The Home Office

My ex-wife used to complain that I “lived at the office.” I‘d tell her that wasn’t true: I lived at the bar. Then she’d get furious at me, even though she was the one that was wrong. Typical.

Since we split up, I’ve been working from home. That is to say, I live in my office.

It’s on the second floor of a four story brick front down at the corner of Down Street and Out Avenue. The joint’s older than dirt and about as clean. There’s a communist print shop on the first floor, so all that hot air makes for free heat in the winter. There’s a gang of jewel thieves living on the third floor, so that makes for free ice all summer. There had been a slew of crooked brokers and speculators living on the fourth floor until ’29, when they started throwing their weight around a little too much and the bottom dropped out. Now the jewel thieves have high ceilings. Sometimes crime does pay.

Now if only it would pay me. Just like any other Johnny Law working a beat, crime’s my bread and butter. If I don’t put the bite on some bad apples, I don’t get any dough, and without dough I’m just another crumb that can’t get his meat hooks on any muffins or hot tomatoes. And I could sure go for a juicy tomato. I might be starving to death, but I ain’t dead yet.

Lucky for me, the one thing this dive has going for it is that it’s uniquely suited for the racket busting racket. You know what they say about real estate: Locution, locution, locution. No, wait, that’s what they say about saying. Real estate is: Location, Location, Cheapness. And this place fits, fills, and foots the bill without breaking the bank.

For a sawbuck a month I get a pauper’s penthouse overlooking the rock bottom. This part of town is a festering cesspool of crime, the kind of filth I’ve got to wallow in to turn a buck. It’s right where the ghetto meets the slum (it’s a fuzzy line) and it’s a stone’s throw from the red light district. In fact from the roof you can spot more gin mills than the average Joe could shake a copy of the 18^th amendment at, and more cathouses than the average John could physiologically frequent in a week. It’s a low life lawbreaker’s paradise- the people are packed so tight down here it’s real easy to just melt away and disappear into the crowd.

Unless you’re a real weirdo, that is. And let me tell you pal, there ain’t a shortage of them down here. The prostitutes, the musicians, the hustlers, the dope addicts, the agitators, the street urchins- everybody’s a character. It’s real colorful. I can’t stand it. But it’s cheap. And it’s home.