Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Free

being pounded. It was a woman client. Tan pointed slender shoes had been left by the door. There was something vaguely erotic about the thought of it, some unknown woman lying naked on a table at the mercy of his wife's long and powerful fingers. He liked the way their shoes were left in his hallway He would have liked them to leave all of their clothes in the hallway. But sometimes they were men's shoes.
    It had been a hard year for Sarah. New people were moving into the neighborhood, and she had befriended one—a girl born on the same day in the same year and named Maya. She had awarded Maya with that most important title children are empowered to bestow—"best friend." To Nathan, Maya and her parents were new people in the neighborhood, they were smarts. But for Sarah, they had lived there all her life. They had moved in about the time the girls were born, buying an entire three-story house on Tompkins Square. Buying property in the neighborhood was a startling new concept to the Seltzers, who had owned neighborhood property since the 1920s and for a very long time had regarded their holdings as a burden. Maya's parents were undeterred by the squatters' camp in Tompkins Square, a little tent city of scraggly suburban kids having an East Village experience. They were certain that the police would soon drive the squatters out, whereas the Seltzers feared that the police would drive all of them out.
    Maya's parents were not like the neighborhood people, and last year Maya had surprised her best friend, Sarah, by starting school, and though it was only a few hours a day, it came between them. Maya awarded best friend status to a different girl who went to her school.
    When Sarah had asked why she didn't go to school also, Nathan had said, "But you are only three years old." Nathan and almost everyone he knew had started school at age five. But his wife, Sonia, who had gone not through the New York City public school system but instead to private schools in Mexico City and Guadalajara, was more sympathetic. Then they discovered that the "preschool" would cost them $10,000 for the year.
    "What do they teach?" Nathan had asked, and Sarah relayed the question to Maya, and the answer came back, "Things."
    But it was summer now, and Sarah was happy because there was no school and soon she would have her best friend back.
    Nathan took his little girl's hand on the old, streamlined art deco elevator and through the polished black-and-white art deco lobby and out into a less polished world, where Sarah took her seat on his shoulders, grabbing his curly mane with her tiny fingers.
    It was a sunny day early in the summer of the Michael Dukakis presidency That summer, Michael Dukakis and the New York Mets both looked undefeatable. The Mets had untouchable starting pitching and powerful hitters. And Dukakis had a recent poll showing that he would beat Vice President George Bush by a margin of $2 to 38 percent. The long nightmare of the monster with the Disney smile was about to be over. Michael Dukakis, whoever he was, had the simple task of being better than Ronald Reagan.
    The era of Ronald Reagan had been an isolating experience for the neighborhood, watching Reagan go from national joke to popular leader in the rest of the country, while here in the neighborhood his joke status remained. No one in the neighborhood had ever actually met anyone who voted for Reagan, but statistically he was very popular, and the only ones in the country who seemed to still know that he was a joke—except for Reagan himself, who always had a silly smile suggesting the ridiculousness of it all—lived in this part of New York City. But now it was finally over and George Bush was too silly even for the people out in America. To people in the neighborhood, the fact that Dukakis was popular and not Bush was a signal that the madness had passed and it was once again safe to leave the neighborhood. The new, short, dark-eyed president, a Greek, was practically