Steve’s arms shot out reflexively, found the man’s shoulders and shoved him away. The bum fell back against the wall, leaving a long wet smear on the tiles. His ragged suit jacket and the wattles of his throat were webbed with pale stringy vomit that dripped off his chin and made small foul splatters on the floor. His skin was grey, flaccid. It made Ghost think of a pumpkin that had sat too long in his grandmother’s cellar once, waiting for Halloween; when he’d poked it, his finger had punched through the rind and sunk into the soft rotten meat. This man’s skin looked as if it would rupture just as easily. One of his eyes was filmed over with a creamy yellowish cataract. The other eye listed toward the ceiling, watered and seemed about to spill over, then managed to track. When the eye met his, Ghost felt ice tingle along his spine. There was no one home behind that eye.
A wasted claw of a hand came up clutching a Styrofoam cup in which a few coins rattled. Veins stood out on the back of the hand. In the dead light they were as stark and clear as a map of the man’s ruined soul. “Spare change for my li’l girl,” he muttered. His voice caught in his throat, then dragged itself out slow as a bad recording. “My li’l girl’s sick. Gotta catch the mornin’ bus to Jersey.”
Ghost looked at Steve. The understanding passed clearly between them: bullshit. There was no little girl in Jersey, there was nothing waiting for this man except the love at the bottom of a bottle. But the reality of him staggering through the desolate corridors in his vomit-caked coat, with his lone empty eye—that was worse than any sob story. Steve pulled out his wallet; Ghost dug through the pockets of his army jacket. They came up with a dollar each and stuffed the bills into the broken Styrofoam cup.
The bum threw his head back and a weird hooting sound came from his cracked lips. It was not quite a word, not quite a whistle. It reverberated off the tiles and ceilings.
And then the walls and the corridors of the Port Authority seemed to split wide open, and the legions of the hopeless spilled forth.
The bums were everywhere at once, coming from every direction, their eyes fixed on Steve’s wallet and Ghost’s open hands and the crisp bills poking out of the cup. Most of them had their own jingling cups; they shoved them at Steve, at Ghost, and their eyes implored. Their voices rose in a hundred meaningless pleas: cuppa coffee . . . sick baby . . . hungry, mister, I’m hungry. In the end the voices only meant one thing. Give me. You who have, when I have none—give me.
They kept coming. There seemed to be no end to them. Their hands reached for the money and grasped it. A persistent young brother grabbed a handful of Steve’s hair and wouldn’t let go until Steve reared back and punched him full in the face. He got a fistful of snot and ropy saliva for his trouble. As the boy fell away, Steve saw angry red holes in the pale flesh of his outstretched palms: needle marks. He was my age, Steve thought wildly; something in the eyes made him think the kid might have been even younger than twenty-four. But he was already worn out enough to shoot up in the palms of his hands.
Steve found himself flashing on Dawn of the Dead, a movie that had terrified him when he was a kid. He’d seen it again a couple of years ago and been surprised by how funny it really was: Romero’s allegory of zombies roaming a modern mega-mall had escaped him at twelve. But now the original kid-terror flooded back. This was how it would be when the zombies ate you. They weren’t very smart or quick, but there were a lot of them, and they would just keep coming and coming until you couldn’t fight them any more.
Filth-caked nails scraped his flesh. The wallet was torn out of his grasp and dumped on the floor. Steve saw dirty hands shuffling through the trivia of his life. His driver’s license. Ticket stubs from concerts he’d seen. A tattered review of Lost Souls?, his and Ghost’s band, that had been written up in a Raleigh newspaper. Rage exploded like a crimson rocket in his brain. He had worked to get that money; he had worked to have a life, not see it trickle away from him like vomit on a dirty bus-station floor.
He hefted the guitar case—none of them seemed interested in that—and swung it in a wild arc. It connected with flesh, filthy hair, bone. Steve winced as he heard the jangling protest of the strings. He’d hit the first bum in his vomit-caked jacket, the only one they had willingly given money. Try that for a handout, motherfucker. The bum fell to his knees, clutching the back of his skull. Even the blood welling up between his fingers had an unhealthy look, like the watery blood at the bottom of a meat tray. It spattered the dirty floor in large uneven drops.
