The Artful Trade

The Hard and the Beautiful When I lived in New York I would regularly pass through Times Square.  It always had a few 'end is near' prophets begging the tourists and the strippers, the 3 card Monte dealers and kids that sold a pint of blood for 6 bucks on the 42 St clinic, to repent. When I was broke once I tried. They threw me out. I hadn't eaten in a few days and they said I would pass out down a pint. Too much trouble. I recall passing by them hectoring the sinner...hungry me... with their certainty and their signs. There was one guy that stood at the corner of 42nd and Broadway. But instead of bellowing about righteous punishment and how near judgement was he stood still repeating the same few sentences. "Living is hard. Living is beautiful."  The hard is trying to make you beautiful." Whenever I passed by I would look for him. Once in a downpour I stood next to him waiting for the rain to ease. He repeated his gospel again and again and seeing me near se...

Maybe Even American... excerpt  The Unforgotten Like everyone else in the kitchen, Armando was from Colombia. One of the hotel owners had a coca farm there. And after the original kitchen staff started to make noise about overtime, back pay and unions, he decided to make an offer to some of the Colombian farm workers.  He rounded up a dozen men, some as young as 16, all bachelors, and offered them a chance. A chance to leave their village and go to America.  “You’ll travel the ocean and see a great city,” he said. “You’ll have jobs and a place to stay and the pay will be twice what you make pulling weeds and kneeling in this dirt.” Each young man looked into his father’s tired eyes, then one by one laid down those weary dreams. For something more. For maybe even becoming American. One by one they said, “Yes señor. I will leave all I have known of this life I will go and live among strangers and try to be something greater than a gatherer of coca leaves.” They said goodbye...

The Numbers Game An old friend, a bond salesman, called me that morning from the 68th floor of a high-rise a few blocks away. I had been to church trying as I sometimes do, to pry myself away from my coyote instincts, hoping that someday something in me could be culled into something true.  He described the second jet, low and fast. His voice shook. I told him to get down on the street and head east up to Delancey and over whatever bridge he could into the refuge of Brooklyn. They had turned off the main elevators so he found the freight lift, stumbled in his blue suit down to the street then up through Chinatown, over the bridge and off the island. He walked the 9 miles to Queens and the train. Catching his reflection in a mirror, he saw that blue suit was entirely white, his face chalky, covered with a mist of dry wall and asbestos.  He said he looked like his own ghost. Back then, I often could not sleep. I didn’t count sheep. I'm Irish. I counted heartaches. For years I wa...

Stolen Away When I was a boy I tried to steal forgiveness from the record store in my small town.  It was a single—they called them 45s then. The Hollies. He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother . . . but it wasn’t about the record.  It was about regret.  The owner saw me slip out the door and run away. At ten, I was fast and light and he was slow and heavy and couldn’t catch me. I went back a couple weeks later figuring he would have forgotten such a small thing. He hadn’t. He grabbed me by the arm and called the cops. They came, looked annoyed and then called my father. Together they decided on my punishment. Each day after school I had to sweep Main Street in front of the record store.  But every night the wind would blow and dust would churn. And dirt once more would cover the road way I had tried so hard to clean. Broom in hand, day after day, trying to sweep away my guilt, I slowly began to understand.  Forgiveness cannot be stolen. You have to pay. It always has a...

Chain Lightning  The old man, like every old man, had a drought in his eyes.  He had lived long enough to know that sometimes the rain just quits. Doubts grow and fears get loose at 3 a.m. He came to expect the ache in his back and trust in his sweat to be a different kind of rain. Like there was a storm in him. A kind of dry lightning. He had seen droughts before. But this year seemed different. The ground was harder. So was living.  His wife, so sick, smiled once like she was remembering him on one knee, promising to give her everything he would ever have. But here he was, doubling up, both knees now, begging God for Time.  And though God listens, Time never does. After she was gone, the drought felt like it would finally dry up the last drop of his dreams. The corn went dry, then so did his hope. It cracked down the middle. Like it was all stalk.  After every dawn to dark day, he would clear away his one dish and step out the front door. He’d walk into the ro...

copyright@2021 will maguire Late one night in Little Italy, I was 2 six packs in and stumbling home up the stairs. Passing an open door I saw this old Italian man all of about 50.  His wife had been hit by a bus on Fordham Road that summer. Killed.  When he got the call he just dropped the phone. Never said a word. He went silent the way some men do, trying to make himself deaf to grief by ignoring it, by vowing to never speak it and never listen to its roar... like the sound of the el train each night.  So he stopped answering the phone and and then his door. Tried to make himself unreachable to grief.   And he went to work each day, praying with his sweat that the ache in his back might someday quiet the ache in his heart.  That night he had the radio on some oldies station, standing at the stove, the smell of onion and sausage and peppers in the air.  As I passed it started to play The Very Thought of You.  ‘The mere idea of you...the longing h...