Searching for Gary Stein.

I first met Gary Stein when I was 23. He was 46 at the time and we were both working at the Strand Bookstore on 12th Street and Broadway. I had been hired about 3 or 4 months earlier – the day after Nathaniel – and so began the inventory project that would place all of the books – 8 miles of them, they claimed at the time – onto a database catalogued by various different criteria and rare books were placed with in depth descriptions of condition and editions. It could be argued that I was the manager of the department at that time, but more probably I was the least objectionable alternative of a fiercely incompetent and sloppy band of misfits.

I didn’t train Gary Stein; Nathan did, which in the end was a dirty trick played by very dirty people – because we would learn later that Nathan was training his replacement, which isn’t to say that Nathan shouldn’t have been fired – it was a wonder that he’d been allowed to stick around even as long as he had and he probably should never have been hired in the first place. What struck me as cruel and inappropriate was that they fired him 2 days before he became part of the union, and more so, because they never fired me. The only grips I could come to is that I was willing and able to do all of the handiwork around the office – hang blinds, strip lead paint, reroute telephone and electrical wires and build desks. All for slightly more than minimum wage. They were exploiting me and I was exploiting them. It was our unspoken concord. I would show up late or drunk or not at all and would never apologize and they would ask me to tinker with 80 year old electrical wires with improper equipment. I was once electrocuted 3 times in one day and threw the screwdriver against the wall and yelled “Fuck all you people.” I think everyone there wanted to bend Nancy Bass over one of the book tables and fuck her in the ass out of pure vengeance for being such a horrible cunt. Even the women, I imagine, most of whom were queer anyway. At any rate, they let me stick around and I consider those days after they threw Nathan out as the second phase in my days at the Strand.

No more Haurel and Lardy.

No, those days were over. I would continue my friendship with Nathan and even now I still call him friend, wherever he is and whatever he is doing. The last I’d heard he was living and working in a commune in Eastern Pennsylvania in an attempt to kick his dope habit, which had spun wildly out of control. He was married to a Japanese stylist named Yasu at the time and their marriage was falling apart. She had money and gave him drugs and had a horrible addiction to cocaine that made her irritable and unbearable at times. As I remember it, the marriage ended a few days before or after he was cut loose from the Strand. I was surprised, perhaps foolishly, when he told me that they pulled the string – and what made it even more despicable was that they waited until the end of the day to tell him. So he spent the entire day helping me hang blinds on the 3rd floor. We went out that night and got ripping drunk on huge cans of Sapporo at some apartment in the Village where a girl he knew lived, in an apartment she claimed Bob Dylan once lived in – there were a lot of apartments that Bob Dylan once lived in or stayed at, in those days, and Gerlinde’s, the old German gypsy I’d been living with, was no exception. She claimed he once spent the night in her place, sleeping on the chair in what would become my bedroom.

We may have ended up at Cokies that night as we would on many nights. Or at Milano’s – the Houston Street bar he had introduced me to and which would become a large part of New York for me. Nathan had just finished a manuscript he was working on called “The Confessions of Jean-Louis Cortez,” and was trying to get it published. His doctor prescribed him anti-psychotics, but he refused to be crazy and he was – but I would argue he didn’t fit the bill for clinical insanity. He would instead use cocaine to get the writing done and he claimed it worked for him – until it didn’t anymore. We went out that night and when I saw him again a week later he said he’d finally come to in Prospect Park with his head stuffed into a briefcase full of drugs. 3 or 4 days had passed and his last memory was scaling up a wall and onto a rooftop with 2 cans of spray paint and a few friends bent on painting nonsense on the side of the taller adjacent building. I began to see him more infrequently, but whenever I did we would have a wonderful time – playing guitars or records or getting drunk and doing drugs. I remember one night in early June more than a year later – after moving my friends into an apartment that I would wind up moving into 2 weeks later – we met up and went to a party where there were some Austrian twins and then we headed off to Cokies. The sun had already been up for a couple hours by the time we left and I had them drop me off on west 4th street. It was a Sunday morning and after watching some guys play basketball at the West 4th Street courts I demanded to be let in the game. I was wearing a shirt and tie and long pants and shoes, not sneakers.

“Can you get me into this game?” I asked a middle aged black man with a graying beard who was also watching outside the fence.

“Nah, man, you gotta be shittin me…you don’t want in on this.”

“I do. Can you get me in?”

He shook his head in recognition that I would have to learn the hard way – that things were going to turn very ugly the first graceful opportunity.

“Hey, my boy wants to run,” he hollered out.

