Warning -- if you don't want to hear the story spelled out for you first scroll down to the podcast first and listen...the link is at the bottom.
The East Village is policed by the 9th Precinct and I wrote a fictional short story called The Going. It is actually a really sad ghost story, I tell you that because unedited with the sex scene for some reason my audience seemed to miss that point but I have the podcast in the itunes store minus the love scene which takes place in the ghost precinct the shell of what was the 9th precinct. An NYPD detective I made friends with because of 9-11 asked me to write a short story so I did and it is dedicated to the NYPD and most especially the detectives because they would go from the WTC site to the morgue and they would stay with even the smallest bit of DNA, with someone's loved ones like a pinch hitting ghost.
I remember "In the Cut" came out and flopped in at the box office. I had read the book and there was a sex scene in the precinct and I knew I could write a better one and I did. I never had sex in a precinct and would not want to. When I wrote this story I cried, I would cry when I read it out loud everytime. It is about a woman from the East Village and a fireman that worked in the East Village that died downtown 9-11 about they don't know it -- they can't come to turns with their death and they wander around the East Village talking to each other on their cel phones until she meets a detective she has been trying to reach on the phone finds her in front of the "old ghost building -- what was the 9th Precinct and what would one day be the new 9th Precinct.
What happened post 9-11 with the Bloomberg administration pushing a tsunami of community crushing development was another shocker, Sept. 11 unfathomable but so is what Mike Bloomberg did to what was left of our neighborhood here in the East Village and city wide so when I listen to my podcast or read the story it is with great irony than I could have ever have imagined.
When I wrote The Going it was with compassion for the heroism of the NYPD especially Sept. 11 and for the good police officers that have to deal with the darkest and saddest elements of society that most of us don't want to face just like death.
When I read the podcast I was so upset I kept making a clicking sound and I did not fully understand that Mike Bloomberg's administration and NYU along with parties I can only describe as corrupt destroyed life as I knew it and loved, more loss which I find ironic.
The Going is love letter to the neighborhood....
Above is the hexagon tile in Tompkins Square Park with a few lines from my poem and short story.
I still get very emotional and upset about this story and I remember The New York City Police Museum had a poignant exhibit about the detectives who did the work at the morgue for Sept. 11.....Heart breaking and courageous.....
