sleeps but the cat prowls. The televsion flickers with a black and white drama from the years of the World War. The power lights on the computer monitors flash in their synchronous way, the screens dark to the powers and allures of the internet. Six books that need to be reviewed for student use, four articles that need to be read, and three manuscripts in various stages of final editing rest on my desk, in both digital and paper form.

In three or four hours we will probably have breakfast, gather ourselves for the day. Football games will appear on television. Emails will arrive. There will be the outdoor market to get to, the garage to re-organise, and all that work to do. As I walk back toward the door with the dog I consider brewing the coffee and starting early. But the great hunter Orion sleeps so soundly, and I yawn. And we go back inside, and I pull off the clothes, and fall back into bed.

___________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - Traversee by Humberto Castro

independence

2007-07-03T12:27:00.001-04:00

There is a line in the Jewish Passover Seder which goes something like this: "Even as we remember tonight what it was like when we were slaves in the land of Egypt; even as we think of our Jewish brothers and sisters who are still enslaved in various lands and places, so do we tonight remember people (whether they are Jews or not) who still suffer from slavery, hunger, and/or repression." It might be a great way to celebrate the American Fourth of July - to remember that none of us are truly free as long as any are not...

neamhspleáchas

Sometime quite late in the summer of 1969 the Irish Army began to appear just beyond the border. That was a real border back then. Today you would only know the line because the speed signs switch from "100" - meaning kilometers - to "60" - meaning miles and because the always spying UK "speed cameras" appear. But in those days there were checkpoints and customs stations and police, and, at least for a bit on each side of the road, fences, though crossing by foot was never an issue.

We'd cross to see them. A real Irish Army. Not Brits, not Protestants, and no masks. Real Catholic Irishmen carrying real guns out in the open. They were instantly our biggest heroes.

The year had already seen the whole world become unglued. You'd think a "revolution" would begin with violence from the "revolting" side, but this did not happen. Protestant Unionists and their Royal Constabulary co-conspirators had already attacked peaceful democracy marches, planted a half dozen bombs, killed a few people. The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland's government had resigned to stop any hope of implementing a "one man - one vote" law that would have let Catholics be citizens as Protestants were. The leader of the Unionists had hope for the future though, "... if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants, ... They will refuse to have 18 children." This thinking had led the Protestant "Londonderry Corporation," rulers of a 90% Catholic city, to tear down much of the Bogside to build highrise flats and such in a desperate attempt to encourage birth control.

The Irish soldiers gave us candy and sang songs with us. They shared their food. They told us about Dublin and Cork, Galway and Kilkenny. And then they'd shoo us back towards that line. "Better be gettin' home lads, don'na want your mas to be gettin' worried."

And then the Battle of the Bogside broke out. The Apprentice Boys, those Prod thugs, attacked our neighborhood, backed by the RUC. Three days of war followed. On Wednesday the B-Specials, the worst enforcers of the government, started shooting people. And that night Jack Lynch, the Irish Taoiseach , went on the telly and said they'd be setting up field hospitals close to Derry and Newry to save lives and that, "...the present situation is the inevitable outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont governments. It is clear also that the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse."

And the armies came. The British Army flew in from Scotland, tanks and armoured personnel carriers and helicopters and very big guns. The Irish Army camped just over the hill, medical tents and food and lorries and, yes, guns as well.

We crossed the border and asked "our" soldiers, "Are ye coming? Will you come over the hill, at least to the river?" But they'd just say, "Don' know lad, don' know." Our parents talked of troops massed in Counties Donegal and Louth, ready to free us and Newry too. The places that should never have been beyond the partition. The oldest talked of those ancient Brit lies of "boundary decisions in 1924," but England wouldn'a give up their Naval Base at Catholic Derry nor Belfast's water supply at Catholic Newry. "The Brits will never do a thing unless you kill enough of them," Johnnie said. It was a scary thing. The room went silent. There were men there who remembered the real wars. 1916 was just a half-century in the past, you might be just sixty and still clearly recall 1920 and Michael Collins and the Black and Tans.

It was the summer that the lights went out. It was the summer when your ma became afraid if you went out the door. It was the summer that great terror mixed with great hope. It was a summer when we stood on an edge, and could not be sure which nation we'd go to school in when school began again, our nation or their's. It was a summer when people began dying all across the six captive counties.

And it was the summer that we all, no matter what age we might be, grew old.

The Irish Army didn'a come over the hill - they said they feared a bloodbath in Belfast if they liberated Derry. The British Army did not leave - they said that freedom and joining the Republic could only come if the Prods agreed. The Prods did not give Catholics the vote - they said we were uneducated "Popist Communists." The Americans did not come to help - though we had great faith in America - which looked down on us like gods from their perch on the moon. The next year the people of Britain elected a right-wing government that turned their Army in Northern Ireland from peacekeepers to murderers.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose" was first sung in 1969. Two years later, before even the slaughter of Bloody Sunday, Janis had sung it, and we listened on Radio Free Ireland coming from Inishowen, along with Don Maclean's song, which got to the end, "I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news. She just smiled and turned away..."

And so, we were left completely on our own.

_________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - images (top and bottom) are of The Battle of the Bogside - 12, 13, 14 August 1969. The center is the Rossville Flats under construction, 1965 (?).

darkness

2007-01-31T16:02:00.000-05:00

There are many ways in which the world divides, and one is this. There are those who, as children, have lived in places where disturbing sounds in the night turn lights on and bring people to windows and doors. And there are those who, as children, have lived in places where those sounds engender darkness and silence and invisibility.

When I am back home I walk up the hill from the Foyle. Everything has changed. Everything is different. The dim and tiny terrace homes that had stood for centuries to hold the overcrowded families of the Catholic lower class have disappeared, first swapped for the horrors of sixties and seventies urban rebuilding, places like the highrise Rossville Flats, and then again for the colorful stucco of the homes that today line these streets. Now there are real furnaces and real waterheaters and good plumbing and they do not tilt the way the old ones did. The roofs and windows truly keep out the rain and the North Atlantic wind, and new smaller families fit comfortably in new larger bedrooms.

But none of that is important. Because I tend to see what was there. Between the sky and the paving stones my eyes and ears fill with phantoms. If it is daylight children run down streets laughing as grim-faced soldiers hold automatic rifles. If it is night then the demons run wild, no matter what I try to do. In those nights every shot, every wrong footfall, every yell, every heavy vehicle tyre sound – and all these came with every sunset – were greeted by people shutting lamps off, and drawing curtains, and shushing children, and keeping them out of the range of windows and doors.

And there is nothing more frightening to a child than to see fear in their parents' eyes.

So yesterday I sat at a dinner table, and was introduced to a compatriot, as she called herself, or another expatriate, I wanted to counter, but attempting politeness did not. "From what I hear," she said, "you must be delighted by the breakthroughs this weekend. Now things can really start to be over." She was, I had learned, Protestant, from Hillsborough, the big-treed, high-tea, old "Royal Suburb" south of Belfast, but had lived in West London for the last 20 years. Life in nice places, I thought, must be wonderful, and you cannot really hold it against them. "I suppose," I offered, "it suggests a chance, and a chance is better than nothing." I shifted my speech to sound as fully a Derry Catholic as possible. That sound that a Dublin friend calls "Irritable Vowel Syndrome." "You wouldn't be one of those Sinn Fein hard-liners now would'ya?" she attempted to sound Irish. "Nah," I said, "the other end of the spectrum. John Hume was a friend of my Da's. I've always been on the side of the angels. And like all angels, I'm just waiting for humanity to understand."
________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

voyage

2006-12-12T21:37:00.001-05:00

There's the story of this woman. You've probably heard something about her. She survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. She survived the sinking of the Britannic in 1916. I thought she had survived the sinking of the Olympic whenever the Olympic had sunk, but she didn't because the Olympic never sank, it was cut into bits in 1935 just a couple of years after being modernized and rebuilt – one more victim of the Great Depression. But this woman, who was a nurse and a stewardess, was on the Olympic in 1911 when it collided with a Royal Navy cruiser that left its shaft twisted and two watertight compartments flooded. I don't think that collision killed anyone, but it was still a pretty big deal. Among other things they had to grab the propeller shaft off the still-in-dry-dock, yet-to-be-completed Titanic to fix the Olympic. This delayed the Titanic's launch and thus maiden voyage from March 1912 to April 1912. Not a long time, but long enough, in that cold year, to create the difference between clear winter sea lanes across the North Atlantic and spring lanes filled with floating ice. Maybe the Titanic still would have struck an April iceberg, but if it had done so on its third or fourth crossing the story might have been, perhaps, a touch less compelling, and maybe, just maybe, that damn movie would've been shorter. I swear that Titanic was filmed in real time and when it first came out I was stuck in that theater for four days, and being on a second date I could barely even complain, but maybe, if I let false memory run away with me, I can remember that the food on-board was quite good.