Ghost was grappling for his backpack. An old woman with skin like spoiled hamburger pulled at one shoulderstrap. The buttons of her flannel shirt had popped open and her shrivelled breasts tumbled out. The nipples were long and leathery as the stems of mushrooms. Her hair was a uniform grayish-yellow mat overlaid with a layer of white gauze which seemed to thicken, to form dense little balls, in several spots. Networks of delicate threads led away from these; dark shapes moved sluggishly within them. Cocoons, he realized sickly. She has cocoons in her hair.
He grabbed the woman by the shoulders and shoved her away. Ghost’s notebooks were in that backpack—the lyrics to every song they had written. Ghost’s eyes met Steve’s, pale blue gone darker with panic.
Then, for no discernible reason, the creeps began to lift their heads and scent the air. A silent alarm seemed to pass among them. One by one they shrank away, sidled along the walls and disappeared like wraiths into the maze of corridors. The money in their Styrofoam cups rustled and jingled. Steve thought of cockroaches scuttling for cover when the kitchen light snaps on. In less than a minute they were all gone.
Steve and Ghost stared at each other, sweating, catching their breaths. Ghost held up a shaky hand. The cocoon lady’s nails had left a long, shallow scratch along the back of it, from his knuckles to the bony knob of his wrist. A moment later they heard heavy, measured footsteps approaching. They edged closer together but did not otherwise react; this was surely the soul of the city itself coming to claim them.
The cop came around the corner all hard-edged and polished and gleaming, stopped at the sight of them, saw Steve’s wallet and its contents scattered on the floor, frowned. His face was broad, Italian-looking, freshly shaved but the beard beneath the skin already showing faintly blue-black. “Help you with something?” he asked, his voice sharp with suspicion.
Steve drew in a long trembling breath and Ghost spoke quickly, before Steve could. Cussing cops was never a good idea, no matter where you were. “I think we got a little lost,” he said. “Could you tell us how to get out of here?”
He was relieved when the cop pointed them in the right direction and Steve bent and scooped up his wallet, then stalked off without a word. Ghost’s brain still ached from the long bus ride and the attack of the homeless people—or the people who lived, perhaps, in Port Authority. Worse than their grasping hands had been the touch of their minds upon his, as many-legged and hungry as mosquitoes. Their raw pain, the stink of their dead dreams. On top of that he hadn’t needed Steve to get himself arrested. But Ghost was used to being the occasional peacemaker between Steve and almost everyone they knew. Steve bristled and Ghost calmed; that was just the way things were.
The sky was already brightening when they came out of the bus terminal. The city soared around them, bathed in a clear lavender light. The first building Ghost saw was an old stone church; the second was a four-storey sex emporium, its neon shimmering pale pink in the dawn. Steve leaned back against the glass doors and began to laugh.
“Good morning, Hell’s Kitchen,” he said.
Washington Square Park was in full regalia, though it was still early afternoon.
There were street musicians of every stripe, rappers clicking fast fingers and rattling heavy gold chains, old hippies with battered guitars and homemade pan pipes and permanent stoned smirks, young hippies singing solemn folk lyrics a capella, even a Dixieland brass band near the great stone arch. There was the savory mustard-chili tang of hot dogs, the harsh smoulder of city exhaust, the woodsy
smell of ganja burning. There were homeboys and Rasta men and hairy-chested drag queens, slumming yuppies and street freaks. There were the folks for whom every day was Hallowe’en, faces painted pale, lips slashed crimson or black, ears and wrists decorated with silver crucifixes, skulls, charms of death and hoodoo. They huddled into their dark clothes, plucked at their dyed, teased, tortured hair, cut their black-rimmed eyes at passersby. There were punks in leather; there were drug dealers chanting the charms of their wares (clean crystal . . . sweetest smoke in the city . . . goooood ice, gooooood blow). There were cops on the beat, cops looking the other way.
And, of course, there were two white boys from North Carolina whose feet had just this morning touched New York City asphalt for the first time.
They had drunk vile coffee from a stand in Times Square, then walked around for a while. They kept losing track of the Empire State Building, which was the only landmark they recognized. The tranquil light of early morning soon gave way to the hustle and shove of the day. The air came alive with shouts, blaring horns, the constant low thrum of the city-machine.
