So is getting a new boiler. Cast-iron boilers, the kind one needs when one’s home is heated with those big accordion-style radiators, are different in two crucial respects from the boilers of homes with baseboards. They cost twice as much, and are three times as heavy. I’m a child of the Internet Age, I make my living writing term papers for stupid college kids and business obituaries for magazines nobody reads. I can’t fix a boiler, and I couldn’t afford new one. So I did what anybody in my situation did, I called on old men for help the next morning.

The first old man I called was Azad. He was the previous owner of the house, and my former landlord in Jersey City. Azad owns about nine buildings and has perfected the black art of slumlordery. When I lived in one of his other apartments, I saw garden hose in the place of piping in bathrooms, pennies jammed into fuse boxes, entire closet walls made of caulking and spackle tape, electric lights powered by inserting loose wires into outlets, and, in the backyard, a small mountain of Army surplus typewriters, stacked up against the window of my living room and exposed to the elements. He tried to sell me one when I asked about them. “Just like new, except for the leaves,” he said.

I wasn’t stupid enough to buy a used typewriter from this man – I own a computer, after all – but I was stupid enough to buy a house. Anyway, in the cosmic algebra of Jersey City real estate, Azad owed me.

He brought me to another old man, a man named Moe. Moe was very old, about 117, if wrinkles can be believed, and he worked in a hardware store on Duncan Avenue. Moe knows. He was on a ladder in the plumbing aisle when we approached him, and glared at us with basset hound eyes. Azad called him “Mister Moe.” Mister Moe didn’t acknowledge my existence, since I was obviously too young to have any worthwhile information or questions. Mister Moe must have known he was coming, since he was on a ladder doing nothing but waiting by the sealant can I needed to buy; I imagined that when my boiler went SPUNG at 2AM the previous morning , Mister Moe sat up in bed across town and screamed, “A boiler! In danger!”

Moe wasn’t confident the sealant would work. In fact, he said “He’ll need a new boiler” to Azad. Azad shrugged. Moe was right. We poured in the sealant and turned on the water, and I had a metal box full of rain. “It’s leaking too much” Azad said about twenty times. When the water drowned our ankles, he turned off the water, but too hard, breaking the switch. We went to Home Depot. There, we were approached by a plumber named Sam. Same instantly diagnosed our problem: we needed a new boiler, there was nothing the orange-smocked man-ape we were drawing diagrams for could do for us. He’d give us a new boiler and install it, in one day, for $1800. He’d even, Sam The Plumber said, find us the same exact boiler, so that we wouldn’t need to buy any new fittings. Finally, Sam The Plumber shook both our hands and announced, “I am Arabic!” perhaps hoping to capitalize on some secret industrial stereotype I wasn’t familiar with. Italians are all in the mob, Greeks make the best greaseburgers, Jews are great with money, when you want a bitch of a boiler installed, call upon an Arab.

Azad is an Arab too, a Pakistani. As Sam walked off, he leaned in and explained, “That man isn’t a real Arab. He’s an Egyptian. Always watch out for an Egyptian.” Another set of stereotypes only old men know. Never buy a baby from a gypsy, it’ll be defective. Don’t stare at a Finn’s shoes, you’ll make him imperceptibly more self-conscious. Never buy a boiler from an Egyptian, they don’t really know what they’re doing. It doesn’t even get cold in Egypt.

We never found the switch at Home Depot. I spent the rest of the afternoon mopping up flood after flood. I needed a better quality of old man. I needed to let the genie out of his bottle, no matter what the consequences. I needed to call my father.

My father is a child of the industrial age, and is entirely perplexed by my lifestyle, as his own father was by his. My father was raised on the cliffs of Ikaria in Greece, and was expected to do nothing more than strangle goats, go to church and press olives. But my father was always mechanically inclined, and mechanically inclined is an unfortunate thing to be on the poorest island in the poorest country in post-war Europe. No phones, no toilets, no internal combustion engines, no electricity, no precision instruments, no watches, no factories, no paved roads, nothing but boats, and old men didn’t let strange kids near their boats. My grandfather, the blacksmith, was the most technologically advanced person in the area. His son wanted more. And eventually he got it. Drafted into the Navy by the military junta, trained to fix diesel engines, weld steel plates while at sea and repair factory systems, my father is living in his own little space age. Physics became his bitch. Tv commercials like to amaze us by explaining that the Internet can send images and information to our door at the speed of light. That isn’t hard. Hard would be getting those bundles of electrons to move much slower than the speed of light. We’re just along for the bitch’s ride. Hard would be, hard is, getting natural gas, water, waste water, steam and exhaust to mix and trade places on demand without leaving behind a wayward drop of water, a telltale sooty smell, or without blowing up the goddamn house. Installing a boiler is hard. Installing a boiler is a bitch, said my father, paraphrasing Isaac Newton. But he could do it. There’s almost nothing that can be done with two hands that he can’t do.

Installing a boiler is a bitch for one simple reason. Boilers are standardized. Houses are not. Boilers are designed to be moved once. The doorways through which we have to are designed for people, not boilers, to move through. More often than not, the upper floors of a house don’t even go up these days until the boiler is already there, in the basement.

So, my old man had to remove the old boiler, piece by piece, and I had to help. I bought a wrench and unscrewed what I could, usually having to rescrew something else back in first, or to knock off a nut with a hammer. My father noticed my wrecnh. Did I buy it just for this, he wanted to know. Yeah, I did. It’s a piece of shit, he told me. Go get the wrench from the car. The wrench covered in grease. The wrench that smells like an oil spill. The wrench that has actually been used before.

Father: 1, Nick:0.

I can’t help but keep score when working with my father. He knows how to do everything that requires physical labor and heavy tools. He’s the gawky computer nerd of the 19th century. He built his own home and still likes to drive by banks and point and laugh at them, because he didn’t need to take a mortgage, unlike those 20th century suckers and their cash economies. When a contractor built a home behind his backyard, my father quickly bought the lot between the two houses, and poured two and a half tons of compost on the property, just to teach the guy a lesson about trying to develop in his small town. He knows everything, and he lets you know that you know nothing.

