Several of New Yorker satirist and editor Veronica Geng’s friends—among them Philip Roth, Jamaica Kincaid and Roy Blount Jr.—were sitting around in an Italian restaurant after her wake in 1997 when someone asked Geng’s younger brother Steve where she got her brilliant sense of humor. Steve glibly replied that her best material came from him. That, of course, was untrue. A sensibility as complex as Geng’s couldn’t be appropriated, even from a sibling. Besides, by Steve’s own admission, Veronica spent much of her adult life avoiding him. It’s also safe to say that Steve’s experiences were not of the sort available to the average New Yorker writer—at least not if she had any instinct for self-preservation.

“Ron,” as Steve called his older sister, followed a fairly traditional route to literary success: She started in low-paid publishing jobs, wrote for women’s magazines and eventually caught the eye of William Shawn, The New Yorker’s legendary editor.

Her brother, now 63, took a more serpentine path to becoming an author. He spent much of his life—until about eight years ago—as a junkie and a small-time crook, a shoplifter talented enough to earn the moniker “Record Steve” for his ability to boost dozens of LP’s at a single bound off the shelves of Greenwich Village record shops.

Shoplifters tend to be among the less confrontational, more risk-averse members of the criminal fraternity. But that doesn’t mean Steve’s career lacked danger or excitement. In fact, the main hurdle the reader faces in getting through this funny, sometimes appalling and finally sad book is caring about a protagonist who apparently cared so little about himself. He would get straight, but enjoyed the junkie subculture too much to stay that way for long. He boasts that withdrawal, at least for him, wasn’t all that bad. He had opportunities that less talented or charming addicts could only dream of: He took up acting and got a recurring gig on Miami Vice; he appeared with Alec Baldwin in the film Miami Blues. But until well into middle age, when he was diagnosed with HIV—and even after that—he preferred the community and camaraderie of crooks to ordinary, law-abiding citizens.

He even recounts, with something resembling good cheer, a sabbatical on Rikers Island where he resisted the romantic overtures of a much larger inmate by trying to sink his teeth into the guy’s face. “The first time I took a shower in that dorm,” he says, “two black guys who were showering at the same time started singing that Motown song, ‘Heaven must have sent you from above ….’ I had a suspicion I was going to have trouble.”

A brother like Steve would have been a liability at New Yorker cocktail parties, no matter how good his tales. And his sister seems to have spent much of her career ducking him and his phone calls and coaching her friends to do the same. When she let down her guard down, she paid a price. On one occasion, she let Steve stay at her apartment when she was out of town, only to have him invite a couple of junkie acquaintances to spend the night. Predictably, they stole her jewelry.

And while the book is billed as the story of both their lives, Steve admits in the acknowledgements that he knew little about his sister’s career at The New Yorker, and much of what he learned came from interviewing her colleagues Roger Angell and Chip McGrath after her death.

That’s not to say that their encounters, when they occurred, lacked poignancy. They shared an outwardly normal middle-class childhood that nonetheless managed to scar both to the bone. Their father was an officer in the Quartermaster Corps with a talent for bullying and berating his children. He came closest to eloquence when he predicted, accurately, that his son would eventually “get his tit in a wringer.”

Rage and unhappiness seemed to stalk both siblings through their lives. Steve’s problems were obvious; Veronica’s manifested themselves in more subtle ways—though not that much more subtle.

She could be ruthless sexually, going behind the back of one boyfriend to have an affair with Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen—to whom the boyfriend had introduced her. (When the musician started leaving weird messages on Veronica’s answering machine, her brother chivalrously offered to have him snuffed out; coming from Steve, that wasn’t an empty promise.) Veronica could also be crushing to colleagues in her criticism of their work. By the time of her death, from a brain tumor at the age of 55, she’d burned the bridges to most of the people in her life.

One of the sweeter encounters between brother and sister occurs at the hospital where Steve is recovering from a brain injury. (He’d slugged a girlfriend, only to have her dispatch a relative to bash in his skull with a hammer.)

“Talk to me a little,” Steve tells his big sister at the hospital. “What are you up to?”

“Christ, nothing this dramatic. Writing articles for women’s magazines about how to catch men.”

“Don’t make me laugh. It hurts my head.”

“You think that’s funny? What about the women who actually took my advice?”

Such reunions were rare. One of Veronica’s final acts was to keep her illness secret from her brother. She seems to have done so less to spare him worry than to protect herself. Steve believes that she was losing her mind—but given his history, her decision to cut him out of the final months of her life seems entirely clear-headed.

Ralph Gardner Jr. is a frequent contributor to The Observer.

Here’s how it works. We see some mega-celebrity coming down the avenue—say Julie Andrews, who is scheduled for this year’s parade, and about whom we’re already excited. We throw open the sash and my wife Debbie, my cousins George and Paul, my friend Bill and any kids who care to join us lean our bodies out the window, and at just the right moment—timing is everything, because approximately 100,000 other people are vying for their attention and the din of marching bands is deafening—shout out in unison, at the top of our lungs, “JULIE!”

Our target celebrity has to be facing in the right direction for us to have any hope of netting her. If she’s waving to the masses in the stands across the street, you can shout until you pop a blood vessel and she’ll never hear you. But if she’s facing in your direction and you scream loudly enough, wave insanely and risk losing your footing and plummeting five stories to the pavement, there’s a slight chance she’ll catch you out of the corner of her eye, look up and acknowledge you.

The feeling, as the ad says, is priceless. Some of our bigger “gets” include Joe Torre, Shari Lewis, Raven, Plácido Domingo, Florence Henderson and Rudy Giuliani—though we weren’t waving at him. This was pre-9/11, when Mr. Giuliani wasn’t yet “America’s Mayor,” but rather that strutting martinet who left his wife and arrested you for jaywalking. “We’re looking at him and thinking ‘What a schmuck!’, and he looks up at us and waves,” Debbie recalled. “I felt creepy.”

