Zero db by Madison Smartt Bell

Author:Madison Smartt Bell [Bell, Madison Smartt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3548-5
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

INY

ALL OVER THE New York Post, people are starting to get involved. I’m always seeing the headlines—

IRT RIDERS CAPTURE TRAIN BANDIT,HOLD TIL COPS ARRIVE

&

WOMAN KO’S ATTACKER WITH BRICK

or

CITIZEN CROWD NABSTIMES SQUARE MUGGER

“I really, can’t believe it,” Patrolman Krepacki, a native of Greenpoint, was quoted as saying. “Twenty years on the force, I didn’t see anything like this.” Things are looking up in the city. The Post proudly reports the passage of a tough new gun law in Albany. Death by violence will now decline. The millennium will continue on page 6. Also, I personally expect, peonies are going to start sprouting up in the cracks in the sidewalk on Delancey Street, and everything is going to get real nice, real soon. The other day I went to Kodak in Cooper Square to pick up some film stock for a friend. I put the film in my shoulder bag and went to see a double feature on Second Avenue. When the movies were over I was hungry and went over to Ray’s on Prince Street. I ate an Italian sausage with green peppers and grease baked in pizza dough. They call this a SoHo Roll, for some reason I don’t know, and it cost $1.65. Anyway I didn’t feel hungry anymore after I had eaten it all. I went outside and began walking across Prince Street through the garbage and broken glass. It was late and everything was quiet except for the bass line shaking the steel door of the after-hours club by the corner of Elizabeth. Across the street the beggars were sleeping sweetly in the mouth of a burned-out building that the city was going to seal five years ago. Everything was as it should be or usually is. I came to the Bowery and stopped for a traffic light. Across the Bowery two bums were fighting in a doorway. Two bums are always fighting in a doorway at the corner of Prince and the Bowery at half-past midnight on Tuesdays and no one ever takes any interest because it doesn’t mean anything at all. But as I watched from my corner I thought I detected signs of malicious intent, and I decided to cross over and poke my nose in. This I began to do. But the light was still red and when I got to the median there was a line of cars coming uptown and I had to wait for the line to go by. Meanwhile the action in the doorway seemed to be taking on the shape of a mugging. A big man and a little man were wrestling. The little man appeared to be wearing a tan suit coat. While I stood on the median looking over the stream of cars the big man forced this coat down over the little man’s elbows and finally took it away from him altogether. Then he began to walk up the street, holding the coat by the collar, shaking it, dipping his hands into the pockets. Meanwhile the last car in the line stopped at my feet.

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