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Those who disagree call Koch an egotist, an obsessive, a thin-skinned son of a bitch who loves nothing so much as his own prominence. They are all correct—at least to some degree—but that still leaves open the question that Koch asks anyone who looks at him: "How'm I doin'?" In terms of the city's budget, he's doing fine.
In terms of the city's spirit, he's doing better—an achievement of sorcery, given that the city's so-called "services" include crime in the streets, garbage in the breeze and a subway system that would look like hell, were not hell more efficient (the wolves won't help). When Koch was officially announced over the p.a. system at the Mets' opener, he was booed to the skies, as the formalities required. Still, he is astonishingly popular in a city that usually elects mayors simply to focus its fury on a single person.
From a New Yorker's viewpoint this popularity is perfectly reasonable. Koch is New York's nut uncle, the bachelor workhorse with opinions on everything, who will not stop talking, who keeps you up all hours telling the same stories a hundred times (half with the mouth, half with the hands), and only grows drowsy when you gain your second wind. He is funny-looking, and dignified too—6 ft. 1 in., bald as an egg, with a body that quits every day.
Yet a scrupulous face, serious eyes. Everything New York does, he does. Gotta lose weight, gotta jog. Did you read Eye of the Needle? "Super, the best." He dines in Chinese restaurants and stands in line for movies. He loves standing in those lines.
Friends persuaded him to hold movie nights at Gracie Mansion, so he tried it.
"But to watch movies in your own home is boring." Koch is not boring. He awakens automatically at 6 o'clock every morning, hungry for his job, and lights a short fuse.
A statue of him would show a fellow eating ice cream on an Exercycle, in perpetual debate with passersby.
All this translates into the sober fact hat Koch is a full-time public servant whose entire being—senses, affections, intelligence—is fused with the life of his lunatic city. Like New York, Koch can be brave, hilarious, generous, protective, occasionally gracious and more rarely, touching. He can also be arrogant, spiteful, petty, wily and a bully. He was a bully at the Yale Club, for example, when a hapless young man rose to challenge Koch's advocacy of capital punishment. The young man put his question: "Why do you think that taking a life is a good thing?" thereby winning the disapproving sighs and groans of those about him, which Koch, of course, picked up. "When do you graduate?" he asked the kid. He would have lost nothing by a show of magnanimity (certainly not the argument, since he went on to state it forcefully), but he had the eye of the needier.
On the other hand, it is this same predisposition to face down opponents that people like in Koch. Stories of his antics at wild public meetings are enlarging New York folklore (with Koch as his own Homer). Yet it is true that Koch has refined a combative style of oratory, which appeals strongly to a city where four-fifths of life is an argument. Often he does not even wait for a threat to appear before pouncing on it. "What's wrong with