J. Weissman

Abe was several blocks away from the Art Deco theater on the Upper East Side where he had taken in that evening’s entertainment when he reached into his coat pocket to warm his hands and was surprised to feel a slip of paper brush against his fingertips. He was normally very particular about cleaning out his pockets and could have sworn he had just had the coat dry cleaned. Pinching the paper between his thumb and index finger, he pulled it out and held it up in the dim streetlight. It was lavender, though perhaps it had once been a darker hue, and had worn wrinkles that reminded him strangely of his grandmother’s face when he had last seen her. There were words type-written on it which he struggled to read, and he turned to catch the glow from the streetlight overhead more directly. 

He could just make out the first initial and last name of what had evidently been a luggage tag, perhaps torn off and stowed away hurriedly in a train terminal or airport. J. Weissman? Abe thought. I don’t know a J. Weissman. Then it occurred to him that he must have received the wrong coat and in a confused panic, he examined the overcoat he was wearing – it was very similar to his own, a large, traditional wool overcoat, dark heather and lined with a beige silk inside. Yet it was not his own – he saw that the buttons were a dark brass, much more fitting on an older style of garment, and the sleeves, now that he paid closer attention, were an inch or two longer, nearing reaching past his fingertips – which would explain why he hadn’t felt the need to hide his hands from the New York winter sooner. 

Passersby muttered under their breath but seeing his age, simply stepped around and nodded as they passed him, staring up at the buildings and street signs to get his bearings. A lifelong resident of the Upper East Side, he knew his way around Manhattan, yet he found himself suddenly disoriented and out of place standing at the corner of 62nd and Madison in someone else’s coat. He wondered briefly if the playhouse had given the stranger the wrong coat as well or if indeed the stranger had been unable to reclaim his coat, a useless claim check held loosely as the coatroom attendants apologized for the mix-up. It was a cold night out, though not terribly cold by New York standards. Abe wondered if J. Weissman would attempt to travel home without a coat at all, or would they be given one on loan, a sort of courtesy coat, by the coatroom attendants? He realized it was an academic question since it didn’t directly concern him - and yet Abe found himself concerned for this stranger whose coat now kept him quite comfortably warm against the icy breeze blowing dust and sending most folk home shivering to their beds at this late hour. 

With a sudden realization, Abe wondered if perhaps he could find this J. Weissman and correct the mix-up. After all, he was quite partial to his own coat, with its sleeves of the correct length and familiar wooden buttons worn from all the times they had been done and undone over the years. Examining the luggage ticket in his hand again, he turned it over and studied the obverse side. He could make out part of an address, something to get him started on at least. It was late but in the city that never sleeps, that could hardly prevent meeting this J. Weissman and getting back his own overcoat. 

Stepping up to the curb, Abe raised his hand in the timeless gesture. A yellow cab soon emerged from the flow of traffic, pulling up so he could climb into the back seat. Glancing up at the cab’s rearview mirror to catch the cab driver’s attention, he saw thickly browed mahogany eyes crinkled in a hidden smile. 

“Take me to the Village,” Abe said. 

“What part?” the cab driver asked. 

“I’m not really sure yet,” Abe shrugged apologetically. “Sullivan Street.”

The crinkles faded from the cab driver’s eyes, but he pulled away from the curb and began negotiating his way through traffic. Knowing it would take a while to traverse nearly the full breadth of Manhattan, Abe settled comfortably into the back of the cab with J. Weissman’s coat wrapped warmly around him. He tipped his hat down over his eyes, crossed his legs, and reminisced about his ill-spent youth down in the Village. It had been many years, he realized, since he had been down that way, and wondered what had become of the hippies and songwriters he had known. Had they, like him, eventually shrugged and gotten on with life, accepting the ways of the world? What would they think of him? Would they see him as just another schmuck nearing retirement in a corner office overlooking the city? He chuckled quietly to himself, thinking of the colorful insults they had directed at the financiers and theater-goers of the day as they squatted in vacant apartments in crumbling buildings, caught up in the fervor of their ideals. Memories played out behind his half-closed eyelids, his mind sifting through decades of dust.

He awoke with a jolt – someone was shaking his arm gently. 

“Mister – hey, old man… we’re here.”

Abe nodded and apologized. “Sorry, when you get to be my age, naps sneak up on you sometimes. What do I owe you?”

The cab driver told him the fare, offering the universal smile all younger people give to those they write off as decrepit and likely at least halfway senile. Abe paid the man in cash and told him to keep the change, climbing out of the cab. 

Checking his wristwatch, sliding up the sleeve of the coat to do so as the cab pulled away, he realized it was no longer just getting late, but was actually quite late indeed – past midnight. Abe couldn’t remember the last time he had been out this late and it occurred to him that his wife would be up late worrying about him, until he remembered that she had passed several years ago and wouldn’t be worrying about him ever again. Smiling sadly to himself as he recalled the way she would nag him for being out late with his friends – an increasingly infrequent occurrence as they had grown old together – Abe began walking down the street. 

