Текст книги "The Fuck-Up"

Автор книги: Arthur Nersesian

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

FIVE

As I passedEleventh Street on Third I saw the big bright sign of the Ritz. Jersey kids were still stumbling in, so I walked over to the door. There was usually a five-dollar admission but an accord had been arranged between Pepe and the manager of the Ritz: their respective employees were allowed free into each others places. I approached hesitantly. The doorman, who was chatting with a group of Jerseyites, apparently remembered me from my many previous entrances. Unaware of my dismissal from the Saint Mark’s, he just waved me in.

Once inside, I had just enough to buy a beer. I was wide awake, so I decided to try dancing off some energy. I approached a skinny girl leaning against the bar and we danced for a while. She kept trying to dance slower and closer, and I kept pushing her away and the tempo up. Finally when it took more energy to repel her than to dance, I thanked her and left the floor. I saw an attractive, healthy girl put down an almost full bottle of beer and leave. 1 would kiss her if she let me, and with that criteria I wiped off some lipstick at the nozzle and poured it into my mouth without touching the rim.

I finally felt tired enough to fall asleep on Helmsley’s sofa, which seemed to be getting harder and harder every time I was on it. Heading toward the door of the club, I was suddenly stopped by two soft hands shoved before my eyes.

“Guess who?” murmured a disguised voice.

“Sarah?” was the only name that came to mind. Pulling off the blinds and turning around, I found myself face to face with Eunice.

“How are you doing?” she asked as if no preexisting clash had ever occurred.

“Are you here with him?” I asked, looking around.

“No,” she replied.

“Why did you lie to me,” I leapt right into the fray, “saying that you were going to visit your parents?”

“Well, I was going to. But do we really have to go through this?”

“But you lied to me! That’s what I most resented.” No anger still existed but for some reason I felt compelled to continue the fight, to hold to some righteous platform.

“You swine!” She gave me a token swat. “You have a girlfriend, and you have the audacity to yell at me for having a fling.”

“Ah ha! But I told you about it!”

“Is that how it works? If confession makes everything all right, then why don’t you tell her about us?”

“She already found out,” I confessed with a hung head. “I told you. She left me.”

There was a stretch of silence, so I gave a slight farewell smile and resumed walking.

“Wait a second.” Eunice caught up. “She left you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to dance?” she finally asked pliantly.

“No thanks, I’m tired.” And resumed walking.

“Wait a fucking second,” she said this time, angrily. “Can’t we try to be friends, I mean does one fight end the friendship?!”

“Yes!” I yelled. “You teased!”

“Tease? I told you right up front exactly what I was up to when you asked me,” she answered.

“You left me hoping, you left the possibility dangling.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Fuck you!” I shouted unconcerned that we were the center of attention in the place. She, on the other hand, had become visibly embarrassed. I continued, “I made minimum wage and spent every cent on you! I spent all my available time with you!”

“Look, I was interested in you as a boyfriend, I admit it.”

“Ha ha!” I exclaimed idiotically.

“But I’m not going to be the other woman. Now that you’re unattached, there’s a new context.”

“Well fuck you!” I yelled. “Go fuck that old fart I saw you with.”

“Well fuck you too!” she yelled back and vanished back into the masses. If not getting involved with her was something that I would ever come to regret I couldn’t feel it then. All I wanted was sleep. On the ride home I couldn’t help but think how just one month earlier I would’ve died to have what I had just rejected.

Sleep was prematurely cut open for me by a sharp angle of sunlight that pierced my closed lids like a can opener. I turned over, but outside the battle of car horns finished off the beleaguered sleep. I lay there awhile with my eyes still closed and thought about old times, and then it started happening. I could feel the rapid palpitations and the sweat. The snail had visited last night; a thick film of oil seemed to be evenly licked over my body. I tossed the blanket to the floor, and with a towel I wiped my face dry. Helmsley’s door was open and his room was bare. Stepping under the shower, I felt the cold water slowly turn hot and then cold again as I tried to scour away my epidermis.

I dressed and wolfed down the ninety-cent breakfast special at the corner diner. It was a wonderful morning. Everything seemed real and luminous. I breathed deeply. A cold wind that days earlier had swept across arctic ice pans settled above Brooklyn and chilled everyone away, indoors. The sun was bright, but ineffectual. The few folks out looked more rugged than the usual anemic breed of New Yorkers. I had nothing to do, so I walked. After breakfast, I walked down Clinton Street, through Brooklyn Heights and across Cadman Plaza to the Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge was reconstructed in the mid-eighties so that it became one graceful incline, more accessible to cyclists. But in crossing it by foot, I constantly feared I was going to be hit by a speeding bike, and preferred the way it was before, divided into roughly five parts by short series of stairs. By the time I finally reached the Manhattan side, I had both a chill and an appetite.

