cubes, a fat man two stools down from me came over and put an arm around me as if we were old friends. 'I'm Tommy V.,' he said. 'Something I can do for you?'
I walked on Park Avenue in the Twenties, Third just below Fourteenth Street , Broadway in the high Eighties,Lexington between Forty-seventh and Fiftieth. That's where the street girls were hard at it, decorously turned out in hot pants and peekaboo halters and orange wigs. I talked to dozens of them, and I let them think I was a cop; they wouldn't have believed a denial anyway. I showed Motley's picture around and said he was a man who liked to hurt working girls, and a likely killer. I said he might be a john, or at least play the part of one, but that he fancied himself a pimp and might try to corral an outlaw girl.
A sallow blonde on Third, her dark roots giving her a two-tone hairdo, thought she recognized him.
'Saw him a time ago,' she said. 'Looks but don't buy. One time he's got these questions. What will I do, what won't I do, what do I like, what don't I like.' She made a fist, held it at her crotch, moved it in a pumping motion. 'Jerking me around. Got no time for that, you know?
Time I see him after that, I just walk on by.'
A girl on Broadway, with an overblown body and a Deep South accent, said she'd seen him around, but not lately. Last she'd seen of him he'd gone off with a girl named Bunny. And where was Bunny? She'd gone off somewhere, disappeared, hadn't been around in weeks. 'On some other stroll,' she said. 'Or
maybe something happened.' Like what? She shrugged.
'Anything,' she said. 'You see somebody,' she said, 'and then you don't. And you don't miss them right away, and then you say, 'Hey, what happened to that person?' And nobody knows.' Had she seen Bunny again since she'd gone off with Motley? She thought it over and couldn't say one way or the other. And maybe it hadn't been Motley that Bunny had gone with. The more she thought about it, the vaguer she seemed to get.
Somewhere along the way I managed to get to the midnight meeting at Alanon House, a sort of clubhouse occupying a suite of offices on the third floor of a decaying building on West Forty-sixth Street
. They get a young crowd at that meeting, many of them newly and shakily sober, and a majority having a history of heavy drug use along with alcoholism. The crowd that night was a lot like the people outside, the biggest single difference being the direction they were headed. The ones at the meeting were staying clean and sober, or trying to. The ones out there on the street were slipping off the edge of the world.
I got there a few minutes late. The speaker had gotten as far as her twelfth birthday, by which time she'd been drinking for two years and had just started smoking marijuana. The story went on to include all the popular chemical mood-changers, not excepting IV heroin and cocaine, along with shoplifting, street prostitution, and the black-market sale of her infant son. It took a while to tell but it hadn't taken all that long to live; she was only nineteen now.
The meeting lasted an hour and I stayed until the end. My attention faded after the speaker finished up, and I didn't contribute anything to the discussion, which was ostensibly on the topic of anger. I tuned in now and then when some speaker's anger was voluble enough to break in on my reverie, but for the most part I just let my mind drift and took emotional sanctuary in the meeting. It was a nasty world outside and I'd been seeking out the nastiest part of it for the past few hours, but in here I was just another alcoholic trying to stay sober, same as everyone else, and that made it a very safe place to be.
Then we all stood and said the prayer, and then I went back out into the goddamned streets.
* * *
I slept for around five hours Monday morning and woke up hung over, which didn't seem fair. I'd slopped down quarts of bad coffee and watered Coke and breathed in acres of secondhand smoke, so I don't suppose it was out of the ordinary that I wasn't ready to greet the day like Little Mary Sunshine, but I liked to think I'd given up mornings like this along with the booze. Instead my head ached and my mouth and throat were dry and every minute took three or four minutes to pass.
I swallowed some aspirin, showered and shaved, and went downstairs and around the corner for orange
juice and coffee. When the aspirin and coffee kicked in I walked a few blocks and bought a paper. I carried it back to the Flame and ordered solid food. By the time it came all the physical symptoms of the hangover were gone. I still felt a profound weariness of the spirit, but I would just have to learn to live with that.
The paper didn't do a lot to elevate my outlook. The front-page story was a massacre in Jamaica Heights
, an entire family of Venezuelans shot and stabbed, four adults and six children dead and the house torched, with the fire spreading to a pair of neighboring dwellings. Various evidence seemed to indicate that the deaths were drug-related, which meant, I suppose, that the general public could feel free to shrug it off and the cops wouldn't have to bust their humps trying to solve it.
The news was no more encouraging in the sports pages, with both of theNew York teams losing, the Jets by a lot, the Giants dropping a squeaker to the Eagles. The only good thing about the sports news was that it was trivial; nobody died, and when all was said and done, who really gave a damn who won or lost?
Not I, but then I didn't seem to give a damn about very much. I flipped back to the news pages and read about another drug-related homicide, this one in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn , where someone had used a sawed-off shotgun on a twenty-four-year-old black male with a long record of drug busts.
That didn't elate me either, but I have to admit it disheartened me a little less than the loss to Philadelphia , which hadn't torn me up all that much in the first place.
There was a honey of a story on page 7.
A twenty-two-year-old man named Michael Fitzroy had attended mass at St. Malachy's with his girlfriend. She was an actress with a couple of commercials to her credit, and she had an apartment in Manhattan Plaza , the subsidized housing for actors at Forty-second and Ninth. They were on their way to her place, walking hand in hand down Forty-ninth Street , at about the same time that a woman named Antoinette Cleary decided she'd had enough of life as we know it.
She acted on this decision by opening her window and throwing herself out of it. Her apartment, as luck would have it, was twenty-two stories up, and she picked up speed on the way down according to that formula they teach you in high school physics class, the one nobody remembers. In any event, she was going fast enough at the moment of impact to kill herself, and to do the same for Michael Fitzroy, who got to her predestined spot on the pavement just a second before she did. His girlfriend, one Andrea Dautsch, was uninjured, but the story said she became hysterical. It seemed to me she had every right.