All things touch all things, more or less.

The Titanic, Britannic, and Olympic were all built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, in the world's largest dry-dock, on a peninsula called Queens Island, in what is now called Northern Ireland but, of course, back then was just Ireland, part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a political entity that lasted, quite uncomfortably, from 1801 until 1922. Whether this union was created to insure proper mental health care for the insane British monarch of the time (one theory: the English not trusting the Irish Protestants who made up the Irish Parliament to go along with their plans for a regent) or to punish the Irish for the rebellion of 1798 (theory two), does not really matter. Over the nineteenth century, Scot/Protestant dominated Belfast industrialized, led by the Harland & Wolff Shipyards whose massive cranes ruled the skyline. The rest of Ireland stayed rural and agricultural and the tallest things in the other three big cities, Dublin, Cork, and Derry, remained the towers of the churches.

If you stand today on the edge of the River Lagan, looking across and east, there is still a working waterfront there. Still a dry-dock, still ship repair, or mostly either repainting or fixing offshore oil drilling platforms. It's a long way from the glory of building the world's largest, most luxurious means of transportation, but then, hell, that part of the city is now called, for tourist purposes, "The Titanic Quarter" – which may not be the best advertisement., all things considered. Though I have always wanted to attend a football game featuring the team from Harland & Wolff, The Welders, so that I could lead a chant of "Iceberg Ahead." But I do not go to Irish League games, even first division games where the Welders play, my club having been, hmmm, "dismissed" from the league because it was unsafe for them to play anywhere after Bloody Sunday. So they now play across the border in the League of Ireland, though the "all-Ireland" Setanta Cup had Derry City playing at Belfast's Windsor Park last winter for the first time in over 30 years.

Things can change, if given the chance.

Belfast was once Béal Feirste which means something like "Mouth of the Farset." The River Farset flows into the Lagan someplace north of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge which is way south of those Harland & Wolff shipyards, or where, at least, you'd see them across the river. But you cannot see it. I think it runs underground now through pipes under High Street, and people have told me that Bridge Street is where people once crossed. The kind of victory of man over God's water that the Titanic failed to be.

Violet Constance Jessop died on the Fifth of May in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-One. She was alive, this amazing survivor of Belfast's repetitive contribution to disaster legends, while I was alive. We were on the planet at the same time. I thought about her as I listened to something on the radio about Americans wanting to go back to the moon. How these "do anything" countrymen seemed to have lost both their nerve and their belief in the cooperative citizenship we call government during the Challenger/Reagan era, but now there was a new generation that could not quite understand the thought that you could go to the moon, but would choose not to. Space exploration - real exploration - is a big waste of money, surely, but it is also absolutely magical, and absolutely human. When humans can try something big, something huge, something that will reach toward heaven, I think that they should, I think that they must.

Violet Jessop kept drying off and heading back to the sea. We should all do that.
________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol - photograph: Titanic Releasing the Last Rope, 1912.

Snow on the road heading south

2006-12-10T17:26:00.000-05:00

We were driving south on the A5 and the snow began to fall, at first in huge flakes that seemed made by small children with round-tipped scissors, but as the miles flicked by the flakes got smaller, and fell much more thickly, and mixed with the gray of the sky and the gray-green of the winter valley landscape and our headlamps worked to cut a tunnel through the darkness.

The goal was a Christmas party outside of Omagh, people neither of us had seen in years, and we were coming together not just for ride-sharing but to add confusion to the rumors about what she and I were or were not doing together at this point in our lives. Maybe though, maybe, as we listened to the CDs she had burned just for today's trip, old songs that had us both singing outloud, it was we who were getting confused.

In the US I would drive easily through this kind of storm, but in this evening in this place everything seemed both more distant and more fragile, and when we got to Strabane, the snow and ice piling onto the pavements, we looked at each other and I suddenly steered the car to the right, a crazed move that left oncoming traffic sliding to avoid us, and crossed this point where the Rivers Mourne and Finn marry to become the Foyle, and drove into Lifford. In the back of the ancient courthouse we found an unexpectedly fine and romantic Italian restaurant, I had a carbonara and she a lasagna, and we told each other tales and laughed so hard that we cried.

When we walked back out to the car through the swirling white cloud we had already made the unspoken decision. And we crossed the rivers again, and drove to the one open and obvious area hotel, and found our shelter from the storm.

___________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

silent night

2006-12-07T00:11:00.000-05:00

The woods are full of snow. The wind is pushing the air across the big lake, and there it fills with the moisture of this vast inland sea. Then it dumps that as tiny flakes as soon as it reaches this cold shore.

I have driven through a scary night, 90 miles west from pretending to be an academic, watching cars and trucks slide when the "bridge freezes before roadway" and it has taken over two hours and two hands on the wheel almost the whole way with grim news flowing from NPR and the BBC, but the talk, it keeps me thinking and awake. Music might let me dream.

There are just eight hours before I need to head back the other way. I hate Wednesdays into Thursdays this semester. But first the dog and I run through the drifts that have swirled around the trees. The wind stings, the lights from the roads off in the distance have vanished, the sky is not there at all, just what falls from it as it crosses a narrow path of vision.

And yet, it is so silent. It is so silent right now. We are making the only footprints, and I can hear the crystals as they fall and strike the ever growing tide of frost.

______________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

city life

2006-12-01T01:25:00.000-05:00

We waited out the rain under Lever House surrounded by great art and one really bad trumpet player. It was the kind of summer downpour that proves New York tropical – sudden and violent and overwhelming in the power of both water and electricity – but it slowed the city only slightly, and the reflections multiplied the passions.

We started to walk again, south towards St. Bart's, and she said, "We're getting soaked." I looked down, an umbrella lay abandoned on the sidewalk. "This looks like what we need," I told her. And now she thought both I and the city were magic.

_____________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol - Photographs: Lever House, August 2006 and Lever House Rain Dance copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

place notes

2006-11-30T02:58:00.000-05:00

I was raised to know that this side of the river was home and that safety lay just a couple of miles west across a fragile border, that Belfast was big and dangerous, dark and Scottish, that London breathed fire and clutched at the world like a coal-driven mechanical octopus, that Dublin was the real Vatican, and New York, well, New York was the true Oz with wizards that were honestly all powerful.

When I was a young man making my way in that grand American metropolis I shared a gigantic home from the 1880s with three friends. It sat on a street in the center of Brooklyn in a neighborhood called Midwood. The street dead-ended into the sunken tracks of the Brighton Line. The house had seventeen rooms and we could furnish nine. It had fourteen foot ceilings on the first floor, and twelve foot ceilings on the second and nine foot ceilings on the third, and in the winter we could heat about a total of ten feet of that, mostly over our heads. But if you walked three blocks north to the Newkirk Plaza Station or three blocks south to the Avenue H Station the platforms promised the choice of "Trains to New York" or "Trains to Coney Island" and we knew we were suspended between worlds of wonder.

We actually lived between Foster Avenue and Glenwood Road. When the City of Flatbush laid out the streets here after the Civil War they decided to alphabetize the main roads, beginning at Albemarle Road, and continuing through Beverly, Courtelyou, etc. But just past us the creativity had failed, and Brooklyn inherited Avenues H through Z. It kept us humble.

In Derry the streets held different names. Ferry Quay and Bishop's. St. Patrick's and St. Columb's. Butcher, Shipquay, Duke, Magazine, and Racecourse, but then Derry grew from conflict and occupation, and Brooklyn from hope and optimism.

I would take what was then the D train but is now the Q or maybe the B and ride from Newkirk Plaza to Manhattan and change for the local at West Fourth Street right under Greenwich Village and then go to Twenty-Third Street and walk eastward until I got to the Police Academy which, for entertainment's sake, shared a block and afterschool bars with the School of Visual Arts. When that winter turned to summer and I was exhausted from nine hours of college each day, five days a week, I might let that D train carry me past my house all the way to the ocean, where I might strip to my boxers and fall face first into the Atlantic. Before I'd retrieve my clothes I might stand there for a few minutes and stare off to the east at places left behind.

________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol. photograph - Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City - copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

night

2006-11-25T18:10:00.000-05:00

The clouds have fled from overhead, retreating to a rim around the horizon, and I lie on the cold stones under the waning moon's glow as the meteors leap from the constellation Perseus and race toward the red spot that is Mars. On Mars they have a day thirty-nine minutes longer than ours. That would give me a few more minutes to sleep, or more likely, to not sleep, to be awake when the rest of this island is dreaming, staring into the lonely dark heavens.

