Read an Excerpt
The Ballad of West Tenth Street
Chapter One
On Fifth Avenue, in lower Manhattan, at the corner of Eleventh Street, stands the First Presbyterian Church, a gloomy edifice made of blackened sandstone. Should you turn there and walk along West Eleventh, you will pass the row house the Weather Underground blew up while dabbling in explosives, then the New School's glass and steel building, and finally Gene's Restaurant and the back dining room of Charlie Mom's, where couples glumly eat sautéed broccoli and mu shu pork.
Cross Sixth Avenue to West Tenth Street, past where the old Jefferson Market courthouse stands on an island, its clock tower a finger raised to the sky and its booming note a reminder to passersby that they are either late, on time, or free of such cares.
West of Seventh Avenue the cross streets run off at a southerly angle. With this shift comes a sense of entering another New York, an older and less orderly one. The names of the streets change as well, from utilitarian numbers to names evoking distant landowners, orchards, and inns. The noise of traffic recedes. Sparrows chitter in the trees.
The remaining Federal townhouses of the West Village keep company with every conceivable architectural fad: high Victorian apartment blocks with Gothic porticos, brick cottages with a galleon in stained glass on each window, stolid Civil War-era merchant's houses with stables behind, engine companies with arched red doors, twenties white brick garages and brownstones. Most of the buildings have an expensive, well-groomed air but a few tenements survive, bra-zenly declaring their poverty, their stone facades coatedin dingy beige paint and a row of dented trash cans chained to their front.
Go a little farther and you'll cross Bleecker Street, with its boutiques and French pastry shops. Near the end of the next block stand a pair of fine old brick townhouses. One has a blue door with a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin. The other is empty. A handsome sign declares it For Sale. The Cavendish Group, it reads, Is Pleased to Announce this Very Fine Property. A telephone number is obligingly given below.
From the house with the blue door, a bang and a clatter comes from the narrow kitchen area below the street. The door opens and a boy with long reddish hair hauls out a carton. "Seven, eight," he counts as he drops bottles from the carton into a bin, the bottles clanking. He shakes his head and goes back inside.
Clumping, making as much noise as possible, as is the nature of boys, he climbs three flights of stairs to the attic floor. There he flops down on one end of the blue leather sofa in front of the TV, which is blank.
"Eight," he announced to his sister, who sat at the other end of the sofa. "Eight in one week. She's drinking like mad again."
"Uh-huh," Deen said, not really listening.
"I'm gonna draw a picture of her liver, all green and purple, and paste it up in her bathroom. Or maybe I'll do one of her puking it right out." He took a pad of paper and a box of colored pencils from the table and began some preliminary lines.
"Hey, Deen?"
"Yeah, Hamish?"
"You have noticed she's acting pretty weird again lately? When's the full moon, do you know?"
"No. Oh, I get it. Okay, I'll check—the paper's right here, hang on a sec. Oh geeze, it's Saturday."
"Aw, shit! And she always drinks more on weekends. What if she goes bonkers again with the pills and all, and this time they don't pump her stomach out in time? What if she dies and we're poor pitiful orphans and have to be adopted by some Mormon family or something, some people who do good works and all that shit, and you'll have to wear gingham dresses down to your ankles and marry some old lech named Jezekial?"
"Geeze, Hames, what'd you eat for breakfast, a bowl of raw paranoia? Munster'll be fine. She only lost track of how many pills she'd taken that one time. Besides, Uncle Brian would adopt us."
"Yeah, then why'd she bake a tennis shoe for dinner last night? With tomatoes, for Christ's sake."
"Okay," Deen said wearily. "I tell you what—we'll get up in the middle of the night to check on her. We can take turns. I'll find a little mirror to hold over her mouth to make sure she's still breathing."
Hamish responded with a dissatisfied sigh. He began a new drawing. Deen went back to her book.
"Hey Deen?" he said. "You think we'll grow up to be like them?"
"Lushes and pill poppers, you mean? Or junkies?"
"I've got a theory about it all, you want to hear it?"
"Be my guest. I'm sure it's highly scientific."
"Well, it is. It's this: You and I got Pops's hair, right? And sort of his looks. And Gretchen's got Munster's hair and totally her looks. So Munster's crazy and drinks and Gretchen's crazy, so that means you and I are more likely to turn out like Pops."
"Dead of an overdose at thirty-nine? Thanks, Hames. But I'm happy to inform you that it's not all that simple. For one thing I'm going to be a classical pianist, not some crazed rocker. And Munster and Gretchen are crazy because Pops died. You and I aren't, because we were too little to miss him."
"I guess. So what do you think I'll be when I grow up?"
"I dunno. You're too young to tell yet. An artist of some kind probably. What're you drawing?"
"Pops dead in the hotel room. I made his skin just ever so slightly green, see?"
"It's pretty good. You think he really made that big a mess in the room when he died, though?"
"Naw, he ran around messing everything up before."
The Ballad of West Tenth Street. Copyright © by Marjorie Kernan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
