Park Life

I flew into JFK at the end of December 1984, and as soon as I saw the giant floodlit billboards stacking up in front of the Triborough Bridge the blood began to hiss and crackle in my veins. At that time, New York was my favourite place: it was everything a city should be – a volatile mix of edginess and possibility.

My father had died a few months before and I had inherited some money, but it wasn’t enough to live on. I knew I would have to find work quickly. At a New Year’s Eve party on the Upper West Side, a pretty blonde girl told me I should apply to a bookstore called the Strand. ‘They take all kinds of people,’ she said. I wasn’t sure whether or not this was a compliment – it didn’t sound like one – but I followed her advice, and within a few days I had a job. The pay was $125 a week.

Like most Strand employees, I started in the Review Books section, which was in the basement. Though winter gripped the city, it was hot and dusty down there, and I spent my first days sorting and shelving hardback editions of novels that had just been published. All kinds of people, the blonde girl had said, and now I understood what she meant: never in my life had I come across such an extravagant array of misfits, bohemians and would-be artists, which more than made up for the dismal salary and the dullness of the job. There was a thin-wristed, moon-pale DJ from Arkansas who spoke in a sardonic voice that made me think of Flannery O’Connor. There was a timid, bespectacled man who ate cake secretly in the downstairs toilet. There was a sweet-natured older man with shoulder-length grey hair, who smoked with great purpose despite his chronic emphysema. There was a winsome, bruised-looking transsexual by the name of Opal. And then there was Klaus, from Vienna. An ex-junkie and sometime lead guitarist, Klaus was the only other ‘European’ in the store. He was working illegally as I was – we were both using Social Security numbers that we had borrowed from close friends – and it wasn’t long before we were meeting for drinks, usually in the Holiday Lounge, a dive bar in the East Village. Later, we would go back to Klaus’s apartment, which was on 51st Street, between Seventh and Broadway, and which he shared with a six-foot-tall, black-eyed Venezuelan girl who stayed up all night doing coke. Klaus and I soon became so inseparable that people in-store started calling us ‘The Two Musketeers’.

It was everyone’s ambition to get out of Review Books, and when Klaus asked if I would be interested in the graveyard detail I jumped at the chance. Graveyard details worked like this. When people who owned books died in New York, a member of the family would often call the Strand and offer to sell the library as a job lot. The Strand would then send an assessor to the home of the deceased, and a price would be agreed. Some days later, two employees would be dispatched in the Strand van, and the books would be loaded into boxes and taken back to the store. The van was the same shade of red as the famous Strand T-shirt, and it was driven by Nelson, a former Hell’s Angel with a plaited ponytail that hung heavily between his shoulder blades. Gears clashing, he would slam through the Manhattan traffic while Klaus and I bounced around in the back on bound stacks of cardboard flats. Nelson had a gruff manner and most people were afraid of him – even the boss treated him with a respect that seemed out of proportion to his job – but something about us ‘Europeans’ seemed to entertain him.