We peeled the tin off the sides of the boiler, and found cardboard and brown powder covering the works. “Don’t put any in you mouth,” he told me, “it’s asbestos.” Like I had a tablespoon standing by. While cutting away at the fittings, I banged my head against a wayward pipe hanging from the ceiling twice. My fault for not watching. My father, who is all of five foot two banged his head against the same pipe seven times (I counted, of course). That was the pipe’s fault. Father: 1, Nick: 1.

We pulled apart the cast iron chambers of the boiler and discovered something interesting. Part of the job, the removal of the pilot light, is actually easy. Turns out my fifty year old cast-iron steam boiler with the standing pilot is actually a conversion job. It was a 110 year-old manual coal fed steam boiler, retrofitted to work with all this fancy natural gas and running water. All the old men lose a point for not recognizing this! I wanted to call Sam The Plumber, and demand he mount an expedition to raise the Titanic so he could install the exact boiler, an American Radiator Company model CL – 003, right now. Father: 0, Nick: 1.

My father speaks the language of old men, so he was incredibly useful. I ordered a new boiler and got a price quote for $2000. He calls the same place a moment later and got a quote of $1650. The difference boiled down to a simple nonsense syllable. In response to “So, you wanna standing pilot Mclean?” I answered, “Uhm…yes.” My father just answered “Yes.” At the store, Sanitary Plumbing Supplies, a large warehouse with every possible permutation of pipe, but without a working cash register, the old men rule. While we were there, a middle-aged man showed up, looking for a part for his toilet. What was the model of toilet? He didn’t know. Did he want a rubber or plastic flapper? Dunno. Is your toilet, asked the suddenly very bored old man behind the counter, one piece or two? He didn’t know. Even I know that my toilet is a two piece job. Sheesh. The middle-aged man rubbed his bald head and announced he was just going to go to Home Depot.

That man was a fool. I had already tried Home Depot, with Azad, and then again, with my father. Some eleven year-old employee tried to sell us galvanized pipe settings, the sort very useful for putting up a fence, but only useful for boilers if you want to kill yourself and your neighbors, all at once, in a terrible explosion. There are no old men there. Home Depot is the exclusive province of the young man, of the stupid man. No wonder it’s so popular.

A young man’s skills do come in handy though. My father had to map out a Rube Goldbergesque pathway of black steel and copper pipe fittings. Twenty five elbow joints, four and a half feet of 2 inch pipe. Seven 2 to 1 _ inch reducers. Seven six inch copper nipples. My father wasn’t sure how to spell the word nipple. I was there, ready with my immense bank of knowledge, gleaned from writing 5000 crooked term papers, enough papers to buy this bitch of a house. En eye double pee el ee. Father: 0, Nick: 2.

At the end of the day, after pulling out three quarters of a ton of cast iron and dumping it in my driveway, my father went home. I stayed home, shivering with my dog. My girlfriend and roommate spent the night elsewhere. Father: 1, Nick: 2.

He was back the next night, Monday, after work. My father works in Brooklyn, on the docks, and reports to work at 7AM. That means getting up at 5, squeezing into an ancient Volkswagen Jetta, and driving from lovely Port Jefferson to shithole Red Hook. He spends most of the day on the crane, 400 feet in the air, whipped by freezing wind coming off the bay, fixing the crane. He works on those huge cranes most people only see in silhouette when crossing the Brooklyn or Manhattan bridges. Few people know that they are designed to lift 60-ton containers from tanker ships, but that they spend most of their time lifting 80-ton containers. Most people don’t know, even those people who depend on these cranes, which includes everyone who likes…things, that these cranes break down multiple times a day. Most people don’t know that workers have been crushed by these cranes as they roll across the piers. And only my father knows what it is like to hose the corpse meat off the huge steel wheels of one of these cranes after it runs over one of his friends. That day, everyone else was given the afternoon off, but my father, who had the most seniority – who was the oldest of the old men there – had to stay behind for two hours, with a hose and a shovel, helping the police put his pal into a garbage bag. So after work on Monday, my Father showed up again to work on the boiler. He left at 1AM and went back to the docks to sleep on a bench. He didn’t want to embarrass my roommate or my girlfriend with his overnight presence. And on Tuesday, he did the same. Wednesday as well. Also Thursday. It takes a long time for one man to fit a standard boiler into a 110-ten year old house.

I’m not quite sure how to score that. I get free labor, but I regret it. I want to be able to do something for my father, but there is nothing I can do that he can’t, that he wants. I can make money with a computer, and this amazes him. Back when I lived at home, I’d write term papers in the living room, typing 100 words per minute with only two fingers, and my father and his cousins and his uncles, old men even more capable than he, would just stare. I didn’t have to leave the house. I didn’t have to bend my back and work twice as fast because some fat foreman with mob connections wants to get home while mama’s tomato sauce is still warm. I didn’t have to comb my hair. Of course, neither does my father, but he feels bad about it. The only job worth having, he’d tell me as a kid, is one where you walk in with combed hair and a pressed shirt, and walk out at the end of the day the same way. Even though I’ve never had to hose the corpse meat off a crane, I feel bad that I’m not able to get a job like that, for him.

Father: 2, Nick: 2.

Finally it is Friday again, and my boiler works, sort of. I have to go downstairs to the basement, connect two wires together, get a little shock from the 24 volt switching mechanism, and then go back upstairs to enjoy the heat. My roommate lives down there, and whenever I go into the boiler room, he asks me, “Gonna turn the boiler on?” The old man answer would be, “Of course not. I’m just going to give her – boilers are female, like ships and other bitches – a massage. What are you, stupid?” Forty minutes later, when I go back to the basement to turn off the boiler, my roommate asks me, “Gonna turn the boiler on?” The old man answer to that stupid question would consist of a 6 inch copper nipple to the head. This I know from experience. Luckily for my roommate, I’m still a young man, and we have a new boiler, one guaranteed for ten, rather than 110 years.

