Absolutely Fourth Street
Fred Bubbers
As dusk approaches, Duncan emerges from the steps of the Six Avenue subway line at Third Street. A gritty, summer gust of wind coming down the avenue lifts up his tie and carries it over his shoulder. He stops for a moment to get his bearings and then continues up the street past the small playground where a marathon basketball tournament has been playing for several generations. Players, some in sneakers, some in shoes, some in boots, sit on the asphalt court and lean back against the fence, waiting their turn. Up the street, some artists are sitting on lawn chairs behind easels, drawing charcoal portraits for the tourists. “Keep on keeping on,” Duncan says to himself. He continues up the block, passing his briefcase from hand to hand and turns the corner on to West Fourth Street. To his right, in a brownstone’s basement, is a French-Vietnamese restaurant. Next door is a vinyl record shop. He checks his watch; he’s meeting his wife for dinner, but he still has some time. He steps into the shop and smells the fragrance of burnt sandalwood and thinks they just might have it. He looks through the records on the rack first for some Bob Marley bootlegs. The shopkeeper, a man in his early fifties with a ponytail and a handlebar mustache tells him he hasn’t seen any in several years. Instead, Duncan heads over to the jazz and blues section. First, he looks for some B.B. King. He pulls out a copy of Live at the Regal. It’s sealed inside a plastic sleeve, but the cover is worn. For several years now, Duncan’s been trying to recover all the albums he foolishly sold when he and his wife had moved into their first house. CD’s had replaced vinyl, and you couldn’t even buy a turntable to play them on. Now they were coming back, and Duncan is setting up a media center in his basement featuring some vintage vacuum-tube based stereo equipment. In a digital world, analog is King.
“I’ve got a near pristine copy of that in the back,” the shopkeeper says. “Pressed in ’79. Interested?”
“Sure,” Duncan says. “Any Miles Davis? I’m looking for Kind of Blue.”
“Oh, for that I have a brand new reissue, 180 gram.”
“Okay.”
The shopkeeper returns with the albums and Duncan follows him to the checkout counter. “The B.B. King is being reissued later this year if you want to wait,” the shopkeeper said. “No,” Duncan says. “This one will do for now. How much?”
“B.B. is fifteen dollars, and Miles is twenty-five.”
“Do you take Amex?”
“Amex, MasterCard, Discover, Visa. We take everything. Nobody buys anything with cash anymore.” Duncan hands over his platinum card.
Duncan leaves the store with his purchases tucked under his arm, and crosses the street and enters the park. It’s been cleaned up since the last time he was down here. There are now carefully trimmed shrubs and flowerbeds where there used to be dirt and empty wine bottles. Somehow, they look unnatural. There is a new children’s playground with little asphalt hills for skateboards and a climbing structure built with railroad ties. On the sidewalk around the perimeter of the park, New York University students are jogging, fully equipped with designer sweats, Nike headbands, and Bluetooth earpieces.
He leaves the park and returns to West Fourth Street, heading toward Broadway. There are fewer people here because of the towering granite structures on both sides of the street that belong to NYU. The entrances are all used as fire exits and are locked from the inside. Strangely enough, however, there is a street peddler with his wares on a card table tucked inside one of the doorways. As he walks by, Duncan glances at the table. There’s a small collection of low-budget music CD’s, some packs of recordable CD’s, some cheap earbuds, some 256K thumb drives, a few nylon backpacks, and some ballpoint pens. Nothing worth stopping for. When he is about twenty steps past the table, he hears someone calling his name as if it were a question. “Duncan?”
Duncan turns and sees the vendor looking at him. The vendor has long brown hair with flecks of gray and a sandy-looking beard. He is wearing cutoff jeans and sandals. Duncan looks at him carefully, taking a few small steps toward him. With the final recognition, Duncan feels his heart sink. “Gary?” Duncan says.
“That’s me, Old Amigo,” Gary says, laying out his hand.
Not sure what to do next, Duncan hesitates and then awkwardly slaps him five, and then lays his hand out. Gary slams him five. It’s a thing they did in high school: a contest to see who could take the hardest slap. Gary won this round. It used to be a lot closer in the days when they would take the subway into the village from Queens to drink and smoke weed in the park and listen to blues in the clubs. One night, Gary even got up and blew harp with Buddy Guy. Gary was hot that night. They played “It Hurts Me Too” and “Rock Me Baby,” with Buddy’s brilliant smile lighting up the room. That was twenty years ago.
