The View from the Vue Read Online Free Page B

mannerisms, Mr. Washington was no Andrew H. Brown. By his own account (which was very readily offered) he was a 1950 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with a major in economics.
    “With that kind of background, what are you doing living on the Bowery?” I asked him.
    “Please don’t be so crass as to think that every resident of a Bowery flophouse is an ignorant, uneducated hobo,” he answered. “The common denominator of Bowery existence is nothing more than lack of money. There are those of us who simply are down on their luck, you might say.”
    “I didn’t think jobs were so hard to come by for economists,” I said, my voice a bit snottier than was called for.
    “Oh, true, very true indeed, my dear young fellow,” said Mr. Washington with all the haughtiness at his command. “You are quite right, if you’re talking about
white
economists. But I’d like to see
you
in
my
skin for a little while, trying to get a job. Perhaps then you’d understand better. No, the unfortunate truth is that Negroes just aren’t faring terribly well at the moment in the economics job markets.”
    Round one to Mr. Washington.
    “Let’s go on,” I said hastily. “Why don’t you tell me how you happened to end up at Bellevue.” I smiled in what I hoped was an ingratiating manner.
    “I’ll be most happy to, if you’d like,” he said. “Though I must say, it
is
a rather painful subject—literally painful, I might add.” He rubbed a black-and-blue area under his left eye, as though for emphasis.
    “I’d appreciate it,” I said. “It’ll help me understand your case better.”
    Mr. Washington shook his hand rapidly back and forth. “No problem at all,” he said. “It’s quite straightforward, really. Last night, at about three o’clock, I was standing on the corner of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street when some young men—some young
white
men, to be specific—accosted me and asked whether I had a match. It happened that I didn’t. You see, I don’t smoke, and so don’t usually have matches on my person. I told them I was sorry, whereupon they became rather abusive. They started to call me names, and—”
    “What names did they call you?” I asked.
    Mr. Washington rolled his eyes expressively. “Well, Doctor,” he said. “They began with nigger, as perhaps you might have expected, and they…well, shall we say, they accused me of behavior that would have made Oedipus feel uncomfortable.”
    I fought to keep my face properly straight. I nodded soberly, and gave a professional um-hum. “What did you do?” I asked.
    “Now, Doctor…uh…I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
    “Karp.”
    “Oh yes, Dr. Karp. Certainly. As I was about to say, Dr. Karp, I’m not trained as a prize fighter. I’m not aggressive and I do all I can to avoid violence. I tried to walk away. But they didn’t permit me to do that. They followed me, calling me those terrible names, and then one of them shoved me into the wall of a building while another one punched me in the stomach. At that point I decided that I had been forced to take a stand, so I hit the second fellow, the one who had punched me. When I did that, all of the miserable hoodlums jumped on me and started to beat me up. I fought back as well as I could, but I was definitely getting the worse of the affair when two policemen came by and broke up the fight. I couldn’t have been more grateful, of course, and was about to thank my benefactors when one of the young men said, ‘That nigger bum tried to get a quarter off us, and when we wouldn’t give it to ‘im he pulled a razor on us.’ Before I could utter a single word of the truth in my defense, one of the policemen hit me with his billy club and knocked me unconscious. The next thing I knew, I was a guest in your establishment.”
    I talked to Mr. Washington for a while longer and could uncover no mental aberrations. There were no signs of psychosis: he did not seem to suffer from