Early yesterday afternoon I and my fellow Carroll Gardeners were indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, letting the warmth of the direct sunlight delude us into believing that Spring was well and fully here. I sat at a table outside my local, Abilene, with a libation and a pretty stiff book (Terry Eagleton’s Trouble With Strangers; sample sentence: “Rather as the sole end of the accumulation of capital is to accumulate afresh, so, in a catastrophic collapse of teleology, the Will comes to appear independent of all specific objects of its attention.”); but I knew, given the number of people passing by, that I wouldn’t get too far too fast.
Sure enough, soon enough, I saw more than a few folks I know, and we exchanged the usual pleasantries. And then along comes Dean H., who I usually never see north of Union Street, and he has a question for me.
“Do you know George Weber?”
Do I know George Weber…do I know George Weber. The full name doesn’t really ring a bell, but I decide to bluff. “Yeah…I’ve heard of him…what’s up?”
“Well it looks like he was killed last night at a party at his place or something. Stabbed. The cops have two brownstones taped off on Henry over by Carroll Street.”
The tumblers start falling into place. Party. Henry Street. Then I think of a guy I only ever knew as George, a regular at this very bar I’m sitting outside of, back when it was a much wilder and weirder place called FInn. Tall, stoop-shouldered, hawk-like nose. Legendary for the sometimes weekend-long parties he used to throw at his place on Henry Street, mostly in the summer, when he could take advantage of his apparently impressively tricked-out back deck. I never went, ’cause I never got anything like a direct invitation, but a lot of the folks I used to call The Whole Sick Crew back in the Finn days—Carla, Brian B., Brian C., et. al.—were regulars. That George, who I never knew as anything but George.
When Dean goes off I do what any self-respecting twat in this situation does, which is look up “George Weber” on the Google on the Blackberry, and discover that the guy, with whom I’ve had a nodding acquaintance with for over ten years, is/was both a fellow media professional and a fairly well-known personality, a radio news guy for ABC who lost his permanent perch last year and had been freelancing since. One of his more recent blog posts is on the five most dangerous neighborhoods in NYC. Fancy that. It takes me about an hour to fully realize that rather than sitting out here brooding and doing Google searches, I can pick my fat ass up and actually walk down to Henry and check out what the hell is actually going on. As we constantly learn, the faster that news travels, the more likely it is to be inaccurate.
So I walk. The sky begins to cloud over, and the chill that’s been in the air all the while makes itself felt. A big police truck’s parked outside of the two taped-off brownstones. A few uniformed cops mill. I ask one if he can tell me anything. He can’t and refers me to the detective over by the front of the truck, tall guy with a military haircut, sharp grey suit and emerald-green tie. I tell him I want to ask, as an acquaintance, is it true that the deceased is George Weber? His head tilts to the left, he quietly says he can’t release any information, as the next of kin are still being notified. One need not be particularly street smart, or journalist smart, to recognize this confirmation.
Across the street, a couple of old-school Carroll-Gardeners are sitting on a stoop, philosophizing on the kind of trouble that can happen when you throw lots of open-invite parties and maybe the wrong guy gets in, and that guy gets an idea, and that guy decides to rob you or decides to come back and rob you. Young mothers with kids in their strollers—and they’re old-school neighborhood people, too—ask questions, get a little scared for themselves and theirs, shudder semi-theatrically, and move on. The newer residents who pass by try to act like they’ve seen it all before.
Back at Abilene a few hours later, Carla and Richie are there, and Carla’s saying it still hasn’t hit her yet. She and George were pretty close. As it happened, Carla and Richie had been at a funeral that afternoon, for another friend who’d died of cancer. They saw Brian C. there. “Me and Brian and Carla figured that George would be there, ’cause he knew this guy too,” Richie told me. “I was thinking, well, we’ll be able to catch up with George a bit today, because we hadn’t seen him since we went to a party at his place in August. So we thought it was a little weird that he wasn’t there. And then we got home and saw you had called, and didn’t leave a message, and we thought, ‘wonder why Glenn’s calling?’ And then we heard about George, and we knew why…”
And there was not much to do after that than have a drink in George’s memory. Two thirds of the people in the bar had never met him; didn’t know what the ten or so older folks huddled at the bar or scattered outside smoking were on about.
That was a nice piece, Glenn. I’ve checked out Weber’s website, and read a few things, and none of it, obviously, really tells me much. But reading about the murder itself, what’s known about it, really fills me with rage. In such circumstances, you picture what it must – or might – have been like, and you think about the terror and confusion of the victim, and since I’ve seen a picture of Weber now I can put a face to that terror and confusion. But the murderer is just an animalistic haze, and he makes me sick.