Looking for Jimmy by Peter Quinn

Author:Peter Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABRAMS (Ignition)
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

The gutting and malling of Albany’s gizzards resuscitated what it didn’t destroy. Block after block of nineteenth-century brownstones were brought back to Victorian dignity, including the ex-rooming house on Dove Street in which Legs was shot to death (“ ‘Honest to God, Marcus,’ he said going away, ‘I really don’t think I’m dead.’ ”) and which is now owned by the chronicler of gangster deeds and demise, William Kennedy.

Its role as the state capital gives Albany an advantage over other upstate New York cities whose depleted or vanished manufacturing base has sucked away their souls. Albany still has its soul, which resembles the hobo jungle in Ironweed, a spiritual core of “essential transience and would-be permanency.” Its transience is underlined by the comings and goings of politics and legislators and governors—today’s big shots, tomorrow’s hobos. Its permanency is partly anchored to the government buildings done in styles from Athenian to Star Trekkian (the State Theater is called The Egg but to my eyes its tilted ovoid shape has more in common with a UFO). More permanent is the Hudson River that the city stands beside, a majestic flow that will still stream seaward when the crystalline and Carrara precincts of the Capitol, stone heart and all, have joined their flesh-and-blood inhabitants in the dust.

Maybe Kennedy’s novels won’t endure as long as the river. But as long as women and men read books, the Albany Cycle will also be part of the city’s soul. Visitors will come from afar to search out his streets and characters, and if they’re lucky and alert enough to what’s going on around them, they might be joined at lunch the way the sojourning First Friday Club was all those years ago when Legs Diamond, sandwiched between pious Alice and sexy Kiki, showed up in Lombardo’s, his arrival heralded by the bagman for the Albany machine, “a dandy and curmudgeony and a wily and wise old Irishman,” as Kennedy describes him, “who had read his Yeats and Wilde as well as Croker and Tweed.”

The entire crew who filled up the backroom of Lombardo’s was known to Kennedy: showgirls, sports, yeggs, and the “men I’d been raised with, men who knew my father and my uncles; tradesmen and sportswriters and other lawyers and politicians and factory hands who like pinochle and euchre, and salesmen who like to bowl and drink beer, and, of course, of course, Jack Diamond.”

Kennedy knows/appreciates/understands these people better than anyone. He forgives them their trespasses and posts bail for their felonies. He refuses caricature. He sympathizes with their quest for mercy. He loves their empowering/crippling incapacity to take themselves or their world too seriously. He laughed with the rest of us when Hattie Wilson, mistress of The Gut, wobbled upward and stood precariously atop her chair, her callipygian assets on full display, and announced, “One way or another, everybody’s an idiot, and that goes double for the geniuses.”

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