looking for a client. Booker was a young black man noted for his ability to hustle. He could get you coke, he could get you H, he could get you a wide assortment of pills. He could also get you a gun but nothing big. Pistols, revolvers, little.22's, but after he got himself one he didn't really get into that anymore. He wasn't a pimp, but he was very good with the ladies. He could really talk to their shit, and he was a great listener. Many a night he spent with a girl and listened to her dreams. Even the lowest-down hooker who would do things with men that took his breath away had dreams to tell. Booker listened, he enjoyed listening, it made him feel good when ladies told him their dreams. He loved their shit. Oh, they would hit the numbers, their astrological chart showed that in the coming year a man would love them, they would have a baby, or have kids grow up to be doctors, lawyers, college professors, be on TV; their kids could sing or dance or act or do comedy as good as Richard Pryor, maybe even become another Eddie Murphy.
Blade Booker was waiting for the Swedish Cinema Palace to empty out after the completion of its X-rated film. Many of the cinema lovers would stop here for a drink and a hamburger and in hopes of seeing some pussy. They would straggle in singly, but you could spot them by the abstracted look in their eyes, as if they were pondering an insoluble scientific problem.
Also most of them had a melancholy look on their faces. They were lonely people.
There were hookers all over the place, but Booker had his very own placed in a strategic corner. Men at the bar could see her at a little table that her huge red purse almost covered. She was a blond girl from Duluth, Minnesota, big boned, her blue eyes iced with heroin. Booker had rescued her from a fate worse than death, namely, a life on a farm where the cold winter would chill her tits as hard as boulders. But he was always careful with her. She had a reputation, and he was one of the few who would work with her.
Her name was Kimberly Ansley, and just six years ago she had chopped up her pimp with an ax while he was sleeping. Watch out for girls named Kimberly and Tiffany, Booker always said. She had been arrested and prosecuted, tried and convicted, but convicted only of manslaughter with the defense proving she had numerous bruises and had been 'not responsible' because of her heroin habit. She had been sentenced to a correctional facility, cured, declared sane and released to the streets of New York. There she had taken up residence in the slums around
Greenwich Village, supplied with an apartment in one of the housing projects built by the city that even the poor were fleeing.
Blade Booker and Kimberly were partners. He was half pimp, half roller; he took pride in that distinction. Kimberly would pick up a cineaste in the Times Square Bar, and then lead her customer to a tenement hallway near Ninth Avenue for quick sexual acts. Then Blade would step from the shadows and clunk the man on the head with a New York Police Department blackjack.
They would split the money in the man's wallet, but Blade got the credit cards and jewelry. Not out of greed but because he didn't trust Kimberly's judgment.
The beauty of this was that the man was usually an errant husband reluctant to report the incident to the police and have to answer questions about just what he was doing in a dark hall on Ninth Avenue when his wife was waiting for him in Merrick, Long Island, or Trenton, New Jersey. For safety's sake, both Blade and Kim would simply avoid the Times Square Bar for a week. And Ninth Avenue. They would move to Second Avenue. In a city like New York that was like going to another black hole in the galaxy. That was why Blade Booker loved New York. He was invisible, like The Shadow, The Man with a Thousand Faces. And he was like those insects and birds he saw on the TV public broadcasting channels who changed color to blend with the terrain, the insects who could burrow into the earth to escape predators.
In short, unlike most citizens, Blade Booker felt safe in New York.
On Thursday night the pickings were slim. But Kimberly was beautiful in this light, her blond hair glowing like a halo, her white powdered breasts, moonlike, rising none too shyly out of her green low-cut dress. A gentleman with sly goodhumored charm, only faintly overladen with lust, brought his drink to her table and politely asked her if he could sit down. Blade watched them and wondered at the ironies of the world. Here was this well- dressed man, undoubtedly some kind of hotshot like a lawyer or professor or, who knows, some low-grade politician like a city councilor or state senator, sitting down with an ax murderer, and for dessert would get a bop on the head. And just because of his cock. That was the trouble. A man walked through life with only half a brain because of his cock. It was really too bad. Maybe before he bopped the guy he would let him stick it into Kimberly and get his nuts off and then bop him. He looked like a nice guy, he was really being a gentleman, lighting Kimberly's cigarette, ordering her a drink, not rushing her, though he was obviously dying to get off.