They laughed a bit, looking me up and down and finally invited me in. I was in good shape so I could handle, to a certain degree, running around a basketball court after staying up all night drinking liquor, smoking cigarettes and doing drugs. After about an hour of catching elbows and shit, some of their friends started showing up and things quickly turned bad. They became more violent towards me and the trash talking became more aggressive.

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“You ain’t from the ghetto,” one of them shot back.

“You can all go fuck yourselves.”

The fists came quickly, a solid shot to the eye and one to the jaw and a blow to the gut that sent me to the ground. One swift kick just below the ribs took the wind out of me so that I couldn’t talk for several seconds, but I could hear the laughter and loud voices telling me to get the fuck off their court. There is a certain humility in getting stomped in that way, because in order to avoid a trip to the hospital or worse yet, the morgue, you must swallow what pride put you in that circumstance in the first place. So, in the most dignified manner you can uphold, you simply wait until they are through beating you, hoping some sense of compassion settles in before any real damage is done. When they were through, I slowly got up, grabbed my tie from the side of the court and walked off their court with them hollering at my back. When I showed up to work the next day with an enormous black eye and puffy face, I told my boss that I’d caught an elbow in a basketball game at West 4th Street. “The Cage! What the hell were you doing playing in the Cage? That’s where people who’d be in the NBA if they didn’t just get out of jail play.”

With Nathan gone from the Strand, I was forced to spend more time with the other people in the department and with a few people in the customer service department. Everyone was crazy in their own way, but Gary’s neurosis was particularly impressive. One got the impression that he had already lost in life, but that he was a little slow in catching on to this harsh fact himself. Not that he couldn’t have made his life better, but it sort of resonated that he never really would. He wore a uniform of his own slow design and the only significant change in his day to day dress would be which button he would pin on to his purplish blue vest. Most of them dealt with paranoia or his fear that we were becoming a police state. His favorite seemed to be one that read, “Help, the paranoids are after me!” and I was fond of this as well. He was a characature of himself and it was comforting in some way to know that he was aware of his condition, despite taking no steps to resolve it. Which brings me to the one fundamentally important thing that I learned from Gary Stein – “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” Yossarian knew this, and so did Gary. Beneath the vest, which he wore every day and would not remove even on 100 degree days, would invariably be a short sleeved button down shirt almost always with sweat on the underarms, and blue polyester work pants with a belt that was once bright yellow and would add vibrancy to the outfit. His feet were unnaturally large for his body and he wore black Velcro sneakers. He would be about 5’10” if he stood up straight, but his head sagged downward and his shoulders curled over. He gave off a dumpy, pathetic presence that he seemed well aware off, but put up no effort to correct. He would grade women based purely on their looks and would assign them anything from an A+ to an F. He fancied himself a “C.” Many years ago he had attended Hunter College and taken art and graphic design courses, though without ever having asked him I assumed that he never completed the degree requirements. He was the North Bronx’s answer to Woody Allen. A poor Jew who could never quite fit in and so he found a home in science fiction – he was a geek gotten into Star Trek, comics and toys that still formed the framework of the positive aspects of his life. He was pursuing a career as a comedian. He had a regular gig at an open mic night once a week at a dive bar in SoHo. He would often practice his new material on me, and one night I took a few friends up with me to watch his act. To call it a strange scene would be to serve it a great injustice. It was a fantasy camp for lunatics and the broken hearted and it was truly an endearing outlet, which made it somewhat sad to hear sometime later that the bar had closed down.

Gary’s routines were usually scathing attacks on the government or popular culture and at times they were funny. When they weren’t funny they were scary. Or it was amusing to think of him sitting around his apartment and coming up with this shit. He didn’t live far from his parents and oftentimes he would show up to the store with a stack of his father’s books to sell and make a few extra bucks. He would come in on a Monday with a plastic bag full of bagels and leave them there as the week’s food supply – despite the fact that every morning we would have to wipe the mouse shit off of the table we worked at. Once in a while he would spring for a slice of pizza and he would give dollar bills to just about every panhandler and beggar he came across on the street. “She needs it more than me,” he said once when I told him he couldn’t afford to be giving all of his money away when he can’t make rent. He was very compassionate when it came to the weak and downtrodden and it allowed me to give him more ground later on, when his neurosis was beginning to become unbearable. At first, it was amusing to watch him behave in this way and occasionally, when he wasn’t bitching about the government and the decline of society, we would have good conversations. I was living with Gerlinde at the time and the apartment was only 4 or 5 blocks away – so on some days we would just get 40s and sit there for an hour talking and drinking beers and I remember once Gerlinde burst in and Gary got weird on her and she looked at me in confusion as to why. I would bring this character into our home. I suppose it kept things interesting.