We’ve dissed other big shots, too, though I can’t name any off the top of my head. We’re not indiscriminate. We don’t shout at everyone. You want somebody for whom the parade marks the high point of his or her career or perhaps a comeback moment, somebody with a certain kitsch factor, somebody who’s almost as excited to see you as you are to see them.

That’s why I’m so excited that Barry Manilow is going to be in this year’s parade. Barry is the perfect Thanksgiving Day Parade celebrity. He’s not exactly passé. On the other hand, paparazzi-filled helicopters aren’t circling overhead every time he goes to the supermarket. Seeing us risking life and limb to attract his attention can only boost his morale. We’re performing something akin to a public service.

I was on the fence about Prince. I didn’t realize his career was in free fall until I spotted him in this year’s parade line-up. He just seemed a little too cool, not Christmassy enough to roll into Herald Square aboard the Mother Goose float.

Turns out my instincts were correct. When I called Macy’s P.R. department to learn more about Prince’s appearance, Orlando Veras, one of their publicists, didn’t know why everybody thought Prince was going to be in this year’s parade. He wasn’t. I directed Mr. Veras to Macy’s own Web site, and to Prince’s name under the heading “Talent.” “That’s a typo,” he said. “It should be ‘Barbie and the Prince.’”

I can’t remember when our celebrity-shouting ritual started. It must have been when I was a teenager and the Porky Pig or Bullwinkle balloon no longer packed the punch it once had. My family has lived on Central Park West my entire life. In fact, half the reason they live on Central Park West, and on a low floor, is for the parade. My mother recently told me that when she moved into her current apartment in 1960, she could have had one next-door at the San Remo. But she turned it down because it was on the 14th floor, too high to watch the parade. That decision probably cost her between $10 million and $15 million, because the San Remo went co-op in the early ’70s and she could have bought the apartment for the insider price. The apartment she moved into, while splendid for parade-viewing, remains a rental.

But there’s no use crying over spilt real estate. It’s the holidays, after all, and I’m all revved up about Barry Manilow, Mr. Copacabana. In fact, I’m so excited that I tried to score a pre-parade interview. I was curious whether Barry, who probably knows people in half the buildings along Central Park West, had arranged to wave at his friends as he went by. And if so, could he add our name to the list? In the back of my mind, I seemed to remember that he’d done the parade before.

Carol Marshall, Barry’s publicist, thought so too. She’s only worked for him for five years, but she recalled Barry’s assistant, Mark, telling her that he “has run alongside the float before.” Unfortunately, Carol didn’t think an interview with Barry could be arranged. “His schedule is kind of crazy at the moment.” Nor did she entertain much hope that Barry could be persuaded to look up and blow us a kiss.

I had better luck with Tara Conner, Miss U.S.A. 2006. She’s going to be in the parade too, aboard the Showboat float. Unlike Mr. Manilow, the lovely Ms. Conner was only too happy to answer my questions. Tara, 20, revealed that she and her mom, up from Kentucky, will start cooking Thanksgiving dinner at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving morning in the Upper West Side apartment that she shares with Miss Teen U.S.A., Katie Blair, and Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera. However, she didn’t say whether her fellow beauty queens will be joining her and her mom for dinner. (All three pageants are part of the Miss Universe Organization, a partnership between Donald Trump and NBC.) Then Tara will build up her appetite by doing the parade, and come home to a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Tara, Mr. Trump should know, is the perfect beauty-pageant ambassador: She agreed to wave as she passed our window and even wrote down my address.

Gracie, my 13-year-old, thinks it’s cool that I interviewed Miss U.S.A.—she’d watched her win her crown—even though it was only a phoner. My daughter even suggested that we make a sign to hang out the window to attract Tara’s attention.

Lucy, my 18-year-old, said the sign should say “It’s Ralph Gardner!”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“It’s stupid no matter what you do,” Lucy answered.

But that won’t stop me—acting like an idiot is what it’s all about. As a matter of fact, I’ve still got my heart set on Julie Andrews. I’m waiting to hear back from her people at William Morris.

Here’s how it works. We see some mega-celebrity coming down the avenue—say Julie Andrews, who is scheduled for this year’s parade, and about whom we’re already excited. We throw open the sash and my wife Debbie, my cousins George and Paul, my friend Bill and any kids who care to join us lean our bodies out the window, and at just the right moment—timing is everything, because approximately 100,000 other people are vying for their attention and the din of marching bands is deafening—shout out in unison, at the top of our lungs, “JULIE!”

Our target celebrity has to be facing in the right direction for us to have any hope of netting her. If she’s waving to the masses in the stands across the street, you can shout until you pop a blood vessel and she’ll never hear you. But if she’s facing in your direction and you scream loudly enough, wave insanely and risk losing your footing and plummeting five stories to the pavement, there’s a slight chance she’ll catch you out of the corner of her eye, look up and acknowledge you.

The feeling, as the ad says, is priceless. Some of our bigger “gets” include Joe Torre, Shari Lewis, Raven, Plácido Domingo, Florence Henderson and Rudy Giuliani—though we weren’t waving at him. This was pre-9/11, when Mr. Giuliani wasn’t yet “America’s Mayor,” but rather that strutting martinet who left his wife and arrested you for jaywalking. “We’re looking at him and thinking ‘What a schmuck!’, and he looks up at us and waves,” Debbie recalled. “I felt creepy.”

We’ve dissed other big shots, too, though I can’t name any off the top of my head. We’re not indiscriminate. We don’t shout at everyone. You want somebody for whom the parade marks the high point of his or her career or perhaps a comeback moment, somebody with a certain kitsch factor, somebody who’s almost as excited to see you as you are to see them.

That’s why I’m so excited that Barry Manilow is going to be in this year’s parade. Barry is the perfect Thanksgiving Day Parade celebrity. He’s not exactly passé. On the other hand, paparazzi-filled helicopters aren’t circling overhead every time he goes to the supermarket. Seeing us risking life and limb to attract his attention can only boost his morale. We’re performing something akin to a public service.