The air is filled with the smells of low tide. Salt and fish and the slippery brown seaweed that makes climbing out of the sea so difficult. My ears roll to the sound of the water sloshing back and forth between the Welsh coast and here. This ocean surrounding us is both barrier and opportunity. It depends on how you choose to wake up and see the day.

Behind me I hear the bells of the church in Sandycove striking five. Their call is gentle, a sweet warning. I pull off my clothes. At this hour this can again be the "Gentleman's Bathing Area," no women or togs. I dive into the chill black endless sea without care for the sharp rocks lurking just below the surface. But I have always been luckier than smart, and miss them all, finding nothing save the comfort of a rich embrace.

I stay within this until I can not stop shivering, and then I pull myself up along the old railing, pull my pants and jumper on over wet skin, and begin a long walk home as the sun climbs over the edge of this world.

_________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

fear

2006-11-21T00:04:00.000-05:00

There were always sounds in the night, and my mother could not sleep. I would hear her down below me, moving from the front windows to the back windows, checking the street, checking the alley, looking for lights that were on that should not have been on, listening for footfalls that should not have been there.

Still too young to run in the darkness I slid deeper and deeper into the tiny space at the edge of the attic's eaves, rolled tighter and tighter into the thick wool of blankets, wrapped my arms around my head, and imagined I was in a berth on a sailing ship escaping west to the lands beyond the sea.

At dawn I would come down the stairs, tired and aching and disappointed that I had not reached a distant port. And she would just smile, and ruffle my hair, and put the bowl of thick porridge and sweet butter on the table for me as she drank her coffee.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, her smile grew thinner, and much less easy, but she would never let it fade completely away.

That afternoon at the pub in Kinawley

2006-11-18T16:22:00.000-05:00

[testing out rhythms here...]

The legend held more answers than I thought anyone might possess. In a redolent Gaelic rhythm I heard how I had chosen to push the stakes in the war higher by deciding to delay my call to the police. How I knew the lunch hour would bring the maximum danger and get the world's attention again when Vietnam and the election in the States was already letting this Irish problem slip off the front pages. How I had made three calls and sent the Army and the Constabulary on a wild chase with confusing calls mentioning different locations. The detail was astonishing: even that word, "Boom," along that rural road as we walked from the telephone, and the far too casual laughter that followed, had been recorded, though now it had been assigned to my lips. But it was the melody that played most eloquently. In this oral tradition that had reached from Belfast back to Derry and then out into hills and villages, and had been repeated in these whispered sagas over more than thirty years, I had not just been instigator and star, but my crimes and the British desperation to catch me had lead the loyal Provo cadres of Derry to arrange a run south, from where I had periodically snuck back in to lead other attacks. I heard myself become a turn-of-the-seventeenth-century The O'Neill keeping the English east of Lough Neagh in ancient and Catholic Ulster, hitting and running in the lost forests; a 1798 Wolfe Tone mixing romantic poetry and rebellion; a 1916 The O'Rahilly rallying the volunteers in the Post Office as O'Connell Street burned under British naval artillery; a 1921 Michael Collins provoking the British into self destructive responses at every turn.

The man who sang this saga to me this had been born into the rebellion during the Great War in an Ireland still ruled directly from London and reigned over by an English King. He punctuated the tale with a chorus describing his earliest memories – the arrest of his father by the Black and Tans and how he returned beaten and tortured and never the same again, the canons rumbling down the streets behind Army trucks, the shock in the mouths of the adults when they found themselves on the wrong side of the partition, the attacks of the IRA in the twenties, and again in the fifties, the frustrating glory of the 1949 declaration of The Republic – "Poblacht na hÉireann," the phrase spilled like a tenor aria even as he told of the RUC busting into the pub to silence the celebration. He smelled of slightly fruity pipe tobacco, a lifetime of Guinness, and the old-fashioned liniments of persistent arthritis. He drank his pints in thick, short bursts and went to the loo between every pint. He stopped at one point to assure me that "Guinness is life, Guinness is the best for what may ail ya," but that whisky would kill. "Whisky and sometimes rebellion," he whispered, and laughed. His face was red and his eyes cloudy but blue. I guessed I was chalk white with fear. Who knew these stories? Who believed them? How dangerous was this journey back? "You'd be quieter than I expected," this seanachaidh told me. "I think I might be less of everything than you expected," I said in desperation.

Solution

2006-11-14T22:42:00.000-05:00

David's father kicked the shit out of him at least once a week from when he was five or maybe six or, fuck, maybe three, until he was fifteen, until we were fifteen. Usually Friday or Saturday night. Usually late. Or very late. When the bars closed he would come home and something, maybe a misplaced toy at the beginning or a bike left out or a dish not washed or a jacket not hung up or finally the car not parked exactly right or parked with too many miles or, well, in the end you know it does not matter, it has nothing to do with whatever it is about at the moment, and he would climb the stairs and burst into David's room. If David was lucky just he would come only with his hands or maybe his belt wrapped around a fist, if David was not lucky then the belt would be loose with the buckle flying or there might be a hurling stick or a baseball bat.

Most Sundays I'd get high with David sitting watching the water flow by, the slow gestures of the tides as they move around the world, the call of hunting seabirds, the way the wind might shatter the surface of this arm of the ocean, and he would be black and blue, and he would have a hard time moving, and he would talk about revenge – starting with specific ideas that might melt into generalities and then fall into pointless anger which I'd watch float into the sky on our exhaled smoke.

That was not saving David though. It was poisoning me, keeping me angry about too many things that had now receded into the past. Stuff I might otherwise have put away.

And so I was ready, probably more ready than he might have ever gotten, when the plot was suggested as we watched a scratchy print of Cagney singing in Yankee Doodle Dandy at David's house late on a February Saturday night. And when David's father stumbled in and saw in the movie his target, "fucking queers!" he yelled and went after my friend. I clocked him from behind with his own hurling stick. And somehow saw myself defeating two demons for the price of one.

The concussion put him in the hospital for four days. I spent two weeks in a juvenile lock-up where I did heroin for the very first time, until David's mother made it clear that no one would be pursuing legal action.

Neither of us ever got hit by a father again.

_____________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

Friends and Family

2006-11-10T18:07:00.000-05:00

I push my way throw the captain's office door, like I'm a cop on TV or something and tell him and the lieutenant that I don't want to do this, but before I say it I already know that won't matter, so I say it, they look at me, I look at them, and I turn and walk back out and go upstairs to the strange little third floor room that is our locker room and many other things and I bang on the steel doors for a minute and then groan and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the Midtown skyline at sunset – it is stunningly beautiful from here – glowing golden just to the north, across the East River. It is the last moment of the day. I chain smoke three Camels and the final one glows against the dark night and the luminous mosaic of the world's greatest city.

"This is just a gun case," I say to myself. "I've done them before." I'm trying to sound like I know more than I do, like I've done more than I have. Convince myself first, I figure. I stick a fourth cigarette in my mouth and sit cross-legged on the table looking at the pictures in the thick file they've given me. Of course I can drop into this group. Of course. I close the file. I put it on the shelf in my locker. I take the nine off my belt and drop it on the shelf too. I grab the old five-shot .38 and wrap the holster onto my ankle. And then I drive home.

This will end badly. Yes it will. Not just because this is political. It matters to people. It's not just money involved. I know that. Everything else I've done this year is really just business. And this is more. But that's just part. And so is the fact that, well, I could just – possibly – know someone involved. The big part is the ambivalence. Mine. And the danger that in one critical second the wrong emotion will surface. I may be young, I may be an idiot rookie in way deep over his head in these deep cover jobs, but I know all this. The captain knows this too. The lieutenant knows too. Everyone does. But I know it more. And they know that I know it more, but they are using me anyway – because it makes the most sense.

For the next three months this will play out. I will even fly to London and take a ferry to Dublin and fly back to New York from there with a fake passport and a flimsy visa and back story I barely need to rehearse. Covering the bases. I will drink in the last pathetic remnants of Hells Kitchen bars. I will commit a few crimes, do some good drugs, sleep on roach-covered floors, and day by day get closer to all those guns – all reported stolen by the Metro-Dade Police Department as expected – that are aimed at people I have been taught are my enemies.

This will end badly. It will end in the kind of recurring nightmare I know I need no more of. Already. As young as I am. But it is the way things work. I am the person for the job. Of course.

Carolyn is watching LA Law when I get home to the little house on City Island. "You're early," she says. "Yeah," I grab a beer from the refrigerator, drop onto the couch next to her, kiss her a touch too deeply. "Yeah, nothing going on tonight."
__________________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

A History of the Bogside

2006-11-08T15:19:00.000-05:00

Too many pints and too much time in this dark corner and the rain washing down the windows by the front and echoed even more darkly in the mirrors behind me and I have not truly slept more than three hours of the seventy-two since I made it back home.

