Remembering Jimmy Breslin: My own New York story

One of the perks of being a journalist is getting to meet fascinating people in often equally intriguing places. My best case in point: Jimmy Breslin, the quintessential voice of New York City, who died this week at 88.

It was 2000, and Hillary Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate in New York. I was a reporter with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and I suggested to my editors that we ought to do a story about whether that state’s former first lady had left Arkansas behind for good.

Spoiler alert: she had. But my editors kindly sent me to New York to prove it anyway, and I made the most of the trip. I dropped by to see former Mayor Ed Koch. I asked a question of Joseph Kennedy at a news conference. I stopped Hells Angels on the street. And I called Newsday, hoping to get Jimmy Breslin’s no doubt entertaining take on Hillary.

More than a typical newspaper columnist, the Pulitzer Prize winner was an author, a TV host and even in movies.

Obituaries this week have portrayed him in seemingly contradictory terms: Poetic. Profane. Legendary. Petty. Unkind. Bighearted.

At various publications through the decades, Breslin championed everyday people and their plights while also skewering the mighty with hard-nose investigations written with a Dickensian flair.

When I called him, he was working for Newsday. Someone said they’d get a message to him. I wasn’t hopeful.

But Breslin called back that afternoon, if not within the hour.

“Where ya stayin’?” he demanded in his thick New Yorkese.

I named the hotel, one of those tiny, old Manhattan places where you share a bathroom with everyone on your floor. Jimmy, appalled, had never heard of it.

“Why didn’t you call?” he asked, explaining that I could have stayed at his place.

Seriously? How would that conversation have gone?

“Hey, Jimmy. It’s Carrie from Arkansas. I know we’ve never met, but I’m a journalist, you see, and I’m going to be in the city and was thinking of stopping by. For a week.”

Jimmy invited me over for an interview at his penthouse almost 30 floors above Broadway near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. I still remember the view as it were someplace I actually had stayed at for a week: the city’s skyline, high and close and lit up as if it were on a platter being served just to me. It was almost like the set of a movie that you know doesn’t really exist, except it did.

Jimmy’s wife, then-City Council member Ronnie Eldridge, lamented that they used to have an even more spectacular view that took in the iconic Chrysler Building, but another skyscraper was built in between. Did I mention that Jimmy wasn’t your typical newspaper columnist?

I interviewed Breslin on his living room sofa, with that view to my back. I toured his home office, which, as I recall anyway, was filled with books and a typewriter.

Breslin was calmer, quieter and smaller in person than I’d expected — more like someone’s genial grandpa than an irascible pit bull in print — but his comments didn’t disappoint. Take his description of Hillary:

“She’s a duplicitous, scheming, grabbing woman,” Breslin told me.

That was complimentary compared to what he said about one of her opponents, former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio:

“Lazio has got to be the most stupid son of a bitch to run for anything.”

My favorite line?

“I don’t hate her,” Breslin said of Hillary. “I’ve just got taste.”

For some reason I can’t remember, I returned to see Jimmy and his wife later that week. They’d ordered in salad and graciously asked me to stay for dinner.

But it was my last night in New York, and I had my heart (or, rather, stomach) set on a fabulous last meal in Little Italy. No salad for me, thanks.

That’s right. I declined dinner with Jimmy Breslin, who then helpfully picked up the phone to call his friend, the equally famous columnist Jack Anderson of the Village Voice, to find out exactly where I should go.

Why — why, why why — didn’t I stay? Looking back, there are so many questions I would like to have asked Breslin. About writing. About the people he interviewed. His New York stories.

As my current editor points out — rather late — I could have had the salad and then gone to Little Italy.

I blew it. Except for one thing.

That night, I had an amazing, only-in-New-York kind of time, with characters right out of a Breslin column. At the restaurant where Jack sent me, I met two guys named — and I’m not making this up — Vinny and Sal, who talked like every stereotypical New Yorker you’ve ever heard. Sal’s cousin owned the restaurant, which didn’t stop Sal from helping me swipe one of the menus as a keepsake. It hangs in my kitchen today, its fabulous vintage photo of Sal’s family from the old country annotated with names in his handwriting. After a plate of spaghetti bolognese, we landed in a Mets bar, much to Vinny and Sal’s liking. The Subway World Series was underway. The much-despised Yankees came out on top that night, but it didn’t dampen our spirits.

Less than a year after meeting my new New York friends — Sept. 10, 2001, to be exact — I returned home to find the menu and its frame had crashed to my kitchen floor. I thought, wow, I hope this doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with Vinny and Sal. They were fine that day and on Sept. 11, too. So was Jimmy. My mother said I ought to write him, but I didn’t know what to say and couldn’t imagine he needed to hear from me at the time.

However, I’d always hoped to have a reason to chat with Jimmy again. Whoever he was as a writer, he was exceptionally kind to a young and unknown colleague when he didn’t have to be.

I still wish I could have him to dinner, even just for a salad.

This story was originally published March 24, 2017 at 6:09 PM with the headline "Remembering Jimmy Breslin: My own New York story."