(published in OPEN CITY MAGAZINE 2002)
Most New Yorkers depend on air-conditioning to survive the summer, unfortunately AC for me always felt, as if a dirty old man from the Arctic who isn’t Santa Claus was breathing down my neck, plus I actually like the heat. I can tolerate anything under 92 with a fan and a couple of cold beers. Anything warmer necessitated multiple baths in my kitchen tub and the drinking countless liters of water, however as July 1999 stretched into its second week of body-sapping heat I had to admit defeat. I needed cold.
Renting a car and driving someplace less tropical was not an option, since the entire coast from Block Island to Cape Hatteras was blanketed by the same oppressive mugginess and the meteorologists forecasted no relief till the end of the week. My bank account held enough money for a small 6000 BTU AC and I staggered out of my apartment with only one purchase on my mind.
The nearest appliance store was on 14th Street. It seemed out of range in the pitiless heat and I stood dazed by the brittle sunlight of East 10th Street, until someone called my name.
Sweat stung my eyes and I blinked several times.
Crazy John was exiting from the Russian Baths. His long white hair was wet and his papery skin was flushed red from the long sit-down in the baths. He walked, as if his feet had no bones.
“You weren’t schvitzing today?” I loved the baths, but not in the summer.
“Why not? It’s so hot inside the steam room that this temperature is almost chilly.” Crazy John was a junkie. Their blood ran cold as snakes. “You should try it.”
“No way.” I was scared of heat implosion. “I need to get cool.”
“Why don’t you go swimming in the East River?” His eyes were the color of mercury.
“The East River?” Every day New Yorkers drive by, over, and under the East River. Its broad tidal stream touches the lives of millions. Lovers wander along its banks, tourist ships cruise its waters, fishermen cast for blues from FDR Park and kayakers shoot the outbound tide off Roosevelt Island, yet since moving to Manhattan in 1975 I recollect anyone ever swimming in that river, except for the Dead End Kids in the movies.
“Sure, there’s a peninsula of rubble on East 20th Street.” Crazy John had millions, but lived on the streets. My uncle Carmine was letting him live for free behind his building. Crazy John said he would pay Carmine a fortune for this favor. Carmine’s wife and I were not so sure.
“I see where you mean.”
”So billions of gallons of sea water flush the river every day. My friends tell me it’s okay. Better than riding all the way to the Rockaways or the Hamptons. Give it a try and let me know. ”
He sauntered off to 1st Avenue without breaking a sweat.
Bathing in the East River was a mad idea, for it had been used it as a sewer for more than a century. The river couldn’t be clean, but I returned to my apartment and changed into shorts and reef-walkers. The AC could wait.
Hitting the street again, I threw a towel over my shoulder and headed east. No one dared to play basketball on the frying pan of Tompkins Square Park. Old men in tank tops listlessly played dominos on East 13th Street, while a pack of children scampered through the spray from a fire hydrant. I resisted succumbing to its temptation and slogged past the Con Ed power station. The river wasn’t far now.
An elevated section of the FDR Drive shaded a cluster of improvised shelters. The inhabitants lay on cardboard boxes, as if they were exhausted from praying for winter. Come January they wouldn’t be so happy about their dreams coming true. Mine was across the access road I ran to the chain-link fence guarding the river from the city.
The water was a cold green plain separating Manhattan from Brooklyn. A tour boat steamed upstream and two jet skis skated across its foaming wake. Their drivers wore wet suits and laughed like they were having a good time. I breathed air scented by the evening tide and hurried to 20th Street.
It was just like Crazy John had said.
Several old-timers basked on a narrow spit of beach extending thirty feet from the stone embankment. Sea gulls perched on the waterlogged stumps of a forgotten pier. The lap of waves dampened the hush of traffic on the FDR and I climbed over a railing to a rock slick with algae. The water emanated a chill and I tested the temperature with my foot. It was cold and I inched into the river. My feet explored the bottom. Anything could be stuck in the sand. Waist-deep was far enough and my body was cooling down from the heat. I would have turned around, except a head popped from the river. It was a man and he wiped the wet from his eyes. The swimmer smiled and sensed my hesitation. “C’mon in, the water’s great.”
“Jamie?” I recognized the voice and the face.
“Way you say that makes me think you thought I was dead.” Jamie stood up like he was tottering on an unsteady perch. He was missing a few teeth and his beard was a grizzled gray, but he was unmistakably alive instead of dead from a series of ODs, fights, and freak outs. “I’m too crazy to die, but I heard you died too. Something about a bike crash in Burma.”
