The Boy Detective Read Online Free PDF

up this meter maid, name of Marisol (her badge), when a guy slammed his Accord into a Civic right before our eyes. Accord, my ass! I nearly said to Marisol. But I held my tongue lest she conclude that I was some candy-ass intellectual, which I sometimes am, or, almost as bad, a cop. It’s easy to mistake us private eyes for cops. So I said, “Shit! Did you see that!” And she said, “Twice a day at least,” while smiling a smile at once coquettish and indicative of “Look, mister, I need to get back to work.” And I didn’t intend to keep her, but “I wanted to ask you,” I said, “what alternate-side-of-the-street parking means, since I hear that phrase on the traffic reports every morning. What exactly constitutes the alternate side?” And the look she gave me, full of contempt and pity, should have been enough to tell me that if you really want to understand the city, or your life for that matter, you need to solve your own mysteries.
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    N O MYSTERY TO the Empire State, except that tall as it is, the building never surprises you. Perhaps that’s because it is old and familiar, the city’s favorite uncle, who just plants himself in the middle of the house. Standing on Thirty-fourth Street, I look up to it as ever. Its feeling of calm comfort is what appealed to King Kong, I am sure of it. Not the height, though he might have experienced a wave of fellow feeling with the tallest thing around for miles. He might have thought, This building knows how difficult, how demanding, how embarrassing it is to be the gorilla in the room. In that case, it could be assumed that King Kong did not so much scale the Empire State as embrace it. So that might have been his reason.
    But I think it was something else. I mean, here was this big ape and here was the big uncle of New York City, the old man who implied merely by being: You are safe with me, King Kong. And even if it turns out that you aren’t safe, even if you clamber to the top of me, your massive hairy hand enclosing Faye Wray, with one last chance at love within your grasp, and a swarm of biplanes swoop down out of nowhere and ack-ack at you, and you holding on to my rooftop pike where the blimps tied up, and you begin to lose your grip—even then, it will be all right. You have lived long enough, King Kong. A good life. A big life. The biggest. If you must fall, fall from me.
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    U NREAL N EW Y ORK . E. B. White’s famous essay “Here Is New York,” which is neither half good nor half bad, keeps thumping away at the loneliness of the city and attaches loneliness to privacy. I, born and reared here, have never thought of the city in terms of loneliness and privacy. Perhaps those who hail from outside New York, like White, find things opposed to the life they led wherever they came from. Communities do not exist in the same ways in New York as they do in small towns or smaller cities, where their demands for conformity are more blatant and melodramatic. Transplanted to the big city, the out-of-towner thinks he’s discovered loneliness and privacy by way of contrast.
    Not I. Loneliness and privacy are real, whereas to me it is the unreality of New York that thrills the citizen soul. Wake up, dress, walk out your door, and there you are, my owl, in an area such as the one I wander in now, bathed in an unreal light. The trouble with those who associate New York with a certain condition or goal is that they are in search of conditions or goals. Real New Yorkers do not want anything of the city. Oh, White loved New York, no doubt about that. But he loved it like a swain who has noted and studied everything about the object of his affection, and then found pleasant words to make cohesive sense of the experience. New Yorkers abjure cohesiveness. We think in images, like detectives. We reason with our senses.
    Want to know the city? A silver-haired gamine stands at the top of the steps of a brownstone