Different Slants

Part 7: The Catholic Priest in the New Jersey Airport 

So, at last…back at the Newark Airport.  It is 7 p.m. on Sunday night. 

Why am I relieved to be here? 

After uniformed security people decided I was no threat, and I put my watch back on, and all other metal possessions where they were before, except for my dull silver Jewish Star necklace, still around my neck, which intimidates no one and which hasn’t the power to trigger any alarms, either.  Perhaps, Divine intervention.  But if so, God, helping me win the lottery would be a lot more helpful, thank you. 

Two hours early for my 9 o’ clock flight, I replace my black sling and blue denim bag back on their shoulder grooves, and I slowly wander through the little airport I’d left only nineteen hours before.  Why does it seem so much longer than that?  

Maybe because I hadn’t slept since 7 a.m. Saturday morning, thirty-six hours ago.  That could disorient anyone, let alone some irrationally motivated late middle-aged Chicago day-tripper who felt compelled to walk from the Jacob Javits Convention Center on the middle western part of Manhattan to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in search of the Brooklyn Bridge.   And solace, too.

Maybe I won’t be back. 

Maybe the disappointment was too much for me, and all that I associated that with.  Maybe I should grow up and not live in fairy tales.   

I don’t know.  Walking through the pretty sterile Newark Airport, I am not feeling any philosophical resolution.  But…I am a little hungry. 

So, I look here and there, hoping for some spot with a little personality, and then I see a place that isn’t McDonalds.  I decide to take a chance, but I’m thinking that this past January I was in Sweden (Note to myself: Don’t go to Sweden in January) interviewing a childhood friend for a book I want to write about him. Lars Drake is worth a book. 

But after Lars dropped me off at the Stockholm Airport, I found an Irish bar called O’Leary’s with fabulous hot wings, and a Swedish-speaking Puerto Rican waiter, Carlos, who was very accommodating.  My first thought, after I was successful in convincing him to actually burn the wings—most people don’t like that, I guess—was that a guy who speaks Swedish, Spanish AND English could probably find a better paying job, if he looked around some.    

Turns out that Carlos also liked his wings burned and out of that little incident came a half an hour of conversation.  He was very friendly and optimistic. Oh, and the charred hot wings were perfect, too. 

But O’Leary’s wasn’t in the Newark Airport, so I settled for anonymous and edible.  It was ok.

(Read on …)

Part 6: Cursed by a Tribeca Fortune-Teller 

After my second try at the 2^nd Avenue Delicatessen, I realized and redefined my expectations to fit this new reality.  New York City was now just a tiny bit smaller, and I mourned that, because the bit that was lost was irreplaceable. 

Changing my attitude, or attempting to, I chose to view the situation as being in a museum-like setting and I went back to visit the original location of the deli.  Its address was on the corner at 10^th Street and (of course) 2^nd Avenue, except now there was a big blue and white Chase Bank sign where one of the windows used to be.  It looked exactly like all the other identical blue and white Chase Bank signs from Seattle to Shanghai.  I sighed. 

I looked down at the sidewalk and saw that there were still bronze stars imbedded in the cement of the sidewalk lined up in front of the bank with the names of now long dead famous customers of the 2^nd Avenue Deli. 

As each day goes by, there will be steadily less people who can remember this old world Jewish treasure, and where it used to be, too.  Like some Mayan Temple lost in the underbrush of this cold island’s urban jungle. 

As I approach age sixty, my own older friends are dying, two recently in one week. One of them, Mike Hecht, at 90, was my synagogue’s shofar-blower for the last 40 years and a warm and brilliant Yiddish-speaking man.  He was not a father figure to me. 

We discussed politics, cursed the Bush Administration, whom Mike despised and he told me detailed definitions of obscure Yiddish words.  We were simply friends, but he was someone I loved. 

The other, Leon Despres, 101, a long time Chicago Alderman and a man I interviewed and photographed at 17 when I was in a high school journalism class in 1968, and who I came to know well during my twenty years running my newsstands in Hyde Park’s 5^th ward in Chicago.  

He was a famously independent voice among the city’s fifty wards comprising the rubber-stamp City Council and the only one to defy the powerful Mayor Richard J. Daley, one of the most powerful political figures in the United States. 

He was once shot in both legs by an assailant and remained in office, frequently seen hobbling around the neighborhood with two wooden canes.  Not your ordinary man. 

Now both are names on a page somewhere, and silent.  

I feel like I am becoming a surviving repository of who, what, why, when and where even as America’s newspapers die all around me.  Who cares?  I do. 

Though I may be just one disappointed man standing on a corner in New York City, there are still things to be done before my 22 hours here are up.  You may be surprised to see how much happened between 8 am and 7 pm, when I was back at that New Jersey Airport.  There were still miles for me to walk before sunset. 

(Read on …)

A reflective note from Bob Katzman to loyal readers of my non-fiction story blog,                                                 

                                                        DifferentSlants.com: 

Yeah, I lie on my bed in the dark (carefully, on my back) wondering which Deity I offended and what it will take to appease him/her.  My world is smaller now and filled with silence.  That part, the last part, is not entirely bad.  This morning I’m going to write my long delayed Part 6 of the 7-part Grand Central Station Conversation story about 22 hours in NYC.  It will appear soon. 

Remarkably, people still go to read the other previously posted chapters 1 thru 5 on my blog, though I’ve posted nothing for nearly two months. While the story is about melancholy and disorientation as my once familiar past disappears, it is very real and human.  It’s entitled: Cursed by a Tribeca Fortune Teller 

Now, with the slow-motion closing of my 20-year old Morton Grove, Illinois back-issue periodical store, Magazine Memories, the loss of my past seems to be accelerating. 

My store closed for good last Monday, after 4 weeks of terrible labor removing 3,000 boxes and tons of lumber.  Last Saturday, August 29^th, I fell suddenly from a ladder onto concrete and smashed my left side.  This morning, the hospital told me I fractured two ribs, besides other damage. 

I am essentially ok, thanks to modern narcotics, but I have had my own little hell for the past week, or rather Hell 2.0. 

So, I am trying to sort things out and figure out my future. 

Part 6 of GCSC is a zig-zagging odyssey from the mid-town Jacob Javits Convention Center on the island’s West Side, through lower Manhattan in my quest to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge located near the Lower East Side, one more time.  Part 7 was written long ago because long stories need a strong ending, and when that part crystallized for me, I quickly wrote it down. It will be posted in a couple of weeks if my readers respond to my blog and conclude I’m not dead. Or not completely dead. 

To pile on just a bit more to this bizarre moment of my physical, economic and mechanical life, my 1996 Dodge Caravan died in Buffalo Grove on Friday night.  While I waited for rescue, a transformer on a power line blew up with a deafening bang, right in front on my eyes, and all the power to that area stopped. I guess I bring my shortage of luck with me, wherever I go. 

As the sun went down, I waited and I shivered in my thin shirt.   Fall came fast, this year.

When the truly eccentric AAA driver eventually showed up–two hours later!–we got to talking about our lives and when he dropped the car and me at my mechanic’s shop fifteen miles later, he refused my offering of a $5.00 tip, saying that my life was worse than his and he couldn’t take any money from me.  After hearing his sad story, this was an honor I could do without. 

As he drove off in the dark, lights blinking, motor gunning, I stared at his red tail lights thinking to myself:

 This…is why I don’t write fiction