Walking south on Broadway, I realized that I had enough change for a coffee in a Blimpie’s. When I opened the door, I was shoved to the floor. When I looked up, someone was holding a fat handgun and wildly waving it around.

“Stay on that fucking floor!” I stayed. The gunman, a spindly Hispanic, was pointing to the till with the pistol. “In de bag,” he shouted. “Put it in de fucking bag.”

Suddenly the door swung open and in walked a preadolescent girl in a parochial school dress, probably for a pack of Yodels. He grabbed her and she screamed and continued screaming.

“There are cops all around here. Get out while you still can,” a career lady behind me said. I didn’t notice her until that moment.

“You’re next bitch,” he screamed at her. Grabbing the screaming little girl in his arm, he frantically tore at her dress. “Shut the fuck up!”

I guess he interpreted her screaming as insolence instead of fear. Spontaneously an old man leapt at the fucker’s gun hand. After hearing the discharged blast, the cashier jumped at the gunman, but he kept slipping backwards. The school girl broke free and dashed out the door. The old man dropped to the ground. I jumped up thinking the situation was defused. The gunman released two more shots. I jumped away, falling through the coldcut display case, and the gunman was out the door with his bag of money.

A tray of coleslaw had spilled over me, and as I tried to rise I felt a numbness in my right arm and saw blood mixing in with watery mayonnaise. The cashier leaned over his old friend. The old man was calmly on the ground, blood was drilling up out of his belly. The cashier was holding a rag on the puncture. The lady hung up the phone after notifying the 911 people. She looked at my arm; through my jacket and shirt there was a deep cut.

“I’m okay.” I trembled with false modesty. “How’s the old guy?”

“Did you know him?” she asked solemnly. I shook my head no.

The lady wrapped a tourniquet just below my shoulder. Soon people from the street started pouring in and asking me dumb questions: “Did it hurt? Are you all right? What happened?” In what seemed like forever, I could finally hear the wailing sirens, and then an endless flow of police started streaming in as if they were compensating for the prior lack of security. The cashier was sobbing over the dead body until one group of paramedics put it on what looked like a large tray and then covered it with the white sheet. Finally one medic, a big guy with a name tag reading “Luciano,” took a scissors and cut the jacket and shirt right off my arm. He started looking for a bullet hole.

“It was a piece of glass,” the career lady explained.

Upon hearing that I had no relations living in the city, she offered to escort me to the hospital. We spoke during the ambulance ride to Saint Vincent’s Hospital.

“What were you doing in there anyhow?” I asked her. She was attractive, articulate, well-dressed, and simply didn’t look like a Blimpie’s type.

“I work in the area.”

“As what?”

“A stock broker,” she said and then asked what I was doing there. I explained that I had just walked over the bridge.

“Didn’t you have a token?”

“The IRT isn’t as poetic as the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Oh,” she replied with an inspired smile, “you mean not many dawns chill it from its rippling rest…”

“Very good.” I was surprised. She asked me if I knew the reference.

“What kind of bogus, never-completed-a-page, cappuccino-slurping writer would I be if I didn’t know the opening of ‘The Bridge’?” The odds that two people knew the same poem seemed rare in these illiterate days.

“Is that what you are?”

“Well,” I replied, “maybe I completed just one page.”

As the siren wailed and the ambulance precariously cut off other cars, she started loosening up and telling me about herself. Her name was Glenn, modernized from Glenda. She was a thirty-two-year-old divorcée with a fair income and her ex-hubby’s Brooklyn Heights townhouse.

At the hospital, they checked out my arm. There weren’t any bones broken, no arteries severed, nor vital organs damaged. I had spilt a bit of blood, but all in all I had plea bargained well with fate. After the bandaging, a cop kept reviewing the incident over and over. Maybe, if I revised the facts, circumstances might retroactively right themselves. The career lady correlated all the details so the cop finally left me alone. Initially the hospital wanted to keep me overnight for observation. But after I explained to the nurse with the metal clipboard that I had no insurance plan, no Blue Cross and Blue Shield and no money, my situation seemed less serious. Before Glenn left, I asked her if she would ever care to dine or something. She said that she didn’t think so.

