There is other blood. Cats and dogs die bleeding, smashed
under cars. Rats and mice die bleeding, poison opening up
their insides and the blood splattering out. The carcasses decompose. They are thrown in trash cans or kicked in dark corners or swept under parked cars. Chickens are sacrificed in
secret religious rites, sometimes cats. Their necks are slashed
and they are found, bloodless. The blood has been drained
out. There is no trace of it. Children fall and bleed. Their
parents beat them. Women bleed inside or sweating on street-
corners. Blood spurts out when junkies shoot up.
38
The piss sits like a blessing on the neighborhood. It is the
holy seal, the sacramental splendid presence, like God omnipresent. The men piss night and day, against the cars, against the buildings, against the steps, against the doors, against the
garbage cans, against the cement, against the window ledges
and drainpipes and bicycles: against anything standing still:
outside or inside: against the walls of foyers and the walls of
halls and on the staircases inside buildings and behind the
stairwells. Mixed with the smell of the piss is the scent of
human shit, deposited in broken-down parks or in foyers or
behind stairwells and the casual smell of dog shit, spread
everywhere outside, in heaps. The rat shit is hard and dry,
huge droppings in infested buildings, the turds almost as big as
dog turds, but harder, finer, rounder.
The heat beats down on the piss and shit and the coagulated
blood: the heat absorbs the smell and carries it: the heat turns
wet on human skin and the smell sinks in: an urban perfume: a
cosmopolitan stench: the poor on the Lower East Side of New
York.
*
On this block, there is nothing special. It is hot. It stinks. The
men congregate in packs on the hot stoops. It is no cooler at
night. Inside the crowded tenements it is burning, harder to
find air to breathe, so the men live outside, drinking, shooting
up, fights break out like brush fires, radios blare in Spanish,
knives flash, money changes hands, empty bottles are hurled
against walls or steps or cars or into the gutters of the street,
broken glass is underfoot, dazzling, destructive: the men go
inside to fuck or eat at whim: outside they are young, dramatic,
striking, frenetic until the long periods of lethargy set in and
one sees the yellow sallowness of the skin, the swollen eyes
bloodshot and hazed over, the veins icy blue and used up. “ I
got me everything, ” says Juan, my pretty, wired-up lover,
junkie snorting cocaine come to fuck while N and R are in the
kitchen. He shows up wired. I hesitate. Perhaps she wants him.
We are polite this way. “ He wants you, ” N says with her
exquisite courtesy, a formal, passionless, gentle courtesy, graceful and courtly, our code, we have seriously beautiful manners.
There are no doors but we don’t know what they are for
anyway. We have one single mattress on the floor where we