It’s next Tuesday when my thermostat is installed. I haven’t spent even five minutes with my lovely new boiler since then. I also haven’t spent even five minutes with my father either, who lives in lovely Port Jefferson. He built a greenhouse last week, after work. I wrote a term paper on NAFTA, for work. He fixed a fifty year-old tractor he bought at auction from an old bankrupt man and used it to move four tons of compost around the lot between him and his young man enemy. I wrote a little something on the thrilling topic, “self-published books tends to suck” for the Village Voice. His own boiler broke, during the storm of the century. He fixed it himself, for free, in one day.

Father: 3, Nick: 2.

Then I realized something. Lots of immigrants’ sons have these imaginary competitions with their highly skilled 19th century fathers. We can never measure up, never fully be on our own, never navigate the planet without the help of an old man. Our own fathers were much smarter when they were young men, they didn’t have these ridiculous hangups. They knew how to win. They left the continent their fathers were on behind them, and dove into a crazy new world without money, family or even the ability to spell the word nipple, and grew old here on their own terms. Meanwhile, I can’t even consider moving further from my parents than Jersey City, what if my boiler breaks again?

Final score: Father: 4, Nick: 2.

Three-card monte is a simple trick. The tosser holds up two black cards and one red one, and tosses them face down on a table. He shuffles them a bit, then asks the punter (in this case, one of the Wall Street guys) to point to the red card. Thanks to a little prestidigitation, the red card appears to have been dropped first, but was really dropped second. The punter loses the card’s place and thus his money. Repeat till the cops arrive.

And on this sunny April afternoon, the cops were nowhere to be seen. I watched one guy dump $300 in six minutes and then leave with a smile on his face as two more fellows fell in after him and placed their bets. One of the guys — I’ll call him Stan Laurel because he was a long stringbean of a man — dumped $75 in three turns. His pal, a hefty, sweating Oliver Hardy sort, was a bit smarter. So smart that he actually called the right card after Laurel eliminated one of the black cards with his incorrect guess. Hardy was so smart, in fact, that he fell into the tosser’s second trap.

“One bet atta time, one bet atta time,” the tosser said, then offered Hardy $100 a turn. Hardy ran out of money after two rounds. By the time the crowd started turning against the tosser, I had watched him pocket at least $800. Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.

Three-card monte has been around since at least Fifteenth-Century Spain, and the even older shell game was probably played in the shadow of the pyramids. By the Nineteenth Century, tossers were dressed to the nines, playing on the image of the professional gambler. Tired and hungry settlers, half-drunk prospectors and bumpkins were their punters. Millions of hard lessons later, the unwary marks learned the basic lesson of capitalism: There ain’t ever gonna be something for nothing. So they dropped out of the game, leaving only the wary.

But what makes the game such a powerful draw down in the Financial District? Even in these economic doldrums, the average Wall Street punter can still work through lunch and pocket more money working the phones than he ever could with a game of three-card monte. It’s the nature of scam to tantalize, though. Working the phones is hard. Shaking down some poor sucker on the street, especially when he looks and acts like a laid-off janitor, seems easy in contrast. The money is flying. The sun is bright. The smell of boiled hot dogs is in the air. And there’s no way some street guy can beat a polished financial predator, right?

Three-card monte now depends on what they call “the rube act.” The tosser I observed was great. Rotten sneakers, holey jeans, worn T-shirt and a missing tooth. His entire ensemble could have been purchased ten times over for the price of one of his victim’s neckties. Who could resist? Certainly not the Wall Street people. They think this guy must be running his game out of desperation, hoping that luck will put a few bucks in his pocket. The game seems simple. Get lucky and win! Even if you’re unlucky, you’ve not lost that much, and there’s always next round, right? But three-card monte isn’t that simple.

The tosser’s investment in human resources is quite extensive, for example. There’s a shill, who appears to win the game; a roper, who attracts folks to the game and encourages people to play, muscle to settle disputes in the tosser’s favor and a lookout to watch out for the fuzz.

What makes three-card monte so hilarious is that the scam is now so obvious. These days, even TV sitcoms debunk it. The police departments posts signs in subway stations to warn off the tourists, and the trick itself is easy enough to teach children. It’s been dissected in books and magazines for years. Why play it then? Canada Bill Jones, the famous monte operator and Faro addict put it best.

“I know the game is crooked,” he said once, while losing his shirt in a dirty Faro game, “but it’s the only game in town.”

Brother Theodore was always a ghost to me. When I returned to Manhattan in the early 1990s, Theodore was a specter haunting downtown. His one-man show, terrible and comic all at once, was still running on 13th Street, and posters boosting the show were everywhere. I saw them at the buildings at the New School For Social Research (dead, reborn as New School University), fluttering on lamp posts like wounded birds, shoved into Learning Annex and New York Press newsboxes, and slid under the door of my creaky railroad apartment on West 12th Street. He looked young in the posters, or the cartoonish profile of him did – he was half Charles Addams’ Lurch, half Hanna Barbara’s Magilla Gorilla. He was firmament and ephemera both, like the old dead bastards named Astor and Varick and Stuyvesant who pollute this city, like the vanished Indian trials that still make us veer west off Broadway. Everyone knew the Brother Theodore phenomenon, but nobody spoke about it, much the same way nobody spoke of Peter Stuyvesant even as they trampled upon and puked on the boundary of his old farm – The Bowery.

I finally saw the show, one of the final performances. Theodore was shorter than I expected, and much older too. I hadn’t realized that the Holocaust survivor thing wasn’t a gimmick, I hadn’t realized that Theodore wasn’t a character playing by some pot-bellied trustfundian with a day job busing tables at Time Cafe. I was too young for Mike Douglas, and could never bear to sit through Letterman. I saw The ‘Burbs and even the animated The Last Unicorn, but never connected name to voice or to face.

Theodore was dead then too, when he had his show. He was animated by cthonic forces, by the black ooze under Manhattan that takes care of its own. But he was damn funny, and he challenged the audience constantly. How dare we laugh at his pain, at all our pain, but we sure as hell shouldn’t cry of whimper. My laughter was the nervous titter of someone absolutely sure that cemeteries aren’t haunted or scary or dangerous. But Theodore led us out of the darkness again, by the end, and left to think about life and death. Dance till your legs rot off.

