I recently gave a reading and a Q&A in Manhattan at which most of the audience was under forty—that is, born after 1985. One of the questions’ recurring themes was curiosity about New York in the eighties.
Two days later I picked up the papers and read about a man who sexually violated a corpse in the subway. My first reaction of utter horror—I mean, seriously, are you f–ing kidding me?!—was complicated by a sense almost of déjà vu , as if I’d been transported back in time to an era of urban crime and chaos in which such an occurrence would not have seemed so outlandish. The era, for instance, of the immortal 1983 New York Post headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”
Of course, it was from the Post that I first learned about this week’s nearly inexplicable event, although it has to be said that even the Post seems to be out of practice, after years of gentrification of the city, in dealing with this level of psychopathy. The headline “‘Necro’ sicko on subway” doesn’t really do justice to the nature of the crime, nor does it have the tabloid’s signature waggish, punning gallows humor…