When the Upper West Side Was King

Sometime around 2015, I saw a movie called The Intern starring Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway. I don't know what genre of movie it was. It had the feel of a rom-com but the love between the two stars was not romantic. That has nothing to do with my point. 

My point is when the movie was over, I felt old and out-of-touch. Not because the film involved a man not much older than I was trying to fit it at a fashion start-up, but because the entire movie was set in Brooklyn. Every scene. Brooklyn. I knew nothing of Brooklyn beyond Brooklyn Heights and the River Cafe. To me, Brooklyn was somewhere you didn't want to live because it was hard to get a cab to take you there late at night.

When I lived in New York, I lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was at the time very in. How did I know that? Because I could not step out of my apartment without running into a film crew. There were always production trucks parked somewhere in the neighborhood. Often they were from Law & Order. If as many dead bodies showed up in my neighborhood in real life as they did on Law & Order, rents would have plummeted. Well, probably not. Rents never plummet in New York. Let's just say it wouldn't have been good.

More often the filming was for movies about young professionals. Green Card. Baby Boom. You've Got Mail. When Harry Met Sally. Even the Ghostbusters were, in their own minds at least, professionals. Certainly, Sigourney Weaver's character was. All these successful fictional characters were my neighbors. Three Men and a Baby filmed a short walk down Central Park West from my apartment. I remember running into the twins who played the baby on the street and all the male stars in the park. A lot of the other movies were shot much closer. I was annoyed to find out while I was on an all-day conference call in my apartment Jack Nicolson had been filming Wolf on my corner. The Upper West Side was a cool place to be.

At the movies, I got used to recognizing not just streets but restaurants. All these shiny characters would sit at the same table where I sat. The Upper West Side may not have been the hippest place to live but it had a certain cachet, a certain style. I loved it.

I had not been living in New York for many years when I saw The Intern. I had heard about the move to Brooklyn. As a matter of fact, I made a business call to the only partially renovated building in Williamsburg in the early 1990s. The guy who lived on top of the mostly empty building where he ran his business told me to buy a building. What happened to Soho is about to happen to Williamsburg. I ignored his advice. I missed the boom. I have never actually been to the hip Williamsburg. For all I know, Williamsburg may have become somewhat passe. There might be a more hip Brooklyn neighborhood. I wouldn’t be the right person to ask.

So watching The Intern brought home to me that my time had passed. Sometimes, I like to revisit the restaurants I loved in the eighties and nineties when they were the hot spots in town, but my enjoyment is always tinged with a little sadness. My favorite restaurant and I are both a hold-over from the past. Ironically, it is owned by Robert DeNiro.

© 2024 Jane Kelly

Meeting Mr. Smith

Meeting Mr. Smith (Not his real name)

As I was approaching thirty, I had a boss who was very concerned that I was not married and, even worse in her eyes, didn’t seem at all concerned about my status. Because we worked in Human Resources, we knew a lot of basic information about every employee—enough for her to screen for suitable mates for me. 

“Mr. Jones seems nice,” she would say. Coyly. 

“He’s very nice, just not my type.”

“Mr. Williams is very polite and is going to medical school.”

“He is very pleasant but I think he’s interested in the head librarian.”

“Mr. Smith is single and always pleasant when I see him.”

“There’s something not right about that guy.”

She brought up Mr. Smith quite a few times and I always had the same response: “There’s something not right about that guy.”

I didn’t have any facts to support my claim. I didn’t actually know Mr. Smith although I saw him on almost a daily basis. He was a nice looking man about my age. From what I could tell, he and his coworker from their small department ate together at the same time and place every single day. Then, they sat for a few minutes in the lobby and watched. Everything and everybody. He even watched me. Not in a lascivious way. Not in an amused way. Not in threatening way. His face remained expressionless. I concluded he simply liked to watch. I found something about that creepy. My reaction was always the same even if I was only talking to myself. “There’s something not right about that guy.”

We never spoke until . . . 

One Friday afternoon, Mr. Smith stopped by HR on his way out the door. He needed to check something. I’ve long since forgotten what. He came into my office sporting a warm smile and exuding an appropriate level of charm that appeared genuine and not at all fake or creepy. His conversation was pleasant. He made me laugh. He stayed a little longer than necessary but not long enough to become a nuisance. When he walked out the door, he had won me over.

I told my boss: “You know, Mr. Smith? I was wrong about that guy. He’s perfectly nice.” And, then, I left for the weekend and I imagine she went home relieved at prospect of wedding bells in my future.

