A couple of days after Gabriele and I put the tepee up, I was walking across Chrystie Street at Canal when a 5x8 print blew up at my feet. Curious, I picked it up and continued walking. As I studied it more closely, I suddenly stopped and looked around quickly to see who had "planted" this photo for me to find. Of course, no one was there but the wind. I walked up on the Manhattan Bridge carrying the picture, trying to find the perspective of the camera which took it. Difficult, because the image was at least five years old. Walking back into time, I finally found it.
Where the tepee now stood there once was a scrawny tree. The rest of the triangular lot was barren. No shanties. I would learn later from one of our neighbors who had been there the longest, that at Christmas one year, they had put ornaments on the tree and some mornings when they woke, they had found different kinds of gifts under it. When we put the tepee up on Thanksgiving, 1990, there was no physical evidence of the tree, only the memory that it was once there, right where the tepee now stood. The print I found proved the memory true. I saved it. An eerie talisman.
One day a photographer somehow escaped the coup counting and stole a nice shot of the tepee and The Hill. Friends told us of a gallery that was exhibiting the photo. I went and cased the place. I had the talisman blown up and framed in the same matting as the gallery print. On The Hill, Ivan was the best at "playing chickie," the partner in crime who looks out and distracts while the deed is done. We went to the gallery and did the ol' switcharoo. No one noticed and the talisman stayed there for the entire run of the show.
One Sunday, some movie producers bring up a banquet for everyone. No cameras yet, but they want to use The Hill as a location. They are making a movie about the homeless, starring Danny Glover and Matt Dillon. The location scout comes by a week or so later and won't take no for an answer. Finally, frustrated, he brings out the trump card he has probably used over and over in trying to secure locations for this movie. "Don't you care about the homeless?" The blush. The actor hasn't forgotten his lines, just recited them in the wrong place. He exits stage left amidst catcalls from the audience.
The Prince of Washington Heights is on location at the Manhattan Bridge a few hundred feet from The Hill. Red is in a wheelchair, disabled from his latest occupation. He has been stealing surveillance cameras and selling them. I always thought Red was either taunting or delighting the overlooking gods of theft by stealing surveillance cameras. Mostly he stole them from ATMs. Of course he merely stole the camera, not the video tape showing him stealing the camera, and stealing from federal banks probably made him vulnerable to more than a misdemeanor charge. One day he was in a precarious position on some scaffolding two stories up at a surveilled construction site, and when he grabbed the camera, the scaffolding gave way. He fractured his right arm and right leg, so he couldn't even use crutches. Ivan pushes him across the street so he can get a better look at the movie shoot. Danny Glover is between takes sitting in a chair about a half a block away. From the wheelchair Red yells, "Yo, Danny!" Danny looks up, returns the wave and smiles in a do-we-know-each-other kind of way. The film actor never blushes. Besides, Red doesn't at all look like his co-star Matt Dillon.
