‘You don’t think about them,’ he’ll say. ‘You don’t think about them. You go slumming, but you never think about them — the others.’
‘Who?’ I asked him. ‘You poor guys?’
‘Listen. I’ve stolen food, out of hunger, just to stay alive. You can do it for a week. After a month you get the look. You look like the sort of guy who has to steal food to stay alive. And that’s it. All over. You can’t steal food any more. Why? Because they can tell, the second you walk in the store. They can see no money in you. Not even the memory of money. Imagine.’
‘Sounds rough. Just goes to show that it’s a really dumb move, being poor. Listen, I’ve seen all that. This isn’t news to me, pal. I’ve heard this stuff all my life.’
‘You’re poor. Still you’re so poor.’
‘You’re wrong. I got stacks of dough and I’m going to make lots more. Now you, you sound seriously strapped for cash.’
Telephone Frank turns out to be not only a money expert, or an expert on not having any. He also talks about the chicks a good deal. For example:
‘You just take women and use them. Then you toss them aside like a salad.’
‘Wrong again. I keep trying to do that — but none of them will stand for it.’
‘Women, for you, they’re just pornography.’
‘Listen, pal, I’ve got a date. Lots of rich pretty people are expecting me downtown.’
‘We’ll meet one day.”
‘I’m really looking forward to it … Okay, Frank, I’ll see you around.’
I arrived at Bank Street eight o’clock sharp, in the very last of the light. Overhead the sky still scintillated, but there was a film of green up there among the pinks and blues, an avocado tinge of beautifying city sickness … My best suit, me — dark grey with a thin chalk stripe. I additionally sported a wide silver tie furled in buxom Windsor knot. The West Village, where the streets have names.
Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones, even a cautious whiff of twig and leaf in the night-scented air. As I strolled along I watched an elasticated black kid, Felix’s age or maybe older, gangle past with his pretty little friend. Negligently he reached into a front garden and yanked a flower from its tree. He offered the pink blossom to his chick, who twirled it in front of her briefly lit face before dropping it to the ground. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey, that was a beautiful thing I did. That was a beautiful thing I did — with the flower. What you throw it away for, cunt?’ He walked on, his spring wound tight now, the shoulders stiff and sullen. She dropped back and crouched to retrieve the shattered thing, gathering dry petals in the dip of her dress.
I had about a half-hour to kill, I reckoned. Taking a couple of rights, I found myself on the ramp of lower Eighth Avenue — a medium-poor people’s district, I assumed. Shoe Hospital, Asia de Cuba Luncheonette, Agony and Ecstasy Club, ESP Reader and Adviser, Mike’s Bike World, also LIQ, BEE and BA. Are the clips on the sidewalk grills meant to look like the soles of giant feet? Young men playing chess on the hoods of parked cars. A pale tattoo on a pale old arm. Here they come again, young and old, health and distemper mixing like American prodigies of money and no money, beauty and malformation, Manhattan miracles of heat and cold. Some of the people are in terrible disrepair. Boy, could they use a little investment, a little gentrification. But I love the dense variety. Yes, it stirs me. After this, London feels watery and sparse… Now I idled in the yellow light of closed banks, municipality and bad business all done for the day. Why aren’t banks as diverse and improvisational as every other American concern? Why can’t we have Mike’s Bank World? I don’t know, but I feel steadier. I’ve drunk nothing all day. I drank nothing at lunch, despite the horrendous Malvinas Surprise I ordered (a triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks). I want to be at my very best tonight. I’ve showered and everything and I don’t look too bad. That hike with Fielding, that uptown safari really did me good. I need it, I need to be strong. You think I’m paranoid but I tell you, man, there is something going on. Are you in on it? I’ve had this terrible feeling ever since I came to New York last time, a feeling of — a feeling of ulteriority. I fry to convince myself that it’s conditioning, the poor boy and his fears of success. It’s not the film. The film is fine. It’ll happen. But something else is not fine, something bigger. It is bigger than what Frank the Phone is doing to me, whatever that is. It is bigger than what Selina is doing to me, whatever that is. It is bigger than what I am doing to me… Turning from a storefront window — and why must this always be the way? —I was confronted by a six-foot woman with ginger hair, bobble hat and tadpole veil frilling her chin. Her leaning presence was deliberate, challenging: I think I’d even felt the play of her breath on my neck. ‘Yeah?’ I said. But she just stood and stared through her mask … Now where have I seen that mad bitch before? Look. Here she comes again. Somewhere, I’ve seen her somewhere.