3
Years later, after I’d graduated college and returned to Manhattan—this was 1989—I got a job working for an Israeli named Uri Yaviv, who was CEO of a tiny startup called Trident.
My title, computer consultant, had next to nothing to do with my responsibilities, which were primarily to oversee the editing of a several-hundred-page proposal full of data flow diagrams and technical descriptions in the coldest, most abstruse language for an antiballistic weapons manufacturing system that tested my capacity for mind-numbing work.
None of this is particularly important, except for the fact that Uri ran the business out of his large apartment in Hudson Heights, just a few blocks north of Little Dominican Republic and the George Washington Bridge—neighborhoods farther north in the city than I’d ever ventured as a boy and so unknown to me in my youth that they might as well have been an entirely different state.
I was living on the Upper East Side at the time.
I was so busy, my hours were so long, that, weather permitting, I made the nearly nine-mile ride on my bicycle to ensure I got exercise, crossing the park and then making the remainder of the trek up Broadway, through Morningside Heights, past Columbia University, through Manhattanville, West Harlem, Hamilton Heights, Sugar Hill, and Washington Heights.
When I was a boy this was considered the DMZ, the forbidden zone.
And there were still stretches of urban decay on my ride but far more beauty and a vibrancy to the street life no different from any other part of town.
This didn’t surprise me, because I was older, because I was smarter and wiser, as I think I am now, but I did not know, then, that this northernmost province of Manhattan was the land, for instance, of so many Orthodox Jews, the Hasidim who owned much of the area’s real estate.
On my trip I spied Hispanic girls in Catholic-school plaid whose parents owned the bodegas and clothing shops and beauty salons, storefronts decorated in multicolored pennants that rippled in the gusts off the Hudson.
I ate my meals at the Bolivian and Mexican and Dominican and soul food restaurants that were plentiful there, at the Chinese buffets and the kosher butchers, and a McDonald’s whose fries always tasted fresh out of the oil.
I felt as at home and as safe in such density as anywhere in New York, and when I took the A train it was no different from any subway line but for the racial composition of its passengers, I being almost completely outnumbered from Fifty-Ninth Street north and 181st Street south.
On that ride, I occasionally thought about what we did to Pilchard.
My guilt had far more to do with our intent, which was to weaponize our city like a gun.
It was also that I simply went along with things.
As to my shame, that was retroactive, it was in hindsight.
For what could we know, then, really, living in our tiny world on that infinite little island? And how lucky we were, as we grew older, to begin to unlearn such things—but not yet, not then.
I am no apologist—“We were boys”—I grant no pardons.
Our education was spatial.
Racial.
Tribal.
Urban.
American.
But mostly—and this is the most important thing—it was dominated by Kepplemen, over whom we were each failing to gain leverage.
And who wore the costume of love.
And who was, day in and day out, teaching us fury, aggression, complicity, desperation, exploitation, and, most of all, silence.
Which is to say that all the way back to my apartment from the train station we neither spoke nor gave a thought to what we had done.
When we entered, I could hear the television on in my parents’ bedroom.
They were asleep, and before I went to turn off their TV, Dad’s voice came over the speaker: It’s ten p.m., went the PSA, do you know where your children are?
Tanner and Cliff were in the kitchen.
Tanner was making a quesadilla.
After the three of us ate, we took a carton of eggs with us to the terrace and lay flat on the ground, waiting for unwitting pedestrians.
Oren appeared.
He considered the three of us.
“What are you losers doing?”
When we told him, he said, “Gee, guys, maybe when I’m in high school, you’ll let me join you.”
Tanner said, “What do you suggest, dickweed?”
To Cliffnotes, Oren said, “Let’s get the map.”
“Great idea,” Cliff said, and jumped to his feet.
Oren and Cliffnotes had a subway map along whose arterial lines they had listed the numbers collected from the city’s nearby pay phones.
On slow nights like these, we picked a location and made prank calls.
We huddled in my closet and closed the door, so as not to wake my parents.
Tanner, still buzzed from the party, asked to go first.
