She works at night. I wheel out of a bar and there she is, arms folded in a doorway across the street. I walk along and she keeps pace and distance. I duck from beneath the spastic neon of a porno parlour, spotlit and anonymous, and there she is, eating popcorn or chestnuts from a paper cone. Sometimes, at the intersections, she comes so close that I can feel her breath on the back of my neck. But I don’t turn. She reminds me of someone. I can’t think who. Now where have I seen that mad bitch before? Wait. Watch… Yes, here she comes again.
They make straight for me, these people. They always have. Like animals, they sniff me out, like dogs. When the baglady enters the hushed cafeteria and threads steadily past the skewered tables, when the derelict stands and faces the oncoming crowds and arrives at his soft selection, we all know who they have in mind. I meet their eyes — I can’t help it. Something in me says something to something in them. Something in them says something to something in me. What? There is spare material, there are loose components in our heads. We recognize this and move towards it. I think one or two people or things are moving towards me quite fast now.
—————— ‘Hey my man,’ said Felix in the lobby, running a thumb down my thin lapel. ‘You know, I like his style. With this guy, it’s a week on and a month off. What’s happening?’
Auditioning was what was happening. I came down the steps of the Ashbery that morning and burst out laughing at the heat. New York can’t be serious about this. I have read, or television has told me, about parts of space where the manmade boomerangs fly. It’s hot out there, several million degrees Fahrenheit. Psychopathic heat. In New York, in July, the heat is psychopathic. On bucking Broadway the cabs all bitched and beefed, ferrying robots, bad dogs, uptown, downtown. I grabbed my trap and joined the shunt.
New York is a jungle, they tell you. You could go further, and say that New York is a jungle. New York is a jungle. Beneath the columns of the old rain forest, made of melting macadam, the mean Limpopo of swamped Ninth Avenue bears an angry argosy of crocs and dragons, tiger fish, noise machines, sweating rainmakers. On the corners stand witchdoctors and headhunters, babbling voodoo-men — the natives, the jungle-smart natives. And at night, under the equatorial overgrowth and heat-holding cloud cover, you hear the ragged parrot-hoot and monkeysqueak of the sirens, and then fires flower to ward off monsters. Careful: the streets are sprung with pits and nets and traps. Hire a guide. Pack your snakebite gook and your blowdart serum. Take it seriously. You have to get a bit jungle-wise.
Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts, the Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on — by almost anybody’s standards, you have a really terrible time. The average patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere. A craving for hourly murder — it can’t be willed. In the meantime, Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy new diseases. She just isn’t going to stand for it.
I ungummed myself from the seat, climbed out and paid the driver through his side window— a London habit, and a bad one for New York. The old cabbie sat there unresponsively in his cage.