The Schizophrenic Detective

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC DETECTIVE — Andrew W. Fenton

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC DETECTIVE Andrew W. Fenton

1 I was standing in the sun, and it was affecting me. I didn’t like that. I become symptomatic; I see things, I hear things, things that aren’t there. I was waiting for the bus, on my way to Wal-Mart to pick up my meds. I’d called them the day before so they’d be ready. That was important because then, if I were lucky, I could do the whole run in an hour. The bus ran Main Street to Elm and then on to Albert. At Albert it would stop at the Five Points Shopping Center, then Wal-Mart and then continue on to Target and a bunch of other stores—it would then loop back to Wal-Mart again, Five Points again, etc. So, if you walked briskly to Wal-Mart after being let off, and there was no line to speak of, you could be back at the bus stop towards home to catch the very same bus on its return run. If you got hung up, a bad line at the pharmacy counter, you’d end up waiting an hour for the next bus.

This day I made it, and as I climbed aboard to get home, I noticed the bus was almost empty. It had been full on the way up. They’d all gotten off at Target I guessed.

So I was riding along all alone to stare out the windows; it was an old lament, sort of thinking back to great psychotic moments. I used to hear my mother’s voice constantly —kind of embarrassing. She had been a good liberal at one point so it was a lament: ”Don’t give up—don’t give in…” And, most of all: “Don’t sell out.” And I didn’t, I just happened to be a loser, or—I was sick. Schizophrenia.

The forces of evil never got me, I guess. Instead it was New York City that did it.

I’d been working at Butler library at Columbia University when I became aware of it,

sort of telling myself to shut up, but it got worse. I knew something was wrong but not quite what. Later I was working at a law firm, and I had to pick up a book about five blocks away at another law firm. It was scorching hot, 92 degrees or something, and it wouldn’t stop, mumbling, chanting, I can’t remember, just that there was a voice, and it was so hot I was wilting. I got the book, made it back, and then retreated to my corner again, back to filling newsletters. Back to nothing, but I was slowly realizing something was wrong. And it didn’t stop. It got worse. As we rounded Albert St. back on to Elm, a big sign caught my attention, and, for a flash, I saw a face; I’d seen that face before. I’d seen it for the first time at 6th Ave and 48th Street, New York City. It would become a standard—high-in-the-sky, thrill kill I decided, straight from Conny Island. The board walk, so vacant in the day and at night: “Blam, Blam, Blam.”

Actually, I had painted it, almost. I painted then. But this sudden flash also reminded me of one of the characters who habituated the bar I went to. He looked like a tough guy—the villain in Dick Tracy. I had done my painting of it during my Max Beckman phase. And then it started rattling around my brain. It would appear regularly, and when it usually emerged, there was another head next to his, mine. He had a slight smirk and the butt of a gun in his hand, and the first time, high above Sixth Avenue, he moved up the gun and pointed it at the head just beside his, mine, and pulled the trigger, blood all over the place, and I had to make it back to my pathetic job. I was a clerk in a law firm library and spent my time shelving newsletters actually—one of those stupid jobs that paid a little too much. But it stayed with me, that visage, and it got worse, voices and visions and blood. I couldn’t figure it out—you’d think it was obvious, but it happened seamlessly within the rest of the things I saw and heard, seamlessly, as though it were real, and suddenly, jumping forward, clutching a bag of pills, there it was. That old thing, I thought. A sudden flash from the past. I hoped it

wouldn’t get worse, but voices were tugging at me, just sniping, something absurd like that I’d gone to Wal-Mart too soon and that I needed to wash the dishes when I got home. All female voices like mom or ex-girlfriends. No men, though that has happened.

In New York the voice above Sixth Avenue was male, and it just started up one day: “This is the wolf, the season of the wolf, you will attack and kill and…” I could even hear myself say, in response: “Oh, shut up…” All it did was get worse and worse until I went into the hospital, about two years later, two years of hearing voices and seeing movies in the brain, images floating over reality. It wouldn’t stop. It was horrible. They took me away.

What I wanted to do now was obliterate myself like I used to with vodka, just crash completely. That would cure it for a while. But I didn’t. I sighed instead. It all faded away. It was normal, little flashbacks, little voices as if they were “classics.” Symptomatic—I didn’t want that. See, one of the problems is that you feel so stupid after, say another two years of insanity—delusions and paranoia—because it’s just time gone. Like dreaming twenty-four hours a day, it’s just gone and afterward you (I), basically get so depressed you feel like killing yourself, and I’d think suicide. I had no gun, no pills, though there was some rope. Better yet, maybe I should move back to New York long enough to create my own death as some sort of DADA gesture. Tie myself to a cross lying on a bed, a belly full of drugs or set up a little ramp so I would roll over and over after blowing my brains out. Something with imagination. Instead I just rode along as usual, back to normal daydreaming, my mind wandering. There was no way out. Usually this led to writing or painting, where I could find some small hope, some sliver of escape.

And then there was my next idea, which I remembered as the bus passed the public library. I would write the stupidest book in the world, and I would become suc-

cessful. No more of this soul-art stuff. No, it was going to be the most obvious schlock imaginable. So, not just suicide of the soul but suicide of the moral self as well.

My latest inspiration had come as I was leaving the public library and noticed on their new bookshelf, a book with, well, a picture of a woman in front of a crashed airplane. Fine. Who cares. Then downstairs was the New York Times best sellers list taped to the wall. Their blurb said (more or less): “Jessica, having started her own cosmetics firm and branching into television, was now a victim of a terrorist plot that takes her across the globe.” That was the crashed plane, a little personal jet. Great. Wonderful, Something to enlarge one’s faith in the American soul. It was number one on the list.

But I decided I could go worse. You have to remember I’ve been sitting in this rat box apartment for the last five years and have been dominated by madness... late onset schizophrenia combined with manic depression (bi-polar 1 schizo-affected is the proper term) so … lots of pills and shots, but none useful for a suicide. Thus, I am fatalistic, the sort of fatalistic that appreciates the conception of writing the world’s worst book.

Like that would free me. Something like....

Janice, a bubbly, newly divorced thirty-two-year-old is suddenly thrown into the fray with the death of her father, the owner of a midsized casino in Las Vegas. But something goes wrong, a lot actually, that she just can’t control, so she calls in a detective, only problem is he is the inheritor of an age-old curse that turns him into a wolf periodically.

Of course it is then that her high school sweetheart returns from the Iraqi war; she gives him a job, so he might do some of what the detective couldn’t, but of course he is hoping for more. Only then does she come face to face with her secret love, a Lawyer, Fred, who stops in for binge gambling and drinking and is slowly drinking himself to death.

And then I decided it really was just a stupid idea: A mystery, romance, thriller, horror, detective novel. Or … actually, that was too good; I should just write a synopsis,

hook up with a partner, and then pitch it to the movies I’m sure that is how it was done.

But in the meantime—what? Big Picasso show at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) —this grated on me; I get their little emails from MOMA I signed up for, and ho-hum, but now the cubist paintings of Picasso were showing, those were the best, especially the little oval ones. Actually, it was with glee that I discovered the secret of cubism—I was in the hospital, and they had some crayons and construction paper to use and … viola … honest, it all suddenly made sense. I painted a whole series when I got home, more or less well again—I painted and painted until I finally stopped. I still have a whole pile of them, a hundred or more, wrapped up in garbage bags. Acrylic on paper, like 16X36 inches—over a hundred of them. It would be great to take a little walk over to MOMA down in New York. It would cost me $250 to see them, more or less, bus, food, subway, and it cost twenty dollars to get in. Oh well. I could take a really late bus that would get me there by 11:00 AM, see the show, have a hot dog, and then jump on the bus back. I couldn’t afford a hotel room.

The bus chugged along—I tried to clear my mind, which is always a little groggy from my meds, and then it was my stop. I pulled the little wire—buzz—and then jumped out. I lived on the second floor of my building, and, upon opening the door, noticed the red light on my answering machine was blinking. I don’t get a lot of calls.

It was probably my mother who calls every couple of day just to drive me nuts. I think she’s crazy, crazy like me, but she’s been able to avoid treatment and … you deteriorate when that happens, neurotransmitters … …they burn out, it’s not good for you…

I lit a cigarette, had a sip of coffee, and with that, I hit the replay button on the answering machine.

It wasn’t my mother; it was instead Ellen who had lived across the street from me in New York fifteen years earlier. It took me a few seconds to figure that out. She was slightly incomprehensible, always.

I copied the number down and had another cigarette. Put it out. And then called back and, for the next ten minutes, had little idea of what she was talking about, except that she had traced my number through some internet service. And then she went on about some book of mine I think they poached from the trash when I left New York— I threw out nearly everything I could, art, some books of poetry I had constructed out of Kinkos (copier) card stock, and even the BIG Novel, back from when I wrote, when I was young and hopeful. Bet on it, I left new York basically as fast as I could, and she just said: “Oh, all we knew was that the police took you away.” I explained to her that the police took me to a waiting ambulance actually, and she said: “Oh dear—we didn’t know what had happened.”

I asked her how Tom, her husband, was, and she said he was dead, for almost two years now, and she went on about that for another twenty minutes. Died of throat cancer; she took care of him but finally had to bring in professional nurses. That made sense, and then she got into all the estate problems. Tom had owned three buildings in Manhattan, an old county house up-state, a couple of houses in California and, I believe, a house in Mexico. She said she had gotten the house in the country, but I got the feeling it wasn’t all sewn up.

I wanted to ask her about the cars. He had some old sports cars, and that was actually how I met them—I was walking passed their building’s garage door across the street from my building. The garage door was open, and I glanced over to spot a Lotus 7 and said “Oh…you’ve got a lotus!” I’m sort of a car fanatic; my father ran a garage back in the sixties, so I know all the cars. (Note, a Lotus was a little racecar, this

one from the fifties.) He invited me in, and we became friends of a sort. He let me keep my motorcycle in their garage, my little Honda racer, and in return I watered all their plants when they were away, usually to the west coast for two or three months in the summer. A lot of watering. I wanted to ask about the cars, but I betted that the Lotus was gone, sold off by the step-son as quickly as possible because as far as I could tell he was selling off everything he could. I think that’s part of what she was trying to convey: the stepson who was … a little fast on the draw, like, the estate wasn’t really settled yet, and he was racing around like they were his. In fact, he was doing everything fast, building a restaurant in one of his buildings, signing cars over to himself and then selling them off. I’d met him a few times; I didn’t think he was that low.

She ended by saying she had considered hiring a Private Eye, but she couldn’t really find one. Could I sort of … investigate things for her?

I said: ”I don’t think so.”

“Well, think about it,” she said, and I could hear a buzzing sound in the background. ”Those are my friends Joyce and Harold—they’re taking me out to dinner.”

“Oh well, eat well.”

What was on my mind after she hung up was studying. I needed to study. I was taking a class called Community Mental Health Care, something I knew too much about on a certain level. I needed to do something with my life. I was only taking one class, about all I could handle. I had no memory to speak of; I’d die on true/false tests—it was pathetic. Next up: March 7, Test 2, Covers chapters 3,4 & 5 (3: Ecological Model— Person in Context; 4: Prevention, 5: Individual Focus: Crisis and Coping plus essay questions on a film the professor showed us—Peace of Mind. This was my practical goal, helping people with the same problems as I. The next evening, Saturday, I got another phone call. “Who is this?”

“Harold,” he said in this melodious voice, almost too slick. “Are you Bob?” “Yup.” “I’m Ellen’s friend, and we’re very concerned about her.”

“Yeah, I bet, I used to live across the street on 107th Street—she was always a bit batty, not trying to be rude, but she sort of has a problem getting to the point.”

“Well, the point is we need someone to snoop around and see what Tom Junior is up to, Tom Junior is a stepson, I assume you know that.”

“Yup.” I said.

He continued: “Well, you see, Tom had a few tenants who always paid in cash, so we’re wondering…”

“Yes?” “Well, are they still there? Is Tom Junior pocketing it?”

“Don’t you people have a lawyer? Was there a will?”

“Basically...” he said, “No. Ellen’s just runs the papers she has received pass a lawyer friend and …well …she can always sue latter. We just thought you might want to help out. We can’t reach him, the stepson, Tom Junior, he only has a cell phone and we don’t know the number. Last time Ellen took a ride past in a cab he was there working on a store front—I guess a restaurant now and ….”

“So you want me to go over and say, ‘Hey Tom, what’s happening?’ He’d love that. He’s a big guy too, like 6’5” and … has an expensive wife I heard. Oh, and he’s trying to crack the art world too. I think he paints. He’d probably beat me to a pulp.

See, Harold, honest, …I’m crazy. No, honest, I just don’t think the way most people do —I take seven pills a day and a shot every two weeks, otherwise I just go nuts, delusions and voices …plus I’m in school—sort of.”

“Well, here, let me leave a number, in case you change your mind—Ellen’s in

her seventies now and very confused—she really nursed Tom while he was ill and, when he died, the stepson just threw her out and started selling anything that was nailed down.”

“All the cars?” I interjected.

“Long gone…”

Actually, the whole thing sounded silly to me. “Well, think about it,” he said and hung up. I sort of chuckled a bit while thinking: Great … sounds awful, I’m so glad I left New York, even if it was under duress at the time.

So I forgot about it. It was just … weird.

2 Wednesday I had to take the bus again, this time to the clinic to get my shot of Prolixon, 18.75cc. “One, two, three,” she chanted—nice sharp point to the needle; before we did that, actually, they asked how I was doing.

“Mediocre,” I said, some delusions, some hallucinations.

“We can up the dosage …”

“Nah, then I’d spend the whole day drinking coffee to wake up—I’ll be groggy all day; I am groggy all day.” So that was that; I made a new appointment (in two weeks). and I left for the bus.

Stainless steel drives me nuts—plenty of that on the bus, so it reflected and reflected while some little voice chanted: “You should get another shot; have two; you’re that sick.” But I’d learned to ignore it if I can; I gritted my teeth as we came to the spot where I had seen the vision days before, and … it was all white, like…the killer had left. We drove by.

I went back to my tawdry apartment. I didn’t have time to get sick again—the last time had been the worst—it just creeps up on you and … slowly takes over until you’re in a completely delusional world. Last time had been the worst….

There I was, sitting in my rat box apartment and … it was horrible; it was depressing, I’d just sit around watching TV … or not, just sitting there. So, I gave my friend Fred a call, and all I got was his answering machine. That’s the problem with being crazy— you lose time, like five years of life is remembered as a minute, if remembered at all.

Gibberish flies though your mind, I had to stay in the shelter once, and they review you before letting you in with a little form, name, date of birth, and stuff like that. The manager, or whatever he was, said: “Oh—almost the big five oh,” and I sat there a second thinking really hard. It was pathetic; if you’d ask me how old I was I’d have said forty-four, maybe forty-three. Five years had just slipped away from me. No memory— plus, everyone you’d ever know had forgotten all about you; all I remember is delusions and flash backs or, occasionally, someone shows up to save me which means back to the hospital. Plus you become really boring. A mix of Insanity and New York are the pits. It was probably already hot in New York, so you’d wander through the day in a slight delirium watching waves of heat through the smog of the day and god save you if you act weird enough to get picked up by the cops or some such. You could be locked up for years in some in-patient clinic.

I called everyone I knew once a year or so, and now I needed a place to stay, free trip to New York, that’s what that guy Harold’s request was suddenly. I could go to MOMA. Fred would probably let me sleep on his couch for a few days, and I’d get Ellen’s friends to pay for the train. I liked trains. I had to think about it a while, but it finally all fit together; I called Ellen and she said sure to the train. I had to explain everything in detail to Fred; Fred knew who they were and, he lived up the street from their little garage and … he didn’t like them; they were in real estate and … made a fair bit of money, so Fred didn’t like him. He didn’t like the son either. Fred also lived on the same street I had, a little west of me, and … he said he could put me up for a few days. Next up was the crazy friend Harold I needed to make sure he knew as he sounded a lot more together than Ellen. He’d left his number.

I said: “Well, I guess we can work something out …I need a vacation.”

“Oh, that’s great, Ellen trusts you for some reason.”

“Oh, huh…well, can you spring for the train? It’s a little steep for me.” He said yes, so I was a detective.

It sounded absurd, but then I didn’t have the penetrating mind I used to have.

I just thought…I’ll wander around a bit. I hadn’t been to NY in years; I’d lived there for sixteen years, but hadn’t been back for a good ten years. But you never know; I might be able to corner that stepson and … I dunno, something.

Monday was my class (March 14, Chapter 6—System Focus = Social Support and Self Help Social Clubs and Club House Model) in the morning (9:30 AM) then home, get my bag and then walk up to the little Train Station—it was just a short walk.

It deposited me at North Station in Boston, and then, instead of heading to the South station that cost a fortune, the train that is, I got a cab to the bus station and went into NY by bus. It was a lot cheaper. New York about 6 PM. Boy, New York hits you like a bucket of cold water if you haven’t been there for a while. It’s really horrible. Smog pouring out as Buses and Taxis start running, waves and waves of workers rushing through the morning and then again at five and … nothing made any sense. At least I had a place to go, Fred’s, though he wasn’t there when I arrived. I stood outside while two Latin thugs hogged the space between the doors; there were two, one you had to activate the buzzer to get in, the other you just turned the knob. The thugs were about seventeen. It wasn’t real clear what they were doing.

Fred always did this, being late; I read somewhere that people who were chronically late used it as a control issue, like … making you wait for hours; maybe, but it went on a while, and then … it was suddenly cheerful Fred dragging all these shopping bags. He had a whole story to tell, starting with buying food…it went on for a while, the whole trip up stairs. I just said, “Oh wow,” here and there.

“So what are you doing here anyway?”

I explained it again, adding the free train ride. “Well, they paid for the train, but I switched to the bus, thus pocketing a small profit.” I explained all this while he put his groceries away.

“So they’re all crooks, right?”

“Well, Ellen and Tom senior were sort of stuck in the late seventies and … they were ‘happening’ like, forty years ago, living in lofts and with excellent careers.”

“Oh, that guy Tom too, right.”

“Bought buildings.”

“Right” “And, now he’s dead and no will or anything. Junior just sort of … took over; seems a pretty cold character when you get right down to it.”

“That big guy?”

“Yeah, he renovates lofts, like high end lofts and…he did the second floor down the street; I think the deal was that he could live there while he did the work so … it took about two years.”

“Yeah, he’s sort of got an attitude.” “You wanna come with me? Meet him?”

“No, not at all. Sounds stupid.”

“Well, it is a free trip to New York for me, and I even get to see the Picasso show.”

“I heard that was pretty good actually. What the hell…”

In the old days we would have been drinking while all this went on but … I don’t drink any more. And, with that, I picked up the phone and called Harold, who sounded rational—he said: “Really we’re just trying to calm her down—just make it look like you’re doing something, and I’ll make up what to actually say to her.”

“Um, ok … I guess.”

“Well, why don’t you come over tomorrow around five.” He gave me the address, the seventies- “and we’ll get to work.”

“Ok” “I’ll call Ellen….”

“Ok…” and I hung up.

3 Harold and his wife lived on 74th Street. It was like stepping into another world, everything spotlessly clean and arranged and, well, looking like a room out of an interior decorating magazine. It was almost surreal, flowers and plants and little doodads.

Harold introduced me to his … companion, Joyce. “Can I get you anything? Wine or…?”

There were two wine glasses on the table. “I don’t drink anymore—coffee?”

“Sure.”

I said to Joyce: “Nice place.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I told her I lived up north and … basically did nothing. I’m on disability. I sort of mentioned that I wasn’t wild about Tom Junior, that he’d sort of snubbed me a few times—he had a very high opinion of himself. I also mentioned that part of my motivation to come down to New York was to see some shows at MOMA, maybe a movie, a little culture. I hadn’t been to New York in about eight years. Harold came back with the coffee and said: “Ellen has lost all self-control.”

“My wandering around is supposed to calm her down? Like … lying?”

“A few weeks ago, she took a cab down and, well, there was a big fight, a shouting match. I mean … they hate each other. Ellen insists he tried to nock her down a flight of stairs when she was she was still nursing Tom Senior.”

Joyce said: “I think she exaggerates.” Harold shook his head.

“Oh, that’s not good, either way. What if I really find something? Could happen.”

“It took Tom about two years to die, and he was, of course, a shadow of himself, wasting away. In the end she had to bring in professional nurses. It was quite expensive.”

“Yeah, and Tom Junior had to wait months before his inheritance…” I paused.

“Well, she always seemed dizzy to me, hard to figure out what she was really getting to, like… why did she call me? I don’t mind a free trip to New York, but … why?” It was all playing into my delusional self—I wasn’t sure if this was really happening, everyone so calm and reasonable. And then the buzzer sounded, so … she was there.

Everyone gave her an embrace as she came in. “Oh hi, my old neighbor,” she said. I think they gave her a glass of wine, and we chatted for a while—Ellen going on about this and that, some old building and her first husband and then her son who came to help out while Tom was still dying.