I was on the fence about Prince. I didn’t realize his career was in free fall until I spotted him in this year’s parade line-up. He just seemed a little too cool, not Christmassy enough to roll into Herald Square aboard the Mother Goose float.

Turns out my instincts were correct. When I called Macy’s P.R. department to learn more about Prince’s appearance, Orlando Veras, one of their publicists, didn’t know why everybody thought Prince was going to be in this year’s parade. He wasn’t. I directed Mr. Veras to Macy’s own Web site, and to Prince’s name under the heading “Talent.” “That’s a typo,” he said. “It should be ‘Barbie and the Prince.’”

I can’t remember when our celebrity-shouting ritual started. It must have been when I was a teenager and the Porky Pig or Bullwinkle balloon no longer packed the punch it once had. My family has lived on Central Park West my entire life. In fact, half the reason they live on Central Park West, and on a low floor, is for the parade. My mother recently told me that when she moved into her current apartment in 1960, she could have had one next-door at the San Remo. But she turned it down because it was on the 14th floor, too high to watch the parade. That decision probably cost her between $10 million and $15 million, because the San Remo went co-op in the early ’70s and she could have bought the apartment for the insider price. The apartment she moved into, while splendid for parade-viewing, remains a rental.

But there’s no use crying over spilt real estate. It’s the holidays, after all, and I’m all revved up about Barry Manilow, Mr. Copacabana. In fact, I’m so excited that I tried to score a pre-parade interview. I was curious whether Barry, who probably knows people in half the buildings along Central Park West, had arranged to wave at his friends as he went by. And if so, could he add our name to the list? In the back of my mind, I seemed to remember that he’d done the parade before.

Carol Marshall, Barry’s publicist, thought so too. She’s only worked for him for five years, but she recalled Barry’s assistant, Mark, telling her that he “has run alongside the float before.” Unfortunately, Carol didn’t think an interview with Barry could be arranged. “His schedule is kind of crazy at the moment.” Nor did she entertain much hope that Barry could be persuaded to look up and blow us a kiss.

I had better luck with Tara Conner, Miss U.S.A. 2006. She’s going to be in the parade too, aboard the Showboat float. Unlike Mr. Manilow, the lovely Ms. Conner was only too happy to answer my questions. Tara, 20, revealed that she and her mom, up from Kentucky, will start cooking Thanksgiving dinner at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving morning in the Upper West Side apartment that she shares with Miss Teen U.S.A., Katie Blair, and Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera. However, she didn’t say whether her fellow beauty queens will be joining her and her mom for dinner. (All three pageants are part of the Miss Universe Organization, a partnership between Donald Trump and NBC.) Then Tara will build up her appetite by doing the parade, and come home to a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Tara, Mr. Trump should know, is the perfect beauty-pageant ambassador: She agreed to wave as she passed our window and even wrote down my address.

Gracie, my 13-year-old, thinks it’s cool that I interviewed Miss U.S.A.—she’d watched her win her crown—even though it was only a phoner. My daughter even suggested that we make a sign to hang out the window to attract Tara’s attention.

Lucy, my 18-year-old, said the sign should say “It’s Ralph Gardner!”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“It’s stupid no matter what you do,” Lucy answered.

But that won’t stop me—acting like an idiot is what it’s all about. As a matter of fact, I’ve still got my heart set on Julie Andrews. I’m waiting to hear back from her people at William Morris.

Let me explain. She was feeling rather depressed, so I thought a visit to Strawberry Fields for some people-watching might brighten her mood. But the path leading through the John Lennon memorial was so pitted and potholed, it took all my dexterity to prevent her from falling out of her conveyance.

The inexplicable, entirely unacceptable thing is that the path has been this way for years. It makes no sense. The rest of Strawberry Fields—the grass, the shrubs, even the boulders—are immaculately groomed. The “Imagine” mosaic may as well be a religious shrine the way Lennon fans garland it with rose petals, leave mementoes and missives, and commune with his spirit.

So I had this conspiracy theory that Yoko Ono was behind the path’s decrepit condition. That this ageless avatar of the avant-garde was trying to send a message to all the alter kockers and their caregivers that have basically turned it into a senior citizen’s center: Do your drooling elsewhere.

I considered contacting Ms. Ono directly to raise hell and even Googled her in search of her Web site. But since even people I know personally don’t respond to my e-mails, why should she? I also toyed with the idea of approaching Sean Lennon. Yoko isn’t getting any younger; perhaps her son had taken over care of the family plot. But then I recalled an encounter with him once that hadn’t gone very well.

This was a number of years ago. My wife and I had entered the elevator in my mother’s building, and there was a young chap standing there holding a guitar case and wearing a familiar-looking red, military-style jacket with gold trim. Says I, not recognizing the kid but always sociable, “Hey, that looks like the jacket in Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!”

Because it was the jacket. Sean just grunted, the elevator doors opened, and the Beatles scion and I went our separate ways. My wife claims I made a fool of myself. But my feeling was that if the guy was wearing the iconic garment in public, wasn’t he trying to attract attention? If he wanted to remain anonymous, why didn’t he wear a sweater?

In any case, I decided to call 311 instead. The operator couldn’t have been more courteous. I stated my complaint, and the operator took my name and phone number and even gave me some sort of 12-digit reference number. He confidently added that the Parks Department would respond to the problem within 14 days. I asked whether the Parks Department would contact me directly, so that I might share with them the precise nature and scope of the problem—its location, duration, the depth of the potholes in question.

“A complaint of this nature, probably not,” he stated gingerly. “To be honest with you.”

Having worked in city government myself, I was familiar with the glacial pace at which change happens (and more often doesn’t) and not at all confident that the next time I took my mother to Strawberry Fields, she wouldn’t do a face plant. I came across the name of Henry Stern, the former Parks Commissioner, and called him for advice. It wasn’t long into our conversation—30 seconds or so—that Henry reminded me that, back in 1980, he was the then City Councilman who had sponsored the resolution to turn a piece of Central Park into a John Lennon memorial. He claims that he even came up with the idea of calling it Strawberry Fields after “the most bucolic of any of his songs.”