"The area that is now known as the Bogside was originally underwater, as the Foyle flowed around the hill of Doire, of the oak grove," said the tattered old book hidden in the bottom corner of the classroom shelf. That stream on the western side of the island, it said, came to be called, "Mary Blue’s Burn. It flowed along the line of Rossville Street to the west of the Lecky Road and out into the Foyle near the bottom of Bishop Street. The burn was crossed by three causeways – probably built by monks – and these followed the lines of William Street, the Bog Road, and Stanley’s Walk."

As I sit at the foot of William Street today it is not hard to see those ancient Christians, disciples of St. Patrick himself, moving along the muddy highground in their rough cloth hooded gúna. The natives came here for fresh water and fish and the wild plants that flavored their food and drink and to meet the spirits of their world. Later they came to fight the invaders and later still to live at the feet of the "British" for centuries as they squeezed out a living making first whisky and cloth, then shirts and ships and phonographs. Now my friends make hard drives, unless they have escaped elsewhere.

I have come back on one of those annual pilgrimages of redemption. Though it all looks different in fact – the houses are new, the Rossville Flats are gone, there is color here and no barbed wire – when I walk the streets I still see the old outlines rising up from the footwalks and hear the footsteps of my friends, and the thunder of the fighters, and the shouts of frightened parents.

I have seen many people over the past three days, though I have not seen her. She is now across the river, past "The Waterside," in some pleasant new estate I am sure, with her husband and her four children, or however many still live at home. She sent me an email saying, "this time, will you see me?" And all I could answer was, "I will try."

"Throughout the nineteenth century the Bogside retained a rural feel with the type of housing and lifestyle of the inhabitants," that book had told me long ago, when I would sneak it from its spot and read that rather than focusing on maths. "Many houses were inhabited by unskilled labourers from the mountain districts of Donegal who subsidised their income by maintaining small potato patches and keeping pigs and feeding them with waste from Abbey Street distillery. Even the Catholic skilled tradesmen who earned quite superior wages could live nowhere other than the Bogside, and often they too rented out potato patches to supplement their income."

Last night I ate bangers and mash with Cillian and his family. It was served with the kind of thick potato soup that would warm me up on nights such as this, and the smells of the kitchen were overpoweringly familiar. Cillian caught me up with where everyone has gone, as he does year after year while his wife tried to convince me to return and offered match-making support.

"You need a woman from here," she told me. "One who knows where ya come from." "American women know where I come from," I said. "Nah," she was absolute. "They think you are Irish and some happy leprechaun or some such thing. They do not know a thing about Derry."

The book had not gone much past partition. "In 1921 Derry nationalists found themselves opposing Derry’s inclusion in Northern Ireland. With the northern parliament assembling in June Derry’s nationalists turned south for support but the signing of the Anglo Irish Treaty in December was greeted with dismay in the city." That stopping point was good enough. The rest of the story was personal.

I look into the mirror. The grip of the silver on the back of the glass has weakened. It makes everything look much further away. I turn back, I do not like looking in mirrors. Derry has always been the victim, I think. It is always haunted by what might have been. It is a place of dreams, but dreams unfulfilled.

Cillian and Sean and Brendan push through the door, shaking water off their heads. "He's blasted already mates," Sean announces, pointing in my direction. "Called Kate yet?" Cillian asks. "Not yet," I mumble. "Fuckin' coward," Brendan says. "Always have been," I say, realizing the reason for my exile, "always have been."
_____________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

dreamland

2006-11-03T01:26:00.000-05:00

Great Uncle Sean had lived in Brooklyn. Or was it Great Great Uncle Sean? Or Great Great Great? It was hard to know. He had sailed to America as a boy, on board the magnificent Cunard liner Campania, on a speed-record setting, Blue Riband-winning, run to New York in 1893 or 1894. The story included all of the detail. The sunshine of the day of departure. The looming shadow of the massive Cathedral of Saint Colman above the harbor. The steam ferry carrying him and hundreds of others from the quays out to the waiting ship. Five days, nine hours, twenty-nine minutes from Queenstown. The first twin-screw steamer. His steerage bunk back above the thundering engines. A glass like August pond stretching from this Emerald Isle to Liberty's outstretched arms, untouched on this journey by the wild tropical storms that bedeviled so many crossings.

I could almost sing the tale. The telling had its own specific melody that flowed around the smells of thick beer and pipe smoke and peat fires and sweat held in woolen jumpers. Sean arrived at a gigantic Hudson River pier and followed cousins across the Brooklyn Bridge and out to a place called Flatbush. I could not imagine that. There were two pictures in a family photo album kept under a table in the front room. One showed two houses in an empty field. The other showed huge crowds moving toward a place where baseball was played. I could not connect them into a scene I could understand, so I simply saw old gangster films but with horses instead of cars. When he grew older he became a policeman. That was crucial. He made it in America. He worked in a towered police building in Brooklyn. He had a badge. He had a gun. He was a person with power.

We knew no one with power, except for the priests and the bishop. We knew no one who had been across the ocean. But we had objects that had returned by post over the generations and over the years. There were mugs with the New York skyline etched into the glass. There were heavy brass weights shaped as the symbols of the 1939 World's Fair. There were those photos in the album and a pen with a pocket clip that looked like the Empire State Building. And I went to sleep each night under a blanket whose label read "Macy's Herald Square" with a red star. Thus, dreams were born.
______________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

going?

2006-10-21T23:52:00.000-04:00

I didn't get there until after one. Not that I'd been doing anything. I hadn't. I'd gotten home around six and after five days of barely sleeping two hours a night I'd passed out on the floor in front of the TV - Seinfeld when I dropped off, edited-for-basic-cable Sex in the City when I awoke. When I first woke up I switched to some Premiership rerun, slugged through three glasses of ice water and two of small-batch bourbons, took a shower sometime in there, sat naked watching a 1960s French film on a three-digit cable channel, but it proved not nearly as nudity and sex filled as I'd remembered from when I saw it at nineteen. So I put clothes back on, and went out.

The hallway was empty. The stairs were empty. There was this brief fantasy that I'd meet Jessica somehow in the lobby, and then I thought of stopping on the second floor and banging on her door, but I didn't do that and she was not there. I walked out of the building and the block was silent with just an edge of moisture letting the street shine, and my shoes made soft rubber sucking sounds with each step on the sidewalk.

I walked toward the place called only "32" that was two blocks over and four down and thought about possibilities. I could take that not-quite-good-enough offer. I could just leave and test survival skills. I could stay and put up with it and sit around imagining that the dream job would arrive. I even thought about changing behaviors, switching the little things in hopes big things might change, but knowing myself I knew that seemed very unlikely.

32 was dark and mostly lit in blue-greens and I sat at the end of the bar surrounded by too many people, all talking and being and connecting, and I got devastatingly drunk.

Halfway through a woman approached, sat down, touched me on the arm, asked good questions, but I blew her off. I wasn't even pleasant. The bartender slammed another drink down in front of me and said, "She's really nice, she's pretty damn good looking, she was probably interested, and you're a fucking idiot."

Two hours later he kicked me out after last call. "You're not gonna live long this way," he yelled into the empty street. But I couldn't be sure enough that he was right.

can I stay?

2006-10-19T22:50:00.000-04:00

If I don't go home now, where to go? I can drift through the mall til nine or, hanging out by the theater, til maybe eleven or even midnight. It is too cold for the park, too cold for the dugouts at the Little League field, too cold even for the elevator lobby in the parking garage. But even midnight is not late enough. Sometimes, but sometimes not. He might be there now, and very angry. He might be out at McKiernan's but if he is he will come home and then. Yeah. Then he'll still be angry and he'll be very drunk, much more than he is right now. Now, if he's there, he'll pull his punches, more or less. A six-pack later he won't. It's a gamble.

But to be gone all night requires conspirators in this season. And that is hard. Much harder than it should be. Why can't I just sleep on your floor and have you not say anything? No lectures, no calls to school, no calls to home. Why can't you just let me sleep on your floor? I won't cost you anything except maybe the water in the flush of a toilet. My body produces heat, I will not up your oil bill. I do not need to eat, there's breakfast at school in the morning or I'll take a coffee cake or two from the grocery. I do that lots of mornings. Pay when I can. If not, not. They don't chase me.

No, well, yeah, I understand. I'm on my way. Yeah, I'll be fine. No sweat.

__________________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol

small worlds

2006-10-16T23:49:00.000-04:00

The old black Humber Hawk would wake all of us with its cough as it tried to start in the hour before dawn on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was the only car on the street. It was the only car for many streets back then and if any of us lads had ever been in an automobile it was either this one or maybe, if you'd been caught, an RUC car.