Then, in a lull, I asked: ”So, what do you want me to do?”

She sort of moaned: “Here, do you have a address for the buildings?” She gave them to me, one was on 25th Street and the other was on 26th Street; she told me this while Harold gave me a dirty look, like I wasn’t supposed to know.

“And…” I said: “What else?”

She took a deep breath. “See, Tom had some tenants, long term and, well, they’re a little difficult. One’s a massage parlor and the other is a photographer who, well, he’ll do anything. That’s the problem. Both always paid in cash. That was how Tom paid for his race cars,” and, turning to Harold: “Bob knows all the race cars … his father races.”

“Oh, I see.”

And, like a deck of cards a little white square dropped from the sky, suddenly flicked down to me, and a portrait of Tom Senior appeared. That happens to me for some reason. Instant portraits; usually I’d brush them away, but I controlled myself—

brushing away things that aren’t real disturbs some people, so I did my best to ignore it, like I was rational. “So, is Tom Junior cutting you out or something?”

“No, I just thought it would be difficult if it hit court, I mean, it’s a seventies thing for Tom, but … Tom Junior just left them there. He won’t tell me. Anything could be going on there. He doesn’t actually own those buildings yet. You see, while Tom Senior was, well … dying, Tom Junior sort of took over, collected the rent, did the maintenance and everything, so … he thinks they’re his….”

“Well, I’ll do my best to find out something.”

“I tried finding out myself, but I couldn’t.”

“So, anything else?”

“No. I mean, he’s already building a restaurant on the front of one of them. I told my lawyer friend, but he just said there’s nothing we can do right now … maybe in court. Tom didn’t leave a will, but we were married, I’m wife number three. Tom Junior isn’t even his son really, he’s wife-number-two’s son, so … I mean, Tom Junior just took over. They’re mostly loft spaces, that was his deal with Tom Senior, that he could live there while he renovated them, but he was very slow.”

“Anything else?” I continued to stop myself from waving the image of those cards and Tom Senior away from me. They were still there. I ignored them: ”Nothing else? You can tell me later, I guess?”

“No,” she said.

Harold added: ”No, not at all, we’re just waiting until Ellen’s lawyer friend tells us to … whatever. There really hasn’t been a decision yet. We don’t know what to do, but I know we’re going to have to sue in the end. We’re just waiting for a decision.

They even gave Ellen a piece of paper to sign and she said, ‘Yes,’ so I took it to my lawyer friend, and he said it meant that I would forfeit all claims to Tom’s estate if I

signed it—can you imagine? We’d been married for fifteen years, and I took care of him as he died for almost two…”

“That’s cold—doesn’t seem like he likes you very much.”

“Well, never, apparently.” And then she went on and on, talking about some ex-husband and Tom Junior’s wedding and then talking about the buildings, and the past, and … finally she said: “You know, there was a message parlor in there, there was also a photographer that does a lot of porno work, in the 25th Street building.”

“You just told me ... a few minutes ago.”

“Does Tom Junior know about them?—he must.”

“They paid in cash,” she said all of a sudden. “They’re from the seventies when no one cared, but I guess if they found out now he’d be in big trouble, and cash so no income tax.” And then she started mumbling again, something about my ex-girlfriend but synthesized from the writing of mine she’d found in the trash.

I said: “Maybe that’s how Junior is paying for his restaurant—that would be a good way to launder it.” They all looked at me: “Don’t you think?” We all sat around not saying anything for a couple of minutes—no one knew what to say; Ellen looked like a giant jellyfish as she had sort of slithered into the chair like there was nothing holding her together. She was old.

“Well, I better be going, I bet you all have a lot to talk about.” Harold tried to feign embarrassment, but I told them not to bother; Ellen flushed for a second, and then said: “We’re having dinner with my lawyer friend.”

“Great! Ask him what we should do.”

“Oh, sounds good—well then, I’ll be leaving—I’ll try giving you all a call tomorrow,.. um … one thing, I sort of need some money.”

Harold said: “Of course” and he opened his wallet—he gave me $40.

“I guess that’ll do for now, but there was the train as well—I love trains, don’t you? Just racing along.”

“Well, we’ll settle up later.”

“No problem ... ok tomorrow I will call.” With that, I left, back down into New York, all greasy black sky and bright lights. I started walking but I heard another voice, this time urging me on: “That’s great—maybe you’ll break a big time porno ring or get that Tom Junior arrested; It’s like this stain on him he’ll never clean—porno and massage parlors”—it went on and on and on; I didn’t really know where it came from and, sometimes, maybe, while listening to them, I’d start to believe—just the thing I needed. I reminded myself that I’d get killed confronting the porno king and that the son would punch me out if I asked any questions. I had plenty paranoia, and, maybe, I was really just being made a fool of by Harold and Ellen.

I should have stayed home. All the lights turned blurry as I walked. They danced, stopped and started, circle and squares. I walked faster.

4 As I walked along the voices started up; sometimes I recognized them, and sometimes I didn’t. Some were just a murmur, as though I was talking to …whomever, but others were louder; this time they urged me on. It’s how I bought my motorcycle— they kept saying: “By a motorcycle, buy a motorcycle,” so, I bought a motorcycle, only problem is when they crash. I had a good time—they’re really a blast, like riding in the air, but, I did finally drop it—long story—and by the time I fell, I was doing like…8 mph, and I was wearing a leather jacket, but still, up and down my left arm, it was like someone had taken a lit cigarette to my arm.

I sold it after that.

So now it was porno and whatever. I ignored it.

By then I was at Fred’s; up the elevator it continued: “Porn king, porn king.”

And then I let myself in, wandered into the kitchen. There was food cooking away.

“How’d things go?” Fred asked.

And I gave him the run down: “Sounds pretty silly actually, but…those buildings are worth a lot of money.”

And he said: “I don’t think you should be doing this.”

“No?” “No, anything that brings out symptoms, I think you should … avoid.”

“Oh, I take my meds ... my last breakdown was that bad ... it was horrible.

I never skip any treatment.”

“I think you should steer clear of that stepson ... all that money on the line ...how many times have you been in the hospital?” he asked.

“Oh …seven or eight probably.”

“You should watch it.” And then we talked about other things.

5 Morning started great. Woke early, had some coffee, hung out with Fred, and then started downtown. Subway—I love the subway, shooting down, racing away. I thought: should I hit MOMA now or 25th Street first? MOMA I decided. Sounded like more fun. I sat around drinking coffee with Fred (Fred worked night shifts, weekends, at a law firm) and then, oh, read the newspaper, went for a walk, saw how the neighborhood was doing, though I did avoid the stretch of 107th Street where I’d lived and where, I dunno, Tom Junior could be hiding out.

And then it was time to head down to 53rd Street.

I tried to act normal, but once at MOMA it really hit me that I hadn’t done this in years, my life slowly swallowed by the great New York City, the big buildings and the whiff of money. Money, money, money. So I walked quickly to the museum, sort of an antidote.

It was 11:00 AM and almost empty. I remembered what a big deal Picasso was, like … rich New York loved him, he was respectable and a GENIOUS. (It’s rich people who buy art—remember?) They believed in Picasso. So, I stumbled around. I tried to be critical. Guitars, pre WW1. It was as though you could see the inside and the back of them all, and so tightly drawn you could almost hear the guitar go: “twangggggg.”

They were more an invention than art, like … no one had ever done this before bending the back by looking at the front; some still life object reborn as the ultimate still object as though the landscape reseeded into some giant form of shadow; Paris recreated as

a origami, paper folds as object too, shadows and false leads leading, eventually to some proto pop. Actually, my all-time favorite Picasso was (is) The Scallop Shell, numbers poking through as the urban landscape is reborn. There too many things to keep track of at once, as though he did it on purpose. In the end one has to take a step back and just accept them, or, that’s what I thought, dissolution and purity and the means to hunt it down, painting as dissolution of the human presence or creator—it was all around us.

I went back downstairs to see what else was happening, and…well lots, but I zeroed in on the Warhol film presentation. I’d always wanted to see one of those. A celebrity that stuck out: a commodity in itself. I thought that, and well, I painted and no one knew me; other people did nothing, and they were well known. Anyway, I decided to catch it later; I was still “full” from the Picasso.

I left and jumped on the train again. Once back on the street I found one building, 26th Street and 10th. I stood there and looked at it. I looked at the door and inside to see if there were any buzzers. Yes, but no big name like…Porno Power or Massage Parlor. Just names, so I walked on. No keys I suddenly realized. They have no keys. Where are the keys? Junior must have them.

I kept walking, now on 25th Street and, there it was with a restaurant half poking out. A new restaurant. and I thought: “Am I ready to bump into Junior?”

I decided I wasn’t; I walked up the street slowly and … he was in there. I kept walking, up the street, the main drag, 9th Avenue, and there was a Starbucks. I know, but I live on coffee, so, I got one. I sat and looked out the window. It was vaguely hypnotic but nothing I couldn’t deal with; cars flashing by while I just sat there. Really, it was almost irritating like, that’s what was left of New York energy, cars racing by, faster and faster, always, and a streak of yellow as the cabs raced through. I could just see

26th Street, just. I stared; no one walked up, and no one crossed from the corner. The Avenue was so busy, but 25th was that empty. I had time to contemplate my relationship with Tom Junior Actually, I didn’t like him. A couple of times, when I still lived in New York, I had run into him, and he had just waved me by, like, Get lost. The best time was when I came out of my building just he came out of his with a couple of friends, one an attractive red head, the other some guy.

He didn’t look at me. I started up the street as he did. He never looked at me. I continued on to the subway. He did as well. When we got there, we just made it— someone held the door for us; he and his entourage sat across me and never looked at me, never noticed.

Now, that was a snub.

I got off before him, and, I thought it was amazing.

I drained the cup and then started down the street. Now or never, get it done.

I walked by the restaurant under construction slowly. He was in there. “Hey,” I called “Long time no see.” He wandered over and gave me a long look. “Bob, from across the street, 107, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sorry to hear about your dad.”

“Thanks” he said dryly.”

“Jeez, what’s this, a restaurant?” I was playing it up, acting as dumb as possible.

“Yeah” he said, and then: “Here, have one of these.” And he handed me an invitation. “Angelina Jones Performance art. Stanton Street,” Two days away on Saturday night. As I read it he added: “I built the stage.”

“Oh wow, then maybe I’ll be there, thanks…I won’t keep you any longer,” and he said thanks. I started walking, a little faster, and … swung by 26th again, just in case, and then back on the train again, south. I had to walk across, down and then

over the lower East Side, which is where I used to hang out. All the bars, all those hours of typing up town, trying to be a star, all of it futile, just … schizophrenic. There’s nothing quite like writing while you’re hearing voices. But down town was all getting gentrified, so little was left. It had been … the gates to hell, perfect on a misty night, wandering from show to show, bar to bar, an ominous tone permeating. You’d see idiots shooting up while they sat on the curb—it was pretty bad, actually. I didn’t drink anymore, much less do anything else. But I decided to check it out in sunlight. I headed where I had ended up when I did still drink. Just a bad habit, when once it had been a compulsion. I used to show my art there; I’d make invites, I’d glad-hand dozens of people I couldn’t stand, and … I failed. I went insane instead. So now back to the Cozmo, the edge of the earth. I’d drink vodka till I threw up. I was nuts. It was … charmingly filthy, no mirror behind the bar, austere, lots of bad art on the walls. But it had changed, the whole place was covered with graffiti tags and monster art—we used to paint it periodically so it was white and reasonably clean and … then we’d hang our art. No more.

I walked in there, and there was Deirdre, sort of an anti-friend. A friend of friends really. I had to shake my head: “You? Here?”

And she didn’t recognize me at first. “Oh, sure” she said: “Um…I need the money.” Deirdre would invite me every time her band played, such as it was, and …

I’d go and … she’d ignore me. I would be…the only one to show up like, literally, the room vacant except for me, and she’d still ignore me. She was really a friend of an exgirlfriend who thought Deirdre was great, she was though, for a girl. She was also little, about five feet tall, but cute and, of course, once on stage, provocative. Really, she was the epitome of a weekend junky, so as it closed in on Saturday, she’d get testy … and then vanish. You wouldn’t see or hear her for a while….

“It’s the worst, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, two people just died, some dumb idiot got garroted down there someplace.” She pointed east, “and across the street … well, see that truck up the street?”

I stuck my head out the door, some sort of utility truck was parked about mid block. It was spray painted all over, some primer, some writing. She continued: “A bunch of people had been hanging out inside, some were living there, honest, and, one of them died; it’s pathetic. They were smothered to death or something—they dumped the body out, called the police, and left fast. The other one, down the street, he was trying to buy like … a bunch of drugs to take away, like he dealt somewhere and needed stock and … they got rid of him. Took all his money.”

“Just, dumb negligence,” I said; it was a pet theory of mine, people just being … sloppy, like no one would notice; it was a theory I applied to Tom Junior—just, somewhere along the line, he didn’t care.

Deirdre continued: “Then, I just spent the last two months trying to find a friend of mine in LA, he’d disappeared like, for weeks, so I went out there—some friends loaned me their Volvo to drive around, like … everywhere. It was a really nice car. My friend… he had gone nuts, like, he was shooting speed and he went nuts and then finally the cops found him in a trunk by the rail road yard—they said he’d been stabbed 136 times—do you believe that? Like he ripped somebody off while he was nuts and the next thing you know, dead. Then this crap happens, it’s like it fallows me everywhere.”

“Drug addicts.” I said, “It’s that simple …”

I took this all with a grain of salt. I think she exaggerated. Stabbed 136 times?

Like they counted 136 distinct knife wounds? I stood there, bored, really, three deaths and … I didn’t care: “Hey—do you know this idiot?” I showed her the invite.

“No, never heard of her—hey, take this one” It read: ”Sue x and the Dictators.”

It was on card stock, like they had done them at Kinkos and then cut them apart. Four to a page. They were to perform that night at Gas Station.

“Oh sure.” I said, “Why not.”

Tom Junior’s had been professionally done, all glossy.

I said: “See you later,” and she shrugged. I was used to it…. It was a cursed bar, that was all there was to it; an art bar, but they had turned to dope in the end. I remember drinking there after we had discovered it, we thought it was a cool place to drink.

I said goodbye to Deirdre.

6 I started walking again, now towards Stanton. Apparently it was safe to do that; it used to not be at all. I was down where the streets got narrow, like a little village. Usually, at night at least, there was no one out. It was quiet. You’d walk along trying not to walk too fast, scared to death, but what I most remembered was walking around down there in the daylight once. I don’t remember why, but it was in the summer, brightbright daylight, like…August in New York. A hundred degrees. You’d feel like every building was empty, maybe dead, no human vibe, just walking through a scorching Saturday. Somebody I knew lived down there, there was a party of some sort, but it was really creepy.

Their theater was easy to find. I peeked through the glass—no one there, but there was a stage in there, of a sort. I decided to head back after that, get back to the mystery of the keys.

They had no keys. Tom Junior did. Why didn’t Ellen have any?

As I turned and walked … a few steps …somebody suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder—I nearly died—I immediately thought, This is it, but he swung me around. It was some dude with the current trendy beard, and he said, “Don’t lie to me—I know what you’re trying to do…” And he turned. Idiot had scared me to death “Huh?” I asked.

“I know,” he said, and kept walking, so there was another mystery to solve.

7 Fred was there. He didn’t work until the weekends. I sort of gave him the run down. He responded with, “I don’t think you should be doing this.”

“Oh … why not, it’s sort of silly.”

“Nope, you’ve been threatened by two people in one day.”

“Oh, I don’t think Junior really threatened me—did it sound that way? Other guy, he was just sort of a twit.”

“What about what’s her name?”

“Oh, Deirdre, nah just…a drug addict doing her thing.”

“Nope, it’s money … there’s too much money.”

“See, there I sort of believe you, but what really concerns me right now is that they have no keys to the place. Should be able to let myself right in, right? But no keys so … no possession of the buildings. Junior has ‘em all locked up somewhere. Ellen and her friends, they might be…out in the cold, like some little dream that they owned them, all that money and … they’re just full of it. Simple as that: you lose. And they can’t stand it.”

“So, what are you gonna do next?”

“Oh, give ‘em a call tonight, give ‘em the run down and then ask—got any keys? Then tomorrow I’m gonna go to their performance art thingy, and then … I dunno, just another dead end. Go home. I guess….forget all about it, let the grind of reality take hold of my life again…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said.

“Really, I can’t take it anymore, anything. Probably the source of my madness.

Rejected by real life, I just …can’t do it straight, some other reality suddenly grabs me by the throat, and there I am again, mad, visions, delusion, giant mood swings, my body twitching uncontrollably and me at the side of the road screaming, completely insane. And then, medications, new medications, trial and error and … here I am calm, almost bored except these lunatics want me to investigate Junior … and it sounds futile.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Fred. “Yeah, just you and your pills…”

“I am rational at this moment, this is reality … detective work; I told you I ran into Deirdre.”

“Yes”.

“Pretty sad …nothing older than an old hipster. I’ll probably head down and catch the band thing she gave me the little card too—wanna come?”

“No.”

8 So, it went like this. I called Ellen first and Henry second, but no answer at either; I left messages—what to talk about? “Oh, do you happen to have any keys to open these buildings with? I mean, Tom Senior must have had some, and well…where are they?

You can call me at 782-3498—beep!” and I hung up.

It was dull, sitting and waiting. I get morose, I see little halos around everything, little rainbows, and then they swing and words or parts of words appear: Keys, it was so simple, you must have keys, you could just … walk on in. I wouldn’t have to sit there just waiting for something to happen. I sat around all afternoon and then went to sleep; around 7:00 PM the phone rang. I didn’t answer it; it finally got to the “Leave a message at the beep,” and they hung up. Little voices pattered across my brain, dull thing, and then images: they went out to dinner, they ordered something in flames, and it went on and on, like I was searching for some symmetry: “it explodes, the table burns and then, all of a sudden, Tom Junior appears .., and he was like…strangling someone, finally throwing them across the room: “No one treats me like that”….and then cars. He got into a car; lots of cars, cars and cars, and I rode in the subway… I drank some coffee.

It was dull; they were mildly negligent. No keys. So I’d played my other card, the invite Deirdre gave me. It was down the street from that bar. I knew where it was, so I went down—a long walk from the subway. The card said it was a big $5 at the door, so why not?

I had no idea where Fred was. He said he was going out for a while. I wasn’t paying attention.

So, I sat around; made some more coffee, smoked some cigarettes; it was like my mind wouldn’t clear … no get up and go; and some little voice was telling me I shouldn’t smoke because I didn’t have to … it went on, nagging my soul. Finally it was time to hit the subway, thank god, and the long walk to 2nd Avenue and then 2nd Street. Ominous, almost always. Drug dealers, 1st Street was choked with them, just standing there in the distance. Some in the street, some on the sidewalk. Like, five or seven of them at a time—how to choose?

I went around them, I went left up 2nd Ave and then down 2nd Street and then I took a right. A little better. And then … it was horrible. I’d forgotten how horrible.

It was so horrible it ate through my delusions—I think that was part of my interest in this whole enterprise. That is, it ate through the voices and shapes that fallowed me everywhere—so horrible it would wake me up for a minute or two.

At first, when it had first opened, it had been quaint, lights on, all the doors open. An old gas station, a genuine old gas station– like, it had stalls for them to do car repairs in, or bands, and the front office was a bar, and then there was open space, sit wherever. Some New York Vibe. And then it closed and was taken over by a local sculptor who built walls out of welded objects: rods, refrigerator doors, old motor cycles, anything. It was a horrible wall going around the place. It was on the corner, so there was an opening exactly where 2nd and 1st met. Inside all the doors were closed, and entrance was five bucks. No one was there—like, two or three people, everybody in leather jackets and then the band set up, started the first song and … they were too loud. It was that simple, like they had a drill and went around drilling holes in one’s brain. I stayed, like …two and a half songs and left. It was disappointing; reminded

me to never listen to Deirdre. It was awful. I walked away, passed all the bars, I walked

by The Cosmo to see if anyone I knew was in there, but there wasn’t. I got on the train again and rode north. It was dull. New York was dull.

Back uptown Fred had turned up. “More spying?”

“No, none of them were around, I went to this show Deirdre invited me too just to kill time—it was terrible, remember gas station? It used to be wide open and this twit has reconfigured it as a jail or something…horrible; these people should just give up—any phone calls?”

“Nah.” “Really, I think the whole thing is a hobby run amok, dead end bands, dead end performance art, dead end buildings, and … like Ellen and Harold: dead end people. I’ll call ‘em tomorrow, I’m ready to pack it in. Just … a little vacation, run amok.

