Member-only story
Sixteen April, Twenty Twenty-One
Nothing good ever lasts
It was dusk and one by one the boys arrived. Each one looked around before clambering up the old iron column to their private garden. Izzy had been the first one to climb up here onto the old high-line railbed. For three precious weeks, it had been all his. Here he was above the madness and the noise and the filth.
With grass and scrubby, determined weeds all around him, Izzy felt safe. Sirens sounding below were simply background noise. They meant nothing. And in every direction — sky. Vast and glorious and indifferent. Izzy sometimes just lay on his back in the grass and watched clouds pass. The pollution-enhanced sunsets over Jersey were better than going to the movies.
Later, he kicked himself for being so stupid as to show his little brother how to get up there. Now there were five of them.
Soon enough there would be twenty and then a hundred.
Only that morning Izzy’s mother’s boyfriend was reading that a couple of guys were fighting city hall to stop the demolition of the old abandoned railbed that ran from below Gansevoort up to 34th Street.
Darby lit the blunt, took a nice lungful, and passed it to Sonny who sucked in his toke and handed it over to Nick. The five were stretched out along the old tracks and…
