Park Life

‘Billy?’ I said one steamy afternoon in May, while Klaus and I were sitting by the fountain. ‘Do you like reading?’

‘Yeah,’ Billy said, ‘I read.’

I asked if he would consider trading some of his grass for a few of our books.

He nodded slowly. ‘That might work.’

‘So have we got anything,’ I said, ‘that you might be interested in?’

He glanced towards our tables, and a kind of slow-motion shudder passed across his face as a thought surfaced in his brain.

‘The Collected Hegel,’ he said, ‘in three volumes – I could go for that.’

I looked at Klaus, and we both burst out laughing.

‘Is that a problem?’ Billy said.

The three volumes, which were bound in green linen and tied with ribbon, were priced at something like $25, but the delicious way in which Billy had wrong-footed us meant that I didn’t even give it a second thought.

‘Billy,’ I said, ‘you’ve got a deal.’

This wasn’t the first time we had worked an angle – but then, according to the brothers from Hoboken, all Strand employees worked an angle, especially if they were sent to Bryant Park. There was a story – possibly apocryphal – that the guy who had run the kiosk a year or two earlier had stolen so many books during the course of the summer that when he had left the Strand in the fall he had opened a bookstore of his own. Klaus and I were less flagrant. Most customers required a receipt when they purchased a book, but if they failed to ask for a receipt we would choose not to issue one, and the lack of evidence for that particular sale meant that we could pocket the cash and act as though the book in question had never existed. Since Klaus and I were responsible for choosing the stock that travelled up to the park – we knew what sold and what didn’t – and since we were never asked to keep an inventory, there was no way of establishing if a book had gone missing. Once we had perfected our system, we were able to cream off roughly $150 each a week, thereby doubling our salaries.

At the same time, ironically, the management was delighted with our performance, since we were making so much money for the store – more than anyone had made in previous years. The fact that we were foreign, and spoke with exotic accents, worked to our advantage – we were popular with bookbuyers – but we took pride in our job as well, and we put a lot into it. For all our swagger, though, we felt vulnerable. Had you observed us for a couple of days, you would have noticed that nobody from the store came by to pick up our daily take. Equally, you would have realized that we didn’t leave it in the kiosk overnight. To anyone watching, then, it would have been obvious that when we walked to the corner of Sixth Avenue and 41st Street at the end of the working day and caught the subway to Union Square, we had the money on us. Even given the amount we were creaming off, we would generally clear at least $1,000 a day, and that was a lot of cash to be carrying about. Muggings were common in Times Square. We might be seriously hurt – or even killed. Not only were we being paid a pittance, but we were also being put at risk, and the management didn’t seem to realize. We began to think of the money we were skimming as danger money. We deserved it for getting on the subway every night. We’d earned it.

Remarkably enough, nothing ever happened, and when it was time for me to leave for Tokyo, where I had planned to spend a few months, I was sorry to go. The life of the park had become my life; I would miss the rituals, the banter and the small-time notoriety. Klaus and Maritza came to Newark to see me off. We had drinks in the airport. We took pictures. I was on standby that evening, but there were no seats left, and I ended up having to buy a first-class ticket to Los Angeles. I drank champagne all night and hardly slept.

Only about a week after arriving in Japan, I received a postcard from Klaus. He had been given a new colleague in the park – a real asshole, he said. He had decided not to tell the guy about our scam. As a result, he had to cream off double, his share as well as mine, otherwise the average daily take would jump for no apparent reason, and somebody might become suspicious. He was now making an extra $300 a week. He was thinking of moving downtown, maybe to Delancey Street. Getting an apartment of his own. He’d had enough of living with the Venezuelan girl.

Another of Rupert Thomson’s jobs while he was living in New York was writing pornographic fantasies, exactly on minute long, to read down the phone to paying punters. This inspired our erotic writing competition. The winning entry will be published tomorrow.

Rupert Thomson’s memoir This Party’s Got to Stop (Granta) was published in April 2010.