Tomorrow is performance art, really, I can’t wait. After going to the Picasso show in the morning I got to see how they contrast—right? Both art. You know who I should be investigating? Harold and Ellen. What is their angle, like…really, choke on it or get a real lawyer for Christ’s sake.” Fred just sat there sipping a glass of wine he’d poured for himself; I don’t drink any more. “That’s what I’m gonna do tomorrow, stake out Tom Junior’s little scene. See where they go, all the little victims, all the poor porno girls. Why not, right?”

“You should go home—they’re nuts like, they don’t have any keys, it is weird like, you own the building but Junior is in there, and he has the keys, and told ‘em to drop dead Plus … he has illegal tenants—don’t forget that, and a restaurant going up.

Apparently he thinks he owns them all…”

“And so…”

“They’re trying to catch him, porno pictures taker, commercial sex, illegal construction, siphoning off rent money that’s supposed to be partially, or even all, hers or the IRSs, or so she thinks. I think they’re trying to nail him. He is sort of a drag. Maybe … there’s a real grudge? Not this throwing her down the stairs crap, but some real, oh … hatred” “Where’s he live?”

“I think … in the building the restaurant is in. You know, there might be just, you know, paper work going back and forth … waiting for a judge … filling papers this way and that. They might be slowly working towards a rational end … it’s possible.

He might be hiding down the street, there’s that apartment in the basement…”

“Sounds like a mess to me, I think you should dump ‘em, just head on home.

9 Next day I woke late … the phone was ringing. I didn’t know where I was and almost clobbered my head while leaping out of bed. I made it to the phone, and it was Ellen— oh, calling back. She started to tell me about the dinner and whom she was with. So I just cut in: ”Where are the keys? Do you have keys to any of these buildings?”

“He took them away from me, that time when he almost pushed me down the stairs. That’s back when Tom was dying, I cared for him for three years, cancer just eating into him, and Tom Junior just took the keys—they were in a little book—it was made out of wood, and when opened there were hooks inside with the keys all laid out and labeled. They were in Tom Senior’s desk; that was before they made him, Tom Junior that is, what’s the word, oh caretaker for the buildings, somebody had to do it for all those years Tom Senior was dying. That’s when he came up with the idea for the restaurant—he couldn’t rent that section out for some reason, so he decided on a restaurant, like I was going to help pay for it or something like that.”

“Isn’t there a trial or something—a hearing where you can chop everything up … something legal?”

“Oh, it’s coming … any month now, it goes on and on, that’s why I thought a little spying was in order, just, somebody who knows New York so … you never know.

“So, I’m spying … is that it.”

“Yes, we just wanted to know what he was doing—every time I deal with him it turns into a shouting match.”

“Ok, sure, I’ll see him tonight then … maybe … he gave me an invite to some performance art … he might be there; I walked up the street pass his new restaurant once and said hi. I acted really dumb, and he gave me this invite. Otherwise I sit in Starbucks up the corner just … keeping watch.”

“Good, good, that excellent—OH! I have a doctor’s appointment, oh I have to go.”

“Fine,” I said: “I’ll talk to you later.”

She said, “Click.”

I had time to kill. I went for a walk. It was refreshing—I felt almost sane; then I went back and read the newspaper. Fred was sitting around; I gave him the run down.

“Huh, well … I guess so.”

“You wanna see some performance art tonight—got the invite—five dollars at the door, sort of SoHo in the lower east side…no other place for them to do it these days.”

“No,” he said. “No. Tonight … I’m cooking.” Fred was known for his culinary skills. ”First shopping, then some cooking.”

“Ok, I have to go in my position as official spy. You never know what might happen.” But it turned into one of those days; the coffee wore off or the stupidity of my assignment burned in. It just became too confusing; not so much a new level of existential angst as genuine frustration.

I didn’t trust myself; I felt like I was reaching for something, but my mind made it evasive—like I’d find out as my brain found out. There was a split. Everything turned blurry; everything suddenly took on this surreal quality—the colors too bright and some crude 3D effect took over and exaggerated everything. More and more I felt isolated— I walked down the street to the subway, and I felt an alien deposited me in the wrong place. I waited for the train feeling what I really wanted was pills, just to fall asleep

and never know. Or just plain old drugs—a hundred bucks of heroin might do it. I’d never feel a thing, but would a hundred be enough for them to kill me as I tried to buy it? I thought of that scene the night before, the dealers in the street watching—like giant insects, mosquitoes, around a lamp. I would have to buy it from them a dime at a time, more than that I might just end up like that poor soul Deirdre talked about, garroted and dumped.

The subway was fun; I’d look everyone in the eyes, but they didn’t look back. I took a scan of the whole car, not too busy, everyone sitting, but they looked like their brains were turned off. I tried to guess what they did. Secretary or professor (we were near Columbia). At 42nd Street it got crowded, so we just rode and rode and at Houston got off and walked across to their little theater. I was early, so I tried to think of something to do, but I really drew a blank. It was all gentrified; it was dull, quiet and vacant and some of the most tepid architecture I’d ever seen had gone up, not like the old days when it had been … dangerous actually. Just some neighborhood they’d given up but they’d slowly weaned the drug dealers from selling there, and now it was …

Queens or Atlanta or even Florida, just big dull buildings that cost too much.

It was a drag.

There were still bookstores at Saint Marks so I walked over that way. I looked for something I might like, but there wasn’t anything. That sounds absurd, but actually, I was out of the loop, no trendies where I lived, nobody pushing the new hot book, whatever that might mean. I left; I stood around out in front for a while; I watched the traffic and finally walked slowly to the theater.

There was … no action; no crowd waiting to get in. Nothing. Through the glass I noticed the guy who had grabbed me the day before. I sneered. He finally walked up the stairs: “We’re running a bit late,” he said like he’d never seen me before. Sure, why not?

I just said: “Oh thanks…” and walked back up the street and found a little café that would give me a cup of coffee to go. The girl behind the counter was very cute. “Just regular,” I said. Walking back down I looked for somewhere to sit while waiting for the show to start. Actually, there was an old school a block or so up. It was probably up for demolition, so they could build something new. I sat on there on their stairs and lit a cigarette. About fifteen minutes later some people seemed to arrive.

It was five bucks to get in, so I gave the girl at the door five bucks and took a seat towards the rear. It went on a while; people trickled in—my old buddy Tom Jr was there. He took a front seat, along with his wife, or I assumed she was his wife. I thought Ellen had said he was married, big wedding, fancy babe (rich I think; I think he liked money). He never looked at me. Pretty good.

They trickled in, all nicely dressed, all refugees from so-ho I would guess, now that so-ho proper was pretty much high end retail.

And then the lights went dim and … there was screaming, then just long moans, and then lights, and I don’t remember it all, props and screaming, a reasonably good replication of a psychotic break actually. I wondered, maybe she was crazy? Maybe she’d been in the hospital? Then she started dancing around and around. There was some rope attached to rollers, the rope went around her wrists then her feet and finally her neck and she lunged forward and—just like that—snap. Her neck snapped and her little body landed and … she was dead.

Pretty good; somebody called 911 on their cell and … they just stood around.

Didn’t know what to do.

I went out and had a cigarette. It was banal, that was my feeling, no drama or importance …just, sort of stupid, banal. It really wasn’t clear if it was intentional or if she was just dumb, a dumb accident.

The police took their time, but eventually big headlights came around the corner, and there they were. They jumped out, walked in, and …it was obviously going to take a long time. An ambulance swung in shortly after that, but it was all over. They got out their little notebooks and started asking questions—one of them walked over to the doorway and said: “Were you in there?”

“Yup.” “Well, stick around.”

It was boring; they carried her to the ambulance, and then, finally, they got to me, my name, my address, etc. Did I see something? I gave them my little rundown, how I had been invited by Tom Junior—I pointed him out and mentioned he had said he built the stage.

“Oh” he said.

I told him I thought the whole thing was vaguely pathetic, just some dumb performance, lots of screaming, and then … click, and she was dead.

“Was there anything else, any assistance she had gotten or anything like that?”

“No, it was pathetic, probably…the rope and all, just negligent. Somebody didn’t know what they were doing … obviously.”

Did I know them? Not at all, just Tom Junior who was more an acquaintance— I knew his father and stepmother.

“Oh.” And then he said: “You can go.” A lot of people, say ten, were still inside.

I left and headed up town. I got back around 9:30. No Fred. Still out. So, I made some coffee and then sat there—in the kitchen—and simmered. It’s a strange experience for someone to kill themselves right in front of you. The train ride was absurd. The cop saying I could go was equally so—reality sort of slipping away after—suicide? Murder?

Ineptitude or just a jump in the air could have been it, or to be an angle hanging in

space, or swimmer, swimming through the air, only … crack! Dead as a door nail.

Suicide?

I drank water while waiting for the coffee, and then there was a click up front.

Good, I could reintegrate myself amongst the living. Fred was back: “How you been?”

“Well sort of … different—you?”

“Pretty good, an old girlfriend turned up… Actually the whole thing is difficult to describe.” Fred was sort of a motor mouth, and his recounting of the previous few days went on and on.

“So, what’s next?”

“Have to give her the brush off, just … one of those things …”

“That’s cold.”

“One of those things,” and he started up again. Finally he asked; “what have you been up to?”

“Death.”

“Yeah? Who this time?”

“Well, a performance artist made a mistake on the stage and broke her neck.”

I still had the invites so I pushed it over: “Her,” and I gave him a quick run down.

“Jeez,” he said: “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, like right in front of you: dead. Try and top that one.”

“I told you to get away from these people ... they’re just bad luck, like that son … jeez, and implicated in, well … death by misadventure, is that what it’s called? I think you should quit.”

“Nah, I’m gonna stick with it—must be a way of tracking down Junior now … and it … see …might…even make the papers? Plus they paid for the train ticket— that’s two hundred and fifty dollars, plus, plus they let me keep my motorcycle in their

garage … for three years rent-free– you know what that would have cost at a garage?

Sixty a month easy, it’s like Twenty-three hundred dollars. Plus, now I might even get to see Junior scurry around like the rat that he is. I wonder if he designed the whole system—not just the stage?”

“Don’t, he’s nuts.”

“Really, they let me keep my motorcycle in their garage—first floor of the building down the street, and …you really think I’d drop three hundred bucks to see that Picasso show? People do—they fly in just for the show—me? I have no money, I couldn’t possibly do it—really cruel of them actually, this town completely sucks at this point.” But, that was thinking too hard. You know, Fred’s voice was one that bounced around my brain, usually while cooking. Honest. Critique the onion I was using, the knife I was using—everything was wrong! Eventually other voices would chirp in, but eventually my meal would be ready, and, oh, I’d ignore them all as I ate in the corner of my kitchen.

Nonetheless, it made talking to the real Fred tricky—I couldn’t always remember what his real voice had said as opposed to the imaginary. It made talking to him a little tricky. I had to act normal: “You’re going to use that knife? No, the bigger one, and dice those onions finer—you need more spices, your cupboard is bare.” And then it might drift away.

Ex-girlfriends also chirped in pretty regularly; I’d break up with them over and over and.. it was all my fault (It was). But sometimes they would fallow me around; I’d quit drinking but, when I did, they would fallow me into bars and tell me what to order, how much to tip. Sometimes I really couldn’t take it and would hide at home, hide face down in my bed, waiting for it to pass or fade or disappear.

Really, Tom and Harold and Ellen were a diversion.

The phone. It was for me. Harold to tell me that Ellen was home; she saw her doctor, and he said it was exhaustion…she gets wrapped up in things. “How are things with you?”

And I told him. I think he was aghast—Fred had been making all sorts of weird faces as I gave Harold the run down, finally hissing: “They’re all nuts…And added: “Well, I’m up for another day of my stakeout at Starbucks.”

“Well, be careful,” he said, and that was it…I told him to check out the papers—maybe it made the papers….” He said, “Ok,” and hung up.

Fred was just staring at me. “One more day,” I said. “Hell, he could be in jail as we speak.”

11 Actually, I felt refreshed the next morning, my mind clear. I got the papers and went through them while I drank my morning coffee and …nothing. I was disappointed, no lurid NEW YORK POST front page, nothing in the metro section of the DAILY NEWS, and in the Times? I really thought they’d go for it—she had to be some rich girl after all. And white to boot, but nothing.

I took a shower and then headed down town. Long walk to Starbucks. When I got there I ordered something, I don’t remember what, but it was a large size, and I looked out the window at nothing much as I sipped it fairly slowly. People came and went— I didn’t pay much attention. I was really staring at the location of the restaurant they were building to see if there was any sign of Junior … and then I saw out of the corner of my eye the girl at the performance, the one who took the five dollars bills. She was in jeans with a leather jacket; she was the one who had stared at me as I talked to the detective … as I sold out Tom Junior I remember looking straight into her eyes. I got up and went after her. I fallowed, more or less. She went up a block and then over and … I lost sight of her. Something on 26th? Never know…I got up and gave chaise.

I gave up. She was gone. I started back up the street, when she reappeared—I stopped and covered my face with the news papers. She went up and then down 25th so I followed her over and … there was Junior and the girl arguing about something. It looked a little heated, and in the end, she walked off, hand on her chest, while he seemed to still be talking to her. She walked up my way and then up towards the subway. I fol-

lowed carefully behind. Yup, the subway and south again till Astor and then above ground and then slowly, 10th Street where she ran up the stairs of an apartment building.

I stood around waiting to continue when she left the apartment building, and … it took hours. But she did finally emerge. As she walked up I said: “Hey, how’s going—I know you.” She sort of sneered at me as I added: “You were at that performance piece the other night—wow, that was horrible—what happened?—A real tragedy!”

She looked at me for a second, then fished around in her gym bag: “Have one of these—ok? I have to run,” and she did, up the street, grabbed a cab, and was gone.

What she had handed to me was a business card: “Waywonics massage, 24 hours a day, and then a phone number and curse, no address.

It was like a clue, my first clue; I wondered if the deceased also worked there— my guess was, why not? And my suspect, god she was cold, didn’t miss a beat about her “friend’s” loss of life. Where was she was running all around to? I didn’t know, but I’d bet the massage parlor was closed. Time for a new job. That’s what she was yelling to Tom Junior about.

But I was tiring out—it was like my brain had a chisel literally grinding into my sorry skull, and then … being shook up, I was walking slowly down Avenue A when this girl said: “Hey you, you were at that performance the other night.”

“Ah yeah…” I said.

“Here take one of these,” and handed me another card. Maria Wolworth: Photographs. So many cards I’d collected. This one was a show of photographs. Maria had black hair, curly; she looked like … a normal person.

“You were there too?”

“Yeah, I was outside looking through the glass window, they were full up.”

“Hey—why not? Hey, somebody just gave me this card.” I showed it to her.

“That’s Nicole, she does or did that crap all the time.”

“You know her? She was the one collecting fives at the performance.”

“Oh yeah … a close personal friend,” she said and started laughing. “No, really, she’ll be at the show … she promised, we used to hang out a little, and then she and Angelina went all macho babe and started working for an escort service to pay for their wonderful performance art–” “Well, she’d dead now.”

“Ha- ha, no, that’s Angeline, Nicola is still with us …they just look alike because they’re both blonds. That’s who you were following, right? I could tell—I’m sure she thinks you’re just out to make her.”

“I don’t think she missed a beat, like…she was dead, so what.”

“I got some great pictures though—had my old Leica with me and shot it all though the glass.”

“Can I see them?”

“I haven’t had a chance to develop that roll.”

I thought of asking all the PI questions a PI would ask, like, who are you? Where do you live? Phone number?… anything. But I was sure she’d tell me to drop dead.

“I fallowed her, Nicole, from 26th Street to here.”

“Fallowed her? What for?”

“Umm, it’s a job, it has to do with the building where she works … just one of those things.”

“Oh,” She didn’t like that. The conversation was over. “See you around….” She said and started walking, so I was stuck going to another show.

12 I stumbled along letting it all flow through my mind. Something like a ribbon of aluminum covered me; I walked in it—I walked out of it. This happens to me; I was ready for it. I walked right through it as I made my way to the Cosmo to see if Deirdre was there, though I would have been perfectly happy to ask any of the bar maids what they knew. That was the Cosmo—always some lurid barmaid behind the bar—always. Usually they came in with a band—girl friend of the bass player, that sort of thing. I assumed the owner just asked the barmaids if they knew of anyone. I picked up a coffee on the way, some deli, and that seemed to help. I was still sipping it when I got there and ... Deirdre was there. The place was a mess; it looked like some graffiti project— no, it was a graffiti project. I used to actually go down and help paint the place when I showed my paintings there—it would look ok for a while. But they stopped. It was a mess, an explosion. I sat down with my coffee: “That band you gave me the invite for was horrible. Do you know them?”

“Mmmm—the singer, and…the bass player, I fired him from a band I was in.”

“So, did you hear about the other night?”

“Yes, I did … I guess that’s a piece they’ll never forget.”

“Did you know her?

“Definately no, or … I do now.”

“How about this one?” I held out the card that photographer girl Maria had given me.

“Nope, never heard of them—you going?”

“She knows her, the deceased that is, and she says she took pictures of it through the glass window of the store front.”

“No way– pictures of it—that’s great.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait, that’s really the limit. It was bad enough being there, and now prints.” I added: “They were both doing commercial sex, massages, escorts, all that stuff, did you know that?”

“Nope, never.”

“Both blonds, petit, sneer a lot.”

“Nope, never heard of ‘em till now; I worked as the receptionist to one of those joints for a while, try to sift out the loonys—it paid great. Oh, one other thing—how’d you get the job here?”

“Um, a friend … Mindy.”

“Mindy?”

“Yeah, you know her?”

“No, and I don’t drink anymore—maybe I should start.”

“She works like … Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and she hates it! Ok?” I said yes and left.

So, I was back to walking through a silver tunnel, and I have, in the past, actually followed this thing as though it was a maze, and all I could do was walk within the walls. Now I walked through them—pretty brave, huh?

I got another coffee at the deli across the street. I lived on coffee, coffee was my only true love in my war with madness.

I sipped it as I stood at the corner and then decided to walk by the little theater.

I hadn’t seen it since that night.

I walked slowly—didn’t spill my coffee, and there it was, all shut down, nothing in the windows, no announcements of future events. I walked up and down the street a few times—I was hoping to meet up with Mr. Goatee—see what he had to say now.

Nothing. Zero; I turned around and walked back—now voices of the past, some radio voice I assumed was Mr. Goatee: “Wow, that was incredible, repeat customers are our pleasure but, here, let me tell you a bit about how it all came about…” I tried to ignore it, but it was true that I hadn’t asked Deirdre about Mr. Goatee, and … she was gone.

Evening shift had started. “Hi…what’s happening—do I know you?”

“Sort of—I used to hang out here like…15 years ago, like…. My name is Bob.” “Oh yeah,” she said slowly, a halo emerging around her from the light coming in from the front of the bar—there were no side windows. I ignored it. ”You hear about what happened last night?” “..like what?”

“The girl breaking her neck?” I still had the invite: “Her” “Oh, Angelina well …that’s too bad. I wasn’t invited.“ “She’s dead, rapped a rope around her neck, tripped or something, and broke her neck. She’s dead.”

“No way? That’s awful.”

“Have you been there?”

“Mmm, once, like when they opened it- they had a big party.”

“Know a guy with a goatee that might help run it.”

“Mmm, no. That’s a drag, like … death. I hate that.”

“What about her? - did you know her?”

“Ummm, sort of, she’s like … really pushy. She’s done stuff around the neighborhood, I guess like, ambitious, she’s done a lot of weird stuff, like breaking glass and

slaughtering animals, like dead rats, and she’d dance around them. Some people liked it.”

“Apparently she was doing commercial sex to pay for it all or pay her rent … hard to make money doing performance art.”

“Oh yeah, I knew that..” and then … there was a weird beep and she reached into her pocket for a cell phone; she walked down the bar so I wouldn’t hear while I thought to myself: Cell phones, why didn’t I think of that? That’s unbelievable stupid of me, like … I didn’t think of that. They could all be chatting behind me—glad I started early, I’ll get made in no time at all…

She hung up and walked back: “Can I get you anything?”

“No, I don’t drink anymore, but thanks.”

“Hey, did she have any friends? There was a girl at the front taking money, Nicola, I think she might be working in a massage parlor on 26th Street.”

“Nicola, she’s a drag but, I think they were best friends…”

“Helped kill the rats, right?”

“You’d be surprised.”

I left, just thinking about cell phones—I’d have to rethink my whole approach.

I went uptown. I was exhausted, psychic energy, I had run out—my brain was exhausted. This girl, then this girl and then back to the first one, then on to the third but remember the fourth. I gave up.

I got Harold on the line when I got back and said: “See? A clue and … a phone number!” That was big. But…I also explained the rest of it, Deirdre, Kelly, the guy with the goatee, the girl I’d followed, and Fred. I couldn’t stay much longer. It all rang in my mind—around and around: Deirdre, Kelly, Goatee, it all went round and round—I had no idea of what to do next.