And lest I was short of copy, former Commissioner Stern added that his resolution had met with stiff resistance from a conservative Republican Councilman from Brooklyn named Angelo Arculeo, who was damned if he was going to vote to devote a precious piece of urban greensward to a pothead and even suggested that a monument to Bing Crosby would be more appropriate.

Eventually, Mr. Stern prevailed, Yoko Ono donated $1 million to the cause, and the area was dedicated in 1985, with Mayor Ed Koch—and Henry, by then the New York City Parks Commissioner—presiding. “Half went to a zone gardener,” Henry explained, “and half went to capital construction.”

He added that part of the deal was that the Parks Department would assume all responsibility for the maintenance of Strawberry Fields. Yoko Ono, who lives overlooking the site at the Dakota, wouldn’t be expected to head over there with a spade and a bag of dirt every time a squirrel (or whatever) dug a hole to bury his nuts. “She would not be asked to do anything to keep it in shape,” Mr. Stern explained.

As a matter of fact, I thought I detected a note of defensiveness in Henry’s voice as he parried my questions. It seems that he’d even made a couple of calls to the Central Park Conservancy before returning mine, to get briefed on the path’s perilous condition and get his talking points. “Where you have paving over soil, the soil shifts, settles,” he contended. “You have to, every few years, have to redo it. There is no policy to abandon it or not redo it.”

Fair enough. But I’ve been traveling through Strawberry Fields to my mother’s house ever since I was a lad, or at least in my 20’s, and I don’t recall any repairs to the path ever. Henry suggested I call the Central Park Conservancy directly. When I reached Lane Addonizio, the Conservancy’s associate vice president for planning, she claimed that it has been the conservancy’s intention to fix the path all along. “Last fall we did a focused assessment,” she reported. “We brought in people who specialize in mosaic conservation.”

A focused assessment? I just wanted them to fill in the potholes.

But Ms. Addonizio explained that the mosaic and the surrounding blacktop are interrelated. You can’t fix one without the other. The tiles on the mosaic keep popping, and since it’s considered a work of art, any repair requires the approval of obscure city agencies.

“Once we go to Landmarks and the Art Commission, we do expect this summer to be working on it,” she stated cheerfully. “It’s just scheduling.”

I got back to Henry Stern with the good news. “It may be fixed a little faster because of your watchful eye,” he confided. “It always helps to have inquiries of this sort. It puts a little spring in your step.”

Even so, something was still bothering me. I finally figured out what it was: I disagreed with the former Parks Commissioner that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was the “most bucolic” of the Beatles songs—“Norwegian Wood” was. Besides, it was a better song. Why didn’t they name the Lennon memorial after that?

“We weren’t in Norway,” Henry stated with uncharacteristic petulance. But recovering quickly, he pulled a sound bite out of thin air. “And Strawberry Fields was directly across the road from Cherry Hill. So we maintained the fruit theme.”

Let me explain. She was feeling rather depressed, so I thought a visit to Strawberry Fields for some people-watching might brighten her mood. But the path leading through the John Lennon memorial was so pitted and potholed, it took all my dexterity to prevent her from falling out of her conveyance.

The inexplicable, entirely unacceptable thing is that the path has been this way for years. It makes no sense. The rest of Strawberry Fields—the grass, the shrubs, even the boulders—are immaculately groomed. The “Imagine” mosaic may as well be a religious shrine the way Lennon fans garland it with rose petals, leave mementoes and missives, and commune with his spirit.

So I had this conspiracy theory that Yoko Ono was behind the path’s decrepit condition. That this ageless avatar of the avant-garde was trying to send a message to all the alter kockers and their caregivers that have basically turned it into a senior citizen’s center: Do your drooling elsewhere.

I considered contacting Ms. Ono directly to raise hell and even Googled her in search of her Web site. But since even people I know personally don’t respond to my e-mails, why should she? I also toyed with the idea of approaching Sean Lennon. Yoko isn’t getting any younger; perhaps her son had taken over care of the family plot. But then I recalled an encounter with him once that hadn’t gone very well.

This was a number of years ago. My wife and I had entered the elevator in my mother’s building, and there was a young chap standing there holding a guitar case and wearing a familiar-looking red, military-style jacket with gold trim. Says I, not recognizing the kid but always sociable, “Hey, that looks like the jacket in Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!”

Because it was the jacket. Sean just grunted, the elevator doors opened, and the Beatles scion and I went our separate ways. My wife claims I made a fool of myself. But my feeling was that if the guy was wearing the iconic garment in public, wasn’t he trying to attract attention? If he wanted to remain anonymous, why didn’t he wear a sweater?

In any case, I decided to call 311 instead. The operator couldn’t have been more courteous. I stated my complaint, and the operator took my name and phone number and even gave me some sort of 12-digit reference number. He confidently added that the Parks Department would respond to the problem within 14 days. I asked whether the Parks Department would contact me directly, so that I might share with them the precise nature and scope of the problem—its location, duration, the depth of the potholes in question.

“A complaint of this nature, probably not,” he stated gingerly. “To be honest with you.”

Having worked in city government myself, I was familiar with the glacial pace at which change happens (and more often doesn’t) and not at all confident that the next time I took my mother to Strawberry Fields, she wouldn’t do a face plant. I came across the name of Henry Stern, the former Parks Commissioner, and called him for advice. It wasn’t long into our conversation—30 seconds or so—that Henry reminded me that, back in 1980, he was the then City Councilman who had sponsored the resolution to turn a piece of Central Park into a John Lennon memorial. He claims that he even came up with the idea of calling it Strawberry Fields after “the most bucolic of any of his songs.”

And lest I was short of copy, former Commissioner Stern added that his resolution had met with stiff resistance from a conservative Republican Councilman from Brooklyn named Angelo Arculeo, who was damned if he was going to vote to devote a precious piece of urban greensward to a pothead and even suggested that a monument to Bing Crosby would be more appropriate.