Aedan's grandfather worked for the Bishop. He went to Belfast on those mornings for the church and came back late in the evenings. We had no idea what he might have been doing there. Belfast was impossibly far away. Only Aedan had been there and he talked about how big it was and how the giant cranes towered over the shipyards. "They built the Titanic there," he told us, "I saw where. It was the biggest ship ever but it hit an iceberg and sank and everyone died." This was an amazing story. We argued about when it might have happened. "Long back." "Very long?" "Before the war." "In the war the Germans sank a lot of boats with torpedoes ." We knew this. There were uncles and grandfathers lost on those Royal Merchant Ships, and even American ones. But before? "Maybe 1938 or like that," Aedan said. This seemed possible. An iceberg! Eventually someone would have to ask an adult.

Seamus had been to Dublin. Out of the twenty of us that ran these streets he was the only one. He had an uncle there. He told us it was "biggest city in the world except for London and New York." Rian challenged that. "Paris is bigger, and Tokyo." But that did not seem possible. We had never seen a French person, how many could there be? And we only knew people from Asia from American war movies, we were hardly sure that Tokyo was more real than Oz or Narnia.

Thomas and I and others had been in Donegal. Thomas and I had been all the way to the sea where we could look west to that New World and all that it promised. Trevor had spent a week somewhere near Coleraine when a rich cousin had come from Chicago. They had taken him to see the Giant's Causeway on a bus. He had told us that so long ago, so, so long back before Wolfe Tone even, when people were much bigger, you could walk to Scotland on those stones in the ocean. "Is that how the Proddies got over here?" Kelvin asked. "No you gobshite," Thomas said, "They came on boats and cut off their hands and threw them here. That's why they've got that on their flag." Thomas was very smart. We knew that. So somehow this was accepted without argument.

We would tell these stories over and over. Long into the night. Even that young. Though when we heard the old black Humber Hawk rumbling over the pavers, and would spot its wavering headlamps, we would know it was time to head toward our beds.

Seven minutes along the Quayside

2006-10-13T18:01:00.000-04:00

I had been showing off the city and so we had started at The Long Hall which is as deeply real, perhaps as deeply Dublin as you'll get in those places just south of the Liffey and then gone to St. Patrick's Cathedral because, you know you have to, though I had told her not to light the votive there because "it is not really a Catholic Church," a comment that drew one of those, "Jesus, get over it" looks, in this case richly deserved, and then walked past Christ Church but did not go in because if you've seen one ancient cathedral seized by Henry the Eighth you've seen them all, and then down the hill, stopping at The Brazen Head for pints and stew. "Yes," I told her, "it is for tourists, but amazing nonetheless." We sat outside, smoking heavily from her packs of duty-free Camels. In this spot I always try to conjure the Dublin of eight-hundred years before. Cathedral construction up there, the quays busy already with the flow of invading Normans and their Saxon subjects. The thick ales of those days being poured right here in this place. Sometimes it is impossible to see, sometimes I can smell it and hear it. Today, with the mist floating through the air the light could bounce a million ways, and if you looked just right...

Thirty or so Euros lighter we walked out onto Merchants Quay. The river and sky were matching grays. The Four Courts loomed across the water. She said, "There might be too much history here for your own good." I shrugged, lit another cigarette. She said, "You seem a little depressed, and maybe a little like you like being depressed." I shrugged again, walked a few more paces, staring at my shoes. "History yes," I told her, "but not really my history. Depressed? Not really, just displaced." She put her hand on my arm, but gently. "So what now?" She put the question to me in a whisper that let me choose not to hear.

Through Wood Quay and Essex Quay we shared that American kind of small talk. I pointed out those strange amphibious tourist craft in the river, pointed up Parliament Street toward City Hall and the Castle, handed out bits of guidebook trivia. We were by Temple Bar before she broke that. "So, we're not going to talk about this?" "Perhaps not." My throat was scorched from chain-smoking. My eyes were tired. She had arrived last night and we had gone out and gotten hammered and come back and shagged for hours without talking. Now I thought that I needed to tell her that I was happy that she was here but I did not want her to stay. I was sure that she needed to tell me that she was not staying, and had come, in one way or the other, to say goodbye.

But we were good at silence. And so we turned south from the river, away from the Ha'penny and wandered into a touristy place with people playing music too loudly. We sat in the smoking courtyard near enough to the pipes and guitar that there was no chance to hear each other's voices, and we drank our pints as the gray sky above turned black.

_______________________________
Copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

into the woods

2006-10-11T21:41:00.000-04:00

The dog runs ahead of me as the moonlight sprays down through the canopy of trees, theatrical lighting for this long past midnight walk in the woods that stretch from my back door and twist between the housing estates, the schools, and the football ground.

Sleep never comes easy. No, I misspeak. Sleep never comes easy in the dark. I can sleep anywhere if the sun is resting on me. Daylight is safety. Daylight washes out the ghosts.

Nights are for fighting. Nights are for war. Nights are for being ready to run. Even though that is all so very long ago. In the night the theatre is beyond my control. The actors push in from stage left and stage right. They flare in the footlights. They rip across the proscenium of my dreams and force me to climb for the exit of awakeness.

The dog runs ahead of me as the moonlight sprays down through the canopy of trees. She had not wanted to get up but once outside the deeper smells of this moonlit forest pull her along. And I follow behind, trading floodlight for shadow and back as I go. "When I move through the darkness I have more power." I say this over and over until we have reached the playfields. Now the moon is there in full. Now the pressure releases. Just enough. The dog circles, once, twice, three times. We lie down together in the damp grass, this old dog and I, and our breathing slows. And for a few minutes, we sleep.

______________________________________
Copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
photograph from desultorybutterfly

trinity

2006-10-10T08:44:00.000-04:00

one

In this night as the storms rage above and below and I climb the boxes and then the shelf in the closet and slip through the hatch into the attic, my own passage through the wardrobe I find myself believing, and push the blankets and pillow I have dragged up as far into the eaves as I can fit – I could not have been more than seven and so I needed very, very little space – then I know that the fear from downstairs might begin to soften.

two

Wrapped in this nest I absorb the rhythm of the wind-driven rain on slate roof shingles so ancient they have been thinned visibly by centuries of Atlantic precipitation. The air is sharp and cold but inside the blankets my body warms and relaxes. In the full-dark I fumble for my secret box, a tin that once held chocolates brought by a cousin from London but now holds votives secreted from the cathedral, matches from the pub, and all of the postcards received from cousin Michael in America. With blind dexterity born of too much experience I set out the candles, and strike the fire.

three

The trinity of flames create more shadow than light but I hold the postcards. There is New York, and the dome of the Capitol in Washington, and a fold-out set from Cape Kennedy, a boat on the Mississippi by New Orleans, even the Astrodome. But the one I always hold is just from a hotel in a place called "Arizona." The building is so new. Palm trees stand in front. The cars are like spaceships to a lad who knows no one who even owns one of the tiny boring cars people have here. And the sky. Oh the sky. It is bigger than any I have seen and a kind of blue I have never imagined.

ar maidin

That postcard is in my hand as I fall asleep. It is still clutched there when the first ray of dawn cuts under deep gray clouds and throws itself through the dusty attic window and for just one moment makes my world absolutely my own.

________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
image from James Lileks amazing Motel Postcard website

wind out of the south

2006-10-08T19:15:00.000-04:00

When we made love the crucifix around my neck would collide with the one she wore, and occasionally they'd entangle, the blunt silver abstraction of mine and the delicate gold beauty of hers. If it was sin it was surely a minor thing compared to the sense of magnificent wonder as we learned from each other with every exploration. At seventeen we lay between thin blankets on chill damp sand overlooking the ocean halfway between Block Island's Old Harbor and the North Light. I wrapped myself around the gentle thinness of her body, giving whatever warmth I possessed to her.

She would be in such deep trouble when we got back. This was already up to a four day run during the school year and her father was going to be insane even if he did not suspect that she was with me, which, certainly, he would. I wouldn't be in trouble unless Renny's father came back early from Chicago and went looking for his boat. The boat I was supposed to be re-doing the teak decks on. But he wouldn't come home early. He was in Chicago playing concerts. And at school and home I was never missed. In fact, it was getting suspended for a week for fighting on Friday that had put this trip in motion, along with a wind told me the last of the summer days were in our hands right now, Renny himself scoring a huge amount of amazing pot, and Meghan saying, "What the fuck, let's just go." So instead of scraping the deck we used the "friends of the cashier at the A&P discount" to stock the galley, charged a full tank of gas to Renny's dad's account, and headed out into the Sound with an eight knot wind out of the south pushing us across the rolling blue waters.

Why was she here? It was a question that played and replayed in my thoughts whenever we were together though one I never asked out loud. I knew all she risked to be with me. She had the right kind of family and a beautiful house and she usually did great in school. She could have been home in that extraordinary bedroom or out with a boy who could buy her anything. She could have been living a life her father approved of, and that would certainly have made things easier.