Eventually—as soon as they could stand to go below street level again—they descended into the subway at Penn Station and didn’t get out again until the Washington Square stop. At that point Ghost swore he would never enter a transit station or board any subway in New York City or anywhere else, ever again. It wasn’t the crowds; since Port Authority the only panhandlers they’d seen had been shaking discreet cups or quietly noodling on saxophones. No one else had bothered them. It was the merciless white light in the stations and the bleak garbage-strewn deadliness of the tracks and the great clattering ratcheting roar of the trains. It was hurtling through sections of tunnel where the tracks split in two at the last heartstopping second before you smashed into solid stone. It was the abandoned tunnels that split off like dead universes. The very idea of the trains worming along beneath the city, in their honeycombed burrows, seemed horribly organic.
But topside, he was fine. Ghost found himself liking the stew of sounds and smells that comprised the city, and the colorful variety of the minds that brushed his, and the carnival of Washington Square. Steve stopped to watch the Dixieland band, and Ghost listened to the dipping, soaring brass for several minutes too.
But in his peripheral vision a man was rooting in a garbage can. He tried not to look, but couldn’t help himself as the man pulled out a whole dripping chilidog, brushed flies away, and bit into it.
The man was old and white, with long gray dreadlocks and mummified hands and the universal costume of the drifter, army jacket, baggy pants, Salvation Army shirt that just missed being a rag: an ensemble ready to fade into the background at a moment’s notice. The chilidog was a carnage of ketchup and pickle relish and flaccid meat, the bun limp, sponge-soggy. The man’s face registered more pleasure than distaste. The dog might taste awful, but there was still warm sun on his shoulders and a half-full bottle in his pocket and a goddamn huge party going on right here, right now. His eyes were curiously clear, almost childlike.
But it was garbage, he was eating garbage. The wire trashcan was crammed with ripening refuse. A redolent juice seeped out at the bottom, a distillation of every disgusting fluid in the can, moonshine for bluebottle flies. Ghost felt his mind stretching, trying to accommodate something he had never had to think closely about before. There were poor people in Missing Mile, sure. Most of the old men who played checkers outside the Farmers Hardware store were on some kind of government or military pension. Lots of people got food stamps. But were there people eating out of garbage cans? Were there people so desperate that they would band together and attack you for the change in your pocket?
You bet there are. They’re everywhere. Your life has been just sheltered enough, just sanitized enough, that you didn’t see them. But you can’t get away from it here . . . this city chews up its young and spits them back in your face.
Ghost looked up, startled. He wasn’t sure what had just happened; it felt as if the world, for an instant, had split and then reconverged. As if someone had had the exact same thought as him, at the exact same time.
He saw a young black man leaning on the low concrete wall nearby, also watching the old drifter. The young man was handsome, trendily barbered, dressed in casual but expensive-looking sport clothes. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with little round lenses, carried a radio Walkman in his breast pocket and a copy of Spy tucked under his arm. In his face as he watched the old man chewing was an ineffable sadness, not quite sympathy, not quite pity.
The hearts that would swell with rage back home—if you could call them hearts—to see a black man looking upon a white man with anything resembling pity . . .
(Get outta that garbage, boy)
The man shifted on the wall and looked straight at Ghost, warm mocha eyes meeting startled pale blue. And suddenly Ghost knew many things about this man. He was from a tiny town in south Georgia—Ghost didn’t get the name—and his family had been crushingly poor. Not trash-eating poor . . . but there had been a man in the town who was. Ancient and alone, black as midnight, brains pickled by half a century of rotgut wine. He was no town hobo of the sort people laughed at but looked out for; he had no colorful nickname, no family, no history. He was a smelly old wino who pissed his pants, and most of the whites in town, if they were aware of him at all, called him Hey Boy. As in Hey, Boy, get outta that garbage. As in Hey, Boy, I’m talkin’ to you. As in Hey, Boy, get off my property before I blow your nigger guts to Hell.
And this young man, as a hungry scrawny child in this stagnant backwater of a town, had seen that happen.
