“I think he was kidding, but listen, nothing serious ever happens. We’re open every day of the year here for twelve hours a day and since we’re in a low-income non-residential district, we’re subject to a lot of crazies. You can’t let them get to you.”
The evening was over, everybody had left, and the lights were out. But Miguel said he still had some tedious business requiring his attention.
“I’m wide awake. I might as well take it all in.” So he told me how much money the theater had made that day.
“Now the way we check this is …” And he showed me a little glass-enclosed dial above the desk, cemented into the wall. “Each time the turnstile spins, this number increases by one. We subtract the amount that the dial displayed at the beginning of the day from this figure, and the amount we’re left with is how many patrons came in today. We multiply that by four, which is the price of admission, and that’s how much money we should have. Understand?”
“In theory,” I replied, and began to ask a question, but interrupted myself with a yawn.
He smiled and said that we could do it again the next day when my energy level was maximum. He walked me to the door. Thi, the porter, had already started cleaning the theater. Miguel wished me good night. I started walking to the subway, but I decided that I didn’t want to be stranded in Brooklyn wide awake.
FIVE
As I passed Eleventh Street on Third I saw the big bright sign of the Ritz. Jersey kids were still stumbling in, so I walked over to the door. There was usually a five-dollar admission but an accord had been arranged between Pepe and the manager of the Ritz: their respective employees were allowed free into each others places. I approached hesitantly. The doorman, who was chatting with a group of Jerseyites, apparently remembered me from my many previous entrances. Unaware of my dismissal from the Saint Mark’s, he just waved me in.
Once inside, I had just enough to buy a beer. I was wide awake, so I decided to try dancing off some energy. I approached a skinny girl leaning against the bar and we danced for a while. She kept trying to dance slower and closer, and I kept pushing her away and the tempo up. Finally when it took more energy to repel her than to dance, I thanked her and left the floor. I saw an attractive, healthy girl put down an almost full bottle of beer and leave. 1 would kiss her if she let me, and with that criteria I wiped off some lipstick at the nozzle and poured it into my mouth without touching the rim.
I finally felt tired enough to fall asleep on Helmsley’s sofa, which seemed to be getting harder and harder every time I was on it. Heading toward the door of the club, I was suddenly stopped by two soft hands shoved before my eyes.
“Guess who?” murmured a disguised voice.
“Sarah?” was the only name that came to mind. Pulling off the blinds and turning around, I found myself face to face with Eunice.
“How are you doing?” she asked as if no preexisting clash had ever occurred.
“Are you here with him?” I asked, looking around.
“No,” she replied.
“Why did you lie to me,” I leapt right into the fray, “saying that you were going to visit your parents?”
“Well, I was going to. But do we really have to go through this?”
“But you lied to me! That’s what I most resented.” No anger still existed but for some reason I felt compelled to continue the fight, to hold to some righteous platform.
“You swine!” She gave me a token swat. “You have a girlfriend, and you have the audacity to yell at me for having a fling.”
“Ah ha! But I told you about it!”
“Is that how it works? If confession makes everything all right, then why don’t you tell her about us?”
“She already found out,” I confessed with a hung head. “I told you. She left me.”
There was a stretch of silence, so I gave a slight farewell smile and resumed walking.
“Wait a second.” Eunice caught up. “She left you?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to dance?” she finally asked pliantly.
“No thanks, I’m tired.” And resumed walking.
“Wait a fucking second,” she said this time, angrily. “Can’t we try to be friends, I mean does one fight end the friendship?!”
“Yes!” I yelled. “You teased!”
“Tease? I told you right up front exactly what I was up to when you asked me,” she answered.
“You left me hoping, you left the possibility dangling.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Fuck you!” I shouted unconcerned that we were the center of attention in the place. She, on the other hand, had become visibly embarrassed. I continued, “I made minimum wage and spent every cent on you! I spent all my available time with you!”
“Look, I was interested in you as a boyfriend, I admit it.”
“Ha ha!” I exclaimed idiotically.
“But I’m not going to be the other woman. Now that you’re unattached, there’s a new context.”
“Well fuck you!” I yelled. “Go fuck that old fart I saw you with.”
“Well fuck you too!” she yelled back and vanished back into the masses. If not getting involved with her was something that I would ever come to regret I couldn’t feel it then. All I wanted was sleep. On the ride home I couldn’t help but think how just one month earlier I would’ve died to have what I had just rejected.
Sleep was prematurely cut open for me by a sharp angle of sunlight that pierced my closed lids like a can opener. I turned over, but outside the battle of car horns finished off the beleaguered sleep. I lay there awhile with my eyes still closed and thought about old times, and then it started happening. I could feel the rapid palpitations and the sweat. The snail had visited last night; a thick film of oil seemed to be evenly licked over my body. I tossed the blanket to the floor, and with a towel I wiped my face dry. Helmsley’s door was open and his room was bare. Stepping under the shower, I felt the cold water slowly turn hot and then cold again as I tried to scour away my epidermis.
I dressed and wolfed down the ninety-cent breakfast special at the corner diner. It was a wonderful morning. Everything seemed real and luminous. I breathed deeply. A cold wind that days earlier had swept across arctic ice pans settled above Brooklyn and chilled everyone away, indoors. The sun was bright, but ineffectual. The few folks out looked more rugged than the usual anemic breed of New Yorkers. I had nothing to do, so I walked. After breakfast, I walked down Clinton Street, through Brooklyn Heights and across Cadman Plaza to the Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge was reconstructed in the mid-eighties so that it became one graceful incline, more accessible to cyclists. But in crossing it by foot, I constantly feared I was going to be hit by a speeding bike, and preferred the way it was before, divided into roughly five parts by short series of stairs. By the time I finally reached the Manhattan side, I had both a chill and an appetite.
Walking south on Broadway, I realized that I had enough change for a coffee in a Blimpie’s. When I opened the door, I was shoved to the floor. When I looked up, someone was holding a fat handgun and wildly waving it around.
“Stay on that fucking floor!” I stayed. The gunman, a spindly Hispanic, was pointing to the till with the pistol. “In de bag,” he shouted. “Put it in de fucking bag.”
Suddenly the door swung open and in walked a preadolescent girl in a parochial school dress, probably for a pack of Yodels. He grabbed her and she screamed and continued screaming.
“There are cops all around here. Get out while you still can,” a career lady behind me said. I didn’t notice her until that moment.
“You’re next bitch,” he screamed at her. Grabbing the screaming little girl in his arm, he frantically tore at her dress. “Shut the fuck up!”