By Ed Staskus

   The summer of 2001 Jeff Saghy and I flew to New York City for a long working weekend it is doubtful we would have gone to check out the Twin Towers. They were just two more office skyscrapers in skyscraper city. We would not have gone to eat at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floors of the North Tower, either. Our expense account would have put up an objection. But, it had been a long Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and our boss surprised us by announcing dinner was on the company. We walked over from the Marriott Hotel next door, where we were staying, and took one of the jumbo elevators up into the sky.

   The hotel had been collateral damage eight years earlier. Diehard towelheads parked a rental truck loaded with 1,500 pounds of explosives in the World Trade Center’s underground parking garage. They weren’t interested in becoming martyrs, no matter the reward of each of them personally getting seventy two virgins in heaven, so they set the timer and left for jihadi snacks of halvah and qahvah. The explosion mangled the lower and sub levels of the World Trade Center complex and damaged the Marriott, as well.  It was two years before the hotel reopened.  

   Windows on the World opened as a private club twenty five years before we ever set foot in it. Everybody who was not a member had to pay $10.00 in dues on the spot before eating there. New York Magazine called it the “most spectacular restaurant in the world.” They put the food on a pedestal and gushed about the view.

   “Every view is brand-new, a miracle. When in the Statue of Liberty Lounge, the harbor’s heroic blue sweep makes you feel like the ruler of some extraordinary universe. All the bridges of Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island stretch across the restaurant’s promenade. Even New Jersey looks good from here. Down below is all of Manhattan. Everything to hate and fear is invisible.”

   We were wearing pressed slacks and our monogrammed trade show shirts. Our slacks passed muster, but our shirts sans jackets were verboten. The maître d’ rustled up spare sports jackets for both of us. Mine was several sizes too small. It was checked, too, the kind a burlesque comedian might once have donated to the Salvation Army. “All you have to do is wear it walking to your table,” the front of the room man said when I gave him an unhappy look. “Once you’re in your seat you can take it off and your server will bring it back to me.”

   I squeezed into the sports jacket, making like Mr. Magoo, enduring amused looks on the way to our table. It was set inside a curved half wall. The dining room was large and quiet, almost hushed. The tablecloth was actual cloth. The waiters wore white jackets and black pants. They were as soft-spoken as funeral directors. We ordered several appetizers. Jeff had roast sirloin of beef for dinner and I had salmon, which was very good. The charge we put on the company credit card, in due course, would have paid most of my home mortgage for the month back in Ohio.

   After we finished our bottle of fine wine we stepped over to the nearest window to take in the vaunted view. There wasn’t any view, however. All we saw was a murky sky above us and heavy clouds below us. There wasn’t a gap in the clouds to see any part of the world anywhere. We had tortes sprinkled with ground nuts and coffee for dessert. The waiter told us the coffee was from Yemen. “It is made from heirloom beans.” he said. I told him it was delicious, which it was. 

    Jeff did most of the talking over dinner and through dessert. He wasn’t overly interested in anything I had to say, although he was polite about it, in a smarmy sort of way. He was an outstanding salesman and like all outstanding salesman could be unctuous at the drop of a hat. Take it or leave it was my sales strategy. I was less than outstanding.

   I woke up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach. The dinner at Windows on the World had been first-rate, the dessert even better, and the wine more than drinkable, smooth and balanced, but something wasn’t agreeing with me. I dressed and went downstairs, where I found a ginger ale. I went for a walk. It was big-city dark, like an undying twilight. The streets smelled bad, but I felt better. I walked down to the waterline on Liberty St., ending up at Pumphouse Park. 

   It wasn’t listed in my New York City Parks Department guidebook. It was just there, next to a small marina of mega-yachts, lots of trees and flowers around an oval-shaped lawn. I walked to where there was a grove of shrubs and birch trees. I kicked back on one of the benches. In a city of eighteen million people, I didn’t see another person for the next hour, although a tough-looking cat tramped past me without giving me a glance.

   Jeff and I had flown to the trade show with Chris Hayes and Doug Clarke, landing at JFK International Airport in Queens in the late afternoon on Thursday. Construction of a new people-mover system at the airport was going on, three years along, so we walked the mile-or-two to the baggage claim. We checked into the Marriot Hotel and took a cab to the Jacob Javits Convention Center to set up our display. The Javits Center was enormous, more than three million square feet of floor space. 

   The reason we were there was the International Beauty Show. “Stock up on all your salon needs at show-special pricing,” was the way the razzmatazz went. “Top notch education to boost your skills and business. Products and tools that will boost your business and streamline your craft. Network with like-minded colleagues and professionals.”