Eventually, Mr. Stern prevailed, Yoko Ono donated $1 million to the cause, and the area was dedicated in 1985, with Mayor Ed Koch—and Henry, by then the New York City Parks Commissioner—presiding. “Half went to a zone gardener,” Henry explained, “and half went to capital construction.”

He added that part of the deal was that the Parks Department would assume all responsibility for the maintenance of Strawberry Fields. Yoko Ono, who lives overlooking the site at the Dakota, wouldn’t be expected to head over there with a spade and a bag of dirt every time a squirrel (or whatever) dug a hole to bury his nuts. “She would not be asked to do anything to keep it in shape,” Mr. Stern explained.

As a matter of fact, I thought I detected a note of defensiveness in Henry’s voice as he parried my questions. It seems that he’d even made a couple of calls to the Central Park Conservancy before returning mine, to get briefed on the path’s perilous condition and get his talking points. “Where you have paving over soil, the soil shifts, settles,” he contended. “You have to, every few years, have to redo it. There is no policy to abandon it or not redo it.”

Fair enough. But I’ve been traveling through Strawberry Fields to my mother’s house ever since I was a lad, or at least in my 20’s, and I don’t recall any repairs to the path ever. Henry suggested I call the Central Park Conservancy directly. When I reached Lane Addonizio, the Conservancy’s associate vice president for planning, she claimed that it has been the conservancy’s intention to fix the path all along. “Last fall we did a focused assessment,” she reported. “We brought in people who specialize in mosaic conservation.”

A focused assessment? I just wanted them to fill in the potholes.

But Ms. Addonizio explained that the mosaic and the surrounding blacktop are interrelated. You can’t fix one without the other. The tiles on the mosaic keep popping, and since it’s considered a work of art, any repair requires the approval of obscure city agencies.

“Once we go to Landmarks and the Art Commission, we do expect this summer to be working on it,” she stated cheerfully. “It’s just scheduling.”

I got back to Henry Stern with the good news. “It may be fixed a little faster because of your watchful eye,” he confided. “It always helps to have inquiries of this sort. It puts a little spring in your step.”

Even so, something was still bothering me. I finally figured out what it was: I disagreed with the former Parks Commissioner that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was the “most bucolic” of the Beatles songs—“Norwegian Wood” was. Besides, it was a better song. Why didn’t they name the Lennon memorial after that?

“We weren’t in Norway,” Henry stated with uncharacteristic petulance. But recovering quickly, he pulled a sound bite out of thin air. “And Strawberry Fields was directly across the road from Cherry Hill. So we maintained the fruit theme.”

The victim says that she got up from her seat at Citibar, 1446 First Avenue, at 10:10 p.m. to change the channel, leaving her purse hanging from her barstool. When she was ready to leave, she noticed that her wallet was missing. So she notified the manager, who went back to his office to review the bar’s security video.

Sure enough, he spotted a male suspect going through the woman’s handbag and taking her wallet. He even recognized the guy, describing him as a “regular homeless man,” though it was unclear whether he meant a regular patron of the bar who happens to be homeless, or a regular guy who just happens to be down on his luck (or perhaps both). The bartender also told the victim that the suspect “is always hanging around the establishment.”

In any event, he’ll probably be sporting a new, improved look the next time he visits the bar, because the woman’s Ann Taylor wallet contained a Nike gift card valued at $100, an American Express gift card worth $100, a $50 Gap gift card and $40 in cash.

Shakespearean Theft

On Feb. 13, the Shakespeare scholar Dympna Callaghan was providing the commentary for an evening of discussion and performance at Hunter College’s Silvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse entitled “Boys Will Be Girls,” according to the Web site Broadwayworld.com. Ms. Callaghan was addressing the mysteries of cross-dressing in the Bard’s work, when someone—taking advantage of the onstage commotion (the performers included Good Night, and Good Luck’s David Strathairn and members of an all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew)—stole her wallet from her dressing room.

Perhaps because her name was on the door of the dressing room, Ms. Callaghan assumed that her star power would give any potential thief pause. Either that or she took the word of the event’s security director, who told her that her property would be safe in the unlocked room. However, New York crooks, as a group, tend to be rather inured to celebrity—not to mention Elizabethan poetry—and the fact that the property was apparently in plain view was too inviting to pass up.

Ms. Callaghan, the author of Shakespeare Without Women, didn’t even realize that her wallet was missing until the next morning, because the thief left behind her handbag and other items of personal property. Her wallet contained $200 in cash and an American Express card, which, fortunately, she was able to cancel before it was used.

Pregnancy Scare

One way to chastise motorists who are guilty of violating automotive etiquette—say when they try to run you over as you’re crossing the street—is to tap on the trunk of their car after you’ve survived the encounter.

This would seem a completely justifiable, even measured reaction, considering that they almost killed you. But the sort of would-be assassin who would drive that way in the first place probably isn’t particularly well bred and might even have homicidal tendencies, as a pregnant woman crossing 79th Street and Third Avenue discovered on Feb. 8.

The victim, 9 1¼2 months pregnant and on her way to the gynecologist, was attempting to cross from the southeast to the northeast corner of 79th Street when a car traveling northbound on Third Avenue made a right turn onto 79th Street and almost hit her. That’s when the expectant mother, a 36-year-old West 67th Street resident, decided to reprimand the driver by tapping on her vehicle.

There are those who can’t take criticism, no matter how valid, and the perp pounced from her car, stating, “I’m going to fuck you up.” That the woman was about to deliver—and even informed her of that fact—made no difference. So much for female empathy.

“Did you fucking hit my car?” she demanded and kicked her in the stomach. Then she fled eastbound on 79th Street. Luckily, the victim—who received medical attention at the scene—got her assailant’s license number and car description before she departed. She was driving a gray 2002 Nissan Altima.

