Part One

Later in life Judy used other names. But she was Judy Finch when she was growing up on St. Mark’s Place, which is itself a kind of alias for the three blocks of 8th Street between Third Avenue and Tompkins Square Park.

In the spring of ‘65 she was fifteen and had what she thought of as her first real boyfriend. Judy was light-haired and blue-eyed. The boy who called himself Ray Light had dark hair, brown eyes, was almost a year older and a bit taller. But their hair was the same length and some days, without planning it, they dressed almost identically.

Sitting on a neighborhood stoop one sunny day they blended into each other, his head resting on her shoulder, her denim-clad legs draped over his, one passing their last cigarette to the other. Ray Light was not his real name. He’d chosen it just after running away from home. When he talked about that, Judy saw him sitting on the edge of a loading dock in Ohio, waiting for a guy, any guy, to start him on his way to New York City. She thought that being able to do this was another sign that they were in love.

The thin, jumpy man who picked him up, before getting down to business, asked his name. Instead of boring Jonathan Duncan, which he’d been called since birth, out came Ray Light. Later it occurred to both Ray and Judy that this had been prophecy.

Ray came from a very nice suburb of Cincinnati. His family hadn’t expected a son who had long hair and wanted to paint, to dance, to play music. What he wanted to do varied from day to day. When he talked about this, Judy thought his plans were kind of hopeless. She had some idea how these things worked. Her father was the conceptual sculptor Jason Finch. Her mother was the essayist and critic Anna Muir. She was going to study acting.

Ray lived with a guy he called the Man who locked Ray out of his loft on 4th Street every morning as he went to work and let him back in when he came home. When she thought about his situation, something deep inside Judy ached.

Ray had just said, “I’m going to ask the Man to lend me the money to buy a guitar,” when she looked up and found this other kid standing there waiting for them to notice him.

“You got a light,” the kid asked and wiggled an unlighted Camel. Ray handed him matches and looked right into his face. Judy gave him the once-over.

He lighted up with a little flourish, handed back the book of matches, and said, “The name’s BD.” They told him their first names. He said he’d just moved into the neighborhood and wanted to know where he could hear music. They told him there were hootenannies in Washington Square and folk rock in little cafés in the East and West Village.

When he asked, “Is there someplace I can score grass?” they both shook their heads, and when he didn’t walk away they got up and did just that.

Later they compared notes and both knew immediately that this kid was from the halfway house. His institutional haircut, white T-shirt, sneakers, and jeans were like a uniform. The halfway house on St. Mark’s Place near First Avenue was a place for teenage boys whose parents were enmeshed in the legal system or in the hospital or somehow couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them. They followed a type—white, skinny, a little in shock—and they got held there until they could finish high school and go on to college or more likely go into the army. Vietnam was just starting to heat up.

“Is he a nark?” Judy wondered.

“If he’s not in the halfway house, he’s got one hell of a cover,” said Ray. They walked by Judy’s place. Her father’s studio occupied the ground floor of a building on the south side of St. Mark’s near the corner of Second Avenue. The first floor had once been a barn when it was a tradesman’s house, and a horse and cart were kept there.

The barn doors had long ago been cemented shut and had windows cut into them. Her father used it as his studio.

Her mother was away a lot. She was in Madison that week leading a seminar on the works of Kate Chopin. Because her father’s studio was too crowded to give him the needed space, he had started to spend a lot of his time upstairs in the living room. He’d rolled up the rug to expose the gleaming parquet floor and had a row of bricks toppled like dominoes in an S-formation. He was working out the exact shape and dynamics of the fallen bricks. There were scrapes on the floor. The building had been bought with her mother’s money.

Today Jack Moore from the Museum of Modern Art was there, smoking a cigarette and sipping a scotch. He smiled and said hello to Judy and nodded to Ray.

Jason Finch was forty and looked thirty. He wore a denim work shirt and work boots. When he worked with bricks, with electric wiring, with pipes like in his last piece, Jason Finch always began to act and sound like a blue-collar worker, a union man doing what he got paid to do.

“Hey,” he said to Judy while scribbling notes on the back of an envelope. “Did you do that science paper?”

“I finished it in study period and handed it in,” she said though she hadn’t and Jack Moore, with his cop’s face and drinker’s nose, chuckled.

“We’re going to watch TV,” she said. Her father nodded vaguely. One rule bound Judy and Ray’s time in the house. She couldn’t have him in her room with the door closed. Ray let her take the lead. They kissed long and hard, as on the screen an actor dressed like a mailman talked to a clown who spoke by holding up voice balloons with words written on them. She switched channels and in another city in the late afternoon, a bunch of boys in three-button jackets and narrow ties and girls in short skirts and long hair danced like it was Saturday night. The two of them danced a little, giggled and ground against each other. Her father and the critic laughed in the living room.

