The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online Page B

old man’s hand. Fishermen in a canoelike boat examined what looked like corpses covered in sheets.
    In a little corner of the bookshelf the radio sat, and I beside it in the late afternoons and early evenings before bedtime—the polished box-cathedral issuing the stories that thrilled my heart. Mr. and Mrs. North. The Shadow. Boston Blackie. The FBI in Peace and War. The Inner Sanctum. The Green Hornet, on which the manservant Kato had his nationality changed from Japanese to Filipino immediately after Pearl Harbor. The Whistler, which opened with eerie whistling and a portentous voice announcing, “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night.” And Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. All the crime stories presented to me in my corner of the bookshelf. The scary music. The silly music. Mr. Keen’s theme song—“Some Day I’ll Find You.” The Shadow and a tracer of lost persons. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” I curled up like a comma.
    While commandeering every surface in the place were ashtrays. Small round glass ashtrays. Square ashtrays, bordered in leather to lend them men’s-club elegance. On the side tables, coffee tables, the kitchen table, the dining room table, the dinette table. Fatal furniture. My father smoking cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe. My mother smoking Chesterfields, promoted as the “women’s cigarette” after the war, as opposed to manly Camels. Watching the ashes grow longer and longer. Cleaning out the ashtrays, and replacing them, as smoke ghosted through the rooms of the apartment. Smoking in easy chairs, in cars, in offices, in bed. LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. I’d walk a mile for a Camel. The Marlboro Man. Old Gold. Ashtrays. Ashtrays. All fall down.
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    I F YOU GIVE a poor man money, he is bound to look improved—happier, more alive, more substantial all around. It is not the same for streets. I approach Fourteenth between Third Avenue and Union Square East. When I wasn’t heading north on my boyhood detecting prowls, I walked down to Fourteenth. Suspects left and right. Men’s clothing stores no one seemed to shop in; a boxing gym where once I watched Floyd Patterson work the light bags; a bowling alley, pretty much of a dive, that sold Yogi Berra’s Yoo-hoo chocolate water drink, and where I brought Ginny on our first high school date on a snowy night in March. That she took to the place proved her a gamer. In those days, the alley still employed pin boys, wizened kids from the poorest areas below Fourteenth Street, who earned nickels dodging gutter balls. Everything on Fourteenth Street bespoke the life of the run-down. But life.
    Today, only the Con Ed building remains unchanged among business enterprises geared for the upper crust. The buildings are much bigger, taller, the renovated street merely a broad aisle for merchandise. On the south side, a P.C. Richard & Son is flanked by two NYU buildings. On the street level of the NYU building closer to Third is a Trader Joe’s and a separate Trader Joe’s Wine Shop. On the street level of Con Ed is a Raymour & Flanagan furniture store, and across Irving Place from Con Ed, a two-towered apartment house offering a Chipotle restaurant, a Subway sandwich shop, a UPS store, and a Food Emporium, opposite a Walgreens. Brand names of modern America. One may furnish one’s apartment in a tower, acquire a Sub-Zero in which to stock food, load up on good wine, get enough Advil and antidepressants to survive the day, seek higher education at night, and never leave Fourteenth Street.
    In 1854, on the site of the Con Ed building, the four-thousand-seat Academy of Music opera house was erected, flourishing there till it was taken down in 1926. In 1927, the Academy of Music movie theater was put up across the street, where Trader Joe’s is now. It had three thousand seats and tiers of balconies and royal boxes. When