“That’s an easy one,” stated a police source. “They have a plate. I’m sure they’ll make an arrest soon.” Let’s hope.

The victim says that she got up from her seat at Citibar, 1446 First Avenue, at 10:10 p.m. to change the channel, leaving her purse hanging from her barstool. When she was ready to leave, she noticed that her wallet was missing. So she notified the manager, who went back to his office to review the bar’s security video.

Sure enough, he spotted a male suspect going through the woman’s handbag and taking her wallet. He even recognized the guy, describing him as a “regular homeless man,” though it was unclear whether he meant a regular patron of the bar who happens to be homeless, or a regular guy who just happens to be down on his luck (or perhaps both). The bartender also told the victim that the suspect “is always hanging around the establishment.”

In any event, he’ll probably be sporting a new, improved look the next time he visits the bar, because the woman’s Ann Taylor wallet contained a Nike gift card valued at $100, an American Express gift card worth $100, a $50 Gap gift card and $40 in cash.

Shakespearean Theft

On Feb. 13, the Shakespeare scholar Dympna Callaghan was providing the commentary for an evening of discussion and performance at Hunter College’s Silvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse entitled “Boys Will Be Girls,” according to the Web site Broadwayworld.com. Ms. Callaghan was addressing the mysteries of cross-dressing in the Bard’s work, when someone—taking advantage of the onstage commotion (the performers included Good Night, and Good Luck’s David Strathairn and members of an all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew)—stole her wallet from her dressing room.

Perhaps because her name was on the door of the dressing room, Ms. Callaghan assumed that her star power would give any potential thief pause. Either that or she took the word of the event’s security director, who told her that her property would be safe in the unlocked room. However, New York crooks, as a group, tend to be rather inured to celebrity—not to mention Elizabethan poetry—and the fact that the property was apparently in plain view was too inviting to pass up.

Ms. Callaghan, the author of Shakespeare Without Women, didn’t even realize that her wallet was missing until the next morning, because the thief left behind her handbag and other items of personal property. Her wallet contained $200 in cash and an American Express card, which, fortunately, she was able to cancel before it was used.

Pregnancy Scare

One way to chastise motorists who are guilty of violating automotive etiquette—say when they try to run you over as you’re crossing the street—is to tap on the trunk of their car after you’ve survived the encounter.

This would seem a completely justifiable, even measured reaction, considering that they almost killed you. But the sort of would-be assassin who would drive that way in the first place probably isn’t particularly well bred and might even have homicidal tendencies, as a pregnant woman crossing 79th Street and Third Avenue discovered on Feb. 8.

The victim, 9 1¼2 months pregnant and on her way to the gynecologist, was attempting to cross from the southeast to the northeast corner of 79th Street when a car traveling northbound on Third Avenue made a right turn onto 79th Street and almost hit her. That’s when the expectant mother, a 36-year-old West 67th Street resident, decided to reprimand the driver by tapping on her vehicle.

There are those who can’t take criticism, no matter how valid, and the perp pounced from her car, stating, “I’m going to fuck you up.” That the woman was about to deliver—and even informed her of that fact—made no difference. So much for female empathy.

“Did you fucking hit my car?” she demanded and kicked her in the stomach. Then she fled eastbound on 79th Street. Luckily, the victim—who received medical attention at the scene—got her assailant’s license number and car description before she departed. She was driving a gray 2002 Nissan Altima.

“That’s an easy one,” stated a police source. “They have a plate. I’m sure they’ll make an arrest soon.” Let’s hope.

These weren’t just any comic books, but my prize collection of underground comics by Robert Crumb, the creator of Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, whom the critic Robert Hughes described as “the Breugel of the last half of the 20th Century.” And James wasn’t asking for them because he wanted to read them, but because he wanted to use them as part of an exhibition that Vassar was mounting.

Perhaps “exhibition” is too strong a word. As James explained it, the Friends of Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center sponsors an art-film series that would be showing Crumb, the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary about the artist. The comic books were sort of visual aids, supporting material, atmospherics to supplement the film.

To describe Mr. Crumb’s work as politically incorrect would be grotesquely to understate his contribution to popular culture. He’s virtually the Moses of political incorrectness. Zap #2, for example, features Angelfood McSpade, a sex bomb lurking in darkest Africa, whose scent is so intoxicating that she’s off-limits to all but pencil-necked researchers—“and those creeps can’t hardly ever get one up.” And Zap #4 visits the all-American, aptly named Joe Blow family, who consider incest a family activity. “That’s it. Pretend it’s candy,” Joe instructs his daughter.

Knowing the no-nonsense reputation of Vassar girls (or should I say women?), I was concerned that they might take offense, perhaps even stage violent protests and—worst of all—damage my comic books. But James assured me Vassar students aren’t like that. “The students are so blasé about anything scandalous,” he said. “You can’t shock anybody here—the racier, the better.” If we were going to have any problems, he added, it might come from the Poughkeepsie natives who like to visit the museum on weekends.

I wasn’t totally sold, but the allure of being a donor, a benefactor, was hard to resist. A close relative recently donated a Dutch painting to the National Gallery in Washington, and he didn’t hesitate to rub it in. Utterly apart from the prestige associated with having a plaque with your name on it in perpetuity, he touted the tax advantages. Apparently, he made so much money last year that he needed the charitable deduction.

My taxable income last year—or any year, for that matter—isn’t sufficient to warrant frittering away a masterpiece. In fact, lending a few comic books to Vassar for a couple of weeks is about all the largesse my Form 1040 can bear. Nonetheless, James assured me that were I to loan my comics to the museum, he could probably arrange a plaque with my name on it, too. So I agreed.

He dropped by a few days later—his attitude no less solemn and seigniorial than I suspect Philippe de Montebello’s was when he was negotiating the repatriation of that looted ancient Greek plate or urn or whatever it was with the Italians—to examine the collection and pick several items that would best summarize Mr. Crumb’s oeuvre.

Unfortunately, those that would aren’t suitable for women and children.