He showed up to my 24th birthday party that my girlfriend and friend had thrown as a surprise at Rich’s apartment on 99 John Street. Rich’s roommate was a conservative accountant and he came home to see this 46 year old man snorting lines of ephedrine which he’d crushed up from pill form on the counter. Frank, thinking it was cocaine threatened to call the cops and stormed out of the apartment and things between them were never quite the same. That next morning Gary went to work and had to get off the subway twice in 20 blocks to puke in the station garbage can. I had taken the day off and spent it roaming downtown Manhattan, drinking beers, and watching a pretty young girl do the jig in front of the World Trade Center’s Towers.

In mid-summer, Gary began dating a woman – she was a “C” according to Gary, but the romance was short lived and he became more erratic and less tolerable to be around. His good friend, Jim, in the Bronx had changed his telephone number and had to establish the rule that he would have to initiate contact and at the time I thought it was a harsh and cruel way to treat a friend. But it began to make more sense. Some of the later lunches, he would bring tapes of comedy bits and radio style science fiction skits that became more and more frightening. It was like being caught in the mind of a frightened and lonely 12 year old’s fractured and imaginative mind. He would smoke shitty pot that he’d bought up in the Bronx and what Kier would later call “The Crippling Stein Weed,” and once I even had him pick some up for me and despite all evidence to the contrary, it delivered its message.

That it was a hot summer and towards the end of it, everything started wearing on the nerves. The store, Gary’s insanity, my own, poverty, hunger and hard living. I met Kier around this point and neither Kier nor Gary could tolerate each other much and I believe it began to bother Gary when I had to start sneaking off to lunch with Kier in order to avoid any ugliness with Gary. I knew I was going on tour at the end of August, so it was a relief to know that the store was temporary for me – something I only had to tolerate for a short while longer. As it turned our, Kier’s aunt was Gary’s last boss and she had had to fire him. Kier never told Gary any of this. He had been unemployed for 18 months prior to getting the job at the Strand and said, “It always came down to me and the other guy and they always gave it to the other guy.” And I don’t doubt he was telling the truth. But to have finally landed a job and have it be at the strand and feeling relieved is a mind set that I would never have understood.

Things reached their breaking point one afternoon in early August. We were sitting at the Burritoville on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street and Gary realized that the man behind the counter had worked with him at his last job. He was a large well built black man and he smiled at Gary when he recognized him – he had apparently given Gary a hard time in the past and he started raving uncontrollably, despite my attempts to calm him down. But he took his plate and turned it upside down, smearing it on the table and then stormed out of the store. I smiled at the guy behind the counter and apologized shaking my head as if to say, “That guy is a freak,” but I did feel a sense of betrayal. My nerves were so stripped at this point that I couldn’t deal with Gary’s negativity and paranoia and I told him outside there that one more outburst and I wouldn’t be able to hang with him again. He seemed a little hurt but quickly brushed it off. We crossed 2nd Avenue and on the south east corner there were 3 young men in hip-hop attire.

“Did you hear that? They’re fucking with us,” Gary spoke fast, angry and frightened.

“No they’re not, Gary. They’re just talking. Get a fucking hold of yourself.”

But Gary bent down and pretended to tie his shoes – his Velcro shoes – and ease dropped on what the kids were saying, which had nothing to do with us.

“Gary,” I yelled, “Get the fuck up. I told you I can’t take this shit anymore.”

He then took off, bolting down 9th Street east towards my apartment, his potbelly bouncing back and forth and almost barreling over a young girl walking hand in hand down the street with her father. When we got to my apartment I quietly had a beer with him and I don’t think we ever had another.

I write this all 5 years later, sitting in Washington Square Park and then sitting on a blue folding camp chair with a pack of cigarettes in the left cup holder and a 22oz. of Bud Ice – the Penguin – in the right and it is a very different city. I have never seen him since I left that day. I visited the following fall with a disguise on and asked for him. The people on the 3rd floor said he’d been moved down to the basements and when I asked about him there, they said, “Oh, you mean the weird guy with the vest and all the pins? He left here a few months ago, I don’t know what happened to him,” and it occurred to me for maybe the first time that anyone living in that state of Paranoia before September the 11th could ever have possibility withstood the initial event, or its impact. So maybe Gary was right all along, maybe they really were after him.