Eddie Boros’ Tower of Toys, 6th St. and Avenue B (2008)
—

I was walking along East Second Street in the East Village when I saw a man brushing out his long curly hair as he walked toward me. He stopped, pulled a clump of hair from the brush and let it go in the breeze. Not a huge fan of personal grooming in public, I gave him wide berth. He was wearing a heavyweight sweat suit despite the warm day, yanking at his scalp and talking to himself. We passed each other without acknowledgement. Half a block later, I saw a crisp, perfect, twenty-dollar bill lying in the middle of the sidewalk. I stopped. The hairbrush man was nowhere in sight. Nobody else was on the block. I looked again, bent down, put it in my pocket and kept walking to the corner. Maybe this was my lucky day.

When I was in my early twenties, I lived in a railroad flat on East Sixth Street between A and B with a beautiful boy. It was the 1980s. There was a lot of careless beauty in those days, all punk and junk. We dragged a big industrial wok we found on the street up to the roof for cookouts with an oven rack balanced over the coals. The abandoned buildings next door were shooting galleries, but nobody bothered us. The rich kids coming downtown to score occasionally ended up around our rooftop campfire. No matter how broke we were, somebody always had cigarettes and Café Bustelo. I was acting and writing, or not acting and not writing. The beauty of that boy took up a lot of time. Sometimes it took so long to choose the right outfit we never left the house. A guy in our building converted the narrow lot next to our apartment into a garden. He kept bees, placing plaster death masks of his friends inside clear acrylic beehives as an installation. The bees made honey all over those spooked up faces. 

We started watching each other too closely for lesions to have much fun in bed. Friends went to the apartments of the dead and filled garbage bags with high heels, dildoes, and wads of purple feathers. Stunned parents walked past the Pyramid Club dragging rational suitcases filled with whatever was left behind. We watched them through the window of the Odessa, a Ukrainian restaurant on Avenue A, over a plate of kasha with gravy. It was the end of East Sixth Street. Everybody started cleaning up, Acting Up, and moving out.

The hairbrush man came hurtling back down the sidewalk, looking everywhere in a panic. I turned toward him. As soon as he got close enough, I called out “Hey, did you lose twenty bucks?” I held up the twenty. He stopped and stared, white hair haloing his lined face. “It was on the sidewalk,” I said. “My mother’s money,” he panted, breathing hard from his run down the block. We looked at each other for a long moment. His eyes filled with watery disbelief. “You got it,” I said. “It’s okay. You got it.” He closed his fist around the bill and ran back the way he came. An elderly woman crossing the street glared at me. She’d seen the whole thing. I was sure she lived in the neighborhood. She probably knew the hairbrush man. She might even know his mother. Who was I to give him twenty bucks? I shrugged and crossed the street. I didn’t care if it was his mother’s money, the cash he needed for a fix, or both. He was temporarily lost and found. It was my lucky day.

I moved out of the neighborhood in 1989. It felt like a bad breakup. I was worn out by my own city. The crackheads, the missing dead, the hardening of scrappy joy into desperate ambition. The beautiful boy broke my heart—and he got the apartment. I thought he should let me take over the lease considering how it all came down, but that’s not how it works in New York. He survived the plague years, married money, and became less interesting. I took a suitcase of corsets and feathers to Seattle, became a trapeze artist, and sang with a band. 

When I moved back to the city with two young daughters after 9/11, the East Village was too expensive. The garden with the bee installation has matching benches and a list of rules from the neighborhood association. The huge garden on the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue B is landmarked by the city. The toy tower is gone. In the 80s, Eddie Boros, who walked the neighborhood barefoot wearing a string of fake pearls, built a high tower in the garden and decorated it with abandoned toys. It was sort of ugly, sort of beautiful, and filled with conviction. People said that Eddie was so strong he could rip a phone book in half—the long way. That was the story anyway. The kind of story you’d hear over kasha and gravy at the Odessa. I live in Brooklyn now. When I walk down East Sixth Street the light has changed. I still wish I’d gotten the apartment. 

***

Rebecca Chace’s fifth book, Talking to the Wolf (novel), is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in Spring, 2026. She is the author of Leaving Rock Harbor (novel); Capture the Flag (novel), Chautauqua Summer (memoir); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle-grade). She is a contributor to The New York Times, and has written for The Yale Review, The New England Review, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, Bookpost, and many other publications. Fellowships include Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dora Maar House, American Academy in Rome (visiting artist), and others. She is a Faculty Associate at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. Check out her Substack: “Hey Friend, You Broke My Heart” @rebeccachace