I wanted to see the show again, but nobody would come with me, and I didn’t want to be one of those weirdoes who attended the show alone, over and over. Eventually, it closed, and Theodore faded into history. He was dead I thought, as dead as the mice I trapped with glue and flung against walls in my Rivington Street slum, as dead as my friend Jay (from smack), as dead as my career plans to take the world of independent motion pictures by storm. I found myself on Long Island, writing term papers for wealthy, but stupid college students, and then in Jersey City, doing the same.

Richard Metzger reintroduced me to Theodore. I had just volunteered myself as a writer for Disinfo.com, and Richard invited me to cross the Hudson (but not in the form of a beautiful swan, the way Theodore himself did, every day, at 2PM) and come out to lunch. He was a friend of Theodore’s, who was inexplicably still alive, but in constant pain and unable to leave his apartment. I could interview him, Richard said, and give the old man a little company to break up the monotony of his life. Theodore was going deaf, he couldn’t watch television. He couldn’t visit with his friends, who were all much younger than him (even his girlfriend was half his age, in her 40s), and he couldn’t even fall asleep without pain.

So I went. Theodore was hilarious as long as I sat on his right side, where he could still hear me. Sharp as a whip. Strong as a suspension bridge, even in his 90s. His arms were like tensile steel wrapped in a netting of pork fat. Whatever dark trades he had made earlier in his life offered him some vitality to go along with the imprisonment and pain of his final days. I couldn’t interview him with Richard there though, he said, I’d have to come back. He’d get another evening of company out of me that way, but I was glad to do it, deadlines be damned.

So I went back. It took him two minutes to walk across his efficiency apartment to answer the door. He smiled a crooked, gaping head wound smile, and invited me in. He told me everything. How Einstein visited him home as a child, and how the scientist answered profound dinnertime questions about God and the nature of the cosmos with “How the hell would I know?” Young Theodore played chess with Einstein during that time. “He was a very mediocre chess player,” Theodore told me, “much like yourself.”

Theodore used to hustle chess in the park. He was a member of a local club when in his prime, and regularly lost money to the Grandmasters when depressed (Grandmasters only play for money) but collected pieces and pawns like stamps otherwise. I am a good enough player to know how bad I am. The one-move-at-a-time ducks were easy pickins’, but anyone who thinks more than three moves ahead gets my queen in no time. Thus, I never played with anyone – there would be no point to it, since I would either win easily or lose utterly. I played the computer though, time and again, and erased my games afterwards, just in case Deep Blue gained sentience and hacked into my box for a larf. But I played Theodore, because there are things one does for old men that one does for nobody else.

Theodore was still an excellent chess player, but his brain was dying. He had a great number of opening moves, but senility and pain kept his head out of the game. We drew a few, he won a few, I won once. I think he let me, to keep me interested, to keep me coming back.

He asked me about me. I told him that I used to live with a woman who was also in constant pain, thanks to childhood sexual and physical abuse. He wept, saying that he couldn’t bear to feel sorry for himself and his situation when there are young people whose bodies were broken in the same way his was after nearly a century of living. This, from a man who faced Dachau. I wanted to hug him, but I felt I’d break him.

I visited him a couple of times after that as well, for chess and takeout food. He grew more distant, as his personality began to collapse into senility, senility exacerbated by constant agony (try to think and be witty with your limbs in thick vices) and near-complete deafness. He called me a few times, to ask about his appearance on Disinfo’s tv show. Was he still funny? Yes. Compelling? Yes. Did the audience at Disinfo Con like his little video? They loved it. Would he get his $800? Beats me, I told him, I just write about George W. Bush and people who like to fuck stuffed animals for Disinfo, I have nothing to do with the tv show or the money. He told me I speak too fast (I do) and that I shouldn’t torture him by rambling on the phone when he wants to speak with me (I’m sorry).

On my 28th birthday, which I spent alone in the former crackhouse I had recently bought, he called me again. He was very far gone. Theodore couldn’t remember my name, but he somehow remembered that February 20th was my birth date. He knew that I was a friend of Richard’s (sure) a playwright (not) and “devastatingly handsome” (…uhm). Would I come and see him again soon? Yes, maybe. Did we play chess once? We did, a number of times. Was I that terrible player he kept beating? Oh yes.

I never saw Theodore after that. I couldn’t bear it. My visits with him were draining, like watching 3000 thousand years worth of crumbling pyramids in an instant. I tried to keep track of him, from afar. He had an advice for the lovelorn column for Mean Magazine. That meant that somebody must be visiting him, to read him letters and record his responses, right? Good, good. I asked Richard for Theodore’s number again, in April of 2000, but never called it.

I even thought about writing this appreciation, even though I barely knew Theodore (and I thought about writing this parenthetical comment, to explain that I thought about writing that I thought about writing this appreciation (and this one as well (and this one, on and on, into the dark pit of nothingness at the center of existence))) and didn’t know much about his life, other than what he told me.

He told me that Gil Hodges’ widow often saw Gil’s ghost, and that he hoped people had breasts and buttocks and cocks in heaven. He distrusted his senses and their limitations, even before they began to betray them. Once, he saw Woody Allen on tv, in some film he couldn’t remember, and saw the most exquisite moment of acting at Allen’s character looked on at a wedding he wasn’t a part of. A look, not a pose or an expression, captured the essence of experience in a way that no other actor he could. Theodore didn’t like his role in The Last Unicorn, because he couldn’t be himself. He didn’t hope to die on stage, but he wouldn’t have minded if that’s how it happened. He never voted, except in Screen Actors’ Guild elections. He hoped that one day someone would do something with a short film in the German Expressionist style he had made 45 years ago, Midnight Café. And he was disappointed that I didn’t share his enthusiasm for dancing till one’s legs rotted off, for truly living only when one was mere steps from the mouth of the grave.

I was disappointed in myself too, I still am, for not seeing Theodore more often, for not wanting a larger share of the dead heat of his collapsing dwarf star, for not thinking and joking and firing my synapses till they collapsed into gray jelly in a cold skull. I deleted the chess game from my computer, and emptied the recycle bin tonight. I’ll never play chess again.

April 16th, 2001.

