nightsticks swarm. Garbled sounds emanate from radios on
their hips. They swarm outside the impressive stone building,
the precinct headquarters. Red lights flash. A dozen cars swerve
in or swerve out, crash in or crash out, are coming or going,
burning rubber on the burning streets, the smell of the burnt
rubber outlasting the sound of the siren as its shrillness fades.
The police cars never slow down. They stop immediately.
They start up at once, no cautionary note, the engine warming.
They pull straight out at top speeds or swerve in and almost
bang against the building but somehow the brake gets the
weight of the cop and the sidewalk is crushed on its outer
edge.
The sirens blare day and night. The cars bump and grind
and flash by, day and night. The blue soldiers mass like ants,
then deploy, day and night. The red of the flashing lights illuminates my room, like a scarlet searchlight, day and night.
The police are at war with the Hell’s Angels, two blocks
away. The motorcycles would collect. The swastikas would be
emblazoned, the leather would defy the summer heat, the
chains would bang like drums through the always-percussive
air hitting the cement. You could hear the anguish of the
motorcycles, hear the anguish of the streets, as the burning
rubber scarred them: the police cars would pull out fast and
there would be a din of dull anguish sounding like distant war,
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there would be the pain of acute exploding sounds that made the
buildings move and shake and your body was shocked by it even
before your mind could understand that you had not been killed.
There were fires too, loud red fire trucks: real fire, the
building across the street next to the precinct building burning,
the top two floors burning, the building right next to mine
burning. The red lights would flash like great red searchlights
and the sirens would scream right into the blood: and there
would be fire.
Across from the precinct in a gravel lot the police parked
their regular civilian cars and boys played basketball.
The street seemed to be overrun with uniforms, fires, guns,
cars careening in and out. The red searchlights and sirens made it
seem that the Martians had landed, or the army, or war had come,
or giant insects, or man-eating plants. Each day was a surreal
drama, an astonishment of military noise and civic emergency.
It was not the usual exile of the Lower East Side: condemned
into a circle of hell from which there was no exit, no one ever
left alive, no sign anywhere of what others call “ the social
order” ; instead, the social order swarmed and crushed sidewalks, was martial and armed; the social order put out fires that continued to burn anyway from one building to the next,
flaring up here, flaring up there, like one continuous fire,
teasing, teasing the men with the great hoses and the heroic
helmets. It was not the usual Lower East Side exile: one was
not marooned forever until death with only seawater to put to
one’s parched and broken lips: one could scream and maybe
someone with boots and a gun and a uniform and a right to
kill would take time out from the military maneuvers of the
swarming militia and keep one from becoming a corpse. One
hoped, but not really, that a single woman’s scream might be
heard over the military din. Right next to the precinct, in the
building next door, a burglar crawled into the apartment of a
woman in broad daylight, the middle of the hot afternoon,
simply by bending the cheap gate over her fire escape window
and climbing in the open window. The army did not stop him.
When he set the fire that killed her as she napped that afternoon, the red searchlights did not find him; the sirens, the hoses, the trucks, the helmets, did not deter him.
*
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The apartment was five flights up. The numbering of the floors
was European. The ground floor was not the first floor, it had
no number. The first floor was up a steep flight of stairs. The
fifth floor was at the top of a huge climb, a mountain of stone
steps, a hiker’s climb up. It was not too far from God. Each
day an old, old, heavy Ukrainian woman, bent, covered in
heavy layers of black skirts and black shawls, black scarf tied
tight around her head hiding her hair except for white wisps,
washed the stairs, bottom to top, then cleaned, the banisters,
top to bottom. She had her bucket and a great mop of stringy
ropelike mess, and a pile of rags: stoop-shouldered she washed
and rinsed, washed and rinsed, dusted and polished. There
was no smell of urine. In each hall there were three toilets, one
for each apartment on the floor. The toilet was set in concrete.
The cubicle was tiny. It didn’t lock from the outside, but
there was a hook on the inside. Each tenant cleaned their
own.
The apartment was newly painted, a bright Mediterranean
pink, fresh, garish, powdery. You walked in right to the kitchen, there was no subtle introduction, it was splintered, painted wood floors, no distinct color, a radiator, a grotesque,
mammoth old refrigerator with almost no actual space inside, a
tiny stove, and a bathtub. There was a window that opened
onto a sliver of an airshaft. There was a room on either side of
the kitchen. To the left, on the street, above the teeming blue
soldiers and desperate fire trucks, there was a living room,
small but not tiny. It had a cockroach-ridden desk, one straight-
backed wooden chair, and I bought a $12 piece of foam
rubber to sleep on, cut to be a single mattress. I bought a
bright red rug with a huge flower on it from Woolworth’s, and
laid it down like it was gold. Under it was old linoleum,
creased, chunky, bloating. There were two windows, one
opening onto the fire escape, I couldn’t afford a gate and so it
had to stay closed, and the other I risked opening. I found a
small, beautiful bookcase, wood with some gracious curves as
ornament, and in it I put like a pledge the few books I had
carried across the ocean as talismans. The room to the right of
the kitchen, covered in the same cracked linoleum, was like a
small closet. The window opened on the airshaft, no air, just a
triangular space near a closed triangle of concrete wall. The
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room was stagnant, the linoleum ghastly with old dirt ground
into the cracks. The room was smothering and wretched. The
walls sweated. I didn’t go into it.
The toilet in the hall was outside the locks on the apartment