people die from the cold each winter. We have called and
written every department of the city. We have withheld rent.
We have sued. No one cares. We know that we could die from
the cold. But fire— they must care about fire, they have a fire
department, we see the fire engines and the flashing red lights
and we hear the sirens. No cold department, no whore department, no vagabond department, no running-pus-and-sores department, no get-rid-of-the-drug-dealers department: but fire
and dogs-on-the-leash departments seem to abound. I am
always pleasantly surprised that they care about fire.
The disco music is so loud that we cannot hear our own
radio: we call the police. There is an environmental-something
department. They will drive by and measure the decibel level
of the sound. This is a great relief. Can someone come and
take the temperature in our apartment? The policeman hangs
up. A crank call, he must think, and what with so many real
problems, so much real violence, so many real people dying.
My pale blond friend sleeps, his skin bluish. I call the police
about the noise.
The landlord has installed a lock on our building. The lock
must be nearly unique. You turn it with a key and when you
hear a certain click you must at that second push open the
door. If you miss the click you must start all over again. If
your key goes past the click, the door stays locked and you
must complete the cycle, complete the turn, before you can
start again, so it takes even longer, and if you miss it again you
must still keep going: you must pay attention and put your ear
right up against the lock to hear the click. The fetal vagabonds
run pus at your feet and the drooping prostitutes come at you,
perhaps wanting one second of steadiness on their feet or
perhaps wanting to tear out your heart, and this is a place
where men follow women with serious expectations not to be
trifled with, pursue in cars, beep from cars, follow block after
block in cars, carry weapons, sneak up behind, rob, need
money, need dope, and you must stand there at exquisite attention and listen for the little click.
The cement on the corner has been stained by its human
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trash: it is the color of a hundred dead junkies somehow ground
into the stone, paved smooth, running like mud in the rare
moonlight. Sometimes there is blood, and sometimes a savage
dog, belonging to one of the drunken men, chases you and
threatens to tear you apart and in terror you edge your way
inside: listening carefully for the little click. In a great urban
joke, God has given us all the trappings of a civilized society.
We have a huge intersection with a traffic light. We have a bus
stop. Across the street there is a bank and a school as well as a
disco. Next door there is a large church with stained glass and
ornate and graceful stonework. The intersection has the bank,
a hospital diagonal from us, and a fast-food chicken place.
And then, resting right next to us, right under us, tucked near,
is the home of the hamburger itself, the great gift of this
country, right on our corner, with its ascending ordure. I laugh
frequently. I am God’s best fan.*
The windows are open, of course, and he sleeps, pale and
dreamless, curled up and calm, nearly warm except that his
skin has become a pale blue, barely attached to the fine bones
underneath. Outside the sirens blast the brick building, they
almost never stop. Fire and murder. Cars rocketing by, men
with guns and clubs and flashing lights that climb five flights
in the space of a second and turn us whorish red, like great
wax museum freaks in a light show.
I listen to the music from the disco, which is so loud that the
Mozart on my poor little $32 radio is drowned out. Tonight,
perhaps, is the Italian wedding, and so we have an imitator of
Jerry Vale to a disco beat that carries across the wide street,
through air freighted with other weight, screams and blasts,
and into the epicenter of my brain. If I close the windows,
however, I will probably die. But it is the vibration, in this
case the endless clucky thumping of the badly abused instruments, that worms its way under my skin to make me itch with discontent, irritation, a rage directed, in this case, at
Italian weddings, but on other nights at French crooners, at
Jaggerish deadbeats, at Elvisian charlatans, at Haggardish
kvetchers, and even, on occasion, at Patti Pageish or even Peggy
Leeish dollies embellished by brass.
I watch the limos pulling up, parking in front of the fire
109
hydrants and no-parking signs. I see a man in a tux tear down
with his bare hands a no-parking sign. I see an endless supply
of kids attending these adult parties. The house used to be a
synagogue. One day it was empty. Then a man with many
boys moved in. The boys had tattoos and did heavy work and
had lean thighs. They all lived on the top floor. The parties
were on the lower two floors. The boys flew a flag from the
top floor. I called it never-never-land. The parties drove me
mad.
