Heading Downtown
In my heart, I knew my wait at the gate was futile, but I really didn't know what else to do. Should we notify the police? File a missing person report? Call all the numbers she'd dialed on the cell phone we'd lent her a few days before?
I called Deirdre. She said she had talked to Megan, a girl who was interning with Carrick at Students for a Free Tibet. Carrick had become friendly with someone who called himself Chaos, Megan told Deirdre, and she might be with him. He hung out in Tompkins Square Park. She described him as pierced and heavily tattooed. Megan told Deirdre she would arrive at Students for a Free Tibet's offices a little after 10, and told her she'd meet me there.
“Tell your husband not to look for Carrick himself,” she said, “He might scare her away.”
I watched a few laggards trot toward the departing train, then headed to the IRT local subway to go downtown. The irony of Carrick becoming attached to someone who called himself Chaos was too perfect to contemplate.
I got off the subway at Astor Place and walked a few blocks east on Ninth St. which, at Avenue A, intersects with the entrance to Tompkins Square Park. The park, ten acres that had been the property of Daniel D. Tompkins, James Monroe's vice president, was first enclosed in a wrought-iron fence and opened to the public in 1834. It has been a locus of dissent and disaffection for a long time. In 1874, more than 7,000 workers demanding relief during an economic depression were routed by police wielding billy clubs. In 1967, as the center of the East Village hippie scene, it was the venue for The Grateful Dead's inaugural East Coast tour. Deirdre would go there in high school, hoping to see Allen Ginsberg or the Lovin' Spooonful's John Sebastian, who lived nearby. In August 1988, the supporters of squatters living in shacks in the park hurled firecrackers and bottles at the police, who swept through the park, again swinging nightsticks, to evict them.
Despite the gentrification of the neighborhood, it remained a popular hangout for drug dealers, users and the homeless. It also was a magnet for young people like my daughter who, bored by the suburbs, are drawn by its ability to absorb, without judgement, any predilection that comes its way. Stan Mack once drew a facetious map of the different groups that hung out in Tompkins Square Park for the Village Voice newspaper. Latino and black chess players had an area in the northeast; Ukrainians and Poles played in the southeast (“don't mess with 'em, may be ex-freedom fighters,” read a parenthetical aside). “ 'Burb brats in for thrills” congregated just inside the southern Avenue A entrance. Carrick recently had told Deirdre she had met some interesting characters in Tompkins, and that she wanted to move to the neighborhood some day.
Making fleeting eye contact with the few people I saw sitting on benches, I walked the paths that crisscross the park. Seeing no sign of Carrick, I eventually took the east exit at Avenue B and continued along Ninth St. to walk to Students for a Free Tibet. I had been on that block nearly nineteen years before, when I covered a fatal shooting in a social club as a reporter for the New York Daily News. I remembered the incident well because the residents of the block seemed so shocked that the social club manager had fired two shotgun blasts into the back of a patron despite the reality that, as I pointed out with a tabloid cliché, “random violence is no stranger to the Lower East Side.” A school custodian who lived there told me: “It's a beautiful block. Black and white, we all correspond together. I want to have it renamed E. Nice St.” Another resident said: “There's never any fights, no shootings, no drugs. It's just working folks.” That may have been so back then, and it may still be so today, but I didn't feel entirely comfortable there either time.