“How you been, Amigo? I’ve meant to call you. Are you still living in Queens?”
“No,” Duncan says, “Abby and I moved to Westchester about ten years ago.” Duncan sees Gary’s eyes darting up and down taking in the suit and briefcase. He wants to continue the conversation, but he can’t think of anything safe enough to ask Gary.
“How long have you been back in New York? I remember when you left to go to Austin.”
“Well, I didn’t finish school, but I got some gigs there. Then I went to LA for a while. As soon as I get enough money together, I’m going. I had this band out there. Damn, we were good. A really hot horn section. We broke up though. Are you still playing?”
Gary’s timeline had some significant gaps, but Duncan quickly decided that he’d rather not ask about them. “Yeah, I’m playing a little. Abby lets me go out one Tuesday night a month to play at a blues jam in a bar near our house. It’s not a big deal. Just a bunch of old farts making fools of themselves.”
“What kind of axe do you have?”
“I’ve got a few. I have a Strat, a Tele, a Les Paul, but I mostly play the PRS that I got last year.”
Gary chuckles and says, “Wow, you could sell that there collection and buy a car if you needed to. Old Amigo has done well for himself. What’s your day job?”
“I manage a hedge fund.”
“I don’t even know what that is. What do you do?”
“I trade stocks for investors.”
“Oh,” Gary says. “What’s Abby doing these days?”
“Abby’s working at a digital media company in Tribeca,” Duncan says.
“Good for her.”
The conversation drops suddenly as a young woman with purple hair and sunglasses approaches Gary’s table. She’s accompanied by her more plainly dressed girlfriend. She asks how much the CD’s cost. “Five dollars,” Gary says, “A dollar off if you buy at least three. See anything you like?” The woman looks over the table. “Not really,” she says. She asks her girlfriend if she sees anything she needs. “I could use some recordable DVD’s for my film project,” the girlfriend says. “Do you have recordable DVD’s?” Purple hair asks. “No, just CD’s,” Gary says. “Why don’t you have DVD’s?” she asks. “Because I don’t,” Gary snaps. As the women walk away, Gary turns back to Duncan. “New Yorkers,” he says.
Duncan needs to get away. “I have to be going. I’m meeting Abby for sushi for dinner at a place on 8th Avenue before we head back home.” He considers inviting Duncan, but there would be too many problems. His merchandise for one thing. What would they do with it? It’s possible that Gary is living someplace nearby, but Duncan didn’t want to find out. The real problem, however, is Abby. She’s never said a bad word about any of Duncan’s old friends, but she never liked Duncan, ever since that time he came over to visit them when they were first married and renting a house in Queens. Gary showed up one day, and he and Duncan went down to the basement and spent the whole afternoon smoking weed that stunk up the whole house for weeks. Since Gary has been out of their lives, Duncan hasn’t had any lost weekends. But Duncan feels on the spot. “Do you have a number I can reach you at? Maybe you can come up for a weekend and jam.”
“Well,” Gary says, “I don’t have a phone right now.” He reaches down underneath the table and tears a piece of paper off of the paper bag holding his extra CD’s. “Give me your number, and I’ll call you.”
Cornered. Duncan takes the paper from Gary and searches his shirt and jacket pockets for a pen; he’s always losing his pens. Gary opens a box of ballpoint pens from his table and hands one to Duncan.
“Here’s my number, and don’t forget to call.” Duncan hands the paper and the pen to Gary. Gary takes the paper but hands the pen back to Duncan. “Keep it, Old Amigo.”
Duncan is shaking as he walks the three blocks to the sushi bar. They’ll eat slowly. Maybe when they come back that way to get the subway up to Penn Station, Gary will be gone. To play it safe, they take a different route on another cross street.
As he pulls open the door of the sushi bar and steps inside, a wave of frigid air from inside hits him, and he shivers. The front of the restaurant is clean and brightly lit, in the back, in the cool darkness beyond the bar Abby awaits. Duncan will not tell her who he ran into on his way to meet her. When he sees her, the remorse he feels will recede for the moment, but it will return and linger on in the days to come, along with memories of summer nights when Buddy Guy grinned from ear to ear, and a blues harp wailed on “Rock Me Baby.”
