Certain writers curdle with time, while others manage to keep adequate pace with the accolades they amassed when alive. Breslin lacked the pretensions of his contemporaries. Although he was associated with the New Journalism that brought literary techniques to conventional journalism, he eschewed Wolfe’s pyrotechnics and Mailer’s existential swaggering; he had no signature outfit, never stabbed anyone and didn’t, like his sometimes-colleague and rival Pete Hamill, date Shirley MacLaine. He did not grasp at Hemingway’s shadow. His masculinity was not performed, nor was it tortured. He was more bookish than he let on—Dostoevsky was a favorite—and he wasn’t, unlike Hamill, prone to fits of reactionary nostalgia. Breslin’s columns, though crafted on deadline and yoked to long-faded news cycles, are wry and crackling enough—and tangle with more universal fare, like the nature of political power and the strictures of class—to appeal to those who never lived through his various heydays.
A product of the white working class, Breslin would always be somewhat sympathetic to their plight, but he spent much of his career as something of an apostate. Many of his columns lashed the NYPD for their brutality and corruption, which was far more brazen in the twentieth century. He was a biting critic of the Irish cops of his old neighborhood. When a young Hispanic officer, Cibella Borges, was fired for posing nude before joining the NYPD, he quipped, in a column defending her, that the police “should have been proud of the pictures, as they prove that at least one member of the force is in marvelous physical condition; most officers are in such deplorable shape that if called upon to pose for pictures, they would first put on overcoats.”
Breslin was a prominent voice of dissent when Bernhard Goetz, a white 37-year-old, shot four black teens who attempted to rob him on the subway. Goetz, in the high-crime Eighties, was briefly a folk hero, the “Subway Vigilante” who attempted, like a gun-toting Batman, to restore order in the underground. Breslin saw a sociopath, a man who shot and paralyzed a teen who had been cowering on the ground after the first bullets went flying. Breslin would visit the nineteen-year-old, Darrell Cabey, in the hospital, and capture his suffering. He won his lone Pulitzer for these columns and his profiles of AIDS victims. In an era of rampant homophobia, he was unafraid of spending time with them, detailing the horror that came with living with such an unknowable, insidious disease. These columns are sparer, heavy with dialogue, J.B. Number One receding to offer the stage to the sick. David Comacho, terminally ill at 27, tells Breslin he got off the phone with his doctor, who told him that the cancer, fueled by AIDS, had spread to his lungs.
“I said nothing,” Breslin writes.
“I’m trying to keep myself together by washing the windows,” Comacho tells him, and the column ends.