So I guess you think you know how this story ends. You guess that just as in any romance novel, my bad feelings turned to love, we married and lived happily ever after. Guess again.

I never saw Mr. Smith after that Friday. I might have noticed that he wasn’t at lunch on Monday but my attention was focused on finding out what was going on that kept my boss, her boss, and his boss behind closed doors for most of the morning. 

Luckily, the secret did not remain a secret for long, Over the weekend, Mr. Smith had been arrested for rape and assault. 

A week before my reaction would have been “I told you so.” But I’d been charmed. And, now I was shocked. Had there been some sort of mistake? In my seventies mindset, I wondered if he had been too aggressive, misread some signal or if a girl had changed her mind. After all, the seventies bar scene was crazy. But then I learned about the breaking and entering charges. Note the plural.

It took years and the invention of the Internet before I learned the rest of the story. In the months before his arrest, Mr. Smith had committed a series of attacks in the western suburbs of Philadelphia each one escalating in terms of violence. There were at least a dozen victims. They had not met Mr. Smith at a bar. They had not invited him into their homes. They had never seen him before. He had broken into their houses or apartments and raped each of them inflicting more and more physical damage than on the previous victim. One of his last victims after a required hospitalization testified that he was a monster. 

He claimed stress at work had caused his actions. He admitted he didn’t handle stress well. He offered alternative recommendations for sentencing to keep him out of jail. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. 

On the rare occasions I drove by the jail that was his home, I wondered how his life was going behind those walls. After twenty-five years I assumed he had been released. I was wrong. He had survived prison for only six years. I couldn’t discover whether he died from natural causes—unlikely in a man his age—or suicide or murder. 

My brain worried that I had bought into his charming act so easily. On an emotional level, I felt only sadness that my initial reaction had been so accurate. I’d been right. 

There was something not right about that guy. 

 

© 2024 Jane Kelly

If I were a psychopath

Handy tip: if you are going to condescend to someone in the global community of social media, you might want to check if they live not in Sri Lanka or Paraguay but within ten miles of your house.

I used to check a daily post by author Terry O’Dell. I had a morning routine I loved which concluded with a visit to her Facebook page where she posted a word of the day and followers provided fake definitions. Light-hearted fun until . . . 

I decided to change a word in my comment. I backed my cursor up and in the eyes of any conscientious member of the grammar police committed a capital crime. I failed to convert the “a” before the new word that started with vowel to “an.” I hit the post button and went on with my day.

I don’t usually get comments on that page, so I was interested to see what someone had to say. What he had to say started this way: “Come on people. This page is run by an author. Let’s get our act together.” Then, he went on to explain the rule regarding the use of “a” vs. “an” to me. In detail.

Being condescended to is one of my hot buttons. So, ignoring the unwritten law that you never respond to negative comments, I shot off a snotty retort. What a jerk. Me. Him too, but also me. I referenced my two graduate degrees and the nine (at that time) books I had published and sarcastically asked: “How did I miss learning that?” I could have noted that I used the rule correctly on the next line of the post but I wanted to show some restraint.

He tried to make light of his remark in one or two comments. I was not appeased. I blocked him but before I did, I whiled away the afternoon—there was a pandemic going on—checking out this jerk. I mean gentleman. Let’s be honest, I mean jerk.

I felt elation when I saw his address. I could be on his doorstep in under half an hour. I knew what his house looked like. Thank you, Google Earth and Zillow.

I learned where he worked and in what department. He’d been there many years without a promotion. I discovered the hobbies he enjoyed and the church he joined. I do not know how often he attended but it was there in his sixties he married for the first time. I found the name of the widow he married. She had grown children and I learned a lot about them too.

I became fascinated not by the information I retrieved but by the amount of information I uncovered. And, how easy it  was. 

He and his wife had recently moved so I knew the price of both houses. I expected to find that info. What I did not expect to find was on the realtor’s website, the realtor who had neglected to remove the virtual tour of the couple’s new house. So I checked out the floor plan moving from room to room including the main bedroom where he would sleep never knowing the price he was paying for making that snide remark on Facebook. But, only if I were a psychopath. And, let me state for the record, I am not. (References available upon request.)

I didn’t need to shoot him in his sleep to get satisfaction. I got that when I checked his profile on Linked-In. There in the first paragraph, I spotted the error. Didn’t he know that the rule is use “a” before a consonant and “an” before a vowel? Come on people . . .

© 2024 Jane Kelly