Another rule limited their time together. Ray had to leave a little before six to be home for the Man. Judy found this tragic and romantic. She usually walked him over to 4th Street. That day he wanted to leave a little early and chose to take a roundabout route. Usually Ray never wanted to go near the halfway house. That evening he insisted they walk down St. Mark’s Place. Against a brick wall in the twilight, neighborhood boys—some still in parts of their Catholic school uniforms—played handball, Ukrainians against Poles.

Across the street kids from the halfway house leaned on the railings in front of their building and watched. They didn’t even speak to each other, much less form teams of their own. Each stood apart from the others and watched the passersby. Behind them, in the ground-floor windows, Judy could see lights on in the dining hall. Ray glanced their way casually but Judy knew he was looking for BD. The Man lived down on 4th Street between Bowery and Second Avenue on the top floor of a loft building that was still mostly factories. Judy, when she’d first met Ray a couple of months before, would go by there at night and look up at the lights in the windows. That evening they kissed and hugged a few doors down from the place where he lived.

“You were looking for BD,” she said.

“I think he’s a spotter,” Ray told her.

“What?”

“Someone who looks for runaways,” he said, gave her one last kiss, and went inside to ring the bell and be allowed upstairs.

Judy stared after him not breathing. She’d never heard him refer to himself as a runaway. For a moment when he’d said it, she’d seen an image of a figure running down the middle of a highway late at night, headlights blasting past him in both directions. And she knew that was his image of himself. Walking along thinking about that, Judy let herself float on the surface of the city, on the deep smoke of a Ukrainian sausage factory, on a tall woman in tights, a dance skirt, and straight black hair carrying dry cleaning in one hand and a trumpet case in the other, on fire engines blasting up the avenue and the feel of a stray evening sea breeze that hadn’t yet picked up city soot and grease. She was on St. Mark’s Place, walking past the Dom, the big old Polish Wedding Hall, when someone said, “Hi.” And there was BD right in front of her with a cigarette in his mouth. Later it occurred to Judy that he could have followed them to where Ray lived and then doubled around to casually encounter her there.

“You’re going to be late for dinner,” she said indicating the halfway house.

“As long as I’m on time for lights-out they don’t care,” he said not missing a beat nor in any way surprised that she knew where he lived.

They stood for a moment amid the Slavs and Spanish who came out of the rumbling subway and off buses on their way home from work, students and poets and shambling winos and a pair of old hookers with minds like confetti walking to their beats up on 14th Street. The man who called himself Mr. William Shakespeare, and who dressed in a velvet doublet and red tights, went past them speaking blank verse to himself.

BD said, “You live around here?” and she nodded vaguely in the direction of her house. “With your parents?”

The way he asked made her feel for him a bit. She said, “Mostly with my father, right now.”

“What does he do?”

“These days he’s mostly a bricklayer.”

“That’s good work,” he said. “My father worked delivering the Daily News. He got sick and died and I had a choice of living with family I don’t like or coming here.”

Judy was surprised that he spoke better than she’d heard him do earlier and that he told her about himself like that. Afterward she would never trust him. But right then, she said good-bye and once indoors thought quite a few times about how his nose was just a little flattened and his T-shirt read in washed-out letters POLICE ATHLETIC LEAGUE GOLDEN GLOVES.

She attended the Quaker high school on Stuyvesant Park, eight blocks up Second Avenue from where she lived. When she came out of there at the end of the day, Ray stood across the street. He had one foot up behind him and leaned against the antique iron spiked fence that ran around the park, smoking a Marlboro, glancing at passersby. Seeing him in that hustler pose it struck her for the first time how lost he looked.

She crossed the street and took his arm as they walked through Stuyvesant Park. She thought about how he always waited for her to take the lead and imagined this was what he did with the Man.

“That guy BD isn’t in the halfway house,” he said. “I went by there this morning and asked, and no one had heard of him.

“I knew I was taking a risk. One of the counselors spoke to me. Acted like he thought I’d come in looking for shelter. He’s queer. Told me they took runaways. Tried to stop me from leaving and to drag me into the showers before I got away.” Judy saw it all as he spoke.

They went arm in arm past the Eastern rite church and strange little stores that shipped packages to Eastern Europe, and stayed on the other side of 10th Street from the gang of psycho, speeding Italian kids that hung around that corner.

He was shaking. They sat on a bench in the St. Mark’s in the Bowery churchyard and she held him.

“They know I’m here. This morning when I left the house I saw BD, whoever he is, right down the street. They’re going to try and take me back home. My parents will institutionalize me.”