But here she was in my arms, eighty miles from that safe life, a runaway hanging out with the crazy new retard in town and his drugged out buddy. Here she was playing along the roughest edges of adolescence. Was she slumming? Enticed by the exotic accent or the rumors of a violent past? Probably yes. Probably all three. Certainly at first, and perhaps still. Never in my entire life have I been able to figure out why people would stay. I surely could not understand it at that age.

One of my fingers twisted in the chain around her neck. Off the beach the mast light flickered in the dark echoed by the burning end of Renny's joint. Under the blanket she rolled back into me, pressing all of her skin against all of mine. We lay there and both looked upward. A crack in the clouds was a dark river that tiny stars swam smoothly across. Just to the east an orange moon bathed in a wide pool. When I whispered that to her she started to tell me that it was the clouds that were moving, but then stopped, and reached back with one hand to stroke my hair. After a long minute she said, "I love to listen to you think." And that was the very best thing anyone had yet said to me.
________________________________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol (this needed some re-writing)
photograph of Block Island copyright Mindy McNaugher

that afternoon

2006-10-05T22:07:00.000-04:00

School shoes had leather soles and leather heels back then that clattered on the pavers as we ran from school toward the river and the quayside where we could spit and throw stones and smoke fags nicked from our fathers' jacket pockets and practice cursing and talking about the girls. The only other shoes we owned were our football boots and those were for the other afternoons when we would stick with childhood up on the hill.

Then the barbed wire came. And the Paras. And the barricades. And practice was over.

______________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
photograph from the Eamon Melaugh archive at CAIN - copyright the photographer

prayer

2006-10-03T16:11:00.000-04:00

The priest thinks he's helping. "This is a terrible thing to experience," he says, sweat spreading across his upper lip. "Yeah father," I mumble. "But you can take comfort in the fact that," I shake my head violently, "Stop," I say cutting him off, then jam the crucifix that hangs around my neck back between my front teeth. The vertical part of the cross is a hollow tube and when I exhale it whistles. He's silent, looking down. I'm silent, staring blankly at the wall and a poster that might describe all that can go wrong with the male uro-genital system.

Sergeant Jackson evolves through the blue institutional curtain and whispers something in the priest's ear. I hear, "the whales are floating away," though that would seem unlikely. As he speaks I reach up and start turning that big spotlight thing on and off, a slow strobe that turns the two of them into a silent movie scene. I imagine a title card will come up, "Both are very concerned," and the piano player will hit a black key chord. The Sergeant turns, looks at me strangely, and slides back out. The priest gets up from the white plastic chair and moves toward me. I could get up and move away from him but I just feel too tired right now. So I let my eyes drop and the fact that my boxers are stained in red and pink registers but doesn't immediately connect.

"You need to know that you did all you could," I am told, "and look for God to bring you peace." I don't respond. He touches my shoulder. I flinch. He keeps his hand there. I try unsuccessfully to shrink below it. "Would you like me to pray with you?" I say nothing, but now, amidst the red on the last piece of clothing I wear I see a tiny fleck of gray, and I know.

That tiny fleck is part of Billy's brain. I don't know how it got there. Well maybe it fell off the blood soaked shirt or vest when I took one or the other off. Peeled them off actually. It's amazing how blood, even the amount of blood that pours from a gunshot shattered skull, coagulates. How it starts to glue everything together, the vest to my body, the shirt to the vest, the pants to my boxers, the boxers to the hair on my legs, the fragments of gray matter to everything, and the image to my brain.

They will come and give me some very strong drug in a few minutes. They will bring me scrubs to wear home. They might even be pouring peroxide over my uniform now so I will not need to see all those bloodstains. I will throw this underwear away as soon as the scrubs arrive. I will stand naked by that sink and scrub myself with Phisoderm. But nothing will get this clean. Not the meds, not the prayers, not the detergents.

If we had gotten there thirty seconds earlier, well, either we would have saved things or one of us would have been shot instead. There is no way to know. Instead, in that split second, we saw the guy step out behind Billy. We saw his head explode. Denny dropped the guy with three shots and I, coming the long way from the driver's side, got to Billy just after both bodies hit the sidewalk. I guess I tried to put his head back together. I sat there on the sidewalk cradling him and, with the free hand, trying to find pieces of skull I could put back. It occupied my time as he bled out and the ambulance raced to the scene.

A doctor has come in, no, maybe a psychiatrist. He hands me three pills and one of those tiny cups of water. I swallow the pills. The priest pats my shoulder, then he vanishes. There aren't any words. I hear the scratching as the psychiatrist writes something down. He leaves too. The curtain swings closed. And then I am alone.

___________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol

Stars in the Sky

2006-10-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

I do believe that the Irish sky is clearest over Dublin in the middle of the night but over Derry it is most often clear in the late of the afternoon, when the fading sunlight turns golden and even the darkest stones and deepest stains are richly illuminated. Neither of these beliefs are necessarily true. But when I walk home from the local pub, usually circling the Sandymount Green, and I look upward at the heavens that our eternal God spun out from his creation, I see the millions of lights in the unending blackness. And when I remember the deepest memories of my childhood the sun is shining its warmth on post-school evenings and football games and races up the hills, but the night is huddled beneath a starless and moonless dome.

There is the obvious argument that slouching back toward my house in Dublin on nights of rain I do not look up and that my childhood memories are carved by tools sharper than cloud patterns over the North Atlantic, but beliefs are beliefs, and I know what I know.

_____________________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol

Psychiatry

2006-09-30T11:48:00.000-04:00

Sean and I had nothing in common. "We weren't friends," I had said when I first sat down here. I had to say that. It wasn't just true. It was important to say that it did not really matter that much.

Sean had grown up always wanting to be a cop, dreaming of being a cop, and more than that, assuming a kind of success as a cop. His grandfather had been a captain; his father was Chief of Bronx Detectives. It was the family business. I assumed purer motives for myself, though, sure, this was the best paying job I could possibly find. Other guys became cops for reasons similar or different, but the result was the same.

Once you are a cop you are different from everyone else. In Sean's world this was good. In his family, among his friends, being a cop made him larger than life, a hero. In my world it worked very differently. Not that I... well, I think I am a good cop. I think I am doing good things. I had even just said this, "I'm a good cop, I like my job, I mean, I don't like trying to stick some guy's brains back into his skull on a rainy sidewalk, but…" He had just stared back at this. I didn't tell him that in my world it worked differently.

Now I say what honestly comes into my head: "Really doc," I say, "if anything's wrong it's what this schedule does to me. I miss my friends, I miss hanging out on Saturday nights. I miss being home with my wife."

"And that's frustrating?" I think that is right out his "how to interview" book.

"Of course it's frustrating." Worse, I want to add. Worse. It's totally isolating. I think about the last time I got high with my friends. One had his new girlfriend with him. When she found out she was getting high with a cop she freaked out. I spent the rest of the night assuring her I wasn't undercover. And whenever I meet new friends of Carolyn's, well, it's always strange. Now, well now everyone in the city's seen my picture. Everyone thinks they know something about me. They react with nervous pity and I don't like that at all. But I don't add any of this. I catch myself. If I don't I'll be stick in this psychiatrist's office forever.

"But that's just the bad stuff, and it ain't much. I love this job. Every job's got bad stuff."

"Yes," he says. "Yeah," I breathe.

"Isn't one of the bad things that you guys can't cut yourselves any slack?" I'm not sure what that means, and he realizes that, so he goes on.

"OK, your schedule's weird, so you're mostly, your world is mostly other cops. But then when something happens, especially when something bad happens, you're always putting the blame on the guy it happened to." I actually look him in the eye. "That seems like a lot of pressure."

"I don't know," I answer, and this is the truth. There's some time when nothing is said.

"You should think about that," he says, "and you know, if you want to come back, just call, the department's picking up the tab."

"I might do that," but we both know I won't.

"If you do come back, maybe we could talk some about other stuff that's happened to you. There's some things here," he flicks his hand, indicating the files on his desk, "that I might be able to work on with you."

I shrug.

"But you're ok." It's either a question or an answer. Not being sure I just say, "yeah, doc, really."

"Take a few more days," he scribbles on a pad and hands the note that gives me a week off. I look at it, the idea of a long day of sex with Carolyn flickers across my consciousness, then that drips away. "Thanks," I say. I start to leave.

"Two last things," he says. I stop.

"First, I'm going to guess that you're right. That you are a pretty good cop. And you like the job, you're telling the truth about that too." There's nothing to say to this.

"Second, you also know that what you said at the beginning doesn't matter."

"What?"

"It doesn't matter that you weren't friends." I look at him. He looks at me.

