Richard Price may have overstuffed his book, Lush Life, with more characters than I can handle. But by now I care a great deal what happens to the failed actor stuck in the middle of the action. So I read onward.
I’ve mentioned the cops that ride around in a cab, looking to make arrests in the dark of the night. They call themselves Quality of Life, which puzzled me to no end.
However, with Google and a host of other tools at one’s fingertips, none of us have excuses anymore for just sitting there and saying, “What the . . .?”
“Quality of Life” refers to New York City when Rudolf Giuliani took over as mayor. He pursued a policy of clamping down on petty crime. If thugs broke a window, you repaired it quickly before somebody smashed a second or third window. The theory was that a broken window, or a wall of graffiti, sent a message: nobody cares; this neighborhood is on its way down, why don’t we kick a helpless old lady while we’re at it.
Under other mayors, New York was too frightening a place for a farm-raised girl like me to visit. Trash blew along the streets. Everybody walked hunkered down, just waiting for their turn to get mugged.
Then it changed to a nicer place. On my very first visit, I descended with fear and trembling into the bowels of the subway, edged up to a man in a nice commuter coat and said, “I think I should get on the Q train, but I’m not sure,” and the man in commuter coat answered cheerfully, helpfully, and made no sudden moves toward my purse.
Not saying that murder doesn’t still happen there. After all, Price’s book is about a murder. But Lush Life captures a certain historical moment, when poor thugs raised in the projects lived next to the young, the rich and the educated, who moved in just then to gentrify the old tenements. Wall Street and its fantastic sums of money sat just a few blocks away. Restaurants that served fussy food, artfully drizzled with colorful sauces, popped up here and there, and one of these restaurants figures prominently in Price’s story.
So I say “Thank you” to the New York-savvy among Richard Price’s readers, who pointed out something I couldn’t quite figure out on my own.
Actually, I know all about Quality-of-Life crimes. Right here in my own kitchen, I fill the dishwasher with a few paltry bowls and cups, not enough for running a load. I post a nice little sign instructing everyone to “Rinse and Load.”
Sometimes this works.
But if just one person leaves a food-smeared plate on the counter, it flashes a message to everybody in the house: Sign? What sign? And by the time I get back to my kitchen, it’s a dish ghetto.
Rudy, you were really onto something here.
Right now, my dish ghetto contains a few less Thanksgiving leftovers. I know the link says “ham,” but we don’t have a leftover ham problem here. We have a leftover turkey problem, so that’s what I hid in the turnovers.
There’s turkey in there somewhere
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