For example, the cover of Your Hytone Comics features a fellow whistling a happy tune as he takes a whiz. And Snatch #3, I believe it is, stars a rumpled, middle-aged commuter impishly nudging his hard-on into the lady in front of him as they line up to board a bus. James eventually left with several comics, none of them quite so graphic, as well as a Crumb-designed Devil Girl chocolate bar and matching tin of “Hot Kisses” cinnamon candy.

I first discovered Crumb back in 1971. Someone had abandoned one of his comic books in the senior room at the Browning School, and I was immediately hooked by its unrepentantly adolescent sensibility and high pornographic content. I shouldn’t boast, but I suspect that my brother James (an art and architecture critic) and I may be the only siblings cited in Mr. Crumb’s work.

He quotes a passage from my brother’s 1993 book Culture or Trash, lamenting the commodification of art, in his own 1996 Art and Beauty Magazine, on a page that features the thoughts of Da Vinci, André Gide and Einstein.

My citation is somewhat less impressive. It comes, unattributed, on page 246 of a Crumb sketchbook, taken from an article of mine that appeared in Penthouse magazine. The piece was about men who worship strong women—a Crumb fetish—and like to play-wrestle and stroke their muscles.

“Tami Frazier,” Mr. Crumb writes, paraphrasing my prose, “a female body builder from San Diego, says she and her athletic girlfriends are not attracted to men with scrawny chests and a self-mocking sense of humor. ‘They can never have somebody like us,’ she explains.”

To which Mr. Crumb adds, “ oboy.”

James, sensing my apprehension, called to inform me that my material arrived in Poughkeepsie safely and had been handsomely installed. No Vassar coeds had yet flung their bodies at the display cases in feminist mortification. However, he reported that his decision to feature the “Grand Opening of the Great Intercontinental Fuck-In and Orgy-Riot” spread from Snatch #1 had “raised eyebrows” and promoted “quizzical looks” in the faculty meeting that had just adjourned.

Furthermore, since school groups—not to mention families with children—apparently traipse through the museum at will, the staff had decided to place a “Viewer Discretion Advised” warning label on the works.

James said that a professor of Japanese art had approached him for information about this Ralph Gardner Jr. character—as in “On Loan from the Collection of …. ”

“Is he a Vassar graduate?” the professor asked. “How do we know him?”

While James assured me that interest was high, and that the Vassar student body had shown impressive restraint—like all top-tier colleges, their undergrads are far more serious and focused than they were in my day—he added that we weren’t out of the woods yet. Weekends were usually when the locals showed up, and how they’d react to Mr. Crumb’s brand of social criticism was anyone’s guess.

As it turned out, the exhibition went off without bloodshed, and James returned the works to me the following week, together with the wall placards describing the material, in impressive museum-quality font. He also tossed in the “Please be advised that some of the contents in this case are of a mature nature” sign.

I placed it in front of the collection on our bookshelf and proudly showed it to my teenage daughter when she got home from school that afternoon. After all, some day this would all belong to her. Perhaps it’s not the same thing as having your name hallowed in the halls of the National Gallery; nonetheless, I was feeling rather good about myself, my collection and my eye—until she spoiled it all.

“Isn’t that pathetic?” she said. “This is your collection … other people collect art.”

These weren’t just any comic books, but my prize collection of underground comics by Robert Crumb, the creator of Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, whom the critic Robert Hughes described as “the Breugel of the last half of the 20th Century.” And James wasn’t asking for them because he wanted to read them, but because he wanted to use them as part of an exhibition that Vassar was mounting.

Perhaps “exhibition” is too strong a word. As James explained it, the Friends of Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center sponsors an art-film series that would be showing Crumb, the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary about the artist. The comic books were sort of visual aids, supporting material, atmospherics to supplement the film.

To describe Mr. Crumb’s work as politically incorrect would be grotesquely to understate his contribution to popular culture. He’s virtually the Moses of political incorrectness. Zap #2, for example, features Angelfood McSpade, a sex bomb lurking in darkest Africa, whose scent is so intoxicating that she’s off-limits to all but pencil-necked researchers—“and those creeps can’t hardly ever get one up.” And Zap #4 visits the all-American, aptly named Joe Blow family, who consider incest a family activity. “That’s it. Pretend it’s candy,” Joe instructs his daughter.

Knowing the no-nonsense reputation of Vassar girls (or should I say women?), I was concerned that they might take offense, perhaps even stage violent protests and—worst of all—damage my comic books. But James assured me Vassar students aren’t like that. “The students are so blasé about anything scandalous,” he said. “You can’t shock anybody here—the racier, the better.” If we were going to have any problems, he added, it might come from the Poughkeepsie natives who like to visit the museum on weekends.

I wasn’t totally sold, but the allure of being a donor, a benefactor, was hard to resist. A close relative recently donated a Dutch painting to the National Gallery in Washington, and he didn’t hesitate to rub it in. Utterly apart from the prestige associated with having a plaque with your name on it in perpetuity, he touted the tax advantages. Apparently, he made so much money last year that he needed the charitable deduction.

My taxable income last year—or any year, for that matter—isn’t sufficient to warrant frittering away a masterpiece. In fact, lending a few comic books to Vassar for a couple of weeks is about all the largesse my Form 1040 can bear. Nonetheless, James assured me that were I to loan my comics to the museum, he could probably arrange a plaque with my name on it, too. So I agreed.

He dropped by a few days later—his attitude no less solemn and seigniorial than I suspect Philippe de Montebello’s was when he was negotiating the repatriation of that looted ancient Greek plate or urn or whatever it was with the Italians—to examine the collection and pick several items that would best summarize Mr. Crumb’s oeuvre.

Unfortunately, those that would aren’t suitable for women and children.

For example, the cover of Your Hytone Comics features a fellow whistling a happy tune as he takes a whiz. And Snatch #3, I believe it is, stars a rumpled, middle-aged commuter impishly nudging his hard-on into the lady in front of him as they line up to board a bus. James eventually left with several comics, none of them quite so graphic, as well as a Crumb-designed Devil Girl chocolate bar and matching tin of “Hot Kisses” cinnamon candy.