I walk out of the office. I get into the elevator. I don't want other people to be in there but other people are in there. Maybe six. All women. All Manhattan-dressed New York women. The kind of women who would never, ever, be in my precinct. Who can probably not imagine the places that I work. If they even see me I am probably mistaken for a delivery guy. If they saw the gun they'd be terrified. I think, I could let them see the gun. But I don't. I don't do anything. I just stand there staring at my smeared reflection in the aluminum doors until they open on the lobby.
__________________________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol

The Sea

2006-09-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

Sitting on the beach at Enniscrone, a few of us on towels, most just on the chill, damp sand, but the fire and his words cut through the cool of the evening and the exhaustion of our day at the sea. They had taken us all here, so far away, to get us out of the city for two nights, into the quiet. "They need quiet and they need to hear other sounds," Thomas and I had heard Father Timothy say and maybe it was a measure of our world back then that we had not the foggiest idea of what he meant.

But we went. Twenty-three of us jammed into four cars with the Priest and three fathers, leaving when it was still full dark, so dark that we did not see the day begin until we were far into the Donegal hills. And we came to the beach, I had not seen the beach since I was a much smaller one. And the sea - oh the sea - spreading out forever and beyond even that with the sun streaking across distant waves.

And now, that night, he told us stories of America. He had played, of course, for the Rovers down in Dublin, and that made him famous enough and made me the envy of many. But now he told us of his year in the States. Of the summer that the team went to Boston to be the "Boston Rovers" and play in New York and Detroit, in Los Angeles and Chicago and even Texas. These were all the most magical places we could conjure, and he described them all so well that we kept looking out across the dark and expecting to see the towers of Manhattan lighting the farthest horizon.

Then, as we slid toward sleep, he told us how the sea was different in America. "You see how the sea rolls in here," and we all nodded as the sparks flicked off the logs and raced toward heaven. "Well that ocean begins in America. The waves roll out from the shore, heading this way." Nothing could possibly have meant more to us at that moment, and that night, we did finally dream different dreams.

Today I stood on this western shore of the Atlantic. I heard the sound, and smelled the salt and looked deep into the distance before I would look at the point where this primal source meets the land. For I am still surprised - yes - always suprised that the waves here do not move as I have always seen them when I close my eyes.

____________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
photo of Enniscrone from the Dublin University Surfing and BodyBoarding Club

"Central, we're on Two-Two-Seven and White Plains Road..."

2006-09-21T22:29:00.000-04:00

Someone yells "he's there" and you start the chase. On dark wet pavement through the thickest July-night air you run down the block, through the alley, climb the rusty, shaky fire escape, there he is, just above, maybe two floors. Of course he's in sweats and Nikes and you're wearing a fifteen pound gunbelt and a bulletproof vest that's choking your chest, and the black Adidas you're wearing are good, sure, but no match really. You're gasping for breath and shouting into the radio asking for help even though you're not even sure what the address is and he gets to the roof and when you get to the roof he's gone. He might be running down the stairs inside but you don't see him or he may have jumped to that roof and be on those stairs but your partner hasn't even caught up with you yet so you can't search two stairwells. Most likely he's vanished into any of the apartments in the five floors below and he's hiding under a bed or he went out and down a different fire escape or the same one even or he's catching his own breath on a couch watching Channel 11 with a quart of Miller High Life.

"We're on the block," you hear the radio say, "Where are you? What are you looking for?" "Male, Black," you answer, sweat pouring down inside the vest, your breathing coming in deep gulps, "Maybe six-one, maybe two hundred, black sweats, black hoodie, white Nikes, Jordans I think." "What'd he do?" the radio asks. And you realize you have no fucking idea.

Internal Affairs

2006-09-20T10:02:00.000-04:00

He has the "cop stare" down, but doesn't even understand how ridiculous that is. I could turn that on too. He won't scare me with cheap tricks. "Where were you, patrolman?" he asks, using the antique term of rank to try and gain some advantage. "Police Officer," I say. "Huh?" he responds, and I know I've already won. "I think we're called 'Police Officers.' I don't think the term Patrolman's actually been used since the sixties." He stares at me across the small gray table, "You think you're funny."

"Sometimes."

"This is not a joke," he states, his stare dwindling, I rock my chair back on the rear legs, studied insolence. "Surely not, but I was in the backyard, I wasn't there."

"Everybody says they were in the back yard." I laugh. He doesn't like that at all. "Yeah," I say, "there was a crowd back there." "Who?" he asks. "Who?" I say. "Who was there?" I press my luck. I grab the folder in front of him and in one movement spin it toward me and open it, scanning his notes. He grabs it back, violently. "I guess I don't really remember, you know," I'm casual, "we were just on back up, then we left."

I notice how old he is, like my dad maybe. I expect him to say "You kids got no respect these days," but realize that's from a movie or a Dragnet episode. He's tired. This is crap. I mean, of course it's serious, but I haven't done anything wrong. Someone has, but it isn't me, and I have better things to do right now than rat on people. I don't like the guys involved at all and if they can prove it, more power to them: fuck 'em, fire them, send them to Sing Sing; but it isn't gonna happen through me.

"How does a young guy like you end up with this attitude?" he asks, but he's not angry, he's resigned. I feel, well, yeah. "It seems to come with the job," I mumble. He waves me out.

Brandon's already sitting in the lobby. "Lunchtime?" "Yup," I say, "Chinatown?" "Very good," he says. The dead kid in the apartment on East 221^st Street all but forgotten.

Front Street near Peck's Slip

2006-09-15T23:43:00.000-04:00

We parked, as usual, by the power station in the block below the bridge and walked in the street, navigating the old stone pavers rather than the concrete sidewalk, down to the bar. The fog rolled off the river, clawing across these lowlands and toward the center of the island, making it impossible to know that anything had deeply changed since 1750 or so. In Jeremy's the Brooklyn Brown Ale came in the 48 ounce styrofoam cups and Mary, who had never been here, was just off the plane from Shannon after all, said, "the beer comes in that?" Yes. It does. The Mets game was on the TV, late from the west coast. It had rained earlier and with the fog the wood of the narrow deck was faintly swollen and smelled of the earth, a bit like a dog's damp paw after a run in a forest.

We sat and stared at the street and kept drinking. Max came down from the last cheap apartment in the area and assured us we weren't driving anywhere else that night, that we looked like we'd have enough trouble getting across his living room – and we had to remember that his ancient wooden building was slipping into the eighteenth century landfill that had pushed this part of Manhattan out into the tidal straight causing his floor to slope at a radical angle.

At 3:30 we finally walked out. You could only see lights as they bounced off the water vapor that surrounded us. Max tripped on the wet paving stones and fell face first but got up without complaint. Mary held onto me, which was as pleasant as it was foolish. Colin screamed Gregory Corso's poetry into the night.

We all fell asleep on Max's floor. Some Irish-Caribbean fusion CD playing a touch too loudly. At 5:30 I had to get up and turn around. The blood was rushing to my head.

______________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
painting Peck Slip, 4 a.m. by Naima Rauam copyright by the artist

The Beach

2006-09-13T11:23:00.000-04:00

With the Hudson River at my back I sit and eat two slices of acceptable "Famous Original Rays" or whatever it is pizza as I stare into the pool below the Irish Hunger Memorial. The koi swim in calm arcs with a few manic direction shifts, which seems just about right. Whenever I am here I think of this sick joke that I can make big money by opening a "Famine Fries" stand in the shadow of this monument, but I try hard not to mention that to anyone.

Long ago, when I was a kid, this whole area west of the Trade Center was just a giant beach. They'd filled all this land in, out beyond the old pier lines, when they built the towers, but then they'd argued about this place called "Battery Park City" for two decades. So it sat there, vast and empty and cool in the summer and icy in the winter and all we had to do was hop the fence and you could do anything out here, soccer, or stickball, drugs or sex, sunbathing or music – it was the most un-Manhattan place in Manhattan, and we loved it.

We loved all of downtown then. Companies were fleeing New York and Tribeca hadn't happened yet and nobody at all lived anywhere around. The old folks bitched that the Trade Center was ugly and too big and too square and the plaza was horrible and boring and the shopping mall was just a shopping mall. But fuck them. The towers were fucking brilliant, transparent and glowing and changing colors with every twitch of the sky. For the price of fairly but not absurdly expensive drinks you could go hang out and get hammered up top at Windows with the best view on the planet. You could skateboard or rollerblade or dance all night to whatever music you could bring to the plaza and the lightposts had outlets right there for power. And after all the suits left the whole lower level was for play. We'd meet guys on the cleaning crew for soccer games lots of Sunday nights in the lobby of One.