“Well, it’s all going to go before a judge at some point, we just thought that he

might want to come to some agreement before hand, and … he doesn’t. We’d also like to have those compromised businesses removed, we want to be on record about that.” He slurred: ”compromised” a bit. Maybe that was the wrong word.

“Slime him, you mean,” I said. “Well, I’ve run out of ideas—I don’t dare go up against Tom Junior, he’s a scary guy, and … well … it sort of hit me this afternoon: they all have cell phones and … they all know each other, one way or another, and …

I’m glad I started early because they might all realize that I was wandering around asking questions. I don’t want to have Tom Junior figure it out, or, say, his tenants, they might very well be real tough guys—that girl I got the card from? She’s knows Tom Junior, and that girl at the bar? She knew who the dead girl was and the girl I got the card from. I really feel like a sitting duck, plus I need to vacate Fred’s apartment, not that he’s said anything, it’s just a good idea.”

“We can find you a place to stay, we have a small maid’s quarters a few floors down… just for this sort of situation.”

“Oh, good, because this is my last night at Fred’s. When do you want to show me the room?” And we set a time in the morning. We hung up. Stupider and stupider.

I waited for Fred to turn up—could be anytime.

13 No problem; I was led into a little room on the eighth floor—a large kitchen with a small bedroom attached. The Bed was made, the room was musty, but there was a phone. Harold gave me some keys. “Great,” I said.

“Tell us if you have any problems.”

“How’s Ellen doing?”

“Still resting, but she’ll be all right.”

“Great. I’ll tell you when I get something on Junior then.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

The whole thing was starting to sound absurd again, but I didn’t say anything. I was feeling manic—a little upswing, and so I spoke too fast. I sounded… unusually optimistic, which I wasn’t. I showed Harold the card. He just said oh; “I tried calling and … it just rang and rang and rang … “You wanna try?”

“Ah, no.”

“Maybe show it to Ellen?”

“Yes, I can do that…”

Harold started back up to his palatial apartment, back to, well, I didn’t know; I hadn’t thought about it. Retired I guessed, but didn’t know from what. I didn’t know who he was except that Ellen knew him. I said: “Oh yeah, I need some money.”

“Right,” he answered; he pulled his wallet out and flipped through the bills— two twenties. “Ok? And we’ll see you for dinner tomorrow night, right? 8 o’clock?

Ellen will be there.”

“Right,” I said, and then he left. It was quiet; I flopped out on the bed, a little light made it through the airshaft and the lights were off; I decided to think about things, think about Tom Junior Cops must have traced where the deceased worked: his building, and … well, that didn’t prove anything, but it did sound that the massage parlor, well, it was gone; fled to the hills. Was the porno shop still there? Was Tom Junior, well, in trouble? He probably had a lawyer, and he could be with him right then…

Actually, what I wanted to do was run into him at some natural spot, or … an art opening, another performance. Maybe that was what he was into; I’d have to check the paper for openings. I could imagine myself going: “Oh, wow, what a coincidence— how you doing?” Or something awful like that.

I remembered my last run in with performance art from back when I painted; for various reasons I was stuck dealing with this idiot across the street from the Cosmo.

I guess the problem was under crimes of omission. One night he did some performance piece in his space across the street and … told no one, or no one I knew. I wandered into his space the next day because the door was open. I was going to say hello, or something trivial like that, and … the whole place was filled with broken glass, actually from a mirror, probably a mirror like six or seven feet long. I don’t even know how they got it in there in the first place. The frame was still attached to the wall. “Been busy?”

I asked.

“Ha ha ha,” he chuckled like old junkies do, and, for no good reason I knew exactly who had done it, this girl, tall and kind of ugly. She came into the bar sometimes, and I’d even said hello once, to which she replied: ”Fuck off.” But she did it, I was sure; this group of guys which included our neighbor, had sort of gotten her going—I

think they were all sleeping with her and, it was a big mess. I said bye and left. Little bastard. I knew I was in trouble, the guy just did things like that, that girl smashing glass while…who knows, they read the Odyssey aloud or something stupid like that.

Broken glass and literature. Contrast. Wow. I left that … situation … not long after. Sort of, run out of town, so I went home and went crazy. I never went back, never drank again, never did anything artsy until that girl snapped her own neck.

I lay there in the darkness trying to work it all out; I wasn’t getting anywhere. I needed to know if Tom Junior had been nailed by the cops, or … something like that.

I guess he could cry mea culpa—what else could he do? And it wasn’t like I could just call up the cops and ask what was happening. In fact, I felt I might never know. I decided all of life would now be with a mystery following me.

I was decompressing; I lay down on the bed - I felt like I had been sent flying by a blast; all I had to do was relax, but that wasn’t possible. It took the wind out of me. But it passed, that blast, running out of energy for a few minutes, so I laid there in the dark. It went on and on, visions and then nothing; I was flying through the air until finally I relaxed. I breathed deeply like I was done with an exercise. Actually I felt like I was leaking ideas and concepts from the top of my head, that … there was a crack up there where my thoughts escaped, and with them, a bunch of dumb leads and ... nothing, just … mud… a flash back. I needed to be analytical, determined, professional. But, nonetheless, it must have suited Harold; he just wanted some small event to take to court with him, something that would tip Tom Junior’s hand….

But we also had a death—tricky that one, and toughened babes with an attitude, and beyond that … one more invitation…photography. It was the next night.

Beyond that I was out of gas.

I fell asleep. I woke and drank coffee for hours trying to wake up; there was a Mister Coffee in the cupboard ,but I’d already run out for some El Pico, something with some real punch. I needed it. Those damn pills did me in, they made me feel groggy, lethargic.

I didn’t know what day it was; I went downstairs and paused at a news stand and got a newspaper: Friday, I’d been there for four days so far. It felt like weeks. Now, what time was it—I tried reading the watches on people passing me, but that didn’t work, so I went in a store … looked around, 1:00 PM. Boy, I’d really slept. The next night was the opening of the photography show. I thought, maybe … maybe that was a good way of tracking Tom Junior, maybe he’d be there: “Hey, hey—what a coincidence—how ya doing old Buddy…”

I had … nothing to do until the big show. I’d given Harold a ring, but just a machine answered—I left a message. I started walking south. I thought, well, was Tom Junior’s construction site open or closed?

When I’d finally drunk enough coffee I decided to take the subway down. I walked east and, at 26th Street, walked to the corner very carefully and then peaked around the corner, and … it was all boarded up closed. Wow, like … a fact. I felt satisfied that something, anything, had really happened. I walked across the street to the Starbucks and had a coffee. I sat where I could keep an eye on things and sipped away.

Nothing much till some girl, always a girl, came out of the door of the building with the restaurant and started up the street. She crossed 25th and then 8th Avenue and then right in the Starbucks.

I tried to act normal but then she walked right up to me and asked: “What are you looking at? See Nina over there behind the counter? She’s an old friend and … you know what?… she noticed this guy—you—just sitting and watching. Why would you do a thing that?”

“Well, I’m keeping an eye on the restaurant they’re putting in. They’re not there today.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“See, I shouldn’t be telling you this but … tall guy? Like 6” 5”? He thinks he owns that building.”

“Oh, I know who you mean, I thought he did too, someone pointed him out as the landlord.”

“Not quite—his stepfather did but he died, he was sick for …a couple of years.

His wife was taking care of him at home, and … this landlord, his stepson, he took care of the buildings while he was sick, for a couple of years … but, he doesn’t own them. The wife also thinks she owns them, or part of them, or whatever. It’ll come out in the end. Anyway, he sort of invited me to some performance art thing down town and the … ah …principle? The star, she sort of died, and apparently he built the stage … maybe more? Winches and pullies and rope …? Plus, like where you just came out, I’m sort of keeping an eye on that as well.”

“Wolf you mean? You have the wrong idea about Wolf, he’s a real director, he did, like, commercials in the sixties and some other stuff in the seventies, but he’s a real director—I wouldn’t work for him if I didn’t think that …he was a real director, working on real movies.”

“Oh—what’s ah Wolf’s last name.”

“Smith.”

“Yesterday the son had a big fight with some girl who popped out of 26th Street—I’d seen her at the performance.”

“Nicola … don’t ask, honest—she’s like that to everyone …”

“And you know about Angelina?”

“No, what about her?”

“She’s dead.

“Oh no, how?

“Tripped on some rope during her performance piece and broke her neck. Nicola, she was there too … taking the admission …five dollars for a death … well, anyway, that’s what I’ve been watching.”

I got up, ready to leave when she said: “Hold on,” and pulled out her cell phone.

“Hey—it’s me, Carol, I got him right here—he says … it’s about the building—right,” Click. “He said drop dead, ok? Be careful with Wolf, he hangs out with some tough guys—get it?”

“Huh?” I thought: She’s threatening me.

“I’m with him right now—he’s an idiot, something about the building and the winches and pullies that the landlord I guess made for Angeline.”

She was listening so I blurted out: “Whatever, but your profession, your set-up in that building, might become an issue in court, I mean … the cops can bust you anytime…” She turned and left; I downed the rest of my coffee and asked Nina what the girl’s name was.

“Carol.” she said: “Carol Johnson.” I said thanks and then walked south.

14 I went back on the subway, and then more walking. Back downtown I thought of food, so I had a slice of Pizza. Very exciting. I went to a newsstand and read some of the car magazines, strange, exotic magazines from Europe. I had time to kill till the next big opening. Why was I going? Because she, Maria (was that a real name?) had seen it all.

Plus, maybe it had made it to the gossip circuit. Maybe Tom Junior had been arrested?

Plus, I was being threatened. I still couldn’t believe it, but now Wolf, not his real name I was sure, would know too. People were watching ….I was trying to run interference, making sure of what I said to whom and when so I might trace the dissemination of their communications—whom they spoke to on those damn cell phones.

I decided … let’s visit Deirdre again. Maybe she’d heard something?

She wasn’t there; some other girl, a blond, my brain started ticking away: Karen was her name and … I never understood why she bartended—her parents took care of her pretty well, money and computers and cars. But she was still working. Across from the bar sat an old nemesis, Kevin, Kevin of performance art with broken glass. Kevin was … a happening dude. Actually, he used to hang out with this one girl—one of the bar maids - and, well, they were a drag, both drunks, both going out with about three people simultaneously. Plus, they were boring. They never said anything interesting, just old junkies that had evolved into drunks. Actually, I once started a novel about them as serial killers racing through the bars looking for out-of-control drunks to kill and then, steal their money, buying dope, more dope. But I gave up—there weren’t

enough drunks for them to kill and rob to sustain a daily habit. I guess, just weekend junkies, but every time I tried to write about their weekends together I gave up. It was too tawdry. They were boring; they listened to Mazak and didn’t move for hours. I called them rat people; they had pointy noses that twitched a lot. Kevin would tell you all about it while I tried to sip my drink. I just thought he was nuts. Plus in real life she just vanished, and Kevin now promoted himself finally as a happening dude. Honest. That was his self-description. He knew everybody, he said, he had his art thing going, his music thing happening, his design thing happening. And he spoke in slow-motion like an old drunk and … everything was fabulous.

The girl behind the bar said: “Wow man, you’re our first customer today— what’ll you have?”

“Got any coffee?”

“No, just booze.”

“Actually, I was looking for Deirdre.”

“Oh” a pause, and: “How’s it going Kevin?”

He looked at me funny for a few seconds and then said: “Do I know you?”

“Bob, from years ago.”

“Oh yeah,” he said slowly, sure, and Karen said: ”Sure I remember you …. Sure” and she giggled.

“It is what it is, kind of quiet.”

“Do you know anything about the girl who got throttled down on Rivington St.?”

“Really? What happened?”

“You don’t know? I thought you knew everything.”

Karen chirped in with: “I heard about it, she like hung herself—everybody thinks she did it on purpose. She said she wanted to live on as a cult—really, she said that, she

told that to somebody: immortality, a new spiritualism, but you know, she was working in some massage parlor and doping coke on the side—sounds cliché … I guess it was…I’d want to cut my throat.”

I knew Kevin from back when I tried to do art shows in that bar—no TV, no mirror, no distractions, we’d paint it ourselves every so often (It turned grey with cigarette smoke pretty quickly) and … the shows were pretty good sometimes, no worse than the drivel promoted by the big galleries.

Kevin showed up one night with an amplifier and a mike and announced open mike night for one of the openings. It was terrible, all these people reading bad poetry, plus it sort of shot the art show to hell—nobody paid attention to them, just, some final fling of debauchery. Everyone was drunk, like .. really drunk, and, well, I wished I’d had some sort of digital movie camera, then—I would have made a movie, theater of cruelty. No audience, all participants. Like Sandra, the serial killer, she sat there with sunglasses on her head and … her little nose twitched—she looked like a rat, honest; I looked over to Kevin, and he looked like a rat too.

But the idea of a cult stayed with me—was the Cosmo itself a cult? Had being a participant marked me, even if I could sit there quietly, not reacting, as, really, I realized later, I just wanted the vodka to fight off the voices and thoughts of my illness. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time; it was later when I was abducted to the local psychiatric ward that it came to me.

I was just sort of flat. I didn’t care—I sort of liked it awful, somehow it empowered me and separated me from garden variety humanity ….

I thought Kevin was really nuts, like … he actually lived within this madness twenty-four hours a day; I don’t know that he drank first thing in the morning, but Sandra did. Oh, and Kevin had a wife as well. They really were all nuts. They thought it was

normal; they eulogized it.

I just drank. I’d sit around just sort of misfiring as snippets of ideas passed through my sorry mind.

Later on I started taking notes so as to recreate my thinking.

I turned to Karen and said: “So, no arrests?”

“Nah, she was just crazy, everybody says so, she’s done some weird stuff in the past …”

“She just wasn’t talented,” Kevin said.

“Oh, you remember her now?”

“I think so..”

“I think she tried slitting her wrists on stage once - some guy sitting up front shouted: ‘Been done,’ like, do something original … so I guess she did.”

“Yeah,” the blond said: “That’s what they said, that she did something like that … shock art.”

“That was then,” said Kevin:” Now it’s no art.”

“Why is it no art?”

“No art? It occurs because there is no art—it’s all over, all the millionaires bought their masterpieces, and the market is down, and the galleries, lots of em, are closing, money is the secret ingredient in art: no money, no art. … just like 86, it’s … all over…it’s: no art; there is no art. There was a real no art once upon a time—I read about it in one of the weeklies, like … the early sixties it was slow, no more abstract expressionism, that was old, but the galleries hadn’t quite decided what to do next, so this guy called them up and he explain in a dynamic voice-, make it sound good, dramatic … inevitable, the next big thing to be sure, and …one of them went for it. So, He got this burlap bag—no plastic garbage bags in the those days - filled it with garbage, got a cab, and took it down to Fifty-seventh street, knocked on the door, went in, opened

the bag, dumped it on the floor and said: ‘Voila! No art!’”

“No art with no money, eh? If you say so, it was sort of true—poor people don’t buy much art—never did, but…something else will emerge—it always does, the next binge on Wall Street…for now, just … drink and the soul are the only things left; it’s no art…”

“How’d you make out?”

“I really just do architectural interior design work now, but even that is trailing off.”

“How about you … you know I used to hang out here like … ten years ago.”

“I know—I was hoping you’d forgotten me.”

“I did–” “I’m really just another cult member.”

“What cult?”

“This one.”

“This is a cult?”

“Yeah, a shared memory of a crime or humiliation…”

“I don’t feel humiliated…”

“I do, that’s why I left.”

The barmaid chattered for a while, something about Angelina’s partner, Nicola, the girl who had been at the door collecting five dollar bills. “What did she do?” I asked, “art or…”

“Nothing,” she said. “Zero—I think Nicola was in charge, like…Angelina was a genius or something, they had all these plans, movie or TV, real stardom—she was real pretty.” Then her phone rang. She started talking about some party the caller and she had been to … they had gotten: “Sooooooo drunk…”

I had to leave, I didn’t want them to know what I was doing; I said goodbye and then paused a minute: “When’s Deirdre work next?”

She stopped and consulted a piece of paper taped to the wall: “Saturday night.”

I started to leave, but then the blond suddenly said: “Hey, you want a dog?’

“A dog?” I said. “No, I don’t need a dog.”

“Well,” she said. “I work for the veterinarian service, that’s my day job, and if I can’t place the dogs, you know … they get rid of them.”

“Oh.” “Yeah,” she continued. “Well then, you should see my photos—like that one.”

She pointed to the wall, it looked like her as a 40’s pin up girl. “We did a whole series, sort of like Cindy Sherman but, with me. I’m looking for a place to do a show.”

“Looks great,” I said.

“I just have them on the net for now but people really like them….”

15 I had time to kill until the next big opening. I hadn’t eaten anything in twenty-four hours, just … coffee. I went to a Greek dinner on second and ordered a pastrami sandwich with fries and even a coke. I wolfed it down, famished. It was almost four o’clock; the next opening was five to seven. I felt silly going to another of their openings, but that’s where the trail went. Anything could happen.

I finished with another cup of coffee and sipped it while watching the cars go by; I wished I had a cell phone to call Fred, call Harold, find out what the hell was going on. I could even call Kevin for the real low down…

I started walking to the next show…

It was way down there—I don’t even remember the name of the street. It was still pretty vacant down there—actually, I didn’t see a soul. Quiet too. But I finally spotted a small group of people up ahead. They were just sipping drinks while standing outside.

It was a small space with, like, ten photographs all nicely mounted on the wall. And, there was a little bar they set up with the one and only Nicola behind the bar. I said: “A glass of tonic. How are you doing?–small world, huh?” She ignored me completely.

“By the way, did Angelina design that thing herself or did someone do it for her?”

“She was a complete drug addict,” she said. “She couldn’t design a circle with a crayon—Rob might have helped, or Ken. Rob had a real thing for Angelina so … that’s how it happened—it’s his space.” She suddenly added: “I shouldn’t be telling you anything - I really should just kill you—you lost me my job, they closed,

they just flipped out and left fast, even left the door open …”

“I don’t think that’s my fault.”

“Might as well be.”

“Seen Tom recently?”

“God no, he vanished too—they’re terrified.”

“Well … he said he built the stage so it makes sense that he might have something to do with the winches and pullies and rope….”

She seemed to think about it and then said: “Fuck off, ok? Just … get lost.”

“No problem,” and … I went and looked at the photographs. They were sort of run of the mill, a couple of nice shadows, a couple of buildings, a dog running down the street … Maria was ignoring me so I turned to leave.

“You want another tonic?” Nicole said as I passed.

“Oh sure, thanks,” and then I was outside. A bunch of losers were drinking white wine. It was a bad show, boring. I tossed my glass away and started back: Who was Ken? Goatee guy? And where was Tom Junior hiding out? I walked up the street and suddenly felt ill. Oh dear, I thought, and then I dived between two cars and threw up, just opened wide, and there went my pastrami sandwich.

Dope, I decided, and not the first time. That last glass of tonic.

Last time had been with Sandra, of Kevin and Sandra. I don’t know why, but I really had drunk too much one night and … I left. I went home, and I just started feeling worse and worse and finally threw up, over and over and, it went through my mind: “They spiked my drink…”I asked them about it later, and they just started laughing, Sandra with her little rat face: ha ha ha.

This time it passed. I felt ok and continued walking, and then I wasn’t. I threw up again. And then I felt fine, too fine actually. At Houston I hailed a cab back uptown.

I gave him the address and then just sank back into the seat.

He was driving pretty fast, up and then over, through the park and then Harold’s building. I paid him with one of my twenties. Little change came back.

I had to sneak in, not for any good reason, it was just my mood. I covered my face with my hand. Inside I drank about five glasses of water, and then I made some coffee. I felt really weird. I hoped I felt better by the next night when I was supposed to meet Harold and Ellen and, I guess, Sylvia, for Chinese food. It sounded like a cliché, like we were all normal people.

I felt dopy, like I might walk into a wall, and my brain was … dead. No visions and voices? Who could tell? Maybe some of them were mine, so … then …where did the others come from? Really, it would be a page of gibberish to recount the sounds and scream suddenly descending, and then … nothing, just … dead; another drug.

Why would people get addicted to this—it’s awful. Actually, I never liked drugs, hard drugs, and I think it’s because I’m crazy. Really, a friend had this small cocaine party once and … I drank coffee all evening. His expensive drug had no effect of me. This stuff was just dumb. It just inoculated me from everything. It was the worst.

Once again I felt like I’d been thrown out by some sort of explosion; I could hear a vacuum sucking it all up around me like …well, like a TV tube. And, I just sort of landed where I now lay and not sure of what to do next. Schizophrenia and heroin and … prolixon, lithium, clonodine, wellbuton, coffee, tonic, and, no food, and I just lay there while a reel of some movie canister unwound all over me. I could almost see a man walking, next a woman. I looked at them from my pillow like I was sticking my head up from a manhole cover. I rolled over … it wouldn’t stop …it went on and on.