The women who went into the house were never contemporary cosmopolitan women. They always wore fluffy dresses or full skirts and frilly blouses, very fifties, suburban, dating,
heavy makeup. Even the youngest women wore wide formal
skirts, maybe even with crinolines, in pastel colors, and their
hair was set and lacquered. They were deferential and flirty
and girlish and spoke when spoken to. Sometimes they had a
corsage. Sometimes they wore female hats. Sometimes they
even wore female gloves or female wraps. Always they wore
female shoes and female stockings and stood in a female way
and looked very fifties, virgin ingenues. They never met the
rough boys from the top floor, or not so that I could see. They
came with dates. There were floral arrangements inside, and
white tablecloths, and men in white jackets. Then, during the
day, the boys from the upper floor would ride their bikes or
get wrecked on drugs. Once my favorite, a beautiful wrecked
child who at fifteen was getting old, too covered with tattoos,
with hair hanging down to his shoulders and some beautiful
light in his eyes and thighs, had a young girl there. She too was
beautiful, dark, perfect, naked, exquisite breasts and thighs,
they hung out the window together and watched the sun rise.
They seemed exquisitely happy: young: not too hurt yet, or
young enough to be resilient: he must have been hurt, all
tattooed and drugged out and in this house of boys, and she
had been or would be, and I prayed for her as hard as I have
ever hoped for myself. That she was and would be happy; that
she was older than she looked; that she would be all right. It
was only at dawn that the human blood seemed to have washed
out of the cement and that injury seemed to disappear: and
men began emerging from the park where they had been
fucking and sucking cock all night: they were weary and at
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&nb
sp; peace: and there seemed to be a truce just then, for the duration
of the dawn, between night and day, between people and despair. The boy and girl, radiant and tender with pleasure, hung out of the window. Underneath them men dragged themselves
toward home, tender with fatigue. I sat by the open window
and smiled. It was the only time to be awake and alive on that
Lower East Side street corner. The light would be not quite
daylight: night was still mixed in with it: and there was peace.
Then the sun would be up, glaring and rude. The night would
be defeated and angry, preparing to return with a vengeance.
The vagabonds would shit and move. The fumes would begin
anew for the day, inevitably thicker and more repellent than
before, more repulsive than it was possible to be or to imagine
or to engineer or to invent. The whores would go home short
and lose more teeth. The boys across the way would shoot up,
sleep, eventually ride their bikes or go stand on street corners.
I would go to the small distant room and try to sleep on the
Salvation Army mattress under the open window. I would hear
the sirens. I would wake up burning, with ice not fire.
*
I would sit by the open windows in the living room and watch
the dark, then the light: dawn was my pleasure, a process
pungent with melodrama, one thickness edging out another,
invading it, permeating it: dark being edged out, a light
weighing the night down until it was buried in the cement.
You could slice the night and you could slice the day, and it
was just the hour or two, some parts of the year it seemed like
only minutes, in which both mixed together resembling peace.
The light would begin subtly and I could just see some tree-
tops up the street in the park. At first they looked like a line, a
single line, an edge of jagged mountaintops etched against a
dark eternity with a sharp, slight pencil, and gradually the line
filled in, got deeper and deeper until the shape of each tree got
filled in, and then color came, the brown branch, bare, the
leaf-covered branch, green, the blossom-covered branch,
chartreuse. I could see some dogs being walked early, the first
ones of the day coming, forms under artificial light turning
into creatures of flesh and blood when the real light came. I
could see, in the next room, the tousled head of my love, the
boy I live with, sleeping. Soon he would wake up and I would
111
go to sleep and he would go to work and I would have stopped
working: now while he still slept and I was a vigilant consciousness I opened the windows that had been closed in the living room and sat down next to them to watch the dawn, the
kindest time.
In the hour before my turn came, my turn to sleep, night
would brand me: it would go through my brain, and make
pictures there of itself: every figure of horror would escape the
night and enter my brain: and each mundane piece of a living
day, the coming light, would grow huge and induce fear: a
drip under the sink was a torrent, irresolvable, menacing: so
there was no time to sleep: and the plaster falling from the
ceiling would become the promised disaster: and there was no
time to sleep: and the crack in the toilet threatened sewage and
flood: and so, it was impossible to sleep: and there was the
landlord to be called, and the windows were open, and congestion in the chest, and shopping to do, and noises on the roof, and some strange sounds from below: and so it was
impossible to sleep. The drip under the sink would mean calling
the super: and this meant no sleep: because he was a small,
mean, angry man, aloof but radiating hot cruelty, one little
man knotted into one fist of a man. His wife, having no English, would answer the phone and in terror stammer out
“ asleep” or “ not here” or “ no, no. ” Once she begged me in
splatters of languages I did not speak: do not make me get
him, miss, he will hurt me. The sink would be stopped up
beyond help, or there would be no heat or no hot water, for us
in this cold place a disaster of unparalleled dimensions, and
she would whisper in chokes: do not make me get him, miss,
he will hurt me. I knew the sound of the swollen larynx waiting
to burst.