Receiver in hand and finger pressed to the cradle’s prongs, he took several deep breaths to nerve himself and then called a pay phone in Times Square.
He tilted the earpiece away from his ear so we could all hear.
A woman said, “Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?”
“Peter.”
“Peter who?”
“Peter Piper suck my pecker!” Then he slammed the receiver into the cradle and bent double, cackling.
All of us shook our heads in disappointment.
Oren, who had a special dislike for Tanner, who thought he was the prototypical Boyd Prep prick, said, “Lame.”
“Fuck you, Oren,” Tanner said, “you go then,” and handed him the phone.
Because I did not rise to his defense, Oren shot me a disappointed look and then consulted the map.
He dialed and glanced between us while he waited for someone to pick up.
When the man answered, he raised his voice an octave and whispered, “Dad? Dad, is that you?”
“Sorry, kid, this isn’t your dad.”
“You have to help me, mister, please, I finally got out of the closet—”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
Oren began to cry, tears and everything.
“Mister, please, he only gives me a bucket to pee in.”
“Look, kid, calm down, okay?”
“Please don’t hang up, I have to get out of this place.”
“I said calm down—”
“He hurts me.
He hurts me real bad.”
“Who does?”
“The man.
Who keeps me locked up.
All the time, whenever he’s here.”
“Kid, listen, what’s your name?”
“Etan.”
“Ethan?”
“Will you please call my dad and tell him to come get me please?”
“Holy shit.
Is this…Etan Patz?”
“Please, mister, I’ve been here forever.”
“ The Etan Patz.”
“Please hurry—”
“Holy fucking shit.”
“He never goes away for long.”
“Where are you? I can come get you.”
“I don’t know, it’s dark in this place.”
“Are you in an apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get to a door?”
“He locks it from outside.”
“What about a window?”
“There’s a window, but there’s bars on it.”
“Look out and tell me what you see.”
“I see…an intersection.
I see a subway.”
“Are there letters on them?”
“It’s hard to make them out.”
“What about the street sign?”
“It says…Fourteenth Street.”
Silence.
“And I see a phone booth.
With someone in it.”
Silence.
“Mister, are you there?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Mister, is that bad?”
“Holy Jesus Lord.”
“Please, mister, you’re really scaring me.”
“You’re—you’re right here.”
“Where?”
“Here.
Where I am.
I’m on your block.
I’m waving now.
Can you see me waving?”
“Is that you, mister? In the phone booth?”
“It’s me.
Which way are you?”
“The other way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your back is to me.”
“Am I facing you now?”
“Yes.”
“I see your building.”
“You do?”
“I’m going to point toward you, okay? I’m going to raise my arm toward you, and when I’m pointing right at you say stop, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Stop now?”
“Keep going.”
“Stop now?”
“Stop.”
“You’re on the third floor.
I got you, Etan.
Don’t worry.
I’m gonna call the police and we’re gonna come get you.”
“Can’t you stay on the phone with me?”
“Kid, I have to hang up just for a second and call the police.”
“Okay, but, mister, before you do, I should probably tell you—”
“Tell me anything, Etan, it’s going to be okay.”
“It’s that, it’s that—”
“It’s what? Tell me.”
“It’s that you’re the most gullible asshole I’ve ever talked to in my life.”
Very gently, Oren hung up the phone.
He looked at me, then at Cliff, and finally at Tanner, with a that’s-how-it’s-done expression.
Even Tanner joined us in our reverential applause.
“My turn,” I said.
I called the pay phone on Sixty-Third and Central Park West.
Someone answered on the first ring.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“Who’s this?”
“Griffin.”
“Well, Griffin, I think you have the wrong number,” the man said.
“Is this 787-858?” I asked.
“It is.”
“Is this the pay phone next to the YMCA?” I said.
“It is.
You know what that means?”
“What?”
“That it’s fate I picked up.
Swear to God, I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“You have?”
“When the student is ready the mentor appears.”
“Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“So am I.”
“Then meet me in fifteen minutes by the rocks in Sheep Meadow, and I’ll tell you the meaning of life.”
And he hung up.