Nothing Good Ever Lasts

It was dusk and one by one the boys arrived. Each one looked around before clambering up the old iron column to their private garden. Izzy had been the first one to climb up here onto the old high-line railbed. For three precious weeks, it had been all his. Here he was above the madness and the noise and the filth.

With grass and scrubby, determined weeds all around him, Izzy felt safe. Sirens sounding below were simply background noise. They meant nothing. And in every direction — sky. Vast and glorious and indifferent. Izzy sometimes just lay on his back in the grass and watched clouds pass. The pollution-enhanced sunsets over Jersey were better than going to the movies.

Later, he kicked himself for being so stupid as to show his little brother how to get up there. Now there were five of them.

Soon enough there would be twenty and then a hundred.

Only that morning Izzy’s mother’s boyfriend was reading that a couple of guys were fighting city hall to stop the demolition of the old abandoned railbed that ran from below Gansevoort up to 34th Street.

Darby lit the blunt, took a nice lungful, and passed it to Sonny who sucked in his toke and handed it over to Nick. The five were stretched out along the old tracks and surrounded by nodding heads of thistle and goldenrod. It hadn’t been a great summer. Too cold and wet well into July making it impossible to get out and do much of anything. Then came the bludgeoning of record-breaking heat with multiple 100-plus-degree days. It was mid-September when the heat finally broke but most evenings throughout found the five boys up here, smoking pot and talking shit.

“I heard they’re gonna finally tear this whole thing down. Guilliani signed some kind of demolition thing on his way out.” Izzy wished his kid brother, Robbie, would keep his trap shut. He always came off as ignorant.

“Nope. Coupla yuppy guys are trying to turn it into some kind of park.” This from Know-it-all Nick.

“Fuck.” Darby said it for them all.

Izzy figured this was how Adam felt getting kicked out of Eden.

Robbie got off the elevator and smiled at Marlene who was, as always, waiting at the door. She took his coat and kissed his cheek.

“How’s Izzy?”

“In and out. Docs are saying any day now but when he’s here, he’s still really here.” Robbie thought about his older brother’s latest diatribe against the world in general and where Robbie lived specifically.

“Hard to imagine anything, even cancer, could take him out.” Marlene had known she wasn’t just marrying Robbie despite having managed a destination wedding in Peru. She married the whole damned family. She rolled with that for the most part. It would be different if they’d stayed in Hell’s Kitchen but living here gave her just enough insulation to suit up and show up as the dutiful daughter/sister-in-law.

Robbie got a beer from the fridge and went to the window. Marlene was saying something in the kitchen but he couldn’t make it out.

“Did you hear me? They closed the Vessel. Another jumper. The third I guess.” Marlene joined him in the living room looking down at the circular twists of the massive piece of public art that Robbie and Izzie had called the Flower Pot.

"How could the designer and builders not have known the thing was an engraved invitation to every potential suicide in the city?"

“Did you cook? If not, let's go down to Estiatorio Milos."

"Wonderful! I'll get my coat."

Robbie had had enough of looking down at the five ghosts chuffing away at their cheap green weed. He figured he could tell Marlene over dinner that he wanted to sell this deluxe bit of hell and move back into the city.

She’d understand. She’d have to.

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