A Smuggler's Bible by Joseph McElroy

Author:Joseph McElroy [McElroy, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780881841466
Google: xr5uQgAACAAJ
Amazon: 158567351X
Publisher: Overlook Books
Published: 1986-05-14T14:00:00+00:00

Right after my exodus, I wrote Duke and Mary I’d taken a room in a Manhattan YMCA. Those first few days I walked up and down Fourth Avenue looking at second-hand bookshops. I met two girls from Cooper Union in an automat. I believed I was casing New York, judging it. But then, beset by noise and sticky-footed on the vast map of human Streets, I decided not to persist in being my own spiritual mayor—and instead elected to let the city run me.

Some ten days after I arrived, I found a letter from Duke waiting for me at the Y one night. I went up to my room, intending to read the letter. But when I got there I found I was afraid to open it. I thought that if I opened the envelope, Duke’s words would rise out like a genie and laugh at me. What was my honesty worth, when I now said to myself that I couldn’t stand being laughed at? I left the letter on my bedtable and left the room and left the Y. And suddenly I was running.

I ran for blocks, ran round clusters of people at Street corners, spurted past long, lighted store windows, until I found myself at Forty-second Street and Broadway. I thought I would take a subway uptown, and I went down the stairs and made for the turnstiles. But then I stopped, and somebody pushed me away from the entrance to a turnstile. I stopped because I suddenly realized I really wanted to know what Duke had said in the letter.

And so I turned around and walked for the stairs. But before I reached the stairs—the stairs out to the northwest corner of Broadway and Forty-second—I passed through a fascinating underground complex of cluttered stands. I was vaguely aware of pop music. For sale were newspapers, paperbacks, jumbo hot dogs, papaya juice, jiffy-booth snapshots (four for a quarter), and pistol games under glass. A couple of signs advertised “KING KORN STAMPS.” Adrift in the passage stood a stubby old man in a greasy white apron. People veered by him as they raced for the stairs. Hard light cast upon his baggy face a gray-gold sheen. He was smiling, puzzled.

Eyes sharply aimed—but not at anything near him—he seemed to be considering the song some loudspeaker poured round us. A very young tenor was crying through the electronic glucose of an organ:

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