“Well, can’t I at least speak to you again?” I appealed. “You aided me in a time of need and I feel obliged.”

“Don’t feel obliged.”

For that fearful moment in the Blimpie’s, she made me feel very protected. I asked her, “Do you have a child?”

“No, why?”

“Think of me as one,” I replied.

“Look, we can talk on the phone, but I’m involved and I wouldn’t want to give you the wrong idea.” As she said this, she took out her appointment planner and scribbled down a telephone number with an extension. She then tore out the page, handed it to me, and was gone.

I had a buck-fifty and needed to be at work in a half an hour so I started walking east. After spending hours in the gloom of that hospital, it was good to be out and away. When I finally got to the theater, the box office lady asked if I would mind the box office a moment so that she could relieve herself. I sat on her stool and waited. After about five minutes, during which time three young bucks sporting ten gallon hats moseyed on in, I found myself deeply attracted to the cash in the till. I finally counted it. It amounted to more than I had seen in years. I finished counting before the lady returned to the box. The balance came to two hundred and fifty-six dollars. Two patrons later, Rosa resumed her place. Going into the office, I coughed through a thick cloud of marijuana smoke. There were burnt-out roaches in the ashtray. Miguel was giggling on the phone to someone. I caught the phrase “mobilization on Washington” and stopped listening. WBAI was playing ancient Siberian folk music and interlacing it with an explanation about these lost people and their futile attempt to protect their vanishing heritage. In mid-sentence Miguel looked up and noticed that the right sleeve of my jacket and shirt had been amputated. Upon seeing the iodine-stained gauze that was packed around my shoulder, he quickly concluded his conversation. “What happened?”

“I walked in on a robbery and fell through a display case.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Someone got killed.”

“How?”

“He tried to grab the gun.”

“He was asking for it then. Were the robbers black?”

“No, it was a Puerto Rican guy.”

“I know a homeopath, like a doctor. He can look at your shoulder.”

“No, I’ve spent enough time with doctors.”

“Well, just relax. Want a medicinal joint?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ve got a case of the munchies myself. Want anything at the store?”

I didn’t. He threw on his jacket and went to the newly opened Korean fruit stand on the corner. I turned on the small TV that was on his desk. Richard Dawson was kissing a mother, and then he kissed a daughter, and then I turned off the TV Trying to appear responsible, I started clearing off the desk top. I threw away an empty Dannon’s yogurt cup and then wiped up all the granola crumbs.

Checking the register dial that showed how many people had come in since the last cash drop, I counted twenty-six and multiplied it by four. The sum came to a hundred and sixteen dollars. But I had just counted over two hundred dollars in the box office. I checked all the math again, something was wrong. Obviously I had screwed up somewhere, so I decided to just keep quiet and let him explain everything to me. I turned the TV back on and watched Richard Dawson kissing some more relatives until Miguel arrived. He put a quart of Tropicana Orange Juice on the desk and, after watching a bit more of “Family Feud,” started instructing me about the job.

“We didn’t do too well today,” he said. Out of his pocket he produced a rubber banded roll of bills. He then checked the gauge that I had checked and did the same computations I had, coming to the same conclusion.

“Yep, a hundred and sixteen bucks,” he said, and then added, “This is pretty average for a Tuesday matinee.”

He then counted the stack of bills: it amounted to the same figure.

“Let me ask you something,” I asked. “When you take a drop, you take everything but fifty bucks right?”

“Right, why?” he asked calmly.

“Just getting the facts straight.”

“Well, I just collected all the matinee, so there is now fifty bucks in the till.”

I watched him put the money in an envelope, fill out the front with the present gauge number, and calculate the sum total of the matinee. He then put the envelope into the deposit bag for the nightly deposit.

Something fishy was going on.

The night spun on as quickly as the digits on the gauge. Miguel gave me a few pointers on the porno business. He talked quickly about the illicit side of the trade, specifically the shakedowns and the pirating of porn films. But he elaborated on the nuances of location. Aside from zoning rules that dictated the locations of gay porn theaters, it was each police captain’s private policy in his individual precinct that usually dictated whether sex was permitted in the theater or not.

“For example, Ox had to sell the theater in Queens because a homophobic commander was transferred there, and he had the vice squad staking the theater out regularly,” Miguel explained.

He also mentioned that business had slackened for a couple of weeks the previous fall because the condom dispenser in the lobby was busted and the boys were afraid of contracting AIDS.