“It was more a near-death experience than the real thing,” I hung my shirt along with my towel on a stump.
>“Hey, those are the worst kind.” Jamie was as wiry as a meth addict’s pit bull.
“Is it really okay?” A flotilla of plastic bags floated past him.
His skin was clear of any rashes. “It ain’t the Riviera, but it’s better than Coney Island with a million people pissing in it.”
“Maybe.” Goose bumps popped on my flesh. It did feel good.
“If the water looks clean and smells clean, then there’s a good chance it won’t kill you.” Jamie swam on his back. “Don’t be a chicken.”
Those words spurred my diving under the water. The cool wet spoke of Labrador and Greenland. Nothing disgusting touched my flesh and I rose from the shallows refreshed by the plunge.
“So what you think?” Jamie raised his arms above his head. The tracks within his arms were on the mend. He almost looked healthy. He examined me too and I said, “Almost as good as Jones Beach.”
“Hey, why shouldn’t it? It’s the ocean. Only don’t swallow any of it?” Jamie glided on his back and the current tugged him away from the shore. He broke free with a frantic flurry of flailing arms and kicking feet. Reaching me, Jamie said, “Damn, it’s dangerous. Exciting too.”
“I have to admit it’s nice swimming in the city.”
“’They’ forbid us from doing it.” His tone made no bones about who ‘they’ were. “A friend of mine dove off the helicopter port. The authorities decided he was a suicide. The fire department and police tried to rescue him. He kept on doing the Australian Crawl. Hah. Even the divers were scared to enter the river. It’s not too bad after you’re used to it.”
“Where you been lately?”
Pedestrians stood by the embankment and gaped at us. It might be another ten years before normal people chanced swimming in the river. They walked away shaking their heads.
“The Bellevue doctors diagnosed me as manic-depressive and I wasn’t in any condition to argue. Upstate I discovered the State was hiding hundreds of madmen and women in these abandoned nut houses. Most of them not really crazy. Only homeless.”
“What do you mean?” I was suspicious of conspiracy theories from avowed maniacs.
“You wonder where those Squeegee men went? No, cause you were too happy with them off the streets.”
Very few New Yorkers missed the hordes of beggars and mumbling madmen, although their near-extinction posed a very sinister mystery. “I figured the Mayor had hired a death squad from Columbia to kill them.”
“He’s too cheap to pay more than the price of a bus ticket.”
An old man shouted from a bike. Jamie waved to him and threaded his way through the debris-strewn bottom to the beach.
“Friend of yours?” I waded to shore, careful not to step on a broken bottle.
“I met Dynamite upstate. Once was a fighter. He took a couple of punches too many.” Jamie picked up a torn tee-shirt.
“You want me to meet him?”
“Dynamite’s a little touchy around strangers.” Jamie motioned for me to stay in the water. “He should be getting help, but they emptied the hospitals, cause the mayor’s running for Senate and can’t piss off those upstate hicks, so you’ll be seeing lots more of my friends.”
“I’ll keep my eyes out for them.”
Jamie waved good-bye and climbed the embankment to the old man. Poseidon had a claim on my soul and I backstroked with the current into the river. I was exhilarated by this simple pleasure, until the wake from a tourist boat filled my mouth with water.
The passengers pointed at me and I imagined their saying I was mad or re-enacting that episode from SEINFELD in which Kramer swam the East River.
“Squares don’t know how good it is.” Jamie yelled from the road.
I saluted him with a raised fist and returned to the decrepit spit of debris. The sun dried my skin in seconds and I sniffed my arm. It smelled clean, but a bath was more than likely not a bad idea. I didn’t buy an AC and the next day the weather returned to normal.
Survivable.
Best was having achieved a feat few New Yorkers could fathom and this exhilaration increased each time my friends’ faces warped with disbelief upon hearing about this exploit. I fought off a grin, since I hadn’t witnessed such boldfaced distaste since the grammar school nuns had condemned my wearing a leather jacket to Mass.
I swam a few of more times in the East River without running into Jamie.
Summer rounded the homestretch into September and his prediction bore fruit. New legions of homeless people begged quarters and harangued passers-by with demented litanies. Most East Villager ignored them in the hopes they would disappear with the change of the season, mostly because the neighborhood wasn’t like it used to be and I couldn’t tell whether it was for the better or worse.
