Me, too. I’d soon and suddenly lived quite a while in that jail-and-pedestal of the zip code 10014. I’d begun writing one slim story that became a novella, soon almost a novel and eventually a huge tome, the kind it would be easy never to feel qualified to finish. The kind that was fun to discuss but perhaps impossible to sell. But, what the hell, I could also now use chopsticks like some Chinese hit man, eating on the run. I recognized eight hundred people on sight—including my hardworking neighbors and our lady of the dry cleaning: “Nina, how goes it?” Robert said we could learn from her and called Nina “Fabulous, a sort of unicorn boarding unrecognized in our Claremont stable full of rental plugs and carriage horses.”

I knew all Vermeers in hiking-distance and on terms most intimate; I lived on a first name-basis with those Dutch paintings’ times of afternoon light—each highlight brushstroke, a particular if minor friend. By now I “used” the Met Museum; I’d learned to go and look at just one picture for forty minutes, not simply gorge on two thousand images for three tourist seconds apiece.

I had endeared myself to the immense emotional Hispanic family next-door. The week after I moved in, I—from my fourth-floor window—spied a cop about to ticket then tow the neighboring sons’ double-parked (hot?) hotrod; I found myself banging on their door, yelling, ‘Quick, cop, goin’ git your car, man! Queek!” Dash made, ticket eluded by nanoseconds as our whole floor watched from balconies, the community closed around me, “tight.” I might look white and set and snide, but I had proved myself “all right.”

We, in this poor folks’ building, agreed to be similar. Our conversations in the barely moving elevator crossed all language barriers to indicate heartfelt exhaustion at the end of long long workdays. When needed, everything essential could be mimed. A palm placed to the lower spine, a rotation of neck and rolling of eyes, the universal sign for Alienated Labor. Complaints about hard work, terrible cold or heat, always drew a nod, a smile, a shaken head. We knew to hate The Law even more concentratedly and personally than The Law yet hated us. It gave you preparation time for Justice’s incoming mischief at your own expense.

The Night of the Angels

nknowns, we would gather at Robert’s to perform-reveal our celestial attempts. It was July Fourth, 1984; I remember this because of the fireworks our neighbors kept setting off with such scary regularity. Our City seemed even more than usually a war zone, but a comic one and safer for that. New York summers are so underrated. You get to throw your windows open. It’s too hot even for thieves to work at their brisk autumn-winter pace. The streets are less crowded and those left in town seem to have more time and emotion, and to wear fewer clothes.