“Anybody can do what they want in here but everybody is given a safe sex pamphlet, I make sure of it,” he said proudly, “and nobody wants to die.”

We spent most of the evening drinking beer and talking. We rambled on about our pasts, and to compensate for our lack of experience due to youth, both of us were unintentionally drawn into colorful hyperbole. He told me about his semester at college in Boulder, Colorado. He lived out of a motorless van and had long wavy hair. His favorite recollection, which also seemed to be his vision of the perfect future, was the time he went to the Rainbow Gathering. This was a festival for orthodox hippies who met once a year somewhere in the undisturbed wilderness. For the duration they met, it was like being a hobbit in a carefree world, provided it didn’t rain. I didn’t care to dredge up my drab and depressing past, so I made up a lively yet realistic background.

“I was raised in New York, but I can’t bear dealing with parents anymore.”

“Where did you meet Tanya?” he asked and for a moment my mind was a blank. Then I remembered the girl on the train.

“On a train,” I answered, almost truthfully.

We talked about other things and just when conversation was getting completely absurd, the intercom buzzed. The box office lady said that there were two people in the outer lobby waiting to see Miguel. I followed him out and met his guests. They were two punks. One was taller, appeared older than the other, and both of them had wide grins. With their mohawks and leather gear they looked like characters out of The Road Warrior,Wez and his motorcycle-mate. One of them was holding a pail and the other one, the taller one, had leaflets.

At first Miguel appeared flustered. He greeted them with the words, “I thought you were coming tomorrow.”

“We were out gluing up flyers for our gig and since we were passing we wondered if we could check out the sound system,” explained the smaller one.

“It’ll only take a moment,” concluded the other. I moved in closer to inspect the mohawks. They were spectrum-colored with glistening speckles. I could see that they were erected with the help of Elmer’s glue.

“Okay,” Miguel consented nervously. So they left their glue buckets and flyers in the box office and followed Miguel into the theater.

As Miguel and the taller one quietly led the way through the dark theater, I walked alongside the diminutive sidekick. He had what resembled the coastline of Asia minor shaved carefully into his bristled scalp; I could make out the Aegean fingering into the Bosphorus. In conversation with the punk, Miguel unlocked the projection booth. The projector was on, but there was no operator present. The two punks quickly went through a checklist and at one point I overheard the head punk whisper to Miguel, “1 didn’t get you in any trouble, did I?”

“No, no,” Miguel replied calmly, “everything’s still in orbit. Only, as a rule, try calling ahead.”

Miguel then introduced us. “This is the new manager, but he’s real cool.”

We all shook hands and Miguel explained that these were two young vanguard filmmakers. Apparently Miguel had many acquaintances from both the NYU Film School and The School of Visual Arts. Since the Zeus Theater had a superb 16mm projector, Miguel rented the theater for private functions at a nominal cost.

Since Hans—the taller one—and Grett—the smaller one—were collaborative members of an important local band called Slap, and since they were able to get Miguel on the guest list of several local after-hour spots and clubs, he was going to let them view their film for free. It was going to be screened the next day, when I wasn’t working.

Miguel talked with Hans awhile, and Grett watched the dirty film. In a moment the two had concluded their business. Hans and Grett exited, but before we could retreat back down the steps, a small door whipped open and out jumped a cute young lady wielding a crow bar. It was the same girl that I had bumped into a couple of days ago when I first got the job.

“What the fuck’s going on here?” she demanded, lowering the bar.

“I’m sorry,” Miguel replied, “I should have buzzed first.”

“If it’s not asking too fucking much!” she yelled back. “I thought you were a rapist. And besides, it’s in the union contract with all theater owners, ‘the projectionist must be duly notified before entry is gained into the booth…’”

Miguel apologized profusely, but as he did, she turned her small back to him and suddenly glared at me. Trying to ease the tension, I introduced myself.

“You’re the straight one,” she said.

“What?” Miguel cried with astonishment. Turning to me, he asked, “You’re straight?”

“Of course not.”

“He specifically told me he was straight,” the projectionist replied. “I bumped into him downstairs. He grabbed my tits and all he could say was that he was straight. Then he runs off.”

“What?!” hollered Miguel.

“Wait a second,” I replied. “I bumped into you, I tried to prevent you from falling and said I was late, not straight! That’s why I was running. Why the hell would I say I was straight?”

“To show why you were molesting me is why,” she explained.