   We were there to showcase a new tanning bed a branch of Efficient Lighting, under the name of Ultraviolet Resources International, had developed. Chris Hayes was the nominal brains behind the product. Doug Clarke, the boss and owner, was married to Kathy Hayes, who was second-in-command. She was the louder by far of the couple. Some of her other siblings, in addition to Chris, Kevin and John and sister Maggie, were the the in-charge team. Doug was like Zeus, somewhere up there on Mt. Olympus. Maggie was sneaky mean and always bore watching. Other brothers and sisters from the Hayes family of thirteen came and went, getting in on the gravy train when they weren’t at each other’s throats.

   Doug Clarke had rolled out a state-of-the-art 45,000 square-foot multi-million-dollar warehouse and offices on nearly three acres in Brook Park, next to Holy Cross Cemetery, the year before, after ten years of leasing and outgrowing space in the Lake Erie Screw Building in Lakewood. It was a new building for a new millennium. Efficient Lighting sold lots of stuff under lots of names, commercial lighting to restaurants and municipalities, saltwater fish lights, grow lights, sign lights, disinfectant lighting, but its bread and butter was tanning bulbs. We sold gazillions of the fluorescent tubes to dealers and end users. The phones never stopped ringing. Doug and Kathy built a McMansion in North Ridgeville on the back of the bronze look.

   The wine room in the basement of their McMansion looked like the bottles snug on climate controlled racks were worth more than Doug was going to pay me if I continued working for him the rest of my life. I wasn’t planning on hanging around for a pat on the back and a gold-tone watch, but in the meantime I was a wage slave. I occasionally reconsidered the merits of anarchism. I was surprised the wine he poured wasn’t better. It tasted hollow to me.

   The trade show boomed, although we scuffled. The last-minute space we had been assigned was near the back of a dead-end walkway. We spent more time talking to the other vendors around us than we did talking to prospects. The end of the day Friday didn’t come soon enough. Jeff could talk all day and night, prospect or no prospects, but I had long since run out of anything to say to our neighboring nail and hair folks, who weren’t selling much, either.

   Doug and Chris were busy with big shots Friday night, the heavy hitters who called the shots at Wolff and Light Sources, so Jeff and I went to dinner by ourselves in Greenwich Village. We didn’t know one eatery from another. All of them were busy. We finally found a table at Pico, a Portuguese restaurant. The inside of the place was exposed brick and beams. We were seated next to a six-foot tall wire sculpture of a rooster. The hostess told us it was a Portuguese good luck symbol. 

   I was staring at our pemeiro prato, which included bacalao cakes with a radish salad, steamed cockles, and foie gras, when our waiter came back. He asked if we would mind sharing our table with two women, since space was at a premium. Jeff said he didn’t mind and the next thing I knew there were two more chairs squeezing in at our table. 

   The young women were in their mid to late 20s, both blonde, one of them from London and the other one from South Africa. We shared what was left of our appetizer with them while we got acquainted. The woman from London was working in NYC and living at a YWCA. The woman from South Africa was visiting her friend. Her family had emigrated to Savannah, Georgia from the dark continent five years earlier, after the Afrikaners lost their argument with the African National Congress.

   The Londoner had been to Pico before and made a recommendation for the segundo prato. I ordered the dish. It was duck braised in terra cotta and roast saddle of rabbit with chickpea cake. Our newfound friends told us more about themselves while Jeff told them all about himself. Was he that dashing with a wife and two children in tow? Even though he and I had worked in the same office for about ten years it was news to me.

   He ordered another bottle of wine midway through dinner. We talked into the night. It was fun. Before I knew it, it was after midnight. We ordered coffee and sonhos, which are miniature doughnuts, cinnamon-dusted puffs of dough dipped into molten chocolate and fruit fondues, for dessert. Sonhos means “beautiful little dream” in the lingo. Nobody needs to speak Portuguese to describe their goodness.

   Jeff had been looking and talking up the cutie-pies non-stop. I didn’t like the look in his eye, wondering if he was angling for some fun in the city that never sleeps. I wasn’t a back door man, though. Besides, tomorrow was another working man’s day. The gleam in his eye dimmed when I hailed a cab and coaxed him into the back seat. He was disgruntled all the way back to our room.

   Saturday was more of the same at the trade show. We finished up mid-afternoon on Sunday. We had brought our suitcases and were ready to go as soon as the end of day whistle blew. Unfortunately, everybody else had the same idea and by the time we were out the door the plaza in front of the convention center was swarming with people. There wasn’t a yellow cab to be had for love or money.

   We were standing around looking lost when a thick-set man in a black suit approached us. He was wearing a white shirt, a black tie, and a newsboy cap. His eyes were bloodshot. He was a gypsy cabbie, driving a black four-door Volvo. 

   “Airport?” he asked.

   “JFK,” I said. 

   “$50.00,” he said.

