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wires cut, their world vandalized, their memory a lament of peculiar losses. It was as if they had robbed themselves, and that gave a certain cheerfulness. Do not imagine that in the reduction to the rented room they received nothing in return. They got a lot, I tell you. They were lifted by insolence above their forgotten loans, their surly arrears, their misspent matrimonies, their many debts which seemed to fall with relief into the wastebaskets where they would be picked up by the night men.
    The Automat with its woeful, watery macaroni, its bready meat loaf, the cubicles of drying sandwiches; mud, glue, and leather, from these textures you made your choice. The miseries of the deformed diners and their revolting habits; they were necessary, like a sewer, like the Bowery, Klein’s, 14th Street. Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble along on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine.
    The Hotel Schuyler was more than a little sleazy and a great deal of sleazy life went on there. Its spotted rugs and walls were a challenge no effort could meet and the rootlessness hardened over everything like a scab. Repetition—no one ever escapes it, and these poor people who were trying were the most trapped of all.
    Midtown—look toward the east, toward many beautiful and bright things for sale. Turn the eyes westward—a nettling thicket of drunks, actors, gamblers, waiters, people who slept all day in their graying underwear and gave off a far from fresh odor when they dressed in their brown suits and brown snap-brim hats for the evening’s inchoate activities. At that time these loosely connected persons had about them an air that was sometimes thick and dumb and yet passive; the faces on the streets had not yet frozen into an expression of danger and assault, of malice and fearlessness, the glaze of death in the daylight.
    The small, futile shops around us explained how little we know of ourselves and how perplexing are our souvenirs and icons. Watch the strangers in the city, poor people, in a daze, making decisions, exchanging coins and bills for the incurious curiosities, the unexceptional novelties. Sixth Avenue lies buried in the drawers, bureaus, boxes, attics, and cellars of grandchildren. There, blackening, are the dead watches, the long, oval rings for the little finger, the smooth pieces of polished wood shaped into a long-chinned African head, the key rings of the Empire State building. And there were little, blaring shops, narrow as a cell, open most of the night, where were sold old, scratched, worn-thin jazz and race records—Vocalion, Okeh, and Brunswick labels.
    And the shifty jazz clubs on 52nd Street, with their large blow-ups of faces, instruments, and names. Little men, chewing on cigars, outside in the cold or the heat, calling out the names of performers, saying: Three Nights Only, or Last New York Appearance.
    At the curb, getting out of a taxi, or at the White Rose Bar drinking, there “they” were, the great performers with their worn, brown faces, enigmatic in the early evening, their coughs, their split lips and yellow eyes; their clothes, crisp and bright and hard as the bone-fibered feathers of a bird.
    And there she often was—the “bizarre deity,” Billie Holiday.
    Real people: nothing like your mother and father, nothing like those friends from long ago now living in the family house alone, with the silver and the pictures, a few new lamps and a new roof—set up at last, preparing to die.
    At night in the cold winter moonlight, around 1943, the city pageantry was of a benign sort. Adolescents were sleeping and the threat was only in the landscape, aesthetic. Dirty slush in the gutters, a lost black overshoe, a pair of white panties, perhaps thrown from a passing car. Murderous dissipation went with the music, inseparable, skin and bone. And always her luminous self-destruction.
    She was fat the first time we saw her,