Love and Grief It took a few days…after…for the sky to return to blue. The subways and trading floors refilled with bodies and dreams all quietly trying to find some way to more. More wealth, more laughter. More time and life. And America, after taking a sucker punch for the ages, staggered to its feet. But death is not so easily boxed up and buried. Worry appeared where innocence and invulnerability had been. It mixed with rage and righteousness and hung in the air, just like the fog of invisible asbestos. My oldest friend John called me that morning from his Wall St. office. His voice shook with emotion as he watched the second plane explode any pretense of peace. Later, catching his reflection in a window he saw that his blue suit had become entirely white, his face chalky, covered with a mist of dry wall and asbestos. "I looked like my own ghost," he told me before he walked off the island and caught the last train home. Neither of us knew then that something s
The Bridge There are profane places in Manhattan. Places where the human heart has beaten itself beyond recognition. There's an underground casino off Mott in Chinatown. The cops all know it's there. They’re paid to leave it alone. Common vice, like gambling, is hard to erase so instead it gets just gets pushed to the dark corners. It helps to know where trouble lives so you don’t have to go looking when it starts to spill out into the open. The guy that ran it kept a fish tank next to the blackjack table. Not exotic fish though. Somehow he got hold of some piranha. They were a special attraction to the Wall St guys that thought themselves big fish. The gamblers jonesing for any kind of new action used to bet on the fish, like dog fights. Gambling has always been a losers game. Places like that look to put the hook in you. Inevitably some hoper takes the big bet bait trying to beat back the odds and gets in deep. The kids college money or the mortgage gets sucked out of him