Dope, all my delusions melted. Honest, as stupid as they’d been, well, I’d grown used to them, but now they melted into some other setting and … there they were: girls,

girls, girls, I saw them all, even the dead Angelina. I saw them all: bartenders and masseurs and actresses. And then … they left. I woke up a little—it was like I’d been really asleep for maybe a minute and then woke startled. Oh no, I thought, and went to the kitchen sink to get a glass of water. I remembered my pastrami sandwich—I hadn’t eaten in two days. I smoked a cigarette. I had no idea what time it was, but it was dark outside. I started out; at the lobby I asked the door man what time it was. 10:30. Amazing, I would have believed him if he’d said 4:00 in the morning or 8:00 at night.

I walked up to Broadway and wandered around a bit—what to eat? I was famished. I finally stopped at a bagel place and ordered an onion bagel, toasted, with lox cream cheese. I sat down on one of their Formica tables. A coffee too, I added, and then I wolfed down the bagel, and then … I continued to sit there sipping my coffee while the traffic rushed by, faster and faster. I had no real desire to get up and do something—I was entranced by the spectacle, cars and cars and cars …

16 Next morning I felt like, well, some drug addict trying to wake up. I needed a shave, I needed a cigarette, I needed some coffee, I needed a shower, bad.

Slowly I woke up; I needed to be able to act normal. I felt nothing—maybe that’s why they do it, to feel dead, obliterated, really, I was ready for suicide—if I’d had a gun I would have done it.

The phone rang—it was Fred, I’d left the number on his answering machine.

“Where are you?” He asked: “74th Street” I answered. “I have the maid quarters. Actually, I’m only here a day or so, Monday I’m gonna go see those Warhol films and then that’s it, out of here— they tried to kill me, sort of, so, I think it’s gone far enough.”

“Uh huh..”

“Spiked a drink with heroin and gave it to me—I’m still getting over it.”

“So you’re leaving…”

“Tuesday morning—early, and no more downtown. I’m done, retired—hey, so you wanna have dinner before I leave?”

“Sure” he said, so we made a date: Sunday, early, like five o’clock (he went in to work at eight), Spanish/Chinese restaurant on Broadway.”

“Good.” And he hung up.

I took a quick shower, shaved, and then ran down and over to Broadway. I found a clock—11:00 AM, ok, and it was Saturday, and then I ran back in.

I did … nothing; I was just waiting for eight o’clock when we would eat—when I would end this whole sorry investigation.

I met them upstairs, the door opened and this cry: “Hi Bob—how are you?” So I walked in, Harold was holding a wine glass with wine in it, actually, they all did. They were drunk and having a grand time; Sylvia was telling some story that apparently was the funniest thing in the whole world and … I didn’t get it. I just stood there; I still felt dopy, like … it was all an illusion; and then it crossed my mind—maybe they’re always drunk.. or tipsy. I was living out a delusion of others.

I sat down. Harold offered me some wine. “I don’t drink; it sort of mixes with my meds … really a bad idea. I’ll take coffee if you’ve got it.” Harold said no problem, so he wondered away. Ellen was always a bit scatterbrained, but it suddenly occurred to me—maybe she’s just a drunk. This whole thing was a delusion. They started talking about some women I didn’t know and never would, and Ellen started talking about how Tom Junior’s wedding had been and how lavish.

I interrupted: ”I think he’s disappeared…like officially.”

“Oh no, because we had an idea…”

“Yes?” “I’ll let Harold explain.” They just sat there after that. Harold came back. “He wants to know about our idea.”

“Yes, we thought that we might run up a preliminary as it were. So I wrote up sort of some demands: Ellen would get the building on 107, the house upstate and ten percent of the income from the Chelsea buildings .. till her death. Just … something to think about.”

“I think he disappeared; his restaurant project is closed up, plus there was that death down there—the little performance art girl, and her friends… and they both

worked at the massage parlor which is now vacant. I haven’t seen Tom Junior in— what, three days.”

“Well that’s what I was trying to say that he and his bride might have gone upstate—Tom Senior has a house up there.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not heading upstate to deliver your little manifesto or whatever you want to call it. Also, I’m leaving Tuesday morning.”

“Oh,” they said.

“And Monday morning I’m gonna go over to MOMA and see the Warhol movies—always wanted to see some.”

“Oh.” “So, no upstate for me. He’ll emerge when he feels like it.”

“Try around five then,” said Sylvia. “Sit out front around five, ok?”

“Why—what difference will that make, I mean … you think he’s upstate so I should sit around the house at five … where I’ve been threatened, like a real threat…”

“All afternoon” she injected.

“Right, Andy Warhol, and then more real estate war. I’m done after that, I mean … I’ve been threatened, I’ve seen some woman throttle herself, they tried to kill me with a big dose of smack—I’m still getting over it so… that’s it and no more.”

“Just one afternoon.” And there was a gleam in their eyes, like they weren’t telling me everything, so I said fine, one more afternoon; and I was leaving Tuesday morning.

And with that Harold said: ”Let’s order in.” And brought out the menu of a Chinese restaurant. “Oh, we’ll get a bunch of stuff…”

There seemed to be some time lag between information and my response. I was slow, very slow and feeling, well, disconnected and speechless. “Sounds great.” It was

also boring, three people I didn’t really know, not to socialize at least, talking about other people I’d never heard of.

Ellen suddenly said: “Bob here was our very good neighbor from across the street and would take care of our apartment when we were gone, out to California or what ever, water our plants and feed the cats … poor cats, Tom got rid of them eventually—drowned them in the tub and then left ‘em in the bottom of some of the trash cans. But really we know him because of Tom’s racecars—he knows all about them.

I nodded, it was true: “My father races…”

“Oh.” “And, I got to keep my motorcycle in their garage. It was a pretty good deal; I’m not sure if this Detective thing is working out as well … speaking of which, I’m leaving Tuesday—amongst other things it’s time for my shot .. I get a shot every two weeks, so…Monday morning I’m going to MOMA to see the Warhol show. The massage parlor is closed up, Tom Junior has disappeared, and someone tried to kill me, all a great success.”

As though no one had listened to me, Sylvia (Harold’s wife?) asked me why I got a shot every two weeks.

“Prolixion—an antipsychotic … I go nuts, that’s why I left New York, I just suddenly went completely out of my mind—been to the hospital a few times. Why? Did you think I made it all up? No, they came and took me away … took me to St. Lukes; they took me upstairs and had me in restraints and then, well, that’s why I left NY. It was like I was just out of luck, I had crashed my bike, I was a mass of paranoia. I mean, I’ve always been … on the edgy side, I’d always been able to squeak by and … I couldn’t make it any more, one mistake and then another, I couldn’t wait to leave before something else happened like … being warehoused in the Bronx—that’s where they put

the lunatics … you’ve employed a lunatic.”

“Oh,” they said.

“So what do you do?” I asked.

“I’m retired—I worked as a buyer for various department stores.”

“Oh—how about you Harold?”

And he said: “Play the market.”

“Oh, well, you seem to be doing ok.”

“More or less.”

I added: “I don’t work, I’m on SSDI.” “Oh,” they said.

And then the bell rang; actually, the door man called up … our food had arrived.

We munched away—I had no idea what they were taking about really, houses and apartments and cloths and cars … all the things I didn’t have.

We ate for a while and then Harold suddenly said: “We have this one last gambit we were going to try—we wrote it up as a paper, that prospectus as it were, of Tom’s estate, you know, Ellen get’s x,y, and z and Tom Junior would get … whatever, buildings, like I explained …but we can’t get it to him.”

“I understand but, what … stake out 26th Street again? When? I’m leaving so soon. Apparently he’s left, I think that girl who gave me the doctored drink said he had flown the coop …you know, there is a death involved, that girl downtown, and Tom Junior said he had designed it or…made the stage at least. Good luck.”

Ellen said: “I think I know which apartment, you know, loft, he lives in.”

“I can’t get in the door, I need someone to buzz me in, can’t just try buzzing ‘em all until someone lets me in, and I don’t want to hit Wolf’s buzzer.”

“Wolf? Who’s Wolf?”

“He’s the porno king, the one who used one of his … model’s?... to threaten me. She said Wolf had .. a lot of friends, tell you what—I’ll get a coffee at the starbucks and watch for a while … after Andy …ok? Or Sunday? Which? Both? That girl called him as I sat in the Starbucks and told me to drop dead, pronto.”

They said that would be fine. Either. Both.

“OK … tomorrow is Sunday, right?—I’ll do it for a while tomorrow, just…sit and wait…. ‘til– I’m meeting my friend Fred at 6 for dinner. But that’s it—no more, get a lawyer.”

“No problem,” they said.

17 Sleep came slowly. I just lay in bed but couldn’t get to sleep. I was gonna be glad when I had that stupid drug out of my system. It was really boring—I felt like a giant sponge.

As a matter of fact, everything in my room was made out of a giant sponge. I still heard voices though—Harold chirping in with the value of the buildings and then his wife sneaking in: “But that would be too much,” and all the while Ellen was in the background talking about the Oprah Winfrey show. I guess she watched it, or that part of my brain that created these voices decided she did. It’s called a delusion; I would believe she did, and Harold too, more about the buildings. They’d given me a manila envelope with something inside. It was sealed - should I open it? Did it say what they said it said? Should I wait until morning and then, more rational (maybe) I’d decide? “No, no, no,” Harold chirped in, he’d never accept it then. Maybe, maybe he wouldn’t care?

Maybe it was stupid and would make me look even stupider?

This drug wasn’t helping at all, it really was a stupid drug, such a reputation, and no relief for the psychotic. Useless.

Morning was the same. I took a long shower. Didn’t help. I think I was getting worse. Stress was to be avoided, and I wasn’t avoiding it. I got dressed and went out for a bagel. It was horrible out there—for some reason it was hot. There was a clock behind the counter: 9:12, so it was time to move. We, the envelope and me, headed down. I still hadn’t opened it. At Starbucks the girl who had filled in the little porno actress about everything—about me, was working. I said. “Hi Nina.” I said I had to

watch the buildings again. I was waiting for Tom. I have to give him something. She said: “Oh” and walked to the back of the shop—probably calling someone: “That guy is here again….” Wolf would know about it in—two minutes. Would he contact Tom Junior? I hoped so. If not, who would he call, and was he part of Tom Junior’s big plans for the building just as soon as Ellen, I dunno—died or something?

A van pulled up—I ignored it. It just obscured my view of the building. I drank slower and then I left. I wanted a cigarette really; I walked slowly down the street lighting a cigarette, and then somebody called: “Hey you… Mr. Smarty pants.”

“Huh?” “You’re the guy, you have a mojo or something.”

“Nah, just waiting for someone—I have something to give them.”

He had a moustache and a crummy suit on. “No, you are the problem,” and another guy popped out of the van, no moustache, t-shirt, and he grabbed me.

I said: “Huh?” The one with the moustache said: “Put him in the van.” He was a big guy, much bigger than me and—he put me in the van through the side door and then closed it.

They jumped in with the moustache behind the wheel.

He started driving: “I thought you had a problem with one of the girls—that happens a lot, but you want something else.”

I said: “I’m waiting for Tom, Tom Junior—I have something for him.”

“Like what?”

“Like this envelope.”

“And what’s in there?”

“A settlement offer—his father’s estate hasn’t been settled yet.”

“Oh.”

“Right…like…he doesn’t own those buildings.”

“He doesn’t huh?”

“Nope, nobody does till he settles with his step mother, and she asked me to give him this, I thought it was a way to kill an afternoon, just sit around waiting for Tom.” “No, Tom left, his wife too—they went somewhere.”

“Well, there’s that dead girl … Angelina…”

“Angelina,” he said. “What’s got to do with all this?”

I said: “She’s dead … her performance art thing—you didn’t know?”

He grabbed the envelope: “I’ll get this to him.” And they pulled over: 14th Street.

“You can get out and, ah, stay away from those buildings for a while, ok?”

“Oh sure, you can trust me.” And I got out and watched him drive off. The license plate read TF-4…something. They drove away fast.

I walked east towards the subway, and as I did I passed a little stand selling watches for three dollars. I bought one, I got them to show me how to set the time— it was a quarter past noon. I put it in my pocket—I would now know what time it was. As I waited on the train platform I noticed a small group of rats scurrying around, they’re little silver bodies glistening as they caught the light of the platform. They were just like my suspects, small time crooks, pornographers and prostitutes (more or less) all dreaming of some illusive fame and, instead, they too were racing along, probably until some cop tied them to an actual crime … just racing around ….

The rats suddenly raced the other way—they preferred the darkness I guess.

18 It was still Sunday, nothing happening. I took the subway uptown, went to my little room, and stretched out on the bed. I’d had my fill of paranoia for the day, actually I might almost say what I had feared would happen, had. But they didn’t look like murderers, just … a little crude. Really, they answered the questions and, you never know, he might actually deliver the envelope—he seemed less than pleased to know that Tom Junior didn’t in fact own the building. I tried calling Ellen, but all I got was her machine. I said: “This is Bob..I got kidnapped…give me a call.” Then I tried Harold, what a name, Harold, it went well with his tweed jackets, but again it was the machine, and I left the same message. Did they have cell phones? I didn’t know. I didn’t—I didn’t get that many calls.

And they hadn’t given me numbers to their cell phones, assuming they had them.

Actually, I felt they sort of didn’t pay attention, but of course they were safe at home or out for lunch. Myself, I felt like cutting my throat. This happened, I’d sort of spiral down the emotional plane and I’d just think … suicide. I was exhausted; kidnapping will do that to you. I should have asked them who they were, I just assumed the one in the suit was the infamous Wolf. But, actually, I didn’t know that; only that they got a little nervous when I said that Tom Junior didn’t actually own anything. So I lay there, an arm over my eyes: pills, lots and lots of pills, so hard to come by, so, maybe a gun? I’d have to go to one of those gun shows: “fit to own a gun?” they’d ask. Of course I was. I wanted it just for self-defense. Or how about hanging, I saved some rope at home just in case, but it wasn’t really fast enough—you’d swing for a

couple of minutes before it worked. You’d still be thinking, feeling …and then the phone rang. I ran across the room and … it was Harold. I had to explain everything, finishing with: “So you never know, he might actually get your envelope.”

He said: “Oh.” I think both of us were starting to get bored with the whole thing. I was. “How’s Ellen doing?” I asked.

“Oh fine” he said. “She’s at home.”

“Oh, well, I think we’re done—time to get a lawyer for sure. Wolf said he wasn’t around, said it like he really knew it, like he knew where to find him - you know, I’m really not tough enough to go up against guys like that, I mean … they’re real crooks.

Tom Junior is a bit of a crook.”

I was avoiding Ellen, she was so emotional about these things, how it fit in with her emotional cosmos; she’d go on and on, her whole history of life, her past marriages, her sons, and finally Tom Senior and his cars and his buildings and then death. Two years of death. She had to start at the beginning every time, so I was anxious to get Harold to call her and explain. I told him so.

“Ok” he said.

I added: “I’m leaving Tuesday morning, show at MOMA and then out of here, but it sounds like he’s hiding … there was that death after all, and I bet the cops knew what she was doing for a living and … they talked to them. Wolf is next…

Tom’s whole cash supply—I bet that was how he was financing his restaurant—not the worst way of laundering money—pay all the guys working on it in cash—they probably loved it.”

“Ok,” he said slowly.

“I’ll talk to you later, before I leave, ok?”

“OK.”

I went back to bed to stare at the ceiling. I looked at my new watch; it was 2:10. I went to sleep and woke around 5:00, almost time to meet Fred. Yup, Fred for dinner. I took a shower; I made some coffee, I ate an orange. I was ready to go. 104th and Broadway, no problem. I walked, a nice brisk walk. I got there about 5:40, a little early and waited, waited and waited. No Fred. Time ticked away; I consulted my new watch every once in a while, I had this feeling—Fred did this: late. Late all the time.

Late with some long winded excuse. About 6:30 I went in and ordered. Chicken and rice. I was pretty hungry.

I was just finishing up when Fred turned up: “Oh, I’m late, I just did my laundry and then this friend called and …I have to be at work by seven, I’ll have to take a cab.”

I said: “Oh.” And he said: “What’s happening with you.”

“Oh, nothing much—I got kidnapped but they let me go after about twenty minutes, sort of …guys connected to the building in Chelsea. They didn’t like my watching things…they threw me in a van and drove around for a while.”

“So they grabbed you?”

“Yup, took a little ride as they say, but they got antsy when I told ‘em Tom Junior didn’t own the building yet. They let me out then—14th Street, and drove off. I’m just hiding out now—I’m leaving Tuesday morning.”

“Right … are you nuts?”

“Like?”

“Jeez, I’d be terrified—it’s liable to get worse too.”

“Yup, the dead girl, she was working in one of those buildings … they’ll trace her for sure. It’s a big mess; I feel like I’ve done a really good job, the whole thing is a disaster. I am literally completely incompetent at these things.”

“I’ll say.”

“Yup, and they all hate me … it’s brilliant! But you never know, Wolf might just make it happen, bring it all to some crisis. As far as I can tell, no one wants to spring for a lawyer. It’s that stupid. That’s why they called me, like … I was the only person they knew that was as tall as Tom Junior, or close. All they know is other old people.”

“Well, I gotta go –” “No coffee?”

“Nah, I gotta run, maybe catch up with you tomorrow.”

“Ok,” and he left.

I had some coffee and starred out the window—this was my old neighborhood back when I was sane—more or less at least. Now I was bored; there was nothing left for me to do with their detective job, everyone had told me to get lost, plus I had no real leads or … anything. I decided to take a walk down 107th Street. I hadn’t dared take a peek when I was staying at Fred’s; I’d lived just across Amsterdam Ave from Fred, “memories” as they say, but now I decided I would take a look.

It looked…the same. I’d lived there for ten years. Across the street was, of course, the Kreshe’s and was where Tom Senior had lived when he was alive. I sat down on one of the stairs of my old building and stared at the Kreshe building. There was a door on the left that led to a loft space on the second floor and then a very nice apartment on the third and last floor and a large garage door on the left. Through that door was a ramp, concrete, and then the garage area. It could hold, oh five cars all together. It’s where I had kept my motorcycle when I had one. Downstairs in the basement was a wood shop, quite extensive, and then, towards the front, a bizarre apartment, a bed, a couch, a funny little bathroom, and … a bar, like it had once been a speak easy or something like that. I’d stayed there once. Seeing as it was in the basement there was

no light in it, so one really had no idea what time it was.

I was just sitting there, looking, when the garage door suddenly opened, and … it was Tom Junior I’d never thought of looking there. He pulled out a little pickup truck, parked it towards the street and then ran back inside. I considered following, but the garage door only opened and closed from within.

Junior came around through the front door again. I swear he looked straight at me, then jumped in the little pickup and was gone. Apparently I was just some guy sitting on the stairs. Not only did he not recognize me, but I was suddenly unsure that he ever had, like … when I’d spoken to him at the restaurant site, like … I thought he knew me just a little, and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he thought I was just … some guy walking up the street. Ditto at the performance, he glanced at me and recognized nothing, just … some guy. That’s what I was, some guy, generic almost.

Meanwhile, swirling around me was remembrance of madness passed. This was where my madness really started, upstairs, second floor, with the windows open, and just gargantuan delusions. They went on for days, weeks really. I lost weight; I’m pretty thin, but I became emaciated. I would wake in the night thinking I was being laser beamed. My head hurt, and, oh, it went on and on. I got up and left; I could even remember the police coming to my door to take me away. They put me in an ambulance actually.

I walked away. Back to 74th Street. I lay down again and contemplated my less intense delusions. They’d come and go; I could never be sure. And then I decided to give Ellen a call. Still no answer, so I told the machine that I’d found Tom Junior back at 107th Street and then hung up. Ditto Harold. And then I lost interest. Actually, I was sort of bored; I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes; I watched the sun set on the airshaft. It was very dark in the apartment. No one called back. Finally I just fell asleep.

19 Monday. I was free; I was sure of it. I started up their Mr. Coffee. Coffee and cigarettes—breakfast of champions. Actually, 80% of schizophrenics smoke so it must mean something though I assumed it was just to fight the drugs. They make you feel dopey and slow. According to the watch I bought on the street it was 7:00 AM. I had hours to wait. My last day in New York. Actually, it was going to be a relief. I went out and got the papers and some milk for my coffee. The papers were dull—I still hadn’t noticed any mention of our dead friend. Just, if it happened that far south they ignored it, I guess. They were all idiots on drugs. But there’d been no mention of it in the weeklies either. It suddenly occurred to me—maybe she wasn’t dead? I’d looked at her—I’d heard the crack, but … maybe it was all a mistake. The police had come, and they’d asked questions? I left so quickly—as soon as I could actually, so I didn’t know.

If so, it was successful.

I paced around—this was a new level of idiocy—maybe it was a scam? Just … part of her “performance,” like if you thought she was dead, then she was dead… they’d agree just to keep you believing it. Of course, supposedly, there were pictures … some place. I could see the next big move of wandering around the lower eastside just to ask: “Did she really die?” I really felt like a moron—had I been duped?

