The Artful Trade

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...

A Small Jolt Some dried out drunks are like raisins. After enduring so much bitter they develop an unexpected sweetness. His features carried the accumulated weight of penance and its Siamese twin humility. The high life almost always demands the low.The blackout nights and broken promises, the lost friends and lies to others and himself had been cured from him. He wore rags, the remains of weather on his features and the unmistakable air of great suffering. He slept on park benches in the summer and apartment stairwells in the winter, paralyzed by the cruelest kind of unforgiveness. The kind you can never grant yourself. He adopted a small park in front of the local church, like he was sure God might stop someday on the way past and hear his confession. The local discount liquor store was on Damascus Street. And eventually, it took years of stumbling in the dark, this blind drunk was granted vision on that road. Years before he had been a captain on the Staten Island ferry...

Sawdust and Blood The first time was a man lying on 8th in front of the bus station. I was just a kid. A small clot of passersby, gawkers, stood silent sure that they should do something but uncertain what. An old woman blessed herself and whispered a prayer. Someone finally called EMS but life had already limped away by the time they arrived. The cops came with yellow tape. It’s meant to mark where life ends and death begins. But it had already trespassed into the eyes of living. The medical examiner came and made a few notes and the EMS lifted him into a bag. A cop began to argue over who was going to write it up. Another began to spread sawdust on the spot. Then straw. Sawdust soaks up blood. So does shoe leather and time. The straw is meant to cover it all. Eventually the wind takes hold and sweeps it away like there was never anything there like a heart that finally quit beating against worry or a dream that gave up it's ghost. I went by that spot a thousand times ...

I love long shots. I love broken down 47-1 thoroughbreds that you could time with a speed dial, penny stocks that might cure cancer and ancient off off off broadway actors that catch that one lightning in the bottle role they were born for. I love red faced fat guys struggling against the years of a sweet tooth at the back of the marathon pack and the limpers that continue into the dark long after the lights and finish line have returned to anonymous cracked pavement. There has never really been anything to love about smart money though. Nothing but the margin is ever risked. Those favorites have already won favor. They are the short odds and sure things. The safe play. Nothing miraculous there ever. But the long shots are the ones that should fail. The ones that carry some essential flaw at their core. They are the Army of Too. They’re the too slow, too short, the too foolish believers. They listen their whole lives to the critics, then let the catcalls find their way into back...

1968 Amputees say they still feel a missing leg. There's a phantom pain that remains long after what's taken is gone. It was long ago. But I still feel it. 1968 is the year part of me was taken. That year brought terrible collisions between old virtues and new verities. Truths taken of faith were tested and sometimes failed. Families were shaken to the bone by wars declared fought in jungles but also undeclared wars fought over kitchen tables. It was the year I discovered loss. The kind that climbs down and in and stays. And this year, 2024, has begun to feel like then. I recognize something in it. Something coming . 1968 began when a kid I knew was expelled from my Catholic grammar school for the grave sin of wearing Beatle boots. We both wore white shirts and clip on ties but the nuns explained he was a heretic. His hair was over his ears. And though we learned to read together, memorized the commandments and confessed our sins each Friday that year, they sa...