Read Online The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin - Free Book Online Page A

kind of standing patrol against the disenfranchised. There was little street crime, though this was slowly changing because the nascent civil-rights movement kept pressure on New York’s mayor, whose official residence was in the neighborhood, to moderate the NYPD’s practice of stopping black male pedestrians and ordering them to pedest elsewhere. From the strictly parochial viewpoint of the police this made sense, because blacks—Negroes then—were unlikely to be residents, so aside from maids and colorfully-attired African diplomats—the United Nations complex anchored the south end of the neighborhood—anyone not white had to be up to mugging, rape, burglary, or just plain trouble. Over time, as restrictive rental laws fell away and wealthy blacks could find apartments in the area, the police gave up the practice entirely. This was a victory for civil rights, but also benefited the residents of Harlem, which began on the north side of Ninety-Sixth Street: instead of preying on their neighbors, Negro criminals drifted south to target the Upper East Side—why mug a black when a white might be carrying a lot more cash?
    “Three colored kids tried to snatch my purse last week,” Terri said as we walked. She set a pretty pace. At this rate we might be at her place in ten minutes.
    I had been hoping for a half hour, with maybe even a coffee-break on the way. Aside from Little Italy and the Village, this stretch of Lexington Avenue was then one of the few places in the city where you could get a cup of espresso. “They succeed?” I looked down at her purse, chocolate-brown alligator the size of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
    She stopped momentarily to look me in the eye. “You really think I’d let those cocksuckers rip off an Hermès purse that cost me a hundred-fifty bucks?”
    I whistled. In today’s prices that would be fifteen hundred, maybe more. “A high price for modesty,” I said. That was the way it was done. One of the gang would come up, pull a woman’s skirt up over her head, a second would knock her down while the third grabbed the purse. That year women were wearing long skirts, very full. It was like an invitation. In a short while New York women would all be in mini-skirts or pants—the incidence of this kind of purse-snatching dropped.
    “Clocked the first one before he even got started,” she said, “Second one I kicked in the nuts.”
    “And the third?”
    “What third?” she asked, showing a deadpan insouciance that could not be learned other than through growing up in the city. In Paris the women were elegant. Here they were matter-of-fact about a well-placed shoe to the genitals. “Son-of-a-bitch ran before the second piece of shit hit the ground. Do you know the crap I have to listen to all day to earn that purse? My mother didn’t love me. My mother loved me too much. I’m not comfortable with my body. Gimme a break.”
    “Isn’t that what you wanted, when you got into being a shrink?”
    “I wanted to help people with real problems, not fashionably middle-class pseudo-neuroses. You know who has real problems? People who can’t afford psychotherapy, who in fact don’t even know they have problems.” She smiled wryly as she walked.
    I knew exactly how she smiled, because I had one eye on where I was going and the other on her tanned face—she must have been able regularly to get away to the sun, because even in a warmish November there were not enough rays in New York City for a tan like that. “People like who?”
    “Whom,” she said. “I thought you were some sort of literary whiz-kid.”
    “I try to disguise my brilliance when I’m talking to people from Brooklyn.”
    “I’m
from
Brooklyn, Russell. No longer
of
.”
    Just her saying my name sent a chill down my back, the hairs standing as though called to attention. “You don’t have to be ashamed of Brooklyn,” I said. “Walt Whitman was from Brooklyn.” I searched my mind. “Henry