I was finding my level.
the first night out after the bars closed I found I had lost my key. I only had on a thin white Calif. shirt. I rode a bus back and forth to keep from freezing. finally the driver said it was the end of the line or the ride was over. I was too drunk to remember.
when I got out it was still freezing and I was standing outside of Yankee Stadium.
oh Lord, I thought, here is where my childhood hero Lou Gehrig used to play and now I am going to die out here. well, it’s fitting.
I walked about a bit, then found a cafe. I walked in. the waitresses were all middle-aged negresses but the coffee cups were large and the doughnut and coffee hardly cost anything.
I took my stuff over to a table, sat down, ate the doughnut very quickly, sipped at the coffee, then took out a king-sized cigarette and lit it.
I started hearing voices:
“PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”
“OH, PRAISE THE LORD, BROTHER!”
I looked around. all the waitresses were praising me and some of the customers too. it was very nice. recognition at last. the Atlantic and Harper’s be damned. genius would always out. I smiled at them all and took a big drag.
then one of the waitresses screamed at me:
“NO SMOKING IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD, BROTHER!”
I put the cigarette out. I finished the coffee. then I went outside and looked at the lettering on the window:
FATHER DIVINE’S MISSION.
I lit another cigarette and began the long walk back to my place. when I got there nobody would answer the bell. I finally stretched out on top of the garbage cans and went to sleep. I knew that down on the pavement the rats would get me. I was a clever young man.
I was so clever that I even got a job the next day. and the next night, hungover, shaky, very sad, I was at work.
two old guys were to break me in. they’d each been on the job since the subways were invented. we walked along with these heavy sheets of cardboard under the left arm and a little tool in the right hand that looked like a beercan opener.
“all the people in New York have these little green-colored bugs all over them,” one of the old guys said.
“izzat so?” I said, not giving the least damn what color the bugs were.
“you’ll see ’em on the seats. we find ’em on the seats each night.”
“yeh,” said the other old man.
we walked along.
good god, I thought, did this ever happen to Cervantes?
“now watch,” said one of the old guys. “each card has a little number. we replace each card with the little number with another card with the same number.”
flip, flip. he beercan-opened the strips, flipped in the new advertisement, replaced the strips, took the old advertisement and put it on the bottom of the pile of cards under his left arm.
“now you try it.”
I tried it. the little strips didn’t want to give. I had a bum can opener. and was sick and shaky.
“you’ll get it,” said an old guy.
I AM getting it, you fuck, I thought.
we moved along.
then we stepped out of the rear of the car and they went ahead stepping along the railroad ties between the tracks. the space between each board was about three feet. a body could easily fall through without even trying. and we were elevated about 90 feet from the street. and it must have been 90 feet to the new car. the two old guys skipped over the boards with their heavy cardboard load and waited for me at the new car. there was a train stopped across the way picking up passengers. it was well-lit around there, but that was all. the lights from the train clearly showed me the three foot gap between the boards.
“COME ON! COME ON! WE’RE IN A HURRY!”
“god damn you and your hurry!” I screamed at the two old guys. then I stepped out on the boards with my load of cardboard under my left arm and the beercan opener in my right hand. one step, two steps, three steps … hungover, sick.
then the train that was loading pulled out. it was dark as a closet. darker than a closet. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t take the next step. and I couldn’t turn around. I just stood there.
“come on! come on! we got a lot more cars to do!”
finally my eyes refocused a bit. I began the wobbly steps again. some of the boards were soft, were worn round and splintered. I ceased to hear their shouting. I took the transfixed strides one after the other, expecting each next step to be the one that sent me on down through.
I made the other car and threw the cardboard ads and the can opener on the floor.
“watza matta?”
“watza matta? watza matta? I say, ‘FUCK IT!’ ”
“what’s wrong?”
“one misstep and a man can get killed. don’t you idiots realize that?”
“nobody’s gotten killed yet.”
“nobody drinks like I do, either. now, come on, tell me, how do I get the hell out of here?”
“well, there’s a stairway down to the right but you’ve got to walk across the tracks instead of along them and that means stepping over two or three third rails.”
“fuck it. what’s a third rail?”
“that’s the power. you touch one and you’re gone.”
“show me the way.”
the old boys pointed to the stairway down. it didn’t seem too far away.
“thank you, gentlemen.”
“watch the third rail. it’s gold. don’t touch it or you’ll burn.”
I stepped on out. I could sense them watching me. each time I reached a third rail I stepped high and fancy. they had a soft and calm look to them in the moonlight.
I reached the stairway and was alive again. at the bottom of the stairway there was a bar. I heard people laughing. I went into the bar and sat down. some guy was telling stories about how his mother took care of him, made him take piano and painting lessons and how he managed to get money out of her, one way or the other, to get drunk on. the whole bar was laughing. I began laughing too. the guy was a genius, giving it away for nothing. I laughed until the bar closed and we broke up, each going our different ways.
I left New York soon after, never went back, never will. cities are built to kill people, and there are lucky towns and the other kind. mostly the other kind. in New York you’ve got to have all the luck. I knew I didn’t have that kind. next thing I knew I was sitting in a nice room in east Kansas City listening to the manager beat up the maid because she’d failed to sell me a piece of her ass. it was real and peaceful and sane again. I listened to the screams while sitting up in bed, reached for my glass, had a good one, then stretched out among the clean sheets. the guy could really lay it on. I could hear her head bouncing against the wall.
maybe the next day when I wasn’t so tired from the bus trip I’d let her have a little. she had a nice ass. at least he wasn’t beating on that. and I was out of New York, almost alive.
________
those were the nights, the old days at the Olympic. they had a bald little Irishman making the announcements (was his name Dan Tobey?), and he had style, he’d seen things happen, maybe even on the riverboats when he was a kid, and if he wasn’t that old, maybe Dempsey-Firpo anyhow. I can still see him reaching up for that cord and pulling the mike down slowly, and most of us were drunk before the first fight, but we were easy