a longer story following, but I thought for our second shot at bat, let’s go to the guy who started it all for me. Jack Hagee was my first series character, both for short stories and novels. He is my voice. Always has been. I understand him better than anyone living, dead, fictional or whatever. This is the shortest Hagee story there is, but it’ll give you a good idea of whom you’re dealing with—both him and me.
BREAD AHEAD
A Jack Hagee Story
I’d gone down to Caesar’s Bay to get away from everything. It’d been a foul, grey, humid day—one of disappointments—one I didn’t want to remember. I’d solved another sad little case, brought another sniveling, cheating husband to ground like the big bad hero I am. I’d made the monthly office rent by ruining a familiy with pictures of daddy grunting in the back seat of their station wagon with a woman who didn’t look anything like mommy at all. As a daily occupation, it was getting to me.
My name’s Jack Hagee. I make my living, put food on my table, buy my toothpaste and subway tokens, by rooting through people’s lives and their garbage, by turning over rocks for lawyers and crying spouses and tired shopkeepers and more lawyers. I’m a private detective and that day I was hating my job as much as anyone else. That’s why, when midnight had passed and I still couldn’t get to sleep, tossing in my bed, dying in the clogging humidity steaming in off the ocean, that I’d gotten dressed and driven down to Caesar’s.
Caesar’s is a shopping mall at the end of Bay Parkway, the main drag through the neighborhood I live in. Most people stay away from it after closing—with good reason.
After dark, Caesar’s parking lot and the park adjacent become one large dark criminal carnival land. Dopers sell their wares, Johns pick up their ladies, kids strip cars, smoke dope, shoot craps and sometimes each other. And the worst thing about it all is, it isn’t in some terribly seedy neighborhood. Not a home between my apartment building and the river would sell for under a hundred and fifty thousand. It’s not a ghetto—just simply the same as the rest of New York City, bursting at the seams from too many people, all with painfully clear visions of the nowhere they are headed.
For those who haven’t tasted the city, haven’t felt the cold, leaden knuckle it digs into the backs of those who flock to it, let me just say that it is a hell—a black, indifferent hell, one which beckons to all types, the stupid and the arrogant, the talented, the cunning, the naive the hopeful and the self-destructive, to come from around the country to lick at the festering black syrup leaking from its million and counting wounds, begging them to call it honey.
Those who had begun to catch on to what the city had in store for them, however, sat in their cars, staring, or prowled the darkness of Caesar’s. I parked my Skylark at the rail meant to keep people from driving into the ocean and got out to prowl. Lighting a cigarette, I walked down along the massive stone sea wall, looking out into the storms front crawling in toward me over the black, oily water. The Verranzano bridge was lost in the fog, as was the parachute tower at Coney Island, both usually easily visible to my spot. Not then. That night the clouds were hanging thick—waiting.
Ignoring the clouds and whatever they were waiting for, I threw myself up and over the steel railing in front of me, settling down on the foot and half of ledge on the sea side of the barrier. My legs dangling over the dashing waves below, I stared out at the ocean, my eyes not focusing on anything, my brain relaxing for the first time in weeks. I was tired. Tired and alone, dying of despairing old age while still in my thirites.
Leaning back against the rail, I pulled a cigarette and managed to light it in the wet of the surrounding mist. I sucked the smoke in deep, holding it down as long as I could, maybe hoping to choke myself. No such luck. The nicotine did start to relax me, however, which at the moment was good enough.
I’d left my apartment in a foul mood. I don’t own an umbrella—ridiculous, effeminate props—but in my anger I’d slammed my way out leaving hat and coat behind. The thickening mist was soaking into my hair and clothes, drenching me. By the time I was ready for a second ’moke the sky had started drizzling to the point where I could barely get it lit.
I downed its fumes one breath at a time, watching the lightning splash along both the far shores before me. The coasts of Brooklyn and Staten Island were illuminated over and over, the random split seconds of light revealing the increasing press of the waves below and the rain above.
The truth of the image depressed me. Even nature worked for the city. It squeezed people, crushing them, forcing them to huddle and shiver, always prepared to wash them away forever for the slightest mistake. Part of me railed at the image but a larger part spoke in calmer tones, implying that perhaps hopelessness was the only sensible feeling one could have living in New York.
I leaned back with eyes closed, the rain lashing, surf below pounding hard enough to almost reach my shoes. I thought of all the reasons people come to New York and wondered what mine had been. As a friend once said, “People don’t pull up in covered wagons to the center of Times Square and say, ‘here it is, honey—a good land, a strong land, a decent land where our children can grow strong and free.’” They didn’t say it when people actually rode around in covered wagons, and they sure as hell don’t say it now. New York is not a good land or a strong land, and it certainly is not a place to bring children. Not by a long shot.
New York is an aching scum hole, a never-closing maw always willing to let anyone—no matter how corrupt, or illiterate, or evil—call it home and hang up their shingle. It is a giant con, a government owned-and-operated money drain, constantly sucking the life and joy and wealth out of its inhabitants the way a dying man sucks oxygen—greedily, as if each breath were the last. It grabs everything in sight, using guilt and law and lies and finally thuggery, if nothing lesser will suffice, to strip those who can’t fight it every single minute of every day, week in, decade out, of everything they have—their money their needs their dreams and wretched, desperate hopes—until finally it either gets the last juice left within them, piling their useless bones with the rest, or drives them away in pitiful defeat, frustrated and humiliated and wondering how anyone as tough as them could have lost—everything—so easily, to an enemy so impartial.
And, I thought, still they come. Every day by the hundreds—by the hundreds, they arrive by plane and bus, in rented trucks, old cars, on bicycles, motorcycles, or they walk and hitch if they have to—all of them desperate to follow some simple-minded plan they’ve mapped out for themselves that is just foolproof. One that shows how easy it will be to make it on Broadway, or in television, or as a painter, a broker, writer, dancer, restauranteur, publisher, actor, reporter, agent, or whathaveyou, willing to work hard now for their bread ahead, not realizing how many waiters and convenience store attendants and busboys, cab drivers, keyboarders, bartenders, store clerks, menials, drug dealers, hookers, homeless starvlings, and corpses the city requires for every you-have-made-it golden meal tick it passes out.
As the rain slacked of, I tried to get another ’moke going, ruefully asking myself what my excuse for being in New York was, knowing all along that I hadn’t come to the city to find anything. I’d come to lose myself, to hide a person I didn’t think anyone should see. I was tired when I did it, tired of corruption, tired of hate—of jealousy, pettiness, violence and anger. I was tired of these things in myself and others.
So naturally, I came to New York, where all the above vices and sins were long ago renamed art forms, encouraged to grow with wild abandon like kudzu, or social welfare. It was the move of a desperate man—trying to hide in a sweltering sea of desperation—hoping the heightened insanity of those around him would make his own reflection look normal. It hadn’t worked.
Not knowing what to do about any of it, though, I let the big problems rest and concentrated on lighting my cigarette. I had just gotten my
