Into this familiar doorway of Pell Street. This musty stale smell. Collect the unwelcome mail. Not a single hint of a friend on a single envelope. Push open the door into the staircase hall. A crouched form looming up. The glint of a knife blade. A black visage in the darker dark. The navy taught you to look in the nighttime a few degrees above what you were trying to see.
“You white motherfucking cocksucker, fuck my woman. I’m going to kill you.”
A shadow coming into the light. Sidestep a flick knife jabbed out at my solar plexus. Draw in the stomach. Blazing hatred in the eyes of this black face. Aspasia’s boyfriend. Last heard of as a prisoner on Rikers Island. Former dumping ground of refuse and dirt from subway excavations. Subterranean fires smoldering in the rubbish, overrun by rats. Has the city’s largest venereal disease clinic. This son of a bitch now released or escaped. Could have, before any shark got him, swum across the bay, knife between his teeth. And on the map when I was looking to see how safe I was from the marauder, if he swam north, he would have landed on a piece of shore, a peninsula of land called Casanova. Get a hold of his goddamn wrist. Twist the knife out of his hand. The fucker’s strong. But my piano-playing exercised fingers are stronger. Just like the Gothic arches of masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge which hold its great cables. As I make you, you son of a bitch, drop this goddamn knife. Kick it along the hall as I get hit on the jaw. Heave a left into this bastard’s ribs. With all the fluent force practiced in all the amateur nights in which I boxed. Send a straight right into his face for good measure. The soft warm taste of blood. My teeth cut into my jaw. Hit him again. Tough son of a bitch won’t go down. Wham, bam. Hit him again. And again. He’s down. Got me by the legs. I’m down. Son of a bitch like a snake. Around my back, trying to get an arm across my throat and hold me in a scissors with his legs. Reach my leg over his crossed ankles. Arch my back in the wrestler’s grapevine. Make his ankle ligaments stretch and snap as he screams in agony. Tear away the arm around my throat. Get loose. Elbow him in the guts for good measure. Grab the knife off the floor. He’s up. Limping and making for the door.
“You white mother fucking cocksucker. I’m going to come back and fix you.”
“I’ll kill you if you do.”
The front door slams. Time to get the hell out of here. And miles away. Before I get a bullet or blade into my guts. Mayham on every side. Escape away into all the anonymity I can muster. Feel for stab wounds and loose teeth. Choking dust in my lungs. Should go after him with the knife. Kill him now, before he comes back, along with a gang. And guns. Plead self-defense so that I don’t go to Sing Sing to the electric chair. The electrodes strapped on as you sit staring in the direction of an audience that maybe you can’t see but who goddamn well want to see you contort and fry. Smoke come up out of your head. And the smell not be as appetizing as toasted bacon. No one rich has ever gone to the electric chair. Means I’ll always be first in line to get my spinal cord melted. And hear them say, Well, bud, you’re paying the price of being poor, so we’re pulling the switch. Marvelous as Aspasia was as a fuck and singer, I can’t feel, without further sampling and verification, that she’s worth dying for, except that there’s no question this guy thinks she is. The sooner I get to somewhere like Montana with only grizzly bears, wildcats, rattlesnakes and mountain lions to worry about, the better.
Stephen O’Kelly’O slowly climbing back to the apartment. Up the stairs creaking one by one. Pain in odd places. The door splintered and jammed. The bastard must have tried to break in. Push it open with a shoulder. Close, lock, and latch it. After the battle. Sit down and rest. All the symphonies that I might now never write. Instead of soaring passages of musical triumph, nothing now but risks of death and awful despair. Just as I was once, unwanted, turned away from joining the school choir. Because of a lack of serious intent. Which wasn’t true. Sat on the steps outside the door where they practiced and rehearsed. Tears falling on the back of my hands as I listened to their voices. The same hands now with a knife cut on the side of my thumb. Blood spattered. As this city now begins to haunt. With Max arrested. Sylvia gone. And she said once when leaving, “One of these times we say good-bye will be the last time we say good-bye. Good-bye.”
And I felt a gloomy shudder the way she said her last good-bye. Her presence now could at least give me something to be irritated by. Watch her pull on her stockings on her long beautiful dancer’s legs. The muscles that could faintly be seen across her stomach. Her shiny clean hair like the hair of the girl in the bus station. This city without warning. Even with all its red lights, sirens, and signs. Catastrophe comes from anywhere in the flash of a second. Take a walk. Thousands pass you by. Alone with yourself. A world that wants you to show your teeth shining out of your glad face.
Two days staying in the apartment. I lay down to sleep with a tiredness so overwhelming. Between moments of tinkling the keys of the piano, staring out into the Oriental street and reminding myself to call Max but waiting to be cheerful before I did, I washed and cleaned the knife, practised pushing the button that flashes out the five-inch-long blade. Kept it handy through the nights and then tried throwing it, sticking it into the back of the bedroom closet door. Feeling lonely for company but remembering that coming back with Sylvia on the train to the city and passing by so many places that you don’t want to be, you realize that nobody in New York has anything to say to each other after all their current jokes are told. And when I did go out on the street to buy something for breakfast, my familiar Chinaman said to me, it is a nice day overhead. And in a desperate lonely disillusion and with the swiftly dwindling money my sister gave me in my pocket, I went back to the Biltmore “Men Only” bar. Same man outside playing his music, pretending he’s blind. Missed three notes from Prokofiev’s Overture Russe, opus seventy-two. Anyway, not one of Prokofiev’s greatest works, but an insult to a composer nevertheless. Inside, a new waiter called Angelo. Had cheese and crackers and a beer. Illuminated by lamps, stared at the painting of the nude reclining girls against their green background. Then, working up the nerve at the telephone in the bar, put my nickel in to dial that Butterfield 8 number, and spoke to her. But before I could utter an endearment, a shock of a frosty voice came crashing into my ear.