If Angels Fight

ON DEATH AND THE DEUCE

I
n the last days that the Irish ran Hell’s Kitchen I lived in that tenement neighborhood between the West Side docks and Times Square. An old lady of no charm whatsoever named McCready and called Mother rented furnished studios in an underheated fleabag on Tenth Avenue. Payment was cash only, by the week or month with anonymity guaranteed whether it was desired or not.

Looking out my window on a February morning, I spotted my Silent Partner heading south toward Forty-Second Street. He was already past me, so it was the clothes that caught my attention first. The camel hair overcoat had been mine. The dark gray pants were from the last good suit I had owned. That morning, I’d awakened from a drinking dream and was still savoring the warm, safe feeling that came with realizing it was all a nightmare and that I was sober. The sight of that figure three floors down filled my mouth with the remembered taste of booze. I tried to spit, but was too dry.

Hustlers called Forty-Second the Deuce. My Silent Partner turned on that corner and I willed him not to notice me. Just before heading east, he looked directly at my window. He wore shades but his face was the one I feared seeing most. It was mine. Seeing that made me too jumpy to stay in the twelve-by-fifteen foot room. Reaching behind the bed, I found the place where the wall and floor didn’t join. Inside was my worldly fortune: a slim .25 caliber Beretta and beside it a wad of bills. Extracting six twenties, I stuck the rest in my boots, put on a thick sweater and leather jacket, and went out.

At that hour, nothing much was cooking in Hell’s Kitchen. Two junkies went by, bent double by the wind off the Hudson.

Up the block, a super tossed away the belongings of a drag queen who the week before had gotten cut into bite-size chunks. My Silent Partner was not the kind to go for a casual walk in this weather.

Looking the way he had come, I saw the Club 596 sitting like a bunker at the corner of Forty-Third. The iron grating on the front was ajar but no lights were on inside. As I watched, a guy in a postman’s uniform squeezed out the door and hurried away. I knew that inside the 596, the Westies, last of the Mick gangs—short, crazed and violent—sat in the dark dispensing favors, collecting debts. I also knew what my Silent Partner had been up to.

But I went to breakfast, put the incident to the back of my mind and prepared for my daily session. The rest of my time was a wasteland, but my late afternoons were taken up with Leo Dunn.

He lived in a big apartment house over in the East Sixties. The outside of his building gleamed white. The lobby was polished marble. Upstairs in his apartment, sunlight poured through windows curtained in gold and hit a glass table covered with pieces of silver and crystal. “Kevin, my friend.” Mr. Dunn, tall and white-haired came forward smiling and shook my hand. “How are you? Every time I see you come through this door it gives me the greatest pleasure.”

I sat down on the couch and he sat across the coffee table from me. The first thing I thought to say was, “I had a drinking dream last night. The crowd watched like it was an Olympic event as I poured myself a shot and drank it. Then I realized what I’d done and felt like dirt. I woke up and it was as if a rock had been taken off my head.”

Amused, Dunn nodded his understanding. But dreams were of no great interest to him. So, after pausing to be sure I was through, he drew a breath and was off. “Kevin, you have made the greatest commitment of your life. You stood up and said, ‘Guilty as charged. I am a drunk.’”

Mr. Dunn’s treatment for alcoholics was a talking cure: he talked and I listened. He didn’t just talk: he harangued, he argued like a lawyer, he gave sermons of fire. Gesturing to a closet door, he told me, “That is the record room where we store the evidence of our mistakes. Any booze hound has tales of people he trusted who screwed him over. But has there ever been anyone you knew that used you as badly and that you went back to as often as you have to booze?”

We had been over this material a hundred times in the last couple of weeks. “You’re a bright boy, Kevin, and I wouldn’t repeat myself if I hadn’t learned that it was necessary. We go back to the record room.” Again, he pointed to the door. “We look for evidence of our stupidity.”

For ten years my habit and I had traveled from booze through the drug spectrum and back to booze. Then one morning on the apex of a bender, that fine moment when mortality is left behind and the shakes haven’t started, I found myself standing at a bar reading a New York Post article. It was about some guy called Dunn who treated drunks.