Fred Bubbers
As dusk approaches, Duncan emerges from the steps of the Six Avenue subway line at Third Street. A gritty, summer gust of wind coming down the avenue lifts up his tie and carries it over his shoulder. He stops for a moment to get his bearings and then continues up the street past the small playground where a marathon basketball tournament has been playing for several generations. Players, some in sneakers, some in shoes, some in boots, sit on the asphalt court and lean back against the fence, waiting their turn. Up the street, some artists are sitting on lawn chairs behind easels, drawing charcoal portraits for the tourists. “Keep on keeping on,” Duncan says to himself. He continues up the block, passing his briefcase from hand to hand and turns the corner on to West Fourth Street. To his right, in a brownstone’s basement, is a French-Vietnamese restaurant. Next door is a vinyl record shop. He checks his watch; he’s meeting his wife for dinner, but he still has some time. He steps into the shop and smells the fragrance of burnt sandalwood and thinks they just might have it. He looks through the records on the rack first for some Bob Marley bootlegs. The shopkeeper, a man in his early fifties with a ponytail and a handlebar mustache tells him he hasn’t seen any in several years. Instead, Duncan heads over to the jazz and blues section. First, he looks for some B.B. King. He pulls out a copy of Live at the Regal. It’s sealed inside a plastic sleeve, but the cover is worn. For several years now, Duncan’s been trying to recover all the albums he foolishly sold when he and his wife had moved into their first house. CD’s had replaced vinyl, and you couldn’t even buy a turntable to play them on. Now they were coming back, and Duncan is setting up a media center in his basement featuring some vintage vacuum-tube based stereo equipment. In a digital world, analog is King.
“I’ve got a near pristine copy of that in the back,” the shopkeeper says. “Pressed in ’79. Interested?”
“Sure,” Duncan says. “Any Miles Davis? I’m looking for Kind of Blue.”
“Oh, for that I have a brand new reissue, 180 gram.”
“Okay.”
The shopkeeper returns with the albums and Duncan follows him to the checkout counter. “The B.B. King is being reissued later this year if you want to wait,” the shopkeeper said. “No,” Duncan says. “This one will do for now. How much?”
“B.B. is fifteen dollars, and Miles is twenty-five.”
“Do you take Amex?”
“Amex, MasterCard, Discover, Visa. We take everything. Nobody buys anything with cash anymore.” Duncan hands over his platinum card.
Duncan leaves the store with his purchases tucked under his arm, and crosses the street and enters the park. It’s been cleaned up since the last time he was down here. There are now carefully trimmed shrubs and flowerbeds where there used to be dirt and empty wine bottles. Somehow, they look unnatural. There is a new children’s playground with little asphalt hills for skateboards and a climbing structure built with railroad ties. On the sidewalk around the perimeter of the park, New York University students are jogging, fully equipped with designer sweats, Nike headbands, and Bluetooth earpieces.
He leaves the park and returns to West Fourth Street, heading toward Broadway. There are fewer people here because of the towering granite structures on both sides of the street that belong to NYU. The entrances are all used as fire exits and are locked from the inside. Strangely enough, however, there is a street peddler with his wares on a card table tucked inside one of the doorways. As he walks by, Duncan glances at the table. There’s a small collection of low-budget music CD’s, some packs of recordable CD’s, some cheap earbuds, some 256K thumb drives, a few nylon backpacks, and some ballpoint pens. Nothing worth stopping for. When he is about twenty steps past the table, he hears someone calling his name as if it were a question. “Duncan?”
Duncan turns and sees the vendor looking at him. The vendor has long brown hair with flecks of gray and a sandy-looking beard. He is wearing cutoff jeans and sandals. Duncan looks at him carefully, taking a few small steps toward him. With the final recognition, Duncan feels his heart sink. “Gary?” Duncan says.
“That’s me, Old Amigo,” Gary says, laying out his hand.
Not sure what to do next, Duncan hesitates and then awkwardly slaps him five, and then lays his hand out. Gary slams him five. It’s a thing they did in high school: a contest to see who could take the hardest slap. Gary won this round. It used to be a lot closer in the days when they would take the subway into the village from Queens to drink and smoke weed in the park and listen to blues in the clubs. One night, Gary even got up and blew harp with Buddy Guy. Gary was hot that night. They played “It Hurts Me Too” and “Rock Me Baby,” with Buddy’s brilliant smile lighting up the room. That was twenty years ago.
