Jesse Lives - Page 1

The purpose of this blog is to edit the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo, which I think has definite potential. My plan is to post a page a day, though I may forget or not be able to do that (on vacation, for example) some days. By the time of the next NaNoWriMo, I should have this one edited. Here we go. Comments are welcome.

P. 1

When I first moved to New York City from Virginia in the mid-eighties, it took a while for me to sort out faces that repeated from the circulating crowd and begin to recognize my neighbors. In Jesse’s case, it wasn’t a repeating face, but a repeating voice and the associated accent, so close to my own, that eventually registered. Appalachian accents were not common.
 
Recognizing one of “my own”, I sought out the owner of the voice and found it belonged to an old man who stood by the entry of the 86th St. subway station each morning reselling newspapers discarded by earlier users of the station. I discovered much later that Jesse was only a little over 50 at the time, but my initial impression was of a man of at least 60, perhaps more, hard-lived years.
 
He did not have the look of the hard-core homeless. His eyes were clear, his clothes clean (if well-worn), he was always clean-shaven, and he never begged. He just offered his wares, calling out the headlines of the various papers in a strong clear voice conveying no judgement on the reliability of the source. The headlines of The Enquirer or The Star (“Baby Fathered by Alien Can Fly” or “Elvis Sighted in El Paso”) received the same matter-of-fact delivery as those of the Times or the Wall Street Journal. He managed to give the impression that he believed them all equally and without question, despite their tendency to be contradictory, and this was why I initially placed him in the same category as the other mildly insane folks inhabiting the area.
 
There was a very well-dressed, impeccably groomed woman who would often stop in the middle of the sidewalk to perform elaborate rituals, turning around three times rapidly, removing and replacing her hat, turning around again, reaching down to touch the sidewalk, turning around three times more, again removing and replacing her hat, then continuing on her way as if everyone did such things
 
And there was the "restaurant inspector", official or not I never knew, who could be heard fairly often bellowing from inside one es