The crash that followed was gruesome. Three days later, I came to, empty, sweat-soaked and terrified, in a room I didn’t remember renting. At first, it seemed that all I owned was the clothes I had been wearing. Gradually, in jacket and jean pockets, stuck in a boot, I discovered the vaguely familiar pistol, the thick roll of bills, and a page torn from the Post. The choice that I saw was clear: either shoot myself or make a call.

My newly sober brain was blank and soft. Mr. Dunn remolded it relentlessly. On the afternoon I am describing he saw my attention wander, clicked a couple of ashtrays together on the table, picked up the gold lighter, and ignited a cigarette with a flourish. “How are you doing, Kevin?”

“OK,” I told him. “Before I forget,” I said and placed five of the twenties from my stash on the table.

He put them in his pocket without counting and said, “Thank you, Kevin.” But when he looked up at me, an old man with pale skin and very blue eyes, he wasn’t smiling. “Any news on a job?” He had never questioned me closely, but I knew that my money bothered Mr. Dunn.

Behind him, the light faded over Madison Avenue. “Not yet,” I said. “The thing is, I don’t need much to get by. Where I’m living is real cheap.” At a hundred a week, Leo Dunn was my main expense. He was also what kept me alive. I recognized him as a real lucky kind of habit.

He went back to a familiar theme. “Kevin,” he said, looking at the smoke from his cigarette. “For years, your addiction was your Silent Partner. When you decided to stop drinking, that was very bad news for him. He’s twisted and corrupt. But he wants to live as much as you do.”

Dunn said, “Your Silent Partner had the best racket in the world, skimming off an increasing share of your life, your happiness. He is not just going to give up and go away. He will try treachery, intimidation, flattery to get you back in harness.”

He paused for a moment and I said, “I saw him today, across the street. He saw me too. He was wearing clothes that used to belong to me.”

“What did he look like, Kevin?” I guess nothing a drunk could say would ever surprise Mr. Dunn.

“Just like me. But at the end of a three week bender.”

“What was he doing when you saw him?” This was asked very softly.

“Coming from a mob bar up the street, the 596 Club. He was trying to borrow money from guys who will whack you just because that’s how they feel at the moment.”

“Kevin,” said Mr. Dunn. “Booze is a vicious, mind-altering substance. It gets us at its mercy by poisoning our minds, making us unable to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t. Are you saying that you had to borrow money?”

I shook my head. Very carefully he asked, “Do you mean you remembered some aspect of your drinking self?”

“Something like that,” I said. But what I felt was a double loss. Not only had my Silent Partner discovered where I lived, but Mr. Dunn didn’t believe what I said. My Partner had broken the perfect rapport between us.

At that point, the lobby called to announce the next client. As Leo Dunn showed me to the door, his eyes searched mine. He wasn’t smiling. “Kevin, you’ve done more than I would have thought possible when you first walked in here. But there’s what they call a dry drunk, someone who has managed to stop drinking but has not reached the state beyond that. I don’t detect involvement in life from you or any real elation. I respect you too much to want to see you as just a dry drunk.”

The next client was dressed like a stockbroker. He avoided looking at my street clothes and face. “Leo,” he said, a little too loudly and too sincerely, “I’m glad to see you.”

And Dunn, having just directed a two hour lecture at me, smiled and was ready to go again.

Outside, it was already dark. On my way across town, I went through Times Square and walked down to the Deuce. It was rush hour. Spanish hustlers in maroon pants, hands jammed in jacket pockets, black hookers in leather mini skirts, stood on corners, all too stoned to know they were freezing to death. Around them, commuters poured down subway stairs and fled for Queens.

Passing the Victoria Hotel, I glanced in at the desk clerk sitting behind bullet-proof glass. I had lived at the Victoria before my final bender. It was where those clothes the Silent Partner was wearing had been abandoned. Without trying to remember all the details, I sensed that it wasn’t wise to go inside and inquire about my property.

Back on my block, I looked up at my bleak little window, dark and unwelcoming. Mother’s was no place to spend an evening. Turning away, I started walking again, probably ate dinner somewhere maybe saw a movie. Without booze, I couldn’t connect with anyone. Mostly, I walked, watched crowds stream out of the Broadway theaters.
A Little Night Music
was playing and
A Moon for the Misbegotten
. Then those rich tourists and nice couples from Westchester hurried into cabs and restaurants and left the streets quite empty.

