On a recent rainy morning we boarded the 7:05 Jitney, trusting that we’d arrive at 701 West 168th Street in time for an important appointment scheduled for 11:30 at the Neurological Institute, and, thanks to Morrie, who whisked us up F.D.R. Drive from 86th and Third, where we’d hailed him, we did — right on the dot as it turned out.
Morrie, whom we tipped well, told us he lived in New Jersey, and that it was quiet there. We told him it was quiet where we lived too, except, of course, for the riotous birds.
We dweebs go into the city about once a decade. I used to live there, on East 12th Street between A and B, in a one-room apartment that gave out onto a cement courtyard and a funeral home vent. I used to tell people that when on the pot my feet were in the oven. Seeing electric bike riders weave in and out of the traffic and doing wheelies on that recent day was disconcerting, though I was once one of them, not as flashy, but equally as insouciant, commuting as I did on a bicycle between the East Village and the Times building on 43rd Street.
This insouciance carried over into my work as a copy boy too, so much so that I was about to be consigned to the morgue when Art Penny, a resourceful Long island Press reporter and Times stringer who lived way out in Riverhead, took me on as an apprentice. Quickly, I became the “prodigious workhorse” Amanda Fairbanks calls me in “The Lost Boys of Montauk,” turning out up to a half-dozen stories a day gleaned from the criminal and civil dockets at the county courthouse up the street, and from the nearby office of H. Lee Dennison, the colorful, visionary engineer who was then the county executive. My increasing confidence concomitantly freed Art up to dig deep into the chipping news at the Baiting Hollow Golf Club.
I continued on in that prodigious vein when I went to work at The Star a year and a half later — a suicidal move professionally, said Art, though, interestingly, it proved to be my salvation — and I did so until about a dozen years later, when, while in the throes of a depressing divorce, I was made the paper’s sportswriter, which greatly lifted my spirits. Not long afterward, I met Mary and was reborn.
It was she who had the appointment in Washington Heights that I mentioned above, and who was, happily, given largely good news. On our return on the bus, I was comforted to think that we’ll have more time together; comforted too — and humbled — to think, on seeing the glistening leafed-out trees and the plowed earth, that East Hampton is our home.