School was back in session and one afternoon I stood on 3rd Avenue in awe of the passing parade of NYU students. The boys wore their hair like boy bands and the girls groomed themselves as if they were seeking employment as a shopping mall mannequin. They watched too much MTV and drank too much Coke. Happiness beamed from their clean faces and their joy infected with a safety of the suburbs.
Tears broached the dikes at the corners of my eyes.
I missed the gap-toothed smiles of the needle-tracked 12th St. whores, the gravity-defying acrobatics of Union Square’s Valium addicts, the ravaged face of William Burroughs shambling through Grand Central, Johnny Thunders falling off his stool, and the constant patter of drug dealers on my corner. My nostalgia was scary, since the bad from those times was so much more memorable than the good.
The traffic light switched to green. Students rushed past the ‘don’t walk’ signal, which I might have obeyed forever, if Jamie’s gravelly voice hijacked me back to the present. “Nothing stays the same.”
“No one said they do.” I turned to face him.
“Remember the way it used to be.” He pointed up 3rd Avenue. “In the parking lots prostitutes worked out of decrepit vans.”
“Now they’re college dorms.”
“Farther along the street were pawnshops, a gay peepshow theater, and a couple of porno parlors.” Jamie looked worse than the last time. His unwashed clothes smelled from a distance.
“Now sushi shops and beer halls for the students.” I breathed through my mouth.
“Shit, the director of TAXI DRIVER filmed at that SRO hotel on 13th Street.” Yellowing bruises discolored his face and he was missing a front tooth. His hand deftly covered his mouth and slipped on a cap to fill the gap. “Man, this neighborhood was fucked up. Junkies, sluts, people down on their luck.”
“Not anymore.” His sidewalk preaching was attracting too much of the wrong attention and I crossed the street.
Jamie followed, speaking with a belligerence better saved for the start of a fight. “I hate these kids. They wear helmets bicycling and condoms for sex. They stare like we didn’t belong in the East Village. It’s them that don’t belong.”
“Perhaps we’re too old.” I led him onto Stuyvesant Street. There were less people on the tiny square.
“The little stick-pussies pretend they’re us.” Jamie snarled at two teenage punks. “They’d survive about one second where I sleep at night.”
They’re kids.” I had been young once.
“if I ran a gang of thieves, pickpockets, conmen, and grifters, I rip these spoiled brats off for every last penny and send them crying to their fat-ass parents.”
The idea of a Fagin gang raping the rich was a psycho-flame not needing any gasoline, but I asked, “Little angry this afternoon, Jamie?”
“Damn right.” His eyes twitched without focus. “I finished a weekend bid in jail.”
“For what?” Knowing him it could have been anything.
“This film crew was tearing branches off a tree blocking their fucking shot. I told them to stop and they ignored me. I punched out the producer and was arrested for trying to save a tree.”
“That’s very green of you.” I like saving the planet too, though not enough to go to jail.
“I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the tree, but I hate film people making believe like the shit they film is the truth.” Jamie was waving his hands in the air to catch imaginary flyballs. “Then I get out and find out they jailed Dynamite. Shit, he ain’t killing people with tobacco or brainwashing people’s minds with advertisements. Only ranting about a fight he might have lost twenty years ago and if that’s a crime, they’d throw all the assholes talking on cellphones in jail too. I wish I had a hockey stick to slapshot them off their ears. I mean who are they talking to anyway? Dynamite’s crazy talk made it safe for straights to speak on phones like they were communicating with Martin Scorsese. Why they have to bust Dynamite? He’s only a drunk. The cops, they don’t care, cause they have orders to protect these fucks’ pretty little world.”
Jamie seized my arm. His fingers bit into my bicep and I pried them loose. It wasn’t easy. “You gotta calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.” Jamie spun around, as if a sudden spurt of vertigo might shift the time twenty years into the past.
“Then don’t calm down.”
“Calm, not calm.” Jamie staggered to the fence around a weedy garden. “You gotta remember why this ain’t how it was. Why nothing is the same it was after the night they took Hakkim away.”
“Hakkim?”
“You remember Hakkim?”
“How could I forget?” His sanity depended on my answer.
“And the night they took him away?”
“We were at the Horseshoe Bar on Avenue B.”
“Good, you haven’t forgotten.” He stood up straight. “Sorry, I lost it, but I get a little crazy, if my blood sugar gets low. They still have egg creams at the Gem Spa?”
A family of Pakistani might have taken over the newsstand, but the recipe was as old as the neighborhood. “Same as ever.” “I drink one of those and I’ll be good. You have money?”