The day would be solidly established, that graceless light,
and the people of the day would begin moving on the street,
the buses would come one after another, the traffic would rev
up for the day ahead, the smoke from all the motor engines
would begin escalating up, the noise would become fearsome,
the chatter from the street would become loud and busy, the
click click click of shoes and boots would swallow up the
cement, the voices would become various and in many languages: and I would make my way down the hall to the small 112
room with the broken springs in the mattress under the open
window and try to sleep.
I dreamed, for instance, of being in a tropical place. It was all
green, that same steady bright unchanging green under too
much light that one finds in the steamy tropics, that too-lush
green that hurts the eyes with its awful brightness, only it was
duller because it seemed to know it was in a dream. And in the
steaming heat of this too-green jungle with its long thin sharp
leaves and branches resembling each other, more like hungry
animals than plants, stretched out sideways not up, growing
out wide not up, but still taller than me, there was a clearing,
a sort of burnt-out, brown-yellow clearing, short grass, flat, a
circle surrounded by the wild green bush. There were chairs,
like the kinds used in auditoriums, folding chairs set up, about
eight of them in a circle like for a consciousness-raising group
or a small seminar. The sun burned down. I was standing.
Others were sitting in the chairs, easy, relaxed, men and
women, I knew them but I don’t know who they were by
name, now or then, and I have a big knife, a huge sharp knife,
and very slowly I walked up to the first one and I slowly slit
her throat. No one moves or notices and I walk to the next
one and I slit her throat, and I walk to the next one and I slit
his throat, and slowly I walked around the circle of sitting
people and I slit each throat slowly and purposefully. I wake
up shaking and screaming, burning hot, in terror. In the dream
I was truly happy.
Or I dream the dream I hate most, that I am awake, I see
the room, someone is in it, I hear him, he has a knife, I wake
up, I try to scream, I can’t scream, I am awake, I believe I am
awake, but I cannot scream and I cannot move, my eyes are
open, I can see and hear everything but I cannot do anything, I
keep trying to scream but I make no sound, I cannot move, so
I think I must not be awake, and I force myself to wake up
and it turns out that I wasn’t awake before but I am now, and
I hear the man in the room, and I can see him moving around,
and I am awake, and I try to scream but no sound comes out
and I try to move but I cannot move, but I am awake, and I
see everything and I hear everything, every detail of the room I
know I am in, every sound that I know is there, every detail of
reality, the time, the sounds of the neighbors, I know where I
i i 3
am and who I am and that I am awake and still I can’t say
anything, I try to scream but I can’t, the vocal cords do not
work, the voice does not work, my mouth works but no sound
comes out, and I try to force myself to get up but my body
does not move, and then I realize that even though I think I
am awake I must not be awake and so I force myself to wake
up, I fight and I fight to wake up, and then I wake up, and I
hear the man in the room, I see him, I see his face, I see him
and see every detail of who he is and how he is dressed and
how he moves and where he goes and I see myself and I know
I am in bed and he is in the room and I hear every sound and I
try to scream but I cannot and I try to move but I cannot and
so I try to force myself again to wake because I know I must
be asleep and I am so terrified I cannot move from fear and I
cannot scream from fear: and by the time I wake up I am half
dead. Drenched in sweat, I try to sleep some more.
I hear my love, my friend, moving around, awake, alive. I
am relieved. The night is over. I can begin to try to sleep. I
hear him turn on the water, he is there if it floods. I have left
him a note, probably two pages long, filled with worries and
admonitions: what must be done to get through this day
coming up, the vivid imperatives that came to press in on my
brain as night ended and I knew I would have to sleep, the
dread demands of uncompromising daylight: more calls to the
city, more calls to the landlord, more calls to the lawyers,
more calls to the super: and buy cat litter: and remember the
laundry, to take it in or to pick it up and I have left money,
five dollars: and I love you, have a good day, I hope it goes
well. I can’t sleep in his bed because in the day his room has
fumes, even with the windows open. So I am down in this
little closet under an open window to sleep. Somehow my
friend comes home at night, it is a surprise always, and I am
always, inevitably, without fail, a cold coiled spring ready to
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