“How you been, Amigo? I’ve meant to call you. Are you still living in Queens?”
“No,” Duncan says, “Abby and I moved to Westchester about ten years ago.” Duncan sees Gary’s eyes darting up and down taking in the suit and briefcase. He wants to continue the conversation, but he can’t think of anything safe enough to ask Gary.
“How long have you been back in New York? I remember when you left to go to Austin.”
“Well, I didn’t finish school, but I got some gigs there. Then I went to LA for a while. As soon as I get enough money together, I’m going. I had this band out there. Damn, we were good. A really hot horn section. We broke up though. Are you still playing?”
Gary’s timeline had some significant gaps, but Duncan quickly decided that he’d rather not ask about them. “Yeah, I’m playing a little. Abby lets me go out one Tuesday night a month to play at a blues jam in a bar near our house. It’s not a big deal. Just a bunch of old farts making fools of themselves.”
“What kind of axe do you have?”
“I’ve got a few. I have a Strat, a Tele, a Les Paul, but I mostly play the PRS that I got last year.”
Gary chuckles and says, “Wow, you could sell that there collection and buy a car if you needed to. Old Amigo has done well for himself. What’s your day job?”
“I manage a hedge fund.”
“I don’t even know what that is. What do you do?”
“I trade stocks for investors.”
“Oh,” Gary says. “What’s Abby doing these days?”
“Abby’s working at a digital media company in Tribeca,” Duncan says.
“Good for her.”
The conversation drops suddenly as a young woman with purple hair and sunglasses approaches Gary’s table. She’s accompanied by her more plainly dressed girlfriend. She asks how much the CD’s cost. “Five dollars,” Gary says, “A dollar off if you buy at least three. See anything you like?” The woman looks over the table. “Not really,” she says. She asks her girlfriend if she sees anything she needs. “I could use some recordable DVD’s for my film project,” the girlfriend says. “Do you have recordable DVD’s?” Purple hair asks. “No, just CD’s,” Gary says. “Why don’t you have DVD’s?” she asks. “Because I don’t,” Gary snaps. As the women walk away, Gary turns back to Duncan. “New Yorkers,” he says.
Duncan needs to get away. “I have to be going. I’m meeting Abby for sushi for dinner at a place on 8th Avenue before we head back home.” He considers inviting Duncan, but there would be too many problems. His merchandise for one thing. What would they do with it? It’s possible that Gary is living someplace nearby, but Duncan didn’t want to find out. The real problem, however, is Abby. She’s never said a bad word about any of Duncan’s old friends, but she never liked Duncan, ever since that time he came over to visit them when they were first married and renting a house in Queens. Gary showed up one day, and he and Duncan went down to the basement and spent the whole afternoon smoking weed that stunk up the whole house for weeks. Since Gary has been out of their lives, Duncan hasn’t had any lost weekends. But Duncan feels on the spot. “Do you have a number I can reach you at? Maybe you can come up for a weekend and jam.”
“Well,” Gary says, “I don’t have a phone right now.” He reaches down underneath the table and tears a piece of paper off of the paper bag holding his extra CD’s. “Give me your number, and I’ll call you.”
Cornered. Duncan takes the paper from Gary and searches his shirt and jacket pockets for a pen; he’s always losing his pens. Gary opens a box of ballpoint pens from his table and hands one to Duncan.
“Here’s my number, and don’t forget to call.” Duncan hands the paper and the pen to Gary. Gary takes the paper but hands the pen back to Duncan. “Keep it, Old Amigo.”
Duncan is shaking as he walks the three blocks to the sushi bar. They’ll eat slowly. Maybe when they come back that way to get the subway up to Penn Station, Gary will be gone. To play it safe, they take a different route on another cross street.
As he pulls open the door of the sushi bar and steps inside, a wave of frigid air from inside hits him, and he shivers. The front of the restaurant is clean and brightly lit, in the back, in the cool darkness beyond the bar Abby awaits. Duncan will not tell her who he ran into on his way to meet her. When he sees her, the remorse he feels will recede for the moment, but it will return and linger on in the days to come, along with memories of summer nights when Buddy Guy grinned from ear to ear, and a blues harp wailed on “Rock Me Baby.”
