Today Alice and I moved out of my West 11th Street SRO room. The temperature was rising into the 90s and I sweated bullets, loading a taxi with our possessions. Jumping in the back seat, I shut the door and we crossed 10th Street to 1st Avenue, where the driver stopped at the curb and said, “I don’t go any farther than this. Alphabet City is too dangerous and this corner ain’t no bargain.”
He pointed out the sinse dealers on the corner and spat out the window.
“They’re hippies in comparison to the junkies. You’re not really going to live here?”
“Yes, but we found a cheap one-bedroom apartment for $180 a month.” I unpacked the taxi, putting our boxes on the corner.”
“Let me guess. Bathtub in kitchen. Water closet in back. Very 19th Century.” He was visibly nervous about having stayed on the corner this long. “Very quaint. Good luck.”
The Checker burned rubber up 1st Avenue. My twenty-two year old girlfriend shrugged, “We’re home one way or the other.”
256 was only three stoeps from the avenue. Two scrawny kids ran up to us and asked excitedly, “Mister, you need help?”
“$1 each to carry a box to our new apartment.” I pointed to the third stoop on the south side of the street.
“Can we trust them?” whispered Alice. Her eyes were two different colors; green with tints of red. The latter was the color of fire.
“It’s not like we have anything to steal. We let them help and no one will think we’re stuck-up white people trying to take over their neighborhood?”
Carrying the boxes the kids joked about us being Mr. And Mrs. Opie, then fell silent at our new address.
A pockmarked junkie sprawled before the door and the taller kid said, “That’s George.”
“Is he dead?” asked Alice.
“No, he ain’t dead, just fucked up,” said the shorter of the two boys.
“Let me see, if I can wake him.”
I called his name several times and then climbed the stairs to lightly nudge the comatose junkie with my foot. As he slumped from the doorway, an enraged voice shouted from behind me, “Who the fuck are you to kick George?”
“Oh shit.”
The two kids dropped the boxes and sped toward Avenue A. The kids in the spray of the fire hydrant scurried to their parents. A bare-chested black man wearing jean too tight for his muscular build approached us with yellowed eyes bellowing with fury.
My girlfriend stepped behind me.
“I’m not goin’ to ask you again. You kick George?”
“I didn’t kick him. I touched him with my foot.”
“You callin’ me a liar, you white piece of shit?” the junkie snarled from the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t look him the eyes.
“Too late for sorrys. You’re fucked.” The veins on his neck pulsed with thick throbs of blood and put a foot on the steps. “I’m gonna to kick your ass.”
Countless scraps with Southie gangs had taught me the value of not fighting fair and I threw the boxes at his chest. Their weight knocked him off balance and his body slammed onto the sidewalk. The crack of his skull on the pavement echoed off the opposite building. A trickle of blood seeped from under his head.
The street was very quiet. Everyone had been surprised by effect of my attack.
George rose from his slumber and stared at his friend and then me.
“What you done to Hakkim? You fucked yourself good. My man gonna come for you and your little girlfriend. Take your clothes, TV, jewelry and fuck her.”
Anyone stupid enough to threaten you deserved a beating and I kicked him in the head. My girlfriend stopped me and said, “We better leave before the police come.”
“Ain’t no police coming here.” I opened the door and carried the boxes to our third-floor flat. We tore the previous tenant’s artwork from the walls, twice washed the floors, toilet and tub. The air in the tenement flat was breathlessly still. We soaked naked in the lukewarm bath and my cock began to get hard. I asked the ingenue actress from West Virginia, “You want to make love?”
“Not in this heat,” she laughed in this heat. She was right. My body was sapped on all libido, but I was at Alice mercy coming to money and she liked my acting as a hustler. Luckily we had one fan and after drying off laid in the futon naked, awaiting for Hakkim’s revenge.
A little past 11AM Alice said, “Nothing is going to happen tonight.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing bad,” the lithe brunette said, as if she had been born on the Lower East Side instead of the good end of an Appalachian hollow. She slipped across the futon into the arms.
We’re home, far from our suburban roots.
The first time I walked these streets was in 1970. Wayne Shepherd and I hitchhiked from Boston to New York City. His sister lived on St. Mark’s, two blocks west from 256 East 10th Street. Alice was asleep and I thought about everywhere I had lived in my twenty-seven; first breath – Boston Lying -in, Hingham until 1954, Falmouth Foresides before moving to the South Shore of Boston in 1960, I left that suburb in 1971 and rented an unheated apartment in Brighton’s Bug Village, a Brookline basement with a sixteen year-old lude dealer, Park Slope with the jazz impresario James Spicer and now here.
With Alice.
From here into forever.
AUGUST 2, 2021 – CLINTON HILL, BROOKLYN
Yesterday afternoon I rose from bed at the Myrtle Avenue Punishment Cells and walked into the kitchen. A wet belch burbled from my lips and I wiped away the bright red wet with the back of my hand and a second later blood spewed from my mouth into a metal bucket. Another four heaves covered the pots’ bottom and the color darkened to near-black. I repeated this several times.
There was no pain, but i instinctively understood that my stomach was fucked.
The retching stopped throughout the night and this morning I packed a night bag with a 1979 journal, Cookie Mueller’s book, A Bernie Gunther novel, two changes of clothes, chargers et al and crossed the East River on the Manhattan Bridge heading for NYU hospital. I wasn’t feeling too good, but felt no urge to vomit.
At the Emergency Ward check-in the nurses immediately led me to the holding pen and I laid in bed.
“We need you to stay overnight. This blood thing is dangerous,” said a young doctor and two hours later I was brought upstairs to Room 2205 hooked up to three feeders. a number of failing vital signs threatened my existence.
I wasn’t scared.
I’ve died before.
I picked up my journal and saw the first page was from August 2, 1979.
Forty-years ago.
I vividly remember the heat.
Alice.
Hakkim.
The one fan.
The crackling of thunder raising the ghost of Rip Van Winkle.
I’m 69.
Old men don’t remember everything.
Neither do young ones.