Ghost saw the blood exploding through the air, smelled flame and cordite, redneck sweat and the raw sewage odor of Hey Boy’s ruptured, blasted guts. He felt the giddy terror of a child hiding—where?—he couldn’t get it—viewing death up close for the first time, afraid its twin black barrels would swing his way next. He could not move, could not look away from the young man’s calm brown eyes, until Steve touched his shoulder. “Somebody just gave me directions to the club. It’s real near here. You want to go check it out?”
Ghost glanced back over his shoulder as they left the park. The young man was no longer looking at him, and Ghost felt no urge to speak. They had already had the most intimate contact possible; of what use were words?
They crossed a wide traffic-filled avenue and turned east. Ghost wasn’t sure just where the Village began, but the streets seemed to be getting narrower, the window displays more fabulous, the crowds decidedly funkier. People wore silver studs in their noses, delicate hoops through their lips and eyebrows. A boy in a black fishnet shirt had both nipples pierced, with a filigree chain connecting the rings. There were shaved and painted scalps, long snaky braids, leather jackets jangling with zippers and buckles, flowing hippie dresses of gossamer and gauze. The streets of the East Village by day seemed a shrine to mutant fashion.
Steve pulled a joint from his sock, lit up, took a deep drag and passed it to Ghost. Ghost grabbed the burning cigarette and cupped it gingerly between his palms, trying to hide it, expecting a big cop hand to fall on his shoulder at any second. “Are you crazy?”
Steve shook his head, then blew out a giant plume of smoke. “It’s cool. Terry said you could smoke right on the street up here, as long as you’re discreet. He gave me this as a going-away present.”
Terry owned the record store where Steve worked, and was the best-travelled and most worldly of their crowd; also the biggest stoner, so he ought to know. But Ghost could not stretch his definition of discreet to include walking down one of the busiest streets in New York City with a cloud of pot smoke trailing behind. Still . . . He looked thoughtfully at the joint in his hand, then brought it up to his lips and took a cautious toke. The spicy green flavor filled his throat, swirled through his lungs and his brain. New York probably imported every exotic strain of reefer from every country in the world, but Southern homegrown had to beat them all.
A few blocks l
ater the crowds thinned out. The streets here felt older, greyer, somehow more soothing. More like a place where you could actually live. There were little groceries on every block with wooden stands of flowers and produce in front. Ghost smelled ginger and ripe tomatoes, the subtle cool scent of ice, the tang of fresh greens and herbs. Sage, basil, onions, thyme, sweet rosemary and soapy-smelling coriander. As long as he could smell herbs he was happy.
New York, Steve decided, was a city bent upon providing its citizens with plenty of food and information. In other parts of the city there had been hot dog carts everywhere, pizza parlors and cappuccino shops, restaurants serving food from Thailand, Mongolia, Latino-China, and everywhere else in the world; newsstands on every corner carried hundreds of papers, magazines, and often a wide selection of hardcore porn. There were radios and TVs blaring, headlines shrieking. In the first part of the Village Steve had seen more restaurants, comics shops, and several intriguing bookstores he planned to check out later. Here you had the little groceries, though not quite so many restaurants. For information, there were the street vendors.
Steve had started noticing them a while back, though he’d been too busy noticing everything else to pay much attention at first. But here they were more frequent and less obscured by the flow of the crowd. They set up tables or spread out army blankets, then arranged the stuff they wanted to sell and sat down to wait until somebody bought it. There were tables of ratty paperbacks, boxes of old magazines, tie-dyed T-shirts and ugly nylon buttpacks, cheap watches and household appliances laid out on the sidewalk like the leftovers from somebody’s yard sale.
But as they walked farther, the wares started to get a little strange. At first it was just stuff that no one could possibly want, like a box of broken crayon-ends or a shampoo bottle filled with sand. Then they passed a man selling what looked like medical equipment: bedpans in a dusty row, unidentifiable tubes and pouches, some jar-shaped humps covered with a tattered army blanket. In the center of his display was a single artificial leg that had once been painted a fleshy pink. Now the paint was chipped, the limb’s surface webbed with a thousand tiny, grimy cracks. The toeless foot was flat and squared-off, little more than a block of wood. At the top was a nightmarish jumble of straps and braces meant, Steve supposed, to hold the leg onto a body. He could not imagine walking around on such a thing every day.
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