Ray didn’t want to hang around the neighborhood that afternoon. So he and Judy walked in a wide loop over to Greenwich Village, through Washington Square, past coffeehouses and Italian clubs, down streets lined with buildings full of sweatshops, past garages and places you could buy live chickens to kill. All the way, he talked about what he was going to do. He’d tell the Man what happened, get as much cash as possible, and split. He’d call her when he was on his way and maybe she could meet him and they’d say good-bye.

It was like the center of her world was about to disappear. She offered to hide him in her house, to get her parents’ friends to help him.

But he refused. She saw Ray reflected in a mirror wearing just a bathrobe and with his head shaved standing in what looked like a hospital or prison corridor. It was the first time Judy had seen his future. They both knew this was what was going to happen to him.

Both were crying and it was almost dark when they set foot on his block. Nothing was happening: A woman pushed a baby carriage, a super hauled trash to the curb, a couple of drag queens sashayed toward the Club 86 near Second Avenue.

They walked to his door and he turned to kiss her. “I’ve never known anybody like you. You’re part of me. You can see what I’m thinking. You’re the only reason I’ve stayed here.”

The door to the building opened and a guy who had been waiting in the hallway came out and grabbed Ray. The car must have been right around the corner because it appeared and stopped directly behind them. The men were big but they didn’t hurt anybody. Two of them cuffed Ray and carried him despite his yelling and thrashing to the backseat of the car.

The third blocked Judy from interfering. Deflected her hands, booted aside her kicks. “You shithead,”

she screamed.

“Now, miss, you shouldn’t talk like that,” he said and grinned very hard. Then he turned and jumped in the backseat and they tore off down the street.

Judy ran after the car, tried to remember the license but couldn’t. She felt Ray’s rage and fear. His face was shoved into the seat, his pants got yanked down. A needle was stuck in his butt. After that he slipped like water through her fingers as she stood on the corner and tried to hold him in her mind and heart. For an instant she had a glimpse, a vision, of three figures against a background of what looked like Technicolor amoebas writhing under a huge microscope.

Judy became aware that a background noise was a man screaming, “I’ll kill you sons of bitches! Bring him back! He’s radiant! He’s the future!”

People on the street who had barely noticed the abduction stared up at the building. She looked and saw a guy with wild hair and eyes, leaning out his window staring at where the car had gone. Judy knew this was the Man and hated him with everything she had in her.

She ran home wanting to lock herself in her room and her mother was there. So were Randolph Crain and Evelyn Killeen, an old married couple, stage actors whom Judy had always liked. Her father was down in the studio and there was the sound of an electric saw. Her mother was standing on the stairs telling him to come up because they had guests and it was rude. Randolph and Evelyn were saying they understood. And Judy went past them with her hands over her face, ran upstairs, and slammed the bathroom door.

Her mother tried to talk her out. “Honey, I know I’ve been away and you felt abandoned. But tell me what’s wrong so I can help you.”

“I’m not your child!” she yelled.

Her father tried next, all quiet emotion as befit an honest workingman. “Judy, tell me who it was that hurt you.”

“You couldn’t see the one I love when he was in front of you!”

It was Evelyn Killeen who came so silently to the door that Judy didn’t know she was there until she spoke. “You lost your young man, honey.” Her voice was uncannily youthful. “I read that in you when you rushed past me just now.”

Some years later Judy found exactly those lines when she read for the part of Norah, the older sister, in the 1930s romantic comedy September Fancy.

That night, though, bundled up in her bathrobe, she told her story to all of them amid tears and hiccups. Later she heard her mother downstairs in the living room say clearly, “You let her hang around where she could get kidnapped.”

Then her father mumbled something unclear. And her mother said, “Your family. They’re deranged enough. Your parents told me I was unfit to be a mother.”

“My parents! Your old man looked like something out of the wax museum.”

“His money was good enough to buy this damn place.”

The next morning when Judy was on her way to school, her father was heading out the door at the same time as if by coincidence. And, like it was the most normal thing imaginable, he walked to school with her.

And she was so lonely because Ray wasn’t there that she let him do that. BD was on the corner of Second Avenue. The sight of him angered Judy so much that she told her father who he was and how she knew he had turned Ray in.

That afternoon her mother came to the school and took her daughter out of study hall. She had packed two suitcases and said Judy was going on a little vacation with Randolph and Evelyn at their house out in Bucks County.

She was too surprised and distraught to properly protest. Next came her parents’ divorce, then a move with her mother to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which she found herself in school in Vermont. It was a couple of years before she heard from Ray, and even longer before she got more than a glimpse of St. Mark’s Place.