“She’s crazy,” I pointed out.

“Then you are gay?” Miguel asked. They both peered at me like a spy on foreign soil. After years of institutionalized bias, I was sympathetic to certain cases of reverse discrimination. But despite my sympathies, I still needed the job.

“I’m nothing,” I finally replied.

“He might be nothing, but he’s a straight nothing,” she replied.

“What do you…you know…do?” Miguel asked after a period of silence.

“Quite frankly, I don’t penetrate anymore.”

“You don’t what?”

“I stopped penetrating.”

“Well, what the hell do you do?” she asked.

“I…I guess I just fondle.”

“But what do you fondle, guys or girls?” he asked.

“Guys, I guess.”

“You guess?” the projectionist said. “What do you fondle, ears?”

“Guys,” I declared, “with guys.”

“So then you are gay?” Miguel added.

“Well, I’ve fondled girls, too. What the hell is the big deal?” I finally got tired of being cross-examined. “Is it a crime to be straight?”

“We’re still something of a persecuted group,” Miguel stated, “and quite honestly, I just feel that for this particular job I believe a gay person is more fit.”

“How about you?” I asked the cute projectionist. “Aren’t you straight?”

“No longer,” she replied plainly, and then added in a kind of disturbed and distant way, “I don’t involve myself with…anyone anymore.” Small wonder.

We went back downstairs to the office where we continued with the routines of the night, but periodically the issue reared its ugly head.

“Look,” Miguel said sanctimoniously, “it’s not that I’m anti-straight or anything. I really have no hang-ups there. But this is a gay porno theater, and a certain understanding is needed, an understanding that comes with being. And besides, if you were straight, working here might be…”

“Dangerous to my health?”

“Disorienting, that’s all.”

“You make homosexuality sound like leprosy.”

“It’s like trying to explain color to a blind man.”

“That’s no answer,” I replied and then declared falsely, “I’m gay, I should be able to understand your argument!”

“Because it’s a violation!” he insisted. “When I was in high school, I didn’t mind the kids who disliked me for being a faggot. But I hated the bastards who claimed to be friends. The ones who were interested in how it was done. Who looked at you like a lab rat they were studying. Condemning it on one hand and getting off on it with the other. It was pure deceit!”

“I’m not straight!” I insisted.

“I suppose not,” he finally concluded and added, “Tanya doesn’t deal with straight guys.”

Soon it was closing time, and quietly we did the nightly tabulations together. Miguel subtracted the amount of people that came during the night from the amount of people that came during the matinee, then he multiplied the sum by four. While in the midst of further calculations, I got up to take a piss. “I’ll pick up the money on the way back,” I offered.

“That’s all right,” he said, “I’m responsible for it.”

“It’s no problem.”

“No!” he was suddenly angry. “Only I’m allowed to deal with the money!”

Perhaps he was still angry over the night’s argument. I pissed quickly to the copulating moans in the abutting stall and wondered why Miguel was so touchy. Miguel returned to the office and put all the night’s money into the drop bag and locked it. After looking at the tally sheet, I was surprised to see that the theater had only earned four hundred bucks. That meant that only a hundred people had come—but the theater was full all night.

While locking up the place, Miguel said that he felt there was still a tension between us due to the discussion, so he invited me for a beer. Instead of going to a bar, though, we stopped in at the Korean deli on the corner and got a six pack. Miguel explained that three nearby theaters were showing midnight films. The Saint Mark’s was showing Blade Runner,the Eighth Street was showing Rumble Fish,and the Waverly was showing Stop Making Sense.Miguel knew Ian, the manager at the Eighth Street, so we could get in free. I didn’t want to deal with Pepe, so we swigged beers and walked to the theater.

While watching the film, I wasn’t sure if it was the beer or the picture but the image seemed liquidy and unsteady. Either I or the film was drunk. When it was over, we decided that we were both still thirsty.

After the beer, the walk, the joking, and then the film, I couldn’t have guessed that our earlier argument might’ve still been raging in Miguel’s mind. He led the way to a bar on Fourth Street called The Bar. Only when we entered did I realize that it was a gay bar. I don’t know how well I disguised my apprehension, but it was the very first time I was ever in a gay bar. I immediately sensed that Miguel still wasn’t convinced about my assumed sexuality.

After ordering beers, Miguel started with sidelong glances while assuming a well-trained unassuming posture. I kept my eyes on safe inanimate objects, the pool table, the wayward bottles, and so on. Finally I heard him utter, “What do you think of these two guys?”