A warning accompanied my two dollars. “You go crazy and you’re on your own.”
“Hey, I’m just having an egg cream.” The evaporation of his rage left him a fragile shell. “You mind coming with me?”
“What are friends for?” I walked him to the corner of St. Mark’s.
“Good to see something’s still the same.” He turned and said, “Do me a favor.”
“What?” I hoped he wasn’t thinking about robbing the Gem Spa.
“For once it’d be nice for someone to wait around, instead of running away.” He almost sounded like a runaway. “Can you do me that solid?”
“Hurry up.” While I didn’t owe him any favors, I couldn’t see refusing this small boon. I waved him inside and examined the street to recall what else had been here twenty years ago than the corner newsstand. In truth very little. The St. Mark’s Cinema was a Gap, the Orchida serving pizza and liter beers had been replaced by an Italian restaurant, the Baths were now Kim’s Video and those were only places.
Faces were also missing.
Steven Pines OD, Carol Smith OD, Johnny Thunders OD, Clover Nolan disappeared into East Berlin, Klaus Nomi and Steve Brown of AIDS. Thousands more moved out to regular lives in the suburbs and hundreds left for LA dazed by the promise of stardom.
I had gone nowhere.
My apartment on East 10th Street had been my home since 1977.
>Back then East Village resembled ancient Rome a week after the Huns had sacked the city. Apartment buildings were abandoned by indebted landlords. Other tenements had been torched for insurance and the rest were rattraps overrun by cockroaches with buckling walls and no heat. The Ninth Precinct had unofficially declared east of 1st Avenue a ‘no-go’ zone and thieves, whores, chicken-hawks, hustlers, rapists, scammers, junkies and deviants contested our right to live in the East Village. It was dangerous, but my hillbilly girlfriend from West Virginia loved the album cover pose of the New York Dolls in front of the Gem Spa and we weren’t the only ones. This was the center of the universe for punks, musicians, artists, runaways, B-grade models, painters, dancers, actors, and sculptors repopulating the burnt-out neighborhood.
It didn’t last long.
Nowadays the politicians, the cops, the shop owners, and the nouveau-riche claim responsibility for the East Village’s rebirth, however the improvement was determined by one criminal’s absence and if anyone tells you different, it’s because they never met Hakkim.
>A scumbag like him comes around once in a generation.
July 1, 1977 was not a day for moving. It was hot, but my hillbilly girlfriend was eager to start our new life and we loaded five boxes crammed with books, clothing, stereo, and a black-and-white TV into a taxi for the cross-town trip.
The driver emphatically refused to go any farther than 1st Avenue.
>We lost the argument and unloaded our stuff onto the sidewalk.
A flurry of near-naked children played in the spray from a hydrant, their parents lounged on the steps, and old men played dominoes on milk crates. This rendition of a Jacob Riis photo was why my girlfriend and I wanted to move here and I kissed her. “Guess we’re home.”
“No, home is upstairs.” She beamed and lifted a box. I tried to manage the other four. One toppled onto the sidewalk. Two scrawny kids offered to help and my girlfriend whispered, “Can we trust them?”
“We let them help and no one will think we’re stuck-up white people trying to evict them from their neighborhood?”
I handed them each a dollar and she frowned in disapproval of my bride. The kids joked about us being Mr. And Mrs. Opie, then fell silent at the door to our new address. A pockmarked junkie lay slumped before the door and the taller kid said, “That’s George. He ain’t dead, just fucked up.”
I nudged the comatose junkie with my foot.
As he slumped from the doorway, an enraged voice shouted, “Who the fuck are you to kick George?”
The two kids dropped the boxes and ran toward 1st Avenue. The kids in the spray of the fire hydrant scurried to their parents, as a bare-chested black man crossed the street. He wore jean shorts too tight for his muscular build and his eyes bellowed with yellow fury. This was not a joke.
>My girlfriend stood behind me and I said, “I didn’t kick him.”
“You callin’ me a liar, you white piece of shit?” he snarled from the bottom of the steps.
“I’m sorry.” I couldn’t look him the eyes.
“Too late for sorrys. You’re fucked.” The veins on his neck pulsed with thick throbs of blood, as he clomped up the steps in his army boots. “I’m gonna to kick your ass.”
Countless scraps with Southie boys had taught me the value of not fighting fair and I threw the boxes at his chest. Their weight knocked our neighborhood greeter off balance and his body slammed onto the sidewalk. The crack of his head on the pavement echoed off the opposite building. He didn’t move and a trickle of blood seeped from under his head. The street grew very quiet.
