Breslin forever
The great, aching, acid, hilarious, humane, infuriating, painfully real Jimmy Breslin, who told stories equal to the great, aching, acid, hilarious, humane, infuriating, painfully real city he chronicled, is dead.
He leaves readers of the Daily News, his home for a golden stretch of his career, bereft, but in deep debt to his spirit.
For more than four decades, Breslin trawled the city’s streets to channel and champion the working people who make the world run, and to excoriate the elites who dared presume otherwise.
His passing at age 88 quiets that Queens bray only inasmuch as his words fade from the pages of history. Fat chance of that.
There was the Jimmy Breslin who got a tip about the bribery scheme run through the city Parking Violations Bureau by Queens Borough President Donald Manes — unraveling a wider corruption scandal that quaked the city.
And who then wrote of the city’s mayor: “The facts show that so far Koch has worked incessantly at knowing nothing. Around him the level of stealing rose. Not clever or crafty corruption, but brazen stealing by stumblebums.” A Pulitzer Prize also came that year, 1986.
There was the Jimmy Breslin who, assigned by the Herald Tribune to cover John F. Kennedy’s funeral, made a beeline for the graveyard to interview the men digging out the President’s final resting place, because, he showed, we learn most about the powerful among us from the vantage of the least.
There was the Jimmy Breslin who was the chosen confidant of the elusive Son of Sam, aka the .44 Caliber Killer, who wrote to “J.B.” care of the Daily News: “I read your column daily and find it quite informative,” adding ominously: “Sam’s a thirsty lad and he won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.”
To which Breslin replied: “The only way for the killer to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me,” adding: “The only people I don’t answer are bill collectors.”
Into the vortex Breslin plunged whenever he heard a siren. “Step on it . . . it could be the end of Pennsylvania,” he recalled barking to his driver as they raced in 1979 to Three Mile Island, as it leaked radioactively on the verge of a meltdown.
Hurtling toward Crown Heights in a taxi in the thick of the 1991 race-religion riots — true New Yorker that he was, he never learned to drive — Breslin became the target, and the chronicler, of rage: “The kid on the hood swung the baseball bat with as much speed as you could want and with a look on his face that told you all you ever want to know about life in New York at this time.” He emerged from the melee with a busted lip, black eye and no clothes — and a hell of a column.
Jimmy Breslin’s voice is silent now. His words, and the words of the New Yorkers whose stories he told, whose values he defended, forever roar.