The South Bronx. Fort Apache. The pits. Chubby wandered the humid streets like the last survivor of World War Three. Human shadows shifted along brick walls like rats. Building entrances like one-way tickets. Latin music sifted through the air high above his head. Chubby laughed, kicking a can into the gutter. A man in a flowered beige shirt and a denim beach hat passed him on the street. He called out something in Spanish and three more men strolled out of a candy store. The four of them followed Chubby for two blocks, until Chubby turned around, thrust his sword at them, laughing, and ran like hell for the safety of a bar.

"Tommy."

"Hey, Chub."

"Come an' get me."

"What?"

"Come an' get me. I'm in a bar in a very bad neighborhood."

"Whatta you talkin' about?" Tommy stood up and shut off the TV. "Chubby, where the fuck are you?"

"Sweetheart"—Chubby leaned out of the phone booth and smiled at a heavily mascaraed woman in a blond wig at the end of the bar—"sweetheart, where am I?"

She said something in Spanish to three people sitting next to her. They leaned back from their barstools and stared at him.

"Hey, where am I?" Chubby repeated.

"You lost." They all laughed. Chubby looked out over the sky-blue-painted pocked plaster walls of the room.

"They won't tell me, Tom." Chubby laughed. "Oh shit," he sighed.

"Who won't tell you?" Tommy passed the living room, the white cord of the phone trailing him like a tail.

"I dunno." Chubby picked his nose. "I'm somewhere aroun' a Hunnert Thirty-fifth Street, I think."

"Just stay there!" Tommy shouted. "Don't move!" Chubby froze like a statue, then burst out laughing again.

Tommy hung up, ran into the kitchen, grabbed a long steak knife, slipped into his pants and ran from the apartment in his bare feet.

Chubby sat down at the red and white Formica bar and lit a cigarette. Everybody at the bar stared at him. A loud pachanga played on the juke box. Chubby got up, one hand flat on his gut, the other raised at a right angle in the air, and cha-cha'ed into the street. He cha-cha'ed for two blocks down 172nd Street to Vyse Avenue before a forearm whipped around his throat, arching him backward. A mustached face came out of the darkness in front of him. The black barrel of a Saturday Night Special was shoved into his mouth.

"Ssh!" The man with the gun put a finger to his lips. "Just suck on it, like a tit." Chubby's lips formed a pink, fleshy O around the gun. He wasn't scared, just curious. Three men led him into a small hallway.

"Lay down." The gun was held in his mouth as he slowly lay back on a rolling wave of cracked, warped mosaic tile. As the three of them quickly searched his pockets, as he calmly sucked on the gun, as he stared up at the ornate brown plaster ceiling with its dim yellowish solitary light bulb, he thought for the first time in forty years of the time he had his tonsils taken out; sitting on his mother's lap, the doctor working without an anesthetic, cutting and yanking like a dentist, not able to scream, the sharp burning singeing pain like a starving rat in his throat, his mother's hands wrapped around his body, the doctor yelling at her to stop shaking her leg, the blood like a bib on his chest...