George rose from his slumber and stared at his friend. “Hakkim, what you done to Hakkim? You fucked yourself good. Hakkim gonna come for you and your little girlfriend. Take your clothes, TV, jewelry and fuck her.”
Anyone stupid enough to threaten you without throwing the first blow deserved a beating and I kicked him in the head. My girlfriend stopped me before I hospitalized him. “We better leave before the police come.”
I carried our boxes to our third-floor flat.
That night I lay awake on the futon waiting for Hakkim’s revenge.
A little past 3AM my girlfriend lulled me to sleep. “Nothing is going to happen tonight.”
Birds singing in the alley woke us and we made love on a dusty futon. We took a bath in the kitchen tub. She washed me and I dried her. We made love again with the sun streaming into the apartment. When I went to buy groceries, the domino players across the street greeted me with a wave. Hakkim appeared that afternoon sporting a stained head bandage and George possessing a black eye and a swollen cheek. Their eyes followed me, but neither man tried to attack me that night or any other.
Their unexpected leniency didn’t curtail their reign of terror against the neighborhood. Two models, Valda and Mary Beth, moved into an apartment across the street. The two models heeded my warnings about Hakkim and installed theft-proof grills on the windows.
For several weeks they were spared the unwelcome wagon treatment, but only because Hakkim had been busy elsewhere.
One night they returned home to discover Hakkim had chopped through the walls, stolen their money, defecated on their beds, and threw their clothes into the street. They moved out the next morning.
My friend, Kurt, devised the unusual strategy of leaving his door unlocked.
“I have nothing worth stealing.” He upped this security measure by refusing to clean the apartment, throwing pizza rinds onto the growing pyramid of trash in the corner. “That’s all I have and, if anyone wants it, they can have it.”
A lack of cleanliness was meaningless to a criminal so far removed from godliness as Hakkim and one day I spotted him wearing a jacket Kurt had buried under a pile of Chinese take-out boxes. Observing my horror, Hakkim warned ominously, “I been waitin’ for you. Waitin’ real patient for a piece of your girlfriend too.”
After hearing of Hakkim’s threat, my hillbilly girlfriend thrust the Village Voice in my chest. The weekly was folded to the APARTMENT FOR RENT section and she didn’t mince words. “Find us an apartment quick. I don’t care where as long as it’s not East 10th Street.”
I called the landlord of a one-bedroom in Grammercy Park.
It was available and my girlfriend said, “Go over and sign the lease.”
“Right away.” Our experiment with urban pioneering was nearly at an end.
No one on 10th Street was strange, yet I’d witnessed enough weird shit in one month and I walked to hail a taxi on 1st Avenue expectin the worst.
Loud shouting rang from the corner.
Hakkim and another junkie were arguing about the number of apartments they had vandalized and robbed. Hakkim saw me. My eyes narrowed and he laughed, “You gonna throw down on me? You a punk bitch same as the rest of ‘em. I own you all.”
It was two-on-one. Almost fair odds. I snatched a two-by-four out of the trash and charged after Hakkim. He scrambled between two tightly parked cars and I swung at his head. He ducked under the killing blow and stumbled into the avenue. His escape was cut off by a Daily News truck. Its fender sent Hakkim flying fifty feet in the air. He landed on the other side of the street, a bone audibly snapping, and his body tumbled to rest. The other junkie stared at him sprawled on the pavement.
I expected him to blame me for causing this terrible accident.
Instead he rifled through Hakkim’s pockets and cried out with joy upon discovering several glassine packets of dope, then ran east spreading the news that Hakkim was dead.
Long-time residents emerged their apartments and stood over the fallen thief. Only the untimely arrival of a cop car from the Ninth Precinct stopped their revenge. The crowd begged the police to leave the scene. The officers apologized, “Sorry, we have a job. For him as much as you.”
People swore at the cops, as an ambulance carted him to Bellevue, but no one was afraid to pray aloud for their tormentor’s death and that evening people walked on the block with newly purchased TVs, radios, and the stereos. Stuff they wouldn’t buy as long as Hakkim controlled the streets.
“You want to leave?” I asked my girlfriend. The sun was setting in an orange sky. Children were laughing beside an ice cream. She tucked her arm around my waist. “If he’s gone, then we’re still home. You want vanilla or chocolate?”
“Both.”
Flowers sprouted in the beaten ground underneath the trees. Supers swept the sidewalks and music sounded on the street. This miracle’s lasting forever was too much to ask from a place so beyond the pale of civilization as East Village.
