seat near the back and settled down to get some sleep. I had drunk far too many beers with my brother the night before, and the hot spices from the submarine sandwich were now expanding ominously inside my abdomen and drifting around like that stuff they put in lava lamps. Soon from one end or the other it would begin to seep out.
I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. Through the gap in the seat I could see it was an Indian man-by that I mean a man from India, not an American Indian. 'Can I smoke on this bus?' he asked me.
'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't smoke anymore, so I don't pay much attention to these things.'
'But do you think I can smoke on this bus?' 'I really don't know.'
He was quiet for a few minutes, then his hand was on my shoulder again, not tapping it but resting there. 'I can't find an ashtray,' he said.
'No fooling,' I responded wittily, without opening my eyes. 'Do you think that means we're not allowed to smoke?' 'I don't know. I don't care.'
'But do you think it means we're not allowed to smoke?' 'If you don't take your hand off my shoulder I am going to dribble vomit on it,' I said.
He removed his hand quickly and was silent for perhaps a minute. Then he said, 'Would you help me look for an ashtray?' It was seven in the morning and I was deeply unwell. I jumped up. 'WILL
YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!' I said to him. Two seats back a pair of Norwegian students looked shocked. I gave them a look as if to say, 'And don't you try anything either, you wholesome little shits!' and sank back into my seat. It was going to be a long day.
I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semiconscious sleep in which you incorporate into your dreams the things going on around you-the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamed of the bus plunging over a cliff face, sailing into a void; in my dream, we fell for miles, tumbling through the clouds, peacefully, with just the sound of air whisking past outside, and then the Indian saying to me, 'Do you think it would be all right if I smoked now?'
When I awoke there was drool on my shoulder and a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank gray hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. They were the sort of burps children make to amuse themselves-rich, resonant, basso profundo burps. The woman was completely unselfconscious about it. She would look at me and open her mouth and out would roll a burp. It was amazing. Then she would take a drag of her cigarette and burp a large puff of smoke.
That was amazing too. I glanced behind me. The Indian man was still there, looking miserable.
Seeing me, he started to lean forward to ask a supplementary question, but I stopped him with a raised finger and he sank back. I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn't think of a single thing.
We reached New York in the afternoon. I got a room in a he el near Times Square. The room cost $110 a night and was so small I had to go out into the corridor to turn around. I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things you do in hotel rooms-played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, smelled the little cake of soap in the bathroom, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase-and then wandered out to have a look at the city.
The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apartment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with its own grocery store, drugstore, laundromat and so on. I don't remember the details except that each building was taller than the tallest building in Des Moines and that the total population was something like 50,000--bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn't understand why in such a big, open country as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn't as if this were something temporary, a place to spend a few months while waiting for their ranch house in the suburbs to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds.
In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binoculars and scan the windows of the neighboring buildings. There were hundreds of windows to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television, a separate glimpsed life, another chapter in the endless story of the naked city. What we were looking for, of course, were naked women-and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this resulted in such excited grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed and gone out for the evening by the time we got their windows back in view. Mostly what we saw, however, were other men with binoculars scanning the windows of our building. It was all very strange. This was August 1968. In the background, I remember, the television was filled with news of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and Mayor Daley's men kicking the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a strange time to be young, full of lust and bodily juices.
What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building. Groups of hoody-looking teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison workshop, but they never bothered us, they just stared.
New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to Times Square. New York scared me. I had read so much for so long about murders and street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand out cards that said, 'Thank you for not killing me.' But the only people who assaulted me were panhandlers. There are 36,000
vagrants in New York and in two days of walking around every one of them asked me for money.
Some of them asked twice. People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn't live in an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his stick.
One guy, my favorite, came up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, 'Borrow a dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at 1 percent above prime and we'll meet back here on Thursday to settle?' I wouldn't give him a dollar, of course-I wouldn't give my closest friend a dollar-but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.
Times Square is incredible. You've never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over