I first discovered Crumb back in 1971. Someone had abandoned one of his comic books in the senior room at the Browning School, and I was immediately hooked by its unrepentantly adolescent sensibility and high pornographic content. I shouldn’t boast, but I suspect that my brother James (an art and architecture critic) and I may be the only siblings cited in Mr. Crumb’s work.

He quotes a passage from my brother’s 1993 book Culture or Trash, lamenting the commodification of art, in his own 1996 Art and Beauty Magazine, on a page that features the thoughts of Da Vinci, André Gide and Einstein.

My citation is somewhat less impressive. It comes, unattributed, on page 246 of a Crumb sketchbook, taken from an article of mine that appeared in Penthouse magazine. The piece was about men who worship strong women—a Crumb fetish—and like to play-wrestle and stroke their muscles.

“Tami Frazier,” Mr. Crumb writes, paraphrasing my prose, “a female body builder from San Diego, says she and her athletic girlfriends are not attracted to men with scrawny chests and a self-mocking sense of humor. ‘They can never have somebody like us,’ she explains.”

To which Mr. Crumb adds, “oboy.”

James, sensing my apprehension, called to inform me that my material arrived in Poughkeepsie safely and had been handsomely installed. No Vassar coeds had yet flung their bodies at the display cases in feminist mortification. However, he reported that his decision to feature the “Grand Opening of the Great Intercontinental Fuck-In and Orgy-Riot” spread from Snatch #1 had “raised eyebrows” and promoted “quizzical looks” in the faculty meeting that had just adjourned.

Furthermore, since school groups—not to mention families with children—apparently traipse through the museum at will, the staff had decided to place a “Viewer Discretion Advised” warning label on the works.

James said that a professor of Japanese art had approached him for information about this Ralph Gardner Jr. character—as in “On Loan from the Collection of …. ”

“Is he a Vassar graduate?” the professor asked. “How do we know him?”

While James assured me that interest was high, and that the Vassar student body had shown impressive restraint—like all top-tier colleges, their undergrads are far more serious and focused than they were in my day—he added that we weren’t out of the woods yet. Weekends were usually when the locals showed up, and how they’d react to Mr. Crumb’s brand of social criticism was anyone’s guess.

As it turned out, the exhibition went off without bloodshed, and James returned the works to me the following week, together with the wall placards describing the material, in impressive museum-quality font. He also tossed in the “Please be advised that some of the contents in this case are of a mature nature” sign.

I placed it in front of the collection on our bookshelf and proudly showed it to my teenage daughter when she got home from school that afternoon. After all, some day this would all belong to her. Perhaps it’s not the same thing as having your name hallowed in the halls of the National Gallery; nonetheless, I was feeling rather good about myself, my collection and my eye—until she spoiled it all.

“Isn’t that pathetic?” she said. “This is your collection … other people collect art.”

More about Mrs. Clinton in a moment; first to the bank robbery.

The suspect, Edward Falvey, 53, allegedly visited the North Fork Bank at 1010 Third Avenue around noon. He produced a note written on a deposit slip that stated: “This is a robbery. I have a gun. Pass me the 20’s, 50’s and 100’s. No dye packs.”

Bank robbery has become a relatively easy crime to commit because many banks are reluctant to beef up security, despite repeated protests by the NYPD. And the average bank teller, understandably, is often eager to meet the crook’s demands, especially with a gun pointed at his or her head.

But there must have been something non-threatening about Mr. Falvey’s demeanor—aside from the fact that he wasn’t brandishing a weapon—because his victim pretended to faint when he presented her with his note. The ploy worked: The crook left the bank empty-handed.

But instead of taking his failure as an excuse to consider a less stressful line of work—especially since he’d just been released from a Brooklyn halfway house after doing time for threatening Mrs. Clinton’s life, having already served 30 months in a New Jersey lockup for a prior bank robbery—Mr. Falvey, loath to let his robbery note go to waste, merely proceeded to the nearby Bank of America at 988 Third Avenue.

For the record, he was more successful at his second stop, persuading a teller to part with $5,199. But a teller from the North Fork Bank, showing impressive initiative, followed him to the Bank of America and watched him pull off that robbery. In the meantime, her fellow North Fork employees had called 911 and tripped their alarm, which helped explain the sound of approaching police sirens.

Mr. Falvey allegedly ducked into a phone booth and attempted to hide from the cops—all while under the watchful eye of the North Fork teller, who obligingly pointed him out to the police units when they arrived. The police took Mr. Falvey into custody and turned him over to the feds; his illustrious rap sheet dates back at least as far as 1977, when he was arrested and charged with threatening to kill President Jimmy Carter. He received probation in that case, according to the Associated Press.

His crime against Senator Clinton occurred in April 2003, when he wrote a letter to a prison psychologist while incarcerated in New Jersey, explaining that his life was “dull and boring” and that he thought he might be able to “spice it up” by shooting a famous person.

Mike Truman, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, described Mr. Falvey as a “busy guy,” despite the convict’s complaints that his life lacks excitement. “Every time I hit a button,” Mr. Truman added, referring to tracking the perp’s rap sheet on his computer, “I come up with something else.”

It seems that after seeing much of the country on the federal dime, or at least what you can observe of it through the bars of a prison cell (Mr. Falvey has done time in prisons in Philadelphia, Oklahoma and Texas), he found himself transferred to that Brooklyn halfway house on Nov. 18, 2005.

“It looks like he was released from Brooklyn on Feb. 3, 2006,” Mr. Truman said. “And they picked him back up on Feb. 8, 2006.”

This means that Mr. Falvey enjoyed all of five days of freedom—and perhaps some respite from the painful tedium of his existence—before he was back behind bars. The suspect is currently incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Brooklyn, awaiting arraignment in federal court for his latest crimes.