Sometimes the next day or the day after people walk through
it and track it around step after step until it is just a faint
splash of faded, eerie pink: and the smell is on their shoes and
they go home: it gets inside, thrown near a pile of clothes or
under the bed: it clings to the floor, crawls along it, vile and
faint.
There is other blood. Cats and dogs die bleeding, smashed
under cars. Rats and mice die bleeding, poison opening up
their insides and the blood splattering out. The carcasses decompose. They are thrown in trash cans or kicked in dark corners or swept under parked cars. Chickens are sacrificed in
secret religious rites, sometimes cats. Their necks are slashed
and they are found, bloodless. The blood has been drained
out. There is no trace of it. Children fall and bleed. Their
parents beat them. Women bleed inside or sweating on street-
corners. Blood spurts out when junkies shoot up.
38
The piss sits like a blessing on the neighborhood. It is the
holy seal, the sacramental splendid presence, like God omnipresent. The men piss night and day, against the cars, against the buildings, against the steps, against the doors, against the
garbage cans, against the cement, against the window ledges
and drainpipes and bicycles: against anything standing stilclass="underline"
outside or inside: against the walls of foyers and the walls of
halls and on the staircases inside buildings and behind the
stairwells. Mixed with the smell of the piss is the scent of
human shit, deposited in broken-down parks or in foyers or
behind stairwells and the casual smell of dog shit, spread
everywhere outside, in heaps. The rat shit is hard and dry,
huge droppings in infested buildings, the turds almost as big as
dog turds, but harder, finer, rounder.
The heat beats down on the piss and shit and the coagulated
blood: the heat absorbs the smell and carries it: the heat turns
wet on human skin and the smell sinks in: an urban perfume: a
cosmopolitan stench: the poor on the Lower East Side of New
York.
*
On this block, there is nothing special. It is hot. It stinks. The
men congregate in packs on the hot stoops. It is no cooler at
night. Inside the crowded tenements it is burning, harder to
find air to breathe, so the men live outside, drinking, shooting
up, fights break out like brush fires, radios blare in Spanish,
knives flash, money changes hands, empty bottles are hurled
against walls or steps or cars or into the gutters of the street,
broken glass is underfoot, dazzling, destructive: the men go
inside to fuck or eat at whim: outside they are young, dramatic,
striking, frenetic until the long periods of lethargy set in and
one sees the yellow sallowness of the skin, the swollen eyes
bloodshot and hazed over, the veins icy blue and used up. “ I
got me everything, ” says Juan, my pretty, wired-up lover,
junkie snorting cocaine come to fuck while N and R are in the
kitchen. He shows up wired. I hesitate. Perhaps she wants him.
We are polite this way. “ He wants you, ” N says with her
exquisite courtesy, a formal, passionless, gentle courtesy, graceful and courtly, our code, we have seriously beautiful manners.
There are no doors but we don’t know what they are for
anyway. We have one single mattress on the floor where we
39
sleep. He fucks good, Juan, I like him, he keeps his junk to
himself, he can’t live long, the coke makes him intense, pulsating, deep thrusts, incredible tension in his hips, hard, muscled hips, not usual for a junkie, I can’t feel the smack in his body,
no languor anywhere, intense crazed coke fucking, intensely
devoted fucking for a junkie. N and R walk by, going out. N
gives an appreciative look. She smiles her broad grin. I am
groaning under him. She laughs her comradely, amused laugh,
grinning from ear to ear.
The apartment is a storefront. You walk down a few steps to
get to the door. Anyone can hide down where you have to
walk. The whole front of the apartment is a store window.
There is no way to open it. It is level with the street. It has
nothing to keep anyone out, no bars, no grating. It is just a
solid sheet of glass. The front room is right there, on the street.
We keep it empty except for some clothes in our one closet.
The middle room is right behind the front room, no door, just
a half wall dividing the two rooms. No window. We have one
single mattress, old, a sheet or two, a pillow or two, N ’s record
player and her great jazz and blues and classical records, her
clarinet, her saxophone, my typewriter, an Olivetti portable, a
telephone. Behind the middle room is a large kitchen, no door
between the rooms. There is a big wooden table with chairs.
There are old, dirty appliances: old refrigerator, old stove.
We don’t cook much or eat much. We make buckets of iced
tea. We have vodka in the refrigerator, sometimes whiskey
too. Sometimes we buy orange juice. There are cigarettes on
the table, butts piled up in muddy ashtrays or dirty, wet cups.
There are some books and some paper and some pencils. There
is a door and a window leading out back. The door has
heavy metal grating over it, iron, weaved, so that no one can
break in. The window is covered in the same heavy metal. The
door is bolted with a heavy metal bolt and locked with a heavy
metal police lock.
The floors are wooden and painted. The apartment is
painted garish red and garish blue. It is insufferably dark,
except for the front room on the street. We have to cover the
window. It is insufferably hot with virtually no ventilation. It
is a palace for us, a wealth of space. Off the kitchen is a thin
40
wooden door, no lock, just a wooden latch. Through it is- a
toilet, shared with the next door apartment, also a storefront
but vacant.
Before Juan comes, we are in the kitchen talking about our
movie. We are going to make a movie, a tough, unsentimental
avant-garde little number about women in a New York City
prison. I have written it. It strangely resembles my own story:
jailed over Vietnam the woman is endlessly strip-searched and
then mangled inside by jail doctors. N will make it— direct it,
shoot it, edit it. It is her film. R is the star. She is N ’s lover for
years, plans on forever, it is on the skids but she hangs on,
pretending not to know. She is movingly loyal and underneath