Park Life

As the weeks went by, I began to realize that the park had its own unofficial and carefully calibrated infrastructure. The main business of the park was drugs, and the area was divided into four quadrants, each of which was patrolled by a different gang. Every gang had a captain. Usually black guys in their twenties or early thirties, they exuded an air of casual authority: this was their turf. Their underlings would loiter nearby, sometimes venturing out on to the sidewalk, sometimes hanging back, but always watching, circling. ‘Sense, sense’ was the perennial, muttered chant, sinsemilla being the drug of choice in Bryant Park, the female flowers of the cannabis plant glistening brownish-green inside their see-through plastic packets, like the crushed backs of cockroaches. But the dealers weren’t the only regular fixtures in the park. At right angles to our kiosk, and backing on to Sixth Avenue, were two other kiosks run by three brothers from New Jersey. They were a little older than us, in their mid-to late thirties – Roy, Nick and Jake, and a beautiful Puerto Rican friend of theirs, Maritza, who would eventually, and disastrously, marry Klaus and move to Vienna with him. Like us, the brothers traded in second-hand books, but they had also branched out into postcards, calendars and maps. Though cagey at first, they quickly became good friends, and would invite us to yard parties in Hoboken, where there would be beer and joints and music, and where Roy would invariably perform his notorious snake dance. Stationed opposite our kiosk was a guy called Billy who sold hot dogs, soft drinks and bags of potato chips out of a metallic silver cart. He had thick blond hair, and wore check shirts and jeans. He smoked a lot of pot, and his eyes were often sleepy and bloodshot. He came from Brooklyn. Though amiable enough, he didn’t exactly strike me as the sharpest tool in the box. Klaus thought Billy looked like an Austrian peasant, which was another way of saying the same thing.

In time we got to know most of the characters who passed through the park on a daily basis, but there was one who particularly intrigued us. He was in his forties, with a drooping moustache, and he wore aviator-style sunglasses with brown tinted lenses. He dressed in a denim jacket and jeans, both of which looked ever so slightly too new. A bulky key chain dangled from his brown leather belt. He reminded me of an extra from a bad seventies movie. He rarely bought anything, but he would look at our books most days, and his outfit meant that he never went unnoticed. We wondered who he was and what he was up to; we didn’t trust him. When we mentioned him to the brothers from Hoboken, they laughed so hard they almost fell off their upturned beer crates. The guy was an undercover detective, they told us, and his remit was to bust the drug gangs that operated in the area. As Roy said, he would have been less visible if he’d come dressed as a cop. Sometimes he would tip off the police by murmuring into a hidden mike, but even before the sirens could be heard, the black guys would be scattering in all directions, like beads from a broken necklace, and by the time the cop cars surged over the sidewalk and rocked to a halt by the fountain, the gangs would be long gone. There would be a lot of posturing and shoulder-shrugging on the part of the police, and then, after buying a few cans of soda from Billy, they would drive away again.

I had already noticed that Billy didn’t take any money from the dealers when he gave them soft drinks and potato chips, and I wondered if he was running some kind of tab, but then I happened to see one of the drug captains deftly drop a bag of sinsemilla into Billy’s cart. While traders were making fortunes in stocks and shares on Wall Street, I was witness to a revival of the medieval barter system in Bryant Park. Up until that moment, we had been buying our grass from the Venezuelan girl who Klaus shared an apartment with, but now an idea occurred to me.