Black Fridays Read Online Free PDF

flat on the third floor, and my father’s commute, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, was up and down those stairs. I did my homework most nights, sitting on a barstool, sipping my Coke or ginger ale and listening to the locals tell each other tall tales. To me, that joint was just another room in our home.
    The P&G wasn’t exactly like that, but it may have been a close second. I hadn’t been there since moving downtown.
    The afternoon crowd hadn’t changed. Vinny the Gambler nodded from his corner by the window, his
Racing Form
folded and cushioning his forearm, his short snifter of Rémy and his pack of Camels on the bar within reach. The two Johns, Ma and Pa, a respectable gay couple who had been holding up the far end of the bar for three or four decades, gave a polite “Hello” and went back to their crossword. There was a new bartender, Rollie, but otherwise the place was just the same. The bucolic, medieval-themed mural that covered the wall over the single bathroom in back was still there, permanently nicotine-stained to an old master’s sepia finish. A third television had been added, but as all three showed the same horse race, it didn’t affect the overall decor. The jukebox had not been updated—a mixed blessing, as it held, in my opinion, way too much mid-career Neil Diamond. I put a foot on the rail and sipped my Bud Light.
    There was a copy of the
Post
—every New Yorker’s guilty pleasure—lying on the bar. When I first started working on Wall Street, the head foreign exchange trader had a framed copy over his desk of the
Post
’s then most famous front page. “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” The editors had worked hard to maintain that level of journalism.
    The headline I was now looking at read “He Sleeps with the Fishes.” There was a picture of a bloated corpse—facedown and therefore not in such bad taste as to cause lawsuits—wearing a torn and faded life jacket. Without the picture, the story would have been nothing more than a follow-up buried on page 12. A few weeks earlier, a junior trader from a Wall Street firm had fallen overboard in a storm on the Long Island Sound. His body had just been discovered thirty miles away by a pair of sport fishermen out for striped bass. I followed the story to page 3. There was a picture of a dismasted yacht, broken and leaning at an impossible angle, high on the rocks in a bay near Greenwich. The captain of the yacht had no comment. The guy’s employer had no comment. His parents had no comment. Even his roommate had no comment. The Coast Guard had ruled it accidental and had no further comment. Still, the paper managed to instill the story with intrigue, cover-up, and the hint of scandal.
    Two men walked in, arguing agreeably about something about the Grateful Dead. I eavesdropped until I found a way to insinuate myself into the conversation. I mentioned that I, too, had been to some of their shows. Immediate acceptance.
    “So, you gonna buy me a drink or what?”
    I looked around. The saddest-faced little man in the world stood at my side. Despite his age—somewhere well past Medicare eligibility—he looked like he was made out of rubber, like you could stretch him in any direction and when you let go he would zap back into the same compact form.
    “How are you, Roger? Long time.”
    He was a late-afternoon regular. When the cocktail hour crowd began to arrive, he tended to take his glass of brandy and retire to one of the back booths. I had joined him there many a night before I met Angie.
    We had met on the corner of Seventy-second Street. I was running late and just wanted to get to the subway. Blocking the sidewalk was a clown. A happy clown. With a big, cockeyed smile, like the letter J. He was trying to raise a wheeled trunk up over the curb. The trunk was as big as he was. It wasn’t going too well.
    “Give me a hand here, willya?”
    I acted as though he must be speaking to someone else.
    “Come on, big fella, don’t