Manhattan Nocturne Read Online Free Page B

and away. Good-bye and good luck—even if the president is assassinated by a movie star, don’t touch my column. Other reporters were finishing up and the night editors had arrived to grind the hamburger for tomorrow’s meal, and I passed them all without saying much. We get along in the usual way. Some of the older reporters sort of hate me, I know, because my stories don’t get killed at the last minute, and I make a lot more money than they do. I actually negotiated a contract with the paper’s executives, whereas the regular staffers are shackled by whatever meager scraps. the newspaper union won in its last collective bargaining agreement.
    Out on the sidewalk, buttoning my coat against the cold, I thought for a moment about skipping the party, simply going home to dinner with the kids, watch them throw macaroni on the floor. I should have done it. Yes, you fucker, I tell myself now, you should have gone straight home. Instead I found the car and crawled uptown through the rush-hour traffic. It was past dusk and I had to keep my eye on the streets; I don’t know the city so well that I don’t need to be attentive as I
drive. As I said, I didn’t grow up in the city, and for a reporter, this is a disadvantage. All of New York’s great columnists came from its streets, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill among them. I’ve had to overcome the fact that I was raised three hundred miles north of the city, almost in Canada, in a farmhouse on ten acres, under a wide sky. In the winters the icy expanse of Lake Champlain stretched before me, and I’d spend hours in the small fishing shack my father dragged out onto the ice behind our pickup truck. Other days my pals and I would tramp through the birch and pine to the tracks that ran by the water and wait for the afternoon train headed south from Montreal to New York; when it would come, huge and terrifying and whirling snow alongside, we’d suddenly stand, ten-year-olds in winter coats and boots, and fire off a good dozen snowballs each, aiming for the flashing faces in the windows, whom we imagined to be rich and important personages. It was 1969, 1970. My boyhood was indisputably small-town, suffused with a certain happy innocence that later drew me toward all that is soaring and marvelous, all that is scuttling and decadent about New York City, where, in the density of possibility, what is strange is not measured against what is normal but against what is stranger still. I’ve seen beggars with AIDS holding signs specifying their T-cell counts, I’ve seen a naked man on a bicycle thread the center lanes of Broadway against traffic, I’ve seen Con Ed men working in the sewers while listening to Pavarotti. I’ve watched detectives with French fries drooping from their mouths wiggle the toes of the dead to estimate the time of death. I’ve seen a fat woman kissing trees in Central Park, I’ve seen a billionaire adjust his toupee.
    And how odd, then, that after I dropped the car in a garage and traveled the last few blocks toward the party on foot, I witnessed another thing I’d never seen before—not exactly an omen for all that followed but memorable perhaps as an emblem of the starkness of human desire. Yes, let us decide that this image is significant: It was a dark block, Seventy-ninth or Eightieth Street, I think, with some renovation going on inside one of the town houses, judging by a looming Dumpster
next to the curb. In the cold I suddenly realized that there were two figures in the Dumpster, atop the debris, moving, struggling. A fight? I cautiously walked closer and, simultaneous with my recognition of the ragged coats and wild matted hair of the homeless, was my apprehension of the rhythm—the cadenced stroke —of the figure on top. They were fucking. Grandly. Two homeless people in the cold. Someone had thrown an old mattress into the Dumpster, and on a mountain of torn-out lathing and