“Real nice,” I replied with no idea of where he was looking.

“Okay,” he replied jokingly. “These two are ours.”

“What?” I winced in disbelief.

“They are ours,” he enunciated. I looked up and noticed his stare, deft and fixed like a matador’s sword preparing for the final kill. He knew I was full of bull. It was time to either awkwardly laugh and tell him the truth or bluff it right to the end.

Miguel’s upper lip was twisting and rolling now as if beset by Parkinson’s disease. Following his line of vision, I saw two guys who looked like they were the result of the crossbreeding of storm troopers and surfing bums. Was there any escape route? I considered the plausibility of announcing some dreaded venereal ailment. But then Miguel probably wouldn’t permit me to work. Slowly they stepped out from the screen of disbelief and started sauntering over.

“Hi,” Miguel said smilingly.

“Hi,” they said back. Everyone seemed familiar and, except for my sudden dumbfoundedness, the procedure seemed to be so gracefully lubricated that I wondered whether everyone already knew each other.

“Warm day, wasn’t it?”

“Precious for a February.”

“Spring’s just around the corner.”

“And summer’s just around spring’s corner.” They sounded like placidminded housewives leaning out on adjacent window sills.

“You should join us. We’re going back out to the Golden State tomorrow.”

“Gosh, I’m getting sweaty just thinking about it.”

I stared at the ground and listened to everyone contribute a line to this potpourri conversation. It was a three-way dialogue that amounted to nothing more than a show of good faith; all meant well and were sane and shared common wants. Now Miguel started walking over to the bar with one of them. The remaining one, the hulkier of the two, was left standing with me. I maintained an autistic fixation of the filthy tiled floor, but evidently he found even that cute because he just kept gazing at me.

“Hi,” he softly bellowed. I finally looked up. Tiny tributaries of sweat collected down the sharp part of his face, as if he had just arisen from a pool; apparently he had danced to an excess.

“What happened to your arm?” One couldn’t help but notice the missing sleeve and the bandage.

“An accident,” 1 quickly replied, hoping to avoid any sympathy that might turn into affection.

“Looks kinda cool.” He touched the surrounding area, tenderly nudging my arm under a soft drop light. Lowering his nose to the spot, he sniffed it: a dirty bandage with a dry line of blood crusted along the exterior.

“You can have it when I’m done,” I said, referring to the bandage. He accepted the offer and proposed buying drinks in return.

“I don’t drink.”

“How about a walk?”

If a walk meant what I suspected then I was a gimp. But all the while, I felt Miguel’s microscopic stare haunting me for results. If I could just walk with this guy until after the bar closes; he wouldn’t be able to return to make his report, then I could dump him. And since this guy was leaving tomorrow Miguel would never be able to confirm anything. He’d have to believe whatever I told him.

“Good idea, let’s walk.” He got his leather night jacket, and we both gave farewell nods to our companions and left. All were right, it was a beautiful night, but it felt more like autumn than spring. The glacier of winter’s cold was still ahead, not behind us. We walked without any destination, which was okay with me because to establish any destination in this vocabulary of clichés and euphemisms might sound like a commitment of some kind. For a New York night, the sky was clear. Aside from the many lighted skyscrapers, which were New York’s consolation for having no visible constellations, I could make out the star, the big one in the northern sky. We strayed westward. And since we were only on Second Avenue there was a lot of westerliness before us.

The oddities of the night included a crab-like man hunching under a huge ghetto blaster angled on his shoulder and back. It was playing “Purple Rain.” Turning north, we journeyed to the corner of Saint Marks Place and Bowery, and as we passed the Transient Hotel, we were propositioned by a hooker who couldn’t intuit our alleged longings. Passing Cooper Union, we walked around an array of garbage, which was street vendor merchandise, unsold and abandoned from earlier that day. Looking north on Fourth Avenue, I saw the clock at the Metropolitan Life Building and the outline of the Empire State Building, an attractive view that was to be barred with the erection of the Zeckendorf Towers in ‘86. Walking through the parking lot on Astor Square, we swung south down Lafayette past the Public Theater. On Houston Street, we noticed a makeshift abode: an old table covered with boxes adjacent to an old sofa—an ingenious housing project for a group of derelicts. Making a right at Houston, we passed the NYU projects with the Picasso centerpiece. There, the wanton one initiated a conversation. “David Byrne lives in one of those apartments.” I could think of no reply.