I had to redo all my thinking, all my “evidence” and coincidences, and it sort of fit. I really was an idiot. A scam (or … art!) and I was the idiot. I went up to the bagel place and drank their coffee, plus a bagel. Where to go? How to start over? It was like

a cold sweat—I’d just spent the last week getting threatened and terrorized while doing …nothing, just exercising my imaginative mind. Sweep the paranoia aside, nothing had happened—nothing happening fitted the “facts” as well as mass conspiracy.

It was just an act.

Tom Junior was all a scam too, like he didn’t care or like he was in on it or like he just wasn’t paying attention. In a flash I thought: Maybe Ellen is full of it, just trying to chip away at all the money involved.

All that was left was commercial sex, the massage parlor, and a little store front down deep in the lower eastside - who cared? They’d get Tom Junior on Tax evasion or something equally stupid in the end. All Ellen needed was a lawyer, and it would all come pouring out.

I said to myself: “Just sue him for Christ’s sake.”

I paced around the kitchen table thinking about it all … and what came to mind? Just more confirmation that I was in fact, once again, crazy. I had concocted this whole scenario and, well, I was leaving Tuesday morning—early, back to Maine and back to my shot. The big shot of Prolixion. That would take place Wednesday. And I would go back to … nothing much. It was all just an illusion, a delusion, complete with occasional hallucinations of … my brain going around in circles where it wouldn’t cause anyone any harm….

20 I was back in midtown. I was walking to the real point of my involving myself in…a bunch of garbage. I was really torturing myself—the mere thought of the lower eastside brought with it images of being punched in the face over and over again. But I did go to MOMA. I did see the Andy Warhol show.

It sucked.

Apparently everything had been converted to digital, like you could mail the whole show to the next museum by cd, or, just attach it to an e-mail.

Nothing was right; film clips as portraits, the movies on flat screen TV screens (probably picked up at Wal-Mart). Everything was the wrong scale: movies reduced, portraits enlarged, everything in a dark, black room. It was terrible. I felt ripped off, but…that’s New York for you—just a tourist trap in the end.

I started up stairs, took a glance at the gift shop (money, money, money), and there she was, Maria, the photographer. I walked in slowly, not wanting to startle her, and said: “Hi, how are you? Remember me?”

“Oh, ah..” She was backing away from the case she’d been leaning on. “Sure— how are you?”

“Well, as well as I could be—look, I have a question for you—Angelica—is she really dead?”

“Yes, she’s dead.”

“You sure? Never hit the papers—make good news—white girl gets killed, they

usually love it.”

“She’s dead.”

“Nicola spiked my drink—I’m still not over it.”

“She does that.”

I still wasn’t convinced. “How’s your show going?”

She shrugged. “It isn’t, really—slow, you get your hopes up and all, and then … nothing. Look—I’m supposed to be working, let me give you my number and we can talk then.”

“Sure,” I said.

So she wrote it out “Talk to you latter.”

And I left. I walked south and there it was, a telephone booth. You laugh. Everyone has a cell phone now. So, I called the number, and it rang and rang and rang.

I left. I had too much time to kill; I thought of leaving right then, and … I did.

Train back uptown, packed my bag, and then went to Harold’s to give him his key back.

I rang and rang. No answer. I threw it in my bag, and then back down, this time port authority and bought a ticket. It was a bit of a wait. All my life was waiting, waiting and waiting, or that’s what it seemed.

I slept on the bus.

21 I hid in bed after making it back, and with my arm over my head, a little film suddenly appeared.

Going to New York had been a mistake. It was horrible. I was over stimulated … I guess. New York was gone … forever, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I would see Broadway, I would see the Cosmo, I would see Harold. I would try to play it all out in my mind like I could finally think it all out—make sense of it all.

Sometimes, when I try to visualize something, it starts up, like something too vivid and, well, I’d lost a little bit of my contact with reality.

And then a film would run, very elaborate and mysterious; it was like a film that ran through my mind … created by? I dunno, they just appear. There were people in it, and they jumped up and down. The whole past week flashed before my eyes—that was Wolf jumping up and down and then Tom Junior and then Harold and then, suddenly, the pavement, like I’d jumped out of a window.

I got up and had a cup of coffee; I smoked a couple of cigarettes. It faded, but I didn’t dare go to bed. It faded but a little smidgeon clung to my mind, just above my eyes. I would remember … that silver film, it was silver—aluminum and molten rats actually, I kid you not (my sorry mind). It would be brewed in a giant pot and then squeezed out, and it was moved like … film, a roll of film, with a silver arm moving it.

This one mostly laser beams, like they could attach the two, and the laser arm would manipulate the silver goo, aluminum and rats, lots of rats. I remembered this part, the

arm moves this goo, so thin you could barely see it, to my brain and then there it was, the movie in my brain. That’s what I thought.

It was the rats that got me, some strange New York hell unleashed. Actually, there is a whole history of the rats in my life. Like the lunatics at the Cosmo who did this enormous painting with rats attached to chains splashed across the mid rang. They also, well, it was a famous photograph—it had been a long evening. I had originally planned on seeing a band way over on 14th Street. Really I was, but at the door, these two guys with really beat up faces suddenly wanted ten dollars for the show; I’d figured on five. So I left. Screw them; I walked across town to the Cosmo. Nothing happening there, so I went across the street where the lights were on. This was Kevin’s place, he had a storefront and did shows and performance art and all that stuff (as I’ve noted).

I went in and said hi. It was pretty boring—I told him about the set across town. “Nah” he said. I went back out and—the lunatics with the rat paintings were there, and one of them had a fat rat by its tail. He had stomped it to death in the bathroom of the Cosmo—he had these heavy duty boots on. We were staring at the rat when—click— someone took a picture. I don’t remember who took the photo, but it turned up once in a while, and the stomper, well, he took his rat down the street to the corner, and as a BMW flashed by, tossed it onto their hood. That was it for real rats. The other was from, well—Antonin Artoud? Or Ant-Oedipus ? Guitari and Deleuse? The dead rat hanging from the ceiling (that being the bourgeois family unit). Which was it? Both?

Anti-Oedipus? I think they must have borrowed it—I don’t think I just made it up.

And then, right in front of my building, when I came out early in the morning (I was completely insane—I’d been awake for about three days), when the sun was just creeping up, there was a dead rat. I was insane, but still, I thought there was some equanimity, some balance, to this rat in conjunction to all the others I’d known.

So I called up Fred: his machine answered: “Hi, this is Bob, do you know anything about the dead rat outside my building? Does it recall, well … I’ve known other rats… so do you know…?”

Apparently not, so I went back down and kicked it into the gutter.

The big question is—how do I know so many rats? Lives of the rat. Rat society.

There are people who I insist are rats—Kevin was one, one of his girlfriends was another. They had pointy noses that would twitch.

I relaxed; I drank coffee and started sketching out the novel I had stopped writing, the one about the rat people. This was the serial killer novel I started writing in a notebook. It seemed … pertinent all of a sudden. All the rats of my life, little rat people scurrying around, running amok. That was New York to me—a whole island filled with rats. Rats killing rats too— I imaged my two rats, Kevin and Debby—that was her name in my book—at parties. They were an adorable rat couple, but everyone treated them like people. “A drink?” Rats love to drink.

It went on and on—fat rats (those were the cops), sleek rats (who were on TV—all of them were obsessed with TV). They would do anything to be on TV like ... the sleek rats like … like … they were people still, that the whole madness of their life had turned them into rats, and they were stuck in the sewer.

I went to bed, and when I woke there was nothing; I’d missed class, and my shot was the next day. Dead time, pacing around, why, why, why? I was just stupid and boring. Time passed slowly and quickly, like it took hours but I remember it as a few minutes, as … I had nothing to do, just my book: The Rat People.

I went in for my shot; it took a minute, but the bus ride there and back took a couple of hours usually. We always had a little chat before the shot. A nurse practitioner did the shot. She was very nice, and I said only that I’d been to New York, and it had

really taken a lot out of me. I explained that I was sort of … decompensating.

She nodded a lot. “How do you feel now?”

I said terrible. I was hallucinating the night before … a lot actually, and voices, always a lot of voices. Stress probably, over stimulated, I’d been so bored just sitting in my little apartment that I didn’t realize how symptomatic I really was.

The rats came back—I even felt like a rat. An outsider, I had escaped New York (again).

“Well, I can give you more prolixon?”

“I’d rather wait for the next shot to do that … I might calm down. I was just surprised it came back so … violently.”

“Tell the doctor when you see him,” and I said Sure, which didn’t explain anything. What should I have said?

I lived in a little box like … I was done … with everything. Dead and a slave to my medicine. I hated my medicine; it made everything so dull. I felt like a cockroach, just something that wouldn’t die, and with that came the specter of Kafka’s Metamorphous. I was depleted by New York; I was just recovering. Really, I’d like to have gone to that appointment with my nurse covered in blood and, from there, to just have screamed. I’d carry a switch blade just in case; maybe cut my throat because of my own mental lacerations…

I should have said, “Here is my delirium….cure it.” But I said nothing. I just wouldn’t die.

I went home feeling aimless and useless. The bus chugged along. I thought of detective novels. I was a detective after all, and they have no friends—I had no friends.

Detectives didn’t build relationships through their work but rather, one person at a time, slowly making their way to … the truth, and when the case was over, they never

saw them again. I planned on never seeing my crew of victims again. The job was over, and I was ready for the next one, which probably wouldn’t come. Maybe there was a way to become certified; maybe it was a job I could actually do. Have myself listed in the yellow pages. It didn’t really sound all that convincing. I would probably just sit around like I usually did, my mind lost in thought, just drifting around and around in circles. That’s what it did.

When I was home again I went back to my normal rut. Get up feeling awful. I’d had some coffee and sat around, I was trying to clear my mind with the coffee and then cigarettes, not too many. And then the day ahead, painting, writing, reading. I usually took one class at the local state college annex—you’d do the whole class by television. But I’d had it with summer classes; they’d do the whole class in seven weeks, and I’d do awful. I’d get D’s. I was a terrible student, my whole brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

I reached for a packet of photographs. I had been talked into signing up for Facebook by one of my classmates. The only problem was that I didn’t have a picture of my face to put up. All I had were pictures of paintings of mine, which I’d scanned in when I was nuts. I finally dug out the old Nikon F I had hidden in the back of my closet.

It’s an antique—hottest thing around in, like … 1972.

I set up a tripod and took pictures of myself, and they were awful. I looked awful.

I shot another roll; I went outside for this one, and some were okay but others were terrible. It felt as if I didn’t know that person. It was like I had been walking around with someone else’s face.

I scanned (at the school) the best ones and put them up on Facebook - no one said anything. But I became preoccupied with my face, obsessed—is that really what I look like? I looked fine in the bathroom mirror, but the camera picked up these horrible

sneers, all my features horrible. I looked punchy (I guess I was). I kept looking at them and comparing them with the better photos. I couldn’t get over it. I looked beat up, which I was internally, my mind swirling around. I had that “homeless” look, kind of thick and dumb. A couple came out ok; a couple had a nice decadent look to them, my face angular with sort of “Mick Jagger” lips.

T

his was the face of a Detective. Of course, what does a Detective really look

like? As a matter of fact, what is a Detective? I wasn’t a detective; no one would take me for a detective—I was just some guy, sort of forgettable; a little down on his luck, a real New York face, beaten to a pulp by the everyday fight.

The phone rang, reality beckoned. Probably one of those calling machines all ready to sell me insurance via a recorded voice. Was it Mom? I was avoiding Mom. No, it was one Larry Scorp, a lawyer in New York representing Ellen Kreshe.

“About time,” I said to him. “I’ve been telling those people to get a lawyer for the last three months.”

“Oh, well my dad is a friend of Harold Ganglof—you’re almost our first case, just started a little firm, general practice, a month ago, me and my partner. Fred Selurp.”

“Oh.” ‘Well, apparently Tomas Krutch Junior did receive Ellen Krutche’s offer, I was told to tell you that.“ “Oh, it got there—that’s interesting … ” “You seem surprised.”

“Well, in his building is … something; not sure what but … I spent all of a Sunday waiting around for Tom Junior to turn up, so I could hand the offer to him. They, Harold and Ellen, asked me to, and instead, I got grabbed by these two guys—I’m not actually sure who they are, with the porno guy I think, or the porno guy himself, but I

don’t know their names, but … one of them took the proposal from me, this after a little ride in his van … like I had a choice and …he apparently got it to Tom Junior He knew how to find him.”

“Apparently.”

“I think he’s a bad guy. Anyway, what do you want from me?”

“Well, we’re trying to put a case together; Thomas Junior sent us a revision, mostly concerning his having run these three buildings in Manhattan while his father was dying. It took that long, plus he insists that it was always understood that he would inherit those buildings—his mother would even write a deposition to it and sing it.

Other than that, he offered Ellen five grand to quit the whole thing. Nice guy.”

“Right, though there is the little problem with the massage parlor in one and a porno director in another, though … that might not be illegal. Should be able to film nude art films in there if he wants to. Also, they paid in cash, and/or Tom Senior told me he did back when he was still alive. Did Thomas really declare all income? All the cash? This is what I was asked to find out by Harold and Ellen, put him in a pinch … sounds like it worked. I think he was building that restaurant—pay for everything in cash, but … I don’t think they’ve done a lot of work there recently, well…it feels like months, but it’s really only been a week. Other than that I have nothing to tell you, oh, there’s some cars missing—I believe he just sold ‘em off, maybe even signed them over to himself to sell them. Oh, there’s the girl who died during some performance art thing … happened right in front of him. He told me he had built the stage, so … I dunno. I think that’s really why they all flipped out - I got threatened a number of times though it’s not always clear what for, just … stop snooping around … so what do you do?

Just make another counter offer? This thing has been dragging along for years, since Senior got sick.”

“Well, we’re looking for closure, and I have an appointment to meet with his lawyer next week.”

“So, is there anything else I can tell you?”

“Well, if your name does not come up during negotiations, then no. But it could, it could also go to trial if they can’t compromise.”

“Oh. Great. Did I do anything I could be charged with?”

“You never know…”

“Thanks,” and we hung up.

Great, wonderful, through a gauze of madness I had made myself … a criminal. Makes sense. Go around bothering criminals, and you slowly become one yourself. That’s why I quit. But this little interview got more and more under my skin. I was afraid of this. A long trail, plus, say the IRS, they’ll come around sooner or later, taxes and more taxes, inherency taxes, cash taxes—that’s what they want to keep quiet, before it goes to any judge. No suit.

I wondered if Larry knew I was crazy—I’d make a great witness. And I did all of it for two reasons: 1) to see the show at MOMA and 2) because Tom Senior let me keep my bike in his garage. I was parked next to the other bike in the neighborhood, and one night the other bike was set on fire by someone. I had a fire resistant cover on mine, but that wasn’t the issue. Would they come back? They told me to put it in their garage, and … I ended up watering their plants when they were gone, like … all summer in California, in exchange. And that was it; I left town, and I never heard from them again, not for ten years. I left. In fact, I couldn’t leave New York fast enough, and now, suddenly, I was inexorably intertwined within their web.

The phone rang again. It was Larry again. “I forgot a couple of things. See, one thing we could use is, well, a way of tracing all the characters, as it were, that might

have had an influence on this case.”

“So, you want me to finger them all? All that are left? Maria at Moma, some sex workers and/or Deirdre who did nothing, Kevin? He knows nothing, and then there is Tom Junior…not much. Also, I think Maria at MOMA is a liar so, might end up anywhere.”

“Well, we might ask you to come down again.”

“Um … ask anything you wish, but it’s just not a good idea for me. New York is just too stimulating, mix in a murder and stuff and … not a good idea—you know I’m crazy, right?” There was no response for a second or two. “Honest, ask my doctor.

Could it be an issue legally, having this crackpot lead you around NY to all the commercial sex high points—have you found out if that massage parlor really closed up— just for instance?”

“No, I didn’t know about that.”

“Oh, 26th Street building—that’s actually illegal—the porno film maker—he could be legal. Nothing illegal about making videos. But I heard he paid cash—that’s how Tom Senior paid for his cars when he was alive. No taxes to worry about.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that either.”

“No—what do you know?”

“Well, my father gave me the run down, an estate to settle, not all that hard really, and then Ellen when we had a consultation mentioned that you were the one to flush Tom Junior out, he’s sort of a mystery man—didn’t respond to any overtures previously.”

“Oh, I traced him through the muck and mud of New York, real film noir stuff, mysterious death, mysterious women, big money - I just finally scared him to death. I’m sure he just wants to avoid going before a judge and having to reveal everything—honest,

he wants to settle.”

“Oh … ok, well, we’ll keep that in mind.”

“If you get stuck just find Maria who works in the MOMA store. She knows where they all are, ok? Great—goodbye,” and I hung up.

I wasn’t interested. I really didn’t want to go crazy again. I know that sounds lame, but the fact is it hurts, my brain would explode, I’d become a victim to delusions, which I acted on, sort of. Action, lots of action, cars zooming around all the time and behind it, always , was some mysterious organized crime syndicate, the mob, they’ve taken over and they just won’t leave me alone.

And that’s how I felt, nuts. I retreated to my dingy apartment and the more mundane aspects of my tawdry, banal existence.

It’s not easy being a loser, plus it nagged at me—it entered the subtext of my mind, as it were, voices and themes popping up in the shadows of my tired brain—I know I heard their voices, and I thought what to do next, would this idiot actually call me. I could hear his voice too, you need some theoretically benign, honest force. He would take care of it, all the little loose strands, because I didn’t do it right. Plus, I wasn’t convinced Angelina was dead. Maria was a liar. That was the little item I’d want to go back to New York to check on, the loose strand. But, they had Tom Junior where it counted.

He was coming in. They’d settle, and then? I bet he’d settle down and play it legal for a good long while.

22 Great, my life was back to nothing again; I’d lie in bed clutching my head trying to think straight, and…it worked eventually. I had no memory (virtually). I had no attention span. But there was nothing to think about really—I just existed, slowly recovering from New York—too much energy, too many things to think about, all at the same time. It all slowly reseeded. Actually, it presented a dilemma. I didn’t really want to sit around forever, but when I tried to do something, it all came rushing back, madness, visions, poor decisions. Plus it was like my brain had shrunk. I couldn’t hold it all together in New York. I became paranoid, over loaded, so … what to do? I tried to slowly think through everything that had happened, and it just sounded awful. I was repelled.

I answered the phone with dread—Mom? Laurence? Ellen? Nothing but bad news.

All of ‘em, they all called, Mom with the latest weather forecast from her weather radio she’d bought at Radio Shack. Pretty boring.

Ellen with: “We almost got it, it went through our lawyers, and then he didn’t show up. We don’t know what to do…” Right? That’s what she would say.

And then Larry with: “I think we need something more in-depth—are you up for another visit? I don’t know where to find these people, your, um … contacts.”

“Girls in commercial sex basically, and actually, I’m tired of being threatened.

People kept threatening me.”

“It would just be for a couple of days.”

“Um, let me think about it—call me at the end of the week.”

“The end of the week?”

“Yup, I need to think about things.”

“Fine, and he hung up, and I had something to think about, kill some time, pace the kitchen floor, and think…

I was a Detective again.

23 I went to sleep hoping that would clarify matters. Really, I was feeling very negative about everything. I’d gotten my test back—I got a 74: C, which actually was pretty good for me. Otherwise I sat around, screwed around with the computer up at school— checked my email which was mostly mailing lists I’d signed up for about art or cars.

Otherwise I thought of death; as a matter of fact, I felt like killing myself. It was all just one big dead end. Like I was really going to bop around New York with this deranged lawyer. I wished I had a gun, or better, a lot of pills I could swallow, and I had neither.

I felt doubly cursed. And it was out of this morass that I was supposed to travel down to New York again. I couldn’t decide if the last trip had been good or bad for me.

Honest, I felt awful, so .. would it make me feel even worse? Plus it all just sounded stupid—I’d found the soft underbelly of Tom Junior And, now prepared, had already in fact blackmailed him.

I didn’t feel proud of myself; another trip would make it worse. Plus I had no ulterior reason to go, no art show, no musical (I hated musicals), no Rock and Roll clubs (all closed down). Plus it was going to be hot—I’d looked up the temperature, like…

96 degrees … it sounded horrible, especially with all the pollution, all the cars, all the taxis, the buses. Plus, no pay. I needed money while I was there (heard of eating?).

Plus, well, I’d already been threatened, well, a number of times.

I sat there sort of vibrating, my legs crossed, a cup of coffee on hand—nothing but stress and dread. Class was Monday, so, after that, I had a free week, a whole

week to really screw up. I felt like warning Tom Junior, like I almost felt bad for him, hiding out from, what, deranged performance artists and actresses? All moonlighting in the sex trade (wow, what a thrill). He was going to get nailed; it was going to cost him a small fortune.