   “Let’s go,” I said, dragging a protesting Jeff behind me. He didn’t like the John Doe black car and the black hole of no license, no regulations, and no insurance. The man was from Nigeria. “They call our kind of driving kabu kabu there,” he said. He drove more than sixty hours a week. He  drove fast, ignoring red lights several times. He stopped some distance from the cab stand at the airport.

   “I got to be careful about the medallion guys,” he said.

   It was just getting dark when we took off, circling northwest back over Manhattan, the lights of the city twinkling in the dusk. We flew through a booming thunderstorm that had rumbled up from the Ohio Valley, but landed at Cleveland Hopkins Airport safe and sound, where our wives picked us up.

   The back end of summer heated up, getting ungodly hot and humid on the south shore of Lake Erie. I went to the office Monday through Friday and did my private enterprise service work evenings and weekends. I would have quit my day job long since if I could have, but I needed both jobs. The office work was easy enough, and so long as I kept my head down, I could put up with my fellow salesmen. The rest of the guys and girls who punched the clock were no problem.

   My job wasn’t especially high paying since I worked for a family firm. Their motto was “Family First.” They said it included all of us, but what it meant in practice was the immediate family was first, last, and always. We had first-class health insurance, though, and I was socking money slowly but surely away in a 401K. I got two weeks paid vacation. 

   My wife and I drove to Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada in late August, chilling out on the north coast. Prince Edward Island is about 5 times the size of New York City, but the city is home to 47 times as many people as the province. We didn’t have any trouble keeping ourselves to ourselves on the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

   We got back the second weekend of September. I took Monday off to unpack and unwind from the 22-hour drive home. The next morning I was in line at a Drug Mart cash register, while on my way to work, when I looked up and noticed the Twin Towers on a TV that was blaring a news bulletin. One of the buildings was gushing smoke.

   “Christ,” I thought. “How did that happen?”

   By the time I got to work everybody in the building was in the lunchroom, eyes glued to the flat screen mounted on the back wall. We found out what happened was that passenger jets slammed into both buildings. We watched the 110-floor towers collapse. The Marriott Hotel disintegrated into a pile of rubble. It was unnerving watching where Jeff and I had slept disappear. It looked surreal to all of us, even those of us who weren’t sure what surreal meant. Doug walked in looking somber and told everybody to go home. It was just after 11 o’clock in the morning. The last fires at the World Trade Center site were finally extinguished in December, exactly one hundred days after the terrorist attacks.

   I drove home on largely empty streets. It was a sunny day, mild and pleasant. My wife and I watched the grim news on TV the rest of the day. We had never seen anything like it, airplanes flying into skyscrapers. Even Snapper our cat sensed something wasn’t right and spent the day sleeping in the basement.

   The next evening I rode my mountain bike on the all-purpose trail in the Rocky River Metropark. The only people I saw in the valley were an older couple strolling arm in arm. There were no dog walkers, baby carriages, rollerbladers, runners, or any other bikers besides me. There were no cars on the Valley Parkway. I could have coasted down the middle of the road blindfolded. I saw flashing red and blue lights of police cars on every bridge I rode under. There were military jets screaming overhead, not that it mattered. The horse was out of the barn.

   I stopped on the far side of Tyler Barn, on the other side of a small bridge, where I spotted a fisherman going after steelhead trout. I rode through the empty parking lot to where he was walking out of the river. He was wearing flesh-colored waders and carrying an eight-foot rod. I could see some big fish in the creel bag slung over his shoulder. He sat down at a picnic table and started gutting them on a copy of yesterday’s newspaper. 

   He was wearing a baseball cap and a week’s worth of whiskers. His forearms were heavily tattooed. The letters ‘HOLD’ were knuckle tattooed on one hand and the letters ‘FAST’ on the other hand. We shot the bull for a minute and talked about the terrorist attacks in New York City. I told him about having stayed at the destroyed Marriott Hotel.

   “I’ll tell you what, it’s a tragedy, those working people, poor souls, dying for no good reason, not expecting it to be their last day, but I wasn’t born no yesterday,” he said “That’s what happens in this world we have made. Society ain’t a disease, it’s a disaster. I say if folks concentrated on the important things in life, there would be a shortage of fishing poles, not a shortage of skyscrapers.” 

   “Are you saying we should concentrate on biological reality and forget about constructed reality?”

   He fixed his knife into the top of the picnic table and fixed a look at me. “I don’t know about any of that, pilgrim, but I know all our plans and dreams get scattered in the wind.” He sucked on a Lucky Strike without taking it from his lips. A gust of wind wafted cigarette ash away into what was fast becoming the early end of summer.

   I got back on my mountain bike, pushed up the long slog of Hogsback Lane out of the valley, and rode home in the dusk. My wife was making dinner when I got home, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and buttered carrots. The kitchen smelled good. 

   “We’re having comfort food tonight,” she said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

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