The invisible hand of the marketplace helped me across the river, to Jersey City. Several years later, the big boys of finance capital have caught wind of this smallish city on the wrong side of the river and like Daniel Boone spotting chimney smoke on the horizon, it may be time for me to move on.

Jersey City isn’t the Kentucky backwoods, it is the single most diverse city in America, even beating out New York City and Los Angeles in the number of ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups represented in force in the town. In the early 1990s, Jersey City and the surrounding area was home to the racist “dot buster” gangs of youths who attacked immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, but few traces of that antagonism remain. Blacks, Latinos, the remnants of the Polish, Italian and Irish ethnic communities have been joined by newcomers from Egypt, India, Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa, and in the streets, peace reigns for the most part. In the boardrooms and ward offices though, a different set of relationships is brewing, relationships which may transform this city beyond all recognition and push the working class families and new immigrants out of yet another city. And I may be part of that plan.

THE RUST COMPANY OF NEW JERSEY in huge red neon greeted me when I moved to the Journal Square area at the beginning of last year. The sign is atop an office building and inexplicably dominates the local skyline.

“Why is it there?” asked my roommate Chris one day, of the sign, which has never managed to spell out the actual name of the company, The Trust Company Of New Jersey, since we moved. “It can’t really help for branding and marketing, can it?”

“Oh, well it is strategically positioned. You see, back before the Hindenburg, this used to be part of the old Akron to New York dirigible route. Everyone coming into town would see the sign while sitting at little aluminum tables and drinking Singapore Slings. The trust company was King Shit back then.”

“Wow, that really does make sense,” he said.

“Yeah, well I made it up,” I said.

The sign is our only entertainment is this part of town. There are no little cafes, no funky bars, no clubs, no bookstores. The sign, also, thanks to poor upkeep, comments on the neighborhood like a Greek chorus with its occasional shuttering and its blinked-out letters. In this part of Jersey, only abandoned light bulbs tell the truth. I had been living in downtown Jersey City since 1997, eking out a living as a freelance writer. It was only a dollar to get to Manhattan, and the prices for everything were much lower in this town, which has been called the Left Bank, the West Borough, and even the “afterbirth” of New York City. For $700 a month, I got a basement apartment where I could stretch my arms without touching both walls. I paid my rent in cash to the landlord who lived upstairs. The city had already begun to revitalize the area; a former dumping ground for tires and rusted cars had been transformed into the Newport Mall, with an attendant hotel and huge Shop Rite. A high rise was built on another old dump. The area was an Enterprise Zone, so sales taxes were only 3%. Some friends of mine heard about the town and found cheap apartments as well. Brownstones could be had for under $400,000, so the inevitable happened. White people showed up. They had cars and some of them had little freedom flags ever-so-discretely on the bumper. Not enough to make a political statement or even register as “out” but just enough to serve as a band-aid for social consciousness and perhaps pick up a date in the mall parking lot. My rent also went up to over $1000. I had to move. “Here comes the neighborhood,” I told my landlord, and I headed west, deeper into the city.

I bought a house across town in the run-down Journal Square area. It was the center of the city once, but not much is there now except for the community college, a Jesuit college, a few cheap restaurants, a strip of 99 cent stores and a huge prescient sign with a burnt out T. If there really was a Rust Company Of Jersey City, it would be doing a booming business on this side of town. Only fifteen minutes away from Manhattan, a two-family home can be had for less than $150,000. Downtown, young white people with punk outfits and cups of coffee would stop me on the street. “Thank God,” they say, “you’re white. You look cool. I’m so lonely here. Can we be friends?”

No. We can’t.

Whiteness in downtown then, and in Journal Square now, is a mark, not the default. Some people think it means you are in their special little club. The We Don’t Really Live In Jersey City, We Just Ended Up Here Club. Won’t you join the club and do the things white folk do, like scurry past the Black kids on the corner, while wondering where the police are?

I won’t. So I moved across town, where grocers renting Egyptian musicals outnumbered video stores, and where flyers promising to get-rich-quick schemes took the place of poetry reading announcements. I moved in Jersey’s own rust belt, because I could afford to buy there, and my dark hair and skin allowed me to pass for Egyptian or Latino. I wasn’t accosted by white people in the street for nearly a month.

Then someone fixed the T on the Trust Company sign. The Y burnt out instead. THE TRST COMPANY OF NEW JERSEY, or “The Tryst Company Of New Jersey.” Jersey City is engaged in a tryst of sorts, with some of the top Wall Street firms. Goldman Sachs, PaineWebber, Salomon Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Deloitte & Touche, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Lehman Bros., and most recently, Chase Manhattan Bank have all moved or are planning to move some of their operations to Jersey City. Even in this booming economy, large capital is looking to cut costs, and as I found out four years before Chase Manhattan did, rent is cheap in Jersey City, nearly half the price.

And for big business, the city is even cheaper than that.

Jersey City homeowners pay some of the highest property taxes in the country, but in order to attract finance capital, the city limits property taxes large businesses have to pay. Many residents – even the homeowners — are in the lowest income bracket (less than $36,000), and yet their total tax bill amounts to 15.6 percent of income compared to only 6.2 percent of those people in the top income bracket ($404,000 or more). In Jersey City, 34.2% of property in tax exempt, and much of it is on the “Gold Coast” of the city, where high-rise residences, brokerage firms and banks squeeze in, and where 85% of over-the-counter stock trades in this country take place.

From the high rise condos near Exchange Place, a well-heeled resident may be able to catch a glimpse of a parking lot with a few rickety trailers. It isn’t another high rise going up, it is an annex for a local public school, part of a system so bad and so underfunded that the state of New Jersey had to take it over in 1989. Republican Mayor Bret Schundler’s remedies are typical of his ilk: vouchers and charter schools. Even with vouchers, the low-income families of Jersey City aren’t often able to afford private school, and there simply aren’t enough seats for all children who need them in the charter schools. The vouchers tend to go to the new residents, the high-rise dwellers who can’t imagine sending their kids to learn in a leaking tractor trailer, whether the trailer houses a public school or a charter school.

