October 11, 2010 Issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s lyrical reconstruction of Buffalo’s East Side, as it was in 1947 (see my “Interesting Emendations” post here ), was still fresh in my mind when I opened this week’s issue of the magazine and found an article with the heading “Letter From Buffalo.” The article, called "Pay Up," is by Jake Halpern. It’s about a small-time debt collector named Jimmy, and it describes a present-day Buffalo that is very different from Klinkenborg’s pulsing, thriving post-war metropolis. In 1947, Buffalo was, in Klinkenborg’s words, “still an outpost of the big time.” In 2010, Buffalo is, in Halpern’s words, “among the poorest cities in the nation.” Halpern hangs out with Jimmy, drives around with him in what Jimmy calls his “raggedy-ass truck,” visits Jimmy’s office, which is located in a former karate academy “on a busy thoroughfare in a rough area,” meets his oldest son, Jimmy, Jr., whom Jimmy had once beaten, goes to church with him, meets a friend who runs a soul-food restaurant, is present at Jimmy’s office for what’s known in the debt collection business as a “talk-off,” which Halpern vividly describes. Halpern writes a plain, point-and-shoot prose that eschews similes and metaphors. At least that’s the way he’s written “Pay Up.” I’m not familiar with his other work. His strong suit appears to be dialogue, and in Jimmy he’s found a street-smart, loquacious talker. Here is Jimmy talking about raising his young set of twins on his own, because their mother was serving a four-year sentence in jail:

“‘Man, I was Mr. Mom,’ he recalled. ‘I’m breaking down crying, ironing these little-bitty-ass pants at five o’clock in the morning, trying to get these kids ready for school. Like, man, if you let them oversleep they going to have a rough day, man. You got to get them up. That was worse than any street situation I was in, but the reward was so good, man.’”

And here is one of Jimmy’s “point callers,” a former crack dealer named Jamal, describing Jimmy: “‘Jimmy was never the kind of person you fucked with, and he still ain’t,’ Jamal explained. ‘Don’t take his kindness for weakness. The street shit is always going to be in you.’” If you put priority on reality over theory, as I do, you are going to appreciate Halpern’s “Pay Up.” It delivers you exactly into the rub of things. (“Man, you right in the underbelly of it,” Jimmy says to Halpern, at one point in their travels through the Bailey-Delavan area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buffalo.) Halpern’s piece reminds me of Ian Frazier’s "The Rap" (The New Yorker, December 8, 2008), except it doesn’t have Frazier’s descriptive artistry. There are no inspired sentences in “Pay Up” like this one, for example, in “The Rap”: “Railroad tracks in a sunken road cut run along-side, and the wider neighborhood offers auto junk yards of crashed vehicles with their air bags deployed, vast no-name warehouses, and chain-link fences grafted to thickets of ailanthus trees.” But "Pay Up" has its own merits, not least of which is its realism. It's a realist's raw variation on Klinkenborg's gorgeous elegy for a once great city.