Why didn’t Larry and Ellen just sue, sue and sue and sue? Other than the fact that it might turn into a mess with the IRS getting interested and Tom Junior, well, sinking to the bottom that quick. They had to trick him instead, scare him, maybe even for his own good.

So I said I’d do it, all the normal finances, money for train ticket, use of Harold’s room (I still had the key), and then I’d show him around. It was absurd; I was absurd, one more week of hunting him down.

Being in New York had been a draining, worthless, almost pathetic week. I had trouble appreciating it as merely one week. It felt like it had taken place months earlier and had lasted much longer. I was now an all new zombie. I had no desires, no dreams, no freedom; my brain throbbed with medicines that brought me down, down and down until I could die of boredom. I just couldn’t think fast. Once back I felt as if under house arrest.

I dug out my old Nikon F again and took some more pictures to see if this decision had made a mark on me and … some were ok, but some weren’t. I looked like a used car dealer with squinty eyes and big sad lips on one of them—horrible, otherwise I looked kind of nondescript, just … some guy.

I couldn’t figure it out; I went through them constantly; I shot another roll or two and … some were fine, some great, and others well, awful. I still felt like I was walking around with someone else’s face.

I finally put another up, one of the new ones—used the scanner and computer

up the street at school, but as I paced around the apartment, thinking, trying to think, they came at me like a deck of cards again. The particular format didn’t make much sense to me; why did it keep happening, cards and then a portrait that would explode in front of me? I’d watch like I was looking at something real, and then the cascade would begin—very quickly - and they all had my bad shots. They seeped into my brain as though to remind me of some horrible fate awaiting me. It was a well I just fell into; I was all ready to go to New York, again, with a face designed to frighten small children.

Was that the problem? I mean, it’s something to think about. I thought I looked ok, and suddenly I realized some of the time, when the light was right, I looked like a monster.

That’s what madness does, madness and the drugs they give you. Your face gets all mushy and beat-up looking. The face of some poor homeless person, which I’d sort of been a couple of times.

Plus the voices, always voices—why couldn’t one choose which one to hear—this time it was Ellen’s, and it was slowly absorbed by my brain as if I might remember later that it was real. It went on and on…probably part of the reason my memory was so poor.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease—I’d wake in the middle of night: not another disease!

Tuesday morning, I got on the train. I did this with some foreboding—something was going to go wrong, I just knew it. I was sure this guy was an idiot. Train, then the bus and then the rotten apple. I went to Harold’s building, went to the fourth floor, and the key still worked. I called up Larry; I got a secretary; I left a message and the number, then called Harold, just so he’d know. Then I went to sleep, a sleep that lasted about two hours. Then the phone rang—it was Larry, and he told me to come down to his office Wednesday afternoon.

I was right on time. It was a granite building probably built in the thirties. I went up to the eighth floor, and there they were, and yes, there was a door with glass in it and with Gold Lettering: “Larry Scorp & Frederic Selurp Attorneys at Law.” And … he was busy. It had to be tomorrow the secretary said. Great, I spent seven hours traveling, and he’s not available.

With time to kill I grabbed one of the weeklies to see what was happening: bands I’d never heard of, clubs I’d never heard of (I never went to clubs), a few art openings I definitely wasn’t attending and then, finally, the movies. I hate Hollywood films, but there, amidst the trash, was showing The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It was such an obvious choice - I‘d only seen it about twenty times, but not recently. Like, twenty years earlier, on a date had been the last time. Apparently it’s not a good date film. I took some Belgian Girl to it, and she had nothing much to say afterward (plus her English was bad and, actually, I pretty much gave up on her fairly soon after). Oh, I had a car then, and it wouldn’t start. A real evening out.

So, The Treasure of Sierra Madre it was; I scooted down on the subway.

I

was really taken by Bogart’s slow decent into madness as his true greed spills

out of him.

That was me. I seemed ok, but, really, I was nuts. I was sure of it; I was sure that Larry would make a big mistake trusting me. What I wanted to be, of course, was the old prospector, who knew a lot more than he was revealing. Plus, in the end, it was not a tragedy somehow—I’m not sure how. I liked that little touch, that … none of them were fated to this desperate moment except Bogart—could that be true? Is that madness, a fate? Bogart’s madness could have been foretold as the movie opened, you just didn’t quite know how it would be revealed.

Gold.

After that I went back to my little room.

The next day I was again right on time, and this time he had me come right in.

It was a scruffy office, old desk, papers all over the place, a few law books, no pictures on the walls, nothing personal in view.

Larry was wearing your basic dark or even black suit, red tie, clean shaven, black hair a touch overgrown.

He started chattering—he was working on some case, and it was driving him nuts, he didn’t have the right books. Then he started chattering about how many of his clients had not paid their bills yet: “If they’d pay I’d be on easy street.”

“Are you gonna get paid for this one?”

“Well, I got a retainer.”

“Wonderful, what do you want to do?”

“Well, first, establish who these nefarious tenants are in these buildings, what and how they pay, that sort of thing. I’d like to know how much money the son has as well, just personally.”

“Is he still collecting rents, he has been for a few years, all while his father was dying.”

“Good point” “Great, so what do you want from me.”

“To help me trace these people. I want to find something I can bring to any hearing—like Tomas Junior’s failure to run these buildings properly. See, I’m trying to get Mrs. Kresch into a court room, or, scratch that, I want the son to think she will, so he’ll settle. He’s refused since his father died to make any settlement, which is why we’re at this impasse. Apparently Harold sent in an offer. Junior’s counter offer was five grand to settle the whole thing. We’re just hanging in the air. So, it might mean court,

contest the whole thing—it can take years….”

“So, you want to meet the criminals.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s head up to MOMA first, start with Maria, Maria knows everything…”

We took a taxi, and as soon as we got in, he asked: “You fallow basketball?”

“No, not at all, no ball sports.”

“Oh, damn. I used to do a lot of sports betting, but I got cleaned out about a year ago. It was pretty bleak, but I don’t go to Gambler’s Anonymous or anything like that. I can control myself.”

“Are you sure? Like … in general?”

“Ha ha ha … I’m fine…. What’s this girl like anyway?”

“She’s a photographer, that’s her ambition, I guess that’s why she works at MOMA— Jackson Pollack worked there as a janitor so … anything is possible.”

“Oh, is she good looking?”

“Mmm, a little plain, but she knows all these idiots for some reason, Angelina and Nicola, and Nicola knows Tom Junior for sure.”

“How did you find them?”

“Me? I just stumbled in—it was my lucky day—honest, fated for some reason. Tom Junior gave me an invitation to an event and … it all unfolded from there…”

“Can we find him again?”

“He might be hiding out at 107th Street, honest, but you just seem to want to play chicken with him, so … here we are.”

And we were, right at MOMA; we entered the little shop they have there—all the post cards and posters for the world and Larry said: “So which one is Maria.” “None of ‘em—I’ll ask.” I went up to the cash register, and there was a girl there and a guy

behind her, both terribly well dressed, and I asked: “Is Maria in?”

“She’s eating lunch.”

“When’s lunch end?”

“Half hour.”

Larry and I looked at each other. “Oh, we’ll be back. We’re just…wondering about her photography show—a friend wanted to by one.”

“Oh!” they said, ok.

So we went back outside, walked up to 5th Avenue, sort of checked out some of the windows. It was hot. I asked Larry if he’d ever actually bought anything on 5th Avenue.

“No,” he said, but he did do a tour of 57th Street with some girl he’d been seeing. She sort of expected it.

“Cheaper than sports betting,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” was his response.

We walked back, and there was Maria. As I caught her eye, her hand went to her mouth, covering it. “This is Larry Scorp,” I said. “He’s a lawyer, a real lawyer, and we’re sort of still going after Tom Kresche…ok? It’s gonna get a little heavy. Any word from Angelina or Nicola?”

“Angelina’s dead, ok? And Nicola came back the other day and is staying in Brooklyn, that’s where they live. She hates it—it’s awful, ok? Her whole life is awful.— here.” She wrote down an address. “There’s a roof party in Williamsburg—ok? She might show up, otherwise, I know nothing, ok? My friend Linda called to tell me, she was on the phone all day, all she does is go to parties.”

“I looked at Larry. “Ok … thanks.”

“You’re welcome; just don’t tell anybody I gave you that, ok? God only knows what she’ll think up next.”

“Just wondering—how do you know them in the first place?”

“Friend of a friend—they wanted someone to take head shots for them, and I’m a photographer. I got paid fifty dollars each.”

As we walked towards the avenue, I said: “You know, she gave me a false number once just to get rid of me.”

“No it wasn’t —you must have misread it—you want it again?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“It’s a cell, just take it and go. I keep it turned off when I’m at work - I can’t hang out at work.”

“There might not actually be a roof party, or … if there is, god knows who’s really there.”

“Gimme that address, ok?” He said.

“Sure, here it is … good luck.”

“What’s that girl’s last name?”

I thought for a second: “Actually, I don’t know any of their last names. Tom Junior’s I know, that’s it. Are you going solo then?”

“I’d like to, but you’re the one who knows what she looks like…I’ve never set eyes on her.”

“It’s a long taxi ride.”

“I can deal with it—I have a client after all.”

He hailed a cab—I said: “Where should we meet?”

“My office at seven, ok?”

“No, it’s not—way too early—lets say the Cosmo, corner of 2nd and 1st, around ten, if anyone asks you what you’re doing there tell them you collect art.”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” and he jumped into the cab and sped away.

I slowly made my way to the 57th Street subway. I was starting to get the feeling that Larry was a little on the flakey side—should he be going to a roof party in Brooklyn in the hopes of tracking down a witness? It sounded like a big mess; he really wasn’t to be trusted, especially dealing with me. I was … unreliable, this in ratio with my madness, like I could turn around and sell out Larry to the first person who asked, say Ellen or Harold, if they ever turned up. I’d tell them everything. I went back to my room and this time got Harold on the phone. Couldn’t believe it; it had been so surreal staying in the little room leaving messages for everyone involved, but now they were appearing.

“You heard about the counter offer Tom Junior Sent?”

“No, what is it?”

“Five Thousand Dollars to kill all claims.”

“Not very generous.”

“Not at all, we may really have to sue—it will cost a fortune. Plus, you know, all Tom’s skeletons in the closet, they’ll have to fall out.”

“That part sounds fun.”

“If you say so; Ellen was devastated—it just goes on and on, Tom Senior’s sickness, years at his bed side, and now this. It’s crushing; her doctor gave her a sedative … you probably shouldn’t bother her for a bit, we’ll keep you posted.”

“Well, I’m here really just for Larry the Lawyer’s benefit—is that guy trustworthy?”

“What do you mean?”

I explained what had transpired in as even a voice as I couldn’t manage. And Harold said: “Oh … he’s still trying to squeeze him.”

“I guess—I think he’s nuts.”

“Well, keep me posted.”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m heading home by Monday no matter what, just … this party and then out of here.” If I left early enough I’d make class (Chapter 7 Cultural Competence + Guest Speaker). There was a midnight bus to Boston—I could just make it.

“You know, I just spoke to Larry yesterday, he didn’t mention any of this,” he said.

“Yeah, he seems kind of eager, but I guess he’s still after some sort of agreement rather than court. That’s something … I guess….that’s why I think he’s crazy … she worked in the massage parlor—I don’t think that really will help much.”

“Fine, I’ll speak to him Monday.”

“Sure…” and we hung up.

All this meant I had nothing to do. Nothing. I guess I could have gone downtown and cruised around to see if I could bump into any of our “victims,” Nicole, Maria, or just old friends who weren’t old friends at all. But I really couldn’t stand the idea. It was just one of those things; you leave New York, you never want to go back. Like … you’re done. It’s over, like any bad relationship. I just ended up sitting around. Actually I thought about … art. Actually, I wondered: does art exist—ok, ok, I know, it’s just stupid but they said they had art, all of ‘em, accept Larry, and they said it was worth a lot of money, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Worthless art—now there’s a concept; think about all the time spent on making it, and … it’s a loss. Destroy it and you’ve got an official negation—pretty cute—eh?

It popped into my head that I could hit the galleries on Saturday. That might stimulate me. They’d be open or be closed—that wasn’t always the case, I have been thrown out of galleries, the door would be open just a little, so I’d open it and start in and you’d hear, “Nope” and they’d grabbed me and toss me out.

On Saturday it was, more or less, official open house day, everyone invited, and if they were closed, they locked the door. There. Art. Something to do.

In the mean time I got depressed , just down a black hole. Nothing to do; no one to talk too. Just waiting and waiting.

At the same time it was strangely intoxicating, all alone in a giant metropolis, people just squeezed in, millions of people on this little island, and I knew almost none of them. It was times like this, in my past when I lived in New York, when I would shoot down to the Cosmo, hang out and find out if anything was happening … art show or bad poetry and bands or parties. As often as not I’d just sip Vodka Tonics and play pinball for hours.

I was an outcast, always. I see things, I hear things, it all goes round in circles, so it was a long night of mannered voices, platonic dialogues of a low order. I had some big book of Plato that I used to lug around—one of my teachers at the “alternative school” I’d gone to actually told me to go ahead and steal it. No one else really wanted it.

I paced around—so far it was madness without visions; madness without voices.

Maybe I was suddenly ok? I relaxed. I went for a walk. I got a hamburger with fries at some deluxe hamburger place on Broadway. I took it back and wolfed it down, followed with some Benztropine (1mg) and Lithium (900mg). I fell into some void, some midpoint in my madness. It was quiet; the sun setting. Eventually I fell asleep, but that only lasted a couple of hours—I woke with a start. The phone was ringing. I wasn’t sure of where I was or what time it was. I fished out the three dollar watch I bought on my previous trip, and … it was eleven. In the morning or in the evening? I wasn’t sure; holding the phone I just heard a series of clicks.

“Hello? Hello?” No answer. I hung up.

Now, this had happened before, clicks and all. As a matter of fact it was sort of the beginning of New York hell for me. I was getting paranoid anyway, sliding into some gulf, and then, late one night the phone rang. I picked it up, and all they said was: “We know where you live—ha ha ha,” and then hung up. Scared the hell out of me. It was Friday night and on Monday when I went into to work they took me aside and said something happened, just … “one of those things.” Sure, like I knew what that meant, so I told ‘em about the call.

“Thanks,” they said. “We’ll repeat it to the police….”

No problem; I had no idea what was happening. I worked in the library of one of those giant law firms. Horrible place; I hated every minute of it. I drank coffee and filled papers all day. Dull, dull, dull, but it was one of those stupid New York jobs that pays more than it should. Fourteen dollars an hour. My rent (I’d been there for years) was Four hundred and forty a month. I could just live on it.

I went around the library a few times and figured out who was missing. It was the floor supervisor. The other part-time clerk was also missing, but he was part-time so I wasn’t sure if he was missing to or just not working that morning, but I never saw him again either.

It went on—he was still missing, so they both got it? No one would tell me a thing ‘til finally, about two weeks later, the periodical entry clerk (every magazine or newspaper was checked in by him, sounds thrilling—right?) showed me a little blurb in the New York Daily News. Gang raped and robbed and … they got arrested.

They stole her car (besides robbing and raping her) and got caught speeding in it.

The guilty party included the part-time clerk who had also gone missing. He fingered her; The Daily News said she had won the football pool at work, and that’s what they were after.

For some reason the whole thing scared me to death. I suddenly felt … underwater, like everything just slurred around me, voices became think and slow. I was just suddenly somewhere else, and it went downhill from there. I went crazy.

I hoped it wasn’t happening again; I’d felt, oh … removed from everything so far, but I hadn’t felt unsafe, just a little absurd, a little bored, a little irritated. In the van ride, I felt exposed, like one of these idiots really might take me out, just beat me up or something like that.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, and it went on all night. My new visions: big Tom Junior and the guys with the van … at my door, or Larry, that idiot, god only knows what he was mixed up in—just the little details of Manhattan real estate. Two buildings in Chelsea now sky-rocketing in value, like ten or twenty million. Maybe more. A lot of money.

Sometime around dawn I finally got to sleep and then woke at eight, confused once again. Was it dusk or dawn, I had to dig my watch out again. Dawn, eight o’clock, and I had a date with Larry at the Cosmo at ten. Big chance to be cool again. They didn’t really have cool in Maine—I guess guys in Corvettes and sunglasses was the closest they came. Down at the Cosmo it was, I dunno, failures, musicians and art left overs, some not even from the eighties but from the seventies. Dark and smoky (or used to be, they outlawed it) and, oh … lots of leather. I had a leather jacket; it was just a shade too warm for leather, but I wore it anyway. I’d brought it, waiting for my big chance.

I drank down some coffee and then shot downtown. I stopped at a Falafel place to eat something and then slowly walked across to the Cosmo. I was a little early. It was empty. I sat down and tried to decide what to have—I had to have something so I decided on a Rolling Rock. I drank it slow. The bartender was some girl. Blond. The

Cosmo always had female bartenders, just to screw things up.

I was alone, so I looked around. Back when I hung out there, well, I was into art, so we’d keep the place painted. The owner paid for the paint, and we’d paint it and then put our paintings up. Sometimes it looked good, it really did. Other times … oh well. Terrible. Currently it looked terrible, like no one had painted it since I’d left (maybe they hadn’t). Still, there was a mood; it really was a decadent cesspool, some relic from the eighties when the area still choked on artists. Everyone was an artist and a drunk and a drug addict.

They died out, sort of.

In some ways it was a nice bar, no TV, no mirror behind the door, no distractions, and it was cheap. Also, no one ever tried to stop you from drinking. People would pass out on the floor, and one would just step over them. Tawdry is the real word.

But the Cosmo hung on, and the tradition of hanging art sort of lurched forward, stalling out here and there. It just never worked out again; the art world never again came down to the lower eastside looking for geniuses. They went somewhere else, I don’t know where, just … anything goes; if it works, it works. We were now post post-modern, so … contemporary was the thing. That’s it. Let the critics improvise. Plus, me personally, I liked an aesthetic statement with my art. Tricky one, that.

So the Cosmo continued, the end of the line, cheap booze and plenty of it.

It had been months since it had been painted, but there was art, more or less, on the walls. The lights were low; you couldn’t really them or see how filthy the whole place was.

I nursed my Rolling Rock and thought: What is Larry? He seemed … ripe for a post-modern analysis, sources of power, decadence. What idiot thinks attending a roof party with a bunch of out-of-work rockers would lead to the truth, his own personal

enrichment, desire spilling out, the body without organs breathless with dumb desire?

He was a performance art unfolding.

I, on the other hand, was psychological, a painter drifting back and forth in some passive/aggressive bind. One extreme or the other.

It was hard for me to sit there; I wanted to go for a walk, use up a little nervous energy.

The barmaid ignored me—we were still all alone. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might interest her, and back in the days when I was in that damn bar all the time I found the barmaids pretty disinterested in me, like I was beyond the pail somehow, just sort of boring to boot.

Regulars arrived—they knew the barmaid, so they stayed at her end chatting about nothing much. I continued to drink my Rolling Rock as slowly as possible, and eventually, Larry showed up, in a cab no less. He was even wearing a suit. “Ohhh, this place, I remember this place.”

“Spend a lot of time here?”

“No, I came in on a dare; some friends led me over here and said they’d dare me five bucks if I’d go in and order a beer.”

“Did you do it?”

“Oh sure, what the hell—we were doing cocaine, and eventually we all just sat around getting drunk.”

“Cocaine?” ”Well … you know…” There’s something about normal people doing hard drugs that hits me wrong, like…you’re supposed to be nuts before you touch that stuff, but no … lawyers do it.

“What’s with the suit?” I asked.

“Oh, I was working, I work all the time … like, all the time.”

“Sorry to hear it, this one’s a tough job.”

“You’d be surprised…”

“Like, what if she doesn’t show? She gave me a wrong number once; she’d do it again.”

He nodded. “So why did you pick this place?”

“Well, it’s close to the Williamsburg bridge, and, I dunno, I used to hang out here, like regularly. See all that art on the wall?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I used to be the one that put it there. I paint and write, a complete failure, actually … curating here was the culmination of my hopes and dreams. But, it didn’t really work out. I went crazy instead. Sort of a drag. I used to drink Vodka—you know: ‘he liked vodka but vodka didn’t like him.’”

I was becoming conscious of a little voice going, “She is evil, she is sin,” in my head as I glanced at the barmaid. Larry was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention. “She is the depths; she is the reality of your lust and the dead. She is erratic and hateful. She is the end of Rock and Roll, she is your failure in your passivity, drinking only a beer, while she unfolds, the modernist dream spilling it out on the floor; you are obsolete.” Larry thought I was talking and looked at me.

“Sorry, I was just thinking of something.”

“Of course.”

It was all true, she was sin and lust, she was the destruction of your soul and moral stuff, she would ruin your life.

Larry said: “You like her?”