Property taxes, in essence, constitute a transfer payment from the working-class homeowners of the city to the big businesses on the Gold Coast. While nearly $1 billion has been invested in the Gold Coast region of Jersey City, much of the rest of the town is still suffering from high property taxes and poor schools. New Jersey will be spending $200 million more this year to attract companies. Chase Manhattan is moving thanks to the corporate tax credits, the low rents, the employee training funds and the limited sales tax it will have to pay. Meanwhile, the city is offering no tax relief for most of its residents. The day I received my quarterly tax bill for over $1000 dollars (only three more to pay this year!), the O on the Trust Company sign expired bitterly. THE TRST COMPANY F NEW JERSEY. Fuck New Jersey.

In 1999, Mayor Schundler announced massive lay-offs for city workers, citing budget shortfalls, in spite of crushing property taxes for most of the city’s residents. The state of New Jersey was compelled by the judiciary to up the amount it spent on urban school districts, and in order to keep the state budget solvent, cut its aid to the rest of Jersey City, which found itself preparing to lay off 1,271 Jersey City employees, representing 58% of the City’s total civilian workforce, 175 police officers, and 137 firefighters. The city blamed the state, then raised property taxes again. The subsidies for the Gold Coast continue unabated. F’ New Jersey indeed. Jersey City seems to be finding itself. In the Winter 2000 semester, I taught two courses for Hudson County Community College in Jersey City. The wage: $400 per credit, or 50% of what an adjunct instructor makes at a City University of New York community college ten minutes away.

The orientation: a listing of the buildings the college was going to buy. The training: one hour with a coordinator, to explain to me that attendance must be taken. Nobody mentioned that half of my students had never read a book. Concentrate on teaching them how to use Microsoft Word to type up papers, and how to use the World Wide Web to research instead of talking about rhetoric, I was told. Use the computer labs; major companies had provided some of the money for them. I couldn’t even do that properly, thanks to Jersey City.

Instead of school-based email accounts (which are federally funded and have been available at most colleges since the mid-1980s), students were directed to make free hotmail accounts. The web-based hotmail isn’t used in workplaces, except to surreptitiously shuttle porn past server firewalls. What are we training these students to do anyway? And of course, security guards closed the computer labs at 4PM, because nobody could possibly need a computer to type up a paper after 4PM. The vending machines and tv lounge remained open till 9PM.

One of my students was learning disabled. I didn’t find this out until five weeks into the course. A professional tutor for my English 101 class had “accidentally” gone to the wrong class section for the first seven weeks of the term. Six of my students had been in the United States for less than a year and pushed out of Basic English courses due to overcrowding. They simply had no chance to pass a college-level English course. And one student was legally blind. Unable to use a keyboard or monitor, barely able to write at age 40 and still waiting for assistance from someone in the city, or someone in the school, to help her simply adjust her computer monitor so that it could display REALLY BIG LETTERS. None came, in direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She failed the course too.

At one point late in the term, I asked the students to write about their favorite book. Nearly half my class had never read one. The college library literally contained fewer works of literature than my own home does. The city was doing about as much to fund learning in this college as it was doing to save its public schools: not much.

Unlike most colleges, where English 101 is sufficient, the HCCC 101 is considered so poorly designed that most four-year colleges won’t even accept it as a transfer credit. Instead of repairing the 101 curriculum, the college simply made students take 102 as well, thus doubling the English and Humanities Division’s income for basic writing courses. Additionally, students have to take the useless ‘College Survival Skills’ course, which does little more than remind them to go to class on time.

For students whose main problem with coming to class is taking care of their own children or attempting to hold onto their job while juggling school, the money spent on College Survival Skills could have been spent on pretty much anything else with better results. Daycare? Scholarships? Tuition reduction? Night courses? And then of course, there was attendance. I was never observed teaching (though the Assistant Dean made and broke two appointments to do so, violating college rules) but I damn sure had to take attendance every day, as if I was teaching high school or warehousing mental patients.

Examined as part of a greater Gold Coast strategy, the local community college and its poor funding and administration makes perfect sense. Jersey City, in order to defend its massive subsidies of wealthy corporations, needs to demonstrate that these companies provide jobs. My students, most of whom were computer science or accounting majors, and all of whom were convinced that they were going to “get a good job” and “be well-off” can work on Exchange Place. They weren’t well-versed in literature, or even in developing simple English sentences, but most of them had basic computer skills and finally learned to show up on time.

They weren’t going to be CPAs or software engineers, but an HCCC education prepared them to be the next generation of data entry clerks, security guards and janitors. The public will be satisfied when their kids start clinging to the bottom of the corporate ladder, and capital will have an array of faces of color for their brochures and corporate videos. The white kids of Jersey City, of course, skip HCCC and attend New Jersey City University (recently upgraded from a mere college with a new sign and some departmental juggling) or Saint Peter’s College, a few blocks away from HCCC.

By concentrating urban renewal on a small sliver of the city, the rest of Jersey City becomes all the more desperate. Most of my students lived in homes owned by their families (often three or more generations were squeezed in) and they wanted out. If two more years in a poorly funded school promised a way out, who was I to tell them that they had better get used to the low wages and zero security of temp work? They could see the skyscrapers rising across town; if I was so smart, why was I in the slum with them, and not out there with the other white people? I quit after one semester, and raised the rents on the friends I was renting to to make up the lost income. So much for my f’ing principles. Then they fixed the O, but the F on the Trust Company sign burnt out.

THE TRUST COMPANY OF EW JERSEY.

Even with Chase Manhattan Bank moving into town, my Manhattan friends still stare at me when I mention my address in “Ew, Jersey!” Avenue B in Manhattan, where we used to loiter and litter with impunity while digging through garbage cans for soda bottles to return, has been redone into a strip of fancy stores. Alphabet City, once the home of squats and poor families, is now where my hipster friends took over. And they took over, thanks to jobs with bankrupt dot coms and family trust funds. They aren’t pioneers like me, ready to explore bold new vistas of large apartments and inexpensive rents.