In Arcade Parade on Broadway, goggle-eyed suit-and-tie johns watched the asses on kids bent over the pinball machines. Down the way, a marquee announced the double bill of COLLEGE-BOUND-BABES and BOUND-TO-PLEASE-GIRLS. Around a corner, a tall guy with a smile like a knife gash chanted, “Got what you need,” like a litany.

Glancing up, I realized we were in front of Sanctuary. Built to be a Methodist church, it had gotten famous in the late ’60s as a disco. In those days, a huge day-glow Satan had loomed above the former altar, limos idled in front, a team of gorillas worked the door.

Now it was dim and dying, a trap for a particular kind of tourist. Inside, Satan flaked off the wall, figures stood in the twilight willing to sell whatever you wanted. I could remember in a hazy way spending my last money there to buy the Beretta. My trajectory on that final drunk, the arc that connected the pistol, the money, the absence of my Silent Partner, wasn’t buried all that deeply inside me. I just didn’t want to look.

At some point that night, the rhythm of the street, the cold logic of the Manhattan grid, took me way West past the live sex shows and into the heart of the Kitchen. On long dirty blocks of tenements, I went past small Mick bars with tiny front windows where lines of drinkers sat like marines and guys in back booths gossiped idly about last week’s whack.

I walked until my hands and feet were numb and I found myself over on Death Avenue. That’s what the Irish of the Kitchen once called Eleventh because of the train tracks that ran there and killed so many of them. Now the trains were gone, the ships whose freight they hauled were gone, the Irish themselves were fast disappearing. Though not born in the Kitchen I identified with them a lot.

On Death, in a block of darkened warehouses, sat the Emerald Green Tavern. It was on a Saturday morning in the dead of night at the Emerald Green that I had found myself in a moment of utter clarity with a pistol and pocket full of money reading a newspaper article about Leo Dunn. I stood for a while remembering that. Then maybe the cold got to me and I went home. My memory there is vague.

What I will never forget is the sight of a ship outlined in green and red lights. I was staring at it and I was intensely cold. Gradually, I realized I was huddled against a pillar of the raised highway near the Hudson piers. One of the last of the cruise ships was docked there and I thought how good it would be to have the money to sail down to the warm weather.

In fact, it would have been good to have any money at all. My worldly wealth was on me, suede boots and no socks, an overcoat and suit and no underwear. In one pocket was a penny, a dime and a quarter—my wealth. In another was a set of standard keys and the gravity knife I’d had since college.

Then I knew why I had stolen the keys and where I was going to get money. And I recognized the state I was in, the brief, brilliant period of clarity at the end of a bender. My past was a wreck, my future held a terrifying crash. With nothing behind me and nothing to live for, I knew no fear and was a god.

With all mortal uncertainty and weakness gone, I was pure spirit as I headed down familiar streets. A block east of Death and north of the Deuce, I looked up at a lighted window on the third floor. I crossed the street, my overcoat open, oblivious to the cold.

Security at Mother’s was based on there being nothing in the building worth taking. Drawing out the keys, I turned the street door lock on my third try and went up the stairs, silently, swiftly. Ancient smells of boiled cabbages and fish, of damp carpet and cigarette smoke and piss, a hundred years of poverty, wafted around me. This was the kind of place where a loser lived, a fool came to rest. Contempt filled me.

Light shone under his door. Finding a key the right shape, I transferred it to my left hand, drew out the knife with my right.

The key went in without a sound. I held my breath and turned it. The lock clicked, the door swung into the miserable room with a bed, a TV on without the sound, a two-burner stove, a table. An all too familiar figure dozed in the only chair shoes off, pants unbuttoned. Sobriety had made him stupid. Not even the opening of the door roused him. The click of the knife in my hand did that.

The eyes focused then widened as the dumb face I had seen in ten thousand morning mirrors registered shock. “I got a little debt I want to collect,” I said and moved for him. Rage swept me, a feeling that I had been robbed of everything: my body, my life. “You took that god-damn money. It’s mine. My plan. My guts. You couldn’t have pulled that scam in a thousand years.”

For an instant, the miserable straight-head in front of me froze in horror. Then shoulder muscles tensed, feet shot out as he tried to roll to the side and go for the .25. But he was slow. My knife slashed and the fool put out his hands.