“Oh, her, not really, but they’re sort of a cult. They usually come in with a band,

like … she dates a guitarist, a little notoriety. I’ll be you money; so don’t get hung up on them, they really are nuts, forever sticking they’re breasts in your face while chatting, “Can I get you something?’”

He said: “Oh.” I said: “So that was the only time you came here?”

“Just that once.”

“Well, if this party exists you’ll be meeting a whole bunch of them. It’s one of the attractions of this bar … girls you’ll never actually meet in the real world. They keep them hidden, or … they’re in the crowd at a rock show, not that there’s any rock and roll joints around here these days, all closed. Actually, this place is slated for demolition. It’ll all be gone except for … Brooklyn.”

He said: “Oh.” “You having a drink?”

“Sure.”

I waved to the barmaid, blond and long hair. “Can I get you something?”

Larry ordered a gin and tonic, and I said to her: “Hey, do you know anything about this party?” I showed her the address: “Maria gave it to us—you know Maria?

A photographer.”

“No, I don’t know anything about it?”

“How about that girl who throttled herself doing performance art down on Stanton—this is her lawyer.”

“Oh that, I thought they made it up at first.”

“An urban legend.”

“Yeah sure, but it‘s real.”

“Seems to be.” She turned and without saying anything walked up the bar to

get his J & T. “There you go.”

I said: “Yeah, the dead girl’s name was Angeline, and she has a friend, Nicole.

They both worked at a massage parlor in Chelsea—but it closed up fast when she died—they just… left town.”

“You know Tony?” she asked.

“No.” “He goes out with some girl who does that but … he’s nuts. His girlfriend is in a girl band, they all wear like patent leather bondage outfits, but there’s no place to play. It’s really bleak. Everybody has a day job, a couple were strippers for a while, that might be them; I think they live in some really desolate part of Brooklyn, that might be this party; only one I heard of. Personally, I’m actually thinking of just going back to school. I have three years done—I really should finish up. What do you do?”

I said: “Nothing, I’m on disability. I went crazy, probably from hanging out here.”

“Oh, you used to hang out here?”

“Like, ten years ago. I paint.”

“Oh, sure …”

“But, we’re working on a case right now, real estate swindle, so, we’re hoping to catch up with Nicole, figure she knows how to find the ex-owners of the massage parlor or how to find the quote unquote land lord. It’s kind of complicated.”

“Right,” and she sort of wandered back up the bar—we had used up her attention span.

“How are you disabled?” Larry asked.

“I’m crazy, I told you that—manic depressive with … complications. I have psychotic episodes, like … last time I became convinced that an international crime syndicate was running big trucks with labs in them, and they were kidnapping people on

the street and doing operations on them, but I was too clever for them, and eventually I bought a little Kodak instamatic at Wall-Mart and started taking pictures of them. I’d have them developed onto a CD, and then I‘d go to the Library and use their computers to send out pictures and description to, like …major news organizations. I still hear voices, delusional thinking—it’s fun. I even have visions, flashes of faces; I used to see guns everywhere like, any minute, they might shoot.”

“Should you be here?”

“Not really, they just, well … before, the last time I was here, on behalf of Harold and Ellen, they pestered me and …there were some shows at MOMA I wanted to see so I finally decided … what the hell. They used to let me store my motorcycle, I had a motorcycle, in their garage on 117th Street, that’s worth about $60 a month over five years. A lot of money, I watered the plants instead, so, I thought I should return the favor. And then, well…you called so here we are. About to entrap poor innocent Nicole.

I’m leaving tomorrow no matter what, midnight bus to Boston. I’m just curious to see how it will end.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, it’s just over … me and New York. Time passes, New York is just another delusion. Honest. It isn’t real, it’s like stumbling through a labyrinth. All you have to do is leave, and it all goes away.”

Then I changed the topic: “So, do you usually do your own PI work?”

“Um, sort of. We do a fair amount of criminal work like for people who are really guilty but insist they’re innocent, so … you get used to it, you have to convince them that they’re really guilty. I like cornering them so we can arrange something more intelligent, cut a deal with the judge, that sort of thing. This one just fell into my lap and … we’ll have to sue, it’s just getting too obvious. I have to find Tom Junior just to

explain things to him—it’s gonna be a mess otherwise. He doesn’t seem to have a lawyer either.” He stopped talking and just contemplated his J & T. “I guess we should go.”

Outside we started scanning for a taxi; it took a couple of minutes. We gave them the address. “You know where that is?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

So off we went, over the bridge and then down into some neighborhood made up of tenements. He didn’t seem to be driving around in circles, though I was afraid he’d take us for a ride seeing as we obviously didn’t really know where we were going.

We stopped him at a corner package store, and Larry picked up a 6 pack, so we’d seem genuine, just there for fun. We started moving again and then, finally, he went screeching around a corner and slowed: “What number?” Larry told him the number and, there we were. It was easy. Larry paid and in we went.

It was an old wooden tenement, wood all dried out, doors open, stairs creaking.

We wandered through an apartment that was virtually empty and all opened up, so one could make it to the back stairs that led to the roof. All the doors were wide open to reveal a few chairs, mattresses, piles of cloths. Up the back stairs, there they all were.

Twenty people or so, just milling around, a touch dull. One girl was in her stage costume, not that she was very good looking, but it made for contrast. Other than that it was dull, no Nicole, not yet.

“So, are you hearing voices right now?”

“Well, sort of, just some monologue about the apartment we walked through, sort of imagining them all in patent leather and that empty, dried out apartment. A horrible place to live, and I can hear their voices, like, oh Madge, what have you done ... I can imagine her real name as Madge, not that anyone is called Madge any more, but you know, my little brain picked it up somewhere; I can see them screaming, I can

see them running up the street, I can see machetes … actually, I find the whole thing frightening, like … where are we, some rock and roll hell. It’s even worse than the show where I saw Angelina die. That actually had some small purpose. This was just … whatever; I hear the girl in the patent leather saying over and over again: ‘We love New York,’ and then go through a litany of things she loves about New York, but this is where they live.”

He said: “Oh.” “And the lights are bright, not that there’s many of them just … they burn through the haze.”

“Oh.” “You know, I’m gonna walk up the street and see if I can get a coffee to go— keep your eyes peeled, she’s about 5’5”, wears jeans and a leather jacket—it’s still cool enough for leather, and she has long blond hair, looks like your basic runaway from the Midwest lost in some life she never asked for.”

I walked away; walked downstairs, then up the street. A lot of people were outside sitting on the stoop or in parked cars hanging out. All of them were Spanish. They looked at me like I was crazy, which I was. There were kids still out, a real neighborhood actually. At the corner I spied a Spanish restaurant. I went in and ordered two café con leche, paid and walked back, back up the stairs, and up to the roof. I had a hard time spotting Larry at first but finally spotted him over by the far wall chatting with some losers. He was a friendly guy. I drank my coffee and stared at the sky, looked back at New York. And then Nicole arrived. I walked away so she wouldn’t spot me and then slowly walked over to Larry.

“She’s here,” I said quietly. “Turn around slowly—just as I described.” Then I walked away, back into the shadows. I guess Larry was where the beer was and Nicole

walked over for a beer, so Larry started talking to her. I couldn’t hear, much too far away. More, I didn’t want her to spot me, that would queer everything, so I stood way back from the party. Eventually Larry and Nicole walked to the door—Larry gave me a little nod, and off they went.

Great. Well, I could emerge from the shadows, take a walk over, see if there was anyone I knew, that sort of thing. I was afraid of that. It’s in situations like that that I realize I really have no social skills. I just stood there sipping my second coffee, sort of nodding my head to a few people, but I kept quiet. I guess I acted nuts. I get anxious at such situations, and become rude. I had nothing to say. I didn’t really want to describe what I was doing there or why, just for instance. A wave of depression suddenly washed over me; the whole process of doing something, saying something for instance, seemed insurmountable. I was helpless and lost. Suddenly everything seemed futile, so I said bye and went downstairs and then up the street to the main avenue to see if there were any cabs. It was a strange sensation, just standing there in some ghetto under the streetlights, cars going by but no cabs, no sign of a subway. I walked back and sat down on the stairs, waiting to see if anyone with a car was leaving. It was misty, all the streetlights with a halo around them. A lot of people where sitting on the steps of their apartment building, children crying, music playing off a portable CD player. Somebody came downstairs. I looked over my shoulder and said: “Hey, you driving back to Manhattan by any chance?”

“Sure,” they said. “Can I catch a ride?”

They said: “Sure.”

As I jumped in, one of the girls slid in some rap on the CD (something I knew nothing about) and away we went. We turned around, went up two blacks at which point the driver said: “OK, which way?”

I said: “I’ve never been here before. How did you get here in the first place?”

“Oh, we had Francesca with us, but she wanted to stay cause … you know … but I think we’re lost.”

At the next intersection I told them to hold up a second, walked to the intersection, looked both ways. Back inside I said: “Turn left—there’s more lights there,” which we did. And we took a right on that street, and then a cop came up behind us. We stopped, and he got out, flashed a flashlight all over us: “Where you heading?”

The girl said: “Manhattan—we’re lost, ha ha ha.”

He told us to keep driving straight for, like six blocks, hang a right and…voila, the bridge back to New York City.

She said: “Thanks, can we go now?” He took a quick look at us with the flash light in our eyes, one after the other, and finally said: “Yes you can.”

“See, he thought we were drug addicts—someone must be dealing right around here.” But we followed his directions and as we cruised up Houston, I said they could drop me off wherever.

“Oh, sure,” they said, and pulled right over at 2nd Avenue.

“Ok?” she said.

“Great,” and I hopped out. I was now one whole block from the Cosmo, so I wondered over. I peaked through the front window. Pretty quiet still, and then I walked across town to the Houston entrance for the 1,2,3 train.

It only took me about two hours to get home. Slow trains at night, maintenance crews would clog it up also. I hummed “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by the Velvet Underground the whole way. Once back, I passed out. I was exhausted. Everything floated away.

24 The phone was ringing. Loud. I looked at my watch: 3:30—there was light so it was PM. I picked it up the phone; it was Larry. “Oh, hello, how are you?”

He said: “Jack pot! Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, names, addresses, phone numbers, the whole wad, she had a little notebook, but, um, I was getting up to leave and she said: “You owe me Two-hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Oh, that’s interesting, where does she live?”

“Oh, up the street from that party, a whole bunch of ‘em live there—it’s cheap, like four-hundred a month, and no one else will live there. It’s so awful. Angelina lived there with her.”

“Huh, that’s interesting. Is she really dead?”

“Nicole had a clipping from the Daily News saying she was dead of … mishap.”

“Well, I guess that proves it. They do that, very late on the draw.”

“Apparently she asked Angelina’s parents for money to ship her stuff back— they told her to drop dead. Hey—did you know that she had a kid? She put it up for adoption.”

“Tawdry is the word. Drug addicts…”

“Anyway, I won’t be needing you any more. Sorry but … I’m in business big time.”

“I take it you slept with her…”

“Oh yeah. That was the two-fifty, the info was free.”

“That’ll look good in court.”

“By the way—she thinks you’re a jerk. You do what you have to do. Anyway, I’ll be on the phone tomorrow—first stop, Tom Junior—got his home and cell phone numbers, so it’s looking pretty good.”

“Fine with me, I’m leaving tonight, midnight bus to Boston, then I switch to the train for Maine—leaves me off about a ten minute walk from home.”

“Good for you Bob, I gotta go, nice knowing you”—click.

Time passed pretty slowly; I made up this weird diagram that included all the people involved in this stupid situation. So I did a diagram, like…squeeze Nicole she’ll call Larry; squeeze Larry he’ll go to Harold and … the buck stops with Harold. It passed the time. I hummed more Velvet Underground, “Sunday Morning” and then “I’m Waiting for my Man”—one of the few songs I knew all the words to.

Apparently I was done, so I called the Bus number to find out what were the buses that evening. Oh yeah, 6:30, 9:30, and then 12:30. Fine, I’d leave on the 9:30.

As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to do. I might as well have been sitting in the desert somewhere. I went for a walk. It was boring. I had another bagel, dull. I felt like a giant thumb was pressing down on me, pushing me this way and that. I headed back, cleaned everything up, got my stuff together, and locked up. Finally I went up to Harold’s and banged on his door, and … he was in. I said: “I’m leaving at 9:30, so I’ll need to give you your key back,” to which he said: “Come in, please…”

All was surreal again, the white walls, the white furniture, flowers arranged but almost dead. I had to bite my tongue to act normal, but I saw and heard Harold as though through a film of gauze. A movie outtake—it didn’t quite seem real.

He offered me a drink. “No thanks, I don’t drink.” He sat down. “I’m sorry, but I’ve had other things to tend to this week—business obligations. I haven’t even spoken to Ellen. How are things with Larry?”

I told him all of it, concluding with: “he knows where to find him at least.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, serve him papers or something. But I’m leaving, it’s out of my hands.”

“Fine,” he said but I think he noticed something wasn’t right, like my eyes glowed or my arm twitched just a little as I handed him the key and said: “Say hi to Ellen for me.”

“Yes,” he said. ”She’s not doing quite as well as she might.”

I said, “I think you owe me some money.”

“A check ok?”

“Oh sure.” I didn’t even look at it, just put it in my wallet. I stood up; we shook hands. “Keep in touch, any big developments,” And I left. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. The whole thing was becoming stultifying. I got on the train at 72nd Street, an express to 42nd. Fast. Fun. I no longer cared about their silly fight. I blocked it out.

On the bus I slept, then over to North Station and the train, saving a good fifty dollars over the whole train version, and, I made my class (Chapter Eight: Empowerment and Ethical Issues). Pretty exciting—I half slept through it; my notes where incompressible, and that was my life again. Boring. Doctors the big thrill. I found it difficult to explain what I’d been doing, just that I’d been to New York, and I felt over-stimulated. I was delusional; I had visions. All they could offer was more Prolixion, which would make me even more dopy feeling, more coffee in the morning, or to cool it.

I said I’d cool it, but it didn’t help. Voices, I always heard voices, and it wasn’t until I really went mad, psychotic, that I realized they were just that—voices my brain

thought up. I’d always thought they were connected to something, but they aren’t— they’re some top running out of control as it thrusts images and thoughts through the air. It might as well have been random, actually I think it was. I tried to ignore them, to know that it wasn’t true. Really, they’d drive me nuts, and I’d just collapse in bed, an arm over my eyes. Suicide I’d think; it came like a wave; I’d be immobile. Eventually it would pass, so I’d try getting up and all at once, this monologue, I didn’t make the coffee right, something like that. Banal. Really, I was disturbed. I was nuts—even I knew I was nuts. I drank coffee and paced around, every so often I’d wake up—it just wouldn’t go away. Little daydreams. I’d find diversions, go for a walk, try to write, eat, buy groceries, and then I’d just sit around. TV was dull, my little town was dull, and, actually, I was dull.

Weeks passed, when once again, the phone rang. I picked up the phone, pretty sure it was just one of those roto-dialing things trying to sell me insurance, but no, it was Larry. “Oh sure,” I said, “what’s happening?”

“I got fired. Harold fired me because of that damn whore.”

“Whore?” I said.

“Nicole, for sleeping with her.”

“Oh, I figured that would be a problem.”

“I tracked down Tom Junior because of her helping me out. Big guy too. I sort of explained who I was, and he just said: ‘They’re mine, it was always understood they would be mine, if necessary I’ll fly my mother out from California to say so.’ I said: ‘Oh,’ like who cares, read the law, what an idiot, this whole thing sucks. Anyway, they fired me. I told ‘em about finding Tom Junior and they just shook their heads—‘How would that look in court? You and some hooker?’ They said they’d obviously have to find a lawyer a bit more mature. How about you, any leads?”

“Me? I’ve been morphing.”

“Morphing?”

“Yeah, like…in my mind’s eye I turn into other beings, other people. It happens when I’m really crazy. That’s the problem with meds. It just dulls everything, sort of holds it arm’s length, so it’s there and not there—see? Part of why I became obsessed with what I looked like—I started taking all these pictures with an old Nikon I have and, they all looked different, the lighting was always too precise, I’d look different in each one. I finally came up with a roll that looked ok, I liked ‘em. It seemed to help.”

Larry said: “Oh.” “Yeah, so I haven’t really been thinking about this case, like it’s done, right? It just goes on and on …”

“I sent them a bill, but I haven’t been paid yet. I hope it doesn’t turn into a problem.”

“I made fifty bucks on the deal—I work cheap.”

There was a pause: “So,” I said, “Seen Nicole recently?”

“Don’t do that to me, I did that for the case, ok? It would have taken us months to get all that info some normal way, if ever. You don’t believe me, but it expedited things, right? Didn’t it? That damn Harold, well, that’s why I called—hear from Harold?

Anything?”

“Nope.”

“God, I explain all this stuff to Harold and finish up with telling him we really should go to trial with this. I think we can win. And he says: ‘You got all this from some hooker, right?’ and I said: ‘Most of it,’ and he just says nope, we can’t do that. I’d be implicating myself like … I hired someone to commit a crime. So I said: ‘What would you like us to do?’ ‘You, you’re fired’ ‘If you hear anything give me a call, ok?’” and he hung up.

So that was that, quiet, though I did often answer the phone with some trepidation.

Instead it was my tawdry existence. I paced around a lot; I tried to write; I tried to study; I smoked too many cigarettes. Sometimes I would buy a lottery ticket just so I could day-dream about all the things I’d do with twenty million dollars or a hundred million.

But I had to buy the ticket first; no ticket and I’d just sit around or try to read. It was like having to pay a fee before one could day-dream.

I didn’t think about New York. New York was the opposite. Once upon a time it had seemed like a world of potential, but not anymore. Now it was gritty and awful and even a bit boring. So I didn’t call Harold or Ellen, I didn’t try to find out if something had actually transpired, but finally, inevitable, it all crashed in again.

This time it was Nicole: “Is this Bob?” “Yeah, whose this?”

“Nicole, remember me, New York City?” I could hear traffic in the back ground.

“Sure—what can I do for you?”

“Well, something happened, that old Lady who was sending you around, she collapsed on Wolf’s front door—you know who Wolf is, right?”

“More or less.”

“Well, she pressed all the buzzers until someone let her in, and she was coming up the stairs, I guess, and suddenly collapsed. They had to call an ambulance and everything. Wolf had me tell that guy Thomas what had happened—Wolf just got in his car and left. I was there right after she fell down—I work as a receptionist for him sometimes. That guy Tom just thinks she did it on purpose … to get the police involved.”

“Oh, so you know Tom?” “No, I was just … being a receptionist. Wolf didn’t know what to do.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“Wolf doesn’t know how to get in touch with her or her friends or who she actually is, so I asked Larry, and he wouldn’t. I told him I’d scratch his eyes out if he didn’t give me the number. He wouldn’t, so he gave me your number instead, like you’d know.”

“No, I don’t know anything about it except that Larry got fired off the case. He wanted to sue Tom Junior, and they fired him because he slept with you to get the info.”

“Oh.” “I can give you Harold’s number, but he doesn’t answer much—a little mysterious.”

“Right, well, Wolf said that Tom said that he wanted to sell one of the buildings but he needs that old lady to sign off first.”

“Never happen. Here’s the number—I read it off slowly—I thought the idea of Nicole calling Harold was pretty funny.

“She won’t signe,” I said:”—cause he doesn’t own them and she won’t play pool.”

“God, I hate this—it’s been like this ever since Angelina died. It’s been straight down, just …everything. I hate you and your friend Larry so much you have no idea— I lost my jobs—all of them. You ruined my life.”

“Is that why you gave me that juiced up tonic?”

“Look, I thought you were a jerk, ok? Just some dope. I was just sitting there— I do it a lot, hoping someone might spot me, I act you know, and I thought you were a drag.”

“I bet.”

“Maria got pissed off. She was afraid someone would hear about it, and she’d

get fired. So why did you follow me that day?”

“You mean 10th Street?”

“Yeah, I ah…I do out call sometimes, but even that’s over.”

“Well, I recognized you from Angelina’s, um … death.”

“Right, I swear, New York is one long hallucination sometimes. Of course you were at that show, just part of everything dying all around me—hold on, here comes a cab.” The line went dead. I sat around seeing if she’d call back, but she didn’t.

There was some addiction to the whole thing, trying to think it out—voices attaching themselves to my sorry brain. Nicole was never seen again; Tom Junior capitulates; Ellen had a stroke that left half of her body paralyzed, and Harold withdrew from the whole sorry spectacle. He gave Ellen the number of a real Lawyer. Oh yeah, and Larry got disbarred.

All sounded likely enough; paranoia and madness sent through a spaghetti strainer. Harold dropped dead and Ellen got better.

I don’t know what happened. Every so often I pick up the phone, tempted to call, but I stop myself.

I never heard from any of them again.

Fin

The Schizophrenic Detective by Andrew W. Fenton with paintings by the author Book design by Christopher Benson Type set in Frutiger Copyright Andrew Fenton 2015 Published by The Fisher Press Santa Fe, New Mexico