Since moving to Jersey City in 1997, I have lured 15 other people across the river, most of them white and all of them college educated. I was helping friends find nice places to live, I thought, but now I see that I too am simply part of the Gold Coast strategy. While I lived on handshake deals, the apartments I found for my friends were in apartment complexes. They talked to realtors, they found jobs with Paine Webber and Chase. After remaining stagnant for years, the ripples from my crossing the Hudson are beginning to spell higher rents. I bought to avoid paying $1400 for a three bedroom, two bathroom apartment (so what if it would have cost $5000 in Manhattan?). I raised the rents I collect now, to make up for tax increases. This will push my friends away from Journal Square and towards the Gold Coast, where they can walk (or be driven by corporate shuttles) to work and spend their money in swanky bistros and little boutiques. They can’t handle the bodegas here, or the fact that the only supermarket is across town, next to the only major mall. They want air conditioning. They want doormen. And thanks to the money flowing into the Gold Coast, they can get it.

In the summer, I leave the front door to my building unlocked and ajar to let the draft in. We have never even heard of a crime occurring on this block. Yet, one tenant reports being told to get off the porch by a cop who was worried about her. It isn’t safe after sundown he said, gangs will attack you right on your stoop. In the months we’ve been living here, we never saw any evidence of gang attacks or dangerous stoops, but the message was received.

Chris, who works for Chase Manhattan Bank, left for Manhattan one evening, but then came back home two minutes later. He couldn’t cross the street to get to the PATH train, because there were “a whole mob of homeboys on the corner.” They weren’t violent, or threatening towards him, and there were only two of them, “but still…” he said, as if I could finish the sentence myself. A week later he admitted that it was just too sultry to walk the seven blocks to the train, and he didn’t feel like hanging out with his friends in the Upper West Side that night anyway. The homies were just a convenient excuse. He joined the White Guy’s club. It never occurred to him that since it was 95 degrees and since most of the apartments on the corner don’t have air conditioning, that people may stay outside to socialize and cool off. Or maybe he did know this, “but still…”

Then there is the upstairs tenant, who keeps a pistol-grip shotgun (a gift from his grandfather, a former steel-mill Pinkerton who was issued the gun to blow away union men in the case of a sit-down strike) under his bed, in case of “home invasion.” He is a law student at New York University, and told the neighbors that he was going to fight “for the people” after graduation, to make sure he was liked and admired on the block. He’s going into corporate law next year. And these are the most progressive of my friends, the ones with working class backgrounds and a distrust of the system. I cleared the path with them, and on the horizon, we can see corporate chimneys rising, with the threat of gentrification looming. They’re ready to turn back, and take their rightful places as conquering heroes in the upper middle class. Me, I’m looking West. I hear that there are abandoned paint factories in Harrison, and that the rents there are very cheap. Ew, Jersey, I can hear them all say, but they’ll follow me eventually, and I’ll have played my part in the destruction of another working class neighborhood.

January, 2001

Northern Gothic is dark fiction. It’s a timeslip story, the racial hatreds of the Civil War Draft Riots drift over into modern day Chelsea and victimize a gay black wannabe dancer named Ahmadi. It was my poison pen letter to Manhattan and to all the people I’ve known who came to the city to make it big, sent the rents skyrocketing and infested the scene, only to run back to Ann Arbor or Columbus or Fresno once mama’s money ran out. You know the type. They struggle along in publishing or the music industry for a few years and decorate their apartments with strings of chili pepper lights and mannequin torsos. They own (and sometimes actually wear) feather boas. And nearly all of them gained their romantic notions of Manhattan and life in it from dog-eared high school library books. Northern Gothic was supposed to be an antidote for that, my way of saying, “New York is full. Go home.” But it was the horror and science fiction communities that picked up the book, not the hipsters. Fat guys in beards and Buffy The Vampire Slayer T-shirts, not those cute young women with bobs and Buddy Holly eyeglasses who never give me the time of day.

I wasn’t the next Dennis Cooper after all. And if the sales reports are true, I’m not the next Stephen King either. I’m the first Nick Mamatas. So of course, I had to represent New York at the Stokers. I’m not really a hotel banquet sort of guy though. More of a Gray’s Papaya sort (at least I was until those porkbelly-trading fatcats upped the price to 75 cents for a frank!) I didn’t even own a suit. I found one a few days before the event, though, in Chinatown, fresh off the truck. There was still sweatshop sweat on the jacket. I borrowed a tie from my housemate, who did the dyke thing a few years ago and had plenty of semi-formal wear to spare. I passed on the shoes though, since I wasn’t going to win. I was going to lose the Bram Stoker Award, and lose it really bad.

It became a joke and a PR thing. “Not only am I going to lose,” I told my friends and even to two interviewers, “I’ll come in fifth out of five. The only drama for me is whether I score the lowest vote total in Stoker history.” I was about as confident as an Iraqi general, and for good reason. Within the horror community the Stokers are sometimes known as “the Strokers.” Members of the HWA publicly vote on a preliminary ballot and then a final ballot. Since everyone knows who votes for what, logrolling is legendary. My own nomination sneaked in through the back door, thanks to the Additions Jury, whose job it is to make sure that deserving but obscure work gets noticed. Northern Gothic qualifies as obscure: it came out six weeks before the end of the year, from a publisher — Soft Skull Press — that never prints horror and rarely prints fiction, and I utterly failed to do gloryhole monitor duty at any of the many horror conventions held throughout the year. Clearly, I had no chance at all.

It gets worse. In the Long Fiction category I was up against the legendary fantasist Harlan Ellison, hot young writer Brian Keene (who was nominated in four categories!), popular Steve Rasnic Tem who won the category last year, and Nancy Echtemendy, whose story appeared in a widely read magazine. Plus, she’s the treasurer of the Horror Writers Association. Would you buy new shoes to lose this badly? I wore my ratty old Doc Martens and my navy blue suit, to properly represent, Notorious B. I. G.-style.

I failed to represent, though. I was utterly anonymous. The woman running the registration desk gave me my badge and then said “Want to buy a Stoker? The campaigning is horrible. ‘Vote for me and I’ll vote for you. ‘Vote for me and I’ll put you in my anthology.’ Nominees should hand out twenty dollar bills with For Your Consideration written across the top.”

“Wow, I’m nominated and I didn’t do any of that!”

