Rector Street
by Jennifer Hawkins Lecce
I have twice in my life felt the oily metal of a gun being pressed to my body. Once to the head, the other to my belly. That second time happened right here on Rector Street in the middle of the day.
Rector Street is a narrow dark cavern steeped in the blue shadow of the towers that line it and cooled by whipped up puffs blown in from the Hudson. It smells of men’s urine. Much of Lower Manhattan smells of it. Everyone assumes it is the product of the unsheltered, who wipe their asses on sheets of the New York Times, but I can tell you it’s the brokers, investors, insurers, re-insurers, traders of salt and sugar and coffee who drink themselves stupid and then spoil these blocks by relieving themselves before commuting out to Hoboken, Westchester, Connecticut, and Queens. Once I saw three businessmen surrounding a cab on Rector and lower Broadway, each one pissing off in a different direction. The siek driver seemed non-plussed until our eyes met and then he began furiously pressing the horn while the men clutched their dicks in one fist and pummeled his cab with the other.
At the top of Rector Street stands Trinity Church with its beautifully carved doors and musty graveyard. Noontime concerts from Julliard and elsewhere made slipping into the cool scented church a rite of passage. Occasionally, a band would come up from New Orleans and play to raise the dead. Every single woman had heard the great advice of the moment, that to get the guy to commit, take him to a graveyard and let him experience his own mortality. Spring and summer always found women with carefully planned picnics balanced on their knees, attempting, in the span of a lunch hour, that Zen thing: to lead without leading, feeding their would be intendeds. I saw a woman and man walking among the headstones their own heads drawn close together, expressions tender and private. Looking at them sucked the wind right out of my lungs. Jesus. All those frustrated women and their little picnics and just once I think I saw where they were headed.
Off to the side on Washington, Greenwich, Trinity Place, Broadway, were crammed the usual pizza and deli shops, a second floor Mexican restaurant, a Seventh Day Adventist food bar, a bible shop, newsstands, a place where women wrestled in brown pudding and the Pussy Cat Lounge the guy who wrote for the nearby Wall Street Journal took me to. So I could see what all the fuss was about. Some guy, married and drunk like all of them.
On this day, I was just coming up Rector with my new dog, still a puppy at 96 pounds. It was one of those teaser days when people say things like what happened to spring and actually bitch about a high 70’s day in late April. I was wearing worn painters pants in a peculiar shade of green and one of those sleeveless t-shirts with a wallpaperish flower pattern- the ones that are meant as underwear for girls that work a lot like having cleavage for those who have none. It didn’t matter what anyone wore- Rector Street was a ghost town on weekends and once I got down to Battery Park the only people around would be the Canadians and Germans paying good tourist dollars to see the Statue of Liberty and stare open mouthed at the Jamaican boys who would do acrobatic leaps and daring dives over pushed together trash bins- leaping from one another’s shoulders onto the hard cement.
I didn’t see the man in the tired brown suit until he was right next to me. He started asking me about my dog, a beautiful brindle pulling at the end of his lead, sniffing the park in the distance. Some of the man’s teeth were framed in gold. He had a New York Post tucked under his arm. I answered a few questions about my dog and then the man told me he could make a lot of money in Harlem with a dog like that. He could make a lot of money at the fights. Dog fights. He was sweating now and stopped pretending to be a curious passerby. He stepped in too close. I told him no, he couldn’t make a lot of money from my dog but when I tried to step around him he drew a pistol out of an outside pocket of the brown jacket and held it right to my stomach.
“I cold kill you and be in that subway and no one would know. Or I could take your dog, and let you go. If I kill you, I’ll take the dog anyway.”
The wave of anger and desperation and cold blooded fear that seemed to engulf the two of us, passing back and forth from one to the other makes a sickening stench and its hard to think clearly. Movies would have us believe these are the moments of wit in action, but personally, and I have a little experience here, I’m leaning toward the theory that it is an aberration that makes you step right out of the picture. But at the same time you think in overdrive: you think about options, you weigh the possibilities, you think bizarre thoughts about cosmic rights and wrongs and the basic lie of separation. You become the ugly brown suit, the churlish wind puffing up from the Hudson, the rattle of the subway heard from the grating beneath your feet.
I decided to square off with the fucker and I took a step right in to him, the gun pressed pretty well into what I suppose would be stomach or intestine- I tried not to dwell on pinpointing the spot. The man had the sense to cover the gun by draping the New York Post over it as if we could be two people talking with a newspaper suspended between us. I lied and willed my eyes not to give me away. I told him the only reason he was still standing was that I hadn’t given the dog an order. I didn’t dare look behind me where I knew my dog was still pulling toward Battery Park and combing the ground for bits of pizza crust. Shoot me and you’ll never get the dog, he won’t go with you. Shoot me and he will certainly attack. Shoot the dog and you lose. On and on, I just kept talking and he began to look at me as though I was dangerous in that I am probably insane. I think there’s a belief, again, from movies, that insane people are harder to kill. So I kept talking- that I was a gypsy and would curse him and haunt him forever. I cursed him in the little Hungarian I knew. He was sweating openly now, and seemed to be calculating the possible financial gain of the dog in the fighting pit, and the odds of being haunted by a crazy gypsy girl. Our eyes were locked, stuck in the dance, unable to let go. I was too angry and too scared to try to run. I wanted to see it through, I wanted to know which of us would win, and I wanted to see the final resolution of this moment as if this moment counted for anything. And then I felt nothing followed very closely by terror. And: What the hell am I doing?
“Just give me the goddam dog you stupid bitch.”
“I can’t do that. He’s mine and I can’t do that.” With that my tongue went still.
‘Yo!’ From the furthest corner I heard my name yelled out. The man and I turned to see my upstairs neighbor waving broadly as he swung out of the doors of the Greek diner. He was doing that inflatable chest thing as he jumped into the street and sprinted over. The man in the suit fled down the steps of the number 1 line. It was over.
“Should I call the police?"
“He’s gone. Lets go to the park.”
We went to the park. How could we not on that beautiful day? I had been rescued. Why not just forget it?
From time to time, I still chew on it, questioning my every breath. Finally, all I can say is that violence is like a natural disaster- it sweeps away everything you think you know as sure as a hurricane can lift a house. And when its over you stand like a refugee on a long dirt road. You recognize the language but can’t make yourself understood. I came to Rector Street like all the other transplants, to blow around the edges, to slide in and out of the constructs of daily living. The man in the brown suit would have had to shoot me that day. At that moment I couldn’t give up anymore and still keep breathing. So I got rescued. Rector Street is funny that way. Live in a place long enough and it starts to seep in, extending its secrets, charting your moments and long after its been left behind it lurks in some side pocket with the shifting lint and small change we mostly choose to ignore.