“I must kiss you for saying that. I must. Just a peck.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O taking his leave, formally bowing to Dru at the elevator door, kissing her hand in the European manner as clock chimes on two different clocks rang ten. Nightlife in New York starts to wake up. Not that the day life ever dies. Departing empty-handed. Tempted as I was to have stuffed a few of the delicious canapés into my pocket. And to have put my arms enveloping around her. The sound of the elevator coming. And the warm inner nature of this woman. As she suddenly rises on her toes, leaning forward to again kiss me on the brow. So close. Smelling so sweet. So welcome to the nose. As there is no worse or more unforgettable smell on a battleship than cordite and the stink of half a dozen sweating men.
Stephen O’Kelly’O walking with a limp along Fifty-seventh Street. Go by, one after another, the massive apartment houses. Somber with their many windows. And spaciously spaced inside where souls dwell, self-existing on private incomes. Doorways with their doormen stationed within. Suspicious eyes peering out. And I go step by step across this tall city. Passing a pharmacy and a discount store selling rugs, paintings. A hardware store selling locks. Another selling brass bathroom fittings, that the citizens struggle to own. A dark dingy brick building there with no windows but has a sign.
INTERBOROUGH
RAPID TRANSIT CO.
SUB STATION NO. 42
The pedestrians thicken westward across First, Second, Third, Lexington, and Madison avenues. And in this city of fervent aspirations, finally to Fifth Avenue the geographical center of wealth. And farther on where it begins to fade, turning into the stone bow-fronted elevation of Horn and Hardart. This old faithful emporium for the cheap square meal. For a dollar bill getting change of twenty nickels strewn out on the worn piece of marble. Twenty times you can read “United States of America. Liberty.” A buffalo bent ready to charge on one side and the noble profile of an American Indian on the other. And the settlers beat the holy shit out of both. But when plugging enough nickels in the slot, a hamburger, glass of milk and piece of blueberry pie come out.
My old pal seen last time I was here is now over there, halfway across the room, collecting his usual dregs of coffee, cup by cup, and with what looks like a script of some kind tucked under his arm. Gives me an acknowledging smile as he ladles out the ketchup on a goodly sized scrap of bread and munches away. Amazing how one can so immediately recognize a kindred spirit. Even though everyone is pulling his prick in this city and shooting each other with guns and stabbing people with knives, it’s still, with its flowing heaving tides of raw humanity, a wonderful democracy. And with a vengeance capable of leading to murder, everyone free to despise, resent and hate everyone else.
Thought of Drusilla all the way back to Pell Street, subway noise roaring in the ears. The faint blue veins of her hands, long-fingered and strong. A glittering bracelet covered in diamonds on both her wrists. Turn now to catch a peek at the rogue’s gallery of somber faces across the aisle. Each one looking as if he’s committed a recent murder or is about to get murdered. Although I had to rake up leaves and cut grass, I had a thirty-five-cents-a-week allowance and poor old Dru had nothing. But in my present poverty there is a vast chasm between our lives. The poor who want advantages and the rich, who don’t want to be taken advantage of. And her wealth, married as she is, wearing her golden handcuffs. Linked and locked up to a rich, rich man. Sampling her luxury makes the confines of Pell Street feel ever more gloomy. And dangerous. As later that night, Aspasia called again. Asked if I got the recording of her singing she’d left against the wall downstairs under the mailbox. I said I’d go and see and that it would be a miracle if it hadn’t been stolen. Said she told her boyfriend I lived on the corner of Fifth and East Sixty-first Street. She knew it was a house she had walked past many a time when she worked wheeling out an old man down the street, and which always looked empty. And now the boyfriend was foaming at the mouth to get there, with a knife longer than she had ever seen before. God help anyone answering the door without a baseball bat to knock the fucker on the head.
As a good citizen, I skipped downstairs, found the record, and went out and made an anonymous call to the police. Mayhem expected at Fifth and Sixty-first. Crazed, berserk, mentally ill and frenzied man rabid and foaming at mouth, armed with a big knife and screaming he is going to commit murder. Please try to save the lives of all the decent people you can. Then I returned to the apartment slightly happier, indeed delighted that justice might be served on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street and put Aspasia’s record on the phonograph. And listened. My God. The exquisite beauty of the melodic golden sonority so purely rising from her throat. A voice reminiscent of the great Russian sopranos. What if they don’t get this son of a bitch and I were ever conducting and she were a soloist at St. Bartholomew’s. Dru and her husband there. And Sylvia on the steps outside, smoking cannabis and snorting cocaine up her nose. Then Aspasia’s boyfriend, if he hasn’t already been arrested by a couple of dozen policemen jumping out of half a dozen squad cars, rushes in with a war cry and foaming at the mouth, charges up the aisle with a knife. My back turned, he has his stiletto raised ready to plunge in between my shoulder blades. The congregation knows I’m a Roman Catholic, so none of these Episcopalian Protestants will deign come to my rescue. And because of the thunderous voices of the chorus, no one hears folk shouting, “Hey, conductor, watch out.”
Waking this next morning in Pell Street unstabbed, alive, and hungry. The sun briefly out from behind the taller buildings shone as it did for exactly eleven minutes on the bed before it disappeared for good for the rest of the day. Exhausted by my dreams of a Steinway somewhere out in the wilds of Montana, I lay between the yellowing sheets and went back to sleep without anything to eat. At lunchtime, resurrecting to go out to buy my matters of survival, a bagel, cream cheese, an orange, and splurged on a croissant and the Daily News. Brewed some coffee in the old percolator, a comforting sound as the dark liquid spurts up. And then as I sipped my first cup, I turned over the newspaper to the front page and nearly keeled over in a faint. There a picture of a marauder brandishing a nine-inch knife and surrounded by a dozen police, guns drawn. Son of a bitch black bastard looked like a giant. With an equally massive headline.
MENTALLY DISTURBED MAN
ATTACKS FIFTH AVENUE MANSION
It was as if the whole world now knew everything about my life and that on any line as I read down the page, my name Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O would be revealed. Aspasia’s boyfriend luckily described as incoherent and disarmed after a struggle, was apprehended by the police, arrested, and arraigned. And he could finally be brought to prison on Rikers Island just up the East River and through Hell’s Gate, only a short canoe ride from Dru’s. And I could have been playing my minuet to send him on his way. A sort of tickling sensation to be at last part of the conspicuous activity in this city, even as a remote root cause, and maybe not so remote and safe, from some mad son of a bitch trying to kill you.
Spread open on the kitchen table I read the caption and the brief story a dozen times. Some black bastard gets a knife and goes out to kill a white bastard and in less than five-minutes activity gets his picture all over the newspaper. While I struggle for months to get a tiny plug for my minuet for immediate release, maybe in a parish magazine. And the only recognition I have to show is my name published on my mailbox. To take immediate delivery of an electricity bill. It’s the pigeons who have the best time in this city. Flying where they want. Roosting and cooing and shitting from on high all over the goddamn place. And just as I was imagining hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in my mind, the phone rang. Sending a shiver through me. Because I owe the phone bill. Pick it up. Wait for a growl. Or now an interrogation by the police. And hearing the Chicago drawl of a familiar voice, sigh with relief.