Blade finished his drink when Kim gave him the signal. He saw Kim start to get up, fussing with her red purse, rummaging in it for God knows what.
Blade left the bar and went out into the street. It was a clear night in early spring and the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers and onions frying on the grills of open-air food stands made him hungry, but he could wait until the work was done. He walked up Forty second Street. There were still crowds although it was midnight, and people's faces were colored by the countless neon lights of the rows of cinemas, the giant billboards, the cone shaped glare of hotel searchlights. He loved the walk from Seventh Avenue to Ninth. He entered the hallway and positioned himself in the well. He could step out when Kim embraced her client. He lit a cigarette and took the blackjack out of its holster beneath the jacket.
He could hear them coming into the hall, the door clicking shut, Kim's purse clattering. And then he heard Kim's voice giving the code phrase:
'It's just one flight.' He waited for a couple of minutes before he stepped out of the well and hesitated because he saw such a pretty picture. There was Kim on the first step, legs apart, lovely massive white thighs uncovered and the nice man so well dressed, with his dick out and shoving it into her. Kim seemed to rise for a moment into the air, and then Blade saw with horror that she was still rising, and the steps were rising with her and then he saw above her head the clear sky as if the whole top of the building had been sheared off. He lifted the blackjack to beg, to pray, to give witness, that his life could not be over. All this happened in a fraction of a second.
Cecil Clarkson and Isabel Domaine had come out of a Broadway theater after seeing a charming musical and strolled down to Forty-second Street and Times Square. They were both black, as indeed were a majority of the people to be seen on the streets here, but they were in no way similar to Blade Booker.
Cecil Clarkson was nineteen years of age and took writing courses at the New School for Social Research. Isabel was eighteen and went to every Broadway and off-Broadway play because she loved the theater and hoped to be an actress. They were in love as only teenagers can be, absolutely convinced that they were the only two people in the world. And as they walked up from Seventh Avenue to Eighth the blinding neon signs bathed them in benevolent light; their beauty created a magic around them which shielded them from the wino beggars, the half- crazed drug addicts, the hustlers, the pimps and the would-be muggers. And Cecil was big, obviously a strong young man who looked as if he would kill anybody who even touched Isabel's body.
They stopped at a huge frankfurter and hamburger open air grill and ate alongside the counter; they did not venture inside, where the floor was filthy with discarded paper napkins and paper plates. Cecil drank a beer and Isabel a Pepsi with their hot dogs and hamburgers. They watched the surging humanity that filled the sidewalks even at this late hour. They looked with perfect equanimity at the wave of human flotsam, the dregs of the city, rolling past them, and it never entered their minds that there was any danger. They felt pity for these people who did not have their promise, their future, their present and everlasting bliss. When the wave receded they went back into the street and started the walk from Seventh to Eighth.
Isabel felt the spring air on her face and buried her face in Cecil's shoulder, one hand on his chest, the other caressing his neck. Cecil felt a vaulting tenderness. They were both supremely happy, the young in love as billions and billions of human beings had been before them, living one of the few perfect moments in life. Then suddenly to Cecil's astonishment all the garish red and green lights blotted out and all he could see was the vault of the sky, and then both of them in their perfect bliss dissolved into nothing.
A group of eight tourists visiting New York City for an Easter-week vacation walked down from St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, turned on Forty-second Street and sauntered toward where a forest of neon light beckoned. When they reached Times Square they were disappointed. They had seen it on TV on New Year's Eve, when hundreds of thousands gathered to appear on television and greet the coming New Year.
It was so dirty, there was a carpet of garbage that covered the streets.
The crowd seemed menacing, drunk, drugged, or driven insane by being enclosed by the great towers of