And when the suits were going home? Well, you could just hang out and watch the human Niagara of commuters pouring down the escalators at Path Square. It was our wonderland. And the world's – pulling even that French acrobat guy who walked between the towers. Couldn't do that in Midtown. Wouldn't even if you could.

I look around. The beach has long since turned into the World Financial Center and yes, the whole Battery Park City thing where no one I know could afford to even imagine living. There is no un-Manhattan Manhattan anymore. It is all Manhattan. Even a third of Brooklyn and parts of Queens are Manhattan now. The World Financial Center would look very, very big to almost anyone, I realize, if we didn't remember the Trade Center which was so much grander. Oh well. It was my city then. It is not my city now.

Still. This is a safer place. All around me are the rich slugs who rule everything now – Friends cum Seinfeld cum Sex and the City, you understand. You can hardly even make them afraid – back when I was a kid even white boys like us could generate fear and get people to cross streets to avoid us. But at least they are actual New York rich slugs and I am more comfortable with that than I am across West Street where tourists from Madrid and Tokyo and Seoul and Iowa gather and buy 9/11 trinkets and revel in some bizarre faked American heroism. Screw them. None of this really matters to any of them, they just like feeling like victims.

I climb to my feet and wander into the Hunger Memorial, entering through the shrinking dark tunnel. People came fleeing real fear back then. They were starving, their children were starving. They were watching their children starve while the British Army dragged food out of the country and back to London. Terrorism indeed. I walk through the ancient abandoned house, a remnant of a true famine village, and past the long cold hearth. Back in the sun I follow the winding path. At the top I look out at the river. Maybe back in 1978 there was a high pile of dirt right here, and maybe I stood in this spot looking this way, seeing a wholly different world.

But it is time to head back to reality. I need to meet people at the Bridge Café on the other side of the island. I think short route, but then switch and walk south into the Winter Garden. The stone of the floor shines so brightly that I am stunned by it. The river glitters beyond the palm trees. Colorful kites hang in the air.

I climb the stairs. The giant window ahead is framed in visible technology that forces a viewer to wonder about how our earth is assembled. Beyond the window lies that vacant pit. "Forget the memorial," I say out loud but to no one. "Forget rebuilding and fill it in. Make it a beach where kids can play."

This vast room is almost empty. My words hang for a moment in echo. Then I leave.

_____________________________________
copyright 2006 by Ira Socol
Fish photograph and Ground Zero photograph copyright 2006 by Jill Piers. Before Battery Park City photograph copyright 1978 Creative Time and 2006 The New York Times. Irish Hunger Memorial photograph copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

Tuesday

2006-09-12T12:36:00.000-04:00

The sky and the Liffey were steel grey that day and I shivered standing in the centre of the bridge, looking east with the wind shoving me from the back, trying to decide, well, not really what to do but what I thought about doing it. The busses, lorries, and flow of cars roared past along the quaysides and tourists made exclamations of wonder as they passed, and once in a few minutes a cloud would spit a bit of rain down, perhaps just to remind me that nature held most of the power.

She was up at Arnott's shopping for, well whatever. She loves the stores on Grafton Street and often pulls me through them – no, "pulls" is too strong and suggests unwillingness – I view top-level retail as some sort of great kinetic art show and do not mind at all. But when she settles into real purchasing modes she is more likely to work the lower price north side and to do it with great efficiency, and I am not much of a shopper in that way. So she went there and I went here. Claiming to need to check something at Books Upstairs by Trinity but not doing that at all, simply following a random path from College Green through Temple Bar and onto the Ha'penny, bringing me to this spot.

We'd agreed to meet at The Oval Bar at two-fifteen or half-past for sandwiches and pints and so we'd ride the bus back home together, and that we would. We'd talk about things as we do. We'd smile at each other and laugh and kiss and she'd kick her shoes off and put them in my lap and I'd massage them with my right hand as I drank with my left. This would all go on no matter what I decided, and it would all be good.

Did I want more or did she? Did I want her to move in, to be mine in "that way," or was I resisting, setting up reasons why not? Did she want what she always told her friends she would not do again, or was what she oft said the real thing? Were her jokes about me a defense mechanism for her or against me? Could something without a future go on and on forever? Or were we dooming ourselves to disappointment?

It seemed early in the autumn for the wind to be this raw. I pulled the phone from my pocket and checked the hour. Three ducks swam beneath me, all males, a pack on the prowl I suggested to myself. Behind me an American man said, "I totally love this city," which is always nice to hear.

I pushed myself off the railing. Turned to my left. Walked towards her.

March Seventeenth

2006-09-11T16:19:00.000-04:00

[I will not watch people try to make money, or political capital, from 9/11/2001 today or anyday. I thought about posting certain old stories of mine (one is in the archives here), but I'd rather this...]

I said I wasn't putting a uniform on and I wasn't working the parade and while I wanted the day off that wasn't a huge deal because even if I didn't get the day off and, it's not like I'm not sensitive to the staffing reports that he needs to send in to One Police Plaza everyday, I'll pretty much be here when I'm here but that'll be between him and me. The lieutenant said, "Whatever, but what do we have on these guys in New Jersey?" And I ask, "That the Feds haven't leaked to CBS yet?" He groans. I just say, "I'm going in today. I won't go tomorrow. Thursday I'll look at the reports. I'll tell you something Friday." He says, "Friday?" I say, "Yeah," and I turn around, spilling a little of the now cold coffee from my mug onto his carpet, mumble "sorry" and leave. Then I spend the next six hours wandering through the ruins of the Trade Center garage, surprisingly hot under the hard hat though it's cold down there, but we're not finding anything important anymore, that's just the truth.

Wednesday I make token attempts. I wear an old Michigan State sweatshirt because it's green. I get to work by about 8:15 more or less, and since my day technically starts at 7:30, that's not bad, for me. I've taken the slow train in. This might mean I've spent too much time thinking. Yes. It does. I've thought about how tired I am. The last three weeks, Jesus. I've thought about how I've slept probably thirty hours since the attack in February, so, of course I'm tired. I've thought about how that's not true: that's not why I'm tired. I'm tired because I'm going nuts as a single dad and I'm tired because not only haven't I gotten laid in a really long time I can't even imagine that a woman might look at me like that anytime soon if ever again and I'm tired because I came downtown eighteen months ago because they thought I was a burnout or I thought I was a burnout and because I have no idea if I want to be a cop anymore and because I've been that tired and then, bam, some motherfucker tries to knock over the towers and then, bam, because my bosses mistake eccentricities for intelligence, I'm totally a cop again, and I wasn't ready for that. And I've thought, well, we pretty much know what's happened and we've pretty much identified the assholes involved and we're not going to get any credit for this anyway because the FBI is running a 24/7 publicity machine for themselves and besides, at some point the CIA and the DIA are gonna take over, right? Then, if all that's true why can't I just dump this task force and go back to crime trend data analysis or whatever the fuck my job is supposed to be, or better yet, just leave this city behind before… well, before whatever's next.

On the train there are lots of cops, of course. Tons of cops and fireman all in uniform all heading down to be in the parade or to work at the parade. I've done that. Not marched but worked it. I did it as a rookie, all rookies do it even ones assigned to weird deep cover stuff. And last year because they said that kind of crap was more or less the price of the detective's shield, or surely the price of getting quickly bumped from Detective Third Class to Detective Second Class when you're getting that kind of pay raise without capturing Son of Sam or something. So I've worked the parade. It's not bad, I just never liked being in uniform in Manhattan where they expect you to wear hats and have shiny shoes and stuff. If I'd done it today though, I'd meet people, and I don't want to meet people or answer questions about how I am, and so I ride downtown, hidden in a corner, the old college baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, and I make it through the pre-parade crowd un-noticed.

I make it through the day mostly un-noticed. I get in late. I drink coffee. I walk a wide lap around the Trade Center. I sit by the water. I sit in the churchyard at Trinity. I walk another lap. I have three beers and a corned beef sandwich at a bar that ought to be better on the edge of Tribeca. On the way back from the bar a fat guy seems to be having a heart attack in front of a Burger King and I drop into public servant mode and do what I can for him until the ambulance gets there. Stuck to the light pole next to where the fat guy lies on the sidewalk is a hand-lettered poster asking, "Is

America

Safe?" A block later I meet Ahmad who's a waiter up in Windows on the World. He walked down 106 floors 19 days ago, and he's been out of work, of course, but he seems good. He laughs cause I'm wearing green, "You guys really aren't all Irish."

At home this night I'll have a Guinness or two, but I'm not going to find a babysitter in my neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day night. Tomorrow I will spread this mountain of paperwork all over the conference room and try to see things in ways I have not before. I'll be wearing jeans and a shirt and tie and none of it will be green. Friday I'll tell the lieutenant something, but I doubt that anything I can say will make any difference.

______________________________________
copyright 2004 by Ira Socol