Two weeks later I was sitting on the stoep with my upstairs neighbor and his face went white. He had seen a ghost. God might have been above saving his only soon, but turning around I couldn’t make any sense of his sparing Hakkim. The junkie was hobbling down the sidewalk on crutches. His admiring coterie toasted his resurrection by ripping the flowers out of a recently planted garden.
“Hey, you motherfuckers.” Hakkim waved a clump of roots over his head. ”Get ready for a Christmas in the springtime, cuz I been hearin’ you bought a lot of shit for me.”
Everyone shirked his gaze and I shook my head. “I have to move.”
When I broke the news to my girlfriend, she started crying. She wasn’t a baby, but believed Hakkim was coming for her. I did too and took out my five-shot revolver from the closet. It was hardly the most accurate weapon in the world, but if I could get within ten feet of Hakkim, he was a dead man.
Night fell slowly during the first hours of my hunt.
Hakkim wasn’t at Brownie’s or the East Village Artist’s Club on 9th or at any of the shooting galleries on 4th.
I ran into Jamie Parker at the Horseshoe Bar on Avenue B. He pointed to a group of passing Puerto Ricans. “They’re gonna to find Hakkim way before you. He ripped off their bruja. This fucked with their juju or some shit, so have a drink and let them commit murder for you.”
Hunting someone in hot blood gives a man a thirst. I drank a few beers. My mind imaged Hakkim on the ground before me. The gun in my hand. My finger on the trigger. Jamie sensed the rising tide of vengeance and ordered me a shot of whiskey. I pushed away the shot glass. “I need air.”
“Don’t go far.”
I stepped outside. The air was still and the streetlights black. Someone had knocked them out. Running feet slapped against the pavement. It was George. No one was catching the little junkie.
“Who was that?” Jamie exited from the bar.
“Fucking George. Hakkim can’t be far behind.” My hand slipped inside my jacket to the handle of the revolver.
“Help me. Please help me.” Hakkim wobbled along the street on his crutches. “They gonna kill me. Help.”
“Someone call the police.” A gang of Puerto Ricans mocked him.
“Help me.”
Plenty of people were on the street and lots more watching from the windows.
No one answered Hakkim and I tried to cross the street to kick him off his feet.
“This doesn’t concern you.” Jamie restrained me.
>He was right and I watched, while the terror of East 10th Street swung a crutch at four young barrio toughs. They were joined by six more kids carrying pipes.
“Help me for God’s sake.” Hakkim screamed with his head to heaven.
A teenager wearing a black satin shirt mercilessly asked the onlookers, “Anyone want to save Hakkim’s ass?”
The people in the windows shut them. Those on the streets walked away. The courts might accuse us of being accessories to murder, but that night we were a jury giving no other sentence than thumbs down and none of us lost a night’s sleep about out verdict. Not that night or any other.
Jamie emerged from the Gem Spa and finished the egg cream with one long suck. “Damn, that was as good as it ever was.”
“Glad to hear it?” I stepped aside for a quartet of retro punks dressed in new leather. They bumped into me as if to show they were tough.
“Watch who you bump into.” Jamie’s eyes locked on them and they ran off like rats with their tails on fire. He tossed the empty egg cream into the overflowing trash bin. “Punks.”
“Jamie, I didn’t need your help.”
“Didn’t say you did, just my way of saying thanks for not walking away while I was in the store.”
“Jamie, you be careful.” I had someplace to go.
“That might be asking too much?” Reacting to my facial expression, he added, “Don’t worry, you ain’t seen the last of me yet.”
To prove his statement, Jamie strolled across the avenue, daring the traffic to hit him. A cement truck lurched to a screeching halt and he yelled, “See, I’m invulnerable?”
Reaching the other side of the avenue, Jamie stopped to speak with a fat punk girl on the sidewalk. He must have told her a funny line, for she grinned broadly. Jamie extended his hand to help her up. They vanished into the crowd of college students. He was lucky with girls, although it was the luck no one wanted anymore.
In the following weeks I expected to see Jamie again, except he was nowhere to be seen. He might be living in a squat with the fat punk girl. More likely he had lost his temper and the police had thrown him in jail. If not, I hoped he left town and whenever I went to church on 14th Street, I lit a candle for Jamie.
Maybe he’ll return, after he has rested or the neighborhood reverts to its old self. It’s only a warning, because they can’t keep a devil like Hakkim in Hell until Judgment Day especially in New York.
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