The night was still young to those who hadn’t felt the depredations of age yet, which were many in this part of town, only a few blocks from NYU. These were the hallowed streets that had, in no small way, birthed the countercultural revolution, as it had later come to be known in textbooks. Back then it was just being hip, being with it, being a part of things, and looking at the world through an enlightened perspective. Much had changed – he no longer recognized any of the storefronts or tenements running the length of Sullivan Street. In fact, he realized that the area had grown up, becoming more modern, sophisticated, and developed in the intervening decades. Chic restaurants and comedy clubs took the place of condemned apartment blocks, dive bars, and off-the-grid establishments used for all kinds of semi-legal activities, mostly aimed at taking down “the Man.” Having long since become part of the establishment, Abe strolled down Sullivan Street and wondered which side had won. Perhaps in the end, he mused, it had all been nothing but a fever dream, a revelation of narcissistic differences made irrelevant in the march of time. After all, Vietnam had been replaced by Afghanistan, Wall Street was digitized but marched inexorably on even after ‘08/’09, and hardly anybody protested or marched on Washington these days. 

Reaching the end of the block, he withdrew the slip of lavender paper and checked the address. Realizing that there was at least a remnant of a street number embossed on the ticket and that his aged eyes had simply deceived him, Abe reached out to a passing college student. 

“Excuse me, sir, could you…?” he asked, holding out the piece of paper. 

The young man stopped mid-stride and glanced confused at the stranger, then his expression softened, seeing Abe’s wizened features. At least there are some benefits to getting old, Abe thought.

“Uh, sure,” the young man said, removing one of his earbuds and taking the slip of paper in the other. “185 Sullivan. Just keep walking another block or two that way,” he said, gesturing down the street in the direction Abe had been wandering and returning the slip of paper. 

“Thank you, young man,” Abe said, taking the paper and continuing on his way. 

He found himself suddenly on a very residential block, trees and street lamps lining both sides of the car-choked road, framing an eclectic mix of architectural styles – everything from traditional brownstones to modern gray and lifeless monoliths. Yet, like many other aspects of the city, the street as a whole blended into something strangely harmonious and quintessentially Big Apple. He realized with a laugh that this must be exactly what non-New Yorkers think of when they picture New York neighborhoods. 

Moving down the street, Abe paid close attention to the numbers on the houses which soon dwindled from the 200s down into the upper 190s then the 180s. Yet where he had expected to find number 185, instead he found that the two houses on either side had been expanded and now the addresses skipped 185 altogether. Thinking perhaps he had simply been on the wrong side of the street, Abe turned and passed between a parked Honda’s front bumper and the square bulk of a luxury off-road Lexus and arrived at the opposite curb. There he found himself in front of a Jewish community center and synagogue, spanning the space where several houses would have been. And in any case, the numbers didn’t match the address he had been given. He looked down again at the faded paper but knew it was hopeless without much better lighting and younger eyes. Besides, the gentleman who helped him had been quite confident – so Abe turned and walked back down the street. 

Crossing again to the space where 185 should have stood even after all these years, Abe suddenly realized he had been here before. There had been a house here, number 185, where he had long ago spent a carefree summer lounging and reading the great poets of the day, basking in the warm summer breeze ever present through open casement windows. He could still see his friend Lenny sitting near the window on the third floor, strumming a guitar and smoking a cigarette as he jotted down verses on a notepad, flicking ash from his beard before replacing the cigarette between his lips and sending more chords out into Sullivan Street. In his mind’s eye, he looked over to the other side of the living room – though it was also a bedroom for several friends and acquaintances who drifted through their lives like leaves blowing around in autumn – and saw Kathleen with a bright blue bandana in her unruly red hair, reclined on the worn couch as she balanced a paperback on her knee, interrupting her own reading to read out quotes to them about the imbalance of the sexes and injustices of capitalism. He had lived here – actually lived here more truly than he had lived anywhere else in his life, he realized, up there in that third-floor flat shared with more roommates than he could now recall. Turning over the luggage tag, he found the name again – J. Weissman. Perhaps this person had been their neighbor then, or had come along later, and held out longer than any of them. 

A smile of memory and friendship filled his face as Abe stood and looked up at the crowded New York homes, seeing another life in another time. His memories of the place were rich and warm, plentiful in all the ways that truly mattered, replete with a richness that he had only found again in the company of his wife. The passage of years marched through his mind in a collage of pleasant fondness – his son’s first steps, his daughter’s wedding day, the birth of his first grandchild. Yet now it all telescoped into proper proportion, and he felt somehow more connected with his misbegotten youth than he had in decades. Years that he had long forgotten or remembered only in passing in the back of his mind where he remembered simple facts like where he came from, the year he was born, and his father’s name. Yet here they were all fresh and new again – memories that stood out bright and in full color, and were now shared with, he realized, this neighbor he had never actually met. He imagined what it would have been like if he had run into J. Weissman back then – would they have been friends? Would they have even gotten along? Then again, it was entirely possible, he realized, that they had passed in the hallways or even been casually introduced one evening and had simply never forged a lasting bond. Yet here it was – they were inexorably tied together by this place and the time they had both spent there. The fact that it no longer existed in reality was of little consequence – it continued to exist in his memory and was as real to him as the slip of paper that had brought him back here after all these years. A warmth filled his chest then that he hadn’t expected to ever feel again – a sensation of belonging and rootedness, of being present in a sense beyond the physical – and a certain oddly satisfied happiness that it had all come together in perfect cosmic symmetry. 

 Warmed as much by these feelings as his borrowed coat, Abe turned and began walking back the way he had come. Yet now he started to quietly whistle to himself, his steps swinging jauntily in time to the melody of Penny Lane carrying faintly through the night.