“Congratulations,” she said, her smile not wavering for a moment, “and good luck.”

Horror fiction has been in the sales doldrums for much of the past decade, and as such only a small community remains. There’s an upside. The terror of the science fiction convention — the bearded know-it-all who smells of cat piss and denounces authors to their faces — has no Stoker banquet analog. Horror folks are normal, intelligent and friendly. The downside was that everyone seemed to know one another. Except me. I recognized a few names from bylines and the Internet, but the only conversations I managed to have were about how expensive the drinks were. The Helmsley charged $5.50 for a splash of ginger ale poured over a glass of ice. Even booze, the writer’s friend, had abandoned me at seven bucks a bottle and two long lines, one for tickets, and then one for the bar to turn tickets into alcohol. It was like buying Russian toilet paper or something.

And “Good luck.” Everyone who recognized my name from the final ballot wished me good luck. I made my ego-defense joke. “Oh, I’m doomed. Last place here I come!” And the same people who moments before were decrying the corruption of the Stroker Awards would just smile and say “Hey, you never know. Good luck.” Of course, almost nobody I spoke to read the book — the few who did liked how I described the city. “Reminds me of why I’m staying in the hotel all weekend,” one of them said.

Invisibility was an asset when it was time for the banquet. I had hidden my suit in the lobby bathroom and changed there. My tie, which my housemate had tied, had come undone. How un-punk rock! It took me a dozen tries to replicate the knot. I yanked all the tags I could see off the sleeves and saw that I was already fifteen minutes late. The dinner was underway!

Two other horror fans spotted me in the stall. They were in New York for the weekend and wanted to know if the lights were still on.

“Huh?”

“You know, for 9/11.”

“Ah, yes, the Batsignals. No, those are gone. The hole is still available for viewing though.”

“Is it by the hotel?”

“No, it’s still where the World Trade Center used to be.”

They didn’t think I was funny. It was all too horrific, that someone might have to take the subway to see neatly swept up carnage live, rather than on TV. Stick to the vampires, boys!

I hit the banquet hall fifteen minutes late, and slinked to a mostly empty table in the back of the room. I sat with more out-of-towners. They’d already been to Central Park and Grand Central Station and wanted to know what else they could do that was close to the Helmsley.

“Well, you can go back to Grand Central, go to the little Junior’s they have in the basement and have a black and white cookie. That’s New York.”

“A black and white cookie! Yes, just like Seinfeld!”

I asked one guy if he was a writer. He was, and he had just had his pitch meeting. His book idea was confusing. A psychic detective who works for the cops and takes the form of the crime victims before the crime is committed but then he experiences the crime but can also stop it if it isn’t supernatural. And that’s just the first few pages.

I told him about Northern Gothic. He thought it sounded political. He asked if I was working on something else.

“Yes. H. P. Lovecraft’s On The Road,” I said, describing a book idea I had come up with as a joke, but which is actually turning out to be quite writeable.

“Wow! One sentence,” he said, excited. “Now that’s a pitch.”

A pause.

“They’d never take that in a million years though.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, good luck. Maybe you’ll win a Stoker tonight.”

“Oh no, I’m doomed.”

“Hey, you never know.”

The appetizers came. Prosciutto & fresh mozzarella with artichoke hearts, black olives and sun-dried tomatoes. I tried to distract myself by observing the Nazi efficiency of the servers, the long Stalinist lines of the cash bar (I sneaked a can of Coke in my jacket pocket. “Never again!” was my response to high-priced drinks) and the very odd choice of pork and cheese for an appetizer in a town with a fair number of Jews. But I couldn’t. I was thinking about winning.

A Stoker Award of my very own. A stylized haunted house with my name on it. The little gray shack of success. Maybe it could happen. Harlan Ellison is a legend, but also a well-known asshole, and his lawsuit against online pirates had cost him some net-savvy fans. Brian Keene was nominated in four categories. Surely, he wouldn’t win them all. Maybe he’d lose mine. Ecthemendy’s story was more magical realist than horror, and plus, as treasurer she may have made a few enemies within the HWA. Tem’s novella was strictly small press, and plus, he had his time last year. Clearly, the ‘you never knows’ had gotten to me. My New Yorker cool had melted into sweat — my own sweat — not cheap factory sweat, and my cheap suit was soaking in it.

I didn’t have to wait long. I had barely eaten my appetizer, and those of the empty seats on either side of me, when salad was dumped into my plate. Then not four minutes later, my chicken marsala (this was a low budget banquet, everyone got the chicken), a twice-baked potato and some green beans came. I wondered what the vegetarian choice was. Probably more green beans and an extra dirty look from the food service Gestapo.

The cheesecake came and I saw why they snatched away the appetizers so quickly. The cheesecake tasted just like the stale mozarella of the first course! It must have been some bargain basement recycling deal. No way was this proper New York cheesecake. I wanted to get up and shout, “Don’t eat the cheesecake! It’s from out of town!” but instead I just turned to my tablemates and said, “Listen, when you go to the Junior’s annex in Grand Central, get some real cheesecake. I wouldn’t feed this to a dead man’s dog” (I don’t normally talk like that, but I was in horror mode). They nodded. Then our coffees were snatched away.

Long story short. I lost. Tem won. My name was pronounced correctly though, which is always a happy surprise. And I got a certificate. It was embarrassing, though — I saw that all the other finalists were holding manila envelopes, but nobody had given me one. What’s worse, being so anonymous that I had to remind the organization that nominated me that I had paid $65 for toejam cheesecake, or just getting a loser certificate in the first place? I got my envelope and was agog as I saw those immortal words of darkness inscribed upon it: BETH ISRAEL MEDICAL CENTER First Avenue at 16th Street, New York, NY 10003.

Stealing office supplies. Now that’s New York! And when I was leaving the hotel to retreat back across the Hudson to walk my dog, someone called my name. She was a cute redhead, with a short bob and a backless dress decorated with cherries.

“Nick?” she asked, smiling widely. Was it a fan? A real indie rockin’ New York fan of Northern Gothic?

“You still have a clothing tag on your pants,” she said. Then she ripped it off my ass.