East of A (1999)

East of A

Russell Atwood's first novel was published in hardcover by Ballantine in 1999 and is read here in the mass-market edition of 2000. Payton Sherwood, a down-at-heel private eye, comes back to Manhattan's East Village after time upstate and walks into the lives of the hustlers, addicts and artists of Alphabet City, east of Avenue A. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex watch

Walking past St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery with cereal and milk, Sherwood notices he still has on his gold Rolex, the only jewelry he owns, worn openly upstate. Minutes later he is knocked down and a teenage girl pries open its crown clasp and runs off with it (p. 12). Jimmy hands it back from his jeans pocket, stopped at eleven past nine, the bubble window over the date scratched opaque (p. 104); Sherwood drops it in his junk drawer (p. 114), then wears it again to show the girl (p. 132). The text describes day and date displays but does not name the model. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: I still had on my gold Rolex. My $3,500, perpetual-motion, date-day-chronometer, gold Rolex. (Russell Atwood, East of A, scan cataloged as Ballantine Books, 2000, p. 4; Internet Archive scan OCR)